Then one day
the sky fell in
and freedom lost control
and ran off the road and hit a pole
And it was all
and it was nothing
at all
-Josh Joplin Group, “Dutch Wonderland”

Woke up this morning in Denver after a pretty severe series of nightmares involving burrowing underground and interacting pretty negatively with space aliens therein. It was the eighth distinct location where I’ve woken up since the open of this trip 2.5 weeks ago, making for further discombobulation of my already rather tormented subconscious. The details of this particular dream are needlessly grisly. Suffice it to say that I’ve had better nights.

The morning voicemail on Em’s cell, however, was in some ways darker still. Apparently the moving truck with all our stuff, save the few items we found relevant to our six-week Sojourn, was in a car accident outside of LA, turning over at least once. No word yet on the extent of the damage or even whether any people were injured (though it sounds pretty bad). There was a claim from the President of the moving company who kindly left the message that, while their insurers were still sorting through it, the damage wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Whether this is an accurate reassurance or an early attempt at liability limitation remains to be seen.

In any case, it requires the contemplation of all of our stuff being gone or irreparably damaged. One’s mind quickly jumps over the furniture and the replaceable though seemingly indispensible stuff (vaccuum, lamp, and so on) and straight to the really sentimental stuff. Stuffed animals. My collection of small carved/sculpted turtles. A few papers. And oh, the photographs.

While the turtles are probably toasted oatmeal, being fragile as all get-out, one would think that most of the sentimental items would survive such a crash well intact. But then the pivotal question, one we can’t likely ask till Monday, is whether the truck opened or not. If it remained closed (and didn’t catch fire or something), then we can at least be sure that there will be an accounting for everything. But of course the vision that quickly develops in the mind’s eye is one of whipping winds carrying burst-open boxes of heart-rending items across the heartless LA freeway, careless convertibles dodging and weaving amongst the testimony of decades worth of beloved accumulation.

Damage I can deal with, but total loss is challenging. And the potential ambiguity of knowing what was lost, the direct result of a failure to sufficiently inventory box contents amidst the madness of frustrating packing, is perhaps the worst of all. And though we are steeling ourselves in an attempt to mentally imagine that there will be no truck at all showing up in New Jersey, just a settlement check for some number of thousands, there is some space between this mental commitment and the understanding that one’s wedding albums and pictoral history of high school are gone.

Of course, there is also opportunity. Like the disasters that would whip through SimCity, wreaking the best-laid zones of half a century to waste in a couple months, the losses that at first seem devastating are often incredible invitations to rebirth. I have been all too aware of the conflict between my own desire to transcend materialism of all kinds and my affection for a certain amount of material items and the collection thereof. It may be just this kind of event, like meat making me sick in high school, that is necessary to nudge me in the right direction. Em and I even talked about this possibility (hard to invoke discussion of insurance, to which I begrudgingly assented, without contemplating doomsday scenarios, which is incidentally one of the many reasons I conceptually hate insurance), realizing among other things that we would probably stop collecting books (probably the only type of item we overtly collect) should something like this set us back. Perhaps we will emerge from this completely devoid of our physical attachments to inantimate objects, able to face the future with a new fearlessness. The very thought is strangely inspiring.

And yet, there are the pangs. A history told in words and pictures. The computer that I didn’t back up quite well enough, or some of the backups that were insanely packaged in boxes in the same shipment as the computer itself. The fact that my decision of whether to start over with American Dream On, my second novel, or work with the 80-some-odd pages assembled over the last 8 years, may be determined by the condition of that machine and its survival or lack during the accident. (I’m pretty sure I wasn’t that stupid and that there are backups of this in multiple places, but one never really knows until something like this happens.) And some things dear to Emily – her grandmother’s music boxes and the candelabra. And the few bits of shared accumulation in 6 years of marriage, few to none significant in their own right, but this is how Americans are taught to mark the passage of their time. It’s not right, but that doesn’t abridge the emotional twists and agonization.

I would love to tell you that I just don’t care. And while I feel closer to that than I ever thought I would, it’s not true. If it were, we wouldn’t have packed up just shy of two tons of stuff and sent it across America’s dangerous highways in the first place.

It’s overshadowed the last week of events, suddenly, which is too bad. In some ways, it could cast a pallor over the whole trip if we don’t start to get a decent handle on how totalled our stuff really is. But it’s a stuff-tragedy, not a personal one, and for that I’m grateful. Stuff can be rebuilt or rebought (or more likely not), but people are inconstructable. The sting of an event like this could create a lifetime of counterbalance to American training about stuff, which could be just what I need. A little bell that goes off every time I crave an item, a Pavolvian antidote to the way capitalism makes us pigs.

There’s just no way of knowing till it all shakes out.

