'You Have to Think Like a Pilot.'

When I started this blog, my reasons were:
a) people told me to do it ('people' also told me I should get married, and we know how that went);
b) I figured it would be a good exercise in discipline (it wasn't);
c) it seemed like a better, more socially-sensitive outlet for my tirades than foisting long ranting emails about pepper grinders in the shape of roosters on people who just wanted to know if I wanted to get some dinner Thursday. (Success!)

And with some generous periods of silence, I've managed fairly frequently to write at least something. Which I think is good and proves I should be doing this or, minimally, that however crap whatever it is I'm going on about at any given time is, I have sufficient motivation to go on about it, and in this forum, rather than face-to-face, in a journal, through email, or by stealing a megaphone and standing outside yelling about poor taste in front of terrifyingly misconceived subdevelopments. So far so good; I think I am content with the 'Just because I'm not Goethe doesn't mean I shouldn't have a blog' stance.

But once it kind of evolved into having a voice/persona behind it - even if the focus or the voice itself changes at times, because we can say each little slant is part of the larger, overall slant - I kept thinking about all the goofy tags. Few serve any practical taggy purpose: nobody does searches for 'appalling taste' or 'Tuscan toilets,' and if they do, I don't think they want to end up here. Nor would a serious-minded searcher for Amelia Earhart trivia get very much rewarding stuff by clicking on her name in my tags. For what it's worth, I know which picture I have of her, but I have no idea why she's in here, what kind of a point I would have making to have had need of natty early-20th-c. aviatrices to support it, but I see her name every time I look at the blog, since she is up near the top of the tag list under A.

There are a couplefew problems. One is the disincentive of how much effort it would take to winnow down all the tags and to make new, sensible ones that might actually provide a clue as to what a posting is about. And it would be a very dull list. Another is that I like how the tags applied to a post better illustrate its content, just in a different way, than labeling it very precisely with what topics it literally contains. Then, too, I still find some of the goofy tags amusing to myself, and if this is really a blog, then that's my target audience: so as long as I keep chuckling nothing else should matter. I like having three entries obliquely or explicitly referencing 'bad monkeys' and another four mentioning Gauloises cigarettes, even if the postings are more substantively about interior design or telephones or pastry cream disasters.

And I imagine I could at least get rid of the ones that only link to one or two posts. 'Amelia Earhart' would be one of that group. But in many cases there is no reason to think I will only ever have one post that mentions that thing or person, so why take it out if I'm going to put it back in, I say. Still, I do think I could afford the time at some point to lose tags for types of wine and just have all fermented grape products under one 'wine' label, for example, without substantively compromising integrity. I could move all three 'fatuous boobs' and both 'idiocy' references to, perhaps, 'fatuity,' 'overarching incompetence,' or 'inanity,' depending on the content. But the thing is, when the posting is really a rant, or some ghastly stream-of-consciousness catalogue of aesthetic sins, and I go all over the place connecting things that in no way relate to each other except thematically and only to myself in some damp corner of my brain, I do go through the list of tags and often find one to append that I wouldn't have thought of had I not had such a long list. And today, I had to add 'China,' which I almost have many times but didn't because I had enough 'Chinese __________' tags. I didn't, on the other hand, make a new tag for 'Nestorians,' but I am sure I will have to at some point, and then it's going to end up between 'neo-Darwinism' (1 link) and 'neuroses' (likewise just the one) unless those have been excised by that point as having been insufficiently utile for all the nonexistent topic-shoppers reading my tag list hoping to find something truly worth reading.

You have to think like a cornichon.

You Can Take the Barolo Out of the Piedmont

But you can't take the limestone out of the nebbiolo. Nor can you, even as a human with a great, hulking, ponderous mass of a cerebrum, it seems, rid yourself entirely of what you once were in order to make way for what you would become. All our stories, all our remembrances, our bad mommies and doting daddies and every dance you were never asked to and each imperfect dismount and second place in debate because you only slightly screwed up the Jefferson line are there, somewhere, even when you imagine you are thinking of nothing at all except the mesmerizing horror that is the infield at the Kentucky Derby. They lie around lurking like recessive genes, just waiting for their one brief instant of relevance, to turn some unsuspecting fetus' right eye blue and leave the left one brown, or cause you to say No instinctively when reflection and analysis might have allowed for more than a few shades of gray.

