Thursday, May 31, 2007

Nature deficits

I'm still very much enjoying the Louv book. In fact, in one of those perfect combinations of events, I sat on the back deck for a few minutes tonight reading while two or three of my kids happily played in the planters. I would've preferred it if they'd gone into the sandbox, but they've been pretty revved up about putting some seeds in the ground on the weekend, so I just let them go to it. And then, to make things even better, my 9 year old turned up with a sowbug in a jar and lots of questions (and some great answers -- I really think she gets about a year smarter when she's outside in nature). We came up with a project for the summer -- we're going to take my digital camera out on the road to collect pictures of flowers and bugs. I explained to her that the book I was reading made the argument that parents should be teaching their kids about nature and that I couldn't teach her because I didn't know enough, so she'd have to help me to learn. She was completely and utterly onside with this. I'll use a different approach with my 11 year old. Geocaching ought to do it, especially when my spiffy new GPS unit arrives in the mail. I think it's a perfect example of how to use the technology that is so magnetic for kids to pull them out the door and into the wild. We'll see.

single parenting

My amazing wife has flown the coop for a few days for some conferencing and hopefully some well-deserved R & R away from the monsters for a few days. So it's single parenting time for me. I'm actually pretty good at it, I think, but only because I manage it like a very long run. I know I have to get from here to Sunday night without any really egregious damage to the kids and also some shards of sanity still intact so that she has something to come back to. Knowing this, I can pace myself, focus on breathing, marshal my reserves. I know in advance which parts will be the most taxing (getting everyone out the door in the morning; finding some way to keep everyone amused on Saturday, especially if the heat wave hasn't broken and the outside air is still as foul as it has been for the last couple of days (is it just me or did there used to be the occasional +30C day on which there wasn't so much ozone in the air it felt like you were trying to breath underwater)). I can work out a timetable to make it all look pretty good, get the laundry done, and if things go exceptionally well I may have a nice dinner waiting for my love when she gets home on Sunday. All, of course, with the sole purpose of impressing her enough so that I might get lucky.

I did a more protracted bout of single parenting in the early 1990s when I split with my first wife. Even then it was somewhat artificial because I had a shared custody agreement in which I'd look after my two kids (two! ha! child's play!) for a two week stint and then get two weeks to recover. I well remember those days. There were times when I'd have to take an entire day off of work just to clean the house, wash their clothes, wipe spaghetti off the ceiling. I got sick a lot, too. The stress of living on the edge, both logistically and financially, causes that. On the Friday evenings when my ex-spouse and I did the hand-off, I remember that I'd schlepp home and crawl into bed by 830 pm. Sometimes I'd just pretty much stay there until Monday morning.

So that was the part-time but with no definite endpoint single parenting experience. But most single parents have it much worse than I did then or do now (though I'm not sure how many single parents have six kids....but I'm sure there must be some).....brief interruption there to shoosh one 3 year old back to bed and simultaneously lug about 75 lb of laundry to the basement....it's hard to imagine how you cope with a situation like this that might well go on forever, especially when you're not as lucky as I was in terms of having an understanding workplace (though, understanding as they were, I came within a hair of losing my career at tenure review time).

Being a parent is the hardest job in the world. Doing it by yourself, well, just unbelievable. I was a tourist. Hats off to the residents.

And now to laundry land.

Sounding off again

I awoke this morning in a brilliantly happy state -- no doubt some weird class of neurochemicals produced by the late night combination of smoked rainbow trout and a MacLaren Vale shiraz. I put a Gordon Lightfoot disc into the machine and was completely swept away by the aching perfection of his young voice in "Early Morning Rain". Strange thing -- I got a lump in my throat and my eyes welled up. Strange because this is not a song that has any particular meaning or history for me, beautiful song though it is. Sounds, music especially, structure time in the same way that buildings structure space. This is not a new idea, by any means. It was Goethe, I think, who first described architecture as frozen music. The same idea. I think it was something to do with that idea that gripped me by the throat this morning. It wasn't so much the song as the idea of music and what can be done with it.

