Green Shell

Attacking Evolution

2010-06-01T20:53:00.000-07:00

Published in 1929:

We boast of scientific investigation, and yet we're the only supposedly civilized country where thousands of supposedly sane citizens will listen to an illiterate clodhopping preacher or politician setting himself up as an authority on biology and attacking evolution.

From Dodsworth, by Sinclair Lewis.

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Morals and Witches

2009-04-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

From Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue:

What emotivism asserts is in central part that there are and can be no valid rational justification for any claims that objective and impersonal moral standards exist and hence that there are no such standards. Its claim is of the same order as the claim that it is true of all cultures whatsoever that they lack witches. Purported witches there may be, but real witches there cannot have been, for there are none. So emotivism holds that purported rational justification there may be, but real rational justifications there cannot have been, for there are none.

Economist Intelligence Unit: "30% Chance of Global Depression"

2009-03-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

On March 20, 2009, the Economist Intelligence Unit—a fantastic source of information on the business climate in every country in the world—predicted a 30% chance for the world economy growing at less than 1% for the next fiver years, which would qualify as a depression.

Depression would be characterised by mass bankruptcies and job losses. In a vicious cycle of debt deflation, the burden of debt would rise in real terms as collateral declined in value and incomes fell. As bad debts piled up, banks' balance-sheets would be weakened, resulting in forced asset sales. These would drive down prices further. Like banks and financial institutions, households and companies would “deleverage”, disposing of assets at fire-sale prices to pay down debt.
Under this scenario, the major developed economies would grow by less than 1% on average over the next five years. Even when growth resumes, it would do so at levels too low to create jobs for a new generation of unemployed.

Alternative scenarios are not good either.

...there is a 60% chance that the stimulus operations now underway will restore stability by 2010/11, albeit at lower growth levels than we’ve been accustomed to.
[...]
A third scenario, in which failing confidence in the US economy leads to mass withdrawal from dollar-denominated assets and a collapse in the US currency, carries a 10% probability.

Though I've heard "May you live in interesting times" is not actually a Chinese curse, it would be a serious curse if it were.

Link to the press release.

US Pension Management Shifted into Stocks from Bonds Before Crash

2009-03-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

When investing, a general guideline is that when everyone is doing something is definitely not the time to try it for the first time. Too bad the agency overseeing millions of Americans' pensions didn't go by this one.

Just months before the start of last year's stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.

Link.

Farm Fields

2009-03-03T13:06:00.001-08:00

U.S. Citizenship as an Army Recruiting Incentive

2009-02-15T12:40:00.001-08:00

The U.S. is now in the business of trading citizenship for war-making.

The U.S. Army has announced that it will accept immigrants with temporary visas for the first time since the Vietnam War in an effort to fill critical capacity gaps. Immigrants will be offered fast-track U.S. citizenship in return for service.

"The American army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical," said Lt-Gen Benjamin C Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the army.

"There will be some very talented folks in this group," he told the New York Times.

"The army will gain in its strength in human capital, and the immigrants will gain their citizenship and get on a ramp to the American dream."

The fragmentation of the U.S. Army into many countries is a sign of what is commonly called overextension. Overextension simply means that the military is failing at what it is trying to do. If it were not failing, there would be no talk of overextension. Overextension is a euphemism.

That the Army "finds itself" fragmented is a sign of poor management by military leaders and insufficient oversight by citizens. The Army does not "find itself" in places, transported there mysteriously. If it is true that soldiers feel this way, then the inadequate rationale for war-making that has infected U.S. culture since the end of World War II continues. How is it that the Army cannot understand how it has gotten where it is? How is it that an Army Lieutenant-General suddenly discovers that the Army has become fragmented, as if he is Rip Van Winkle awaking beneath a tree after a long slumber?

Offering United States citizenship to immigrants in exchange for their services waging war is a reproachable strategy, indicative of a broken volunteer military and an American culture that no longer understands or agrees upon the reasons it takes violence across the globe.

Offering the "American dream" as an incentive at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing jobs, homes, and retirements shows just how desperate the Army has become. The lack of any public commentary or awareness of this new Army program shows just how ambivalent the U.S. citizenry—we—have become about managing ourselves and our country.

The Regulation of Pants

2009-02-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

I recently read the entire LR Village Code. Okay, not all of it. I skipped some sections, like Title 3, Chapter 8: Fire Insurance Companies (abbreviated 3-8). But I did read others that I really should have skipped, such as 3-6: Raffles and 4-6: Explosives and Fireworks. How could I not read 4-6? I'm stuck inside and looking for divertimento.

When sequestered indoors in winter and reading your municipal code for laughs—in other words, when in my situation—the first place to look for amusement is not, paradoxically, 3-3: Amusements Generally. The real action is in...3-2: Liquor Control!

Judging by page counts in the LR Code, liquor is at best the most heavily-regulated activity in LR and at worst tied for most regulated with 7-6: Sewer Use and Service, and that only due to the latter's abundance of definitions for things like Properly Shredded Garbage, Biochemical Oxygen Demand, Compatible Pollutant, Slug, Floatable Oil, Effluent Criteria, Useful Life, and Control Manhole (the last of which goes straight onto my list of potential gay bar names). Without those useful definitions, 3-2 wins by many, many pages, this even though it only defines two terms! Really, who needs to have liquor explained? Answer: far fewer people than need sewer use and service explained.

The LR Code sets out the law of the Village, similar to, but distinctly different from, the law of the Jungle. Law in general has been described in many ways, including "invisible forces in the air", "something people get paid too much for", and "that shit that no one understands or likes". The LR Code contains the law that the people of LR have determined will guide and regulate their tiny piece of the world. Delightful things are in the LR Code. Delightful things are in 3-2: Liquor Control.

In Section 6 (3-2-6): Restrictions on Issuance of License, the citizens of LR define who among them may not obtain a liquor license. Such persons include

3-2-6D: A person who is not a citizen of the United States.
3-2-6F: A person who has been convicted of being the keeper of a house of ill fame.
3-2-6G: A person who has been convicted of pandering or other crime or misdemeanor opposed to decency and morality.
3-2-6P: Any elected public official, law enforcing officer, the Village President or member of the Village Board of Trustees, LR officer or employee or member of any LR board or commission.

The citizens thus exclude from obtaining a liquor license both keepers of houses of ill fame as well as elected officials, panderers as well as the Village President. 3-2-6P protects against conflicts of interest. Determining what 3-2-6D protects the village from will require more analysis.

If you should be so lucky as to avoid inclusion in the exclusions of 3-2-6 and you successfully obtain a liquor license, your first step will likely be hiring employees to sell your liquor. Your second step will be deciding what those employees will wear, naturally. To do so, turn first to LR Code 3-2-16: Attire:

3-2-16A: Every licensee and every employee...shall be properly and decently attired during the course of the sale [and] distribution...of alcoholic liquors of every description.... Topless or similar costumes are prohibited.

Shirts? Check. But, you're probably asking, what about pants?

3-2-16B: It shall be unlawful for any licensee or employee...to: 1. Expose his or her genitals, pubic hair, buttocks, natal cleft, perineum, anal region or pubic hair region.

"Dang!" you may say. "How will I sell copious amounts of booze to people if unable to attract them to my bar with pantsless employees?" But, an idea occurs: "What if I have my employees wear devices, costumes and coverings that make them appear to be pantsless?! Yes! Yes, this is the answer!"

3-2-16B: It shall be unlawful for any licensee or employee...to: 2. Expose any device, costume or covering which gives the appearance of or simulates the genitals, pubic hair, buttocks, natal cleft, perineum, anal region or pubic hair region.

"Damn you LR Code!"

You have found, as I did, that the LR Code is always, if not two, at least one step ahead of prurience.

"But," you may stammer, "but what if my employees wear shirts with no fronts? Yes! Again, yes, the answer!"

3-2-16B: It shall be unlawful for any licensee or employee...to: 3. Expose any portion of the female breast at or below the areola thereof.

"No! This can't be! How, how will I sell booze?!" Well, good person, may I make a suggestion? Seeing as 3-2-16B.3 applies specifically to "the female breast", perhaps a male gay bar would be profitable? If you are interested, I have a list of potential bar names that I might be willing to sell you. Let us only hope that 3-2-16A intends the same discrimination toward females as 3-2-16B.

Lest you begin to think that the LR Code only concerns itself with persons of ill fame, it should also be noted that the Code also contains moments of civility by prohibiting anyone from selling liquor "to any person known by them to be an habitual drunkard, insane, mentally ill, mentally deficient or in need of mental treatment" (3-2-18), as well as to minors (3-2-19).

Beyond the regulation of alcohol, the LR Code offers many morsels of insight into the social mores of the LR community and the values of LR citizens. Consider the legal definition of VEHICLE as outlined in 4-5-1:

A machine propelled by power other than human power designed to travel along the ground by use of wheels, treads, runners or slides and transport persons or property or pull machinery and shall include, without limitation, the following: automobile, truck, trailer, motorcycle, tractor, buggy and wagon.

Consider also the legal definitions from 5-2-1 for ANIMAL:

Any and all types of animals, domesticated and wild, male and female, except man,

for CAT:

Any cat, male or female,

and for DOG:

Any dog, male or female.

Lest you begin to think that the Village of LR consists only of marginally-drunken pet owners prone to inebriated buggying, know also that LR citizens care for all of nature, including both noble plants like trees and ignoble plants like weeds. Diseased trees harboring Dutch Elm Disease or the breeding activities of the Elm Bark Beetle are defined as nuisances and are to be removed and burned within ten days of identification for the protection of healthy trees (4-4-1A, B).

The citizenry also knows its weeds, so well that it delineates between Noxious Weeds and mere Other Weeds (4-3-1A, B). Noxious Weeds are: Ragweed, giant and common; Canada thistles and all of its varieties; perennial sow thistle; European bind weed; hoary cress, leafy spurge, Russian knapweed. Other Weeds: Burdock, cocklebur, jimson, blue vervain, common milk weed, wild carrot, poison ivy, wild mustard, rough pigweed, lambsquarter, wild lettuce, curied ock, smart weeds (all varieties), poison hemlock, wild hemp, ox eye daisy, goldenrod, yellow hemlock, buckhorn or other weeds of like kind.

Who know that LR harbored such a plant-menagerie? (If these plants were to be displayed in the Village as a kind of menagerie, the proprietor would have to obtain a license for the "exhibition of inanimate objects" costing $5.00 per day under 3-3-2, control for crowding under 3-3-4A, guard against the show becoming indecent under 3-3-4B, and prevent rioting and any other public disturbance under 3-3-4C, all common occurrences at exhibitions of inanimate objects.)

The LR Code is a fun read if you are predisposed to legal fascination and ruminations on the ability to hold up to 5 pounds of dynamite in one's residence (4-6-2A). The LR Code and other municipal codes reveal to a certain extent how citizens and elected officials think about acceptable and unacceptable activities for humans. These laws regulate how we all live and establish the circumstances under which the state can exercise violence against its citizens through fines, seizure of property, and even imprisonment.

In this way, the municipal code outlines the activities that negate a citizen's quotidian protections against state violence that are outlined in other documents, like the United States Constitution. It is rather remarkable that such an important, consequential line is drawn in nearly incomprehensible legal language. However, the legal language is the way it is because it attempts to do something impossible for the written word: avoid ambiguity.

The law is a system for settling disputes and tries to establish the rules for all parties such that the actions of all people can be equally judged. However, all parties do not interpret language the same way. As an extreme example, consider someone with no knowledge of English. What meaning would they glean from the US Constitution? Words contain no meaning but are instead imparted meaning by their reader. Ambiguity is the unavoidable result of leaving the meaning of words up to every individual who reads them.

Nevertheless, the LR Code defines what is and is not permissible in the Village, but, if challenged, the meaning of the words would be interpreted by the legal system, by lawyers, judges, and juries charged with the responsibility—and power—to decide what words mean and impart consequences on people based on those decisions. This is the basis of one of my greatest fears: to be charged with and punished for something that I do not consider a crime. What I think about it really doesn't matter because deciding if something is a crime is not an individual decision, it is a social decision. (Dostoevsky's book Crime and Punishment—and much of his other writing—explores this fight between individuals and society (often religion) to define right and wrong.) Social decisions often get very messy because society's mores change faster than the individual values making up the society. It is a rare elderly person who thinks kids are doing the right things. And as we all know from the parental cliché, not knowing something is wrong does not excuse you from being punished. How else are you to learn that it is wrong?

Incidentally, this is the same principle underlying one of my major pet peeves. Dog owners in LR rarely if ever discipline their pets that jump on me while walking or charge toward me, murder in their eyes. The dog gets a yell from its owner, and the dog probably gets as much meaning form that yell as it would if it tried to read the LR Village Code. I, however, get serious negative reinforcement to ever step out of my house. Which is fine because it's winter.

Multi-national agriculture, drive by water.

2009-02-04T09:48:00.001-08:00

Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea are all leasing or buying land in other countries on which to grow food. Water demands for agriculture have overwhelmed the water each country has access to domestically, forcing them to look elsewhere.

When a country devotes 40% of its renewable water resources or more to irrigation, it starts to face these water allocation issues.

By 2030, under business as usual, all of South Asia will reach the 40% threshold; the Middle East and North Africa region will have hit 58%.

Agriculture almost always loses out to the industrialising economy, especially to the energy and manufacturing sectors, in such water allocation decisions.

Current trends suggest that by 2030, demand for extra water will soar.

Rapidly industrialising economies across South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, which support approximately 2.5 billion people, will be forced to look elsewhere for water-rich land for their food.

Story from the BBC, which has had several great water stories today!

How much water is in your blue jeans?

2009-02-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

A fascinating article from BBC on Unilever's efforts to reduce the water used in their products includes these choice quotes:

"For far too long, businesses like ours have been effectively shipping water around the globe," says Gavin Neath, a spokesperson for Unilever.

"In the past, especially in the US, big was always best," explains Mr Rutherford.

"And the more bubbles and foam the better."

The point of Unilevers water-use reduction? Profit, of course:

Smaller bottles mean less packaging, meaning fewer carbon emissions.

"It also means more can be transported on fewer lorries which reduces fuel, which in turn lowers emissions.

"And making a more concentrated liquid means more goes further, so customers don't have to lug as much detergent from the supermarket as often."

The most exciting thing offered by this story is an interactive graphic that shows how much water is involved in the production of some common goods. The graphic might make me drink much less coffee. See it and the story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7785479.stm

Melamine, China, and Expecting to Be Poor

2009-01-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

China has sentenced Geng Jinping and Zhang Yujun to death and Tian Wenhua to life for their roles in the melamine-tainted milk deaths of six babies and the sickening of at least 300,000 others. Geng used melamine, a toxic industrial chemical, to fool regulators by increasing the protein content of watered-down milk. Zhang ran a workshop producing melamine-tainted powder sold as a protein enrichment. Tian was a dairy boss who for months delayed notifying regulators that her company's products, including baby formula, contained melamine.

Reporting for the AP, Anita Chang writes that deficient official oversight contributes to chronic food quality and safety problems in China. (Various versions of Chang's story were picked up. One is here http://agweekly.com/articles/2009/01/22/commodities/dairy/dairy28.txt, another here http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090122/ap_on_re_as/as_china_tainted_milk/print). Chang contrasts the Chinese system in which milk comes from a "patchwork of producers" with the United States dairy industry in which "dairies run farms with thousands of cows and are better able to control quality." This comparison implies that Chinese food quality and safety could be improved with better official oversight, and that centralizing producers would make official oversight easier. Whether or not centralization is necessarily a good idea will be the main point of discussion herein.

In a very basic analysis of the situation, there are two ways to improve official oversight. The first is to change the production system to better fit the existing oversight system. The second is to change the oversight system to better fit the existing production system. Chang implies that, in China, the system of production, the patchwork of producers, should be changed to better fit the existing oversight system. These two systems can be thought of as either centralized or distributed. Chang characterizes the existing Chinese dairy production system as decentralized and the oversight system as centralized and implies that the production system should be centralized.

Two consequences of greater centralization will be discussed. The first are the political impacts of increasing the size and importance of primary producers. The second is the impact on the supply stream. Centralization has political consequences in terms of the power relationships between industry and government. Centralization makes producers more politically powerful by increasing their importance to the food production system and their wealth. Increased importance leads to an obligation of government to avoid infringing on the operations of firms deemed "too big to fail", embodied in the notion that "owing the bank $100 is your problem; owing the bank $100,000,000 is the bank's problem." If the closure of a dairy producer would disrupt the supply chain and consumption of dairy products, that becomes the government's problem, and that producer has a strong bargaining position. Reducing the number of producers also promotes monopoly power. The increased wealth from the monopoly power can be used for lobbying, soliciting government for preferential treatment. In these ways, centralized production can actually weaken the efficacy of government.

The second issue of greater centralization addressed here is the impact on the supply stream. Centralized production means that a relatively small number of producers are responsible for the bulk of production. This amplifies the supply-stream impacts of a problem at one producer. If one producer has a problem with quality or safety, its impact will be felt by many consumers due to the large amount of product coming from that producer. In a distributed production system, each producer contributes a small part of the supply stream, so amplification would not have as large an impact. Amplification is a significant drawback to centralized production and has shown up in some recent US food scares in centralized industries, e.g. salmonella on tomatoes and E. coli on spinach, in which problems at a small number of large producers resulted in widespread contamination.

But this begs the question of why the melamine contamination became such a large problem in China. After all, Chang says China's dairies are a "patchwork of producers", presumably distributed. If a distributed production system dampens the impact of amplification, how then did the melamine contamination in China come to be a national problem and sicken hundreds of thousands of babies? The answer to this question requires examining where melamine entered the Chinese dairy production process.

Investigations into the incident found that middlemen between milk producers and dairy companies were primarily responsible for the melamine contamination. These middlemen watered down raw milk and then added melamine to artificially increase its protein content. A low protein content would have tipped regulators that the middlemen were watering down the raw milk. Melamine was not being added by producers of the raw milk, presumably what Chang would refer to as the producers in the "patchwork of producers", but instead by consolidators of the raw milk. The point at which melamine was added was therefore a point of centralization in the production process and served to amplify the effect of the contamination. Chang's representation of the Chinese dairy production system as a "patchwork of producers" is somewhat misleading. The "patchwork of producers" of raw milk was not where the melamine problem occurred.

If this is true, how would increasing the size of individual producers, as Chang suggests is what safeguards the US system, guard against an incident like the melamine contamination? Here a subtle distinction in Chang's article must be noted: Chang attributes US quality and safety to the dairies themselves rather than to official oversight. Again, Chang writes that in the US "dairies run farms with thousands of cows and are better able to control quality." Here Chang minimizes the importance of oversight in the US dairy system, saying instead that the dairies themselves are controlling quality. But, as found in the Chinese melamine investigation, it was not the dairies that were responsible for the contamination. It was people and firms located at points of centralization between primary producers—the dairies—and end-product producers. The producers of raw milk had no incentive to add melamine to their product, because the only reason to do so was to hide from regulators that milk had been thinned. So how, then, would increasing the size of the dairies in China prevent another melamine incident or one like it?

Increasing the size of individual producers could reduce the middlemen involved in the production process and eliminate a point of entry for contamination. In the Chinese example, middlemen consolidated raw milk from multiple small producers in order to gather a large enough volume to sell on to other firms like baby formula producers, firms that need large amounts of milk on a daily basis. Middlemen had an incentive to use melamine that primary producers did not. If raw milk producers were capable of providing large amounts of milk to firms directly, the need for middlemen may be reduced. Official oversight of the producers could then be feasible. But notice how this does not make official oversight any different. Rather, it is the reduction in middlemen, the reduction of the number of people and firms involved in the production process, that would make official oversight possible. This is an example of changing the production system to fit the existing oversight system.

In China, centralization and control are central components of government, while in the US government is more distributed across states and also fragmented internally into branches. Chang's argument that centralized production would enable better official oversight in China is valid when it is evaluated from a perspective resting on the assumption that the production system should be changed to increase the efficiency of the existing oversight system. If Chang's argument is approached with different assumptions, such as that centralized production should be avoided or that government itself should be changed rather than only the production system, it appears weaker.

China's mode of government and of development is oriented toward centralization, be it with population growth—a great migration from rural to urban areas—or power production—the construction of the Three Gorges Dam that will provide about 3% of the country's electricity. China will choose to centralize production to fit better with centralized government before it will decentralize government to fit a distributed production system.

In other contexts, decentralized government regulation of distributed production may be more politically acceptable. The advantages of a distributed production system arise from the system's inherent redundancy, yet this redundancy is antithetic to a mode of government regulation that rewards economies of scale. Economies of scale refer to the advantages that producers can gain when they increase in size. The most important competitive advantage gained from economies of scale is the ability to sell products more cheaply than smaller competitors. Economies of scale only work in certain regulatory and business frameworks. In capitalism, the system employed in both the US and China, economies of scale are very rewarding, and most firms strive to achieve them. However, economies of scale can also lead to monopolies when one firm becomes so large and its pricing so powerful that it drives all competitors out of business. This situation develops in capitalism absent of regulation and led to a crisis in the US in the early 20th century. This crisis resulted in the creation of anti-trust (anti-monopoly) laws that limited the extent to which firms could harness economies of scale to shut down all competitors.

In the past half-century, China has undergone massive centralization. Millions of people have been removed from agricultural livelihoods and centralized into cities; the Yangtze River has been diverted for the past decade as the Three Gorges Dam—the world's largest—is constructed; and censors block information from flowing into and out of the country. Centralizing the country's dairy industry fits into this framework and will almost certainly be pursued. The government likely will not miss the opportunity provided by the melamine scandal to eliminate an entire level of middlemen.

However, there is danger in this path. Centralization increases the efficiency of production in part by reducing the number of employees. This reduces jobs. China has a large population that has been removed from labor-intensive agricultural work and must now be supported by industrial and service jobs, and the existence of these jobs requires continued, constant growth in consumption of goods and services. The era of centralization in the US in the early 20th century led to a tremendous over-capacity to produce goods, which in turn contributed to the Great Depression when there simply was not enough demand to satisfy the productive power of world industry. Reviving demand required more than 10 years as well as a World War. Also of concern is the timing of China's growth with the world economic crisis. The US unemployment rate is now expected to approach if not exceed 10%. The population of China is more than 1 billion people. Ten percent unemployment in a country that large could mean 100 million people unemployed. The vast majority of these people would be living in newly-created cities and would have memories of agricultural life that had been taken from them, agricultural life where their purpose made sense and where they could provide for their basic needs with their own labor. This is not to paint a romanticized vision of Chinese agricultural peasantry. That life likely was and still is hard work that destroys the body. But it is not hard to imagine dissatisfaction growing in these people with the promises of their government for a better life in the city falling flat.

The melamine contamination is an interesting starting point for thought and discussion on the impact of centralization and on the correct balance between centralization and distribution in production systems, as well as the role of government in all of this. Contrasting the Chinese and US cases can provide insight, but is also rife with pitfalls as overgeneralization and conjecture abound. However, the present economic crisis may mark the endpoint of one of the great periods of centralization. Entire generations of people around the globe only know economies that grow at extraordinary rates, only know societal change that advances with great speed, and fully expect their own lives to mirror the change and increase in affluence that older generations went through. The realization that these expectations will be unfulfilled may lead to social problems so bad that they make an economic crisis ten times worse than the present one seem preferable.

A Story of Cold

2009-01-15T13:23:00.001-08:00

It's -10 degrees outside, and the moment I stepped into it and breathed the cold air into my nose, I thought of my dead grandmother.

I've moved around a bit in my short life, and I have found that there are things that remind me of other things. Remind is a funny word, like we should pay attention to something, re-mind it, as if we've ignored something for so long that it's begun feeling neglected and reaches out for our attention again. I've had people do this to me. After all, I've moved around a bit.

My grandmother died in 2004, I think. Or, maybe it was 2005. For three or four years she lived in a nursing home ten or fifteen miles from where my parents lived. I was in college but lived a couple summers at home. As a kid I drove eight miles to high school more than 150 days a year. I visited my grandmother in that nursing home no more than 5 times, even in summers when I was so close. I told myself I couldn't take being in a place like that. But what place was it? A place full of the dying, which is really anyplace. I guess I was afraid to be somewhere that the dying was just so obvious.

The first breath in of -10 degree air freezes the slime in the nose. The first breath out thaws it a little. The second breath in of -10 degree air freezes the slime again, but not as much cold is taken out of the air and given to the body, since some of the slime was still frozen from the first breath. Some of that cold that isn't needed for the second freeze passes right through and begins to freeze the split in the windpipe where air either goes out the mouth or the nose. A couple more breaths and the lungs start to crystallize. It's a wonderful feeling, the same as drinking ice cold water on a hot day and feeling yourself cool from the inside out.

The same air arrives around the same time each year, whether or not I or my grandmother is there to breathe it. She had been around to breathe it for 80 years. I'd been around, more or less, for 20 of them. That leaves 60 of something, maybe apples, or maybe 100 depending on how you do the arithmetic. She was a matriarch. Her husband died when I was less than 5 years old. 4 years less than 5 years old. That makes 1. She held that side of the family's Christmas gatherings, until she didn't. Christmas is a holiday about eating food, opening gifts, and being family. Gifts are things that people give one another. Usually things. Sometimes they're obligations or annoyances or favors. Most of the time they're things, though. Family is different everywhere. Being family means acting the way families act where you're from. Some families are family by not celebrating Christmas. But those families are in different places than my family.

The -10 degree air reminds me of her. The way the cold air freezes into my body, the same way it had when we used to gather ourselves Christmas morning and go down to her house. Her house. It had far too many rooms.

I've moved around a bit. I've seen some houses. I've learned humility and how to write in the third person without feeling ignored. I don't need to remind the third person that I'm around. But it's nice when it notices.

Adel stands next to me breathing in that -10 degree air. Adel wears a green coat. It is fake suede. Adel wants to go down to the family Christmas with my family. I say, "We'll have to walk about three blocks and about eight years."

Adel said, "Fine. Glad to. I like the smell of this air anyway."

Adel started walking down the snow-covered street, unplowed for two days. The plowman was deer hunting when the last storm came through. The snow was rutted from people going to and from somewhere in their cars and trucks. Most of the snow was dirty, looked like it had been soaked in chocolate. Adel could tell where the road was and wasn't from where the chocolate snow started and stopped. He avoided the chocolate snow.

As he walked, he looked over the small homes along the street. Most looked back at him with quiet porches at the top of simple three-step staircases flanked by railings. Some of the porches had walls, others just posts holding up peaked roofs. Most of the houses attached to the porches were just large boxes with light-colored vinyl siding. Adel thought that the vinyl siding showed how economical the owners must be. Low-maintenance, durable and long-lasting, and unobtrusive. Adel surprised himself that he even noticed the siding because it blended in so well.

Once he saw and understood it, he could no longer look at it. One of Adel's great flaws was his inability to pay attention to something once he thought he understood it. This caused him grief over time, as others almost always proved him a fool, eventually, by showing how much better they understood things than he did. But by the time they told Adel, he hardly knew what they were talking about. It wasn't so much that he didn't care. He just didn't find things interesting after he understood them. Things that changed, however, kept him fascinated. This was another of his great flaws, that he gave himself over only to those things that kept eluding him. These were his only two flaws. Except for ignoring most things in favor of intensely devoting himself to some things, he was a perfect man. Most people called him cold and flippant. Some people, though, thought him a devoted and terribly interesting person, and did not hesitate to tell others about him.

As Adel walked, the houses and street around him slowly changed. This did not surprise him. He was used to things changing and sought to surround himself with such things, lest he become bored. In the same way that water finds a course of least resistance—for its particular mode of travel—Adel found ways of avoiding constancy.

The vinyl siding became asbestos tiles. The porches lost their walls. Only when brilliantly-white smoke started pouring out of them did Adel see that most houses had chimneys emerging from their roofs. The stains on the chimney bricks slowly faded as he watched the smoke wisp into the bright blue sky. Wooden siding replaced the asbestos tiles. Adel's attention was suddenly caught by the disappearance of entire sections of some houses. Garages were disappearing. The neighborhood gained more and more space as houses shed other parts. Adel noticed a pattern: the vanishing parts of houses seemed to not really belong to the houses anyway. He only saw this after the pace of disappearance slowed. Soon all that remained were house boxes with bare front porches. The street trees had grown immensely smaller.

Adel arrived at my grandmother's house.

It's nice to be noticed sometimes.

He stepped up the three steps onto the porch and looked for a doorbell. He didn't find one and knocked on the door instead. A short woman in a bright green dress opened the door. "Come in!" she beamed. Adel stepped inside. The floor in the small anteroom was made of thin wooden strips, polished to a shine. To the left lay a pile of shoes, and coats hung on hooks along the wall on the right. The short woman had disappeared into another room. Adel took off his shoes and placed them at the edge of the pile. He noticed that all the shoes sat in a puddle of slightly-muddy water. He checked the floor by the coats before stepping over to them and hanging his own green coat over a black wool coat. There were no open hooks.

Adel heard voices toward what he thought would be the rear of the box. He followed the sound. The rest of the house was carpeted with a thin fabric, dark green with an ornate red design around the margin. Adel heard a heater and was glad for the warmth. He began to heat from the outside in. He smelled food, probably ham and potatoes. Adel wondered how the potatoes were prepared. Would they be mashed? Baked? Perhaps au gratin.

Adel stepped into the kitchen and found a table covered with food. A young girl and an old woman were filling their plates with ham and mashed potatoes and deviled eggs and piles of a delicately pink goo from a large glass bowl at the center of the table. The young girl looked up from her work. "Hi," she said. "You want some food?" The old woman didn't seem to notice Adel's arrival.

