Yapper

I hate annoying dogs. I especially hate the little yippy ones that think any change for whatever reason is a reason to alert their owner to whatever vital observation they have made. Visitors arriving, debarking, neighbors arriving, leaving, cars going by, changes in humidity... We have neighbors, as so many are forced to in our increasingly dense living centers, and they have a little yippy dog. It wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that the walls are somewhat thin, though the floorplan is thoughtfully laid out to minimize this effect as much as possible. Now, this is a dog of the Bichon Frise breed (it even sounds annoying), and these are the quintessential celebrity canine accessory, along with teacup Chihuahuas. That right there should be enough to embarrass any potential owner out of interest in that particular breed.
This neighbor's dog is no exception to the yippy dog stereotype, yipping incessantly whenever any event happens whatsoever, so it is a relatively constant background noise. Perhaps for some lucky apartment dweller out there, inured to noise by years of obnoxious neighbors and street noise, this would be fine. However, I come from Alaska, parts of which, even in the main cities, you can't hear anything except the snow splintering.
The really fun part of this is that they are of a certain ethnic background which lends itself to language and musical tastes that lean higher on the sonic register than mainstream American culture, with it's tendency towards low, heavy beats and deep guitar rhythms. Language being partly a function of biology, those with smaller bodies tend to have higher-pitched voices as well; compare the difference of an average 10-year-old girl and a 215-lb. adult man. Different. By quite a bit.
It is entirely possible that a constant exposure to these higher tones as both a cultural phenomenon and a biological feature results in higher pitches being the norm and therefore perfectly normal to my neighbors. However, living in dense societal matrices necessitates some hopefully voluntary restrictions in behavioral patterns. Cranking the stereo up to 11 is proscribed unless the neighbors are invited to the party; yelling in the middle of the night is seen as rude in all cultures I am aware of, especially most Western cultures. I'm not suggesting that the dog be silenced surgically (although I can't say I don't enjoy the thought); merely that the family could do a better job in keeping it's shrill yap from being as pervasive as it is.
You ask, "why not just ask the family nicely to keep their dog a bit quieter?" Ahhh, and herein lies the crux of the matter. Verra no Ingissh. None. At least, none of the family members, barring the 10-year-old (approx.) son, speak enough English to understand the subject of a discourse, much less follow a meaningful dialog to a successful conclusion.
At the time this family moved in, I was engaged in a semi-voluntary withdrawal from a fairly serious caffeine habit, as well as a massive reduction in my alcohol intake. Needless to say, I was less than my usual charming self during this approximately 3-week period. This dog was the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard every time someone would walk up the stairs, down the stairs, open or close a door, or make a noise. As this is not a traditional large extended family, this was not as much an issue as it perhaps could have been, and I thank the Karma gods for it. However, this still added up to an almost criminal level of noise pollution at short remove from my living quarters. I am not in college and I do not accept a certain level of background noise as a fact of life. I don't expect silence either, but rather an existence relatively free of extraneous noise. I am exceptionally fortunate in that my other 2 neighbors are nearly silent, and I return the favor. It is a very calm situation all around. Until the yapper.
I wish I had pursued a civic course of action regarding this problem, but I confess that I did not. Instead, every time the dog would start yapping, I would yap back, aggravating the dog to the point where it would nearly yap itself hoarse trying to out-yip me. This was a rather satisfying solution to the problem because it allowed me to vent some of the feelings of violence that I was harboring towards that little rat, and it hopefully also caused the family having to live with said dog to go a little crazy as well. The perfect solution would have been to muzzle or shoot the dog, but it's not mine, and I could never get a shot off.
After about 2 weeks of this yip-for-yap struggle, the dog became strangely quiet. Not silent, but just didn't yap as much anymore. Apparently, the owners of the dog got the hint that their dog was driving someone crazy and took steps to minimize the noise, whether by putting the dog in a back room or teaching it to be less vocal. Either way, the dog is now tolerable. It still yips, but few and far between. I can live with this; as I said--I don't require silence, just a relatively noise-free existence.
I do wish this had been resolved in a manner more conducive to neighborly relations, but as the communications barrier was nigh-insurmountable, it was done through a more crude method. I'm not proud of it, but it worked.
Were they unaware of the effect the dog had on others? Maybe. Did they just not "actively hear" the dog, having become accustomed to high-pitched sounds? Probably. I think that as our living density increases, the human need to just be left alone is becoming strained, as our lives are constantly being bombarded with noise, advertising, neighbors, friends, computers, and other sources chipping away at our sanity, and that if we continue to compress, when that decompression happens, we may find ourselves barking like madmen instead of being neighbors and just yelling at them to shut the fuck up. :D
Seriously, all this talk of "diversity" and "can't we all just get along?" is becoming laughable. I don't think humans were meant to get along with each other, much less in close proximity. I don't want to love my neighbor; I like my family and friends just fine and don't need any more. Does this make me anti-social? I don't think so. I just don't think that the utopian dream of peace on Earth is achievable in our current biological state. We are still too close to our animal ancestors to entirely be docile. It's a great dream, don't get me wrong; just don't expect it to happen for even thousands of years. We call ourselves civilized, but crime and death and horrible diseases and people fighting over lands that are essentially sun-blasted cat litterboxes are growing disproportionately to our staggering population growth. We are growing too big to contain with our current governmental structures. The fall of Rome was preceded by insane leaders doing unconscionable things because the people were powerless, fractured and therefore unable to hold their society together. The rich got richer, the poor got desperate, and by the time of Pope Urban VI, the once-most powerful nation the world had ever known was a rusted hulk inhabited by the lime burners. A revolution is coming. Maybe not in my generation, probably not the next, but within 3 or 4 more, the world will come to a wall that it cannot negotiate and the center will no longer hold. I don't believe in any Second Coming bullshit or the reincarnation of the Hare Krishna as a cat or whatever particular fantasy you grew up with--I have my share, too. I do know that the schism is widening and soon all that's going to be left is a crack. I just hope we don't bark with nuclear weapons at someone else's dog.

