Philosophy

I was in Memphis two years ago on Earth Day, during a blogging hiatus. Scored this awesome pin at the Hardrock Cafe’ because I am sometimes a terrible tourist, and I love to hit those joints. A lot has happened since that Earth Day — in my own environmental endeavors and the world’s. Too much to write about.

I mean, the whole “green” thing was hot last year. It’s hotter this year. Like a lot of people, I was worried that it was just a fad. That the fixie crowd would ditch their bikes, that organic food would dwindle again, that hybrids would get fewer and uglier. But it seems like it’s either a long-living fad or becoming the norm.

My initial concern is that I’m losing some cool factor. Recycling and buying recycled goods are getting mainstream enough that I’m not that awesome for wearing a recycled steel necklace and junk. Lots of people in Baltimore brave the traffic and the hills to cycle now. But this is something I’m happy about. I mean, “the more, the merrier” applies here as much as it possibly can. With my windows open on University Parkway, I constantly hear freehubs and old freewheels clicking by. I want to cheer everyone on, but there are too many. So I stick to yelling at joggers who ignore the empty sidwalk to run in bike lanes.

My other concern is that we’re all going to half-ass any green efforts. Ooooh, there are some recycled Coke bottles in my shirt. BFD — what are your jeans made of? Too much of the green craze revolves around buying shit, which is largely how we started messing up the planet so much anyway — material showing-off. [My TV is on because I wanted to hear a weather report and not get too into NPR to do what I need to do this morning. Ed Norton just said that plastic bags are the stupidest things we are doing. Hey, dude. Yeah, you. Heard of cars?] I know; I do that, too. I’m just saying. Driving a big SUV pretty much cancels out most of what else you do for the planet, doesn’t it? I mean, seriously, look at how much of your carbon footprint your car is, even hybrids, which are made of the same junk as any other car before you even buy them.

Off my high-horse now because everyone I know has a car. So at least I retain some of my awesomeness, being the only (aside from my wife, of course) intentionally car-free person I currently hang out with or am related to. [Though Mr. D has gone mad car-light with The Mule and pedals around town constantly.] And I don’t pretend that environmental issues are the only reason I went car-free, either. A large part of that decision was my own neuroses.

I don’t mean to insult anyone, and I totally get some bummed rides all the time. Don’t send me hatemail because you love your car. I realize that my bike was made overseas, that my pedals, lock and tools are covered in vinyl, that the metal and plastic on The Duke didn’t grow on trees. I know my own shortcomings, too, like non-recycled, imported notebooks, my fleeting weakness for French bubbly water, my Tevas, my fondness for cheap pens in spite of my collection of Goodkinds, my failure to remember travel mugs, etc. Very verily etc.

But I’m not the only one with a long way to go.

Nietzsche was semi-quoted on “Law and Order: SVU” this year, and I was like, “Nietzsche? Oh, yeah, I remember him. Wrote a dissertation that was largely about him, or, at least, dealing with him.” I mean, Nietzsche is hugely quotable and all.  And I did spend months doing nothing but studying him, hate, and power.

I keep forgetting that I have a dissertation to edit and send to my committee and have since the end of last summer. Honestly, I’ve been putting it off because, once I send it, I’m unemployed. Now, I tell myself, I am a student. Even though, of course, in practice and in my own mind, my student days are effectively over. Still, it will be nice to get this out of my life and over-with. And for everyone to have the “option” of calling me Doctor.  It might have been nice if I had realized that I implied I was still a full-time student on every job application I have sent minus one.  Damn it.

I have a stack of Moleskine Cahiers with Nietzsche notes in them from last year.  Most of them have some of my favorite quotations on them, like these do.  Those notebooks worked well, especially since I spent last fall in a semi-nomadic fashion, much like Herr Nietzsche himself.  Not that I had any great thoughts long the way.

Please do keep any “Nietzsche hated women” and “Nietzsche was an anti-Semite” comments to yourself, lest you reveal that you do not, in fact, understand Nietzsche at all. Or, at least, have not bothered to read any of his books.  And if you feel the need to do it, don’t troll.  Come back and answer for yourself.  Nietzsche would.

