Arachnophilia

I have a new squatter in the yard today, a surprising and impressive addition to the menagerie.

I first noticed the web on the clothesline (yes we are retro) as I was talking to my wife on the porch. My first impression was "What the hell ... ?" When we finished discussing the schedule for the day I got out of my chair and went to take a closer look.

The spider was sitting in the middle of the orb. I saw immediately that she was not the usual type of spider, the yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia), that I see in the backyard. Her legs were shorter and the coloring much different. But she was skittish. She didn't like my magnifying glass at all. Checking the databases later I wasn't sure if she was the spotted orb spider (Neoscona domiciliorum) or the more common cross spider (Araneus diadematus).

But her web just stunned me.

Our clothesline is made of white woven cotton and runs between two pulleys that are six inches in diameter. It cuts across one end of the backyard, from the small porch by the kitchen door to a pole about 30 feet away. It is fairly taut so the six inch gap between the upper and lower run stays consistent.

Her web was constructed in the middle of the line, situated perfectly in an area where the prevailing breezes would guide her prey right into the net. Her web was a more haphazard spiral than the yellows', and there were gaps where prey had struggled. By the size of the holes, I assumed that their struggles were in vain.

But that's not what had surprised me. You see, the web hung suspended from the lower run of the clothesline and was anchored by a single thread to the ground. The distance from the cord to the ground was fully six feet!

In the middle of the night, a small dark spider had climbed the peeling white-painted wooden frame of a kitchen door looking for a place to start the web. She probably hesitated a bit at the vibrations transmitted to the pulley from the light breeze blowing across the cord, but, when nothing threatened, she moved across the pulley and out onto the clothesline glowing whitely in the moonlight.

She carefully moved along the cord. About halfway across, she found a place that suited her. She spun a small amount of silk and attached it to the cotton, then spinning the silk as she went. lowered herself to the ground. She found a stiff stubby stalk of hawkweed, left after a recent mowing, and anchored her silk to it.

Then she climbed back up. For someone of my height, it would be like climbing straight up a 75-foot rope. At the top she moved about two feet further out along the line to attach another line, then walked back and descended the first line spinning her thread all the way to attach the new thread about three feet down. Then she did the same on the other side.

Spiders generally take advantage of the surrounding structures to anchor the main framing cables of their webs, but, for some reason, our little friend decided to do it the hard way. Using the anchor line and the two lines angling down at about 45 degrees to it, she started creating the radii of her web; the non-sticky spokes to hold the sticky spiral.

Every few inches along the huge double triangle she had created, she attached another silk thread then, trailing the silk slackly behind her, walked along the closest path to a point midway between the downward pointing apex and the clothesline, tightened it up and secured it. Then up she climbed back up to do the next line repeating the process until she had nearly 30 spokes. She then created a non-sticky spiral, moving from spoke to spoke with a slack thread then tightening and attaching it.

With this spiral complete, she stopped for a short time, whether to rest or perhaps change the chemistry of her body to produce a different kind of silk. Then using the non-sticky spiral and the spokes as pathways she started to lay down her sticky threads. Sometimes, in the more widely spaced areas she would move back and forth in the same area before moving on to a new one.

Finally done she moved to the center of the web to wait.

By the time I saw her, the web was looking a little ragged. I hope that meant she had eaten well.

I went into my study to try to identify her from my brief glimpse. When I went back out to double check her markings, the breeze had stiffened, her anchor line had parted, the web was gone and she was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps she'll be back tomorrow.

For a more scientific explanation of this impresive feat, you should look at the explanation of web-building by Samuel Zshokke.

For a wonderful and more 'old school' description I suggest one of my heroes Henri Fabre whose description of the process is in "The Life of the Spider" Chapter IX: The Garden Spiders: Building the Web.

On Meeting a Biblioclast

My recent posts about sorting my library reminded me of an incident earlier this year and how, sometimes, people give you no option about how you judge them.

Usually, selling books involves a day trip to New Hampshire. There is a second-hand bookstore on Route 1 that has a wonderful selection and the owner willingly swaps or buys from me. As an added benefit, he has an impressive collection of jazz recordings and it is a delight to listen to Ornette Coleman, Art Tatum or John Coltrane while browsing.

I had a couple of boxes of books in the back of the car. They were just random reading materials, some trade paperbacks, a few hardcovers, nothing extravagant. But time was short. My wife and I decided to take them to a different store in a nearby town.

I had been avoiding this more convenient bookstore for a very simple reason ... it was too damn tempting. The last time I had been there I had seen a nearly complete collection of the works of E. Phillips Oppenheim, and another of Sax Rohmer. The bookseller had huge masses of wonderful old hardcovers and I wanted them all. These are the kind of books that I find very difficult to dislodge from my shelves and the best defense is self-denial, but I had been diligent about my book purchases long enough, so off we went.

I find that the polite thing to do is to leave the books in the car and ask if they are buying books. Some stores have designated hours, others get overstocked and won't buy for a few weeks. So we left the books in the car.

When we entered the shop, I was bothered. Previously this owner had classical music playing quietly, but now the place was filled with the pablum of easy rock and country.

My wife went to browse through the art and children's books while I checked with the owner. He was a new guy in his mid 30s or early 40s, very fit and proud of it since he was wearing his upscale jogging outfit at work. I asked if he was buying any books and the floodgates opened. He informed me that he ONLY bought trade paperbacks, that he ONLY bought them if they were in perfect condition, that he ONLY bought them in small quantities, etc. Then with a sniff, he also informed me that he didn't buy anything that smelled musty, and punctuating with another sniff he informed me that he never bought books from people who smoked.

"I can't sell books that stink," he said, "people won't buy them. So I doubt that I would buy anything you had."

I wasn't going to argue with him. It was, after all, his bookshop. Other bookshops were happy to take my books. I couldn't help tweaking him a bit though.

"When I worked at a rare book library," I told him, "there was an ongoing research project that suggested that tobacco smoke actually worked as a preservative."

At the prospect of my having some real goodies he started to backtrack. "Well bring them in he said, "Maybe there's something that I'd be interested in."

"No," I said, "I'll just see if you have any books worth preserving," and wandered back to the shelves with the goodies I'd lusted for. They weren't there.

"Where are all the hardcovers?" I asked.

He proceeded to tell me in, agonizing detail, that people didn't buy hardcovers anymore, that they smelled funny, that he didn't like having to research their prices, that he didn't want to get cheated out of their true value just because he didn't have time to price them properly, that they smelled funny, that they looked weird ... and on and on.

"So you sold them off?" I asked a little sadly for having missed the opportunity to bid on the little darlings.

"No." he said, obviously proud of his perspicacity and business acumen. "It cost me thousands, but I had them all sorted out and removed."

"Removed?"

"Stacked in boxes and put into three dumpsters."

My face froze. It must have frozen with an ambiguous expression, since he went on happily to tell me that he had donated the contents of the dumpsters to the Boy Scouts. I relaxed briefly. Then he told me, "Those kids made about fifty dollars after they pulped the ugly smelly th ... "

I turned and left to avoid the impulse to punch his face in. I went out to the car and lit a cigarette (just for the benefit of the books in the back seat). A few seconds later my wife exited the shop, and came and sat down with me.

