Making a Belated Record of April Vacation



I had another vacation at the end of April. I did not actually do very much during it but due to my state of mind over the course of this past year it felt significant to me and I wanted to make a record of it. I will start by putting up a picture from just three summers ago (2015). While the location is not of particular relevance, this picture was taken in front of the at that time former country store in Grafton, Vermont, though it looked then as if someone were trying to get it up and running again. I don't think we have been back there since, though over the years we have probably gone there at least five times, as it is near our camp in Brattleboro. There is a small low tech, what I supposed could be called dusty nature museum there that we always visit, and that it is one of those places I think of fondly now...   

This is all sort of apropos of nothing, however, the point of the picture is to see how little everyone still is just three years ago. They all really were children. The two older boys are definitely not children anymore, at least not like they are here. So that is a significant change. And of course I feel that I have departed a certain phase of life since then and entered a new one that, to be blunt, seems even less personally exciting than the previous ones seemed to be. Three years ago I was 45, but how young 45 seems compared to 48! At 45, especially if you have not had any indications of real physical decline set in yet, you can sort of persuade yourself that you still have more than half of your life remaining to you, during which you are somehow going to feel more or less the same, energy and health-wise, as you always have. At least I did, which obviously was insane, though I guess I can console myself that I made it to nearly fifty feeling relatively youthful. Up until four or five years ago as well a few reasonably attractive women in their thirties would still, if not exactly be flirtatious with me, at least give me cause to wonder whether they had some inclination to be so. But even this kind of supremely mild speculation of possible sexual tension seems to be over now. Especially when I am out with my youngest daughter, women increasingly ask me if I am the grandfather now. So I am experiencing a lot of ambivalence and distaste as I go through this adjustment.

On the first activity day of this vacation I loaded my children in the car and drove an hour north to Lincoln, New Hampshire, the gateway to the Kancamagus Highway and the White Mountains. The main destination of this trip was a thrift shop in a shopping center along the main strip, which I had alighted on during one of my internet search games, but after going to that we were free to improvise. The thrift shop visit was a success. I did not find anything for myself but several of the children were able to leave with presents, for a total cost of under $15. Unfortunately I neglected to take any pictures there. We proceeded thence to the White Mountains Visitors Center, newly re-opened for the season. I have to confess that I love Visitors Centers, and always try to find an excuse to stop in them when I can. It's the idea of having arrived at the destination but not having yet plunged into the experience, but being in a limbo between anticipating the experience and having any part of it behind you. So I love that sense of having momentarily suspended time, even if all I am doing is the most mundane activity such as going to the bathroom or drinking water...

Needless to say the picture above is at the White Mountains Visitor Center, which I consider a superior representative of the species. There are numerous appealing visuals and displays, nostalgic touches, a large 3-d relief map set out on a table. The bathrooms are calm, quiet, and reminiscent of the past. I wish I could find a tavern that worked for me half so well.    

From the town of Lincoln we drove a mile or two into the White Mountains National Forest and pulled into a parking area. As one of the children refused to leave the car we were unable to walk anywhere where we would have lost sight of the parking lot. Despite the still profuse amount of snow cover it was 60 degrees on the day we were there. Most of April was still essentially winter this year where I live as well. I'm still not entirely caught up on my heating bills and it is nearly July.   

Though it does not look it, this is very close to the parking lot. Even for just a few minutes, it was good for me to be out in this beautiful country and air after the long winter with all of its obligations and other problems. 

The view from the bridge pictured below. It is a sad truth that I only live an hour away from this place yet I usually only make it up there maybe three times a year, and most of those for rather short and haphazard visits. I just have too many other things to do. It's madness, really. I think it is peak madness right now and for the next couple of years, perhaps, but who can say I will ever have the time for slower and more contemplative days of travel in a state of comparative health again?

Some of the children on the bridge. My son is wearing the hat he got at Fenway Park. We had already gone to a game there about a week before this outing (baseball season starts early in New England). It was my first time ever going there as well. I had previously been to baseball games at Veterans Stadium (Philadelphia), and the old Memorial Stadium and the then new Camden Yards in Baltimore. I also went to a football game at RFK Stadium in Washington once. This is my sum experience of famous baseball and football stadiums. 

The next day we headed to Vermont, stopping along the way to climb a small hill with a view of Lake Sunapee. As you can see the snow was melted here. This first "hike" of the year was about 1/2 a mile up a paved trail. As we grow more numerous (and temperamental) our walking is becoming less ambitious, I am sad to say.

View of the still slightly iced lake with the ski slopes of the mountain resort visible as well. I don't know what the children make of "views". I assume it makes some impression on them.

On the third day we are finally arrived in Brattleboro. It rained all day, so we went into town. I went to the used book store (not pictured) to pick up a book that I had been monitoring for 15 years because it was finally coming up on my reading list, and it was no longer there! After this disappointment we went to a restaurant on Main Street that was vaguely hipsterish I guess. The people in it looked like they had all spent a lot of time in modern liberal colleges and other strongly left-leaning environments. I really have not, so I find this atmosphere somewhat stimulating because I feel like something of the social life I never had could have been found among this class of people even if I have trouble understanding a lot of the driving passion and motivation behind this type of education and political position. The sandwiches were of the artisan bagel variety, with an underground selection of juices and other drinks. We had to mix and match quite a bit to satisfy everybody. Someone's sandwich was loaded with sweet potato which no one, including me, could get down. In the end I think we ended up sharing two or three egg oriented concoctions.

After the restaurant we went bowling, which took us quite away from the degreed lefty crowd (though we once went to a bowling alley in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that seemed to have quite a few people there who were something of a variation, and overall a more attractive one, of this type, appearing more affluent and less socially sour than the standard version. Don't ask me to explain how they came to be bowling). 

When I looked at this rather melancholy sight outside the bowling alley, the phrase "the era of big parking lots is over" popped into my head. The mountain visible in the background is in New Hampshire, on the other side of the Connecticut River, which would be barely 200 yards away.

