Hazy Shade of Winter

It was just less than a month ago that I posted pictures of the autumn drama at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Writing shit about new snow
For the rich
Is not art.
 ~ Robert Hass (supposedly a translation from 小林 一茶 (Kobayashi Issa)

As Kobayashi-san says; that shit's done with.

The weather has made a hard turn to winter. Mind you, it's winter in the Northwest, which means one of two things.

Typically it's an endless gray drizzle spiced with days of genuine hard rain. Low temperature 42, high temperature 44, rinse, repeat. That's the "west-wind winter".

Then every couple of weeks the polar high looms down over the intermediate space between the Cascades and the Rockies, over the high desert, and the east wind blows the clouds away and the cold in.

That's when you get mornings of freezing fog, and bright, chill afternoons that never let old bones warm, and my bones - those of which that aren't titanium aftermarket parts - feel very, very old on those sorts of days.

They're also not beloved of Portlanders, creatures of the Mediterranean that we are. So the Garden was quiet and I enjoyed the change from red and gold to spare black branches. 

Or bare red ones, as on the red-twig dogwood...

I should note that True Portland dies hard in the winter; this young woman attending the annual "Crafty Wonderland" fair refused to let the biting weather nip her toes back into closed shoes:

That's not actually an uncommon sight here (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it somewhere but am too lazy to look...), the combination of a heavy sweater or jacket above some chilly pink toes below. 

Part of it may be hardiness, part of it may be unwillingness to surrender to the season. Part of it may be the simple ease of slipping into sandals rather than wrestling with heavy socks and shoes.

Whatever the reason, it's a thing, and a Portland thing, at that.

Speaking of Crafty Wonderland, several Portlanders took advantage of the seasonal surroundings to let some pretty serious Xmass-y freak flags fly.

One such was this gal; I couldn't get a great shot of her outfit but this gives you the idea - the entire front of her dress was an solid mass of Christmas-tree bling, like the gold-encrustation on Smaug's belly:

Plus glittery silver snowflakes in her hair. 

The effect was completely insane in a sort of holly-jolly way. The Nikes make it sort of Ugly-Christmas-sweater-casual. Fun look, but I sure couldn't pull it off. There's something to being cute and /or pretty that helps make "okay, that's freaky" into "awww...that's cute".

But the award for Most High-level Holiday Cosplay goes to the Elf Off The Shelf:

I don't want to show her face, so you miss the Santa-hat topping, but given the rest of the outfit you get the idea.

My favorite bit is from the hem to the floor; you got your saucy fishnets going for the whole "Santa Baby" frisky sex-under-the-Christmas-tree thing, but then you've got the massive engineer boots that add a touch of "...but-fucking-try-it-and-I'll-kick-your-fucking-ass" danger. 

Clearly this is someone who has the authority to get you on the Naughty List.

That's all for now.

This little post has been too much fun to load up with serious business, so I'll close with Christmas standard you know (It's the "Piano Guys" doing the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts tunes, and since Blogger is being a dick about letting me embed it, here's the link to copy and paste - https://youtu.be/tyPDQpel8bI and a finger to you, Blogger, for being dickish about this). 

But I will be back later in the weekend to discuss some of the nonsense that we're getting up to here in the Land of the East Wind Cold.

Back in a bit.

Shizukesa ya

 

"Oh, tranquility"...

...is the first line of one of Bassho's best known poems:

閑けさや　岩にしみいる　蝉の声 (Shizukesa ya/ Iwa ni shimiiru/ Semi no koe)

Oh, tranquility
Penetrating the very rock.
A cicada's voice.

 

The voice that penetrated the very rocks along the path up to the Japanese Garden last Thursday wasn't the cicada's, but the modern avatar, the gas-powered leaf blower. Why the groundskeeping staff couldn't have done that work on Monday when the garden is closed, I don't know.

The cold sunshine illuminated the maple golds and reds, though, as bright and bitter as the east wind that carried from the polar high that loured over the continent straight down the gorge and up against the West Hills.

物いへば　唇寒し　秋の風 (Mono ie ba/ Kuchibiru samushi/ Aki no kaze)

When you say something
The lips feel cold.
The autumn wind.

The value of membership is in being able to enjoy the quiet - well, the normal quiet - of this place before the crowds arrive. I've been coming here for ten years or more, and the carefully curated wilderness never fails to find a peaceful place within me.

Less leaf blowers help with that, mind.

The fall color is perhaps the most popular time for the garden, when photographers descend in troops to make art from the maples. Apparently the single most popular spot is "The Tree", the big red maple alongside the upper pond. So much so that the staff has barred off the Tree and posted a set of rules to keep the fighting down to a manageable level.

夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡 (Natsu kusa ya/ Tsuwamono domo ga/ Yume no ato)

The summer grass
All that remains
Of the dreams of the warriors.

Or photographers, for that matter.

I with my little phone was no threat to their massive lenses. 

I took my snapshots, paused, and passed on.

As did she.

粽結ふ　片手にはさむ　額髪 (Chimaki yu/ Katate ni hasamu/ Hitai gami)

While holding the Chimaki dumpling
Her other hand held
Her bangs.

3 am

Awake, empty-handed, in the darkness with the sound of rain
rattling inside the cheap metal gutters like muffled drum-fire.

The warm, soft smell of your hair pressed close still rich

in the sharp empty chill of the rented room.

 

The sough of the distant highway your night-breathing

rising and falling as though you're traveling faraway.

 

(Years ago I was working on the road, doing the most grinding dirt-nanny work and staying in a cheap motel in Medford, which is kind of the lower GI-tract of Oregon. I awoke in deep night from a dream of home and wife and, just for a moment, thought she was there with me.

She was not.

That was a very long night.)

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

 

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the Moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

~ Linda Pastan

(This is from a newsletter I follow. It's written by someone who I came across very oddly, a former actress by the name of Lisa Jakub. She gave up acting and has, instead, become...thoughful. Her substack is here, if you're interested.

But the thing is that almost immediately after posting the personal piece that precedes this I ran across the wonderful Pastan poem in her newsletter and it fit perfectly with my mood. 

So. There.

In which I am become Titania, Queen of the Fairies

"And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which..."

~ Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2, Scene 1 

(Maxine has become the Garden Goddess this spring, and this chaplet of sweet spring dandelion buds is her work. Very nice, sweetie.)

A brief sunbreak

 I was one busy sonofabitch yesterday and didn't get to see or hear a moment of the inauguration of the 46th President. That was fine with me. I'm not a hopey-changey kind of guy. As you've probably noticed, I think my country is in a very dark place right now and, largely though the dogged efforts of "conservatives" is unlikely to get brighter anytime soon.

The mere fact that the nation was rid of the worst hominid ever to be elevated to its highest electoral office was enough for me.

When I got home last night, though, my Bride wanted to watch the ceremony, so I got to sit (well, mostly sit - the Little Cat demanded play, so I hauled out the jingle-ball-on-a-string that is Her favorite and spent much of the re-broadcast doing neko-jarashii as they'd say in Cat Samurai...) and watch the whole hour or so of lame speeches and political theater.

And then came Amanda Gorman.

And she was transcendent.

I'd read bits of her poem earlier in the day and had thought it was fine.

But in her own voice it was more that fine. It soared. It resounded.

It sang.

There will be dark and dirty, dangerous days ahead.

But every so often it is moments like her poetry that remind me that for there to be light there must be darkness. For there to be dawn there must be night. And that for there to be courage there must be fear, and the two must always be yoked together.

Amid all the refreshingly bland political mummery it took a slender young woman of color to remind me that even in defeat there is honor and glory in facing those fears and dangers bravely and with hope that the fight is worth fighting.

Or, as Gorman put it:

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

if only we're brave enough to see it

If only we're brave enough to be it.

Christmas Day 2020

 

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

---”Holly”, from "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney.

 (h/t to Lance Mannion, who has been posting these evocative Heaney poems...)

Fuck the Bread

From the Paris Review, a small gem of crystalline brilliance by Sabrina Orah Mark:

"I like it here. I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of homeschooling. Eli asks me to remind him how to make an aleph. I take a pencil, and draw it for him very carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.” “You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet."

Go. Read.

It's a great quantity of goodness in a ha'pennyworth of your time.

A Poem for the Plague Year

Ah ! ce que j'entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui glapit,
ou le pendu qui pousse un soupir sur la fourche patibulaire ?

Serait-ce quelque grillon qui chante tapi dans la mousse
et le lierre stérile dont par pitié se chausse le bois ?

Serait-ce quelque mouche en chasse sonnant du cor
autour de ces oreilles sourdes à la fanfare des hallali ?

Serait-ce quelque escarbot qui cueille en son vol inégal
un cheveu sanglant à son crâne chauve ?

Ou bien serait-ce quelque araignée qui brode une demi-aune
de mousseline pour cravate à ce col étranglé ?

C'est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d'une ville sous l'horizon,
et la carcasse d'un pendu que rougit le soleil couchant.

~ Aloysus Bertrand, Le Gibet

Translation:

Ah! that which I hear, was it the nocturne of the wind,
or the hanged one who utters a sigh on the fork of the gibbet?

Was it some cricket who sings lurking in the moss and the sterile ivy,
which out of pity covers the floor of the forest?

