SmokeSound

As a nation, we are defined by our Constitution; not by our religion, not our ethnicity, not our guns, not how money we do or do not have.  We aren't a Christian nation, or an Anglo-Saxon nation.  We have a Constitution.  "We the People, in order to form a more perfect union . . ." aren't so sure about that, anymore.   The Constitution specifies a Supreme Court--a judicial system--to judge whether subsequent things we do are in line with the Constitution, or not.  Does the Constitution permit this?  Rule this out?   The Supreme Court just ruled that it is constitutional to provide for a health care system such as the one recently passed.  It does not violate the Constitution.  It is permitted by the Constitution.  That is what a Supreme Court is for:  that is what it said.   It used to be that our ordinary arguments about our court system debated whether the Constitution had to be taken literally--something like a fun...

I have a small, red machine, capable of creating irritating noises.  It clips, awkwardly, to valve stems, and inflates tires and basketballs and boat fenders. Our school systems have somewhat similar devices for inflating grades.  "Grade inflation" refers to the fact that, in this country, almost all students get an A or a B, today; more As than Bs.  A C is something shameful.  From a system that began with the intention of indicating that a median, or an average, grade would be a C, and in which only a handful of really superb students would get As, and in which only a few would get an F, we have come to the situation in which A is the most common grade. Our school system now is a Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon place, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. There are some advantages to having achieved old age:  we waded through hip-deep snow to school every day, and when we were above average,...

We do strange and goofy things when we are stressed.  I am, sometimes, almost afraid of how some automobile drivers behave, nearly exploding at something trivial.  We even have a name for it:  "road rage".  The reaction is all out of proportion to the stimulus.  Why? Because what is happening at the moment--a lane change, or lazy turn--is not the real reason for the anger.  The real reasons are, more likely, a bad situation at work, or too many bills and not enough money, a crumbling personal relationship, kids out of control:  always something else.  Not the lane change.  Not really.  Maybe immigration! As a nation, we are experiencing something like road rage.   People are shouting at each other, giving the finger to each other, accusing each other of treason, or un-Americanism, or of unspecified conspiracies. Why? I think it is because we are changing.   We have, almost from our beginnings, pretended that we w...

Her name is Karen Klein.  She sat quietly, kindly, as several young kids called her a fucking fat ass, as she tried to behave like a decent human being; a monitor on a bus. I could not watch the whole tape.  I could not bear it.  It made me ashamed to be part of the same human race. She reminded me of my mother's mother:  Big Grandma.  "Big" because she was big, just as Little Grandma--her mother--was little. I don't want to be a prig, or pretend that I was a good little kid, or even a good old man.  I wasn't, and am not.  I was a troubled kid, having my own reasons for being angry:  having had an abusive father, never having been a good athlete when being an athlete was self-worth, for too long an unaware student, altogether too much religion, and socially awkward.  (I believe that if someone had taught me to dance, instead of asking me to memorize the catechism, I might have had a chance.)  And those kids, taunting that old lady...

Houses have vindictive traits. They have ways to get even. This house, the one we are trying to leave, has grown complacent over the last six years, and is doing all it can to keep us here. Last summer's new air conditioner, weary of over-compensating for a wiring glitch, demonstrated just how much water it could squeeze from Minnesota summer air, puddled up and dribbled down, as the old one did. The water-filled baseboard heating register in our bedroom sucked all the air it could from the water, and locked the system up, signifying irritation, and heating nothing. The wildflower garden resisted weed spray, and thwarted the new seeds, demonstrating that once a wildflower, always a wild flower. So far, our "new" house in Tucson-- no newer than this quarter-century-old house-- has managed to set off the alarm system every time we have unlocked the door. Our closets and cupboards are breeding replacement parts for everything we take out. Does i...

The flickering woke me at three AM, and by four the thunder caused me to be wide awake, contemplating an early death by impalement from a 2X4 from South Dakota.  Annie, our cat, understood the gravity of the situation, and demanded a last meal.  "Why not," I thought, "there is no reason why she should go hungry into that good night." The weather channel featured a mechanical recitation of the coming of Jesus on a very dark cloud, together with quarter-sized hail, possibly, perhaps, here and there.  By five o'clock, it was evident that Jesus was not coming to Dakota County, or at least not to northern Dakota County.  The mechanical recitator said that Jesus might land in Red Wing, Minnesota, or Stockholm, Wisconsin, where conditions were worse, and thus better, for true religion. I am waiting for the cock to crow, so that I can  go to the Coffee Shop and say, "Wasn't that something!", and such. Normally, I might be working my way through a ...