I would love to now launch into the travails of a return to the Grand Canyon and the roundtrip to Indian Garden, of a whirlwind Albuquerque with my parents in full fervor, of the discovery of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a town that joins Nevada City, CA and Madrid, NM, and probably a few others as potential small-town retreats for a future I still can’t flesh out. But these will have to wait – personal timing of the trip unending calls us to another outing and my own wrestling with late developments makes such review seem relatively trivial, or at least not primarily pertinent. There will be time and space to discuss those details – they are not forgotten. And suddenly, those may be some of the only photographs of the last 15 years that I have.

Someday, I will leave this world. And take not a single physical possession with me on my way. Perhaps it’s time to enact the latter early, well before having to engage in the former. An opportunity indeed. Not one without pain, but perhaps, over time, one without sorrow. Or at least regret.

Perhaps.

I’ve been wanting to write more than I have – I’ve even had more Internet than I might’ve expected. Somehow, however, the inspiration has been limited. I have been tired. I have found my already trying struggles with sleep made all the more wearying by waking up in a different place most every morning (or middle of the night). I am both hopeful that my inspiration is storing up for winter and dining lightly in the meantime and trepid that I have somehow been sapped and zapped entirely. The latter seems utterly unlikely, but the former all too convenient, no?

My green comp book still remains unsullied by language, my mind an uproar of milder things than the trip embarked. Or past things. Or non sequitorial things. I have been having a predominantly fabulous time – don’t get me wrong via my temporary tone. The Canyon is always and forever one of my all-time favorite places on Earth. Infinitely spiritual, challenging, magnificent, overwhelming. I may have actually taken 500 pictures there alone. It makes for a mesmerizing feast of visual overwhelm on my parents’ relatively new giant screen.

My parents are busy and with a latest project, this more of the rabble-rousing variety than the entrepreneurial. It at once makes it harder to fully commune with them and happier to see them involved and engaged in something they find inspiring. I find myself more tired as a result of the relaxation that comes with feeling at home. And tomorrow I depart again.

There is more to say, much more to see, but for now a Wednesday note of my persisting state and forward progress will have to do. I have been a bit melancholic in the last 24 hours, prompted by rehash and review of experiences that have not yet settled into their mostly concluded state. My angst with some of the order of operations at Glide, my anticipation of the upcoming balancing act of trying to work as hard for my own efforts and long-desired outcomes as I could for others. Trying to hold on to every location, every person, every turn of events that in this journey would alone be sufficient for a trip entire. And yet they come, fast and fleeting, back to back to back to back.

Sometimes it is enough to live, knowing the reflection will catch up with the events soon enough. Soon enough.

Our goodbye party (Ohlone Park, Berkeley) setup on Sunday the 5th of July:

All packed up and ready to ship:

After our last dinner (at Bangkok Thai in Berkeley) with Gris & Anna:

The old place, finally empty and clean:

The Prius, full and ready to go:

One last visit to the Grand Lake on our way out of town. Normally we wouldn’t have seen “Ice Age 3D”, but the Grand Lake made it worth it:

Fast-forward to Saturday the 11th of July, which we spent mostly in Kings Canyon NP. Here, Emily had just bonked her head on the interior of a fallen sequoia:

We also went into Boyden Cavern in the national forest just outside Kings Canyon:

Sunday midday, heading out to embark on our hike to Ostrander Lake:

Emily looked happier somehow:

6.2 miles!

See, I really did pack in War and Peace:

Further review today revealed that I failed to get a shot of a mid-jump fish. But the lake was still beautiful:

Our campsite:

A marmot said hello when we awoke in the morning:

My John Muir impression on the walk back:

And Emily’s:

We made it!

Buffalo guarded the car while we were up the trail, as per usual on cross-country roadtrips:

The Wawona Hotel. Best parking spot ever in the foreground, our room in the top left corner, and the restaurant just below:

A mule deer ran through the Wawona grounds at dusk:

On the road again:

We’ve spent much of the trip with Em’s family – the Paul IV set in Tracy, followed by the Paul III set and Jen/Geoff and kids in Fresno/Clovis/Sanger. There was a whole lot of Transamerica, a pretty fierce board-game losing streak by me (I think my first loss of Puerto Rico among Em’s family in a couple years), and a lot of heat. It was hot enough for me to both wear shorts and get in an outdoor pool. As I commented repeatedly, it’s been seven years since I’ve seen summer. Quite a welcome change.

On Sunday, we wound our way up into the mountains above Fresno to visit Yosemite and get a wildnerness pass to camp in the high country. Emily and I have noted a devolution in the terms and practices of camping in modern America – “camping” used to mean taking a tent and a backpack into the woods and, after a decent hike, unrolling them for an overnight stay. Apparently this term has now come to mean driving one’s car to a parking lot and getting some things out of the trunk for an overnight stay within a stone’s throw of the bumper. Meanwhile, “backpacking” is now the term of choice for what camping used to be. And pretty much nobody does it.

