Better than Sex...

www.BookCrossing.com

Know it.
Use it.
Love it.

Birdcages and Vitamin-C: a few thoughts on the impulse to embellish

A forward: looking back on this post I wish I could say that I was high at the time, or extremely sleep-deprived, or convinced that I was a manic, unintelligible genius, unfortuneately this is not the case. All I can say in my defense is that it made sense at the time (and sounded seriously less pompous in my head) This will undergo major revisions...I promise.

Please go on to the next post.

Seriously.

-S.


When did the idea that basic nature was not sufficient to supply our basic needs? I understand the anthropological roots and the strategic necessity of the city as a citadel or center of trade and commerce. But its very appearance, glass-faced obelisks that compete with each other for attention on the skyline, seems to be an attempt to mimic a forest; impersonalized, efficient, birdcages stacked one on top of another till they tower above the streets. Their inmates kept to produce "revenues" and "results" to "marginalize fiscal attrition" and maximize "quarterly gains". These ends are seen in today's society to be representative of happiness. Money = Enjoyment. And perhaps, to some extent this is true, but how then, are we any different than songbirds, singing for another's pleasure, each song a transitory moment of gratification.

This raises the question of whether or not birds themselves appreciate their songs as an artistic embellishment to basic existence or whether they understand only that their music is only a language used to communicate the desire or achievement of the basic necessities for survival? I would be inclined to believe the later as today's biologists categorize birdsong as an iteration of "bioacoustics". And there is little if any evidence of the prior. How is it that we are so egocentric and yet so naive? I suppose one is a function of the other...

This leads me to the original reason for this post: VitaminWater. I know, how banal, ludicrous even, but still, the stuff is everywhere. The local family-run grocery store, the big chains, the gas stations, hotdog stands, even the local cafes and the library at _ College. Why is it that so many people, myself included, have bought into the idea that water in its most basic form, H2O, is somehow lacking? It is one of the essentials for life, and sustained countless civilizations before the 21st century. Why is it that all of the sudden we feel compelled to engineer a "better" water, one that is flavored and color-coded, in packaging complete with prominent logo, witty quips and pop culture references? The label claims that the drinks are made with "vapor distilled, deionized, and/or reverse osmosis water," and yet it also claims the "the inside is natural." Personally I differentiate between a component that has been modified by chemical (or other) process, and a component that is presented before you as, essentially, it appears in nature.

If birdsong is, scientifically, the pursuit of basic communication; then the introduction of VitaminWater and the ideas that it rides on, are like birds marketing their conversations to philosophers and intellectuals as podcasts. (This analogy is still under construction...)

Now I'm off to dink my Multi-V lemonade with vitamin supplements from a-zinc.

This is Not "A Field Guide to North American Birds"

There are a few things you should know about Cancer. People whisper the word in grocery store corridors and block parties as if it’s a cuss word, a dirty word, as if just mentioning it is contagious. I could tell you that I hadn’t heard it before, that when I did, it hit me like a ton of bricks, that my thoughts and emotions whirled out of control, spinning like the arrival and departure times on the information board at Heathrow. But I would be lying. Maybe that would pique your interest, gratify some voyeuristic pleasure, confirm everyone’s secret hope that when something big happens to them the world stops turning. It doesn’t.

Cancer first slunk into my awareness as I sat in a church pew, at 7, playing with the hem of my dress and wondering why, if my friend’s mom, with her water balloon tying knowledge, and barely noticeable blond wig was gone, why my friend sat through the entire ceremony and laughed. Cancer, that’s what it does to you, it doesn’t make you put on a put on a Joni Mitchell CD and stay in bed, not moving, with the covers over your head in mid March. It doesn’t make you have that third gin and tonic or sit on the floor of the shower to scream while your clothes are soaked through. No, Cancer makes you want to stand at the edge of the world, and look into the abyss and laugh, because there is nothing, nothing, that you can control, or ignore, or understand, or change. So you laugh.

You should know that Cancer is like finding a library book, buried under some papers on your desk, unpaid bills, grocery lists, an old book report, and knowing that it is so overdue that nothing can be done, but sit and wait for a bill with a charge so high you could never have imagined or foreseen. And all you can do is laugh, laugh at a world where you have to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for A Field Guide to North American Birds, or some other book you never even had the time to read. Cancer is listening to Wynton Marsalis or Duke Ellington while your Father’s face turns the color of sunflowers from jaundice. Cancer is reading a childhood book amid tubes and medical implements that drip and hum. Cancer is about talking about movies with ever increasing levels of evisceration. Cancer is about sitting there, and calmly conducting the final interview. This is what you should know about Cancer: Have your interview questions prepared in advance.

The Group

There we all sat, in a lopsided circle of mismatched chairs. Eleven chairs, ten other people with their other problems, ready to display their war wounds like vendors spreading their wares at a bazaar. I would say the world had gone mad but it had not. It was starkly sane, blue-gray paint peeling off the walls, the heater whining, and the general rustle and shift of a room of strangers unseasonably hot and uncomfortably close. As each woman spoke, I felt like a jury member sitting in judgment, ready to gather a stone from the ground to toss. I feel like I need a shower, I feel mundane and exhausted.

The Desk

“If thou could’st empty all thyself of self, Like to a shell dishabited…” – Sir Thomas Browne

The background image on my laptop is a picture of a desk. The white paint that originally covered the writing surface has long since chipped and peeled off, the wood stripped to the grain, the left front corner stained a darker brown from a cup of coffee injudiciously placed. A dusty round clock sits on the top-right corner, reading four-eighteen, though you can tell that it hasn’t worked for years. The top-left corner is occupied by a simple brass lamp, missing a shade, its naked bulb exposed. Some papers are crumpled between the back of the desk and the windowsill, as if someone had lost patience with what the papers had to say.

Rising behind and above the desk is a bay window which stretches from one side of the frame to the other, dividing the world outside into what can be captured in the regularly spaced panes and omitting the rest. At the center of the window, just above the far edge of the desk is one large pane, cracked open so that the light falling on the desk dissects it into sharp abstract shapes. The space in the picture is pregnant with possibility; it stands boldly empty displaying the vestiges of a previous owner’s thought processes, tastes, and life. This could have been Tennessee Williams’ desk or Virginia Woolf’s. Perhaps, I think to myself, as the photograph hovers, visible at the borders of the paper I am typing, today I will write something good.

Ladybugs

I went out on the back porch overlooking Rhoads Beach and sat on the wall beneath the windows of the common room. Some one was plaing chopin on the piano, and the closer I listened the farther I drifted away in my thoughts, towards our house in California, picking blackberries around the lake, my dad, and how all the fallen leaves here look like dried orange and apple peels turned in on themselves with the chill.

When the music paused for a moment I came back to myself, realizing that my arms, the book I was holding, (Richard Ford’s “The Lay of the Land”) the wall I was leaning on, was dancing with ladybugs. My mother always told me they were good luck. I didn’t want to disturb them, so I waited until they had all flown off, paper-thin wings beating frantically as they hurtled away, dipping with the changes in wind current and the burden of their own weight, before climbing off the wall and heading back indoors.