El Burro Volador

I am desperately trying to be at least modestly productive this morning, because I intend to fritter away the entire afternoon and evening.  Starting at one o’clock this afternoon, Spike is having a Deadliest Warrior Marathon and running all nine episodes of the show.  Now, had I just planned to lay around watching it, guilt would probably force me to do housework or write during the commercials, as well as the two episodes that I’ve seen.  Luckily, however, I convinced Tyler and Ezekiel to make a day of it as well, and so we get to have a little caveman festival watching shows about violence, roasting an ox, and emphatically not bonding or talking about our feelings.  Maybe I should bring some tools over, y’know just to have them with me, maybe gesticulate with…

Also, took time to watch Le Samourai recently.  It was about what you would expect from the French take on the “hitman” genre, very cool and aloof.  They really committed to the main character’s silences and bleak demeanor.  And of course there was a world-weary police inspector to provide the commentary so beloved in French popular fiction – some of his lines felt just like the knowing authorial “asides” in a Balzac novel.

Gray’s famous “Elegy” is beginning to seem applicable to this poor blog lately.  The usual readership could be counted on the fingers of one hand – but for the last week or so, that hand could belong to someone who had exercised poor judgement around a threshing machine or bandsaw and still provide sufficient digits for the task.

Ah, well – to business.

Today, after much preparation, I make my initial attempt to land clients for my process-serving firm.  Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, on impulse and via a couple of well-worded emails, I have landed a terrific part-time job.  I know that I have made attempts on this site to discuss the strange little world of roleplaying games that claimed my Tuesday nights for a while – and which has claimed many of my leisure hours over the last 19 years.  Well, an opportunity for me to do this for money has arisen, and, while the exact scheduling and compensation have still to be negotiated, there is every reason to hope that I will be able to replace one day a week in the sulfur mines with an equivalent expenditure of time gaming and receive an equal monetary reward.  I can’t find anything not to like about that.

On other fronts, I have resumed going to the gym, albeit in erratic fashion, and I have got past the first of Nietzsche’s four Untimely Meditations.  The burden of this first one is essentially that David Strauss, a rival academician, is an idiot, and that his last book was utter trash.  Nietzsche did a thorough job of getting this across, taking fifty pages to assault poor Strauss from a variety of angles.

I am also finding time to help my cousin AJ with some essays she is writing, and putting my shoulder to the old yardwork wheel as well.

This constitutes a more-or-less complete update of my recent exertions.

When I made my much-ballyhooed reading list back in high school, I went through this elaborate ordering process designed to delay most of the books I really wanted to read until later in the list, but to mix some of them in earlier so it wouldn’t become a chore.  As I am well into the last third of the list, it has been supplying me with more and more of the books I most anticipated back then.

But this leaves me with a Nietzsche problem.

Y’see, back in high school philosophy had a certain mystique for me.  Although I was largely ignorant of philosophy as a formal discipline, my mind was often preoccupied with large abstract questions, and I thought that the “great thinkers” who had wrestled with these same questions and advanced humanity’s understanding of them deserved study and possibly veneration.  So I made sure to include a number of philosophy texts on the list, and they tended to score high on the index which determined how far back on the list they would be placed.

Now, I had perhaps an unusually well-developed awareness of literature.  Which is to say – though I had not read all the “classics”, I had a general idea of  what they were all about – much as most of my readers are probably aware of the general plot and main characters of Melville’s Moby Dick, but have likely not read it.  Bits and pieces of it filter down through cultural references in tv shows, common expressions, other books, etc.  Even back in high school I possessed this kind of sense about most books, due to my voracious reading, frequent discussions of literature with any teacher or well-read person I could corner, and a superb memory for references of this kind.

This sense was much more limited when it came to philosophy.  I knew Descartes, for example, as the author of the cogito, and Nietzsche for his writing about the ubermensch, but I lacked a clear understanding of these doctrines, so in many cases I just gauged how cool each book would be by its title.  And Nietzsche , whatever else may be said of him, could really jazz up the title of a book.  Whereas Locke authored Treatises on Government, and Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and its steamy sequel Critique of Practical Reason, Nietzsche wrote books entitled Twilight of the Idols, or Beyond Good and Evil.  Old beliefs cast down, transcended by a new, vital understanding of being.  No “critiques” or “treatises” here – this was elemental, powerful stuff – The Antichrist – now that is a provocative title.

