Diary of a mad squall

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Alas, poor Jack…

Well, it seems that Jack’s penchant for aged cheese, mousetrap-aged a good three weeks longer than Tillamook’s usual style, was his demise.

I was in the kitchen near the utility room when I heard the snap, then some furious scratching and what sounded like another snap, but must have been Jack slamming the trap against the metal furnace body in his final throes.

I called my husband, who was across the river picking up some brake line supplies at NAPA, and told him it sounded like it was over for Jack, and suggested that, if at all possible, he might hasten his errand. I couldn’t think of cooking meat with Jack’s remains in the house. He returned very quickly, and soberly transported Jack to an appropriate receptacle out of doors.

Where was my fearless cat, the end product of millennia of breeding of swift, spring-loaded feline hunters and catchers of mice? Where was my cat, whose highest emprise was once to catch spiders and deposit their trophy legs on my bed for mere approval? Was he scratching fiercely at the furnace panel, trying to alert me to intruders? Was he desponding that the trap nailed the mouse just as he, Coolidge the Bigness, was preparing to pounce?

Coolidge was neither scratching nor desponding, but was in fact sleeping. My camera roused him slightly, something the mouse had failed to do.

“What next?” she asked dubiously… “a free cremation offer?”

The cheeky ghouls! The uncouth trident wielders! Is this a Neptune Society experiment, testing how best to ensure their junk mail is perfunctorily trashed unopened?

I haul my weary old bones down to the mailbox and collect my mail. My reward for not littering is to haul an offer from the Neptune Society — an offer to cremate me (for free!) — back up the steep grade of my long driveway. On the outside of the envelope, which is addressed personally to me, is an offer for a free cremation. Me! A pyrophobe, and a living one at that.

I wonder from which database the Neptune Society acquired my name….

I have provided the Neptune Society’s address in case you’d like to tell them how you feel about receiving free cremation offers in the mail. Please pardon the garbage stains on the envelope.

Notes from Moby Dick

This is really an outline of my thoughts on Moby Dick, and is not intended to be any sort of attempt at an outline of the novel.

I. Various levels of Moby Dick

1. Spiritual allegory

A. Man’s Great Quest (against the Infinite)

2. Moral & social commentary

A. Distinctions between Christian and pagan worldviews are irrelevant; moral expression of one’s religion is what counts. Queequeg’s idolatry is, if not equally valid, as harmless as the social gospel, which Ishmael counts as Christianity. A good cannibal is a better companion for the journey than an unkind Christian, etc.

B. Pagans and cultural Christians readily forge alliances when they see an opportunity to secure victory according to their own wills, and unite to do  battle against God.

3. Humanism, Psychology, & Gnosticism

A. Ahab hates the good for being the good because he has no goodness himself, and no wish to have any (though he seems to seek vindication through his wife and newborn child). Revenge, the driving force of his soul, is preferable to righteousness because it is an act of his own will.

B.. Moby Dick’s whiteness is part of his terror, the terror of the righteousness men innately know is required of them, and their lack of it. Even fatalists believe in judgment.

C. Ahab refers to a prophecy of his dismemberment; the prophecy was fulfilled, and he is determined to have revenge against the whale. He had already sought to kill the whale; obsessive revenge has now fueled his determination.

D.. Starbuck calls the insane desire for revenge against a dumb beast “blasphemous,” understanding that Ahab’s willfulness is rebellious usurpation of God’s will, as well as usurpation of the ship’s proper mission. Perhaps the only real tragedy in the entire chronicle is Starbuck’s departure from the way he knew was right to follow Captain Ahab.

E.. The driving force of Ishmael’s quest is to get a good story to tell, and to broaden his experience and thus his knowledge. He’s a happy gnostic. He’s not particularly seeking truth, or trying to find himself; he isn’t trying to find God, make the world a better place, or attempting to pin down a universally competent morality outside of circumstantial pragmatism. He isn’t very particular about anything at all. The narrative quest succeeds brilliantly. Ishmael is one to pretty much leave everything as he found it. His genius is knowing when it’s time to move on.

5. Philosophy

A. Through broad experience, Ishmael is comprehensively informed about the natural world, social history, and religion, and as such is an informed observer, verifying nature empirically, without making any particular moral commitment.

B. Ishmael the observer has no real interest in truth, but is content to observe, assign his observations to categories, and live and let live from one quest for diversion to the next.

