Helping Me To Ruin

I tell you what, advertising really works. You might be thinking, Well, duh!, but honestly, I figured that an intelligent and knowledgeable person could be immune to it, but I suppose that is like saying that an intelligent and knowledgeable person could be immune to a heroin injection, or a cigarette…well, maybe we don’t have to go THAT heavy…how about to sugar or comfort food? In the battle between what we KNOW and how we FEEL, I pretty much believe that for me, at least, the feeling state will win over almost every time except in cases when I work very hard at girding the loins of my intelligence and rationality against what I know is a very powerful influence. Is this a sign of my weakness, or of my normal humanness?

My college degree, a bachelor of science in business administration (and yes, there actually is a science behind it), had the specialty of marketing. There were several other specialties I could have chosen, I suppose, such as personnel, production, transportation, finance. Probably the most valuable of those choices when it came to obtaining a job later would have been finance. And I honestly did enjoy the beginning courses in accounting, but the advanced courses in accounting didn’t move me very much, and while I very much enjoyed macroeconomics, I truly detested microeconomics (price theory), and also found wholesaling pretty bad, plus “finance” seemed to be a good specialty for introverts, which I absolutely am not. So, finance was out, although I knew that regarding earning money in the corporate world, those who worked with money earned the most, those who worked with people earned the least, and those who worked with data came somewhere between.

My favorite business courses ended up being in business law, which led to my going to law school for two years, but then I realized that I really didn’t want to be a lawyer for various reasons, so I dropped out before I started the final year.

Ironically, the work that I am doing now is a cross between both business law (specifically: legal compliance)—but definitely not earning at an $800.00 an hour billing rate—and personnel (now called human resources), but I never took a single personnel course in college, mainly because the professor in that specialty was so awful (I had signed up for the beginning personnel elective, but fortunately was able to drop it before the deadline), but also because of what I said two paragraphs up, those who work with people make the least money in the corporate world, so I saw no lasting value in electing those subjects.

So why did I choose marketing, of all things? Because in the advanced stages, it is actually a fascinating subject, a marvelous combination of science and creative artistry; it had the sort of course material that a person might want to audit no matter what their major. Unfortunately, though, the early employment tracks in that field can be pretty awful, in my estimation…such as sales. Sales, no thank you.

Writing advertising copy might be fun, but for someone who actually should have chucked college altogether and become a professional writer (no matter the struggle and expected poverty), advertising copy would have made me feel that my head was in a vice. Oh, working in New York City might have felt like “success” (if, presumably, I had actually managed to achieve that), at least for a few months, but I know that ultimately it would have been a nightmare.

Again, ironically, through some kind of great fortune I did gravitate into something that skipped over the whole sales track, and that was being a market research analyst. And it was in that position whereby I got to experience at the creative level how advertising really works, or doesn’t, as the company for which I was a project director was there to determine that success or failure for advertising creators so that they didn’t waste untold millions in publishing or running advertisements or commercials that weren’t effective.

Some of the elements to be analyzed and evaluated are (a) the introduction of the product, (b) the person presenting the product, (c) the demonstration of the product, (d) the music in the commercial, (e) and various other subtle elements, such as colors, graphics, the emotions induced, the fears induced, the satisfaction promised, and so on. Audience testing will show the analyst just how well these elements are working, and if any of those pieces don’t work very well, the whole the marketing effort can come apart (and maybe even do more harm to the product’s success than good).

Having professionally analyzed those various elements, I am pretty familiar with them and can intellectually recognize and subjectively evaluate them (how they work for me), but I can also see how often I am just as helpless against them as somebody who is entirely consciously unaware of their effects. I think just about the only way to not be affected by them is to not be exposed to them, which really means don’t look at any magazines, don’t watch television, don’t go to any movies. I add “movies” to that list of “don’t dos” because I am aware that there is hardly a coming attraction I have seen that didn’t make me want to go see that movie. I have noticed that if I stop going to movies for a while, then I don’t go to movies for a LONG while (because the desire/fulfillment dynamic is broken), but if I break that long-term absence from the movie theater, then I end up going continuously until I get sick of it again.

Watching television is something that I had stopped doing regularly about fifteen years ago when my cable bill had reached $100 a month and I realized that the only channel I was ever watching was Showtime. Yes, I liked Showtime, but I realized that for much less than a hundred dollars a month I could watch everything that Netflix could throw at me, so I got rid of my cable and until very recently, was a most peculiar oddball in that I never watched television at all…only DVDs and videos on the TV screen.

I am still pretty much that same oddball in that I don’t have cable. I am able to receive 13 basic channels (and dozens of Spanish and Asian channels that may as well not exist) via an antenna and a digital converter box, which comes in sharp and clear and is completely free. Right now, I am watching only ONE television show, though, and THAT is because of going to a free movie screening, which happened to be in the very office-building-with-a-test-audience-theater where I used to be the market research analyst described above, except that that company is now no longer there. It wasn’t a movie, though, but an advanced screening of the television pilot (also the kind of thing I used to analyze) of the NBC television show, SMASH. Like what happens to me with coming attractions at the movie theater, I got interested in watching this TV show, so my Monday evening is devoted to watching this one television show. And maybe one other that precedes it (so it is convenient), Alcatraz, because it is executive-produced and sometimes script-written by the husband of a teacher at the school where I work. But I am more devoted to SMASH, not missing an episode, and can be hit and miss with Alcatraz.

So, after a decade and a half’s absence, I am now being exposed to television advertising, which on Monday night, at least, seems to basically be lots of car commercials alternating with lots of cell phone commercials. They may be advertising other things, but apparently I am immune to those products whatever they are as I couldn’t tell you what a single one of them is…oh, no, that’s wrong, trying to remember, I do actually remember one for a Scott lawn product (memorable because the man presenting speaks with a Scottish accent, which is an effective gimmick) and another one for a Chase Bank cell-phone-oriented method of sending money to somebody (memorable because it features a cute and funny little boy toddler who is into kicking a ball that smashes all the neighbors’ windows), but as I do not have a lawn, the Scott advertisement means nothing to me (and, if anything, it makes me not want to have a lawn, because it involves all that work to take care of it), and for some currently unknown reason, I’m not really into the idea of transmitting money via cell phone. Who knows, though, maybe that will change.

But what I AM suddenly driven by is (a) an emotional desire to get a new car, and (b) a desire to get a Smartphone with lots of apps.

Sigh.

I really don’t intellectually want to buy a new car. I don’t want to have a car payment! And yes even though my 1993 Cadillac Sixty Special sedan is now 19 years old (and has something over 150,000 miles), it is huge and roomy and powerful (and, I think, beautiful and elegant-looking), which is very hard to come by with affordable 2012 models, and runs pretty well (although not as well as it should) and looks pretty good (although ideally I would like to have it repainted). Its flaws are not enough to justify getting a new car that will be smaller, weaker, and a car almost indistinguishable for every other car out there on the road, and that will COST ME!

Naturally, though, the car commercials dangle what seem to be amazingly low lease rates, rates that make we wonder how they compare against whatever I am paying in repairs to keep a 19-year-old car running. Maybe I am just being stupid and uneconomical…I mean, if it is cheaper to lease a new car than to keep my 19-year-old (gas guzzler) running….

The one thing saving me from running right out now and leasing (buying?) a new car is that the ones that appeal me really are the ones on the more expensive end and truly do, or would, go over any kind of repair bills that I have. So those apparently quite low lease rates don’t quite manage to pull me right into the car dealerships with my checkbook in my hand, because I realize well enough that they are nothing but loss leaders (for me). I am not ordinarily one to get the rock-bottom model of any car line (I want the biggest engine, the top-level trim, virtually all the options…so forget that at-first reasonable price).

But this doesn’t mean that I am able to blissfully be fully satisfied with the car that I already have, like I was before I started watching television again. I find myself constantly noticing OTHER cars, and my brain is continuously running little gears evaluating the various cars that catch my eye, that convertible sure would be nice… maybe I should figure out what I would want to go out and get if my car died right this minute… gee the way my engine seems to be skipping a beat when I accelerate up a hill between 55 and 60 miles per hour… isn’t that shifting getting to be a little bit too jerky and rough—how long has it been this way? In another words, a constant stream of “potential new car” talk keeps unavoidably running in my head.

However, due to how much money is involved, I probably will successfully beat the new car advertising.

But the cell phone advertising?

I am someone who hardly ever actually uses his cell phone. I am not one of those people (apparently the vast majority) who seem to be ON their cell phone every single possible second. While they are walking down the street. While they are driving their car. While they are sitting in a booth at a restaurant on a dinner date. While attending a business meeting. While walking down the stairs exiting a stadium movie theater, like they have been painfully putting their text-messaging and e-mail-checking on hold throughout the two-hour duration of the movie, but the second they are free to do it, they are back on that cell phone like an addict.

Sometimes people do call me on my cell phone, but unless I am expecting them (“If I will be delayed in meeting you downtown, I will call your cell phone”), I usually miss the call and end up getting their voice mail weeks later. I don’t normally carry the phone around in my pocket, but leave it in the car (my main expected use is to have it in case I need to call AAA…does this connect with the situation of having a 19-year-old car?), as I can’t imagine having any reason to call somebody while I am out, and if somebody were to call me, I wouldn’t want to talk to them while I am out. I’ll talk to them at home.

In a way, I am remarkably cell-phone-unsavvy. I have never sent or received a text message, and truly can’t imagine why I would want to. I don’t even have text-messaging capability on my now-ancient clamshell Motorola. It DOES have a rudimentary ability to go on-line, but it is so slow and the screen so tiny that I never have enough patience to actually use that feature. (Naturally, I have the lowest cost plan.)

An example of that “unsavvyness” was a couple of weekends ago when I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see a marvelous artistic creation (kinetic sculpture) (that has something to say about the frenetic and inhuman quality of car-centered urban culture but is also awesome-cool), "Metropolis II", which was like an immense Hot Wheels and model train set.

Before I went there, I toyed with the idea of bringing my digital camera (which also has a video feature), because I figured I might want to photograph this, but then, similar to a concert, I figured that that might not be allowed, something about this work being proprietary, so I decided to leave the camera at home. Well, of course, I discovered nearly everybody in there, people by the hundreds, were snapping pictures and taking videos of it—with their CAMERA phones. I suddenly felt stupid…of course, you can’t take people’s cell phones away. Even if the museum WANTED to prevent picture-taking, there seems to be in this era no way to actually stop it. And this meant that technologically, I was being left behind.

