All posts by Owen Scott

If we are defined by our work, then (in order) it's Cherry Picker, Farmhand, Student, Stonemason's Apprentice, Carpenter, Fisheries Technician, Commercial Fisherman, Information Technologist. If it's by where we live, then it's Wyoming, New Jersey, New York, Seattle, Alaska, California. If it's by role, then it's child, son, brother, husband, father. If it's by passion, then it's nature, art, music, writing, technology. If it's by our spirituality, then it's Zen.

Unlikely Saints Among Us

When my father was alive, and I was much younger, he and I would have long conversations about what, exactly, was meant by “enlightenment.”  I remember at one point he gave me a wonderful book about a woman who called herself the “Peace Pilgrim,” and who simply walked wherever the road took her, for 28 years.  She walked for a purpose, and while her routes may have been random, her intentions were not.  Nevertheless, collectively, as a culture, we call people that do things like that “crazy,” but of course they are far from it — if we must indulge in our propensity to compare everything, then  it is we that are crazy, settling for a life of drudgery, normalcy, and routine, and they who are sane, alive, and without fear.  It is someone like the Peace Pilgrim who I think sets a good example of what we might call “enlightened.”

Maybe a useful definition might be one who has a freedom of spirit, and who is in touch with the kernel of awareness that is completely liberated from distraction, ego, and fear — those things that keep us locked into a daily dialog with dread.  It’s a bit naive to think that the enlightened person feels no pain, and is only happy all of the time.  Happiness, I think, is more of a natural condition of freedom, of enlightenment, but it not impervious to pain and suffering.  It’s just that the enlightened person experiences suffering with the same clarity that they experience everything else, and so they are more alive than the rest of us even then.

But there are subtle degrees, and every once in awhile, if you keep your eyes open you stumble upon someone who is living in this enlightened state right before your eyes, and in the most unlikely of places.  I don’t remember this happening for about the last twenty years or so, so it’s worth writing about, since it happened today.

Today I took a certification exam, which is delivered by a company named Prometric,  a gargantuan network of tiny and not-so-tiny testing centers spread across the globe like so many grains of salt.  Some of these places are really tiny — they are found in Community Colleges, strip malls, in the lobbies of office buildings — all over the place.  Today’s exam was delivered in the local Community College, and after thirty-five minutes of conversation with the proctor there — a middle-aged woman who worked part-time there — I felt that I was immeasurably enriched simply for being in her presence, such was the energy that she carried around with her, and which she had no trouble expressing.  She absolutely loved her part-time, low-paying job, and gave it her all, to the point at which she had used her design skills to create a set of blueprints for the complete redesign of the center itself — a generous offer that the college, or Prometric, or maybe both, took her up on.  They move into the new building in January.

With just a few simple words she changed my way of thinking about teaching.  The limit I had naturally imposed on myself with respect to teaching these technical courses, once  I get the Microsoft Training Certification, was that I would limit myself to teaching things that I myself was an expert in.  This sounds like a fairly sensible idea, and it could actually work from a practical standpoint because I do have a lot of broad and deep experience in this industry, but she pointed out that what was bringing to the classroom was much more than the dry, procedural knowledge of the subject matter — it was me, my energy and personality, and the ability to help people open up to the material, which in my profession, can be dense, abstract, and impenetrable at times.  And it is indeed my gift for analogy and communication that makes me a good teacher, and not necessarily what I know.  Besides, as she pointed out, the Curricula is set, particularly for the Microsoft Courses — it’s the art of interpretation and delivery that makes the difference, and is why everyone doesn’t simply lock themselves up in a room with a book to learn what they need to learn these days.

But it was the few simple words that she left me with, and delivered in a manner that made me feel the importance of the idea that really stopped me, because I had not heard them so simply expressed in a long time — it was the simple fact that after all of the years she had been alive, and all of the things she had learned, she felt that the only place it made sense to spend time was the present.  Neither the future nor the past held much use for her.  It w as only the present where she felt most alive.  She mentioned God and Blessings a number of times in that relatively brief conversation, but I must say, I don’t think Dogen himself could have said it better.

