Frozen Toothpaste

It has been more than a month since I posted here. And before a short streak of three relatively-consecutive posts, it had been nearly a month before that.

I say this not to apologize — it’s been far too long for that to be anything but hollow — but to demonstrate my point.

Around the start of June of this year, I broke the habit that had kept me filling words into this space on a regular basis. There were a number of reasons for this, not the least of which was a loss of time, ideas, and the feeling that it was necessary to write five times a week, Monday through Friday.

Breaking that habit — that constant pattern that didn’t let me escape without feeling guilty about how I wasn’t keeping to the plan — meant that I was free to interact with this space as I liked until such a time as I reestablished a habit of writing with a certain pattern of regularity. This certainly was a freeing act, but it’s also one that makes you suddenly look down and wonder what happened to your former prolific self.

I type this in a state of awe that I was ever able to write so much of, if not top quality stuff, at least six to eight paragraphs a day that I wasn’t embarrassed by. It seems like a stranger has replaced that prolific writer. Or perhaps that that prolific person was himself a stranger.

I don’t have a stirring conclusion, and my purpose isn’t to tell you to exercise three times a week so that you’ll have good health for far more years than you otherwise would. Though I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage you from physical fitness, I’m not in the business of telling people how to live their lives. But I’d guess that someone who is in that business is now trying desperately to convince a roomful of people of this fact that I’ve now learned on my own, through a series of months: Habits matter.

That’s not meant to judge habits. Some habits — lying regularly and recklessly, acting violently toward others — are galling. Some are undoubtedly bad, but not nearly so ugly. Your habit of having a cookie with lunch may not be doing your waist much help, but it’s hardly as bad as many other habits. And maybe you’ve got some incredibly beneficial habits, like sleeping eight hours a night, exercising regularly, and eating well.

Nor do I wish to encourage dogmatic adherence to your useful habits. Even those can be unnecessarily limiting if you spend too long fearing the impact that breaking them will have.

I just want to write this down so that I never forget: Habits matter.

Making twilight more beautiful, since the dawn of time

Because I nearly missed it, and because it wasn’t going to be around long, I seemed far more concerned than anyone else that tonight’s twilight, in this time and place, was full of beautiful and unexpected colors, in beautiful and unexpected places.

I suppose it started with an ordinary decision to walk the dog. The pavement was still drying off after a short but torrential rain half an hour before, but the precipitation seemed to have stopped.

Once we were actually trudging along — with frequent stops to smell the bushes — I noticed that it was still raining. Not much, but a few drops more than “sprinkling.” And as we got toward the point of no return, it seemed to be picking up. “I guess we’ll just make this a loop around the block,” I thought.

But because I sometimes seem a plaything for the gods, even that light rain abated just as I approached the front door. And so, in a stroke of luck, I decided it was necessary to head off again.

And I’m so glad I did. The colors, the shapes, the shadows I saw. It was unquestionably one of the ten best sunsets and twilights I’ve seen in my life. I’m tempted to arbitrarily rank it at number two.

As the sun set over the mountains to the west, the yellow faded into orange and pink. But more interesting was the sight to the east, where a pink wall of clouds served as the backdrop for some curiously formed pieces of gray fluff. Further south, there was a billowy cloud. I’d call it a mushroom cloud but for the apocalyptic connotation.

There was, just past that, the slightest hint of a rainbow. Though gauzy and lacking definition, it seemed to be projected exactly onto another background of cloud. And directly south was a large gray thunderhead of a cloud. But in that large gray thunderhead of a could was some truly unexpected red. As if there was a command center, lit in red for dramatic effect, exactly in the middle of it. “Let’s really wow them tonight,” were the words that echoed out from that room.

As time went on, it changed magnificently. There was, for a time, a perfectly formed map of England, with just the slightest suggestion of Wales off to it’s west. There was also a dramatic looking dogpile, with just one more player running up to jump on top.

