The Taco Traveler

Fittingly, this essay entitled "Endings" is the last in this "Old Stuff" series. I don't have a lot to say about it; it stands pretty well on its own, I think. Published 1994 with my masters' thesis.

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Endings
But we do not want to get anywhere.
We would like only, for once,
to get to just where we are already.
-- Martin Heidegger

The Triumph of Beginnings
Beginnings are over-rated; they're so much more often the start of good than the start of bad. We often credit them with being the first step on the roads to success, to grand schemes or projects, and to anything that will eventually Be. Endings, however, though they can signal the conclusion of something horrible (say, for instance, war), are rarely celebrated with as much vigor as what begins from that same ending (peace). Sex generally feels good, and birth, the occasional end result of that sex, always hurts. After a birth, when the woman is finished hurting and sweating and screaming at her husband: "You did this to me!" the couple celebrates, not the end of a pregnancy, but the "defining moment:" the beginning of their child's life.

We define things by their boundaries, and those boundaries help us to find the broader meaning and purpose in those things. A hole is not a hole because of the air it contains, which, if you raise it out of the ground would be nothing. Rather, a hole is a hole because of the walls of dirt that define the hole. In the same way, we define ourselves and each other by the car we drive, the community we live in, the job we perform daily, our race, our sex, the closeness of our family, or even our clothing style or musical preference. Any definition of us necessarily reads like a game-show introduction: We are a teenager from Long Island who likes to play roller-hockey; we're a retired social worker from Waterloo, Kentucky who hunts pheasant and collects stamps; we're a Sagittarius; we're an all-American college basketball player from Duke. We're defined by the greater context of the "things" and circumstances that make up our lives.

Einstein called this greater context a "co-ordinate system"--the frame of reference that determines the position of any body at any given moment in time. For Einstein's purposes, the earth (its physical properties and laws) provided the frame of reference for his experiments and theories. The earth was his coordinate system. In one illustration of his theory of relativity he used a room (as a more accessible representative of the earth) to illustrate how the exact same event can occur at different times for two separate observers.

Religious philosophers attempt to define the human soul by making God into a stable, relative system. Western religion gave Him a name: Jehovah. They gave Him a sex: male. They gave Him speech or the power to speak through humans and write books through them. They gave Him a human body so if one of his followers wants to pray they pray to an image and not just an idea. This image of God is so tacitly and completely acknowledged as the westernized system of religion that He even appeared once on "The Simpsons." It's the same God I saw, when, as a child I needed to ask forgiveness for having squashed a slug on my sister's new dress. In my mind (and on "The Simpsons") I saw a kindly old man with a full head of long, white hair and an equally long, white beard. He wore a flowing white robe tied at the waist with a golden rope, and on his feet he wore Birkenstocks.

With the possible exception of ultra-dedicated scientists and the clergy, however, our everyday lives don't usually revolve solely around either a scientific or religious system. Rather, it is the coordinate system of beginnings and ends, as vague and undefinable as they may be, that we use to frame our lives, our bodies, and our minds. We measure our lives by beginnings and firsts: when we were born, when we spoke our first words, when we started driving, when we could legally buy alcohol, when we began to be a part of someone else....

I fell in love with a friend. I cannot say, at what point in time this actually happened; I just looked closely one day and found myself falling or already fallen. Perhaps it was a sunny Sunday morning and I woke earlier than she did and just watched her as she slept. Maybe I realized, just then, as the soft glow of morning sunlight ignited her face: 'Yes, I love this woman.' But when did it actually happen? When did we cross the line between whatever we had before to the absolutely undefinable concept of "love?" Who knows? All I know is this: In the beginning I was happy; in the end I was sad.

Paradoxical Science

Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody
is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached
its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

If you hold a piece of string between your hands you have an "end" in each hand, but in more ways than one each end can also be called a beginning: The beginning of the string, the beginning of the transition from string to hand, or the beginning of the transition from string to air. Quantum physics has taught us that nothing is absolutely any one thing. The string--be it nylon, hemp, or cotton--has electrons, and those electrons, busy critters, move, flux, and orbit, constantly redefining the space of that piece of string. The electrons of your hand, too, constantly shape and reshape your "personal space" by their activity. In the resultant intermingling of the subatomic parts of your body and the string you become, to some extent, an extension of that piece of string and it becomes a part of you.

Astronomers speak of a similar idea called "The Mediocrity Principle." This idea says that, at this time, the view of the universe from earth is no better or no worse than from anywhere else in the universe. As Chet Raymo says in his book The Virgin and the Mousetrap: "We're cosmically mediocre." But because the universe continues to expand, there must have been a time when it began to expand. Though with today's technology they have no way of knowing when exactly this occurred, astronomers have formed a hypothetical idea called zero time. Even this, zero time, is not the beginning of the universe, however; that's just when it began to take its current shape. You can trace the evolution of a loaf of bread back to when it was just a lump of ingredients, and you can trace it to a time when the ingredients came together, but even beyond that all the ingredients were still there; they just hadn't come together yet. Cosmologists differ on what they think the universe was before the ingredients came together or how they got there in the first place, but even the strictest of evolutionists believe in the literal truth of at least one bible passage: Ecclesiastes 1:9: "That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which will be done: and there is nothing new under the sun."

