hairy situation

If hair were currency, how would you spend yours? Would you grow it long and flowing, or keep it close-shorn?

Money wouldn't grow on trees, it would grow on heads.

Hats would be more popular, and wallets less. And hair thieves armed with razors and scissors would be rampant in locker rooms. Hair nets would be a must-have fashion accessory, especially while you were travelling overseas. Better yet, a turban.

Every month there would be a stick-up at the salon. Of course, the hairdressers would be more like bankers, and you'd likely keep a safety deposit box there. You'd still want the latest look, but you'd keep the extra hair put away someplace safe.

You could sign a contract for extensions that you promised to pay back with natural growth--plus interest of course.

The wealthiest men would have voluminous beards, flaunting their wealth and their good fortune, while those impoverished baby-faced boys would look on longingly, rubbing their hands over bare cheeks, or weak stubble, and wishing for a better lot in life.

And the women? Why wax away prosperity in the name of vanity? Men would be after those with the bushiest eyebrows and perhaps a faint little mustache, too. Hairlessness would be undesirable in either gender. It's not a lot, but maybe it's worth more. But we'd all be walking that line between beauty and wealth; fortune and fashion.

You'd still wish on eyelashes the way you wish on pennies, and strands of hair stuck to your couch cushions would replace the spare change buried in the crevices.

And what about pet owners? Owning a cat might be as lucrative as owning a cow or your own chickens--maybe more so. You'd brush your cat when you needed a little extra spending money, or shave it when you needed a lot. And you'd never let the thing outdoors again.

If hair were currency, you'd have a period of your life where your earning power was high and then it would taper off, leaving you to depend on your hairier relatives. You'd watch your hairline even more grimly, worrying about the future, hoping you've set aside enough to last you through your twilight years.

Let's put it this way, if your bank balance were your hair, would you be bald? Would you already owe next month's growth on things you bought last Saturday? Would you just have enough to scrape by, admiring your polished scalp every time a bill came due, wondering what you can do to grow it faster?

Maybe fish oil, I heard that helps.

Your hair grows at a regular rate so you could learn to budget. See how far you could stretch an inch, or how far you could fudge it.

It's really too bad hair can't be spent like money, but in at least some respects, maybe it would be better to treat money more like hair -- be grateful for what you have, and be careful what you do with it.

passing in hallways

We do a lot of passing in hallways around here--
a lot of glancing up, sideways, lowering the eyes,
timing their upward tic for the most accurate moment
while passing, smiling and uttering the shortest of "hi"s.

How much do you really have to say to each other anyway?
Strangers inhabiting the same space for the requisite forty hours.
You know names, vague details about a life outside, a family,
or sometimes only where their desk is.

You can't just stop in the hallway and strike up a conversation--
it's too late for that, and besides, you both have things to do,
so you smile, nod, utter a name, sometimes not fully vocalized,
when your voice was unprepared and you just croak instead,

sometimes just a sound that resembles hey or hi, sometimes
just a smile with closed lips and eyes that catch each other
maybe a dozen times a week, with furtive, carefully timed flashes
while passing in hallways, and you say only nothing,
because what else is there to say?

are you there?

