How many, two?

Walking from the village to the lower east side relatively early this morning, I saw a few people standing around a blue post box, staring at cakes in a window. They were waiting for a bakery to open up. The cakes looked very good. Walking back along the same street this evening, I saw a still larger group of people, lined up along the same window, backing up all the way around the corner of the block. A young man wearing a smock and pastry chef's hat stood at the door with a cell phone in his hand, directing people inside as other customers left. This is the first bakery I've seen with a door policy.

Not long ago, by contrast, I found myself eating meals with a rail-thin New Yorker, a well-intentioned person, though hardly unusually socially conscious. He has, however, seen movies such as Super Size Me, and is painfully aware of America's reputation for, among other things, excess and wastefulness. Consequently, he prefers not to eat anything made with any amount of fat, grease or oil. Likewise, any culinary effort at manipulation or artistry is unacceptable for its overtones of decadence, the stuff of empire. As a result, his diet consists, for the most part, of raw grains.

I couldn't help but think of him as I passed back by the bakery this evening.

A brief interruption

Dear Reader,

For the next two weeks, I'll be in the air and on the road. Come September I'll be all the way back, but in the meantime things may get dicey.

If you're new to the site, please enjoy the previous posts, below.

With great fondness,
General Bird

Clock of ages

I met a friend yesterday, hadn't seen him in five years. A handful of emails in all that time. He hasn't changed a bit. I said, "You haven't changed a bit." He said, "Of course not."

Five years: many long hours, or five quick turns through four short seasons. I can barely recall who I was five years ago. I can hardly believe it's been more than a month since last I saw him.

So I'm wondering again at the instability of my sense of time. Someone recently told me he didn't believe in time. He expressed this in the course of denying fiction, because, he said, to write fiction is to chronicle fact, since the writer describes a corresponding action that likely occurs in the future. Make of the comments what you will. I heard in his words the warring specters of Newton and Einstein.

It has been asked before: what is the nature of our time, what do we know of ourselves by our relationship to it?

Consider the importance of the clock to our culture. In the religious Islamic world, the muezzin divides the day at five points according to physical phenomena. What can we say about the west in relation to other cultures by reference to its units of time?

Can the secular west be defined by its devotion to the division of each day into twenty-four hours, into fourteen-hundred-forty minutes? Are we able to return to a day organized by events discernible with the senses -- sunrise, sundown, high noon -- or, conversely, are we approaching something new, something still more radical? In the authority of the clock, do we have, among other possibilities, an expression of man's ingenuity and will triumphant, or an example of man's folly?

If, before going to sleep, I am sufficiently conscious of a time at which I must wake up, I can do so, without an alarm, to within minutes of that time. I believe this to be a common ability. So I wonder whether our units of clocktime actually find correspondence with the rhythms of our bodies. Alternatively, perhaps the sleeping mind superimposes natural sleep cycles against the hours assigned to the night. Or have we internalized an abstract fabrication to a remarkably intimate degree?

Of course, at two in the morning, once again, maybe I'm just a little tired.

Man and couch

What is the attraction of man to couch? How many men wouldn't rather just fall asleep on the couch? Who has not gone crashing through the supergravity of sleep interrupted, belatedly finding his way to a mattress in the small hours of the morning?

It seems to have little to do with lifetime. And even less to do with whether someone's waiting in the guy's bed or not, unless that person is only freshly acquainted with the bed. Laziness?

There's something imperative about that couch. Something that seems so much more right than going to bed. Going to bed is subordinate, it's unmanly.

What is man, then, as he rides drifting on the couch past bonds of wakeful responsibility? Is he the hunter-gatherer at play in the fields of his subsistence? The laboring man, exhausted, still trying to produce, perform? Or bourgeois man, futilely fighting the infantilization he has embraced?

I'll be going to sleep now. Good night and god bless.

