It was a sneak attack. The weather had been warmed by Chinooks and today was looking like a good prospect for venturing as far as the county seat to do laundry. I went to bed expecting temps around freezing and little or no new snow. About 3AM I got up for an hour to work at the computer and that expectation still seemed justified. When I woke up again -- I’m not sure what time because the electricity had blinked which stops my alarm clock -- the cats were under the covers with me and there was nothing out the windows. The world was simply a blank white sheet of paper except for wind. This is what it means to live at the cross hairs between cold from the north and moisture from the west. All plans are abandoned. The road report that showed dry roads from highway 44 to Shelby now shows impassible roads everywhere. The newspaper made it through because it comes so early.
There’s enough to eat. Lunch is a cut up green pepper, a cut up onion, and a half-can of corned beef hash -- stir-fried until crisp. Crackers is willing to eat the cat food I bought here in town. Squibbie doesn’t want to get out of her chair. By the time I’d gotten up, I’d inched the controls on the electric mattress pad to 8. Normally it’s about 4. But this could all end by afternoon. The forecast is twenty below by sundown and all night, but usually when it gets that cold the moisture is wrung out of the air in a few hours. This is Saskatoon weather. Polar bear weather. By tomorrow it will be much safer on the lake for the ice fishermen. I hope the polar bears will be able to hunt seals.
I have plenty to do. In Paris there is rejoicing because Tristan is recovering from his wound breaking open, thanks to his alert older roommate checking on him faithfully. The boys and Tim, all decked out in motorcycle leathers and boots, attended mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame to pray for Tristan. A young priest there suggested that their appearance scared the old ladies. My idea was that they should go to the old ladies, gently oh so gently kiss their hands, and ask them to pray for Tristan as well, since undoubtedly in their lifetimes they had prayed for many other boys in danger.
The foxes I’m chasing on the screen at home are Third Force psychology, now sometimes called “humanistic psychology,” which was such a saving force in my life decades ago. Where did it go? Did the neocons try to kill it? Or was it buried in a shower of genomic and molecular confetti? Maybe both. Both Barrus and Darrell Kipp have been drawing on these ideas all along, but have I forgotten about some of it -- sold the books? I see I can buy some of my favs back for a penny each (plus shipping). I wonder if my UPS man is out in this storm.
Another is digesting the “Inside the Actor’s Studio” DVD’s I still have. Where are THOSE books? The one’s they showed on the screen as basic and enlightening. Stanislavsky and Chekov. Actually, they fit right into “humanistic psychology” and were probably one of the reasons I was so ready for Rogers, Maslow, Perls, Erikson, and company. And then after that the kind of Unitarianism that existed when I came aboard before all the furor about making the denomination grow, before art required an MFA and small businesses required an MBA. In those days you just did it out of passion.
The history of ideas folks are beginning to work on these issues. I’m surprised to see that some of them are not just talking about Bush’s eight years, but are reaching back FORTY years to the shift in the agenda of the Republican party, not unlike the shift in the agenda of the UUA. The history of ideas, of course, always refers to the famous essay about the fox, who had a lot of darting shifts in thinking, and the hedgehog, who stuck to one concept and that one concept devotedly. How does that fit in with Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift?
I read a blog this morning about how the culture changes all the time, but human values do not. http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/books/view.bg?articleid=1142261&srvc=rss Unfortunately it was a trivial little complaint about false memoirs: now the self-righteous are claiming that it’s unforgivable to picture lovers throwing apples over a fence, even if the author really WAS in a holocaust prison camp. Why is everyone so hypnotized by this sort of thing when they ought to be indicting our president and his advisors for war crimes? Maybe that’s the answer -- they don’t want to have to face the real crimes that cost lives, both in the flesh and financially.
What a lot of work for a practical intellectual to do. On the local scene it has really shaken people, esp. young men, to witness the aging and destruction of Bush. They had identified with him, thought his values were the right ones, and that he would win -- so they modeled themselves after him. Now what? No one modeled themselves after Nixon or LBJ, so their collapse didn’t hurt so much. And Clinton -- well, Clinton bounces.
General crankiness in town has expressed itself in criticism of two of our three town employees. The clerk, a “girl,” is exempt. The collapses and eruptions of our century-old infrastructure, to say nothing of the exceptional weather, is being laid at the doors of the guys who plow. They do it wrong, they do it late, they do it to the wrong streets, they pile the snow in the wrong places. There’s little they can do that suits people. This makes THEM cranky, so the union has come into the picture and now we have a three-handed “games alcoholics play” situation with victim/persecutor/rescuer chasing each other around the triangle. The mayor, meantime, is having a pacemaker installed. I think maybe only a change of personnel is going to resolve hurt feelings. If the street plowers leave before spring, we’d better hope some unemployed person who can plow streets shows up fast. Will we suddenly become more grateful to street plowers or will they wake up one of these mornings and pack for Mexico?
Another section of my shelves holds books about how weather has changed matters large and small. Today’s archeology/geology lesson in the science sections of the paper is about how asteroid impacts, probably in northern North America, ended the Clovis people along with the mammoths they ate. It just feels a little too relevant.
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