Astromechs

As I pick the bits of grease from under my fingernails on a Monday morning, my thoughts turn from my own busted knuckles and mechanical tribulations to those of today's ultimate 'astromechs', the 'astronauts' aboard the space Shuttle.

To be clear, I have no intention of diminishing the glory of these brave and gifted individuals.  Though their professionalism makes going into space seem safe and perhaps even easy these days, we need only recall the Columbia and Challenger disasters to remember just how dangerous their undertaking inevitably is.  No matter what they are doing up there, these men and women clearly risk their lives with every breath they take in space (and on the rides up and down).  But their role has changed.  In many ways, it has actually transformed from a romantic role to a regular job.

It's no ordinary job, to be sure.  Astronauts, as those of us who have read/seen The Right Stuff will recall, are a very special breed.  But that breed is changing.  Even during the life of the space program, from Mercury through Apollo and on into the Space Shuttle era, we have seen this group--as a group--evolve.  They were originally fighter pilots, hard-drinking men with brass balls.  Now, though I would say that while still in possession of the requisite metal cojones (men and women alike) they are now more often like mechanics than pilots.

To be sure, these young men and women still have the right stuff.  It's just that the stuff has changed. If anything, these amazing people are even more amazing today than the first generation that Wolfe wrote about. They are still among the smartest, fastest and most driven people on the planet.

But now, even though many astronauts cannot pilot an airplane, they all have advanced degrees in something: engineering, physic, biology, nanotechnology.  They still perform science experiments while in space, but increasingly, instead of doing them for a team of scientists 'back home' they are themselves the lead investigators in the tests they conduct, and the data they gather is part of a career that will only begin with these couple of rides into space.  After their time is space, many of these astronauts will return to active research careers in the lab, not semi-public retirement on the links.

However, in spite of their advanced degrees, in order to advance to the further glory that awaits them on their return, while they are space, today's astronauts are often reduced--for want of a better word--to being astromechanics.  Their job, for several hours each day during a two-week mission, is to go outside with a set of tools and bolt and unbolt things.  They spend their days removing damaged/broken parts and exchanging them with new/rebuilt parts.

This is exactly what an earth-bound mechanic does, with the notable exception that an earthbound grease monkey like me doesn't have to worry about bolts frozen by space or concerned that a half-million dollar bag of tools might float away into interstellar space.  I certainly do not need more risk.  Even with gravity on my side, I've managed to lose plenty of my tools in much more conventional ways.

Grateful, too, am I for being at no more risk on a Sunday afternoon in my driveway than a busted knuckle or a blood blister on my fingertip.  Since I always find a way to hurt myself anyway with my little set of metal tools, I am thankful that the damage I can do to myself and the car is, at the end of the day, fairly limited.

Of course, there are many more differences between working on my little Karmann Ghia and the International Space Station, not the least of which is not having to face instant death with a careless mistake.  That's alright with me--master, as I am, of the careless mistake. No, I have no desire to work in space.

Oh well.  While these Astromechs are certainly smarter than me by half, there is one clear advantage I will always have over them--I can drink a beer (or two) while I work.  Cheers!

The World is Now

Well, it's happened.  The End of the World has come and gone.  Dare I say it? We are all still here.

Notwithstanding the possibility that we are all--to a man and including the engineer-cum-prophet who used his fifteen minutes of fame on the Internet to stir up all this fervor in the past couple of weeks--not without sin and therefore all doomed to remain here on Earth, I will take the position that the End of the World is neither nigh nor not possible.  It's somewhere in between.

What would a reasonable person who actually believes in The Rapture have to say about this latest failed prediction?  Of course, it is easy to blame this particular elderly preacher as a false prophet, but such a censure really begs a larger question:  Is there such a thing as a true prophet?  Even larger is the question of what prophecy actually is and why anyone would want to engage in it.

Why, when and where would anyone actually believe the words of a 'prophet'?  Especially these days, when skepticism (can you say birth certificate?) about worldly issues seems to be at an all-time high, who in their right mind would, could fail to doubt the word of a single man concerning the fate of all men?  The faithful?  Really?  Is this a question of faith versus reason?   Or, as the cynics would ask, is the opposite of faith mere folly?

Prophets and the predictions they make faith--even in the profane--seem like folly at best.  For example, we are all frequent critics of the 'Weatherman'.  We happily heap scorn on his predictions of rain, sun and even ice.  To put it bluntly, our faith in Meteorology is anything but steadfast, and for good reason.  A 60% chance of rain just means that 3 out of 5 weathermen agree.  Setting aside our universal absence of faith in the predictions of such mundane matters as rain or shine, the question remains:  Does faith require the suspension of reason?  Is there a reasonable way to believe in any prophecy, let alone an apocalyptical one? This is an old debate, but as recent events demonstrate, apparently it is still relevant.

Some people look at their tea leaves (or coffee grounds) in the morning and read into them the end-of-times.  Some people read into them just another day at the spaceship/office we call Earth.  The real question is whether we see the world as worse-than-it's-ever-been and consequently on the verge of an apocalyptical collapse or whether we see it as the same old world, simply spinning round, the same-as-it-ever-was and on the verge of nothing more dramatic than another day and another night.

On the one hand, the evidence for the end-is-near folks seems to be pretty considerable, what with all the earthquakes and volcanoes and the general malaise generated by the recent economic maelstrom.  It does seem rather calamitous.  On the other hand, it might be argued that this sort of stuff seems to always and naturally occur.  And of course it does.

Prophetic enterprises are built on and embellished by dramatic scenes of death and disaster, especially on a massive scale.  Human drama is entertaining, and massive human drama is even more engaging to the eye and ear.  Consequentially, it is only natural that many people would find the possibility that the end of the world could come on a specific day in our lifetimes to be at least entertaining, if not entirely credible.

Given that entertainment always seems to trump credibility, especially in this case, is it possible for someone to have actually seen this situation for what it was--a publicity stunt at worst and a public embarrassment at best--and yet still believe in the underlying concept of The Rapture?  Or, does believing in the latter preclude the possibility that one could see a charlatan proclaiming the same for what he is?

I think this is likely to be the case, because for the faithful, seeing the emperor naked would require an ironic acknowledgment from them.  A false prophet is allegedly one of the very signs that signal the beginning of the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.  Don't hold your breath:  acknowledgements of fundamental ironies are not forthcoming from the faithful.

Personally, I don't see any room for reason in the circus tent known as religion, and I'm not just taking pot-shots at Christianity, tempting though this situation has made that possibility.  The whole religious arena--especially now that it is (like porn) the Internet--allows for the performance of the clowns to be taken for that of the Ringmaster Himself.  The result is to be expected: folly.  Now, many good hearted and reasonable people come to the big tent to sweat away their impurities--those inevitable sins--while pretending that so doing is in itself the proof of a good and faithful life.

I believe that there is a third way here. I don't feel compelled to make a false choice between 'doom-and-gloom' and 'whatever'. I see a middle way, one which is actually more commonly adopted than the preternatural fear at the fringes of an admittedly evangelical fundamentalist Christianity or the existential loathing at the edges of supposedly dispassionate reason.  This middle way is not new or undiscovered.  The path is well-worn, and it requires neither Christian anxiety or atheistic apathy to follow it.

It is this from this vantage point--between the two extremes--that we may see and appreciate the world differently than the radicals at the edges.  From here, we can see the world as new each day, full of calamities and virtues both large and small.  From here, we may indeed realize that things--most things--are both good and bad, in some of the places and some of the time.  But not all things, not all places and certainly, not all of the time.

Most of us don't want to disbelieve, we just know better than to make predictions based on little or no evidence.  From painful experience, we know that prophesies both good and bad seldom come true and almost never pay off.  Predictions of doom as well as boom are rightly met with a worldly and weary skepticism.  We are not so weary, however, to think that all predictions are inherently false, just experienced enough to know that things are always changing.  Things won't be--can't be--the same as they always were. Yesterday isn't the same as today.

In fact, for some of us, today is actually better than yesterday.  The number of people for whom this is the case is certain to be small when compared, say, with the number of people alive (or who have lived) but I will argue that that number is both significant and growing.  I, for one, am still optimistic.

If anything is 'as it ever was', it is this.  The line that describes us--people, humans, souls--is an upward bending arc, always changing and potentially, without end.

So no, the world is not about to end.  And no, it's not the same as it ever was.  The world is now.  It is new.  And it's a great time to be here.

The Silver Bullet

These days, it seems, everyone is looking for the answer. Never mind the question. It is the answer we want. And lately, that answer seems to be a 'silver bullet.'

Yes, whether it is the economy or the war in Afghanistan or the Gulf oil spill, everyone is looking for a silver bullet.

The economy? The Washington Post said, "Pass the silver bullet."

Iraq? "Iraq Elections: No Silver Bullet" says The Century Foundation.

Iran? "US admits no silver bullet in US-led drive against Iran" says the AFP.

Afghanistan? "No silver bullet for Afghanistan" says the Guardian.

Gulf oil spill? "...dispersants are not a silver bullet." says BP.

Besides the obvious disagreement in syntax, I have a more basic question: Does anyone have any idea what they are talking about?

What exactly is a silver bullet? Why do journalists, speech and copy writers invoke it every time they don't have a simple, immediate solution to a very complicated, long-standing problem?

