Quit While You're Ahead

There's a lesson to be be learned in the Methow Valley wolf scandal. A series of lessons, in truth.

If you're going to poach, don't poach an endangered species. If you're going to poach an endangered species, mount the head or pelt in your den and say you inherited it from your bibulous uncle--don't brag about it and certainly don't sell it. If you're going to sell it, don't ship it across state lines (involving the FBI) or to another country (involving the US Customs Service).

But if you really must sell the pelt of an endangered species that you poached and ship it via Fed Ex to another country, for God's sake put it in a Ziploc bag so blood doesn't leak all over, giving the good people at the Fed Ex drop-off cause to think you're shipping your husband's head to Canada.

Moral (choose one of the following):

a. Stupid is as stupid does.
b. When you're in a hole, stop digging.
c. Quit while you're ahead.
d. What was the question?

Death of the Quiet Society

The Adventures of Simplicissimus

Lawn Nazis

I had forgotten that Friday is landscaping day at my apartment complex. I had been working late, slept in somewhat, and woke to the gentle strains of leaf blowers directly outside my window. It was kind of these gentlemen to give me a wake up call exactly at 8:00am.

The modern corporation has solved the office smoking problem and office sexual harrassment problem by simply not having offices anymore. We all work from home. People think this is a dream job, but it isn't; much of my workday is spent finding a suitable workspace, and our lawns are the workplace of so many others. It is amazing that in an ailing economy we spend so much money keeping up the pretense of fastidiously manicured lawns. As William F Buckley once famously paraphrased La Fontaine, "Quelle est cette merde?" What indeed is this fetish about wide expanses of perfectly clipped grass? More significantly, why do we accept the attendant racket that comes with it? What is most disturbing is that no one, a la Candide, attends to their own garden anymore. Not so long ago, people raked their own damn leaves, and it was a long, meditative session of white noise--the rake scratching along the ground, puffing on a cigarette, and perhaps an Autumn breeze gusting by. Then flinging the cigarette away to set the neighborhood ablaze. Now it is done by others, hired to come and invade one's property with the shrill turbine whine of leaf blowers. The opportunity of meditation is lost, not only for you, but for all your neighbors. But to hell with them, the grounds are perfect.

With no hope of being allowed to concentrate, I dressed and went to the library to work.

The Lyceum of Grabassia

The public libraries in my upscale suburban community are well-appointed and designed in a modern, updated style of the classic Northwest mountain lodge. They have audio visual sections and meeting rooms, banks of computers, spacious sections for Children's literature, Young Adult fiction, and the newest mode, teen-only study rooms. All this unfortunately leaves only marginal space for a few carrels of books, and those are increasingly filled with thrillers, tales of gory lurid gore, bodice rippers, and the latest transcriptions of cultural bloviation.

People do not seem to read in the modern library. Why should they? There is much else to do. Answer your phone, text, tweet, chatter, surf, and scurry about in a daylong session of grabassia.

When did our libraries stop being places of of almost reverent silence and become ersatz Romper Rooms? Since when did libraries have to provide day care services? Likewise, why have large sections of libraries been cordoned off for the exclusive use of pimply, wetwired adolescents? The rest of the library is pretty much taken over by old farts such as myself and a few homeless people, who actually fit in rather better than the rest. They might smell, but they read silently and attentively, or better, doze off.

The Great Sniffer of Koryo

Chief among the annoyances, however, among the screeching brattle of unattended waifs and high whine of high-powered Mexican leaf blowers, is the Dreaded Asian Sniffer. Over the years in the diverse Northwest, I've learned much about Asian cultures--the most useful aspect of which is what Asian people do with their mucus.

To the Japanese, blowing one's nose is a gesture of such mortifying rudeness that were one to use a tissue, he would have to exile himself from refined company pretty much forever. The Japanese solution, therefore, when assaulted by the common cold, is cunningly and unobtrusively to wear a surgical mask wherever you go. And what happens behind the mask, stays behind the mask.

The Chinese, I hesitate to report, simply lay a finger aside the nose and hurl it out onto the sidewalk without further consideration. In fact in Jiangxi province it is considered an egregious insult if you do not luge on your neighbor's doorstep before entering.

The Koreans, being historically caught in the middle of these two cultures, cannot decide what the hell to do and simply sniff. In such manner, kotagji can be stored in the ko for hours on end. Oh yes, and if you believe there exists a more annoying sound in the universe, try enduring the occasional yet inevitable long uptake of a runny nose for an hour or so. No earphone or earbud piping in Metallica, can blot out the deadly sniffer.

