“Then when you graduate
You take a look around and you say “Hey wait!”
This is the same as where I just came from
I thought it was over, aw that’s just great.
…
Seen it all before
I want my money back!”
-Bowling for Soup, “High School Never Ends”

Early in our senior year of high school, my friends and I designed a T-shirt as part of the contest to design the official class shirt for the Class of ‘98. We were not the “in” crowd; we were the guys who played chess in the commons. In the style of a popular series of T-shirts of the day, our design submission theme was “Co-Ed Naked Albuquerque Academy: We Have to Pay for It”.

It is thus not surprising, perhaps, that I am just hours from paying $35 for appetizers and access to a cash bar with a collection of my high school classmates.

The T-shirts never got printed. Not because our design didn’t win the contest, but because the Academy wouldn’t allow such a controversial design to carry the noble school’s official sanction. We actually won the contest vote twice - first in a primary landslide, and then in a secondary run-off with the Academy faculty making it very clear that our design was still eligible to win, but would not be printed or sold by the school if it did win. It won anyway, and no one got a class shirt that year because we didn’t want to finance our lark of a design.

I often describe Albuquerque Academy as a school in the middle of the West trying desperately hard to be an elite New England prep school, without the boarding and the uniforms. There is no dearth of ridiculous description of the Academy - we called the cafeteria a “dining hall” and had assigned seating with ten students and a faculty “table head” (to facilitate appropriate mealtime discussion) per table, plus assigned student “waiters” on a half-quarterly rotating basis who brought out the family style meals. We were dominant in every realm of pretension and pomposity, garnering sour looks from any non-Academites who we gulpingly admitted our alma mater to. My time at the Academy was single-handedly responsible for my flat refusal to apply to any Ivy League colleges, weary as I was of wealth, class, and elitism.

And yet my years at the Academy were predominantly fabulous. I made most of my most enduring lifelong friends there. I learned how to debate. I wrote and read and even felt academically challenged once in a while. I started dating. I became a vegetarian, started growing my hair out, became outspoken and dramatic. I spent five years there, a personal record by more than double at a single school to that point. I attended until the end of the prescribed term, a first in fifteen years of attending educational institutions.

There were horrors there too. One in particular comes to mind, but there were others. The antagonism that only adolescents can offer other human beings. Unmotivated teachers whose only offered challenge was to see how much one could get away with on their watch. Ultimate frisbee.

Tonight, I revisit ten years of history, or really sixteen since that day in August 1993 when I was one of two new kids in an eighth-grade class pushing 150 students. My parents, full of hope that I had finally found an academic home, exchanged looks of grave concern as I broke out into open weeping in the restaurant where we dined after they picked me up. Sobbing in the aftermath, I wasn’t sure that I could face returning for even a second day to this foreboding brick wall of insular classism.

I wish I could tell that near-hyperventilating young man about the ten-year reunion he would voluntarily attend 193 months thereafter.

The question seems to have arisen of late as to why I am going. My parents took it for granted that I would go; most others assumed just as strongly that I would not. Far too much of my willingness to attend hinged on the prisoner’s-dilemma reservation tracking website and how a few particular battleships navigated the seas of Yes, Maybe, and No. An early perception that many of my old crew, my lifelong friends, would be attending was erased after I had locked in a ticket. In the end, there were too many people I wanted to see to pass up the chance. It was really as simple as that.

Then, with some of my friends dropping out in every direction, Emily and I saw the film “American Teen”. While not the most brilliant movie of any kind, it captured most viscerally and profoundly the essence of being high-school aged in America in my generation. While I admittedly didn’t recognize the abundant text-messaging from my own days, everything else was the same. The raw emotional force of each day, each interaction, each second of life, unmatched before or since, is so well portrayed in this movie that it actually makes one feel 17 upon exit. When one comes to one’s senses, the only remaining feeling is a crisp, pristine relief that one is not only not 17, but never has to live through being so again in this lifetime.

Thus, I’m still riding out the excitement of that movie, of a handful of people about whom I am genuinely interested and curious (yes, both), of a few long-term friends who it will be good to see in our old hometown outside of winter. I feel certain that I will have changed less than almost anyone. I still think of myself as approximately 20… and now I even look like I did back then (perhaps with longer hair). I’m sure at least one person will call me out for having stayed in the United States despite promising my junior year history class that I would leave in disgust shortly after graduating college. I’m sure at least one person will ask me where the old ‘51 Buick is. I’m sure at least one person will fail to believe that I still don’t drink, do drugs, or eat meat.

I’ll see you out there soon. I’ll be the one in the Mariners jacket.

It is morning in America. Early morning here, just past six on a Friday morning. I’d normally be just stirring, an hour’s timezone west, wondering what the last day of the week was about to bring at work, wondering if yet another gloomy looking Friday for the country was going to pan out that way. Duck and Cover would be a toss-up between a failing financial institution and the impending doom of another poised hurricane, and likely end up with a nod to both as those punny animals mixed their disasters once more.

Instead, I’m wide awake in the wilds of Colorado. This is Sarah Palin country, they would tell me, where free-spirited mavericks who believe in war without end run around in cowboy boots. Never mind that a woman Sarah Palin’s age in a Target parking lot in a tiny town was on her cell phone talking about trying to see Barack Obama. Never mind the details. We are supposed to be in a house divided along clearly definable boundaries and I am on the “other” side. Never mind that I probably won’t be voting for Obama either and am tempted to write in Mickey Mouse when I fulfill my obligation at the polls in less than 60 days. With many in the far left clamoring behind a ridiculed ex-Democrat, with Ralph Nader well over any sort of hill of reasonability, and with Obama once again on the waffle-train to a platform of bombing Afghanistan into the 6th century BC, I’m probably okay. Once again, shockingly, no one on the ballot really speaks for me. And don’t talk to me about lessers of evils. You could go blind trying to parse out distinctions between evil in this country.

