Commute Canticle

A highway that stretches through rural towns in my part of the state carries me most of the distance to my job.  The cattle and fields and hay and pastures and farms and ranches and creeks and ponds and small town businesses constitute much of the scenery I see each day on my commute.  Sometimes I see stranded motorists in need of help, or on some occasions, I’ve encountered an accident scene.  

One morning, I had the opportunity to engage in a rescue mission.  I spied a hardback book on the side of the road as I sped passed.  I saw the telltale white square on the spine that told me it was a library book.  After doubling back to check it out, confirmed it was an errant library book, abandoned so close the speeding traffic.

I hopped out of the Jeep and discovered Anne Rice’s Blood Canticle, an apparent confluence of the Mayfair Witches and the vampire chronicles. It was from the public library in a nearby town.

The stamp on the card inside the book’s cover indicated it was due back to the following Monday.  I wondered what circumstances conspired to leave it on the shoulder of a highway. 

I returned it.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Last month, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Back in November, Dr. Mukherjee was interviewed by Terri Gross on NPR's Fresh Air.  They re-broadcast the show in the wake of the award.  Terri really did her homework and brought many well informed questions that pierced the medical jargon and targeted the most crucial insights. And Dr. Mukherjee is extremely articulate and carefully answered the questions in a very instructive way that didn’t disregard the laymen listening. 

The book seems thoroughly fascinating and worthy of the Pulitzer.  It traces the history and understanding of the disease, as well as some of the development of many modern treatments (including dramatic new treatments).  In the interview, Dr. Mukherjee briefly discussed research done to examine how cancer evades a patient's immune system and what can be done to assist the immune system in engaging the disease.

Aural Time Travel

Howard Jones released Dream Into Action at the end of my senior year in high school. Though my '79 Cutlass Supreme Brougham had an inexpensive stereo, that cassette sounded so clear and pure when I turned up the volume. I loved it. It was like the soundtrack to a pivotal time when I was truly embarking on life.

The next year, when I was in college, HoJo released One to One. Discretionary funds for buying music were hard to come by. Heck, any funds were hard to come by. I remember getting food was a big priority in those college-student days. Kentucky Fried Chicken sold chicken-on-a-biscuit for only 39 cents, and two of them amounted to a chicken sandwich. The best days of the week were when my  roommate would bring home leftover pizza from the restaurant where he worked.

Despite the hard-to-come-by funds, I saved my money and bought that tape as soon as I could. There's something magical about the right music -- how it can be more important than food.  Especially when you are young. I got a lot of play out of One to One in those struggling times. I listened to it constantly, and it often remained in my stereo for the entire weekend commute between where I was living and my hometown.

While on vacation last summer, I scored a CD of One to One for $3.99. I never thought I'd hear those songs again, because I didn't think the album was made available on CD, except for a limited run.

Listening to those tracks a quarter of a century later amounts to an aurally invoked time machine. The vocals are like a wormhole to a different time. The beats take me back. That was a chapter in my life when I was working as a clerk at a convenience store, picking up 22 hours on the weekend, while attending college and (allegedly) focusing on class and studies during the week.

I lived in a horrible little apartment with a bud from high school who was going to the same college. We watched David Letterman every night on a 9-inch black and white TV that I got for Christmas the year I was in the 5th grade.

If only all the roaches and crickets in that on-the-cusp-of-condemned apartment complex would have contributed toward our rent. It would really have reduced my monthly expenses.

The cost of my jaunt back in time was merely $3.99, thanks to Howard Jones and his synthesized sounds.

Cairn O' The Cosmos

I have a cairn on my office desk.  It is of my own making.

I scavenged the trio of rocks from Goleta Beach Park just north of Santa Barbara several years ago when a good buddy and I were dispatched to the west coast under a delightfully narrow scope of responsibility.  The late-game need for us meant the only available hotel room was on the beach.  We were merely hired guns, so to speak, who had the particular credentials to help edit a series of documents whose delivery date rapidly approached.

We had more free time than usual on that trip.  So, I took him to some of the places that I'd previously visited -- Goleta Beach Park among them.  I picked up three surf-smoothed rocks that were partially submerged in the beach sand.  And now they are stacked on my desk with such perfect appearance that a viewer might consider the result to be a fabrication, a novelty store sculpture.

Each stone's slight variation of hue divided by interstitial shadows.  A tiny tower.  An ellipsoidal, stone snowman.  A mysterious monument.

