House Hunt

Thom and Rebecca went on a house hunt. Some houses were too big or too small. Some had noisy streets and spooky neighbors. One house required an offer just to see the inside.

So they said, “OK. We’ll play that game. Here’s our offer.”

The seller’s agent said, “We’ll let you see it as soon as the “hostile” tenants move out.”

“Hostile?!” Thom and Rebecca said. “We’ll keep looking.”

A few days and houses later, Thom and Rebecca walked through the front door of a house that they just loved at first sight. Everything was just as if someone had read their minds and put everything they liked into this house. Aah…just right.

Then, their agent said, “That house you have an offer on is open to look at today. You want to see it?”

“Oh, that one with the hostile tenants? OK, we’ll look, but we really like THIS house.”

So they drove to Hostility House.

When they arrived, they thought, “Hey, this looks OK. Needs a little paint on the front door, but we still like the other house.”

The seller and her agent were there, carrying buckets and wearing elbow-length rubber gloves. Clearly, there was some disinfecting going on.

Thom, Rebecca and Nolan walked through the front door. The bouquet of Pine-Sol, stale body odor and vintage urine flooded their senses.

“Nolan, don’t touch anything!” said Rebecca.

The carpets were tattered. The color wasn’t discernible between the stains. The interior doors had been chewed and soiled by wild things with ever-growing teeth and scratchy claws. The walls had a line of oil and dirt grime that revealed the average shoulder height of the dogs that had ruled these ruins.

In the backyard, the former site of a rabbit hutch was known by a small mountain of pellets. Thom regarded their work. “So that’s the angle of repose for rabbit manure. Now I know. At least it’s outside.”

The view of rocky hillsides a few miles away was wide open and a westerly breeze carried fresh air into the house and out the front door.

Thom and Rebecca looked at their agent. “We’ll take it.”

Ain't Election Years a Hoot?

Election year politics are always ridiculous, but this year is the ridiculous-est.

The recent dustup over Obama requiring the Catholic institutions to provide contraceptive coverage is a red meat issue for a primary, but general election voters will be tired of this barbecue come November.

In reality, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA aka Obamacare) already has exemptions for religious groups, but to hear some politicians and talking heads tell it, Obama wants to force churches to provide a birth control pill with communion wafers.

The debate boils around the Catholic Church and affiliated institutions, but most Catholic entities like universities and hospitals already provide contraceptive coverage for employees, many of whom are not Catholic.

It seems simple enough, if I’m an employer and have moral objections to some service or drug included in my insurance plan, then I, and employees of like conviction will not use those. If my religion prohibits me from eating Brussels Sprouts, my employees should still be able to get them if they choose.

Requiring employers to cover contraceptives is not new. In 1978, the Senate passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by a margin of 75-11. Republicans were a lot more liberal in those days. The PDA addressed the practice of some employers providing access to prescription drugs, but not birth control.

Individual states have had laws in place for years that deal with this same issue.

Here are some numbers:

26- States that already have laws requiring insurers to cover any FDA-approved contraceptive.*

20- States that offer exemptions from contraceptive coverage (usually for religion) for insurers or employers in their policies.

6- States that don’t allow exemptions for religious beliefs. Even Obamacare doesn’t go that far.

Where has the outrage been all this time? This isn’t about the 1^st Amendment at all. And the GOP is seeking to stunt access in a wider arena.

Senator Roy Blunt, (R)Missouri, recently introduced an amendment to a $109 billion bipartisan transportation bill. It may prove to be a poison pill for the jobs carried in that bill. It’s so broadly written that all employers, not just faith-based employers, would be able to tailor their health insurance plans using the cut of their personal conscience.

I’m not going to paste the legislation-ese**, but one provision uses a lot of words to say that PPACA didn’t go far enough by carving out exemptions just for religious organizations, it needs to also allow for the conscientious objection of any employer to any medical services covered in an insurance plan.

As written, Blunt’s amendment means that: 

• ·      Abortion
• ·      Contraceptive drugs
• ·      Vasectomies
• ·      Tubal Ligation
• ·      Immunization
• ·      Biopsies
• ·      Blood transfusions
• ·      Psychotherapy
• ·      Antidepressants
• ·      Drug therapies of any kind
• ·      Surgery of any kind 

are all on the table to be excluded from an employers health plan on religious or just plain conscientious grounds.

