discharge

My childhood memories are of things felt and heard, more than of things seen.  And what was seen, I remember for what was imaginary, more than what was there.  

In the dark cold of the night, my young, soft hand on the radio, warmed by the solid state electronics within, as I swept the tuner needle across the frequencies, listening to the hiss and squeal just audible, what with the volume so low.  The scratch of the rough fabric that covered the large floor speakers.  And the soldered, dusty smell through the ventilation grill of the Sharp audio receiver, sitting beneath the turntable, with its amber plastic cover.  And then I would squint and look through the ventilation grill, to see the circuit board within, a little cityscape of dusty resistors, capacitors and diodes, and I would pick out, always, the same resistor, with its little stripes of red, green and yellow, and imagine that this, this resistor was the building in the circuit board city within which I lived, and that that, the great capacitor, a blue cylinder towering an inch high, was the hulking skyscraper in which I worked.

I think of this as I look at my emptied 42nd floor office, then out the window, to the new 23rd floor office across the avenue, where I will begin new work, on the first Monday in 2015.

Bravakis

One thing that holds me back -- I am not quite saying it is a disadvantage -- is that I am easily impressed and pleased with people of little achievement or merit that are, somehow, appealing.  The advantages of being advantaged thus seem, to me, less great.

unmirrored

Gratitude is an index of consciousness.

passing Calhoun

Within my head, the starring role is not mine but an aged self, eyes sunk, ears hardened, eeking not earning. He, not this me, awaits his grand, leering, Third Man Orson Wells entrance, in this one-seat theater. I do not think I will like him, but I cannot look away.

.-. . .--. . - .. - .. --- -.

Primrose v. Western Union Telegraph Co., 154 U.S. 1 (1894). 

lies and lies

Most of what is morally wrong is not so absolutely, but because most of us cannot handle it - at least repeatedly - without falling into things that are wrong, and entirely so, unless equipped with rules, structures, organizations, and so forth.  And that equipment varies with culture because it is, in large part, an interface between the actor and that culture.

apparent

The lucky favor meritocracy.

orange as embers, as molten iron

The sun rises, reflected from the windows of Manhattan's high-rising offices.  Slight deviations from plane make the orange light ripple from pane to pane, like the slow surface of a lake under breeze.  A moment as shy as fog over our bridges, as serious in its beauty, as liquid over solidity.

just us homefolks

The whispering, occasional aside of the novelist's asides; the paced but constant single voice of the radio reporter; the crowd, music and scene of television and movies; the roar of one's own friends and acquaintances by text and message and stream: the re-learned appreciation for the tranquility of print and the early-morning kitchen-table intimacy of radio or podcast.

blooded ballots

A description of the form of government, or of kind of sovereignty, must include the type of economy to be meaningful.  A capitalist democracy is not of the same category as a socialist democracy or as a guild republic.  Nor is a feudal meritocracy meaningfully relatable to a capitalist meritocracy.  Matters of money are more important to our social selves than the vote.

glories

The salt of the earth.  What beauty in metaphor!

Mers-el-Kébir

Atrocity is the punctuation of history, and as regular as the comma and the period.  But the words of peoples and governments carry the freight of life, itself unspoken and vast as the freighted air and sea.

resources

Walking up Third Avenue in Midtown to the subway, the sidewalk busy with commuters, the mother and child ahead of me begin to stand out because his pace slows and grows heavy.  He may be four years old, and both he and mother are expensively dressed - he has a little corduroy jacket whose cut and fit are as adorable as they are unnecessary on anybody whose size is a moving target.  His head is turned towards his mother and his eyes are looking straight up the diagonal line of sight towards her eyes that parallels their linked, taut arms: he pulling toward the curb, she keeping him from stepping into the planters set out at intervals to hold trees.

It is rare to see young children talking to their parents as they walk.  The angle is too inconvenient - they keep their silence or stop their progress.

Well, as I say, he is slowing down, and his mother with him.  They pivot to a planter and stop.  He then fumbles with his pants fly, his mother assists, and he begins to urinate into the planter, piss arcing and steaming into the fall air.  Commuters stare-and-pretend-not.  He even manages to hoist one leg to the side, knee unfixed, in imitation of a pissing dog, I suppose.

I pass and see no more.  But what have I seen - whose idea was it?  Did the boy need to piss right then and this occurred to the mother?  Or did just that occur to the child?  Or did he - maybe - simply want to do what so many urban dogs do, at an early stage of development that permitted the action but preceded the social stigma?  Or has he learned the lesson of Manhattan that early - that we are crowded into privacy, that we are looked at as I looked, with curiosity but without connection or risk of shame.  Or had the mother learned that sadder lesson, that she and her child, in their whiteness and wealth and cuteness, could get away with what would have disgusted others, invited ugly stares and perhaps a citation, had it been done by a mother and son without those advantages: by a mother and child whose relative characteristics would have led me and others to feel it was gross rather than to consider child development, infant fascinations and parenting styles.

I come to my subway stop and descend the escalator to the platform.  There is one of the homeless old guys I've seen for years, vaguely familiar to me from my commute.  His battered Home Depot shopping cart has been banged down the stairs to the platform again, and I wonder how he does it, its width being greater than the stairs or escalator.  But he is in the holiday spirit.  Flashing green-corded Christmas lights chase around his cart, twined with garland, the lights' cord disappearing into the cracked boom box he carries with him.  I think: he has an inverter in there?  Or is there a battery-operated kind?  Does he have a soldering iron?  A wire-stripper?  How many D-cells does he go through?

We each have our range of means: pitifully narrow or revoltingly wide, in virtue or willing to vice, but always surprising and uneven, with juts and islands of capacity half-seen through the fog.

seamy

Like the wind, we must move or lose shape.

Milano

Bloodlessness is an aesthetic vice but a social virtue.

Firenze

Two contrary - but not contradictory - convictions are necessary to handle unfairness wisely.  First, to recognize and conduct one's self and advise others with a firm conviction that unfairness is a permanent and pervasive feature of all human society, and will remain so.  There is no utopia - in every possible society some folks are getting the short end of the stick.  Second, to hold fast to one's enmity towards the promoters of unfairness and to maintain the conviction that unfairness can be minimized everywhere and even excluded in some respects from some places, some of the time.  Those who are getting the short end of the stick, undeserved, deserve special consideration, and their condition is the first measure of a society's merit.

A wise person may even leverage existing unfairness, without taint or blame, perhaps even extend or cause it in ways that are small and passing, but this is delicate, requires and invites judgment, and is better left unsaid.