For the past twenty-five years or so Chaos Theory has been one of the hottest, most interesting fields of scientific study. Edward Lorenz was one of the founders of this new method of scientific inquiry, and the founding idea of chaos theory is what he called his "Butterfly Effect." In studying the earth's weather systems, Lorenz proved through a series of differential equations that even the tiniest fraction of error in the measurement of weather patterns could lead to drastically different effects. His term for this phenomena, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, is one of the most important characteristics defining chaotic behavior. For example, if a measurement was rounded off at the twentieth digit and placed into his equation, the result would vary considerably from the same measurement rounded off at the twenty first digit. His "Butterfly Effect," then, says that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil will significantly affect the weather in Texas, eventually. What begins as a wing-flap today may someday be a hurricane. A ripple in the ocean may someday be a tsunami. What this says is that nothing is self-starting; the physical world is powered by inertia. The butterfly that causes the hurricane in Texas flaps its wings to escape the little Brazilian girl chasing it with a net. A surf contest is won in Hawaii by someone who got lucky and caught the best wave of the day--the wave having been started eight days earlier in Alaska by a young boy skipping stones.

Because nothing can be called simply one thing or another, this sensitive dependence on initial conditions is applicable to more areas than just physical scientific theory. Because beginnings and ends form a type of coordinate system for human lives, slight variations in the characteristics of those points can also be the difference between love and hate, or getting or losing an important account. Because of the complexity and immeasurability of human emotions we can't even round off at the equivalent of the second digit, let alone the twentieth. But if first impressions are everything, wouldn't it be nice to know which glance, if properly given, would be the butterfly flap that accelerates into love?

Continuance

I cried, and I burned in that cry.
I kept silent, and I burned in that silence.
Then I stayed away from extremes--
I went right down the middle,
And I burned in that middle.
-- Jalaluddin Rumi

Death, while in many respects an "end," actually serves as more of a beginning for all but the most pessimistic of religions or philosophies. Even Socrates, at one time near the end of his life, at least, felt this sort of hopefulness. According to Plato, on his deathbed after having drunk the hemlock, Socrates mumbled these last words to Crito: "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget it." In his time it was customary to offer a cock to Asclepius, the God of Healing, upon recovering from a sickness, so at a time of impending death Socrates was actually thinking of healing in one way or another and beginning anew. When he confronts the idea of his own death earlier, however, in Plato's Apology, he says: "If I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbor in any respect, it would be this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it." On his deathbed, then, Socrates seems to be offering the cock just in case, a common reason for religion for many dying people.

All religions have death rituals or hopeful ideas of where they will end up after their death: Hindus seek to escape repeated reincarnation by practicing yoga, by adhering to Vedic scriptures, and by devotion to a personal guru; Buddhists seek a state of living Nirvana by following the path of righteousness--if they are not perfectly righteous then they repeat another lifetime that is either good or bad depending upon their actions (karma) in their previous life; Christians believe that if they take Jesus Christ as their savior they may gain access to heaven after their life on earth. Joseph Campbell believed that all of the world's religions are tied together by the similarity of their myths. Stories of creation, holy trinities, resurrections, deaths, and heavens repeat over and over again in slightly different forms. He believed, then, that all the world's religions are the same, but they're cloaked in different masks that betray the prejudices of the culture. One thing all religions have in common, however, is this: When we die, we all go somewhere else in one form or another.

The beginning of a thing is its birth. The end of that thing is its death. Within the broad framework of our lives--the coordinate system that begins at age zero and completes some sort of cycle when our bodies stop breathing--we experience an infinite number of beginnings and ends. But like the electrons that float from hand to string to air, those points are enigmatic. We cannot label them; we just live them and live through them. At these times we may feel gain or loss, sadness or exhalation, weakness or strength, but all we can do is loiter within the realm of our knowledge, our personal universe. Like anything else, the edges of that universe are undefined, but one thing is certain: Now is less than an instant and then it is gone. All we can do is snap pictures of Nows. The pictures say this: beginnings will sometimes be happy; endings will often be sad. This is an ending. We continue.

It's been a long time since I've read this, and some of the things could really use some editing / updating. Mainly, these things bug me:

1) I reveal way too much sappiness with the whole Nora Ephron thing. Jeez, was I that soft? Yes, it's been verified that I was. Blech. Some may say I still am, but I'd argue, a bit.
2) My programmer friend makes 45k and I say it like it's a lot? Well, 4 or 5 years out of college, and in 1990 or so, it probably was a lot. I don't remember now.
3) I unfairly group "Seinfield" in with later "Star Treks" and "Melrose Place." Sorry.
4) Only one guy gives that advice to Dustin Hoffman (not "everyone"), and the way I say it makes it look like I wanted to go into plastics or something. Where were my editors in 1994?

Anyway, I'm going to resist the editing thing and just throw it out there, with the explicit reminder that it was written in 1993 or 1994.

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Learning to Love Casablanca

At the risk of sounding like an uncultured dolt, I've never quite felt the magic of Casablanca. The first time I saw it I had rented the tape with someone who, at the time, was my fiancée. It was a cloudy (and hung-over) Saturday afternoon after a late Friday night, the perfect time to lie around the apartment watching movies, and my fiancée was excited to share something with me that was so close to her. It's the only movie I ever heard her say she "loved." In fact, it's a movie that everyone seems to love--everybody but me.

I've loved many movies, though, and having them in my video collection means I'll never want for the certain feeling that each movie provides. I've got the three greatest Chevy Chase movies, Caddyshack, Fletch, and National Lampoon's Vacation, which are always funny, and pick me up even on the fortieth viewing. Fast Times at Ridgemont High makes great background noise at parties, and always brings me back to the first time I saw it: drinking a graveyard mixture of booze in a salad dressing jar in the parking lot behind the theatre, sleeping through everything until my friend woke me so I wouldn't miss seeing Phoebe Cates in a sexy scene. I watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly when I want to feel like a man's man, because there's nobody like Clint Eastwood for making you feel cool, like you could handle anything. And when I'm worried about my future, which is often, I pop in The Graduate for the advice everyone seems to want to give Dustin Hoffman--"Just one word: Plastics."