Was it some fly in chase sounding the horn
around those ears deaf to the fanfare of the halloos?

Was it some scarab beetle who gathers in his uneven flight
a bloody hair from his bald skull?

Or was it then some spider who embroiders a half-measure
of muslin for a tie on this strangled neck?

It is the bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon,
and the corpse of the hanged one that is reddened by the setting sun.

Mary Asks for a Miracle

"behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"
—Luke 2:48

How do you approach a miracle? She forgets her son
has sky spilling out of his mouth, so she doesn’t look
in the temple, where he’s practicing a prayer
that sounds like the only rose-colored feather
on the wing of a desert finch. She searches the road,
with the revellers, the travellers, returning home,
but the miracle is a beak that snaps the pinyon pine
shell apart like a lever, releasing its heart from its case.
The miracle is a set of questions made by the river
that clips its blue leash to the sea. The miracle is
only partly a boy, only partly a bird or a beach.
She forgets the part that is made of fire and wind,
the part that opens what’s closed or finds what’s lost.
She is sad and worried in her unremembering.
What do you say to the miracle you’re missing
when the miracle tells you it is already home?

~ Linda Dove

This evening we celebrated Christmas Eve with all the traditions of our family; lazy idleness, videogames (for the Boy), desultory exercise (for Mojo and myself), and a meal of honey ham (because honeybaked ham...), scratch mac n' cheese with sharp Tillamook cheddar because the Boy - whose diet generally consists of whatever is on the "prohibited" list published by the American Diabetic Association - specially requested it, and a garden salad because it symbolizes the rebirth of Sol Invictus or Christ, whichever comes first, or who takes two out of three thumbwrestling.

I won't pretend that this winter solstice doesn't feel dark and dim, and not merely because we're into the Dark Ages here in the Pacific Northwest, the rainy months when we see the sun only randomly from week to week. To me it feels like the December of 1860 must have; a tense, louring time vibrating like a tightening string, turbulent with anger and danger. The election of 2016 has made evident what has been true since 1980; that We the People are a house divided against itself, that we are in a cold civil war, and the the only thing left to question is whether we will continue in this tortuous state or break out into open struggle to become all one or all the other. I can neither effectively fight that struggle or win it; all I can do is try and turn it from me and mine.

So I hope you and yours are together, and safely ensconced in love and light. The night is long and dark, and we are our own candles, flickering bravely against the cold outside the glass.

May all of us find our way home safe tonight.

The Fallows of the Year

It's been a long day already, and it's only mid-afternoon.

I woke at five to the shrilling alarm in the dark. Shuffled to the kitchen to light off the coffeemaker, then to the toilet, then back into the kitchen to find provender for the ravenous maw of the small domestic predator that bosses us around the Little House. He's affectionate but a demanding master, the furry little bastard, and will let me know in no uncertain terms if his breakfast isn't served up quickly enough.

From there it was out and about Oregon all day. I had driven two hundred miles before noon, and that wasn't the end of my travels.Fortunately today I ended up at a site close enough to my house to take a detour to the local pub - the Lucky Labrador on North Killingsworth, no more than a long pint-bottle-toss from the Fire Direction Center, where I could have a pint and some peanuts and write up my field reports and, now, this post.

And that's many of my days; up early, off to work, home, dinner, bed. Desultory conversation with my Bride and the Girl (the Boy has entered the Dormant Phase of adolescence, where he will not speak unless 1) directly compelled, or 2) about some kind of gaming - he's at the extreme endmember of "videogamer", and if there was a way to make a living at playing Fallout outside of Seoul he'd be on it like a Republican on a tax cut.

Speaking of Republicans...

Actually, no. Fuck, no. Instead, let me start with this.

I've been thinking lately about this place. About how I wrote it off this time last year, about how I had decided that it was a ghost blog, and that I had nothing more to say here. And how I felt about that.

And I've concluded that I feel like shit about it.

I've written a lot here in this place. I've been slowly collecting the "battles" pieces into a Word document with the idle thought of possibly submitting it to a publisher and realized that I am up to almost 200,000 words (and I'm only up to Verdun, back in February of 2012!) I wrote some brilliant invective. I wrote some that I, rather vainly, consider some genuinely fine prose. Some pretty damn fine prose. Sometimes even containing some genuinely worthwhile thoughts.

And a lot of crap, of course.

But I thought about how I'd chosen to let this blog die like so many others and thought...no.

Goddamn it, no.

I'm a good writer. I have some more worthwhile thoughts and ideas and emotions to write in this place.

So I've decided to make a concerted effort to bring it to life again. There'll be more "battles" pieces, but only discussing events that entertain and amuse me rather than the famous ones that make the history books and the "decisive battles" compendia.

