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I just put my son Elliot down for a nap and I was thinking that my grandmother Laura would have done just the same with Virgil some seventy-eight years ago. Time slips and we with it. I’m going to be a pallbearer for the third time on Saturday. Rest in Peace Virgil.
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In the afternoon we went to Sue and Gary's for a BBQ and Elliot's first swim in a pool.
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Jes and her father saw him a few years ago at the Maryville Speaker Series. When I told her that he had died she noted that he was the second speaker that they had see to have died, Benazir Bhutto being the other one. She said that after seeing a speaker in the speaker series you feel as if you know them on a personal level, as though you've become friends.
We sat and watched his coworkers say goodbye to him last night. I am certain we will miss him in public life - he did seem to set the bar for journalistic integrity. We will miss him in private life as well.
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I mention all this to explain why Elliot and I have begun walking the malls. As per my robot post, I've had enough of hanging out at home with the kid. I love the kid. I love the home. But cabin fever is cabin fever. Unfortunately, St. Louis is no place to be outside in during the summer months. Yesterday we walked the length and breadth of Crestwood Plaza (not a "mall" but a "plaza", not to be confused with a "center"). If you're looking for signs of an economic downturn, look no further than that facility. Only half of the available store space is currently in use. Entrance after entrance displayed the wares of some store that was open at some other location in the mall - display courtesy of such and such - black curtains of economic doom supplied by mall.
To counter my sense of foreboding about the retail economy, we went to the Galleria today. When it comes to opulence, the Galleria (not an, but the) is a mall that could give the hanging gardens of Babylon a run for their money. My high school economics teacher held up the Galleria as a historic example of the shift from palaces for producers, in castles and cathedrals, to palaces for the consumer. Marble marble everywhere and Gouda cheese to cut - assorted knives fourth floor in home wares. To my surprise, here too were there curtained causeways, though only a few. I had fresh rolled spicy tuna sushi in the food court while the Japanese food sellers cooed to Elliot in Chinese. (The Galleria sells surface).
Still, the Disney store was having a run on its widgets with only two days left until closure. I nearly bought Elliot a King Louie doll for two bucks (I want to be a man, man-cub), but the line of bargain shoppers was too long. That's the thing about downturns - you have closeout specials on fantasy when the reality is that most mall walkers, like Elliot and I, are there more for the free AC and exercise then for stuffed chotchkies of insignificance. I suppose we like to look at the price tags and marvel that people in some other economy than ours are willing to spend what they do. Had I bought it there, I could have spent my entire stimulus package check on a single patio umbrella. I was going to stop at Goodwill on the way home to do some browsing around things I can actually afford, but the E man had had enough - and as a matter of fact he is still sleeping off all the wonders of the day. I make significantly more than the median income in the country. If most people make less than I do, I have no idea how any of those stores remain open.
|
This is not intended to be a cynical critique of the average drone's life of drudgery, my title is instead meant to suggest literal robots, though loosely defined.
Jes has been working a six-day ten-to-five workweek since I have been on summer break and I have been home alone with Elliot, the pets, and the bots - that is to say our washers of dish and tumblers of laundry, our computers and cameras, CD-DVD and Wii, stations of play, lap and desk tops, ice making side-by-side refrigeration and self-cleaning stove, scanners and palm pilots, central air and many gallon water heater (inscrutably guessing at where I will need hot water and when), door sensors, CO2 sensors, heat sensors, temperature gages, proximate automobiles, British voiced alarm avatar, widgets and gadgets galore. I am whelmed by these overages of techne.
I often use the plate spinner metaphor in my writing, but it seems ever so apt and analogically expandable as I multi-task from work station to workstation, winding up each little clockwork according to its means. Where are the people, the interlocutors for these interlocking systems? They are at work earning the ideas that these spinning plates save labor rather than create it. I could go out and see people, but then I would need to buy something to predicate and purpose the interaction. Instead, Elliot and I will once again descend into the basement to mutter Marxist musings on the mystifying modern man; besides, it's too hot out for much else.
