With No Particular Place to Go

Since Jan. 6, 2010, and for 191 consecutive Wednesdays thereafter, we’ve explored in this space the concept of placeness, specifically placeness as art, and we even coined a pseudo-Latin-ish term, “arslocii,” to use as a tent in which to gather together our musings, monologues and misgivings.

We started off as purists, adhering rather rigidly to our stated mission of writing about art and site, and how each impacts the other and imparts a power to (or subtracts the same from) each other, so that because of this relationship, symbiotically, each has a certain “something” it did not have before, and has become something it was not before – and that together they are not two things but one. Placeness. Arslocii.

Soon, however, ideas and truths and suppositions led us further afield: consideration of the role empathy plays in the perception of art and place, the placeness of “places” that don’t actually exist (“homes” that appear in fiction-based TV shows, the Glass houses of Salinger’s stories), the placeness of highway entry ramps and the space circumscribed by plastic traffic cones or gabions, the placeness of places inhabited and deserted and left behind by death. And then, frankly, we wrote about things that merely caught our attention or plucked our emotions, and we took out the sturdy arslocii shoehorn and made them fit, and tried to walk without anyone noticing our pronounced limp and our bloody toes.

Arslocii and looking at the world through it became our life, and we can’t envision a time when we will stop seeing things in that way. But we do envision a time when our clockwork entries will stop. And that time is now.

We’ll still be contributing to Arslocii, but on an every now and then basis, as we divert much of our energy and efforts to other, long-term projects that we will let you know about. Those who’ve signed on to receive these blog posts regularly will see them from time to time, like house guests who, kindly, have brought their own sheets, towels and food; those who check in to this site in a hit or miss fashion might, if you continue doing so, bump into something new to read … or not.

Thanks for your interest in what we’ve thought about; we hope to earn that interest again with our newer pursuits. As the departing Mr. Wickham said to the relieved Bennets, “Let us say not farewell, but as the French have it, au revoir!”

See you soon, then, some place else.

… Is Not Gold

Okay, we have all been bombarded with advertising slogans and when it comes around to holiday time, the main event is perfume and jewelry. “A diamond is forever” and “Quality is Remembered Long After the Price is Forgotten” are two ubiquitous refrains from the world of luxury-item sales pitches. Naturally, advertising can run the gamut from  bending the truth to down and dirty lying, but recent events have convinced me that the whole of the jewelry industry is a fictional construct that is rivaled only by the lore of the world’s religions. And who here doesn’t believe in the power imbued in jewelry?

I admit, I never did. Fancy things hanging from my fingers, neck and ears just kept me from doing things that were active and fun. I never found the pleasure involved in passively glittering, as if a hunting lure for birds or fish. It is possible that some women find a kind of empowerment in being be-jeweled, but for me it was quite the opposite; limiting and inhibiting – maybe even as a control mechanism. Here, dear, take this shiny object and be content, this is how much I care (in value). And, over time, it hasn’t changed much as both a token of affection or guilt.

So imagine the bind I find myself in, having inherited objects of desire and/or apology crafted in gold and precious stones from people I valued, people now absent. Yes, there is the sentimental factor, but, mostly, there is reversion to the material stuff. Plus, there is no placeness in it. And there the stuff sits, languishing in much the same way that it did when it decorated those who appreciated it more than I ever can. After a seemingly appropriate waiting period, it is time for a parting of ways. But how, with something that has such a commodious value? I headed out for “jewelers row” to unload the stuff.

In large cities there are diamond dealers, even diamond districts. An entire industry is built on the jewelry trade. That should be the place to go. It is like its own city within the city, an enclave of people who live and breathe gold. They fill entire blocks of four or five story buildings. The funny thing is that they all work in competition with each other but there is a symbiosis, a collaborative atmosphere. Their shops are separate but they come and go freely to other shops, and I get the distinct feeling that they trade among themselves and maybe even do group buying from the same distributors. Perhaps they are all related by marriage, as in a small town. I imagine that all the shop facades are joined backstage, like a false Western storefront set, and where many of the honchos are gathered around a table gambling with diamonds. I mean, they are worth way more than money, right?

Some of the shops have fancy showrooms with lots of mirrors and crystal chandeliers, similar to casinos I have visited. Others are less glitzy and even more tacky than casinos. One had an office atmosphere with a line of desks (and a surveillance camera over each) and a counter more like you might see at an optician’s. The workers break down into the bosses, those who sell, those who assess, those who test and weigh, those who make or fix. The seven dwarfs may mine the gems, but there is definitely a hierarchical structure to the business of jewelry. I even heard an employee describe the man to see as not just a jeweler, but a watchmaker – a man of skill as well as know-how.

