The Office, Mid-Day Strolls & the Family Back Home

It was 116 degrees today in L.A. and not a whole lot less than that in Redwood City. It struck me today how seldom we document our work spaces. Here are a couple shots of the chaotic nature of my desk. Front and center is the plastic water bottle.

Plastic water bottles are conveniences that will soon pass from our lives. Why? Because most bottled water is simply repackaged tap water, at a cost markup of more than two orders of magnitude (51 cents a year is all you need to drink your biologically necessary amount of tap water; the same amount of bottled water costs you $56.)

At some point, economic rationality has to return to our consumption habits.

Probably more significantly, 80% of all plastic water bottles in this country end up in landfills as waste, albeit slowly-decomposing waste. They take 10,000 years to break down.



Piles of books. Wherever I go, piles of books follow. Books, too, will soon be mere curiosities of our past. The cost of the leading electronic book platform -- Amazon's "Kindle" -- stands at $ 359 or so today. It will be a third of that two years from now, according to the crowd at Predictify.com.



Office workers like me generally go out for a walk in the middle of day. Sometimes a cluster of us goes out for lunch. Other times, I wander my new environment on my own, admiring the lush scenery.



As the workday closes, we head home. For me, today, it was a very special day, and a rare one. It was the only day of 2008 so far that I came home to all six of my kids, their partners, my grandson, and my partner.

Tomorow is the first day of summer, officially. Happy Solstice, fellow druids!

One Quarter

That's the percentage of this lovely young fellow's genes I can theoretically take credit for. Of course that is not enough for any kind of grand claim, which I would not make in any event.

But it is enough to feel the bond of our common blood.

Tonight brought a complete surprise, in the form of my grandson and his parents stopping by, along with a long list of other friends, relatives and special visitors. The Weir family is an expansive one; if you are a friend of any one of us, you are a friend of us all.

But back to little James. Isn't he beautiful? As I look at him, I see the potential for wonderful things that I myself could never accomplish. James will reach far into a future I will never witness.

For now, he is at the beginning stage, and I am at my final act. What can I possibly say or do to transfer all the accumulated learnings of a life like mine?

Perhaps silence is golden in this regard. Times have changed so dramatically, and they continue to change. There s nothing much from the past for me to give him, other than this -- love transcends all else, James. Love is what we need.

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Emotions, Expressed or Not

One of the outlets I inevitably turn to in times of ineffable pain is the world of visual art -- drawings, paintings, photography. I have never had even the slightest conceit that I have any talent in these fields; rather, it is for me a channel for feelings that otherwise seem to have no way to be expressed at all.

Whenever I encounter this emotional state, I recall my lifelong buddy, the late Ken Kelley, whose life a group of us intend to remember, and hopefully celebrate, this coming Saturday in San Francisco. In his last years, Ken created paintings, which he claimed the head of SF-Moma said were worthy of a showing.

(You had to know Ken to be able to evaluate the truthfulness of this claim.)

I'm not sure that this will make sense to anyone else, but when I reached that point in a particular day when I didn't know who to talk to, Ken always came to mind. He was the kind of friend I could call who was always happy to hear from me.

We all grow and change and migrate away from the center of our personal universes. As we do so, old friends are often the only anchors that can reassure us that no matter how far we venture out in this world, there's a place we need to be pulled back to.

As I've anticipated what I might be able to say or do in Ken's honor this Saturday, I've revisited these feelings. My only conclusion is that many things may have to remain left unsaid, in this life, because we really don't know how to express them.

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Lost in the Surf

So, did you know that Elton John was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight. Or, that Iggy Pop was born James Newell Osterberg, Jr.

What about Tina Turner? (Anna Mae Bullock.)

Or, most awkwardly, John Denver? (Henry John Deutschendorf.)

The Internet is a source of so much information that one can be forgiven if (s)he gets lost in it all.

* Chimps use kisses and hugs to comfort one of their members who has just gotten pushed around.

* Thomas Jefferson is widely believed to have fathered one child with his slave, Sally Hemmings. But the records indicate she had six children, though she never married. Was he the father of all of them?

* The Mars probe has found a mysterious white substance on the Red Planet. Is it ice or salt or a compound we've never before encountered?

(Answers when we find them.)

-30-

Father's Day Weekend in Pictures

Words are not necessary.

Finding Our Way Home

My sense is that in our generation, the Baby Boom, we are all halves as opposed to wholes. In the Sixties, the choices we faced were so drastic (war or peace) that each of us had to rupture in two.

Although for a while we may have adhered to extreme positions, most of us see the validity in the other side's opinions.

Since the way I think is to write, I'm perhaps more inconsistent than most. At a given moment, I can seem wildly leftist, and the next, contradictorily conservative. The truth, I suspect, is I'm both, and probably we all are.

An epiphany would be to realize we no longer need to choose. It's okay to embrace positions all along the political scale. Who's keeping score, anyway?

Probably the worst ideology I've experienced personally (having missed the Nazis and the Stalinists) is the politically-correct left. They keep score! There's an irony in those who strive to be "right" in this way.

I once gave a speech that offended a foundation supporter. She's never spoken to me since. I once made an offhand comment about hunting at a university; the other professors told me it was the most politically-incorrect thing I could have said. Examples go on and on. Think of an angry schoolmarm wagging her finger -- that's what the PC folks are like.

They assume a consensus of the virtuous.

I assume a process of debate, after which a more complex, layered consensus may or may not emerge.

A mutual friend invited me to dinner with a local conservative columnist, anticipating gleefully that there would be fireworks. He underestimated both of us; she and I became friends, and I later invited to her address my class at Stanford when she was a visiting journalist at the Hoover Institute.

Those who continue to cling to a sense that there is an "other" out there -- a different type of human being from us -- simply have not explored this world deeply enough.


***


Even that most frightful of creatures -- the Islamic fundamentalist -- has another side. Hiking through the very border country currently hiding Osama bin-laden and other al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders years ago, I was welcomed into villagers' homes and treated to the best meals they could muster. The poorest put a portion of food on the table for me that, had I eaten it all, would have meant their family would not be able to eat for a week.

Of course, I knew the score, and feigned satisfaction after only a few handfuls. (There were no utensils.)

These people are not the terrorists, of course. These are the people sheltering them. The terrorists are principally middle-class dropouts from Arabic countries (al-Qaeda), or Afghan orphans raised in Wahabi Madrassas without the benefit of female influence (Taliban).

The people housing them are not privy to the larger implications necessarily. Theirs is a simpler, deeper connection. My house is your house. This, along with tribal loyalty, is a fundamental building block of society in Pashtunistan.

Finding the bad guys first requires comprehending the society sheltering them. An American could conceivably just walk into the area, even today, and be warmly welcomed, as well. Problem is, few of them know that and even fewer would ever try it.

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