Well, the answer to the first of my rhetorical questions is no: most writers have no idea what they are talking about when they say that "there is no silver bullet."

While it is facile to conflate real-world bad things like a failing economy or a useless war with fictional bad things like vampires and werewolves, its simply a lazy way of summing up something so complicated and obviously bad that it can only be compared to a evil and bloodthirsty creature that comes in the night to kill people and steal their souls.

More frustrating than the over-use of this cliche is its mis-use. I have heard people say, "there is no silver bullet that will rebuild the economy." Well, of course there isn't. Bullets, even silver ones, are not the sort of thing that one uses to build anything, economies, houses or relationships.

Or,"there is no silver bullet that will cure cancer." Again, this is a not just another real misunderstanding of the metaphor but its another case in which it doesn't even come close to describing the intent. If bullets cured cancer, we'd all pack heat.

It sounds like a intelligent--dare I say literate--way of saying something akin to "there is no single solution to this very complicated problem/war/situation," but in fact, they are simply being the opposite of intelligent by parroting a false metaphor. Even the image of a silver bullet does nothing to combat economic problems, or ideological problems that are at the root of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does offer up an easy and easily misconstrued image of a solution.

As if a single shot could solve what a million words, images and rounds of real lead ammunition have so far failed to do: end it all.

Brother's Day

Now that Lynda is gone, it's easy to count Mother's Day out as one of those artificial 'Hallmark' holidays, especially because it's also one of those days when I always have to work at the restaurant.  Now, on this day I am quite naturally thinking of Lynda, but I am also thinking of my brothers.

I think of Lynda often.  I think of her when I see my hands, when I hear my sigh, when I look in the mirror. I talk to myself the way that she did, knowing, now, what that conversation is about.  My blue eyes seem to have faded just a shade of late, now more than ever resembling Lynda's soft grey-blue eyes.

What's missing, though, is the contact, the talk, the reassurance that it--whatever it happened to be at the moment--would be alright.  I think it's safe to say that we never grow too old to be reassured by our mothers, and if there is any one single thing that makes us regret their absence it would be that.

It's a complicated emotion.  I miss her taking care of me long after I needed taking care of, but I also miss taking care of her, long after that care was needed.  I try to substitute for this with my Hospice work, but it is to be expected that it is just--not the same.  My contact with Mr. B. has been limited of late, not just by my schedule, but also by his reluctance to interact.  Then again, the volunteer work was never intended to be anything like what I shared with Lynda.

In the years since she's been gone, sharing time with my brother Stephen has helped close the gap considerably.  Our (nearly) weekly lunches give us the time and opportunity to talk about life at the pace it develops, slowly, instead of in big gulps at rare moments.  I see in his hands, feel in his eyes, and hear in his sighs the same vision of Lynda as my own.

It is, of course, a variation on a highly personal theme. David is another important manifestation of  this phenomenon.  Though he is more distant physically, our almost daily interaction via the net has drawn us closer than we've been since we were boys.  I know that he--like Stephen and me--thinks of her a lot and that sees her regularly in his daily life.

So, while I mourn the absence of Lynda and hold fast to the hope that Billie will be here for another year, I have to come to terms with what this day might mean for me in the future.  It's not an artificial holiday unless we make it so.  In fact, since I need look no further than either of my brothers for my reassurance and that sense of continuity that I need, I guess I ought to start calling it Brother's Day. 

Big City Blues

Lest either reader think that my previous post is evidence that I am angry or depressed, you may be assured that I am merely exorcising some demon words from my hand written journal of late.  It's the sort of thing you have to put up with, as does the other Reader.  By way of explanation, sometimes, it seems to help when I transform the ink into pixels.  But like the rest of this endeavor, it is essentially a self-centered exercise, so my advice is to simply skip it and read on.

More immediate in my consciousness is my recent trip to Chicago.  This week, I went to Holland, Michigan to visit Billie and John.  My path led me through the Windy City once again.  I have to say I never tire of it.

Granted, I haven't really seen Chicago in 'full-on' winter, at least not for the months of biting and bitter cold.  That small fact aside,  I have to say that every time I go downtown, I am exhilarated by the experience.  The energy and intensity of the city is apparent even on a deserted Sunday afternoon, but on a 'regular' weekday afternoon, it reaches a level that I find powerful, exciting and almost addicting.

This is how I found myself thinking about what it would be like to live there once again, as I was riding the 'L' as it carves through the concrete and steel canyons.  While they resemble those of New York or San Francisco, these spaces are different.  They have a character and feeling all their own.  Where New York can be gritty and oppressive, and San Francisco can be narrow and confining, Chicago is open and liberating.  It is welcoming in a way that is uniquely midwestern and yet it is a genuine 'big' city.

My imagination runs riot as I ride.  How thrilling it would be to live somewhere where there is not one or two but many museums, each with it's own special show (or two) each year!  I think of all the restaurants there are to discover.  How many parks are to be explored, how many interesting people are to be uncovered?

It's not as if we live in some cultural and physical backwater here in Austin.  Well, so we would like to think.  Alas, in spite of our big-city dreams, this town is just that: a town.  Dallas and Houston, bless 'em, are no better.  They may have the large populations required to define them as a city, and even some of the accoutrements of the same--an orchestra, a ballet and a museum (or two)--but it's just not the same as a 'real' big city.

Someday, health and my Bride permitting, I resolve to live for a year in Chicago, or near enough (like Holland) that we could visit it regularly.  Now, whether or not I can take a true winter remains to be seen, but I think I could.  It would be nice to give it a go someday.

Grendel

Rage
if you will
You must know
why mouths are left agape.

She comes in silk and satin
You know
Blood red robes
That twist like a rope
Whipping up lust for
Erections until after.

Go
if you can
Don't wait for a sign.
You are
too close to the edge
to remain
but
still too far away to fall.

Run
if you must
Trapped in a pitiless gaze
Your legs will
freeze
Your lungs will
burst
Your brain will
bleed.

All around you
the hate will coil
You will reap that harvest
long laying fallow in the
field.

Weep
if you should
but not for the thunderstorm of your soul
that never came.
Did you think your story tragic?
Did you forget to drink your full measure of blood today?

Run
if you dare
Back to your lair bitch.
The smell of hate
can only hide your fear for so long.
Then
you must boil your own bones
for the oil to light
my lamp.
As I descend into darkness
the light of your rage will guide me
to you.

Turn
if you want
but it's too late.
I will suck you from the earth
draw you up from the deep
past my fears
and
spit you into the stars.

Long or Short?

Simple though the task may be, removing a nut requires making a critical set of choices even before the tool touches the steel.  Which tool?  The long or the short?

This question can and does apply to both the process and the tool required for it.  In terms of the process, the first decision is about how much time I want to take for the removal.  If time is of the essence, then I will choose the socket wrench, since this is a much faster way of removing a bolt than using an 'old fashioned' spanner wrench.  If space is the key factor, then even if I want to be quick about it, I am forced to use the spanner.

The question is, why would time ever be of the essence?  Why shouldn't I take my sweet time with every nut and bolt, using only the most basic--and less likely to fail--tools and methods?  Perhaps the automotive mechanic who is getting paid by the hour needs a socket wrench to improve his efficiency, but why should I, a mere South-Austin-driveway mechanic, need to be efficient with my time?

Philosophical considerations that take into account the value of my time along with my desire to enjoy this process--as opposed to knocking it out as quickly as possible--notwithstanding, I  have the sense that even though I don't have to, it is nice to use a socket wrench to speed along the removal of all those nuts and bolts.  In addition to enjoying the nice little precise sounds of the ratchet, I have the feeling that I am making good progress as the wrench moves from side to side and the nuts spin off effortlessly.

Contrast this with the slow-as-molasses feeling I get when easing a nut around a bolt head, one milimeter at a time, and it's easy to see why I would instinctively choose the short process over the long one.

Or is it?  Yesterday as I removed the nuts holding the alternator stand to the engine block, I had to use the spanner for two of the four nuts.  Though I would have preferred to use the socket for all four of these fasteners, in a liberating moment of compare and contrast, I came to appreciate the slowness of the spanner wrench.  

The feeling of 'breaking' the nut with the spanner is much more physical and immediate, requiring my palm to sense, perfectly, the amount of force needed to move the steel without hurting myself.  Then, when the nut begins to move, even though the action comes in much smaller increments than it would with the socket, the physical feeling of the wrench easing the steel around is much more sensitive--and therefore that much more satisfying--than the all-mechanical feel of the socket.

Of course, some situations call for the improved leverage of the socket, and some situations call for the delicate placement of the spanner, so it's more than just a time commitment.  Sometimes, one of them is the right tool for the job.

And, it's not as if the choice is between an 'old-fashioned' hand tool (the spanner) or a 'new-fangled' mechanical gizmo (the ratchet).  Both still seem like basic hand tools, especially when compared with, say, a modern compressed-air driven impact wrench.  

No, it's about time, and how much of it I want to spend on any one particular piece.  Even though it be unconscious and seemingly practical, most often the choice between the socket and the spanner is a still essentially a philosophical one.  How much time have you got?

Stuck

I'm stuck.

It's not a big problem, really. But it is enough to have got me stuck in what Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called a "gumption trap." This is a place where, for a reason often very, very small, an entire project grinds to a halt because the driving desire behind the project--the gumption--is lost.

