General Essays

Pontifications, pomposity and other pretentiousness

The Perpetuity of Inspiration

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About 20 years or so ago, my wife and I found a print of a painting we liked in an art store in a mall. We brought it home and it hung in our living room for about fifteen years.   When I converted the spare back room to my office about five years ago, the painting followed, and now hangs right above my desk, where I do all of my “writing.”  It’s a winter landscape of a Midwestern farm, and I’ve always loved it, it’s always spoken to me.   The original was created by someone I’d never heard of, an artist named Tom Heflin who painted it back in 1976.

I looked him up on the internet a while back, and found that he’s had quite a career, and his website has photos of a wide array of beautiful paintings.  Not having had any formal training in art or any discernible talent, I know what I like, and I think I have a fairly good eye, at least, decent instincts.  The beautiful work displayed on his web site stands as an affirmation of my taste.

As for my writing: for the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been blocked like I’ve never been blocked before.  I’ve been unable to put hardly a word down, and even the parts of my novel in progress that I’ve outlined and know where I want to go with have been impenetrable.  Nothing has been coming to me, no ideas, no words, sentences, phrases – you get the idea.  Writer’s block, they call it.  In my case, writer’s constipation would be more appropriate, because no shit was coming out.

Behind the book cover you can see a glimpse of the print that hangs above my desk.

Behind the book cover you can see a glimpse of the print that hangs above my desk.  From http://tomheflin.com 

Then last night, before going to bed, I looked at the painting over my desk, and I thought, what if I wrote a story that took place there?   What exactly is it that’s always appealed to me about it?  I thought about it as I fell asleep, and when I woke up this morning, I took another good, long look at the painting and I started putting people in it, and the next thing I knew, I was writing!  So far, tonight, I’ve got about 3500 words and I’m about halfway through my short story idea.  I still don’t know if it’s going to be any good or not, but I’m writing again!

So whatever comes of it, I have to thank Mr. Heflin in particular and art in general for the ability to inspire.   I’m sure my little short story will probably never be published, if I even finish it.  If I do finish it, I might or might not even decide to show it to anybody.  But it strikes me that that doesn’t matter, inspiration is inspiration, and that 37 years ago, when he created the painting, Mr. Heflin had no way of knowing that one day his creation would lift a total stranger out of his doldrums and inspire him to create something of his own.

This is, I think, the essence of any art, what compels us to create anything – it’s the perpetuity of inspiration, that by being inspired, we may someday inspire others.

Race to Judgement

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“The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you’ve lost your innocence.” –        Bruce Springsteen 

There’s been a lot of fuss in the news about some television personality named Paula Deen and the use of the “n” word.  I know nothing about Paula Deen except that she apparently has some kind of cooking show, and, from what I can gather from the headlines, the “n” word in question isn’t “nutmeg.”

Race is and has always been the most sensitive, complex and divisive issue in American history.  We are a nation of immigrants, the “melting pot” where opportunity for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are considered inalienable rights granted to us all.  Our ideals are undeniably noble, while our reality undeniably falls short.  The words at the heart of what we believe and aspire to, “all men are created equal,” were written by an unrepentant slave owner.  We became a country by vanquishing the Native Americans who were here first.  We were the last industrialized country in the world to formally abolish slavery, after more than four years of bloody civil war.  As a nation, our innocence long ago lost, we struggle to maintain the idealism we were born from.

As a middle aged, middle classed white man living in the Midwestern suburbia, I am amazed at the number of men belonging to the same demographic who’ve had no hesitation in telling me about their hatred for other races.  These are typically casual acquaintances, people who know who I am but don’t know me.   When my sons were younger and playing sports, on more than one occasion I had other fathers approach me on the sideline to make small talk. You know what small talk is – polite and safe topics meant to pass the time agreeably and to make a good impression. Small talk in these instances included things like, “your son is really improving,” or “how about the weather?” or “I’ve had it with those lazy black people.”  I had another man say to me, “I know it’s prejudiced, but I just can’t stand Mexicans. At least I admit it,” like that somehow makes it better or more rational.  Most recently, I was having a nice conversation with a guy about rising health care costs; we were pretty much on the same page until he pointed out that a big part of the local costs were all the black people from Illinois who were coming across the Wisconsin border to make fraudulent claims.

