It’s a rainy day here. I guess everybody knows it’s our turn to have a storm, here in Southern California. We really look forward to them. It’s basically a coastal desert, and we go months without significant rain. So I’m enjoying the sound of water running down the pipes on the side of my house. It’s a good sound — like the end of the year is circling the drain, and flushing away.

Thinking about 2005, as it finally crawls off to find a place to decompose, isn’t easy for me. It will always be the year that I lost the comfort and company of my very best friend. I can’t help that; the pain is very real.

So I spent some time yesterday writing a letter to my Tasha, recalling happiness, bright loyalty and abiding friendship. I know she isn’t dead, because love can’t die. But I miss her so much, and every day I think about where she is. Sometimes, the Rainbow Bridge, sometimes a star in the infinite firmament of Being; beyond Thought and Not-thought, between the shadows and the light, between the notes and silence of a music which eludes my comprehension. In other words, God.

I’ve been told that there are three relevant and important questions in a person’s life: Who am I? Where did I come from? and Where am I going? I told Tasha that she is love, she came from God, and she has gone home to Him. Does that make sense? And do you see that cannot die?

For the people generally, I think it’s been a year of storms and war, of national leadership so steeped in fear that the sour smell of their malfeasance has circumscribed the globe. I pity them their myopic judgment and their cruel and gory sins. I pity every person caught up in their world of tiny thought.

I don’t want to miss the chance to say this in 2005: Bushie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.

Did we ever get a conclusive body count in Hurricane Katrina’s wake? And did we ever calculate how many died not from the storm itself but from neglect, abandonment and incompetence? I don’t think so. God knows.

On the other hand, two of my friends served as volunteers for the Red Cross, and went to help. Thank you, so much!

2005 has also been a year of hope for me. I started a weight loss program in August, and I’ve lost almost 60 pounds so far. So I enter 2006 with a lighter heart; when something changes, things are bound to change. And that’s good.

Said the king to the people everywhere,
“Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people, everywhere,
Listen to what I say!
A Child, A Child sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light,
He will bring us goodness and light.”

This was today’s quote on my Google homepage:

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

— John Cage

No doubt Mr. Cage forgot more about music any day before breakfast than I’ll ever know. But I have to challenge the premise here. I note that Mr. Cage passed away in 1992, before the rise of the vacuous thumping which is known as rap or hip-hop. Smart lad to slip betimes away; he got out while the gettin’ was good. I think that in today’s context, a musical ego cuts one off from a good deal of mindless suffering.

A lot of the unmitigated crap I hear limping through traffic and booming past my home isn’t music at all. It’s just mindless, guttural chest thumping, without melody, and with a canned rhythm. And don’t even try to tell me it’s “street poetry.” That’s like saying my driveway, which is 12 feet long, is the road to Ohio. It’s part of the process of a trip to Ohio, but hardly significant, just as the lyrics in such expression bear some distant relationship to English. Poetry goes somewhere … my driveway, and rap and hip-hop “music” don’t go very far at all. It ain’t art.

A friend sent me an article recently, clipped from the New Yorker, about the glories of Fall and the stomping of acorns.  I enjoyed it very much, and promptly misplaced it.  I’m happy today to find it available on their Web site, so I can pass it along.  

• The people who are starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1987.
• They are too young to remember the first space shuttle blowing up on liftoff.
• Their lifetime has always included AIDS.
• Bottle caps have always been screw off and plastic.
• The CD was introduced the year they were born.
• They have always had an answering machine.
• They have always had cable.
• They cannot fathom not having a remote control.
• Jay Leno has always been on the Tonight Show.
• Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.
• They never took a swim and thought about Jaws.
• They can’t imagine what hard contact lenses are.
• They don’t know who Mork was or where he was from.
• They never heard: “Where’s the Beef?”, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”, or “de plane, Boss, de plane”.
• They do not care who shot J. R. and have no idea who J. R. even is.
• McDonald’s never came in Styrofoam containers.
• They don’t have a clue how to use a typewriter.

* * * * *

I don’t know where this year’s list originated, though I found it posted here. Beloit College used to do a yearly Mindset List, but it looks like they stopped a couple of years back.

Thanks to my friend corewell at Life’s Terms for passing this along.