Is there anything sadder than Willard "Mitt" Romney wearing blue jeans, trying to convince himself, and us, that he is just an ordinary, good guy who understands our situation because he, too, has drunk coffee from a paper cup?  Once.  Just recently, in fact. He understands the mania for NASCAR, and the Indy.  He has friends who own racing teams.  Like many of us, he as "flown on an aircraft".  Most of us, of course, fly on airplanes , but who are we to quibble?  He has been unemployed:  not a job in sight, living from unemployment check to unemployment check. What he does not have, and might have no way of recognizing, is a reality check. When my mother died, somebody in the family decided that I should have my mother's jewelry box.  That is it, above.  There is a little spring-loaded, rusty button that opens the lid.  Inside, there was just a nail buffer, although all of us siblings have seen Mom open that box, all of her adult...

June Sky over Minneapolis "Severe thunderstorms!", Public Radio reported.  "Already over the western suburbs.  Expect high winds and large hailstones." Every time I hear something like that, I recall the time at Weyerhaeuser Grade School #303, in western Washington State, when our little band of learners came out of the "Old School" building on the back of the property, where we had played basketball, to find ourselves in a "severe thunderstorm", with lightning striking the fir trees just a few yards away, and where, for the first time in my life, I smelled sulphur in the air.  Damnation all around! We dared not run across the gravelly ball field to our three-room, two-classroom, eight-grades "new" schoolhouse.  We stayed on the porch of the Old School, where my mother had said she went to school, to wait for Damnation to slack off. Mostly, Western Washington, on the ocean side of the Cascade Mountains, simply leaked rain down...

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. The sun goes down just when you need it most. He walks as if balancing the family tree on his nose. People who slap you on the back are just trying to help you swallow what they just told you. You can get anywhere in ten minutes if you go fast enough. Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.                  --Mark Twain Against stupidity, even the gods themselves contend in vain.          --Isaac Azimov You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat: you pull his tail in New York, and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here; they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.                               ...

I have been in mourning, but there has been no good reason for it.  That is often the case, is it not? Here, in Minnesota, we do not actually live in Michele Bachmann's Congressional district, but we feel, nevertheless, that she is one of us.   She is ours.  Our Belle, Michele! And we are moving to Arizona, where she is only a rumor, a phantasm, a very attractive, mean-mouthed, gaffe machine of the Tea Party kind.  But I should not have despaired so quickly. We are moving into the Congressional district represented by Gabby Giffords until yesterday.  Yesterday, there was an election to choose someone to fill out her unexpired term.  She, as you recall, is the person, along with a little girl, and several other people, who was shot by a lunatic with a thirty-shot magazine (or something like that).  In her last election, she barely nosed out Jesse Kelly, who ran for the seat again, against Giffords' former aide, Ron Barber. Yesterday, ...

Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should. Parents learn from experience. We do not wake up our second babies just to see them smile. Monday:  in Christian countries, the day after the football game. Missionary position:  the missionary on top. On College Deans:  At some point, every faculty would certainly lynch its Dean, if it could only agree on a date. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.                                      --H. L. Mencken Predestination was doomed from the beginning. It is amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired. Iowa:  famous for potatoes, and Woody Hayes. A limerick packs laughs anatomical into space that is quite economical.      But the good ones I've seen      So seldom are clean and the clean ones so s...

We are moving, but God wants us to stay in Minnesota. How do I know?  I am no illiterate believer!  I can read the signs! We have been packing things, and moving them to the garage, preparatory to loading them into the trailer, in proper order. As a consequence, I cannot get my pickup into the garage. It is difficult enough when there are no boxes there:  I have to pull in the driver's side window, and hold my breath. And tonight--here is the sure sign from God that I am displeasing him-- we are told to expect sixty mile an hour winds and hail. Hail ruined our house roof and four garage doors just a couple of years ago. The signs are simple enough.  God wants me here in Minnesota, but in order to keep me here, he is willing to ruin my pickup. How am I supposed to be grateful and obedient in the face of such pure extortion?  I tried that once before:  "Go into the ministry", God said, "and save your eternal soul!  And keep the Svinth ...

There it was:  "Steve Morel's Screw"! I was sorting through the closet off our computer room, and there on the floor, in plain sight, was Steve Morel's Screw"!  We had been living with Steve Morel's Screw for six years. I showed the envelope to Mari. "Where did you get that?" she asked.  I told her. "Who is Steve Morel?"  I didn't know, but I wondered whether he was a former owner of our house. I looked up "Chasewood Gates on Chasewood Parkway" in Minnetonka--the name on the envelope.  " The detail information of CHASEWOOD GATES is no longer available."  It said I should look up other apartments.  So apparently Chasewood Gates was an apartment building.  Maybe.   I also told her that I was not sure I wanted to touch Steve Morel's Screw, inside the sealed envelope. But since I had no idea which Steve Morel was our Steve Morel, nor whether his screw was worth the effort, I opened the envelope. Ste...

