Influence peddler

Five hundred hashmarks, it turns out, takes a very long time to make.

This is blog post No. 500.

High time, then, to examine how I've done in changing the world from my little virtual outpost these last five years.

Not all of these posts have been phoned in. Not even most. Oh, they comprise so much navel gazing, of course, but almost always in thoughtful consideration of the fuzz therein. Occasionally I have looked beyond myself, out into the crazy beautiful stinking tragic foregone world, rolled this blog into a megaphone and used it to shout at the world: Hey, fix that!

And how did that turn out?

Let us review: I, in chronological order:

• Got Jerry Brown elected governor. That has turned out rather well, especially considering the Schwarzenator he replaced. Third time being the charm, Brown is the older crank caretaker who doesn't really care what you or I think. He loves high-speed rail despite the cost, wants to build tunnels shoveling precious water to Southern California with greater ease, and could possibly be on the new Bay Bridge when its corroded cables snap in a massive CG effect gone real, but other than that, a nice change of pace. The guy who'd rather live in an unfurnished apartment his first time around now will move into the old haunted governor's mansion in which he was raised, remodeled with oodles of high-end restaurant-style kitchen appliances, but we'll give him his due.
  
• Stopped our sycophantic Yankee adoration of the British royal family. We only pay attention to Queen Elizabeth and her kith and kin now when one of them has a baby. Or gets engaged. Or married. Or breaks off the engagement. Or divorces. Or says something inappropriate. Or breathes.
  
  Of course, I showed the world how to make money off it all.
  
• Exposed the great wine fraud. It all comes from one source, and "winemakers" use the power of suggestion to get you to believe different "wine" "varieties" taste different from others. Again, you're welcome.
  
• Ended war in our time.
  
• Sustained the Occupy Wall Street movement by sheer force of will, and reduced the owners of our money to the petty government-sponsored thieves that they are. Our political landscape is forever changed. You're welcome, once more.
  
• Gave veterans and public education all the resources they need.
  
• Finally saw the light and heard the screams, and stopped war in Syria. ("Ending war in our time" still results in stubborn little skirmishes, like spot fires). Oh, and turned the tide for equality in marriage. Apathy is over!
  
  Though — funny thing! — war was harder to end than I had given it credit. But I finally made our leaders tell the truth. President Obama thanked me for making it so, which was nice.
  
• Changed Scouting policy to include Scouts who are gay.
  
  All attempts at facetious self-deprecation aside, I feel like I was on the "right side of history" on this subject, or at least in the right place at the right time. It's one of the few issues for which I can speak from the heart, about which I know more than a little.
  
  Of course, I don't really expect to move anyone's thinking on anything I write here, just to turn my own thoughts to concrete. Part of me — the ego part — couldn't help but wonder if I could, somehow, compel someone to see another side of an issue. Maybe that's why I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote — and wrote — on the matter.
  
• Stole Christmas. And good riddance!
  
• Ended gun violence … stopped the unbelievable tragedy … before it could get any worse … mopped up the blood … so much blood … really, a lot of blood. But now it's mopped up. All is well.
  
• Made government transparent. And not just that thing President Obama did, where he said his government is transparent when he meant, no, it is not. Now our overseers are exposed to daylight.
  
• Shortly after, brought peace and common sense to our government.
  
• Sorted out our official religion, the National Football League. Now we play nice.
  
• Set our minds free.
  
• Ended drought in California. Taught homeowners the error of their false bounty.
  
• Trumped presidential aspirations, for the good of the country.

It stands to reason all this saving the world stuff can be overwhelming to process, which is why I peppered the blog with bits about swimming and Giants baseball and paid doodles.

Now, if you'll excuse me, time to work on No. 501. But really, what problem could possibly be left to solve?

That is, except for determining if this counts as a blog post.

Wish

Elegy

Why no silent night,
O Christmas rat, O Christmas rat?
Why thrash so,
so I can hear?
I, the hunter, who wants no prey,
who prays you'd just go away?

Why die so, and salt my suffering?

Up in the rafters you arose, such a clatter!
The hard red, warm, dry wood,
better drum than house,
raised your death rattle to a roar,
a battle royale. 
Such horrible skritches,
the snap of trap having caught
a reindeer by its paws
perhaps.

We were no different,
wanting the same:
Shelter and comfort,
rest from labor, peace from intrusion.
Quiet.

You were no rat of Christmas past,
who fattened in our larder,
mocking our dominion.
You slipped instead in a door disguised,
unseen except by keen eyes, and dined out.

