Last dance

Dancing with one of the last christmas gifts.

Stay

She's softly breathing next to me.
A shining angel sent to me.
From where she came it's hard to say.
Tiny star she guides my way.

Leaving

I went to the dentist last week. Thought I had lost a filling. Turned out it was merely chipped. This wasn't "my" dentist, just a local one, since I thought I had an emergency. But as I sat down in the chair, an assistant started going through all the things she was going to do that day. I needed a whole work-up, she said. There were a bunch of x-rays to be taken, then a thorough examination, and finally a plan was to be drawn up for what would turn out needed to be done over the next few years. The next few years? I paused her. Suddenly, I had realized that after years of moving to this place, I had now stopped. That now it was time to start moving away from here. Some people tend to want to stay in one place. Not I. Apart from moving frequently—living here for four years has been my longest consecutive stint in one place since the eighties—I tend to be mentally either moving in or out even while staying at one place. I thought becoming a father would change that. It hasn't. So far, at least. And so it was in that chair that I realized that I have now begun preparing for leaving this place. In a year or so. Perhaps a year and a half. Mentally, I have started making plans for how to deal with that. Whether to take one car along. Two. Or sell them both. What appliances to leave. When to list the house. I am leaving, ever so slowly.

It also just seems to be in the air. Not only are our neighbors, the people who we have really connected with here, leaving piecemeal for another country, but other big attractions on the street are leaving as well. One branch at a time.

We became interested in the neighborhood before we became fond of the house. Short, quiet streets that are close to the bustle—such as it is—have always appealed to me. That is why I liked staying in a quiet apartment overlooking Las Ramblas, in the obscure little hotel around the corner from Times Square, at the resort on the calm side of Duval Street, on Maui instead of Oahu, near Montmartre instead of on Champs Elysees, on a side street from Oxford Street, comfortably close to Strøget etc. I need people. Crave life. And when that life ebbs, I lose interest. Become sad, even.

Like today.

I still remember the first time I saw that tree. It towered over everything. Not just the house which yard it occupied, but the house across the street as well. Actually, the whole street for that matter. It just stood there, graceful, quiet, strong. Like some benevolent giant, watching out for us puny beings busying about below its branches. My daughter took to it immediately, as well. It must have been one of the more striking sights for her early on, laying in her carriage, looking up at the sky, as I pushed it up and down the street.

I struck up a conversation with the head of the deconstruction crew. He said he was sorry to see it go. I believed him. He was probably in his early sixties, but couldn't remember this street without that tree towering over it.

Why do we so crave stability, somewhere in our lives? Why do we need to know that some things are not evanescent, that they will "always" be there? Maybe it was just the immoderate size of this being, and its apparent immovability that gave the illusion that it would never leave.

In the end, it doesn't matter. It, too, is leaving.

Fifth

12 Angry men [1957]

If you have read this blog on a regular basis, you will know that I abhor it when people pigeonhole other people on the basis of their education, nationality, their sex, age, race, sexual orientation, whatever. Labels don't clear anything up. They tie up those that you apply them to. And they give you false security when you start generalizing about that group. About how they will react. What they think. How capable they are. Whether you will agree with them. Or find them interesting. The apparently inate human urge to categorize our fellow man, to cheat our way towards getting to actually knowing that person by attaching a predefined set of attributes to him or her, just may be one of the most devisive afflictions that this race is born with. Still, its prevalence is not just based in the ease of mind that comes with being able to hang these neat labels on every human being that crosses our paths. The difficult truth is that some of these labels have just a touch of truth to them. Just a tad. Enough to make us feel good to use all of them, and to base on them our whole, already fragile value system regarding other people. And before you know it, some potentially sane person gets up, walks over to a perfect stranger, an African-American, and tries to pay that person a complement by saying "These are promising looking children you've got there. Odds are that one of them will become a professional athlete. Congratulations!". By the way, I am not just taking this as a theoretical example. This actually happened to a friend of mine. Last week. In a restaurant, in the next town over from here. But of all the half-rights, those grains of truths, the whole 'men are angry, women are gentle' is probably the most prevalent. The notion that the World's two ruling forces are testosterone and estrogen. That men's drive is rage and women's is love. Men want to conquer, women want to comfort. I could go on all night. These half-wrongs permeate all our culture, to the point that there does not seem to be a sphere of human discourse that is free of them. This film certainly is not. Hell, it actually tackles it, head on. Through the years, Henry Fonda keeps getting the big credit for his lead in this SIdney Lumet's first bout on the big screen. And sure, he is good. Quite good. But this is a film from another era. Another world. A world completely ruled by men. Men who in general were just as inept then as they are today at doing things like conveying their feelings, especially to those that are close to them. Including love. And it is Lee J. Cobb who steals this show. His portrayal of an enraged, bitter man, whose son has abandoned him after receiving heavy-handed upbringing, really got to me. I felt I knew this man. I understood him. Not because I know men like him. Or because I empathised with him. But it still struck a nerve, somehow. The moment he briefly talks about his son, early on in the movie, I could feel that was going to be what it all came down to. And it did. Masterfully. Brilliantly. If I were to generalize about one hald of mankind, I would say that there is a locomotive quality to men, as a gender. They are one-track minded, loud, blow a lot of steam, slow out of the gate, high-maintainence, unflinching if you cross them, and take forever to stop once they are on a roll. Toot-tooooot.

