| CARVIEW |
Yes. This is not news. Sound the trumpets if OC somehow manages to accomplish something without erring. Alas. OK, anyway. What’s new about this news is the nature of the news that OC erred in seeking.
Which he sought from a commercial “news” source. “The media”.
Right. Shoot him now. Though it would be appreciated if you waited until he got his story finished.
Y’see, as he has mentioned elsewhere, one of the tools that he uses, to keep tabs on things in the San Juan Islands while in Hawai‘i, is the “Travel Alerts Bulletin” (TAB) page of the Washington State Ferries (WSF) website – the activities, or lack thereof, of WSF being a key component of life in Friday Harbor, there being few other ways to get on, or off, the island. Since OC and Quilly have returned to the San Juans periodically, and will again, it’s good to have a heads up on just what kind of travel conditions to expect, and plan accordingly. (No, this does not mean that OC travels with an accordion. Lugging the trumpet is hassle enough.)
Late on the evening of the 20th, OC consulted the TAB page, expecting everybody to have gone to bed, and discovered that the ferry Chelan was stuck at the Orcas Island terminal. Several hours after it should have been berthed for the night in Friday Harbor. That’s funny … The next morning, he looked again. The Chelan was now stuck at Friday Harbor, and the route that it was supposed to serve, a circle route among the San Juan Islands, was out of commission [ahem] “until further notice”.
Happy happy joy joy. So what is going on here?
It so happens that the TAB page of WSF is reasonably good at informing its public what is going on. “The ferry is out of service. We will let you know when it’s back.” It’s less good at telling folk why. “Unplanned maintenance.” Right. That could mean anything from changing an oil filter to repairing a crack in the hull to having to replace an engine. Details matter if you’re trying to figure out if the disruption is going to last an hour or a year.
So OC resorted to a websearch. And found an article from a Seattle news source that presented the missing details. Turns out, on the evening of the 20th, Chelan struck the shoreline while traversing a narrow strait between islands, Wasp Passage, suffering damage to the hull above and (later reported) below the waterline, and to at least one propeller. This is not good. It’s the third such incident in a year (after the crash of the Cathlamet and the grounding of the Walla Walla), and the Chelan is likely to be out of the water for some time, perhaps the rest of this calendar year – when the system is already hurting for boats to sail and sailors to staff them. But no personal property was damaged, and (most critically) no one was hurt. This datum is, um, on the minds of Hawaiian Islanders just at the moment. And OC got this information without being spammed, or paywalled, or phished.
Having thus escaped his rash act with his mind, and what passes for his fortune, still intact, did OC declare victory and walk away? Of course not. He had to go and compound his error.
He opened the comments section on the post.
Hold your fire, he’s still not finished yet. But you might want to block your eyes as you read the rest. It’s not pretty. And he’s not paying the “news” provider for the privilege of spouting on their page (and getting spammed/phished for his trouble). So the comments go here.
1) Multiple (presumably) eligible voters commented on the fact that a 132-car ferry was serving a low-traffic route, and what a waste of money that was. At the time of the accident, the ferry had four passengers and two cars on board. Godawful!
… until you realize that the boat was on its last circle of the day, more than two hours late, and after having been idle (for lack of crew) until a mere four hours before the accident. Most of the persons who would otherwise have been on that boat had made other arrangements by that hour. And the boat still had to get to its “home port” to serve the more populated morning runs.
… until you realize that, of the five smaller boats available to the system in July, when the Chelan was assigned to the route, the 87-car Tillikum (the usual boat on the run) was headed to drydock (and, by the state’s own rules, should have been retired four years ago, 60 years after its construction), the 90-car Sealth had been pulled from service without explanation (it’s scheduled for drydock in October), the 64-car Chetzemoka had not yet been released from drydock (where it had been since March), and the 64-car ferries Salish and Kennewick were needed on the only two runs that these ferries can effectively serve. The Chelan was the smallest boat available.
2) Other commentators suggested that the “circle route” in the San Juan Islands is a subsidy of the wealthy and the superfluous:
Do the taxpayers of Washington really need to subsidize the recluses on Shaw Island making their weekly grocery and supplies run to Friday Harbor?
Attention, island dwellers. Your lifestyle is coming to a close.
Yeah, well, last time OC looked, San Juan County was the only county in the State of Washington that paid out more in taxes than it received in services. Who, pray tell, is subsidizing whom?
Besides. It’s long been a catchphrase on the islands that its residents “have three houses, or three jobs”. The wealthy don’t need the ferries, the workers do, for basic services and for supplies (groceries, to name one) for the merchants who serve those workers.
And if there are lifestyle changes pending, there are those who would welcome them, if they meant no more tourists who demand to know at what time of the afternoon the whales are fed, and if they meant the shores and waters of the San Juan Islands become a marine reserve in fact instead of merely in name.
3) Any number of commentators blaming “the government” for the failings of the ferries and just about everything else:
Name one part of State government which is getting the job done well.
Name one part of the Legislative and Executive branches of the Washington state government that does not have at its head an elected official! Who is not getting the job done? Who is not putting funds in the hands of the ferry system, to pay for new and repaired boats, for crew in sufficient numbers and with sufficient skills to keep the boats on their routes and off the rocks?
Who insist on noise that makes them feel good, instead of facts that make for miserable hearing, and burdensome responsibilities, but just might keep things from falling apart as fast as they are now. Facts that spur a resolve to fix things for all people, not just one’s preferred armed camp:
One party state. Zero pressure to improve performance.
Indeed, comrade. Sieg Heil!!
OK, enough. Fire when ready.
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 28 May 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
The “Manoa” of the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa is a valley, trending in a NE-SW direction, with the Koʻolau Range at its head and Waikiki where it meets the sea. It is flanked by steep-sided spurs from the mountain range, rising hundreds of feet from the valley floor, which peter out about a mile and a half from the beach.
Up the valley about a mile from campus, there is a shopping center. I have business there, and start walking to it at about 3 PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon. At least, it’s sunny where I am. But the trade winds are blowing, and they are pushing clouds, thick clouds, white at the top but dark at the bottom, over the ridge and down into the head of the valley. Tendrils of those clouds reach for the shoppers of Manoa. They dissipate before they can make good their threat, but every once in awhile, there is a drop of mist on my cheek.
The walk takes about twenty minutes, much of it on a path where the houses and the mango trees block the view of the valley walls. At the end of the path is an open field. Here, the whole upper valley comes into view. And as I’m crossing that field, I notice the stub of a rainbow rising from the ridge spur to my right – the eastern wall of the valley.
Not much of a rainbow, I thought to myself, short and dim. I thought Hawaiʻi was supposed to be able to do better than this.
Then I looked again. The stub was the upper part of a double rainbow. The lower part, brilliant and full, had splashed itself against the side of the ridge, never launching itself into the sky but expending its brightness like spray paint against the green mountain.
A few minutes, and a hundred yards or so, and the angle had changed enough so that the top of the bow just managed to clear the ridge. And standing over the top of the bow, almost touching it, there was the waxing moon, five days from the full.
I went into the shopping center, expecting to be inside a good long time and not seeing anything more of the rainbow.
I was right about the “good long time”. It was nearly two hours later when I finally got what I came for and could emerge from a place where the only things Hawaiian about it were the price tags. The sun was low in the sky by the time I could see it again, and the skies clear overhead. But the trades were still blowing, and I looked to the west and to the slanting rays of that sun, and they were mottled by drifts of mist.