It was not that I wasn’t able to do something, because I could have chosen to bring my digital camera, but that I was out of actually thinking what was capable of being done.

Even more powerful of a lesson was a school event we had a little after that day I went to the museum. Instead of the usual drinks and dinner party that the school has every year as a way for the employees and the trustees to get to know one another, the event planners decided to make the event “experiential” and set up an event of fun that was also meant to be team building and competitive, which was in the form of a commercially-produced “scavenger hunt” (called “CityHUNT”) which took place on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

This “scavenger hunt” consisted of a three-page listing of various locations, activities, tasks, and items to be documented by photographs and videos taken by cameras that the company furnished, and collecting some required items. Some examples of tasks might be (“taking candy from a baby”, “helping a stranger”, “the entire team in mid-air”, “shaking hands with a policeman”, “being under water”, “walking two dogs”, “getting a pair of chopsticks”, “read the school’s mission statement very passionately to a group of people dining in the food court”, “putting a coin into a dolphin”, “the group doing high-fives in front of the Disney Store”, and so on and so on (and so on!). These activities and items had various point values depending on their difficulty in doing or complication in figuring out what was required. We were allotted two hours to this task.

What at first seemed like it would be very difficult, eliciting the help of strangers or interrupting or bothering them, was actually quite easy and was probably the most fun aspect of this. The strangers out there having a good time on a Friday night on the Third Street Promenade were all so nice, and it ended up that their experiences with us in doing all these various things was entertaining for them. So if team-building was what was required, part of the lesson of team-building included being open to strangers and honestly enjoying this expansion beyond our comfort zone.

Teams were chosen at random, except that every team would have at least one, if not more than one, trustee (since employees outnumbered trustees by about 5 to 1). This provided an opportunity for the trustees and the employees to work together "on the ground".

After it was all over, the facilitators of the scavenger hunt received back all the cameras and evidence and calculated all the scores. The group that I was in came in dead last out of about 12 different teams. We earned a little over half of the total possible points. Aw. But we got a good booby prize, though!

What was surprising to me was that the winning group had successfully completed every single thing on that list but one…they got an almost outstandingly perfect score.

As it happens, for the casual dinner that came afterwards (and a showing on a screen of all the photographs, many of which were hilarious), I ended up sitting at a table with some friends of mine, and who also sat at that table were three of the nicest trustees of all, and whose teams had come in first, second, and third place. And so of course in the discussion at dinner was what strategy (or strategies) worked, which came in in various pieces during that dinner, which I must have mulled over in my mind later that night so that by the time I was up and cooking breakfast Saturday morning, I understood what our team SHOULD have done.

Our team (and, I suppose, most of the others) immediately felt the pressure of competition that made us almost immediately leave the bar where this whole thing was to begin and end, taking off at almost a run down the street while somebody was to read out loud on the go the list of things that we were supposed to do, which list-reading would be stopped if we saw something along the way that satisfied one of the tasks. This already set us up for a random, chaotic, running round, hoping to come up against or recognize various things that we were to do, and this very unorganized activity kept us frantically busy for the whole two hours and was only good enough to successfully complete a little over half of the required tasks.

Here, instead, is what we SHOULD have done, and is exactly what the winning team DID do:

Not leave the bar until the entire list had been read and everybody on the team had heard and understood everything that needed to be done. Ironically, there were about 5 tasks that could be completed right there in that bar, and which we didn’t figure out, or see, until the very end when we came back, but too late to complete.

All teams were furnished with a basic Third Street Promenade map that, while not showing the name of any store or identifying any particular feature such as a fountain or a food court or a bus stop, DID show where the starting bar was in relation to the whole Promenade, and demarcated the various blocks along the whole length of it. The team then should have marked on that map the location of everything they could see that was required. For example, a man on our team already knew where there was a sculpture of a dolphin, and a woman on our team knew where the Disney store was. We should have marked these on the map.

But, beyond using the knowledge of members of the team, the winning team pulled out a SMARTPHONE (by the way, the moderator of the game, in giving his instructions, had said “If you get lost, you can call my cell phone number”—which he gave us—“either from a payphone or feel free to use your own cell phone which you can certainly use, and I will guide you back here”) and obtained a complete, detailed MAP of the entire Third Street Promenade, complete with store names and landmarks, so before they had left the bar, they pretty much already KNEW every location they needed and in which organized route to get to them the most efficiently. A Disney Store, a movie theater, a food court, a chinese restaurant, an Apple store, a Puma store, Victoria’s Secret, a candy store, Easton’s Gym, were some of the required destinations. Also, one of the tasks was to find a store that had in it the name of somebody on the team…that might not have been possible for every team (but maybe it was possible to be creative), I don’t know, but the winning team was able to figure that out by having this entire directory of all the store names on the Third Street Promenade.

Also part of the winning way to organize the hunt was to take into consideration the point value of the tasks. There were some tasks worth as much as 120 points (and we had completed only ONE of them, to have somebody video us doing a conga-line in front of the Cabo Cantina), while most of them were worth only 40 points.

We did ATTEMPT another 120-point task, and that was to go into a store and have three of us sing the song “I Will Survive” to a customer in the store. Unfortunately, none of us knew the words to the song, and hardly even knew the tune, so while we did put together an awful video of our attempt, we didn’t earn any points for that one. The winning team? They used a Smartphone to find the lyrics on a website that also played the tune, so they did a beautiful job.

So, you can guess what I got out of all this. Even though this whole thing was just playing a game (but one that our EMPLOYER figured was something we needed to do for some of the lessons involved, and one of the school's current focuses is TECHNOLOGY and understanding the kind of world that our students will be living in), I guess that the deeper lesson in all this is that in our current era, one can no longer afford to NOT have a Smartphone; that being outside of that technology is similar to not even having a computer. And nobody wants to be left in the dust of progress.

And here’s another obvious advantage to having a Smartphone. Something kind of weird has been happening with LA traffic, lately. It seems that I get everywhere way more quickly than I expect to, sometimes having an hour, and maybe even an hour and a half, to KILL. Several times in the past month, I have had to use my cell phone to change the time I was going to meet somebody, because I had gotten there way earlier than I had thought I would (which is better than being late, but being right on time is best). And I am pretty sure this isn’t because LA traffic has suddenly become delightful, but that I have gotten used to adding so much cushioning to my time estimate that I am now going way overboard.

The way I use Mapquest is to obtain driving directions and see what their time estimate is…let’s say it says 20 minutes, so I round that up to an easy 30 minutes. But then my rule in LA is to double Mapquest’s estimate, which in this example now means that I will make it an hour. But if I am going to do this drive during rush hour (in other words, after work, for example), I will then TRIPLE it, so now we are up to an hour and a half. And if the event or occasion is so super-important that I absolutely do not want to miss it, or be late to it, I will add in an extra half-hour as a cushion…so now for a trip that Mapquest originally estimated at 20 minutes, I might be allowing two hours! So, no wonder I am often getting there way ahead of time. And that is a waste of time.

I have seen advertisements for Google’s Nexus Smartphone on the Internet, and their traffic app, where they show you the bad traffic areas and the good traffic areas and all the alternative routes, really really really appeals to me. How incredibly wonderful it would be, especially when stuck in heavy traffic, to actually find out what is going on and figuring out what you can do in that situation. I find that I am spending a lot of time going somewhere by automatically taking the alternate route by default, when the traffic on the freeway might actually be quite light. Light traffic on an LA freeway might mean that to travel three miles actually takes three minutes, but in heavy traffic, might actually take 20 minutes, or if traffic is stopped because of an accident, that same three miles might take several hours. So if a person is going to live in a city like Los Angeles, then having available accurate traffic information while on the go is pretty important for daily life unless you are going to live like a hermit.

Sometimes I am out on the road and suddenly feel like going to a movie (one whose coming attraction I had seen, probably!) but out of five or six theaters in the area that might happen to be showing it, I probably don’t know what times they will be showing it and from my car, have no way to easily compare all the possibilities…that is, if I don’t have a Smartphone to give me that information. So, wouldn’t I like to have this information at my fingertips? Prior to seeing all these cell phone advertisements along with the TV show, SMASH, I would shrug my shoulders and think, oh well, if I want to see that movie, I’ll go tomorrow after I have checked all the times on-line from home or work. But even that is not foolproof, because plans change, things come up, my time gets allocated differently the next day, and so weeks may go by before the opportunity comes up again and by then I may have missed seeing the movie altogether (some of them don’t stay around too many weeks, since they have to make room for the next one), when I COULD have seen it that day when I felt like it when I was out in my car.

In a way it’s kind of silly to only recently be awakening to the benefits of having a Smartphone, but my point is that it has been all this advertising that has been raising my awareness and making me feel that I NEED this. I don’t REALLY need to have a Smartphone any more than I may need to have a maid to come in and clean my house once a week, but I sure do seem to keenly FEEL the advantages of having one.

And finally, the most emotional draw of all, and this is the final demonstration of how powerfully well advertising works…working on your self-image, desires, and maybe even your fears. Here, this has to do not only with being left behind, things changing very fast, but of a sense of aging, becoming too old, of possibilities soon to be lost, or already gone. And that is the iPhone commercial that shows the attractive young male teenager whose face they don’t really show in full, which means to me that he stands in for “the generic good-looking lean-bodied totally hipster youth who has EVERYTHING ahead of him" (a) asking SIRI, iPhone’s voice-command system, where he can buy a guitar, (b) digitally uploading the recording of a song he wrote on the guitar he bought, (c) asking SIRI to send the love song to his girlfriend, (d) asking SIRI to make a note of his new rock band’s name, (e) asking SIRI to send an invitation to his girlfriend to attend his rock band’s show tonight at such and such a club, and (f) asking SIRI to refer to him from now on as “Rock God”, with the commercial ending with SIRI saying back to him, “Okay, now you are ‘Rock God.’” And you know what, you really do think he is a "God". He is, and you aren't. But you want to be.

I also love the other SIRI commercial with various people demonstrating all the things that it can do (answer questions about the Grand Canyon, finding the nearest gas station, etc.) that ends with “Remind me to do this again,” and the SIRI voice says, “Okay, I’ll remind you.” I am pretty sure that the SIRI voice is the same female voice that is in these XtraNormal YouTube videos (although yes, I could be wrong). It is a voice I have already come to love.

