It’s December, a time when afternoons are short and evenings come on quickly, when nights are long and breezes blow in from the Arctic, when Main Streets and malls are decorated with glitter and twinkly lights, people are full of holiday cheer, and thoughts turn to — United Parcel Service. Why UPS, you ask? Well, UPS is very busy at this time of year delivering holiday gifts and things, and it hires lots of temporary employees. And I was one of them. In late 1975, while looking for a job after graduating college, I took an interview with the engineering department of UPS. They said they liked my academic credentials, but at UPS you need more than credentials. You first have to prove that you could cut it out there in the mean streets with an overloaded brown parcel truck. So they got me a job as a temporary driver for the holiday season. If I “made standard”, i.e. if I delivered enough packages per hour, they’d consider taking me on in management. I didn’t have any better offers at the time, so I signed up and put on the brown uniform.

This isn’t one of those stories with a happy ending (sorry, I don’t have too many of those). I was let go the day after Christmas. Didn’t “make standard”, thus no management job, back to unemployment. I just wasn’t cut out for package delivery. Not that I goofed off. But I just couldn’t remember the street layout in my assigned sector. Thus I spent too much time zig-zagging back and forth to get my loads delivered. I often came back in the evening with packages that I never got to. That isn’t looked at very favorably at UPS.

Still, it was a memorable 5 weeks in my life. And hey, that’s saying something. So much of life these days is just not memorable. Much time goes by without anything memorable happening, especially in your middle years. Or in my middle years, anyway. But I still remember my UPS days, the retail stores along Raritan Avenue, the factories along the Penn Central tracks, the Hispanic guy with the heavy accent who would say either “heavy” or “not heavy” before handing me a package (and once in a while he’d watch me brace when he said “heavy”, then handed me a flyweight package, followed up with a grin). And the Jewish guy who couldn’t sign for a package, so I scribbled something for him (with his permission). And the time I left behind my delivery log in some factory, but was able to recover it (and thus avoided getting fired immediately). And the night before Thanksgiving when I had to deliver melting turkeys to some really forsaken houses out in the middle of nowhere. Or the Catholic group home with the big old crates of Coca Cola bottles outside. Or the time the police stopped me when I was assigned a rented van (UPS used to rent extra vans during the Christmas rush). Or the lady who gave me a bag of pecans, or the other lady who gave me some hand lotion (it was usually the less affluent people who would give you a tip; the folk on the richer streets seldom even had a nice word for you). Or the candy factory. Or Jesse, the guy who was the shipping clerk at one of my warehouses, who I usually saw in the morning and sometimes again in the evening while delivering a package to his house. Yea, it still brings back smiles.

I will say one thing about being a UPS driver. It was truly a lesson in sociology and community dynamics. You can play Sim City (I still have the 2000 version) or take a class on urban planning, and you still won’t get the feel for a community that you get as a package delivery person. With UPS, you visit the rich ends of town, the poor side, the police stations, the schools, the stores, the gas stations, the hospitals, the offices — you encounter people in just about every walk of life, busy walking the walk that makes their town buzz. You see all the crazy little parts of human activity that come together in a community. You appreciate the complexity and diversity and interdependence of our species a bit more. It is certainly more interesting than an ant farm or a bee colony or connected prairie dog mounds — but somewhat like them in a way.

Well, there was sort of a happy ending. About five days after I was booted by UPS, I got a call from the federal government about a job. A month later I was on my way to Washington to start my career as a bureaucrat. I started writing reports and pushing forms around, and to this day I still do stuff like that. One could say that I’ve been stuck all my life in an office with no idea of what the real world is about. But actually I did get a close-up look at the real world. Perhaps I couldn’t live up to UPS’s productivity standard because my mind was too busy absorbing the goings on of a village called Highland Park, New Jersey, watching it prepare for a solstice holiday ritual. So, there’s nothing for me to feel all that bad about; but I do hope that all of those packages I never got around to delivering finally made their way to their intended receivers!

