Anti-Social Media

So recently I upped my involvement with Twitter, and it was fantastic, and then it was an absolute disaster.  Read on, and learn from my mistakes.

First of all, like a lot of folks, I have been a long-time user of facebook, and I have a really good community there - lots of ongoing conversations across the spectrum of opinions and politics.  I pop on for an hour, here and there, and maintain ties to this community with ease.

Twitter ain't like facebook.

Or rather, it is and it isn't.  And learning the similarities and differences has been a painful process.

First of all, I should point out that I am not tweeting as an individual, but instead on behalf of my radio show, Things Not Seen: Conversations about Culture and Faith.  This led me to think about numbers, numbers, numbers instead of people.

I was going a little nuts, sending out blasts of tweets about various podcast episodes and adding hashtags galore.  For a few days, the response was incredible.  The downloads jumped from a couple dozen to hundreds a day.  It was addictive - the higher the numbers grew, the higher I wanted them to go.  So I tweeted, and retweeted my own tweets, blasting bigger and bigger each time.

Two days ago, the numbers stopped rising.  In fact, they dropped off entirely.

What happened?  Well, Twitter throttled me.  And with good reason.  I was acting like an ass.

You know that guy who shows up at a party, or a funeral, and starts handing out business cards?  You know that "long lost friend" who reconnects out of the blue, only to start trying to sell you on some multi-level marketing scheme?  Yeah.  On Twitter, I now realize I was That Guy.

I never had difficulty understanding how facebook is social media.  To be honest, though, at first Twitter just seemed to me to be a big free for all, a meet market where you threw 140 characters out again and again because, after all, they would blast through the feed and disappear in the noise if you didn't.

The problem, I discovered, was not trying to cut through the noise.  The problem was I had become the noise that needed to be cut through.

So, gentle readers, I am offering this public apology.  I didn't do Twitter right.  I treated readers like numbers, and not like people.  I added to the noise.  I am sorry, and I will not do it again.

I stayed up pretty late last night, thinking about all this.  Lots of friends on facebook gave me some great advice and pointers, too.  I went to bed feeling just like I would have felt if I had been an ass at a party.  Because, in a lot of ways, I was.

What have I learned?  Well, first, that short term explosive growth is exactly that: short term.  It comes at the expense of what really makes social media work, namely relationships and trust.  I learned that just showing up on Twitter and blasting and then disappearing is about the equivalent of drinking too much and insisting folks listen to you sound off about politics loudly in the kitchen.  Folks may listen politely for a while, but eventually the host is going to shut that crap down.

So, this morning, I opened up Twitter, and instead of sounding off about the show, like all last week, I read what other people were saying.  I spent more time listening than I did talking.  I thanked people for the tweets that made me laugh or think, and I found good things to pass along that had nothing to do with promoting me or my radio show.

After a day of doing this, I am beginning to feel better about my relationship to Twitter, and to the followers who trusted me not to ruin their party.  Still a ways to go, but I will say today, Twitter has made more sense to me, and started to feel a little more like the community I value so much on facebook.

There's still a long way to go to make amends for acting like "That Guy," but this feels like a good start.

Thanks for reading.

Forward in all directions

It's a hundred-plus degrees outside. Kira is waiting to go into labor with our second child at any moment. It's the tail end of the second week of school. And I just got inside from a bout of pruning the rose bushes.

How's that again?

By "pruning," I should instead say, "butchering." There is a gnarled pile of brambled branches by our curb now, and the rose bushes look markedly worse, not better, for my efforts. Did I mention that I am also a sweaty mess? Sweaty and stinky, and punctured and itchy and a little bloodied from gargantuan thorns? I am.

This is my life right now.

My entire life is that thorny bramble of tangled and knotted branches, overgrown and without order. At least, that is how it has felt for the past few months. It's been frustrating.

So I decided, this afternoon, and with things I should probably be doing (like writing or organizing papers or getting through the overfull email inbox) to take a few minutes and hack away at the lowest-priority problem on the planet at the moment, that problem being the cosmetic state of our front yard.

And yet. There I was. And it was just nonsense, I tell you. The rose bushes have become over-overgrown, with branches heading in all directions and braiding around each other. So I just started hacking and snipping, with no plan or direction other than to reduce the total amount of thick overgrowth.

The result? A four foot pile of nettled branches, large and small. And now I can see the underside of the bush, and how bad the whole job is going to be. There's a lot more to do to get these bushes back in order. It will be a multiple-attempt undertaking.

So this was a first step - wild, no plan, just jumping in and going as long as I can. Then stopping, toweling off, and going back inside, until I build up the gumption in a few days to do it again.