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I am in a house of sleepers. Jes is exhausted from working six days in an air conditioning free glass studio. She asked me to take Elliot away at around seven a.m. (he was all sing and babble) and she disappeared into slumber. E and I played in the basement for a few hours and then ran some errands. Nine times out of ten he falls asleep as soon as his car seat clicks into the waiting base. He slept through Walgreens, the car wash, and is still in his car seat on the living room floor - crashed out. I was thinking about what it must be like to be E today. He can't crawl yet but he can roll over and roll around.
Pause: E woke up and we did the bottle ritual.
He'll be eight months old this week. For six months he was mostly on breast milk, but now it's mostly Enfamil. We had this bottle warmer that we used until the plastics scare and now we run tap water - apparently the harmful chemical leaches from the plastic when you heat things in the plastic. Our friend Kate's mother is a biochemist and she was horrified when they began to make food containers and glasses out of plastic. She has long avoided wares of Tupper. I suppose we could have switched to glass, but at some level almost everything in our lives is toxic. Perhaps we're just in denial, or pround of our increasingly fire retardant chemistry (David Duncan - National Geo/PBS).
As for real food, sometimes we give E half a banana in the morning. Often he gets avocado, peas, acorn squash, steamed carrots, or some new veggie for dinner. He had his first unsweetened applesauce last night. I suppose it's ironic that we won't use the store bought Gerber because of preservatives, but we're still using the plastic bottles for his formula. A prime non-religious syncretism if I ever saw one.
We tried to use the Seventh Generation diapers, but given E's propensity for what we call outfit-enders, Huggies have a better shot at wardrobe control than their more environmentally friendly counterparts.
Ah well - mom's up now so I am off - 1 p.m. - that's a good sleep in!
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Two days ago I discovered that the cat had been peeing in our laundry. A gallon of Nature's Miracle and two washes per rewashed load later and I feel like I am making progress.
Two weeks ago - after my dad and I chopped down the dead tree that prevented people from seeing into my backyard - someone stole my lawnmower. I was a 1986
self-propelled Snapper. I'd been having trouble with it dying on me in the middle of a cut and had been on bad terms with it when we were parted - I'm trying to remain positive about the theft and chalk it up to the unwritten tax on city life. So far they've taken a grill, a lawnmower, a yard cart for pulling weeds, a Peroni beer glass filled with ice water (while I was mowing), and my van - but I got the van back. Crime sucks.
Soooooooooo, now I keep running over to David's to borrow his electric mower, which is a pain in the neck all around. The lawn is definitely getting away from me given the record rains that we've had - I think the wettest Spring on record - near biblical flooding and I've lost the means to combat my plague of grass. I had bought the mower out of a front yard in Kinloch - which means it might have been stolen when I bought it - so we'll chalk up its continued transience to the vicissitudes of karma.
Just now I found a tribe of ants gathering force in the dog's dish. I'll have to run out to Target for Raid chemical death houses in a little bit. I tried to dump out all the standing water in the backyard last night to impede the growth of mosquitoes, but that's the thing about insect plagues and entropy in general - you know when you start to fight that it's a battle you'll eventually lose. No matter how empirically pyrrhic things appear, we soldier on in the great plate spinning enterprises of our false immortality - all the while marching to the crematoria of our constituent elements. My father has a great phrase for all this abstract busyness, he calls it rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Can I get a Sancho?
|
His central metaphor was the downloading of updates for his MAC, which was then allegorically applied to the downloading of cultural movements, historical ages, you name it. He did a few flourishes of Christ ministering to the dinosaurs, a la his show Sexy, which had me in tears. His mime of a triceratops at table – armored to the nines and munching beets - was beyond hysterical. Playing scrabble before the advent of language was an entertaining bit – lots of high scores for arbitrary sounds.
He did an extended mime of two giraffes discussing an approaching tiger – what’s he doing in Africa? He discussed the Ten Commandments at length – focusing particularly on the coveting of one’s neighbor’s oxen. He challenged anyone of a literalist persuasion in the audience to attempt putting two of every kind of animal in a large boat – where do the giant squid go? How do you keep the female spiders from eating the male ones? We keep putting other pairs of animals in with the tigers, but only the tigers are currently in there; it was excellent satire for a stormy Friday night.
