No Regrets

Wednesday Rotogravure: Your Bangs Are Too Short, Kid

Too-short bangs: it's enough to drive a girl to drink.

This girl is my great-aunt Lillian, known as Gene, with her father, my great-grandfather Oscar, about 1910. You can tell she's uncomfortable wrapped up in that big bow.

Here's Aunt Gene in the 1930s. In those days, all a woman had to do to come out was put on a pair of slacks.

In 1929, Aunt Gene snapped this photo of her baby niece, my mother Doris; it was published in a magazine because the kid was so darn cute. In 2007, I used the image in an assemblage below.

Specific Gravity, 2007.

People food at our house: cow for dinner.

Cat food at our house: lizard for lunch. Murphy is not a member of the clean plate club.

Last week, it was a plague of doofus bugs. This week, we got an upgrade: I found this beauty in the house. The body is as big around as my little finger.

Deer of the week. I'm wondering why her ear looks serrated.

Sheep of the week, from the collection.

Google Plugs a Hole

 

It’s been about 3 months since the Other’s Google searches have shown up in my account, a time span that roughly coincides with my phone audience before a real live Google product manager and a Google engineer. This event was not easy to arrange—Google puts a big barrier between its geeks and the plebe class of users that is impossible to breach without a well-connected emissary. Although I’ve not heard from Kavi or Vlad since then, nothing along the lines of, “Hey, we found and fixed that big security leak you turned us on to,” the tracks of alien searches—rat terrier/Chihuahua mix puppies, unemployment compensation, free porn—are no longer part of my Google experience, so I’m going to assume that the leak has been plugged.
Great! But listen, Googleguys, it’s still pretty horrifying that it happened at all, and it left behind an enduring trail of data. I now know more—much more!—about a stranger’s life and interests than I care to, more that she/he would want to tell me without at least a couple of drinks. And I know where she/he lives. The trail led to an address, and served up a name as well as a search history. I would not want to be in his/her shoes, anonymously observed and nakedly vulnerable. I’ve been harassed online, more than once, and it’s not pretty.*
 So Kelly, your information is safe with me. I've deleted all your searches, and I’m trying hard to forget about the very idea of a “teacup Chihuahua.” But getting to "know" you has made me keenly aware that, even without the occasional Google security glitch, private life as as we used to know it is over. In cyberspace, our personal information is written on a postcard, despite the comforting and entirely false illusion of being able to seal it in a nice password-protected envelope.

*Touched by madness
The first incident was relatively low-impact: some whack-job harvested my email address from one of the Pleistocene-era networking sites and let loose a barrage of obsessive emails, some of which strongly suggested that he was familiar with my daily routine. I blocked him, and forgot about it.
The second time was deeply creepy. Soon after Answerjack and I got together, one of his former dalliances got my work email address and every few days would anonymously send copies of their ancient lettres d’amour, an act so patently pathological that I worried about coming home one day to find a bunny boiling on the back burner. 

I got the office manager to screen my emails (blocking was beyond the capacity of the IT department); he was a drama queen and enjoyed the intrigue, a bonus. My harasser eventually got bored, or found another diversion—she was in an open marriage, although I gathered it was considerably more open for her husband than for her. A philandering husband, no family, no career, and plenty of time to cultivate extreme meshuganoses; a sorry and scary mix. I was very glad there was a continent between us.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Man With an Arrow Through His Head & Doofus Bug Death Throes

Long ago, candid photographers were a fixture in big cities. They'd shoot you walking along the street, then hand you a receipt that could be sent in with a dollar bill to get a print. This one was taken on Randolph Street in downtown Chicago, circa 1944; that's my father with an arrow through his head. He looks a little worried; he's on his way to boot camp at Fort Sheridan, plus there's that arrow. Incredibly, he's 18 years old, cannon fodder ripe for harvest.

A few weeks later. He looks more like the kid he is without the sport coat and cigarette.

 

Jessica noted certain congruences between this photo of her, John, and their friends, taken in 2007, with the following photo of her parents and their friends, taken in 1972:

 

That's Gretchen in the top with the striped sleeves, right of center. Uncle Bill is in the bottom right, with the dark hair and beard. Keep your eye on that adorable bald baby.

 

Ravi, then and now. His birthday is this Saturday, April 25. Happy birthday, Boogie!

 

Deer Of The Week, with bonus Murphy pix. This is right outside my study door. Murphy likes to hang with the big mammals—he was sleeping between this deer and her more timid sister just moments before this photo was taken.

 

Sheep O' The Week, from the collection.

