Archaeologize at Home! Ask Me How!

We've got a glass farm going next to the house. Requires no sunlight or water—basically all you have to do is throw a bunch of broken glass on the ground and kick some dirt over it, then die, then in 80 years someone else buys the house and keeps noticing all this glass glinting through the soil in the patch of woods back behind the shed. Actually, it doesn't sound fun to start such a farm—because of the having to die part—but we, the beneficiaries of our predecessor's foresight, started the glass harvest this past weekend.



And what a trove of jagged crap we've discovered! A few minutes' work with a pick and a hoe yields not just glass, but an enchanting array of flaking and rusty bits of metal, a spoon, wire, a fragmented leather(n) child's shoe, pot handles, a ribeye bone, plus the fragments of bottles and crockery, some bearing decorations and some plain. Like us, the previous homesteaders enjoyed both the milk and the whiskey, plus other unknown sasparillas, lemon cokes, Efficacious Solutions, laudanum, & c. They apparently ate from plates. There are some of what appear to be horseless carriage parts -- at least, they're completely rust-bloated, larger and heavier than any normal household metal object we use today. Although I suppose they could be parts of dismantled stoves or other appliances.

I'm clinging to the thought that this was an appropriate site for the disposal of household waste in the early part of the 20th century. Before a couple of additions onto the house in the last twenty years or so, this spot was even more distant from the actual building, and I'm assuming—persuading myself, really—that it wasn't a filthy, lazy and vile habit to throw your crap in a disorganized heap in an unused part of your own property instead of carting it to a communal dump someplace. I'm telling myself that this stuff is old because I'd much prefer it to have happened when it seems it would have been more appropriate, and so far the lack of tupperware, Alberto V05 cans, 8-track cassettes or frilly velour tuxedos mixed into the junk supports my wishful thinking.



•

Cult-Like Programs I've Embraced, Part III: The Kerry-Edwards Campaign

November 6, 2004

The speaker was a 68-year old Army veteran who had served two years in the 1950s and was proud of it. He was a middle-class working man, a grandfather, a husband, a senior citizen. He was probably a churchgoer. I stood in his driveway in Bedford, Ohio, listening.

“He’s a punk,” he was saying. Almost beside himself, he was trapped between a desire to make clear his disgust for George Bush and a wish not to be brought to low language. “This guy? He’s a scumbag.” He looked uncomfortable having to speak this way. “The middle class is paying the taxes and fighting the war. A deserter. And he says John Kerry didn’t serve honorably? This guy’s a deserter, and deserters used to get shot.”

His grandson graduated from one of the top electrical engineering programs in the country; of twenty graduates, only two had gotten jobs. His grandchildren range in age from 24 down to 14. “If those kids want to go to Canada, I’ll drive ’em.”

We stood alongside a trim and modest suburban house on a clear, windy fall day, the day before the election. I was rapt. Label me (an East Coast editor for a British auction house) if you want, but I dare you to call this guy an “elitist,” or whatever it is they’re calling Kerry supporters now. Call him a bullshit-spotter. Call him a man of honor, someone with an understanding of hard work – not the kind you see other people do on television, but the kind you do yourself. He had my instant respect: sincerity, sensitivity, and above all, anger, came off him in waves. Call him what he is: a patriot.

I had come to Ohio on my own hook, getting up early one morning to drive from New York City’s far-northern suburbs to Cleveland. The ACT office there needed canvassers, and I had done some work in that line in 1991. That had been Thursday, October 28; my intention had been to return home on Sunday to catch my son’s first real Halloween. Instead, I was drawn in.

The intensity of the work was part of it, but the Cause overlaid the entire experience. No task was too mundane. Nothing was extraneous. Not once did I hear someone turn down a job. And in us all — New Yorkers, Californians, Ohioans, celebrity phone-bankers — there shone a joyous light, the knowledge of Doing Right so clear and so keen that it leapt from our eyes and our brows and our fingers as we sorted and packed and studied and clipped, and finally as we ushered the righteous walkers out the door and into the streets. When the training room was empty, we followed them out and brought the light forth ourselves.

