family

Back when I was a teenager, my Dad took me and my step-mom and sister to Europe. In retrospect, that trip was a big deal for me. It gave me a real taste of (and for) the big wide world. One of the things we ended up doing was peeking in on Palm Sunday mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, and seeing all those Catholics in that beautiful building singing in French was really something. Ever since, I’ve have an abiding affection for other people’s religious rituals.

As a confirmed agnostic and dabbler in personal mysticism, it’s a real treat to be welcomed into another cultures’ spiritual practice as an observer or novice participant. Today I had the distinct pleasure of attending my Nephew Jacob Friedman’s Bar Mitzvah. As the Rabbi rendered, the kid’s a mensch. He did a good job with all the tricky rituals and language, and more impressively rendered a philosophically sophisticated opinion on the meaning of the Tower of Babel story that was the subject of the service.

To wit: if all people were united and making the biggest tower ever, why would God break up that scene? There are traditional answers about idolatry or excessive materialism, and about human hubris, but his reading was a bit deeper I think. If we have everything, we cannot really be happy. Thus the scattering and confusion assist humanity by creating adversity, challenge, difficulty and loss. Only in the presence of sadness is there joy.

Anyway, smart observation; especially for a thirteen year old. Mazel Tov to him.

A few other things came to me in the service. The first and foremost was the primacy of family, both that we are given by blood and that which we take in by choice — close friends, lovers, colleagues and mentors — as well as the wider community we inhabit. These are hugely important things in human life. I sometimes think these are the most important things beyond simple survival, and it’s a worthwhile temper to my internal ambitions and drive to consider what it’s really all about in that context.

The other thought I wrestled with started as a famliar gut level reaction to the implied subservience resident in most religious texts. Exalting your deity, proclaiming his/her/its glorious supremacy and promising obedience aren’t actions I associate with freedom or liberty or enterprise or creativity, so I sort of recoil from that at first; reject it out of hand. But in reading through the accompanying text analysis in the service book around the story of the Tower of Babel, I started digging a little deeper.

As I said, the typical lesson of Babel is that we shouldn’t get too big for our britches as a species, and basically I disagree with that. I believe that people are what should (and in most cases do) matter to people. As per the above note on family/community, first and foremost we are all about us: we exist for, by and through one another. As such, I’m all for the exaltation of human works. Let’s go ahead and build mighty towers — or maybe shoot a few people off to the moon, or whatever — as a way to flex our muscle, make some history, and celebrate ourselves.

However, without some careful steering that line of thought does run us right into the Icarus ditch. Technological idolatry (fanboyism) isn’t particularly effective, and what’s worse it can blind us in important ways. We currently struggle with a global/generational crisis because for centuries we thought that treating the air like an open sewer was pretty much fine because of how awesome coal-fired power was. Flew too high, now the wax is melting, our wings are coming apart, and it’s a hell of a long way down.

It occurs to me that you don’t really need to subscribe to the notion that some sentient force created the universe to realize that the universe is frackin’ awesome, and that some consideration and awe of this creation is justly due. Whether this deference is to creation itself or to “the creator” is largely a matter of semantics, and perhaps the attendant humility is more important as a best-practice compliment to the manic, churning, can-do spirit of industrialized man.

So, for instance, I’m an environmentalist, but only of a sort, more on the spaceship earth trip than concerned with saving the whales per se. I believe need to manage the planet better because if we don’t life will suck and we may die in large numbers. That said, I really don’t want Polar Bears to swim to death, and I think maybe it’s a Good Thing to imbue the rest of the biosphere with a little divinity.

Quite often I find there’s real value in the ability to blend seemingly inconsistent or irreconcilable ideas and traits. The Jungian Thing. In the Rabbi’s discussion of what made Jacob a mensch, she gave a compelling case for moderation — something that’s too often associated with bland, watered-down timidity, or bullshit equivocation (c.f. “bipartisanship”) — by talking about the need to be passionate, but not uncontrollably ruled by passion, and so on. Feels like the old, Romantic Polytheism.