"Yes, that would be fine," said Adel. He wasn't really interested in the food but thought refusing would be rude. He wasn't sure how these people took being family. The old woman held a spoonful of the pink goo over her full plate, searching for a small open space on which she could deposit the load. She tilted the plate as she struggled to see around the heaped spoon. A deviled egg slipped off the side of the plate and landed in the large glass bowl with a soft plop. The old woman stared at the egg for a moment, forgetting about the spoon and her plate. Half of the goo on the spoon slid off and landed on a tray of pickles. She didn't notice. She abandoned the egg, filled its former place on her plate with the remaining goo on the spoon, and gently placed the spoon back in the bowl of goo.

"You can sit next to me," said the young girl as she passed Adel.

"Thanks," Adel said. He followed her into another room where he found a table full of adults and young men and women. They were having small conversations with one another. The table was too large for everyone to talk about one thing. The young girl passed between a line of chair backs and a papered wall. Adel followed her, smiling and making gestures of greeting to the people seated on the opposite side of the table who looked up at him curiously. The short woman who had greeted him at the front door sat at the end of the table. She winked at the young girl as she passed by. She ignored Adel.

He passed into another room where he found a smaller table populated entirely by children. The young girl who had invited him appeared to be the oldest one of the bunch. She slid her plate onto the table and climbed into an empty chair. There was another empty chair sitting next to her. Adel decided not to join them, returned to the anteroom, carefully retrieved his shoes from the small pond, put them and his coat on, and stepped out onto the porch.

He took a deep breath and felt the slime in his nose freeze.

As Adel retraced his route through the town, the houses began changing again. They started as boxes with simple front porches and chimneys exhaling silvery plumes of white into the sky. As he walked, the houses added strange rooms that unbalanced their simple shapes, wooden siding turned to large square tiles and then to dull vinyl. Garages appeared with enormous doors covering their entire side. Just before he arrived back at my house, the chimneys went dead.

Adel didn't notice any of this. He'd seen it all before.

Barry Minkow's Money Machine

2009-01-09T12:00:00.001-08:00

Lennar Corp. has a method of structuring deals so some can go bad but the company does okay. Charges were made today that this structuring is essentially a Ponzi scheme:

"Lennar Corp., the third-largest U.S. builder by market value, fell as much as 28 percent in New York trading after Barry Minkow's Fraud Discovery Institute alleged that the company operates joint ventures "like a Ponzi scheme." Lennar denied the allegations" From Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=am6Nqfg6QZbQ&refer=us).

What's interesting is that this Barry Minkow and his Fraud Discovery Institute outs executives for lying about their credentials. He recently claimed that a Broadcom exec had lied about receiving an MBA from UC-Irvine, my alma mater.

Minkow has turned this into a money machine, and the setup sounds like it has to be illegal. Though if there is substance behind the accusations, I suppose he would be hit with libel suits. Minkow's method is to buy options of the companies whose executives it accuses of fraud, making money when the companies' stock falls. From the Broadcom case:

"Questions about their academic credentials were originally raised by Barry Minkow, a San Diego investor and co-founder of the Fraud Discovery Institute. Minkow said his company ferrets out potential executive fraud and buys options in their companies, betting the shares will fall when bad news breaks." OCRegister (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/minkow-company-peterson-2246174-manian-degrees).

It seems if making money is that easy I should not be worried about making money.

We Need to Change How We Tax Travel

2008-12-16T00:03:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I wrote about Cooper Tire trying to play states against one another by threatening to close a plant without sufficient economic incentives.

Now, Toyota is abandoning plans to complete construction on a plant it has begun in Mississippi.

Bloomberg:

Toyota Motor Corp., heading toward its first U.S. annual sales decline in 13 years, indefinitely delayed the opening of a plant in Mississippi that was to begin building the gasoline-electric Prius hatchback by 2010.

LATimes:

To date, Toyota has spent about $300 million of the Mississippi plant’s anticipated $1.3-billion price tag. The automaker plans to finish building the plant, now about 90% complete, but it won’t install the metal stamping machines, robotics and other expensive equipment needed to assemble cars.

Car demand has fallen off for all auto manufactures, not just the American big three of Ford, GM and Chrysler.

Every major automaker reported a year-over-year sales decline of more than 30 percent on Tuesday. The Detroit carmakers were among the worst hit, with GM's U.S. sales falling 41 percent and Chrysler LLC's dropping 47 percent.

Their overseas rivals posted abysmal results as well. Toyota's sales tumbled 34 percent, while Nissan's dropped 42 percent and Honda's fell 32 percent.

Even luxury automakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz were down big in November, 25% and 30%, respectively.

The steep drop off in demand for cars has accompanied a drop off in demand for driving itself, with vehicle miles driven sharply down on a year-on-year basis as the Department of Transportation reports October 2008 travel on all roads fell 3.5% compared with October 2007, while cumulative travel for 2008 has also fallen by 3.5% (.PDF Report).

The decline in auto demand and travel has serious planning implications, especially for state budgets.

Transportation is supported by large public expenditure in infrastructure. States receive a lot of money from gasoline tax, and as gasoline consumption wanes with reduced vehicle and travel demand, so too do tax receipts from the sale of gasoline. This has become such a problem that some states are exploring new methods of taxing transportation.

North Caroline is considering taxing people based on the number of miles they have driven. The Charlotte Observer:

With gas-tax revenues plummeting, the state of North Carolina is looking seriously at taxing motorists for how far they drive.

If the “road-use tax” is implemented, it would at first be simple – with the state checking your odometer annually and taxing you based on how many miles you have driven. But transportation experts say new GPS technology could allow the state to charge people different rates based on when and where they drive, in an attempt to manage congestion.

Placing GPS devices in American drivers' cars has never been popular, but it has been talked about in Great Britain since 2003:

Its report suggested every car should be fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS), which measures its distance from three or more satellites, and using triangulation, can pinpoint the position of a car within five or 10 metres.

Each vehicle would transmit its location back to a central computer, probably via the mobile phone network.

Different charges would be set, depending on which roads the driver uses and the time of day.

The bit the government likes is that it could cost more to use congested routes, during the rush-hour.

The basic idea behind such schemes is that greater command and control of driving patterns would lead to more efficient use of public infrastructure, namely, less congestion on roads.

This would occur because the government could track and charge cars rates dependent on the demand at the time of the use of the roadway. High demand times--like rush hour--would require higher tolls for drivers taking trips during this time. And with GPS technology placing cars spatially, drivers in high-cost areas like city center downtowns could be charged more to drive in them than drivers in rural areas, regardless of time of day or traffic volume.

Even though there is opposition to GPS trackers in the US, the economic philosophy behind the reason for using them is already at work in the United States. Toll roads in Southern California change in price depending on traffic. To use toll roads, cars must have transponders in them that communicate with electronic toll booths, removing the need for slowing down and paying tolls and allowing faster travel flow through toll collection areas. And because most new cars have the option of GPS navigation installation, it is not many steps from requiring people to have transponders to use the toll roads to requiring people to have GPS receivers to use the toll roads, and from there to use freeways, and from there to use surface streets.

More finely-tuned transportation pricing could finally lead to substantial reduction in automobile use in the US, but only if policymakers set the price of driving high enough to compensate for the environmental and social costs of driving cars. If the prices are set to maintain the existing traffic patterns at the time of implementation, the pricing system will do nothing to decrease the negative impacts of driving. However, if the pricing system makes driving appropriately expensive, policymakers could actually have a significant impact on car use in this country for the first time.

Well, the first time the impact would lead to a reduction.

However, far more likely is that we will see stimulus rather than reduction.

The Obama administration is already talking about upgrading our roads and bridges. Why would we do that if we want to decrease our use of the car? Scientists and car manufacturers tout the increased efficiency of their vehicles. This means nothing to the social costs of sequestering millions of people away in private vehicles for two hours each work day.

The cost of driving is much greater than is currently reflected by its monetary price. If we change how we charge people to move around, we might be able to actually influence how they do it.

The best thing to happen to the US in recent memory was the tremendous increase in gasoline prices. Driving demand was actually falling.

Now that gasoline has become inexpensive again, US demand for gasoline is increasing. What we should do is place a flexible tax on gasoline that will establish a floor in its price. That floor should be around $4 per gallon, the point at which demand actually started to drop in this country. As gas prices fall due to decreases in oil costs, the tax should be increased to maintain the $4 minimum. As oil costs increase and gas cost rises, the tax could be relaxed.

While this scheme will reduce gasoline usage and dramatically increase the money available for states--at least in times of low oil costs--it will do nothing to decrease the uncertainty that states face when forecasting expected tax revenue from the sale of gasoline.

For that, the only solution is to curtail our state-budget dependence on gasoline tax.

Understatement of the Day

2008-12-03T14:12:00.001-08:00

From some New York Times thing:

The lavish ceremony surrounding the Queen's Speech -- when she speaks from a gold throne in the House of Lords, wearing an ermine robe and a crown studded with nearly 3,000 diamonds -- contrasted with her message of economic caution.

Executives Lying about Education

2008-12-02T14:37:00.000-08:00

Broadcom Senior Vice President Vahid Manian may have lied about his academic credentials (link).
However, the more interesting part of this story is this:

The discrepancy was uncovered by Barry Minkow, co-founder of the Fraud Discovery Institute, which looks into the backgrounds of executives....Minkow almost always holds a position in securities his organization reports on, according to a disclaimer on his Web site. He said that he doesn’t own any Broadcom shares, but he does own put options on STEC.

STEC is a storage device maker; Manian holds a seat on its board.

This sounds like a market manipulation racket wrapped in a facade of a watchdog organization. Fraud Discovery Institute searches for executives who may have oddities in their backgrounds. Once found, the Institute buys securities that will increase in value if the company for which the executive works loses equity value. Then the Institute makes an accusation.

By the way, before founding the Fraud Discovery Institute, Minkow served seven years in prison for committing fraud while running ZZZZ Best Company.

On the Idea of Economic Development Unions

2008-12-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

So the auto bailout has gone from $25 billion for all three automakers to GM needing $4 billion just to survive the next month.

I fear that my perspective vis-a-vis amounts of money in the public sector has been crippled: I no longer even blink at the thought of $4 billion dollars. What will this mean if I'm ever working in economic development for a city and need to determine whether a $20 million tax break is justified, for example? That amount hardly seems worth worrying about, yet it is an extraordinary sum of taxpayer dollars.

There's now an incentives war gearing up between Ohio, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi. Cooper Tires has threatened to close one of its 4 plants, 1 in each of those states. Mississippi has fired the first salvo by planning to offer $30 million in incentives.

Consider the arrogance/regrettable dependence of the states that allows this to happen: "The company asked the four cities to submit incentive proposals to the company by Monday." (http://www.sunherald.com/218/story/989110.html) Sickening. What are the odds that the company is even serious about closing the plant?

One serious criticism of the incentive model of "attracting" private investment is that the incentives usually aren't meaningful enough in the big picture of the company for the company to actually care what they are. Where they choose to locate is usually where they would have gone even without incentives, but they still put up the front that they need them to get whatever they can from municipalities and states. Until government holds firm and decides not to fight over companies, this will continue. Kind of like the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, thousands of whom showed up in CA responding to promises of abundant jobs only to find the employers driving down wages by stirring fighting amongst the laborers, the states in this case need to organize.

We need the equivalent of organized labor at the economic development level. The information asymmetries in the current incentive model startle: companies claiming they must have assistance "to make a deal work" have no incentive to reveal their actual financial situation unless the government refuses to offer assistance, but that bargaining power of the government is undermined by neighboring governments who try to steal companies.

Ohio, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi need to work together to help Cooper solve its problem. After all, this is Cooper's problem: it is not operating its business in such a way to remain profitable without having to close a plant. There is mutual interest here, as Cooper is a major employer and the states do have the power to offer financial assistance. However, infighting between the states only screws taxpayers.

Government needs to stand firm and counter the tactic of used by industry to divide and conquer.

CA Deficit Calls for Tough Sacrifices

2008-11-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

In a report released today, the Legislative Analyst's Office says state budget could hit $22 billion deficit.

Recommended actions:

increased and new taxes, including a return to the old vehicle license fees, a surcharge to existing income taxes, eliminating income tax deductions taken by seniors and more.
increasing student fees at California State University and the University of California
chopping research programs at UC schools
Cuts in social services, other education and even tightening requirements for a person to be convicted of a “third strike” and thus sent to prison for a lengthy period of time.

CA voters just passed Prop 1A, committing the state to building a high-speed rail line that will cost billions and be funded by bonds. (Full disclosure: author voted no on Prop 1A)

Given the intense pressure to cut government spending combined with reduced spending of consumers, the high-speed rail project as well as a project in Orange County called the Great Park will be watched closely for the next couple years.

Median Income Disparity by Gender

2008-10-31T15:39:00.001-07:00

from US Census Bureau.

Book with one-vowel chapters

2008-10-30T12:55:00.001-07:00

Eunoia by Christian Bok

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7697000/7697762.stm

Initial—and scant—details of FDIC mortgage plan

2008-10-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

An NYT editorial explaining the early--and scant--details of a mortgage workout plan being developed by the FDIC.

Key info:

Though details of the plan are not yet worked out, the outline calls for creating standardized criteria that would be used by mortgage servicers, the firms that handle collection and foreclosure proceedings for lenders and mortgage investors. Loans modified under the criteria would be eligible for a federal guarantee that would protect lenders and investors against default.

If the criteria are well established, defaults on the modified loans should not be a big problem. When the F.D.I.C. took over IndyMac Bank in California last summer, Ms. Bair established a streamlined program for 60,000 troubled loans from the failed bank. The program, which is yielding encouraging initial results, calls for modifications that lower a loan's interest rate, extend the life of the loan or defer payment on a portion of the principle. Taken together, the modifications lower the monthly payment to no more than 38 percent of the borrower's pretax income. [emphasis added]

Key phrases, I think:

1) Details not yet worked out.

2) Standardized criteria: can this work? Seems like a bureaucratic response to making the problem "manageable" rather than actually addressing the specifics of each case. More interested in the agency perspective than the borrower perspective, perhaps, but also perhaps unavoidable. Is there another option that could work?

3) The federal guarantee would "protect lenders and investors", not borrowers.

4) If the renegotiated loan terms are linked to the borrowers income, as in "< or =" to" style="font-style: italic;">the perspective assumes the borrowers remain employed. This kind of workout will not help borrowers if they get laid off, although helping borrowers does not seem to be the point. Instead, in the absence of addressing unemployment, this program seems only interested in ultimately giving more gov't money to lenders and investors. This is a trickle down effect of the algal-water-on-a-drainage-tunnel-wall variety.

First month of tracking planning jobs

2008-10-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Below is a chart showing the number of jobs listed on Planetizen.com from September 9 to October 24. It omits weekends and occasional weekdays when I forgot to update my numbers.

It appears as if the number of jobs being posted to Planetizen has decreased by about 30%. This is sobering news for a recently-graduated planning student.

Thoghts on the Economy II

2008-10-11T18:09:00.001-07:00

Since first recording thoughts on the economy last Thursday, my concerns regarding long-term behavioral impacts of this crisis remain. I would now like to talk a little more about lending as an institution.

When I say lending, I refer to the practice of a party (lendor) giving resources (loan), usually money, to another party (borrower). The borrower usually agrees to pay back the entire loan (principal) over a set period of time, plus an additional amount of money (interest), in the case of a monetary loan, as profit for the lendor. The interest due on a loan is usually calculated as a percentage (rate) of the principal.

From the lendor's perspective (the supply (of money) side), the rate of the interest for a loan is used as an approximation of the risk that the borrower will not pay back the principal and the interest (default). The higher the rate, the higher the risk. E.g. a loan with a 1% rate would be considered less risky than a loan with a 2% interest rate.

From the borrower's perspective (the demand for money side), the rate is the "price" of the money being borrowed. When lendor's perceive higher risk, they demand more for their money in the form of higher rates.

A supply/demand analysis of money flows in lending is an interesting exercise in which the price of money increases and decreases relative to the supply and demand for money. In the US, the interplay between these is the foundation of the Federal Reserve Interest Rate. The Fed Rate is the interest that must be paid when a borrower takes a loan from the US Treasury. The US Treasury is the only source of new money in the US, and thus the only mechanism by which the supply of money in the US can increase. Because the Fed's mission in recent history has been to keep inflation low (as well as keep unemployment low, a topic for later), it must pay attention to the supply of money in the US. When money supply increases, the value of each individual unit of money decreases: this is inflation. One Fed tool to control inflation is changing the Rate, which is effectively the price of new money.

When the Fed increases the Rate, it is making money more expensive. This decreases the number of people who can afford to borrow, therefore reducing the number of people who borrow from the government and introduce new money into the system. The Fed Rate is the primary mechanism by which the US Government influences the US financial system and is completely based in lending.

Alan Greenspan served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for more than 18 years, appointed by Ronald Reagan in late 1987 and resigning in early 2006. Recently, he has been blamed for inflating recently-burst housing bubble with a policy of extremely low Fed Rates beginning in 2001. Three shocks to the economy after 2000 led to the lowering of the Rate. The first was the bursting of the dot com bubble. The NASDAQ Index peaked on March 10, 2000, at 5132.52 (intraday), more than double its value just one year earlier. However, the tech economy lost favor, and over about a year lost over 4000 points: on April 6, 2001, the NASDAQ closed at 1720.36. The second shock were the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the third were the accounting scandals of 2002 involving WorldCom, Enron, and many firms.

In order to increase consumption in the US—and, by extension, improve the economy—Greenspan and the Fed embarked on a campaign to make money very cheap by steadily lowering the Fed Rate. On May 16, 2000, the Rate was 6.5%. By May 15, 2001, it was 4.0%. By June 23, 2003, the Rate stood at 1.0%. Such a low rate meant that new money was extremely cheap. Lending skyrocketed, and, as more analysis on the housing bubble becomes available, it appears that 2003 coincides with the beginning of the subprime lending spree.

Lending—and, by extension, borrowing—became chic. It also made economic sense from the borrower's perspective: if for a borrower the price of money was only 1% of the amount borrowed, then it should be almost impossible to not use the money to make more than that and thus both repay the loan and profit at the same time. However, the picture was not as rosy from the lendor's perspective.

For lendor's such a low rate meant that the profits on lending were very low. If a person or institution had money it wanted to invest, surely it could find—like borrowers were—better returns on investment than 1%.

The housing market offered an opportunity. Borrowers could borrow enough money to buy a house and could afford mortgage interest rates that were at historic lows due to the low Fed Rate. (Mortgage rates were never equal to the Fed Rate because individuals cannot borrow directly from the Fed. Instead, individuals borrow from institutions such as banks which in turn can borrow from the Fed. The institutions are intermediaries and make their profit by charging those who borrow from them a higher interest rate than the Fed charges the institutions for the money. However, due to the competition amongst institutions for borrowers, the intermediary rates were at historic lows just like the Fed rates.)

The problem that became the time bomb that has now detonated was that often the mortgage rates, like the Fed Rate, were not fixed rates. In adjustable rate mortgages, interest rates that were affordable for two years suddenly increased to rates that were no longer unaffordable. Defaults ensued and are ongoing. Right now, there are still many, many loans out there that have not yet reset to higher rates. The mortgage meltdown will continue for the next year or two unless part of the many bailouts we have seen goes to borrowers with these mortgages.

Thoughts on the Economy

2008-10-08T00:42:00.000-07:00

How will today's financial problems affect generational behavior? Those who grew up during the Great Depression—so far still not needing the additional specification of "during the 1930s"—often attribute their thrift and financial fastidiousness to growing up during hard times. One myth surrounding the Depression is that it produced several generations of "savers". Seems to be partly true. Seems also true that generations born of the savers—mostly those enjoying the post-WWII boom, both population- and economic-wise—are marked with the opposite financial qualities, namely opulence and spending beyond means. And then there's my generation. Discussions of my generation often involve the word "entitlement". So be it. Here's a rather simplified and of course horridly indefensible chronology: those who had nothing-->those who bought and buy more than they had and have-->those who expect a lot but who will get little.

I'm wondering now what the impact will be of today's financial problems. How will our future attitudes toward money be influenced by what has happened in the past two weeks? There are, of course, people "coming of financial age" right now. This includes people of all generations, as many of us had become negiligent about our relationships to money, to macroeconomics, and to government fiscal policy. Not exactly the most riveting of subjects, which of course means that eventually too few people were paying attention, and look what happened: abuse. In fact, I've just now started to hear who I consider to be the average person start talking about 401(k)s, bank lending, and credit crunches. So the commoners are finally paying attention, and, by extension, getting a full-on education.

Quick run down: Owning a home became synonymous with the American Dream and with becoming wealthy. All one had to do was purchase a house, wait twenty to thirty years, then retire. I do not believe that one part of government can be held responsible for what happened, but certain attitudes in government certainly contributed. The Clinton administration pushed for more homeownership lending to minorities. In 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing investment banks and commercial banks to merge and commercial deposits to underwrite speculative investments. (Don't worry, I don't understand that explanation either, but apparently it's important). In the 2000s, mortgage lending standards became increasingly lax as new investment vehicles based on mortgage repayments were created from thin air. Well, maybe not such thin air, since Wall Street is fairly close to sea level. As long as mortgage payments kept rolling in, they could continue to be fed up through the chains of investors in these new vehicles. However, mortgage payments rolling in depended on housing values continually rising because the loans had variable interest rates. To keep it going, banks gave larger and larger mortgage refinances so people could keep paying their payments, even with those payments increasing due to higher and higher interest rates. All it took for this feedback loop to fall apart was for housing prices to decline and mortgage interest rates to increase at the same time. Those two things both occurred in 2007 when housing markets became unstable and variable rate mortgages reset with higher interest rates. Homeowners could no longer refinance into larger mortgages to get money to pay the higher interest rates, and defaults ensued. Sales of foreclosed homes further depressed housing prices, exacerbating the new positive feedback loop in the negative direction.

So, knowing a bit more about what happened, how will this affect financial psychology? Brainstorm time: (1) people will be less willing to buy homes because they no longer see them as 100% safe investments; (2) people will be less willing to invest in the stock market after seeing investments decline as much and as quickly as they have in the past two weeks; (3) people will be less willing to use credit; (4) people will be less able to access credit; (5) all of the institutions and businesses that have become bloated on easy money in the past decade will fail.

Elaboration: (1) people will be less willing to buy homes because they no longer see them as 100% safe investments. This will prolong the housing slump, which is actually not the "slump" that economists mostly think it is. Instead of a slump, with its connotation of a temporary and slight deviation below a norm, this is a return to historical trend. There will be no recovery out of this "slump" for some time. Calling this a housing slump is akin to saying a dead man is currently experiencing a nap.

(2) people will be less likely to invest in the stock market. This will negate the image of the stock market as a no-brainer for the common person. Remember when we were considering investing Social Security funds in the market? Our confidence in the market had reached a dangerous extreme, leading to utterly ridiculous ideas as to its purpose. The stock market was never a guaranteed vehicle for wealth accumulation. The stock market is a market in which investors can buy shares of companies they think will earn profit. Buying stock was a way for investors to contribute to, then benefit from, a company's growth. The day the stock market was talked about as the possible repository for the money that we as a society have earmarked for the well-being of our retiring workers was akin to the day plasma TVs went on sale at Wal-Mart: spurious. The loss of confidence in the markets contributes to its continuing decline and will retard any future growth to far slower than what we have seen in the recent past.

(3) people will be less willing to use credit. With the death of the house-as-ATM model of personal finance, people may be—and "may be"—is the key here, less likely to utilize credit. While this is definitely a good thing when it comes to the frivolous purchases made on credit in the past decade (see above for plasma TVs at Wal-Mart), the reluctance to use credit will also retard the growth of business as the pool of possible entrepreneurs, reliant on credit for financing, shrinks. Fewer people willing to risk opening a business on credit means fewer businesses opening means fewer employment opportunities means less growth. However, at least the growth that does occur in such an environment might be more legitimate, robust growth than we've seen with the latest explosion in things like frozen yogurt chain stores.

(4) people will be less able to access credit. This is the big one. This is the key. In times of easy credit and utter faith in unmitigated (and unmitigatable) growth, every institution, business, and person became bloated in both mind and wallet with credit. The most damning cases are government budgets and college tuition. Governments at all levels will have a terrible time in the near future funding themselves. Raising taxes will only further slow growth. Not raising taxes will demand cuts in services, slowing growth. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Already the state of CA has reported that revenue in the last month was a full $100 million less than was projected. When all the projection models were built in a period of excess capital and confidence, they of course did not include possible recession scenarios. The assumption of growth became priced in to the system, so to speak. Without access to credit, governments will have to reduce spending on programs or raise taxes precisely at an economic time when neither is helpful.

There will be people who cannot attend college because they cannot afford it and no one will give them money to. This is an astonishing change. Our society has come to regard the bachelor's degree with the same respect as given to a high-school diploma. I myself have done that. How arrogant and unfortunate that we got to that point. College tuitions became drunk on easy credit just like everything else did. Schools could raise tuition by 10% in one year without fear that people would not enroll. All that had to be done was go get a loan. Now, this is priced into the educational system. The system expects that kind of growth. People want to be paid, deans want more resources, campuses are in the midst of expansions and building projects. When colleges can't get credit, projects like that will end. When potential students can't get credit, their expectations of going to college will be dashed. This is going to happen. It probably needs to happen. However, those earning degrees from 2000-2008 will forever have them tainted by the dilution of easy credit. Too many people (myself included) used their four years (or five, or six) of undergrad as nothing but unsupervised and unproductive attempts at living on their own. They were living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Our excesses now mean that someone who wants to go to college to learn, to advance, and to contribute may not get the chance.

(5) all the institutions and businesses that became bloated on easy credit will fail. I have touched on this above. This is why the term depression is now so casually being thrown around. Think about this: we are seriously discussing the possibility of a depression. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs lost. Trillions of dollars of wealth gone. No. Jobs. What will you do? Iceland—a nation-state—is on the verge of bankruptcy. What chance does the average American citizen have if nation-states are going under? There is no safety net. You were supposed to have made enough money in the stock market and your 401(k)s to get you through bad times. You did, right? You're sitting on a year's income in a CD, right? (I saw that advice in a financial column recently: have a year's income in a CD. Right). Where will you turn if you have no income?

This may sound like all doom and gloom. It is. American optimism has its tail between its legs and is slinking around the grill licking fat drippings off the dusty concrete. Our government is scrambling every day to avert a crisis it not only didn't see coming but can't seem to predict now that it knows its here. Europe is crumbling. We may see the death of the euro.

Finally, as bad as it gets for us, for me, for you, we must not forget that it will be much worse for many more people in the world. We will be complaining of decreases in our standards of living while billions around the world continue—continue—to live malnourished. I think the most damning thing to come out of this entire Last Supper at which credit was the main course is the concept of microfinance. We got so tripped out on credit, we saw it as a way to make money from the desparately poor. We even gave the first Nobel Peace Prize ever given for for-profit work to the man widely credited with inventing microfinance. Extending credit to the poorest of the poor was not a humanitarian act; it was instead credit seeking out profit in even the most destitute of places.

What will the long-term impact of the financial crisis be? I can't say that I know. I can't say that I understand what has happened, or how we got here. My government doesn't understand it. The most educated economists disagree on much of what is going on. Certainly my fellow citizens don't have a clue. All I know is this: things are not going to be the same as they were in the past ten years.

There is a lot of chaff in the wheat and a mighty wind blowing.

Election

2008-10-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

“Senator Obama has more money than God, the most favorable political climate imaginable — a three-week Wall Street meltdown and financial crisis — and with all that, the most margin he can get is four points?” said Bill McInturff, one of Mr. McCain’s pollsters.

Link

AmeriCorps

2008-10-02T10:23:00.001-07:00

Internets

2008-09-22T16:40:00.000-07:00

As world economies have grown, so too have their connections. The first telegraph cable connected Europe and North America in 1866. The first submarine cable system connected North America and Europe in 1958, transmitting up to 640,000 bytes of information per second. Today, the submarine cable system connecting North America with Europe can transmit more than 7 trillion (7,000,000,000,000) bytes per second, more than 10-million times faster than the original system. However, the increasing reliance upon this infrastructure also presents vulnerabilities as modern economies become more and more dependent on constant communication.
In early 2008, a ship severed two undersea cables off the Egyptian coast and cut 75 million people from the Internet grid, prompting attention from top-level government officials concerned with the economic impact of the blackout:
While tens of millions have been directly affected, the impact of the blackout has spread far wider, with economies across Asia and the Middle East struggling to cope. Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. ‘People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do,’ said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur.
Business interests took precedence over other uses of the network in resolving the outage. While not all of the information moved on networks is directly related to business, a large amount is. Of the total worldwide network capacity that is actually utilized, 27% is made up of private networks belonging to companies. Of the remaining 73% of the network, 72% is taken up by Internet use, and it may be safely assumed that a significant percentage of this traffic is somehow related to commerce.
As modern economies increasingly depend upon uninterrupted high-speed telecommunications, they must invest in infrastructure to insure against weak points that could lead to widespread outages. The cables severed off the Egyptian coast were two of the few high-capacity cables directly connecting Europe with India, China, and Japan. In contrast, where in 1958 only one cable connected North America and Europe, today no fewer than 11 high speed lines run directly from New York City across the Atlantic Ocean to the European continent. This redundancy is essential as the economic impact of network outages can be substantially negative. Research conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 2005 estimates that, if the entire nation of Switzerland lost network access for a week, it would cost the country 1.2% of its Gross Domestic Product. For both good and bad, connectivity is central to modern economies. This is true at the local scale as well as internationally, for California as well as the entire US, for Orange County as well as California.
The potential positive economic effects of increased connectivity in Orange County are substantial. According to a Sacramento Regional Research Institute report, increased broadband use in California could net Orange County 186,00 jobs and $15 billion in payroll gains over the next decade. Econometric research sponsored by AT&T linked economic gains with expanded broadband access between 2001 and 2005 in California. For every percentage point increase in broadband use, employment increases between 0.2 and 0.3 percent. A concerted broadband expansion policy in California could net the state more than $375 billion. The US Department of Commerce found that if a region grows in connectivity, it tends to experience more rapid growth in employment, the number of businesses overall and the number of businesses specifically related to information technology than comparable regions without connectivity growth.