 

Hope

Is this the first step on the way back to sanity?

Slave

As has been mentioned here a few times before, I am a junkie. I have the mentality of an addict, and when I am about to become hooked on something, I frequently need to approach it with an almost 12-step mentality, if I am not to fall pray to it. It makes sense that such an inclination runs in families, seeing how my brother was a slave to alcoholism all of his adult life, almost up to the point when he died just after his 43rd birthday.

Still, I do not get hooked on everything. And not even some of the classics. For example, booze doesn't seem to be a problem for me. But smoking is. Or would be, if I hadn't gone to some pains to stop using it when I was sixteen. I think my saving grace was that I hadn't smoked for more than a couple of years, but it was still an effort. Other smoking or snorting or shooting up has not been a problem, simply because I have been too scared shitless to even try most of it. However, I was addicted to what I gather is the worst of them all, caffeine. That took a long cold turkey back in '92 or '93, and I have stayed away from the stuff ever since. Of my current masters, chocolate probably remains the most powerful, and insidious. I have spells every other month or so, where I just can't stop eating it. I wake up in the morning and have to load up on candy bars. I can therefore not wait to get to the gas station, beacause I know that I cleaned out any scrap of chocolate in the house the night before. Same thing with ice cream. There are these recurring periods when I have to have my daily pint, preferrably of Ben & Jerry's. At least there, I actually do have a warning sign I sometimes pay attention to: The day I have had two pints, by myself, during that one day, is usually the day I manage to start a successful ice cream cold turkey. Which may last a couple of weeks, or even a few months.

Somewhat less corporal, but no less consuming, are addictions such as my movie/DVD spouts, my road biking periods a.k.a. my marathon years a.k.a. the fight for my brown belt (also known as the karate-kid-with-several-broken-bones period), back in the day my computer games insomniatic weeks on ends, latent workaholism, and my ever-present news addiction. That last one actually never seems to really subside, it just varies in intensity from glancing over headlines twice a day to an all-out, full-blown ride through news media on five continents, followed by bouts of depression over the cruel brutality in the world and my inability to do much about it. Those rides can last all through the night, several nights in a row.

Now if I could only get hooked on moderation.

Fourth

Network [1976]

One of the best movies. Ever. This is the movie Robert Murdoch was watching when he got the idea for the Fox "News" Network. This is just so incredibly well written. Which is enough for me. I mean, the acting is good. Really good, actually. But the movie is just a solid delivery of text. Wonderful, spine-chillingly fabulous text. But that is it. There is minimal action or physical movement of any kind. Basically because there is no room for it. Hell, it is a Sidney Lumet film. I mean, 12 Angry Men took place almost entirely in one room. Plus it isn't needed. The lines are king. One result of that is the timelessness of the film. Look past the 70's hair-dos and bell-bottoms, obsolete technology etc. and you have a movie that could have opened yesterday. And it would have been received as a timely wake-up call. A fresh critique of TV's kiss of death to society. Or as one character puts it in the film: "You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split-seconds and instant replays. You are madness, Diana, virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you." But there is another pillar holding up the movie. Another aspect of society getting a whooping. The conglomerate. The corporation. The Network. Actually, the movie is more about how big business corrupts television than about how television corrupts people and their society. Kind of like Syriana, which I really look forward to seeing. I'll end with a quote from the Network's chairman of the board. This says it all: "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale."