Category Archives: personal

personal

On Dog Poop

I have a dog. His name is Lucky and he’s the size that strangers consistently say “what a cute puppy” when they see him. He’s at least seven people-years old. That’s 49 in dog years. To the extent that he understands the strangers, he doesn’t seem to care.

You may be thinking that this is the story of how that charming dog came to live with me. This is not that story. This is instead the story of dog poop.

I am, in this area, incredibly inconsiderate. Just ask anyone who’s walking through the park when they see a dog arch it’s back in that certain way that makes it clear that they couldn’t really be doing anything else but what they are. And then they’ll yell, “I hope you’re going to pick that up!”

To which I give the only reasonable response, nothing. And as they walk away, I do too. Without a bag of warm excrement in my hand.

I realize that leaving my dog’s turds in public is not appropriate. But sometimes I just can’t stoop down to pick it up. Especially when it looks like Lucky had a little too much to drink last night. Or especially when someone reminds me of my ‘responsibility.’

It’s not that I never pick up the dog poop. If the conditions are right, and a bag is close at hand, I’ll do it. But even then I can’t escape the feeling that it’s a rather silly thing to do.

There a number of reasons that picking up dog poop is absurd. For one, horses, whose poop is much larger and much more solid, are allowed to leave turds wherever they want. Their owners seem to feel no need to clean it up, even if it was lain in the middle of a perfectly good hiking or biking trail.

Further, dogs are, to my knowledge, the only animals that poop outside that we are required to clean up after. Surely inside-pooping cats get their poop cleaned up, as do gerbils, rabbits, and guinea pigs, but this is because they’re pooping in our homes.

The where and how of dog poop is much more like the where and how of squirrel or wild/feral rabbit poop. And it’s not as if dog poop is a danger to the environment. All they eat is grain and some rare meat proteins, nothing terribly foreign or worrisome. In fact, it probably makes pretty good fertilizer for all the foreign substances (like grass) that we plant everywhere.

So next time you’re walking your dog, and someone asks you if you’re going to pick that up, do the right thing. Say yes and walk away. Leave the excrement where it falls.

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american society, personal

Doubts About the Working World

About a month ago, I graduated from university with a BA in History. To no one’s surprise, I am still unemployed.

Six months prior to graduation, I couldn’t wait for it to arrive. Slogging through boring papers, tests, and classes, I looked so forward to being allowed out of the confines of the institution so I could take on and take over the world. I was ready to write great books, articles, anything. Raise money, consciousness, everything in order to fix the world problems.

One month prior to the event, I had doubts. Not only was I uncertain that I would graduate, I was even less sure that I wanted to. People’s suggestion of staying around for another year seemed all the better. Where five months ago I scoffed at such an idea, now I was certain that it was better than my current plan.

Looking back on it though, I am glad I graduated. If only because I know, maybe better than most, that I would never have been ready to leave. I would never have had any great clarity because I never would have sought it without an urgent need for it.

Granted, even with a need only slightly less than urgent, I haven’t yet found it. I’m told all the time that this is a really great job market. That it’s a good time to have graduated, even if you just got an apparently worthless degree like I did. (I don’t feel that it’s worthless, but the world at large seems to be of that opinion.)

I would readily cede that the reason I don’t currently have a traditional job is not that I wouldn’t be able to get one if I tried. It’s rather that I haven’t yet found one that I actually want enough to apply for. What I see is not what I want. I don’t want a job selling things, making things, or analyzing things being bought and made.

Lloyd Dobler’s famous line says it better:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

I recognize that to get a job in the traditional sense, I have to do something someone will pay me for. But right off the top of my head nothing I can think of seems worth doing.

And partially I’m just scared. Scared of taking on all that responsibility that comes with a job. Scared of how taking a job will change me.

I worry that if I take a job I don’t really like, I will be changed by it. That I may grow cynical, uninterested or useless. I realize that not all people with jobs are these things, but part of me thinks that I would be.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I should become a mailman. Or an insurance salesman. But right now, I don’t like the idea much.

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personal

The Torturous Minutes

The alternate title for this was “Why I Like Being Sleep Deprived.” But I feel that both of these titles require some explanation. The first thing you should know it that I’ve long thought, or perhaps I was told, that when you struggle to fall asleep at night, it’s because you don’t physically need to. I remember I heard once that if you have to lie in bed for over 15 minutes before you fall asleep, it means that you’re getting enough.

And this is about is that torturous time between deciding, usually around 11:45, that it’s time to turn off the light and float away to dreamland and the time that I actually do float away.

Those torturous minutes that I seem to only notice when they venture above 15.

