the trouble with cars...

old no-longer-faithful blew a spark plug clean out of its seat late friday, implying all sorts of nasty problems with pistons and other sensitive and un-reparable engine parts, and i'm on the phone this morning with the shop to have it diagnosed later today. "do you have triple a" is one of those questions you hate to hear anytime, but when it's for something that'll likely require a whole new motor on a car that's going on a decade old, it's especially painful. not that whole new motors aren't painful at any time, but i was already planning to dump the old heap later this summer, and now i'm likely to find out it'll cost me just about as much to get it into condition to sell as it'll gain me to sell it. as they say, bleh.

makes me mindful of the frequent daydream i've had here in shangri-lowell of pitching automobiles altogether and just living off the land and the public transportation. (yeah, i know what they say about being careful what you wish for). if it weren't for this situation cutting me off from the kids while it persists, i'd honestly want to consider it. but i'm stuck borrowing money (which i hate) to finance a replacement, so i'm going to have to make the best of it.

what are the chances some little old recently-widowed lady had a husband who kept a '71 mercedes convertible in their garage and only drove it on (sunny) sundays, and now she's looking for some nice man who will take care of it just like her husband did... "oh, i couldn't ask for more than $1000 for it..." yeah, that's the ticket.

so, here are the choices:

1) gas guzzling 4wd man truck, the theory being i won't drive much and i ought to enjoy it.
2) gas mediocre awd sports sedan (convertible if possible), same theory.
3) gas friendly 2wd coupe or sedan. *sigh*

with a "perfect world" all three would be downstairs here, garaged indoors for me. with the compromised but still idealistic one i'll continue to live in for as long as possible, only one can be chosen. the sad part is giving up on any part of the dream.

the 4wd activity truck is sorely tempting...

only once over the safety fence, and skiing was the best it's been in decades. beer, hot tub, sun, snow, and i still can't figure out in which order they ought to be listed. good friends first, that's for sure. high point of the week was enjoying the unspoken "why are you talking to me?" undercurrent that accompanied my ex's (inevitable) call to poke. the most amusing part of the week, aside the aforementioned trip over the safety fence, was being beyond cell range and inducing a land line call blitz to try to locate and pin down (unsuccessfully for sure) my itinerant self.

believe it or not, that's one of the most succinct paragraphs i've ever written.

self-indulgence

told the boss i'm off next week, and i'm taking up old friends on their invitation to ski my brains out. no, there won't be any of the usual self-indulgences of which i'm becoming quite fond here in shangri-lowell, but there will be sun, snow, beer and a nice friendly hot tub at the end of each day to cushion the blow. besides, being single again, it'll be fair game hitting on the bunnies in the ski lodge, and there's nothing not to like about that.

weeks like this remind me how short life truly is--it's hard to believe how many years it's been since i've been spring skiing.

so i'm tossing the gear in the car and i'm off to chase my youth once again. it's likely there'll be a great big gap between correspondence here, but i'm hoping you all can hold the fort while i'm away.

the politics of personality

here's the glass half full:

roger clemens and dan duquette didn't like each other very much. (i think they were both right). though we like to warm our cockles with feel-good stories of life-long friends and loyalty made good instead, i'm quite sure the annals of fruitless amity would make a far-thicker volume. (right, silda?) so how, then, do we really choose how we feel and who we feel about it?

i'm reminded of jimmy stewart's soliloquy from "harvey", in which this choice is described as between oh so smart and oh so pleasant. (he recommends pleasant, btw, and you may quote him). i think i understand a little bit about what he means, as i've always in the past judged people and accumulated and cultivated my deeper friendships on a basis of oh so smart. yet, lately, i think i've grown up to recognize the value in people on a far more pleasant basis, and it's starting to create some friction.

for example, in a small group i used to manage, there were two women who could not have been from further points on the spectrum. the smart one, as you might guess, was very close to me, and i to her. (we still are). the pleasant one, as we might call her, was very much less so. but between my egalitarian ideals and my clearer sight, i was always able to find value in ms pleasant's other gifts, where my smarter friend was instantly frustrated and put out. "why do you put up with her?" was one of the more frequent inquiries. "she makes me want to pull my eyelashes out one by one just to listen to her talk" was one of the more frequent observations.