Letting Go

As I am writing this I am in the process of a heart-pounding procedure, truly a jump from the precipice as it were.

With that introduction you might imagine all sorts of things — is it experimental brain surgery?  Extreme Snowboarding at very high altitudes?  Parachuting for the first time?  Nah … I’m wiping out my laptop and reinstalling the operating system.  Pretty radical, huh?

Well, it’s all relative.  When I think about what I do on a daily basis to earn my living, and the dependence I have on this machine, I would say that there is very little I could do to earn money if I did not have a completely functional system at my disposal every moment of every day.  So this last hour and the next four are pretty dicey.   I can feel your palpable excitement as you read these words.

To prepare for this event, I felt that I first needed to back up every byte of data that I use on the daily basis, which turned out to be lots and lots. I use an application named Syncback for that.  So I systematically backed everything using about a dozen profiles, which resulted in a backup set of about 250 GB.  That wasn’t enough, though. What if something went wrong and I needed, must have a system to work on immediately?  So I started the process of creating an “Image” of the system using Acronis, but when it started it said that it would take “about 4 hours.”  I don’t have four hours.  I haven’t had four hours to do anything in a given day for as long as I can remember.  So I had to let it go.

I’m proud of that — proud enough to write a post about it — I actually let go of a fear, and it felt good — a break with the past.  So what if I can’t get my machine back to the state it was four hours ago?  It’s a pretty sorry state indeed, anyway, which is why I’m doing this in the first place. After two years of banging on the thing it’s a complete mess, in terms of data and function, so Let it Go , already.  It’s like a new beginning.  How exciting.

Now I just need to do the same thing with the way I am living my life.  In terms of data and function, it’s a bit of a mess.  No point in taking an Image of my life at the moment — better for a clean break and start afresh.  Remember Krishnamurti?  If you do, then you know that he advocated this practice not every two years or so, but EVERY WAKING MOMENT OF EVERY DAY!

Which means that you don’t look at anyone with the same eyes that you did yesterday. You don’t let past conclusions about people and about the world affect what you are seeing this very moment. This is hard to do. Try it sometime.  If you are successful, the promise is Peace.

A Semi-Perfect Day

I suppose it is revealing about the state of a person to ask them of their idea of the “Perfect Day,” which is sure to be a dynamic and fluid idea depending on their current situation, their mood, or the daily circumstances that make up their lives at any given time.

For me, today was as close to a perfect day, although we have to add “semi” because here I sit in a noisy data center at 3:54 AM babysitting a sick server and watching mysql updates scroll across the screen while struggling to keep my eyes open.  Not an auspicious ending, that’s for sure, but the day a decent beginning.  It went like this:

6:35 – the kids are on school break, so I’m absolved of the drop-off at 8AM, and so I head out early for a four-hour server installation in La Habra at 8:30.  I figure I’ll find a SBUX in Brea or so, and do some work, instead of sitting in traffic.

6:50 – in Brea already, banging out some mail processing for GEMM, getting a head start on the day.

8:30 – Server installation goes well, which is a fine end to a horrible engagement, where the first guy I send out to upgrade a simple Windows 2000 server spends nine hours and ends up with a broken POS that I drag back to the office and build from scratch.  But the engagement ends well, with the customer happy because of my inherent generosity besides being a veritable wellspring of knowledge that advice, which they are short on in all respects technical.

12:30 – Swing by a client to fix two small items and pick up a laptop.  Will work on it at the office during the leisure hours (right ….)

1:15 – Manage to have lunch with my wife at “The Counter”, a distinctly California concept where you build your own gourmet hamburger, in my case in a bowl without the bun.  The food is delicious.

2:30 – We both go back to the house and pick up the kids and take them to a neighborhood pool.  The water is cold, but the Jacuzzi is warm, and the kids have a blast.  Back at the house they have triple decker peanut-butter jelly sandwiches.