There is one thing that will probably not be here.

U.S. politics.

And there's a simple reason for that; there is nothing more to be said about U.S. politics that I haven't said over and over again. It is a worthless subject to discuss because there is no "discussion".

The "conservative" faction in the United States has given in entirely to cargo-cultism. There is no more remaining intellectual rigor or political throw-weight to movement conservatism. It has devolved completely into a sort of...well, here's what I wrote seven fucking years ago:

"...the modern GOP has become...a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right..."What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger."

And that was seven fucking years ago. Since then the prion disease has engulfed the "conservative" brains. There's just nothing left there. It's all God, guns, gays, snowflake babies, tax cuts, and Islamophobia (now with 100% more racism!) all the way down. Trump isn't a symptom, he's part of the disease, and the third to two-fifths of the American public that are infected don't want to be cured.

And that's the problem.

No republic can survive that percentage of its citizens immune to reality and reason, committed to nonsensical idiocy like "trickle-down economics" and white pride.

No.

We are, instead, living in the final years of the American Republic. Like Rome, we will either preserve the trappings of republicanism as the workings are replaced with open oligarchy, or we will devolve into a low-grade sort of civil cold war. Watch the ridiculous charade now enacted in the capital, where the reality of a moronic Chief Executive whose behavior reflects what we knew of him before the creaky mechanisms of colonial oligarchy installed him as our First Citizen cannot be accepted by his "conservative" cult for fear that, once the nonsense of Ptolomaic geocentrism is exposed as the nonsense it is, the remainder of the edifice will not stand. That a criminally cretinous fool must be defended at all costs, because the costs of accepting the criminal reality and cretinous truth would destroy the cult just as the first broken tapu brought the entire Hawaiian religion down in a heap.

These people would rather burn the republic down than hand over power, and that in itself is what destroys republics.

I cannot stop that. I cannot change it. I see no point in being the Shirer of the Fall of the American Experiment. I may touch on things from time to time, but I cannot imagine what earthly good it would do to repeat and repeat and endless string of posts that amount to a rewording of "WASF if the GOP is not destroyed!!!"

So I'll resume the one-sided conversation here. I'll talk about home and work, life and love, my home in the Pacific Northwest and other places I love or have come to love. There will be battles, and there may be poetry. There will likely be random posts where I talk about nothing but what amuses me.

But there will be, once again, posts.

Long-form blogging may well be dead but, goddamn it, it's not going to die here, not now, not in the fallows of 2019.

I sit. And I listen.

When I return to California,
to my life with its many engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow.

~ Brian Turner, Phantom Noise

Summer Rain

No, it's not summer, and no, it's not raining. I just found this over at Lance Mannion's place and liked it so much I had to repost it.

I woke past midnight
to the slightly burnt orange odor
of soft summer rain.
My wife slept beside me,
her breath punctuated with
the little sighs of a dreamer. Outside, pale moonlight
shone through the clouds, the great
evergreens dripping.

the katsura at the far end
of the garden turning
bright yellow already, although
it was early August.
I made a cup of tea and went
out to stand on the deck. I've clung to this place
like Han Shan-tzu
clung to his cave near the temple

on his beloved mountain.
I've watched these trees reclaim
a chunk of forest---slash,
waste and underbrush
when I came here
thirty years ago. No place is special
except we make it so
through myth and habitude. The forest reclaims itself
as best it can. Can I
do less? "No road leads the way,"
Kotaro duly noted his echo
of Han Shan's echo of Lao Tzu,
and hundreds of years between. I love beyond words this quiet rain
in these trees, the rose
whose stark white blossom lasts only a day, this garden
in moonlight, and the woman
who sighs, worried in her dreams. about her sleepless paramour
who rises in the night
to smell the rain.

---“Summer Rain” by Sam Hamill, collected in “Almost Paradise: New Poems & Translations”

May have to do with that I'm a long way from home at work, and am thinking of my loves and my home. But more about that later.

Winter garden (冬 庭園)

いざ行かむ　雪見にころぶ　所まで

"Let’s go out
To see the snow view
Where we slip and fall"

Since we didn't get the February Snowpocalypse we anticipated, I took advantage of the sunny midday and went to the Japanese Garden.

初雪や　聖小僧が　笈の色

"The first snow
That the young Hijiri-monk has
The color of the wooden box"

The color of the wooden box perched on the bamboo post isn't a Hijiri-monk, but a common Northwest forest thrush. But perhaps since it's a Hermit Thrush it is monastic enough.

市人よ　此笠うらふ　雪の傘

"Hey, townspeople,
I’ll sell you my woven hat,
The snow umbrella"

初雪や いつ大仏の 柱立

"The first snow,
When is the pillar set up
For the Great Buddha?"

