Let's hear it for the gray!

To begin to explain how I feel about where we are right now, I need to start by talking about some basic colors.

There's black and white, and then there's gray. And at the risk of sounding pedantic, while we may think we know what we mean when we refer to them, I feel that nevertheless I need to explain what I refer to, and how I feel about these colors.

When I was growing up, like most people growing up, so many things were very clear. There was right and there was wrong, and so forth. And I was suspicious of the grown-up world, where it seemed that immorality and hypocrisy used as a crutch the idea that things were not so clear as we youngsters thought they were. A similar idea, that helping one person or promoting one idea often means hurting other people, also seemed like a cop-out, an excuse put forth by lazy incompetents.

Now of course I am on the opposite side of that divide, and for better and worse, I see things differently. I am shocked that nowadays it seems that so many people carry that black and white view of the world well into their adulthood, in some cases never letting go of their simplistic worldview. I am troubled to be forced to see things in a much more complicated way, where there are often no answers to problems, for example, but I am sure that is what a mature person must do. And I will defend my right to hold to a moral center of my own making, to continue to work out an understanding of how best to deal with the complexity of adult life, to anyone who insists that I abandon this middle ground for their islands of certainty.

I am continuously challenged by the fact that with so many issues that come up, I do not agree with either side. And usually, I have good friends and loved ones who stand on both sides, snarling and gesticulating at the perceived enemy across the gaping chasm of uncertainty. Perhaps I have a thing for iconoclasm or something, but my views do not usually fit comfortably into either camp, and I must make a place for myself on the outside.

For one thing, call it a spiritual conviction, but I cannot believe in placing this versus that or us versus them. To put it in common parlance, I think this 1% versus 99% stuff is bullshit. We all got ourselves into the situation we are in, we all benefitted from the shady dealings that eventually sunk the ship. None of us are living in the cabin next to Thoreau out near Walden Pond, making our own candles and stitching together our own mocassins. Modern society is a closed system, and while you can choose to participate in it or not, not only is it unhealthy to NOT participate in it, but most people who believe they are not participating in it are deluding themselves.

And the truth is, in my opinion, that when you put things into an us versus them paradigm, you play directly into the hands of your perceived enemy. You put a target on your back. You give your enemy fodder for rallying others to their own cause by pointing out your failings and the weakness of your argument. You limit yourself to a position that may not, in the end, really serve your needs or bring you any kind of longlasting happiness. There is a ridgity there that is bound to eventually sink your cause.

Now I know that for so long in our culture, we have been conscious of the little guy and the big guy. Our country was founded with a sense that here, for the first time in history, the little guy would get his due. In America, all citizens would have the protection of the law, and access to economic opportunity. But how many of the little guys secretly longed to be big guys, and what would stop them, once they became big guys, from using their resources to protect their big guy status and prevent other little guys from similarly climbing to the top of the economic machine?

So it's time for us to begin to, among other things, re-calibrate our expectations of what our country is, to forge a new identity. The ingenuity and the fairness that for so long seemed to be our birthright have gone elsewhere. For example, American inventors who are coming up with ingenious ways to create sustainable alternative energy are finding investors in Germany and other countries, while they are ignored and belittled at home. It's time we came up with a new way to get an edge. A way to set ourselves apart. It's time to embrace the gray.

I am not talking about gray areas as in the questionable behavior that Jack Bauer engages in to go beyond the law and catch terrorists. I am, to go back to the beginning of this discussion, suggesting we embrace the complexity of modern life, where no one position on any issue successfully conveys the complete picture. I am also suggesting that we give up on some of the idealism we have held onto in white knuckle fashion for so many generations, still believing that certain long-standing problems facing human civilization can ever be solved. It is more than possible that many of these things could be better managed once we accept that they will never go away.

There is flexibility in the gray, I believe, that will allow us to move forward and embrace new challenges and find allies we didn't know we had. There is always more that we have in common than whatever ideals and positions that divides us. When we stop labelling others as our enemies and give ourselves in service to treating others as we wish to be treating, we may find others much more willing to bridge gaps and lend a helping hand in our times of need. Time is short, and practical considerations command our time much more than idealistic posturing. We need each other, as bad and misguided and misinformed as you may believe us to be. We need to embrace the gray.

The latest sequel of "Halloween" - starring the St. Louis Cardinals

Wow. I've been a baseball fan for almost 40 years, and I have never seen anything like last night's game 6 of the World Series between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Folks at ESPN and elsewhere had talked about the things that went wrong for the Cardinals manager Tony La Russa and the Cardinals in game 5, when miscommunications led to the wrong relievers being in the game at the wrong time, leading to the Rangers winning, 4-2. Well, in game 6, La Russa's moves largely worked, especially the late ones, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Rangers manager Ron Washington made all the wrong moves. What am I talking about? Let me give them to you one by one.

1) With the Rangers winning 4-3 in the bottom of the sixth inning, Washington takes out starter Colby Lewis and brings in super-reliever Alexi Ogando, who had been struggling in the World Series. Ogando proceeds to walk Yadier Molina, forcing in the tying run.

2) With the Rangers winning 9-7 in the bottom of the 10th inning, instead of bringing back closer Neftali Feliz to finish off the game, Washington goes to Darren Oliver. Darren Oliver????? Yes, we know that St. Louis had two lefthanded batters, Descalso and John Jay coming up, followed by the pitcher's spot (with St. Louis out of pinchhitters). But Oliver - correct me if I'm wrong - has better results against righties! Just a major head-scratcher. And wouldn't you know, surprise, surprise, those two leftie batters both singled to get the Cards off to a fantastic start!

3) After bringing in Feldman to replace Oliver in the 10th, Washington elects to pinchhit for Feldman in the top of the 11th, and bring in Mark Lowe in the bottom of the 11th. Not as obvious a mistake as no. 2 above, but still - Feldman has great stuff, didn't throw that many pitches in the 10th, etc. With a tied game, you could make the case that Washington wanted to be cautios and save Feldman for a possible game 7. But if he had left Feldman in, kept the score tied, with St. Louis's most feared reliever, Jason Motte, out of the game, you had to figure Texas's chances of scoring in the 12th inning or later against Jake Westbrook, who had not pitched in weeks, were pretty good.

You may not agree with me, but anyway you look at it, fortune started to smile on St. Louis, from the 8th inning through the end of the game. Texas had 3 hits in the final 4 innings. Meanwhile, St. Louis, with 3 hits through the first 7 innings, managed 10 hits in those final 4 innings. John Jay, 0 for like 99 thus far in the World Series, had two hits and scored the tying run in the 10th. Everything went the Cardinals way (except for Josh Hamilton hitting a 98 mph fastball with one hand off of one leg for his first home run in 82 ABs in the 10th inning).

So I tend to think all of this leads St. Louis with a major advantage going into tonight's game 7. Then again, I am sort of rooting for St. Louis, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because of Albert Pujols, or Tony La Russa, or Lance Berkman. Maybe because I don't believe in this "Texas deserves to win it because they've never done it before" reasoning (who did people who believe that kind of stuff root for in 2005, when the White Sox who hadn't won in 87 years were facing the Houston Astros who have never won the championship? Shouldn't those people by rights be rooting for the Chicago Cubs to win EVERY year?).

Cruz and Napoli are banged up, Hamilton is still banged up, and oh yeah, the Rangers just last night suffered the most gut-wrenching loss in the history of baseball. Yeah, yeah, I know, they will all say, "oh, we gotta shake it off and play tonight like last night ever happened", but last night did happen, and not too many people have the focus to completely put it out of their mind. As soon as the Cards start doing something positive, you know most of the Rangers are going to be thinking, "oh no, here we go again."

I remember in 1995 watching the Yankees play the Seattle Mariners in the AL division series. After winning the first two games in New York, the Yankees had to try to win one of the next 3 games in the hell-hole known as the Kingdome in Seattle. In the 3rd game, the Yanks had an early lead, only to see Seattle come back and win. In the 4th game, the same thing happened. By the 5th game, I was hoping that an earthquake would come and demolish the Kingdome. And when Paul O'Neill hit a home run early in game 3 to put the Yankees up, did I think, "yeah, here we go, we are going to win this thing!"? No, I thought, "oh no, the Yanks may have a lead, but I know those @#$%^ Mariners are going to come back again!" And what happened? The Mariners did come back and finished off the Yankees in extra innings, in gut-wrenching, agonizing fashion. And here, now, in the 2011 World Series, I'm sure there are a huge numbers of Rangers fans AND players who fear, in their heart of hearts, that no matter what the Rangers do, the Cardinals will come back and beat them. Just in time for Halloween, we have Jason and Mike Meyers combined, in the killer team that wouldn't die, the St. Louis Cardinals.

Oneata, "kissed by the sun"

For capers, there are not many that can measure up to the scrapes we get into while in college or shortly thereafter, the stuff we do before we have really started to put our roots down and get all respectable.

One of the strangest but most sublime adventures I ever got involved in was spending most of a night in the attic of the Ward House on the Wagner College campus.

The Ward House, named after the family that owned it and lived it until the college bought it in the late 1940s, was used for a long time for music classes and performances. During the time I was in school, my friends and I grew to love the building like no other part of campus. Part of the reason was its location, across the street from the rest of campus and therefore rather isolated. Also, its history was rather compelling: it was built after the Civil War by William Green Ward, a retiring Union officer (Colonel or General, depending on who you ask). After he and his wife died, his two spinster daughters lived in the house until they died in the 1940s. Most of all, we loved the house, I think, because we thought it was haunted, or at least a repository for weird disturbing energy.