"That's the last time we go to that place," she said. "What an ass." I couldn't help but agree.

The Liberated Library

You might think that I am a bibliomaniac, but that is far from the truth. I am not manic about books. I buy them, sell them, trade them and lend them. I certainly will admit to being a bibliophile, a lover of books.

I have always been a voracious reader, ready to be immersed in the new worlds or alternate visions that books provide. As a writer, I understand that words are a form of power that can be used and abused. So when I find a book that I like, I feel that it imparts some of its power to me. My shelves of books are like my armor, Quixotic armor, rusty and dented, but protective nonetheless.

So disposing of a large part of my library is like stripping away a protective shell, laying myself bare to a world that is not as neatly ordered as my volumes. Like a hermit crab abandoning its shell and trailing its soft abdomen as it searches for another, I feel vulnerable. Unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, I don't particularly want to be a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I will also admit to being a collector. The books that I collect are old, but not necessarily expensive. The most I have ever paid for the books that I collect is about $50, and that one was special since it had the bookplate of its previous owner in it; the previous owner being Harpo Marx. (Which reminds me that his brother Groucho once said that, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark too read."

Some that I own I bought for a few dollars at second-hand bookshops only to find later that they were worth hundreds of dollars. Many of these, although dear to me, will be finding new homes.

I am going to think out loud, so to speak, about the process of culling.

My collection consists of quarto-sized books primarily published by The Bodley Head at Oxford, England or Dodd Meade in the US. They are beautifully illustrated fantasies by Cabell, Anatole France and others. They are staying with me, as are the complete sets of Sir Richard Burton's translation of "A Thousand Nights and A Night" and Fraser's "The Golden Bough".

Much of the poetry will go. The books on technical writing, semiotics, linguistics and much of the science and math will descend into the cardboard purgatory with most of the religion and philosophy.

The reference books stay. So what if I have three rhyming dictionaries ... they stay. The books on colonial history, agriculture and architecture stay.

Most of the novels will go except for those that would be nearly impossible to replace. Probably half the books on design will also find new homes.

The easiest to dispose of and the first to be packed will be the collection of books that I have written. It's not as horrifying as it sounds. I spent many years as a technical writer and wrote hundreds of software manuals, marketing guides, reference books, and contributed papers to many periodicals and proceedings. All of them are outdated and although I am proud of the work, they are now meaningless.

Ah me ... I know that I am doing the logical thing, but my heart disagrees with my head. Logic is like the the curate and the barber in Don Quixote, sorting and consigning the mad knight's books to the fire as he lies sleeping.

"That night the housekeeper burned to ashes all the books that were in the yard and in the whole house; and some must have been consumed that deserved preservation in everlasting archives, but their fate and the laziness of the examiner did not permit it, and so in them was verified the proverb that the innocent suffer for the guilty.

One of the remedies which the curate and the barber immediately applied to their friend's disorder was to wall up and plaster the room where the books (had been), so that when he got up he should not find them (possibly the cause being removed the effect might cease), and they might say that a magician had carried them off, room and all; and this was done with all despatch. Two days later Don Quixote got up, and the first thing he did was to go and look at his books, and not finding the room where he had left it, he wandered from side to side looking for it. He came to the place where the door used to be, and tried it with his hands, and turned and twisted his eyes in every direction without saying a word; but after a good while he asked his housekeeper whereabouts was the room that held his books.

The housekeeper, who had been already well instructed in what she was to answer, said, 'What room or what nothing is it that your worship is looking for? There are neither room nor books in this house now, for the devil himself has carried all away.'"

But this is no destruction. My wife has no kindling at hand. There will be no garden conflagration ... except, perhaps for the trivial instructions I have penned. Although, if they are to burn, it will be by my hand. I will not make a Lady Burton out of her; putting her husband's manuscripts (no matter how trivial) to the torch.

No, these orphan books shall go to good homes, shall be adopted by bibliophiles more settled and secure. I send them off with a quote from Richard LeGallienne:

"Thus shall you live upon warm shelves again,
And 'neath an evening lamp your pages glow."

The Bookman's Melancholy

I am in the process of decimating my library. Actually, it's worse than that. I have had to set myself the goal of reducing my collection of books by at least two thirds.

This is a painful process for someone whose life has always centered around the written word, both his own and others. Don't misunderstand me, I appreciate a good movie, and although I seldom watch television these days, I enjoy some of it quite a bit.

But I grew up with books, and they are my first love. My parents say that I first started to read on my own when I was three-years-old. By the time I was in 5th grade, my bedroom was filled with bookshelves from wall to wall. As a freshman in high school, I was the only person other than the librarians to have a stack pass to the city library. (They told me that it was self-defense since I read so much and such varied subjects that it was easier to let me get my own books than for them to be constantly searching out yet another obscure book.)

The size of my personal library peaked many years ago at about 10,000 or so volumes. Since then I have tried to impose some discipline. Until then, any book that I liked, or thought that I might like better in the future, or that I thought I might need for research, etc. could easily find itself a home on my shelves. Well actually it would have had to be a book that was intolerably bad in some way not to achieve at least a temporary adoption.

These days, I try hard to be diligent about culling but, I probably have over one thousand books in this room alone, and another 500 or so scattered elsewhere throughout the house. Several of my bookshelves are stacked two layers deep.

People don't read as much as they used to, or so I am told. I guess that must be true since even the well-read among my friends are startled by the volume of books on the walls of my study. I must be out-of-date.

I have mentioned before, when in a listing frame of mind, some of the books that live here with me, so I will not revisit them all. But to return to the subject of this blog, I would like to examine here the melancholia of a bookman in the process of divorcing his companions.

Here is, as the King of Siam would put it, a puzzlement. I have three copies of Rabelais' works. Each contains the same text translated by the same translator, yet each has its own unique charm. Which of them shall be sent away, expelled from its place on the shelf? How am I to make a choice?

The first cut is easy. One of the copies is a paperback used only for reading to save wear and tear on the other two. With only a small pang I place the tattered Penguin paperback into the box to be joined later by other outcasts.

But the second choice is hard. The two hardcover books sit next to me as I write, waiting to learn their fate. The smaller is covered in brown cloth with goldleaf title on the spine and an illustration in gold on the front cover. Published by Chatto and Windus in 1879, it contains "numerous" illustrations by the great Gustave Dore. Illustrations even more delightful than those he made for Dante's "Divine Comedy". They are wicked, bawdy, and powerful.



... and yet ...

The book with the red cover has no date on it, but I know that it was published in 1927. It contains the same text, but this one was illustrated by Frank C Pape, an artist now mostly forgotten except by a few fanatics (in whose company I eagerly count myself). He is an illustrator whose delightfully vicious sense of humor was so perfect that James Branch Cabell once wrote him a letter apologizing that his text was no match for Pape's illustrations.



How do I choose between them?

The simple answer is ... I cannot. I place the two books back on the shelf.

My wife comes in to see how my task is progressing. She looks in the box at the single paperback, laughs and shakes her head. She pats me on the shoulder, kisses my on the ear and tells me to keep up the good work.

A bee in the elecampagne

 

Study in Black and White

It's not as if there are only white flowers in my garden, the place is simply awash with color, but for some reason it is the small white flowers that seem to get all the insect attention lately.

