Want

Sometimes observation happens in the most unusual circumstances. I am not a litterati... more like illiterati. Though raised by a wordsmith, I do not consider myself one any more than Romulus and Remus are wolves. But every once in a while I'll bump into a word that I thought I knew and stupify on how I missed the rest of the meaning. Lately this is happening more and more. It probably looks like a petit mal seizure, or maybe an old computer getting jammed with a huge file to process. And I would expect this sort of thing if I was one of the many English as a Second Language people. There, that second language might just help color in the understanding of your own. That's not me. If anything, I might be illiterate in a couple languages, but not enough to dare conversation in unless pressed by dire circumstance... anyway I digress.

So in this place I call home there are all these houses that are tucked away from the madness of the urban center. The houses all look alike, are well appointed, and are generally full of people who want more stuff to put in them. I'm not saying they're bad people. They are people, and people are people; products of their choices. It is apparent from the upgraded flooring, landscaping, electronics, and cars that they want more. Somehow in the story of the American this came to be the story everyone wanted... the immigrant who comes off the boat with nothing and achieves success and comfort.

That story is so much more interesting when you look at the struggle, the rise, the learning that comes for the road. Its the destination that's a let down once you've finished the trip. Somehow I think about my ancestors and their immigrant roots and can't imagine their success defined by underground sprinkling and a three car garage. They had so little and came to find their decendents with so much.

But I am still restless. I don't want any more. I am sorry I ever did. Feel stupid for ever buying a new car when a used one would have been fine, or for buying DVD movies I still haven't watched, or for making people who know and love me feel like they need to buy me something to prove it. I have more than enough. Too much. This stuff is collecting like cholesterol in my veins. I don't want it. But I did.

And that's when I started thinking about want. All these years its been 'I want a '. I remember when all I ever wanted was a 10 speed bike. Then I got it and all I ever wanted was a stereo-cassette player- the kind with TWO tape decks... and those funny lights that blinked when music played. It seems so funny now, because they are so utterly useless to me now, like in the movie The Jerk:

Navin R. Johnson: And that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.
[walking outside]

And then it becomes apparent to me that want is not just a desire to possess, its a personal deficiency. A self imposed void. That I lack because I choose to want. That I deny my own perfect nature in order to seek something that 'complete's me, like a paddle game. Or an ashtray. Or bamboo hardwood floors. Or a 3rd garage stall to hold all that crap I bought that I can't throw away. The story of Eden lives anew when I think about the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Funny, just one blog ago I was ripping it. Shows you what I know... only that I don't. Well, Snow White's a nice story too. Also has fruit in it if that's important to you in a tale. Sorry... I digress. It just that our want has made us wanton.

Now my sainted ancestors, forebearers of a distant age, those people for whom I am the pinnacle of their existential lineage, those whose manifest decendent has it all, is no less content than they were before they left their respective motherlands. The journey of a thousand years. A battle against privation, war, racism, only to end up with the same want, neatly appointed in the suburbs, where I want a riding lawn mower. It would complete me... until I get a satellite dish. Or a paddle game...

Grass Roots Suburban Protest

The lawn is waiting for its last manicure appointment of the year. There was frost on the lawn this morning, an elegant silver sheen punctuated by birch leaves lazily cast from a neighbor's tree. Still morning air, frigid and brisk, catches my breath like comic dialog balloons
around my head. There are so many thoughts. My head is encircled in a fog.

The deck stain is scratched and scuffed, and is only a year old. There are things to maintain. Entropy to resist. But not now. I just don't want to. I could break open a laptop and work on something for the Man, but that's not satisfying either. The air feels good, freezing slightly as I inhale. My bare feet burn from the cold of the sugar frosted deck.

Maybe I'll mow later when it warms up. Maybe not. Maybe I'll sleep instead. I'd rather sleep. Its been one of those nights as a parent when you have to earn your title. Sick kids vomiting their way to new sheets and a surprise load of midnight laundry. Awake more than asleep, I
can't feel anything. Not exhaustion, not pain, not love. Not even my feet, which should be bright red with cold by now.

I have these two choices. One I'd do for the neighbors, not me, the other for me and not the neighbors. I'm thinking I'll nap. Let the association fine me for not having the grass cut, or for having cars parked in the driveway and not in the garage. There is something stupid and
rebellious about my refusal to cooperate.

My mind skips back to a day last summer when my friend Hunter pulled into the driveway to find me cleaning my minivan to Rage Against The Machine. I'm armor-alling the dash, vacuuming the floor, cleaning fingerprints from the side windows, all to a background chorus of "fuck you I won't do what you tell me". Hunter saw me and broke into a fit of laughter, saying this was not exactly the revolution they had in mind. Sure I saw the irony. But it wasn't like Bullet In Your Head was muzak or anything... Yet. Now, however I realize the truth of that moment, not the irony.

