The Blue Star Lounge

A wooden Christmas

2011-11-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

Christmas has always been a sort of gonzo season, when reason flies out the window for most Americans, and we do our level best to be the perfect enablers for our whining, pathetic, entitled youngsters. In my own feckless youth, the Sears Wishbook would be thumped out onto the table at a family meal with the instructions that we mark our quarry and remember our rationality, and we were one of those families where a hundred dollar gift was a once-in-five-years sort of thing, not an expectation. Back then, 'round 1977 or so, we'd wear down that catalog until it was a feathery stack of dog-eared corners, with items marked, crossed-out, revisited, emphasized with happy faces and exclamation marks, and Christmas morning was joyous, all pajamas and rampaging desire danced out under slowly descending clouds of shredded wrapping paper.

For me, it was always ruined, in some measure, by my astonishing ability to get my toy unwrapped, explored, paraded around the room, and either broken or dismantled in what seemed like a single blur of activity, so I am pictured in hysterical tears in most of our holiday morning photos for a decade, generally holding up a toy missing a leg or other major piece.

Still, there was this month of anticipation, and our home was the best place in the world to anticipate Christmas. I grew up in an actual log cabin, a relatively modest two hundred year-old farmhouse in Scaggsville, Maryland with foot-thick walls, exposed in our family room to reveal enormous hand-hewn logs and mortar chinking bristling with horse hair. We always had a real, and usually live, tree that filled the house with the glorious pine perfume of the season, as a plastic or aluminum tree was so far out of the realm of decency to my parents that one was never even suggested. We decorated outside with a single large wreath of real pine cut from one of our trees, mounted on a large plywood circle my father had cut, and lit with white lights, and would sometimes light the two small pines in the front as well.

Inside, we lit the tree with those big colored bulbs that ran so hot that they sort of baked the tree, releasing even more of that unbearably gorgeous scent, and it was hung with a mixture of our own handmade ornaments, the ornaments from my mother's childhood tree, and an otherwise chaotic mish-mash of decorations, to be topped with our gold foil angel with a real porcelain head, who stood waiting on our old Victorian pump organ until the night of Christmas Eve, when she'd fly to the top of the tree under her own steam, at least if you took my parents' word for it.

My mother took Advent seriously, and we had had a proper wreath and she would studiously enforce the weekly tradition of a short reading and lighting of the next candle on the wreath. We'd hit the date on the Advent calendar each morning at breakfast, too, invariably fighting over who got to open the next little cardboard window on the calendar.

All was not idyllic, of course. There's something to the season that brings up feelings of inadequacy and of being incomplete, and there was an undercurrent of that, too, at times. There were family spats, and frustrations about why we couldn't get wildly expensive gifts like some of the other kids in our school that neatly highlighted what we didn't know then, which was that we really didn't have that much money, with so much going into starting the family's fledgling business and paying the mortgage on a house that cost an astonishing twenty thousand dollars.

My mother, I think, was most sensitive to all this, and she was the most strident critic of the commercialization of the holiday. It hadn't been this way in her youth, she'd maintain, and it was getting worse by the year. We all knew it, sort of, in that way that you see a train rumbling down the tracks and know exactly how little you can do to stop it or change its course. We were different, though, and knew it.

What can you do, right?

"You know," my mother said, brightly, at dinner one night well in advance of Christmas. "I was thinking that we should have a wooden Christmas this year."

Three sets of utensils clinked on plates. My father kept eating.

"What?" asked my sister.

"I was thinking we should go back and have a Christmas like they used to, where everyone made gifts for each other and it was a real holiday, like in the olden days."

Three throats tightened. My father took a sip of tea, searched out and removed a bit of thickened sauce that had made it onto a loop of his handlebar mustache, and my sister spoke up.

"Wait, you mean we're all going get wooden toys? That sort of thing?"

"I don't want a wooden toy," I added, stepping in to voice my horror. "What am I going to do? Just pull a little wooden duck around by a string or something?"

"I just think it would be nice if we got back to basics on Christmas, since it's such a special day," my mother said, and we all just goggled, because she'd clearly finally gone completely insane.

We didn't have a wooden Christmas that year. That year, I got what I still regard as the best present I ever received, an Lloyd's combination clock radio and cassette recorder with which I discovered the joy of radio drama, the pleasure of recording The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series so I could memorize and rehearse every single moment of it for five years, the solace of going to sleep with Brian Eno's Discreet Music playing, and the occasional thrill of waking to "Good Morning," by the Beatles. I've gotten other wonderful gifts since, but that year, well—

It became a sort of mean joke at my mother's expense, the wooden Christmas. She raised the subject a few more times in earnest, then ended up sulking about it for a few years after that. We, of course, found it to be great fun over the years, laughing over anything so preposterous, so stomach-churningly outrageous as forcing kids to accept lousy wooden presents made by hand.

What horrible lives we'd have led.

The only thing is, well, it's not quite so funny anymore. I'm not ten anymore, and this year—this year in which the country I thought I knew really started to go bug nuts, with tea parties and rage and panic and endless, unfathomable stupidity, calmed with the opium surge of singing contests on television and the unlimited cultural mania over dumb women with spray-on tans doing dumb things and cheap electronics from China and...well, this is the fucking year for me.

I've had it. This is when wooden Christmas happens.

See, I'm not a Christian anymore, and it's been thirteen years since I stopped being a middle-class (by birth, not income, alas) white guy with a degree in poetry dabbling in eastern religion and realized that I was, in fact, an actual taoist, albeit one practicing a home-grown flavor of the philosophy that would almost certainly evoke a smirk in the Chinese observer. I don't believe in a historical Jesus, I don't believe in Him as the son of God, I don't believe that what we say happened on Christmas actually happened. It's not my holiday anymore, except by familial and cultural convention.

When all the old celebrants of the day in my family either died or moved with their jobs and families to places elsewhere, and when the old house in Timonium where we'd celebrate the second half of Christmas with my lovely aunt and uncle and my cousins and my grandmother and step-grandfather finally went away, leaving a void, I lost interest in the day.

For years, I had a tree. Later, running late, I started decorating the vacuum cleaner, and I've done that, off and on, for a decade, feeling linguistically smug about the social commentary hidden in what I call "the vacuum of Christmas," but I've missed the celebration and the joy of it. I get together with my mother, my sister, and my nieces, but it's lost most of that magic for me. Thanksgiving was always my true center anyway, with my beloved annual drive to Georgia, the magical family homestead there, and all my wonderful family, so who needs it, right?

I've reached that annoying age when I start to find out, more and more, that my parents were right. I worry sometimes that I'm just getting crankier and more conservative, and that I'm on the verge of obnoxiously declaring myself a libertarian and affirming all those little nagging rake-shaking doubts about the world of the future, but I think it's actually possible that my mother had it right on this one.

This is the year for a wooden Christmas.

I'd already narrowed it down, telling friends and family to please, please not get me anything, because I'm tired of stuff. I'm swimming in stuff, drowning in stuff, stomping around in a rage because I have nowhere to put all this goddamned stuff and it's falling off shelves and tripping me.

Don't get me stuff, please.

I'd narrowed it down to my nieces and nephew, setting a rule that Christmas is for children, but even that, well, I just reduced to gift cards. Gift cards to a bookstore, mind you, but gift cards, given because I feel like society makes it obligatory, unless I want to cross the Rubicon and become the cranky old duff I sound like a lot of the time.

This year feels different. It feels desperate, like those neighborhood parents back in my day who really hated Christmas, and hated their lives, and hated their failures, and hated the choices they'd made, but damn it if we all aren't going to be HAPPY this year. Just spike up the eggnog a bit and shut the hell up, okay?

If you don't shop, the economy will crash.

There's just this ugly, panicked thing out there, this monstrous mutant of the Christmas Spirit™ on the loose, metastasizing like a glittery, green plastic wad of cancer, and you can't turn on the TV, you can't go to a department store, and you just can't set foot in the media-saturated cultural landscape without being washed over by the whole thing, by the whole clownish grinning hypercolored sparkling LED-struing inflated novelty Santa bursting out of an inflatable novelty chimney giggling magical wonderland maniacal desolation of it.

