.:Colter:.

This thought occurred to me on the subway yesterday: every declarative statement implies hundreds of opposites.

For example, if I say, “this chair is blue,” then the following statements have been implied:

The chair is not red.
The chair is not yellow.
The chair is not green.
The chair is not orange.
The chair is not purple.
The chair is not brown.
The chair is not black.
The chair is not white.

I found this peculiar, because while I’m acquainted with the notion that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the idea that every statement has hundreds, thousands, or even an infinity of opposite reactions to be mind-boggling.

In much the same way, a statement like “God Bless America” implies that God should favor us over others, that God should not bless France or Eritrea or every other nation in the world. Why would he do that? Why would we want him to, but out of selfishness and arrogance?

Another example: you sit down at a table of women, and you greet one of them by saying she looks beautiful. In doing so, you’ve effectively stated that the other women at the table are not beautiful.

Language is dangerous.

Because I’m a complete pushover, I fell victim to a Carnegie Hall telemarketer a few months ago and signed up for a four-show series of legendary Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain. I made my way to the show this evening, and as I pulled out my ticket, I kind of stood and stared hesitantly at it awhile (after all, I have three more nights of Zakir to see in different combinations, and Wednesday features Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck). I was quickly noticed by two alert fans looking for tickets. One needed two tickets but the other, an older Indian gentleman, only needed one, so I sold it to him at face value. He thanked me profusely and said he would gladly have paid more. He was so happy, the look of joy and relief on his face was more than payment enough.

I think I may embark on a non-profit career of scalping tickets at face value just to see people overcome with joy.

…but this is actually one of the most amusing things I’ve witnessed in New York. Granted I’m easily amused[1], but take a gander at the link. It’s a video I took last week of some pigeons.

1.) Especially by little things like unnecessary footnotes.

I attended my fourth SXSW last week in Austin. For reference, that’s 2005, 2006, 2007 and now 2009.

There weren’t as many acts this year that I was face-slappingly excited to see, although the trip itself was thoroughly enjoyable simply because of the weather, the chance to bike around town, and to see a guitar show and record convention.

This is the first year I took videos, though:

St. Vincent
Nellie McKay
Maps & Atlases
6th Street on Thursday

Sadly I neglected to bring my camera’s battery charger, so my documentary efforts were cut short by Friday evening. D’oh! Still, I managed to get in a few nice pics of Andrew Bird, Ben Harper, Gomez, American Princes, and a bunch of St. Vincent, my new crush.

All this in addition to my usual batches of old signs, peculiarities, sundries and whatnot.

One of the nice things about moving somewhere new is that you have a fixed marker in time for everything that’s happened to you within a given year. For example, in the last year I’ve gone through two bottles of shampoo, two toothbrushes (on my third now), two boxes of sugar, etc. I also have a tin of mints in my bag that have been there since September (I know because I bought them before a job interview). Previously I had no idea just how long these items last – who remembers when they buy these things? I never realized how long shampoo really lasts.

I’ve really been enjoying taking short videos for use on Flickr. They limit videos to a minute and a half, which is nice; keeps everything brief. And people seem to look at them more than the pictures, at least when they’re videos of kitties.

Here was my train platform this morning in the blizzard. I had to pass up a couple of trains because they were so packed there simply wasn’t enough room. The Carroll and Bergen stops after mine were even worse. Some people had waited an hour or more.

And here is a sunset from last week. I caught the last few seconds before the sun disappeared.

As a reminder, in the right column of this page you’ll see a thumbnail of whatever my most recent upload to Flickr is. Here are some other recent highlights:

The New York Times lobby installation
Coney Island at sunset
Symbols of my neighborhood
Really cool bookstore
Saving prostates

• Having a job on the 19th floor with several miles of visibility has allowed me for the first time in my life to be acutely aware of each day’s sunset, and how it occurs slightly later each day than the one previous. I should also mention that I’ve now been working at this job longer than last year’s stint in advertising. So far, so good.
• I think I feel like a New Yorker now, or at least more so than at any point in the last year (and yes, it has been more than a year now), as I recently told myself I needed to “run up to 52nd” to get some shirts at H&M. That I consider this task a simple errand indicates a sizeable shift in my thinking. Manhattan has now become casually traversable. Nevertheless, I’m still not yet convinced that I belong here or want to stay long-term.
• Not until John McCain said “the fundamentals of the American economy are strong” did I begin to wonder whether that was ever in question. Now I know that it may well be. More and more I hear people referring to the American Experiment as something with the potential for failure.
• I’ve bought my tickets for SXSW in Austin! Tara now lives on the east end, which is great because I’ve always wanted to explore that area. While she’s at work I’ll most likely bike around and take pictures. This actually excites me just as much as seeing bands play. Oh, and the Texas Guitar Show is in Austin this year, same weekend. And the Austin Record Convention. That should all be enough to distract me from turning 33.

