ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Sunday, January 26, 2014

Loose Nuts

I am back on the blog, after a long time away. My blog skills are rusty, but I am drawn back today as I spend some time focusing inward and trying to make sense of the events of recent days. Herb is upstairs working on his professional commitments and I am sitting in a sunlit room beside the pellet stove, trying to stay warm.

It has been two months since we posted anything. 2013 is gone and 2014 has been here long enough for us to be able to make out checks with the appropriate date.

I have been back in the classroom and out again. I am working again in the online version of the educational world. And that is a blog post in and of itself. Herb has a new project pending which looks as though it will give him a chance to stretch his professional wings a bit further. He is also now a Justice of the Peace and can perform marriages. He is running for the Selectboard which is the governing body of our town.

We are both recommitted to our writing, but it is fragile enough - the writing, not the commitment - that we are yet hesitant to share what we are working on.

And as the old song goes, the wheel keeps turning.

But last night we heard some stories that felt like a flat tire. There were echoes of those dark stories this morning. They are not headline news, but they have shaken me.

Some years ago, one of our local officials had nails strewn in his driveway after a particularly ugly battle over local services.There are reports that someone sprinkled sugar into the gas tank of town equipment, and then the local official was blamed for not keeping the equipment safe. I thought that was about old grudges between hard-boiled men.

A year or two ago, a  disgruntled nephew stole a can of coins from his uncle. Word went out that a green Jeep had been seen around town and that we should watch for it. It turned out to be the car of the local appraiser who was making notes for tax appraisal time. The two events were unrelated.

There are reports of major drug problems in the town next to ours and some of it is reported to have slipped in here, though all I have seen so far is a very pale skinned, somewhat wild-eyed, pit-bull-paired, loose jointed couple buying a child's table and chair set at the local library yard sale.

And then I heard that the lug nuts on one side of a friend's Jeep had been loosened after a disagreement over a town issue that engendered some tax increases. She made it to the shoulder of a snowy highway, and the wheel made it across the lanes of oncoming traffic with no injuries.

This morning, I heard that  a friend who built a tiny "half-house" on land some few miles away had found out that  her windows had been broken though nothing was stolen. She is returning "from away" to repair the damage.

This morning, as I stood at the top of the stairs, Herb said there is a dark side to this town. It is something I've not seen or acknowledged until today.

I am stretching for the lessons in this. I am stretching to understand how a town that vaunts its sense of community, and its safety for the children can have such a dark side.

The friend who had her wheels loosened said she had been a newcomer at the time, and that people were angered by her stand on a local issue. She said she might have been scared but instead was angry. "If you want to argue with me, come up here and do it on the porch," she said. "If you want to punch me, come up here and punch me. Don't put my friends and my kids at risk when they could have been in the car."

A friend worried that a new town office building planned for the main intersection in this tiny town, on two county roads, should not house the library for fear that some disgruntled person would come with a gun and shoot the children there.

There are shadows here that I have not seen.

Some of those shadows are the long shadows of Newtown where the children were shot by a madman who had been someone's son. All of our towns are vulnerable to the loose nuts. Some of the shadows are of problems with economic disparities and a lack of jobs, and a sense that our lives are tenuous, and that just a little sip or a little snort or a little something in the veins will make it hurt a little less, at least for a time. Or that something small will make us feel stronger, as though our outrage has a place to settle, our anger, an expression in someone else's pain.

It is too easy to say that it is about newcomers and oldtimers which is what I've often heard. It is too easy to say (as I have) that it is about old grudges. Or kids with too much time on their hands. Or wounded men with a streak of violence.

Or of loose nuts.

It is of course all of the above...and more.

But I am spending time again, as I have before, looking at my own expressions of loss and anger and disempowerment, at the way I express my own rage....and wondering how to repair the damage. Mine and that of those I love.

A blog presumes that there is some discovery, some lesson to be shared. It presumes that what we have written, like a recipe blog that tells us how to boil an egg or make charlotte russe, has something tasty at the end. We have built a society that seeks an instant-fix googled answer to our questions.  In 2008, The Atlantic published an article called Is Google Making us Stupid?  The author Nicholas Carr wrote,
The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.... But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought."
I find myself longing for the google-wikipedia answer, the recipe for something light, sweet, nourishing. Maybe it is my version of the shot, the sip, the little something in my veins.

Carr continues,
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies... Lewis Mumford  described how the clock 'disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.' The 'abstract framework of divided time' became 'the point of reference for both action and thought.'...
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
I find myself wondering whether we have become a googled community which seeks instant answers rather than the process of consensus building which takes time and the capacity for listening to other people's stories. We seek instant fixes and all-or-nothing responses. In a recent controversy, one of the members of the Historical Society insisted that instead of agreeing to disagree, all the members of the Board needed to come to consensus and since none could agree and the discussion was stalemated, any movement forward was stymied.

I am seeking to understand how to fix my own google life. I want to understand how to stop depending on instant fixes, all or nothing scenarios that leave people out and block movement forward.

Carr continues,
"In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas...If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture....
The work of community building requires time and work that is unaccustomed these days. We worry that a real record of the extended time spent by the committee planning the new town building (and responding to individual and group concerns) will be seen as time wasted, at the same time that we worry that others will contend we are moving too quickly ahead.  We worry that our efforts to make good policy will take too much time, alienate our friends. We worry that we should walk to town rather than risk the lug nuts on the car or the gas tank. But the roads at night in a rural place are dark...

Carr cites playwright Richard Foreman saying,
"As we are drained of our 'inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,' Foreman concluded, we risk turning into 'pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Have we become pancake people who are spread so wide and thin, by loss of jobs, and loss of respect that we no longer know how to build the layers of trust in each other and in a future that we can share, where we can agree to disagree, without having the wheels come off?