Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve been really sad today. A little angry, but mostly profoundly sad. I decided it was time to take a walk.

Here’s what that looked like:

Long road ahead.

Mysterious ground-seeking tree.

Groundcolor.

Camouflage.

An opening.

Upon reflection.

Knock here.

White wind.

A glaring sign.

Underwater cam.

Contrast.

Twilight crossing.

Looking up at gravity.

Weep me a river.

Wade in the water.

Eating club.

Impromptu lake.

The smallest tide.

The shadowmakers.

No grilling.

Goose stepping.

Good posture.

They see the light.

Takeoff.

Cruising altitude.

Catching trash.

Glow gull.

Waste management.

Puddle vision.

Portrait of the artist as he now feels.

Aspiration.

Recycling.

Deus ex folium.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Dave Niehaus died last night at the age of 75. Most of you probably don’t even know who he is, but the picture above might give you a running start. He was the man who single-handedly (or voicedly) convinced me to be a Mariners fan. He was the shepherd of my audio youth, the man who may have first inspired me to take an interest in public speaking. Indeed, it was an aspiration of mine to be a baseball radio announcer long before a speaker or debater. Although I guess drama had something to do with that evolution as well.

A lot of what I would want to say about Dave Niehaus today is what I already said about him when Ken Griffey Jr. retired earlier this year. Read that post and you’ll see how inextricable the influence of Dave Niehaus as the lead broadcaster for the Seattle Mariners was from my growing to love the team, from my love of all the players whose names he called amid the excitement of “My oh my!”, “Fly away!”, and “Grand salami!” He was the consummate broadcaster, warm, friendly, approachable, prone to enthusiasm at all the right moments. And of course he was on the call when the greatest moment in Mariner history happened, that fateful fall of 1995:

In recent years, I’d gotten a chance to reconnect with Niehaus during his early-inning stints on the TV broadcasts and late-inning stints on radio, both available in California and Jersey through the magic of the Internet. He’d been wearying a bit, laboring under the strains of a septuagenarian body running through a much younger man’s schedule. They were giving him breaks in the middle innings. But in 2008, he finally was inducted into the Hall of Fame, and the lift in his voice that came in the final two years thereafter was clearly audible.

It is thus tragic, but somehow almost fitting, that the M’s lost 101 games in his final year with the team, with the planet. The Mariners have never been about winning, not really, not even when they set the record for wins in 2001 only to fall short of a World Series. The Mariners of 1977 that Niehaus first broadcasted lost 98 games. They went on to have six seasons worse than that, including 2010, and one equally bad (1992). They didn’t even get above .500 once until 1991, by which time Niehaus was well on his way to converting me away from the A’s and into a lifetime of love for Seattle. And the next year they still lost 98 games.

Listening to a Mariners game will never be the same. Dave Niehaus has announced nearly every one of their games in franchise history. No one knows what it’s like to be aware that the M’s are playing and not know that somewhere, whether directly audible or not, Mr. Niehaus is plying his craft in the booth, musing and screaming with every pitch and swing.

Thanks for everything, Dave. Fly away.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I meant to post about this article when it came out. That was in April 2008. Which was a while ago. Even longer ago in feeling than it is in calendar months. I try to get a sense of it and come up short. Reading this helps a little. Or maybe this old cartoon:

But I won’t ever be back there, ever go back to the time (8 April 2008) when I described the girl I dated before Emily as “my last unsuccessful relationship”. Will I ever have that kind of confidence in a relationship or a person again? How could I? I can trust, I can try, but the idea of that kind of certainty seems innately preposterous. But this is not what this post is supposed to be about.

It’s supposed to be about a man on the verge of death, one who is revered all but universally in the wake of his death, now 42 years on and counting. About the fact that he was not content with the political or economic systems that comprise our perspective today, that seem to consume even the most progressive and semi-radical of proponents. That even the radicals he was surrounded by at the time were not up to his vision of a peaceful demolition of a way of life that leaned heaviest on those who could least afford it. Read the article, the first one, the one I didn’t write. Register your vision of the man we celebrate every January and on a road sign in every town with the advocacy of paralyzing Washington until it coughed up capitalism and spat it out.