What did I come away with? It is all lights and mirrors and the only science, let alone alchemy, is the weighing and pricing of gold – not market price, but rather jewelers’ price. I was told a few times that the only value in the booty I presented is as scrap. How does one explain that thirty years before, just one of the items I held was appraised at four times what I was being offered for the entire lot today? Surprisingly, two potential buyers quoted the same amount for the “load”; the next doubled their matching bids; a fourth offered the same as the first two but for just three items, with no interest in the “lot”; and the last shop offered three times as much as the first two, but in three weeks, not now (this one must be psychic about gold values).

So despite all the pretense of acid tests and digital scales, the monetary value of these “forever” baubles was fairly low. Of course, all that overhead has to be factored (and I didn’t even see the bodyguards), and also the price that the jewels could possibly fetch in the current retail market and then subtracting the age-related style deflation – well, being a seller in a buyer’s world – you can see where I am headed with this. Just like a casino, you can’t possibly beat the house. Since the game is made up and controlled by the dealers, you can’t compete. The only “forever” with jewels is the endless supply of suckers who keep the industry afloat. The family jewels is a hoax. Except for those whose families are in the business.

The Bag I’m In

I needed to put something in something and carry it somewhere. Genius was not required to conclude that a bag was what I needed.

In a deep, tall closet that we use as a kitchen pantry, there is a certain shelf – when this building was home to a contractor’s office, before we turned it into a home, this closet was utilized to store boxes of files, so the shelves are sturdy and broad – and about half of this shelf is inhabited by our stockpile of paper bags. [Digression: Don’t use plastic – save the Earth. End of diatribe.] There are, on this shelf, grocery bags of all sorts – the plain brown sacks, the ones with formed paper handles, the ones that have been made deceptively smaller (as if we didn’t notice) so that it seems as if your huge supermarket bill has bought you more stuff when in fact it has bought you less, the ones that have stamped on them the alleged name of the possibly fictitious line worker who, “with pride,” pushed the button to the bag-cutting and -forming machine. (And just why do the markets and paper companies think that we’re interested in knowing who made this bag that, “with pride,” is already about to burst at the bottom with the weight of three boxes of tissues in it? Are we supposed to feel good about the bag because “Fernando Torres” had a hand in its mechanical manufacture? Is the personalization meaningful, even to Fernando? Are we to think that the bag was handcrafted in some way by an artisan who, apparently, likes to work in multiples? Is the point of the worker’s name on the bag so that we know to whom to direct our “Great bag – keep up the good work” thank-you note? I don’t get it, but to save a stamp, let me state here publicly: “Thanks, Fernando Torres, for helping me get my tofu home safely. Stay proud, but don’t get cocky.”)

Most of the bags on the shelf come from supermarkets, a few from department stores (remember them? They used to advertise in all the newspapers. Remember them?). A few of the bags have the logos of high-end boutiques (the only way they got here is if somebody else used them to bring us gifts). There are thin and long bags that once had wine bottles slipped into them. There are bags that seem masculine; others that seem feminine. And others that, like kids in school who don’t know the answer to the teacher’s question, are scrunched back so that they won’t be selected. Some bags we’ve had for just a week or two, while there are a few goofballs or underachievers that we’ve probably had for years.

And then there is a clump of them, a real handful, maybe 50 or so, tied together by the kind of white string that bakeries bind their boxes with. They’re crisp, brown, Duro No. 6’s. I look at them, and it’s funny the things that make memories rise up in front of your eyes, spectrally, faster than light speed, but these bags do it for me. They are, sitting there, themselves placeness, and, via recall, placeness suggesters. First, they make me think of – and feel, and smell, and hear, and, strangely and sadly, turn around and swear that for a second I can even see – our guys, that special and irreplaceable litter of cats, now long-gone but forever clawing at the fabric of our hearts … because we would use a new one of these bags just about every day to hold the nasty stuff we’d scoop from their litter boxes. The Duro No. 6 size seemed just perfect: It could hold a lot, but not too much, because you wouldn’t want a big bag of cat stools sitting around for very long or bursting open at the seams, and the No. 6 was easy to lift when full, and its opening was big enough for a heaping scoop to slide in and out of without losing its toxic cargo. And when each was filled, it would be put into a grocery bag with a half dozen or more of its stinky brethren, to sit until trash day, a pile that looked like a fraternity prank in the offing.