I mean, not nobody, but it’s pretty proportionally rare. Legend has it that camping spots fill up in Yosemite between 9-18 months in advance, especially for summer months. And while the park deliberately keeps somewhere between 30-50% of its camping reservations free for same-day spontaneous booking (thus debunking the legend on face), it’s true that the “campground” spots fill up quite early in the morning, especially for summer weekends. Of course, close examination reveals that this is all for bumper-proximity “camping”, while there are essentially limitless wilderness passes for real camping, er, backpacking.

Of course, everyone could just be reacting to an up-sell practice from the local rangers that we only discovered on Sunday. Witness:

“We’d like a wilderness pass for one night and we’d love to get a suggestion or two.”
“How many miles are you looking to hike?”
“About four each way.”
“How about 6.2?”
[pause]
“Uh, maybe. Is it mostly flat?”
“Yeah, it’s kinda flat. I mean, there’s a pretty steep uphill just at the end, but it’s worth it. It’s a beautiful lake.”
[pause, wherein we realize that we could be totally screwed]
“Uh, sure.”

I mean, yes, we could have counter-offered and demanded four flat miles. But in response to our uncertainty, the ranger (who looked young enough to be my child had I lacked moral discipline in high school) waxed eloquent about the beauty of the lake, the grandeur of the views, and the quick pace with which we would conquer the mileage. We pretty much had no choice, lest we appear to this precocious thirteen-year-old completely unworthy of our wildnerness pass. And it wasn’t just about image – there would be a lot of regret if we wound our way through a runner-up mulligan trail that wasn’t so beautiful and did it with ease. We would always wonder if we could have done more. Plus, we’re still hoping to hike into the base of the Grand Canyon and back up (a mere half – or really less – of what I did in the summer of 2000’s fabled Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim journey), so I figured this would be good preparation.

But there are some big differences between the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, not the least of which is that one can see and evaluate the Grand Canyon before descending into it. The main difference, in July at least, is what one packs.

In Yosemite, the lows (even in July) are in the high 40’s or low 50’s, which necessitates your narrator packing a variety of layers. In the Grand Canyon, if memory serves, the low might hit 85 or 90 in the base of the Canyon on a cold night, while the temperatures otherwise hover close to 120 if there’s anything resembling sunshine about. Plus, there’s no real need for a tent in the Canyon, or a bear canister (required silo for all food and scented items to prevent Marpellian “bear country” attacks). And, I wasn’t reading War and Peace in the Canyon. Yeah, I know, this sounds like a bad joke. But I start reading it a few days ago and thought briefly about ditching it for a shorter tome for one hike only. But then I thought it would make a good story that I actually packed in Tolstoy’s epic on an uphill journey into Yosemite.

I hope you’re enjoying the story, because I don’t think it proved worth it.

Part of the problem, of course, is that our juvenile delinquent of a park ranger totally sold us a bill of goods. The 6.2 miles were almost entirely uphill, with exactly four downhill stretches combining for some hundred yards tops. The first 3 miles were a gentle uphill, enough to create a false sense of security to be shattered on the loose rocks of the grueling latter half of the trail. We spent the last mile and a half pausing every few hundred feet. It was laughable. Spurred by the promise of a shining lake on the hill, we pushed ourselves well beyond any predicted limits of exertion, only failing to collapse in anguish by the sheer force of will. Emily encouraged me on with discussion of a forthcoming sense of accomplishment, but I think it unwise to trust anyone who spent high school running cross-country in matters of endurance or the reasonable expenditure of physical energy.

Suffice it to say, of course, that despite this pain (and the journey was still punctuated by lovely views, countless butterflies [and mosquitoes] of many shapes and sizes, and an expanse of blooming flora, making it enjoyable despite the struggles), we almost immediately determined the trip worth it upon arriving at the lake. The lake (Ostrander Lake for those scoring at home or considering similar trips in future) was gorgeous, contained the cleanest water I have ever seen in my life, and surrounded by enough boulders of varying shapes and sizes to satisfy a year’s worth of rockhopping urges (this is one of my favorite physical diversions – slightly better on rocks nestled amongst creeks, but pretty good without rushing water as well).

We navigated a few boulders, found a patch of flat dirt already tamped by previous campers nestled between three boulders, checked for minimal frequency of ant tunnel openings, and set up shop. We were still in the setting sunlight and had a good view of the lake and only when the tent was set up did we suddenly realize how starved and exhausted we felt.

