The joy of blustery days

The edge of Jose swirls warm and damp through the trees here in New England, whipping the top branches into frenetic dancing while the more sedate lower limbs sway quietly. I am glad that the storm did not hit directly, but I am also glad that the bluster of weather outside gives me an excuse to sit and work.

I was once a technical writer and my work consisted almost entirely of sitting in front of a screen, much as I am right now, testing software, finding my way through processes, and writing down the steps and explanation that others could use to make the program work properly. There is an art and skill that is unique to the field and a took a great deal of pride knowing that I was good at it and that those who worked for me were even better. I'm sure many who knew me then would be bemused by what I'm working on now.

When I'm done posting this, I'll shove my computer to the back of the big oak library table that is my work space, turn on the speakers and as I listen to Silly Wizard, The Chieftains, De Dannan, and Iona, I'll set up my bench hook, untie my tool roll and continue work on a basswood bas-relief of a sparrow perched on a leafy twig. My knives, chisels and gouges are sharp, the mallet that I carved out of a holly trunk will be at my right all of the sharp stuff to the left ... and that's me gone for the next few hours.

I'm not a very good carver (a fact underscored by the failed figures of foxes, birds, and buddhas that perch here and there on my bookshelves) but I'm trying and it's good for my head. As an added bonus my grandchildren seem delighted to watch the progress and are wonderfully forgiving of my errors.

I think today I'll start with Silly Wizard's "If I were a blackbird".

Redivivus

Well it seems that i have taken a four year sabbatical from blogging here. Prodded by a dear online friend I will start being more diligent.I have started other blogs but, as is usual for one of my distractible persuasion, have let them fall into disuse. I shall therefore combine any useful or interesting stuff into either this site or my autobiographical IDKIIRC site, and retire the others.

I have received several messages about Meera Collier's reposting of my 9/11 piece, and I thank you for your comments.

The Pleasures of Anglophilia

When I was in high school (several millenia ago), a cute exchange student appeared one fall. Her name was Penelope and she was English with blond straight hair, green eyes and a fantastic figure. She dressed modestly, unlike most of her classmates who were typical Harvard Square hooligans. I, for example, commonly wore black jeans, engineer boots, black turtleneck and a blue Oxford cloth button-down shirt. The engineer boots were my personal modification to the intellectual thug uniform.

At that time, Rindge Technical School was across a small park from Cambridge High and Latin. Sitting in the middle of the park was the Cambridge Public Library. Although the true thugs from Rindge (things are often black and white to teenagers) we CHLS students rarely ventured past the library into terra incognita.

One day I approached a small hormone addled mob of boys in this park. A horde of hesitantly hovering bees humming around the flower that was Penny. The difference between them and me was that I was meeting her there to take her for a walk. Desperately trying to look cool and unconcerned the boys chatted to each other about how they did in the swim meet, or the riot in the lunch room last week.

I stood back a little waiting and admiring how her yellow dress, which was far too frilly for the current styles, set off her hair and eyes. Penny noticed me just as one poor guy, in a desperate bid to attract attention through sympathy, started to complain about the unfair marking of the last history test. He got a response from Penny, but not what he was expecting. After listening to him moan and groan for a minute or two she said offhandedly,

"Oh for God's sake. Keep your pecker up."

The sudden silence was amazing, as was the rising blush on the faces of the other boys as they slithered off in disbelief.

"What did I say?" she asked me. An anglophile even then, I knew what that what she'd said was "keep a stiff upper lip" or as some would say these days "man-up". I very diplomatically hinted at possible other interpretations. She laughed.

"What a bunch of wankers," she said.

I agreed, and we walked down to the Charles River to ... ummm ... discuss it in more detail.

The Leather Nun

I was in Milwaukee working for the federal government from 1972-76. My salary was so low that my family would have qualified for food stamps except that, at the time, government employees were excluded. I also couldn't afford a good place to live. So I ended up in a cross between a tar paper shack and four unit apartment building on Pulaski St., with a hooker in the other second floor apartment a trash collector directly below us and a family of Gypsy women in the fourth unit.

My wife found this unwholesome, so I took out a loan and moved us out to West Allis to an apartment complex that looked like a cross between a minimum security prison and a strip mall. Suddenly, shortly after our second child was born, I came home to find her packing. She was moving back to the East coast with the kids. She was leaving immediately.

After terminating the lease, I moved to a tiny apartment (I hadn't known that Murphy beds still existed) a few blocks from my office on North Prospect Street near Lake Michigan. I moved in with a couple of stacks of books, a couple of changes of clothing, some discount willow pattern china, a wok and a rice pot.

I wasn't done with my marriage, and I've always been a little too honorable for my own good. So instead of searching for love, I just searched for companionship. I just needed some good company. One of the people I found was Franz. On the weekends I earned some extra spending money by doing tarot readings (I used the now out-of-print Hurley-Horler deck if you're interested) and Franz owned an occult book shop, where he let me ply my trade.

