Onion Cap

I love books, and I have a lot of them.  In the past few years, an increasing number of my books reside in The Cloud and appear when I ask for them on an electronic device connected to The Cloud.  The rest of my books are in boxes in storage or on shelves in my study.  I read more from The Cloud than from the printed page because I can read in the middle of the night without turning on a light, and I can carry an entire library with me on an airplane.  I spend a lot of time on airplanes.

A few years back when digital readers were becoming more common, I had a lengthy discussion with a group of very smart friends, who read as much or more than I do, about digital readers.  We were divided on the future of digital text.  Some of us thought it would become the dominant form, and others thought it would never really replace ink and paper.  I won’t say what side I was on, but digital text has almost completely taken over my world since that day some six or seven years ago.  I read on my computer screen, on my phone, and on my handheld digital reader.  I do still read every day, with great local interest, a newspaper that arrives on my lawn at about 5:30 each morning.  I feel like the newspaper connects me with my place and time and physicality in a way that digital reading cannot.  And besides, no one is commenting on the stories except my wife.

But mostly, my reading is shaped like a cloud.  Today I bought a more advanced digital reader that is charging and connecting with The Cloud as I write this.  It has a better lighting system, so I think, that provides a more even backlighting for middle of the night reading.  I look forward to waking at 1:30 am when I will pick it up from the bed stand and see if what was promised is delivered.

Election Day is the only poll that matters.  It’s not a binary choice since you have the choice of voting this way or that way (and maybe another way) and you also have the choice of not voting.  Trinary at least.  When the polls close and votes are counted, the choice is made, revealing what was going on all along, regardless what narratives has been created, solidified, and believed in.  Nothing actually changes with a vote; it is a reveal, not a confirmation of narrative.  We learn from it insofar as it conflicts with our narrative, just as we experience cognitive dissonance when new information emerges.

My Uncle used to pop his teeth out, just to be funny.  I thought it was horrifying, since I couldn’t imagine how a person could pop his teeth out.  Of course I learned that he had false teeth, and the sound of popping them out was more of a plastic on plastic rattle than a cracking of bone.

So Trump was elected.  Did I hear the popping of firecrackers and noisey whistles or cracking bones and dry screams?

I like Hillary.  She is a strong, intelligent, and thoughtful person.  I believe if I ever have a chance to sit down and talk with her for a half an hour, I will like her even more.  I’d like to have a beer with her.  I bet she’s hilarious.  It’ll never happen, because with her schedule and the project she has undertaken to be elected President, it’s very unlikely that she and I will ever have a chance to talk about anything.

That’s the problem, really.  People have to imagine what it would be like to meet her and have a coffee and talk about whatever the heck you want.  Voters can’t imagine that happening because she has become something she really isn’t:  a spectacle.

Donald Trump is a spectacle, in the the way that Jessie Ventura, Paul LePage, and Mohamed Ali have been spectacles.  That’s what they are.  They revel in it and are revealed by it.  Creating spectacle, whether you create spectacle by being an idiot, a musician, a wrestler, or a scientist, equates to views, eyeballs, votes and revenue.  It doesn’t mean people adore you, it means they are fascinated with you and mesmerized by your spectacle.  People might even vote for you because they want to keep seeing you; they want you to continue the show, view a spectacle.  For Donald, his creation of spectacle is the only thing he does.  He’s one of the wrestlers in Barth’s Mythologies: “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess.”  We can’t take our eyes off it.

That will never be Hillary.  She hates being a spectacle.  She just wants to get to work. Hillary is a serous person, a complete policy wonk, a woman who has worked and studied and completed her assignments throughout her life, including sucking it up and working for the man who defeated her in 2008.  She is a class act.  I like her.  I’m going to vote for her.