And to the east, the rainbow, full and sharp, towered over the parking lot.
I stood in the middle of that parking lot, transfixed. Like I would have in Maine, where a rainbow of such perfect colors and dimensions would stop traffic. People would pile into each other, would race to windows and onto porches and patios (quite possibly still underwater from the just-passed violent thunderstorm), all of them digging for cameras and cell phones.
Manoa’s shopping center was full of cars and people, each one of them with a purpose, each one focused on his or her private errand. Not one of them so much as looked up.
I suppose that’s not so strange. I can imagine a citizen of Hawaiʻi, newly landed in Maine, staring in blank-eyed astonishment at the lobsters in the aquarium’s touch tank. While the Mainahs shake their heads and slowly walk away. Tourists!
And then I noticed the moon. The filling moon, in exactly the same place on that rainbow, perched practically touching the top of its arch, that it had been when the rainbow was still spraypaint on the valley’s eastern spur. It’s as if the moon were pulling that rainbow. Stretching it into the fading of the day, higher and higher and yet higher still.
Until the arch can take no more and it shatters into brittle pieces that fall, dissolving as they go, never reaching the valley floor.
Leaving only the memory of color in the gray shapes under moonlight.
]]>OC (“He”) and Quilly (“She”) are taking a vacation from Hawai‘i – yes, yes, we know, we know – and are spending some time back on our other island home, in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.
He and She are in a cabin in the woods. Washing machines are in an outbuilding several dozen yards away. It is early one fine weekday morning, and He has just entered the cabin with a basket of freshly-cleaned clothes …
She: “Laundry?”
He: “Yeah, I thought it would be a good idea to march the clothes to the washing machines before they marched off themselves. Either to the laundry or away from it. Either way, we wind up naked. Not a positive outcome.”
She: “Especially in this climate! Brrrrr! But I didn’t hear you leave with the laundry basket.”
He: “Hm? I thought you were awake. Where were you?”
She: “You won’t believe it.”
He: “You weren’t off making eggs Benedict for guerrilla gorillas again?”
She: “No. I was playing with Ken and Barbie space aliens. In their flying saucer!”
He: “[…] And they took this lying down?”
She: “Exactly! They were wandering around outside their spaceship, which looked just like a white Frisbee, but when they saw me coming, they just lay down and were still! So I picked them up and put them in my dollhouse with my Ken and Barbie dolls, and put the Frisbee in the closet!
“Well, it wasn’t long before I heard this commotion in the dollhouse. The aliens were trying to talk with the dolls, and were arguing with each other, and I finally heard the Barbie tell the Ken, ‘We’ve got to get out of here before we wind up comatose like these two!'”
He: “I wonder if the Mattel factory has a section called ‘Kansas’.”
She: “I don’t think they issue dogs named Toto, either. So, they ran off. I ran after them. And when they saw me coming, they fell over just like before. But this time when I picked them up, they spoke to me.”
He: “Plan 9 from outer space? When playing dead doesn’t work?”
She: ‘You’re not taking us back to that nuthouse’, they said. ‘We’re trying to get home!’
“‘I’m not stopping you’, I said. ‘Yes you are’, they talked back. ‘You have got our spaceship!’
“‘Do not.’
“‘Do so. It’s in your closet.’
“‘What, the Frisbee?’
“‘Gah!’
“So I went back and got the pink Frisbee, and …”
He: “The white Frisbee, you said.”
She: “Well, when I went back into the house and got it, it was pink. Go figure. Anyway, I returned it to them, they got in it and flew off. But they didn’t get far before bang! Someone or something shot them down. They bailed out and came back to Earth – with parachutes. And they came up to me and demanded, ‘Now how are you going to get us home?!?'”
He: “And what did you do then?”
She: “I woke up.”
He: “Naturally. And that’s when you noticed that the clothes basket was missing.”
She: “No. That’s when I went back to sleep. And dreamed the same dream all over again!”
He: “Doesn’t sound like the instant replay did them any good.”
She: “Or me!”
He: “Yeah, there’s that. But there is a good thing about this repeater dream.”
She: “What’s that?”
He: “You left me out of it! For a change!“
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 15 May 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
When I was a boy … Yes, I was a boy once. At least that’s what it says on the birth certificate, and in the bathroom. But we’ve been through this already. Still. While all the real boys were hanging out on ball fields and in slot car parlors, I constantly bugged my parents to take me to greenhouses. Where I could commune with the tropical plants. And to pet shops, where I could gaze at the tropical animals.
Well, either I’m entering into my second childhood, or I’ve already died and gone to heaven. ‘Cause here I am sitting in Honolulu, and I swear somebody let all the birds in the pet shop loose in the greenhouse.
Yes. This post is really about birds. The ones with feathers. What were you thinking?
I mean, really. I walk through a lawn covered with Java Sparrows …
and I remember seeing these things for sale in the finch cage of every pet store in New England. I read (click on the picture) that Java Sparrows are now more common in Hawai’i than in their native Indonesia.
I’m sitting at a picnic table on the University of Hawaiʻi campus, trying to eat my lunch while a dozen feathered moochers are giving me the hairy eyeball. Greenbacks and the magic plastic be damned; how dare I deprive them of their rightful sustenance?
Now, I’m sure that anyone who has ever eaten lunch outside on a summer’s day in Europe or North America is used to this blatant guilt tripping by the starlings, house sparrows, pigeons on the grass alas, and, of course, the dreaded squirrel birds. One of the saddest sights of my life was that of the house sparrows at a McDonalds in Seattle. They were so greasy, they were fire hazards. Somebody should shoot a video of these birds and append it to the DVD of Super Size Me as a special feature. Not that the profits of Mickey D’s would notice.
Honolulu has house sparrows and pigeons. I mean, doesn’t everybody? But they’re not the big players in the begging game around here.
Leading the charge are the Zebra Doves, birds that look and act like pigeons but are actually about the size of starlings. They don’t seem to come in groups of less than 150, and they’ll hop right up on the table and stare you down. “Ubi est mea (Where’s mine)?” Funny. I thought these birds were from Asia. Not Chicago.
Right behind them are the Spotted Doves, pigeon-like birds that actually are the size of pigeons. They might be bigger than the Zebra Doves, but they’re no braver. They seem content to hang with the Zebras and let them do the shock-troop bit, then wade in and eat what they haven’t earned. Maybe they should be called Dean Doves.
Perched overhead, waiting for a chance to swoop down and snatch something, are the Common Mynas, from India. Myna birds are related to starlings, but are prettier, and can be taught to talk, though none that I have seen has seen fit to say anything. Perhaps from the lack of worthy role models. I keep wondering what Hawaiʻi did to deserve this. Perhaps one day it will get its act together, correct its errors, and mend its fences. So that India will deem it worthy, and send its majah birds.
The red flash of the Red-Crested Cardinals (from South America) is startling when these birds launch themselves from the rims of trash cans, and is still more startling when they launch themselves from under your feet, when you have the damned gall to move and disturb their quest for the crumbs you dropped.