For the last few years, I haven’t really WANTED anything. Throughout my teens and 20′s there was always something I was thinking about, saving up for, or berating myself for having recklessly purchased[1], but that’s tapered off in recent years. Maybe it’s maturity, or maybe it’s just that I have most of of the objects I’ve ever wanted. There are still a few guitars that I would go bonkers over, but they’re so rare that I’ll likely never come across them.

Lately I find myself wanting a particular guitar that I know I shouldn’t buy. It has nothing to set it apart from my other guitars save its coloring and scarcity. For the last year, it has been one of the only things I punch into eBay and actively search for with the potential intent to buy.

I think part of this psychosis is that I haven’t really particpated in active coveting for so long that I miss the process. I miss wanting things. It’s a terrible thing to say, really. I’ve never been a very good consumer of shiny things – it took me years to replace my crusty $50 TV and the stereo I’d had since high school, and my car is as utilitarian as it gets. But guitars are my single material vice[2]. I have so many of them that I tend to give them away, or at least loan them out indefinitely.

So after a year of half-heartedly looking out for a particular guitar[3], an gloriously tacky blue and pink Ibanez PGM100, I’ve discovered that Ibanez is reissuing it for its 20th anniversary. Clearly they did this just for me, so really, I have to buy it, right? The catch: it’s $2,000. That would be more than I’ve ever spent on a guitar. I’ve never felt like any guitar is worth that much.

I know I shouldn’t. I have too many guitars and this one is essentially identical to the one I already have, but for the paint job and limited edition status. It might be a collector’s item, but that trips me up because several of my guitars are collector’s items.

I’m going to be responsible. I’m going to be mature. I’m going to resist.

But that won’t stop the gnawing of the Gollum-like creature now living inside me. Maybe I can trade one of my other guitars in…

1.) These things tend, almost exclusively, to be guitars. This should surprise absolutely no one.

2.) No, music does not count.

3.) A guitar I once owned; I purchased it for $400 in Springfield back in 1998, but traded it in 2000 for not one but TWO other Ibanez PGM guitars.

I was watching Saving Private Ryan recently, and my thoughts turned to Mr. Roy Griffin.

Roy is a gentleman 90 years of age who lives by himself in a house with a large vegetable garden a block north of my house on Tyler Street in Hillcrest. I’ve met him only twice. On a particularly chilly Sunday morning a few years ago, I was stepping out in my pajamas to get the newspaper when my front door closed behind me, locking me out. Barefoot in 35 degree weather at 8 a.m. on a Sunday, I knocked on a couple of neighbors’ doors to no avail. A black Ford SUV pulled up and the man at the wheel was Mr. Roy Griffin, on his way to church. He asked me if I needed a ride somewhere, and I figured my friend Sara’s place would be the next best bet, so he took me there.

He told me, “I know what it’s like to be cold. I spent a winter in Belgium in World War II.”

He dropped me off at Sara’s and waited with me until she answered the door (which she did very grumpily, of course). I just needed to get the number of my friend Kathy, who had my spare key, so I waved Mr. Griffin goodbye and he went on his way. A few days later I took him some cookies to say thanks. He was on the phone when I went by, so I didn’t stay to visit. And, because I’m naturally kind of shy, I never got around to going back to his house just to chat.

Truthfully, his statement about knowing the true meaning of the word “cold” always kind of intimidated me. I never figured I’d have anything to offer the guy – he’s a WWII vet who still drives to church and works in his very impressive garden, so the guy is clearly tough as nails.

And today I found out just how tough. I Googled him. As it turns out, AETN has a vast website of veteran interviews and archives at InTheirWords.org. Here is Mr. Griffin’s page. He was an amphibious engineer in the Army. He fought WWII from the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia to Omaha Beach, and helped liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald. It’s a lot to dig through, but here are some highlights to get you interested.

From Video #9:

When I first come home, I was just hanging. What I wanted to do most of all was to get my feet on the ground, just be a normal person. And I could picture myself going way out into the Rocky Mountains and get so far out I couldn’t hear a train blow or nothing. It didn’t work that way. I know if it hadn’t been for my family I’d have probably lost it all. I never did get depressed, but I was worried because I was with this tough outfit for five years.

