Category Archives: the game of life

Of Addicts And Writers And Doing And Being

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I’m currently reading two books. (I probably do this in keeping with my Vatul nature; consider it an offering to my ancestors, if you will.) They are Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

The books have nothing to do with one another and I picked each up for completely different reasons, but there are a couple of questions that both books bring up.

1) Is addiction a personality trait? I understand addiction as various things -  habit gone bad, a genetic predisposition and certainly as a disease – but is addiction / can addiction become a part of you such that it is something to describe you? Think about that question for a second. See, I view John Belushi as a great actor and an addict, neither which are necessarily part of his personality. I am trying to get at the distinction (or lack thereof) between what you are and what you do. If you think I am going about this the wrong way, read Question 2.

2) In his foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie remarks, “I have treated my writing simply as a job to be done, refusing myself all (well, most) luxuries of artistic temperament.” Easy for him to say when he is a great writer who came gifted with the tools. Just like it’s easy for me to treat exploration geophysics as a job when I come with the necessary geological knowledge and technical abilities. But, how can Rushdie treat something as a job to be done that is such a part of him? Again, how do you plot that line between what you are and what you do?

I’m reminded of some of Mark Folse’s odd words, “Passion and discipline are two names for the same thing, aspects of the same cruel and delightful god that drove men to go to extraordinary lengths to plant a flag on the moon and to write Moby Dick.”

And Frank Sinatra, “Do Be Do Be Do.”

Update: Scientific American asks and answers similar questions this week. “… the link is not between creativity and addiction per se. There is a link between addiction and things which are a prerequisite for creativity … You don’t become addicted because you feel pleasure strongly. On the contrary, addicts seem to want it more but like it less.”

Québec City Was Founded On A High Cape Of Utica Shale

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Map of French Québec City's fortifications on bedrock relief (North is conveniently to the bottom right)

Québec City sits between the Laurentian highlands of the southeastern Grenville Province of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachian Mountains that were formed during the Taconic and Acadian orogenies. Bedrock here is the Upper Ordovician Utica shale that “overlies the predominantly shallow marine carbonate facies of the Cambrian-Ordovician St. Lawrence Platform” (or St. Lawrence lowlands).The adjacent St. Lawrence River, which I gather formed post-Pleistocene glaciation by cutting into the relatively less-resistant sedimentary rocks sandwiched between the Laurentians and the Appalachians, is part of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway system.

As a sign by one of the many higher-up river outlooks explains, the land beneath Quebec City was not chosen by the French because of the overwhelming tectonics over an equally stupefying period of time that created it but purely for defense strategic reasons. To each their own time scale.

In a time-traveling nutshell: Canadian Shield forms the core of the North American continent –> happy passive margin forms with the buildup of a carbonate platform and the transgression of the sea –> BAM BAM Taconic and Acadian continental collision events creating the Appalachian mountains –> some quiet time as the Atlantic Ocean forms to the east –> glaciation from the north –> glacial retreat –> uplifted Québec City and associated river –> some French dude named Samuel de Champlain surveys the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence area, claims the high cape of Québec City and territory all the way from north of Minnesota down to and including Louisiana for New France in 1608 and his people put up a bunch of ramparts against, well, everyone –> the Brits take over in 1763 –> Canada forms in 1868 and tells everyone to sod off in exchange for putting limey monarchs on its currency –> Canadian geologists find economic natural gas in the Utica shale. (Someone call They Might Be Giants and set this to music.)

Related reading:

Ge(neal)ogist

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While talking with my dad yesterday, he mentioned that now that both of his parents have passed, he often performs a Hindu ceremony called Amavasya Dharpanam in their and other ancestors’ honor. This ritual is conducted on the day of a new moon, and to keep a long explanation short, is the equivalent of the Catholic All Saints Day or Dia de los Muertos when family members who have died are remembered and honored. Every culture seems to have its version of flatbread, meatballs and the Day of the Dead.

At the South Asian Journalists Association annual convention this past weekend, Oberlin College (and Smithsonian Institute) sociologist Pawan Dhingra announced that he wants home movies and stories for the Smithsonian’s HomeSpun Indian-Am Heritage project. My family’s experience as Indian-Americans starts in 1990, coincidentally when my dad discovered the Hi-8 camcorder and started to take it everywhere he traveled in his new home. Once I get these over to a digital format (and after editing out portions of the program in which I am seen in neon wear and Keds), I will be sharing them with HomeSpun. Whether you are Indian-American or have Indian-American friends, please get the word out and send any good videos HomeSpun’s way.

