You just might break . . .

. . . into a smile. I do whenever I see the video of Feist's song "1234". I read about her in a New York Times article back in April and saw the original video then - I decided that it was the most organic music video that I'd ever seen. Very sweet and innocent - I mean hey, when's the last time you saw a music video for a song with banjo and trumpet? No guns, no pyrotechnics, no moody sunsets - just a really great combination of song, choreography and filming. Congratulations and thanks to all involved. Here's a link to a short film of the making of that video.

The Future

I've checked in a couple of times on the blog of George Hotz, the teenager who famously hacked the IPhone. Clicking on his profile led me to another of his blogs. I'm no expert, but it apparently documents his efforts to turn a toaster oven into a pizza-cooking plasma TV. Maybe with an optional Death Ray. Neat to hear his extra geeky descriptions of test equipment and the like - he's a teenager, after all. There's hope.
BTW, his IPhone Hack blog is here. Cool inside view of the story we all saw on the news.

The pack

The pack exhales and the pack inhales.
When I'm feeding the dogs I still sometimes look around for Stella.

Our new girl Georgia had a pretty dreadful time of it last month - the folks that left her when they moved away thoughtfully chained her to a fence. She was taken in by the Atlantic County Animal Cruelty Officer and transferred to the Pleasantville shelter. There were maggots in her ears, her nose was being eaten by flies and the chain had gotten totally wrapped up in her fur. She went to a foster home in Dorothy where a couple of good people - Marie and Bob - have fifteen dogs and four cats on a couple of acres. A few sad stories for some of those dogs, too.
Georgia was pretty timid when we got her home - she ran to a far corner of the yard and hid. We coaxed/dragged her to the house where she hid in a closet. She spent a good part of the next day under the back deck.



It has been a week now since she arrived. She is still really thin but clearly becoming less fearful. We're watching the pack rearrange itself. She'll be fine.

The Charlie Brown of Sailing.

Beautiful breeze blowing today. Even more crisp now than it was a few hours ago when I sailed across that mooring line.

It was one of those bright pink mooring balls with three dingys tethered to it in front of me to starboard. I had just come onto a port tack and was making my way through the mooring field in the west end of Cape May harbor. I thought I would be able to get by upwind of the mooring ball, but it was going to be close. At the last minute I pushed the tiller a little and headed between the ball and the dingys.
As I scooted through there I was thinking ‘this is probably a mistake’.

I might have been better off if I’d just run down the mooring ball – at least there would have been a fifty-fifty chance that I’d have brushed by on the upwind side of it, instead of catching the mooring line and gaining myself a little train of three dingys.

The mooring held, I guess, and when I saw those three dingys following me I let the sheets go. I paused for a minute to assess the situation, then took off my shirt and shorts and went overboard to see how the line was caught.
What I had snagged is the line called the ‘pendant’. The mooring ball marks and suspends the chain that goes down to the anchor or weight that is more or less permanently set in the bottom. The pendant comes off the chain and is supported in turn by a small float so that it can be retrieved with a boat hook.
It was tight against the skeg in front of the rudder. I tried getting my feet on top of the line and pushing down but I couldn’t budge it. I thought it was jammed in a groove or something. I tried diving under to take a look at it but I couldn’t see well enough. I felt along the pendant to the bronze clip that secured the dingys. I figured that if I could unclip it I could pass the line back under my boat and then refasten it and be done. I climbed back in the boat and fastened a line to the lead dingy and tied it to a stern cleat.

I must have figured out that the mooring was what was holding me in place and that if I got loose from it, my boat and the three dingys would drift off away from the float. With this in mind I threw out my small anchor, but I failed to make sure that it was set.
As Lyle Lovett says, “ . . . I had made my second mistake.”

I went back overboard and managed to pull some slack in the line and get the dingys unclipped. With the mooring line no longer taut under the skeg my boat began to drift, pulling its un-set anchor.
I climbed back aboard and watched as the distance between me and the mooring grew to ten, twenty, thirty feet.
I had traded up in problems. Here’s where I should mention the unreliable motor.
It runs, and I’m confident that it’ll get me out of a jam, but it won’t idle or run at slow speeds. You’ve got to start it, jam it in gear and push the throttle up. No close maneuvering, no backing up.
I shackled my bigger anchor to the main anchor line and tossed it off the bow. At least I’d still be in the right neighborhood when I finally figured out how I was going to get those dingys back where they belonged.

