Adlai Stevenson at the Pinewood Derby

Oh how we all worked and engineered away on Mikey's Pinewood Derby car! First the internet search, for the Secrets of Pinewood Derby Life n Such. This involved a necessary download of the Car Guys proffering their theories about the Pinewood Derby (they're either in favor of it or in favor of laughing at it, one). Then Dad whacked away at the regulation block o pine with the Skilsaw to establish the basic profile of the vehicle; Mikey paging through hundreds of Batmobile designs, picking out the parts he liked (and doing a pretty good job of combining them into one integrated vehicle), and dragooned Our Andrew into assisting in the sanding, weighting and painting consultation. The Mama and The Dad machined the regulation nails and wheels into the preferred mirrorlike finish; we ignored the Internet recommendations for calipering the diameter to insure perfection, perhaps this was our downfall. The Pinewood dry run actually got Mikey's hopes up; the consensus of his brother Scouts seems to have been "You've got a fast car there, dude."

Mikey is the most competitive of the guyses. He s losing. He despises losing. He abominates losing. He's not happy losing. Problem is, every year he loses. That happens when one is competing one's Pinewood Derby car against, well, real rocket scientists. But this year, it looked like Mikey might just have a shot at a Fabulous Prize.

We did a bunch of managing expectations. We had many family conferences with Mikey, reminding him that it isn't if you Win or Lose, the Cub Scout Motto is "Do Your Best" and not "Winning is the Only Thing", that it's an exercise in Grace Under Pressure, all that kinda motivational stuff; and on the way to the track, Mikey allowed that he was satisfied with his work, as he should have been. A couple of tweaks at the Official Weigh-In, and we were ready for racing.

Six heats for each car. Mikey won five out of his six, as well as a run-off. Not good enough for a Fabulous Prize. Sigh.

It's hard for a competitive little guy to accept that sometimes one's best isn't as good as someone else's best; and that just missing is, in technical racing terms, well not to put too fine a point on it, losing. He's taken it harder, but still ... he took it hard.

It amazes me how much we need the validation of a Fabulous Prize to reaffirm our basic worthiness. Another manifestation of our fallen nature, I reckon. Still: it hurts to see a little guyse hurting so; and even though he managed better than he ever has, it hurt too much to laugh, and he was almost too big to cry, coming so close and missing by so little.

It's the end of the world, and I feel fine

Shortly after moving here I remember watching a Major Teevee Movie Event called Amerika, about the Soviet occupation of the former America following some offcamera significant event or other. The Newspaper o Record made sure all us mouthbreathing lipmoving readers knew which night the all-over ruined architecture of Our Former Nation's Former Capital, and by extension our own former miserable yet curiously unimportant lives n livelihoods, would be showcased; as I recall it was showcased through the windshield of a pretend Soviet helicopter orbiting the Capitol dome, or matte painting or miniature or whatnot, which had a handsomely art-directed hole allegedly blown out by a bazooka-totin' partisanist something or other. Somewhat later I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a picture of an exploding White House on the cover. The headline was "Boom!"; one wonders how many and how long the grownups met in their editorial cabal to settle on that one. The article was a feature on a Major Malloplex Movie Event called Independence Day which also featured exploding Empire State and Capitol Records Building miniatures rendered lovingly in equal opportunity miniature and matte destruction, albeit neither the beauty cover shot for Newsweek nor lovingly recreated in IMAX for, um, the Smithsonian. Not that long ago Our Nation's Malloplexes featured global warming glaciers appearing out of story nowhere to engulf New York New York, the town so nice they named it twice --and, given prevailing weather patterns presumably my home, place of employment and person were both securely at the bottom of said glacier. In the last month we 've had a digitally kudzufied Brooklyn Bridge and a digital flying Statue of Liberty head digitally degraded to look all YouTubian n such, this last coupled with the trailer for Star Trek XI which is promising to return to the utopian Roddenberry future imagined in The Original Series -- one can clearly hear John F. Kennedy urging us on to the moon, Smilin' Al Shepard wishing John Glenn Godspeen, and Neil Armstrong announcing that the Eagle has landed before Leonard Nimoy whispers "Space ... the final frontier" all actorly n such while protoBorg weld up a digital Enterprise not in SpaceDock, cue the rough beast fanboys slouching. Thus setting up a big ol' steaming heaping serving of Consonant Dissonance for those malloplexians who failed to leave their brains in their little pink houses, value added with their admission.

