"Nulla dies sine linea - but there may well be weeks."
Walter Benjamin, Post No Bills
30 August 2010
I really didn't think today would end this well.
The weather was, in a word, crappy. It rained this morning, cleared a little at noon when I ducked out from work to go buy the range membership, then started raining again just before I left work and started heading east on Highway 14. But once I hit the highway, I could see, in the distance, a break in the clouds.
The Sherwood Park Fish and Game Association's shooting range is probably a forty-minute drive or so from the city. A long way, when you've got a brand new rifle that you've never fired in the trunk and three hundred rounds of cheap ammunition to burn. The radio seemed in the spirit of things, though in an annoying kind of way; as I made the turn off 14 onto the country road, on came Mother Mother's Hayloft, followed immediately by Blur's Song 2. I couldn't help but smirk. It was like an attempt at encouragement by someone who just doesn't get it.
There were a few other people there when I arrived. As I unlocked the range gate, I could hear the deep boom of someone's centerfire going off. But no one was at the rimfire range. I had that one all to myself, separated from the others by high dirt berms on three sides, and isolated. Which suited me just fine.
You shoot to the west. The sun was dropping toward the high dirt backstop, just a little to the left of the target boards. All around was green grass, bathed in the golden glow of that enormous late summer sun. The sky had cleared almost completely and was a perfect kind of blue, and by the time I was really getting going, it seemed most of the others had left. The last shooter on the centerfire range to the south of me must have been hardcore; I think he fired two shots for every fifteen of mine. I suspect he was waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal after walking back and forth to change targets on the three hundred meter range.
And so, again, shooting became the solitary, ironically quiet, excitingly tranquil experience it always was with the air rifle in the basement, but this time, with the beauty of creation all around me. Warm light battling cool air. Squinting against that fiery star as I fixed my eye on the front sight post, trying to steady the tiny black dot, fifty meters away, just on top of it. Everything is quiet, even unnaturally so with the (mandatory) hearing protection on. Pierced by the clean crack of my rifle and the occasional deep boom of the big-bore to the south.
I stopped a few minutes before the range closed, standing now in a scattered and satisfying mess of brass casings on the cement pad. I swept them up. Plus a few others that someone else had left without cleaning. Put my rifle back in its case and got in the car.
Mists were starting to creep across those remote country roads, and by the time I hit the highway, the beginnings of a sunset were taking form in the west. "A scarlet thread stretched beneath the gathering dark," Rich Mullins once called it. I rolled the windows down to smell the chill in the air.
And I left the radio off. All the way home.
24 August 2010
These past few mornings have been the first since summer came that I have driven to work in darkness. Granted, I started coming in earlier; I'm on the road at five-thirty now, but even so, until recently it was at least dawn by that time.
Not so anymore. It's black when I start the car, and the sky is just blueing by the time I arrive, just a couple of minutes before six. No shadows have yet been cast, and there's a new quiet to these mornings.
When I was fifteen, I had a job at the McDonald's in Spruce Grove. Most of the two and a half years I worked there was completely forgettable, but I remember very clearly some of the winter mornings I opened there. I forget exactly what time we had to be there, but it was around five, if memory serves at all. My dad would usually ask me, the night before, if I wanted a ride in the morning, and I almost always declined.
It had to be a forty-five minute walk. A long way, through the center of town and up by the highway where there was no sidewalk. You had to just walk on the shoulder where the snow was just getting deep. Trudging would be the best word for it.
And so it was that Christmas Eve morning, a little before five. It was probably twenty degrees below freezing and there was just a little snow falling. I was on the side of the highway and the sky was pitch black and the road glistened in the orange glow that the streetlights cast on it. And it was wondrously quiet. In December, birds don't sing and leaves don't rustle. And on Christmas Eve, no one travels the highway west of Spruce Grove at four thirty in the morning. The snow, in the absence of wind, came almost straight down and softly lighted on the ground without impact. I was a very rare and beautiful kind of alone.
It was like I hoped never to arrive and for the sun never to rise. I could have walked on in that dark stillness for ages.
These mornings now are reassuring. Though it comes with bitter cold and no small amount of inconvenience, that stillness will return. The slight chill in the air as I walked from the door to the car and the world between me and the sun were its first heralds.
The wind still rustles the leaves. It's a ways off yet. Give it time.
4 August 2010
You never can tell what it is about a vacation you're going to miss afterwards. In this case, after camping just north of Drumheller for a few days, it's the faint hiss of the propane stove and the gurgle of my percolator making my coffee in the quiet of the morning.
Honestly. It's that sound.
21 July, 2010
The Roman Catholic Church just can't seem to keep itself out of the news these days. For a minute there, things were sort of quiet, after Pope Benny made his statement that the child abuse cases were a result of sin within the church, not without, and that "forgiveness is not a substitute for justice". It was a step, albeit a small one, in the right direction, though miles remain to go. Even so, the critics quieted down for a little while, and seemed to be waiting. And watching.
What were they waiting and watching for? This, apparently.
I've had a couple of discussions regarding this now. What shocks me is how normally reliable media have treated this case. Both the New York Times and Time magazine ran articles online making the claim that the Vatican considers the ordination of women just as morally despicable as child molestation. Naturally, a lot of people are bent out of shape over this one.
One commentator made the observation that the Vatican seems to never miss an opportunity to shoot itself in both feet. While I'd hesitate to disagree, this one just doesn't seem to be their fault.
The Vatican never said the two offenses were equal. Where the confusion comes from is the fact that both are mentioned in the same document. That was enough, it seems, for the fine folks at the NYT and Time to presume the worst and announce it to the world with full conviction. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the two offenses against Canon Law were put in completely different categories, and were in no way equated morally. Kind of like bank fraud and rape - both are illegal, both will land you in jail, but there's no question that one is more reprehensible than the other from a moral point of view.