It always amazes me that these attitudes are still so prevalent, but even more how casually and comfortably they are espoused.   I don’t know what it is about me that makes me so approachable, that makes them think that not only wouldn’t I find offense but that I would agree with them.  The only thing I can think of is that, like them, my skin is white, and since we have that in common, we must think alike, too.  Normally, in an attempt to be civil, I bite holes in my tongue and don’t say anything in response, sometimes I give a brief I don’t agree with that remark.  I’ve long given up trying to argue or point out the hatred and bigotry behind their remarks, because I won’t change their minds.

The various people spouting off these opinions have come from different classes, from working blue collar to corporate executive, from retired to freshly entering the workplace.  The only things they have in common are that they are white and male.  Oh, and none of them use the “n” word, and none of them are racists.  Just ask them.

This is my problem with the “n:” word.  (By the way, the “n” word in question is “nigger.”  There, I’ve said it.)  I agree that it’s offensive, especially when used by a white man.  But I don’t believe that a word should be used to determine who’s racist or not, because it is too simple to hide behind.  Not using the “n” word doesn’t acquit one of being a racist any more than using it is an automatic conviction.  Racism is much too complex to be determined by a single word.

Besides, my writer instincts tell me that no word by itself should ever be forbidden.  Whether it’s Richard Pryor or Chris Rock, Mark Twain or William Faulkner, or David Duke using the word can make all the difference.  People have a right to be offended, but it’s in the context of the use of the word, just like any other word, like “fuck,” for example.

My father, rest his soul, was born in 1926 and raised on a farm in rural northwestern Wisconsin.  He was a good and kind man, who I loved dearly.  He was smart and funny and, more than anything, good company.  He was also raised in a geography and time that had no exposure to people of color.  As a result, when I was born in 1958, he still had unsophisticated and uninformed and unsubtle attitudes about race.

When I was four years old, in 1962-63, we’d just moved from northern Wisconsin to an all white small town in the southeastern part of the State.  We had a black and white television set – mainly white, because there weren’t many black people on the air at that time.  I remember watching Louis Armstrong on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and he was a genuine curiosity. My brothers and I were all amazed at his lips and how white the palms of his hands were while his skin was so dark.  I’d never seen anything like it before.

It was about the same time that my mom took me with her grocery shopping at the Sentry store in Racine.  We were standing near the frozen food section when I saw a real live black man for the first time in my life.  My mom was getting something out of the freezer while I stood there gawking, and as she returned to the cart, I said to her, plain and loud enough for all to hear, “look, mom – a nigger.”

The next thing I felt was my arm seemingly being pulled out of its socket as my mom grabbed me, and I remember the look of disgust on the man’s face.   I’d obviously said something very wrong, but I didn’t mean to – I was just repeating the word my dad always used.

So was I, at four years old, a racist?  Was my dad for teaching me the word?  Was my mom for tolerating that language in her home?

This is where things get complex, get a little grayer. It’s the “r” word, the companion to the “n” word.  Nobody accepts that they are a “racist.”  I swear, you could interview an entire Klan of sheet wearing fanatics at a cross burning and not one of them would admit to being a racist.  If any word is more reviled than the “n” word, it’s the “r” word.

Racism is as insidious as it is pervasive, and it seeps in to our conscious and unconscious thought patterns.  No matter how enlightened or open minded we like to think we are, we all have, deep down inside us, prejudices and stereotypes that we to some extent, whether we want to admit it or not, believe.

A few years ago, I was in the drive-thru lane at a fast food establishment. The voice on the other end of the loudspeaker had to belong to a complete and total idiot, as he could not get my order straight.  I was finally, after the third time repeating that I did not want fries, able to get through to the tinny voice on the other end of the speaker.  I approached the first window eager to put a face to this moronic voice, when I saw that it belonged to a small middle aged black woman.  I was overcome with liberal guilt and waited with kind and tolerant patience as she struggled to get my change correct, and I thanked her when she finally handed it to me.  If she had been the white teenage male I was expecting, my sarcasm would have undoubtedly boiled over.  This strikes me as not only unfair to the white teenager, but also condescending to the black woman.  My liberal bias refused to accept that a black person can be just as incompetent as a white person. This is exactly what many conservatives see as wrong with liberals, and there is some truth to their argument that by being “compassionate” liberals are really lowering expectations and perpetuating social injustices and inequalities.