MUSICA: I’m old enough to remember the days when “rock and roll” was quite broadly defined, encompassing everything from Van Morrison to Van Halen. You could go back and forth between the different rock stations in your neighborhood and they’d all be playing pretty much the same mix, although it was a broad mix ranging from pre-disco to early metal, even James Taylor ballads. You could go to Boston or Atlanta or Omaha or Sacramento and you’d hear pretty much the same stuff. The world was a familiar place. You could even memorize the names of band members (Kiss was the last one that I did that for).

Today, the world of rock radio is much more fragmented and quickly changine. One station’s mix has very little to do with another’s. You get used to the bands on your favorite station, and then you find out that the other channels are playing totally different artists (and come back in three weeks and your favorite station will be doing the same). Forget about leaving the area. Admittedly, there is still some common ground. Aerosmith, ACDC, Bush, Creed, Eddie Vetter, Nickelback, Metallica (unfortunately), and maybe Godsmack seem to have served as national standards within recent memory. But Stain, Saliva, Buck Cherry, Puddle of Mud, the Hives, Stone Sour and Theory of a Dead Man may not be. I often read something in the Times entertainment section about some band that’s supposed to be the hot ticket in rock, and I’ve never heard of them (and never will). Or maybe I’ve heard of them but never heard their music on the airwaves, e.g. Nine Inch Nails.

And of course there’s all sorts of rock classifications these days, e.g. classic rock, metal, indie, alternative, industrial, etc., with radio stations specializing in one or two of them. Early on, back around 1988, the softer stuff like James Taylor and Eric Clapton and Sting and even U2 got kicked off the rock stations and into the “easy listening / adult contemporary” slot (guess that’s where Dave Matthews went too). Next, classic rock split off into its own specialty. So as a result of this process, most stations today have a very narrow focus, even if they play music from thousands of different bands. In a way, this is all very good; there’s now a lot of variety out there. But in a way it’s bad; not much that we can all agree on anymore.

Strangely enough, there’s sort of a counter-effect going on in the nostalgia arena. There are more and more stations specializing on “the 80s”, especially on the net (Club 977 is a good example — quite good in fact). These stations seem to have healed the breaches that developed back in the 80s between disco-dance and rock and pop-schlock (and new wave, whatever that was). On these 80s nostalgia stations, you now hear Donna Summers and Asia and the Pet Shop Boys and the Fixx and Duran Duran and the Go-Gos and Sammy Hagar and the Subdudes existing quite peaceably, just as the lion and the lamb in the Psalm. Time heals all wounds, I guess.

Lately I’ve been hearing a catchy little ditty called “Bad Day” from REM on the airwaves. REM – one of the last bands I saw in concert, before I got too old. So you know they go back. Actually, they were once considered the cutting edge of the “New Wave”. Now, like every old band, they spend their time putting out “Best Of” collections. But of course, they release a new song or two on them. Which is where “Bad Day” comes from. I like the song, but only yesterday did I figure out why. It’s pretty much a remake of “End of the World” (End of the World Part II, perhaps). It has the same mix of witty, cynical words being chanted by Michael Stipes as a fast-paced background melody whizzes by, with an occasional refrain to hold it together.

So what the heck. When I was a teenager, bands from two decades ago were considered museum pieces. We didn’t have time for Elvis. It’s nice to know that kids today still lend an ear to Alice Cooper and Bon Jovi. Yes, my generation is too old to rock and roll but too young to die, as Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull once sang. Who’s Ian Anderson and what is Jethro Tull? OK, well admittedly it didn’t all carry over to the present.

So, I’ve lived to see my fiftieth Thanksgiving. And I suppose that I should be thankful for that. Thanksgiving is obviously meant to be a day for giving thanks. Ironically, it comes during the later part of the autumn season here in North America, a melancholy time when another cold, dark winter is setting in. If you really wanted to feel thankful on Thanksgiving, late April or early May would probably have been a better time for it.