Of course, even if I'm right about this, the world still has plenty to be angry at the Vatican for. It's beyond dispute now that they deliberately concealed child molesters and shielded them from investigation. Of course, that has given some the idea that the Roman Catholic Church is a welcoming pervert club, and that they protect pedophiles because they like to. In reality, "protecting" pedophiles was an unforgivable by-product of their primary goal: protecting the Church from scandal. I doubt they were thrilled at the necessity of their actions (though I realize that necessity was only perceived, not real - they could have done right from the beginning).
I make no excuses for their past sins. It seems even the Pope himself has a lot to answer for, and I quite sincerely hope that he does. In the meantime, Benedict XVI has done more than any pope before him to tackle the child abuse issue head-on. He hasn't gone far enough yet, but the pieces seem to be moving on the board. Whatever else I may vehemently disagree with him on, he may yet do some good in the course of his term. Hopefully, more good than harm, though it remains to be seen.
Some would wonder why I would defend the Catholic Church, given that I'm not actually Catholic. My reasoning is something like this: they're what the world looks to when it thinks of the Christian faith. I'm associated with the Vatican whether I like it or not. And if they can get their house in order, they stand to do a great deal of good. I'm all for them getting their house in order, and I won't stand by and watch them get kicked while they're down, which is what this latest news story amounted to. Let them deal with their issues. Let them make their changes. Put pressure on them where it is needed, but don't needlessly throw rocks at them when they're trying to put the past to rights.
"Speak truth to power", goes the old Quaker saying, and Paul often reminds me of it. And amen to that. We've had enough of lies from all sides.
8 July, 2010
They say you shouldn't let it build, like it's the pressure you really need to be concerned about. And they say you should make yourself heard, as though failing to do so was just a disservice to yourself and your own interests.
But that is so self-absorbed as to be nearly pointless. It's not the disservice to myself that I ought to be concerned with. It's the dishonesty of the thing, the lie of it that I tell without even realizing I'm telling anything at all, let alone a lie. Walking along calmly and upright as though there were no pit bull sinking its teeth into my heels. Not even glancing as the mosquito pierces my skin.
I don't know where I learned to lie like that. Or where I learned to think so little of people as to suppose that they aren't tough enough to take the truth. Perhaps it isn't condescension, though, but fear of them, of losing them, of making them think less of me. Any number of explanations, all of them probably worthless.
There is so much to be undone. Fixing and wrecking and fixing again, with an unclear picture, in this case, of what the whole thing ought to look like. If the creature is limping, the parts are in place...
No, I don't really know what I'm doing. But I'll try really hard to do it.
30 June 2010
It's fair to say a pattern has been established now. Every time I have a store order something in for me, either because they are out of stock or only get it in by request, there's a problem. It never goes smooth.
The first striking example was my telescope. The store had none in stock, but said they could get one. I ordered it, and was told it should take a couple of weeks. A month and many inquiring phone calls later, I was told that the distributor had them backordered from the manufacturer. A few weeks after that, it finally came to light that the manufacturer was no longer building the thing. I ended up with a different scope altogether.
I think that was where it started. It has happened a few times since. Now it's happening with my CZ 455.
I don't think I have ever ordered something and had it show up on time, without headaches.
Anyone wanna buy a curse off me? Five bucks.
We've all heard before that people change. Over the years I've become more and more convinced that people don't change as much as we suppose, and that the other adage, about leopards and spots, is probably much closer to the mark. Spots, though, do not a predator make.
Some things are more engrained in a person than others. Someone who just doesn't care about other people has a long road ahead of them before they start to. But a lot of things, little things, are more malleable. Bad habits. Not like smoking or excessive drinking, but things like hitting the snooze button too many times every morning or not putting things away when you're done with them. Or certain predispositions, perhaps to distraction, or procrastination, or forgetfulness. That last one always crept up and bit me. Actually, I've got some tooth marks from all three of them, but talk about people who can't remember to do a damn thing, and yeah, my name comes up.
It's not that I have a bad memory. In fact, it's quite good, in certain ways. I can remember lines from movies verbatim, and song lyrics stick with me. I think it's an auditory thing. And I can memorize information fairly well, like when studying for a test. Ask me a question, and I can dig the answer out of my brain. The problem for me has always been remembering things without a cue. Ask me to pick up milk on the way home from work and I'm hopeless. Ask me when I get home "what were you supposed to pick up?" and I'll be able to tell you, immediately. But there in the car, with nothing reminding me that there's something I'm supposed to be remembering, the milk is doomed to remain unpurchased in the store cooler. You might as well just hang a sign on the front door that says "MILK", just so that I can turn around and go back to the store before I even walk in. This would spare everyone the grating conversation and dirty looks that would be necessary if I actually entered the house.
I've got past a lot of that, though. But not because I changed. Those who know me well know that I wear a ring on the middle finger of my right hand. The one I have now is my second (the first was stolen - long story), but it is in every way identical to the first. I made both, the first at work and the second on my little lathe in the basement, out of Nitronic 50 stainless steel. Both were made to fit the middle finger. It turned out, though, that the rings would fit my index finger as well, though they never felt comfortable there.
That discomfort, as it happens, was useful. It first occurred to me a day or two after I had, yet again, forgotten some task that needed to be done, which had created no small amount of inconvenience. I don't remember what it was now (quelle suprise); I just remember feeling very frustrated with myself, sick of my own unreliability. I tried to think of ways to deal with it. For many, the solution to forgetfulness is to write things down. But that does no good if you don't remember that there's something you're supposed to remember - you won't look at the piece of paper to check what it is.
