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he sweet spot of contact ted s poems are about what it feels like to be inside ted an amazing place no question posted by curtis faville at 7 04 am 1 comment sunday september 26 2010 epitaphs testaments the need to define the parameters of existence to put the stamp of finality on one s sense of the essence of human life to characterize the gist in a few carefully weighed sentences has always interested compilers of collections of quotations such compendiums are as often as not the repository of forgotten chestnuts either too familiar or too obscure to be compelling here are two such quotations each perhaps just a bit long to fit into the the typical brief homiletic formula but interesting nonetheless the first by william saroyan was the preface to his pulitzer prize winning play the time of your life 1939 saroyan famously turned down the pulitzer saying he thought that commerce should not infect creative arts in the time of your life in the time of your life live so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches seek goodness everywhere and when it is found bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed place in matter and in flesh the least of the values for these are the things that hold death and must pass away discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world ignore the obvious for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart be the inferior of no man or of any men be superior remember that every man is a variation of yourself no man s guilt is not yours nor is any man s innocence a thing apart despise evil and ungodliness but not men of ungodliness or evil these understand have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill kill and have no regret in the time of your life live so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it william saroyan 31 august 1908 18 may 1981 the statement is interesting for the somewhat politically incorrect sentiments it contains particularly the business about the taking of life americans are typically ambiguous about such matter of factness regarding violence and death our largely protestant secular culture urges peaceful resolution and humility in our relations but we ve fought our share of wars and have usually been able to reconcile our religious teachings with the call to duty still saroyan s comment doesn t limit the principle to war he clearly believes that there may be times when defending oneself or someone else killing is necessary or unavoidable robert traver the pen name of john d voelker wrote both fishing books and straight fiction a judge in private life he retired early on the strength of his earnings from his runaway bestseller anatomy of a murder 1958 which was made into a movie 1959 to spend more time fishing in the upper peninsula of michigan testament of a fisherman i fish because i love to because i love the environs where trout are found which are invariably beautiful and hate the environs where crowds of people are found which are invariably ugly because of all the television commercials cocktail parties and assorted social posturing i thus escape because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience because i suspect that men are going along this way for the last time and i for one don t want to waste the trip because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters because only in the woods can i find solitude without loneliness because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there because maybe one day i will catch a mermaid and finally not because i regard fishing as being so terribly important but because i suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant and not nearly so much fun john voelker robert traver june 19 1903 march 19 1991 because i share voelker s love of fishing this statement serves as a very useful kind of excuse for the pursuit of a pastime that may seem to the uninitiated to be an elegant way to waste one s time like golf or needlepoint the fatalistic pessimism i suspect that men are going along this way for the last time may seem like a bad beer commercial phrase out of context but the promotion of such virtues to which trout may respond quietude and humility and endless patience seems an expression of an admirable civility against the posturing and false importance of our daily commitments it always puts me in mind of the camaraderie which obtains among friends on the water in those still moments between the stirrings of interest or action when sportsmen feel that sense of liberation of feeling and surmise which characterize the relaxed mind posted by curtis faville at 2 08 pm 1 comment friday september 24 2010 more thoughts on internet identity one of the strangest things about the internet and blogging is its enormous reach and the personal vulnerability or nakedness of one s presence on it like all forms of media projection it facilitates the creation of a specific persona soon virtual visual interaction is coming allowing users to watch each other literally to look into each other s real physical space while spending time online whether or not people choose to allow this kind of exposure will depend upon a number of factors privacy as it has been thought of in the past will have to be revised we already know that much of the world is under continuous surveillance by cameras and hand held devices of various kinds as technology penetrates ever further into our personal space s we continue to lose privacy to lose the anonymous incognito physical sense of being inside our personal envelope secure secret contained the satellite mapping devices and street mounted address programs allow us to look at private addresses at street level and down upon neighborhoods throughout the world it occurred to me a few days ago that people i ve known throughout my life starting right out with my early childhood following me all along the roads and byways of my adulthood could all given a half way efficient computer and an internet connection see exactly what i m doing what i ve become and what i think it gave me pause perhaps unexpectedly i ve only been able to establish any kind of contact however brief with just a handful of these people that seems odd i was in a high school graduating class of over 500 it s true that i can only remember the names of perhaps 20 people on dead recall but i m sure i d be able to identify many many more if i saw their pictures with the names and yet they re hidden out there in the world many of them must be dead many have moved into remote parts of the globe many have fallen into obscure hopeless backwaters but many of them probably don t wish to revisit their pasts and even with the venues that now exist such as high school alumni websites their curiosity about the fates of those whom they started their lives with is simply absent either they don t want to evoke their past s or they re too embarrassed to expose themselves to view it s strange sometimes i catch myself thinking do i really want people to know this stuff about me maybe there s something exhibitionistic about it maybe it s a juvenile craving for bland forms of ersatz friendship and pointless contact