This is my life. These rose bushes are my life, at least for right now. Everything - school, parenting, finances, the future - is a thorny, overgrown thickness, tangled and braided from my neglect. It's a bit daunting.

But I learned something today, with those bushes. Jumping in without a plan is not a recipe for disaster (as I initially suspected). Instead, it actually allowed me to get my bearings, and to figure out the real extent of the problem. It got me started, and that's good.

I think I need to apply that approach to the rest of these thorny parts of my life right now. Dive in, hack away, towel off, do it again in a few days. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

I have been avoiding all action, largely because I am afraid, and I don't have a good plan for anything right now. But what I just learned from the roses is that if I can at least hack at it a bit, there might be hope. For everything.

My wife jokingly calls this approach "forward in all directions." I used to be good at it. I lived the whole of my twenties that way. But of late I have been timid. Writers block and being the father of an infant has made me a bit cautious. Or maybe it gave me too much excuse to be too cautious.

Time for a bit of hacking away at things. Time for a bit of gumption.

Forward. In all directions. Towel off. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

One less key

I did it.

On October 30th I took my car out to CarMax (a bit of a haul from where I live - the ride took about 40 minutes) and got it appraised. This was not a glorious process, and the price offered was not high. After all, I had owned the car for almost fifteen years. I had toured in it when I was a musician. I had used it as my main vehicle for not one, but two, long-distance recruiting jobs (Outward Bound an Vanderbilt's Programs for Talented Youth). All told, I had put almost 200,000 miles on the car myself, and it had close to 60,000 on it when I bought it. It looked like Hell, but it ran. It got me where I needed to get to.

And where I needed to get to, spiritually and existentially, was here: the place where I no longer need a car.

This sentiment has been brewing in me for a long while. It started when I briefly lived in Europe, and saw how de-automobilized travel is and can be. In Germany, France, and the Netherlands I have experienced city life and travel that is convenient and easy thanks to both a good train system and my own two feet.

When Kira and I lived in Nashville, we tried to walk as much as we could, but in a lot of the city it was just impossible. No sidewalks, for one. This lack, combined with a sadistic ethic of urban planning that actually made it impossible to walk in some retail areas without jumping fences or endangering one's life, kept me driving, even as I dreamed of car-lessness.

In that regard, moving to Memphis has been a breath of fresh air (in more ways than one). The area in which we live, the Cooper-Young neighborhood, has lots of sidewalks, as well as a good supply of stores and restaurants nearby, within easy walking distance. We can get groceries and necessities, as well as a good variety of meals on nights we don't feel like cooking. Best of all, I am a seven minute walk from work.

I have been building up to this switch. When I first arrived, I used the car a lot. Over the past two months, however, I have been steadily, and rapidly, tapering off my driving. After I went four weeks without using my car, and not feeling the pinch of not using it on my life, I was ready to take the plunge.

The real moment for me, though, was a couple of weeks back. It has been raining like cats and dogs in Memphis through most of the month of October. One day in particular, about three weeks ago, it was really coming down - just bone-soakingly torrential rain. I was due to teach my morning class, and I wavered. Was I really going to try to walk in this? I should just take the car...

I cowboyed up. I gave Kira a kiss, shut the door behind me, and set out. By halfway down the block, I was drenched. I had on a really good rain jacket, so my top was dry, but my pants were soaked through. I put the contents of my pockets into the secure pouches of the rain jacket and trudged on.

Almost all the clothing I wear is somewhat rain-ready, so the pants were manageable even though they were so wet. Once I got to school, I made a quick stop by my office, where I have a towel (stashed there for just such occasions) and did my best to reduce the immediate moisture. My top was still dry, so it wasn't completely uncomfortable. I set off to teach, and made it through the day just fine.

(What I learned from that was not that I should have taken the car. What I learned was that I needed a good set of rain pants. They came in the mail a few days ago, and are now a permanent part of my rain gear. I am looking forward to the next storm, so I can try them out.)

A lot of what kept me from getting rid of the car sooner was fear. Even after I had proven to myself that I could survive just about anything - including a monsoon level storm - and be okay, I still wavered. I dislike change, and the unknown. I had never in my adult life been voluntarily without an automobile before. The couple times I had been without a car and hadn't wanted to be had sucked. Would this suck, too?

After a solid week of non-ownership, I can tell you, no. It does not suck to be without a car. It does not suck to stop paying auto insurance, to no longer have to save for repairs, or to no longer buy gasoline. It does not suck to no longer so directly participate in or support a bloated petrochemical culture. It does not suck to regularly get fresh air and exercise, to see things I like because I have time to notice them as I walk by, or to have an excuse to travel lighter on a daily basis.

I realize not everybody will be able to do this. It took me a long time to build up the gumption, and to arrange my life such that it would be possible. But I'm telling you - even if its just in little ways, you ought to at least try it. The world is a lot more fun on foot.

