Entries from August 2004 ↓

Carmel-by-the-sea is a little seaside town that appears to consist entirely of quaint little shops that sell very, very expensive things. Every third storefront is an art gallery: abstract sculpture emporiums crammed cheek-by-jowl against purveyors of modernist watercolors, or wedged between elaborate rug/tapestry vendors. Lots of quaint restaurants too, with European names that start with chez and sur and end with words that use our God-given American vowels in ways that the Founders never intended.

We drove into Carmel under a canopy of cloud, the first obstruction between us and the sun that we’d encountered since our arrival in California. This was a bummer, to say the least, because Carmel was going to be our beach destination. There was to be much lolling about in sun, much coaxing of the moribund melanin in our skins into darker shades. But it was not to be. The fog roiled above us the entire time, leaving not much to do but stare into shops and sully the pristine driveways of rich people with our presence. This is where I should say something to show that I’m Making The Best of Things, such as: “But I learned a lot about ancient Croatian Pottery!”, or “At least we haven’t drowned in a freak tsunami!” or “Boy, it’s a good thing I didn’t contract a life-threatening disease!” But fuck that. I don’t like making the best of things. It sucked.

We went to Big Sur next, which most definitely did not suck. We’d seen some big redwoods at Yosemite a couple of days earlier, but, really, I can’t get enough of these behemoths. Standing at the bottom of one and looking up, or peering into the cavernous cavities at their bases, is a huge, unyielding thrill.

We visited Muir Woods two days later, another sequoia enclave that was just as cool, but in a completely different way. The forest here was dense, and the branches met above us to filter the sunlight into a kind of ubiquitous, sourceless autumn glow. Lots of the trees were gathered together in faintly druidical circles, which gave the scene a sort of ancient gravity. The effect wasn’t so much unremitting massiveness as peaceful, arboreal calm, which was a nice tonic to the week’s hurly-burly.

One of the best things about Muir, though, was the information desk we passed on the way in, because no one was manning it. This gave me an opportunity to slip behind it and put on my park ranger hat — which looked a little bit like a filthy Florida Marlins cap, but close enough — and answer some questions.

A lady came by and asked me what makes the redwoods red. I told her that we feed them tourists every night, and the red is human blood sucking up into the trunk through their clawed, grasping roots. Another lady asked how old the oldest one was, and I said about four gajillion years, give or take a jillion. She looked at me quizzically and I said ok maybe four trintillion years. She said I find that hard to believe, so I said it was some multiple of four, and that it was a lot. She said do you work here, and I pointed at my Marlins cap and said what do you think? A guy asked me where the bathroom was and I pointed at the five-hundred year old tree behind me and told him that if he really felt the need to relieve himself on a lifeform that was his elder by several centuries, then he should go right ahead. I didn’t have a good answer for the last guy, though, because he said get the hell out of my seat you little bastard, which isn’t really a question. It’s more of an order.

Over the bridge, next, and into San Francisco, which turned out to be a canted wonderland. We mostly walked around in Chinatown, where everything sits at a crazy angle on the insanely steep streets, and everything’s crammed together so tightly that it all sort of morphs into one big blob of frantic mercantilism, which is too bad. It strikes me as the kind of city that’s better to live in than it is to visit: you could feel the heft of the place, a profound cultural density. Really, though, that’s just speculation. All I really know about San Francisco is that Chinatown is crowded, the streets are slanted, and the Golden Gate Bridge is way cool to walk across. Hopefully we’ll have time to get back there, soon. I’d like to become better acquainted.

And now our California Adventure is over. As I write this, we are hurtling eastward in a winged silver cigar, bumping over divots in the jetstream. I am in negotiations with my memory over how much of this past week it will consent to remember. My memory is like San Francisco, in a way: dense and cramped and tilted and way too small to contain everything that wants to live in it. I think I’ve gotten it to agree to 75% retention, a sizable and impressive figure, but I had to agree to part with what little Calculus I remember, along with the first two verses of The Raven. I think that’s fair.