A gumption trap starts with something simple that fails or doesn't work the way it is supposed to. In my case, it's a stuck nut. I know, I know, that sounds like a perfect description of yours truly.

In this case, the project that has ground to a gumption halt is the Green Ghia.  And the nut I'm talking about--the one that has me figuratively stuck because it is literally stuck--is a rather large steel one. To be precise, it is an 42mm nut, and it holds the brake assembly--drum, brakes and backing plate--to the rear driveaxle of the Ghia. There are two of these nuts, one on each side of the car.  They are--quite naturally, given the job that they do (holding the wheels on)--torqued down very, very tight.  I got one off, no problem.  But the other one is, well, stuck.

I don't know how many foot-pounds it takes to break this nut exactly, nor do I really care, but I do know it's one helluva lot. I know (now) that you are supposed to break these nuts while the car is not merely still assembled, but also while it is still resting on the ground. In other words, this should have been one of the first things I did, like six months ago.

This nut is stuck because the amount of force required to break it free is no more than two or three pounds less than the entire weight of the car.  Now that it's stripped down to the frame, I just can't bring enough force to bear. My puny little 140 pounds of dead weight is just not enough. Even the breaker bar that extends my reach by a foot and a half and doubles my leverage is insufficient to the task.

So, there you go.  I'm stuck. I've tried various solutions, but so far, nothing's worked. In fact, so many things haven't worked that I can say with some certainty: I am stuck. I look at it. I think about it. Nothing comes to mind. Yet.

Actually, being stuck isn't all bad. In fact, it may be the very reason why I've undertaken this project in the first place. In Zen, Pirsig used the idea of 'stuckness' as a pivotal point for his inquiry into the nature of Reality.  He observed that it's not until we are stuck--that is, in a critical situation without an obvious solution--that we become momentarily aware of Reality itself.

Reality appears to us only for that moment, however. As soon as we find our solution, we lose that direct contact with it, and find ourselves dealing instead with the duality that masquerades as the world.  We turn from the light and again see only the shadows.

Fear not, I'm in no danger of losing touch with Reality.  Though I am staring at the light, I'm still well and truly stuck on this damn nut.

The exasperating aspect of this situation is the fact that this is a double-edged sword (or wrench, if you will) that I'm holding here. On the one hand, as both Readers know, I love the metal and the grease and the whole taking-things-apart idea that the Ghia project embodies. In a simple world, it'd be easy to explain these impulses as simple boyish desires to have fun tinkering and getting dirty.  I don't deny it. To a large extent, that is actually the case.

On the other hand, if it were all too easy (if that nut were to just come right off), it'd be no fun either.  Ironically, it actually feels good to be stuck.  For a while, anyway.  It seems that I seek stuckness as a way of finding satisfaction in what I do.  It's an integral part of the process and the source of my motivation.  Escaping from the gumption trap is truly an exhilarating feeling.  But you can't get that feeling without getting stuck, first.

I know, to a casual observer driving down our street on a Sunday afternoon, it might look like I'm just standing over a rusted hulk of a car with a couple of buddies, drinking beer from a green bottle and doing nothing. There's some truth to that.

But that's only part of the story.

Inside that stereotypical South Austin driveway mechanic is a true philosophical type, pondering the infinite mysteries of a stuck bolt in much the same way Socrates considered the nature of Love during one of those infamous all night drinking parties he had with his buddies.

Ok, ok, so I'm no Socrates and this is no Symposium. But then, could he, would he, have figured out how to break this damn nut?

Two New Things

Never let it be said that I am unwilling to try new things. Why in just the past couple of days, I've tried not one but two new things.

1. Bubble Tea.

Hmmmm, this opens up so many crude and disgusting descriptive possibilities that I don't want to explore that it's hard to even think about extolling any part of this experience. If either Reader be inexperienced in the matters of this beverage, suffice it to say that my descriptions of the same are unlikely to tempt you into trying it. If you have already experienced it and liked it, well, you may go ahead and skip to the second half of this little rant.

Why it's called Bubble Tea I do not know--and clearly I haven't budgeted even a moment to a Google search prior to writing this--but I think it is related to the tapioca globs of snotty goo...erm, I mean 'pearls' that are dumped into the bottom of a cup of weak and sweet milk tea. Various flavors are available, in all sorts of combinations resembling a sno-cone stand, all of which had virtually the same appeal as 99% of the sno-cone flavors.

In other words, I could have had a papaya-banana-mint bubble tea. I'd rather have had the V-8. I had the plain milk tea. This, my friend explained, was my mistake. But, while he chose the papaya something-or-other at the end as he slurped out the dregs (mmm)he proclaimed it was not as good as he recalled. Oh well, my level of satisfaction will never even rise to that level. Nor will it for my second new thing of the week:

2. A minivan.

I was obliged to rent a car for a trip to Houston yesterday, and I selected a nice mid-sized car because I had two colleagues to transport as well as myself. When I arrived to pick it up, the young man asked me if I'd prefer a minivan. With a merely appropriate amount of scorn (that is, barely visible) I turned down this offer and soon found myself presented with a little red Chevy car that looked like a fake hot-rod. Not quite even as good looking as the PT Cruiser (which I will not deign to describe), it is called, I believe, an HHR.

I don't know because a minute after driving away from the rent car place with this thing, I had to return it. The interior was so dirty that I could not in good conscience allow my colleagues to ride in it. The fellow was most pleasant about it, and said he'd get me another car.

But, would I prefer the minivan?

Alas, I said yes.

It's sad, but the very moment that I set out in it, I felt embarrassed. There's really no other word for it. I have never driven a minivan for a reason. I have always felt that they are abominations, encouraging not only poor driving habits, but poor relational and nutritional habits as well.

Of course as I drove it through the Arby's drive-thru, I felt perfectly comfortable for a moment. And, to be fair, it was great on the road, and quite comfortable for the trip. The thing was a Dodge Grand Caravan, but I have to say, I didn't feel particularly grand in this oversized plastic and tin boat. Maddie noted that it was, perhaps, the faux marble accents that made it seem so, well, regal.

Don't allow any of this delicately offered faint praise to trick you into thinking I am going to go back to the well for either of these experiences in the near future.

Been there. Done that.

Good and Bad

As I walked on campus today, I chanced to pass a couple--a young man and an older woman--who were in earnest conversation.

"For every good person in the world," I heard the woman say, "There is a bad one."

Who knows how this fits into a context? I certainly do not. It was just a snippet of sound; a brief glimpse into other lives in a passing moment. What I heard, however, was enough to make me wonder.

Is that true? Are there an equal number of good and bad people in the world? No? Then, is it more or less? Can you even quantify something like that?

Of course not. We need venture no further than the question of who gets to decide about the definition of good and bad to completely derail this as some sort of logical inquiry.

But, the question remained in my mind as I walked along today. It was a beautiful day, full of sunshine, with warm fragrant spring air filling my senses. No need to worry about such things.

I'm home now and I've had a beer, and some time to think, but it doesn't look like I'm going to find my way on this. I want to be an optimist. I also want to be a realist. These two opposing goals have ever had me at odds with myself. It's been my personal dilemma--not unique, but personal, and therefore meaningful to me, and perhaps one or the other of my Dear Readers.

Still, in an instant, my first reckoning was quite telling, and, perhaps, just a bit too brutal.

Despite my good mood and the delightful day I thought the woman was being far too generous.

"She's wrong. 2:1 bad to good" I thought.

Then, I chastised myself. "No. Come on, it can't be that bad."

But, it isn't anything like, say, 2:1 good to bad. Can't be. Maybe the woman was right.

Even odds? Really?

The Good Cookie

With so many celebrity chefs on television these days, it seems that there are as many ways to measure the skill of an individual as there are channels on the tube itself. Infinite.

But to my mind, there is one supreme test of culinary skill. While it can be done quickly, it doesn't have to be done in exactly thirty minutes. While it can be eclectic, it doesn't have to be quirky or even inventive. And while style can count, it is taste and texture that really measures the skill of the preparer.

I'm talking about cookies.

To be sure, I am biased. According to Lynda, who rarely seemed to remember things as trivial as this, my first word was cookie. I have no reason to doubt her because I happen to really like cookies. In fact, they are my favorite sweet.

Not just favorite dessert, but favorite sweet. I'd much prefer a good cookie to a candy bar, for sure. A good cookie is better than a good cake or a pie. Actually, a good cookie is both a cake and a pie. And that's why it is so hard to make a good cookie. The baker has to really know their stuff to make a really good cookie.

An amateur baker can fake a cake, or a pan of brownies, but they can't fake a cookie. Even the 'slice-n-bake' stuff, while it allows the faker-baker to get a lot closer than 'store-bought' cookies, just cannot even approach the real thing.

The real thing, for me, is a scratch-made cookie. It is neither too sweet nor too salty. It is neither too thick nor too thin. It is neither too crunchy nor too soft. It must be all these things at once. A cake has to be airy. Bread has to have texture. Cookies have to have both.

Chefs, like doctors, have an informal hierarchy in their world. For example, while all doctors are M.D.s the surgeons hold themselves to be at the top of the doctor ladder. The anesthesiologists, on the other hand, while no less doctors, place themselves lower on that invisible ladder.