Photo Friday: The Good Life. You might be thinking, “The good life? Coffee? Isn’t that shallow?” I mean, after a decade of studying Western philosophy, shouldn’t this be a photo of a relaxed person, contemplating comfortably in a cafe’? Or after studying Eastern philosophy, why photos of a mind-altering substance like coffee?

It’s been…a week. So right now, Friday morning, when I have to run around until about ten or eleven tonight, teach kids about bikes, go see my sick grandfather days after his 80th birthday, work on job stuff, etc., coffee is the good life. I know; everyone is busy. So you should know what I am talking about then.

I am finishing up Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness. Being jobless and stuck in my apartment most days while Mrs. P is at work, I found this book both thrilling and depressing. I am a big Chatwin fan, but I especially enjoyed this posthumous publication because of the honesty of a few of the pieces, such as “I Always Wanted To Go To Patagonia” and a letter wherein he spells out the plan for his great book on nomadism/restlessness that never got written. I mean, Chatwin was a little…pretentious at times, such as when, in The Songlines, he spelled out how awesome his black notebooks were in such detail that an Italian company was able to reproduce them ten years later. I mean, I confess an addiction of sorts to those little treasures, so I think this is a good thing. But in an interview, maybe. In the main text? Pretentious? Or maybe brave? A little soul-baring? Chatwin says that the man he was talking to looked at him, when Chatwin told him about his precious notebooks, as if he had never heard anything more pretentious. Did that happen, or did old Bruce imagine that in some kind of self-consciousness?

Maybe even when he is fictionalizing his “stories” he was still honest to some degree, more so than one would believe when I started writing this post. Maybe he was a complete liar. I don’t know. Either way, you should still definitely check out this book. Or anything else by Chatwin you can get your hands on. I found this book, first edition, sitting on a stack when I walked into Normals one day this fall, after looking for that book for a long time. I exclaimed out-loud, “I’ve been looking for this! It’s like it was here just for me.”

But now I am restless. Very. When I read the first essay last week, I went shopping when I was pretty sick (and got sicker) because I could not stand the idea of staying home all day after reading something like that. Is that sad? I have finally gotten around to filling in a travel journal from our research trips in fall 2006. They were a bit of a pain at the time, when I was trying to get a dissertation written. But now I wish I could go back to New Haven for another chilly Friday morning wishing I brought something other than sandals. Or to New York for a thunderstorm on Broadway, ducking into the largest Barnes and Noble I have ever seen. Or to Boston, within a mile of where I lived for two years, remembering all things I loved and hated about that place. Hours at my favorite cafe’ there.

For now, I have to settle for books and other people’s experiences. And, of course, remembering my own.

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Do not adjust your screen. That is in fact a photo of two copies of the same book. Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals. I received a copy of it in June 2003 when I finished my MA from an old friend. I was excited about getting to read what I wanted to read between grad programs and was generally giddy about starting my PhD program. I finally read Kerouac that summer and listened to a lot of great music.

I was in a funk often during the school year of 2002-2003 wherein I was feeling very shallow, materialist, boring and cold. I worked too hard (really, I used to do that), lusted for things like more jeans than a person can actually wear and an army of coffee cups. I tried a number of things to get myself more, I don’t know, more alive.

One of these things was that, during the spring of 2003, I read poetry every single day. I found those cool little Pocket Poets series books at the Harvard Bookstore (no relation to the school) for like $4 and built a stash. Perfect for taking on the subway, when I was underground with no people and spring to look at. I read Whitman because I always liked his work. I was enjoying Rimbaud’s younger verses, perfect for April and May. I got into Baudelaire at the recommendation of a friend, and I found something very moving.

I’ve talked about Baudelaire before.

One day, I swear I will learn French. I have that software; you know the one. I will tell everyone that it is for my eventual trip to Paris. But it will largely be so that I can read Baudelaire in French. Rimbaud, too. And watch Amelie.

Anyway, my favorite passage from this book made it’s way into my dissertation, during the chapter on enemies bringing out the best in us:

A man goes pistol-shooting, accompanied by his wife. He sets up a doll and says to his wife: “I shall imagine that this is you.” He closes his eyes and shatters the doll. Then he says, as he kisses his companion’s hand, “Dear angel, let me thank you for my skill!” [Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, pg. 37.]