The larger birds head for the blueberries, the hummingbirds go straight for the beebalm, but the insects gather on the white blossoms of the garlic chives and the oregano. This is lucky for me since they are planted near the porch, the favorite vantage point of a lazy man.

It's also interesting that there are few bees about. The dominant insects right now are the cabbage butterflies and wasps.

The cabbage butterflies, unwelcome in those years when I plant that type of vegetable, are small and predominantly white with black wingtips and a black spot in the middle of their forewings.

The wasps, as far as my somewhat tentative examination of them reveals, are digger wasps, I assume, from some cursory research that they are a variety of the thread-waisted wasp. They are a steely blue-black.

The two types of insects cohabit the blossoms without any confrontation or irritation, each quietly moving in its own way around the clusters of white flowers. There seems to be no real instinct of territoriality either within or between the species.

Each type of insect provokes a kind of primal, visceral reaction. The fluttering, randomness of the cabbage butterfly seems somehow gentle and clueless. It is hard to think of the butterfly as any kind of threat. Dislodged by a gust of wind, it tumbles across the garden like a scrap of paper, rights itself, seems to shrug fatalistically and bumbles about to find another blossom.

The purposeful, powerful vectors of the wasps are threatening ... no, everything about the wasp is threatening. It's obvious why designers of fighter planes seem to take it as a template. It is a living metaphor for aggression. Its color and shape, the direct and purposeful vectors of its flight are danger incarnate. When the gust of wind dislodges its goofy butterfly neighbor, the wasp is unperturbed. It hunkers down, holds tight and continues to feed no matter how low a bow the flower makes to the wind.

Yet, of the two, the butterfly is the greater threat. Admittedly the wasp will sting if disturbed, but the solution to that is simple ... don't disturb it. It is a predator, but its prey is pestiferous insects that like to eat the same food as humans. The butterfly on the other hand, as gentle and passive as it seems to be, will lay eggs and let its children kill your vegetables and leave you hungry.

Brains and Brawn

In an earlier post I mentioned that we, here in the US, have the luxury of disgust. Our food is pre-processed to the point that we can no longer recognize its origins.

I have been engaged for some time in writing a history of Farmington, Maine in the year 1868, based on the diary of a young lady (who would eventually become my wife's great grandmother) who graduated from the 'normal school' or teachers' college that year.

In the course of my research I have learned a great deal about the daily life of the people I describe in the book. Recently I've been studying their cooking.

One of the books that I have found fascinating is a compendium of facts, processes, and recipes from 1889 written by Barkham Burroughs. I though that I would share some of this lost knowledge with you.

Brawn
Clean a pig's head, and rub it over with salt and a little saltpetre, and let it lie two or three days; then boil it until the bones will leave the meat; season with salt and pepper, and lay the meat hot in a mold, and press and weigh it down for a few hours. Boil another hour, covering. Be sure and cut the tongue, and lay the slices in the middle, as it much improves the flavor.

That is not a recipe for people who sterilize their kitchens after opening a package of plastic-wrapped, skinless, boneless, chicken breasts.

Cardinals Rule

There is a crumbling cement birdbath in the shade of the white pine and the black spruce beside it. In the drowsy warmth of mid-afternoon I watch as a cardinal drops from the skeletal branch of another black spruce, a dead one that I have been too lazy to cut down.

The red dandy lands on the rim. He cocks his head from side to side checking out the neighborhood, but the old black cat is asleep in a puddle of sun, and the dog is too hot to be bothered.

After a wary moment he makes a quick hop forward into the small puddle in the middle of the dish. He flutters a bit with his wingtips low splashing the water about.

After a moment or two, his mate joins him. She stands guard on the rim as he bustles in the water. Then he hops back to the rim to stand guard as she takes her turn. She splashes briefly before a small cluster of chickadees, attracted by the movement, come plummeting out of another nearby tree. She hops back out to the edge, startling them into flight, but they don't go far. They land on the tips of the live spruce, making the branches bounce. They are little balls of black white and brown amidst the green needles like little ornaments.

They dive back singly from time to time, splashing quickly then zipping back up to their perches. Madam Cardinal is not amused and soon leaves the rim for the depths of the pine. Milord, however, stays for a while, seeming to enjoy playing 'boogie man' to the tiny chickadees.

It seems to be mutual, for when he finally flutters up into the branches of the dead tree, the small birds abandon the birdbath too.

The cardinal seems to settle in on his perch his plumage a brilliant contrast to the blue sky behind him and the stark brown of the dead branch. I wonder what he is doing. I get the binoculars.

He is preening, working all of his feathers with his beak. He sits there, grooming himself for at least five or ten minutes, unperturbed by a few visits from his mate who seems to have an "aren't you ready yet?" attitude.

I look away for a minute and when I look back he is gone.

I realize that my observations are simplistic and tend to humanize animal behavior, but I must say that I always admire the seemingly uncomplicated lives of the small creatures in our neighborhood.

An incident like this puts me in mind of a poem that I have always liked.

Lizard
A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
and swirl of a tail!

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they'd be worth looking at.

D.H. Lawrence

True Luxury

These days it must seem a luxury to have a garden, to have enough land to plant and harvest your own vegetables, fruits and berries, but it was not always that way. Not long ago, it was a necessity. Stores and markets were only for those foodstuffs that you could not grow yourself.

If you have an historical bent, and it is focused more on the people and how they lived rather than the big events, this will not be a surprise. Subsistance gardens were the norm except in the depths of cities. Less than 100 years ago, livestock was even found in urban environments with cows, pigs and chickens being raised in Boston, New York City etc.

There are still vestiges of this in the community gardens and victory gardens often found in these cities, although livestock is so uncommon that the appearance of a cow at an intersection in Los Angeles, recently, was a shock to the senses (although her date, David Lynch, might have had something to do with it).

The very idea of buying produce that one could grow was antithetical to the values of those times. Household economists avoided purchasing in favor of cultivating.

But as we became an industrial, then a service, and now an information economy, we have drifted further and further away from the earth. Our fruits and vegetables come from the supermarket with identifying stickers so that the cashiers don't need to identify the unfamiliar, our meat is packaged in plastic, our foods created in huge vats in factories to save us the effort of even having to look at the uncomfortably organic shapes.

So many things now are cookie-cutter; standardized, sanitized, de-scented, bleached, colored, sorted, all to achieve a kind of homogeneity that is not found in nature. Consistency trumps flavor. Sameness is king.

There is a new luxury today, and it is an expensive one. It costs us money, health, and pleasure. It is the luxury of disgust. As corporate farmers and food processors divorce us from our roots, they remove the knowledge of that which sustains our life and substitute a horror of dirt and of nature. The very idea that a caterpillar may have once crawled over the surface of a tomato repulses people. A bird landing on an apple tree makes many people reject the fruit. They should be more concerned when animals refuse to share the food. This is a luxury of deprivation, and I am happy to be deprived of it.

