Hiatus - from the Latin for 'Save My Ass'

The Internet is in a sorry state. Strident liberals are calling Republicans nasty names, and insisting that conservatives want to control the nation's vaginas. Self-righteous conservatives are trying to characterize an honest difference of opinion on the morality of reproductive choices as a war on religion. With everyone focused on creating memorable sound bites to advance their cause, no one seems interested in the kind of civil discourse that could actually move us forward.

Obviously the nation needs me right now to set things straight. It's time for another of my long-winded posts. You know the type. You find they get tedious by the third paragraph, and your attention begins to flag. You skip to the end to see if I've made my point in summary so you don't have to read through all the boring folderol. You know you're going to get tired before I've come down firmly on one side or the other, determined as I am to give fair treatment to all sides. Eventually you just say to the screen, "Whatever..." and click over to Farmville or Words with Friends. I need to write one of 'those'.

Unfortunately I can't do that just now. I'm busy getting ready for a craft show in Orlando in a couple of weeks time. I've got photos to shop, prints to make, packages to assemble and displays to build. When it's over, with any luck, I'll also have money to count. Best not get ahead of myself though.

So I'm going to have to put off saving the world for a few weeks. I'm busy trying to save my financial ass, my self worth, and my sanity. I hope you understand.

MORE AIMLESS PHILOSOPHY

Ironically perhaps, there is an aim to aimlessness, and it is this—TRY NOT TO SCREW UP. No one intends to screw up, but some are more comfortable with it than others. To the truly directed for example, as opposed to the aimless, failure is a key stepping stone on the road to success. Failure teaches valuable lessons. Failure is useful, and, while it shouldn't be hoped for, once it has arrived, it should be embraced. Failing proves, among other things, that one is challenging oneself, reaching beyond one's grasp, daring the larger current and accepting the risk.

The aimless would never do that. To the aimless, failure is a setback of monumental proportion. Failure is a good reason to give up the whole enterprise. The aimless don't like to backtrack. They don't like to do stuff over. They don't like retracing their steps through familiar territory. The lament, 'been there—done that', was probably first uttered by a practitioner of the pillars of the aimless arts—procrastination, hesitance, ennui, and sloth.

Presentation slide for upcoming seminar on aimlessness.
Everything looks legitimate on PowerPoint!
If I thought people would come, I would totally do this.

The aimless believe that you can learn stuff from books. You don't need to repeat someone else's trials and failures to arrive at their level of knowledge. That's already been done. The person who did it, or some faithful chronicler of theirs, has written it down so you don't have to suffer through it all over again. This is a tremendous time saver.

The aimless don't get enough credit for this. People who have succeeded after multiple failures are way more interesting to the rest of the world than people who studied up on a thing and proceeded to do it right the first time. There's no romance in the drudge, or at least not so much as exists in the phoenix that manages finally to rise from the ashes of his own ineptitude. It's the phoenix who's going to become the CEO while the aimless drone toils in obscurity in the fetid depths of the accounting department—the one place he's suited for because it's the one place where you're not allowed to make a mistake.

Payment in Kind...Hoo Boy!

This is my neighbor's car.

He keeps it in the garage most of the time. He is my only neighbor who keeps his car in the garage. Everyone else keeps their cars in the driveway like me because our garages are full of crap that won't fit in the house. There is no room in our garages for anything as big as a car.

This car only comes out of the garage to get washed and to have its rims swapped out. My neighbor has had this car for about a year. So far he's had four different sets of rims on it. He sells the rims off the car and uses the money to buy another set.

He claims he makes money doing this. I don't know how this is possible, but he is a very enterprising fellow. He owns five businesses that I know about, and probably some more that I don't. Between the businesses and the wife and kids, my neighbor stays pretty busy.

I made this portrait of his car for practice. I thought it came out pretty well, so I gave him a print. I hoped that maybe one of his big gangsta-rim loving associates would admire the portrait and hire me to make one for them. Hasn't happened yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I also made a portrait of his dad's car.

This car is never in the garage - mostly because the garage only holds one car, but also because the car itself is a piece of crap. Putting this old heap in a garage would be wasting space that they could otherwise use to store up inventory for their next garage sale...you know...like the rest of us.