For me, it should be academic. I'm not a Christian anymore. I'm Christian-adjacent, and I've seen and known many people for whom the faith produces wonderful change and magnificent humility, but I don't need it.

This year, though, I've had it. I've had it with the gloss and the empowerment of endless entitled whining from all the little kids who've been genetically mutated into the shock troops of corporate sales forces, their little dye-reddened cry holes yapping out orders to the adult world, lest they unleash the ruinous forces of disappointment. I've had it with Best Buy's CEO claiming that he feels "terrible" to force his employees to shelve their Thanksgiving nights to go in and open those wretched stores at midnight so that wage slaves can march in and fist fight over chattering dolls because nothing else will do, MOMMY. I've had it with packaged cheer, bottled Christmas tree scent to spray on lousy plastic trees, cutesy Christmas cookies stamped out by machines in the billions.

I could let it all go, and be that guy.

I've been that guy for a decade. No skin off my nose.

I could also clean up my table saw and make something. I can sew, I can knit, I can make things. I am the kind of man Thoreau wanted me to be, largely because I read Thoreau and made it so. The thing is, I like to make things and give them away. I like to celebrate, even when it's not my holiday. I like to cook and bake and prepare fine meals.

This year, I think, may be the right time for that wooden Christmas.

The old log house is gone, in the hands of people who I hope treasure it at least half as much as I did. All my uncles are gone, and my grandparents, as well. My father last picked a crumb out of his mustache fourteen years ago.

The country where I grew up is gone, too, gone away into divisions of Red and Blue, with us and against us, I'm right and you're wrong and everyone's just dug in and set to fight.

Like someone watching a train, I can't put my hand out and stop the juggernaut, but I sure as hell can step off the tracks, find my own way, and share what I learn in the process. When I was a kid, it was all about the anticipation, and the desire, the way it burned and the way is made me feel like my whole life would change if I just got the right thing. Sometimes it was true, and my clock radio with a cassette recorder changed things, and my Commodore 64 with a Datasette changed things, but mostly, the gifts are just more details in the day.

If I think back on how it was, I don't miss and often don't even remember the presents I got, unless I managed to break them in some spectacular way. I think back and I remember my family, all of us, back when all those wonderful people were still with us. I remember the drive across Baltimore and running across the lawn of my aunt and uncle's house, and I remember sitting on the hearth talking, and fleeing when their old Dalmatian would break wind. I remember playing in the gully behind the house with my cousins, and having long conversations with my aunt's mother, who I flattered shamelessly and who flattered me in return by speaking with me with the same attention and reverence she would accord another adult.

The gifts were always just the excuse to let us feel special, but you never know that when you're young and you still believe that what television tells you is real, and that what your friends tell you is real, and what the internet and the billboards and the itchy underlying buzz of insatiable need says is real. Christmas is the gonzo season for Americans, and lots of other Westerners, but it's only as real as we make it.

If I had my way, Black Friday would be the day for everyone else that it is for me.

This year, I'm going down early to Georgia. I'll pack my tiny red roadster like a piece of luggage, check the oil and clean my windows, have a lovely two-day drive down my favorite road in the world, Route 301 from Maryland to Sylvania, Georgia, and I'm going to unpack in the back bedroom of the house down there, charge up my netbook, and sit on the porch swing writing and watching the cars go by. I'll be out in the back with the roller harvesting windfall pecans, and I may drive into Savannah for an afternoon. I'll prepare the congealed salads, set up the tables, brine and cook the turkey, polish all the good silver, and otherwise work my fingers to the bone in the best possible way.

At midnight on Black Friday, I will be asleep. At eight AM on Black Friday I will be asleep. Around nine, I'll get up, convene in the kitchen with all my Georgia cousins who I only see twice a year, and we'll assemble some kind of breakfast from the mountains of leftovers, and eat scrambled eggs, venison, pecan pie, turkey, cranberry sauce, congealed salad, dried apple cake, snowflake rolls, cereal, and whatever else is there, and talk and talk and talk and tell stories and share our adventures and just be there, right there, in that moment, far from the crowds clamoring for one stupid piece of plastic crap after another.

Come December 1st, I'm going to start putting together the details of the best wooden Christmas ever, but before then, I will be damned if anything's going to stop me from telling my cousins lurid stories about the street people I meet at work. 'Round noon, I'm going to lock myself in the big bathroom with a book, fill that enormous seven foot clawfoot tub with scalding hot water right up to the rim, and float there, reading, until I'm one big pink raisin.

The way most people live mystifies me, but I was very lucky. I can't stop a rolling train, but I can share my own story, and point out that giving your children a wooden Christmas will be hell for about thirty years, but they'll get over it, and find that they've been living better all along because of what's behind that absurd suggestion.

Maybe there's another way.

And I'm here to tell you it ain't half bad.

Two afterthoughts on Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T14:12:00.000-04:00

Last night, posted in metafilter's obit thread:

I took a moment to visit my basement just now, where my workshop is currently in a state of wild disarray as I've had a long talk with myself about my mild hoarding affliction, which has left me with the place packed to the joists with the accumulated collections I've socked away in my twenty-three years in this apartment, and pulled out my family's original Apple ][ plus. It's not forgotten there, in pride of place where my favorite beige things rest between my hysterical bouts of nostalgia.

The ][ plus is special, or at least this one is. I've got the receipts around somewhere, dated to 1981 and totaling around four thousand dollars for this one, with the optional RF modulator, a potentiometer joystick and a pair of authentic Apple Computer paddles, a 16K "language card," two Disc ][ drives, a monstrous Epson MX-100, and various software, but what makes this one special is how it landed there, in a two hundred year-old log farmhouse in Scaggsville Maryland, and changed everything.

My friends all had Ataris, and I never understood the appeal of the wretched things, clad in Radio Shack-grade fake wood, with games that just...just...my God—how could they possibly be that bad? Some of them had Fairchild Channel F machines and Intellivisions and so on, and friendly Mr. Roy down at the bus station had an APF Imagination Machine with the computer attachment and a cassette data recorder on which I helped him type in a program to let him create mojo books on the spot.

"Joe, if this thing helps me win the lottery, I'm going to buy you a car," Mr. Roy said once, as I sat transcribing numbers from his magic mojo books, little palm-sized paperbacks filled with dates and signs and symbols that promised BIG MONEY NOW!

"A Beetle!" I said, looking up from the APF.

He got an Apple ][ plus the same time we did, and his worn old bus station stood at the corner of Main Street, three doors down from the family business, and, as he was more inclined to frivolity than my father, I'd wander down and end up behind the counter, playing games on his Apple until my dad would show up and shoo me out of there.

Our Apple split allegiances between work and home. It actually commuted for a time, spending the week down at the office, running VisiCalc, a boring-looking program that I always greeted with a scowl, little knowing at the time that it was a program that would literally change the world, from accounting to project planning to just...everything. At work, it worked hard, churning out dBase reports and running through the clunky paces of spreadsheets and so much boring stuff that kept me in sandals and Toughskins.

At home, it was a place to play and explore. I'd laboriously type in programs in Applesoft, only to realize I'd booted into BASIC and not booted off the System 3.3 disk, which meant I couldn't save my work. I found my mainlines for illegal games and copied them onto Verbatims, Dysans, BASFs, and whatever insanely expensive disks I could save up to buy, most of which had been converted to double-sided floppies with an X-Acto knife.

I did my first computer-based writing there, too, firing up Apple Writer, an ingenious writing tool written by the genius Paul Lutus. It was astonishingly primitive to modern eyes, given the fact that the ][ plus printed 40x24 columns of uppercase-only text on the luminous greenscreen. An inverted block character stood in for capitals, and our MX-100 was usually loaded with wide greenbar tractor-feed paper, so I was the first kid in Scaggsville to annoy his teachers with nearly unreadable term papers.

There was something, though, to that sensation of writing when I'd just start flying through a story with a pair of soup can-sized AKG headphones connected to my cassette deck with an arc of coiled cord and the room completely dark, with the words hanging there, in space, almost like I was seeing my own thoughts.