The details of the work are important. When I walked in and reported for duty, as it were, someone took me aside and gave me a stack of forms to alphabetize. The beautiful thing, the architectural thing, about this job was its place in the scheme. I was sorting forms filled out by phone bankers who had spoken with potential volunteers and logged their contact information and availability. My forms held contact information for those volunteers who had been left messages and who would call back to obtain their confirmed assignment for the massive voter outreach effort that would happen over the weekend and through Tuesday. In the Cleveland area, about 2,000 canvassers and phone bankers were expected, with a target of reaching some 150,000 households. These forms had to be in order so that when the return-call hotline rang, Ken, the volunteer assigned to it, could find the caller swiftly and finalize their assignment.

Not long afterward, I was loaned out to the AFL-CIO, and thence to the NAACP, for a foray into the center of Cleveland to remedy attempts to suppress the black vote. Cloaked in a yellow “NAACP Voter Protection” jacket, I walked streets with alternating patches of well-kept yards, boarded-up windows and street-hardened dogs, knocking on doors and handing out Voters’ Bills of Rights. Everyone I spoke to planned to vote (the guy with three tattooed tears on one cheek sitting on the porch with the boarded up door seemed agreeable, at least), and they knew that forces were at work to take away their rights. That was evident in the thick metal gates through which we spoke. As darkness fell the blue flicker of TVs maintained its own twilight. Most everyone watched with the lights off there.

Every job was like that – its impact was incremental, but its necessity was evident. Over the course of the next days I performed dozens of discrete tasks, from data entry to raiding AAA for road maps to moving tables, ferrying messages and carrying food. At one point I was placed in charge of a team of volunteers creating canvass packets assembly-line style, highly reminiscent of my first post-college temp assignment. The meat and potatoes of my Ohio stint, however, was canvasser training.

Thirteen years earlier I had worked out of NYPIRG’s Albany office as a canvasser — at 22, I was among the older crew members. Filling in one day for the assistant canvas director, I cleaned the office and roused the troops with a briefing on Fear, which, combined with my generally successful neighborhood outings, landed me the assistant director job on through the summer and into the fall. Here in Ohio I was back again, trained by mid-20s SEIU organizers to motivate volunteers, to touch every sympathetic voter in a 10-mile radius. It felt powerful, and on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I would train and then go out myself, full of this astouding reservoir of belief.

The place I visited was not unlike Queens, but politicized, earnest, proud and American. I learned that the electoral map trumpeted by the media is a fiction. I fell in love with Ohio. On my map, the state is Red, but Ohio is no more Red than Orange County, New York is Blue. Blue and Red are just different names for Black and White, and to see the world that way is to deny not just the subtleties of your country, but to deny your spirit the richness of its full potential. Look no further than this Bedford man in his working-man’s driveway, speaking his mind with huge conviction and true emotion, forced — by a deeply-held knowledge of what is right — to denigrate the President. The pain of it was heartbreaking, and the yearning for a respectable presidency never felt so real to me.

Bush doesn’t matter, of course. Our efforts will one day be shown to have saved the world in some unlooked-for way. Perhaps we activated someone in some inner-city neighborhood; maybe someone’s child looked after one of us as we left her house and wondered why we walked; maybe my angry friend’s grandsons will refuse the offer of a ride to Canada and will instead lead a march on Washington. Maybe displaying hope was enough. Regardless, in the continuing struggle against injustice, poverty, corporate control of government, environmental destruction, and enforced religion, no effort is a waste, no task is unimportant, and no voice should be silent.


•

The Heat? On.

Today Florida feels like Satan's rectal thermometer. How do I know? I know because I'm there. Here, that is. And even though it's only 7 degrees hotter here than at home (95 vs. 88), the...sun...is...burrowing through what's left of my skin like a...like a...sorry, I'm out of similies because of the above. Freaking hot.