I finish my lunch, surviving the collective disdain of half the avifauna of Honolulu, and head back to work, musing on the fact that none of these birds was found on the Hawaiian Islands before Europeans arrived. The same is true of the plants. Nearly all have been brought in from someplace else, and are growing rampant throughout the inhabited places of the islands.
But there is one exception. I have seen them, looking down on a flowering acacia tree from my fourth-story dorm room (temporary lodging while I wait to get paid and seek such better things as can be afforded on an academic’s salary in this part of the world – which ain’t much), and I see them now, green Christmas ornaments on a Cassia tree. They are the Amakihi, one of the few Hawaiian endemic honeyeating birds to survive in the European urbanity that now dominates O’ahu.
I stare in wonder at the sight. Until, just before it was too late (for once), I remember that most sacred of adages about bird-watching.
A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
Unstained, this time, I wander back to my hired bed.
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 5 May 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
There’s a myth out there, and an evil myth it is, that one can assess the value of a hotel by the number of stars it’s given by this or that reviewing site.
Bogus. Forget it. It’s all mirrors.
You think I’m kidding??
Think about it. You go to one of these cheap motels. They might leave the light on for you, but you’ll have a hard time shaving by it, ’cause it’s not bright enough for you to see anything in the semi-polished frying pan bottom that they pretend is a mirror.
Pay a little more, and you might find the mirror in your room. Not least ’cause they surround it with all these little vanity lights, making you think that there’s more mirror there than there actually is.
This place? Crikey! The room rent would feed all the Sidewalk Sunday School kids in Las Vegas for a month. The bathroom is larger than the house I grew up in. And there are mirrors everyplace!!
OK, I’ll grant you, if you’re going to stay at a place like this of your own volition, you can’t have any particular difficulties in the ego sufficiency department. But does that have to extend to staring at yourself everywhere you go? Especially in the bathroom?
I mean, really. Will you please tell me what’s the thrill in facing a full-length mirror when you’re standing in front of a urinal??
Besides. If you can afford a place like this, usually you weren’t born yesterday. There’s typically a little mileage on the corpus, not to mention evidence of hard or unwise living. Maybe you, dear reader, can get to the age of wisdom, and hotels with mirrors, and still have the reflections smile at you. Me? Believe it, this amoeba ain’t showing up on the cover of GQ anytime soon. And any fantasies about doing so were dispelled 10 milliseconds after confronting that wall of mirrors. I just hope they survive the shock of receiving the photons reflected from my shape. I can’t pay any repair bills.
I suppose I should count my blessings. At least there’s not a mirror over my bed.
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 4 May 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
Written on a transcontinental flight. Posted from a San Francisco hotel room.
Trailers for sale or rent,
Rooms to let, 50 cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets –
I ain’t got no cigarettes;
Ah, but:
Two hours of pushing broom
Buys a eight-by-twelve four-bit room.
I’m a man of means by no means,
King of the road.
My father and mother grew up together during the Great Depression. And not on the sunny side of the street either. My mother wasn’t one of the children of the little old lady who lived in a shoe. But it was a near thing. Seven of them (I think she said it was seven) in a five-room two-story postage stamp, living on the $19 a week my grandfather made – and only during golf season, which in southeastern Massachusetts is six months.
My father’s father had passed away when Dad was five. Dad caddied at the country club to help make ends meet. Four hours, five miles, for 60 cents plus, if he was lucky or good, a dime tip. He would have been better off with the broom. But if he ever pushed one, he never told me about it. And he hated the road. Grew up in this town, lived all his life here, would die here and he didn’t care if he saw anything else, he’d already seen enough.
And so he did. Though his wife did drag him out on occasion. Like the time they travelled across the country to visit me in Seattle, while I was in graduate school. That must have taken a whole lot out of him.
When I caddied as a teenager in the 60s, the pay had gone up to $2.50 ($5 for doubles). I did it again as a graduate student in the 70s, the rate had gone up to $10 ($20). Now, the rate is $0. Most clubs no longer allow caddies.
Every once in a while, when I was like ten years old, I would rise at a ridiculous hour on a Saturday morning and join my dad at the country club. Not to play golf, but to make the course ready for those who did.
His duty, in the three hours between first light (5 AM) and the first tee time, was to set the cups on the greens. He would take a hole cutter (specially designed for the purpose), a hook to pull the metal lining of the old cup out of the ground, a watering can, and a bucket of dirt. He’d stow these things on the back of a tractor and drive from hole to hole, every time the same way. He’d get to a green, inspect it for a place where the grass more or less matched that where the old hole was and was suitable for play, drive the hole digger in the hole, pull out the plug, take it to the old hole, pull out the liner with the hook, plant the plug in the old hole, using the dirt bucket to make sure the plug was level with the rest of the green and using the watering can to settle it in, then drive the lining into the new hole.
He was good at it. Every once in awhile, he’d try to teach me. I wasn’t good at it. I couldn’t master a minimum-wage job. I keep telling people, that’s how come I got a Ph.D. Mostly, I got to pull the flag out of the old hole, and plant it in triumph into the new one. And, between holes, I would ride on the hood of the tractor and listen to my dad talk.
A favorite pastime of those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder is to bash those on the higher steps. My father did his share, though it was tempered by his generally cheerful nature. He was a peasant, knew it, and wanted it no different. He was singing Don’t worry, be happy three decades before it was a hit, and he hated the very thought of doing anything that might have made it a hit. To him, people with money talked to themselves, and on occasion put loaded pistols into their mouths. His brother was the superintendent of grounds at the country club, he benefited from that arrangement, and that was as close to running things as he wanted to get. Near-minimum wage was a fair price to pay for comfort. And he didn’t let his wife work until it was almost too late.
One pearl of his wisdom has stuck with me all these years. I don’t know if he made it up or just parroted it from somewhere else. But it pretty much sums up his attitude, and that of the men with whom he worked all of his life.
A man who’s short a million dollars eats in the best restaurants.
A man who’s short a nickel goes to jail.
I hope Dad ain’t lookin’ right now, ’cause if he is, he’s hatin’ my ass. I’m not short a million, but I’m short enough. And I’m in a five-star on San Fran’s Nob Hill. Yes, someone else is payin’. No, I can’t tell you about it. ‘Cept to say, there’s a reason I’m moving to Hawai’i. And it’s not to take pictures of dolls in grass skirts.
I haven’t ridden a long-haul bus in several years. But a peasant whose car has just died a miserable death has to get himself from Maine to Boston somehow. So I boarded a Trailways bus in Wiscasset, expecting to relive my cramped and smelly memories.
I knew something was amiss with that memory when the bus stopped in front of the corner market that doubled as the rural depot, and it kneeled to let me on. The seats were plush, there were snacks, and on the back a console for a personal sound system. Not to mention the video screens showing movies. And the thing didn’t smell of a thousand stale farts. Hell, it was almost pleasant. It sure ain’t your father’s Greyhound. Or third boxcar, midnight train.
I don’t always feel that way, and I sure as hell don’t deserve it, but I’ve been lucky. And maybe some of what my parents learned from the dirty end of the ladder got passed on to me after all. Sometimes, you just gotta know every handout in every town. And all the locks that ain’t locked when no one’s around. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
]]>King of the road …
Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 1 May 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
Awhile back, I got a comment on one of my blogs expressing surprise that I ate pizza. That comment surprised me. Like, as if pizza were beneath me – as opposed to inside me, which is where a good simple red-sauce pizza belongs. I mean, really. Just because I occasionally toss words like atrabiliousness into my posts is no reason to suspect me of panini addiction. Yes, yes, this amoeba is immortal, invincible, and leaps tall bacteria at a single bound. Naturally. But otherwise, I’m just like anyone else. And I can prove it.