Back then, in the early eighties, I knew I was already living in the future.

It wasn't long before friends started showing off flinty, soulless new IBM PCs, scowling at my not-the-newest, not-the-fastest machine that was still more than enough. The thing is, when people mock us Apple fans as if we belong to some kind of cult, they're only partly misguided, and there's a reason why we're content to take the alternate route when everything else is cheaper, faster, more of this or that, and just tiringly ubiquitous.

The thing about Apple, for me, is in that little wedge in my basement.

It's in the hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent playing Eamon, writing bad science fiction film scripts, experimenting, and eventually clapping the handset from our big black rotary phone into the rubber cups of an acoustic coupler to make my very first remote connection to a giant mainframe at Goddard Spaceflight Center, and then to BBSes in my area, where I'd use FidoNet to send my very first e-mail.

It's in the brilliance of the simple gesture of the way the first Apple ][ was packaged. Where the early pioneers went for that boxy lab equipment look or the plastic fantastic ziggurat or the shape of a heap of silver sadness, Jobs worked to have Woz's amazing wonderwonky engineering wrapped in a distinctive case that struck a perfect balance—futuristic, but not silver lamé and glitter fiberglass futuristic. The Apple ][ just looked like something matter-of-fact from about ten years in the future, with radiused corners and a sort of warm coolness in the form.

On a table in 1981, it just felt like a thing.

This is how we live now.

People stick their noses in the air these days about Apple, sniffing that they're for people who care about style, but that's not how it works. Jobs just had this perfect grasp of how to change the world, not by cheapness, gadgetry, or mass-marketing, but by making things that gave you that amazing feeling that you were living in the future and then stayed in the background. Right now, I'm writing on a 1.83ghz Core2 Mac Mini that's perched on my left monitor speaker, under a paperback book and a stack of DVDs, and it's obsolete, except for the fact that I am living in the world of the future, writing to people all over the world, using a machine that's smaller than Tupperware.

In my basement, I've got the ones between. My SE/30, my Classic, my Powerbook 140, my iBook, my tangerine iMac, my father's original Mac II with a keyboard modified with a jack for a footpedal for when he broke his arm and couldn't press [shift], and which he kept using for years afterward because he just liked it that way. I let my fingers trail over the old machines, and find the Mac IIci that I set up on my father's desk at work the night before he came to work, went to read his paper, and died right there. I've got the Apple //c that I coveted like hell for years until it turned up at a thrift store, with those glorious Frogdesign Snow White lines.

In 1981, for a bright shiny moment, I sat at a computer and the future descended over me like a cloak, a mantle to draw tighter when the days and nights sucked, because everything is possible. Really—everything is possible. This is how we live now.

In 2011, I am older, fatter, gone grey everywhere, and in a career I'd never have anticipated, but one that I love anyway. There's a little black glass iPhone sitting on the desk in front of me, plugged in and charging, and I could pick it up and call anyone in the world with a telephone, or log in to my building and unlock the front doors or monitor my security cameras. I could pick it up, plug it into my music rig and play a full set of ambient music with it as my primary instrument, or I could play a little game, or call my nephew and talk to him on a real picture phone just like in Kubrick's space station. That's just one of the everyday wonders, and I'm surrounded by them, many of which exist because Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs took the road less traveled.

Could we have arrived here, where the future is just so natural, without Steve Jobs?

I know what I think. I may be in the minority, just like I was, thirty years ago, sitting in front of a beige lump of potential dressed as an everyday appliance, but I remember how special it felt to be there. We'd never go to Disneyworld, or have a boat, or get expensive Christmas presents, but we had a computer.

In 1981, in the dark, my words hung in the air like my own thoughts, played out in space, with my soup can AKG headphones blasting out tunes to keep the stories flowing, and I beat the words out despite the primitive surroundings of Apple Writer.

1n 2011, I'm in the dark, my words hang here like my own thoughts mingled with all of yours from all over everywhere because of an amazing invention Tim Berners-Lee put together on one of Steve's later ideas, and my headphones are slightly smaller, but they're loud enough. All these machines, all these years down the line, the road back still leads to a little garage somewhere, with a pair of hippies carrying on the best part of all that revolution that stumbled along the way.

This is how we live now.

And I'm sad, because I think heroes deserve to spend their latter days in resplendent relaxation, watching the world they changed unfolding in all those new ways, but we're still changing it, right now, using those tools that were laid out for us. Those old machines, my father, the family business, Mr. Roy, countless companies, and now Steve Jobs, they're all receding swiftly into the past, a bit further each day, but there's work to do.

I'm in the dark, my words hang here like my own thoughts mingled with all of yours, and I'm happy I'm not the only one. I'm going to sit back now, take a moment to go over it all in my head, and turn up the music.

What a ride it's been.

This morning, posted in metafilter's obit thread:

One of the things that I'm sad will get lost in the swirling chaos of half-educated journalists trying to write clever memorial pieces about Jobs where they'll credit him with inventing the personal computer, inventing the MP3 player, and inventing the tablet-format computer is that, in all that misinformation and complete, knuckleheaded hurried-deadline ignorance is that what they'll almost all leave out is the one thing that I believe is his real, lasting gift to the world.

Jobs didn't invent the Apple ][, a machine that's almost entirely the product of the equally brilliant Steve Wozniak, but his move to how it was packaged and made usable made the difference between the merely great and the insanely great.

Jobs didn't invent the Macintosh, or even start the Mac project, and was, by many accounts, an absolute dick to work for, but he brought in the right people, urged decisions to replace the great with the insanely great, and had his team actually sign their work like artists, which is why that first Mac was a work of art.

Jobs didn't invent the MP3 player, but holding up a Nomad, he said what lots of us feel about so many of the things we can buy in a store—this is shit. Yeah, those first clunky MP3 players worked, and did their job, but there was nothing about them that felt right. Every button placed was placed there by random engineering, functions were buried in nonsensical menu systems, and every shape was the product of limp, mainstream blobject boilerplate design overseen by marketing departments, not by usability experts. The critics cry "fashion," but those of us who use these things answer "just...works."

It's not what he envisioned, or what he said "yes" to. It's what he refused.

It's just too easy to always compromise, and always back down in the face of this committee or that mid-level marketing team, to follow the trail set by the "coolhunters" and the avant garde or the mass market.

5.25" floppies on the Lisa or Mac? No.

Open architecture on the first Macs, then on the iMacs? No.

What about upgrades? No.

What about parallel ports, ADB, serial ports? No. How 'bout this new thing, USB?

Volume knob on the iPod? No.

Sometimes he's wrong. No fan on the Apple III? Disaster. No fan on the Mac? Well, at first, then they pretty much had to. The Cube? Disaster. Gorgeous, artistic, lovely disaster, but disaster...but not without a happy ending, as the technologies there ended up in quiet cooling systems for later machines and in the Mac Mini, which wasn't a disaster at all. What's wrong with a fan? Nothing, to someone in an office. To a musician, or a poet, on the other hand...little things matter.

He said "no" a lot, and sometimes, you need to be a negator to be a creator.

We've got a world jam-packed with folks with business degrees and big ideas about market sectors and design languages for new buying segments, but not enough people in a position to say "no" and back it up.

In the face of a junky, cluttered, half-useful object culture, where things all sort of work, and everyone's sort of using them, and they sort of fit into how we live, Jobs stood up in his arrogant, narcissistic, demanding, frustrating way and said, you know, we really don't have to live like this. All the dismissive essays and articles about his style-stunted followers just completely miss the mark, which is that he saw the world, at least what of it was in his grasp, and challenged the gestalt dullness, the hopeless middle-management compromise, and our flaccid consuming habits, where we'll just shrug and take what we can get, and offered us something that just works.

The little green iPod Shuffle that I use in my car could be a little shiny trinket, I guess, something to wave around as a signifier that I've consumed my way to cool, but for me, it's music without distraction, a machine that I can control without looking away from the wheel. No screen, no FM radio, no giant removable pack of AA batteries—just a function, packaged and designed to be as natural as possible. It can't be improved.