But on my first viewing of Casablanca that Saturday my fiancée and I lay down on the couch in the spoon position, with me behind so I could rub her back, and the last thing I remember is Rick playing chess by himself--his first scene. For some reason my fiancée didn't notice I had fallen asleep until my drool traversed the fabric of our shared pillow to where she could feel it on her ear. She elbowed me hard in the stomach as Ingrid and Humphrey were in a Parisian café, nearly half-way through the movie, and I was conscious enough to hear Ingrid say such things as: "Is that cannon-fire or my heart pounding?!" and "Kiss me! Kiss me as if for the last time!" There were tears in my fiancée's eyes as she turned to glare at me, though I'm not sure if they were caused by the sad scene in the film or my disappointing her by falling asleep. A few minutes later I tried to make up by mimicking Bogie, gently pushing her nose and saying: "Here's looking at you, kid," but it was too late. I had made a huge mistake in our relationship.

So now my list of therapeutic movies includes a few sappy romances, because, since the world's biggest Casablanca fan is now my ex-fiancée, there are times I need to be convinced that there is some cosmic chance I'll find love again. On those lonely nights and for that particular objective there is nobody better than Nora Ephron, and whether I watch "When Harry Met Sally" or "Sleepless in Seattle," Nora always sends me off to bed dreaming of my next love, who I imagine, coincidentally, will look a lot like Meg Ryan.

To many people, though, television and movies aren't so much therapeutic tools as they are necessary wastes of time. There were days, I hear, when people read books to waste time, but I saw a statistic on the news that said ninety-seven percent of all novels are purchased either for reading on an airplane or in the bathtub--places where, for a person of average income, a television cable doesn't yet conveniently reach. While the "wasting time" scenario might fit the masses who sit down each week to watch "Roseanne" and "Silk Stalkings," there are certain shows--like "Seinfeld," "Star Trek: The Whatever Generation," and "Melrose Place"--that seem to inspire more passion in their audience than maybe they deserve. The notion of "wasting time" is offensive to a television addict, and it seems they often feel more passionate about "their shows" than their own lives.

To inspire that kind of passion is to shape (or at least reveal and accentuate) a person's ideals. There are certain groups of people for whom this television brand of social conformity is something you fight against simply because nobody else does. Essentially, they strive to be individualistic, just like all their friends. They want to be different, just like all the other different people. I was talking to an idealistic friend the other day who, to combat commercialism, refuses to use his TV for anything but Nintendo. I know a lot of people like this who like to think of themselves as impoverished bohemian idealists. They recycle, they eat granola, they listen to reggae, and they've all read Kerouac's The Dharma Bums at least twice. They're the type of young adults who grew up and rebelled against wealthy parents and the "American Ideal" by dressing badly and drinking cheap red wine while still driving really nice cars on their parents' insurance. I've asked a few of the TV-less ones how they manage to survive without "The Simpsons" (I have forty seven episodes on tape), and they usually answer with tirades against commercialism and laziness: "When you watch TV, man, you're buying into all that bullshit middle-class Americana. You're being brainwashed by Tide commercials and Ivory Snow." That could be. I do use Tide though I have no clothes worthy of the gentle softness of Ivory Snow. But I've never claimed to be resisting the mediocrity of camp, kitsch, and commercialism. Many of these people, however, claim to be untainted in those respects, and they get so angry when I point out that they now sell their exact same style of Doc Martens at Nordstrom. My Nintendo friend, though, didn't even attempt to reconcile his anti-commercial, anti-lazy bohemian ideals with his video game addiction. He's a computer programmer who makes forty-five thousand a year and gets at least that much stress. He uses video games like I use my sappy romantic movies--as therapy. When I asked him about Nintendo's commercialism, though, he just shrugged his shoulders and, because he had just sent the count full against Ken Griffey Junior in the bottom of the ninth, said: "Can you wait 'till after this pitch?" But he never answered because Griffey hit a home run and my friend kicked the power switch before The Kid rounded the bases, because the loss would have ended his electronic season, and his season is important to him.

T.S. Eliot once said of television: "It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome." He said that in 1963, five years before I was born, but I think the same could be said of the medium today. There will always be lonely people, and those lonely people will always be suckers for the imaginary love stories that conceal the equally lonely lives of actors and actresses. But for the short time during and just after a good movie I am truly engaged; I believe in something created by a bunch of people being paid to create that believability. I take comfort in thinking there's someone out there who can relate to me, like Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle searching for love again after losing his wife to cancer, or Humphrey Bogart sitting in a corner of his immensely popular bar playing chess with himself, and that comfort makes television worth my time. Other people have different views of their media of choice, but everyone is equally self-righteous about the universal quality and importance of their own particular experience:

My parents can watch QVC, the shopping channel, for hours and listen to any stupid sales pitch. They insist they're saving the earth because they're not driving to the mall.

My Nintendo friend spends sixty dollars every couple of weeks on a new game cartridge because he needs a new challenge; after two weeks he's beaten the computer at every level of Griffey Baseball or Mortal Kombat. No human beings will play him; he's that good. And when he beats you he rubs your face in it--not by talking trash, but by seeing how high he can run up the score, or how quickly he can kill you. It's embarrassing, really.

I asked my ex, recently, whether or not that day I fell asleep during our first Casablanca together was the turning point in our relationship. She looked kind of perplexed at first, like she didn't even remember. When it hit her she feigned annoyance: "Oh, come on! Do you think I'm so shallow I'd let a movie influence my life?"