On the fourth day we went to Deerfield in Massachusetts, which is about a 40 minute drive from Brattleboro. We had gone there before to visit the Yankee Candle world headquarters and superstore, but this was our first time going to the historic village, which consists of around ten or fifteen preserved houses dating from the 1700s, some of which are furnished in period style, others of which hold special collections such as furniture or silver pieces, or have craft demonstrations. This is the sort of thing we used to do a lot before there were so many of us and it became both expensive and difficult to appeal to so many varied interest levels. However I wanted to have one outing of this type during the vacation and this is one of the places out that I have long had an interest in going to, so we took the plunge. It cost $61 for all of us to get in, which is not too bad. The guides at the various houses, who looked to be retirees and who are almost certainly volunteers, were very good. Personable human guides are a commodity and attraction in themselves in today's world.

The picture above by the way is of the town's Civil War monument--every village and town and city in New England has one--with one of the old buildings of the Deerfield Academy prep school in the background. 

Still in the center of the village, turned 90 degrees from the view in the previous picture. I think this is the Unitarian church. The Unitarians of course were very prominent in these old well-educated Massachusetts towns. Beautiful New England sky as well. I believe this was around April 26th, and still no leaves visible. 

The two older boys, not exactly mesmerized by the history or other circumstances of the village, but the assumption is that exposure to the general atmosphere will leave some kind of impression that produces a jolt of recognition or insight in later life. 

There were too many of us to even contemplate taking lunch at the historic Deerfield Inn, which seems to have been the only restaurant in the village, but the museum shop had a little sort of tea room, pictured here with its pretty windows and curtains, where you could get a muffin and a drink.

A little footpath through some of the local farmland as well as the playing fields of the Deerfield Academy down to the river.

The whole group spent about 20 minutes hanging out and exploring the river. At this point my camera (actually my phone) ran out of picture space. This is an ongoing problem for me when I go out, since it seems like I have to delete 20 pictures to clear out enough space to take three. 

This is back in Vermont. The two girls who have so many good qualities we don't even have to talk about them make some homemade pizza.

Here they are standing outside the then still-covered pool, which is open now. We were even in it the other day (June 17-18th) when it was 93 degrees.

This picture is from Easter. The building blocked by my head is the New Hampshire State House. I'm still getting used to my sudden transition to looking old. I do think I look like someone who in a past age might have been a writer or local intellectual of some kind, at least in this photo.

I probably shouldn't put up so many pictures of the girls, but, on the other hand, the years go by fast and one forgets. I have a decent little archive of pictures on here for the last ten years or so, many of which commemorate times that are especially meaningful to me.

Daisy scout uniform. These two are my fifth and sixth children, and a lot of environmentalists and other sour people are pretty open in their belief that they shouldn't exist, but while acknowledging that every child is a gift from God and without praising my own children too effusively, because you never know how things are going to turn out, I suspect in the overall balance of human society and civilization they are going to be overwhelmingly positive additions.

Little DIppers and Other Songs

Another 1950s-ish pop instrumental that I have lately stumbled upon. This footage appears to have been shot somewhere in our mountainous Northeast. The people in it, if they are still alive, would be around 80 years old now. Some of the girls are admittedly goofy-looking, but a few of them are quite lovely, though one wonders whether they ever really knew it (or maybe they were progressive enough that they didn't care). I am still kind of depressed but I think I am slowly coming out of it. My wife indulged my low feelings for a couple of months as a common side effect of going under anesthesia and some other reasons, but at a certain point in March she said it was time to snap out of it, at least around other people. So I am doing much better compared to what I was feeling in January and February, and I don't feel right now like I am going to die or become incapacitated within the next couple of years at least, so I am going to try to be in a good mood during this time now and enjoy living, especially since I really don't have any terrible problems. I have the usual problems people in my position have, many of which are only "problems" as far as you choose to regard them as such. You must excuse me, this is my pep talk to myself to project more joie de vivre. I'm becoming more attached to church and related events as a sort of comfort. Yet what do I need comforting for? While I am increasingly appealing to supernatural powers to help me, none of my wishes are for particularly spiritual or noble or disinterested things. When I recall the past my major regrets are still not that I was a better person, but rather that I wish I had been more successful at being somewhat immoral. But I am finding the rituals and trappings of religious practice to be more and more essential to my psychic well-being.



I still think of this as a "new" song, but it is from 2001. This is a very cheerful video. I don't know much about the people in this group, but I like their faces, which is something that I am not often struck by. The video is full of good faces, actually, which the world seems to be sorely in need of. Even though this band was quite popular in the late 90s/early 00s, I haven't found any other songs of theirs that I like.


There are times, often provoked by some pop culture artifact, when the 80s feel as remote, or even more so, in time to me than the 60s or even the later 50s do. Perhaps this is because I do not have actual real life memories of the 60s so that there is no sense for me of that time being lost, as it has always been lost. Or perhaps it is because so many of the familiar songs and images from that period are still ubiquitous enough that they seem to exist on some kind of continuum in the lives of many of us into the present, having never exactly gone away. One is unsure. However, this song does not have the same kind of life independent of their time I don't think, and even in its hour was only a hit among a much smaller segment of the population than most famous songs are. I don't know where this was filmed--it appears to be a Mediterranean locale, but in which country even I cannot pin down--but it is a quintessentially 80s vision of travel, that due to all of the changes we are all aware of, including the eclipse of exclusive Euro-American economic domination, can never be recaptured. It still very much informs my ideas when I dream about traveling however.
 
One of my missions in the upcoming months is to become familiar with more jazz, at least the more famous artists and pieces. I usually like it when I hear it in a restaurant or on a film soundtrack, but I haven't followed up. For one thing, as here, the individual cuts tend to be pretty long, and I am somewhat harried for time. But there is a spirit in it that I often like, so I have to try to carve out a space to immerse myself in some of this. This piece of course working off of the familiar Rogers and Hammerstein tune is a good starting point for me and my particular needs. These are not the greater society's needs and they certainly aren't any artist's needs, but I am fully outside of all of those kinds of discussions now for my own purposes. But I am out of time and this needs to go up now...

Life With Six Children

This is supposed to be my monthly update, but I am going to continue on with a post I was already working on about having so many children. I've really been a basket case lately. Very sad all the time, overwhelmed with nostalgia, fear, anxiety. I suppose some of it can be laid on seasonal mood disorder, which has really begun to effect me in recent years, and some of it on the circumstance that I haven't felt that great since December when I had my kidney stone, but in truth a great deal of it is because I am really very happy, and I am suddenly overcome with terror that it is slipping away and that all these disasters are going to befall me, mostly financial in origin, but also now health-wise, that are going to rob me of my happy life with my children. Of course to some extent I have always felt this way. Looking back at 2005, or 2006 when I started this blog, I thought myself fairly plagued by misery, yet now I think of those years as an impossibly happy and simple time, the golden years of my life. But I was very fearful of the future then as well, I never imagined I would have made it to at least 2018 without some catastrophe befalling me from which I would not be able to recover.


