An article in today’s Daily Telegraph about Australian trends in funeral song choice:

Highway to Hell among most requested funeral songs

Cool! Also popular are “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which features the lines, “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it”. And then there’s “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead”, from Wizard of Oz. Hey, any one of these has got to be better than those ghastly, never-ending, amorphous organ dirges which usually get airplay.

I can think of a few other songs I might consider, including one from Neil Young called “Why do I Keep F….g Up?” How about you? Why not have some fun at your funeral?

Whenas the rye reach to the chin,
And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream,
And schoolboys playing in the stream;
Then, O, then, O, then, O, my true love said,
Till that time come again,
She could not live a maid.

George Peele (1558-159

I am not one for complaining, as you all know (and for those of you who do know me - that was meant to be sarcasm), but really it has become just too stressful to watch the tennis this morning.  Baseball is still ok, for now, but tennis on tv has become one intense highlight reel.  Between shots, after the volleys are over, the  replays run, and sometimes run right into the next shot.  Federer vs. Nadal.  I like gaps between play.  I love the time, the expansiveness of time between pitches in baseball, the chance to think about what just happened and what is about to come.  Tennis should be the same.  You should be able to just watch the volleys, and then think about what just happened, and what needs to happen next.  But instead we are shown replays - guys diving, sliding, fist-pumping, etc.  This is ok once in awhile, but after every shot?

And that’s my two cents.

What a slacker I am. No, it’s true. But then again, the pressures of work are particularly intense right now, so maybe I can be forgiven for not getting up any writing for a long time. But here’s the thing: you have to keep the best part of yourself for yourself. Being a slacker is not as bad as allowing work to dominate your life. If it were just a matter of wasting time in a pleasurable but not unhealthy way, that would be ok. But that’s not what I have been doing. I’ve been allowing work to suck up all my time and energy, leaving me unfit for anything but watching baseball on tv at the end of the day. Work will take all you give it and never be satisfied that you are giving it enough. It’s like dealing with a particularly demanding and unappreciative child, really. No matter how much you give it, it only asks for more. Time to cut that child loose and let it fend for itself.

So I’ve picked up The Happy Isles of Oceania again, by Paul Theroux. It’s a book I started almost four years ago, at a time when I myself was getting ready to visit Micronesia. I never quite finished it, but now I am making time, and loving it. It’s well researched and intimate, and it takes me back in spirit to some of the places I have been.

What Theroux captures so well is the marginal nature of the islanders, their sometimes pointless existence, and their inability to rise above their circumstances. He is particularly hard on the French colonial influence, especially in his chapters on Tahiti and the Marquesas. The Marquesas is where Melville based his novel Typee, and is also where Gaugin is buried (what a bastard he was!).

The islands are very difficult to reach, having steep cliffs down to the sea and no good harbors. At one time the Marquesas supported an estimated population of 80,000 people but it is now down to about 7,000. As with Easter Island, and as with the Mayan empire, The Marquesas is rich in archeological remains which testify to a complex but largely forgotten culture. Ecological disaster seems to be at the root of the de-population. Stone temples covered in thick vines can be found in inpenetrable jungle hills and valleys. Many of these sites have never been excavated, but most have been defaced by overzealous 19th century missionaries intent on whacking off offending penises and such. Most of the native islanders have never visited any of the sites, even the ones in their own backyards, and they have no particular interest in their history - such is the dissapating effect of missionaries and colonialization.

Here is what Theroux has to say at the end of his stay on the Marquesas:
“There is no cannibalism in the Marquesas anymore - none of the traditional kind. But there is the brutality of French colonialism…. The French praise and romanticize the Marquesas, but in the 1960s they had planned to test nuclear devices on the northern Marquesan island of Eiao, until there was such an outcry they changed their plans and decided to destroy Moruroa instead. It is said that the French are holding Polynesia together, but really it is so expensive to maintain that they do everything as cheaply as possible - and it is self-serving, too. Better to boost domestic French industries by exporting bottled water from France than investing in a fresh water supply for each island [there is an abundance of fresh water in the Marquesas]. That is what colonialism is all about… The French have left nothing enduring in the islands except a tradition of hypocrisy and their various fantasies off history and high levels of radioactivity..

“When France has succeeded in destroying a few more atolls, when they have managed to make the islands glow with so much radioactivity that night is turned into day, when they have sold the rest of the fishing rights and depleted it of fish.., when it has all been thoroughly plundered, the French will plan a great ceremony and grandly offer these unemployed and deracinated citizens in T-shirts and flip-flops their independence. In the destruction of the islands, the French imperial intention, its mission civilisatrice - civilizing mission - will be complete.”