On the walk into work this morning, I was very much filled with this idea as I listened to the birdsong (is there always this much song in the air or was it the trout talking again?) nicely segmented by the metronome beat of my heavy feet on the dirt trail through the park. The thing is, we can listen to the same set of sounds in so many different ways. With practice, we can reorganize the boundaries in the soundscape so that everything comes to us as the ear receives it. Or, if we choose to, we can bracket the identity of the sounds and just pay attention to the spatial properties of the soundscape. This is a very pleasant thing to do while walking, because sound sources leave things like motion trails -- a kind of aural motion parallax.

By the time I arrived at my office, I was convinced that I needed a new chapter on sound -- another topic I know little about.

Even the other party of remoteness can share wonderful pleasure

Ok, something fun this morning -- adult content by the way. Teledildonics has made some progress it seems. Don't ask me how I stumbled across this. I told you not to ask. I was WILFing through Wired after being sent to an article about neuroscience (really...) and a reference to this product caught my eye.

Crazy world.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A point of pride

Since I've been commuting by foot and my adorable wife has been biking to the clinic, we've been falling a little behind on the automotive maintenance schedule. When we tried to start up the old wagon today to get the snow tires removed (!), we discovered the battery had died from a long period of driveway dormancy. We decided that the only reason we own two vehicles is so that when one dies we can boost it with the other one. Perhaps it's time to hold a car raffle.

Our neighbour across the street teaches new immigrants, disadvantaged single parents, dropouts and strays of one kind or another who have somehow managed to reach adulthood without knowing how to learn or organize properly. She's considering holding a contest in which competitors write a short essay about how owning a car would improve their lives. She's going to give her car to the winner.

Perhaps what we could do is to hold a similar contest, but make the condition of entry an essay describing how our giving our car to a contestant would improve everyone's lives (my entry would be that we could park it across the end of the street to block traffic and then cover it with pro-Green slogans, open up the hood and plant a garden among the cylinders). I've also been wondering whether there is a simple way to turn the car into a community vehicle, available for anyone's use in exchange for paying a share of maintenance and insurance. But, of course, I'm sure there are a million reasons why we'd never be allowed to do such a thing. There's a bikeshop in town that fixes up hacked up old commuter specials and sells them for $25 each. If we got a fair price for this car of ours, we could probably trade it for about 800 bikes. We could paint them all a distinctive colour (yellow?) and park them all over the city for anyone's use.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

There's dirty foot awork

The book blog goes live on or about June 12. Not quite sure what will happen here. It'd be nice to keep it up, but since one of my goals here seems to be to make a convincing case that I'm not qualified to do what I'm doing (I'm feeling more and more like Chance The Gardener in "Being There"), and since I'm told that this is not a particularly good marketing strategy, some gear shifting may be required. Maybe I could just put a fake nose and glasses on the header. That should fool the legions of curious potential readers. Or perhaps I'll just post pictures with dreamy captions.

awesome google hit

"Making lysergic acid from scratch." I'm done with that stuff I think, even though I just found out that my university's 50th anniversary motto "Why not?" is something that Timothy Leary apparently uttered hundreds of times on his deathbed. Still, if there are clues in these posts about how to pull it off (other than to leave that rotting rye bread in my cupboard for a while longer) I'd be kinda pleased. Plus, it's way better than all the usual pornographic searches that somehow get dings on my site.

Home now, 3650 words later. I'm a man on fire. I can actually feel my ass burning. Perhaps I just need a new chair.

silence

I'm enjoying a rare few seconds of silence. My office door is closed. There are workmen outside in the hallway who have been knocking down a wall all morning to make a new doorway. A sensible person would have skulked off to another part of the building, found an unused workstation, and picked up the pieces. Something possessed me to want to sit here, surrounded by hammering, sweeping, effortful grunts, to see what effect that might have on my writing. It certainly slowed the pace below 21 words/hr, but also made me edit more carefully. No idea why. Perhaps the noise prevented my imagination from kicking in, but didn't affect my curmudgeonly critical sense. So the nasty, detail-oriented, critical parts of my mind are impenetrable to chaos, but the nice, holistic flowing bits are knocked off kilter by the least disturbance. Seems about right.

When I was an undergraduate student, I remember a room-mate once commenting on my ability to read 16th century English verse while Led Zeppelin belted out of our giant floor to ceiling speakers at volumes loud enough to cause heart arrhythmia. I've assumed that this kind of focal attention requires substantial neural resources, and as the brain cells begin to thin during the 4th decade of life, that kind of focus becomes a bit more of a challenge.