Part of this melancholy is tied up with my second son's finishing 8th grade this year. 8th grade seems to be a big milestone for me, I was also quite overwrought two years ago when my oldest son finished that year. Of course I am deeply moved at seeing them grow up, and also these schools, and paying for them, consume so much of your energy, they become your whole life almost. But I still have four more children to go, including a just-turned-three-year-old who hasn't started preschool yet. My life is hardly over. But the older ones do take me back to when I was younger and more energetic, and it's sad to see them get big. They are very unsentimental about these things themselves though. For people who only have one or two children, every grade they complete, every sport they finish playing or toy they outgrow, that's it, the end, forever. It must be unbearable. Or maybe they have ordinary adult lives and hobbies to return to or continue with. I really don't after 15 years of having babies in the house.


I am even sad that technological changes have made the tapes and DVDs that my older children watched obsolete. The younger ones watch everything through streaming.


One downside of having six children without being extremely wealthy is that I am probably not going to be able to leave them very much, and since I had them mostly later in life, I will likely die when the younger ones are still in their 30s and 40s at best. So they'll be on their own, which in today's world is a scary prospect. However, I still do believe, largely because I have to, that our culture and economic arrangements are going to improve from the near-dystopia that they are today. I would feel guilty about having brought them into the world only to doom them to a wretched, hopeless existence. But I don't think they feel that way yet, or have occasion to, though neither do I and I often do anyway.


When I hear people saying they don't want to have any children because of concern for the environment I think that they must really be hammering this into people's brains in college, and that it's too bad. The world, or at least my part of it, desperately needs young people, especially smart ones. The rapid aging of the population while the number of people under 30 or even 40 continues to shrink is really becoming visible in New England. My children and their sports and activities are probably keeping me from descending into total existential despair.


I could write so many more things here, and maybe I will sometime, but I determined that when I reached my time limit, I would publish what I have, so here it is.  

Off-Topic

This is something I was going to post on Facebook within the last couple of weeks, but I didn't do it because the people I am aiming such posts at and the people who actually read and comment on my posts there most of the time are (mostly) not the same people, and I didn't think the latter group was likely to get my point the way I wanted it to be gotten. But I still want to write the thought down, so why not do it here, where I need content and where I have no real idea who, if anyone is likely to see it:


So the other day I finished reading the second volume of Knausgaard, and in the spirit of that book I thought I should take a similarly honest appraisal of the essential banality of my ordinary thought and activity. As most people have probably noticed, the last year has not been a very happy one on Facebook most of the time, particularly for those of us whose friend base is 98% affiliated with the Democratic Party (I have only two friends out of 133 who openly supported the Republicans in the elections last year--ed.). Most of the time nowadays I wonder why I even bother looking in. When I tried to think of what in the last year had given me the most happiness on Facebook it had nothing to do with people who had performed virtuous or courageous or defiant acts or who were defending truth and speaking it to power in the current age of lies, of course not, it was discovering that people who I have always thought of, and still do, as attractive, cool, and successful to a degree that I have never been able to attain go camping with their families in the summertime, and appear to enjoy it and think it a fine way to travel. I don't think anything else could have done so much to help in improving my own attitude towards camping, which had been largely negative and reluctant, only undertaken on my part because I am so desperate to go anywhere sometimes that I will even agree to sleep on the ground in the middle of the woods miles from the nearest town if that is the only option. But being able to see that certain people of the sort that I imagined myself being excluded from the company and atmosphere of by going camping camp themselves is the sort of thing that makes me keep checking in. I would have hated to have missed that.


I'm glad I did not actually write this. This is a good example of why I don't have any real-life friends with whom I have serious conversations. I cannot form a coherent thought without working through it first for several weeks, let alone trying to say anything in real time. I appear to have no idea what I think about anything, or even why I like something if I am overcome with genuine pleasure, though this is not exactly true. I simply have no idea how to say it unaffectedly in a way that would be socially acceptable or that I would not be embarrassed by.


The internal debate I had over this half-baked paragraph took place before I found out that another one of my classmates (aged 45) had died suddenly. These (and there have been quite of them, considering what I take to be our relatively young age as far as dying is concerned) are always shocking to some degree, since so far they almost all happen out of the blue, but this one was especially shocking. I am of course interested in knowing about what happens to all of the people I used to know, even tangentially (though this particular person I knew somewhat more than tangentially) and something like Facebook is good for that, I suppose. I am increasingly cognizant now of having most of my life behind me, and that probably even most of the trips and drives and outings and ice cream stops with my children are in the past, though I do still have a two year old. However, my energy as far as organizing and carrying out these activities on a regular basis seems to have declined noticeably in the last couple of years, though the desire to do them is still there. You see, I am talking about myself again instead of the person who has died, but it is hard to say anything at the time, I was even like this when my grandparents died, the real meaning of their absence, what they really were, the kinds of things that went out of my life or were not said or thought anymore when they died did not really become clear until they had been gone for a while.

Olympics Wrap-Up (Disclaimer: Has Lots of Babe Pictures)

Needless to say, I have been dabbling with this article for several weeks. I have continued on with it since I hate to throw anything away, though I don't really have anything to say about this year's Olympics. It was looking for a while like I might be getting a new computer, probably a laptop, that would just be mine, mainly for trying to keep this blog somewhat up to date. However my son was starting high school and we had to get one for him, since apparently it is impossible to function in high school now without a computer. Then my seven year old spilled juice or iced tea on his mother's laptop. Being a professional, she needs one for work, so we had to replace that. Maybe next year.