I’m visiting my mother and sister on the eve of my move to Hawai’i. Last Saturday, my sister declares a play day. No more meetings, no more kooks, no more patient’s dirty looks. We’re going out. So we pile into the car and head to Cape Cod, and spend the day indulging in one of my sister’s favorite pastimes.
Miniature golf.
There is method in my sister’s madness. My mother is recovering from back surgery, and for the first time in too long, she’s able to join us in a round. That was and is a joy. And I was spared the joys of courses that make you knock balls into the mouths of clowns and through the vanes of spinning windmills.
But, as you probably know, no miniature golf course worth its price of admission just gives you a ball and a putter and Astroturf and leaves you alone. Oh no. You must have a theme. Props and gadgets and sound effects that squawk at you just as you’re lining up your thirty-foot bank shot around the rock formation.
Now, my mother and sister are Disney kind of people. They like nothing better than to surround themselves with the various themes of Disney World. And facsimiles thereof elsewhere. Me? I reckon that a corporation that pays its CEO a salary larger than the gross domestic product of Bangladesh doesn’t need any encouragement from yours truly. Especially the green folding kind of encouragement. But, it’s a play day. My mother and sister are who they are. And I might not see them again for awhile. For one day, I can put up with the props and gadgets and sound effects of the miniature golf courses of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
And, I swear, me hearties, 17 out of every 10 of the miniature golf courses within the city limits of Hyannis has a pirate theme. Arrr!
I suppose that makes sense, given the popularity of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Given that the gift shops associated with the golf courses can’t keep Captain Jack Sparrow hats in stock – and this is the slow season, more than a month before Memorial Day and the first big surge of tourists to Cape Cod. Well, it’s supposed to be a big surge. Assuming anybody can make it to Cape Cod this year after running the gauntlet of one-armed pirates flying the death’s-head flags of Gulf, Citgo, BP, Exxon/Mobil …
But I have to feel sorry for the workers who have to put up with the same canned pirate captain’s command (“Fire at Will!”) every five minutes, all day every day. Not to mention the wiseguys on the course who yell back, I’m sure a half-dozen times an hour, “Which one’s Will?” By the tenth iteration, I was ready to destroy the power grid of southeastern New England if it would only silence that bloody tape.
After a day of hearing every cliché in the pirate canon except Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum (and I can’t imagine how I could have missed it), I was not surprised to find a book about pirates in the house, a recent reprint of Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly, first published in 1996. When I mentioned it to my sister, I discovered that she had found it unrewarding, and stopped reading.
I soon found out why. I reckon she had been expecting Cordingly to present novelesque narratives of the pirates of history. Especially those pirates active in the Caribbean during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the buccaneers of the so-called Great Age of Piracy from whom most of the romanticized outlaws of fiction have sprung: Long John Silver, Conrad, Hook, Jack Sparrow.
Alas, writes Cordingly, the sober historian finds no data to permit the spinning of such narratives, even for the most notorious captains such as Sir Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and William Kidd. Cordingly arranges the scant facts according to themes, not chronology or biography. From him, I learned what I already suspected. That the lives of real pirates were short on glamor, romance, and time, and long on brutality and violence. That the men and women who sailed under the Jolly Roger were neither noble rebels nor cartoon villains; they were terrorists.
What I had not previously known was the organization of the terrorist organization known as a pirate vessel. Each voyage was conducted under a set of written articles, signed (willy-nilly) by every member of the crew. Each signer was then entitled to vote on all matters relevant to the craft and its maintenance. The crew voted in the captain (and not infrequently voted him out), the cruise route, the rations, codes of behavior and the punishment for violations of same, the distribution of plunder, and the compensation due those injured.
In other words, at a time in the history of the world when most governments were headed by absolute monarchs, these ocean-going vessels represented the planet’s most able and active democracies, embodying liberty, fraternity and brotherhood a century before the American and French revolutions. Democracies of violent men, which existed solely for the sake of plunder, for the unrepentant robbery of the wealth of others.
In other news, the American armed forces reported four more dead in Baghdad today.
]]>OC and Quilly are taking a vacation from Hawai‘i – yes, yes, we know, we know – and are spending some time back on our other island home, in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, and at various other locations in mainland USA. In this space, miscellaneous impressions of our first significant travel since the onset of COVID, almost exactly two years ago as this is written.
One of the tools that OC has used, to keep tabs on things in the San Juan Islands while in Hawai‘i, is the “Travel Alerts Bulletin” page of the Washington State Ferries (WSF) website – the activities, or lack thereof, of WSF being a key component of life in Friday Harbor, there being few other ways to get on, or off, the island. It’s been high on the list of “somethings else” that he has been in the habit of doing instead of what he was supposed to be doing.
Now that he and Quilly are on San Juan Island, following the WSF Travel Alerts is a thing, not a procrastination tool. Not least because, thanks to COVID and its economic and social fallout, the ferry system is running fewer boats and fewer sailings – and, a lot of the time, can’t even keep up with the reduced schedule. Which brings weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth from afflicted citizens who, in their next breath, demand that somebody do something about global warming – other than stopping the exhaust from the ferry that they were supposed to be on.
Which is how come OC was on the Travel Alerts webpage early one fine morning to discover that the first ferry run to Friday Harbor had been cancelled.
To bring fire-fighting crews to Friday Harbor.
That got OC’s attention. “Fire!” is a word that grabs the attention of every resident of the San Juan Islands generally, and the town of Friday Harbor in particular. The San Juan Islands are small islands, with limited options for leaving in an emergency. Small islands with big forests. Big conifer forests. During the summer months especially, big dry conifer forests. Big wildfire in a mainland forest is a calamity. Big wildfire in a San Juan Island forest is an existential crisis. And every islander knows it.
So where the [deleted] is the fire?
The answer was soon forthcoming, via social media. The fire was not in a forest, but in Friday Harbor’s town center.
A town center of crowded wooden buildings, some of them dating to the early 19th century. Historic and quaint and memorable and, um, fire code? What fire code?!? OC’s thoughts quickly flashed back to when one of the two grocery stores in town burned to the ground in 2002, and was never replaced. The other one was/is right across the street. “Gonna be a whole lot of hungry people if that’s what’s burning now”.
It was soon revealed that the fire was one block away from the food market. By the time the last ember was quenched, some twelve hours after the first alarm was sounded, the blaze had extinguished a kayak rental establishment, a real estate office (in the town’s oldest building), a coffee shop.
And Herb’s Tavern. The town’s one watering hole since 1946. A hole in the ground since 7 April 2022. “We will rebuild”, proclaims the owner, and rebuilding will probably happen. But new structures don’t often conserve old memories, which can be a shame.
Or it can be just as well.
In 1975, when OC first stepped foot in Friday Harbor, Herb’s Tavern could be a dodgy place to be. OC was teetotal at the time (no longer strictly true), and seriously risk-averse (still, alas, very true), so he never set foot in the place during the 1970s. But he heard stories. Especially about fights between the townspeople and the Labbies, students at the marine biological field station of the University of Washington. The Friday Harbor Laboratories are older than Herb’s Tavern, but not by a whole lot. And the original site of the “Puget Sound Biological Station” was just south of town, next to the salmon cannery that, in 1975, still stood on the town dock.
