Dumpster Driving

Over the past few days, I have been helping rearrange the offices on the fourth floor--the Penthouse. There was an embarrassment of musty, untouched papers to sort through, mostly long-retired records and false-starts at organization that were eventually folded. Quite a bit seemed to be folded projects, dox-matrix printer paper, bytes of data stored on 5 1/4" floppy disks that is irretrievable, and long-retired but sacrosanct archives. They say we are all immmortal, at least through our official signatures. It was interesting uncovering this palpimpsest, digging through archeologic tirades--that not much has changed in the interim. The lot of it, excepting the files I thought ought to be saved for the next junking expedition, was sorted and swept away. With this incidental garbage destined for the recycling bin, I wondered would future residents ever know that their busy work was nothing novel--that this or that scheme had been tried before, and it was just good job insurrance to forget. If everything in the government didn't change its name every few years, half the people in the government would not have anything to do. I tried to salvage a few choice information briefs that were eerie bits of presque vu. As I was toting the piles to their separate dumpsters, I remembered a rather depressing fact: the recycling process was much too materially intense to allow such mundane things as a plastic shopping bag be reborn as another shopping bag. Generally, plastic deterius was spun into fiber for cheap clothing and carpet, a steel chassis of an automobile paper-clips, and paper was pretty much only fit for mulching. Perhaps there was a security reason for these limitations of recycling. Office paper wasn't meant to be a slate for more of the same.

Nesting

Over the past week or so, the weather has taken a sharp turn brisker. People, especially at work since it seems to be socially acceptable common-currency (co-workers talk about stuff like the weather more when they feel compelled, I think, to wilt away from the latest buzz with politics and the economy) complain, and they complain as if the seasons are a brand new phenonmenon, instead of one of the oldest inevitabilities. Personally, I'm never quite prepared for it either and this summer left me asking, "Do we get another?" What surprises me, in addition to this collective amnesia, is how people don't seem to work up to the cold. Dressing in layers is important, but should happen gradually, like one of those nested Russian dolls in reverse. First one should begin with corduroy pants and a light jacket, making a gradual curve to scarves, hats and long underwear. The dreaded overcoat and chemical handwarmers are a last-resort and gauche before mid-January.

Rain Dance

I spoke to my mother, living in Texas, to see how she was weathering the latest spate of hurricanes. She was fine, however, the several evacuees from Galveston she was providing shelter were not. They had lost everything in Hurricane Ike, the storm ramming a ferry over the canal and down the block where they lived. My mother, who was incidentally in the process of selling her home and preparing to move to Europe, said that tensions were high amongst the evacuees, a pair of whom are a gay couple, kept in limbo with FEMA (the US Federal Emergency Management Agency) responses, having lost all their worldly goods--including a fantastic little antique shop. My mother made the real estate agents angry by stopping all viewings of the house, but she didn't want these people to feel more displaced than they already were. If I felt like a refugee, I think I might like to be put on display, tell potential buyers I had squatters' rights or was at least part of the furniture. Amid all the chaos, one partner kept his focus rapt on the television, hoping to see some footage, a fly-over shot--any thing more telling than the stock-scenes replayed of the surf lapping over the floodwalls, which seem more like metaphors (cut to windswept drapes, rather than the steamy bedroom scene) than pictures of a devastated town, or fibrously water-logged beach houses. What coverage the hurricane damage did manage to garner, though, seemed like a great understatement, an uncharacteristic glossing over, and generally made him feel worse. Maybe it's the louder blaring of world stock markets in turmoil, the contest for the US presidential election (which was magnanimously already put on hold once for a natural disaster), or the fact it is happening to my mother's friends, which make it seem as if not enough is being done or at least being said about Ike and Galveston. Could FEMA possibly still betray some embarrassment? Are the pictures and personal losses too horrible to see, especially for a public not only fatigued by bombardments of disaster but also fatigued by facetious shows of unity? My mother believes that the weather is controlled by Dick Cheney. Maybe someone should tell the candidate this is what the vice-president does all day.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

I said to H yesterday, "You know, they did catch some actual witches during those trials." I meditated quite a bit over this anniversary of a long global nightmare. It's tragic to realize that many, many people are willing to entertain the most specious of connections and shadows of evidence. Public security has been society's weal for quite some time, but that the average, good and reasonably circumspect person is willing to buy into this suspension of disbelief, like the rapt audience of an absurdist stage play, is astounding. In a few years Iraqis and other subversives may be blamed for a whole range of misfortunes from bad harvests to difficult births. I wonder if those witches were ever blamed for what they were actually at fault for, like for being easy targets, scapegoats, objects of mass-hysteria, distracting people from their true problems, or for not being real.