The end result being, of course, that approximately 15% of my remaining list is now composed of Nietzsche.

The intervening years, bringing as they have a deepening and broadening of my perspective regarding philosophy, have taught me that the impending Friedrich-fest will be nowhere near as fun as first supposed.  I will soldier on, however.  Currently, I am slogging through Mr. N’s Untimely Meditations.

I always kind of wondered how Clemmy and Z’nah felt about each other.  When together they are a classic “odd couple”, Z’nah all quiet and obedience and dignity next to our hyper and waggish little terrier.  Clem can provoke anything, however, and Z’nah eventually gives in and chases Clem around the yard, or the living room, or wherever.  It seems to be playful, although it does involve a lot of Z’nah’s large mouth going around Clem’s small head.

Recently Z’nah stayed over with us for a few nights.  At first, I was worried that Clem would take issue with another dog spending so much time in her turf, especially sleeping in the bedroom at night – as I have previously reported, Clem sleeps in a secured enclosure to prevent nocturnal… well felonies.  I thought Z’nah being allowed to sleep on the floor might bother Clem, leading to her surprisingly expressive and plaintive grumbling, groaning, and whining – not conducive to sleep.

None of this proved to be a problem, however, and new behavior began to manifest.  Z’nah began giving Clem these big licks – her tongue covering half of Clem’s face at one swipe – and Clem would stand there with her little face upturned and her eyes closed for as long as Z’nah was willing to do this, clearly loving every minute.  They began traveling around the house and yard together, as opposed to the previous pattern where Z’nah would follow Rebekah until Clementine’s repeated hit-and-run tactics goaded her into “playing chase”.

This led to a whole new spate of worries on my part.  Primarily, I was worried that our terribly spoilt and often ill-behaved dog would teach Z’nah all kinds of bad behavior.  When one would come upon them frolicking through the house together, and Clem would frisk toward you and jump up at you, as is her wont, Z’nah would advance a couple steps before stopping, clearly just holding herself back from doing the same – something she was far too sedate to even contemplate before.  Then there came the night when tiny Clem leapt upon the bed, followed by big Z’nah, making her first excursion into previously forbidden territory (our bed is high, and Z’nah was not supposed to jump on and off of it because of her bad hip).  And then there was the day when Z’nah was caught furtively munching on the leaf of a plant in the garden – clearly a behavior taught by Clementine, who is now so good at it that she is never caught, her crime only discovered by the trail of gnawed foliage she leaves behind.

One night, I returned from a late evening of gaming to find all three ladies curled up together in bed – Rebekah spooning Z’nah, and Clem snuggling into Z’s belly.  They were so cute I left them that way and went to sleep in the study.  The next night Clem and Z’nah were eager to repeat the experiment, which turned out to be an utter disaster.  On the increasingly frequent occasions when Clem gets to sleep in the bed, she burrows under the covers and stays there – something that Z’nah, thankfully, made no attempt to do.  But in the middle of the night, Z’nah would get up and turn herself a couple times, looking for a cozy spot.  Often treading upon the submerged terrier in the process.  This in turn led to Clementine boiling up from underneath the covers, a process impossible to sleep through as Clem lurches this way and that, pulling blankets aside, scrabbling over the torsos of drowsy human beings, and just generally bulling around until she reaches the edge of the covers, looks around balefully for her assailant, sees no one but Z’nah, snorts, and burrows back under the covers.

Z’nah had to return to Merlyn’s cabin yesterday to help patrol for bears, however, and this tale of canine love added a poignant chapter.  Merlyn collected Z’nah from Rebekah at Lambspun, and when Rebekah returned home, Clem was waiting as usual on the top of the loveseat by the door.  When Rebekah closed the door behind her however, Clem leapt down to investigate, searching between Rebekah and the door as though Z’nah might be found hiding behind one of ‘Bekah’s legs or caught in the doorframe.  We all soon retired to bed, but Clem kept up a steady stream of little grumbles and growls – and even one little baby howl which was indescribably mournful.  Whenever I would draw near to investigate – or just pass by on my way to the kitchen or laundry room – Clem would race to the front door, as though fairly certain Z’nah had been left outside, an error we would remedy as soon as we realized it.  Eventually, Clem’s patience ran out, and whenever I got out of bed she would leap snarling upon my ankles until I grappled her and put her in lockdown for a cooling-off period.

