Entries from August 2005 ↓

I’m making some changes to some really old software whose license ran out some time ago. As a result, whenever I want to test my stuff, I need to set my computer’s clock back two years, or the server won’t even start. This has led to some very strange behavior:

1. When I bring up my browser and go to the Washington Post, it shows me a bunch of two-year-old stories. I read about the upcoming presidential elections, the Enron debacle, the Martha Stewart trial.

2. When I send email to people, the responses I get back are preplexing. A guy I met last week claims not to know who I am. My aunt and uncle in Texas politely ask me what I’m talking about when I write to thank them for their hospitality on my recent vacation. My wife firmly reminds me that our upcoming anniversary is our ninth, not our eleventh.

3. When I go looking for files that I just saved, I can’t find them, or the directories they used to be in. Two years worth of work is gone; it never existed.

And so on. I set the time back five years, ten years, more. The operating system changes, becomes Windows NT, then Windows 95, then Windows 3.1. My browser becomes Netscape, then Mosaic, then Lynx, then disappears. I’m looking at a black screen with a command line and a little white cursor, blinking implacably. Everything gets slower. I’m communicating with the Internet via dialup, then not at all. My computer swells in size until it takes up half my cube, and the hard drive blurps out of its casing and becomes two spinning reels, and then a wax drum. A technician in a white labcoat and thick black-rimmed glasses appears beside it and starts pulling vacuum tubes. My keyboard vanishes, is replaced by a stack of punchcards. The monitor melts down into a chattering teletype machine.

And now there’s nothing but an abacus sitting on my desk. I move the beads around, trying to figure out how to set its clock, but it doesn’t appear to have one. I think I’ve reached the point of no return.

I guess this means it’s time for lunch.

The Cockroach Hall of Fame isn’t much to look at it — just a little glass case crammed into a narrow Pest Control shop in a nondescript shopping center in Plano. The case contains dead roaches posed and dressed up in various configurations. There’s Liberochi, and Marilyn Monroach, and H Ross Peroach. Imelda Markoroach has little gold shoes on the ends of each of her narrow, chitinous legs. Elvis Proachley’s little white jacket is studded with shiny little rhinestones.

We’d been looking forward to this visit ever since we read about it in the Post a couple of weeks ago, so the experience was, almost inevitably, just a touch anticlimactic. Not sure what kind of climax I was looking for in a display of deceased roaches, but whatever I hoped for, it wasn’t quite there.

Still, I can now cross “See Dead Roaches in Funny Outfits” off of my 100 Things To Do Before I Die list. Next up: “Visit Richard Simmons Short Shorts Museum.”

I’m sitting above the Riverwalk in San Antonio, sipping a Frappucino, watching a small flock of pigeons gathering at my wife’s feet and staring up at her muffin. These are Texas pigeons, which means they’re about two times the size of normal pigeons, and that they’re staunch supporters of George W Bush.

Actually, the easy generalizations don’t apply down here; they never do, but in this case they seem to apply even less than usual. There is a President George Bush Turnpike that I’ve been forced to drive down on several occasions, as well as large pro-life billboards littering the route down from Dallas to San Antonio, and stuff like that — but none of the in-your-face, bright red conservatism I was expecting to encounter.

In fact, if there is any lesson to be drawn from a vacation that has consisted chiefly of lounging, chatting, eating, and laughing, it’s this: politics are a blight on the soul, and have nothing important to contribute to your life. I used to think that politics were your innermost beliefs made manifest, but I was wrong. They’re informed by your beliefs, but they don’t really represent them, at least not for long; they’re too tainted by cynicism and corruption and the ambient shrillness of the chatterati to represent much of anything at all. What they can do, however, is serve as a kind of malign feedback mechanism that soils your actual opinions with dogmatism and bile. There’s no agreeing to disagree in this charged climate; you stake a position and cling to it as if your life depended on it, swatting down rational discussions and reasoned counter-arguments like some sort of ideological king kong, clutching the Faye Wray of your true beliefs in …

Ug. Ok. That’s enough of that. The point is, no political discussions have occurred during this past week, and I barely got worked up about any of W’s latest outrages. Which was nice.

On Sunday we attended what was probably the best sermon I’ve ever heard. It was a church in Frisco, Texas, one of those huge modern ones with indoor-stadium seating and armies of greeters and kiosks outside the sanctuary advertising church services. A friendly place filled with friendly people and no sharp edges.