Franz also studied the art of saber fencing, and introduced me to live war-gaming with BB guns goggles and heavy clothing in the maze-like tunnels and passages under the two or three blocks surrounding the store. This may seem somewhat advanced for 1973 or 74, but remember this is the city that hosts The Safe House bar.

One day Franz introduced an attractive lady in her mid 20s. She was about 5'6" and slender with short curly blond hair and wore a white cotton shirt tucked into Levis and engineer boots. I couldn't help but notice that she wasn't wearing a bra ... probably because her shirt was unbuttoned halfway to her belt buckle.

"This is The Leather Nun," he informed me and laughed as my expression must have shown a bit of disbelief. "You'll figure it out," he chortled as he walked away.

"Did you want a reading?" I asked, confused.

"No, I need a date."

"I'm sorry, I'm a married man," I explained, somewhat ruefully. As I said, she was quite attractive.

"Unavailable," she said, "but without any current family duties."

I shot Franz a glance but he was feigning innocence and pretending to arrange the shelves.

"Well ... yes?"

"Then you'll be perfect," she said. "Mose Allison is at the Blue River Café tonight, my date stood me up and I don't feel like getting hit on by a bunch of middle-aged jazz nuts."

"So you're looking for a stand-in."

"Yes ... You do know who Mose Allison is?"

"Of course. So this isn't actually a date?"

"No."

I didn't get to be a good tarot reader by being obtuse.

"So I suppose your date doesn't like jazz, and she wanted to do something else."

She laughed. "Franz said you were fast."

I grinned back at her. "So the idea is, that we're two music lovers who pose no romantic threat to each other."

"That's it."

"I'm not sure that I'll be able to fulfill that role if you don't tuck that away." I nodded at the pretty pink nipple that was poking out.

"What this?" She hauled her breast out and examined it as if she'd never noticed it before. "Well if it bothers you ... " She tucked it back in and fastened up one or two buttons

"Well," I said, "as it happens, I've got stage-side seats for tonight, but apparently someone ... " I turned and smirked at Franz, "will have to go home after work."

Franz lumbered forward and grabbed us both in a bear hug.

"Good. I can't stand that weak-ass espresso at Blue River anyway. You kids play nice now."

That was the beginning. Tina (as I discovered her name to be) and I had similarly eclectic tastes in music and art, and we spent a lot of time together. I met her partner once, a darkly sulky Joan Baez type who dismissed me as her partner's "pet castrato". She claimed to be an ethnomusicologist and spent altogether too much time explaining why our tastes in music were degraded and how much more expressive the grunts of some obscure Amazon tribe were than any "composed" pop garbage. I forgot about Franz's odd introduction.

One weekend we were going to a performance by John Fahey and I suggested that we meet for dinner first at this decent Italian place on East Brady Street. She said that she'd meet me there. She asked me to try to get a seat by the window.

About five minutes after I had been seated. I was looking at the menu when the restaurant went quiet ... very, very quiet. I looked up and saw Tina pull back the chair across from me and sit down. I did mention that this was a VERY Italian place. Most of the patrons were speaking either Italian or heavily accented English. Italian grandmothers in black, Italian mammas with their bambini, Italian construction workers with biceps like fuckin eggplants.

Tina was wearing a nun's habit.

Let me be absolutely clear on this.

Tina was wearing a nun's habit.

She had added a leather under bust corset which she was wearing over the habit. The nun's habit was sheer and it was quite obvious that she wasn't wearing anything underneath.

She sat down, pushed the Chianti bottle candlestick to the side, leaned across the small table with its red and white checks and with great gusto gave me an unaccustomed, deep and sloppy kiss. then she sat back.

I looked around the room. Forks were frozen in midair, pasta of various shapes quivered on the tines dripping sauce on the tablecloths. One man was petrified and, as I watched, the cheese and tomato of the slice of pizza he held, slowly eased itself over the crust and dropped to his lap.

I looked back at Tina. She smiled at me sweetly. I had about 18 nano-seconds of pleasure before my instinct for self-preservation kicked in. I leapt to my feet, grabbed her by the arm, and rushed her to the door.

I could hear the room doing a collective dinosaur take as she reached back and gave my butt a squeeze. I heard chairs being pushed back and silverware hitting the floor as the door slammed shut behind us.

I rushed her around the corner and into a side street. As we waited for the shouting to die down, I slipped my jacket over her shoulders.

"A little underdressed tonight, Tina."

"I just needed some attention."

"Well you certainly got it."

We stifled our giggles and she kissed me again.

"Thanks," she said. "That was fun and you're a sweety for putting up with me."

"Just one thing, Tina," I said.

"What's that?"

"Please make sure that you never warn me when you are going to pull one of these stunts."

"I promise."

I took her home. She changed into a denim skirt and Indian print blouse (still sheer, but not as mind-numbingly so). Then we went to listen to John Fahey be rude to us as he broke strings and retuned them over and over.

Art and writing

There is much in modern life to induce a state of melancholia. Much that Sir Robert saw has become more poignant and painful in the passing of the years. It could be said that though mankind has advanced in many ways it has regressed in many that make up the quality of our daily lives.