I agree that there is need for thankfulness, given that people don’t fully appreciate the gifts and possibilities of human life, i.e. of love, beauty, art, accomplishment, intelligence, collaboration, understanding and wisdom. On the other side of the coin, being human is not an unmixed blessing. There’s still a lot of pain attached to each and every life, lots of disappointment, lots of sickness, lots of stupidity, lots of misunderstanding, lots of fear, lots of weakness, lots of loneliness, lots of anger and lots of hate. We have the brains to define an ideal of human civilization, but we aren’t able to live up to it. So, there are a lot of things about living that are NOT to be thankful for.

In sum, being a human in the year 2003 is a mixed bag. Maybe it’s getting better over the years, and maybe it’s not. There were two articles in the NY Times that recently explored both sides of the issue. On the pessimistic side, there was an article on Nov. 25th in the Science section about our genetic similarities with chimpanzees, who have made warfare a natural part of life. Male chimps have the inbred urge to band together, mark off territory, defend it, and try to expand it by raiding other male gangs who have similarly marked off their own boundaries. Scientific observations have proven that these chimps are not playing; if one chimp “army” is stronger than the other, it will kill as many enemy chimps as possible, and even wipe out a neighboring colony if possible. It seems to be a genetic thing.

The big question is, do humans have a similar genetic set-up? As the Rolling Stones song goes, are we all “Monkey Men”? Another Times article, on Nov. 11, seemed to argue that we aren’t. Sure, there are a lot of similarities between our propensity to war and that of the chimp, and we do share 98% of a chimp’s genetics. But there is a chance that we are just victims of misunderstandings and circumstances, and that we can yet learn not to be such animals when faced with frustrating circumstances.

I’m on the fence about this. I’d like to think that aggression and war is just a big mistake and that people can be taught the value of tolerance, cooperation and peace. On the other side of the coin, just when are we going to start seeing some evidence of such a learning process? There seems to have been war ever since humans gained the language tools and other means to organize on a large scale. Everyone seems to know that war ultimately makes things worse for the overall lot of humankind; even if it benefits a group in the immediate future, it obviously sets a precedent that will eventually harm that group’s children and grandchildren. And yet, the urge to war is very strong, almost as mysterious and intractable as the urge to sex. People just naturally agree to war as the preferred option to resolve their unhappiness, even when they know there will be hell to pay for using it (recall the high approval ratings for the war in Iraq back in March; interestingly, they are down quite a bit since then, from around 80% to around 55%). War really does seem as strongly grounded in our genes as the sexual drive is. That’s just my two cents, you can find people who know a whole lot more about genetics and anthropology than me who argue that this is not true.

But then again, I don’t think that the urge to aggression and war, even if genetically based, is unstoppable. We also have a genetic ability and propensity to think. Flexibility is the calling card of the human species. Chimpanzees can live in warm climates with lots of fruit trees, but not in deserts or mountains or arctic regions. Humans can live in such areas, because they can think out new responses to environmental challenges. So I haven’t given up hope that someday, our species will think up ways to avoid the stupidity and destruction of warfare. For that I’m thankful. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to live to see that day. For that, I’m quite sad. An appropriate paradox for a holiday of thankfulness set in the melancholy month of November.

The Eternal Student “Civilization Ain’t Dead Yet” Award: This one goes out to Nickleback for the cover of their latest CD “The Long Road”. I saw it in Best Buys the other day and said to myself “My God, Impressionism!” Let’s hope that other bands get the idea of incorporating classic art within their marketing plans.

Note of Caution to Not-Quite-Geeks: Be careful in disposing of a broken computer or any storage media, including CDs, floppys, hard drives, whatever. Someone recently told me that there’s a little industry forming, made up of people who roam around landfills or cruise through suburban neighborhoods on junk collection day, looking for thrown-out computers. They take ’em home and hook the storage media up to a diagnostic machine, searching it for files or memories containing Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, registration numbers, etc. Obviously they sometimes find things of value, or else they wouldn’t be doing this. Good old identity theft. I’m not an expert at how to permanently destroy memory – there are probably web sites that deal with this. But do keep the overall problem in mind when you throw computer-related stuff out.