And then… Saturday my sister V. got married. I had all of my siblings in town over the weekend – which is a gaggle of folks. The wedding reception was in Illinois at Hidden Lake Winery. Jes and I got a cabin – which we ended up getting for half price as we had only lukewarm water. The facility is lovely, but the staff members are still getting their sea legs. I imagine I’ll write more about this later, when I have pictures to share.
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Thursday, June 26, 2008
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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My paternal uncle Virgil passed away yesterday. It was sudden, but not unexpected. He died at home. He’s pictured here with my father Harley and their brother Arlyn. My father is the youngest and Virgil was the oldest. In the car photo Virgil is seated on the car with my dad to the right. In the Easter photo Virgil is on the right.
I just put my son Elliot down for a nap and I was thinking that my grandmother Laura would have done just the same with Virgil some seventy-eight years ago. Time slips and we with it. I’m going to be a pallbearer for the third time on Saturday. Rest in Peace Virgil.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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Father's Day was nice. We went to Sears to buy a vinyl pool table cover and bought me a new lawn mower instead. We got a nice Craftsman on sale, fifty dollars off for the holiday. Then we went to the fabric store and bought twelve yards of a very nice vinyl, at fifty percent off for the holiday. We bought enough to make a pool table cover and recover all the barstools.
In the afternoon we went to Sue and Gary's for a BBQ and Elliot's first swim in a pool.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A few years ago Jes and I were headed up to my family farm in Wisconsin (Christmas trees) and we stopped off at a Cracker Barrel for lunch. You can rent books on tape from one Cracker Barrel and return them to some other restaurant in the chain. So, we rented Tim Russert's book about his father: Big Russ and Me. The Wisconsin trip can be around nine hours with stops, which means that we had no trouble getting through the book in a single session. I'd been familiar with Mr. Russert from Meet the Press and his debate coverage, but the book personalized this public figure for me and as a result, I felt a personal loss yesterday when we heard of his passing.
Jes and her father saw him a few years ago at the Maryville Speaker Series. When I told her that he had died she noted that he was the second speaker that they had see to have died, Benazir Bhutto being the other one. She said that after seeing a speaker in the speaker series you feel as if you know them on a personal level, as though you've become friends.
We sat and watched his coworkers say goodbye to him last night. I am certain we will miss him in public life - he did seem to set the bar for journalistic integrity. We will miss him in private life as well.
Friday, June 13, 2008
If you're not from St. Louis and you read this blog I feel compelled to tell you something about the setting. Locals, including myself, are generally provincial in their love of this city of parks, free concerts, good art, and great food. The main downside to the Lou is the weather; or, more specifically, the seasons. There are only two seasons in St. Louis: winter, which I consider mild having grown up in Wisconsin, and summer, which is as hot and humid as you might imagine the most sweltering tropical jungle to be - temperatures in the hundreds plus one-hundred percent humidity. You might as well be swimming at the equator. Fall lasts a week and spring might be ten days. This year spring was replaced by a monsoon, which has actually continued into summer. We went from ten degrees bellow average temperatures to ten degrees above average overnight.
I mention all this to explain why Elliot and I have begun walking the malls. As per my robot post, I've had enough of hanging out at home with the kid. I love the kid. I love the home. But cabin fever is cabin fever. Unfortunately, St. Louis is no place to be outside in during the summer months. Yesterday we walked the length and breadth of Crestwood Plaza (not a "mall" but a "plaza", not to be confused with a "center"). If you're looking for signs of an economic downturn, look no further than that facility. Only half of the available store space is currently in use. Entrance after entrance displayed the wares of some store that was open at some other location in the mall - display courtesy of such and such - black curtains of economic doom supplied by mall.