But I’m not here to talk about my own consternation in a few short weeks. I’m here to talk about getting to rural Colorado, about flying to Denver and driving to Steamboat Springs. The flags were not only at half-mast yesterday, they were at this bizarre-seeming quarter-mast, as though someone hadn’t quite finished the job of taking them down. As though the thunderstorms rolling across the Rockies had just set in as the flags were coming down (or going up) and those next to the lightning rods had run for the hills or cover and forgetting all about Old Glory tacking in the breeze. In mid-morning, sometime between the breakfast burrito devoid of green chile (which always contains pork in Colorado) and the Target for Obama, I had to inquire why the flags were all at half-mast.

“Who died?” I asked my traveling companions.

Trying to restrain a look of emergent horror, Em’s Dad offered in the plainest tone possible, “It’s September eleventh.”

“Oh, right.” Feeling sheepish, I wanted the subject disappeared. The whole interaction indicated that I represented the worst fears of God-fearing Americans: I had already forgotten. Not that anyone aware of such a date on this continent could ever truly forget, but somehow in bumbling through security to board a sleepy empty plane (I mean, really, 25-30 people on a plane that can hold 250) I hadn’t thought of the date. It was a day off of work, after all. The date matters a lot less on the first day of vacation. I hadn’t even written a Duck and Cover, with no time in the extremely early morning to make scanning noises while our guest slept next to the computer (I was still steaming from my lost half-post on Em’s laptop). So many chances to remember, but I had slipped all of them. So much for never forget, just 7 years later.

But seven years? What’s in seven years? 9/11 was “The New Pearl Harbor”, after all, which puts us at December 7, 1948. My Dad had been born, Brandeis founded, WWII three full years in the rear-view. No doubt 12/7 was marked as a somber occasion and the flags were probably at half-mast (are they still? they must be…). But the country was ready to move up and move on, already eying the fifties and recovery and an era not entirely defined by the past. And there had been further horrors and atrocities after 1941… surely on both sides, and more from the USA (Dresden, Hiroshima, etc.), but at least there had been give and take. The promised continued terrorism and antagonism hasn’t really followed against our brave nation this time around.

And yet it’s hard to imagine 2008 not being continually defined as the whole decade has been, hijacked by an obsession with terrorism. It may not matter how long we go without a renewal of the blood of patriots, so long as we keep shipping our good boys off to fight their evil boys. Never mind that our boys are often twice the age and education of their boys. If you oppose the war but support our troops, then you must doubly support their troops. They’ve been hoodwinked just as much, if not more. Read Bel Canto (thanks Fish). They’re even younger, even more impressionable, even more convinced that what they’re doing is right. And to boot, they’re actually “defending” their homeland, or at least fighting in it. They’re not still punishing foreigners for some esoteric and unrelated battle seven years old; they’re actually fending off invaders.

By every standard we have of justifying war, you have to support the “terrorists”.

Not that I advocate this. Let me underline this, everyone, I am not advocating support of the terrorists. For the same reason I don’t “support the troops”. No matter how young and manipulated, you should know better. God and your conscience are not dead to you and you should never kill for any reason. Never point a gun and threaten. Never train for battle. You just know better, no matter how little you are attributed to know.

So back to Colorado, with the special super-half-mast for September eleventh, me steaming at myself in the van for being so clumsy as to admit violation of “never forget” in the presence of people who will vote for Sarah Palin. The signs of foreclosure and failure are more subtle in the wide-open spaces than they were in the close-clustered communities outside Sacramento in the summer. People may be hurting, but it’s harder to see under the big sky. No matter how much lightning may be descending, how many storms on the horizon, how much distant events may be conspiring against one.

The raindrops pound the window, trickle down the side, fly away in the artificial machine-winds. Before the day’s end, there will be Mexican food and bowling and laughter and good discussion of the day’s events. What can be more hopeful than a wedding and the surrounding activities? What can represent more investment in the future?

It’s still September. And I am undecided.

“I suppose you are wondering why you are here.”

Seven billion souls shuffling their feet, which many at once notice are not exactly feet while somehow failing to not be feet. Even those who did not have feet just moments before now have these quasi not-feet feet. They at once seem to be in perfect health and yet be a collection of mid-size blue bubbles, slightly suspended off the floor.

“I’m sure you have many questions, and it is our work here and now to answer them. We will try to, ah, anticipate them. That is something you will find us very good at.”

A good-natured half-chuckling from the seemingly endless company of bubble-people entities behind the speaker. They are at once bubbles and highly reassuring, trustworthy people. The half-nature of everything is less unsettling than one seconds ago seemed to suspect it was.

“For example, many of you are wondering where you are and what this is and what this has to do with anything from, ah, before. I both appear to be speaking and yet not using language and yet you understand perfectly well. Yes?”

Seven billion souls murmuring, each to themselves, to the speaker, a general sense of affirmation.

“I think if you search your inner perception, you will understand exactly where you are and what this is.” The microscopically briefest of pregnant pauses to let this sink in. “Now then, this is a very unusual and special circumstance. Normally, this is a very private and intimate matter. We would normally spend a great deal of what you think of as time with you individually first before ever bringing you into this type of experience.”

Not so much confusion among seven billion souls as utter lack of recognition of what is being discussed. Yet not with the frustration of misunderstanding so much as the best-natured curiosity regarding what this could all possibly be about.

“In terms that you are used to perceiving, I would say we don’t have room for you all individually. You all came in such a rush. We couldn’t possibly accommodate you all with so little notice. Of course, that has nothing to do with the truth of operations here. We could, in fact, seamlessly accommodate the normal circumstances without the slightest of inconvenience or difficulty. But there is, no doubt, something to be said for making this transition gradual. And where you come from, there is no question that we would be beset by such practical challenges.”

Some acknowledgment or general sense that this all must be about to make sense in a minute, so there’s no use fighting over the details now. A collectively unuttered “fair enough”, if you will.

“Now then, a moment ago. An hour ago? Time is another concept that we will be weaning you off of here, but for now let us communicate as though bound by the temporal. An hour ago, something happened. A very significant something. And it brings us to this, this moment, this collective gathering.”