Today my neighbor and I traded produce. She is a sweet lady, in her late seventies, but still active, vital, and to my great benefit, an avid gardener. We both eschew chemical fertilizers and insecticides, so neither of us hesitates about eating the food fresh of the vine or bush. What a delight. She appeared at my door today with four large and gorgeous yellow pattypan squash, and four thin and warty cucumbers. After selfishly slicing a cucumber, adding just a pinch of salt and treating myself to an alfresco lunch on the back porch, I gathered a quart of ripe blueberries for her and left them on her doorstep.

These days many folks think that cucumbers are there merely for texture. They douse them with processed salad dressing to the point that one can no longer taste the vegetable. That is no great loss since the cucumbers one buys from the supermarket are tasteless to begin with. But those from a sun-warmed garden, inconsistent in shape, with warts and mottled skin, have a flavor, one not to be ruined by the violence of modified starches and ersatz "natural flavors" of a supermarket salad dressing.

Perhaps I've been spoiled. I lived in Southern Italy when I was younger. Gardens abounded. Refrigerators were few. You harvested the food for the day, or bought food that had been grown within a few miles. The travesty we know here as Italian salad dressing was nowhere to be found.

To make an Italian salad, one rinsed the leaves of the lettuce to remove the sand and any remaining insect life. You tore the leaves into the proper size, removing areas of brown where some creature had enjoyed a bit of it before you, and made one or two additions; perhaps some olives, some other greens, a slice or two of radish. To dress it was simple. A glug of olive oil a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt. Just enough additional flavor to enhance, rather than disguise the green, crisp, and slightly bitter leaves.

But here, in the US, a salad is most often a mess of sugary glop with chemical flavors hiding a tasteless mound of cloned leaves, genetically altered to repel insects and grow to a uniform shape for easy harvesting.

To me, the perfect taste of summer is the tomato sandwich I learned to make in Naples. Here is the recipe:

Early in the morning (5 or 6 am is best), you walk down to the local bakery and buy a loaf of freshly-baked, crusty Italian bread. Carry it home and put it on the counter to cool. You may want to cover it with a light dishtowel to keep the flies off.

At 1 pm, go into the garden and pluck two ripe sun-warmed tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are best, but they should be real ones, the type that are now called "heirloom" and fetch high prices because they cannot be machine harvested. While you are in the garden, pluck a stem of basil, and, unless you have some in the kitchen, you might as well grab a bulb of garlic.

Back in the kitchen, find the olive oil. Slice the tomatoes into thick slabs. Peel, crush and mince two or three cloves of garlic. Slice about five or ten leaves of basil into thin strips. (You don't need to bother wiping the knife off between jobs ... don't be silly.)

Slice the loaf of bread in half, parallel to its base and open it up. drizzle both halves with a good amount of olive oil and sprinkle the bottom half evenly with the garlic and shredded basil. Lay the tomato slices across it with the slices overlapping slightly. Take a pinch of coarse salt and scatter it over the red surface and place the other half of the loaf on top.

Cut the sandwich in half and place it on a plate. Put a handful of olives next to it. Pour a glass of mineral water with a squeeze of lemon (or if you prefer ... a glass of good Chianti).

Take the plate and glass out to the garden to the chair and small table under the fig tree.

Serves one.

That, my friends, is true luxury.

Darren's challenge

Back when I worked as a technical writer I had an occasional correspondence with Darren Barefoot whose museum of bad technical writing was a lot of fun.

I've been following his blog for a while and today he posed a challenge. Based on James Lipton's final questions on Inside the Actors Studio, he provides his own answers and suggests that others answer the same questions in their blog.

Here are the questions and his answers:

1. What is your favorite word? - Serendipity
2. What is your least favorite word? -Tumour
3. What turns you on? - Originality
4. What turns you off? -Bureaucracy
5. What sound or noise do you love? -The jungle at night
6. What sound or noise do you hate? -A Harley Davidson engine
7. What is your favorite curse word? - Bollocks
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? -Archaeologist
9. What profession would you not like to do? -Surgeon
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? - “Nice work”

Here are mine:

1. What is your favorite word? - Oxymoron
2. What is your least favorite word? - abled
3. What turns you on? - People who enjoy their work
4. What turns you off? - Blind faith
5. What sound or noise do you love? - The song of a mockingbird
6. What sound or noise do you hate? - Sirens
7. What is your favorite curse word? - Godfrey Daniel, Mother of Pearl
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? - Teacher
9. What profession would you not like to do? - Sales
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? - “You're too early.”

If you decide to take the challenge leave me a comment with a link to your blog.

A Garden Spider

To walk out on the crumbling back porch and find that, overnight, a spider has created a huge triangular web anchored to one of the uprights and the roof, is an interesting shock.

It hit me in stages. First, the sheer beauty of the geometry, its symmetry heightened by the droplets of dew which catch the rising sun and sparkle like the hat of Kipling's Parsee, "with more than Oriental splendor." Then, an instant later I was stunned by the size. The main line forming the hypotenuse of the right-triangular construction supporting the orb was nearly four feet long. The orb itself seemed well over two feet in diameter, larger than any web I had previously seen in my yard. A zigzag of bright white silk was scrawled across the center.

The lady was hard to find. but I finally tracked her down in the shadows working on something on the edge of the web. She seemed to be re-anchoring one of the spokes.

With a magnifying glass to aid my old eyes, I saw that my new tenant was large, her body over an inch long, with yellow and black markings on her body and bands on her legs. I don't know a lot about spiders, so I had to refer to my field guides. She was a Black and Yellow Garden Spider, Argiope aurantia, and as I suspected her web was an anomaly, much larger than the usual. No-one knows the purpose of the white zigzag in the middle, called a stabilimentum, though some think that it might be camouflage, but its presence gives this spider one of its common names, "the writing spider".

She was a beauty, and her web an adornment to the porch. I decided to give her a housewarming gift. I remembered that there was a half-dead fly on the kitchen windowsill so I retrieved it with some tweezers. It buzzed fitfully but did not have the energy to escape. Being careful not to damage the web, I placed the fly on one of the sticky strands of the spiral. My hand shook a bit and the spider sensed a threat and curled up nearly invisible in the crack of an upright. After a few moments she unfolded sensing the buzzing of the fly through the tremors in the web and slowly made her way out to investigate.

She paused near it (I can't help but think, a little disdainfully) then moved in to kill and wrap it. Over the next few days she captured a wasp, a few dragonflies and a bumblebee. Sometimes I saw her sitting in the middle of the web and shaking it.

One day I noticed a somewhat pitiful little zigzag structure with a smaller spider in it at the point of one of the triangles. It seemed to use a portion of the garden spider's web as supports. I went back to the field guide to find that it was the male of her species.

I considered giving him a welcome gift, but when a slight breeze tweaked the web, he dove off the web trailing a silk line like a kind of arachnid bungee jumper. I decided that he was too skittish and I didn't want to give him the spider equivalent of a heart attack.

The following week I was walking past the porch and saw the female sitting in the middle of the orb. Thinking that she must have caught something I went to investigate ... but there was no prey. I wondered what she was doing. Suddenly she moved and a small dark blur streaked across the web. When it came to rest, I saw that it was the male.

I brought a stool out from the kitchen so I could sit with a good view to enjoy some hot spider sex.

Slowly the male retraced his steps. He was plucking at the web, perhaps to signal that he was not prey. When he climbed onto her it was impossible to see him against her coloring, but I didn't want to get the magnifying glass or get too close. I was afraid that even my breath might disturb them.