But then something hit me: in an adaptation of the old "tie a string on your finger" trick, I moved the ring from my middle finger to my index finger. It felt weird. It was supposed to. And sure enough, remembering whatever it was I'd needed to do became astonishingly simple. That weird feeling was like a constant reminder that there was something I was supposed to remember. It worked again and again.
I did it for months without my wife noticing the ring's subtle migration. What she noticed was that my memory had markedly improved. She didn't see a contrived sort of system or method; she saw a more reliable husband. And that was what mattered.
I'm still exactly the same forgetful person. But I found a way to deal with it that took the sting out of the weakness. I didn't actually change; I learned. There's no sense in the leopard just wishing, trying to live as though he has stripes instead of spots; the poacher with the rifle will just chuckle when he pulls the dead cat out of the tall, vertical grass. Better to understand the spots and figure out how to work with them. And that's why the spots on the leopard sometimes don't matter. Maybe the leopard can't change, and maybe that's okay. Because the leopard can learn.
I think I've been wearing that ring five years now. At first, I made it because I liked it. Then, it became a practical and important part of living my life. Now, it gives me a little hope that perhaps some of my other shortcomings could also be rendered inert, and a little more willingness to try.
I don't aspire to be a perfect leopard. I'm just learning to work with my spots.
I'd almost forgotten how much I loved shooting.
She's a fine piece of work, the Slavia 631. A .177 spring-piston air rifle, built by CZ in the Czech Republic. Low power and suitable for a basement range, but far and away one of the most accurate rifles in its class (and certainly in its price range). This is not the BB gun of "A Christmas Story" - she's a hefty bit of wood and steel built for the enthusiast who appreciates quality and precision.
I had taken the homebuilt aperture sight off the rifle to try to make some drawings of it, and had never put it back on. So it had lay locked in its case and inoperable for a long time. I don't know when the last time I'd put a pellet through it was.
I'd only meant to put the sight back on the rifle, in preparation for our trip out to the cabin; it was already getting late and I had to work the next day. But, as it seems is the case with anything in the basement, it turned into a somewhat longer affair. Sighting in a rifle is never just sighting it in. You spit some lead out of it for fun, too. It's inevitable.
My own experience with shooting sometimes makes me marvel at the near-complete association made between guns and violence. I know few things more tranquil than my own shooting sessions. Everything becomes about being still and slowing down, about generating a silence broken only by the sound of the shot itself, a loud thwack in the case of this rifle. And then it is quiet again, as I calmly break the barrel and put another pellet into the breech, consciously trying not to move too quickly and increase my heart rate. I cannot understand how some can see only violence in this zen-like activity. The world melts away as I look down the barrel over the sights, and patiently wait until my body settles and the rifle steadies and my lungs are just newly relaxed.
Of course, the groups were shaky after so long, with a lot of "flyaway" shots landing an inch or more from the ten-ring. But the groups tightened and the flyaways became less frequent after a few dozen shots. It started to come back to me, the attention to breathing and sight picture and trigger pull and hold. Spring-piston guns are particularly sensitive to how you hold them, since their recoil produces not only backward motion but also torque; you've got to hold them exactly the same way, with exactly the same pressure on every point of contact between the rifle and your body, shot after laborious shot.
And with the returning skills came the elation and the frustration, those companions with which every shooter is familiar. The disappointment that blankets you when you walk up to the target and find that the group is broader than you thought it was, and the wry satisfaction that lights on your face when it's tighter. Every group with one effort a little further from the mark than the others taunts you like a dare to go back to the line and reload. And back at the line you try. Over and over again. To stand more firmly, to grip the rifle more consistently, to breathe more precisely. And above all, you promise yourself that you won't let the next shot break until everything is perfect.
Usually, I find out that I don't have that kind of patience.
But a tight group in the paper is worth all that effort and more. It's not about the holes or the damage. It's about the intention, about exercising will at a distance, about not missing the mark. It is about achieving with precision something so deliberate. To do exactly what you mean to do. To achieve the goal with no wandering, though gravity and your respiration and your pulse and fatigue all align their wills against you.
My ego is far too fragile for me to dare make a list of all the things I meant to do. And even in those things I achieved, so often what actually materialized was something near what I meant, in the general area of. Seldom exactly. Even at my age, I'm still not that good at this yet.
Because to do as we intend to is far more difficult than we would suppose. Harder still is to do it over and over again, at will. So I keep going back to the line and reloading.
Perhaps I should be used to this by now.
This was the first time, though, that I really had to try to explain death to my boy. He doesn't really get it. My wife told him Timmy was dead, and that we would bury him in the backyard. This actually kind of excited the boy, simply by being something he got to do that involved the crab.
Our son had always loved that little creature. Any chance he got, he wanted to be the one to feed him, carefully lowering the dish full of veggies onto its spot on the sand. Sometimes he would mention Timmy's name when he so much as saw us cutting up something that the crab liked, like strawberries.
I'd had Timmy over five years. My wife had actually bought him for me after the death of another crab, Hagrid, who was a pity purchase from a pet store. Hagrid had been in rough shape when I bought him, and I knew his chances were slim. I spent about three weeks trying to nurse him back to health before he finally gave up. The next day, I think, my wife came home with a tiny little crab, not any bigger than a marble, who eventually grew into the beast you see above, nearly the size of a mandarin orange.
But all three of us found ourselves in the backyard this morning, crouched around a hole in the dirt saying our goodbyes to the little crab. The boy was the one who shovelled the dirt back over the body. Then he asked if Timmy would wake up tomorrow.
I told him no. For the fourth time.
So long, Timmy. We'll miss you.
You're finally starting to say the right things and point the finger in the right direction. It's a start. I can only pray you'll put your money where your mouth is and follow through on this.