Victory is mine

For the past year or so, Kira and I have been increasingly conscientious about composting our food scraps. This has been, on the whole, a positive experience, and it has been pleasing to see the subsequent reduction in our weekly flow of garbage that gets hauled away from the curb.

I say "on the whole," however, because composting is not, at the end of the day, a bed of roses. The song of the lonely composter is, at best, bittersweet -- a mixed melody of virtue and sorrow.

I sing, dear reader, of fruit flies.

It started with the advent of warmer weather a few weeks back. We have been keeping a small, charcoal-filtered scrap bin inside near the kitchen trash cans. When preparing food or slicing up fruit to put on our cereal for breakfast, the location of the pail made it easy to get rid of the bio-waste as it was being generated. Throughout the cold months pf winter, this arrangement worked just fine. Come the summer, though, things started to change.

Without being too graphic, it got to the point where every virtuous lift of the lid on the small bio container brought its own "reward" of a small cloud of very active -- and hungry -- pests. It didn't take long for the strawberry tops and banana peels, doing their fetid business in the small green pail, to become a breeding ground for these harmless, but quite annoying, swarms.

What to do? What to do? Both Kira and I have been trying to avoid harsh chemicals lately. Allergies, general health, and a host of other concerns leave us leery of fumigating rooms or zapping the little bozos directly. We both, my wife and I, have been on a "home remedies" kick of late, and I was curious if there was a more "old world" solution to the problem then resorting to the wares of DuPont and Dow Chemical.

Turns out there is. After a little thinking, and some digging on the internet, I came up with this: take a shallow dish, fill it with a dash of port wine, stretch some cling wrap over the top, and poke a small hole in the middle with the blades of a scissors.

Some of you who know me, reading this, may recall that I have a particular fascination with the theme of monkey traps. Being a theologian, I think a lot about the workings of systems, and I am particularly interested by systems that are powered to deliver results on the basis of "lowest-common-denominator" operations. That is to say, I like systems that are so elegantly simple that they continue to work even when they are in what is known in the biz as a "failure condition."

For a system to work, even while its failing, requires the sober understanding on the part of the designer of some factor, outside the system, which can be depended upon to deliver a satisfactory result, regardless of the condition of the system. In the case of the monkey trap, that consistent factor is the short-term thinking of the monkey. Because the monkey cannot let go of the immediate desire to have the fruit or the nuts in the bottom of the trap, it gets caught -- and held -- by its own fist, refusing to let go of the treasure in the trap.

This fruit fly catcher functions using the same principle: the files are smart enough (and driven enough by the scent of the sweet, sweet wine) to get in through the hole, but they have no capacity whatsoever to get back out again.

The first morning, after laying the trap, there were ten flies floating in my little scarlet sea. Two days later, there are thirty, and I no longer spot pests on the wing here in the house.

Given all the catastrophic failure we have seen recently, I am encouraged by this. With a little thought and planning, systems can be designed to incorporate failure into their flow, so that even when they aren't directly "working," they can still work. Part of this, I think, involves a willingness to let go of active control, and to allow passive factors to operate.

Passive factors are not nearly as glamourous, of course. It would probably be a lot more macho and satisfying to grab that can of D-Con and zap each individual winged beastie in turn. But there's a lot of ways that that macho crap can fail, and pretty quickly. Can't be everywhere at once, in the first place. Second, the little pests might outbreed me, and develop a resistance to the chemicals. And finally there is the worry that I and my loved ones might not be as resistant to the chemicals as the bugs are (an ultimate sort of system failure, this).

What I love about the port-wine trap, in contrast, is that none of these factors drives the success of the system. All that matters is that fruit flies keep having a mad lust for fruit juice -- and I think its fair to say that nature is on my side with that one.

Take my advice, O reader: build to fail.

Books that changed my life: How Children Learn / How Children Fail, by John Holt

Years ago, during the first couple years of high school, I had a pretty cool English and Literature teacher, Mr. Youngblood. Being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much for English, or Literature, or sitting in a desk to listen to much of anything being taught to me (so goes adolescence). I did, however, care about Mr. Youngblood. Mr. Youngblood was pretty cool.

I guess he thought I was okay, too, because when he was packing up to move (he left for new horizons and opportunities between my sophomore and junior years) he invited me and a couple other kids to his house to get first crack at a bunch of his stuff before he pared it down in a series of yard sales.

Mr. Youngblood pointed me to a stack of albums by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - and since that moment there has not been a day gone by that I am not eternally grateful for that gesture. He also had a large and unruly pile of unsorted books, and, being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much that they were unruly or unsorted. I dove in.