C. Utilitarianism (which Melville reportedly loathed) is displayed in the incident involving Pip’s accident. The crew would have let him die rather than lose the whale — the greatest good for the greatest number.

D.  Melville places before the reader all of the philosophies of his day — pragmatism, empiricism, transcendentalism, utilitarianism, Christianity as philosophy, hedonism, voodoo, etc.. Their moral consequences are scarcely distinguishable. He implicitly declares all of them invalid, and, speaking through Ishmael, he presages existentialism.

E. Ultimately, Moby Dick is a sad testimony to Melville’s very thorough biblical literacy, without real evidence of commitment to biblical veracity.

6. Natural history of whales

7. Expository comments on whaling

8. Literal adventure

II. Premise: All men believe in an infinite God.

1. If man is not given to believe in an infinite God of infinite love and mercy, he will believe in a God of infinite malice and retribution.

2. Men know they require infinite mercy.

3. Infinite mercy can logically proceed only from infinite love.

4. Obsession sustains Ahab’s vain hope that his will-driven revenge will prevail against infinite retribution.

5. Self-will is rebellion against the providence of God, and the antithesis of faith.

III. Props

1. King Ahab of Israel had an ivory house; Captain Ahab has a whalebone ivory leg stub.

2. Perception of Fadallah as the devil: Idolatrous man inevitably seeks to materialize the spiritual.

 IV. Fatalism

1. Ahab and Moby Dick both serve brute forces: Ahab notwithstanding his humanity, the whale according to his nature.

2. A strange identity between Pharoah and a whale is displayed at Ezekiel 29:3-7 (this is not the novel):

“Behold, I am against you,
O pharaoh king of Egypt,
O great monster who lies in the midst of his rivers…
But I will put hooks in your jaws…
I have given you as food
To the beasts of the field
And to the birds of the heavens….

When they took hold of you with the hand,
You broke and tore all their shoulders;
When they leaned on you,
You broke and made all their backs quiver.”

(a.) Ahab is Egyptian, symbol of the pagan worldview.

(b.) At one point toward the end, Ahab tells Starbuck how good it is to lean on him.

3. Ahab is a fatalist, though not a very competent one, because when confronted with what he perceives as his fate, he continues to pit his own will against it. As is the case with all atheists, the only thing worthy of Ahab’s worship is his own will.

Back to Jack…

Jack the Tripper has gone missing. Not only has he not appeared, but we have had no tripped traps in the crawl space, within the furnace panel, or in the utility room. Nada. I suspect the $28 murine Gitmo device we placed in the utility room insulted him. He must have decided we were completely boorish to think he would find the trap irresistibly enticing, and so insult his exceptional canniness.

How could Jack know that I had devised an alternative plan, a plan for his deportation and not his demise?

I had actually decided that if he had, in a lapse of exceptional canniness, been irresistibly enticed to enter the murine Gitmo device, that I would gingerly place the device in my station wagon, and take a short but very pretty drive down Evans Road, and release him in a park there. An alternative plan had even occurred to me to drive into the subdivision off Ben Jonson Road along the way, and release him in a field behind one of the McMansions.

But now, Jack’s sociability, and my altruism, are thwarted. And weirdly, I miss him. But he will not make himself approachable so that I might apprise him of my change of heart.

… before the taking of a toast and tea

Time for you and time for me,
And time for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
– T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I find myself inordinately indecisive when I am on an out-of-control control binge. Stores, in particular, make me nuts. Yesterday, for instance, Rosauer’s was not good ground for undertaking a quest for tahini.

It turns out there is a tahini famine in the land. Albertson’s distributor has quit carrying it, and now Safeway’s has, too. So I headed for fancy Rosauer’s, slashing red flags at every turn, desperate for a tin of tahini, one of exactly four sources of protein tolerable to my compromised metabolism.

Rosauer’s parking lot was unusually full for a Thursday morning, and once inside, I was struck by the crowd and the long lines at every checkout station. I checked my watch, verified that it was not Valentine’s Day, and trooped on in my quest for tahini.

I headed for the store’s ridiculously overrated health-food department, Huckleberry’s. No tahini. None in the Asian foods section, either. But they had peppermint oil, something I had been unable to find anywhere else locally, so I headed to the checkout with my little bottle of peppermint oil.

