July 12: Frozen, One Position, Fairy Tale Friday

"Who's ignoring it?  Nobody's ignoring it!"  Horwitz said.  He got so damn excited and all, I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something.  "They live right in the goddam ice.  It's their nature, for Chrissake.  They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter."

Horwitz, Holden's cab driver, has a lot of opinions.  In the passage above, he's talking about the fish in the lagoon in Central Park and what he thinks happens to them when the lagoon freezes over.  The fish freeze in one position for the entire winter, according to Horwitz.

It's quite a little metaphor.  A creature stuck in one place, surviving on the same food, air, water for months and months.  Horwitz doesn't find anything remarkable in this.  It's just their nature, what they were built to do.  Of course, Horwitz is full of it, bullshitting the great bullshitter, Holden Caulfield.  But, Horwitz also touches on something that appeals to me:  the idea that a creature can live and thrive in one single situation, one environment, for a long time.

I like sameness.  I like constancy.  I'm not Indiana Jones.  I don't go out looking for adventure.  In fact, I avoid change at all costs, especially change that makes me uncomfortable or threatens my day-to-day routines.  I know I can't avoid it.  Change happens.  People die.  Jobs are outsourced, eliminated.  Money disappears.  Children are born.  However, I prefer to be a fish, frozen in the lagoon for winter.  That's what I want.  There's an admirable self-sufficiency in the image.

I owe you a fairy tale tonight, don't I?

Well, once upon a time, there lived a man named Oscar.  He lived on the edge of a small lake.  He got everything he needed from the lake.  He got fish for food, collected driftwood for fuel.  He thatched his roof with dried seaweed.  And he never strayed from his little piece of the world.

During the winter, the lake froze over.  Oscar would go out onto the ice and look down, staring at the world beneath his feet.  One December night, as he was standing on the ice in the middle of the lake, Oscar saw a bright star.  He whispered at the heavens, "I wish I could be a fish and live in this lake for the rest of my life."

He immediately was transformed into a rainbow trout.  He flopped around on the ice until he froze to death.

Moral of the story:  Don't walk on a frozen lake.  It's dangerous.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

This could be you

January 31: Pneumonia, Old Phoebe, Blessed by People

I started thinking how old Phoebe would feel if I got pneumonia and died.  It was a childish way to think, but I couldn't stop myself.  She'd feel pretty bad if something like that happened.  She likes me a lot.  I mean she's quite fond of me.  She really is.  Anyway, I couldn't get that off my mind, so finally what I figured I'd do, I figured I'd better sneak home and see her, in case I died and all.  I had my door key with me and all, and I figured what I'd do, I'd sneak in the apartment, very quiet and all, and just sort of chew the fat with her for a while.  The only thing that worried me was our front door.  I creaks like a bastard.  It's a pretty old apartment house, and the superintendent's a lazy bastard, and everything creaks and squeaks.  I was afraid my parents might hear me sneaking in.  But I decided I'd try it anyhow.

Holden has been talking about his kid sister Phoebe almost since the beginning of the novel.  In fact, the only time Holden is happy or at peace is when he's thinking about her.  At this point in the novel, he's almost at rock bottom.  He's cold.  He's almost broke.  He's drunk.  He's friendless.  He's sitting by the lagoon in Central Park, imagining his death.  It's a dark moment.  And yet, in this darkness, Holden finds a little light.  In Phoebe.

It's another cold, snowy day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Except for the university, all of the schools in the area have shut down.  The temperatures have been steadily falling.  It has been a week for hunkering down indoors under blankets.  However, after two or three days, kids don't want to hunker anymore.  They want to get out.

My wife just took my son to Burger King so that he could expend some of his four-year-old energy, of which he has a huge supply.  He spent a couple of hours climbing and running and eating fries.  Sometimes, I get a little jealous of my wife's ability to do things like that in the middle of the day with our children.  I mostly see my son and daughter at night, when bedtime is looming.  I'm the bad guy.  I give my son his bath and nag my daughter about her homework.  I make lunches and pick out clothes.  I don't generally have time simply to play with them.

My wife and  son are on their way home now.  They stopped by the Medical Center to drop off a Diet Coke for me.  As I was walking away from the car, my wife started beeping her horn.  I walked back to the vehicle.  My wife rolled down my son's window.

My son smiled up at me and said, "I see you at home, Daddy."

I leaned in and gave him a kiss.  "I love you, buddy."

"Me, too," he said.

I watched the car pull away from the building, into the afternoon wind and snow.

It was a Phoebe moment for me.  A light in the middle of a dreary day.  A blessing.

Saint Marty is a lucky guy.

Having a Phoebe blessing

January 4: Ducks, Lagoon, P.O..E.T.S. Day Mess, Firefox

The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull.  I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South.  I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go.  I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over.  I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something.  Or if they just flew away.

Holden is still speaking with his teacher, old Spencer, in this passage.  However, he is allowing his mind to wander.  Old Spencer is lecturing him about his failures at Pencey Prep, and Holden is worrying about the ducks in Central Park.  He keeps coming back to those ducks as the story continues.  He talks to a taxi driver about the ducks.  He imagines the fish in the lagoon frozen solid in the ice, waiting for spring thaw.  Instead of worrying about his own life, Holden focuses on the plight of ducks and fish, wondering how they survive the snow and ice of winter.

I wish I could have been like Holden this morning.  I wish I could have worried about ducks on this P.O.E.T.S. Day.  Instead, I spent three or four hours trying to solve an issue I was having with Blogger.  Last night, I tried to upload an image from my computer.  I couldn't do it.  No matter what I did, I couldn't get the Upload function to work.  This morning, I tried again, with the same results, so I spent the entire morning trying to troubleshoot the issue.  Now, I may have a minor in computer science and two advanced degrees, but none of those helped me.

Eventually, I started deleting images from my Picasa web albums.  (Don't ask.  I have no idea what they are.  However, some genius on Google suggested that it would solve my issue.)  Well, all that did was eliminate images from a whole bunch of old blog posts.  So, on top of still being unable to upload images, I now had to go back through over a thousand posts to figure out how much damage I'd done.

Eventually, I stumbled upon another user forum on Google where hundreds of people were posting comments like, "What the hell is up with Blogger?  I can't upload any images."  I wasn't going crazy. However, I was the only moron who had unwittingly eliminated dozens of pictures from his blog.  The solution to the problem was pretty simple:  don't use Internet Explorer.  I switched to Firefox, and my uploading issues vanished, just like Holden's Central Park ducks.

Now I have a whole lot of repair work to do.

If you're looking through some old posts on Saint Marty and stumble upon a blog that has a caption without an image, that's just Saint Marty being a moron.

Even these ducks think I'm a moron