: lower black pain.

72 degrees Fahrenheit is what most of us set our thermostats to, both winter and summer. It’s an ideal temperature; a little cool for a swimming pool, a little hot for a tub of potato salad, it’s seen as, generally, a popular temperature overall. It’s what Los Angeles is. 72 degrees is just perfect.

32 degrees has great press: Christmas and winter and even though over half the country never sees a single flake of snow it’s RIGHT THERE ON TV, in cartoons and stop motion animations and romantic comedies about princesses who don’t even know they are princesses until one day a mysterious letter arrives as they are putting the final touches on a four-layer wedding cake in the back of their artisanal gluten-free bakery in a midwestern city. 32 degrees is ice in a glass and frost on the windshield of your car. 32 degrees is frozen.

59.Fifty nine.

Sweater, right? You wear a sweater when it’s 59 degrees out… a light one, but still.

It’s not warm, 59. You’d never say “Wow, it’s 59, let’s go work on our tans!”

Nope.

59 lacks the crisp bite of, say… 42, but doesn’t approach the reassuring aura of 68. 68 is almost 70.

Which is almost 72.

Today is my birthday. I am 59 years old. Some of my friends tell me I don’t look a day over a number less than 59 (which is incredibly sweet of them). As a lifelong fan of Steve Martin I aspire toward white hair, and I don’t know how other folks my age are feeling, but I feel like most of my serious wrinkles are on the inside.

I’m not really discouraged. I am tired, but not entirely weary, and I greatly appreciate the privilege to live a life that bridges the worlds between Count Basie and Doechii. I stand as a testament to age being just a number, unless I’m actually on the ground, in which case I stand slowly, as a testament to the fact that it takes me a little longer to stand up than it used to. (I thought for a while I had unknowingly become significantly taller and the new dizziness upon rising was a sudden shift in altitude.)

Fifty nine is not sixty. I will feel younger at sixty. I will feel like George Clooney at sixty: salt and pepper hair and that thing where one eyebrow is always slightly higher than the other, a wry yet gentle smirk on my clean shaven yet subtly textured face. But that’s NEXT year.

This year I am “almost sixty”. This year people will ask me what my plans are for my next birthday. Over eighty percent of them will expect that I am going on a vacation, somewhere interesting.

Probably somewhere warm.

My birthday is in autumn, and I truly am an autumn child. True story: I had always thought I was a Thursday Child as well (“far to go”) but I just this week realized that I was in fact a Sunday Child (“bonny and blithe”). So I’ve got that going for me.

A week from Halloween, my birthday is “spooky adjacent”. Not quite close enough for a skull cake or a costume party, but always accompanied by leaves on the ground, pumpkin decorations, and a deep-sweeping chill in the wind. There was always a pile of coats at the birthday parties I was lucky enough to have, and the air was special - lacking the harshness of December or the earthy-sweetness of November, it was just clear and cool and incredibly appreciated by kids with pollen allergies.

I have celebrated my birthday near the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Missouri River, but never once have I been somewhere warm, like with a beach, because I actually love WHEN my birthday is, and specifically the typical North American midwestern weather patterns during this time of year.

Fifty nine is not warm. It necessitates a coat, but not a winter one - a jacket I can wear a sweatshirt underneath to provide plenty of pockets for all my comic books, yo-yos and playing cards. It’s cool enough to feel the air enter your lungs but not panic them. A brisk walk will warm you right up, and a mug of hot cider won’t overheat you too much.

It’s not sixty. It’s not. 59 knows it’s not. 59 isn’t fancy. 59 is proud to be the endnotes of my “maiden” phase, if not the back cover. 59 is a little rounder, a little more careful, and sleeps always for some reason in the slightest draft.

59 aspires toward a more comfortable 72, and even has dreams of the balmy mid-eighties. For now, I will just put on a sweater and keep going, comic book in hand, yo-yo at the ready: not quite a grown up yet, but getting warmer.

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Dangling. Helpless. Fingernails dug deep into the bark of a fragile branch threatening to splinter and snap under the weight of the struggling, desperate body which swings from it - eyes mad with dread, awaiting the inevitability of plummeting, plummeting, into the abyss.

This is a description of the world’s greatest and most celebrated motivational poster.

It’s been hung in the highest halls of Congress and office break rooms everywhere. Millions of prints sold, not counting the various ripoffs, tributes, and copies.

It is Victor Baldwin’s 1964 black and white photo of a siamese kitten barely clinging to a branch of bamboo, milliseconds from falling: a frozen moment of mammalian anxiety.

The poster’s headline?

“Hang In There, Baby!”

Rosie the Riveter, Uncle Sam, and Simmy the Kitten - three images meant to inspire a weary nation.

Rosie’s strong arm poster encouraged us, with the words “We Can Do It!”.

Uncle Sam pointed straight at the viewer, exclaiming their crucial value to the defense of freedom, saying - nay, practically shouting “I Want YOU!”.

But Simmy was silent. She was too busy to speak, she was attempting the impossible, reaching beyond her limits, going into uncomfortable territory, challenging herself. She wasn’t touting confidence, heavens no… she was exhibiting the highest aspiration and deepest vulnerability, allowing you see her effort, experience what was certain to be her failure, and through that, better understand your own dreams and struggles. Simmy gave up her ego to bond us all together, as if she psychically knew there would be throngs of exhausted workers who needed a boost after lunch under florescent tube lights, at formica tables with metal tube chairs which scraped the floor with a din that tears at both ear and soul. She dangles, as WE dangle, with no alternative but to pull ourselves up with all the strength we can muster, or be brave enough to fall into the unknown.

