Ten Years of Yesterdays

Tomorrow is always ephemera.

Today is a fact, is happening as we move and speak and act, is created as we live and collide like atoms in aether with others living their lives in their own ways. Today is the play we're writing as we live it, passing moment by moment into yesterday and past history.

But tomorrow is a chimera.

Much of our tomorrows is entrained by our todays. But there's always an uncertainty, a randomness that makes tomorrow nothing but a vague sort of promise half-muttered, half-heard until the remorseless wheel of Time brings it to us as the next today.

Being human we love - have always loved, probably always will love - the idea of messing about with yesterdays and tomorrows. I think it has something to do with our contrasting the mutability of tomorrow with the intransigence of yesterday, and the contrast between hope and regret.

"If we fall in the race though we win
The hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin
Remaineth forever Remorse."
~ R. Kipling

If we could only go back and change this or that yesterday; say the "right" thing instead of the wrong one, do this instead of that, love more wisely, act more quickly, fight harder, think faster...if we could just do all of that we would have saved that beloved, not lost that marriage, gotten that job, become wealthy, happier, greater than we are today, and present ourselves with an even greater tomorrow.

I got to thinking of all of this while writing the two preceding posts.

Because there was a time when if I could have I would have stopped time, reversed the spinning Earth, undone the hidden tragedy that took my elder daughter's life, diverted my world into another tomorrow where little Bryn lived and grew into that young woman who burned the offering at my grave.

But...

If Bryn had lived...

The world that cascades from that chance spins off into an infinity of mirrors.

With a living older sister my son, even if he arrives as such, becomes a different kid. And there's no guarantee that Mojo and I even have a son; perhaps our second child is another daughter. Perhaps we never have another child.

And with a living daughter, we certainly don't go through the insanely difficult and painful adoption process that finally, through some bizarre miracle comprehensible only to Loki, the God of Mischief and several junior functionaries working for the China Center for Adoption Affairs, provides us with the little girl who we know as Missy Shaomei. That little girl becomes someone else, in some other lifetime. We never know her.

And having sat up with her just last night (she was feeling quite unhappy with a sick headache from having fallen asleep with her glasses on combined with a stuffy sinus) I can't contemplate that with anything but horror.

So to change the past we change the present, and the future; to regain a lost daughter we have to lose another.

That's not an exchange I could, or would, make.

So I have to release that phantom-Bryn, that skinny girl wrapped in night-bedclothes, that stern young woman standing over my grave, to retain my very real Missy who is at this moment cuddled up with the Yellow Blanket and her beloved "stripey wubbie" watching some sort of awful Air Buddies movie her brother adores.

And - while a part of me grieves at the betrayal - the greater part of me is not displeased with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes that the problem with result of making the inflexible pledge of death before dishonor means that time will produce only the dead and the foresworn. I am in the unenviable position of the latter; for my living daughter I must foreswear any wish to restore my dead one.

I'm sorry about that, lovie, but the dead must bury their dead. I have a now-dear child that calls to me from this side of the Veil, and I would - even if I could, even if I had the power to change yesterday to be otherwise - go to her.

This time next year I will grieve for you again. But buried in that grief is the smaller sadness that I would now choose her over you, choose the life I have over the life that might have been, choose the messy reality of today over the unrealized promised of the tomorrow that never came.

The Mirror Crack'd

This blogging is an odd thing.

It really doesn't matter much in the sum of things. Just a little trickle of more noise, really, lost amid the greater noise of our cacophonous Information Age where we are carpet-bombed with light and sound until we shout just to be heard yet find ourselves one of millions of shouters whose voices drown each other out.

I wish I could pretend to have some trick worth coming to read, some facility within that produced some wisdom without, some internal depth that would translate into words on the screen that you would clamor to come to ingest them, and ponder them, and that would in turn provoke you to some great insights within yourselves. I can't.

I don't have any real insight into politics, or human nature, or sex, or warfare, or knitting. I have the contents of my head, and I take them out and air them here, in hopes that they will touch something in you. I don't know why I feel compelled to do this. Vanity? Probably; I'm a trifle vain of my own erudition and skill with words. But I haven't the skills to make a living at it.

Well, there's David Brooks, then.

Hmmm.

Let's say, rather, that I haven't the skill that should allow me to make a living at it.

But this odd little forum allows me to natter away without consequence, and allows me to at least pretend that someone or someones come to read my nattering. Looking back at last year I seem to be losing something; I didn't manage to find enough to talk about to match my postings for the year before, and certainly not from the Big Year, 2008, where I found enough materials lying around inside my skull for almost a post a day.

