It came on me here on the back porch, not so much in a flash of revelation but more like a shrug of shoulder resignation. No big sigh, just an uncomfortable slip into a slump. I have been struggling lately. The ride home this evening was like a slog through a bitter syrup. Indecisive drivers holding back forward motion, large 18 wheeled trucks jamming side roads, traffic signals malfunctioning. The realization of how little I could do. How little I cared to do. How little of life was used to just sit there and accept it. Listen to the topic at hand on the auto speakers. Stupid. A pod cast.

It is all invasive the struggle. The stress of life. There’s good stress eustress and bad stress distress. Yes, I’ve read my Marshall McLuhan, who in those old days seemed to have an answer for each with a brief firm nod to Hans Selye. There was further illusion of understanding in my early day readings. Marcuse worried the one dimensional being, Norman O. Brown held the Life After Death until the Closing Time. Even old Joe Campbell inhabited mythopoeic regions hence unexplored at least by my tender psyche. Jung was I and not easily Freuded. Norbert Wiener manned the helm steering humans humanly as possible and The revolution would not be televised. It would be writ in a language sempre più dolce, molto oblongata.

Who knew it would come to this. We wallow in shallow intellectual ruts of spiritual excess. Defined by lurid thoughts far more pornographic than any raw sexual act in the nonfiction and d-i-y list of endlessly bickering best selling crud. Tired beyond relief, stripped of most belief. There is not any longer so much an adventure of the spirit and the mind, but a combination regimen of sackcloth and ashes and the buttered balm of a cloying conscience. Beat me daddy eight or more hard. Is this what they call depression still. Cruel aches of the mind reflecting badly on the spirit.

Racking around in the muck and the mud. A church bell, soft in my suburbs, chimes in intimation of a Big Ben and there is a smell of garbage blowing in from some unknown location. The incessant susurration of tire wheels in even time commercing up and down the street. Heavy water molecules ringing out of the air on to my skin along with the gnaw and suck of a far less than extinct insect species. The truly ugly caw of a crow. Every cloud’s overcast, obscure every star’s in the sky. And I am tired.

It could be worse. I suppose it has been worse.

People suffer from cruel human conflict inhumane. Atrocities are caught. We are the terror. And I sit here in comfort and cry over a glass of Syrah, sirrah. How little I can do.

Opinion foisted, in my face, like a bad smell of undigested onion from the horrid breath of some bullying lout. I hear it as I fall asleep the radio set on the tawdry amplitudinally modulated dial. Ideas wailing from some circle of hell. Propped up and blowing by a foul wind. I hear it as I fall asleep with the High Definition Television blurred in my eyes. Uneven thoughts raging from the minds of the minions.

It is there in conversation as innocent as a water bubbler on the floor of a thousand tan carpeted offices. An overwhelming wealth of opinion, mostly ill considered and well intentioned.

Oy, the politesse…And Yoy, the poletics……as if it was important. It is mostly just an excuse for ill tempered people to massacre other folk. Murder in mind. In intellect. In spirit. In body. An intolerant nation, moving, more intolerant. Closing all avenues, shuttering every area, enclosing our world in the bubble of a field of rude force, creating a hot house of inhospitable breeding, a runaway greenhouse effect of conviction.

I’ll take another small sip of whiskey and then go in to sleep. After all I say, tomorrow could be another day.

This is not about jargon. Not much anyway. How can you possibly poke good fun about a subject that is by definition and deep in its very own existence both important and ludicrous?I found myself asking the other day, “What was the TD of the superheat on the TXV?”

When I was a kid I used to be accused of spoiling everyone’s fun. Had I been a little more glib, I would have squawked. Had I pondered it a little longer, I would have shrugged my shoulders, realized the truth. Everyone was trying to spoil my fun.

I heard an interview with an author via a pod cast as I was driving home this evening. I purchased an mp3 player in the hopes that it would make the silly and certainly unnecessary drive time traffic less annoying. See, just more people trying to spoil my fun! I am convinced that the only reason there is traffic in this world is for the sole purpose of disturbing my equilibrium. The audio massage leaves me with a fine subdued sense of well being.

The writer was asked if he was going to pursue other means than the novel to write. In particular he was asked if he would consider a blog. He replied that since he didn’t even know how to use his iPod that a blog was out of the question. He also stated that he was going to get rid of the wi fi in his apartment and become connected via some wires. And that he spent too much time on the internet reading fluff and that he was going to get back to books. The interviewer agreed with him heartily.

Now, I had something more than traffic to annoy me.

I love books. I have quite a collection as anyone who has been to visit me can attest. I love reading, more than you, I’ll bet. At least as much as the author being interviewed. The attitude that I was hearing is one that people often feel they have to convey to me. This new kind of technology is demeaning and base.

I do my work on a computer. I consider it as an amplification of my thought, my being. I work more effectively and think more clearly when I am at the keyboard of a computer. A connection is made that is vital to me. More and more I consider blogging an evolving form of my art.

