Chain Reaction

I stole this idea from John Moltz, one of my favorite Twitteristas. On his blog, he posted this photo of Obama's maternal grandparents and an excerpt from a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, which I'll reprise below:


Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

...I was looking at this picture of Obama’s grandparents and thinking how much he looks like his grandfather. And suddenly, for whatever reason, I was struck by the fact that they had made the decision to love their daughter, no matter what, and love their grandson, no matter what. I’d bet money that they never even thought of themselves as courageous, that they didn’t give much thought to the broader struggles in the the world at the time. They were just doing what right, honorable people do.

We often give a pass to racists by noting that they were “of their times.” Fair enough, and I know Hawaii was a different beast, but still, today, let us speak of people who were ahead of their times, who were outside of their times. … Here’s to doing the right thing.

John Moltz titled his reprinting of this, Here's To Doing The Right Thing. I gave mine the title I did because I had an idea that if it got reprinted enough...I don't know. That it would sink in. That it would seep through the unconscious prejudices that so many of us have and overflow into We Shall Overcome or something. That we'd remember some part of ourselves that's connected to everyone else. And we'd love that part more than whatever it is in us that insists we're separate or better or somehow more human than others.

Steal this post and reprint it. Share it. Keep adding to it. We may not be ahead of our times, but we can at least make good on the promise of those who were. Yes, we can.

R.I.P., Paul Newman

A year or so ago, I posted here about writing fan letters, and I made a list of people whose work or lives have inspired me enough that I feel an obligation to express my admiration and gratitude to them. I don't remember how close to the top of my list he was, but I actually wrote Paul Newman a fan letter last month, and finally put it in the mail a couple of weeks ago. Somebody had shown me a recent picture of him looking frail and I thought, better get this done before it's too late.

Paul Newman died yesterday. I have no idea whether or not he got my letter. In my narcissistic writer mind, I imagine he did, and the letter killed him. With kindness. If he did read it, I hope he felt, wow, I really have touched people's lives in some way he'd never quite felt it before. The letter mostly emphasized how his life has enriched mine, from movie moments I'll never forget, to witnessing his political activism, to the inspiration of the Hole In The Wall Gang camps for kids, to the good food, good works, and good packaging copy generated by Newman's Own. And I told him that he made me feel better about getting older, which is no mean feat.

I sent the letter to the Newman's Own address, and included a piece I'd written for an "encouragement project" at Hallmark. As fan letters go, it was pretty damn good, I must say. I really hope somebody got it to him.

And I hope anyone who reads this will take the time to tell someone who has inspired you what that inspiration means. These people aren't always going to be around.

I never told David Foster Wallace how his work blew my mind, and then it was suddenly too late. You can't anticipate an early exit like that, and I'm not saying a fan letter can prevent it. But it's worth doing. It feels satisfying to have gotten this one out before Paul Newman died, even if he never saw it. At least I didn't leave it on the table.

I hereby hoist a Fig Newman in honor of a great actor, humanitarian, and all-around cool cat. Man, them's good eatin'.

So this week, I'm picking a writer. What do I really want to say to...Philip Roth? Robert Bly? Billy Collins? Or Annie Proulx? It had better be good.

Mann About Internet

I've mentioned Merlin Mann here before. I first bumped into him on Twitter, where everyone seems to follow his feed. He's written some of the funniest stuff imaginable in 140 characters or fewer, ever. He also maintains a creative productivity blog (43 Folders) that claims a vast readership, a much-laughed-at weekly podcast (You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene) with two other humorists, a video interview series (The Merlin Show) also on iTunes--AND a hilarious site called 5ives, which is simply lists of five things--some literary, some techie, and some just pop-topical, viz.:

Five ways Angelina Jolie can quickly acquire more children
1. gestate auxiliary sets of twins in climate-controlled Fendi bags
2. make Brad build a big-ass gingerbread house
3. explore viability of controversial “dorsal carriage” (a/k/a “butt fetus”)
4. surreptitiously cruise Gymboree with mallet and a sack
5. lay excess eggs in what’s left of Sean Young

A goofball. But a serious one. His basic premise about doing business on the web is, if people would just try harder to express a passionate point of view about what they're interested in, other people would get interested in it, too. 25,000+ Twitter followers and millions of hits annually on 43 Folders pretty well confirm that idea.

