I can always find a way to make it worse

Someone once said "Honesty is the best policy." Someone did not include "all the time" in the statement. I believe Someone was right in this omission. It is not always best to be honest. Take the following two recent (oh so very recent) situations and help me judge how Someone would have implemented that sage advice:

Situation 1

Having completed a grand run of preparation and presentation of a great high school musical, we the directors sat together to write thank yous to our cast and crew. We would each write a paragraph or so. Our observations and thanks would complement one another. We would say good things. As I began to write in the second card I paused and turned to my colleague and said: "Should we be worried that they might share what we write to them, with the other cast and crew?" She responded that she hadn't thought about it till just then. She smiled and shrugged, and went back to writing. I took that as a firm "Good question, but I don't have a good answer." So I forgot my concern and went on writing. I was honest most times. Sometimes I was a bit enthusiastic, to be encouraging, but mostly I was honest. I felt good about the process as we handed out the cards.

Of course they compared notes! What was I thinking?! And in one case it turned into a good-natured, but potentially intense exchange (that turned out really well and I thank the good graces and maturity of the two people involved). Nevertheless, honesty, or even the appearance of honesty, doesn't always make things best. Unless we need to clarify how we understand "best" in this, and every other context, it's reasonable to say that there will be times when your honest opinion is going to make things harder for you, and may in fact be destructive to the recipient of your honest talk.

Situation 2

Sitting around a table with friends that we haven't sat around the table with for a long time. The conversation moves along nicely. We catch up. At some point one of those tickety books finds its way onto the table. You know, the ones that are raffles for one community cause or another, and one of you gets stuck with selling them, or just straight up buying the whole book yourself to avoid the social discomfort. (Does anyone actually enjoy selling these things? Who comes up with these plans to raise funds? Do they like to sell these things? Why do we do things like this that most (I think I could say "all," but I won't) of us really don't feel comfortable doing?) As I say, the booklet is on the table, with several tickets already purchased. I see it. I say to myself, I'm going to assume it's not there, until someone makes it clear that to me that the thing in fact exists.

For the first half of the evening this works. But at the halfway point, the intermission, the owner of the booklet does the deed. He even prefaces his pitch with a disclaimer. Something like, "Well here we are, and I won't take it the wrong way if you don't say yes, but ..." Then he launches into the spiel, and it becomes clear that, although the prize being raffled is not insignificant, it's nothing that I'm interested in, and the cause is too close and personal for the seller to have enough distance to actually mean "I won't take it the wrong way." He would. In so many ways. So I bought a ticket.

It cleaned out my wallet to buy that ticket. I'm no widow. I've got more mites in my bank account. It's not that big a deal, but you know that if honesty were the best policy I'd have called him on it right there and said, "What do you mean you won't take it the wrong way if I don't say yes?"

And what good would it have done? Of course if I wasn't feeling a bit strapped these days, the wallet-cleaning would not have been much of an issue. The issue is, I think, that mostly what's best, if you want to avoid discomfort, is to lie. I should have said I didn't have any cash on me. I should have assumed that anything written will be read. In fact I probably should not be writing this right now.

You've got my back right? True dat.

Ride report

in: -15'C wind NNE 10 ks

out: -8'C wind N 10 ks

Out of obligation

Or was it a sense of failure that made him write the letter? He dove into it anyway.

It went like this:

Dear friend,

I hear from friends of yours that you're still trying to get by. You're still in school. You're still doing all sorts of stuff that won't do you any good though, because you know it and I know it that there's not much point in being enrolled in a school if you're not actually interested in going to school.

I've seen your facebook page. Sure I'm your friend there. Who isn't? So I thought I had permission, you know, to look at your photos. Your wall. Your messages. Whatever I could. Some people call this creeping. That makes it sound so sad. So silly. But you should know that I'm doing this because I care. What's a friend if he doesn't care?

Do you understand that I can't read what you write there, on your wall, for every one of the 345 friends of us to see, without wondering "Why did she write that?" Without wondering whether it makes any sense at all? Without wondering if you thought about who might read and get the wrong impression?

The other day you wrote on your wall:

I'm sipping a mocha latte half caffe at the corner 2nd Cup on Edmonton missing u. They're playing 'Funeral' - Band of Horses. What to do? - posted from my Blackberry

I couldn't make it out. There's talk of hipsters. Blackberries and iPhones. Why do you say these things to all of us? Who is u? Why is the music selection the establishment's shuffle music machine has chosen significant? What if every 2nd Cup establishment in all of North America was on the same system? What if they were all playing "Funeral" by Band of Horses at the same time (taking into account the different time zones). What if some other depressed student is listening to "Funeral" at 3359 Mississauga Road North, in Mississauga (obviously), and texting the same dreary half dark, half white, half sweet version of their ennui? Or someone in the 48 Kenmount Road location, in St. Johns, Newfoundland?