Because we need you and yours. Not just for your sheer numbers, but because whatever and however great our differences, at the end of the day we are under the same flag. The rest of us need to be able to feel like it's a flag we want to be under. The world is watching to see what exactly that flag represents, and all of their eyes are not on us. They are on you.
An enormous chance lays before you now. There is so much to lose and so much to gain. Don't flinch. As forgiveness is no substitute for justice, talk and sentiment and statements on airplanes are no substitutes for action.
Now's the time for you and your very fine hat to show us what you're made of.
Sometimes your greatest allies are the unlikely ones, the ones you never expected to find beside you on the same side of the barricade. It's even a little humbling sometimes to turn your head and see the face of your old enemy, rifle in hand, wearing perhaps a bemused or ironic grin but no less invested in the new task at hand. You both wear scars that you likely gave each other. Your sense of moral superiority, perhaps overdue for a thrashing, gets knocked down a peg or two. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," the saying goes, though I'm not sure where it really comes from. And that's the funny thing about some enemies: they fight just as fiercely beside you as they ever fought against you.
We need this to happen to us once in a while. When our old, or merely presumed, adversaries surprise us, when we finally discover that unexpected common ground, there's a little bit of our badly-beaten but precious faith in humanity that is restored, almost always at the expense of our own sense of self-righteousness. None of us has a monopoly on the moral high ground; our harshest critics and most vocal opponents probably share our stance on something and would gladly storm the gates alongside us, given the right particular battle.
It forces us to think better of others. And when we do, something else unexpected happens: we realize that it brings us far more happiness to think well of someone else than it does to think well of ourselves. That self-righteousness carries with it both an emptiness and a subtle bitterness that we don't even realize is there.
Nick Cave might have been wrong. Perhaps people just ain't so bad. Sometimes.
So the whole family dropped off to sleep at around four in the afternoon yesterday and took a little nap that lasted until seven. Three hours. Which meant there was no hope of getting the three year-old to bed at any sort of reasonable hour.
But little glitches like that sometimes carry in them the potential for a wonderful break from routine, or present opportunities that are normally absent. It was mostly dark, and the sky was fortuitously clear. So I quickly set up the telescope in the parking lot of the complex.
I'd been looking forward to doing this since the time I first learned I was to become a father. He seemed ready now, old enough to discern what he saw in the eyepiece and understand, sort of, what it was. I had flipped through astronomy books with him before, and looked at the pictures. He knows a photo of Jupiter when he sees one, and often asks where it is when we're outside at night.
It all came together last night. He was awake, the sky was clear, and I had planned on getting the scope out anyway. I held him up off the ground, and he seemed to know what to do, maybe from watching me. Adjusting his head, trying to figure out how to get his eye right up to the eyepiece. A wide grin right from the first look, which was a rather unimpressive view of Venus. But even just that little white ball enthralled him. I pointed to it in the sky and told him that that was what he was looking at.
Next came Saturn. He saw the rings. Then the moon; he learned the word "craters". Then he asked to look at Saturn again. Then asked again for the moon. Back and forth. Held his little action figure up to the eyepiece so that he could take a look (Submarine Man needs to see the solar system, too).
The smile never left his face.
She's up and eating now, after a week of recovering from the turmoil of getting out of her old skin. She looked so thin last night, so frail, when I dropped the cricket into the tank and sat down to watch, to make sure she was strong enough to hunt. But she didn't falter. She sat motionless as a stone until the prey was within striking distance. Then finally, swift and sure and with ferocious grace, she struck.
The insect was lucky the first two times, having found the remains of Bella's shed skin, still in the burrow, and darting beneath it. But Bella knew the cricket was there, and just waited like a sentry. The cricket always moves eventually, and the motion reverberates through the soil to the listening spider. And she seldom misses. Between her astonishing speed and surprising force, the hunt is a foregone conclusion as soon as the cricket hits the tank.
Thomas Merton once mused that the hawk knew its business. And in much the same way, I sometimes envy this spider, for she knows exactly how to be exactly what she is. She has a clarity of purpose and a certainty of means. She doesn't need to seek those things as we do or agonize over their existence. She senses the tremor in the earth and knows exactly how it ought to be struck. When a new skin is ready and the world is warm and moist enough she knows how to get out of the old one. No one taught her, and she will teach no one. She knows her business.
My grasp on what I am is tenuous at best, and my knowledge of how to be it is, in my own estimation, comically lacking. But I muddle through. And watch spiders.
So Bella pulled a surprise molt on me last night.
I used to always get warning, back when her tank was upstairs on the main floor, because my toddler's running around would stress her out enough that she always developed a bald patch on her abdomen. When a molt was imminent, it would turn black, the new hairs underneath becoming visible through the old skin.
But the stress was exactly why I moved her tank down to my office in the basement, where the boy doesn't run around. It worked; she seems much happier and less troubled down there. The downside (which is really an upside) is that she doesn't get that bald patch anymore. So I didn't see the molt coming. I just happened to look in on her last night, and there she was, sitting next to an old skin, and looking tired.
There was a white, ugly-looking stump where one of her legs should have been. I don't know how it happened, but she lost one in the process somehow. Severed right at the cephalothorax. It'll grow back in time, but she's stuck with seven for now.
Fortunately the wound had clotted, and wasn't bleeding anymore. Bleeding can kill a tarantula; they don't have muscles like we do, but instead move their bodies almost hydraulically, using changes in blood pressure to articulate their limbs. Which means if a spider loses too much blood, or becomes otherwise dehydrated, they may not even be able to crawl to the water they desperately need.
But I think she'll pull through. She's tough. Here's hoping.