So it’s important that we get to the substance.   All racism is evil.   Not all racists are evil.  A racist is a human being, and all human beings I believe have the potential for both exploitation and redemption.   Racism is institutional, racism is fear and hatred, racism is a means to an end.  Watch newsreel footage or read newspaper headlines from the 1940s, while World War Two was being fought – you’ll find frequent use of the words “Japs” and “Nips” as well as ugly caricatures in reference to the Japanese.   At the same time, we were interring Americans of Japanese descent in prison camps.  Racism was deemed an accepted tool in fighting the war against Japan.  We’ve seen the same attitudes rise against Muslims after 9/11 and in proposed legislation to profile Hispanics on the U.S. / Mexico border.   With such strong and pervasive institutions as the government or the media making its arguments, it’s not difficult to see why people accept racism, and how the perpetuation of it creates an unending pool of racists.

The United States became as strong as it is by taking the best of people from all over the world.  Our strength comes from the aggregation of our differences.  Racism is the fear of these differences, and plants the seeds of hatred in otherwise good people.  Like any evil, there are those who profit from perpetuating it, those who capitalize on our fear.

This is the unspoken subtext that is really behind the Trayvon Martin shooting and the George Zimmerman verdict.  What I haven’t heard in all of the discussion is what planted the idea in Zimmerman’s head that Martin was so suspicious looking to follow in the first place, what was it that made him carry a loaded pistol with him.  Zimmerman was acting out the fears that the gun manufacturers and their mouthpiece, the NRA, have been relentlessly pushing, the fear of the hoody wearing black man.  It doesn’t matter that Martin was unarmed and had committed no crime, the “stand your ground” laws imply that fear of the hoody is a valid reason to shoot first and ask questions later.  The gun industry has been so effective in promoting these fears that sales are off the charts, and all states now have some form of concealed carry laws.

But in the process of fearing each other, we are weakened.  Only when we acknowledge and accept our differences can we see the common humanity we all share.

I don’t know the first thing about Paula Deen, if she is a racist or not , or if she deserved to get fired from her show.  The only way that Paula Deen matters is if she makes us take a long look in the mirror and see our own prejudices and fears.  Maybe then we can remember that whatever the color of our skin, we are all members of the human race.

The Last Morning

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On the last morning, the sky was overcast and gray and heavy with un-fallen rain.  I took the boys down by the water while Deb cleaned out the camper.   We stood on the shore and threw rocks.   There was a cool breeze blowing out of the north, just cool enough to remind me that not only was this the last morning, but that soon summer would be gone, too.

I picked up a smooth dark gray stone and wrapped my index finger around its curve.   Then I bent down and threw it side armed out across the smooth surface of our rented little piece of Lake Superior.  It skimmed over the water and skipped five times before sinking to the bottom.  The boys were reasonably impressed, as they should have been.  I’d had years of experience, starting when I was their age, throwing hundreds of stones into any number of rivers and lakes.

After the ripples faded, I thought about the stone I’d just sent to the murky depths.  I wondered how long it had sat there, on that sandy beach, before I picked it up.  And I wondered how long it would remain where it was now, under the waves, on the bottom of the lake.

We’d better get going, I said, before it starts to rain.   It was late August, and it was the last day of vacation.

Spelling Bee

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Getting called out of my 7th grade classroom to report to the Principal’s office wasn’t that unusual of an event for me. What made this particular occasion different were the other kids that were selected to join me. They were four of the smartest and best behaved kids in the room and, of course, they were all girls. I honestly had no clue why we were called out of class.

It turned out that we were the top five finishers in a test to determine who would represent our classroom in the middle school finals of the spelling bee. Then we had a little spell off for the classroom championship, conducted by the school’s vice principal, right there in the office. No one was more surprised than I was when I won. And trust me; anyone who knew me was surprised, too.

I was a notorious screw up in my junior high years, blessed with a rare combination of immaturity and laziness. Most of my academic energies were concentrated on coming up with new and original excuses for not turning my homework in (I lost count of how many times I claimed that papers fell out of my notebooks and into sewer grates on my way to school – there was also the dog we never owned that had an insatiable appetite for paper, and was eventually the victim, along with a science worksheet, of an apparent alien abduction. That one didn’t go over very well). So my winning anything except more detention time was big news.