I had to shut that door for good
and hunt you down:
You spread disease and reproduce and make
a mess!

We are no different.

Finally I found you. It took two tries. 
You had not flung far,
but slumped in the cream curds of insulation
under the trap where I set it.
Hiding, even in death.

I gave you this much: Only so much
as a sidelong look at your folded shape
so small and light,
before I bagged you.

And set another trap, peanut butter-baited,
because I am the hunter, and must.

I have sinned.

You sinned too:
         A creature
stirring

Executioner's burden

Should I have expected the rat to die so horribly?

Yes, of course. I know now.

But I wanted to believe different.

I wanted to believe, when I opened the pantry door Saturday morning, that the rat had escaped our snares, baited for days but finally set the night before. I believed I would see the familiar trail of rice-grain poop pellets along the baseboard and the shelf edges, and a bottom corner of, say, the saltines box and a plastic sleeve of crackers nibbled away.

I wanted to believe the rat had gotten its fill once again and disappeared, and the grim game would continue, of wanting to catch it but not really. I doubt the rat saw the game in it, but rather safe harbor in the wall somewhere, and secret passage to larder.

Or I wanted to believe the rat would appear neatly dead, held stiff and bound in one of the sprung traps like a specimen awaiting dissection. I wanted to believe that trap and trapped would lift easily into a garbage bag, the kill site would disappear with a quick wipe of bleach, the dastardly deed would be done.

But it didn't happen that way.

I found the rat Saturday on the floor of the pantry in a thin pool of blood, like old syrup worked over on a breakfast plate, where its matted fur had etched its struggle.

The slashes and splotches of blood told the tale. The trap on the second shelf up from the floor — dolloped with peanut butter and bits of dog food — had smashed its skull. The rat had not gone up that high before, as far as its luxuriant traces showed, anyway. But Saturday morning it did, bypassing a trap on the floor and one on the first shelf.

It must have yanked away from the crushing bar in violent flail, flinging blood onto the canned mandarin oranges and chutney and tuna set nearby on a lazy susan. It ran or whirled, slipping down the narrow space between the front edge of the shelves and the closed pantry door. Its tail must have slapped blood against the inside of the door and the door jamb, and it must have spun about in agony, spraying blood on the low walls before coming to rest where I found it, on its side, facing away from the door.

How like a fish it was, its heavy body seeming to radiate cold even through the layers of newspaper I used to pick it up and slip it into a plastic garbage bag. I did not look at its head. Bleach dissolved some of the blood. Hard scrubbing and washing ensued.

The rat was hot and light and soft when I first encountered it 12 days before. All was the usual overwrought frenzy of Christmas preparation in the house, of cooking elaborate meals for Christmas Eve two days away, and wrapping the last of the presents. My mother-in-law and one of my brothers-in-law were staying over, deep in the cooking preparations.

I was sick, sweating profusely or shivering wildly through the day, stunned by headache. The sudden evidence of rat dredged up new energy in me. The dog noticed first, this old vestigial rat hound, sniffing the baseboards of the living room, lingering at a corner behind the Christmas tree.

Poop pellets lined the baseboards almost all the way around the living room, having escaped our notice. We took it as insult. The rat must have taken it as opportunity and ease.

Cleaning the pellets, I eventually found a hole in the floor near the hearth where the rat had pulled out all the carpet fibers to make room. I stuffed the hole with soapy Brillo™® pad, but it didn't deter. Eventually the shreds of pad were pulled up and the hole widened again, and holes in the ceiling where previous homeowners had threaded speaker wire were enlarged by the rat.

Trailing the rat energized me. I cleaned up the pellets from the living room, then moved into the part of the kitchen that wasn't commandeered for cooking. Drawer by drawer I searched, finding the occasional poop pellet.

"If we were a restaurant," I announced, "We'd be closed down by now."

Onto the pantry, I moved from the top shelf, moving containers around and wiping surfaces just in case. The lower I went the more pellets I found, until I reached the floor and could smell the urine and see piles of pellets embedded in its thin cake. The dog's rolled-up bag of dry food that wouldn't fit into its plastic container looked chewed into, so I began to pull it out to clean the mess behind.

Out of the bag flew the rat! It alighted over my arm and into the living room. My brother-in-law and I gave chase with brooms and a dodgy flashlight, flushing it out from behind cabinets where it ran straightway to the hole I had stuffed. It ran back to the shelves, twice now bypassing the open sliding glass door to the backyard. Back it ran again toward the plugged hole, zig-zagging and disappearing, it seemed, into the Christmas tree, where we half suspect it spent the day.