You'd be amazed how cooperative a three year-old can suddenly be once you consent to address him as "Dino Piranha". And if you go as far as to refer to his mother as "Mommy Dinosaur" and yourself as "Sharptooth", you can get the kid to finish nearly everything on his plate.
This has been my life for a few days now.
We stripped the altar at the church last night. Right at the end of the service, after the eucharist was finished; it's how the Maundy Thursday service ends. I don't know how old the practice is, but it represents the abandonment of Jesus by his disciples in Gethsemane and the stripping of Jesus by the soldiers before his execution. The hymns appointed had all been sung; my work on the piano was done, and the priest asked me quietly if I could help him, along with two others, with the somber task. I had not expected to be part of it.
Against the reading of a plaintive psalm (I think it was Psalm 22), read aloud from the back of the nave by the assistant, we went to work. Everything behind the communion rail that wasn't bolted down was taken. The chairs the assistants and the priest used, the brass crosses on their posts, every hymnal and prayer book and water glass. The microphone stand. The massive Bible and Prayer Book.
The assistant's deep voice and the solemnity with which he read made the whole event decidedly eerie. The linen cloth that always covered the alter was folded ceremoniously and taken away. The bread and the wine, already blessed for the Good Friday service, were taken from their place and moved out of the room altogether, down the short corridor and into the sacristy. The doors of the cabinet they are normally kept in, built into the wall behind and above the altar, were left open, making the absence of the elements glaringly and disturbingly apparent.
And as all this went on, everything else was quiet. All those who had attended sat silent in the pews, watching. I could not help but notice the looks some faces bore; somber, pained even, like what was happening, and what it symbolized, was just beyond the edge of comprehension.
And once everything was gone and the reading was finished, the lights were turned off and the whole church fell into darkness and quiet and emptiness. No one spoke. Most, I think, were kneeling. After a minute or two, slowly and one by one, people got up from their pews and quietly shuffled to the door at the back.
Goodbyes were spoken in whispers at the door, even though there was no one praying or otherwise engaged in the church at the time. It was just understood, somehow, that quiet, if not total silence, should be kept.
This morning was the Good Friday service, carried out in front of a bare altar. The bread and wine from last night were to be used entirely, so that none remained. Some of us were given two or three wafers at communion. Once the eucharist was finished, there remained no blessed bread or wine anywhere in the church. As far as I know, this is the only time of the whole year at which that ever occurs.
I cannot wait for Sunday. When the glad shout of Alleluia! returns to the dismissal. When the solemnity is finished and the altar is restored. When things come back to life.
Sometimes you've got to wreck a thing a little before you can fix it. And sometimes that means that you've got to fix the thing a little first, just so that when you wreck it, you don't wreck it beyond repair.
And that first fixing can look so forced, so artificial, so oblivious to the actual problem, because it doesn't address the problem at all. It can't. The thing won't yet survive the damage that addressing the real problem will do.
So you tighten the bolts. You change the bearings and you clean out the filters. You sand down the rusty parts and paint the whole thing shiny again. You talk about the weather and ask about the trip. You pour your efforts into anything that can be made better without making something else worse.
Only then, when the whole shabang is sturdy enough and might stand a chance, do you take the axe to it and start cutting out the part that really went wrong in the first place. The sledgehammer and the blowtorch do their merciless work, and you fight with the last fasteners that hold that troublesome element in place, wrenching it free with all the finesse of a wolf pulling the flesh off its kill. There's no other way to get it out. And it's only because of all your other, seemingly unrelated, work that the whole thing doesn't crumble to pieces in front of you; it holds together. It bends, it flexes, it groans and grumbles and complains, it shudders and shakes under the blows of your tools, but it doesn't fall apart. It holds.
And if you've done it right, when the whole thing lies broken again, you'll find yourself looking down at something that is, without question, worth fixing. Because you, and everyone else around you, can see it as it always could have been. The damage doesn't look so bad now. 'It just needs a new whatzit, that's all,' people will say. And they're right. They're endeared to it now, and want to see it brought back from the edge. Even the adjuster wouldn't write it off now.
The surgery is over; there's a nasty-looking wound, some blood has been lost, but the heart is still beating.
So on Friday night, I bought an electric guitar.
It's beautiful. A wine-red Epiphone Special II, not an expensive guitar at all (probably one of the cheapest on the rack), but it's the one that beckoned to me the most. Reminds me very much of an old Gibson L6-S I once had the pleasure of playing.
This makes the slippery slope even steeper. Because I now have an acoustic guitar (with a preamp in it), an electric guitar, a digital piano, a proper microphone, and an iBook with GarageBand installed. All I need is that little USB interface to jack all of these things directly into the computer, and I'm set.
Like I've got the time. Another hobby is about the very last thing I need, except maybe a blow to the head with a fax machine. But who cares.
As a half-crazy French-Canadian machinist I once knew used to say, "I very like it."
Sometimes your life explodes like a grenade, all violent and dramatic and loud. Other times, like now, it kind of explodes more like a ballpoint pen.
You don't even notice it's happened, at first. You feel your finger slip but you think it's just the oil on your skin. Then you notice a tiny smudge of blue. And quickly, to your horror, you realize that half your hand is covered in the stuff, and it's gonna take ages to get it off.
Of course, it happens right at the critical part of the lecture, right after the prof says something like "Write this down and go home and memorize it, because you will need to understand this from here on in, and it's complicated".
And I just know, I'll deal with my right hand and then find ink on my elbow. I'll think I'm done, but there's some on my chin.
It's tiring. But you've got to get the stuff off.
The past month, perhaps, has been filled with motion. Some things moving madly, others speeding up slightly, and some, perhaps most importantly, just stirring quietly to life.
And those stirrings, those might-be-beginnings, are both promising and frightening, because I don't know how to do this. I've wanted this, even prayed for this, over and over again. And now it might be here, and I'm stricken with indecision and uncertainty.