The project reminds me that I have a National Day Of Listening interview in mind for both of my parents. Here are the questions I’ve chosen for them. What would you ask your parents?

  • What is your earliest memory?
  • Where is your mom’s family from? Where is your dad’s family from?
  • What were your grandparents like?
  • What were your parents like?
  • Do you remember any of the stories they used to tell you?
  • Who were your favorite relatives?
  • How did you meet mom/dad?
  • What are the classic family stories? Jokes? Songs?
  • How has your life been different than what you’d imagined?
  • What are you proudest of in your life?
  • What advice would you give me about raising my own kids?
  • Is there any message you want to give or anything you want to say to your great-great-great grandchildren when they listen to this?
  • Turn the tables: This is your chance to tell the person you’re interviewing what you’ve learned from them and what they’ve meant to you.

“Even More Hilarious Than The Day After Tomorrow”

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On the road this week. I leave you with the latest from a geo-blog which must go in my feedreader once I get back. It seems that Hollywood is putting out another sciencepocalypse (or is that scienceageddon?) film, this one entitled 2012: Ice Age.

There’s a volcano. It unleashes a glacier. Don’t ask me how. But it’s a fast glacier. A really, really, really, really fast glacier [that's] like a brazillion thousand miles across and can get from the Arctic to the US in a day or two, because it is seriously pissed off and has installed a turbo. And then it destroys New York City, because that’s what you do when you’re the world’s fastest glacier that’s been set free by a volcano.

… One of my guildies suggested that this movie should actually be Speed 3, with Keanu driving the glacier. I am not ashamed to admit that I would pay perfectly good money to see that.

Oh, and one more thing. I’ve completely lost my mind seeing as how I just signed up for the 2011 Susan Komen Houston Race for the Cure. For the next fifteen weeks, I am back on the Couch Spinning To 5K wagon. If I’m not blinded by all the pink around me on race day, I may just make it to the end. (But first, once I hit “Update,” I am going to find a corner and cry like a little girl.)

Parental Perfection

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My friend, Sam Jasper, has an electrifying and crazy forthright post up at Back Of Town about her father’s suicide and parent-child interaction following a family trauma. If you don’t watch Treme, Sam’s post comes from one of the plots in the show: Professor Creighton Bernette jumped off the Algiers ferry in early 2006 (at the end of Season 1), his workaholic lawyer wife Toni read the suicide note but didn’t share it with their daughter Sofia and now, in Season 2, to say that the relationship between Toni and Sofia is antagonistic is a major understatement. Toni tries hard to be the parent the only way she knows how – by drowning herself in work, paying the bills and disciplining Sofia for coming in at all hours – but doesn’t level with Sofia. Sofia is a sullen, insolent, hormonal teenager (all redundant) who understandably misses her father very much, while her mom “is to blame.” Kids know things; they sense things that their parents hide from them because “they’re just kids and won’t get it.” And, yet, they’re still kids, especially in the eyes of their parents, and how much knowledge and responsibility can a parent drop on them? What I’m trying to say is this isn’t exactly win-win territory.

The Bernette Situation got me thinking about my own relationship with my mother, from the perspective of a daughter, an aunt and hopefully-mother-to-be-some-day. My strong-willed mother, who defied her father to educate herself early and well, lived far away from home as a teenager, held her own against Arab and western men in a famously misogynistic country and tells people off to this day. And has no clue where I came from. “You were so pleasant as a child. What happened?” News flash, mama, I’m what they call a Perfect Storm. Younger child + your obstinacy + dad’s sense of adventure + lots of education + Kuwait + America = what did you expect? You should have duct-taped to me one of those flaming, 1970s-orange poles (you know the one in the living room of the place where we lived when I was a small child) when you had the chance.

[The struggle lies between not saying too much and being too honest at this blog. It all works out fine when I write from the heart. So here goes.]

As I reacted to Sam’s post, “That I could take certain liberties with my parents’ sanity is, too, their love for me and mine for them.” I admit I was incorrigible and still have the temper of a wounded ox. You, mom and dad, must admit you were, at times, very unfair. Another news flash: This happens to approximately all parent-child units on this planet. We are not special in our experiences of discord.

My mother has always half-jokingly referred to herself as the less-popular, less cool one as compared to my dad. “I will always tell you what’s on my mind, even if that makes me unpopular.” I’m 36 fraking years old, and still have to listen to this recording every week. Sometimes twice a week. The martyrdom. It burns. While I know I’ll always be her baby, at times like this, there is something that I’ve always wanted to tell my mother as well as parents like Toni Bernette, be they from the old country or the new.