In no way do I want to convert you to becoming a computer user in order to become a better communicator, to amplify your intelligence, to check to see if facts are straight. All of those things and more are part of my work and my being. It doesn’t have to apply to you. I can stand it.

In no way do I want to convince you to read or write a blog, to download a pod cast or to configure an RSS reader.

The author, the interviewer and far too many people want to convince me that their particular means to enlightenment is the one that I should employ, the “way” that I should follow. Sorry!

Me? I kill the Buddha every chance I get.

A famous science fiction writer on a cable channel during an essay segment that he created brought out a crafted box containing his collection of pencils and told the viewing audience that here was the way he wrote. The synapse fired from brain through his arm in clean strokes of pencil on paper. No computer for this fellow. Not even a typewriter. Nope, just the smooth line of fine dark on white.

I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth of his writing. I’m pretty sure he was also telling all of us what slackers we were for not using such a divine method to write.

Use your pencils, write your novels, read only “great” literature, only read non-fiction works, don’t watch science fiction movies, drink wine out of a jelly jar, compose only jazz, put the toilet roll so that the paper reels out across the top, create a poem by scratching with an awl on a piece of sandstone. It’s not that I don’t care….well…maybe it is that I don’t care…it’s that it’s just not all that important to me.

And the way that I do things just aren’t that important to you. I’ll be glad to talk about my methods ad nauseum. I’ll listen with interest to your ideas. I could even adopt them as my own. But I’ll never write a how-to manual. And I sure as hell won’t read yours.

It doesn’t make me righter or brighter, does it?

- No no no! How many times do I have to tell you? Wash the glasses first, then the dishes!

In the words of Sir Winnie the Churchill, “Ending a sentence in a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”

What’s the point?

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

The day smelled wet, gray, chilled. Late 1950’s early vernal promise out of the brown compost of layered leaves. My father circled the blacktop in front of Allegheny Observatory then parked in front of a set of concrete steps that lead the entry door.

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

My passions like tendrils creeping ever downward to tap roots, it seems, have been with me since my beginnings. It’s enough to make me believe in a calling. It’s enough to make me sad that I fall so short.

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;

Eighth grade Seneca Junior High School Social Studies Class. The last major project, as I remember it, before the end of the school year was a report about our “calling”. We were assigned the task of interviewing someone who was presently involved in what we believed would become our vocation. My head was ablaze with the idea.

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,

I had a thought, far too daring, almost unspeakable, for my introverted troglodyte teen age. A call to meet my call. My uncles mostly worked in the building trades. As did my father. Should I interview Sofis Pedersen, one hell of a plasterer, or Bettino Fragale, one hell of a painter, or even my old man, one hell of a carpenter. It would have brought home the grade, but it just didn’t seem right. I looked around our small suburban neighborhood. Streets like the promise of small town America. A public swimming pool at the bottom of the hill. Should I interview a township solicitor, a school teacher an insurance agent?

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

I called Allegheny Observatory. Somehow got through to a guy who was on staff who was an astronomer who would interview with me. I felt the spheres of the solar system click into gravitational place. More than a priest, more than a pope, here was a religion that I not only understood, but was in full mental, physical and spiritual accord. The actual meeting was closer to the Walt Whitman poem dispersed throughout.

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

I had a wad of gum chewed, devoid of all spearmint and sugar, in my mouth. I realized it as disaster as a left the car. Never interview with chewing gum in your mouth. Pretty sure that was in the lesson book somewhere. Maybe it was just my superego out for a laugh. I took it from my mouth and placed it in my right winter coat waist pocket. Never throw wet sticky spent gum on the concrete walk. I think that was a PA State law. My hand felt sticky. And wet. I was pretty sure I was going to have to shake Frank’s (the only vestige of his name left in my psyche) hand. Always introduce yourself with a firm handshake. Never chew gum.

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

I turned his hand into a sopping gooey mess. He didn’t seem to notice. We settled down. He showed me a 3 1/2 Questar Telescope. (Just looked on their website and the 50th Anniversary Model would be about right) Unbelievably small, unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably beyond my outstretched reach. Unbelievable.

I had orchestrated this whole rambling, haphazard interview to lead up to the one question of unimaginable import. “Frank,” I’m sure I called him Dr. so and so, “did you choose astronomy or did astronomy pluck a celestial chord, call like the Lorelei, haunt like a very very sweet melody and choose you?” That was the intent in any case and most likely not the actual words.

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
– Walt Whitman

He, poor guy, broke my heart. “No,” he said, “I thought I might give a try to chemistry when I first started out, but the course was pretty full and they were just developing astronomy department, so I chose it instead.”

I’ve compromised far more than ol’ Dr. “Frank” in my life. It shows. But somewhere down really in the depths of me lies the universe in all its awe and mystery. Just takes a dark night on the back porch. You’ve got it too.depths of me lies the universe in all its awe and mystery. Just takes a dark night on the back porch. You’ve got it too.