I imagine a day 85 years ago when my great grandfather sat in a trench in France during WWI, a third of his company dead from mustard gas. The bodies still unable to be properly attended lying around. Guys he knew. He spoke good , but not perfect English. As an immigrant, it was not his first thought. Arabic was. He was a long way from either home... Lebanon or America, but by choice. The still morning air there would have been unsettling, like the eye of a
hurricane, or that moment before a storm breaks, but he wanted it this way. The injustice. The murder. The rape. It had to stop. People had to pay. He came to America and enlisted for the opportunity to fight against his oppressors. When the Turks sided with the Germans, it was clear he had to leave. He could make a bayonet just as gruesome a weapon as they did. But he wasn't catching babies on them like those bastards. Whose God could condone such an act? He was supposed to stay and take it. Agree to be cowed. Allow the rapes. Look away from the abuses.

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

He left it all behind and standing in a damp trench in the middle of the European Theater, he'd seen more death than he could have ever imagined. It would haunt him for the rest of his days. Except there were just Germans. No Turks. Same side. Same score to settle. And it was hard living. Hot and cold, hungry, unclean. Scarred by shrapnel, cold and silence. He felt worse for it all , now better. Damp trenches freezing your feet in the morning dew.

Maybe I'll stain the deck. It'll rot eventually if I don't. I really don't care if it does. Not today. I'm all thought right now and no action. My mind is wandering through all these honey do items and a parallel thought occurs to me: I don't care. Its not the mountain I am prepared to die on.

Would the 'association' fine me for my sloth? Would I pay up? Listen? Repent?

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

These associations are not tossing anyone on a bayonet. They aren't evil. They are formed with people who are seemingly normal. Formed with best-practice ideas on structure and function. Forms with a large predatory bird as its logo, oddly reminiscent of the Third Reich. Form with. With Form. Conform.

That's asking me to be like everyone else, for the sake of everyone else. A terrific bit of circular logic, since each person, their snowflake soul a divine original work, must homogenize to a lowest common denominator. Everyone. Casting away that which is divine for that which is less urbane. Suburban.

Its not that these people don't have souls, its just easier to keep them hidden, like everyone else who keeps theirs hidden. Its easier to dislike and hate people like this. To snicker about their lawn edging or catch someone's kid on a bayonet. You just aren't real if you hide
your humanity. Your fears, loves, hopes. Hide them, the society says. Seem normal. Average. Blend in.

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

Meditations on Rap's New Boon(e)

Rap has always been great. It appeared as I was growing up and the first strained sounds from New York City were guys like Kurtis Blow who rapped about basketball and things they liked. RunDMC liked their Addidas. Eventually angrier tones rolled in. Public Enemy was the first Rage Against The Machine. Their anger was palpable. Can't Trust It, 911, they spoke about their anger and I felt their emotion without ever knowing their circumstance. Its time for rap to come back to that.

Dont misunderstand, I'm no hater. Snoop is great and is adding more new words to the language than any guy since Shakespeare. Wait until you see the Dog's sonnets! They will shizzle your nizzle! But there's nothing to relate to with snoop or Dre. Not anymore. They're rich and don't like shooting at people, getting shot. Ice T, the Cop Killer is now a cop on TV!! We've jumped the shark. Its time to get back to our roots. Talk about where we are now.

Yes. My roots. So I was in the middle of Deliverance, USA for the birth of rap, but I was a refugee from 7 Mile. A mile farther into the abyss than that Marshall Mathers guy. My pedigree is credigree, except Livonia was a little farther west than him. Almost 45 minutes. And there was a Crowleys Department store across the street, which made getting socks for church convenient. And I was mistaken for black by my classmates because they'd never seen a black person and I was dark brown. An honest mistake. I believed them for a while. Geography stinks in school and it takes forever to talk about the Caucus Mountains. Hard to imagine so many people think they come from there... Sorry. I digress. I've got cred. That's all you need to know. You'll feel it.

Rap doesn't talk to me anymore. I have chosen a lifestyle that is sub urban. I want to have someone to tell me about my pain. I'm no Cop Killer. How am I supposed to get into that? The new rap will be about what we feel in the burbs. Mole killing. Weed killing. Now my passion is aroused.

