Mess-merized.

As you get older, does time seem to move faster for you or slower? If, like me, you are still working for a living, chances are it seems to move faster. There are not enough hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the month nor months in the year to accommodate all that you have/would like to do. When you were younger, you had time to waste. Now, wasting time seems like a waste of time.

But then again, perhaps it is really a simple matter of being disorganized. It's not that I forget to write things down that I need to do. It's more that I forget to look at the list. Or maybe that I forget where I left the list. Or maybe I can't find my glasses to read the list.

Millions of philosophical nuggets have been authored over the years on this business of time and energy and work. Most of it falls into the Get Organized school of thought, which seems to suggest that if only you get into the habit of thinking ahead, you'll be successful. Hang up the clothes you'll need for tomorrow where you can easily get at them. Make your lunches for next week on Sunday evening, and freeze the ones for Tuesday through Friday. Keep a list of the foods you have in your freezer by date so nothing will go past its best by date. Set aside a specific time to do laundry, to vacuum, to do the dishes, to read, to meditate, to pick your nose....

The wonder of it all is, it works for some, and not for others. By the time I've read the self-help stuff on getting organized, there's no time left to get organized: another week is upon me.

Complicating all of this confusion is the environment of living in a house of three generations. I swore I would avoid this eventuality at any cost, but the Robert Frost's Law of Returning Offspring ('Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to take you in') has resulted in a kind of compound interest effect when it comes to disorganization.

Although I was brought up in a house that was probably less than 800 square feet on the ground floor, I now believe that children cannot be raised in any house that is less than 2000 sq. ft. in floor space. Why is this? Because of the proliferation of plastic. We live in a polymer paradise. For every phase of childhood, there is now something made out of plastic or encased in plastic that is vital to their well-being; something without which the young person will inevitably be unable to achieve a wholesome adulthood. And the best of these creations, such as play saucers and cribs and storybooks, will turn out to have been the ones that required alkaline 9-volt batteries for their operation.

Part of the function of these devices and the flotsam and jetsam that bobs in their wake is to slow me down, to make my progress more arduous. A simple walk to the door in the morning typically requires navigation through the treacherous shoals of multi-geometric shapes which fit inside some sort of octahedron that is not currently in the same room. It has not, in fact, been seen in this room for some time. These plastic triangles, rectangles, stars and squares have cleverly-designed thin edges that are guaranteed to immobilize any unsuspecting instep for at least several minutes.

In a similar vein, the closet doors are often wedged open by shoes belonging behind the opposite door. Because they have stepped out into the pathway and taken up a position, the range of movement of the door to my side of the closet is severely limited.

There can be only one karmic reason for this mode of living. I am meant to slow down. It's time to set my eyes toward the earth, to be more grounded, to notice what is around me for the sake of my own well-being. I cannot forever be rushing forward in hot, heedless pursuit of what captivates me at the moment. The time to achieve goals is past. The time to take note of where I am and what I am doing is upon me.

I need no more self-help than a good pair of glasses. Now where the hell did I leave them?

I hear ya

Last night we went to a party where there was supposed to be live music. A group of four older guys with guitars and a drum kit were slated to play 50s songs, which is one of the two genres that I really enjoy, the other being classical instrumental from the baroque period.

When I got inside the venue, and saw the size of the speakers and the amplifier console with its upward curving red line of LEDs, I knew it was going to be a noisy night.

In anticipation, I had brought with me a pair of compressible foam earplugs that I sometimes use when the going gets too enthusiastic in our drumming rehearsals. With the first crash of the cymbals and the thwanging of the guitar, I could hear nothing but the shattering high frequencies that sounded like glass being broken. The bass guitar could not so much be heard as felt. As fast as I could, I rolled up the little cones and stuffed them into my ears. As the foam gradually expanded, the extreme noises died back, and I began to recognize the songs the band was playing. It actually became enjoyable as the crystal-shattering, floor-shaking ends were cut off while leaving a subdued middle.

I looked around at J who was busy trying to make herself heard and to respond to other people at our table. It occurred to me that the others might be experiencing this same pain. I got up and went to the car where I had stashed a package of these wonderful earplugs and brought them back to the table. Everyone took a pair.

I have tinnitus, as do many of the older people who were at the party. It manifests in my case as a high-pitched frequency that is constantly present, although not (thankfully) constantly heard. It does interfere with my enjoyment of orchestral music, primarily live, but also for several years now on CD and DVDs. The violins in particular trigger my awareness of this background noise. As some wag said, "The trouble with this music is there's too much sax and violins."

