Ashes

Remember, you are dust,

And to dust you shall return.

The priest murmurs it as he swipes the ashes onto your forehead on Ash Wednesday.  To dust you shall return.  Remember that, for all your grand goals and ambitions, for all the inflated belief in your own value, your purpose and necessity, one day it's worm food for you, pal.

Lent is especially striking this year.  I want to use the word "cloying," but not in the negative way, indicating something of, say, an overwhelming saccharine sweetness.  Rather, the season claws at my soul, demanding a different kind of humility than usual.

For the first time ever, I am jarred by people who take these days lightly and dismissively, like the fellow in the newsroom who announced with a chuckle that he was "giving up religion for Lent."  Normally, I'm okay with the fun and games; I'm rather difficult to offend.  But now the piling on by the irreligious, or even non-Catholic, seemed ignorant and to be missing the point altogether.  This is a moment to pause and reflect on the real purpose and intent of your life, not a diet plan.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

 - Matthew 6:24

These days, I scramble for inflated belief in myself and my future.  As I've said before, worries about money can suck the joy out of anything, and sometimes it seems that the hole is not only deeper, but that all my furious efforts are only resulting in me digging in more, not in digging out.

Yet I can hardly complain.  The Sunday before Ash Wednesday, a priest who works for Food for the Poor spoke at Mass.  He described the stunning poverty, the astounding smell, of the nightmarish Cite Soliel area of Port au Prince, Haiti. 

I live comfortably, even well, probably beyond my means, but not extravagantly.  I do what seems reasonable, and I work hard to make enough income to cover it, and yet ... 

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

-"Sixteen Tons" 

The trick here, I think, is to be sure to despise the correct master.  I mean: we really have to work for money.  It is the rare person who can simply exist from moment to moment without any thought as to where the next meal or payment will come from.  After a while of living in anything but the most ascetic of ways (like a monk, for example), one acquires obligations and responsibilities, like family and rent bills, expectations of food and clothing, and to be honest a certain style of living (whatever that style may be -- the monk can afford to live with only his robes, but the office expects something besides the same tattered outfit every day.)

Lent -- to return to the main point -- gives you an opportunity to step off of the treadmill for a moment and take a look at just what you're doing.  How much of the above is just rationalizations ("I really must have that new outfit for the office to be respectable."), how much the unthinking indulgence in little pleasures?

"When I fast from meat today, do I do so because it's a rule, or to unite in solidarity with those without access to meats and food?" asks a Facebook friend, the sort of Christian I can only aspire to be.  "There are an estimated two million living in Syrian refugee camps, moms and dads who look for something, anything to feed their kids. Isaiah 58 makes very clear the kind of fasting preferred by God."

It can be hard to fast in a normal, American day, when friends are snacking and going out for burgers and pizzas.   It should make one think because many Americans have to, well, think about ways to not eat.

“Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.” 

  

-Ambrose Bierce

So, not to keep hammering on the money thing, but right now I have a dollar in my wallet, as in: a single dollar bill.  Everything else is allocated to gas and other basic survival expenses (groceries, medicine and the sort).  Especially for Lent, but in my life in general these days, there is rarely "spare" money.  (That's a term that's always amused me, especially when panhandlers ask for "spare change," as though I carry some extra money around like a spare tire in a car.  "Oh, this?  It's extra money; I have no use for it."  But perhaps this is another posting, and I am getting sidetracked.)

My question is: what do I do with this dollar?  Part of me wants, as I buy aforementioned gas, to get a lottery ticket.  I've long since dispensed with hopes of any of these massive wins of hundreds of millions; a little payout for a small game with better odds would be helpful.  Just a few thousand dollars would make an immeasurable difference.

But the above always comes to mind.  No matter how much I think I "deserve" even a small win, no matter how deeply I pray God take pity on me, facts are facts and math is math.  The odds are deeply against me; I might as well give the dollar as "spare" money to the first deserving looking person I meet.

For that matter, why not formalize the donation?  Why don't I, as the basket goes by, simply drop the dollar at church?  If I want God's help, surely it can't hurt to do Him a good turn, can it?

Of course, I know that logic is both practically and theologically suspect.  If I want to give it to church or charity, I should do it because churches and charities need money, and I wish them to prosper.  I should do it because I think that dollar will function better in that place than in the lottery fund or at the bottom of a fast food cash register till.

Maybe I should just shove it in an envelope with any other small amounts I come across.  It's always good to save, and even in paltry amounts, money eventually adds up.  Will it add up quickly enough?  Is it more practical to "leverage" that dollar, as a financial adviser might say of a significantly (significantly) larger amount, and put it to use somewhere ... like as a lottery ticket?

And we return to question one ...

Hello Again ...

I've mentioned before how I don't really understand how traffic on this blog will spike or not.  Often, it would make mysterious jumps for no reason, and other times (when I thought I had posted classic "click bait,") it would lie there like a dead fish. 

A few times, I have delved into the options offered by Google to show statistics on traffic, but never really got it.  For a while, it seemed, I was getting traffic from India.