Jobs was a man, just a man, and, as many would attest, often a difficult, unlikable, unpleasant man, but he had a keen grasp on a simple concept that we should all embrace in our lives—a distaste for shit and a genuine love of amazing things. That he didn't back down is the wonderful part, because the world's full of businessmen who can recognize a good thing and then settle for some muddled, half-assed plastic abortion from the folks down in marketing.

We need people like this in every field, so it's sad to lose this voice.

Let's hope those around him were paying attention.

A good tool: The Alphasmart 3000

2011-09-24T15:06:00.000-04:00

I will, on occasion, wax romantic on the delights of the manual typewriter, and my feelings on those marvelous devices remain steadfast. I'm a child of the computer, an aging teen in the age where these machines and the web they spin just keeps getting larger and better and opening into new worlds, and an adult who savors the sweet potential of interconnection that the highest technology allows us, and yet—

The internet calls us, distracts us, lulls us into functional abeyance as we listlessly paddle down the endless streams and by-ways as we wonder about something that tickles the curiosity, then draws us deeper in, and deeper in, and deeper in until we've forgotten what we set out to accomplish. For a writer, in particular, this can be a compelling trap. We start out strong, beating words into submission, then wonder about a word or a fact or something else, and step outside our work to check the consensus, and then we're lost in the wash, dazed and digital, and the hours pick up speed and leave us behind.

The typewriter is a splendid focusing tool, because it can't pick up four strong bars of unlimited information, and, in the manual varieties that I most adore, doesn't hum, doesn't get hot, and doesn't occasionally fail to save my work. It's just there, just an interpreter of crystallizing dreams, and it's the tool with which virtually all the most accomplished novels in our language were realized. At the same time, typewriters are a dwindling resource, with the last manufacturer of manual typewriters finally shutting down their production lines, and they fall prey to facile self-taught craftspersons, who cut them to pieces to make cheap jewelry for literary dilettantes and hangers-on. It's a true shame, but one that won't be recognized until long after it's too late.

The Alphasmart 3000, on the other hand, is a refugee of a more recent era, an almost laughably limited machine that stores about a hundred pages in eight files selected with dedicated keys, revealing your writing through a digital letterbox of four lines of forty characters each. It has no apps, no distinct software or capacity for installing any, and can't connect to the internet, retrieve email, or browse anything beyond those fixed eight files. Even the means by which it connects to a computer is idiosyncratic—one either plugs a USB cable from the 3000 to one's host computer or uses a now quite rare infrared connection, fires up a word processor on the host computer, and presses a key on the 3000 to send the contents of the currently open file to the host computer by simulating a keyboard typing the file in. Seriously.

You plug it in, tell it to go, and it dutifully types your work into the computer to which it's attached. That's it. There's no communications software, no hardware specific plug-ins, widgets, or drivers, just clever hardware that tells the host computer that a keyboard is attached. A more sophisticated user might call it absurd, a clunky workaround, but it's designed to be robust, and it is robust.

It's also physically robust, because the original Alphasmart and Alphasmart 2000, which evolved into the 3000, the somewhat awkward mid-level Dana, and the current Neo, was designed for children, and reflects their wild, destructive nature with sturdy, simplified construction. I've demonstrated mine with enough waist-level drops onto a variety of surfaces to have smashed far more sophisticated machines, and it doesn't show a mark from the effort. It's been frozen and broiled, sitting in the trunk of my car as my be-anywhere writing machine, and it's still here, still stalwart. The slightly dated translucent blue-green plastic of the case seems almost surreally impervious to anything but a targeted assault.

It runs on standard AA batteries, and runs nearly forever at that—I wrote the bulk of the book manuscript I'm currently editing in fits and starts on my 3000, watching the battery indicator stay stubbornly in one place because of its odd operating mode where it's really only consuming power when keys are being pressed. I've carried it with me on cross-country trains, on planes, on the bus, at work and at play, writing whenever there's a free moment of clarity, and it just works. It just works, which is more than can be said for more sophisticated machines sold to us as perfect do-it-all multi-tools, and it just does one thing, and does it very well.

The keys aren't the most satisfying, and my single longstanding complaint about the 3000 is that the spacebar needs a firm tap in a direction perpendicular to the keybed and will stick if struck near the edges, but they work, and in the last seven years, I haven't worn them out. The display isn't backlit, so you have to use it in lighting conditions comparable to the conditions in which one would read a book, and there's no font—just a 1980-vintage 5x7 dot matrix character against LCD grey. None of these flaws do more than cause an occasional and fleeing wrinkle at the bridge of my nose, and for the price, the 3000 is a bargain. I carry it everywhere, never worrying about the risks of losing a thousand dollar (or more) laptop, and if I leave it in the trunk of my car for months, a backup for those moments when inspiration strikes, it's always alive when I dig it out and fire it up.

When the Dana came out, I picked up one of those as well, and while the keyboard on the Dana is absolutely fantastic, the screen's not quite as nice, and the stylus-based interface (the Dana is essentially a Palm device) and attendant complexity of having multiple apps and files and storage media (with a dependance on using the Palm software to move data in and out) disturbs the simple surface tension of the original 3000 enough that it's never gotten as much use. The newer Neo model, which looks for all the world like a hybrid of the 3000 and the Dana, with the 3000's simplicity and the Dana's lovely keyboard, would likely be an even more perfect companion, though I can't speak to its virtues, having never found myself needing more than my old reliable 3000.

Brand new, the Neo is $169 at the time of this writing, which is a bargain for a latter-day manual typewriter with all the attendant virtues of being able to directly dump one's writing to a full-featured computer for editing, and used 3000s go for as little as $20 on ebay or Amazon, with the Neo running about $75 or thereabouts.

As a tool, they are unmatched. Simple, robust, long-lived, and economical, I can't think of anything remotely comparable in this day and age, and if you're the kind of writer I am, who's a little too prone to the easy surrender to distraction, I can't recommend them highly enough.

For anyone who ever fell down a hole.

2011-08-03T21:30:00.004-04:00

[In response to this excellent post on 10 things not to say to a depressed person]

Because of the way my brain works, in little swirly microclimates of joy and sadness and overall high-tension electrical storm responses to the things I encounter from day to day, and our culture of armchair psychiatrists armed with just enough talk show wisdom to feel like they can out-diagnose actual professionals, I've been "diagnosed" with a lot of maladies.

"Oh, Joe, you've been in this funk for so long, you really should be checked out for clinical depression," they say, and I love their concern and compassion, but they're wrong.

I have long, desolate blue stretches sometimes, but there's something important in my indigo days—I can always backtrack to the root causes, and if I rally and beat those frustrations back, silencing the bill collectors, changing careers to leave a bad job, tuning out of the Grand Guignol news cycle, and aborting toxic relationships, my blues go away. It breeds an ugly kind of arrogance, that pattern of defeat, effort, and success, because we're all programmed on some level to believe everyone thinks like we do.

"You just have to be happy," I used to say, with the kind of smug brilliance that comes from feeling like you know something so simple and important that the world would change for the better if people knew what you know. "You just have to imagine the joy and wonder of the world like a little spark and fan the flames until they consume you."

I'm so ashamed, sometimes, but I am a product of my culture and my environment, so I have to forgive myself almost everything, because my arrogance came from ignorance.

I could only imagine a brain that works like my own, and as someone who's already the odd man out from the rest of the world, based on my fizzy, shiny-seeking, hyperfocused mind, I should have known better, but we need help—all of us, from the people we hurt the most. It's a lot to ask, but when I want people to understand that the way I see the world isn't the way you see the world, a distinction that might have made my school years so much more than they were, I have to become a poet. I have to be patient and understanding, even to those who do me harm without knowing what they do, and turn words into that shifting, simmering, undersea world that exists in constant flux that I know and treasure.

I've been doubly lucky to have two difficult experiences in this century.

First, I've had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of an artist who's just one of the most stunningly talented, visionary, wry, and multidimensional creative minds I'll ever come to know, and she's someone who's dealt with severe unipolar depression that digs a hole so blue and so deep that she just can't escape it, and feels at times like she'd rather just leave the world than endure. When I met her, I loved her work, loved her words, and loved the way she transformed the world through her art into something so rich and peculiar and perfect.

