Looking In

A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

With the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries out of the way, it is high time for a quick and facile look into the 2008 presidential race so far.

Hillary Clinton saved her ass in NH, or rather older female voters did. According to polls, that group carried her to victory. Ms. Clinton was on the run after losing in Iowa, and really, really needed to win New Hampshire to get her groove back. Which she has done. In interviews she is confident again, even cocky. That is her at her most natural. The sort of humble persona she adopted after Iowa did not fit her well. The times I like Hillary best is when she is supremely confident. Glowing even.

One of the oddities of the primary season is that a guy like Barack Obama can be riding so high after Iowa, then get edged out in New Hampshire - not exactly a surprise - and so be put in a position where he almost has to win in the upcoming South Carolina primary, just to maintain a creditable candidacy. Weird. If you want to know the truth, I don't think Obama has the legs to make it all the way through the long, withering process leading up to the conventions this summer. One of the reasons I think Clinton has remained so confident is that she knows there doesn't appear to be a lot of substance behind the very pleasing up-front image Obama projects, and that the lengthy primary process will, in time, expose this. She (and I) may be dead wrong, but I would be very surprised to find it out.

John Edwards is a nice guy, has a nice family, has a few nice ideas, some very nice hair. . . but he creates zero excitement that I can see. Substance is very important, of course, but if you do not excite people to any degree, especially after eight wearying and acrimonious years of an us vs. them Bush administration, you are - in technical terms - royally fucked. Edwards has to win in his neighboring state of South Carolina, just to stay alive.

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John McCain winning New Hampshire on the Republican side is sort of like when some old '80s hair band reunites and has a big hit. You are thinking, well, it is nice to see they still have it in them, but. . . Who the hell is going to take this nomination, though? Mitt Romney seems to be faltering. I don't have any feel for Mike Huckaby, I need to pay more attention. Rudy Giuliani has something of the same problem Barack Obama does on the Democratic side - his "Remember 9-11" message was stirring at first, but it gets old after awhile, and then one begins to realize he has no real plan for what to do if, by some miracle, he gets elected. And, unlike Obama, Rudy appears soulless otherwise. I don't expect him to be around much longer.

The dark horse out there is Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani's successor as mayor of New York City. Bloomberg is rumored to be exploring a late run, either as a Republican or, more likely, an independent. He has no national recognition at this point, but shitloads of money. And money talks, of course. A run by Bloomberg might actually help Giuliani, in that it would throw things on the Republican side into even further disarray, which is the only scenario under which I can imagine Rudy reviving his moribund candidacy and making a real run at the nomination.

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How will all this turn out? Fuck if I know. You will just have to stay tuned.

On Freedom, And Flight

Some Notes From My Time in the Water Land

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,

How good, how good does it feel to be free?

And I answer them most mysteriously,

Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?

--Bob Dylan, Ballad in Plain D

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I hunt. Or rather, I used to hunt. Ducks, to be specific. Though, in this case, "hunt" is a rather misleading term, in the strictest sense. What I really did was hide myself in a bunch of tall reeds, or in a heavily camalflouged blind, in an area where I thought the ducks might be hanging out anyway, and then I waited for some to fly by. The upper Texas Gulf Coast used to be on a branch of the main southern flyway for ducks traveling from Canada to Mexico and beyond for the winter. We'd see all kinds of waterfowl flying through here in the fall - from mallards to spoonbills, gadwalls to widgeons, "black" mallards to all manner of teal to even canvasbacks, and more. Geese, too; mostly Canadas and snows and especially speckle-bellies. We almost always "limited out", and usually quickly, so I rarely remember staying out in the marsh past about 10:00 a.m. or so most hunts.

I eventually grew out of duck hunting. Which is to say, as I got into my later teens, my increasingly demanding social life dimmed my desire to arise at 3:00 a.m. on a weekend morning and go sit out in a windy, freezing marsh, waiting for some birds to start flying around. Also, the flyway moved east, for various reasons I am not really qualified to describe in any detail. But this meant less ducks in this area, overall. The hunting experience is diminished somehow when one goes hours without seeing what one is out hunting to begin with. Not that I was ever only out there for the shooting, mind you, but that is another story.

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Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried, in my way, to be free.

-- Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire

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I don't think the virulent anti-hunting crowd quite gets it. They label hunting as inhumane, forgetting that humans, too, have their place in the food chain; and that for 99% of our species' existence, they way we ate dinner was to go out and kill it first. Hunting is part of our makeup (as is violence, by the way), even if what we mostly are out hunting now is a good deal on brisket at H.E.B. But if everything blew up tomorrow, while the anti-hunters dithered around wondering what to do without a supermarket, there would be hundreds of thousands of people who would know exactly what to do - they'd pick up the shotgun and go out looking for something edible to kill and bring home for dinner.

I am not one to argue the hunter's cause, though. I'm a non-hunter nowadays, as I said, and in truth I have little sympathy for the real idiots out there, who shoot and kill for no other reason than the thrill of it. The thrill killers. These are the guys who mostly make it onto TV and radio with their "outdoor" shows. They are the worst representatives for hunting one could imagine, and it is no wonder they drive anti-hunters to distraction.

One thing you will almost always hear from hunting apologists, aside from bullshit like they are necessary to "thin the herd", or they somehow benefit wildlife by pursuing and killing it, is that a large part of the experience is the joy of just being out in nature, truly in nature. And that without hunting, most people would not have this experience at all. That drives anti-hunters nuts, too; but it is absolutely true. I know this from my own experiences.

Killing the ducks was all right, but what I really remember vividly from my hunting days, over twenty years ago by now, is not some great shot I made, but rather a dozen little vignettes of being out in the marsh when nothing was flying, and really experiencing nature like I never could anywhere else. Shooting time was thirty minutes before sunrise, and in order to be ready, we would often be out in our blinds, ready to go, long before that. Some of my fondest memories of duck hunting were those times when I found myself all situated and ready for shooting time, with thirty minutes or an hour to kill before getting down to business. I would settle down into my blind, pull the Thermos out of the game bag in my jacket and pour myself a cup of warm black coffee, maybe fire up a cigarette, and then just pay attention.

The marsh may not look like much from a distance, but there are a million little things going on there at all times. In the minutes before sunrise, when the first light of dawn strikes, things begin in earnest. The place suddenly comes alive, birds and bugs and fish (and nutria rats, and alligators) all in the commotion of living. It is literally thrilling to experience all that. It was in my duck blind that I first realized one early morning that there is a species of spider that can literally walk on water. I don't know what they are called, but they are small and apparently really light. They skitter across the surface of the water without ever breaking it. That is pretty amazing itself, but what really got me, when I looked closely, is that each step by each leg created a small indentation on the water's surface. Each step would almost break the surface, but not quite. These guys were designed to be just the right size and weight to almost fall through, but ultimately not to. Whatever your belief system is, you can go ahead and praise the overseer for the genius of this design. I just so happen to be Christian, and so I would thank God just for being alive and having the opportunity to be out in that marsh on that morning, at the start of another glorious day. And also for the cool little spiders, walking around on top of the water, just like they say Jesus did.

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Sometimes, after I was done communing with nature, I still had some time left to reflect a little on my own existence within it. This was a pretty natural thing to do in the peace and quiet just before everyone started blasting away with 12-gauges. I was young then, a schoolboy really, and I usually had some burgeoning romance to deal with. So I would sit out in the marsh and think about that, sometimes.

There was this one girl, Diane. At the time I was crazy about her, totally infatuated. I would think about her, and what she was doing at the moment (sleeping, probably), and what she would do when she got up, and if she would wonder what I was doing, out in the marsh. Just goofy shit like that, and it seemed to make the time pass very quickly.

The time still passes very quickly, I am sorry to say. But to this day, when I see a marsh, I think about little spiders. And about romance. That is mildy crazy, I know, but for me there is no way around it. One of my enduring mental pictures of myself is of me 20 years old or so, in my hunting gear in the blind, long hair pushed under a canvas Duxback hat, smoking a cigarette in the near light. Cradling my 16-gauge and armed to the teeth, waiting. And meantime watching little spiders run around on top of the pond, while thinking about my baby.

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If you arrive and don't see me
I'm going to be with my baby
I am free
Flying in her arms, over the sea

-- Shuggie Otis, Strawberry Letter 23

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Earth Blues

Erda

Suspended globule
Sparkle and blue,
An ageless lady
Of delicate hue.

Timeless, and beauty
Created for sight,
Always to brighten
The forever night.

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It is freaking cold around these parts right now. Cold weather always causes me to become slightly pensive and distracted. Warm weather does this, too.