Pornography and Invisibility

But what endears me most to the library is that, on the best days, I can almost vanish, mentally at least, from the noisome, attention-deficit world at large. To be fair, allow me to point this out: I am more attention-deficit than most. And that is why the library had in the past been for me a sort of guilty pleasure, a wandering about in a sort of Borgesian pleasure dome. Now that inner world has been replaced by the Internet. Is it trite to say it's not the same? Yes, trite.

When you're in a library, you are physically within a library. When you're in cyberspace, you're probably in your pyjamas, and I shall not conjecture further on your threadedness.

We now pretend to search by means of Googling; back in The Day ("The Day" or "ye olde days" being in my 6 year old daughter's words when queried about an ancient book, "The 80s?"), "googling" was checking out a voluptuous coed from betwixt the books of a nearby carrel. Now it is a lame exercise in which a computer tries to finish your sentence as you type, viz. when I tried to research (for purely academic purposes) the keyword string: "Asian hot" and got rather unsatisfying longtails such as:

asian hotel owners association

Essaying forth once more, I did better with:

asian hot dog eating contest winner

Which, for all practical purposes, was close enough. Bravo for Google! Yet the experience is just not the same. It is simply too... virtual for my taste. If I want exposure to porn, I only need go back to one of the larger city libraries, sit behind some good gentleman, and observe casually his online research. Why, only the other day, I sat in the Bellevue Main Library behind an upstanding African American fellow, and was surprised to see a kind of pornography I had never yet observed (and was heretofore grateful for the fact).

This fellow was in the process of "researching" photographs of extremely corpulent females. Perhaps he had mistakenly landed on a site such as celluliteplanet.com; I am not certain. He expanded a photo of the largest female bollocks imaginable; it not only eclipsed the screen, I thought it might perhaps bring the library servers down.

No such luck. However, the man sniffed not at all, nor made any sound, and it went down as one of my more productive days at the library. So I say, pipe in terabytes of porn, give library passes to the trenchcoat brigade, bring Robert Mapplethorpe himself into the library, let him sign books with... well, let him perform a book signing in his own inimitable way!

Maybe then I can get some damn work done.

The Light of the Living

You number my wanderings;
Put my tears into Your bottle;
Are they not in Your book?

In God have I put my trust;
I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?

Have You not kept my feet from falling,
That I may walk before God
in the light of the living?

--Psalm 56

To the Dreary End

こんな夢を見た。。。

From the annals of the Dream Library, ~8:00am, 2011-07-07

I dreamed that reports had come out that the world was about to end soon. Naturally it was widely covered on cable news; subsequent bulletins and rumors said the event would occur somewhere around 8:30pm. To my surprise, there was no looting or general mayhem; instead, people became unusually pleasant and arranged informal get-togethers to chat about things and maybe bid farewells, if they thought to do so, but not everyone did. No one seemed particularly upset or grief-stricken, though the mood was a little sad, like seeing friends off at the airport, knowing you won't see them for a long time.

I was at an office building that afternoon, presumably at work and said goodbye to some friends. My thought was to get back to my car by 8:30 but then I realized that I had no real home or family to get home to, so I simply stayed where I was. The lobby had a small bar with a TV mounted up above, and a few people sat there talking, an older couple and a young woman. The older gent mixed drinks, free, for presumably no one bothered to charge money any longer. I watched the coverage on Fox News, which was predictably designed to string the audience along when nothing is actually happening, like their signature coverage of missing little girls that they milk on and on for weeks. I had no idea the end of the world would be so boring.

The time came and went. Not daring to be so impolite as to suggest that the world perhps had not ended, I suggested instead that maybe the world had changed in some fundamental way, some physical law of nature had been altered, but we hadn't noticed yet--that the world as we knew it had in fact ended, or perhaps we had ceased to exist in the reality we knew, but we were continuing on in a new reality.

The older couple at the bar were very down to earth and such wooly ideas simply breezed past them. I might as well have been recounting the premise of some pseudoscientific fantasy novel to them. The gentleman at the bar showed me a stunningly beautiful revolver; presumably he had taken it along in case of trouble, which happily had never materialized. It was a stainless steel Ruger snubnose with a 2 inch barrel and engraved vine-and-leaf scrollwork on an unfluted cylinder; caliber .22 magnum, and it held nine rounds. It must have been a special run, as I'd never seen the like before.