There isn’t much to say about Yosemite that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. You drive into the park and wind down narrow tortuous roads into a valley. You park. You get out of your car, and fuss with your luggage, and slam the trunk, and look up, and see that you’re in a low place between sheer walls of rock, 10000 feet high, and your breath leaves your body in a rush, and suddenly you feel very, very small.

We stayed at Camp Curry, which is a crowded warren of closely-spaced dwellings called tent cabins: essentially tiny rooms with canvas walls, wood floors, a bed, a chair, a little nightstand, and a single bare bulb with a pull cord. It was clean, simple, spartan, and — to my surprise and infinite relief — very pleasant. I’ve hated camping since I was a kid. I like having an Inside to flee to after I’ve had enough of Outside, and tents were never Inside enough for me. Throw in the insects, the weather, and the atavistic terror of the unknown, and you’ve got an extreme case of anti-camping-proclivity.

But this was nothing like camping. There were bathrooms and showers nearby, and stores and a dining room with a predictably overpriced buffet. It was almost like being in a hotel, except you had to walk a while to take a piss, and you could cut holes in your walls if you didn’t feel like using the door.

Actually, though, there was one little detail that made it not so much like being in a hotel, and that detail was called bears. Or, more precisely, the constant danger of being eaten by bears. We had to stow our food in special bear-proof lockers, and not in our cabin, and not in our car, or — the signs said — the bears would know. And they would come, and they would tear through our walls, and they would pry open our car, and they would eat our food. And, if we happen to be between them and our food, they would do whatever was necessary to make sure we stopped being between them and our food.

This I didn’t like so much. I realize it’s true that I’m far more likely to die on the highway on the way to work every day than in the jaws of a bear, I find the thought of being eviscerated by one unpleasant.

My wife, however, is made of stronger stuff than I am. As soon as she heard about the bears, her eyes lit up, and she smiled, and she said: “Ooo. Bears. We’re going to see bears.” I reminded her that the objective was not to see bears, and she nodded, and asked if I thought bears liked Pringles. I said it was immaterial, because the Pringles would be in the bear-proof lockers, along with all the other food. She nodded and said that Pringles probably weren’t pungent enough to attract them, and maybe we should use the strawberries instead, which were very ripe. I said that the strawberries would also be in the bear-proof locker. She nodded and said we should probably use both: we would surround our tent cabin with a low wall of Pringles, and smear its sides with strawberry paste. She thought that would get us at least three bears. She thought three was a good number.

I did manage to convince her to stow all our food far away from us, eventually; and, that night, I also managed to dissuade her from putting on a bacon suit and going out in the parking lot with a flashlight, making bear calls. In fact, we lasted three days and two nights without any bear sightings, or bear damage to our car or our persons.

The days consisted mostly of hikes up and down the mountains. Once again, words fail me here. It’s not enough to describe the scenery, the impossibly high mountains, the trees, the grazing deer, the flowers and the meadows and the waterfalls and everything else, because you also need to describe the feeling those things engender in your gut: a sort of vertiginous, butterfly-in-your-stomach feeling, a perched-on-the-edge-of-eternity kind of a thing. A place like Yosemite isn’t just materially daunting: it’s temporally vast, too. You look up at half-dome, with a peak that looks like a bisected sphere, one half rounded, the other sheer and flat, and you marvel not just at the hugeness and tallness of it, but at the thousands and thousands of years it took to make it that way. It makes you feel tiny in every way it’s possible to feel tiny.

I was a little sad to go, which was also surprising. The clamor for Inside was just a dull hum in my head, by then. I wish I’d taken a picture of the tent cabin, just to steady it in my mind. I have no idea what my memory will do to this place, if it’ll even bother to store it. I hope so. These past few days have really seemed full, a crazy experiential cornucopia. Time really does slow down when you’re not doing the same damn thing all the time.

Next: Carmel-by-the-sea. Beachfront, antique stores, pounding surf, quaintness, and no bears.

I am standing under a jet of cold water, staring blearily at nothing, trying to herd my senses into some semblance of order. My body is in full revolt.

Do you know what time it is? it says, incredulous.

