September 12, 2001

I had such hope on that day. Hope that the awful events (Was it over? Really?) would make us realise how stupid we'd been with our love of celebrities, materialism, hollow patriotism and false pride, things that don't matter. On the eleventh I looked at that day's USA Today. The main story was the scheduled start of the Texas mom who'd drowned her four children in a bathtub. Yes, a bad thing. But come on. Four people? Trivial.

Maybe now, I thought, America will take an honest look at how it treats (uses) the rest of the world and the effect that has. Maybe we'll ask hard questions about who we support and why and whether or not it's right.

I had hope we'd do that then. What have I learned in the years since? No fucking way would we do so. It's too far out of our comfort zone. Back to our regular programming.

The Woman at Work

Susan was gone for several weeks. I don't know her well and didn't notice her absence until she returned to work.
"I was attacked," she said as we stood in the hall. She'd been at a bar with friends and left a few minutes after they did. The man was waiting for her outside. He beat her severely and sexually assaulted her.
He was caught. He has a lengthy criminal record, Susan told me, and although this assault was unusually severe, it was hardly out of character.
"The doctors told me the rib could've punctured my lung," she said. "It shows you that God was looking out for me."
I can't remain silent when faced with idiocy.
"If there were a god," I said, "wouldn't this man have been, oh, run over by a bus when he was 15 years old? Then you wouldn't have been attacked at all! Wouldn't that make more sense?"
Blank, bovine stare.
Superstitions, religions (different names for the same thing) baffle me. Why do so many treat blind faith as a virtue? Why don't people ask the simple questions they'd ask a car salesman when told to swallow whole belief systems? I understand the desire to conform and not make waves, to accept easy, comforting explanations, to let people in special uniforms do their thinking for them, but when there's that huge chance that it may be wrong and zero evidence that it's right, doesn't it make sense to turn on your brain for ten minutes and apply logic to a belief system? I often hear people say they "choose" to believe something. That's impossible! If you could do that, you could choose to believe anything! You could be like a teenager who likes to think her entire life is nothing more than the dream of a superior being and that she'll wake up at any time and live that being's life, which is far more significant and interesting than her own.

Too Late

1. On June 3, 1844, on the island of Eldey, off Iceland's southwestern coast, a nesting pair of auks were killed by Jon Brandsson and Sigourour Isleffson. Their single egg was smashed by Ketil Ketilsson and the great auk was forever lost to the world.

2. From a review of "Eaarth," by Bill McKibben:
Taking aim at those who talk airily of saving the world “for our grandchildren,” McKibben shows how we are already standing in our grandchildren’s shoes. Sunnier types like Thomas Friedman, who argues that we can shift our energy economy to renewable resources and reclaim the old, cool Earth, are dispatched efficiently. While agreeing with the sentiment behind Friedman’s joie de vert, McKibben points out that even if we were to start an ecological Manhattan Project and build two million large windmills — “four times as many as we built in 2007, every year for the next 40” — we would offset only one-ninth of the carbon output necessary to make our planet vaguely resemble the one into which baby boomers like Friedman (and McKibben) were born.

How I Shop Now

I've been eating better these days. More vegetables, more fruit, less of everything, including vegetables and fruit. It turns out that if you want to lose weight, you can't eat as much X as you want and never feel hungry. You have to feel hungry all the time. A little, anyway. After awhile, you like it and when you eat enough not to feel hungry, you miss it.
I've lost 15 pounds since February.
I buy produce at a large farmers market and I've found a new way to do it. Instead of carefully looking over every piece or bunch I buy, I reach out, put my hand on one piece, and take it. I  may take home a piece that has a cut or bruise. If so, I cut around it, if it's bad enough. Sometimes I'll get something beyond ripe or not ripe yet. It's always good enough, though, and  it seems to be a more natural way to eat.
I can't think of why I never thought of this before. Food's not a large part of my one-person budget, so the tiny percentage lost in the occasional, small bits of produce I toss is insignificant. I've never had that "Nothing but the best for me!" attitude, so that's not a factor. And the time and stress I save scrutinizing leaves and berries and thumping melons makes shopping fast and simple.
Earlier today while shopping for tomatoes I accidentally knocked one to the floor. I picked it up and bought it.

Dear Republicans

Fuck you. Really. You and your stupid, binary rationales about health care, your moronic clinging to American exceptionalism, your lies and less-than-half truths, your tortured polls, and your idiotic loyalty nearly sank the most important social legislation in half a century that will help ease the lives of millions of decent people, even though it may cause your fatcat buddies to have rethink the size of their next yachts. "Who's going to pay for it?" you shrieked for months as you fear mongered. Funny how you never asked that while under President Dummy you were so gung-ho about two illegal wars of choice that have killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, thousands of Americans, and put our country deep in a financial hole that will take years to escape.
The only problem with the bill is that it doesn't go nearly far enough. But someday we'll get to where other developed nations are, nations that, by your reasoning, should be working furiously to make their health care systems just like ours is today, as it's "the best in the world." Have you ever spend even five minutes wondering whey they're not?

Counting

I got the oversize, thick envelope in the mail today. "United States Census 2010," it said on the front, and in a box on the left: "U.S. Census Form Enclosed YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW."

NO PROBLEM, FRIEND! I said to the envelope. I'd love to help flesh out this once-every-decade snapshot of who we are. Ask me anything! Delve into my living conditions, my relationship status, my income, my interests, how I live. And let the records show how I lived to anyone interested long after my bones have been turned to ashes, just as I pulled up my grandparents records a few years back and learned the names of their Irish nanny and cook.

I opened the envelope, happy with its thickness. Some get a one page form asking for minimum input. Not me! I've been singled out for a long form with many folds.

Page one. Name? Got it! Age? Can do! Address, phone number? No prob! Race: Am I Hispanic? No, Senor G-man, just another white person! Live alone? Sigh. Yes, always. You see, there once was someone, yearsag-- PLEASE TURN PAGE.

Oh, all right.

The remaining five pages were for persons two through twelve in my one room apartment.

My last hope was the return envelope. It required licking. Maybe, just maybe, someone would want to get my DNA from the seal and run my genome, and learn about how unique and special I am, if only to myself.

The Afterlife

The two girls embraced and waited on the tracks as the train powered toward them at over 100 miles an hour. A third girl, who'd changed her mind, stood on the side of the tracks screaming at them to get out of the way.

It happened last week just outside Philadelphia. One was 16, the other was to be 16 this week and had been planning her party the evening before, her father said. The girls were saddened by the death of a boy who'd been killed the previous month while bicycling to one of their houses.

No notes have been found, but many teenagers who do such things often plan to "be with" a lost friend. They look forward to a tearful reunion in a vague, misty place followed by eternity together.

This gruesome event and its cause made me remember my own evolution of thoughts on death and its aftermath.

As a very young child -- four -- I concluded that there was no god. Believers tell me it's impossible for a child that age to feel so, but ask most four year olds if there is a god and they'll invariably say they "know" that there is. Not allowing for the opposite shows a distinct bias. My lack of blind faith meant that I never had that "Family Circus" view of an afterlife, where you sit on a porch swing with your departed grandma and watch Ben Franklin play checkers with Socrates.

Despite this, even as my rejection grew in sophistication and strength as I matured, I hoped that death wouldn't be an immediate end to life. I examined alternatives to the view of heaven many hold.

Reincarnation. Live properly, return in a better form, eventually achieve a state of permanent bliss. Great! Then the idea got popular. Best selling books led to conventions and meetings. Every meeting I read accounts of were attended by a dozen women certain they had been Cleopatra and as many men who were Caesar. Say again? Proponents spoke of people knowing of things they couldn't have seen. A tool for tanning hides, a weapon, a design. But people for the past century have been exposed to thousands of hours of stories and images, far more than our ancestors. Who knows what images I've stored in an unused cluster of neurons when I was 10, watching a long since forgotten movie, waiting to be triggered by a dream or random occurrence? Besides, has there ever been a child whose first words were, "Aha! I live again!" No? Shoot. And if you limit reincarnation to humans, the numbers involved make no sense at all.

In the past decades the promise of computers have offered the possibility of an afterlife of a sort and it's often the topic of speculative fiction. Scan or slice a brain and replicate it electronically. You could live in a virtual world that would be as real to you as this one, or observe the real world. Your choice. But if you could do this you could also augment your brain and design your life. Why ever feel pain or be depressed when with a virtual keystroke you could feel only joy? Why settle for an IQ of 115 and not ten times that? Buy more terabytes of storage and know everything! Upgrade your CPU and understand it all! The problem here is that it's the fears, inadequacies and pains that make each of us who we are. When you've finished your tweaking, you'll find that you're not really you anymore but this superior, happy thing, a higher form of, well, not life but something better than life, who looks at your former self and shakes its electronic head at the dimwitted simpleton.

All notions of an afterlife have the fatal flaw of eternity. We like the idea of watching our grandchildren have children of their own, then watching them grow and do the same, but where would this end? Humans reached their present mental stage approximately 60,000 years ago. Does anyone really think there are spirits of Ong and Onga somewhere, clad in animal skins, smiling benevolently down on their distant descendants playing Guitar Hero in Idaho? Wouldn't the 71 virgins promised to terrorists who complete their suicide missions get a little old hat after a few million years? No? How about a few trillion? Some say that in their afterlife a thousand years on earth will pass as a second to them. Fine, but you're just changing the scale, not the fact. There will still be unlimited time. What will you do five million years from now? The universe has a limited time. It's many trillions of years, but it's a limit nonetheless.

The ultimate argument for an afterlife is the same for many blind faiths. It's that the lack of one would be "intolerable," and therefor impossible. A textbook case of faulty logic. Why aren't people more suspicious of such easy, pleasant answers? Do people really think that the level of comfort an answer provides is linked to its veracity? Yes, I've heard it: "It's not easy to ignore the yearnings of the flesh and to love your god," but against the payoff of eternal happiness, yeah, it is. Being decent and going to church now and then is the easy choice.

Just now we seem to be going through a fad of apocalyptic thinking. Tsunamis! Earthquakes! Climate change! Disease! Asteroid strikes! We love to think the world will end on our watch. This is ego talking; it's easier to picture the world and us ending together than it is to imagine a world without us. We know humans won't exist forever and we all want to see how our story ends.

My favorite version of an afterlife, one I entertained in college, is that after death our energy and spirits exist for a time determined by what we had to do to make peace with ourselves and others, like in the movie "Ghost." We float around until we're ready to let go of our lives, then willingly fade into nothing. But any hard evidence of this is lacking. Accounts of floating above one's own body while doctors revive you have been found to be brain phenomena, with a mechanism duplicated by drugs or stimulation to the brain. And the 21 grams nonsense was debunked decades ago. Supernatural experiences are a numbers game, like the chain email that used to go around telling you that if you sent it to a number of others before the day ended you'd hear from an old friend. I could send an email to ten thousand people and tell them that a loved one would die tomorrow. Guess what? I'd be right, for some of them. I've been with people I'm close to and we've both had the same random thought at the same time, but in 99.9999 percent of other times our thoughts are different. Sure, there are some things science hasn't fully explained, but the millions of things it has indicates that all is explainable.

Wouldn't we be better off trying to make amends with others and accept the idea of a world without us while we still live, to see life as a series of lessons in non-attachment, to not confuse reason and cause? That's what I try to do.

I wondering what those girls would have done if they'd had some measure of doubt regarding an afterlife ("They're with Jesus now. And Billy.") And I worry that their peers will only have the idea of one strengthened by their parents and teachers, and consider joining their dead classmates.

Happy First Day of March Everybody!

Spring is coming. I'll like being able to get ready for the outdoors in zero seconds. I'll miss having lots of pockets, though.

One day to a greener, healthier life

Do not have children. We are the one species on the planet sentient enough to grow down our population, yet we've bred as if we're on the verge of extinction for centuries.

Recycling, using your own coffee mugs, composting your trash, paying bills and shopping online? All feel-good bullshit and doesn't make a real dent in anything. If you sincerely care about the planet, wake up and see that the problem is your need to make a little version of resource-burning you.