Seven billion wracking heads (minds? bubbles?), peppered with just the slightest handful of knowing staring at the floor. As though one could sink through a floor one isn’t even making contact with that isn’t quite a floor. The concept of universal paradox, of reality simultaneously being impossibly unreal and yet feeling more real than any prior memory or experience, is starting to sink in. They are becoming acclimated to it, like breathing underwater or at very high altitude. Each moment, the impossible is becoming easier and everything is innately what it is not and it is okay.

“Perhaps you have heard of the Large Hadron Collider? An ambitious project of your species, designed to simulate what leading scientists declared to be the origins of your universe. Using principles much akin to those of, ah, your greatest weapons of self-destruction.”

Those who’d been feeling the faintest glimmers of the desire to hide now are thankful that these blue bubbles appear impossibly alike. And yet they seem to radiate varying levels of familiarity and communication, as though other identical blue bubbles are somehow just like they still perceive themselves, encasing fully identifiable bodies that somehow seem aligned with the prime of one’s life. It is all infinitely processed and reprocessed each moment. There is the sense of the progression of time simultaneous with a great universal all-time at once. And all this is distracting from efforts to blend in, to hide, to shield.

Meanwhile, of course, there are others who have only the vaguest idea what is being discussed and have never heard of Colliders nor scientists nor weapons of self-destruction. And they have only the slimmest clench in their stomach-bottoms that they are about to be informed of something terrible, a death in the family or an attack on the community. This feels like all the bad news of before, rolled up at once, and the apprehension is rippling across seven billion bubbles.

“There are some of you, a scant few, who predicted this might happen. You should not feel wronged or cheated, saddened that you were not heeded. You shall come to understand that it is perhaps for the best that your cries were met with derision and, ultimately, silence.”

Only a very few of the souls can follow this chain of logic, but they float rapt. Can any others be truly said to be less attentive? Even when incomprehensible, there is a sense that these are most essential matters that are coming to pass.

“You see, while this Collider proved, in some absolute sense, to be the most destructive force in your history, it was relatively painless. It was instant. It was immediate, here and gone, a snap of the fingers, a blink of the eyes. And the alternatives, well. They were not so simple. Which is not to say, of course, that there needed be alternatives with the same ultimate outcome. Nothing is inevitable, nothing at all. There were, however, likelihoods. Probabilities. Actions create other likelihoods of actions, in a prevailing course that leads to a great deal of suffering.”

A dull ache of remorse and concern is now welling, like a crick in the back of most necks of the souls. Not, of course, that they have necks so much as a ball of uncanny sensations.

“Perhaps a metaphor would be more fitting. It seems your species is fond of examples.” The slightest acknowledging motion toward the row behind the speaker. “After all, you will come to learn that your entire time just before has been a metaphor. It is one of the great realities of life that life itself is modeled as an unending cascade of examples. Most fitting indeed, then.

“So, it is, perhaps, the pulling of an electrical cord. A plug. The plug has been pulled, and the power gone out. One instant, one burst, everything gone. Which is unfortunate, of course, for power. However, as compared to a slow draining of power, where one first must give up one appliance, and then another, and then a third, constantly struggling on the way down to maintain control. How shall they be compared?

“Or another view, perhaps, that of the disappearance of the crops. This is perhaps more accurate. Is it better to be beset by a drought over vast time, with death and suffering in each day, as the losing battle of survival is fought on and on? Or would, perhaps, it be better to experience a single tsunami, an instant flood that wiped out everyone, crops and people and animals alike, in a single apocalyptic day?”

The penultimate word sends shockwaves that are immediately calmed, in the same manner that everything here is profound and then gone, replaced by its opposite. There is a sudden torrent of understanding. The crowded hall, seven billion incomprehensibly strong, now suddenly feels a closeness, an intimacy, as though each were in their regular living space, perhaps where they slept, with only a few friends as though gathered at their deathbed. It has all become terribly clear, stark and frightening and yet somehow relieving.

“And thus, you are here. And it is not so bad, yes? It is perhaps, acceptable. Fair enough. A fitting end. It cannot be said that you were treated unfairly?”

Here this seems utterly ridiculous and then immediately obvious over the course of the few short sentences. They have gone, almost instantly, from being wronged to being set right. And come to it of their own volition.

“Thus, what we’d most like you to focus on, to consider, ponder, discuss amongst yourselves, is this. With the recognition of life as metaphor, with your experience just upended as a series of exemplary lessons… what can you see in this incredible reality? What do you take from being gathered here, just an hour after scientists who had delivered so much knowledge and understanding promised yet more with the touch of a button, with their simulation of the creation of all things? Is there anything to be learned from this?”

The question at first seems rhetorical, then hangs on the air as truly thought-provoking. Slowly, without yet turning directly to other bubbles to engage in the alluded discussion, there is a sense of understanding overriding the relief. Of the childlike joy of putting together a puzzle that initially seemed complicated, far too intricate. The feeling of a concept snapping together like it was obvious from the beginning. There is the sense, if not the reality, of nodding one’s head vigorously eighteen or twenty times with increasing speed, letting out a little whoop, and then almost crying from sheer exhilaration and exhaustion. No one seems immune to this tidal wave of emotion as it ripples up, down, and around, washing the seven billion souls in a deeper sense of depth than they have ever felt before.

“Grandpa, tell me what it was like back in the old country before the fall.”

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“I dunno. What was it like just before the fall? Did anyone know what was about to happen.”

“Oh, I think some people did. Back in ‘08, Grandma and I went up to Gold Country for a little trip.”

“Were you looking for gold?”

“No, no. We were just going to a place with a little history to celebrate our anniversary. We’d been married for five years at that point.”

“History? Like how old?”

“Well, the first night we stayed in the oldest hotel in Placerville. It had been built in 1857.”

“Grandpa, that’s not old! Everything here in _______ is older than that.”