References:
Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. (2008). Radio and Television Broadcasting. Available online at
http://encarta.msn.com.
Johnson, B. (1 Feb. 2008). How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people. The Guardian. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/internationalpersonalfinancebusiness.internet.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
mi2g. (2005). More than 1% GDP drop estimated per week of Internet blackout. Available online at http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pageid=http%3A//www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/220705.php.
Sacramento Regional Research Institute. (2007). Economic Effects of Increased Broadband Use in California - Research Report. Available online at http://www.srri.net/AboutUs/EconEffectsBB_Research.pdf.
Crandall, R., W. Lehr, and R. Litan. (2007). The effects of broadband deployment on output and employment: A cross-sectional analysis of U.S. data. The Brookings Institution. Available online at http://www3.brookings.edu/views/papers/crandall/200706litan.pdf.
Gartner, Inc. (2003). One Gigabit or Bust Initiative: A Broadband Vision for California. Available at http://www.cenic.org/publications/archives/glossies/Gartner_Full.pdf.
United States Department of Commerce (2006). Measuring the Economic Impact of Broadband Deployment. Available at http://www.eda.gov/PDF/MITCMUBBImpactReport.pdf.

Word Cloud Comparison: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama

2008-09-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

Reading through Bill Clinton's 1992 convention speech (see post below) got me thinking about the comparisons to Obama's campaign rhetoric of change. I decided to create word clouds of the two speeches. First is Clinton's
and Obama's

Obama was taking notes

2008-09-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

It's as if Obama has the same speech writers Clinton did. Clinton's 1992 "I Still Believe in a Place Called Hope" speech, I believe his speech accepting the Dem nomination at the convention (link). Anyone who thinks Obama's "new politics" isn't based on the oldest political trick in the book, take note:

Governor Richards, Chairman Brown, Mayor Dinkins, our great host, and my fellow Americans.

I am so proud of Al Gore. He said he came here tonight because he always wanted to do the warmup for Elvis. Well, I ran for President this year for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to come back to this convention center and finish that speech I started four years ago.

Well, last night Mario Cuomo taught us how a real nominating speech should be given. He also made it clear why we have to steer our ship of state on a new course.

Tonight I want to talk with you about my hope for the future, my faith in the American people, and my vision of the kind of country we can build, together.

I salute the good men who were my companions on the campaign trail: Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey, Doug Wilder, Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas. One sentence in the platform we built says it all: "The most important family policy, urban policy, labor policy, minority policy and foreign policy America can have is an expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-wage, high-skill jobs."

And so, in the name of all the people who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules, in the name of the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class, I accept your nomination for President of the United States.

I am a product of that middle class. And when I am President you will be forgotten no more.

We meet at a special moment in history, you and I. The Cold War is over; Soviet Communism has collapsed; and our values -- freedom, democracy, individual rights and free enterprise--they have triumphed all around the world. And yet just as we have won the Cold War abroad, we are losing the battles for economic opportunity and social justice here at home. Now that we have changed the world, it's time to change America.

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come--and gone. It's time for a change in America.

Tonight ten million of our fellow Americans are out of work. Tens of millions more work harder for lower pay. The incumbent President says unemployment always goes up a little before a recovery begins. But unemployment only has to go up by one more person before a real recovery can begin. And, Mr. President, you are that man.

This election is about putting power back in your hands and putting government back on your side. It's about putting people first.

You know, I've said that all across the country, and someone always comes back at me, as a young man did just this week at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He said, "That sounds good, Bill. But you're a politician. Why should I trust you?"

Tonight, as plainly as I can, I want to tell you who I am, what I believe, and where I want to lead America.

I never met my father. He was killed in a car wreck on a rainy road three months before I was born, driving home from Chicago to Arkansas to see my mother.

After that, my mother had to support us. So we lived with my grandparents while she went back to Louisiana to study nursing.

I can still see her clearly tonight through the eyes of a three- year-old: kneeling at the railroad station and weeping as she put me back on the train to Arkansas with my grandmother. She endured her pain because she knew her sacrifice was the only way she could support me and give me a better life.

My mother taught me. She taught me about family and hard work and sacrifice. She held steady through tragedy after tragedy. And she held our family, my brother and I, together through tough times. As a child, I watched her go off to work each day at a time when it wasn't always easy to be a working mother.

As an adult, I've watched her fight off breast cancer. And again she has taught me a lesson in courage. And always, always she taught me to fight.

That's why I'll fight to create high-paying jobs so that parents can afford to raise their children today. That's why I'm so committed to making sure every American gets the health care that saved my mother's life, and that women's health care gets the same attention as men's. That's why I'll fight to make sure women in this country receive respect and dignity -- whether they work in the home, out of the home, or both. You want to know where I get my fighting spirit? It all started with my mother.

Thank you, Mother. I love you.

When I think about opportunity for all Americans, I think about my grandfather.

He ran a country store in our little town of Hope. There were no food stamps back then, so when his customers -- whether they were white or black, who worked hard and did the best they could, came in with no money--well, he gave them food anyway --just made a note of it. So did I. Before I was big enough to see over the counter, I learned from him to look up to people other folks looked down on.

My grandfather just had a grade-school education. But in that country store he taught me more about equality in the eyes of the Lord than all my professors at Georgetown; more about the intrinsic worth of every individual than all the philosophers at Oxford; and he taught me more about the need for equal justice than all the jurists at Yale Law School.

If you want to know where I come by the passionate commitment I have to bringing people together without regard to race, it all started with my grandfather.

I learned a lot from another person, too. A person who for more than 20 years has worked hard to help our children--paying the price of time to make sure our schools don't fail them. Someone who traveled our state for a year, studying, learning, listening, going to PTA meetings, school board meetings, town hall meetings, putting together a package of school reforms recognized around the nation, and doing it all while building a distinguished legal career and being a wonderful loving mother.

That person is my wife.

Hillary taught me. She taught me that all children can learn, and that each of us has a duty to help them do it. So if you want to know why I care so much about our children and our future; it all started with Hillary. I love you.

Frankly, I'm fed up with politicians in Washington lecturing the rest of us about "family values." Our families have values. But our government doesn't.

I want an America where "family values" live in our actions, not just in our speeches--an America that includes every family, every traditional family and every extended family, every two-parent family, every single-parent family, and every foster family--every family.

I do want to say something to the fathers in this country who have chosen to abandon their children by neglecting to pay their child support: take responsibility for your children or we will force you to do so. Because governments don't raise children; parents do. And you should.

And I want to say something to every child in America tonight who is out there trying to grow up without a father or a mother: I know how you feel. You're special, too. You matter to America. And don't ever let anybody tell you you can't become whatever you want to be. And if other politicians make you feel like you're not a part of their family, come on and be part of ours.

The thing that makes me angriest about what's gone wrong in the last 12 years is that our government has lost touch with our values, while our politicians continue to shout about them. I'm tired of it.

I was raised to believe its that the American Dream was built on rewarding hard work. But we have seen the folks in Washington turn the American ethic on its head. For too long, those who play by the rules and keep the faith have gotten the shaft, and those who cut corners and cut deals have been rewarded. People are working harder than ever, spending less time with their children, working nights and weekends at their jobs instead of gong to PTA and Little League or Scouts, and their incomes are still going down. Their taxes are going up, and the costs of health care, housing and education are going through the roof. Meanwhile, more and more of our best people are falling into poverty -- even when they work forty hours a week.

Our people are pleading for change, but government is in the way. It has been hijacked by privileged, private interests. It has forgotten who really pays the bills around here -- it's taking more of your money and giving you less in return.

We have got to go beyond the brain-dead politics in Washington, and give our people the kind of government they deserve: a government that works for them.

A President -- a President ought to be a powerful force for progress. But right now I know how President Lincoln felt when General McClellan wouldn't attack in the Civil War. He asked him, "If you're not going to use your army, may I borrow it?" And so I say, George Bush, if you won't use your power to help America, step aside. I will.

Our country is falling behind. The President is caught in the grip of a failed economic theory. We have gone from first to thirteenth in the world in wages since Reagan and Bush have been in office. Four years ago, candidate Bush said America is a special place, not just "another pleasant country on the U.N roll call, between Albania and Zimbabwe." Now, under President Bush, America has an unpleasant economy stuck somewhere between Germany and Sri Lanka. And for most Americans, Mr. President, life's a lot less kind and a lot less gentle than it was before your Administration took office.

Our country has fallen so far, so fast that just a few months ago the Japanese Prime Minister actually said he felt "sympathy" for the United States. Sympathy. When I am your President, the rest of the world will not look down on us with pity, but up to us with respect again.

What is George Bush doing about our economic problems? Now, four years ago he promised us fifteen million new jobs by this time. And he's over fourteen million short. Al Gore and I can do better.

He has raised taxes on the people driving pick-up trucks, and lowered taxes on people riding in limousines. We can do better.

He promised to balance the budget, but he hasn't even tried. In fact, the budgets he has submitted have nearly doubled the debt. Even worse, he wasted billions and reduced our investment in education and jobs. We can do better.

So if you are sick and tired of a government that doesn't work to create jobs; if you're sick and tired of a tax system that's stacked against you; if you're sick and tired of exploding debt and reduced investments in our future -- or if, like the great civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, you're just plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired -- then join us, work with us, win with us. And we can make our country the country it was meant to be.

Now, George Bush talks a good game. But he has no game plan to rebuild America from the cities to the suburbs to the countryside so that we can compete and win again in the global economy. I do.

He won't take on the big insurance companies and the bureaucracies to control health costs and give us affordable health care for all Americans. But I will.

He won't even implement the recommendations of his own Commission on AIDS. But I will.

He won't streamline the federal government, and change the way it works; cut a hundred thousand bureaucrats, and put a hundred thousand new police officers on the streets of American cities. But I will.

He has never balanced a government budget. But I have, eleven times.

He won't break the stranglehold the special interests have on our elections and the lobbyists have on our government. But I will.

He won't give mothers and fathers the simple chance to take some time off from work when a baby is born or a parent is sick. But I will.

We're losing our family farms at a rapid rate, and he has no commitment to keep family farms in the family. But I do.

He's talked a lot about drugs, but he hasn't helped people on the front line to wage that war on drugs and crime. But I will.

He won't take the lead in protecting the environment and creating new jobs in environmental technology. But I will.

You know what else? He doesn't have Al Gore and I do.

Just in case -- just in case you didn't notice, that's Gore with an E on the end.

And George Bush -- George Bush won't guarantee a woman's right to choose. I will. Listen, hear me now: I am not pro-abortion. I am pro-choice strongly. I believe this difficult and painful decision should be left to the women of America. I hope the right to privacy can be protected, and we will never again have to discuss this issue on political platforms. But I am old enough to remember what it was like before Roe v. Wade. And I do not want to return to the time when we made criminals of women and their doctors.

Jobs. Education. Health care. These are not just commitments from my lips. They are the work of my life.

Our priorities must be clear: we will put our people first again. But priorities without a clear plan of action are just empty words. To turn our rhetoric into reality we've got to change the way government does business -- fundamentally. Until we do, we'll continue to pour billions of dollars down the drain.

The Republicans have campaigned against big government for a generation. But have you noticed? They've run this big government for a generation. And they haven't changed a thing. They don't want to fix government. They still want to campaign against it, and that's all.

But, my fellow Democrats, it's time for us to realize that we've got some changing to do too. There is not a program in government for every problem. And if we want to use government to help people, we've got to make it work again.

Because we are committed in this convention and in this platform to making these changes, we are, as Democrats, in the words that Ross Perot himself spoke today, a revitalized Democratic party. I am well aware that all those millions of people who rallied to Ross Perot's cause wanted to be in an army of patriots for change. Tonight I say to them: join us and together we will revitalize America.

Now, I don't have all the answers. But I do know the old ways don't work. Trickle down economics has sure failed. And big bureaucracies, both private and public, they've failed, too.

That's why we need a new approach to government--a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement, more choices for young people in the schools they attend, in the public schools they attend, and more choices for the elderly and for people with disabilities and the long-term care they receive--a government that is leaner, not meaner. A government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy--a government that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise. I call this approach a New Covenant -- a solemn agreement between the people and their government -- based not simply on what each of us can take but on what all of us must give to our nation.

We offer our people a new choice based on old values. We offer opportunity. We demand responsibility. We will build an American community again. The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal. In many ways it's not even Republican or Democratic, It's different. It's new. And it will work.

It will work because it is rooted in the vision and the values of the American people. Of all the things George Bush has ever said that I disagree with, perhaps the thing that bothers me most is how he derides and degrades the American tradition of seeing -- and seeking -- a better future. He mocks it as "the vision thing." But remember just what the Scripture says: "Where there is no vision the people perish."

I hope -- I hope nobody in this great hall tonight or in our beloved country has to go through tomorrow without a vision. I hope no one ever tries to raise a child without a vision. I hope nobody ever starts a business or plants a crop in the ground without a vision--for where there is no vision the people perish.

One of the reasons we have so many children in so much trouble in so many places in this nation is because they have seen so little opportunity, so little responsibility, and so little loving, caring community that they literally cannot imagine the life we are calling them to lead. And so I say again, where there is no vision America will perish.

What is the vision of our New Covenant?

An America with millions of new jobs in dozens of new industries moving confidently toward the 21st Century. An America that says to entrepreneurs and business people: We will give you more incentives and more opportunity than ever before to develop the skills of your workers and create American jobs and American wealth in the new global economy. But you must do your part; you must be responsible. American companies must act like American companies again -- exporting products, not jobs. That's what this New Covenant is all about.

An America in which the doors of college are thrown open once again to the sons and daughters of stenographers and steelworkers. We'll say: Everybody can borrow the money to go to college. But you must do your part. You must pay it back -- from your paychecks, or better yet, by going back home and serving your communities. Just think of it. Think of it; millions of energetic young men and women, serving their country by policing the streets, or teaching the children or caring for the sick, or working with the elderly or people with disabilities, or helping young people to stay off drugs and out of gangs, giving us all a sense of new hope and limitless possibilities. That's what this New Covenant is all about.

An America in which health care is a right, not a privilege. In which we say to all of our people: Your government has the courage -- finally -- to take on the health care profiteers and make health care affordable for every family. But you must do your part: preventive care, prenatal care, childhood immunization; saving lives, saving money, saving families from heartbreak. That's what the New Covenant is all about.

An America in which middle class incomes -- not middle class taxes -- are going up. An America, yes, in which the wealthiest few -- those making over $200,000 a year -- are asked to pay their fair share. An America in which the rich are not soaked -- but the middle class is not drowned either. Responsibility starts at the top; that's what the New Covenant is all about.

An America where we end welfare as we know it. We will say to those on welfare: you will have and you deserve the opportunity through training and education, through child care and medical coverage, to liberate yourself. But then, when you can, you must work, because welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. That's what the New Covenant is all about.

An America with the world's strongest defense; ready and willing to use force, when necessary. An America at the forefront of the global effort to preserve and protect our common environment - and promoting global growth. An America that will not coddle tyrants, from Baghdad to Beijing. An America that champions the cause of freedom and democracy, from Eastern Europe to Southern Africa, and in our own hemisphere in Haiti and Cuba.

The end of the Cold War permits us to reduce defense spending while still maintaining the strongest defense in the world. But we must plow back every dollar of defense cuts into building American jobs right here at home. I know well that the world needs a strong America, but we have learned that strength begins at home.

But the New Covenant is about more than opportunities and responsibilities for you and your families. It's also about our common community. Tonight every one of you knows deep in your heart that we are too divided.

It is time to heal America. And so we must say to every American: look beyond the stereotypes that blind us. We need each other. All of us, we need each other. We don't have a person to waste. And yet, for too long, politicians have told the most of us that are doing all right that what's really wrong with America is the rest of us. Them. Them the minorities. Them the liberals. Them the poor. Them the homeless. Them the people with disabilities. Them the gays. We've gotten to where we've nearly them'd ourselves to death. Them, and them, and them. But this is America. There is no them; there is only us. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all.

That is our Pledge of Allegiance, and that's what the New Covenant is all about.

How do I know we can come together to make change happen? Because I have see it in my own state. In Arkansas we're working together and we're making progress. No, there is no Arkansas miracle. But there are a lot of miraculous people. And because of them, our schools are better, our wages are higher, our factories are busier, our water is cleaner, and our budget is balanced. We're moving ahead.

I wish -- I wish I could say the same thing about America under the incumbent President. He took the richest country in the world and brought it down. We took one of the poorest states in America and lifted it up.

And so I say to those who would criticize Arkansas: come on down. Especially if you're from Washington -- come to Arkansas. You'll see us struggling against some problems we haven't solved yet. But you'll also see a lot of great people doing amazing things. And you might even learn a thing or two.

In the end, the New Covenant simply asks us all to be Americans again--old-fashioned Americans for a new time. Opportunity. Responsibility. Community. When we pull together, America will pull ahead. Throughout the whole history of this country, we have seen time and again that when we are united, we are unstoppable. We can seize this moment, we can make it exciting and energizing and heroic to be an American again. We can renew our faith in ourselves and each other, and restore our sense of unity and community. Scripture says, our eyes have not yet seen, nor our ears heard, nor our minds imagined what we can build.

But I cannot do it alone. No President can. We must do it together. It won't be easy and it won't be quick. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight. But we can do it--with our commitment and our creativity and our diversity and our strength. I want every person in this hall and every citizen in this land to reach out and join us in a great new adventure to chart a bold new future.

As a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor I had, named Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so.

That future entered my life the night our daughter Chelsea was born. As I stood in that delivery room, I was overcome with the thought that God had given me a blessing my own father never knew: the chance to hold my child in my arms.

Somewhere at this very moment, another child is born in America. Let it be our cause to give that child a happy home, a healthy family, a hopeful future. Let it be our cause to see that child reach the fullest of her God-given abilities. Let it be our cause that she grow up strong and secure, braced by her challenges, but never, never struggling alone; with family and friends and a faith that in America, no one is left out; no one is left behind.

Let it be our cause that when she is able, she gives something back to her children, her community, and her country. And let it be our cause to give her a country that's coming together, and moving ahead -- a country of boundless hopes and endless dreams; a country that once again lifts up its people, and inspires the world.

Let that be our cause and our commitment and our New Covenant.

I end tonight where it all began for me: I still believe in a place called Hope.

At least the weather is nice

2008-09-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

Wisdom teeth removal recovery continues. Currently 4 days post-op. Still on regular doses of ibuprofen. Have resisted vicoden.

Currently in the gap between work and Spanish class. Spanish progressing nicely. Have begun to understand audio recordings used in online homework. Can muddle through BBC Mundo articles. Vocabulary still quite ~~piqueño~~ pequeño, though. Spelling obviously off a bit...

Picture below is view from the coffee-shop courtyard where currently enjoying a terrible cappuccino. Often being a hipster is not enough to qualify one for a job making coffee-based drinks. No effort whatsoever.Currently in doldrums. Feel no progress. Personal pronouns have disappeared.

Peace Corps Milestone

2008-09-12T14:15:00.000-07:00

Today I completed a milestone in my preparation for Peace Corps service. Today I had my wisdom teeth removed.

Actually, four hours ago I had them removed.

This got me thinking about Michel Foucault and ideas of disciplining the body. I'm definitely disciplining my body in the Peace Corps process. So far, I've had bloodwork done, had my first rectal exam--and my doctor seemed to feel more uncomfortable with that one than I felt--have enrolled in a Spanish language course, and have had four teeth removed from my face.

Talk about trying to get things in order.

Bad time to be starting in planning?

2008-09-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Below are two charts showing the number of job postings on Sept 9 2008 taken from two popular urban planning websites, Planetizen.com and Planning.org.

Many higher-than-entry-level positions open. This could be a good thing for those just starting in planning, too, because it may be an opportunity for rapid advancement in the industry. I suspect that planning, like many industries, is on the verge of disgorging massive numbers of baby boomer senior employees.

I will make an effort to begin tracking these job boards on a weekly basis, to perhaps get a sense of how the industry is changing over time.

Palin and Urban Planning

2008-09-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

I'm a little worried with the anti-city rhetoric at a time when city policies need to be closely examined for resource consumption impact. A lot of us live in cities, you know.

That planner salary doesn't look so bad after all...

2008-08-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

A planner can make about $45k in Shreveport, LA. I live in Irvine, CA.

Jargon

2008-08-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

I just heard the term "action items" used twice in one sentence.

Green Economy a Pipe Dream?

2008-08-22T11:21:00.001-07:00

From Humboldt County, CA's General Plan:

Currently there is a substantial economic drain on the County's economy for energy; in excess of 100 million dollars annually. Energy conservation could help keep a substantial portion of this capital in the County, which would then be spent with other businesses stimulating the local economy. Alternative energy production and conservation could potentially spawn numerous businesses and industries, thereby aiding the diversification of the County's economic base. [emphasis added]

To what degree is the green economy being promoted as a panacea? Is pinning economic development hopes for diversification on a single industry--not quite diversification...--anything new? I wonder if the most ardent advocates for the green economy are also representing areas with depressed economies.

What is the correlation between green advocacy and the economic health of the advocate's constituency?

Although this might be a moot point as the US economy weakens and calls for green infrastructure from Obama become louder. Or...that just might support the point.

Police Truck

2008-08-18T14:39:00.001-07:00

2008 Olympics

2008-08-18T14:25:00.001-07:00

Light Pole

2008-06-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

Middle Earth Student Lounge

2008-06-15T12:06:00.001-07:00

At least something waited for me

2008-05-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

It's been crazy lately. Haven't been posting. At least in my absence we've still managed to not figure out biofuels:

New Trend in Biofuels Has New Risks

ROME — In the past year, as the diversion of food crops like corn and palm to make biofuels has helped to drive up food prices, investors and politicians have begun promoting newer, so-called second-generation biofuels as the next wave of green energy. These, made from non-food crops like reeds and wild grasses, would offer fuel without the risk of taking food off the table, they said.

But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended consequences. Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.

Nick Veasey's X-Ray Art

2008-04-15T10:51:00.001-07:00

Stumbled across an on-line gallery of Nick Veasey's x-ray photography. Fairly fantastic stuff.

Sample:

Add Another Strike Against Biofuels

2008-04-10T12:22:00.001-07:00

New York Times op-ed adds more (bio)fuel to the fire(?) against ethanol and biofuels.

Last week, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, warned that 33 nations are at risk of social unrest because of the rising prices of food. “For countries where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption, there is no margin for survival,” he said.

Prices are unlikely to drop soon. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says world cereal stocks this year will be the lowest since 1982.

The United States and other developed countries need to step up to the plate. The rise in food prices is partly because of uncontrollable forces — including rising energy costs and the growth of the middle class in China and India. This has increased demand for animal protein, which requires large amounts of grain.

But the rich world is exacerbating these effects by supporting the production of biofuels. The International Monetary Fund estimates that corn ethanol production in the United States accounted for at least half the rise in world corn demand in each of the past three years. This elevated corn prices. Feed prices rose. So did prices of other crops — mainly soybeans — as farmers switched their fields to corn, according to the Agriculture Department.

Washington provides a subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to ethanol blenders and slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imports. In the European Union, most countries exempt biofuels from some gas taxes and slap an average tariff equal to more than 70 cents a gallon of imported ethanol. There are several reasons to put an end to these interventions. At best, corn ethanol delivers only a small reduction in greenhouse gases compared with gasoline. And it could make things far worse if it leads to more farming in forests and grasslands. Rising food prices provide an urgent argument to nix ethanol’s supports.

Oh how I remember about four years ago in the Midwest when ethanol held the same panacea status as a 1990s Michael Jordan.

Olympic Flame Shenanigans

2008-04-08T12:32:00.000-07:00

Article about protest impact on Olympic torch relay.

My interest:

The flame was lit in Olympia, Greece, on 24 March and is being relayed by torch through 20 countries before being carried into the opening ceremony at the Beijing Games on 8 August.

But the torch had to be put out three times in Paris because of the protests. The flame itself was kept alight in a safety lantern.

I'm fascinated by the symbolism of this flame, how the flame that left Olympia can somehow be conceived of as the same flame when it arrives in Beijing, and of how powerful the IOC is that it presumably can get a burning gas safety lantern on-board trans-Atlantic and trans-Oceanic flights. I can't even bring >3 ounces of toothpaste...

International Monetary Fund Weighs in on Cost of Credit Crunch: $1 Trillion

2008-04-08T09:52:00.001-07:00

A report just out from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts the cost to the global economy of the credit crunch at nearly $1 trillion.

The report includes a good overview of the systemic conditions in regulation and financing that created a lending environment based on what have turned out to be unacceptably risky investment positions.

It also touches on the implications of the credit crunch fallout for the global economy, including the sobering warning that

it is now clear that the current turmoil is more than simply a liquidity event, reflecting deep-seated balance sheet fragilities, which means its effects are likely to be broader, deeper, and more protracted.

This outlook draws on a feedback hypothesis in which decreased access to credit impinges on household borrowing, business investment, and asset prices, which in turn influence and are influenced by employment and output growth. The mutual influence in this loop will continue driving economic activity down.

Back in fall 2007, commentators had widely varying predictions for how bad and how long-lasting the effects of the crunch would be. Now commentators are using more long-term language, and the proper noun Depression is being thrown around quite a bit more than its less discouraging, non-proper counterpart depression that was the star so many months ago.

The policy implications suggested by the IMF report are intriguing and include calls for global policies to limit the fallout of the mostly-U.S. credit crunch in other economies, though it's somewhat contradictory for the IMF to speak of both a world economy and then break that economy into state economies at various times throughout the report.

The report includes this line, which I find remarkable:

It is now widely acknowledged that public measures are needed in a number of areas.

This is a call from the IMF for government action. Even more, the IMF calls on any plans for spending public money "to ensure that shareholders accept the first losses". This seems to be a strong position against government bail-outs.

Report in full.

2008-04-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

Three hundred twenty-nine bubble-like rainbow sheen oil slicks with water densitied out on bottom bottom bottom. Number numbers also how many numbers numbers. How many friends from the past slow circle under tested fire alarms at night waking everyone from restless sleep in a dim orange sodium glow?

Leg irons bracelets. Macabre jewelry fancied by excavationists. Iron worn from skin rubbing. Marble steps sagging footfalls centuries centuries years and years and days and hours of not quite anymore the way it used to be how maddening it ain't.

Three hundred twenty-eight bubble-like rain—

"Don't you wanna go home tonight," Bobby said bobby said to him white t-shirt reaching out the window to operate the windshield wipers in this rain (test fire alarms).

"Sure," he said hand on wheel hand out window head out window wind so fast lungs can't pull air in ANY MORE, "sure."

Racing along.

Time spent time spent time spent as if in reserve it could ever be banked no way. Why can't it be the time now it was then? So much better. So much easier to forget how bad it was it is impossible to forget how bad it is but how bad it was is an easy one to forget. Just don't think about it.

Curve coming up. A bend. Rain falling lighter. Wipers still. Bobby wants the rain back so his head goes back out the window and his heart races. Those jeans slipping down.

Now it's just dark, and there are uncertain directions before them, and light from two round lights.

Bobby's dad told him once, "Can't have followers without leaders, Bob," and Bobby thought to that, "Can't have followers without leaders." Leader the good side according to Dad. Mom thought the same. They both thought the same. Bobby figures lots of followers are leaders. At least inside. Bobby figures lots of leaders are leaders straight through. That's why they are. Someday they'll be followers, too, if it helps them get ahead of Bobby.

Nothing stays as it is or is at all if it tries to stay. Can't measure speed if position known. Can't know position if speed is known. Moving around makes staying put harder and harder and harder the faster and heavier you go, until infinite mass makes moving rather, well, pointless.

Ninja Loans

2008-04-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

Couple things.

Came across a new term today: Ninja loans. These are loans made that require No Income, No Job, No Assets on the part of the borrower. In short, bad idea.

Peace Corps app process is still in the post-interview stage. In delaying my decision to move ahead in order to wait and hear back from grad schools, I've now been pushed into the next PC selection cycle, beginning May 15, I think. This means my departure date has moved from this fall to next spring, a full 6-month swing. This was somewhat disconcerting at first. However, I realized that I could work for the interim period--its entirety or in part--and then travel a bit before embarking on PC service. This could have some rather exciting consequences for giving me a chance to go somewhere and do something I wouldn't have otherwise. Possibilities include:

biking or riding a motorcycle or scooter all over the US
backpacking the Appalachian Trail, or at least part of it
traveling in Russia--if I can get a visa--and maybe doing the Trans-Siberian Railroad! (However, travel would likely be in winter...)
traveling in Central America
trying my hand at picking up freelance writing jobs on the way

Those are initial thoughts. Unfortunately, the weak dollar may make traveling abroad difficult. A friend of mine recently returned from Costa Rica and reported that people there no longer prefer US dollars. Pura vida, baby!