I decided that I should get in the lead dingy and row back to the mooring, pulling the other two behind me. I would clip the little train of dingys to the pendant and swim back to my boat. Simple. I climbed down into the first dingy and put the oars in the oarlocks.
Ahh, the circus is in town. Maybe I’ve rowed a dingy sometime in my life. I don’t really remember if I have. I rode a motorcycle once – that I remember. So maybe I never have rowed a dingy before. You’d have gathered that from watching my performance.
I could barely make it the two feet that separated the dingy and the boat, let alone row upwind fifty feet back to the mooring. I was picturing myself and my little dingy village being blown across the harbor. After what seemed like endless flailing I secured the dingy to the stern cleat again and climbed back aboard.
Time for Plan C ®.

I started the motor and with the dingys in tow I made a big circle, aiming for a spot between two moored sloops upwind of the mooring ball. I planned to drop my anchor there and ease my boat back down on the mooring by paying out line. I used up the eighty-odd feet of braided anchor line and had to add a hundred feet of nylon three strand. This worked out pretty well, but when I was down to the mooring it was about twenty feet off the starboard side - out of reach. I started the motor again and powered over a little past the mooring ball and got the boat hook ready to snag it as I swung back on the wind. No success, but this looks promising. Motored back past the mooring for another try. Got a hold of the pendant this time and secured it to the pulpit on my boat.
When I took a good look at the lines on the dingys I was pleasantly surprised to find that I hadn’t lost the bronze snap hook from the lead dingy. The second dingy was clipped to it and it had just been pulled back underneath. I clipped it back into the pendant and slipped my temporary line off the bow of dingy number one. See ya later, fellas.

I pulled my boat back up the anchor line hand over hand, stowed the anchor and got on back to the slip to clean the mess up. Maybe - if I'm lucky - no one was watching.

Look at this dog.

Look at this dog. If you're wondering 'what kind of dog is that?', welcome to the club. Don't let me lead you here, but maybe you're thinking 'that is one complex pooch'. Or maybe you think she looks simple-minded. Let me tell you: there may have never been a more self-aware canine on earth.
Having had the pleasure and honor of knowing Stella for at least 14 years I would like to share with you my thoughts about what is going on in that picture. She is made up for a dog show. A local 'here-is-my-great-dog' show. No fabulous prizes. She is totally in on the joke. A tutu, a tiara, a feathered boa leash in hot pink. She totally gets it.
This is a dog who - I swear - understood irony. But the look on her face says "This is the real me!" (Please click on the photo for a better look.)

Stella had to leave us today. She was 16 or 18 or 15 years old. Ellen saved her from a shelter in 1993 - she surely would have been put down in a matter of weeks. Ellen felt like they saved each other.
Rage on, Stella.

Saint Michael?

Anyway, here I am – having failed to live up to the great task that I found before me. I’m not a saint.
The ones who can do that job – they’re the ones that it's worth crossing the street to shake their hands.
Why, they’re the ones for whom we melt colored glass and then cut it into shapes and make it
into a picture held together with little lead strips – then we put these glass pictures up in the big buildings that we’ve built
so we can get together
and try to
remember what it was we were supposed to be doing.

I saw sainthood and thought . . . how’s the health plan?
I saw sainthood and thought . . . is there a uniform?
I saw sainthood and thought . . . I bet I won’t be allowed to touch my dick.
I saw sainthood and thought . . . I wonder what’s playing down at TLA?

Something I believe, and a nice picture of a boat.

So. How is it again that we are God?

Because we get to decide how to make sense of our universe – our experience.
It all sweeps in – we gather it and swing it back out – ju-jitsu of some sort, redirecting or deflecting the waves.
For sure, we’re already selecting and rejecting input on a level that is far, far below ordinary consciousness.

And here's that nice picture I promised -

This is a lightly Photoshopped picture of our boat Ikey Boy, sitting in the slip at Harbor Lane Marina.

two old journal entries

3/28/93
Trying to throw away some stuff that was cluttering the kitchen.
I looked at a '92 wall calendar sent by the oil company - inside the front cover, under the flap where you dutifully tuck each page as the month passes, is a little grid with a dozen lines for entering the date and the amounts of your fuel deliveries.

Staring at it, I felt as though I might as well have been looking at a postcard from the Alps, or Polynesia; a picture of a life blessed with simplicity. A dream of a life so simple that you could hang this calendar in your laundry room, or near the back door, and whenever the oil truck came - maybe you'd have a pencil hanging on a string from the nail the calendar is hung on - you could write down the date, the amount, and the price.