At any rate, I think that voice is very funny and appealing, so now I want THAT feature. And anyway, not using cell phones hands free in the car is illegal, not to mention dangerous to keep glancing at the screen while driving, having this voice activation and communicating feature seems almost essential. Of course, Android phones also have a voice system (they even had them first), but it doesn’t seem to have the same level of artificial intelligence that the iPhone SIRI system has, plus I don’t think it talks back.

So, all this is to say that I definitely now WANT a Smartphone; I keep hearing the SIRI voice saying, “Okay, you are now ‘Rock God’”, so that probably means an iPhone (which also has a traffic app and all the other stuff, not too different from what Android phones have), but there is the problem of how expensive some of these phone plans are when you include data downloads and the like. Unlimited plans can cost over a hundred dollars a month (thinking back to when I cancelled my cable TV, that seems to be my negative price point), but I have no frame of reference for how much of a data plan I would need if I got a cheaper plan where usage was charged by the minutes and gigabytes. Having never had this, how do I know how much I need?

So that, for now, hangs me up.

Yesterday I went for a walk throughout the whole huge Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, and you can guess which TWO stores I happened to walk into (since they were there...), and they were the ONLY stores I went into.

1. The Audi dealership (yes, they sell cars at this mall, too; they also have a Ferrari dealership there, but I didn’t go into it!). Audi IS one of the cars I would consider getting, although gee, too expensive, really, except for the smallest, most basic, 4-cylinder model.

2. Best Buy Mobile, “Any Carrier”, “Any Phone”, “Any Plan”, although I don’t think they sell the iPhone…for that I would need to go one floor up to the Apple store. The guy there was very helpful, demonstrating with his own phone several of the apps that interested me. But gosh, just SO MANY choices of carriers phones, and plans unless I just jump in with both feet say, “Okay, iPhone, unlimited everything plan, just wipe me out totally.”

Advertising, are you helping me, or ruining me?

Not Wasted On The Young

Sometimes on these marvelous lazy weekend mornings when I can wake up when my body wants to, without an alarm piercing a leak into my dreams and murdering my sense of peaceful comfort, I can enjoy the pure simple comforts of being in the bed and having no particular demands on my time. Everything feels delicious, the soft but firm mattress, the numerous loving pillows, the smooth elegant silken sheets, even the soft thickness of the black and gold comforter that has a rich beauty that would have made a Russian Czar envious. But, best of all, is my own body, that as my exploratory fingers stroke across my chest and stomach, and beyond, I am surprised and impressed anew by this internalized feeling of perfect physical beauty.

I am amazed by the lean hardness of my sternum, bracketed by the obvious slopes of evident pectoral muscles, and my lean ribs, rising and lowering in clear relief, and the sudden downward ski slope of my abdomen with its moguls of abs, and there in the center of those muscles is the magnetically sensual indentation of my belly button, surrounded by a rubbery ring; I HAVE this now, instead of…what was there before.

Intrigued, wondering if this looks as good to my eyes as it feels to my fingers, I push the covers down and lift my head for a look at my stretched-out supine self and all of it appears even better than my fingers had imagined. There is, of course, the centerline trail and its lighter splayed out branches as the hair becomes fuller across this flattened valley and instantly I grab what is the centerpiece down there (guarded by the wings of pelvic bones and the lean but strong thighs and long racehorse legs of the long-distance hiker that lie splayed there beyond), the apparent goal of all these pathways, already close to fullness even before I began my squeeze, and I see it rise up rich and thick and tall and fragrant…and gorgeous in all its perfection of size and proportion, not huge, mind you, but way more than adequate, but, more importantly, clearly very beautiful and a very icon of male sexuality.

Within the privacy of my thoughts, I think that I ought to take a picture of this, but I don’t, haven’t, not yet, anyway, if I ever do, but I realize that I do not reject or dismiss or think negatively of the concept, not at all.

A little narcissism is good for the soul, I think.

I have to quote Alice Walker here, on this, “I think it pisses God off if you see the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” A little noticing of and admiring with appreciation your own color purple is what is called for, here, and it is only a force of evil that leads you to thinking that that is wrong. Where did that come from, anyway? From out of a pit of diabolical darkness, I am sure.

I’m rather intrigued by those guys (and girls do it, too) who photograph their naked selves and even videotape themselves and sext them to their friends or post them on the Internet. Not that I would do that, I am, after all, NOT of the “Internet generation of youth” which is another way of saying that no purpose would come from me doing such a thing and not a soul on earth would be interested in seeing it if I did. Early morning physical self-admiration is one thing, but expecting others to share in that is quite another and I do know better than that. It is quite enough for me to share my thoughts in a reasonably-anonymous forum like this one, but a visual physical sharing is not going to happen with me at my age, now. But if I were, say, twenty-two, yes, indeed. I WOULD.

And I think those who can, SHOULD. Beauty should not be hidden away under a barrel (or some phrase like that), especially for youth who are in a stage or phase where they need to have confidence and social affirmation and be securely centered in their own power as they set off to make their way in the world. Their own body is surely an expression of their own dreams as anyone with half a shred of artistic sense can clearly see by how and what those bodies are communicating.

But for the middle-aged (and older), the fading of those dreams is also on display and in so many ways, it is a very sad pageant of misery. There is the sagging and the bagging and the softening and the fading. There is the thickening middles and the angry dispositions. The frowns and the scowls and the sharp barking orders and admonitions to those very youths whose energy is viewed as an affront against those failures—the nos and the don’ts, that what I think of as the “don’t runs” and the “sit down and shut ups”. Hatred of that which one once had and never appreciated and now doesn’t have and appreciates even less.

BUT.

You CAN have it. Again. Or still.

You just have to know the way.

Way number one: you must not lose the feeling inside you. What you see in the mirror may not be what you remember from decades ago, but keep smiling anyway. Even if you have gotten so out of shape that you avert your eyes from every reflection that stands in your way and mocks you mercilessly, you must still feel an appreciation for beauty that is everywhere, and that you even surprisingly sometimes still feel within you. It COMES from you anyway, even if currently it is only a flickering ember. With the right fanning and oxygenation, that ember can become a roaring furnace again.

Way number two: you must be healthy and you must be discriminatory in how to have that health. Listening to (a) marketers and (b) governments who are in the pocket of marketers are probably not the best people to listen to. They don’t care about you, they only want your money for as long as they can squeeze it out of you. To listen to them and to do what they tell you is to be a special kind of stupid, and I realized sometime back that I didn’t even blame them for what they did; that people let themselves be so lazy and stupid that manipulating them was like taking candy from a baby, so the temptation was too great for this kind of person to not take advantage of. (In this case, it is GIVING candy to a baby.) So, don’t be lazy, don’t be stupid, or what you will end up suffering will be your own fault. You saw the trap, yet you just kept on walking right into it anyway.

Way number three: What makes sense from a natural, ecological, tribal, worked-for-millions-of-years-of-human-evolution point of view? Stand in the doorway of a gas station mini-mart and sweep your eyes across all the shelves of packaged material on offer there. WHAT in there is actually FOOD? Instead, it is all white sugar and white flower combined in a myriad clever forms and shapes. If you were, for example, a Masai warrior, you wouldn’t see that as any more a food store than you would see the gas pumps as water fountains.

Way number four: Be wary of commercial weight-loss programs. For me to better explain this, let me give you an example of something that happened many years ago. I was on a little road trip and had to go to the bathroom. When that happens, I look for a McDonalds, which are plentiful and always have a bathroom. Well, if I am going to take advantage of their bathroom, I feel that I ought to buy something from them, which usually means that I get a cup of coffee. So, on this road trip, I had gone to a McDonald’s bathroom and now was in line behind a woman who was about to place a food order. For some reason, I just KNEW that she was a member of Weight Watchers. She wasn’t “fat”, mind you, in fact, I figured she had reached her goal weight. The SCALE was reporting back to her a poundage number that had positive meaning to her, so she had successfully achieved this thing, she was now weighing an acceptable weight for her height and age.

She then placed her order and I knew enough of how the Weight Watchers program worked, so I heard myself say to her, “You just ordered a perfect Weight Watcher’s meal,” and I reported to her how many “points” that meal was. She smiled back at me, very happily, and said, “Yes, I am a Lifetime Member of Weight Watchers!” I said back to her, “Congratulations, a job well done!”

I got my coffee and got back into my car and resumed my road trip. But I was thinking about that woman and wondered HOW I so accurately knew that she was a member of Weight Watchers. As I said, she clearly wasn’t “fat”, and, as she confirmed for me, she was even a Lifetime Member (that’s actually a scary phrase if you really think about it, and very telling), which means that she had reached her goal weight, maintained it for six weeks of maintenance, and from now on can attend as many Weight Watchers meetings as she wants and never will have to pay anything so long as she stays within two pounds of her goal weight and continues to attend meetings at a certain frequency (the actual number of which I forget…one a week, maybe?). So, she was a SUCCESS as far as that program goes. And Weight Watchers is generally considered the most successful of all the commercial weight loss programs.

So, with her having achieved that success, shouldn’t she look like, say, Audrey Hepburn? I mean, if a total stranger can simply take a glance at her and think “she is a member of Weight Watchers”, then something must be wrong. A stranger should be able to look at her and never have the slightest clue that she had ever been overweight. One would hope that having once suffered obesity would not leave an indelible footprint.

The clues that led me to see her as a Weight Watchers success are myriad and subtle and I can only think that while she weighed a lot less, her body somehow still must have retained the “shape” and ratio/proportions of an overweight person. And believe me, we humans are GENIUSES at instantly making all these body proportion calculations in our mind, it seems to be hard-wired within us so that even at a huge distance, we can immediately see if that person up ahead has a beautiful body or not, and even babies can do it.

I still get cues and clues as to that with my own person. When I moved back down through the pounds to the weight loss success that I have had, I went beyond even the smallest clothes that I had retained, which means that I am now leaner and more muscular than I was when I was a freshmen in college and hadn’t a thought in the world of ever being overweight. I had to buy new clothes and needed to have my shirt and pants size measured. But the measurements by a sales clerk at Macy’s, while close, were not entirely accurate. She measured my shirt size as neck 15 ½, sleeve 32-33, and pants waist size 34, inseam 30. I didn’t try on the shirts (so packaged and pinned-up as they are), and the pants SEEMED more or less okay when I tried them on. So I bought several shirts and pants.

However, actually experiencing the wearing of them, I soon enough realized that shirts sized 15 neck, 34-35 sleeves and pants waist size 33, inseam 32, would be better, and so I bought some of those.