so just this past week, in germany, there was an ampitheater filled with half a dozen dozens of corporate do-bee's, in a presentation led by two particularly arrogant and overbearing blow-hards in desperate need of some humility. and though all of us oh-so-smarters were too wise to crack wise about it, there was one, bless her simple little heart, who had the innocence of ignorance enough to raise her hand and repeatedly ask the questions that were desperately needed to be asked, all the while prefacing each one with a beautifully simple "i don't get it". nope, nobody did. but only my pleasant old friend was there to simply be herself for the good of her compatriots. in that moment i knew exactly why it was right not only to not dislike her, but actually, to actively *like* her. to be oh so pleasant in fair trade for her oh so pleasantness. and it was only too bad my oh so smart friend wasn't there to experience it with me. i'd hope she'd understand.

valuing people for who they *are* and not how you prefer them to be is yeoman's labor. it requires patience and humility and a relaxation of everything that we are, in favor of everything that, perhaps, we are not and could never be. but we must. our disgust may be physical, and our revulsion visceral, but what are we in that moment but a roiling sea of all our worst? smart, maybe. but not smart at the same time.

i am resolved to treat kindness with kindness. scorn with kindness, too, but kindness, especially. i'm hopeful to replace the bitter and the judgmental with the sweet and the generous in my life, so that my energy can be saved for more important things. the unfortunate math of our lives is that spare time for pleasant can only be achieved at the expense of smart. you can't be both, because, as any smart person will tell you, it's not always smart to be pleasant, and as anyone who deals with smart people all day can tell you, it's not always pleasant when people are smart.

glass half empty:

life is hard. it takes smarts to survive when you're on your own. think about that.

glass neither half empty, nor half full, but simply twice as big as it needs to be:

people are incredibly resourceful and capable. they are also inclined to share those resources and capabilities, provided either enough guilt, family obligation, or motivating pleasantry. well, you can tell the guilt-mongers to go pound sand, and you can repudiate your family, but i dare you to live your life in selfish denial of your happiness to help others who are kind to you. actually, i don't have to dare you, because, if you are or were anything like me, you've already found copious opportunity to fall short on that score. but you don't have to. i don't have to. nobody has to.

my team is the pleasant one. i know, the smart ones think they recognize my uniform, and, as ashamed as i am to admit it, i've played for them on more than enough occasion to confuse fans and players alike. but that's not me.

i'm for the underdog. i'm for the unlovable. i rooted for the patsies, and i still miss good ol' pat patriot on the sides of the helmets. if you give me a choice between joining the winning team, or throwing my hat in the ring on the side of the losing one, i'll take the disadvantaged side every single time. it's not smart. but they're the people who would need me and my efforts, and that's a very pleasant thing to realize.

2 for 1 on Amiestreet

amiestreet.com is running a 1 day 2-for-1 sale, and there hasn't been invented a better bargain in online music. for example, today, for half of 17 cents, i grabbed mission of burma's "that's when i reach for my revolver", and for half of $3.76, a 10-song live performance from marvin gaye at the peak of his soul/funk best. want something classic? they've got sam & dave and johnny cash and ray charles and ella fitzgerald and etc. etc. etc. want something punk? in addition to mission of burma they've got the pixies, and who knows how much else. something nobody's ever heard before? there's no END to the new tasty biscuits every day.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

du vs. you, or, somewhere beyond the sie

in germany they have what amounts to a sacred cultural ritual when the formal is forgiven in favor of the familiar. "sie" is what we outsiders hear when we hear their language, and we hear it in full regalia of formality, command and distance. but the secret of "du" is invested with so much more.

i think we're confused, when we hear of the hypothetical existence of it, by how it bears similarity to familiar conventions in french and other languages. "je t'aime" is something we all have heard, and we know all about "te" from the experience, even when it's almost invisibly contracted into it's corresponding verb. but we've seemingly never seen a german be tender, and "ich liebe dich" is not one of those international phrases, is it. besides, voulez vous can be so inviting regardless of it's linguistically technical formality. the germans, for their part, would hardly ever say wille sie in the first place, let alone deign to make it sound less than a command. it's how their language works.

so now you can all help me to approach a riddle inside a mystery, in hopes of unwrapping the enigma.

you see, (no homophonic pun intended), there's this remarkably beautiful german i've known for years at work, who is the antithesis of everything we've been taught by experience to expect from germans. she's soft, and sweet, and even in her native tongue she never sounds, nor, in fact, ever is, abrupt or insensitive. (which is otherwise impossible in formal german, trust me, from years of outsider's experience). she's been warm to me in her formal greetings since i've known her, and myself, being for the longer time married and fastidiously refused of crossing the personal/professional boundary, (a rule proven in its exception by my relationship with two dear friends who used to be coworkers), it has never been beyond the professional embrace and polite conversation between us.

