“The land, still cold and wintery, was alive with creatures that trusted in the coming of spring.” –William Least Heat-Moon
A blog is the cultural equivalent of a yard sale.
Elon Musk turned a lot of people off by giving Nazi salutes, but the media never mentions this when reporting Tesla’s falling sales. “Elon Musk spent several chaotic months crudely slashing government programs,” reports The New Yorker.
During our Happy Birthday Phone Call, my Uncle mentioned that I was a Bicentennial Baby. “Yeah, I’m sorry our 250th is under such Circumstances.” “That’s okay, just stick around for 300.” “Uh … yeah, I’ll take some vitamins.”
“You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.” –William Least Heat-Moon
“I don’t trust pride, but when you realize that we are all one, you can be proud of being part of that gigantic entity that we all are.” –Bob Weir
I had a dream that my bicycle got stolen and I was annoyed about having to replace it because can you even buy an affordable awesome new bike with a front fork suspension and rim brakes anymore?
My wife is going for an evening walk.
She asked if I would like to join her.
The cat sitting on my lap looked up at her and meowed “no.”
The older son is going in my stead.
“A city of men is also a city of horses–balding horses, horses beautiful as Brooke Shields. Cars kill more people, but relieve us of the sight of beings whipped on our streets.” –Sparrow
Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch. Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress. I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collop of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid it on, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the guttural trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or my ear joined me.
Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s — believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get — that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and his curiosity, they make and remake him.
Excerpts from some brunch-time reading, penned by Cincinnatus Hibbard, via Metro Silicon Valley, transcribed by hand from the print edition:
“How often do you think about ICE?” I asked “Juan,” the gruff old ranch hand. He paused, reckoning, and replied, “Maybe 50 times a day.” That shocked me–was he that frightened? He had been stoical, like a rock, even when he had told me that he had not seen his wife or his children living in Mexico for 23 years. There were grandchildren now–grandchildren he had never held. His eyes were distant. Perhaps, looking inward, he was trying to see them now.
“Why don’t you go back to see them?” I asked, deeply moved. “I cannot re-cross the border,” he said. There is no work back home. My family, they need me here–working.”
We sat at a picnic table under a tree beside a field, where undocumented farmworkers volunteered after their work shifts, farming organic vegetables for the local food bank. Despite paying local and federal taxes, and despite their poverty, undocumented immigrants are inelegible for Calfresh foodstamps–as well as Medicaid medical insurance, disability insurance (though they work some of the most dangerous jobs) and Social Security retirement checks. They might be keeping those safety net programs solvent for us.
The winter crops were in. The workers were tending two types of onion, garlic, two kinds of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, jicama–and strawberries for the small children to pick. “Why do you work here, after working so hard in the vineyard all day?” I asked “Ernesto.”
“Because I know hunger,” he said. “I know what it is like …”
. . .
This is terror.
“Lupe” talked about a pain she had in her pelvis last summer. For months, the pain grew and grew intolerable, and still she told no one–she knew her friends would try to make her go to the emergency room–but the hospital wasn’t safe from ICE. What was this pain stabbing up like knives from her pelvis to her navel–“Was it cancer?” she wondered.
Finally, she admitted it–there was no hiding it; she would pause in her farm work as she breathed through the unbearable pain, swooning. Her friends and family were begging her to go, but she wouldn’t go–she would be taken by ICE. What would happen to her children then? Finally, she was taken in a faint for emergency surgery, by friends with H2-A papers.
This is terror.
. . .
“Sophia” fears for her teenage daughter, “Ana,” who was already given to panic-attacks. Like many Latino youth with undocumented friends and relatives, her social media algorithm is filled with shaky cam POV shots of raids and arrests at homes and school drop-off, or ICE contingents parading in full battle regalia down residential streets, guns pointed, or smuggled videos of immigrants deported to war zones (like South Sudan) or hell-on-earth prisons (like El Salvador’s CECOT prison.)
. . .
This shift to deportation work has caused slow-downs, stoppages, and/or unraveling of cases against “high level” child sexual predators, sex traffickers, smugglers, scammers, international criminals, embargo evaders and international terrorists. As the deportation arrests surge, the true bad guys are getting away.