5:00 – I attempt to curl up in bed with a laptop and catch up on some of the work of the day, but it isn’t going to happen.  I feed the kids, and spend some time with them.  Maybe it’s this part of the day that is “perfect” or as close as it gets.

7:30 – Server crashes, and I need to speed down to the data center for hours and hours of wrestling with operating systems, log files, data, data, and more data …

2:30 AM — full circle.  Thus ends the semi-perfect day …

Our Very Own Mid-Life Crisis

It looks like I”m down to one post a month, which is not exactly as I had envisioned this project … it was supposed to be “Daily Writing …”  Well, all I can say is that I am not my father, at least certainly not in that respect.  The thing about him was that he may have been subject, at times, to deep, crushing depression at times, but he never stopped writing.  Never.  As I approach fifty I see that I am subject to the same sort of depression, except that writing is not my form of therapy.  And so while I have dozens of ideas for something to write about each month, I many times cannot put my hands on the keyboard.  Physically unable.  That’s depression, all right. I have come to believe that it’s related to hormones.  Specifically, the lack of them.  These things happen when you age, hence the title of this post.

It’s become something of a joke, or at least a cliche’ – this idea of the mid-life crisis, and the various and silly ways we express it.  Some reactions are more destructive than others.  I’m thinking of affairs, inappropriate cars, and the usual things associated with a reflection and subsequent disillusionment with where we are at whatever age we begin to reflect.

But there are more subtle manifestations, such as the increasing difficulty to view the world with a fresh perspective, the tendency to allow bitterness or disappointment to take root.  This sort of thing is considered part of aging, but it doesn’t have to be.  Thing to do is get out — get out of the daily routine. For me that always meant get out into nature, into wilderness.  That’s not such an easy thing to do anymore, but it’s not possible.  Joshua Tree is not so very far away from where I am, and that place has the right kind of physical beauty and promise for adventure among the boulders and cliffs that the Gunks had thirty or so years ago.

That’s one form of medicine, but in an effort to get to the bottom of the mid-life crisis / aging issue I went to doctor for a full blood workup.  What do you suppose she came up with?  Turns out I have almost zero testosterone flowing through my veins.  Well, that’s probably good for the avoidance of Prostrate Cancer, but it’s not good for much else.  Taking the proscribed has made a world of difference.

Sometimes we are, after all, just a bag of chemicals …

The People’s Act of Love

Last night I finished a book that I am compelled to call a modern masterpiece.  It’s called The People’s Act of Love by James Meek.  It might best be described in the format of the Hollywood pitch — in this case something like “Cormac Mccarthy meets Leo Tolstoy on the Comedy Channel” …

The book focuses on a tiny part of a huge historical event — the Russian Revolution — and is set in a tiny, remote village in Siberia.  You might wonder how this setting could possbily contain enough varied characters to support a richly drawn story, but it most certainly does, mainly because, in case you didn’t know, there were some 67.000+ Czech soldiers deployed through this period, scattered across the vast expanse of Russia like so many toy soldiers, thrown hither and fro between a half-dozen powers.  There were also apparently some pretty bizarre cults operating around the taiga at the time, plus the native Siberian population wandering around the frozen forests. Not to mention the White Russians scattered around Siberia in the same way that Eastern Businessmen drove West in the 19th century to seek their fortune and, of course, exploit the land and people they could find along the way.   The principal difference, of course, is that a social movement occurred there that did not occur here, where many of those businessmen were strung up like so many light bulbs on a Christmas morning, or marched out into the forest and summarily shot.  This, however, is not the main focus of the book — it’s actually written more as a mystery, and is gripping as well as fascinating to read.

There are certainly parallels to be drawn to our tumultous history of our own West, which in part reminds me of Mccarthy, but also because Meek tends to push Big Ideas through the characters he creates in a similar manner to Mccarthy — and yet Meek somehow manages a hilarious wit throughout.  There is, for instance, a Czech engineer/soldier who spends most of his time attempting to discover and document, in engineering terms, the precise mechanism of female erotic arousal, except that he has almost no occasion to ever touch a woman, and so must grill his more successful compatriots for the information he so desperately seeks.