Mmmphhhh, I say, because my speech centers have yet to come online.

Two thirty. It’s two fucking thirty. In the morning. Why are we awake?

Vacation, I manage. Airplane. 6:00.

Why did you get such early tickets?

Cheap.

Cheap our ass. If you don’t get back in bed right now I’m going to make the rest of your day a living hell.

Shut up.

My entire left side goes numb.

How do you like that, tough guy? And that’s just for starters. You’re in a middle seat on the plane, aren’t you? I could arrange it so that you have an unbearable urge to pee the entire time. Ok? How would you like that? How would you like to be barfing from the moment we take off to the moment we land?

If you don’t shut the fuck up I’m not feeding you breakfast.

Silence. My body likes breakfast. It likes it a lot.

Finally: Ok, fine. But I’m putting us to sleep at 8:00 tonight. No matter what.

Whatever.

I turn off the shower, stumble into the bedroom, pull my pants over my head and step into my shirt. My wife is wide awake. In fact, she hasn’t gone to sleep; she has an uncanny ability go nocturnal, at will. I eat a quick breakfast, then go downstairs to put the suitcase in the car.

But I can’t lift it. I curse, bend at the knees, heave upwards. It shifts a couple of inches, then settles back into place.

God damn it, body. I thought we had an agreement.

Don’t blame me, dude. I’m doing the best I can.

So I wrestle the suitcase onto a scale, and discover, to my horror, that it weights seventy pounds. Seventy. I have no idea how we managed to fit seventy pounds of stuff into this thing, but it’s a real problem: not just because I can’t lift it, but because the airline is going to charge us grievously for going twenty pounds over our weight limit.

We have to repack.

I look at the clock. We also need to be out the door in ten minutes.

This is Crisis the First.

My wife is a master repacker, though, and fifteen minutes later we’ve got things more equitably split between the big and small suitcases. I pause briefly to reflect on the sad fact that we’re taking two goddamn suitcases for seven days of vacation, then let it go and throw everything in the car.

We drive to my brother’s house, who, in his infinite kindness, has agreed to wake up at 4:30 to drive us to the airport. He hops in, and five minutes later, we’re on 95, barreling toward BWI. We get there in good time, say our goodbyes, stand in a ridiculously long security line, put our stuff on the security belt, remove our shoes, submit to various cavity searches, sign a statement pledging eternal fealty to Emperor Bush, and we’re through, and on the plane.

It’s an Airbus, which means that I have to contort my body in strange and unnatural positions just to get in my seat, and then sit with my knees drawn up to my chest and my head pressed into my lap. This has to be a violation of some Geneva convention or another. I make a mental note to complain to someone, about something.

The plane takes off, without incident. The seatbelt sign goes off. My wife falls asleep. The cabin attendants come by bearing drinks and I order tea for both of us. My wife wakes up, sips her tea. Falls asleep. Wakes up, sips her tea. Falls asleep. Wakes up and dumps the entire contents on her tea on my lap.

This is Crisis the Second.

As crises go, this really isn’t much of one, but it is quite uncomfortable. Not just because of the several layers of skin that boil off of my thighs in the immediate aftermath of the spillage, but also because the tea that doesn’t soak into my jeans seeps down onto my seat and settles there. In the past, whenever I contemplated the prospect of sitting in a tepid lake of sticky brown liquid, I’d always come to the conclusion that it would probably be very unpleasant. In this, I was correct.

Thankfully, we have a layover in Chicago. We get off the plane, spend twenty minutes eating breakfast and wandering around. My seat is dry when we go back, which is good, but no bigger, which is bad. I swiss-army-knife my body into a little ball and slide into the seat and spend the next four and a half hours watching my various extremities, starved of blood, go numb and shut down.

But it’s worth it. When the plane finally lands, we step off of it and into a perfect San Jose day. The forecast calls for cloudy skies, but all I see is a tiny speck of something in a corner in the endless azure bowl above us. Maybe this qualifies as a cloudy day in Northern California. I don’t know. But the humidity is nill, the temperature just absolutely perfect, the sun round and yellow and bright. I squint into it, looking for the happy face, because this is a storybook day, and suns always have happy faces in storybook days.