Also, all this talk of traveling and PC constantly reminds me that I'm putting off "settling down". Really, if I leave for PC in spring 2009, the earliest I could conceive of actually stopping somewhere domestically (double meaning very much intended) would be 2011. That's a bit of a scary prospect because I'll be 27 upon returning from PC. I don't want to be much more than 30 years older than the children in my family.

That being said, my apprehension is very much related to all the expectations surrounding age that are promoted in my culture and society. The most brief of historical surveys would show that such expectations have changed dramatically over time. Even today, the notion of being an old parent--especially for young professionals (and young now extends into the 30s...)--is not at all abhorrent. Senator Christopher Dodd, RPCV, had children at 50! While that is not something I am at all interested in at this time, the notion of spending another at least 3 years in the single-young-male-traveler lifestyle is also not exactly appealing.

I try very hard to let my strong attachments to these notions of expectations and ideals go, but just when I feel them slipping away from being important, and sometimes even essential, to my conception of my role in the world, I grasp even more tightly to them, as if they are my birthday balloons trying to escape to the sky. I sometimes feel on the verge of realizing that nothing at all matters, and that is a terrifying prospect for me, someone who has spent his entire life believing that things matter.

Role of wives in political adultery

2008-03-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

LA Times story on the role of politicians' wives when politicians admit adultery. Focused on Silda Wall Spitzer, soon-to-be-former NY Governor Spitzer's wife, standing by him at press conference. Includes commentary on the comparison being made between Spitzer and Rodham-Clinton.

I keyed in on the implications for the institution of marriage, but there's plenty in the story for thought.

Affordable Housing and Community Development Resource

2008-03-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

Knolwedgeplex.org is specifically targeted to affordable housing and community development professionals.

Guatemala: Hostages and Land Rights

2008-02-23T11:04:00.000-08:00

Farmers in Guatemala today released 29 police officers they had taken hostage (BBC) to demand the release of a farm leader, Ramiro Choc. Choc was detained by police for illegally occupying land. A police spokesperson said the farmers had threatened to kill the hostages "one by one" if Choc was not released. The freeing of the hostages followed a call by Choc from prison for the farmers to release the hostages. The Guatemalan government has said it will work with the farmers to legalize their land holdings.

Teaching is exhausting

2008-02-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

Just finished 3 hours of TA teaching. Am tired.

It's very difficult to calibrate myself to the level of understanding the undergrads bring to the classroom. Also to their expectations. Or, their lack of expectations, I should say.

I try to anticipate what they are going to want/need to hear/learn, but I always leave feeling like they came not wanting/needing anything.

Makes me wonder why I'm even there.

Makes me wonder why I'm even here.

Next steps (prospective)

2008-02-20T16:03:00.001-08:00

Finish MURP degree
Enter Peace Corps Masters International Program as bridge to Doctoral studies
Complete 1 year of Masters study
Serve in Peace Corps for up to 36 months, preferably in Urban Planning
Return to Masters study
Find a partner who wants to raise a family while traveling all over the developing world
Transition from Masters to Doctoral study
Complete Doctoral study
Start on family and career

That sounds about right and will sound different tomorrow...

Next 3 years: PCV-->RPCV

2008-02-17T14:54:00.000-08:00

ATTN: Single Women

2008-02-15T20:07:00.001-08:00

You really need to get hitched, since it's what you actually, deep-down, want to do anyway:

And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

USAID policy on evaluation

2008-02-11T13:51:00.000-08:00

http://dec.usaid.gov/partners/evalweb/resources/train.cfm

I may have posted this already: Notes from Atlanta, summer 07

2008-01-28T23:57:00.000-08:00

I arrived without baggage. Well, without one of them. It's impossible, even with today's airlines, to arrive without baggage. My guitar made it. Everything else did not. I was told to come back the next morning. When I did, not only did they not have my bag—with everything—but they were also out of the convenience kits they supposedly provide to people whose bags are lost. Perhaps the last shipment had gotten misplaced.
Signs hang from the airport ceiling:

Walk to:
Baggage Claim
Concourse A
Concourse B
Concourse C
Concourse D
Concourse E

Distance:
5000 feet
4000 feet
3000 feet
2000 feet
1000 feet
You are here

The airport runs its own train taking people from concourse to concourse. I walked for 1000 feet before realizing this. I boarded the train. I deboarded the train.
At baggage carousels, a distinct and terrifying tension prevents me from looking at anyone else in such a way that they notice me looking at them. I do look. Otherwise, I would not be able to set my fear at an appropriate level. For it is only by observing whether or not people who I think may have been on my flight have picked up their bags that I know if I "lag the crowd". Many flights use the same baggage carousel. The stream of luggage flows endlessly, it seems, a Nile's worth of toiletries and light sweaters—adaptable to any weather!—bob past, several of them over and over and over again until I stop mistaking them for my own bag and realize they will probably end up lost forever on what the writer of The Brave Little Toaster would certainly conceive of as a great journey but that actually is rather dull and full of lodging problems. Some of them undoubtedly belong in Denver, or Houston, or even Philadelphia. Some of them will never find their way back to their masters. Dred Scott would applaud lost luggage. Those bags are, after all, full of all the right stuff to survive as runaways.
I don't want others to know I'm looking at them. I want to save them the embarrassment of being caught out using me as a yardstick for how scared they should be. I also don't want them to see fear in my eyes as that carousel keeps squeaking round and round, the blades folding under one another like pin feathers on a steel bird of prey. Steel bird of prey: sounds like an Army operation, with helicopters. Ah, more blades.
I gave it ten more minutes. Still, the bag didn't come. They told me to come back at 11:45 that night, which is roughly equivalent to 9:30 the next morning when relying upon public transportation in a foreign city. The transportation is MARTA. The city, Atlanta. I boarded the MARTA train.
In my pocket, a sheet of paper, my only hope for refuge in the city, began "Location of Ratsack". As far as I knew, the thousands of people in town for the conference had booked every room in the city before I managed to decide I was going. I had found out about Ratsack when a friend of mine told me she was going to stay with him. Beyond that, I only knew that the house had no electricity. I searched "Ratsack" on-line and found he is a spoken word artist who had appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam. Not only had he been on Def Poetry Jam, but he had been on Def Poetry Jam twice. Though I'd hoped it would, this new information did not help me decide how to pack to stay in an electricless house in Atlanta for four days. Perhaps Ratsack kept the place under blackout for fear of Delta attack. My friend never showed up. I looked at the paper again.
Objective #1: Take the MARTA to Five Points.
Objective #2: Transfer to either the 17 or 55 bus, whichever is at the station.
Objective #3: Exit the bus at the second stop after the railroad tracks, near George Washington Carver High School
Objective #4: Walk up the street one block to Martin St., on which I will find the Location of Ratsack.

Peformance:
Objective #1: The Atlanta airport is just outside the city, to the south. The MARTA runs on two axes, one east-west, one north-south. The airport is the southern end of the north-south axis. Five Points station sits at the intersection of the two axes, right in the downtown. I believe it's called Five Points instead of Four Points because the north-south axis bifurcates about halfway from Five Points to the end of the true north axis. There are, then, five endpoints to the MARTA system: north, south, east, west, and north-northeast.
I learned all of this from staring at the large route map in the airport. I bought a four-day rail and bus pass. The train station is elevated above the concourse, requiring a trip up an escalator, or stairs if you're feeling sporty. The escalator is a common theme in the Atlanta transportation network. Some of the MARTA stations have to be almost 200 feet underground, and the walls of the tunnel are simple, bare rock that still shows the bore holes from the drills. Escalators to escape these caverns are nearly 100 feet tall. Because the stations are so far underground, the street-level exits can sometimes be blocks apart for the same station. I boarded the train at the Airport station.
The train is elevated until it gets to the downtown business district. The ride from the airport goes, not through, but above south Atlanta. Enormous brick buildings with hundreds of windows line the train route. Graffiti on one reads, "The End Times Has Come," in brilliant blue block lettering. The buildings appear empty, except one labeled as a box manufacturer. Brown cardboard boxes sit inside, stacked to the ceiling. A small sign in the window facing the train reads, "Welcome to Atlanta." Tall rusting water towers stand in lots of green grass and abandoned steel. Several junkyards, filled with old car bodies, employ the men sitting on truck tailgates outside the shop doors. A horse and buggy sit outside a short steel building. Houses stand scattered on the land. Vacant lots are plentiful. The quiet, air conditioned train rolls above them all, and I arrive at Five Points.
I exit the train and am deep underground. The station feels like an underground warren. Signs promise of stairways and escalators with arrows pointing to hallways. According to my directions, I need to find the intersection of Forsyth and Alabama for the 17. I see Forsyth on a sign. I follow the arrow.
After ascending two sets of stairs, I stand on Forsyth Street. The Atlanta business district and its skyscrapers drive northward from Five Points. I only know this because I can see the tall buildings begin just a couple intersections north on Forsyth. At this time, I do not know what lies south of me. The street is dirty. McDonald's bags, candy wrappers, and plastic drink lids skip along the curb, blown by a wet, warm breeze. A woman leaning against a light pole aimlessly asks, to no one in particular, if they can spare 75¢. She is either blind or pretending to be. Two street vendors sell candy bars and other junk foods from ramshackle huts made of bungee chords, metal shelving, and tarp. A man walks by pulling a plastic box filled with cell phone chargers, in case you need one. The sun is hot. Most people are standing in the shade, just inside the station. I don't know where the bus stops so I step into the June heat and walk to the information booth on the corner of Forsyth and Alabama, across from a McDonald's.
The booth looks fortified. The man sitting inside has no opening to the outside world but an intercom through which he can speak and hear. I think the black box on top of the booth is a small air conditioner. It must not be terrible inside. I ask where the 55 stops. He looks at me as he must look at everyone who comes by asking questions they could answer themselves by looking at transit maps. He points down Alabama Street, away from Forsyth. "Down there," he says. I doubt he realizes what it's like to be in a strange city.
I should mention: everyone is black. I am white.
I walk down Alabama to one of the MARTA signs indicating a bus stop. The route numbers listed on the sign include neither the 17 nor the 55. A man sitting on a nearby bench looks as though he might know the system. I sit next to him. "Does the 55 stop here?" I ask.
"Don't know," he answers.
I don't press him. After being in Atlanta for only two hours, I'm already tired of trying to navigate this strange place. Even the buildings seem to move of a strange logic. The man leans over, "Maybe he could help you out," he says, pointing to a man standing next to an idling bus at the stop. He appears to be the driver, on break. I stand up from the bench, grab my guitar case, and walk over to the man.
"Is this where the 55 stops?" I ask, gesturing to the idling bus.
The man looks at the bus, then back at me, "No, you've got to go down the street," he says, pointing even farther down Alabama, away from Forsyth, "and take a right to get the 55."
"Thanks," I say. I decide to only worry about the 17, which stops at Forsyth and Alabama, and walk back up Alabama to the information stronghold. I cross Forsyth and join the group of people waiting for one of the number of southbound buses that stop at the intersection. Buses come and buses go from the northbound stop across the street, next to the vendors and blind panhandler.
"Can anybody spare me 75¢?"
Since some time, buses have been sold as roving billboards. I assume the advertisers target the expenditure of their money by advertising their products in places and to the people most likely to make use of them. A northbound bus passes, its side pasted with an ad for bail bonds. The ad shows a black man in front of a black woman and child. From the hook, "Finally home," and from my understanding of the notion of home, I assume the man is the father of the child.
Yet, I am white, they are black. The impressions made upon me by the ad of home, of fatherhood, and of marriage are social, and my feelings so far in this black city of Atlanta make clear to me that I possess no special insight into a black understanding of the world. I can, though, understand that the ad targets people and the families of people who are in jail and cannot afford bail. Money and race on the side of a public bus. I would like to meet the capitalist owners of this bail bond company who make more money by loaning their existing money to those without money but with a loved one in jail. This redefines "interest." I am the only white person waiting for the buses.
The 17 stops. I stand in line, my Breeze card in hand to swipe across the fare reader on the bus. I find a seat. The bus is air conditioned and brightly lit. Lettering on the windows above the front seats reads, "These seats are reserved for seniors and those with disabilities." Deference to the old permeates this Atlanta. Even the abandoned factories seem to have been treated with a reserved respect. The graffiti was well done, anyway. Perhaps the solid construction of the buildings masked inattention: their decay may be slow. Three small LCD televisions hang above the seats. The TVs show ads full of white people. White newscasters, white weather forecasters, white families ecstatic to receive payday loans. I can't take my eyes away from the bus TV screens. The Directions to Ratsack say to get off the bus at the second stop after the railroad tracks, near George Washington Carver High School. I suddenly realize that I haven't been watching outside the bus for the whole trip. I could have already crossed the tracks and slipped by the high school without knowing it. I consider that I might have to ride the bus on its entire route in order to come back to Five Points, my only landmark, the only orientation I have in the enormous Atlantan map. I feel the city stretching around me, enveloping me. I am reminded of how starfish eat. I have dealt with this anxiety forever. My only strength has been in understanding that everyone is lost. In this I feel with company. The plastic bus seat is cold; I sit next to my guitar.

When I arrived at the airport, I went to the baggage claim. After deciding that my bag hadn't followed me, I went to the Frontier Airlines desk and arranged to pick it up the next day. I then spent a half hour helping a Turkish man purchase a phone card and make a phone call to Turkey. He spoke little English. I don't even know his name. He approached me as a I walked by the pay phones and asked if I could help him. A phone card machine next to the pay phones seemed a logical first step, but how could he have known that? We went over to it. He carried only fifty-dollar bills. The machine took only tens and twenties. I gave him change.
The machine said nothing of the cost of international minutes, but he bought a ten-dollar card anyway. We went to the pay phones. He dialed the number on the phone card. After realizing that he couldn't understand the recorded, English-speaking voice, he handed the phone to me and pointed to a long number he had written on a scrap of paper. Turkish phone numbers have lots of digits. For a moment, I thought of the possibility that I might end up in Federal prison for making this phone call, for blindly offering assistance to a young man who, in broken, no, shattered English roughly told me that he was a student going to study in Mississippi, of all places, for the summer. Perhaps he merely saw that I thought I understood something that he was saying and simply confirmed what I thought he was talking about. Past experience has taught me that I am easily manipulated. The first time I stepped out of a Chicago train station, a black man walked for a block with me and my two friends offering us advice on cab fares before demanding money for his "services." In Baton Rouge, a young black kid asked me for gas money on my way into a gas station. He had two black friends with him. As the kid asked me for money, I watched his friends. One of them couldn't contain a huge smile. They'd done this before. The asker looked real sad, too. A white guy asked me for money on my way out of the same gas station not five minutes later. I must look an easy mark. I didn't give those people money. I tried to help the Turkish man.
I couldn't get the number he showed me to connect. We tried another number he provided. Again, no connection. I took him to the airport information desk where I had gone to ask about baggage claims. I had also asked the young white man working there where I could find the information desk for the conference I was attending. I told him, "I'm attending a conference here that's supposed to have an info desk at the airport."
He asked, "What's it called?"
I answered, "The US Social—"
"Oh," he exclaimed, "the USO is up those stairs or the escalator, then to the left."
I was pretty sure this was not what I was looking for, but I went anyway. Surely enough, when I got to the top of the stairs I saw only a camouflaged white man guarding a door emblazoned with "USO" and covered in an American flag color scheme: I had come to Atlanta to attend a conference questioning everything about capitalism and U.S. imperialism, and the first place to which I was directed was to the nerve center of the maintenance apparatus of capitalism and U.S. imperialism. Hoo-rah. I never did find the US Social Forum info table.
We stood at the info desk, the Turkish man and I. I asked the young white man why we were having trouble calling to Turkey. He didn't know. However, a black woman also working the info desk—who had not been there the first time I had come to the desk—overheard us asking about calling Turkey.
"What country code you using?" she asked.
My companion did not answer. "Well, he told me 0090, then the number," I said.
"Oh, well, you don't need the zeroes. I worked as a switchboard operator for twelve years, and you just have to dial 90, then the number. That's your problem," she explained.
Unbelievable. We returned to the pay phones. I dialed with the new instructions. The first numbers still failed to connect. The second worked. Ten dollars of phone card got my Turkish friend four minutes of talk time. When his target answered, we discovered the pay phone we were using was broken, and the person couldn't hear anything my friend was saying. The phone card rounds up to the nearest three minutes. The thirty seconds of frantic attempts at communication exhausted the phone card.
"It's empty," I tried to explain, pointing to the card as if it had held something in the first place. "You'll have to buy another one."
I confused him. "The card...is—" He waved his hands like an umpire signaling a safe baserunner.
"Yeah," I said, thinking this gesture universally understood. "You don't get much for ten dollars. International phone calls are expensive." I spoke slowly and loudly like Americans do when confronted with misunderstanding. If only I slow down and yell, he'll surely understand.
"No more?" he asked.
"Yeah, no more," I said.
We stood by the broken phone, him looking at the phone card deciding what to do. He seemed to make a decision and looked up at me. "How do I get to Mississippi?" I think he may have practiced this line.
I forgot my frustration and fear at having lost a bag and being in a strange place. Suddenly, only empathy for this Turkish man filled my mind. He arrived with little knowledge of the language, little ability and luck when trying to contact Turkey, and absolutely no idea how to get from Atlanta to Mississippi, further proving that someone else always holds the worse-off card. Of course, my change of feelings may have just been another manifestation of my fatal flaw of gaining confidence and comfort only after discovering and securing my superiority over others. I have no such comfort on the Atlanta bus. We just crossed railroad tracks and am passing George Washington Carver High School. The stop must be around here somewhere. I pull the chord. A pleasant feminine voice announces, "Stop requested." The bus pulls to the curb. I step from the air conditioning into a June Atlanta and don't know where I am.
Directions to Ratsack say to just walk up Jonesboro a block. I do, but find no Martin Street like I should have. I turn around, my guitar heavy, humid, uncertain sweat building beneath my small black backpack. A black boy and girl are walking from a house toward the street and me. I begin walking up the street, the other way, then turn and ask, "You know Ratsack?"
They keep walking but look at each other. They stop once they get next to me. "You mean Ratpack?" the girl says.
"Uh, yeah," I say, figuring that it's close enough to be the same person.
"White guy?" she asks.
"Yeah, white guy, Australian accent," I reply. This confirms for us both that we speak of the same person.
She turns to the boy. "It's about 4:30, right? He should be around his place, yeah?"
"Yeah, he'll be there," says the boy.
She points up the street where the bus had come from. "You just need to go up there a couple streets and that'll be where you find him," she says.
"Okay, thanks," I say and begin walking.
"I'll show you," she says after me and begins walking with her friend.
I walk faster than they do and slow down to match, but they walk so slowly that I cannot keep pace with them and end up always slightly ahead, my guitar case in hand and my body slightly turned back toward them. I am scuttling, crab-like, down the Atlanta sidewalk.
The girl notices a man standing in the fenced-in yard of a mechanic's shop across the street. "Hey, you know if Ratpack's home?" she yells.
"I haven't seen him for a while," he replies.
I had stopped but now resume walking. We pass two men playing checkers on a large board they hold between them on their thighs. The checker pieces are the size of high-ball coasters. As we pass another house, a woman on the porch says, "I thought you was coming here with that guitar."
The girl notices a man she knows on the opposite side of the street. The man yells hello to her. She says, "I'm going to get some weed," and she smiles as she yells. She had been smiling since I met her. I guess it wasn't me.
When we reach Martin Street, she points down it. "It's the second house on the left down there, the big white one," she says.
"Thank you," I say and begin walking down the street at my own pace again. Soon, I'm knocking on the large black metal mesh front door on the white house, second on the left.

The only rule: take your shoes off at the door. I leave mine to the right, added to the pile already there. This house is young, or, at least it's present form is. The place is obviously old. Ratsack is absent. This is not entirely unexpected. He is, I learn, occupied with the neighborhood kids, something that becomes a theme.
I have to explain my guitar at the door.
"Oh, you have a guitar," the tall man says who answered. "That's cool, that's cool."
"Uhm, yeah," I say, eloquently, "I just started playing about a year ago. I'm still learning."
"Oh, okay, that's cool, that's cool," he says. "Cathy's upstairs. She owns this place. You can go ahead and go up if you want. Just leave your stuff down here. Ratsack isn't around right now, but when he comes back he'll show you the house down the street where you guys will be staying." The stairs are behind him, just inside the front door. They creak loudly as I ascend.
I meet the owner in an upstairs room she converted into a computer lab and where she edits video. She's making a documentary about being a white person and moving into the South Atlanta hood. At some point during my time here, she tells me, "I don't want any more white people moving in around here, frankly." Gary and Franklin are also in the room, sitting at the two computers along the south wall. The south and north walls are the long walls. The door is to the east and windows to the west. I sit behind the two men at their computers, in an old chair, faded pink fabric stuffed full, the seat and sides billowy. The chair's back is tall and wooden legs carved. Tacks run along the seams.
Gary swivels around in his computer chair to face me. "Hi," says Gary. His hair grayed sometime in the past. He wears glasses and a white t-shirt with some kind of eco-message emblazoned on its front.
"Hi," I reply. "I'm Nick."
"Gary," he says, and we shake hands.
Franklin, sitting in the chair to my right of Gary, introduces himself as well. "I'm Franklin," he says.
"Nick," I say, and we shake hands.
Franklin is young, maybe in his mid-20s, and has an innocent face suggesting a near constant disbelief that the world can actually be as cruel and heartless as he experiences it to be. His is a face of perpetual and ignorant and resilient faith. Some say I'm disillusioned.
"You one of the people in town for this conference thing?" asks Franklin.
"Yeah—"
"The U.S. Social Forum," says Gary, for clarification, of course. He looks at me like an owl testing the mettle of a field mouse, deciding if it's worthy to spare.
I start again. "Yeah, I just got into town today. It's been a bit of a confusing start as I've never been to Atlanta and one of my bags is about a day behind me."
"Where you coming from?" asks Gary.
"I just flew in from Southern California," I say. I am immediatly guilty for my having taken an airplane. "I'm a student out in Irvine, in Orange County."
"What are you studying?" says Franklin.
"I'm in urban and regional planning."
Gary followed up with what reporters call a "softball." "So," he begins, "is anyone honestly talking about the fact that the earth just can't handle any more people?" Actually, that's not a softball. A softball is an easy question, the answer to which poses no risk to the respondent. What Gary asked is what I call a "revelestion," a question that reveals quite a bit about the asker.
This first indication of the causal-driven people I come to spend the next four days with somewhat dispirits me. I suppose I should have guessed that conversations at this conference with these people would begin and end with "the big questions." Sadly, I came to find out that whatever I say instantly became branded as what I believe with the firmament of my being. Just like the leftists and socialists and activists and organizers and etc. attending the conference who must dress as belief billboards, what one says is merely another addendum to the visual and auditory presentation of identity and argument carried on by everyone who thinks they think of everything correctly. I have to admit, though, that one of the more enjoyable things about being in Atlanta for those four days was hearing all of these people justify their Starbucks coffee purchases. They wanted coffee, and it just so happens that the very economic and social mechanisms that all of these people railed against had created a downtown Atlanta in which the visitor cannot find a single place to buy coffee but Starbucks chain stores. I cannot help but think that the people maybe could have gone without coffee for a while, but, when product satisfaction is on the line, I guess diatribes against capitalist centralized mega-corporations take a back seat in the party bus. [I had the audacity to question whether or not the Ivy League colleges actually matter in the grand scheme of things. After all, less than 5% of college students probably go to Ive League schools. Someone immediately attacked, "Just look at the president every year!" and I was immediately labeled the fool for having not thought of that. I had been merely trying to test the latter speaker's assertion that the Ivy League schools give access to social networks that are disproportionately powerful compared to other colleges.] I told Gary that, though some people were thinking about carrying capacity, it really hadn't made its way into mainstream planning discourse yet.

The Talent Show
Shortly after first meeting Ratsack, he told me, "The kids want to have a show for you all tonight." "You all" meant those of us in town for the USSF, and I found out later that "show" meant lots of hula hooping, a magic trick, and myself as performer. First, though, Ratsack had to show "us all" around. Only myself and Gary were around for the tour.
We headed down Martin Street to its end, only about a block and a half from Cathy's place. The neighborhood kids who plan to perform in the show that night followed us. They continued this behavior for the duration of my stay in Atlanta, whenever I was around Cathy's place, anyway. At the end of the street we found Atlanta phone books scattered everywhere.
"I already explained to the kids," said Ratsack, "that they're very lucky. You see, these," he said, pointing to the phone books strewn on the street and yard of the house we were to stay in, "these are the fruit of the phone book tree. Phone book trees are very rare." The kids weren't paying attention to this. I think they had heard it before. "We've been looking all over for the actual phone book tree but haven't found it yet."
"Hey Ratsack!" yelled someone across the street. We turned and looked for the source. A man stood on the porch of the house opposite the one we were to stay in. "Hey Ratsack. You found that phone book tree yet?"
"Uh, yeah," said Ratsack, his Aussie accent suddenly coming on strongly. "We've narrowed it down to about a thousand but aren't sure which one yet," he said, sweeping his hand out across the small forest at the end of Martin Street. The street dead-ended on the grounds of George Washington Carver High School. After the street ends, a large grassy hill with several large trees on it rises to a small plateau area where some basketball courts and, farther on, the school itself sits. The person seemed to catch on to the sarcasm.
Ratsack's sarcasm is unlike anything I've ever encountered. A conversation like the above is nearly perfectly inverted from the usual case of the person being sarcastic actually being sarcastic for rhetorical purpose. In Ratsack's case, it seems that he so strongly believes in a childlike, fluid understanding of possible explanations that he no longer recognizes the concept of sarcasm. Everything is serious, everything possible, no explanation is any more plausible or right than any other. This is relativism to the extreme and undercuts the very notion of a common language, of truth, really.
The neighbor had no reply to Ratsack. Expecting Ratsack to acknowledge his being in on the joke, he instead found Ratsack not only continuing but extending the fantasy. It almost seemed like Ratsack mocked him in tone and choice of words. "Yeah, we've narrowed it down to about a thousand," Ratsack said, as if the quest was his and and the kids' and the (adult) neighbor had no business intruding on it. It was something a smart-alek kid would say. But Ratsack is forty years old.
Much of Ratsack's conversation is like this, allying himself with the neighborhood kids who never make their actions and words fit into a rational, adult understanding of the world. Reducing narrative and world-creation to the individual scale, each constructs an individual belief and reasoning. This, to some extent, may be expected of kids who have not yet succumbed to culture, the funnel in which diversity of understanding distills to a relatively limited set of possible, accepted understandings of the world about which all can talk and to which all can relate, i.e. in which adults are made. Nothing is impossible in a child's world because there are no unjustifiable explanations. Sure there's a phone book tree. Lots of stuff grows on trees, and why not phone books? Becoming an adult demands abandoning infinite explanation and instead banding together with groups of people who share the same limited acceptable explanations of the world as you do. One must find this group because communication is impossible without a common language, and because language is only the transfer of information, i.e. of understanding, mutual intelligibility, i.e. common language, ensures that the interlocutors understand the world in the same way and can thus act in and on that world in the same ways.
This fits nicely into today's infatuation with language, talk, and communication as well as the postmodern emphasis on narrative, story-telling, and history and world creation. However, while postmods would probably argue that there no longer exists a single set of possible explanations enforced by threat of penalty—i.e. the white male capitalist understanding of the world that reigned for who knows how long, enforced by the patriarchal nation-state and its "legitimate" use of violence manifest as the military—I think it far too early to seal the casket of modernism. While alternative understanding of the world are becoming more "accepted," they are being accepted by something, and that something is the same old patriarchal nation-state with the same old fire hoses and rubber bullets. Ratsack, who I believe is a posterchild, or, perhaps more currently, a FATHEAD for a postmod understanding of the world, lived in a tent behind a community center for two years and is still decidedly outside the formal (read: patriarchal white capitalist) economy of the U.S. In the end, Ratsack's neighbor simply turned his back on Ratsack's refusal to play the game of adult understanding. Ratsack just returned to a different, new game he had invented: phone book catch, which, in its most developed form, consisted of throwing phone books back and forth for hours while drinking Natural Light and vodka. I went into the house without electricity and fell asleep on the floor without blankets, though I needed none in the Atlanta heat. I did keep my socks on, though.
Oh, the talent show. Yes, it happened before the phone book catch, and after I got to Atlanta. Only myself and Gary had arrived of those who would be there for the USSF. The kids wanted, according to Ratsack, to perform a show for us. The kids, I should say, were about seven young black kids, both girls and boys and all probably younger than 12. They hung out with Ratsack almost every day of the summer while on break, as far as I gathered.
A stage had somehow been built in Cathy's yard. She must have owned two lots because the stage and mud structure (more about that later) sat on the corner lot in full view of the neighborhood. The stage is simple: three short steps lead to a rectangular platform of 2x4s painted brown. No railing lines the edge. The yard around the mud structure and stage is overgrown with weeds and hasn't seen a lawnmower in quite some time. Then again, the lawnmower fits into a decidedly narrow understanding of the world not necessarily existent on this particular property in South Atlanta. Six benches sit on the ground on one side of the platform with another on the stage to the back left. Behind the benches, a large mud pit shows where the mud for the mud structure came from.
The first act was hula-hooping. The second act was hula-hooping. The third act was hula-hooping. Ratsack, however, ably transformed the same performances into something more by counting out loud each revolution of the hoop around the performer's waist. It soon became clear who could hula-hoop the best among the kids. One of the older boys performed a magic trick that also utilized a hula-hoop. He had tied a sheet around the hoop in order to make, when the hoop was held above the ground, a column of cloth inside which he could stand. He enlisted Ratsack's aid in the trick. Ratsack stepped onto the stage. The kid set the hoop and sheet on the ground and stood inside the hoop. Ratsack lifted the hula-hoop until the kid was hidden inside the cloth tube. He then had the audience—about six kids, myself, and old man Gary—recite a short verse that I have forgotten. After we had done so, Ratsack dropped the hoop to reveal that the kid had disappeared! Sadly, my mind had long-ago been trained against understanding this trick as anything but possible, and I quickly noted to myself that the kid had performed the trick standing right next to the back of the railless stage and had probably just stepped off the back. The world's rationality was maintained. Whew.
Suddenly, it was my turn. Ratsack had, when setting up the performance order, casually included me in it, saying that everyone had to do something, even if it was just stepping up on stage and thanking everyone for coming. I had my guitar case, which the kids had seen and taken an especial interest in. I opened it and stepped on stage. This was my first public peformance ever since I started playing a little over a year earlier. I had been reading music from classical guitar books and could only remember simple warm-ups and practice exercises by memory, so I chose the easiest one I could remember, stepped on stage, and sat on the bench. One of the young girls came and sat next to me. I think she was rather taken by the guitar or by me, strapping lad that I am, but I prefer to displace her affection onto the musical instrument, thank you. I began playing, erred, began playing again, erred again but was able to turn it into a different line of notes that I think convinced the audience of children, middle-aged spoken word and mud architecture enthusiast (more on that later), and old environmentalist/population capper that I hadn't forgotten how to play a five-note song at most. Suddenly, as I was playing, the girl sitting next to me began singing a song over the notes I was playing. She improvised completely, as far as I know, but the words' rythm and tone had so little to do with the notes I played that she may have been reciting a favorite lyric of hers or just saying whatever came into her head. Then again, thusly great things birth. My first performance couldn't have come in front of an easier audience, period. Additionally, the girl's singing took all the focus off of my atrocious, fumbling musicianship. My self-evaluation always ends critically, regardless of what I do and the praise others might give me. I hold myself to imagined ideals. I am a story-maker, always wrapped up in possible worlds in my head rather than engaged in the actual worlds around me. I create impossible scenarios and then berate myself for failing to actualize them. That is my understanding of the world. It makes things difficult. Having these kids and Ratsack applaud and forget what I had done in the same motion made me realize the incredible freedom of the childlike state. I think Gary avoided me afterward for fear of having nothing constructive to say.