Every shopper’s cart was towering full, but I didn’t notice initially that every cart was towering full specifically of cereal. Every line was backed up at least six shoppers long. The couple behind me, their cart towering full, I now realized, of cereal, had attempted to cut me and my little bottle of peppermint oil off to get ahead in the line. I turned to them and asked, “What’s with Thursday — why is it so crowded today?” “It’s the 13-hour cereal sale! It’s all over Facebook and it was in the paper!” Any sanguinity I may possess is attributable to the fact that I am bereft of these sources of information.

I have never liked Rosauer’s because of its high prices, poorly designed parking, and claustrophobia-unfriendly aisles. But now, I so thoroughly detested the store for promoting havoc and diabetes, that I put the peppermint oil on a nearby shelf, went home, found tahini and peppermint oil on Amazon, and ordered them. Even with shipping, it turned out to be a money-saving move. Amazon is my refuge from a fair amount of trouble.

I have a queer hatred for Facebook, have no Facebook account, and have no desire to Like anything on Facebook, or to adopt Like as a noun. But now Facebook has insinuated itself into my neighborhood pharmacy, which offers a 10% discount on nonpharmacy items to customers who Like the pharmacy’s Facebook site. It’s the sort of pharmacy that stocks no prescriptions but gets them for you in a day or two, but it has probably the best gift and toy selection in the Valley. I let my friend who works there know that I specifically resented paying more for my items because of my anti-Facebook sentiments, but she knew I was just in my control freak mode and that it would pass. Let’s face it, Facebook rules; paleos probably drool in the eyes of Facebook junkies. Of course I can shop elsewhere, and of course I probably won’t.

It doesn’t take that much for me to recover myself from one of these episodes. It’s important for me to reconstitute at home, with nothing else going on. It’s important for me to fortify myself with the word of God. It’s important for me to know that God is my refuge and very present help in trouble. And it’s important for me to accept setbacks and minor slings and arrows with grace, and to appreciate the wondrous gifts I receive for no payment at all, not even a Like.

For instance, um, not to brag, but, my granddaughter’s doctor acclaimed her as “amazing, wonderful, perfect, advanced, and thriving” at yesterday’s checkup. What a thrill to receive my daughter’s report.

The important things in my life are amazing, wonderful, perfect, advanced, and thriving. The residual stuff is just residual stuff. And ultimately, there is time for all of it before the taking of a tahini-slathered rice cake and tea.

Jack the Tripper

Thanks largely to the gratuitous field of experimental psychology, a super race of trick-trained mice roams the earth, seeking rewards for their acquired finesse. And, perhaps perceiving our penchant for the exceptional, super race poster mouse Jack the Tripper has nominated us to be his hosts, and he will simply not hear of our declining the nomination.

Jack has now tripped three mousetraps: one in the crawl space beneath our house, one immediately inside the furnace panel, and one in the corner of our utility room. To show his appreciation, he tripped the utility room trap and took the cheese. The evadee shows no dearth of resourcefulness nor of moxie.

Our Jack is the Chuck Yeager of mice. He has the engineering gene and the practical joke gene; he would never think of quitting while he’s ahead — and he’s always ahead — he has no intention of parlaying his evadee status into a trip home when he could stay in the war, and he doesn’t give a rip about the rules.

Jack does appear to be properly socialized, having extended himself on three occasions to meet us. The most recent appearance was Monday evening, while my husband was removing the furnace panel to place a trap. Jack winged by Vic’s foot at mouse-Mach 2, then dove into the quarter-inch-wide space between the furnace and the wall. “He was right there in stomping distance, but I wasn’t on my feet,” my husband said, summarizing somewhat our history with Jack.

My friend Diane at the drugstore asked whether the mouse had returned since his first visit. I said that he had indeed put in another thrilling guest appearance, and that we had bought some more mousetraps. She asked whether we were using have-a-heart traps. “I’m actually into the break-a-neck kind.” She gave an evil smile of accord. She knows the caliber of the mice in this valley.

At 5:46 this morning, my dawn-simulating lamp at half target brightness, we heard a smart, satisfying, very loud CRRRRAAAACK! down the hall. “Your turn,” I said to my husband. “I’ve already been up to feed the cat.” More superfluous words were never spoken, because the mousetrap is, of course, exclusively my husband’s bailiwick.

But clever Jack had merely tripped the trap and snagged the cheese. Evadee remains on the lam. And Coolidge the Blasé remains on the chaise.