Yesterday, I ran in the morning. Have I already said this? Perhaps I'm delerious. That might explain the palace of ice cream cones I can see hovering upside-down in the distance, drawing me forward, forward. Anyway, I ran in the morning, snakes and lizards darting across my path, heat-prostrated pit bulls ranging alongside behind fences, a petit, angry, blisteringly hot land crab threatening my feet, another version -- scuttling gray monster -- pulling itself into a burrow as I passed. Bloated alligator carcasses lined my route, dead of heatstroke all of them, dehydrated vultures plucking listlessly at their livers, the vultures thinking of January and cold-water lobster. All that was missing was Virgil to guide me the 4 miles.

Ice cream!

•

Another Day, Another F%cking Animal

I just grabbed bat #2 (or maybe it was #1, returned!) out of the fireplace, showed it off to an appreciative woman who lives with me, and tossed it out into the night. Between the bats and the snakes, I'm wondering if maybe Lord Voldemort, from the Harry Potter books*, hasn't taken up residence in our cellar.









*Hi! You must be from Google. I live upstate! (Also, Lindsay Lohan!)

UPDATE: No search hits for Harry Potter or Lindsay Lohan, but I did get someone looking for "man fcking animal," so I guess I'm on the right track! Go Internet!
•

Someone's Gotta Do It

You know the little plastic tubes in perfume bottles that carry the product up to the spritzer? I just found out that my cousin has a business in his garage that consists of two machines—that he designed and commissioned—that cut those tubes to the right length for non-standard sized bottles.

Quick, look around. What could you be providing to the world?


•

The Meeting I Made

Truly friends, have things changed. Among the many ills brought about by commuting is the fragmentation of communities that disproportionately depend on long commutes for their economy. Where I live, where the average commute runs someplace in the 90-minute range (which usually means New York City), there's really no way that anyone wants to come home after such a slog and figure out how to attend the library board meeting, the school night, the church concert, etc. As County Planning Commissioner David Church put it:

"People just can't make the commitment," says Church, who notes that many towns — and his department — schedule meetings later and later, hoping for better attendance. All that time commuting is a big reason why volunteer fire departments and ambulance corps from Blooming Grove to Bloomingburg are hurting for members. "Communities lack the connectedness. It's less of a democracy."

That was my lot for the last four years. Last month, I changed jobs, and changed commutes....

And this evening, at a very civilized 7:30, my wife and I sat down in the Hamptonburgh Town Hall to hear the Orange County Water Authority's presentation on the regional impacts of climate change. The keynote speaker was Dr. Patrick Kinney of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who summarized a recent report on climate change projections for the northeast. The host was Simon Gruber, head of the Water Authority and on every local green's rolodex. And I had the pleasure of saying hello to Mr. Church, who continually advocates for smart development in the county.

It was precisely the meeting I wanted to attend, to feel like part of the space up here, to listen to people who knew something about the air I breathe and the water I drink and who understand how to keep those things working properly. But it was time that allowed it.


•

How It Went Down (A Father's Perspective)

The parents of a very pregnant woman who lived with me last year had come to visit so as to be on hand for the birth of their third grandchild (sorry I keep pausing, although you can't tell, but I'm eating some fried chicken while I'm writing this and it's hard to get the best fried gristle bits out of the ribcage without using both hands and then wiping down so's not to spoil the pretty Mac keyboard, anyhoo). That was a Thursday evening, I guess, and Friday morning my mother-in-law woke up with a numb leg. We took her over to the hospital down the street (the hospital where my wife was born, incidentally, but which no longer has a birthing center) and they looked her over for a day or two, ruling some things out, but leaving plenty of options on the table.

So it was Wednesday the following week, a year ago today as it happens, and the plan today was to get Mom down to Columbia Presbyterian in New York City, or maybe she was already there? I don't remember, but anyway, my wife was planning to go down there and visit her, with the boy and the belly. We had a backup plan for watching the boy when we had to go to the hospital, which was my sister would come up from the city when we called.

In any case, it was Wednesday and I was down at work, and my wife had gone and bought a cell phone for herself, and she and the boy and the belly were about to mosey on down to the city, and if I don't get some dialogue in here this post is going to fall asleep. So she called me at some point.