Acid trip Ratsack story and seeing his face on a Hunger Coalition flyer later.
The Story of Miss Muffy
gentrification and the owner's story
Talent show: lots of hula hooping; easiest first crowd in musical history; later told Ratsack I was scared
wore same clothes for two days; finally got bag; went another two days w/o showering because I liked it.
Frank: lost job, was suing for wrongful discharge, claims company fired him when they found out he was injured instead of paying him workman's comp. ratsack "helping him through it". Ratsack: they can't fire you if they're looking to file unemployment for you, right?
Describe the house: no electricity, unfinished second story (have to wear shoes because of debris on floor); uncovered vents pose danger of losing valuable items, had to cover with guitar book.
Trip to Mud House: hunger project, lady making lasagna in incredibly hot gymnasium. first night with other people that had arrived; one guy had been living in Thailand since 1999; others I don't know; story of acid trip suicide: Ratsack's cell phone convo while we sat there talking, oblivious. Ratsack's words, "if we cry, we hold the spirits down. we need to laugh to lift them up. i think it's hilarious. what a way to go." we later saw his face on some flier someone handed out at the social forum advertising a discussion of some kind. I guess they were short a facilitator.

John Wayne Airport Pilots Info Guide

2008-01-21T20:33:00.000-08:00

Learn about my local airport! And a bit about piloting jargon!

http://www.ocair.com/generalaviation/JWAPilotInfoGuide.pdf

Report downwind!

Hiatus

2008-01-15T21:11:00.001-08:00

Back in Black. 'Cause I'm TNT.

Okay, interesting words from Wastewater Microbiology:

luxury uptake
waste pickle liquor
Sulfolobus
risky foodstuffs
Mongolian gerbils

2 of 2 poems 12-18-07

2007-12-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

I must remember happiness
Somewhere inside my past.
Could I have always been on
This side?
I doubt I would have lasted
This long, even, were that true.

I am writing this to you
As my roommate and a girl
Laugh together and
I stare at ink gathering on a page.

I wonder if they even know I'm here,
If they've forgotten already their
Sadness at hearing the big door
Close behind me and have returned
To the pleasure they were having.

Perhaps life is neither happy nor sad constantly,
Sure,
But it may be that I am offsetting
A blind optimist somewhere.

1 of 2 poems 12-18-07

2007-12-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

There is snow falling
In this memory
Of you two thousand miles
Away, standing, waiting
For a train
With snow falling.

I called
So you could explain
How you're
Leaving again.

I don't recall the conversation.
Just you, and waiting, and a train coming,
And me seeing snow falling on your reddened face,
Happy to be telling me you're leaving again.

(Laughter of
My roommate and
A girl in
His bedroom.)

I've slipped into the present again,
Where you've been gone forever,
With everyone.
I do not like it here,
Where it never snows
But in the mountains
Far Away.

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.

2007-12-12T16:47:00.001-08:00

Far out man:

Ooh, a lake:
Hey, what's that?

Oh, it's international commerce!

Historical Hurricane Density

2007-12-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

I found this picture somewhere of the tracks of all Atlantic hurricanes between 1851-2004. I think there's some sort of lesson here regarding arguments about preventing people coming back to New Orleans because of hurricane risk. Hmm...shall we depopulate NYC? All of Florida? All of the east coast?

You want them moving in next to you?

Visit to the Noguchi Garden, Costa Mesa, CA

2007-12-02T22:21:00.000-08:00

Commentary on My Visit

Isamu Noguchi’s California Scenario (1980)
Sculpture Garden at 611 Anton Blvd.
12/02/07

From the little I’ve read about it, sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s California Scenario is supposed to be “a major artistic attempt to interpret California”. As I write this, I’m sitting in a ’99 Buick Century—coated with dust even though it rained for eight hours two days ago—in an office park parking lot. (I love the playful use of the word “park” in Southern California, by the way, especially how it’s used for both office parks and parking lots.) I’m about to leave my car and walk around trying to find Noguchi’s garden, supposedly hidden between two office towers and a parking garage. I’m interested to see what Noguchi thought of the California landscape 25 years ago. As an emigrant grad student, I’ve been trying to make sense of it for the past 12 months.

Today, at least, my California scenario has been airing up my desperately flat right rear tire at a gas station whose air pump hose leaked about 65¢ of the 75¢ worth of air I bought; then it was onto the arterials, three and four lane “streets” choked with shining imports even at noon on a Sunday; then it was onto the 405 freeway where a bright red Ferrari blasted by myself and a blue Honda or Toyota college-import-club-pride-piece whose driver saw in the Ferrari a chance to show off while being covered from the authorities should anything “go wrong” and promptly gave chase—it took all of ten seconds for the Ferrari to leave us both far behind and straddling freeway lanes because of our gawking inattention; finally, once off the freeway and near South Coast Plaza, purportedly the world’s most profitable mall, I ended up doing what I always do when trying to find destinations around Irvine.

I got lost.

I drove around the streets of town right to the traffic cop…okay, wait. That was just a mish-mash of driving in SoCal and Frosty the Snowman lyrics: must be all these Christmas trees in the 70° weather.

Anyway, I drove around for a while. After marveling at the prowess of a particularly adept bit-arrow-sign intersection sales acrobat (BASISA), I pulled into a large parking lot, deciding to figure out from here just where exactly to find Noguchi’s—and my own—California scenario.

I got out of my car and suddenly realized where I was. My boss had driven myself and a co-worker past the Noguchi Garden site a few weeks earlier, and we had passed right by the parking lot I was in. I recognized the two large buildings down the street as being near the garden and headed towards them.

The first picture-worthy thing I found was this:

This is a strange sign, now that I think about it, because it is on the left side of the road. It’s really only visible to pedestrians on the sidewalk, who at this point seem to need parking directions the least. Perhaps this is a moment where one of the party exasperatedly says, “Now they tell me!” The pastiche of parking, garden, offices and restaurants also foreshadows the character of the garden. One of these is not like the other ones….

Shortly after seeing this sign—and in the general direction of the garden as indicated by the sign—I came upon my first example of Noguchi’s sculptural interpretation of California. Here’s a picture:

Now, do not be too quick to judge. I at first thought this to be a somewhat disappointing entrée into the sculpture garden. But as I stood and pondered the juxtaposition of toppled construction fencing, raw concrete droppings, exposed infrastructure, parking lot hedge, parking structure, office tower, and TGI Friday’s, I realized that perhaps the Noguchi Garden might actually pull off a brilliant sculptural interpretation of California. This possibility was further reinforced by the next element of the installation I came upon:

It was while absorbing this particular site that I considered the possibility that Noguchi might be leading me along an iterative process in which sculpture and landscape slowly blur together until both are indistinguishable as separate entities and all that is left is a fruitful mélange of transliterations and cornucopian visions. What impressed me most about this—just the second element of the California Scenario that I had found so far!—was its immediate self-reference to the earlier, more purely-infrastructural installation mentioned above. This site also forced me to reconsider my initial interpretation of the Parking/Noguchi Garden/Offices & Restaurants sign; that sign may have in fact been the first element of the garden, and I had dismissed it as simply cartographic! This, of course, means that the combination sign/infrastructure site was in fact the third (!) element of Noguchi’s garden that I had seen so far!

Standing before this third site of the Noguchi Experience, new realization in hand, I could only muster the thought, “This Noguchi is brilliant!” Looking at the sign, the water hydrant, and the electrical piping, I rejoiced, “He’s daylighted the taken-for-granted infrastructure underlying all California life! Truly this is the California Scenario!” I have to admit, driving to the garden from Irvine, I hadn’t once thought about the utilities infrastructure on which my entire life depended. To now have it so dramatically forced upon me for consideration sent me reeling with emotional and metaphysical tenuousness. All it would take would be for one of these things to fail, and life would be over. Thank God California buries utilities in the unmoving earth to keep them safe.

I continued on and arrived at an intersection. I saw another bit of Naguchi brilliance directing me to the left:

I’m still puzzled over Noguchi’s decision to suddenly cut “Parking” from the top, replace it with “Jerry’s Famous Deli”, and paste it into the former place held by “Restaurants” and also by his decision to paint a large white arrow on the ground pointing at the sign. If you have suggestions for the reasoning behind this, do not hesitate to contact me. Also, for a moment, I thought that the small strip of white and red flowers at the base of the sign was the entirety of the garden. I thought this because the arrow on the sign seems to indicate that only Jerry’s Famous Deli and Offices and Parking are to the left (note the change from “&” in previous signs to “and” in this one for “Offices and Parking”—I suppose this could be signaling a slight departure from the purely symbolic?). My initial reading of the sign told me that the Noguchi Garden was, in fact, right here. However, even the excess of brilliance I had already found in Noguchi’s sign/infrastructure installations along the way to this point had not been enough to drive from my mind an expectation of earthshaking brilliance, and, frankly, a median strip of flowers wasn’t doing it for me. I decided to believe that the left arrow also referred to the Noguchi Garden and proceeded thusly.

I glimpsed it through an opening between Jerry’s Famous Deli and Savannah. (Apparently Noguchi’s decision to excise “Restaurants” from the sign had more to do with programmatic intent than with reality, as both Jerry’s Famous Deli and Savannah are restaurants…to the left.) After navigating the small passage between the buildings, I saw this:

(*Important note: This is where actual discussion of the Noguchi Garden begins. The preceding notes on the road signs and construction work were facetious jabs at landscape architecture criticism; however (compound complex sentence, thank you Ms. Kilker), it is a potential launching point for a broader discussion of what it means to "read" a landscape, i.e. how to know if something you are looking at has meaning within a certain framework or not. How would one know that the road sign and construction work were not part of the garden, part of Noguchi's design? If you say, "Well, duh, it's obvious," please explain why. It's such taken-for-granted-assumptions that limit us in the way we see the world. Because we think we know the meaning of something, we don't think about the meaning. Anyway...discuss at your peril!)

Ah, yes: here is my Noguchi Garden, I thought, complete with stand-in family. There is a giant concrete wall, flowing water, what I thought were Cypress trees but are actually redwoods (yikes!), a gravelly mound with cacti, a big wedge, some boulders, and a knoll with a tree. But, even at this early juncture, I couldn’t help but feel something was missing…and then, just to the right, I saw it:

Hidden in the shadows, a Latino man was emptying the garbage cans.

Thoroughly satisfied that Noguchi may in fact have hit on something closely approximating the California Scenario as I know it (albeit with a discerned lack of vehicles, though the sound of the freeway on the other side of the large wall was enough of a reminder of that to let Noguchi off the hook for omitting it sculpturally), I dove headfirst into the garden.

It’s very nice.

Here’s a map:

I visited the garden around noon, and at that time the most striking thing about it was the light. It being December, the sun is quite low in the sky, even at noon. In the drawing above, the sun would have been about where the circled number 5 is and because of this threw a long shadow off the tall concrete wall as seen in this photo:

The amazing thing about the light at the time I was there was that it was being reflected off of the Comerica Bank building directly opposite the garden from the sun:

(Those are the redwoods again. You can even see some clouds reflected in the glass.) This reflection caused there to be a strange glow cast back down into the shadowed areas of the garden, mostly onto the gravelly hill. Check out the picture of the shadow line again:

See how there are cactus shadows running opposite to the one cast by the sun and the tall wall? Those shadows are thrown by the sunlight reflected from the Comerica Building in the opposite direction of the sun. I’m not sure what the chronology of the site is, so I can’t say whether or not this might be an intentional use of that building as the building may not have been there or planned when Noguchi laid out the site. But it makes for an unearthly glow as seen in this shot:

All of that light is from the building. Well, okay, it’s from the sun, sure, but it then hits the building and then back down to the garden, after some of it passes through the window and illuminates some TPS Reports, of course. You gotta’ be able to see those. And that’s why they need cover sheets all the time. You don’t want your TPS Report Table of Contents to be faded when you move it up the corporate ladder. They'll understand if the cover sheet is ruined, but the Table of Contents...well, that's part of the Report. In the photo, you can see that the sun is in the opposite direction from the cactus shadows by looking at the shadow thrown against the wall in the upper left of the photo. The mottling on the wall is also a result of the light reflected from the glass.

One more thing about the light: this photo shows another element of the garden, a triangular prism-type object from which or to which (I’m not sure which) the stream cut into the garden floor runs:

I include this photo only to give a bit of a sense of the strange character of the light in the garden while I was there. It was as if there were two suns. I felt like I was on Tatooine. Okay, that’s a lie, but I think it’s worth leaving in there anyway for the three or four of you who will understand sans Wikipedia what I’m saying. This photo also shows how Noguchi’s California Scenario has, in my opinion, nothing to do with representing California. The garden in this photo looks like some sort of strange movie set, devoid of people but seemingly poised to receive them, complete with a lone door set in the shadows of an otherwise impenetrable fortress-like wall over which signs of civilization can be seen.

Wait a second…. That’s exactly what California is! Leave in strange movie set but substitute national interstate system for lone door, Mojave Desert for impenetrable fortress-like wall, and the rest of the US for signs of civilization, and you have California! Damn you Noguchi! It’s as if this stupid walled-in garden mirrors the compartmentalization of the malls in Orange County, Orange County in California, California in the US, and the US in the world! Ach! And it’s all “illuminated” by a gigantic bank mirror! Interest and financial security lights the state! Ach ach!

Okay, admittedly this interpretation takes off from an unfounded start: that Noguchi intended the light to behave like this. I don’t know if that’s true or not. The website mentioned at the beginning of this post claims to elucidate Noguchi’s intent. Apparently each of the elements in the garden is keyed to a particular facet of California as seen by Noguchi. He is a sculptor, after all, so it’s not too surprising that, though the elements are all arranged in a common space, each sits alone as a separate work. Only by using the overarching theme “this is California” do the elements synthesize into anything that might be called dialogic, even a conversation, if you will. The problem is that for a dialogue to occur, there have to be people to talk.

For the ~40 minutes I spent taking pictures in the garden, only about 10 people wandered through. The garden is hidden, sure, by restaurants, a parking structure, and enormous bank buildings, but for noonish on a Sunday afternoon, this place was decidedly deserted, not to mention empty of people. (You see, cause deserted is also “to be a desert”, and there are…cacti…and…well, okay you see the point I think.) Also, this site is but a short walk from the most profitable mall in the US, South Coast Plaza, where you can go have a nice lunch at a fine French restaurant and sit outside as if you’re on the streets of Paris but strangely enough people are walking by on gleaming ceramic tiles with shopping bags in their hands and there’s a mall roof over your head. That place surely wasn’t empty. But, as Kurt Vonnegut says (he’s still kicking on Tralfamadore), so it goes.

I got a distinct “expensive smoke break” feel from the garden, probably due to the proximity of the three restaurants and two office tours. Though Noguchi could never have anticipated this, I think “expensive smoke break” is also a great descriptor of California, both for the scenario with cigarettes these days as well as the off-putting tendency of the state itself to catch on fire. However, as I was leaving, the expensive smoke break idea proved unfounded as well. Between Jerry’s Famous Deli and Savannah, some employees were enjoying a smoke break on some creaky wooden benches and in the company of some hideous stained glass:

Looking at the picture I notice they were hanging out with one of the freshly-emptied garbage cans as well.

It’s unfortunate, I think, that these people didn’t want to hang out in the Noguchi Garden. They could have sat on triangle thing, or over by the big wall, or maybe even on the bench under the redwoods. If they would have chosen the redwood bench, they could even have flicked their half-smoked cigarettes into the grass as they went back to work and ignited a forest fire. National news would have picked it up after the Orange County fire marshal grossly exaggerated the small blaze’s threat to celebrity homes in Malibu.

And that’s a California Scenario if I’ve ever seen one.

Beginning of novel 2

2007-11-29T23:50:00.001-08:00

"What was it they said about love? Let it go? If it comes back?"

I watched Mark staring up at the night sky. "If it comes back, you know it was love," I said.

He looked over at me. "Is that it?" he said.

I held his gaze for a second, him lying close next to me. I turned back to the sky and the stars above New Orleans. I felt the thick levee on my back. "That's it, I think," I said.

We laid next to each other watching as the moon slowly turned red, then black in the eclipse. The river flowed right by the whole time, and the city behind us kept its pattern. Didn't seem to matter much to most people that the moon went black for a couple hours over them. Suppose that means we've come a long way.

Some kids were running all over the barges moored at the bank, the big rusted ones that sat there who knows how long and for what reason. The boys chased the girls around the wooden piles, some of 'em with naked chests glowing pale orange in the refinery light from across the river. They calmed down soon enough, though, except for an occasional escaped shout of laughter. We couldn't see many stars, but the moon showed brilliant white up there until it went dark and almost disappeared. Still could see it the whole time though, just a little brighter than the total blackness around it where stars were but weren't. They just couldn't beat their way through the lights of the city. They weren't there, anyway. Most had died long ago.

That's something me and Mark talked about a lot, that and girls, talked about them all the time, how they didn't stay put, how we only saw the ones whose traces happened to hit into our own, how space must actually look like a snarled nest of security beams that Earth spun through around the sun, clearing out a little shadow. Mark always ended with, "Sure is an interesting way to think about it out there. Wonder what it would be like to see all the light at once." I'd just say, "It'd be white as hell," and we'd laugh. Maybe it's that people see before they die, all the light in the world. I hadn't told Mark that.

"Those stars must really love that light, huh," Mark said, "to let it go like that and never expect it back?"

I turned to look at him. He was looking up and smiling like always when he got clever.

"Yeah, I guess so," I said. I tried hard to keep him from knowing how much I hated him getting to an idea before me.

"You think they know when they get hit by the others' light?" Mark asked.

I'd never thought of that before, either. "You mean like we kind of think about this?"

"Yeah," he said. "You think they can feel it get a little warmer, a little brighter, maybe?"

I couldn't let him get on with this one. I said, "You mean, if the stars, the big balls of fire, can feel it get a little warmer in space?"

Now Mark looked at me, and I was smiling but he wasn't anymore.

"Yeah, well," he said, "we're pretty hot, too, you know."

One of the boys on the bank gave a whoop and then we heard a big splash. Mark sat up on his elbows and looked down the levee bank to the trees at the river edge. "Wonder what's going on down there," he said. We heard a bunch of quick whispering, but it calmed down soon enough.

Body heat

2007-11-29T20:50:00.000-08:00

The clothes were still warm from the prisoners when they gave them to us, when they delicately laid them on the ground by the line that slowly became a naked line and a line whose end everyone knew was hot and where everyone knew no one would need clothes there. The guards mediated the transfer, stood between us and the prisoners when they were still warm, and the guards were warm in their full clothes and would shoot at us if we held the prisoners' clothes to us for too long, to rub some of the warmth off the clothes onto us so maybe it might stay around a little. The guards stood there between the two lines, almost shoulder to shoulder, covered by wool or felt uniforms of muted colors, old dyes, practiced methods of construction, mothers' pats glowing there on those shoulders where the humerus cuddled up to the scapula, right on the facet there. One line over there, one line where we were. The prisoners put their clothes on the ground on the other side of the guards from their line, they gently reached between the legs, between the femurs with their fossa and the floating patella and one thick and one fragile shin bone and laid the warm clothes on the wooden boards behind the guards' rubber heels.

And we picked up the clothes without looking as best we could at the cooling people passing by on the other side of the tibias and fibulas, the people behind the patellas and femurs and fossas and facets and the tuberocities hanging between condyles. We couldn't look at them, but we did because we couldn't look away all the time, nobody could do that. The prisoners tried to not look at us, too, but sometimes we'd see each other looking at each other and our bones would shiver in us and we saw theirs shiver but not them they couldn't see ours in our slight coverings. The guards stared and stood on pylon plugs of legs in hip sockets, their weight beautifully grounded through that system how we walk and run and trot, skip, hop and stroll, sprint. The guards stared and stood. The prisoners filed by slowly disrobing.

San Diego fog come falling fast

2007-11-20T00:14:00.000-08:00

Pic from San Diego port tour. We were shrouded momentarily.

CA

2007-11-12T14:30:00.001-08:00

Maybe one reason California's economy is so large is time zones: by the time anybody in CA is actually out of bed and working, most of the country has already gone home for the day. The only people left to call and make business deals with are other Californians.

Eek! > 1 Week! $ymbo!s!

2007-11-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

Many, many good things have happened. Actually, one very, very good thing that equates to the same effect as many, many moderately good things. Hint: It involves ratatouille.

Ambiguous Title #1: Aborted Children's Story

2007-10-30T01:32:00.000-07:00

Smuglonely was lonely because he was smug, but when he was lonely, he didn't want to be lonely, so he made up stories in his head about how much fun he was having by himself, which made him seem smug to others, so they left him alone.

"He doesn't need us!" they all said as they stood in a group by the pine trees. They said that while they all looked at Smuglonely, laughing to himself under the leafless dead apple tree, across the green lawn of the playground, right by the sharp brown corner of the brick school building. "No he doesn't!" they said as they turned around and ran screaming fun down the hill to the benches. They hid under the benches like they were hideouts in foreign wars.

Back up on the hill, Smuglonely was thinking about airplanes beneath the dead apple tree. The corner of the building was a ninety-degree angle aimed right at the trunk. Smuglonely thought about that, and, like always, when he thought about things in his head he forgot about things outside his head. This made him smile, because usually the only thing outside his head was how lonely he was. Because this made him smile, no one thought he was lonely. Smuglonely thought about the corner of the building.

It was a cannon for bringing down the aid planes, the ones full of water for the poor, thirsty people in this dusty place. Beige buildings squatt down on the earth, squatt like they're hiding from those planes, but the people inside those beige buildings, the thirsty people with the crust of dust on them, they hide, too, but want the planes, well, not the planes, but want the water in the planes, and badly. But they can't go outside, not here, not where the canons open up on those planes, fling bits of metal up into the sky. Sometimes the canons kill a cousin's or an uncle's cows two hundred miles from the town. And even more sometimes those flung bits of metal kill cousin's and uncle's, brothers, mothers, and, rarely because there aren't many around to soak up the metal, those canons even manage to kill a grandmother.

The planes fare much better. The death of a plane does happen, though, sometimes. First the penetrated aluminum skin leaks water, leaks it from the pierced bladders in the cargo holds. Eventually, in an arc the people, tense and hiding in the houses, would think extraordinarily beautiful if they ever saw it, the plane falls to the ground, on some unlucky squatting beige houses full of people whose hearts absolutely race, pound so hard the ground quivers in neighbors' houses. People hear the dead plane get louder and louder and think, "Finally, some water will land!" The plane comes down on them, shatters their houses, kills them, and then douses its own flames with the water it had carried those hundreds and thousands of miles. There's no smoke, just a sudden flood carrying small sticks and dirt, bits of paper wrapping, small blue plastic helicopter blades long missing from the chopper bodies sold at the grocery store, blue aluminum cans, a flood of water with garbage, dirt, and ash down the streets and into the low spots, the depressions.

The corner of the school is a canon, the tree a plane. Smuglonely is the only person in town outside looking up, and Smuglonely is the only one outside smiling.

The playground supervisor blew his silver whistle. Smuglonely thought a plane had been hit, thought the wind was screaming through a silver-sharp hole in a plane's aluminum skin. The playground supervisor blew again, and Smuglonely saw a leafless apple tree above him, and the brick of the school beside him, and he saw the stream of kids coming back to the top of the hill, and he jumped into it, and he walked slowly to the doors with them, no longer smiling.

Even after sitting down, one kid to each black-legged desk, hinged on top and full of grade school detritus, even after that they kept talking. Smuglonely sat in the second of five rows from the front, the fourth of five columns from the right. He played with an eraser he'd taken out after sitting down. It had been white but now was covered with pencil grime. He put one end against the desk and pressed the other end with his finger so the eraser stood on end. He spun it with his other hand. It was unbalanced, and the pressure from above kept knocking it over. The girl to his right watched him with peripheral vision while she wrote with a mechanical pencil in her small notebook. She wrote about what she wanted for Christmas. She wrote this under several previous entries on the subject. She wathed Smuglonely spin his eraser. Her handwriting strayed. When she noticed, she clamped her hand down over the pencil and the notebook and opened the desk top. She rummaged through the rulers, worksheets, graphite dust, loose screws, playground pebbles, paper towels, clumps of hair, notebooks, nickels made in 1997, and hair ties until she found a small bit of eraser that had once crowned another of her mechanical pencils. She gently lowered the desktop and began rubbing the tiny bit of rubber against the errant lines. She looked at Smuglonely whenever she heard his finger push too hard and hit on his desk.

The teacher tried to calm them down by saying, "Did everyone have fun at recess?" This was not a question she wanted answered. It was instead something people in front of groups do to get everyone to stop talking. CEOs do it: "How's the coffee, everybody?" Politicians do it: "Gee, are you all here to listen to me?" Everyone does it. Smuglonely does it, too, to the audiences in his head. "Are we all ready to have some fun!?" he asks with an excited voice. He's not excited, but his voice is.

The circus begins. Smuglonely pulls on the front of his bright red coat where buttons look like brass from veneer. He smiles brilliantly. "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," he says, emulating the classics on ringmastership he spent hours reading at night behind the sound equipment boxes. Recalling the famous flourishes of Brigadier General Simon E. J. Harrisburg, who wore his full uniform in the ring but secretly wore a full Ringmasters uniform beneath it, Smuglonely pauses, rotates three-hundred sixty degrees by shuffling his feet, looking at everyone to be sure they're looking at him, then says, sweetly, quietly, as Morris Flemue would have said it, and in fact did say something just like it, but in Belgian, "Ready?" The circus band strikes the cymbals then, and the whole building lights up violet and red and gold.

The kids in the front nine rows, reserved entirely for them at the Ringmaster's request, strain to see the trapeze artist high above them. If they'd have been sitting with their parents in the upper reaches of the seats, they would have been level with her, would have seen the true agility required of flying through the air with nothing but a swinging bar to catch. They would have appreciated her talent. But, from down below where they sit so close to the rings they're under the net and watch through it, they only look up and wait, breath held, for the tiny woman to start getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, a sign that she is falling, that she has missed the bar and will soon fall all the way down into the net, stretch it, then slingshot up into the air from being saved. The kids see that from where they are, and they are where they are courtesy of the greatest Ringmaster in the Middle 28 states of the Union.

Attention Span

2007-10-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

Death slogs through a slimy swamp, sidestepping ferns and fallen trees searching for the beasts. They fall where they are touched. The bodies slowly sink into muck, into muddy water. The bodies slowly become black, viscous ooze, a putrified jelly pressed from above by dead and dying ferns. A drill rips through the earth, through the rock walls of the cavern full of oil. The oil ripples at the intrusion, moving for the first time in millions of years, shaking and mixing before slurrying up a pipe, up through miles of stone. A part of the oil, John careens upward out of the dark pool deep within the earth’s crust through the pipe into a dark steel tank on the surface of the earth and is processed, bumped around and fiddled with. He vibrates down a noisy assembly line in a factory, surrounded by dirty yellow machines. A dull, oiled metal sheet falls upon him, forcing him, molding him into a brown plastic door handle. A cold hard arm picks him from the line and places him in a brown cardboard box. For a while it is dark, and there are jolts, sudden accelerations, slow stops. He lies in the dark, waiting and wanting for nothing until the box tears open and empties onto another shaking belt among more dirty yellow machines. John fits perfectly into the car door, a small brown plastic part in a small metal car in a small assembly plant...

“…lives forever, you know. Sometime yer gonna have to realize that yer here for a reason,” says John’s father.