But, then, a second memory intrudes on the first. It is of a store, a really old place on a corner in an ancient part of town which has seen gentrification and upscaling but it, the store, resisted until recently all attempts to ride the coattails to the present, or even the near past.   The building is more than 150 years old, and the store in it – a restaurant- and party-supply business – looked to have stock that went back nearly as long. And employees older than that. We called it “the wet dog store” because it smelled like … well, there, you got it. The floors of the place were original and wood that was in spots concave from the generations that trod on it; the shelves were loaded with items that would be archaic if they weren’t, now, suddenly, in the forefront of retro, everything an eatery or food truck might need, if it wasn’t too fancy and the year was 1953: cardboard boats to hold hotdogs, the kind of blue-and-white Anthora paper coffee cups that look like they’ve been around since the ancient Greeks, all kinds of wood coffee stirrers and french-fry pokers, Chinese takeout boxes, classic mustard and ketchup squeeze bottles and sugar pourers … and bags. Paper bags. Tons of them: the kind that corner stores scoop candies into, the kind that pastry shops slip paper-wrapped eclairs into, the ones that perfectly encase a loaf of rye bread. Each type of bag sat, gathered in big fistfuls, tied in string, on old and dusty shelves, with no price anywhere to be found. You’d ask a clerk what a bundle of No. 6 bags cost, and he’d say that he’d have to ask the owner, who sat in an office tucked back in the store and who may have been dozing back there since the building’s foundation was poured. The owner would shuffle out, take a look at the item, take a look at you, size you both up, make a face briefly that led you to believe that he was trying to remember the price, and then would make it up. “Three dollars,” he’d say, definitively and arbitrarily, on one visit. “Two-fifty,” he’d quote you the next. Whatever, it was worth it – cheaper than the much more cheaply made similar bags they sell as sandwich bags in supermarkets, and, anyway, buying from this ancient guy in this ancient place was not only great urban theater, but it was personally becoming a part of a continuity that would not continue much longer. Stores like this are vanishing, with neither a whimper or bang, as older generations die and younger generations don’t want to continue in the business, or they don’t want this kind of stuff anymore, or they buy it now on Amazon or eBay. But these latter miss the point of the joy of commerce. Buying in a store like this is like being an actor in a play for which you have no script but you know all the lines, except that the central character keeps improvising. Even, sometimes, when the owner would make up too high a price – “Five,” he’d say, as if it had always been five – you paid it anyway, without a fuss or reminding him of what you had paid the previous visit, because you wanted to support this creaky vessel until that inevitable day when you’d come for your bags and there’s a Starbucks sitting there instead …

All of this, rushing at me, sparked by a bunch of bags in my pantry, where they create a placeness in my home and echo the placeness of their origin and their wonderfully circuitous journey to me, and my journey with them.

And, please, don’t get me started on the napkins and toothpicks – we could be here all day.

Tears for Eydie

The one time I saw Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme perform in person was when I was assigned to review them for a local newspaper – “resigned” more accurately describes how I felt, although, as a freelancer, there was 25 bucks in it for me. And I’m sure my piece (my memory of it is completely gone by now) dripped with appropriate dollops of snark that I, in my under-30 years, felt it necessary to bring to any discussion of this beyond-satire, cufflinks-and-sequins duet that my parents, with that odd pride of a common Jewishness, would have kvelled to have seen. Frankly, except for casual but pointed mention now and again in conversation, referring obliquely to a kind of generic, Vegas-y, Rat Pack-y form of entertainment long since departed (the seismic shift in taste and demographics tilted the continent, rolling all such acts to Branson), I hadn’t given much thought to Steve and Eydie, not presuming that they were dead, exactly, but simply no longer “here.”

So, then, how to explain, to my surprise, my getting misty at the news of Eydie Gorme’s death, at 84? For one, I suppose I felt sorry for Steve Lawrence’s loss of his partner of more than 55 years. (Couples like that should go together, in some freak mid-song microphone electrocution accident, with no survivor left to look unbalanced and incomplete – “Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Steve and” – or uncomfortably stapled to a new and younger partner – “Please welcome, Steve and Gaga.”)

But that wasn’t enough to bring tears. Nor was my latter contention that Gorme was a decent and powerful singer who was diminished by the style and patter of the duo’s act, and choice of songs, placing her in the same kind of novelty niche in which one could find Keely Smith, another exceptional singer lost in assumed persona. That Gorme perhaps never got the full respect that she deserved was enough to make me sad, but not wet-eyed.

What I think it was that affected me was the sound of another door slamming to the past, and the loss of another beachhead that my parents held on the current shore. Gorme’s death made me feel like my parents were, in a smaller sense, dying again, too. As each touchstone of their lives goes by the wayside – be it a person, or place, or action – my parents recede. Saddening, too, is the realization that the past is getting bigger, like the universe expanding and, like the universe, with increased velocity. Don’t believe that the past is set and that the future is mutable; it’s just the reverse. The past is a place, and its placeness is altering by the minute; since so much of it is forgotten or confused, and so much of it we make up to suit our needs, the past is a place with rubbery borders, malleable signposts and a populace that looks different every time we look to them for something we need.

To watch video clips of Steve and Eydie young is to see my parents young again, and to be reminded that they are gone, along with Eydie now, and their time. And to realize that we were young like that, too, and that the slippery slope between now and then is greased daily. As I watch the touchstones of my parents’ generation disappear, I notice the unraveling at the edges of my own. I would like to think my review of Steve and Eydie was kinder than I think it was; it being in the past, I can alter it to make it so, even if only in my mind. I think I will.