If someone of a certain moral position can make policy for the company’s health insurance plan, then they can decide that no employee should have access to medical interventions that run counter to that policymaker’s conscience.

This seems to be the fight the GOP is waging to beat Obama in 2012. With the economic picture improving on multiple fronts, albeit slowly, their thunder on the economy is not as loud. We see the lightning, but the sound is taking longer to get here as the storm recedes.

They need a new issue, a wedge. So, we find ourselves revisiting the 1990s and dusting off the culture and moral wars of that era. But Republicans’ time-travel has gone back back back and landed them in a time when even contraception was controversial.

Instead of recalibrating their Wayback Machine, they’re saying, “This is nice. We’ll plant our flag here.”

They plopped down in a place that most Americans and a majority of Catholics*** don’t care to be.  Even the Catholic Health Association said that Obama “responded to the issues [they] identified that needed to be fixed.” Did Republican leadership find these facts daunting? Nope.

Faux outrage over non-issues can provide some fireworks to pop for the primaries, but it’ll fizzle at the polls in November.

*National Conference of State Legislatures- http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/health/insurance-coverage-for-contraception-state-laws.aspx

** Read Roy Blunt’s amendment here: http://blunt.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/ce0de928-f717-436e-9da0-4a3e7fee0302/S.%201813%20Amendment.pdf

*** http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/catholics-support-white-house-contraception-mandate/2012/02/07/gIQAXXu1wQ_story.html

My Father's Words

Whitney Houston brings back echoes of my father’s words.

I don’t remember the exact year, maybe 1964 or ’65. I was about six. I was watching our first color TV with my dad. A comedian performed on his weekly show.

After it was over, my dad said, “The people who make us happy are often unhappy people.”

I remember wondering how that could be. After all, the guy was saying and doing funny things, the audience was laughing and clapping; they loved him. It looked like he was having so much fun, therefore “happy.”

I always remember that as one of the first times my father said something that made no sense to me, but I knew somehow that I should store that little pearl.

Years passed and many times over my dad’s words have proven to be true. I could start listing all the comedians, actors, musicians, singers, poets and painters who led troubled lives and died troubled deaths, but I leave that to you because they are too many.

So it is again. Whitney Houston is dead.

We are saddened at the loss of someone who had the talent, the beauty and the drive. She had wealth and the adoration of millions. Who could want anything more? She seemed to have pursued happiness and when, by all measures that society attaches to success, she caught it only to find that she was not happy.

In this day of instant news, camera phones in every pocket and the insatiable appetite for gossip and dirt, her unhappiness had been on full display for some time. We scorned and ridiculed her for not leading a life that matched the beauty that she had once shown us on stage.

We live vicariously through entertainers. We miss the fact that their achievements are a byproduct of a life out of balance. We thrill at their affluence and imagine how happy we’d be if fate smiled on us so brightly. We’re angered and contemptuous when that someone takes away our illusion of store-bought happiness. We jeer and salivate wide-eyed at the TV, Twitter and tabloids that capture every moment as they spiral back to earth trailing a tail of flame.

We’ll see and hear every lurid detail of Whitney’s long demise and terrible last few days as long as the ratings hold up. There’ll be a spike in online searches and iTunes sales. Investigative reports will be narrated with baritone gravitas in a parody of real news. Onlookers and hangers-on will get their seconds of fame telling what they saw. Everybody will care about her until she fades from the news again.

We’ll find another to marvel at while their surfaces gleam, colors shine and their song is in tune. Again, we’ll find that living our lives through someone else’s outward appearance is a formula for disappointment.

Paint cracks and peels. Rust bubbles up. Their frail inner self shows through. We hate them for that. We throw rocks at them like an abandoned amusement park ride. The only thrill left is the sound of crashing glass when we hit the mark. Then even that is gone as the ride crumbles to rubble beyond recognition.

Many still don‘t get how those who bring us the greatest joys can be so self-destructive and unhappy. It’s as though they take on responsibility for our happiness by losing theirs. If they try to shirk that responsibility, we resent them. If they take it on and fail, we despise them.

