Mr. Smudge, the cat, never actually fully made the transition to Standard Time this fall. For the longest time, he was waking me up in the middle of the night for his morning meal. Since he is a persistent little fuzz ball, this meant me eventually getting up in the pitch dark to spoon out the Friskies and then stumbling back to bed. He's been some what better about this as I resist his timing over the fall, but when the alarm goes off at 6 am it's still very dark out. From a "light" point of view, it really doesn't matter much if it's 4 am or 6 am. It's still very dark here in the Athens of America. But this will change. It is the Winter Solstice and it's time for the balance to swing back.
Of course, the sun does eventually come up over the Tobin Bridge in it's usual red splendor as I sleepily strive to start the day by focusing on Cheerios, taking my vitamins, and getting Smudge a second helping of food before he heads back to bed for the rest of the morning on the little pad in back of my editing desk. In a world where we seem to have lost control of the large things, the small rituals of the day become much more important as a way of ordering life.
For me another way of ordering life is the Annual Report that send to you each Winter Solstice. If not order, then there is at least explanation here at the the luminous nadir of the year. So here is the way that things look from the top of the hill this December:
Work
Don't have any. At least at the moment. I cut myself loose from the Harvard money machine this fall with no clear direction to go. Sometimes you just know that it's time to go, and it was time to go from the job at Instructional Media Services. Mental health demanded an exit and I listened to what that little interior voice was telling me. But, of course, this doesn't mean that the little voice will tell you what to do after this fact.
And what does the little voice tell me now after a time away? Well, as usual, the message is garbled. I do know that I have to start the cash flowing again sometime soon but, besides this, the path is still not clear. It's taken multiple months for me to extract my head from the all consuming Harvard context and now that I'm out the over-riding question is "what's next?" The answer, as of today, is "don't know." I remember that when I was ten I wanted to be an astronaut. Do they take 55 year old astronaut trainees?
Social Life
If you're over 50 and single take my advice -- don't go out there. Don't go into the dating pool. It's brutal. Wait for later when you get to The Home and the social context makes sense.
Arts
Continuing in my tradition of attempting impossible things and wondering why I don't get anywhere, I have continued to study the arts this year - both visual and martial. I participated in my first group art show in the summer - putting up 4 drawings in a show at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. The most interesting part of this (besides the good wine at the opening reception) was going back all my old drawings from the past three years. It seems that there were occasional moments of Art that happened early on, but I have been able to be more consistent in producing work that I don't want to immediately throw away. I took an intensive drawing class this fall and, hopefully, this has filled some of the draftsmanship holes that I had been experiencing. We'll see as I go back for less structured work this winter. Trudge, trudge, trudge.
My aikido has subtlety changed over the past year and now I find myself doing a more interesting "wet blanket" style against people younger and stronger than I -- smothering their attack and then throwing. It's hard to explain the change since I don't really have a handle on what's happening here yet but it looks like I'm slowly developing a style here. Who would have thunk it? Anyway, the body is still holding up and Paul Keelan is still teaching, so I'll follow this path for as long as I can.
Politics
George Did It
So here we are in the middle of the Iraqi tar baby that we warned about 2 and a half years ago. We've got 140,000 people stuck in the Mideast and we can't go forward and we can't go back. Bush and the NeoCons have taken the bright, shiny (and very expensive) Hummer of our military and driven it directly into a swamp -- all the time saying that it's the responsibility of the President to drive and we shouldn't criticize. The country is currently run by people who make wrong decisions and then won't take responsibility for this fact. They want all the power (wiretapping and snooping on your library books) but won't accept the burden of command - you screw up and you're gone. It is debatable as to whether these people are honorable or not. But it is not a question as to whether these people are competent or not. They aren't.
Three more years.
Environment: Katrina and Climate Change
Hey, when are we going to wake up to the fact that we lost a major American city here? Is there any recognition that something is screwed up when a) there are more hurricanes this year than any on record, and/or b) Katrina explodes into a Category 4 storm as a result of very warm water in the Gulf of Mexico? Both these situations were predicted by those who said that we have a growing problem with climate change. George's response: "We will adapt." Well, the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are certainly doing that and more these days. But I don't see George adapting. Nor do I see his pro-oil industry policies adapting. So we can't even trust that he'll follow his own "head in the sand" pronouncements.
If you look around on the environmental front the only conclusion that you can come to is that things have already turned bad environmentally and we have to wait three years before we can do anything about this on the federal level. So we better all get active on the local and state levels if we don't want to lose what we have to hurricanes, tornados, and/or ecological collapse. The alternative is to wait for those people who gave you the current state of New Orleans. Is Cape Cod next?
Mitt
In political good news, we in Massachusetts learned this week that we don't have much longer have to put up with a Governor who's ambition to be President leads him to denigrate the people who he currently serves. The bad news is that he might actually get to be President. I don't even want to think about what a Commonwealth under the reign of Junior League candidate Kerry Healey might be like. It would probably be a tough call as to who would be worse -- someone who is all flash and didn't do anything except indiscriminately cut budgets or someone who couldn't even win a state rep race in her home town.
Of course, I probably shouldn't complain. All my relatives live in Florida.
Next
I haven't seen any "Save the World " employment ads in the paper lately (at least ones that don't involve Jesus in some way), so I'm probably going to have get a slightly more prosaic job in the near future. Please let me know if you know of either variety. I'll find something. I always do.
But given the state of the country, it's hard to be hopeful and this weighs on the spirit. Many of we Americans are caught in a sinkhole of materialism and, though we can be helpful and compassionate in specific instances, we still haven't managed to be able to translate this to any sort of social policy. Nouveau conservatist marketism isn't going to cut it. And it remains to be seen whether my generation, the generation that was going to change all this crap, can wake up and take up responsibility for one another again. Time is beginning to get short.
It has become trendy in some liberal circles to talk about how "optimistic" we are all are about how we've reached the bottom of the well here in the US and now there's no place to go but up. These people are curiously lacking in examples, while I see Ted Stevens or Dick Cheney on the tube every night justifying everything from rape of the Alaskan wilderness to indiscriminate torture as a legitimate way of protecting the "American Way of Life." Besides the fact that this is not the "American Way of Life" that I want to have anything to do with, I don't find this as anything to be optimistic about. It's time for us to stop hiding in the corner and start to do something to stop the process of America's decline as a light of world civilization.
I encourage you to think about how we can all do this and talk with one another about it. it is clear to me that it is up to us increasingly older folks. I like what I see in parts of the younger generation, but it may be too late to create a noble and compassionate world by the time that they come to bat.
It is true that starting today the light starts to return. But that's astronomical. If we are to see the light return to out lives as well as to our days, we have to put our shoulder to the wheel and make it happen. What's happening next for me? I don't know. But I can predict what's going to happen to all of us if we don't get to work reclaiming our country.
As always, one of the purposes of this annual communique is to express my gratitude to all of you who have helped me get this far and this has not changed. I couldn't have gotten this far without you and I know it. I hope to justify your faith in me and your compassion in giving me a helping hand when I needed it. With the coming of the light, for me it's back to work in many senses of the word. I hope that it's the same for all of us.
The light returns. Let us spread it as far as it will go.
Happy Solstice and Much love,
Spriggs
Don't be so gloomy about dating. Screw the online dating stuff and go attend activities where there are women in your target age.
Posted by: Cletus van Damme | January 01, 2006 at 05:49 PM