Placeness in the Heart

The heart, the ancients believed, was the seat of all emotion. We modern, rational beings know better; science tells us that it is the brain that processes stimuli, rallies the chemical and electrical resources and gives the body its marching orders. When something frightens us, saddens us, moves us – when we see a loved one, when we spy an enemy, when music or drama touches us in the most intellectual or primal of ways – it is the brain that’s behind it all, juicing the system. It is natural that the heart would have been pre-science’s candidate for the center of feelings, because that is where we tend to most noticeably feel them: in the rapid rhythm of fight or flight, in the skipped beat born of beauty and desire.

And yet … no matter how many studies prove the brain’s preeminence, we – who, like candies, have a hard nut of the primitive tucked inside our coating of rationality, always ready to get stuck in our scientific teeth – refuse to fully believe it. It is to the displaced, status-lowered heart that we turn to explain ourselves. We can be heartsick, an important action is heartfelt, when we are courageous we have heart, or are urged to build courage by taking heart (and, conversely, when we are cowardly or have little faith, we have lost heart or are disheartened); at sad news we come with a heavy heart, when love ends we are heartbroken, with good news we are heartened, joy plays a song in our heart, it is heartily that we grab the gusto, and heartlessly we steal it from others …

And on, and so forth. Science tells us that the heart has nothing to do with these adjectives and adverbs – but just try to replace “heart” with “brain” and see how thuddingly it falls from the lips. “Brainfelt”? “You gotta have brain”? “I come with a heavy brain”? No, don’t think so.

Granted, the brain as Numero Uno is the product of scientific principles that have been around for far fewer years than the centuries, the millennia in which beliefs and superstitions about the capabilities of the heart have existed. Moreover, the brain just doesn’t have the romantic aura that the heart possesses. The brain is the Rodney Dangerfield of major organs – it gets no respect. It’s dull – compared to the kinetic heart, the brain just sits there and does perceptibly nothing, a spongy mass that might as well not be there for all we are aware of it – and, of course, that’s its fault, since it is what allows us to have awareness at all. (To add insult to injury, the most cataclysmic of brain ills – a stroke – is erroneously thought by many people to be something to do with the heart, so much so that medical popularizers have tried to rename it in the public mind as a “brain attack.”) We have a likeable, instantly recognizable, stylized cartoon-version, Be My Valentine drawing of the heart – there is no such vernacular illustration for the brain. (Indeed, we have Valentine’s Day, a celebration of the loving heart; no such brain day exists, unless we’re talking about the College Boards.) The brain struggles for identity because, though it sits, synapses sparking and leaping mere millimeters behind the sensory inlets of our eyes, nose, mouth and ears, we ignore and devalue its powerful and necessary contribution to our very being and believe that we are creatures of the “mind” – something we deem as being different and removed from the brain.

The brain, in other words, lacks placeness. The heart is lousy with it – it is, in our minds,  the place. Some of that is because we can feel it, and we can see it causing our chest to rise and fall; it is the first machine within us that we become aware of, and, when it is time for us to end, it has the final word. Moreover, the heart’s placeness has much to do with its actual place, its location – right smack dab in the middle of our body, upfront and vulnerable. The brain is, though right here in our head, tucked away somewhere within a protective shell. In earlier arslocii essays, we spoke about how placeness is a partner with empathy; oddly, though empathy is a function of brain plus experience plus genetics, we rarely think of the brain as an empathetic force or repository, but rather as a cold, analytical mechanism – it is the blood-pumping device called the heart that we see as the font of empathy. And let us not overlook the Hallmark Card-ish sentiment that  within “heart” is “art.”

If we are to be modern and rational adherents to the scientific method, we must and should find it not difficult to embrace the notion that the brain rules. But so long as we retain the basic animal in us, so long as mystery and imagination and metaphor are part of what we are, so long as we know that we do not know, so long as we know that science is wonderful but imperfect and sometimes blindered – so long as all these contingencies exist, and so long as we humans see the heart the way we want to see it, then maybe there is something to it, maybe there is some sort of spiritual autonomy and power that resides in the heart. Maybe we’ve been able to intuit that, sense it, a certain something that science will one day catch up with. Maybe we’ll learn that in some ways the brain takes its orders from the heart, not vice versa – that the heart is not just a dumb pump but something that has a brain, too. Maybe poetry is right; wouldn’t that be nice? Paraphrasing the words of the current pope, who is the brain to judge?

Fanning the Flames

Air conditioning has never held a place in my life. The only mechanical cooling devices that I have used are electric fans. My father was a mathematician and electrical engineer, and he therefore understood the physics and practicality of products with cords. He would place fans in strategic locations around the house: one was attached across the opening of the attic’s hatch in the ceiling – to draw the hot air up and out through the roof vents; another would be placed in a doorway on the floor to push the warm air up above our heads; others would be set in windows, either blowing in or out, depending on which side of the house. There was an intelligent logic about air masses and air flow that he demonstrated by these placed fans. He never aimed a fan to blow directly on him, though; that might have been more of a superstition than an educated decision.