I mean, I’ve taken pictures of my cats, but they just kind of sleep most of the time, and when they do cute things it’s usually too fast to capture on film. Simmy was perfectly safe, by the way, as the photographer loved animals of all kinds, and enjoyed taking photos of his four cats in between shots of such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

It is a testament to art that a frozen moment, captured in 1964, can accurately reflect what I felt like yesterday afternoon, and probably tomorrow morning. We are a world dedicated to dire circumstance.

Our “amusement parks” have “thrill rides” that drop us from the sky at terrific speeds. We do that for fun.

A majority of our movies are filled with maniacs, creatures and zombies. We watch those to relax.

Millions have been invested to prove the fatal effects of drink, smoke, and drugs - yet we spend billions to imbibe in them, even though we are clearly aware of this research. We do that to alleviate stress.

And the endless videogames where the predominant point is that people are trying to kill us, with guns or with swords or by giving us spectral cooties as we gobble up little yellow dots. That’s where I finally drew the line, turned my back on conveniently packaged panic and derision: many decades ago when exploring the latest edition of an incredibly popular series I discovered that extra points were given for spectacular cruelty, and just…stopped playing.

“Whaddya do that for?” a competitor asked me. “They ain’t real!”

“Yeah”, I told him, “…but I am.”

If Rosie’s poster was to come to life, she’d just be silently smiling at you, flexing.

Uncle Sam would be a somewhat awkward septuagenarian.

But if little Simmy’s poster sprung into motion it would be… well, a cat video, and you know how awesome cat videos are. Something’s happening in her poster, and something is definitely going to happen.

Simmy’s poster isn’t just a stationary platitude, but a dynamic manifesto: what must be endured yet cannot be sustained can’t last long…time is ever destined to defeat imbalance.

Rather than “Hang In There, Baby!”, the poster should read,

“That looks pretty bad, but it’ll definitely either be better or worse in a minute.”

Or maybe, “…this too shall pass.”

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Around the time of my daughter’s second birthday we went camping at a park that had Airstream™ campers instead of cabins. I adore Airstream™ campers and aspire to someday own one, though most likely I will never be able to afford a driveway to park it in.

We arrived in the afternoon, and eventually the sun set (as it does) and the lack of streetlights and buildings left the outside world a pristine shade of nothing. All the windows of the trailer were pitch black.

My daughter had never before experienced this. She is a Brooklyn™ child, free range and urban oriented. The silence (which also was new), mixed with the absolute lack of light (as if the sun had closed its eyes), precipitated a sound in her that we had never heard before, a kind of low trill, like a rumble, or a gentle waking snore.

My wife was extremely excited about this trip; she was raised in California™ where “the outside” was always somehow closer to “the inside” than where I grew up, in the American Midwest, where we employed the clever technology of “screen doors” to protect us from “the outside world”… although most of the year this proved far too permeable a barrier.

“Let’s go outside!” she said in her best and most enthusiastic Mom voice.

The deep creak continued to emanate from the child. It grew not louder, but perceptibly more intense. She somehow was able to make the noise both while inhaling as well as exhaling.

“It’s awful… dark out there, Sweetie.” I said.

“Yeah, it’s great!” At that my wife opened the door of the trailer and stepped out, walking into the night. It took about seven steps before she was out of the glow of the trailer’s ambience, and disappeared completely. I agreed that seeing the stars might be fun, but thought we might begin by turning off all the inside lights and looking out the window, then maybe braving going out and looking all around.

“C’mon!” her disembodied voice called from the void.

My daughter’s rumble was now paired with a widening of the eyes and gentle stiffening of both legs and arms.

“Whatssamatter??” my wife called again.

I thought the situation was clear. That was my mistake. I felt that the idea of explanation at this point was not only moot but unnecessary. But people are different, built from a world of experiences, and the gift of true friendship is welcoming alternative perspectives.

“I… think she’s afraid of the dark a little.” I said to the inky nowhere.

There was a pause. “Why?”

Now I responded with a pause of my own, as I had never personally considered the logic behind what-I-had-always-assumed-to-be universal opinion. There I stood, in the middle of the woods, at the open door of a fragile aluminum tube I would be sleeping in that night, contemplating the very root of fear. How best to sum this complex primal instinct?

“Uh… it think it’s ‘cause you can’t see anything.” Genius. The words, indeed, of a poet, an intellectual, a true thinker of thoughts.

My wife was understandably underwhelmed. “You’ve gotta let your eyes adjust! You can see the stars!!”

I turned to my daughter.

“Ok, Mama is really excited about us going adventuring out there. You remember what it looked like before, right? Well it looks just like that right now, only we can’t see it so well. But I’m gonna give you this -”

and here I handed her a flashlight. A good one, with that beam that looks like a lightsaber…

“ - and you can light stuff up. And then we will look at the stars, and then we’ll come back in. Is that ok?”

Rumble. She held the flashlight, considering it.

“I’ll carry you the whole way, okay?”

At that, she agreed. I picked her up and walked carefully down the folding aluminum stairs into the night. She pointed the flashlight beam ahead of us, finding her mom by the two wooden lounge chairs a few yards away.

Fascinated by the power of the flashlight, my daughter lit up trees and grass and our car parked beside the rented camper. Then she looked up.

“You can’t really see them with the flashlight on, Honey. C’mon, trust Mama.”

My daughter’s trill stopped. She took two deep breaths. Then, she CLICK!ed off the flashlight.

As if by magic, suddenly above us were galaxies of light. Z pointed out different constellations. The light we had left on in the trailer seemed very far away from us.

After three minutes, the flashlight clicked back on. My daughter had heard a noise of some kind in the woods. I myself could not immediately identify it.

“I think that’s it for now.” I said.

We all went back inside. We turned off all the lights in the trailer, and through the illogical safety of the window screens, looked outside at the endless stars.

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It’s pretty grim. I mean, “things” are. Or they look that way. Things seem pretty grim. Somewhat. Depends on where you look, I guess, and other variables. For me, it’s worse when my eyes are open, so while that’s happening, I point them in friendly directions in attempts to “de-grim” the experience, somewhat.

