Weather Patterns
To ask a Japanese, which is to say the common opinion fed by no-nothing news broadcasters, this rainy season has been unnaturally dry. Never having lived in a country that suffers genuine droughts, they don't really get how insignificant the difference is between 9 inches of rain in a month and 10. Anyway, the rain and too much Harold Bloom have been making me think about childhood, not so much my childhood as the abstract. The result is as follows.
sweat
I'd baked my brain in the sunlight
before I'd even let it rise;
I'd let water cool my throat
until it became ice
tinkling in a glass of lemonade
as bright as the sunshine I'd baked
with my thoughts had risen up
like cold steam from the ice
wrinkling in the uneven heat
of the crystal air shatters
the sun into perfect hazy
pieces of hexagonal ice.
sweet
lemons drops of rain sounding somewhere
beyond a frosted pane of glass coat
the road in a thinnest film of mirror.
somethere tickling the puddles with her
shoes the reflection of a girl is tasting
the water that someday rots her teeth.
the wet icicles dangling from the clouds
somehow reek of peppermint the whole
way she wanders to the end of the block.
sleet
I'd wanted to believe the myths of nana
tucking in the lads, telling them stories
of how she'd lived her life in hail.
You'll forgive me if my thoughts are a bit cloudy at the moment. I've been using idle train time, of which I have an endless supply, to muse on what Mike had said about me becoming [insert name here]
"If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you'd be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don't have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn't know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn't dare challenge them."
posted by Nicholas Theisen @ 9:48 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I lift a frothy glass in praise of the author of Freakonomics: he has hit the Nailcholas on the head.
It's funny, I only superficially want it not to be true, perhaps because I don't want to admit that I've basically become my father.
It became apparent to me, when, on the phone with my dad, we got into a petty argument about batting stats, as baseball is the only true thing we have in common beside temperament, and I absolutely would not concede my point about the meaninglessness of things like RBIs and "clutch hitting," two of those old fashioned baseball stats that in fact don't predict anything. I realize now that it's basically an (oedipal) symptom of a burning desire to say, "i can do precisely what you do, only better."
nicholas, i have been wondering about this for a long time: it seems that there is a kind of tension/confrontation/competition between men in general. Not that this does not exist between women or between men and women, but this appears to be more visible between men. Do you think it would work if you use the daoist water strategy when dealing with your dad?
about the expert thing, both you and mike strike me as such an expert at different moments. the most recent example would be when mike squeezed ten big names into a tiny paragraph. hahaha...
Nicholas: Oh, don't worry. I turned into my father a long time ago. The hoarding, the inclination to being a hermit, the esotericism, the bad temper. It's all here in spades! I think you're right about RBIs, but I don't know what clutch hitting is.
Liansu: Welcome to the helpless, useless dick-waving world of mutual male aggression, the motto of which is "We can't fuck each other, so we fight each other." Daoist water strategy is about as useful here as a 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper is against a hurricane.
Your sidelong jabs at my pretensions continue to amuse me. From a certain point of view, Nicholas and I remain friends mostly because we are more or less equally skilled in areas of expertise that overlap just enough for us to have something to share, but diverge enough to give each of us some reserve to fall back on if the other should gain too much ground. It's really all about military strategy - and there's nothing like proving the worth of an ally to yourself by engaging in war games with him.
As for my name-dropping, well, it's an urge I can't control all the time. Like the urge to eat peanut butter right out of the jar. Mmmmm, Heidegger. Tasty.
HAHAHAHAHAAAA!! mike, you are hilarious. this made my day, seriously. you would have sent me rolling on the ground laughing my eyes out if i were not in the library right now. a toast to you and nicholas:)
Clutch hitting is the hitting percentage with runners in scoring position, arbitrarily determined to be 2nd and 3rd. The idea behind it is how well does a batter perform under pressure. The statistic is meaningless for 2 reasons: 1) it only takes into consideration hitting, so if the bases are loaded and the batter walks, he's helped score a run for his team but the stat doesn't reflect that and 2) the stat has a wide margin of error because each season a batter finds himself in relatively few "clutch" situations.
Mike's right, but I would add that it's not quite fighting. Fighting is attacking someone with the intention of causing them some sort of harm; this is more akin to exercise or sport. There's something we gain by suffering with each other.
how about cub fighting or kitten fighting? i am always amused by how those tiny animals showing off their violent nature in a highly skillful yet playful manner. don't deny it, nicholas. you once admitted to being a willful baby. a cub is no worse than that.:)
Rock-a-bye, willful baby, may angels sing you to your rest.
Tee hee. That explains N.'s big pale peely head.
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