I re-typed this stuff from the print edition because 1) I prefer reading print to begin with 2) my modest manual effort in transcribing the words means more to me and my soul than simply copying-and-pasting the same quickly-forgotten text around the Internet. I hope that in some small way, these words find meaning for you.
I heard on that ultra-trendy news site, NPR, that Social Media is On The Way Out in 2026. What comes next? Well, I kinda like blogs. And I’m not the only one. Joan Westenberg wrote a kick-ass piece here: The Case for Blogging in the Ruins about the long view of how sharing knowledge works and how social media kinda pissed all over things … I’m going to just drop some excerpts …
Before social media ate the internet … blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages.
When I write a blog post, I’m writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they’re interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who’s made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.
When I write for social media, I’m writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. … The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.
She explains the origins of Essays: provisional attempts to try out ideas.
Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.
I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they’ve moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. … It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.
The capacity for hot zingers like the symphonies to ringtones analogy are maybe something we can thank our social media experiences for.
She’s got some advice on what makes a good blog and how to get started, and how to address “the Discovery Problem” with the observation that blog entries get indexed and surfaced over time, where social media disappears. I have to admit, though: since Social Media came about, this humble blog has received about zero comments over the past decade. Kind of a bummer. But the quiet exploration over here in my own space beats The Monetize Everything Hate Machine.
Today was pretty intense at work. Debugging federated authentication with vendors? Not my favorite activity. I was hoping to knock off early and work on water rocket derby kits for the Cub Scouts but by the end of the day Cory Booker was breaking Strom Thurmond’s record in the Senate and that was good enough for me.
“My Beloved Monster” by Caleb Carr
I finished a book yesterday: My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr. At times, I thought, “This is a book about an old man living with his cat,” but it was really a good story about a man’s life and a cat’s life and how, if you care to pay attention to another soul, you can connect. Ambassador Carr spends a lot of beautiful words on a relationship with someone who does not communicate with words.
As I was finishing the book, I made the mistake of checking Mr Carr’s Wikipedia page, which gave a spoiler of the date of Masha’s death, which isn’t too important, really. The book was published a month before Mr Carr’s own passing. He was a good companion, sharing the joy of his journey with Masha. As he finished her story, he noted that she was “already traveling.” I thought of our beloved Maggie, whom we saw off together at the end of 2023.
When the veterinarian makes a house call . . .
Love your sentient companions.
2025-04-09 Wednesday
I just finished “The Life of Fredrick Douglass” by David Walker. It was a Thank You gift for supporting KPFA, but due to trouble with their app I received three copies. I’ll have to donate.
“The Life of Frederick Douglass” by David Walker
Slavery is a hard topic and not one I think I’d want to endure through a prose novel. (We read “Beloved” in high school.) A graphic novel is a nice approach. What was new for me was some of the history. The first people brought over in 1619 weren’t slaves for life. To my understanding, slavery has a long history in civilization as a temporary status. In 1640 three indentured servants ran away from their masters in Virginia. They were captured and the white men had their servitude extended some years while the black guy, John Punch, got his servitude extended to life. 1662 is when Virginia declared that children of slaves would also be slaves.
Frederick Douglass’s story is of a happy childhood with Grandma, then being turned over to cruelty at the age of five, then of learning to read, fighting The Man, and escaping and devoting his life and talents to Emancipation. In the middle of the book he has his freedom, a job, a house in Massachusetts, a wife and a child. In the words of the book, “I knew not then that my freedom was incomplete. If asked at the time, I would have been incapable of expressing the lingering notion that clawed at my soul: as long as one was enslaved, all were enslaved.”
It is not enough for things to be good for the individual, unless things are also good for people generally.
2024-04-14 Monday
I still need to do the taxes. Pretty soon I’ll be at a decent break point at work. While babysitting batch jobs, I catch up on online reading. Darrell Owens is sharing good stuff:
The reason why men with degrees are disproportionately voting to the left globally isn’t due to the content of the education, but primarily the campus experience where you engage with women on a professional, social and personal scale.