With spring coming, you might want to pick up some of the books I was talking about and which I wrote about very shortly after I began blogging. Read it here. You can sometimes find them cheaply at the physical locations of Daedalus, if you’re in the Baltimore area.  My stack has grown to around twenty volumes these days, though I don’t get to read much poetry lately. Don’t get to because I’ve been reading a whole lot of fiction. I’ll dig into my tiny poetry books soon, though.

By the way, my blogging history turns four tomorrow. Make me a cake please.

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I really like using the cargo rack on my bike. My frame does not have the holes for the top attachments (the 2005 and the 2007 both do, but mine’s the 2006), but I got it on in a sturdy fashion with the aid of something a biking friend of mine sent me, some electrical tape, and patience. I use my rack whenever I can. So when I had to take a stack of boxes to the post office last week, I was stoked. I rolled up with four packages, paid less than five bucks and left with an empty rack.

Sometimes, with large loads, I get stares and weird looks. I think it’s funny. I could not sit on my seat, though, with that many boxes, and it hurt my knees for the mile up to the post office. Then I got from the post office in Roland Park (near Eddie’s) down to Charles Village to have Mexican food for lunch with Mrs. P in ten minutes flat. Which rendered my pinkies numb, despite my sweet new cycling gloves that I got for Christmas. But I was in a good mood for all the errands, all of which were made more fun on two wheels. I remember what a chore going to the post office in the Dale was. I enjoy it now.

Holy Oily Sand, Batman! Shell’s CEO, Jeroen van der Veer, admits that peak oil might be here in seven years. Read the story and letter here.

What is “peak oil”? “Peak oil is the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically.”

That means that we’re running out. Guess who’s going to get oil when it really starts to disappear? Not you, not me. Probably the airlines, industry, the government — all groups who should have freakin seen this coming. Maybe rich people will be apple to get oil. Probably. I can see all the cars in Hampden and Roland Park disappearing for tiny versions of their former selves, more bikes (which now sell for two thousand dollars), then the huge houses down the street from me on University Parkway having land yachts with combination locks on the gas tank doors and armed guards circling them. The engines left running as a disturbing display of wealth.

Not to mention things made of oil like plastic. Starbucks might charge you for that lid soon, man. Plastic will replace gold for bling!

What? You just bought a big SUV or hovercraft? That sucks for you, dude.

I was thinking this morning in the shower about that whole “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” thing. You’ve probably gotten a similar email like I have, which is supposedly written by some guy who was in the Vietnam War or the current situation in Iraq or some other official war. This alleged soldier talks about how great life in America is, how terrible it was in Iraq. How we are so free and Iraqis were so oppressed and how everyone in Iraq is so much better off since we invaded their country, overthrew their leader and screwed up everything so badly that suicide bombs and shootings don’t even make it onto/into most mainstream American media outlets very much anymore. This person who claims to be a soldier of some war (and the wars change, while the email does not, proving at least half of it a lie) goes on to talk about “protesters” and other people who speak their minds. It goes something like this:

“Boy, I sure don’t know why you’re saying that and blaming us for how screwed up Iraq is now. I mean, it was not our President’s fault, not my fault. It was the bad guy’s fault. [That things have only gotten worse without the bad guy is, evidently, irrelevant.] Can’t you hippies just shut up? But, you know, I am over here defending FREEDOM, your freedom. I’m fighting for your freedom of speech. And then you just use it against me. I don’t understand. But I am a better person than you are for fighting for your free speech that you throw at me, and everyone who put me and all these guns here is right and better than you. We have Jesus on our side, one nation under God, etc. etc.”

The email I’m paraphrasing is about free speech, obviously.

So I was thinking of flag burning and how that is related. I mean, do we have freedom of expression or speech? I mean it; I don’t really understand. And what kinds of expression are Okay? Am I free to express my anger at racist bungholes who do everything but drop the N-word and then say, “What? I’m not racist. I didn’t call him a n—–. Don’t be so sensitive”? Because, you know, not liking negative talk about “them blacks” makes me a sissy. Am I free to express my rage when some jerkass on his cell phone almost flattens me with his SUV making in illegal right turn while I’m out cycling somewhere? Or when some yuppy can’t control his or her kid in a coffeeshop? Rather, my question is not whether or not I can express my rage but whether I can do it with fire and/or destruction.