Pants in Waterland

Went biking today outside of Amsterdam. Outside of Amsterdam, geologically speaking, is where the sea should be, but they filled it in long ago. Filling in the sea is a lot of work; there's only so much you can do. You can't, for example, make dry, hilly wine country. But you can make an unremmittingly flat and green expanse of good farmland. And when the sun rides high and bright, and clouds like fantastical airships drift at the edge of the sky, it's beautiful.

If you ride along the dyke that keeps the water out, you can see all of it as it goes on and on, and you can also see the villages, each one of them a café next to a church, surrounded by low brick and wood houses along narrow streets. And if you ride far enough you will come to Pants in Waterland. That's the name of one of the villages. Actually that's a translation, but it's accurate. I have no idea why they call it Pants in Waterland.

I do know that as you're riding away from Pants in Waterland, if you look back over your shoulder, moving away at speed, craning around in a position that is disorienting and hard to hold, the sun dazzling back at you as it nears the horizon, it's like looking across memory itself into timelessness.

What we know about each other

What can I tell you about the guy who sells Z magazines outside the supermarket across the street? I can tell you he's a nice guy. I know this because he's usually smiling and often says hello. This is what the Z salesmen do, and I buy it from this guy. He's unassuming, but his presence is not negligible. He pantomimes exaggerated amusement when he sees me leave the liquor store next to the supermarket with two arms full of wine. I see him walking around the neighborhood sometimes. He has a pleasant gait. Says hello then, too. He's not Dutch, his complexion is ruddy-dark, he likes jumpsuits, and there's a light in his eye that reveals depth and confusion in equal measure.

I wonder what he can tell you about me.

The high-low revisited

We have embraced the understanding that we can learn about the highest things by celebrating the lowest. What credence do we now give to the possibility that we understand the least by reference to the greatest?

What do I know about the driver who would run a red to attach me to his fender, and shatter my eardrums with his horn for the privilege -- how do I understand this man, the decisions he makes, the way he helps shape the government that I share -- by reference to, say, Søren Kierkegaard? Ok, take a less over-the-top example of incomprehensible behavior, but keep Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard looked into the light of his times and saw calamity, so he defied everything that he understood himself to be and plunged into the darkness instead. Or another: Nietzsche embraced the fellowship of man, but in the face of man's most comprehensive effort to provide for universal fellowship, he foresaw failure and turned inwards for salvation.

Of course, Kierkegaard's darkness and Nietzsche's isolation were both alleviated by a different sort of shared presence: the ideas of others who lived in different times and places. Neither was entirely alone; they were joined in a community of thought. In that thought, that community, they found relief from the disappointment of the decisions of a people they would embrace, people they understood too well and described with great artistry.

What are we able to know about ourselves, the world around us, its frustrations, the occassions of our impotence, when we contemplate that art, when we look to the select few who have considered most closely and addressed with the most care precisely who we are, who we might be?

And it's not just a negative thing. I shouldn't wait until late to write these entries. Because what from all this can we learn about our enthusiasms, about the ways we love, the persistence of goodness?

Fierljeppen: catch the fever

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you fierljeppen (pronounced: fear-l-yeppen), a traditional Dutch sport, precursor to pole vaulting. I learned about this sport the other day, when someone set simultaneous records for distance jumped and self-punishment. The two go hand in hand in this sport, but more on that below.

The origin of fierljeppen, like most forms of Calvinist recreation, is functional. The Netherlands, or lowlands, being formerly underwater -- except for the series of natural dykes (like small island chains) on which really stubborn, geographically challenged farmers originally set up shop -- it was pretty hard to get around. And you couldn't drag your boat everywhere any more than you could own enough boats to have them handy all around the farm. (Farms on water-logged dykes allow for only so much excess wealth.) So, refusing to do anything reasonable like move to France, you walked around with a long stick and threw yourself over the water, from highground to highground, as it were.

Today, people in the north of the country, where it all started, continue to throw themselves over the water. They're no longer doing this, for the most part, on farms, so they appear to have opted to land in sandlots, instead. The result being: the better you are, the greater the height from which you are falling onto a rural driveway.

