Archive #2

Here is a poem I wrote recently while on a poetry writing field-trip. One of the stops was at The Broad Street United Methodist Church in downtown Columbus, Ohio. This is one of those really old churches with tons of history; but with its downtown location, it is now a small struggling congregation on Sundays and an inner-city soup kitchen during the week.

We sat in the church space and wrote. This is a response to the building’s spectacular stained-glass windows. As I thought about it, it seemed also to be the right poem to dedicate to my maternal grandmother who passed quietly this morning in her sleep.

I Spy… 

In memory of 

Isabel Helen Mocker 

(1916-2011) 

From the front pew in the balcony
I look over the congregation in the
Broad Street United Methodist Church
this February Sunday morning in Ohio
and cannot find you.

Under this Victorian-Gothic ceiling,
in August of ’54,
before Grandpa Bill lost his hog farm,
when serious grounded folk sat quietly in   worship,
Reverend Brumfield drizzled sacred water
over your forehead, and you laughed.

Later, in the leaded and stained windows,
we secretly played I Spy when the Gospel was too long to hold out attention or
when the sermon was about greed or envy.

In my dreams I whisper:
Is it the faint halo around Christ’s head?
Is it the disapproving hand of Judas

clutching the chair?
And you giggle and quietly say No.

Like a dam cleaning its foal,
I would eagerly pour scented oil
over your dusty feet and 

gently pat them dry.

But Grandpa Bill and Reverend Brumfield

are long dead.
God of the Ages is now sung 

in American Sign Language.
Borrowed preachers now speak of 

service and compassion.

And I whisper,
Is it the challis in the left panel?
Is it the wreath in Victory’s hand? 

Late Night Radio

Back 1979 or so there was a Cleveland sports guy named Pete Franklin (1927-2004) with a nightly radio show. 

People of Wikipedia claim:

Pete Franklin is widely credited with pioneering the more aggressive, acerbic and attention-grabbing form of the genre, which has since been adopted by generations of sports media personalities, and bringing it to a multi-national listening audience. The zenith of Franklin's career came when he hosted Sportsline on the 50,000-watt Cleveland AM station WWWE ("3WE") 1100-AM from 1972 to 1987.

Well if you rate sports guys on a scale of one to ten and let one be the guy who doesn’t know sports exist and ten be the guy who tossed-out his remote as obsolete once he tuned in ESPN, I would be a 3.45. I establish this because Pete Franklin being an early version of a radio sports talk guy is not why I listened to him late into the night.

I listened because, back then, I couldn’t fall asleep unless the radio was on, and I couldn’t fall asleep if the radio was playing music. When Pete’s voice came over my old clock-radio, I could focus on this, tune-out the little odd noises that would distract me from falling asleep and peacefully drift off.

Around 1982, I broke up with Pete Franklin and became a loyal Larry King fan (King was exclusively on the radio then). His syndicated show played live from 11 PM till 2 AM and then repeated from 2 till 5 AM. So as I worked through high school and college it didn’t matter what time I hit the sack, I could always count on Larry King to be there to talk me off to sleep.

Well, strange as it might seem, I still listen to the radio late at night (For my wife’s benefit, I now use one ear-bud). When Larry King left the late-night radio world, I jumped around to various local and syndicated news and talk shows for years never quite able to latch on to one for longer than a few months. So, as of now, I have settled for something called The BBC World Service.

This all news and human interest format works well for me. The British accents and somewhat obscure stories about the governmental taxation in Zambia are often just what the doctor ordered for a good night’s sleep. Oh, I guess I should also mention that sometimes when I roll over at 3:48 AM and barely wake up for a minute or two, I catch an interesting news bit and then fall back to sleep. That’s exactly what happened last night. Here are two little stories that caught my semi-conscious mind and stuck.

The first is from Iran. Here is a summary I found this morning online:

A man who blinded a woman by throwing acid in her face in Iran, after she rejected his marriage proposal is preparing to face the same fate.

Iran's Supreme Court has upheld the controversial sentence against Majid Movahedi, who attacked Ameneh Bahrami six years ago. Amineh has demanded that Majid should be blinded too. She told the BBC's Persian TV she wants to carry out the sentence herself.