"I feel weird," she said.

"Having-a-baby weird or uncomfortable-in-these-clothes weird?"

"Eventually having-a-baby weird, but not yet. More like, some contractions, but pretty much like Braxton-Hicks ones, but something's definitely in the works. I mean, I lost my mucous plug. But it's definitely not soon."

"Today?"

"Maybe, but not anytime soon. I guess it can't hurt for me to go down to the hospital to visit, right? I mean, at least I'll be at a hospital," she said.

And down they went, and around 1:00 she called and said something like "Hmm. Maybe it would be easier if instead of taking the train home, you just caught a cab up here and drove us home."

"Are you having a baby? Should we stay at Columbia?"

"Oh, heavens no," she said. "Let's just go home. After all, Our Friend Who Is A Nurse is bringing over that really good pasta and chicken dish."

"True dat," I replied, or words to that effect. I called my sister at her office.

"How'd you like to come to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital?"

"Uhhh, sure, I guess. Any particular reason?"

"I think it's today, and That Pregnant Woman Who Lives With Me is there and I figure I'll drive her and the boy home. But don't worry, a nurse is bringing us dinner at home tonight."

"Uhh. Okay."

Two cabs later we were having a nice chat with my Mother in Law (ideopathic transverse myelitis! go figure) and wrapping up the visit and heading home. It was all very relaxing and nice. We got home. Our Friend Who Is A Nurse came over a little while later. She and my sister busied themselves making the chicken and pasta. We made sure we had a bag packed. We hung around.

"How's it going?"

"Oh, you know, little contraction every once in a while," she said.

"Sure," I said. I'm smooth like that. "Little contraction. Roger."

So we sit down to this meal and let me tell you, Our Friend Who Is A Nurse is not just a nurse, she can cook like the dickens (she's also a star athelete and a potter and a baker extraordinaire and you don't want to get into a garden contest with her and she's on the library board a couple of towns over from here and I don't know how she does it but anyway) so we tucked in to that chicken and pasta.

That increasingly pregnant but-about-not-to-be woman came in from the salon with a fluffy bathtowel and sat on it and served herself seconds and said something like "we got water," and then something like "this pasta and chicken is delicious."

At this point, we all stared at her. "Just what the hell is going on here?" I asked.

"Huh?" she said, mouth full of food. "Nothing, I'm just really hungry." She put down her fork. "Think I should call the doctor?"

She called the office and they paged the goofball on duty and he said something like "sure yeah right whatever are you in any pain how far apart are the contractions, you say your water just broke, call me when it hurts" or whatever.

"Hey," I said. "Where IS the hospital anyway?" I pushed my plate away and wiped my hands on a napkin (actually I just did that now because of the chicken, but it's atmospheric, no?). "Do we have a map?" I asked my sister.

She stared at me. No help at all.

My wife was back on the phone with the doctor. "Well, it'll take us a little while to get there," she said. "Oh yeah? Sure, I'll hold."

"Hey, honey," I said. "It ought to take us about forty minutes, I guess. How're you doing?"

She was having cute little contractions, but didn't seem to mind. They still had her on hold.

Then I heard her do a little inadvertant Lamaze breath, and I thought something like holy shit — this feels just like denial! Just then Our Friend Who Is A Nurse walked over and murmured something like "think maybe it's time you guys hit the road?" I nodded.

That's when it sped up. I grabbed the phone out of my wife's hand, she started doing a LOT of Lamaze breathing, we ran outside and bundled her into the car, friend, sister and boy in tow and screeched out of the driveway. The boy yelled from the porch in a sudden panic "WHAT TIME SHOULD I GO TO BED!?"

"8!" We didn't even have time to spell out the word, is how fast we were going!

My car is a, how you say, heap, and I pushed it to 85 the entire way, and sure enough it was a 40-minute drive and we had entertaining conversation as it became apparent that things were Much Further Along than we'd thought. Chat like:

"Don't push!" and

"I'm going to have this fucking baby in the car!"