The Whale Rider

Look at me! I'm riding a killer whale for your entertainment! As I ride you're hearing some recorded patter about it and its natural habitat but, wink wink, we all know that what you're really here to see is a human being treating an apex predator like an amusement park ride. If something awful happens everyone will talk about what a pity it is. Few will question the value of what I'm doing or say that there are better ways to learn about the wonderful creatures that we share our planet with, and those who do will be pooh-poohed as spoilsports. And as long as we devote a small percentage of the lucre we get from exploiting this beautiful animal, confined in a tiny space for years until it goes mad, we who do things like this will be considered good people.
Besides, what could possibly happ

Why I despise the Tea Partyers

They're morons.
And so am I. Oh, I keep up with the news and I have a graduate degree, so it's not like I spend all my time watching TV and playing video games. But I don't want to be the one to decide how best to make sure the air I breathe is clean, the water I drink is pure, the medicine I take, the cars I drive and the planes I fly in are safe. I want to elect people who are as smart or smarter than I am to convene, study these things, and decide for me. If they choose in a way I feel is wrong or if they've been bribed or coerced in any way, I'll vote for someone else in the next election. And I want them to listen to me while they're in office. What I want them to do is ask themselves one question before deciding something: What will provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people?
A government of the people, by the people, for the people? Sounds great as an abstraction 200 years ago and even in 1863, but life is far more complicated now. Think of running a country as major surgery. Your family doctor may be a talented physician, but would you want her to handle your child's kidney transplant? Of course not. As science has progressed, we have more and more specialists. Yet two centuries ago you'd have had one doctor in your village or town who would do everything. (Interestingly, many, particularly older people, still talk about going to "the" doctor instead of "a" doctor, even when they live in large cities with thousands of M.D.s.)
American schools have been awful for decades now. Eavesdrop on those around you, people outside your circle of friends and coworkers. Hear the double negatives, the dropped "g's," the loud guffawing at stupid jokes, the unformed ideas and opinions? Watch the top-rated television shows, google "vomiting schoolgirls" and see how many hits you get, tune into your local newscast, and observe how people drive. Then ask yourself if you want the average American making crucial decisions for you. Tea Partyers are more than just morons, though. They hold their pious, simple ideas and solutions with unwavering faith. And there's nothing more dangerous than morons who have no doubt that they're right.

February 14th

I've always been anti-Valentine's Day (yes, I can hear you: "She's anti everything!" but only on this site). The amount of joy I've seen people get from the day is fleeting and superficial. It never outweighs the depth of hurt I see in those who spend the day alone, reminded cruelly of their lack of status.

Of course, 70 percent of America's economy is based on consumerism and we've been taught not to question our corporate masters and get busy spending money on worthless trinkets and silly cards.

Still, can anyone help rolling their eyes at this, which I got in my email box today? Be still, my heart!

How to Enjoy the Blizzard

Couldn't tell you. Here's how not to enjoy it, though: Watch your local news's "team coverage" of it and let them exploit your anxieties and fears about exceptional events, showing you pictures of things you can see by looking out your window and doing what they can to make you rely on them to interpret the experience.

Next time they say, "Stay tuned for continuing storm coverage," ask yourself -- and answer -- why?

Debark Your Dog

I love animals, but when I read the N.Y. Times article last week on debarking dogs, I was solidly in favor of it and I was please to see that so many of those who commented on it felt as I do.

I cannot count how many times sound sleep or quiet times have been shattered by yapping dogs as they're walked down the street I live on. A dog's bark is meant to disturb and awake people. It's not like any other city noise. Think of it as a baby crying in the street.

Something worth noting -- but you'll have to forgive the lack of sisterhood solidarity here -- is that women do a far poorer job of training their dogs than men do. Dog owning women I know just throw up their hands and say, "I don't know what to do!" Dog owning men I know are kind to their dogs yet say, "The dog's the pet, not me."

Many will say of debarking that besides being cruel (an argument little supported by fact, unless you think that any tampering of nature, which you do every time you start a car, is cruel), silencing a dog may have negative consequences in that the animal may not be able to alert you to danger. Yet the times dogs save their owners by alerting them to fires and intruders are really quite few. Look at it this way, when it happens, it makes the news, and how many stories this week did you see about it? Besides, if there's really something going on, your dog will let you know whether it can bark or not.

As much as I love animals, I have no pets. This is because I grew up in the suburbs during a time they ran free. We'd let our dogs and cats outside in the morning and they'd explore and hunt all day, returning happy and tired.

By the way, if I had a cat you'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to declaw it.

In the 1980s Fran Lebowitz wrote about her dislike of animals in general. When it came to dogs in cities, she noted that the only people who need dogs are the lonely and the blind. Her idea: Have the lonely, in shifts, lead the blind!

Please Pray for Haiti

Please pray to the invisible man in the sky who caused this earthquake. Ask him to somehow make the lives of the survivors, who live like medieval peasants when times are good, less agonizing.

Close your eyes, kneel, bow your head and ask in your mind a supernatural being you've never seen direct evidence of to help these crushed and homeless people whose buildings fell down because, even though they live on a fault line, were constructed with less structural integrity than a Hollywood film set.

It's the logical thing to do.

I'm a Secret Santa

 

Goodbye Men

The likelihood of my sleeping with a man again is nil. This isn't me being gloomy and negative, it's me being realistic. It's been a dozen years since I've had sex successfully. Since then,  there've been two stabs at it; one with a nice man who couldn't maintain his erection, another a try at mild kink, which was interesting but not really me.

There are other things to live for. Those in need, aging parents, friends. Literature, art, learning to see, hear and perceive the beauty around us. I've lived in cities my entire adult life. It's been decades since I've been in the darkness of the country side with my eye crammed against a telescope's eyepiece, looking at binary stars, the rings of Saturn, shadows on the Moon. I must do that again sometime.

Two Letters

The best letters magazines and newspapers publish are more than letters expressing opinions; they're miniature articles or op ed pieces in their own right. The condense and restate the article's premise and add an insight or fact it may have lacked. If you never read anything else about talking on a cell phone while driving, please read these two letters. The first is a little scientific (magnetoencephalography?) but you'll get the idea. The second has such a good idea in it I'm amazed it's not a nationwide requirement. Both letters were in the New York Times last month and were responding to a lengthy article about driving while distracted.

To the Editor:

Your July 19 front-page article relating cellphone conversation to increased probability of auto accidents relied on anecdotal data with a sprinkling of accident statistics. A follow-up article (front page, July 21) briefly mentioned a number of scientific studies demonstrating impaired brain function during cellphone conversations, whether hands-free or hands-on.

We would like to point out that it is studies of brain function that solidify the case against the cellphone.

For example, in our lab we have conducted functional magnetic resonance and magnetoencephalography studies during hands-free phone conversation using a film simulating driving. (Magnetoencephalography is a functional brain imaging technique with millisecond time resolution and millimeter spatial resolution.)

We showed that during hands-free phone conversation there was decreased activity in the right parietal area (an area involved with multitasking) and increased reaction time. The observed changes in brain function are independent of the design features of the phone.

Susan Bowyer
John Moran
Norman Tepley
West Bloomfield, Mich., July 21, 2009

The writers are senior scientists at the Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit. Dr. Tepley is also scientific director of the Neuromagnetism Lab.

•

To the Editor:

Nearly 40 years ago (long before cellphones), my high school driver’s ed instructor, Mr. Tansee, made me, and the rest of the class, write a fictional letter to the parent of a child explaining how and why we had struck that child while driving.

It had to be a serious effort. I guess it was his way of impressing upon us the awesome responsibility we were about to undertake.

Every day I see multitudes of people, young and not so young, who could benefit from this not-so-simple exercise. I don’t believe that Mr. Tansee would have accepted “Sorry, I was on the phone” as a reasonable explanation.

John Fletcher
Ringwood, N.J., July 20, 2009

Forwarded Email

The Important Thing About Obama's Press Conference Tonight

Did you hear that sound in the background during the president's news conference tonight? At random but frequent intervals there was something that sounded like several people typing on manual typewriters. What is it? you ask. Cameras.

When I was a reporter for a small weekly newspaper I'd sometimes have to take photographs for my stories. One tip I got from one our full-time photojournalists was that when photographing someone speaking, wait for him or her to gesture; there's nothing duller than a photograph of someone gripping a podium.

Sure enough, once you know what to listen for you realize that the sound increases greatly the more vividly he gestures. Two hands versus one, hands held high versus low. If you know what's going on, it's fun to watch. You'll notice that every photograph you see of a speech-maker is one with a significant gesture in it. Politicians gain the power of a conductor during newsers, though the sound of shutter planes clicking is music only to photographers' ears.

Don't Read This

The big story in the New York Times today, the story you'll be hearing about all week, is the one on cell phone use by drivers.

I was going to come here and say, Read it! Now! It is an open-and-shut case after reading this!

But why bother? If you feel as I do, that it should never be done while driving, it's only affirming your beliefs. If you use them, you simply won't read it. Nothing in it, not all the logic and statistics it ably provides, not all the experts cited, will change your mind. I understand this. If I came across an article about the flaws of people my age, race, beliefs and background, no matter how well-reasoned and correct it is, I'd skim it, if that, and move on. It would be like having a photograph taken of your worst body part in bright light then blown up and posted in your dwelling. You'd avoid that part of your wall. We're all only human.

Reflections on the Moon

I think my jaw actually dropped a little when Jennifer, a young coworker, a college grad headed for graduate school, said she didn't believe America landed people on the Moon in 1969. 

But after some thought, it made sense. She was born in 1986. I have books I bought then I haven't read yet! Over half of Americans living today weren't alive when the moon landing occurred. (Makes those of us who watched it on black and white TVs feel like dinosaurs, no?)

Jennifer's generation has been around only long enough to see exploding space shuttles, bungled wars of choice, one president diddling his intern and another incompetent in even his native language, car companies making the exact wrong cars, lying journalists, corruption, greed, and other countries reaching parity with us and often more in the sciences. They've seen enough credibility given to electronic publication that wildly unsubstantiated conspiracies of the type my generation saw in mimeographed sheets handed out on street corners by unkempt men with rheumy eyes are indistinguishable from those published by legitimate news organizations. Is it any wonder that now 6 percent of Americans think the landing was a hoax?

And the latest. NASA erased the original tapes of Neil Armstrong's famous steps. (Oops! Silly us.) What's left looks like something low-level techs in any Hollywood studio could put together in an afternoon. What better fuel for denial of an event?

To these young 'uns, however, I say this: Look in the mirror.

Not yours, the one on the Moon. That's right. Hours before they left, the Apollo astronauts put a prismatic retroreflecting mirror on the lunar surface and angled it toward the Earth on July 21, 1969, just hours before leaving. Two more were left during subsequent Apollo missions, and the Soviets have one on a lunar rover. The purpose was to have surfaces that could receive and reflect back pings from laser beams. By measuring the time it takes light to reach and return from the Moon, scientists can gauge the distance with great accuracy -- to within an inch or so. Four decades after the landing, they still do it, making it the longest running experiment to come from the Apollo missions.

It turns out the Moon is leaving our orbit, albeit at a rate of less than two inches a year, due to the Earth's ocean tides and that the universal constant of gravity is very stable. Phew!

A box about two feet square sits on a dusty, gray surface called the Sea of Tranquility offering proof to all that the late Walter Cronkite (goodbye, old friend) was telling the truth when narrating over images that were indeed live from the moon.

Footnote: Right now there are 13 people on the International Space Station. That is the most ever in space at one time.

Dear Whiteowl

I don't often read Whiteowl's posts. They're hard to get through, with the poor spelling and grammar. The nearly random punctuation makes you have to backtrack to read sentences sometimes to get their meaning. But heck, I'm on vacation this week and just for fun cut and pasted one and answered it.

I have always been sympathetic to those that cannot afford or are unable to get healthcare.  I believe there should be a way for them to get coverage.  In my opinion Obamacare is not the answer and is in fact a hugh disaster on many fronts to the American people.  And, like every other Obama Plan, he is trying to push it through without proper evaluation and trying to make it so important that it has to be done yesterday.