"They told me there will be a doctor who will carry out the sentence but I said no I really want to do it myself. Let me do it first and if it didn't work, the doctor can complete the operation"

Even by the tough standards of Iran's judiciary system this is an unusual case. The country has one of the highest death penalty rates in the world, and there have been high profile cases recently involving stonings or amputations.

But nonetheless Iranian public opinion is divided about the verdict -- as is Ameneh's family. Arguments about punishment, fairness, deterrence and revenge are being used by those who both sides of the debate.

For their part, the family of Majid Movahedi, who have repeatedly pleaded for mercy, are preparing themselves for the daunting prospect of their son's being forcefully blinded on Saturday. 

Wow. I mean one side of me is saying that this scumbag deserves this, but the other side is saying that this doesn’t seem emotionally healthy for the victim. Revenge is not really an ultimately satisfying resolution and most psychologists would work with the victim to focus on acceptance and perhaps even forgiveness; but then again, I can understand wanting to do this to the guy who inflicted so much agony on me. I do know one thing, however, that just like capital punishment, this verdict will not stop other people from repeating the act. We do not function this way. If I am really angry and crazy enough to throw acid in someone’s face, then I am not rational enough to think that I better not do it because I will get into trouble. So, this verdict is based purely in revenge and punishment. Maybe that is fine, but I tend to think it is not.

And the second story is about a woman who meets her anonymous, biological, sperm-donor father. It turns out that the guy is Jeffrey Harrison who lives alone with four dogs and a pigeon in a broken-down RV in a Venice Beach car park. He donated sperm three or four times a week, totaling 500 times, during the 1980s and 1990s to help pay the rent.

Obviously an interesting story from the privacy standpoint, but for me the most interesting thing about the story is that the daughter did not find the guy. Harrison came forward and identified himself. It seems that he saw a newspaper article about the girl and her search for half-sisters (his daughters from other donations) and knew he was the father. After about two years, he freely came forward and sought them out. He said it took two years to decide if he wanted his daughters to know what he was like and how he lived.

So here’s the question I leave with today. If I had donated back in the day, am I proud enough of who I am today to want the resulting child to know me? Maybe this falls under the category of how we decide if we are of good character, or maybe it falls under the category of it’s not about me. One side of me feels that even if I were ashamed of my life, I would still owe it to the child to let him make his own judgment.

Disclaimer: I never donated. This is hypothetical.

We might be clones

There’s this website called Stuff White People Like (check it out if you want: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com), and being a white guy, I figured it would help me decide what I might like. In fact, it does list many of the things I actually like.

Here are some of them: #133 The World Cup, #23 Microbreweries, #123 Mad Men, #1 Coffee, #109The Onion, #96 New Balance Shoes, #86 Shorts, #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to, #83 Bad Memories of High School, #81 Graduate School, #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report, #80 The Idea of Soccer, #134 The TED Conference, #50 Irony, #44 Public Radio, #40 Apple Products, #67 Standing Still at Concerts, #30 Wrigley Field, #28 Not having a TV, and #82 Hating Corporations.

And although I very well might write future blogs on each one of these topics, today’s blog is going to focus on #134 The TED Conference and #82 Hating Corporations.

Now, I like TED talks. Sadly, I might like TED talks for the reasons Stuff White People Like suggests.

One of the easiest ways to create something that white people will like is to create something that will allow them to feel smart but doesn’t require a large amount of work, time, or effort. There is, however, a catch. Whatever it is that you create cannot be a shortcut. You see white people like the idea of getting smarter quickly, but they don’t like the idea of people thinking that they are lazy.

Due to the broad audience watching the talks, TED speakers generally take very complex ideas and boil them down into a simple engaging presentation. So when a white person finds out that you have a PhD and attempts to engage you in a conversation about String Theory, you should know that all of their understanding comes from a twenty-minute talk they listened to while running on a treadmill. You should also be aware that the average white person considers their knowledge on the subject to be on par or superior to yours. 