I find grocery shopping soothing. Plenty to look at that’s pleasant to see. Vegetables are soothing (frozen vegetables a bit less so). The part of the store where they have all the bottled water…very soothing: so many variations of tall green glass bottles and skinny clear plastic ones. Yep. And the cereal aisle… big boxes with happy colors and friendly characters. Nothing grim there. Nothing at all grim about being a healthy part of a balanced breakfast.

But here we are, Spookytime™, when all about is “Boo!” and shadows haunt and lurk and everything is supposed to be somehow scarier, except that a very high bar has been set in that area recently, so the traditional spooky efforts seem kind of… quaint.

And in my experience, nothing defines that specific gap between truly scary and kind of quaint more dynamically than the General Mills Monster Cereals.

Dracula, Frankenstein (’s monster) and his bride, The Werewolf, The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Creature of the Black Lagoon, The Phantom of The Opera. It’s likely that those names evoked images from the classic series of monster films produced by Universal Studios in the 1930’s: black and white “fish out of water” tales (save the Creature, who was in) where society either invades the monster’s quiet home or frowns on their habits of dining on townsfolk. Dark, quiet nights, where clouds of fog obscure feeble gas streetlights suddenly become torch-lit mob scenes filled with angry villagers brandishing pitchforks and other farm implements. Scary.

I grew up with these movies, and these characters, and understood that, in real life, Transylvanian and Egyptian royalty rarely met, and neither hung about with unlucky Welsh shopkeepers, even on full moons. But Hollywood seemed to assume that these monsters knew one another, as they showed up in “monster rally” films – stalking Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin… and they had a band as well called the “Groovie Ghoulies” that I absolutely adored (that one was a cartoon). The monsters’ association as friends (or at least acquaintances) became part of their general lore.

Which is what the General Mills company leaned into in 1971 when introducing their three new cereals: Franken Berry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula. I don’t want to waste your time or insult your keen skills of deduction, but the “pre-sweetened” flavors were strawberry, blueberry, and chocolate. They had a bit of a rocky start, as the early formula for Franken Berry “included an indigestible pigment” that, well, remained bright pink enough to… panic parents. Besides that bit of shock, the cereals represented a new version of these classic characters that lived in the daylight, right on the kitchen table. Quaint.

In sixth grade I got to try Boo Berry at someone’s house. My mother wouldn’t buy any of the “monster cereals”. I thought it was because she judged nutritional value by the color-of-the-food’s proximity to anything in nature, but later on, Fruity Pebbles proved inexplicably acceptable.

And I don’t think they do this anymore, but a breakfast cereal box used to be more than just a product container - each one represented an engineering challenge of increasing difficulty.

Level One: a game printed on the back of the box that I could play (using pennies as the tokens).

Challenge - eat the entire box of cereal and then (carefully) cut the game from the box. Oh, and find someone to play with (only child).

Level Two - same as Level One, except that a paper six-sided die pattern (a little box) was also printed on the back.

Challenge - (carefully) cut out the little box pattern, fold the low level pressboard together enough to define but not collapse each side, glue tabs A into slots B, wait for it to dry, then find someone to play with, etc.

This never worked because the weight of the glue created a paper version of “loaded dice” that would roll the same number over and over.

Level Three - a plastic toy (in what was later discovered to be the exact shape of the human throat) was placed in the ACTUAL BAG OF CEREAL at the bottom.

Challenge - I could NOT pour out the cereal and put it back in the box, and as the inner bag holding the cereal was glued to the bottom of the outer box, it couldn’t be pulled up separately and flipped over (we tried that). Nor could the box be turned upside down, as the only closing mechanism on the box was on the TOP. FIENDISH. DIABOLICAL.

They stopped doing this due to choking hazards and began to place the toys in individual plastic bags inside the box but NOT inside the inner bag, which could be lifted, prize obtained. JUSTICE.

Which brings us to:

Level Four - The Flexi-disc - a PLAYABLE PHONOGRAPH RECORD is PRINTED ON THE BACK OF A CEREAL BOX. Holy crap. I remember staring at it like a safecracker, studying the box stability to determine how I could -

Challenge - (carefully) cut around the record’s circumference and gently lift it from the box, without nicking the inner liner.

Total fail on the Bobby Sherman single, but the excitement of The Jackson Five became a family project. It was Mom who discovered that the manufacturers had actually PUT A DOT OF GLUE right where the middle of the record met the inner liner, making clean retrieval impossible. DIRTY POOL.

Anyway, I like cereal boxes.

So that’s me, a grown man, staring at a wall of cereal, pretending I’m going to buy more than these organic gluten-free fruit loop substitutes. I don’t even shop at a store where they sell fun novelty food anymore, but they are such a core part of my culture that even these all-natural brands hold a bit of comfort. And that’s all I need right now, little tiny bits of comfort to get me from one crazy scenario to the next - strength to face the grim, and bear it.

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It’s all moving so fast.

The world’s always changing. I seem to be getting older, like, almost every day now. My daughter’s baby clothes don’t fit her any more now that she’s in high school. Zoom. Zip.

We are SO CLOSE TO THE FUTURE. Cars talk and can drive themselves, but they don’t fly quite yet, and that’s “The Future” benchmark: the second a Volvo leaves the pavement we will be knee-deep in The Future, full stop.

Well, not full stop, that’s the point; the modern world is an endlessly flowing event horizon, constantly churning like a temporal Niagra Falls, brutally battering the present with newer and newer new stuff, some of it seemingly beyond imagination.

Which is impossible, of course, since imagination is all that exists beyond what is currently known, so anything beyond it is still technically it.

And it’s the “currently” that’s exciting to me, because that means that something imagined now might actually be known in the future. That’s why Walt Disney froze his head (allegedly), although we can’t ask him that directly.