What if it's everywhere? What if you're everywhere? You and your alienation. You and your tinny blue cry for attention on that painfully obviously named social network. You and your 345 friends.

I know I know, this isn't helping. It's not lifting you up. But what would do that for you? I've read your posts before. I've seen the photos of you on the deck of that cruise ship with your mom, all smiles and happiness, drink in hand and the sun's glare in your eyes - in the glint of your glasses. Is there only more to drink? Is there only one more holiday? Is there only the next trip to the doctor? Are you ever going to finish that paper? Will you ever actually try to adapt to the professor, rather than expecting her to change for you? Will you ever stand on your own?

Okay. Maybe that's taking things too far. Maybe ...

He had to stop for a moment. He scrolled up to the top of the letter. Reread a few lines. Winced on occasion. But mostly thought he was on the mark. He was hitting his stride. He would be heard, maybe even understood. So he went back at it.

... when you noted the song that was playing was "Funeral" you even knew the words. Some of us know the words too! Don't you think you're responsible for that? You asked us what to do? Well? Is this some kind of hint?

I'm coming up only to hold you under
I'm coming up only to show you wrong

Yeah, you're right. I'm taking this too seriously. It's really only my loss. I don't have to follow you like a friend. I don't have to care. Frankly, the way you keep throwing it around, I don't know what to care for? Do you see that? Do you see that by calling me a friend you've made me something I may not be able to be, when you give me such crappy information? Do you see that when you call me a friend, and then let 345 other versions of me see all the same photos and read all the same messages, that maybe that means that none of us are friends. You know. In that, Hey-how's-it-going-let's-sit-down-and-talk kind of way?

I'm assuming you were in that 2nd Cup alone when you posted from your Blackberry. Or if a real live person friend was there, then I assume you had to stop talking with him or her long enough to post that on your Blackberry. I hope he wasn't saying anything, you know, interesting, or important. I hope he didn't get the wrong impression when you stopped talking and used both your hands (thumbs a'flicking! above or below the table?) to tell the world about your misgivings. I hope they weren't singing that line about waiting for the funeral.

Nah, I didn't think so.

Yours truly,

Your Friend

He pushed away from the keyboard then, and scrolled up and down again. He read and reread. He saved the file under a name he would recognize later, in a new folder named "correspondence with friends". Would it be bravery to print it? To fold the paper in half, and then again into three panels, and fit it into a standard friendly letter envelope? Would it be courageous to stand in line at the post office behind the 80-year-olds who send and expect nothing less? Would it be extravagant to buy a stamp? To find the right mailing address? To drop it in the box? To wait?

Ride report

in: -26'C wind NNW 18 ks

out: -22'C wind NNW 13 ks

Liminal

What's the deal with the word "liminal" these days?

It's a stripped down version "subliminal?"

What is subliminal is just beneath the threshold of consciousness or awareness.

What is liminal is that which lies just above the threshold of what is conscious; that which is in between.

At work there's a colleague who's used it at least once a week.

I just read it in a critical piece on the Shinto motifs in Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

I feel liminal.

Who doesn't?

What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. (Hamlet 3.1)

I learned on Saturday, from someone who knows more about old cars than I do, that by the late 20s they did use keys to lock vehicles and to turn them on, even if they didn't have electric starter motors to turn the engines over. So my complaint in my last post about the '27 Henney Hearse is to be disregarded. This fact does not erase for me, however, the sense that Get Low lacked narrative coherence and was at times anachronistic in its sensibilities. But I'm feeling liminal about that issue now. That is I am just far enough above the threshold of caring to mention it, but that's about it.

Further, it's 11:32 PM and I'm about to cross the threshold from weekend to week - the liminal hour. Here we go.

Get Low

Some movies have all the promise in the world, but then you find that they let you down. They get lower than they should. They get let down by something. I'm going to say it's laziness or a lack of funds, and ignorance. Why else would waste the efforts of Robert Duvall and Bill Murray?