Then I noticed that whenever I wore any of the 15 ½ x 32-33 shirts, or the 34 x 30 pants, if I got complements at all, it would be on the color combination of the clothes, but whenever I wore any of the 15 x 33-34 shirts AND the 33 x 32 pants, I not only ALWAYS get complements, I also keep hearing about how surprisingly thin (or tall) I am (so that my 6 feet ½ inch height seems to be perceived more like 6’2” or more). There’s not all that huge of a difference between those two shirt or pants sizes, and, frankly, either one of them is pretty damned good for a man of my age, but essentially what is happening between the two combinations is that the ones that get definite complements are ONE INCH less wide and TWO INCHES longer. Somehow, people just instantly see that as an immensely important difference in a person's appearance.

And now, currently, I am wearing the “lean” or “slim” cut of those smaller sizes, and I can now wear 32” waist pants, so now the gushing never ends (which, I freely admit, I really do enjoy). I can’t make myself any taller, and with a single-digit fat percentage, I can’t really lose much more weight, but I do see that I am probably just one more pant size away from male fashion model dimensions, which might be worth achieving, if possible. Also, I do think it would now be worth it to get custom-sized clothing, now that I see how much difference these tiny changes in sizing make toward the perception of ones body dimensions.

All of which is to say that a person doesn’t have to end up with that “Weight Watcher’s body”, but that it is actually possible to transform a body back to what it is supposed to be.

I have a body composition monitor that provides me with several other measurements, one of which is an estimation of my “metabolic” age (based on fat, lean body mass, bone mass, and other measurements), which in my case now fluctuates around among the various TEEN years, which, incidentally, seems to also be backed up by what my blood test shows about my testosterone level, which used to be so low that I was supplementing it with biodentical hormone therapy, but now is a good reading for even a man in his prime.

So, for all VERIFIABLE measurements and methods, miraculously, I am now actually physically “young”, that is to say, “a youth”, without actually being a youth. How fantastic is that? To actually have at this point of life, again, what was once had in the prime physical years, but at a time when I can really appreciate it, is totally delightful.

So leave me to my early-morning self-admiration, not diminished when get up and see my smiling self, naked in a mirror. What I am enjoying IS available for all of us, no matter what our age, and I am simply the happy proof of that.

Jeffrey Dahmer of the Woods

I certainly very much enjoyed my first cut Christmas tree, but the going in is better than the going out. While I am pretty sure I will have one again next year, I nevertheless wonder if the whole thing makes more sense when one lives in a rural setting, or if urban or suburban, then at least living in a house with a yard. Somehow having a cut Christmas tree, especially with the disposing-of-it-after-Christmas issue, in an urban apartment may seem as peculiar as having a pet tiger…something that more reasonably belongs in and can be better taken care of in a different and more appropriate environment.

First, getting the tree home…certainly not every urban dweller has a truck, or, if they do, it is more of an affectation rather than something they ordinarily will get much use out of. I guess maybe one could stuff a Christmas tree into the back of an SUV (most of which never haul anything except children), but the whole Christmas tree thing seems to fit more of an image of tromping out into the snowy woods, cutting one from your farm’s tree lot, and then dragging it home. None of that in the big city. As for me, I had mine delivered, and was thankful for the service.

The place where I bought the tree advertised a disposal service at the end of the holiday, but when I asked about it, they said that it wasn’t them, but a separate service that they would be happy to refer their customers to…all arrangements would made with that particular company. Somehow this extra step was enough for me “think about it later”, which I also did when I saw that the place was selling “Christmas tree disposal bags”, at a price I don’t remember, but somehow it seemed that the disposal service and the bag, together, were going to cost more than the whole tree did to buy in the first place, and that is not even counting the cost of the delivery (and tip), so I balked. So, I just took one step at a time.

But soon enough (actually, surprisingly quickly), it was time to deal with that issue. Despite having a full bowl of water to sip on, the tree was noticeably drying up, even before Christmas. This did not destroy its appearance, but instead, as the thick, rich, full foliage “shrank”, it revealed the lights more (which I had buried into the branches), which was quite pretty, and still did show green, although a paler green than it had shown originally. So I was happy to keep it going a while longer, keeping an eye toward New Years day.

But, alas, the calendar turned and New Years came and went and winter break was over and I was back at work. For sure the time was now to undecorate the house and figure out how to get rid of the tree, which I thought of kind of like a pet that needed to put down.

I was curious about “curb-side” pick-up, but, looking on-line, found nothing conclusive. It seems that in my area, trees can be “dropped off” at several county parks and fire stations, but only on Sunday, January 8, between certain hours. No mention of any kind of curb pick-up, and indeed, last week along my commuting route, I saw only one tree outside on the curb and there it stayed all week.

I did find an advertisement for what I bet is the same pick-up disposal service that the place where I bought my tree mentioned, but it just seemed to cost too much, so I was reluctant to simply use them. I figured the best bet would be for me take advantage of one of the drop-offs, but for that, to be able to put the tree into my car, I felt I needed to put the tree in a disposal bag. However, now it seems that where I bought my tree (where I saw the bags for sale) is closed for an indefinite time. This isn’t because they are only a Christmas tree lot, because they are not. They are a vegetable and fruit farm, selling produce all year-round, or so I thought. Anyway, they aren’t open NOW, so no Christmas tree disposal bag.

I decided the best thing for me to do would be to cut up my own tree. Using a hand saw, I cut off the top two feet. This revealed a forest of branches underneath, so I began to eviscerate the tree, one branch at a time, sawing, sawing, sawing, and stuffing the branches into regular kitchen garbage bags (which were too thin, but serviceable). I figured this would be good enough for stuffing pieces of the tree into my car’s trunk, which otherwise wouldn’t have carried the tree whole.

I admit that I felt like Jeffrey Dahmer, doing this, except that instead of my apartment now flowing in blood and internal organs, the tree version is needles…so many needles…a virtual unstaunchable torrent of needles.

I’ll tell you this, if you love the scent of an evergreen tree, having had the tree, itself, over the Christmas holiday gives you only the hint of evergreen, but cutting one up from limb to limb, you’d think I spilled a whole bottle of Pine Sol. Also, there is quite a lot of tree sap generated, which required me to stop and wash the tar off my hands as I progressed.

It was at the time of cutting off these branches and attempting to stuff them into kitchen garbage bags that I came up with my “you ought to be rural for this” thesis. How badly I simply wanted to burn the whole thing, a nice wintry bonfire in the evening would be perfect, or, failing that, I could be warm and toasty crackling these branches in a wood-burning stove. But, an urban apartment…please.

The most laborious aspect of it all was the shifting Sahara of pine needles all over the place. I had read on-line that one needs to sweep up all the pine needles, NOT vacuum them, as apparently they can gum up your vacuum cleaner’s works (must be that tar, again). Taking them at their word, I actually did sweep up those needles, and added them to my kitchen garbage bags (picking up handfuls of them). Of course there was still some dusty duff that I couldn’t manage to pick up off the living room carpet, so that portion (not too much), I did vacuum. I discovered that when I did some more vacuuming today, that my vacuum cleaner (at least with this bag still in it) is now a powerful pine scent atomizer.

I kept the eviscerated Christmas tree parts by my front door all weekend until this morning, Sunday morning, the day that all these places were accepting the drop-off of dead Christmas trees. Now for the task of getting the bags out to my car. However, only a third of the bags completely filled up my trunk, and left a trail of pine needles (and on the floor of my trunk), to boot. And, sitting right there next to me were four perfectly good garbage dumpsters, not anywhere near full…in fact, the furthest one was nearly empty, and I knew that the garbage collection would occur tomorrow. So, to heck with it, I simply threw the sections of tree into the dumpster. I’m not quite sure why I shouldn’t…after all, except for the garbage bags themselves, this is definitely biodegradable and may actually be good for the landfill. I am pretty sure the apartment complex’s gardeners put their prunings into the dumpster. Still, I did feel a bit “bad”, like I had put myself in league with all those people I complain about who throw their furniture away in (and mostly around) the dumpsters (which is against the lease). I wished that the management of the complex had sent notices around to all the tenants regarding the best way to dispose of their dead Christmas trees, but they ignored the issue, leaving it to the devices of the residents, which is not the best idea.

As an example of that, one person had simply dragged their finished Christmas tree out to the dumpsters and left it lying there, still nailed to its stand and water bowl, right in the exit path of the guy who parks next to me. Next time he wants to leave, he will be faced with having to do something with that old Christmas tree that is blocking his egress. It’s still unimaginable to me this low level of action (simply leaving a Christmas tree there for another tenant to deal with), but in this place, the unimaginable is becoming “normal” quite fast. Of course, whoever did that wouldn’t be expected to even have a saw to use for cutting up his tree like I did, let alone actually do the work of cutting it up, the benefit of which apparently would accrue only onto to somebody else, a stranger, no less. Which takes me back to the idea of having to being rural again, where self-reliance and, I hope, some consideration of your neighbors, might be the norm. Which makes me wonder why people like that celebrate Christmas at all. Just what does it mean to them, exactly? In their heart and soul, do they even have a place for meaning?

If I Express It, Maybe It Gets Better

One thing good about starting back to work tomorrow after having had one of the best winter breaks ever--and this is the only good thing I have thought of so far--is that I won't have to hear every day the horrible voice of the man who lives down below me. I don't really know if he actually does live there, I don't think I have ever seen him (I only hear him), as I had originally thought who had moved in was three very ugly girls (young women). I wouldn't ordinarily think to describe anyone as ugly, and the fact that all three are grossly overweight has nothing to do with it, but when I happened to run into them waddling across the parking lot and gave them a very friendy "hello", they ignored me entirely, which in this complex (or neighborhood) could mean that they don't understand a word of English (or even have the ability to interpret a smile), or, more likely, actually are very ugly people. Their ignoring my friendly overture lifted any optimistic veil I might have had covering my eyes and I could see quite clearly that the very best word to describe all three of them was "ugly".

It must be that all three girls were moving in, they kept piling in so much junk that boxes and bean bag chairs and every other kind of assorted (ugly) junk filled up even the dining area that is easily seen from the front door. They even filled up their balcony with junk, something that is against the lease, but is something that is generally ignored elsewhere in this complex, as well. As the quality of the clientele here has diminished steadily over the months (to the extent that I feel a rush of surprise and positive energy if I happen to run into somebody here who is actually decent), so have the standards, to the extent that, apparently, there no longer are any standards at all.