Of course not. I am not free to hurt another person’s body or property. But that’s my point.

Maybe advocates of flag burning are invoking the wrong American right (funny, I know). Maybe it’s not our right to speech but our right to property they should cite. A nylon piece of material with colors on it is a piece of property, no? No one can take a flag that I own. But I can do what I want with my property, so long as it does not hurt anyone else, right? So maybe we have the right to safely, within fire codes and laws, of course, burn whatever piece of our own proptery we want to, so long as the taxpayers don’t have to pay for that hook and ladder to roll up and put out all our flaming crap?

Better keep your receipt.

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Man I have a lot to do tomorrow/today/Friday. It’s days like these when I wish I were still meditating instead of sucking at the teet of the caffeine god and having hot sauce on my breakfast. At least we had a fun band practice tonight and an hour and a half standing outside chatting over hot chocolate when it was twenty degrees. I love when it is this cold.

Fleece socks never felt so good.

Photo Friday: Passage of Time.

Back in 2004 when I started blogging and even earlier in 2003, when I lived in Boston and flirted with the idea and started really reading blogs, I liked a certain kind of blog. The author would be a fan of Amelie. Tea/coffee. Fancy notebooks. A Mac or otherwise non-standard computer. Funky glasses. No cussing. Only nice things to say. Fondness for books, especially poetry. Sharing recipes. I was joking one time that there was a uniform for the Cuddlebloggers: Amelie soundtrack, Moleskine, Timbuk2 bag, gel pens or, better, a fountain pen with some obscure color of ink in it like Nipple of Venus Rose Pink. I formerly identified some Cuddlebloggers as hipsters (read here), but it has lasted far long enough to be official in some way. I think.

I don’t mean this in a bad way, really. I have so many Moleskines that I need a shelf. Not to mention my affection for Amelie and utter and complete caffeine addiction. I’m just saying is all. And, to be sure, I totally tried to be a Cuddleblogger at first, whether I realized it or not. Until our car wreck, that is, when I let loose with my first naughty language (here). That sumbitch in the land-yacht changed everything for us, literally knocking us out of a pattern of contentment that was leading us to somewhere we did not want to be. But that’s another story.

I like making up words and definitions. Cuddleblogger. You know what I’m talking about, though they are certainly a dying breed. I’m hard pressed to think of more than one or two who still blogs regularly. And I miss them.

This is posting in the future, when I’ll be off to Harper’s Ferry for a nice day trip and hike up to Maryland Heights. I went there the day after Thanksgiving in 2002, too, and they had homemade cinnamon rolls with fresh icing poured generously with a ladle at the ice-cream shop. It was cold, and the plates of heaven steamed on the porch when I confessed to a friend of mine that I was a vegetarian.

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I don’t mean to be hokey, corny, stale, etc. But you know, I think it’s complete crap that those of us who don’t support the war let those who do, those with four of those ribbon magnets on their cars, own patriotism. I’ve said that before.

I don’t support the war or several of the things my country chooses to do. But I still love my country. So forgive me if I select just one thing the US stands for, and post it for Photo Friday: Strength.

So we are taking some boys camping this weekend, to include a 20-mile hike. We are going to the C&O Canal, which has a neat story itself. I’d love to get a light mountain bike and ride the whole thing one day, which would not be hard — perhaps to kayak along the length one day, too, later.

The weather for Saturday (hike day) looks gorgeous. Not too warm, definitely not cold. The last time I was there was this same weekend in 2000. I was still a senior in college and hadn’t lived anywhere but Maryland before. I said “Goodbye” to the mountains and valleys there that time; I suppose I knew it would be a very long time before I would return. I was on journal hiatus in those days and instead wrote bad poetry and played a lot of music for staying sane during my grad school applications. And I liked to take a lot of walks. That was my other car-free period, before my three cars in two years while I lived in Carbondale.

I remember coming across a page on the Sierra Club’s site about keeping “nature journals” the way that John Muir did. It’s still there, so I downloaded and printing the template, hand-cut some paper and bound some little nature journals for the boys with red ribbon. If not for poems and notes, they can always be used for rummy scores and keeping track of things seen for future use. It’s as much something for them to think about as to actually use, if that makes sense.