More than one student had had bizarre experiences while in the house - things like suddenly feeling cold, getting dizzy. Friends of mine had identical dreams about the house. I myself had dreams, some beautiful and some nightmarish, and continue to have them to this day.

The dreams and bizarre experiences aside, we loved the house, and prized the classes that were held there. So when, after my junior year at Wagner, it was announced that the house was being closed down, it was a blow to all of us. The college's administration had decided that the house was too expensive to heat and maintain, and they were concerned about security issues since it was so far from the rest of campus. They locked it up while it was decided what was to be done with the house.

We feared the worst, that the school would get rid of the house, probably tear it down. And that is what eventually happened. But it took a few years of vandalism and then finally a terrible fire before they could justify tearing it down.

A friend of mine, B., had taken up the cause of the building in the meantime, and he began learning about the background of the house, the history of the neighborhood where it stood on Staten Island, and all about the family. He interviewed elderly relatives who remembered spending time in the Ward house when they were children, back when the two sisters and their parents were still alive. And he started collecting memorabilia about the family and the house - photographs and the like. He discovered that the family had named the building "Oneata", a Native American word that means "kissed by the sun," inspired by the fact that the front of the house faced east, more or less.

When the house was shuttered, B. became concerned about important things being lost if the house should be demolished. One area he focussed on was the attic. It was said that, when Wagner College took over the building in the late 1940s, all the Ward's possessions still in the house, including materials found in closets and the attic, were either sold or discarded. But B. was sure that there were still things left behind, perhaps belongings that might shed light on the family.

At this point I had already graduated from Wagner, but B. and many of my friends who were great lovers of the house were still students. The only access to the attic was a door in the ceiling of the main hallway in the house. The scheme was hatched, not sure by whom, to steel a ladder that we could then bring into the house and prop up in the hallway beneath that door and then climb up the ladder. It was decided we would remove a fire escape ladder from another building on campus, Kairos House (which housed the campus's chapel), with the idea that after we were done using it, we would return it, and noone would be the wiser.

Keep in mind that, as students, we knew the security force on campus, and knew them to be inept and largely ineffectual. We figured that if we were careful and timed things out well, we could avoid detection and not have any trouble. The snatching of the ladder went well; however, getting into the house did not. We had the ladder in place - Me, B., two friends named Chris (we knew a lot of Chris's back then), and maybe one other person - and sat in Chris's car waiting for security to make their pass before we made a move to get in (luckily, we didn't have break in, because due to vandalism and the college's carelessness, there was at least one door that was open). Unfortunately, when security made their pass and saw my friend's car, they lingered, until we drove away.

I wanted to go back, walking through the woods to the house, but everyone else thought it was too dangerous, that now that security had seen someone near the house, they would keep a close eye on it. Ultimately, I gave in, because I knew my friends weren nervous, thinking that if they were caught they might be expelled from school. Before we left, we had ditched the ladder in the woods, thinking we could come back after a week or two, find the ladder, and go on with our plan.

However, when we looked for the ladder on a night a few weeks later, we couldn't find it. So we had to steal another ladder. Luckily, Kairos House had a second ladder. So we took that one, snuck across campus with the ladder in our hands (crap, that thing was heavy), and got into position well before it was time for the security sweep. The door was open, and we got the ladder inside and into position.

Our friends had had enough excitement, so they decided to leave. But B. and I stayed. We climbed up the ladder, pushed the door up, and found ourselves in a place that noone had been for who knows how long. The attic was dusty the way that oranges are filled with juice. It was not tall enough for either of us to walk standing up so we had to crouch and waddle. Over time, our backs and legs grew very cramped and sore. But we stayed there for several hours, until we had explored every inch of it.

Did we find much? Not really. A handful of pieces of porcelain dolls. Lots of postcards, and some early glass photograph negatives, some whole, some broken. A couple of books that were in horrible shape. But we looked over it all, and gathered together whatever seemed like it might be useful or interesting. B. kept most of the stuff, but he let me keep a couple things that were not historically interesting - a title page from a score of Verdi operatic instrumental music arranged for playing on the piano, and some other stuff I've forgotten.

At around 6 in the morning, after being in the attic for 4 or 5 hours, we snuck out, left the ladder behind, and scooted off the campus through the woods to avoid detection. We made for the house where one of our Chris friends lived, and crashed on his couch and in an extra bedroom, exhausted, cramped, and absolutely filthy. I swear it took a week for me to get the smell of that must and dust out of my nose.

A year or more later, after the house had gone through more setbacks, B. and I snuck inside once more. What we saw was shocking. The school was using the house as a place to store all kinds of junk like old rusty bed frames and God knows what. But all the walls were crumbling, the paint was gone, the wood door frames were scratched up if not gouged, it looked like there had been about 50 years worth of destruction in one year. The door to the attic was open, revealing that someone had cut a square hole in the roof of the house. Whether this had been done by vandals or by the school, the effect was the same: rain coming directly into the house would destroy it much faster than just vandals. We scouted around and took what few momentos of our time as students in the building remained: the numbers on the rehearsal room doors, etc. We knew after all this that it wouldn't be long before the house was gone. And sure enough, just a month or two later a mysterious fire was set, ruled as arson by the police though the culprit was never caught. And after the fire, Wagner College finally got what it wanted: now condemned by the Board of Health, they had to tear down Oneata. We were heartbroken, but we had a good number of momentos.

With all the information B. collected, all the interviews, etc., there could be at least one book written about the Wards of Staten Island and their home. But I gather he abandoned the project. I hope some day he will pick it up again, so that people can hear again about the property and the house that so captured our imaginations.

A Tribute to Sammy

This entry will probably make little sense to many, but for the group of people I shared time with last week, it will hopefully be very clear what I am talking about.

After hearing from people who knew Sammy all their lives and most of his, I would like to give my perspective, of someone who just got to know him in the last year of his life.

I know some have said that in recent months, under the burden of progressing illness, Sammy was not the person they always knew. This man was feeble and uncertain of himself. The Sammy they describe to me was a take-charge kind of guy. Well, I can tell you that to me, beyond the infirmities time imposed on him, that person was still there.

Therese, Sammy's daughter, and I started dating in January of 2010, and I met Sammy and his wife Eileen for the first time in September of 2010. They came to New York City to visit for a couple of days before boarding a cruise ship to Canada. Then, on the back end of their cruise, we spent another couple days visiting in New York before they got on a plane back to Florida.

We had a wonderful time. And near the end of our time together, when Eileen lamented that this might be their last vacation, Therese proposed (and I heartily agreed) that the four of us do a cruise the following September. And in the ensuing months, we have been planning out that trip, a cruise to the Mediterranean that Therese, Eileen and I go on starting a week from now.

Now I want to clear up something - and this is really the central point of this tribute. Anyone who thinks that the work of planning this trip, and accommodating Sammy's infirmities for this trip, has been some kind of labor or burden, or that we have made some kind of sacrifice in including him in the trip, is wrong. They don't know the real story. So let me tell you that story now as best I can.

In getting to know and love Therese, I have from the beginning felt so special because of the openness and generosity she has demonstrated to me, in welcoming me into her life and her home. I supposed that she learned to treat people in such a loving way from her parents. This suspicion on my part has been confirmed in the last week, when all the members of Sammy's family welcomed me with equally open arms. I may be a recent addition to the family, but in true loving fashion, I was treated on equal terms as everyone else.

So having been treated so well, with such loving care, I can only hope to demonstrate the same qualities myself, to give back what I have received. Planning our trip has been so much fun. The anticipation, as we have been counting down the days until we were to leave, has been delicious. Unfortunately, Sammy didn't hang on long enough to enjoy the trip with us. But he got tantalizingly close!

And the experience of sharing Sammy's last days, and taking part in caring for him, and then putting together his memorial service, is something I will never forget. My grief at his passing must be miniscule to what Therese and Eileen and Joan and all the cousins and friends are feeling. But I know that none of us can have any regret about not doing all we could to make Sammy's transition from this life to what is to come as smooth as possible. We did, as Therese kept reminding us, an incredible job. The pangs of pain at losing this man who meant so much to us will continue to come. His suffering has ended; we still are here to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on.

The memory that I will always carry with me is spending last Christmas with Sam and Eileen, along with Therese and her daughter Valentina and Valentina's boyfriend Jake, in Naples, Florida, at Sam and Eileen's home. There is a photo from that visit of Sammy, Jake and I smoking cigars on Sammy's porch on Christmas morning. Sammy looks very happy. He was very happy. I was very happy too.

The theory of evolution, human intelligence, and "Star Trek"

OK, so I am reading "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand, which follows the development of modern American thought from the time of the American Civil War to the first couple decades of the twentieth century through the prism of four of the great thinkers of that era, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey. I found this book when Therese and I were in Boston for the Early Music Festival a few weeks ago, in a 2nd-hand bookstore called Brattle Book Store (a cool spot - if you're in Boston, check it out).

Anyway, the section on William James talked a good deal about the rise of Darwinian thought and the theories that evolution and natural selection replaced. It is fascinating to me, that monogenism and polygenism, those very theories, were both used as justifications for slavery and the place of negro people in America. Natural selection, it seems to me, does not comment one way or the other on the question of whether white people and non-white people are equal or superior or inferior to each other. However, it does make the whole question moot, as it threatens to remove European human beings from the lofty position he had enjoyed, poised on the top of the heap of creation.