A couple of weeks later they pulled me out of class again, this time to the school cafeteria, where I was to compete against all of the other sixth, seventh and eighth grade classroom winners in the school finals. All told, there were about 20 contestants. All of the other kids were very smart, good students, brainiacs, who, unlike me, had actually studied for the event. I might have studied, too, had I been paying attention when someone must have told me about it, but I had no clue – but then again, I probably wouldn’t have studied even if I’d known about it. But it was an hour or two out of my normal class work, which I was all in favor of.

Well, in the crowning achievement of my academic career, I managed to finish 4th in the event. I wish I could say that it was a life changing moment; that inspired by my performance I buckled down and became an honors student, and I realized all of my untapped potential, but nothing of the sort occurred. I was the all-American screw up, blessed with talent, brains and opportunity, and I was spoiled and stupid enough to squander it all.

The other night I watched the national Spelling Bee finals on ESPN. These kids are incredible, breaking down impossible words that I’d never heard of, knowing not only how to spell them but where their origin comes from, and what a syllable might mean in that original language. I can’t remember what word eventually tripped me up in 7th grade, but I can guarantee it wasn’t anything close to what these kids were breezing through.

Being the white American male that I am, I couldn’t help but take note of the fact that the eight finalists were all of Asian descent. I thought for a moment about what that meant, and the answer quickly came back to me: not a damn thing. They’re all Americans, and thank God, with intelligence like that, we’re so lucky to have them. There’s no way looking at them you can tell if they’re first generation Americans, or if their families have been here for decades, but that makes no difference, either.

I was so impressed by these kids, with their unique personalities and their incredible grace under immense pressure and their sportsmanship and class. I really enjoyed the shots of their families, the nervous and proud parents and siblings. Many of the contestants had lofty dreams of what they’d grow up to be, and they all seemed achievable.

Short features showed the contestants at home with their friends and families, and they were just kids, smiling and laughing, just like my kids did at that age, just like I did, and it struck me, this is America at its best, where kids can still be kids, where they are loved and nurtured by family, and where they can dream, and where there is still a chance their dreams will come true, no matter where they’re from, how long they’ve been here, or what the color of their skin is.

For those of us who grew up taking everything this amazing country offers for granted, watching these kids was a great reminder that this has always been our dream, and that as long as there is an America, it always will be.

What’s New

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So what’s new with me?

First of all, for my latest contribution to the 2nd First Look site, I not only wrote about the great Wisconsin writer Michael Perry, I got to interview him!  Check it out here:

http://www.2ndfirstlook.com/2013/05/michael-perry.html

He was very kind and gracious, and it was a thrill having a conversation, even if by e-mail, with a legitimate big time, New York Times bestselling author.  It was like, as I put it in one of my correspondences with him, playing catch with Robin Yount.

Second, I posted a while back that I was attending the Writer’s Institute conference in Madison in April, and pitching my novel Ojibway Valley to a couple of big-time, New York City literary agents.  Well, the conference was great, with informative sessions that were professionally presented.   Even better was the chance, for three plus days, to hang out with fellow writers.  I enjoyed meeting each and every one I met, whether it was in the hallways between sessions or in the hotel bar.   It was great to commiserate with so many others who have been bitten by the writing bug and are trying to get their work out there.  I met people working in every conceivable genre, from romance to fantasy to hard-core pulp fiction.  The common denominator shared by all was a love of the process and the need to express something about themselves, and the exhilarating and addictive joy of creating.

The conference also featured the launch of the inaugural issue of the new literary journal, “The Midwest Prairie Review,” featuring a short story of mine, “A Leg Up.”  I was very proud to be included in what turned out to be a high quality publication.  The issue is only available in print for now; at some point, they may make it available on the web.  If that happens, I’ll include the link on this site.

As for the pitches with the agents, they seemed to go okay.  I had only eight minutes with each agent.  One asked for the entire manuscript and a detailed synopsis, the other asked for the first 50 pages.  I sent them out the week of April 17th, but I’m not holding my breath.   Even though I honestly think it’s a pretty good book (it has its faults, which I try not to dwell on), I’m expecting rejection.  Both agents said to give them about eight weeks to respond one way or another, so we’re about half way through that period.  In the meantime, I’m hard at work on my second novel, and enjoying the process of writing it immensely.   My first one will probably remain unpublished, and my second one will more than likely meet the same fate, but I’m at the point that I’m okay with that.  I’ve fallen in love with the process of creating longer works of fiction, and any disappointment brought about by rejection letters cannot dampen the joy of watching these little worlds I create come to life.   I know that they might not be the greatest things ever written, but I also know that they are me at that moment, and I know that the more I write, the better I get.

