Amazing Quote From a Favorite Work of Fiction

So I was rereading a quirky, one-of-a-kind book by the gifted Canadian author, Douglas Coupland, who will forever be famous for popularizing the terms "Generation X," "McJob" and "Microserf."

I speak of Coupland's 1994 undersized volume of thematically linked short stories, Life After God.

Each story is divided into multiple short sections. Each section is prefaced with one of Coupland's (who once attended art school) whimsical felt-tip pen drawings.

Like this one on p. 103 where he's remembering the old distaster flick from the '70s, The Poseidon Adventure:

As I'm was reading the title story I reached a section that has a drawing of what appears to be a stack of People magazines.

There ensued a conversation between the narrator and his friend Kristy:

   I mentioned to her one of my favorite fantasies: to be in a coma
   for one year and wake up and have a whole year's backlog
   worth of news to catch up on.

   "Me too!" she cried. "Ffity-two whole issues of People to
    catch up on—it'd be like heroin—information overdosing."

There it was, The Van Winkle Project in a nutshell. The excitement of doing something so non-standard, so weird, and the ecstasy of when it comes to an end!

But wait a minute.

After all this time (see the counter over there on the right clicking off days, hours, minutes since I awoke) the ecstasy of information appears to me to be a bit overrated. If this is heroin, it hasn't seemed as alluring as mother's milk that I'd want to fill myself with. In fact, after going on two years of being "awake," I have yet to make a concerted effort to find out much about what I missed during 2010-2011.

No, I want to tell Mr. Coupland's characters, the real trip is the coma itself. Its's about finding a way to remain immune to the daily onslaught of stuff we don't particularly need to know. At the same time it's important to leave space in the brain for what really matters.

What really matters? The very things that depressed, over-consumed, drugged-alcoholed, junk-fooded narrators of Life After God find themselves drawn to at their better moments in these stories:

• nature
• friends
• their pets
• simple memories of childhood
• floating in the swimming pool

Call the kind of life I'm commending to myself a "conscious coma" since the oblivion is not total. Who wants to give up the bad stuff and at the same time miss out on the good?

Hey, maybe I need a T-shirt that says that:

 



All this is to say that I'm once again longing for the peace and extra time made available when I cut back on my curiosity about the larger world, a world that I can't begin to effect.

..

End of a Year: Dreaming in 3-D



Marty invites you to put on the 3-D glasses
for his latest film.

 A couple of weeks ago I did something that was forbidden to me one year ago when I was still Van Winkled. I went to the Century 21 Cinema and took in a newly released film.

My son and I bought tickets and a box of buttered popcorn. We settled back in our chairs and put on 3-D glasses for Hugo.

What's in the Box?

There's a scene in this latest Martin Scorcese's movie (based on the Brian Selznick hybrid novel/graphic novel) that makes me think of what it's like to revisit this blog after choosing not to post for several months.

Hugo Cabret and his intrepid girl partner, Isabelle, explore a room in the house of her mysterious Uncle Georges (Ben Kingsley). There's a wardrobe looming tall in the room and, guess what? The two youths detect a secret panel in the top.

After a precarious bit of balancing on a chair, Isabelle opens the panel and, yes! there's a wooden box secreted there. As Hugo watches from below, Isabelle eases the box out but uh-oh! it's heavy and suddenly! the chair topples, the box hits the floor, the lid separates, and papers fly all over the room.

Hugo: The box reveals its secrets--all the thoughts and visions of one man.

A discovery is made. Each sheet of paper is a sketch for costumes and scenes from early movies.

Revelation: Uncle Georges is the once-famous French moviemaker Georges Melies.

This is startling news because Melies, after early successes in the movies, is thought by some to be dead. No one has heard anything from him since shortly after the Great War when he quit making movies.

Uncle Georges intrudes upon the scene. A defeated and frustrated artist, he has responding by withdrawing and hiding away the wellsprings of all his work--these pieces of paper meticulously filled with ideas and sketches.

He picks up a piece of paper, looks at the children, and crumples it in his hand.

Van Winkle Redux
Coming back to this blog is a bit like opening Uncle Georges' wooden box. In this case the box is stuffed with posts someone diligently produced for 52 weeks when he was sequestered from all news, weather, sports and entertainment.

The person who posted here called himself "Van Winkle" and further protected his identity by never naming where he lived or worked.

One year ago: Blog readers could see my shoes, but not my face.

Van Winkle knew almost nothing about what was happening in the larger world (except for a few leaks that got through to him), but he was a fairly persistent observer of the minutiae of his life.

I can go back and read about his impressions of his ficus tree, holes in his T-shirts, a concrete cherub named "Reginald" on his patio, his dog Bullwinkle, a red piece of paper snagged in a bush in his front yard.

He also relived intensely at times his youth in Alaska, and he made more than a few attempts at finding what is humorous in the surrounding commercial and social side of America.

I'm fine with what Van Winkle wrote. I'm not going to react like Uncle Georges and try to destroy my posts or hide them away and try to forget them. However, I've begun to look back on my experiment with a deepening perspective as I try to answer the question, "Was it worth it?"