箱根こす 人も有らし 今朝の雪

"Some people
Would cross the Hakone Pass
Even though the moaning snow"

All of the poems are by Bashō Matsuo (松尾 芭蕉), as they were the last time we visited the Garden.

White Christmas!

For the second time in three years we had snow on Christmas Eve. It says something about how old the kiddos are that they were stolidly unthrilled about that.

The other family member who was less than excited was Drachma the Merkitty, who seemed to take the whole snow business as a personal insult.

The day before Missy and I went for tea at the Lan Su Chinese garden downtown. I seldom visit the garden in the winter; I should. It was serene, an enclosure of stillness within the cold, busy city around us. The garden teahouse was a retreat from the noisy holiday season, as well, the only turmoil the steam rising from the dark oolong in the stoneware cup.

For Christmas Eve dinner I made a huge cauldron of the Hungarian mushroom soup that was once a gift to the city from the funky Old Wives' Tales restaurant. It's rich and thick, full of sour cream and dill and paprika, the perfect winter soup to go with a crusty bread and dark beer; my brew of choice was a Deschutes Brewing stout called The Abyss. It hit like a barleywine and was ideal for some Christmas cheering.

I hope you are with your beloveds tonight. Certainly the history of faiths, like that of nations, suggests that the old grinning ape within all of us can and will use them for our own malicious ends. But beyond those histories faith, like the best hopes of nations, promise a better world than the one we have created. The promise of tomorrow is the promise of the birth of Hope, the promise of a peace that passeth all understanding. That we cannot seem to find a place in our hearts for that peace is the fault of our hearts, not of that promise.

So I wish all of you hope on this cold, silent night. Hope for love, and peace, and happiness, for you and yours.

And...

May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me.
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel!

~ Hilaire Belloc

Our Kind

Our mother knew our worth---
not much. To her, success
was not being noticed at all.
"If we can stay out of jail,"
she said, "God will be proud of us."

"Not worth a row of pins,"
she said, when we looked at the album:
"Grandpa?---ridiculous."
Her hearing was bad, and that
was good: "None of us ever says much."

She sent us forth equipped
for our kind of world, a world of
our betters, in a nation so strong
its greatest claim is no boast,
its leaders telling us all, "Be proud"---

But over their shoulders, God and
our mother, signaling: "Ridiculous."

~ William Stafford

(huge h/t to Lance Mannion, who posted this...)

Bull Webbly

I was away from home last evening and had time on my hands, so what else was a fella to do?

I went to a minor league baseball game.

The game was at the Single A ballpark in Everett, Washington where the visiting Salem-Keizer Volcanoes (a San Francisco farm) played the penultimate game against the home side, a Seattle affiliate. The game itself was something of a snoozer; a 7-nothing rout for the visitors capped by a disastrous (for Everett) four-run ninth where the Volcanoes pretty much pasted the Everett closer all over the park.

I learned to score ballgames from my pop, the Master Chief, who told me as a slip of a boy that "it will make you pay attention to the game" and, yes, pop, that it does. I still record the pitch count for each batter, the direction the ball was put in play, and I tend to make my own decisions as to hits and errors regardless of the official scorer. So it was on the Salem-Keizer run in the sixth inning, when, according the the linked story above...

"Salem-Keizer capitalized on a Little League-type mental error in the sixth inning to score a run. With one out in the inning, right fielder Heath Quinn advanced to third base on a fly out to right field. The AquaSox right fielder, Dimas Ojeda, thought there were three outs on the catch and did not throw the ball in. Third base coach and manager Kyle Davis waved Quinn home emphatically and Quinn scored to take a 3-0 lead in the game."

Yeah, well, you make a bonehead play like that, Gehrig, and I'm givin' you a freaking error. That might well have been the highlight of the evening.

The location, though...the Everett ballpark is in some sort of sports complex, with a ginormous empty football field and track to the west. The entrance is down a blacktop ramp and past some sort of play field where the Everett players were taking part in some sort of kid-event in the long summer evening before the game...

The open area south of the ballfield was full of...stuff. Kids, parents...

...bouncy-houses, picnic tables, more kids, more parents, and scattered here and there players, looking ridiculously young and unformed.

But this is Single A Short Season, the lowest form of professional baseball life; there's a reason for that. Most of these players ARE young. They're are the hopefuls, the aren't-yets and the never-weres. The only lived-in faces are on the heads of the handful of the useta-bes and pluggers still hoping for a shot at the Big Casino.

This level is all about "player development" so the game, that actual game on the field, was...if not actually meaningless as near as dammit. Even if I still followed pro baseball I wouldn't have know who these players were nor did I care.