During the (mercifully short) evening, a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years of age, was the only dancer on the floor. I didn't think of it at the time, but since he was a mere ten feet from the band, in front of a large speaker array, there could be no doubt that his hearing was being damaged. Nevertheless, he did his moves for about ten minutes with his sneakers flashing those little red lights near the heels as he pranced around. It was cute and amazing.

When he has trouble later in life making out what people are saying, or cannot enjoy music because of a persistent ringing, will this young fellow blame his parents or the band or a society which is deathly afraid of silence, yet whose most popular catch phrase is, "I hear ya"? Or will we by that time have developed aural implants that instantly clamp down sound bursts that threaten our audiological well-being? Or will electricity have become so expensive to produce that the rock or country band with the thousand watt amplifiers have gone the way of the dodo?

An ice idea.

I don't usually (ever) write about sports. It's not that I'm not a sport fan. If you're born Canadian, at some point you become a hockey devotee. It's in the genes. But there's been a breakthrough in the technology of the game that is going to take it in new directions.

As anyone who has ever skated can tell you, it's punishing work, learning how to skate. Your rear end takes an incredible beating as you struggle to master the balance and the starting and stopping. In fact, I found that I never did.

When I ice skate, I can only turn in one direction. I'm ideal for those outdoor and indoor public skating hours when everyone goes around and around in one direction and nobody has to stop (because many can't). I learned how to avoid crashing into people by crashing into other people. And when you stop, you're supposed to turn sideways on your blades and drop down so that the leading edge of your blade cuts into the ice evenly, sending up a flash of white snow that is really a cloud of ice chips. It looks so, so, suave. In fact, you can't play hockey if you can't hockey stop.

I'll never forget the time I decided to save ten bucks and sharpen my own kid's skates. I guess I was just ignorant enough of skate sharpening to think that you could take an ordinary grinder and run it over the blades. Trouble was, after all the trouble of lacing R's skates up, and pushing him out onto the ice, his feet shot out from in under him like Bambi's, and he couldn't even get himself back up again.

The secret, of course, was that the professional skate sharpening machine has a very thin, convex profile grinding wheel which they constantly keep formed by running a special profiling diamond dressing tool against it. The result is that the sharpened blade is slightly hollow-ground, giving two edges to it. It is these edges that determine whether you'll start, stop, slide or slip on the ice. So skating is like dancing on four knife blades pointing downward.

But of course I went through the era of the bobskates that strapped on my winter boots, so I never started out the hard way. You can stand on bobskates, and if your brother pushes you along from behind at a reasonable pace, you can pretend you're skating. That's kind of my style now, too, although at some point I did learn how to turn around 180 degrees and skate backwards until stopped either by the rink boards or by someone coming the opposite way (known in hockey parlance as a "check").

The big problem till now for anyone playing hockey is the extreme expenditure of energy in chasing after the puck. It requires exceptional skill to be able to follow the rubber around the rink, given that it can come from any direction at high speed. So a hockey player is a major anticipator: exceptional hockey players recognize and anticipate plays, using their peripheral vision to great advantage in positioning themselves on the ice to minimize the amount of energy they have to expend.

The physics of frozen water is such that as you skate, you're actually melting the ice through the pressure of your own weight on the narrow blades. But recently, after some years of testing, a Canadian inventor has developed a heated blade. This device has been shown to save energy and offer quicker starts and stops because it doesn't freeze up like the ordinary blade. Instead, it keeps the ice at a constant temperature slightly above freezing, because, as everyone knows, the friction is reduced between the steel and the ice by the thin layer of water. So, less energy is needed to skate.

So I guess I'm really not writing about sports after all, but rather about physics. Heating the skate blades is just another example of fundamental laws of physics with a practical application that would not have been possible without the invention of microchips and the improvement of battery technology.

My understanding of the physics of skating is very simple It's the Law of Levity. "What stands up must fall down."

Better buy the dozen

With all the unfair, despicable, cowardly and brutal things going on in the (political) world around us, you'd be excused for not wanting to hear about another.

This is just a reflection on something that comes up time and time again in the course of my daily work. When I teach classes, sometimes I get to hear little bits of stories about the people who come to them.

Tonight, I had a dozen people, eager to learn the basics of Microsoft Word. I was into it for about ten minutes when a burly gentleman arrived and apologized for being late. I set him up with a computer, and got him caught up to the point I had left off with the class. In a few minutes, he was a bit lost, so I went over to him and helped get him back on track. During that minute and a half or so, he told me that he had just lost his job, a desk job in law enforcement, that he had held for 30 years, because he lacked the computer skills required by changes in the department, and was given no time to pick them up. He needed to climb the mountain of the learning needed to become competent in Windows and Office skills, because that was now a requirement. Fortunately, he had a working wife.