“Not everything.”

“Just about.”

“Anyway.”

“So you really weren’t looking for gold?”

“I mean, we joked about it a little, but all the gold mining novelty shops were sold out of equipment. Too many other people were trying to find it.”

“What’s ‘novelty’ mean?”

“Hm. It’s like a knick-knack, or a little trinket. Something you don’t really need, but you buy because it’s cute or you just impulsively want it.”

“That’s weird. I’ve never heard of that.”

“Yeah. I guess not. Huh. There used to be shops full of them in America, before the fall. But not so much right before the fall. Most of them were closing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. On that drive up to Gold Country, we passed all these half-deserted towns and suburbs. There were all these signs saying ‘For Lease’ and ‘Space Available’. But they looked like they were in the middle of nowhere. Places people had built thinking everything was always going to grow and expand. But then… it didn’t. And there were just shells of buildings.”

“Kinda like Gold Country, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Old buildings and old towns that were kinda deserted. People moving on. I guess the difference is that no one knew where to move on to in the suburbs. Back in Gold Country days, there was always more opportunity just over that mountain.”

“Or so they thought.”

“Yup. So maybe it was the same.”

“When did the banks start failing? That was a big part of what started it, right?”

“Oh definitely. Let’s see, that was… huh. That morning, actually. I’m almost positive. I’d brought the laptop up to Gold Country and checked the news that morning and it said IndyMac had failed. That was the first one. It didn’t seem like much at first, but people knew then that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were going down too. And they were half the housing banks.”

“Why’d people choose such funny names for banks? They sound like people.”

“That’s a good question. I guess they wanted to sound friendly and helpful. ‘Like a good neighbor,’ that was one of the old slogans an insurance company had. Just like some regular Joe on the block who’s helping you out when you need it.”

“But can’t balance his own checkbook.”

“That’s pretty much exactly right. I’m not sure anyone in the old country knew how to balance their checkbook at that point. It was pretty clear that nobody really cared. Until all the banks started failing and then everything changed.”

“When did you and Grandma get out?”

“Of Gold Country or the old country?”

“Old.”

“Probably not soon enough, dear. Probably not soon enough.”

Been nearly two days in Chicago with a day to go. Have seen a full game in Wrigley Field (Cubs 3, Pirates 2), seen both of the previously unseen campuses I passed up as possible collegiate choices, and managed to smash up my wedding ring finger into a purple pulp. You didn’t think this town was gonna let me off easy, did you?

This post will likely be short, in large part because typing with nine fingers is a task I’ve never had to learn. Rather than being 10% slower, it really seems about 98% slower given how long it takes for me to decide which finger to sub in for the S finger. Luckily, this finger is only responsible for three letters (and two of them are w and x), but unluckily s is pretty common. I don’t know if the finger’s broken or not, but I’m leaning towards not at this point given that it’s pretty much stopped hurting. Last night when I willingly took two painkiller pills, was talked into a third, and never refused ice, the signs were pointing to badness.

The method of the smashing was picking up a bowling ball. Just nanoseconds before lifting, I was wrapping my left hand around the ball as support and the old-school see-saw ball-returner shot a ball into the row at breakneck (or break-finger) speed. The entire stopping point of the chain-reaction impact was my hand, primarily focused on one finger with peripheral contact on the two neighbors. Sandwiched between a 14 and a 12, this did not lead to warm fuzzy feelings. Somehow, in about 20 years of bowling, this had never once happened to me. And it really bugged me because it was entirely preventable. And because it hurt.

This is hardly the focal point of the trip, though, and shouldn’t be where I put so much emphasis. The trip has been about an old friend and his new friends. Fish has been the consummate host, as always, and given me a glimpse of both Chicago and alternate pasts that I have turned away from. His group is what I remember of groups assembled at schools - smart, funny, interested, and interesting. Everything about school except for school was always great. If everyone could self-select and come together for such things in the interest of some sort of club or life commitment (or even society?), things would be really cooking. But sadly school seems to be the only thing deemed worthy of bringing like-mindeds together from such distant places in a socially comfortable setting. And thus my path is barred, by my own volition.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see a friend doing well, to immerse in his world, and to talk through all the things it seems go unsaid these days. Examining one’s own life is often so difficult without the full-length mirror that is someone who has known you across a multitude of years and situations.

Debate and discussion. The caterpillar story. A coat forgotten and regained. Misty walks on paths not taken. Cheez-its and carrots, coffee and Cheerios. Once more unto the grocery store. Everything’s different and nothing’s changed. Everything’s perfect and Fish is god. Ow.

It is still too early to be too late.

I’m back in an internet cafe, one with a painfully slow 33.6 Kbps that makes me yearn for the national parks of Nepal. We’re holed up in Orchha, India, a village of a scant 9,000 people with an incredible number of beautiful Hindu temples and a gargantuan palace of the Mughal era.

The palace itself was one of the nicest surprises of this trip, since Orchha initially looked like the lowlight of the whole journey. It’s a beautiful place, though, although admittedly vaguely tourist-trappy. There have been few places we’ve seen that aren’t at least a little touristy, though, or seemingly designed for a good bit of the population to cater specifically to Western visitors.

As predicted, I have made myself internet-accessible mostly to check in on the American political situation. CNN is a painfully slow website in general, opting for millions of bytes worth of loading instead of making information simply available. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten so accustomed to their format and their vote-counts that I can’t try to navigate another site on this connection. So I’m still waiting for it to load. I got a look at earlier results, however, and it looks like I may have been wrong about which party will have a hung convention. Although when there are only two candidates, one can’t really have a hung convention in the end, even if someone ends up winning by a single delegate. Maybe Edwards will refuse to drop out and cling tightly to his 26 delegates in the hopes that those few can swing the entire election.

Of course I still find it completely inevitable that Clinton will eventually be President, so this is all pretty academic. It’s looking more and more like a repeat of the 1996 election - a Clinton against a hopelessly old has-been who is about a decade past his political hopes and dreams.