He put the pistol in a drawer while he mixed more drinks, and I noticed the young woman at the bar stealthily reach over and put it in her purse. I followed her out, thinking to win her confidence and maybe get the revolver back. We crossed a bridge as we talked and she told me that she was a runaway from a bad situation; I figured she needed cash, so I offered to buy the revolver from her, and I was even tempted to keep it for myself. However, she refused, as she thought she'd need it for protection. Unlike my aesthetic lust for the gun, her interest in it was purely practical--any pistol would have served her purpose.

The dream transitioned abruptly, and I was back at my car. Fritz was there waiting for me to take him along for the ride. I was lucidly aware that he had passed a few months ago, but the reality of his presence was so vivid that I ignored this fact. I picked him up and held him; I could feel his wooly fur and the warmth of his body, and he moved exactly as he had done in life. I put him in the passenger seat as usual and we were off. Originally I had planned to drive home, but now I wasn't sure where home was, and we seemed to have another destination, undefined. The drive was erratic, traffic frequently slowing and speeding up, with sudden stops. We crossed a bridge going rather fast, and hit a dip and hump in the pavement; the car lurched upward and seemed to leave the road's surface for a moment, but we continued on together, safely.

When it all burns down

蔵焼けて障るものなき月見哉

kurayakete sawaru mono naki tsuki mi kana

"My barn burned down; now nothing keeps me from seeing the moon."
--Zen koan by Mizuta Masahide (1657-1723)

On the Long Walk Home

In 2004, I wrote a short piece as part of a novel. The larger story itself is not relevant except that the theme was a young man's regret that he did not reconcile and get to know his father before the father's death. This parable was intended to be delivered as part of the father's eulogy. Worthy though it sound, it is one of the most leaned upon of themes, but one that, if not given over to sentimentality, rarely fails to engage.

It is a very simple tale of how a man deals with his beloved dog's final days. What is remarkable is that I wrote it almost seven years ago, when my dog Fritz was half his age, in full health, before he had any serious health problems. His first serious symptoms came about a year later--it turned out to be arthritis, but at first we had no idea what it might be, or how serious it was. I'm not claiming to scry, skein, or augur into future events. However, I sincerely believe that writing that is genuinely felt or deeply understood through hard experience--that is, true writing, taps into something ineffable that has a quality of cutting through time. It transcends what our poor senses cannot.

It's apparent that I was coming to terms with Fritz's end a long time ago. Some might call this a very foolish exercise in sentimentality. At the time it might have been, and it didn't make my feelings any easier when the end finally came. But it's stunning to me how closely this parable describes my feelings--and my relationship with Fritz in his last days--seven years later.

I had intended to publish this upon his death, but it needed work, and to be blunt, I didn't have the courage to return to this text for over a month. I took my time; I wanted it to be right, a fitting tribute to my little friend.

Someday we might spread Fritz's ashes at Golden Gardens Beach on Puget Sound, his favorite walk of all time, or possibly in the Methow Valley, where he owned a grand domain full of wildlife that he loved to sniff and survey. We might set down a stone. If we do, the epitaph might read:

There will never be another
Fritz

On the Long Walk Home

Once, a man owned a dog that had been a wonderful companion for many years, and the dog likewise trusted the man without reservation. Like all dogs, he craved the reassurance of routine. In fact, the more repeated the activity, the more it seemed to intensify the dog's enjoyment: the familiar smells along a walk, the nightly bone, the happy replenishment of the food and water bowls. He especially looked forward to his afternoon walk when the man returned from work.

In the course of years, the dog grew old, and though he had enjoyed an active, healthy life, he suddenly began to grow weak and listless. Concerned, the man took his dog to the veterinarian. The doctor told him that the dog had a serious disease, and though an operation was possible, it was doubtful that the dog would survive. He prescribed a few palliatives and told the man that if the dog's condition deteriorated, he could bring him in so that his suffering not be prolonged.

Certain thoughts weighed on the man as he headed home. The news was bad, but not surprising. He thought that he should feel worse, but instead felt strangely distant, and could only focus on what to do next. He knew that in the past he had slacked in his duties with the dog. Sometimes he might feel lazy and shorten their walk, or simply let the dog out into the yard. He determined that the days remaining to his dog should be the fullest possible--with everything he had come to expect in his daily routine.