The next stop is the rental car. We go into Hertz, claim our reservation without incident, then wheel our large and ungainly and less-than-fifty-pound luggage out to the numbered spot. And there find, resplendent in its behemothishness, a shiny new SUV.

This is Crisis the Third.

Again, more of a crisis of conscience than a real crisis. The problem is this: I spend a good portion of my day complaining about SUVs — their ridiculous size, pathetic mileage, general eco-unfriendliness — and the braindead twisted government regulations that make them possible. And yet I stand here with a pair of SUV keys in my hands, and I find the prospect of driving one of these things strangely … attractive. To be up so much higher than everyone else, to be able to bump over large rocks and through bogs and quicksand, to be a real manly man on the road — it’s all very exciting.

My rationalization engine immediately kicks in. It’s only for a week, it says. And you’re going to Yosemite, you’ll probably need it to get through all those impassible backwoods and stuff.

But we’re going to Yosemite Valley, I remind it. It’s a tourist trap. Paved roads. Parking lots.

Right. But what if there’s an earthquake?

How’s an SUV going to help in an earthquake?

You know. It’ll get us over the rubble and the … chasms. And the molten lava. It pauses. Because there might be a volcano too. Pause. That we need to escape from. Pause. And then: Just get the goddam SUV. You know you want to.

I do. But, in the end, my deep-seated fear of hypocrisy wins out, and we go back in and get the keys for what they claim is the only other available car: a Chevy Aveo. Although they do not say so, this is a punishment for refusing their SUV. Because Aveo is to SUV as ant is to Earth. It’s one of those tiny sawed-off looking cars, rising from a longish snout to end abruptly at a blunt and premature backside. It’s the kind of car that clowns pass over as too cramped when they go shopping for clown cars. Chevy somehow managed to get four doors on it, though, and the trunk can handle all our luggage. Good enough.

On our way to the hotel, we pass, to my inexpressible (and inexplicable) delight, the headquarters of many tech companies who have thusfar been nothing more than names and bytecode and streams of HTML to me: BEA, Sun, eBay, and many, many more. Later on we’ll make a pilgrimage to Apple headquarters, less than twenty miles away in the holy city of Cupertino. My inner geek begins to cavort like an over-caffeinated toddler, to vibrate like a struck tuning fork. We’re home, it says. We’re finally home.

I stroke it, and say sweet things to it, and don’t mention that tomorrow we’re going to be far, far away from home, in the middle of Yosemite, where cell phones don’t work and wireless networks have never, ever existed. We’ll be surrounded by Nature. I don’t say this to my inner geek, because I don’t want to scare it. It’ll find out soon enough, poor thing.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email, sat down and tapped out what would go down in history as the first email message ever sent. It went something like this:

    QWERTYUIOP.

As it turns out, this profoundly uninteresting missive did not have a great distance to travel: only as far as the other computer on Mr. Tomlinson’s desk. Still, in that short journey, the Internet’s first killer app was born.

This much is known, a matter of public record. Lost in the histories, however, is the role of a certain Gerald Dicklebread, Mr. Tomlinson’s apprentice. He was a dim, unpleasant man who hid his bottomless reserves of malice behind the saccharine smile of a flatterer and hanger-on. He had attached himself to Mr. Tomlinson as a volunteer factotum, and skulked about his offices, lank of limb and squinty of eye, forcing his menial services on that great man. Although he contributed exactly nothing to the development of the first email application, he was shocked that he received no credit for the invention. And, in the fetid crucible of his wicked mind, the shock developed slowly into anger, and Dicklebread began to plot the downfall of his enemy, and more than that: the downfall of Email Itself.

For many years, he lay low, waiting for his chance. And, when he saw that computers were beginning to move out of the cloistered corridors of academe into the business world, he decided it was time to act.