I'm not sure why.

Perhaps it was the official "end" of the Third Gulf War and the plainly-visible-to-everyone-outside-Victor-David-Hanson outcome (like "a dragon by the side of the road", as Bill James once said) of the Umpteenth Afghan War. Maybe it was the final, painful realization that my country is going to slide back into a half-assed sort of Gilded Age without even the prospect of enough dismal jobs in meatpacking and ironmongery to keep the parents of the future match girls and breaker boys in laudanum and cigarettes.

Maybe it was just preoccupation with the usual sorts of things we use as excuses for our national lack of political, economic, and social concern; work and family.

I don't think I'm done here. And I certainly want to thank and appreciate all of you who take the time to stop by, to read, and, especially, to comment back, especially those familiar friends and comrades; Lisa, jim, basil, Ael, Don Francisco, Pluto, Dee, Podunk Paul, Big Daddy, labrys, mike, Leon, Kevin...you are always welcome here, and welcomed. I hope to continue our epistolary friendship in the year to come. So this blog will be here, and I will be here, and, I hope, you will, too.

And I will continue to blab out whatever's in my head; poetry, and war, and love, and Korean in-laws, and kids, and ire at fucking Newt Gingrich, that vile staff-banging plutocrat, and soccer, and politics, and Portland, and the Northwest.

Oh, and I have eight more beers to review!

So, I hope, that even if I have nothing much to say I can say it well.

Welcome, friends, to 2012. I hope it finds you all well, strong, douce, and happy. And may we all leave it better, saner, happier, stronger, and kinder people than we enter it!

"On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road run by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott."

~ Fred Tennyson

Light Sleeper

The rains have returned.

Not that that's surprising; December in Portland?

Rainy.

A typical December day begins with spitting rain and ends in showers while the temperature never rises above 47 and never falls below 44. The daylight hours pass in a glower of badly-lit drizzle as though you were living inside a poor-quality VHS tape of your life. We endure this part of the year without loving it, the price we pay for our lovely mild spring and summer days.

One unfortunate effect of the deterioration of my hip-joints has been that I usually need a painkiller to get to sleep. But the PKs have a nasty tendency to wake me up in the early hours of the morning; I'm not sure whether it's a side-effect of the drug or an effect of the drug wearing off and the pain returning.

Whatever the reason it's been consistent, so I've gotten used to getting up around 1:30 or 2 in the morning and spending a hour or so at the computer before trying to get back to sleep.

The world is a stark place when viewed through the pixels of the online news channels. My friend Lisa noted that in reality we live in a vastly safe world, and, when you think on that for a moment, we really do.

The great and terrible wars of the 20th Century have been spared us, our generation. The total number of combat deaths in all of my country's wars over the past decade come to less than the dead men piled up in 76 hours on the island of Betio in November, 1943.

Seventy-six hours!

We have been spared the terrible epidemics of history. The days of the fearsome marauders; the horse nomads, the migrating tribes, have been spared us. For most of us in the West we stand a better chance of being warmly housed, decently fed, and healthily raised than almost any other time and place in human history.

It must be human nature, then, to look around and ahead for things to fear when our here and today are so benign.

Just moments ago my little daughter shuffled out of the dark, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She, like me, is a light sleeper, and the light and sound of my wakefulness often brings her up out of whatever little-girl dreams are carrying her through the rainy night. She never really fully wakes but still feels compelled to go and see what I am doing.

So she totters down the hall, into the front room, and up to my chair and waits, wordlessly, for me to pick her up.

She's getting big, my little orphan child, with a density that betokens strong muscles and bones and which makes her difficult for me to lift. But that lifting is an important part of our night-wakings; I heft her to my shoulder and carry her back down the dark hallway with her smooth, soft, fine hair pressed to my neck. She cuddles in against me with a drowsy sigh, and then snuggles into her welter of soft blankets; thumb into mouth, tattered terrycloth blankie in fist, and in moments she's asleep again.

And as I'm walking back to this desk I realize that we don't need the big frights and the great terrors; every one of us has our own small worries to trouble us.

The flu germ, the inattentive driver, the lost job, the burning house...we all have so many places to be wounded. When we love we give those loves as hostages, knowing that life and Fate in their uncaring profligacy will spare us nothing, knowing that we are granted happiness and peace by the merest of random chances.

We can do all the Right Things; live carefully, love greatly, work fiercely and well, and in the end we may end up with a handful of dust and ashes.

And yet...

How can we not?