When the blue holes swallowed her up, when I talked to her, there was that arrogance in me, the sense that maybe, just maybe, I could talk her out of that place, or give her support by working to get her artwork out in public, where it could be seen, and I'd have that ridiculous thought—well, she's a lovely, amazing woman, with a handsome, talented husband and a kid who's just a superstar, just seriously, a bonafide superstar, and she has a wonderful house and wonderful things and…well, how could anyone be sad with this life?

It's just hard, the complexity of all of it, when you really want to just think that every problem has some solution that's so simple and obvious that everything can be fixed, and I've had ten years getting to know my friend, getting to see how she works, and how it is when she starts to fall, and how it is, or as much as I can see from my vantage point, when she feels like the best thing in the world for her would be to just not be there anymore. I've come to an understanding that I don't want to know, because I don't want to know that some people face problems that can only be managed, and balanced, and dealt with like walking barefoot over Niagara Falls on a tightrope made of razor blades, but still, I'm glad to know.

There's a disease that afflicts us all in this country, the putrid mythos of the just-world hypothesis, where we blame the sick for indulging their illness, the poor for their lack of initiative, the lost for their uncertainty, and it's just wretched, how much a part it is of our national character, feeding the movements that push for Ayn Rand's shrugging Atlases and a society for the selfish, ruled by the selfish, to the glory of me me me. It's a manageable illness, and I've been doubly blessed on my way to not saying the things you hear on talk shows, where rich people tell poor people to just suck it up and be an übermensch.

My friend gets by, day by day, sometimes, and her engagement with her demons shows in her art, and though I feel like we're swimming in TV prescription psychodrugs, self-diagnosed vanity illnesses, and self-pitying people who maybe could just get themselves together, I am blissfully thankful for the sea of chemicals that let me enjoy having someone so special in my life.

The other thing, for me, was the love of an impossible man.

Part of the defense strategy you build up when you're just a different child, at least in my case, is to master the art of detachment and substitution as a way of making it okay that you don't get what you need when you need it most.

Popularity? Pssht. Popular kids are fools. They'll never enjoy what I, alone, enjoy in my odd little world. Hell, I don't need them at all.

Success? Phbllbpt. I am a shining success at being me! No one knows how cool and unique I am, or what I can do, but I know, and I am very successful at being that guy. I don't need money or a reliable car or nice things or security. That's for capitalists and TV-chasing morons.

Love? [eyeroll] Yeah, sure, good luck with that. Hell is other people. Man, have you seen my apartment? It's perfect. It's like the inside of my own head. Why would I want anyone around to mess that up?

As it happens, it was love that finally knocked me all the way off my high horse. Didn't want it, didn't expect it—hell, didn't even see it coming from someone who wasn't remotely my "type," whatever that means, and someone who was just a year out from losing the love of his life in the most horrendous way, who told me, often and forcefully, "nothing will ever happen with us."

Except, well, love did happen, and it was a shining star when it was good, something I'd never experienced in that way in my previous two relationships, in the way where anything is fair game, and everything's okay, even when it hurts like hell. The impossible man loved me back, even though he said he wouldn't, not now, not ever, and even though loving someone so deeply hurt hurts in ways I'd never imagined, I was irretrievably in the thick of it.

We'd be on again, and I'd just have the constant internal dialogue of intrusive thoughts about him, about our problems, about how fucking desolate and impossible it was, and we'd be off again, and I'd have the constant internal dialogue of intrusive thoughts about him, about how much it hurt, and about how I couldn't just disengage, because it wasn't the one-sided thing he'd tell me it was when he hurt too much inside to give me a sliver of room. Sometimes I felt like I was dying, caught in a limerence so deep and profound that when I tried to imagine how it would be at the end of his assignment, when he'd move away forever, I feared I'd die from Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, an actual physical collapse they call "broken heart syndrome."

Where my friend taught me to listen, love taught me that there are things in life you can't escape, no matter how much you want to, or need to, and that's where the blush of compassion starts to spread, deep in the gut and in the soul, a feeling of understanding that blossoms like a flower blooming in your head, with roots unfurling through your blood vessels in delicate, teasing, invasive tendrils until you just know. You just know.

I am a vastly better writer because of this. I can take those fragments of dialogue I hear, and those faces, those circumstances, the way people move and the things they dream about, the way that suffering and loss turns bones to charcoal and hearts to rags, and it's a gift I never had when I was still the master of the easy dismissal, when my writing was clever and self-conscious and gimmicky. I am better for having been through what I went through.

Hey, though, it's over, right? It's over and it was sad as hell and he's three thousand miles away and five years out from the moment he drove off for home, with me standing there, crying, watching his car dwindle into the golden sunset like something from a movie. It's over and I'm okay, and I've dated a little and moved on and had my third career move since he left and it's just fine.

"Joe, you're my best friend, and you know how much I love you, right?" he said, on a recent business trip that brought him back into my orbit, and then he explained that he'd met someone, and that he was ready to explore that, and that maybe he loved the guy, but he just had to see.

"Oh, that's great. I'm so happy for you. I knew you'd be ready one day, and all I want for you is to be loved by someone who knows why you're so amazing," I said, and I meant it, though my head was sort of buzzing. I left his hotel room, put the top down on my car, and headed for home with my head hurting from that old familiar interior dialogue—a monologue, really, where I go over and over and over what I should have said, and I cried almost continuously for three solid days.

How can I not be over this? Jesus, I've been his friend for five goddamn years, and I've had a life, and things are good, and I know it probably never would have worked, and besides, he's kind of a dick, anyway, and wasn't nearly good enough to me and...and the monologue rambles on, and it's just sour grapes, and then the shame comes, and I am such a fucking loser, just such an idiot, like a little girl in love with teacher.

Five years on, there's no denial, no Stalinist rewriting of my own history, no distraction that's enough, and I am humbled by that realization, that there are things in life you can't fix easily, and sometimes, you just have to accept that they're there, deep in your meat and marrow, and that you'll only ever be able to make the best of what you have, and find the ways to deal with those blue, blue, impossible places inside you.

In another flush of that rare, bottomless understanding, I find I can't be arrogant like I was, because I can't claim to be the master of all my problems in the way I've used that to defend myself. The world will destroy me one day, just like it destroys all of us, but in the meantime, I have problems, solutions, and things that can only be managed, so they don't constantly return to slam the brakes on as we travel along our path through the world.

I've had a blue month, since talking with my friend, my love, or whatever the hell he is, or was, and I've made it through with distractions and diversions, knowing full well that I'm sidestepping something that needs to be addressed, and I keep telling myself "but, hey, think of how much better your writing is now! This is progress! Can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs!" as a palliative, to make things okay, as much as I can.

It's as much as I can manage, but in all honesty, I'd rather be a bad writer, and who I was before, as small and frustrated as I was then. They say what ever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but lately, I'd rather be be weak, but this is the tenor of this funk, and I will get through it. When I want to wallow in self-pity, I have to remember that I will clear the blue when I deal with what's making me blue, but that's not always how it works, and never is, for some people.

It's just such a gift, those people who are patient enough to deal with our judgmental, intrusive, arrogant impulses and who can breathe that bad air in and exhale it as simple language that makes sense from the inexplicable and is kind when we are thoughtless.

For everyone who ever felt the familiar sting of cheap psychiatry delivered by fools and roused something more articulate and meaningful than anger, legitimate though it may be, I can only say that I am so glad that you are in this world, and I am lucky to have encountered you along the way.

This, too, is often not enough, but it's true, nonetheless.

©2011 Joe Belknap Wall
Originally posted on metafilter in response to this posting.
All opinions expressed are solely my own and do not reflect the opinions of my employer.

The return of the crocodiles.

2011-08-02T05:00:00.013-04:00

I was a kid who never quite fit into the world, and as a consequence, I knew that sensation of the incoming flood far too well, when you knew it was coming, the rush and roar and heat of it, when all you can do is surrender, because the dam's already burst, and it's just a matter of time before you're swept away.

"Mr. Wall," said Mrs. Marcellus, a particularly cruel and thoughtless first grade teacher in my school, "Am I to take it that we're going to be blessed with another of your fine performances?"