What King knew then is something still barely being whispered about in the frenzied corridors inhabited by a small portion of my friends and other scattered like-mindeds. That the idea of eternal growth in production and consumption is innately flawed on a fixed planet with fixed resources. The the idea of competition where one’s life is literally on the line winds up all too often in death. That the commoditization of everything means that most people end up with nothing and a few people end up being able to functionally enslave everyone else. That racial equality is only the first step in a long road toward the kind of equality that we should all be striving for.

Is it any wonder, then, that he was silenced? With even his closest allies nervous about the next direction he would take his booming voice and sweeping influence, it is unsurprising that someone pulled the plug. Watch his Memphis speech:

He knew it was coming. He knew the risks and he knew it was worth it. Not just for racial equality, mind you, but for the message that capitalism was insufficient as a way of organizing a nation.

So next time you think of the importance of the economy, think of what you want to happen, think of your own personal compromises with financial “realities,” remember MLK. Ask yourself if (and if so, why) you believe so wholeheartedly that this structure is the terminal shape of human interaction. Does it really make sense? Is it really working for you? Are you living the same life you would live without the concept of money?

“Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve been hearing something going bump in the kitchen periodically since moving to my new domicile and am beginning to see traces of evidence that something small and squeaky is dallying in said room for late-night snacks. This at least makes me less worried about the unpredictable loud noises, though perhaps I should worry about having a furry companion in my midst. Maybe I should send for another furry companion currently vacationing indefinitely in Southern California. I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t insist on leaving little blotches indicating its presence on the counter.

This rodential roommate is one of a growing list of imperfections about my current quarters that make me wonder when it’s time to contact the landlord. The problem with almost all of these is that the manner of fixing them is worse than putting up with the mild inconvenience of leaving them alone. For example, Fish & the Madster found out first-hand this weekend that my cold “tap” in the bathroom runs unchecked unless one has learned the special trick for retwisting it to a mere drip, whereupon it remains at a slight drip. There are two small nails that poke up above flush-floor level in strategic spots near doorways between rooms. No two patches of wall are exactly the same shade of off-white, the product of several spackelings without repainting.

I really don’t care about any of these things, though the dripping/flooding faucet is pretty grating for guests. But bringing in someone to help would involve them camping out in the place and making an altogether unnecessarily large deal out of whatever the issue is, be it painting or plumbing or, heaven forbid, chasing mice. So they become folded into my day as small conduits to the way that most people live, those being people who don’t have the luxurious options to live in America and expect comfort at every turn. And of course even as proxies for such experience they fail, because the fact that 99% of this apartment is perfect, including and especially the heating and solidity of the place, keeps me well removed from such a real relation to incomplete living space.

In other first-world news, I have received my first cell-phone bill and determined that while I do not need to immediately switch to an unlimited plan, my interest in same was not entirely unwarranted. I used 3,258 minutes last month (54.3 hours), though only 384 of them (6.4) were at billable numbers during billable hours. So I guess you could call me a big fan of the phone, even if I’m not wild about its cellular nature specifically.

Soon I should know whether I’m going to be spending most of December working in New York or hanging out in New Mexico. Why do I feel so old?

This is an albino water buffalo:

I post it in lieu of a picture I took of Fish & the Madster while they were here for almost a day which they asked me to refrain from posting. The unposted flick is cuter, but not by much.

Debate-wise, this weekend was not ideal, but it at least seems to have featured an assault on the NOTY (Novice of the Year) board by our youngest generation, though we didn’t stick through three outrounds just to find out. We collected a whole bunch of 3-2 records and a new judge for the top of our scratch list! Good times.

Outside of debate rounds and performance, this weekend was a darn good time. The team had a great time hanging out and our ride back involved epic games of Ghost that both came down to the final letter. I got a chance to see Brandzy, breaking our longest-ever streak apart, hanging out literally all night at IHOP and wondering whether or not we actually existed. Then Fish/Madster came over and we all celebrated the end of Daylight Saving(s) Time. Would that Jaque were here to really put some pep into it, but I guess he always liked Spring Forward day more because of its implications for early evening activity than the mere opportunity for a “free” hour of sleep.