[ . . . ]
The main reason the gender war stuff only spanned two years for me was because I made adult friendships. When I was 19 years old, I first discovered the then-new pro-housing movement, and my local organization was founded by a trans woman and a non-binary person about 10 or 15 years my senior. I didn’t even know what a non-binary person was, and I didn’t know any trans people at 19 year old. But because of my exposure to these awesome people — who tolerated and corrected me when I occasionally said ignorant stuff — the right-wing YouTube videos of “Trans people gone wild” never convinced me the way it has millions of Americans.
My work with local political groups exposed me to men of all types: seniors, wealthy men, poor men, fathers in their 30s and 40s, depressed men, gay men, happy men. And of course a lot of women of all ages, too. My friendship with these people, especially men at different stages in life that had already gone through what I was dealing with, taught me that this nihilistic, dating nonsense, gender wars was just a phase. It wasn’t even explicit speeches but just clear observation. The married men were generally nice people. The middle class men made money in realistic ways and they kept telling me to stay in college. The depressed and poor men were open about their issues to me in a way that made me comfortable. And having female friends, especially older ones, made it so that I didn’t just see the opposite sex as just for dating.
. . . having male friends in their 40s casually remark when I was slacking around in my early 20s to go finish my education helped me tremendously. To be friends with older men with the lifestyles and families I wanted had a much greater impact than curated social media feeds of influencers.
“I mentally reprimanded my wife for disappearing to the candle aisle; it was impossible to keep track of two kids in this orgy of affordable consumerism.”
–Peter Stenson, “Bone Frag” The Sun Magazine, October 2024
2025-04-19 Saturday
The week has been difficult. It started with hard work, which really isn’t hard. On Wednesday I took the wife to a nice restaurant for her birthday. On Friday I watched the press conference with Senator Van Hollen. I can’t let Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of my heart. A father with a loving wife. A guy who works for his family. He’s anyone in America and he and others get snatched off the street by The Government and sent to a foreign Gulag.
I made the mistake of learning more about CECOT in El Salvador. There’s at least one awestruck influencer video on YouTube marveling at the Security Measures. Okay, sure. There’s also the understanding of 23.5 hours lock down, never going outside, bodies stacked 100 to a cell, zero contact with the outside world. And an admission that these inhumane conditions for “the worst of the worst” are applied to many innocent people because The Dictator gleefully brags that rounding up innocent people is just what you have to do to make the streets safe.
And the President of the United States, after “whoopsie” sending a guy here without due process and then digging in and insisting that Kilmar will just be deported again if he returns, and that he wants to treat US Citizens the same. The Constitution is Dead, in his eyes.
I debate whether CECOT is a concentration camp or a death camp. It is a one way trip off of this earth into a mass grave. They haven’t added the gas chambers and ovens yet. The conditions are more horrific than what I read from Alexander Solzhenitzyen and the fuck of it all is is that if you’re having to parse your national policies in comparison to the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, you’re already in deep shit.
I’m stressed out. I have friends who have pre-arranged their emigration strategy. The wife and I look at each other: we’ll stay and fight. I wish I was being hyperbolic and overreacting but it feels like the United States is Wile E Coyote having run over the cliff, pausing in mid-air, then daring to look down. It isn’t a Done Deal that we have lost our Democracy and I have some Faith that we’re going to Keep It Together but I am totally freaked out.
The photo of Senator Van Hollen and Mr Abrego Garcia was a relief. The man fled gang violence in El Salvador. A US Court found his fears to be credible and allowed him to stay. Then he’s dumped into the prison with all the evil gang members and all the officials involved are bending over themselves to deny any agency at all. The dots connected themselves for me to imagine that President Bukele felt embarrassed at the prospect of having to dig a body out of his mass grave to repatriate to America. A bad look. Fortunately, they had the good sense to keep the deportees separate and then send Mr Abrego Garcia to a less atrocious facility.
These are the standards of April, 2025. Which we would have found unconscionable in 2024. The Pendulum needs to swing. The current trajectory is hard towards a collective national tragedy.