Trump is remarkably pedestrian and common. You can meet Trumpists just about anywhere. They are scared of people not like them. they are resentful of small things and big things. They are sexist, racist, bigoted, and uneducated. That’s why Trump loves the uneducated. So it is no surprise that Trump has become a spokesperson for the Trumpists. He is saying over and over what I have heard in barber shops, bars, grocery stores, and parking lots.  Trumpists and Trumpism are everywhere.  Now we have a name for it.

making choices
taking a stand
it’s all we got here
in palm of our hand

time is lonesome
when it takes too long
just keep believing
and staying strong

sooner or later time will tell
love is going to get you at the wishing well
time is all we’ve got, but we’ve spent it all
love’s the only thing when the darkness falls

take my hand babe
hold me tight
watch those stars
as they fill the night
the night is cold love
but your heart is warm
i feel your heat now
as we face this storm

see the sunrise
over your head
i feel the morning in your warm bed
can’t live without you
got to breathe your air
run my fingers
through your auburn hair

sooner or later time will tell
love is going to get you at the wishing well
time is all we’ve got, but we’ve spent it all
love’s the only thing when the darkness falls

Now here’s a choice our forefathers never faced:  to drink water from a bottle or from the tap.

It would have seemed to them an absurd choice since buying water in a bottle would have been an absurd idea.  I recall longing for and finally purchasing a military canteen.  The canteen was a metal container shaped like a saucer, covered with heavy canvass.

The legislature in Maine is set to consider whether plastic water bottles will be allowed in state offices, buildings, and schools.  Green concerns make up the most of the anti-bottle beliefs, while concession revenues, water safety, and convenience inform the pro-bottle forces.

Such a choice – to bottle or not to bottle.

There are some things you simply can’t choose.  It’s too late, you weren’t born that way, you haven’t the right genes, it flies in the face of physics, or your peek has passed.  It’s impossible, and not in the sense of the impossible dream.  Ain’t gonna happen.  No choice.

For instance, you can’t choose to be a Mainer. Nope.  No way.  If you are not already a Mainer, you can’t choose it.  By the same token, if you are a Mainer, you can’t not be one.

Mainers came here sometime before 1750, had children, whose children had children, who had children, and so forth, until it comes to you, if you are a Mainer.  You can move here from somewhere else, at which point you are considered from away, a back to the lander, a tourist, or a summah person.  But you ain’t never gonna be a Maineah.

You had to choose to be a Mainer before 1750.

And as they say in Maine, yah can’t get theah from heah.

To be, or not to be, that is the choice.

We wish that were true, and in some ways it is the essential existential question; but choosing isn’t what we usually do.  More often than not, we live in the comfort of not-choosing.  Small choices make us happy – do I choose the Italian roast this morning or the breakfast blend?  Do I have oatmeal or do I have toast?  Over easy or scrambled?  Do I buy a car or a truck?  Do I go for the high mileage or comfort?

Pliers or crescent wrench, your choice, $9.95!

Really?

The bigger things, who we love, where we live, what job we take, what religion we ascribe to, what health status we embark upon, what language we speak, what family we are born to, what air we breath … do we really have the choices we think we do? We like to think we have choice, but what may seem like choice may be rationalization, backfilling, and story telling.  It’s only a choice after you’ve made it, after you’ve had a chance to invent the options and measure the outcomes.  To be a choice, there must be options weighed.

What choice do we really have?

That is the question.

When did “choice” become a thing? Of course I want to have choices – to choose where I live, what car I buy, what college I go to. I want to choose whom I love. Making choices is what humans do.  Making choices defines being human.

But choice as an ideology? Can we have choice for choice’s sake? Are we entitled to choice, or do we make choices possible?  We are embedded in the culture that we learned, the family, the language, the ways, the diet, religion, the economy, and so forth.  We didn’t have a choice in it; we were born to it and raised in it.  How then, are we entitled to choice?

The way we live our lives gives us the chance to choose, and we deal with the consequences of choosing. That is how we learn, or fail to learn. That is how we grow, or fail to grow.

Something is fishy with this notion of choice.

This morning the sun rose bright and sassy over Maranacook Lake, reminding me that in mid-February the days grow longer quickly, marked by bright sun early and a longer afternoon. We have today off for Presidents’ Day, an important holiday in the Northeast. In the midwest it was noted, but not deemed worthy of a day off. Teachers put George Washington on bulletin boards instead. In Maine, we give the kids the day off. Another reason to like this state.

I bought a set of fly tying instruments and a pile of feathers and yarn. April 1 is opening day on most streams and lakes in Maine for trout. Sometime between now and then – perhaps even today – an egg sucking leach or two will be created.