In my previous, I made a cutting remark about Douglas Ruskoff’s “Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.” While my opinion remains that the book is deeply flawed, as noted by, among others, Zeek.net), I didn’t intend to be dismissive. For one thing, Rushkoff obviously cares enough about Judaism to want to help keep it relevant; for another thing, his book is aimed at people who don’t know that the tradition wants to be questioned. If “Nothing Sacred” encourages even one Jew to say, “Maybe there’s something to this after all” and start studying on his or her own, how is that a Bad Thing?
It Started With Fingerprinting
Actually, it started two weeks ago, when I was interviewed by two Sonoma County Law Enforcement Chaplains who asked me why I wanted to become one of them.
"To tell you the truth," I said, "the whole idea terrifies me. But it's the sort of terror which compels further exploration."
They laughed. "You couldn't do this if you didn't feel that way," one replied.
Or maybe it started in 2000, when I interviewed a Sonoma Valley man who had just graduated from the 85-hour program in order to be able to sit with victims of crimes and accidents and help them cope when they'd otherwise be alone; or in 2001, when first responders in New York walked into two burning buildings, perhaps knowing they weren't coming out. I'd been writing about police and firefighters then for long enough to think I knew why they did that — and right then, I wanted to help those who help. But it wasn't until earlier this month that the opportunity arrived in the form of a newspaper blurb looking for chaplaincy candidates and urging the interested to fill out the form on http://www.sonomalawchaplains.org.
Anyway, whenever it started, this grey cool morning found me in Santa Rosa, at the county sheriff's headquarters, being fingerprinted with three other chaplain candidates.
The woman who runs the fingerprinting machine said she didn't like it at first. She was of the ink-and-roller school, and said she only adjusted to the new technology when they took her roller away. Now, she said, she couldn't imagine taking fingerprints any other way. The LiveScan fingerprinting machine is a digital camera, which takes a group shot apiece of the four fingers on each hand, and then one of each finger and thumb which the technician rolled gently across the cleanest glass plate I've ever seen.
"Just relax," she said.
There's a lesson in that, and one which I'll be thinking about next Tuesday evening the training begins in earnest with a weekly three-hour class until April. More about that subsequently, God willing.
There’s WATER on ‘ing MARS.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080731.html
(Is it just me, or did the Universe suddenly get a little more friendly?)
inyourhand to metaphorager
Effective immediately, and thanks to a recent free domain offer from the greatest ISP in the world, inyourhand.org is now metaphorager.net. (Well, and it’s also a cooler title.)
Too Mellow to Die
It worries me somewhat that my friends and colleagues are more concerned than I am that I experienced my fourth cardioversion Sunday.
“Experienced” is the wrong word. I experienced, and have a clear memory of, the 150 beats-per-minute irregular jangle in my chest, alternately exhilirating and tiring; the two ER trips, one for pink pills and one for (and this is why I love the emergency-responder sense of humor) “Edison Medicine;” the quiet peopling of “my” ER bay with what now seems in retrospect an awful lot of medical personnel; the partial deforestation of my chest so the defibrillator contact won’t arc; the smell of IV-administered sedatives in my nasal capillaries; the slow drop into warm unconsciousness from a ring of too-casual faces. I’ve seen it before, twice in succession five years ago and once three years after.
But of the cardioversion itself, the targeted electrocution which Ann tells me is always difficult to watch, I have absolutely no memory. And therefore, the seriousness of the situation — the potential for blood to clot in and shoot out of my atria toward my personal brain — somehow has never sunk in. Except for those around me.
All I seem to carry away with me (apart from the deep stretchy scorch in my chest, and a somewhat longer life) is a sense of the Universe’s fragile tensity — mine, yours and everyone else’s, all sideways in space and forward and backwards in Time; a sense that paints with echoing joy and terror everything it touches. (Synesthetics intentional.)
So maybe I shouldn’t be bothered by not being more bothered. Kissing the face of your sweetie can be intoxicating enough — how much more so to kiss the face of Reality, or of God?
Poetry of News
There is a certain poetry to newswriting that’s not readily apparent to its readers — and perhaps not even to its practitioners.
This derives in large part, I think, from the absurdity inherent in exchanging six to eight hours a day for six to eight hundred words a story which will be forgotten by next week.