Abandoned.
Friday Harbor in 1975 was a town in transition, and not too happy about it. For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the San Juan Islanders made their livings by farming and fishing. Crops grown in the islands supplied the marketplaces of Seattle for decades. Then, in the 1930s, the great dams appeared on the Columbia River, opening eastern Washington to agriculture. The small farms, orchards, and ranches on the islands were quickly buried by cheap produce from the irrigated plains on the other side of the Cascades.
Oh well, there was still fishing.
But the mainstay, the salmon fishery, was shrinking. More and more effort was needed to catch what, already in the 1960s, was fewer and fewer fish.
And then, in 1974, the US Government decided that the massive effort was in violation of 19th century treaties with the first peoples of the Pacific Northwest of the USA. At the stroke of a judge’s pen, the share of the available catch allocated to non-“Indian” fish catchers was 
reduced from the de facto 90% to the de jure 50%. Which, despite lawsuits and physical violence, was stringently and effectively enforced by federal agents, who ensured compliance when state agents could, or would, not.
Abruptly, fishing had joined farming as a way to not make a living in the San Juan Islands. And here come these prissy clueless kids from the goddamned Labs who could afford to sit around and play with starfish while the banks were foreclosing on everything that real people owned.
No wonder there were fights. No wonder we still have Donald Trump.
As Friday Harbor and the San Juan Islands slowly pivoted to the only remaining profitable option – tourism – there were efforts to open a tavern to compete with the old-timers holdout, Herb’s. In 1977, the new place was called the “Electric Company”. It was located down the street from (and within sight of) Herb’s, and closer to the ferry landing. It lasted a few years, then closed. A succession of taverns, restaurants, and other businesses followed. The site is currently occupied by an eatery plus bike rental shop that appears to be a cheap imitation of a cheap Hawaiian barbecue chain, open Fridays through Mondays, presumably to catch the unwary tourist crowd waiting for ferry boats that may or may not show up on time, or at all. OC has never seen anyone in there, and he doubts that it will last long.
Herb’s itself changed with the times. OC and Quilly had visited, with friends, during their residency in Friday Harbor a decade ago, and found the pub food good, the people friendly and not inclined to pick fights.
OC has been told that the new owners had cleaned up the place considerably, possibly (for example) removing the decades of cigarette smoke buildup on the wood paneling around the bar and the pool table.
Only to have the whole place go up in smoke.
“We will rebuild”. OC supposes that there could be no better day than Easter Sunday to reflect on resurrection.
And perhaps no place more likely than a watering hole to experience resurrection. With popular acclaim. Even from prissy clueless Labbies.
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 17 April 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
I came across this quote this morning. It struck me with great force, in the context of today’s word at Waking Ambrose and my own present “hole in the world” state of mind.
It’s the final speech from the 1940 movie The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin. In which a Jewish barber is mistaken for Adenoid Hynkel, the Leader of Tomainia. The barber, as “Hynkel”, is making a speech over the radio. If the words sound all too applicable to 2007, well, I can’t help that.
[“Oh, poor baby! You thought you had such problems in 2007! We so feel for you!” Sincerely, Great Recession v.1, 2008 / The Donald Trump Presidency, 2017 / SARS-CoV-2 + Great Recession v.2, 2020 / The Invasion of Ukraine, 2022 – Ed.’s Note]
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
“The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
“More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
“The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
“To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
“Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.
“Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men!
“In you!
“You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
“Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security.
“By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people.
“Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.”
]]>[Filming for “The Great Dictator” began in September 1939, at about the same time as the Nazi – Soviet conquest of Poland. Filming was completed six months later, around March 1940. The Nazi conquest of western Europe began in May and was completed by July. The film was released to USA audiences in October. Its farcical treatment of Hitler and Mussolini, and its
naiverousing final speech, resonated in a USA that was then still neutral in WW2, and with USA audiences that were aloof from, if not dismissive of, the unfolding catastrophe, not to mention holocaust, that was Nazi rule. For those under that rule, it would have been a wtf moment – if they had been allowed to see it. Which, of course, they were not. – Ed.’s Note]
Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 16 April 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
I’m sitting here stunned at the news of 33 dead and more wounded in the shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (more commonly known as Virginia Tech). I didn’t get the news right away; the Tax Day Nor’easter of 2007 came through eastern Massachusetts (where I’m hanging out at present) last night with howling winds, and it took out our power. It was only when it was restored, close to noon Eastern Daylight Time today (16 April 2007), that our concerns about toppled trees and flooded basements were trumped by the echoes from flying bullets.The news of the worst disaster of this type in US history is bad enough. But it’s that much worse when you’ve spent your entire adult life in academia. Dammit, I have friends and colleagues there! I figured that they’d be out of harm’s way; botanists don’t usually hang out in buildings devoted primarily to Engineering. Then I read that one of the dead is a professor of German, whose class had been booked into a lecture hall in that engineering building. They have not yet released the names of the hit. “Pending notification of next of kin”. I just hope I don’t get an email, or a listserve posting …
As I write this, I am watching a news conference in which the campus police chief and university president are getting a toasting over their apparently slow response times to the events of the day. To listen to the critics, police should have instantly notified everybody, and both shut down and locked down the campus. That way, fewer people would have died, they said. We would have Security.
Yeah right. Perhaps if we had the police state some of us feel we should have in Amerika right now. But for those of us whose memories actually extend back to the facts of Kent State University in 1970, there’s a bitter irony to this message.
Ever since the Morrill Act of 1862, public universities have proliferated in these United States, out of the abstruse notion that education was actually good for something. (Virginia Tech is one of the 106 Land Grant colleges and universities that were made possible by the Morrill Act.) Not just education, but education that was independent of outside influences.
The benefits of a free exchange of information and ideas among academic types was given a further boost during World War II, when such exchanges produced superior technologies faster than a foe (Nazi Germany) that initially had the lead in them, but did not encourage collaboration among its research and development teams.
The concept of a public university as a place for politically unfettered intellectual activity received a severe challenge during the 1960s, when campus lifestyles underwent a drastic change, from the voluntarily adopted lockstep of the Cold War era to the hippie counterculture of the Vietnam Era. Increasing levels of campus-based protest against US Government policies led to increasing levels of US Government intervention in campus affairs. Including incursions, real and imagined, by local police, state police, FBI agents, CIA agents, and even National Guard troops to curb the activities of recalcitrant students and faculty alike.
Some of us still remember when the attempts to curb campus-based anti-Vietnam War protest culminated in the deaths of four students at Kent State University on 4 May 1970, shot by nervous Ohio National Guard troops. Some of us still remember the strikes and protest marches that resulted from this episode. Some of us still remember Neil Young’s protest song.
Maybe fewer of us remember the longer-term effect of all this, at least, the effect that I have seen, and, being personally interested, kept some track of, though not in an “academic” sense with footnotes and all that – a renewed, concerted effort by the colleges and universities to “keep the pigs off campus”.
