Monsters under the bed

How does the tune by The Mamas & The Papas go?

Monday Monday, can't trust that day,
Monday Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way
Oh Monday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be

In a sense, that's true. There is often no telling what Monday is going to be, coming in fresh off the weekend. It can be a whirlwind of pent up needs and demands that were impatiently waiting for the weekend to end and me to get back into the office to address them all, or a relatively quiet morning as people stumble in and slowly relearn their work-week routines, getting gradually back into the productivity groove.

Check the calendar, check the inbox and voicemail, look back at the projects list to see where I left off and what deadlines are approaching, then the day starts to take shape. At least until most of the rest of the campus arrives (a perk of being an early morning person is the hour or two of quiet work time each morning before many others come in), when things can change again quickly.

Changing quickly: how precious is this thing called life when it can be snatched away in an unthought moment, as we saw again this past Friday in Colorado. The above-quoted lyric also notes:

Oh Monday morning, Monday morning couldn't guarantee
That Monday evening you would still be here with me.

Sometimes writing, including blogging, is about chasing the ghosts away, shining a light under the bed to prove (we dare to hope) there really are no monsters hiding under there. We can lie on the bed, afraid to move because of all the things we fear may be growling and slithering under us, or move and risk the monsters, if only to resolve our uncertainty, whether moving proves or disproves they exist. It's better to know.

In my case, I don't mean my life, our family, our campus, our community; all of that is clicking along well to reasonably well at present (though for others, any of these circles may be where monsters dwell). No, for me all is well at the micro level, it's the macro that depresses. The larger world outside of my community is being torn in so many ways, approaching flood-stage.



I can't escape a sense that things larger than my immediate sphere of influence are moving toward crisis and I am powerless to shift them, like the storm-tossed voice in John Donne's poem, The Calm:

What are we then? How little more, alas,
Is man now, than before he was? He was
Nothing; for us, we are for nothing fit;
Chance, or ourselves, still disproportion it.
We have no power, no will, no sense; I lie,
I should not then thus feel this misery.

Very much like Dean Young's poem, The New Optimism (do follow this link and and read the whole thing!):

The young who knew everything
was new made babies who unforeseeably
would one day present their complaint.
Enough blame to go around but the new
optimism didn’t stop, helped one
pick up a brush, another a spatula
even as the last polar bear sat
on his shrinking berg thinking,
I have been vicious but my soul is pure.

I wonder, for example, if it can still be called a democratic election when both the message and the dialog is bought and when we cannot get enough people to turn off the television, step away from the programmed programming, and return to honest discussion and dialog. I wonder how democracy operates when "the people" are simply objects to be manipulated by messages (or does history tell us otherwise?). Maybe we do have the right to bear arms, but does that really include urban assault weapons and mail-order bombs? Really? Or can we really do anything about climate change so long as there are still minerals to extract and profits to be made from the old fuel paradigms? Or...?

There is only one way to be certain of my fears, and that is to purpose to take action. The bed isn't really any safer than the rest of the room, if
there are truly monsters underneath it. Monsters never play by rules, and they don't honor the notion that the bed is a safe zone so long as you never move from it during the hours of darkness. We prove our fears justified or silly by summoning the courage to get off the bed, dashing for the light switch, whirling around and looking to see what, if anything, is coming toward us. In so doing we can separate our fears from whatever we really do face, and then we can at least take informed action.

What is certain, then? Only that we move through a complex world interconnected with the lives, passions, and needs of many others. Beyond that, every day brings micro and macro uncertainty. The trick is not to let our fear of uncertainty keep us from living and loving and effecting such change as we can.

Today's playlist:
- Chicago: Wishin' You Were Here
- Sam Baker: Sweetly Undone
- Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia: That's All Right, Mama
- Madeleine Payroux: Don't wait too long
- John Mayer: Slow Dancing In a Burning Room


- Posted via Hermes.

Strangely together

Thursday, threatening sun, but still cloudy on the drive in this morning. Thursday, the great pretender, pulls the ultimate Agatha Christie surprise ending this week and, in the final scene of the play, reveals he really is Friday after all. The pretense was itself pretense.

Things at the college ramp down a bit over the summer, and I try to summer schedule Fridays off as vacation days. Summer is when I work a little harder at the elusive notion of work/life balance (which, I suppose, is irony). Irony or not, today is Thursday and also Friday for me.