In spite of all the brilliant points that are constantly made against it, I remain an Olympics fan, and if anything am becoming more of one as I get older. It is cheering to see so many healthy and flourishing young people gathered in one place. Sadly, this too is, or has become, a rare spectacle in most of actual life outside of certain exclusive and expensive locales, the goings-on in which are not usually televised. I didn't get to see a lot of the Games because I work in the evenings and am generally busy during the day, and I also went on a three day vacation over the middle weekend. So I mostly caught the late night coverage, which was mildly festive, though it only gave a taste of what was going on. I saw no wrestling, or weightlifting, or boxing, or modern pentathlon, or other of the traditional Olympic sports that contribute to the grandeur of the event. I ended up seeing what seemed like mostly volleyball, both of the indoor and beach variety, and diving, as well as track and swimming heats and a few replayed highlights. Apart from a few of the classic events I don't care too much about the results or even the competition. I like the idea of Being that is embedded in the Olympics. Since I am so swamped with children and keeping my life in semblance of order I do not go out very much--I have never been to a steakhouse, for example, or a winery, and I haven't gone to a bar or hotel that any educated adult would find mildly exciting or interesting in years. I've noted here several times that I have not flown on an airplane since 2001. So the Olympics on television gives something of an opportunity to vicariously immerse oneself in that kind of elite life, being part travel video, part collegiate atmosphere (or post-collegiate, given that the typical age of participants seems to be going up; on several occasions I heard a competitor described as being "only" twenty-five, which during the era of the amateur ideal would have been considered about the upper limit for Olympic participation in most cases). It is tiring to always feel. or be, completely out of place everywhere that is semi-desirable, not counting one's own home of course.




I don't have enough moral indignation on one side or the other to weigh in much on the various "controversies" that arose during the games. I admit that I kind of liked Ryan Lochte. He doesn't appear to be terribly smart, but I like that he is open about his desire to enjoy his life and have fun, of course while still managing to be good at something. Is he a jerk? Probably, in the sense that a lot of cool people come off as jerks to those not as socially blessed. I will concede that he may be a little too old to be vandalizing gas stations. I probably did or took part in something somewhat similar on at least one occasion (as Lochte attempted to explain, with little avail, when you are very intoxicated it is hard to remember the details), though I was probably more like 22 than 32. This theme of the older, or professional Olympian I will be returning to later.




The controversy of the (possibly) intersex 800 runners running as women, particularly Castor Semenya, was arousing the ire of progressives in my Facebook feed to the point that people were announcing the throwing of symbolic bleach in the face of intrepid commentators who merely indicated that they were entertaining the possibility that there might be a legitimate cause for the controversy, without committing themselves to the position that there was one. (The bleach throwers were not my friends though it was one of those threads you can see anyway. I can't figure out who one of the people is, though I must know her, since she is friends with all the people I knew at school. People who are that insanely progressive always hated me from the start for being so insipidly normal and morally limited. However I am beginning to think we are getting to that part of the revolution where the left begins to devour its own. People are beginning to demand behaviors and submissions and ideological adherences that normal people who want to live in any kind of reasonable human society will not be able to accept). I admit I don't have a strong opinion on this with regard to the competition. I gather they did away with the old sex testing for too high testosterone levels, and no one has made the argument I don't think that these runners are in fact men, so it appears legitimate for them to compete in the women's race. Of course their hormonal composition seems to give them a huge advantage over more traditionally distinct women, not that physical disparities and advantages are not endemic to sports competitions at all levels in the first place. If the question is whether the scale for who is a "woman" and who isn't for Olympic purposes needs to be narrowed (again), I don't know. But other people know (do they ever).  However, if I had to rule, I would say that besides that the world isn't moving in that direction anyway (banning people from competitions for things which are not their fault), it should not be, unless the testosterone levels involved are outliers to such an alarming extent compared with even regular world class female athletes that it is unreasonable to claim that the competition as a women's competition is any longer meaningful. Got that?


What else was there? Hope Solo? I don't have anything constructive to say about her. I actually like meanness to an extent, but maybe she is overindulged. There was some other scandal but I don't remember what it was already.




I didn't get to see too many finals in the Track and Field, other than the last weekend. Among the men I missed all of Bolt's races, except for the relay. Also the 400 and 800, which seem to have been exciting races. I did see the relays, the 1500, which, incredibly, an American won for the first time since 1908, albeit in an extremely slow race, and the marathon, which being traditionally the last event, or at least held on the last day, I always find to be stirring. I don't think I saw any women's finals other than the relays and the 5,000 meters.

Dafne Schippers, the World's fastest white girl (5th in the 100, Silver Medal in the 200). Yes, I am terrible for even taking note of these things, but hey, besides being fast she is pretty cute too.




In laying out a sort of outline for this post I had this section labeled 'Intro to babe talk'. This is the part where I discuss certain women of the games who caught my attention for reasons only tangentially related to their performances. This is a little bit frustrating since one only sees a fraction of the participants, many of the events require equipment or move too rapidly or involve teams that make it difficult to identify or focus on anyone long enough (and I don't need much time) to identify them as a television romantic interest. Thus athletes in a handful of drawn out individual events are at a distinct advantage, which, liking to be as thorough as possible, is unsatisfying to me.


If anyone considers this a somehow inappropriate objectification of women, I just can't care. Man cannot live on feminist manifestos alone. It is too great a pleasure to see healthy, athletic and for the most part attractive young women, especially when one lives in a social environment that is largely devoid of them.




Though I still consider beach volleyball to be something of a sham event and am annoyed that it gets so much television coverage, especially in the late night hours when I am able to watch it, it did provide me with my primary Olympic crush, Isabelle Forrer, a 34 year-old Swiss player. When her team was eliminated in the round of sixteen I felt her absence so keenly that I took to following her on Twitter (by the way, if you want to follow me on Twitter, my address is @Michael29024447. I only have 27 followers and feel that I deserve more. Not a lot more, but some more. I do not tweet very often, admittedly, only around 180 in four years). She mostly tweets in German about all the volleyball tournaments she goes to. Her physical beauty is augmented by a soulful and mature European demeanor that the Olympics ideally were at one time intended to showcase. Doubtless she knows numerous culturally important languages, knows how to eat, is at home in all the great cities, etc, etc.

Isabelle Forrer a little glammed and cheesecaked-up. I wouldn't say that she does not photograph well, but I couldn't find any photographs that precisely captured the quality that catapulted her to such a prominent position in this article.






As the Olympics wound down in the second week I became so desperate to find someone to fixate on before the show ended that I developed interest in the 38 year-old ex-diver turned commentator Laura Wilkinson, who won a gold medal in Sydney in 2000 and finished in 2004. She is (and always was) mildly goofy-looking, and she was, I thought, a pretty bad commentator, but I supposed the circumstance that she looked into and spoke at the camera like a Montessori preschool teacher fascinated me, since it was such a contrast with the rest of the announcing team. Laura W. is from Texas and is a devout Christian who is into saving children and things like that, which sounds like the kind of person I would zero in on to try to hook up with (hopelessly) at the final party at the end of the school year or some other cathartic event. I looked at her Twitter account but decided I couldn't stomach following her.