Not-So-Famous-Last-Words: Back in 2000 we got some new computer equipment at work and they gave me a PC with an external USB drive meant for Imation “Super Disks”. Super Disks were a nice idea, a three and one-half inch “floppy” that had enhanced media inside holding 120 megs of data, not the usual 1.44 megs of regular floppys. Sure, CDRW was prevalent by then, but CD drives seemed clunky and slow compared to a floppy drive (and still do). The Super Disk seemed like a happy compromise, easy to use and carry but still holding a lot of stuff.

So, when I ordered a Dell for home, I shelled out an extra $50 for a floppy drive that reads LS-120 Super Disks. I figured that they couldn’t miss. Imation was quite optimistic too. On the back of each Super Disk case it said “Here to Stay. Super Disk will become the new standard disk drive … soon you’ll see Super Disk Drives built into desktop PC,s notebooks, external drives … It’s the technology with staying power”.

The prophecy was not to be fulfilled. Imation never let the price go below $10 a disk (which was reasonable compared to a regular floppy, given that it held 80 times as much data, but no contest against a 50 cent CD that held 5 times more than the Super Disk).

So, Super Disks have gone the way of the eight-track tape. I’ve got seven disks at home and I still like to use them. But obviously I don’t put anything on them that isn’t backed up somewhere else. Sic transit gloria …

For me, one of the scariest things about the Muslim world and culture is its general lack of humor … at least any sort of humor that we westerners would recognize. That’s a major barrier, something that blocks the finding of common ground and cultural understanding. However, I just read about Shabana Rehman, the 26 year old Muslim “standupkomiker” from Norway (as she is described on her web site). She hails from Karachi, Pakistan, but migrated with family to northern Europe at a young age.

Ms. Rehman gives it to the fundamentalists right in the eye, coming on stage wrapped in a traditionalist burka and then throwing it off to do the rest of her routine in a cocktail dress. She also has choice comments about western-liberal political correctness (which still has some fans up in the Scandinavian countries). The Norwegian liberals aren’t exactly complaining, but the radical Muslims often harass her or cause a scene at her shows. (She probably works it into the act, and the liberals just figure it was all staged).

Ms. Rehman is showing the power of comedy to make people think. She’s taking some heavy risks to build bridges where the bullets and mortars are still flying. I definitely take my hat off to her. Some of her stuff is a bit over the top, e.g. the photo of her in the nude with the flag of Norway painted on her skin that appeared recently in some European political magazine. But hey, artists sometimes get brash to make a point. Ms. Rehman is making a lot of points, but the one I like the most is that we should all ultimately define ourselves according to our own internal standards; we should not have it dictated to us by our family, our home country, our adopted culture, our religious traditions, our fashion setters, our TV advertisements, etc.

I think that Ms. Rehman is saying that we need to lessen our desire to be just another sheep in the flock, another bee in the hive. We’re humans, not insects. We can create and recreate ourselves into something totally unique, just as each snowflake is like no other. We can pick and choose our own interests, our own fashions, our own traditions, and our own beliefs, regardless of how popular they are. If Indian head pennies or Amish quilts or Easter Island idols or 70’s pop music or school board politics (or even blogging) appeal to your soul – well, go for it. But just remember, other people’s souls are drawn to totally different things, and you’ve gotta respect and tolerate their preferences if you’re gonna expect any respect for your own.

If you check out Ms. Rehman’s web site, you won’t get too much from it unless you can read Norwegian. But there’s one picture there that sez it all, no translation needed. Ms. Rehman is dressed in traditional Middle Eastern female attire, with some kind of jewel over her forehead. And yet, she’s holding a pair of skis. Most excellent! That’s the ultimate weapon against the people who train suicide bombers and terrorists. And as Ms. Rehman points out, we westerners also need to break out of our molds, the ones that affluence and economic freedom paradoxically create. We need to do some independent thinking ourselves in the face of consumerism and crafty marketing strategies (I mean, if political operatives really think that the typical ads you see around election time can convince people to vote for their candidate, then Americans ain’t got their thinking caps on right).