If I had a night job at Home Depot: a conjecture

Okay, they look like they know what they’re doing…they know where they’re going… they don’t need any help. Oops, they stopped to ask Pat where something was. Okay, they’ve got it. Of course they’d be garden people. Weird, now they’re talking to Rich about furnace filters longer than I’ve ever seen anyone talk to Rich, or about furnace filters before. Okay, they’re buying the economy kind after all. Figures. That’s all they’re getting… approaching check out, typical for dinner hour couple shoppers; they just make a beeline for what they need and go.

Light up the smile; she looks a little tense. “Hi, find everything you needed?” At least she smiles back, even if he does the talking. Oh, I get it. They’re buying a bunch of mousetraps. She looks, like, if she saw a mouse, she’d probably go to the dry cleaners. “Have a nice night, folks.” She’s smiling, she almost looks like she’s trying to be brave or something…. Right, the mouse. I get it. Some people just can’t handle the mouse thing.

Oh, the people I’d meet and the stories I’d write
Of the dramas and sights of a Home Depot night.

The mouse, the card, the net: Chronicle of an unplanned adrenal exercise

Wednesday evening, shortly before 8 PM. The cat is staring, staring at the organ pedal board. “What do you see, Coo?” I ask. He stares some more, gives up, and goes back to sleep without answering.

8:09 PM. A mouse, a mouse… only the second time in my entire life that a mouse has been in my house, and the first time I was living in an old trailer at Grand Canyon… but it is the face of a mouse that is looking around the corner into my well-sealed home’s beautiful living room. The face turned back and disappeared.

My husband is at a friend’s house, attending our church prayer meeting. He’ll probably be home in 25 minutes or so, but that’s too long. He needs to leave now. That will have him home in 20 minutes.

I call our friend; no one answers. I call my husband. No answer. I call our friend again. He answers. My husband calls back at the same time. I ask our friend for my husband, but hang up on him to take my husband’s call. Isn’t technology wonderful?

“Our useless cat and I are at home with a mouse in the house.” No blame, no fault, no announcement that I am going to the Sheraton, because there is no Sheraton here. Just the facts.

My husband immediately departed, mentioning the mouse. The other guys understood completely, except for one thing. “What’s with the cat?” Rob asked.

My husband immediately deduced that the mouse made his way up through the furnace duct and found his way into the house through a small hole behind the furnace panel. The organ is against the wall opposite the furnace on the other side of the wall. The cat must have heard the mouse making his way up the duct, but he never sensed the mouse’s presence in the hallway, or it didn’t interest him very much. He ignored the creature completely, despite my strong exhortations for him to dispatch it at once.

The mouse evidently escaped the way he came, and my husband plugged the hole.

Thursday morning, 8 AM. My phone rings. It is an 800 number. I don’t answer. But there is a voicemail. I listen to the message. I return the vigilant representative’s call, the vigilant representative of our bank’s credit card fraud unit. I confirm that the suspicious transactions that just caused our bank to cancel our credit card are indeed unauthorized. I was not in the UK and somewhere in the US nowhere near where I live on the same day, charging sub-dollar amounts to test whether the randomly fabricated card number would work. We will receive a new card.

8:15 AM. We discover our Internet is down. We can’t get online to get the phone number of our ISP. My husband scrounges through some ancient e-mail archives and retrieves their phone number. He is told they have no service down. It’s our WiFi router. My husband can fix this and he does.

All alarming but ultimately light stuff; all crises, immediate and potential, belayed. It was all a drill, a test; and for once, I wasn’t completely undone. My neck didn’t morph into a pillar of granite, and I didn’t get a headache. Maybe, maybe, I am gradually, more and more, being weaned from this earth….

Minutes from home

After a harrowing few days of realizing that the voice-recognition software that enables me to use a computer was crashing, and concluding that the problem was not amenable to diagnosis, we discovered, after deleting and utterly uninstalling Dragon NaturallySpeaking and reinstalling it, that the root of the trouble was a microphone issue. My husband has always been one who can fix a problem, and although he steadfastly refuses to run for president, he did find a way to get my microphone up and running again, and better than ever at that. With relief surging in my veins, we headed down our road and over the ridge after church to appreciate what God has done for us in bringing us to this beautiful place, and although the wind was brisk enough to knock my focus, I was grateful to chronicle the Snake River and its landscapes, prismatic rocks, and farms near our home.

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