Aside from the rather extensive collection of fan brands and types – oscillating, box, table, window and hassock, with their big electric motor company logos – I became enamored of their look and style as much as their function. By osmosis, I learned about moving air in a meaningful way. As a pre-teen, whenever I would be blue or upset I would take walks; on one such walk I found a fan in a weedy empty lot. I brought it home and Dad helped me to rewire it. It was a prize. When, as a young adult, an older relative was downsizing and I spied a huge window fan in the “out” pile, I grabbed it like it was the most valued object in the house. Well, to me it was. Many more old electric fans have come to me at yard sales, flea markets and from other family members. At last count, I have four large window fans, five floor fans, five table fans and two fans on stands. They are much loved and oiled on a regular basis. You could say I am a fan fan.

What is it about them? Well, of course, their connection to my father. But they are often round and I like round things; and even if their casing is square they have a round soul or face. The electric whirr of the motors is soothing, and maybe one day someone will discover that it taps into your alpha brain waves in the same way that biofeedback did back in the day. They do actually cool you in the heat, too. I close things up during the hottest part of the day, then I either draw basement air up into the first floor with a window fan; or I pull cooler night air in through the open windows, and by morning you might need a blanket. In my house there is an attic fan, but, as opposed to my father’s scheme, it doesn’t pull hot air from the house; rather, it is solely for evacuating the trapped hot air from the attic. It does have a similar effect of cooling the house, just not as directly.

Anything that has electricity and moves has a life to it. Fans have the added bonus of providing a service, doing something helpful and immediate to cooling our world – without collecting and adding more heat in the process like air conditioning. Buildings shut themselves off, cars are closed up tight with chilled air – chilled air in an unbreathing room belching out hot air for the rest of us. Why aren’t fans good enough anymore? We have made a move on wind power and capturing the energy that it produces. Fans have been using the energy to cool us by evaporation for as long as electricity has been available.

It is sad that the fan – so simple, so effective, so versatile – is in decline in our Air-Conditioner Nation. Take a walk, as I used to, and you’ll see, especially on trash day, fans kicked to the curb, unwanted, dismissed from duty. And, often, they are still good. Within the past few months I have found two in someone’s discard pile, took them home, plugged them in – and they worked like charms. In fact, they are charming, in all senses of the word. In your window, on a table, on the floor, they hum away, pushing air around in the kindest of ways, letting you look through their grill-work to see the blur of their busy blades and views of what’s behind and beyond. An air conditioner merely sits there, a big, personality-less block, like the Borg ship, separating you from the world at large. A fan lends an air of placeness to even the grimmest of rooms; an air conditioner removes placeness, the way it removes heated air, from even the nicest of surroundings. A fan is like a pet; an air conditioner is like a security guard.

You don’t have to be the coolest thing to be the coolest thing.

I’m With the Band

Suddenly I find myself in a sea of rubber bands. Squirmy mounds of bands of varying thickness and lengths sit in a bowl like clusters of rainbow-colored seaweed. They are everywhere. Wasn’t there a time when they nearly disappeared? I am remembering a while ago, maybe the later half of the 20th century, when they weren’t being used as much in offices, schools and homes as they once were.

My fascination with rubber bands started early. I always liked the friendly nature of their form and substance. First, they are round in a predominately square world. But they are shape-shifters, too. Their diameters vary, as do their widths and thicknesses and colors; I have seen some as tiny as a half-inch in total or nearly as long as my forearm. They seem to be one of the longer-lasting, unsung, amazing albeit small, ubiquitous products of the 20th century, after having been patented in the 19th. But the patent is a johnny-come-lately; as states a Wikipedia entry, “Mesoamerican peoples had already produced vulcanized rubber items, including rubber bands, by 1600 BCE.” They did, after all, have the rubber trees within reach.

Lately, I find them everywhere. Our mailman uses them (the large industrial tan or natural-color ones) to bind together individual households’ mail. As he makes his deliveries, he drops the rubber bands on the ground. Not environmentally sound thinking, but you could probably follow his trail of rubber bands to learn his mail route.

I also have noticed that much of the produce I buy is bunched in rubber bands: wide purple or yellow ones, thinner blue ones wrapped multiple times. Some leafy greens still employ large-scale twist-ties – like regular ties on steroids – but many more bunches of vegetable matter, whether shipped in or locally grown, are sporting festive rubber bands. I have such a large collection of them now, I feel that someone ought to figure out another purpose for them. I do reuse some and I have learned a few things indirectly about their properties and uses, slingshots aside.

1. They don’t freeze well. In a freezer, the rubber fails, dries out, becomes inelastic.

2. They can be cheap, attractive bracelets but they should be loose on your arm.

3. Things that aren’t too thick and you can roll up, like blueprints and maps, are perfectly suited to rubber bands to hold them steady. Eventually, they will dry out and loosen.

4. If you are a jerk and want to annoy someone, you can shoot rubber bands in his/her direction – but avoid the eyes.

5. They are a good way to hold wound-up electrical cords together, when a twist-tie just won’t handle it (unless you happen to have saved one of the huge ones from produce).