After a scarfed and inelegant dinner of snack food (we were certainly not packing any cooking gear), I headed to the lake to do some rockhopping and soon discovered that the only sound audible for miles (we were the only ones at the secluded lake, one of the joys of Sunday-night camping) were periodic bloops in the water, which it didn’t take long to discover as fish jumping out of the lake to swallow surface-skimming bugs whole. I immediately had to trek back to the tent (almost getting lost amongst the Rohrshach of boulders, manzanita, and dirt) to retrieve the camera and waste many digital shots attempting to get one of a fish mid-jump. I’m pretty sure I got one (the image is almost inscrutably small on the digital camera’s playback window), which I may upload before we leave LA if time permits, but paid for the shot with about a dozen mosquito bites and near discarding of the camera in the lake out of quick swiveling to the sound of bloops as they crested the water.

Then I returned to the tent where Em was already asleep, to read War and Peace as the light faded. I spent a good bit of time laying awake thereafter, failing to acclimate to the silence punctuated by wind rustling the rain-fly across our tent. The first night I go camping after a long while, especially when there are no other people around and I’m camping either alone or with Emily (I’m talking about this like it’s a common phenomenon, though it’s been unfortunately relatively rare), I tend to have a hard time adjusting to sounds. And when there has been much prepping for how to deal with bears, mountain lions, and so forth, every sound sounds like an approaching predatory mammal. I almost never have trouble falling asleep, making the process of having trouble doubly consternating in this environment, all due to a primal irrational interpretation of auditory experience. Suffice it to say that I eventually had to haul out the booklight and immerse myself in Napoleonic Russia to the point of lid-drooping exhaustion, which I should have just done in the first place. But it’s so easy to go from that state to adrenaline-pumping frozen listening with just one good rustle that sounds for all the world like an approaching bear.

The moral of the vignette is that I need to get out more. Way out way more.

As an aside, it’s interesting to trace patterns of fear over the course of my life. Not only have I realized a marked increase in weird fears and even random paranoia as I’ve gotten older, being able to at once rationally grasp that I’m going through the hackneyed process of becoming more conservative and fearful as I age and yet irrationally feel it all the same, but my fear of death may be at an all-time high. As someone who was pretty sure he had conquered such a trivial phobia at age eleven, this is both extremely disconcerting and supremely annoying.

The problem, of course, is that I like my life way more than I did when I was eleven. Don’t get me wrong – I had baseball and animals and my parents were very supportive. But I frankly spent most of the years between 11-21 being able to take or leave my life. I talked pretty openly about this perspective with a bunch of friends and family, to most of their chagrin and loquacious objection. And I simultaneously touted a spirit of fearlessness and triumph over concerns about mortality with intellectual trappings that I now fear were somewhat baseless, at least on a primal level.

I mean, yes, I had reasoned out the limits of this mortal coil, consolidated my reasoned belief in God and an open-ended afterlife, and come to accept how insane it was to truly fear the only surely inevitable result of life on Earth. It seemed pretty academic, and it was. And certainly my bout with suicidalism just before shored up my appreciation of life and my understanding of its fragility. All true thoughts that haven’t faded over the last 18 years.

What has changed, though, is an ever-increasing feeling that I have something to lose in this mortal experience on this planet. And the big difference between 21 and 29 is that not only do I have Emily, giving me a massively unprecedented reason to live, but I am now about to embark on the first open-ended stage of my life where I am doing what I feel I should be doing with my time and mental energy, namely in writing full-time. It’s hard to fully convey what it feels like to have felt like one is primarily wasting one’s time or building limited and mostly pointless skills for some unnamed and unmarked future for three decades. Three decades. I realize, of course, that most people live their entire existences in that state, often discarding the idea that they should even try to do something they feel called or driven to do amidst the endless compromises of their passing life. But to actually be in the midst of transition to that higher use of time and energy is to understand how vivid the contrast is between that state of being and everything else.

It’s a white-hot glow of excitement approaching euphoria, yet it comes with a burdensome sense of responsibility that mostly seems to be manifesting in really really not wanting to die. Which, frankly, is a newish feeling for me. So maybe this will help shed some light on why the wind rustling on the tent in the secluded wilderness bothered me even more than usual, bothered someone who used to brag about having cast out fear of death like a pair of shoes that no longer fit.

Anyway, morning brought an end to the fitful sleep and more pain for my already backpack-sore hips. For some reason, Emily and I have decided along the way that bedrolls are excesses in camping trips, given their awkward bulk and limited assistance. My hipbones are the only part of me that ever disagrees with this assessment, but they were certainly singing about it Monday morning. We had breakfast, relaxed by the lake (wherein Em managed to get severely sunburned reading amongst shining white rocks), did some rockhopping, and packed out. The downhill version of the 6.2 miles was a cool breeze, though the last 1.5 miles were painful (I think our self-assessment of 4 miles each way was pretty much precise, though hopefully we’re stretching out our endurance by processes like this). We then booked it by car to the Wawona Hotel, wherein our Yosemite experience shifted gears from hardcore wildnerness exploring to refined old-school hotel visiting.