After the class was over, I got talking to another of my students, a man in his 40s, who lost his job as a machinist, because he had apparently had a back condition that was undiagnosed from birth, resulting in a deterioration that made him no longer capable of doing the kind of operations that machinists do. He too wanted the Windows and Office skills to make it possible to re-enter the workforce. Fortunately, he had no family or dependents.

There have been many others, especially during the last eight years, who have felt the sting of layoff, firing or unemployability, and they pass hopefully through our classes, which are probably too general to do them much good. In all this time, I have not heard of more than about three people who have succeeded in getting a job that paid a decent wage. One person solved the problem by working for his brother, but that is rare indeed.

This America is not a worker-friendly country any longer. There are no real breakthrough ideas as to how to deal with the older, hard-to-employ worker. There are few good jobs for mothers returning to the workforce, or starting for the first time since their children left home. There are no solutions that haven't been tried by thousands. And there is no compassion because there is a common perception that there are no solutions that aren't basically socialist in nature. And socialism is a four-letter word.

What would it take to change this country into a nation that actually cared about the poor and the powerless? Cared enough to try to change so that everyone is treated fairly?

Some form of the 12-Step Program should just about do it.

1. Admit that life in America has become unmanageable because of addiction to consumerism, power and the accumulation of wealth.
2. Realize that a Power beyond anything we have experienced can restore us to sanity. That could be, for example, the power inherent in an unrigged election system.
3. Make a decision (i.e. vote) for someone who is undeniably moral, decent, honest and open, who has the best interests of the world's people at heart, not just "what's good for GM".
4. Take stock of what exactly we mean by "morality" and develop a global perspective on what morality means in the context of our common existence on this blue ball.
5. Admit to the current and past (and in the case of Iran, future) "enemies" the exact nature of what we have done wrong to them as a nation and part of the world as we know it.
6. Become entirely ready to remove all these defects of character, attitude, and posture.
7. Humbly ask them to help remove these defects. For those who think God, however understood, has any interest in this, well, we need all the help we can get.
8. Make a list of all the countries and nations and peoples that we have wronged and publicly and as a matter of policy prepare to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Releasing the wrongfully imprisoned at Guantanamo would be a good start.
10. Continue this process of moral and political inventory, especially through the rehabilitation of the mainstream media, which would long since have awakened from their acquiescent stupor and pernicious collaboration during the reign of the current administration.
11. Sought to improve our conscious contact with our conscience, both public and private, such that the right thing would always be done whenever there was a choice.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, then try to carry these principles (freedom, equality, opportunity, compassion) to others and practice them in all our affairs.

While I realize that "in a perfect world none of us would be here" (thank you, Eric), I also think that it is the lack of personal effort even to stop and think that there may be a better way than the one we're going now that causes so much indifference, fear, cruelty and self-indulgence. Every minute of every day is a great starting point to create a better world. So come on, let's do it. We need to heal the nation's addiction to greed and self-preservation. We can. We must. It's the right thing to do.

Oh my Gourd!

Our duties as djembists and balafonists took us to the Darke County Fairgrounds in Greenville, Ohio on Saturday. For someone who only occasionally eats pumpkin pies, this was a revelatory experience. There were thousands of gourds of every shape, size, configuration and color. So what is a gourd anyway?

Apart from the scientific definition which you can find on the internet, a gourd is a cello, a flute, a drum, a banjo, a whole orchestra, really, judging from the amazing ingenuity with which these instruments were constructed. It is a table lamp, a bowl, a spoon, a water fountain... in fact, it can be almost anything that time and talent can make it.

Part of the musical entertainment tied in with this theme at the annual Gourd Show was an Indian musical group whose featured instrument was a sitar. The leader pointed out that the resonating chamber of a sitar starts out as a gourd, and in fact many sitars have a second gourd at the top. The spiritual aspect of the sitar's gourds was explained by a charming story of the rescue of the god of music from drowning in a river when a higher god tossed him a gourd.

What I think makes the gourd so fascinating is that it is as individual as we are. All shapes and sizes, all thicknesses and weights, and all different color shades and hues populate the world of gourds. In the hands of someone who respects the gourd, a gourd can take on a beauty or radiate a sense of humor that reflect the crafts-person's own.

And as a balafon player, I can testify that the graduated gourds that resonate under the bars of the balafon make it possible to be heard even when the drummers are in full flight.