"Well. . . ?" I said. "Do you remember how, later that night, when I was taking out my contacts, you handed me hydrogen peroxide instead of the saline solution? Was it some kind of 'If he can't watch Casablanca then he'll never watch anything again' idea?"

She just frowned.

So I bought a copy of Casablanca, and I think I'm finally beginning to see why it's so appealing to such a large audience. Despite all its clichéd sentimentality it does posses an artistry somewhat beyond the level of a Danielle Steele novel. Its humor, too, kind of grows on you. Like Humphrey Bogart saying he came to Casablanca for the waters. "Waters?" says Claude Rains, "What waters? We're in the desert!" And Bogey's casual reply, which I imagine myself, in trench coat and tweed hat, using as an excuse for all future Saturday afternoon lapses in media-correctness: "I was misinformed."

Wedding essay #2 in the Old Stuff Series. Delivered April 18, 1998 for my little sis. Coming up on that 10 year anniversary, which also means ("My - wow - 30 years of experience...") that I'm coming up on 40. Uhhhhh.
 

Would you like to use this essay in your own wedding (or a wedding where you're reading)? You may use this (edit the names, duh) but please credit tacotraveler.com in the program. However, if you're a single guy hoping to get lucky at the wedding by appearing sensitive and literate, you can say you wrote it yourself.

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The Beauty of a Moment

For John & Rochelle - April 18, 1998

Twice in my life now I've woken up literally on the tops of mountains. Not Rainier, McKinley, or Everest, but mountains, anyway. And what's interesting about this is that on both occasions I arrived at the top of each mountain way after dark - nearly midnight, which makes waking up all the more special. The sunlight hits my tent, I hit my mental snooze for a few minutes and let myself thaw, and I unzip the door of my tent to take in for the first time what I couldn't see the night before: the magical views that make the hike worth the effort. Snowfields, waterfalls, rock formations, once a grazing deer....

What I'm getting to is the beauty of a moment, but I suppose I don't feel real comfortable just telling you Remember the beautiful moments, or Seek out the beautiful moments, because that would imply that I know something that you don't, which is ridiculous; we all have, and recognize in our own way, our own special moments. By moments I don't mean entire events like the experience of this wedding, but instants. Instants that are not just a look, but also a smell, a taste, a touch. Feelings you'll remember forever, like when time stopped as you were holding your child or your grandchild and he looked up, blinked, and smiled in recognition. Or maybe for you it's the moment when you said what these two will say in a few minutes: "I do." I have my own examples: I remember being airborne on a baseball field, parallel with the ground, and the line drive hitting my mit for the third out in the final inning. I remember sitting on my surfboard, Del Mar California, as the sun went down, a pod of dolphins swimming by. I remember saying "I love you" for the first time. Twice.

For a couple years now, I've been enthralled with a particular lyric by the group Counting Crows. It's from their song "Long December:"

The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl

In the song they use that last line as an epiphany to illustrate that no matter what else is happening - what troubles or distractions winter brings - whether it's real hospitals or theoretical pearl-less oysters, the sudden discovery of a beautiful moment can cure, can get you through a long December, can make the bad moments inconsequential.

So today we're here witnessing a beautiful moment in the lives of John and Rochelle. Rochelle has that certain indescribable bride's beauty right now, light not attaching to her but emanating from her. And John (if he's clean shaven) has a certain glow of his own. So maybe they're experiencing one of those beautiful moments every time they look in each others' eyes tonight. We're lucky enough to be present for that rapid-fire assault of beautiful moments, which, in a way, makes them our moments, too.

Now is just a moment and then it is gone. All we can do is snap mental pictures of nows. My - wow - 30 years of experience tells me the trick is to occasionally leaf through those mental pictures of your beautiful moments. I can't pretend that's the answer for everyone, but I am more comfortable now, so I'll say it: Remember this moment. Snap a picture of now.

Prologue: This is my worst piece of non-fiction, I think (my fiction is crazy-stupid-bad). But I was under a pretty strict time constraint. Anyway, the couple is still together, so there's that. In fact, I'm proud to say that every marriage I've ever written an essay for is still intact. Both of them. Can Shakespeare say that? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Anonymous? The Corinthians? Baaaah!

Would you like to use this essay in your own wedding (or a wedding where you're reading)? You may use this (edit the names, duh) but please credit tacotraveler.com in the program. However, if you're a single guy hoping to get lucky at the wedding by appearing sensitive and literate, you can say you wrote it yourself. But you may have better luck with my other wedding essay, which I think is better and proved a bit luckier for me. Good luck, dude.

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Soul Mates

For Scott & Robin - September 21, 1996

What I'm about to say may be one of those things that seems like a revelation to me, but is something everyone else already knew, like the time I called a friend late at night to say: "You know the refrigerator brand, Frigidaire? I get it: frigid air." But the concept of a soul-mate has somehow eluded me. . . in more than just the tricky grammatical sense. Here's the Frigidaire part: Scott and I have lived together; we shared a house; we were house-mates.