It turns out that the author himself is an award-winning journalist, and in the acknowledgments he thanks people from a string of tiny Siberian towns, and so you know he traveled through the region in his research.  What a life, eh?  Here is what he  has to say about the difference in writing fiction and journalism:

“One of the main constraints on the reporter, as opposed to the novelist, is space. The reporter is required to be economical with words, sometimes extremely so. The 150-word news story leaves little room for considerations of rhythm or poetry, and the 1,500-word news story not much more. As a rule, there is a close deadline involved, too. It might be thought that this training in economy would benefit a fiction writer. I’m not sure. To be comfortable as a novelist or even a short story writer, you don’t want to feel uncomfortable with setting your own limit, or no limit, to length.” (Three Monkeys)

My father was one of those that believed that journalism was great training in learning economy and was mainly a benefit to the fiction writer, and it’s interesting that Mr. Meek is not so sure of that.  But one of the great pleasures of the book is that he takes his time to tell his story, and does so from four main points of view — a Czech officer, a cultist, a mysterious student/convict/revolutionary, and a woman who has traveled from the “civilized” part of the country to remote Siberia for reasons that are not entirely clear at first.

I like to read interviews with writers because sometimes they let slip clever techniques that help them put together something of the scope of People Act of Love.  I imagined Meek standing in front of a large table with dozens of index cards, like I heard somewhere that Nabokov did, but what he actually did was even more interesting  — “At one point, when I had about a dozen characters all interacting in a single chapter, I wrote all their names on little pieces of paper, folded the pieces so that they sat upright, and arranged them in front of me, like an audience, to make sure I didn’t forget that any of them were there. I had them there for weeks.” (Three Monkeys)

I imagine these days there are all kinds of software to help with this kind of process.  Like Meek says in the interview, though, writing is never, ever easy, and I’m sure it cannot be made so with the use of software and other tools.  Reading Meek’s book is not the easiest endeavor, either, and I almost want to read it again because there are clues and various subtleties that I’m sure I missed. I book that rich probably needs to be read twice — to write something of that depth and have it appear on the NYT best seller list is indeed an accomplishment in 2007.

I first heard of the book with a full-page ad in the NYR of Books, which was so compelling that I dutifully ripped out the ad, and then lost it a week later, I’m sure.  But I didn’t forget about the book, although I unfortunately forgot the title and the author’s name … and half-heartedly searched for it as “the book” that would get me reading again.  From 2007 to 2009 whenever I would go into a bookstore, which is at least a monthly occurrence, I would drift from the Computer Books section over to fiction and peruse the shelves, looking for the cover, which is all I remembered — a lone figure walking away from the viewer through a narrow road in a snowy northern forest.  At one point I actually tried to ask for help from a Barnes and Noble staffer by describing the cover of the book, and received the appropriate look (“what, you are kidding me?”) and then on my last day in Boulder a couple of weeks ago, THERE IT WAS, staring at me in the used section.  For the next week I barely put it down, spending more time reading in the last week than I have in the preceding eight years.

What a pleasure.

Now I see that there is a movie in production of this book,  or should I say “Development”.  I thought a little about how it might be to make the book into a movie as I was reading it.   It will be a great surprise to me if Hollywood manages to create this movie without completely blowing it.  I suppose we will see …


Reading and Writing, no Arithmetic

About a month ago or so, I ran across someone who turned out to be an avid reader, and it happened during the course of my work, which makes it that more interesting and rare, considering what I do for a living.  How I came to know she was an avid reader is kind of silly -- I was delivering one of those canned software courses, where the presentation material contains trite introductory diversions in order to "loosen up" the audience -- something like going around the room introducing oneself and then providing your favorite hobby, etc.   Corny as it sounds, it actually worked well, everyone in the room learned more about each other in the ensuing conversation than we might have otherwise.

