Sweet Sixteen

For my youngest son's birthday this weekend, I bought him his first smart phone, an iPhone4S. He immediately programmed Siri to speak to him in an Australian accent and asked her the meaning of life.

She indicated there is a "lack of consensus" over that question.

The meaning of life is on his mind this weekend. A year ago, when his close friend committed suicide, his birthday could be acknowledged only with a heavy heart. Today, he went to a small gathering of students and teachers remembering their friend.

As we walked away from the Verizon store on Mission Street, with his phone in his hand, my boy allowed a smile to escape his lips. "I can send messages so fast!"

If ever there were a teenage boy who deserves the label "sweet," it truly is him. Brilliant, quirky, shy, private, tall, gangly, beautiful and loving, and one to hardly ever ask for anything from his parents, he's the kind of child you love to make smile.

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The Quiet

This was one of those days that my main goal was simply to endure. All manner of confusion and disorientation have been visiting, which if unchecked, leads to early insanity.

I forgot something, and that is disheartening.

Time slowed to a pace that frightens. I walked out back in my slippers, feeling the warmth but pondering an apple tree with sparse blooms. Yesterday I spied a hummingbird there.

Today I wondered if the tree is well.

I walked so quietly that a cat sleeping at the back of the yard stayed put and blinked at me sleepily. Usually this cat races away as I approach.

Out of respect, I turned and contemplated the plants. So many flowers!

I tried to take a photo of the garden with my iPhone but shot a movie instead. Worthless. Deleted.

There is no more lonely feeling for a writer than when he shares his ideas about writing with someone he thought he could trust only to treated with silence.

Silence, as I have often noted, is the cruelest of all responses. For anyone yearning to connect with others, out of any emotional need whatsoever, talking is the answer.

Talking allows people to correct misconceptions and reconnect emotionally.

Silence deepens the gulf between people and allows everyone involved to just float away into space, disconnected particles of dust.

I fear, often these days, that we are all using new technologies to communicate in less intimate ways.

That is a subject for an entirely different type of post on one of the other platforms where I write.

But here, for now, all I have to say was that this was a very bad day. A very lonely day and a very quiet day. The kind of day that reminds me that in the end all we have is ourselves.

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The Most Boring Election Ever...Unless

So it is Obama v Romney. The African-American moderate against the Morman moderate.

Great. Good luck with that, all of you who favor extremes. I will eventually do the math to figure out the odds on this one, and when I do you can bank on the results, but frankly it hardly seems to matter.

Whoever wins the most electoral votes will be the next President. That does not track with what various pockets of Americans care about, especially not extremists.

If you think we need a smaller government or a withdrawal from world conflicts, your wishes will not be granted. So long, Ron Paul.

If you hew to a Christian conservative vision of what the America you wish would be like, you can forget that as well. Adios, Rick Santorum.

If you are on the left, and hope Obama will enact your preferred policies, think again.

My overall sense at this point is that Obama will defeat Romney, by a relatively small margin, just as Junior Bush won re-election in 2004. The math usually favors the incumbent, and this time around the GOP has chosen an exceptionally weak candidate.

But I could be wrong. Should the Obama camp chose to mount a much more aggressive campaign this year, based on his strengths (killing bin-Laden, defeating the conspiracy freak "Birthers," enacting the beginnings of a national health-care system, saving the auto industry, stimulating an economic recovery, and just today boosting startups) he will be locked in for a huge victory next November.

In politics, love and sports, it is always and only about projecting a sense of confidence.

Then the rewards always follow. In that case, we should expect President Obama, in the first two years of his second term to do some very special things. After all, this will be his chance to make history.

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Story Time

Someday, if I live long enough, I promise to reward long-time visitors to this foolish little blog with the news that one form of my writing or another, all of which have been on display here, has turned into a gold mine.

On the other hand, I may well disappear, literally and figuratively, long before then.

Here I write and write, sharing certain portions of a life in real-time, taking care to shield you from the extremes that only trusted intimacy can handle. You can rightly assume that my true life is both better and worse, by orders of magnitude, than I am able to reveal here.

What I yearn to do is share enough that my trials and my successes at least offer some comfort or inspiration for you, in whatever you are going through.