  

Answerjack left the back door open Saturday night. We're lucky the raccoons didn't run riot through the house as we slept. As it was, we woke up to swarms of doofus bugs in every room of the house; here are just a few of the hundreds of corpses I've scooped up since then.

Bell-Shaped Curve

Gretchen, 1971
We’ve all had friends unlucky enough to be picked off early on the trek toward the steep slope of mortality’s bell-shaped curve—young people dead from improbable illnesses, or overdoses, or car crashes. The wrenching tragedy of early death carries with it a touch of the bizarre, being far enough out of the norm that we can place it in roughly the same category as spontaneously bursting into flames while walking down the street—something really awful that is most likely not going to happen to you.
As we rack up the years, we realize death is going to happen to us. Peer death becomes less uncommon, if still bizarrely random: the fit fifty-something athletes whose hearts give out in mid-stride at the gym (I’ve known three); the friends and friends of friends felled by malignancies, by aneurysms, by post-polio syndrome. Last week I knew five in that group; this week I know six.
Gretchen left the Bay Area in 2001. When it became apparent that her multiple sclerosis was progressing, her husband took an early retirement and they bought a big cushy RV, taking off cross-country while she still had mobility. We spent an evening with them before they left: drinks at our house in Sausalito and then dinner down on the Bay with more chums from the olden days, a gently festive gathering under the shadow of a threat to one of our own. Getting ready for bed that night, Answerjack, who’d just met Gretchen for the first time, said sadly, “Your friend is hosed,” which is guard-down doctor-speak for “The prognosis for your friend is poor.” Sometimes I wish I had married a plumber, or a poet.
After more than a year on the road, Gretchen and Glenn settled in Sandpoint, Idaho, and I lost touch with them during the stretch of time that Answer and I had 10 different addresses on either coast. Uncle Bill, the BMW-riding yenta of the group going back to the ‘60s, kept in touch with her and would report back to all. The news about her health was never good. Several months ago Gretchen got news that was very bad indeed: a diagnosis of laryngeal cancer. And then she was dead.
Now that my demographic has been assembled at the base camp of the steep section of that bell-shaped curve, the death of a peer has taken on a different meaning. It’s impossible not to have a heightened sense of our collective mortality. And collectively, my generation is responding to this increased awareness in a predictably self-absorbed way.  James Wolcott notes in his article Final-Exit Strategies that the growing canon of best-selling death-lit turns the demise of our peers into a teaching moment (Tuesdays with Morrie), motivational tool (The Last Lecture), and sales pitch  (those bucket-list books of things to do before you go)—all at a profit.
I’m committed to avoiding this part of the Zeitgeist, because there’s something vampiric (as well as colossally narcissistic) about grubbing for personal growth among the remains of someone else’s life. Because our friends do not die for our edification, and their last words should not be converted into downstream revenue dams. Because the job of the living is not to take from the dead, but to give witness, and remember. Because the Angel of Death is not a life coach.
So: Gretchen, I was glad to know you. I have some great memories and one or two sucky ones; all in all a good run. You could not have asked for truer friends or a better mate. You deserved better health and better luck, and, of course, more time. Safe journey, amiga.

That's all.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Teabagging; Nothing Happened

I've had years like that, too. Not lately, though.

King's Kash in Memphis.

Child's play in Oklahoma, circa 1948. I married one of these gunslingers.

I love this picture—the priest-in-a-dress; the first-generation American kids, still with the stamp of the old country on their features. My father's in there, back row, third from the right.

My mother is third from the left in the top row.

Was there no one in what remains of the Republican Party who could tell these poor dolts what "teabagging" means?

Sheep tschotke o' the week, from the collection.

 

