Playing in Rain, I meet Tom Bombadil

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When I was a new dad, I'd come home from teaching in San Jose around 330, round the summit of Highway 17 and see that big old ocean stretched out below. Like a window on another world.

And it was. The window was from 330 to about 530, when I'd have to be home in time to cook food for my family and take care of the little guy. And that window often was filled with disc golf. One problem: in the winter it rains, and so it would rain, and I'd try to gauge the amount of rain on my windshield as I approached the exit. Either get off here and play, or admit it was too wet and go on home.

I played in a lot of rain.

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Today I woke up to a cold threatening to rain day. Great: roofers are on my house, the paper is down but the shingles aren't all on. Solar panels are waiting to be lifted and put on the roof. Oh well. Take the boy to his math class; take the dog for a walk in the chill air; go to the doc for a look at the overall health of the body; drop by the local skateboard store to see about possible teen jobs for the son and heir. Then to the cafe for caffeine in its most glorious form, and writing until the computer says "running on reserve battery."

Then grab a sandwich and play some disc. Except it is dumping rain. So eat food and wait for the run to stop. And when it doesn't go to the course and wait. And read.

The rain pauses for a long couple minutes. Then back comes the rain.

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Sitting in the car does things to a man. Well, not quite like being out at sea for months. But the rain sleets down the windshield, and so if you watch the trees through the water they seem to shiver and melt, like some Hollywood hallucination special effect.

Ok time to do this. Patagonia rain shell with hood, check. Ski hat with brim, check. T shirt to wipe down discs, check.

The plan: throw from under the trees on hole 20 over to the practice basket, then run and putt out and run back and dry off and do it again.

No cars in the parking lot by now. 5 pm and I've got the place to myself; even the birds are safe inside, doing whatever birds do when they are hiding out from rain. Reading bird books? Considering new migration routes?

And then I meet Tom Bombadil.

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Tom (not his real name) drove up in a slightly beater car of uncertain coloration. I've seen him up at de la (the name of our arcadian disc golf course) many's the time, over the course of 14 years. He's got the weatherbeaten face of someone who spends a good deal of time outdoors, and for all the time's I've seen him playing, I've also seen him working on the course or taking with someone, usually about their lost disc.

Both Toms are merry fellows,who wanter and explore the natural world. Both are known for the quality of their voices. The Tom with the beater car proceeded to tell me stories about finding discs in the most amazing places, including 300 feet down a huge arroyo way off the beaten path of Hole 4, and underneath a massive tree that had fallen in the night. The discs thus found are mysterious and epic, like any number of things from Tolkien. No “one ring” discs, but certainly discs of uncertain provenance and ancient manufacture. One disc in particular got my attention, an almost mythic disc I've never heard of: the fabled Pegasus.

As the rain fell and the day wound down, Tom regaled me with tale after tale of discs found and lost, rare plastics unearthed, valuable ace-run discs stolen by scoundrels, the Building of the Course at Pinto Lake. He was out in the rain to pull poison oak, which when wet gives up its long long runner roots (unlike weedwacking or cutting which only lets it come back bigger and badder than ever).

I bade him farewell, threw a final set of discs out into the now ridiculous rain, and hauled to my car. As I looked back, I saw Tom traipsing off into the brush. And thought of that rhyme from time out of mind:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

Bionic Dog

I am at The Verve on a cold maybe gonna rain Tuesday in Santa Cruz. The coffee is excellent (well when the café is also a great local roaster and the beans are roasted Next Door, that’s going to happen). I’m massively cyborged right now: phone is hopping with pictures, texts, email alerts; MacBook is working overtime on a wide variety of tabs and themes. Women’s World Cup (US women win 2-0 over North Korea). I read the comments on ESPN’s GameCast site, check the Giants game (holy crap! Up 11-3 over the Cubbies and it is only the 5^th inning!). Email: send messages to my son’s math tutor, check for “trouble” email from school/work/home, read some FPIF (Foreign Policy in Focus) on the amazing Chinese art at the Tate:

In the vast exhibition hall of London's Tate Modern, the installation looks from a distance like a huge patch of gravel. Perhaps it is the first stage of a construction site or the last stage of a demolition. Only when you come closer and crouch down can you identify the little objects. A discerning eye might determine that they are reproductions. The rest of us rely on an accompanying video about Ai Weiwei's project, which explains that the Chinese artist had commissioned a village of artists to produce the porcelain objects and paint them to resemble the real thing. What from far away looks like a gravel parking lot is actually one hundred million artfully produced sunflower seeds. http://www.fpif.org/articles/art_v_state

The brain is racing around a wild and bizarre racetrack, a steeplechase shaped like the inside of a computer merged with the global pings of a manic caffeine driven pingpong ball or pinball. I’m reading about the fickle nature of capital, the recent release of Ai Weiwei from Chinese prison, meanwhile mulling over the NPR show I heard on the way here (a frankly disappointing, much too limited discussion of “fracking” on Diane Ream show) and wondering how “clean” it would be to frack with natural gas to get natural gas, instead of using other dirtier methods…

And then I found a bionic dog in my Inbox.