I got the doctor on the phone -- I was remarkably calm, I thought, driving 85 in a stick on a dark highway with one hand, doing Lamaze coaching out of one side of my mouth, talking to a lackadaisickal doctor on a cell phone out the other. I asked if he thought they ought to alert an ambulance corps on the way, or maybe the police. Calm radiated outward from the phone. He wasn't concerned. Everything was going to be okay, except that I was going to smash the phone hard enough to make his head hurt because dammit, my wife said she's going to HAVE THE BABY NOW and WE'RE NOT AMATEURS, we're DONE THIS BEFORE, she was CONSCIOUS THEN and SHE REMEMBERS WHAT IT'S LIKE.

I'd bought that car on eBay, as previously mentioned, for $2,500. Goooooood car. We pulled into the emergency entrance — practically INTO the emergency entrance — and I hopped out and ran around to get my wife out. Some dude did one of those Hollywood "hey, you can't park he—" deals as I ran inside calling for a wheelchair.

They tried to hand me paperwork while I wheeled my wife along a corridor asking where the maternity ward and Doctor McChill were located and while my wife did the end-stage no-pushing breathing. I tried to explain that I wasn't a panicky first-time dad convinced the baby was coming when it wasn't, but was in fact a panicky second-time dad who had some idea that they were about to have a messy desk area, and that we weren't going to flee without doing paperwork.

We entered the birthing room with nurses in tow. Despite about an hour's warning, they hadn't set anything up yet. Doctor Cool ambled in, chuckling, and had my wife lie down.

"Well now, let's just take a look and see what all the fu---ck!" he said, or something like that. "Okay, don't push!" A stream of commands and the rapid setup of ping-machines followed, my wife pushed for a few minutes and presto.

A girl. Happy birthday, Little.




•

Agricultural Education

It seems so much longer ago than May that I lamented not being able to get a skilled person in to turn our strangely unadorned staircase into a gentle bumpitty slide made of safety and pillows. And yet. Here we are a mere three monthsish later, and spindles now stand proudly alongside the formerly open staircase. The little one, a cruiser now, will soon find herself blocked by a gate, actually anchored to actual wood and wood by-products, which will open and shut smoothly to the mute request of an adult hand.

It's about pace, I think. Our lawn has been mowed these last few weeks, by a professional. Months ago it seemed as though it simply wouldn't ever happen again — that I might have to go out and buy a lawn mower (again) and do it (again) myself. Shudder. An engineer came a couple of weeks ago and recommended some simple fixes the town could undertake that might help our drainage problems. The dining room seems to have painted itself, against all odds. These things just...happened.

Humans plant seeds, and then we wait. But part of our brains — scientists call it the renuflexum diaptor — doesn't understand the concept of pacing. In this part of the brain, the seed is already corn on the cob and goddammit the renuflexum diaptor wants its corn NOWYOUHEARMENOW. But really, three months? Nothing. It's the interval between the T and the H in nothing.

Sometimes we don't even know we've planted the seed. We just have a vague want, a whiny wish, a momentary whim. And unconsciously, our will bends that way. We enact some tiny change here, make a single phone call there, do a Google search about that thing we wondered about that one time. We write a little list in our special Notebook of Ideas. "Someday/Maybe," David Allen calls this list. We often don't know anything is even growing, until one day our cabinets are painted, or we're in a farmhouse in France, or getting published in the LA Times, or having a kid, or scheduling a book signing, or reporting to a new job.

Check your soil. What are you watering?






•

The Hours

"We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems."

Apparently Lee Iacocca said that. I vaguely remember Lee Iacocca as some kind of 1980s presence, an avuncular but untrustworthy corporate magnate, often confused in my pre-adolescent mind with John DeLorean. In any case, Lee had long been off my mind until he was brought back via Weight Watchers, when my leader recited the quote above. Each meeting has an "inspirational close," you see, and this one came early in my weight loss. Not very long afterwards, we moved upstate and I began commuting to my job in Manhattan.