I will freely own that I have no great dreams of tomorrow. When I was young I dreamed of greatness; of my name being spoken with love, or dread, or admiration by people I had never met and never would. Of leaving monuments behind me; spires, thrones, and dominations, pyramids of skulls, works of great art and skill that would speak of me long after I was gone.

Now I hope only for small victories; a sound, useful life, a legacy of good work well done, and a part in the raising of a family of good men and women who grow to be themselves intelligent and honorable people. And every day well-lived becomes a victory over those small worries. Every evening that I can hug those small warm bodies to me becomes a triumph, and a challenge.

Because all those dangers and snares await me and mine with the next daybreak.

So I sit, and type, listening to the silent sounds of my bones as they ache and gripe at me, and look out the window at the predawn sky, seeking the faintest traces of the light of the coming day.

Face of the Tiger

"There was a young lady from Niger"

My hip is aching tonight, so when the little cat jumped up on my chest (she likes to climb on me in the night and sleep, and she's so small that usually I give her a pat or two and go back to sleep myself. But not tonight.) I got up, shuffled into the kitchen to drop some kibbles in her bowl, then to the bathroom, and then here, where we left the laptop on all night because it is developing some sort of boot-issues and Mojo needs to use it for work tomorrow.

And I spent an hour or so visiting some electronic friends.

Isn't that odd?

I am a great believer that we are really fairly consistent monkeys; I honestly believe that human behavior hasn't changed all THAT much since Sumer. So our hopes and hates, our dreams and nightmares, the way of a man with a maid or a mother with a child have more commonality than difference whether we live in little brick houses or in temple-cities.

But electronics really have made a difference in scope.

So whilst jim and Lisa are in Florida a continent away I can drop in on Ranger Against War, or Lisa's posts at Big Brass Blog, and see what they've been doing. Or e-mail Lisa and chat (always a worthwhile thing, since she is as wise as she is lovely). And Labrys, whose ferocity and intelligence are as great as the goddess she bear, lives almost in my pocket here in the Northwest and I feel like she's a neighbor although we have never met. And there's a whole damn digital bar full of cronies; basil, Andy, Al, Publius, Ael as well as the welcome random visitors over at MilPub.

And then there's the whole Facebook deal. I wish I could hang with Britt and talk about her photography, or enjoy Carrie being serious amid her twinados, or kid India about her roller-derby hip (which is something like "keeper's-hip" which is what woke me tonight...) or hear Linda read her poems or fuss over Emme. But they live in New York or Texas or Arizona or California.

The thing is that with Al Gore's great invention we can visit whilst never moving from out of our chairs so far apart.

And that's a pretty terrific thing.

It doesn't replace going to the Thirsty Lion with my pals Brent and Julie to cheer the Timbers and hang out, or going biking with Devora and Ed, or playing D&D with Will (I swear, we will, soon, I promise!) and talking Portlandia with Meghan...but I value my Internet friends in their own way; not more, not less, just in another key, a blue note - because I wish we COULD be physically nearby. But their songs are part of the complex music that is my life.

And - as much as I worry about what seems to be my problem with keeping close to people I like - it's a pretty damn good life, a rich, strange, and varied piece of music.

"Who smiled as she rode on a tiger"

Which sometimes delights me. But which also sometimes amazes me - how did I get here? How did I deserve this brilliant, lovely woman and these smart, funny kids? - and sometimes confounds me.

And sometimes disturbs me.

Because for all that I love my life; my family, my friends, my work, my home and the place I have found to live and, I hope, to die, here in Portland and the Northwest I adore...when I look at my country I feel positively feverish; a hot flush of anger followed by a shiver of despair.

I think everyone feels that they are living in turbulent times. Peace and rest are for the dead; living people are always troubled. But I look around me and what I see is very ominous.

I think my nation, as a nation and as a people, is not socially, economically, or politically sound. For most of my generation (I entered the Army the year that Ronnie Reagan was elected) we have been dismantling the America I grew up in.

I know that America was not a perfect thing. I know it had many flaws, although as a son of a relatively wealthy white couple I wasn't forced to confront most of them. But it had a lot of strengths, too.

For one thing, it was much more coherent that it is now. We had our wealthy, and they pretty much ran the place (after all, those well-to-do planters, merchants, and attorneys didn't meet in Philadelphia to create some sort of paradise for layabout and yahoos, right?) then as now. But they were less distant, and you could still make a pretty decent way in the world even if your parents weren't in the yacht club.

A college education was affordable, much more so than it is now (I just talked to a Facebook friend from college whose child is looking into attending the small private school we payed something like $40,000 - pretty big money in 1975 - to attend and is looking at something like a quarter of a million over four years) and with a much better chance of leading to a decent job.