And so this led to more conversations, and actually inspired in me a desire to start reading again -- I mean really reading -- books, that is, and not just semi-weekly editions  of the New York Review of Books or Harpers, or that SPAMlike of magazines that seems to arrive on practically a daily basis - The New Yorker.  She provided me with The Samurai's Garden, a beautifully-written book about a Chinese boy in the 30's that is shipped off to coastal Japan by his wealthy family for health reasons, and where he meets a number of finely drawn characters with complicated and tragic pasts.

Then she told me about Paulo Coelho, whom I had barely heard of,  being so completely out of literary touch, as it were.  So I purchased a couple of his books tonight, and realized in the bookstore that I had always left it up to my father to feed me literature, and, considering he has been dead for twelve years, maybe it's time I started paying attention to these things myself.

Perhaps more importantly, this chance friendship has also inspired me to dust of "Fish," which is the novel I wrote in a mad fury over a four week period about sixteen years ago, while in Seattle between fishing seasons.  My father was still alive then, and as an illustration of how powerful affect he had on me, especially in terms of my literary ambitions, after receiving from him two or three critical sentences in response to the chapter I sent that I thought was my best, I put the manuscript down and never picked it up again.  Until now.  In fact, just two days ago late at night in this hotel room in Boulder I rewrote probably the last part I am willing to rewrite at this point.  I do think it is ready or very close to being ready for Lulu, or whatever.  (POD being the subject of another post at some point ...)

In talking with Ginnie today about writing, though, it was great to hear that she herself has a yearning to write -- and this is the first conversation I've had about writing in, oh, about fifteen years -- but I forgot to mention something that I now remember Dad telling me when I started to write seriously, about thirty years ago: 

Do not, under any circumstances, judge anything you write when you start.  It is the kiss of death.  Just, simply, write.

He cited a few reasons --

1) Everything you write when you first start will likely be garbage, but it WILL get better.  But, if you stop and judge too quickly, you will never get past the garbage stage, and will likely give up, and

2) You don't know , and you cannot know, the quality of your own writing.   No matter who you are, you are not equipped to be subjective about your own literary art.  It could be a masterpiece, or it could be completely unreadable, but you will not know it.  At least certainly for the first ten or so years of writing.  So don't, for cryin' out loud, stop and judge anything you write.  Just ... write.

I think he's right about that, at least based on my limited experience.  And it's true, I think, for everyone. A few weeks ago The New York Review printed some of  the letters of Norman Mailer to the couple of writers he admired in the 50's, right around the time he had recently written his anti-war masterpiece The Naked and the Dead, and he was full of a mixture of brio and doubt in his letters about his current projects -- not completely sure that the work was damned good or not.  He thought it was, but wasn't quite sure. And you read, between the lines of the letters, a desire to be validated by his peers.  So I think it's fair to say that if it's tough for Normal Mailer to judge his work, writing at the height of his powers, then it's not worth trying to judge your own.

One of the things we talked about was one the most thrilling and mysterious aspects of writing fiction -- the concept of the Muse.  It's no joke that the Greeks went to such lengths to explain the mystery  the creative force in art as the result of a Goddess, or Nymph, separate from your own self, that is responsible for the life that comes to the characters you create.  It really does happen that way, and just talking about it gave me the chills today, and I long to feel that again.  It's such a strange thing when it happens, because you think you have created these characters, right out of your head, and then they begin to take on a life of their own, and proceed to act in ways that baffle and amaze you.  I remember shrugging and laughing at some of the turns of events that came out of what I wrote when I was staying for a year in a cabin the Adirondacks, finishing my first novel, starting my second, and then trying to write short stories, all the while reading the likes of Lie Down in Darkness and bemoaning the likely fact that no matter how many years I remained holed up in that cabin I was not going to be able to write like Styron.

Nowadays, of course, no one writes like Styron -- or, how would I really know, anyway?  But the excerpts I read in the review magazines that garner effusive praise such as "luminous, enchanting", etc. are written in a flat, spartan style that is far, far from Styron and his southern predecessors, that I can only imagine that no one is reading him or the likes of him these days.