That wasn't really the point; it was a lazy evening, the peanuts were salty, the beer was colder than the wind off Puget Sound, and it was a relaxing sort of finger-mantra to tick off the little squares with the symbols of the game unspooling before me.

G 6-3, backwards K (a swinging strikeout - he "went around", got it?), little diagonal line with a black base at the end and an arrow up the middle for a line shot single to center. Idle thoughts; who taught that kid the odd half-sidearm delivery? Why the hell didn't the shortstop make that play?

The entire business was revoltingly wholesome. Unattended kids gamboled thunderously in the metal bleachers, mom and dad doucely sipping their eight-dollar beers.

I thought the young woman at left was a salacious outlier, some sort of baseball annie looking to pick herself up a young stud, but instead she turned out to be another bit of the small-town-America wholesomeness, mommy of one of the kids involved in one of the family-friendly gimmicks; in this case, out on the field with the home team for the anthem.

In fact, it had been so long since I'd been to one of these low-minor games I'd forgotten the cornball carny atmosphere; the idiotic costumed mascot

(the "Webbly" of the title - why the hell an outfit called the "Aquasox" decided that some sort of Amazonian poison tree-frog was what they needed for a mascot I have NO idea, but there he is, hideous bulging eyes and all...)

the Prozac-cheerfulness of the team employees shepherding lucky fans through a variety of silly antics; catching pizza boxes in a dipnet, two schoolkids racing around the bases dressing in hugely oversized team uniforms.

Perhaps the ultimate moment in all this goofiness came between the fifth and sixth innings, when two anonymous fans were handed radio control sets and tasked with guiding toy trucks around the infield from the third base to the first base side.

Predictable chaos ensued, with one racer getting halfway to second before turning completely around while the second circled the bag cluelessly before ramming into second base and flopping over, tires spinning.

All the while the Everett infield was warming up, looking warily about at their feet in case a plastic pickup was about to slam into them at the ankles. Sweetbabyjesus, what a circus.

My sport of choice, as you know, is soccer. I love the game itself, I love learning about it, studying it, the beauties and ugliness of it. I love being part of a culture of deep emotion, of topgallant delights and keelson-deep despair. Of thundering out love and devotion along with thousands of others, part of a thunder of voices over the hammering drums.

Baseball, though...baseball was part of my growing-up. Jack Brickhouse announcing Cubs games on my mother's cheap plastic radio during the summer of 1969, the Year of Tragedy and the Mets. Slow afternoons at the old Civic Stadium, Lois the National Anthem Lady and the Portland Beavers of AAA

(and someday I should really tell you the story of Bernardo Brito, the Beavs slugger...though I notice that the Aquasox have a kid named "Brito"...I wonder if he's a relative..?)

and filling in scorecards with the names of the Minnesota players of the Nineties.

I was a little surprised, and a little pleased, to find that all the old skills returned; recognizing the motion of fastball and curveball and slider. Acknowledging the position of the fielders, knowing where to look on throws, following the quickness of the bat.

It was an evening full of slowness, almost sweetness, like turning time down to a near stop and just being, drifting, afloat on a slow-rolling sea of silly, kitschy Americana.

Sprawled in the chill bleachers south of the gritty Everett downtown jotting down the runs and hits, listening to the hollow sound of the calls from the crowd float out across the ballyard; like finding an old scorecard from a game played long ago, a distant record of a time, and a me, that I'd almost forgotten.

Game Called.

Across the field of play
the dusk has come, the hour is late.
The fight is done and lost or won,
the player files out through the gate.

The tumult dies, the cheer is hushed,
the stands are bare, the park is still.
But through the night there shines the light
of home, beyond the silent hill.

Life is life (da da da da da dum...)

(Soundtrack for this post, from Laibach, my second-favorite group of Slovenians...)

I wanted to post this quickly after my sad little rant from yesterday, because it sort of typifies my position as an "optipess". That is, I am very unhopeful about the overall trajectory of our industrial civilization. I really don't think that anyone will solve the two huge problems that are going to bitchslap us:

1) Industrial civilization is learning how to make things without people, especially things that don't require a special sort of creative process. So the people who used to live by "making stuff" are going to find that they don't have jobs. Or that the jobs they will have are either a) horrible, like hospice and elder care work, b) low-paying, or both. Basically I think that a hell of a lot of what used to be the "working" and "lower middle class" (and even a fair bit of the "upper middle class") won't have a way to make a living. And

2) Anthropogenic global warming.

I think the resulting social chaos - people fighting over water and cropland or trying to escape rising seas while scads of people will be living aimlessly, without work or hope and on the edge of appalling poverty - will make the great migrations of Europe and Asia look like a child's birthday party.