Turns out a lot of those books in that pile were about education, and it turns out that a lot of them soon made it into my car and eventually into my personal library. Mr. Yougnblood had been schooled in the sixties and early seventies, and a lot of the education books I found had a sort of granola/hippie uselessness to them (I was them, as I am now, essentially a punk rocker at heart, and I distrust mightily all that "peace-love-dope" crap). These were eventually read, considered, and discarded from my own unruly pile. Wheat and chaff, after all.

Despite my skepticism, a handful of the books were worth keeping, and reading, and re-reading. Among these - the top of the unruly pile, certainly - were two books by John Holt: How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

The books are actually collected excerpts from a series of journals Holt kept during the early-to-mid sixties, as he was observing classrooms as part of his own training as an educator. His reflections on what he saw was revelatory to me - both concerning my own difficulties at the time with my schooling, and in years hence as I have worked with students of my own.

A basic thesis of the books can be boiled down to the fact that what a teacher believes is happening in an educational moment, and what the students believe is happening, may be profoundly different - even alien - from each other.

Education, of course, always involves discrepancies of power. Teachers are more powerful than students in that teachers have the power to grade. The difficulty arises in the fact that, in our culture, grading a student's "performance" feels (in many, if not the majority of cases) from the standpoint of the student herself like a summary judgment of her worth and quality as a person. This is not just true of young children; think about adults you might know who hear criticism as attack or disrespect - these responses are similar to how students, young and old alike, feel in such moments. Our culture blends ontology (the state of one's being and worth) with how well one "performs."

Holt argues that the result of this unspoken blending is a situation toxic to learning.

It works like this:

1. the feeling of being judged and found unworthy is uncomfortable, and it is an understandable and shared human trait to want to minimize or eliminate this discomfort as quickly as possible Schools subtly use this discomfort, especially in early education, to keep students "focused on the problem" they are given (as Holt puts it, "We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour" [HCF 198]). Teachers use the unspoken threat of disapproval and rejection to corral young students into "working hard."
2. Instead, students - motivated to minimize or eliminate the discomfort of feeling judged as quickly as possible - redirect nearly all their energy away from the educational moment in favor of working on the real problem, as they perceive it: how to stop feeling, as quickly and decisively as possible, the discomfort of being judged and the threat of being rejected or disapproved of as a person.
3. As a result, what students really learn from these exchanges are simple strategies to end the discomfort quickly. This learning is reinforced, again, and again, so thoroughly that by the time most of us are out of kindergarten they are already fully formed defensive maneuvers.

For some of us, the strategy is to simply learn whatever details will help us answer the questions we are asked so completely that we can always "perform" properly, and thus be praised and rewarded (we all know folks like this growing up. I remember in my class in second grade when one of them I knew got his first "B" - the terror and the tears of the tantrum that followed showed just how much pressure this poor little kid felt he was truly under). Others - perhaps the majority - learn how to "fake it." That is to say, they make a good show of pretending to wrestle with the problem, all the while watching the instructor for subtle, nonverbal clues about what the right answer might be - all amounting, in the end, to a highly theatricalized guessing game. Still others simply quit trying altogether, and just take their lumps, put their heads down on the desk, and tune out (I was one of those).

What is common to the entire spectrum of responses, says Holt, is that whatever the motivation for the student was coming in - curiosity, love of learning, enjoyment of community - it is very quickly replaced by fear.

What is essential to understand - and what is most brilliant in Holt's analysis - is that in every educational moment learning is always taking place. The problem is simply that what is being learned may not what the instructor, or the institution, thinks is being taught.

As a teacher, I may think I am neutrally teaching "a subject" like Algebra or Theology. Some of my students may have come there out of an actual interest in the subject. Many others are simply there because they were told they had to be there (and this is as true in college and seminary classes as it was in grade school). The subject is complex; I give what I think is an adequate and sufficient explanation - some of the students' brows furrow, and I glower at them. "I explained it once already, people - aren't you smart enough to get it...?"

The problem, of course, might not be in my students. The problem might (and often is) in the way I have structured the course, or my examples, or communicated my thoughts. But here we are in a situation where I have the power to make my judgement that some of them are stupid (not me) a matter of permanent and semi-public record. It is a lot easier (and advantageous, in the short run) to perpetuate the illusion that my teaching and reflection on teaching is up to snuff, and it must just be that some folks are too stupid to get it. They simply failed to learn.