To counter my sense of foreboding about the retail economy, we went to the Galleria today. When it comes to opulence, the Galleria (not an, but the) is a mall that could give the hanging gardens of Babylon a run for their money. My high school economics teacher held up the Galleria as a historic example of the shift from palaces for producers, in castles and cathedrals, to palaces for the consumer. Marble marble everywhere and Gouda cheese to cut - assorted knives fourth floor in home wares. To my surprise, here too were there curtained causeways, though only a few. I had fresh rolled spicy tuna sushi in the food court while the Japanese food sellers cooed to Elliot in Chinese. (The Galleria sells surface).
Still, the Disney store was having a run on its widgets with only two days left until closure. I nearly bought Elliot a King Louie doll for two bucks (I want to be a man, man-cub), but the line of bargain shoppers was too long. That's the thing about downturns - you have closeout specials on fantasy when the reality is that most mall walkers, like Elliot and I, are there more for the free AC and exercise then for stuffed chotchkies of insignificance. I suppose we like to look at the price tags and marvel that people in some other economy than ours are willing to spend what they do. Had I bought it there, I could have spent my entire stimulus package check on a single patio umbrella. I was going to stop at Goodwill on the way home to do some browsing around things I can actually afford, but the E man had had enough - and as a matter of fact he is still sleeping off all the wonders of the day. I make significantly more than the median income in the country. If most people make less than I do, I have no idea how any of those stores remain open.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Life among the robots:
This is not intended to be a cynical critique of the average drone's life of drudgery, my title is instead meant to suggest literal robots, though loosely defined.
Jes has been working a six-day ten-to-five workweek since I have been on summer break and I have been home alone with Elliot, the pets, and the bots - that is to say our washers of dish and tumblers of laundry, our computers and cameras, CD-DVD and Wii, stations of play, lap and desk tops, ice making side-by-side refrigeration and self-cleaning stove, scanners and palm pilots, central air and many gallon water heater (inscrutably guessing at where I will need hot water and when), door sensors, CO2 sensors, heat sensors, temperature gages, proximate automobiles, British voiced alarm avatar, widgets and gadgets galore. I am whelmed by these overages of techne.
I often use the plate spinner metaphor in my writing, but it seems ever so apt and analogically expandable as I multi-task from work station to workstation, winding up each little clockwork according to its means. Where are the people, the interlocutors for these interlocking systems? They are at work earning the ideas that these spinning plates save labor rather than create it. I could go out and see people, but then I would need to buy something to predicate and purpose the interaction. Instead, Elliot and I will once again descend into the basement to mutter Marxist musings on the mystifying modern man; besides, it's too hot out for much else.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Snapshot:
I am in a house of sleepers. Jes is exhausted from working six days in an air conditioning free glass studio. She asked me to take Elliot away at around seven a.m. (he was all sing and babble) and she disappeared into slumber. E and I played in the basement for a few hours and then ran some errands. Nine times out of ten he falls asleep as soon as his car seat clicks into the waiting base. He slept through Walgreens, the car wash, and is still in his car seat on the living room floor - crashed out. I was thinking about what it must be like to be E today. He can't crawl yet but he can roll over and roll around.
Pause: E woke up and we did the bottle ritual.
He'll be eight months old this week. For six months he was mostly on breast milk, but now it's mostly Enfamil. We had this bottle warmer that we used until the plastics scare and now we run tap water - apparently the harmful chemical leaches from the plastic when you heat things in the plastic. Our friend Kate's mother is a biochemist and she was horrified when they began to make food containers and glasses out of plastic. She has long avoided wares of Tupper. I suppose we could have switched to glass, but at some level almost everything in our lives is toxic. Perhaps we're just in denial, or pround of our increasingly fire retardant chemistry (David Duncan - National Geo/PBS).
As for real food, sometimes we give E half a banana in the morning. Often he gets avocado, peas, acorn squash, steamed carrots, or some new veggie for dinner. He had his first unsweetened applesauce last night. I suppose it's ironic that we won't use the store bought Gerber because of preservatives, but we're still using the plastic bottles for his formula. A prime non-religious syncretism if I ever saw one.