Throughout the four years that I commuted via bus and train, two hours at a shot, toting a laptop, I tried to apply Lee's wisdom to that particular problem. Not just Lee's. Anyone's wisdom who would listen. My Twitter bio explains it: "I talk about commuting almost as much as I talk about not commuting." My cell phone was always handy to call a friend and complain. When the bus was too crowded to call, I'd whip open the laptop and write about it. And write letters to friends. And write personal essays. Do a little work. Look through old pictures. Listen to music. Outline novels. Begin humor books. Read. Nod off. Always in search of that elusive "opportunity" presented by an hour and a half trapped in a metal canister moving painfully slowly along New York's motorways or rails. What, oh what, was the hidden treasure inside this soul-sucking disguise?

With my new, shorter commute, I have noticed something: it's hard to write when you have so much more time. Time to sleep, at home, in your bed. Time to play with the kids. Time to help with the chores. Time to go to sleep, at a reasonable time, at home, in your bed.

This time, at least, I'm in no doubt as to my opportunities. They're not very well disguised.


•

Jump down. Turn around.

So we saw that Al Gore picture and then we switched to a cloth diaper service. (Although some stats claim that disposables use less energy in total, that's not true.)

And let me tell you. They're harder to use, they stink a LOT once they gang up at the end of the service week, and they're not that much fun individually, as you have to sort of process one at every changing (unless daycare saves 'em for you...then you get to handle them all at once, in a sort of rancid salad with ammonia dressing).

Certainly I'm not the first to write about this -- I understand the mommies have quite the blog thing going -- but the simple fact is that it IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT WORTH IT. Maybe it's because a very conscientious woman who lives with me does the bulk of the heavy lifting on the diaper front (and back). Or perhaps it's the sense of satisfaction we get from not tossing out dozens of little toxic plastic sausages every week, each loaded with a stank center. As the primary garbage-taker-outer, I can attest that it's better this way.

And that bulky baby butt clad in a cumbersome diaper is considerably more cute.


•

RIP, Sean O'Neill

The city of Utica, New York, was the scene of a massive race a week ago Sunday, with more than 10,000 people running 15 kilometers in the annual festival/race called the Boilermaker. Sadly, one young runner fell victim to a previously-undetected heart arrhythmia and collapsed on the course. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later.

Several of his friends ran the last 3 1/2 miles for him a few days afterwards.

•

Animal Control

I'm in a hotel parking lot in Utica when the phone rings. It's HQ.

"There's a fucking bat in the house."

It's tempting to say that this kind of thing always happens when I'm away, but that wouldn't be true. The creatures pretty much feel free to come and go as they please around here. From the deer having a snooze in the driveway around dusk, to the possums murdering one another just outside the bedroom window, to the snakes lounging in the cellar staircase, the animal kingdom is goverened under the su casa=mi casa rule.

This particular animal is the only one of the household variety that gives me the willies. Oh sure, I hates me the possums, because they look like they'd be happy to slit your throat and drink your blood, and I'm afraid of bears because they kill people occasionally, but bats look like all they want to do is crawl up your pants leg and scrabble around, squeaking. Ghhhah.

In other words, there are times when one's glad to be in Utica, and this was one of them. At ease in my distance from the bat, I offered some lame advice ("get the neighbors") and proceeded about my business. Later I got the update.

"We couldn't find it inside, but we saw one outside." We concluded that this must've been the one that was inside, and now it was outside, case closed, goodbye unwelcome mammal of the night. I returned Sunday evening and checked inside the fireplace, shining a flashlight around and into a quarter-inch-wide crack in the bricks — where I saw a bat wedged in like it had been poked in there with a stick.

The willies came back. So I got the Equipment: safety goggles, long screwdriver, work gloves, duct tape around the pants legs (kidding). I went back and the bat was gone. So I laid a fire and let 'er rip. A good smoky fire ought to flush out order Chiroptera.

A couple of hours later, after a nice meal and pleasant company, I went back over there and listened to the scrabbling and squeaking of at least one healthy bat. I looked back into the fireplace and saw this:



So I grabbed the camera, to show how brave I am gloves, grasped the bat gently but firmly, and tossed it out into the yard.