6. They are not good to pick up in a vacuum cleaner, and happily, it is difficult to do so. Somehow, their lack of substance and friction-y surface help to discourage that.

7. They are miracle healers. If they break – unlike so many other binding technologies – all you have to do is tie the ends together and there you go again … a little smaller, perhaps, and a tad more fragile, but usable. A second life.

8. There are so many ways to store rubber bands: in a box or envelope or any containing vessel, in baskets (as we do), on long rods either sticking up from a desk or out from vertical surface. One can even keep rubber bands rolled up in a ball. Indeed, there are those for whom this is not just a practical thing but a hobby or work of art.

9. In an irony not lost on the consortium of rubber-band producers (there must be some such organization somewhere), rubber bands have supplanted the fuzzy, slightly elastic, so-called “stocking tops” as the binder of choice for home-delivered newspapers … just as newspapers are taking a nosedive into oblivion. Millions of such band/paper pairings occur, still, to this day, every year..

10. A rubber band can be a terrifically annoying, almost non-musical musical instrument. Stretch, pluck – twang/plunk. Over and over.

11. Without a rubber band, there would be no paddle-ball. From one’s personal perspective, this is either a benefit or an indictment.

12. Unlike paper clips, staples, paper clasps and other such metallic binding products, a box of rubber bands if accidentally dumped on the floor will not make a sound that will draw the attention of the person whose desk you have raided to “borrow” such items. Rubber bands are willfully complicit in all crimes.

13. They may be soft, bendable, twistable, squeezable, roll-up-able – and, yet, they can really sting when you’ve had one snap against your skin. And as easily breakable as they are, put them in the array of braces on your teeth, and they not only have the strength to reduce an overbite but can also cause a great amount of soreness and pain and headache, not to mention embarrassment. All from those tiniest of rubbery squiggles.

14. Keep them away from animals; they have appeal to all creatures and you don’t want  any to end up in a digestive tract.

Rubber bands are, at this point, part of our genetic make-up. They are without affect or personality but there is a placeness to their presence in our everyday world, and by their very nature, functionally, they create placeness by limiting and encircling and defining, determinedly and yet forgivingly. If they were not around, it would be a harsh and rigid place with only paper clips, staples, clasps and the unyielding like.

A Timely Entrance

We all are creatures of schedules, whether by adhering to them or ignoring them, purposefully or by perverse nature or by mindlessness. Some of us couldn’t function without them; others resent them; for many of us, it is both. Still others pretend that they live without any schedule at all.

The typical time frame in the so-called work world is 9 to 5, give or take an hour on either end, but in this 24/7, internationally plugged-in life cycle we find ourselves in, work can commence at any hour, and in so doing the “ordinary” world seems to lurch – they don’t call it a “shift” for nothing. And pity those whose shifts vary, regularly or otherwise, such as police officers and firefighters, who might have long days followed by short days followed by days off, and a change in hours, as well. This spreads out decent schedules and terrible ones in an equitable sharing, but it has to wreak havoc on their sleep patterns, not to mention their personal lives.

We here at arslocii are people who, over the years, have had less scheduling than most. Some might call it “underemployment.” But, when you work for yourself you have to create your own schedule, and that can be difficult for many, impossible for others. Freedom requires discipline.

Change being the only unchanging certainty, we, though free spirits that we are, have found ourselves for more than a decade as someone else’s employee, on someone else’s clock. Not that this was a new concept – we’ve had lots of jobs – but, rather, a bullet we had dodged for a while. And, maybe because of that avoidance, in some sort of karmic payback we ended up having to design our lives around a 4 p.m to midnight  work-time slot. What that meant was that we had part or most of the daylight hours to attend to stuff of our own and had to “time-shift” what we would normally do in the late afternoon until after the witching hour because the real hours belonged to an employer. Once you get used to the rhythm, it isn’t so bad. But, because of the schedule, our dinner time was around 3 in the afternoon. Again, you can get used to it. So we did. We got pretty good at it, in fact. It got to feel like normal. We wondered how others could survive on those horrible 9-to-5 work-release sentences. Other than realizing that the world’s insistence on stupid, standardized work hours meant that we could no longer attend evening socializing of any sort, we felt that we had the best of all possible worlds – except the one where you don’t work for anyone else … or work at all.