Drop a beat yo! Freestyle:

I am the mole killa 'cause
Its how I like my villa and
Don't fuck with Feng Shui or
My tea that is Chamilla

Now you know. You feel that. I could go on, rhyme bustin' outta my mind like... like I've got rhymes. Yeah. I got mad rhymes, read the Sunday Times... I am the sub urban rap seuss. But there should be more. There could be a healthy side business in merchandising to the do it yourself sub urban rapper. I'm thinking a thesaurus. The Rap Thesaurus would help conjugate the 'izzle' form, for instance, include a bitch and ho' compendium, and possibly annotated fashion guide. This has merit.

Love-Hating On Quality... And Persig

I can blame it on Persig, that jerk who wrote Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Like the garden of Eden, I used to cavort mindlessly, carefree. I had issues with wonder, but I tried to repress it. Idle thoughts, really, like fixating on the meaning of words. Once I spent 2 weeks in a stupor when I finally figured out when it REALLY mean to 'want'. So this was a pre-existing condition- I'll admit that freely. But this book of Persig's really stuck in my mental craw.

Stupid quality. Quality? Quality. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid quality. There. I feel better. I am sure Plato did that after getting his perfect circle out of his head, or Newton, after he recovered from the mental collapse brought on by the universal laws of gravitation (yes, Isaac learned firsthand that gravity is a harsh mistress). Maybe it gives me a chance to laugh about the fact that I went from being totally unobservant to its painful inverse after this book. Without any increase in wisdom. Just watching the wonder of a wider screen.

So it started with the whole idea of 'what is quality?' Its easy enough. I've seen quality before. Good food, great art, music. Something. But they are all different. In fact quality is simplicity, complexity, synchronicity, or all or none of those things depending on what's being discussed. It just seems to depend totally from case to case what makes something an item of true quality. Maybe its really just giving a damn. Doing more than just the minimum work required, even if it doesn't show in the end product. Maybe that's quality.

So that's why quality control seemed like such an oxymoron. I know a little about quality control in a manufacturing environment. It makes sense there: parts need to come out a certain way or they do not fit during assembly. These ISO/QS9000 standards in manufacturing define consistent manufacturing process to the level of a living, tediously boring document. But how do you control quality? Perhaps I am just the oxygenated moron, but I always thought about quality being akin to excellence. The highest example. The highest is a relative problem, I understand that. It changes depending on your view. Call it parallax. I get that part of the lacuna, but can you control quality?

So going back to manufacturing, I thought about this anew. A product could not possibly be the best example of excellence if nothing fit together. Who would want a car like that? I've had one. Trust me. GO ISO! All right, so ISO has a place. Consistent manufacturing helps keep bolts out of the Cherrios box. My teeth can appreciate that. And then it would make sense then that if a company could deep fry a million chickenesque nuggets of some kind and distribute them evenly around the world, it would be a great example of quality control. Except I think I just used chicken nuggets and quality in the same sentence. That is really disturbing.

I know its just fo0d. But I thought I understood quality. Actually, first I had no idea at all what it was, then it was a convulsive loop of knowing and unknowing. Concentric circles of foolishness brought on by sensible examples of everything. Maybe food isn't the best example, but it is disturbing because of the homogenity that is made sublime through quality control. Suddenly I am having suburban flashbacks. Burbs sub-divided into micelles of homogenous housing. Similar lawns, siding, kids playing. People who live there know the houses by the names architects gave them... The Manchester, The Barrister, The Pennitant. Dogs of similar pedigree are led past these homes by people with the same logos on their shoes, heading back to one of 4 possible floor plans to enjoy a meal of chicken meat, stamped into a die, then fried.

Housing makes me think it could be a good example. These floor plans offer consistency and improved quality, presumably because the kinks of making these houses get worked out as hundreds are put up. Quality is better. But hundreds is really a small number. Manufactured, stick-built houses... now there's volume. There could be a couple thousand of those. They are made inside. There's a guy with a slide rule and a pocket protector making sure the screws went in the right depth. Now that's quality. But... what if you put wheels on it? And called it a double wide? There are far more mobile homes made than custom or manufactured homes. The best opportunity for quality control happens there, probably with the single wide trailer. And curiously, they are grouped in clusters of similar homes- trailer parks. Perhaps its moomoo's walking pit bulls instead of soccer moms walking retrievers, but its close.

So quality control is eating nuggets in a trailer. Quality? That is quality? No, of course not. I guess I've coming to the conclusion that quality perhaps, like lightening, cannot be controlled. It just happens. You give a damn for something, but can you for everything? And quality control can keep a mouse out of my Pepsi bottle, but it can't make a better Pepsi. I always thought the true nature of quality was to chase the infinitely perfect up and up and up concentrically inane or insane circles.

The problem is one of mass delusion: people believe they are all entitled to quality. If it exists for everyone, then is it really quality after all?