In the kitchen, it is the line cook that thinks he holds the top spot, while the pastry chef is supposed to operate somewhere below the line. Often they work off to the side or at completely different times than the rest of the cooks in the kitchen.

To the doctors in the operating room, or the chefs in the kitchen, this hierarchy may make some sort of sense, but to those of us on the outside--the real subjects of this exercise--the perception is really the reverse.

In the operating room, the last person the patient sees is the anesthesiologist, on whose skill and touch they must rely in order to survive the surgeon's ordeal without pain. The surgeon claims the credit but the patient is silently thankful for the ego-less skill of the 'other' doctor in the room.

In the dining room, often the last food the patron will eat is from the pastry chef's hand, and thus on whom the outcome of the meal is ultimately resting. How ironic is it then, when he Chef comes out to take credit even as the diners are scraping up crumbs--not of the entree, but the dessert?

Given the importance of the pastry chef, you'd think there would be a better measure of their skill than the humble cookie, but there is not. Not for me anyway. When it comes to the dessert course, I can tell more about the skill of the chef back there not by the flavor or texture of the marscapone-toasted-cashew-chili-pepper-rubbed ice cream, but by the flavor and texture of the cookie that is often simply and casually tossed into the glass or onto the plate as an mere afterthought.

The cookie is no mere afterthought. I think that it is the supreme measure of a chef's passion and skill. I think that Chefs ought to first master the art of the cookie before they are allowed anywhere near the line.

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

The Poet O looked past me
bright blue eyes focused
somewhere I had been

I looked back
Still frozen in time
no one, nothing moved.

Are you ready?

I nod assent
He turns to go
each step he takes opens a crack
in the ground between us

At first the cracks are small
but soon his pace picks up
I fall behind
now jumping jagged voids
a thousand miles deep
and ten feet wide

A last leap is short
my hands hold the edge
but I have no hope of holding on
slipping I feel his hand
catch me up
from the fall
I sit at his feet
stare into the dark gate.

Are you ready?

He doesn't wait for me
to answer
but follow
into the dark
out of the park
the street awaits.

We thread our way
through frozen traffic
cars are bumper to bumper
silent and dark
then
there is life inside
these cages
where rages
erupt
fangs hit the glass
the blood sprays
but stays inside.

Other cages are hot
melting the asphalt
with screams
that don't stop.

Don't stop!

Dark

Dark you come too fast
Linger a bit at least
Before shadows short are cast
Pause a bit before the feast

The creatures of the night will wait
The execution will be stayed
The trap will release it's bait
If but sunset be delayed

A Soft Shroud

February 20, 2008 started out as an ordinary day. I got up to go to work about 7, dressed and made my coffee. Before I headed out, I poked my head into Pierre's room to check on him. He was sleeping soundly. His heavy snore told me he'd been up late again--I'd heard him come back in the middle of the night--so I crept up close to see if he was alright. His posture was a bit odd and the sound of the snore wasn't the same, but details like this appear only in hindsight.

As both Readers know well, that day was the day Pierre died.

This year, as that day approaches now for the third time since his actual death day, the question of what to do about it becomes more acute even as I learn to cope with it. The pain of his death has begun to fade just a bit, falling back from the constantly excruciating to the merely constantly painful. It's a matter of degree, of course. There is one degree past which the human body ceases to function. Because of this one day, I will ever exist just a hair's breadth below that line.

Given that, I suppose I should not wonder why I am so moved to do something on this day, as opposed, say, to his birthday. Both days are worthy of marking, so in some ways, it's silly to imagine not marking either one of them.

Pierre's birthday was something we always celebrated, of course. We will continue to do that. Not in the same sense that one remembers a birthday with greetings and good wishes, but in the sense that every parent feels about their children's arrival dates, particularly their first-born.

There's no other experience like it. The births of subsequent children, while not necessarily a been-there-done-that sort of feeling, are simply different from what that first time was like. The moment when you realize that you've changed the world by bringing a new person into it is a factor in all births, I guess, but it is that first time that is really life changing.

Obviously, Pierre's death day was equally life changing, but for reasons that I would never have thought of at first. For example, one of the hardest questions I have to answer these days is, "How many children do you have?"

This question is hard to answer for a couple of reasons. It's such a simple, often innocently asked question, I can't fault people for asking it. But it does present me with a difficult dilemma.

My instinct is to answer as I always have since Maddie's birth in 1990, "Two."

While this answer isn't wrong, it also isn't truthful. I want to add, "But one of them died." Now that, as you can imagine, is a great conversation killer that I have learned to avoid. No one knows what to say after that, especially me. I hate to put people in that kind of an awkward situation so I often just dodge the question altogether. But why? Why shouldn't I be truthful? Why can't I simply say "Two" and just leave it at that?

Well, because it rarely gets left at that, and the subsequent conversation can be even harder to bear. The next question is something like "Oh? How old are they?"

If the previous question presented a difficult dilemma, this follow up is even harder to answer. Unknown to the questioner, the answer is difficult for me to even contemplate for a couple of reasons. Quite honestly, it means calculating how old Pierre would be today. Now, while I have no trouble remembering that Maddie is twenty, figuring out Pierre's potential age is an exercise in painful math. And as both readers know, for me, even simple equations are painful enough without some sort of a death factor.

The math will never get easier, I suppose, but talking about and dealing with the day itself certainly will. Thankfully, those awkward conversations with strangers become rarer with time and I find it easier to cope with when they do occur.

While it has been over a thousand days since Pierre's death day, we have only had just three chances to observe and cope with that anniversary. Time will not erase the memory of what happened that terrible day, but it has begun to cover the date itself with a soothing veil of grace, a soft shroud whose layers are spun and woven from our loving memories.

The Warm Bubble

Last night I had new experience as a hospice volunteer. I participated in what they call an "11th Hour" vigil at a dying man's bedside.

When I went through the training over a year ago, they talked a bit about this service that Hospice Austin provides, and told us that we might expect to be asked to participate in one if we elected to. Since I have signed on for the whole deal, as it were, I decided that this would be one more way that I could contribute through this wonderful organization. I checked the box saying I was willing and interested in participating in 11th Hour vigils should the opportunity arise, but I really didn't give it another thought until yesterday evening about 5 o'clock.

That's when I got the call from the Gayle, the Volunteer Coordinator asking me if I'd like to join a vigil at the home of a man (Mr. C.) and his wife in my neighborhood that evening. I said yes, with the condition that I could not arrive till nine pm, because it also happened that I had a work commitment that would last until at least eight. Gayle said yes, that was fine. I was free to go by there whenever I had the chance.

As I realized that I was committing myself to this new experience, my apprehension climbed rapidly. While I wanted to simply say yes, I will go and be there for and with them, I found myself searching for the limits of this endeavor. Should I call before I come? Whom should I talk to? What to say? How long will I have to be there?

Gayle, as she always is, was most reassuring. She had answers for most of my questions. It was the Mr. C.'s wife who had apparently asked for a volunteer to come sit with her and her husband. Of course I should call her before I go. Just be yourself. Stay as long as you like.

That seemed so vague. Questions, a long list of them, emerged in my mind. Should I stay through the night? Gayle said probably not, but I should be prepared to stay as long as I could and as seemed appropriate. Despite Gayle's reassuring tone, I was still uneasy at the prospect.

The questions continued to reel in my head. What would I do if the soon-to-be widow was hysterical? What if the man died while I was there? What if he didn't? What if she asked me to stay all night? These questions I did not ask, out of a sense of respect and figuring that I would not be able to answer them till I was there. So, I went.

I arrived just after nine o'clock and was greeted at the door by Mr. C's daughter. She led me into the living room where I met Mr. and Mrs. C. He was in a hospital bed in the center of the brightly lit and very warm room. Also in the room were the daughter's husband, her two teenage children and another of Mr. C.'s sons. He sat by Mr. C.'s bedside, holding his hand and occasionally dropping some pain medication into his father's open mouth. This close to death, Mr. C. was open-mouthed and breathing almost involuntarily. I greeted him in an awkwardly formal way, bowing slightly instead of offering my hand as I am accustomed to doing.

Everyone in the room seemed to be holding their breath as we listened to the dying man.

Well, I am not a very good breath-holder, so it was to be expected, I guess, that I would break the ice. After thanking them for welcoming me into their home at this intimate moment, I tried to find out where I was . I asked about Mr. C. and who the other folks in the room were. They went around and introduced themselves. We had some small talk about Austin and the weather. Then they started to interview me.

This is where I entered into new territory. Many of my original questions had been answered as soon as I entered the room, only to be supplanted by newer, even harder-to-answer questions. Mrs. C. was definitely not hysterical, but was very quiet and subdued. What was I thinking? Of course she not going to be wild with grief. Of course she is going to be weighed down by the impending death of her husband. It wasn't to be said, but I knew that she was also secretly praying for the end to come soon.

I could see--in the presence and the eyes of her family--that she had their love and support. I could tell that Mr. C.--even if he could no longer acknowledge it--was appreciative of his family and their loving devotion to him.

I could also see that while he was close to death, Mr. C. wasn't going to die in the next few minutes. So, I settled down, took a seat on the couch by his bedside and somehow became the center of attention for the next two hours.

Now, both readers know that being on stage is not something I necessarily shun. While I'm not the trained actor that my brother is, neither the absence of training nor ability doesn't seem to be able to stop me from being a ham. And boy did I manage to pork it up.