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The email included a complete cut and paste of a SFGate article on Naki’o, “the first-ever “bionic man's best friend."” Below the print were two videos, one from ABC News, showing Naki’o running on four prosthetic legs, and generally acting like a happy energetic puppy. The story has big pathos:

Abandoned by a family fleeing their foreclosed home last year, Naki'o and his red heeler [Australian Cattle Dog] littermates barely survived the harsh Nebraskan winter. In his weakened state, Naki'o stepped into an icy puddle in the basement and got stuck in the freezing water. The 5-week-old puppies were eventually rescued and taken to an animal rescue center. But Naki'o lost his paws and the tip of his tail to frostbite. Under the shelter's care, his paws healed to rounded stumps, but he was left unable to walk.

As a dog owner and I suppose now a dog “person,” (a funny phrase and probably worth pursing – as opposed to a cat person, but also as opposed to a person person?), I had predictable reponses: restored function, happy dog, happy adoptive humans, great ending to a sad story. Then other questions came up: how much did this cost? Who did the work? And is this going to be an option for pet owners, and if so, is this gong to move us into the big-cost insurance world for pets that already exists for humans? (for the answer to this last question, I recommend the terrific series on animal insurance on This American Life at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money).

The story is that veterinary technician Christie Tomlinson found the dog (where?) both “charming” and “crawling on its belly to get around.” So she raised $1300 to have Naki’o’s two back legs fitted with prosthetics; when he did well the company Orthopets offered to fit the front legs for free. The total cost was $4500, thoug it isn’t clear if some of this was donated by Orthopets. It was this last fitting that made the dog into the first fully “bionic” dog.

The prosthetics look totally cool to me; they are meant to mimic dog limbs, and it does indeed look as if the dog can move freely and happily. So. Happy ending right?

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Increasingly I have been reading the comments at the end of articles like this. For many cyborg readers (that is, reading articles online and linked to sites that allow a wide audience to comment, flame, spam, etc) the end comments represent much of what is awful about the internet. My friend Crystal hates the mostly inane and often hateful posts; the author Jarod Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not A Gadget calls out the lurkers and trolls that destroy coherent conversations on the Net.

But for some reason I’m drawn to what people say about articles. Perhaps it is the writing teacher in me; I want to know what a wide range of people will say because that gives writers information. And it isn’t hard for me to move past the empty comments in order to find the spread of responses from a potentially huge audience.

In this case, the comments mirrored my own responses. First of course, admiration for the people who designed and perfected and fitted these prosthetics, and empathy for animals who have been abandoned or injured. Second, the feel-good part of the human story: people showing large amounts of empathy for suffering and dong something about that. Then…just as in the comments, I wonder about the people who abandoned these animals. Do I have the whole story? Are they cruel people? Bad people?

Here are a couple sets of comments:

Diana says: 
23 June 2011 at 10:33 am 
That story is so sweet it makes me want to cry.



Dogs Rule says: 
23 June 2011 at 10:55 am 
Freeze the limbs off the idiots that abandoned Naki’o and his siblings!

Empathy builds the animal-centric community, and that community can also express a wide range of emotions at those who are outside it. Anger against those who hurt or abuse pets serves to constitute a part of this community.

This it is only a matter of time before the accumulatin of pro-prosthetic and pro-animal sentiments produce a response by those outside:

K Fils says: 
24 June 2011 at 7:46 am 
Bravo Orthopets! How wonderful that there are still so many kind and giving pet doctors!
With all the poor animals that end up as amputees, I wish there was an Orthopets everywhere.
I hate that people lose their homes and simply abandon their pets. Pets are family and should be treated with the love and respect that family deserves. Karma will get these folks.



Kat says: 
24 June 2011 at 9:00 am 
So glad you could hit in the gut those poor people who cannot pay for medical coverage for their human problems. Paying $6000 to buy the new feet for that god, plus the surgery itself, really says how important humans are. Great the animals are being helped, but many humans need help, and the humans aren’t getting the help. In some countries, the humans would eat the dog, because the humans can’t afford the food.



