Monthly Archives: April 2007

Peepers

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Over in Shelburn tonight, helping sheetrock. G__ is very independent, very obsessed with his projects, so typically blows through them alone, but sheetrocking a ceiling is something that is just, well, let us say, … difficult … to do alone. Quick job though, a small bathroom. Ripped down the old acoustic tile, ran the new wiring, and hung, say, the better part of three sheets.

Couple of hours, and got a family dinner out of the deal. Last time G__ and I were up in a ceiling, though, the family was mine, was my boy toddling amongst the tools and extension cords, and my other little one in the bath with Mom. Now it is his kids, mine being only home half the time since the divorce, and pretty well grown besides.

Bittersweet. Good to think we’ve been friends, working on each other’s houses, sharing meals, for so long. Sad, even years later, about the divorce.

Walked out to the car, clear blue sky of twilight, silver crescent moon hanging low in the northwest. That impossible blue, fading to black in the east, light enough show the clearest intricate silhouette of the trees up on the ridge in the west.

And I heard peepers. Maybe we won’t have eternal winter after all.

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Doesn’t Everyone Already Have One?

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Was over a friend’s house watching baseball on TV tonight – prime time commercial TV, something I never see (don’t have a set myself).

The car ads are amazing. A guy walking down the street, notices a car and stops to look it over. Were it a woman he was checking out like that he would have been arrested for stalking, or maybe just lewd and lascivious. A Range Rover driving on a newly formed lava field, I believe this car would make your life exhilarating, some BMW promising that you would be extraordinary should you purchase one.

I felt out of touch. This does not match the reality I see around me day to day. We bog down in traffic, we cannot find a parking space, we drive on asphalt – perhaps fresh paved, perhaps potholed, sometimes out in the country a ways, but always asphalt (I know there are some young bucks out their thinking about the time they drove daddy’s ford off in a field last summer …) I don’t get it.

And I thought … doesn’t everybody already have a one? There seems to be no shortage of cars. So I looked up some numbers.

US Population – roughly 300 million. Between the ages of 18 and 64 – prime ‘need a car’ years, down to 186 million. And, according to a couple of sources (census, NADA) there are about 136 million cars currently “in operation”. That is not quite one for everybody, but pretty close, one for seven out of ten.

And, new car sales (at registered new car dealers only) have exceed new persons added to the US population annually by about a factor of 8 (16m vs roughly 2M annually) for the past several years.

So, it seems to me that pretty much everyone who needs a car most likely already has one. That would explain the commercials. I guess it is no surprise, but they are not selling cars, not selling something that anyone has a real need for.

They are selling sex, excitement, glamour, self-worth.

The illusion is astonishing, the costs real high and … everyone pretty much already has one.

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Ninety in Ninety (Or, well … here we go)

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Every newcomer gets this “Do a Ninety in Nintey” thrown at them.

What the hell, I thought, when I heard it, why not just say “Go to a meeting every day”? I still don’t know the real answer to that question, but I do know that doing something every day is a little scary. Feels like commitment, feels like “being good.”

Like flossing, or something your Mom would tell you to do.

But Ninety in Ninety. Sounds like reps with weights, working out in the gym, I thought, real tough. I liked the sound of it.

And it took a while to dawn on me that ninety days was actually just shy of three months which is a quarter (roughly) of a year, which is a goddamm long time to be doing anything.

There is something powerful about doing something every day. And pretty simple. The every-other-day or every-third-day or twice a week thing never really worked for me. Especially twice-a-week, which, I could tell you right off, speaking as a well trained statistician, would never work out as there are an odd number of days in a week, and so that is what, an average of every-three-point-five-days? Asymptotically, maybe, but how do you operationalize the point-five of a day?

And for the others, well, the difference between I did it yesterday and I did it the day before yesterday – be it practicing the piano, working out, or watering the plants – is a little difficult for me to make out. I start counting back days, trying to remember what I had for dinner, what I wore, who I talked to on the way out the door that day as a means of figuring it out. My memory is just not that good and I get sidetracked easily. Next thing you know I am digging in the back of the closet looking for a snapshot that will tell me which beach in Maine I camped at back when I still had the blue ’67 ford pickup.

More importantly, not-quite every day opens the door for gaming, for bargaining, for making deals. Does two days in a row count for missing if we are doing every-other-day? Perhaps on the front end, but then, what on the back end? Are we on or off? Does this Monday make up for last Friday. If I am extra good, can I skip just this once? And on and on and on. If I were on the up-and-up about this, if the bargain was always fair, if I was always an honest dealer, then this might be OK. But, usually, the point of a Ninety in Ninety is that I am not an honest dealer, bargaining with fair, pure motives. If I were what would I be doing in a tin chair in a church basement drinking bad coffee?

And, on a deeper level, the bright shining beauty of Every Day is that these conversations are eliminated. If I am looking for a bit more peace, a bit of relief from the constant noise in my head, then Ninety in Ninety drops out a large chunk of internal discussion. Gone, just like that.

Ok, Maybe not. Maybe it just makes it clear that that the discussion I hear is just the usual smoke coming from the incessant excuse machine, rather than some kind of real planning, all that what how maybe when but if stuff being something that can be safely ignored.

Either way, there is the potential for a bit less self-involvement, for looking around with curiosity, and actually paying attention to whatever it is that I am supposed to be doing.

So, I want to be a writer. Well, what do writers do? Lots of things, I imagine, but, I would hazard a guess that the defining characteristic of a writer is writing. Maybe time for a Ninety in Ninety.

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