Deciding on a sticker or a wall hanging or even a T-shirt takes me a long time. I have to intuit whether the motif-y object will influence me the way I want. When I saw this red sticker, though, I decided in only a few minutes that it belonged on my laptop (my constant companion!) as a reminder for how to live life. You have to take risks, but first — some backstory.
Recently I’ve been cleaning out a closet, partly so wifely Kate can put her work clothes there. Cleaning out this closet entails dealing with old CDs, always a weird nostalgia trip. I ran across in one box the Japanese release of Megadeth’s 1999 album Risk, and the sticker was inside the case, waiting probably a half-decade for me to find this use for it. Glad I hadn’t throw it out. When I look at the laptop now, I really don’t view the sticker as connected with Megadeth — just as an independent artwork.
Risk album cover
About that album, however: with it Megadeth tried to get away from their same-ol’ same-ol’ bellocisty and incorporate some fresh ideas from techno and other musical territory. Aging, they’d realized life wasn’t all about aggression, and further atempts to bring forth art that spoke only of hostility rang false to them; but, on the other hand, they (and, I presume, their biz overlords) wanted to still please the angry-teenager fan base. Trying to please everyone made the new elements sound unsure, just poor compromise. Not a brave enough risk.
A 1999 live version of Risk’s opening track, “Insomnia,” which is quite good, I think:
Alternate music for the frailly eared: the best recording, to my taste, of a particular Bach piece that made it onto the Voyager Golden Record.
Megadeth’s demeanor in the live performance above suits the angry young adults they once were, but in 1999 they were nearing their forties, and by that age I think it’s definitely time to have sequestered anger for release only when absolutely necessary. See as contrast artists such as Sting, whose long career has evolved through many styles, attitudes. Artists can’t force themselves to create once-agains of their past art; they’re no longer the same people. Unfortunately for 2010, Megadeth, currently out of tune with themselves, sound like such parodies of their youthful selves that I won’t embed a representative video. I must clarify, however, that I really enjoy most of their music, including Risk, and I wish that love to be noted.
Judith Butler has a passage about the necessity of taking risks, written in the context of ethical theory (emphasis mine):
… we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.
Generally I interpret — maybe wrongly — that Butler quote in terms of small and difficult interpersonal interactions. You’re having a longstanding quarrel with a friend, for instance, and you’re not sure what you should say the next time you see them. The real trick is, in the actual moment of interaction — when what [has formed you] diverges from what lies before [you] — simply to risk yourself despite the context of uncertainty (what will happen?) — at moments of unknowingness — to risk making yourself vulnerable — to become undone in relation to others — and try to do whatever the right thing seems to be, fear be damned, consequences subordinate to honesty.
Sometimes I feel I’m not living up to the need to take risks with my own creative writing. Probably that’s just my self-criticism module out of whack, but who knows, maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Here’s perhaps my best story ready to go out in the mail (as multiple simultaneous submissions) once some certain literary magazines open up their fall reading periods:
“Flares” ready for snail-mailing
When I wrote this story, I wasn’t at all concerned with grand ethical notions of risk. In fact I just wrote, wrote, wrote, laying down words like so many bricks on a path across a few months(!). Now I write faster, in more mature ways, even, but few other works of mine quite affect readers as intensely as this one, I don’t think. So maybe, likely, it was just good luck: every so often as a fiction writer you create a 10-out-of-10 story, not an 8-out-of-10. Goes with the work, maybe. But I wonder how I can push myself harder to take risks, to say vulnerable things well…
This is what to do with the remnants of vines you chop out of crepe myrtles. Those vines were so overgrown, by the way, that they effectively destroyed my hedge clippers — by the end of the afternoon, I’d wound up swinging the clippers like an axe.
Several times during Kate and I’s wedding & honeymoon trip, I asked taxicab drivers in NYC and DC for marriage advice — partly because, like Perot & Obama both, I’m all ears for suggestions; also, partly for the sake of amateur anthropology and since I simply like talking with people. The more unusual the person, the better. The more you feel you understand things well, the more you have to cultivate the attitude that other people might actually outsmart you; and, strangers are often the ones who give you best insights.