"Are you still there? I can't hear you. If you are there, please press any key."
"Are you still there? I still can't hear you. If you are there, please press any key."
The computerized caller had hit a snag, receiving a response from my computerized answerer, and the resulting voicemail at first annoyed me that yet another computer had been calling. It seems every time I answer the phone, it is a computer reminding me about my prescription, or about my library books, or about my health coverage.
And if it's not a computer voice urging me to speak to it like a normal person or at least press a button, it's the nearly-as-robotic recording of a person. Even when they are animated about changes to the auto insurance laws or about the cruise tickets I've got coming to me, I hang up in disgust that the commercials are starting to come through on my private phone now. There are days that I would just as soon be rid of the thing if the only calls I'm going to get are commercials and computers.
Then there are the real people on a live call that only sound like recordings. They're sitting in some giant dark room far below weak, pale flourescent beams, watching their computer screen as it dials, dials, dials, bringing far away voices into their headsets, voices interrupted during dinner, during a show, while driving, at the office, or just pulled away from the newspaper or magazine they were reading moments before.
I did that job. I got so many answering machines--mostly recorded computer voices, the same two or three machines seemed to answer phones all over the country. I'd click a button on my screen to call back and then turn to read another few paragraphs of my textbook while my computer dialed the next number. I did my best to sound human and engaging on the phone, but I've gotten so many calls from someone rattling their script in the 7th hour of their 8 hour shift, the third or fourth shift of the same script, the same call, the same opening over and over and over, hundreds of times a day. Do something mechanical long enough and it's hard not to become a machine. That's what we're programmed for.
I learned that the human voice has a frequency range of about 13,000 hertz and that the telephone can only transmit about 6,000 hertz of that range, which explains why everyone's voices sound altered over the phone. The upper and lower threshholds of our voices are dropped out, preserving the core range, squeezing it down and pressing it through the wires, beams, and various tiny computerized components to be spit out as a close facsimile on the other side. It's pretty incredible even with its shortcomings, that a thin artificial diaphragm can so closely replicate the sound of a deep sigh or a genuine burst of laughter. But that very compression is one of the things that can trick you into thinking
I can still hear the eerie computer's voice asking if I am there. I wonder how many times a day the computer on the other end begs someone's voicemail to press any key - any key. Perhaps the next advance in communication technology will be a computerized answering service programmed to answer the phone as if it were us, a computer that knows enough about our buying habits and preferences to respond to surveys, and sophisticated enough to convert important reminders about due dates and appointments into calendar notifications. Then those high-powered business people won't say "I'll have my people call your people," they'll say more truthfully, "I'll have my machine call your machine."
Whenever that technology comes along, all it will do will be to replace a strange computer with a familiar one. It will just be one more technological buffer between people, building yet another wall and making it even harder to interface with another actual human being. Meanwhile, the commercial people will find more and more invasive ways to get through, no matter how sophisticated our defenses, no matter how isolated we make ourselves, until, every time October rolls around, you'll be curled up in the dark basement of your soundproof chamber pressing your hands against your skull trying to keep the campaigns from beaming telepathically into your consciousness: "if you are there, please think any number."

air pocket

air pocket in the toothpaste tube
pops out a little extra gel onto
upturned bristles. I look down
the neck into a black cavity
like nothing I've seen
before. Like if you chopped
my head off, drained me out,
scooped out the bones. Yeah,
it would look like that.
Of course, I've never really looked
into the neck of the toothpaste
before -- not so deliberately.
It's one of those inevitabilities,
something you picked up a long
time ago and only have to think
about once every few months
when its thoroughly flattened,
exhausted. Even then there's that
tiny bit of paste left in the neck,
a barrier to the emptiness behind.

What is a hole made of? It's made
of nothing. Absence has no substance,
so can a hole exist?

I don't know how the tube gets filled
some assembly line churns them out
robotic arms and everything. Even
without a human in sight, there is room
for imperfection, for a pocket of air,
for a hole.

leviathan

a picture of stillness

scattered cars parked placidly

under amber lights, the owners

wandering lit hallways or sitting

at security desks on the night

shift in the shadow shrouded

building hunched on the lot's

edge. Shrubberies have stopped

stirring, birds not yet stirred to

chirp on the dawn.

                              A hulking black

shape lumbers in, white eyes flashing,

sweeping the blacktop, a behemoth

disregarding the careful ordered

lines, rumbling through the quiet

to the gated dumpsters. A servile

leviathan hungrily roaming pre-dawn

streets, noisily devouring refuse

without a shade of subtlety

or recognition.

whate'er thou art

Whate'er thou art, act well thy part.
An Italian lawyer in Cagliari told me much the same thing, using a bit more colorful language. "Qualsiasi cosa sia, sii uno con palle!"
He and I were going on exchanges, something I don't have many memories of doing with members. I don't recall where we were headed or any other details, just driving down the road that led by the church, via Peretti. During the day, you could stand in front of the church by the fig tree from which I had my first taste of that unusual fruit and look across via Peretti to see the hilltop Castello di San Michele. You could even see it from inside the church, where once President Pacini had asked me, gesturing out the open window of the classroom where he was interviewing me, if I could picture a temple in place of where that twelfth-century castle stood. But at the time of this advice, we were driving along in the dark and all I saw were street lights, traffic signals, and illuminated patches of roads and sidewalks, blurring by beyond the windshield.
I don't even remember the name of that man I was riding with. Fratello something. But I remember those words and they sting me sometimes when I'm feeling like I am not being whatever it is I'm supposed to be con palle.