I was standing there, humiliated, having been dressed down for slipping ahead in my reader in front of the whole class, and the jeering, giggling, lurching masses of those ugly, awful grins of twenty kids who also failed to understand a thing about how I worked, and who I was meant to be in this world, were hot enough to feel like the late afternoon sun in a Maryland summer.

I stood, and burned in the glare.

"No, I am not," I said, jutting my jaw out defiantly, and proved myself wrong almost immediately, dissolving into the choking gales of desperate tears.

"Well here we go," said my horrid teacher, rolling her jaundiced eyes. "Bring on those big fat crocodile tears, Joseph, and show the whole class what a great big baby you can be."

Even then, even lost in a moment where I felt like I was the only one of me there'd ever be, and the only one who'd ever know, I knew she was wrong.

In my household, my father cried. My father cried, and cried over things as simple and overt as the lilting, tragic melodies of Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé suite, and he was a strong, limitless man who shared those tears easily, and shared why we cry, too.

"Son, if you listen right here," he said, counting out the measures as we sat in front of a pair of tweed Advent speakers, "this part is about the romance of a man who never existed, but if you listen to the way the composer wrote the music, he carries us along, so we feel what we're meant to feel."

"If it's a romance, why does it sound sad?"

"It's Russian. Russian music always sounds a little sad."

"But if he's in love, why is it sad?"

"There's sadness in everything, Joe-B. Sometimes you can be happier than you've ever been and still feel a little sad. Sometimes, you can feel sad because something is so beautiful it's just too much to bear."

"Things can be like that?" I asked. It was all a mystery to me.

"You'll know better when you've seen more of the world."

He was right, of course. I have seen so much more, and it's easier to make me cry than ever. These days, though, when I reflect on the running commentary of a foolish, mean-spirited teacher, I feel sad, too, but for her.

"How long shall we expect to enjoy these great big gales of tears, Mr. Wall? The entire class is waiting for your interruption to end, so that we can continue on the assigned lesson in our readers."

"You big baby," whispered the nearest, meanest kid, with a snicker, and even then, I knew that I was anything but. I'd seen my father cry in his headphones, silently conducting his Kijé , and there was no one stronger in the world, no one smarter, no onebetter. Even then, even when I was just a kid, I knew who I was, even if I couldn't explain how I got that way.

When my niece was coming up, my sister once commented, finding that she was crying frequently, how like me she was. "She's just...tuned in, like you always were," she said, and I nodded.

"An eleven, yep."

It's my own little code for that sort of hair trigger heart, being the kind of person who's always turned up past the ten on the easy feeling scale.

Of course, I didn't always want it. When it was a movie day, on those special days, I always sort of wanted them to run Pete's Dragon for the hundredth time, rather than spool up my favorite film, The Red Balloon, a film I loved so much I never wanted to see it again, because it was just so playful, and magical, and terribly, terribly hard when it took the turns that were most familiar to me.

The film would chatter along in the projector and I'd recognize the familiar streets of a Parisian neighborhood that no longer exists, and barely did even then, and I'd feel that electric static of familiar twinges up my spine, because I loved that film, loved that boy, loved those streets, loved that balloon, and I knew what would happen, because it always happened.

I'd see myself as a quiet French boy, see myself finding the balloon, find myself in the kind of chaste love with the balloon, and the chase, the charging, terrifying chase, and the moment when the bad kids stoned the balloon, finishing it off with a stamping foot, and all the air would leave the room. I'd sob very, very quietly, a skill you learn when you cry easily, and try to look away, but then...well, then, all the balloons in Paris would come flying, and it was too much to bear, too beautiful and sad and wonderful and everything, and I'd desperately wave to the teacher to ask to be excused to use the lavatory, because if I opened my mouth—

If all the balloons in Paris came to me, why would that be sad?

You just don't understand such things until you've seen the world. Sometimes the things that make you cry the hardest, even when you've seen them again and again, are the ones that most remind you that life is a kind of glorious agony, where nothing is either good or bad, but some impossible mixture of things. I cry when the dogs die, when love's not enough, when I see myself up there, living out some parallel of my own life, even though it's all just a story, told for the purpose of entertainment and enlightenment.

It's all just a story, so why am I crying?

It was just so confusing. Sitting in a movie theater in the city, with my parents flanking me, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, annoyed by the damned mimes in ape costumes, enraptured by the futuristic space station and the moon and the giant space ship, so lovingly rendered, and when Dave Bowman pulled the little glass blocks out of Hal's brain, accompanied by that steadily slowing monologue, I caught myself at it again. Distracted by the baffling remainder of the film, I wiped my tears and sat through it, until the lights came up in the theater.

"Dad? Did Hal die?"

"I think so, though it's hard to know what happened in that movie."

"That was sad, but I don't know why I was sad because Hal was mean."

"It's sad when any thinking being dies, Joe," my father said, and he was right.

"Why was the computer mean?"

"I can't say."

Still, when I sing "Daisy," I tend to slow down at the end.

I took a decade off, though, after my father died, because I'd cried enough, and I watched movies that didn't take me to those places. I can say with some certainty that I have probably seen Romy and Michele's High School Reunion more frequently than the film's editors. Sometimes you just don't want to be sad anymore, and there's a world out there dedicated to dampening those lonesome feelings so you won't have to hurt. There's always Ernest Goes To Camp, Ernest Goes To Jail, and Ernest Scared Stupid, and hell, didn't I watch enough depressing subtitled French films in the nineties? Can't I just escape it all for a moment?

Until you fall in love with someone who's lost someone, and who wears it on their sleeve as raw and open as a wound, and then it all comes flooding back, the rush and roar and heat of it, and you find that you've finally grown up enough that it's not unbearable, the other side of that boundary between life and death, love and loss, and kindness and cruelty. You sit in a packed theater with the guy who opened the floodgates, even as you feel, deep down, that it's almost over, both in the film and there, in the world, watching Ennis and Jack and thinking, "why the fuck did I have to see this movie with him, of all the fucking people in the world?"

"Jack, I swear," Ennis says, smoothing out the shirt that's wrapped around Jack's shirt in the closet in his trailer, and you sob, audibly, and go completely salt-blind as the tears come, knowing that the guy next to you is crying over someone else, someone who came before you and who you'll never be, and that's how things are, being grown up in a complex, impossible world.

Here comes eleven, you think, and it's not so bad now that you're a grown, middle-aged man. Here comes eleven. How lucky am I to know this feeling? How lucky to know this world.

In the mercury lamp glare of the parking lot to the movie theater, you don't say a word, but even though you know it's all just a fantasy, you half expect to see all the balloons in Paris coming your way, to carry you away from it all, and let out a laugh that's not entirely a laugh.

"What?"

"Nothing. Thought I saw all the balloons in Paris for a second."

He rolls his eyes. You find the car, and your taillights disappear in the night, where the credits ought to be, if life were really like that.

If only.

Flashbacks: To pry open the ways.

2011-08-01T13:14:00.009-04:00

Maybe you don't even think about it anymore, what's back there. Maybe you've gotten so used to the impotent presence of that painted-over metal door that's right behind the workbench where you labor in a rented space in the ruins of a colossal turn-of-the-century factory that's been rusting like a fleet of sunken ocean liners for longer than you've been alive.

You tried it, of course, but it's stuck fast and there's work to do, so you shove your bench against the wall, blocking off the residual temptation to keep on trying. All the neighboring spaces are rented by cabinetmakers and duct fitters, who thrive in the raw, dusty spaces of the old place, and it's probably just one more of those guys back there, dutifully turning out a custom kitchen for someone who can afford it.

Thousands of men used to work in the factory, but times change.

After it's all over, when you've packed up and moved the workshop out until the next grant comes in to start it all up again, the heady moment of completion revives old instincts. You gather a group of fellow travelers and start to look for that hidden, magical place on the other side of the world.

Industry is so much the landscape of this city, or it was.

Nothing is guarded.