But I'd never thought about the term "soul-mate" very deeply until Scott & Robin tasked me with writing something for their wedding. I'd always just thought: "Soul-mate, someone you're destined to be with forever," as if these two separate souls are drawn together by some cosmic force, and as if that "coming together" completes the soul-mating. But that's just how the term is used on Oprah. That's the generic interpretation. It takes two people like Scott and Robin, making the commitment they're making today, to remind us of the grammatical roots of the term: "Soul-mates:" they share one soul. Combine those grammatical roots with the significance of their wedding bands: They each provide a one-hundred and eighty degree arc, a half of the circle that makes their love complete and whole. "Soul-partners"

I can't answer the broad questions like: "Who gets to use the soul if Scott goes fishing but Robin's going to see a foreign film?" or "Why is it that while talking with one soul, Audrey Hepburn, on the Ouija board, I didn't sense a bit of her soul-mate there?" But maybe I have an idea or two: To carry the house-mate analogy a little further - when Scott and I shared that house in Kirkland, we still had other interests, worked different jobs, cooked separate meals. . . . And when I visited friends in California and Scott went to North Carolina to see family, we still paid rent on that shelter we knew we'd eventually come back to.

Is the simple answer then, that soul-mates share that soul only during the time they're together; and together, here, on this earth? Maybe. Regardless, I still believe we all either have known, know, or will know that person, someday, whom we can call "soul-mate." Let's just hope we're all as lucky as Scott and Robin, standing here in front of us after having found their soul-mate early in life, about to make official a promise they and many of us already knew: that they'll be house-mates, soul-mates, and partners for the rest of their lives - possibly longer.
 

Prologue: Created 1995 - never actually read on the radio. But it's not horrible, I don't think. I've evolved, though; I do now wear a small bit of cologne sometimes.
 
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Radio Essay: "On Perfume"

"To smell, though well, is to stink."
-- Michel de Montaigne

I was out jogging the other day when I was passed by a red Jaguar that smelled strangely fragrant, as if the exhaust were one part gasoline and two parts White Shoulders perfume. Whether the car had a hot date with a pickup or was merely testing some sort of alternative fuel I'm not sure, but I've heard the idea that one day we'll be able to run our cars on water, so anything's possible. For now, though, I'll stick with a conservative assumption: that the smell was actually coming from inside the car--from the wrists, ankles, shoulders, and neck of the woman driving. . . with her windows rolled up. I imagined how, if I were hitchhiking in the desert and hers was the first car to come by for three days, I'd be better off, health-wise, to stick to the fresh air and fight off the vultures.

It seems these days in my sort of naturalistic area of the country, the Pacific Northwest, there are fewer people wearing perfume and cologne, but those who still wear it seem to make up for the people who don't, and then some. Whether other people refrain from wearing it out of respect for the ozone layer or the sensitive noses of the local deer I'm not sure, but I myself haven't worn cologne on a regular basis since high school. I'd just rather use plain old deodorant and smell like nothing at all than subject innocent people to some artificial scent I was convinced to buy after seeing a magazine ad implying I needed a heavy masking odor, not just so I could smell nice, but so I could prance about in the black and white setting of a Mondrian painting with beautiful waifs like Kate Moss in tow or otherwise in submission.

Of course, perfume in moderation isn't all that bad, but I think there should be some kind of law restricting its use like they restrict the volume of radios on the beach in the summertime. Where I used to live, in San Diego, you could get a ticket for disturbing the peace if a lifeguard could hear your radio from more than a hundred feet away. A good rule for perfume, I think, would be that if someone can smell your perfume, without kissing your neck, you're wearing too much. Scent addicts and perfume industry lobbyists would disagree, of course, and they would probably argue that if you can't smell someone from at least fifty feet away then the perfume isn't doing its job of being that initial attractor, the thing that gets you noticed, that gets you past the first step in courting, just like all the ads imply. But it's the rare person, I think, who's impressed by how much money someone spends on their smell or by how quickly they're able to get through that king-sized jug of Brut. Others might argue that they wear perfume for the sexually intriguing animal musks, but our bodies are actually stimulated by less than a quadrillionth of an ounce of that secretion, so the irony is that people would be more sexually excited by someone who had just cuddled a pot-bellied pig than someone who suffocates all the other riders on an elevator with gallons of Christian Dior's aptly named "Poison."

Kouros, Egoïste, Eternity, White Diamonds, Obsession, Stetson. . . all scent names intended to hint at not just what the smell is--rich and sophisticated for Liz Taylor's White Diamonds, range-roving-manly for Stetson--but also to provoke the idea of belonging, of being desired, perhaps even obsessed over. But to what extent should you be allowed to assault the most acute of human senses? Where does your personal zone end and your neighbor's begin, and should you just flirt with the edge of that zone or should you charge it like blitzkrieg, your scent the rumbling tanks, your personality just the footsoldiers?

There's a happy medium somewhere between the nape of your neck and your neighbors' noses, and the distance between the two will change according to whether someone is aroused, intrigued, disgusted, or simply overwhelmed by your smell. I tend to prefer scents that you have to get really close to smell, and aren't just the smell of the product, but the product plus the body, like a clean-smelling soap on soft skin, or the strawberry shampoo or lilac deodorant that an old girlfriend used to use; more personal smells that don't assault but, rather consent; smells that rely not on commercially created images, but real love, and real intimacy. Perhaps this says more about the human need for close relationships than it does about the attractiveness of any kind of natural or artificial scent, or perhaps it says more about me than anyone else. But I can live with that. I don't mind sharing a bit of myself, and I won't hide behind a blanket of cologne.

Originally published (yes, published, in the Western Washington University library!), circa 1995 as part of my master's thesis for English / Creative Nonfiction.
 
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For Love, a Mountain

Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation:
and I look downward when I am exalted.
Who among you can at the same time laugh and
be exalted? He who climbeth on the highest mountains laugheth
at all tragic plays and tragic realities.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I once sat on the top of a mountain on the eve of what was supposed to be my wedding day. I'd been hiking for six hours, the last two by flashlight in the dark, to get to that spot I'd never seen before, way below snowline but high nonetheless. I left early in the morning from Seattle seeking to just get away from the friends who would surely call to see how I was doing, and I went to the mountain hoping a list of commandments would suddenly appear, magically engraved in my clear and empty, alpine-air-filled mind, and lead me to a place where I would find another love. After setting up my tent I sat there sipping a beer, my legs sticking out onto the cold, rocky ground.