This morning, on my way to work, I stopped to help a turtle cross the road. It peed all the way across.


•

Bursting in Air

Last night, alerted between downpours by thunderous warning shots from the pending fireworks display on the town land next door, the boy and I trudged through the woods -- down a freshly weed-whacked path through poison ivy and other nefarious plants -- to the field behind the library from which much water flows.

~~~~
Flashback to February 2006; an observant woman who lives with me is taking a walk around this house, looking at the roof from the yard. "What's that six-foot scorch mark?" she asks the realtor showing the place. There is an ugly black scar spanning eight or ten rows of shingle.

"Hoooo-eeee, they don't make chimneys like that anymore," says the woman, pointing at another house.

"No, no, THAT scorchmark," says my wife, pointing to the scorch mark on this house.

"And it's a whole third of an acre," explains the realtor. "Plenty of room to expand."

"Hey, is that from the fireworks you guys told us are so close?" I venture.

"Shall we look at the cellar?" she asks. "They've just put in a fabulous Be-Dri™ system down there. Bone. Dry."
~~~~

So we get out there, in the rain, and the fireworks start. Like small-town fireworks everywhere they're half-baked, going off occasionally, sometimes in sequence, sometimes not high enough. A bunch of us crowd under the overhang on the public library to evade both the rain and the falling ash. A couple of big ones explode about thirty feet up. The pall of smoke sometimes fogs our view, but the smell of the gunpowder is nice.

They do two finales, but we've already started back before we realize there's a final barrage. I'm stepping through dense undergrowth cautiously, my comrade ahead of me with the light. Vivid flashes, accompanied by ear-shattering crashes, slam into us and light our way. The boy, wearing earplugs, seems more or less unfazed, or perhaps numbed. The breeze kicks up at our back, and the shadows of trees stand out stark, like tall strangers in the mist around us, and still this last volley continues, BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG, each percussion picking out every stem of oily weed and jagged thorn as we hasten through the undergrowth back to the house.

In the morning there are busted pieces of rocket, shreds of paper, wisps of fuse and string, all of it smoky, scorched, blackened. On the cars, on the lawn, hanging in the trees. There are only a couple of pieces on the roof, which was fortunately well soaked by the rain.



•

Who's Your Nerd? Say it!

Only 5,000 subscribers were able to send their pictures in to Wired in order to appear on the cover of their personal copy for the July "personalization" issue. That's a measure of something, isn't it?




•

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

In the old days (two weeks ago), I got 14 minutes a day with broadcast radio, during the drive to and from the ferry. For the northeastern liberal who favors the AAA format, there were generally two or three choices: WAMC, the regional public radio station, which at those times is playing Morning Edition with some regional news thrown in (or, if I caught the later ferry, I got the regional forecast by Mike Landin out of SUNY Albany’s Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Department; it’s like driving with a scientist), and there was...

Make that one choice.

NOW...hoo-boy! There’s 107.1 — “The Peak” — out of White Plains, playing, you know, rock, but not classic rock and not “world class” rock (update: I'm wrong, it IS "world class rock.") There’s WFUV, Fordham University’s folksy AAA station, interrupted occasionally by actual Fordham University sporting events, which, I mean please, really, who cares (and my sister went to Fordham, but still). Also interrupted occasionally by Steely Dan and/or Steve Miller, puh-extra-leeeze. And then there's WNYC, New York's public radio station.

It's possible that nothing strikes closer to the upstate/downstate, Hudson Valley/Manhattan vibe than the NYC/AMC dichotomy. (Then again, it's possible that the economic differences between Jamestown and Scarsdale come close.) To illustrate the difference between WNYC and WAMC, let me try this. Take Alan Chartock on the one hand, and Soterios Johnson on the other. It's like Bugs Bunny versus Felix Unger. Jimmy Cagney versus Ralph Fiennes. Woody Guthrie versus Frank Sinatra, but also, ALSO, Frank Sinatra versus Bing Crosby. Oat bran versus pudding. Soil/marble. Wood floors/tile floors. WHAT MORE DO I HAVE TO SAY?