My dad's words ring true and serve as a reminder to enjoy and admire someone's high achievements, as well as our own, in the right context. Don't think that great achievements in one arena automatically translate to perfection and happiness in all of life. That's a formula for bitter disappointment. 

The Power of Illustration

The cliché, “A picture is worth a thousand words” will always be true. The brain can take an image in, process it and act on it before you can finish reading this sentence. We do this hundreds of times a day.

Images are created to evoke a feeling or thought that a viewer may translate to action. That action could be to read a book, buy a product, turn down a road (or not), elect a leader, humanize those with whom we empathize, or dehumanize those against whom we war.

Illustrations can use symbols and abstract images that the brain will interpret. The human brain is exceptional at spotting patterns and completing the incomplete. It wants an image to make sense which is why we occasionally marvel at “Lincoln's face on a quesadilla.” Nothing supernatural about it, but it is miraculous in that the brain connects the elements and makes us spot the face where there is none.

Illustrators and artists made use of brain science before it was a science whenever they created images no matter what their purpose.

Comics, political posters, company logos and everyday road signs are all examples of imagery that put the brain to work for the illustrator’s ends. These images guide the viewer to a feeling and an action desired by the illustrator.

A comic book depiction doesn’t look like a real face, but the brain not only tells us it’s a face, but also interprets expressions. Is the character good, bad, happy, sad, funny, repulsive? All this will carry in what the illustrator has put on a two-dimensional representation in shapes, lines and color.

                                  

Propaganda posters can whip up a population’s nationalist pride and add to a people’s hate for an enemy. During World War II, U.S. posters depicted the Japanese enemy, not as another human, but as a yellow snake with Asian eyes.      

The illustration struck at people’s deep primal fear and hatred of snakes and attached that to a dehumanized enemy.


A company logo can denote an attitude that attracts clients or defines the culture within a company. Bold fonts and colors suggest strength and power.

Italicize the font and the company is in motion.

Cursive can be caring

or carefree.

Some rely on familiarity and require no words.

                       

Some illustrations can save your life or at least some inconvenience. Road signs can work without words for people who may not speak the local language or may not be able to read at all.  I don’t speak or read much Thai, but...

I’d slow down more readily than if the sign said “ข้ามช้าง” with no picture

Illustration plays a critical role in our actions hundreds if not thousands of times each day.  We make myriad decisions based on the images that we assimilate, sometimes unconsciously. These decisions can be fleeting and seem inconsequential, but they coalesce like ripples into waves that take on a common powerful movement and become habits that determine the overall direction of our lives.

No Offense, but Merry Christmas.

It’s that time of year again: sleigh bells ringing in the snow, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and TV talking heads who stand to defend Christmas from those who, they say, would seek to sanitize the season of any religious connotation.

The spirit of the season is jarred by a loud few lobbing grenades over how we celebrate and how political friends and foes celebrate it as well.

Some, when greeted with “Happy Holidays”, might use “Merry Christmas” as a bludgeon to show their rejection of “political correctness.” Others, when affronted by the offensive “MC” greeting may fire back with “Happy Winter Solstice” to strike a blow for their belief system. Some just wear bad sweaters so people will leave them alone entirely.

Trees at the White House seem to be particular lightning rods for Christmas controversy. Maybe because they are so conspicuous and the ceremonies surrounding them give all sides a read on a President's stand on Christmas.

Around the turn of the 20^th century, President McKinley was urged to forego the “Christmas tree habit” since it was “arboreal infanticide.” Another group opposed having a tree in the Executive Mansion since it was a “German” tradition.

In 1972, the Nixon Administration drew criticism for using a peace sign as a tree-topper. In 1973, conservation groups wanted to address environmental issues. They persuaded the White House to use a live tree instead of a cut one.

During the Clinton years, a couple of stockings decorating the tree were marked “Bill” and “Newt”. One had candy, the other had coal…respectively.

Lincoln Chafee (Governor of Rhode Island) decided to call his tree a "holiday" tree, much to the dismay of those who prefer "Christmas."