I'm certain it has a grander meaning.  I'm certain.

My Own Maxinkuckee

After flying over the lake of his childhood summers, Kurt Vonnegut remarked: "That wasn't the real Maxinkuckee down there. The real one is in my head."  

That quote has really meant something to me through the years, as I try to conjure apparitions of my past and make some sense of them.

Kurt Vonnegut died four Aprils ago at the age of 84.  With my calendar boldly proclaiming APRIL, my thoughts are haunted by the ghosts of my parents, and the vignettes of my early life that now seem so distant as to belong to a movie I saw in a previous existence.

But, my grandmother, father, and mother all died in consecutive Aprils.  Dad was just a few months older than Kurt Vonnegut.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I had a dream in which my parents were alive again.  I was riding my old red bicycle (with chopper bars and banana seat!) near my childhood home, though I was my full-sized, fat, adult self.  My sister and friends and cousins (who appeared in the dream) were all adults, too.

At one point in the dream, it was revealed to me that my mother had died the night before, and I simply hadn't been told until that moment, because others were shielding me from the grief, cloaked in the motives of their good intentions.

Friends and family were gathered in a neighbor's large home.  I sorta wandered through it in a stupor, not really speaking to anyone.  It was on my mind that I needed to find my dad and comfort him, though I never saw him in the dream.

I woke up sad.

But, of course, it has been more than fifteen years since my mother died. It somehow never occurred to my dream-self that I'd already buried both parents -- that my father preceded my mother in death, and would therefore not have been a survivor of her death, as he was in the dream.

How do dreams do that?  How do you convince me of things that are not so, foist me into some alternate, anomalous existence populated with circumstances incongruous to the reality I know.

Catch-22: The Ethics of War

Global hotspots are the new black.

Though it typically isn't the sort of flashy news peg to get much attention, it is true that the U.S. Army understands the power of non-violent opposition. Sounds silly, I know. I mean, it's an army -- and shouldn't that intrinsically imply the use of force? Well, yes. But, I guess the lesson is that force isn't always violent.

To wit: understanding the complexities of local socio-cultural nuances and mores will go a long way to better enable soldiers operating in that environment. Therefore, sometimes government contractors, such as social scientists and specialists, are imbedded with combat units to help develop non-violent options for stabilizing chaotic areas.

In 2008, an incident happened in the southern Afghanistan village of Chehel Gazni, about 40 miles from Kandahar. I read about it months later.

A couple of Human Terrain Team contractors (Don Ayala and Paula Loyd) were on a foot patrol when one of them, a female (Lloyd), approached a local, Abdul Salam.

[This is the part of the story where I pause to remind you that these contractors are culturally knowledgeable and specifically tasked with seeking non-violent ways to help quell local disorder.]

Ms. Loyd was suddenly doused with a fuel jug Salam was carrying. And Salam set her on fire.

Loyd's fellow contractor, Ayala, apprehended Salam and detained him. But, when a soldier arrived on the scene a few minutes later and reported that Loyd was badly burned, according to an Army Criminal Investigation Division affidavit: "Ayala pushed his pistol against Salam's head and shot Salam, killing him instantly."

Loyd later died from her wounds. Ayala was taken into custody and charged with second degree murder in the shooting of Salam.

That is an intense situation. If you try and imagine being embedded in a combat unit in a war zone of a hostile region, seeing your friend doused with fuel and burned, it doesn't seem too far outside the likely human response to dispatch the guilty party. War tends to involve moments of killing.

I realize there are complexities here that prevent this from being a simple black-and-white issue. And, I can't say for sure what I would have done in a similar situation -- which is to say I could have very well done what Ayala did in a reactionary rage. It seems it isn't too far of a stretch to imagine that, in that moment, he was so emotionally overwrought as to be unstable, and, one might say, temporarily insane…and to consider that Salam bears some responsibility for inciting the incident via the heinous attack on Ayala's coworker (which resulted in the coworker's death).

Rules of engagement (ROE) can plague any person operating in a hostile zone. Someone removed from the front lines can easily determine, on some academic technicality, that a given incident qualifies as murder, whereas another event is justified as a "part of war."

It all furrows my brow.  It seems we put our military personnel in circumstances where the expected course of action is to become a casualty.

An Assumption of Soundness

Sometime between the April 1994 death of my father and the April 1995 death of my mother, I made a discovery that entwined a combination of poignant triggers. It was like wading into an emotional estuary with competing currents of love and loss.