Trying to Reclaim the Old "Normal" 
I've had most of the autumn of 2011 to reintroduce myself to the world of news.

Like a fisherman setting out again on the news sea, I've been able to reel in as much (or as little) of Reality as I wish.

So I indulged myself...

As you probably know, there's been quite a bit going on, even in just the past 60 days:

• Politics (the rise and fall of Herman Cain! Rick Perry's oops! Newt's surge in the polls!)
• The economy (payroll tax holiday debates! Black Friday! Internet Monday! Mega Monday!)
• Historic (the U.S. leaves Iraq, North Korea has a new leader, Steve Jobs dies)
• Sports (the Angels buy themselves a super team, Tiger Woods finally wins a major)
• Entertainment (Mel Gibson's record divorce settlement, the new iPhone introduced  us to Siri)

The Future?

Even though I don't want to go back to my unnatural state of one year ago when I, in effect, buried my head ostrich-like in the ground, I have reached the following conclusions: 

1. Reality, as constructed by what we call "news," is not so great. More, it's not even particularly necessary for successful living. There are other realities all around us, realities that teach, nurture, and inspire.
2. News is a product that is constantly shoved at us. Producers of the news shrewdly choose what they think we will grab us most emotionally. This is not the same as choosing what is news-worthy.
3. Because news appears to be "free" it is easy to consume too much of it.
4. Is news free? I don't think so. It taxes us emotionally and intellectually.
5. Most news stories will soon be forgotten. They are not worth following in the first place.
6. A few news stories do have historical import, but it's not necessary to watch them unfold and be analyzed to death day by day, hour by hour. One would do well to catch them at the beginning and at the end.
7. There's a news paradox: The most useful news usually isn't in the headlines. What we really need to know tends to be the small bits about human triumph and tragedy. These stories are typically reported by lone journalists, not well financed news crew with vans with a satellite dishes on top with a feed to a network anchor.
8. Big news (essentially useless) tends to drive out small, useful news--to our own detriment and diminishment as human beings.

So, based on what I learned during my newsless experiment, and what has happened since, how do I propose to move forward with my life in 2012?

Ah, that is a good question. A little voice whispers in my ear, "Save it for another post...but this time don't wait so long..." - a.h.

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A New Literary Analysis of Rip Van Winkle

Now that Phase I of the Van Winkle Project has ended--avoiding the news--I'm in the midst of Phase II. In this effort I'm  somewhat like my literary inspiration, Rip Van Winkle.

Since 12 months was long enough for me to forget all the details of Washington Irving's account, I combed the house until I found my nice little copy of Three Tales with its handsome, vintage illustrations.

I wanted to read  the ending again and make sure I had it right in my memory.

I especially wanted to revisit how Rip deals with a flood of new information (America had become an independent nation during his sleep) and how he spends his days once he's newly awakened.

It turns out that Rip wakes to a sort of personal paradise.

As I read the full account I learned that twenty years is sleeping and aging and being completley out of it brings with certan advantages.

Because Rip is old no one expects him to contribute.

In addition, his nagging wife has burst a blood vessel and died years ago. She will never again critique his behavior or nag, nag, nag.

For the first time ever, Rip can truly be himself unimpeded and enjoy life as never before.

Set Free
Have I arrived at a "happy age" like Rip Van Winkle? Well, our cases are both similar and different. I have no nagging wife. Rather than wishing her away, I am proud of the fact that my wife has been with me this entire time. She endured my project heroically, even during those early days in May when she was dieing to tell me that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

What I realize, though, is that I did have another version of a nagging wife living with me. For decades. A nagger par excellence. This other wife of mine has a name.

The news.

You see, one can read this little story as something of a parable. It breaks down like this:

There's something that bothers a person greatly in life. It hounds them. Then one day a wonderful thing happens. They accidentally escape it in an unexpected way (in Rip's case a magic nap). When they come back to their old life everything is new and better. All it takes is TIME.

Let's give this gradual de-toxing phenonomenon a name: The Rip Van Winkle Effect (RVWE)

How the RVWE Works For Me
Compared to before, my life now seems largely quiet and peaceful. The news doesn't have the hold on me that it once did.

I don't hear that nagging voice saying, "Check online and see what's happened in the last hour," or "You've got to watch the evening news every night, every minute of it" or "Read the newspaper as soon as you bring it in in the morning."

Nag, nag, nag.

And I used to obey. I was afraid I'd miss something I needed to know. But I realize the truth now. It wasn't about need. It was habit.

My news habit seems to have been burst its own blood vessel and gone away.

I realize, of course, that bad habits can return. In stressful times ex-smokers scrounge a butt and light up. Yesterday, habit returning, I said, "Hey!" to someone in the hallway after vowing weeks ago that such a low-grade greeting would never cross my lips again [See: Andy Rooney's Eyebrows: A Mini-Rant]

I'm hoping for the best this time. That I can model myself on Rip.