We tried to use the Seventh Generation diapers, but given E's propensity for what we call outfit-enders, Huggies have a better shot at wardrobe control than their more environmentally friendly counterparts.
Ah well - mom's up now so I am off - 1 p.m. - that's a good sleep in!
Thursday, June 05, 2008
A melancholic Don Quixote fights the good fight against the windmills of entropy:
Two days ago I discovered that the cat had been peeing in our laundry. A gallon of Nature's Miracle and two washes per rewashed load later and I feel like I am making progress.
Two weeks ago - after my dad and I chopped down the dead tree that prevented people from seeing into my backyard - someone stole my lawnmower. I was a 1986
self-propelled Snapper. I'd been having trouble with it dying on me in the middle of a cut and had been on bad terms with it when we were parted - I'm trying to remain positive about the theft and chalk it up to the unwritten tax on city life. So far they've taken a grill, a lawnmower, a yard cart for pulling weeds, a Peroni beer glass filled with ice water (while I was mowing), and my van - but I got the van back. Crime sucks.
Soooooooooo, now I keep running over to David's to borrow his electric mower, which is a pain in the neck all around. The lawn is definitely getting away from me given the record rains that we've had - I think the wettest Spring on record - near biblical flooding and I've lost the means to combat my plague of grass. I had bought the mower out of a front yard in Kinloch - which means it might have been stolen when I bought it - so we'll chalk up its continued transience to the vicissitudes of karma.
Just now I found a tribe of ants gathering force in the dog's dish. I'll have to run out to Target for Raid chemical death houses in a little bit. I tried to dump out all the standing water in the backyard last night to impede the growth of mosquitoes, but that's the thing about insect plagues and entropy in general - you know when you start to fight that it's a battle you'll eventually lose. No matter how empirically pyrrhic things appear, we soldier on in the great plate spinning enterprises of our false immortality - all the while marching to the crematoria of our constituent elements. My father has a great phrase for all this abstract busyness, he calls it rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Can I get a Sancho?
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
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Monday, June 02, 2008
Ye gods, what a weekend! On Friday night we went to see Eddie Izzard at the Orpheum Theater – a birthday surprise from the local tribe. The new show is called Stripped and it was as good as Dressed to Kill. As per usual, the circular comedic thematic was the replicating-meme/preposterous nature of both sport-fanaticism and religiosity. He often went for word play irony; such as, Football is more about running and throwing than feet, one rarely find much rest or takes a bath in either restrooms or bathrooms, etc. He took on the Biblical-literalist assertion that the world is seven thousand years old, versus the fifteen billion year measurement of the people with actual rulers.
His central metaphor was the downloading of updates for his MAC, which was then allegorically applied to the downloading of cultural movements, historical ages, you name it. He did a few flourishes of Christ ministering to the dinosaurs, a la his show Sexy, which had me in tears. His mime of a triceratops at table – armored to the nines and munching beets - was beyond hysterical. Playing scrabble before the advent of language was an entertaining bit – lots of high scores for arbitrary sounds.
He did an extended mime of two giraffes discussing an approaching tiger – what’s he doing in Africa? He discussed the Ten Commandments at length – focusing particularly on the coveting of one’s neighbor’s oxen. He challenged anyone of a literalist persuasion in the audience to attempt putting two of every kind of animal in a large boat – where do the giant squid go? How do you keep the female spiders from eating the male ones? We keep putting other pairs of animals in with the tigers, but only the tigers are currently in there; it was excellent satire for a stormy Friday night.
And then… Saturday my sister V. got married. I had all of my siblings in town over the weekend – which is a gaggle of folks. The wedding reception was in Illinois at Hidden Lake Winery. Jes and I got a cabin – which we ended up getting for half price as we had only lukewarm water. The facility is lovely, but the staff members are still getting their sea legs. I imagine I’ll write more about this later, when I have pictures to share.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Shakespear Fest.
Elliot's first trip to a play in a park - wide eyed and raring for that Elizabethan English. Forsooth!!
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