At the end, I come around once again to a familiar vision in which the creator is creation, and moral necessity springs from the necessary practice of enlightened people existing in simpatico. Being right with one another demands some honesty, trust and charitable spirit, but it’s generally not rocket science to do the right thing. Like the soap bottle says, we’re all one or none.

First, the news.

My postmodern uncling career is really taking off. Our lead story is last night’s text message from Tommy reporting the birth of baby Ramadan Adderall Callabasa Sparks-Plus Stereo-Clutch Manmohan Death-Machine, a strapping 9lb 4oz girl. Actual name turns out to be Mirella Colette Dauter. Beautiful! I had a feeling about that one.

Also noteworthy: the recovery of my automobile in the East Bay hamlet of Hayward. I’m hoping my attorney will be able to disentangle it from the impound lot, have conducted some long-distance bureaucratic maneuvers via facsimile. Luckily my office is near the jail, and the bail bonds people are also notary publics. Mechanical status is unknown, but the report doesn’t indicate wreckage or any stripping. Perhaps Moamar will have a glorious third act.

Last night was also opening day for the Humboldt Crabs, America’s longest continuously running pro-am baseball team. It was good old fashioned home-town hillstomping double header; I caught the night game, which the Crabbies walked away with 13 to 1.

And now, for some analysis and context.

It’s really a great scene down there at Crab Park. It’s everything you know of baseball, complete with highschool kids selling nachos and old men keeping stats with over-sized clipboards and complicated paper forms. But it’s also lots of neck-tatoos, microbrew, heckling, and a volunteer brass band that plays Sabbath.

The combination represents, in my opinion, some of the best of America — layers of idiosyncrasy, honest fun, community spirit, low-stakes gambling, social diversity and ritual tradition. It is also specifically some of the best of small town living. When it works, it’s like everyone’s a VIP.

And I mean what I said when led off with my position as postmodern uncle. Family is a pretty virtuous thing, blood-related and otherwise, and it’s really fun to help wrangle a bunch of kids at these things, especially when it’s a once a week event and not a daily responsibility.

Outside, in the Big World, I’m not so sure what to say. I’m far from being one of those who takes such a dim view of things that they don’t want to bring kids into being, but we’re heading into some turbulent times for sure. Politics is moribund and lifeless; the right typified by bitterness, half-crazed infighting and literally murderous extremism, the left ineffectual as ever, a fact made abundantly clear by the Democratic Trifecta. They’re blowin’ it, in my opinion, unable or unwilling to take the kind of action necessary to, say, guarantee universal health care.

Meanwhile, Governors around the country are slashing already meager social welfare programs as jobs continue to evaporate at a rate of several hundred thousand a month. With GM set to begin mass layoffs (which will have significant ripples as the whole automotive supply chain adjusts) and another wave of mortgage resets and real-estate losses in the mail, I think harder times are coming. Our institutions are failing.

I see no reason to be worried about my own personal fate, or any reason to expect anything bad for my business (the viability of a boutique bicycle startups notwithstanding), but it’s getting really tense and shitty for a lot of people who are already on the bubble. The dark reality is that a lot of companies are bloated paperwork-clotted clusterfucks, and they really can lay off 1/3 of their workers and still do just about the same thing.

One in ten citizens is functionally illiterate. One in five unable to balance a checkbook. We live in a nation wracked with inequality. Not quite Brazil, but headed in that general direction, even as Brazil steadily improves.

The old philosophical struggle between revolution and pirate utopia, running hot these days. But it’s a nice sunday afternoon, and in spite of my aching back, the time is now (now!) to dig up the septic tank.

My grandmother Victoria, Vicki to the rest of us, passed last week. She was a tough old lady. She saw the depression and worked the USO during WWII, said that British sailors were the worst, that they used shoe polish to keep their uniforms white rather than washing.

She had five children, including my mom, two of whom she outlived; my uncle Patrick who worked for IBM and programmed primitive computers for early nuclear submarines, and my uncle Terry, who got hit by a car before I was born and who I never met, but am supposed to resemble. She was the matriarch of the McCues.