However, I don’t think I’ll be taking this one taxicab driver’s advice, which he gave as I stepped out of his cab: that Kate and I need to have children immediately. I replied that we were considering maybe one or two children sometime about five to seven years from now, and he hollered that Kate and I need to output one within a year. It focuses things, he shouted, driving off.
When I rode from St. Mark’s Bookshop (I purchased the rest of Paul Park‘s Roumania Quartet, but wisely left Jung‘s awesome and awesomely expensive Red Book to peruse at local libraries; also, St. Mark’s had a great poster that graphed USA economic inequality — this too I refrained from purchasing, partly because such a purchase seemed ironic splurging) — when I rode from St. Mark’s Bookstore toward Cafe Lalo, where Kate was waiting, a Senegalese taxicab driver poured all sorts of advice into the backseat. “Put water in your mouth!” he advised. “If you are angry, if you are about to speak hastily, put water in your mouth instead! Hold the water in your mouth until it cools your anger!”
Citing the numinous wifely wisdom that causes husbands to tremble, he also said Kate was always right about everything. On this I respectfully disagree. =)
But I do agree with his misleadingly callous-sounding comment that spouses shouldn’t have too high expectations of one another. Because no spouse can fulfill every need for the other; if one spouse isn’t into, say, heavy metal or shoes, the other can share that passion with his or her own friends instead. Plus, if the one spouse does check out a metal band or scrutinize some shoes, it’s a bonus for the other, not the fulfillment of some needy requirement the other has. And that way, with a good marriage, each constantly receives bonuses instead of feeling disappointment at failures to meet unreasonable expectations.
In DC (where we honeymooned) the taxicab drivers were tenser, less prone to talk, and busy listening to political news. The diverse taxicab experiences in both places, however, made me hope even more to be able to approach the world someday such that I genuinely feel that everyone, even the most problematic (mean-spirited, or obnoxious, or …) person has something to teach me.
My Clarion West2008 classmate Rajan Khanna snapped the above photograph of Kate and I at NYC’s bar dba (the 41 First Avenue location) on Thursday May 27th 2010, two days before she and I’s wedding. The bar was great — examples of its background music, so unlike Fort Worth playlists, are sufficient proof of that for me: “Would?” by Alice in Chains, “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction, “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” by The Ramones — and seeing long-time friends there (Theresa! Janna!) made me exuberant. Especially when Raj said: “Douglas, you’re all grown up now.” Raj, thanks!
Check out my T-shirt, by the way. This will be old news to many, but the hexadecimal number printed on it, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 (which in regular decimal notation is 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 — thirteen undecillion something), can be used in various ways — for example, as a tongue twister, as a song lyric, or as a key to break HD-DVD and Blu-ray copy protection. In 2007, in response to the number becoming publicly known, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator LLC (a trade organization providing encryption technology and backed by Disney, Microsoft, and others) sent sites such as Digg.com take-down demand letters that claimed their publication of or trafficking in the number constituted violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and asked for the webpages to be removed, as though webpages aren’t constantly cached and archived elsewhere anyway. (Clay Shirky discusses Digg’s counter-response in his interesting book Here Comes Everybody — the book’s title, I’ll pedantically note, comes from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.) The legal threats cued the Streisand effect, wherein efforts to silence something controversial only cause it to be repeated more loudly: everyday netizens republished the number an undecillion times over, including on a certain black EDUN LIVE Essential T-shirt worn by me, courtesy of zazzle.com. Although it’s feasible to legally threaten a small number of people (such as those running Digg.com), it’s impossible to legally threaten a vast number of people (such as each and every podunk blogger posting about 09 F9); this basic principle of mass civil disobedience, used by the pro-piracy netizens, now prevents — I presume — additional take-down demand letters from being sent, as in, for example, to me. The world has been made safe for long strings of alphanumerics.
Kate and I married in NYC on Saturday 29 May 2010 at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Six guests attended: our four parents, her sister, and my best friend. Supporting personnel included LDF Floral and Event Design, the estimable Eileen Regan as officiant, and the very effective Katje Hempel as photographer; all three worked perfectly. (The photograph above is Katje’s, as is the pair below. You can see a few more photographs on Katje’s blog.)
Our short service included a reading from (and this was Kate’s idea!) Theodore Sturgeon’s novel Godbody:
This is the answer!