But...at the same time, my own life is fairly sunny. My hip is working much better. The Boy seems to be happier now that he's taking his Brain Medicine. The Girl is her usual sweetie self. And my Bride is, as always, a Garden of Delight, Dispenser of Pleasures and Domestic Goddess.

This, for example, is from the past Saturday. Mojo and I took the Girl to what we call "Sushi Train". It's one of several little kaiten-zushi joints in Portland, and the Girl loves her some sushi. About two-thirds of this stack is hers. That's a LOT of sushi..!

There's always something fun going on at home; yesterday I got back late from a soccer game to hear all about the little fledgling crow that the kiddos had found. They tried to shoo it back towards its' nest-tree (amid great caw-ing from all the neighborhood crows) when some sort of raptor arrived.

From the kids' description you'd think this sucker was the size of one of Tolkien's eagles! But I think it was either a red-tailed hawk or a big accipiter like a Cooper's hawk. Anyway, it took the fledgling for its' own hatchlings to the great excitement (and sadness) of the young people. "It's the Circle of Life..." sighed Little Miss, who then giggled when I reminded her that she says the same thing when she farts.

I'm doing good work and getting paid for doing something I love.

I live in a beautiful part of the world, and I have my books, and my sport, and my hobbies to distract and entertain me. I get to write to you here and get the opinion-kinks out of my head. I have people I love and who love me close to hand.

I have it pretty goddamn good, at least here, and for the moment.

And that's pretty much all any of us can ask from life, isn't it?

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsered, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Abiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

~ Wallace Stevens

Dreaming in Mid-winter

An Archaeology of Snow Forts

There’s not much left to be said
Some well-washed stone hasn't heard before.

History is composed of broken walls and bad neighbors:
Just ask these chips from Berlin, the Parthenon and Cathay
Or these cool magma hands of Pompeii, dark and grey.

If you listen carefully in the right place
On University Avenue, you will learn
There is a minor wall near the Yalu River
Dancing on the hills of Qin for the moon,

Who knows exactly what I mean
In every tongue worth mention.

She’s moonlighting as a curved garden serpent
Coiling around old Laocoon,
The Suspicious One with his astute eye,
Crooning with a sly wink,

"Come, touch true history."

And how the moon must laugh when she spies
The tiniest hill in Minnetonka,
Where the small hands of the earth have erected

A magnificent white wall,
A snowy miniature Maginot
Raised some scant hours before,
Already melting into a hungry, roiling river
Who is not yet finished eating Louisiana for brunch.

~ Bryan Thao Worra

No particular reason. Just loved this poem, and the thought of a minor wall in the mountains above the Yalu dancing in the moonlit snow.

3am

Awake, empty-handed, in the darkness with the sound of rain
rattling inside the cheap metal gutters like muffled drum-fire.

The warm, soft smell of your hair pressed close still rich
in the sharp empty chill of the rented room.

The sough of the distant highway your night-breathing
rising and falling, deep and slow and far away.

Bible belting

Though I'm not personally religious I have always been fascinated by religion.

As Mark Twain said, its kind of like dandruff; a lot of people seem to have it and spend an inordinate amount of time and money fooling with it.

My Salvation Army grandfather gave me a King James Version Bible back when I was just a little proto-atheist and I've always treasured it just for the connection to him and the poetry. Whether or not you buy the religion the KGV does have some pretty terrific poetry.

I think part of being irreligious but intrigued by religion is that I was raised in a conventionally religious household but also raised United Presbyterian.

In case you're not familiar with this suburban sort of American Protestantism I should note that it's perhaps the whitest of Wonder Bread religions in this country. Even the Episcopalians (who are probably "whiter" in the pasty-faced Aryan sense) have their smells and bells and their faux-Catholic imagery. The Presbies?

Let's put it this way; when I was a kid I'd actually watch the service and take in what happened and what seemed important and what didn't. Finally one Sunday morning I asked my mother "So...what's so important about the money?"

Because to eight-year-old me the most exciting, most fun, most interesting part of the morning was when people got up and started passing these big brass dishes around. They were heavy, shiny brass with a broad brim and red velvet on the bottom of the cup-shape in the middle. Everybody put money in them while we all sang a song and then the passers took them up front and set them on a table and we all sang another song. It seemed like the highlight of the whole occasion, so I kind of figured that the object was to worship the money. This "God" stuff seemed pretty opaque but the money had its own cool dishes and songs and everything.

My mother was pretty irked at how I missed the point to churchgoing as she saw it. But that is a pretty good summation of how religion never really "took" to me.