And these are terrible minutes. They’re terrible because you don’t want to think any really good thoughts because you’re liable to forget them by morning. It’s the time when you remember how you didn’t do enough push ups that day, but you have to fight the urge to get up and do them because you know that you’ll inevitably be less tired when you’re done.

This time is rather new to me. I’ve spent many years staying up far too late or getting up too early to be used to this limbo. This time between the essential binary of our lives. Between the doing and the not doing. Between the waking and the sleeping.

Maybe this isn’t the curse of the well-rested. Maybe I’m an insomniac. I doubt that’s the case, but it is possible.

This is a time when too often I have good ideas and feel compelled to get up and jot them down so I have them in the morning. And when I get back to bed I wonder if that hasn’t just prolonged the problem.

But if I must say one good thing about these tortured minutes, and I feel I must, it’s that they never fail to give me at least one good or interesting idea that I seem to miss during the clearly awake part of life.

And so maybe, just maybe, I should be thankful for limbo.

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american society, big ideas, personal

Changing the World with Ideas

I was raised Catholic. And, for a time, I convinced myself that I was a saint. Not just any saint, I went further than that. I convinced myself that I was the Christian Messiah. I was the second-coming of Christ. To the extent that I understood such things as the immaculate conception and virgin-birth, they didn’t matter. I was Jesus Christ.

And while my messianic tendencies have declined since I was in the first grade, they are not dead. Though I’m no longer a Catholic, I still think, from time to time, that I’m rather saintly.

Perhaps we could blame my ephemeral convictions of my own importance on how children are raised “today.” The way they tend to be praised more and scolded less. Loved more, encouraged more, impressive more.

Please don’t take me as someone convinced that children are soft these days. Though I don’t disagree that I had it far better than my grandparents, I don’t think they would want me to go through all they did.

They, like most, realize that to the extent that society has made us soft, it’s also given us more comfort and time. And whether we use it for good or bad, this is a nice state of affairs.

But if I may, I’d go back to the Jesus thing. Though I’m no longer convinced of my religious significance, I still think that I can and should do something for the world.

But where two years ago I was convinced that I could fix it all, the whole world, by myself; and where one year ago I was convinced the world was hopeless and I couldn’t save it; I know recognize that no one, no one, can change the world alone.

At the risk of angering some, I would argue that Jesus certainly didn’t change the world by himself. To the extent that his teachings came to matter, it was through the concerted effort of his early followers, and later, Roman and then Church bureaucrats.

But he did offer the world something. He offered ideas that have had positive impacts in human lives for hundred of years. I’m not arguing in favor of Christianity, but rather in favor of ideas. Any idea that resonates with people and forces them out of their own little world.

I believe that ideas have transformative effects far beyond any single person.

Ghandi didn’t end British control in India. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t end segregation. But the force of their ideas and the courage of their convictions turned the tide. Helped to push others to ask themselves about their thoughts, their beliefs. What was right, what was wrong.

I still don’t know if I can save the world. Or if I can change even the smallest bit. But I believe that if I do, it will have to be through ideas.

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personal

On Graduation

One month ago today, I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The ceremony was rather large and anonymous. This was not unexpected: commencement ceremonies are rarely the intimate gatherings that perhaps they should be, especially not at a large state school.

Though I could go on, I prefer to discuss the event’s significance.

There has always been, it seems to me, some quasi-religious rite-of-passage aspects to graduation or commencement ceremonies. Whatever age, they are spoken of as dividing lines. Mundane events painted as crucial turning points. There is only before and after. You are a fundamentally different person, you are constantly told, and after this you’ll be treated according to this new system. The life you knew is dead, the life to come will challenge you, shape you, change you in ways you simply cannot understand.

I graduated from the sixth grade in 1998. For a second, I believed them. I believed that Junior High School was massively and importantly different from elementary school. But I soon realized: though we no longer had line-leaders, we were still doing the same thing. And maybe the building was bigger, but the people were about the same size as they had been three months before.

I guess part of this rhetoric of change is a fundamental outgrowth of the fact that the first graduation ceremonies were important. They were likely adaptations of medieval rituals brought inside the hallowed halls of some long forgotten French of English building. To distinguish men from boys.

Today there can be differences with graduation. Having decided that I need no more book learning (I’m sure my use of that phrase would convince some otherwise), this is an important dividing line in my life.

But it is not for all. Many go one, whether by choice or inertia, to study still-longer at universities. Keeping themselves from the new reality that graduation introduces them to.

But if the commencement ceremony really signifies a change, if it is really the path into independent adulthood, it cannot be the end. That change, that path, if there is one, is a slow and arduous path. The change may have been introduced, but its reality has hardly arrived.