Many of these regressions are so entwined with our current understanding of "the way things are," others may superficially seem to benefit humanity and still others may seem like divine gifts promising better, more productive and peaceful lives.

But, as in all things, balances must be struck, easements and bargains must be made. Something may be given with one hand, but you may be sure that the other is extended for recompense. Though the price of a thing may seem to be merely money, far more may be expected. Other tenders accepted might be the quality of conversation, of intimacy, of sympathy, the blind acceptance of mass delusions, the appreciation of nature and of one's own humanity.

An artist working in digital media may seem to be more fortunate than his predecessors. No longer need he grind colors, inhale turpentine fumes, sharpen pencils, clean the charcoal from out his pores, stretch canvas and paper, clean brushes. No longer need he be poisoned by the very basis of his art and be driven mad by lead, cadmium, lapis lazuli and more. We may admire the work of mad artists but I would venture the thought that few of them took up a brush with the intent of descending, or rising, into insanity.

Beyond that, the digital artist has no need to mix paint to get the color needed, his brushstroke is not a hand skill developed from long practice but a selection from a menu. He need not despair that the proper paper is not available when he can duplicate its tooth and absorbancy with the press of a few keys on a keyboard. Waste is reduced since there are no failed attempts to crumple and discard. There is always plenty of ink, graphite, charcoal, and paint ready at hand for no additional cost.

On the whole it seems that working digitally provides many advantages to the artist. The question becomes what must she give up?

One thing that is lost is what I call the zen of preparation. That meditative period of time between her thought and the beginning of its realization. A computer screen lets her jump right into creation, which on the face of it, may seem to be a good thing. There is no searching the sofa cushions for enough change to buy a tube of Phthalo Blue, no stretching of canvas  or paper, no gesso, no preparation of the palette and brushes or sharpening of the pencils, no time between inspiration and attempt. There is no time for her unconscious to rotate, palpate, and mold the thought into something more durable, more potent.

Another casualty is the contribution of the ground and the medium, the differences in the feel of applying ink to paper with a brush, or acrylics to a gessoed and stretched canvas, or water color to illustration board, or egg tempera to masonite. the flow of the medium onto the surface under the tip of a pen, the hairs of a brush, or the spring of a palette knife.This is a direct modification of physical entities and there is a feel, a resistance, an impetus that travels the nerves in a constant feedback loop as the artist senses the rightness of a line, a swirl, a dot in the nerve endings of her fingers, a positive sense that travels upstream to her brain to show that her hand and eye are in perfect coordination.

A physical painting, drawing or sculpture is unique. True, they can be forged, but it takes a great amount of effort for relatively little return. A digital work, however, is easily duplicated and reduplicated and rather than their signature and style for authentication, they needs must rely on watermarks and electronic tricks like steganography, that, and mutual promises from artist and owner not to publish any more. As time goes on artists will develop and use other devices to provide the sense of uniqueness, but their will always be a niggling suspicion at the back of the purchaser's mind.

The greatest loss is something that only certain types of people think about, mistakes. It is not just researchers, and scholars who treasure the missteps, the sketches, the cartoons that are created in the process of creation, they are the trials, the half-formed concepts, the discarded errors that tell the story of the genesis of a work. The tale told in the intermediate steps is often lost with a digital creator who, more often then not, will simply revise the original leaving no breadcrumbs for their most diligent admirers to follow.

Lest you think that digital artists are being unduly singled out, let me hasten to say that the same is true in the writing profession. In the basement of a library in New England there are ten steamer trunks filled with manuscripts, drafts, and revisions constituting the life work of a major poet. It will be rare for future scholars to find the same profusion of documented trial and error for writers working today.

I am not immune to criticism on this account. I sit typing this text into a text editor, correcting spelling and grammatical errors on the fly aided by some handy software and leaving little trace of the fact that, when typing, I often substitute "d" for "g" as I do when handwriting. Is this something that some, as yet unborn, scholars would find useful? I know not, and yet I hate to deprive them of their clues. Will they deduce the brand of spellcheck and grammar parser from a meta-database of linguistic red flags? Will they find traces of corrections in the data files and try to redefine my writing in terms of their assumptions as to what I had originally written. I know not. Occasionally, I even despair.

I will continue this investigation.

Visitor

We have a little visitor to our garden and it's beginning to look like it might be moving in. The poppies have popped in incandescent colors, the peonies are muscling through the wax that covers the buds, and my wife, Dee, abashed by all the floral effort decided to water the flower beds.

As she did her impression of a rain cloud, apparently she surprised something that made a dash for the tall grass. At first she thought it was a snake but when she looked for it she found it was a small brown rabbit about 6 inches long and, after the dash, with all the animation of a statue.

It stayed stock-still in the long grass as we looked at it and my son, Avi, took some photographs. Dee's first instinct was, of course, to pick it up, cuddle it, find it a nice box and feed it carrots. She was persuaded to let it be overnight in hopes that a parent would retrieve it. This morning it was still there.

