Devo Appreciation

Let us now appreciate Devo.

Beautiful World

Satisfaction

Uncontrollable Urge 

Nutra Theme / Jerkin' Back And Forth

Jocko Homo (In The Beginning Was The End)

Bracing for Re-entry

My COVID cocoon is ending soon.  Soon I will be rising earlier than usual (some of the time) and bathing with more regularity and heading to the subway station for the first time in nearly 20 months (I hope my card still works) to commute to my office.  It's not like I want to, and not that I need to, but rather that I am obliged to.  Capitalism impels me.  The prospect of this momentous transition has not only made me sick to my stomach, it's somehow put me in a pensive frame of mind.  I'm not seeking them but I keep coming across opportunities to cogitate.

For instance, I  recently had a philosophical discussion during a phone visit with an older relative, a nonagenarian, about what the new normal will mean for her.  She's a social person by nature still living independently (with assistance from neighbors and nearby family) but she has forgone in-person visitation willingly since the start of the epidemic in the interest of safety.  She's fully vaccinated and even boostered as are her friends, one of whom is encouraging her to consider an in-person indoor visit while both are still healthy enough for it.  Her instinct was to demur.  I share a bit of her skepticism about the objectivity with respect to risk factors exhibited by those who are desperate to forge ahead with the return to normality.  But as I listened to her, I wondered if she had considered the impact of a future without human contact, even at her stage of life.  

After having myself lived through several months with the risk of covid reduced thanks to widespread adherence to proper public preventions and precautions, it seemed to me that with a long winter coming, there might come a day when she would crave the company of one of her many friends, and that given the brevity of life, and the reduced risk of infection with full vaccination, especially in conjunction with the wearing of masks indoors, she might find herself wondering why an indoor socially distanced visit with the right masked person on a cold winter day wouldn't be worth the risk, and I wanted her to know that if she decided it was, I wouldn't protest.  She thought for a minute. She hadn't considered it.  The most insistent friend she thought was maybe too reckless to be trusted even fully vaccinated, but she imagined she could entertain the possibility of relaxing her standards enough to give it a try if she thought the situation was worth it someday.  

I'm not sure why I took that tack with her.  I don't think I'd have any trouble swearing off the company of other humans* if circumstances warranted it (or gave me plausible deniability for it).  But I have an aversion to commitment, and an aversion to standing on principle, so the thought of someone committing to a behavioral stance, such as abstention from having guests, on the basis of a principle, such as a notion that nothing is worth the risk of contracting COVID, is probably bound to be viewed by me with a jaded eye.  Is it really true that nothing is worth the risk of COVID?  Probably not.

I've had other excuses to wax philosophical occasioned by this new phase of the COVID era.  Recently, a call-in podcast I listen to had a series of callers who wanted to debate the host on the premise that it is  immoral to have children, not just because of COVID  but also in response to the unprecedented uncertainties of the future due to global warming and to the hostility, particularly toward the young, of stubbornly persistent neoliberalism especially as it is coupled with frantic end-times capitalism.  The solution to the problems we are facing they say is for humanity to actively give up and for the righteous among us to work toward a future that is voluntarily emptier of humans.  Many of these callers would like to see some sort of tax disincentive if not outright legislation to prevent at least the most poorly reasoned births, something that many of these folks feel is something of an epidemic given the world that children are born into.  How could planning to bring a child into this world ever be a good thing, they wonder.   No one is talking out loud about culling babies, but why go public with this proclivity if you're not willing to get serious about it?  

To me it seems a paradox: if you're clever enough to realize that when having a child is a choice it could well be an increasingly immoral one, we need more of you, not fewer.  What we don't need is a world more full of people who think the purpose of life is to populate the earth with their kind-- though with clever people abstaining from procreation, that is exactly the kind of world you get; and in light of that it may not be a coincidence that it's a hellish place in which to bring forth a child.  But my view is that the choice to have children should be just that-- in a sense it can be nothing other than that-- a choice, made possible with fullest advantage of tools for realizing the desire.  In my view it's better to focus on the tools for responsible choice -- birth control for those who choose not to reproduce; health care and child care, an amplitude of resources and a healthy, well-tended environment for those who choose (or merely happen) to have children.  