Laura Wilkinson, probably in much younger days.

Here is the more recent mom version.


This is a 21 year-old American diver named Kassidy Cook. This is the kind of person one probably needs to be able to hook up with if one wants to ever do so successfully and manfully with all of these more complicated and mature women, though I doubt they realize as much. They may be the culmination, but culmination requires groundwork.

She is another Stanford person though(!)

This one really takes the cake.




Last but not least there was a swimmer named Maya Dirado from Stanford who was getting a rather inordinate amount of attention because she was retiring from swimming after the Olympics to begin working as an analyst for the McKinsey consulting company in Atlanta. She was not a particular love interest of mine, though of course she was intelligent and personable and seemed a lot older than the other twenty three year-olds. Here are a few of her California/Napa Valley wedding pictures which include, presumably, friends of hers from Stanford or that milieu. These people are all like gods, especially when combined with the setting:

I mean, for real. I had seen more in the same vein before, but I can't find them now.


This was of interest to me because it seemed like there was a big deal made about the job, and the retirement from sports competition. Of course, this was in contrast to many of the other athletes who seem to be hanging on to the sports into their thirties because they don't know what else to do with themselves or there isn't anything out there for them. And these are young people who have a lot going for them and have the experience of years of dedicated serious training and the absorption of instruction from world class adult mentors. You would think this would translate long term to adult success, however one wants to define that, though work in a field that pays respectably is a part of that in most cases. I didn't really get across what I wanted to here, but it's a complicated subject and I've been working on this post for how long? Maya Dirado may have started her job by now.

Buffalo Wild Wings

While I do for the most part lead a comparatively retired life in a dusty old house among dusty old books and shabby and mildewed old tables and cabinets, I still like to drop in once in a while--usually it ends up being quite a long while--at some loud, brassy modern barroom with a hundred gigantic televisions, video game consoles on the tables, frat party music pumping through the restroom, and cute young waitresses. I had forgotten to do this for several years until I was in the grocery store a few weeks ago and saw one such attractive woman** there who was wearing a Buffalo Wild Wings work shirt, at which the thought occurred to me that perhaps I ought to go there sometime. Of course I have long given up entertaining any thoughts of having any meaningful interactions even with women my own age, but for all that I am still biologically somewhat alive, and it still affects my spirits positively to see a few attractive women* on occasion, maybe (of course?) especially ones whose own spirits don't appear to be weighed down yet by children or bitter experience or the other cares of deep maturity***.

I found that I enjoyed indulging, for a little bit, in the overwhelming stimulation of the televisions, almost all of which were turned to sports stations. I have not had cable TV for years, and I have never owned a giant flat screen television, so the immensity of the picture and the scope of modern media coverage of sports are amazing spectacles for me to behold. I was especially drawn to the NFL Networks replaying of the previous week's games in 30 minute condensations. That would have seemed like Elysium to me as a ten year old. Once in a while I will sit down to watch a little bit of a football game at home, but my wife, who hated football long before it was fashionable, can only endure about a half an hour of this before some crisis or theretofore unsuspected (by me) necessary household project is found to exist which necessitates leaving off the game. Shortly after we were married my wife actually began taking down one of the walls of the living room in the middle of the NFC championship game--this had been planned, but it hadn't occurred to me that the demolition could, or would, begin during the game. This was what a football coach would call 'setting the tone' in the marriage. In truth the games are too long for any new age husband and father to reasonably give up more than a couple of Sunday afternoons for in a year, and those only if the weather is too bad to do anything outside. So I am not very attuned to the ethos of the man-cave lifestyle that is supposedly prominent in current society.

The food was not very good, which if I noticed it means it must have been beyond terrible. I know that refined opinion holds that all these kinds of places are atrocities against human culture, but usually I am either so hungry or otherwise stimulated that the awfulness does not make a pronounced impression on me (also I have no real idea what good food in the United States is supposed to taste like, or where to consistently go to get it,**** but that is another article). The excessive saltiness really did strike me this time, however. I think it is more that I am getting older and need less salt and am more sensitive to it. So I doubt I will go back there very often, if at all, but...it is one of those places, contrived and phony, though not wholly ineffective, that holds out some kind of tantalizing promise that Fun really does exist, and that maybe you, or somebody anyway, could have it at Buffalo Wild Wings. They won't discourage you from pretending or imagining it to be the case, anyway.

As a case in point with regard to this, when I was in the restroom I saw a truly awesome poster the absurdity of which made me nearly double over with laughter at the time, and caused me to suppress chuckles throughout the rest of the day. Here it is:

The humor of course lies in the fact that the guy in the picture is experiencing a level of ecstasy at indulging in the Tuesday night beer and chicken deals at Buffalo Wild Wings that no one ever experiences in real life. People are not this ecstatic when they win Olympic gold medals or Nobel Prizes. Maybe some men are this ecstatic if they get somewhere with a woman a level or more of desirability higher than they really merit, but this almost never happens. Maybe desperate authors and academics who land a publisher or tenure track position feel something like this, but the glory they feel may be more delusional than that brought upon by the arrival of the basket of hot wings. Top line rock stars are never this ecstatic; nor are even second rank rock stars. John Tesh is said to get pumped in this way during a concert, but I cannot find any photographic proof even of that.

So I think the poster is kind of genius. It sums up what all ordinary--i.e. non-cool--men deep down want their night at their bar to feel like, and that they imagine must be what they would feel if they could suddenly transform into a cool guy--and makes them believe what ordinary bars are too real and honest to pretend, that this feeling is what they are selling, and that it truly can be bought. Of course I know it cannot really be bought. Or can it, provided one is emotionally shallow enough?

* I know that in much of the country the waitresses at these kinds of establishments tend towards a more extreme bimboish or sorority girl model that is beyond what a person like me could really relate to. However that extreme type doesn't really exist in New Hampshire, and the women at the place I went to were quite normal-looking, young and thin and with regularly proportioned bodies, this being really almost the whole source of their attractiveness, as they were otherwise almost entirely normal in their appearance.

**I did not see the person from the grocery store on the day that I went to the restaurant. She was probably slightly prettier than the ones who were there, but really as I say they were all of a very similar type and the overall effect was little less pleasing.