Then suddenly, unrequested, this year they changed the schedule on us, to noon to 8 p.m., and Sunday through Thursday. Now, most everyone would think that this would be an improvement over the previous work-day period. It even moves us closer to “normal” hours. But not quite, not enough. In fact, in some ways, in many ways, it is an even worse schedule. After seven-plus years of afternoon dinners, we now are forced to dine at 9 pm. Explain that to your trained stomach. And, by the time you pack up your stuff and get out the door, you still can’t make that 8 o’ clock curtain. Also, where did the hours go for taking care of home-based stuff? You don’t have a day, you don’t have a night. What’s left is maybe two hours in the morning and possibly (if you can stay awake after a meal) two at night. Think about how quickly two hours can disappear without notice and – wham! – suddenly your whole life becomes somebody’s lousy dime. Of course we need that dime. We are grateful for the dime. Others envy us our dime. Some might think us spoiled and entitlement-obnoxious for complaining about that dime. But, still …

In the midst of this upheaval, though, we have found something that we didn’t expect: a renewed sense of placeness. When you go to work to the same place at the same time with the same people every day, you cease to notice any of it, and you come to believe that that is all there is to the place of work and the tasks you and others do. Then, you find yourself coming in at a different time, and the workplace seems something new, even alien. Whereas before, on a later shift, we would come in just as the day-crowd was leaving, and all we knew of them was the transitional passing off of information, chitchat and uncompleted work. They were them; we were us. Eloi and Morlocks. As different, in a real sense, as day and night. But now we are among the day people, and the room that is, at night, quite empty is, when the sun shines, a lively place full of workers who, until now, were just shadows who left their stuff for my group to tidy up and send on its way.

What you see, what you sense, is that a workplace, one with numerous shifts that go on around the clock, is like a theater that never closes, and that you used to think that the production – comedy? tragedy? – began and ended with your entrances and exits and lines, but now you realize that the show was going on before you arrived and continues after you leave, that work life is like this endless ribbon that you are merely a snippet of cut off at random lengths, and that the place hums to more tunes than you ever imagined. It’s a new script, but somehow you know your lines and the choreography; it’s a familiar set, yet something is different enough to make you think that you missed the memo and a few dress rehearsals, and it makes you aware, perhaps for the first time, or for the first time in a long time, of the artificiality of it all – that offices and factory floors are like Potemkin villages to which you grant the gift of reality, whatever that is, so that you can do what you have to do and believe in it.

So, from a simple rejiggering of when you show up for work, what you might come away with is the knowledge that, in all other things in your life you believe yourself to be the star of your own movie, but here you are but a member – perhaps even just in the chorus – of a large and revolving cast, and that the “set” has a lot more storyline outside your own than you ever thought. And somehow, somewhere in there, there is art.

Ways and Means

As creatures of habit, once we establish ourselves, we find our favorite routes to and from. Some of us never vary our paths; others are more experimental in mixing it up a bit, for variety’s sake. I once worked with a guy who had his routes, by car, so mapped out that he knew exactly how long each one would take: 7 minutes and 32.5 seconds – yes, that precise, and he loved to offer his statistics. Kind of scary.

I do find that once I like a certain path, I will repeat it since it becomes predictable and safe. And I am definitely a shortest-distance chooser, meaning that if there is a choice between the fastest route (higher speed, when it likely takes you out of the way) and a slightly slower one (that connects the start and end points in a straight-ish line), I prefer the latter. Of course, here we are talking about roadways. But whether it is by bicycle or on foot, I will move according to “as the crow flies.”

Another factor that determines my paths is a sense of comfort with the terrain. I just don’t feel safe in multilane highways that slice through undeveloped parcels and give the traveler no sense of context, let alone placeness. It can be like a big, open-range cattle-herding chute, in stampede mode. We have way too many of these behemoth roadways and they disconnect people from places. It is an earthbound version of the “fly-over,” which is how all of America between the east and west coasts is referred to by east- and west-coasters. We have set up thousands of miles of “drive-over or -through” zones. I consider these avoidance paths.

I am a map person – I know that that places me somewhere in the pre-Holocene epoch – and loving the in-hand maps includes the wow factor of the mind-blowing concept that crazy/brave explorers mapped out our world, long before GPS appeared. I not only value what they did but I cherish what they left for us. Maps are wonders of the world – how were they designed, conceived and realized? I have seen some of Lewis and Clark’s first renderings of the Mason-Dixon line. Did they find a path or did they make one? Native Americans followed deer paths and Lewis and Clark followed Native Americans. Now we follow road engineers who don’t believe that the land knows best – they just cut down anything in the way; and it never ends up being a straight line anyway.

I admit I don’t warm to GPS or even to Internet mapping programs because they lack context. There is no where there. Certainly I can follow directions, although they are not always accurate. Instead of beaming in on the micro, a real map will give you the whole picture, and then you can find the specifics. On a device, you have a very narrow window through which to view your options. If you move out, the detail is lost, street names disappear; move in and you are a dot with maybe three lines surrounding you. With a map, you have an entire region and you can maneuver through it in different ways. And you will probably learn things along the way, as opposed to accepting and following one way. Sometimes getting lost with a map in hand can be challenging or exhilarating, since it offers you options for self-correcting. I always feel safer with a map nearby, it is a guidebook to the ground. And as long as we are grounded, it is useful, necessary.