A million years ago (or maybe just two years ago this month) I made the decision to start this blog. I decided to use my morning commute's iPod-shuffled playlist as the daily melody line and riff around that as best I could. I also gave myself a couple of rules I would try to follow: write a blog entry for every working weekday for a full year (or as close to that as possible), and to never skip a tune when it was shuffled up. No matter what came up, I would dutifully record it, from the current and cred-worthy to the dated and laughable.

That year went by surprisingly fast, and I did a pretty good job of meeting those self-imposed goals. Nowadays, this blog is more relaxed and more sporadic, though I try to post a couple times each week.

From the first post to this one, one question remains essentially unanswered: why blog? More specifically, why do I blog? I am not trying to build a media presence, I don't blog to represent my college or any products or services, I'm not a famous personality with fans anxiously looking for anything I produce, I'm not monetizing my blog in any way, and I'm not serializing my first great novel to build up a fan base.

My best possible answer: I came to enjoy the quiet exercise of this form of writing, for me, early in the morning. Having the blog simply gives me someplace to put that writing, and affords the slight chance someone else might read it. The latter possibility keeps the pressure on to write as well as I can, to not post something I will be embarrassed to have my name associated with later.

If you are not me and are reading these posts, then I have connected with others (nearly 6000 views in two years), if only for a brief few virtual minutes, and there is value in making connections as we pass through our world. I'm not talking about the deep mystical connection of, say Donne's flea dining on two frustrated lovers, but something more akin to the accidental and momentary connections of people sharing a sidewalk.

I had a professor who rather dramatically swept into the first day of class, wearing a long black overcoat, and wrote on the chalkboard (yes, it was that long ago, now) the single word, "Strangely." He then turned around and said, slowly and clearly, "Strangely!". Turning back to the board he added the word, "together," then turned back to us and said, "Strangely together..."

He repeated this process as he added each word to the sentence he was writing and speaking until he had the full sentence: Strangely together in a world which speaks.

He then proceeded to describe a world in which verbal and non-verbal communications swirls around us, and used the example of people walking toward each other on a crowded sidewalk. Nobody has to declare their path, and yet everyone (mostly) adjusts their path forward dynamically and we don't (mostly) run into each other. At least, not when our attention is focused on those brief quiet connections we constantly make with the people around us. I wonder if his sidewalk example would still work in our current heads-down-eyes-on-smartphone-screen disconnected world?

Well, if your eyes are on this (or any other) blog as you walk down a crowded sidewalk, I guess it isn't as disconnected as it might seem. It's just being selective about which momentary connections we are engaging. Maybe.

Today's playlist was as good as it gets:

- Bruce Cockburn: The Coldest Night Of The Year (x2 because it's so good!)
- John Lennon: Imagine
- The Carpenters: I'll Never Fall In Love Again
- Gordon Lightfoot: Sundown


- Posted via Hermes.

I hear the rolling, amazed, agonized thunder

Monday wakes slowly to another beautiful sunny day here in the northwest corner of the U.S., with only a thin layer of overcast cloud-haze to shed. Like a lace cotton shawl over a bright blue gown, it is taken off and tossed over a chair back as Monday enters the room. When the Pacific Northwest
does do summer (and it is always a limited engagement), it does it perfectly. Temperatures in the low 20's (mid 70's, F), a light marine breeze to cool things off in the evening, and usually a light cloud ceiling to burn through first thing each morning.

Perfect weather for plants, too, as evidenced by the floral exclamations in our yard:


Very early this morning, though, was another matter altogether. I was woken about 3:00 AM to persistent distant (sounding) thunder. One roll crashing over another like steady surf on a rocky coastline. We don't normally get rolling thunder of that sort around here, and the night had been clear with no sign of coming storms, so I couldn't reconcile what I was hearing with normal and had to get up to see what was really happening.

It was thunder, alright. Regular flashes of what looked like sheet lightening back-lit the night sky, which was glowing a dusky orange even between the flashes. Aren't we supposed to count the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder clap to estimate the distance of the storm? That didn't work last night because the flash always came immediately after the thunder rumbled.

It approaches from the sea, too small
For thunder and lightning
But ominous as a closed fist
And what it will bring

(Dick Allen, Cloud No Bigger Than A Man's Hand)

No, that's not quite right. This was more unbroken cloud cover than isolated (large or small) thunder clouds. There is a touch of Swift's humor in the unusual nature of this spate of nature noise:

Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

and...

Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings,
A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.

A Description of a City Shower.

And yet, there was no shower (that I could discern looking out my window into the dark of early morning), so Swift isn't quite the right fit either.