John suddenly finds himself back in the car and hates his father for saying yer and for, instead of you’re and for or yer and fer. John hates him because John speaks the same way.

“Dad, you’ve told me this before. I know why I’m here, but yer never gonna understand why yer reason ain’t my reason. I’m sorry for wasting yer money.”

* * *

John and his father sit in the family car in the parking lot behind John’s apartment building. Spread across the asphalt, dormant, rusting light poles throw long thin shadows in the low late-afternoon sun.

“Well John, I’m proud of you for what yer doin’ while yer here, and don’t worry about the money cause it’s yer education that’s important.” John’s father’s right hand floats up from the brown vinyl steering wheel, punctuates “worry” with a short jab toward the dash, and hangs suspended waiting for John’s reply. It slowly sinks back to the wheel.

* * *

“Dad, why did you go to Texas after you got out of school?”

John’s father looks up from the faded blue denim on John’s left knee and stares at a nearby light pole out the driver’s side window. “John, I came back home from school to the town I was born in, and it was boring. I thought somewhere else would be better, anywhere else, so I got in my car and drove. I ended up in Texas, but there were a couple nights in Vegas, too.”

“You left South Dakota for Texas and happened into Vegas?”

John’s father looks at his hands on the silent car’s steering wheel, slowly loosening and tightening his grip on the leather wrapping. “I didn’t know where I was going.”

Yer such a cliché, thinks John.

* * *

John leans on the right side of the grey car’s hood not knowing how he got there. He sometimes misses short stretches of time, and thinks he has a disorder and can’t convert short-term into long-term memory. John kept a journal for some weeks after watching a television special about a man who could not remember anything that happened to him. The man kept a journal, too, chronicling his life in ten minute intervals because his mind had an eighteen minute threshold past which nothing existed. As far as the man knew, he was anywhere from sixteen to eighteen minutes old, and someone had given him a pile of books in which boring stories about a regular man continued into the past forever, in ten minute intervals. Time is unfair to John as well. It seems to go quickly when he wants it to go slowly, and, when he wants it to flow quickly away, it seems intent on indulging itself.

John looks over his right shoulder through the windshield. His father’s hands open and close, open and close around the brown faded leather on the wheel. “You can get out if you want,” John offers.

John’s father looks up at his son’s chest. The car’s roof blocks John’s face. John’s father sits for a moment tightly clenching the wheel before peeling his fingers from the damp leather. He opens the driver’s door with his left hand and pulls his phone from the single cup holder between the two plush front seats with his right. After swinging his legs out of the car he stands, closes the door, and walks around the back of the car to stand next to John. “Tie yer shoes, John.”

“What for?”

“So you can carry yer stuff to yer room without fallin’ down the stairs.”

“I’ll be alright.”

* * *

“Must get hot out here with all this tar,” says John’s father. “Sure glad I don’t live in a concrete jungle like this.”

Their heads oscillate in the silence, following strangers to and from the cars scattered on the lot.

“Do you need any help carrying stuff?” John’s father nearly shouts.

“No,” answers John. “It’s a short walk to the building and only a couple flights of stairs. Just open the trunk.” John’s father points the remote on his key ring toward the trunk, presses the open button, and watches as the lid slowly rises.

“Ya know, this thing’ll work from fifty feet away,” he says, looking fondly at the remote in his hand. “When I was in the dealership the saleswoman unlocked the car doors from her office,” he says. He holds the keys out to John.

John ignores him as he pulls his own apartment keys from his pocket and steps around his father to the back of the car. He coaxes a flimsy cardboard box from the trunk, carefully cradling the bottom flaps to prevent them from falling open.

John carries the box across the soft asphalt, still hot from the day’s bright sun, gingerly hoists the box onto his knee to open the door at the bottom of the building’s staircase, and climbs three stories to his apartment, opens his door, sets the box on his floor, descends the stairs, walks to the trunk, extracts another box, carries, climbs, sets, descends, walks, picks, carries, climbs, sets, descends, walks, stops. He slams shut the trunk lid, and returns to the side of the car next to his father.

“Well, that’s everything,” says John after standing there for a moment.

John’s father shifts his weight to his right leg and pulls his left shoe out of his shoeprint sunk deep into the asphalt. “I need to use your bathroom before I head out,” he says.

John looks up at the third floor of the building, at the small window of his bathroom, the only window in his apartment. “Sure. Come on up.”

* * *

John switches his apartment radio to an AM news station and listens to a newscaster describe the changes brought about by the tragedy. The newscaster says that all entertainment programs on television will be cancelled for two days.

John’s father steps from the small bathroom, out of the disgusting yellow light from the old plastic bulb cover hung on the wall over the sink, and cringes at the sound of the closing door. He stops and wiggles the door, leaning towards it. “You should oil these things,” he says, moving the door and pointing at the shrieking hinges.

“Maybe. I could always take the door off, since I’m the only one here.”

“I suppose,” says John’s father, leaving the door open and walking down the dim hall connecting the kitchenette and living room with John’s bedroom.

“Did you hear the news?” asks John.

“News?” John’s father stops at the table in John’s kitchenette. He pulls out one of the two old metal folding chairs around the kitchenette table and sits down facing the back of the couch where John is sitting. No wall separates the kitchenette from the small living room, but John’s couch sits just off the edge of the linoleum kitchenette floor, dividing it from the living room where John’s television looks back over the couch at John’s father.

“About the tragedy?” says John, turning on the couch to look at his father.

“Which one?” John’s father asks, pulling his keys and phone from his jacket pocket and placing them on the round table.

“The one with the kids,” says John.

“Oh, yeah, I think I know what one yer talkin’ about,” says John’s father, slouching down into the chair and slipping his hands into his pockets.

“In the school,” John adds.

“Oh, yeah, I know what yer talkin’ ‘bout now. Sounds like they’re canceling all the television shows for the next couple days. They’ve got some crazy people over there. No high ups here would ever cancel television shows. Too much money in commercials.”

The theme from Beethoven’s Fifth plays softly from the table top. John’s father sits up in his chair and picks his phone from off the table. He looks at the small screen, frowns, and presses the answer button, silencing the music. “Hello? Hello?” he says, rising from his chair, struggling for reception in the thick-walled, nearly windowless apartment. He wanders around the room, around the couch and up next to the television, back into the kitchenette, repeating, “Hello? Hello?” before walking back down the hall and into the bathroom where he leans his ear against the phone against the only window in the apartment.

John rises from the couch, walks around its end into the kitchen, opens a cupboard, removes a tall, thin glass, and fills it with milk from the carton in his dirty refrigerator. He holds the glass up between his right eye and the single light in the kitchen, closes his left eye, and looks at the milk backlit by the bright light bulb hanging over the small round table on the orange and brown linoleum.

A line of black and white dairy cows snakes out of the milking room into the feed yard, a perfect single-file line of swollen swinging udders seeking relief. A door on the other side of the barn opens and several cows leave the milking room and return to the feed lot and the feed troughs full of hay and artificial feed additives. John turns and slowly empties the glass into the sink, watching the soft white liquid run into the drain.

“That woman really gets me sometimes,” says John’s father, stepping from the dim hallway. John looks up from the empty glass and turns slightly to his father before returning to the couch.

* * *

“Pretty nice couch you’ve got here.” John’s father’s weight stretches the already tired springs in the half of the couch next to John.

“I bought it at a garage sale across town a couple days after moving in.”

They stare at the blank television and pick the same moment to break the silence. “What Do did you do like you’re in…”

“Go ahead, dad.”

“No, that’s fine, you go.”

* * *

“What did you do in Vegas for those couple days?” says John

“Nothing I’d wanted to, y’know,” answers his father. John thinks his father’s going to stop and desperately searches for another question to ask. However, his father continues after only a slight pause. “I left a nice home to stay in, oh, it had to have been the worst hotel in town at the time, place called the Golden Bangle. The sheets were wet when I laid down. The next morning I couldn’t find the swimming pool they’d advertised, which, y’know, made the sheets even worse.” Smiling he glances at John. to see him staring between his shoes at the crushed brown shag carpet. John’s father continues, “I thought I’d find someone to show me around town, go to a show with. Didn’t though.” He sighs and throws himself forward trying to rise from the sagging springs but fails and relaxes back into the aging cushions.

“Don’t ever trust a hotel cleaning staff, and don’t leave yer wallet lying out ever. Even leaving it in the pocket of a pair of jeans in the dresser apparently doesn’t help. I didn’t even have to gamble to lose a lot of money.” John’s father looks at John’s feet. “I wasn’t much older than you are now,” and, looking at John’s face, “but I don’t think you could even do something like that now, y’know.” John continues staring intently between his shoes. John’s father looks at the dusty black television screen. “I slept in a tent along the road sometimes. If you did that now you’d prob’ly get robbed, y’know, by some crazy guy on the highway. I saw a show about it once.”

“Ya, prob’ly.” says John. “But ya never know.”

John’s father jerks a look of surprise at John. “What do you mean you never know?” His face softens. “You really mean that? Only yer smarts can keep you safe today. We didn’t even lock our house when I was a kid. Even after that idiot kid took yer mother’s wallet, y’know, took her wallet from her car right in front of the house that one night, ‘cause we didn’t lock them either.” He waves his hand and looks away from John. “You just can’t trust people anymore.”

“What do you mean?” asks John, refusing to look away from his shoes.

John’s father quickly turns toward John, scrutinizing him. “I’d trust anybody I know from church, or from work. Well, almost everyone from work anyway.” His voice rises with each word. “But to trust a stranger to leave you alone while you sleep on the side of the highway? I mean, y’know, that’s a little crazy, isn’t it? You know how many people, y’know, in the hours you’d be sleeping on the roadside, how many people go by, especially on a major highway between Vegas and Texas? How can there not be some crazy people in there?”

* * *

John stands from the couch and walks around it into the kitchenette. He sits in an old metal chair at the round table beneath the bright light. A large globe coated in dust with a potpourri of insect corpses collecting in the bottom hangs beneath the bulb.

John’s father has retreated into the bathroom, into the yellow light again, and is talking on his phone with his wife, John’s mother. In his head John runs through indirect ways of telling him to leave. He picks up his father’s keys, examining each, tracing the grooves with his thumbnail.

He inserts the short brown key into the soiled padlock on the cellar door. The key turns, but the lock remains tight. John hooks his finger under the lock arm and pulls and jerks until the arm finally pops free of the lock case, sending his hand flying after his finger loses its grip...

John’s father returns from the bathroom, snapping shut his phone with a gentle click as he walks the short distance from the hall to the table. John grips the small brown key between his index finger and thumb and holds the keys out above his father’s open hand before dropping them with a clattering of thin metal. John’s father jams the keys into his pocket and sits across the table from John in the other old metal chair.

“What did she want this time?” asks John.

“Apparently we have to give the reading at church tomorrow. I guess she doesn’t think it’s our turn, so she’s going to call the pastor to make sure.” John’s father pulls his phone from his pocket and spins it on its short, thick antenna.

“Does it really matter who does it?”

“Well, if it’s not our turn, we shouldn’t have to do it for someone else. Everyone’s got to take their turn, y’know.”

* * *

“You can go if you want to get home before it’s late,” says John.

“No, that’s ok. I might be a little tired at church tomorrow, y’know, but not more so than the sermon usually makes me anyway.” John’s father’s lips contort into a smile that slowly withers away in the silence. “Hopefully we won’t have to read tomorrow.”

“Everyone’s got to take their turn, right?” asks John, with slight smile and averted eyes.

“What does that mean?” returns John’s father, setting his phone on the table and leaning back in his chair.

John’s eyes flit up to meet his father’s and quickly turn away. “Maybe if you read tomorrow you could get a credit to get out of reading next time, y’know, to kinda make up for doing it out of turn.”

“Oh, God, yer not going to start a fight about this are you?” says John’s father, crossing his arms.

John sits, refusing even to blink. “I’m never the one who starts it.” He almost whispers, “You just can’t handle someone seeing the flaws in church.”

John’s father stands, walks to the refrigerator and opens it, pulls out an apple, examines it and finds two small brown dots near the stem, presses them and, after his finger sinks into the soft flesh, opens the cupboard beneath the sink and tosses it into the trash there. He nudges closed the door with his knee while reaching for the stiff yellow towel hanging from the oven door handle.

“I was eventually going to eat that apple,” says John. “It was just a little bruised.”

“You shouldn’t eat trash like that,” says John’s father while wiping his hands on the yellow towel. “If you need money, y’know, to buy groceries that aren’t half-rotten, I’ll give you some.” He tosses the towel on the counter next to the sink.

“Yeah, sure, I could use some. You just trashed tomorrow’s breakfast.”

* * *

“What did she want this time?”

“I wish she would stop calling every ten minutes. She said we don’t have to give the reading tomorrow, but now she wants me to pick up something to give to the pastor for makin’ him take the extra time to find who was supposed to read. Sometimes,” John’s father shakes his head, “I don’t understand that woman.”

John thinks, This is yer wonderful life: picking up crap for yer pastor at yer wife’s whim, some plastic trinket shipped over from China, full of meaning for some idiot willing to buy it.

* * *

John’s father cranks the car window down into the door, fastens his seat belt, and pulls his keys from his jacket pocket. He reaches for the ignition and pauses. What just happened, he thinks, remembering what occurred in the apartment before he left. John leaving the table…John on the couch…John asking...“You ever think about divorce?”

Instead of starting the car, John’s father drops the keys into the cupholder and hangs his arm out the window. He stares at the single brilliant eye of a nearby light pole. Its orange light sloughs onto the car.

“Life used to be so good,” and everyone was proud.

* * *

John spies into the parking lot below through the small bathroom window. Why hasn’t he left yet? Was something forgotten? No, he didn’t bring anything up.

Beethoven’s Fifth startles him. John leaves the window for the table beneath the dirty globe and picks up his father’s phone. He glances at the caller’s number. Why talk to her?

John’s voice is sent into the sky, into space. It’s so cold his words nearly freeze out of the air and whirl off into the black. Instead they slam into a satellite made from metal pulled from deep underground, are sent back down, into plastic by his mother’s ear, and appear in her mind as sound coming out of his decapitated head. John’s not concerned with which words they are...

He tucks the phone into his pocket after the symphony stops playing.

* * *

John’s pocket hitches a ride from his feet, carrying the silent phone down the stairs, to the lot. John’s hand briefly cools upon the metal door handle. His eyes see the passenger door getting larger, larger, in front of them. Metal cools his hand as the car door opens. John’s mind is somewhere in space watching a stream of his words flit from satellite to satellite, false star to false star. His body stands bent at the waist, half in and half out of the grey car.

“You left yer phone,” say his lips, as his hand pulls the phone from his pocket, his arm extends it toward his father, and his eyes see tears. John’s mind plummets from space, through the brilliantly black nothing. From miles up it falls into the creamy night sky above the city and straight into his body’s head.

John’s father jerks away from his son to look at the rusting light pole, its neck and single brilliant eye. His left shirt sleeve soaks the tears from off his face. The car groans as John settles into the passenger seat, tilting slightly to the side, the body settling into equilibrium, necessarily tenuous and broken by the soft closing of the passenger door so gently it doesn’t latch. John examines the phone for a moment before placing it in the cup holder. They stare at the silence, each struggling to say something.

“You ok—“

“Ya,” John’s father says sharply.

“This about mom?” asks John after some seconds. “Uhmm, she called yer phone, y’know, after you left. That’s how I found it, anyway. That’s why I came down here.”

John’s father picks up the phone and pulls the keys from the cupholder before replacing it. He slides the ignition key into the switch. “What’d she have to say now?”

“Well, I didn’t answer it, y’know, ‘cause I really didn’t feel, well, I didn’t feel like I should, in case it was something important for you.” John looks away, unable to even direct his voice at his father. “I guess, well, I just didn’t want to talk to her, either, so I hurried down here to give it to you, y’know, after it stopped ringing.”

“I don’t think I would have answered it anyway,” John’s father offers with a “humph”. “I was just thinking how much I don’t want to go back to the house. Isn’t that terrible?”

John thinks of his apartment, of the diseased yellow light, of the bug necropolis lording over the table. Perhaps the corpses were once corn in a faraway field, or barley carried by wind from Nebraska to New York City. The shock of his father’s tears fades away.

“Remember what I said when you asked me if,” a gulp, a sequestering of air, “what I said when you asked me about divorce?”

“Ya,” says John. Perhaps the insects below that light once were fruits in an open air market.

“‘Ya’ you remember or ‘ya’ I said yes?,” says John’s father, knowing it unnecessary.

“Ya...” John says, his mind slowly floating toward the globe above the table in the apartment kitchenette.

John’s father continues, “I meant it! When I said it, I meant it! For the last year it’s been like living in…oh, I don’t even know where! Everything I say, everything I do is taken like I’m trying to cause trouble. But I don’t even think I’ve changed! That’s the really bad part, y’know? It’s like I’m suddenly wrong when I do what used to be right!” He throws up his hands and looks toward the car roof. “We sit down like in movies, across the kitchen table from each other, and write down our problems as if they’ll stay on the paper, out of our lives, like the therapist says. Then we can at least live together for a while. But soon I can’t even look at her because I feel like my list is written on my face, that every time she looks at me she just sees the things I think are wrong with her. She always says I don’t pay attention to—“

Beethoven’s fifth interrupts him. The same number on the phone glows a washed-out green in the cup holder. John’s father looks at the phone until the music stops. He sits silently for a while.

“When I was in Vegas I thought I was going to find the perfect woman for me, y’know, but every night I found myself alone and thinking of the stories you hear of a guy sitting at a bar meeting a waitress and being married to her that night, then telling the story at their 50th anniversary, surrounded by sons, daughters, fantastic in-laws and loud stupid grandkids, drinking glasses of wine ‘till another 50 years seems certain. So I sat at bars, went to shitty little diners where a guy could talk to a waitress for a couple minutes. But I never even got a phone number let alone a trip to a chapel. I just sat thinking of being other places, of other people. I would see an attractive woman come in and, instead of moving from my seat, I would just create a story in my head of how I’d win her over, of how we’d be together from that night until we died. But then I’d snap out of my dreaming, and she’d be gone, and I’d order another drink and wait for the next one to come in.”

“I got so desperate I went to strip clubs. I mean, can you imagine me telling my parents I married a girl for her lap dance!” John’s father laughs a broken-dam laugh, letting go all his sadness and regret. “Boy, that would have been a joke,” he says with a sigh. “A real mess.”

John imagines the carbon atoms in that bug-filled globe, how they might in the future be the foundation of a famous concert hall or grocery bags instead of corpses in a college kid’s kitchenette. He steps on a metal chair next to the table, reaches up and loosens the rusted screws around the bulb, removes it from beneath the light, and peers inside.

A mass of jointed and disjointed legs, antennae, wings, shells, heads sits dusty and dead. He slowly swirls the bowl, watching the corpses shuffle and swoosh, gliding over the glass, over his distorted hands cradling the globe. The dead parts click together, jostling, dissolving from familiar shapes into monstrosities: a single body made of a dozen legs, all from different insects; two heads joined at the severed necks keeping infinite watch; wings breaking and shattering under assault of heavier parts; antennae crumbling into ever-smaller segments. Falling apart, falling together, swirling.

He remembers being very young, his mother taking him to an oval swimming pool. She swims around the edge while he floats in the middle. She swimming, swimming, swimming, pulling the water behind her, training it to follow, faster, faster until she stops working and rests in the current, watching him as she quickly orbits around the edge and he slowly turns in the eye...

“...and now I don’t know what I’ll do,” says John’s father.

Wildfires? What about coastal erosion, San Diego...

2007-10-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

An LA Times article about the proposed Federal buyout of half of Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi--two years after Katrina wiped out much of the housing stock in the town, along with some of its people--mentions the need to embark on a nationwide 'retreat from the coast'. For all of you who think there's something strange in the tension between calls to abandon New Orleans and thousands of firefighters in Malibu right now, check this out:

In 2005, Congress asked the Corps of Engineers to assess how to protect coastal Mississippi from damage by hurricanes and other storms and saltwater intrusion, as well as ways to preserve fish and wildlife and prevent erosion.

Most Mississippi homeowners, however, did not learn about the project until last month, when the corps held a public meeting in Bay St. Louis. Corps officials are now scrambling to win support from local civic leaders before they submit the $10-billion project to Congress at the end of the year.

Some experts are advocating a full-scale retreat from the nation's shorelines, but corps officials say there is no current plan to extend the project to other regions.

"Ultimately, a retreat is our only solution," said Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He said the coast is eroding, sea levels are rising and there is growing concern -- though no scientific consensus -- that hurricanes may be becoming more forceful.

While the risk of coastal disasters is greatest on the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts because of the low topography and strong risk of hurricanes, experts say rising sea levels will eventually affect the entire U.S. shoreline.

A 2000 study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimated that by 2060, erosion could wipe out one of every four homes within 500 feet of U.S. coasts.

Gary Griggs, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said that in California, particularly vulnerable "hot spots" include north San Diego County, where beaches are narrow and cliffs are heavily developed. He added that similar risks are posed in Malibu, where people live right on the beach.

Story #3

2007-10-18T00:00:00.001-07:00

The pale green bed sheet whispers as it unfurls, and suddenly she remembers the night she spent alone with the lonely-eyed beauty from Caspin, Illinois. She had been alone, too, utterly alone though they'd laid wrapped together in that sheet all night and into the next day, another day sopping humidity, the air a coat itself that everyone wore. As the sheet floated down around her feet she remembered joking about the air conditioner, old and chugging along, "Like manifest destiny across the plains," those lonely eyes had said.

The objects in her life are becoming heavy.

She gathers the sheet in her arms, throws it out over the bed again and smooths away the wrinkles. How many times, she thinks, how many times has that sheet held me together? As she walks out of the bedroom she answers herself: Two.

The stairway's smooth planks creak as she steps down to the hall. Two times, she thinks. She presses her palms into the sides of her thighs as she walks down the hall toward the stained glass window high on the wall at the far end. Orange light fills the hall from the evening sun coming in. I should have painted them green, she thinks, looking at the walls. She remembers painting them that off-putting brown, remembers thinking how nice it would look against the old wood on the floor, dented and stained from years. She pauses at the end of the hall and looks up at the window, then to the corner above it where the brown wall and white ceiling meet, where a tiny patch of brown creeps out of the wall and out across the ceiling. Again she stands on that old, swaying ladder, brush in hand, Vivaldi's Summer coming softly down the stairs from her stereo, and when she reaches up to the corner with the loaded paint brush, the first try, the test, the ladder leans to the side, begins sliding from beneath her, and she jams her hand into the corner to correct her balance, and the brush slaps against the ceiling, falls from her grip, and leaves a broken trail of brown down to the floor.

She looks at the floor where the stain still shows, just as it does above in the corner. She turns and goes into the kitchen. I hope he got rid of that ladder, she thinks. I should have used green.

Twice, she thinks as water fills the glass. It fills. She drinks half and puts it back under the faucet. And you weren't even one of them. She dumps the water in the sink and leaves the glass there, upside down, suctioned to the satiny steel.

The brown wooden desk. The silver-armed chair. They should give her something, should find a thread from her past to tug on. They've been with her, it seems, forever. She stands in the doorway to her study looking at the back of the chair, at the outline, the shape of the desk. The roll top gently curves up the desk's face. She slowly walks to the chair and rolls it out, its metal wheels churning on the wooden floor, the whole house an amplifier, enriching the bass with a hundred years of history. She sits on the springy seat, on the green vinyl covering the springs. She pivots in the chair and pulls herself to the desk. The roll top rumbles as it opens. She pulls herself back up to the desk.

Still, nothing comes to her mind, no memories, no thoughts. The desk remains unattached to any one thing, perhaps so well connected it short circuits a single selection, unparsable, overwhelmingly complex. After so long, there may be too much there to know.

She takes some sheets of blank paper from the center drawer. The paper rustles as she pulls it out, brilliantly white, dry, smooth, a flattened pearl, bleached marble, a small part of an enormous, flawless sclera. She slides off the top sheet and puts it on the desk in front of her. The rest she puts down to her left, against the desk's side wall. With her only pen she begins writing, begins leaving a broken trail of black across the page.

Forgetting memory.

2007-10-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

The UCI Langson Library is using its card catalog as scratch paper. You write the call numbers from the online database on the backs of the cards, go find your book, then throw the cards away. I like to read them, though. Here are some:

Evacuation

2007-10-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

I just got this in the mail from the University

There's a presumption of survival somewhere in here...

How I Met Ray Bradbury

2007-10-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

This little part here is true, for the next several paragraphs, so save yourself the trouble of asking about the rest, which is a combination, or completely a lie. In fact, the little might already be a lie because, right now, I haven’t yet met Ray, though we’re on a first-name basis. Right now I’m a graduate student on leave from school but still living in the apartment I only get for being in school. I’m actually

Now I’m in the library, in a room I shouldn’t be in, for grad students only. I’m going to have to keep jumping through these loopholes to meet Ray. I haven’t even paid fees and they haven’t caught me yet. It’s early October and I’m probably in a pile somewhere. They’ll catch up to me as they go through the IN box updating history.

He lives in LA, at least has a place there. I’m so close I can smell the books in his basement, which could really be a filthy phrase when applied to a writer of books.

The day I decided I would meet Ray Bradbury, Oct. 8, 2007, I also wrote a story entitled “The Bedroom”. It’s all dialogue between lovers on a bed talking about past lovers and pine cones.

The day I met Ray was sunny, the sunniest day LA had seen forever. Whole chickens cooked on sidewalks having been left outside by their owners the night before to thaw after the weather report came on. “So sunny the FDA advises against using stoves tomorrow,” the meteorologist said. “Temperature differential might lead to undercooking and elevated risk of contracting salmonella. Better to put your chickens on the doorstep tonight, then throw them on the sidewalks tomorrow. Best time should be,” and the forecaster held up a piece of paper to read from, “2:15 PM, Pacific Time.” After that, commercials came on selling tin foil and barbecue sauce. The ad agents for the station must have known about the forecast. They certainly knew already how many chickens LA could eat in a day.

The day I met Ray I drove up from Irvine where I was living at the time, drove up the 405 freeway, a wide grey rubber band snipped and stretched flat across the brown basin, seeming ready to snap back off the ground at any moment. LAX smelled of kerosene, everything else of barbecued chicken. The sun drove off the tin foil tents directly into my eyes. Ray told me somebody on a Spanish radio station found the freeway shoulders were hotter than the sidewalks, even with the wind of the passing cars, so everyone went and set up out on the margins of that gray lace, their foil chicken ovens like robot cycling fans lined up ten deep along the Tour de France, red sauce erupting from the holes where the sensors brought in the world, triggering metallic cheers for the correctly numbered cyclist they were programmed to love. Location, location, location. The difference in heat meant five minutes off each chicken and onto life. I saw where drivers’ wanderings left long stretches of exploded foil ovens, barbecue sauce spattered on the sound walls. Those cars must smell delicious, I thought. I was glad for the distraction. Driving 75 miles per hour through densely populated desert to meet Ray Bradbury demands distraction from the destination. I needed to think of the moment, each one flitting by faster than the chicken tents, each one getting out of my way to Ray Bradbury.

He wasn’t home when I got there, at least not at the home I went to. I had screwed up the date. My tiny planner had “BIGGEST DAY” written in the tiny box with 14 in it, but I stood at the gate squarely in 13. At least I was the only thing in that box. I decided to drive around the city to look around, maybe run into Ray by chance and say, "How amazing that the day before we’re supposed to meet we meet anyway, and in such a large, anonymous city, no less!"

“Piffle,” he’d say. “I’ve met more people here than anywhere else. Why shouldn’t you be one of them?”

I got back in my car and drove off without direction, feeling the incredible feeling of freedom that light traffic LA driving brings, a complete illusion, of course, but exhilarating as if designed to stimulate without substance. Just going somewhere is enough!

Suddenly I was back in Orange County, in Seal Beach, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Costa Mesa, Irvine, then onto the 5 freeway through Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, and then the Lagunas, Laguna Woods, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, finally through San Juan Capistrano, Dana Point, and San Clemente and out of Orange County for the second time that day. Those Lagunas string together so nicely, perfectly suited for the brochures that sold them, but their inland, not like Laguna Beach, so they couldn’t throw Beach onto their names, so they threw Laguna on and hoped people confused them, a gimmick, New Jersey businesses with New York P.O. boxes. Should have called them all just Laguna, then, in practice, just called them by their mayors’ names. “Yeah, got to go down to Lopez today, through Cruz and Sterling. Yep, all the way down.”

I turned around after filling up at a gas station where the sunburned man said, “You got some of that chicken for me?” and I said, “No,” and turned around and entered Orange County for the second time that day and drove through the Lagunas and back to my apartment in Irvine as the sun set faster than it does anywhere else in the world, like the biggest rock you and your brother could find to throw off the bridge disappeared into the stagnant water the sun retires in Orange County and I didn’t meet Ray Bradbury on the road at all until the next day.

The 14^th was the cloudiest day on record in Southern California, three trillion pounds of grey hanging eleven feet up. The freeways were free from the tyranny of trucks, which made driving back up the 405 from Irvine to Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley to Westminster to Seal Beach to LA COUNTY! where more than eighty cities jostle each other for what little dirty breathing room they can get that much easier. I arrived at Ray’s gate, again, twenty-three minutes early, and watched the pounds swirl above me for twenty minutes before pressing the intercom button and hearing a heart-breaking nothing. No response. He couldn’t do this, could he, I thought. He must have calendars, too. He wouldn’t forget our appointment. I stood watching the weight hover above me for another ten minutes and tried the button again. This time, a response, a two-second burst of crackle that lit up the grey around me and pushed the cloud deck three inches higher, closer to a big-rig green light that, though I didn’t want to deal with later, would surely be worth it. Nothing more came of the speaker. I waited ten more minutes. I pushed the button again and this time nothing but a sprinkling of water from above replied. Rain in LA, I thought. Oh my.