But Holt makes this a much more complex interchange. The students are aware, as I am, of this power dynamic at every moment. The difference is that the students are often much smarter about how this dynamic can be used to their advantage. Many of them, from the very first moment of class, are undeniably learning: they are learning to fool me. Most of them will be able to make me think they have learned something, despite the confusing and mis-thought manner in which I have presented the information. I will, unconsciously, communicate enough of my likes and dislikes that students will feed me exactly what they, very perceprively, have learned that I want. In that case, the subject of the class is no longer "Algebra" or "Theology," but rather "David's [or fill in any other instructor's name's] ego." I know, when I was a student, I sometimes got a decent grade in classes exactly this way - I imagine some of you have, too. It took a lot of study and critical thiking to get that grade - but not study of "Algebra" or "Theology." As Holt puts it, "[Students] in the right-wrong situation will naturally grasp at every available clue. We teachers have to learn to present [our educational tasks for the students in such a way that] irrelevant clues will not so often lead to correct performance" [HCF 183].

Other students, by contrast, develop elaborate strategies to outwit the educational expectations entirely. This may be for a variety of reasons. For some students, the instructor presents the material in a manner that is fundamentaly disrespectful or demeaning to the student's background or culture. The strategies developed in such a situation are no less elaborate, but they are much less pleasing to the instructor's ego. If you have been a teacher and ever wondered why certain students, who seem to be so alive and intelligent outside the classroom, suddenly become to dull and unresponsive when they sit down in the chair, it is likely that this is a strategy. By "playing dumb," the student allows herself the means to "preserve a small part of their integrity in a hopeless situation" [HCF 195]. As Holt goes on to say:

Subject peoples both appease their rulers and satisfy their desire for some human dignity by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent that they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies [HCF 195].

I think both Holt and I are pessimistic when it comes to the institutions of education currently in place in our society. Far too many of our classrooms reflect the unspoken dynamics of power mentioned in the quotation above. What I learned from these two books, however, is that I could work to be a better teacher than some that I had (and don't get me wrong - I have had some excellent teachers, and I'm not just saying that on account of the Captain Beefheart albums), and that it might be possible in some moments for actual, real and good learning to take place.

If you are an educator (like me), Holt will give you some concrete lessons in learning to listen to what is not being said (though it is very loud and apparent, once one has ears to hear) in your classroom. If you are a former student who has difficulty remembering multiplication tables and long division (like me), his books may help you unearth what went awry in your own learning all those years ago.

What I think you will most gain from Holt's books, though, is the hope and possibility that (whether student or teacher), even at this late hour, we still might learn something new and useful, together.

Of the Human and the Sublime

A few weeks ago, back in late March, I was in Manhattan for a conference and to visit with some old friends, and I had one of those moments that linger with you and affect you for a long time. In order to adequately describe it, I need to give a little context about myself and these sorts of "defining moments" that pop up every decade or so.

Years ago - a lifetime ago, really - when I was eighteen, some friends and I drove to Atlanta to see a show. We went to the Metroplex, a punk club in the heart of downtown Atlanta. It was 1988, and I think the Metroplex was on Moreland Avenue or somewhere like that. At any rate, we were there to see Fishbone. I hadn't seen many shows at that point in my youth. This night, however, would in many ways change and define my life.

The Metroplex was a fairly sizable club. It was rare in that, in addition to "the pit" (the area in front of the stage where the slamdancers "moshed") it had a balcony that circled three sides of the performance area. I was sitting in the balcony. That detail is important.

(The opener was the truly mighty Follow for Now. I remember they started their set out with an instrumental riff on the Rush song "Tom Sawyer" that opened a can of whoop ass in the room. But that just set the stage for what was to follow.)

To say that Fishbone was energetic would be an understatement. They started their shows hard, and then intensity just grew continually through the evening. The very first thing Angelo (the lead singer/saxophonist) did was run across the stage and dive into the audience, surfing on top of the crowd. The crowd, needless to say, was with the band from the first, and the spasmodic energy was palpable.

I have seen a lot of Fishbone shows in my time. One of the common threads to each was a point in the set where Angelo would induct the crowd into what they called the "Fishbone Familyhood." Though never exactly defined, the Familyhood was a sort of transracial love-fest. Ambassadors of goodwill to the cosmos, sort of like if the Deadheads moved faster and looked more like the Rainbow Coalition.

In most shows, the Familyhood induction speech happened from the stage, with Angelo leading the crowd, eventually, in a common "oath," of sorts, culminating in a chant: "Peace. Love. Respect. For everybody! Peace! Love Respect! For everybody!"

This night, however, when it came time for the Familyhood speech, Angelo had surfed the crowd to the back of the room. He had climbed one of the support columns beneath the second floor, and was now hanging from the balcony railing. He was less than ten feet from where we were sitting, and about fifteen feet above the floor below, hanging on with one hand while his other held the wireless microphone. Soon the whole crowd was chanting, "Peace! Love! Respect! For everybody! Peace! Love! Respect! For everybody!"...

...and Angelo leapt into the air, into the empty space above the crowd.