Yet.

A few days ago, the good people at Apple updated some software. They sent out a casual email announcing that now their earpieces – already impressive for mysteriously staying seated in the ear without glue, tape, or velcro – can instantly translate spoken French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. Instantly.

Like a fish.

Not a REAL fish, a BABEL FISH, the invention of a science fiction author about 45 years ago. Douglas Adams’ sprawling adventure titled “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” solved a fictional problem of direct communication between all creatures with the invention of tiny fish that, when Inserted into the ear, translates any form of language for its host. Did I want one? Yes. Did I try to stick a fish in my ear? No, I was a dreamer, not a maniac - but some other dreamers took it upon themselves to make this actually happen, and here we are in a world where I can at last enjoy the intricate torture of Vogon poetry.

Now, living in NYC I hear a great deal of languages every day, and I can’t understand them, but I don’t really need to, as those people aren’t speaking to me. I’m not planning on traveling anywhere very soon and most of the films I want to see that aren’t in English have been subtitled. It occurs to me now, on the day that this dream is a reality, that the second more important part of the dream was the traveling through space and meeting interesting creatures to talk to part.

This is like getting a fancy cup holder without a car. As a companion piece, I need a more adventurous lifestyle, or a multi-national Zoom call, or a quest that sends me deep into Queens to negotiate a mysterious treaty of some kind. Communication has never hinged on just what is possible, but is mostly rooted in what is necessary.

A few years ago someone released an app that said it could translate the speech patterns of dogs and cats… it did not sell well. It was obvious that the inventor of the app did not own a pet, as most people already understood the phrases “I’m hungry” and “I want to go outside” in both Modern Dog and Traditional Cat, and “I love you” was just as easily interpreted. We didn’t need that technology.

Now the new “babel fish” tech is going to be incredibly useful eventually, but just as its fictional counterpart it may cause as many arguments than it resolves. I’m still going to try it, just to see it work, but if I don’t sound appropriately excited, it’s because I’ve been disappointed by new communications tech once before.

The MEGO Star Trek Communicators were plastic walkie talkies in light blue with the logo of the Federation of Planets on the flip up cover. We had a one present budget for birthdays every year, and my mother found them at K-Mart and put them on lay-away. I opened the package and went bananas. I could already hold my fingers in the “live long and prosper” Spock position, so I was all set.

I stood at the very front of our little apartment while my mom made her way to the back room. 60 feet seemed miles away since we couldn’t see one another. So exciting.

“Hey Mama! Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” my mother replied. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes!” This was amazing. There was this moment of wonder, looking at the little box in my hand.

Then we both realized that we didn’t have much more information to share at the moment. My mother prompted me with a question.

“What does it look like out the front window?”

Newly inspired, I investigated. “There are a few cars parked on the street and …”

“zzkzkzzzkzkzkzkk!! uh, what’s your 20?”

It was not my mother’s voice.

“Heading South, good buddy! Hitting that stop on the I-70.”

This, also, was not my mother’s voice. For a moment I thought we had actually dialed in to a passing star cruiser.

“Checking out that new lot lizard?”

“Well, let me tell ya -“ and then came a pretty steady stream of some really high quality profanity. My mother rushed from the back of the apartment to the front to wash my mouth out with all the soap that had ever been produced in the world, but found me slack jawed looking at the toy, not saying a word, while authentic trucker lexicon boomed from both our units.

And back to K-Mart they went. She was given a full refund. She wasn’t the only one who had returned them.

Now I have a cell phone. It is, technically, cooler than the Star Trek communicator because it has pictures and plays games and all that. It’s great, really. Very very cool. I love it.

To be clear, i am absolutely not holding a 50 year torch for some basic toy with a frequency mishap. But a great lesson was learned on that birthday, incorporating what we want versus what we really want, the power of communication versus the right to privacy, language and culture, and what grown-ups really say when kids aren’t listening.

The next weekend, and this is absolutely true, my mother and I made a “tin can telephone” with taut string stretched through the apartment, which was just as fun (even though we could see each other). We told each other jokes… they worked great, were very affordable, and did not include the risk of random vulgarity from passing strangers.

I drew a Federation of Planets logo on each of the cans in permanent marker, and we honestly couldn’t tell the difference.

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In 1902, a man went hunting in Mississippi. The man loved hunting a great deal – had created a 1000 creature “Museum of Nature” in his room at 12 years old (mostly insects), and adored the outdoors so much that he became one of the first people ever to be known as a “conservationist”. He had hunted his whole life, all over the place. He just loved it.

This particular trip wasn’t very fulfilling, as he hadn’t found anything really huntible in the woods after several hours. But his hosts wanted him to have a good time, so they found a bear and tied it to a tree for him as a surprise.

Here, the story actually branches into two different versions: in one, the bear was very old and somewhat feeble; while in the other, the hosts actually found a bear cub. Both of these options are more likely to be simpler to handle, as tying a healthy fully grown bear to a tree can prove a considerable challenge.

But when the man got to the tree and found the bear, he ordered its release. In just a couple of years this same man would embark on an international nine-month-safari, so you don’t have to feel sorry for him or anything… besides, this incident actually changed the world forever, in its own small way.

Talk of this seemingly unimportant vacation fail spread like wildfire, partially because it was a tale of great compassion, but mostly because the man was Theodore Roosevelt, who at the time held the position of President of the United States.

A political illustrator, Clifford Berryman, created a cartoon panel depicting this great restraint. He drew Mr. Roosevelt with his back turned away from the animal, arm up in a “talk to the hand ‘cause the face ain’t listening” position. The bear was depicted as a little bit confused about the entire affair, rope around its neck with a largish fellow pulling him back into hunting range. The cartoon was captioned “Drawing The Line in Mississippi”.