But today, I drilled down into it again (after my last post generated a remarkable 38 hits -- not exactly Gizmodo or Upworthy traffic, but remarkable for me) and found the clicks are coming from Google, this site itself (I guess that means people typed in the address directly) and something called ighome.com.

So I went to see what it was, and it appears to be a personalizable (is that a word?) dashboard where you can have a series of sub-windows open to check your favorite sites.  Cool.

So thanks for clicking in.  Check out some of the really old posts while you're here; I do that myself occasionally, and am surprised at what I have forgotten.

Write Drunk, Edit Sober

I saw that attributed to Hemingway, and it sounds like him, but research (eg: Google) raises some question.

Anyway, a friend asked once why I hadn't blogged in a while, and I said that I was afraid I had nothing interesting to say ... and I hadn't been drunk enough lately to try.  Blogging -- frankly, writing in general -- is a constant struggle to find something worth saying, and then manage to get it down in some form that you can find acceptable enough to let others see.  In a quote I know is authentic, Dorothy Parker said, "I hate writing, but I love having written."

The very crushing of inhibitions that can result in a bad late night bar hookup can also help the words flow.  So can some sober inspiration.  Neither seems to be around lately.

All this is by way of getting something on here, even though it has been two weeks since I last posted.  Work has been busy, and I have had a dearth of worthy ideas (though I do have a couple of posts in "Draft" form searching for the right inspiration to flesh them out). 


And there is a lamentable shortage of wine around here.

Psalm 36

Sin speaks to the sinner
in the depths of his heart.
There is no fear of God
before his eyes.

He so flatters himself in his mind
that he knows not his guilt.
In his mouth are mischief and deceit. 
All wisdom is gone.

That's the beginning of Psalm 36 in a modern translation.  King James is somewhat different:

The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, 
that there is no fear of God before his eyes. 

For he flattereth himself in his own eyes, 
until his iniquity be found to be hateful.
 The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit: 
he hath left off to be wise, and to do good.


It's almost as if the translators are seeing completely different, though vaguely similar, texts.  Anyway, the modern version struck me.  Particularly that first line: "Sin speaks to the sinner."

Sin, it says, creates a closed loop.  You begin to undercut the basic premises of morality, chipping away at your values in little bits, then reenforcing that erosion with the justifications that caused it in the first place.  "He so flatters himself in his mind, that he knows not his guilt."  You're now operating in your own little world.

It reminds me of all those characters in reality TV.  You know, the ones who become the villains of the piece, willing to do anything to win.  Inevitably, when they're caught out, or perhaps when the show airs and the viewers react, the subject in question finally cries, "I'm a good person!"   In their world, everything they did was perfectly understandable.  Maybe, confronted with their actions, they'll admit they acted poorly, but we just don't understand, because in the end they are "good."

Sin has spoken to the sinner.  As they went down their "practical" path, these people began closing the loop, failing to see it from the outside.

This is related to the whole idea of losing one's perspective.  Tim Gunn of "Project Runway" refers to it as being in the Monkey House.

Chris, from Project Runway: "Check out my fur-inspired line of clothing, it's covered in human hair!"

Tim Gunn (politely gagging): "I have this refrain about the monkey house at the zoo. When you first enter into the monkey house, you think, ‘Oh my god this place stinks!’ And then after you’re there for 20 minutes you think, ‘it’s not so bad’ and after you’re there for an hour it doesn’t smell at all. And anyone entering the monkey house freshly thinks, ‘this stinks!’ You've been living in the monkey house."

This effect is often the cause, I think, of poorly envisioned villains in movies and fiction.  (I almost said "popular fiction," but I would hope that something badly written wouldn't, in the end, be that popular.)  Anyway, well-formed villains don't get that what they are doing is wrong.  It all makes perfect, logical, internal sense to them.  Often, they are actually proud of it.

Badly formed villains are evil because someone needs to do bad things to let the hero do good things.  The writer (or usually writers, which is how so many movies have come off the rails over the years) needs this or that plot development, so the bad guy does it.  Why? Well, the author explains, because he's evil.  Not good enough, I answer.

This reminds me of an acquaintance who was interested in making horror films.  She asked my advice on cinematography (or videography, I guess, though I dislike that word as some sort of modern pastiche to create a false sense of prestige), and this naturally segued into talk on plot structure and character development.

As she described some ax-wielding villains, I asked why they were ax-wielding villains.  Well, she said, because that was the danger, the MacGuffin.  But, I said, you need to work out their back story, their reasoning for doing this, even if you're the only one who knows.  It doesn't need to come out in the movie -- Basil Exposition needn't stop the action and say, "But of course you know why Cletus wants to kill you, don't you?" -- but it drives and informs everything that character does.  Otherwise, you'll have him doing things just so they'll be done ... and it will make no sense at all.

About Hats and Fashion ...

My father hated hats.  He's of that generation.  You know, the Kennedy generation of men who came to adulthood in World War II and built the country in the 50s and 60s.  JFK reportedly hated hats too, and rarely wore one.  He was the first president to be inaugurated without a top hat.  (Look at the pictures, it's true.  Before him they always showed up in cutaway coats with gray top hats.)