so here we are in an amphitheater among five or six dozen colleagues at the end of a two-day marathon of corporate ennui, and it's time to take our leaves. and she turns to me, in english, of course, because it's all i can be made to understand, and tells me in her impossibly warm way, that i should call her in advance of my next trip for work, so that time could be made to spend together outside it.

one feeling and two thoughts flood over me in that instant: best i intellectually know of the hyper-mythical german invitation to forgo sie in favor of du, this may be all that can be translated to the ignorant american of "you are my friend".

planes and trains and automobiles

germany was just fine, tyvm, and tampa was, well, tampa. i'm still at a prodigious deficit of sleep, but rested enough to reflect on where i am and how i got here.

not everybody "gets" me. oh, a lot of people *think* they do, but they're proven to be pathologically unable to look past the looks and the vocabulary and the circumstances. i put up a pretty compelling front, i think, without necessarily realizing or intending. even age, with the graying and the glasses, hasn't arrested that trend. (damn contemporaries are decaying even faster than i am). but looks and smarts and circumstances aren't who a person is, any more than we can predict what's going to be in the bottom of the crackerjack box.

there's an opportunity cost to allowing life to be cluttered with less than might be deserved. tonight, i'm proud to say, i'm making room for *better* than i deserve.

the morning news

because you likely won't hear the results unless i told you, let me tell you that the ball game was epic. lowell fell behind by 10 points after the first few minutes, and for three quarters central catholic had it all their way. (the fried dough, however, i'm happy to say, was judged by all in my party as competitive as it comes). by the time it was 50 to 37, though not a body had left the building, you could tell it was going to take something heroic to make it close, let alone give lowell any chance for a win, and the uneasiness had become a pall.

first two. then four. then seven, and omg here they come. then nine, eleven, and then even on half a 1 and 1, and then...

another half a foul shot tandem and it was 51-50, in favor of the lowell red raiders. less than a minute to play. the house was ROCKIN'. rollin'. arm-pumping chants from one side, (how do the kids know which side of the arena was going to be theirs?), and answers from the other. defense. drives to the lane. more defense. EPIC.

it all came down to a blocking foul, committed against the smallest and youngest looking player on the floor, who got his two, and set the final margin of victory for central catholic. a boy among man children, dwarfed in size but not in complete ignorance of any thought that he couldn't. lowell played their hearts out, and the fans on both sides were the best example of sportsmanship i have seen in an age. everyone played great, and the game finished on a half-court heave that could have given lowell a victory, but flew wide in honor of central catholic who had earned the win for themselves.

yeah, i know, home town guys aren't supposed to be quite so magnanimous in defeat, but, honestly, it was as good a game as i had seen at the garden the week before, and a better crowd.

i love this place.

and the kids do, too.

which makes me love it even more.

all this and the dropkick murphys.

tell me life isn't good.

vanity

the new plates came in, and i went down to the registry to pick them up. in all the years i've found idle opportunity to check to see if they were available, they never were. then, separation rears its selfish head, and i'm down to the rmv against my will to exchange a perfectly good registration for another one, simply because their system cannot handle divorce, and i just think, maybe, while i'm already here, i should give it one more check...

bingo.

well, they make you wait over a month, and pay all sorts of fees and honorariums, but they do eventually get around to it. and i think the goods really do look nice. the same three letters i learned were my grandfather's before mine. maybe they won't mean anything to the next generation, but they're good enough for me.

can't wait for a new car to put 'em on. MY car. my way.

the politics of cardboard

the bachelor pad at shangri-lowell has had its permanent citizenship increased threefold this past week, and j and d and i are already getting along famously. my roommates are very personable, if you'd like one man's opinion, and possessed of all the necessary enterprise and personality to carry their share of the entertainment load here. unanswered questions include why it is that j runs the wheel towards the center of the room while d runs it towards the wall, and whatever it is about cardboard that's set such an aggressive tone in the tank, but sometimes it's reasonable for single guys to keep their secrets.

about those boxes, it's really rather remarkable. aside from the heavy bit in which they've appropriated their gerbil bachelor crash pad, the moment any shred of extra is dropped into the tank, it's immediately set upon with a vigor that would make a beaver weep. tp tubes, consumer goods packaging, even flat pieces falling out of mailing envelopes, are all shredded without delay and in total within minutes. right now d is enjoying his spin on the new wheel and j is disintegrating the little cardboard insert that stopped it from spinning in the store. not a moment to lose.

