Category Archives: Personal

The Day I Became a Hegelian

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I remember distinctly 14 April 2000, the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 617.78 points, or 5.7 percent, to 10,305.77 (Fuerbringer, Jonathan and Alex Berenson, “Stock Market in Steep Drop as Worried Investors Flee; NASDAQ Has Its Worst Week,” The New York Times, 15 April 2000, p. A1). The company where I worked offered options and stock purchase plan heavy compensation packages and it was the first really precipitous drop in the stock market since the online discount stock brokers like E-Trade went really big. At the office where I worked nothing got done that day: no one could do anything but watch their portfolios plummet. I remember a group of us going out for lunch. This was in Seattle and the Harbor Steps II was still under construction. At that time it was just a reinforced concrete skeleton and a kangaroo crane. As the group of us walked down — I don’t know — probably University Street, I looked up at the concrete stack of Harbor Steps II and the bustle in and around it and it occurred to me that if the stock market were to continue to fall like it was, the development company might halt construction — that building would cease its coming into being. At that moment, I saw that it was primarily a blueprint, an architect’s vision, a developer’s profit and loss projections, investor expectations. It was less matter and more idea and at that moment I first thought that maybe there was something to this Hegel fellow.

Abandoned construction, Bangkok, Thailand, approximately Sukhumvit and Soi 8, 2 December 2006

Similarly, when S. and I were in Thailand, we stayed in a neighborhood a few blocks from an abandoned, half finished concrete skeleton of a building. They were actually fairly common in Bangkok. So quickly had this construction project been abandoned that there were places where the rebar had been put in place and half the concrete had been poured when work had stopped. A pillar ended in a jagged mound of concrete with the remaining half of the uncovered rebar simply jutting skyward. I took one look at that building and said to S., “That’s probably left over from the Asian financial crisis.” That’s how suddenly and ferociously the Asian financial crisis struck: people simply walked away from multi-million dollar building projects. When the beliefs don’t pan out, the rock and the steel cease to fill out their imagined dimensions.

Ten thousand years ago ideas played almost no role in human affairs or history. Today they play a significant role, perhaps already the better part of every artifact and interaction. The Pattern On The Stone as Daniel Hillis called it. The stone is inconsequential: the pattern is everything. It is a part of the direction of history that ideas gradually at first, but with accelerating speed, displace matter as the primary constituent of the human environment.

And that, as I read it, is Hegel’s Absolute

Carbon Offsets II

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Das Boot (1981)

The company for which I work is located in an otherwise normal seeming building in downtown Washington, D.C., but it’s apparently up-to-code circa 1970s exterior belies a decrepit, crumbling cinder block. The HVAC has gone out somewhere between five and ten times this year. Most immediately, the air conditioning has been out for the last two days — it’s nominally back on today but they must be finessing it and we are loosing ground against the in-pouring solar radiation. The building is a greenhouse. Despite its being in the 90s, at least outside there’s a slight breeze. Inside it’s just dead, sweltering air. I’m in a cube near the window — a window that like in Office Space is mostly obscured by my cubical wall — so it’s particularly hot in my area. It’s like Das Boot in here: we’re dead in the water, stripped to our bare torsos, streaked in diesel fuel and struggling to work in the thinning, stagnant air.

Central HVAC is supposed to be this great civil engineering panacea, but despite decades of experience, I have yet to work in a place where the HVAC system operated well. As a result, employees all take illicit measures. At one point last winter the building management felt the need to reminded the company that the terms of the lease prevented employees from possessing individual space heaters. The accounting / admin. manager sent one of his minions around the office with a giant box to collect up all the offending heaters. But then, just a few weeks later the heat in the building conked out. It was only a matter of time before employees were at the accounting manager’s office door militating for their space heaters back.

