I Song of the twenty first century

I woke up this morning feeling like Whitman. I-song and such, though the sky is low and spitting rain. Outside the kitchen window the maple has turned red, and the ivy that climbs the back fence. Everything is changing again, and I see, in the lines in my face, in the slight bits of grey at my temples that I too, am changing. Downstairs, the children are asking for breakfast, and it is somewhere between receiving the grocery list and the people to call about the gutter that I forget about Whitman, about reshaping the contours of the world, or even this day. I button a coat. I fix a sandwich. I wrangle and hector until they are sitting in the car. 

In Trader Joe’s, I buy a box of dark chocolate covered oreos that I love. Perhaps this is the I song of the twenty first century, buying a box of cookies, taking it home, and sitting on the couch, eating one after another, in the dim light given off by the lights of the tree. Soon the box will be gone. Then the tree. Then the whole season itself. I can feel it in my bones that things are always changing. 

Ice Fishing

Just the other day I was talking to a strange girl, one who's answers are occasionally non-sequiturs. We were talking about California, about the desert, and about the cold. Then we were speaking of cities in the south. I could see you in Austin, she said. I've been there. And so we talked for a while about the bars there, the warmth of the streets at night, people pouring out into the blockaded streets and dancing to music from a roof top, and then she said I should go ice fishing.

I went ice fishing once, a decade or so ago. We awoke early, put on boots, gloves, hats, scarves. The key to ice fishing is layering. Though I've also been told that the key to ice fishing is drinking, and I've also been told the key is finding a good space heater.

You cut a hole in the ice using something called an ice augur, which really just resembles a very large hand crank that corkscrews around and around, cutting a solid hole in the thick ice. Once you have a hole in the ice you drop a fishing line in and wait. And while you wait you talk of your wives, of the cold, of the disappointment of the latest football season.

We didn't have much use for ice augurs in California. The first time I witnessed snow I was ten or so, and I walked outside into the dusted bits of grass, my pants still wet from last night's urine.

That whole morning, whenever my line went taut, I pulled up in a hurry, banging the fish's head against the block of ice, so that they'd drop off the line and then back off into the depths of the canal to do whatever it is that fish do all winter, perhaps read Proust. After a while, I gave up on pulling up fish, on doing anything but banging their heads against bits of ice.

One more failure amongst many, but you should have heard the fish speak French. God, what a morning.

In Winter

In winter, I get cold. And when I get cold I am constantly reminding people that I am cold. When they say, "How are you?" I say, without fail, "Well, I am cold. This damn cold." I am deeply uninteresting in the winter. Though sometimes, truth be told, I'll be caught off guard and instead I'll say, "I'm fine. What I love about winter is the way all that sunlight blazes through the trees, come summer we'll have gained warmth, but we'll have shed ourselves of so much light." Or perhaps I'll tell them a story about the day, nap time, or what I'm working on in school. The fact of the matter is, which I've stated above, I am deeply uninteresting in winter.

In the fall I am also deeply uninteresting, but the contours are different. I'll say things like, "We should enjoy these days before winter comes." Or, "Look at the rusted color of those leaves, and the way the late autumnal light cloaks those trees in gold and look at all the clouds scuttling across that piercing blue sky." Though usually I'll just say that I'm not ready for the winter. I'll say, "I'm from CA, so I don't do the cold." Deep down, I suspect everyone knows I am deeply uninteresting.

Many winters ago I traveled up north when we were living in Michigan. We went cross country skiing, which turns out to just be working very hard at pulling oneself along with poles in the snow. If there is joy in it, like many things in life, it escapes me. After a few miles the group stopped to self-assess and talk about the plans for the day. Someone saw a cardinal, a splash of red on the white quilt of the afternoon. My eyes were so dry that my contacts froze to death.

We skiied back across the tracks of white land, pulling ourselves along with thin black poles, like stars passing across some great white sky. But of course, like the stars, it meant nothing. Back in the cabin, I pulled my contacts out and eventually threw them away. I spent the last few hours of the trip wandering around with everything around me in a haze. It was a pleasant way to spend a winter's afternoon, for once not talking, just trying to discern the shape of things to come. Is that a friend crossing the room to talk to me or just a chair? Who knows how long it will be until someone sidles up, and we start talking once again, of the oncoming cold.