Both aspects of the trip were fantastic and complemented each other nicely. The Wawona Hotel was not our first choice from the largely misleading Yosemite website, but proved to be by far the best option (it was the only place with vacancy when we booked, which made us sad right up until we actually visited the various lodging facilities). The oldest standing hotel in the park, the Wawona has retained most of its 1870’s appeal and appearance, and was replete with baseball-park-style bunting that bothered me less than most displays of American patriotism, probably because it just seemed nostalgic rather than jingoistic in this particular manifestation. We lucked into some really prime real estate within the hotel, a second-floor corner room of the main building, with claw-foot bathtub in-room and a sprawling green veranda(h) overlooking the lawn, swimming tank, and other buildings.

We celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary with a leisurely four-course meal in the downstairs restaurant, sitting outside on the hotel’s front porch as we worked our way through some pretty decent vegetarian food for a place aspiring to finer dining. The highlight was a lentil-and-spinach soup, but every item was surprisingly edible and the overall experience was exquisite.

The next morning (we’re up to yesterday morning), we toured a bit more Yosemite, including the expansive historical village, then flew down the mountain all the way to LA, with Emily picking up a good stretch of driving while continually telling me how much of her promised 8% of the total trip she was already fulfilling. Years of “splitting” driving on roadtrips with me have convinced her that “under-promise, over-deliver” is the method of choice, made all the more amusing to me in light of our wedding “sermon” that her brother delivered six years ago, highlighted by his apt and eloquent comparison of marriage to a long car ride.

Our slate is rapidly filling in LA, with most every trip to LA being somewhat similar but all quite rejuvenating and fun. I was going to note something in here as well about how I have really struggled to write about this trip while on it so far, but I’ve pretty well shot that theory to pieces with this post. Indeed, I have a green comp book with me that remains unsullied by written word as yet, despite my intent to write most every day. Perhaps I just haven’t had enough time for reflection until this morning, with Russ asleep and Emily dozing and reading. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last eight years, it’s that I need time for reflection to write most anything. I’m hoping, however, that when Internet is less plentiful, I still have time to chronicle this journey. I guess my journals like this always get off to a slow start – I’m thinking of Russia ‘95 and India ‘08 in particular. Someday I will transcribe all those to the web as well.

For now, people are stirring and there are games and activities to pursue. I am elated to consider that we still have a month left on this trip, that it really has just begun. And that all of this is just prologue to the greatest adventure of all, my upcoming foray into the written word. No wonder I put so much stock in how well I can use same to track my progress toward that shining year on the hill to come.

Pray with me that I make it there against these weirdly resurgent fears that actually signal hope and promise of a future that matters.

Currently in Tracy, CA and on the way to Fresno sometime this afternoon. More updates, likely on a quite sporadic schedule, when time permits.

Today, they tell us that the oceans are so full of garbage that there are spare airplane seats in the flight-paths of missing jets that are not from those jets. That it’s perfectly reasonable to expect all kinds of discarded material to show up in the sea, since we’ve been leaving it there as long as we can remember. Our species has so blatantly disregarded the gifts we have been given that we don’t consider them gifts anymore – the only gifts we can accept are those we give ourselves. We have lost a sense of perspective, of balance, of harmony. We don’t sit in pastures anymore, trying to describe what we’re missing. We think everything we’re missing is on the Internet.

And yes, I’m aware of how both (1) unoriginal my comments are and (2) how ironic it is that they are appearing on the Internet. The Internet offers us wonderful things as well, like the ability to connect with others from a field with just the minimum of time-delay.

Nonetheless, I have to think that we lost our way, collectively, when science split from religion. Or vice versa. Surely there were crimes committed on both sides, as there always are in human disputes. Conflict is nothing if not mutually assured on my home planet. But when the scientists stopped being interested in God and the religious stopped being interested in solving mysteries, then surely something was irrevocably torn asunder. How anyone can accept the answers offered by one group in total ignorance of the other eludes me daily.

(As though to taunt me, a wireless network has just been found by this laptop. Or maybe a metaphor about ability to make connections from remoteness or the seeming lack of connection? You decide.)

