Who's paying attention?

Nevermind turns 20 this September. In 1991 I started my second year of my first teaching job at a private Christian high school. My classroom was in the basement and my first class of the day, all year long, was grade 11 English Lit starting at 8 am. At some point during that year I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit in that basement hallway - dank, gray tile floor, cinder-block walls painted a faint green. I have this memory. I want to believe that one of my kids, Nick maybe, was playing it on the ghetto blaster on my desk. Oh I wanted to turn that thing as loud as I could. I wanted to be one of the kids. I wanted to celebrate hating all the crap that was school, especially when all that was loaded together like a bad seven layer salad in a religious school. 


To this day, at least once a semester I play Nevermind in my classes and every time the kids (most of them) recognize it and nod their heads, track after track. It may not be their style, but they understand and appreciate what's being said and done.


Whether you liked Nirvana then, or now, is not so much the point as that at that point in time a lot of us, young and not as young as we wish we were, felt like somebody got it, and we sang along (even if Kurt was daring us not to). The album was an observation, a complaint, a confession, and a dare. Does this sort of naked, open, and powerful art (yes, I'm calling it art) happen today? I know this kind of question is asked often, but I do wonder whether the media landscape is fertile to grow a singular piece of critical, artistic communication with nearly worldwide impact. When Nevermind was released they initially shipped 46,251 copies to American record stores, and 35,000 to the UK. Within a week they sold out and it took a while for the industry to create more copies for people to buy. This would not (could not?) happen today. In the face of that sort of delay, we'd all lose attention and click off to find something else. 


Yes, in many ways the artistic soil is so fertile now that many (any) things can and do grow. If you've tried to garden you know that fertile soil for your vegetables is also fertile soil for the weeds. Is anyone out there taking the time to weed the garden? What would it be like if albums like Nevermind, or The Joshua Tree, or Dark Side of the Moon, or Pet Sounds, or Revolver were released today? Who would notice? For how long? Radiohead seems like a reasonable contender, but even their albums don't create the sort of sustaining reverberations that big albums, albums we now think of as "important," used to, and continue to, make.


So can you name one album in the last ten years that has had the sort of widespread impact, for listeners and for fellow artists - that albums like these have had? PB can you make one? Please? In the meantime, help me understand what we're losing. Or maybe ... well ... nevermind.       

It cooled off today

So I took the day off from my labours, had breakfast with friends, wrote a portion of what may turn out to be a fine short story, and then set out on a 60 km bicycle ride.

Yesterday Andy Schleck rode 60 kms of the 18th leg of the Tour de France alone and out front to claw away at Voeckler's lead, and today he completed that task by placing fourth (in time at least) in the 19th stage, well ahead of Voeckler, to take the yellow jersey.

I, on the other hand, rode out onto the 421 heading east and expecting to ride toward the 75 and then to Emerson and onward, since Environment Canada (that all knowing better than stepping out the door and checking for yourself website) said the wind was NNE. Well I'm about to Sommerfeld, supposedly heading into the wind a bit, but I'm cruising at 35 k/h and the ditch grasses are waving with me. This wind's from the NW I say to myself, and since I prefer to ride into the wind first, and with it last, I turn around to head west and ride out toward Altona and then to Rosetown and onward.

Of course by the time I'm through Altona and nearly at the 306 (and I've been keeping a 34 k/h pace) I realize that I overplayed my hand again. Either the wind has shifted, or I've misread it, but I now know that I will have a 8 k run with the wind down the 306, and then I'll head into the wind (more or less) for the last 26 ks. Great.

I tell myself that I'm building strength and stamina. I tell myself that this is my HC climb at the end of the stage (Climbs in the Tour de France are designated on a scale of 4 with 4 being the least onerous, and 1 being the most difficult, and the HC climbs (Hors Categorie - that is "out-of-range difficult"), because of length, or grade, or both, or placement in the race (ie. a category 1 climb at the beginning of the race would be and HC climb if it was placed at the end of the race)). Still, the rewards for fighting a wind are so small: 1) being done; 2) beer (hopefully); 3) fitness (but that's almost mockery).

In this riding into the wind and shoveling dirt or gravel are not unlike one another. Need I say more? What reward is there in digging a sump hole to help manage the water that seems to want to collect around my garage? What reward is there in digging out limestone (that three years ago I intentionally put there) to replace it with clay so that the water drains away from the footing rather than collecting around it like it's a sink?

I've been keeping track of the Tour and watching as they wind through areas of France that I visited, or very near those parts. I want to go back and struggle up those hills and mountains to be rewarded by a great view and an exhilarating descent. But that will not be. I will be doing more riding into the wind this summer. I will also be doing more shoveling.

Yes. It cooled off today, and tomorrow it's supposed to rain.        

Bustin' concrete

Usually we've photo-documented some of the more momentous renos or changes we undertake. Today when F and I pounded and pried out the concrete from the garage and back work area, we dropped that ball. I do however, have a few pics of what it looks like afterward (which isn't really that interesting), and the tools we used to do it.