The metal squealed and started rolling open. Of course, of course! If anyone has some kind of secret hidden camera guarding their gate from intruders, it would be Ray, wouldn’t it? And a test of my perseverance?! Such a man. Probably taking notes in his favorite chair before the screen. Stands watching unusually low clouds. Can this be used for character seeing as it is a reaction to an extraordinarily unlikely event? Yes. Oh, sorry, Ray, that’s hardly representative of the joy in your writing. Forgive a novice. I didn’t mean to look up, really, but I get so little of that anymore that I needed to look closely at the obscuration. The sky’s too clear in Orange County, always, once the morning marine layer has burned off. Sure at night it’s usually cloudy and the sodium lights of the freeways hum along with the traffic to remind constantly of movement, always movement, but at least there’s still something orange in Orange County, the orange sky at night that is, a somber reflection of the ground in the sky. I had to look up really, and when it started raining…oh, you saw me dance a little, something I usually don’t do. If I’d have known you were watching I never would have. I would have written about it later, though, but I wouldn’t have done it, have put you through that. I did dance though after a month in Irvine when the first rain came. I went outside into the pale orange night and danced with my face to the sky remembering what it’s like to be wet outside and smell the dust that seems so fragrant only when it rains.

The gate stood fully open and silent and I walked in, Ray. If I’d have known you were right behind me in that car I would have waited to save you the horn blast or your driver anyway or whoever that was who dropped you off at your house as I watched from behind the gate where I had to go when you yelled at me to get out of there and wondered loudly who I thought I was. I know who I think I am Ray and thought you did, too. How was I supposed to know it wasn’t you who said, “Sure the 14^th at my place in LA get the directions from the website.” It was so nice of you Mr. Bradbury though to come slowly down to your gate out of that incredibly low cloud deck surrounding your house I couldn’t even see you at first and thought I’d just stand there for a while wondering what it would be like to meet you but then I saw you emerge from that grey weight above and come slowly down to the gate where you asked who I was and I told you a fan of your work and of stories and writing in general and you told me you had a good one for me and asked whether or not I had seen all the tin foil on the freeway and whether I knew where it came from and that you’d heard the other day that a Spanish DJ had told everyone to take their chicken onto the freeway shoulders where it was hotter than anywhere and would save them all 5 minutes of cooking time that they could add to their lives and that 239,000 chickens were destroyed by drivers along with 14 people hit as they tried to stop the chicken from overcooking and getting dry and that if I wanted to I could use that as the beginning of a story of my own as you had taken lots of ideas from the news that you’d heard over the years and turned them into beautiful tales of rocket ships and women and fire and then you said goodbye and walked slowly back up disappearing into the clouds clinging to your house and I got in my car and went back down the 405 freeway into Orange County where the sky brightened with each city I passed through a little brighter in Seal Beach, a little more in Westminster, in Fountain Valley I began to see helicopters and airplanes and in Costa Mesa I could see more blue than grey then finally stepping out of my car in Irvine I looked up to see nothing but magnificent blue sky with mountains on the horizon and a terrible layer of pale dust settled on everything in the five months since it last rained.

Freewrite #1

2007-10-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

Note: All freewrites will begin with a random Wikipedia article. Writing will be non-stop for a 10-minute period.

For this freewrite, the article is Sidney Osborne Bufton.

Sidney Osborne Bufton (12 January 1908 – 29 March 1993) was an Air Vice Marshal in the Royal Air Force who played a major part in establishing the Pathfinder project.

After retiring from the RAF, he joined Radionic Ltd. as an inventor and later became Managing Director until 1970.

As a young man he had been a Welsh International Hockey player (1931 – 37) as well as playing for the RAF and the Combined Services.

Here goes:

"Sidney."

"Yeah."

"It says here...it says, Bufton?"

Sidney squinted at the man. "Yeah, that's right. Bufton."

"Sidney Bufton. What a name," he said.

"That's right," said Sidney Bufton. He stared the man in the face.

The man sat back in his chair. "What brings you to St. James, Sidney Bufton?"

Sidney jabbed his thumb behind him. "That van."

The man sat up and looked over Sidney Bufton's shoulder. He saw a beige van with dull hubcaps sitting by the road. "Quite the ride, there," the man said.

"Yeah, yeah it is," said Sidney Bufton. "Dead now, though."

"Really," said the man, sitting back in his chair. "Now how'd a thing like that happen?"

"Three thousand two hundred miles, that's how," said Sydney. "And this desert," he said, still staring the man in the face.

The man looked behind Sidney Bufton again. "It is some desert," he said. He looks at Sidney Bufton's face again. "Good thing you broke down here, though. I'm the only mechanic on this stretch who'll not rip you off."

"I know," said Sidney Bufton. "I've already stopped at three."

The man frowned and looked at the dirty white countertop between himself and Sidney Bufton.

He looked up again. "Well, I'm sure you'll find this place what you're looking for."

"Hmm," said Sidney. "I need a radiator hose and some water."

"That's it?" said the man. "That's all you need and you stopped at three other places and didn't get it?"

"They wouldn't give me the water for free," said Sydney. "So I kept pushing."

The mechanic whistled poorly. "A principled man, huh?"

Sidney put his hands on the narrow ledge between himself and the window screen separating him from the mechanic. "No, not at all. But I'm not paying for water."

The man stood up from his chair and reached to slide the window closed. Before he did though, he looked at Sidney Bufton, then looked down at the dirty counter, then looked up again, and said, "You do know you're in the desert, right?"

"Yeah," said Sidney Bufton. "Yeah I do."

The man looked at Sidney for a moment longer. "I'll be right out," he said and slid the window closed. It rasped in its old metal track.

Sidney and the man stood looking at the wall of the garage, the side wall, to the right. It was covered in hoses. All black. All dirty and leaving a scum on the man's hands when he pawed through them, looking for the one he thought would fit Sidney's old van. "Looks like it should be about a 32-slash-A," he said.

"That so?" said Sidney Bufton.

The man looked sideways at Sidney. "Yeah," he said. He turned back to the wall. After five minutes of searching, he carried three curved hoses out to the van by the side of the two-lane highway. Sidney followed, looking up and down the long stretch of road visible in both directions from the tiny group of buildings gathered around the garage. Not a single car was on the road.

The man said, "Open the hood."

Sidney stepped around him to the front of the van, felt under the front of the hood with both hands until finding the latch, then popped the hood open. He pulled the rod out of its holder and used it to prop the hood up.

"Out of the way," the man said. He dropped the hoses on Sidney Bufton's feet, staining his brown pants with streaks of black grime.

Back in Irvine

2007-10-05T17:10:00.001-07:00

I'm back in Irvine, so I did what everyone does: rode my bike to the coast and played harmonica.

Also saw this:

Untitled 1

2007-10-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

when every nerve in my body is screaming GET OUT OF HERE MY FRIEND and we ride together through the brown twisted field grass on a rusted bicycle frame with two bent wheels missing spokes and reflectors grass crunching beneath the worn tires whipping legs rasping through the outer layers of skin already dead. the stories were true somehow never thought the man actually lived out there shack-bound the building well kept but he's a mess with hair that long he'd scare a cougar and a bear to hugging. the bums know about him maybe he was one of them sitting downtown on the corner the black concrete steps maybe exiled from the concrete moved around by those five men nothing to do sitting downtown on their mobile steps and they never move them in front of doors just muscle the steps against walls white aluminum siding that leaves fine pale dust on your clothes or red brick rough with years and waiting for your skin. three bums sit at once on the stairs the other two stand and earn the right to decide the next place for the steps pulled over by the three who then argue over who stands next but sometimes one or two volunteer having a great idea in mind for the next place. we're to the road and safe now. with you lying in that long brown grass not knowing what to do without you 'cause you saw the old man staring down from the tree stand built for shooting deer that's right. the dirt falls off him in chunks when he moves on that platform looking on the field. remember that little boy under the bleachers saw us under the bleachers kiss first time kiss right when the halftime buzzer rattled the bleachers? too young to cause trouble thankfully couldn't have dealt with more than the taste of you at the time almost couldn't then. oh my your hands. in the grass your hands again. oh my. who says we're missing essentials? not us. we don't miss anything but they miss us. hate to see them not. but now need a new field now that man showed up crazy for living crazy for dying surely you saw it too in his eyes right the spark of life so quickly gone but there without a doubt glad you saw it too 'cause that's what we're doing here for us that spark in the eyes we look in so close to your face you close your eyes when you kiss. where we gonna' go next? running out of space it seems the people either catching up or catching on might have to leave soon when the man on his tractor rides by looks out over the field and we can see him but he somehow doesn't us or doesn't show or can't show that he sees us even when he's alone can't show even us that he sees us for fear of what he'd do he feels as watched as we do obviously or he'd have waved or shouted or fired a gun over our heads and got us running far away from his kids so strong and beautiful have you seen their hair as whispy as the edges of fall clouds shredded by the jet stream of hundreds of miles per hour winds so high above us but we look up at them anyway and wonder where we'll go next can't be here forever they're getting closer and closer to seeing us ruin their lives as the world falls down around them and the winds pick up at their margins tearing family far away to other places like we'll be going but where to? where more brown fields with tall grass that hides what we do from those it needs hiding from and rustles with the wind in the autumn when we need it most before the long winter drives everyone inside and dries the skin and hides us from them and everyone oh my?

Short story #1: Mrs. Hensey

2007-09-30T22:22:00.001-07:00

Mrs. Hensey

I have an eleven-year-old daughter. She's in the 4th grade. She tells me about math, about how hard it is. When we stand by the van on the edge of the pasture, watching the horses eat spring grass, she tells me how sometimes the answers are in the back of the book. "Every other one's in the back," she says. I look at her black hair, down right onto her head; I look at the place it all swirls out from. Once, long ago, in school, I'd read something about human hair. It's long since been forgotten. I look from high above her, at her, and say, "That must make homework pretty easy, huh?"

It's a stupid thing to say. She never talks to me about the easy things. She only talks to her mom about that: my wife gets the easy ones.

"Well," she says, already sage, "Mrs. Hensey only gives us the other ones, the even, for homework. The odds are for practice." She speaks like a judge, pronouncing rather than saying. She learned that from her mom. I say, "Your teacher's pretty smart, huh?" She watches the horses eat their way around the pasture.

My father always had an answer. Not the answer, though. Only an answer, to any question I ever asked. But he lied. He lied about how bees made honey, telling me they mix it in the comb with tiny spoons, one in each of their four front legs, until it turned golden, when they knew it was done. I asked, "Where are you going tomorrow," and he'd tell me, "To the bottom of the ocean where I have a meeting with some eels." He was a trucker. He'd climb into the big silver cab at 5 AM after he woke me up to stand on the porch and watch him leave. He made me salute him like he was a rocket ship captain, stand and salute as he drove away. I could only stop and go back inside after he blew his loud horn. Sometimes he never did, he'd disappear over the hill down the road without a sound, and I'd stand there saluting until I woke up and realized I'd slipped into sleep and that my hand had fallen away from my brow anyway. Then I'd go inside and back to bed.

I think he lied to Mom, too, but they seemed happy. I never knew they fought, if they did. They had to, though. Who doesn't? Maybe he'd just always promise roses and diamonds, then drive off to space in his ship and come back three, five, seven days later smelling of smoke and diesel and with a load check in his front shirt pocket. He'd always leave it there 'til he saw Mom, and she would walk up to him smiling and take the check out of his pocket with her right hand, looking in his eyes the whole time. "I brought it from the moon," he'd say.

When I finally left for good to go to school, I saw him in my rear view mirror saluting on the porch. I drove down the road and over the hill without a sound, and he stood there the whole time. He'd told me, right before I drove away, he told me, standing next to my car packed with boxes and plastic crates, told me through my half-open driver's window, "Take care. We love you lots. I'll see you soon," then I slowly drove across the gravel to the road and he slowly walked to take his station on the porch, and I drove down the road I'd be coming right back down seven days later for his funeral. I swear when I came back over the hill toward the house I saw the dust cloud from my departure still settling onto the crab grass in the ditch.

I've shown my daughter pictures of him, explaining that he's her grandfather. She takes the pictures in her small hands, looks at them closely, then starts asking questions. "Did he have pets?" "How old is he?" "Is that shirt in the closet upstairs?" "What's on the wall behind him?" I answer as best I can. "No, only a farm dog, but he didn't call it a pet." "We threw away his clothes when he died." "That's a grandfather clock he made from a kit he got in the mail." She flips back to the picture of him in front of the clock and says, her voice filled with wonder, "A grandfather clock?" She sits quietly for a while staring at the picture. I study her. She looks up at me. "Can we take pictures of Mommy?"

We're sitting on the carpet. I lean back, bracing my arms against the floor. I look at her face looking up at me, "Sure, honey. Sure we can."

ii.

I disappoint her. I tell her the truth. I don't lie. She'll get enough of that from everyone else. Sometimes I think she doesn't like talking to me. The world's slightly less wonderful from my lips, I think. She says, "Can you do a times table in under a minute?" "A times table?" I ask. "Yes. Mrs. Hensey says we've got to do a times table in under a minute to go to fifth grade." "Really," I say. "That sounds pretty tough." She says, "I can do everything up to six, but we have to go up to nine." "Nine's a big number," I say. "Nine's this many," she says holding up nine fingers. She keeps one thumb down. "How many is ten?" I ask. She thinks a moment before flipping out her thumb and shoving her hands out, palms toward me as if pleading innocence. "This many," she says, giggling.

It's the same gesture Mom made the first time she saw me after Dad died. She looked up from the old couch, pushed her hands out to me with fingers outstretched, and I went to her and put myself between those hands and arms and wrapped myself around her. We stayed that way and cried, her sitting on the old couch and me standing, bent ninety-degrees at the waist. We sobbed into each other for a long time. Now I wonder where my daughter learned to do that with her hands.

"What's that," she asks. She's pointing at a caterpillar crawling across the gray sidewalk. It's brown and black and furry. I pick it up, tenderly, and place it in my open palm so she can see it. "That's a woolly bear caterpillar," I say. It's entirely black except for a band of brown in its middle. It's about an inch long, the brown about a quarter inch. My father had explained to me how you could find out how long you'd live by adding together the length of the brown bits on every one of the woolly bears you ever found. He'd said, "If you ever find one with no brown, that means you'll live forever." One time I found one without any brown and took it to him, asking if I'd live forever. He took it from my palm, picking it up between his thumb and forefinger, and held it up in front of his face. He examined it. It curled into a tight ball, all fur and black, a disk between his fingers. "Well son," he'd said, "I guess this means we're gonna live forever." He put the disk back in my hand. Now my daughter looks at the same creature and I tell her, "It's going to turn into a moth soon. That's where moths come from, from caterpillars." I hold my hand out to her. "You can touch him," I say. She reaches toward the caterpillar with her tiny hand. She curls her fingers to pick it up, but then stops and pulls her hand away. She looks up at me. "Where do caterpillars come from?" she asks. "Moths," I say.

iii.

My daughter comes into the kitchen crying. "I didn't do the times table right!" she sobs. She sits at our round table and pushes a piece of paper to me before crossing her arms on the table top and burying her head in them. I pick up the paper. At the top, next to her name, it says 74/100, written and circled in red pen. The rest of the sheet is covered by math problems, all multiplication. Some of the problems aren't answered. "Did you run out of time, honey?" I ask. She doesn't raise her head. Her words are muffled when she says, "It wouldn't have mattered. Now I can't go to fifth grade!" Her sobbing increases. I look more closely. The format is orderly and patterned. The first problem is 0x0, the next 0x1, all the way from zero to nine. The red slashes only start halfway into the sevens. "You really did know up to the sixes, didn't you?" I ask. "It doesn't matter," she says. She looks up from her arms. Her face is red and her nose is running down to her lip. "I only got the sevens, eights, and nines wrong," she says. Her eyes clench shut as another sob comes out. I go to the counter and get some tissues. "Here," I say handing her the wad. She wipes the whole wad against her eyes, ignoring her nose entirely. I look at the paper again. "Honey," I say, cautiously approaching a suggestion. She hears it in my voice and stops crying immediately. "What?" she asks. She doesn't like my suggestions. "When you were doing up to the sixes," I say. She sits up a little more with each word. "When you were doing the sixes, you got 6x7, 6x8, and 6x9 right." She's fully alert now, her face still red but sadness forgotten. I stand next to the table and look down at her. "But when you tried 7x6 and 8x6, you got them wrong, and you didn't even answer 9x6. Don't you see that they're the same problem, just reversed?" "I told you," she says, her voice rising, "that I only know up to the sixes!" She screams the last word, buries her head back in her arms on the table, and cries, cries, cries.

iv.

I failed out of school after one semester. While the other freshmen were going to orientations, first classes, and parties, I was clutching my mother under a new moon as we wailed for our lost spaceman.

I have an eleven-year-old daughter. She's in the 5th grade. She knows her times table up to nine. They've started biology already, even though it's only September. She brings me her book one night, to our round table in the kitchen. She sits beside me. I put aside my notebook and pen. She opens the book, points to a picture, and looks at me, our eyes level. "What's that, daddy?" I look. It's a furry caterpillar on a green leaf. It's almost entirely brown except for its ends, both black. Each black end is about as wide as my pinky fingernail. We've both forgotten last spring during our long summer together, full of warmth and laughter. I read the short caption beneath the picture. It reads, The caterpillar pictured above will soon become a moth. The coloration indicates how near the caterpillar is to full growth before autumn weather stimulates it to seek a winter shelter. I look at my daughter. "That's a woolly bear caterpillar," I say. "The bigger the brown part in the middle, the colder winter will be." She studies the picture then looks at me, her eyes wide open. "Do you think it will snow a lot?" I smile. "Of course it will, honey. The moon is generous."

NYC Update

2007-09-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

Today I stumbled upon the Central Park Dance Skater Ass'n. Very cool. Big party. Man in white wedding gown, white hat, parrot riding on hat, pushing baby carriage, poodle riding in carriage, poodle also in dress, man's beard dyed red and yellow, poodle's head dyed red and yellow.

The Big Apple: An In"cider" View of NYC

2007-09-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ooh, that's a cute post title, eh?

Anyway, I arrived in NYC yesterday at approximately 11 AM after having left DC at 7:30 AM. Train went through Boston, Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore. For some reason, Amtrak goes through what must be the most run-down parts of towns. This has seemed consistently true throughout my travels by train, which, I must admit, have been fairly limited but are quickly being filled out.

My train experience:

Chicago<-->Vancouver, BC
Chicago-->New Orleans
New Orleans-->Washington, DC
Washington, DC-->New York City
New York City-->Chicago
Chicago-->Irvine

Nos. 5 & 6 are planned and will be executed in the coming month.

I have already been corrected for pronunciation. I asked directions to Houston Street, pronouncing it like the Texas city, and was promptly told that it is pronounced House-ton, and that, if I said it like Hues-ton, I would be pointed and laughed at. Eh.

My first day in NYC I spent walking through the American Museum of Natural History, which was rather disappointing as some exhibits had obviously not been updated since the late sixties or early seventies. Cobwebs and characteristic fonts, you see. However, the dinosaur exhibit was quite impressive, and I saw a model of a dunkleosteus, an extinct fish-like creature which holds a special place in my heart due to a trip to Rockford, Illinois' Burpee Museum of Nat'l History as well as its having lived in the Devonian period. I took a picture of it but cannot show it to you here, as I am at an Internet cafe.

The rest of the day I spent in Central Park. I sat down under a tree near Belvedere Lake to read a book--Albert Camus' The Plague, which I rather do not like, which is disappointing after having read The Stranger in NOLA and liking it. I heard a rustling near the lakeshore where tall weeds grew between the water and a short fence. I then saw a rat stick its nose out from beneath the fence. It would scurry a couple feet out into the grass to forage on something left there before returning to the weeds. It was rather charming for my first encounter with a NYC rat, though I suppose this one could be considered somewhat of a "country mouse" given its habitation. A short while after the rat retreated from view, a woman walking a dachshund walked by me. The dog wouldn't continue and seemed to be wanting to come over to me. I informed the woman that it was probably smelling a rat that had been hanging around and that she should be commended for having a dog with such a good sense of smell. She promptly told me that they were bred for hunting badgers, to which I responded, "Ah, a burrower." The dog went straight to the place in the fence where the rat had been entering and exiting. I told the woman this. She gave a slight squeak that was rather more disturbing than any sound the rat had made and quickly hurried off.

Today I spent five hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park. I also saw the Obelisk, which stands in the park and is about 3500 years old and covered with hieroglyphs. Very strange to see it there, mostly because it is from Egypt yet is held in place on each corner by iron lobsters. That's right: iron lobsters.

Tomorrow I am going on a self-guided walking tour of Chinatown, ending in a tour of the Tenement Museum, which I am highly looking forward to. This is an expensive city, though. I'm going to have to take a few days off, I think. Both my wallet and my legs are giving out.

Success Stories

2007-08-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

Part of my work with Stay Local! has been writing up success stories of local businesses for publication on the Stay Local! website. The first was done last week. You can read it here. The second story I wrote today after interviewing the business owner this morning. I'll post a link when the draft has been finalized.

Quick picture from my walk this evening on the MS River levee:

Midsummer Mardis Gras

2007-08-26T10:29:00.001-07:00

The Krewe of Oak, a Mardi Gras krewe based out of the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street near where I live, held their Midsummer Mardi Gras parade and party last night. Here's a pic of the preparation out front of the bar:

The parade wound through the neighborhood, starting at about 9 PM and ending who knows when. It felt like I was living in U of I's campustown again, a feeling reinforced when I walked down Oak this morning and saw garbage and broken beer bottles everywhere.

People were costumed in all kinds of garb: toilet paper toga, belly dancer outfits. The fairy costume has a special place in NOLA, I've gathered, and fake buttocks are apparently this season's Tickle Me Elmo, as judged by popularity. Sorry I couldn't get a better picture:

New Darwineans

2007-08-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

What repeatedly strikes me about the whole "Katrina thing" is how Darwinian the aftermath has proven to be. In the absence of a large-scale external effort to preserve and protect what existed before the storm, the people, places, institutions, and very cultures of the affected areas have been subjected to a cruel experiment--if one is the type to ascribe moral judgment to "acts of God," which when speaking of God's morality is usually not the case--out of which only those entities arbitrarily positioned to survive such a calamity without support actually did survive. It's as if, to extend the Darwinian analogy, everything in the Gulf Coast, the towns, people, families, houses, neighborhoods, organizations, businesses, aspirations, dreams, and very lives were all...finches, just slightly-different finches all happily roosting along the Gulf of Mexico coastline who bedded down on August 28, 2005 with no notion of the test they were about to be subjected to with tomorrow's dawn.

The storm came.

Each finch was differently equipped to deal with the storm. Some were so poorly-made that the storm killed them immediately, some were able to hold out for just a while before succumbing to the new conditions of life after the storm. Others were just lucky enough to be the types that not only hung on but prospered in the absence of their former finch neighbors.

In some ways, this sounds callous. To say that my house was destroyed while my neighbor's turned out fine implies that I did something wrong, or at least deficient. But Darwinianism isn't judgmental like that. Instead, it's pure hindsight. The entities deemed to have had advantages over others are only judged so because of their surviving hardship. My neighbor's house was not superior before the storm because the standards were different. Only by applying the criterion "did or did not survive storm" can my neighbor's house be said to be "more fit," in the Darwinian sense of fitness, than my own. But on August 28, that standard didn't exist.

Thus the Gulf Coast today might be seen as a kind of "negative map." The notion of negative maps has kept coming up in my mind over the past couple months. I think I first conceived of the world this way when I was thinking about the understory of a forest with a thick canopy. Only a small amount of light penetrates such a forest, and the vegetation on the floor of the forest can be thought of as a map of where the sunlight falls through and how intensely it does so because different vegetation types react/seek out different "types"--intensity, angle, duration--of sunlight. So the understory might be considered a negative map of sunlight penetrating the canopy. In a similar way the Gulf Coast might be thought of as a negative map of what survives a catastrophic hurricane. What is still there and thriving is so for a reason.

Now, it's not quite that simple because of the influence of external inputs like disproportionate aid for some things and none for others, but I think the concept is at least thought-provoking. And, anyway, isn't this how we learn, by applying tests and sweeping up the results into our brains in order to inform further tests, until we've either destroyed everything or have gained just enough to create things capable of withstanding all *known* tests?

Sadly, hurricane Katrina was outside the set of previously *known* tests. Therefore, we hadn't really figured out how to create things capable of withstanding it. What still stands was a crapshoot, really, as are all things Darwinian. Just look at the platypus...

NOLA Update

2007-08-17T17:04:00.001-07:00

Okay, it's been way too long since last post, and that one was off-topic even. I've been somewhat busy, and when I haven't been busy I've been writing a story about my experiences here. If you want to know the NOLA news...don't. The newspaper here is horribly depressing and has been so for two years. Quick news synthesis:

One of the few politicians thought clean pleaded guilty to accepting bribes this week.
Two nights ago a guy sitting on a bar stool stabbed the guy sitting next to him, then calmly walked toward the door where he slit the throat of a 28-year old woman having a conversation with a friend. He knew neither of the people. The man survived, the woman died in surgery. That's the kind of violence that's creeping into this city.
A man stepped out of a car at an intersection as people left a basketball game at night a couple days ago, raised an AK-47, and sprayed bullets into the crowd, killing two.
People in this city are Saints crazy for their football team.

Here is an excerpt of the story I am writing. This section is loosely based on the day I actually did walk out of my house to find a woman lying in the street:

Key into lock...wait, no. What?

black legs lying street woman black gold SUV pulled up stopped leaning out window white t-shirt rolling on the pavement wet from recent rain screaiming near puddles AHAAHAHH writhing woman SUV somebody helping shot was she shot oh my god right here go outside stay here close the door (?) maybe not go out today 'til this is over no she's screaming black woman on the ground gotta do something crackhouse down the street porb'ly shot? oh well gotta do something (fingers phone in pocket) this is waht crime's like but this s'posed to be a safe neighborhood
key in lock. gate open. close. lock.
walk.

look left. look right. like streetcrossing. a small crowd now. a man the SUV drives away. a white man steps into the street to make sure cars coming down the one-way don't run her over. Ed stands by the front gate beneath a large umberella on the phone. a white woman and two teenage kids huddle under a tree across the street having come out of their compound of a house unlocking the eight foot fence gate probably brought by the screams. the woman is rolling on the street, crying ludly for help. a few black people appear at the intersection to the right. two young men jog up to the woman and try to get her to sit up.

"...hit by a car..." Ed says.

Oh, they shouldn't move her then.

Everyone damp.

One boy picks her up under her arms. She's too much dead weight though. He tries to pick up under her knees too and carry her away. He's more like draggin her, her bare feet skinning across the pavement and voice rising with constant crscendo to a wail. He looks at his buddy, uses hes head, nodding, telling hsi bud what to do, where to grab, how to move. She's too heavy. The try just to help her walk. Hit by a car shouldn't be moving her. She collapses. The boys step back as a large black woman in red gets close her face contracts hands to mouth Oh my sista' Oh my god my sista! She stops walking to stare and cry and some others come with her stand next her. The two men give up but one kneels behind her head and pulls her up so she's kind of reclinging bare feet and calves splayed out from the knee long jeans she's in.

The white man waves to a white SUV coming down the street.

"We need an ambulance, too, not just the cops," Ed says into his phone.

The white male driver and white woman passenger only see the white man waving them to the side not until they're passing her until the point her chest would fold beneath the front tires does the woman suddenly point down Oh! hand to mouth turned to driver pointing to the black woman on the pavement alarm the widows up so a miming of it, the most talented miming Creevey's ever seen.

Jack jumps over the big puddle where Ed's car usually parks onto the street looks down on the woman and young black man there. A busted up car sits just upstreet, windshield smashed at least the front passenger flat. The white family stands beneath the tree before its gate. The brief after-rain cool is disapearing back into a humid haze smelling of dirt and rust. The tall metalwork stretching thick black cable acrosss the river appears unaffected.

Jack walks over to the woman and squats onto his heels feeling his knees pop.

"You better not move her," he says to the young man. "She been hit by a car?"

"Uh-huh, an' I know the one that done it, too."

The woman stares beyond them. Her eyelids begin fluttering.

"Cyn," the man says, slapping her cheek. "Gotta' stay awake Cyn," he says leaning over her looking her in the face but she looks straight through the tiny spaces in his tissue.

"Oh my God," the red woman screams as Cyn convulses, some kind of seizure. An old black man come with the red one says, "Don't let her tounge goback," another, "Yeah she gonna' choke you not careful. The blacks stand downstreet the woman the wheite gate upstreet where the tree drops little specks of a rainsttorm done died from its leaves. The woman hte young amn Jack in front of Ed's gate where Ed hangs up phone pocketed steps through gate to wait like all of us for someone under lights or sound or salvation or willing to take what we have upon us upon themselves so we can go back to living.

The black man walks around the woman to see her face.

"Oh, she can't die she's got too many kids," he says to no one.

"Five or six kids," he says to Ed standing beneath his unneeded umbrella.

"What's your name?" Jack asks her.

No answer.

"Her name's Cynthia," says the young man sat back but still looking at her face. His right arm is cut and bleeding.