The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving.
The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing.
The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go.
The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling.
The answer is not death, but love.
Kate and I stayed at the On the Ave hotel in NYC between Wednesday 26 May and Monday 31 May; we honeymooned in DC from Monday 31 May to Sunday 6 June, staying at The Jefferson hotel, an amazingly nice place. In DC, among other sites, we really enjoyed visiting the Smithsonian American History Museum (Julia Child’s kitchen!) and the Lincoln Memorial at night. In both cities, we shared some fantastic meals.
Soon I’ll post more about our adventures … and the loquacious taxicab drivers’ marriage advice.
The most impressive Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) in Dallas-Fort Worth lives at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The picture above shows a view of it from near one of the Garden roads (along with a few tiny, other trees). Many magnolias in Fort Worth are impressively tall — for example, the one pictured below, which grows next to the library of my alma mater, TCU — but the one at the Botanic Gardens is the best!
A TCU Library Magnolia
From some angles, the Garden’s huge magnolia can at first look like many trees, not one. That’s why I never(!) truly noticed it; I mistakenly saw a big stand of multiple trees, not a single special individual. This past May, however, Kate — a special individual herself – showed me one of the “secret entrances” to the “cave” made by the magnolia’s drooping branches.
A Secret Entrance to the Big Magnolia Cave
Once you go through the secret entrance (no password necessary), you’ll see a scene like something out of Lord of the Rings or a King Arthur tale. This cave hides in plain sight near University Drive, one of the busiest streets in the city! Here’s a shot of it. The branches go all the way around, 360 degrees.
Fruit: Cylindrical aggregate of follicles (“seed pod”). Green changing to red. Matures Oct-Nov.
Twig: Stout. It gives off a citrus scent if broken.
Bark: Brown to gray, thin, smooth when young, but plating or scaling later in life.
The Southern Magnolia is sometimes called an Evergreen Magnolia, or a Bull-bay.
I took four pictures of the tree’s flowers, each illustrating a different stage of the flower life cycle. You can learn much more about the magnolia flower life cycle, and see pictures of it, at this website.
The Flower Before Blooming
The Flower Begins to Bloom
The Flower Has Bloomed
Once the petals fall off, the center of the flower remains — the fruit or seed pod:
The Fruit; Flower Petals Have Fallen
In the last year I’ve taken to learning about trees via field-guiding. While field-guiding is certainly enjoyable in itself, I started mostly because I wanted to improve my ability to see, both during observation and with my mind’s inner eye. Routine close observation of details — samaras, leafstalks, whatever — definitely has lead to improvement in both areas. For example, a mechanic showed me some small parts of a Civic brake system a few months back. My eyes would have simply glazed over a year ago. But as a result of field-guiding, I could see just what he was talking about. As to the inner eye: I’ve always had difficulty visualizing in my mind. Many people are startled when I confess that while I can close my eyes and picture a stop sign, I can’t mentally change its color. Still can’t. But the more I scrutinize small visual details, the better my mind’s eye becomes. A specific instance of this is what I think of as “stabilizing” my mental imagery. Before field-guiding, if I closed my eyes and visualized the sycamore fruit I have sitting on my shelf, the image would sort of wobble and vanish after only a second or two. Now I can more or less keep it in my inner eye for as long as I can concentrate.
She’s running in honor of Jason Harmon, who’s now receiving treatment in Houston for aggressive lymphoma. His Dallas doctors said there was nothing else they could do, and gave him a very short time to live. The estimated number of Americans who on this day battle diseases like Jason’s totals almost a million.
The Leukemia & Lyphoma Society is celebrating its 60th year. It is a worthy institution that has invested more than $600 million in blood cancer research. Please help Kate raise money for them. Even a small amount, such as $25, moves her closer to her fundraising goal.
Kate has raised 71% of her goal amount so far. It took me less than two minutes to donate through her well-organized website, where you can read more about her training and and the program. Donors receive email confirmation of their secure donation. If you cannot donate, please at least forward this information to someone who might be able to.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or to otherwise contact me. Thanks so much.
(Origami dollar photo used under Creative Commons from Thomas Hawk.)
As a member of 
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or to otherwise contact me. Thanks so much.