The dog seemed well enough for several weeks, but then became quite sick. Again they went to the vet, who advised him to expect periods of seemingly restored health, punctuated by severe relapses. He cautioned him not to be buoyed by false recoveries. The man said that he understood, and asked how long they had. The vet said that the decision was entirely up to the owner, and the dog would let him know when it's time. The man wondered how he would know.

He took the dog home and struggled with the problem of when. On one hand it seemed selfish to let his friend continue suffering; on the other, he felt the dog deserved to live out whatever time he had. All he knew for certain was that he himself needed a little more time. He still took the dog for walks, but was careful not to go too long, lest the dog become exhausted. After a few days, it became clear that the dog could no longer go the least of what could be called a walk. The next day he decided to take the dog for one last outing.

When the time came, he approached the dog with the leash and said, let's go for a walk. The dog looked up wanly, but his tail quivered with the old enthusiasm. The dog bowed his head slightly to accept the leash, as he always did, and the man took comfort in knowing that the dog knew the ritual and found not a little joy in it.

He drove to a neighborhood that the dog liked, that was also near the vet's office. He knew the dog would recognize where he was, but it couldn't be helped. He took the dog to certain favorite spots, a tree-lined street, a playground where they would sometimes sit and simply watch the people and their kids, a vacant lot where rats and squirrels left their fascinating scents.

The dog took his time, investigating, sniffing at his leisure. And the man watched attentively. He wished that, instead of often being impatient on the way, he had paid closer attention to his friend's spirit of exploration, how he trotted from place to place, how he carefully sniffed, as if ruminating over the clues left him. How his friend stopped and watched the world with a calm that he himself would never know.

He wondered why he had never before put aside his fretting, busy thoughts to pause and observe life so.

After investigating a certain doorstep, his friend suddenly lay down beside the stoop and looked at him, panting slowly and deliberately but not whimpering or showing any pain. The man was seized with panic. Was this the sign? He simply wasn't ready. Then he justified himself with the sudden conviction that in this condition the dog couldn't possibly walk to the vet's office.

The man sat on the stoop and petted the dog for a while--it didn't seem long--and suddenly the dog stood up and tugged at the leash. The man was encouraged, and decided that they should go home, since this was obviously not the day. Perhaps he had jumped the gun. Yes, he should wait and see, take care of this tomorrow, or another day, for after all, the dog could become better unexpectedly--the vet had said himself that there was no predicting how it might go.

He stood up and tried to lead the dog back to the car, but the dog strained against the leash, wanting to continue the walk to its end--but that direction also led toward the vet. He gently urged the dog in the opposite direction. The dog headed stubbornly the other way. He didn't want to force his friend, not in his condition, and he felt that he should not interfere with the dog's wishes, not on this walk of all walks, so he allowed the dog to move on.

The man became anxious as they drifted further away from the car, and closer to the vet. To his relief, the dog took a detour, a right turn, and they headed off in yet another direction. Now as they were getting farther from both the car and the office, the man worried that a longer walk back might be too much for his friend--and further, that they'd also be too far from the office should his friend worsen. Or too close--he wasn't sure.

They came to a corner park, no more than a small, shady garden with a bench. He sat on the bench and his companion lay near his feet. The dog looked up at him again, panting soundlessly, happy to rest there for the moment.

The man too felt content. For a moment he forgot why he they were there, and it was once more just another of their walks, the usual routine that they both loved. He gazed round absently and enjoyed this one moment together. He felt he almost understood the way his dog gazed at the world: contentedly, serenely, but also intently observing.

He had accepted where the dog wanted to go, and was now ready to continue. He stood up and asked, are you ready? The dog remained where he lay, quiet and motionless. At first the man almost laughed, for he thought that the dog had fallen asleep, then a cold numbness ran through his veins. He crouched down, put his hand on the dog's head. He'd miss their walks, he thought, but he also felt grateful for the burden that had been lifted from him.

He gently took up his friend in his arms, and carried him on the long walk home.

The End of an Era

Our loyal friend and companion, Fritz, died peacefully today. A few weeks ago, we discovered that he had pervasive liver cancer; he declined rapidly, but went easily.

He brought joy to our lives every day for almost 15 years. We'll forever be grateful for him.

Resquiat In Pacem † Fritz Trenton 1996-2011

( )

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?