I did this one for practice too. I made the rusty piece of crap 4x4 truck look way better than it does in the driveway. I added the lion to give it a sense of adventure that it could never actually muster since it doesn't have enough power to get out of its own way.

It doesn't have to go very fast. They only use it to go to the convenience store for cigarettes and beer and to go out into the savannas west of here where they trap snakes, lizards, toads, and tarantulas to sell to an exotic animal dealer down in Miami. This is one of the businesses that I know about, although sometimes I suspect that I don't know everything. I try not to ask too many questions. They've already showed me some critters I don't want to think about escaping the confines of whatever they're keeping it in over there. I'm not a big fan of fangs or venom.

My neighbor's dad was very excited to get a print of his 4x4. He makes fun of the truck. He calls it 'Duke Brown', which I gather is not supposed to be a respectful name. I think he is secretly kind of proud of the fact that he has managed to keep it running and engaged in a useful life when anyone with normal sensibilities would have abandoned it long ago.

Still he thinks making a portrait of something as mundane and ugly as Duke Brown, the spider catching truck, is a wast of time and money. He thinks I am kind of a fool for doing it, but he appreciates it just the same. In fact he is so ecstatic about the result, ridiculous as it may be, that he wants to pay me for the print.

I was pretty happy about this when I first heard it. I thought it was a fortuitous turn of events. I like getting paid for my work, especially when I didn't expect it. It's nice to be appreciated. Of course that was before I found out that he doesn't want to pay me in money. Oh, no. Instead he wants to pay me in kind. The kind of kind he has in mind is a ball python. He wants to give me one of the offspring when one of the three breeders they keep in their house hatches eggs.

Needless to say, my wife is happy to know that my little photography business is finally taking off. One good thing. I'll be clearing up some space in the garage. Since I won't ever be allowed in the house again, I'm going to have to take the tent and whatnot out of the garage and set up camp in the back yard for the snake and myself. Doing all the cooking on a propane stove is going to be a bitch.

  

Essential Rhythms: Dancing with the Stars

  the great big old clock o' the universe with jazz hands

There is a rhythm to the affairs of the universe. It has a beat. You can't really dance to it because it is very, very slow. One beat takes two lifetimes. This is why the closest anyone has gotten to the sound of the universe is 'om.' They could only register one lifetime's worth before they shuffled off this mortal coil, and one lifetime's worth is only half a beat. The sound of one complete beat, which takes two lifetimes, sounds more like 'boom'. Imagine!

All the other rhythms—the ones you can dance to—syncopate to this fundamental rhythm in wondrous, poetic ways. If you get out of step with these non-essential rhythms, you can assume that you are also out of step with the universe. It's important to hear the beats all around you, and dance to the ones that have meaning in your life.

There is a rhythm to writing. I'm feeling it right now. You should feel the same beat when you read what I have written. It is the rhythm that connects us—your senses, your heart, to mine. The better I am at keeping the narrative beat with my choice and arrangement of words, the more compelling what I say becomes for you as you read. This connection, this dance, is lifeblood pumping in time with the universe.

There is a rhythm to cooking as well. The cook who knows how to dance in the kitchen orchestrates all the various dishes of a meal to come together at the same time—each at the peak of its flavor, its warmth, its nose, and its visual appeal. This is the time to sit down and eat because this is the time when everything the cook has striven for is perfect. Anyone who is not ready to sit down when dinner is ready does not understand cooking, is not in tune with the universe, and doesn't deserve to get any supper.

No one in my family is ever ready to eat when dinner is ready to be eaten. I know this because I do most of the cooking. Even if they were all ready a few short moments before, by the time I lay the food out and announce dinner they will have found a million other, more pressing, things to do. There are sudden text messages that need to be sent off into the ether, e-mails that need to be answered, TV schedules that need to be checked, sunsets that need to be admired, and dogs that need to be walked. More frequently than you would guess, one of the things requiring attention is taking pictures of the food I have made—evidence at least that I have got the visual appeal part of the rhythm of cooking down.

There is a proper rhythm to TV and the movies as well. A 30 minute TV sitcom runs about 22 minutes of show time, and is punctuated by commercial messages. The writers know this when they script the show. The director paces the narrative accordingly. Strange as it may seem, without the commercials some of the intended rhythm is out of kilter.