The unit below me is like mine, a three-bedroom apartment, so three college-age girls commonly makes sense for that size of an apartment if one isn't a family. In fact, I have finally understood why there is so much moving in and out, which I have observed over the months and determined from some conversations I have had with those doing the moving out--they are singles who have roommates and the roommate moved away for some reason, and, since the tenant couldn't find another roommate, he or she had to move out, too. The other big reason is that if it is a couple, they break up, or get a divorce. The complex is large enough, and the relationships unstable enough, that there is a U-Haul in the parking lot almost every single weekend, including the resultant thrown-out ratty furniture crowding out my parking space...also against the lease, and also generally ignored, of course, because it is impossible to police and it seems that people have lost the ability to police themselves. Which means that I will very soon be treated to a whole forest of dead Christmas trees also crowding out my parking space. For my own (sadly) drying-up Christmas tree, I have found several places run by Los Angeles County where you can for free drop off your trees to be turned into mulch, so that's where my own will be going. By the way, a few days ago, I took to one of the county's hazardous waste disposal three bags of stuff--one filled with expired prescription medications, one filled with expired over-the-counter medications, and the third filled with old grooming products that I no longer use. Imagine, I didn't just throw all that out into our apartment's dumpsters, how weird everyone here would think I must be to not do that!

As ugly as the "three girls" were, they weren't really very noisy, which was a blessing compared to whomever lived there before, the heavy pot smokers who generated smells in addition to their constant fighting and door-slamming noise, not to mention their yippy little dog whom they would put out onto the balcony (instead of walking him like they should), which made his yapping all the more evident to my ears. I seriously contemplated dropping down some poisoned meat, and I love animals and normally would never think of such a thing, but this dog simply did not deserve to live. I prayed for these people to move out, but, you know, be careful what you wish for.

However, after a month of blissful quiet, I soon started to hear the sound of a baby or child crying. Now, this isn't minding that per se, or least, in this case it wasn't the crying itself that was bothering me, but more that it sounded like a child who was possibly being abused. I definitely couldn't hear clearly enough to make any kind of a determination on that score, nor can I explain exactly why that thought would enter my head, but somehow, this didn't quite sound like a baby's "normal" cry, but had some note to it that made me think "abuse". And with three obese ugly girls taking care of it (read: "serious emotional problems and frustrations"), abuse sure seemed like a possibility, but not enough for me to call any kind of authority, but just enough to put me into a state of constant tension whenever I would hear it.

It was soon after that that I began to hear the voice of this hideous man. Again, I don't believe I have ever seen him, but there is some evil quality to his voice that makes me want to vomit. He never seems to speak, he only seems to shout. It is impossible to understand what he is actually saying, because it is in a foreign language, so for all I know, he may be saying "Honey, do you want me to help you with dinner?", but instead it sounds like anger and bullying. I do think it is Spanish, but I have never heard Spanish sound ugly, before, so, again, I think he actually is speaking ugly, angry, bullying words. Anyway, he seriously puts me on edge and the fact that I live so close to such a horrible-sounding man is disturbing, and also a bit frightening, thus the feeling of nausea that overcomes me, as if I, myself, were the child fearing abuse.

Without knowing his story at all, what I can imagine is that he was the "lover" (using that term very loosely) of one of the ugly fat girls, who got impregnated by him and now this is the baby of the two of them, who are not married. He is probably taking no responsibility for this baby at all, but comes by periodically just for some more sex. I can't imagine anyone wanting sex with one of those three girls, whichever one it is, if any of them, but from the sound of him, he can't be too choosey. He probably hates her for her ugliness, though, and he hates her for his sexual need (a man like that doesn't take responsibility for anything, even his own desires; it is all the fault of somebody else). And so it is possible that the abuse of the baby comes from him...in fact, I have started to notice that the two sounds are now often concurrent. Again, not anywhere near enough for me to be conclusive, only negatively imaginative.

Fortunately, I really don't think he lives there, but, instead, comes loudly clomping up the stairs (also disturbing to me) and slammingly enters the door and the shouting begins until he slams the door on his way out and his hobnail boots go stamping on down the stairs and his car-sorely-in-need-of-a-muffler-repair goes booming out of the parking lot. I hate him and want him totally gone. Even if everything I have imagined is 180 degrees away from factual, the hideous sound of his voice, alone, is enough for me to want him removed to a different dimension.

I am sure that all this makes it seem that I live in a truly awful place and, of course, must want to move, myself. Well, I do want to live in a house (living here has made it very clear that I would never buy a unit in a condomium) and have no idea what my future holds, but I actually really love the apartment, itself. And unless I were a millionaire (or maybe even billionaire), I have no idea where I could go where the entire culture, itself, isn't falling apart. Fortunately, except for some noise and a certain feeling of "aloneness" (the negative aspect of "solitude"), my life here is good. There are so many neighborhoods that are much, much worse. From a middle-class point of view, this one is still pretty good. Although I will admit to being disturbed by having discovered just last week that the Spanish-language billboards are now only one major street to the north away (as you travel south from here, the neighborhood goes from middle class to some of the more upper class in the entire San Fernando Valley, but as you travel north from here, well, the billboards being in Spanish tell you what that means).

With the United States being economically more polarized than ever before in its history, and it is predicted to get only worse, the ones who are being hurt are the middle class. The rich class seems to still be untouchable, and the lower class is now the ever-increasing majority. When one reads of people moving out of Los Angeles specifically, and out of California generally, I think the ones doing that moving are the middle class. Again, the rich are still benefitting from the assets that California has to offer, and the poor somehow just keep on piling in, across the border if from no place else.

Strangely enough, I am actually liking Los Angeles more than I ever have before, but still, if I ever manage to hear of (and be convinced of) any place in the world where things are actually getting better (and by that I don't mean China, which most westerners think is the economically booming place, but I think that it is heading for a serious correction, or Africa, some countries of which actually have logged in some of the highest economic growth on the planet, meaning "up from nowhere", so...no), I would visit there to see what it was really like, and maybe even make plans to move there. However, so far, I have not heard of one hint toward anything in that regard. Instead, what I have heard of strikes me as ridiculous; mostly extremely rich Americans moving to what they believe is the real-life version of Atlas Shrugged's "Galt's Gulch", but which is located, not hidden away in the mountains of Colorado, but in southern Argentina. I say, "Argentina, you've got to be kidding me;" that's a country that seems to alternate among dictatorships, socialism, and economic collapse, which one of those cycles is the one that is supposed to be appealing? Of course, I'm not rich enough, or "mover and shaker" enough to be welcome even if it really were a genuine "Galt's Gulch" but as it is, it is a commercial real estate venture that heavily advertises its golf courses and the like and is being sold more like a billionaire's resort except not in a Caribbean paradise. So that one is a "no".

So, for now, like most everyone else, I am stuck with what we've got and attempting to make the best of it. So for me, to quote Nick Vujicic, "Attitude is Altitude".

I Brake For Lemonade Stands

I absolutely have been having the best time this Christmas season, not exactly sure why (although I have generally felt extremely good this whole year), but I think it may have something to do with my having put up a Christmas tree.

This, honestly, is the first time I have ever gotten my own tree. For most of my Christmases, I had gone to my parents’ house, which continued every Christmas (with few exceptions) as long as they were alive. This took me far into my adulthood.

For those few exceptions, I have lived in apartments that were too small to fit any but the smallest (artificial) tree, which sort of counts, but not really.

For the past couple of years, I have been spending the few days immediately surrounding Christmas at the house of my brother and his wife. But they do not decorate for Christmas (but my brother’s wife does the most marvelous COOKING, plus they are a blast to visit, so I am definitely NOT complaining!) I think my brother had his fill of Christmas decorating, because the brunt of that effort our mother put HIM to, mainly because he was always able to get to their house many days before the rest of us were able to make it (remember that our mother had multiple sclerosis which made her bed-ridden, so she could no longer do the decorating herself, which she sorely wanted to do). So HE was one who assembled their large (artificial) Christmas tree, put on all the lights and decorations, and did all sorts of other decorating until the rest of us got there to help. I swear, our mother wanted every inch of their house decorated for Christmas, right down to things hanging on every doorknob, dozens of needle-pointed Christmas theme pillows on all the furniture, and Christmas-oriented hand towels in the all the bathrooms. There wasn’t a square foot of wall space that didn’t have something Christmasy hanging there. And, oh yes, there were Christmas coasters and Christmas barware (you drank VERY well at our parents’ house…my father seemed to stay planted at the bar the whole season, and you WILL partake! Hey, my arm doesn’t need twisting; and if you were a friend of theirs, yours didn’t, either!).

I don’t want to make it look like the rest of us were slackers…at least, not me, anyway, because since our brother was the one who had put most of it all up, the rest of us were the ones who had the job of taking it all DOWN. I think I would rather decorate than undecorate, but that’s how it was and I’m not complaining…I wish we could still do it, parents and all (but if they have a way of checking in on me, they already know that they are thoroughly IN me).

But lately I have felt that something was missing Christmas-spirit-wise and realized that now that I live in a place large enough to easily fit a full-sized, cut Christmas tree, that was what I wanted. And I’ve been able to enjoy it ever since Thanksgiving, and will continue to do so up to New Year’s.

I pretty much knew where I would go buy my tree, a place that is normally a strawberry farm near where I live, one of the very few farms still remaining in the San Fernando Valley (which, once upon a time, was completely agricultural, but Los Angeles spread and spread and spread). They always fill up an immense lot with beautiful trees.

Since I figured I’d have to somehow get it home, myself, and I really wasn’t into getting involved with tying it onto the roof of my car or some such (guaranteed that it would slip off before I got to the next block), I felt that I’d have to get one small enough that it would either fit into the trunk of my car, or maybe my backseat (uh oh, tree needle city!).

However, fortunately, they had signs everywhere on the lot advertising that they would deliver (for a reasonable fee), and when I checked on it, I learned that they would actually deliver whatever tree I bought that very day (THAT sold me)! Good thing, too, because I saw that the four-foot trees just weren’t going to cut it, I wanted something at least my height or it wouldn’t satisfy my desires.

The truth was that every single tree they had was full and beautiful and perfectly shaped. They were all lined up in perfect rows by the species, starting with the least expensive ones, the Douglas Firs, and going up from there to the most expensive, which were Noble something…but I actually liked the Douglas Firs the best, so I picked out a 6 ½ foot one that seemed to call out my name (like a puppy in a pet shop), so that’s the one I bought. The woman who rang up my sale was a jolly elf, laughing and full of cheer and so happy that I was happy, so the entire purchasing experience was a delight.