But enough about America; I’ll be back there soon enough with very little else to ponder. I’m hoping to design a webpage to commemorate this trip upon return, but I’m already over 1100 digital photos taken (I’ve gotten used to my first digital camera in a hurry), so it’s going to take a good deal of time to get things posted. I am completely mentally unprepared to be back, save for a few bizarre work-anxiety dreams about the new post that I’ll be in within 16 hours of landing back in California.

The trip remains overwhelming and amazing and overall an incredibly positive experience. Trying to describe it in small bits seems to undermine the effort to describe the whole undertaking in full grandeur and detail, which I’ve kept up with nicely in my comp notebook. (Of course transcribing that will also take a while…) Suffice it to say that this is a beautiful country and different from North America in many of the very best of ways. Certainly not perfect, of course, and it’s been hard to transcend the experiences of a tourist to really get to the core of the country. It may be impossible, especially on a trip this short and this guided, though.

Emily’s Mom keeps saying on this trip “How could you possibly describe this?” and “You couldn’t possibly explain this to someone else.” I’m hoping to prove her wrong with my pages and pages of writing and hundreds of pictures.

But for now I’ll have to leave you with that and keep you in suspense.

Tomorrow, on to the Taj Mahal and then back to Delhi. I may run out of things to do in Delhi and post again, but I doubt it with the Gandhi Museum still to see…

Hello from Chitwan National Park in Nepal!

I won’t attempt to try to describe the events of the past few days, but they have been among the most memorable in a very long time. I am currently sitting in an internet cafe in a village on the outskirts of the Chitwan National Park, maybe a third of the way through our journey through Nepal and India. I have been taking copious notes in a comp notebook about the whole trip and I will probably dump them all straight into a “primary sources” entry upon return home. Already Emily and I have taken over 400 digital pictures and I’ve written over 30 pages chronicling the trip.

So I’ll save most of the details for when I get back. It’s been an amazing and extremely positive trip so far. I got a little sick (cold/ear infection type) the first couple nights, but have seemed to knock it out cold (if you will) with some crazy Australian cold/flu medicine that’s powerful stuff indeed.

Our group leader is phenomenal, a Nepali-born resident of India who has been showing us around and giving us the inside scoop. Our group is joined by three Australians and a British couple and we’ve all been becoming closer as we share this completely unprecedented journey. Yesterday we went on an 8-mile hike through the National Park and got within a few feet of a wild rhino, not to mention seeing a tiger in the wild, which is apparently incredibly rare here.

Less than an hour till my elephant ride, so I’d best log off soon. As this internet cafe and many of the things I’ve seen prove, the smaller worldview of interconnection has definitely come to Nepal, to a far greater extent than I could’ve possibly anticipated. We may be traveling “grass-roots,” but the whole world is traveling through the series of tubes.

I hope to update again sometime before return, but no guarantees. Maybe on Super Tuesday (since I primarily logged on to see what happened in Florida). Though now it looks like less is in suspense and everyone’s folding in behind Clinton/McCain. Surprising, but perhaps demonstrative that America’s obsession with voting for winners trumps all other political concerns.

Namaste for now.

But way back where I come from
we never mean to bother
we don’t like to make our passions other people’s concern
and we walk in the world of safe people
and at night we walk into our houses and burn.
-Dar Williams, “Iowa”

I neither come from Iowa nor the hyper-isolationist East Coast that Dar Williams is referring to in this song and I remember thinking when I first heard this song how emotionally broken those regions are. Not that the West Coast is probably much better, but it has a slightly higher portion of betterness, I would imagine - people willing to take risks or embrace their freedom to a certain extent. This isn’t meant to be a condemnation of other coasts or regions or my friends who come from them. Just a common critique I have of general tendencies, which becomes quite revealing when analyzing the two states which, in the next six days, will anoint the new so-called leader of the so-called United States.

Despite everybody’s dead-sprint to the front lines of the primary/caucus chronology in this young year, Iowa and New Hampshire will still have an insanely disproportionate impact on the election of the President, as they have for decades. A large portion of voters are undecided up until the day of the election, annually amazed at just how poor their choices are yet again in any given year. And almost all of America wants to back a winner more than they want the next President to be good, so those undecideds immediately bum-rush whoever seems to be the most likely winner.

Thus people like John Kerry come out of nowhere and get nominated to be President, despite having no personality and no chance of defeating George W. Bush, just based on a handful of people in Iowa. (And, perhaps, I must duly admit, the media’s willingness to sink someone who isn’t towing the party line by trumping up one small whoop to the level of certifiable insanity.)

My personal schizophrenia should also be noted here to provide context for my comments. I am well convinced that there are no viable choices in either party, and that it’s possible that Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are actually being paid off by the establishment to seem far crazier than they are to make their reasonable perspectives seem like unthinkable lunacy to the mainstream of America. Once again, as in 2004, we will have an incredibly unpopular ongoing war with no actually anti-war candidate. No one willing to go any further than saying it wasn’t an ideal choice to start the war, but hey, now that we’re in it we might as well stay till 2025 or so.

But (the other half of my schizophrenia here) I also have an insatiable interest in the machinations of politics, and am always drawn back to political analysis despite my confidence that it’s all rigged, irrelevant, and incredibly depressing. I will inevitably watch hours of political television coverage tonight, despite the fact that the candidates are functionally interchangeable and all will continue to run the country into the moral and economic ground.

So back to the show. Regardless of which side of the schizophrenia I’m on at a particular moment, it’s abundantly clear that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable winner of both the Democratic nomination and the Presidency. The name-brand recognition, the rose-colored memories of Bill’s eight-year reign (which only looks good when comparing it pound-for-pound to the reign of King George II), the utter lack of experience of any rivals (not that she actually has much political experience beyond a marriage), and the fact that she has seemed to be a front-runner from the outset (remember the back-a-winner psychology of the American voter!) will all combine to propel her to relative landslides in both races.