Let's discuss what is really happening.  The Democrats claim that there are 46 million people without healthcare.  What they don't tell you is that 12 million of those are Illegal Aliens that they want included in a Healtcare Plan.  There are another 15 million that are eligible for either Medicare or Medicaid, but do not apply for it for whatever reason they have.  So, why can't we give the rest, the same courtesy we give to Illegal Aliens who get coverage at the taxpayers expense? (1)  Why would you want to change the best Healthcare System in the world and spend over $1 Trillion to do it, get rid of healthcare for over 130 million people who would be forced to go to government plans, put the government in charge of your health needs and create a bureacracy so big that it will be uncontrollable. (2) Every worker in the country would be paying for it in higher taxes. (3)  Approximately 39 states would end up with a tax rate approaching 50%.  I am sorry folks, but there simply has to be a better answer for the 15 million.  When has the government ever run anything efficiently or with your interests in mind. (4) Businesses would be crippled by the requirements put on them, jobs would be lost and a bad economy would just get worse.  The Budget Office has stated that there will be no savings and the costs will just continue to rise.  Socialism is simply not the answer.  It has worked nowhere. (5)  When is the luster of the Obama Charisma going to wear off and have sensible Americans realizing that this is NOT, "The Change you could believe in."  This plan is another HUGH DISASTER FOR AMERICA. (6)

1. Sounds like you got some of these ideas and numbers from Fred Thompson's June 21 appearance on "Meet the Press." Thompson, the Republican senator and actor who was laughed out of the presidential race last year, quoted 2007 numbers and rounded those down. If anything, the numbers are much higher now. The number of undocumented aliens, according to the National Institute for Health Care Management, is 5.6 million. Eighty percent of the uninsured are U.S. citizens, according to the nonpartisian, non-lobbying Kaiser Family Foundation. About 12 million who are eligible for Medicaid are not enrolled. No one is sure why.

2. A remarkable number of factual errors in just one sentence. Best health care in the world? Hardly. We pay more and get less than any other industrialized nation. The trillion dollars is over a decade. Funny how that's not mentioned -- you're supposed to think it's in one year. No one with existing insurance will be forced into a government program. The administrative costs of private insurance are huge and one reason American health care is the most expensive in the world. Those costs would be hugely reduced if run by the federal government. Why would it be uncontrollable? And you're just plain wrong: Obama has long said he would allow individuals or small businesses to buy insurance through a public plan – like the one now available to members of Congress. Nobody would be forced to drop his or her current insurance, and private plans would exist as they do now. This was the health care plan he promoted as a presidential candidate.

3. Not true, as anyone who's been keeping up with the news knows. The rich would pay a slightly higher tax. If you make $350,000 a year, your tax will go up 1 percent. If you make $1 million a year, it'll go up around five or six percent. This is called a progressive tax. Nothing new; income tax started out that way.

4. Well, let's see. Our military, while misused lately, is second to none. We have an excellent federal parks system, great interstate highways, a wonderful space program. Our national forests are protected by the federal government, 300 million aces of them. Wetlands protection policies since 1990 have saved over 832,000 acres of coastal wetlands. Species once thought endangered are recovering. And the Environmental Protection Agency, founded under that bad old Richard Nixon, has helped reduced toxic emissions by 54 percent since 1970 even though U.S. gas consumption has gone up. By 2015, harmful chemicals are expected to be reduced by 70 percent over current levels. These are reasons you have government. Altruism is seldome a motivation for private enterprise.

5. Nowhere? I lived in Japan for three years and never heard a complaint. Same's true of most Europeans I meet, the French, Danes, Swedes, Fins, others. Yes, I've actually met people from those countries and talked about it with them. I met a Canadian where I work once who had elective surgery scheduled in two months and said he wished his system was like ours. I said, "I've worked here for a year and have no health insurance. If you were fired tomorrow, you'd still have that operation." He had nothing to say to that. Imagine if getting police and fire protection depended on your company paying a monthly fee for you and you lost your job and, because you called 911 for a kitchen fire six years ago the premiums were too high for you to afford. Would that be fair? Why is that different from health care?

6. Now we're getting someplace. It seems you object to Obama personally. Still can't get over the loss? Understood. But try to be objective. Hey, it's not easy if you dislike someone, I know, but it is possible.

The Animals

I'm on vacation. And housesitting in the suburbs. Two cats, a parrot that bites. Interesting creature, the parrot. Bred in the United States, hand raised, yet violently opposed to me. His owner, a woman in her 70s, has asked if I'd take him if she dies before he does, which is likely given his probable longevity. I said yes. How strange it would be to have a living companion, a pet, that you could never touch.

The cats. There are two, a male and a female. They're ragdolls, a breed known for their gentleness. Long hair, blue eyes. Both are young. They run and frolic in the house.

When I'm in the bathroom the male tries to come in. Tries. The door is ajar. He pokes his head through the opening and moves forward, where he meets a wall. The distance is too near, the angle too steep for him to turn, so he presses forward without success. He reaches his goal via random batting with his paw and nuzzling.

It amuses me, his inability to cope with the primitive technology of the hinge, but I'm being unfair. He has all the innate abilities to live outdoors with no tools or clothes, finding shelter, catching food in darkness with his claws and teeth. That his brain, which would fit in a tablespoon, is not hardwired to understand the lever, the inclined plane, the screw, is no deficit on his part. I should respect this sample of his species; he is at least highly as evolved as I am.

Michael the Molester

I'm amazed at the number of people who speak in such absolute terms about those who molest children who have compartmentalized Michael Jackson's behavior with young boys in this overlong,  media-hyped post-mortem love fest.

Does anyone honestly think all charges against him were made up? Have any of you read the transcripts of the trials, all available on thesmokinggun.com? I have. They will make your hair stand on end. Do you really think anyone, especially someone in great financial trouble, would settle out of court for $20 million to make a case go away if he were entirely innocent? If so, you've been drinking a little too much "Jesus Juice."

And don't give that, "But he was abused as a child!" "He was an artist!" crap unless you're as willing to overlook the actions of the creep in the playground boys room who probably suffered as much if not more.

Some are actually saying, "He's in heaven now, surrounded by children." It sounds like yet another Michael Jackson joke along the lines of Q: Why does Michael Jackson like 28-year-olds? A: Because there're 20 of them.

The Birds

As a child I was the one who tried to rescue the fallen baby bird, the injured rabbit, the turtle with the shell cracked by an automobile. The result was always the same; a continuation of agony before death. As I matured, I learned to kill the creatures who blindly intersected with humans or their pets and were mortally wounded for their mistake.

At 14, I drowned a rabbit after a hopeful night of wishing it were stunned and would great the next day alert and friendly, with gooey, Disney eyes and buck-toothed smile. In college I came upon a groundhog writhing on a rural Ohio road, alternately choking on and expelling its blood, hindquarters crushed. I dispatched it by slamming a jack handle on its neck. The number of blows it took with the heavy piece of metal shocked me and since that hot afternoon I've never questioned any being's instinct to fight hard for life despite impossible odds.

Last summer, I returned from work and entered my parents' backyard to feed the fish in their small koi pond and found a drowned fawn, its legs bound by the pump's power chord as if by a sadist, the result of its struggle to escape the drinking source it had fallen into. A freak accident, the only one in the pond's two decades. Its mother probably watched it tire, then go under, helpless against the plastic and copper tendril tightening on her offspring's hind legs.

I dug a deep hole in the yard and buried it. An urban dweller, I was housesitting while they were away and I never told my parents about it. What good would that do?

Then there was this evening. Walking the half mile from the train station to my parents' house for dinner, I heard the battle cries of small birds. There were sparrows, robins and catbirds, darting about a small but lush tree, no more than a dozen feet tall. A territorial dispute of some kind, I assumed. Then a huge brown figure exploded from the tree's crown. A hawk. A big one. Such birds in the suburbs were rare when I was young and seeing them now still startles.

The hawk sought altitude, heading for a taller tree, as a half dozen of the smaller birds tailed and harassed it, nimble fighters chasing the lumbering bomber. The hawk clutched something small in the talons of one foot.

The tree was on the side of the road and as I drew closer I could see on the road a nest and, near it, a bird. A robin, young, weeks from flight, its eyes were open, body quivering. What to do?

I was tempted to crush it underfoot, but the bird appeared to be fine despite its recent trauma. Hand feeding only rarely works. And am I to take unscheduled time from work to do this?

I scooped it up, put it in its nest and wedged the nest in the tree as high as I could reach. That mother birds abandon nest, eggs or their young if they've been touched by humans is a fallacy. Most species of birds have no sense of smell; those that do have a poor one and only the strongest odors drive them away. I stood across the street after replacing the nest. A robin neared it within two minutes. I left.

My father drove me to the station after dinner (chicken). Passing the tree, I saw nothing at its base; the nest remained. Next week, I'll pass the tree on foot. I'll have choices. One will be to look into the nest and see if it harbors a rotting corpse. The other will be to cross the street before the tree, and imagine my own ending to this feathered drama.

A Health Care Point

You know how sometimes you think you're smart and then you read or hear an idea so well thought out and expressed yet so obvious that you doubt whether you should even be counted on to use a can opener? That's how I felt Sunday when I read what I've stolen and pasted below, the first paragraphs of a newspaper article.

Throughout all the, well, let's call them discussions, I've had over the years on health care with my brother, an insurance lobbyist, it never occurred to me to make the comparison made in the first three paragraphs.

The article is by Jeff Gelles of the Philadelphia Inquirer and was published by them Sunday, June 28:

Imagine living in a society where reliable police and fire protection were available only to those who worked for the largest employers. In this fictional country, people with enough money might be able to buy personal protection - but perhaps not if they'd suffered a burglary five years ago, or once called 911 for a kitchen fire.

Would people with good ideas and a little bit of money be willing to give up personal security for the chance to start their own businesses? Or would they cling to the safety promised by a job at a big company or institution?

Substitute health insurance for police and fire protection, and you have one of the best - and least-heralded - arguments for universal health care, according to a small but growing number of economists.

It is an argument with potential appeal across traditional partisan boundaries: that severing the link between reliable health insurance and employment could unleash a wave of pent-up entrepreneurial energy, much as conservatives often argue that cutting marginal tax rates stimulates the economy.

The Time is Near

My pupils are small. This gives me a bird-like gaze people politely call "penetrating" or "piercing." I never had the wide pupils said to show, on a subliminal level, approval or sensual delight. My eyes take long to adjust to darkness. While others run in darkness outside and find movie theater seats during the previews I stumble on rocks and sit on strangers.

A side effect of having pinpoint-size pupils has been that, like stopping down the aperture of a camera, they see in great detail. As a child I could read tiny print, astonishing an eye doctor, and see words where my peers saw grey lines. In adulthood I could see periods and letters on paper as separate things, and observe the deformation of the arc of a serif as it curved through miniscule hills and valleys inherent in the texture of paper.

In middle age, this meant not needing reading glasses as soon as most. Needing them is an inevitable result of aging as the lens stiffens and no longer flexes enough for close work and generally occurs in your mid 40s. In my case, however, at 51 I don't need "readers."

But I will soon. I need bright light to read normally in bed now, and when text is at an angle I have difficulty.

I won't enjoy wearing them. I suppose no one does. They go along with sagging breasts, grey hair, loss of energy, and hardened forehead skin. Most of my coworkers are younger than I and while I don't pretend to be of their generation it will still cause a pang when I first reach for my spectacles in their presence. And what will I do in the unlikely event I ever have another date? I've read that men chasing younger women go to restaurant Web sites and read the menus online before a date so they can order without giving away their age. Would my pride have me doing that? Or, as men often pick the place, would my dating life be one of eating only the specials?

I picked up a pair left behind where I work. Minimum strength, clean. They sit on my night table now, waiting. The look up at me, stern their glass both judging and reflecting me, as if saying, "Get ready, you spinster, to put us on and show the world your eyes are as inadequate as you are."

E-Ink Support

Earlier this week I read something that made me, like many of you a long-time lover of print, yearn to see books abolished in favor of electronic ink media like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle.
(It turns out the below is crap, though I'm quoting the magazine accurately. Read a comment below. Bottom line: It's one book per seat. I should have checked further but didn't think of checking Robert's own Web site. A lesson learned.)
It is this, from The New Yorker's June 22 profile of Nora Roberts, the romance writer: "There are enough Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium four thousand times."

Not four times, not 400 times, but 4,000 times. And not cover, but fill. The writer was trying to give readers a concrete image of the huge numbers of Roberts' books in existence, but in my case I had to back up and read the sentence again, then once more, and I still can't quite picture it. I mean, take just one seat in the stadium and stack Nora Roberts books on it. How many feet high would that stack of two or three books have to be to show the amount of her books one large bookstore would hold? Ten? Twenty? And get a square yard on the field and stack it to the height of the stadium. That would be a great number of books. Do that with the entire field and all the seats and then repeat it 3,999 times. Picture a grid 63 by 63 and in each square is a Giants Stadiums. This would dwarf most cities and you'd still be 16 stadiums short. Then you'd fill them all with Nora Roberts books.