Maybe the best fit is in the sense, less than the literal, evoked in the poem So It Goes, by W. S. Di Piero:

That marsh hawk,
its blown-leaf flight
across Tomales Bay fog,
summer’s abraded light,
the Pacific tide pressuring
and squeezing wave on wave
into the bay’s pinched inlet. . .
We feel somehow between us
still water crushed by that sea,
so constant it seems not to be.
The hawk, a circus, tumbles,
stops, stands upon the air,
beats its wings as if to shoo
the sun’s drenched veils,
and its clapping wings stop
our unstoppable argument,
that love goes, who knows why,
and delivers us from pain
to pain, air with teeth
that seems to eat more air.
Northern harrier, owl face,
they sea-changed your name,
who listens with your face
and shows not love but want,
speed, life in flight
toward, forever toward,
pausing at every chance
to use what ocean-born
bayside air sustains you
by resisting you. We thank
your sunken head bones
and wild close-to-water seeking
that somehow speaks to us,
delivers us
to another amazed
agonized place.

Amazed and agonized, indeed. At any rate, we had thunder, lightening, and an overcast glowing sky at 3:00 AM this morning, and now we have beautiful blue skies and a warming rising sun to look forward to.

Today's full playlist:
- Lyle Mays: The Imperative
- Fountains of Wayne: Hotel Majestic
- Phil Keaggy: The great escape
- David Gray: The One I Love

- Posted via Hermes.

Boom! Celebrating a work in progress

Tuesday is confused. Is he Monday's hangover (his usual self) or is he Friday's understudy in this unusual holiday-bifurcated week? Tomorrow is the Fourth of July holiday here in the U.S., our annual flag-waving, pyrotechnic, day of misty-eyed patriotism.



We have much to celebrate, much that is right. Mostly, things work reasonably well here for most folks, though that is not the same as saying things work reasonably. We also have much that isn't right, and that we still need to own and address. We celebrate our national tension between the rights of the individual and the good of the community. Depending on which of those two faiths you embrace, we are great or we are failing. Either way, we celebrate our nation and whatever it is currently, but mostly what we believe it will be, can be, in the future.

Politicians will wrap themselves in red, white, and blue and each will stage many enthusiastic photo-ops showcasing them as paragons of national pride. They will emulate through their marketing our cultural myths about the self-made man, the perfectly assimilated immigrant, manifest destiny, and a society that affords equal opportunity to one and all.

Are we more Hutch, by Atsuro Riley:

From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.
Them days men boys gone dark groves rose like Vietnam bamboo.
Aftergrowth something awful.
Green have mercy souls here seen camouflage everlasting.
Nary a one of the brung-homes brung home whole.

...and...

Remembering the Garner twins Carl and Charlie come home mute.
Cherry-bombs 4th of July them both belly-scuttling under the house.
Their crave of pent-places ditchpipes.
Mongst tar-pines come upon this box-thing worked from scrapwood.
From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.

Or are we more To The King On His Navy by Edmund Waller:

Where’er thy navy spreads her canvas wings,
Homage to thee, and peace to all, she brings:

...and...

The world’s restorer once could not endure,
That finish’d Babel should those men secure,
Whose pride design’d that fabric to have stood
Above the reach of any second flood:
To thee His chosen, more indulgent, He
Dares trust such power with so much piety.

We are, of course, a complex weave of both (and of much that lies between). It is our work in progress we honor on this holiday.

Our neighborhood will take on something of the war zone sound and appearance, from midday until well into the morning of the 5th, as fireworks explode brightly and loudly. Families will celebrate the holiday in spontaneous neighborhood gatherings, sharing fireworks in thousands of small collective shows. The air will be tangy with the after-burn of sulfur and other chemicals, and the spent cardboard shells and wrappings of left-over fireworks will swirl around the street edges with whatever breeze passes through the next morning. Then it will be Thursday.

For the last couple of days I have been listening to a Pandora station based on Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. Complete nostalgia stuff from an era when album covers were sexist and campy, South American rhythms were all the rage, and there was no such thing as too much brass in popular music. Fun stuff, really.



Today's full playlist:
- Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass: Bittersweet Samba
- Gal Costa: Corcovado (Live)
- Chet Atkins: I'll See You In My Dreams (feat. Mark Knopfler)
- Bert Kaempfert: L-O-V-E (Love)
- Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass: So What's New
- Elsa Soares: Say No More
- Nara Leão: Garota De Ipanema
- Posted via Hermes.