I knew a girl named Jill once. A quiet sort of thing that mostly kept to herself, but with a uniquely bright smile and a sarcasm that carried no hint of malice, once you got her going. An understated jeans and t-shirt style that kept her from standing out too much and a face that neither wore nor needed any make-up. I don't think she ever knew that I had a little crush on her, back when we were fifteen or so. I think now that perhaps it was the way she didn't stand out that I liked, just grinning at the jokes the rest of us made hanging out in the church basement at youth events, seldom making any of her own.
We graduated, went separate ways. I found out later she went to college somewhere, and took up carpentry in her spare time. I'm told she turned out to have a natural talent for it. That, and an unswerving devotion to both her faith and the compassion it taught.
I don't recall now when the accident happened, or even how many people perished in it; I just know Jill was one. I believe her sister was another. There was a van, a few passengers, and an Alberta highway. I think they were on their way back from Caroline. That's all I remember for details.
What I remember most was her funeral, held at the Alliance church in Spruce Grove because the Baptist church we had attended wasn't big enough to hold that many hundreds of people. People I hadn't seen in years. Paul Kemp came and said hello and told me he was the organist in the Lutheran church on ninety-sixth street now. The day was full of those tense conversations, with people you haven't seen in years, and are happy to see, but not like this. Circumstances, you know.
Her father was surprisingly composed, I recall, as he spoke from the podium. It was clear he was grieving, but he spoke as though he had a peace unheard of in a parent who is in the process of burying half of his family.
They had printed, on the back of the funeral program, a quote that had been found, handwritten and with no name beneath it, among Jill's papers when they cleaned out her room. It read:
When you come to the edge of all you know
And are about to step out into the darkness of the unknown
Faith is knowing that one of two things will happen:
Either there will be something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.
It might well be that this week has been the week of perpetual annoyances. If it isn't stupid people, it's stupid machinery. Generally speaking, the week has been kind of stupid.
It started with the car. A minor fender-bender became a wretched headache; the body shop agrees to do the work, has the car for over two weeks, then hands it back to you with new, and totally unrelated, problems. All they needed to do was fix the back hatch and the bumper. Why does my remote starter no longer work? And why are the automatic locks all screwed? And why does the dome light not come on when I open the driver's door? And above all, why are you telling me to just "take it back to the dealership and have them reset it"?
At the dealership, the verdict was pure gold: somehow, in the process of fixing the tailgate of my Outback, the body shop guys had damaged some wiring under the dashboard.
What?
Of course, the body shop pitched a line that sounded something like "No, really, liquor naturally evaporates from bottles like that - we had nothing to do with it. It just happens sometimes". Eventually, ready to drop a wallaby into a wood chipper, I agreed to split the bill, which wasn't all that big, anyway.
This on top of a sudden bout of overtime the bosses have asked me to work, and a particular machining job that should have been simple (you noticed the way I put that, did you?). In fact, the shop had made these parts before. We even had CNC programs for them. Everything could have gone so smoothly, if only a few things had gone differently. One being if the, um, very nice person who made them last time had written anything down. "Oh look, tool ten in the program cuts this nifty profile inside the part. I wonder what boring bar he used as tool ten? Do you think he remembers?" That last question, in this shop, is almost always rhetorical.
After an hour or so of wasted time trying to figure it out, it eventually came to light that the tool that had been used last time had since been epically trashed during another machinist's momentary lapse of reason and good sense, caused by what I'm positive was a very lovely daydream in front of his Okuma.
Now, I understand that this particular tool costs something to the tune of two grand or so, but there was a reason we had it in the first place. Which, of course, begged the question: why did we not replace it after its violent and hideous-sounding (trust me, I was there that day) demise? Turns out, the decision was made to replace the tool when the need arose.
Here's how that plays out: a job comes up (like the aforementioned "should have been simple" job) which really sort of requires this tool. We order one, and it is delivered "in a timely manner". A manner so timely as to make you believe that the PO was sent from Edmonton to Stockholm in a capsule tied around the neck of the Neo Citron dog, and that, upon receipt of the order, the supplier had dispatched the tool across the Atlantic in a canoe manned by a rotary telephone and a potato, with a note attached that just read "Dear Canada: please give this to Travis", believing that statistically, it was likely to end up in the Maritimes somewhere.
The point is, if I wanted to get the job done on time, I had to find another way to do it. And I found one. A way which was efficient like western governments and easy like putting contact lenses on a badger.
And after fighting with that job for four hours this morning (which was Saturday, by the way), I came home, headed to the basement shop, and madly started machining the last few parts for a little project I'm doing for my wife (it's a device for holding a photography reflector), having to swap the little 4-amp fuse from the lathe between the lathe and the milling machine, because at some point last night, I blew the milling machine's 5-amp fuse and had no replacement. There was no time to get one today, and she needed the thing for lighting tests tonight.
After all of this, the car still has that dome light problem, I'm pretty sure that boring bar was never ordered, and I still don't have a 5-amp fuse. But I'm driving the car, I finished those parts at work, and my wife has her reflector boom.
I call it a win.
Tonight, in the basement of the church, I found a piece of paper with nothing but the following, written in a child's hand, on it:
Wake up
Breakfast
Adventure
Lunch
Adventure
Supper
Bedtime snack
Sleep
Faerie schedule.
It's true: your spouse never stops surprising you.
Today I learned that my wife of seven years can't stomach the sight of Silly Putty. We got one of the little eggs of silly putty as the toy with a kid's meal when we ate out today, and when I opened it for my little boy, my wife visibly grimaced, shuddered, and turned away, covering her mouth with her hand.
I mean, really, is Silly Putty that vile? I always liked it. Apparently she feels differently.