In that ever-clear hindsight I use so much, I see that while they had invited me there to talk, I took the bait far too easily. Selfishly, I ran away with a long-standing conversation that didn't even include me up until last night. Somehow, almost before I knew it, the conversation was about me.

In my defense, I can say that they didn't seem to mind too much. The conversation moved around the room, but it always seemed to come back to me. There were a few awkward silences, made more awkward by the fact that silence never really reigned supreme, what with Mr. C. rasping away in the center of the room.

But for the most part we talked. We even laughed a bit.

After a couple of hours, it seemed like time for the party to break up. The grandchildren said their last goodbyes, followed by the daughter and her husband and suddenly they were gone.

I was left with Mrs. C., her husband and son, sitting by his Dad's bedside, medicine dropper in hand. We looked at each other for a moment or two. I had no idea what to do next, so I waited. Finally, Mrs. C. thanked me for coming. I shook her hand and the son's, then gave Mr. C. one final salute before turning to leave.

Outside the cold February air reminded me that the warm bubble was temporary, like life itself. A few moments of talk, a couple of laughs and it's back out into the night. I felt a bit guilty about hogging the conversation, but as I walked to my car, looking up at the new moon and evening star, it occurred to me that I had done exactly what they had wanted. What I perceived as selfishness was actually a welcome escape for them. This, especially during a moment when conversation seems to have turned in on itself and there is nothing meaningful that hasn't already been said.

In some ways, the very meaningless-ness of my presence provided blissful a moment of temporary relief. Despite the double negative, it ended up as a positive feeling for me. If the experience was a cathartic one for the family, it was learning one for me.

Don't Blink

Much is made
to vanish before first light.
Screaming, it goes
into the hole
at a million miles an hour.

Fasten your seatbelt.

Don't blink
or
you'll never wake up.
Tears will wet
the way
for your imagination.

Oh, let mind fill in the gaps.
That's all there is
anyway.

Dead Poets

It comes
when no one
is watching.

Just that moment
in a torrent
of time.

Milliseconds
that
last forever.

Eternity in a bubble.

Come
fall back
with me.

The siren call
unlaces me.
I am a ribbon
in a hurricane.

Whipped by chance,
borne up by force.
Choices are such
cruel jokes.

Don't tempt
the razor
to cut your throat
but
sing so loudly
with it at your neck
that even
Dead Poets
will rise and turn
to see
at whose feet
the wreath is thrown.

Or,
be lost.

No one hears it
so
offer it
as though the blade
were held
to your son's
pulsing throat.

Be ready.
Do not disappoint.

Cry out.
Make the last note
clear.

Like a long
whistle
in the dark.

That Guy

I am not a frequent flyer so I considered it a privilege when, last month on a short flight from Oakland to San Jose California, I actually got to sit next to That Guy.

Well, it wasn't exactly next to him, but in a small confined space like a commuter airplane, aren't we all seatmates, so to speak? And, for That Guy, were were indeed, all in this together.

That Guy? Who is That Guy? Well,if you don't know, you may want stop reading now and wait for the next post, but I'm guessing that both of you, dear Readers, know just who I am talking about. No, not me, of course, even though I can't claim never to have been That Guy, but you have met him, and more than once. You've had to sit next to him on a plane, ride in his cab or sit in on one of his meetings.

He's the guy who is too loud, too outspoken, too insensitive to the needs of others and is far too in tune with his own feelings and opinions. Opinions, alas, are not like assholes. Assholes have way more than just one opinion.

That Guy doesn't need to know anything about a subject, or at least no more than enough to have already made up his mind well past the point of change. Change isn't even a realistic possibility for That Guy. That Guy's most popular subjects are, of course, sports, politics and religion, often in that order.

Despite having (at least) these three popular and seemingly easy subjects to choose from, That Guy usually has taken the time to become an expert on just one of them, though depending on how drunk he is, he may try to connect two or more of the three. Sports and religion are the easiest to link up, but it isn't hard to imagine what political dialog at the bar or Fox News might sound like sans the language of gridirons and concussive campaign web hits.

Still you have your purists, like That Guy on the plane. He was a Sports Guy, and a one loud Sports Guy at that. Worse, he was a One-Team-One-Sport Guy, which, as we all know, is the most obnoxious kind. Worse, even, than the Religion Guy preaching on the corner, who, while as rabid and gesticulatory, is at least thinking of something grander than himself, however fanciful that vision may be.

By contrast, That Sports Guy is focussed on just the one thing. His Team. With a capital T, naturally, because It is The Thing to be Worshipped. It is also The Thing to be Paid For. As in tickets, hats, jerseys and most of all stupid squanderous bets, entered into in the worst and most ambitious kind of ignorant hubris: simple pride and vanity transformed into the false promise of monetary reward. In a word, faith.

But in this faith there is no hope for salvation, only for the next Sunday, for the next Super Bowl (that someone else's team is always seems to be playing in) and for the next season. No one is really a winner in this game.

And it's not just That Guy who's got a losing record. In the end, even (especially?) the players lose their much larger bets, having in their youth unsuccessfully put up a pair of knees, say, for a couple hundred thousand dollars that was gone before they were middle-aged. Ah but who cares, right? Not That Guy.

So this Sports Guy was all That. And he knew it. He even said so.

"I'm That Guy," he said as we settled into our seats at the beginning of the flight. It was a point of pride. He then talked at the top of his lungs for the entire hour or so that we were on that plane. He recounted every drunken episode from every drunken Sunday in the past drunken year. He talked about his 'Old Man' and the 'Old Lady' like he was a dockworker from On the Waterfront. Well, Brando he was not. That Guy, he was.

Thinking perhaps that it was a bit too quiet as we waited to get off, or perhaps that we hadn't already heard, he spoke up again. "I'm That Guy," he said. "If you don't like it, there's nothing you can do about it."

Ah, true that. Well, almost nothing.

I hoped that the San Diego Chargers would kick the Forty-Niner's asses that evening. And lo and behold, they did.

Tools Make the Man

As both readers know well, I am no master craftsman. Although I own a fairly complete set of tools, it is safe to say that when it comes to using them, I'm fooling myself if I say that I am in any way skilled.

Take something simple, say, like a wrench. Now this is a tool I've used a lot, but sometimes it feels like it's the first time I've ever held one, let alone mastered its use. I routinely look carefully at a nut or bolt, walk back to my tool kit and pick up the wrong wrench. I walk back to my work, discover that it is either the next one up or the next one down, but not this one. Then, I walk back to the toolkit and attempt to chose the right one. Often it is that damn third time that is the charm.

Oh well, at least I'm getting my exercise.

Some tools, however, I use so infrequently that it really is like the first time when I pick it up again. Yesterday, I picked up such a tool, a little 3-inch angle grinder. I've used this little power toy maybe two or three times since I bought it back when the car in my driveway was a partially disassembled MGB.

I used it for the first time in three years just the other day, when I cut down the angle iron that I used to make a frame brace before we lifted the body off the chassis. Yesterday, though, I had some serious work ahead for this tool--cutting the rusty body pans out of the frame--yet my lack of experience was to be no hindrance to the task.

When I first bent to the task, I was hesitant and sloppy. I revved up the cutting wheel and locked in the 'on' position, but when I touched it to the welds, I let it skip and bounce a bit. The result was a jagged line that actually missed the second weld.

Sparks were flying everywhere and I had to stop and wait cautiously for the smoke in the frame tunnel to fade away. A fire inside the frame would have been particularly hard to put out, to say nothing of the damage that it would do.

So, when the smoke cleared, I went back to work, this time resolved to use the tool with a bit more confidence. I began really cutting into the rusty bumpy steel intersection between the pan and the frame. It felt less like steel and more like bread. Instead of a sawing motion that I would use for bread or meat, I began to drawn the spinning blade back in a straight line as I applied downward pressure to the steel. I began to feel the material as something less than steel, more 'cuttable'. Soon a neat line appeared behind the blade and I was making good progress.

Better than that, I was actually learning to use this tool. It felt great.

It wasn't to last too long, however. Depending on how you look at it, the fact that the person who welded in the pans the last time (it was NOT a stock installation) was so unskilled or lazy (or both) with the welder, that half the pan was not even welded in. After I cut through the first half, the pan just peeled back and off the frame. In less than an hour, I had the left floor pan off the car.

The right half will be much easier, of course, because now I have acquired just enough skill with the cutting tool to make it barely so. I will be fooling myself if I allow myself to believe that the skill is anything more than rudimentary. After all, I won't be cutting out floor pans on a daily basis, so whatever skill I manage to develop next weekend will surely be lost before the next task comes along.

In spite of this sober approach to my tools and my skill at using them, I am never so fully engaged, so deeply happy as when I have a tool in my hand and I'm learning how to use it. I think this is a deep, primordial urge, something so basic that it compels me despite my lack of skill and experience. Holding and learning how to use a tool--teaching myself as I go--makes me more than a shade-tree mechanic. It makes me human.

Don't Make That

These days, it seems fashionable to be 'anti-art'.

It seems that no matter what art it is or where it is placed, somehow, someone will be against it. But what does that mean, to be 'anti-art'? Is this a new phenomenon, or is it something ancient, built-in, so to speak, to society itself?