I'm thinking that there's a thesis project for someone willing to play Find the Link among these examples of apocalypse, the ends of terms of certain sitting Presidents, the then-current general condition of the economy, and the agreed-upon accuracy of American popular art's reflection of the Zeitgeist. I'm wondering about this while trying to keep my head down and my powder dry during an increasingly dreary primary season which seems mostly an exercise for Certain People to scold us peons for not hurrying up, getting with the Program, and confirming the Fixes that have been In for the past two years, while assorted groups of taxpayers and voters remember certain remarks consigning their persons to Flyover America and, well payback certainly is a painful rectal itch, ain't it.

Monetarily, times are tough. I'm not liking it. I'm not seeing much to be optimistic about. It feels like 1991 again, kinda, but I don't recall civilization as we know it ending at that time, unless one counts the election results as proof. I'm considering that the American empire probably has come and gone siccing transit on Gloria Mundi her own bad self; the euro isn't all that happy a substitute especially once those Brits, crafty Deutschers and Franish persons decide to hell with this and go back to their own homegrown and much prettier currencies, and that if we were really foresighted parents we'd be making sure the guyses were fluent in Chinese, that is if we were cleverly and subliminally setting them up for worldly success for the rest of their lives. And I'm also considering that some of us are trying to talk the rest of us into a recession, probably as an election strategy. And I am really not liking that, not one little bit.

Now I am not an economist, don't play one on teevee. and am having personally one devil of a time keeping my personal head above the immediate and certainly rough financial waters. And I normally have no truck for conspiracy theories, because conspiracies are work and people don't like to put that much effort into work. But I also know a thing or two about th tools o th authorial trade, and the artful deployment of smoke and mirrors, and I'm hearing way too much hollering and not enough prooftesting comprising the Recessionalypse Now drum solo, which itself is sounding more and more akin to the young lepetomane Buddy Rich demonstrating how to whack a few strategically placed noisemakers louder and faster n any hombre for a hunnert miles around and trying to force us to gape like jeeters at how goshdarn frantic and unknowable it all seems. And I see the nozzle of the smoke machine in the wings and the fingerprints on the mirrors, and I wonder what those jaspers are doing behind that curtain, anyway.

My g-g-g-generation has been merrily demonstrating simultaneous ineptness and shamelessness for way too many decades now, running increasingly on the diminishing returns of what's left of our parents' good will. I begin to understand why the Xers hope we die before they get old. And I suppose the sorry lot o midgets running for Supreme Leader of th Free World, every one of them ready for their closeup, is fully expecting to be digitally enhanced by hired mythmakers (no writers need apply) into something more Presidential in about three weeks or so Eastern Standard Time, at which point the election will be declared over and We the so-called People can return to Flyover America, press our noses against the explosionproof smoked glass dome over the Beltway and let our betters get on with the business of running the country into the ground. I think that's why we get served tasty supersize apocalpyse burgers with a side o recession fries at these turning points. It keeps us from doing something off-script like looking too closely at the Best Candidates the System Can Spit Up, proclaiming them spinach, and finding and electing a real leader

We've been known to confound these wisenheimers before, and I suspect that if we got our hands on primary sources we wouldn't find a lot of newsprint remarking on how Presidential those Lincoln or Rosenfelt fellows seemed. I do recall that we elected more than a couple of Supreme Potentates on the basis of their remarkable resemblance to Roman statuary already enshrined in the Halls o Congress, I'm looking at you, Messrs. Harding and Hoover. That's the problem with being from Missouri: when somebody comes along heralding the imminent arrival of th Four Horsemen of th Apocalypse who are turning the corner and heading down my block, well ... show me.