Anyway. What I post to Social Media is Not The News. The World As We Experience It On the Ground is the reality we need to appreciate.
My America is the one where plastic dinosaurs frolic on public fountains.
You see, I picked up a very old 15″ MacBook Pro. Very Old like around a decade? I paid not more than $50. The battery officially “needs maintenance” but it is fine for web browsing or playing games while sitting on the sofa. Or it was, because Apple stopped supplying OS updates and then Google stopped supplying Chrome updates on the old MacOS and then Steam dropped support because it uses Chrome as an embedded browser. So, just slap Linux on there . . . but if we’re doing things in The Old Ways why not try FreeBSD?
FreeBSD was my first free Unix Operating System. I must have first used it in 1996? It is a great server OS, and made a fine desktop in the old days as well. Sometime in the aughts I transitioned to Ubuntu Linux, just because a more mainstream OS tends to have better support.
So, I busted out my old 4GB Cisco-branded USB key and tried it out. The crisp white fonts detailing the bootstrap felt comforting, probably from Old Days. The installer set up ZFS and added a user. From there I had to bust out a USB wifi dongle that had driver support. I worked my way through setting up nvidia drivers and X windows and KDE, and . . .
Once Plasma was running, it was easy enough to switch the display scaling to 150%. I was mostly home!
It was more effort just to get that far than I am used to with Linux. But, I enjoyed working my way through The Handbook like it was the late 90s all over again. That we watched an episode of “Babylon 5” while the system churned through a pile of Internet downloads really got that 90s vibe going. I couldn’t su. Then I recalled the wheel group, granted myself access, then installed sudo.
Alas, I got into trouble installing steam and google chrome because something was wrong with the Linux emulation required for both. And I had no clue how to get the internal wifi working. And the dongle was slow. Like 90s Internet. So, the next day, I busted out a 16GB Kingston USB device and brought kubuntu in. Quick work. ubuntu-drivers figured out how to activate the internal Broadcom wifi, though I had to manually sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470, but FreeBSD had given me the clue for that earlier:
So, you could say, the visit to FreeBSD had been worth the trip.
2025-02-07 Friday
Yesterday I set out to catch up on bills. First order of business was to wipe the old phone and put it in the return mailer to get some trade-in credit from Google. I then noticed that my personal workstation was lagging on keyboard input. I tried a reboot. It got stuck at boot and soon after, stuck at BIOS. Fearing the worst, I started removing components: video card, M.2 daughter card, RAM … not until I disconnected the 2TB SATA drive did the system show signs of health. That was my “mass storage” where I keep the Photographs and Video. I dropped by Best Buy and grabbed a 2TB M.2 card . . . because there are actually slots on the motherboard, then I began the process of pulling the backups down from rsync.net.
My troubleshooting was backwards, you might figure: why not disconnect the hard drives first? Well, in my work life, I encounter bum hard drives often enough, and normally what happens is the system boots, there’s a delay in mounting the failed device, and then boot completes with an error message. Not booting at all . . . I guess this is a difference, probably, between a server-class motherboard and the thing I have in my home workstation which has blinky lights on it to appeal to gamers.
Didn’t get through any bills. And I had a Letter of Recommendation to write — my first, which I apologetically delayed. This morning, I ran up to The Office for All Hands, which got postponed . . . doing Something New is always somewhat intimidating. I was tempted to ask an AI for guidance but I’m a Gruff Old Man from the previous century, so I googled up “letter of recommendation” and got a nice template to follow. Combining that with a little more research and a little bit of writing talent and a desire to Come Through for Someone I wrote up what I felt was a pretty decent Letter of Recommendation and I hope my grateful friend finds some success in their endeavor.
Yay me for personal growth. Yay friend if they get the position! (Or even if they don’t. Personal Growth all around.)
2025-02-21 Friday
This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world. Our oceans teem with the waste from generations of averted eyes. And I believe the two — local pathologies and attendant global pathologies — are not not connected.