What I'm getting at is if you think of all the trees, chemicals and energy used to manufacture that many books and the transportation of them, storage and disposal, it's hard for me to champion print. And this is just one author. Think if every other book, newspaper, magazine, office document or advertising flier in America were no longer on paper. Then spread this worldwide. Sure, there are environmental impacts when you make an electronic reader, but when I see how much paper I bundle for recycling every two weeks -- and my amount is low -- I can't imagine that if I had a reader that lasted even only two years the impact wouldn't be much less.

I can get as sentimental about the old way as anyone else, but something clearly better quashes such feelings.

Sunday, June 13, 2008

The man waits for his parents in his ninth floor apartment which overlooks his city's museum and part of its largest park, long a source of pride. The day is bright, clear, a perfect June day that carries no hint of the Mid Atlantic state mugginess that will stifle the city in the weeks to come and now, at five in the afternoon, the sun hovering high in the dry sky, visible through the open glass door leading to the man's balcony, is still a welcome presence.

The man is young, in his early 20s, and in turmoil. A month ago he received his B.A. and he has been waiting ever since to hear back from the graduate school that he wants most -- more than anything, ever -- to enter. He learned Friday that he had not and now, this day, this Sunday, he must face his parents and tell them. His parents emigrated to America and he is their great hope to assume powerful positions in this beacon of meritocracy. They worked hard at jobs beneath them so he could study long hours from childhood to his last year of college without having to sacrifice study time to perform similar menial labor.

And for nothing! the man thinks. His admission to the school that would have made so much of a difference has been declined! You're not good enough. There is no alternative plan acceptable to him or his parents. There was only this, and he has failed.

It is five minutes after five. His phone rings. The building his parents have paid so much money for him to live in is a good one. It has a front desk and the halls are clean, light bulbs are replaced, the plumbing system maintained and reliable.

It is the front desk, telling him his parents are here. He tells the clerk to admit them.

The man waits. His heart pounds. They are having dinner not to celebrate so much Fathers' Day, this bizarre American holiday, but what his parents think is the man's good news.

He hears his parents' voices through the door. The sounds of the simple doorknob mechanism. A click. The door opens. His parents begin to enter. The man stands in the narrow living room, watching them. They are nicely dressed, his father in a tie, his mother wearing a dress. They smile when they see him.

The man turns from them, a clumsy pivot, and runs. It takes a few steps and just seconds pass before he is at the railing of the balcony. He sees his hands on it as he vaults, a graceful move. He falls. Every sense is magnified. He sees each leaf in the tree across the driveway. He feels the air buffet his body with more and more force as his speed increases. He notices there are differences in how it feels against his clothes and his exposed skin. His parents' shrieks are muffled, barely escaping the carpeted interior of the apartment, but he hears birds sing with purpose, children shout, all vowels, as they play a block away, the metalic crunch of a car door slammed shut. These sounds start below him and rise as he falls, gaining presence as he enters their plane.

The fall lasts seconds. When his head is as far from the ground as it would be if were he standing there's an instant -- far too short to process into words but known nonetheless -- in which something seems as natural as it does wrong. He is his height, a normal man on a normal street, like everyone except for the terrible speed. He is still, a stationary object; it's the planet that is moving up to strike him.

He lands on concrete. Bones shatter, internal organs rupture. His brain is severed from its stem, rendering the other damage and attendant furious nerve endings moot. His heart, pierced by knives of broken ribs, shivers a moment, and stops.

The building is near a police station. An officer arrives in minutes, does a quick check, makes a call, and covers the body with a sheet. The officer knows by the way the body has fallen several feet from the building that it was likely a jump, not a fall, and takes comfort knowing that the dead man, just a boy, really, at least for a moment, wished to die. Still, thinks the officer, no stranger to what he's seeing, Who would want to die on a beautiful day like this?

At twenty after five a woman returning home from work sees the sheet-covered body. The sheet is white. It is marked by blood, a growing stain of about a square foot. The color is shocking, a vibrant, cheerful red.

I Love My SUV

I Love My SUV

My SUV is big and strong.
Rids Earth of all that gas.
Oil’s been trapped much too long.
Burns lots, small cars I pass.
I sit in the seat, way up high,
Feel better than all of you.
It is my ship, I’m Captain Bligh!
Do what I tell you to!
Mini Cooper? Bike? Pedestrian?
I just might knock you down.
I’ll close my eyes and count to ten,
While you glare at me and frown.
At intersections can’t see past me,
Wait till I’m off the phone.
Because even though I’ve room for twenty,
I’m traveling alone.

TV and Me

Then, as now, I was a loner. Poor student, short attention span. A shy girl at a single sex school. I avoided all after-school activities, certain that a girl with a deformed leg would garner only negative attention, a suspicion often confirmed in public.  Boys were as much a mystery to me in the mid-1970s as men are to me now.

I had TV.

Television then. Three channels, not counting PBS, never a true network.

My favorite shows were on Saturday nights. I would get my supplies -- cigarettes heisted from my mother, cookies, the cat -- and watch, on the portable Sony black and white my parents allowed me to have in my bedroom on weekends, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Bob Newhart Show," and "The Carol Burnett Show," the three back-to-back on CBS. On many cold winter nights I'd watch them in the bathtub, turning on the hot water with my foot when the main body of water cooled, the windows black, textured with vapor. I'd emerge pruned after two hours, release the cat from her forced friendship, and go to bed. Another Saturday night spent solo, but with laughs, the time not wasted.

Time passed. Real life became more interesting than tube life. College and friendships, none very close but entertaining. I was moderately funny, my timing honed by the years of sitcoms. After college, life abroad for five years, mostly with no television at all. Didn't miss it a bit. There's a scene in a movie I saw years ago that described what watching television is like when you haven't for some time. It's a parody of sitcoms. An anonymous man enters the front door of a house, a generic living room set. There is wild applause. The man says, "Honey, I'm home!" Gales of laughter. No answer. He turns toward the kitchen. "Sweetheart?" More laughter. That's what it was like watching television after not watching it for half a decade. After a diet of movies, books and travel even the sharpest shows seemed dimwitted and plodding.

Gradually, I began to watch a few shows. "Seinfeld," "ER," "Homicide." Far fewer programs appealed to me. Some I never saw an episode of though they were on for years. "Murphy Brown," "Home Improvement." Some are still on and I've yet to see them, like "Law and Order" and the "CSI" shows.

At 51, I've aged out of television's demographic. I had cable briefly but saw little reason to pay that much for commercial channels. And I've always been poor.

This week comes the digital switch. I got the box months ago. The picture ranges from perfect to nonexistent.  I've lost some channels completely. All I can receive is CBS, Fox and a few bizarre channels with irregular and dull programs.

The best nights are when I come home, eat while watching the news and, if there's not a Netflix movie on tap, or something on Hulu.com, I turn the box off by seven. Long evenings stretch before me. I can read, nap, surf the Net, listen to music. All on my schedule. I've found that the less TV I watch the better that night's sleep. I've also learned that even when shows I watched habitually for years are no longer available, my mourning period is less than a week.

The Weekly Suburban Paper

The Weekly Suburban Paper

Oh, the weekly suburb sheet,
Detailin' so much o' life.
Local crooks, turn up the heat,
Talk to a commissioner’s wife.
High school sports are pretty cool,
Zone issues cause big trouble.
Kid near drowned in the public pool?
Circulation may well double!
And don’t forget the social page,
Gowned women, black-tied men.
School section talks of a teen rage:
Blue jeans are back again!
Last and saddest are obits,
Accounts of lives lived long.
Grandkids’ names listed like hits,
Careful – don’t spell them wrong.

Dear Julie G.

Dear Julie G.

I know all about you, Julie G.,
Though you have not seen moi.
Info on you I could get a fee,
Or follow you a la film noire.
I know where you have stock,
And where you work and live.
I know your love of classic rock,
And charities to which you give.
“How do you know this?” you will say,
“Me, have you been stalking?”
No, Julie, but on the train today,
On your cell you kept on talking.

Things I Don't Get

Computer screens They're oriented horizontally, yet everything on them is vertical except movies and TV, which even now aren't the majority of what they're used for.

Those pieces of wax paper at stores you're supposed to use to pick up bread, cookies, etc. I understand the idea of keeping things clean, but doesn't everyone just touch the ones they're buying, or is that just me?

Having a dog in a city I love dogs and grew up with them. But that was in the suburbs in the 60s and 70s. In a 21st century city it makes little sense. They sit in apartments or small houses and are walked twice a day on a leash. If they're lucky they get to run with other dogs in a fenced-in yard a few times a week. And the barking. I guarantee that every dog yapping as it's walked down the street, shattering the peace, is being walked by a woman. Not always, but nine times out of ten. I'm not saying we're not capable of properly training our pets, I'm saying that we too often don't.

Madonna I'm her age, so it's not a generation thing. She's a sexually liberated Catholic. Understood. Not groundbreaking in the 70s, not to mention the mid-80s, when she made her bones. Two, maybe three tunes you can hum. Can't act. Not too bright. Little fashion sense. Pretentious. Why listen to anything she says?

Sex writing This is not a criticism of it, just a sign of my advancing years. I haven't read anything this decade I didn't see in the 70s, when I was in college. Different styles, some different technology (the Net), but really it's just reworded versions of The Pearl or Anais Nin.

Alarm clocks Why do they just make one sound at one volume? Years ago, in Japan, I stayed in a place that had a cascading alarm. It started with a pleasant sound you could barely hear and, over the course of a minute or so, got louder. It was like being nudged and spoken to gently by a lover versus shouted at by a drill sergeant. This was 20 years ago. I thought, "Surely all alarm clocks will be like this in ten years." I'm still waiting.  

Toothpaste tube caps The caps on tubes of Colgate toothpaste have flip tops you can open with one hand. This little thing makes your morning and evening routine easier; brush in one hand, open the tube with the other. The problem is, I prefer Arm & Hammer's baking soda and hydrogen peroxide toothpaste (since using it I've had zero dental problems). When I saw Colgate's caps a decade ago I thought, "Surely all toothpaste tube caps will be like this in five years." I'm still waiting.

Artichokes They are ugly, they have thorns, you have to scrape what little food there is on them with your teeth like a starving rodent to get it and whatever health benefits they may have are negated by dipping them in butter. The heart's all right, but hardly memorably delicious. So why, the three or four times a year I eat them, do I consider them a treat?

The Conservative Right Do they really think life would be better with them in charge? Obama won. By a lot, actually. Why do they use the flag as their symbol? It's as if they're saying if you don't agree with them, you're un-American. Who told them that? Isn't pointing out what you think is wrong with your nation and working to fix it the most patriotic thing you can do? Why are so many of their actions mean-spirited?

The Liberal Left Do they really think life would be better with them in charge? They sit there, nodding iin uncritical agreement at anything one of their own says, deriding all those right of center say. Obama won. By a lot, actually. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of good people who voted for someone else with ideas they should listen to.

Action movies There are dozens of silly things in all movies that we'll put down to artistic license, but why is it that in action movies when someone stuns an armed bad guy chasing them they run but leave the gun behind! The bad guy gets up and keeps chasing them. Even if you know nothing about how to use a gun, wouldn't you at least take it and throw it on a roof or something?

Tax cutting No matter who's been in office and no matter how much they've been taxing, my take home pay and quality of life have been identical, which is lower than average. I've never found myself saying, "I can/cannot do this now because my taxes have gone down/up." Sure, a lot of the tax money is misspent. But everyone who gets money misspends a percentage of it. Hospitals, churches, schools, your kids in college. Everyone. But a lot of it goes to good things. Tax the hell out of everyone, I say. Me included. The rich won't suffer and the poor may benefit. "I'd be rich if I didn't have to pay so much in taxes." Oh, please.

People who think sarcasm has anything to do with humor I've had girlfriends who put "I'm sarcastic" in online dating profiles as if it's an asset. I've never heard a man say he likes sarcastic women.