When my beloved earth-mother tried to save it, it proved to be less fearful of the rest of the world than of her, and made a dash for the flower bed again, disappearing amidst the poppies.

As for me, I'm torn between my appreciation of the cuteness of our visitor and the realization that now I know what happened to those lettuce plants that went missing. On the other hand, I just found out that chard is problematic for people who have had kidney stones, so maybe I should just let things take their course.

Spring has come at last ...

The temperature is nearly 50F, and it finally feels like spring today. There is only a tiny patch of snow left in the backyard and the grass is greening nicely.

I wandered around to clean up. We lost one limb of the huge white pine in the northeast corner and a couple of dozen smaller branches. When I moved the deadfalls, I saw a small cluster of nascent lily-of-the valley plants close to the trunk.

What a curious plant that is. One legend says that the flowers formed from the tears of the Virgin Mary, which sounds sweet and ethereal until you realize that the entire plant is highly toxic ... and what are we to make of that? Another curious thing about the flowers is that their odor is intensely attractive to mammalian sperm. This complicates the early spring delight of seeing new life so much that I decide to stop thinking lest I get a headache.

The pile of dried twigs and branches in the garden is just about ready for burning. Today or tomorrow I'll go to the town police and fire station and get a permit. After my little bonfire is done I'll dig the ashes into the soil and plant tomatoes, basil, eggplant, chilis, zucchini, etc.

The rhubarb plant owns an entire corner of the plot, and returns year after year. It is a mixed blessing. It is a beautiful plant, and tasty, but it is very high in oxalic acid and having had kidney stones once, I am determined to never have them again.

Birches with crows

In back of the drab cinderblock building, across a small pot-holed asphalt parking lot, there is a small grove of trees, maple saplings and a mass of vines and shrubbery. The skeletal look of the trees is made more intense by two old birch trees with bone white bark.

The sky is gray, the overcast creates steely reflections in the puddles. I toss my gym bag in the back of the car and go sit on the hood to breathe and relax for a moment. I look for signs of life, but there is nothing to see. There is no green haze of budding leaves nor yellow mist of forsythia blossoms yet, just somewhat globular masses of leafless vines and bushes that look as if some gigantic cat has found a ball of rough yarn.

The birches are grim. They are old and thick, but look like they're ready to die. Not only are they bony, they are broken. Thick limbs hang from splintered crotches, an ossuary of severed twigs and branches litter the ground beneath them.

There is a sudden movement in the tree to the right. a black shadow detaches from one of the high branches, swooping down nearly to the ground then back up into the other tree where it lands ... knocking another shadow off the branch. The displaced crow freefalls momentarily then spreads its wings turns and swoops with a few unnecessary flourishes into the first tree, where it sits croaking softly, before launching itself back to knock its aggressor off the branch.

The two crows continue this for some time. It's obviously play, since there's none of the harsh abrupt attack and calls that you would expect in a territorial contest. It's more a game of tag, or king-of-the-castle.

After a while they move to trees that are further away, and shortly after that they disappear into a denser clump of trees in the distance. I get into my car and drive away.

New toy, new start

  It has been a long time since I updated any of my blogs. But, rather than abandoning them, I think that I'll combine their separate functions into a single effort. That will be this one.  This means that my writing progress, dietary quirks and general malaise will become centralized for your continued avoidance. I suppose we can thank the new iPad for this newfound ambition.

John "Chauncy" Kiernan

Today is my father-in-law's 102nd birthday, or it would have been had he survived. John "Chauncy" Kiernan was a natural nobleman, a dignified, witty man whose charm and honesty was evident to everyone who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. More than three decades have passed since he did and still I can see the twinkle in his eye and the slow smile as he waited for me to process his latest bon mot. He loved honor, country and family. God alone knows what order to put those in. He loved his daughters and I suspect that he even loved me for loving his oldest girl.

I miss him.

His family came from County Leitrim, one of the poorest counties in Ireland and settled in Old Lyme, CT. They worked hard, they loved their dram and they loved the telling of stories and I only wish that I could have been there when my wife's grandfather, John and his four sons, "Chauncy", "Charlie", "Denny", and "Joe" were in the mood to drink and spin yarns. I only met Chauncy and Charlie but both enriched my life.

Tonight, in lieu of a cake, my wife and I told a couple of Irish jokes and lifted a glass of Jameson to the memory of Chauncy. If he'll forgive the Scottish toast ...

"Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few and they're all dead."

Today the heat wave has finally broken. Closer to the equator the past three days would not be remarkable, but here in New England it is unexpected, uncomfortable, and unwanted.

The rest of the family and our guests are on the back porch chatting and smoking. So I take my usual seat on the front steps where I can be smoke free and solitary. There's a lot to be said for the front, you can watch people come and go, the steps are lower so it's more like sitting in the garden than above it, and I can watch things happen without being distracted.

The steps are about six feet from side to side, cement slabs on brick risers. The middle one has a crack that needs patching one of these days. A brick walkway extends from the steps a few feet then turns left to head toward the driveway. The walkway also encloses part of the front garden.