The modern condition consists of a constant self-infantilization, of any number of “non-adulting” activities. The main being, of course, plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up. At least a morning cigarette habit in 1976 gave one time to look at the world in front of one’s eyes (and a gentle nicotine buzz). Other non-adulting activities include relinquishment of general attention, concentration, and critical thinking capabilities. The desire for deus ex machina style political intercession that belies the complexities of real-world systems. Easy answers, easy solutions to problems of unfathomable scale. Scientific retardation because it “feels” good. Deliverance — deliverance! — now, with as little effort as possible.
A moment of thought and I realized the challenge was easy, and heartening. This speech has been given before:
“Hillary Clinton understands that we must fix an economy in America that is rigged and that sends almost all new wealth and income to the top one percent. Hillary Clinton understands that if someone in America works 40 hours a week, that person should not be living in poverty.
She believes that we should raise the minimum wage to a living wage. And she wants to create millions of new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. – our roads, bridges, water systems and wastewater plants.
This election is about which candidate will nominate Supreme Court justices who are prepared to overturn the disastrous Citizens United decision which allows billionaires to buy elections and undermine our democracy; about who will appoint new justices on the Supreme Court who will defend a woman’s right to choose, the rights of the LGBT community, workers’ rights, the needs of minorities and immigrants, and the government’s ability to protect the environment.
This campaign is about moving the United States toward universal health care and reducing the number of people who are uninsured or under-insured. Hillary Clinton wants to see that all Americans have the right to choose a public option in their health care exchange, which will lower the cost of health care.
She also believes that anyone 55 years or older should be able to opt in to Medicare and she wants to see millions more Americans gain access to primary health care, dental care, mental health counseling and low-cost prescription drugs through a major expansion of community health centers throughout this country.
Hillary is committed to seeing thousands of young doctors, nurses, psychologists, dentists and other medical professionals practice in underserved areas as we follow through on President Obama’s idea of tripling funding for the National Health Service Corps.
In New Hampshire, in Vermont and across the country we have a major epidemic of opiate and heroin addiction. People are dying every day from overdoses. Hillary Clinton understands that if we are serious about addressing this crisis we need major changes in the way we deliver mental health treatment. That’s what expanding community health centers will do and that is what getting medical personnel into the areas we need them most will do.
Hillary Clinton also understands that millions of seniors, disabled vets and others are struggling with the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs. She and I are in agreement that Medicare must negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry and that we must expand the use of generic medicine.
Drug companies should not be making billions in profits while one in five Americans are unable to afford the medicine they need. The greed of the drug companies must end.
This election is about the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that currently exists, the worst it has been since 1928. Hillary Clinton knows that something is very wrong when the very rich become richer while many others are working longer hours for lower wages.
She knows that it is absurd that middle-class Americans are paying an effective tax rate higher than hedge fund millionaires, and that there are corporations in this country making billions in profit while they pay no federal income taxes in a given year because of loopholes their lobbyists created.
This election is about the thousands of young people I have met who have left college deeply in debt, the many others who cannot afford to go to college and the need for this country to have the best educated workforce in the world if we are to compete effectively in a highly competitive global economy.
Hillary Clinton believes that we must substantially lower student debt, and that we must make public colleges and universities tuition free for the middle class and working families of this country. This is a major initiative that will revolutionize higher education in this country and improve the lives of millions.
Think of what it will mean when every child in this country, regardless of the income of their family, knows that if they study hard and do well in school – yes, they will be able to get a college education and leave school without debt.
This election is about climate change, the greatest environmental crisis facing our planet, and the need to leave this world in a way that is healthy and habitable for our kids and future generations. Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that if we do not act boldly in the very near future there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels.
She understands that we must work with countries around the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy – and that when we do that we can create a whole lot of good paying jobs.
This election is about the leadership we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform and repair a broken criminal justice system. It’s about making sure that young people in this country are in good schools or at good jobs, not in jail cells. Secretary Clinton understands that we don’t need to have more people in jail than any other country on earth, at an expense of $80 billion a year.”