P.S. one element of my own individuality is my taste for craft-brewed dark beers (OK, not exactly cutting edge anymore, but still pretty good for a guy who grew up drinking Coke and Pepsi all day – can’t even touch that stuff anymore, surprised that anyone over the age of 18 still drinks that glop). I haven’t offered too many reviews here, but I just tried a new one that raised my eyebrows. It’s called Old Heathen Imperial Stout by Weyerbacher, brewed near the Delaware River in Easton, PA. Weyerbacher is not as fashionable as the various craft brewers from Colorado, Oregon or Vermont, and it’s had its problems with light beers (some of which are downright skunky). But Weyerbacher seems to know dark beers rather well (they’ve had a nice raspberry stout for some time), and this one hits the nail right on the head. It’s full-bodied but not syrupy, smooth and maybe even silky, with plenty of dark chocolate and coffee tones. It has a nice lacy head to it, neither foamy nor flat.

This is alcohol as it was meant to be – expensive, well done, to be sipped and savored in moderation, and not gulped down in a drunken stupor. Moslem fundamentalists seem to fear alcohol (although the 9-11 terrorists had no problem belting it down), while typical Americans and western Europeans are too prone to get drunk. It’s up to the radical individualists like Shabana Rehman to find the middle ground. Perhaps Weyerbacher should send her a complementary six of Old Heathen. It’s probably a great beer for the long, cold winters up in Norway.

A THOUSAND WORDS ARE WORTH A PICTURE: For all you booklovers out there, here’s the motif above the door at the local library.

To be honest, I don’t use the public library much any more. If I want to read a book I schlep over to Borders or log on to Amazon and buy it. If I want to look something up, I check out Google. But hey, I’m glad to pay tax dollars to keep the libraries open. They’re outposts of civility and reason in an increasingly uncivilized world. Well, at least they are when kids aren’t jammed into them, fooling around while pretending to be doing homework.

The mini-computer is doing the public library harm in more ways than one. There are all sorts of computers available in the libraries these days with all sorts of referencing tools. I myself have no idea how to use them. Because of short staffing due to budget cutbacks, it’s hard to find anyone to explain how they work. I was taught the old ways of finding things in libraries (card files, periodical indexes), and those old ways are all gone. The local library may still be a gold mine of information, but I have almost no way of getting at it.

Nevertheless, I still like to stop in and wander around a library every now and then, amidst the other lonely old psychos and losers you usually find in them. The ideas and ideals behind and within the libraries are still an inspiration and are still worth preserving.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY: I used to watch the X-Files on occasion, although I never became a true X-cult member (I suppose that I don’t really want to believe). That show was a bit too graphic and violent for me. Nonetheless, the underlying theme of an alien invasion conspiracy was rather intriguing. Not that I believe that there really is something like that, but it made for a good story (when they used it; I never liked the “rogue monster” episodes).

The scene from the X-Files that I remember most was the time that Mulder’s public identity had somehow been shifted through alien magic to some other guy, and the real Mulder was being hunted down as a dangerous renegade. If memory serves me (which these days is not guaranteed), everyone thought that Fletcher was Mulder, Fletcher being some bit part guy who showed up every now and then for reasons never fully explained (just like everything else in the X Files). Towards the end of that episode, Agent Mulder stopped at a gas-and-go convenience store late at night and went inside, pricing a gallon of milk or something under the harsh fluorescent lights. Then the ominous music started playing and the dude behind the counter decided to abandon ship. (Good move — when that ominous music starts playing you know some major plop is gonna happen). Then the stormtroopers burst in with military gear and nabbed the real but thought to be unreal Agent Mulder.