Many thoughts early this morning about the small crescendo of research suggesting interesting cross-cultural differences in perception. The latest news is that, compared to Westerners, the East Asian tendency to process wholes and contexts corresponds with some differences in brain activation in areas that are also involved in finding one's way around in space, recognizing landmarks, noticing objects. I've been wondering whether these kinds of differences are reflected in architecture, the emphasis in Asian architecture on placement, proportion, and orientation (feng shui, in other words). Like leaf rolling weevils, bowerbirds, compass termites, and subterranean mole rats, our dwellings cast shadows of the shapes of our minds.

The workers are coming back. This is probably the best writing I'll manage today.

Monday, May 28, 2007

plodding along

I somehow managed to pull 2300 words out of somewhere -- perhaps it helps when you can't see what you're writing. Seriously, though, I can feel myself plodding through the material that I know well, that I will have no problems pushing into shape at the last minute, in order to get to the stuff that I really want to get to. In spite of all of this, I managed a blurry pre-read of the first draft of what's coming up and realized I know even less than I thought that I did. One thin and meandering chapter has to become two meaty chapters that will be part of why anyone would ever want to read this book in the first place.

On the positive side, I finished the day with some interesting reading about animal architecture. Whenever I feel as though my own research is a little on the edge, I delight in finding someone who absorbs all consciousness in something much more arcane. Do you know, for example, how a leaf-rolling weevil decides that the leaf it occupies is the right size to roll? I'll leave you in suspense (buy the book....). Do you know which bird trains for years to build spectacularly beautiful houses whose sole function is to lure females down boldly painted 'avenues' to Sin City? I do.

Now I'll finish the day with a good cup of French press, a stroll into Uptown with my beloved, and a film that I suspect will make us both cry. Ahh, springtime.

blinkered

I'm not sure what the day will hold for me. Last night, my son coaxed me onto the floor for a Spiderman wrestling match. Somehow, my glasses, perched on my forehead, took the worst of one of his Spiderman blows. I thought I'd fixed them with a big, blurry set of pliers (pretty hard to fix glasses when you can't actually see them properly), but a few minutes ago, they fell off my face. My spare glasses are old, weak, from days long passed when I was considerably less Mr. McGoo-esque. So I'm looking at the world through a blurry kind of a fog.

It seems unlikely that I'll be able to do much writing, even 21 words/hour. So perhaps what I'll do is spend a bit more time listening. By strange coincidence, I spent a few minutes on the weekend looking over the promo materials for this book. Long time readers will know that I developed somewhat of an obsession with environmental sound last year while on sabbatical in a setting that presented more of an interesting mix of sounds than the low industrial hum that surrounds me here most of the time. Also, some of the peak experiences I've had while meditating have been connected with sounds.

The trick, I remember, is to try to stop yourself from streaming sounds into their various sources (such as, from where I sit -- the conversation of an IT staffer, the water cooler, my computer fan, my clicking keyboard, some kind of construction machinery outside my window, a lawnmower, a blackbird, traffic, my breathing) and, instead, to appreciate the soundstream as one very complicated, endlessly renewing, inconstant, never repeating mixture. As hard as this is to do, I find it much easier to manage to avoid naming and categorizing sounds than I do images. And, once managed, even if only for a fraction of a second, life's impermanence becomes so obvious that all efforts to cling seem silly enough to provoke laughter.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

almost home

My healthy plan of yesterday was thwarted within 50 feet of my house by a porch full of beer-swilling neighbours. Such is life in a neighbourhood where people actually talk to one another about things other than bylaw infractions. Much of the rest of the evening was spent playing among the broken trees in the neighbour's yard. Having skinned an elbow, splintered a finger, and felt the treetops brush against my head, I now get it completely. Now I hear a chainsaw outside taking care of business. It has to be done and, if I figure out where to stow these four kids I'm supposed to be supervising, I'll go over to help bury the dead.

