The Urban Pantheist

The cluttered office near mine.

I wrote myself a note to clean the kitchen table in order to find my health card and the letter from my dad. The health card is the missing piece to making a doctor's appointment, and I was going to use the letter from my dad to post something poignant about a conversation we had.

I more or less cleaned the kitchen table, by which I mean I dug through a year's worth of stacked mail and moved some of it to other rooms and threw a lot of it in the recycling, and did not find my health card but I did find my Dental Insurance card. I figured that there's a chance that I could sign up for an online account with that, and get the ball rolling toward going to the doctor regularly like a grown man (I mean middle aged man). The application to get an online account seemed simple enough but when I got to the bottom to click "next," the blank page reloaded. Start again! After doing that 4 times I gave up.

I couldn't find my dad's letter either. I found a dozen other letters from him from earlier in the year but not that one. Suffice it to say: He documents me being a terse dick. But it's funnier than that sounds.

EDITED TO ADD:
No, wait, I'll tell the story the best I can remember it. My dad wrote it out and it was pretty funny so I'll try to approximate his version.

We were on Sanibel Island driving around, talking about Ding Darling (the cartoonist who managed to get legal protections against development on much of the island) and such when my dad said something like "Anne Morrow was out here at that time too." And then just let it hang there. Now I had no idea who Anne Morrow was, and I didn't really care. I forget what we were up to, but I didn't want to learn new history at that moment, we were trying to do one of our crazy fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vacation style tasks. Both he and my brother do this, and I probably do too, but if I do please tell me because it's obnoxious: dropping a name or a fact out there, knowing that the person you are talking to probably has no idea what you are talking about. It's a way of dominating the conversation by leaving breadcrumbs that the other person has to pick up in order to complete the thought of the last sentence. Anyway.

I inhaled deeply and said "I don't know who that is."

"Anne Morrow's father was a partner at JP Morgan who became ambassador to Mexico and the Senator from New Jersey. Her mother was president of Smith College, where Anne went before becoming an important author. It was in Mexico that she met Charles Lindbergh, they married and she became a pilot herself. Lindbergh believed that Germany ... politics.... Lindbergh baby Kidnapping...." I confess at this point I dropped the thread of the narrative realizing that we had passed a shortcut.

"Can I stop you there, dad?" He did.

"She was Lindbergh's wife."

"Yes."

"Okay thanks."


My dad's takeaway from this exchange is that he talks too much. I'm not sure that's exactly right; I would say that we each talk a lot, and each have fairly deep interests in very different fields, and would do well to be considerate of one another. Also I diminished the important accomplishments of an important figure in history to simply being the spouse of another important figure in history. We should probably all know Anne Morrow better.

Anyway, thanks Dad! Sorry I was a dick.

Back to the glorious clutter of home.




Even more glorious: a walkabout the backyard reveals that a mantis has placed her ootheca on the fence! I can't wait to see the baby mantises!


For some reason these small, almost rectangular beetles kept landing on me. Anyone recognize what they are?

We slept in again, to the almost unconscionable hour of 8:30. Alexis can go without breakfast (in fact, she rarely eats it, claiming her appetite just isn't there) so I had a couple handfuls of nuts and some expensive Mexican blackberries before we set out. The world was eerily foggy, so we headed to Franklin Park; the fog was caused by warm air reacting with the snow (or something like that) and Franklin Park has lots of open fields where that happens a lot. I tried to restrain myself from taking photos, since I always overdo it, I have no daily photo project (except the snapshot), and Alexis would be taking pictures anyway. I still took some.

( Read more... )

After a lunch of eggs with ham and avocado (gain weight now! ask me how!) I went to the used record store to get rid of a bunch of singles and ten inches, while Alexis set off to the laundromat (our dryer is broken).

I was kind of surprised that the used record store was still open, and it seemed like they hadn't changed much since the last tie I had been in there 10 or 15 years ago. They had added shelves of DVDs but kept tons of VHS tapes, as well as audio cassettes (relegated to the back room) compact discs, and the backbone of the place: vinyl records. The guy (possibly the owner) looked at my records and said, "I don't know, what do you want for them? I can't tell if they're worth a dollar or a hundred dollars." I told him honestly that I had no idea how much they were worth (I kind of expected him to be the expert telling me how much they were worth and offering me a fraction of their value; I used to work in a comic book store, I know the routine.) I probably spent 200 dollars on them originally; I accepted 30 dollars in trade for them, then had to try to find something I actually wanted to bring home.

I didn't even look at any of the music, except for a bin of expensive recent releases, on super-thick vinyl for record nerds. Since I'd gone in the place to dump a bunch of music, I couldn't see bringing any back with me. I looked through all the DVDs and found some things that I was kind of interested in, but kept telling myself that I could watch them on Netflix and not have to store the thing forever. I found the place where the TV shows on DVD were, and that was even worse. Someone will buy a DVD of "Survivor?" I was looking for something that I know I would watch over and over again, like the Simpsons, and had a hard time seeing anything I would want to watch once. The whole experience was depressing me really heavily--at one point I caught a whiff of dusty old record jackets, and the smell made me so sad I wanted to run away. I ended up with season 6 of the Simpsons, in the stupid novelty case that looks like Homer's head, and a copy of "Kingdom of the Spiders," since I defend it so often I feel I should own it.

Until the next time I move and just give all this crap away.

I was bound to get the one finger salute for one of the 3:00 snapshots, but I wasn't expecting a two-fer!

Alexis goes through the paper photographs; some into albums most into the recycling.

I went through several hundred photos just now, mostly from me and my dad's trips in 2001 and 2002. ( Read more... )

The internet is full of a lot of garbage, just ask my dad. But it's also full of amazing cool things. Reason alone for the internet to exist is Awesome Tapes from Africa. In many parts of the world, cassette tapes are still the currency of music, especially (one imagines) in areas with limited resources. This blog is the work of a man who collects these cassettes, changes them into mp3 files, and makes them available on the internet. Disseminate the worthy obscure! that's my new motto.

Before the internet, photographs were available only in bulky and wasteful paper format. I have several thousand of these. Because these were created using a primitive machine which did not allow you to preview your image before you printed it, the vast majority are complete garbage. I attempted to discard some, opened up an envelope of washed-out blurry images of palm trees, and realized I was looking at my first trip with my father, to Rio De Janeiro. I started to go through them--not a single image was worth keeping, but they reminded me of the trip--then I started to separate out the doubles (back in the day you would print two copies of everything in case something was worth sharing--can you imagine?!). It was then that I accepted that I was not up to the task, not yet.