“You’ve got to realize the world is a big place—try not to be so up tight.”
After his frank indictment of my character, I stared blankly at Mr. Mortenson, my high school physics teacher and tennis coach. His classroom had the idiosyncrasies of a long-occupied room: a non-standard office attached to the back wall, lined with 20-year-old physics instruction adjuncts and old tennis rackets. We had just handed in another assignment, on which I was accustomed to acing, but had flubbed a sign or made some minor error. I’m sure I looked crushed by my mistake and was redoubling my efforts and asking questions to get the concept right. I really didn’t like any grade less than 100%.
This wasn’t the first piece of advice from Mr. Mortenson. I remember a lecture about Newton’s Laws when he tied in Semisonic’s song Closing Time:
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end
“That’s physics!”, he said. Perhaps it was because he was nearing retirement and his quoting a popular song was almost anachronistic, or perhaps it was because he refused to just focus on physics and instead say something more. I see now that he didn’t want to be limited to dry, rote block-on-incline-plane stuff. No, Mr. Mortenson sometimes actually said stuff that applied to our lives, lives we’d soon be out living.
And then, since it was so unusual to hear anything that applied to the real world, he said something I’m still surprised by today: “Touch the world gently, and it will touch you back gently.” Googling this now, I would guess that it comes from Javan’s 1984 book Something to Someone. But keep in mind, I was coming up on 12 years of education without any teachers talking to me like I’d end up in the real world, and here’s some life advice flying into my head in the middle of a physics lecture.
Given his record for slipping gold into black sand, you’d like to think I immediately took Mr. Mortenson’s “up tight” comment to heart. Fact is, though I remember his comment 10 years later, I did not at all understand it when I first heard it. I couldn’t see that there could be more than jumping through the hoops, that I was just a “really excellent sheep”. I’m glad I remember his words.
The ex-potato field felt empty but not desolate—lot stakes, light posts, and the bafflingly windy streets of modern suburbia were all in place. Ours was the second house in Brighton’s Landing, a development in what would soon become one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. I knew none of this context, nor would it have refined my picture of my place in the world—like any child, my life was defined by low walls and narrow vistas. But I did know we were moving, here, to this new house. I gazed up into the vaulted entryway, looked down at the unstained ornaments for the front window. My memories of this construction phase are spotty, but I know we visited regularly during dim fall evenings. I remember little from the days we moved, but the vast expanse of fresh carpet lodged in my brain. Perhaps because I was six years old and still close the ground. That was 1991, over 20 years ago.
I believe I have one very special memory, though. I say “believe”, because this is one of those memories where you can’t tell if your brain fabricated it for you while listening to the retelling of the event, or if it is authentic. I maintain a fervent hope this memory is no interloper into the vessel of memory: my sister and I are in a car, and the overwhelming emotion is “safe”. It’s in the air. I can’t tell you the model of the car or the time of day, but this emotion I recall more than anything. My grandma is there. Safe. We are outside the old house, and we say “goodbye house.” And then, we leave. This is exactly how one wants to feel before going on a journey, before moving, before beginning something new. Safe and loved and whole, surrounded by this vibrant, palpable love.
That house to which we moved, the one in which my parents still live, sits at the top of four circular terraces, descending the height of an 80 story building down to a lake. During that first winter, we could grab a sled and cut a clean line through what would soon become dozens of houses and yards and fences. All there was was white; no landmarks, no chimneys, just white and the deafening silence of snowy land. Our sleds were blue with yellow handles and we rushed to buy a fake christmas tree in the last days before the holiday. In the summer, we played on a giant dirt pile from the excavation of a neighbor’s foundation, skidded our bikes in circles in the gravel at the end of the new street, admired the green of our new sod next to the brown that surrounded us. This situation became a defining dichotomy of my childhood—the shelter that comes from the prosperity and optimism of flourishing suburbia juxtaposed to the timeless freedom that stems from roaming pastoral countryside.
So, 20 years. I come to this realization by way of a roof—that house I grew up in got a new roof yesterday. Another 20-year roof. And sitting there, talking with my mom, I did the mental math. I’ll be 47 years old when that house needs a roof once more. Somehow, making this calculation pushed the cold indifference of time right into my face, and it set me back on my heels. Can that be right? I’ll be almost 50 when this place needs a roof again?
At some point before I started college, I stopped living in the moment. I can glorify the memory, but I fail to enjoy making it. My writing falls short of imparting how I feel, but I’ll keep practicing, practicing the introspection needed to improve oneself. Now, I no longer want to improve just for the sake of improving, but instead with a hope that I can tune myself to the present.
On this ancient and miraculous world, where such
beautiful natural and living things have evolved,
something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a
manufacturing process. I read that in 50 years, we must
adopt a largely vegetarian diet or die, and forgive me if
I take that as good news.
When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is
understood not as a failure of civil society, to be
mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted,
there is little civilian life left.
She’s right. But even more to the point:
… former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new
interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the
greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on
the American public by special-interest groups that I have
ever seen in my lifetime.”
If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality.
As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan.
Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenge of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
I capital-h hate killing things. I hate killing small things, hate killing big things, hate killing things that are nuisances. I can sometimes make exceptions for flies and mosquitoes, but not always. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” is the only refrain I can come up with if I have to get rid of a spider from our bedroom. And right there, I wrote ‘get rid of’, preferring the euphemism to the reality—I killed a little piece of life that never did anything to me.
I hate to see old buildings torn down. I’m always straightening piles, tightening screws, touching up, wiping off, oiling, polishing. I physically react when I see clear-cutting of the rainforest, the enduring tree chopped down for transient finances. Most boys run around pulling up grass, breaking walls, throwing rocks at windows. I was always looking to build and maintain.
Years ago in my immunology class, I was the only one in my group who was able to wrangle our lab mice. I had to take a lancet and pierce the mice at the neck, so we could take blood samples for antibody measurements. Their scapulas felt like the fine edge of a guitar pick, and they squeaked when pricked. It wasn’t a nervousness that I felt, like when your stomach clenches before a big speech — this was different, like a deep, clawing, despair. Puncturing their skin, feeling the membrane stretch before the desmosomes gave way, made me feel atrocious. The pointlessness of our ersatz research (simply to confirm what the textbooks already told us) made it even more awful. If such a thing was a means to an end, if mice were being poked and injected for a greater good in medicine, I would understand. After all, the mice went about their business and kept living after we got blood samples. At the end of the semester, it was time for them to be killed with gas—I made someone else do it. I left the classroom and looked out the window at an early spring day, trying not to imagine what it’s like to die.
The other day I saw a video that was mostly lovely — a man had taken a GoPro high definition video camera on a sport tuna fishing trip. He modified it to work underwater, and captured breathtaking video of a pod of dolphins swimming with the boat. But there’s a few seconds at the beginning of the video, before the underwater shots begin. The men are standing on the boat, one steering, others watching their lines, and one gets annoyed because a tuna is flopping around on the deck. Now, keep in mind this is a pretty big fish, so flopping around really can create a commotion. The guy grabs a heavy, blunt, bat-like thing, and casually beats the fish into a bloody pulp. I don’t know, maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I just really really did not like seeing that. I don’t even like writing about it right now; it doesn’t feel cathartic at all to revisit how I felt.
I think it’s that I love to see things working like they’re supposed to. A crown fits on a tooth, a stove heats a pan evenly, a tree puts down roots and gives shade, an animal twitches or swims or pounces or sprints. I love to see things working, and I have a hard time when I feel like I’m undoing that.
This has been making the rounds today, and I don’t usually post something just to link to it (anymore), so you will understand that this is for future reference. Semicolons; So Tricky by Mary Norris at the New Yorker, quotes from a book called “Punctuation..?”:
Its main role is to indicate a separation between two
parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but
less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full
stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.
Stronger than a comma, weaker than a period. So, the semicolon has both a comma and a period in it.
Two days ago, we saw a live puppet theater in the backyard of a Prospect Park neighbor on Franklin Avenue.
The title of the production was “The Adventures of Juan Bobo”, and the second half of it, which we caught, was really fun. The live accordion player made it really… lovely, too.
I do wish I could have seen the production of “The Amazing Cow Boat”, which can be summarized thusly:
The Amazing Cow Boat tells the story of a boy named
Charlie who is playing pretend in the bath tub. He dives
into his imagination where he becomes the captain of a
boat that is part cow, part boat, part amazing.
There are more shows in other places, perhaps I will catch the Cow Boat show.
One day ago, it was our third year wedding anniversary. Somehow, with all the changes we’ve been going through (buying our first car together, considering living somewhere by choice rather than by necessity, figuring out our careers and family plans), we both knew that a lot needed to be written in the cards we exchanged. And we wrote a lot, a lot about how we felt now and about our future. And you know what? That brought us closer together. It’s probably a good sign that one of us didn’t write a novella while the other just put “Love you lots!” Nice to be on the same page.
So we went to a lazy river at the new Como Park Pool. We lazy rivered for about 20 minutes, which is exactly the right amount of time to lazy river on a small lazy river on a beautiful late summer’s evening on your third wedding anniversary. I suggested we make this a tradition. No matter where we are or what we are doing on our anniversary, we find a lazy river and then lazy river on it. (This paragraph brought to you by verbing).
These days, we’re starting to do more things. Saw a movie on a weeknight with Nils. Had dinner with old and new friends (Emily Fulton and her boyfriend Nick). Did stuff that felt more like living life than surviving. We’re both trying to figure out what type of structure we want for our days, weeks, years… and it is hard because right now we have fewer restrictions on our lives than ever before. Mykala is beginning to consider her transition out of school, I’m in the middle of mine.
I love her more than anything, and that fact is my North Star.
Just ate at Wok in the Park in St. Louis Park. Wow! Not only was just about everything on the menu vegan-friendly by request, but they had two flavors of vegan cheesecake. One of them we actually thought they’d made a mistake and told us it was vegan. Nope: the head chef stopped by and explained to us how he made it without any dairy or animal products. Yum.