I agree with Kat says: 
24 June 2011 at 4:46 pm 
Seems like a lot of resources wasted on an animal when people could use help. In a way the story is heart warming, but also indulgently disgusting. How strange…



And that was my own response, partly informed by how I often read: how will others read this? And how do I read through a wide range of eyes, including first second and third thoughts? People were quick to jump on Kat, for assuming that people who help pets don’t help humans in need…

But this is what writing is (often) supposed to do: generate not simply agreement, but a variety of responses, so that we see what was assumed, left out, needed to be developed.

The comments are prosthetic to the article. Poorly designed or not, they are crucial. Technology lets us see what otherwise would remain invisible: this range of responses, this range of emotions.

Both sides have some work to do, it seems. And the comments allow them to see that work, and to do it. To design better writing prosthetics for a wider reading community to use.

Death in the Afternoon

Yesterday I got my dog and ran over to Meder Street Park, where I found a memorial going on, about 75 people. I decided to run and then attend to see what was happening. When I got to the dog park I found out that the memorial was for 25 year old Zachary Parke, the bike messenger and climber who was killed in a hit and run on Empire Grade Road on June 8, a couple weeks ago. He was hit from behind on a narrow dark road by Elliot Dess, who fled the scene, failed to call 911, lied to the police, and is now facing felony manslaughter and hit and run charges.

Man. I sat at the park and thought about bikes, and cars, about mixed use conflicts (bikes vs hikers, cars vs bikes, cars vs pedestrians).

I thought about two lives, one ended, one about to become a kind of hell. No way to hit rewind.

When I got back to the memorial, I walked among the mourners and well wishers, seeing many young faces, some drawn and sad, others talking and smiling in the perfect June sun, all trying in their own ways to come to terms with what had happened. Cliff met all the dogs at the memorial, and I stood in front of a table full of Zach's mountain climbing gear, including chalk bags that he had made himself. Long shadows from the trees...I tried to imagine his life, his family, all the people affected by his too early departure from this glorious life.

I took a flyer with images of Zachary on it, and then looked at some other pictures of him, one as a little kid with whipped cream on his face. That little kid, smiling into the camera.

At the food table a woman said "Please take some bananas" so I took a bunch (literally) and Cliff and I walked home, past the Jewish cemetery on Meder. I stopped and thought back; when I'd walked by this earlier, I had seen all the cars parked and thought there was a funeral, but all I saw was the usual Arcadian scene: gravestones, trees, grass, birds hopping from branch to branch. And now I understood that there had been a death, and the funeral/ritual was a new kind of funeral: mostly to honor the life of the fallen young man, but also to bring friends and fellow cyclists together to ask questions about safety of roads, about justice.

When I got home I put the bananas on the dining room table, and the pictures of Zach next to my computer. Lia and Paul came in from a ride, hot and tired and happy, newlyweds. I showed Lia the images of Zach and she was quiet as she read about his life and death.

When I asked her where she'd biked to, she said, "Up Empire Grade Road to Bonny Doon and back."

Reading Shteyngart

At 476 pages, Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook is decidedly Russian in length. (For comparison, the Bantam Classic version of Crime and Punishment is 576 pages; don't even get me started on the Norton Critical Edition at 704 individual leaves with writing on them).

And it is drop dead funny, lie in bed in the morning reading more even though you should be rising to start your day engaging. Russian. Jewish. 1993 American. So encompassing that as I was sitting out in the California June sun this afternoon, I felt only partly present; another part of me was in a lower east side office dealing with psychotic Russian fathers of mafiya Russian sons named The Groundhog. Or in a fictional Eastern European former Soviet nation, Stolovaya (Russian for cafeteria) and its down at the medieval heels capital Prava (part Praha/Prague in the go go 90s, part Pravda meets the National Enquirer).

I simply wanted to take a moment to do something that "Housekeeping vs The Dirt" did: try to represent, not "the text" and its meanings and successes/failures, but instead a record of my own reading of it. And so: I begin reading it on a whim, finding it on my wife's nightstand, and wondering what it was doing there. Not that my wife isn't a voracious reader; she is. But for a moment I wondered if this book slipped in undercover, a wild and wooly Philip Roth meets V Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis with an accent that gets more pronounced as it imbibes more alcohol (of which there is a stunning amount). I am not sure why it is named as it is, unless Vladimir Girshkin, the main character, is said debutante...more likely it is one of those "how can we sell more of these? let's get a chick lit title and surprise the hell out of all those beach blanket readers from the Hamptons!