I found a letter in the back bedroom of my childhood home that Dad had begun writing to me while I was overseas. He never finished it.

I don't know if the missive was being composed near the day he died from congestive heart failure, or if it had already waited weeks or months for him to return and conclude it before his life had its own conclusion.

His typically bold and forthright penmanship appeared shaken and uncertain. Descenders and ascenders belied his unsteady hand.

It seems that somewhere along the path of my own life, I discovered my parents had grown old. Their old age often startled me when I arrived for a visit, an undeniable reminder that the world had moved on from the simpler times of my childhood.

Dad's letter talked about golf and the golf balls he fished out of the creek along the fairway on the first hole. His letter insisted that I be careful while abroad and return to them safely.

I was pleased to have that correspondence. Since the intervening months between its composition and my receipt of it brought my father's death, it held more metaphysical weight than it would otherwise.

Both my father and his father died when their own hearts turned on them after decades and decades of dedicated and faithful duty -- the daily thrumming and pumping in their chests. It occasionally makes me curious about my own heart and its unknown intentions.

After a while I found myself becoming nostalgic
for the way I thought I remembered it being
between my heart and me, a kind of continuum
of body and mind, an assumption of soundness,
that sense you have as a child of being in such a
full, weighty recline within yourself that things
like sitting on a porch or swinging in a hammock
seem unsettling redundancies.   -- Charles Siebert, A Man After His Own Heart

The Ocean of Our Unknowing

I first heard of Don Miller while on a business trip in Waco.  He wasn’t there.  But, I visited the University Baptist Church, and the pastor mentioned his book, Blue Like Jazz, and read this from the frontmatter.

I never like jazz music, because jazz

music doesn’t resolve.  But, I was

outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland

one night  when I saw a man playing

the saxophone.  I stood there for fifteen

minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that, I liked jazz.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love

something before you can love it yourself.

It is as if they are showing you the way.

I like that.  The sentiment and the way he packaged it.

So, I’ve since become a full-on follower of Don Miller and his spiritual exploration, his presentation of questions and observations and theological ruminations.  I like the way he refuses to find contentment in the merry acceptance of the doctrine bequeathed by elderly men.

And I follow his blog, too – enjoying posts like THIS ONE and THIS ONE (from the time his dog, Lucy, took over blogging duties).

His recent book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is now available in paperback.

This Miller quote has stuck with me from Through Painted Deserts: “It turns out the droplet of our knowledge is a bit lost in the ocean of our unknowing.”

This & That

In 2009, I listened to a Slate Audio Book Club podcast about Nicholson Baker's most recent book, The Anthologist. I followed that up by hunting down and reading a review in the New York Times.

Sounded appealing. I figured I'd one day buy it or pick up a copy from the library.

Around that same time, I'd begun mulling over e-readers, not quite convinced I wanted one. But, I was curious. And, like my plan to read The Anthologist, I figured I'd do it one day -- I'd take the plunge and get an e-reader. Not soon, mind you, but eventually.

In my curiosity, I poked around online to see what assessments there were about Amazon's Kindle. Somewhere, I encountered a reference to a Nicholson Baker article for The New Yorker about his experience evaluating the Kindle. Kismet, I figured. I'd already learned that some people were reading electronic books on their iPhones -- and that topic also surfaced in the Baker article.  Plus, there was general hubbub in those days about something called an iPad (which I have since bought for my wife).

So, I read the article, which was the "cause" that begat a few "effects." It reinforced my notion that I'd be waiting to see which direction e-readers veer. It also made me seriously consider that an iPhone (or iPod Touch) could supplant an e-reader-specific device with added functionalities. But, it also thoroughly encouraged my interest in Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer (which Baker discusses reading electronically).

Thus, when I spied an audio book of The Lincoln Lawyer on a shelf at the library near my office, I promptly seized it. And I found it an outstanding companion on my daily commute.

Now, there's a movie of The Lincoln Lawyer about to hit theaters.  And it looks good.  I know all the plot acrobatics, but I still expect to enjoy the movie.

I still haven't read The Anthologist, thought I have enjoyed several other Connelly novels.  And, though my wife has an iPad, all the collective murmurings of the masses these days is about the iPad 2.

No Oscar for You

The Academy Awards happen tonight.  In fact, as I type this, there are undoubtedly throngs assembled for the red gauntlet, er, I mean carpet.