My mother moved her out to Eugene a little more than six years ago after my sister left for college, gave her a nice final act in Oregon. She was pretty happy there.

All in all, I think it’s as light and positive a turn as death really gets. The past year or so, I’d known that Vicki had decided to quit fighting for her life, accept the coming end. After two hip replacements and a broken femur, she didn’t see the value in physical therapy; already a pretty private person, gradually retreated into herself. She also had Parkinsons, and while she wasn’t senile or anything, she had started forgetting things and getting confused from time to tome. Worse she was more than with it enough to know she was making mistakes, which I think for her was the hardest thing of all.

Last Wednesday night she suffered a massive stroke in her sleep and never woke up. Half a day later she died in Hospice. I’m glad she didn’t suffer, and I’m glad that she’s at peace.

I went home this weekend to help my mom pack up her things, and to lend some good old family joy to the situation. It was good. These events have a way of getting everyone down to a level.

So I’m nobody’s grandchild now; advanced a generation on the ladder.

So I’ve been rolling this one over in my mind a fair bit in the past week, thinking about what I want out of life, what/how I want to be.

One thing I want is to hold on to my far-flung cadre of friends, the bigger Family I have that’s grown by choices. I don’t have any illusions about everyone all living together in one big happy hippy compound, or cutting a swath of stylish destruction as a king-hell gang of city-dwelling bohemians. No, people want to do their own things, and that’s cool. I’m good with it. There are 31 flavors and more. Please sample them all and stick with whatever fits you the best for as long as it feels right.

What I’m more thinking about is keeping up the knitting, maintaining fresh contact information and some sense of What’s Up with all these people I fucking love so much. Keeping up the process of running them into one another whenever possible, expanding the network when appropriate, etc. I don’t want to sound like an ass, but I like being a part of an elite crew. I’m ambitious. It drags me down being around sad or needy or low-caliber individuals. You know the tune; Rise above, we’re gonna rise above.

I was talking the other day with my Gypsy Princess roommate, about how she’s always felt the lure of travel, the open road, adventure. And the more she thinks about it the more she wonders if the life of a rambling gypsy isn’t but one of many possible outlets for her inner desires, maybe the easiest and best-practiced and ergo most alluring in a default fallback kind of way. Life tough? Go travlin’. That always gets the juices flowing. But maybe there’s something more out there, something more substantial, another expression, a way of being that answers the same calling, but more creatively, substantively, sustainably.

It made me wonder about how fired up I got being back in NYC, if there isn’t something similar at work in my psyche. Not that I’d ever consider denying myself the joys of The City — any more than she’d consider giving up travel — but that feels like a thread worth tugging on. Unraveling my various rationalizations, it occurs to me that one reason I feel so comfortable in New York is that I can be as Big as I want there and nobody will necessarily notice. Out here in the HC — and in a different way in SF — letting the full flower of my being bloom would turn a few heads, at the very least, and I’m not 100% comfortable with that.

Which runs into the fact of my ambition like a wood-chipper. Cognitive dissonance. Look at me. Don’t look at me! No, wait, look at me! Yeah.

So, in the continuing spirit of Owning My Shit, and also following the philosopher’s advice that Beliefs are Habits of Action, I think I have to intentionally put myself into the spotlight a bit more, if for no other reason than to get comfortable with that as my ongoing role in life. The truth is I love being a center of attention. I’m a fucking Ham and everyone knows it. I just need to get over and/or embrace my inner artist, quit being so worried about always being a success and never being a jackass. Worry takes one out of the game, and it’s who dares wins. Fortune favors the bold.

Well, I’m descending into catchphrase hell now so I’ll pull up. It was a lovely Thanksgiving, Mom and Sister coming to me for a good break from their routines. December promises to be fun, with some travel back up to Oregon in the cards. I’m hoping to get some serious Time Off to decompress and then dig into some personal projects.

My comrade Franko and his lovely lady Laura are preggers. Way to be procreative, kids.

Also, nice to know that years of bike-riding did nothing to deplete Mr. Robbins’ virility. Big ups to the ball-channel.