And the notion that taxes were the price of civilization was much more widely accepted. I've watched that - beginning with Measure 5 here in Oregon in 1990 - entire concept fray as a third of my compatriots take on the Leona Helmsley Philosophy of Life, that taxes are for the Little People.

And, of course, there's the Lesser Depression.

I know a woman, one of my former community college students. Brilliant woman; bright, energetic, persistent, decent. She's done everything "right", played by all the rules. Worked her way through community college, cared for her parents, took on tons of student debt to get her bachelor's degree...and she's got nothing. No job, not a hint of a job, and she's running out of time, and hope.

There's a lot of others like her, and that's just not fucking right.

In a better country her problem, and the problems of the others like her, would be a firebell in the night. We'd be frantic to figure out why all these people couldn't work, weren't working. And we'd be doing something to change that.

But we're not.

At least our so-called "leaders" are not. Instead they're nattering about deficits and fretting about taxing the "job-creators"

"Job-creators". So where's Suzanne's job? Where are ALL the jobs we're so tenderly shielding your wallets from, plutocrats? Why are so many of the young people I know working at Burgerville? Why are so many of the storefronts I drive past vacant?

Are you seeing what's wrong with this picture, you puling fucktards, you entitled bastards, there in your legislative offices from Portland to Salem to Washington D.C.?

No. I don't get the sense they do.

"They returned from the ride with the lady inside"

The news of the police reduction of the various Occupy encampments has struck me harder than I thought it would.

For all that I think the Occupiers have failed, I had hoped that their presence would have done something to change the way we in this country are talking. I had hoped that it would have shown that the populists of the Left had some kind of common ground with the supposed populists - the "Tea Party" - of the Right. That between them there would be a hope of swinging the national consensus back towards the People.

From history I understand that the United States has always been a contest between Those Who Have and Those Who Want. From the Framer's ideal of the rule of the deserving through Jacksonians-versus-Jeffersonians through the Great Schism over slavery, the labor-against-robber-baron struggles of the late Victorian times, the Gilded Age that ended with the smashup of '29 and the rise of the New Deal my country has always been the battlefield of those who believe that the nation is ruled best when it rules for the humbler sort against those who believe that those who have deserve to rule over those who have-not.

And being emotionally as well as politically a sort of have-not I know which side I favor.

So as much as the Rise of Reaganism has been personally and politically painful for me I understand that it's just the latest veer of the political wind.

But lately that wind seems to bring me a wintery loss of hope.

Because it seems too much like first icy gust of the perfectly terrible storm. An economy that has been sustained for decades by bubbles has burst. Our tax and tariff policies - enacted by thirty years of politicians trained to believe that getting cheap plastic crap into the country was worth letting jobs flee the country - don't encourage domestic manufacture. The last "recoveries" have been largely without rebuilding the lost jobs. There are now too many Suzannes out there, desperate for work, burdened with debt.

And our politics has become perfectly toxic. Where once "conservatives" believed in things like low taxes and small government as philosophy they now believe in them as religion. There is no compromise in them; they want it all, and are willing to go to literally insane lengths to get it. And "liberals" who once believed in the ideals of this country as expressed in the great words of its birth certificates have lost their willingness to fight for those ideals.

We were seduced by our long post-WW2 domestic tranquility into thinking we'd outgrown the dirty deeds we did dirt cheap back in our younger days. But those ways were still there, and when the vermin we elected eleven years ago reintroduced us to them we turned out to be all to willing to accept them.

We aren't horrified by the idea of torturing our captives; we're debating it. We no longer retch at the idea of assassinating unwitting opponents in lands not our enemy; we ignore it. We don't recoil at the notion that we should be a land where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Or, at least, "we" - the bulk of us - don't do anything about it.

So it seems to me that we're sliding down into perilously bad economic times, times that have the potential to be bad for years, at the same time that our politics has become impotent to do so much as agree that those bad times are upon us, much less do anything to arrest the slide.


"And the smile on the face of the tiger".

So. Here I sit. Warm, at peace, well-fed, content. Surrounded by a houseful of peaceful sleepers (other than the little cat, who has climbed into my lap as I type this and is making it very difficult to write) in a silent, dark neighborhood that I love, in a city and a part of the world I cherish. Enmeshed by a web of friendships with good people; fine, decent, lovely people who make the world a better place merely by breathing in it. In a country richer, more powerful, grander than any that has risen glittering from the Earth since the mud-walls of Sumer and the marble columns of Rome.