I watched a YouTube video in which someone animated excerpts from a radio interview with the late David Foster Wallace. "The whole thing about perfectionism is that--perfectionism is very dangerous because, of course, if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything, because doing anything results -- it's actually very tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is."
The quote hit home hard enough that I typed it out, making allowances for Wallace's wandering way of getting to the point, and printed it on a strip of paper. He goes on to share his experience as a young tennis player. He says he played it "enough to feel like it was really beautiful." He apparently got quite good, but he never went pro, because, as he puts it, "you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point." When asked why he passed up on a potential career in tennis, he elaborated on his view of people who play seriously. "People who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean, you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10 to 12 hours a day. The difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything."
Wallace clearly illustrates what he sees as the ideal tennis player--a pro tennis-player who has chosen a path and devoted oneself to it performs that way. The goal is to win championships and get sponsors and be very, very good, which requires certain actions. To be a tennis player con palle (forgive the pun), there is a clear-cut path.

The anecdote takes me back to my own college days, where I confronted my own limitations in another field: that of music. I was getting good on the saxophone. My instructor, who held a PhD in woodwind studies, told me I had what it took to be a music major if I had chosen that route, that of all his non-major students, I showed the most potential. After auditioning for the top jazz band one semester, he told me that I was good enough to be first alto, but that he had chosen another player for that seat simply because he was a music major and needed the experience of leading the section.
I would say I had played enough to see the saxophone and jazz music as something really beautiful, and yet I had reached a point where I either needed to make the decision to commit to it entirely, monastically, or not to. I either needed to become a saxophone player con palle, following the footsteps of greats like John Coltrane who could practice a single pentatonic scale in a small, windowless room for hours on end, or not. I opted to not go down that road, not willing to make that sacrifice to something that would provide negligible career opportunities.
My playing has declined measurably as a result; it had to. Though I made the choice deliberately, it is a fork in the road that I reflect on frequently, wishing I knew where that other branching path would have led me, because the path I have taken has been meandering for a long while now, and I have not yet discovered what it is I am.

Everything comes in two versions: the ideal version and the real version. I think the ideal is what we--all of us in tacit complicity--agree that a thing should be, what we wish it was. Though I may have my own personal ideal concept of what a tennis player is, it is based largely on what everyone else agrees a tennis player should be. And it's not just tennis players or jazz musicians, it's every role. Saul Bellow's Augie March pointed out that everyone constructs their own version of reality, and that most things that don't align with their version of reality tend to get filtered out in an effort to preserve the reality that they have constructed. Discord and difficulty ensue when one is forced to measure up those differences.
My versions come in conflict with the real versions every day. For example, an ideal father and husband is a provider - not just a barely satisfactory one, but one that secures the necessities with plenty to spare. He's Cliff Huxtable, or some other by-gone TV dad, one with a steady, satisfying, rewarding, challenging job and lots of leisure time. Maybe he's not a doctor, but he's at least somebody's boss, especially his own, because being somebody's subordinate is a shortcoming. Because being a man con palle brings with it the necessity to be top of the heap in some way, even though that heap is all on the same team.
Wherever this wandering path of mine is leading, that ideal outcome seems like the least likely of destinations. Like wandering a downhill path through wood and expecting to end up on top of a mountain. It seems unattainable from my current vantage point. What's worse, I'm not positive I can say I am doing "my best" under current circumstances, cowed by fear and uncertainty as I am. The best I can say is that I am doing something, which is not the same as acting well my part. I'll have to abide by another popular maxim that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until we are able to do it better. That one at least offers some encouragement.