Life has been busy lately. I have failed at carving out time for the little things like keeping up with email and reading and writing. One theme that is just below the surface these days, is an understanding of the Individual’s impermanence, that one will inevitably be swept away down the river. But, the good news is, it is the river that is the thing. You stick your foot in the river, and you feel the tug of the currents: this one fast and warm, that one slow and cool. In life, we are these currents, flowing together, mingling, becoming something identifiable and satisfying while also becoming the river itself.
Death has been on my mind lately. Dad passed about a year back, and the Reaper has expressed an interest in the health of another loved one. I am not opposed to Death. We’re all going to get there. Life, the abused cliché reminds us, is the journey and not the destination. I’ll be forty in January. One can read that as the half way mark. I want to pull over and look around. Close at hand, I see my toddler Son, his eyes wide with the possibilities and joys of life, his future for him to know and hopefully to share with his old man. And, not far off, I see my Father, whom my Son will ever know through stories, mainly told by me. Stories I mainly lack. And, yonder still, my own Grandfather, whom I know mainly through the most exaggerated of stories.
We all come from somewhere, and we are all headed somewhere. This bend in the River knows only a short ways upstream, toward the various and contradictory legends of the Wellsprings, and only a short ways ahead, toward the various legends of the Delta, where we believe the River as we have ever understood it will cease as it merges with the Great Ocean.
The August issue of The Sun Magazine brought with it an interview with Stephen Jenkinson, whom some call “The Death Whisperer” … he packs a lot of great ideas that resonate with me into eight pages. Not bad. What follows is a bit of perspective on the idea of one’s influences.
Hoffner: Who would you say are your influences?
Jenkinson: Anyone who claims to know his or her influences probably doesn’t. I think our influences are a lot subtler than we think. For example, I was born nine years after the closing of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima half a world away. When those soldiers came home from World War II suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder before we had a name for it, North America created the suburbs for them. I grew up in the unacknowledged presence of those wartime horrors: Auschwitz on the one side, Hiroshima on the other, and the suburbs in the middle. That’s an influence on me.
As a child I was read to every night. Before I even understood the words, I was carried along by the momentum of the human voice. The pageant of the story has its way with you, even if its not in a language you can comprehend. Story is a sublime practice that makes us recognizable to ourselves.
These days I admire the songwriter Leonard Cohen, my countryman and a polestar in the firmament for anyone who has faith in human eloquence. Eloquence is a conjuring; it’s magic, and Cohen is a servant as well as a practitioner and a repository of that magic. He’s a patron saint of the Orphan Wisdom School, unawares. I don’t know what kind of life he lives, but it’s inconceivable to me that those songs might come from a duplicitous nature. In a country that appreciated its artists, he would be a national treasure and wouldn’t have to work five minutes in his life unless he was so inclined. As it is he’s been on the road for years trying to make back all the money his manager stole from him.
I met another of my influences at Harvard. As a young man I was on fire with learning about the historical Jesus. I didn’t come from a religious background, but I applied to Harvard Divinity School and got in. I was determined to be a preacher of some sort. I don’t know what else you could do with that kind of education. At the divinity school I met a fellow who was the living incarnation of a stereotypical televangelist: power-blue suit that didn’t fit so good: too-tight white shirt that was popping its buttons. He was in charge that year of vocational counsel. I told him I planned to get a master of divinity and become a pastor or a minister. He asked me the name of my sponsoring congregation, and I said I hadn’t worked that out yet. Then he asked my denominational affiliation. I told him I didn’t have one. “Son, where do you go to church?” he asked. I said that I didn’t, and he asked, “Well, where did you go to church, then?” No answer. So he said, “Let me understand this: you propose to go into the ministry, and you’ve never been to church?” “Yes sir,” I replied. “Well, I nev-uh,” he said, just like that. I was three questions into my vocational interview, and I was done.
My career as a preacher came to an end at that moment. I was counseled to register for a master of theological studies — a layperson’s degree — instead. That same week I met a preaching instructor whose name was Hugh Morgan Hill, but everyone knew him as Brother Blue. He was a vibrant speaker in the African American tradition. He said I should be in his class. I told him I’d already been counseled out of the master of divinity program. “Nobody needs to know,” he said. On my way to his first class I picked up a harmonica. The class had already begun when I got there, and Professor Hill was in full flight. He was a great storyteller and performer. For some reason I started to play my harmonica along with what he was doing, just improvising.