In the mid-19th century, when Darwin and others were developing their theories, there was already a good deal of friction between religious leaders, who were happy to have theories in place that agreed with the man-at-the-center-of-the-universe construct they saw in their bibles, and those who would supplant those theories. As we well know, that still goes on to this day. I have spent time myself engaged in that battle. When I was ten years old, I was confronted in school by Cathy Baker, a classmate who attended the same Lutheran church I did.

After she tersely demanded I explain how I could believe in evolution, when the bible says we all come from Adam and Eve, I calmly and simply told her, "it's not the same thing." I did not see Christianity and Science as working in the same realms, and therefore, one could not be a threat to the other. Religion is about believing in something, while science is about accepting theories.

The two realms have one connecting phenomena, in my estimation. That is, they both involve being comfortable with things that cannot be conclusively proven. Evolution, relativity, even spaghettification (another theory and the spark of inspiration for this blog) can never be proven beyond a shadow of doubt. God may show all kinds of signs in the opinion of believers, but she has never appeared in a courtroom in the guise of George Burns or Morgan Freeman. All conclusions about what God wants us to do with ourselves and our world will remain strictly speculative for the forseeable future.

But that doesn't stop us from trying to figure out all this mess, and trying to use religion and science as we are inclined to do it. I personally use both to some degree or other, but I don't place absolute value of one over the other. If there's one thing that natural selection helps me with, it is humility, and seeing everything as relative, with no predetermined hierarchy. An avowed brainiac, I am constantly reminded that, as much as I would like to put myself on another plain from fellow human beings who I judge to not enjoy my level of intelligence, there are many reasons why doing this does not work. One is that intelligence can be measured in any number of ways, and as much as I would like to think I am MORE intelligent than others, when I do, I am apt to put myself in position where I can be knocked off my high horse.

It's like teenagers, right? When I was a teenager, I looked at my parents and thought I had figured everything out, and didn't need their help any more. When they told me I couldn't do something or other, I was outraged - how dare they place restrictions on me! But now that I am older, I grudgingly admit that they frequently knew what they were talking about. I thought I held all the cards, when in fact M & D had the aces and quite a few other face cards.

I continue to believe that the problem people have with evolution is not really a matter of religion. To me, it is the same problem people had with Copernicus. We would like to feel as if we are the last word, the top bananas, deliberately created as unique and perfect, not to be improved upon. Evolution knocks humankind off THAT high horse. Humans are subject to the same pressures, the same frailties, as the rest of the creatures with whom we share planet earth. No matter how much we use science and other systems to remove ourselves from the game - curing diseases and combating natural disasters and so forth - in the end we may suffer a fate that is beyond our human powers to avoid, a fate controlled by the forces put in place by chance, or God, or however you would like to categorize those forces.

I like to consider what forms intelligence takes on besides the ones we think of when we say "intelligence." We all know that there are people who will never score high on the SATs, for example, who nevertheless possess faculties for carrying out sophisticated activities and creating mind-blowing stuff. And I also like the fact that, once white European ancestors are not the be-all and end-all, it becomes possible to not only consider what the other guy can do that we can't - but also to take a closer look at what is happening in the rest of creation that demonstrates intelligence that approaches our own.

Animal lovers, for example, know for sure that Descartes was wrong about animals just being machines that carry out simple instinctual properties. Animal intelligence is something that is fascinating to me. The tricky thing is how to distinguish between anthropomorphising - seeing human properties, in this case, intellectual processes, in animals - and actually observing instances of animals carrying out intellectual processes of their own design. I had a cat for 14 years named Hobbs who I considered to be a cat scientist, because I got the uncanny feeling that he studied me and changed his own behavior to accommodate my shortcomings so that we could live together amicably. That was my version of the story - I have no idea what he thought about it. I do know that we both adjusted to the circumstances life presented to us, like good roommates always do, to be good companions for each other. Granted, the relationship was skewed, since he was much more dependent on me than I on him. So it behooved him to make some adjustment.

What I'm saying is there were moments, when I was alone with Hobbs, when I definitely felt like the relationship dynamic shifted, and I was the dumb animal carrying out rote behavior, incapable of creative thinking or whatever. In those moments, I felt like he was holding the cards. That would make me laugh, to think that, like some cartoon or children's movie, I was the idiot and my cat was the genius pitying my inferior ability.

Of course, we do measure animal intelligence, whether by our terms and by some barometer we ascribe to the animal in question. For example, people will talk about what dog breeds are smarter than others. Again, I am skeptical of this, because a dog who doesn't learn to fetch a stick in 5 minutes, as far as we know, could be making the judgment that the activity is beneath his dignity!

I suppose the process of trying to imagine what intelligence may exist beyond the realm of human intelligence is a very challenging field (what is that field called? I can't think of it...). Science fiction has considered that topic in many fascinating ways. Star Trek has had many episodes that centered around the confrontation between humankind and human intelligence with creatures from other planets and galaxies whose forms and intelligence are completely alien to our own. Of course, many of the alien species encountered on the show were conventionally humanoid, played by actors with a minimum of make-up. But even within those restrictions, it was possible for the show to consider how different from us other species might be.

It boggles the mind to imagine that beyond the limits of our perception, there might be all sorts of things going on equal if not superior in sophistication and intellectual ferment to our own. To deny that the possibility exists that there might be things going on that show us to be on the bottom of heap as a species instead of on the top, is a great mistake. For me, the true measure of intelligence is curiousity and tolerance. When I am ready to "put myself in another man's mocassins", as an old adage used to say, I can double the size of my world in an afternoon. Or maybe in a moment.

Me and you, and you and me

See what happens when you blink? A week and more passes with no writing. Oh well, here I am again, with another topic to make you think but hopefully not make your head hurt.

There are two basic ways to look at the world. The first one is where I make a distinction between myself and everything else I see around me. There is me and there is not-me. In the second one, there is no distinction and I just feel the continuum between myself and all I see outside of me.

In metaphysical circles, these two positions are known as duality and non-duality. There are all kinds of possible ramifications for believing in one or the other. For example, responsibility takes on a different hue depending on whether you feel that everything that goes wrong in the world touches you or not.

In the west, most of us are diehard dualists. We recognize that part of attaining maturity is learning to distinguish between what battles are worth fighting, and when to leave things alone and walk away. We pick those people we are going to care about, and care for, our relatives and a handful of close friends. Maybe we have a few causes that we get involved in, like feeding the homeless or protecting national forests. But we draw a line as to how far we are going to go, and that is a healthy thing, because at the end of the day we have to take care of ourselves.

Psychologists tell us though that when we are very young, we are closer to having a non-dualist view of the world. We don't see any distinction between ourselves and what we see. We feel very powerful - we cry, and our mothers come running to take care of us. If something goes wrong, we hold ourselves responsible for making it happen, like children who are sure that their parents splitting up must be a result of something they, the child, did.

Being a pure non-dualist must be very hard - not because it means feeling responsible for everything necessarily, but it really means disbelieving the messages our senses are giving to us. If someone else is hurt, we don't literally feel their pain. If a friend is happy, we may brighten up in their presence, but we don't feel exactly what they feel. So non-duality is more of a philosophical concept, something, it seems to me, one may cultivate through a lifetime of meditation and spiritual work. Whether anyone ever completely, truly attains it is a good question.

However, the trend nowadays is towards expanding our personal universes. Facebook and other social media allow us to make meaningful connections on whatever level with people we would otherwise not even know exist. And some people share all kinds of personal information, including personal achievements and tragedies. In addition, we see the interconnectedness of world economies and political movements. We may have previously given lip service to there being domino effects or chain reactions to forces beyond our immediate control, but now, for better or for worse, it is easy to see that anyone and everyone can be touched by something happening on the other side of the globe.

At its base, at its heart, non-duality is about relinquishing control. In that sense it is the exact opposite to what we sense as a baby. We strive to let go of the impression that we are at the center of it all. Shifting from a dualist to non-dualist position is like admitting that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around. It is admitting that the most important thing to me may be happening at a great distance from the body I call my home.

The impulse to be charitable is a non-dualistic one, but when we are cynical about it, it is possible in many if not most instances to ascribe personal agenda to giving of oneself to another. Altruism has followed chivalry onto the endangered species list. For example, corporations and wealthy individuals endow sports arenas and performing arts venues in exchange for getting their names pasted on these same places. It's all part of good business practices.

The way I look at it is that what we really experience is a combination of duality and non-duality. In effect, there is a duality between the two - the two paradigms exist in a dynamic interplay between the two. We each maintain a healthy focus on taking care of number one, while also enlarging our purview to include people and places we previously would not have bothered with. In order to feel comfortable within myself, I have to be comfortable with my surroundings, my surroundings - my apartment, the neighborhood I live in, the places I buy my groceries, etc. - have to reflect me. I don't think I am alone in having these new demands on my world - that disharmony without is going to lead to disharmony within, and therefore, the outside has to be in synch with the inside.

But it does all come back to me. As I deepen my appreciation for what my life is all about, and gain greater confidence that I will give myself everything I need, I can let most people off the hook for providing those things for me. I can allow for greater divergence from my comfort zone, without perceiving disharmony, without being knocked off my center. Growing that security within myself, gaining that confidence, may be a life's work as well. But it has many rewards in the here and now.