Global warming deniers It's clear that human activity is contributing to global warming. How much is not as clear. Those who say it's true may be exaggerating its effects. But even if they're wrong, what's the worst possible outcome? That we clean up our act, switch from burning fossil fuels, which we'll have to do someday anyway, and in general tread more lightly on the planet? Sure, there will be some short-term pain: lost jobs, slow cars, fewer material possessions. But think of what the air could be like a hundred years from now. Imagine waking up in Los Angeles or New York and on a typical day seeing clear blue skies and breathing in crisp, clean air.

People who think it's just fine to pull up in front of a friend's house in a city and honk their horn What are they thinking? That only the person who needs to hear it will hear it? Don't they know that this is the definition of selfishness? Do they really think it's fair to disturb dozens of others because they're too lazy to get out of their car and push a doorbell or knock? Don't most of us have cell phones that we can speed dial our friends with to let them know we're almost there? And that little toot! when you're leaving? Stop it.

Professional sports "We won!" people shout. Who's we? Sports teams are made up of millionaire athletes rarely from the city they're playing in who would move elsewhere without blinking if another city offered them more money. Then, on camera, they'd act sad about this as if some unstoppable force of nature, like an earthquake or a hurricane, were forcing them to relocate against their will. Am I really supposed to feel elated/depressed because a group of men who temporarily live in my city beat another group of men who temporarily live in another city at a children's game?

Conan O'brien He has no idea -- none -- how to tell a joke. He'll tell it, then spend long seconds trying to get a laugh out of the audience's reaction to it. How many times has he told a joke, seen it bomb, and then say, "A woman in the audience just went 'Yark!'" or something. The audience is primed ("We're in New York! On a TV show! Conan!") and sure enough they act like he's the funniest guy they've ever seen. Anyone, even Leno, has a better monologue. 

Saying "Everything happens for a reason!" No it doesn't. Everything happens due to a cause, but that's not the same thing. It makes as much sense as saying "There are no coincidences" (the favorite of conspiracy buffs). Sure there are! Lots of them! What kind of supernatural force with incredible powers and intelligence would decide that the best way to cure Parkinson's disease is to give it to Michael J. Fox. Why him? Wouldn't a popular sitting president be a better idea? A top-rated talk show host? I have nothing against Michael J. Fox but I can think of a dozen people who would be better at popularizing finding a cure for the disease. Wouldn't a powerful, benign being just cure it outright?

Memorial Day

Andy Rooney said something I've been thinking for years during his minutes on "60 Minutes" tonight when talking about the many men he knew who were killed in battle. He said no one "gives" their lives, their lives are taken. I've always wondered how governments, including ours -- especially ours -- get away with using the language they do when describing acts of war.

"He made the ultimate sacrifice," they say, as if a soldier threw himself on a live grenade to save his buddies when, in wars these days, he was most likely killed by a bomb hidden near his vehicle or in the clothes of a suicide bomber.

Calling every soldier serving in war zones a "hero" the way the government and the media do is a joke, and the soldiers will often be the first ones to tell you that. Many sit around, bored to tears, watching DVDs or surfing the Net. Real heros die in battle as they fight against the odds to defend their country. 

We know now that some of our soldiers have behaved atrociously. One of the ones who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl then put her with her family and shot and burned them all to death was sentenced just last week. And the Abu Ghraib photos we've seen are but a few of many, the government tells us. In any war the atrocities revealed are a fraction of those which occurred. An amazing number of female soldiers have been sexually abused by their male counterparts. Going to the latrine is a dangerous thing for them.

Every time I see a soldier on TV say he joined to serve, protect, blah, blah, blah, I can't help seeing a lack of  conviction in how they say it. They're toeing the line, saying what a loyal soldier would say, being part of the team. They seem to be saying it to convince themselves it's true. But be honest. We have an all-volunteer army now and the way they've gotten the young to sign up -- those who aren't so desperate to get a job that they'd do anything, that is -- is to entice them with incentives. A coworker I had, a bright college student, plans to become an Army medic. His desire to help American soldiers is genuine, but if the Army didn't promise to pay his medical school tuition, which he'd never be able to afford on his own, I doubt he'd enlist.

When I remember those killed in wars I think primarily of those who died in World War II. Korea and Vietnam seem silly to me now. Did we really think Russians would land in our back yards and force us to be communists? And the wars we're in now will be looked back on in fifty years as the Oil Wars, wars of choice America started to squeeze out as much profit for corporations as possible before the wells ran dry and we had to do the hard work of adapting to new forms of energy.

"There never was a good war, or a bad peace."

Benjamin Franklin

Leg Poem

Two Legs Good

We were not built to walk erect
But I’m most glad we do.
It makes my hands stay so perfect
And I’m high above the poo.
Two-legged life is mighty fine
Beats living in a sty.
If I find reason to whine
It’s ’cause I cannot fly.

Two Things

If you dated John Deere and broke up with him because you fell in love with someone else you'd have to write a Dear John Deere letter.

I asked a new coworker yesterday if she had any siblings and she said she had a younger brother and sister who were identical twins. I'm still trying to figure this out.

My Pigeon Poem

This is a poem I wrote a year ago after seeing a male pigeon court a female on a train station platform.

Pigeon Love

If I throw up in your mouth
A little predigested pretzel,
Will you let go far south
Or would you treat me like an Edsel?
If I bob and weave and strut
And have feathers sleek and strong,
Will you be my wing-ed slut
And make me feel that I belong?
If I coo and dance and preen
Can I part your scaly legs?
If you let me be obscene
I’ll be good to all our eggs.

My Poem

A few years ago I had a minor operation that required general anesthesia. I felt mildly out of sorts for a day or so afterward and I found myself making rhymes. I wrote down a few and published them on Craigslist, in the Rants and Raves section. This continued for a week and soon I challenged myself to write one every weekday. I did this for three years. It angered a surprisingly large number of men, even though each one was labeled as a poem in the subject line, meaning they could avoid it if they wished. I called them "poems" in a tongue-in-cheek way. Light topical verse would describe them better, but even that implies you're in the hands of a better writer than I. For fun, I may re-publish a few of them here. The below is a sample from August, 2007.

Conspiracy Buffs

Area 51's the home
Of aliens quite outrageous.
Half the nation worked alone
To make Camelot uncontageous.
Dollar bills and secret shakes
Are how Freemasons talk
About making sure that Hostess cakes
Control minds (Thank you Herr Salk!).
We buffs all know that eleven, September
Was a completely planned-out plot.
The motive's something we can’t remember,
But it doesn’t matter a lot.
We know what we know, we’re smarter than you,
We know all the means and the ends.
But smart as we are we long for a clue
On how to get some girlfriends.

How I have fun

I seem to be the resident sourpuss here, but I do have fun. Often. A sampling of how.

1. Talk to others. I work with the public, many of whom have traveled overseas to be where I work. They are often interesting and lively.

2. Talk to young people. Again, this is at work. Most of my coworkers are younger than I am. They have bags of energy, are fun-loving and surprisingly optimistic about things these days. Wonderful.

3. Explore nature. It's rare that I do this, living in a big city. But when I get to see wildlife or new growth it makes my day.

4. Bicycle. I've used it for transportation for over 20 years now and no matter how workaday it gets I still, at age 50, find it fun. Might be a case of arrested development, but I don't mind.

5. Flickr is my guilty online pleasure. I go to the home page and click on the thing that shows samples of what's been uploaded in the past minute or so. There are men obsessed with women's feet in slippers! Who knew?

6. Go to bookstores or the library and wander. I live near my city's library's main branch and some very good bookstores, used and not. How time flies when I'm in them.

7. Read. Don't we all? Fiction, mostly. Newspapers, magazines. Life is great when I find something funny. Anyone read "Buzzed" in the May 4 New Yorker? I laughed so hard I had to stop reading! And I've never done coke.

8. Watch TV. Aging out of the demographic, but there are still a few shows that make me laugh. Mostly, I get movies from Netflix.

9. Think about things. I know that sounds odd, but thinking as an activity doesn't get the respect it should. All those things we were encouraged to ponder as children then forgot when real education took over are still fun to think about. What will cities look like 100 years from now? What do cats think of each other? If you were invisible, where would you go? If you went to a planet inhabited by intelligent alien beings on it, what would their music be like?

10. - 1,000,000. There are so many things that generally aren't regarded as fun but are sometimes, when the circumstances are right. Cooking, baking. Really cleaning something. Going through a closet and weeding out old clothes. Weeding out weeds. Washing the windows, sweeping the stoop, emailing friends, surprising someone by ordering a book online for them, hand writing a note, finishing a crossword puzzle, thinking up a joke, shining your shoes, grooming a pet, polishing metal. Anything, really.

My Swine Flu Thoughts

1. It'd be cool if it killed everyone who got it and five minutes after they died they woke up craving human flesh and the only thing that could stop them would be a severe blow to the head.

2. The pork industry doesn't want it called the swine flu anymore, so now it's H1N1. Lacks the ring it had, but what the hell.

3. It will be regarded as the most overreported story of 2009. Look at the numbers. The very few who've contracted it have recovered. I guess the media has decided we're all tired of 24-7 recession reportage, with no end in sight.

4. Touching people is overrated. I've had intimate relationships with people I've only shaken hands with and been near strangers with people I've embraced. Sex is another matter; at that level, there's always a connection, provided the encounter is consensual and relatively sober. So if your doctor, friend, minister, whatever is telling you to say hello instead of shake hands, great. The Japanese see bowing as a valid means of communication -- how it's done and for how long. Body language and the eyes can say it all.

Movies to Avoid -- Additions welcome

1. Those reviewed in the Saturday N.Y. Times. Movie distributors schedule critics' screenings for Thursdays so critics can have reviews in the Friday edition. If they know the movie is bad they advertise the hell out of it and release it Friday in hopes that viewers will see it based on the ads, story idea and stars. If the flick cost little to produce they can make the money back in a weekend.

2. Movies with ads in which the review quotes are from people or publications you've never heard of or local television affiliate critics.

3. Movies with review quotes you may have heard of but are mere organs for the industry, like Variety, Entertainment Weekly, et al.

4. Movies "presented by" or produced by solid directors like Scorsese or Spielberg or from "the people who brought you ____."

5. Those with a shocking/stunning/unimaginable twist. Done often, sometimes well ("The Crying Game," "The Sixth Sense"), but is usually a cover for a bad movie.

6. Any movie starring Madonna.

7. Any movie based on a book or series of books you haven't read that has a cult following. Saw all three "Ring" movies. What the hell was going on? Harry Potter movies? Pass.

8. Chick flick weepers. Sure, we roll our eyes when men flock to the latest action/adventure offerings, but when we do the same to "The Muted Heart" ("Seinfeld" reference!), they laugh at us. A double standard, but there it is. Wait till the DVD is out and he's away.

9. Anything described as "heartwarming."

10. Movies that are "This year's _______!" If I want to see "Juno" again, I'll rent "Juno" again.

11. A movie you know nothing about and haven't even heard of. Sure, you're too busy to keep up with every little piece of information that comes your way but if a movie's worth seeing, you'll hear something about it at some point.

12. Just about all sequels. The old joke that the only sequels better than their predecessors are "Huckleberry Finn" and The New Testament holds for movies. Possible exception: "The Godfather II."

Death and the Afterlife

The idea of an afterlife has never made sense to me. For how long? Eternity? Really? Time's a tough concept for us to fully grasp. Wouldn't you get bored after a million years? No? How about a trillion? How about 100 trillion years? That will be long after our universe will have ended. (Everything decays, loses energy.) "No," some say. "In the afterlife a million years passes in an instant." Ah, but there's your eternity problem: You're just reducing the scale, not eliminating the number.

It amuses me that some people still cling to the old Family Circus concept of an afterlife. Playing checkers with Ben Franklin. Attending lectures by Einstein. Piano lessons from Mozart. Helping out your grandchildren. It's comforting, like warm, mushy, food. It fits in our time scale, the books we've read. But it always comes back to the time element. Humans have existed in something like their present form for less that five million years. We've been civilized -- if you can call it that -- for just a few millennia. What will you be doing a billion years from now, long after nothing human roams the Earth or any other place? And what about our minds? When we age so many of us lose our memories and mental abilities to disease and the natural process of aging. Those things aren't going anyplace, they disappear. Does anyone seriously believe that when elderly people or those who've had severe brain injuries die they're met by someone who returns those abilities? "Jane! Good to see you! Here's the memories of your youth back!"

