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I started this blog so I could listen to all the CDs I own, one at a time, and write about them, after my wife asked me why I had so many of the damn things. I got up to 888, and then I packed them all away because we thought we might move again. We didn’t, but I haven’t the heart to sort through and figure out which ones I’ve listed here and which I haven’t, plus the 50 more I’ve purchased since then, so: time to put that project aside, and start another! The plan now is to watch the top 100 movies ever made, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures Don’t They, and blog about each one. I thought to watch and write about 1 per week, which my lovely wife though was “aggressive,” but I still think it is a good average to shoot for. The list gets updated from time to time and movies shift position, so we’ll use the list I grabbed today, 2/18/2019. #100 is Sans Soleil, a documentary by Chris Marker, director of La Jetée. Here is the full list: Movie List

I started clearing away brush and piles of dead leaves so I could move our compost bins yesterday. That this is what concerns me now seems odd, or at least not the kind of activity I would have predicted for myself twenty years ago. I was not raised on a farm, or even in a family that kept a garden, and I’m not sure where I picked up the habit. I’m not an avid gardener, I’m pretty haphazard about the whole endeavor, but I like watching things grow, and I like the flowers and vegetables that result, and I have a little space to make it viable. In fact, I probably don’t need a compost bin, I could get by with a garbage can if I was just producing compost for the stuff I grow, but I also like the idea of not throwing things away if I can help it, so there I was, scraping a rough “E” shape in a microbial landscape so I could arrange bricks into bins. Before I could get to the brush and leaf and loam, though, I had to pick up the pile of bricks stacked on the spot. We’d claimed them from…
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Good lord, my previous post to this blog was last year, in October. I have been elsewhere, apparently. I was here: Medium, the Operating System, thanks to the kind invitation of Jared Schickling. And I was here: Rockvale Review, and I was many other places, but too often I was working on other people’s projects (yeah, you know me). So, time to get some of my own projects cranking again. This is my reminder to myself, done in public so I can’t renege.

In 4th or 5th grade, I refused to say the pledge of allegiance. I stopped putting my hand on my heart and reciting the words, as we all did at the start of the day, turned toward the flag in the corner, speaking along with the voice of the principal on the loudspeaker. My teacher noticed, after a morning or two or three, and asked why I was not saying the pledge. “I don’t understand why I am supposed to,” I told her. I had gotten hold of a book that told the true story of Columbus day and some other of the uglier facts surrounding the “discovery” of a populated New World and the genocide that followed, and I was confused. All I really wanted was to have a conversation, for one of the adults in the school to tell me what is was we were pledging to support, what part of the story, and why so much of it had been hidden from us, at least in school. Predictably enough, none of the adults wanted to have the conversation. I remember the teacher was sympathetic, but also sent me to talk the principal, who was not. My mother…
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My last post here chronicled some of the bizarre difficulties we’ve had trying to sell our house, but only as a means to explore to how hyper-competitive our culture has become. The need to dominate, to win, to succeed, and to see the world as balanced on these very simple extremes—if you are not a winner, you are a loser—is a terrible way to live, but is also so deeply a part of the way most of us see ourselves, it is difficult to imagine a different world. It is also a culture of violence, to be sure, and a culture of male violence, which is not to say that women are not violent or that all men are, of course, but that this particular kind of violence, a violence done to others in order to dominate them, is much more common in men. I know plenty of evolutionary psychologists claim male violence is an inherent trait, that the male warrior is a role we are born to, that it’s part of our biology. But the research does not bear out that conclusion at all; I prefer the explanation that the domestication of agriculture and large herd animals, which require…
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My wife and I have been trying to sell our house for the last 5 months. Actually, my wife and I have sold our house 3 times in the last 5 months, and each time, something untoward knocked the deal off the rails at the last minute. The first buyer had botched surgery that incapacitated him, the second had some kind of PTSD episode and refused to answer anyone’s phone calls, the third was torpedoed by an unhappy home inspector who had no idea how to properly assess an old house, and then stood on our porch and tried to scare the buyers into buying a monthly warranty, yearly warranty, and a bunch of other upsell crap—this after the house had received excellent inspections from 2 more experienced inspectors as part of the previous sales. So, if I were I believer in signs, I would say something is trying to keep us from moving. But I’m not. Still, we are left with the lingering feeling that somehow we failed, or that there is something wrong with our house. To the latter point, I should say that we really love our house, didn’t want to leave it, just wanted to go…
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I went to my niece’s High School graduation a few weeks ago, watched as she and 715 of her closest friends sweated to Pomp and Circumstance, and listened to speeches about the future, and superheroes. Never having graduated from HS myself, it was an interesting spectacle, and also rather sad, everyone was trying so, so hard to make it an important and significant event, while also trying so, so hard to look they weren’t trying at all. Near the end, it started pouring, which was a nice reminder of our insignificance, so we huddled under a long bridge that led to the upper tier of seats. Several other groups of people huddled with us, albeit at an appropriate distance, following the tribes-should-not-mingle rule that comes clear during minor key huddling events. 8 or 9 meters down the slope, a buzz-cutted, workout-loving father and his 3 teenish children stood, watching people dash for cover. Up the slope came a woman with some sort of movement disorder who had decided, since she could not dash anywhere, she would just walk in the rain, along with her partner, a fairly overweight man with lots of hair. The whole family watched sideways as they…
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