I have discovered a new favoritish place in town, namely the Palace Diner in New Brunswick that’s just a hole-in-the-wall breakfast/lunch joint operated by an (at least today) ornery but efficient old gentleman. I’m not eating out a whole ton these days, but I might a bit more if I start incorporating the Palace into the mix. I was long overdue to find an affordable breakfast spot in this state, having repeatedly come up empty in Princeton.

I have spent most of the weekend being way too cold or a little too warm. My throat is scratchy, but still stable. My thoughts are scattered and they’re cloudy. I found the end of Point Counter Point particularly poignant on this of all days. The light is failing early and I am overdue to take my leave.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

The rest of the story…

The sidebar on this blog looks a little different now – I’ve manually added a bunch of links to the only active blogs I know of that my friends are keeping. If I overlooked yours, let me know and I’ll add it. And if for some reason you want your link taken down, we can do that too.

I’ve tried to just use titles and not identify anyone this time around, since it seems that a lot of people are into the relative anonymity thing. Looking over the previous rendition of my links to others’ blogs, it’s kind of remarkable how many people seem to have gone through blogging as a “phase”. But at least a handful are still into it at some level or another, so bully for that. One of these is also seeming to hope for anonymity, so I won’t identify who summed up my political thoughts better than I could just yesterday. Good reading, though.

I’m also not convinced that the whole Blue Pyramid Stories thing is working out. Frankly, no one seems that into it, given the view numbers. A lot of people have said they think it’s a little weird, especially with the candles and my somewhat toned-down demeanor. It’s an experiment, and one that I will probably continue to dabble in a little (I still have to finish the Scotland story, after all), but I’m not sure it’s going to be the multi-day-a-week thing I initially envisioned it as. Then again, once I actually revamp the sidebar to the BP page and have a featured landing page for the Stories, maybe people who haven’t heard them from knowing me will take an interest. Or maybe it’s all just too strange.

It’s been raining all day in Highland Park and it’s been a particularly daunting storm. The mood seems to be affecting everyone, especially those at the Cafe today, who were subdued amongst the quiet reclusion indicated by the absence of patrons. This storm seems to be winter’s declaration of arrival, the calling card of a season that may menace us with the portend of bundled coats and zipped up faces. I may have to drive to debate, not even to keep dry so much as to stay focused on not getting swept, like so many drenched leaves, down the road and into the river.

Might be working on a quiz at some point too. I know I’ve long promised the Song Quiz, but I’ve also been thinking about going with something really zany to mix things up. I need a focus, something lighter and more fun than I’ve been investing in. I feel heavy with the weight of reality. Maybe I should just join a bowling league or something, though that also puts a weight on one’s shoulders. Or at least one’s wrists.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

There are a lot of one-time costs associated with this chart that are hopefully more inflated than they’ll regularly be. Suffice it to say that I overspent this month by a decent, though not atrocious margin. Still, this included bills for kidney stone procedures (had a doozy of one come in during debate last night, which was exactly as much fun as you’d guess) and Prius service and upfront costs for my cell phone and this website.

Of course, all of this will matter a bit less if I manage to get that job. Though then the transportation costs will also spike. Everything in life is about trade-offs. Hopefully ones that still outpace their drawbacks.

Goal for November: get Recreation above 1.4%.

A poignant, if periodically disgusting, memory of an early bout with near-death:

“It’s because you’re not trying to be happy or wondering why you should have been made unhappy, because you’ve stopped thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That’s the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,” Mrs. Quarles went on; “they never think of life except in terms of happiness. How shall I have a good time? That’s the question they ask. Or they complain. Why am I not having a better time? But this is a world where good times in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it’s inevitably a disappointment – for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it’s been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody’s happy. It’s because they’re on the wrong road. The question they ought to be asking themselves isn’t: Why aren’t we happy, and how shall we have a good time? It’s: How can we please God, and why aren’t we better? If people asked themselves those questions and answered them to the best of their ability in practice, they’d achieve happiness without ever thinking about it. … If you’re feeling happy now, Marjorie, that’s because you’ve stopped wishing you were happy and started trying to be better. Happiness is like coke – something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.”
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

It’s not just because I ran across this passage in my train-reading this morning that today’s been a good day, but that certainly didn’t hurt anything. I’d long heard about the brilliance of this book, written at a time (1928) when the West looked a lot like it probably did in 2008. It’s shockingly modern for a book of its era. I’d put off this Huxley classic for ages over a misunderstanding that it must be a book of essays given the dryly factual title it bears. But at current paces, it’s in the rarefied air of Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and Crome Yellow. Most impressive.