Because I felt somehow under-emotional about the wedding that almost was, I decided to listen to a disc of wedding songs on my Walkman: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" and Pachelbel's "Canon." I suppose I was testing myself to see if the pain was, in fact, over, but my answer didn't come from inside me; it came from the mountain, or nature, or some sort of equally godly spirit: at the beginning of "Canon" I closed my eyes and saw and heard the string quartet we'd already picked out and paid for. When they reached the point in the piece where, the next day my ex-fiancee might have been walking down the aisle to become my wife, I heard, not babies crying and cameras clicking, but rather the barely audible scratching of hoofs on nearby gravel. I removed my headphones and picked up my flashlight, and when I shone it towards the sound I stared into the yellow-glowing eyes of a four-point buck that had walked into the circle of my camp. After a brief stare-down he chose to ignore me, and began chomping the frozen grass. I knew I would be okay. My spirit felt renewed, somehow, by a chance encounter with a creature that didn't really care, and in the morning I returned to the city to be with my friends and face the condolences.

I suppose I went to that place high up in the Cascade range because of a prejudice that great things happen on mountaintops. Surely my encounter with the buck wasn't an exception. It is also on the tops of mountains that the world's observatories chart the red shift of stars trillions of miles away in hopes of finding where the earth and the universe began. Other scientists (of a sort) have gone to the mountains for divine instruction: Moses was called to Sinai for The Law. Practitioners of Vedanta philosophy meditate to the South-Facing Form: an image of a man who sits high in the Himalayan mountains looking southward over the Indian mainland. He is an imaginary, representative Nature Form meditating upon the infinite, and he resides in the Himalayas because Nature is the Vedanta's "window into the infinite."

On April 30, 1792, Captain George Vancouver pulled into north Puget Sound and said to his third lieutenant something to the effect of: "Baker! I'm gonna name that mountain after you, old chap." Until that time, however, Mount Baker was called by the natives of the area Koma Kulshan, meaning "white, steep mountain." I snowboard as often as I can at the resort that hugs the northeast ridge of that mountain. It's a sort of self-serving worship for the old volcano, but by some evil trick of the ski area designers you cannot see the top of the mountain you are skiing on. There's a walk I take almost every day to work, though, and each time I get to a certain opening in the trees I'm rewarded with an incredible view of the very tip of that fabulously white and amazingly steep mountain. There's a certain curve in the freeway near Seattle that, on a clear day, unfolds to grant an equally majestic view of Mount Rainier (nee Tacoma--"the mountain that was God"). On one particular morning a couple years ago I was driving with my (then) girlfriend down to a marina on Puget Sound where we were to rent a sailboat on which, later that day, I would propose. As we rounded that curve and saw the mountain we each let out an "ahhh" that was sickening, in retrospect, for its harmonic cuteness, but it's as apt a description of the beauty as there could possibly be.

I was flying to San Diego last Christmas to visit some friends, and as the plane passed over the humongous suburb that is the entire stretch from Los Angeles to San Diego I noticed that nearly all the hills had been flat-topped and black-topped. They had become views for people unwilling or unable to leave their cars and climb. A home in a hilltop neighborhood with sidewalks and grassy swingset parks is "beautiful" to many, but to many others the beauty is destroyed. These people were not living on mountains, certainly, but what man-made gods had taken these majestic hills and transformed them into private mesas for the wealthy? Bulldozers, graders, and excavators made by companies like Hyundai and Caterpillar collectively move over one-hundred-thousand million cubic meters of soil each year. I've always been amazed, whenever I see Bob Ross on his PBS show "The Joy of Painting," how he can create an incredible mountain on canvas with three thick brush-strokes of burnt umber and a couple knife-swipes of liquid white. It is just as amazing, and somewhat depressing, that these machines can destroy the real thing almost as quickly as Bob Ross can create them in his mind and on his canvas.

Man destroys the mountains; nature slowly builds and eventually destroys them again. On a bright, sunny, Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, I was in my mother's huge backyard garden on the pretense of helping her pull weeds. What I was really doing, though, was picking sweet pea pods and eating them right there in the rows. I remember at one point taking a break from the peas to tangle myself in the blackberry bushes against the fence. I stood on a ladder in the middle of those bushes seeking the sweetest, juiciest berries at the top, and as if in a nuclear dream I looked towards the house to see a black mushroom cloud rising very slowly, from a very great distance, over the roof. It was the morning of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. I ran inside to the television to see what had happened, and for the next two weeks I watched as the Toutle river carried mud and debris down to the lowlands. My mom made me wear a cotton mask to school for the next few days despite the fact that we only received a trace of the mountain's dusty breath. On one particular morning, after a night of more abundant ash-fall than others, I took off that mask as soon as I rounded the corner out of my mother's sight and used it to scoop up some keepsake ash, which I still have hidden away somewhere, still scooped inside the mask, in a box or drawer at my parent's house. I never saw the mountain in real life before it blew, but the photographs of what it was before, and the desolation I saw after, keep me always on guard for beautiful sights that may someday be just mud and tangles of evergreen trunks, and I appreciate those sights all the more.