She moved again, and again the male made a dash for safety. At least a dozen times I watched the same scenario. Once, after a particularly sudden movement on her part, the male just dropped to safety on his silk line.

Finally I saw him move slowly away from her, retreating slowly up her web towards his own. Like a flash she turned, and bit, then, not even bothering to wrap him, sat and quietly fed.

Some days later I noticed three egg sacs suspended near the middle of the orb. They were a little more than a half inch in diameter.

My references tell me that she did this at night. She made a sheet from her silk, laid the eggs on it, then tucked them in under another sheet. She covered them further with a protective blanket of brown silk and formed the whole thing into a small ball. Each sac, according to my sources, contains as many as a thousand eggs. I'm sorry that I didn't see it.

A few days later there was a thunderstorm in the middle of the night with heavy wind and pelting rain. The next morning the web, the egg sacs and the spider were gone.

I looked around for a while, hoping to rescue the eggs, but they had disappeared completely.

Dragonflies

I am sitting on the porch this morning in the early morning sun. The dog, as usual, curled up nearby, my wife is still asleep, as is my youngest son.

The latter works for a major caffeine pusher, so the coffee I'm drinking is particularly good I am enjoying the dark, rich bitterness of something poetically called Komodo Dragon as I listen to the birdsong and watch the shadows ooze slowly across the shaggy grass and the flower beds.

It's warm and not yet humid, but I can feel the potential for a muggy day on my skin. In its way it is a perfect moment of pleasure.

It occurs to me that it might help people visualize the scene if they knew what I look like. I am a big man though not tall. I am what you might, diplomatically, refer to as "burly" ... barrel-chested, a bit heavy, everything about me, everything that you can see that is, is a bit over sized. Legs, feet, arms, hands, fingers, head, all seem a little large. My shaggy, graying, black hair (well overdue for a trim) is thinning a bit on the top, and I have a full, mostly gray, beard. (When I let my beard grow and wear a hat I can easily be mistaken for a Hasid.) Today I am wearing denim shorts, a short-sleeved olive-drab shirt and a pair of cheap sandals.

The porch that I am on is a mess. The paint is peeling and some of the floorboards are rotting. It reminds me that the roof needs repair and that there is a dead pine that needs to be cut down. Having acknowledged my failure as a handyman, I put the thought of repairs out of my mind and just enjoy the sun and the sound and movement of wind, branches and birds. In spite of all the motion and sound it is a kind of stillness. I am absorbing the day like a sponge.

But then ... 

A small, swift motion catches my eye. A tiny flicker of brilliance flashes in the sun. It darts this way ... stops ... then that way ... then, in a fraction of a breath, it leaps towards me and lands on my bare knee.

It is a dragonfly. It is about two and a half inches long and an iridescent blue. Its transparent wings, wings that look too fragile for flight, quiver briefly and then go still as it sits quietly in the patch of sun on my right knee. An instant later, seemingly from out of nowhere, my left knee is similarly adorned with another jewel-like insect, but this one is green.

It has been a wonderful summer for dragonflies. They are everywhere. They flit across the gardens and sun themselves on the clothesline and in the bare dead branches that I have not yet pruned from the small beach plum tree in the middle of the yard. A few days ago there were so many of them on the little tree that it looked like it was jeweled. Intense flashes of green, blue and red covered every branch.

They are so beautiful and inoffensive. They seem the gentlest of creatures, but there is an interesting dark side to them as well.

Some years ago my oldest son and his cousin went off one morning with a bucket to gather creatures from a local pond. They came back with a few small minnows, some tadpoles, and an odd but dangerous-looking water bug with bulbous eyes and nasty-looking jaws. This last creature lurked in the bottom of the bucket. Quite an interesting haul, and they displayed their collection to me proudly.

The boys put the bucket outside the back door while we had lunch at the kitchen counter. We heard some splashing. "The fish are trying to escape," said my son, and went out to check on them. He came back in a moment later, eyes wide.

"Dad," he said, "You gotta see this."

The bucket was empty except for the bug which was near the surface and looking very much like an H.R. Giger alien. Small fragments of tadpole and fish drifted around it, slowly sinking to the bottom.

We got out our tattered and stained natural history guide. It took a while, but we finally found that the voracious little monster-bug was a dragonfly nymph, an aggressive predator that eats other insects in the water (including each other), small fish and tadpoles. They catch their food with a toothed lower lip that shoots out in a flash to grab its prey and pull it back to the rest of the waiting mouth.

I bet Giger knew about them.

What’s interesting about the Dragonfly Nymph?

What's amazing is that most of the dragonfly's life is spent in this form, eating and moulting for years before crawling out of the water and moulting one last time to become the delicate creature that sits on my knee.

Even as an adult they are predators though. Now their prey is smaller, mosquitoes, gnats and other small flying insects.

Richard Feynmann in his book "The Joy of Finding Things Out" talks about how knowing how things work adds to the aesthetic enjoyment of their beauty. I must admit that knowing the yin and yang encompassed by the life of this flying jewel makes my delight at having one on each knee in the early morning sun all the greater.

Tea break

At this time of year the sun rises from directly behind the white pine in the corner of our backyard. It is a large tree for a suburban yard, nearly 30 inches in diameter at the base. The trunk rises straight for about 25 feet and then changes direction back and forth slightly.

It is at those points that the sun casts puddles of light through the branches and needles onto the porch. That warmth of sunlight on my denim-clad knees is a pleasure, and when the sun hits the porch, Penny, my old English setter wanders out of the house and curls up at my feet to enjoy it.

This morning is particularly nice. Just before dawn it rained, but now the sky is clear and blue with an occasional cotton candy wisp of cloud. When the sun is masked by the trunk of the tree, it causes an interesting effect. A light breeze will rustle the long needles of the pine and a small rainstorm will occur as the tree sheds the rainwater. The drops would be nearly invisible from this distance at any other time, but from this vantage point they form bright lines in the shadow of the tree and against the backdrop of a palisade fence.

The perfect drink for watching this little light show is a black Chinese tea called Pu Ehr. The reason for this match is a combination of sight, smell, and taste. The drops of rain being shed and the smell of the soaked earth drying in the sunlight provide a sensory complement to the dark richness of the tea.

Pu-Ehr has a rich, dark, earthy taste which comes from being fermented, molded into blocks and then buried underground to mature. Its flavor makes me want to walk on freshly tilled soil in my bare feet.

Don't misunderstand. I am not a tea connoisseur, the tea I'm drinking cost me a couple of dollars at an Asian market. I'm just sitting here enjoying myself.

The Problem With Blueberries

The problem faced by someone who is both a sensualist and a writer is that is difficult to fully convey the deeply subjective sensual reaction in a universal way. One common method is to assume that everyone for whom you write is familiar with that which you describe. This method lets you take a shortcut. You merely highlight the differences between an assumed standard and that which you are currently describing.

If I say that the blueberries that I picked today are sour, I assume that you know they should be sweet. I could even say that I am implying that they should be sweet since I have chosen to tell you that sour is a departure from the norm. This lets me write tersely and dismiss the subject with a few lines. But it doesn't help someone who has no experience of blueberries, or has only experienced them as chemical or sugar enhanced flavor bombs in processed foods.