It’s the game of Reality Creation, newsriting is. My job is to tell you what happened in a place you didn’t see. Though I labor to get it right (literally, with sweat and grunting and everything), my account is necessarily incomplete and should be taken with a grain of salt. (As should everyone else’s, of course: including yours.)
First Week In
Three things:
– My beats: fire, cops, breaking news, and meetings as needed.
– I work with some freakishly smart, amazingly creative people; two of whom I have now dueled with a lightsaber.
– The Game hasn’t changed much — get it fast, get it right, and get it (or a different part of it) first. Many of the players have also changed, but the ones who haven’t seem as happy to seem me as I am to see them.
Last week also found me chasing a fire, investigating a vehicle crash (no injuries, thank Gd), touring a local farm, and chatting with a now-retiring fire chief friend. It’s great to “be” a small-town newspaperman.
Again.
And so, to work.
It was four-and-a-half months since I was laid off from the sasonal office-manager position at a local nursery, and longer still since I worked in my official profession, when I picked up the phone to call Sonoma Valley’s newest newspaper. The conversation went something like this:
“Hi, I’ve been out of work for five years but I think I can help. Do you need any reporters?”
“Sure!”
Well, not exactly like that. But pretty close. Anyway, I started yesterday at the Sonoma Valley Sun, and will be covering fires, cops/courts, and breaking news. (In addition to whatever else is needful, like features and (I hope!) columns.) Also, I’ve reclaimed the byline “Neal Ross” (which I adopted for radio back in 1995 since nobody can seem to spell or pronounce “Attinson,” and kept for newspapering since that’s how all my contacts knew me. They still do).
There’s a saying that the One rewards men only for the merit of their wives. I don’t generally hold with Deuteronomic reward/punishment theology, but seeing the relief on Ann‘s face makes me agree with at least a small part of it … Blessed is the One who makes our wives happy.
As for me, I feel as though I’m walking in a dream. But I’d better wake up before the deadline. 😉
Thump, Flutter, Gak
I looked up from the computer, wondering about the “thump.” Then I saw the robin on the patio — fluttering wings outspread, struggling to get up.
Outside, through the gate, into the side-yard. “Are you okay?” I asked reflexively.
She wasn’t, at least at first. Her beak and eyes were wide open, and she was panting — or do robins always breathe that way? She seemed dazed but unhurt (no broken legs or anything), so I sat down next to her and babbled softly: “You poor thing. We’ll get you fixed up, give you some nice worm broth and pyracantha cobbler,” etc.
Continue reading “Thump, Flutter, Gak”
Natural Machines
A number of years ago, I got into a cocktail-party argument (or its boho-pomo equivalent, since we were in San Francisco in the 1980s) with someone who decried the “unnaturalness” of spaceflight. Her thesis, IIRC, was that humans were somehow apart from and opposed to Nature, as evidenced by the fact that “we make stuff instead of using what’s already there.” I asked, “What about beavewr dams and birds’ nests?” She got mad and found another people-knot. Would but that I could have steered her http://www.nextnature.net/-ward!
Exploring Mind
WHAT DIFFERENTIATES THE EXPLORER FROM other humans is his answer to the following question:
“If you could experience something that no one else ever had, but the cost was your own life, would it be worth it?” Continue reading “Exploring Mind”
Hiding the Hidden
Last week, we read in Parsha Beshallach about the departure from Egypt (Heb. “Mitzrayim”, or “narrows,” which the mystical tradition identifies with the forces of constraint and bad-habitry). Among the other nifty details is this one, from Exodus 13:21: “And YHVH went before them by day in pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light.”
This is traditionally seen as a cloud shot through with flame — one phenomenon (or metaphor-target) with two aspects. At our post-Shabbat Dinner chevrusa, Ann & I proposed this:
– When things go well, it’s easy to see the Path. When they don’t, we need a reminder that it’s there at all.
– The cloud also figures in this week’s portion, Yitro, where it surrounds Mt. Sinai prior to the Ten Statements. Perhaps this is one of Torah’s (not-so-)subtle Hints that, as Heraclitus put it (init caps added by me]: “The Nature of things is in the habit of concealing Itself.” In other words, that G!d can only manifest in hiddenness — in the mystery of direct experience.
I think this is one of the many, many things ungotten by Christopher Hitchens, Pat Robertson and other dogmatists: “If you can figure God out, what you’ve figured out isn’t God.” Buncha weenies — cluttering up the Godscape with conditions and qualifications, as though the primate brain has an exclusive on Truth…