daily post | The Gad About Town

A S(n)ob Tale

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

“Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a snob.”

“Hi Mark.”

“I don’t like going into new situations or meeting new people. That means I’m a snob about everything, right? A social snob. If I already have it or know it or know you, I don’t want it or you to be added to or replaced by anything because the new thing or person can’t possibly be as good as the one I know or own.

“But this goes against what I tell myself and what I know from experience is true: that every new person I meet might—in just a few weeks—might be a best friend who I can not imagine life without. Every new person is a friend I am going to feel snobbish about and possessive of in a little while.”

“I think we’ve had a breakthrough. Shake hands with the two people next to you.”

“No.”

* * * *
Snobbishness is my form of insecurity about my own likes and loves; I resist introductions to new things and people (to my detriment, as even I acknowledge, but I resist all the same), as if I am insisting that what I already possess and love is sufficient.

At its most benign, this gives me a collection of quirks. At a bookstore, I do not purchase the book from the top of the pile of identical books. Instead, I find a copy below, as if “my copy” sat there untouched by human hands and unseen by human eyes until I found it. Yet I love used books and their lived-in qualities. My own books appear unread, with the spine uncracked. I do not lend books to people who crack them open, and I know which of my friends treat books in said fashion. In my world, there is a right way to read books.

At its most malignant, this gives me a truly stand-offish air, a self-presentation that of course only serves to reinforce my prejudicial thought that the people I love and the things that I already know are quite fine as they are.

* * * *
De gustibus non est disputandum. Loosely translated, this means, “There is no reason to argue about matters of taste.” There is no fighting over subjective personal likes or dislikes such as colors or sounds. You can not successfully argue me into liking certain smells. I can not punch you hard enough to like what strawberries taste like. I can show you how to make coffee the way I like it, which of course is the only way to make it, but there is no amount of money I can present to you to convince your taste buds to agree with mine.

(Dark roast, half-and-half—I know, I am such an American—enough half-and-half to convince me that the color has changed, even though a painter with a color wheel might be hard-pressed to find the change, so, no, not much half-and-half. Sugar.)

I am aware that there are best practices for using tools and producing things and enjoying many foods and drinks, and I know that these are usually merely socially agreed upon practices developed through experience. They are not universal physical laws or properties of mathematics. They are suggestions. One ought not teach a student to play piano like Chico Marx, but if you meet someone who taught themselves his method, do not urge them to un-learn it.

I took a lot of pride in and occupied too much of my brain with knowing these “best practices”: the best way to make a whatever or know which color goes with which season or which performance of this or that piece of music is the one to enjoy. Knee-jerk snobbishness is the opposite of enjoying something. It is blind and deaf and meekly resistant (no matter how loud the protestations) to the new.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 8 asks, “Even the most laid back and egalitarian among us can be insufferable snobs when it comes to coffee, music, cars, beer, or any other pet obsession where things have to be just so. What are you snobbish about?”

Two Awards in One Day

Posted on October 7, 2014 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.

Some Time Travels

Posted on October 7, 2014 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.

* * * *

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?”