A Journal of Experiential Holiness and Snack Bar.
Tales of the Great Dollar Hunt.
1. IT USED TO BE CALLED “doing the marketing.” And it is one of my life’s favorite small pleasures.
2. This simple joy can probably be traced back to my dad and I doing it together every Saturday or Sunday morning (or so goes my memory), when I was a young’un in Massachusetts. We would visit one store for meat, another for produce, another for household products, yet another for baked goods. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Grocery Shopping”
OF ALL THE PET PEEVES this modern life offers, one of the most soul-sucking is checking out at the grocery store.
I’m specifically talking about the debit-card machine. Time was, you could fill the two-to-three-minute transaction with friendly banter; ask after the checker’s health and/or welfare; comment on how busy the day is; even chat about the house music. It doesn’t matter what — it’s a friendly benefit for both customer and checker. When you’re working retail, these little conversations help pass the time and break up the daily monotony. Continue reading “Don’t Look Up”
IF I HAD KNOWN THAT our galleon would collide with a freighter, I would have worn a life jacket.
The time was February 1988. Through a curious series of circumstances, I had signed aboard the replica galleon Golden Hinde II a few months earlier as a deckhand and docent, sailing around the Bay Area and down the California coast giving tours of our fine ship. Our plan that night was to motor (yes, we had a small engine) from San Francisco to the Farallon Islands, then sail down to Half Moon Bay. We left San Francisco well after midnight in order to take advantage of the outgoing tide, and were soon past the Golden Gate Bridge and into the open sea.
A cold and foggy 3 a. m. found me atop the foredeck on bow-watch (front lookout) with a couple of other chilly souls. Continue reading “Night, Fog, and One Hell of a Bang”
FOR MOST OF THIS YEAR, and health permitting, I have been co-hosting a weekly radio show every Thursday afternoon with my rabbi (and showhost), Steve Finley. It’s billed as the Sonoma Valley Interfaith Ministerial Association Radio Hour, and is an exploration of different faith traditions and communities as represented by their local spiritual leaders; each episode also features a lesson from engaging cantor/musicologist Jonathan Friedmann. You can hear it on livestream at 4 p.m. PDT at http://ksvy.org; or if you’re in the Valley, on 91.3 FM. (Missed us? Here’s a link to the show archives.) It’s always a rousing conversation, so if you like this sort of thing (and what metaphorager doesn’t?) dial or click us in!
THERE IS ONE INFLEXIBLE RULE which, if followed diligently, will result in years if not decades of safe bicycling: Pretend you’re invisible.
Now, many get the wrong impression on first hearing this advice — they hear “invisible” and think “invincible,” as if an inability to be seen were some sort of safety asset. As a former bike messenger and longtime bike enthusiast, it’s been my observation that many drivers either can’t or won’t see you — especially in city conditions. And that can be … problematic. Continue reading “Bicycle Safety 101”
TAKE THE WORLD AND YOUR part in it seriously, but not yourself.
Never refuse anything offered, but be careful about entanglements.
You’ll need computer skills, but you’ll also enjoy them.
Write.
Stake out early your points of honor.
Dream. Then write it down.
Hold on to your comic books, graphic novels, ephemera and trading cards. (Science fiction will be some seriously big business in a few years.) Continue reading “Advice to The Younger Self”
THIS QUESTION WAS POSED TO me by a friend who’s considering the path. Since I have some small experience with the subject, and some readers have some interest in it, I’m posting my reply here and will be absolutely unoffended if you skip it.
Wow. No one’s ever asked me that before, so I needed to take some serious time to think about it before replying. So first, thank you for an interesting think.
Before I reply, you need to know that I’m currently off the rabbi thing; partly because I made an unsuccessful bid earlier this year to serve my synagogue in this capacity, and since I now know I only wanted to “be a rabbi” for this community (and despite that everybody still treats me as a spiritual leader) it seems rather moot to continue my studies. But there are other reasons as well. That said, there were certainly aspects I “liked,” or more accurately, found rewarding.
The best thing to me about “being a spiritual leader” is making a difference for people in a direct, immediate way. People come to services for many reasons — duty, support, inspiration, help, grief, socializing and sometimes even to pray. To at least offer a moment of connection for those who need it is incredibly fulfilling; to have it accepted, even more so. (I always feel like I learned most about leading services by hawking for Greg; it’s important to be able to read the crowd and respond appropriately and immediately.)