I didn't know that until today.
"That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are."
Maurice Sendak
Where the Wild Things Are
Bono said there was a silence that comes to a house when no one can sleep; but the greater silence, in my experience, comes when everybody but me is asleep. The not-quite-three-year-old who didn't take a nap today dropped off to sleep with little trouble, and a diligent but exhausted wife was in bed before even her son.
I am sure that it is quieter when they are here and asleep than it is when I am home alone. Perhaps because I tread more softly as not to wake them. Yet even the animals seem to keep their peace at such times as this.
Add to this the still of winter outside my window, and you have a rare kind of quiet, the kind that makes standing at the sink doing the dishes a contemplative act. Going over my list of tasks for the night as the sink fills, a strange content falls on me. Perhaps because of the stillness in the house. But it is strange insofar as it comes when so many mundane tasks lay before me.
These are not the things that get in the way of life, it finally occurs to me. They are the stuff of life itself. Washing dishes and picking up toys and sweeping floors and tending to paperwork are necessary and natural parts of living in a corporeal world. And there is a shift in my perspective that makes sense of the content. If this world of matter and energy is not second-rate, if the creation is truly loved, then every element of existence in it, every necessary part of making one's way through a mortal life in it, every meal and every shower, every bit of the work of my hands by which I make my living and every pause I take to enjoy its many beauties, is a hallowed act. Like a monk scrubbing the monastery floor, washing the dishes becomes almost an act of worship.
If even so mundane a task as this can be hallowed, what then, O Lord, is unimportant in Thy sight?
I finish the dishes, wipe the counter clean, and set to a general tidy of the kitchen. In a pile of flyers that has come in the mail, I find a new issue of a magazine I subscribe to; immediately sidetracked (my wife will testify I'm prone to it), I spend several minutes perusing the headlines. And then I snap back to the task of tidying with an almost comic feeling of guilt. Not the normal I-should-stop-goofing-off guilt that comes when you get distracted doing monotonous work - a little greater than that. But not a heavy moral guilt, either. Rather, the sheepish kind of guilt that you feel when you find your mind drifting to last night's movie during the Sermon.
The countless toys in the living room don't even seem to test my patience when I get to them, but I don't notice this. Not until I am halfway through cleaning the first of two rabbit cages do I realize that I am not even hurrying. I've stopped to pet Dusty, rubbing the top of his head with the back of my index finger. He presses into it; rabbits love that, even though they almost always look frightened. This chore is not in the way. It is not an interruption, as it almost always has been on any other night. It is not a duty that delays a thing; it is the thing itself, right now, in this moment.
If this, too, is worth doing as unto You, what dare I deem trivial?
The rabbits tended, I sit before my laptop in the living room and tend to an insurance matter. I find myself being unusually thorough. It takes only a few minutes, but in that time all three cats have gathered in a circle around me, waiting on their nightly treat that is, in fact, just a vehicle for a medication that only one of them needs.
Treats for the cats. Then finely, dare I say lovingly chopped orange pepper for Timmy the Crab. For what are pets, after all, but creation entrusted to our care in a special arrangement? 'Until you have allowed your heart to love an animal,' Anatole France said, 'a part of your soul remains unawakened.'
Frustration and annoyance just didn't show up tonight. Could every day be like this?
The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night, and at the last a perfect end; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be with us this night, and for evermore. Amen.
Just watched the promo video for the iPad last night.
How is it that Apple does not yet own the world?
Nearing the seven-year mark, I can't help but smile for where I find myself now, against all prophecies and warnings of boredom and mediocrity and divergence. Those naysayers are for me like so many doomsday preachers, screaming from a soapbox and barely able to contain their eagerness to say I told you so. Like I'm just not even really in the particular world they are lamenting the end of.
It isn't hope or optimism that comes when I think of it. Rather it is the exhilarating quiet that falls on you when you see that things are in their place. The comfort of a confidence in things to come. The fermented fondness for the scars of storms weathered and the matured appreciation for the DVD and bag of chips of a Friday night that is blissfully routine.
So Pat Robertson has said his piece regarding this earthquake in Haiti. Apparently, it was their own fault for being such bad people, and God is punishing them, like he punished America for hedonism with 9/11. And once again, his word is being taken by many as the "Christian" stance on the matter.
And I think I can see why. There were two striking comments made over on atheistrev.com regarding this guy, and they're worth attention.
First: "Pat Robertson has a long history of making this sort of claim, most of which have only contributed to his influence and resulted in little blowback from mainstream Christians."
And second: "I understand that many Christians are reluctant to admit that Pat Robertson and others like him speak for them, but this does not change the fact that he does indeed speak for them."
The thing is, both of these statements are completely true. Which is a problem. Why do comments like his receive such little blowback? Of all the Christians I know, not one of them agrees with Robertson on the "reasons" for this earthquake. At best, they do try to take the stance that "he doesn't speak for us".
But he does. He is speaking for us, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with him or not. He makes these statements under the banner of the faith we profess. And we are, for all intents and purposes, powerless to stop him. So then, what do we do?
If you can't stop someone from speaking for you, then start speaking more loudly for yourself. And it will take more than a reactionary "No, I don't agree with Pat Robertson". If we do not share his stance on Haiti, then what stance do we take?
It seems to have gone unnoticed by the world that churches everywhere are calling madly for donations and support to go directly to relief efforts in Haiti (of note is ACT International). And yet somehow, one man's comments have constituted "the Christian stance".
We would do well to ignore Robertson and spend more time just helping. The authentic Christian stance should not be "Pat Robertson is an idiot" (though that may well be true). The Christian stance ought instead to be "Hustle with the help, because a lot of people in Haiti are suffering".
Do what you can.