We know our world by our passing through it

This morning is unexpectedly clear skied and warm (for morning) at 50° (10° C). The forecast still calls for more cloud cover than this, along with scattered showers. I don't complain. It means I can leave the top down again this morning and listen more clearly to the morning bird song over my commute soundtrack.

This also opens the car, and me, up to the many variations of morning smells along my route in: something blooming fragrantly here, mulching lawn clippings there, diesel exhaust from a ponderously large truck some distance in front of me, a fried breakfast (?) as I pass these houses, the trailing fumes of a cigarette from someone who passes in front of me in a crosswalk as I wait at a light. This is high season for lavender, a spicy-floral scent that pops up more than once along my way. Our own yard is currently abloom with lavender, and it's passing scent conjures a vivid mental picture.



My commute takes me past woods and wetlands, suburban neighborhoods, and through concrete-intense intersections and overpasses. I think, as I move through each distinct zone, I would be able to spot my place on my morning commute just by the subtle (mostly) nuances of each area's scent. It would be an interesting test, at any rate.

Of the many ways we know our slice of the world, traveling by car is usually the least informative. We see, but usually stay well isolated from smell and sound. The car is a controlled space, sealed up and personally defined.

On early mornings when I can have the top down I sometimes go without music altogether. When I do have music on I keep the volume down very low. Partly out of courtesy to the homes I pass, many with windows open and people still sleeping, but partly because I don't want to drown out the exterior soundtrack of the morning commute. As much as I like to entertain the idea that I can identify my commute location by smell alone, I am even more certain I would know my location by its sounds.

Writers and poets (if there is even a distinction) commonly refer to scent and sound when they write of places and journeys, and for good reason.

Scott Cairns, in his poem Another Road Home, writes:

before our mountain, above our mountain tea
suggests in its late, cypress-scented air
a pressing density, a wine-like, whelming
cup, ksinómavro—deep and dark, substantial.
And the road? Meandering, manifestly
inconclusive, and for that reason not
so likely to ferment blithe disregard.

Robert Burns, in Afton Water:

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Thou stock-dove, whose echo resounds thro' the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear,
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair.

and...

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;
There oft, as mild Ev'ning sweeps over the lea,
The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.

Or Bruce Cockburn, in his song My Beat:

Past the derelict mattress
and the overgrown pavement
over the tracks
and through the hole in the fence
Past graffiti-bright buildings
and the junkyard alarm bell
and the screaming police cars
and it's all present tense

It's my beat
In my new town

Past the drunk woman reeling
with her bag of provisions
Down through the tunnel
with the stink-fuming bus
On to the bike path
where it's something like freedom
and the wind in my earring whispers
Trust what you must

It's my beat
In my new town

We know our world by our passing through it, and we know most when that passing has intention and attention.

Today's full playlist (volume – pianissimo):
- The Guggenheim Grotto: The Universe Is Laughing
- Franco DeVita: Si Tú No Estas (Live)
- The Killers: Mr. Brightsides
- Posted via Hermes.

Friday and a mostly Canadian muse

It's Friday, and that means the return of the popular dude. Yesterday was glorious sunshine and the top was down on the Miata all day. This morning is back to grey and threatening. I reach back and pull the top up over me about two-thirds of the way in this morning after a few small drops appear on my windshield. On these maybe-it-will-rain-maybe-it-won't mornings I think leaving the top down to see if I can make it all the way into campus without getting wet is a game I play with myself. This morning I lose just before I get to the second Starbucks along my route.

Regular readers (both of you) will know I am no small fan of yerba mate. My current perfect mate drinking set up for the office looks like this:




A gourd-ishly shaped Pete's Coffee mug rocking a small heap of Guayki's smokey barbacua blend mate, a spoon-style Argentinian bombilla, and a Guayaki travel mug full of additional hot water, to serve as my desk-top termica.

I'd much rather have my morning mate than coffee most days, but there are times (and especially on Friday mornings) when I wish I could get my mate via the Starbuck's drive through. Not because it is hard to make (nothing could be easier than setting some water to near-boil), but for the I'm-treating-myself-today aspect of picking up a cup of coffee on the way into the office. Ok, that's silly, I know, but there it is nonetheless. This morning I pass on by.