In the video above, rather than seeing entirely traditional fierljeppers, we see evidence of fierljeppen's siren song, spreading the world over. The instructor lands, uncharacteristically, on his feet; the students do about as well as one could expect.

For some real fierljeppen, however, try the video links on this page. I commend your attention to the righteous, bearded spectator on the bench in the first video linked, top of the list. Is that Bruce Jenner?

Glory untold to the person who can name the sport that's even cooler than this one. Yes, it's out there.

Sweet inspiration

The most incredibly sick thing happened today. I went out to this lake, right, this lake where it's all a little funny because I mean a lot of people haven't been going to the lake lately other than like newscasters and whatever because it's that these sheep and cows -- for real, sheeps and cows -- anyway they've all been kind of disappearing from around the lake, no joke. So me and some buddies went up there to check it out and maybe go swimming. Dude, bad call.

I lost my best friend, this hot chick that I only just met like when we first got to the lake, and half a case of beer. The cold half. You'll never guess how. I'm still in fucking shock, in case you couldn't tell.

To a fucking crocodile. This giant fucking crocodile, in the middle of the goddamn lake! Motherfucker. I was like Holy Fucking Shit! It totally came up out of the water and just started eating shit. I mean, when Brad thought he'd do his lumberjack thing but with real log rolling, it was like: good christ, No.

I think that's the movie I'm going to watch later. Boy am I excited.

Stamkroeg

Still another question:

What is it to sit quietly at the quiet bar? Drink one beer and another in the company of people who share the same devotion to the middle distance: call them friends, decent people. So sometimes there's talk, certainly; there are observations like there are beer mats.

Because this is the bar where the regulars go. Not a wise-cracking place or a back-slapping place or a place where the almost lucky drink to sentimental oblivion. Noone doesn't make it home.

There's laughter, too, some comfort. But the silence shames them both in time -- it's no punishment, no unusually bitter flavor to the beer, it's just that time and modesty are in abundance here.

So who's to say what this is?

Sing auspex

Alright, let's diversify. I say let's -- I imagine company. Who is with me here, now? But the diversification. Something at once more mystical and quotidian. Something like this:

Where do birds go to die? That's right, one more time: where do birds go to die? Or perhaps: Where do city birds go to die? (I'm not sure the distinction need be made -- I've lived outside of the city and not seen dead birds in any greater number; but while the number of dead birds remained roughly constant, at close to zero, the amount of space available to them was considerably greater.) At any rate, think about how many birds you see alive every day, and now think about how many you see dead. And of the relatively smaller number of dead birds, how many of them have not been roadkill?

Some birds, if not most, must be dying naturally somewhere. So where? They can't all be dying in their nests. Surely if that were the case I'd have seen at least one non-infant carcass in one nest by this point in my life, which I haven't. I also have neither seen nor heard of concentrations of dead birds in parks or other open spaces. And, of course, they're not just kicking off on streets and sidewalks without that fuel-injected nudge.

Tucked away in corners? Wouldn't someone have smelled that? Leaving the city to spend their last days in comfort? Unlikely. Plus, if both urban and non-urban birds were concentrating outside of the city to shed this mortal coil, then I'd expect to have seen more discarded avian coils than I did during my tenure outside of the metropolis.

Secret bird burial ground? Has anyone run a genetic comparison of bird and elephant dna? Are there any other behavioral similarities? Can birds even dig?

What if it's more sinister? What if they're not even really alive? Or, leaping past the implications of that last question, what if they're not alive as we know it?

This could be big. Surely someone has considered the question.

[I'm going to put some bird names here in the interest of attracting to the site people who might know something on point. Heron, humming bird, eagle, falcon, hawk, sparrow, albatross, owl, blue-throated warbler, nightingale, yellow-bellied pip, quail, robin, oriole, phoenix.]