Also in that video, he tells about finally getting home from the war, to Camp Shelby in Mississippi, just a few hours from his hometown of Yazoo City. He was being told about his options for assignment, none of which involved getting home to see his family any time soon. When an officer told him he didn’t have any privileges while awaiting assignment, he said:

Then I told him which side his bread was oleo’d on. “I’m a tell you something. I haven’t seen my wife in three years. Do you think I’d recognize her if she walked in?” I said, “if you need me in the next few days, get a bunch and come after me, don’t come by yourself. Just sure as God made little green apples, I’m gonna go home.”

I won’t give away the ending, because it’s great.

All of this made me realize that war stories are only stories to those who didn’t live them. The rest of us can only sit back and be fascinated and enthralled. Reading about Saving Private Ryan on IMDb.com, I see in the trivia section that the film is listed as President Bush’s favorite movie. Neither President Bush nor I have ever seen combat, but I can’t help feeling like he missed a lesson there: War is a last resort. And as the world is coming to a slow realization that the Iraq War represents either the world’s most colossal intelligence blunder or the world’s most cynical exploitation of warfare for corporate gain (or both!), maybe we’ll even start to realize that there was a justifiable war once.

And even it was hell.

Happy New Year. Here’s to 2009 being a time for learning lessons.

I wrote this on Facebook today, and thought it was worth sharing:

Once you’ve been tagged you have to write a [note] with 15 weird/random facts about you. I was tagged by Jill, so I’m doing my duty. This one seems to have a childhood theme to it.

1. I don’t think I ever learned how to properly untie my shoes until college. I used to always pull the loops rather than the ends. I have no idea why.

2. When I was 4, I knew every make and model of every car on the road in the US. Or so my mom tells me. I have no recollection of this whatsoever.

3. When I was 2 or 3, I left the house in my pajamas at 8am and went across the street to our neighbor’s house for cookies. I think Mrs. France called my mom to let her know. Mom was looking everywhere for me. So yeah, I’ve had this cookie thing for a long time. It may be congenital, because….

4. …My dad always had a stash of Butterfingers. He called them his “medicine” and kept them on a high shelf away from our stuff.

5. In 1982 or so I burned my Star Wars AT-AT into plastic glop on a snowy day. I was burning a hole in the underbelly (like Luke!) when it caught fire. I learned that when plastic catches fire, there’s no stopping it. I threw snow at it, but eventually gave up and threw it in the fireplace.

6. Elizabeth Evans and I would constantly re-enact the scene in E.T. where Eliot’s mom hits E.T. in the face with the refrigerator. Guess who played E.T.? I wonder if chronic mild head trauma has cumulative effects over time…

7. In the days before video rentals, and yes I’m old enough to remember them, my dad had a friend dub Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back onto VHS tape, which I watched with a regularity that approached monomania. By 1985, you could see through the tape.

8. My dad owned an old and busted Austin Healey. It lived in the garage and made scary noises and I used to have nightmares about it because the grill looked like the teeth of a monster. Cut me some slack, I was 5. In 1986 my stepmom’s cat had kittens in it, and the car was sold not long after.

9. In kindergarten, my sister and Amy Crosland locked me and Robert Whisenant out of my house. We panicked and then totally went on the offensive by trashing Amy’s mo-ped. I poked holes in the seat and Robert put rocks in the engine. We had to pay for that.

10. In the summer of 1990, I would walk to Quail Tree swimming pool listening to nothing but Steve Vai’s Passion and Warfare on cassette. That fall, I started guitar lessons.

11. The only time I ever went to drama competition, I got first place in solo acting, thanks to a great piece my dad gave me, written by Peter Cook. I’ll post a link to it on my page in a few minutes.

12. In 3rd grade Chad Causey and I used to have competitions to see who could put more pepper in their chili. Mountains we’d put in there. I don’t recall who won. But I know that I’m addicted to Vietnamese hot sauce today.

13. In addition to the many ashtrays stolen from Burger King, I participated in the heisting of a newspaper rack, along with Odie and I think Dave Deere? Maybe Lance. I forget. I know it was in Odie’s truck. Probably listening to BloodSugarSexMagik. Because music makes kids commit crime.

14. I was only paddled once. Summer Rec, by Coach Hudson. My crime: going into the stands of the junior high gym to retrieve a frisbee, after we were specifically forbidden from doing so. I was clearly a juvenile delinquent and had to be punished.

15. My grandfather was a minister who wrote and self-published a book on ghosts and their relationship to divine spirit. He did this on a Mac Plus in the mid-80′s, hampered by his slow-moving fingers, which gave him limited movement following a stroke in the late 60′s. I only ever knew him as a man with slurred speech, with a walker or a wheelchair, but his mind was as sharp as a tack.