I’m looking forward to visiting them this New Years. It’s been too long!

UPDATE: Housing secured. Also, Brie would like to point out that she is not, in fact, a “gangbanger.”

Any of my New York readers know of a place to say in Brooklyn?

Brie is teh awesome. You should be so luck as to have her as a roommate.

In Which I Explain With A Single Quote My Certainty That All My Achievements Will Be Eclipsed By My Sister:

By 7[pm] I was sitting in the back of a really small, really red, bar (alone, I might add. A practice I'm not a fan of) listening to some Columbia graduates read from their first published works. Nothing like hearing words pulled off the page and spoken out loud, it evokes a good feeling, a little internal nudge that this is what I really love spending my time doing. But, for the love of God, what's with that fucking wispy, ethereal, panty waist voice grown men get when they read poetry? That's got to stop, people. Let's put the balls back in prose.

The blog you all really want to be reading.

I'm doomed! Doooooomed!

Some news! My sister (above) somehow scammed her way into this New York City diploma-mill popularly known as "Columbia University." Seriously though, this is exciting stuff. She's definitely moving out there along with her man Scott, and is still waiting to hear from some other schools, but Columbia's MFA Writing program is, as they say, prestigious. So things are looking good. I always knew she'd pass me on the achievement ladder one of these days, dammit.

Also, somewhat selfishly, this is a great reason to get back east more often. I can feel the sweet embrace of her couch already.

For my part, I spent Sunday - Wednesday down and back to the Bay area. It was all business, so not that much fun, but I got the work done and for the first time I tried my new plan of bringing the bike with me and using that to get around the city. Weather was lovely, and it worked out great until I got hit by a car in Oakland: some kid who was already fleeing a hit-and-run with a parked car. I'm fine and so's my machine, but it was close to being awful. Ironically, one of the bits of business I was dealing with was filing for our company health insurance. Cheap thrills.

On the five-hour drive back, I thought a lot about this whole urban/rural living thing I have going on. I've been missing NYC a lot lately, and I've also been pondering what it would take to make living here more sustainable. Girl(s), obviously, but there's also a level of peer-review that I miss, a community of people who I share some ambitions with.

It's proving harder to make those kinds of connections. I don't really do that well at meeting new people without a context, and it's a smaller pool. People seem private though. I don't know if it's just the way of country life, or if, as someone recently pointed out, there are proportionately more people here who are stoned out of their minds at any given point.

Maybe getting back on the art-train is the way to go. Maybe it's just that my close-friend/household relationships have gotten a little stagnant. In any event, it's slow going, but I've got high hopes that the Spring thaw will set things in motion.

Final Note: I think I like this format for now: simple layout, big pictures, etc. I may turn this into the first step on the road to OJ 2.0...

I'm at the bar at Rose City at PDX, loving the free wifi (every airport should do that; they'd see a bump in food/drink sales as a result) and I was just enjoying the scenery across the bar. Portland is a hipster capital, and I have to admit I do love that style on the women.

My "vacation," which has been roughly the past week and will run through the 1st, has been nice. I had big dreams of hitting the Y a lot, getting my body prepped for a higher level in 2007, but I'm more like my mom than I admit -- genetics is a real thing -- and so we spent most days perched across from one another at her high-tables working on our laptops, eating pizza and drinking beer into the night. I wish I had a picture. It was nice, but also sort of the antithesis of getting to the gym and hitting the stationary cycle.

On the upside, I did some good work on Chapter Three's first non-client project -- alpha launch coming in early Jan -- and I also started my open-source community service effort for 2007, the Drupal Dojo:

It's basically a place for up-and-coming developers to rub elbows with more experienced types in a less intimidating setting, to help be a middle-ground in the burgeoning Drupal economy. I launched it about 24 hours ago and already we have more than 100 members. Oh boy.