I tend toward the latter explanation because while it is sometimes fashionable to be iconoclastic, it has always been safe to be anti-art. The most common example of this is trite.

"That's not art. My five-year old could have done better than that!"

While uttered often in our era, I suspect that down through time, there has always been some observer off to the side muttering that very sentiment, even stretching back to the Neanderthals. Critics, even cavemen, have ever been so cruel. Another, less articulated but still prevalent attitude is more direct.

"I don't care what you call it. Stop. Don't make that."

This is most often directed to artists at the extreme edge, whose position there is to elicit that very response, but it is what is really at the core of most objections to art. If being anti-art is somehow seen as being pro-order (or anti-anarchy to double down on the negative) then it is a rather common feeling, I suspect.

Many people feel--and, perhaps, have always felt--that art and artists have simply run away with (from?) the rules of society. There is a prevalent feeling that for most people, most art is no better than graffiti, and certainly is no less harmful to society. Art, like graffiti, is a sign of decay. Art is anarchy that threatens the order of society and some people think that they are defending not simply their opinion, but their very way of life.

Sometimes it's tempting to think this way. It'd be much easier to reject art than think about it. But common sense and some reasonable humility are in order. When we see ourselves as the last bastion of civilization, it's a sure sign we are overreaching.

California Wine Country: Sonoma & Napa

I took my first trip to California wine country last week.

Yes, truth be told, the secret is out: though I have sold many a bottle of wine from Sonoma and Napa, I have never been to see where they come from. While it might seem like a trivial thing--after all, I haven't been to most wine producing regions of the world, let alone the many in California alone, or even Texas for that matter--in fact it was a way of providing some background, a context, if you will, for the wines that I sell every weekend.

Seeing the sky, smelling the earth and experiencing the terrain where the grapes are grown is as important as tasting the wine they are made from.

That much I was prepared for, but only in the way of knowing that was how I wanted to experience it first; raw and unprepared except for a few appointments at wineries whose products I know and whose wine makers I have come to respect by virtue if that product. Some of the wine makers I had already met, like Robert from Deerfield, Paul from Red Car, Gove from Neal and John from Caldwell.

We went to see five wineries in Sonoma and Napa in two days. Our first winery was in a rainy, mossy, and foggy Sonoma, at Deerfield. Here we were met by Robert Rex and his wife P.J. Their home was full of wonderful smells, most cozy and welcoming, as were they. P.J. claimed that she was cooking stock and pea soup because Robert had left the freezer open when he'd gone for some ice late the night before. If it was just a ruse, it was a wonderful one, because it made us feel right at home.

Robert and P.J. were also most interesting and easy to talk to. We drank some of their wines and ate some delightful cheeses--an Argentinian 'parmesan' and a French bleu--with some little bits of toast and garlic oil in a little bowl. P.J. served us demitasse cups full of the fresh pea soup she was making along with a little truffle oil on top. it was bright green and fresh, and I could really taste the peas.

We talked around their table for about two hours. I learned a lot about Robert and P.J., their business and their passion for wine. The latter we already knew about, but finding two very likable and open people was a highlight of our trip.

Next, we drove through the rain to Dutton, where we got more of the classic 'tourist style' of tasting. We went to the tasting room, where we met Ruben, the General Manager. He tasted us on a couple of wines and gave us a nice, if rather perfunctory tour of the winery and warehouse where they store all the barrels. We bought a bottle of the syrah.

We ended the day with a trip to Red Car, which is actually winery but there isn't much to see. They were having an open house to celebrate the opening of their new tasting room. We were among the first people to arrive, mostly because we didn't want to go to our hotel till we had had a chance to say hello to Paul, who had come to our house a couple of years ago.

That night, we stayed in a Hyatt in Santa Rosa and ate dinner in a restaurant called Syrah. It was very good, and affordable only because we split an appetizer and an entree with no dessert. They had a wine list that looked more like a book; it must have listed 300 wines. I think the waitress was a bit disappointed when Valery had a glass of chardonnay and I had a beer.

The next day we went to Napa and began the day at Neal, whose Cabernet is unquestionably my favorite Napa Cab, and whose winemaker Gove was out to Hudson's for a wine dinner a couple of years ago also. The Neal winery is one of those complete shops. They have their own vineyards, all the winemaking equipment, including de-stemmer, crusher, press, tanks, barrels, cave, bottling room, label printer and tasting room. They've only been making wine since 2001, but they have lots of money. Mark Neal, the owner, is a grape grower.

That's something I learned, about all the different roles that people play in a wine producing place like Sonoma/Napa. You have your farmers, grape producers, and your brokers, who sell grapes to wineries. You have the wineries, which can be in a beautiful purpose-made building with a cave (like Neal) or just a warehouse (like Red Car) and the winemakers, who are mostly UC Davis grads, but there are still a few autodidacts out there, like Gove at Neal. You have grape brokers who are also winery owners (but not wine makers) like our fifth and final stop on our mini-tour.

We met John Caldwell outside his 5,000 square foot cave drilled into the volcanic ash of a hillside. Inside is a state-of-the-art winery, with all the trappings of the big-time, including a special tasting room that is actually a dome carved out of the rock inside the cave. Caldwell is bit of a curmudgeon, but only because he's been in the business long enough not to be impressed by money or power, only by passion and an earnest desire to learn about his wine, which he was happy to talk about for about two hours.

If anything sums up our experience, it was the feeling that if one were to live in Sonoma or Napa, one's life would almost necessarily revolve around wine. So pervasive is the industry that when I went to get a hot-dog at a roadside stand in St. Helena, they had a wine list. I wouldn't be surprised if they also had a sommelier.

While I learned a lot from this trip, mostly what I learned is how little I really know. It was wonderful to put a few wines in context, but I doubt I'll ever even learn a fraction of what there is to know about wine, wineries and wine makers. So, while what I know may not qualify me to be a sommelier at a Napa Valley hot dog stand, it'll have to do for Hudson's. At least I'm learning!

Science and Superstition

I won the football pool this week. I won $100.

Now, before both Readers zip to the bottom of this post to add congratulatory comments, consider that this is the 12th week of the NFL season, and that I have bet $10 for 10 of those twelve weeks. Even I can do this math. Hurray! I broke even!

Actually it's not so good as that. Consider, if you will, that I bet on every single week of the NFL season last year--that's sixteen games--and won, well, not even once. Again, this math is not beyond my reach. I am, for the two seasons that I can recall for the purpose of this essay, down about $160.

Now I know it's really not fair to look at betting from a historical viewpoint, as this is most likely to prove the foolishness of the endeavor, but it is fair to say that I am under no illusions about the profitability. I know I am going to lose more than I win. Still I enjoy playing, for reasons that I have explored in another post, and this essay is headed in another direction.

Specifically, I have begun to wonder about what makes for a reasonable strategy when it comes to making my pool picks on any given week. I mean, is it knowledge that drives the decision-making process?

Or, is it luck? Common sense tells me that it is some combination of the two, especially because we all--football fans and non-fans alike--know that any given team can beat any other given team on any given Sunday (or Monday or sometimes Thursdays or Saturdays). Even the best teams lose one game per season.

And this underscores my point. Which, if I were to have made it by now would be this: it isn't so much what we know about something that informs us about future possibilities--like the outcome of any given NFL game--but it's what we don't know. Or rather, it is what we don't bring to the decision-making process that makes the difference between whether we pick right or wrong; whether we win or lose.

In this case, I think it's a case of what you know that hurts you.

Consider a particular case. N___. She's won the football pool twice this year. In terms of just this year--recall that we don't do the historical thing--she's actually ahead for the year! She's making money!

What does she know that we don't? What's her method?

Is she a football fanatic? A fan, perhaps, but no fanatic. In fact she doesn't even watch football except when she's at work and it happens to be what we have on. This is not to say that she doesn't know anything about football. She's actually knowledgeable about the game, the rules and even knows many of the players names. She knows how to watch the game on television and can tell good play from poor, good players from bad.

She ain't dumb, that's for sure.

But she doesn't know anything that we--read male football fans--don't know. She doesn't read the stats--except to look at the standings from week to week when making picks, which almost everybody does--and she doesn't look at or listen to any kind of post-game analysis or anything as detailed and particular as, say, injury reports. Not even a few minutes of SportsCenter before bed. Glee, perhaps.

So, it's fair to say that N___ isn't relying on knowledge for her picks. But of course, she would tell you that if you asked. In fact, I have asked, and she told me. She is quite candid about her method, which, it is safe to say, she will share with anyone. Here is the N___ method of choosing picks:

First, she looks at each match-up. Sometimes, she'll know from personal experience (she plays every week) which teams are doing better than others. Sometimes she'll check the standings sheet that Bobby (the HOB Football Pool Commissioner) prints off the net when he makes each week's sheet. But if N___ doesn't know--and this, by her own account, is often--which team is more likely to win, she has a method for breaking the tie, the N___ method, so to speak, and it has nothing to do with football.

She picks the team that is from the city she would rather live in.

Now, you might argue that this makes it easy for her to eschew choosing the hapless Buffalo Bills or the hopeless Dallas Cowboys, but then you'd have to explain why she occasionally chooses New England or Green Bay and why she doesn't always pick Tampa Bay (ok maybe not) or Miami.

Hey, I'm not saying that I endorse the N___ method for choosing which team is more likely to win on any given Sunday, but I am saying that at least N___ cannot be accused of over-thinking her choices.