We’re roughing it much more than usual. No kitchen or showers or toilets or electricity. I’m bringing my own food because I don’t want to be one of those pain in the butt vegetarians who gets too vocal about it. And, I like to cook.

Instant coffee in a camp cup. The smell of my musty sleeping bag with the ducks inside. My trusty daypack. Penlights. New hiking shoes. My shortwave radio. Fire. The stars that I took for granted when I live in Southern Illinois. It’s going to be a nice weekend.

I participated in the Komen Race for the Cure yesterday. Got up super early and wore layers and had lots of coffee. I even got to be on TV (in the background) and see a certain news personality on whom I have a serious crush that my wife likes to tease me about (winks at Dan).

There were weird things about the whole event. There were a lot of people doing the walk (not the run) who were wearing brand-new track clothes and stretchy things I don’t even wear for 10 mile bike rides and 20 mile hikes. I could not tell if they were congratulating themselves for doing the “race” for a good cause or if they really thought that walking for a whole hour was a serious physical undertaking.

One thing that I thought was weird was how many people had their photo taken next to the one mile marker during the walk. The whole walk was three miles, and there were far less people getting their photos taken at the three mile mark.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that I’m no explorer. I don’t walk for Thoreau’s famous four hours a day. I never jump the back fence armed with tea, bread and a blanket like John Muir. No one’s arrested me for being in the wrong country during a coup like Chatwin. But I walk more than the Komen’s three miles in a normal day, usually even a day that involves cycling.

What I mean to wonder is, are my fellow Marylanders so sedentary that they need to prove to their family, friends or themselves that they actually in fact definitely walked a whole mile at one time? I wondered that as we passed the other mile markers and noticed less or no people getting their photos taken. And when scores of people collapsed at the end, perfectly young and/or apparently reasonably fit people, I did feel a little, I don’t know, awesome because I was ready to walk all day.

I hope this is not all true because we are taking 5-10 young men on a 20+ miler in the mountains this coming weekend. They are very good kids, but they are a lot less…active than even I was at their ages. My first 20-miler at age 14 wrecked my feet (I was stupid enough to wear new boots), but I made it. I know these boys can do it, but yesterday’s Komen walk has me a little nervous. I have not the upper body strength to be carrying anyone.

Speaking of Muir, I have something neat in mind for the youngins this weekend, which I’ll share later.

So in Washington last week, there were Greenpeace volunteers out recruiting. I have a lot of memberships, to groups like the Sierra Club, Center for the New American Dream, ACLU, Thoreau Society. I don’t have one for Greenpeace, though I did choose my current cell phone after reading their green electronics report (it’s a Nokia). When a nice guy was talking to us about issues, not far from the White House and a lot of Popos, we stopped to chat. We told him we’d likely get a family membership but that money is tight now with the job hunting. He was nice even after that. Yay Greenpeace.

Then later on, we’re walking toward the Smithsonian, and there are some Greenpeace volunteers parked outside of Wholefoods. Now, I’m gonna say it. The Wholefoods closest to my apartment is not somewhere you’re likely to find a lot (which is not to say no) environmentalists or even people who give a shit. No. Instead, it’s the local status market for all the look-at-me’s who roll up in land yachts and German V8s. Shopping there is a nightmare of ignorant yuppies cruising around like they own the place, who have no idea what the hell Wholefoods even exists for. Seriously, if you have an SUV like that, everything else you might try to do for the planet won’t cancel that out, especially since I doubt the average 13-passenger vehicle owner lives in a small and efficient apartment. Shopping there makes me want to make people disappear, first of all the jackass employee who parks hers or his rusty bike parallel to the bike rack, hogging the whole thing daily. I only go there for things I can’t get at the two other markets near my apartment.

Anyway, there are these Greenpeacers outside of Wholefoods in Washington. We are hot, sweaty, tired, have to pee and just want to get to the Smithsonian as quickly as possible. I know they don’t want me to sign something that I would probably really sign. I know they want a membership and that they are not getting one until I get hired. I know they are probably hot, too. So when “Mr. 22-year-old I know something so I know everything” approaches us, I try to save us all time by telling him the truth: we are in a hurry. He exclaims, “It will only take a minute!” and keeps shooting it and stomping his feet as we walk away. What. A. Weiner.