Stillness in Movement, or just stillness

On a few occasions, I have tried to get into meditation. You know, sitting in a comfortable position, surrounded by soft lights and quiet, trying to empty the mind and find the still place at the center of my being. But usually what I get is an experience of how much my mind jumps all over the place and refuses to be still.

I know meditation is supposed to be good for me. I also know brussel sprouts are good for me, but at least I can grill those in olive oil and garlic (maybe even add some bacon if I am feeling particularly naughty) and come up with something mouth-wateringly tasty. The noise coming from my mind when I am sitting still is less like garlic and olive oil, and more like sand in the underpants. It just seems to get in the way of me enjoying the quiet like I would want to.


I was encouraged a while back when I read about Tibetan Buddhist meditation, where you get to treat the images that come into your mind not as obstacles, but friends. Follow the labyrinthine path your mind wants to take, and when it has finally run out of gas, then you can really experience the peace, before, like a 5 year old, your mind catches its breath and starts darting all over the place again. Not bad, but still not the wonderous experience of meditation, the revivifying blast of me-as-mountain that I'd like to know.


Of course, the solution was right in front of me, which is why I didn't see it - it's tattooed on my forehead, and I wasn't looking in the mirror. I didn't waste all those years (from 1986 to 1999, basically) singing Gregorian chant weekly. We learned that listening while singing, as daunting as it can be to try to do those things simultaneously, can really settle the mind, transform experience, all that kind of good stuff. Yes, there's still that idea of the workings of the mind as distraction that I have a hard time with. I just can't help feeling that there is a good reason that I think what I think, even if there is a hierarchy and there are times when I would like to set aside the nagging suspicion that I forgot to buy bread at the store to focus on more important and/or more pressing concerns. Cleaning house doesn't necessarily mean throwing out all the furniture to get to the dust and the cobwebs.


So here I am now thankfully in a new chant choir, singing mass once a week. Now granted I am the only singer who is aware of what I am trying to do. I have no idea what the motivation is of any of the other guys with which I am singing. But for me the most important point of the whole thing is listening. Not that I do that very often. In fact, part of my motivation for writing this is to remind myself to remember to listen more frequently during the mass. So far I have been tied up in making sure I sing the right notes, and keep in mind where the next piece of music is in the book.


But things are getting better. Every so often I get the feeling that, hey, I do know how to do this, don't I? I start to relax just for a moment. I look at Charlie, the director, and try to hear the other voices in relation to my own. All the things I learned to do more than 20 years ago when I first learned to sing chant. And then the moment is lost and I go back to struggling. I trust that the more I listen, the faster I will start to get back my chant "chops." And then I will be not a chant follower, someone trying desperately to keep up - I willl be a leader, capable of leading others and capable of being sensitive to others and myself.


In the meantime, if I can make some progress in my physical therapy, I may, before the summer is over, get to take up again one of my other favorite methods for getting to that quiet place: in-line skating. Perhaps because it works the core so well (you know, the lower back and stomach muscles, in some circles the center of our being), skating, especially when I do it alone, is a tremendously "centering" experience. There is so much rhythm to the strides as I move, left, right, that it sometimes feels like I am not moving at all - an analogy to the mind moving and remaining still. It is at the most energetic moments of skating fast with sweat rolling down my face, the sound of the wind whistling through my ears, my limbs darting back and forth, that I remember the lesson of this exercise.

While some may search for stillness by eliminating everything that moves except for maybe the breath, for me, the stillness makes itself most indelibly felt in concert with movement. In other words, stillness is part of all that is moving, and conversely, movement if it is harmonious and free is a part of the meditation.

At the center of everything is nothing...

OK, for the next few days it looks like I am getting back to the original focus of this blog: stuff that makes my brain buzz. Today we are going to talk about meaning and meaninglessness, or how everything is built on nothing (or something agonizingly close to nothing).

Years ago, I showed up for a psychotherapy session. At the time, my therapist Ellen was subletting an office space from another therapist Heather. At the beginning of our session, Ellen excused herself to put a note on Heather's desk. As she put the note on the desk, her hand brushed against a pencil can on the desk, and the can fell to the floor and broke.

Ellen became upset and wrote another note to explain what had happened and offer to pay for the pencil can. We then sat down for our session. The first thing Ellen said was, "gee, I wonder why I did that? Was I subconsciously harboring some resentment towards Heather?"

Now, you should know that I have a pet peave about the tendency of therapists to see meaning in every little thing that happens. Nothing is just what it is, no person is innocent, everything done is a window into the tortured tendencies we all have lurking beneath the surface of our personalities.

I countered by telling Ellen that I thought what she did had no meaning whatsoever. She was aghast: how could it not have meaning? Surely everything has some meaning, however slight and simple. No, I responded. It is actually the existence of meaninglessness at the heart of everything that makes meaning possible.

Whoa. She didn't have the foggiest idea what I meant. Could I explain that further? So I turned to math as an allegory - to the importance of undefined terms as the basis for defined terms. I couldn't quite remember how it all worked, but I did my best to recall it. Here is a better explanation than what I was able to describe to Ellen that day.

In geometry, we have terms that are defined, and terms that are undefined. The three terms that are undefined, point, line and plane, are the building blocks for the entire discipline. Without the undefined terms, we would have no point of reference for that which is defined. However, they remain undefined, because it is impossible to define them.

I know that in microphysics, there is a similar sort of thing going on, where as we examine particles in their most basic forms, we discover that they are built on energy which is in movement. But there is nothing that can be measured or precisely located. I know less about physics so I can definitely be corrected if I am wrong, but that is what I remember. Once again, all that exists, all that we have, is built on, perhaps we could even say depends on, imprecise, non-existent things.

My therapist listened and tried to grasp what I was saying. In the end I think it all confused her and we moved on: so, Karl, how are YOU today? But I did not let the idea die. Certainly therapists are not the only ones who spend a good deal of time searching for meanings in all their actions. I continue to believe that the situation for us is analogous to what I have described in geometry and physics.

In the example of Ellen brushing the pencil can, I believe we are distinguishing between whether what she did was deliberate or accidental. If it was deliberate, then she would have been completely aware of where the pencil can was and decided to knock it over. If it was accidental, then she was probably unaware of the location of the can. This is why I find seeing meaning in everything aggravating. It presupposes some kind of all-knowing, all-seeing ability. It also presupposes that while her conscious intention was not to disturb anything on the desk, her unconscious intention was to carry out some sort of agenda against Heather, and that her consciousness was powerless to detect this agenda and intercede to prevent Heather's can from being broken.

It is all just too much to accept. It reminds me of the eleborate formulae Ptolemy came up with to explain the movement of the sun and all the planets while desperately keeping the earth at the center of the universe. This meaning-in-everything position strikes me as somewhat desperate as well - it is a way of keeping ourselves at the center of our own universes, a way of avoiding growing up, I believe.

More healthy to accept, not that we are all powerless to prevent our unconscious from acting out secret vendettas at all times, but rather that, while it is useful occasionally to investigate our motivation for doing what we do, it is also very healthy to let things go that are not central to keeping us from living happy carefree existences.

I know I am being hard on Ellen and others who share her profession. Certainly, the reason I would have sessions with a psychotherapist is because I want to examine more acutely the mysterious movements of my psyche. And certainly, when Ellen wondered about why she had knocked over the pencil can, she was at least half kidding, and probably more than willing to just accept that it was an accident. I took it more seriously than she did, perhaps because I was the one who was sensitive to this mania of looking for meaning. I may not have wanted to examine my own motivations, my own secret, subconscious intentions.

But certainly it is healthy to have a balance in this as in all things. Scientists have shown us that so much in the natural world behaves in predictable ways. We have spent a good deal of time examining how the mind deviates from that principle. Perhaps though, even in our unpredictability, we exhibit patterns that may be considered to be predictable. We do things unconsciously that are in synch with the intentions of our consciousness. And nobody gets hurt, either accidentally or deliberately.

Another day with nothing to say...

Warm, humid, overcast today in New York City. It matches my mood pretty well: pensive, brooding, melancholy. I remember in college how a friend of mine saw me sitting in the cafeteria at lunch one day and told me I always looked so thoughtful. The difficulty is getting the thoughts to coalesce into something that might be meaninful to share with others.

Of course instead of staying with my thoughts and trying to unravel them a bit, I could just read emails or post on Facebook or occupy myself in any number of other ways on the internet. But that would not serve me in the long run. There are enough distractions in life without me going out of my way to create some. Not that I don't indulge myself in distractions often enough.

I hesitate to begin because frankly I am puzzling over the issue of privacy. It's one thing for me to use this blog to just talk about whatever is on the surface of my mind. But it would be another thing to divulge the real inner workings of my mind - to make myself vulnerable before the vastness of the internet. In one sense, it wouldn't be much of a big deal, since I don't think many people read this blog anyway. Also, God knows I have revealed myself in postings on Facebook and other message boards, sharing details of my life that few people know.

But in another sense, I think it would be the wrong thing to do. I know I am a guarded person in some ways with those closest to me. But ironically it seems easier to share some deep secrets in cyberspace, where those who will read it are at a distance. I think there is some valor in going the harder route and letting the truly important people into my secret world. And I also think it could be hurtful if those people were to read important things that should be shared with them broadcast impersonally over the internet.

So I think I will stick with the safe route. Not that I am not sharing stuff that is meaningful to me here. Over time, I hope to really get in a groove here and write some good stuff that people will really want to read.