In any event, we can all look to extreme examples and see the absurdity. Science reducing all human existence to a collapse of uncontrolled synapses, eliminating free will and indicating that all human existence and creation is a lie, while pleading endless randomness in the face of the most wondrously perfect system ever built or discovered. Religion claiming that God will decide all and answer all, that those who die are meant to, while those who are afflicted should not fight but simply resign themselves to a fate larger than themself. A similar abdication of free will, a similar destruction of meaning, a similar breakdown in the purpose that ought drive human existence, both on a macro scale and the individual level. How are these examples not sufficient to get everyone to attempt to strike a middle-ground? Even atheist scientist friends are uncomfortable with the elimination of free will altogether, and certainly don’t live their lives like they believe it’s true. Even religious zealots seem to assert themselves as though they have the ability to change something around them. So why all the trouble seeing across the divide?

Surely the closest society to holding these interests in balance was the first society to settle on my home continent. Or series of societies. There was wide-scale recognition of higher powers behind every aspect of the universe they saw, as well as interest in developing and advancing to higher levels of understanding of that universe. The respect that was afforded each of these concepts led to the development of a minimally invasive culture, with much time for contemplation and communion.

But it was not a culture designed to particularly assert control or dominion, and it is a telling lesson about my species that this is one of the few cultures upon which an all-but-complete genocide has been visited in recorded history. The very idea of trying to learn more from the land than one was taught was so reprehensible that its adherants were forced to either change or die.

My wife, Emily, is not particularly spiritual, not much of a believer. About half of our conflicts for the more recent half of our marriage so far have evolved from some sort of discussion about this topic. I struggle with reconciling my love of Emily and my respect for her intellect with the fact that she not only doesn’t overtly believe in God, but finds the question to not be fundamental to existence on the planet. It should be noted that most of my friends feel this way as well, and while this also concerns me, one’s identity is far more wrapped up in a spouse than a friend. It feels like more of a reflection of oneself when one’s own life partner rejects something so fundamental to one’s own perspective.

And yet, Emily says that she feels something whenever she is isolated out in nature. That connecting with animals, with the basic forces of the natural world (wind, water, flora), simply being “out there” is enough to get her thinking about the bigger picture and often feeling some conviction that there is something greater afoot. She often remarks, either in nature or when confronted by amazing constructions of human hand that she finds less impressive, that she has never seen something made by humanity that can measure up to the lowliest product of nature. While this sometimes surprises me, grandson of an engineer who learned about bridge-building and to differentiate styles of columns before most anything, I think she has a telling route map to those who are otherwise disinclined to believe. What makes us (collectively, as a species) think we’re so great? Why do we even bother scarring the Earth’s surface with our contributions when nearly everything impressive is already there?

It’s a competition, in part, or even an offering as an aprentice. That we have something to contribute which can hope to allude to the grandeur and beauty of what we already found when we first opened our eyes. Look ma, no nature. I did it all by myself. Like a crude reflection of the world around us for taping on the refrigerator with a quietly pitying love. And just as high-quality, just as worthwhile in the face of the real thing, as a four-year-old’s lazy finger-painting.

Which is not to say that there’s nothing worthwhile in the Pyramids, the Internet, language, or art. But compared to the systems and understanding implicit in your average field, your average patch of non-garbage-infested ocean, your average rainforest? I think the metaphor flies.

Part of what I’ve never understood about the pitched battle between science and religion is the respect that each have for order. Science even calls the discoveries it makes about the universe’s order of operations “laws”, the same word religion uses to indicate its principles and guidelines for living. Science interprets the world around it with a presumption towards order, towards compacting what it finds into a series of laws that are never abridged, or at least never contravened except where another identifiable law overrides. And indeed this bears out – we hardly see gravity working some of the time in Iowa and then failing to at random times. But somehow, science is disinterested in a source of all this order and law and perfectly behaved matter, insisting that all order came from one moment of complete chaos. This theory itself fails to stand up to science’s own presumptions and policies of rigorous study – were it about anything other than something in impenetrable pre-history, it would be rejected on face. But because there’s no other explanation available without resorting to the three-letter no-no, it is offered as fact. How can science not feel that every additional law that holds up, every extra consistency and element of order that is found, how are these not evidence for God?

The only explanation is that religion has mangled God into seeming arbitrary, somehow the opposite of order. Because in its rejection of scientific practice, many religions have tried to ascribe unending magic and mystery to the figure of God. Mysterious ways, inexplicable methods, something that cannot and should not be known. This idea is just as dangerous and worthless as atheism. Perhaps moreso, for it rends people’s conception of the most important aspect of the universe from the reality of that aspect, thus nullifying it for the interpreter far more thoroughly than mere denial would. This resorting to inexplicability is just as senseless as resorting to the Big Bang – for wont of explanations, those who expect themselves to seamlessly explain everything appeal to something wholly inconsistent with the rest of their theory. And then wave the crutch of paradox or the rest of their intellect about to try to fend off naysayers.