And the delivery occurred without a hitch, with two people who carried my tree up to my apartment on the third floor and set it down in my living room right where I wanted it. Immediately, the whole house smelled like I was camping in an evergreen forest (which I now have a yearning to go do some weekend!), a feeling that has not diminished. It is such a grand atmosphere to come home to after work.

I had in my storage unit (sadly, not yet emptied out…one of the projects I hope to work on this winter break) some Christmas decorations that I got from my mother’s collection after both parents had died (most of which she had made), but that storage unit is so solidly packed that I was unable to find that box or those boxes; it would have required emptying the whole thing out, and I had neither the room nor the time to deal with that. So I realized that I had to buy some new decorations and strings of lights, with the idea of leaving some room my mother’s things for NEXT year. (Didn’t quite work out that way…it was hard to estimate and what I bought was enough to fill up my whole tree.)

Shopping for Christmas decorations (at Target) was another joy. Families were there in all of the aisles and I could hear the excited voices of children that filled up my heart. “Oh Mommy, look at THIS, can we buy this, can we, please?” So sweet. Of course, I loved buying things for my own tree, but I truly loved being there among the families who were buying things for THEIR tree. I kind of feel like I am with them, even if I am not. But I would share in the fun with them and would laugh and joke with them, and everybody seemed to enjoy this sense of shared happiness. Why not do that?

Back at home, I put on some good music that I could sing along with as I worked, and I truly did have a blast decorating the tree, which ended up requiring four strings of lights (I had to go back to buy two more strings; two just wasn’t enough!). My heart just soared. I knew that probably no one else was ever going to see this (my apartment really isn’t quite yet ready for “prime time”, as I say, so I have not yet gotten into entertaining mode), but it is actually okay to simply treat ones self, in fact, that is now one of the main lessons that I like to share (to whomever will listen to me if the subject comes up)…you MUST treat yourself and not deny yourself because “it is only you”. So, please, do things for YOU. Yes, do things for others, but don’t leave yourself out. Make your life beautiful.

Here are some pictures of my tree, which I realize probably looks pretty pedestrian as Christmas trees go, I guess, and pardon some of the nearby junk (more winter break projects!), but I love it, and it looks so pretty in the evening when the white lights buried in among the feathery green branches are twinkling (hard to properly photograph THAT effect), so it’s all good.




And now that “I am participating”, I have been appreciating the Christmas decorations that everybody else has done, some of which is mind-blowingly spectacular, and some of which is simple yet still wonderful, and I am thankful for their efforts since it seems that they are communicating a certain feeling out to the general public (I, too, have some external decorations, a garland of purple lights along my balcony railing along with a Christmas snowman wind sock blowing in the breeze out there; for some reason, I am the only one in this immense apartment complex who has any external decorations). Much fewer people out in the community compared to previous years have decorated, though, which is troublesome (Increased unemployment? Continuing economic crisis?). I think there was more decorating for HALLOWE’EN (which I also did, mostly as an advertisement to the kids out there on the street that there was candy to be gotten at my house; that’s where the purple lights came from, which I bought at a Hallowe’en store—I figured I could use purple for Christmas, too, which I couldn’t do with orange as that would obviously be left over from Hallowe’en; those were the only colors sold at the Hallowe’en store. But purple is good.).

Decorating has been very sparse at work, too (absolutely nothing in the school’s reception lobby). This year, there was no “Secret Angel” festivities (gift-giving that would go on for a whole week and that usually garnered ever-increasing office decorating), but the woman who normally organized that didn’t want to do it this year, and another person who volunteered to take her place lived, according to many complaining people, “too far away” (okay, so she wasn’t a five minute drive down the hill...!). The kind woman who volunteered ended up with only six participants besides herself (with me being one of them), so she said “Let’s just do a simple gift-exchange and pot luck lunch here at work” (not a whole week of giving like we’d do when Secret Angel had twenty or thirty people participating), the kind where the first person opens their choice of wrapped gifts (NOT white elephant gifts, but something new that cost under $30), and then the second person can steal their gift or open a wrapped gift, etc. Some people hate that game (the “stealing” part), others really love it. But with us having so few people, there really wasn’t much stealing go on, but I think everybody ended up with something that they liked. Anything that anybody bought was worth having, so there really was no reason to take something from somebody else.

So that was fun, but the offices didn’t look much like Christmas (or any of the other winter season holidays).

I felt like there was a lot of generous gift-giving from our school’s parents and from some of the employees, though; I ended up with way more than I had ever gotten before (boy that sounds materialistic, but that’s not what I meant; what I mean is that suddenly at the last moment, a “lot of Christmas” came out).

I couldn’t possibly afford to give gifts to every employee (there are more than a hundred), and my administrative position doesn’t really “allow” me to choose favorites, so I had started the habit of giving gifts to those who chose to give gifts to me. Again, in a way, there’s something not quite right about that, but I honestly haven’t figured out a way around it, because I am constitutionally unable to simply receive gifts without giving anything in return. Fortunately, it’s usually the same people who give to me each year, so I already put them on my shopping list at the beginning of the season. However, there are often surprises; this year there were five surprises. I had prepared for these surprises by already having on hand something nice but generic to give in those cases, but some people fooled me by not giving me a small loaf of homemade nut bread or something like that, but really giving me something amazing and that took specific thought. So THEN I really had to SCRAMBLE to get them something somewhat equal in thought to what they had given me, which can be extremely hard to do at the last minute. Thursday evening, I spent several hours at Pier 1, which was an appropriate store for one of those who had given me a spectacular gift and which I figured might have something good for the others. I kept finding things that I wanted for myself, actually, but for the most part I stuck to my plan of finding things for the people who had surprised me.

While I was at Pier 1, a woman came over to me and said, “You are a man, I would like you to answer a question for which I want an honest answer.” Uh oh. While I am always quite pleased to be a “stand in” for my gender, I sometimes wonder if I am “man enough” to do so! But anyway, she stated her problem; she had to buy several gifts for some teenage boys and some grown men, all of whom live in France, so her task was to give them gifts that they would like but that didn’t cost a huge amount of money, and that would not be very expensive to SHIP. She said that she had spent several hundred dollars just in shipping costs alone, last year, and she just couldn’t do that again. I understand her problem, because I used to give gifts to people overseas and the shipping costs killed me, so I simply stopped doing it. She then went on say that the girls and women were EASY, and she proceeded to point out dozens of things right in the vicinity of where we were standing that would work for the females, but, obviously, none of that would work for the males (and she was right about that).

Well, she gave me quite a challenge, but one that I was internally ADAMANT that I had to solve for her. It’s not often that I get to speak for all male-kind, and FRENCH ones, to boot! But gee, surely I ought to be able to figure that one out. But before she spoke, she outlined all the things she had already done BEFORE, thus instantly wiping out every idea that had immediately come to my mind. So now that I was tapped out, I kind of just stood there hemming and hawing to the extent that she decided that I was going to be no help and so thanked me for my willingness, but conceded that the task was impossible.

But it is NOT impossible, but give me some TIME, okay? I asked her if she was going to be in the store for a while longer, and she said “Yes”, that she still have some other shopping to do there, for the GIRLS.

I said, “Okay, I have to do some more shopping here, too, so let me think about it as I look around and if I come up with some good ideas, I go find you.”

She answered that that was a good idea, although I could hear the sigh in her voice that meant she never expected to see me again.

However, as it turned out, I had gotten only about two aisles away from her, when I got my answers that I was going to share with her. Fortunately, I found her nearby.

I told her that it was almost certain that the teenage boys were into video or computer games and that there would be no limit to their capacity to absorb and enjoy those. All she would have to do would be to find out from their mother (or mothers) what system they used, Playstation, X-Box, Microsoft, or whatever, because a game for the wrong system would be useless, and while she was at it, maybe she could find out what KIND of game each one liked, such as role-playing, battle games, life simulation games, building games, travelling games, violent fighting games, “Car Theft” games, sports games (basketball, football, hockey, etc.). I said that fortunately with computer games, the software standards are international, unlike, say, movie DVDs, which have to conform to a regional standard in order to be playable.

Also, computer games come on a disc, so they would be very light and inexpensive to ship.

She LOVED that idea and said that it would be snap to find out from their mothers the right system and type of game. She also seemed to know where she could find these games (I would have suggested the two places that I knew, WalMart and Fry’s Electronics, but she seemed okay on that score). I had given her THE acceptable and useful answer for the teenage boys.

As to the adult men, I said that EVERYBODY likes music, and CDs, of course, are as light and inexpensive to ship as the video games would be. Now, she might not know what taste these men have in music, or what music they may already have and what they may want, but I had a solution for that, too. I told her to go home and get on her computer and do a search for “Concord Records” (actually, when I checked it out at home afterwards, the right spot is “Concord Music Group”, but Google would send her to the right place). Concord Records would be a supplier of rare, collector, or unique artist retrospective CDS or CD sets that those in France (and in the US, as well) might not be in a position to be familiar with. I know all about Concord Records, as Hal Gaba the OWNER of that company, was on the Board of our school’s Trustees and was someone whom I personally knew (unfortunately, he died a few years ago of cancer). He, and television producer Norman Lear (his partner in that venture) bought up some languishing record companies that happened to own an incredible treasure house of classic jazz studio tapes, material that HAD NEVER EVER BEEN MADE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC, by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Theloneous Monk, John Coltrane, and dozens of others. This is stuff you really can’t get elsewhere.

I said that, stereotypically, the French have very serious artistic tastes and the French have always welcomed jazz; in fact, in the early portions of the 20th century, black jazz artists from America found a powerful welcome in France, where they did not suffer discrimination, so even if these men didn’t specifically like jazz, they would still appreciate having one of these CDs, which maybe even would open up for them an appreciation of this high quality level of jazz.

Okay, so this woman now was really excited, first the video games, and now this, yes, yes, these were the answers, and she was going home right away and search for and then log on to Concord Records. I had solved her male-gift-giving-problem! Wow, I was so happy to help!

Now, here’s something else that happened that same Thursday evening. I had left work to take to the post office some very important mailings that had to be postmarked that day (December 15 was the deadline). Instead of taking my normal route home, I took a road that went down the hill to a spot that would take me quite close to the post office that I was going to use. It was already quite a dark evening anyway, but it had been a cold, rainy day, which deepened the sense of darkness.