This is fine if your thesis is not the blueberries, but the development of some other subject or a plotline. But it does do a disservice to that portion of your audience who wonder what a blueberry is, or, worse yet, think that they are those crunchy sweet things distributed among the flakes of their cereal.

Another common method is to use a synesthetic approach, as oenophiles do, relating the flavor and texture to other things. This is an approach that can easily be abused, leading to meaningless phrases like "they taste like the open sky on a cloudless day;" a pretty sentiment that will mean nothing to someone who lives and breathes in Los Angeles. I see far too much of this sort of folderol and can only hope that overuse of it will lead to the revocation of the writers' poetic license.

I do understand why writers take those approaches. It is hard to put sensation into words in a truly meaningful way. Truth be told, I have used both methods myself. Although they leave me dissatisfied, I have to work with what I have.

Enough of this preface.

There are two general types of blueberry bushes, both bearing the dangerous sounding genus and section of Vaccinium Cyanococcus . The low-bush, as should be explicit in its name, grows low to the ground and bears small berries with intense taste. When I lived in Vermont, I used to gather these blueberries from a series of patches that grew along the fence-line separating the meadows where the cows grazed, from the woodlot. 

Harvesting these small dusty blue globes, about the size of large green peas, required kneeling in the deep grass and wildflowers and sidling on your knees along the row, and because of their small size it took a long time and much wear and tear on the joints to harvest a bucketful. But they were worth the effort.

In my backyard these days, up against the house, there is a large Northern High-bush blueberry (Vaccinium Corymbosum). The flowers are bell-shaped and white with a tinge of green. Each year it bears an extraordinary amount of large, sweet, juicy blueberries, and though I have to battle the birds for my share, there is always plenty.

The high-bush does not require the same type of obeisance. Even the lower branches are easily reachable for an old codger like me. The berries are the same dusty blue color, but they are larger, just a little smaller than a small green grape.

To visualize the size better, a low-bush berry would fit on a dime with room to spare, High bush berries will vary between the size of a nickel and a quarter.

Blueberries grow in clusters, often hiding beneath small canopies of leaves, and each of the berries in the cluster ripens at a different time. They have a flaring "crown" at the end opposite the stem. After the flowers fall away, the small pale green green berries appear. They increase in size then darken to a reddish-purple, then finally ripen to a dark purple almost black, with a dusty outer coating that makes them look blue. Once they start to ripen in mid-July, I can harvest about one and a half to two quarts daily for more than a week.

A ripe blueberry pulls from its stem with just the gentlest of tugs. If there is any resistance, I leave it for the next day or for the catbirds (who aren't so picky about ripeness). If I turn one of these resistant berries over (being careful not to pull it off) it will show dark red perhaps even fading to white at the base of the stem showing that it is not yet ready.

The real trick in harvesting blueberries is the part where you try to transfer them into the bucket. Since I have a heavy beard, duct-taping my mouth shut is not a good option. Having my wife standing near me smacking the back of my head every time my hand moves in the wrong direction helps a bit but futile. The only real solution is to have a very small bucket and a very large crop.

Luckily ... I have both.

This brings us to the hardest part of my description, the sensation of blueberry. It is a difficult task because the environment is such an important factor.

As you may have gathered, I prefer my blueberries as close to their natural state as possible. Syrups, jams, pancakes and muffins are fine, but there is nothing like the berry itself in its unadorned richness.

Hot Blueberries

It is a hot, brilliant day; one that makes me think of the line from Leonard Cohen's song Suzanne, "... and the sun pours down like honey on Our Lady of the Harbor." It is over 90 degrees and even the birds refuse to venture out of the shade of the evergreens. I am in shorts and the thinnest rattiest t-shirt I own, already soaked with sweat from the effort of picking up an empty coffee-can. I'm wearing sandals and the dry grass tickles my bare toes.

I reach up and pluck a blueberry from a high branch and pop it in my mouth. It is even hotter than the air around it since its dark color has been absorbing the rays of the sun for hours.

I roll it around in my mouth savouring the feel of its roundness, the tickle of the crown against my tongue, the slight salt from the sweat of my fingers. Then I position it between my front teeth and bite down. The skin of the berry ruptures flooding my mouth with the juice and pulp.

The explosion of sweetness dominates the initial experience. It is a burst of energy and temporary pleasure against the tastebuds. But as the shock of sugar fades, I sense a slight tartness, a gently touch against the side of my tongue and a sort of astringent quality that you taste in wine. These last two qualities are, for want of a better term, thirst quenching.

But there is another flavor lurking and it starts to dominate. It is a sensation at the back of the tongue, almost in the throat. I open my mouth and breathe in a mouthful of the hot moist air, and now the taste is more defined. There is a roundness to it and a complexity. This is the true flavor and the one that is so difficult to describe without resorting to synesthesia.

It is a blue taste. A taste so perfectly matched to the color of the berry that it nearly makes me believe in a cosmic designer ... nearly. It is as blue as chocolate is brown, with similar qualities of dark richness, but where chocolate seems redolent of earthy warmth, the taste of blueberry is lighter, more evanescent, more aerial.

It tastes of a hot summer day.

Cold Blueberries

It is drizzling and the cold front has brought a fog. Everything is soaked. The ground is soggy, the cuffs of my bluejeans are saturated and swing heavily against my ankles like a bell against its clapper. My shoes and socks are so wet that every time I change my position they squelch.

Every leaf on the bush is dripping. Each berry glistens with a moist mist kiss. A breeze rustles the branches and I get an impromptu shower. A trickle runs down my collar causing a brief shudder.

I reach up and pluck a blueberry. It comes loose freely, but even the slight tension causes another cascade of droplets from the leaves.

I pop it in my mouth and roll it around, enjoying the wetness of the accumulated mist; marveling at its cold smoothness and its rough crown.

I crush it between my front teeth. The cold delays, for an instant, the rush of sweetness and, by the time it comes, the astringency is already in place.

Even slower to emerge is the back of the throat richness of the berry, but soon enough ... there it is, darker and richer for the cold, and slower to dissipate. This time the flavor seems to move, starting in the back and flowing forward, bathing the entire tongue with its depth.

It tastes of a foggy summer day.

I have my poetic license right here officer. When will I get it back?

An Editorial Limerick

The editor stood there and blinked
At the author whose lips were all tinct-
ured with black.
Then, taken aback,
Said, "That's not what I meant by succinct."

 

Simplicity

While in Seattle recently, I was at one of the best bookstores I know, the Elliot Bay Bookstore.

In the store there is a sign posted prominently. It says ...

Children left unattended will be given a cup of espresso and a puppy.

Primroses

I was sitting on the back porch in shorts and a t-shirt this morning. It cooled down overnight from yesterday's muggy high 90s. A cup of coffee was close at hand, and my nerves were twitching for the ritual of the cigarette (which I have once again pushed away from).

I fidgeted, irritated by the fact that I was irritated by my attempt to break an expensive and anti-social habit. I brought the dog's attention to a squirrel on the fence and urged her into action, then immediately got surly when she would not stop barking at the place it had been.