I’m still on vacation in Shaver Lake till the weekend (and we’re finally getting snow today!), but were I to have access to write a Duck and Cover today, it might go something like this:

Duck: Are you ready for the coronation of Queen Hillary I today?
Turtle: Don’t you mean caucus?
–
Duck: A ceremony by any other name would appoint just as well.
–
Turtle: Could you get any more cynical?
Duck: Just wait.

The real question is who she’ll beat and whether Iowa and New Hampshire will combine to create a Republican front-runner who is chosen by tiny states to become unstoppable, or whether the party’s complete disarray will lead to the first watchable convention since 1968. I realize I’m reviewing things I discussed in my last post of 2007, but when I logged into Facebook this morning, so many of my friends were listing statuses that showed baited-breath anticipation of hope and optimism related to this race. And here in the extremely Republican Garin Clan, there is slightly less interested interest in a variety of candidates on that side. So I feel compelled to spend today reviewing why I don’t share the enthusiasm and any more than politically academic interest in today’s events.

But we started this with Dar Williams and her discussion of how emotions in the Midwest and Northeast lead to people not taking risks. I’m not saying that we could guarantee that if Nevada or New Mexico carried the opening primary with as much respect and homage as people currently confer to Iowa and NH, results would be a lot different. After all, my favorite case that Steve Rabin and I used to run was that we should have a one-day national primary (a case which debuted with a 4-1 win in the semifinals of a tournament in New Hampshire). The whole progressive drag of small state primaries deciding for the nation is a completely busted system. But we still have people in especially low-risk states trying to evaluate how they can best go back to their friends and say they backed a winner.

I feel like this post is rolling around a lot of things I’ve said in the past and I keep flitting wildly between the two sides of my schizophrenia. At this point, I’m just going to go ahead and bank my predictions and move on…

(D)
HClinton - 36%
JEdwards - 29%
BObama - 27%
JBiden - 3%
BRichardson - 2%
Others - 3%

(R)
MHuckabee - 27%
MRomney - 24%
RGiuliani - 20%
JMcCain - 13%
FThompson - 10%
RPaul - 4%
Others - 2%

I’ve never been much of an Elliot Smith fan, but I feel like I could really hang out with him today. I mean, not literally. I obviously couldn’t literally hang out with him, because he killed himself. And that’s really another post altogether.

Somehow I missed the Happy New Year train.

Happy New Year.

Today, believe it or not, I’m even almost objecting to the use of that phrase. I know I have a bit of a reputation as a contrarian already, but I’m really not sure that’s the best thing to hope for from a year. When was the last time someone wished you a Thoughtful New Year? Or how about a Peaceful New Year?

I recognize that I’m straw-manning this situation a little bit, because obviously the etymology of the “Happy New Year” construction is about the day of New Year (actually “New Year’s Day”)… the phrase is actually meant to signify “Happy New Year’s Day”. This simply puts the phrase/day in line with almost every American designation for holiday greetings, save for perhaps Christmas. And wishing someone a Thoughtful or Peaceful day is a little ridiculous, or at least would get Americans to look askance at you.

They asked me to come down and watch the parade
and to march down the street like the Duracell bunny
with a wink and a wave from the cavalcade
throwing out candy that looks like money…

It’s not that I don’t have hope for the new year of 2008, or even the new year day of 1/1/2008. See? But there’s something a little bit off right now, and it feels important to detect what that is. The TV is telling me it’s the Year of the Rat, though they note that this doesn’t get underway till February 7th. It makes me look up to the television to see tens of American girls whose lives are peaking at this moment. Their televised appearance in formal gowns and dresses, high atop flower-adorned vehicles, will be the highlight of lives specifically designed to aspire to the life of a princess. They will never be closer than today. And when you ask them along the course of the next 30 or 50 years, they will mention their marriage (until it goes sour) or the birth of their child (until they rebel), and it will probably not be till 2067 or so that they turn over in their aging recliner and whisper softly to their granddaughter that “Don’t tell your mother, but the day I was in that parade was the best day of my life. My whole future was in front of me and I could’ve been something or done something. Promise me, promise me now that you’ll do something different.” And the granddaughter, age 7 (or maybe realistically it’s a great-granddaughter, with the speed that most Rose Parade highschool queens run at) will blink and promise and have no idea what grandma is talking about and go watch a movie about princesses and sigh softly to themselves.

But today, Miss Wherever, enjoy it. I can see that the biggest thing you’re concerned about is worrying whether you’re being too ardent or too reserved in your exact waving technique. By the end of the parade, you will have resigned yourself to however you have the stamina to acknowledge the crowd, but for now the anxiety about proper waving technique is probably ruining at least half your happiness on what you will look back on as the pinnacle, the apex, the Best Day of Your Life.

The day that they told me the best way to be part of the Wheel of Fortune crowd, and maybe even get called to play on Wheel of Fortune, was to demonstrate mindless, even vapid enthusiasm during the taping of the show was a big one for my perception of the world. It came another step full-circle when Emily & I, together with some of the Garin clan, attended a taping of The Price is Right 5 years ago. Now as I listen to the commentary, I am reminded how much of the world has this mandatory vapidity check at the door. Even CNN, still wearing its “most trusted name in news” label that was accurate in the mid-90’s, has hired an army of smiling toned young people to convey the collapse of various aspects of the planet with a smile and a nod to advertisers and the incredibly insipid tactic of faking impromptu conversation between anchors. Reading informal inter-anchor dialogue off a teleprompter must be one of those truly surreal experiences for its participants.