"Enjoy yourself now!" the father said to his son. "When you grow up its just going to be work." I did a silent, inside groan.  Poor kid! His dad was training him to dread becoming an adult, to dread work; to become like his Dad.   I suppose the father just wanted to tell his son to enjoy being a boy, but given his morose tone, even that could not have worked.   It certainly is the case that a lot of people are trapped in their jobs, and that a lot of jobs are drudgery.  Perhaps he had such a job.   I have been one of the lucky ones, having had interesting work, and it might be luck more than my own attitude, but it was all I could do not to tell that boy that work--a job-- can be a wonderful experience, and that he should do his damnedest to aim for something that really interested him. He should, at least, try! Instead, for once in my life, I said nothing.  But it is nagging me.

A man should be greater than some of his parts. In a museum i Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus; one when he was a boy, and one when he was a man.                                                      --Mark Twain A cynic is a man with a stolen lantern searching for an honest man. Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam on a picnic without looking to see whether the seeds move. Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy. Its the occurring that's hard.                     --Stephen Leacock The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. All buses heading in the opposite direction drive off the face of the earth and ...

Try to discipline your children the way your Lord wants you to, and the next thing you know the gubbamint is after you! Creflo Dollar knows what I mean. Creflo and his wife, Taffi, are just trying to make a buck, serving the Lord.  They are co-pastors of the World Changers Church near Atlanta, a little place with 30,000 members.  They have a few "satellite" churches, too, and maybe even some orbiting prayer stations, although  nobody has ever claimed that, or denied it.  There are four satellites in Georgia, and more in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Washington, Cleveland, Dallas, and Houston.  No one knows where the prayer stations, in orbit, are, or even whether they are in polar or equatorial orbit.  (I have made up all this orbit business, so no one will ever really know, but that's the way it is, when you try to make a buck. Well!  Creflo and Taffi's 15-year-old daughter wanted to go to a party, and Creflo is said to have "got physical" with he...

People worry that if there is no God in heaven, threatening us with bubbling pools of sulpher, that we will have no morals at all.  Nonsense! In the first place, such a pessimistic view of humankind assumes that we really are a savage lot of beasts. And while it is true that we do occasionally spawn a psychopath or a sociopath, most people are just what we see when we look around:  just what we are. Would you be savagely mean if you could get away with it? I think not.  I think you would be, and I would be, just about what we are. We grow up in communities that teach us to behave the way they do. We become human beings in community. Parents, and aunts and uncles and grandparents, friends, and teachers, and people at work, nudge us toward what most of them think is good. They learned it the same way.  So do our kids. Adding a god who will punish you if you goof up is just a way to emphasize how serious we think it is. Every ethical system ever dev...

Hartley's First Law:      You can lead a horse to water,      but if you can get him to float on his back,      you've got something. I've had one child. My husband wants to have another. I'd like to watch him have another. Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in this country.  The rest is thrown out. What makes us so bitter against the people who outwit us is that they think themselves cleverer than we are. Just because you've beaten a sorcerer doesn't mean you've beaten a sorcerer. How can I miss you if you won't go away? Men rarely, if ever, dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. Among economists, the real world is often a special case. Never say you know a man until you have divided an inheritance with him. A conservative is a person who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.

Bear euthanized after eating Canadian murderer •    By Jeremy Hainsworth Associated Press VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Canadian conservation officers have euthanized a black bear that ate the remains of a convicted murderer. British Columbia Environment Minister Terry Lake said Monday the bear's description matched that of one seen guarding a cache that contained the remains of Rory Wagner, 54. Examinations of fur at the scene as well as teeth and claw marks confirmed the bear that was euthanized is the one that ate the remains. Lake said the animal was put down because bears remember food sources. Officials suspect the bear pulled Wagner's body from his car after he died on a remote logging road. Well, there you are!  The poor bear got killed for bad taste.   What if PETA (People Eating Tame Animals) hears about this?  The woods in Canada will be filled with people taking off their clothes to demonstrate that bears are naked:  something like that. ...

Map from Wikipedia "The Balkans": Albania                                        Kosovo Bosnia and Herzegovina             Macedonia Bulgaria                                       Montenegro Croatia                                         Romania Greece                                         Serbia Italy                                             Slovenia                           ...

Hummingbirds never remember the words. A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn. The wise man can see more from the mountaintop than the fool can from the bottom of a well. Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.  The limerick is furtive and mean. You must keep her in close quarantine.      Or she sneaks to the slums      And promptly becomes Disorderly, drunk, and obscene. Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are. You are not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.