One of the awards not given during tonight’s telecast, or during the earlier (and apparently less television-worthy) technical awards, is the Best Trailer Oscar.  There is no such statuette for that category.  But, there should be.

There exists such skilled visionaries that the most mundane of movies are made to look absolutely dazzling and tantalizing through the wizardry of trailer editing.  Carefully selected images and scenes are edited together with well crafted voiceover copy so as to convince the viewer that he or she will not be satisfied with life until the advertised film is experienced in full.

Curse them and their mastery!

I gave away part of my life and soul on a meandering, dour piece of cinema called BLINDNESS.  It would have worked much better as a 10-minute short -- or perhaps a trailer.

It was, in fact, the trailer of the film that convinced me it was an artful undertaking with social commentary and the dogged persistence of a band of citizens determined to get to the bottom of evil-doing or some grand governmental (or corporate) conspiracy.  Woo-hoo! Sign me up!

Indeed,…sign me up for a film like that when someone makes it...because this was merely the product of the seed of a good idea.

I felt that the screenwriters were on the road to developing something, when they sorta gave up any grand aspirations and settled for merely puttering around within the confines of a partial conceit that they never nurtured into its full potential.

Blabbity-blab-blah.  (Yawn.)

Yet, when I cautioned people not to get suckered into the cinematic mire, it was brought to my attention the film was based on a well-received, award-winning novel.  That leads me to call on the time-tested cliché that suggests the book is better than the movie.  Sadly, however, I'm drained from any impulse to approach the book open-mindedly, because of my burdensome encounter with the movie.  

Desktop Surgery

I sometimes listen to audio books during my commute. And, since the Jeep's stereo plays cassettes and CDs, when I browse the library selection, I can choose from either format.

Recently, twelve tapes deep into an audio book, a garbled sound revealed an issue with the cassette spooling. Indeed, when I ejected the cassette, there was stretched and twisted tape. So, I put it on my operating table desk and opened it up for a little corrective tinkering. I did that more than once in the '80s to rescue an oblivion-bound cassette.

I think it was my familiarity with the process that encouraged me to jump right in and take care of the problem.

There was some odd time-travel-ish aspect to the tape surgery...like a souvenir from a bygone era.

I suppose these whippersnappers today may eventually find themselves reminiscing about rebooting their iPods.

A Long Day's Journey Into Yum

Recently, I soaked some black beans in water overnight, then piled them into a crock pot with a jar of salsa and some water. Let 'em slow-cook (on low) all day. Then, after they'd been in the refrigerator overnight, there was a certain creaminess around the beans that finely capture the spiciness of the salsa.

MMMmmmmm.

I reheated the beans, plopped dollops of them on tortilla chips, sprinkled with cheese, and slid them in the oven for a few minutes.* Once out of the oven, I've included a bit of sour cream and made many nacho meals out of this. They lasted a long time, and I was sad to see my supply get low. 







_______________________
*Perhaps not the most photogenic foodstuff, but righteously tasty. Feel the tasty!

A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama

I read a review of The Canal Builders when it was first published.

The book's author, Julie Greene, examines the workers who converged on Panama, displaced the earth, civil-engineered locks, and connected Atlantic waters with Pacific waters via a man-made artery through the Panamanian isthmus.

Aside from the fact that this is exactly the sort of thing that fascinates me, and its guarantee to conjure the oft'-quoted palindrome (see blog entry title), I have a more personal cause to read about the lives of the workers who made the canal a reality.  My paternal grandfather was among them.  He went to Panama to work as a telegrapher.

I love that.

My grandfather -- born in the 1880s -- died when I was around 8 years old.  I wish I had known him as an adult, because I think we would have had a strong connection.  He looked a bit like E. B. White.  And his physical similarity to one of my literary heroes has only served to heighten the myth that I've nurtured through the years.

When I first learned of the Panama connection, I was mesmerized by the notion of my grandfather working on the canal.  I conjured many fantasies (none of them based on any knowledgeable source) of what it might have been like for him.

This month marks the 122th anniversary of my grandfather's birth.  My dad was the youngest of his siblings, arriving later in my grandparents' lives.  And Dad was 44-years-old when I debuted on the planet.  So, the generations have been stretched out through the decades, ensuring that I have little insight and considerable curiosity about my grandfather's life.

Lone Star Life

One of my favorite recent discoveries is a PBS program originating out of Austin.  The Daytripper is a 30-minute show that highlights the opportunities for interesting and fun daytrips from the Austin area.  Granted, from out in East Texas, the destinations of the show could hardly be a jaunt in the confines of a day.  But, they are great to know about for future opportunities when out and about in Texas. 