There is something about watching a human body hang in the void, even for a spit second, that stops your breath. I thought of this again, a few months ago, when Kira and I, along with our friend, Katy, went to the Belcourt to watch the award-winning documentary, Man on Wire.

There is a point, right at the end of the film, when - after all the preparation and intrigue, the planning and covert research that preceded Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center - Petit mentions that he "made the decision to shift [his] weight from the building to the wire."

What follows is a slow series of still photos of Petit in the air, a quarter mile above the ground, as lilting strains of Eric Satie play without voice or comment. I have seen the film now several times, and the sight of this still stops me short and chokes me up. (If you have yet to see the film, see it. The moment is indescribably beautiful. Sublime.)

So on that day back in March I was walking around Central Park with my old friend Anson. I was feeling bummed because part of what I had planned to do during my visit to New York was to go see a play he was in, "Mourning Becomes Electra," but it had been canceled before the end of its run. Anson, however, was insisting that this was good, in fact, because this meant I now had a chance to go see what he claimed was "the best show in New York" at the time, "FuerzaBruta."

I'm not much for last minute schedule changes, so I was initially hesitant. Anson, however, was both enthusiastic and insistent, and I soon agreed. He made a call on his cellphone to another acquaintance of mine (who was in the show), and arranged to have a ticket discounted for me. Done.

A couple of hours later, I was on the subway heading south to Union Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village. After looking around a bit, I found the Daryl Roth Theatre, which apparently used to be an old bank. I stood in line, got my ticket (thank you, Jon!) and walked up the stairs as the show was just beginning.

How to describe FuerzaBruta? It was like that moment when Angelo leapt out over the crowd; it was like the moment in Man on Wire when Petit makes the decision to shift his weight from building to space; only it went on for more than an hour.

The performance space is cavernous. every inch of it was utilized - horizontally and vertically. The sweep of the themes and narratives (there is very little dialogue) is cavernous as well. The narratives are open-ended and infinitely interpretable. Horrifying, startling, liberating, exhilarating, euphoric... every moment brings a new possibility for feeling huge feelings. I have never seen anything like it. It was beautiful. Afterward, in fact, when discussing it with Anson and Jon (the performer who helped secure me the ticket), I said it was probably one of the most beautiful events I had ever seen. I meant it then, and I mean it now. Beautiful.

More than beautiful, though. The right word isn't "beautiful," I think. The right word here is "sublime."

The sublime was important years ago to folks like Shelley, Wordsworth and Lord Byron - Romantic poets dealt with the sublime. "The sublime has its source in the associated qualities of 'power,' 'vastness,' 'infinity,' and 'magnificence,'" M.H. Abrams wrote in his classic, Natural Supernaturalism, "and its characteristic effects on the beholder are the traditional ones aroused by the conception of the infinite power of a stern but just God: 'terror,' 'astonishment,' 'awe,' 'admiration,' and 'reverence.'"

You will think I am exaggerating, but this is not the case. Standing in the crowd at the Daryl Roth Theatre that evening, I felt those feelings. I think many around me felt them, too, though I am also certain that the range of responses was vast and unpredictable.

As I stood in the crowd, I thought of my Mother, who passed from this Earth the month before. I thought of how differently she and I saw things, and yet how we were still both able to be moved so deeply, in our own ways, by huge intangible things like "Beauty" and "Truth." It is a connection we shared, though our lives together had been been broken asunder by time and circumstance. Standing in that crowd, I missed her and mourned her, as I do now, typing this: in my own way. Death has a sublimity, too. But love, strange and broken and interpretable thought it may be, is still the stronger, in the end.

You will want me to link to video and show you pictures of what I saw that night. I will not. You will want to go to Google and look it up yourself. I cannot stop you, but I will say: you should not.

What I will tell you instead is that you should go to Manhattan. Get on a plane and go to Manhattan and get on the train and go to Union Square. Go the the Darryl Roth Theatre and buy your ticket and stand in the crowd and never forget that you are human. Frail and fragile and lost in the immensity of the universe you may be; but you are human... And it is wonderful to be human.

Angelo leapt into the air. The crowd reached up to him with its arms, and caught him.

Go to Manhattan.

Lesson number one

A great deal of my life has been spent apologizing - or at least feeling like I should be apologizing. Now admittedly, there have probably been a lot of things that, if I am honest, should have been apologized for, so this is not entirely an out-of-line self conception to have. Just like twelve-step says: when you are wrong, promptly admit it and try to make amends.

There is, however, one habit I have had for many years, and I no longer am interested in apologizing for it. In fact, I would like to encourage more of my friends, or the people I meet, or the readers of this blog (or any combination of the above) to take up this habit as well. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I will admit, I used to feel like I should apologize for this, but no longer.