So as long as I’m offering my own self up for sale as a carbon offset, I should add to the menu of offsets on offer, that if you are galloping through energy keeping your environs a comfortable, neutral temperature, kick a few bucks my way and I will sit around like our ancestors of generations, exposed to temperatures unregulated by the products of human ingenuity.

Carbon Offsets

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Ezra Klein — a meat eater and a foodie, mind you — has had a lot to say about meat consumption as of late. Back in May he went so far as to say, “If I had more will power I’d be a vegetarian” (“View From a Herbivore,” TAPPED, The American Prospect, 8 May 2008). Today (“Why It’s Worth Talking About Meat,” ibid., 21 July 2008) he links to The PB&J Campaign that has the following grouping of factoids:

Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you’ll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.

Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you’d save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

Hey, that’s pretty cool! Forget about planting a tree: I think I’m going to start positioning myself as a carbon offset! Wanna eat a Big Mack but feel kinda bad about it? Give me five dollars — PayPal button up in the corner — and count on me eating a block of tofu or an undressed salad to make up for your extra 2.5 pounds of carbon. And if you commuted to work and know you’re part of the problem, send ten and rest assured that I rode my bike to work in your stead. But if you play too many video games, I’m not tuning off my computer for you at any pricelevel.

On a related note I have been chuckling to myself and brandishing Will Wilkinson’s comment on why he bikes to work for some days now (“Bikes vs. Cars,” The Fly Bottle, 9 July 2008):

I honestly don’t give a fig about my carbon footprint (and anyway, since I’m not a breeder, I really should get carbon carte blanche).

So while I’m at it, if you have made more of us miserable ecosystem-trammelers and know it was just a guilty pleasure (what, a mirror not good enough for you?), then send money and I will refrain from procreative sex as a carbon offset for your brood.

The Squirrel Path of Naigedajo

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Koike, Kazuo and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, issue 3, The Gateless Barrier, July 1987, p. 39

Before I leave the issue of animals, I guess one more observation.

Our cat is an indoor cat and I like to torment him by enticing the squirrels into the backyard. I leave a trail of nuts along the top of the fence and the cat sits in the window despairing to bury his fangs into the throats of one of those rodents. And for their part, the squirrels love it. They dance and cavort outside the window, just inches from the cat. But there’s more to it than nabbing the nuts with impunity. The squirrels seem to revel in braving death. They will take up position on the fence and lock themselves into some mental faceoff with the cat, the most ready human analog that comes to mind is the contest of will between pitcher and batter in a baseball game (only with death on the line). They stair intently at each other. After a period of fixed stillness, they both begin to twitch their tails in some sort of converging harmonic. There’s this elaborate dance — a dance of death, if you will.

What is surprising to me is the utter level of clumsiness that seems to be effective for a predator. A predator doesn’t have to get the drop on their prey. Frequently enough, prey spot predator and seem to have some sort of prey behavior where they recognize and accept their prey destiny. It’s enough to make me believe in the Inuit practice of killing only the whale that an elder has confirmed has given itself willingly to the village. It’s like Freud’s death drive already present in some common ancestor.

Alternately, last week S. and I were sitting in the back yard and a regular outdoor cat who works a circuit up and down the alley of our block made a stop at our place. The nuts were out and so were the squirrels and I braced myself to intervene to save one of the creatures that I had enticed into harm’s way. The cat leapt up to the fencerail. The squirrels scattered, except one who stood his ground less than a foot away from the cat. This is a tough, gristly, street-smart black cat. He was prone for the kill. We could see the tension for the pounce build in his body. But this squirrel didn’t back down. They stared at each other and both did the tail routine. But after a few minutes of this psychic altercation, the cat relaxed into a submissive position. The squirrel won the faceoff through some means entirely invisible.

