Two Awards in One Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Two fellow bloggers separately named “The Gad About Town” as a winner of the “Lovely Blog” award today. That is as cool as it gets.

Both are blogs that I enjoy reading regularly, by two very different writers in different parts of the world: Tidlidim and The Reluctant Baptist. Thank you both. Both writers have strong personal voices in their work and sometimes include their own photos.

In the blogging world, there are some rules of etiquette in the form of paying forward the “lovely” attention. Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for the award.
2. Add the “One Lovely Blog” logo to your post. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget.”
3. Share 7 facts/or things about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 bloggers you admire and inform nominees by commenting on their blog.

The last one first. I have been participating for the last 10 weeks in responding to our WordPress service’s Daily Prompt, which has helped spur my most prolific period of writing since graduate school. (This prolific-ness is a good thing, too, because I am working on a terrific project, due out soon, with another blogger.) Most of the writers with whom I have been communicating regularly, several of whom ask me questions and give me applause every single day, I met via that service. My subscribers have doubled and so has the number of blogs that I subscribe to. Go to the Daily Prompt any day and you will see the several dozen blogs that I read and often like every day.

I fear I will leave someone out, is all I am confessing.

Several random facts about me:

1. The number four is my lifelong “secret lucky number.” (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world’s luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing’s existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my “secret lucky number 4”: It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it. Maybe.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the nearby Wallkill River—I am legend, I suppose.) And then I had to move again, this time to Goshen, NY.

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinal muscular atrophy as an “illness” versus a “condition.”

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family’s house with my crayon scribblings on them and in them—I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then inform my parents was a story. I’ll guess I was about three or … four. See? It must have been a lucky number.

5. I am very audiologically sensitive (I do not know if that is even a term). I can identify voiceover actors, even when famous ones are used anonymously. The downside of this is a sensitivity to certain noises … if the faucet in your kitchen sink is dripping, I will excuse myself from your living room to see if the tap can be tightened or if the faucet swung away from any container under it. Bloop bloop bloop. Sadly, this sensitivity does not translate to any musical ability. I have none, just an appreciation for music and performance.

6. I see words as I speak them.

7. My favorite animals growing up were dinosaurs. My favorite dinosaur was the triceratops. In the children’s books about dinosaurs, the triceratops always seemed to get into a tangle with the fearsome T-Rex and walk away, unscathed.

http://thereluctantbaptist.com/2014/10/07/and-the-nominees-are/

http://tidlidim.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/grouping-two-lovely-blog-awards-into-one/

Some Time Travels

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In his “Confessions,” St. Augustine writes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” He decides that time is an idea, unique to humans, and also unique in that we can simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation. In our minds, but only there, we are not locked to one perception of one reality.

Yesterday, I deleted everything that I had written up to that point by dragging my unbuttoned shirtsleeve across my laptop’s touchpad while reaching for my coffee. (No, I can not replicate the results in an experiment; yes, like an idiot, I have attempted to replicate these results in an experiment.) In a feat of memory, I retyped all that I had written to that point; simultaneously I remembered what I had written, was super-present and typed it attentively, and expected a future in which I regularly saved my work, a lesson I first learned, oh, 20 years ago. I was in three specific time-experiences at once, and all of them sucked.

* * * *
For decades, it has been known that subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time. In yet more recent (2014) experiments, physicists have “simulated” time travel. Science reporters tell us that time travel is in the “near future,” or, more prosaically, “just around the corner.” If this is so, no one from the future has yet visited us, because if it truly is something that we will invent or discover in the future (near or not-so) we would know all about it already. This is because, oh, you get it.

Many therapy techniques suggest remembering oneself in a childhood moment and reaching out to that younger self; the thought is that we carry every self we have yet been forward into our psychological present and can communicate something of a healing nature to those past selves. Whenever I have attempted anything of this sort, I have cried. I have received no reports from the younger self about what he made of the unexplained appearance of an older man leaning on a cane.

* * * *

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!
Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped
There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,
How little I knew, or which of them was the one
To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.— “I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read,” Delmore Schwartz

* * * *
The thought experiment of time travel has a long history in popular culture. Fantasists invent tools (a jet-pack in every garage) in novels and movies, tools which actually only address the needs of the present moment and do not attempt to imagine the future needs that will be answered by the future tools. In almost every science fiction work that uses the device of time travel, the several paradoxes of “a visitor from the future would influence current history and thus change their present” or “if I go back in time and change a mistake, erase an error, will I not change who I am now?” are addressed.

Many of the heroes decide or discover that the path that brought them to where they are and to the person they are now was always worth taking, errors and all. As long as one is breathing, lessons can be applied. (Ebenezer Scrooge, for example.)

It is a seductive thought experiment, though. Offer a person a time machine to return to a specific moment in the past and take up residence there, from that moment onward, and relive one’s life so one can fix whichever errors and enhance whichever successes that followed, well, it is seductive. Offer a person life from a future moment from which they can see it all unfold, … well.

* * * *

delmoreschwartz

Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz’s heart-rending short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” opens with the narrator in a movie theater as he realizes the feature is his parents on their first date; he becomes frantic and yells at the screen, “Don’t do it!” and gives a list of reasons. (Oh, to have been Delmore’s mother. He was 21 when the story was published.) The audience hisses him down, as he is ruining the movie for them, but he knows how it ends.

My father tells my mother how much money he has made in the week just past, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated. But my father has always felt that actualities somehow fall short, no matter how fine they are. Suddenly I begin to weep. The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theatre is annoyed and looks at me with an angry face, and being intimidated, I stop. I drag out my handkerchief and dry my face, licking the drop which has fallen near my lips. Meanwhile I have missed something, for here are my father and mother alighting from the street-car at the last stop, Coney Island.