Vladimir's story is "part P. T. Barnum, part V. I. Lenin." It takes aim at the new immigrant experience, as well as the American and Wester ex-pat experience (again, I kept seeing Czech Republic, and all those Americans descending on the New Place to Be). It sends up the weird Bohemia of Manhattan in the early '90s, and the weirder Bohemia of Eastern Europe after the wall fall. So much of the language is comic, you don't expect the accumulation of comic moments to end up serio-comic, with quite a lot to think about after all.

One moment worth considering. At the beginning Mr Rybakov, the "fan man" who cheerfully introduces himself as psychotic, is trying to get our hero to help him gain his U.S. citizenship. (He almost got it but failed the citizenship ceremony; when it came to the part about protecting the US from enemies domestic and foreign, Mr. R began to beat an enemy-appearing hapless Turkish man with his crutches). When Vladimir says that there is nothing he can do to influence the INS, "ten hundred-dollar bills, ten portraits of purse-lipped Benjamin Franklin, were unfurled on the table to form a paper fan."

First, instinct: Vlad grabs the hundreds and stuffs them in his shirt. Then, American reflex: "What are you doing? You cannot give me money. This is not Russia!"

And the response: "Everywhere is Russia," said Mr. Rybakov philosophically. Everywhere you go...Russia."

This turns out to be way truer than the reader can possibly predict. For a Russian, and especially for a Russian Jew...and an immigrant at that...Russia is everywhere, and what is happening in post-Communist Russia is, indeed, happening in other places as well.

What that means exactly is the burden of the book, and the sum total of the many many spot-on details of psychology and economics in this novel. Let's just say mafiya, Ponzi schemes, glossy brochures advertising nonexistent industries, uncertain allegiances of former security forces, and the kinds of ethical and personal quandaries such things are likely to engender, flourish in places like New York City and Miami.

I wonder if Bernie Madoff is reading this novel in prison. Hey Bernie, did you like the part where the mafiya Groundhog gets beaten by Slavic airport guards? Oh that side splitting comic sense of justice...

PS Here is the picture of Gary Shteyngart on the back, which partly made me want to read this:

Nuclear/Rabbit

Periodically I write on nuclear issues. And most people in my life call me Rabbit. (Or bunny, or buns, or…perhaps this is too much information?). But it isn’t often that the rabbit and the nuclear overlap. This is one of those times.

I was congratulating a friend’s daughter on her upcoming bat mitzvah. I wanted to sign my email mazel tov, [Hebrew name for rabbit]. So I googled “rabbit in Hebrew” and got:

arnevet (hare)

arnavon/arnavoni (little sweet bunny)

shafan

I found this at the “House Rabbit Society” website, “An international nonprofit organization that rescues rabbits from animal shelters and 
educates the public on rabbit care and behavior.” http://www.rabbit.org/

The site also had news of rabbits around the world, including “Japan's Earless Rabbit Sparks Worries About Radiation, Mutation.” Posted on June 9, the article begins:

“It's no Godzilla, but an earless rabbit allegedly born near Japan's severely-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant has become the latest poster child for the side-effects of radiation exposure.

The bunny -- purportedly captured on video just outside the crippled plant exclusion area and posted on YouTube on May 21 -- has become big news in Japan and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere, stoking fears that contamination from the damaged facility could cause genetic mutations.”

Here is the YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqVY9azhH3U&feature=player_embedded

Now you, Dear Reader, may well be saying, Wait a minute, small eared Rabbit. This story is most likely a hoax! Allegedly! Purportedly! And of course you might well be right. First, the YouTube video’s poster has not been found, so this rabbit could have been from anywhere in the world. Second, it is hard to identify the exact causes of birth defects in animals. And third, it turns out this might not be a birth defect/mutagenic problem at all. Mary Cotter, a veterinarian from the House Rabbit Society, reported that she’s encountered two earless rabbits, whose mothers had most likely over-groomed their baby’s ears. (And I thought it was bad when my aunt used to spit on her handkerchief and wipe things off my eight year old’s dirty face!)

For the record, the two earless bunnies were named "Stubs" and "Nubbins."

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So it is hard to know whether this bunny really is a victim of Fukushima. And I was impressed by the strong assertions in the article regarding radiation and genetic mutation. It cites F. Ward Whicker, professor emeritus at Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, to the effect that natural radiation can also cause such anomalies, that usually the cause cannot be determined:

"So far as science has shown, there have never been mutations produced by ionizing radiations that do not occur spontaneously as well."