I acquired all of my knowledge of Zen Buddhism, Bushido and Kendo as a pre-teen through an intense study of Lone Wolf and Cub comics. And intense study is how I would characterize my interest in these books. To this day I still find occasion to break out some concept or bit of wisdom gleaned back then. In issue three of this most conceptual story, Itto Ogami is hired by town politicians to assassinate a local radical Buddhist priest who is militating for the peasants. When he finds that he cannot deliver the killing blow, the monk counsels Mr. Ogami on why he cannot:

That which is not … cannot be slain. You cannot kill me for I am a leaf of Naigedajo. Forget the self and unite with Mu, Nothingness.

To kill a man, you must first project the aura of death. Your opponent reciprocates, projecting his aura of death — or perhaps an aura of fear. Thus united can you wield the sword. This is Mu. But if no aura opposes yours … that which you project rebounds upon you. It is impossible to make such a cut. If you force yourself, you yourself will be cut.

Like Sensei Splinter, I think that squirrel must walk the gateless path of Naigedajo.

Back on Assignment; the Menagerie

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13 July 2008, Pennsylvania menagerie

No posting for the past week because I spent the last few day in Pennsylvania with S. visiting her family.

There’s lots of nature up there, in lots of different states. We saw two grey down-covered baby birds in a low nest. They extended their gangly necks and waived their open beaks when they sensed our presence. We stopped in the road for a gaggle of baby wild turkeys in tow behind both their parents. I nearly stepped on a fog who decided that laying low until the last minute was the best strategy. I saw just about the biggest frog I’ve ever seen while walking a lap around a pond. One of S.’s parents cats, George, scared the shit out of me when he came galloping up while I crossed the yard in the middle of the night. He turned out to be just a cat, but when I heard his feet in the dark I didn’t know if he was a coyote or what. The deer are so prevalent that they aren’t even worth mentioning. Except maybe the one we saw cross the lawn of a notably manic hunter neighbor. We marveled that it managed to get that close to his house without getting blasted, but it turns out that for some reason he has taken favor on this one and has tamed it.

And where does one even start with the bugs? The most unusual black and white moth, more like a church window than a moth, tried to hide in a basket full of shells in the W. house. At a dinner over at the maternal grandparent’s house, a moth so big that it was mistaken at first for a bat, got trapped between the house and the bug net. Along a creek — what most people would call a drainage ditch, but from the environs was obviously a fairly important part of the area — something that looked and flied like a dragonfly but with colored butterfly-like wings flittered.

I plucked two beetles off a bush. They clung to the leaves in large numbers. They had a characteristic way of spreading their legs out that seemed designed to dissipate heat. Once in my hand, one pulled its legs in and curled up into a ball. The other ran across my palm, grabbed the other, rolled her into position and, to my surprise, mounted her and began to copulate. Part of me was disgusted to have these bugs fucking in my hand, but the other part of me was fascinated! I have read Olivia Judson’s post on paleontological sexology and all the different animal genitalia (“A Tyrannical Romance,” The Wild Side, The New York Times, 12 February 2008) and was thrilled at the prospect of conducting field observations. Their spurred feet dug into the ridges of my fingerprint so that dislodging them would actually be somewhat of a chore. He deployed from his abdomen a maroon colored device like my mind’s eye imagines the weapon of the second murder from the film Seven. He jabbed it into her abdomen and I could actually the proboscis pumping her full of semen. He took a couple of minutes, finished, retracted, and commences some sort of post-coitus ritual, running his previously confining appendages all over her. During coitus she had folded her antennae, like the rest of her appendages, in to some ultra-sleek shape, but now she relaxed them out and they began to twiddle as in a more active state. It’s amazing how much the forms of human copulation resemble those of the rest of the animals, all the way down the hierarchy. It was time to move on for the humans so I ditched these two randy bastards to perhaps another mate for her (all nature is slutty) or perhaps gestation time. It was a rare opportunity to observe something totally wild.