The time that I miss smoking the most is when I write. Right now, for example. Smoking provides a ritual pause a time for thinking and gathering oneself together. To be literary about it, the cigarette ritual is like a comma, a brief pause, mental punctuation.

It is not the health risks that have inspired me to give up this comfort, it is the mess. I've emptied one ashtray too many. I can't have a fan going or the ashes get spread around my study, and the type of cigarettes I smoke are too expensive for me to be able to justify.

But that's not what I'm supposed to be writing about. It's just an extended explanation of why I was irritable and out of sorts, and how something small changed my mood.

I have a pleasantly large back porch. It was screened once, but now it is merely a wooden platform covered by an extension of the house roof. It needs painting and the wood is so old that the heads of the nails protrude above the surface. It's about two feet higher than the backyard which gives Penny the ability to leap joyfully as she launches her pursuit of anything smaller than herself.

I am sitting on this porch hair and teeth unbrushed, toes starting to roast in the puddle of sunlight that has sieved through the branches of the large white pine. Two inches from my toes is a small stand of evening primroses. I decide that they are open during the day by design ... just to irritate me further.

The primrose flowers consist of four overlapping bright yellow petals with a notched outer edge. I wonder if I could use the term 'bi-lobal' but I haven't the desire to do the research. Dark creases radiate from the center of the flower up each petal but disappear before they get to the edge. In the center eight stamen stand surrounding an X-shaped stigma. A pleasant enough looking blossom and at the very least admirable for its having volunteered its way into my yard.

And, as I said, a small stand of them were moving and bumping in the morning breeze a few inches from my bare toes. I idly stared at them trying to avoid thinking of my self-imposed fast. Suddenly a dark object plopped into one of the larger blossoms, increasing the sway and setting off a chain reaction in the blossom siblings, caroming brightly in the sunlight. It was a small bee which seemed to have landed awkwardly.

As I watched, the small insect righted itself and walked out to the edge of a petal. The petal promptly folded inward depositing the intruder on its back at the base of the stamen. The bee righted itself again and once more tried to walk to the edge with the same results.

The bee apparently stood for Buster Keaton, as the hapless insect repeated its actions with tenacity. Finally it seemed to have given up (what was it that was so attractive about the edge of the petal anyway?) and instead started climbing the stamen ... up one, down the other, up the next, fall off, choose another randomly. Up ... down ... up ... fall ... up ... fall ... up ... down ... up ... fall ... The bee's manic but inept concentration seemed to be similar to a drunk person trying to climb a flight of stairs or get a key into a keyhole.

I suddenly realized that the little thing had never seemed to stop long enough to get any nectar. It seemed to be fascinated by the swings and roundabouts and uninterested in gathering nectar and flying home.

Eventually it lay, either exhausted or in a stupor at the base of one of the petals. A few moments later, a gust tipped the flower and Buster rolled out of the blossom and hit the ground. I leaned over the edge of the porch to watch.

He righted himself, preened a bit, and took off heading for parts unknown.

I reached for my coffee and suddenly realized that, at least for the moment, my craving for a cigarette was gone.

A Stone

There was this young farmer, Jacob, who married his sweetheart, Amanda. They lived in happy poverty living hand to mouth, one season to the next. The land was poor and they could barely feed themselves. But they subsisted.

Until one day Amanda felt ill. Days went by, then weeks and she felt no better. Jacob sacrificed one of his precious hens to pay the doctor to come. It was congestion of the lungs said the doctor. Get some of this medicine in town. But they had no money to buy the drug. Amanda grew weaker and one night died in her sleep.

He buried her out in the meadow beyond the orchard. He sold all her clothes and the things she had owned and finally managed to scrape together enough money to have a headstone made.

Jacob grew bitter. For want of money he had lost that which was most precious to him. He made no vow. He did not shake his fist at God. But he changed. Scrimping took over his life. He spent little on himself and saved what money he could in stashing it in hidey holes throughout the house. He made the farm pay through hard work, but any profit went into the secret caches.

Many years later, Jacob found himself attracted to a local widow. He cleaned himself up and went courting. He was tired of living alone with nothing but fields, animals and an empty house.

Elizabeth was near his age, her children were old enough to be helpful in the farm work. Did she find him attractive? Did they fall in love? Perhaps. Back then marriage was not always as romantic as we imagine.

They did seem to be comfortable with each other, but there was a problem. She knew of his miserliness. He persuaded her that he could change. After some thought, she decided that it would do no harm to look at the house that she might choose to live in.

Jacob had scrubbed and cleaned the place inside and out. It may have been bare, but it was clean. Elizabeth arrived with her father and the two of them looked the place over.

"Very well, said she, next week I shall bring the rest of my family here and I shall prepare them a meal in your kitchen. Here is the list of things I shall need.

Jacob looked at the list. Most of the provisions could be had in his own pantry and cellar. The few he did not have would not be too expensive.

"I will make biscuits," she said. Jacob blanched. To make biscuits she would need a baking stone in the oven. During the cleaning the old one, unused for many years, had shattered. When he went to town the next day, he gathered the other provisions he needed, but the baking stone was so expensive. How much did he want this? Which was dearer to his heart ... love or love of money?

The following week Elizabeth arrived early in the morning. Jacob had the wood stove going. She cooked as he set the table. After everything was almost complete, she rolled out the biscuit dough scored it with a knife and put it in the oven on the stone.

People started arriving. Jacob seated them and helped carry out the feast. The last to be brought out was the large unbroken sheet of biscuits.The family tucked in. Then one of Elizabeth's young sons noticed something.

There's a pretty pattern on the bottom of the biscuits, he said. He reached over and flipped the sheet of biscuits over. It took a moment for them to puzzle it out since the writing was backwards. It said

To the
Blessed Memory
of
Amanda
Wife of Jacob

Some thoughts on belief

Belief is a curious thing. Essentially it is a codified set of prejudices about the world.

I don't use the term prejudice as a negative here. What I mean is a set of assumptions that a person does not want to challenge. And I am not getting all "holier than thou" either (if you'll excuse the use of the phrase), I am quite aware of the masses of material that I take on faith.

Everyone has prejudices ... everyone. Whether they are true or false, whether deity centric or logic centric, there are large portions of our life individually and communally that we do not challenge with analysis.

We look at a glass and think, "it's empty", not "it's full of air". The best science teachers struggle constantly to break the preconception that air is nothing. The Annenberg Project has an excellent documentary on the continuing failure to actually get students to understand photosynthesis and the students' belief, even past graduation from MIT, that a plant gets its building materials from the water and nutrients in the soil. (Okay, everybody who had to rethink or look up photosynthesis raise your hands ... oh right ... I'm talking to a bunch of geniuses am I?)

We accept black boxes, cars we cannot build, cell phones we cannot diagram the electronics for. We accept their operation on faith. How many people are reading this note of mine who could read and understand the diagram of a computer chip. We are told that the circuits are logical ... and we believe it. We believe because it works and because we don't want to spend the time that it would require to find out for ourselves.

Sometimes that leap of faith pushes logic. Think of the faith in technology (or perhaps in humanity or even a deity) that would let some one strap themselves to a block of metal weighing several tons in the expectation that it will soar thousands of feet above the earth and land thousands of miles away. An aeronautics engineer will know the science. But most others have to use shared experience not knowledge.