I can do it from memory: the date is passed, the amount is never enough, and the price is always too high.

-------

4/29/93
My mood got fixed
maybe it was by the two little girls
chalking hopscotch diagrams on
that sidewalk. Maybe it was the
sunlight and the white splashes
as the ocean hit the rocks.

Kurt Vonnegut, 84 years on Earth

4/12/07
Sad I am, and happy too, for Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. He was our patron saint of Irony. It might well have been called Vonnegut. I have poured a glass of whiskey.
Writers – do they give shape to things we need words for, or make shapes for us to pour ourselves into? Is that the same thing? And yet again I am brought to wonder about what awaits us when our eyes close for the last time.
Godspeed, Kurt Vonnegut.

If youd'a woke up, youd'a seen me sleepin' . . .

3/4/07 1:34 PM
So, I’m here on the couch. I share it with two dogs. We're on vacation. We are so self-centered, Ellen and I, that we think this is what the Booboo Heads love most – to have us with them. Maybe they do. Like kids running to the top of a dirt pile and yelling “Look, look, Daddy!” – they are validated by being observed, we like to think. They can lie around the house all day by themselves, but when we can be with them, watching them lie around the house, then lying around the house is a noble pursuit, not just a way to pass the time ‘till we get home. So - do we really know what dogs want? We like to think this is one thing.

Ego wins . . .

2/10/07
Ahhh . . . the more I think about it, that “Along the Road” entry in my blog is like B-minus high school writing. I should just stick to observing and skip the trying-to-make-a-political-point stuff. There I went, with my imitation Kurt Vonnegut irony and my faux-naïf cutesiness. Ego tempts me now to post my criticism on the blog, too.

Dog Hair

2/8/07 11:17:27 AM
Windy and cold today. Haven’t been out except to walk to the mailbox.
Been sitting here at the counter emailing back and forth with Ellen upstairs and Tim in Cherry Hill. Tim started this string of emails with a link to a NY Times article about earthen floors, and he suggested using dog hair instead of horse hair or straw as a filler/binder in the floors. One thing led to another and to a string of Haiku (as these things often do) –

Mine:
Fortune awaits us -
Our Stella alone will floor
McMansions galore

Ellen’s:
Enterprise anew
Shining fur gleaming and black
With thanks to our pack

Tim’s:
Mud-matted dog hair
Dirt to dirt and dusty feet
Fits. Starts. Full circle.

The 'fits-starts-full circle' reference was to Tim’s tongue-in-cheek name for the construction company he and friends made up while working on a camp cabin. He’d mentioned it in his first post about the earthen floors. All in all, a frigid morning well spent, I’d say.

Devoted reader

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was speaking to the Association of Republican Governors. I’m not sure of the context of the remark, but I do remember him saying that the average number of readers of a blog is one – the person who writes it.
Nevertheless, we think of the blog as the window to whatever it is within us that we consider worth sharing with the world. Nnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Rrrrrrrrrrrr. Spppt.
My (MY!) spell checker has underlined those three things.
Some of the things that we put in our journals are not intended to be shared. For one thing, some of the entries are crude or childish or otherwise not publish-worthy.
There is still one entry that I’ve wanted to put on the blog. An edited version will surely suffer from a lack of context, but it still is a capsule – for me – of one lots-of-coffee morning sitting here at the kitchen counter. I am telling me – my devoted reader – who I am. It was July 25, 2004. I had been writing about an idea for a story, thinking that I’d send it to Josh for an opinion. Not sure if I did or not. Here is how it ended up:

This is a great day. Very relaxing. I find that I can’t do a damn thing about time slipping along under my feet here, or under my butt – here on the stool. I’ve spent a little time (a lot?) looking at and working on the “Lunchbox” here. What do I think? I think I’m an artist by temperament and training, and go fuck yourself. I make my living as a builder, but today I made Peach pancakes for my wife and myself. I made a lot of coffee and drank it. I made two cups of it for my wife, too. So, there! I made that damn barn out there. Go fuck yourself.
Quit Word.

Along the road.