Man, I need a shave. There was a time it seemed when I could get away with only shaving once a week. But now within a couple of days there is enough scruff to make it a dangerous proposition for my girlfriend to kiss me. Nobody wants carpet burns on their cheeks and chin! I suppose I just feel lazy about shaving - preparing the skin, making sure the blade has the right sharpness, cleaning up afterward. The reward is worth the trouble I guess; but within a relatively short amount of time, the smoothness of my newly shaven face is spoiled by new whisker growth already making itself felt. In short, before the day is out, I am scruffy once again.

It's like some cruel joke. Shave, shave, shave, and then I have to do it again. A Buddhist monk I know had an interesting take on this sort of thing. He was talking about eating, another thing we have to do over and over again. He said we have so much desire that can never be quenched. We eat and feel sated for a short time, but then our appetite returns and we want to eat more. From his perspective, the best thing to do is to train ourselves not to have desires.

I disagree with him. First of all, the training he is talking about takes more than a lifetime, and it is not easy. Secondly, I think that for the vast majority of people, it doesn't work. And third, I think the idea that we should want to rid ourselves of our desires presupposes that desires are not useful or do not serve a very strong positive purpose in our lives. Again, for most people that presupposition is not true.

Let's return to shaving for a moment. Here I am resisting the need to shave. It is as if, in a very small way, I am going against the current of the flow of life. For a time, being dirty and unshaven may be perfectly fine, as I slave away at this blog entry. But I will feel a sense of accomplishment by overcoming my resistance and shaving. The fact that I will have to shave again at some point in the future is immaterial. Buddhists talk all the time about being in the present - well, in the present, after finishing that shave, I feel fantastic. I don't need to worry about the next time I am going to have to shave. The only thing that is important at that moment is the pleasurable feeling of having a clean smooth face.

There are many other reasons I object to Buddhism. For example, I think it's too intellectual, too heady. I won't go into the other reasons at the moment. But they certainly have it right when it comes to placing emphasis on enjoying the perfection of where any of us is at this exact moment. I personally get in trouble because I am always worrying about all the things I would like to do that I haven't done yet. Sure, I will feel good once I have crossed all those tasks off my list. Then tomorrow there will be another list and so forth. For me the whole process can be full of inner excitement or pleasure: making up my list of tasks for the day, going through the list one by one with some discipline, getting to the end of the day when I can sleep next to my girlfriend, full of excitement that I get to do it all over again tomorrow.

Sure, I would like to make a mark, make a difference, to live a meaningful life. How I might do that is a topic for another post. But this daily drudge, the daily searching for fulfillment of our petty desires, can be the beginning, the first solid steps toward building the person who does important, groundbreaking things. At subsquent stages of the process, there may be more layers of distraction to peel away. But for now, this is where I am.

Another pet peave: sports media coverage

OK, let me take this discussion of sports one step further. Therese and I were talking about this last night, so I will get this off my chest here and now.

I don't know whether you want to say that sports journalists are lazy or conservative or what, but I feel like they constantly cover the story that is easy to cover rather than covering the story they should be covering. Let me explain.

This weekend 22 year old Rory McIlroy took the golfing world by storm, winning the US Open and in the process shattering numerous records. He led from start to finish, and after the second round of the tournament on Friday, he was already 6 shots ahead, and it was pretty definite already at that point that he was going to win.

Imagine my surprise when I picked up the US Today in my hotel in Boston and found, accompanying the front cover's lead story on the US Open, a photo of Phil Mickelson, and a story of how Mickelson and other stars were not playing very well in the Open. But I should not have been surprised, because this is routine for sports media of all kinds. They would much rather put their energy and their money into covering the obvious thing, even when that is not really the story.

My hope, staying with golf for another moment, is that McIlroy's success will draw attention and we will finally not have to hear every week stories about what is wrong with Tiger Woods. Don't get me wrong: I am a fan of Woods and hope that he returns to his level of excellence and breaks the record for Major Tournament victories. But I really don't want to hear about every little detail of what he is doing with his swing coach or whatever. Especially not when there are other players like McIlroy who are showing off their talent while the endless drivel about Woods' problems continues to flow.

And this is common among all sports. Look at basketball and the media's focus on LeBron James. Or how about football and all the stuff about Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco? I know that Owens is still a legitimate player at wide receiver, but he is no longer the no. 1 receiver in football. But if he speaks up and says anything at a press conference, in no time flat it's all over all the sports news.

I understand that controversy is appealing, and controversial athletes are always going to get more attention than ones who "just" play their sport at its highest level. I also understand - or maybe this is just my take on things - that journalists have a hard time dealing with athletes who don't give them what they want, and so anyone who is the least bit complicated or elusive is going to be labeled a problem or, worse, a flake, and treated like a joke.

What would I like to see? How would I like to see sports journalism change? Well, to say that it should adhere to the same standards as other journalism is a joke at this point, since most broadcast and print news is distraction and drivel. But I think it would be a lot better off stretching itself, working a little harder to tell not just the stories that immediately sell newspapers. I would like to see some journalistic ethics and editorial vision applied to deciding what stories will be told and what stories should be told. When a person implodes, for example, anyone with any sense of decency would either look away, or help to calm the person down and see if they can do anything for them. They would not look for ways to make the person lose control even more, which is the equivalent of what we see in sports journalism all the time.

Of course, there are many reasons why a lot of the best and most compelling stories from sports never get told, or at least not until a great deal of time has passed after the events have taken place. For example, the parties involved would lose their competitive edge over other teams. But I'm sure that many athletes would be more willing to forge relationships with journalists in the hope of getting the story told well if they were not convinced that journalists are not going to make them look like fools. In that respect I can understand why journalists focus on the few superstars that everyone is talking about - at least they are going to get some story from Tiger Woods or LeBron James. But I would be more impressed to see that one journalistic outlet or newspaper who, the next time everyone is writing the same story about how LeBron didn't play his best, decides to spend their energy on who is playing their best and why. In other words, I would like to see sports jouirnalists do the job that we expect all journalists/reporters to do: hunting down interesting things that noone has heard about and telling us why we should be interested.

Some thoughts on sports

I love sports. I started playing basketball when I was around 8, baseball and football when I was maybe 9. And I started watching sports on television when I was 10 or 11 - the first World Series of baseball I remember seeing was in 1973, when the Mets played the Oakland A's. I vaguely remember seeing the Knicks beat the L.A. Lakers earlier in 1973, but I wasn't glued to the TV set. It took me a little longer to get into watching football - my first favorite team was the Minnesota Vikings, which I chose for two reasons (because their uniforms were in my favorite color, purple, and because I liked their quarterback, Fran Tarkenton).

I remain a big fan to this day. In baseball, I am a big fan of the Yankees, but with other sports, my allegiance changes, and I tend to follow favorite players more than particular teams. I am sensitive to the fact that a lot of people dislike the Yankees, and I understand why, but I consider myself to be different than a lot of Yankee fans. I'm almost as much a fan of baseball as I am of the one particular team, and I don't expect them to win every year like so many people who call themselves fans do. I think it's at least unrealistic, and at most stupid, to think that your favorite team is going to win every year. I mean, you might believe that when you're ten years old, but as an adult, you know better. Plus, it is disrespectful of other fans to think that your team should win all the time and noone else's favorite should have a chance.

So I consider myself a real fan in the sense that I enjoy to watch the sport more than I root for one particular team. I distinguish that from the casual fan who wants to see the team they root for win, and is not interested if their team does not win, and will find something else to occupy their time if that is the case. As I've grown up, I have seen that sports is really about making money more than keeping fans happy, and the sports have tried hard to attract the casual fans in my opinion. But while the MLB and NFL have done this by trying to insure that parity exists, i.e., that many if not most of the teams have a chance to win the championship, I feel that the NBA has worked hard to do this in another way, by insuring that for the most part, a small group of teams focussed around mega superstars will win most if not all of the championships.

This started with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. The league became more popular than ever before, and made more money than ever before, and once the owners got the feel of that wealth in them, they did not want to go back to making pennies after Jordan retired. So they have continued to heavily market whoever they could find who might take up Jordan's legacy and win multiple championships as well. And sure enough, just a few teams have won championships since then, while in baseball and football during the same time period, the championships are won by a different team pretty much every year.

The first player to be marketed as the "heir apparent" to the title of best player in the league was Kobe Bryant, and sure enough, his team, the Lakers, has won 5 championships in the last 10 or so years. The next player to receive that title is LeBron James, and the league has been working very hard in the last several years to get James' teams to face Bryant's in the finals, without success. First, LeBron made it with the Cleveland Caveliers, but the San Antonio Spurs beat the Lakers to face them. Then the Lakers made it three years in a row, but James' Cavs couldn't beat the Celtics and so once again the league was thwarted from getting their dream match-up. And now this past season once again, it didn't happen - the Dallas Mavericks swept the Lakers from the playoffs, so James' new team, the Heat, had to settle for playing someone else.

And even though the Heat lost to the Mavericks, most of the media coverage continues to focus on James, who apparently is more compelling as a loser than any of the Mavericks are as winners. This is the kind of nonsense that completely discourages me as a fan. But again, the league wants to maximize its profits, and most casual fans just know LeBron or Kobe or whoever. They can't tolerate having to actually pay attention to what teams might win or have the most talent or whatever. They want to see their hero come out on top, and if he doesn't, they want to know why he failed, and when he will come out on top. It is ridiculous, and one of the reasons that my interest in professional basketball comes and goes.