Today's commute featured a wonderful playlist, another of those randomly served up lists that make me wonder what magic really lives in the iPod's shuffle algorithm. Two of Canada's best poet/songwriters account for 50% of the playlist. If I were manually managing this list I would be tempted to add in one more song written by one Canadian (Ian Tyson) and made famous by another (Neil Young): Four Strong Winds. But that would be gilding the lily, I suppose.

Leonard Cohen (covering his own Hallelujah, and being covered by Perla Batalla) weaves a beautiful, almost mythical (is it real, or only shapes in the clouds?), story with his Ballad of the Absent Mare. Just one small piece of this poem demonstrates its artful imagery:

Oh the world is sweet
the world is wide
and she's there where
the light and the darkness divide
and the steam's coming off her
she's huge and she's shy
and she steps on the moon
when she paws at the sky

Admit it, you can see that horse now, can't you?

Then Bruce Cockburn with his Iris of the World, which reads, in part:

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
on a boulder by the shoulder
the paint will likely outlive
both the feeling and the holder
in the age of Global Warming
when all things are growing colder
it's beautiful the writer
opened up his heart and told her

Passing through the iris of the world
Passing through the iris of the world

I'm good at catching rainbows
not so good at catching trout
I'm good at blowing holes in things
and ranting in self doubt
I've got a way with time and space
but numbers freak me out
I've mostly dodged the dogmas
of what life is all about

Passing through the iris of the world
Passing through the iris of the world

So it's Friday, that saunteringly popular dude, and the skies are grey, the mate is self-serve (as befits the end of the work week), and the muse is mostly Canadian this morning as we pass through the iris of the world.

Today's full playlist:
- Gary Louris & Mark Olson: Precious Time
- Ella Fitzgerald: Desafinado
- Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah
- Fountains of Wayne: Please Don't Rock Me Tonight
- Bruce Cockburn: Iris Of The World
- Perla Batalla: Ballad of the Absent Mare

- Posted via Hermes.

Testing Clover

Tuesday comes wrapped in Nobody Owen's grey winding sheet, damp and slightly chilly this morning. This makes for a commute of adjusting wiper blade speeds to deal with endless variations of mist to sprinkles. As uncertain as Tuesday's role in the work week, the rain today is more mild irritant than significant impression.

Folks are tired of the rain and grey skies this far into June. I can tell by the impatience of their driving this morning. Pressing into each other, tailgating, cutting corners, pushing, pushing. Trying, I imagine, to force their wills onto the landscape of the morning commute, to exercise control over something, anything.

For whatever reason, I can't be bothered to get caught up in that this morning. I feel like I'm simply slipping alongside the morning rush. I am the small twig floating inconsequentially past canoes on the river. My commute is short, though, so it is easy to sustain this illusion. Much more time spent in this coursing stream of collective frustration and I, too, would undoubtedly catch the communicable rancor of the morning commute.

I pull into the sleeping campus no worse for the wear. The quarter break is upon us, and the campus does rest. The parking lots are largely empty, there are no early morning clusters of students moving toward early classes, and the whole place feels quietly different. A college campus should throng and buzz with activity, but these occasional quiet spaces in the annual calendar do have a serene beauty of their own.

Walking across campus yesterday I came across a clump of purple clover in full bloom. Instantly, I was back in my youth, walking in a field on a warm summer day, plucking clover heads to suck the sweet drops of nectar from the base of their flower spikes. I wanted, so badly in that moment, to bend down and pluck a few spikes and test for nectar. Being grown up, though, I also thought about passing animals, th habits of people, airborne pollution, and gardening chemicals (though we do practice sustainable horticulture on campus, so the latter was probably not a real concern), and I resisted. I resisted tasting the clover blossoms, but I did pause long enough to snap a picture:



Like Whittier's musings in his poem The Barefoot Boy:

Oh for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,
Of the wild-flower’s time and place...

And

Oh for boyhood’s time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon,
When all things I heard or saw,
Me, their master, waited for.
I was rich in flowers and trees,
Humming-birds and honey-bees;

All this swept over me in a flash, before and after I took the adult course of inaction. If I pass that clover again today, and I believe I will, I intend to follow the barefoot boy's free-spirited course of action this time. Maybe they won't taste as sweet as memory, but at least I will know.

Tuesday can keep her grey winding sheet, June her clouds and rain, and the morning commute her seething frustration. Sometimes you have to step outside of time for the briefest of moments (if that isn't a contradiction) and test the clover.

Today's soundtrack (all from the new Sigur Rós album Valtari:
- Remembihnútur
- Dauõalogn
- Varõeldur

- Posted via Hermes.