A Brooklyn shopkeeper saw this, and was so touched that he sewed a 3D approximation of the little cub, which he stuffed with fluff, and gave to his son. When many of his neighbors requested that he make more for their children, he wrote to the White House to ask permission to use the name he had chosen for the toy, “Teddy Roosevelt”. That permission was formally granted, and the toys became known as “Teddy’s Bears”.

This cuddly invention quickly became a cottage industry, and the shopkeeper decided to start a new business which he called “Ideal Toys”. Within five years the teddy bear was so popular that they began to outpace the sales of baby dolls (which some community and faith leaders publicly considered a direct threat to the maternal development of young girls).

In 1907, a popular tune was written titled “The Teddy Bears Two-Step”, and 25 years later lyrics were officially added to that tune:

* If you go down in the woods today,You're sure of a big surprise.If you go down in the woods today,You'd better go in disguise.For every bear that ever there wasWill gather there for certain becauseToday's the day the teddy bears have their picnic...

An enduring, beloved childhood icon, born from an act of empathy and compassion. Beautiful story, with a great deal of luck all around, as the hunted object could have been a crocodile or another less cuddly prey.

In a spirit of acknowledgement to all sides of an event, one might observe that while this specific incident proved incredibly sporting, it holds a minuscule ratio against Mr. Roosevelt’s full lifetime of hunting expeditions - the aforementioned nine-month-safari trip alone resulted in over eleven thousand individual specimens, of all kinds.

But this is not a life story, just a retelling of one single moment, unburdened by context, where a man’s specific empathy for one single creature resulted in millions of children clinging to a soft rendering of that empathy as an icon of love and security. In the last hundred years, billions have held to their chests a miniature version of a wild and dangerous animal that somehow, without detailed explanation, universally signals comfort.

But the song… confuses me.

Clearly, we are not invited to the teddy bear picnic - in fact, we are meant to avoid it at all costs:

* If you go down in the woods today,You'd better not go alone.It's lovely down in the woods today,But safer to stay at home.For every bear that ever there wasWill gather there for certain becauseToday's the day the teddy bears have their picnic…

It is fun for the teddy bears, as they will have “marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play” until “their mommies and daddies…take them home to bed” at 6PM.

Mommies and daddies? No wonder they don’t want us around; in the world of this song we have torn them from their families, homes and traditions - no matter how outwardly pleasant they may present themselves, it seems mathematically inconceivable that they do not hold deep resentment and might eat us on the spot.

I don’t think this song was written by a person who had a teddy bear. Or children. While hummable, it is a mean song, full of mocking spite and prickling envy, penned by a man obviously denied the cozy care represented by its subject. But while the song isn’t accurate for beloved toys, it does seem super instructional for gatherings of ACTUAL BEARS, although it presupposes their diet and traditional bedtimes.

To be perfectly honest, I find it all a bit confusing . Comfort from hunting? Dire warnings about soft toys? It seems incredibly random that one thing can come from the other. Crazy, right? I mean, it makes you think, “Wow! Where does an immersion blender come from? The Renaissance?” Cause and effect don’t seem anywhere near one another.

But that is the reason I find this story encouraging. I spend a lot of time trying to see “where things are going”; where causes are complex and their effects overwhelming, yet here is Theodore Roosevelt, whose most lasting legacy is not all the choices made at his incredibly significant day job, but the enduring echo of a single moment of mercy.

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As I get older, I’m becoming a great deal more and much, much less adventurous.

* “Never heard of orange wine!” I heard myself say once, many years ago, “…sounds interesting!” I told the cashier as I purchased a bottle.

* “We’ll just rent a car, because driving in Europe is probably the same as driving at home!” said a man who looked exactly like me, only younger.

* “Now this cat looks like he needs a lot of love… what does “feral” mean, exactly?” spoke a previous version of myself, a short 14 hours away from bloodied hands and arms.

My youth, and a great portion of whatever came directly after that, operated on a general philosophy of “appreciable risk”, where… sure, there was risk, but how much risk does it take to make something risky?

50%, I thought.

- That cheese sounds good.

- Those rides look safe.

- This date is going well.

Experiences were worth the risks, so I had experiences, lots and lots of them… and then all new ones, with new risks attached. Thank Heaven I didn’t get to that point where it flipped and I became one of those people who just sought out risks for risk’s sake; instead I began to curate my experience/risk ratio.

Today, I identify a lot less experiences as “worth the risk”.

* Severely overcrowded subway train? Let it pass by.

* Cello bag of green beans that got lost at the back of the refrigerator bin from two weeks ago and are curiously glossy? Don’t cook ‘em.

* Calls from an unknown number? Voicemail.

My keys are latched to my belt, I keep the gas tank full, and I haven’t indulged in mysterious hors d’oeuvre at parties in over a decade.

My risks seem less jarring now: how late can I stay up working before the next day becomes a bleary, unnavigable haze? 9:30? 11:15?

My risks seem tiny now: how do I find the current barometric pressure on my phone without seeing breaking news pop-ups?

And my risks seem necessary now, as it feels so often that the only way forward is over rickety bridges and through dark forests. Metaphorically.

The majority of my current risks fall into the category of “unavoidable”. No longer am I courageously choosing the paths least chosen, it’s just that all the other elevators are stuck on the 13th floor and not moving and there’s no way I can walk up 18 flights of stairs while holding these boxes so I have no choice but to take the one that ever so often gets stuck between floors for a couple of hours.

The world today changes with unrelenting consistency, few days like any other, a walk through a funhouse or a Dali or Escher painting. My job is to adapt as quickly as possible, keep moving forward, and try to put a positive spin on the whole thing.

My latest challenge? 5:30 in the morning. A new school year with new school schedules means that 6:30 alarm I relished ignoring has moved back an hour and is now a rule rather than a guideline. To compensate, I have begun going to sleep around 10PM. To be honest, the first day we got up at 5:30 I had absolutely no problem being in bed by 9.