Inner-City Black Lesbian for President!!!

Hell, why not? She couldn't possibly do any worse than our current exalted leader. She would have to be a self-made woman, if she were to have risen from the socio-economic train wreck that is the inner urban landscape, and as such, would have both the perspective to see what rich white America has been sweeping under the rug, as well as the guts to do something about it.
I admit I was raised to be prejudiced—not because of my parents, both well-educated and respectable members of their community, but because until I was in high school, I can't remember anyone who wasn't white and lower-to-middle-class like me. That instills a primitive xenophobia that is hard to shake off. However, as I get older and hopefully wiser, I realize that it is less about color and more about those who have screwing those who don't.
We have got to break the stranglehold that Old, White Money has got this country into. We are letting our brothers, fathers and sons die in wars halfway around the globe so that a few rich white men can make even more money. Bush, Cheney and others of their cadre own parts of the contracts for the military hardware being purchased by the Federal government to supply the war in Iraq. They're selling the tools to fight a war they're running!
An inner-city, black lesbian may not be the answer—maybe there's a young white country boy or girl out there who has the genius we need, but after seeing this country get run into the ground by a little boy playing with daddy's government like it's his own private sandboks (psst! That's spelled with an 'x,' Mr. President...), I'm willing to bet what's left of the farm on a new point of view, because there isn't going to be much left of it when Shrub gets through with it.