Very often, the difficult decision that a parent faces is not "Do I run over there and physically stop my child, or do I try to discourage this behaviour verbally?" but rather "Do I run over there and stop my child, or do I quickly but quietly grab the camera?"
Usually, it comes down to a question of sequence. First, photograph the behaviour, because it is hilarious. Then put a swift and stern stop to it and tell the kid to never, ever do it again.
I love being a dad.
It is as though we forget, in winter, what a thunderstorm feels like. Not in the sense that we can't recall it, but in the sense that it leaves our minds and must be consciously recalled. There's that part after the rain has started, but is just spitting a little, not really coming down, as though the clouds haven't yet committed. And then there's my favourite part, that swift crescendo when the sky opens up all at once, the air is suddenly thick with water and the massive drops, moving earthward with real force now, make impact with elegant violence.
It is the closest thing to the feeling of prayer that I know of. If someone were to ask me if I find prayer relaxing, I would have to give them an emphatic no. It is not. At least not usually. And why should it be? To be a point of intersection of Heaven and Earth, to stand on the fault line, is not something we should expect to be calming. It is elegant and violent and tumultuous and wrenching and pulls you apart like it's making room between the two halves for something. Like a freight train passing right through the middle of you. The beauty of it is astounding.
Of course, individual results may vary.
I knew I should have just gone to bed last night. And I certainly should have known I would spend more than half an hour down there when I headed to my office in the basement, but I don't know that it would have mattered. It had been too long already.
The one string had been broken for I don't know how long. Over a year, I'm sure. I hadn't even taken the thing out of its case for ages, let alone played it. At times I wanted to, but the broken string slammed the door on that, and on any given day, buying new strings just wasn't on the agenda. And the room in the basement was so packed and cluttered that the guitar wasn't even easy to get to.
But now a couple of the things that were filling that room have disappeared, out of my way. And with a package of new strings that my lovely wife bought me for Christmas (thank you, honey) on another good friend's advice (thank you, too) in my hands, last night seemed just fine. It didn't feel right, in fact, to wait any longer.
And so I played. Remembering, with difficulty, songs and arrangements I'd loved at one time or another. Ignoring the sting in my uncalloused fingertips and the fret buzz I couldn't quite get my hand to eliminate during bar chords. Singing like there was no one else in the house, even though there was.
I never put the guitar back in its case. I found the old guitar stand, stood it in the corner, and let the instrument sit upright on it, displayed, in full view from anywhere in the room, something important that had been brought back from disrepair.
And important things have fallen into disrepair. Not all of them are as simple to fix. Some are not fixed with paint or metal or just-wanted-to-see-how-you're-doing phone calls or long letters explaining where we stand, though those events might be a necessary part. There is a necessary plunge into the unknown that, on any given day, just doesn't seem to be on the agenda. And the plunge doesn't come for Christmas or a birthday. You have to lace on your boots and step out into the cold and go get it.
It doesn't feel right to wait much longer.
If Ikea isn't a Behavioural Study masquerading as a furniture retailer, it should be.
First, their shopping carts. Most have two fixed wheels at the back, and will only travel in more or less the direction they're pointed. Not at Ikea. All four wheels on the cart swivel, which means you can point it straight ahead of you but sidestep to the left or right, and the cart still moves with you.
For three hours in that place today, all I could think was 'This is awesome. I feel like I'm flying a Viper'. And it would almost be a shame if there wasn't somebody watching on a surveillance camera, noticing how I would take unnecessary turns and circle things off-axis for no practical reason, all the while with my toddler in the cart.
Second, store layout = rat maze, complete with hidden shortcuts for the extra-smart. Not much more to say there.
Of course, then there's the assembly of Ikea products. I wonder sometimes exactly where in the packaging they put the camera. The funny thing about Ikea directions is that they actually do tell you exactly how to put the thing together, but they don't warn you about the subtle little never-in-a-million-years-would-you-notice detail in the picture that you've overlooked, and which won't become apparent until six pages later and usually involves a lot of disassembly and bad language to correct. Combine that with the fact that fourteen of the nineteen parts look virtually identical to anyone who isn't a mechanical engineer, and Ikea's senseless and irrational bias against the use of written instruction dissuades them from labeling the parts with stickers or something that say 'A' or 'LEFT', and you have hours of entertainment for clandestine observers, and heaps of fascinating data for psychological analysis.
Seriously, Ikea. If you're not watching us, it's a tremendous waste of an incredible chance.
You know, I had planned on making a first post to this new version that described all that was new within it. But I'm not going to. You will find the new features on your own. And probably a few inadequacies, too, so there's really no point in making any fanfare.
So let's forget about what version 2.0 does. What it is perhaps is of far more significance. It is a new beginning, a redefinition. This is not a makeover, not a facelift. Rather, it is as though the heart and soul of Broken Parabolic have been taken out of a sick and dying body and put into a younger, stronger, and more capable one, one which might stand a chance of letting it become what it needed to. Not in the manner of the young and strong elbowing the aging and weakened out of the way, but rather like a changing of the guard, the fresh spelling off the stalwart but tired.
And it feels good to welcome in this new form. I've been told by those who know me closely that I sometimes hang on to things for far too long, be they material or not. I had not thought of myself as resistant to change, but it turned out that I was. One might even say that I sometimes developed an irrational affection for things of no real significance.
Perhaps I'm getting over that.
Version 2.0 is not about a website. It's about finding my feet, seeing the path ahead, and the way in which I might walk it. It is a part of becoming.
And that is one of the many beauties of creating. You cannot create without recreating yourself, at least a little. Because when you are finished your creation, you will have become the person who created it. It sounds redundant, but it isn't. 'Helical' might be a better word.
So here's hoping the transition goes smoothly. But it probably won't.