But regardless of this, the other day I was running on my treadmill and watching Eli Pariser’s TED Talk called, Beware online "filter bubbles." In this discussion he informs us that search engines like Google are now programmed to filter search results in such a way that the results I get will likely not be the same results you get. The search engine calculates everything it can learn about who the searcher is and then selects the results that it concludes would be most in line with the type of person you are. Sounds scary right? Well I thought so, and for a few days after learning this I told people I ran into about the Big Brother scenario. They too were disturbed. 

But then I started to think about it. We give out identifying characteristics about ourselves constantly. We let the grocer keep track of everything we buy when we give them our value card to swipe. We let the hardware store know about our home improvement projects by offering them are ACE Rewards cards. In fact, I have so many rewards cards that I don’t even know where half of them are. But that’s not a problem, because the cashiers can easily look up my reward number and thus continue compiling data of my consumer tendencies. In exchange for all this data, I get some discounted gas or 10% off coupons in the mail. Seems like a deal. I mean now I even buy Lowe’s gift cards at the grocery to get the rewards points and then go to Lowe’s and use the gift card to get the stuff I was going to buy anyway. Oh yeah, I also buy everything with my credit card, so I can get the points, but also, so my credit card issuer can collect data of everything I ever purchase. 

So Big Brother has sucked us in; we are on the hamster wheel and happy to run. Well I guess I am. What’s wrong with Amazon knowing the books I like to buy and then suggesting others I might also like? What’s wrong with the local grocery store knowing what items I like and making sure they stock them and items that, based on previous purchases, I might also like? What’s wrong with a computer guessing what web sites I might like to visit? It seems pretty convenient to me.

Are we really that concerned about our almighty privacy? Nothing about us it all that private. When we can give up the idea of American individualism, we might see the benefits of corporations knowing stuff about us. I mean we all pretty much buy the same stuff anyway, we just don’t like to think that much about how the shirt I am wearing was mass produced and is hanging in ten thousand closets right now. I’m not really a unique consumer; I just like to think I am. I would even argue that most of what we are is what we have been taught to be. Do I really naturally and innately like white, cotton, button shirts more than my neighbor? So maybe Stuff White People Like should add two entries: 

I like thinking that I am a private individual while still receiving all the benefits of not being one.

I like the idea of making fun of what I like by listing stuff white people like. 

Archiving

One of the reasons I started a blog was to gather together the various stories and poems I have written over the past twenty or so years. Some of these are so old that I am not even sure I can read the files anymore, but I’ll try my best to dig everything out from the grave. With that said, however, here is a recent poem that I wrote during a visit to the Columbus Museum of Art. It is a free-for-all spilling of spontaneous prose in response to this three panel modern piece by Robert Bechtle called ‘61 Pontiac. He painted it between 1968–69 using oil on canvas. Here’s what it looks like: 

So here is what I wrote about it: 

american bald corduroy 

Response to Bechtle's ’61 Pontiac 

all-american family / intellectual serious matter-of-fact dad does not care for communists or poetry / button-down short-sleeve / cigarette-pack pocket / Spanish-rice dinners with whole white milk / proper undershirt / self-aware nurturing mom in bangs and sandals / sews just a bit and likes Gunsmoke and Roy Orbison / a skirt and long-sleeve sweater / modern / liberated / cautiously experimental / wants to look together, successful, perfect. 

all-american family / and maybe they are / maybe he does wrestle with the boy and play peek-a-boo with the girl / belly-laugh when junior pretends to read the New York Times /  believes he is lucky to sip Maxwell House on Sunday mornings while he and she do the crossword and sometimes make love / thinks his new ’61 Pontiac station wagon is exactly what his family needs / maybe she is perfect / not pretending at all / maybe she was the toddler in her mother’s arms in front of the black ’42 Olds with her US Army father / maybe she knew even then about perfect all-american families and patriotism and gratitude and grace / maybe he works with a black guy and chooses not to bowl with free-masons and bookies / maybe together and often they piously bow their heads and recite the lord’s prayer and have even seriously considered becoming leaders of their church’s youth group / maybe he inherently knew about kicking the tires before buying / maybe the tow-headed boy will grow into a football-star and marry the cheerleader and have two beautiful white-kids and no miscarriages or lumps / maybe they will stand in front of an red ’84 Chevy and be the all-american family /  maybe the baby will become the first american astronaut and marry a culturally sensitive California wine maker.