This is an unwinnable war. If it’s a “Christmas” tree, then one group is bent out of shape. If it’s a “Holiday” tree, then you’ve run afoul of someone else’s sensibilities. Others are upset at the use of a tree at all, maybe for environmental reasons or because a decorated tree amounts to pagan idol in their view.

Despite all the noise from high-visibility (and audibility) ideologues, I believe most people still feel good will toward each other around the official start of winter. It’s a wonderful time of the year, for whatever reason you may choose.

I’d like to say Merry Christmas to all. I mean those words in kindness and with all good wishes. Greet me as you wish (or not) and I’ll accept that in the same spirit.

And I may even compliment your sweater.

Going Viral: Old School Edition

My son is so adorable. He’s every cute YouTube video your friends send you. You see him and you just want to hug him. I won’t publish his name here, but for purposes of this post we’ll just refer to him as Ragin’ Contagion.

You might know someone like him.

RC goes to preschool where they collect and trade plagues as part of the curriculum. It’s like a scavenger hunt. Prizes are hidden on doorknobs, on faucets and atomized into green clouds. I’m sure the clouds are green, not a pretty pine-smelling or minty green, but a drab yellowish-green like overcooked Brussels Sprouts. Mmm! Did you get yours? Well, that’s part of the fun; you won’t know you won for 2 days to 2 weeks.

You might wake with a painful swallow and a voice that sounds like you singlehandedly keep big tobacco profitable. Maybe one of your eyes is bonded shut with yellowish super-glue.

You get up and the world feels different. The brush of your flannel pajamas is more like an Army Surplus wool blanket. You run some water for a warm washcloth to un-stick your afflicted eye and hot tea to irrigate your dustbowl throat.

I’m certain that another of the survival strategies of microbes is to make the infected act so pitiful that others draw near to comfort them.

You groan. Why? Because the agents of pestilence are pulling levers in your brain that make you groan. Your loved one looks at you and says, “Aw.”

At just the right moment, the virus says, “Fire!” A cannon shot of microscopic balls of snot bursts into the air. They land like seeds. A scant 10 million or so packets of DNA seek fertile pastures in an upper respiratory tract or maybe an eye.

Wash your hands. Cover when you cough. Get plenty of rest. Drink lots of fluids. And stay the heck away from me.

Oh, I’m sorry. That was harsh. You poor thing. Let me hold you.

Gesundheit.

Lunar Eclipse, December 2011

I awoke at 1:15 a.m., an hour before the alarm was set to go off. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept going over the checklist: Camera, batteries, lenses, tripod, wallet, phone. I looked at the clock again, 1:55. So I got up to get ready.

This morning would be the last lunar eclipse here until 2014.

A keystone patch of full moonlight fell on the carpet through the window. I looked out on the yard. The icy white light hid the colors. Shadows were sharp and deep.

Full moon nights always reminded me of cheap western films where they’d shoot “day for night” by putting a blue filter over the lens. It made midday sun look something like moonlight. It also made things easier for the actors and horses who wouldn’t have to bump around and trip over things in real darkness.

But this was real night tonight. Thanks to some obliging proteins found in the light-sensitive photoganglion cells in my retina, I could see by a living form of night-vision goggles. The night was painted up in shades of indigo, marble white and carbon black.

I had to be in San Diego to meet my daughter at 3:30 a.m. We’d head for Torrey Pines State Reserve, park at the golf course and hike to a viewing spot by the 4:45 start of the moon falling into the shadow of the Earth.

The I-15 was mostly deserted at 2:45 a.m. I hoped that most of the drunks had found conveyance home or to jail by now without hurting anyone. Long-haul trucks rolled on under the orange sodium vapor lights to loading docks somewhere. The public radio station broadcasting British World Service sank into the hiss of background radiation as I drove into valleys. I caught a few words of a real-time report about protesters taking to a sunlit Red Square at the same moment that I drove through my moonlit time zone.

Stephanie was sleeping over at her best friend Courtney’s house. We’d arranged to meet at our favorite coffee house, Peet’s, at 3:30 a.m. I was still marveling that I had a teenage daughter who was willing to rise at this hour to have an adventure with Dad. She's always been like that.