it's an interesting habit--this cardboard destruction fetish. there's no question they know exactly what they are on about, dissociating each new flake from its integrity with the whole by holding the main piece steady in their front paws, and alternately chewing towards the middle from each side of the soon to be jetsam. zip, zip, done. and there's no hesitation nor mercy about it, either. cardboard exists in this little glass-lined world to be dealt with in its certain way, and if the quantity can't be finished this evening, well, it'll still be there for the moment when waking is in order again.

i'd like to continue to learn better the politics of cardboard, and the easy fulfillment of doing what must be done--no worries, and no complications--so i can be more like the j & d show. what you see is what you get. no slacking, because it's 100% leisure already, and no care about it one way or the other, either, if it's not. i'm thinking i know a lot of people in this world who might benefit from joining the party, too. (like the entire world). i'm sure, if they could just figure out which one ought to be president, and which one the veep, they'd make a compelling ticket for the nomination.

be true to your school

the lowell high school red raiders basketball team turned back the everett high crimson tide last night, and so earned a saturday night date with central catholic for the division 1 north championship at tsongas arena. (7:30pm--be there or be square).

i wasn't born here, and i wasn't raised here, and other than the odd coincidence of the team name matching my high school's, there isn't much that i have in common with what's been going on these past few weeks and months down at the riddick field house. but they've been playing the games on the ltc channel, and i've enjoyed them all, and for that and other inexplicable reasons i'm sure i don't understand (i've never been a basketball fan) i'm drawn to it with an emotion that can only be described as home-town.

it was actually lowell's game against central catholic back in january that started it all. I can remember it well--the accidental tour through the channels; the obviously high school production values of a single panning camera and almost complete absence of commentary; the grit and elan of a group of multi-colored and multi-talented boy men who wore the name of my adopted country across their chests and played their love for it on their sleeves. somehow and sometimes you can see emotion--have you ever noticed that? i noticed it that day.

and if it were love at first sight, or the bandwagoneering of following a winner, i'm sure i can't tell you. all i know is that it's my team, and they're in the finals, and it's all right there where i can reach out and touch it.

i'm bringing any of the kids, mine and everybody's, who will say yes and walk with me down the gritty boulevard, past the city hall and the field house, to the arena where pride, win or lose, will have its day.

be true to your school. go red raiders.

are you?

interesting day yesterday. i encountered myself at the bus station, listening to someone trying to have their emotional hair shirt cake and eat it too.

why are we always so easily convinced of our emotions? "i'm happy" or "i'm not happy", as if they appear to us out of the blue from some alternately benevolent and cruel deity, kinda like the emo tooth fairy. i was convinced i was happy in my marriage right up until the moment when i knew i was not, but she wasn't different, and i certainly wasn't different (at that time) and we were just doing things as we always had. where did those emotions come from? were *they* real? or was *real* the world that hadn't changed??

we get to choose. i firmly believe that. we get to look past our emotions and see another self buried beneath them, or at least we carry the potential privilege before we fall short in the doing. like the kid on christmas morning happily digging in the horseshit because there's gotta be a pony under there, it's all in how we look at things.

i've come to believe our emotions are simply there to give our inner ids the lever by which to overpower both our inner selves, as well as the "smart" one who thinks they're running the show, but who is really only watching the train wreck from the passenger seat. why else are we so habituated to undermine ourselves with such stark efficiency and effectiveness at every turn? aren't we smart enough to save ourselves??? of course not!!! we feel the emotions, believe they are real, and then act just like a blind man believing he's not on the curb about to step into traffic.

in one of my fantasy hockey leagues, there's a guy who has found a way to become the fantasy hockey equivalent of the 1978 red sox, only instead of bucky dent swinging the final bat, he's ironically come in to swing it himself. nobody could have made him do what he did, (he actually benched his players last weekend instead of using them to score the points that would have guaranteed himself a playoff spot), and only he was in a position to do it. but he did. he did it. inexplicably, and against all reason and to the tune of his anguished railing at the unfairness of the universe, he did it.

it was pure emotion. a fit of pique. so upset at someone goading him (ok, it was me) into a corner, he blindly stepped off his curb with a flourish of pure auto-drama, and straight into the traffic. he didn't have to do it. it was almost as if he couldn't help himself--the emotional tsunami so overwhelming that it left him not one whit of free will with which to save himself.