Smiling Pirates

Three out of four kinder wanted to see The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything today; the fourth, Our Andrew, didn't object in theory but in practice wanted to go gaming at Games Workshop, the place for gamers to go gaming with gamers dontchaknow. Gamers have their own conventions; we don't host them; out of touch with the real world as per usual and no surprise there, I reckon. So we identified a malloplex within a crow's flight of the neighborhood Workshop, which is not in the neighborhood at all but Our Andrew hopes and hopes that the vagaries of the real estate market (too much vacant new storefrontage too empty too long and too close to his Homely Home) will align themselves appropriately and evolve a Games Workshop a mile or so from the Homely Home. This would put it conveniently within biking distance, but biking I fear is for dweebs and Our Andrew is not now nor has he ever been a Dweeb. We are pedalling madly below water to ensure that he will never be a Droog either, but as always we digress.

Well, if one is looking for the latest and greatest advances in CGI, the Veggie Tales franchise has never been the place to look first and still isn't. In our circles the Veggies appear about the same time as Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine videos, but have on the whole better legs. I'm not sure that this is due to the quality of the writing, or the parents' desire to hold onto the children, or even of the hearts of the creative types and the created's recipients. In fact, the corporate history is all too familiar and sad: head honcho grows bidniss too big too fast, signs One Dumb Contract, it all collapses in a heap of lawsuits and bitterness, franchise gets ed up at firesale prices by disinterested acquisitor, head honcho ends days sadder but wiser.

But.

This being America, there are second acts. And while I was om-ing through the movie, doing my best not to worry about my own problems (mostly having to do with solving the delta between net pay and current bills), it occurred to me that the saga of Phil Vischer, the aforementioned Head Veggie, is not dissimilar to the sage of Brian Wilson, the sounder of our own innocence.

If I'm recalling aright, Phil Vischer had the thought of "Saturday morning cartoons with Sunday morning values", and having the talent around him to craft moral tales with Warner Bros. 'tude, using off-the-shelf video graphics software and a distribution network that put the things in our faces through endcap displays in Our Nation's (Capital's) supermarkets and emporia, the franchise was pretty ubitquitous through the mid-90s. Seems to me the Warner Bros. 'tude was a key part of the package: there's a certain snarkiness in the omniscient tone that is consistent throughout most of the individual pieces of the package (staging, graphics, music, words) -- but not the voices. As far as I know, none of the voice actors were or are trained actors, and so I think there's more of the performers' personas in their roles than there are in, oh say Spongebob (the closest video equivalent I can think of). It was Mr. Vischer and his friends voicing; they performed but did not act, and so they did not or could not really professionally dissociate their selves from their characters. My opinion and $1.75 is that this is what kids responded to; I base this on close observation of my own kids, including Our Andrew the Anti-Dweeb, as well as on observations of 10,000 kids watching the Veggies as warm-up videos before the quadriennal evangelical Christian kid missions to the streets of Our Aforementioned Nation's Capital (the biggest response to all of the warm-ups is to the Veggies) as well as the presence of Veggie tapes in the video libraries of all of the churches we pass through. Mr. Vischer became convinced that he needed to be the Christian Disney, and pushed his company into deals much like the Disney Disney pushed his company into deals sixty or seventy years previously; the difference being that perhaps Disney Disney's backers and bankers were products of their times (growing up in pre-World War I smalltown America) and Mr. Vischer's backers and bankers were products of their times (growing up in 60s and 70s America). And where both Disney Disney and Mr. Vischer trapped themselves into a cycle of borrowing money to float the business so that they could develop product to pay the last round of loans, falling into cycles of diminishing returns and exponentially increasing loans, Disney Disney gambled and won big with Snow White and Mr. Vischer gambled and lost the farm with Jonah, the first Veggie Tales movie. Of course, in the late '30s Our Nation didn't have the weekend box office grosses at our fingertips Sunday evening, and our popular art was not generally evaluated based on the opening weekend's box office. So the Disney company survived with its One Big Hit, morphing into ... well, a company that continues to look fearfully for Disney Reincarnate every ten years or so, now having declared that lo John Lasseter is He for the nonce; and the Vischer company didn't, got bought and bought and bought again, with Mr. Vischer left behinder and behinder, as it was he who was the Boss who, well, ran the company into the ground so to speak.

