Noise

A few days ago I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room and some insane pudgy man with spiky blonde hair was on television yelling out the secret to making egg rolls. The TV set was bolted to the ceiling with a sign that said “Please Don’t Change the Channel” and “Ask the Nurse for Assistance.” I looked around at the other folks waiting and I couldn’t see so much as one single person paying any attention to the fat chef. I could see any number of people who seemed very annoyed at the noise. Some were trying to read, others to doze. Even the receptionist was flashing dark looks at the oversized cuisinier. To make matters worse, minutes earlier an orderly had told us the doctors were running up to an hour behind, which meant most of us were essentially being held hostage by the cooking channel.

I wondered what the purpose of the TV was. Certainly, it couldn’t be entertainment. No one was smiling, and I had the feeling that out of sheer spite, none of us would ever eat an egg roll again. I asked the receptionist if we could at least change channels but she said the remote was lost and we were not allowed to stand on a chair to do it manually. I asked her if she, at least, liked the show, and she told me she didn’t even notice it, which was a lie. She had been doodling little fat chefs with spiky hair on her calendar.


I think maybe the powers-that-reign at my HMO have decided that noise is better than no noise. Maybe if we are occupied hating the noise, we will be too busy to complain about the long wait, the $30 co-pay, and the lack of any magazines save the one put out by the HMO and the AARP monthly.

It made me wonder about the value of silence.

My home is quiet. Even though I own enough CDs to stock a small store, I rarely play them. I detest Muzak, loud trucks that belch black smoke, sirens and horns, people who shout and commercials where the decibel level is 50 percent higher than the show I’m watching. I think ear buds are pure evil—we’re raising a generation of Future Deaf People of America, and I don’t think that’s good.

But then again, I used to play in rock ‘n’ roll bands, so my hearing is already shot, and if I were thirty years or so younger, I wouldn’t listen to me about anything, much less a complain that the world is too damned loud.

Rights vs. Rights

What do you do if one inalienable right bumps up against another inalienable right? It’s the old irresistible force/immovable object argument played out once again as varying groups battle over the US Constitution’s intent.


In this case, we’re dealing with a small assembly of fundamentalists, members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas. These people believe God is angry at the United States for a number of transgressions, including homosexuality, abortion, and other perceived sins. God, they say, is punishing us by killing American soldiers overseas. Lately, the group has taken to picketing military funerals with signs that read “God Is Your Enemy” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” The church comprises mostly members of the Phelps family, many of whom have gone to law school and are eager to test the limits of free speech and expression. Their leader, Fred Phelps, dislikes gays, Blacks, Jews, most Christians, America, immigrants of all stripes and anything else that doesn’t agree with his “you have sinned and God hates you philosophy.”

There is no doubt the actions of the group are repugnant. Creating a disturbance during a funeral—any funeral—is a hideous way of protesting against something you don’t agree with. The family of a dead soldier being interred deserves better than to see and hear disparaging comments about the loved one no longer with them. They have inalienable rights too: the right to worship without being disturbed, and the right to privacy.

Surely the Founding Fathers could never envisage that the document they were drafting back in 1787 would ever be challenged in such a manner. Nor, I think, could they foresee that the media—the free media they championed—would rush to the side of the Phelps family.


Here’s the thing… The media is terrified of any encroachment of its right to free speech. And so, much like the National Rifle Association’s fear that any control of firearms could one day lead to a banning of guns, the media has decided that any action that could eventually be seen to encroach on free speech must be challenged.

This is ridiculous. We’re not allowed to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. We are not allowed to preach sedition, or foment murder, or join an enemy that the country is battling. All these things could be seen as challenges to freedom of speech but they’re not. They are common sense rules that any group must abide with if it is to live in a peaceful and cohesive manner.

It’s truly disappointing that the stalwarts of the press are so shortsighted they cannot see the difference between apples and oranges. And it makes me sort of embarrassed that I was once one of them.

eBay

The economy must be getting better—suddenly, I’m selling a lot more stuff on eBay than I have for the past couple of years. Admittedly, they’re small items, the leftovers of a busy life, consumer items that no longer please or have been superseded. I sold camera batteries to a buyer in Moscow, a CD instruction manual for a home recording system to a Mexican in Guadalajara, a pair of truly awful fake gold cufflinks to a lady in Arizona. There have been nibbles on a couple of larger pieces, including chromed tail-lights for a Harley Davidson motorcycle, the locking mechanism for the passenger door of a Jetta, and an assortment of sunglasses collected over years of Florida travel. I’ve bought six cars, two motorcycles, a trailer and three pairs of inline skates on eBay, and only two purchases were lemons, so I think I’m running about the same average as if I’d bought used locally.