Sunday, January 21, 2007
Yesterday as I was driving along Route 55 in south Jersey, I heard some numbers mentioned in a radio broadcast.
As I listened, I did some math.
If the 21,500 soldiers that George Bush is planning to send to Iraq were lined up alongside a highway they would make a line 12.21 miles long. At typical highway speed it would take a little over ten minutes to drive past them all. About as much time as it takes to hear Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” by Traffic, just to give two examples from the Itunes library here on my laptop. Or Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major or the Violin Concerto No. 5, also in A Major.
They’d be there, the soldiers, as you sped by. You might think, "Wow, that's a lot of guys". Even if they weren’t dressed in uniforms you’d have a pretty good clue as to what they were.

If the 3,250 soldiers who have died in that conflict were lined up alongside a highway they’d make a line a little over 4.3 miles long. Some of you might point out an apparent mistake in the math that I’ve done. I’ll explain: I have given the soldiers yet-to-go 3 feet of space to stand in. The soldiers who have been killed are given 7 feet of space. I think we would all agree that the dead soldiers should not be made to stand.

I may not be a reliable narrator. I was able, through incredibly good luck, to avoid serving in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam War, the war of my youth. I was in college – an incredibly lucky thing in itself, regardless of the political situation – and I also had a high number in the lottery that was being used as a means of selecting young men to fight the war. Most of the guys I knew back then were worried about being called up. We'd talk about it around the kitchen table at my mother's house. Vietnam didn’t look like a good place to be. I was very lucky. I guess George W. Bush was lucky, too.
At times I feel what I have to guess is survivor’s guilt. I get very emotional when I see the pictures of the young and not-so-young men and women who have been killed in Iraq.
Having not served, I sit here in the comfort of my warm kitchen and type this meditation on what 21,500 and 3,250 mean.
12.21 miles, 4.3 miles. Along the road.

Letting go

Another old journal entry -
November 24, 2004 6:14 PM
Interesting end to the day – a nice piece on All Things Considered by a guy who built a log cabin in Maine with two friends back in the late sixties. He told it well, about the work and the friendship, about getting the materials and tools to a site without a road. The friends grew up, changed jobs, moved apart. One friend, the owner of the cabin, sent the writer a letter about how he planned to burn the cabin down – no one used it anymore except vagrants and he was afraid of someone getting hurt. He took pictures of the fire. The other friend, on hearing of the event, sent a Japanese poem that I remember as:

I see the moon so clearly
Now that my storehouse has burned.

This brought tears to my eyes. The whole thing – hold on but don’t be attached. I love you all.

Sailing 101

Saturday, December 2, 2006
Hmm . . . this running aground is getting to be a theme. Did it again today, but in my defense it was out in the harbor where you’d have thought there was plenty of water. Well, some of us would have thought so. We had this great temperature swing over the last 24 hours – a front has been coming across the country dumping snow everywhere. Yesterday the temperature here was 72 or 75 degrees – a record for the date. Today it was in the low 50’s. The front also manifested itself in a strong W and NW wind. It was blowing about 15 this morning. I thought I could just hop out onto the harbor for about an hour of fast tacking. Wrong. It was just about 45 minutes to low tide when I left the dock, and that NW wind was blowing the tide out. I was out of the channel in the area in front of the Harbor Cove development (World’s Largest Houses). I felt the bottom start to catch the boat – I was sure the centerboard was up but I checked it anyway. No damage, the bottom being mostly mud out there. Black, black mud. Chuck called me on the cell phone. Jack Sayre had seen me run aground and called him. Small town, eh? He offered to come out for me if I needed it. I thanked him but said I’d try a few things first. I had the jib up but not sheeted in, so I tried trimming it to see if the extra pull would get me off. Nope. I hoisted the main to try to heel the boat over and still possibly sail off, but that didn’t work either. I called Chuck back and told him that I thought I’d just sit tight and wait for some water to come back in. It was just after dead low at that point. I took down the jib and main, heaved the anchor to windward and set about cleaning up the lines. The flogging had ripped the ring off the release piston of the snap shackle on the main halyard. I put a different shackle on the halyard and repaired the bronze snap shackle. If I’d had my cordless drill with me I would have gone ahead and installed the mounting blocks for the navigation lights. I tried to fold the jib in the V-berth but there wasn’t enough room and it was definitely too windy to try it on deck. Giving up on that, I dug out one of the New Yorkers I’d stashed on board and started to read a short story. Up against the bulkhead in the cockpit I was out of the wind and the sun felt great. It would have been nice to just doze there for a while, but that was just too far out of the program. I read and kept checking the tide indicator on the GPS. I jotted down the coordinates of my position so that I could tell if I started to pull the anchor. I had no way of knowing whether I’d get blown into shallower water if I pulled. The anchor held (probably assisted by the broad hull resting in the mud) and after a while I could feel a little rocking that told me there was more water under the boat. I had the motor running and put it in gear – forward motion! Yay! I pulled up the anchor and made a turn back toward Devil’s Reach. Thanks – another lesson learned, only 67,481 left in the Intro To Sailing.