But does it matter, really, what people are reading?  No, it's about the writing.  We must remember that we write, foremost, for ourselves.  If a book gets out and makes its way to some people and you end up with some nice feedback, I suppose there can't be too many things that can happen to a person to top that, but when you are sitting in that quiet place, deep in the writing, I would hope that you are writing  for yourself, and not with others in mind.

The Facebook Dilemma

I first heard of Facebook a few years ago — probably some tech journal, or maybe Harper’s or the New Yorker, where, by the way, I heard of Google years before anyone seemed to use it outside a few academics. Facebook sounded like a good idea for the College set, who must have seen it as a perfect extension of the social web that one creates when one goes to school.  When I first heard of it, it was confined only to college students.  Now, of course, the thing has gone completely viral, and has spread easily throughout just about every demographic.

My wife spends an enormous amount of time on Facebook, and has used it to great affect for her business, by creating a group that now has over a hundred members, I think.  So, after some gentle cajoling, I actually made it through the process of signing up, after having tried a few times, and pausing over the Submit button and hastily bailing out at the last minute.

The earlier attempts were the result of my personality — which is actually quite social and friendly simply because I have always liked “people” in general, and still do — but which also contains a great deal of built-in guilt about not contacting people I have known in my life and when it came to the point at which Facebook looked into my Address Book and found 134 people that I could “Friend”, I couldn’t go through with it.  But when I finally did create the account and even put my High School, my company, and other information into the profile (still refraining from reaching out, though) , I began to get the invitations from “Friends”, each one of which caused a slight pang of anxiety and guilt, because I could not imagine reaching out to any of them and making that connection and then living up to what I suppose a Friend should be, which I imagined as a forty-page treatise describing everything I have done in the last 30 years.

I know this is ridiculous, but it is what it is, as they say.

So today after a brief discussion with a co-worker who reminded me of Facebook when he told me he joined up, I logged in and Deactivated my account.  When you Deactivate a Facebook account, you are asked to provide a reason.  Here is what I wrote:

“I can’t take this step right now in my life.  Too much guilt about not contacting people in my past. This would unleash the floodgates and rain down a torrent of remorse, guilt, and pressure that I could not bear. I would develop Hypertension, followed shortly by Heart Disease, then a slow miserable death.  Presumably, I would not die alone, however, because the 1,417 Friends that I would have, including my Kindergarten teacher, and everyone who ever picked me up hitchiking in the 1960’s.  It would be like dying in the middle of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Album Cover.  It would be a fine death, surely, surrounding by this multitude of people I have not spoken with in forty years — and which with I was able to exchange 140 character quips (wait .. that’s Twitter, isn’t it …) — in any case, while I do see the benefit of dying in this very public matter…  I think for now I will skip it. Thanks.”

An absurd reason from someone who is ridiculous in their inability to … Facebook, as it were.  (it’s a Verb, too, right?)

What is the difference, then, between this blog and Facebook?  Plenty.  Here I am a hologram with no ability to interact, and so I can write away as if I were in alone in a room, or standing on a little platform with a robe intoning nonsense to Luke or Hans Solo.  I don’t even know who reads this, and don’t particularly care.  I haven’t told anyone in my actual life about this — not my brother, my wife or kids.  Not to say that they can’t find it immediately, but there is no expectation of an audience.  And so I am somewhat able to write with the freedom and slight thrill of not knowing who will read it.  Somewhat, I say, since there is always the possibility that someone will read it and be offended by it which belongs to the small group of people that still control my ability to create income to support my family.  I doubt it, though, since these posts are pretty tame, and I haven’t started on any of the stories from my life yet.  They will come …

Facebook says, on their front page … “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

That depends on what life you are talking about.  With the exception of my wife, the only people really in my life are not on Facebook (they are all under the age of nine …), and so we would be talking about a life from the past, or a life made of people from the past.  A life that would grow to include those that I had known long ago, when I think I was truly a different person, in a different place, and in a different time.  It would be strange, confusing, disorienting — not sure what to make of it, since I’m just writing away now, and not thinking …

Maybe there will come a time in my life when I am not working 80 hours each week, and I don’t have four little kids and a wife  to attend to.  Maybe then I can join Facebook, or the current incarnation of it.  Maybe then I will be happy to spend the kind of time that my old friends deserve.  For now, though, this one-way mirror will have to do.