"You okay," Jack asks him touching his arm near the cuts. The skin is sticky, wet like dewy leaves but coated with street grit from Cynthia's shirt. The red innards of the cuts glow agains thte dark borwn skin, their swelling making little lips like mouths along his forearm. The cuts are small.

"Yeah," he says.

Cynthia's breathing disappears. Her head falls to the side, eyes looking toward the red woman but so much further she's irrelevant.

"Cyn," says the cut man with no alarm in his voice.

"Cyn," he says, tapping her cheek.

Cynthia lies in his lap. We hear her breathes again.

"Oh my god!" the red woman screams away the silence but for drops of water from eaves and wood trim rotted to slivers and soft murmers of the white family muted by their tree and the humidity. A young girl from among them walks up to stand at Cynthia's feet.

"Can I get you anything?" she asks hands on knees standing slightly bent at her waist blonde hair hanging plum-line straitght about her pimpled face. She is thin and tightly clothed.

"Water," wheezes Cynthia.

"She wants some water," says the cut man.

"Water? Okay," and the girl's off to the gate and inside the house.

Where are the police?

She comes back with two plastic cups of water red and blue a straw in one to Cynthia's feet, "I brought you a straw in case you want it," she says with strained laughter behind her voice, just unable to hide the absurdity. She sets the cups down by Cyn's head. Cyn reaches for one and hollds it as high as her chin the angle threatens to spill and just holds it there the one without the straw.

We all wait.

She cries, "I can't get it high enough," and Jack and the cut man both reach to help—

"You better not give her anything if she's been hit by a car we don't know what's wrong with her yet."

"Yeah—"

"Yeah tha's right."

The cut man puts the glass back on the street, and it wobbles on a small bit of stone.

Two cops walk up. They hadn't even come with sirens, thinks Jack, shouldn't they come with sirens? A jeep comes up the street the wrong way slowly, EMT on the driver's door. A uniform gets out goes to the back comes out twith gloves and a clipboard.

The cops start asking the samll crowd about what happened.

Ed says, "I had just come out of my house—"

"Where do you live?"

"Right here," Ed points," and I heard the sound of a car running on flats, the plo plop—"

"That the car there?"

"Yeah, she came driving up in that car, kind of just stopped there got out and then collapsed on the street here. She kept saying somebody ran her over or hit her with a car or something like that."

"She get hit by that car?"

"Uh, no, I don't think so. That was the one she was driving."

The red woman begins emptying Cynthia's pockets as Cynthia directs her with her eyes. She pulls a thin black wallet, some keys, some cash, each time piling what has been pulled out into her left hand, clutching the sweaty fingers around the growing pile, and readching back in with her right hand. They look each other in the eye each time, Cynthia suddenly attentiative, focused, desiring for whatever the red woman is doing, making her lighter in both weight and danger, a script followed by those knowing the police, expecting the search, the frisk, the routine suspicion, invasion usual and impersonal and uncaring. Red woman holds a wad in her hand and checks again to ensure the pockets are empty. She could have saved herself the trouble: Cynthia's looking back to somewhere in the sky.

The EMT had just finished a quick exam and was back at his Jeep. He returned with a neck brace. Stooping down to Cynthia, he asks, "You have an ID?" He rips the neck brace strap open, searing the succulent air with the sound of velcro, modeled, as the myth goes, after burrs on plants, a seed dispersal mechanism, like tufts of white cottony down inspiring children's blows or Sakorsky bladed maple choppers raining down onto the windswept Illinois streets of a small town where the old fear the coming winter and the young revel in piles of leaves and their parents give passing worried glances to the brown and gold and crimson and crackling piles possibly hiding the one deadly stick. Oh how the children love those piles soft and waiting for jumping into and will even do the work of raking them up if only they get to play spread them out again rake them again and keep jumping on them pounding them to flakes like goldfish food too small to rake the pile gets no smaller just holds less air as the pieces burrow into the grass below and stay there forever until the earth worms born from the dirt itself pass by and turn it over an acre foot a century through those slimy tubes also good for fishing the silty surface rivers sitting on eroding bends banks as the crickets sing in the sweetly-smelling autumnal dusk of an Illinois childhood that ties every living adult moment to a loss a memory of bliss of paradise but surely this is true for other places not like rurality is Eden with the invisible spores of pesticides and herbicides and pig feces floating down from the fields and the spidery sprayers onto the children walking the five miles home down the gravel road old truck tire tubes slung over their shoulders in the mid-afternoon summer break sun burning a wide stripe of skin across their backs from the tube's shade or the negative image of the burn anyway. Not like that's Eden.

The red woman, "I got it here." The EMT takes it and puts it under the metal bar at the top of his clipboard.

I'm gonna' need any insurance cards, also," he says, turning back to his Jeep to use the hood as writing desk. The red woman begins looking through the pile of pocket contents.

Jack stands and walks around Cyn after touching her arm and telling her she'll be okay. He takes the water glasses over beneath the tree to the yhoung girl.

"I don't think we'll need these anymore." Thanks she smiles as she takes the still full glasses the straw spinning in the blue one. He walks back to the gate at Ed's and locks it.

The busted car has only a windshield left, the others temepred glass and shattered out rather than spiderwebbed like the windshield. Jack looks at the doors and trunk for bullet holes, but sees only dents in the faded blue metal. The car sits just off the street center, tucked beneath the banana leaves. An immature bunch hangs above it. Kind of looks like a piñata, thinks Jack. The short green fruits grow upward from their stems, a thick bundle like the spines of a porcupine thrown up against a starving dog. Small glass polygons cover the car interior, looking mosaic, full of tiny reflections of the car's cloth ceiling and the roiling clous in the sky and the moist dark succulent green leaves of the banana plant that Ed says fountain water, artesian wells when you cut the thick stems.

An ambulance arrives just as silently as everyone else and parks behind the police car, next to the destroyed car but leaving enough room on the other side to wheel the stretcher past the family uinder thtree to tohe woman on th street lying with her head in the lap of a man with cut black arms bleeding red.

The EMTs pull the empty stretcheer from the back, unfolding as it comes.

"Just another day in paradise," says one to the other.

Jesus christ, thinks Jack watching them over the destoryed car form the dark shade of the bananas.

The other EMT, J.S. Stewart, from the silver bar, says nothing and wheels the front fo the stretcher to the side. They disappear behind the ambulance.

"Hi," says the talking EMT to the fmaily as they pass, looking especially at the thin girl holding a cup of water in each hand before each young breats in her tight shirt. Long smooth legs fall to the ground from her gray shorts. A stretcher wheel jams in a pothole. J.S. yanks it free with a loud clattering of bars and brackets that must be somewhat loose for folding the thing inot the ambulance. They stop by Cynthia and lock the wheels after lowering the stretcher.

"The guy put a neck brace on her," says Ed. "She looked like she had a seizure, too." He turns to the group of black folk. "She have epilepsy or somethin'?"

Everyone watches Cynthia wince as they put her on the stretcher. The wheel catches in the same pothole. The cut man walks with her to the ambulance. She looks past everyone. The red woman and black fold turn and walk back up the street. The white family watches them shut the ambulance doors. The EMT eyes the girl as he turns from the latch. She stands with untouched water in each hand beneath a tree, shaded by green leaves and occasionally hit by delayed raindrops. Creever finds no bullet holes. Lucky she didn't have a gun, he thinks.

Why biofuels don't matter

2007-08-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've seen enough stories about the consequences of US and European moves to biofuel, consequences usually centered on the destruction of habitat in sensitive areas—think Amazon rainforest, Borneo—for replacement as biofuel crop.

This is going to be a listing of news stories chronicling the new Western colonialism: the extraction of agricultural viability from third-world countries for the financial (and emotional...hello biofuel snobbery!) gain of the developed world, via globalized markets that move goods from low-production cost to high-sale value parts of the world.

Still, no one important seems to get that it's about consumption...not production.

Story 1: Losing land to palm oil in Kalimantan

Barto's village of Aruk is on the Indonesian side of the border with Malaysia, in West Kalimantan.
It is a key region earmarked for palm oil expansion, as Indonesia hopes to reap the benefits of a growing demand for palm oil products in China, India and Europe.
The EU recently agreed to replace 10% of its transport fuel with biofuels, including palm oil, by 2020.

NOLA Update—Rain, ACORN, Glass Blowing, and Book Writing

2007-08-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, update needed, so here is:

I got my first taste of flooded NOLA streets yesterday when a cell ballooned up over the neighborhood I'm in and hung around dropping heavy rain for forty minutes straight. You can see that the sidewalk is completely flooded in this pic (taken from the second floor area: I ain't no dummy...):

I cannot imagine what six to eight more feet of water would look like, but that's how much covered a lot of the city. I find nearly impossible imagining what the city was and looked like flooded. Even two years later, many buildings still show waterlines. Depending on where one is in the city, these lines can be at step two of the front steps or just under the roofline. Really strange is to see strip malls with a thick brown stripe along the entire row of storefronts, all of which invariable stand empty. Very strange.

Second, I'll be going up to ACORN (http://www.acorn.org/) sometime next week for a couple of days of volunteering. I hope to get into some house gutting to see what those places look like that church and volunteer groups have been working away in for the past two years. I'm in a relatively un-flooded (Katrina-wise) neighborhood of the city and feel very distanced from what is going on in the worst affected areas. The Lower 9 is still mostly empty, but I haven't made it down there yet as I have no transportation. Also somewhat intimidating are the near-daily newspaper stories of people being shot in the face in the middle of neighborhood streets.

Third, I went to the New Orleans Creative Glass Institute (www.nocgi.org) for a glass blowing demonstration. I'd like to try my hand at this someday, but I think I'd go more for kiln work, or at least a method of glass working that allows me to create more than the fairly limited selection of forms a novice glass blower can achieve:
Also, had a lot of time on my hands as Stay Local! work has been online, mostly, so between bus trips to the French Quarter, coffee at Café du Monde, and bike rides to Tulane and Loyola, I've been writing. I've exhausted two pens and have almost filled half of a composition notebook. Perhaps this will get me in shape to tackle something I might someday sell...

Okay, some more neat photos:

Scary but impressive house:
Evil tree:

Church on Camp Street:

Office building in French Quarter:

Cool coffee shop:

Update: Central City and Palm Trees

2007-07-24T19:38:00.002-07:00

I had to go to a meeting in Central City today, one of the "rougher" neighborhoods in the city right now. Older parts of NOLA where I've been moving primarily are set up in such a way that grand boulevards—St. Charles is the nearest to me—lined with dramatic southern mansions and with a greenstrip in the middle on which the streetcars (used to) run anchor and separate neighborhoods. I took the bus on St. Charles until I got to Jackson St. where I de-bused. I walked up Jackson St. and not one block away from St. Charles the city is completely different. I had suddenly entered Central City. That's how it is: one second on a mansion-lined boulevard, the next, merely a block "in," in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city.

Also, the boulevards are lined with beautiful live oaks, which provide much-needed shade. However, while walking the 4 miles along St. Charles I did today, I noticed...2 PALM TREES! I immediately noticed why palm trees line SoCal streets: palms provide absolutely no shade at all. The live oaks cast shade on the entire sidewalk, a saving grace to pedestrians, while palm trees don't do squat beyond the slim shadow of their trunks. SoCal, you can have your fuzzy-topped sticks. I'll take shade trees any day.

What Dreams May Come, i.e. What Funds NOLA Redevelopment?

2007-07-21T18:54:00.001-07:00

According to a WDSU article reporting on Ed Blakely, "Private investment is funding most of the current rebuilding." This ties what gets done to what has the highest profit margins, and what has the highest profit margins? Why, guaranteed adequate housing, food, and education for all, of cour—err...wait, that's not right at all.

I was saying Boo-Urns.

New (Orleans) Way of Annoying Lots of People

2007-07-21T17:19:00.001-07:00

Sorry, no pic or video of this, but one of the new cool things for people to do to their cars in NOLA is install speakers in the engine compartments. That way, one can blast one's tunes to the masses and still enjoy a nice windows-up, air-conditioned "ride."

As far as I know, there has yet to be a cool term coined to describe this phenomenon. Feel free to think one up. My submission: Thwippin'.

"That ride is Thwippin'," said Frank to the table lamp he considers his only trusted friend. The table lamp doesn't hear him over the music of the passing Thwip.

Free for all (with capital)!

2007-07-20T08:42:00.001-07:00

If you've heard that "New Orleans is for sale," believe it. Whether it's "economic opportunity zones" (i.e. sites of high investment return for capitalists) or exclusive meetings between powerful business elites and government officials to plan "recovery," a lot about post-Katrina resembles not just the fire-sale of a city but the full-blown implementation of neoliberal development ideology across a major metropolitan, already developed, area.

If I'm Fiction I'm Good at Lying Part I

2007-07-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

Goddamn this ceiling fan, and waking up. This place is a box oven with no heat source but the sweating nakedness on his rented twin bed. God damn waking up.

Three mornings now in this city, so destroyed two years ago. Already repetitive, monotonous, cyclical, already expected. How disappointing. Time to move on already, but can't. He's working. Or thought so.

She doesn't pay him, probably because he told her he'd work for free. Goddamn altruism. He got caught up in this destroyed, goddamn city.

The ceiling fan spins and squeaks slightly, the rhythm marking the revolution, the light sneaking in through the shuttered, blinded window just enough to confirm visually—even with his imperfect eyes making looking at other nakedness a mere search for the beauty form in what was a blurred but might now be a pixilated body just feet from him—the utter sameness of that squeak, marking time, a clock, face down, staring at the naked man on the naked bed, too hot even for the single maroon sheet contorted under his back-laid, splaying body.

He wears a sock on his right foot. A mosquito shares the room. Attacked the man's—HIS—right foot, the mosquito a drone, a tyrant whine supporting the ticking fan. Small mounds cover the foot, red, flat-topped, bleeding volcanoes erupting with itch, he scratches in his sleep, unconsciously, like most do burying their hands in their crotches in the night, but he pulls his foot to his hand and tears away the skin with long fingernails, burying the flesh under the long white shelves. Goddamn city, and goddamn waking up.

The glass on the table is empty when he picks it up. He sits on the bed's edge, elbows on his knees, sleeping, the fan breeze on his damp back doing nothing, blowing hot air on a hot man in a hot room in a hot hot goddamned city still and always destroyed. He's been everywhere, and here isn't the worst. Because they're all the same, all goddamned cities sitting on or in their end, waiting for it, for the landslide, the falling off the earth, the Grand Demise guaranteeing a place in history, in the books trying to cement existence by reifying ephemerality. They don't seem to see the always over in the stories, the tome's final page, there regardless how many precede it. Long or short, all the same climax.

He lies back, head on side of the bed, legs the other, back bowed from their falling off, a stretch possible only in morning stupor before pain enters consciousness, before yesterday enters memory, always before, always before. This morning, this waking up the highest point of a low existence. Goddamn waking up.

He's working. She gives him too little and too much time, like all people have given him unaware of his unspoken suffocation desire. Fire in zero gravity snuffs itself out, a sphere of combining, of consumption around a fuel; fire in space a star, the small flames we've lit the same as eternal world-end nucleocity of the mammoth reactions but on different schedules. What does a billion years mean to him? What fifty? What one hour? Nothing. Nothing but the present and the ghost of the future, certainly unrealized and already costumed under a white sheet with eye holes cut out and hot to one-millionth a degree below ignition, almost a brilliant flaring revelation but always not quite, always slipping by heating the present to near explosion, then setting the past—much more combustible—into inferno, a vaporizing, an insignifying. He's working.

The shower never needs the hot tap. The heat of this city warms the cold water pipes and the air so much to make cold a wet dream, something worth the brain sending the sleeping hands searching the sleeper's body.

Jack Creevy in the lukewarm waterfall wishing for winter, the same as yesterday, and tomorrow. Jack came to the city after it reached for him. He had been living as supposed to paying bills, going to the bars lit with yellow-glassed lights and blacked-out windows on blacked-out streets anyway. Jack Creevy loved his life when others did. The city reached for him, a promise of love for his service. He's been everywhere because of this. He turns off the shower. He goes to a café in search of others.

Atlanta—The Talent Show

2007-07-18T16:06:00.000-07:00

Shortly after first meeting Ratsack, he told me, "The kids want to have a show for you all tonight." "You all" meant those of us in town for the USSF, and I found out later that "show" meant lots of hula hooping, a magic trick, and myself as performer. First, though, Ratsack had to show "us all" around. Only myself and Gary were around for the tour.

We headed down Martin Street to its end, only about a block and a half from Cathy's place. The neighborhood kids who plan to perform in the show that night followed us. They continued this behavior for the duration of my stay in Atlanta, whenever I was around Cathy's place, anyway. At the end of the street we found Atlanta phone books scattered everywhere.

"I already explained to the kids," said Ratsack, "that they're very lucky. You see, these," he said, pointing to the phone books strewn on the street and yard of the house we were to stay in, "these are the fruit of the phone book tree. Phone book trees are very rare." The kids weren't paying attention to this. I think they had heard it before. "We've been looking all over for the actual phone book tree but haven't found it yet."

"Hey Ratsack!" yelled someone across the street. We turned and looked for the source. A man stood on the porch of the house opposite the one we were to stay in. "Hey Ratsack. You found that phone book tree yet?"

"Uh, yeah," said Ratsack, his Aussie accent suddenly coming on strongly. "We've narrowed it down to about a thousand but aren't sure which one yet," he said, sweeping his hand out across the small forest at the end of Martin Street. The street dead-ended on the grounds of George Washington Carver High School. After the street ends, a large grassy hill with several large trees on it rises to a small plateau area where some basketball courts and, farther on, the school itself sits. The person seemed to catch on to the sarcasm.

Ratsack's sarcasm is unlike anything I've ever encountered. A conversation like the above is nearly perfectly inverted from the usual case of the person being sarcastic actually being sarcastic for rhetorical purpose. In Ratsack's case, it seems that he so strongly believes in a childlike, fluid understanding of possible explanations that he no longer recognizes the concept of sarcasm. Everything is serious, everything possible, no explanation is any more plausible or right than any other. This is relativism to the extreme and undercuts the very notion of a common language, of truth, really.

The neighbor had no reply to Ratsack. Expecting Ratsack to acknowledge his being in on the joke, he instead found Ratsack not only continuing but extending the fantasy. It almost seemed like Ratsack mocked him in tone and choice of words. "Yeah, we've narrowed it down to about a thousand," Ratsack said, as if the quest was his and and the kids' and the (adult) neighbor had no business intruding on it. It was something a smart-alek kid would say. But Ratsack is forty years old.

Much of Ratsack's conversation is like this, allying himself with the neighborhood kids who never make their actions and words fit into a rational, adult understanding of the world. Reducing narrative and world-creation to the individual scale, each constructs an individual belief and reasoning. This, to some extent, may be expected of kids who have not yet succumbed to culture, the funnel in which diversity of understanding distills to a relatively limited set of possible, accepted understandings of the world about which all can talk and to which all can relate, i.e. in which adults are made. Nothing is impossible in a child's world because there are no unjustifiable explanations. Sure there's a phone book tree. Lots of stuff grows on trees, and why not phone books? Becoming an adult demands abandoning infinite explanation and instead banding together with groups of people who share the same limited acceptable explanations of the world as you do. One must find this group because communication is impossible without a common language, and because language is only the transfer of information, i.e. of understanding, mutual intelligibility, i.e. common language, ensures that the interlocutors understand the world in the same way and can thus act in and on that world in the same ways.

This fits nicely into today's infatuation with language, talk, and communication as well as the postmodern emphasis on narrative, story-telling, and history and world creation. However, while postmods would probably argue that there no longer exists a single set of possible explanations enforced by threat of penalty—i.e. the white male capitalist understanding of the world that reigned for who knows how long, enforced by the patriarchal nation-state and its "legitimate" use of violence manifest as the military—I think it far too early to seal the casket of modernism. While alternative understanding of the world are becoming more "accepted," they are being accepted by something, and that something is the same old patriarchal nation-state with the same old fire hoses and rubber bullets. Ratsack, who I believe is a posterchild, or, perhaps more currently, a FATHEAD for a postmod understanding of the world, lived in a tent behind a community center for two years and is still decidedly outside the formal (read: patriarchal white capitalist) economy of the U.S. In the end, Ratsack's neighbor simply turned his back on Ratsack's refusal to play the game of adult understanding. Ratsack just returned to a different, new game he had invented: phone book catch, which, in its most developed form, consisted of throwing phone books back and forth for hours while drinking Natural Light and vodka. I went into the house without electricity and fell asleep on the floor without blankets, though I needed none in the Atlanta heat. I did keep my socks on, though.

Oh, the talent show. Yes, it happened before the phone book catch, and after I got to Atlanta. Only myself and Gary had arrived of those who would be there for the USSF. The kids wanted, according to Ratsack, to perform a show for us. The kids, I should say, were about seven young black kids, both girls and boys and all probably younger than 12. They hung out with Ratsack almost every day of the summer while on break, as far as I gathered.

A stage had somehow been built in Cathy's yard. She must have owned two lots because the stage and mud structure (more about that later) sat on the corner lot in full view of the neighborhood. The stage is simple: three short steps lead to a rectangular platform of 2x4s painted brown. No railing lines the edge. The yard around the mud structure and stage is overgrown with weeds and hasn't seen a lawnmower in quite some time. Then again, the lawnmower fits into a decidedly narrow understanding of the world not necessarily existent on this particular property in South Atlanta. Six benches sit on the ground on one side of the platform with another on the stage to the back left. Behind the benches, a large mud pit shows where the mud for the mud structure came from.

The first act was hula-hooping. The second act was hula-hooping. The third act was hula-hooping. Ratsack, however, ably transformed the same performances into something more by counting out loud each revolution of the hoop around the performer's waist. It soon became clear who could hula-hoop the best among the kids. One of the older boys performed a magic trick that also utilized a hula-hoop. He had tied a sheet around the hoop in order to make, when the hoop was held above the ground, a column of cloth inside which he could stand. He enlisted Ratsack's aid in the trick. Ratsack stepped onto the stage. The kid set the hoop and sheet on the ground and stood inside the hoop. Ratsack lifted the hula-hoop until the kid was hidden inside the cloth tube. He then had the audience—about six kids, myself, and old man Gary—recite a short verse that I have forgotten. After we had done so, Ratsack dropped the hoop to reveal that the kid had disappeared! Sadly, my mind had long-ago been trained against understanding this trick as anything but possible, and I quickly noted to myself that the kid had performed the trick standing right next to the back of the railless stage and had probably just stepped off the back. The world's rationality was maintained. Whew.

Suddenly, it was my turn. Ratsack had, when setting up the performance order, casually included me in it, saying that everyone had to do something, even if it was just stepping up on stage and thanking everyone for coming. I had my guitar case, which the kids had seen and taken an especial interest in. I opened it and stepped on stage. This was my first public peformance ever since I started playing a little over a year earlier. I had been reading music from classical guitar books and could only remember simple warm-ups and practice exercises by memory, so I chose the easiest one I could remember, stepped on stage, and sat on the bench. One of the young girls came and sat next to me. I think she was rather taken by the guitar or by me, strapping lad that I am, but I prefer to displace her affection onto the musical instrument, thank you. I began playing, erred, began playing again, erred again but was able to turn it into a different line of notes that I think convinced the audience of children, middle-aged spoken word and mud architecture enthusiast (more on that later), and old environmentalist/population capper that I hadn't forgotten how to play a five-note song at most. Suddenly, as I was playing, the girl sitting next to me began singing a song over the notes I was playing. She improvised completely, as far as I know, but the words' rythm and tone had so little to do with the notes I played that she may have been reciting a favorite lyric of hers or just saying whatever came into her head. Then again, thusly great things birth. My first performance couldn't have come in front of an easier audience, period. Additionally, the girl's singing took all the focus off of my atrocious, fumbling musicianship. My self-evaluation always ends critically, regardless of what I do and the praise others might give me. I hold myself to imagined ideals. I am a story-maker, always wrapped up in possible worlds in my head rather than engaged in the actual worlds around me. I create impossible scenarios and then berate myself for failing to actualize them. That is my understanding of the world. It makes things difficult. Having these kids and Ratsack applaud and forget what I had done in the same motion made me realize the incredible freedom of the childlike state. I think Gary avoided me afterward for fear of having nothing constructive to say.

NOLA Architecture Old and New

2007-07-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

The guy whose house I'm staying in—let's call him "Melvin"—showed me around his neighborhood. Turns out he's a bit of a local historian when it comes to local architecture. Here's my photo tour, concluded with an examination of some Tulane projects I saw today along with a consideration of whether or not they suck.

The Shotgun House
The house that Melvin lives in is a modified shotgun house. A shotgun house is so-named because it is said you can shoot a shotgun all the way through it down the one hallway connecting all the rooms. Shotgun houses are single-story, long and narrow homes.

The myth—and it is a myth according to Melvin—is that the hallway runs from the front door out the back of the house with no interruption. Mel says that, for privacy, the front door would open to the front room, but the hallway would start diagonally across the room from the front door. It's a bit of a technicality, I suppose, because you can still shoot a shotgun through most of the house. Anyway, shotgun houses are known for having hipped roofs like the one pictured above and they were commonly built in rows.

The Creole Cottage

The creole cottage is distinctively symmetrical. A gabled roof runs with its shingled side toward the street presenting two clean straight and parallel lines. A few steps lead to a porch on which five shuttered openings stand from porch floor to overhang ceiling. These five shuttered openings are evenly spaced. The center opening hides a doorway behind which a central hallway leads to the back of the house with rooms opening off it to the sides, similar to the shotgun house. The other four shutters hide tall windows. Before air conditioning, these houses were designed with natural ventilation in mind. The tall windows could be opened on both the top and bottom allowing hot air near the ceiling to escape and be replaced by cooler air closer to the ground.

Modifications
Both the shotgun house and creole cottage forms have been modified with time. Shotgun houses have had gabled roofs put on their fronts rather than hipped roofs. Two shotguns are sometimes combined into one double shotgun, a kind of duplex, really.

Creole cottages have been built with only four openings, one of which is the door, thus disregarding the symmetry of the original form.

Visual History
Melvin told me how to gauge the relative age of buildings. Structures with no setback from the street are ante-bellum, i.e. before the Civil War. In Melvin's neighborhood, many structures sit directly on the street and may be that old. One intersection in particular has three such buildings, one of which is pictured below.

Another building in the neighborhood served as a hospital during the Civil War. It's a rather strange structure regarding its orientation to the street. As can be seen in the picture below, there are no doors onto the sidewalk. Entrance is only possible from the sides.

New Architecture after Hurricanes
Yesterday, I dropped by Tulane University's Architecture building to check out what was going on. I happened to come in when I think the students were presenting project ideas for a new structure somewhere in the city. Plan drawings were pinned up on some corkboard, each accompanied by a cardboard model of the structure proposed. Each plan included a photo of the streetscape on which the structure would sit, and the students had created rough renderings of their buildings and inserted them into the lot where the new structure would go allowing for a rough approximation of what the street would look like after the building went in. The students had also modeled the entire street with cardboard models so they could then put their own models into the street.

Here are some pictures of the plans:

The picture above is a good illustration of the crap that is being produced by architecture departments all over, as far as I can tell. If you look at the picture of the existing buildings in the upper right, you can see the utter lack of flat-roofed buildings with crazy window configurations, but, the student(s) propose(s) just such an alien structure. When I went with a group of architects to look at some architecture design/build projects on the ground in NOLA, one of them commented that, "We just saw three covers of dwell magazine." Here are some more pics of the same look that was in all of the proposals:

The above actually shows the basic design as three boxes. You can see that in the center of the sheet.

Here again you can see the basic "boxes" that ground the design. These don't seem to have any relationship to the existing buildings on the street in terms of street profile or roof line.

Why It Matters
So what if some of the buildings built post hurricanes don't resemble those built before it. After all, the short architectural history of Melvin's neighborhood is one of dynamic change over time. However, changes were not quite as drastic as those being implemented by many architectural design/build projects in NOLA at this time. People wishing to maintain their neighborhood identities find it difficult when faced by powerful institutions like universities
pushing to produce landmark structures.

Some of the designs by students are certainly intriguing. However, it makes me wonder that the emphasis is entirely on the envelope of the structure rather than on how it will be used/experienced by people in and around the structure. This is what bothers me most about the seeming disregard for existing character of streetscapes in the designs of these structures: why can't the architecture students create fantastic spaces inside structures that don't rupture the cohesiveness of existing streetscapes? Why must the distinctiveness be seen from the street rather than from inside the structure?

I think one possible answer to this question is the photographic focus of architectural evaluation. Designs win/become popular/become famous based on photographs of the structures prior to anyone actually using/living in them.

Existing Streetscapes
Melvin's neighborhood was not flooded significantly. In other parts of the city, entire streetscapes have been abandoned and will eventually be either replaced or demolished. In such parts of the city, what does it matter if the visual character of the streetscape changes? Most of the impetus for preservation comes from residents wishing to recreate what was before the hurricanes. How many returning residents does it take to prohibit changing the look of a neighborhood? Can/should one resident be allowed to stop development? Interesting and important questions for urban planners and developers alike.

Too many buildings with these spray-painted symbols remain in the city two years after the hurricanes:

Though the symbology wasn't completely standardized across all the search crews in the city after the hurricanes, generally the upper quadrant shows the date the building was searched, the left quadrant identifies the search team, the bottom quadrant indicates how many bodies were found in the structure, and I can't remember off-hand what the right quadrant showed. Perhaps the whole point of architecture in NOLA will be to erase the memory of the thousands of buildings with these symbols on them and create a new memory along with new conversations for residents who are tired of talking about mold and contractors every day.

More bathroom tech

2007-07-15T18:50:00.001-07:00

This is another instance of bathroom innovation.