Friday, May 25, 2007

progress

1200 words buys me 57 hours of respite. Plus, my publisher would like to set up a new blog for me to begin building buzz (bwah ha ha). I can't decide whether I'll link to it from here. In a way, it would be stupid not to, but it's funny how much the thought of giving up anonymity feels like taking off my clothes in the middle of a shopping mall (which is something you definitely...doo...nooot...want).

But for now, I'm going to pop chapter 7 in my backpack to take home and add to the pile (there's nothing as comforting as hefting the weight of hard copy on those insomniac peregrinations through the house when I fear I absolutely cannot do this -- I may soon start piling manuscript pages under my pillow), hike home, go for a run down the trail and then pop open a beer.

Deadlines

Days left until my book deadline dropped below the magic number 100 today. 99 days. 5 chapters. If I didn't sleep, and wrote at a rate of about 21 words/hour, I'd make it. That's actually pretty scary as many hours of writing yield less than 21 words. No wonder I'm getting edgy. I keep trying to tell myself that it's ok, because much of the writing is actually re-writing, but my deep secret self tells me this is not true. There's much vital material that is not even begun yet. I think I'm basically screwed. I'm now at a point where I know that if this book is going to be as good as I want it to be, many other things are going to slide. It isn't a pleasant feeling at all, because some of that sliding is going to hurt. The worst of it is that the last 4 chapters of the book are the ones that I'm most excited about but have the least background to talk about -- I almost feel as though I've been slowing down, putting them off on purpose because blank pages, though not very interesting to look at, are at least not ruined pages. I read somewhere that writing a book is like pushing a mountain through your head. It is.

Enough self-pitying drivel from me. Time to go write some words. I'll chime in again sometime when I'm feeling happier.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Falling sky

While we were away last week, there was a brief but very intense storm. A tornado touched down just a few miles away. We arrived to a yard full of broken branches, but our neighbours to the west fared worse -- they lost 3 large trees and the back end of their house. What fascinates me is that most of the neighbourhood children, who tend to be pretty good at playing outside rather than inside in front of screens, have been rabid to get in that yard full of broken branches, trunks askew, foliage bedlam. Kids don't come home when called for dinner. Little heads can be seen poking through branches here and there as they wander through the masses of vegetation. Occasionally, someone brave enough will climb the six foot height to sit on the trunk of the biggest tree that fell. It's a little sad that we've lost the trees -- a few enclosing green walls have been lost, making the back vista at our house a bit less appealing -- but I love the way the children have responded, even though I don't understand it completely. Is it because they can suddenly gain easy access to tree tips that formerly towered 30-40 feet above their heads? Is it because the neighbour's yard has become a beautiful green labyrinth into which they can stitch their stories and fantasies? When they dig their fingers into the gnarly trunks, do they feel the power of the 70 mph winds that knocked down and killed some of the oldest residents of our street? I'm sure that a little of all of these things must be true. It's been a treat to watch.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Easy Florida

I can't help but like Florida. It's a weakness. I know all the reasons why 'communities' gutted by multi-lane limited access roads are soul and air destroyers. I understand the absurdity of huge colonies of retirees banding together in gated communities, running their air conditioning full blast, venturing out for the occasional round of golf and then the trip to Walgreen's for groceries. Florida's big, flat, hot, wet, silly and, in a slightly odd way, kinda sexy for me. For a family vacation, there's something wonderfully retro about jumping off the plane, sliding behind the wheel of a huge van and pulling up in front of the borrowed hacienda, replete with a massive grill and a nice pool on the screened in patio. I violated about a dozen things that I'm pretty sure I believe in and couldn't muster much resistance. Maybe it was just the heat.

Perhaps the defining moment of the trip was a visit to a dacquiri bar when I asked the perky waitress if they had wifi. She cocked her head quizzically.

"Wifi? Is that some kinda liquor?"

I wanted to hug her, but didn't. The bouncer was huge. My wife, a physician, knows how to inflict physical pain in ways you cannot imagine.

So yes, it was still tech weenie me asking for the wrong kind of hookup in a hot beach bar, but I did let go.

I topped it all off by wandering into a tattoo parlour and getting inked. The guy who stands in grocery stores for hours reading labels, comparing ingredients against a mental checklist of carcinogens and other slow killers walked into a little store full of strangers and sat still for a couple of hours while they injected toxic inks into his dermis.