Most of the American universities with which I have been associated, in one way or another, have their own security forces. Sometimes, they even call them “police”, and they have their own badges, uniforms, squad cars, all that. They are there so that the campus can announce to the rest of the community, “What happens in Vegas on campus stays on campus. If we need help, we’ll holler. Unless and until that happens, keep out.” It’s a way to erect, and keep, a barrier between the (supposed) intellectual fervor of the university setting and the (potentially) suppressive coercion of political interests. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a great idea. In principle.
Until there’s a calamity. Like the shootings at Virginia Tech.
I do not know any of the details of the Virginia Tech campus security forces. How many people they have, what the nature of their equipment is, what their procedures for dealing with crises are, what their relationships are with local and state police, or the FBI, or whatever. But given the generally sedate nature of most university campuses, where (I reckon) the usual activities are parking enforcement, traffic control, and breaking up drunken brawls after football games, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that they are totally understaffed and underfunded to tackle a crisis of this type and magnitude.
Besides, it takes time and practice to coordinate a community-wide response to a major emergency. At any time of the day. Never mind the Monday morning rush hour. Especially, it takes practice. And I can’t even remember the last time I participated in a fire drill in a university building. Probably because the administrators got sick of handling the hate mail from students and staff who were hacked off at the interruption to their activities.
The university campus remains today the most free community remaining in our supposedly free American society. The only real restriction to access is finding a parking place. Doors are usually open; when doors are chained shut, as apparently some were at Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, they’re chained to control student movements for the convenience of custodians, or in the name of some energy-saving initiative. You don’t need an appointment to meet a professor; he probably would forget the appointment if you made one. Dorm proctors are as extinct as the Happy Days the Fonz used to inhabit. Which is just as well, because the comportment of most of today’s students would have sent the Miss Groby’s of that era into apoplexy – and into demands for permanent lockdowns. Demands that, in 1956, might well have been honored.
Our universities have proliferated. And they have grown, mightily. So have their fees. That fact alone has stifled much intellectual fervor. As I learned in Berkeley last year, hippie philosophy has a hard time surviving where house lots are selling for a million bucks. And it has piled stress on stress on those who remain. Stress that the absence of Miss Groby’s strict social codes has a harder and harder time containing.
Any police detective should be able to tell you what that adds up to. Motive. And opportunity. Maybe we should be counting our blessings that we haven’t already had a dozen Virginia Tech massacres. Maybe we should be wondering what to do to ensure that we don’t invite a whole lot more. Without inviting the pigs back on campus, to do their bit in the name of Homeland Security. Which I’m sure Our Beloved Administration would just love the chance to do. We wouldn’t be hearing anything more about that blessedly inconvenient global warming, now would we …
The other night, I sat up with my sister, whom I might not see again for awhile (Hawai’i is a long way away from Massachusetts) watching the DVD of the Farewell 1 Tour by the Eagles. I was particularly affected by their September 11th tribute song. Little did I suspect to what other circumstances the song could be applied. Or how soon I (we?) would be applying them.
There’s a hole in the world tonight …
– O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.
OC and Quilly are taking a vacation from Hawai‘i – yes, yes, we know, we know – and are spending some time back on our other island home, in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, and at various other locations in mainland USA. In this space, miscellaneous impressions of our first significant travel since the onset of COVID, almost exactly two years ago as this is written.
“May we sit here?”
Quilly and I were planted on a bench at the departure gate, waiting for the Eskimo Airline’s overnight flight to Seattle from Kona. We had been watching as an elderly, portly gentleman with a full, dingy-white beard, and his all-black, middle-sized service dog, contended with two pre-teen boys in shark pajamas, over whom their mother, a far taller and heavier woman than seemed to belong to the boys, conducted indolent supervision.
As the boys lost interest and started to move away, the gentleman noticed the empty space on the bench between us and a skinny twenty-something male, and asked if he and the dog could fill it. We said yes. The twenty-something moved away. The dog, gently, buried its nose in my mid-section, grateful for scratches behind the ears, and then took up station on the floor in front of his master.
The man did not introduce himself, but did introduce the dog, Robert. “A better airline passenger than many people”, he told us, quoting airline flight attendants. We thought this likely, given how well Robert had coped with the sharks.
It soon became apparent just how much practice Robert had at being a good passenger. For the man, on this occasion, was departing his home in Hawai‘i for Seattle, then straight on to see family in Houston (“they can’t say ‘no'”), and, when that was done, on to his permanent home in Alaska, which he would be happy to see again after winter had finished with it. That was this year … He had a successful business in Alaska, the man said, and he spent some time in his travels pursuing leads and connections, but a son was running the business in his absence, and was, the man asserted, happy that his father was doing the traveling, for “he had earned it.” We began to wonder how come Robert, the dog, didn’t have stickers stuck to his flanks, like a well-traveled suitcase.
A young man walked by. The back of his shirt proclaimed allegiance to ‘Quartz Lake‘. “Just outside of Fairbanks”, the man commented … and then disclosed his puzzlement at how little traveling folks do in Hawai‘i. How he made the circuit from Kona to Hilo via Waimea twice in three days, one time, and got the response from acquaintances, “why would you do that?”
The distance from Fairbanks to Quartz Lake turns out to be around 80 miles – which is about how far Hilo is from Kona. Of course, one can drive one hell of a lot further in Alaska without spinning in circles, or needing an amphibious car, than one can in Hawai‘i. The man understood that, but did not understand how anyone could be content with that. He would have been astounded by Quilly’s experience with a young woman in a small Utah town who, when Quilly asked her how to get out of that town, responded “I don’t know, I’ve never left.”
Abruptly, the man gasped. Robert came to attention. The moment soon passed, and the dog relaxed. His master explained. “Robert is here to help me cope with my emotions, to help settle me down when I need it. Or otherwise, I can be ugly company. And I hate hot flashes!”
“You too?” Quilly exclaimed.
It turned out that both Quilly and Robert’s master were suffering hot flashes due to medications, an estrogen blocker in her case, a testosterone blocker in his. “And they’re making me take these pills every day for the next ten years!“, Quilly complained.
His physicians had given the man from Alaska three years.
The man and his dog sat in the seats directly behind us during the flight to Seattle. As promised, Robert was an exemplary passenger. Only once, as we were all disembarking, did the dog display any emotion, any need to get out of there.
“He probably has to go shi-shi”, the man explained.
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 1 March 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
In the middle part of the 1970s, just about when I started my Ph.D. education, the bottom dropped out of the market for scientists.
In the late 50s and 60s, in the years after Sputnik, a Ph.D. in the sciences was a magic talisman. Graduates were being snapped up by universities as fast as they could be robed. Research funds, though never plentiful, still were relatively easy to get, and a single award could build you a nice laboratory and get a whole lot of work done. Not to mention large buckets of brownie points with university administrators.
Then came Vietnam and its aftermath. And the Golden Fleece Awards. Science came to be seen as just another tool of The Man. And besides, there was this nasty little thing called the Law of Supply and Demand. The schools had become too good at churning out scientists. Now, there were simply too many of us running around.
This was when Ph.D. programs started getting longer. From three years to four. Five. Six. Seven. Ten. I’m not making this up, Dave. When the stipends for teaching and research assistantships started shrinking. And when the phenomenon of the “postdoctoral fellow” appeared on the academic horizon.
Postdocs. The itinerant preachers of the sciences, willing to work long hours for janitorial wages in the hopes that the resulting slew of research papers with our names on them might at last win for us the coveted, and increasingly inaccessible, title of Assistant Professor.