And yet tonight I look out into the night and I feel the hope for my children, for my nation, for the next ten years fading away like the stars before the coming dawn.

Far Overhead

The date of my arrival on Earth as an individual was marked, according to Wikipedia, by "...panic overt(aking) the American public, which created an enormous sense of vulnerability regarding the United States' ability to defend its territory. Adding to this fear was the element of surprise...which left the American public in what was observed as a “wave of near-hysteria"

I wasn't responsible. Really. I wasn't.

It was this guy...

"Простейший Спутник-1"

...better known as Sputnik.

Funny, in a way; the birth of the Space Age (or at least the Space Race) the same day as my own. And here we are just over half a century later with the Space Age reduced to a sagging badly-maintained space station loafing about in high Earth orbit with no particular purpose and nothing to look forward to except obsolescence.

I hope this is not a personal commentary as well.

Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce called Sputnik's radio signal "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."

No one ever described me quite so poetically.

Well, damn.

My Soviet counterpart lasted 90 days. The radio transmitter fell silent in early November when the batteries went dead. The satellite's low orbit decayed through the autumn of 1957 until on 4 JAN 58 the object re-entered Earth's atmosphere and was consumed in a fire that probably lasted no more than a few seconds.

The reentry is not reported to have been observed.And here I still am.

Little PS-1 might just have been responsible for much of the modern world. It stunned the U.S. public and jump-started much of the Fifties and Sixties science boom in my country. The Wiki entry says that Sputnik-1 "...would eventually invent the Internet, upon which this page is published, NASA, and an increase in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education. One consequence of the Sputnik shock was the perception of a "Missile Gap." This was to become a dominant issue in the 1960 Presidential campaign"

Which leads me back to last night.

As I was driving home I got to thinking.

Who am I?

What am I doing, and why?

When I was a child I dreamed like a child. Except I dreamed that I would shake the world, that I would leave a name that would echo down the years with a grandeur and a whispering, like Hulagu Khan with his pyramid of skulls.

And then I grew up into the real world.

But when I was a younger man I still had at least some pretensions to playing a part on the world's greater stage. Not inventing NASA or the Internet, perhaps, but as a soldier I was involved in events that changed the way the world wagged, for better or worse. I went places and did things that, in their small way, impacted those places and things. I had notions about the world and my ability to affect it, and those notions, while exaggerated, made me at least believe that I was changing the world and the lives of the people in it.I spent a moment yesterday reading about the people who are "occupying Wall Street". For all that I think they are a quixotic and forlorn hope they are, at least, acting out their beliefs and those beliefs - that my country is and continues to be fallen into the hands of malefactors of great wealth and that only by prying that wealth from the levers of power will there be any chance that the Lesser Breeds such as I and my family will have any chance at having a say in our own futures beyond mere random chance - while my part is to sit and read about them and then go home to my dinner.

I think about myself today; slowed, domestic, exercising myself in the public fora through nothing more than this pallid electronic medium...and contrast that with the younger man in his jump boots and aid bag.

I think about joining that group in Zucotti Park, about more; about the kind of men who fought the company thugs and the National Guards for the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day, who fought the FBI and the state troopers for civil rights, who fought the British soldiers for liberty and law.

And immediately think; but what about my family?

Who will work to pay off their mortgage, their schooling, their food? Who will help them with their homework, find their stuffed pets (my son just awoke crying that his small stuffed manatee had swum away somewhere in the bedding. At eight years old. At two in the morning. Sheesh.), who will help my bride through her transition to her next job if I am arrested, if I lose my work fighting the banksters...if I'm suddenly not there, who will be?

Thus does domesticity - and my own fears - make a coward of me.

Don't get me wrong. I've had a hell of a fucking good half-century-and-four. I've lived well and foolishly, loved badly and immoderately, sampled life here and there and liked the taste of it. I've seen the sun come up over the Red Sea and set into the mountains of Panama. I've caressed the naked skin of the woman who has borne our children, and felt the fear of violent death and the elation of its passing-by.

And I have, I hope, more yet to come; pride, and passion, the work of helping my children to grow strong and good, in fighting (still...) in what ways I can to make my house, my city, my nation, and my world more honorable, more equitable, more honest, and more realistic places than they might be without my mite's worth.

But I wouldn't be human, and I wouldn't be who I am, if I didn't regret not being...more than I am.That I didn't invent the Internet or pile up my pyramid of skulls no longer troubles me.

But still, in these quiet early morning hours, I can't keep myself as I sit at my darkened desk in my silent house from straining, just a bit, to hear the faint beep-beep-beep in the night sky far overhead.