I’d say it’s a sight that’s quite worth seeing
it’s just that everyone’s interest is stronger than mine

This post is starting to feel more like fragments of a story than any sort of nonfiction presentation of the realities of my (or other’s) life. I’m sure the story has been written already and maybe in many ways, probably often with a strange moment of seeming redemption where the person who has devoted their life to the false prophets of fame and fortune quietly accepts their role as a middle-income middle-interest middleton who can be Happy Just the Way They Are. Alternately, maybe one of them has the ending I would write, where they spend one afternoon or dark night of the soul facing everything they’ve committed to and believed in and then, just before dusk or dawn, decide to willingly (metaphorically) gouge their own eyes out with a pitchfork, and undertake a dedicated regimen of controlled-substance-consumption, or obsessive collection of Pokemon cards or beanie babies, or maybe setting a goal for themselves of sleeping with as many people as possible before they die. And then, if we’re going for maximal irony, even this wanton goal is upended by either some unexpected death or even more damningly a small but important reminder of their “real life obligations” that puts them right back where they were at the beginning of the story, spending almost the entirety of their days quieting the voices of disappointment in the back of their head.

This is the point in the narrative where I usually feel strongly impelled to write some trite reassurance to my friends and cohorts that I am not actually feeling this dark and melancholy, and that sometimes I let my mind run away with my emotions and wind up in a place that I don’t really feel. I’m going to go ahead and take a pass on that opportunity.

It’s not that I’m chronically unhappy, or even particularly unhappy at this point in my life. (Dammit, this isn’t taking a pass after all.) It’s just that being thoughtful about the human experience, especially in the happiness-obsessed nation called the United States of America, always leads me to a realization of just how short we are of the way things should be. And observing this shortness, exploring it, trying to absorb it and put it on display, this process looks very sad. It is, however, deeply hopeful in the end. One could give up, stop caring, decide that humanity/America/vapid individuals are not worth saving, and then turn away and write about something “happier”. My sadness is my hope. My anger is my clinging to this planet and its meaning. I know Elliot is sponsoring this post, but I feel like I need to shout “If you’re not angry, you’re just stupid, you don’t care” from the rooftops most days.

I wonder if Elliot Smith and Ani DiFranco ever met. They seem finely attuned to have one of those profound love-hate relationships that leads to torrid romance, incredible blowout fights, and ultimately some sort of suicide pact.

and when I traded a smoke for a food stamp dollar
a ridiculous marching band started playing
and got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song

I’m working on longer pieces (outside the bounds of this blog) about the nature of rite and ritual and how our personal desire to fill our lives with such lead to us slowly carving meaning out of our lives with a spoon. Today, I think my take-home message about New Year’s is about the problems with its rituals and traditions. The entire point of a New Year is to embrace the new, the unexpected, that which we can change. And yet what defines 12/31 and 1/1 for people? Doing the same thing over and over again. The same toasts, watching the same shows. Followed by the same morning and the same (you guessed it) Rose Parade.

I was personally soaring at the idea that our TV somehow couldn’t get Dick Clark’s special last night, given that it’s both (A) a three-hour-old broadcast appearing on tape and (B) the exact same thing every single year, for years on end. All of these traditions proudly talk about being the 94th Rose Bowl or the 119th Rose Parade or Dick Clark’s 35th New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. How can it be reassuring to do the exact same thing every year to embrace a brand new year of opportunity and possibility? Why not make it a tradition to do something you’ve never done every single year?

Emily and I got into a bit of a fight about how overt I was in my opposition to watching an East-Coast broadcast. But really, I can think of very few relatively trivial things that get me so profoundly angry as West-Coasters starting their new year by watching a three-hour-old taped film of what happened in New York City. I mean, blind-rage, literally-seeing-the-things-in-front-of-me-with-a-tinge-of-red-that-must-be-some-sort-of-squeezed-blood-entering-my-eyeballs angry. The entire point of observing a new moment, a turning over, a changing, and actually seeing something that happened far away, three hours ago, and is not really happening now (or even close to now) and this being the seminal moment of change and turning. I feel my soul frothing at the mouth just thinking about it.

And yes, I hear you. The New Year moment itself is no more meaningful, really, than any other second. After all, in my very last post I decried New Year’s Resolutions as getting in the way of valuable and important change 98.08% of the time. But symbols and metaphors and emblems are important and do have a certain weight or value. After all, this whole planet, really, is just an exercise in metaphor. And so that moment of crossover, of turning, is an important reminder that we’re living a complicated life with an open future and that we have an incredible amount of control over the future that we create for ourselves.

There are still hours left in your New Year’s Day. Go do something different. Don’t start a new tradition, but do something important you’ve never done on a New Year’s Day. Embrace the open future symbolized by the four numbers 2, 0, 0, 8.

Thoughtful New Year.

It’s the last day of the year called 2007. I am the last one awake in a cabin at Shaver Lake, California. Most all of the Garin Clan is here, save one component family. It is late, and there are less than 24 hours remaining in this annum.

I am writing mostly to check in. It’s been a difficult last few weeks of the year, and this blog in particular has demonstrated that with sparse updates which bear out the frustration of the time. Being sick was debilitating and working through it doubly so. Wrestling with the nature of my job and some of the people I work with wrecked much of my motivation to create or explain.

There is hope, as there always must be, for 2008. There’s a reason we pile the expectant and expected holidays in the middle of winter, and it has very little to do with the weather. Here indeed, we came for the snow, but there is little about. You can call it global warming, but the snow in Boston was allegedly record-breaking for December, they tell me. There’s a reason that people started calling global warming “climate change” instead. The mistake that the last 12 generations of weather-doomsayers made was predicting that things would go in one direction or the other. Saying that things will go in both directions saves us from any contrary evidence. Even the scientific method has been beaten back by propaganda and marketing spin. At least in 2005, everyone banked on more devastating hurricanes. That was a sure bet for 2006-7.

But nothing is sure, as that does a pale job of illustrating. This was meant to be a personal check-in and I’m already off on my high horse about political issues. And ones most of you don’t agree with me on, to boot. That’s no way to end a year. Maybe I’ve forgotten how to write these things. Or maybe the laptop in a foreign house is just no place to be coming back to a familiar venue.