Smart enough to know better

We are the educated poor, a class-within-a-class of the working poor. We have above-average education, some with Master's degrees or higher, crushed under the burden of staggering student loans and working for minimal wages, often without adequate insurance for cars, health care or dental needs.
Growing up in a time when the perception that anything was possible, with people getting blindingly rich playing the stocks or investing in dot-com startups with record-setting IPO's, we were raised with the view that hard work and education would ensure a comfortable life, and with a bit of luck, we could even retire relatively rich, ending our days in comfort and satisfaction. The American Dream, indeed. We have been misled.
We have been misled by those in power and those who stand to gain from the tide of people looking for a better lot in life who have been fed the notion that education will ensure that we will be in demand, risen above the uneducated, first in line for the good jobs. This may have been the case twenty or thirty years ago, when the delineation between industrial jobs and the emerging high-tech middle class, when education was necessary to comprehend the new technology and stay abreast of emerging trends, but we have become such a specialized society that the employment market is becoming saturated with qualified applicants. This is great for the furtherance of technological breakthroughs and research, but what of those not at the absolute top of their field? There are millions of qualified job seekers who are edged out by an applicant who has been specializing like an ant since near conception, left to search for the average entry-level skilled position. These positions have historically been populated with many an employee who has been working the same position since their entry into the field, often starting out at the absolute bottom as a high-school student with few needs and willing and able to work for the pittance wages offered therein. A college degree was supposed to have leveled the field, playing experience off of knowledge and ability to bring new ideas to the position, but there are no positions to be had but those which cannot offer enough to even begin to make our looming payments.
Now we who have forgone the long-term investment in the low ladder of menial positions in favor of struggling for an education in order to better ourselves find that we are being left out in the cold in the Bush-ridden job market, consigned to a litany of unpleasant choices in constructing our future, our dreams of a comfortable middle-class life smothered. We live to work so that we can pay our crushing student loan debts, fighting to afford food and rent, disillusioned and cynical, and many of us turn to self-destructive comforts that provide effective, if temporary reprieve. Our hard-won degrees useless, we are left without options in increasingly desperate situations, frustrated and snarling, doing no one any real good, often putting burdens on the state for assistance that the government is exponentially reducing, leaving more and more to fend for themselves like rats. And when too many rats get put in a cage, they start eating each other--crime rates rise as fewer legal opportunities are available, and spiraling down, too busy surviving to take interest in community or government, allowing laws to be passed by the affluent for the benefit of the affluent, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
This cannot continue--the center is corrupt and the outer rings are being whipped to shreds. We, as those educated enough to have a better-than-average grasp of the situation (I don't think anyone really knows, short of maybe Alan Greenspan and a small group of alien residents) have to make the effort to do something about it, as those with the ability to do something have the responsibility to do it, if only by voting (I'll get into the voting rant in another section) and paying attention. Let's band together, organize, DO something!!! A revolution is coming, and we can make it a quiet one. Otherwise, it's not going to be pretty.

Got a boat to build...