The high dive

The summer camp, like every summer camp that has ever existed in the Platonic ideal of childhood, had a high dive. The high dive was terrifying. A long slab of concrete, a ladder that seemed to climb like a bean stalk into the sky.

I knew, as most children know, that climbing to the top of the board was a rite of passage. And yet, not every rite of passage was or has been useful. And so I stood all summer on the hot concrete, in the small puddles of water, watching girls and boys ascend the ladder and then plummet to the earth.

As a very young child I'd been obsessed with dinosaurs, and I had a blue book, which spelled out the names across eons and posited fights between Triceratops and T-Rex. It was the eighties then, so it's likely that most of the information is now wrong that the dinosaurs they posited all had feathers or turned out to be vegetarians. However, it made an impact on me, pun intended. Because the last page of the book shows a pair of dinosaurs lying in the green grass and posits their extinction at the hands of a meteor.

Up above, a girl, years and years older, walks to the edge of the high dive. She pauses, hair and red swimsuit catching the light, and then she falls towards the water like a meteor, like a cannon ball, like an extinction event waiting to happen. She parted the waters and rose up like Christie Brinkley in the Vacation movie, and I watched her from the edge of the pool, toes resting in the water, waiting for things to change.

Some Brief Thoughts on Democracy and health care

I don't know if anyone was paying attention to the elections the other day, I know I was only tangentially. It turns out that a democracy doesn't require its citizens to vote. It just needs to give them the option. Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the gobenatorial races and Senate seats went to people who are eager to cut portions of the Care act that help people who fall into the Medicaid gap. 

I don't really understand our countries fascination with disenfranchising or blaming the poor for their predicament. In fact, it makes as much sense as blaming an otter for being cute. He doesn't really have any control over it, just look at his face? And yet, in our country, there is a large portion and a disturbingly large portion of self-identified Christians, who seem to think that paying higher taxes to help people who's lives are, beyond any reasonable doubt, fundamentally shittier on a day to day basis, is a ridiculous or somehow unAmerican thought. 

At no time in our history has an ideal America existed. Those people eager to get back to the Constitution should remember that it was pretty much written by and for white male landowners. It is not some inviolate or particularly enlightened document by the standards of 2015. And yet, it's often held up as some sort of sinecure for all that ails us. I am troubled in many ways though and so I fear this piece of writing is about to go off the proverbial deep end, but stick with me. 

Firstly, what standard of life is the American electorate so desperately clinging to? I'll submit that I'm not particularly happy with the state of life, but that particular predicament is existential more than anything else. My life is, by and large, pretty good. However, it is not so fundamentally wonderful that I am fearful of having some of "my" money given in tax dollars to help people who are in need. But perhaps my take on life is mistaken, and everyone else around me, on say, this plane, where an older woman has been scrolling through old text messages for the duration of this two hour flight, or perhaps the woman reading a Danielle Steele novel are fundamentally ecstatic about the state of their lives and perhaps, by extension, this fine country brought into being under the noblest of possible circumstances, getting rid of Native Peoples. If so, then I can see the resistance to proto-European models of government, higher taxes, affordable health care, kind of trades. If however, their life is as fundamentally rote, boring, and, in any sort of grand scale, as small as mine is, then who the fuck cares about giving up some small sliver of it? 

I suppose I'd understand the motivation if the most important decision that people ever make in their life is choosing their parents. It is likely, that if you're born rich that you'll stay rich, and if you're born poor that you'll stay poor Imagining a world, which we kind of do, where every man can rise from being a shepherd to the King of Israel is a fantasy. But it's also a fantasy, and a deeply rooted one that people's hard work is what has brought them to a certain standard of life. I don't want to entirely dismiss the role of hard work, but I'd counter that the hoops people jump through in order to attain their goals are almost always already drawn for them. Yes. I went to college. Guess what? So did my parents, which makes me infinitely more likely to have done so. It's damn near impossible to climb the social ladder and just as hard to fall off it. In large part because we've structured our society around money, which is really best, in our current instantiation, at making more money. Cutting benefits, health care, food stamps, etc. is, without stretching your imagination, morally reprehensible.