I was so busy with my new novel that I missed the 2nd anniversary of this site.  I’m so focused on my novels that I don’t find as much time for drivel lately, so there have been fewer posts (51 in year two compared to 77 in year one).   Most have been consistently mediocre, but of the 51, there have been a few that I still like:

Time After Time:  Written on the occasion of my wonderful daughter’s graduation from high school.  She is what she’s always been: an amazing human being.

July 4th:  A brief excerpt that I ended up cutting from my first novel, because it just didn’t fit – but I still like this one.

Prophecies:   A short fiction that shows some skills developing

Accomplishment:  Only because one of my recent literary heroes, Patricia Ann McNair, author of the brilliant The Temple of Air, read this and commented on it.  I’m not worthy …

If Al Pacino Was My Dentist:  The title says it all.

Melting Diamonds and the Great Blue Bus in the Sky:  I wrote this about four years ago, but I still like it.  I was thrilled when Conrad Stonkey’s granddaughter wrote to me that she’d read it; that I got the characterization of Conrad right was an added bonus.

In these pieces, I can find something of value, something that shows some development, some hope.  Of course, there are also pieces like The Year of the Dishonest Corn Chip that reveal the arrested adolescent that I remain most of the time.  To summarize, on balance, I remain unbalanced.

A Reminder

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In July of 1977, just a couple of months shy of my nineteenth birthday, I left my home in southeastern Wisconsin and took a job in the Norco Windows factory in the tiny town of Hawkins, Wisconsin.  On my first day, I wore my Emerson, Lake and Palmer t-shirt.  At the time, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, a progressive rock band famous for their twenty minute songs fusing classical music with rock and for Carl Palmer’s rotating drum set, was all the rage with teenage middle class boys living in the suburbia of the Milwaukee to Chicago corridor.  As I was shown to the department I’d be working in, I was disappointed to find that all of my new co-workers were middle to near retirement aged men to whom “Karn Evil 9” would surely be nothing but unpleasant noise.   Finally, I was relieved when I was introduced to George, a guy my own age.  He looked at my shirt and said, “Emerson, Lake and Palmer – who are they, a country band?”   It was my reverse “you’re not in Kansas anymore” moment.

Back then, going on 36 years ago now, before the internet and the information revolution, northern Wisconsin was truly an isolated place, with limited and delayed access to mass culture.   It would make it there, eventually, long after it’d been consumed and watered down by the coasts and the metropolises in between.   In this age before DVDs and even VCRs, movies would show up in the small town theatres about six to nine months after they finished their run in the cities.  Unless you ventured down to the college town of Eau Claire, the only music available was in the small album or eight track bins of the local Holiday gas station, with room only for the biggest country and top 40 acts.  Television was whatever fuzzy network feeds you could get through rabbit eared antennas.  Radio was mainly A.M. and country and Casey Kasem and top 40.  There was no way of knowing that the punk rock revolution was even occurring –we’d never heard of the Sex Pistols.   The closest thing was “Roxanne” by the Police, which was dismissed as this weird song on the juke box in the 211 Club.  When the disco craze erupted, a backwoods version of Studio 54 finally opened in I think 1979, and its dance floor was soon filled with farm boys and factory girls stomping to the pulsating rhythms of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees.  John Travolta it was not.  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Now days, technology has opened up access to the culture to everyone.  That’s a good thing.  You can stream radio stations from New York City over a cell phone (for the first year and a half I worked at Norco, my apartment didn’t even have a phone).   Movies and books and music are available over the internet, only a download away.  The barriers of time and distance have been broken down.

But there’s been a price to pay for all this progress.  As mass culture explodes, local culture becomes a casualty, collateral damage.  You see it along the interstate off-ramps, in the proliferation of the same fast food restaurants.  You see it on the main streets of small towns, where Wal Mart super stores have replaced the local ma and pa hardware stores and the local co-ops or grocery stores.  You see it in the aging eyes of the farmers, the few who are hanging on to family farms that have been abandoned by their children, and in the many who now work for corporate mega farms.  You see it even in the shrinking numbers in the rural and the neighborhood taverns and bars, once the places where people connected with one another.  It’s as if in the process of opening up the world, we’ve closed off our neighbors.