I’m sending you off again, to read another poem; a very good, a very simply brilliant poem – 56 – by Philip Schultz.  You’ll be glad you did.  So follow this link to the poems for Wednesday, and read 56.  

“…Because I expect nothing and what I expect defines me.
Because the world exists without us but without us it is nothing.”

“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”

– Golda Meir

Well, if that’s true, it explains quite a lot about America, doesn’t it?

A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender.

The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, “What’s your IQ?”

The man replies “150”, and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituality, biomimicry, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nanotechnology, and sexual proclivities.

The customer is very impressed and thinks, “This is really cool.” He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink.

Again, the robot serves him the perfectly prepared drink and asks him, “What’s your IQ?” The man responds, “about 100.”

Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, super models, favorite fast foods, guns, and women’s breasts.

Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks,  “What’s your IQ?”

The man replies, “Er, 50, I think.”

And the robot says … very slowly … “So … ya gonna vote for Bush again?”

A good time was had by all, and there were no serious injuries.  

I paused a few times to admire the deep quiet of my brother’s home in the woods.  But now in my condo, I can hear only the tap of the keyboard, the hum of the computer, and the faint whisper of distant traffic.  It’s every bit as quiet here, like it or not.  Without the talking of family, the laughter and singing of my little nephew, and the soundtrack of soft Christmas music, is much too quiet indeed.  

OK, there’s the neighbor’s plumbing, water in the pipes. Much better.  

I’ve missed four days of newspapers and CNN; they don’t choose to have TV up yonder.  So I’m a little behind the times.  But looking at Yahoo News just now, I see that the chaos and slaughter in Iraq continues apace.  So everything’s just as I left it.  As long as nothing changes, nothing changes. Which gives one a sense of security, yes?  Facetious I’m being, Yoda.

I didn’t take the time to think about changes to the blog, so I guess this won’t change either.  It will just have to morph with me, as I continue my quest to weigh less, think less, worry less, and Be more.  Sorry, I know it’s disappointing.

There was little time to visit any of your blogs over the long weekend, so hopefully you didn’t write either.  Because I’m not fully up to speed, and won’t read them tonight.  I’m tired.  It was nine hours on the road today, all of it dragging a big, wet shadow of post-holiday decompression.  It’s worth it: As the year to come wears on, grinding us like flour and water into big, toasted existential tortillas, we’ll have these Christmas memories to nibble on.  Sweet.

[click to enlarge]

Well well.  Here we are.  Rather, here I am and there you are.  No matter where we go, that much remains constant, doesn’t it?  So I think I’m going to take a few days off from the ol’ blog and spend (Western) Christmas pondering that.  

I keep thinking that metaphor needs to take a somewhat different tack, if we’re going to get to where we’re going, from wherever we are. It’s a mathematical problem: subtracting the net of where we are from the total of where we’re going, in order to solve where we were, and at least a few of the adjusted gross places we’ve been since we left.  I’m sure you understand.  

I plan on taking notes.  

And abstaining from Christmas cookies.  

Ho ho ho, and so it goes.

Before I sign off for the holiday, I’d like to point out that I’m not the only one who thought the point about Bush not being the Commander in Chief of the country, which I made recently, was germane. Behold:

“Do I have the legal authority to do this?” Bush said at a White House news conference. “The answer is absolutely. . . . The legal authority is derived from the Constitution as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress.”

In the 2001 congressional resolution Bush cited, that authorized the use of military force in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, calls for the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks.”

But Temple Law School Dean Robert Reinstein, former chief of general litigation at the Justice Department, said Bush’s arguments don’t hold water.

“Being commander-in-chief of the military doesn’t make him commander-in-chief of the nation,” Reinstein said, referring to a 1952 Supreme Court ruling that said President Truman did not have the right to seize steel mills during a strike that threatened production needed during the Korean War.

“The president is putting himself above the law by this argument that he is commander-in-chief,” Reinstein said. “We are not talking about operations of the military abroad. We are talking about a law that was designed to protect people’s civil liberties.”

[Link]

See, I’m not such a doofus after all. So there.

This pretty much speaks for itself. Except to say I think they finally caught the beastie behind Dick Cheney’s rhetoric.