The movie's premise intrigues the viewer. There's a hermit with a gun yelling and shooting at kids who throw stones and break his windows. He catches one and the kid pukes. So he lets the kid go. Perfect. He's a scary dude, but he's not a bad dude. Obviously this scraggly-bearded hermit dude is tortured. Why else would he live alone? We guess that all this torture has to do with the opening scene of a house in the woods in flames, and someone escaping via a second-storey window, in flames themselves. They run away, still in flames. They run past us, the guys with the movie camera, still in flames. Cut to scene with kids throwing rocks through windows. Next hermit dude heads into town on his wagon, being towed by his mule, to figure some things out. We reckon that the scene is set in the 1920s. In the American mid-West. He goes to the church of course. The minister is courteous, but not interested in the hermit's proposal to have a funeral before he's dead. The hermit says he wants to hear the stories that people have about him. He says he wants to hear them while he's still alive. The minister thinks this is disingenuous. The hermit thinks the minister is full of, and proud of, his own shit. The hermit leaves. When he gets to his wagon and unhitches the mule, people watch and whisper. One town idiot with a big mouth yells out. Tells him the whole town knows all about him, and he throws a few stones at the hermit to make sure he gets his attention. The hermit dude says, "What?" and plays possum long enough for the idiot stone-thrower to walk over to the seeming frail old man, who sets about kicking the poor young idiot's ass with a stick he pulls out of the back of the wagon. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. There are cliches at work here. A lot of them. And Duvall makes them worth watching. And then when Bill Murray shows up as the desperate and moderately greedy undertaker willing to make the Felix the hermit's funeral wishes come true, the story takes yet another positive turn. But two positive turns do not put it in the right direction. You know that if you're shooting a rifle, you don't have to miss the mark by much to miss, period.

Can you write a nostalgic period piece morality play, if you don't care about the simple details enough to get them dead right? It's little things that set me off. That make me think that someone's not paying enough attention. For instance. The funeral director (the aging, jaded, Chicagoan) and his man (a young family man with a boy-child and a cute, but firm, wife) drive a 1927 Henney Hearse. Beautiful. At one point the man is going to set off to ameliorate the wily and miffed hermit. The man needs the hearse to drive there. He says so. The funeral tosses him the keys, just like Dad might toss the keys to his own boy, and the man drives off in the hearse. Except that keyed ignitions weren't common until 1949 when Chrysler made them common. I did not know that this was the history of keyed starters, but it just felt wrong when the old guy tosses the keys to the young guy. It felt like the director was trying to tell us something about the relationship, but he was using a language that wasn't in sync with the times. So it just didn't ring true to me.

When these sorts of minor misses occur, I get edgy about what big misses might be in the air too. I get edgy because the director (and maybe the writer too), in a period piece, needs to get it right, or he might be better off setting the story in a time he knows, and he will get it right. Why worry, you ask? Because sloppiness begets sloppiness. The plausibility of a whole community's inability to understand the cause of a 40 year self-exile - after a housefire in which said hermit's lover and husband die - seems far-fetched. In fact it borders on ridiculous that the dead-in-flames lover's sister (who was also a former lover of hermit Felix), Maddy, played by Sissy Spacek, greets her sister's former lover, the hermit Felix, with warm regard after 40 years of not knowing where he'd gone to. But this is all played straight, and we're to take it as likely that she would be cordial, even winsome, when she sees the old man again. It's inconsistent and, by the end, awkward and maudlin.

Duvall, however, is great to watch. The redemption of the film is that I can aspire to age and wear my stiffness like he does. He's proud and competent, and will not be undone by his body. Oh to grow old and have your mind be your strongest asset. For that hope, Duvall offers an inspired performance. Besides that, Get Low, doesn't quite get it right.

Ride report

in: -16'c wind NW 30ks

out: - 8 wind NW 25ks

Winning and other evils

What a night. What a night.

We exchange singles. Twice.

We take two in the fifth.

We give up two in the sixth.

We take five in the seventh!

It's over! 9 to 4 after the seventh end.

We go on to the next round.

We're in for another swing.

I was telling my therapist about it, and he downplayed it. He said, Don't take that winning too seriously or you'll get cocky and then you'll come down hard. He said, Don't let it get to your head. He said, You could as easily lose the next time, as win. He said, You're getting old man, you gotta take what comes, but don't take more than that.

I don't trust those therapist guys. They're like the Good Angel in Faustus's ear. They want to hold you back. They want what's "best" for you. What a load of hooey.

Dennis listens to his Good Angel, so he heads home to be with Ang. Seems reasonable I guess. Chris listens to his Good Angel too, and heads over to watch the Aces lose. I listen to my Evil Angel and stay in the club for two, but it's tough being a winner all alone. So I end up heading over to catch the last five minutes of the Aces season. Sorry boys.

Ride report

in: -16'C wind 10ks SE

out: -8'C wind 4ks SE

Sharpening

It was the kid's third comb this week. You know, one of those old style combs you might use to slick back your hair with brylcreem, back in the 50s. He loved those movies. Rebel without a Cause. American Graffiti. Giant. It was a comb with a long handle. It was a Goody comb. It was black, and now he stood, at the back of the room, at the pencil sharpener, sharpening that comb handle, while the other kids worked on their math.