Shelter: Zillow, Zillow on the Wall

Once upon a time, obsessing over the price of real estate was pretty much confined to those who dwelled in storied regions like San Francisco and New York City. Now it's a national pastime, with homeowners throughout the land fretting about the downward slide in value of what is, for most of us, the largest single investment we'll ever make. The fabulous realm of Interweb offers many easy entry points from which to explore the treacherous terrain created by the implosion of the housing bubble, and provides helpful tools so you can pinpoint where just about any property stands, literally and metaphorically, in the vast rubblescape. There's no rational explanation of why you would want to do this unless you really have to.
I'm a bit of a Zillow.com abuser, myself, and yes, I know about the site's inherent inaccuracies. Still. We bought our house about this time last year, just as the economy started to grind to a halt. Although SF area real estate historically maintains mostly peaks with few valleys, odd slumps of value can occur. And they have now: through the magic of Zillow, I know that the house Answerjack and I tried to buy in the Oakland hills (full price offer, which the sellers rejected, hoping for a bidding war which never materialized) is currently valued at 20 percent less than what it sold for last March. A bit further removed, the house I used to own in Walnut Creek, which 3 years ago (long after my tour as chateleine) sold for more than triple what I paid for it, is down 25 percent. The owners of this sad house—clearly hanging on by a thread last year—lost it; it went REO. The couple from whom we bought our current house have their new place on the market, 9 months after moving in.
This is the background against which I sit down at my computer, type my address into Zillow's search field and await, with bated breath, the pronouncement of the oracle: fair, still, or not? Magically, still yes. Fairer even than what we paid last year. My intense relief—we are very lucky—is tempered by diffuse guilt—so many people, no more or less deserving than we, are not. I am fully prepared to see the value of this investment slide and am committed to riding it out. And in my own little kingdom with its peculiar laws based on the magic of good will, I hope, every day, that everyone else, too, will be carried safely out of the valley, their families and hope and confidence intact.

Wednesday Rotogravure

Two from my collection of sheep tschotkes.

Cows are nice, too. This bold bovine stands apart from the herd, a few miles from our house.

Here's the deer of the week. This one hangs out down the road from us—someone went and built a house in the middle of a deer path back in the '60s, but the deer never got the memo.

Bluey Twoey the Betta. I killed Bluey One when I changed his water with chilled imported bottled water, a Marin Moment. Now the fish gets local bottled water, and I drink from the tap.

Another Marin Moment, only it's at our rented loft in Memphis. Things are tough all over.

The view out the front deck when I started this post.

And the view now. Good night!

Mad Science: Muting Mnemosyne

The New York Times reports that a group of researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, have mapped the mysterious regions where Mnemosyne dwells deep in our minds, identified the substance that jeeps her going, and developed a drug to block her activities. The idea is that life could be improved by tweaking specific memories—making us forget fears and bad habits, say, or eliminating the emotional aftermath of trauma. SUNY scientists have already accomplished this for the usual gang of early adopters, lab rats, with a single dose of an experimental drug to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills. The drug works by blocking the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. The substance—the “memory molecule”— can be also be enhanced, thus possibly staving off dementias and other problems. Researchers are pretty sure it's going to work on people, too.

It’s an audacious idea with obvious potential for benefit. Unfortunately, humankind never met a scientific advance it couldn’t figure out how to abuse, especially if there is power to be gained, profit to be made or lousy judgement to be exercised. Think of Botox, developed to relieve crippling migraines and now Hollywood’s most-abused injectable substance, a Draconian cosmetic. Or IVF technology, for decades a boon for infertile men and women that recently resulted in the spectacle of a seriously deranged unemployed single mother of 6 neglected kids whelping an artificially implanted litter of 8 premature babies.

No easy answers about what tinkering with memory at a molecular level would mean for humankind; Mnemosyne's gift, both a blessing and a curse, shapes our perceptions and reactions to the world. Who decides which memories just have to go? Who controls our recall?  Medical ethicists will be working on the issue of selectively edited memory for a long time—hey, kind of like defense lawyers have been doing all along.
Read on: Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

Wednesday Rotogravure: Above the Fog and Into the Woods

Once upon a time, newspapers were mostly text, with relatively few photographs appearing in daily editions. Separate photo-and-caption sections, called "rotogravures" after the printing process that produced them, were published on the weekend. When I worked in the Features department of the Chicago's American, so long ago that my job description included the word "youth," the ink-stained old-timers still called the Sunday magazine "the rotogravure."
This blog is pretty text-intense and I have a lot of photos, so I think a regular online rotogravure is a swell idea. I'm posting it mid-week because I like the way "Wednesday" and "rotogravure" sound together. No ink is involved.

My siblings and I are the inheritors of a vast store of family photographs found in our mother's house after her death. Some are more interesting than others, and others are more interesting still in juxtaposition to related photos. Here, my 60-something father appears to be having a phone conversation with his 30-something self. I wonder what he's saying? That man's hair was incredible at all ages.

 
Here are Jessica, circa 1984, and Murphy, circa last week.


My mother and me. The more recent photo was taken at Jessica and John's wedding 9/08 and the hand gesture is less loaded with portent than it appears; I wasn't really going to poke my thumb in her eye, just gesturing to Answer, who is out of the frame.


I live in an incredibly beautiful area. This is what I see out my bedroom window in the morning.
Believe me, I am thankful, every day.


This is the view out the window in the shower. Look closely.


That's a deer. She/he (too young to make the call) really likes that spot.


More local fauna, on the deck.


And into the woods, behind the house.