I upended the couches, drew away rugs, displaced cabinets and moved all the Christmas presents and some of the furniture out to the back patio, to simplify the landscape. It looked neatly ransacked. We vacuumed every inch. The rat did not show.

My mother-in-law sat at the kitchen table reading between bouts of cooking, working very hard to pay nevermind.

We had done all this rat eradication backward, not realizing it was inside the house with us. We should have plugged the hole after it escaped, but now we had blocked its escape.

Over the occupation of  two homes we have had three rat incidents. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that. The first time, the kindly exterminator with no sense for capitalism told us, "I'll put some bait in the attic. The rat will chew the wax and eat the poison, which will make it very thirsty and cause it to bleed from its insides. It'll want to escape the house in search of water. Go to the hardware store and buy galvanized screen and zip ties, wait a couple of days and then cover every vent and gap you can find around the house. Cost you about 15 bucks."

It worked.

The second time, when at least one rat took residence in our garage, I followed the exterminator's prescription and got my own wax poison bait, waited and covered all the vents and gaps. It worked again. One rat stumbled drunkenly to the middle of the garage floor, lay down and died.

This time I found the wax bait is illegal, and in its place are an array of fancy useless better mousetraps that no rodent would dignify.

So began day after day of weapons acquisition and war-room strategy, with three days of cease-fire during Christmas when we left town and had no choice but let the rat run free and maybe stumble into one of the useless traps people buy because we don't want to kill the rat but would like it simply to crawl into a plastic coffin, coaxed by rat poison, and entomb itself.

We bought repellent foam and filled every hole and crevice we thought a rat might use, including the hole by the hearth. Still the rat entered, ate and left, into a wall of the kitchen, scritching into the early hours.

Grim reality finally seized us. The rat could be breeding, and the kitchen overrun with offspring. The daily deposit of pellets can't be good for anyone. We'll be forever disinfecting the kitchen and living room.

Time for the tried-and-true killing traps.

"You know the trick with these, doncha?" said the helpful clerk at the helpful hardware store. "Bait 'em for a week to let the rat get used to the traps, then set the trap. Oh, and wear rubber gloves so the rat doesn't smell you."

A week!? I'm giving the rat two days, tops, to endure its slovenly, disease-ridden idyll. Each night I dobbed peanut butter; each morning I wiped up pellets.

Then Friday night, jaw set, brow furrowed, spine stiffened, I set the traps (watching a couple of YouTube™® videos first). Nancy set newspaper beneath each.

I believed different. I believed neat and tidy. I found a blood-soaked crime scene.

No more rat, as far as we can tell. It had roamed my office at least once in its reverie, depositing pellets along the baseboard. I cleaned that up yesterday. All evidence is gone, no more has been left.

We still don't know the rat's secret passage, don't know its renown among rats. One trap is still set in the pantry, just in case.

Auld lang syne

Some Christmas cards I created this year for clients:

Which remind me:

One of the few Christmas traditions it surprises me to keep is singing carols at a nearby hospital with Boy Scout Troop 328, the Troop our son and I belonged to (it retains me its rolls as Token Strange Guy from the Past).

Monday marked the 14th Christmas the Troop has serenaded patients (and probably making some sicker). Maybe the 15th. I've lost track.

When a new adult Scout leader with the Troop, someone I'd never met, asked me when our son earned his Eagle award, I suddenly realized it was (gasp!) eight long years go. So now I've been caroling with the Troop longer than when our son was in it and I was active as an adult leader.

Strange Old Guy from the Past. Who shows up for Eagle courts of honor and caroling, frightening the young Scouts with his weird sideburns. That's me.

The Troop is kind and invites me to sing along. They say it's because I'm the only one who can sing, but I know it's just their excuse.

Each year I recognize fewer and fewer Scouts. This year only one Scout knew me by name, and I by his, a Scout I've known all these years because his older brother moved up through the Troop and this year earned his Eagle. Now little brother is one of the Troop's senior Scouts.

Two dozen Santa-hatted, fully-uniformed (mostly) Scouts showed, along with parents, making a throng of about 40 roaming up and down the hospital's floors, led by the hospital public relations person. We're breaking in our second hospital flack, whose extra-hours duty right before Christmas is to put up with us. But we know the drill: Walk single file down the hallways, line up on both sides of the hall when we stop to sing, don't look into patients' rooms, only speak when a patient acknowledges you, etc.