And reincarnation, an idea that reached faddish proportions in the 1990s, didn't quite work out. There were too many conventions with too many women insisting that they and not you had been Cleopatra, too many men were Alexander the Great. And I've yet to see a child whose first words were, "Yes! I live again!"

The closest we'll come to immortality will be reproducing our minds electronically. This sounds crazy to those who don't know of it (so did human flight and space travel), but there are people working on it. It will happen one day. (After my time, though. Shoot.) It would be great. We could write our own life stories and live them and it would seem -- it would be -- as real as the lives we live now. We could all be rock/movie stars who discover cures for disease, write best selling books and bring about world peace with our wisdom and intelligence. We could set our bliss settings to maximum and be in a state of pure pleasure for as long as we wanted to. It would feel like laughing, being loved, being successful, euphoric and having an orgasm all at once. When we tire of this we could rewrite the program. If we decide we've had enough experiences would could elect to forget them and begin again or simply turn ourselves off. Personally, I'd set a timer to turn myself back on every fifty years or so to see what's going on in the world.

When I was in my mid teens and working through these things I thought the ideal would be that after death you'd exist as an energy plasma of some sort, floating around, observing for weeks, months, years. Once you've made peace with this gradual transition to non-existence you'd happily let yourself just fade away. As an adult I've realized that this is unlikely and why take chances? (I've yet to see any supposed contact with the deceased not eventually exposed as a charlatan of some kind. They just better at it.) A worthy goal is to try to make peace with the idea of a universe without you while you're still alive, without depending on blind faith in a supreme being or any other kind of magical thinking.

It's not easy, but I try.

Dear Reader

I am your daily newspaper. I started out around the middle of the 19th century, when the web press and industrialization led to the penny press and most cities had several of us competing fiercely for the reader's attention. I adapted over the years, adding photographs, comics, puzzles, advice columns and more as I took on radio in the 1920s then television in the 1950s.

Now it looks like my days are numbered. My afternoon editions waned in the 1980s as congested roads made distribution difficult and printing techniques made those editions little changed from the morning ones. Cable television birthed a 24-hour news cycle, but I was still relevant to the newly awake, enabling my morning self to survive.

The late part of the last decade and all of this one have given me my most powerful foe to date, the Internet. Broadband access lets you see photographs in greater quality than print and provides video or audio clips with news stories in the time it takes to turn a page. To get a foothold, I gave myself away for free on the Internet, and you took me, opting to maybe buy my Sunday edition only, reading the weekday edition during your coffee break at work. Craigslist came along and robbed me of the vital revenue I got from my classifieds, those agate ads in the back that cost you a lot to buy, me little to print, and were the best way to advertise your yard sale, your used car, your dating availability.

My print edition will end in the next decade, probably sooner, as electronic ink readers improve and get cheaper. Yes, many of you can't imagine that now and rhapsodize about the "tactile" satisfaction you get from holding paper, but you will be the horse-over-car people of your day, as the young who grew up without me will shake their heads in wonder at the notion that people spent over a century cutting down living trees to make something that would be tossed after a day.

I will evolve and the word "newspaper" will pass into history in favor of "newsfeed" or the brand name of whatever you'll read. I'll have to figure out how to charge you. It may be by the article, it may be by subscription. Some have suggested making me a public resrouce, like libraries, funded by the state. Not likely, I think. One thing is certain; I won't have 400-person newsrooms in every mid-market city, taking up valuable office space. Nor will I have multiple foreign bureaus.

Much will be lost. Most important will be my ability to do serious (and expensive) investigative journalism, spending months, even years, uncovering social ills and corporate and political malfeasance while television sticks with the entertaining but meaningless gotcha brand, exposing shoddy contractors, sexual peccadilloes and the like. True, the majority of readers didn't read those articles, but in many cases the people who mattered did: I brought down a president and helped end (and start) wars.

My future self will have to appeal to the ever shrinking attention span, as readers view me like a man watching TV with a remote in hand, jumping from story to story in perpetual search of something better.

What I've Learned from Flickr

I am a voyeur, peering into the lives of the successful and happy. In the past I've stared at the photos coming down the little slide on the photo machines in pharmacies while pretending to peruse the batteries. Now I needn't leave my apartment. I can go to flickr.com
and click the reload section on the home page and bring up photos from all over the world. I can click on those and enter the photostream of a complete stranger. It is as if I've broken into an apartment building for the United Nations and am entering the apartments where all I do is thumb through their photo albums. I have learned the following:

1. South Americans are sexy. Europeans are stylish. Americans are fun-loving but often overweight. Asians are cute.
2. You can never take too many photographs of: Parties, weddings, your baby.
3. Provocative: Girls taking pictures of each other in come hither poses. Creepy: Men taking pictures of women from behind in public spaces.
4. Cats are calm and often half asleep. Dogs are eager to please and as active as the people they're with. The result: Cats are easier to photograph than dogs so there are many more cat pictures.
5. When young people, especially men, are photographed they make fake gang signs in the belief this makes them witty yet mildly threatening.
6. There are hundreds of photographs of wool. Or is it yarn? Is there a difference? Is yarn just wool that's been turned into string?
7. Professional photographers take the least interesting photographs.
8. Photos of the elderly are usually sad.
9. Never show your friends photographs you took of: Sunsets, flowers, interesting cloud formations, most landscapes, interiors of the room you stayed in while on vacation. In fact, limit most vacation photos. Getting drunk on a beach was fun then. The memory of it is pathetic.
10. Very few people look good while singing or playing musical instruments. Never photograph someone while they're eating.

Tax Day

"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1904, before America instituted its income tax in 1913. Now, when anyone speaks of taxes they're cast as an evil taking of money from innocents.

I am poor, yet I still pay a huge chunk of what little I make in taxes. My East Coast city has a high cost of living (my one room hovel's rent is $640 a month) with high sales tax, wage tax and city tax. Being single with no dependents, the state and federal government both assume I don't need much of the little I earn so they take as much as they can, too.

But you know what? I'm happy to pay taxes. I know that far too much of them go toward things I'd rather not support -- Bush's  unnecessary war of choice, multi-million dollar bonuses for incompetent executives -- but a much greater percentage funds things I approve of, like education, the justice system, police protection, health care for some (but too few) of the poor and elderly, federal parks and wildlife preserves, government agencies that protect us from tainted food and ineffective drugs. Sure, you can criticize all those things and it's no secret that the FDA was gutted during the Bush years but even so, they're better than nothing.

There are still parts of this world where it would be a bad idea for an urbanite like me not to have a gun. Imagine. Uh-oh, someone's creeping around in my back yard. I'd better get my gun. Hope I'm a better shot than he is! No thanks. I can call a three digit phone number and several trained professionals will be at my door in minutes to help out.

Yes, yes, anyone can tear all this apart and come up with many examples of cops not showing up, but the number of people who are protected just by the existence of a police force, a number that can't be counted, of course, is surely much higher.

Observed and Reported

I work with money. Cash. Coins, bills. In the store we've noticed a few things.

First, there are more returns these days. People spend, go home, realize they don't, after all, have all the money in the world and return, embarrassed, to return the merchandise.

Second, people who do have money and have shopped in our store for years are now noticing they can get a better deal on the Internet. These are people for whom money was not a consideration before and never checked.

Last, and this is subtle and anecdotal, we're finding many more wheat pennies now than before. I keep them even though they're usually not worth more than a penny. (Today I found a penny that was minted in 1909, the first year they were minted, replacing the Indian head penny. If it had an "S" on it (for San Francisco) and the initials of the designer on the reverse it would be worth over $4,000.) We've deduce that more people during these hard times are cashing in the jars of loose change they've kept for years. Piggy banks are being smashed, emptied. We're also -- and this I don't get -- seeing more of the old five dollar bills. I liked the changes in U.S. currency, but it's good to see the old bills come back. The engraving is more elegant.

Breasts

In our girlhood we wondered when we would get them, what they would look like, would boys like them and, if they did, would that be all they liked about us? Then at times they became a nuisance, things that needed to be harnessed, tucked in to tight bras when we did sports and even shielded for the few of us who participate in contact sports.

Our breasts are celebrated for their true purpose for a relatively brief period of our lives, when we use them to feed our young, if we choose to do so. Before we know it our children are crunching solid food, our breasts again relegated to ornaments. At the same time, or soon after, we're told we must keep an eye on them lest they morph into vectors of cancer that kills so many of us, and they are squeezed on tables, shot with radiation, pierced with long needles.

While they are ours, think of all the men who've died, stupidly, because of them. Those men who get upset when other men check out "their" woman's breasts, who will, when drunk, mad at the world, or both, start fights over them. And the number of traffic and pedestrian fatalities caused by men girl watching as they drive will never be known but surely is substantial among the forty thousand or so American traffic deaths each year. All because of these lumps of fat and tissue on our chests, these modified sweat glands said to evolve along with face-to-face intercourse, mimicking healthy buttocks.

These nurturing hemispheres, our body's first victims of gravity that men have pressured us into going to often ridiculous lengths to modify and preserve. And we comply, convincing ourselves we're doing it to feel good about ourselves. We even have surgery on them, surgery that often deadens nerves leading to a loss of nipple sensation, turning our wonderful, natural breasts literally into objects.

Does anyone really believe it's coincidental that the image we try to make our breasts conform to is that of the male ideal's? No wonder they're so often called boobs.

Bald Truths

Men are superficial and callow creatures, judging us on meaningless attributes like breast size and weight, ignoring our souls, our spirits, our inner lives. They deserve to be forever frustrated in their quest for women who comprise a tiny minority of the gender, with disproportionately large breasts and lustrous heads of hair atop hairless, malnourished bodies.

But wait a minute. What's this? An article about a hair firm that placed nearly identical ads for two men on a dating Web site, the only difference being that one had hair, the other was bald? Ah. It seems the haired version got 108 replies, the baldy just 22. Yes, you must consider the source: it's in the interest of the testers, Maximum Hair, to show that flowing locks lead to locked lips. Also, those seeking love via the Internet may be the type who rely on variables that can be quantified by a simple check sheet or photograph.

Still, we all know that for men with hair the field is wider than for those without, and that when given a choice between the two, all other things being equal, we'd opt for the guys who won't need a hat to shield them from the summer sun.

Bald men I know cringe when women try to make them feel good about being smooth pated by extolling the sexiness of the long dead Yul Brenner and Telly Savalas, and Vin Diesel, who has a physique and manner that puts him in as small a fraction of his gender as Jessica Alba is of hers.

And I haven't even touched on height. The average American man is 5' 9", the average American woman 5' 4". And what do you think is the height desired by these women? Hint: It starts with a "6."
I'm not defending men for wanting us to be what they do. Far from it! But I do think some of us should think twice before lambasting them for it.

Arguments

I have never, in my entire life, lost an argument. I have also never won an argument. And yet I've argued long, loud and often in favor of or against things I've had strong opinions about.

The thing is, no one ever wins arguments or loses them. Not right away, that is. By argument I don't mean a simple disagreement easily settled by empirical information -- Abe Vigoda's life/death status and the like -- but opinions bolstered by selected facts; a debate. I've never seen anyone in an argument raise a finger and say, "Stop! I never looked at it that way. I now have an entirely different view of the matter and realize that what I thought before was entirely wrong and that your opinion is one hundred percent correct. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways!"

What happens is you incorporate what you've heard from the person you argued with, ponder it, turn it around in your mind for awhile, sometimes years, and if the point is valid and you eventually accept it, it becomes yours and is a part of you as you mature and age.

I no longer wish to be the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, I think people not born in America should be able to be president, and the drinking age should stay where it is.

Now how can I find the people with whom I had those arguments?

Abortion

A fellow PNN poster, who says she's in her early 40s and is fond of writing saucy prose, wrote of having eight abortions.

Abortion. As reliable a wedge issue as guns and school prayer, dividing the masses for at least a century.

I'm prochoice, but the older I get, the more I understand those who aren't, even those for whom it's a religion based decision (I have no religion). Imagine if laws were passed that would permit mothers to euthanize their children before age one if they decided having them wasn't working out and you'll know how the pro-life crowd looks at it. "That's absurd!" you'll say. "You can't equate an independently living infant with an embryo."