I think all of this is what John Mayer is singing about when he says he is bigger than his body gives him credit for. There is so much packed inside, so many unrealistic expectations, false hopes, grand fantasies crowded in this meaty glove of a body, it feels like it must spill over somewhere, hover around me like a cloud of flies. Visions of myself being something con palle--it doesn't matter what, because all of them feel like they are simultaneously within me and just beyond me. Each vision is a spark kindled in my aspiring center and then set floating out of reach, out of sight. But that bursting feeling remains, the pressure of that great furnace, strictly internal, that urge to do something, to be something. To grapple those weaknesses into submission and achieve some work of noble note..
Something inside me feels a sense of nascent greatness, nurtured and probably blown out of proportion by inordinate levels of praise from teachers, grandparents, and too many inspirational quotes defying me to be anything less than great. But all those expectations get to be burdensome when things don't shape up in quite the way they are painted. And every single person who succeeds at something I mean to do or hope to do but haven't yet adds a brick to that load.

One consolation is that this struggle is anything but unique. John Mayer, Alfred Lord Tennyson, David Foster Wallace, that Italian brother in Cagliari, the anonymous author of that proverb, must all have experienced and slogged through the same confusing quagmire. Every individual probably experiences multiple levels of dissatisfaction, discouragement, and disappointment - it seems universal, part of the human experience. Their examples suggest that these feelings can become fuel.
I see now that the tendency is to get overly hung up on the first part of that phrase - what is it I am supposed to be anyway? But I'm beginning to think it is the second part that I should focus on. Previously I've seen that first clause as restrictive, as step one--first discover who you are. But there is a good chance that the author meant exactly the opposite: it doesn't matter what or who you are in the least, so long as you act well your part. That part may be hazy and undefined, it may not have a clear label complete with instructions and expectations, but you can't let that prevent you from performing. And not in a false way, but in the most sincere way you can. Put aside the fantasies and ideals, the pie-in-the-sky, paralyzing what-ifs and if-onlys, and deal in a real and admirable way with the daily realities and necessities.
If I can master that, then maybe that is how I will realize the first part - maybe that is the only way to finally define and declare what thou art.

the very trees obey us

"Wherefore, we search the prophets, and we have many revelations and the spirit of prophecy; and having all these witnesses we obtain a hope, and our faith becometh unshaken, insomuch that we truly can command in the name of Jesus and the very trees obey us, or the mountains, or the waves of the sea."
(Jacob 4:6)

Jacob is a fascinating individual in the Book of Mormon. Younger brother to Nephi, born in the wilderness, he grew up watching the widening gap between his eldest brothers. Reading his book also shows a poetic tendency in his writing, such as the verse above.
Before tonight's adult session of stake conference, that last line has always struck me as the borderline supernatural miracle like Jesus walking on water or producing food out of nowhere. It brought visions of Tolkien-esque animate trees. We recently read Prince Caspian, in which Narnian trees wade through the Earth like water rather than on the surface.
I pictured mountains grinding across the landscape or waves parting to admit hosts of believers to cross on dry ground--the truly spectacular manifestations that stretch the limits of imagination and belief.
But tonight a congregation member commenting on Jacob's degree of faith and commitment, reminded everyone in passing about how Jacob had crossed the sea. That simple phrase struck a chord with me and made me think:
Trees provided the timbers of Nephi's ship. Mountains provided ore to make tools and other hardware. Waves provided passage to a promised land. All three were made subject to the will of Nephi and his family; all served a purpose in their journey.
The verse says they could "command in the name of Jesus," and the elements would obey. That doesn't necessarily mean that these otherwise inanimate objects need to spring to life to fulfill that command. Perhaps their obedience--their service--looked much less remarkable.
I'm not saying that the other kind of display is impossible. I love Elder Talmage's writing in Articles of Faith:

"No earnest thinker, no sincere investigator supposes that he has yet learned of all the forces existing in and operating upon matter; indeed, the observed phenomena of nature, yet wholly inexplicable to him, far outnumber those for which he has devised even a partial explanation. There are powers and forces at the command of God, compared with which electricity is as the pack-horse to the locomotive, the foot messenger to the telegraph, the raft of logs to the ocean steamer... These mighty agencies, and the mightier ones still to man unknown, and many, perhaps, to the present condition of the human mind unknowable, do not constitute the Holy Ghost, but are the agencies ordained to serve His purposes" (p. 146).

I believe in the possibility for the supernatural manifestations implied by Elder Talmage and by the verse above; however I think it is much more difficult and much more important to acknowledge the miracles that look mundane, but which are made possible and realized by the type of unshaken faith Jacob describes.