It’s no wonder we’ve become more politically divided.  Why get to know that guy next door, he’s probably a redneck tea partier, when I can find all the liberal friends I want on social media.  There’s plenty of information to support whatever politics we subscribe to, left or right, and we assume it’s accurate if it reinforces how we view the world.

Then something like the Boston bombings occur, and we remember that we are connected.   The one consistent thing about these acts of terror is the way that individuals and communities react.  When the bombs went off, people ran in, towards the chaos and the debris, in an almost instinctive and primal reaction to the naked face of evil.  For a moment, there weren’t any tea partiers or 99 percenters, there were just innocent people.  And it didn’t take long to add up the numbers and come to the conclusion that there were a whole lot more good people than evil.   It’s the same reaction we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hooks shootings, and in the first days after 9/11.

I’m sure that it won’t take long for the cynical and disingenuous from both sides to twist and manipulate Boston to shape their own agenda, and in time we’ll come to view the events of last week through our usual ideological lenses.    But as we sit here tweeting on our blogs and liking this post and disliking that post, we need to remember that computers don’t bleed and that social media doesn’t heal.  Neighbors, real flesh and blood and breathing people, still matter.

My G-G-G-Generation

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Last night while out to dinner, someone my age said that the generation entering the workplace these days has to be the “most selfish generation ever.”

Oh, really.

Before I respond, some perspective.   Let’s take a look at recent U.S. history. These are generally accepted dates and terms used in defining post 20th century generations.

Born 1900 to 1924: G.I. Generation
Born 1925 to 1945: Silent Generation (my parents generation)
Born 1946 to 1964: Baby Boomers (my generation)
Born 1965 to 1979: Generation “X”
Born 1980 to 2000: “Millenials” (my children’s generation)

It takes a while for a generation to grow up and exert its influence on the world. Let’s say a generation’s sphere of influence occurs 30 years after its start date to 50 years after its end date. This, of course, means there are periods of overlap where two generations dominate the culture. A timeline of influence might look something like this:

  •                 G.I. Generation:   1930-1974
  •                 Silent Generation:   1955-1995
  •                 Baby Boom:              1976-2014
  •                 Generation X:          1995-2029
  •                 Millenials:                2010-2050

What this shows us is that the Baby Boomers, my generation’s, time is rapidly winding down, and we are approaching the middle of Generation X’s sphere of influence. The Millenials, the supposedly selfish generation, are just beginning to have their influence felt.

So to understand where we are, we need to look at where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

The G.I. generation endured the great depression and won World War Two, built the strongest economy and highest standard of living in the history of the world, initiated civil rights reforms, and saw the U.S. rise to become the undisputed world power. Pretty damned impressive!

The Silent Generation saw advances in science, medicine and technology, advancement of civil rights, victory in the cold war as the U.S.S.R. collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. Not as impressive as the previous generation, but still, not bad!

As a result of the work and sacrifices of the G.I. and Silent Generations, U.S. Baby Boomers were born into the most prosperous time in human history. We had every advantage that our parents never had. And what happens to children who get everything they want? That’s right, they get spoiled. And boy, oh, boy, no generation has ever wanted and got more than us Baby Boomers.

We started out okay. In the sixties, raised on the promise of the American dream our parents had worked so hard to realize, we reacted strongly when we saw that dream corrupted. The civil rights and anti Vietnam War movements fused idealism with action, and through a violent and turbulent decade, the young baby boomers truly changed the world.

But somewhere along the way, spoiled children with short attention spans that we are, we grew tired, and decided that it was more important that we have everything we felt we were entitled to, which, it turns out, was everything. We had to have the new house in the suburbs, we had to have luxury or sports cars in the driveways, we had to have every toy imaginable, we had to have the prestigious career, we had to have the best of everything.

This lust for things bled into Generation X, too, and soon they were joining us in racking up obscene credit card debts and mortgages. In our need for more and more things, we plunged deeper and deeper into personal and national debt, we turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the destruction of the environment and the burning of the atmosphere. We gave away whatever power we still had to our corporate masters, and hung on to every crumb they left behind as they deserted our shores and replaced us with slave and child labor. We bailed out the banks that were screwing us, and we turned a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Wall Street and oil executives. We elected disingenuous and corrupt corporate puppets as our leaders, and waved the flag and cheered when they lead us into illegal and unfunded wars. All so we could make a quick buck, have that nice house, and drive that forty grand S.U.V.

