Motus Mentis

We are in Wellfleet this evening, having arrived late last night on an important mission. No, I’m not talking about plucking oysters from the bay, though this afternoon did find me splashing about at low tide as usual. This weekend, however, the task at hand is to take our son Nick off to college. He was accepted as a midterm admission at a well-known university in the Boston area, and the moment is at hand; we drop him off tomorrow.

We are in Wellfleet tonight, after a long day on the road. It’s mighty quiet out here, as you would imagine — which is just what the doctor ordered, here in the final days of a difficult and sorrowful year. Reading, rest, and quiet reflection top the agenda (and perhaps scooping an oyster or two out of the bay), so do forgive me if waka waka waka operates on a reduced schedule for the next few days.

To all of you, Merry Christmas!

To kick off the holiday festivities, my mother-in-law, ancient of days, has, for what seems like the fortieth or fiftieth time, fallen and broken her leg, and is once again in hospital. Service at waka waka waka may be light for a few days as we cope.

It’s been an awfully busy week both day and night — I’ve had scant opportunity to write, and probably won’t get much of a break until the weekend. So for today, we will simply comment briefly on two items drawn from today’s issue of Gotham’s paper of record.

To all of you. I thank you for visiting, reading, and commenting, and I hope this day finds you at peace, in good health, and in the company of those you love.

We’ll be traveling this weekend, and Internet access will be iffy, so waka waka waka will most likely be off the air until late Sunday, or perhaps even Monday.

You never know, though.

Well, Election Day is over at last. No more infuriating telephone spam, no more of the juvenile taunting and slanderous invective that, as this editorial rightly points out, should be enough to keep any self-respecting adult out of public service, and no more dithering over which of the current drift of egomaniacal swine are the ones we ought to hold our noses and vote for.

I don’t have much to say about the results, other than to note with satisfaction the ouster of that blustering ignoramus, the self-righteous, swaggering creationist and homophobe Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum, and to register hearty approval, also, to the belated departure of Donald Rumsfeld, at whose feet I lay much of the blame for our catastrophic bungling in Iraq.

As for local news, my Congressional district here in Brooklyn is now to be represented by one Yvette Clarke, who occupies a slot on the ideological continuum somewhere just to the left of Leon Trotsky, and our junior senator will continue to be the scheming carpetbagger Hillary Clinton, who was indeed preferable — she does, after all, exhibit a certain shrewdness — to her Republican opponent, the amiable and bumbling nullity John Spencer.

Of course, this is all just an opening flourish, a prefatory ruffle of drums and flutter of strings, to the performance that awaits us in 2008.

From Duncan Werner comes a link to an old memory — the story of Jose Feliciano’s performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at a World Series game between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, way back in 1968.

Last night we added an extra hour in our return to Standard Time. Like most people, I heartily approve; I enjoy the notion, however illusory of gaining a line on the moving finger. Now if we could just persuade Congress to “fall back” three hours a night in perpetuity, I might even get rid of these bags under my eyes.

I’m sure that almost all of you, by now, are familiar with Google Earth. This fantastic tool, which requires nothing more than a good Internet connection and a free software download, allows the user to zoom in on high-resolution satellite images of any location on the Earth’s surface. The resolution varies from place to place, but will only get better with time, and already there are large patches of the planet that are represented in astonishing detail. The pictures aren’t live, of course, but are snapshots taken on clear days over the past three years or so.

We’ll be traveling to Ann Arbor, Michigan this evening, and waka waka waka may have to lie fallow for a day or two. Visitors are encouraged to browse our archives in the meanwhile, and we’ll be back as soon as we can.

There was a tragic and shocking event here in New York today, as most of you have probably heard by now. Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, acquired just this summer by the Bombers in the trade with the Phillies that also brought Bobby Abreu to the Bronx, was killed, along with his passenger, when the small plane he was piloting flew into a high-rise apartment tower on East 72nd Street.

I don’t really know what to say about this sad, strange story; I just thought it would be remiss of me not to make note of it. It is always so unsettling to see how some lives end while the rest of us go on, for a while at least.

The technological infrastructure here at waka waka waka is provided by an outstanding hosting service called BlueHost. Among the many excellent services they provide for the absurdly low fee of $6.95 a month is a versatile website-statistics package. It occurred to me earlier this evening that it might be amusing, in lieu of coughing up yet another grim and controversial entry about the accelerating decline of civilization, to look over some of the search-engine phrases that have brought visitors here over the past year.

From Ornette Coleman:

There is no bad music, only bad performances.

This idea unfolds nicely.

Avast, ye scurvy bilge rats. Just in case you didn’t know, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

New York City has a rapid metabolism; a lot happens here, and even when it’s something unpleasant, the wound closes quickly, and rarely leaves much of a scar. September 11th was different, though; it hurt us very badly indeed, and though we don’t have much of a limp these days, we are still shaken, and today here in Gotham the old pain was back again, throbbing and aching, and the gaping hole where the towers were still feels like a missing front tooth.

Everyone, as far as I can tell, knows someone who died that day. Our family was lucky – we’re all still here. My wife and I were still at home in Brooklyn when the planes went in, and our son, then thirteen, was safe at school nearby. But my daughter, who had just begun her junior year, was at Stuyvesant High School, about five hundred yards from Ground Zero. She and her classmates gazed in horror from an eighth-floor classroom directly facing the doomed towers, and saw the first one fall before they were evacuated onto West Street and left to find their own way northward amid the panicking throng. My wife and I, watching from our rooftop across the harbor as the ghastly pall of smoke blew directly over us, had no idea what had become of her, and grew more and more anxious as the day wore on. It was not until five or six that evening that she was finally able to get through to us on the telephone – tearful, but safe.

As I say, New York is a resilient place – vibrantly alive if any place on Earth is – and we’re fine, mostly. But there are some wounds here that will never fully heal, and today you couldn’t be in the city without being aware of the presence of a great, almost unbearable sorrow, the collective grief of the millions who mourn the thousands who died.

As I look out my back door I see, rising from the site about three miles away, the brilliant columns of light that pierce the sky every year on this day, towering to the very zenith. I hope our neighbor, firefighter David Fontana of Rescue Company One, who gave his life, on his wedding anniversary, to save the lives of so many others, can see them too.

It’s been a long day, and having just got in from a long drive back to Brooklyn from Cape Cod, I’m rather too worn out to say much tonight.

But I do want to note with shock and sorrow the bizarre and untimely death of Steve Irwin. He was a delightful character, and an iconic figure in his native Australia. His fearless and hyperkinetic enthusiasm, his genuine love of animals (and his immense skill in handling them), and his goofy smile, khaki shorts and broad Aussie accent won him millions of fans the world over (I was one too, in case you can’t tell), and I join them all in mourning his loss.

My old friend, the painter and art collector Patrick Goldsmith – whose peregrinations have taken him often to the remotest East – took up, a few years back, the art of the sonnet, and a collection of his work is available online. Called The Wayfarer Sonnets, they are intended as companions to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, and I do hope you will take a look. You can find them, in print or downloadable form, here. Just the thing for those of you with a Tao jones.