First off, we're breaking out these two 50 plus year old pads because they're terrible condition - cracked and heaved and uneven. Also, this winter the frost heaves were particularly pronounced, which effected the doors. It's become obvious that these pads need to be removed and one, in the garage, will be replaced. The other pad will be replaced by an independently floating wooden platform.

Both pads came out more easily then I'd anticipated. We used sledge hammers and a heavy, chisel-ended steel bar.

    

    

This steel bar is the best $41.50 I've ever spent! Once we'd cracked the concrete by pounding it with the sledge (we found that, consistently, if you pounded a slab in the centre of it 10 times, the cracks would spider out from that centre spot and then the whole pad would break apart) we were able to pound the chisel end of the bar into the cracks and pry the slab apart.

Then we'd load the chunks into the bucket of the tractor and cart it away to a pile where it will be picked up by a local backhoe operator. (Apparently there's high demand for broken up concrete to be used as fill.) We started at 9 and finished the garage by 12.

After a lunch of smokies and beer, we attacked the second pad in the back of the barn. Again, in 3 hours we had finished it, even though by the end we were quite spent. We toasted the day with a couple more beers and a pipe of tobacco. 

By the way, I'm also moving and rebuilding my workshop from this mess ...

... to this modular masterpiece (yet to be completed)!

No ride today, but I did work on my bike (It had developed an annoying creak during the ride to the WFF last Wednesday, and then the chain broke, which caused the rear derailleur to deflect into the wheel and break a spoke, which the fine folks of Olympia (through the support of the WFF) fixed at no cost while I was at the fest. It seems though that just about everything on the bike loosened up after the ride (I suspect she was a bit tired from the year of commuting) and the creaking just didn't stop (turns out I'd broken one cup in my bottom bracket too).).  I rode 23 ks of gravel and dirt roads yesterday on my crossbike, and the day before that I rode 58 ks on the road (the Rosetown loop).

I'll try to be more regular ... I'll try to do my best, but I may not.

 

Sacred and profane

It's 11:51 as I begin to write this, sitting beside Margaret, who lies and breathes and through her struggle illustrates our entanglement. We stay sometimes because we cannot leave. The world is, in fact, too much with us, and we, well, we are also too much with the world and though we might hope to let go without pain and discomfort, it may well be otherwise.

When my Mom died, I wasn't there. The night before, I had listened to her rattling rasping breaths, skin drawn back over her bones, and found perhaps that there was just too much to see and hear then. So I left. I had to work the next day. Since I could leave, I did, and took the call during the work day, that she'd passed.

That was 20 years ago and I don't trust my memory. My impressions are unclear, but for the vision of her gaunt face, mouth agape to draw in the air it could not refuse. We'd known by then, for a few months in fact, that she was no longer making conscious choices about living. Without her permission her body marched onward, obedient to some other force over which she no longer has control.

Now Margaret reprises that moment, and again this gives me pause. I am both in awe and in great fear of just this sort time in which, stripped of conscious volition, you may find yourself enslaved to a dance, a seeming propulsive whim, that demands you continue - that marionettes you. I'm showing my bias here, but I wonder what is sacred about this moment. To me, just now, it feels hopelessly profane.

The distinction is, of course, ours. We've parsed it out this way for some reason. Heaven and hell. Paradise and expulsion. Holy and earthly. We want, it seems, to declare our moments as one or the other, and in doing so we simultaneously create and avoid the gap, the ironic middle ground in which we actually live most of our days.

At risk of discomfort, it could not be more clear to me tonight that Margaret wishes for an end to her journey. She breathes because she must. Just as fitfully as I was two nights ago when, unable to sleep, I grumbled and threw back the covers, only to wrap myself in them again, sigh, and wait once again, restless in the face of my own haplessness. There was nothing to do but wait. Four hours. I recall the clock reading 3:48 and then it read 7:10. The hard evidence of a small reward.

Is it mean to think it? What will be the evidence? What the reward for the wait?

---

By 5 am Saturday Margaret could wait no longer. She headed off alone, though following a path that we all, single file (with or without looking back?) will follow. After we'd called the morticians, we sat with her body and cried and talked. I sang some songs with Dad. We talked some more. We had coffee and cinnamon buns. We made plans for the next few days.

Though thinking back on it, the spectre of her silent form in the room seems macabre, at the time it was not that strange. It became regular, in its own way. Initially Dad tried to get her mouth to close fully. He wept and caressed her face and told her that she finally had her wish - to go home - and then he gently pinched her lips together, as they were about half an inch apart, but to no avail.

We left her face uncovered as we waited. It never occurred to me, nor to anyone else, that we should do the "TV" thing and veil her. Over the course of the 6 hour wait it seemed to me that her lips did slowly move back together. Perhaps it was just the mechanics of rigor mortis. Perhaps it just took time for her spirit to fully exit.