So this year has left me with a profound sense of something missing in my life, leaving me adrift--something fundamental, like the ache a quitting smoker has, of an undefined need that if I could just identify it, I could sate the craving and fulfill whatever it is that's creating this hole in my id. Or maybe it's in the ego, or the superego--I'm pretty sure it's in the unconscious somewhere, hiding behind a dresser like a timid puppy, unsure whether my psyche can be trusted not to laugh at it.
I've tried many different remedies to attempt to smooth this away, this speed bump in the psychological development of the Self; drugs (of various flavors), sex (of various flavors), hobbies, exercise, fishing, drinking, crafts--you name it, I've probably done it, which I suppose makes me some sort of demented Renaissance man, like Tommy Lee going to college to learn the art of Zen Buddhist Underwater Basket Weaving. College was an instructive experience, infinitely valuable, if only for the opportunity to immerse oneself in the hallowed halls of the sum of human experience, written, carefully researched, delineated, typeset or freely shaped, post-modernist, Neo-Classical, Chicago, Turabian, APA, MLA, beautifully hand-wrought or painstakingly exacting. It is an ivory tower, with all the conflicting imagery that it brings to mind--luminous, soaring, but simultaneously confining and insular. It filled a niche in my soul that was created specifically for it, like stretching a canvas before your first learn-to-paint class.
It was beautiful, wonderful, difficult and rewarding, and I realized after more than 18 years of schooling that I am not meant to be an academic. I have intelligence and the wherewithal to maintain an academic life should I so choose, but it would be a hollow maintenance of existence rather than a spiritually fulfilling drive.
Speaking of spirituality, I have gone through several flavors of religion in heavy enough doses that there should have been a warning label affixed, or at least a sticker advising that continued use could impair one's ability to operate machinery. I have never envied those for whom religion is a panacea to their own spiritual holes, as it is a patch at best, like a sleeping pill, good for a guaranteed dose of unconsciousness, but powerless to treat the underlying condition. God is a comfortable label our limited human consciousness uses to confine the infinite vastness of our reality to a conceptualization we can come to grips with. All we can see of the elephant is the tail, but it lets us hold on to something concrete, without which our minds would spiral into psychosis. I think this may be the driving force behind science--a drive to define, and therefore compartmentalize our existence, the better to grip the tail. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away from our Sun--there, that's easier than just saying that it's too fucking far to comprehend. It would take me quite a while just to write the number of miles that is on this page, and you wouldn't want to actually read it, so I'll save us both some time.
So I guess the point of this post is that I've found something that has the best chance of any in recent memory of containing the possibility of filling this void, but now that I've found it, I'm unable to pursue it. There is a fantastic school here in Washington that is an *accredited* (who knew?) school teaching the disappearing art of building wooden boats. I don't mean childrens' toys-- I mean daysailers and ketches and restoring yachts and classic pieces of our watery Northwest heritage. THIS is something I could happily do the rest of my life, as I have been around boats my entire life, thanks to a similar affliction affecting my father, who passed on the boat genes to me; specifically, the ones for sail preference. I'd rather sail than have sex (mostly, although there are definitely some times with my wife that qualify as a spiritual experience...), and tuition is reasonable. Even better, while I'm in school, my current student loans would be deferred. Now, I'm not sure of what the market is capable of bearing in terms of hiring those with that level of woodworking experience, but I'm sure those skills are laterally-transferable, say into carpentry, finish woodworking, etc.
So after how many years spent looking, I've found what I want to do with my life. And then I find out that it is so far away that I'd have to leave my wife, ensconced as she is with a good job, a nice place to live and friends nearby, and go live in a little port town, probably with some other boatbuilding students and live the life of a bachelor again. So the dilemma is this: leave my wife for up to a year to fend for herself and be without each other for far longer than either of us could conceive of, or take my wife away from her carefully-built, hard won success to chase a pipe dream of building boats. Or I could stay here in Seattle and keep looking for a job that will pay our loan payments without selling too much of my soul. Some of it's for sale, but if I have to go into retail sales again, I'd rather just take my own life and set up Jen with the insurance payout... :D.
This can't be the best of all possible worlds; that would mean the boat school would be nearby and I wouldn't have any loans to pay off. Fuck. If this is the best of all possible worlds, I'm going to go get smashed and try not to think about it any more. If nothing else, I'll remember this and when I'm old and I've had a depressing career in some fluorescently-lit drab office stamping paperwork for 20 years, I can go do this and revel in the brief reprieve from this so-called "modern world." Maybe the world needs a few more wooden boats to remind us that all is not bigger, better faster moremoremoremore. Maybe what the world needs is a few hours in a creaky wooden sailboat, taking in the sheets and trimming her up so she skims the waves on her way out to where ever.

Somebody shoot me...