On the whole, Z’nah’s visit was an excellent chance to see the devoted and loving canine nature at its best, although ‘Bekah and I really can’t afford to add to our little menagerie of birds and cats and demented-force-of-nature-masquerading-as-terrier, we did think fleetingly what it would be like if she had a little buddy to pal around with all the time.

It has been a good few days.  Actually, ever since the embarrassing and unpleasant series of hissy-fits that sundered my old gaming group, my fortunes have been steadily on the rise, but they have accelerated in the last few days.  I have recently begun to patch things up with an old friend, I’ve met some intriguing new people, I’ve landed a cool new part-time job, and, while I agonized about taking time off from work to launch my own business, it has led to such rapid progress that my conscience has reluctantly acquiesced.  If I could land a client or two this week I would be on top of the world.

Speaking of people who are on top of the world, last night Rebekah and I watched The Last King of Scotland, a light-hearted romp through the benevolent regime of Ugandan philosopher-king Idi Amin.  From the stirring musical numbers to the poignant and charming love story to the perfect comedic timing of James McAvoy as Amin’s goofball sidekick, everything about this film is delightful.  Well, nearly everything.  Though he bears a strong physical resemblance to Amin, leading man Forrest Whitaker is somewhat vapid and lackluster at times, and is often overshadowed by his castmates.  Still, on the whole it is a terrific date movie or good casual flick to relax with at the end of a stressful day.

I am currently giving myself a big push to get my process serving business off the ground.  Starting Tuesday, I will be pitching prospective clients which is kind of the make-or-break part of this.  If I can get to a point where I am serving 4-5 documents a day, 5 days a week, then I think the business will be viable.  One big question which I at least hope to have answered in the next few days is exactly how many documents a given attorney or law firm will need served per month.  I am hoping that landing around ten clients will get me to the viability level.

In related news, I have found an intriguing new lead for some part-time work in the education field, of all places.  I’m unsure yet if it will pan out, but it would be a way to work in that field in a more flexible, informal way – I would be trading in the full salary, benefits, and security of a full-time position in a public school, but I would also be sidestepping the vast majority of the bureaucracy and not placing myself in any of the vast and darkly glittering array of excruciating situations through which the average public school teacher is run.  So I’d have that going for me.

I don’t think such a career would be tenable for someone who didn’t have another job going, but hopefully between this and my other “sideline” business of process serving, I’ll be able to coax a living for Rebekah and I out of this tough economy.  I am determined to do this one way or another, but it would be pretty damn great if I could look forward to doing it every day, whether that day will be spent driving around as a freewheeling courier who sometimes has to engage in a little investigation and chicanery or spent cherry-picking all the fun and rewarding parts of working with kids.

One side effect of pursuing multiple occupations like this is that the question “So, what do you do for a living?” will be too complicated to answer literally.  I think I’ll just steal a page from Merlyn’s playbook and say “I live by my wits”.

And when presented with the “occupation” blank on some form I’m filling out, I’ll write in “hustler”, or “philosopher”, or “wiseguy”, or “miscellaneous”, or “airplane”, or “extemporaneous narrative generator”, or “harmless eccentric”, or “sun-dried tomato” or “the ass-kicker of you” or “ephemeral” or “etc.” – depending on how whimsical I’m feeling at the moment – chances are, if my bills are paid and my spirit isn’t being crushed, I will be feeling at least a little whimsical.