And it did, of course, become less brilliant. The pinks and oranges that were for a time vibrant, became duller, then grayish, now completely invisible. The sky was undeniably becoming a uniform dull gray as we hit the home stretch, but perhaps as a solitary reminder that it knew it put on a show, the sky offered, for a minute, a dull teal unlike anything I’d seen before. Red, pink, orange, blue, even yellow, these are color the sky has offered a million times before. A green, even a dull one, is an unquestionable oddity.

I was a little sad when even that hint of teal faded into a dull and darkening gray. The majesty, which it seemed no one else noticed, was gone. I’d seen a show few others did, but neither I nor they could enjoy it now. And even I would have missed it, if not for some inexplicable luck that made me realize that once around the block wasn’t really a long enough walk.

So here it is, my conclusion: beauty is heightened by it’s passing, elevated by all the times that it’s missed. Art that is widely recognized as possessing great beauty, therefore preserved endlessly and unchangingly in humidity and temperature controlled chambers, monuments to man’s effort to overcome ephemerality, are made less beautiful and less interesting for their persistence. The Mona Lisa may be nice, but her unchanging face makes her much less interesting than a sunset.

I was struck recently, by a bit of profundity in the oddest of places. Twitter, as you may know, is a “micro-blogging” system that allows you to post thoughts of at most 140 characters. It sounds like thoroughly pointless technology, but it was there that I found this:

so many different ways i could have lived this day. but i lived it just like this. and i suppose in that way - it was perfect.

“The perfect day” is a topic that people get fixated on a lot. They imagine what they would do if they suddenly knew — with a certainty all but impossible in real life — that they had 24 hours to live. Variations on the theme generally involve eating great food, keeping great company, and doing great things.

And simply, I think it’s absurd. This exercise is valuable only to the extent that it educates the listener about what the speaker believes to be the best things on earth. Maybe it’s Japan. Maybe it’s pastrami on rye. Maybe it drawing without getting distracted. Maybe it’s watching the sunset as many times as you can. But though these things are interesting to know, but they don’t help us better understand our lives and our living of them.

Because this game involves no compromises; life is about compromise.

Though I used to hope to live a life without regrets or compromises, I now recognize that it’s much better to hope to never regret my compromises.

Very few, if even the hyper-rich, can afford to live without compromises. You can have your dream job, but it’ll probably require you to compromise on the city and social-scene of your dreams. You may be able to spend your life with the love of your life, but you’ll probably have to give up your chance at your dream job.

And this is no less true about the mundanities of life. Though you may abhor the thought, eating McDonald’s is sometimes the best way to satiate your growling stomach and get back to the office in time for a meeting. Some times you’ll have to miss the night out with friends to finally do the project that you’ve put off far too long.

It’s nice to think that we can live each day as if it were our last. To be able to spend all our time doing work we love in a place we love, eating food we love with people we love. But that simply isn’t possible. It was never possible, and quite possibly, it’ll never be possible.

But sometimes the compromises themselves, in their unexpected serendipity, their accidental profundity, or their unlikely beauty, work out better than our dreams. And I’m not sure a day or a life can be more perfect than that.

wickenden (ASA)

There are two general signs that a blog is heading toward extinction. The first is a declining frequency of posting, and the second is a proportional rise in the number of posts about the blog itself. These two don’t always go hand-in-hand; sometimes it’s just one or the other, sometimes you don’t get either warning sign. But when either of the two is spotted it’s reasonable to begin wondering how long that curious internet publication will continue to be updated.

I bring this up not to say that Frozen Toothpaste is on the way out, but because I realized that it has recently offered such an impression. My unannounced absence last week was caused by the distraction of a thoroughly awful stomach flu. I really did intend to post.

Back to the point: there’s something that you begin to notice if you spend much time on the internet. Most blogs — used here as a catchall term for all regularly updated, vaguely artistic, internet endeavors — seem to last somewhere between three and six months. Some make it longer, but five uninterrupted years is unquestionably a rarity.