I want to run back, shake him and make me tell him what kind of car he drives. I want to shake him for all the “greener than thou” people I know, especially the ones who tell me stupid things that are not true — as if I am wrong for not “knowing” them while they are in fact false, hence my not “knowing” them. Especially people who go out of their way to tell you how green they are, how much they recycle, how they have organic shampoo — all the while owning a car they don’t need in a city where it’s easy to live without one. If one more person tells me about how they recycle their bath water over a big meat sandwich on a foam plate that they bought, I am going to snap.

I am not talking about people who own cars. Everyone I know, with one or two exceptions, owns a car. Or truck. I’m talking about people who want to be “hardcore” environmentalists but not give anything up, so they get all vocal and try to make you feel inferior to their green status. “I recycle, so it balances out. [insert other very false fact here] Johnny, you should…” Living a lie, in very obnoxious ways.

I know I’m not the greenest person around. I do have a thing for non-recycled notebooks, cheap pens, Tevas, imported beer, etc. But I don’t drive, don’t eat meat, don’t use “normal” products for cleaning my apartment or body, I live in a small apartment, don’t have AC at home. At least I’m trying and not lying to myself and everyone else and judging people who aren’t themselves first judgmental jerks. I do judge judgmental people, though. That’s probably a personal problem. Or, I like to think, me being the agent of the universe and balancing things out in some cosmic and ironic revenge on idiots who loudly think they know everything.

But that has nothing to do with organic potatoes and aloe-based toothpaste.

My mother never learned to ride a bike. She had six brothers and grew up in the city, so this is surprising. So a few months ago, at the age of, ahem, 29, ahem, she told me, in response to my constant, “You should get a bike!” that she would ride a tricycle, like she rode in Atlantic City once with my father before they were married. When we all went to help move my brother into his house in Abingdon early this summer, we came back in two trucks because we had to move a lot of stuff, run to Ikea, etc. I was in the second vehicle with my other brother, and we saw a man on a blue trike with the basket full of groceries. The cell phone rang, and the Mom said, “That’s what I want! Find me that, and I’ll get a bike!”

So find one of those I did, and I found a red one, her favorite color — it even has 6 speeds and full fenders! We had to have it shipped to her house, take it to the bike shop and pay them to assemble it. Turns out that the guy who put it together worked with the pedicabs in New York, so the trike was in good hands. After some issues with the rear band-brake, she got back from the beach in time to ride it.

But then she locked it to a poll in her yard with her husband’s Kryptonite U-lock after her first ride. And lost the key. And the original was nowhere to be found, and no one wrote down the key numbers, either. I took the poll apart and the poor trike (then known as Flower Power because of the flowers on the tires) sat sadly for a month while we spent far too much time looking for the keys. Either of them.

We gave up, and my friend tried to saw it off with something plumbers use to cut pipes, with no luck. Not even with a new blade.

We took it to the bike shop, and they needed three people and a “grinder” to get it off. When The Dad and I showed up with his pickup truck to get the bike, the man at the shop said, “You’re here for Big Red, aren’t you?” I rode it out of the store and around the parking lot and to the truck. I enjoy riding it, and I totally want one, once someone pays me enough to have a little house in the city where I will have a shed with all my bikes, or my garage, if the house has one. I’ll take a blue or yellow one, thanks.

The Mom bought a helmet in white because she’s Polish, and the bike’s red, with a white basket. All Polack colors. And, rather than a practical bell, there is a huge pig squealer because The Mom likes pigs. A lot.

She got to ride up and down her alley again last week when we got it back from the shop, like she did the day she got it/locked it. Put my brother’s pug in the back. Roxy was hypnotized by the blinky. I stole Big Red and rode around Hampden with her a little.

Then on Friday, the Mrs., The Mom and I rode up Elm Avenue to the lower Rotunda lot (the unused one) so that Big Red could get broken in a little more. It was The Mom’s first time in traffic, and the first time I saw her on a bike/trike in my 28 (Thursday!) years.

There’s nothing like the look on the face of someone who just discovered cycling. Nothing. It’s better than giving someone their first Moleskine or cup of French press coffee.

Stay tuned for part ii, and check out larger photos at Flickr.