But leading is not just services. Depending on the tradition you embrace, you may also be witness to (and help facilitate) some of the most powerful moments in someone’s life. What I like most about this, perhaps selfishly, is that there’s no room for yourself in these moments — you must be a pure conduit for those involved — and for a heavy egotist like me the experience is wonderfully freeing.
This next may be a specifically Jewish thing (on account of the heavy rabbinical teacher’s role), but there is also a particular joy in seeing people get excited about their really, really old heritage: that moment of “Ohhhh … THAT’S why we do this.” It’s fun to share the things which excite us. It’s also very scary to be the one passing along a tradition — you want to get it right, and you want to get it relevant — but I think a proper spiritual leader needs a certain amount of insecurity.
Seeing people smile when you enter a room is also a nice benefit. But be careful of being praised beyond your capacity to accept. Gracefully accepting gratitude is something I’m still trying to master; what I do comes naturally to me, partly perhaps because I /don’t/ see myself as being altogether worthy of doing it. I just allow it all to happen, that’s all. Like the old Grateful Dead lyric about the storyteller: “His job is to shed light, not to master.”
That’s all I can think of at the moment. I hope it helps you in some way.
Be well, good luck, and blessings.
CONSIDERING THE GREAT POTENTIAL CONTAINED in most human beings, and the difficulty we have getting started on projects, perhaps we might accordingly revise our notions of messianism. The Re-(or Un-)born King may not set things right so much as give us the tools and gumption we need (or point out that we’ve had them all along). After all, getting started is the hardest start to any project. Perhaps we just need a little push and can take it from there.(1)
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(1) Disclaimer: This being Monday morning, I tend not to believe in a literal Messiah. In fact, I tend not to believe in a Messiah at all unless as metaphor or if I have a really, really bad headache. But “believe as thou wilt shall be the hole in the Law.”
1. THEY RECOGNIZE THE SUPERIOR QUALITY of my work by admitting that they “regret that (they) are unable to carry it in the magazine.” You can’t regret doing something that’s not regretworthy, right? Right?
2. They spelled my name right. BOTH names. I could plotz from that alone.
3. It gives me a chance to plug the original (as well as its backstory: Drifting into a reverie one afternoon, a series of images — colored panels in the style of Nicole Claveloux or George Herriman — began flipping before my eyes. I could barely write them down fast enough. That usually doesn’t happen to me; I usually compose either at the keyboard or while pacing the room. The version I sent to TNY omitted the dialog, which is inconsequential anyway; I didn’t know what else to do with it, so I sent it off. As William S Burroughs so famously quoth in Naked Lunch, “Wouldn’t you?”).
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No pay necessary — work from home in your spare time. Equal returns and credit guaranteed Scout’s honor (“A Cheery Coproduction of _YOUR NAME HERE_ and Neal’s Brain Unlimited”). No poseurs, players or funless wimps need apply. Please direct all serious inquiries (no phone calls please) to scoop at sonic dot net.
TODAY IS THE WORST DAY (or one of the worst days) in any given year: it’s the last day I’ll be teaching religious school, which means I won’t see “my kids” any more — and I’ll be slightly stupider without someone questioning my basic Jewish assumptions every couple of weeks.
I don’t know what motivated the people who taught me, but what motivates me is the conviction that, at 12 years old, the human being is halfway between the wonder of youth and the skepticism of age: old enough to begin thinking critically and asking interesting questions, and young enough to still enjoy curiosity. When I was that age, my teachers told me not to ask interesting questions (apparently not knowing that Judaism is all about interesting questions): thereby driving me on 23-year post-Bar Mitzvah quest for a spiritual path that did. Mind you, this world offers a variety of beautiful approaches to finding God Or A Reasonable Approximation, but I don’t want my kids to have to go to as much trouble as I did. (Of course, if they do, I expect to hear all about it — they’re all smart and love a good argument.)
And so, every year, I have taught them a bit of history, a little Torah, some customs; I especially tried to teach them that this rich heritage is theirs, and that it isn’t limited to a bunch of rules and some dusty bookshelves: that it’s alive, and growing, and that they’ll eventually pass it on to their own children. And that they’ll want to — not because someone said so, and not only because a moral compass (or good manners) and sense of relation are human universals (either to stand on or to kick off against).
But because we’re all here so briefly, we need all the help we can give each other. And because being a Jew, like being anybody, matters.
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.)
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