My Dad and I have a running debate about how many units of housing there are per person in the United States. Or, hopefully, the debate is about how many people there are per housing unit. I guess that’s part of the debate. Regardless, it has occurred to me already on this trip that we have utterly forgotten vacation rentals, timeshares, and other such pseudo-units in calculating the equation. How, after years of Pismos and Aspen (PIRG) and a couple cabins at Shaver (Garins), not to mention an entire childhood on the Oregon coast (Seaside) this factor eluded me is beyond me. But it’s not beyond me anymore - vacation rentals must be a huge part of the equation. Em said NPR told her it was in the “high millions” a few days back. Borrowed housing, borrowed time. It’s a great opportunity, like “being in the Real World” noted one of the Clan as we entered the house. Most of my readers won’t need the explanation that this was a reference to a TV show. The Real World is a TV show. Being there is like being on TV. Are we getting somewhere?

Of course the real world is not a TV show, and little could be less like a TV show than the real world (Brandzel’s theory of my life duly excepted). But that pioneer of reality television has brought us an ever-cascading series of series that package the life of aspiration into narrower and more expensive boxes for people. It’s not to say that what we’re doing here (here, as in at the cabin) isn’t great, but it gets me thinking late into the night. How long has the American economic bubble of housing and consumerism been kept afloat by houses intended only for brief visits? And where do these fall in the overall picture as it slides down the screen?

Already three legs into what I tongue-in-cheekily dubbed the EmStor Winter World Tour 2007-2008, I realize I’ve reported on naught so far. It’s been a whirl of hellos and goodbyes, lights on trees and in bags and in skies and on screens. I can no more recount the details on this particular night than I can attempt to sum up the year that falters and fades this very eve. I will say I have had a great time so far and expect much more. That goes for the Tour and the year, and perhaps every day therein.

My expectations rarely are as well developed as they are on this particular cusp. I think it comes with getting older, being a little more conservative, feeling like on has a little more to lose and things to really hope for. I guess that’s the opposite of at least part of the popular perception, but it’s where I’ve been for awhile. Youth is as free as the openness of the future, which tends toward the vast. With age comes a more finite vision, and that specificity lends itself to careful prodding of the future, squeezing it and shaking it like so many wrapped gifts, and having something fixed in mind when tearing open the package. Watching my nieces and nephew this Christmas, I was reminded of my own time when I simply tore at the package in blind blank anticipation of what lay within, letting the surprise hit me at once instead of feeling it out.

I’m sort of walking away from a chance to do that now (or technically soon), instead choosing the more sedate (but wiser?) method of analyzing, holding on, weighing, and deciding. There’s no telling whether that’s the right call (and this fact, in itself, gives me a bit of that bald open future rush), but I feel confident that this is the decision that leaves me the least likelihood of immediate and irreparable regret. What a sad standard that is. It sounds so safe, so sedentary, so moderate. But I used to weigh debates by the better worst-case scenario. And how better to view that than through regret? And yes, I must dance this cryptic dance a few more days until someone gives me the official signal to speak. But many of you know already.

I think this post may exhaust every category I have for this blog. At the very least, it’s exhausting me a bit. Or maybe that’s just my age, or the significance of a year (which I’ve always revered), or the cancer seeping into my legs from this laptop.

You already know I don’t look to 2008 with the aura of political hope. Many do, and I bid you all the best of luck. How you will react to the inevitable crowing of Queen Hillary I from the House of Clinton remains to be seen. Had two royal families ever conspired to take turns with each other and steal the word “demos” from the Greeks, we may never have had experiments in voting and the current widespread form of government in the Western world. But they weren’t as clever as the modern plutocrats, and so we get to test the experiment a little late in the day. I think anyone who knows me knows why I can’t stand Hillary Clinton (well beyond the royalty thing). She will probably start as many unending wars as her predecessor, combining the general Bush/Clinton hawkishness with a unique desire to prove that women aren’t “weak”. And her ability to prove that being someone’s wife is a higher credential than any other experience, leadership, or character for a woman….? That will set everyone back a good few decades.

Whether she gets to kick around Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani will probably not be decided till summer, or whenever the Republicans are having their convention. While Hillary will lock things up with a 5-point outright win in Iowa (she has a role-model martyr without having to die, after all), the Republicans are facing a scenario I first anticipated over a year ago with all of the colliding early primaries. They seem almost destined to have the first undecided (read: meaningful) convention since the infamous Chicago ‘68 sham put on by the Democrats. Rudy’s fading and the Huckster’s coming on strong, and Mitt may enter the convention with the most delegates but the startling reality that the Republicans will never ever nominate a Mormon to be their horse. The party bosses are most likely to close in behind Giuliani, depending on how 9/11-crazed people are and just how many decomposing corpses are exhumed from Rudy’s closet. Huckabee will possibly be standing out as a clean bit of contrast and the only mainline traditional Republican in the bunch, so he could end up with it. But McCain has enough followers and Thompson enough watchers to almost guarantee that this convention will see no one close to the magic number going in. It will be exciting to watch, and even more interesting to see the various implosions of the party as they try to consolidate and can’t and end up spending months running 2-3 people against Queen Hillary I.

The most interesting thing to see will be whether the Republicans, after the shellacking of ‘08, will be able to convince King Jeb I to return the favor King Bill I dealt King George I and jump in 4 years early in ‘12. Unlikely, though… it’s far more dignified to let the monarchs have 8 years to reign. Even if it turns out the way King George II did.

So, no, my hope for ‘08 is not political in nature. It is wrapped up instead with projects and possibilities, travel and even turmoil. 2007 has been good, but has felt like a long extended period of practice. 2008 will hopefully feel a bit more of a game. With any luck, that would leave 2009 as the beginnings of a real showcase or tournament.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t really do resolutions, being open to the future and all. Anyway, if a resolution occurs to you, you should probably start doing it right away if it’s a good one. Which means that only 1/52nd of the time that really leads to a New Year’s Resolution. Anyway, the last thing I need is to be making more commitments and promises at a time like this. Let’s just agree to hope for today and leave it at that.

Keep checking back, because I really owe you more details. As they say on the TV shows, “stay tuned”…