The learning curve.

Okay - I've been obsessing about sailing for just about a year now. The last time I owned a sailboat was more than 25 years ago. Last October a friend called with a tip about a boat being auctioned on Ebay - it was in Cape May and slated for destruction if not moved/sold. I got the boat and over the course of the year it has displaced just about everything that previously held my interest. Especially work. Learning about sailboats in general is now beginning to give way to learning about sailing, and I'm looking up the slope of a steep learning curve. I took the boat out single-handed a couple of weeks ago. It was just the second time out under sail. The first was with my friend Milt, who is my primary source for sailboat wisdom. My solo trip was under mainsail alone - not confident enough to try my hand at jib and main. It went well enough until the end. My docking technique continues to evolve, but that evening I ended up in the harbor when I found myself unable to stretch between a boat drifting backwards and the piling I was holding onto. Major Lesson 3A is about having your cell phone in your pocket when you fall into the harbor. (Hint: don't)
Ahh, the expensive lessons that pile up at the bottom of the learning curve. The fifth and most recent trip on the boat was when I took my sister, brother-in-law and nephew out for a couple of hours on the bay.



That sail was fun, though uneventful. Learned about the speed of the current that accompanies the falling tide (fast!) and also that 5 - 10 knots of wind is a bare minimum for the Westwind.
My friends Bob and Anna tell me "The wind and waves favor the skilled sailor" - I'm working on that 'skilled' part, my friends. Still got a ways to go.

Lettuce Zen

If y'all can't forgive me for pulling these old bits out of my journal . . . well, too bad.

Sunday, May 29, 2005
I’m getting this ‘page-a-day’ calendar by email, a Zen stories calendar. This is today’s:

Three wandering monks, Seppo, Ganto and Kinzan, had lost their way while making a pilgrimage through the mountains. Then they spotted a green vegetable leaf floating down a stream, which meant that someone was living up the mountain. But they decided that anyone careless enough to lose one vegetable leaf was not worth meeting. Just then they saw a man with a long-handled hook racing along the stream, looking for his leaf.

“LETTUCE” ZEN

Splash!

Westwind #72 hit the water on Monday. She floats! She crossed the harbor and settled in at her new home with help from my friends Milt and Chuck. She was here in our driveway for just over a month - next to old #13 who has been here for almost a year. Suddenly - because I can't see her from the kitchen window - it seems that we possess her less. I suppose that'll change once we've sailed her. There is still rigging to do, motor controls to organize, dozens of little things . . .

Spiritual GPS???

Okay, my friends, another entry from the journal . . .

Thursday, November 11, 2004 7:34 AM
A little bit of the sleepless-in-the-middle-of-the-night last night, and the ensuing
‘will-I-panic’ thoughts. The time when I’m forced to consider what are the boundaries of the world. What keeps the cart on the track? Day to day, I have nothing but assurance that life is as it should be. It is just those times, usually in the middle of a semi-sleepless night, when I doubt the things that I usually accept. Kind of hard to describe, but the feeling is an irrational fear that none of the things that I know as true will be sufficient to keep me – hold me – in place. ‘Place’ meaning that you are in alignment with all of the connections, assumptions (etc.) that identify the world for you. Almost like you must hold a position in space – like a planet – for the alignment of things to have meaning. If you slip a little out of that alignment the interrelationship of everything is thrown off and then a doorknob is no different from a verb or a cousin or a Christmas morning. What is needed is a serious piece of machinery – a spiritual GPS.
I guess that is what I end up reaching for when I’m thinking of - ?
I think of Dad. I think that, in a way, I carve a little stone god of him – or at least whittle a little wooden god of him – and put it up on the windowsill as a totem or a good luck charm. In the most basic way, I am placing my trust in my idea of him. I am desperately asking him for guidance.
I’m one of those people who begins to gag when I listen to evangelical preachers (or whatever fundamentalist types) talk about that absolute faith in the words written down in the Bible. It all just seems so weak-minded. But in the middle of the night (wow, there’s a metaphor that’s hardly been used) sometimes the mind – the intellect - doesn’t seem like a strong enough - or absolute enough - post to hold onto.