I lost my mind, and I'm not sorry.

I'm discovering that getting older is a bit like being very young, but in a good way. You can live comfortably with contradiction.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

R & R, Science and sand

I'm off to the sunnier south for a few days of science and long walks on a white sand beach. I doubt I'll blog, but I did remember to pay my carbon offsets. Now that's optimism.....

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Simple mathematics

I've been struggling for days to figure out what to say next. I'm not usually much of a doomsayer -- funny thing about that last post is that it didn't even seem like gloomy pessimism so much as a frank acknowledgment of the obvious. It is obvious in a way -- we're all going to die of course. Less obvious is whether we truly are in the old age of humanity, but I have to say that it surely feels to me as though we may be.

I'm feeling so inured to the increasing pace of the bad news assault that when I read this article in the Oil Drum, I was actually slightly elated that a serious doomsayer thought that in 100 years there might still be a billion of us left. Of course, it's a simple model that makes many assumptions (and if you take the time to read it make sure to wade through at least some of the comments to get the full perspective on this). He has no idea, really.

A wise friend of mine put it best when she said that she doesn't really know what is going to happen (neither do I, and I know that I don't, even for all of my passive-aggressive bipolar vacillation) and can only be certain that she'll be here for as long as she can, doing whatever she can to protect those she loves.

And that's roughly the conclusion I was coming to as well. We don't know how much time we've got, either individually or as a species. We never have. But the elderly folk I've known and admired the most, as they've looked into the twilight at the end of their lives, have been memorable for a few things. They don't seem afraid. They don't sway from a conviction that every action they take, right to the very last one, makes a difference, and that the choice is always there as to what kind of difference it makes. Whether as doomed individuals or as members of a species that is ultimately doomed, we're always going to be better off paying proper homage to our own finitude, rather than pretending, with absurd hubris, that there's any chance we will go on forever. In other words, better to try to be clear-eyed and calm than get ourselves into a fuss of panic ranting over things that can't be fixed. Otherwise we run the risk of not noticing what can be accomplished.

I'm winking out some time in the next 40 years at most. That much is a personal certainty. That still seems like a pretty good stretch to make some difference if I take my time, keep trying to think clearly and realistically about how best to spend those years, try not to be too afraid, pick my battles (and they'll be tiny ones I suspect), and do my best.

It all seems pretty simple at the moment. Daunting, perhaps, but simple.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

What if it is too late

I've been struggling all day to put down some words, dealing with a delicate bit of writing where I'm not completely convinced I know what I'm talking about. It should probably happen more often. Also, niggling at the edges of my mind have been some sad thoughts about the possibility that all the ranting in the world about global warming, environmental carnage, blah blah blah may just be a waste of time at this point. Maybe we're fucked. Just as no single life lasts forever, no species does either. Maybe we've had our run. Maybe we shouldn't even be that upset about this. It's been a jolly good time. We're the only animal on this planet to ever have been aware of ourselves (and this might just have been our Shakespearean tragic flaw). We've done some great stuff, understood more than any other being in the history of life. It does feel slightly awkward that we've probably done ourselves in -- no asteroid impact to blot out the sun, no ice age, no unbeatable predator, just a bit of stupidity, perhaps, some laziness, a too-well-developed desire for comfort and pleasure and most of all short-sightedness. But maybe our sight is supposed to be short. Maybe it all just seems a bit unreal and unpleasant because, unlike any other beast that has arisen over the past few millenia on Earth, we're the only critters who understand that after we're all gone, something different will happen. Without us. We hate to miss a good show, is all. We've made a mess of things, but once we're out of the way the mess will slowly heal. So then it all reverts back to the old question. If you knew you only had a year to live, how would you live the year? With us, it's more like a generation (probably two or three more before we're all gone, but our kids will be the last bunch who will be able to carry on much like we have if that's what they choose to do). But it's the same question. Assuming we are doomed, what should we tell our kids? It's a strange question, I know. One way we deal with death is by reminding each other that the departed loved one will live on in our memories. You're not really gone until everyone who knew you is gone. But if we're all gone then we're all really gone. Different feeling. No solace. No comfort. Just real gone.

It sure takes off some pressure.

Wish I could convince myself.