I repeated Ben Franklin’s adage:“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Vague, but worth a shot. Let’s play this out and see how it goes. Those are three great things…could be worth it.

I started out strong the first few days: eyes somewhat bright, world lit by a fresh sunrise, the excitement of a new schedule…

…but a few days later the sun wasn’t up at all when we got up. Then it began to get really cold at night, the kind of cold that’s more than cold because it’s humid as well, and makes one want to stay in bed.

And then the coffeemaker broke.

I have the flu now, as it turns out. And we have to fix the coffeemaker, which even though we’re doing it ourselves represents a pretty significant unanticipated spend. Thus, I am not healthier, nor am I wealthier, and by the tone of this very rant I believe you would agree that excess wisdom has not been bestowed on me to any significant degree.

But I will valiantly keep at it, mostly because I’m an adult and this is the time we have to get up now and it’s (close to) Autumn and the days are getting shorter and I can just wear thick socks to bed and pile on more blankets until Spring.

The circumstances change, but we are all moving forward, and as long as we end the day somewhere ahead of where it began (even if it began before sunrise), then whatever the effort, challenge, or risk, it’s worth it.

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A calendar year seems kind of random - the length of time between one page and a page 12 pages after. I used to find it poetic that the year began in the deep of winter, then blossomed outward toward summer - only to pull dramatically into itself in autumn, like a Martha Graham dance. But then I learned of The Southern Hemisphere. Wasn’t ready for that. Winter in July. Santa on the beach. Spiders big as dinner plates. The world gone mad.

The School Year seems more stable. Its scheduling is in no way standardized, just somewhere between Memorial Day and Labor Day in the US, with monthly holidays dispersed like marshmallow bits in a breakfast cereal and sometimes (if you live in the right geographic area) an occasional snow day as the prize at the bottom of the box. The school year was always comforting to me because it held a promise: by the end of it, I would know something new, something that I did NOT know at the beginning. Buildings full of people were paid real money to make absolutely certain this promise was fulfilled, not just for myself but for millions of young people.

This was cool, because there was no industry supporting or steering how tall we were getting or any other changes we were experiencing, yet the Basic Skill Sets in our heads were upgraded year after year, for over a decade, whether we wanted to learn anything or not.

(Oh, sure, I could have dropped out of school and put on a leather jacket and dark sunglasses and grown a beard and gotten a motorcycle and explored the open road, but it would have been hard to afford my comic books and I don’t know how I would have carried our pekingese dog along with me unless I bought him some kind of special sidecar.)

School year learning was always a bit of a blind bag prize operation: we all knew that algebra was math…of some kind, but we didn’t know if we were going to like it until we were in the class already. Then subjects we already liked might be thrown a spanner if the teacher was in question, like the one with the WWII uniforms (Axis, not Allies). He chose odd poems.

Still, we were smarter, somehow, at the end of every school year. We all had this Voyage of Discovery in common, which was slightly bonding, and new names to call ourselves - freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. Such fun.

Did I learn a lot in school? Yes, yes I did, but honestly the classes were only half of it. There was How To Talk To People in grade school and How To Get People To Talk To Each Other in high school - social lessons not on the printed menu that often had a more lasting impact than the scheduled board of fare. In high school I also learned How To Take A Punch, How Not To Get Punched, How To Get Out Of A Shut Locker From The Inside and What People Really Mean When They Say Things. Sadly, these were also valuable lessons later on.

My best college class was the Prog-Rock seminar a roommate gave all of us during senior year. I believe it was around his birthday, he was turning 21, and had a big weekend planned. Months before he had gathered money from us for a surprise event, which he only revealed the weekend before at a private seminar in his room.

He used his own albums and CDs to give us a crash course in the history and importance of Progressive Rock: the eclectic instrumentation, epic arrangements, virtuosic solos, mystical lyrics - he spoke for quite a while but we were each allowed a beer and the songs were long and I was kind of sleepy.

Then he revealed that one of our events was going to see Yes, who I only knew from their 90125 album, with the big MTV hit “Owner of a Lonely Heart”.

This level of familiarity classified me firmly as a moron, which I was blatantly told by our ad-hoc professor, who assigned me extra listening homework before the concert. It was a hard class.

But it wasn’t the lectures that stood out, it was the field trips.

The crowd at Yes was a lot different from the James Taylor show I’d seen that summer. Since I hadn’t heard all of their other albums, many songs were new to me. It was all kinds of fascinating for reasons both artistic and sociological.

Then came Saturday. At 5PM we all got in somebody’s car and drove 40 minutes to see the band RUSH. Good grief. They were like electric druids. Something changed in my very soul that weekend, and even though this work wasn’t counted in my cumulative GPA, I am very proud of what I learned there.

Now I am an adult, very nearly an elder one, and can learn whenever I want, or more to the point whenever I can find the time. Which is ironic, as all my time as an adult is spent working, at a job, which was supposed to be the actual point of school.

We spend over a decade learning every day in order to get Good Jobs where learning is rarely we are paid to do.

Well, as a new sort-of-elder American, I am standing in defiance. Or I will here, in a minute… this chair is really low and I’ve been sitting in it a while. Oof. There we go.

This “school year” I am creating a curriculum for myself. I saw online that people can learn Mandarin in 127 days. They brag about being able to order in restaurants. I don’t really need that flex, so I’m going a different direction.

I bought a new book of rock guitar licks, a full course on advanced slight-of-hand coin illusions, I’m going to write three short stories and a one-act play. By May. We even renewed our subscription to Masterclass™, so I might become a tennis pro or international diplomat.

Next summer I won’t be an acrobat or an EGOT, but I will know something I didn’t know today. I don’t know when I plan to squeeze this all in, but if there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that there’s no such thing as spare time.