As a Scoutmaster I used to know all the Scouts, used to know which Scouts liked to kid and be kidded, and which just wanted to say hello and stay quiet otherwise. I knew which ones needed reminding to act appropriately and which ones could influence appropriate behavior for others. I knew each Scout's interests and sports and ambitions, or their lack, and I could talk with them about their lives.

They had given me false hope I could be a teacher.

Now they're strangers. They're the same kids, it's easy to see. Some are wiry and full of energy, others are quiet and unsure. Older Scouts celebrate their bonds of going to the same high school or their long tenure in the Troop, and form cliques. Some younger Scouts, for whom no amount of activity will settle them or reminding will quite shush them, form their own cliques. Some are experimenting in social behavior, the Troop their laboratory.

Same kids, just different.

Descending a stairwell on our caroling journey Monday, a Scout accidentally stepped on the heel of my shoe.

"Sorry," he said. I turned around with a smile and said, "Yeah, I'll bet." By the passing storm on the Scout's face, I could tell he didn't know whether the Token Strange Guy was joking or denigrating.

Tempus fugit.

Through hard work, demographic shifts and good fortune, Troop 328 is large again, with at least three Patrols. I'm jealous of the new patches, one for the Notorious 9 who came into the Troop together, another for the Raptors.

Their new Scoutmaster, whose curlicue mustache makes nonsense of my measly bristles, says he's thankful for all the Scouts and parent help. He hardly says a word to the Scouts, but he doesn't have to. The Senior Patrol Leader, the Scout the Troop has elected to lead them, really does lead them, making sure they follow the hospital guidelines.

The Troop carries on the tradition of singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," as we move from Point A to B. For some reason this year the flack diverted us from the pediatric wing, where the Scouts tend to put extra energy into "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," with louder "like a lightbulbs" and "like Columbuses," and "Frosty the Snowman." In fact, we never sang "Frosty" Monday.

The Scoutmaster is continuing to develop the Troop into one truly run by boys, as it should be. It's a never-ending process, more difficult than you might think, what with us parents wanting their children never to fail. But the Scoutmaster is serving as a presence, a go-to guy if the Senior Patrol Leader needs him this evening. The Senior Patrol Leader doesn't.

A young man, hearing us sing down the hall, requested that we sing to a specific patient, a parent or grandparent maybe. Almost all of us stuffed the room to overflowing one room and sang, a few of us left standing in the hallway.

We said our "Merry Chistmases" and goodbyes after, and I left Scouts to their post-sing tradition of scarfing sugar cookies and cocoa. The Scoutmaster kindly invited me back, for this or anything else in the Troop.

Good people came after me, I can see, much better equipped to develop leadership and self-government among the Scouts. The best thing I can do for the Troop is be Token Strange Guy, showing up now and then from the Past.

*Yes, I capitalize Troop and Scout and Patrol, and I know it's irksome. The habit latched onto me when I was corresponding to the Troop as Scoutmaster, mostly as a way of honoring the importance in which I held Scouting (see, there I go again). Sorry. Get used to it.

A modest proposal

I hate Christmas.

Can't dance around it anymore, or dull my declaration with $10 words. No point in making people around me wonder why I'm such a jerk (or moreso) during the holidays.

I hate Christmas for what it is — what it probably always has been: A celebration of consumption. Not a celebration; a hyperventilated expectation of consumption, the de facto duty of all Americans (and maybe all the first world).

The economy, somehow, depends on us to buy stuff at Christmas. And buy. Etc.

It is the Mythical Manufacture and Movement of Money, the Emergency Reallocation of Resources, and everything we do during the ever-lengthening season serves it.

Even what we call tradition is really just a whetstone for commerce.

Maybe once Christmas was solely about tradition — but not in my lifetime. Probably not ever.

Many ancient traditions, it turns out — even ones we may hold dearest — aren't ancient at all, but just made up for covert motive.

To my wife's chagrin I'm reading "The Battle for Christmas," an analysis of how America celebrates the holiday, by historian and Pulitzer finalist Stephen Nissenbaum. At first banned by Puritan leaders because it collapsed into drunken riots, Christmas has since become a layered social engineering project promoting family togetherness and homebound pacification, Nissenbaum writes.

In no time the economy hijacked the whole package and ransomed our wallets. We have since been buying things we don't need, with money we don't have, and singing and baking in an attempt to sugarcoat it all.

Once — some of you may recall — this was a spiritual time, and not just for Christians; many religions and philosophies held this time sacred or at least solemn, finding in it a period of rest representing death, a dark cold time of hope for longer, warmer days representing renewal. Many interested parties, Christianity among them, decided this a good season to stick a high holy day.