I‘ve been selling stuff on eBay for more than a decade and, to the best of my estimate, have concluded more than 1,000 transactions. I have 100% satisfaction rating, and only twice did I have to use strong language to get satisfaction on a deal. Interestingly, both involved cars. My specialty has been electric and acoustic guitars and amplifiers. I got to be fairly knowledgeable, but when the economy crashed, so did the sale of instruments to would-be rockers and folkies. I know all the ladies at the local post office since I come in two or three times a week with odd-shaped packages going to strange countries.


In recent time, there’s been a move to try to tax eBay transactions. After all, this is a billion dollar, largely un- or self-supervised industry with millions of auctions going on concurrently. A wealth of dollars change hands every second and Congress is smacking its lips in anticipation. But there are some issues involved.

eBay, after all, is nothing more than a glorified international garage sale. Yes, quite a few businesses sell on the site, but these must abide by the standards and laws governing commerce, and they pay taxes on profits. The brunt of eBay sales remains individuals with single items or home-based “stores” that are nothing more than email addresses. If the government decides to tax eBay trade, it will eventually have to begin taxing yard and moving sales, door-to-door Cub Scout enterprises and the local lemonade stand. That’s unlikely to happen. And eBay has some strong supporters who vote. Whether there are enough to make a difference is not something an elected state official will want to test. Which is as it should be. My experiences with eBay have been overwhelmingly positive, and if it ain’t broke, don’t tax it.

A Moving Experience

In both July and September, I helped friends move their earthly belongings, huffing and puffing large pieces of furniture from old homes to new ones. As I was assisting the transfer of an antique two-thousand pound television set from a third-floor apartment to a U-Haul truck, it struck me that the act of moving from one place to another is one of the last communal events where friends are relied upon to gather and lend a hand. It’s a form of barn-raising which has all but vanished in our urban setting.

Moving people fosters trust and new friendships—or at least that’s been my experience. When you’re on the bottom end of a refrigerator going down a flight of stairs and the guy at the top end is someone you met fifteen minutes ago, a sense of immediate trust is necessary. One stumble by the new guy and you’re apple sauce. You’re thankful when that doesn’t happen; the shared labor and sense of accomplishment—that was one heavy mother, and you congratulate each other for a job well-done—create instant kinship.  You start talking, you relate because you’ve just done a manly thing together without injury, and that’s worth celebrating! As the day progresses, you discover that the new guy and the new guy’s wife are OK people. You have things in common with them aside from the sweat and bruises. You listen to the same music, have read the same books, and remember a concert you all saw though not together.

Moving has important traditions involved.

The movee must provide a truck, unless the friends have a collection of pick-ups, vans and Toyotas with empty trunks. It’s assumed that the movee has already done a lot of work by him/herself.  It’s considered bad form to have to move boxes of books, clothing or shoes. We gather to handle heavy items: sofas and broken Lazy Boy chairs, curved Art Deco dressers made of impenetrable wood, bookshelves from a century ago and mattresses and box springs and disassembled beds made of thick and solid metals.

Gender differences are not necessarily celebrated. I have seen tiny women lifting dining room tables and strong men carrying embroidered pillows. I have never, though, seen a woman moving a piano single-handedly.  

And then there’s the food. Several years I went to a catered move. The movees had gone to a local deli and ordered a feast of cold cuts, cheeses, breads and pickled vegetables. It was all wrong. Moving calls for pizza.  It is de rigeur, as are bottled waters, cheap sodas, and beer if drinkers are involved. Drugs are not recommended for obvious reasons.

All told, moving can be a memorable experience for all involved.  We should do it more often.

Nighthawks

Nighthawks, the 1942 canvas by Edward Hopper portraying isolated customers in a downtown diner late at night, is an emblematic work, one of the most recognizable painting in American art. I was fortunate to see it when the Art Institute of Chicago released it for a US tour and I visited it at Washington’s National Gallery twice in one week, and one more time a few days after that.


It’s a big painting, five feet across and two-and-half feet tall, a study in shadows and austere white. The diner is stark, stripped of decorations. There is one door, possibly to a restroom. The customer in the forefront does not seem to be fully there, his body melds with the darkness, and even the woman at far right is a mystery. Is she the girlfriend of the man next to her, part of a couple? The red dress she wears might be that of a prostitute, a predatory nighthawk. Or is she simply a tired worker? If Hopper knew, he never told.

In the 50s and 60s, according to art historian Sister Wendy Beckett’s American Masterpieces, every college dormitory in the country had a Nighthawks poster on its wall. Hopper’s work reflects the angst of the time; the customers, shoulders hunched, enwalled in themselves and neither speaking nor looking at one another, are icon of existential loneliness.