The next week his wife phoned and asked if I’d come with him to a church service — and bring my harmonica.
I performed with Hill on and off for seven years. It was an unofficial apprenticeship. We traveled all over the U.S. and Canada. This was the era of school integration, remember, and there were race riots in some cities, but since we were together, we were OK. He was a holy man from the ghettos of the American heartland. Virtually everything he did in the world was self-initiated. He never seemed to have a job description. He carved it out every time he stood up to speak. I learned from him the importance of proceeding without the green light, the red carpet, the Get Out of Jail Free card. I was emboldened by his example when I was working in palliative care, because I realized that if I was going to serve these dying people well, then I couldn’t wait for anyone to ask me to do it. And if I’m going to serve the era I’ve been born into well, then I can’t wait for approval and recognition. I’m going to have to proceed without it. If it comes, it comes; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. That, and a lot more, is what I got from him.
Brother Stephen articulates a lot of ideas about Life and Death. Ideas I am still digesting. But I suppose I can share some notes.
To be Alive is to be In Debt to Death. Everything we have, everything … the food we eat day after day, the clothes we wear, the fuel we use to get around … animals and plants, and if you think about it, the Solar energy that fuels All Of It comes from the slow annihilation of the Sun, as its atoms fuse into ever heavier elements. “What will your death feed?”
The Debt is non-negotiable and it will be re-paid.
“Grief is not sadness. There’s sadness in grief, but grief is not exhausted when the sadness goes away. … Sadness has a shelf life, but grief endures …” I picture a small pot, held over the flame of death. The sadness bubbles and splatters and evaporates. The pot is withdrawn from the flame. There is a residue left over. That residue is grief. It does not boil away. You paint with it. You leave a mark somewhere so that when one needs a reminder that “this too shall pass” they may thus be reminded. This paragraph is painted with grief. I hope it feeds your wisdom.
In the interview, Jenkins has a riff about the need for an element missing in our culture: the Rite of Passage in which childhood ends and adulthood begins. A consumer culture derives better profits from a population that is not asked to Grow Up: You Deserve More and More!! His critique resonates but I disagree with the idea that a Rite must “kill off childhood” … on the very next page he explains that it is misguided to shelter children from the idea of death … I think that Childhood is maybe what lends Death its greatest contrast. Young and full of possibility and very self-involved … adults should not be so self-involved, the grown ups must labor to pay the interest on our life debt … but we still need to grow and learn. While we would prefer for grownups to not be self-involved narcissists we need also ask them to be sufficiently self-involved, and other involved, to cultivate their self awareness.
Other involved is what we ask of a child, and what we give a child, when we share with them the fact of Death. Children can appreciate Wisdoms, just as Adults can appreciate Wonders.
A last thought, while I sat in my favorite coffee shop, taking and making these notes, and watching an Old Man drink in the Joyful Clown Antics of some toddlers across the way, was that nursing homes really ought to co-locate with nurseries. Children bring Life into the Room. Elders bring Life as well. The children are starting from scratch, painting with incoherent vitality. The elders have taken their lives, chipped away at it, and produced works of art, called Lives. Day by day, they reveal these works to the children: some are beautiful, some are perplexing, some are sad, and some are horrible. The children react, embrace, reject, imitate, and iterate. Culture ensues, and the river flows enriched.
Early in my career, I didn’t interact much with management. For the past decade, the companies I have worked at had regular one-on-one meetings with my immediate manager. At the end of my tenure at Cisco, thanks to a growing rapport and adjacent cubicles, I communicated with my manager several times a day, on all manner of topics.
One of the nagging questions I’ve never really asked myself is: what is the point of a one-on-one? I never really looked at it beyond being a thing managers are told to do, a minor tax on my time. At Cisco, I found value in harvesting bits of gossip as to what was going in the levels of management between me and the CEO.