I am talking about lunch.

Actually, not lunch per se. Rather, lunch with interesting people. Regularly. Weekly, if not more. Not a rushed, sit-down-get-up sort of affair, either. Leisurely. Long stretches of ideas and conversations. Two hour lunches.

I used to indulge this pleasure furtively - once a month or so. It felt so decadent to just, you know, sit with someone and simply enjoy the company and the conversation. It would feel strange to see tables around us fill and empty and fill again as we sat and enjoyed time together.

2008, however, was a turning point. Maybe it is because I see my middle age coming fast upon me (my birthday, right around the corner, inches me closer to 40 every second). Perhaps it is because I have finally given up on small talk - the kind of vapid shallowness that keeps people invulnerable and at a safe social distance from one another.

Maybe, at the end of the day, it was finally reconciling myself to the fact that I am a loquacious bastard: I have a well-developed vocabulary and vast, disconnected interests. For many years I felt compelled most of all to apologize for this - for the fact that some people do not follow the connections I make or understand the words I use, or especially because I do not seem to have the interests many others have in sports or television or the lives of celebrities.

What I have discovered, over these years, is that there are individuals who do follow my thoughts, understand my style of speech and vocabulary, and who are themselves robust in their brilliance and fascinating to talk to. And I guess it took me a long time to figure out that these are the people I should be focusing on - not the many who will find me confusing or a chore to speak to.

So I abandoned all hope, and entered the world of leisurely lunches.

What I have discovered is that I was never that smart by myself. I am smart (and exponentially smarter) when I interact with interesting, smart people. I learn things, discover things about myself and about them and about the world. I am, slowly but surely, becoming a good listener (I have always been a good, if occasionally banal, talker). I find I like the listening better, honestly. Interesting people are interesting. Moreover, I am discovering that, given time, even many people who are not interesting are interesting, if given time and encouragement.

So now I am shameless. I have a wonderful wife who loafs for hours with me, talking about all sorts of things. I have a dear friend with whom I have a standing lunch date once a week, and we have been meeting now for over three years. I go out of my way to meet friends for coffee, and have made amazing discoveries about the world and my life in the process. I am not exaggerating when I say that, on more than one occasion, lunch has saved my life, or at least my sanity.

The world will tell you not to indulge. The world will tell you to rush, to keep the "fast" in the food. Do not listen. Take time in huge gobs and spend it lavishly on people who feed you - spiritually, emotionally, intellectually. Even as you feel ashamed or sheepish at first, persevere. There is no substitute for quality relationships and friendships that touch your soul - money will not substitute, nor will fame, nor your own carefully-constructed self-aggrandizement (nor mine). People who are worth your time are simply worth lots and lots of your time.

To the many friends who have expanded my life and my soul with the generosity of themselves and their company for vast and leisurely hours, I thank you. I am the better, always, because of you. Thank you.

Hell's Departure Lounge

This was my Odyssey.

All I wanted to do, you see, was get home. I had just spent a lovely four days on the North Shore of Massachussetts, travelling up the coastline visiting little towns and just relaxing. It had been so relazing, in fact, that I had begun to soften my hardline position that the world is a rude and ugly place. I had begun to feel what some people call hope (and hope, of course, is what Terry Pratchett refers to as 'that greatest of treasures.')

Ah. But then I went through airport security.

I had found a cheap round trip ticket on US Airways, which is the daughter company of a recent merger of USAir and America West - a merger which was being loudly touted from walls on posters and from thumped chests of ticket agents on buttons. Great things afoot, the atmosphere seemed to say. Here, in this place, the perils which have beset the airline industry as a whole are firmly held at bay.

It should have been simple: a short flight from Boston to Philadelphia, and then from Philadelphia to Nashville. Simple, in my life, implies a certain level of tolerance, of course, and Things Do Happen. But within reason, no? A certain level of tolerance goes a long way under Normal Circumstances.

But Normal Circumstances had, apparently, followed my lead and taken a holiday somewhere on the North Shore.

We were delayed getting off the ground, due to a bad weather system throughout the middle Atlantic states. Then, after an hour, we got off the ground, and were delayed in the air from landing by, again, severe weather. Once we got on the ground (after an extra 45 minutes in the air) we were delayed on the tarmac, three times, by what is called a "ramp closure".

Closing the Ramp, apparently, involves pulling back all ground crew from service and halting all traffic in and out of the airport. Nothing moves. Which means, of course, that the third time we stopped on the tarmac, 30 feet from the gate, that was exactly where we stayed. 30 feet from the gate. For another half hour.

Needless to say, I was late making my connecting flight. My connecting flight had miraculously managed to make it out in one of the windows when the ramp had not been closed. Now, this is understandable, and still well within my level of tolerance.