Merlin's personal blog is called Kung Fu Grippe. He posts a lot of video, promotes other sites and stuff he finds, reveals a little of his family life (married, doting on an infant daughter), and ruminates. He recently took a Twitter break, saying people could find him blogging instead. The last time I did, I found an amazing post, entitled "Better" -- a call to a higher quality of content creation. It's partly a renunciation of Twitter, suggesting that he'd become addicted to it and too distracted by it to create work he could be proud of. I miss the laughs, but I really respect the POV, which he's amplified over at 43 Folders as well. A big following of amused daily readers isn't enough. You have to feel that your creative life is truly creative and truly alive.

Update: Merlin's back on Twitter, but only tweeting one or two times a day. Still funny, still inimitable, and still getting archived in more people's Favorites than just about anybody.

There's a cluster of Merlin Mann links in my sidebar. It's hard to keep up with him, but trying has its rewards.

Mystery

And speaking of matrimony, if this were my darling wife instead of a less lovely stranger, this minute of video would be even more beautiful, even more mysterious, even more of a sideways inky liquid dream.

irregular flow from 4khz on Vimeo.

Why isn't there more of this kind of thing? Wouldn't thirty of these be better than, I don't know, Two and a Half Men and Eighteen Ads?

It makes me wonder why my video camera is sitting on a shelf in the dining room. Why am I not making something beautiful with it right now? Why am I typing?

Where did this come from? An artist named 4khz, audio track by someone named Colleen, who calls it "Summer Water." Who are these people? Who am I? A guy who writes, but who seems to be reducing himself to a guy who types.

James Wright from his hammock: "I have wasted my life."

See what beauty does? It fucks you up.

Hitting the Heights

Look at ‘em. Emily and Ned, in the canyon of rocks and marriage. I just don’t think brides come any more beautiful or grooms more groovy, or for that matter, weddings more wow. Or alliterative.



But first. We had a big party at the home of Ned's parents (Steve & Judi) the night before.
That's my darling, my momling, and one of my niecelings.
Many toasts were offered, including sublime humor and heartwarming sentiment from the Grinnell College crowd and an incoherent, point-A-to-point-12 ramble from yours truly. Wish I’d thought that one out a little…

We stayed at a nice b&b (Los Altos, in Grand Junction) on a mesa with views of the western half of Colorado in every direction. Weather in the 90s, desert-dry, enormous blue skies. The b&b room was great, the food OK, the company lively. My sis and the rest of the Boston ladies were there, as were my big bro, sis-in-law, and son Babe. And my folks scurried about, busy as could be, delighting in a rare confluence of family. It had been several years since this many of us had gathered in one spot.

Wedding day, I had to shlep beer and wine to the reception hall, which task required the help of Steve and his Chevy Suburban. So I come over and happen to catch Emily just back from getting her bridal hair done, standing among vases of flowers for the reception, going over a list of last-minute to-do’s. One look at her and my whole head exploded in tears. Steve said, “Well, this is going to take a while,” and left the two of us crying and hugging there. I was a mess.
Ah, Emily. I was struck throughout the weekend by her amazing calm, a steady grace and in-the-moment-ness unlike any bride I've ever seen. She is a wonder.

The ceremony was at the Colorado National Monument, elevation 7200 feet, give or take. What with my crying jags and shlepping, we were running late to get up there, yet the bro/sis caravan arrived before almost anyone else. Longest day of the year. All the time in the world.

Emily and Ned had decided to do the ceremony under the small ampitheater roof that’s up there, rather than right out on the monument cliff-edge.
Good call, for the shade. A blazingly hot day. Somehow, a hundred or so people managed to fit in under there, though only about 75 folding chairs did.
#1 son played conch shell and didgeridoo for the processional, so the rocks themselves were humming the whole ceremony into us from under our feet and all around the cliffs. He made that didge himself, by the way. Harvested the agave stalk, hollowed it and honed it--and man, can he play it.
#2 son was billed as “Ring Guy” and kept the rings in a little bag in his vest pocket. I encouraged him to say something like “Circles mean forever,” but come the moment, he just stepped up, handed off the rings, and sat back down, solemn as a sawed-off pope.

My parents ran the show, using the sun and summer solstice for a kind of metaphorical gravitational pull. We dads did our readings. Steve wanted 1st Corinthians, so I had to come up with something to balance that out. I decided on a personal story about Ned & Emily and tied it to a quote from Rumi. Pretty much everyone had teared up by the end of it, so I think I was like a warm-up act for the vows, which had the assembly gushing like hydrants.