Almost weekly I see real-life versions of Nighthawks. The setting has not changed much though the diners have become fast-food places and the workers are no longer white-haired short-order cooks. Today, it’s minimum wage Latinos or Pakistanis. The clients are often single parents with children, a father and son, and when I see them I get the impression this is Dad’s night out with the kid. Maybe the parents are divorced and Mom has custody, so once or twice a week Dad takes his son to Subway. They eat in silence. Dad has a foot-long sandwich and the kid has a six-inch with meatballs. They don’t share bags of chips or drinks. They concentrate hard on their food and the kid makes sucking straw-in-an-empty-cup sounds. There are wadded up paper napkins—more on the kid’s side—and a cell phone next to Dad’s sandwich. Recently, in a mom-and-pop carry out, I saw an expensively dressed professional woman in tears and being comforted by her not yet ten-year-old daughter. No one paid any attention to the scene, and as I left the place I heard the woman say, “That bastard!”

I wonder what Hopper would have made of that scene…

Friends

I have few friends, mostly by choice. Over the last five or six years I’ve trimmed away some people, nice people, I might add, but ones who in one way or another demanded too much, were opportunistic, or had little to offer. A good rule of thumb is that I don’t really want to be around folks who infringe on solitude while not alleviating loneliness.


Often, the trimming is mutual. Friendships ebb and flow, I think, as does most everything else. What is initially fascinating in a person becomes mundane. The irreverent questions might be charming at first but quickly lose their appeal, and what was at the start an endearing trait or quality becomes an irksome character defect. Someone, I forget who, once said that in the initial phases of any relationship—friendship included—my representative is meeting your representative. That makes a lot of sense. Most of us are guarded and reticent; we don’t like to share things that really matter. We allow our respective ambassadors to conduct lengthy negotiations in the hope of finding a common ground to grow on. Sometimes we find one, more often than not we don’t. Friendships—true ones—are rare and take years to erect, and though they may endure decades, they also remain as fragile as cut crystal.

There are friendships too that begin with an infatuation of sorts—a passion or fascination we thought unshared with anyone else. We’re delighted to find a kindred spirit and the friendship will endure as long as the common interest does. I’ve had many friends like that, people with whom I’ve played music, fished, hiked, studied or worked. There are also friendships built around a third person—a child, a teacher or mentor, someone ill or dying. Those are strange, temporary friendships that by definition have no future. They may serve an immediate situation but don’t have legs.

I once witnessed with great sadness the disappearance of many friendships at once. When my mother died in France, the friends she and my father had maintained over their married decades vanished. My mother had been the glue that held relationships and links together, and when she was gone so were the bonds. My father was left to fend for himself, and I was shocked by how quickly this happened. There was a lesson to be learned there. I never could quite figure out what it was, but it made me wonder if Lord Samuel, the British liberal politician, was right when he said, “A friend in need is a friend to be avoided."

If I had a... Oh. Never Mind

It’s 1:15 in the afternoon and I’m stuck in traffic. There’s nothing unusual about this; we’re in Northern Virginia, a few miles south of Washington DC, and the area is undergoing a massive upheaval as construction for an extended subway line befouls circulation for miles around. Everywhere you turn are pillars that will support new bridges and overpasses, road torn to shreds and awaiting re-tarmacking,  closed lanes and iridescent traffic cones. I once calculated that the average speed on roads in my neighborhood is 12 miles per hour. NoVa already has a rep as the third-worst driving experience in the country and it’s not getting any better.

I’m waiting for the light to change. On my right, a huge orange machine is gouging red clay and leaving teethmarks while a portly construction worker is hitting something with a hammer. It suddenly strikes me: he’s hitting something with a hammer, just as people have been hitting things with hammers since the first tool-using anthropoid picked up a rock and hit another rock with it. The hammer is man’s primeval implement, weapon, artifact, and valued property. Hammers are handed down from father to son. A hammer’s purpose hasn’t changed in tens of thousands of years; it is par excellence, the great-great grand-daddy of all tools. Here’s a guy still enjoying the afterglow of Sunday’s Redskins victory, and he’s hammering, as untold generations did before him. How cool is that?

Hitting things is a basic human activity. We hit nails, balls, targets, and each other. The hammer is a way of making the hit more powerful, more focused, more lethal. We use the hammer to do the most basic of construction chores—securing one piece of something to another piece of something. We use it to make and pound out dents; little ones put brads into delicate woods, giant ones sink pilings into the earth and through bedrock. Hammers on anvils beat red hot metal into plowshares and swords and don’t care about the final product. It’s all in the relentless force generated by muscle and mass; hammering—it’s all repetition, and no one has really improved on the basic concept—a handle, a head, a trajectory and something to be hammered.

The hammer is a powerful symbol, too, and with its agricultural cousin the sickle, it caused an entire generation of students to hide under their school desks in fear of a nuclear attack. Pete Seeger sang that if he had a hammer he’d change the world, which came to represent the progressive movement in the early 50s and gave socialism a bad name.

I suspect hammers will continue to have a purpose and a place in society for the foreseeable future. And I also am almost certain no one will ever sing, “If I had a crescent wrench.”