Which doesn't on the surface of it seem to have anything to do with Brian Wilson, who by his own admission frittered his music and his life away for 20 years or more in a kind of passive agressive hoovering of everything that wasn't illegal, immoral, fattening or nailed down on the Left Coast. I'm guessing that there were far more people around Mr. Wilson enabling his bad behavior than there were around Mr. Vischer; and as far as personal toxicity goes, I'm guessing that Mr. Wilson's toxic behavior was far more destructive to his personal self and immediate family -- hard really to see any toxicity other than well-intentioned hubris at work in Vischer, although I suspect that when Vischer's company collapsed far more people lost their jobs than when Mr. Wilson slid into his personal oblivion. Mr. Wilson's self-destruction is part of My Foolish Generation's legend, and is I think known well enough to not be improved by my retelling. What is so wonderfully surprising was his willingness to finally get off his butt and own the art again.

I have a couple of posts boiling up inside of me about Good Work and Just Doing the Damn Good Work. They're not ready yet. Mr. Wilson let go of his hubris and finished Smile; Mr. Vischer let go of his hubris and finished Pirates. Both works are naive; that's OK. Both works are from the creators' hearts; that's OK. Both works are major works from people who are supposed to have been Written Off. My mind wishes for more meat on the bones of these works; my heart's OK with them. The Little Boys are quite happy with the latter, and aren't ready for the former; the Little Boys are still hopping around the living room reworking scenes from the movie and incorporating themselves into the scenes. That's successful work.

I'm glad to live in a time and a place where Phil Vischer and Brian Wilson can rise and fall and rise aright again.

Neither Eminence Nor Eminem, Definitely Griese

The reason for advancing to the Western Front was a wangled invitation to the 20th anniversary of a professional organization that I joined oh 20 years ago or so it would seem. Among the pitifully few real envelopes that crossed my desk one day, thankfully falling out of the catalogs advertising goods and services that I stopped buying three or four years ago, there came this invitation to the Swank Anniversary Gala Party. It not seeming to me to be wisdom incarnate to propose spending public dollars to attend a Swank Anniversary Gala Party, much less spending public dollars to travel 3000 miles to the Western Front to attend a Swank Anniversary Gala Party, much less spending public dollars to do anything when the very Office of Tax Collection Its Own Bad Self seems to have enjoyed an ongoing looting of some 31 millions of the public dollars so that the perps could attend Swank Atlantic City Casinos (an oxymoron methinks). And then another group I have the honor of associating with, when I'm not considering Groucho Marx's axiom concerning groups who would hang with the likes of me, desired that a big-deal initiative of theirs get in front of as many groups as possible as fast as possible, including -- the wery group that desired me to travel 3000 miles to the Western Front to attend their Swank Anniversary Gala Party. Synergy, sez I. Suggestions were posited, e-mails exchanges, approvals in triplicate secured, shoes were doffed, planes were boarded and deboarded in Seattle, City of Light (Not).

On the Left Coast Hand, it was wonderful and the very blessing of the world to visit with friends from Back in the Day, when the organization was just starting up and we made things up as we went along. On the Right Coast Hand, um ... where did all these young persons come from? Must have been not paying attention, imagine that. And let's not strike out into any territory that might putatively be defined as Eagerly Awaiting Poils of Wisdom; cross that out and make it Here Be Monsters instead. Truth to tell, given the notion that half of all Received Wisdom is obsolete within five years, I'm long overdue to be hung up in the antechambers, arms and legs akimbo, muttering disconsolately about the Old Days ("Pleasing an Impossible Customer? Hah! Let's talk about Reagan's Second Inaugural!" "Um ... wasn't he, like, ?" "Well, that didn't come until later.")