***It is telling how pitiful the state of modern manhood that I seem to be experiencing this as some kind of revelation. Of course I always have imagined it must be so in theory, but have had vanishingly fewer and fewer occasions to test it in practice.

****I have always wondered about whether the women frequenting and working at vegan and other alternative/new age establishments would be of the sort to provoke this mood boost in me. The problem is, I either really can't abide the food at all (veganism) or don't have the habits/rhythms/ sense of purpose to effectively hang around trendy coffee shops or those arty/organic/raw milk anti-mainstream America type restaurants. Yet I still believe this is where my natural crowd and all the friends I should have in life are really to be found.

Report on Trip to Annapolis Last Weekend

I'm sure you're all dying to read this.

This was another reunion, twenty years out of college. For historical comparison, here is my write-up on the last one, five years ago. I am always happy to be there, though as always the place is too easy on me. The harshest thing anyone said the whole time was that smoking a cigar gave me an appearance of gravitas that I otherwise lacked. No one said out loud what I am always looking for them to say, which are things like, "Why are you here? Why were you ever allowed into this school in the first place? Have you no shame? Have we no shame that we continue to tolerate you in our presence? etc, etc", though surely someone in the administration of the college at least must think this when they see me or any other comparatively sorry graduate, of which our school appears to have at least its fair share. But I really was glad to be back in that environment, with its relaxing of the most humorless and unforgiving standards which govern most of polite society, even though it was only for a couple of short days. I was also happy to see more or less all of my old schoolmates, as was everyone else, though of course by our last couple of years there everyone was either tired of each other or, if not, had long given up hope of getting to better know the people they were not tired of and still had some interest in getting to know. But enough of the introduction. Here is the raw experience:

The Journey Down (And Back)

This used to be as big a highlight as actually getting there, but this is the first time I can recall going on a long trip where I could feel the ravages of age really affecting me. My usual plan is that I leave on Thursday after school and drive to Philadelphia, where my mother lives, inevitably getting there about 2 a.m., then I leave there around noon on Friday, usually rolling into Annapolis shortly before four, though on paper the drive should only take about two and a half hours. Then I stay over Friday and Saturday nights and, after the farewell brunch on Sunday, go the whole long way home. This time this regimen really wore me out, and even though it is now the following Thursday, I have still not caught up on my sleep, my laundry, the dishes, the lawn, and so on. I also developed some kind of infection or something the day I left which still hasn't gone away. I have had it before--it seems to have at this point an 8-10 month recurrence, during which it lasts for two or three weeks and then goes away again--but I don't like it. It made driving very unpleasant. I did not think I was particularly anxious leading into the trip--this condition always seems to rear its head at times when I am experiencing anxiety, though at that point the condition causes more anxiety than whatever it was that may have been bothering me before. I also did not have much of an appetite over the whole course of the trip. Usually a big part of the fun for me is stopping in at restaurants and so on along the way, but I was not up for any of that this time. My mother made me sandwiches when I was at her house (I also stopped in on the way back to pick up a few articles of furniture, that have also not been properly dealt with yet back at home), and I just nibbled on those when I got hungry. I did not actually buy any food in the entire four days (though I had paid for the Saturday dinner at school ahead of time). I had breakfast at my hotel and otherwise just sampled whatever snacks or hors d'oeuvres happened to be put out at the various functions I attended. My appetite has picked up a little since I got back home, though it is still not what it usually is.

Book Stores. I went into a couple of bookstores on Saturday, one a used shop in the village near the campus, and the other the college bookshop itself. In both instances I felt oddly overwhelmed by the actual books and quickly abandoned looking into any of them, though I did hang around the school shop for a little while fingering t-shirts and mugs and doing some surreptitious people-watching. I think it must have been the general social agitation that the weekend induced, because this does not usually happen to me on the rare occasions when I go to such places in New England. Of course in New England these kinds of stores tend to be in old barns or large Victorian houses and tend both to be more spacious and have numerous rooms or divisions of shelves laid out in labyrinth-like designs. Being a somewhat large person, still more tall than fat, I think, but carrying more than 200 pounds, I have always needed a good deal of room and privacy in order to read or even flip through books comfortably, neither of which the Annapolis stores provided. The used store actually looked pretty good, and they had quite a few of the books on one of my older reading lists that have fallen out of regular print, though I didn't get any of them.

Other People's Anxiety. I was surprised by the number of people at the reunion who (undramatically) admitted to being anxious beforehand, especially as these confessors included several people whom I anticipated as being more likely to be the cause of anxiety for others than to be afflicted by it themselves.I did not hear anyone elaborating in great detail about the particulars of their anxiety, but I found it interesting, and kind of comforting, that they found themselves able to say it in the natural flow of conversation and sense that the people they were talking to would know what they were talking about. This seems like a simple thing, but it bespeaks a level of unconscious intimacy that is hard to replicate with people one meets after age 25 or so.

House Tour. I went to visit the Hammond-Harwood house, which some people consider to be the purest expression of classical Georgian architecture in the entire United States, on Saturday afternoon. As I have begun reading more about old houses and the colonial era and those sorts of studies, Annapolis, which among other things has more preserved 18th century houses than any city in the country, keeps turning up, and I have had to admit a keen embarrassment at not having paid attention to this all during the nearly six years that I lived there. The Hammond-Harwood house especially, which is on Maryland Avenue and across the street from the Chase-Lloyd House, another massive colonial era pile occupying the better part of a city block, I must have walked past at least a hundred times, or fifty times anyway without stopping to take a look at it, or even noticing it. I know my thought deigned very little in those years to wander anywhere too far from the inside of my own head, sparsely furnished though that space was, but this defies belief. The docent properly chastised me the way I wish the St John's people would when I told him I had gone there but had never been over to see the house. The tour was very thorough and informative and had much of interest to look at. Near the end I could feel my agitation rearing its head though I cannot imagine for what cause. There was plenty of time left in the day. Under normal circumstances, where, however, I had nothing else to look forward to other than perhaps dinner, I would have felt the tour to be excellent, and the high point of the day.