I especially like the bit where we're told he makes friends "among the rising generation." Whenever I have hope for the future, it almost never comes from anything I read or hear in the news. It comes from the young people, especially my students.

What else can I learn from the Rip Van Winkle Effect? That eventually all things pass. What I wring my hands over today at some point will simply be history and have an end date placed on it.

• The bad economy
• Global terrorism
• Mideast unrest
• Famines in Africa
• Assorted annoying people, both public and private
• Unfortunate musical styles and fashions

Yes, I may actually outlive the popularity of Justin Beiber, Snooki, and too many movies based on comic book heroes! However, I'm not naive. I know what any intelligent person is thinking. My list of "wish-it-weren't-so's" will be replaced by new ones. No matter how long one waits, true paradise never arrives.

Though it's no solution to try to sleep through all the bad stuff, I now believe it might not be a bad idea to take more short news naps than the nagging voice in one's head says is socially acceptable. Accrue some RVWE.  If upon waking the bad news hasn't gone away, at least it will be more distant.

It seems to have worked for me.

LAST THING: In case anyone is wondering, I don't plan to neglect the other aspect of the ending of Rip Van Winkle:

"It was some time before he...could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor."

For the foreseeable future this blog will be my "bench at the inn door." I'll lounge here and idly chat and share my reactions to old news. Not that anyone cares. I'm just an old guy who is behind the times.

Still, I figure if I'm going to live on the same planet as everyone else it might be a good idea to at least get back into "the regular track of gossip." Next time someone says "Super Committee" or "Michelle Bachmann" I'd like to know what they're talking about. - A.H.

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Hello, Sexy Friends

Today as the time of my "awakening" draws nigh, I am going around and paying silent, admiring attention to some well known friends from my former life as a news and culture junkie. I want to reassure them.

"Hey, it's me. I'm about to return."

I begin by going out to the garage where I have stored a year's worth of the local newspaper and the Sunday New York Times.Many months ago I took a picture and posted it with a yard stick alongside to show how my newspaper stalagmites were growing. The papers have now gone well beyond 36" in height.



One year's worth of daily local newpapers on the left.
52 issues of Sunday NY Times on the right.

 I stare at the picture posted here and I feel a bit like someone who is looking at an old photo of his "ex." Hmm. We once had a beautiful relationship. She was so sexy! All those pages we turned together. All that ink that smeared on my fingers...

Then something happened. We separated. But what if? The "what if" being our getting back together. Can it be like before?

One of those imponderables I suspose. You'll never know until you hold out your arms, say, "Come to me!" and give it another try...

While I am in the garage I open up the car and loft a special greeting to the in-dash radio. "Hello. I'll be turning you on soon!"

The radio is silent, but not for much longer.

For 365 days all that has come out of my car's speakers has been music from pre-Sept. 2010 CDs. I didn't dare tune in an FM or AM station for fear that someone might play new music or break in with (gulp) the news. Of course, NPR, my normal drive to work drug, was absolutely verboten.

"Michele Norris, Susan Stamberg, Robert Siegel, Ari Shapiro!" I call out. "Oh, how your alternatingly bemused and concerned voices once made sweet love to my ears!"

Lastly, I have to go into the den and stand respectfully before the silent TV. Over the past 12 months I've only fired it up when watching a DVD of a movie (again, pre-Sept. 2010 vintage) or in order to watch Seinfeld re-runs on the indie channel.

I've watched it very little in the last year, and, yes, that is dust, definitely dust...

I take in the sight of my Television Lover in her stripped down, barest form. I do so for longer than is healthy for a normal adult male. A 42" empty, unenlightened HD screen. It's true what they say. The sexiest color is black, all black. And the sexiest pose a TV deprived person can imagine? One finger on the remote.

Time Served
My project has lasted long enough that there's a certain unreality about what used to be the norm in my life. It's difficult to imagine that once this Sunday rolls around I'll be free to do as I please with newspapers, magazines, television and radio, not to mention how it will be "surf's up!" time on the Web as the many sites I've carefully avoided for so long are once again open to me.

I guess this must be a little bit how a prisoner feels as his release date approaches. He's planning for it, filling up a bag with his few personal effects, figuring out where he'll have his initial meal on the outside, who he'll want to visit in person first. At the same time it's got to be as frightening to contemplate as it is exhilarating.

Can I survive my reencounter with all that's already happened in the news, sports, entertainment and weather?

And assuming I'm able to catch up to the point that I acquire some more than passing familiarity with what events and changes took place during the past year, can I then get back into the harness and joyfully become a consumer of what's happening on a daily basis the way I did before?

I must testify that it was quiet and peaceful in the Van Winkle slammer. On the other hand, it was a prison or, if not that, a very sensory deprived coma-like state. I don't want to go back, which is not the same thing as saying that I'm dieing to go forward...

Truthfully, I'm feeling anxious about returning to the normal world. What's it going to be like? I have no idea. - V.W.

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My Kind of August Bliss

I wonder what's on his mind...