The host, Chet Garner, is equal parts endearing and goofball.  Many episodes can be viewed on the website (linked above), and new installments are boradcast on Saturday mornings (for those watching PBS on KERA in Dallas).

The Daytripper recall a show from my youth, when I watched the earlier incarnations of what has become Texas Country Reporter, a human-interest news show that explores the backroads and backstories of fascinating people around the state of Texas.

There was the guy who built his home from a decommissioned missile silo in West Texas, the old barber in East Texas who's been clipping hair for decades and decades, the tasty eatery in Beaumont, the centenarian porter at a regional airport who still makes his way to work everyday and helps people with their luggage. Stuff like that.

The host, Bob Phillips, is personable -- and, for me, his distinctive voice (sounding like it is perpetually trapped mid-gulp) and inflections have become synonymous with these sorts of down-home segments.

A particularly fascinating episode profiled John Wells, a former fashion photographer from New York who has staked out a life for himself near Study Butte, Texas, just outside Big Bend National Park amidst the austere West Texas landscape, sometimes desolate, sometimes starkly beautiful, sometimes both.

There are those who can't fathom forsaking their shopping malls, conference rooms, office buildings, department stores, mega-multi-movie-plexes, and other so-called accoutrements of civilization. But, Wells instills a purposeful drive to reconnect with nature and the purity of a self-sustaining life.

It would seem, looking from the outside, that such an existence highlights both the boon and bane of solitude, occasionally conjuring its darker cousin, loneliness. But, some people are better suited for limited opportunities of face-to-face interaction. And Wells manages the tether of DSL to remain connected via the Internet.

He still exercises his photography skills, too, keeping his daily blog lively and documenting life around The Field Lab.

The Road to Helvetica

A buddy recently gave me a DVD of a documentary that I love: Helvetica. It is about the history and cultural impact of the seminal typeface.  And I dig the soundtrack, too. (El Ten Eleven.)

Typeface.  That's what we called it back in the day, when I was in college in the '80s.  I mean, I seldom used the word "font."  At least, not until I was more familiar with computers. 

These days, if conversational topics drift into college days, people always raise a quizzical eyebrow if I mention that my most difficult course was not chemistry or microbiology or theoretical physics (okay, I didn't take that last one...it just helped make my point).  The most difficult, absorbing class I took was called BASIC TYPE.

A designer drove to the university campus once a week, and for four hours each Tuesday evening, I did my best to impress -- or at least not offend.  We drew letters.  With nary a computer in the room.  We drew typefaces with pencils and worked to tighten hand skills, living for x-heights and serifs and descenders and such.

This was in the days when not everyone had a computer.  In fact, most people didn't.  And available computer programs didn't make typeface usage and design more accessible to the population.  If you wanted something, if you had a vision, you drew it.

Our first assignment was both specific and broad in its parameters.  We had to draw two boxes.  The border for each box had specific weight (or width), with the top and sides being different than the bottom border.  But, each box's border had different dimensions from the other box.  Inside the left box was a body part.  Inside the right box was a typeface.

Students asked for clarification:  "Do you want words?  Or just letters?"  "Should the body part relate to the word or typeface?"  "Does there need to be a physical resemblance between the body part and the letter?"

The instructor wouldn't say.  He simply explained that he wanted to see what we would do.

This is what I did.

My critique went okay when compared to the thrashing that many students received.  Two girls left the room crying.  Four people dropped the course.

The instructor told us that we had to have the skill, not just the will. 

I think he meant that just because you liked to doodle during your math lecture in high school didn't mean you should become an art major.  Or, more specifically, you may not have what it takes to make it.  Just because you liked the artsy crowd and the image of the crowd, you weren't automatically gifted with talent.

My first big project used Railroad Gothic.

I spent many, many hours each week hunched over my drafting table, leaning in close to the vellum to examine curves and edges and intimate areas of negative space. I was always very pleased that I didn't fail that class.  But, it did help me understand that perhaps my destiny wasn't to become a designer or professional illustrator.

Mark-ups of an early effort.

More mark-ups of a version with the candles in place

A reverse Photostat of the phrase.

Pathologies of Frustration in the Balance

This week, in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash draws notable comparison to the precarious events in Cairo's Tahrir Square with the pivotal moments of the Velvet Revolution.