For a final touch, the moms did blessings at the center of a big group grope, with each person touching at least one other person, so everybody was connected to the couple. Definitely an electric buzz, with a lot of people still sniffling and wiping their eyes.

Bouquet by my darling Penny Lorraine. The florist was a little prickly, but they did a great job keeping the hydrangeas and sweetpeas from giving up the ghost in that desert climate, and they put the thing together almost exactly as Penny had designed it.
Reception was mostly outdoors in the cool shade. The paintings there were a project of the party the night before--everyone contributed a color, a symbol, a vignette, or at least a blotch to the diptych. Dancing, cake, and a champagne toast inside the hall. Glorious.
#1 son gave a magnificent bride-specific toast, and Ned’s sister rejoined with one for the groom. A contingent of friends showed up in sailor hats, pursuant to several previous night toasts about how Ned used to surprise people by showing up in a sailor suit at odd moments. Somehow, Oliver wound up wearing one of the sailor hats--as unlikely a get-up as I can imagine for him.

The food was lovely (no pix yet). The caterer had used several of Emily’s and Ned’s favorite recipes, including Penny’s justly famed black bean/mango salsa. I’d do a 2-to-1 white-to-red ratio on the wine instead of a 3-to-1, but all the white sure looked good in the big tubs, along with six fat magnums (magna?) of champagne on ice.
The wedding quilt, a pet project of Emily’s mom (she got a a lot of people, including us, to contribute sections), features scraps from Emily’s and Ned’s old childhood clothes.
Oh, the friends. The reception (and the following night’s campfire) culminated in all the guitars coming out, voices raised, a gigantic singalong, mostly old stuff that all us baby boomers know and that twenty-somethings apparently still dig. (Wedding singalong tip: Bill Withers’s “Lean On Me” is hard to beat.) That's Em with Vivek, who with another friend kept the dinner and singalong going from start to finish ("we move people; that's what we do"). I led “When I’m 64” on the piano, with a didge solo by Oliver, laughing our way through at the half-assedness of it. At Jonah’s request, Ned did his famous ukulele number, “Princess Papuli got plenty papaya/She likes to give it away…” And Emily melted everybody down with a tribute to the happy couple’s next destination, “California Stars,” a Wilco/Billy Bragg tune. Everybody was still belting ‘em out when we left to get Jonah and his cousins to bed. Man, I love those Grinellians. Such smart, big-hearted, funny, soulful people. All that tuition was more than worth it, baby.
They rode off through a crowd of cheering, sparkler-waving loved ones.

Now it’s westward ho to northern Cal for the kidses. But oh, what a wedding we didses.

From the Colorado National Monument, you can see the beginning of a whole new world.

A Stiff Belt of Daddydom

A week before my daughter's wedding, 20 things I should be doing besides this. But I just read the best blog post ever, by a guy I don't even know, who does what he calls "one of those Daddy blogs." Well, it is and it isn't. It's called "The Wind In Your Vagina," taken from something his four-year-old said, and I won't spoil the anecdote for you. It's on his home page, the link to which is now in my sidebar, right below The Bloggess (an insane Mommy blog).

The post I mentioned is entitled "Rubber," and I won't spoil that for you either. Superb. It made me wish I'd given this mishmash blodge-podge of meandering riff-raff some kind of focus. This guy has a definite niche, a distinctive voice and point of view, and a respectable, admiring audience. I found him on Twitter, where he posts under his blogonym, Black Hockey Jesus.

Wunderkind #3 is playing with a friend, darling spousette running errands. I'm trying to figure out what's left on my non-existent checklist. Got luggage rack, installed it (exacting to the fraction of an inch), all set to move son #1 out to Boulder en route to wedding. Wrote piece to read at wedding--is it everything it should be? No. Words fail. It's a whole new level of bittersweetness for me. Still waiting for return calls from florist and caterer. Script rewrite going OK, if you don't count having to send pages via fax. Blogging unnecessarily about all this? Check.