He approached a company called Lotus, which was just beginning to develop a new application that promised to link together disparate parts of large organizations. They wanted an email client. Dicklebread, rising from the bog of spent sycophants, appeared at their offices, flashing his dubious credentials and his sickly smile. They hired him, and he immediately set to work creating the worst email client on earth. A client that, once released, would be so horrific to behold, so impossible to use, so vomitously unattractive, that its users would begin to regress to more primitive forms of communication, setting up complex networks of cups and strings, passenger pigeons, smokesignals — anything rather than spend another instant in this program’s vile embrace.

It was called Lotus Notes. And it was to be the Death of Email.

Dicklebread’s methods were as brilliant as they were evil. His first and most important task was to sink his users into a constant state of befuddlement and dismay, even when they were trying to perform the simplest tasks. He created menus with nonsensical headers containing items with no relationship to the one another, or to the menu itself. He spread operations on the same object across multiple menus, often hiding the most important of them in dusty basement submenus. And, for his coup de grace, he contrived to change the content of the menus, based on where the user was in the application.

But he didn’t stop there. His next step was to thwart every principle of good user interface design, to consciously go against all the de facto standards that were emerging in the industry. Thus were born custom tree controls, more ugly than functional; command histories that hide behind simple labels, indistinguishable from actual labels; tabbed windows with no tabs; horrible file browsers that hearken back to the brief ice age of graphical desktops; a calendar page that wastes 20% of its real estate on bright color photographs of doors and windows, to no apparent purpose. And so on, a grim litany of abysmal user interfaces that do their job badly, when they do their job at all.

And then there are the things that just don’t work, or work only sporadically, or don’t do what they’re supposed to when they do work. Calendar alerts that don’t; automated “out of office” email responders that wait until their user is back before they tell anyone he’s gone; an editor that does strange things at odd times, screwing up your formatting at the slightest provocation, and giving you only one level of undo to reverse the damage.

All in all, a terrible, terrible product. As bad as it could possibly be. One feels filthy after using it, as if one has just waded through a pit of ancient snot littered with soiled underthings and used bandages to get to one’s mailbox, all the while being sodomized by minotaurs.

Thankfully, however, most people have not even seen this poor Frankenstein’s monster of an email client. Although Notes did manage to proliferate throughout the business world, it failed to get any kind of a foothold among home users, the demographic that put the boom in the internet boom. Other, more worthy clients emerged, ones not dedicated to destroying the very medium for which they were written. Email survived.

But Dicklebread is still out there; he’s simply moved on to different, more nefarious methods. Now, you see him every day in your inbox: he is the ads for penis enlargement, for dietary supplements, for cheap prescription drugs, exercise equipment, scalped concert tickets. And, if the industry is ever able to create a mechanism smart enough to remove the scourge of spam without hobbling email itself, he will find another avenue of attack.

It’s just something we have to accept as inevitable, like death and gravity. As long as there is email, there will be Dicklebread.

I’m trying to think of something tasteful and appropriate to write on this card, which will soon be affixed to a wedding gift I’m sending to one of my best friends. Of course, it’s not just for him, it’s for him and his lovely bride-to-be. So I have to be careful about what I write. It’s difficult, it really is.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Congratulations on your special day. May this gift illuminate your lives and bring warmth and joy to your new home.

Oh my god that’s lame. If I send him that he’ll definitely rat me out to the League of Guys, and I’ll be XYCommunicated. How about this:

Bet you can’t guess what’s inside this package. Here’s a hint: it rhymes with FENDER!

Oh my god that’s rhymes-with-dame. How about this:

If man is five / if man is five / if man is five Then the devil is six / then the devil is six / then the devil is six And if the devil is six Then GOD IS SEVEN Then GOD IS SEVEN Then GOD IS SEVEN

Well, that’s way cool, but kind of off-topic. Maybe something a little more gift-oriented:

This is by far the best gift you two will ever receive. I hope you cherish it forever. Frankly, I can’t image that you won’t. It’s that good.

I like that: forceful, self-assured. Kind of sets them up for a big disappointment, given that it’s a blender and all, but from the moment they read the note to the moment they tear open the wrapping paper, they’re going to be some pretty excited newlyweds.