Just as I came to a curve in the road, I saw a bright, “glow in the dark” hand-lettered sign that said “Write Your Teacher’s Name, Unique Christmas Gifts Here!” and a young boy and his mother sitting in front of their house at a table covered with what looked like a collection of small potted plants. Now, you remember the bumper sticker that people used to have, “I Brake For Small Animals”? I think maybe there was another one that said, “I Brake For Garage Sales”. I ought to have one made for me that says, “I Brake For Lemonade Stands”, and by that I mean, generically, anything that a child or a group of children have enterprisingly got together to sell, I will pull over for and buy from them. First of all, it is such a pleasure to deal with excited children, but also, I like to support what they are doing, which I think is a valuable help for their future. I want them to know that what they are offering will have an appeal to people, even though probably a discouraging quantity of cars will simply drive on by. So, in the past, I have bought lemonade dozens of times, large pink grapefruits that kids had grown in their yard, cleverly-carved miniature pumpkins that kids were selling prior to Hallowe’en one year, and more high school car washes than I can count.

Well, I WAS on my way to buy gifts at Pier 1 (described above) after going to the post office, so this one was in all ways a no-brainer. I had to find a place to turn around, and then wound my way back to the house, and since it was a busy road with a curve, the only reasonable place to park was in their driveway, which I did. I said it was quite a dark evening, but when that boy and his mother saw me enter their driveway, it was as if a spotlight had turned on. They were so HAPPY…and remember, they HAD been sitting out in the RAIN to do this (but at the moment, the rain had blessedly stopped).

What they had for sale were potted Christmas cactuses (that’s a smart idea right there), but they were better than simply one plant potted. The boy (whose whole idea this was), had put together little artistically arranged miniature gardens with several sizes of Christmas cactuses, some of which were blooming red and some of which were going to bloom soon, and also what his mother called “Thanksgiving cactuses” that were soon to bloom white, all set with beautiful stones in a way that was what I would call “casually zen-like” (if “zen” even CAN be casual…). Also, the boy had painted the perimeter of the flower pots below the lip or rim with blackboard paint, and had “planted” in the cactus garden a nicely-made brass “wire” that held up a piece of white chalk that was inside of a carefully spiraled loop. The idea of this was that you give this gift to your teacher, for example, and you could write her name on the blackboard portion of the pot, “#1 Teacher”, or whatever you wanted, or one could write and erase their own messages, just like writing on a blackboard.

And the prices were reasonable ($10, $15, or $20 depending upon the size) and intelligently set in that they didn’t require messy change-giving. I would have bought one of them regardless, simply to support the boy’s effort, but honestly, I LOVED them, and bought one in the $15 size that already had a really nice red bloom going on and several white ones that they told me would open in about a week. At the time I figured this would be a good “generic” gift to give to someone who had surprised me on the last day of school (Friday), but honestly, once I got it home and saw it clearly in the light of my kitchen, I realized that I liked this so much that I decided to keep it for myself. Up until now, I hadn’t had any plants in my apartment, but my Christmas tree (even though it was cut and will have to be thrown out after Christmas) seems to have risen within me the desire to have a plant in the house.

It ends up that while the boy goes to a different private school from the one where I work, the mother said that they knew a family whose children had gone there, and she told me the name and I knew who they were. Also, the woman told me that her mother’s best friend is the mother of one of our substitute teachers, whom, when she told me her name, I described as “a goddess”, and absolutely IS the first substitute teacher that any teacher of ours calls when they are sick, and, in fact, that teacher is basically there on our campus every single day. So that was fun, having those connections, and I am sure the mother will mention me to those people and say that I bought one of the boy’s cactus gardens. But I hope that he sells a lot, as he should. When I told one of my friends about this at work, she loved the idea of it, especially the idea of being able to write a message on the pot, so she told me she would go down there after work to buy one, too, which I hope she did.

I had to research on-line how to take care of this cactus, and found out that unlike most cacti, this kind comes from the JUNGLE, not the desert, so it doesn’t require, or like, hot sun baking down on it, which means that it doesn’t have to be outside, but can live quite well indoors (it does like LIGHT, though). Perfect.

This morning, as I was making my breakfast, I saw that beautiful red bloom with those waiting white buds, so perfect for Christmas, and instantly this blog entry was written in my mind, so here it is, now, all ready for you.

I hope you have a glorious Christmas, and may you thoroughly enjoy the joyfulness of the season.

Ghosts

On Thanksgiving day during my Thanksgiving break (the family celebration of the holiday was going to take place on Saturday), I took a day trip up to Nevada County, where I had lived between the years of 1988 and 1993, and it had been a significant five years of my life. I had been back there one time again for a short while in 1996, for another, but quite different significant chapter in my life, but until yesterday, I had not been back there since.

I had no idea what to expect, but while there, I observed a typical phenomenon of my life, how just the sight of a road, or a building, or of anything, really, would immediately bring to mind something that I had done in that spot, even insignificant things, and this occurs even if some major details are no longer the same (such as whole blocks were razed and new buildings put in their place). It is clear to me that every single thing is recorded in memory (or perhaps stored in some kind of a spiritual cloud), the address of which for finding again actually IS an “address”, that is to say, an actual geographical location that one sees again. This tells me that the physical dimension, and the experiences there (since so strongly remembered and so easily recalled upon stimulation), are extremely important in a way that I might not have understood or appreciated before.

It is clear that these recallings ARE memories which may have no correlation with the present reality of the location. For example, I was somewhat horrified to see the house where I had lived, which had been mutated not only in appearance but also in spiritual atmosphere to the extent that I almost missed it entirely. It feels to me that after I and my particular energy moved away from there, nothing but low-life people moved in (perhaps a stream of them), and the place had become a place of an almost sickening misery. The house had been externally remodeled in an inexpert way, strictly for appearance’s sake, so that a structure that had once been almost beautiful due to its simplicity and honesty, now looked like a face that had undergone a hideously botched plastic surgery. Also, the place looked abandoned, and possibly even vandalized, so that I considered parking and actually walking into the grounds and looking around the property and peeping into windows. There was a real estate sign out front, so it might have been safe for me to do so. However, I wasn’t completely sure that there weren’t people currently living in there, so I was reluctant to invade what might be their privacy; that, coupled with a whole feeling of evil (or, at least, “neurosis”) about the place, convinced me to leave it alone and do whatever research I wanted on-line via the house’s real estate listing (which I did do later back at the hotel, and I saw that they had performed even more useless alteration and had expressed even more tastelessness on the interior of the house. Low-life, absolutely, and from driving on the mountain country road in this area, I felt that this area to me now looked like what maybe could be called “California’s Appalachia” and I wondered just what it had been that had drawn me to live in such a place at the time. I certainly had absolutely no interest in any of it now other than that I had had a past there; it for sure was NOT “me” any more, if it ever had been. It was, maybe, a detour in my own road and it might be valuable to analyze if anything that HAD been developed of me while I lived there is, any more, a genuine part of me, or should be.

Being way out in the middle of nowhere there, and on Thanksgiving Day when so many commercial enterprises are closed, I developed the need to go to the bathroom, in addition to which I was hungry, so I now headed back into the town areas of Nevada City and Grass Valley where I hoped to find a restaurant that was open in which I could satisfy both needs.

I decided my best bet would be “Lyons”, in a business area half-way between Nevada City and Grass Valley, which had the further value of having been a 24-hour coffee shop in which I had had many, many meals and wonderful experiences. In “those days” when I lived there, Lyons was a hang-out for Nevada County’s “theatre set”, of which I was a part. After rehearsals and performances, whole groups of us would head over to Lyons for a late-night meal and for me it was wonderful to have friends to do something like that with. And, even better, I was working on an unlikely relationship with a nineteen-year-old actor of remarkable beauty and talent, one who, surprisingly, responded back to me at every turn, who ended up moving in with me, and who remains to this day the only relationship with a male I ever had in which the loved one ever told me that he loved me, and when he volunteered this information to me (as he held and kissed my hand lovingly), I could absolutely feel it and clearly understand why he did. I could see through him the me that someone like him genuinely WOULD love, which is a very special and empowering experience. He and I, upon occasion before he moved in, would go to Lyons after a show, have dinner, and continue talking there until morning, at which time we would then have breakfast; pulling “two meal all-nighters” at Lyons. Due to this, Lyons had become one of our own special love-havens.

But as I drove down the hill on the freeway from Nevada City, I saw that “Lyons” was now no longer called that, but was “Lumberjack’s”, instead, and all redecorated in a split-wood, log-cabin type motif. Well, my bathroom needs had become even more urgent, so “Lumberjack’s” it was going to be.

After I finished in the bathroom and came out to be seated, the hostess seemed to be confused, for some reason, as to where she could seat me, which section was available (although the restaurant was far from crowded). But then suddenly appeared on the scene a beautiful young man, probably quite recently graduated from high school, who directed her to seat me in the section that was his. He was one of those whose very appearance washes away all other considerations or practicalities…his beauty becomes the only reality, and deeper than that, the only truth that matters. At first what I saw of him was only the perfection of the shape of his torso as it pressed against his shirt, although I was also subtly aware of his take-charge, solve-the-problems attitude. It also vaguely seemed to me that he very much wanted to have me in his section, which is something that now I feel quite strongly had been the case. He definitely had had the chance to have me seated in another section. Of course, one could say that the only “wanting” regarding that was mine, ME wanting to be in HIS section, but he had already been in the motion of insisting that I be placed in his before I had even seen him.

Where he had the hostess seat me was in the very first booth, the one closest to the hostess’s station, but on the other side of a wall that separated the booths from the area where people sat to be seated when the restaurant was crowded. Interestingly, the effect of that was that whenever he came into view, it was always a sudden appearance from behind me that I would see out of the corner of my eye. It also had the apparent effect of him coming onto a stage from the wing on the left, so there was no gradual fading of him in and out, or with longer views of him from a distance. He was either RIGHT THERE at my table, or else only a few tables beyond me. If this were a stage, I was sitting in the first row.

The hostess had given me a menu, one I had never seen before, of course, whereas I imagine that diners in that town already know the menu by heart. (When it was Lyon’s, I had known everything on THEIR menu.) But here I had hardly even opened the menu when he was there to take my order. I explained that I needed a few minutes, as I had never been there before. But this gave me a good excuse to say, “How long has this been ‘Lumberjack’s’? I remember when it was Lyon’s, which may be ancient history.” (I felt like adding, “Which was probably before you were born,” but I did not.) My main impulse, though, was not that I wanted to obtain information (although I was legitimately curious), but that I wanted to talk with him; I wanted to have more of an involvement with him than just giving him a food order.