There were several St John's connections with this famous house. The college actually bought the house at auction in 1924 when the last of the spinster descendants of the Harwood family passed on without any heirs. There was some daring involved, as a rumor had started that Henry Ford was interested in buying the house, taking it down, and re-assembling it at his Greenfield Village museum in Michigan, and the town fathers of Annapolis, not wanting this to happen, supposedly gave Henry the wrong time for the auction so that he missed it. Given that he was one of the most powerful people in the country at the time, it seems like if he had been really angry, that could have been the end for little old St John's. The college ran the house as a museum until 1932, when the Depression forced them to close it. In 1940, by which time the Great Books braintrust was running the school, and evidently seeing no use for maintaining a closed up Georgian mansion (though it would certainly seem to have potential for parties and other great social events) they sold it to the commission that still owns it today. The house also had on display several music and architecture books that had been lent or given to it from the college's collection.

Assessment of My Own Weekend. It was pretty good. I talked a little, with a greater variety of people than I usually do. I would still have liked to have talked more. I did wander off a few times for long periods and skip certain events because I am conscious of being a large presence that is often something of a void, and I wanted to give people a break from this, forgetting that the duration of the entire event is about 42 hours and then they don't have to see me again for 5 years. Even the most social people scarcely get to talk to everyone. I felt less of a barrier between myself and many people than I have felt in the past, which is good, but of course there is still, compared to others, more of this than I would prefer in a ideal world.

Moving the Blog Due to Malware Invasion

I have set up a new site, at iwillembracereality.blogspot.com, due to this one's having been invaded by Malware, which I have no idea how to get rid of, and don't really have the time to learn.

I suppose if this page becomes well again I can move back. Think of the archives here that will be lost.

I am hoping the new site will have some effect of unclouding my brain, which of late has become almost paralyzed with regard to writing, or even thinking. I don't know what can be done about it. The following was the entirety of my saved work for the week before the Malware crisis erupted:

My mind is so unlucid. It is maybe the greatest disappointment of my entire life.

I need to tell a story. I need to get back to stories.

I have never had a good sense of what the consensus is on this question.

Hopefully any regular readers can find their way over to the new postings.

What I Did Today

The details are mostly family stuff, surprise, surprise. I woke up at 8:23. My daughter, evidently worn out from our outing to Quechee Gorge on Sunday, slept late. The air was getting more humid. Some children and their mother were coming over at one o'clock, so the primary activity of the day would be cleaning.

I had a mini bagel and an English muffin. I must improve my breakfasts, eat less bread. When school starts and everyone is out of the house I will try to become organized in this. Weighed 223 lbs today. This is the least I have been in several years, mostly I have run 225-230 and last year I got as high as 235 at which point I reluctantly gave up soda. Am now on a pendulum from 220-225. I am 6'3", so I would probably look good at 210 or 215, not that anyone cares, but it is a game.

Put away laundry, did dishes, cut grass, did various other tasks. Not really worth having people come to the house, requires hours and hours of preparation. Topics of thought included wondering why so many hip-pish, modern educated people like Nate Silver--his analyses strike me as soulless and not very interesting--topics for blog posts, trying to determine if I held actual opinions about anything, or if I had been reduced to mere feeling, the usual thoughts about whether I could ever have been a professional/had the potential to have a lot of money doing anything. It seems less and less possible that I could have done it as the years go by, the knowledge and development required seem to have to be poured into the brain in its formative stages.

The guests arrived. I was unshowered and dirty, excused myself. Had a roast beef, swiss cheese and mayonnaise sandwich on a bulky roll, and a glass of orange juice. No mail came. Took daughter up to play in hot attic. Looked around at neglected objects, thought of taking pictures and making a facebook album about them.

Went to work. For dinner had lemon haddock and spinach, with a cup of Buffalo chicken soup, from which I had to extract at least 15 carrots. Work was dull, and my brain largely rotted. Did manage to read 23 pages of Emerson's Journals in slow moments. Enjoying better than other Emerson I have read, though the sense that any of it is meaningful is intermittent, as is the case with most of life (the format did inspire this post though). Wrote this post. Going to store to buy milk, then home. May watch last 45 minutes of a film and read a little before bed. Probably more of the same tomorrow, though I need a haircut.

Polishing Up a Little the Post That I Was Bogged Down On Before I Went On Vacation

(I am still going to be effectively retired however)

...for "Religious Views" I wrote "I should have been a Catholic but society has convinced me that I am a nihilist and will never be embedded in the body of a living church." I know it is fashionable to think for yourself and not submit to the influence of mainstream opinion, and I did try to convince myself I could overcome it if I had inner resources enough; but I did not...

...for "Political Views" I wrote "1940s-1960s soft socialist. I do not want to kill business and industry entirely, but yes, I would like them subjected to some restraint, as I do not think the culture and mindset that their current extreme dominance encourages is having a good effect on the character and spirit of the populace." Maybe I don't have political views. I don't like my role, the way I fit in in this society as presently organized, or my lack of inner resources, so I suppose I seek a political solution for it, which solution, however, possibly not existing, cannot therefore be considered a political view.

Do I ever worry about how I will pay for my children to go to college? Surpisingly, not much. Mainly I suspect because I don't have, or anticipate having, enough spare money that I stand to be relieved of in its entirety. Those are the people who are the most obsessed about paying for college, the ones who would be able, or perceived to be able, to fork over a substantial pile of cash which would, however, demolish their ability to do lots of other nice things. I am not even in this category, so much so that a great many of these decisions are in effect taken out of my hands. Am I embarrassed or uncomfortable that my children will almost certainly have to apply for financial aid, even for a state school?--New Hampshire's state universities are the most expensive for residents I believe of any in the country, with the other New England states right behind them. For myself, yes, a little, especially as the good schools seem to me to increasingly act as if they are at least mildly irritated with people whose parents are supposedly educated but can't afford their tuition and come cap in hand begging for at least a partial handout for their (probably) similarly mediocre children. And I tell myself that if, when the time comes, I believe that any of my children are not legitimate university material who would be using resources and taking up slots that could be given to more promising candidates, it will be my duty to be somewhat frank with them about their intellectual limitations and discuss other avenues they might pursue, not that I know what any of these might be either. Of course it is also hard to see this as being the case, since I am still at a place in the world where pretty much everybody manages to go to some college, and most of them go to ones that, if not global powers, are fairly legitimate, or at least old, and would be recognizable to most of the general public for their sports teams if not their academics. I can see through the wonder of Facebook that in several families of my old connection that I considered to be non-academic and even mildly hostile to book-learning all of the children have gone to college, usually to a place I think of as not being terrible (though in the photos they put up the students don't look like they ever do things like read Proust or anthropology or physics books for pleasure--however, this is an entirely prejudicial judgement on my part and anyway it is beside the point). All of this makes it difficult to imagine at this time that my own children would not be able to go to some halfway respectable college, assuming they wanted to do so, because I was totally incapable of paying for it. I suppose there are a lot of people who are genuinely in the top 10-15% of academic intelligence being shut out of college due to the cost; but I have to say I am not really seeing it much in the environment I move in.