Anywhere.
Gone were the dreams of a four-year doctoral dissertation followed by a choice job at the University of California at Berkeley. Now, six years in the Ph.D. and four more as a postdoc might win you a job at an obscure Baha’i college in North Dakota, teaching courses completely unrelated to your research.
And we were caught. Our choices were made before the laws of economics put the hammer down on us. We could skulk off in disappointment or follow our dreams to the bitter end. Most of us stayed. We would joke among ourselves that, if people we knew were going through a bad stretch, they were suffering “a fate worse than graduate school”.
We would travel from laboratory to laboratory, meeting to meeting, giving seminars, talking with people, presenting our scholarly wares, telling ourselves that we were knights on the vanguard of the public good when what we were really doing was selling ourselves like any deodorant commercial.
And then one day, as a bunch of us were traveling in a crowded car to yet another scientific meeting, a Bob Seger song came on the radio.
And I said, “That’s us!” And I rewrote the lyrics to reflect the experiences of a stressed-out science graduate student on the road to that Baha’i college in North Dakota. If fortune favored.
I heard that song again on the radio in my car the other day. As I was waiting on news that would decide whether I would, once again, be on that highway. Giving seminars, talking with people, presenting my scholarly wares, selling myself like any deodorant commercial. Whether I would be returning to the days when I first heard that song, and adapted the lyrics to those who feared fates worse than graduate school …
]]>On a sun-baked superhighway on the Indiana plain,
The heat bedews your body and the engine rocks your brain,
You rehearse your presentation and its concluding refrain.You find yourself reviewing all the costs that lie ahead,
For the meeting’s registration fee and dormitory bed,
You fear that you’ve not done enough to stay out of the red.Well here I am, on the podium,
Here I am, up on the stage,
Here I go, playing the brain again,
There I go. Turn the page.Well you walk into the meeting hall, looking for a friend,
But they’re all in the practice rooms with no time they can lend,
The strangers greet each other: “Do you remember when …?”Mostly they don’t notice you. Sometimes though they do,
“I’d love to stay and talk, but George’s paper’s in a few”.
Your own’s not ’til tomorrow; you wish that it was through.Well here I am, on the podium,
Here I am, up on the stage,
Here I go, playing the brain again,
There I go. Turn the page.When you speak you cannot tell if they’re asleep or they’re awake,
If they’re paying any heed to all the points that you must make,
You pour out your wit and energy, hoping something takes.In the small hours of the morning, you sit beside your bed,
With the clamor of the cash-bar party ringing in your head;
You save the day’s last paragraph, remembering what you said.Well here I am, on the podium,
Here I am, up on the stage,
Here I go, playing the brain again,
There I go. Turn the page.
He and She had just finished their Sunday morning bacon and eggs …
She: “Lovely breakfast, love.”
He: “Glad you liked it.”
She: “I did. But …”
He: “But what?”
She: “I’m supposed to be getting more plant protein! And …”
He: “So I didn’t give you enough bacon.”
She: “Never enough! But that’s not what I meant.”
He: [sigh] “How long we stay Hawai‘i?”
She: “A long time now.”
He: “But we’re still not counted as Hawaiian?”
She: “Well …”
He: “Fine. We’ll get you your plant protein and up our cred with the locals. We’re stocking up on Spam. In case lots. If that’s not Hawaiian, what is?”
She: “That’s not plant protein!”
He: “Half a million people say you’re wrong.”
She: “None of those half million people is my nutritionalist! She and her M.D. want me to get most if not all of my protein from plants!”
He: “And where else did your bacon come from this morning? I didn’t exactly go fishing for it …”
She: “Plants with flowers! Not plants with production lines!”
He: “Now She tells me. You want these then. Plants with flowers passed through plants with production lines. Got you covered both ways!”
She: “Yes, dear. Not. They don’t have protein. They have carbs!”
He: “Silly me, I forgot about the war on carbs. Even cars don’t have carbs any more. And I suppose the Gen Z’ers will have to do a websearch on them.”
She: “I’m still looking for my protein.”
He: “So where does your M.D. think it should be coming from? And do I wish to know?”
She: “Beans.”
He: “[…] That kind of leaves me a little flat, y’know.”
She: “You’re just going to have to get used to tooting something other than your trumpet.”
Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 13 February 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
The scientist stood at the edge of the beach, letting the cold waves that rolled in from the west on this summer afternoon lap at his feet and drape his hip waders with the seaweeds.
They called the place Moss Beach, but that wouldn’t help anyone who might have been looking for him. There are dozens of places called “Moss Beach” on the California coast, where the surf rips the marine plants off their underwater moorings and toys with them as the cat toys with the mouse, now throwing them up onto the beach in great windrows, now drawing them into the surging waters, back and forth and back again until the tattered, battered remnants finally decay and settle into the sand. These pawns of Neptune are “the drift”, the “moss” of a Moss Beach.
To the locals, the drift is mostly a nuisance. To him, it had been a treasure house. To him, and to the scientists who had come before him, who had been coming to this spot since the middle years of the 19th century to walk among the wreckage of the plants and try to understand from these castings the saltwater forests and meadows from whence they came. He had come to stand where his predecessors had stood; to learn what they had learned and, as it was given to him, to add to what they had known.
He remembered the first time, when a greenhorn stood among the piles of drift, fascinated and a little overwhelmed. Now he passed among the waves and the weeds with the easy familiarity of a graybeard among old friends. Except that it was not so easy. He would be leaving soon. The times were changing. He was changing. He did not know when, or if, or how, he would be back.
He picked up seaweeds from the pile, one at a time. He had long ago mastered the art of recognizing the fresh ones, the ones newly cast upon the shore, the ones who had not yet forgotten their stories in the torture of the surf.
As he had mastered the art of remembering their names, and he recited in his mind the name of each one as it came into his hand. None of the seaweeds had common names; they weren’t common enough. They were just “moss” to most people. If they weren’t “shit”. They just had the long names. The fancy ones. The hidden passwords and secret handshakes of the fraternity of the students of the sea. Those who saw only “moss” would be astounded to find out how many names there were, just how many different things made up this forest.
Gracilaria … oh hell, he couldn’t tell them apart. Without DNA, no one could.
“Did Cicero say anything?”
“Ay, he spoke Greek.”
“To what effect?”
“Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.”
Callo-. Beautiful. Phyllis. Leaf. Carpus. Fruit. Rhynchus. Nose. How could a beautiful leaf have nosy fruits on it? There were no noses on the plant in his hand. It glistened pink and papery smooth. It wasn’t time for fruits. It was part of the mystery. Birth. Growth. Reproduction. Aging. Parting. Damn.
He had done too damned much parting in his life of chasing knowledge, pursuing the funds for the chase, the jobs that would put a roof over his head for the chase. Place had followed place until his head was filled with fragments of half-remembered things and people. He wondered what would happen to his memories of, and connections to, California.
The herbarium with its long rows of cases full of century-old dried plant specimens, with curators to match.
The fancy church with the brand-new pipe organ inside, and the destitute, pushing their lives around in shopping carts, outside.
The million-dollar postage stamps that pass for homes in Berkeley, along streets lined with trees that can’t figure out what time of year to drop their leaves.