yep, i met myself on that platform. i know i was only able to stir up the hockey asshole to self-immolate because i moved the same levers in him i always used to move within myself. and i've done my share of sitting while the acrid taste of gasoline enters my mouth, and the flames consume my soul. but i've replayed that movie in my head, of the saffron robes and the horrified onlookers, and the focus of the piece is always on the hand that holds the match. it's my hand.

some of my best friends are...

cultural and other divides are hot topics these days. (arab/israeli. muslim/christian. prime/sub-prime.) in recent conversation i was reminded of one, that i need to tell you about:

"...or the baby jesus will cry"

who ever heard that before? i sure hadn't. i thought it was a papist thing, but i've been told it's got nothing to do with guilt religions. some sort of tweak-the-fundies thing, maybe...

in the calvinist germanic version of things, the only person to cry would be the one not tough enough to do whatever they're obligated to do. (my grandmother used to say, about my crying, "that's very nice music", right along with repeating all related directives). i think, just like doing away with the little bell during communion upon nailing the 95 theses to the door of the schlosskirche, lutherans are quite explicit about the fact that the baby jesus never cries. not for anybody. not even to make a joke.

which, i believe, is part of the reason germans are acknowledged to have the world's smallest sense of humor. (apples hardly falling so very far from their trees...)

winter protocol

in addition to the crime wave downtown here, there's a bit of a flap over the local homeless shelter that has residents of strong opinion. one of the very intelligent things done here in lowell is the seeding of difficult areas with bright, clean and well-tended parking facilities, so that developers can make hay from the abundance of underutilized mill and other space. next on the list of targets is the area among jackson, appleton and middlesex streets, (the "JAM" project), and, i've got to say, the new deck looks like the best one yet. it's got retail space on street level, and the architecture of the structure itself is well beyond soulless concrete. (brick facings, glass storefronts, etc.) with the beautiful brick empty space all around, it's going to be a great neighborhood.

so what's the first popular campaign to compliment the progress? why, the nearby homeless shelter has to go, of course.

the shelter sprang up amidst the urban malaise many years ago to take advantage of a street that nobody else wanted to live or work on. it's functional, though certainly as run-down as everything around it. the most fascinating part about it is its clientele--surprisingly young, articulate, and varied by gender.

yes, most of them are there via a life-stop-off for substance abuse. but it's also clear that these are people who are getting it together. they're packed in against the winter cold on cots in the main room like FEMA victims, but they're gregarious, pleasant, and hardly dulled by the depressing surroundings. one woman wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper that the popular characterizations were all wrong, and i, for one, can attest to the truth that she is right.

the blight outside the shelter that is most castigated by the popular masses are the drunks and drug addicts. see, the first rule of the shelter itself is that nobody gets any of the warmth or hot food without being clean. sober. on the way up, and ready to make the most of the hand up that is offered. but there are also rules in effect that require the shelter to pull double duty in the wintertime against the deadly cold. the infamous "winter protocol"--they have to pull in *anybody* who needs a roof over their heads once the sun goes down, and the crowd milling about outside waiting for their shot is exactly what the cliches make them out to be. and nobody wants that in anybody's neighborhood, but most of all, "not in mine".

so the dirt-averse voting population is now gripped by the fascinating suggestion to "move them all to TEWKSBURY!!!". see, there's a vacant state facility there that would be just PERFECT for hiding the problem, i mean, placing it out of the way of economic development, i mean, taking care of all these people. except there aren't any jobs there, affordable housing to which to move up, or decent public transportation to get them around while they're pursuing both. it's a bad idea.

i spent some time there yesterday afternoon, (clothing donation and working on other volunteer opportunity), and i think i understand the problem. we're mixing our worst apples with our best. we're blinding ourselves to the fullness of human potential because we're not discerning between someone on the way up, and those with further yet to fall.

this city needs this shelter. what it doesn't need is the one-size-fits-all knee-jerk attitude that drunks are always drunks. because there are dozens of hopeful and helpful people in need of a start who aren't, and who, truth be told, appear in conversation to have far more on the ball than the people who would otherwise write them off. yeah, tewksbury and tyngsborough and billerica and a bunch of other nearby places owe more to their care than they're presently carrying. but sending the problem downstream isn't the answer.

i'm looking forward to getting to know ALL of my new city. there are a lot of people here who are worth knowing.