The think about America’s rural areas is that there is a lot more interesting wildlife engaged in natural-type stuff, instead of obsessing over the contents of our trashcans like all the animals in the city. Unfortunately, rural people think that the best way to enjoy nature is to destroy it, in that a significant portion of the animals that you encounter are various states of dead. A significant portion are roadkill. The weekend revolved around a giant country picnic that entailed a lot of barbequed cow, two deep-fried turkeys, lots of hunters and their hunting paraphernalia. The picnic was hosted on the grounds of an avid hunter who took us on a tour of his above-garage bar and game room. His game room included a real menagerie of dead and stuffed animals, skulls and antlers. S.’s brother (a meat-eater) commented that the place was like the sanctum of a psychopathic killer. One could imagine a Jeffrey Dahmer or someone similarly collecting and posing their human victims.

On the way home, we drove part of the way down Route 11 to avoid construction on I-81. Route 11 runs along a river and we passed a gigantic turtle in the middle of the road — and I mean gigantic! He was probably three feet tall and 60 pounds. Instead of the usual stubby little tail that most turtles have, he had this long, spike-rowed tail like a dinosaur. But he was a turtle in the middle of the road. Prospects: bad. He looked like he knew how bad they were, but had no choice but to cross the road. I though of insisting that we turn around and help him, but what would have happened? Maybe both of us would have been done in together. I can see the headlines the next day: “Man and Turtle Killed in Accident on Route 11.” Or for all I know he was a species of snapper and the fucker would have turned around and bite me and I would have had to chop off his head to get him to let go. It’s sad to think that a probably 60 year old specimen of a species millions of years old was killed by a redneck on a potato-chip run. Animals possess a dignity that humans ought not violate for their petty purposes.

Anyway, enough with the animals and the rednecks and my weekend. It’s back to the tussle.

Four Years

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21 June 2008, Fourth anniversary as a blogger spent in Atlanta, Georgia workin for the man

Saturday, 21 June 2008 was my four year anniversary as a blogger. I made my Inaugural Post that Monday in 2004. I had intended to post on the day-of, but I spent the day in question in Atlanta, Georgia on a business trip, running myself ragged for someone else’s year-end bonus. Colorless bureaucrat by day, intrepid blogger by night. Here I am at the Atlanta Peachtree Westin conference room A “continuous refreshment service” helping prospective linguists fill out the SF-86 Questionnaire for National Security Positions. Oh MedWatch 3500 where hast thou gone?

I lead a life devoted to little boxes. Mostly to making sure that people have correctly and completely crammed a continuous record of the last ten years of their lives into a series of little boxes over eleven to thirteen pages. But also comparing in meticulous detail the boxes on the sheets of paper to the corresponding boxes on a computer screen. And then checking off a list of little boxes to record that all content-bearing boxes have been adequately verified. I hate to admit it, but I think it’s my calling. I know that my record of spelling on this site has done nothing to prove the case, but baring the spellings, I am nothing if not meticulous. I am a relentless machine of attention poured into little boxes. I am a tireless warrior against the omission and the oversight. My favorite admonition is that “you have to write N/A as the investigator cannot tell the difference between an omission and a negative response.”

Anyway, the murderously mundane, death of a salesman workaday aside, the blog is great. I really feel like I’m in my groove. The goals no longer seem burdensome and I frequently kick it in confidence that any lull now will be more than made up for in a burst of activity later. And it’s stimulating. I spent almost the whole of today in a state of heightened agitation over the ideas that were swirling around in my head. The only problem is time, stick-to-it-ivness and the adequate eloquence to the task.

Part of the anniversary is the annual review, with an emphasis on the analytical. I switched to a third party product this year and turned over admin rights to John, so I have a helpdesk ticket in with him to get the permissions and whatnot necessary to produce the stats. Hopefully I can produce a more full assessment of the last year in a couple of days. For now it’s off to Miami this weekend: more errands in service to the man. Maybe some mile-high blogging though.