As I settle onto the cracked cement slab with a mug of darjeeling and a peanut butter sandwich, the family across the street struggles to don pads and helmets for a bicycle ride, as their dog mournfully yelps its separation anxiety from inside the house. They wave and I wave back and the five of them ride off in a cheerful skein looking for adventure.

As the dog's barks slow in the knowledge that it is doomed to be alone for an entire hour, I finish my sandwich and suddenly notice that there is a large white flower on the holly bush to the right of the steps. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that the blossom doesn't belong there. It could be from another plant that has poked its way up through the dense holly foliage. As I try to work up enough curiosity to put down my mug and investigate, the mystery is solved as the flower splits in two and takes flight as a pair of Cabbage White butterflies.

Across the walkway, a small dragonfly is firmly perched on the tip of a rhododendron leaf that bobs and sways in the breeze. It's too far away for me to make any attempt to identify it more completely. I watch it for several minutes until, at last, it disappears in a blink and returns in another blink. If I know my dragonflies, it's probably chewing off the head of something that was flying too slowly.

A handful of bumblebees are staggering around a patch of small blue flowers just to the left of the steps. They bump into things and each other as they make their way around the bouquet buffet.

Another dragonfly has appeared on the right. There's a plant with long spiky leaves that start from its base (if I remember correctly, it's an iris). One of the leaves has bent towards me at a right angle to the plant and the dragonfly is perched on this green runway like some dangerous warplane.

I go back to watching the bumbleclowns. One of them has its face in a flower at the tip of a stem. Another is sipping from one a little further down the same stem and their combined weight has bent the stem in a deep arc. A third bee lands increasing the tension on the stem, but then the two lower bees leave at the same time and the stem whips up, hurtling the bee off the top flower and deep into the rhododendron jungle.

I like bumblebees. I relate to them. Like them, I am clumsy, round, hairy, and hungry. Like them, I am peaceful, vegan, and attracted to bright colors. Like them I can do unexpected things like stinging when I have to.

I wonder if, like me, it is their ungainliness, their clumsiness that dictates their seeming preference for solitary endeavor.

A kind of limbo

I am starting to despair of ever getting any writing done. I have three novels and a history floating in a puddle of inaction, slowly dissolving into unmemorable fragments.

Part of the problem is the lack of proper chemicals to subdue my distractibility long enough for me to get some words on paper. Another part is the need to travel to other libraries and towns to gather the research materials for the history. It's not that I don't like to travel, but the sense that by doing so I am removing what little chance my wife has of getting out of the house.

I know that her depression and agoraphobia are not my doing but I seem to have persuaded myself that any action on my part underscores and emphasizes her inaction. So I don't do anything.

I have psychologically painted myself into a corner where I sit and rust while waiting for her to decide to get better.

I have written several blog entries today, and will visit a sick relative this afternoon. Perhaps I'll sort some books and try to decide whether giving her the latest Leonard Cohen album for Valentine's Day is a good idea.

A bookish day

Today I received two of the books that I ordered recently.

One of them, "Timothy Dexter Revisited" by John P. Marquand will be put on the shelf unopened until the first of his books about that singular Newburyport gentleman arrives. I am looking forward to devouring the two in order since, as Lord Timothy himself said, "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the known world." He sounds like a man worthy of attention if not respect.

I have his wonderful little book, "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones," sitting on my desk for inspiration. He was a canny and very lucky businessman for someone who declared himself a lord (although he insisted that it was popular acclaim that did so), who faked his own death in order to see who would turn up for the memorial, who kept a personal "poet laureate," and who seems so oddly disorganized and self-absorbed.

John P. Marquand fictionalized Dexter's life. That is the book that I'm waiting for. The book I just received is more of a memoir and historical piece written 35 years after the first one. It is my fancy that it is important to read them in chronological order

The second book I received today is "What I Require From Life" writings on science and life by J.B.S. Haldane. I am looking forward to reading it. Haldane is a witty and engaging writer and, whether you agree with his politics or not, time with him is well spent and challenging.

I met Haldane once in (I believe) 1961 when he visited the Stazione Zoologica in Naples. That would have made me 13 years old, just old enough to be terribly embarrassed to meet the 70 year old author of one of my favorite books in person. In addition to his political and scientific writing, he had also written a wonderful book called "My Friend Mr. Leakey" (a copy of which still sits on my shelves).

But if I start dipping into Haldane tonight, I'll have to set aside "1493" by Charles Mann with only a third of it read.

Ah me, the vagaries of distraction send me tumbling hither and yon like a crisp, dry maple leaf in an hibernal gale.

Vegetarian tipplers

«A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet.» --G.K. Chesterton

Sharing Meme

It seems to me that this whole sharing meme is a bit out of whack. Someone puts a picture or a quote identifying some reprehensible behavior on facebook and gives you a moral shove saying that, “if you don't pass this along, then you are a bad person who condones this." Alternately, they do the same thing for positive stuff.