You aren’t and don’t always have to be the bad cop, even if you’ve given yourself that responsibility out of sheer habit. In subsuming your identity and purpose in setting everything right – career, kids, my mistakes, everyone else’s mistakes – regardless of emotional context, you start to worry about things like your “perfection” and “infallibility.” Did I make a mistake? Was I, am I good enough? Did she, will she turn out alright? My dear, great tough nail of a mother, you were amazing but not perfect, and that is OK. You have a past, a life, a backstory as it were, something that shaped you, an identity. And that person is human, not Supermom or Underdog. You have always been allowed to make mistakes. Parenting doesn’t come with an operating manual and you did the best you could. You did better than best. Now, just let go. Not of me, never of me, but of your need to be the mother that you will never admit you were. A good one. Now talk to me as if we’re in this together … because we are.

In the days following when she learned my father was taken hostage by the Iraqis, my mother lost her composure, I mean totally lost it, for the first and last time. She held onto and bawled on me, and, suddenly, I saw her humanity. It was what slapped me out of my self-righteousness and into thinking of someone else’s grief besides mine. Your kids don’t get it all, but you as a parent don’t get some other pieces. All you have at that moment is one another. And the only mistake you can make then is not living in that love.

“Neither Bad Nor Good, But It Is Real”

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Two relatively young New Orleanians I knew slipped, fell and died. As they lived alone, both of their bodies were not discovered for days. One in the Marigny, the other Uptown. One last month, one this month. Death can happen to anyone at any time. Numbers all around me are being called, just ask. But, unlike my in-laws or grandmother, for instance, who saw their deaths coming for a long while, these people died without warning.

I, too, could get hit by a car tomorrow. No, wait, that happened twice and I lived. I could fall off a cliff. Nope, that’s happened too, and I made it. At any rate, something could happen that wipes me out. Tomorrow. Today. Right now. But, what if I die in my sleep at the age of 85? What will my life have meant between now and then?

Derek Miller died the other day. I didn’t know him, but his most graceful message of life and death is going around the internet. We should all feel so lucky and thankful when we pass on.

… It turns out that no one can imagine what’s really coming in our lives. We can plan, and do what we enjoy, but we can’t expect our plans to work out. Some of them might, while most probably won’t. Inventions and ideas will appear, and events will occur, that we could never foresee. That’s neither bad nor good, but it is real.

I think and hope that’s what my daughters can take from my disease and death. And that my wonderful, amazing wife Airdrie can see too. Not that they could die any day, but that they should pursue what they enjoy, and what stimulates their minds, as much as possible—so they can be ready for opportunities, as well as not disappointed when things go sideways, as they inevitably do.

I thank my life for my family, friends and D. That’s really it.

May Flowers In Texas

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Next year. The (cold) drought here is so bad this desert rat craves rain, heat and its accompanying humidity. Shorts, tank tops, barbequed ribs and cold beer now! How else is a former Kuwaiti resident to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden? Screw that, I’m more worried about the impact of the Mississippi River floods downstream. Data nerds, parse this: US Army Corps of Engineers Near Real-Time Gages reporting Hourly Stage Data. Let me know if there are better data to look at.

It occurred to me that a blog post can be two sentences long and provide evidence that neither VatulBlog nor I are dead.

While we’re making discoveries up in here, I

- have uncovered an inverse correlation between extreme productivity at the new job and frequency of blog posts here. It’s not even that I don’t have the time, energy and inclination to post during the day; my brain and creativity are put to such great use in that time that there is little left for the evening. Plus, Big D and I are still unpacking, unwinding, un-everything.

- am an extreme germaphobe, except when it comes to lovin’ on dogs and cats. Go figure.

- beat myself up too much over “not a writer” and/or “don’t write enough” when I clearly write when I put the old noggin’ to it. Example: The Season 2 opener post over at my other joint, Back Of Town. She’s a non-writer who doesn’t have enough time in the day for this blog, but runs an other blog. Uh huh.

- am signing off to watch Bladerunner again. Speaking of which, a number of Philip K. Dick books were posted to Project Gutenberg this morning. Check them out.

Instead Of Merely Holding Conversation, Hold Me Tight

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That hollowed-out feeling right after you have thrown up. For a little while, you live in a thin, gray space right between collapse and revival. You’re not happy, sad, tired or revving up. You just are, for really low values of You. In truth, it is. It just is. It goes on.