I'm not big on telling people that they have to study a certain subject, other than that it has some tradition or basis that compels some sense of weightiness and of elevation. I still certainly consider the arts and humanities, if taught and studied seriously, to possess these qualities as much as the hard sciences for most purposes of attaining wisdom and competence in leading life. I would be delighted for my children to take up any noble subject if they were able to do well in it...

Deep Adulthood (Warning: Major Midlife Crisis Post)

It took a while, but most people my age seem within the last couple of years--around attaining the age of 40--to have finally entered the realm of consciousness that impresses itself on me as Deep Adulthood. In certain of these instances such frivolities and other immature tendencies as may have lingered into the middle and even later thirties have all of a sudden, if not disappeared, become far less pronounced or significant as characteristics than they were formerly. This effect is most pronounced in women who both work and have children and men who have very serious jobs, though it is discernible in most people who occupy a position in which a plausible degree of responsibility for the maintenance and functioning of society is implied.

Needless to say I have not attained, as an overall character, to this state of being. I might not even have noticed this if my circumstances frequently put me in social settings with other middle-aged child-men or women, but they do not, and my complete inability to sit with the grown-ups and talk about the business/ career landscape, real estate and home maintenance, the various abilities and excellences and successes I am inculcating and spurring in my children, and the like, is becoming even more conspicuous than it already was. In my formative years I doggedly dedicated myself to avoiding most of the experiences and challenges that lead people to this character in middle age, both because I lacked the wherewithal at the time to begin combating with them effectively, and also because I was certain I was 'above' needing to cultivate such qualities. This is how such people as I am, who intuitively seem inexplicable, can come to exist.

(My 'b' and 'm' keys are sticking, so that hitting 'b' usually either results in nothing or 'bbbb' and I have to go back and make a correction in either case. This is also causing me to be extra irritable).

For educational purposes, the following are some the major avoidances I made in the past to arrive at my present state:

1. Failure to assert any positive or strong character in my natural/childhood family (i.e., parents, siblings and other near blood relatives). I have opted instead since the age of 16 on to keep distant from them as much as possible. The problem is not that I did this, but that it originated out of a consciousness of weakness and inability to thrive in my native surroundings rather than strength or superiority. I thought that over time events would mitigate this impression of weakness and reveal the truth to have been, if not other than this, than at least more complicated than what it seemed. But this has not occurred. Probably it never does.

2. Resisting all training and other practical education. I don't know why I could never commit to this or focus in on anything I might be able to do. I don't want to give the lie that I was any kind of swaggering rebel, but it is true that I never ingratiated myself with my teachers and bosses or anybody else likely to be a mentor because I was lazy, sullen, lacked personable qualities, and had nothing interesting to say to anybody. Consequently I had no leads to getting on any kind of interesting career track. Obviously I was warned about  this, but it made little impression on me, or I interpreted it as somehow hostile to my amour-propre. It is true that the options usually presented to me as realistic were never very appealing, so it was easier to brush them aside.

3.  Avoidance/inability of dealing with competent/demanding men. This is probably the biggest and most damning one. In my 20s I was so ill-equipped, and even ashamed, to contend with serious men, especially where the work world was concerned that I evidently decided that I just couldn't do it at the time--because I was an artist, or something--took a job where essentially everyone else was female, and figured I could work through my issues by reading more, or something. This problem never quite resolved itself, though various developments seem to have worked somewhat in my favor to enable me in the ensuing years to pass as not quite so obviously execrable. First, and this is no small matter, the dramatic, and frankly shocking, increase in sad-sack males in the population since 1997 has made everyone who is not utterly wretched look less bad than they in fact are. Similarly, the ongoing recession and employment crisis since 2008 have I think made most people, men in particular, somewhat more forgiving of people in low and unexciting professions, especially if these have been able to stay off public assistance, primarily due to terror that they (the judgers) could find themselves in a similar position. Also my wife and children give me a certain amount of credibility as a real person that I lacked as a 25 year old. I could probably handle the screaming and cursing and personal criticism of a more manly work environment better now than I could have then; but I still don't have any of the kind of hard skills that would make other men like me, or that would allow me to ever rise much above the bottom of the organization. The main appeal I can make at this point is something like, 'I've proven over time that I'm not a complete fuckup,' which is at least more than I could have persuasively said 20 years ago.

I was going to tell a couple of stories to illustrate where mistakes were made in developing my character but they are rather involved and I am on the eighth day of this post and need to wrap it up tonight so I am going to skip them.

4. There is a scene in The Best Years of Our Lives which as I grow older becomes much more damning and devastating to me. Peggy (Teresa Wright, the dead actress that I have a crush on almost as if she were a real person), is defending the guy she's in love with, Fred (played by Dana Andrews), who at the time is working as a soda jerk at the drug store, saying something like (I can't find either a video or transcript of the scene right offhand) "He won't be satisfied with working at the soda fountain all his life' delivered with the unstated but utter assurance that of course she would never tolerate such low ambition, and that Fred surely knows and expects this. It actually is hard for me to watch this scene now. Of course we don't know how the future plays out in the movie, nor, it should be added, did the filmmakers know that in 1946. However, now that we have nearly 70 years of intervening American social and economic history to guide us, I think we can safely project that: I. Peggy will be a good wife. II. Assuming Fred does not become an abusive alcoholic who becomes incapable of holding a job, enough opportunities should be opening up within a few years that he should easily be able to support a family and raise his social status, make his wife proud and maybe even earn the respect of his in-laws. He has a chance anyway.

Seeing as it's Valentine's Day, I think I ought to send out a few Valentines:

Oh, Dianne. You are slaying me, girl. The Lennon Sisters might not be Tiger Mother types when it comes to academic prowess, but I bet they don't have much tolerance for blatant underachievement either. Especially Dianne.

Eyds.

Yes, you too.



Sybil Seely!

And Sybil Seely taking a bath! Oh my God.