P.S.: You’re not gonna believe this, but I actually found recordings of the EXACT SHOWS I SAW. I just got the cities mixed up backward.

Yes:

Rush:

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So there’s this thing you can do with masking tape, where you make a little loop over two fingers and fasten it together and then put one of those loops in each corner of a piece of paper in order to place it on a wall. Though not recognized as an acceptable form of professional art handling at any major museum or gallery, in the late part of the last century this strategy did hold sway as the preferred method to display the carefully curated poster collections of young people in bedrooms across the American Midwest.

Other places had tacks, I’ve heard. Some even used frames (in Beverly Hills, most certainly!). But regular old beige-ish masking tape was my go-to, however dubious its ultimate sticking power, and in complete disregard of its tendency to sort of melt in the summer heat, leaving square grease spots on both wall and artwork, reminiscent of butter pats on slices of hot broiled toast.

My first poster was a 4-page fold out from Dynamite Magazine, a Scholastic™ publication with a popularity rivaling that of TV Guide, Rolling Stone, and the just-published People Magazine, but for schoolchildren. One issue featured a 4-page fold out of The Fantastic Four, the Marvel Comics family of superheroes. This remained on my wall until I went to college, and years later, I mounted it on card stock. And years after that, it’s in the room I’m sitting in right now.

It looks a bit rag-tag, with its tattered and “butter-pat” stained corners, but the original dynamic Jack Kirby illustration (of the team virtually leaping from its flat surface to face down danger of some dire kind) is as vibrant as it was in 1975. Which was… ok, let me figure this out… carry the one…

Wow. 50 years ago.

Technically, that’s vintage. And that’s not just my opinion: one of these posters just sold on eBay for $40. There’s another available for only $20 from someone in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota (just two hours southwest of Minneapolis).

I could go on and on (and on again) about the staying power of the image and the characters and the legacy of storytelling it all represents, but I’m more impressed with the power of paper.

In the year 1455, Johann Gutenberg inaugurated a new invention, the movable press.

Although he reproduced content that had been published before, Gutenberg’s production method generated a version that could be perfectly replicated and distributed, transforming one of literature’s most powerful works into one of the most significant objects ever created, the first printed book.

That very book, the Gutenberg Bible, is available to view at the Library of Congress, with other copies on display around the world.

Each is over 500 years old.

Somewhere, Gutenberg must have a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, a child of our DIGITAL AGE, whose heritage keenly bridges that of physical rendering to digital storage. She probably worked with me at an advertising agency as print became the word “print” with air quotes around it, as technical skills such as paste-up and kerning were interpreted by algorithms, and the simple Xerox™ machine became 4 color, then accurate color, then extremely high resolution, and then FAST.

To be honest, I appreciated all these miracles; they made my job easier and more interesting and allowed me to do more with less. But every “New Point O” technology was like a crab in a barrel, each one eventually crushing the other. Thus, I have, in a drawer right over there, a SYQUEST disk. If this does not “ring a bell”, you are either too old or too young to have heard of one, neither of which you should feel bad about, because they were only relevant for an instant. I also possess three different sizes of floppy disk, a ZIP disk, an optical disk, a CD-ROM and a DVD-R, each digital storage medium invented in the last 50 years, and none of them valid today.

I have moved thousands of files of artwork, literature and information from format to format for the last four decades, ending up with my current hard drives that are so bleeding edge that last month I had to replace two of them after only three years of use. Because they are slow now, and don’t hold nearly as much as hard drives one fifth of their size.

It only took one decade to transform the world from Johann’s to that of his (many many times) great-granddaughter, but the miracles of her age seem fleeting, dependent on electricity and technological relevance that is both constant and unpredictable, like a beach ball tumbling on an “up” escalator.

Add to this mayhem - the production and distribution of music, and the storage of photographs and moving images. Go ahead. Crazy, right?

But an old shoebox filled with photos beats an old shoebox filled with 3.5 inch disks any day. Particularly when the only thing you need to decode the pictures, is enough light.

My friend has a book from 1785.Last time I was at her house, I read it. No problem.

Our most incredible monkey’s paw is social media, which is as intoxicating as it is exhausting. At our most noble, humans produce art to convey emotion, hoping it will drive someone, inspire someone, to action. This is a gentle enterprise, rooted in metaphor, beauty and tension - subtlety and empathic nudging toward awareness.

Social media is not that. It’s a whisky shot with a pickle juice chaser. It’s a red carpet filled with paparazzi right after one of those eye exams where your pupils have to be dilated with those drops. It’s a loud sound in the middle of the night that you get up to investigate but end up stepping on a stray LEGO piece in the dark. It’s built of stimulus, like an iced triple expresso with Red Bull™ instead of water.

Social media feeds the world to us with a soda straw, allowing no control over the experience. It is overwhelming, and completely unstoppable -

- and then it’s kind of gone. Forever. Even if I do remember to click that little button to save something, I RARELY revisit that list because there’s a new world of everything every day - but none of it is tangible. None of it occupies the same world that I do.

So while I may not be able to tell a book by its cover, I do appreciate the covers, because they remind me where I am, inside the book. When listening to a vinyl album, the tone arm patiently marks time on the needle’s path. Photographs take up space in your hands, in your life - and they weigh exactly what I think a memory would weigh - incredibly light individually, but then mysteriously heavy in combination.

I shouldn’t be able to carry tens of films and hundreds of albums and thousands of photos in my pocket. And I don’t, I carry their shadows, and like shadows they are entirely ephemeral - their very essence dependent on whether I remember to charge my phone battery or not. Without power, they are all gone.

Whereas, roughly half the days of the year, in my latitude, if I’m outside - I can read any book by the light of the sun. With a candle, I can read 24 hours a day, all year long. I could even write a letter.

A cell phone without power is not even a good shoehorn.