A case in point is a picture posted in my FB stream recently showing a bruised woman wearing a slit skirt and pink blouse collapsed at the feet of a man wearing bluejeans and a plaid shirt. The man's hand is closed, but you cannot see his face. The bruises, the spraddle-legged posture of the man, the position of his hand and the camera angle lead you to leap to the conclusion that he has just beaten her. The message beneath the picture says, “hit share if your against women abuse. lets get 1000 shares."

Well! Who wouldn't be against the abuse of women. So why not click?

But I have two problems with the post. The first is the picture. It has too many inconsistencies to be effective. The man's hand, though closed, is not clenched, his forearm is not tensed, his knuckles do not show the damage that would be evident had he been beating someone. His posture is as likely to be that of someone reaching down to help spreading his legs to balance as he helps her to her feet. So now there are multiple new possible scenarios involving helpful strangers or off-duty EMTs coming upon auto accidents, or the aftermath of a drunken brawl or perhaps a woman being abused.

So the photo is either bad staging or a misrepresentation. So what‽

Too many people skim their emails and social media, not reading deeply or interpreting, making snap judgments and, when they see something for which they can construct an easy conclusion, saying “me too" by hitting the share button. They have constructed a scenario, supplying the missing pieces according to their own prejudices. That can't be helped. Our brains are hard-wired to supply narratives, sequences, causal chains to fit what we see. There is an excellent recent article in Wired about how that propensity for humans to construct a narrative has occasionally led science in some disturbingly bad directions.

In a way you could say that my problem with the photo is that it was done poorly and offends my editorial sensibilities in such a way that it interferes with my ability to create the expected response. I would add that it seems to me to be a gratuitous use of shock values, no better than using a pornographic photo and saying “share this if you are against pornography."

But the problems with the photo are petty compared to my real gripe.

I want to talk about the veneer of involvement that we apply to ourselves by tapping the share button, a kind of non-invasive soul-surgery accomplished with a single click. The question to ask is, “What does that click on share do?"

It does a couple of things. It lets the person, who is saying “me too" think that they have added their voice to some kind of petition, or that they have joined some kind of movement. It lets the “me too" feel that they have raised their voice in outrage. It lets them think that they are on the side of good. Solidarity!

Give me a break.

What it actually means is that the “me too" has been socially engineered through embarrassment and implied social pressure into passing along a message with someone else's name on it. At best the result will be that the originator of the message will be able to harvest the names of, in this case 1000 people who forwarded their message on. This then gives them the chance to “friend" them (since the initial contact has been made) and potentially sell that list of names, spam them or, in the best case scenario, inflate their own importance.

What it doesn't do is anything else. It doesn't pay for shelters or medical treatment, it doesn't provide psychological or social support, it doesn't change the mind of any brutalizer or victim. It does nothing except make “me too" feel like they have done something. It lessens the impact of real appeals for actual support. In essence, it lets the person say that they support something that they are actually ignoring. They can pretend they have done something. It's like the ultimate, “I gave at the office" excuse.

“I condemn the battering of women by clicking on an ambiguous photograph," they say. “My soul is clean and I am a good person and I can be counted among the morally upright without any cost to my wallet, my time or my life."

You cannot dry clean your soul so easily. Don't share the damn photograph. Go do something about it.

Phantasy

"Phantasy, or imagination, which some call estimative, or cogitative ... is an inner sense which doth more fully examine the species perceived by common sense, of things present or absent, and keeps them longer, recalling them to mind again, or making new of his own. In time of sleep this faculty is free, and many times conceive strange, stupend, absurd shapes, as in sick men we commonly observe. His organ is the middle cell of the brain; his objects all the species communicated to him by the common sense, by comparison of which he feigns infinite other unto himself. In melancholy men this faculty is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from common sense or memory. In poets and painters imagination forcibly works, as appears by their several fictions, antics, images: as Ovid's house of sleep, Psyche's palace in Apuleius, &c. In men it is subject and governed by reason, or at least should be; but in brutes it hath no superior, and is ratio brutorum, all the reason they have."

-- Robert Burton "The Anatomy of Melancholy"

"Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -- toasted, mostly."

-- (Ben Gunn) R.L. Stevenson "Treasure Island"

Dreamscape

For nearly a year, I have been taking a combination of medications that is intended to thin my blood, lower its pressure and keep my arteries open. At the same time, I have had to reduce my caffeine intake (a terrible sacrifice for someone who thinks that four portions of espresso is barely enough to lift the eyelids) and give up the stimulant medications that control my ADD and keep me productive.

The blood pressure medication is, I believe, to blame for my lassitude and lack of energy. It is bad enough to have one's work require a sedentary life without a drug draining what little remains of my vim. Combined with my stimulant fast, this has resulted in a singularly unproductive, uncommunicative, and unusually unfriendly year.

The most unusual effect has been that of the blood thinners. The labels warn of the potential for disturbed sleep and vivid dreams, but I was not expecting the clarity and memorability of them. As Joel 2:28 would have it, I am an old man who "shall dream dreams" leaving the visions to my juniors. The dreams I have are so startling and so different from any that I have had before that at times I wonder just what is happening to my mind.

I have had dreams all my life; predictable, simple dreams, easily interpreted and understood. I call them the "frustration dreams". 

I am on a Navy ship doing an errand and it is time for me to leave. I know where I'm going and I have plenty of time to get off before the ship sails. Suddenly I realize that I have taken a wrong turn. I am lost. I don't see this as a problem, I know how to read the numbers on the bulkheads, and I have a sense of how the ship is laid out. I take another turn and the ship has changed. It is now a cross between a cruise ship and a mall. There are escalators and ladders. In essence I am in a "maze of twisty passages all alike". When I finally find my way out I find myself on the bow of the ship. It has left port and I am stuck on it. As I stand there, the ocean transforms into a lake, then a river, which narrows until the ship runs aground.

This is only one scenario. There are many, but the form is always the same. The sense of desperate confusion and being out of control wakes me up and leaves me rattled for the early part of the day.

These new dreams are different, more vivid, more real. I drop into someone else's head as a first-person observer of a story or a life in progress, knowing the back story, recognizing venues, friends, and situations that are common to me in this new persona, as fantastic as they might seem in my "real" life. These dreams are durable, easy to remember. I wake from them suddenly, sometimes sure that I have awoken but other times not, and with some of them, if I let myself drift back to sleep, I take up the story shortly after I left off. The dream seems to have continued its progress in my absence. They are not unpleasant, many are amusing and quite cinematic and there is often a sense of loss when I wake up. 

I have a consistent physical reaction too. When I wake I invariably have a dry mouth. I mean bone dry as if my salivary glands had completely stopped. Unless I keep a glass of water next to the bed, it takes a minute or two of working my tongue and jaw muscles to start them going again.  

This was last night's dream. 

I enter the dream as if opening my eyes from a blink. It is a pleasant spring day and I am waiting, sitting on a stoop of a building that I know I do not live in, watching the door of a building across the street. I'm in tan chinos, a blue button down shirt and white sneakers. The street is lined with three and four story brownstone walk ups and there is little traffic and few parked cars. A few large trees provide puddles of shade up and down the street. The stoop that I sit on is near the corner where this street crosses a similar one. The cross-street has a number of storefronts on it but this street does not. It looks a bit like the area in Boston where Marlborough Street crosses Mass. Ave. 

I am waiting for something to happen. Charlie, my friend and colleague is sitting, cross-legged, under a tree near the door that I'm watching. He's in his forties but has made himself look older. He's wearing a ratty t-shirt, blue jeans with frayed cuffs. He's playing a harmonica and a dirty paper coffee cup is set up between his dirty bare feet. He's playing a wheezy, inept "Red River Valley" when he seems to hear something. He plays a quick blues lick, and tucks the harmonica into his pocket. 

The door bursts open, bounces against the high concrete side of the stoop and partially closes again. A man looks out to check the street, his face red and contorted under closely cropped blonde hair. He doesn't notice me and seems to discount Charlie. The face pulls back into shadow then the man backs out of the door shouldering it fully open. I can see the collar of a white shirt rising above the collar of his gray suit. His shoes are very shiny and black. 

He has his right arm around the neck of an attractive woman with dark curly hair. She's wearing a thin floral print dress. In the man's left hand is a small black automatic. A bald man in a brown suit, pale yellow shirt and bright blue tie steps out behind them. He uses his left hand to slam the door shut behind him. His right arm hangs by his side seemingly to minimize the visibility of the revolver he holds. His expression is calm but grim as he nods to the first man who wrenches the woman around to face the steps and starts forcing her down them.

Her face is purpling from the pressure on her neck. She reaches back and grabs at the bright red of his necktie, but gets hold of the white shirt collar and yanks. He grunts and his sleeve bulges as he tightens his grip on her neck until she lets go. They reach the bottom and the second man starts backing carefully down the steps watching the door.

Charlie has disappeared, but I know where he is. We've done this kind of thing before. I move to the dark blue car parked under the tree near me and lean against the trunk. Neither of the men notice me. They seem to be looking everywhere but where I am, which is as it should be. 

The first man drags the woman across the street to the car. He pulls on the passenger door handle twice before he realized it's locked. A momentary confusion flickers across his face. He's right, he left it unlocked, but I took care of that for him. He tucks the gun in his belt and reaches into his pocket for his keys. I look through the back of his head and see a kaleidoscope of colors. There is one in particular that I'm looking for, a blob of cyan with red veining, the pleasure center. He jumps slightly as I reach through the back of his skull, touch the spot and send an overload. All the tension in his body instantly evaporates. His arm drops from the woman's neck and she leaps away turning to face him. 