We were told that a gate agent would meet us upon our debarking from the plane, to assist us in making new connections. So, upon debarking and calling the nice person in Nashville who would have been picking me up at about that time at the Nashville airport and informing her that I was in the airport at last, only not the right one, I got in the line to talk to the station agent.

After about five minutes of waiting in line, the station agent suddenly announced loudly to the crowd that he couldn't help us anymore, and that we all would have to go to the other end of the terminal to wait in another line to talk to the customer service agents.

Thinking this a rather loose interpretation of the promise we heard on the plane that "an agent would be waiting at the gate to help," we all just stared at the agent, mute.

"No, I mean it," he repeated. "I'm leaving. You'll have to go to the other desk."

So I turned and made my way, like the rest, to the other end of the terminal. Ah, now being at the back of the line was an advantage, as it meant I got to a higher place in the new line. Tolerance. Sweet tolerance.

After an hour in the new line, though, tolerance was waning. Of the three agents at the desk, one kept leaving to talk on her cell phone, and the other two seemed about as efficient as, well, a post office after a bad fire. Ten minutes per person seemed to be the average, we determined (my stalwart co-queued companions and I), and we heard through the grapevine that the folks still not quite at the front of the line (which was not so far from us) had been standing where we were standing, two hours ago.

Lovely.

At some point, two more agents arrived, but the comedy of errors continued. The line moved a little faster, only now new plagues erupted. Computers began crashing. Printers ceased to work. The devil, it seemed, was in the details, and no one was bothering to pay attention to the fine print. I will spare you, gentle reader, of the many grumblings which ensued.

I will detail for you, however, that when I finally got to have my time at the desk, it was with a gate agent that (I swear, I am not using this term in anything but the most accurate sense) was literally mentally challenged. Everything I said, or indeed anyone said to him, was repeated back, slowly, and pondered at great length before any action was taken. Watching him type was a Chinese water torture of one-fingered hunt-and-pecking. It should go without saying as well that it was when he finally was trying to print out my new boarding passes that the computer printer went down again. Despairing, after five minutes of watching his slow, bumbling attempts to fix it, I howled for a manger.

This was, in fact, the limit of my tolerance.

So now, armed at last with boarding passes in hand, I was informed that the airline does not offer hotel considerations for delays due to weather, and my flight home was leaving at 6:45 the next morning (it was then just after midnight). So I found the bar (ordered a two-fisted set of beers to brace my rattled nerves), and then the all-night Chinese restaurant in the other terminal (good egg rolls, sub-par shrimp fried rice), and had great impromptu conversations with my fellow refugees. I really didn't sleep at all that night, though there was one fitful nap on the floor of gate B-19, for about an hour. Never was I more glad that I always travel with my travel pillow strapped to my backpack.

The next morning should have gone smoothly. Instead of a direct flight, I was re-routed to Charlotte, and from there to Nashville. Fine. So I got to my gate, fueled with a breakfast of chocolate and vanilla swirl yogurt cone, and got on the plane. Thank you.

And there we sat on the plane. For two hours. Two hours, and a lot of that time with the air off (and it was hot). Apparently, we finally were told, the ground crew had put too much fuel on the plane, and it had to be siphoned off. Why they hadn't taken care of this the night before (since, trust me, that flight had been on the boards since 2am - I was checking) is beyond me.

So, needless to say, I got to Charlotte late, and missed my connecting flight.

(There is a funny word we used to employ in German class: abgefukt)

Now there had been snafu's all through the system, of course, and also some flights from Chicago had been cancelled that morning, so there were now a lot of people trying to scramble to get where they were going. The earliest I was told I could get on a flight was 5pm that afternoon.

Did you know that they now have places in the airport where you can get massages? I splurged and got one. If I was going to be shouldering burdens like some slacker caryatid, some transient Atlas, I wanted to make sure my shouldering equipment was in peak shape.

Refreshed, I stormed the nearest customer service counter I could find, with my trademark mix of sweet charm and steely assertiveness. By the end of my seige, I was booked on a 1pm flight. They had tried to route me through Atlanta. No, thank you. The thought of another connecting flight made visions of late career Tom Hanks movies dance in my head. I got to get out of this place, I kept repeating. Direct flights only, please.

When I got to the gate, the agent asked me (of course) if I would be willing to be bumped to a later flight?

No. No, thank you.

When I finally got back to Nashville, after twenty-two hours behind airport security, I had decompressed enough to remark, ruefully, that at no point had anyone offered me an apology, or anything other than grudging consideration. It was, though and through, a completely miserable experience.

The road to Hell is, of course, paved by the Tennessee Department of Transportation. But if you choose to fly, trust me, you'll be booked on US Airways.