Ash notes: "The Arab arc of crisis, from Morocco to Jordan, is Europe's near abroad." The migrated relatives of Egypt's revolutionaries have spent recent decades settling in Spain and France and England. If a revolution brings down Egyptian autocracy, a newly freed population can more easily mingle among the European lands and feed those economies and cultures.

However, Ash cautions that if the uprising fails, "then tens of millions of these young men and women will carry their pathologies of frustration across the sea, shaking Europe to its foundations."

Modernization and reform stand in opposition of autocratic and theocratic rule. An irate people stand in the streets, defy the curfew, and seek to shape the future of their nation. Meanwhile, I'm fretting over long-delayed yardwork, how to secure the latest personal technology, and whether I should go out for lunch or heat up that microwavable dinner.

Enter, Stage Right

Do you ever consciously or subconsciously assign your own leitmotif?

Periodically, when walking down the hallway at work, or sitting at my desk typing an e-mail, or pulling the Jeep into traffic, I hear the opening strings of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in my head -- the forthright drums giving them a sense of purpose and expectation.

The other evening at the dinner table, my wife, who works in a tutoring program with local high school students, said one of the kids asked her what her theme would be is she could have a song played whenever she enters a room.

At professional baseball games, sometimes the players select a few bars of a favorite tune to blast over the speakers as they move from the on-deck circle to the batter's box.  I've always wondered what I'd choose in such a scenario (certain, though, I'd never have to wrestle with such concerns of professional athletes).

Darth Vader gets an imperial theme to accompany his presence in the Star Wars movies.  Brünnhilde and Siegfried are likewise musically announced in Götterdämmerung or Wagner's earlier operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Should I go with gravitas?  Or whimsy?  Or perhaps a regal brass fanfare?

I'm still mulling.

Belongings in Bags

When you go to an ER because you've caused a severe auto accident, and you're all banged up, sometimes you arrive strapped to a gurney with your clothes cut off.

This happened to me nine years ago. The EMTs cut off my new Christmas clothes at the scene to examine me for compound fractures or any other injuries. It was freezing that night. (Once I was pulled from the back of the ambulance, it seemed as though I was left restrained on the gurney in the frigid weather of the hospital portico while the EMTs debriefed the nurses outside the ER.)

Anyway, when they release you from such an ordeal, they give you a bag of your belongings. It contains the possessions off your person, even if they’ve been shredded up by EMTs doing their job.
I saw someone handed his belongings bag the other night on TV, like a mom giving her third-grader his sack lunch as he heads out the door for the school bus -- or a prisoner emerging from his senetence and receiving the scant items of a displaced life, a former self. 
 
I find it a very existential exercise, to receive such a thing. It presents quite metaphysical scenario: summarily sent you on your way with a tidy bag of what represents you.

Opsimath & the Art of Jeep Maintenance

I've never been much of an auto mechanic -- or, truthfully, a mechanic of any kind.  Lately, I've more assertive and involved in diagnosing and finding solutions to trouble with my Jeep (thought I have to admit I really haven’t had much trouble with it until now).

After a recent episode, it seemed as though I was less a repairman than someone who tricked the Jeep into working properly.  My engine light came on, and the Jeep sort of stuttered, sputtered, and struggle of as I tried to coax it into accelerating.

From poking around online, I learned of a few possible culprits. But, the Gordian knot loosened some when I discovered a little trick for Jeeps.  If the engine light comes on, put the key in the ignition and (without turning it far enough to start the engine) turn it ON-OFF/ON-OFF/ON, leaving it in the ON position the third time.  Then, a code (or codes) will display where the odometer is located.  And these codes will indicate why the engine light came on.

I received two codes:  P 0301 and P 0302. A little cyber-sleuthing revealed the causes for these codes (misfire in cylinder 1, misfire in cylinder 2).  So, I learned a bit about distributors and how computers work on automobiles these days, and I devised a plan.

I disconnected the battery for about five minutes, hoping to reset the engine light and essentially restart the computer to its default settings.  If the engine light codes weren’t telling the computer there was a problem, I theorized, perhaps it wouldn't be attempting to advance or retard the timing of the cylinders. Next, I promptly purchased the most expensive fuel injection cleaner I could find and poured it in the tank.

I did all that right before my commute home, so the fuel injection cleaner would have a chance to work its way through the system.

There have been no recurring issues since my ruse.  All's well that ends well.