But the sermon was something else entirely. The subject was the significance of being created in God’s image, and it was unsentimental, hard, uncompromising. The pastor spent a lot of time parsing his way through a few verses from Genesis; in particular, he pointed out the difference between being created in the image of God, and being created as the image of god. Both formulations appear in various places in the bible: the former means that we kind of look like God, that we’re sort of flawed, stunted mini-gods; the latter means that we’re manifestations, earthly expressions, of God’s will. Or something like that. I don’t think I totally got it, but I find these kinds of exegeses fascinating, despite the fact that the original text has been redacted and scrambled and transcribed and translated and stretched so many times over the centuries that I can’t imagine how any of the language’s original subtleties could have possibly survived.

So that was cool; not earth-shattering or anything, but cool. I would have walked out of there mildly contented (but still mostly bored) if he hadn’t said this:

Imagine you’re standing in a green meadow, looking out at a brilliant red sun setting over a bright blue ocean. You turn around and study the sunset again, reflected this time in a range of snow-capped mountains. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

But then you smell something unpleasant; and, looking down, see a drunk man lying unconscious at the bottom of a ditch, sprawled in his own vomit.

The question is: in which of these sights — the sunset, the mountains, the drunkard passed out in his own filth — does one find the face of God?

The answer is the drunk, because we are the image of god. The rest is just window dressing.

This just blew me away, and I’m struggling to understand why. I don’t agree with the human-centric view of the universe implicit in this parable: the notion that we are the acme of creation, God’s ultimate achievement. It’s this kind of thinking that’s slowly killing the planet. But there’s something captivating about the notion of looking past simple, uncomplex, postcard beauty and finding something else: something intrinsically beautiful.

Maybe we need to tell ourselves that we’re fashioned in God’s image before we’re able to acknowledge that kind of beauty.

We rise through the drear and punch through the overcast and suddenly we’re looking down on mountains of heaped clouds, dazzling white in the sunlight. When we bank left, my window fills up with this billowing, Seussian landscape; when we bank right, the view turns a perfect azure blue. I don’t fly enough for this to have become ordinary yet.

The plane levels off, and the seatbelt lamps go out. A snack cart trundles by, followed by a stewardess in a smart blue uniform. We’re heading south and west toward Texas: my former Paradise.

When I was a kid, I had a simple, Manichean view of the universe: Beirut, where we lived, was hell; Texas, where we vacationed, was heaven. Come summer, we’d pile into a jumbo jet and take off from Beirut’s rickety bullet-ridden airport and fly west for eighteen hours straight, toward the promised land. I’d spend the time staring down at the Atlantic, or roaming the aisles, or watching movies, or playing the sorry excuse for handheld video games we had back then. When I was very young, the stewardesses would sometimes come by and give me toys, or show me around the plane, or let me sit with them in their special stewardess seats. Eventually, they stopped doing that — pretty soon after I really began to enjoy it, I imagine.

It’s hard to describe the sheer, blinding joy that came over me when I stepped off the plane. Texas was better than Beirut in every imaginable way: there were widely-spaced houses fronted by big green lawns; there were malls filled with bookstores and arcades and movie theaters; there was television all day, every day; there was touch football and theme parks and water rides and central airconditioning and hamburgers. There was going outside whenever you felt like it. It was beautiful, rapturous.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, of course, and the obverse of that deep and profound joy was the mind-crushing despair of going back home. I remember one dark evening in Lebanon, the day after we got back from vacation, running up and down the hallway of our apartment, jumping up at the midway point to slap at the cord that hung down from the attic trapdoor, over and over again, like I was caught in some feedback loop, thinking: I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. I was a whiney little bastard, but the self-pity only lasted for a week or two.

We moved to the US for good when I was thirteen: not to the promised land of my earlier youth, exactly, but close enough. I can still remember looking out the car window on the way out of the airport, watching the trees scroll by, marveling at the sheer greenness of everything. It wasn’t Texas good, but it was still very, very good.

I take all of this for granted now. The big clean supermarkets, the constant supply of electricity and water, the freedom to move around, the wide open everywhere; the green. I’m jaded, ungrateful. I wonder if this return to paradise will shake me out of my complacency, and help me remember how it felt back then, when everything was new, and shiny, and perfect.

Transcript of recent UN Security Council meeting, the first attended by the new UN Ambassador from the United States, John Bolton.

Kofi Annan: Our purpose here today is to discuss the plight of third-world countries who continue to struggle under the twin burdens of poverty and famine. As you know, we …

John Bolton: SHUT UP! WHO CARES?

Kofi Annan: [pause] The American ambassador wishes to to speak, I believe.

John Bolton: BE QUIET! I’M TALKING! I AM THE AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED STATES! THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! WHEN I SPEAK THE WHOLE WORLD FALLS SILENT! AND TREMBLES!

French Ambassador: [whispering] Mon dieu. Quel idiot.

