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A long time ago, when I was in college, I liked to take long walks in the woods. I was very fortunate that the college I attended was situated in the midst of miles of thick forest; one of the trails followed a creek running through a long ravine terraced by many waterfalls. In the Autumn of my freshman year, I had seen shoeprints in the muddy trail, and the imprints were very distinctive--Bass brand shoes, the slender print of a girl's shoe. I followed the steps as far as I could, past the waterfalls, until they disappeared somewhere up the ravine. I had a strange notion that I'd find that girl eventually.

Not too much later, I did meet a girl whom I dated for years and eventually married. I discovered that she had a pair Bass shoes with soles in the exact pattern I'd seen. Over the years I forgot about this juvenile fancy I'd had... a whimsical aside hardly worth mentioning parenthetically. Maybe I'm hopelessly sentimental, but I've always been convinced that I found the girl who made those footprints.

We met in April, the time of year when the polliwogs hatch out and leave the water as young frogs. The peepers make their first feeble croaking sounds in the early Spring, and they multiply until it seems their cries are numbered as the leaves.

It's early April now. I live up the side of Cougar Mountain, and there are streams all around. The reedy croaking has been growing stronger every night. That sound brought with it all these memories--because, inside us, sound isn't just sound. An entire world is waiting to spring to life, and certain sounds are a song, bringing past moments back to life.

Now the parentheses have closed. I lost her recently, and it took me quite some time to realize all the stupid and vain things I'd done to poison the relationship and alienate her. I shouldn't be surprised that it suddenly closed shut on me. Parts of our lives pass into subsequent phases, and we usually don't pay attention, so it doesn't seem like anything has ended. We have an illusion of continuity when really, our world is ending every day, a gentle apocalypse unfolding like cherry blossoms. We don't think of it as death, but we live with a kind of ongoing death, which is part of life itself. Not until life ultimately reaches an irrevocable end do we even start to consider that our part might be over, and we ourselves must make an exit somehow.

At the end, we're tempted to say "I wish" or "if only," but I won't say that. I got my wish. It took decades, but my "if only" happened, over a very long time. I'm grateful for that. I write this today because we met on this day, April 19, 1980.

A long, frustrating, sweet, difficult, passionate, and devoted history lay between those parentheses--quarrels picked, hot, messy afternoons painting rooms, roads explored, conversations far into the night, apartments chosen, clothes tried on then worn till threadbare, groceries shopped and brought home in brown bags, writing projects ending not in publication but only in ellipsis... but it would take 30 years to tell the whole story.

How Deep Is Grief, How Far Is God?

As I previously commisserated on Lent in last April's Can't Wait to Sin, I must be the world's worst Lent participant.

Especially this year, when the commitments are things like thinking positively and staying focused and clear of distractions. (On reaching out to help others, perhaps I haven't done as badly.) But in falling down, I learn about my deeply held beliefs and where I stand with respect to them. For example, I believe that God wants the best for each of us. He wants us to be happy and fulfilled according to our potentials.

When I stop thinking positively and indulge in nostalgia, I learn something about the purpose of memory, and I've made the following observations:

I wonder whether God, being perfect and not being able to act incorrectly, created us so that he could understand free will and failure. And He incarnated in order to understand our struggle and suffering.

God also needed a way to record events. Living things record events, whether consciously or not. Trees record fires and volcanic eruptions in the rings of their trunks. And we have a superb ability to store far more complex memories. We record through our senses, and God helps us bumble our way through, with all the attendant messy emotions.

I have been working through a family crisis, where many memories come crashing over me, and do not allow much respite. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by grief. Certainly, God is silent. The work of His hand may be apparent in all things, but God often seems very distant.

We have to accept that bad things are going to happen, terrible things. It has been asked over and over again why this continues, and the answer is that God doesn't break his own rules. The universe was created as an ordered system; like Dharma, if a physical law were violated, there would be no law, and chaos would reign.

This is not to say that we simply accept tragedy and misfortune--this is why we struggle--we're expected to work through our travails. I'm working through my own. Elie Wiesel said that human problems are like an ideal gas that expands to fill each person's psychic space. This is why each person's problems seem to be the greatest problem in the world--for that person. Keeping this absurdity in mind, I look around and wonder at the grand scale of disaster, economic and geologic, of the recent past. Why it is all happening now, we don't know. We do know that catastrophes tend to cluster. Whatever the reason, I cannot fathom the depth of suffering--I only perceive that I don't have real problems. Everything I have and love was not wiped out by a tsunami, for example. I simply have challenges.

Even though I keep saying it, I keep forgetting that God ultimately wants us to turn to joy, and probably wonders why we don't seize on His compassion when it's offered freely. Though I believe in it, I have to say, the compassion is a silent one. It often seems indifferent and severe. The silence is a great mystery; it can break one's heart.

Nuclear Poop

Say what you will, the Japanese explain nuclear accidents better than any other culture on the planet:

Nuclear Boy うんち・おならで
例える原発解説

Nuclear Boy unchi - onara de tatoeru genpatsu kaisetsu
Nuclear Boy's poop - a commentary of farts likened to nuclear power


The really disturbing part is when they talk about Chernobyl and banjos start to play. Then the understatement: "Yes, it was quite an incident." Don't we always have a banjo soundtrack in our minds when we recall nuclear accidents?

Tsunami Inu

津波犬   Tsunami inu, tsunami dog (lit. "harbor wave dog")

"There is another dog right next to the one sitting down. He is not moving. I wonder.... I wonder if he is alright. The dog is protecting him. Yes. He is protecting the dog. That is why he did not want us to approach them. He was trying to keep us at bay. I can't watch this. This is very difficult to watch. Oh. Look. He is moving. He is alive."