Now, the next generation, the Millennials, my children, are left to clean up the mess my drunken sailor of a generation has left them with. They enter their time crushed by debt, in a worldwide economic crisis, teetering on the edge of environmental collapse, with limited access to effective health care.

Our parents left us the estate and we got drunk and burned it down.

We took the cake with open fists and stuffed our gaping mouths and bloated bellies, leaving nothing but crumbs for the next generation.

Boy, are they selfish.

Spring

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It’s eleven degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the ground is mostly white with snow cover.  On my way to my garage, I have to navigate deadly patches of ice.

According to the calendar, it’s officially spring now.

Spring is cruel, at least in the beginning, because we all know what it promises and what it’ll eventually deliver.  Winter is long and cold and becomes an affliction, also known as cabin fever, and in the first warm days of spring we feel that fever breaking, only to fall victim to one last cold snap or heavy snow.  Slow though it might be in arriving, spring will eventually come.

Around here, in the southeast corner of Wisconsin, spring announces itself with water.   First it’s the snow melt, then the ice from the lakes, and finally the rains in April and May that put the final coat of green paint on the season.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite discoveries each year would be the day in early spring when a thaw came, and walking home from school, whether it was the old grade school off of State Street, or the middle school on the south side of town, or even the high school on highway 45 on the north side, following newly created rivers of melting snow water.  I have never outgrown my love of moving water.  The great thing about those days was that they were always unexpected but annual surprises, the time every year that the flat, boring town that had been stifled by the cold for so long suddenly warmed up and transformed, the streets that had been gray and dead now alive and flowing.  I’d drop something, usually a stick, at the headwaters of these new, great and temporary rivers, and follow its voyage to its unexplored destination.

The water that accumulates and pools in swamps and eddies gives birth to enormous quantities of wild life, from the dreaded hatching of vast armies of mosquitoes to the schools of tadpoles that so enthralled me when I was little.  A couple of years ago, on my property in northwestern Wisconsin, I discovered in the stray backwaters deposited by the swelling and contraction of the Chippewa River, hundreds of the little green guys swimming about, and I was just as captivated as I was when I was little, although these days I am more aware of the fact that just a percentage of them will make it to full grown frog-ness, as any number of predators is also captivated by their presence for altogether more practical reasons.

In my property up north, in the woods near the river, in early to mid spring, the forest floor becomes covered with white and blue wild flowers.  They last for a couple of weeks, a brief honeymoon period until the rest of the forest floor reignites into green thickness and overtakes them.

Spring is brilliant blue skies and whitsummere clouds, but it is also the ominous black rumbling skies of thunderstorms that move in from the west and bring hard rains that pound the hard and unyielding ground into the soft and fertile soil from which sustenance sprouts and grows.

Spring is a great time for wildlife viewing.  The supply of fresh water and the rebirth of vegetation provide an all you can eat buffet for a variety of species.  In the early spring, after a typical winter of snow and cold, as the snow melts, more deer can be seen than any other time of year.  In late winter, with food scarce and their defenses down, deer will herd up; obeying there’s a safety in numbers logic.  When the snow first melts, you can see what’s left of these herds in fields and meadows, picking through the holes in the snow for the best of the still brown and faded grasses.  Often times you can find large numbers of them out even in the middle of the day, so hungry that they could care less if they are watched.

There is a wide variety of species that awakes from hibernation in the spring.   Most notorious of these is, of course, in the northern part of the state, the black bear.  Bears are always to be respected, but especially in the spring, when they are hungry and their body weight is down from their long slumber, and when sows have young cubs to raise.  Over the past several years, near my cabin, we’ve had countless sightings.  Once, about five or six years ago,  on a spring day as I was walking down the dirt road in front of my cabin, I saw a bear get up from  about twenty yards from me and run off.  I didn’t think much of it until, after running about another twenty yards the bear changed direction and started running to the north, parallel to me.  At the long driveway of the property next to mine, it abruptly turned, and started running straight towards me.  Standing there with nothing between me and an adult bear running straight towards me was an unnerving sight.  It got to about fifteen yards away from me when I raised my arms and said “hoo hoo,” the first words that popped in my brain, my survival instincts apparently having been instructed that impersonating an owl is the best defense against a charging bear.  Much to my amazement, upon hearing my eloquent plea, the bear hit the brakes, its front paws digging in the dirt, and turned around and kicked it into high gear, running away from me at a speed I never imagined such a large animal could achieve.  It’s a good thing, too, because if the “hoo hoo”  hadn’t worked, all that would have been left for me to do was to soil myself.   Then I heard some noise in the woods to my left, on the other side of the road, and the best guess I could give is that my bear was a mother with cubs on the other side of the road, and I had gotten between them, the most dangerous place to be.  When the mother ran at me, she was trying to scare me (and trust me, she succeeded), my “hoo-hoo” calling her bluff.   This is all theory, though, as I didn’t stick around to fully investigate the sounds to my left and confirm that they were made by cubs.  Instead I made my way back to my cabin as quickly as my overweight, out of shape, rubber boots wearing body was capable of.