But again, it is about making money, and not just money, but big money. If the guy the league is depending on to bring in the casual fans fails, and the casual fans go elsewhere to spend their entertainment dollars, then they will find someone else to focus on as the next savior of the league. It's a model that to me is misguided and stupid, but it worked with Jordan, and they are not going to abandon it anytime soon. I am not even going to get started on the myriad ways in which I can perceive favoritism on the part of the league in trying to get the result they want to bring in and keep bringing in that big big money the owners crave so much. But let's just say that their strategy for league success makes me question the credibility of the sport on a more than occasional basis.

Why do I have to have a topic?

Well, this writing every day project is going well. I am indeed writing every day, and sometimes, most of the time in fact, I have something to write about. I think of friends who have blogs who write every day, and wonder how long it took before they felt in a groove with it. I remember talking to my friend Philip Newell who has written and published many books who told me that even after writing for many years, it is usually still, as he put it, "a slow slog." So the goal is to just keep doing it.

It's not as if I don't have a bunch of subjects that could be turned into more sustained projects, perhaps even books - I absolutely do. I won't share them with you right now because I know that blogs are probably most read by others who blog/write, and I don't want to find out somewhere down the road that one of you got the idea from me to write the same thing I wanted to write! I know: I should put my ego aside and realize that most if not all of my ideas are nothing new (nihil sub sole novum, right? (it sounds so much cooler in Latin!)).

So here I sit without a topic. I have so many interests: sports, music, literature, film. Surely, I should be able to get a topic out of all those! Plus there are many possible things to talk about from my everyday life - I've already talked about cooking, but I could share with you things about my job hunt, or any number of other things I care about, like politics and religion and the weather, blah, blah, blah.

But I also feel like the measure of a writer may be when he doesn't have anything particular to write about. A good musician can enthrall you with one note, and a good actor only needs one look, one word, to move you, right? So a good writer, like a good stand-up comedian or orator or anyone else who thrives on thinking on their feet, should be able to make something out of nothing, just by taking a deep breath, looking within, and letting the fingers go flying over the keyboard.

Of course, even as I contemplate this, my mind searches for topics. Hey, I could tell you how I started writing... or, what about talking about my dreams for this blog for the future... or, I don't know what. But I will, for the moment, still resist letting my anxiety about not having anything to talk about steer me towards relying on a topic. I love telling stories, but in order for this blog to not just be a self-centered exercise in having a chance to be the hero and control the point of view, there has to be some alternate view.
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Nihil sub sole novum. Or as Dylan Thomas put it, in regard to the task of writing, "the lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft." "On no work of words" is one of my favorite Thomas poems. It's a bit bleak, and I think we all need to make friends with bleak, to get comfortable sitting in the dark, so that we can encounter on a deep level our own strength. If you can't sit still without your blackberry and laptop and iPod to keep you company, well, then you're in a bit of trouble. As we know, at the end we will lose all those things, and more. But when we can become brothers in bleak with Mr. Thomas, I think we can begin to experience that after everything is gone, what is left is much more.

I'm not giving you some kind of Christian message (although I am a Christian of sorts, admittedly). I'm just saying that we draw on resources deep within us all the time, strength and humor and empathy and creative thinking, that will be with us to the very end. Even if our last days are spent comatose and mostly braindead, I still believe there is something going on in there. I know, this has turned kind of morbid. I needn't have chosen as my topic not having one. I could've talked about any number of different subjects. But anyone who knows me well has to know that I do not resist thinking about death when appropriate.

Sure I'm afraid about leaving this earth and hope to have as much time as possible left here. Not that however much time I have will ever be enough. My life is very rich. Yes, I have creature comforts, but that's not what I mean. I mean that I live in a time full of possibilities, in a country where I am relatively free from harm, in reasonably good health, both of mind and body, with a healthy modicum of good spirit, optimism and determination. As I go forward, writing this blog, I hope to express what I have and what I am, while also letting in all the warmth, beauty, and complexity of what I experience around me.

Don't answer that question!

Let's just get this over with. I have never been one of the cool kids. I avoided following trends, wearing the cool clothes, etc. from the earliest days. And the kids who were really cool, who didn't have to work at it - you know, the ones with that certain swagger, who didn't care what anyone thought - well, I could tell I was not one of them, either. I did care what people thought, but I was doomed to be looking in from the outside when it came to fitting in and being one of that "in" crowd.

The reason I mention all this, is that I once again find myself seemingly out of step with the bend of things, behind or ahead of the mainstream or whatever. So I find myself thinking, "gee, am I getting old?" but the truth is that the position I find myself in is not a new one, and has nothing to do with my age.

Let me explain. Saturday night Therese and I finally got around to going to see the movie "Bridesmaids," which is one of the most popular movies out there nowadays, and from all the positive reviews, one gets the impression that it is a very high quality film. It continues to be popular, since the theater we were in was quite full. Therese doesn't usually go to comedies, but since we had heard positive things, she agreed to give it a try.

Well, let me be blunt. Bridesmaids is easily the worst movie I have seen in a theater in at least 10 years. Granted, I have not seen any Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey or other Judd Apatow films in theaters. But if this movie is an example of what good comedy is today, then all I can say is that the bar has fallen so low that the distance between the bar and the ground is measurable only through a microscope.

It is difficult for me to explain how or why this movie is so bad except to say that it is just not funny. The main character is bland and unlikeable. The situations she is put through are so overworked and nothing new is presented to make them interesting. The things that made many of our surrounding audience members howl with laughter only made me cringe. The pacing is slow, the acting is wooden. The only person who seems to be having fun with their character is the woman who plays the sister of the groom, who gets to be brazen and outrageous.

How can a movie that is making so many people laugh so loud be completely unfunny to me? I find this a little troubling. But at the same time, I know that I have a sense of humor, and many things that happen everyday make me laugh. And I watch mainstream sitcoms - granted, mostly in syndication, which may mean that these are yesterday's sitcoms - but I watch them and I do indeed laugh!

So I hold fast to my assessment of the situation, and say that if Bridesmaids is an example of the best comedy films being made today, then comedy is a lost art in Hollywood. Of course, this is nothing new. My friend Ed has been lamenting for years that the people branded comic geniuses nowadays can't hold a candle to the brainy funnymen and women of days gone by. The likes of Andy Kaufman, for example, are not to be found in the current comic landscape. And Ed watches a lot more comedy than I do, so I trust his assessment of the situation. Our tastes are not always the same, and I do feel like Chris Rock and Margaret Cho, for example, are incredibly funny people. I also don't mind Kathy Griffin.

So I guess the big picture is that there is still plenty going on within the mainstream that entertains me. God knows, I don't spend a lot of time looking for it. But I also don't spend as much time as I could searching out quality entertainment, the rare entertainment experience where I might feel transported and changed and uplifted. For example, I just realized that I haven't read a book from start to finish in more than a month. (gotta put "reading" on the schedule!)

I suppose I could blame it on Facebook and cooking shows and whatever else is taking up my time these days. But another part of me feels like there's no reason to blame anyone. Whatever I am doing, it is filling my needs, and if I need something I am not getting, I will break out of my earthenware routine and go scrounging in the gutters and wherever else looking for it. The internet will probably be involved. So if I get disillusioned by feeling once again out of step with the bland and the nonsensical that is forever being put in front of us as the thing everyone is doing, and I ask you if there's something wrong with me, please ignore the question.

A story of summer heat

Since the heat is so much on my mind, after two straight days of 90-plus temperature and thunderstorms last night, let me tell you about one of my adventures in the heat.

When I was first married, we had no air-conditioning in our spacious Queens apartment. But we had pretty good cross-ventilation, and our first summer together was pretty mild, so we congratulated ourselves on roughing it and saving the cost of buying more appliances.

The next summer, however, there was a blistering heat spell. Sleeping at night bathed in our own sweat became old fast, our moods were dark and tempers frayed during the day. The only relief we had was when we went to our evening jobs at a law firm in an icebox of an office building.

For the weekend during this heat, my friend Ed invited me out to go rollerblading. His friend John was in town, and we would go down to Battery Park City, right next to the water, where there was bound to be a nice ocean breeze. I weighed my options: I could stay home in my apartment with the shades drawn and no breeze, sweltering, suffering with no energy or will to do anything, or I could go out and risk heatstroke from engaging in strenuous exercise with the hot sun bearing down on me. Oh, and did I mention that Saturday was forecast to be the hottest day of the heatspell, with temperatures possible reaching 100 degrees?

Well, I don't know how I spun it to Kristin, my then-wife, but I convinced her that I would be perfectly safe rollerblading with my friends. So off I went. To go with the festive mood of the outing, I wore my new Grateful Dead concert t-shirt that our friend Allyson had gotten for me, at what would prove to the be the Dead's last concert in Madison Square Garden before Jerry Garcia died. I met Ed and John and Ed's wife Ginny, and off we skated, down the westside of Manhattan to Battery Park City. The sun was brilliant, just scorching, but there was also a breeze, a hot breeze but the air was moving at least, and while we were skating, the heat didn't really make an impression on us. And we stopped frequently to just inhale large quantities of water and juice and such.

We skated all over, drenched in sweat and grime before long, climbing over hills and gliding down inclines. We stopped in the middle of the day at a restaurant in Chinatown, one with minimal air conditioning, and just gulped down glass after glass of water. The food's saltiness was just what we needed. After that rest, though we were all a little stiff, we put our skates back on and skated back to the westside pedestrian ramp, and skated back up to the upper Westside, before I left them to get on the subway home.