yet the great majority of people i meet here are strangers people whom i will almost certainly never meet in person and whose lives will never intersect in any other way in any other place it s like having a wide correspondence with a regiment of aliens who are these people they re just like you and me or maybe not i always think of the phenomenon of my own birth as a combination of weird accidents the same could be said of most of our life contacts they re accidental in some small villages of the world the inhabitants may spend their whole lives in close proximity to just a handful of individuals many of whom are relatives in the modern world with its portability mobility anonymity loneliness disconnection the only glue that seems to keep people connected is family and even that frequently breaks down under the pressures of work dislocation and generational disapprobation i don t know where this is all leading am i looking for something here why do i write these brief essays and personal accounts who am i trying to reach who do i think cares about all this am i my only true audience posted by curtis faville at 7 29 pm 5 comments monday september 20 2010 the bicycle whence whither when i was a child growing up in the 1950 s most kids had bikes boys more than girls i suppose but any child who wanted one could get one i got my first bike for my 8th birthday a great big wide wheeled green monster with a beeping horn bell front and rear fenders a riding platform on the rear and a spring suspension on the front wheel it was pretty heavy we lived in the suburbs of a small northern california town napa and typically we were allowed to ride around in the neighborhood without supervision from a very early age and by the time i was 10 i was riding all over town on weekends or during the summer when i was 11 i took a job as a paper delivery boy 110 papers seven days a week roll em up and pedal around an eight block area that lasted four years and by the time i gave it up i was already in high school that was my first real job and it taught me a certain application and duty from an early age i think in some respects it might have been better if i had spent a little more time socializing and traveling in those years but we were so poor we could hardly have afforded much real recreation it was both a way of earning an allowance and of getting good regular exercise my heavily muscled thighs testify to that in those days the narrower wheeled schwinn bikes were a novelty eventually the wider wheeled bikes would disappear entirely only to be re introduced as trail bikes and off road wheelers later today there are many variations even fold up versions which commuters can carry onto trains or busses i mention this because bicycling seems more and more to be at issue today when i was a boy grown ups didn t generally ride bicycles in america bicycles were for kids almost no one rode bikes competitively or as a sophisticated recreation the way they do today people didn t commute on bikes bike racks were confined to school yards if you d suggested to either of my parents that they ride a bike they d have thought you were nuts but today bicycling is growing in popularity for a number of reasons automobiles have never been cheap and the price of operating a four wheeled vehicle is becoming comparatively inconvenient especially in bigger cities not least because of the cost and inconvenience of storage and temporary or longer term parking eastern seabord cities weren t originally laid out for motorized vehicular traffic lanes but have had to be adapted in the midwest and west most towns and cities grew up during the advent of cars and busses as well as rail and hence are in fact designed primarily for automobiles with the rise of two wheeled vehicle use natural conflicts of access and right of way have begun to occur in california where we live they ve begun to create bike lanes between the automobile lanes and sidewalks this has put additional pressure on parking in principle most people favor bicycling as an alternative to automobile usage since it s cheaper healthier cleaner and lest wasteful in europe and part of the third world bicycles are much more ubiquitous you can see the consequences of widely expanded bicycle use in places like india and china where the streets are clogged with them in cities where this occurs major safety and congestion issues have developed i m not sure why it should be but bicycling seems to encourage a flagrantly cavalier attitude towards rules of the road when i was a kid most people didn t get their bikes licensed and laws governing usage were typically ignored today in california helmets are required by law something we would have thought quite unnecessary in the 1950 s but today bicycle riding is serious business though as i say public opinion is generally in favor of encouraging cycling there are a number of problems associated with their increased usage and they re only going to get worse controversy has heated up over the last few years in west coast cities involving militant advocates of expanded bicycling lanes and bike parking in cities where parking has already become quite difficult further restrictions on automobile access and parking are regarded by the business community with a raised eyebrow american cities have been designed to accommodate movement primarily through automobile usage the american suburb paradigm was posited on the prevalence of the car attempts to force people out of their cars and into public transportation or onto the streets on foot have been largely unsuccessful inner city planning has misapprehended the european pedestrian model creating downtown wastelands in some cases where no one but bums and delinquents go to loiter or kill time the mercantile core of our cities was not helped by the design initiatives intended to revitalize our cities by forcing cars away from the city centres if anyone thought seriously about the actual effect that widespread adoption of the bicycle in american cities might have enthusiasm about the bike might be muted bicycles and automobiles sharing the same street is a recipe for problems the more bicycles there are per block the more dangerous things generally become on a typical day one may encounter a half dozen bicycles pedaling along the right hand edge of the road imagine what it might be like if that number were to increase a hundred fold navigation by bicycle is typically less controlled laterally than with cars and when several bikes are lined up they can effectively take over a lane then there s the matter of safety for each additional bike on the road the stakes go up many bikers seem to regard their unfettered right of way as a cardinal virtue mocking or sneering at traffic violating every principle of courtesy and every rule of the road most laws governing bicycle use are designed to protect the biker who is nakedly exposed to every kind of physical hazard with or without a helmet there is something about the casual recreational quality of bike use that encourages riders to think of biking irresponsibly i won t live to see the death of the automobile as we have come to know it but it seems safe to say that even with the tr...