Back at the beginning of the Van Winkle Project I took a picture of this little man you see on the left. The wooden figure was carved in Africa. He resides on a shelf above the flat screen television.

I'm not sure why I took a picture of this nameless one except that at the time I thought somehow I could use him as an illustration in a future post.

Until now he wasn't needed, but now I would like to summon him onto the cyberspace stage...

This week I am beginning my last full month of being Van Winkled. My first reaction to this is to rejoice. The restraints are about to come off and my news, weather, sports and entertainment fast is about to end!

I'm like a child looking ahead to his birthday party and the great, bounteous gifts of information I'm going to unwrap on Sunday, September 11 when I finally awake from my metaphorical slumbers.

Not so fast, Van Winkle...

Honestly, there's a part of me that is drawn to our pensive little African man. Hmm. Should I really be in such a rush to get this over with? Is there more that I can learn?

I believe there is.

I've already discovered that I'm a pretty poor candidate for a year-long news blackout. I'm too "accident"-prone. Or were those really accidents when I stumbled across a few words here and there in headlines and spoiled my potentially pristine ignorance? Or maybe it was a psychological problem? I was too self-conscious about avoiding the news, so much so that the constant tension drove my subconscious to keep undermining my efforts.

But there's still a month left to do things right.

"I know nothing!"

I want to relax a bit and at the same time have for the first time, deep down absolutely zero interest in anything going on in the world. In other words, I want to stop being me.

And I want this month to pass S-L-O-W-L-Y so I can savor one last time what it's like to have a general aloofness from the heavy burden of knowledge.  

• With no bad news I will have no occasion for pessimism or cynicism.
• With no good news I will not waste precious emotions on hope that may prove false.

More than ever I want to move about in the immersive envelope of "now" where every whisper of wind on my neck or drop of moisture on my hand has a significance equivalent to a hurricane or some event of historic proportions.

I'm going to collect the pennies in my life and forget about the mountains of gold that presumably are being mined by others.

If the world is lucky, it will be a slow news month: no natural disasters, no airplane crashes, no horrible fires, no shootings, no wars or civil wars, no political shenanigans, no economic crisis, no unexpected deaths.

It's going to feel that way to me regardless of what actually happens. August 2011. The calm month. My final month. A last shot at blissful ignorance. - V.W.

The National Nudity Considered

I've commented quite often on posts at The Van Winkle Project that it's difficult, if not impossible, to filter out all the news.

Bits and pieces of news stick to me like lint to a sweater.

- A word in a headline briefly glimpsed.

- Something accidentally overheard in a conversation.

- A bumper sticker innocently read that turns out to be fraught with timely implications.

Or even a T-shirt--like the those the Dallas Mavericks fans were wearing back in early June...

Latest Indiscretion
Recently our family was on vacation. This is usually a time when even under non-Van Winkle conditions I fall out of touch with the news. Vacation is about living in the moment and getting out and doing new things instead of being tied to a computer or a TV or having a daily newspaper arrive on the doorstep.

Still, I had problems this vacation.It began with the now ubiquitous flat-screen TVs in the airports, all of them tuned to 24/7 cable news and with their volume turned up loud; if you plug your ears, there remains the visual assault of the crawl at the bottom.

Later, as I hung out with relatives the pollutant became words and phrases dropped into conversations.

"What this country is coming to."

"Trillions. It boggles the mind!"

"Government broke."

And, yes, like a monk who has resolved to give up women but who still has to go into the city, I glimpsed the equivalent of some cleavage and legs courtesy of the newspapers lying around my sister-in-law's house.

My Speculation
Okay. So I sorta think I might know kinda what's going on back in Washington the past couple of weeks. On the other hand, I don't have any details or why or wherefore.

When I went to "sleep" back last September the economic and political talk was still of 1) the unemployment rate, 2) bailouts,  and 3) health care. I honestly don't remember "trillions" of anything being in the conversation.

But times bring change. Maybe America is waking up with a big hangover. A collective national problem. For years we've been ignoring this problem, covering it over with a fig leaf if you will.

Now the leaf has dropped. Citizens are stirred up.So imagining that I've intuited what this news must be about I've dreamed up an op-ed piece.

My apologies if I've garbled reality. Perhaps I have misunderstood?

THE PROBLEM OF THE NATIONAL NUDITY

by Seymour Sitazon

America is a great country! One that is built on the idea of ongoing opportunity leading to prosperity for as many as possible. Yet we recognize, almost instinctively, that prosperity and the big wild good life ought not to derive from an excess of nudity.

In the past America has approached its national nudity with caution. When there was too much nudity the government acted and brought redress. The national nudity declined, although it never went away entirely.

It is notable that during the Reagan years the national nudity began to rise for the first time in a most alarming way. President Reagan implemented tax cuts, but he did not cut nudity. Nudity, in fact, became a way of playing with our toys today and deferring the costs of those toys until tomorrow.

Some of the toys the national nudity made possible were quite large: houses, SUVs, hot tubs, and everything at Sam's Club.