My wife hates commercials. She records everything we watch so we can watch it later and speed through the commercials. When I watch the ad images speeding by in kinetic disarray, and images of Victoria's Secret lingerie models shoot past my consciousness like so many meteorites in flaming free-fall, I know we have upset the balance of nature. The collaborative art that is television suffers for the misstep.

When we have arrived at the climax of an on-demand movie, the instant when multiple plot threads are about to resolve themselves, my wife will suddenly pause the show to look up the complete filmography of one of the actors because we have an iPad now so we no longer have to wonder about such things. The cantilevered give and take of the dance with the stars that is a movie is undone. The quickstep of heart and mind comes crashing to the floor in a kaleidescope of limbs, sequins, and taffeta. Please pack up your pumps and go. You've been eliminated.

Bean works on his timing.

Animals have to step to the rhythm too. Fish have the tides. Wolves have the moon. Problems crop up though when the seasons of the beasts collide with the seasons of their masters.

Our dogs, for example, are finely attuned to the rhythms of our lives. The effect is the same as though they were not. They have aligned their downbeats to coincide with ours, but the lyrics don't match up, and harmony is largely absent. So, when we sit down to dinner, the dogs need to go out. The timing is bang on, but the requirements are completely different.

When I've got a burst of creative juice at the computer and words are flowing, Bean will think it's an excellent time to play catch. He will convey this happy thought to me by poking my elbow with his cold, wet nose, and barking. My flow is stopped dead in its tracks to accommodate his. Our rhythms are in sync, but I'm doing a box step and Bean's doing the tango. Somebody's going to trip. I'll bet it's me.

All these are just minor catches in the give and take of timing. We all experience them. The trick is not to let them throw you completely off the beat.

It's the larger currents of our affairs that are more problematic and, should one lose the beat, harder to recover. For instance I tend to buy stocks at their historical highs and give up on them just before they finally bottom out. I lost my job the week before Lehman Brothers hit the fan, confirming what all the major players already knew, and sending the economy into a tailspin from which it is still trying to recover. I decided to become a writer just at the moment when the Internet removed all barriers to entry into that noble fraternity, including it seems, any requirement to understand spelling, punctuation, grammar or even the subject about which one decides to write.

All these things have had a disastrous impact on life as I used to know it, but I am far from being the most ridiculously out-of-step wonk on the planet. I use to think that distinction belonged to Friedrich Riesfeldt of Paderborn, Germany, the zookeeper who gave an elephant an olive oil enema and was subsequently suffocated beneath several hundred pounds of its poop. Riesfeldt's story is wildly entertaining and clearly illustrates the most dire consequences possible for ill-timed choices, but it turns out to also be a fabrication. (You can read the complete original account as well as the facts that prove it to be false at Snopes.)

With Riesfeldt off the table, I'm left with several replacement candidates (pun fully intended):

• Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, in a nationally televised debate, decides to list the federal agencies that he would eliminate if elected. He can't remember them.
• Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, decides to suspend his campaign, all the while maintaining that he had not had any inappropriate sexual liaisons, when the number of women coming forward to dispute this claim looked as if it were going to surpass Tiger Wood's record.
• Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, blasts Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for corruption and says any politician who deals with them should go to jail...just as it comes out that Fannie/Freddie paid him $1.6 million for providing them consulting services as a 'historian'.
• Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, claims America's new focus on income inequality is all about 'envy', interrupts his Florida Primary victory celebration to tell CNN's Soledad O'Brien that he's 'not concerned with the very poor [because] we have a safety net there', then releases his last two years tax returns showing $45 million in income and an effective tax rate of just 13.9%. Turns out he's got significant assets tucked in Swiss and Cayman Island accounts where, presumably, all us envious haters won't be able to see it. And the very poor? He probably thinks they can use their safety net to buy themselves a couple of Cadillacs to drive around like his wife.

By now you've probably noticed a recurring theme in my list of candidates for poster boy of failed timing. That's right—they're all middle aged men whose neckties have cut off circulation to their brains. It's fitting that the Republican mascot is an elephant because never has any one group of like-minded yahoos been so out of step with reality, nor so deserved to be buried under a steaming pile of pachyderm dung.