Ah, but that's exactly what they do, and they have a point. How old must someone be before they're granted the most basic right? How can we get angry when we see pregnant women drink or smoke but not when they have abortions? We mourn so when a child dies; the wasted potential. But haven't we just filled in more blanks ("She loved kittens and pink flowers"), blanks that any blastula has as surely as a child?

And yet I, who have never needed one, remain in favor of keeping abortion safe and legal within the first trimester unless medical conditions warrant otherwise for all able to conceive. Without it, no matter what is promised by social agencies, women and girls will seek to terminate pregnancies on their own or with the aid of poorly equipped abortionists, endangering the health of those often reeling in shame through no fault of their own, e.g., rape or incest.

Still. Eight? There's no excuse for that. One's understandable. Even two can be forgivable. But any beyond that and you're using it for birth control. That's not why so many women -- and men -- fought hard and long to make it legal. 

How to Listen to Music

All right, brace yourself; this is a geezer speaking. I see so many people with bud phones in their ears, listening to music as they walk around, shop, take trains, exercise, and in general fart around. I approve, overall, so long as you're not cranking it at an ear-damaging level and are aware of your surroundings. (A young woman I know doesn't use an iPod for that reason. I applaud this.)

There are things I dislike iPod culture, however. First, you seldom get entire albums. You pick and choose the songs you like or that have been recommended by others, skipping the ones lacking a fast hook. Albums, ideally, are entire works of art, the cuts in the sequence they're in for a reason. I can't tell you how often, in the vinyl days, there were pieces on them I've wished I could omit at first that later became my top choices. Second, headphones cut you off from the world around you. Sure, it's great to walk with music in your head -- it can make life seem like a movie at times -- but you'll miss sounds a sentimental crank like me likes, children laughing, birds chirping, doors creaking open.

Third and last. It's good to just sit still, indoors, no distractions, and have only the music to focus on. I'm always struck by how much sadness there is in even the most up tempo songs sometimes.

That's my lecture. Class dismissed.

Something I'll Never Say

Years ago I decided that when I get old I'm not going to be one of those grinning seniors who chirps, "I'm 75 years young!"

My reasons are simple. I find it fey and cloying. And phony. I don't want to consume culture I dislike to try to keep up with those in their 20s and 30s. Over half the Americans alive today weren't around to watch the Moon landing. I was and I'm glad I was. Each year I slip further away from the prime time television demographic. The shows may be well-written and produced, but they seldom interest me. To this I say, great! It frees up my evenings considerably.

Another reason I don't like using "young," which seems to be used far less these days, is my respect for words. When you're 80 there's a pretty good chance you'll be dead in a month or two, and who wants to die young?

I know what you'll say, that it doesn't really mean you think you're young and that it's just a quick way of saying that you keep up with the times with an open mind. Fair enough. But I'll let my actions speak for themselves.

A Basic Thought About the Genders

Even now I find myself pondering things I did as a teenager. One is a fundamental difference between men and women: brute strength.

Men still have that over us despite huge increases in opportunities for women to develop our bodies, opportunities we've used. I've known women who've had all kinds of training in this or that fighting technique yet in real physical conflicts against men with none, most of them have lost. There's no getting around what 50 pounds of extra bone and muscle will do -- any guy will tell you that.

Imagine what it would be like if we were stronger than they are. Relationships would change dramatically. If you read transcripts of women talking you'll find that when not scripted even the most intelligent and accomplished of them use milder forms of speech than nearly all men. They're far more deferential and begin sentences with "I think," "I feel," or "I believe" and end others with questions ("It's hot today, isn't it?") while men state opionions as facts.

Maybe it's a brain thing, maybe a body thing. More likely, it's both. Yet we still say one person "looks up to" another when that person is admired and considered better at something than others, don't we? See? I did it.

(Not) Very Superstitious

I've never understood supersitions and I'm apalled by how many take them seriously. Part of my dislike of them is my nature -- I've never been a magical thinker. If you apply five minutes of critical thinking you'll see how silly and wasteful they are.

First, they're cultural. One day, in China, I was in a department store. It was raining outside and a dozen or so shoppers were looking at umbrellas. This was in the mid 1980s and quality merchandise and money were rare among the general population, so when they bought something they made sure it worked. All these Chinese were opening umbrellas inside without a second thought. Of course, they had never heard that doing so is "bad luck," it not being part of Chinese lore which has many, many of its own supersitions.

Years later, I worked in a small building. A coworker and I were going to walk out to get lunch together, but she was reluctant to use the nearest door. Why? Because she had entered the building through a different door and believed it was bad luck not to exit through the same one. I was 40 years old and had never heard that one and had surely left through different doors hundreds and hundreds of times. Was I doomed?

I save so much time and stress by not being superstitious. No worrying whether I'd brought my lucky pen to a test, no detours around black cats, and I save time by walking right under ladders, a frequent occurrence in the city I live in.

Do people really think there's some intelligent, supernatural force watching the 6.5 billion people now living and punishing or rewarding them based on meaningless rules? "Hmmm. You broke a mirror. I'm going to make your life miserable for the next seven years. Think I'll start by ... killing your little sister!" Please.

I know what you'll say: "Oh, but they're fun!" To each her own. I've found that when you shuck distractions the mind is freer to focus on other things. Including the fun ones.

What Gets Me Mad

Not a lot, these days. Call it age, call it maturity (I wish), call it ennui, just too tired to get the blood pumping.

People who refuse to listen, shutting me out, no matter how politely I'll tell them something -- that can get me going but even that I can tolerate.

People who think they have more rights than others (OK, me) because they have better looks, youth, a bigger car, more money.

Sometimes I'm surprised at what angers others. I've noticed most women get angry and defensive if they feel they're being judged. They act as if judging others is a bad thing to do. I disagree. People are judging animals. It's a basic thing we do, a means of adapting and surviving.

Judge me on this. Say something like, "You clearly have inferiority issues." If I agree, I'll say so. If I don't, I'll say so. But I'm certainly not going to whine about being judged.

Food and Me

I eat meat. Some. I've gone years not eating it. College, with the salad bar right in the center of the dinning hall. Out of college it was hard to be pure veg and I was lazy. I went back to meat.
When I lived and traveled overseas I ate strange things, usually in small amounts, usually for bragging rights. Dog in China, live shrimp, turtle, sparrows grilled sticks, whale.
I don't think I could go vegan but I probably should. A friend did and while she was healthy before, five months into it she looks great. Glowing, thin. Healthy.
Beef is an uncommon meal for me. Very uncommon, about once every two months or so. Pork and lamb are even more seldom dishes. On the occasions I eat beef, however, it feels as if I've had vitamin B-12 shot and a strong cup of coffee, without the jitters. I feel like I could fight ten men. It's great, but it passes. I have no objection to chicken but haven't had any in ages. My primary meat is fish, in small amounts, two or three times a week.
All of my meat-eating habits are dwindling these days because of something I read six or seven months ago that keeps coming back. I forget who said it or where (The Times, I think). It is just this: There is no way you can eat meat and call yourself an environmentalist.
Ouch.
The more I read about the resources used to produce just one pound of meat of any kind, the less I felt like eating any.

How I Quit Smoking

I learned to smoke at 14 from a cool friend who knew about sex and good rock. One of those 14-year-olds who could pass for 18 and buy beer (this was the 1970s) while I could get into movies for the kid's price.
The first time I inhaled an entire cigarette, I vomited. My friend said to keep at it and that would stop, so I did.
I stopped in high school my junior. I started again in college. My college was residential and classes were all with a quarter mile, yet my first winter there was a storm so severe classes were cancelled for two days. Nothing like being holed up in a dorm with popcorn, hot chocolate, and backgammon boards to take the habit up again.
I left my liberal arts college with no marketable skills and a pack-a-day habit. A great time to smoke. You could smoke anywhere. Not just bars and restaurants, but libraries and the workplace. I was poor but when it came to spending my last $1.50 on cigarettes or food, I'd choose the cigarettes. A pack of smokes can last longer than $1.50 worth of food, and it's easier to cope with hunger with cigarettes than it is to cope with no cigarettes and food.
Here's how I quit: 1. I exercised. I biked everywhere for transportation and lifted weights. 2. I thought about it. I pictured what I thought tobacco company executives looked like (rich white men with fat necks) getting money from me. 3. I turned 25. I knew I was weak and that if I didn't quit than I never would. I pictured myself at 50 or so, the age I am now, in a doctor's office, my cigarettes hidden in the car, breath masked by mints, getting very bad news.
The combination of this things made me quit cold turkey. It took me a couple tries, but I kicked it. Even though I'm not militant about people smoking in my presence people who know me now are surprised I ever smoked. They just can't picture it.
If you ever wonder how bad tobacco is, imagine if it were only discovered now and someone tried to market it. It would never happen. As far as defending tobacco by saying it employs people, the numbers it employs are greatly exaggerated by the tobacco companies, who include all suppliers, whose business with them is a fraction of their total, convenience store clerks and the like. The number is actually pretty small; under 200,000, about half the number of Americans tobacco kills every year.
Fact: Tobacco kills more Americans that alcohol, cocaine, crack, heroine, homicide, suicide, car accidents, fires and AIDS combined.

The Kindle

I am all for the Kindle and the much better-designed Sony Reader, though both are at primitive stages and I wouldn't dream of forking over $300-plus for either.

Electronic ink, a screen that only uses energy when you turn the page, high contrast displays. Entire trees worth of literature, newspapers, magazines -- all saved on microchips. (American book publishing fells 30 million new trees every year.) And the technology will only improve. This summer you'll see an electronic ink screen the size of a magazine. And soon, color.

I've waited for this kind of thing for decades. Not exaggerating. No need to gas up to drive to a book store or a newstand to get the latest. Presses needn't roll, delivery trucks needn't deliver. I know I'm supposed to get sentimental about the joys of books on paper held tight, treasured, conversations started over spotted covers, husbands met in library aisles, but I can't.

No doubt out mothers missed not sharing news over back fences while hanging out the laundry, their mothers missed quilting bees and beating rugs together on Mondays. Go back far enough and you'd find men longing for the comraderie of hunting mastodons together. But we don't miss those things now. People adapt, they find new ways to connect and share. What you're looking at right now is one of them. One day it, too, will seem quaint as our ancestors spend time with their peers in ways we cannot yet even imagine.

Grit, Grime, Food

It's my day off. Good, having a weekday off; easy to shop, no lines.
My city is filthy. The snowstorm on the East Coast last week melted fast and there's been no rain since. All is grey and covered with a patina of silty dust. Cars are still white with salt, drivers hit the gas at intersections, sending clouds of powdered gravel and salt in the air.

I got lots done. Actually made a to-do list. Post office, library, bank, Chinatown, farmers market, office supply store. All this by bicycle. By the end, the large messenger bag I use was heavy with supplies and foods I'd miss if I lived far from a big city. Kimchi, miso soup, ahi tuna, rice noodles I like. I shouldn't eat tuna, I know. They're overfished. But I eat so little beef, just a burger once a month, if that, when I eat out. The portobello mushroom burgers are as satisfying.

I'm not a food person, not at all, but sometimes, on cold nights, when I make the kind of Japanese meal I ate when I lived there two decades ago it brings back nice feelings. I had no phone or television. I'd vacuum my tatami mats, steam the rice, prepare the fish, open a beer. Sit, drink, eat, read. Years of youth ahead. Teaching English as a second language wouldn't be forever. What was next? Who knows? Something else, obviously. Mystery.

The Farewell Gathering

Not as bad as it could've been, thanks to modest amounts of alcohol.

She is 35, laid off due to cutbacks company wide, though you wonder if had she been nicer to those under her, would it have been the same?

The event was at a noisy place, for a younger crowd, where conversing means shouting for two hours. The snacks were deep fried, greasy. After two beers that means this: nourishing.

She talked of having worked since she was 16, never having been laid off or fired. Yes, a pity. But better you than me, in the long run. Finally, she will purchase her own laptop, not having access to a computer at work. She has questions: Is the memory enough? Is it a good brand? What is this stuff that's free the first two months and should it continue?

Questions asked, answered. Beers downed, nachos consumed. Time for the hug goodnight (Some of us have work tomorrow, you know!). The embrace is a tearless one, for the first time since last Tuesday. "When your computer's up and running, make sure to email me!" She promises she will. Out the door, into the night. Home, ears still ringing from the music at the bar, the last hour of which was live and loud for old ears.