Go Fly a Kite … then Call an Old Friend

Today the daily work ended at a reasonable time, and although I had some kind of unhealthy desire to work for the rest of the night, I took the advice of a new friend and colleague who told me to “relax”, which is sort of like telling the wind to stop blowing, although this time I listened.  I decided to head up Baseline to  where a park opens up to a wide swath of grassland criss-crossed by some dirt trails right at the slope below the Flatirons.  I brought my my new little stowaway kite that I had purchased at Into the Wind last week — just a little Delta, beautifully colored.  These kites, by the way, are not your grandma’s kites of yesteryear. They almost leap out of your hand and rise energetically straight up in the slightest wind.  There’s no running, like Charlie Brown used to — they just elevate themselves and dance around as the wind shifts and twists.  There’s a little maintenance, and once the kite took a dive in a strong wind and I found myself wading through the tall grass to retrieve it, but if you pay attention and act accordingly, you can fly the thing almost absent-mindedly for hours.  And what a blast.  There is a sense of freedom to be connected, however tenuously, to a playful object that seems alive soaring high above you.

When I left the lowlands there wasn’t a whisper of wind but when I arrived at the park the wind was probably at about three knots — just enough to get started.  Then it began to gust up to about 20 which made for some interesting flying, and then a group of long, deep gray clouds came rolling over the Flatirons and after about an hour the first drops of rain began to fall.  I thought for a moment about Ben Franklin’s lightning experiment and decided that perhaps I should  call it quits.  On the way out a met a nice Boxer out for a walk with her Person, a happy Boulder native who was oblivious to the rain, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and change in light from the now black clouds.  It struck me how similar Boulder is to Irvine — they are bubbles of contentment, and for different reasons.  Irvine because of the affluence, climate, relatively low crime, and Orwellian corporate-style civic management, and Boulder … well I’m not completely sure yet, but judging from the real estate prices, affluence certainly has something to do with it.

Food, too.  I ate at Centro, and the food really was as the waiter described it would be, which was “delish …”.  The wine, a Spanish red, was fantastic as well.  I had something like “brown sugar encrusted lamb” (sorry, not a food critic) which was great, and the appetizer was a ginger plantain fritter with a sauce I could eat every day and not get tired of.

But the best part of the meal was that I took the opportunity to plug in the headset to my phone and called an old, old friend of the family named David Frair, who is now one of the few people left who knew well both my father and mother.  I told him how I remembered the first time I met him when he was probably twenty and I was about five — he had just a pair of shorts and sneakers and a headband and had just come back from a 10-mile run outside of Woodstock, NY.  Dave was one of the “hippie” generation in upstate NY that my father had befriended as a sort of elder, and who exposed their group to things like Jazz music and literature.  He was a journalist for the local newspaper, while Dad was a newscaster for the local radio station in Newburg, but in the late sixties they both quit journalism in favor of starting some kind of construction business with Joe Nicosia, who could actually build houses, and in fact built many.  Not that any of them made any money — I guess that wasn’t the point.  I think that was pretty much the last steady job my father had, which was fine, since my mother decided right around that time to start working.