When I returned to civilization on my wedding-day-that-wasn't last summer, I tried to explain to a friend how it felt to be the only human being on top of a mountain, to see every single light or lighted object in the sky, and to wake to a panorama that wasn't there when you arrived in darkness the night before. I couldn't make him see what I saw. Instead, my friend, knowing my love of the outdoors isn't limited to the quiet of the mountains but also includes the solitude and power of the sea, asked whether I could really escape from memories of my ex by sailing around the world or becoming a hermit in the mountains. It was probably one of the more difficult questions I'd ever been asked, since I'm not sure I could pick just the mountains or just the sea. In seeking to fill the void left by my ex fiancée, however, I had taken to the element most opposed from my memories of her: the mountains. After all, I proposed on a boat. But then I consider the last Christmas we shared together, when she skied and I snowboarded at a local ski area. It was one of the better times I have spent in the mountains, but because I know now that even then she was falling out of love, the time and memory seems somehow despoiled and false. Now, whenever I see a car go by with both skis and snowboard on the roof-rack, I think: "It'll never work. They're just too different, and it's difficult to ride the chairlift together."

It's been almost a year now since the breakup of that relationship. It's been a year filled with six or seven different blind dates and a couple that I actually worked for myself. I've taken dates to restaurants, to movies, to concerts. I went with one to a haunted house and with another, because she had just recently separated from her husband of five years, we just sat in a bar and tried to define "love." The first date I went on with my newest girlfriend, though, we went to Mount Baker where she skied and I snowboarded. I discovered on that day, while riding a chairlift with my date, my snowboard and her skis awkwardly clanging and chipping against each other, what I would tell my friend in answer to his question about my desire to hide in nature from the memories I was afraid to confront. I would tell him that human relationships have no place in a discussion of nature; Nature is just too big to be weighed down by our relatively paltry troubles, and maybe that's why people have gone to Her for thousands of years to meditate, pray, and heal. She is a facilitator, but She is not a healer, and I made that realization on a day I was having the time of my life talking and snuggling with my date, my new girlfriend, on a chairlift. It was snowing hard; it was foggy; my goggles were all steamed-up; and we never, once, saw the top of the mountain.

Preamble: Yes, this is (currently) 12 years old, and my youngest son is almost the age of the little boy in the story. Wow, time flies....
 

Post Long-Distance Blind Date Ramblings
For all my friends because I'm a big fat blabber-mouth.

03/21/96 9:17 PM

Okay, I'm going to ramble for a while here because I promised a full report to many of you regarding the blind date I just flew to Boise for. But because I've got such an overwhelming feeling of goodness right now (sorry about that), and because that feeling isn't necessarily because of the date, itself, I have to go beyond the date's scope. Please, either be patient or delete - I have to get this stuff out. I'll try to keep it clear, but I'm also trying to keep Edgar happy by returning his clicks, "rerro"s and "whayadoon"s over my shoulder, so I may get scrambled. There - I just gave him a peanut, so he should be okay for a little while.

I've had three major spurts of writing in my life. The first was when I first fell in love, and I kept a journal in which I wrote sappy stuff that back then I called "poetry:"

. . .
I try to keep my thoughts at bay,
At least until that Summer soon.
When I see her beginning June. . .
Thoughts spoken on that longer stay.
. . .

When that kind of writing was over, I didn't write again until the relationship that started that writing was over. I wrote essays instead of journal entries, and fairly good poems instead of bad (I think they were better because they were darker and more black-turtleneck coffeeshop kind of poems). The third time is now, and the reason I feel like writing now and lately is that I feel, more and more, that my life would make a fairly comical screenplay, where the first and last scenes look something like this:

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SCENE ONE

Players:

Lauren: Sister, 28-ish.
Rochelle: Sister, 24-ish.
Me: 27-ish.
Parents cleaning up in the kitchen or something; they never appear, but we know they're there.

Fade in to a Christmas scene - wrapping paper and ribbons strewn about; decorated tree drying out by the fire.

L & R are huddled around S - with the passing of the scene below, they grow more and more excited, talking over each other as they realize the are visualizing the same scene. As they begin describing what they see, the imaginary scene takes over in a cloudy, dreamy frame.

R: Well, I see you with someone very specific: she's got dark brown hair, straight and kinda shoulder length, like Phoebe Cates . . .

L: And blue or green eyes, very pretty . . .

S: (smiling, but with sarcasm) But on the Ouija board Elvis said she'd be a brown-eyed blonde.

L: I'm serious! And she's really smart . . .

R: And she's like, reading a book on a white sofa with her legs tucked beneath her

L: . . . in a metropolitan flat, and you can see a sky-line out these big huge picture windows.

R: And she's wearing academic-looking glasses, and satiny pajamas.

L: And she's drinking a glass of red wine.

R: (dreamily) Yeah. . . .

SCENE THE LAST

Begin airplane noises (blind date was previously discussed in film: father met this girl on a plane trip ("Are you single?" "I have a son. . . .")

Fade in to close-up of , well, Me. Just like Dustin Hoffman at the beginning of "The Graduate," looking kind of numb/worried/open-eyed-unconscious.

Ride from Boise airport to the Airport Holiday Inn.

Check in. Long walk to room.

Call The Date, Michelle. Phone conversation is casual, as they've spoken several times before.

S: Hi!
M: You here?
S: Yep. You ready?
M: Mmm hmm.
S: Wanna meet in the bar?
M: You still wouldn't recognize me. I have your picture.
S: Oh. Yeah.
M: What number are you in?
S: 505
M: 505 - Wow! You're way over there. Why don't you come to my room?
S: Okay. Number. . .
M: 215
S: Be right there.

Hair check, tooth-brush, armpit-check. Deep breath. Begin purposeful walk down endlessly long corridor to her room. Pan to numbers on doors as they flash by: 257-255-253. Amplify breathing. Pan other side of hallway: 230-228-226. Close-up: bead of sweat. 221-219-217 . . . Gasp - as the door that should be 215 has no number - it's a housekeeping closet. Two more steps: 215.