Story of a Biker

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Here’s how it works with bikes: first you don’t know how and don’t get those guys who dress like Indy cars with spandex diapers (Yglesias, Matthew, “Bikes,” TheAtlantic.com, 6 November 2007). Then some stupid user taunts you about being fat and lazy (Bloix, “comment,” TheAtlantic.com, 13 April 2008). So you buy a bike (Yglesias, Matthew, “Prepare for Bikeblogging,” TheAtlantic.com, 23 April 2008). A mere ten days later: I’d say that was some pretty effective taunt. Next thing you know you start getting all in the activist mentality and really enjoying it (Yglesias, Matthew, “Segway Boom,” TheAtlantic.com, 16 June 2008).

A Herd of Goats in the Road

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A herd of goats in the road, the corner of Greenwood and Meshoppean Creek Road, Dimock, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, 14 June 2008

I’m up in Pennsylvania for the weekend. Under pressure of rising energy prices, this region is being invaded by companies seeking to tap the area’s deposits of natural gas. S.’s parents are going to get a well on their property so we spent a drizzly afternoon driving all over the Pennsylvania countryside trying to see some of the existing wells to get an idea of what was going to happen to the W. farm.

Some of the wells are tucked away in some pretty secluded locations so we ended up driving through some surprisingly remote parts of Pennsylvania. At one point, we were driving down a single track dirt road through fields and forests, scarcely a human settlement around. We were following some switchbacks down a hill into another wooded area when around one of the switches we came to a sudden halt because a man was sitting in a chair along the roadside tending his flock of goats who ranged up and down the road.

It was bizarre, like a foreign country. We all piled out of the car, butted heads with the goats, petted the kids, exchanged pleasantries. He explained that he had so many goats because you’re supposed to sell off the males for slaughter, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He liked them too much. Sensitive types don’t make much of farmers.

33

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10 June 2008, 33rd birthday with bike

I turned over 33 years today.

I bought a bike over the weekend because I wanted to spend my birthday riding around town. It was surprising how easy it was to come into a new bike. I guess it shouldn’t have been. The previous bike came pretty easy too: it was left in the apartment by the previous tenant.

Anyway, I decided to ride the Mt. Vernon trail from Georgetown to Old Town Alexandria. People will often tout the Mt. Vernon trail as an aspect of what a livable city Washington, D.C. is. That this is a piece of D.C. livability speaks volumes. The Mt. Vernon trail is really just a sidewalk along the George Washington Parkway — and under the Reagan National Airport landing pattern. At one point, the trail is just a little berm between the Parkway and the airport runway. There are actually blast walls along part of the trail because they have backed up planes along it with their engines idling. It’s 95° out and the trail is a thin strip in the midst of 100 feet of blacktop on either side: one with thousands of cars averaging 80 miles per hour, the other with a jet landing every four minutes. Apparently D.C. people think this is a nice encounter with nature.

But it’s not so much the trail that’s miserable. The misery of the trail is only indicative of the larger problem, which is that D.C. has decided that the best use of the Potomac river is as a natural cut for freeways. On the Virginia side the river is walled off from the city by the George Washington Parkway. On the District side the river is more or less inaccessible all the way from Georgetown University to Anacostia Naval Base. The Mall, rather than ending at the river ends in one of the most confusing and nasty tangles of highway interchange in the country. The river is so cut off as to play no significant role in the life of the city. It may as well not be there. Washington, D.C. doesn’t even feel remotely like a river town.

Anyway, after the ride down, I said fuck it and took the train back into town.

Commercial Pleasures

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21 May 2008, David Cook wins American Idol

When I first moved to D.C. I had a roommate who was such a Redskins fan that I almost couldn’t be in the house when a game was on, so loudly did he scream at the television. I didn’t get it. There’s no excuse for getting that emotionally wrapped up in something so alien from one’s own life. Then I discovered Ninja Warrior on G4 (G4 | wikipedia). S. and I scream and wave our hands at the television with an increasing fanaticism as the contestant nears the finish line and the announcer goes ballistic with Japanese excitement.