So I'm no longer a believer in faith-based healing. Not that I was incredibly religious (ok, even sorta) to begin with, but with the recent train wreck of a bug that hit my wife and I, I'm really not amused. I am not one that gets sick on any kind of regular basis--truth be told, I'm fortunate in that I can't really remember the last time I was sick. However, that usually means that anything tough enough to batter its way through my defenses tends to put me down for the count. I'm an all-or-nothing kinda guy, and so I tend to believe (with the backing of experience) that no matter what, I'm not going to get sick with the latest superbug traversing the neighborhood. A bit arrogant, sure, but its worked for years.
I believed wholeheartedly that I wouldn't get sick this time around, even though my wife is sick as hell, coughing and wheezing and sore all over, and so I thought nothing of being around her constantly, bringing hot tea, warm blankets, water, etc. to make sure she was as comfortable as humanly possible, until the morning I woke up with a headache. Hmmmm. I haven't had beer in several days, so it's not a hangover (not that I drink enough to get one to begin with, but you gotta eliminate possibilities here). Ok, maybe I got a cold or something... Until the next morning. Full-blown flu symptoms. Owwwww--even the air hurts.
So since the belief system didn't work, I turned to medical science--specifically, the art of the distiller... A hot toddy is a mixture of honey, lemon juice, hot water and whiskey (or brandy, but that stuff is vile...). Somehow, with all of the cough drops and drugs and various other chemical crap the pharmacy companies try to shove down our throats, the most basic remedies are often the most effective. I had one and am now feeling quite a bit better... Driving may be out of the question, but I wouldn't want to give anyone else what I have, so it's entirely an altruistic notion on my part...

Easy Hot Toddy Recipe:

1-1/2 oz whiskey
1 oz honey
1/3 oz lemon juice
3 oz hot water

Blend in a mug and sip. Salut!

The Center Cannot Hold (A return to humanism)

We cannot keep this up. We have become a nation, a world of specialists, so driven to maintain the cutting edge that we are unable to take the time to look at the greater picture. The increase in knowledge has become exponential, with more knowledge having been gained in the previous twenty years as in the whole of human existence. That includes the Classical era of Cicero and Plato, the Renaissance of Plutarch and the Enlightenment of the 18th century, all periods with (then) vast advances in the collective of human knowledge and thought.
The burgeoning, nay, explosive advances in science, mathematics, physics, engineering and other so-called “hard” sciences has led to fantastic achievements never dreamed of even a century ago—we have split the atom, looked billions of years into the past with massive telescopes to the beginning of the universe and seen inward to the depths of the very building blocks of reality itself, postulating that at the end of all things is a sort of “quantum foam,” with bits blinking in and out of existence, seemingly randomly.
However, with this focus on deeper, faster, greater, farther, we have begun to neglect those disciplines that provide a framework both moral and practical to take that knowledge and focus it towards a greater good. We have management overseeing scientists creating technical advances that go far beyond anything a business degree even begins to touch upon. There is becoming a vacuum between those who create and discover and those who control what is done with it. We are in a widening gyre of our own making, and the center is beyond our reach.
The neglect of the arts and humanistic disciplines is leaving us a nation of technicians with no idea of how to place these wonderful and terrifying creations into an holistic world view. Like the Italy of the 13th and 14th centuries, their nobility and our current leadership is determined not through who is the best fit for the job, but is due in large part to nepotistic cabals of old money and landed gentry. There is no concern for the greater good, and even a contempt for it, as they are safe in the knowledge that we as a public body can no longer come to a consensus about anything at all, even for the greatest of causes such as the ostensible election of the most powerful executive officers of our collective reality.
We as fragile human beings live lives that are far too short for the achievement of true wisdom by any but a select few who have given their lives, sometimes sacrificially, to the furtherance of a greater human consciousness, based less upon science and more upon the implications of what our knowledge is being used for and by whom. The lack of community engendered by our espresso-fueled culture is fracturing our cities, leaving them open to coups by the rich, whatever their intentions. We need to back away from the cutting edge long enough to see that it is only cutting us, severing our ties to kith and kin, with no time for creating or maintaining bonds or any sort of perspective. We have become a nation of moles, always burrowing deeper in search of a greater discovery, a higher truth, a bigger den.
A return to a humanistic perspective will not solve the great world problems alone, but by studying history, art, literature, we can better understand who we are as a culture, as a race, a species inhabiting a world we have to share, and at our current headlong pace, we are bound to hit the wall. Let's hope that the aftermath will resemble the mercantile coup de maître of the nobility at the start of the Renaissance, taking the power out of the hands of squabbling rich families and returning it to the public in the form of a Republic. We have lost our Republic in the name of progress and are slipping towards a wasteland of our own creation.