Screw You, Orbitz, I’m Moving to Fallon, Nevada

I went to Michigan for Thanksgiving again this year. The weather was fairly gloomy all week and my back was killing me the first several evenings, thanks to Orbitz (I booked ten weeks in advance and cheerfully paid more than a month's rent to make sure I’d have an aisle seat; in the actual event, I was mashed into a window seat next to a fellow who actually touched my ribcage with his elbow more than once, not meaning any harm), but it was nice to see my parents and sister. We went through my father’s stash of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books from the 1940s and 50s and divided them up.

Last year, by the time my parents got done preparing Thanksgiving dinner, nearly every possible flat surface was covered with dirty pots and utensils, even the washing machine in the back hall. I stayed up until about 3 a.m. washing the dishes so my father would walk into a perfectly clean kitchen the next morning.

I planned to do the same this year, but my father made a point of washing everything as he went along, so the kitchen was nearly sparkling clean when we sat down to our vegetarian Thanksgiving feast, and I know he did that so I wouldn’t wash dishes for hours, so thank you, Dad. He got up at 3 a.m. himself to make this all happen.

I have been lately enjoying going to iTunes and sampling different versions of jazz standards. I got Monica Mancini singing “When October Goes.” I’d never heard of her, but that was the one that gave me goose bumps, and then there’s Etta James singing “Tenderly”—wow! Gorgeous. I’m going to buy a couple of her CDs. She once weighed more than 400 pounds: awesome. She's still alive. I should send her a fan letter. I got the Al Hirt version of “Tenderly,” too. I like his jaunty trumpet playing.

I also got a few Jonatha Brooke songs, including two lovely things from The Works, her CD that uses Woody Guthrie’s lyrics, and I got Queensrÿche's "Revolution Calling."

My magical chiming clock has granted me the ability to start doing something I’ve long wanted to do but which seemed impossible: to get up before the moment of absolute necessity and meditate in the morning. I feel noticeably calmer during the day if I meditate first thing, and it’s great not to have yet another task waiting when my bed is calling to me in the evening; its murmured "Come back!" starts the moment I arise, and reaches a deafening volume by nighttime.

Now it's perfectly easy to get up at 6:30 a.m.—thanks, clock!

Eugene Cash now and then puts out a stack of free books with the other literature at his Sunday night sitting group. I confess I kind of thought they would be worth what I paid for them—nothing—but I’ve been enjoying them. I just finished Meditations, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, which is a collection of dharma talks, and thought it was excellent and inspirational. You can download the whole thing at www.accesstoinsight.org, along with lots of other stuff from this and other authors. I went there and printed out the four talks I liked most from this book so I can reread them without having the whole book lying around.

I have been to Eugene’s only a couple of times in the last several months, for whatever reason. The last time I was there, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s son, Will, was teaching. He started his dharma talk, after we meditated, by asking, “What’s happening now?” Then he was silent for several anxiety-producing moments. “What’s happening now?” he asked again. More silence. More anxiety. “And now?”

After a few minutes of this, the anxiety ebbed and it became very restful: Oh! That’s all there is to do, to notice what’s happening now. The peaceful effect of this lingered for days.

I am lately reading The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, by Steven Watts. I was complaining to my mother about someone having bent my ear with something boring, and she asked, “Is that anything like your telling me something about Henry Ford every ten minutes?” “No,” I explained, “it’s nothing at all like that, because facts about Henry Ford are inherently interesting.”

For instance, did you know Henry Ford was dyslexic? Or how about this? “Socialists such as Vladimir Lenin admired Ford as one of the major contributors to twentieth-century revolution, and it was not unusual to see portraits of Ford and Lenin hanging side by side in Soviet factories.”

Or then: “He has gained a reputation, of course, as the American pioneer of industrial mass production, but a less appreciated role was, perhaps, even more critical. Coming to prominence amid the collapse of Victorian tradition with its values of self-discipline, thrift, and producerism, Ford popularized a new creed of consumer self-fulfillment. He was perhaps the first American businessman to realize that large-scale production depended on large-scale consumption.”

The Model T went into mass production in the fall of 1908, and in just one hundred years, with its descendents, wrecked what had been peacefully sitting here for 4.5 BILLION YEARS (give or take)! Doesn’t that boggle the mind? Not that I blame Henry Ford himself. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. I’m quite a fan of Bill Ford.

Nonetheless, the car polluted our air, water, soil and food; the oil to fuel it we now kill each other to possess. Automobiles made it so people could live far from their jobs—working in cities they don’t care about because they don’t live there, living in communities they likewise don’t care about because they spend so little time there, speeding daily through bland wastelands their eyes never consciously rest on.

Whereas it once was likely that you’d live with or near your extended family all your life, when it became standard for most folks to have a car, it was easy to say, “Screw you, I’m moving to Salt Lake City,” and never be seen again.

In sum, the car destroyed our natural environment, our landscape, our cities, our suburbs (after making possible their creation), and our family units. Without the car, we wouldn’t have the exact same chain businesses in town after town after charmless town.

Today Tom and Sarah made a run to Costco, dropping me off at Rainbow beforehand and picking me up afterwards. I made two-bean chili and listened to the second Nazz album, Todd Rundgren’s first band. The first Nazz album has a few nice moments; the second has considerably more. You can hear Todd becoming Todd. “Hello It’s Me,” one of his biggest hits, can be heard in its first incarnation on a Nazz album.

Tonight, conscientiously seeking to remain culturally literate, I watched High School Musical.

The elbow that got clobbered in my bike accident at the end of July has lately started to hurt again, so I went to see Jeff, who said adhesions had formed. He treated my elbow with the means at his disposal (acupuncture, moxibustion, a bit of massage), and then I went to see Jack, who agreed about the adhesions and worked on them, which was quite painful, but when I saw Jeff again last night, he said things were improving, and I agree.

Between them, those two can fix just about anything short of being backed over by a UPS truck.