Still, most all of our great and good friends from those Particular Days were there, and they emitted appropriate fabulosity, generally more so that my particular self. I will admit to sporting a strategic pair of red Chucks. You would think these things would be growing off trees in Seattle, but no ... It occurred to me that during my August Presidency, this organization began at its gathering of clans to dance; now it would seem that the dancing never stops. Master Po advises me that this is neither good nor bad, it just Is. Parm me for a sec while I recommend Master Po to Bite Me. As the whippersnappers of the last century did say.

Andrew still calls me Daddy

Back home from traveling, westward ha for this trip (kinda hard not to travel west, especially if one's flying outta Dulles, peace and blessings be upon TSA the creatures). Besides the indignities heaped upon us the non-business class non-first-class traveling public by the airport architects, airport authorities, airport securitymongers, airport airlines and airport obellos for all I care, the time differential between the Left and Right Coasts ensures that should the traveling parent wish to call home to check in or otherwise let all know that all's well the traveling parent mought as well dial directly into voicemail. Pfui to all that; traveling is becoming fairly pointless as we strive to upgrade our urban environments to ensure that at ground level there ain't a euro's bit of difference between Seattle and Baltimore. The Armchair Traveler has coopted urban design; hence I travel 3000 nautical miles westward ha, first thing I do is scope out the Starbucks.

Playing bedtime roulette one night, madcap that I am I gambled on actually reaching an awake guyses, and won -- Andrew picked up. No one else was home; The Mama and the other guyses were out gallivanting about, dilspatching sleeper agent J to ize the very librarians of the world. I could see them in my mind's eye, J dashing through the library, The Flash albeit with arms akimbo, books tumbling off the shelf in his supersonic wake, kinda like Slimer but cuter. Pleasantries exchanged, no seriousity no depth, the point of the exercise really is just to keep reaching out to each other, it's so easy to get out of practice in reaching out, the step before losing one's way, never to recover unless we wake up on the train and find ourselves pulling into Willoughby. So after comparing the mutual weathers (similar), outfitting of the speaking rooms (dissimilar), current times of day (ditto), and the highlights of our fascinating days (ate, stared out a window, watched TV, ate -- in other words, similar), we concluded that we had just about exhausted conversation for now -- brains were not engaging, 'sallright it happens. So we bade each other goodnight, and Andrew said "Goodnight, Daddy."

My fifteen year old son, beginning to tower over me his body stretching out now like Mr. Fantastic, working on his Eagle Scoutship, phone voice deeper than mine, experimenting with loud electric guitars and long distance puppy love friends, movie nights out with his friends (obligatory pizza afterwards of course), careful in public to be seen as Tres Cool, testing the parental leash ever so tentatively but testing it indeed, my beloved young man in the quiet of our solo nights, still calls me Daddy.

In that moment and in his backyard I am richer than Bill Gates. I am still Daddy to my Buddy, and I now know I always will be. God is good.

Cold comfort

The Mid-West is cold. The Mid-Atlantic is not necessarily cold. It will get cold soon enough. Sometimes during the winter it gets cold, a no-matter-where-you're-from-we-agree-it's-cold; once in a while it gets Cold. Mostly, in the City, it gets let's-stipulate-it's-cold. I believe this is due to the abnormal concatenation of lawyers. I believe that we get all spun up about potential weather on account of the abnormal concatenation of lawyers. If I had a nerf cannon, and I shot it off in my little corner of Cubeland, I could hit four lawyers easily and I don't work in Legal anymore. And every one of them was cold today. But it wasn't as cold as it was in the Mid-West.

Actually, I'm glad. I don't miss frozen feet, or frozen noses, or frozen ears, or frozen teeth. I don't miss deep cold in my bones, that doesn't thaw until May. I don't miss a sullen snow on the ground from November until April. I don't miss fingers that can't grip a pencil. I don't miss dry skin so itchy it seems I'm showering in starch daily. Nope, nope, no sir -- I don't miss it.

If we must live through the grey days, at least our grey days are pretty much limited to February, a thoroughly useless month anyway. It's only there to round out the calendar. February is for starting plants and tax returns.