Surprisingly, it was President Bill Clinton who gave us a glimpse of what it might be like to see a decline in the national nudity. It may have been his policies or it may have been luck, but he proved to be no fan of nudity. Not even Monica Lewinsky could deter him from doing something about the national nudity. In fact, as the economy grew along with tax revenues during Clinton's watch there was the hope of decreasing the national nudity once and for all.

Then came two expensive wars abroad and a financial collapse.

The national nudity is now of extreme proportions. When you add it up, day by day, there must be trillions of instances! It seems we'll never be rid of it. Our children's children's children will inherit nudity that staggers the mind. How will they end up? Totally tragically naked?

Having laid out this problem I'd like to end by making an unexpected turn. What if the national nudity is not the rampant evil we suspect?

I mean look around you. Have you noticed thats even with such high levels of national nudity the people of this nudity-ridden nation still lead normal lives?

They drive down the road. They stand in the check-out line at the grocery store. They eat their hamburgers at McDonalds. We have national nudity, but we function. Indeed, as a people we seem to smile a lot.

The other day I was at a baseball game, eating a foot-long hotdog, and thinking about the rampant national nudity.

I looked up at the cheering fans--men, women, boys and girls. I looked at the handsome boys of summer. "So much national nudity!" I said to myself. Then "Crack!" the bat made contact with the ball and we all went "Aw!"

That's when I had an epiphany.

National nudity is as American as baseball. It's ingrained into the American skin like a wavy tattoo of Scooby Doo. We don't need fig leaf solutions to national nudity dreamed up by Congress or the president.

We need another hot dog with mustard and relish. And if I can't find my wallet to pay for it, well, blame it on the national nudity and let's get back to watching the game!

- V.W.

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Under 100 Days to Go!

I've been waiting for this.

Yes, that was me, day by day keeping an eye on the counter over on the right-hand side of this page with the intensity of a gambler staring at a spinning roulette wheel or a slot machine.

The counter has paid off.

Finally, I'm entering the home stretch of The Van Winkle Project. Soon I'll be able to watch TV again. Go to movies. Stop blushing like a shy bride every time I almost glimpse a newspaper headline.

What Keeps Me Going
Why am I so keen to get to the end? The truth is I've grown weary of my regimen. In fact, a couple of days ago I thought, "Why not quit not right now?"

I thought of how people had been dropping hints that I'd missed some REALLY MAJOR STUFF during the first five months of 2011. If that were true, then there was nothing left to prove. I had already made myself one of the least informed, most ignorant people on the planet. Mission accomplished.

Then I thought of the magic "100." With that number about to topple it seemed possible that I could stick this thing out until Sept. 11, 2011, as I promised in the first place...

There was another reason I focused on "100." It reminds me of a day back in November when I posted with some excitement that my first 100 days of the project had passed. Back then I compared my own landmark to the first 100 days of the U.S. presidency, a time when political pundits and prognosticators sit down and analyze just what the president has accomplished in that relatively short time span and predict what lies ahead.

Another reason to continue? Visits to this blog have trended up,
way up, in 2011...

The last 100 days in office of a president don't have quite the same significance. We call the resident of the Oval Office a "lame duck." The new president has already been elected and is waiting in the wings to be inaugurated in January, which makes the current president seem almost irrelevant. The president might as well relax, plan retirement, and gather materials for the inevitable presidential memoir.

I'd like to relax, too, knowing that I don't have that far to go, but I think it's wise not to. It's still too easy to lapse and almost involuntarily violate the terms of this project.

Confessions of a "Wait" Watcher
When I began the Van Winkle Project last fall some people congratulated me on undertaking what they called a "media fast." They said that they've considered a media fast for themselves. They thought media fasts were admirable. They hoped my media fast turned out well.

Wait a minute. Hold on. What's a media fast? Is what I've been doing for 265+ days been a "fast"?

After all this time to think about it, I think I'd like to tweak the metaphor a bit...

When I decided to give up all news, entertainment, sports and weather for a year, it wasn't really a fast from all electronic and print media. It's true I haven't read the news on-line or in newspapers or watched it on TV. Ditto for sporting events, new movies, and the national weather outlook. But it's not been a "fast" because I've still allowed myself plentiful portions of the following:

• Watch as many movies as I wish if they were released before my project began.
• Watch TV reruns and old shows.
• Listen to my old CDs and LPs
• Read books as long as they're not recently released.
• Read and send emails.

That's not exactly a fast.

I think a fast would be someone doing what's referred to as "living off the grid." If you have no electricity and you don't get any mail, then I think that's as close to a media "fast" as I'd want to contemplate. But no one should ever mistake Van Winkle for such an off-the-grid person. I'm not that ambitious or stalwart.

This project has been a bit like banning all traditional
forms of PROTEIN from my diet...

I think what I've been doing is more like a diet.

By giving up key elements of what goes into forming one's personal fabric of memory, social interaction, and conversation—but keeping everything else—I resemble somebody who has sworn off, say, protein derived from animals. They can have all the carbs they wish in the form of pasta, bread, pancakes, fruit, etc., but all meat and eggs and cheese are out.