•

A Different Take

The new commute takes me (by car) over the river on the Bear Mountain Bridge, then into the wild roads of northern Westchester. It's interesting; there are ways to go that don't involve big highways and multilane clogs. This morning, with a little extra time, I pulled into a scenic overlook not far from the bridge and wondered if my former train was passing below. There were signs of eagles.



See? Signs, of eagles.

•

The Wheels (of Justice)

It's December 2006, and I get a speeding ticket. I plead not guilty, because I am clear in my conscience. This evening, my court date. My name is called in the small, packed room. I walk the four feet from the back of the room to stand before the judge, who doesn't look up but takes out a rubber stamp, whacks it on a piece of paper and says "go home."

•

Additional Scenery

Weekends around here, when you're not weed-whacking or waging a thankless war against poison ivy, are spent in the presence of things like this:




•

The Transitioneer, Issue Four: Payoffs

Lest you think The Transitioneer is a litany of complaints and a record of Fears of Change, try this on:

• Two hours less commuting per day.
• Higher pay.
• Goodbye, subways. Goodbye. Goodbye.

I can just sit around for two extra hours a day spending money.* Who hasn’t dreamed of having that kind of time?

Also on the plus side? I won’t have to ride with the guy assembling his paintball gun in the seat across the aisle.**




*The author is joking.
**The author is, alas, not joking.


•

EX-urbitude

I’ll never forget the day I parachuted into the walled island of Manhattan on assignment – very much against my will – to rescue the President, whose plane had crashed but whose crash-proof pod had landed intact. The authorities were getting strong signal from his personal transponder, but to stage a recovery op they needed someone who could navigate the city’s complex criminal hierarchy and treacherous back alleys. That’s where I came in.

It’s twelve years later. While I never did find that darned president, I did get a series of comfortable temp jobs and had some extremely limited, tiny success writing pieces for the “Internet,” which at the time was a source of limitless money that ran on a crank and pulley system from someplace on the west coast. I had friends who worked there. Later, after getting in good with the thugs who ran the island (from their heatproof dome in the volcano located under Grand Central Terminal), I was given a temp job at a well-known company in the recycling industry, where I quickly became a permanent employee and rose to some prominence as the one least likely to quit. Failed again, I suppose.

Having some years ago moved to the outlying farming districts (principle crops: onions, McMansions, tree stumps), but bound by honor and paycheck to make a daily pilgrimage to the city (especially daunting because it meant being fitted for a new customized high-velocity parachute harness and dropped from 6,000 feet every morning, then digging through the base of the wall with a spoon and swimming through the nematode-enthickened waters of the Harlem River every afternoon around 5:30 to make the mainland to get home in time for dinner), I sought in vain some way out of my predicament. Rescue came this year, in the form of a squad of revolutionaries from Westchester who rappelled in armed with an excellent benefits package and a job description. I accepted their gracious offer, but, of course, was apprehended digging through the wall.

Which is why you find me live-blogging from a small platform set over a pool of lava in the catacombs below 42nd and Lex, tied to a rather comely woman who attempted to help me escape (to my wife: I’ve never met her before, I have no idea who she is and besides, I think she’s going to betray me), with only my trusty laptop, oh, and Blackberry and cell phone — uh, and my PDA, thumb drive, VPN token and headphones — to help me get out alive.

The barbarian overlords of this granite and steel enclave shouldn’t have brought me here, of course, so close to the heart of their base, because naturally once I’ve used Google’s new UnderStreetView™ to research the best way out of here, I’ll be passing by the vault containing the bagel and pizza recipes that are the source of their stranglehold on power (it’s not “the water,” people). Easily overpowering the overly-complacent guards, I’ll take those with me, thank you very much, and be on my way, synchronizing my departure perfectly with the eruption of said volcano and the destruction of the entire complex. Which will work out nicely, because it’s June and everyone will want to be in the Hamptons anyway and they’ll get everything cleaned up by Labor Day.

In other words, it’s my last day here. Thanks for the adventure, New York. See you soon.



•