So there you have it. “Grrrr…. the French,” as Michael Moore would say. But of course the parallels to our so-called civilizing mission in Iraq are readily apparent - and so is our attitude to the way we treat the scarce resources in this Island Earth. Use it up while you can, because tomorrow only matters for our grandkids - and since they are not us, they don’t really count.

I heard from one of my online friends yesterday who lives in Chengdu, China, which is prime earthquake territory. Here’s part of what he had to say:

“…we spent the night sleeping in an open space at a nearby university campus, braving the flat again after torrential rain forced us indoors! i’m sure we may end up there again tonight. it all feels a bit like something out of War of the Worlds, or Cloverfield, which we just watched a few days ago. my heart goes out to those caught in the epicentre though, and i pray that things don’t get worse over the following days. anyway, time to get back outside. i really, really shouldn’t be indoors. good luck to anyone else stuck in this.”

Pay him a visit to find out more. Hope things get better soon.

The Michigan Land Use Institute has an excellent story on its website, outlining the efforts of a certain Timothy Stoepker, attorney to the big box stores, who is aggressively litigating to override local government decisions to exclude the stores from their townships. Some of their methods are downright diabolical.  From the page:

“BEAR CREEK TOWNSHIP— An attorney with a controversial history of suing public officials as private citizens has helped force this Emmet County township to spend $388,000 to defend itself against multiple lawsuits he’s filed on behalf of a local developer with downstate roots.”

Bastards.

I’ve got a  dozen of em, and here’s one - first lines to short stories which never panned out:

“On Tuesday morning Jack spotted his neighbor’s hippie wife, who used to be fey but now looks like a feral tribeswoman, running around in her sleeveless print dress, her toes pointing in all the directions of the compass after years of shoeless abandon, her legs coated in a wiry fir, her skin perpetually swathed in the dusty residue of the garden, from which she had recently emerged.

I could claim it’s doctor’s orders, or that I made a pact with myself to lay off literary endeavors for a month, or that I’ve been too busy with domestic duties to write, or any other number of lies, but in fact what has happened is that a month has gone by and I have not written much at all. But I have been thinking, in my own shallow way, and I hereby resume with my observations, this one about how old age creeps up on you unawares.

I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that when I’m old I will probably end up as one of those cowboyish old guys, all gangly and gravelly voiced, wandering around saying “howdy” and nodding his index finger to you as you pass. I’ll wear a preponderance of plaid and shoe myself in regulation white mall walkers.

Spring arrived, and then it didn’t quite pan out, as so often happens in this neck of the woods. So I’ve been doing odd jobs and wearing that old plaid shirt-jacket around, the kind you wear between winter and spring, because the seasons mix for so long. It’s lined with something like kapok, and lumpy as an old life jacket. I’ve been engaged in such archetypal equinoctial old guy activities as fixing the bird feeder, which had fallen victim to the depredation of hordes of marauding squirrels. On my head I wore my old kelly green mesh baseball cap, broad as the brow of Moby Dick himself, and tacky to boot. The sunglasses I wore seemed chic when I bought them, reminiscent, I suppose, of that Peter Fonda Easy Rider era but in fact strangely like one of those geezers from Vernon, Florida, which is to say shopworn and overdone, reminding me now of an old guy who has just been let out of the hospital on a sunny day and must wear the wraparounds to cope with his eye condition.

And so, arriving this way at the top of the stairs, having come in for a moment from outside, (to pee, probably - I can’t remember) I am surprised with my reflection in the mirror. “Who is this old fart?” I ask myself, and see that it is me, is always me, with the silly hat, the big sunglasses, the lumpy plaid jacket and the enormous expanse of upper lip and jowl extending downward like Boris Badenov himself. Or is it Fred Ziffel that I resemble, and visions of domestic vicissitudes - men holding toilet plungers, that sort of thing? How did I end up looking this way, and how do I get out of it before the routine persists and hardens into habit, driving out the dashing dude who lives inside?

Some days were running legs

Some days were running legs and joy
and old men telling tomorrow would be
a fine day surely: for sky was red
at setting of sun between the hills.

Some nights were parting at the gates
with day’s companions: and dew falling
on heads clear of ambition except light
returning and throwing stones at sticks.

Some days were rain flooding forever the green
pasture: and horses turning to the wind
bare smooth backs. The toothed rocks rising
sharp and grey out of the ancient sea.

Some nights were shawling mirrors lest the lightning
strike with eel’s speed out of the storm.
Black the roman rooks came from the left squawking
and the evening flowed back around their wings.

Iain Crichton Smith from ‘The Long River’ 1955

A Scottish poem I used to teach, and had almost forgotten about, resurfaced yesterday, and here it is, in all its old glory.