or maybe the way the father stands ever so slightly on his heels reveals that he is not really leaning in / that he actually is thinking lustfully about Joyce who works in the deli / that he wrestles daily with angst and ennui / that behind the beard is skin scarred with anger and regret / maybe the mother’s wide foundational-stance is hinting that she is trying not to fall over in tears swallowed by stained-laundry and bacon-grease / will he suffer a stroke in ten years and spend the remainder of his life in a hospital-bed next to the living-room window with slurred speech / will she start drinking too much gin and resort to eating TV dinners in a thin housedress and chain smoking filtered-cigarettes / will the all-american boy drive this ’61 Pontiac in ’74 (then a rusty junker), listen to Jim Morrison on an eight-track and pick up a hitch-hiker who will offer to do him for a few bucks and some weed / will the baby eventually drop-out of Ohio State, marry an abusive engineer, hide her black eye behind gigantic sunglasses, have a hyperactive child

for now though, this all-american family will remain forever still-lifed into this painting and allow all who sit on this bench and glance at their bliss to know exactly where we have gone wrong 

Why Dunbar?

So today my lifting partner and good friend asked me where the name Dunbar came from. Well, sadly, there is no real story here. I guess I became aware of the name from the 19th century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

According to Wikipedia, “Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky; his father was a veteran of the American Civil War … Dunbar's work is known for its colorful language and use of dialect, and a conversational tone, with a brilliant rhetorical structure.”  

Here, if you like poetry, is what some consider to be his most important poem:

ODE TO ETHIOPIA

O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.

Sad days were those—ah, sad indeed!
But through the land the fruitful seed
of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spred its leaves so fresh and young—
Its blossoms now are blowing.

On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiope's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbour;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammers ring their forges smoke,
They sit in honest labour.

They tread the fields where honour calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power.
To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour.

Be proud, my race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.

Thou hast the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism.
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.

No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forgot the past and proved them men
So noble in forgiving.

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
and proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory.
 
So with all this said, let me tell you that I am not really referencing Paul Laurence Dunbar through the name, I am simply speculating on how the word Dunbar entered my psyche. I must have studied him in some literature class and remembered the name.

So upon further searching Wikipedia, I now know there is also something called Dunbar’s Number. Wikipedia reports:

Dunbar's number is a theoretical … limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than [Dunbar’s number] generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group … Dunbar's number has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known [in the past], a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
 
I’m not so sure I can manage 230 people in a stable social relationship. In fact, I’m not sure I even know what a stable social relationship means. My wife will tell you that I can barely remember the way my immediate family is related to one another. On the other hand, she is remarkably good at relating how some tangential acquaintance is socially connected to us and where said person grew up, how many siblings they have, the major and minor joys and disappointments of said person’s life, and sometimes even detailed information about said person’s extended family. Amazing to me, but second nature to her. Even though much of what she can do is technically excluded from the system, maybe she should be called “Dunbar.” Her number is way above 230; my number is about 12 I think. But this too is not the answer to “Why Dunbar?”

The answer is that a few years ago I was a passenger in my wife’s car and, as I sometimes do, I was acting silly with the kids. Out of the blue I pronounced that they could no longer refer to me as Dad or by any other name. That from that point forward I would only recognize Dunbar as my name. When they asked why, I simply said, “Because I’m Dunbar.” So this is the origin. If you want to ask, and for those who have asked, the response remains the same, “Because I’m Dunbar.”

The story goes that when readers asked William Faulkner for further explanation of his works, he would tell them reread, that all the explanation is in the work. After all discussing art risks making the art banal: Discussing Dunbar risks making Dunbar banal.