Ben Horowitz has a good piece on his blog. In his view, the one-on-one is an important end point of an effective communication architecture within the company. The employee should drive the agenda, perhaps to the point of providing a written agenda ahead of time. “This is what is on my mind,” giving management an opportunity to listen, refine strategies, clarify expectations, un-block, and provide insight up the management chain. He suggests some questions to help get introverted employees talking.
I am not a manager, but as an employee, the take-away is the need to conjure an agenda: what is working? What is not working? How can we make not merely the technology, but the way we work as a team and a company, more effective?
Two quotes passed along on September 11, from my meat-eating Grandmother:
A USDA inspector reviews the carcasses of slaughtered pigs for our safety. Credit: Wikmedia Commons
“As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields.” –Leo Tolstoy
“We are the living graves of murdered beasts
slaughtered to satisfy our appetites.
We never pause to wonder at our feasts,
if animals, like men, can possibly have rights.
We pray on Sundays that we may have light,
to guide our footsteps on the path we tread.
We’re sick of war, we do not want to fight –
The thought of it now fills our hearts with dread,
and yet – we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
Like carrion crows we live and feed on meat,
regardless of the suffering and pain
we cause by doing so, if thus we treat
defenseless animals for sport or gain
how can we hope in this world to attain
the PEACE we say we are so anxious for.
We pray for it o’er hecatombs of slain,
to God, while outraging the moral law,
thus cruelty begets its offspring – WAR.”
–George Bernard Shaw
This drives me insane. Part of the challenge is that most software dictionaries are unaware of the word “colocation” and are happy to offer “collocation” as an alternative, but that is wrong wrong wrong wrong and it makes me a little nuts every time.
So, here is some explanation I just sent to the NOC and copied to the Sales team of a “Colocation Provider” who keeps sending me messages from something called “Collocation Status Report”:
Dear NOC:
A collocation is a statistic used by linguists to determine the
frequency with which words and phrases are found together.
On your contact information page, there is an option to contact Sales
about “Colocation”
Assuming that you are indeed in the business of Colocation, and not
actually updating us on the status of word frequencies, please fix the
name in your outgoing envelope from “Collocation Status Reports” to
“Colocation Status Reports”
A paragraph I had highlighted as I finished my reading of Du Bois’ “Dusk of Dawn”:
The Dyer Anti-lynching Bill went through the House of Representatives and on to the floor of the Senate. There in 1924 it died with a filibuster and the abject surrender of its friends. It was not until years after that I knew what killed that anti-lynching bill. It was a bargain between the South and the West. By this bargain, lynching was let to go on uncurbed by Federal law, on condition that the Japanese be excluded from the United States.
Sometimes Divide and Conquer needs some unity of purpose to succeed. All too often, we have made compromises to accommodate critically-needed constituencies, and it takes us far too long to realize the evil in the deals we have made, and far too long to correct it. These days I feel that efforts to reduce carbon emissions for the sake of a stable climate are for our generation what race and gender equality, voting rights, workers rights, national infrastructure and slavery were for previous generations.
Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.
At the level of first principles, gay marriage effaces that gift.
[ . . . ]
But there are more good things under heaven than these beliefs. For me, the most important is the equal dignity of homosexual love. I don’t believe that opposite-sex and same-sex relationships are the same, but I do believe, with growing numbers of Americans, that the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over. Whatever one’s definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness.
I think that there is more to marriage than children, and that those children who can not be adequately cared for by their birth parents are still entitled to be cared for by whatever competent and loving parents society can find for them. At any rate, I am glad to see a Prop 8 supporter come out of the closet and realize that the way to strengthen marriage is to focus on strengthening marriages, rather than denigrating homosexuals.
The other day they were talking about Aung San Suu Kyi on the radio, that the path she chose to follow was the path laid forth by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King. The idea is not to seek victory over the enemy, but to identify the universal capacity for virtue, to love the enemy and change the enemy’s heart, to be open to a more enlightened and equitable path. I feel that David Blankenhorn’s evolution here, along with the evolution of many Americans, is evidence that this sort of spiritual warfare is carrying the day in my country.
“If I were committed only to being right, I would go out and talk anyway, but because I’m committed to making a difference, I wait until I’m ready.” –Julia Butterfly Hill