And then an even bigger gun is wheeled out: nuclear historian Richard Rhodes. He points to the research done after the atomic bombing of Japan:

"In the years after World War II, there was a major American commission that looked into the health ramifications of the atomic bombings, and it found no genetic changes in the populations of Hiroshima or Nagasaki," said Rhodes, who has written extensively on the bombings. "There were no birth defects attributed to the bombing, and no genetic consequences."

Now this was interesting. An American commission you say? And no genetic consequences to the massive doses of radiation encountered by Japanese downwinders/survivors? Or wait…none “attributed” to the bombing. It isn’t that I doubt Rhodes (though I believe he is a strong proponent of nuclear power, which is a different title than “nuclear historian”). But…since much of the article asserts that it is next to impossible to attribute birth defects to a particular cause, then I must assume that the number of birth defects after World War 2 did not rise significantly. Was this the case? How good was the study? Honestly, it is hard for me to imagine that there were no consequences to the bombing. But I’m off to see what the study indeed says, and who conducted it.

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Meanwhile, the rabbit has become indeed a kind of poster animal for Fukushima in a variety of news reports, all generated by the YouTube viral video (268,298 hits as of today). What happens when you eat nuclear grass. Not good science. Of course, neither, in my opinion, is a nuclear power plant you can’t turn off. Meanwhile, in the absence of a real public debate about the Fukushima accident and its implications, and in the wake of new and ever more frightening revelations about the severity of the radiation releases from the land of Godzilla and Tepco, the viral earless rabbit circles the globe, ambassador of a kind of deep fear of what, after all, is not being heard.

Dog Park: Candace

I was walking back from the dog park when Candace walked by trailing dogs like the pied piper of the canine set. She has a very cool cowboy hat, shades, and she is a total Jedi when it comes to the dogs around her.

They know - almost every one and I'd place bets on it - that she makes contact with each of them, and that they make contact with her. Dogs have their name said by her, treats given by her, wisdom and advice dispensed by her...

I wish you could have seen it dear Reader. Across a neatly cropped suburban park at the edge of Santa Cruz, in a lake of June sunlight (the same sunlight that falls on San Francisco and Point Reyes and on a good day on Monterey for that full Steinbeck look...).

She was striding with these great gorgeous Irish wolfhound dogs this furry round poodle-something my dog the black terrier/Chinese crested. Maybe. My 12 pound running partner and cross between a skunk and a prospector.

Right exactly out of a fair tale.

Blog for Market Day

I’m reading a novel by Helon Habila called Oil on Water. And after reading The Windup Girl, I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology and capital follow closely on each other to destroy fragile human political and social arrangements.

The Habila novel takes place in “the oil rich and devastated Niger Delta,” as the bookjacket announced. The plot takes us up river, similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and as the two journalists seek the wife of a oil executive, kidnapped by militants, we see the horror of this devastation firsthand.

Indigenous people who sold their rights to clean water and their original life to oil companies and ended up with broken VCRs and a river awash in life-destroying oil, dead fish and armed resistance, a government keen on keeping oil revenues flowing even if it means the flow of blood and the flow of pollutants. And those who tried to resist the oil money? Who made the “right” choice? Their chief is taken and executed; the soldiers come back with his “confession” and his “signature” on papers, and the oil companies win anyway.

The mixing of valuable natural resources and neocolonial multinational corporations and infinitely corrupt and corruptible “governments” - well. When you read Conrad and get to the horror, the horror, you know what he’s talking about, his code for the horror of the Western mix of naïve and arrogant idealism and decidedly non idealistic strategies for the taking of things from those with flatter noses and darker complexsions. Not much has changed, except perhaps for the extent of the environmental devastation that now accompanies the extraction of what the white men value.

Hannah Arendt said that fascism and totalitarianism always come home; the strategies practices “over there” come back with the people who practiced them. Now we have fracking, the extraction of natural gas from bedrock, a mind numbing technology for destroying water sources and land on the way to finding “clean” natural gas.

Those of us who have learned to distrust the adjective clean will not be surprised when the head of an energy corporation smiles into the camera and makes fracking sound like a miracle of human ingenuity which will help heat homes employ people bring us safe and clean energy. And that is part of what novels like Habila’s do: they help us not only see and think, but feel, and feel again, the human and environmental horror visited by the neverending search for resources.

The modern curse: to live over or next to things the first world needs, and needing, feels it owns.

I’m at a Farmers Market and it is June and everything feels hopeful, sustainable, a moment when humans can and do pull off a marvelous cultural action. It is strange to be writing this post amidst such a scene. And these burgundy red cherries will taste sweet on the tongue later.

A sweet side to life, and a shadow side, always.