Texas Canyon is really the Texas mountains, just east of Tucson.  Who knows? Where the road comes closest and highest, there is a stop for gawkers, such as I. If it is not the grandest sight on the road most commonly taken toward Tucson, from the east, it is at least among them.  Truth, and consideration, be told, there are beautiful sights everywhere in this huge land. The rich soil of Iowa is deep, and when the ordinary rains come, nothing seems quite so green and promising for life.  A political reporter once said that Iowa had all the geographical interest of a rumpled bed, but he was a reporter who could not see that he was standing on one of the best examples of why this has been called, "breadbasket for the world".  Iowa has conserved its soil, and its religious values, and political opinions.  They mow the roadside for those of us who pass by. Nebraska, along Interstate 89, never strays far from the Platte River, and because the land is low and f...

I used to think that the time god sent two she-bears to rip apart little kids was an awful story.  You will find it in II Kings 2:23-24.  I looked it up on the internet, and it is still there. "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." However, I had more hair then.  It is not nice to make fun of people who are going bald.  God agrees.  God sends bears.   Well, that is the easy part.  The hard part is believing that the Bible, or Elisha, or Pat Robertson are divinely inspired. I don't know what the moral of the story is.  It has something to do with not teasing bald men, because God sends bears.  

"I get frustrated when I talk to evangelical friends or students and they ask, 'How can you be a Christian and a Democrat?'" Valerie Cooper, a religious studies professor from the University of Virginia said. Well, dear Lord, I should hope so!  What kind of lunacy would generate a question like that?  "How can you be a Christian and a Democrat?"  It would be equally lunatic to ask how one could be a Christian and a Republican.   Unless, of course, you had a secret passage directly to the mind of god, and god said that a woman had no right to her own body, or that no Speaker of the House should be orange.  Or maybe that White Houses should be reserved for. . . .  Oh, you know!  That white thing! The problem is that people who think they know the mind of god have as much a right to vote as people who scarcely know what to think.  The only difference between them is that the people who have a pipeline to god believe they are absolutely right:  ...

Paralysis.  We are overcome with paralysis. Or maybe it is not paralysis, but a twitching of the muscles.  A tic, perhaps. We are moving, emptying this larger house--disposing of old treasures and newer whims--stuffing everything into a trailer for destination, and re-imagining our lives:  a different house, a different although familiar city, a life after income.  It is no trivial exercise.  It is the process that seems trivial, and impossible. "What shall I do now?", Mari asks.  "Shall I gather all our heavy winter clothing, for destination at the ReUse Center?  Or is that the landfill?  I mean, 'the Goodwill'." "Yes," I reply, "Do that." Mari watches Nathaniel, new grandson in Tucson, on her phone.  I can hear him cry.  I sit down at the computer.  We are attacking the problem as best we can.  The process will work.

I have been grieving.  Our best local newspaper--The Minneapolis Star Tribune--is not a great newspaper, but it is pretty good.  One could learn quite a lot about what is going on in the world by reading it.  Our other municipal paper is suffering from universal newspaper woes, and lack of income.  It reports mostly sports and local happenings. On our quick trips to Tucson, to which we are returning, we have been buying the Daily Star.  It is more like our second best newspaper.  Thus the cause for my grieving. It sounds almost elitist, but Mari and I have promised ourselves that we will continue our subscription to the New York Times, in order to improve the taste of our morning coffee.  We will take the Daily Star, too, of course, because it will, better than the Times, report about the place where we will live. Traveling across the western part of the country, as we have been doing, means that we have read whatever the local newspaper is, near...

Our new  house in Tucson, which is precisely as old as the house we presently live in--that is to say, "new to us, but about a quarter of a century old", is on the northwest side of Tucson, looking still farther west and north toward Twin Peaks.  At this time of the year, when the sun sets north of west, it dips behind Twin Peaks, not cautiously, but with a thunderous declaration that it will rest. It does.  The earth rolls east, and east, and nearly forever east, and in the morning, the sun appears north of east, as enthusiastically as it had dipped west. "It is a dry heat", as you have heard, and so the ridges are sharp, unfiltered, unscattered by water in the air. There is a sharpness to the edges of life in the desert.  The riders of the purple sage go carefully at night.

Playing with the Big Kids We have an old dog of a trailer--16 feet long, built on the frame of what might otherwise have become a stock trailer, so a good part of the cargo box is ahead of the axles.  It trails like a dream, and is easy to back up.  We have moved to Tucson twice before, using that trailer. When heavily loaded, as it often is, the weight on the hitch lowers the back of the pickup enough so that, at night, people think I have my lights on high beam.  Oncoming vehicles blink their lights at me, and I blink back, really blinding them for a moment, just to demonstrate that my lights are on dim, and we pass in the night, mutually cursing at each other.  It makes moving a cursing contest. We have just returned from taking a second load of our lives to Tucson, and what we hope will be the third and last load will leave in about a month. There are modest alternative routes from the Twin Cities to Tucson.  The mindless one is to drive south on I...