It has always been this way, since I launched this blog six years ago yesterday. You can go back into the archives and check (although I have since removed many posts from public view for reasons of others' privacy) to see that I have held clear to the notion that whatever I might be able to share from my own life has been posted here in an effort to help you deal with yours.

There is no other reason for this blog to exist. We are in this together.

I've been working on a novel. This is not news. But today, I finally got enough free time to review the synopsis, the character descriptions and the first dozen chapters, and I liked what I read.

Now I need someone to show this work to, someone I can trust. Once I get some feedback, I will move on to the next step along the long road toward publication. If anyone reading these words has a suggestion, I am "all ears," as my Dad used to say.

***

Writing, alone among the arts, inspires a power that seems to know no boundaries. As I have been profiling self-published authors lately, I have been struck at how shocked they are when they suddenly realize that thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of others respond to their stories by paying to hear more.

Clearly, I must graduate from here to there. To do so I may have to modify the way I communicate, and some may not like how that turns out. But if it proves true that the stories I have to tell can resonate with others beyond the relatively few who visit here, I owe it to them to (and to my kids) to figure this out.

Stay tuned.

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A Cutting Wind

Unfortunately, I did not yet get a good photo of it but my young daughter drew a lovely representation of a tube of lip gloss today. She was practicing her artistic skills while recuperating from a cold and spending a day with Dad on her spring break.

I worried it was a boring day for her, as I worked at my below-minimun-wage tasks, but she never complained.

She seldom does.

She'd stubbed one of her little toes this morning before I fetched her from Bernal, and joked that it really didn't matter whether it was broken because it was such an insubstantial part of the human body.

We fantasized about the small cast that would be required while such an appendage, if broken, healed, and had a good laugh as we drove across town.

Outside, the skies had cleared after last night's Manchester rain, and an uncomfortable wind blew through this town.

Every time I ventured outside today, I shuddered. I hate cold winds.

***

I just finished an enormously long and detailed book, The River, by the British author Edward Hooper, which postulates and investigates the hypothesis that a lot of contaminated chimpanzee kidney culture used to grow polio virus in the 50s helped SIV cross the species barrier to become HIV, thereby causing AIDS, in human beings.

This was, for me, a painful book to read (reread actually, for the second time) because of the author's earnest attempt to be transparent in his process while advancing a theory that made so many establishment scientists so uncomfortable that they went way beyond the norm in undermining and denouncing his work.

This was an effort at investigative reporting, never an easy task, and one that consumed most of the first half of my own career.

Reading the book, and experiencing (through Hooper) his many disheartening attacks by those hoping to discredit his work, I was reminded of where many of the scars I bear originated.

"Kill the messenger," of course, is what society does. But the message, hopefully, lives on for another hearing. Does anyone know the current state of wisdom as to the origin of AIDS? Is the polio vaccine theory advocated by Hooper still in the mix? I've not heard anything in years.

Manchester Weather

It wasn't predicted locally but a rainstorm blew through San Francisco tonight. The joke among those of us watching a friendly scrimmage between the local Seals U-17 team and a similar team from Manchester UK was that the Brits brought this weather with them.

Anyone who knows anything about world soccer knows that the Manchester teams in the English League are the top two this year, and their youth development teams reflect pride in that impressive fact.

Tonight these polite and aggressive lads prevailed over our Seals. It was 2-2 at half, but in the second half a close game fell apart in the last five minutes and turned into a rout.

My very competitive son was disappointed, but he did notice that three of his U-14 girl players had shown up to endure the bad weather to watch their coach play and cheer his side on.

It was only a scrimmage but a destructive one, of course. Athletes hate to lose.

As I drove him home to his Mom's house, we were both soaked to the skin. I just hope he doesn't get a cold, because he has two practices and another scrimmage in the next four days plus another practice session as coach at the pitch nearest my house starting at 5 pm Friday night.

As I often write, the thing about sports, especially as you proceed to higher and higher levels, is it is every bit as much about failure as success. You win a big game, as he did recently by scoring the winning goal.

Then you get knocked flat, as happened tonight.

Either way, you have to get up and be ready ready to fight again.

Congratulations to the British lads. But I wonder where that rain came from?

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