News, entertainment, sports, and weather are the protein I'm depriving myself of. And sometimes this analogy feels apt. If a person doesn't get protein in some form (e.g., the legumes and tofu that vegetarians make sure to consume), then your body will weaken. Not knowing the following things makes me feel weak and feeble:

• How bad the natural disasters of 2011 have been.
• Why gas prices were going up then seem to have stopped.
• How the economy is doing.
• What's happening between Congress and the President
• What decisions the Supreme Court has issued.
• What's been happening in the Middle East.
• Who won Oscars at the Academy Awards this year.

These are not simply take 'em or leave 'em "desserts"; they're main course items, as far as I'm concerned. I feel semi-deprived and hungry. I'm a "Wait Watcher." I have to wait until I can "watch" again, and like people enrolled in the real "Weight Watchers," it can make a guy a bit grumpy at times.

But, thank heavens, it seems like an end is in sight. I just hope I don't get too big of a stomachache when in about 98 days they feed me the answers to all the questions I have. - V.W.

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The Drip, Drip, Drip of the News - Something Happened Pt. 2

Every day it's the same thing in the semi-darkness
just before dawn. Touch, but don't look.
I must save another newspaper for the day I "awake."

Each morning, as I go outside to retrieve the newspaper, I approach the rolled tube lying on the sidewalk with extreme care.

I usually get up at 5:30 a.m. and it's still dark, yet there is the porch light. This provides enough illumination to make it possible to see through the transparent plastic protective sleeve of the newspaper.

Without making out any of the specific words, I can sense that the headline on the front page has been an impressively large font size most every day this week.

Today I want to read. I want to find out what the world is, in effect, shouting about. Can't I "wake up" for just a minute or so? I swear after that I'll go back to being Van Winkled...

Then I remember my fresh vow.

My Recent Failures
In light of some recent news leaks that reminded me of the flawed nature of this project, I've decided to crank down on the news faucet. It wasn't that it was gushing. It was that I had allowed it to drip and dampen my potentially pristine ignorance.

Drip, drip, drip...little pieces of news were slipping into my life.

Here are three  items that have happened in the past few weeks that I'm not supposed to know about and how I came to come in contact with the "drips."

Could a birth certificate really be big news?

1 - President Obama "released" his birth certificate:
I learned this because one of the newspapers I'm stacking in the garage for future reference (after Sept. 11) was turned the wrong way and I glimpsed the main headline.

It only takes a second for a few key printed words to register in the brain.

Of course, this particular headline raises many questions that I assume readers know the answer to, but I don't...

How is it more than halfway into his presidency people are still talking about whether Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen? What was released that wasn't released before? Why was it held back? Are the naysayers satisfied? Or has doubt gone mainstream? Is this a big news story or is it a sideshow circus?

2 - A tornado or tornadoes did major damage to Tuscaloosa, Alabama:
I know this because I was speaking to the woman who comes to clean our house. We were talking about the hail storm right here in our own town occurred on Easter afternoon. This was perfectly permissible because it's first-person local news, which is not banned by the Van Winkle Project.

But then she started telling me about her sister in Alabama and about the power plant that was destroyed and that there was no electricity for a huge swath of the state and that the president was headed there today...I couldn't stop her or stop my ears.

3 - There seems to have been a thing people call a "Royal Wedding":
Well, how was I not going to know that? For weeks there were pictures on magazines at the grocery store check-out lines. I had to assume some of them were not Global Lying Star inventions, but true. William really does love Kate! And, there was the main source of this unwanted information: people were talking about it.

And the bride wore what? I have no idea.

It should be noted that Americans sometimes have a conflict about the Brits. Should we really care about what their royals are up to?

So the conversation became, "Are you going to get up in the middle of the night to watch this wedding or do you think the whole royalty thing is a farce? I mean, the country is actually run by a parliament and the prime minister and what goes on at Buckingham Palace is sort of like the world's most expensive reality TV show that the rest of their nation pays the bill for."

That's the critique, but don't misunderstand (especially if you're from the U.K.). I'm sure England is a lovely country. It's just that between the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the U.S. some people (not all) seem to still hang on to their King George III hangover.

Know Any Good Plumbers?
The point of this post is that the news faucet continues to drip into my life. However, so far (knock on wood) it has never turned into a flood. I'm only slightly dampened (to keep pressing the metaphor to the point of screeching) with the minimal amount of knowledge. Apparently, I'm not good at this kind of "plumbing," so I have no certainty that I can ever shut it off completely.

I have to say it's much worse to know just a little than to know nothing. Even knowing that on May 1 "something major happened" destroys a chance at "blissful" ignorance.

I know, but I don't really know. And with incomplete knowledge lies the potential for worry and concern. Fear, even. What is waiting out there in the darkness? - V.W.

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Something Happened, Didn't It?

I sense there's been major breaking news.
Can I avoid finding out what it is?