On an old loading dock, now behind corroding corrugated sheetmetal and bent-up fencing, the door to the shipping manager's office, built as beautifully as an Art Deco ticket kiosk, is open just enough to let you in. In a dash, dodging the sound of voices coming your way, you're in, up stairs with streamlined rails and steps so covered with plaster fallen from the ceiling as to be almost a ski slope, you're in, and it doesn't take long to find what you're looking for.

The other side of that door.

And you hope and dream and too easily yield to despair, always hoping there's an Oz to escape to, somewhere rare and glorious, somewhere to remind you that there is somewhere to go when you find yourself caught up in a kind of life that's just too much to take in.

It's too much, all too much, so the doorways disappear behind workbenches, appliances, bookshelves, suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty, until this meager place where we've trapped ourselves is all that's left.

So who comes knocking at those doors?

Do you claw at those gateways only when things really wear you down, when you're too weak to pry them open? Do you hear the sound of something on the other side and wonder if someone's finally come for you, to rescue you from the sore times?

It just all gets so tired, sometimes, like all the joy and wonder in the world is finally all used up. The ground under our feet gets as hard as our weary hearts, as heavy and unyielding as concrete weathering away in an empty place like this, and still, you always hope there's something more, even when you're feeling bitter and cynical enough to suspect it's probably just one more disappointment.

This old factory should have burned to the ground so long ago, all but for the fact that there's so little left to burn. Even the paint and linoleum have long since dried out, curled into little twists and flakes, and blown away through the shattered windows.

Still, you step into the immense space that was right there all along, just feet away from your workbench, where birds nest and fly free in this distinct universe and where there's more than enough room to run until you can't catch your breath, enough openness and solitude to give you space to dance like you've never danced in your whole life, enough of a track to ride a bicycle in circles until you've covered a thousand miles in your own thoughts.

It's just a very, very large empty room, but that's just fine.

Everywhere, the machines are still, frozen where they were left decades ago, rusted into place, stuck between floors or locked into the interim poses of their once-important tasks forever and ever. You can't help but see it all with a kind of awe, at the scale and weight of all this, of what used to go on here and what it's all come to.

It is so arrogant, this love we have of our own self-hatred, a perverse inversion of the puritanical streak that's still so deep in the collective soul in this country. It is so easy, so obvious, to look on these ruins with horror and disdain, to say "well, this is what happens," even when that's more or less the essential dictate of the evolutionary clockwork we're all caught up in.

Here and there, there is still power flowing, still 480 volts of current running through inch-thick braids of wire with insulation dangling like snake skins, and you can't stop yourself from touching the switches and buttons that call to something primal in us.

Touch me.

Some ignore us, some reward us with terrifying shrieks of metal twisting as unlubricated machines the size of cart horses struggle to return to the illusion of life they once had, sometimes it's just a light bulb here or there, or a little mechanism that emits a steady, desperate buzz, just below the ceiling.

Mostly, these places are just dead, it seems.

You hear voices, wonder what it would have been like when everything was roaring along at full tilt, all those thousands and thousands of hands at work, capping bottles and forming beer cans and making patented corks and seals.

You wonder, too, if there will ever be that much going on for you, if you'll ever have that stretch of thunderous, clattering, insane industry, when whatever you're meant to do in this world really starts to happen, all at once, all fed from the same source of high-tension electricity.

It's too easy to remember lives you never lived, eras that ended before you came along, and think you'll never find that source. You sit at your keyboard and write and it's almost too much to know that Shakespeare ever existed, or that Ginsburg howled or Joyce rambled or the writers of Laverne & Shirley ever gave Laverne another glass of milk and Pepsi. You sit there, clutching your guitar, paralyzed by Hendrix, Clapton, and the ghosts of the unknown greats out there.

Is the weight of history too much?

Maybe you're still sitting on a book that's not finished, not because you don't have stories to tell or courage to open yourself up, but because life just got too complicated all the sudden and left you unsure which way to turn. Maybe you daydream about coming close to the mastery of color that defines the magic of Matisse, right down to when he was so sick all he could do was cut out shapes, or think that one day, you might just catch the right wave, or ride the right slope, or find the one person you think will finally understand you.

Maybe you stand there, in the center of one more of these worn-out places, surrounded by rust and crumbling mortar, looking through the holes in the floor to the floors below and below and below all that, and feel that gripping, stunning feeling of panic, like you're falling, like you finally understand where all this ends up.

Everything you do will crumble and fade.

Everyone you know and love will leave you behind.

This is the ultimate destination for everything, this ruin of industry, where even the biggest giants come crashing to their knees.

Why do you even open these doors?

Is it the nature of doubt, or the fear of disappointment, something that calls for confirmation, as if to show yourself, once and for all, that nothing will ever change?

So you lose yourself in that feeling, in that abandon.

There's freedom in surrender, even when it's surrender to failure.

Your stomach rumbles, your head aches a bit, but you're in the presence of fellow travelers, and something of their energy pulls you along, presses you forward, and that's enough.

The old tiles crackle and break underfoot, the scenery changes, from grey to grey to grey to fading colors fading to grey, but things are never so simple.

The green is startling, jewel-like.

How do things grow here?

There is no soil.

It is that old arrogance, that old ego at work again. For all we've made, for all the stories we've told and the adventures we've had, built on wonder and cruelty and ingenuity and selfishness and more, all we seem to relish is the possibility that all that's left is destruction.

We're gonna blow up the world.

We're gonna destroy the planet.

We're gonna end life as we know it.

We're so goddamn vain. No wonder that comes back to haunt us, to dig into our souls like tapeworms, telling us that nothing will ever matter, because it all ends up in ruins.

Why bother?

That question comes to me too much. I sit at my keyboard, and I think I'm writing something good, something that feels generative, the version of that feeling of joy that comes when you take in some kind of amazing experience, except going the other way, and the question comes.

Why bother?

There are so many good answers, but you never seem to remember them when you can't help but ask that bleak, draining question.

If only it were easier to stay focused, to avoid that little gap in confidence that lets you come to ignore the unopened door. If only that paradoxical combination of arrogance and self-hatred wasn't so deeply entwined with our nerves and sinews and capillaries, so tangled that it's hard to know when or if we can slip out of the net.

We actually think we're big enough to destroy the world, powerful enough to stop the green, whether that comes from our tedious liberal self-disgust or our grim, prudish righteous puritanism, where we think even god must hate us.

If only it was easier to find focus, and hold it—how things would change.

If only it was as easy as finding a doorway.

The rails of the stair have broken free, rusted away where they were welded, eighty or ninety years ago, but you try the tread with a toe, then a sole, then a little weight, and it holds. Anyone with sense would see this place as nothing more than a disaster waiting to happen, but maybe we all need that disaster, that pending calamity, to keep our hearts pounding, the blood rushing, the fine hairs on our forearms standing almost on end in an ancient evolutionary response to the possibility of danger.

You skip the stairwell that's full of rubble, lit with sunshine from above where the whole roof's come down, marveling at the damage done as those huge blocks came crashing through, slamming through the treads and winding up in the basement, and you eschew the basement room that's full of deep black water, right up to three feet below the ceiling, so Stygian it makes your skin crawl.

You take tentative steps, after a deep breath and a little gasp of bravado, and step across the thresholds into these unlikely places.

Everywhere, it seems, there is green.

It catches your eye out of the absurdity of placement, and how strange it is that anything would want to be here, but that's that old arrogance, that Western ego, to think that desire plays much of a role in the overall scheme of things.

There is green everywhere because it can be there.

There is green everywhere because green does not doubt.

It's hard not to read feelings into the ruins, almost impossible to miss a trio of pipes looking for all the world like the periscopes of shipwrecked submarines, looking around for explanations in the rolling, raucous progress of the plants. We reach a lower roof and climb carefully across rusted beams that traverse an open shaft that goes four stories down into dark, still water, and suddenly, there's a forest in the sky, suspended over everything.

The trees are huge, rich, extraordinary creatures, with leaves as big as elephant ears, and are lush and rampant in spite of the drought that's turned so much of the surrounding countryside to shades of brown and grey. I find a seat in the shade and I am beside the trunk of one of the largest trees, leaning back to find where it's rooted, where it's found purchase in the masonry and sheetmetal, but there's no source, no obvious anchor.