He flashed me a glorious smile and he had devastating dimples that twinkled, and he answered, “Oh yes, I remember. It has been Lumberjack’s since September 5, 2010, but the restaurant has gone through several changes.” He began to tell me what name had followed Lyon’s, which I could now see had been pretty soon after I had moved away, and then the name after that. The name after that, I think he said, was “Sweet Pea,” but then in 2010 it became Lumberjack’s. While it wasn’t clear from his list of names whether these were all the restaurant’s changing hands (Lyon’s was, or had been, a chain, and upon later looking up Lumberjack’s on-line, I saw that it is a chain, also), but there was something magical about the WAY he said all the different names, in that from his manner in saying each of them, I could feel what their decorative atmospheres had been, what kind of clientele they had been designed to appeal to. He wasn’t TELLING me the names so much as he was vocally INTERPRETING them. His was an artistic answer, not a “business” or “financial” atmosphere.

And he seemed well-pleased to be telling me these things, and responsive to me being more than a customer who is unaware of or uncaring about the history of places and little design details and touches; in other words, he seemed to be glad that I was someone who fully experiences the experience, which, he, at the moment, was the main significant part of THIS one.

He then left to give me a chance to study the menu.

The restaurant, while not crowded, certainly seemed quite busy, at least in his section, and he seemed to be doing a good job of keeping everybody satisfied. He was quite occupied by bringing large plates of food to the various booths, and the people in each booth kept filling him with further requests, so for a while, all of his “on and off stage” movements involved him carrying things in either direction for the other diners. But finally, he suddenly materialized at my table (from behind me, of course) with his order book in hand, thanking me quite profusely for my patience. I indicated that I hadn’t suffered the least bit, but had appreciated having the time to look at all the appealing offerings that were on their menu. He very graciously received “my reprieve,” if that’s what it was, and I noticed that it was true that he genuinely was very beautiful in how he looked, the musical and poetic way that he spoke, the grace with which he moved, and the manner in which he operated, which I think I would describe as “compassionately extroverted and responsibly self-reliant.”

A person like that I can’t just leave alone, and by that I mean I had do something more than simply be someone who orders a meal and then moves on. But, as Juliet said to Romeo that first night on the balcony, “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” I didn’t live there in town. It was highly likely that I would never see that guy again. And what could I possible be to him, anyway? To HIM, all I was was a customer. Maybe slightly more interesting or pleasant to work with than the normal, but that’s all.

I thought of so many things I could say to him, something funny, for example. In keeping with the theme of the place, they had running on the video screen (that so many restaurants feel that they need to have, these days) a lumberjack “Olympics”, in which Paul Bunyan-type guys were racing to chop their way through immense tree trunks. The way the guys were violently wielding those axes, it was like Bruce Lee crossed with an Ax Murderer coupled with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Next time that waiter suddenly manifested at my table with his dimples flashing, I was going say, indicating the video, “I’d hate to make one of those guys mad, the way they’d tear into me, I’d need plastic surgery from head to toe”! Believe me, it WOULD have been funny, except the waiter had gotten into a little drama from making a mistake with the order of the couple in the booth in front of me. He had gloriously arrived with two immense platters piled high with delicious-looking food, presenting to them with a flourish, “Two turkey platters” (remember, this was on Thanksgiving Day), but neither the man nor the woman moved a muscle, freezing the waiter in mid-flourish. “Wrong order,” said the woman. Flashing dimples gone. The self-reliant, graceful waiter was for a moment confused, but then remembered, and said, “Ah yes, prime rib and tilapia, not two turkey platters, I remember!” and off he was again, exit stage left. No stopping by MY table to hear funny comments about the ax-wielding lumberjacks.

Then the ax-cutting contest ended and now it was pairs of behemoth guys pulling saws back and forth, cutting logs the diameter of my rental car, making my hoped-for comment no longer appropriate, or funny.

Next out of the corner of my eye, the waiter RUNS like Wiley Coyote, and brakes to a stop at the mistaken table, this time laden with prime rib and tilapia platters, each one studded by a full miniature loaf of sourdough bread with the explanation, “Since you had to wait, I’m giving you each full loaves.” This seemed to be something he had taken upon himself to do for them, which I thought was respectable (although please don’t do that for me, I can’t even have the half-loaf). But the way he had RUN to them was magical. Again, he communicated so well with his entire body.

He then quickly exited the stage again, since he still had more plates to deliver. By now the whole lumberjack contest video had ended and there was nothing left but a slide advertising chainsaws from a local hardware store remaining on the screen. No appropriate comment occurred to me, now.

But thinking about how he had run by with those plates of food and how he had jerked to a perfect stop at those people’s table, I heard in my mind my asking him if he had ever performed on stage there. Here was the perfect leading man, physically gorgeous, and also a character actor for the funny parts. Anyone as expressive with movement as that, with such great diction and vocal interpretation, plus his perfect looks, he’d be the town STAR in no time. And for sure, no crippling stage fright for him!

I began to have a couple of fantasies…one was that he was currently acting on stage there, and was, in fact, already a star, and would be able to trot out some names of directors or theater owners or performing companies that he had worked with, whom I can say that I had known, or worked with when I lived there before, and it would have pleased him very much to have his qualities recognized by such a stranger seeing him out of context. This would be bound to make him feel good.

The other fantasy was that he was not performing in local theatrics there, but had wanted to and all he needed was just a tiny little push, such as the suggestion by a stranger that he do so. I couldn’t imagine that a guy who was like him DIDN’T have that desire, if he wasn’t already pursuing it.

Either way, this would give me the opportunity to do something for him, give him some gift that might have some positive impact on his life, and just the thought that maybe I could do that would be the satisfaction that I could obtain.

I did wonder, though, if what I was seeing in him was genuine, or was I being affected by the ghosts of all the performers who had filled these tables in the past. And was this still an acting town, where audiences would come from Sacramento, and maybe even the San Francisco Bay Area, to see plays in the oldest theater in California, or was all that, too, something from the past?

Had I just become a semi-senile “old man”, confusing a cute boy with the one I had courted and loved and who had wanted me, too, and who told me that he loved me several decades ago, the only one who had ever said it, and probably the only who ever would?

A good time to ask him my question, give him my verbal gift, would be when he comes to refill my coffee. However, when he did come, he didn’t have a coffee pot in his hand, but was there, instead, to tell those of us who were in his section that he was now having to leave to go to a family dinner and that he was turning his tables over to the waitress whose name he gave, but which I didn’t store my head. So, there was not going to be any time for any kind of humorous repartee, he wasn’t even going to finish the basic job of being my waiter for one meal. Still, despite this not being the best moment, I heard myself ask him my question.

He didn’t answer immediately, so I got embarrassed and said, “Not that I am recruiting or casting or anything, but I just thought that with your great expressive diction and appealing, extroverted mannerisms, and leading man looks, that you would be a natural for the stage.”

He then smiled that sunrise smile, and with comfort and ease canted his hips into a position of relaxation, and said that he had never been on stage, but that he had been politically active, had started an anti-litter campaign called “Super Hero” (“Be a Super Hero by keeping the environment clean) for the county that was meant to be directed at school children, in which he made county-wide presentations wearing a Super Hero costume and had been interviewed on the radio (the same radio station that had interviewed me about a play that I had directed) and he had become known for the character that he had created and played, and that he hoped to use his political experience in other helpful ways, as well. He than apologized profusely for having to leave, but assured me that I was in good hands with the waitress whose name I didn’t store, and that he hoped to see me there again, and then he moved on to the couple whose order he had messed up, and he apologized to them again for originally messing up their order, but they said that he had nothing to apologize for, he was a “Super Hero” to them, and he went on down the line of booths repeating that he had to leave but that he would be back in the restaurant that evening, and woman in the last booth he spoke to was very concerned that he wasn’t going to get the tip that she wanted to give him (which had I had been concerned about, as well, but I figured the take-over waitress would share the tips with him), but he assured her that he WOULD get his share and all was well.

And then he quickly walked out of there and then through the large picture windows of the restaurant I saw him run as fast as he could over to his black pick-up truck, and I had every expectation of seeing him speed that truck with a squeal out of the parking lot and down the street, but no, he drove at a very respectable, sedate, safe pace, the all-around great guy that he was.

Driving back down to my hotel in Sacramento after my day trip to Nevada County, I couldn’t get him out of my mind and I thought about his answer to my question. Politics? What did his answer mean? Was he saying to me, “No, I am using the qualities that you observed for genuine ACTION, not fantasy; I am using them for making a difference, not for simply telling a story or providing entertainment.” Was he, in a way, saying, “Thank you for your observations, but I am way ahead of you, already doing something else that I think is better”?

DO I think the “action” of politics is better?

Well, no, I do not, nor am I sure that that is the best use of his qualities. I never thought of politicians as beautiful, although I guess they could be. Who was the last good-looking politician that I could think of? President Kennedy, maybe. Mostly I just think of them as ugly, corrupt old men.

An actor on stage can create any of an infinite variety of characters all bringing to life a meaningful story that adds to the culture and enhances the growth of the individual who can open to the meaning of the story and apply its lessons to his own life. Being a “politician” is just ONE type of character, and I don’t think the waters run very deep, nor is the effect very positive.

In order for him to give me the answer that he did, he had to hear what I was saying, extract from it what the qualities were that he had used, and enumerated for me how every one of them he had used, similar to how he had had enumerated for me the name of every incarnation of the restaurant where he now worked. While he had never performed on a theatrical stage, he DID apply himself to a public arena in a different venue, even right down to his choice of wearing the costume of a Super Hero, and it was his body that had been the first thing of him that I had noticed, and he had been interviewed on the radio, where his only instrument would be his voice. So his answer was, in fact, a perfect and appropriate response to my question.

If a person actually hears what you say and is able to apply what you have observed of them into real examples from their life, then that means that you two have made a connection. So what he experienced that day was that he had been really SEEN, and what I gave him was the gift of that. If he wants to continue with political actions, then he has received further affirmation of the rightness of that path. If he has other desires, then his having been seen will also have been beneficial in ways that his genuine self will understand.

And it wasn’t the ghosts of performers from the past who distorted by vision. My vision was perfectly clear.

But the fact that THIS is the restaurant where he is making his living, makes me think that the ghosts have had a pull, after all. Perhaps they drew him there, and have made him feel right at home among them. We can rarely know the impact that we might have on people, but if we are willing to give the gifts of our positive, supportive observations, some good, either small or great, is bound to come in the lives of others we meet and are drawn to; it is making love.