The Mama has from time to time threatened great bodily harm to my person when broaching the subject of pursuing work in Chicago/Minneapolis/Milwaukee/any place with latitude much further north than say the front yard. No lake effect for her. Can't say that I blame her.

Bring on da hats. Bring on da gloves. Bring on da mufflers. Bring on da wool. Counselor, you may stipulate it's cold all you want. I choose otherwise.

Auld acquaintance? Fahgeddaboudit!

We were holed up the past fortnight or so, emerging only for the necessities (that is to say food, church, and gazing at other people's light displays) and didn't get back Into the World until yesterday afternoon and return-to-work Wednesday. Yesterday was clear and cool, with the chilliness clearly visible in the western sky headin' our way -- but not yet arrived for our holiday walk. Ve vere planning to volksmarch, until we found out that the volksmarchers were a couple of hundred miles south of us -- seemed a silly idea to jump in the car, drive for three hours so that we could walk for an hour, then drive back. Counterproductive, counterintuitive, yet insufficiently countercultural. So instead to the woods went we, Mama and Nannie and Dogberry made three. Not including J and The Michael. And yr. correspondent. So that's six, and the memory Comedy Routine-o-Matic spins up Bob McKenzie asking how much six would be in metric <>.

Homes should abut woods. Ours doesn't, but there's a woods about four blocks away, so that's close enough for my particular butt. Dogberry's first woods trek; we made a good fifteen feet in fifteen minutes, what with all the plants that needed to be sniffed and cataloged in the Doggiewiki. There was like a whole forest of flora. And it was full of other woodswalkers, which never happens. My theory is that these were people for whom the prospect of endless college bowl games was about as appealing as <>, anything would be better -- even dare we say it communing with nature.

It seemed to me at the time that it being January 1 and all, the appropriate greeting for meeting other humans upon the trail would be "Happy new year!" I seem to remember that at one time people said that. Must have seen it on teevee as a child. So I greeted all and sundry with about as cheery a "Happy new year!" as I could manage, what with supervising Dogberry's ongoing research and such. You shoulda seen the looks we got. Maybe I should have eschewed the traditional and opted for a heartfelt "Fish slime!" or "Shoes for industry, comrade!" I thought for a second that the Birkenstock Trio would have doused me with thirty gallons of holy water, much like the aforementioned victorious college football teams practicing their jolly sporting ways on their beloved coach, the better to induce my spontaneously combusting given the look of horror evinced; but then again I should think the Birkenstock Trio would themselves have spontaneously combusted if they found themselves within a half-mile of the stuff. They contented themselves with warding off the Evil Eye and studiously studying the trail for possible signs of aliens or predators. Maybe it was the attempted eye contact. Or the presence of children.

Well all righty: aging boomers keep to their own clans, film at eleven. Except that we got the same reaction at BigBoxBooks, picking up a book that The Mama ordered from the endless interchangable supply of scornful Xers that BigBoxBooks keeps dehydrated in the back for just such occasions. "Ugh! Human contact! Must -- resist!" Ditto the various representatives of the various regional public transportation systems this morning, the Teeming Masses silently staring at train tracks hoping to conjure up a bullet train to elsewhere, not to mention my fellow cubedwellers as who likewise returned to the Land o Gainful Employment this morning (as opposed to the sensible ones remaining elsewhere still). The folks who actually responded, in fact beating me to my salutory punch, were my Muslim friends at work.

Hi ho, the paradoxical life suggests that when the countercultural becomes cultural, it stands to reason that culture becomes counterculture. That being the case, perhaps any marginal culture sufficiently organized would logically fill the vacuum vacated by the putative nt culture, which in our slice o geography at least seems to be so busy shirking its responsibilities to, you know, Set an Example and Lead. Maybe Arthur C. Clarke got it right: any sufficiently advanced culture appears as magic to a lesser culture. Wever. Personally, I rejoice to accept and return wishes for a Happy New Year, and if my fellow masters of the universe can't be bothered with such trivial poop the back of my hand to them.

So Happy New Year, I tell you! And may the blessings and peace be upon us yet, the ceiling not fall on us, and our hearts not attack us.