I pulled into the empty lot. A few minutes later, Stephanie parked next to me. I saw Courtney in the passenger seat. I was impressed that she had decided to join us. Now that’s a friend. Apparently, there is at least one more stalwart teen in the world.

As we pulled away, Peet’s was dark. It would be open when we returned. We looked forward to bringing hash brown burritos from Cotija to have with coffee, tea or hot chocolate.

The parking lot at the Torrey Pines Golf Course is an ideal place to park, if you want to avoid the ten dollars to park in the reserve and have no aversion to walking half a mile to get to the trails.

As expected, there were no other cars there when we arrived. We high-stepped over the low rail fence to get out onto the sidewalk. Spots of moonlight flicked like silver dollars on the sidewalk under the eucalyptus trees lining North Torrey Pines Road.

We entered the park and walked along the 15-foot wide, two lane park road that, until the 1930s, was part of the 101 between San Diego and Los Angeles. Model Ts had once rattled and trundled over these slabs of concrete paving. At the north end of the park, a 3/4-mile descent was so steep that the gravity-fed fuel systems of the day couldn’t keep the engines running. The solution? Back down the hill.

We cut left onto the trail marked “Broken Hill.” We wound through the stand of head-high Chamise, Black Sage and Manzanita. The aromatic oils of the sage were carried on listless warm and cold air currents in these early morning hours. The moonlight was enough that we didn’t need flashlights.

We stopped to take a couple photos with a lone Torrey Pine in the foreground. Courtney and Stephanie experimented with long exposures. They moved their camera around to make the moon streak across the frame at random. The results were fun, but, not content with that, they decided to move the camera so the moon would trace a white heart in a black sky. I was amazed at how well they made it work.

While we were making “art”, two bundled and backpacked people passed us with tripods slung over their shoulders.

“Out here for the eclipse?” one said.

We all said yes.

“Ah, more outlaw photographers,” he said, marching on.

It was true. We were here in flagrant violation of something about the place being closed between sunset and 8 a.m.

It was nearing 4:45 when we reached our spot.

Stephanie said, “It’s starting.”

I looked up and saw the upper edge of the moon darkening like the edge of a paper disc being tortured with a lighter.  Before long the darkness had grown to look like a bite out of a cookie.

Courtney asked if we could look right at the eclipsed moon. I told her that was a good question and that you could look directly at it since the light was the tiniest fraction of what a solar eclipse puts off.

We shared our viewing point at Broken Hill with the two other outlaw photographers who had passed us. From there, we could see across the swales and ravines to the north. Now and then, the blue glow of an LED headlamp or an LCD display would give away the position of other photographers dotting far hillsides.

In the hours as the moon phased out, I took a number of shots with different lenses and exposures. I was treated to the meandering conversations of teenage best friends. Subjects ranged from prospective college choices, to last words and deaths of famous people, and what might happen if the moon was destroyed. I’m not sure what our new neighbors made of the topics, but I felt privileged to eavesdrop on a world that had changed surprisingly little in the decades that separated our teen years.

The light grew fainter. The moon was now a bruised smoke and blood orange ball. The landscape that had been so apparent a couple hours before was now black-veiled. Stars started to peek out in greater numbers from their hiding places to see if the big bad moon was dead.

I turned the camera on the southern view. I took a number of long exposures out of curiosity. The lights of La Jolla, six miles distant, burned into the CCD over 10, 30 and 60 second exposures. The red bluffs and Torrey Pines were in silhouette against the glare.

The red moon fell closer to the horizon. It seemed to blend into the blue-gray haze, a faint rusty feather as the sky lightened around it. Then it disappeared entirely.

Time has a way of sneaking up on you when you’re busy through the night. The predawn light brightened like someone had opened a curtain in the east. We realized what time it was. The moon had not reemerged from the shadow before it set into the sea. The light was hardening and the colorful bands of the furrowed sandstone bluffs would soon lose their magic.

It was time to go home.

As promised, we picked up burritos and settled in at Peet’s. We warmed ourselves hunching over steaming cups held with both hands. The chill retreated in the glow of good company and a shared experience.

We’ll do it all again in 2014.