Whatever was spiritual about this time, though, became the flea on the tail of the big dog.

Witness any Christmastime TV trope. Whenever religious reference arises in any show, whenever Christ is born in a manager — in a school play, say — Santa is soon sure to follow, distributing gifts. I've done my hour with Jesus, now gimme my "Call of Duty: Black Ops."

The farce has no limits. One ludicrous violation soon follows the next. Christmas shopping now begins officially on Thanksgiving —Black Thursday! — and will eventually start even earlier; thousands camp out at stores, pushing, shoving, yelling, cursing, fighting in gratitude for the chance to buy. Talk about tradition.

Jon Stewart is right. It's not a war on Christmas. Christmas is warring on us, swallowing up other holidays.

The Hallmark Channel, hijacker of our emotional consumption, rolled out the Christmas movies long before that. You can find radio stations playing Christmas carols year 'round. TV commercials mock the gifts we give, unless they're the cool gifts the TV commercials sell. Only cool parents buy kids cool gifts. We are supposed to believe this how we are supposed to behave.

Car makers seriously suggest you buy someone a new sedan for Christmas. A local dealership even declared last week in a commercial:

"Nothing will give you more holiday joy than driving a 2013 Audi A3."

Read it again. Nothing? Even under the crushing overhead, bled by razor-thin margins and ruthless competition, an auto dealer should be able to taste the bile in that season's greeting.

But we sally forth, celebrating harder and louder, as if to drown out the siren song of the shopping malls, and the true nature of this time.

I say, enough. 

Here's my modest proposal: Skip it. Have Christmas every other year. Give it distance so we can miss it and welcome its return with sincere remembrance. Give Christmas a rest. Make it official, issue a decree.

Unlike Jonathan Swift's modest proposal, no children will be eaten in mine. Nor is mine satire.

Here's what will probably happen when Christmas takes a holiday:

• A lot of people will still have Christmas, by which I mean buy and buy, and so be it. I'm not against shopping, just buying for buying's sake. More, relieved of the duty, will spread their purchases throughout the year as needed.
• A lot of people will still worship, and that's all right; it'll feel illicit and rebellious and dangerous, just like the old days. I'm not stomping on religion, just on consuming. In fact, worship may deepen; people will find again the quiet space in which to consider the faiths in which they were raised or have gathered up in their lives
  
  I admire Kwanzaa, for example, a holiday Maulana Karenga created 46 years ago from African traditions, promoting community and individual ideals. More power to those who celebrate it. But the holiday takes place the week after Christmas, and if it has any real chance of worthy consideration among communities, it needs distance from our overriding urge to have things.
• The divide will narrow — the one between those who have the cash to keep up with Christmas consumption and those who don't but keep up anyway, because no one is going to tell my child doesn't deserve what your child is getting.
• Depression will lift among the people who see the holiday for what it really is, and can't make it go away. They will have peace.
• The economy will not sputter.
• We'll remember that veterans and  families without homes shiver and starve and get sick and hide out in the woods during the rest of the year, too, not just Christmas.
• After a two-year absence, we may buy even more. But I bet we do almost everything but.

You're right, I'm a big fat hypocrite. I am, as a matter of fact, proposing a last-one-in-bar-the-door policy. I did as a child succumb to the nervous elation of peering into the darkness of an early Christmas morning to see, as my eyes adjusted, a mountain of sherbet-colored Hot Wheels™® track, with loops and ramps, already assembled and ready to play, and six new cars to run on the track.

I loved it with a child's skepticism. I wasn't a bad kid, by any means, but I certainly wasn't good enough to merit this cascade of toys (oh, the Hot Wheels®© weren't all!) that Santa brought, so many I couldn't — and didn't — appreciate them all, or even a little.

I'm not denying that for kids to come. Maybe my proposal will elevate that feeling, so the mountain of toys every two years becomes all the more grand; certainly we'd be able to save up for it every two years. Or maybe my proposal will elevates kids instead; absent the constant commercial drumbeat, maybe kids will want less, appreciate more what they get.

It's a tough sell (so to speak), I know. I'm having enough trouble convincing my family that Thanksgiving is not about turkey, is not about a meal that takes eight hours to make and 30 minutes to eat. Thanksgiving can be grilled cheese or take-out chicken and a family walk in a park. Or an afternoon with friends. Or coats for the family in the woods. It's about giving thanks, not getting stuffed.

There's always next year.