He had a plan for the sharpened comb. The other two had been experiments. He'd stuck them into things until they broke. The first one he stuck into cardboard: one layer, then two, then three. It failed at five. It didn't break so much as bend and lose its strength. The shank of it showed the telltale whitening of structural stress. So the kid bought another one, and sharpened it, during English.

The second one the kid took home and stuck into his cat. He could do this because the kid's cat trusted him. Didn't think that betrayal was in the air. He could do this because he didn't really like the cat, but he was good at making the cat think he did, which said something about the kid's ability to act. The cat lived. The comb pierced its hide just below the rib cage because it sensed, too late, that something was up, and managed to take off before the plastic spear entered more than half an inch.

The kid got a feel for it though - what it felt like to stick something living. And that was enough. Now he would do it. Within the next three days. The kid could feel it. The question he asked himself was whether he could do it and not get caught, that is, make it seem innocent. An accident.

One thing the kid had going for him was that everyone thought he was honest. Honest and innocent. You see, the kid was small. Short, I mean. Which lent to his relative obscurity. When he sharpened the third comb during math class, the sharpener was a bit high for him and he had to stand on his toes to get enough leverage to get the handle going fast enough to make the tip sharp and to keep the plastic from fraying and fuzzing too much. For the kid wanted it sharp, he wanted it sturdy, and it needed to be sleek. He wanted it to keep sliding in when he pushed it.

The kid knew that when it happened it would happen so fast that the comb would have to be perfect. The kid also had two more in his pockets that were blunt. These were the decoys. This was part of the plan. He'd been combing his hair with the combs for the past few weeks. At first the other kids thought it was weird, and they told him so. Then some of them said it was cool too.

So by the time he stabbed Bobby Bueckert in the eye with it, everyone thought that Bobby just hadn't been watching. That the kid hadn't either. That he'd been combing his hair back with those crazy long handled combs he'd been using for the past few weeks, and somebody's eye socket got in the way. The sharpened comb never entered Bobby's brain, but they had to put a glass eye in his left socket before he came back to school.

That was the next school year though. By then the kid had moved on to pencils. He'd rub the eraser down to the metal and start sharpening that cylinder, on the desk legs, his zipper, anything that rasped.

Ride report

in: -26'C wind WNW 30ks (flatted on mile three; repaired it at June's)

out: -16'C wind SSE 25ks

127 Speeches

In both cases, the focus of 127 Hours and The King's Speech seemed to me, on the surface, uncinematic. I could imagine them on the stage - monologue heavy with interior moments and long digressions - but really doesn't stuff have to happen to make a movie work? To further complicate things, both films are biopics. They both make us believe the outcome could be tragic, but we already know better. One man loses his forearm but gains his life, the other loses his uncertainty and gains the crown. So why are they popular films? Why do these stories, fully spoiled by our real life knowledge of them, succeed in making us keep watching?

Is it vulnerability? Both Ralston and Bertie hide themselves when they look at you the first time. Whether it's the facade of careless youth, or the shield of temerity, they won't let us inside. When Ralston meets two female hikers and playfully shows them around the canyon, he appears impermeable to their sexuality, and one girl says to the other as he leaves (after they've invited him to their Scooby-Doo party back in town) that their time together probably won't even register as an event in his day. Similarly Bertie stomps out of the room when Logue, his prospective speech therapist presumes to speak to him as an equal, a friend.

What we are offered is the steady peeling away of mask and armour, but this does not happen easily. Fate works here, and if you call it providence then you believe in trial by fire. Whether you step on a rock that you thought was firm, or hope that a brother will step up when called upon, you should be prepared to be disappointed. And then you should be prepared to step up yourself.

I think we're nostalgic, in a strange way, for the kinds of uncompromising situations in which these two men find themselves. We watch them because we want to believe that if we were in those same situations, sawing at a forearm with a dull knock-off leatherman, or staring through a microphone at the English-speaking world on the brink of war, we too would do what was required. We would be measured well.

For we, today, studiously make a point of safety-zoning ourselves away from the very risks and challenges that might make us better, even great. So rather we settle for watching these men who, in fact, find themselves through the kinds of trials that we would either shirk, or regulate away. We will watch these movies. We will watch these men triumph. And we will do it as we sit on our couches, and eat chips. We may wish we were them but, we're not.

Snow day today! Big wind kicked up at about 4:30 AM and kept blowing snow around until just about noon. If there'd have been school I would have ridden in, I think ...