As they led him away at the point of an automatic weapon, you saw Agent Dana Scully, Mulder’s work partner and soulmate, together with Fletcher out by the gas pumps. Scully was obviously under the alien spell that made everyone think Fletcher is Mulder, and she was obviously pleased that the impostor has been caught. Perhaps more than pleased; you could see the look of love in her eyes for Fletcher-as-Mulder. Seeing all this in passing, the real Mulder starts screaming at the top of his lungs, “SCULLY, HE’S NOT ME, HE’S NOT ME….” As the nasty federal agents jam him into the armored paddy wagon off in a dark corner of the gas station, you hear one last desperate “SCULLY, HE’S…” on the fade-out.

Want to know why this scene got stuck in my memory circuits? Because it touches a nerve with me and most every aging person who once had a dream of a better world. Maybe one in ten people who dream such dreams in their youth get to do something with them; the rest of us are forced by fear, circumstances and lack of will into one compromise after the other. We take on a hard shell in order to survive and fulfill some of the more immediate commitments that we’ve been assigned by fate (children, aging parents, attractive spouses that didn’t quite share our dreams but seemed right at the time, the temptations of a comfortable suburban life with all its techno-toys). We do what we must for the bucks. After a while we may even start believing in our new image, in ourselves as successful people. But somewhere deep inside the prison of our subconscious, there’s still that sensitive young soul looking out at who we’ve become, with our spiffy suits and fashionable haircuts, screaming “HE’S NOT ME! HE’S NOT ME!”

You might be able to think of other stories or plot lines that go something like this. The writers for the X Files weren’t the first to have thought it up. It’s a rather archetypal theme – the fear of inauthenticity. Of course, in the X Files, the aliens eventually slipped (or maybe it was all a part of their game — you never really knew with the X Files) and the real Mulder made a comeback. As for me, though — I’m quite not as optimistic.

Autumn isn’t my favorite season. It’s nice, but it’s over too quickly. Before you know it you’re stuck with another long, cold, dark winter. Nonetheless, I’m still trying to make the best of it.

The other morning I got in my car and noticed that some of the falling leaves got stuck on the moist windshield during the night. Now, there was a picture of autumn. So I went back inside and got out the cheap-o digital. Didn’t come out too bad.
 

A new female gang was discovered recently on the streets of East Orange. They call themselves the “FBI”. Catchy little acronym, eh? You might wonder just how these young women justify those initials. OK, here goes: Female Bitches In Charge.

That’s street language, all right. Light years away from the world of the grammatician, who would point out that “female bitches” is redundant, and “in charge” is a phrase consisting of two very independent words. A hyphen just wouldn’t work here. Thus, the acronym would more properly be BIC.

Of course, people who join street gangs do not earn their meals by making precise use of written and spoken language. They live in a world where brute force and sexual exchange are the language of government and commerce.

Does that mean that a gang member is necessarily less moral than a lawyer, businessman or senator, i.e. the people who command our world through the spoken and written word? I’ve seen a lot of deception and raw aggression asserted through the precise application of the mother tongue by highly educated and civilized people. Perhaps their means aren’t considered criminal, but their ends are hurtful none the less. Does that mean that I’d rather live in the world of Bloods, Crips and now the FBI? No, but mainly because I don’t play their game very well, whereby I can more or less survive against the word gangsters.

So long as we have Enrons and security firms giving bogus advice and sales strategies built around alluring advertisements aimed at getting the fast buck and politicians willing to say anything for the vote and businesses that poison our land and sea and skies, I would not tell a gang member in jail that my world is humanly superior to his (or hers, in the case of the FBI). Until my comfortable techno-suburban world becomes more honestly concerned about the streets where the gang bangers hail from, more willing to make some honest sacrifices to help people like them, and less tied to the unspoken official motto of the 21st Century (Screw You, I’ve Got Mine – and don’t think that charities aren’t some of the most enthusiastic practitioners of that), I’d say that we “mainstream” law-abiding Americans have nothing to be smug about.

You say that perhaps I should form a gang called the Bleeding Heart Liberals? The BHL, that is? Not bad, but not quite as catchy as “FBI” (although in a presumptuous mood, we could twist it around to “bleeding HEArt LibERalS”, i.e. HEALERS).