I remember reporting aboard an aircraft carrier and hesitating on the pier knowing that the damn thing weighed 95,000 tons. My gut told me that it shouldn't float but my brain (and fear of prison) persuaded me that it did.

Belief, in and of itself, is not bad. It lets us concentrate on what's important to us and leave the rest to people who are interested in it. I don't want to know about the engineering of the aircraft, I merely want to get on it in Boston with the expectation of getting off it in Seattle. I don't need to know the cavitation of the screws of the ship to realize that I'm on the equivalent of a very large office building that is traveling at more than 50 mph.

So if someone who knows nothing about chaos theory wants to describe Hurricane Katrina as an "Act of God" rather than an "Act of Butterfly" I don't see that it makes much difference. Whether your belief is couched in technical terms or religious terms it is still belief.

... AND THAT'S NOT A BAD THING DAMMIT!!!

What is bad, is when you let your belief in stuff that you don't want to understand take over your life. The perversity of people continues to amaze me. The fact that they will turn around and say. Gosh I don't know anything about this so I'll do anything that anyone who claims to know about it says.

I'm not just talking about religion guys. You can make that connection yourselves. I'm talking about cell phone and MP3 players and computers and cars. I find it touching, for example, to see the simple yet transcendent joy in a teenager's face when gazing upon the glory that is iPod. It is the one true iPod and thou shalt have no others before it. All their friends have iPods, so it must be the right, the true, the only way. "Suffer the little children to MP3." All other forms of music are anathema.

Look at advertising. Talk about faith-based initiatives. An auto ad touts the speed. Can you drive that fast? No. But wouldn't it be nice to know that you could! We'll just wear the speed limits like the chains of martyrdom around our necks. Ooooh this detergent gets things whiter than white ... that beer will help me get friends ... 

But the total rejection of belief is as unbalanced as the total acceptance of it.

Our minds, all of them, are hybrids of what we believe and what we know. Often, belief and knowledge exist in dynamic opposition, providing us with two interpretations of the same thing.

We can believe that a hole is empty, and know that it is full of air. We can believe that the stars twinkle, know that it is just an effect of the atmosphere, then be bemused to find out that the light of some stars varies as its planets block its light. I believe that my car works properly, because I don't know how it works and I can't prove that everything is functioning as it should.

This balance always exists. It has to. Belief is at the basis of discovery just as it is often at the basis of the rejection of discovery. Knowledge comes from the successive proving of a chain of beliefs. A scientist believes something to be true and sets out to prove it. If he does, then it becomes knowledge, if he proves it untrue, it does not. Scientists are just people who can believe more creatively and extravagantly than other people.

But, in a way, scientists have it easy. They have a kind of call and response way of dealing with the world. The difficulty comes when you are dealing with the unprovable, those beliefs that are not subject to evidence.

Gods were created as a catch-all explanation for the unexplainable, for things that our ancestors could not understand. George Gamow in his book "1-2-3 Infinity" derives the title from the counting used by a tribe of hunter-gatherers who felt that it was unnecessary to count higher than three. Their numbers were 1, 2, 3, Many. To them, many was infinity, a number which stood for all those other numbers for which they had no names, and for them it was sufficient.

God is infinite. God is our "many". The concept that stands for everything we know is there and yet cannot be proved because we don't have the capacity or the tools. Does that mean that those things aren't there or cannot be proved? I'm sorry, I don't have the capacity or tools to answer that, but I do know that there is more to know, and I don't care what you call it.

Okay, I'm rambling a bit, so let me wander back on to the topic. The problem is not belief but, as I mentioned before, "blind faith".

Blind faith is such a wonderfully appropriate term. I see it as an atrophying of the ability to perceive anything but what is pointed to, as if you were an old carthorse wearing blinders. (A particularly potent image for those of us gifted with Hunter Mind ... ADD to the rest of you.)

If it were not so pervasive throughout history, I would suggest that it is a reaction to the stress of the info age, a way to let someone else take the burden of understanding. People who suffer from this form of mental atrophy seem tired of having to think, extrapolate, make decisions, and discover. They want to be led.

Is it any wonder the degree of vitriol they can spew when an article of faith is challenged. To argue logically seems beyond their capacity. Their vehemence born of the fear that all might not be as they have been told. Most people don't subscribe to "blind faith". Unfortunately, some of the loud people do.

Those of blind faith believe that "every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill laid low" without considering what it would do to the ecosystem and the economics of ski resorts. The sameness, the lack of surprises, comforts them and they "like sheep" desire only an immense sameness of flat pasture.

What a drab and boring place it would be if everyone on earth were just like us, believed like us, knew like us, acted like us, etc. It sounds an awful lot like a kind of Hell. Give me people who think I'm a pinko commie scumbag, or need the services of a mental health professional and are willing to argue. Give me diversity. Diversity is fun.

Environment

It's odd to become aware of one's own inconsistencies. 

I'm sitting here avoiding cleaning my desk and the sheer oddity of the paraphenalia scattered across it strikes me as worthy of a line or two.

The bulky stuff is, these days, probably common to most writers. From left to right it consists of: 

• A printer
• The left speaker of a pair
• A black riser that my laptop lurks under and that supports ...
• A monitor and
• A desk light
• The right speaker of a pair (Pandora Radio is playing Brubeck through them)
• A table lamp

Pretty consistent so far, right? But wait. Going back to  the left:

• A staple gun
• A short stack of books consisting of Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds
• A stack of CD-Rs in jewel cases containing backed-up data topped by one of the pair of disks of Janis Ian's concert album Working Without a Net
• Two packages of origami paper
• A small spiral-bound notebook
• A stack of music CDs consisting of:

• Fretwork - Purcell: The Fantazias and In Nomines
• Dave Brubeck Trio and Gerry Mulligan - Live at the Berlin Philharmonie
• Michaela Petri and Keith Jarrett - Handel: Recorder Sonatas -
• Louis Prima - Let's Swing It
• The Love Dogs - Heavy Petting
• Nickel Creek - Nickel Creek
• Wendy Carlos - The Well-Tempered Synthesizer
• Chuck Brown and Eva Cassidy - The Other Side

• An almost empty pack of Djarum Lights
• A large and bulky computer headset
• A disposable cell-phone
• A stapler
• A netsuke of rats on a bag of grain
• A small semi-functioning digital camera
• Another short stack of books consisting of: a 1966 Indian cookbook and O'Reilly's HTML Pocket Reference
• A small stone ashtray sits on top of the books with the last cigarette from the now empty pack fuming in it.
• A disposable lighter
• A pack of small post-its used for bookmarks
• A coaster advertising the last high-tech firm I worked for full-time with the remains of an iced four-shot Americano on it
• An brown ceramic jar that once held preserved Tien-tsin vegetables that now is overstuffed with an assortment of pens and pencils
• Two stray pens
• A Petersen System full bent tobacco pipe
• A can of Frogmorton tobacco
• A Leatherman pocket tool
• A full pack of Djarum lights
• A stack of random papers that I WILL get to eventually held in place by a Japanese cast-iron turtle paperweight.
• A pair of broken reading glasses