The best part of spring comes later, when you least expect it.  I remember sharing this observation with my dad a few years ago, and he agreed, he knew exactly what I meant.  Every year, there’s a sunny morning , in either late April or May, that the sky is a heartbreaking vivid shade of blue, and I become aware that seemingly overnight the world has transformed into a symphony of lush greens, the trees having leafed out, while the musical chatter of songbirds plays in the background.  It’s rebirth and renewal, it’s awakening, it’s life.   It always comes as a surprise, and it always takes my breath away.

On this cold first day of spring, with everything frozen and bare, I think of that day and what a wonderful thing it is that the world can still surprise and amaze me.    However long spring takes, the wait is always worth it.

Mid February

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

He’d always spent too much time inside his own head.

It had gotten to the point that he started referring to himself in the third person.   Bitterness and cold emptiness gripped him like the snow that covered the ground.

When he was a kid, after the lights were turned out, he’d lay awake, the sheets pulled up over his head, and listen to the indecipherable murmur of the voices he heard from the far reaches of the darkened house, and he’d wait for the warm hum of the furnace blowing heat through the registers or the familiar rumble of a distant train to drown them out.  He had trouble distinguishing between what was real and imagined.

Now the voices had gone silent.  The house was empty.   Empty days faded and bled into one another, shrouded in a fog of fatigue.

Then she’d be there, and every once in a while he’d say something and she’d smile, and the fog would lift, and the years fall away, the emptiness consumed.  It occurred to him that her smile was neither real nor imagined; because nothing real could be as perfect, and its perfection and beauty was beyond the boundaries of any landscape he could construct from the murky depths of his shallow and narrow mind.

In the middle of the still and black night he woke and felt her in his arms. He realized that it didn’t matter if she was real or not, because she was all he had, and that was everything.

The History of Man Explained in Three Minutes

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

(I wrote this for my wonderful Aunt, the school teacher, who is always so supportive of me and takes the time to write well thought out and encouraging critiques of my work.  Sharper than a razor blade, she remains as always one of my all-time favorite people – this is an example of the kind of B.S. I’ve always tried to show off for her with)

Back in the old days when we were not-so-bright Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons or whatever, we had to rely upon instinct to survive.   The most important component of this survival instinct was fear.  By being fearful of that sabre-toothed tiger that was always lurking about, we learned where to find the best shelter, how to read the wind, whatever we had to learn because we were motivated by primal fear.  That fear is what lead us to discover fire, and once Prometheus had let Zeus’ little secret out, Zeus saw his worst fears realized, that those crafty humans would learn all of his secrets, and soon we were splitting the atom while Zeus went off to the great senior home in the sky, where he bores the other gods with the same old stories about how in his younger years he was feared and worshipped and powerful (although I hear he plays a mean shuffleboard).

Meanwhile, with the sabre-toothed tiger and other threats to our day to day survival removed, the forever evolving humans had less use for fear.   Once they sublimated fear, they gained visibility to those things that had previously been available only to the gods – love, truth and beauty to name a few.   Fear is the enemy of these things, and it fought against them so as to regain its force.  So fear created greed – what is greed after all but the fear that others may get more than you? – and greed in turn created power, the power to instill more fear.  Power manifested itself in religions and corporations and the NRA, and told people, forget about the sabre-toothed tiger, what you need to fear is each other, while you are staring in wonder at how lovely and true and beautiful that flower is, a black feminist Muslim is going to blow you up and force you to spend all of eternity underground at a barbecue hosted by this nasty red dude with a pointed tail.

Only when we recognize fear as the archaic and obsolete force it truly is will we gain access to all of those Platonic planes, as well as a few we probably don’t know about yet.