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Rants and counter-rants.

On the proper use of kenoza

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The holiday season is upon us, and it’s time to think of dancing and swilling! And, of course, along with the merriment, kenoza!

But first, a word about the Chicken Bowl. The Chicken, neither dead nor alive, must be placed in the Bowl in strict accordance with sacred ritual, and not be mentioned for 37 weeks in order to avoid devastating consequences. Now, on to the kenoza!

Although kenoza are the most intimate tools of Rindswille, their correct use is poorly understood. However, following these few simple guidelines will ensure a joyous holiday.

The kenoza are used every third year of the Hizzen Cycle during alternate spring rains. You may also use them during the autumnal equinox if you live in a bumpy area. There are 36 kenoza, numbered one through eight, skipping the seventh in remembrance of the Absence of Dwend. Each kenozum may be decorated as desired, but the missing seventh should always be the most ornate. They should be used by the whole family together, or with the first seven random strangers you encounter if you have renounced your family. They are to be prepared as follows.

Separate the kenoza into four piles. Sprinkle them with absinthe and bake them in a 400-degree oven along with a sprig of elderberry and three miggins of Klob each, for 48 seconds. Remove them from the oven, taking care that no one present utters any word of the Haksaka during and for three seconds before and after the removal process.

After they have cooled (but before the following Tuesday), they should be distributed according to the ancient tradition. One pile in the fireplace, one at the foot of the bed, one under the doormat, and the final (and most significant) in the coal bin. In modern homes without coal bins, simply place the last pile near a sack of potatoes.

Before any dancing can begin, and ensuring that there is no waning crescent moon, burn the first pile in the fireplace along with your Letter of Introduction. You may hum the Kenozati Canticles while doing this, but it is not required. When this is done and the ashes consumed by the family of voles living under the front porch, it is time to address the second pile. The usual address is 1326 North Lakeside Road, but you may use any address of your choosing, so long as it is undeliverable.

Now carefully lift the doormat by the northeast corner, taking care not to disturb the kenoza (especially the missing seventh), then slam it down as hard as you can. Gather the family (or the strangers) and take turns dancing on the doormat until there is nothing left of the kenoza. Now it’s time to eat the pudding, smash the bowls, and fling your shoes in the air. It is also a perfect time to sing the Kenozati Canticles as robustly as possible, taking care to use an undecipherable language.

By this time, you may be exhausted and confused, in perfect condition to mumble the third pile into animation. Everyone who has thus far participated should jump into the bed together and distribute themselves in as close an approximation of a heptagram as possible. Under each pillow there should be a portion of the Final Concoction. DO NOT EAT IT AT THIS TIME. As each weary participant is drifting off to dreamland, the kenoza at the foot of the bed will move to the elbow of the corresponding Uncle. Gently massage the kenozum nearest you, then fling it at the window until it breaks, and all the kenoza (except the missing seventh) are gone. If you awaken the next day, you may begin the long process of the Last Pile. It is very important that this last process be completed exactly as prescribed, and within 48 seconds.

Into the coal bin (or potato sack) you go, displacing kenoza along the way. Each participant should grab the nearest kenozum, and loudly recite the following incantation:

[Note: This section has been deleted in deference to ritual tradition]

There you have it; follow these few simple rules and you should avoid extermination at the next conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. Happy Rindswille!

Disease by the numbers

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Credit: tumsasedgars

Every morning I check the Covid-19 stats for the state and county I live in. Every day the numbers get bigger and the picture grimmer, even when things are improving. How can this be?

First of all, let me dispel the notion that I want to downplay the danger. Far from it; I fully support efforts to get people to wear masks in public places, to avoid large groups, and to keep a reasonable distance apart when interacting. I support those measures being made mandatory when necessary. I hear people say that they’ve “done their time” in lockdown, and that it seemed to them that the threat turned out to be much less than the government let on.  Setting aside for the moment the question of what motivation there would be for the government to impose lockdown, except to keep the pandemic under control, these people miss the obvious fact that the measures they complain about are exactly why the direst predictions never materialized.

But those issues have been dissected and debated abundantly; there’s no reason to add my 2 bits beyond what I have already written.  My interest here is in information and the extent to which it is useful.

Keeping a running total of infections doesn’t seem to be very useful. You might find it helpful if your motive is to keep the sense of crisis alive, but even that is questionable. There is no shortage of published articles on crisis fatigue. At a certain point, there’s just an overload, and the human alert system just shuts down. Eat, drink, and be merry, as the saying goes, for tomorrow we die. 

We need a way to assess how many people are actually infectious at any given time. In my county, for example, just over a thousand cases have been reported since the beginning in March. Something over sixty have died.  But I can’t easily find how many of those cases have recovered.

So, out of that thousand, you can subtract the deaths, which are statistically miniscule. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could also subtract the number of recovered, and therefore no longer infectious, cases?  I know those numbers are available, but why can’t we see a number for current cases that are actually a potential threat? Shouldn’t that number be front and center?

Our poor, tainted political system

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I’m not a huge fan of Elizabeth Warren. In fact, I think that just the idea of being a “fan” of hers or not is symptomatic of our deeply disturbed political system at the moment.

I think she’s a perfectly acceptable candidate among the 20-odd choices, and I will vote for her if she ends up the official nominee of the Democratic Party. Until such time I will withhold further support. I want to wait and see how the issues unfold.