I was on the train to head to New York for my second interview there in about six weeks, though this one was directly for an organization rather than for a placement agency trying to slot me into a job that had already sailed. We’ll see how it goes. I’d be very excited to do the work and get involved with a really dynamic and important non-profit and I think the interview went rather well. So keep your fingers crossed or whatever superstition you adhere to going in whatever fashion you see fit.

Going into New York still feels like a major investment each time, so that’s something that would hopefully lessen with routine… it’s only been twice going in since adopting my new life, but it’s felt like a significant excursion both times. At the same time, I’m sure the first few BART rides into SF felt that way. And while this is certainly lengthier and on a more substantial train, it might offer the opportunity to bring back the much-beloved Strangers on a Train category with my random insights about fellow riders and their transport-bound habits. Chaff, I tell you, but you all seem to tell me otherwise, and thus so be it. Who am I to blow against the wind?

The wind was chilly and verging on frostbitten as I trekked the brief two and a half blocks from Penn Station to the venue of my ‘view. New York is a cold place in so many ways, but today it felt palpably terrified of terror as well. Constant reminders droned through Penn Station about random searches that may be conducted and concluded with an admonition to not “pet the [bomb-sniffing] dogs.” The men’s room facilities are temporarily port-o-potties in an alley just outside the station. A man barked at me for entering the wrong waiting area for my ticket to go home at one point. New York City always feels like it has an edge, but today was especially intense. Maybe something about Election Day, though I fail to see how that makes Penn Station an abnormally likely target. Then again, train stations have long proven to be a vulnerable but somehow unstruck target.

Election Day makes me feel like a target, what with the barrage of bunting all over Facebook and the deep-seated passion on display from so many politically-minded friends. It makes me tired. I don’t exactly begrudge anyone their commitment, but I fail to see why it’s so much greater than the commitment to so many other important matters in our society. It doesn’t matter who you vote for in this country at this point in history. They are all corporatists. There is one party in America and it is The Corporation. When someone hits the campaign trail speaking not just against big business, but against the idea of business, give me a call. Then it might be time to get invested in politics. Until then, the interests being defended are those of the moneyed profiteers. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a big dollar bill stamping on a little dollar bill, forever.

Sorry, George. It had to be said. As did the answers to my interview questions, which felt much better than they did four and a half years ago when I last sat in a group interview at a non-profit I was excited about coming to work for. That was a significant political day too, May Day 2006, the rallies all over the country and especially the Bay to defend the rights of immigrants. Not a lot’s been done about that one since that day, nor particularly on any of the rights and freedoms issues facing America, at least not at the ballot box. Arguably a little has happened in the courtroom. We’ve given a lot of money to corporations and called it a rescue or a reform or a renewal. Laundering cash has many names.

The man across the way from me in the (correct) Penn Station waiting area had no cash as far as I could tell, and maybe not even a ticket. He was unseemly looking at first, unwashed and underbitten and prattling away in the hyperspeed manner of so many of New York’s outcasts. But rather than move away to better concentrate on Huxley, I briefly used that latter as a foil for paying attention to the former without showing overt interest. A demonstration of interest could lock me a month-long discussion, but bearing stealthy witness to a monologue yielded a remarkable bounty. The man was a savant, a true rhetorician, his words were perhaps a bit fast (an import from policy debate?), but well spoken, extremely well-crafted, and made intelligent points. He spoke of a detailed history either lived or imagined, one in which he’d not been the soliloquizing soul on the taut foam seats of Penn Station’s NJ Transit waiting area. He’d known people and interacted, been accepted and then ultimately beaten down by the caprice of life and its callous inhabitants. He drew analogies to politics, analogies to the future. Yes, he delved occasionally into the “out there”, hinting faintly at crazy before reeling himself back in to something interesting and eloquent. I need to learn to start taking tape recorders with me to the train station. Or maybe at least Rutgers Debate flyers.