It's a bad time -- an awful time -- to lose a job. Also good: unemployment insurance has been extended to 33 weeks? Good till the end of '09, almost! But that's happy face nonsense. She will, we all hope, be all right.

How to Celebrate Your Birthday

My ego does not permit me to throw a birthday party for myself and I discourage others from doing so for me. In the workplace, I refrain from telling people when mine is.

The idea of celebrating birthdays strikes me as childish, all right for little children who are happy with the novelty of being the center of attention, having a "special day" just for them, but after the age of ten or so, is it really an important date? Isn't it just an excuse to eat and dink excessively?

And the "big numbers" -- 25, 30, 40, 50. So? Marking those birthdays as significant milestones of longevity is surely a holdover from centuries ago, when the world was rife with disease and danger. And as far as being a measure of where you are in life, aren't we socially evolved enough for it not to matter if you do or don't have a solid career by age 25, a house and spouse by 30 and the requisite number of children by 40?

My best birthdays have been spent alone, relecting on the date if anything. I'd recommend visiting a library on your birthday. That's right, a library. Go to the periodicals department. Some libraries still have bound copies of the actual Time, Newsweek or Life magazines that were published the week you were born. You can see pages identical to the ones your father may have stared at uncomprehendingly in a waiting room, an ashtray full of cigarette butts beside him, while your mother gave birth to you down the hall. You can also get microfilm showing the newspaper published the day you were born and read the one published the following day, which will record what happened on your birthday. What did the ads look like? What was on TV? 

If you're young, you won't get any of this. "It's my birthday!" you'll say. "I want to go out! Have fun! Do shots! Party!"

One day, however, this will make sense.

The Exact Time

There is no reason I need to know the exact time but I usually do. My computer updates itself, I have a watch that receives a little radio signal from Colorado every night and matches it, I love it when the local news radio station beeps on the hour and the half hour.

The time is a fact, a simple one. I can look at my watch, a screen, the television and it will tell me something that's true as far as it knows. With so much uncertain in my life -- When will my parents die? Will I lose my job? Will my apartment get broken into? Will there, no, when will the next attack be, and where? -- this is something I can be sure of.

A Web site I like: time.gov. You click on your time zone and it tells you the exact time to with tenths of a second. Better: it shows you where on the planet the sun is shining. The shaded parts are curvey, forming figures like crude descriptions of a person's figure. Now it is wide at top, the arctic, narrowing toward the bottom. The opposite will be true in this hemisphere's summer, of course, and I suppose the solstice will have fairly straight lines. If you watch it long enough, you can see it move. If you watch it at dusk, you can see night approach.

Love Sounds

Always, first, I hear her laugh. I'm in 3 Front, they are in 2 Front. These are small studio apartments in a rowhouse, units usually occupied by students or recent graduates their first jobs under sail. I've been here nearly two decades. I am a financial failure.

She's the girlfriend of the man who lives there and seems to be spending many nights with him these days. They begin around 11 p.m., and they have sex almost every night. They are young.

In funny movies the sounds lovers make are loud, obtrusive, cause for much distress to neighbors and used to show the humble circumstances of the protagonist.

In real life, this, it isn't so bad. She makes the same high pitched Ah! several times. The sound rises through gaps in the edges of the floor. It's indirect, soft, rhythmical. He, fortunately, is silent and only the engine of her sounds. In minutes both climax and are unheard. They talk, sleep, hold each other. Whatever couples do. I barely remember. I've been celebate for twelve years now. I am a relationship failure, too.

The Thinking Woman

A man thinks, body drawn in, face scrunched, brow furrowed, frowning. This is good. Problems are being solved, the universe contemplated.

Shh! Leave the room. Let him be. It's important.

A woman thinks, body slouched, face contorted, brow knit, troubled. This is bad. What's wrong, dear? Is everything all right? Do you need help? No?
C'mon!
Smile!

The Weather Report

Snow is falling in my East Coast American town. It'll be pretty this time of year and well tolerated; we know it'll be gone in a matter of days.

When I was a child snow was a magical thing, whitening the landscape, muffling sound, closing school. I'd put on boots and hike for what seemed like miles through unspoiled drifts, never sure of what my feet would hit as they sank. Looking down as I crossed fields the blank canvass had a meditative effect. Suddenly, shadows. A stand of trees. I'd look up and the complexity of the interlocked branches, their top halves white, gained new vividness.

That was four decades ago, in suburbs which still had unexplored natural vistas for a 10-year-old, vistas long since conquered by office parks and housing developments. Now I live in the city and weather has new functions.

Storms now are primarily marketing tools for weather forecasters. Tonight, the local news has promised to cut in every hour with "team coverage" of the snowfall's progress, which is to amount to about six inches, a paltry amount by any northern city's standards. The roads will be passable tomorrow morning, yet the schools will be closed. (They weren't when I was a student, not with that amount.)

People flocked tonight to grocery stores to load up on items they probably already had like milk, bread and eggs. Tomorrow the malls will be filled with teenagers who got there easily. Parents with young children will be forced to call out from work. More often than not, those who call out will be mothers, giving employers more reason for biased hiring decisions.

The weather people will urge viewers to stay tuned, to their channel, of course, all day for updates. Why anyone would need to watch TV to know what they can see by looking out a window won't be mentioned. Woe to anyone who would turn off the box and get in bed with a good book.

The temperatures will be in the 50s by the weekend. Next year, the lateness of this snowfall will make most remember the season as having a lot of snow. It hasn't.

Ah, the theatre!

Tonight, for the first time in decades, I think, I went to see a live play.

The play was good enough. A taut drama about a man in his 50s being confronted by a 27-year-old woman he'd seduced when she was 12. The acting, directing, stage design, lighting -- all fine!

So why would I not again pay for one ticket three month's worth of Netflix fees to see another play anytime soon?

Because live theater leaves me cold. Movies, even though they're projected images of people who acted miles away and often years ago in built sets, strike me as more real, more authentic. I accept the artifice of movies because it's unseen. With a proscenium arch you know they know they're speaking in front of a room full of people. And technical demands being what they are, they have to project. No one ever said the things these two people said that loud.

Will I never again see live people trot the boards? Maybe, but only if they're in musicals or performing a solo act of some kind where they address the audience. I don't just want that fourth wall broken; I want it to not exist.

Oh, you may be wondering why I even went. Not that it's pertinent, but the male lead and I were good friends in high school. I haven't seen him since the late 1970s but have read bits and pieces about him. He never went to college -- he knew he wanted to act. He's had highs and lows (addiction) and is now doing very well.

I liked the balance the play, Blackbird, gave to it's topic. A 40-year-old man has sex with a 12-year-old girl. We all say That's. Just. Wrong. The play doesn't try to say it's right, but it does propose that not all such things are 100 percent either/or. If it did, that would be an Oprah show.

Who Knows?

Weirdness today. One of those days everything that can go wrong did. I worked the evening shift, one to nine, and everyone else coming in then said almost the same thing. It was unseasonably warm, and windy. The air was full of powdery grit.

When life's like that I'd swear that gravity itself seems affected. You put something on a table and it slides to the floor. Wet foods jump out of your hand and hit the ground. If you forget something on the second (or third, or fourth ...) floor, gravity gives an extra tug as you climb stairs to get it. Important items that are dropped accelerate on the way down and break when they hit. The hour hand was slowed on its climb from six to nine p.m.

A Headache

Who doesn't get them? No one, I'd guess. I get them worse as time goes by. Fortunately, they're not migranes, so I should count myself lucky. If only they weren't so random I could perhaps discern a cause and seek a remedy.

I have one now and while it's a random one, a phone call from my older brother earlier tonight made it worse, at least as far as my perception of it goes.

I am not like most people in many ways. One is that I don't like recreational chatting over the phone. Especially by cell phones from people who are really doing something else. Especially when that something else is driving a car down a residential street. At night.

A friend of the family's was killed a few years ago by a car while walking her dog in the evening. They never found out who did it. I am fully convinced that there's a good possibility that the person who killed her has no idea that he or she did so. I think they were cruising along, music blaring, in a big SUV and hit what they thought was a hellofa pothole instead of a 120 pound woman. The damage to the car could've been minimal, no more than a parking lot bumper dent. You always hear about blood on hit-and-run cars, but that's not always the case; it was winter and she was wearing heavy clothes. It was not major news and who reads newspapers anymore anyway?

So my brother. Why do people always call during the Final Jeopardy! clue? I told him firmly how I feel about cell phone calls while driving. He gave the usual defense: He's careful and is using Bluetooth.

A loaded issue. Think about this: The problem with cell phones and cars isn't physical driving ability, it's a cognitive matter. When talking to someone on the phone, as opposed to a passenger sitting next to you, you do not allow moments of silence no matter what traffic concern comes up. You know that if you do there will be questions ("Are you there? Hello?") that will require attention so you don't allow it. It is, under the best circumstance, distracted driving.

My rule: If you absolutely must use a cell while driving, keep it short: "I'm running late. I'll be there around seven. Bye."

The Netflix Man

When I was young I wanted men who were adventurous, strong, thrilling. When older I wanted men who were all that but stable and attentive to my moods and needs.

Now I want what I call the Netflix Man. The Netflix Man is someone you wanted, so you put him in your queue. He's a man who's come recommended by others, and you know pretty much about him before he arrives.

You asked for him weeks ago, sometimes longer, and if you haven't been checking online you may have forgotten what he'll be like when he arrives. This gives you hope of something a little unexpected but at the same time safe.

When the Netflix Man arrives he'll be ontime as promised. If you're too busy for him, he'll wait patiently in his bright, red envelope until you're ready for him. You open him carefully, shoving a finger in him and using it to rip along his dotted line, then tearing the little tab that holds his bottom half closed. Prying into him takes a little doing, but is easy and risk free for you; he hardly resists. You take the small envelope within the larger one out and look at it.

"Oh, it's you!" you say, remember the title, reading the paragraph that describes him. You put Netflix Man in your player on your terms. It whirs a little and brings up a menu. He is putty in your fingers as they push buttons on the remote. You dim the lights. You hit "Play."

He begins. If you like him, you invite him to stay for the full two hours, give or take. If he's not working out but you're still curious about him, you can fast forward, to the end if necessary, and know all about him.

If he's rude, offensive or just not for you, you hit "Open/Close." You hear the sound of small gears pausing, backtracking. A door slides open. On it lies Netflix Man, still, quiet, embarrassed. If you liked him and invited him to stay his alotted time, he is comfortingly warm when you pick him up.

You take him in your hand and put him back in his little envelope, which then goes back into the larger one. You make sure his barcode shows through the tiny window in the back so his handlers can scan him and say, "Aha! Back so soon, are you! Well, well!" or "Goodness, you've been gone a long time! She must have watched you two or three times!" Then Netflix Man is but a pleasant memory, or not. Whatever he is to you, another will arrive, probably in time for the weekend.

A computer will ask you online whether your experience with Netflix Man was good or bad. You answer without fear of reprisal. All they'll do is instantly suggest another Netflix man for you to invite over.

This Woman

Sometimes it surprises me when I come across people who are my approximate age, my gender and who live where I do who have markedly different perceptions of the world.

Take the woman in this photograph. I saw her today in the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. She drove her Chevy Suburban right over a curb even though the turn she was making was an easy one to negotiate. So much of the vehicle was sticking out when she parked it she started it up again and pulled it in three more feet.

And her bumper stickers! On the right was a McCain/Palin sticker. Fair enough. But the one on the left said this: No Osama! No Obama! No Chelsea's Mamma! Equating Hillary Clinton and Obama with Osama bin Laden puts her pretty far out on the right wing.

I like to think I'm tolerant of others and that I understand points of view different from my own, but when I was watching the Republican National Convention (was it really just last summer?) and they were all shouting, "Drill baby, drill! Drill baby, drill!" I couldn't help but think, who are these people? Where do they live? What do they read? What do they think about when they lie in bed at night before falling asleep?

It's as if there's a parallel universe, and now and then a portal opens and I get a close up look at the other side, where exploiting natural resources for short-term gain is wise, where meaningless showings of symbolic support for frozen cells prevents life-saving research is good and where people actually believe that allowing the rich to pursue more wealth unfettered will benefit the poor.