The truth, of course, is that science can prove God with all of its order, and thus God is knowable. God is not mysterious and inaccessible and hopelessly oblique – God is in the systems that work every day to maintain life in its countless manifestations. God is the laws and rules and policies and structures that keep it all just so in ways that humanity fails laughably to imitate. How is it that humans have never made a computer that can’t break down, and yet life on the planet persists from well before humanity to (likely) long after it?

But perhaps this would rend the people who pursue science and religion from what they’re really after – power. If they were not maintaining some sort of supremacy in their ability to properly interpret God or the laws of the universe (truly the same thing), what use would there be in the respect they are accorded in our hierarchies? And if they did not do battle, how could they build their power by tearing each other’s down, by fighting for followers, by bringing the urgency of a following and extreme loyalty out because of the urgency of a false conflict? You think nation-states are the only ones that can raise a false-flag to ask unthinkable sacrifices of their minions? No, only by mystifying and cloaking the fundamental and simple realities of their alleged domains can scienctists and religious leaders exert their authority over those they attempt to mislead.

Perhaps not always with such a nefarious intent, I’ll grant. But certainly with that level of nefarious effect.

So what is to be done? How do we get to a place where people recognize the order in the universe as the signifier of something greater than themselves rather than the converse? How do we make peace between scientist and religious leader before it is too late to fish the garbage from the ocean, or worse, before it is after anyone cares about such things? Like all of the important realizations, it cannot be forced or likely even persuaded. It must be found within each person, of their own volition.

In the meantime, I spend time in the pasture, contemplating a day I have long dubbed Mortality Day, a reflection of a larger scientific/religious order I find in the planet’s course of movement through the same space every 365 days. A day laden with symbols (6), the memory of an unbelievably significant mass-murder (D-Day), the steady approach of a day when the planet is held in balanced opposition to itself. It is vital to neither dwell in the anticipation of death nor to ignore its daily possibility, but for me, setting aside a holiday of sorts to recognize the mortality of myself and others, has worked well. Eighteen years to the day after the death of my mother’s father, I continue this personal tradition, sometimes to the fear of those around me. But fear not for me in the context of death, for I have conviction that it would be merely a step, and probably ultimately a relieving one. I have not felt less that way than now for some time (about the relief), and yet I still can recognize that no matter how much I personally desire to cling to this planet and help it out, there are wonders beyond my imagining ahead, other planets and other learning to be had.

And whenever this faith wavers in the slightest, as it sometimes trembles like the trees in the wind, bending with the difficulty of a given circumstance or a cold black fear, I come back out to nature. And the wind itself reassures me, reminds me of what I know even in the worst challenging moments. How can you look upon the world, upon an “ecosystem” or a “valley” (whichever you prefer to call the same thing) and not be awed by the presence of God? How can you understand the depths of human understanding and think this is all for the purpose of one isolated planet, 60 or 80 years only?

Go out into the fields. Walk. And then come tell me it’s all random, happened for no reason, that there’s no purpose to anything we do or try or contemplate. Tell me all these rules are either figments or coincidence. And tell me that, somehow, the pursuit of a means of exchange or sheer hubris is worth destroying it all.

A plane tears through the sky, close enough to hear but not to see. Through the clouds that are darkening the sky and escalating the threat of rain. Rain that will not be enough to wash it all away.

We could live beside the ocean
leave them far behind
swim out past the breakers
watch the world die.
-Everclear, “Santa Monica”

Russ and I went down (up? over? out? – I have no sense of direction in LA) to Santa Monica yesterday and wandered around this open-air mall area near the ocean. We had a good time and caught some sun, but I was also sort of overwhelmed with the sense of impervious obliviousness of the people of Southern California. I had a hard time putting a precise finger on what was befuddling me, but I had a strong sense that a meteorite could have landed nearby and no one would particularly pay attention. A combination of intense absorption in one’s own world with general apathy to everything.

This then sparked a debate about LA apathy vs. NY apathy and Russ defending NY as an insider, which contrasts with my general perception of NY as an outsider. Place puts a real filter on the way one perceives what’s going on, though. This is not a new concept, but it can be startling to see (really feel) it in action. If nothing else, the Bay Area feels very raw and exposed. It’s as though there’s a bubble or force-field around LA that shields it from everything, while the Bay Area just feels completely open to whatever’s going on, if not actually having a magnifying glass bear down on it for extra fun.