I know what she is seeing. He has a goofy happy expression on his face, probably starting to drool slightly, and over his shoulder she sees me. I smile slightly and raise my hands to let her know that I am not a threat. Across the street the other man is standing by a utility pole starting to raise his gun in our direction, when Charlie peels himself off the wood and touches the shoulder of the brown suit. The man's gun clatters to the ground as he floats up. He seems paralyzed as a gust of wind catches him and in a swirl of updraft he drifts into the power lines and explodes into flame and fragments like a small Hindenburg.

I pull the gun from the unresisting fingers of the man by the car. I can see and smell the effects of my intrusion in his brain. A dark stain spreads across the front of his trousers, and it is not urine. Charlie comes to help me I open the door of the vehicle and we help him collapse inside as the woman stands watching us. We close the door. His eyes are glazed. I have given him unendurable pleasure, indefinitely prolonged and it will eventually kill him. Charlie pulls a cell phone from his pocket, and looks at me. 

"Should I bother the cops about this?" he asks. I shake my head.

"No, it's nothing they could turn off."

Charlie and I walk on either side of the woman as we cross the street to her door. We let her precede us she opens the door and waves us in, but immediately turns and runs to the back of the house. We follow through a living room full of overstuffed chairs, glass fronted cabinets, bookshelves, and small tables, some of the furniture is overturned and broken. We find her in the kitchen struggling with the knots binding an older couple to two back to back wooden chairs. I walk over and reach down flattening my finger to the width of a few atoms and slice through the ropes.

I step back and let Charlie and the young woman get the couple to their feet. 

"Would you like some coffee?" asks the woman we rescued.

Charlie and I nod. 

"Go clean up," the older woman tells her, "I'll make it." She shoos us out of the kitchen.

The younger woman goes upstairs. The old man, Charlie, and I straighten the living room. We right the chairs, straighten the rugs, and sweep up shattered pieces of porcelain and glass. I find a chair with a loose leg and crouch to fix it when I hear footsteps and smell coffee. I continue to work. Then I smell something damp with the light perfume of soap. I look up and the young woman is standing by me. She smells like the shower she has just taken. I am very aware that she is wearing a thin white cotton robe and little else. 

I stand up and she puts her arms around me, hugging me tightly. I hug her back amending my awareness, she is wearing nothing else. She lets go and steps back, then settles onto the arm of a chair. The older couple are already seated and Charlie is standing near the mantle of the fireplace. 

"How did you do that," she says, smiling at me warmly.

I look over at Charlie and nod to him as she follows my glance. He turns sideways and disappears.

"It has to do with dimension," I say, and take a backward step to the wall near me at the same time wondering why I am showing off. I grin at how her eyes widen as I flatten myself against it, like a poster against a billboard. But then I feel a tug from behind and I seem to re-expand into the wall instead of the comfortable living room where my friend and partner, an older couple and a warm and attractive woman are waiting.

Instead there is darkness, and a flicker of light. I realize that a car has just driven by. My mouth is dry. I feel a tug back in the other direction and I know that I can go back, but I reach over and wrap my fist in my wife's t-shirt. Even in her sleep she jerks away from my touch but I hold on, knowing that the three dimensionality of the knot will anchor me in reality and prevent my return to the dream. I work my tongue, feeling the saliva start. Now I am fully awake. I sit up.

And then ... too late ... I feel an overwhelming sense of loss.

Falstaff ...

S'blood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat or a lug'd bear.

Starting again

What a poor performance on my part. There is all this space to fill up on the server farms and I just haven't been doing my part.

I could claim, rightfully that my life has been overfull of late, but that's not really an excuse. I am old enough, if not wise enough, to be able to take the vagaries of existence in stride and still be able to take quill in hand and set it to paper.

This is not the only project that has lain fallow and I am horrified at my lack of productivity on all sides. The materials for two half-written historical biographies are stacked, forlorn and dusty on the bookshelf behind my left shoulder. The notes for three novels are neatly labelled in expansion file envelopes. My in-basket overflows with unanswered correspondence and the miscellaneous scraps of paper that constitute my "day book".

It is not just the mental pursuits that have drifted out of control. Tomatoes lie rotting in my garden. The basil has blossomed, overgrown, and toppled leaving the rhubarb in domination of the small plot. My list of things to do has grown to the point that I can no longer bear to even think of looking at it.

Perhaps the onset of Autumn and the colder weather, the prospect of being able to take fewer medications and the institution of a new and simpler diet will help to change my mood. As regards diet, it is interesting that Burton, in cataloging those foods that the classical writers believed would cause one to be melancholic, seems  to suggest that in order to avoid the black humor one must perforce become a Breatharian, an airy fancy that I would find unpalatable.

I seem to have persuaded myself into a working mood. It's time to push the keyboard back for a while and take up my pen.

Sorry

 I got distracted for nearly a year. I keep saying that I will try to do better and I keep failing. In any case, I have pulled two of my other blogs out of circulation in disgust at my own inability to concentrate.

 Instead I have added a new one called Henry and the Nipping Jig. This blog will document the successes and failures I experience as I write a new book. It is a history ... in a way. Please visit it, I seem to be better at keeping it going.

 I will try to post here more as I get my brain back into synchro-mesh.