Low Sparks

A Gun That Didn't Make Any Noise

From time to time over the years I have had the experience of hearing a song I have listened to maybe hundreds of times before and maybe have even loved, except this time, for no particular reason, I suddenly really "hear" the song for the very first time. The long obscure-to-me lyrics make perfect sense, I can hear each crisp note in the song, the sum of them going together in perfect order. I don't even know what to call this. Sudden hearing? Reverse deja vu? Probably some phrase of Greek origin (the Greeks had a word for everything, after all.)

Recently I was driving home at 3:30 a.m. (don't ask), and the song "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" by Traffic came on, the long, 11-minute LP version. I have known and favored this song for close to 40 years. I even used it in the soundtrack of a movie once. But on this night, for some reason - pensiveness at a late hour? The fact I was practically the only car on the highway? I was really tired? - I really "heard" this song for the first time. I got so far into it, it was a little weird. The lyrics, which I'd long ago memorized, suddenly sounded brand new. Steve Winwood's thin, high-pitched delivery of them was just right. The words, long considered basically meaningless by me, suddenly seemed profoundly, well, profound. They made perfect sense. And the saxaphone that pops up throughout the song was very haunting.

The last of "Low Spark" played out just as I was pulling into my driveway. Perfect. I don't know what to call this phenomenon, this sudden hearing, or what causes it. I am just very grateful it happens to me every once in awhile.

I am assuming this is a fairly common experience for any serious music lover. If it is not, and rather is just another odd personality quirk of mine I have just inadvertently revealed. . . well, forget everything I just said, utterly.

Later.

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It wasn't the bullet that laid him to rest,

Was the low spark of high-heeled boys

Heeled boys. . .

Here We Go Now

2008, Just Great So Far

• I have averred in the past there should be a law prohibiting any car dealership owner from producing and/or participating in his own television commercials. My thinking was this would absolutely protect the interests of society as a whole, as the best laws do. In retrospect, that may have been a little harsh on my part. Of course, all locally produced dealership commercials are goofy to one degree or another, and the vast majority of them are downright annoying. But there is one currently running locally that I actually look forward to. In this one, instead of some moron jumping up and down and screaming about saving you money, the tone is low-key and the commercial is set up as a series of testimonials from supposed actual customers. There is a young woman who says her car is so "accomodating", her friends can even sit in it and stuff. Also a guy who says he wouldn't buy his parts anywhere else (????). But my favorite is a grandmotherly-looking woman who looks sternly into the camera and says, "The service at (so-and-so) Honda is better than you can get anywhere else in these United States." These United States? I love that line to a ridiculous degree, and look for opportunities to work it into everyday conversation as often as possible.

• I fear the days of the great (or greatly quirky/weird) infomercials are over. These "sponsored programs", which dominate really late night TV, have grown increasingly homogenized and indistinct over the years. More and more we are seeing them hosted by entertainers whose careers have apparently gone into steep decline, and less and less by entertaining oddballs and weirdos and nobodies. By the way, if I ever just decide I don't care what happens to me anymore, one of the first things I am going to do is get an assault rifle and go after whoever is responsible for the Extenze commercials, the ones touting a product that is supposed to magically grow "that certain male body part" to humongous size, causing everyone involved to become ridiculously happy with the results. Anyway, there is one extended commercial running now I actually kind of enjoy, something about a super chamois cloth which should replace paper towel usage ("which you are going to spend $20-$30 a month on, anyway," the host says. . . Huh? Who the fuck spends $30 a month on paper towels?). The super chamois absorbs 100 times its weight in liquid, something like that, plus you can wash it in the washing machine! The host of this commercial is engagingly odd, and anway I don't know how I have gone this long without owning a really big chamois cloth. Super chamois it is, then; if I order right now, they'll throw a second super chamois in at no additional cost.

• There are too many post-season college football bowl games anymore, and they are too hard to keep up with. Now we not only have the Mieneke something bowl and the O'Rielly Auto Parts bowl, but a whole group of these second-rate games are now lumped together now under the banner of the Capital One Bowl Series. Leaving out the fact that I fucking hate Capital One - they recently bought out the bank I had my accounts with, and customer service went from decent to exceptionally poor literally overnight - do we really need another tier of advertising for these mostly meaningless games? Add to that the big traditional bowl games aren't even played on New Years Day anymore, and you know what? I don't care, I have lost interest. I'm tuning in to the Law And Order: Criminal Intent marathon instead.