The world of Gutenberg’s grand(x7) daughter is filled with wonders, but I can’t put most of them on my wall, and much much less than 50 years later, many will be at best obsolete and in the worst cases, inaccessible and/or forgotten, while card stock and laminated paper are still crushing it.

I love the future. It’s great here… I’ve been waiting for it and it is in no way dissapointing. But I do appreciate it in context, because for over 50 years, a simple piece of paper has made me smile almost everyday.

No battery required.

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We’re celebrating the beginning of a “new school year” because at least one person in our home is going “back-to-school” in a few weeks. This means that the rest of us get to glom on to their excitement - purchasing our favorite pens, boxes of artisanal pencils, and the occasional odd-sized notebook that we absolutely do not need as we haven’t yet filled up last year’s notebooks with particularly compelling pencil or pen marks.

As part of this pre-academic nesting, our household shared a mutual end-of-the-summer cleaning push, pulling everything off our shelves and out of closets to sort through, culling what was needlessly stored to prepare for The New. But this exercise backfired for me, as deep in my closet I discovered a fabric IKEA box filled with poorly labeled videotapes.

Of course, the only way to get rid of them was to go straight to eBay for an old VHS player and convert them to digital format.

Of course, this procedure added even more things to the house… but only initially, as I’ve tossed about seven of the tapes so far.

This was a project I’ve wanted to tackle for many years, and the box really was a mixed bag. None of the tapes were accurately labeled, and in an effort to use the tapes to their full capacity, each ended up a crazy jumble of clashing 1990’s recordings:

* full episodes of Late Night with David Letterman

* a rehearsal tape of the southern rock band I sang with after college

* an interview with my grandfather from local television

* a performance of the song “Purple Haze” by the Kronos Quartet

* and me, singing in a talent show (1994), shot the second week of my first job in New York City: proud to say I was the audience favorite, but after the show the judges pulled me aside and told me that I couldn’t win, as that would be politically detrimental for me, as the hurt feelings of certain company veterans would quickly sandbag any career I was hoping to cultivate at the company. Instead, my new boss pulled folded cash out of his pocket and handed it to me like I was an influential head waiter at an uptown restaurant. That was my food money for a month. I didn’t even remember it had been taped. The song was actually pretty ok.

That show also opened the door for me to speak to the Big Boss at the ad agency, who at that time was James Patterson. He spoke with me for 20 minutes in his office, asking what I was into and what my plans were. When he heard that I wanted to write, he revealed that he had just that month sold his very first book, after writing for seven years at five in the morning, everyday. He soon retired from advertising. I hear he’s doing very well.

Another tape was the 30th Annual Grammy Awards (1988), live from Radio City Music Hall. I was there, actually, backstage, so my mom’s husband taped it for me in Kansas City.

My college roommate at the time was from a LA showbiz family. He had been invited to work on the show, but as it was a week-long gig at the same time as Spring midterms he thought it best to not to do it.

Somehow he offered the job to me. I did not consider Spring midterms and immediately took the train to the city, staying uptown(!) on the couch of a friend that had graduated the year before, and taking the subway to midtown(!) everyday, with no idea where any of these places were.

I worked with the dance crew, who that year were staging two numbers - the opening with Whitney Houston (my mother’s then favorite singer in the whole wide world) and a medley with George Benson (another family favorite), Cab Calloway, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, Lou Reed, RUN-DMC, Billy Joel, and Miles Davis, who showed up to all the rehearsals just to make out with random dancers, but decided to skip the actual show.

Michael Jackson was there too, but absolutely no one was allowed to speak to him. I, in a very “me” move, got completely turned around backstage one afternoon and kind of ran right into him on his way onstage. He was very tall.

I snuck down to the house and ninja-crawled on my knees through a row of floor seats to sneakily watch his rehearsal (which no one was allowed to watch). Cautiously raising my head, I found that lots of people had snuck in to do this, including loads of celebrities. We kind of bonded, because all of us were not as famous as Michael Jackson.

But Ms. Houston was the highlight of the entire experience, her voice flawless even when sitting right next to her on a piano bench. Early on I did something that she found particularly nice, and so she was particularly nice back to me the entire week, even signing a copy of my college graduation announcement for my mother - “You must be so proud! Congratulations! Whitney.”

Out of respect for my friend I tried to show up early and stay late every night, pitching in wherever I was asked. When the other PAs headed out after rehearsals for drinks, I stayed behind and stacked things and pulled old masking tape marks off the stage.

And so I found myself all alone, center stage, at Radio City Music Hall, with a fist full of old masking tape and what I saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I sang the end of the national anthem, from “oh say, does that star spangled banner yet wave…”, as well as I could, and at the top of my lungs. I figured it wasn’t illegal or anything, and no one was there. Let me just tell you, the acoustics at that place are great. As my last little note echoed, someone at the back of the house clapped and yelled “Play Ball!”.

I gave a little bow and ran offstage.

Did my midterms suffer? Well, yes, obviously, but I haven’t really used my grade point average since graduation. Yet, when I began actually working in show production, I did use what I’d learned that week in New York: that if I kept my head down, and spoke politely with confidence, most folks assumed I was someone with authority, because no one is really sure of who anyone else is backstage.

That evening was my Fanciest Night, hands down: deep in the basement of music’s Downton Abbey, peeking through curtains at expensive clothes and extremely familiar faces that I’d only seen in two dimensions on little tiny screens or great big gigantic ones. The funny part is that the full show isn’t online anywhere, and since I was working, I didn’t get to watch the broadcast on TV, and never would have seen it if I hadn’t found that tape.

So I will sift though the rest of this mountain of magnetic ribbons, holding no expectation, as I’ve already found images of great historical significance on the same tapes as Milli Vanilli music videos. I’m excited to discover if I can learn anything new from this black plastic stack of Old Time.

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