Word Problem
Today I calculated beer & wine for the wedding party, guest list now closer to 100 than 150. My formula is arbitrary, but sensible: Figure half beer drinkers, half wine drinkers (no liquor--too complicated). It's hot in the high desert on the longest day of the year, so figure a 3-to-1 ratio of white to red on the wine. Half lite, half something good on the beer. So, how much to order? The overriding imperative is, You Can't Run Out. Figure two drinks per person per hour. We have the hall for four hours. That's 800 drinks. So 400 beers, 100 bottles of wine @4 glasses per. WTF? 400 beers and 100 bottles of wine for 100 people sounds like backstage with the Stones. Can I get some blow with that? So cut it by 25%. 300 beers and 75 bottles of wine, 50 white, 25 red. Wait, that's a 2-to-1. Plus, case lots, so multiples of 12...72 bottles? 54 white, 18 red. A better ratio, but...

Is this insane? Yes. But if you cut by half, it doesn't sound like enough. So, 300 beers = 12 and 1/2 cases. Say 13. Say five cases of lite, five cases of good ale, and maybe three cases of generic lager. 54 bottles of white wine = 18 chard, 12 sauv blanc, 12 pinot g, 6 blended, and 6 viogner. For the 18 reds, I think I'll ditch the cabernet. Who drinks cab on a hot day in the desert? But you kind of have to offer merlot, don't you? Maybe 6 merlot, 6 shiraz, 6 pinot? Maybe drop one and double the pinot--it's lighter & still in fashion. Maybe there's too much variety here.

Shit! What about champagne? Aw, jeez. Maybe scrap the blends, reduce the chardonnay, add a case of bubbly? How many little toast pours can you get out of a case? I knew I forgot something....

And I still gotta buy a belt to match my shoes.

I never wear belts. They seem like quaint holdovers from a more decorous era of loose-fitting trousers and corporal punishment. But you don't go beltless to your daughter's wedding.

I've been to most of the decent clothiers in Kansas City, and only came close to buying a belt at one store. They all look ugly and clunky to me. Can you even dye a belt to match this brown? No? Jolly old town.

Exit the Draggin'

Sick twice in the past six weeks, the same gross cold on either side of a hay fever month. This second bout of hacking, wheezing, and post-nasal gradoo sneaked in while I was distracted by itchy, watery eyes and non-stop nose-blowing. Man, it's a drag.

So. What am I doing to cause this, besides working too much and not exercising? Cuz that's nothing new. I contemplated my outlook of late. Despite springtime and many family joys and Twitter and what I think is a fairly sanguine predisposition, it's been pretty lousy. I've been down on myself, on work, on the world at large, life in general. And I realized, I've come to view Positive Thinking kinds of programming as vacuous happy talk. Why? I don't know. I used to be much more of a "create your own reality" kind of thinker. Where'd that go? I don't think I can blame the Bush administration for this.

So I do a search on positive thinking, just to get reacquanted. And I find the Positivity Blog. Sound horrible? Maybe. But lo and behold, the most recent post is about a major hero of my teen years, Bruce Lee. Turns out, on top of his legendary martial arts skills, Bruce also kicked ass as a positive thinker and productivity guru. (Go ahead, be like me and say, "Yeah, look how efficient he was at dying young.") But lo! The blogger quotes several key principles of Bruce Lee's personal and professional philosophy, and then expands on them. The second principle in particular caught my eye:

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

Adding more thoughts and thinking things over for the 111th time may create a sense of security. It’s also a good way to procrastinate and to avoid taking that leap you know you should take. And the more you think, the harder it gets to act. Perhaps because you want to keep that comforting sense of security and avoid the risk of wrecking that feeling.

Thinking has its place. It can help you plan a somewhat realistic route to your goal and help you avoid future pitfalls. Overthinking is however just a habit that will help you waste a lot of time.

I've been doing exactly this. I've been putting off several things that have to get done for the June wedding trip, and continually thinking, "I need to call so & so, and then I need to do blah-blah, but before I can do that, I've gotta find out X, Y, & Z--oh, and I need a luggage rack for the car..." and ALWAYS, to conclude this litany, the refrain: "I don't have time to do all this shit."

I just found a 3x5 to-do list in the pocket of a pair of jeans I haven't worn in at least two weeks. There's only one thing on that list that I can cross off. I've done one thing I need to do, out of about twelve.

Maybe I'm sick because all I do is think. The sheer tonnage of stuff I've put off doing has crushed my immune system.

This changes today. I'm finding out X, Y, Z, calling so & so, doing blah-blah, and ordering the goddamn luggage rack. I have time to do it. I just don't have time to keep thinking about it and telling myself I don't have time to do it.

And I thought the only lesson Bruce had to teach me was the one about the finger pointing at the moon. "Concentrate on the finger, and you miss all that heavenly glory."