Yesterday I talked a little bit Deadliest Warrior, but I knew I would have more to say.  After the initial segment where they give a very brief overview of the two “combatants” and introduce the experts who will be helping with the process comes the segment which constitutes the main body of the show.  This is the “testing” segment, where, with the help of their expert demonstrators, they compare the weaponry used by both sides in a series of forensic tests, complete with ballistic dummies, various sensors, etc.  The data garnered from these tests is ostensibly fed into the computer program that will be determining the ultimate outcome of the “battle”

For the “Mafia vs. Yakuza” episode that I saw, they compared one weapon from each side in five separate categories.  For example, for “close range weapons”, they compared the baseball bat used by mafia legbreakers with nunchakus, with which their yakuza expert seemed pretty proficient.  This particular test revealed a definite discrepancy between the two systems of combat that I find intriguing.  Whereas the nunchakus take far more skill to wield effectively (anyone who has seen an unskilled user can tell you – they are hilarious!), the baseball bat turned out to deliver force far more efficiently, and was thus ruled a superior weapon.

This is actually part of a trend I’ve noticed in recent years.  Increasingly, attempts are being made to demystify asian martial arts, and also to dispel the corresponding perception that there are no “western” martial arts or that they are much less advanced.

Ultimately, I think what is emerging is a recognition of the difference in the underlying approach to the situation of armed conflict.  While western civilization has primarily focused its technology upon weaponry, the eastern approach has focused upon the warrior.  “Mafia vs. Yakuza” was a perfect example of this: repeatedly, the yakuza experts would refer to their weaponry in aesthetic terms, and describe the discipline each took to master.  Repeatedly, the destructive implements of the mafia turned out to cause more harm in less time – to effectively mass-produce trauma, injury and death.  Naturally, the computer simulation which concluded the episode favored the mafia (the results of 1000 simulated battles are tabulated, and the mafia was reported to have won almost 600 of these) – leaving the yakuza experts to assert that “in real life” the superior commitment and dedication of their “soldiers” would have made the difference.  At first I was inclined to think this nothing more than the griping of a sore loser, but upon considering the greater degree of skill and discipline required by their mode of combat, it seems at least plausible.

No, this isn’t going to be a post about Clementine, though she is often called by the sobriquet “The Deadliest Warrior” in Paraguay.  Oh wait, I’m sorry, Uruguay.  In Paraguay she is usually called “El Ventosidad Mortifero”.

Anyhow, this post isn’t about Clem, it’s about a show I have recently discovered on Spike TV called Deadliest Warrior.  It all started, for me, with a commercial which depicted a huge viking warrior.  “The savage Scandinavian raider who plundered Europe” said a narrator in his best Spike TV “guy’s guy” voice.  Then the image was replaced by that of an armored samurai “Japan’s elite warrior class, famous for their blinding speed and precision attacks” said the announcer, or something in this vein.  Then the voice asked one of those primal guy questions – the kind of thing ‘Bekah rolls her eyes at while I suddenly become helplessly rapt, my little eyes round with fascination: “who would win in a fight?”

The premise for the show – an in-depth examination of two historical systems of combat in an effort to determine which one is superior at killing people, ranks fairly low on the relevance scale, and even lower on the “things enlightened, sensitive human beings should be interested in” scale – but it blasts the top off the testosterone-drenched Spike TV “red-blooded Male Stereotype” index – and I am often susceptible to this sort of thing.

After a week or two of pursuit I managed to catch an episode on tv just last night.  The subject was “Mafia vs. Yakuza”, and the show began by introducing their experts on the two criminal organizations.  Now, what I am wondering is, what is the point of entry into this particular profession?  How does one go about becoming a “Yakuza expert” or “Mafia historian”?  Are there universities that offer a degree in “Organized Crime Studies” – or does one just get a history degree and specialize?  Are there schools with particularly strong OCS departments?  “Oh yeah, you wanna learn about la Cosa Nostra, you gotta go to Carnegie freakin’ Mellon – fuhgeddaboudit.”

In the case of last night’s experts, a different set of credentials seemed to be required.  While the Yakuza experts had the articulate, reasonable mien of academics, the mafia “historians” looked entirely too comfortable demonstrating the use of the ice-pick, baseball bat, and molotov cocktail during the “weapons test” portion of the show.  In addition, one of the Mafia experts possessed the last name of Bonanno, and it was revealed that yes, he is related to those Bonannos, though he had never been involved in the “family business” himself, especially not on the night of august 4th, 1993.  Ah, well, I guess it’s just one more way that crime pays – the creation of cushy tv consultant jobs for relatives.