For most people, the intent of a blog is somewhere between a journal and — the unlikely hope is — a valuable public mouthpiece. Given the scarcity of interested and committed readers available on the internet, the average blog ends up being a mostly private journal. And the failure rate of a new blog is about the same as it is for a private journal.

Everyone’s probably done it once or twice: you get this strong impulse — for me it usually strikes in a bookshop full of beautiful and empty pages bound together — to record your thoughts for posterity. At that moment your ideas seem so clear and forceful and fresh that you simply owe their recording to posterity.

But it never seems to last. My aforementioned and unresearched estimate of three to six months for blogs, is roughly how long journals seem to last me. I’m arrogantly assuming that I’m at or above average.

It always seems to be that journals — and blogs — begun with the urgent intensity of someone confident that the simple act of putting their thoughts on paper will clarify or improve them, you soon find that a personal conversation is hard. And whether it’s because you find yourself a poor conversationalist, a slow writer, or an incoherent blabberer the realization generally comes that the results are a little less than magical. The realization dawns that what you’re writing is not really in need of urgent preservation.

So you walk away. You give up. You’ve expelled whatever it was that caused you to create a blog or buy a journal. You’re done with the superfluous recording of everything.

It’s a rather natural process, this sudden enthusiasm and slow disillusionment. But it doesn’t make it any easier to accept all the dead blogs on the internet.

Recently I’ve been giving some serious thought to my aversion to cable news, local news programs, and the vast quantities of stories that circulate on the internet. I came to this rough conclusion:

There are essentially two kinds of news: events and trends that change the lives of millions of people, and one-off stories about violence, theft, or kidnappings.

Basically, the vast majority of what I don’t like — stories about celebrities, crime, “human interest pieces,” — are stories that are interesting primarily because of their randomness. They have little to no meaningful and lasting effect on the lives of most people.

Coming to this conclusion, I did pause to think of the callousness — perhaps necessary — of this. Someone getting shot is a tragedy. And it’s an important event that could change their life forever or even end it outright. But I don’t have the time nor energy to hear all of those stories one-by-one. I don’t think anyone — even if they spent their whole day listening to such stories — could know, understand, and empathize with all of them.

But a single one-off story can easily fill a whole hour of time. Shows like NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s Primetime, and CBS’s 48 Hours are essentially dedicated to doing that. Their go-to format is to take one sordid incident — a murder, a kidnapping, a robbery — and tell you all the details they can about it. This can be compelling as a storytelling device, but it generally fails as a way to show what’s really happening in the world.

These shows — and cables news networks which spend much of their airtime telling similar stories — are ostensibly engaged in the act of conveying news. But they often fail to document the broad brushes that truly matter historically and personally. Unless you’re involved in these one-off events it’s unlikely to affect your life. But everyone everywhere is affected by record prices for oil and food.

Having said all that, there’s a difficult-to-define line separating one-off news from the events and trends stories in which I am legitimately interested. One murder in Denver over the previous weekend seems to me a one-off story. But five murders are certainly something I’d want to know about. That quite nearly constitutes a trend and could be a valuable fact to know. Between one and five is a difficult line of delineation that I can’t begin to tackle.

Natural disasters are also one-off stories. Definitionally, they happen only once and are unlikely to have an impact on me unless they were nearby. But when the volume of tragedy and destruction reaches above some arbitrary benchmark — which, again, I don’t really know exactly — I care about them.

Now one could even say that many of the things that I do consider news — the war in the Congo, or the mess in Zimbabwe, the conflict in Darfur — are one-off trivia as well. After all, as an average American the state of democracy in Zimbabwe is unlikely to ever directly impact my life. But it does, I would defend myself, matter in the lives of millions of Zimbabweans and millions more in surrounding countries.

It’s very easy to break the world into categories, but much harder to accurately define the countours of those categories. I have no doubt that almost all news involving movies stars will always be lowly one-off news to me, but that doesn’t provide clean delination for the rest or what crosses a journalist’s desk in a day. I don’t consider this the final answer to the question of “What news is worth knowing?”, but I’m rather certain it’s a step in the right direction.