I must have been a sight when I got home. The Grateful Dead t-shirt had dirt and grime stains on it that would never come out. Kristin was furious that, in retrospect, I had put my life in danger. All I could do was shrug my shoulders. I felt fine, and experienced no ill effects from our skating expedition. And then two days later we gave in and bought a couple of air conditioners. A very civilized thing to do. And everywhere I lived since then, I have been very careful to make sure I spend the hottest days of summer chilling indoors. No use risking heatstroke.

Film in New York

I have for such a long time equated New York City with serious filmgoing that I can't remember a time when I didn't! And while I started going to the movies at such a young age that many of my earliest memories are connected with movie experiences, even before I moved to New York City there was always a certain gravitas (to use Therese's word) around seeing a film here in New York. So it seems only fitting that I tell you about the first movie I remember seeing in New York.

It was the summer of 1973. We had purchased tickets to go see the Mets at Shea Stadium for a Saturday 1:00 game. My dad, my two older brothers and I made the train trip from New Jersey into Manhattan and then took the number 7 train out to Shea. The weather was crummy and it looked like the game might be rained out, but we went there hoping to see a game. As it turned out, the game was rained out, and we waited in line to exchange our rain checks for another game. But the question turned to what we would do with the rest of that day.

The idea of seeing a movie came up, which sounded great. Which movie? I would bet it was my oldest brother Bob who came up with the idea of seeing Jaws. It had just come out, there had been lots of commercials about it, and it was rumored to be gory, which my brothers loved. My dad agreed that we could see it - I would imagine he had a newspaper and was able to find out where in midtown Manhattan it was playing. We took the subway back to midtown and traded our rain check line for a ticketholders line, waiting to get in to one of those huge theaters that used to be all over midtown in those days.

I was poised at the ready from the moment the movie started to cover my eyes with my hands. It wasn't the first time I was going to a movie that my brothers would love but that would most certainly prove to be too scary for me. Just a year earlier my brothers had snuck me into a showing of Willard with them, duping my mom into thinking we were going to see some kid's film that was playing at the same theater. I spent most of those 90 minutes with my hands over my eyes, and walked away with a stomach ache from all the gut-clenching I had done.

But this was supposed to be a high-quality film, not a lowbrow shock feature. And sure enough, from the first scene of teens partying on the beach at night, I was pulled in. And though there were a couple scenes that were too scary for me - the one where Brody and Hooper go out to investigate the boat floating aimlessly at night, and the guy's head pops out of a hole in the bottom of the boat stands out - overall I was awed by the experience, and of course relieved when Brody finally killed the shark at the end.

The movie let out just in time for us to go catch an early dinner at the Horn & Hardart Restaurant in Penn Station, our usual routine after watching ballgames, before hopping on the train back home to New Jersey. My mom was irritated when she found out what my dad had taken us to see - she was particularly worried that it would cause me to have nightmares. Sure enough, when I laid down for my usual 9pm bedtime (hey, I was only 11 at the time!), I found it hard to settle down to sleep. Vague scary images were floating around in my head, and each time I dozed off, they would start to solidify into disturbing storylines of monsters chasing me and such. So after maybe an hour of trying to sleep, I got up and wandered into the living room, where the rest of my family was watching tv.

My confession that I was having trouble sleeping renewed my mom's complaint to my dad about taking us to such a scary film. But she went easy on me, offering me cookies and milk and letting me watch tv until I had settled down enough to go back to sleep. I'll never forget what was on tv: my family was watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, I think on public television. Well, I couldn't understand their accents very well, or get their jokes which were over my head, but still I felt very special, getting to see what was obviously adult fare. The fact that my two older brothers, who are only 2 and 3-1/2 years older than me, were also watching, did not diminish my feeling of being included in adult entertainment watching.

I suppose I did settle down after a couple of chocolate chip cookies and glasses of milk, and then was able to sleep just fine. It would be a number of years until the next time I saw a movie in New York City - off the top of my head, I can't think what the next one was, but it must've been during college, nearly ten years later. That first time made quite an impression. And "Jaws" remains a favorite, the kind of film that, if I am idly watching tv on the weekend, and I notice it's on, I will watch it all the way through without changing the channel.

Cooking, part three (conclusion)

So after a year-and-a-half, I broke up with that latest girlfriend, and I was on my own for a couple of years, licking my wounds and expanding my cooking repertoire to suit my new palate for meat. A friend gave me a George Foreman grill she wasn't using, and I started grilling chicken breasts and turkey burgers and other things on there once a week or so.

In addition, one of my favorite quick meals became making a dressed up frozen Amy's soy pizza. I would sautee mushrooms, bell pepper and sometimes onions, slice up a chicken sausage, put all that on top of the frozen pizza, sometimes put extra soy mozzarella cheese on if it need it, and bake that in the oven. That would make a very filling meal, especially if I paired it with a nice Belgian ale. I was really getting into drinking beer - after a trip to Belgium in 2007 and subsequent trips to Monks Alehouse in Philadelphia, I was getting spoiled and very particular about what beer I would drink. Mostly, if I was going to drink beer, I only wanted to drink the best.

A year and a half ago, I met Therese, whose love of food equals my own. So of course being together with her means I have gotten to expand my cooking repertoire further than it ever has been before. I have made all the things I've done before for her: chicken pot pies, Thanksgiving side dishes, pasta w/mushrooms and cheesy tomato sauce, baked my famous amazing cookies. And I've done lots of new things. Some have been inspired by things we have seen on the Food Network, like baking Tart Tatin after seeing Jamie Oliver make it over an open fire in France. Some have been inspired by things I love that I've always wanted to make, like paella, which I've now made three times, most recently for Therese's daughter's birthday. Some have come from recipes that Therese has clipped from magazines, like a Moroccan style chicken with cinnamon. And often, now when I want to get an idea of how to cook something, I look it up on the Food Network's website to see how Emeril and Rachel and Pat Burrel, etc. would do it, and then I adapt it to my own tastes!

Therese and I have different philosophies for cooking. Therese is more into feel and adding things as she goes along, and not following a recipe or using the timer to determine when something is done. She lets her nose tell her when a dish is ready. I like to have a recipe and exact measurements and timings as the basis for what I am going to do. Which doesn't mean I am inflexible and will not let myself be inspired to do something that suits me. I just want to make sure that the result is going to be not just tasty, but memorable. Because if a dish comes out tasting really extraordinary, then that is something I will add to my rotating repertoire, and we are going to have it again soon!

Cooking, part two

Living on Staten Island in a large apartment in a Victorian house suited me. It was there that I did baking for the first time. I tried making oatmeal raisin cookies from a macrobiotic recipe. They came out horrible. Then I found a recipe in Vegetarian Times for making a chocolate cake with creamy chocolate icing. That one came out pretty good, although I overcooked the cake so it had a crispy crust around. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone to eat the cake, so I had to eat it myself, and it turned stale before I could get through half of it.

As much as I liked living on Staten Island, I was floundering, working a string of low-paying retail jobs. So I turned to education, and left Staten Island to go to graduate school for musicology at Columbia University.

Columbia gave me an off-campus apartment, where I shared with 4 other graduate students, including sharing one refrigerator and one tiny kitchen. I had to be strategic about when I cooked my meals, especially dinner. Two of the guys never really cooked, so that helped.

I spent my 2-1/2 years at Columbia subsisting on very little, since the salary I got for being a student-teacher left little after I paid my rent for doing anything. Typically, my first meal would be in the middle of the day, and consist of a toasted bagel (or two) with margarine. Then for dinner I would have ramen noodles with mixed vegetables, or pasta with spaghetti sauce, or brown rice with beans and vegetables. When I had a little extra, I indulged myself and bought Entenmann's cakes or cookies, using the sugar to stave off the oppressive feeling of being a graduate student.

Near the end of graduate school, the pall of being a student began to lift, and I became a little more adventurous in the kitchen. Under the influence of a friend, I started eating seafood now and then, ordering Chinese shrimp fried rice and such. Also, I experimented with making cheesy-style sauces for my pasta. I knew I shouldn't eat dairy, but if I ate a tiny bit of cheese mixed with margarine and flour and water over my pasta, other than getting a bit of a gravelly voice, I was ok.

After graduate school, I moved to the East Village where I once again cohabitated with some bohemian types. But these people were decidedly more upscale than the ones I had living among in New Brunswick. And food was one of the few things that we spent money on when we had it. One of my roommates, a German guy staying in New York for 6 months for an internship, loved to socialize and entertain. He was always having barbecues on the roof of our building, and he would always make sure to make a skewer for me with no meat on it.

And I was cooking up a storm myself. I baked bread numerous times, baked cookies and muffins, and all in a rickety little convectioner's oven. With Chinatown nearby, I shopped frequently in Asian supermarkets and bought soy-based mock meats and spice packets and hearty noodle dishes.

Then one Thanksgiving, I ate turkey for the first time in probably 8 years. My roommate invited her friends over, and I invited my new girlfriend, and we had a blast. I don't remember what I made, but there was turkey and lots of vegetable dishes, and then one person made a sweetpotato dish with marshmallows that nobody liked but me, so I got to eat all the leftovers of that!

My girlfriend and I got engaged, and then a short time later got married, and we moved in together to an apartment in Flushing, Queens. This was a huge place by New York standards, and included a large eat-in kitchen. Now that I had another person to cook for, I really went to town. I baked cookies. I baked pies. I perfected a number of dairy-free and vegetarian adaptations of dishes I had loved as a kid, like macaroni and cheese and tacos.