I'm writing this on Monday, May 2 at 6:19 a.m. CST and I have a recurring question racing through my mind:

"What's up?"

Last night my wife met with some students on campus. It was one of those frantic, get a project ready for the last week of the semester kind of thing.

I'm guessing that on the way home my wife listened to the car radio.

At 10 p.m. as we were going to sleep she said this:

"Be sure to not even go near the newspaper tomorrow morning."

An Opportunity
I want to continue to be candid here and testify accurately to the realities of being Van Winkled as I'm experiencing them.

Throughout the project to date my attempts to avoid information about news, entertainment, weather and sports have not resulted in the kind of pristine ignorance one might expect of a man living castaway on a desert island.

No surprise. I live a low-key life, but I'm not completely isolated. I have friends, I have a job, I get out and about.

So, despite my usually attentive efforts to avoid such, there have been "leaks." Fragments of news insidiously manage to slip through.

This is disappointing in many ways. I'm going to all this trouble, yet when I wake up on Sept. 11, 2011, I'm not going to be completely surprised...

But now I have a fresh chance.

Placing "Clueless" Under Lock and Key
Something just happened. Right? And all I know about it is a result of my almost falling out of bed when my wife mentioned it in the vaguest of terms. She then took pity on me and added cryptically, "It's not bad. Just be ready. You'll probably hear some people talking about it."

Okay. Bad or good, let's amp up this experiment a bit.

I am going to try to take every possible precaution in order not to find out about this event, whatever it was.

For the next few days, I'm going to keep my head down and my ears sealed until perhaps it blows over and people move on to the next thing.

Can I do it?

Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

I suppose you do.

But take my word for it. I don't. - V.W.


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The Healing Art of Photography

Lately I've been bothered by a space inside me that has developed as a result
of not knowing what has happened in the greater world since I went to "sleep" on Sept. 11th of last year.

I can feel this emptiness. It's a dark chamber within where a tiny metal ball is bouncing around.

Let's call the metal ball "frustration" and "anxiety" and "disconnectedness."

Recently, though, I went on a photo workshop weekend and made a discovery.

I found that I felt reconnected to the world every time I raised a camera to my eye. My empty space began to fill up with a sort of "news" I'd been overlooking. The news of shadow and light and shapes that are right in front of me.

The prescription goes like this: I look intently at nature or people or the things people have made. I snap a photo. I feel better.

I wonder why?

A Book to Spend Time With
Years ago my wife gave me as a present a book entitled God Is at Eye Level by a woman named Jan Phillips. Rather than a "how-to" book, it is a collection of Ms. Phillips' fine black and white images, quotes by famous people, and her own narrative of how she has profited from a life of making photographs.

She begins by telling how way back in 1967 when she was 18 years old she wanted to devote her life to God. She entered a convent. Two years later she found herself dismissed for "lack of a religious disposition."

The situation was handled brusquely. One night Jan's parents came to take her away. She was not allowed to say goodbye to anyone, and she was told she that hereafter she could not communicate with any of the sisters. The novice director ended with, "They will keep you in their prayers."

Jan Phillips first camera,
the humble Kodak Instamatic.

Nine months passed and Jan realized that the birthday of Lois, her best friend in the convent, was coming up. She couldn't write Lois a letter or send a card, but perhaps she could send her a present? How could she make it personal and still have it get past the order's superiors who were censoring all the mail?

Jan decided to make a photo album. The only words she included were quotes from authors she and Lois loved, songs they'd sung together, poems and prayers they'd shown one another.

As for the photos she used a Kodak Instamatic to take pictures as a substitute for the words she could not write.

She took a picture of her own footsteps being washed away by the tide and one of a collapsed sand castle. She photographed her body against a twelve-foot cross. She captured her shadow on the steps in front of a locked church door.

Each photo, including one of "birds soaring into a golden sunset," was a coded message about what she was feeling. The images were visual metaphors. They were signposts pointing to her emotions and her shadowed soul.

They didn't let her become a nun and that
led to a journey...

When Jan's photo album arrived at the Motherhouse the novice director called Lois to her office and told her to read it aloud. Lois did so without revealing the personal implicaitons which she very well understood,. Thus, she was allowed to carry the book back to her room.

Even more than this story of an artist's craftiness that allowed truth to penetrate the walls raised by implacable authority, I am impressed by something Jan says about what happened as she selected the photos and fixed them into the album:

     "Making that album was a healing ritual from beginning to end...
     As I glued each photograph onto the page, I was touched by its power,
     its ability to give voice to my silence, to shed light on my darkness."

An Eye Behind the Viewfinder
The subtitle of God Is at Eye Level is "Photography as a Healing Art." I've begun thinking of photography this way, too. Taking pictures heals some of the loss I feel at stepping away from the stories and developments affecting humanity. The pictures I take become my own coded messages to myself about what I'm looking for in this world that for me temporarily seems full of emptiness and echoes.

Sometimes my pictuers have surprised me. Three themes seemed to choose me, rather than the other way around, during my photoshoot last weekend.