Recently, relying on a web-based mapping program in a rural area – it, sadly, was the only option (well, there’s one point for the electronic version) – but it mapped the wrong address on the wrong road, and had its little pointer pointing to the end of the road for the destination. Strangely, the real road continued on despite the virtual road having ended, but the blinking dot (meaning my car) just kept moving along the empty space of non-existent road on the virtual map. Talk about scary. The road ends/it doesn’t end and the virtual car has found the other side of the looking glass. It was the cellphone to the rescue, in this instance.

Yes, it is miraculous and bizarre, and a bit scary, that a satellite can find you and follow you – yet, apparently it doesn’t care where you are. But think about the miraculousness of a piece of paper that a) someone created, b) after someone trekked, c) after someone measured in distance and contour: mountains, rivers, oceans, roads, and drew it all in an organized system of scale.

Look at a real map and find those squiggly lines that snake up a mountain or alongside a creek. That’s the path I want to take, in this case not a straight line but as straight a line as nature provides, the contours of the land molded by wind and water. If we follow such paths, who knows where they might lead?

Who’s That Nut-Nut-Nut-ing at My Door?

I like to think that I can communicate with non-human animals. I don’t eat them, and maybe that gives me an edge, since they can smell it on us. Or, maybe I am just open to other creatures, so it happens. Yes, I have opposable thumbs – big deal – I don’t think that is the only meaningful attribute in the universe.

Many years ago, we were living in Allentown, Pa., in the upper two floors of an old Victorian twin. The house sat at the top of a big hill with amazing views west, a precarious and exciting spot for watching thunderstorms roll in. The yard swept steeply downhill and, because of its pitch, stayed as a rather wild area. There were many small animals that made their homes on that hillside. I watched their daily patterns as they grazed about in the late afternoon: rabbits, squirrels, woodchucks, chipmunks and birds. There were times when I witnessed bunnies playing leapfrog in the grass, just as frolic-y and fun-loving as squirrels. I would sometimes sit in the yard and watch them as if it were a scheduled performance, one I would have gladly paid to see.

So on one of those occasions, as I was sitting in the grass, the entire community of small mammals showed up simultaneously, whereas usually their timing was as separate acts, with a bit of overlap. My partner was coming up the path alongside the house, and stopped. It was like a Disney moment, with me and these other wild creatures all going about our business in perfect harmony. A peaceable kingdom, indeed. The bunnies were perhaps a couple of feet away from me, and the whole cast of characters surrounded me, as if I were a tree in their landscape. I talked softly to them. This went on for minutes and we shared a moment. Arslocii.

I have always talked to animals; at a zoo, where a pacing wild cat would suddenly start purring and pressing its flank against the bars; to squirrels, many times admonishing them to stay out of harm’s way. In March, I was working in my community garden plot and was visited by a robin who, of course, was excited by the digging. I started talking to this robin, and when a huge worm would surface I would toss it over to Robin (let’s call him/her that). Every day after that, Robin would show up and serenade me, or call to me from a tree; then, upon hearing my voice, would hop over to greet me. My partner was digging in the plot one day and Robin showed up. After hearing the wrong voice, Robin flew away.

I am an appreciator of squirrels, despite the fact that so many people see them as pests. We have a small courtyard that is an oasis, if not an animal refuge, in a hard-surfaced city neighborhood. Squirrels come into our courtyard every day, sometimes to bury things, since we have one of the few breaks in the pervasive cement. One squirrel likes to eat the samaras on our paperbark maple tree. I don’t mind as long as the smaller branches don’t break, although they often do. To ameliorate the damage, I started setting out small fistfuls of peanuts in the shell. Since there is more than one squirrel, I am learning a lot about their differences. There is a huge chubby one that sits in the pile and scarfs down the nuts, scattering empty, broken shells every which way. There is a slimmer one who systematically buries all the nuts, maybe eating one or two, but leaving no trace that there ever were peanuts.

I don’t put out nuts every day, maybe every few days. They all get taken, but I can tell who got them by what is left or not left behind. I have witnessed, lately, that if the fat guy got the nuts, the thin guy gets angry and kind of acts out, running around the courtyard and digging up some of the stored booty. I have talked to this particular squirrel and explained that there is more to come, just be patient.

Yesterday, the overfed one’s thievery must have happened again because the thin squirrel was excavating previously stashed nuts. And, surprisingly, a few shells were left on my steps. But the peculiar thing was that, sitting in an empty plant tray on a low wall, there was a single peanut still in its shell and with telltale dirt marks from its burial. Mind you, I always pile the nuts far from the stairs and door, to give a sense of safety to the hungry diner. Was this squirrel telling me something, making an offering, or asking for more? This had never happened before. It was a sign.

This morning, while I am sitting at the kitchen table next to the partially open window that separates the kitchen from the courtyard, I hear a strange chirping sound. It is unfamiliar but insistent. I look out – and there is the thin squirrel looking straight at me through the door, and the chirping is emanating from the squirrel. It is a request, I understand. More nuts, please, sir. (And, so, more nuts were given.)

An interspecies communication, a breaking down of barriers, a placeness. It is a wonderful thing. And right in my own backyard.