Ok. I’m no closer to coming up with a message, and this order screen is about to time out. It’s late. All I can think of are hackneyed wedding tropes. So maybe this:

Platitude platitude cliche platitude saccharine sentiment platitude blender cliche cliche. Hope you platitude platitude platitude. Hackneyed trope. Platitude.

Yes. That’ll do nicely. Heartfelt, but restrained. Tasteful. I’m done. Time for bed.

This just absolutely fucking kills me.

I switched parties so I could vote for McCain in the primaries in 2000. I became a Republican for this guy. I disagreed with him more than I agreed with him, but I thought he was gutsy and principled and smart and genuinely honest.

And I suppose I still do. But he’s apparently chosen to sacrifice all of those things on the altar of party loyalty. It’s just sickening. What the hell are you thinking, John? What was I thinking?

This weekend, for the second time in our almost-decade of marriage, my wife convinced me to go to a salon-type establishment to get my hair cut. I usually go to the Hair Slaughtery near our house, where Priscilla shears me quickly and competently with the ruthless efficiency of an inveterate hater-of-hair. It looks fine afterwards — not movie-star fine, granted, but it’s not sitting on a movie-star head. There’s no need for movie-star fine.

Which is what I tried to explain to my wife. She shook her head and said: “Look at it. It’s shapeless.”

“It’s shape-challenged,” I said, patting it gently. “You’re hurting its feelings.”

The truth is, I kind of wanted to try something new. Just to see. Because, every so often, one tries to exceed one’s fate-ordained limitations, surge against the boundaries of self-image toward some imagined higher plane. Which is dangerous. The boundaries of self-image are a rubber band: they yield a little bit, for a little while, briefly allowing you access to something better before thwanging you back into your rightful place. Hard.

But I never learn. So I went.

It was a nice place; it had a quiet, subdued professional air about it, and nice lighting, and an actual front desk with an actual greeter behind it and a sign with a long catalog of services complete with a really startling list of prices. I was escorted to the back, where a friendly lady washed my hair with something sweet-smelling, for like five minutes. That’s the most hair-washing I’ve ever experienced in a single sitting. It was very cool.

The lady who cut my hair was very sweet, and seemed extremely competent. As soon as I sat down, she rummaged through my hair, fluffing it around, digging through heaped uneven masses of it, searching for some sort of pattern to follow. Tentatively, she said: “Short on the sides?” I nodded. “Parted to the left?” I shrugged.

She began.

Half an hour later, she stopped.

Half an hour.

I can’t begin to understand why it had to take that long, but I understand the mechanics of why it did. She was incredibly meticulous. Usually, it’s shears to the back and side, some careful snipping up top, and done. But not this time. She used the shears, but I think she went through three different settings, and instead of just swiping it up and down, she sort of nudged gently at my head, almost apologetically, as if raking a zen garden.

And it got even slower when she took out the scissors. She snipped carefully at my hair, cutting tiny bits off at a time, like an archaeologist carefully unearthing some buried tomb. The hair fluttered down to my lap in tiny little bits, not the large wads of heather to which I’ve become accustomed. She’d snip, stand back, appraise, snip again. I stared off into the middle distance and listened as the interval between snips drew further and further apart.

She finished, finally, and turned me to face myself. My chair had been angled almost parallel to the mirror, so I didn’t actually see much of what was happening to my head. After all that time, I was expecting something really, amazingly, profoundly spectacular.

But here’s the thing: my hair looked the same as it always did after a haircut. A little less short, maybe, but basically the same.

I smiled, thanked her, tipped her, went to the front desk, signed off on the second mortgage, paid. Left feeling lighter of head, lighter of wallet, and kind of stupid.

So in summary: I got a haircut that cost three times more than it usually does, took three times longer than it usually does, and came out with a head of hair looking largely the same as it usually does.

My wife thought otherwise. She exclaimed with delight. She pawed and patted and circled in wonder. “Wow,” she said. “It looks great.”

“Then it must always look great. Because it looks the same as it always does.”

“Think about what you just said.”

“I know. It’s ridiculous.”

“Trust me. It looks amazing.”