John Bolton: WHO SAID THAT? [looking around the room] IT SOUNDED LIKE A FROG! DID A FROG JUST INSULT THE DIGNITY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

Kofi Annan: Mr Bolton. If we could just focus on the task at hand.

John Bolton: [picks up a stapler and hurls it at the French delegation] UNGRATEFUL CHEESE-EATING RUNNING-AWAY REEKING MAGINOT LINE BASTARDS! [turns to Kofi Annan] WHAT TASK AT HAND?

Kofi Annan: We were discussing the plight of the third-world.

John Bolton: WHAT ABOUT IT?

Kofi Annan: As you are perhaps aware, Prime Minister Blair has suggested a comprehensive package of aid and debt relief for …

John Bolton: WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE SAFETY AND SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

French Ambassador: [still whispering] … avec une tete comme un grande morceau de fromage …

John Bolton: [spinning around] I HEARD THAT! I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND IT BECAUSE I DON’T SPEAK FROG! BUT I HEARD IT! [picks up a stapler and hurls it at the French ambassador] WE COULD NUKE YOUR COUNTRY INTO A BIG CRATER! ALL I HAVE TO DO IS PICK UP THE PHONE AND ALL YOUR LITTLE FROG BABIES GO RADIOACTIVE! AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR, PIERRE?

Kofi Annan: [clearing throat] Mr Bolton. In this era of globalization, the well-being of the third world has a direct impact on the security of even the strongest nations.

John Bolton: [reaching into a bag, pulling out a handful of staplers] ARE YOU THREATENING ME?

Kofi Annan: No, of course not.

John Bolton: BECAUSE IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE GETTING READY TO UNLEASH A HOARDE OF POOR ILLITERATE HUNGRY PEOPLE ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Kofi Annan: I was merely saying …

John Bolton: WELL THAT’LL NEVER HAPPEN! BECAUSE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA …

French Ambassador: [whispering] … moustache est tres amusante …

John Bolton: SHUT UP! [loads four staplers into a small cannon and fires them at the Canadian delegation]

Canadian Ambassador: We didn’t say anything!

John Bolton: I KNOW THAT! BUT YOU DIDN’T SAY IT IN THE SAME LANGUAGE AS THE FROG WHO DID SAY IT SAID IT! SOCIALIST BASTARD! WHERE’D YOU PARK YOUR MOOSE? HA HA! HA HA HA!

Kofi Annan: Mr Bolton.

John Bolton: SHUT UP! I’M SAVORING MY WIT! HA! HA HA!

Kofi Annan: Mr Bolton. Please.

John Bolton: AS I WAS SAYING! BECAUSE THESE SO CALLED “THIRD-WORLD” COUNTRIES ARE BREEDING GROUNDS FOR TERRORIST SCUM, THE UNITED STATES HAS DECIDED TO TAKE THE WAR TO THEM! WE WILL IMMEDIATELY NUKE ANY COUNTRIES THAT CONTAIN HUNGRY PEOPLE!

Kofi Annan: [pauses] You’re joking.

John Bolton: BEFORE THEY TURN INTO TERRORISTS!

French Ambassador: [whispering] … il est comme une gros pile de merde …

John Bolton: SHUT UP! THAT’S IT! I’M DOING IT! [picks up the red white and blue phone on the desk in front of him] HELLO! MR PRESIDENT! LAUNCH OPERATION IRRADIATE PIERRE! ON MY MARK!

Canadian Ambassador: Your phone’s not even plugged in.

John Bolton: SHUT UP! IT USES SUPER-SECRET TELEPHONE TECHNOLOGY THAT YOUR TINY LITTLE CANUCK BRAIN COULDN’T EVEN BEGIN TO COMPREHEND! MR PRESIDENT! LAUNCH OPERATION SPLATTER CANUCK!

Kofi Annan: Really, Mr Bolton. This sort of behavior …

John Bolton: [throws phone at Kofi Annan] SHUT UP! GOD BLESS AMERICA! [holds thumb to ear, speaks into pinky finger] MR PRESIDENT! LAUNCH OPERATION REMOVE EXTRANEOUS PORTIONS OF UN BUILDING!

Kofi Annan: Perhaps we should adjourn until the Ambassador from the United States regains his sanity.

From an Amazon.com review of Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning:

Really. I mean, this album just makes me want to take my pants off and shave my wolverine that prowls in the darkness.

Finally, my years of plowing through unhelpful album reviews has borne fruit. Brilliant.

PS: Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, this album is absolutely beautiful. Check out sample tracks here and here, and a video here, then go out and buy it. It’s breathtaking, revelatory. Seriously.