The Jewish mother and her two just-grown Mexican sons, squabbling. Pickalittle tugalittle scrapealittle nipalittle cheep cheep cheep pickalittle pickalittlemore ….
The geriatric cats. Cabin Cruiser, the formerly fat one, now weighed less than the injured Hobbles, for a reason no one could figure out. The scientist wondered how much longer he would be around to beg to sit in a human’s arms – his own arms – and have his belly rubbed. Or whether he would find out about it when “much longer” became “no more.” He thought he knew. Been there, done that. After all, he would be no more as far as that place was concerned. Someone else would have the room he had lived in, the office in which he had worked, and of necessity that person would get the attention. There’s a new kid in town. Turn the page.
“This too shall pass”. He had heard that line over and over from adults in his youth. And they had been right. His life was now full of things that had passed. They had passed into the fog that he could see hovering on the Pacific horizon, the fog that was waiting on the summer California night so it could come in on its cat’s feet and blot out the landscape. Not many of those things had ever reappeared out of that fog. They had drifted off. Or he had. He had thought, hoped, that he would be more anchored. Or they would. But things hadn’t worked out that way. And now, an increasing number of those drifted parts of his life were beyond all returning.
The Callophyllis was beginning to bleach in his hand. This happened to seaweeds that were stripped off the seabed and cast on to the shore, to be picked up by children and tourists and scientists who held them up to the air and the sun and started them off on the road to becoming decayed particles that settled into the sand. He dropped the plant into a tidepool, a little rock-walled thing that jutted out from a rocky promontory next to the beach onto the beach itself. It was connected to the ocean by a narrow channel. For a while, the pink bundle floated on the tidepool’s surface, slowly rocking back and forth with the small surges that came in through the channel and sloshed the tidepool’s water gently around. Then a wave breached the rockwall, and for a few moments everything was a roar and a boiling foam.
When the clamor subsided, the Callophyllis, the beautiful leaf, was gone.
]]>Originally posted by O Ceallaigh on the discontinued blog Felloffatruck Publications, 9 February 2007. Reposted here, with updates, in support of a retrospective currently ongoing at the Dude & Dude site.
I’m driving in my car this afternoon, returning to work from the house in Damariscotta Mills. I had to drive up there to stoke the wood stove (the place doesn’t have any other major source of heat yet, and my housemate was called to a family funeral halfway across the country) and retrieve the bag of stuff I left there this morning. Including my glasses. So much for my plans to get work done in the morning.
The radio is on, and tuned to MPBN, which is running public affairs programming. Everything else on the radio at this hour is either boring or disgusting, so I hang with the public affairs. Including a show from the BBC World Service, on what they’re calling Generation Next – persons coming of age in this first decade of the 21st century. Naturally, the program first aired on the World Service during the first week of December last year. We’re getting it late. Whatever. This is Maine. We should probably be grateful we’re getting it at all.
But the program’s premise got my attention. “Like, the age of majority is too old, man. Don’t tell me I have to wait until I’m 18 to vote when I can go to jail as an adult at 13. And waiting until I’m 21 to drink alcohol legally just sucks. Stop the hypocrisy already!”
Did that ever bring back memories.
“We can get drafted at 18. We can go to Vietnam at 18. We can die in a jungle for The Man at 18. Dammit, we’ll burn your town down until we get the right to vote at 18!!”
We got it.
We also got the right to drink at 18. In Maine, it lasted, I think, maybe four or five years, from about 1970 to 1975. Just long enough for the authorities to figure out that the main result of the change was to dredge a river of beer from the 18-year-olds to the 14-year-olds. Hell, the carnies from town all clustered around the convenience store next to my college campus, waiting for the boys from my dorm to buy for them. So much for the “maturity” of the new voters of 1972. The drinking age was rolled back to 21 faster than you can say “Card that kid!” And there were plenty of people arguing for the age to be rolled up to, like, 25.
(Incidentally, they still had “mens” and “womens” dorms at my school back then – though the designations were mostly honored in the breach.)
So why are we doing this all over again? Why all this talk about pushing the age of majority down? I mean, Nelson Mandela wanted the age of majority in South Africa to be fifteen!
Of course, one could also ask, “How come the age of majority got pushed up so high in the first place?” After all, once upon a time, “majority” was all about biology. Puberty meant adulthood, and adulthood meant puberty. Clean, neat, simple. That’s why the Jewish Bar Mitzvah is celebrated at age 13. The Christian rite of Confirmation used to be celebrated at about the same age.
[It also meant that you survived childhood, which half of those with the same birth year as you did not. And, since the risk of death by combat, or childbirth, while still high, was orders of magnitude lower than that of death by childhood disease, it meant that it made economic sense to educate you. Just in time to enlist you in the war machine, or the brood stock.]
I still get insanely jealous when I read of 19th century American historical figures like William Walker and George McClellan graduating from college before they were 20 (in Walker’s case, when he was flippin’ fourteen, for God’s sake). I would have killed for the right to skip grades and get school over early! It was never allowed. What happened?
Well, I have some thoughts. To research the thoughts would stretch this post into next week. I don’t have the time, you don’t likely have the patience. So you get the bulleted version, and you can shoot me for it if you like.
1. Technology. The theory goes that, as machines have multiplied since the Industrial Revolution, both they and the society that has evolved around them have become more complex, and the complexities take more time to learn. Couple this with the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution, which gives families the resources to nurture children rather than throw them into the economic breach, and you get “the emergence of childhood as a stage of life”. Not to mention its prolongation.
2. Longevity. As humans have become more long-lived, and healthier longer into their lives, they remain productive longer. Have incentive to retain positions of power and influence longer. And all those ratty kids are threats to the stations of the elders. The longer they stay kids …
I vividly remember meeting a Japanese colleague at a meeting back in 1987 (I think it was). He greeted me with effusive congratulations on my exalted station in life. I was 34 and had been a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in a New Zealand university for the preceding two years – and I thought this was a terribly slow progression, reflecting badly on my person and skills. I responded that he surely was younger (not to mention smarter and more industrious) than I, and would soon come into his own position.
His reply knocked me down. Because of the hierarchical nature of Japanese academic positions, he had to wait for someone to die before he could attain a position equivalent to mine. Since Japanese academics tended to live until they were like 90, this could be a long wait. And my colleague was already 44. (He is now a famous university professor in Japan.)
3. Demographics. We can’t forget that today’s world, at least in the industrialized nations, is dominated by those dreaded Baby Boomers. Who have had every incentive to keep kids kids, lest they actually compete for the positions that the Boomers sacked campuses and burned draft cards to secure for themselves.
Except that now those Boomers are starting to retire. And are going to need somebody to keep working to pay all those juicy benefits that they have secured for themselves.
So now it’s OK to let the young people talk about reaching the age of majority sooner. The Boomers are going to need all those bodies making money for them. The earlier they get to work the better …
At the very end of the BBC program, host Robin Lustig asked members of Generation Next how they thought they would govern when it came to be their turn to be in power. “Oh, more environmentally friendly”, came the response.
Really? And this is different from the 1970s how? Didn’t the Boomers promise peace, love, and the Whole Earth Catalog? That there would never again be an Iraq a Vietnam?
Robin Lustig, BBC, allow me to introduce you to Pete Townsend, of the rock band The Who. You may recall the last line of one of his most famous songs:
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