This leads me to my final point. Over-thinking, I think, is the sure-fire way to lose. I have no better evidence to offer in this argument than the circular logic of this very statement or my own dismal 0-16 showing last year. By the way, I think N___ won at least once,if not twice last year.

I think that in order to really understand the complexities of decision-making, even those seemingly simple or mundane choices, we have to ignore the trees and look at the forest.

As Malcolm Gladwell observed in his book Blink, the powers of human observation and the synthesis of information is a much faster and less conscious process than we realize or even like to admit. Yet we trust that 'gut feeling' to get us through many a difficult decision, not just the ones that involve wagers of a monetary nature. We make far more choices based on our 'instincts' and 'luck' than our 'skill' or 'knowledge'. I put both in quotes to accentuate the irony; clearly neither instinct nor knowledge is 'it'.

My father Bill used to say--after he'd beaten one of us children at a game in a particularly easy or befuddling way--"It was just Science and Skill versus Ignorance and Superstition".

I certainly didn't use the N___ method when choosing teams this week, but I'll admit, it was Ignorance and Superstition rather than Science and Skill that yielded the winning combination for me this week.

A New Chapter

In the six weeks after Mr. N died, I have to confess that at first I was relieved, not just for the cessation of his suffering, but for my own 'freedom' to go through a week without seeing him.

But if I was busy enough to need the time, I was not so busy that I didn't notice the void his passing had left. It's not a void of the painful type, which I know all too well, but rather the absence of the calming influence that this mission, if you will, has effected in my life. It's selfish, really. In those moments being with and dealing with others I am lifted out and away from my own self perceived miseries and find that I have, in fact, very few of of those miseries indeed.

This is not to say that my life seems so much better when compared to the dying, because if I can't say that I'm not trying hard enough for sure. Instead, it is the feeling of being outside myself, engaged with someone I don't know in a relationship that is meaningful to us both that I seek.

Yesterday began a new chapter in that story.

I met 'Buddy' B at his home in South Austin yesterday morning. He is 90 years old and rail-thin like me. He has bright blue red-rimmed eyes and a ready smile. He is very frail, of course, and a bit hard to follow in a conversation, but nowhere near the garble that I used to share with Mr. N.

At first, we talked about where I lived, worked and why I'd come. Then, I asked what he'd done for a living. He worked in the Piggly-Wiggly (long defunct in Austin but thriving elsewhere in the south) here in Austin for many years. He went to Austin High, which means that we share something already, but I am not sure if or how much of this he'll remember in our subsequent conversations. He was very pleasant to talk to and even a little funny. When I asked what he'd done in the grocery business, he replied "Not much!" He likes football and follows the 'Horns but said that he has to watch whatever is on the TV, which he noted with some dissatisfaction was "on all the time." I don't doubt him--while I was there, it was on some sort of a music channel, just playing Christmas music in a loud and seemingly endless loop.

I will learn more about him in the coming weeks and months, I am sure. He's old and frail but not ill or actively dying yet, and it looks as if it may be many months or even years before that happens.

I'm looking forward to this new relationship, not least because of the place where Buddy is staying. It's a home in South Austin, just off Slaughter Lane near our house. The home is similar to the one I managed to find for Lynda at the end of her days, privately owned and operated under a license from the State. These folks are young and friendly and I have to say that when I walked in, it smelled good! Not just ok, but actually good. They were preparing lunch for the residents--five or six in all--right in the open kitchen area behind the living area.

Buddy sat on the couch next to a man who didn't talk or even acknowledge me, but as I pulled up a chair next to the couch, the two ladies in wheelchairs at the kitchen table couldn't help but hear us talking and watched us the whole time. At one point, I turned to acknowledge them and as I left, I got to thinking about how this was going to be a much more interesting and pleasant experience than the anguishing and solitary visits I had for Mr. N for so many months. At Buddy's home, they are actually caring for the residents, with good food, a caring attitude and lots of smiles, which they shared with me. Of course the residents are old, but here they didn't seem so resolutely unhappy. It is amazing how far a little kindness--and good food--will go.

I left with the smile they gave me on my face. I like 'Buddy' and being a part of this new 'family'.

The Way It Is

There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a particular niche - sports, weather, cooking, religion - and an infinite variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, "That's the way it is."

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."

So what Koppel? You say it like it's a bad thing.

I know the 'problem' as it exists for 'traditional' journalists. The problem I have is that you make it sound as if journalists have been around for as long, say, as priests, or even athletes or, heaven and/or glory help us, politicians.

Though I might wish otherwise, I think that what we have come to know in the last half of the 20th century in the U.S. as 'real' journalism--particularly print journalism--will be marginalized for quite some time, perhaps the first half of the 21st century. This is not to say that journalism has no value, or that it is irrelevant, or that it will be eventually erased.

What will be erased is the sense of altruistic entitlement that conventional journalists--not unlike the politicians that they 'cover'--feel they have inherited from their experience in the previous century. The boys from the old school think that writing about the world, covering a beat if you will, is best left to trained professionals who learned how to write 'back in the day'.

I come bearing news, sire. The world don't owe you no dime. It seems to me that what has really changed is one word in your conclusion. Frankly, I much prefer the 'infinite' variety we have now to the oh-so-very-finite and Neopolitan (three basic flavors) world of the 1960's and 1970's. I've had both, and I like the way things are now better, thank you very much.

Of course we trusted Uncle Walter (and you too, Uncle Ted), but that was because we had no choice. As children we looked up to you, literally, from the living-room floor. But we 'boomers' (your kids) are all grown up now. Or at least we think we are, though it's clear that we're still babies in the digital age.

Infants though we are, at least we have learned that we can absorb information from far more sources and at a far faster rate than we ever thought before. And even that rate of change is accelerating. Ok, so that's not really news. There were folks who doubted the ability of humans to drive automobiles faster than 60 miles per hour. There are still folks who doubt that men have walked on the Moon.

Oh well. In fact, we are capable--we must be capable, really, for we have no choice (again/always)--of dealing with this flood of information from more than three 'trusted' sources. We must--we are--learning to evaluate more information critically even as it comes at us faster. Watch twelve year-olds play "Black Ops".

Critical decisions come faster under many circumstances these days, and I think, are in many ways more reliable than the supposedly well-thought-out decisions that do not take into account the rate of modern information flow. Read 'Blink'.

Saying 'That's the way it is' is more than quoting Uncle W, it's what we call a cop-out, Ted. You are unfairly using his words, for that's not how it is, at least not any more.

And I really like it the way it is.

Two Books

Two new books--both purporting to be autobiographies--came out in print last week, both of which interested me enough to purchase. But, when it came down to a choice between one or the other, even though neither author will receive a penny of the proceeds, I picked the one who work I knew I could trust to be entertaining, if not entirely accurate.

No, I did not buy a copy of Decision Points, even though I am likely to at some point for much the same reason. Instead, I chose to buy a copy (albeit electronic) of Samuel Clemens' autobiography, otherwise known as the Autobiography of Mark Twain.

Since I haven't read either volume it would of course be a bit premature for comments on the works, but even before I open either one, there are some significant differences in the two works that swayed my decision.

First of all, even though he didn't actually write this work, Clemens did at least dictate it. This may seem like a trivial difference, especially these days when other equally famous but less literary types (no names here) are likely to have someone 'ghostwrite' the work for them, but for Twain the choice to dictate was forced upon him by time obviously grown short.

The introduction to his work, which I have already skimmed, makes prominent note of the fact that Twain not only tried and failed to write his autobiography on several dozen occasions after the age of forty, he had almost abandoned the idea till late in his life. Closer to death, however, he knew it was something he had to do, even if it meant stepping outside his boundary as a writer and examining himself instead as a famous and not entirely righteous character.

The other reason I bought Twain's book first is because it is anything but new. In fact, it is a hundred years old, and this by design. Claiming quite rightly that he would be unable to write an accurate and unvarnished account of his life and relate his opinions of his contemporaries without fear of damaging or embarrassing those people, he insisted that the work remain unpublished for one hundred years after his death.

This has been, I think, a troubling issue for every would-be autobiographer (not just the famous--me included), but none has ever taken it seriously enough to actually do something about it. Only Twain, with his supreme self-confidence and even, dare I say it, arrogance about his own opinions would have had the sense to know it wouldn't really be a good book--or a best seller--for at least a century. In fact, like many other famous and now dead authors, his wishes were largely ignored, but the incompetence of those writers who chose to ignore his wishes made their works instantly obsolete, thankfully for those Twain fans lucky to be alive in 2010.

Of course, now I am judging the book in advance of actually reading it, but I wanted to make note of the fact that when it came to a choice of how to spend my $9.99 this week, I chose to put it in the pocket of a long-dead but still admired literary hero.

Next week I shall likely succumb to the curiosity that is contemporary 'history' (having read the biographies--auto or not--of all the presidents since Kennedy), but this week I'll be gaining energy and insight for my own work from the greatest of old masters with a real sense of history.

If I was a Tiger

If I was a
Tiger

Oh sure
I'd terrorize
the villagers
but not the way
you might think.

If I was a
Tiger
I'd eat the
Important Ones first
The fat ones, rich
with crunchy bones
that scare
the skinny ones
when they pop.