I looked in the mirror this morning, and, really, it actually looks a little worse than usual. It’s flat and aggressively, dweebishly parted now. I just don’t get it.

So the question is: why does my wife insist that this newly-sheared head of hair, identical to my usual newly-sheared head of hair, look so much better? Why has she decreed that I must never patronize the Slaughtery, ever again?

I have three theories:

1. She’s beginning to realize that, as I move into middle age, I am slowly developing into the seething, Adonis-like slab of pure male sexuality that’s always been lurking just beneath my skin, and that the ladies will soon come a-flocking. And she’s trying to sabotage me by disrupting the natural flowering of my Herculean locks with expensive, dweeb-hair-inducing salon visits.
2. She’s engaged in wishful thinking. She wanted so badly for this haircut to improve things that she’s refusing to admit that it hasn’t.
3. She’s right, and it actually is better.

Because I’m the sporadically optimistic type, I first explored the possibility that it’s (1), and my advancing age is doing wonders for my appearance. So this morning I unshrouded my mirrors and took a good, long look at myself, and … no, it’s not (1).

That leaves wishful thinking (2) and truth (3). Both seem equally unlikely. My wife is much more ruthlessly observant than I am, and I yield to her in all matters that require visual assessment, or any sort of sense of style or taste. So it can’t be (2).

So it must be (3).

But it isn’t. It definitely isn’t.

Aaargh. I guess I’m just going to have to chalk this one up to the ineffable, and leave it alone. That’s what you get with you go messing with your hair routine. It’s nothing but trouble.

But this I do know: next month will find me in my old chair at the Slaughtery, watching Priscilla hack at my head with her shearing cutlasses, venting her directionless, deep-seated aggression on my hair. It’s the way it was meant to be.

Thom Yorke on the lyrics for “We Suck Young Blood”, which he wrote while Radiohead was recording Hail to the Thief in Los Angeles:

It’s got a sex thing about it — sex being a form of currency in Hollywood. There’s a malignant quality to it — a dark force devouring everything in its path. It’s an expression of that desperate urge to be somebody at any cost, even if it means being preyed on and sucked dry by every scheming parasite in the world. You find examples of this in the music industry and the porn industry but it could just as easily relate to the way the extreme right seduce young people to enlist in their ranks. Fascism starts with the embittered 50 year old sado-masochist who finds dysfunctional teenagers who he then works on for a couple of years until they become transformed into homicidal little skinhead motherfuckers.

Damn.

There was a tree of hands.

It stood outside of Sally’s house in the harrowing heat of July, and its leaves were hands.

All manner of hands.

Pink and fat, brown and cracked, fine and alabaster white. Calloused hands, clawed angry hands, long and lithe hands.

And when the wind blew, the hands fluttered together. Breezes brought thin smatterings of polite applause; high winds a great clapping din, as at the end of a great Opera, or a marvelous speech. And sometimes, in the kind of odd twisting winds the blew plastic bags in tight spirals, the hands just shook and snapped their fingers, like jazzmen.

Sally was ten years old. She was small and shy and quiet.

Very quiet.

So quiet, that when she spoke you couldn’t hear her unless the rest of the world was silent.

And the rest of the world is never silent.

So you could never hear her.

She’d come with her family the year before, in the wintertime. The tree was just trunk and branches, then, denuded and bare, and when the snow fell it looked like the skeleton of a great fire.

Her family moved around a lot. Her father was in the Army.

But he didn’t kill people.

He just moved around a lot.

And every time they moved, Sally became more shy, and harder to hear.

When she was very young, she had lots of friends. But she discovered that having friends was difficult, because she lost them when her father moved them away to a new place.

They became memories of friends.

And memories of friends were worse than no friends at all.

So she withdrew from the world, and said very little, to very few people. And when she did speak, she spoke very softly. Too softly for anyone to hear.

Which was the same thing as not speaking at all, her parents told her, looking worried and sad.

But it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. Because Sally was a poet.

Everything she saw and heard and felt became words in her mind.

And not just words.

The right words.

The only words.