But the point of this is that the conversation made the dinner that much enjoyable, and it was great to catch up with Dave.  If I had not been traveling, I suppose it would be much more difficult to find the time to spend an hour on the phone with someone I had not talked to in about twenty years.  But that’s something that needs to change.  Same thing with Chris and Linda — here they are less than forty miles and when was the last time I sat down with them?  Maybe a year.  No excuse for that.  Seems like almost everything I write leads me back to the fact that there is a paucity of time. An illusion, of course, since we know from experience that there is truly an eternity wrapped up in every moment we spend, dazed and overworked…

Boulder, CO … revisited 29 years hence

When I was 19 I was on the tail end of a several-month odyssey that took me 300 miles down the Pacific Crest Trail from Cascade Locks to the California border by foot, followed by some easy time spent with high school friends who had escaped Orange County, NY for Marin County, CA, followed by a long, slow trip to Mexico, and then hitchhiking/meandering up through Arizona all the way to Wyoming and finally down to Boulder, CO, where I visited for an entire month with a guy that grew up next door to me, but which had managed to leave and head west a year or two earlier.  I worked day labor picking tomatoes until  I could afford to buy a car, which turned out to be a black ’59 Volkswagen purchased for $400 which I drove East with a Danish college student to get back home.

Looking back, and writing this 29 years later here again in Boulder, CO , if I had known what I know now, I don’t think I would have ever left what has to be one of the very best towns in America.

I could go on and on about Boulder, but the crux of it is a combination of things, such as perfect climate, progressive politics, low crime, intelligent planning, spectacular scenery … I mean, what else is there?

Getting off the job at 5:30 PM today left plenty of time for me to head up Pearl Street to the Pearl Street Mall where I had a great dinner overlooking tulips against brick punctuated by happy people walking by.  It’s spring here, and everyone seems very content and at peace.  After dinner I found a cool Nepalese shop and bought a singing bowl, which is a remarkable Tibetan invention about 1500 years old that fills the room with a tone said to heal your troubled Chakras.  Following that I was absolutely struck by a guy playing a combination of a digeradoo, steel drums, bells, and I don’t know what else, all simultaneously in a lyrical, story-telling fashion.  He had forty people transfixed for ten minutes while he used his entire body to make some incredible music.  His name is Christopher and I think his music would be perfect for film soundtracks.

A typical evening in paradise, I suppose.

Sometimes you visit a place and you have a sense that your name, or perhaps you destiny is written all over it.  For me, this is such a place.

Stamina, Focus, and the Good Life

An hour and a half ago I was at the tail end of a ninety-minute Bikram class and it struck me that of all of the things that may have contributed to whatever measure of success I might have achieved thus far, one of the most powerful has been stamina.  I can’t think of a time in my life where I was tested so often for pure stamina than the ten years I spent fishing in Alaska, where we were routinely asked to stay up 24 hours or more while offloading 1000 frozen tons of frozen product and fishmeal.  Fishmeal was particularly tough because the bags weighed 70+ pounds apiece and there were thousands of them.  I always stayed to the end, and I remember once at the tail end of one of these marathons one of the BIG guys — and I mean 6-8″, 270 pound big — exclaimed “You’re one of the toughest little fuckers on this boat!”  which I took as a pretty decent compliment. But there’s this zone, or whatever you want to call it, that you must find in trying situations where you simply have to keep going no matter what (like 70 minutes into a Bikram Yoga class), that will help you through.  And I believe that a lot of this has to do with focus, and the quieting of the mind.

Not that I’m a model for a quiet mind — far from it, but if you can reduce the things that you are chattering away about inside yourself you will find a place where there is only the awful thing that you are trying to complete.  Nothing else.  If you breathe, focus, and REDUCE … you will make it.

Needless to say, this can work on a macro level as well.  Like if you are going through a particularly difficult, say, month … it’s the same thing.  It’s just a bit slower, and you must work to pace yourself.  The sine wave of your battle in that case is long — maybe days long — but the more you can focus and let go of the crap that plagues you from inside, the more stamina you will find to finish out the tough ride.

It would seem that we should be spending as much of our waking effort on a daily basis to structure a life that is not subject to a roller coaster effect, whether it be financial, emotional, or even physical, but we generally don’t.  Instead we just hold on and ride.  If that’s all we are capable of, then at least we need to learn how to ride, and focus and stamina are a couple of very good resources to draw upon.

So …. breathe, focus, and quiet the mind.  Repeat as often as possible.