If I was a
Tiger
Oh, I'd eat them all.
One by one
starting with the
tastiest
richest
of them all.

If I was a
Tiger
I'd eat
dessert first.

If I was a
Snake

Yes I'd still
tempt the villagers
but not with no
ordinary Apple.

If I was a
Snake
I'd tempt the
Strong Ones first
Them whose I
lights up
in their palm
fat Gucchi sacks
that pop
when you fill them
with MITunes.

If I was a
Snake
I wouldn't leave
the weak
just tempt them
with Dollar Stores
cheap makeup and
swarovski crystals.

If I was a
Snake
I'd save the best for last
to pair with the laughter.

Rush

Push past
the edge of
night nowhere
on the horizon
is it
as dark as
the inside of
my eye.

If you look
into that
abyss
I may not
let you out.

Scream
if you like.
Monsters don't wait
for me
to call them out.

They run
when I seethe.
Such is the
anger
they cannot rest
or hide
from my eye.

Expectations

The greatest distance between any two points would have to be that between expectation and realization.

Though this a personal observation, rooted in my own inability to reconcile those two forces in my life, I feel that this disconnect underlies much of what frustrates people in general these days, whether it is politics, religion or simply familial relations that seems to be the cause.

In my own case, I know that my expectations are often unnecessarily high or out of line with what should be a reasonable outcome, yet I find that setting expectations outside of the realm of limitations is inevitable and a consequence of my particular personality. I attribute it to either unfounded optimism or simple hubris.

In the former case, I count those times when I think I can get a job done in a certain amount of time even though I know it's physically impossible. I am forever deciding to do things, setting aside too little time for too many steps, and then having to adjust my sense of accomplishment downward notch by notch until it finally gets done, a day late and not quite as well I'd hoped. The optimism in the back of my brain tells me that without it, I would just be assuming the worst, and even though I might get things done when and how I expected, the very idea of setting the bar low seems contradictory.

After all, why would I set out to do something that can't be done?

Now when it comes to simple hubris, many are the times when I have simply assumed I had either the wits or strength to pull something off when in truth I knew going in that I had neither. In this case, the wide gap between those expectations and the logical outcomes I knew to be coming are more of a head-in-the-sand sort of approach as opposed to a perfectly willful ignorance of reality, but the result is the same. Shoulda coulda woulda knew better, right?

My observation here is not just about my own inadequacies--both Readers know that would fill a volume or two--but to make the connection to what I see going on around me, particularly in the political realm. Having just gone through one of those endless 'election cycles' I feel particularly beat up and anxious to say something, not because my politics were not affirmed--are they ever?--but because the current appetite for strident and voluble rhetoric seems to have brought a huge load of horse shit to the communal table. The distance between expectations and realization is so great that we can't even see the two in the same field of vision. One or the other is all we see at any given moment.

Expectations dominate. Why for example, can't we simply just turn off the financial crisis? End the war? Plug the leak? What is taking so long? Why can't simply just go back to the 'good old days' when everybody got along? What happened? When did we start destroying our society?

Well, here's the big news, at least as I see it. We aren't destroying our society. Nobody has ever just 'got along'. Financial crises, wars and leaks take time to fix. What has changed, I think is the speed with which we adjust our expectations downwards to contrast with realization. Previously, it might have taken months, or even years to come to the realization that things weren't working out just the way we'd planned. No worry, though, as there was always time for a 'mid-course' correction. No need to steer the ship onto the rocks just to prove that they are there, right?

Just a generation ago, the President said, "Mistakes were made" even as he kept us off the shoals. A few years later, with goals set high for 'winning' a 'War on Terror' and 'finding' WMDs in Iraq or bin Laden in Afganistan, we have set out on a course of unreasonable expectations that have never been rolled back to match realizations. Some wars are un-winnable and some things are un-findable. The result of this gap has been dismal, to say the least, and not just to the left. The right has suffered from this disconnect as well.

It's like looking for the 'cure' to cancer. Is it really our expectation that we will eliminate cancer as we did smallpox? Do we really expect to avoid death altogether, or are we just conning ourselves so we can go to sleep at night?

Ah, easier said than done. While I think I'll be able keep my expectations about politics and religion in check, I am still convinced I can rebuild that rusty little green Karmann Ghia sitting in my driveway.

After all, without a little hubris, nothing would ever get done.

Engine Work

Rebuilding an automobile engine is a dirty, tedious and thankless task. I know because I did it. Twice.

The first time I did it, I did it because I wanted to. The second time I had no choice.

Choosing to rebuild an automobile engine by myself was a decision made in no small part due to outright hubris, but I can't rule out foolish ambition nor willful ignorance. This sad state of awareness was tempered only slightly by the musings of John Muir, who not only convinced me that I could do it before I did it, told me how to do it; guiding me through the process first bolt to last as though he were there in person.

Muir, of course, did not advocate rebuilding the same engine twice, but he was there for me the second time round with nary a note of recrimination.

His book, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, is considered the precursor to the whole "S&*! for Dummies" phenomenon that swept through the pre-internet publishing world a scant decade or so after Muir's hard-edited typewritten and photocopied manuscript was spiral bound and set upon the Whole Earth catalog for hippies like me.

Muir was prescient that way, knowing that humans needed technology but also realizing that we needed humans to tell us how to fix technology. A couple of years later I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where Robert Pirsig explored and expanded on similar themes, so I was primed to work on my car both from a cultural, physcial and intellectual background that led to this desire.

Well, if you ask me, any amount of reading, no matter how much, just isn't enough. Muir's book, fortunately, was less about reading and more about the doing, so when it came time to find this bolt or that nut or just how-in-the-hell-do-I-get-a-screwdriver-on-that?, Muir was my guide. Emphasis is on the word guide, for as much as I concentrated on his instructions, at some point I had to set aside the book and actually assemble things, and that's where it got a bit tricky.

Actually I did pretty well at the tear-down part, but only in terms of speed. My organizational skills were decidedly lacking. For one thing, I didn't label things with anything like the detail that was really required, so even though the result of a week's work looked like I had the damn thing apart and under control, only the former was true. I had the thing apart alright.

Even though it was better than some of the places where I have worked on my bits of metal, including the present spot, my workspace for this engine rebuild was not exactly ideal. I chose to spread the pieces out on several tables under the carport at the the house where we were living. So, even though it couldn't technically rain directly onto my work area, it was exposed to the elements to a degree that made work intermittent and unpredictable even when I did get out there.

One thing that I learned from the experience was about the practical aspects of engineering. When working on a bit of metal as complex as an automobile engine, the consequences of how something has been cast, machined or milled can be serious. The order in which the thing is assembled may not be the way it comes apart, and it certainly is not often the way it is repaired.

Not only did I manage to get the thing apart, I also managed to get it back together.

Though all the details are lost to me already, I know that there were more than a couple of mistakes made along the way. I am pretty sure it took at least two sets of bearings before I learned how to properly 'seat' them in the crankcase, and I know I went through a couple sets of not-so-very-cheap rings before I got them into place. The various seals were not as easy to put in as I'd hoped either, and as a result, there were more leaks from that metal assembly than I have fingers and toes. Thank goodness there is no water system in a VW engine, or that would have leaked good and proper as well.

Suffice it to say that by the time I had the thing back together, I had made every mistake in the book. Plus, I had enough that weren't in the book left over to write a book. That is, if I hadn't already dismissed them all from memory. Muir's warnings notwithstanding, if it took several tries before I broke it, I broke it. To my credit, I did manage to step back from the brink often enough that the various critical systems eventually stopped leaking, grinding and/or scraping long enough for me to declare it finished and put it back in the car.

That, however, was just the beginning.

From the sound of it, the first time I started the engine up might easily have been the last, but for some quick reflexes and plain dumb luck. Instead of bench testing the engine before I put it back in the car, I simply pushed myself hard to get it all back in, wired and hooked up before I settled in and turned the key. Big Mistake.

The sound that came out of the engine with the first three or four revolutions (thankfully it was no more than that) was horrendous, to say the very least. It sounded like I had imprisoned a demon with hammer inside, and it was banging desperately to get out.

I felt sick. After all that work, it just didn't seem possible. What had I done? More likely: What had I missed?

It turns out that what I had missed was a simple little metal washer, about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Somehow--and family 'lore' has it being the innocent act of a small child, but no names will be named--that washer made it's way into the bowels of the engine through an uncovered hole in the block. It had to have happened sometime after the block was back together, but it obviously hadn't made it's way to a critical place before I put the engine back in the car.

I had no idea that a piece of metal that small could sound so loud. The pounding coming from the interior of an engine made me think that the entire guts had just been destroyed. As I stepped out of the car and took a look, the realization hit me. Sadly, the only way to find out what it was would be to tear it all back down.

As I said, rebuilding an automobile engine is hard, thankless work, but never so much as during the time I was tearing my handiwork apart. Two weeks later, through the tears, blood and motor oil filling my eyes and covering my hands, I found the washer, bent double and resting on top of the cylinder head. In spite of all the horrific noise, other than a small semi-circular dent in that head, there was actually no damage to the engine.

The second time, I figured out how to bench test the engine before I put it back in the car, but it was of little comfort to me when it finally passed. By this time I was exhausted and frustrated, which is not the way you want to start off working on the body.

Next: Body work: The bigger hammer