Lumberjacked Up

Labels are neither interesting nor useful unless you're looking to define something that's felt, but otherwise unexpressed. An infinity of fuzzy logic waits in the shadows of my quick list of working cognitive definitions. In a neutral state, not seeking an end, this asteroid belt of errant thoughts is not a problem. When blissfully unmotivated I can look at something I use all the time and see it as something altogether different. Take, for instance, pyromania. The mania interests me because its not pyrophilia, and yet pedophiles are not pedomaniacs. I digress, but you get the idea. That is the space between my ears. It feels crowded, and yet still frequently vacuous.

"How are you?" can be a query of paralytic proportion. I think I even wrote a blog on that once... Something as simple as that question seems to have so many potential responses, that it frankly bothers me that people ask. What do you mean? How Am I?? Eh... cognito ergo sum? That space between the question, the mental awareness, and the answer feels sometimes very tense because I have to pick a lane. Just one. I cannot proceed infinitely down two or three lines of thought simultaneously, but often I try and get lost in the land of non-sequitor. The challenge is apparently getting from a motionless mental state where everything can be turned and rotated to where the quantum spin of my legion individual thoughts can only be managed with principled uncertainty. Sometimes I marvel that I can get dressed in the morning.

It is for this reason that work is a valuable tonic. The construct is already formed, the terms and definitions set. I do well at work because of this. Sometimes I do too much of it because it is so clear. Even physical exercise fits in this definition of work. I find deep satisfaction in training for this reason. Whether its at the gym or in an office, there is a satisfaction in coming to that mental space where everything has again slowed down to a constellation of fixed point thoughts. It is a moving meditation. The motion creates the stillness. The stillness is the place where we become manifest. Where thoughts become words, then deeds. Its where I don't have to worry about losing that thought if I move, blink, or listen.

I cut down a tree this weekend and it was profoundly satisfying. The cherry tree had died perhaps two seasons ago. Last year its stark leafless branches were in vivid contrast to the norms of suburban landscaping, yet it passed through the seasons nonetheless. At the time it was just a tiny point of light in my mind. It existed in the constellation, but I was distracted by the disturbing pallor of much nearer health issues. So it transformed from ornamental to sun-dried cherry until finally a torrent of rain and gusting brought it down.

No longer did I have to ponder the new shape of the yard and the design of plants in that now treeless space, or how the grounds should be reshaped, when it should all be done. The tree was bent at 45 degrees to the ground. It had to go. I knew the steps to that dance. Rain fell so many days in a row and so softened the ground that the roots came up with the tree. When I saw its awkward tilt Friday morning, I knew it was time to finally act. No more delay, no excuses, no errant thoughts. Just cut down the goddamn tree.

So I did.

Saturday morning I awoke to the soft rattle of rain finding its way from the gutter to downspout. I dressed quickly and went downstairs to assess the available resources. Once upon a time I had rain gear. I've lost it. I found tolerable substitutes and went to the garage to find tools. No chainsaw. No neighbors up to lend one. I took small handsaw, a hatchet, and a 12lb maul and walked out into the cold morning air.

The leather work gloves felt awkward against my skin as I pulled and twisted the tree until its six in trunk finally broke free from the ground. There is always too much material in the last finger of the glove. You could have six fingers and still wear them. I hold no animus toward Inigo Montoyo, but it would be nice to have a glove that allows you to get your fingers around the handle of a saw. A neighbor pulls up in a moment when I am trying to catch my breath after lugging the 20 foot carcass to a suitable spot to cut it up.

"How are you?"
"What are you doing?"
"How is it going?"

I am speechless, for sheer lack of air or thought. Clearly no relation to Sherlock Holmes, I looked at the neighbor, dry in her car except the edge of her left hand sitting on the half-mast window. A small halo of exhaust lingered around my thoughts and I continued to catch my breath and think of any answer at all. The first thought was not a civil one, nor was the second, third, or 12th.

"Fine, thank you. Playing lumberjack... work in progress." It took 30 seconds to respond. Noting the lack of witty repartee, she nodded, waved and drove on.

The next 30 minutes were a furious blur of sawing, smashing and crushing followed by another 30 minutes of neatly sorting, stacking, and raking the debris from the yard. It felt good. For an hour there was a tranquility grounded only in the sensory ties to cold air, wet earth, and hard wood; mind at rest, body at work, spirit fully absorbed. When finally the tips of my fingers began to numb a little from the wet air, I collected the tools and walked toward the warmth of the portal to my family within.

Tomorrow, when I return to work and am asked what I did this weekend, I will be able to honestly say: "I cannot tell a lie. I cut down a cherry tree."