I read speculation once that the reason those men turned from hats was the rigid hat-related discipline in the military during the war years.  I don't know: that seems a bit simple.

I like hats.  I think they're helpful (I dislike both umbrellas and having rain on my head) and stylish.  I miss the social signals that could be sent with them.  In the day, you knew that a man in a top hat was of the upper classes, and a man in a soft hat (like a fedora or a panel cap) worked for a living.  You knew where a person was headed by his dress and headgear (see above re: cutaway coats and top hats).  You could make a political statement by, say, wearing that soft fedora as a member of the aristocracy, thus showing you weren't as stuck up as your parents and peers and sympathized with the working man.  And if you wore a bowler, you were a stand up, respectable member of the middle classes, a pillar of society.

from Tumblr

Hats seem to be making a bit of a comeback on the fashion runways, but we all know the connection between that magical fantasyland and reality is a distant one, made more of symbolism and metaphor.  They may show guys dressed in crepe paper suits tie dyed in vibrant neon hues with flip flops and ties made of lettuce, but the signal to be read for the everyday streets is: the fit's a little snugger this year.  Still, it would be nice if this meant something.

Of course, it's not like I couldn't buy a bowler.  They're more than available today, but then again we return to the question of social signals ... and frankly of looking like a fool.
 

http://lefashionimage.blogspot.co.uk

That's not to say I'm in favor of all hats.  Lately I've been seeing a lot of pictures in fashion-related stuff of women wearing these big, boho, floppy hats, both casually and sorta' formally.  Ladies: these are ugly.  They're big and ugly.  Someone may say it's a great, funky way to just throw something on when you're having a bad hair day.  They're full of it.  It just makes everyone wonder: What's she trying to hide with that big, stupid, shapeless hat?

They should be burned.

TMI

Okay, so we all know what "TMI" means: technically, "Too Much Information," intending to warn the speaker that he is getting into uncomfortable, overly personal territory.  But this morning I was recalling a moment yesterday, and wondered about the phrase's literal meaning.

One by one, my daughters insisted I watch segments on YouTube about how each of the My Little Ponies got their "cutie marks." (That's a mark on the rear flank which symbolizes the pony's special talent, for those who have lived life without the privilege and pleasure of the show and accompanying toys ... or is that the other way around?)

At any rate, the segments are rather cute, the message -- though obvious -- is positive, and I had the time to stand and watch.  Besides, I like to try to treat their interests and fascinations with some respect, to not be that parent who thinks anything the kids do is trivial and a time waster for adults.  I don't always succeed, but I try.

So this morning, leaving them asleep in their beds, I am thinking during my commute that I may never have need of knowing why Pinkie Pie or Fluttershy or Rainbow Dash have their particular talents, or what they are for that matter, but is there really some information that is a complete waste to know?  Is it possible to have too much information?

I'd Be More Interested If You Were Dead

I saw a T shirt in a catalog recently that said: "History Buff: I'd be more interested in you if you were dead."  I thought that was funny ...

I compliment myself to think that I could live quite comfortably, and even happily, in a 19th Century environment. Even though I work in television and enjoy the product, and though I obviously blog on the internet and enjoy that, books remain a boundless pleasure.  Electricity is nice; central heating is something that I would be reluctant to surrender, but I've lived in houses with wood fireplaces and stoves that not only did a good job, but sometimes too good a job of keeping it warm.  Air conditioning?  Well, yeah, I guess that's important.

Society, though, I think was more pleasant in its way.  I finally got to see the new Coen brothers version of "True Grit" the other night, and was reminded of the baroque language of the day, for which the film was justly celebrated.  It reminded me of T.R. Reid's excellent account of his time as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Tokyo, Confucius Lives Next Door.  In it, he speculates that the equally elaborate way of Japanese speech presents an insight into the structured  society and very low crime rate in that country.  I like that idea.

I think it would be nice to live in a somewhat more formal and polite society.  I grew up in the 1960s, when youth (and the media culture) rebelled against what they saw as the restricted, limited, rule bound world of the gray flannel man.  Though Victorian art (like Art Nouveau) was enjoyed and celebrated in the psychedelic culture, to label something "Victorian" then was to mark it as closed minded and unacceptably, even ridiculously, structured.  Everyone was to be free to do as they pleased, and "why can't we just tell the truth all the time, instead of being so ... polite."

Well, 40 years later, I'm not sure it has really worked out.  I saw a piece on the internet on this.  Discussing the current  culture of self-obsession and self-esteem, the author turns to a quote from Marilyn Monroe: "I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best."

"Out of all the profundities ever uttered," Matt Walsh then explains, "what does it say about our society that THIS is the quote we’ve decided to take to heart?"  Absolutely right, and explained better than I could later in his blog.

Or perhaps, on the opposite side of the thought, there's this from NPR's "This I Believe" series. Author Dierdre Sullivan explains why she thinks her father was wise to demand, even as a child, that she attend viewings and funerals of friends and acquaintances as well as family.  "'Always go to the funeral' means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it," she says.  "I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to."  Being polite, caring enough to not force people to deal with you at your worst, that comes in the small things.

Maybe we could all try a little harder ...

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

- Ian MacLaren