Well, the old clock on the wall says that not much remains of 2004. So it goes. It wasn’t a particularly loveable year, was it? Even if you had the good fortune to count its passage with, say, a Dilbert or Garfield calendar, or one with puppies or varieties of the orchid, your probably felt a certain suction. Like putting your hand over the bathtub drain when you were small, and the water was draining away. Now as the year makes its final swirl, let’s put the rubber ducky of hope safely in the soap dish and take a deep and sober breath.

In truth, it was a year of needless, heedless war. It was the year George Bush got elected in Ohio and Britney Spears got married in Vegas; events of comparable inanity. It was the year of the cow. And I don’t mean on the Chinese calendar. It was the year of bovine intelligence, deliberate ignorance. Millions of Americans still believe there were WMD in Iraq, and Saddam was behind 9/11.

For me, it was a year of God’s mercy because my own failures of productivity could have left me in much worse circumstances. I had family challenges and in the summer we lost our Grandma, but God is with us. I think my high point may have been my nephew’s third birthday in the Spring. That child is a steadfast and shining consolation, a joy.

The year closes with Tasha still with me; her small and selfless respirations continue apace in her place beneath the desk. For this – and the continued health of my family – I am profoundly grateful.

I’m at a loss to circumscribe the year with meaning, except to say that those of us who survived it, and watch it end now in sufficient affluence to do so in front of a computer, have seen the mounting of death tolls and the blooming of flowers. Most of us have attending funerals and weddings, and born our burdens with the means to pay way too much for coffee and gasoline. Those of us who write have had the leisure to write a lot about a little or vice versa, and it hasn’t changed much except to present us to the world in some form of hope. For me, I thank God for the Internet, but for which I would have murdered too many trees.

This blog will now observe the last hour of 2004 in silence, in prayerful, astounded sorrow for the loss in southern Asia.

Banished Words List :: Welcome: “That’s how Lake Superior State University selected words and phrases that make up its 30th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. “

I love this stuff. Look forward to the list every year, you bet. Of course they make some good points, and I think the language has been dissolving like alka-seltzer for at least 100 years. But I don’t know yet how I’m going to respond to banishment of blog, blogger, etc. They just told half of my URL, “You’re Fired.”

There is nothing for me here

but images and the passage of time.

I can’t find a center, can’t imagine

my place or purpose in all of this.

If I said Peace aloud, made it gentle

but emphatic, with my hat over my

heart, would anyone respond?

Can any word I imagine carry

meaning into an afternoon

of cold rain, wet wool, muddy shoes?

I see smiles under great

irrelevant clouds.

I should think of a word that can live

in such cold, rain slick hours.

I should say flower, ceramic,

grandmother, butterfly, light.

And from all of them, to which

I add clock for a flavor of time,

I choose grandmother,

then I turn and go home.

Kyle Kimberlin

Thursday, December 30, 2004

I’ve seen some opinion, blaming God for the deaths in Indonesia.

I’m far from qualified to stand as an apologist for the Almighty, but do you really think God wipes out people with Tsunamis? If He wanted them dead, they’d be dead. No big wet drama required. There are earthquakes, they displace the mass of water. So it goes. Life on our little blue ball is inherently dangerous.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the

children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the

long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

– Helen Keller

The destruction is the fault of diastrophism; plate tectonics. The deaths are the result. And if we weren’t so damn busy as a species making war and documenting the sexual cavorting of the hour’s celebrities, maybe the region would have had a warning system. Blaming God is, in a word, absurd.

Sometimes you sit in a chair which someone else has just left, and feel the warmth they left behind. You pick up a sweater from the bed and find it warm; the dog has been sleeping there.

This afternoon, lying on the sofa, I closed a book and left it on my chest a while. I pondered the chapter I’d just read, looked at the Christmas tree, and checked the insides of my eyelids for light leaks. When I picked up the book again, I was surprised to find that it was warm. It was warm from the warmth of me. Imagine that.

I suppose this phenomenon has always part been of my life; maybe others have felt the heat that I’ve left behind in a chair. I’ve never given it much thought. I mean I don’t consider myself warm like other people. It’s bizarre to think that someone would take comfort in a chair I left behind, unless I did so anonymously.

I think of myself as neither hot nor cold, but as a moon in the neutral ambient radiation of spacetime. I am not measured in decrees Fahrenheit, in sound or silence, words or innocence of paper, not in mass or texture or even in weight, but in energy – 100 ergs per gram of irradiated whatever. I put this here and that there and sit back, as the equator pitches more or less to the arc of the bland, indifferent sun. So I’m IO or Ariel. A placekeeper, an orb to keep the pretty cosmic mobile, hung for an infant’s bassinet, just for a moment spinning true.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

— Mark Strand

It’s terrible. An unbelievable, heartbreaking loss of life.

Here’s an animation of the waves.

If you read one long, serious, beautifully written book this winter, make it Toward the End of Time by John Updike. I finished it this evening, having chewed through it, like a hungry and purposeful mouse gnawing into a bank vault, these part couple of months. I was richly rewarded. Updike probes his way through male sensuality, botany, cosmology, eschatology and even ontology like a man in love with his memories, like a writer in love with words.

Sssh. Did you hear it whisper past? Was that Christmas?

There was a giant ring around the moon tonight, so tomorrow maybe it will rain. And it will be the day after Christmas. Can there be another day in the year that so crisply defines the way Time drains through our fingers like rain?

Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both.

I did a little work on my novel today. I’m rewriting a chapter which starts by describing how my youngest character, 8-year-old Bo, carries his favorite possessions around in an orange knapsack. It requires me to really try to think back to childhood: What was precious to us a third of a century ago?

There are some things that Bo doesn’t want to get dirty or worn out. He leaves them aside from his travels. Some get to go, but only with due precautions. Some – like his sprung slinky and his GI Joe – are rugged enough for off road deployment.

I’m fishing for ideas. Well, really I’d just like to talk about it. What was precious to you when you were little? What did you love? What does that love mean to you now?

I’ll post about this again, after I hopefully get a few comments.

Well here we are, in the pines in the pines. My folks and I are visiting my brother and his family in the wooded foothills of the Northern California. We’ll be here for Christmas. It’s good to be with family.

Checking the news, I see that Rumsfeld has paid a surprise visit to Iraq. His message: Merry Christmas, Endeavor to Persevere. OK, since we can’t seem to broker a cessation of stupidities on the part of the Bushies for the duration of the holiday, I’m going to declare – for the sake only of my sanity – a suspension of cynicism. I can’t keep up with it, and you gotta admit it takes big rum balls to face those guys in the midst of all this sad chaos and abject failure. So Merry Christmas to Rummie and Bushy; Merry Christmas, one and all. Try not to choke on the goose, you turkeys.

I tried to post a couple of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, like Pete did on his blog. But my main column is too narrow – it screws up the blog – and I don’t have the energy or inclination to wade into html at 1am to fix it. If I shrink the picture files, they suck. So here’s one and here’s another. Enjoy.

In the important interest of another perspective on Donald Rumsfeld, check out this post at JustinLogan.com.

This doesn’t speak to the assertion, which I’ve read elsewhere, that Rumsfeld and Cheney pulled the same pro-corporate, fascistic, pro-cold war crap during the Ford administration. But it’s an interesting way of looking at him anyway.