At the end, the narrator is thrown out of the movie theater while on screen his father is refusing to have his fortune told by a Coney Island fortune teller. And then he awakens to “the bleak winter morning” of his 21st birthday. It was all a dream.

* * * *
As Augustine saw, way back in the 4th century, we always live in the three time zones of our experience and psyche simultaneously: past, present, and future. Always.

I no more wrote than read that book which is
The self I am, half-hidden as it is
From one and all who see within a kiss
The lounging formless blackness of an abyss.

How could I think the brief years were enough
To prove the reality of endless love? — “I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read,” Delmore Schwartz

* * * *
Neat Thing of the Day: Lou Reed reading “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Reed had been a student-mentee of Schwartz’s at Syracuse University): In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 7 asks, “Congrats! You’re the owner of a new time machine. The catch? It comes in two models, each traveling one way only: the past OR the future. Which do you choose, and why?”

Sick Transit, Gloria, on a Monday

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One could define Hell as the experience of the sensation of wanting to be any place other than where one is at that moment. In the proper wrong circumstances, your bed could be rendered almost as uncomfortable as an MRI tube.

If I convince myself that the seat next to mine presents a better view of the movie screen and I can not slide into it because you are there, ask me in a couple hours what the film was about or who was in it.

Walk through any strip mall shopping plaza on a Sunday afternoon: not only is the place bereft of customers, not one single employee wants to be there, even for the money. Or a Walmart after midnight. Every employee is elsewhere, Walter Mitty’ing their way through life, perturbed to be where they are. Perturbed to be. That is a variety of Hell.

Sic transit gloria mundi, there goes the beauty of the world, in four-hour half-shifts working at a job one does not hate exactly—because hate is a strong enough emotion to inspire actions towards real change—but dislikes, detests, disdains. I detested myself when I disdained my jobs.

* * * *
One could also define Hell as the Albany, New York, Greyhound bus station. No one appears happy to be in a bus station, neither the transiting passengers nor the employees. An extended stay in a bus station is the experience of boredom minus information.

Airports present a vast panoply of human experiences, from the fear of permanent change to the excitement of temporary reunions. I have experienced emotions that I have not encountered elsewhere in my life in airports. I realized that I had fallen in love with someone 60 seconds too late in an airport once upon a time. (More correctly, I think that I thought I ought to have gotten a phone number.) I almost missed my next flight in indecisively wandering around O’Hare while debating whether I should run “just like in a movie” to what I thought was the terminal my desired companion had told me her flight was leaving from. If you did not know, O’Hare is too large an airport to be indecisive in.

A wait in a train station is boredom plus information, as the trains are usually on time and people willingly, even happily, strike up conversations. Grand Central Station or Penn Station in New York, South Station in Boston—look at this photo:

South_Station_Terminal_Inside

Boston’s South Station: Filled with sunlight and advertising and well-stocked newsstands. Look at that happy place. (Photo from Wikipedia.)

In memory, this is truly what South Station looks like: full of light. In truth, I remember once sitting beside the late journalist David Halberstam as he waited next to the Martin’s News Shop (see above) for the Acela train to whisk him off to New York City and the two of us watched a man throw up on himself on a bench not eight feet away. I was rendered mute by both seeing someone I idolized and that sight. The great writer was spared an embarrassing “I’m a big fan” speech from me, but maybe I missed making the scene into a conversation-opener. (Mr. Halberstam has since passed away, something that was perhaps hastened by the incident.)

In America, there are only a couple reasons one is in a bus station for an extended period—overnight, say—and two are the side effects of unhappy circumstances, like not knowing anyone in town. A typical long distance bus journey includes a couple changeovers and long breaks between legs in the trip. A traveler has to stay somewhere and if one is the only person one knows in Cleveland, Ohio, (for example) one might spend eight hours walking around the neighborhood, which looks a lot like this photo that I did not take one overnight stay in Cleveland in June 2000:

But the Albany Greyhound Station? No one wants to be there. No traveler or bus driver wants to spend more than 27 seconds there (I have never seen a driver enter the facility; they remain beside the bus even after passengers have collected all bags and boxes, as if afraid the vehicle will be stolen), and no one in a position to change things in that great city wants it to be there, either. For almost 30 years it has sat atop both Greyhound’s list of buildings that need to be replaced or rebuilt and Albany’s. Each wants to see what the other will do before acting. The building’s continued existence is the picture of a stand-off, as no one will invest time, money, or care in the place if it is always about to be razed and rebuilt by the other entity. Greyhound wants to see what Albany will do, and vice-versa. (Here is a recent article.)

Photo by Michael P. Farrell/Times Union. From www.timesunion.com/local/article/Churchill-Albany-s-Greyhound-station-is-a-5320974

Any photo will make the Albany bus station appear benign. Do not be fooled. (Photo by Michael P. Farrell/Times Union. From http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Churchill-Albany-s-Greyhound-station-is-a-5320974.php)

Yet there it stands, dingy and apart. It is a reminder that life ends, but bus stations are not supposed to be memento mori.

(Photo by Michael P. Farrell/Times Union. From http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Churchill-Albany-s-Greyhound-station-is-a-5320974.php)

Hell’s waiting room, the Albany bus station. (Photo by Michael P. Farrell/Times Union. From http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Churchill-Albany-s-Greyhound-station-is-a-5320974.php)


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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 6 asks, “Train stations, airport terminals, subway stops: soulless spaces full of distracted, stressed zombies, or magical sets for fleeting, interlocking human stories?”