Two quick knocks. Peephole goes dark and then light again as the chain is unchained. Door opens. It's the girl from L & R's imagination in Scene One.

M: Hi.

Face shot of, well, Me. Grin grows wider. Much blushing, joy, & merriment are had by all. Happy Hollywood ending.

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So, you know what? Things don't always go like they do in the movies. Michelle wasn't really The One, though she is really super-nice and we managed to get along great and keep the awkward lapses in conversation to a minimum. The long walk down the corridor is totally true, right down to the housekeeping closet that freaked me out because it's where 215 should have been. We had dinner at Olive Garden and then went searching for a movie to see, since there was nothing else going on in Boise (this morning, I asked the girl at the front desk if she had a rack of those brochures full of things to do in Boise, and she said "Sure!" and went around a corner and came back with two brochures, both of which told me the best places to go shopping. One brochure was actually entitled: "OUTLET SHOPPING IN BOISE!"). We couldn't find a movie we wanted to see, so we ended up just sitting in her room (cause she had a business-person's kind of suite with a couch), drinking a bottle of chardonnay, and watching Sylvester Stallone's "Assassins" on Pay-Per-View. No romance - just getting to know each other.

Today I woke up at 8 and went to her room, then we went down to breakfast. Then she went to work (she's a traveling salesperson - I've got a whole heapin' handful of CIBA contact lens eye drops if anyone wants a bottle) while I sat around writing and playing pool in the Holiday Inn Holodome: wooooo!

When she got back from visiting her opthamologists we went and played miniature golf and HORSE (basketball). We split the golf (I won one round; she won the other), and I crushed her mercilessly at HORSE.

We had lunch at Red Robin (I had a guacamole burger; she had a chicken Caesar), and then we sat around talking at the airport for an hour or so before her flight. She said (only half-joking, I think) that I should meet her next week when she goes to Missoula. I said "Right. Let me know when business takes you to Las Vegas." I told her I was planning a big tour of all my buddies in California late in the summer after my Jeep comes in, and that I'd divert my course to Utah because there's some great 4x4 trails there.

In sum: I'm sure we'll just be long-distance buddies.

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The best part of this trip came on the plane-ride home, where I sat next to this little dude named Michael: a cute little guy, 5 or 6 years old and really smart, polite, and talkative. His dad put him on the plane to go visit his mom in Seattle, and I ended up being essentially his babysitter for the hour-and-a-half flight. A beautiful young stewardess came by and gave him a couple coloring/activity books and Michael and I spent the entire plane ride talking about stuff like Jurassic Park and the virtues of Sega over Nintendo. (The stewardess--to answer your question--though she seemed impressed by how well I got along with Michael, also had a humongous rock on her finger). Michael insisted that his grandma has seen live dinosaurs because she's almost a hundred years old. He said this just after he also acknowledged that dinosaurs went extinct 10 million years ago:

"She's seen 'em! In cages!"

"Like in a zoo?"

"Yeah. And the T-Rex almost got out. He was like: Rrrraaaagh! against the cage when she was there. But the Stegasaurus just walks around."

"Oh. He's tame, and people like, pet him?"

"Yeah." He takes a big gulp of Pepsi, finishing it off.

"You know what?" he asks.

"Huh?"

"I like riding in riding in riding in planes cause you get to do stuff like like. . . like. I'm not sposed to have pop. Mom says it makes me crrrrrraaaaAAAYYYYZEEEEEE!"

Here's what's put me in such a good mood, and made me decide to write all this stuff down tonight: I was showing Michael how to apply the tattoos that come on the wrappers of his Fruit Stripe Gum (I told him: "When you see your mom at the gate, say 'Look, Mom! I love you so much I got tattoos for you!"). At one point he said to me, out of the blue: "You're the nicest person in the whole world. I can't wait to see my mom and say 'Hey, Mom, this is my friend.'"

Near touch-down, Michael saw a lady across the aisle putting on lipstick, and he pointed her out to me. He said: "I think girls are pretty when they put lipstick and stuff on."

I said: "Yeah, I think so, too, but I also think they're pretty when they don't put lipstick and stuff on. You know what, though? I bet that lipstick would make a really good, bright-red tattoo for you to show your mom." He looked more intently at the woman putting on the lipstick. He seemed distant and dreamy, maybe appreciative.

"Yeah," he said.

I'm about to enter a period of prolific blogging, but not new blogging.... Old stuff, reposted, hitherto called the "Old Stuff Series." They're all essays but one, but that one keeps me from calling it the "Old Essay Series." Oh yeah, I guess I could throw in some old crappy poetry, too.

So I'll post everything separately, one a day for the next 10 day or so, and keep links to them here, but I'll cheat and do all the self-conscious self-criticism (or, more accurately, pre-emptive criticism: "Yes, I know this sucks, and here's why...") before you even get a chance to read them and think about why they suck, or don't, in some cases.

Is that enough ado? Have you ever heard ado used that way? I haven't. I'm a game-changer.

Post Long-Distance Blind Date Ramblings (1996, reposted 2.18.2008)
For Love, a Mountain (1994, reposted 2.19.2008)
Radio Essay: On Perfume (1994, reposted 2.20.2008)
Wedding Essay: Soul Mates (1996, posted 2.21.2008)
Wedding Essay: The Beauty of a Moment (1998, posted 2.22.2008)
Learning to Love Casablanca (1994, reposted 2.23.2008)
Endings (1994, reposted 2.25.2008)