However, she already seems to be the choice of the political disruptors. I’m seeing more and more gratuitous mentions of her Native American heritage fiasco (on which, see Snopes.com). It has become a trope, bordering on the magnitude of Clinton’s emails, and just as irrelevant to her qualifications for the job of President.

I said as much in a comment on a Tweet recently, in (I thought) a reasonable tone. I got two or three responses telling me why I was wrong, again, in a more or less reasonable (for Twitter) tone.

Then, all at once, dozens of comments popped up, and I mean all at once. Some of the comments could be construed as in my favor, and others against, almost all much more insulting in tone that the original exchanges. I’m not a big Twitter user. I rarely get a thread going with more than about six or seven comments, and never over about 20, even when I’ve been getting piled on, and even then, they have accumulated gradually, as you’d expect.

Nowhere in all of this fusillade was there a mention of her ideas on policy, her other qualifications, or even a suggestion of an alternative candidate.

This tells me three things:
1. at this point, the opposition considers Warren the most likely to survive the nominating process,
2. they consider her the most dangerous in terms of running against Trump, and
3. the bot network (Russian or homegrown) is up and running already.

As they say, buckle up.

City boy

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I grew up in a close society of immigrants, clannish, insular, distrustful of their new country and the people in it, all the while reciting its praises. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Every adult was allowed to, and did, monitor and even punish every child, though generally they only reported misbehavior to parents. As a teen, my time was strictly regulated, with one curious exception: while any time spent with my American friends was subjected to the minutest scrutiny, when I was with Latvian friends, the gates were flung open and no questions asked. Naturally, I exploited this loophole at every opportunity, drinking at laxly run taverns well before coming of age, and getting into trouble in general, always forgiven, as long as no Americans were involved.

Still, it was stifling. The social strictures, and, above all, the religious impositions, might as well have been physical chains. I longed for something outside these limits. I devoured Kerouac and Baldwin, read Ferlinghetti and Corso as if they were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I spent hours staring out the front door window, imagining a completely different life.

But I lived in the city, and the city was my escape, my safety valve. For 27 cents, I could hop on a bus a half block from my house, and within minutes be in another world, one of libraries, book stores, and coffee shops, and above all, anonymity.

Years later I would find myself living in a sleepy little town, a county seat with a high opinion of itself, and all the insularity of my immigrant community. Right next to it was a company coal town, and the miners and their families provided the underclass that seems so necessary to maintain that peculiar superiority of big fish in small ponds.

The heartland, they called it, but someone had built a university where the favorite hunting grounds used to be. Some of the locals cashed in big as they sold off farmland, and others were bitter in the self-righteous way of those who had missed the big payoff. Either way, it was the beginning of the end for the inbred insularity the town was known for. With the university came a preference for urbanism, and connections to the nearby city, long resisted by the locals, began forming and strengthening.

Nowadays, we’re a suburb, and the older residents pine for bygone days. But there are restaurants, several grocery stores to choose from, coffee shops to sit in, and the feeling that everyone knows your business and disapproves of it has all but disappeared.

People talk about the failure of small-town America, but I see another story, that of the transition from ruralism to urbanism. Lots of small towns have emptied out, to be sure, but many others either joined larger nearby metroplexes or grew into cities in their own right. Along with that inevitably came the cosmopolitanism beloved of the city-bred like me, and despised by the unrecostructed rural. And both, as so often happens, for the same reason: the decline of big-fish smugness.

What it takes to be an artist

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Think of the stereotypes. Artists are loners, wild and unruly, enthralled with themselves, beholden to no norms, egoists above all. Whether you approve or not, artists are held to different standards. Think of Picasso, Warhol, Morrison, Joyce. The #MeToo movement has put some cracks in this image, but, I think, without doing any serious damage to the stereotype. Is there a kernel of truth to it?

Maybe. Or better, in part. I think the image of the self-possessed and self-obsessed seer of things the rest of us can’t may be a caricature of a small subset of artists as a whole: those who are successful enough to rise above the mass of humanity and become visible to us. In a word, the famous.

I know a lot of artists — painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, novelists, musicians – who will never be able to quit their day jobs but ply their crafts with as much dedication as anyone. Is it because they’re not as good at it? Some part of it is no doubt that, but who is as good as or better than whom is an elusive quality to pinpoint. I suggest that more of it has to do with precisely those personality traits that make up the stereotype.

Doing art involves rejection and ridicule. A lot of it. A little Googling will turn up dozens of famous writers who collected numerous rejections. As for painters, the term impressionist was first used as a term of ridicule. It’s not hard to find any number of inspirational essays citing these facts and exhorting the artist to stick to it, that perseverance will eventually pay off.

This isn’t one of them. It may payoff, but most likely not much, and that’s not the point. The point is that all the artists you know about had, in addition to the basic skills (and occasional genius) required of their craft, an ability to face up to rejection and ridicule, to keep close an image of themselves as important people with something unique and valuable to contribute to society.

It’s an attribute of character that’s more about success in general than peculiar to art. Think of Steve Jobs, whose self-confidence about knowing more about cancer than cancer researchers actually killed him.

Still, being a little bit wacky doesn’t hurt.

Okay, it hurts, but it’s a gas.