While looking up Rebekah’s distant relation, Franklin Pierce, I wound up doing some reading about the different historical surveys that rank presidents.  Among other things, I read about the most recent surveys, the ones which had the opportunity to rate George W. Bush.  Apparently, in the 2005 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal – a survey which attempted to balance the numbers of liberal and conservative scholars among its respondents – GW was often rated among the six worst presidents by liberal scholars and among the six best presidents by conservative scholars!

Now, I do not really consider myself to be a left winger, but seriously – any scholar who compares Dubyah’s presidency to Lincoln’s, Jefferson’s, Washington’s, either of the Roosevelts’, or hell, even Truman’s should be taken out in the street and horsewhipped.  I get that you’re a conservative, and you have to follow the party line – but for chrissakes throw Reagan in there – he’s practically been canonized by the GOP since his death.  What about Eisenhower – he was a republican as well as a war hero.  Maybe even Andrew Jackson – I know he had dangerous populist-democrat-type leanings, but talk about an advocate of the second amendment – the man fought in 13 duels, which I’ll bet the gun nuts just love about him – energize your base!

This type of thing shows the outrageous pitch to which partisanship has risen in this country.  It is old news by now that our journalists, once perhaps our most important seekers for truth, have succumbed to partisan infighting, and are now just propaganda machines for one side or the other.  It appears that our academics, supposedly the other great bastion of fair-minded inquiry, have crumbled as well.

Well, I have long resisted this whole trend – as burros are wont to do (note: the burro which gives its name to the site has nothing to do with the donkey adopted by the democratic party as their symbol).  Ever since I attained political majority in the late 1990′s I have advocated an approach I call “centrist-obstructionism”.  This approach believes that the kind of political polarization happening in this country leads to the ultimate empowerment of zealots and crazy-people, while disenfranchising moderate, reasonable types like myself.  As the parties and their adherents shift their stances farther apart, neither of them remain good policy-making engines for the centrist.  To put it differently, if either one of these groups were to take and hold the majority of political power in this country for a sustained period of time, the end results would not be beneficial but harmful.  Accordingly, we must do everything we can to ensure that they remain relatively balanced against each other, expending the majority of their political capital thwarting the other party’s agenda, and accomplishing comparatively little – and then only the items both sides can grudgingly let slip past as they martial their forces for more crucial fights.

It is, I admit, a cynical agenda – our democracy has foundered, and we need it to sink as slowly as possible in the hopes that

1) The physicists solve the energy crisis and usher in a new era of global peace and prosperity.

2) The biologists solve disease and hunger, and usher in a new era of global peace and prosperity.

3) Someone nukes the middle east and ushers in a new era of peace and – well peace, at least, finally.

4) The aliens show up.  The ball’s in their court then.

5) We all become hyperintelligent robots.

6) We are “rescued” by a third party – though whether that party will be an immense asteroid, a ravening horde of devils bent on devouring the unrighteous, the plumed serpent Quetzalcouatl, or the flaming sword of the giant Surtr is still much debated, though all of these are more likely than the Green party.

Rebekah’s latest interest is researching our family trees.  Like most of Rebekah’s interests, it has passed rapidly from the “intrigued by” to the “obsessed with” phase, where it will likely remain for a while before either settling down to a steady interest (like birdwatching) or be discarded (like tai chi).

The catalyst for this particular interest was a book of old family photos which resurfaced recently.  I looked through them with her, and as usual, found myself both captivated and unsettled by staring at these frozen moments from nearly a lifetime away.  It is truly humbling to think how wide the gulf of time yawns before and behind each of us.

Anyhow, Rebekah has been digging into our respective ancestries, and discovered some cool things.  On her side, she has discovered a distant relation to America’s 14th President, Franklin Pierce – historically considered one of America’s least effective presidents – and unearthed some other truly remarkable or eccentric individuals.  My favorite of these would have to be a phrenologist named Elvira.

I intended to go into more detail, but Clementine has just crawled up on my lap, grunted a little, groaned a little, jabbed me repeatedly with her stiff paws, and settled in for a nap, so I am signing off to snuggle her.