So when speaking of the whole "buying the religion", the other morning my Bride (my rose of Sharon, my lily of the valley, my sister, my spouse...) asked me "Are you an atheist, or an agnostic?" and for the life of me I couldn't come up with a good answer. Given my background that probably shouldn't be a real shock, but, still.

"I haven't really thought about it enough to say." was my reply, and I realized that I really hadn't. In a backhanded way I suspect that I'm open to the idea of a god or gods - if no other way simply because I don't know enough about Life, the Universe, and everything to rule out a god or gods - but in my everyday life I really have no use for one or more of them. If there is a god, or are gods, it and they seem to me to be pretty careless of human lives. Both "careless" in the sense of casually throwing them away or bending and breaking them and "care less" in the don't-give-a-shit sense. If there are then they owe me huge for the death of my oldest child. But I don't see anything that makes me suspect that there is anyone there. Our lives appear to be just what we, and others, make of them.

I can see how comforting it'd be to think that there was this incredibly powerful mystical Being that cared about me and had my back. I just don't see any evidence that's true, and don't see the sense in spending a great deal of time fretting about that. I have all sorts of intellectual and moral wellsprings to learn from and to guide me. I don't feel the lack of or the need for a deity for that, so I guess the best way to describe wouldn't be "atheist" or "agnostic" but "indifferent".

So that's my religious condition taken care of.

Anyway, I got to thinking about all this when I came across Jim Wright's post over at Stonekettle Station about the recent brou-ha-ha over "religious freedom" and hatin' on Teh Gays that cited a bunch of the usual directives from Leviticus. You know what I'm talking about, right? Don't eat owl, leave seed in the field for the poor, don't bonk a guy like you would a girl, that sort of thing.

As you'd expect, down in the comments section several discussions ensued about the Levitican prohibitions and how they apply, or don't, to Christians. And that was sort of fascinating to me, historian and self-identifying scholar that I think I am. Because they all circle back to a single source; the text of one of the Gospels, Matthew, chapter 5, verses 17-19:

"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."

That made me run down a bunch of commentary on this piece of Matt, which seems to be one of the more contentious issues in Christian exegesis.

The bottom line seems to be the question of "when the Christ said "fulfilled" what did he mean by that?" The passage in Matthew seems to suggest that the old Levitican strictures - indeed, all the laws and directives laid down prior to the 1st Century C.E. - might "pass" once "all is fulfilled". And it seems that many Christian theologians think that with the Christ the law was fulfilled; that with the events that are reported as occurring 2,015 years ago the old laws "pass". These scholars cite passages like Paul's Epistle to the Romans, chapter 10, verse 4: "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth."

What the hell does that mean?

Certainly it doesn't mean what it says: "...the end of the law..." Western Christians, American Christians, live hedged about with laws like every other American. Local laws, state laws, federal laws. Certainly being the spiritual heirs to a god's sacrifice doesn't let you beat a speeding ticket.

But does it mean that modern Christians are exempt from the stuff laid down in the Old Testament?

(As an aside, let's hope so. There's some pretty appalling shit in there. Take, for example, Exodus, chapter 21. That's the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" bit that a lot of us think of when we think of "Old Testament-y" crime and punishment. But that's actually pretty mild compared to the slavery. Selling your daughter into slavery? Jake with the Lord. You just can't sell her to smelly foreigners. Or if you and your wife are slaves after six years you get your "Get out of slavery free" card. But...if you married during those six years? Your wife and kiddies belong to your former master. Seriously.)

All this is good fun, but the question before the floor remains; are modern Christians bound by the Levitican strictures against homosexuality and homosexuals? Or does Christ "fulfill" those strictures and replace them with his own words, none of which discusses the question of who gets to go into the Fun Zone and how and whether that's bad?

Lemme cut to the crux of the biscuit: it doesn't really matter. You either don't get to hate on the queers...or hatin' on the homos is the least of your worries.

If old laws still apply, and if you want to hate the homos you also can't eat fat (Leviticus 3:17) or pet a dog (Leviticus 5:2) or wear cotton-poly fabrics. You basically can't live a modern life. I suppose if the idea of a couple of husky bears kissing reeeeeally drives you wild you could do that, but I'd put the actual number of Americans that could in the low single digits.

Go read that Leviticus stuff. I'm serious - it's completely fucking whack.

Or they don't, and you pretty much have to go with what J-dawg said:

"And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these."

Don't see "...except for the homos" after the "thyself". Seems to pretty much settle that.

So Christopath-Americans? You can all go home now. You're wrong.

Sue, kiss Sally. Joe, kiss Matt. Everybody happy now?

The hell with all this legal parsing. Let's have some poetry.

"Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.

Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.

Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards.

Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon."

(Song of Solomon 4:3-15)