And she knew, instinctively, how to weave them together, and how to make poems and songs out of them.

But when she sang those songs, she sang them very softly, and only to herself.

One day, on her way to school, she found Mindy Cohen sitting on her backpack, on the sidewalk, crying. Mindy cried a lot. Her Dad was in bed, at home, dying slowly of a slow disease.

Sally stopped, and put her hand on Mindy’s shoulder, and said:

    Sorrow is a child of joy     As joy is a child of sorrow     And they will renew each other     Like the Seasons     Forever.

But Mindy didn’t hear her.

On her parents’ tenth anniversary, her mother put on a new dress, and did her hair, and came into Sally’s room laughing and posing. Sally had never seen her mother smile like that, or dress like that, or move with such grace and joy. She was beautiful.

So when her mother asked how she looked, Sally said:

    There is the easy, breathless beauty of youth     And there is the deep, quiet beauty of age     And there is a place in between, where both live     And you are that place.

But her mother didn’t hear her.

No one heard her.

Except the tree.

One afternoon, on her way home from school, Sally decided to make the day into words: the blue sky and the cottonball clouds, the sun and the grass and the trees. She wove a song out of all of them, a perfect tapestry. She passed many people on the way, and they smiled at her, because she was pretty and sweet, but they didn’t hear her song.

She came to her house, and turned up the walk and went past the tree, still whispering the words that were forming in her mind.

And the tree began to clap.

At first, Sally didn’t even notice, because she’d heard it clapping many times before.

But then she saw that the day did not have any wind in it. The afternoon was hot and breathless, and there was no wind.

She stopped singing.

The tree stopped clapping.

So she began again, earth and sky, birdsong and the faint scent of magnolias, and once again the tree’s leaves moved together, applauding her. The applause grew louder and louder, and rose to a rustling crescendo just as she finished.

She bowed, and then courtesied, and then bowed again, and laughed. And touched the tree, lightly, and said: Thank you.

The next day she went to the tree and sang a quiet song about herself. It was full of sadness and hope and longing, and the tree clapped louder than it had the day before, and did not stop until she went in the house.

Every day a new song, and every day a fresh round of applause.

And every day her confidence grew, and her songs deepened and spread and moved into unexplored and unexpected places.

One evening, on the last day of summer, she looked out her bedroom window and saw that all the hands in the tree of hands were waving at her.

She waved back. And she knew, without knowing how she knew, that she was waving goodbye.

The next morning, when she came out of the house, she saw that the hands were sagging, dull and lifeless. They’d turned a coppery shade of red, and become desiccated and brittle in the night.

Sally sang to them, but they didn’t move. As she watched, one of them dropped off and floated slowly to the ground.

Tears stung her eyes and crept down her cheeks. She stepped forward and put her arms around the tree.

And the hands fell around her, like rain.

She stood there for a long time, until her mother came out of the house, and put a hand on her shoulder, and said it was time to go to school now.

So she did. But all she could think about, all day, was her tree.

When she came home, in the afternoon, she found that all the hands but one had fallen off. They lay in a soft mound around the base of the tree. It seemed naked without them.

She began to cry.

Mindy Cohen was walking by, on her way home from school. She stopped and said: Are you ok?

Sally shook her head. She said: My friends are gone.

She said it loudly, in a clear, measured voice. A lovely voice.

Mindy opened her mouth and did not close it. Sally had spoken. Speechless Sally. Spoken.

You can talk, said Mindy.

I could always talk, said Sally, listening to her voice. She decided that she liked it.

Then why didn’t you? said Mindy.

Because I didn’t think anyone would want to listen, she said. And then she said: Would you like to come inside and play?

Mindy nodded. They went up the walk to her front door. But before she went in, Sally looked back at the tree, and mouthed the words: Thank you.

And the tree heard. The last hand, a small thin delicate hand, just like hers, lifted itself and waved once, twice, then fell away, and floated serenely to the ground below.

Sally smiled, and went into the house with her new friend.

A rare moment of complete honesty from George W Bush:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Maybe Kerry really should step back and just let this guy implode.