In more personal news, I also made it over to my older half-sister's xmas for dinner with her mom and husband Fabio and my nieces Sarah and Anna, all of whom I love. Her mom Eileen is my dad's first wife, who I hadn't met until I went down to LA for Anna's Bat Mitzvah at the beginning of December. She's great, and so is her current husband Gary, one of those guys with an infectiously positive personality; reminds me a bit of Kevin Kuhlke, the old director of the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU (although clearly less weird).

Anyway, it was really cool to see all of them, especially since the Bat Mitvah and associated party were sort of a whirlwind. I'm constantly reminded of how lucky I am to have such a sprawling and diverse family tree full of so many winners and interesting personalities.

Eileen showed me some wedding photos of her and my dad from 1961. He and I have a different mouth, but from several angles we look almost exactly the same. It gives me some pause. I haven't talked to him in a couple of years, or rather he hasn't responded when I've reached out. Liz and I talk a little about this, how he'd been distant at times with her. It's good to know it's not just me, and it's really sweet and touching to see the photos of him and Eileen (who was a stone fox by the way) and Liz and my other half-sister Nan when they were kids; another side to things.

It makes me wonder. As I said, genetics are a real thing. My mother and I share a similar obsessive-bordering-on-unhealthy relationship to work, among other traits. What do I get from my dad, other than height and a brow-line? Given the loop-de-loops I seem to go through in my love life, it's not just an academic question.

I'm on my way back to New York, a city of women for me. This is undeniably a huge part of what's drawing me back. I don't know what to think of all that. It doesn't strike me as incredibly rational to pursue transcontinental relationships, and yet I don't seem to meet anyone I click with in the HC, whereas in the city...

When I first moved out, I had an unspoken dream of landing some big city babe and dragging her out to my rustic hill-country homestead. It was a very Hank Stamper ambition. I can't fucking believe the internet doesn't have a page I can link to that will explain what that means (so I must make one, later), but basically it's a romantic lumberjack notion, which is to say one that may or may not work out in reality.

See, most people don't have the career flexibility that I do. The femme types I click with in these metropoleis, they don't have much to do out in the country, away from graduate schools and the bigtime culture industry and suchlike. While it's true I'll probably end up living at least part time in an urban setting, for the time being I'm not planning on going anywhere, and where I live now doesn't offer a lot to the ladies I like.

And I certainly don't have any interest in getting with a kept woman of any sort. Not my style.

So all that's sidelined for now; roll with the punches; the most important thing is to stop struggling. I make transcontinental flights for business, but with the thrilling promise of makeout really spurring me on. I embrace this. I'm resolved not to overly judge or self-sabotage if I can help it, but it feels undeniably temporary.

I remind myself, there's nothing wrong with that. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Indeed, I recoil from too much romantic responsibility like no other (just ask, they'll tell you), and while some will suggest it's the dreaded fear of commitment, I just call it not wanting to get in over my head. I'm cagey when it comes to being accountable for other people's feelings. I don't want to let anyone down. Still, I believe that the right thing will come in the right moment. Call me a gambler. I'm holding out for a jackpot.

The heart is a mercurial organ. I can't manage it. I don't know how to turn it on or off. I can't reliably sort out a temporary rush of attraction from true love, and if you pressed me on it I would probably say they're not really different things. One just grows and blossoms, and the other has a more ephemeral life. Nature is replete with examples in this vein.

So I keep plugging away. Some days I feel the underlying belief that "good things will come" more than others, and I try to hold on to at least that little bit of faith. Many great songs have been written about this -- improbably, George Michael and Tom Petty come to mind at the moment, but there are hundreds of others -- and in that I take Howard Zinn's confidence: the poets are on my side. That's something.

It's a long life, and it might be the Jameson talking a bit, but I'm feeling good about next year. The trends are positive, and my personal chi is good. Predictions and resolutions soon, but for now a simple beatific smile and quiet confidence.

Great Success! Me and Brie went in together on a travel voucher to sent mom back to France sometime -- because if we get her the ticket she has to go -- and I cooked up a pretty fine meal (bacon-wrapped steaks, shallot/shitake sautee, garlic mashed potatoes, asparagus and spinach ceasar salad) and dined it up with the Grams and everything. It was a lovely adult night.