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personal, politics, USA

From the past: Vote for me in 2024

Considering the merits of my former blogs while working on my current one, I went back and looked at some of what I’d written. To call most of it a little embarrassing is probably understating the truth. This piece, however, was something that I thought still had some slight personal and public merit. It is by no means perfect, nor is it necessarily in line with my current feelings. But I just can’t resist revisiting a piece of personal history. [This and many other embarrassing pieces of work can be found online, but for my own sake, I’ll leave you to find them.]

Written 18 January 2005 (nearly 30 months ago):

Dear America,

Few things confuse me more than politics. At least in the United States, they seem to be the most completely useless thing ever. Sure, the election of George W. Bush may mean that a few more animals lose their habitat, but John F. Kerry wouldn’t have stopped the inevitability of that animal losing his home. Sure, he may have delayed it for a while, but what’s needed isn’t minor change that the two party’s we have offer. What we need is real change. What we need is people who are only willing to focus on [more than] three issues per debate. That’s not solving the worlds problems any more than going to the polls is.

What we need here, and soon, is someone who will face up to what needs to be done, and do it. And there’s a lot more than need to be done than Iraq and social security reform. Those were syptoms of the problem, not really issues that should have been debated any more than the price of coffee.

This is why I want you to vote for me in November 2024. I know its a long way off, and the issues will have changed a lot by then, so I’m not going to talk about them here. They’ll be far more relevant later. I’ll most likely be running indepent, and unless Nader can make some real changes, will be fighting hard just to get my name on the ticket on all 50 states. But at some point in my life I think I really should be the president of this country. We were once the best in the world. Revered by the good guys, and hated by the pinko-commie-bedwetters. We’ve fallen far from that pedestal, but my administration will change that, have no fear.

I’m not a career politician. I’m thinking about becoming an Industrial Designer, and making a lot of cool [stuff] that people love to use. Or maybe I’ll become a philosopher. I could answer all of people’s problems. That might help the run to the White House a little more. Maybe I’ll be a Chemical Engineer. I’ll make Hydrogen possible, and end our dependence on foriegn oil. That should win me some votes from Republicans. Maybe I’ll become a historian. And look at all presidential races in history, see what it takes to win. That could be the best of all.

And although my path to the presidency is far from clear, I’ll run sometime. I really think I could help the world, and so I want to do it. I know its a lot of pressure. I know its one of the most dangerous jobs, because its so easy to anger people. But I think I need to do it, for the good of society.

So, I’ll see you on the stump, and remember to get out and vote for a better America.

With love,
David Hayes

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personal, poetry

Meeting William Stafford

This is not about the time that I met the late and great poet William Stafford. Though we shared six years on this earth, I never got that chance. This is rather about the metaphorical meeting that great poetry can convince you you have had.

There are poems that you read which resonate. About which you say, “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel, or at least how I’d like to.” The first time this happened to me though, I was shocked.

My high school education included too much average poetry and too little that resonated with me, if anyone. We read Dickinson too early to understand her, and Plath too briefly to care. We surely read others, but they never stuck.

I became convinced that I hated poetry. It’s not that I hated the words, I hated the pressure that my education put on the form and the analysis.

First I learned how to write sonnets. Not that I would ever write a sonnet, but someone thought I should know how to.

And then I was forced to pull meaning out of Shakespeare. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Really we were simply looking for tricks that reinforced the poem’s meaning. But I was never told, so I became convinced that there was to be meaning attached to each slant rhyme, each sibilance, and god forbid, the hundreds of metaphors. This killed any innate love for poetry I may have ever had.

After that, I hated the form.

With time a few broke through. William Carlos Williams famous “so much depends…” got me once. Bukowoski, beaten over my head by a friend, seemed good enough.

William Stafford, though, he’s the one that snuck up on me. Surfing the internets [sic] one day I found this:

‘Any Morning’

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

I couldn’t look away. The poem was so simple, honest, and full of the simple joy of simple moments. And it made me do one thing nothing I’d not done in some long time: seek out a book of poems.

And there I found another:

Love in the Country

We live like this: no one but
some of the owls awake, and of them
only near ones really awake.

In the rain yesterday, puddles
on the walk to the barn sounded their
quick little drinks.

The edge of the haymow, all
soaked in moonlight,
dreams out there like silver music.

Are there farms like this where
no one likes to live?
And the sky going everywhere?

While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us.

Again, same effect. Transfixed. The last stanza especially.

“…we study how to deserve/ what has already been given us.” I must have read it over at least ten times. I considered how much I truly owed the world. How much I’d been given, how much I had left to give.

I haven’t read any more Stafford recently, but these have kept me. Perhaps I should look for more, I’ve waited long enough.

In any case, there’s the story of how I met William Stafford. And how he helped me love poetry. And better understand the world. And my place within it.

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