But watching the stock market revel this morning, I get the sense that my bubbly feeling in Santa Monica was enhanced by a larger denial rippling all over the place. The ostensible reason being proffered for a return to 8,000 on the Dow is the impending demolition of mark-to-market accounting, which you can find under “accountability” in your financial dictionary. Without this rule, the same financial geniuses who created our current economy would be freed to attribute whatever value they wanted to whatever assets they have. Keep in mind that this entire mess is largely attributed to a massive bubble, followed by a period of uncertainty sparked by not knowing how much someone’s holdings are actually worth. Now you’re trying to cement a reality where we bubble up in positive reaction, followed by a world where everything is valued by unconfirmed self-perception? Really?

If you think people lack confidence now, wait till absolutely everything on the balance sheet is measured by optimistic, self-interested accountants! Sure, this house could go for a million if everything transforms tomorrow. I mean, there’s no evidence that this Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card will ever be worth six figures, but if I value it at that price, why not give me credit for same? Don’t you want to invest in my outfit that has access to millions, nay billions, because of a stockpile of baseball cards, used books, and cat litter?

It makes sense as a reaction to a world where currency governs most everyone’s life and currency is manufactured out of whole cloth (literally) by the government at their random and manipulative whim. It is the perfect answer to a country spinning out of control in its own realization that it has no idea what anything is worth, what anything even means anymore. It’s a little like the whole place just became LA. Put on your sunglasses, get gussied up, and let’s go pretend everything’s fine. Bring the credit card and the substances, for tomorrow we die.

This may be a weird time to mention that I won $781 in an online poker tournament the night before last, more than paying for the trip I’m on. Hooray gambling.

Tomorrow morning, unemployment figures will be announced for the US in March. They will be worse than anyone could imagine, probably fueling an even greater rally in the stock market (it’s how they roll). It’s a nice thought that we can value our household appliances and trinkets at millions of dollars to make up for the fact that no one will pay us for anything else anymore. But eventually, an economy based on tying people in the bondage of day jobs and profiting from their enslavement will fail when no one is employed anymore. I promise.

If you need me, I’ll be at the beach or in the casino. Seriously.

It’s not something that SoCal would be for me if I didn’t have a continual stream of friends in La Jolla or Pasadena or Beverly Hills or other vacationland sounding destinations with their sun and smog and beaches. And what I end up doing in SoCal is usually a lot longer on video games and all-night conversation than anything beachy. And yet, when I think of SoCal, it’s exactly like watching some minds-eye palm-tree laden commercial, knowing that days or weeks spent in this area will recharge me and get me through whatever obligatory nonsense I feel I need to complete (college, work, etc.) or emotional wreckage I’m in the wake of (see, for instance, May 2000). If only I’d had friends in SoCal in the summer of ‘97. Or ‘90 for that matter.

It makes me wonder if, long after all my friends have left LA, I’ll still feel this emotional attachment to the area as the place to go to rest up and regroup. Not that there’s anything particularly daunting facing me now, beyond another April/May that will hopefully be my last two months of day jobbing for at least two years. Maybe I’ll always have friends in this area. But I attach such emotional significance to place that this association will probably transcend the scale of whoever ends up living here. Would I still come here in the aftermath of something really trying even if there was no one to see? I guess it’s unlikely, since in the end, truly, people are home to me and place is just association.

For the purposes of chronicling, highlights from this particular incarnation so far have included Denmark beating FIFA on the second hardest level after just a day and a half, actually filming crazy celebrations of same for possible YouTube clip-show purposes (stay tuned), epic chess matches of an hour of calculated brilliance usually coming down to some tremendous blunder, buying Russ a coffee maker because it’s cheaper than going to Starbucks for a week, the inevitable revisiting of the year where every move we made held the universe in the balance (quadfecta, etc.), and watching our most recent YouTube creations conquer the Internet.

We’re gonna ride it till we just can’t ride it no more.

There is some debate from past years as to whether the previous record for luminarias was 525 or 576, but the record has fallen this Christmas Eve, as Emily & I constructed 620 luminarias, which I single-handedly placed as Emily contracted a flu this morning. My Dad helped light them (to the tune of about a third of the total), but otherwise, I placed and lit all 620 between 7:30 this morning and about 5:15 this evening. I even took a couple breaks here and there.

I was hoping to instantly upload some of my favorite shots of the record-setting display (talk about your instant media), but we are facing technical difficulties in camera compatibility and failure to bring a cord. So you will have to imagine, if you will, luminarias from street to roof and every level in between, totaling 620 in number, with not a seam put wrong. (Though we lost about 8 bags to fire, but they were replaced and thus only counted once in the 620 total.)

My legs and neck are sore, even when at rest. I feel vaguely dazed and thoroughly overwhelmed. And yet, I couldn’t be much happier (minus the Em being mightily sick thing). It may be the last Christmas in America, but it’s quite a Christmas. My heart will always swell for luminarias. I’m going back out to the cold, the candles, the sand, the bags. This is my holiday, the day on which I probably work the hardest.

“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.