A Coupon-Induced Quest

When a buddy sent me a coupon in the mail for $5 off a purchase at Half Price Books  (HPB), I insisted to myself I was only buying one book.  I want to buckle down in 2011 and read through the stack of books piling up unread on my shelves and desk.  Then, I’ll venture out to buy some more.  I immediately knew what I wanted to buy -- a book whose mere mention was practically taboo where I lived on the brass buckle of the Bible Belt, simply because it had the word satanic in the title.

I recall when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses, at the end of the '80s.  In a Vanity Fair article, Christopher Hitchens posited that the fatwa was issued in a bid to regain some Islamic street cred after reneging on his vow to never sign a treaty with Saddam Hussein.  Suddenly, with the utterance, Khomeini recast himself as the Defender of the Faith and shifted focus from his dealings with Hussein to the outrage of a novelist's heresy.

While I never heard the expected news of Rushdie's murder, what I didn't know about until reading the Hitchens article, was the deaths of "supporting cast" players.

The fatwa didn't merely suborn Rushdie's murder, but was "fat" enough to encompass those "involved in its publication."  Khomeini might have tossed in those "who read the blasphemous text," too, had that not opened the door on complicated explanations about whether or not he had read the offending novel himself.  If so, he'd call for his own death.  If not, how could he know?

The Japanese translator of Rushdie's novel, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death.  Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was knifed in Milan.  And The Satanic Verses publisher in Norway, William Nygaard, was shot thrice in the back outside his home in Oslo.

After reading about the plot of the lyrical novel, it has intrigued me enough to read the object of all the controversy, the frothy calls for censorship, the religious indignation -- except it was not to be found at the few HPB stores I visited.

Instead, I picked up and carried around the 2007 edition of the Houghton Mifflin Best American Essays, edited by David Foster Wallace, whose 2008 death was a profound disappoint me to me.  

Just a few days before his death, I spoke with a friend about Wallace's measured and thorough "Host" essay. We both praised it for being informative and fascinating.  It not only gave me a lot to consider, but I felt it armed me with new, detailed insight where I previously had none at all.

(Read the essay here.) [1]

Typically, death is a tragedy.[2]  I mean, there is always grief for those survivors left to make sense of the loss.  The perplexity of processing it is compounded in cases of suicide.  (I was also inexplicably affected by Spalding Gray’s suicide. [3]) Answer-searching seems more complex, more futile when the deceased was not the victim of a random accident, disease, medical complication, or other likely causes of demise -- ones that can be accounted for, even if it is ascribed to the profound misfortune of time and place wherein a freak accident cuts a life short.[4]

Then, I spied on the shelf an edition of the Billy Collins book of poems, Picnic, Lightning, which had one of my favorite pastoral paintings for cover art:  “Newburyport Meadows,” by Martin Johnson Heade.  For years I have been a fan of Billy Collins, whose poetry never fails to buoy me with phrases and imagery.  The serendipity of the cover art suggested perhaps I should purchase that book instead of the essay collection.

But, the quest concluded when I found a book I have wanted for some time, Fred Kaplan’s 1959: The Year that Changed Everything.

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[1] Though it was originally published in Atlantic Monthly, I read the article in the collection New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass of NPR and Public Radio International's This American Life.

[2] I say "typically" because for some persons severely wounded -- on a battlefield or in a remote area, for example -- or inflicted with a painful and terminal illness, there seems to be some comfort for survivors knowing their loved one is no longer suffering.  And, for a would-be assassin killed in the act of attempted murder, tragedy hardly seems the appropriate word.

[3]  I read an article about Gray that revealed some of his habits and perceptions...and some of the circumstances that led up to his disappearance.  Previous to that, he already held some fascination to me in his talent as a monologist.  It was heartbreaking to imagine what his wife and children were coping with in his final months, throughout the period of his disappearance, and beyond the discover of his body.  But, Gray’s suicide came as no real surprise, though the finality of such an act reverberates through the emotional landscape of all who knew and cared for him.

(Read the article on Spalding Gray -- "Vanishing Act" -- from New York Magazine.)

[4]  I certainly don't intend to imply there aren't complex and seemingly unanswerable questions of survivors (i.e., friends and family) from non-suicide deaths.  It's just that the purposefulness of the deceased's actions is at once angering and inexplicable -- and, in some ways, a thing survivors are likely to wrestle with and continually imagine how they might have said or done something differently to redirect the deceased from that option to another one that involved living.