…I Am A Tree

I was out driving tonight and the usual happened: assholes didn’t pay attention on the road.

Let me state something: Thank you for trusting my driving skills. I appreciate your confidence in me. But just to clear the air: I don’t reciprocate. Your cell-phone using, coffee swilling ass doesn’t earn my confidence back. You suck.

Howdy, all three blog readers. Well, not true, but the spikes only come when I actually write something. Duh. The forty or so hits I get then are a far cry from the 1,500-2,000 a day I used to get back in my prime as a political blogger in 2003-2004.

With another political season in full-swing, the urge some times hits me to write about it all, but then I’d simply be more noise to sift through. I’ll just say I’m voting for Obama, even though I’m less-than-enthused by him. But hey, at least the White House issued a memo this weekend that was anti-SOPA/PIPA, so that’s something good for once, domestically. Still doesn’t excuse his voting for FISA when he was campaigning in 2008.

What amuses me is how Rick Perry trotted out the comment last night that Obama disrespects the military. I love how the GOP always says that about a Democractic candidate/president. Who has more respect — the person sending the military haphazardly abroad on some vague mission (The War on Terra!), or the one who ends the missions and brings them home? It’s not about winning — it’s about choosing the correct battles to begin with, in my opinion. 

And anyhow, who got Osama, at the end of the day? Not W. He let him get away a couple of times. Saying that it was W’s policies that got him is ignoring that very fact.  How soon the lessons of Tora Bora have been brushed under the carpet and forgotten. I remain neutral regarding his foreign policy shifts regarding China, but will watch that one closely.

Since Romney seems to be coasting to a quick win in the GOP primaries, I hope folks wake up to the fact that the guy was a corporate raider, and really doesn’t give a shit about We the People (not that any of them really do, at the end of the day). The huge amount of money waiting in the wings with the SuperPACs is scary, and I expect the airwaves to be filled with nonsense very, very soon, to the dismay of all of us.

I do like what Stephen Colbert is doing with his campaign to highlight the problems with SuperPACs. Hopefully we’ll get some true campaign finance reform at some point; gods know the last round simply opened the flood gates.

I’ve been meaning to get a haircut the past week or two, and finally did so at lunch today, at a small shop underground in the exterior part of the #1 Station at 50th Street and Broadway. It’s a quick in-and-out place which I’ve used before, but never with anything leaving me feel completely satisfied. Today was the last time I’ll go there.

To whit:

I went in for a cut and beard trim, knowing the guy works fast. So while I had my eyes closed toward the end, and with no warning as he was still using the trimmers, I suddenly heard it:

Pft! Pft!

And then, dear reader, I felt the cold mist of liquid descending upon my hair, my neck, and my face. Somehow, with no warning, the barber decided I needed to be doused in cologne. Awful, tawdry cologne that conjures up visions of Eurotrash. Or old European men who think this smell will be appealing to the New Yorker on the go — I’ll go with that one.

I can attest to the fact that it doesn’t. Appeal, that is. I was rather flabbergasted that this happened.

I paid up the sum due and a minimal tip, and hurried out the door, horrified by what I now smelled like.

Fortunately, when I got back to the office, I was the only person in the elevator. I had no desire to subject this to anyone else. Perhaps ten minutes later, my friend, Michael, IMs me, asking if I want to go out for air — he smokes, and I accompany him usually when he goes out for one. I hop onto the same elevator going down — alone again, I might add — and he gets on at the next floor and says, “Damn, that smell is still here. It smells like a cheap whorehouse!”

I was appalled. Turns out, he rode the same elevator after I did, so he knew the smell. I said, “No, no, that’s me! My barber did awful things to me!”  I leaned over for him to smell, but he couldn’t tell that it was, in fact, me.

“I’m very unhappy!” I said, as we made our way down the elevator. Once outside, I could feel the cologne radiating off of me, not unlike what you see for Pigpen on Charlie Brown cartoons. He wrinkled his nose over the cigarette, stating, “It is you! Oh, my god!”

“This is why I’m unhappy!” I said, “I have new hire training in an hour, and the new paralegal is going to be stuck with me for an hour or two, having to smell this.”

He was practically in tears, repeating, “Five dollar whore!”

“You’re not helping, you know!” I stated.

“I know!” he replied, laughing.