After the video was shot, the dogs were both taken into care of the local animal shelter.

Vietnamese Dog Tree

I dreamed that Vietnamese people tied tiny toy dogs, or puppies, to the branches of small ash trees. They considered them to be holiday decorations, much like Christmas tree trimmings. But the little dogs kept slipping off the branches and had to scramble back up on their unnatural perches, lest they hang. The Vietnamese thought this was cute, but I felt very badly for the dogs. It felt similar to the tenuous struggle of my present financial and career situation.

Don't Grow Old Quietly

The Dead Weather...

...and the most politically incorrect video of all time, which serves as an adequate metaphor for romance.



Of course, I wouldn't want my little girl to watch this, because, you know, cigarettes are bad for you (viz. 3:17).

Guns are yummy

Cigarettes are bad

Catastrophe Theory

Every so often, a metaphor supremely descriptive of the current Zeitgeist unexpectedly bubbles up from divers sources all at once. The current one is the concept of the tipping point, popularized by a book of that title published in 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell defined a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."

Conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have applied the metaphor to the recent 2010 elections. A cogent article by James Gannon summarized this idea nicely in The American Spectator. It is probably only a matter of time before it is applied as well to the unexpectedly nascent Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings.

There might be a larger scope to the concept, though. I've been giving a lot of thought to the broad sweep of change that has occurred in our society in the past few years. While not as sever as the Great Depression, we call it the Great Recession--but it is no more limited to economic machinations, as it is limited to the vagaries of political football.

I confess I haven't gotten my head around it yet. I can only speak to my poor singleton's perception of it. A few surrealistic motifs of my youth come to mind. The rapid, precipitous changes in social economic and political structures I call the Wave of Mutilation.

As to causes and mechanics of the tectonic changes we've seen, I can't help going back to a memory from graduate school, when in the engineering library I found a curiously titled book: Catastrophe Theory. In short, this is the study of how built structures fail. The most interesting thing I discovered about such failures is that almost always, the integrity of the structure holds within normal variances until stress brings it to a catastrophic and irreversible failure point.

In other words, things look peachy until they suddenly go pear-shaped.

To Hell with New Year's Resolutions

Several years ago I replaced the idea of "resolutions" with "principles." So rather than saying I have this or that goal, which is often thwarted, and at the end of the year I feel even more worthless than the previous year, I generally commit to changing my daily or weekly habits and attitudes according to key guiding priciples, and then evaluate my progress at the end of the year. To Hell with New Year's resolutions, I say!

Now, this is not to say that goals aren't useful--but only if you break them down into discrete tasks and focus on executing the plan. This is because plans "gang aft aglay." In other words, I tend to measure success by performance on the whole process--how adaptive and resourceful was I?

Here were the guiding principles I set for 2010:

• Stop following paths to nowhere and behaviors that don't meet your needs. For example, work toward getting a job in a new career path, whatever it may be, though it may be tempting to take a nice gig that you're comfortable with.
• Identify essential or blocking tasks and follow through on each until done.
• Focus on real experiences toward real goals in the real world.
  I've cut way down on TV viewing. I've set limits on time online, and replaced it with more book reading and writing ON PAPER. Usually the low-tech approach is more rooted in the real world. Recently I've decided not walk around plugged into my MP3 player--it renders you essentially deaf, and puts you in what self-defense experts term "condition white," a lack of awareness that renders you vulnerable to accidents or assault.

So, what are my new priciples for 2011? In addition to the above, which are ongoing, I'm working toward these:

• Plan weekly, prepare daily.
• Learn how to think and act entrepreneurially; don't think like a consumer. That is, the mindset with which we're unremittingly programmed, that buying stuff will solve all our problems and make us feel better about ourselves.
• With respect to writing projects, act rather than plan.

That last item merits some discussion. Blogging over the past two years has been much more rewarding than I expected. It has given me a chance to experiment with my ideas, and how to form content as well as the medium (design and images). Why does it work? For one thing, it's a low pressure situation--you write only little at a time--and over time you learn what works and what doesn't. It teaches another valuable lesson that you can take to other ventures--what I call the Amazon approach vs the Microsoft approach.

In the old days, software companies developed a product and tested it iteratively until they were reasonably certain that it worked. After remaining bugs were documented as "features," it was copied onto media such as floppy disk, or later, CD-ROM. This gave rise to phrases such as "burning the golden bits onto disk" as if the disk were some sacred calendar chiseled in stone.

But Microsoft still uses this model for products distrbuted via the Web. If the product or service isn't perfect, the entire process has to be re-evaluated until they can work out the problems, and usually several features are cut in order to make the deadline. Any improvements that developers come up with during this cycle must be pushed off until the next release. In other words, the product can only be as good as the original plan, which often goes back a few years. An apropos marketing slogan might be "Here's last year's technology today."

By comparison, if Amazon puts a widget on their website, and the widget isn't popular, or doesn't work as expected, or they think of something better the next day, they simply pull it or replace it. They absolutely do not worry about "publicly testing" a feature, because people expect the Web (like Life) to be constantly changing.

This was an immense revelation to me, and I've learned that I can effectively apply it to ongoing efforts in Life.

What's Your Microsoft prediction for 2011?

The Seattle Times Microsoft Pri0 blog asks: What's Your Microsoft prediction for 2011? Well, here are mine:

Steve Ballmer will... co-star with "Little Frank" Colacurcio on a new reality show, "Real CEOs of the West Coast"

Microsoft's stock will... replace Lunesta as the most popular sleep aid

Windows Phone 7 will... prevent most users from walking into telephone poles

The iPad will... continue to be the "really don't need/must have" item of the year

Bing will... continue to exacerbate my attention deficit disorder

Here are other reader responses.