Kenny Rogers redux

I know I’m risking driving away whoever might be reading “Day Two” of “random Dunbar,” but if you’re going to follow my blog, you are going to have to be patient with me.  Over the next several weeks I plan on blogging about random stuff and occasionally posting poems and stories that I have written in the recent past and in the not so recent past.  But one thing you readers should know is that I am what some call a completist (if that is even a word).  When I was in seventh grade, this teacher said to me that I should never start a book and not finish it.  He said that doing so would lead to a lifetime of bad habits and incomplete jobs.  I was a rather impressionable seventh grader and since have finished just about every book I’ve ever started (including Marcel Proust’s seven volume novel Remembrance of Things Past which is substantially different from J. K. Rowling’s seven volume story, but this is fodder for a later blog).  I tell this because now I am going to return to my discussion of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.” 

When I first decided to write about this song, I though I would only be writing about the chorus, but yesterday’s blog found me lured into the first two stanzas.  So let’s look at stanza three as a way to ease us back into the water and then hit that ever so perplexing chorus.

So I handed him my bottle and he drank down my last swallow.

Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.

And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.

Said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.

Here is that sacrifice we looked at yesterday.  The speaker freely offers payment for the advice.  It is his choice.  The gambler makes him pay not by simply finishing off the bottle, but by demanding additional payment.  Once the gambler is sure the story-teller wants the advice, the mood grow solemn, we lean in, and boom, we get no advice at all.  We get some cryptic message about playing it right.  Hey, I’m upset.  This is a coach telling the player to play better but not offering any instruction.  This is not what I, or the story-teller, want.  We want clear guidelines, a checklist to follow that will guarantee happiness, fulfillment, and success.  But like I asked you to do with my blog, I will be patient and see if there is more specific advice in the chorus.

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,

Know when to walk away and know when to run.

You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.

There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

So there really is no concrete advice.  Frustrating?  Maybe.  Or maybe it’s wisdom and that old existential notion pushing through once again.  The gambler knows that no one life is like another other than that each of us will make a series of choices that will ultimately shape the outcomes of our lives.  When to hold on to our core beliefs, our shattered loves, our investment holding, and when to cash them in and move on is such a crucial individual decision that no one can make it for us.  All the gambler can say is figure out what works for you, but take it seriously and think about it.  Strive to learn what is valuable and hold on to it and to learn when your choices are so untenable that you need to cut your losses and move on.  He cannot, should not, and will not, try to teach this skill.  Like the existential Christian, the gambler values freedom and does not want a higher power to dictate rules, even though this vagueness is clearly more difficult. 

Learning when to walk away and when to run is more of the same idea.  Again, the gambler is not instructing us on when to do this, just emphasizing that we have to figure it out for ourselves.  In fact the only somewhat concrete advice he offers is about when to count the money.  He knows that life is not over at 10 or 20 or 30….  Life is over when you die.  At that time, someone, if he cares to, can look over your existence and examine what you've earned.  The danger is in sitting back and counting our accomplishments while we are still alive.  We are not only failing to focus on the game, we are also allowing pride into life.  And as every gambler (and every baseball player for that matter) knows, life is ultimately a humbling experience.

So here are the last two stanzas.

Now Ev'ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin'

Is knowin' what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

'Cause ev'ry hand's a winner and ev'ry hand's a loser,

And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

So when he'd finished speakin', he turned back towards the window,

Crushed out his cigarette and faded off to sleep.

And somewhere in the darkness the gambler, he broke even.

But in his final words I found an ace that I could keep.

The gambler reminds us that every wise person (gambler) knows that learning this skill is essential; knows that every life has potential for great success and horrible tragedy; knows that most likely we will have both; knows that in the end, the absolute best we can hope for is to die peacefully.  We cannot hope to take accomplishments and possessions to the grave.  We also, thankfully, leave our failures and moments of shame here when we leave.  No matter what, we break even.  We come into the world with nothing, and we leave with nothing.  We just hope to be at peace with this knowledge when our time comes.  And that’s the ace the story-teller found that he could keep. 

The song is full of clichés and perhaps a corny gospel-like group of back-ground singers at the end, but the lyrics are actually pretty relevant and rather existential.  Interesting that the song enjoyed such success.  Maybe we actually agree that others cannot make our choices for us.