I’ve since tried to wash it off, with a very small success. It did get into my shirt, I think, even though I had a smock on. I took it off while I washed my neck, face and hair, but…well, let’s just say my new hire will not be thrilled.

A five dollar whore. Yeah, that’s the “Welcome to the Firm!” image I want to put forth.

From my friend, Eric:

 During a recent password audit, it was found that a blonde was using the following password:

“MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento.”

When asked why she had such a long password, she said she was told that it had to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.

Let me explain the last post: I have an iPad which my firm graciously gave me last week when I was camped out in Austin for a pilot of our new Win7/Office 10 initiative. Most attorneys will be given the option to get one next year, so management decided to let us trainers get them, too. After all, I’ll indeed to know about using them to train on them.

Let me tell you — this rocks. Or it will once I fix the keyboard — somehow it split and became smaller. Still…wordpress installed ridiculously easy.

It’s a new day, maybe.

Let’s see if this works…

I have many stories, but I was just over on Clients from Hell and remembered one that would fit right in. This was around 1993 or thereabouts. I was working at Condé Nast Publications on the 11 AM – 7 PM shift, and was talking with a magazine writer who was calling in from Toronto who had a story he needed to file. Fax-modem technology was new for our writers, and many couldn’t wrap their minds around it. Email wasn’t used yet for attachments, and considering that we were dealing with 2400 baud rates, who wanted to spend days uploading stories anyway? We used a word processor called XyWrite, which was an ASCII text program (and is still my all-time favorite word processor), which would have allowed for thin files, but it was still a bit too cutting edge. So this night, I was on the phone for a while.

To whit:

Writer: So, I’ve been trying to fax this ten page story for the past three hours, with no luck.

Me: Your modem is active, right?

Writer: Yes! It’s flashing, but it won’t send my fax!

<Time passes — almost thirty minutes>

Me: So the document is on the screen again, let’s hit <Send> and see what happens.

Writer: I’ve been doing that! I had to lay the screen all the way back to place the paper on it, but it still won’t scan and send!

Me: …

<Pause while I realize the writer has been placing the paper ON the screen, instead of sending the electronic file. Insert strangled sounds of me trying to keep from laughing on the phone.>

Me: Alright, then, I think I found the problem. . .

For a few weeks now, I’ve noticed that the green is fading, slowing shifting into what will eventually become brilliant golds, yellows, oranges and reds. We’re not anywhere near that yet, but I did see this one branch in the park which is always the first to change has become yellow in the past few days. That made me smile.

When I first started walking a pagan path, I stood an all-night vigil on the night before Mabon, 1987, to cleanse myself and prepare for a life lived outside the norm. I was married at the time to a different woman, and one of the many reasons we ended up splitting up was due to my metamorphosis into what I felt then was — and still feel now is — my true self.

It all started rather low-key. My friend Ken owned a comic book store around the corner from my folks’ house and I used to pull a weekend shift there so he could have a day off. Some time around 1986, he was introduced to a woman named Susan by his ex-wife (named Sue), with whom he quickly developed a relationship and moved in with her. One day we were hanging in the store shooting the breeze and he says, “Hey, did I tell you? She’s a witch. It’s pretty cool, too — we did a circle last night for the moon and you know how we’ve talked about there having to be something more? Well, this was the More.*”

We talked a lot over the next few weeks about things, and he explained how neo-paganism (what witches/druids, etc, get lumped into) was really about nature worship, and to him, it just felt right. I read a little about it — this was pre-interwebs days, so information was harder to come by — and found myself intrigued. Not long after, I got invited to a summer solstice circle being held by Susan’s group, named Shadowpath Grove, which was part of a larger organization called Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship, founded by the late Isaac Bonewits as an organization whose purpose was to train pagan clergy.

I’d had my go ’round with Catholicism, and felt it lacking. I knew I was spiritual, but hadn’t been able to define it. That solstice day, despite the ritual running into a few snags, was like the goddess slapping me up’side the head and saying, “Wake up!” I thought I’d never experience something like that, but there it was, all wrapped up in the goddess.

And thus began my immersion into the modern pagan scene. The spark was in me, and it was not going to be extinguished. I joined Shadowpath and ADF a few weeks later, and stood my vigil that September at Wolf Den State Park in Connecticut (where the last wolf killed in Connecticut in the 1700s had been living). Over the next few years, I found myself drawn every year to the writing of the Mabon ritual, and man, what stories some of them spawned. There was one year we did a ceremonial battle of the light ceding to the dark (I, as the god, was beaten by the priestess, representing the goddess) in the circle and at the peak, a stag snorted just outside the circle. It had been watching us and there was something incredibly spiritual about the entire experience. I still get shivers thinking about it.