I don’t know where D’s mind is right now. Where does a man’s mind go when he is in the middle of a life upheaval, most of it an all-consuming, cross-country move, and his only living parent unexpectedly passes away? I’d curl up in a dark corner for days, but therein lies one of the big reasons I stayed with D. The man is made of  Upper Midwestern bedrock and he keeps going, doing his dharma, not once stopping to whine or bemoan. But, god damn it, he is human and he is physically and emotionally exhausted. And his father just died.

Bobby. Captain Marshall Robert Erwin. What a man you were. Not a word of the stuff I really admired could we put in your obituary. Don’t worry, I will tell your tales at the right time and place to the right people (with lots of Oban and Jameson present, of course, for we can’t disappoint your Scots and Irish blood. What did your Belgian half drink anyway?).

Thank you, Huehns Funeral Home, for making Bobby look great in his mint and gold tie, in the olive casket with the gold lining, with the green and gold flower spray on top. We know you loved the Packers, old man, even if you were a contrarian Brett Favre fan, considered Ted Thompson, Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers a bunch of losers up to no good and were only slightly mollified (slack-jawed, taken-aback and crow-eating is more like it) when the Packers won the Superbowl. I saw that smirk on your sleeping face.

Did you like your 21-gun salute? I was numb when it began, but it shook me into pride. You did a lot in your three quarters of a century. Rest now. I love you.

***

Yes, we’re tired, if it isn’t obvious merely from the lack of posts around here. We try to find rest and entertainment when we can get to see each other, but what we need is sleep and time.

Time.

Time also means a past, which slips away from us slowly and in sudden spurts, when we aren’t looking, watching, waiting. Hell, even if we are looking, watching, waiting, grabbing away at the slippery jerk with all we have. In the last five years, D’s mother, my father’s mother, my uncle, my mother’s mother and now D’s dad have left us. Their presence, the time they occupied, their lives, their voices. No more. This theft of the past is so secondary until you’re puttering along, sitting in traffic somewhere and The Andrews Sisters come on the radio with a song that Sharon grew up with and danced to. And it’s all you can do to dry the sudden fountain of blazing tears, collect yourself and hold on, HOLD ON, to that momentary vision of Sharon and Bobby waltzing as when they first met, fell in love and into each other’s arms. A time. Their time. The time that made us. Now gone. Only empty space.

I’m not sentimental, just severely mindful of history and the people who gave us life, molded us and stuck around for a while to see how we turned out. I chose to love a good number of these people and this is the price. It was worth every minute.

Me: “And then there were two Erwins.”
D: “Guess we have to make more.”
Me: “Really.”

I wonder if old stories can make good new ones.

In Which D And I Move. Again.

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Today, I took a Taiwanese-British girl who speaks Dutch and lives in Holland shopping for cowboy boots in Houston, Texas. It was only slightly less weird than the time I was standing behind two white boys during a bluegrass concert in a dive bar and they began to speak to one another in proper Tamil.

Let me back up a little. This requires some explaining via interpretive picturization. Here is a map of most of my travels from November 2010 to date, color-coded by earliest (black) to latest (red). Spiral shows the current location of Hurricane Maitri.

NEWS FLASH: D and I have moved to Houston. Yes, as in Texa$$. It seemed time to mess with it. I cannot begin to tell you how long and hard we thought about this and how much I miss miss *sniff* MISS my parents in Ohio, but we made the move for all the right reasons. There’s only so much of this and this and other bullshit one can take deal with and heap on one’s poor, put-upon husband. Houston gave us a great offer we couldn’t refuse.

Wisconsin. New Orleans. Ohio. Houston. Ping. Pong. SO TIRED.

I have posts in my head on topics such as the meaning of home while constantly on the road, the mockery of representative government going on in Wisconsin, Carnival in New Orleans and American infrastructure in the wake of the latest global disaster. They will come.

So. Cowboy boots. Not a big fan. They look so uncomfortable. Haven’t bought any. But, when they look and feel like this pair, I may have to reconsider.

HamsterLand

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We cruised by a store called FishLand today.

Me: “So, they sell, um, all fish at FishLand?”

D: “Yeah.”

Me: “Like halibut and tuna. Fried or blackened.”

D: “No, they sell fish as pets. It’s a pet store.”

Me: “A whole store dedicated to pet fish instead of a fishmonger. Okay, then where’s HamsterLand?”

D: “Yes, because there’s a market for rare, tropical hamsters.”

And then I dissolved into stomach-folding laughter imagining a guy in a FishLand uniform running through a South American jungle after a startled and seriously psychedelically-colored hamster.