So it is that I predictably turn to poetry to try to get at the nuances of what I might be feeling, for example, or that someone else consistently knocks himself out in squash when he fears he would otherwise be knocked out by something less manly. Where we start to bump up against the things we'll later be banging our heads on if we're not careful is where I try to intuit what you mean by 'squash' and you wonder what it is that Farrokhzad has that you don't.

The answer in either case is usually Nothing and Stop Being a Fatuous Boob, but we can't know that if we stay mired in our own heads. Someone observing me or listening to me is always going to filter what I do or say through his own experience. What might to me feel like the knife-edge of recklessness might to him seem dull and commonplace. Other things might be boring to me while appearing to him frighteningly exotic. And I seem to you perhaps apathetic and restive when I'm really just shy, as I meanwhile tire of what I see as your brittle callousness when you're actually struggling madly to know what to do...

People have gotten tripped up with me when they, in thinking I have so many words at my disposal, believe each one always must be the fruit of exacting, deliberate selection. This puts an undue amount of exegetical weight on 'nuts!' when I drop my keys in a puddle. It also makes it hard to talk crap, which is frequently necessary and often welcome. There is also the problem of the 'literal reading,' which can be done with some books but no persons, since you cannot know what precisely one individual construes as the difference between 'languid' and 'languourous' in the privacy of his own head.

You need, in other words, Context, which only comes over time. I know when an exhusband is being snarky about something in a friendly way, and I also know when he means he really does hate something in the depths of his heart. I know which friends are not disingenuous in embracing ostensibly contradictory opinions and which ones have an unambiguousness of speech that William Penn would covet. Not knowing them, one might think their apparent frankness were there to mask actual doubt -- but it's not; they know what they think, and they say it.

Which brings us to Dating, and why one sometimes just has to cry in bed. I am strongly of the opinion that neither party can give an adequate representation of what he or she is actually likely to bring to the hypothetical relation they are in theory potentially considering as a possibility. Everything relevant comes later. Well, almost: as I have lengthily and tediously admitted earlier, I do understand some people's need for leggy honeyblondes, divinity-school dropouts, effete flutists and partners who iron their socks.

But bracketing all that, or else assuming those factual and obvious criteria are met, the stuff that would constitute the soaring and glorious bits of the relationship once it was not hypothetical cannot be glimpsed over coffee, or even between heady sips of an unfolding Piemontese red. One can't know the depths of a lover's solicitude until it has been evoked. You simply cannot have a discussion about Potential Solicitude - in the main because there is no such thing. A former lover finally got me to the point of intimacy with a cogent and convincing argument that this was something we should no doubt know about, something that would prove quite relevant, and we weren't going to know anything about it, whether it worked for us or not, until we actually undertook it. It wasn't especially romantic, I admit, but there is little about romance that is -- until you get to that point where it all is, where you are routinely overtaken by love because your husband is brushing his teeth, or switching to fourth gear. And of course, if you get to that point, you come to the stunning realization that you no can longer care that he doesn't iron his socks.

Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning

Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.

I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.

Additionally, and this shocks me, I drank too much. I don't know how pronounced the visible effects were, but it was no more enjoyable for me during or after than I imagine it was for my companion while I went on about whatever it was I was going on about. I suspect I know why I drank: nerves. And I know why I got loaded from it: I weigh ninety pounds or under and normally don't consume any alcohol, I had nothing in my stomach prior, and there is a reason drunks go for fish and chips and burgers and fries rather than sautéed clams when the bar closes... That is, if they hope to find their way home.

So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.

And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.

We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.

But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.

Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.

But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.

And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...

So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.