1 - Craving Form:
Ah, to find structure and order in a sometimes chaotic, randomly arranged life!

2 - Loving Texture:
The varieties of bumpiness and smoothness and in-betweeness call out to the attentive eye ("I") .

3 - Desiring Peace:
In a world of troubles and a relentlessly fast pace, it's nice to be reminded that there are pockets of calm that yield quiet moments as the river of cares rushes past.

- V.W.

Hit the Wall - Project's Over!

Let me begin by saying I'm not angry at the NYT.

I'm not going to blame the NYT. And I'm not posting this to diss the NYT.

But after what happened, I've reached my limit. I'm declaring an end to the Van Winkle Project.

I guess it's fair to say the NYT was the catalyst.

A Brief History of Times
I've always liked the Times. I read the Times when I was in college where it was dropped each morning with an emphatic slap on the hardwood entryway outside my dorm room while I still lay in bed. I groggily claimed those newspapers and leafed through their many, many pages.

Maybe Robert Redford reads the NYT,
but would Jay Gatsby?

Some people opine that the Times leans politically to the left, not in an up-with-the-proletariat fashion, but in way that represents the interests of the moneyed, ultra-educated, morally decadent elite.

If life were a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, some suspect  the self-made, romantic, sunny Reaganesque millionaire Jay Gatsby would get his news from Fox or the Wall Street Journal. The Ivy League, polo playing, adulterous Tom Buchannan would read the Times...

I don't know about that.

Frankly, my favorite part of the newspaper, at least on Sunday, has nothing to do with coverage of domestic politics. I love the Arts and Leisure, Book Review, Style, and Magazine sections. I want to read about Broadway shows, interviews with choreographers and movie directors,and learn what's turning heads in fashion. I dip into consideration of new novels and nonfiction. Such riches!

All of which will no longer be denied to me.

The Sudden Arrival of Excessive Angst
As if my deprivation hadn't already bad enough, the NYT went and did something on Monday and I'm collateral damage. They sent me an email with this heading:

Important notice about your New York Times subscription

Well, I had to open and read this email, didn't I? Maybe I owed them money.

That's not what the email was about. Instead, I was learning that something that had been bruited about for a long while was finally coming to pass:

     As of Monday, March 28, The New York Times
     is charging for unlimited access to NYTimes.com
     and our NYTimes apps.

I understood immediately Anyone wishing to read any Times material on-line beyond the home page is going to have to "pony up" and put some coins in the change jar.  This is a very BIG deal, I realize, to much of the world. In the balance rests the future of newspapers and how can they make money. On the other side there's readers who have had the equivalent of a free lunch all these years.

But guess what. That wasn't my problem and did not lead to my ensuing crumbling resolve to remain news-less.

You see, the Times' policy shift doesn't affect me. I already subscribe to the print edition of the Times on Sundays which means under the new regime I automatically get access to all on-line content without further charge.

Lucky me!

A message from the publisher...

My actual problem arose when I followed the email's suggestion at the end:

     P.S. For more information,
     click here
     for a message from Arthur O.
     Sulzberger Jr., publisher
     of The New York Times.

So I clicked. And I read, "Blah, blah, blah, this change...necessary...blah, blah, valued, subscribers, blah, blah...

THEN THIS:

    As you have seen during this
    recent period of extraordinary global
    news, The Times is uniquely
    positioned to keep you informed.

What! What's going on? I'm Van Winkled and that means I'm asleep and I'm not supposed to know about that. You pair the words "global" and "extraordinary" and what am I supposed to think?

All this is to say, to quote B. B. King, "You upset me, baby." The NYT got me agitated. It started me wondering and worrying.

And finally? I snapped like a stale pretzel that had lost all its salt.

All the News That's Fit to Ignore?
Of course, I have confessed on this blog that there have already been news "leaks." These have come from remarks that have dropped from the mouths of people in a public situation where I couldn't cover my ears in time or gracefully walk out, e.g. church.

Now, thanks to Mr. Sulzberger's way with words, I'm thinking there's likely more that I'm missing than I realize. Paradigm shifts? New generations arising? Old ones slipping away? The very planet groaning at its moorings?

I remembered that a friend emailed me mid-February and recalling his words added fuel to my emotional fires:

     All I can say is you picked quite a year to take a nap. You will never catch up.
    You will be reading books about this year not just newspapers.

I don't know what this is all about. I've begun to feel like a sort of dim bulb who is walking around faking his life, pretending that I know why people are acting the way they are these days. They seem a little bit bothered and distracted. Or is this just my imagination?

So if you were me, could you continue to go on?

Certainly not! I quit!!! - V.W.

Wait a minute. I just checked today's date. Delete the post title and most of the above paragraphs. April Fool's!

So I'm still "in." I'll find out about this extraordinary global stuff on September 11 as planned. But I just want to say to Mr. Sulzberger that when this project ends my subscription will be money well spent. I'm going to pig out on the news, so to speak. I hope, though, I don't get a stomachache - V.W. (for real)