Plenty of time for that if I get the job. For now, we wait. See what winds blow into the country, what bluster and hyperbole is made of them. I’ll be on the sidelines, with Aldous, George, and my anonymous beleaguered spreader. This is one for the books. It’s all for the books.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Forgive the use of the Star Warsy sounding subtitle in the new logo up top, but it’s really the most accurate thing I can convey. There’s a reason that film was a smash hit, and if you go back and look at it, it wasn’t because of the acting, dialogue, or even the special effects. I’m going with title.

Explanations, you ask? No one ever called me an enemy of the sine-curve. And since there was nowhere to go but up a few days back, the universe promptly complied. Or I dug myself out. Whatever narrative you prefer, based on your accordance of free-will, control, fate, or what have you. As soon as I can resolve the paradoxes of absolute free will and the benevolent safety-net of the universe, I’ll let you know.

Suffice it to say that I’ve had the best 50 hours of my last 2,500. It’s been over a hundred days since the crisis began, and it feels like I’ve been truly happy in a sustainable (read: more than a few hours) way for the first time in that whole duration.

Some causes:

1. UPenn vastly surpassed Maryland (which was only two weeks ago, and the last competition we attended) as the best tournament in RUDU club history (caveating again the legends of early-1990’s teams that were comparable and technically organized as a different club). Dave & Kyle won the tournament, the first tourney win in the 10-year history of RUDU. Farhan & Chris broke for the first time as a team, including Farhan’s first-ever break, won quarters on a 3-0, and then barely dropped semis on a 3-2, finishing 3rd overall. First and third. Needless to say, the team was euphoric all weekend and everyone was just beaming at the team dinner as we basked in the glow of having come a ballot short of closing out finals. And Krishna & Bhargavi were in a bubble round to boot. As the post that will go up on the debate side will attest (once we get an image unloaded off someone’s camera to display atop the site), Rutgers is now 5th-ranked in the country, breaking our all-time high from two weeks ago, and Dave & Kyle are the 4th-ranked partnership in the country. Yeah. It was a pretty good weekend.

2. Today I got a call about a job interview for one that I’d applied to long enough ago that I’d given up on it. Turns out that they were sifting through 400 resumes and I’m one of three (3) finalists getting interviewed in the next couple days. It’s in NYC, four days a week, wrapping pretty neatly around debate. It looks like I can get monthly train passes that keep the transportation costs from being prohibitive, and carry the added bonus of giving me a marginal-cost-free ticket into New York whenever I want. There’s no guarantee, but I’m feeling pretty good about it. And even if I don’t get it, it bodes well for future such applications. My interview’s tomorrow.

3. The San Francisco Giants, long my second-favorite team in baseball and my favorite NL team, are one win away from the World Series title, their first in the city I used to work in. While my obsession with their playoff run has been limited to listening on the computer due to not having a TV and generally being lower energy for much of October, I’m still elated to see them on the verge of this milestone, especially coming at the expense of Texas. I can’t imagine how Gris must be feeling right about now.

4. There has been another development which I will refrain from overtly discussing, probably for a long time depending on how things go. But it’s good and has helped turn things around in conjunction with the above.

Happy? Yeah, I’ve been happy lately. For real. Today especially, with that job interview coming in on top. I can look at these four things and think they might not look like much. You might even say they were all obviously inevitable. But in the throes of the last hundred days, not a one of them, let alone all four, felt even likely. That’s the nature of a tunnel.

It’s far too early to declare any sort of emergence from the tunnel and it’s clear that all four of these things are tenuous (well, probably not debate, since that’s pretty well established and no one can undo the accomplishments of the past nor deny the momentum it implies for the future). But it’s a big fat start. And there’s enough factors that even if one or two collapse completely, there’s a lot to build on. It’s rally time, kids. Get your caps on.

Postscript:

Cleaning up my place today and doing the surprisingly enjoyable laundry (having it in the basement instead of down the road or at the laundromat is remarkably fun – this is the closest I’ve lived to a washer/dryer since living at home in high school), I was listening to Pandora. And paying close attention when a song I’d never heard came on.

It was Tom Petty’s new “Something Good Coming”, and I submit it to you as the best encapsulation expressible of my current mood:
Listen to/watch “Something Good Coming” here.