But while Kristin and I were together, my dedication to being a vegetarian began to soften. First, at Thanksgiving and Christmastime, we would get a turkey. We told ourselves it was mostly for our pet cats and dogs, so that they could have the treat of having fresh warm meat. But as the years went by, we started eating the turkey more than the animals did!

Next, Kristin was a big fan of getting pre-made hero sandwiches at a local deli. Whenever I didn't have anything planned for lunch, she would grab one of those sandwiches. Then over time, she stopped eating what I made, opting for her deli hero sandwiches. So eventually I gave in and ate the sandwiches sometimes myself. But when I cooked, I would still make vegetarian food, except for those twice yearly turkeys.

After 8 years of marriage, Kristin and I split up and I moved to Brooklyn. As far as appearances were concerned, I told everyone I was still a vegetarian, but now I started occasionally eating meat, especially from fastfood sources. After a year of being on my own, I dated a woman who was supportive of my being a vegetarian, and she even made really delicious vegetarian dishes for me. But she also liked to eat meat on a regular basis. For example, her job working for a university occasionally called for her to attend events that would sometimes include dinner. When one of the options for dinner was filet mignon, she would order that. She really enjoyed her meat, that I could tell. And I wasn't offended by that. On the contrary, I found her relish for chowing into a big steak very sexy.

Unfortunately, my relationship with that woman did not last long. But a year later, I found a new girlfriend. She had a tiny kitchen in her West Village apartment, but we made the most of it. In addition to making lots of the usual things, omelets for breakfast and pasta for dinner and such, we tried making some exotic things, like fresh pesto sauce and chicken pot pies from scratch. And then when Thanksgiving came around, we really went to town: several of her friends came over, and we spent several days making side dishes - cranberry sauce, homemade stuffing logs, sweet and sour red cabbage - leading up to the day, when in addition to making a huge turkey, we made garlic mashed potatoes, haricot verts with slivered almonds, and a beet-centered appetizer that my girlfriend had found in a magazine. And for the crowing touch, the night before Thanksgiving, we peeled, chopped and cored numerous pears and made a huge yummy pear pie with raisins.

By this time, I was no longer identifying myself as a vegetarian. My girlfriend encouraged me to try heavier meats to see what my digestion would tolerate after being a vegetarian for so many years. Eventually, I found lamb was ok, but beef was sitll off-limits. At home on my own, I would still cook mostly vegetarian, although I did begin to buy chicken sausages to put in my pasta rather than vegetarian sausages.

OK this is getting long, so I will finish up the story tomorrow.

Cooking

Well, since I talked about one of my loves, music, on Friday, I though I might go on a bit about one of my others, cooking.

So one of the major events of my young life was when my dad got laid off from his job when I wass around 12, and my mother was forced to go back to work fulltime. Why does this have anything to do with cooking? Previous to my mom going back to work, she made all our meals. The only food I ever made was sandwiches, which during the week meant cold cuts with mustard or Miracle Whip and on the weekend maybe something a little more elaborate like grilled cheese with ham, or maybe a fried egg sandwich with a Kraft American cheese melted on top of it.

But once Mom went back to work, she relied on my brothers and I to get dinner started before she got home. So I started to get a little bit of exposure to what cooking actually was. It might mean taking a pot out of the fridge with all the ingredients already in it, putting it on a burner, bringing it to a simmer and then leaving it on low to cook for a certain amount of time, until Mom came home to finish it. But getting dinner ready might also mean cooking pasta, heating up sauce and a vegetable, for a total of three pots - keeping a watch on all three and determining when each pot was done.

When I went off to college, all my food was prepared for me in the dining hall, so that was really a step backward. The only thing that might involve some creativity was putting together a salad and choosing the dressing. But we were allowed to rent small refrigerators for our dorm rooms, and fill them with rudimentary ingredients to get us through the time when the dining hall was not open. Yes, that was usually just sandwich meat and maybe a slice of leftover pizza, but we felt adventurous to have options in our fridges.

So it wasn't really until I set out on my own after college that I started cooking. The summer after I graduated, I spent a few weeks living with a professor, trying unsuccessfully to get a job in NYC. At the beginning I had some money to contribute to groceries, and so I would buy simple things like tv dinners but also the fixings to make omelets. I still remember what those early omelets were like. First I would get a little margarine melted in a frying pan. Then I would sautee some sliced mushrooms. Then take the mushrooms out, put in some margarine, and start the eggs cooking, throwing in the mushrooms, putting some thin pieces on cheese on, and voila! my omelet. I felt so urbane, so cultured, to be making my omelets.

Of course I could also cook pasta and heat up spaghetti sauce. And make tv dinners. So there was my repertoire! With that I got through half the summer. Then my professor kicked me out - he felt that I wasn't trying hard enough to find a job - so I went to spend another few weeks with an older friend named Jesse. Jesse taught me how to make a variety of simple dishes, like sliced up hotdogs mixed with frozen vegetables warmed up in a pan, and then tossed over rice. He also got me to make something from scratch for the first time, using a recipe: cream of mushroom soup. what a sense of accomplishment I gained from that! And he instilled in me the rule that cleaning up is an important part of any cooking! Considering I am your usual guy who frequently avoids cleaning anything like the plague, this was a revelation; but I took it to heart, and I would say to this day the area where I am most likely to do a good amount of regular cleaning is in the kitchen.

Finally at the end of the summer, still without a job, I had to admit defeat and move back in with my parents. But I got a job in a short amount of time working in a warehouse in New Jersey, and with earning my own money came buying my own food. This occasionally caused some friction, since my mom still dicated the diet for those of us who lived at home. For example, I'll never forget the first time my mom saw me put wheat germ on top of spaghetti sauce. She freaked - "you're ruining my sauce!" she said, even though "her" sauce was probably mostly from a jar. Eventually, she calmed down, and got used to the fact that I could now fend for myself pretty well now, and if I wanted to eat something different from what she was providing, I could buy it and make it.

Luckily, I saved enough money to move out of my parent's house in less than a year. I ran into a high school friend named Pedro who told me about an opening in his apartment. I jumped at the chance. There I was, living in New Brunswick, NJ with two Rutgers students and my friend, who did canvassing for a political organization. As you can imagine, it was a rather primitive setting. And frequently, I was the only one with a regular source of income. So I would take it on myself to collect whatever I could from my roommates and make a grocery run to the supermarket. My repertoire expanded to include some beatnik standards like brown rice and soy sauce and dried beans that my artsy roommates wore as banners of their membership in the counterculture.

Other than the occasional omelet, which might include bacon, I rarely ever cooked anything with meat in the apartment. This worked well, since two of my roommates were vegetarians, the first such animals I had ever studied at close range. My third roommate, ever a protagonist, took the opposite position of eating meat at every opportunity to make my veggie roomies uncomfortable. I took a position somewhere in the middle: I felt sympathetic to my vegetarian roommates sentiments, but I also loved ham sandwiches and chicken legs and bacon, and couldn't imagine going without those things. What would I eat if not meat, I thought.

So there I was, sitting on the fence. But being a vegetarian seemed to fit in with the alternative bohemian lifestyle I was affecting, so before too long I gave in and decided to give it a try. There I was, soaking blackbeans overnight so I could boil them up the next day to eat along with a pot of brown rice and some steamed broccoli. I couldn't help cheating on the diet though, especially when free food was involved. When my parents invited me to come home for dinner, I would eat chicken cacciatore and fresh ham and Swedish meatballs, and love it, without any qualms. Then when I returned to bohemian New Brunswick, I would sheepishly avoid the subject of what had been for dinner.

I became more solidified in my vegetarianism when I got my first job in New York City, and moved there as well, in early 1986. That first job was at Weiser Books, one of the most famous occult bookstores in the US, and I was their new shipping clerk. With all the spirituality and alternative living being promoted there, I encountered a number of vegetarians. And I became good friends with Ed, who as it turned out lived just down the block from me in suburban Staten Island. Ed's girlfriend Ginny actually worked in a healthfood store on Staten Island, and Ed was always bringing wonderful dishes from home for lunch, all vegetarian, and sometimes he would share with me. He was leary of me when it came to the subject of diet, though, because he could tell that it didn't take even the slightest breeze to make me bend back towards meat-eating.

My new roommates on Staten Island were very supportive of my vegetarianism. They had had a previous roommate who had been very allergic to molds, so they were used to having to segregate their food and such from others'. It did confuse them, though, when I would bring home a ham and cheese croissant from Zaro's bakery for my dinner, or accept an offer to share a meatdish that they made.

Another turning point occurred when my next job was with the same healthfood store where Ginny had been working. By then I had determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was allergic to dairy, so in addition to mostly abstaining from meat, I also wanted to abstain from dairy, which meant reading ingredients of anything that I bought in a store. Working in the health food store, Family Health Foods, made finding non-dairy alternatives easier, since most of the people who worked there were vegetarians and also abstained from dairy. In the back of the store, they had a kitchen where they would make lots of popular staples of the American diet, but altered to exclude meat and dairy. Over time, I learned how to make many of these things myself, using soy milk and tahini and nutritional yeast and ground cashews and such to make mock cheeses, and using seitan and textured vegetable protein and such to make mock meats. I got by, and instead of just rice and beans and vegetables, I could make some things that were more interesting, like mock beef stroganoff, so the experience was very empowering for me.

Tomorrow I will pick up the story in the late 1980s and bring it to today.