Last night when they declared David Cook the winner of American Idol I lost it in a way that I never have before over television. From the time it of the final six (Carle, Brook, Castro, Syesha, Archuleta and Cook) it has been apparent to both S. and I that it was going to come down to a contest of the Davids and both of us have pretty much figured that Archuleta had the teenie-bops with their text-dexterous fingers all lined up and thus was going to win. Last week when Syesha was voted off I though Archuleta was going to win. Cook seems burned out and you could see the disappointment he had with himself after many of his performances. Meanwhile Archuleta’s been on the rise. “Stand by Me” couldn’t have been a better choice for him. Then on Tuesday night Archuleta’s rendition of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” was perfect. Meanwhile Mr. Cook’s songs were sufficiently mediocre that after his final performance (“The World I Know“) he too was so certain that he had lost that the moment he finished his song, before Randy Jackson had said his first “Yo,” Mr. Cook started to cry. The judges all gave him consolation complements.

And I had long since made my peace with Mr. Cook coming in second. He has a tendency toward incipient pop rock as it is and being saddled with the obligations of being the American Idol was only going to further hamper him. They were going to hoist a few television commercials and a really marketable, over-produced album on him, when what he needs is to get together with someone edgier, someone who realizes that the explosive, dramatic power ballads are Mr. Cook’s forte. Better that Mr. Archuleta ends up the America Idol. He’s already a one-man boy band.

And so last night when Ryan Seacrest started, “And the winner is … ,” I interjected “Archuleta.” “David”; Seacrest paused having revealed nothing with two finalists both named David. Again I finished his sentence. “Archuleta.” When Mr. Seacrest finally let out “Cook” I leapt off the sofa. “No fucking way!” I shouted in disbelief. After fore explicatives and expressions of disbelief I tuned around in a circle and stared at the television in disbelief. Out of 97.5 million votes, Mr. Cook won 54.75 million to Mr. Archuleta’s 42.75 million, or 56 percent of the vote, a 12 million vote margin of victory. I was sure that David Cook was going to lose, but he won and in the end it wasn’t even close.

And Mr. Cook thought he knew he had lost as well. He seemed resigned to his fate and already congratulatory toward Mr. Archuleta as Mr. Seacrest taunted them with the results. I think it was the shock as much as the adulation and excitement that caused Mr. Cook to become so emotional after the announcement.

This is part justice and part tragedy. Mr. Cook is 25 years old. He got a degree in graphics design, but before settling into the nine-to-fiver he told himself that he was going to give music a few more years to see if he could make it work. One of his friends and a band-mate had already given up on music and gone to real work. Mr. Cook was nearing the end of his experiment and already had his alternative waiting in the wings. He’s been given a new lease on his dream. On the other hand, his older brother, Adam, is dying o brain cancer. I heard, I think it was his mother, say that it’s like heaven and hell: for David to be doing so well while things are going so poorly for Adam. I can’t imagine the survivor’s guilt Mr, Cook must be feeling in front of his brother. It has been an emotional rollercoaster for Mr. Cook and his family.

How did it happen? Always the political blogger — can’t avoid analyzing election returns. A few episodes ago I saw a sign waving in the audience: “Cougars for Cook.” The average age of an American Idol viewer is significantly up — witness moi. I guess the cougars overruled the teenie-bops. The other factor was his trio of performances early in the season: Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” the Beatles’s “Eleanor Rigby” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” I think he never did anything so spectacular as “Billie Jean” and he tired as the season wound to its climax, but on those three he built a winning reputation.

I took a little walk this afternoon to go buy lunch and some coffee. I found my pace brisk and my thoughts buoyant. In the background of my mind, David Cook had won, and it has caused the slightest uplift in my mood all day long. It’s stupid I know, to be such a fan-boy. But I can’t help it: I really like David Cook.