Time was, my year revolved around festival season. Not music festivals, but the big organized ones in the pagan scene. Rites of Spring in May, Suntide in July, Twilight Covening in October (with one of the most intensely spiritual experiences in my life wrapped into three days back in 1988).

When I moved to New York City in 1990, I was a completely different person than I’d been a mere three years prior. I had a good job, I was out of my loveless marriage, and the future looked bright. I did keep going back to Connecticut over the next four years or so for occasional Shadowpath gatherings, but once I sold my truck, it became harder and harder to get out of the city. It’s a black hole that, for all that it’s an amazing place to live, can suck you in and never let you go. I’d had a leavetaking from Shadowpath when I first moved to New York, but the ties were still there and I was always welcome.

The black hole also sucked up much of my spirituality as time went on. I was a very intense person in those days, and living in Manhattan as I was, you couldn’t keep yourself open to the world around you. If you did, the sheer enormity of millions of people around you would batter at you. I raised a wall and never realized how thick it was until I’d moved to the Bronx and relative solitude with Kim**. I’ve worked on easing it ever since, and believe me, it’s not easy.

Even though I’m nowhere near as active as I once was, I still consider myself to be pagan to the core. I’ve written elsewhere about how music also ties into this, and how a good Railroad Earth show, to me, is religion. What many don’t actually get, though, is that it really is religion for me. I can reach up and touch the goddess, and feel her move through me.

The gods are immanent, not transcendant to me. They are within me, and whether it’s music, ritual, or whatever, it all ends up bringing me to that moment of bliss Joseph Campbell talked about. I carry the tools to be my own priest, and my cathedral is a forest.

As the song sings, “My skin, my bones, my heretic heart are my authority.”

Blessings to you all.

* Not quite verbatim, but close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons.

** I bet you’ve never read the phrase “relative solitude” in conjunction with the Bronx. Well, compared to Manhattan, it’s an apt description.

It’s no secret if you read my twitter stream (which I need to get back on here) that I’m heavily into Spotify these days. So much so, that I think it’s one of the great innovations in web history. While that means that, yes, I am listening to music for free (I’ve yet to decide upon subscribing), it also means this: I’m trying out a lot of music I’ve previously only been able to find on youtube.

The critical part of that sentence is trying out. I’ve a list of bands now that I need to start actually buying their music. The Reasoning. Panic Room. Big Big Train. Mostly Autumn. And thanks to a random look on wikipedia, of all places this morning, Melting Euphoria, who are a really trippy space rock band.

As I’ve said to folks, Spotify lets me scratch my musical itches. Big band? Let’s find some Glenn Miller and Harry James. Jazz? How about some Monk or Gardot? Music from my youth? Steely Dan, Ambrosia. Prog? Genesis, Marillion, Steve Hackett, and many of the bands mentioned in the above paragraph.

I don’t know about other people, but I do plan on buying a lot of music thanks to this service, and I highly recommend to bands that they get their music on the system, particularly lesser-known bands. People will buy it if they have access to it.

Good stuff.

Talking with Elizabeth on twitter just now, I remembered I used to have a telescope when I was a kid. I spent hours looking at the moon, Mars, and especially Saturn when I could find it. It was a huge amount of fun.

But that isn’t what this post is about. No. Rather, it’s about our night sky in the Bronx. Or lack of one, thereof. Usually it’s just grey/black with a suffused glow about it, due to our proximity to Manhattan. Even six miles away, the city light overpowers the night sky here.

Except for one star*. I even pointed it out to Kim once, saying, “Look honey! Our star is out!” This has become a running joke for us, especially when we’re in places where you can see more than one star. It’s sad to me, though, that many kids in the Bronx won’t have the wonder I had of looking through a telescope and seeing such amazing sights.

We’ve used Kim’s phone and the sky map app to identify some of the stars overhead recently. That is one cool app, I have to say!

I hope to some day have a house where we can setup a telescope and gaze again on the wonders of the heavens above.

* I kid. Mostly. On cold and clear winter nights, you can see Orion blazing overhead, and more, but from May through October, it’s usually one, maybe two stars.