Unfortunately, the climate in this country, political as well as geological, is just not hospitable in these times to either choice.

~~~~~~

* Don't act like you'd care if I did!

Love Poems to Things

Suburban House -  Sidewalk, lamppost, driveway, stoop. What appeals to me, walking by the curb?  It is you, suburban house.  Set amid your landscape monopoly, behind portico and bay window obscured by drapes, the mystery of how you fill your square footage beckons.  Locus of homemaking, shared address, proletarian palace, how could freedom be any freer than it is behind your façade?  Where goes your stone path?  What patio skirts you; what shed or outbuilding attends you; what yard art adorns your shrubbery?  Twilight falls.  Exterior yearnings yield to interior hermitage. What nourishing smells assault the senses from the cauldrons heated by your appliances, what fragrant artifacts line your cupboards, closets and cabinets? What mundane transpirings does your inner golden glow illuminate?  A robot could design you; only a primate troop could animate you.   

Roadside Pine Grove on a Curve - It's such a long way to the sea, that I wonder why I ever go.  When I get there I know, but the way back is so long and the road so dark that I wonder why I ever leave.  And then, when I have counted down the miles and the byway at last rounds down to the highway that will lead after a while to home, don't think that I don't see you in my excessive haste, roadside grove on the outside curve.  Your elegant array just beyond the shoulder, your members at road's edge like sentinels daunting entry to your forest, your unpeopled collectiveness receding into the enchanted blackness of night-- anomalous orderly wilderness.  I only see you in a blur when I am readiest to be home, but for that moment you remind me why I ache to wander.   

Saturday Afternoon - To the left of you is the week before. To the right of you is the week to come. Only you, deep mid Saturday afternoon endure in unactualized completeness.  While I accede to the chore I chose to spend you on, dreaming of the undetermined treat to come that I have in mind to give myself for not just lolling in you in my dreamy sloth, you seem to fleet forever.

Decay - Spring returns and green encroaches everywhere without relent.  Life burgeons like an alien invasion from every corner except yours, decaying structure.  Life abounds, expands, fills and conquers yet you wither, lifeless, neglected, defeated architecture.  Caving in on yourself in slow motion, you are the sister of the moth who came to its end trapped in a web beside your door, who once shook and strove, saying, "This too is life!" until in tatters it shakes no more except in bursts of wind.  Life insists, but you dead brown house, resist.  Your  deliberate return to nothingness--visible, beautiful, passively defiant-- is a relief.

Pegboard - Someone needed a room in the garage that they couldn't afford, so they nailed you, Pegboard, to some pine beams, and called you a wall.  Then they hinged a section of you, bolted a $2.50 cabinet handle to you and called you a door.  Hiding and seeking one day in youth, you called out to me and I popped you out of your latch, slipped through you into the dappled windowless darkness that you enclosed and pulled you quietly shut.  Then I sat amid the storage, waiting in the pinholes of light to be sought.

Everything is Obvious: A review

William of Ockham

I saw an article not long ago on the Americans with Disabilities act that said that the older you get, the more disabled you become.  I hadn’t known that, until I started aging and becoming increasingly disabled.  Then it was obvious.  

Which reminds me of the book my niece got me for Christmas a few years ago - Everything is Obvious*: *Once you know the answer, by sociologist Duncan Watts, on the pitfalls of common sense, which I had been enjoying and absorbing until it disappeared one day, which happened to be the same day that my wife had hired a maid service to come clean our house before the visit of a friend from out of town.  Having a few moments for reading that evening, I searched the house for it with no luck. How disappointing! It's not a big house.  It had been on the surface of things just that morning.  Where could it be?  I racked my brain; retraced my steps until a notion bubbled up from the depths.

My theory was that the book had been resting on the lip of the waste basket in the bathroom. Some new bric a brac in the bath-chamber had made the customary place for books in progress, the toilet tank lid, off limits and for want of a better idea, the waste basket rim had become the de facto (and piss poor I might add) substitute for it.  Anyway, I was thinking I or a maid had maybe inadvertently tipped the book into the trash can, and the maid, perhaps not being a book person, had not the tools to recognize a book in a trash can as anything other than trash, so had dumped it along with the other trash in a receptacle where, evading discovery, it was left on the curb the next day and removed for good by employees of the public works department in their usual efficient manner.  While I was disappointed at the turn of events I was very pleased with my powers of deduction for having figured that out.  

My daughter protested that it was classist and maybe even racist to think a maid wouldn’t know what to do with a book.  I countered that it wasn’t racist; it was a fact of life that some people, people of all walks of life, are not book people and for them a book is not an object to be totemized and venerated but an object that in a trash can is indistinguishable from other objects whose original identities and purposes have been superseded by that of “rubbish”.  I cast no blame; on the contrary, I was pleased that with my powers of reasoning and a mind open to the world views of a stranger who happened to be engaged in a cleaning activity in my house, I had been able without prejudice to understand where the book had gotten to.  

Oh sure, the coffee cup that I suspected a maid must have broken without telling us that same day showed up a day later on the bookcase in the bedroom where I’d left it, as did the bag of dog food that I was afraid might have tempted one of the maids (whether for her dog or her family or herself I did not care to judge or to speculate) when I couldn't find it right away.  So of the 3 missing items, 2 turned up within a day, but not the third, and somehow my confidence in my powers of deduction remained bolstered by the stories I’d concocted for the 2 missing items, even when they were proven wrong.  I mean the stories were good.  But as I say the book remained gone and I kept feeling that pang of knowing a tragedy that maybe could have been prevented had occurred in spite of a premonition I seemed to remember having that day.  

You probably can see where this is going-- last week, my wife was digging around behind the computer for something and found, right where I’d left it a month before, the book.  Of course it was behind the computer!  That’s where I put it to avoid any mishaps with the maids.  The end.