Occupation of Independence

Just about everybody has had a powerful, subjective experience -- say, an automobile accident or illness -- and then been crushed by the indifference of their listeners. Usually the listener starts squirming away in just a few seconds, even if they know you quite well. And yet I persist in using odd, and rather subjective, experiences as the starting points of personal essays. It still seems like a good idea, as long as I move briskly away from the anecdote to seek out the more General. The oddest such experience of recent days was getting a glimpse into the world underneath a Quartzsite RV dump. The winter sun is low in the desert. It almost glistens off the desert pavement. The air is chilly. The desert seems so clean: no bugs or creepie-crawlies. Perhaps that is what made the experience memorable : first, surprise; and thirdly, the contrast with the world above ground. And 'secondly'? Ahh yes... It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. You think y...

It's Super Bowl season. What would the ancient Greeks think of the NFL player who dances in the end zone after scoring a touchdown? No matter how proud a modern secularist and rationalist is about their superiority to superstition, don't we still believe in hubris? We start to get nervous about feeling too pleased with ourselves, and especially, if we show it in public. For instance my van (tow vehicle) recently passed the 250,000 mile mark. At first I thought about celebrating th is achievement by posting about it. Then I decided to keep my big trap shut, lest I jinx myself. But by now, the gods have probably moved on to other things, and they won't notice if I do a little dancing in the end-zone about this.  Of course, when a person considers a new vehicle, all they can really do is stack the odds in their favor with statistically-valid generalizations. It still comes down to one lucky or unlucky specimen in a general category. But it is still worth mentioning my g...

It is always a bit of a triumph when I survive a Russian novel, in this case a historical novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "August 1914". A worthy book. I'd like to do something I haven't done before on this blog: show what I've been doing most of my adult life when I read a b ook. What good is a book if the words go i nto one eyeball and out the other? In order for the book to have any effect on your life, you must re tain the best parts of it -- its j uicy but condensed nuggets of goodness. And then you can digest and assimilate these nuggets into your own organism. To mix metaphors, let's look for the book's classic quotes, its pemmican of wisdo m, and turn them into building blocks for our own mental s kys crapers in the future.  Just a few years ago now, baby kaBLOOnie and his siblings being programmed and brainwashed by their schoolteacher father. p. 107/622:  He had not expected to find much to hearten him at Second Army Headquarters......

The other day I went to "Poop Central" in Quartzsite, th at famous modern equivalent of Cloa ca Maxima of an cient Rome .  I expected to pay 80% as much to dump a 5 gallon porta-pottie as you would pay to dump a 75 gallon tank in a Class A motorhome. That's how things work in this country. Much to my relief (bad pun), the cost was entirely reasonable. I brought a flexible sheet of plastic along, to make a funnel out of, in order to dump the porta-pottie into the 4" hole without spillage. It was strange the way they brushed me off, just as a busy auto mechanic dismisses the emotional anecdotes of a female motorist who is describing her car problems. The worker at Poop Central pulled up a manhole cover, and told me to just hurl it in. What? Hurl it in? What was going on down there, anyway? After a couple seconds my eyes adjusted to the shadowy netherworld under the superficial world of appearances, and I saw a milk crate a couple feet below. Why would a milk crat...

The trick is to avoid eye contact. When walking on the sidewalk of a large city, people learn that you must avert your eyes from winos, junkies, and panhandlers. Quartzsite is not a big city, but the same principle holds. If you slip up -- even momentarily -- at the laundromat, the old boy will notice what license plates your vehicle has, and start in with whar-ya-frum, and then move on to story after story about what happened to him, there, 38 years ago. At another time, in a crowded bakery, a line of annoyed people were held up by an old boy cracking "jokes" with the bakery worker. When he wasn't succeeding well enough at holding her up, he would look around and try to spot some new victim who made eye contact or seemed slightly amused at his bullshit. That person would soon regret it. I tell ya... there are worse things than death; like out-living your usefulness, and becoming one of these old men in Quartzsite. _________________________________________ It is e...