There's no soil, but these trees deny that with their existence.

In places, you see where they may have taken residence in the windblown grime and old leaf humus you find on the rooftops, and yet they go so much farther, and reach so much deeper. The biggest tree has broken the walls that hemmed it in, beating back the might of human masonry with the greater virtue of patience and gentle effort, and its canopy spreads over the whole corner of the roof, making an island of shade and serenity there.

As you head higher, the green spreads, finding more sun, more sustenance.

What feeds you?

And it's been so hard, the last few years. It's been different, mutagenic, uncontrolled, a descent into chaos from years that were too orderly, too easy.

I step into a ruined office, and there's some kind of triumphant buzz in the air.

All those years, at those stupid desks, under drop ceilings and jittery fluorescent lights, all those wasted dreams, all that time spent on someone else's bottom line. The last two months of accelerated change have paralyzed me, coming after the last four years of accelerated change, unanticipated developments, and out-of-the-blue disasters, coming after too many years in this office, under this drop ceiling, filling out paperwork for other people even more trapped and hopeless than me.

It's all in ruins.

The plants dig into the soft, spongy fibers of the fallen acoustic tiles, spinning networks of roots out to find whatever nourishment there is in that lifeless grit and grime. They dig in and reach out, unfurling sails of lurid green into the sunlight, waiting for the moments when the wind breaks out one more panel to open up one more square foot of light, and in time, they will demolish this whole place.

We are so vain, even in spite of how amazing we are.

Even hopelessness is arrogant, that desperate moment of abandonment when we give up, as if we don't all have to participate in this incredible, unbearable, unlimited world.

We think we can just stop, step away, and be alone in the world.

Such vanity.

A bank of old rheostats still hums, just slightly, but I don't even think about trying to test if I'm just imagining it. I just step out onto the roof, and that is enough.

It's been five hours and we've only been exploring one building of dozens.

You step out into the sunshine and the whole city rolls out around you. The forest up here is mostly brush, limited by the conditions of the roof, but it's making headway nevertheless.

It's almost cloudless.

You can't even find the words.

Pipes go from nowhere to nowere.

What did they carry, all those years ago?

Below, it all seems so dead, so empty.

Will the green win out here, or will this place become the darling of legions of the soulless yuppie invaders that have colonized and obliterated so much of old Baltimore?

Would that be wrong, or is that my arrogance again?

Is there really a difference between all of us?

In an odd way, I start to see it all running together.

I say there is no soil, but this is all soil.

Where there is the potential for life to arise and prosper, it always does.

In my head, I am writing.

You are reading some fraction of what happened then, but you will never know all of it, unless you open your own doors. Maybe you're feeling as stuck as I have been, as trapped, as overwhelmed, as hopeless.

Hopelessness is the product of vanity.

Do those plants choose to grow where they grow?

Do you?

We run out of steam and head for the ground, hoping for food and a sink where we can wash the rust, grit, and pigeon guano off our hands, and it's a far faster trip.

From a windowsill, I see where an ailanthus altissima has found a place in the frame of a cloudy window on the floor below. It will dig in, slowly break the frame, cracking the panes of glass, one by one, until there's a new forest there.

At ground level, there's not much green, just more of the broken glass, rust, concrete rubble, and garbage that's the standard ground in the city, and over us, the old factory rusts away, a monument to something as simple as a way to keep your beer sealed up.

Life doesn't need to be much more complicated than that, but we find a way.

It is our nature, and our soil.

When we're lucky, we find sustenance.

The lease is closed out, the space is cleared.

Even with the next grant, we probably won't return to Crown, for all sorts of logistical reasons, and I might not even be a part of the next mosaic project for the museum, with my new position there. It is all so overwhelming at times that I can't even catch my breath, or get myself motivated to make the changes and organize myself the way I need to, but that is the life that is.

There are so many more unopened doors.

There is no soil, sometimes, but we seem to find a way.

In the middle of one empty room, buried in that titanic wreck of a building, I found a little speck of green that I couldn't quite explain. Its stem emerged from a tiny hole in an unbroken slab of solid concrete, so small I can't even figure how a seed ever got there, and was nourished, and found a way to grow.

Maybe it won't prosper, finding its limits in its environment.

Maybe it will just strangle itself and die there, a little twist of brown against the grey, unnoticed by anyone in the whole damn world, one more unlamented loss in a lifetime that's full of such things.

It's impossible to say.

Patience, gentle effort, perseverance, and a little luck–

Small things lie between lifelessness and green, things as small as a single step.

And yet, that step is only a start.

Flashbacks: Life on a roll.

2011-07-31T18:09:00.005-04:00

I've had a lifelong proclivity for personality pareidolia in objects that's almost on the level of my sleepwalking in explaining my curiously haunted life.

There's a key incident in my childhood that's fondly remembered by everyone in the family and many of the people who have come to know me well understand it as a telling moment in where I come from. I was maybe nine or ten, it was the family meal, which we enjoyed around a table, all together, just like a scene out of some kind of nostalgic propaganda.

I reached for a poppy seed roll, but it was tantalizingly just out of the way, in a basket over the seam where the leaf slotted into the old oak table with lion feet.

"Son," my father said, "do you want a roll?"

"Yeah."

"Which roll?"

"That one," I said, pointing with the prepubescent tension of a Diane Arbus model. My dad's hand hovered over the rolls, annoyingly close, and I hoped he wouldn't touch them all with his big hairy mitt.

"This one?" he asked. I nodded. "You want Jerome?"

"What?"

"That's Jerome Roll."

"It's a Jerome roll? What's a Jerome roll?" I asked. My mother, knowing, rolled her eyes and smiled a Mona Lisa smile.

"It's not a Jerome roll. It's Jerome Roll. That's it's name."

He picked up the roll, and handed it over. Of course, I couldn't eat the damn thing.

It had a name.

Jerome sat there, on my placemat, throughout the meal, and I fussily picked my way through the freshly steamed vegetables from our garden that were a kind of healthy torture for me, making sure nothing touched anything else on the plate in an inappropriate manner. At the end of the meal, I picked up Jerome and started up the stairs.

"You're not going to eat that?" my mother asked. I furrowed my brow and shook my head, because sometimes, grownups just didn't have a clue.

I carried Jerome around for a few weeks. He lost most of his poppy seeds, but otherwise survived my patronage in remarkable condition. I put him in the captain's chair in homemade spaceships, had him trekking through the brambles in the backyard or sitting guard as I broke the rules and climbed into our stone-lined well, and took him spelunking through the Chlordane-saturated dust of the crawlspace under the log section of our house. The dog was unusually interested in me for much of this time, but I kept her at bay.

At night, I'd tuck Jerome under the edge of my pillow and go to sleep, listening to the house creaking and groaning the way it would, punctuated by the occasional muffled scrabbling of a mouse running in the walls. It seemed like the noises of the mice were increasing, but I didn't think much of it.

One morning, though, Jerome was gone. There were crumbs and a few poppy seeds, but that was it.

"Jerome!" I screamed in the way you scream when a pet's died or run away.

My family made a good faith effort of looking for him, but he was never seen again. My mother pointed out that mice probably came out and ate him in the night, which just added a new and more realistic fear to my terror that a Zuni fetish doll was going to cut up my ankles in the darkness. I took to keeping the broom next to my bed so I could use it to reach over and turn on the light from the bed before I'd step down to the floor.

It's always possible I ate him myself. I did do a lot of sleepwalking then.

We all still call a poppy seed roll a Jerome roll. When I was a contractor to the DEA, and the only one in my company who'd never so much as tried pot and therefore was the guy with the highest clearance available, I was instructed to play it safe and stay away from poppy seeds. When that contract ended, I had a toasted poppy seed bagel, drowning in butter, and relished the gritty greasy happy chewy experience of it without the slightest regret.

Of course, bagels don't have names. Who would name a bagel?

A tentative waltz at the Lounge

2011-07-31T17:19:00.004-04:00

Working out the details. Cranking up the old Victrola. Dusting off the saddle shoes.

All machines are standing still. Listen. Stories are happening.