Watch Your Step

A bit of paranoia starts to set in when one month a black widow shows up on your back step and the next a scorpion appears poised to wipe its eight feet on the mat of your front step. I said I like bugs; I didn't say come for cocktails! But word seems to have spread, and on a recent morning I stumbled over this millipede all curled up like a bum sleeping on my stoop. He stayed for a cup of coffee, we talked about the weather and set off on our respective days. I told him the neighbors serve Peets with a shot of whiskey, if he wants to wake up over there tomorrow.

*sent from a foreign computer. hope it works!

Hawk Watch

This morning broke with the urgent, incessant, and mournful calling of a hawk rising out of the thick fog that erased the small valley beyond the back yard. Rising out of that fog (and the middle of a spectacular view on a clear day), a lone extra-wide redwood tree provided a place to rest. Through my binoculars, I could see it was a fully mature red-tail. I could also see it was uneasy. Its head scanned all about. It shifted on its talons with a yearning to take off again, but
something impeded its mission. The fog perhaps? It called and it called, its lonesome screech stretching out over the fog line and disappearing into the mist somewhere in San Rafael. It would take off from the tree top, soar across the fog bank towards Mill Valley, then back across again towards the bay. It would return, rest, and call some more. Finally, around 8:30, it took off for the last time. It headed towards Mill Valley, but this time, when it returned, it was followed by another hawk, one about two-thirds its size and with the pale gray and white markings of a juvenile red-tail. I don't know if adults accompany juveniles along their coastal migration; I'll have to look it up. I couldn't help but be reminded of a recent tough-love talk I had with Maggie about why she shouldn't return from her travels in Europe with only pub-crawls to account for. Our wayward wanderer, wildflower in the wind.

Who Can Kill the Combustion Engine?

There's a giant California wave undulating through the crowd of "change" fans with Henry Waxman the latest change agent to rise out of his seat with his arms in the air. We Californians are a rowdy bunch, and we like our transformations impolite, immoderate, sweeping. Fed up with an ineffective legislature, we got this wave going years ago with first a governor and now ordinary citizens turning state-wide propositions into the rule rather than the exception on the ballot. I'm not saying it's a good thing to have the temps running the office while the staff is playing finger flick football in the conference room, but you gotta love our pluck. Twenty percent of energy's power from renewable resources by 2010? Go for it! Reliable, high-speed public transit between San Francisco and L.A.? Bring it, baby! Help people acquire more alternative-fuel vehicles and fund research for renewable energy. Huzzah! Sure, only Prop 1A providing 10 billion dollars to plan the high-speed rail actually passed, but damn we're saucy (as well as sly for pinning Pickens' greed and sick of picking the scabs of our '00/'01 energy crisis. Make no mistake though, Props 7 and 10 will be back.) You can't help but wonder how deeply even California's nervy nature can penetrate the sludge that fuels the combustion engine of Washington, but it feels right that the state sueing the government to allow stricter greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles is the one to lead the way. So, the question is how, and this is where California needs to walk the talk to make Washington make change real. The internal combustion engine was the main driver of the industrial revotuion, yet no one can argue that it is the Frankenstein of progress. Revolution implies making something new out of something old, a retread, if you will. We all know it's not a new set of tires we need, but something on the order of discovering the wheel. It's got to be altogether other, and we're thinking the "Eureka!" state is the place to birth such innovation, am I right? It doesn't escape notice that it was the California Energy Commission who killed the electric car, but that was before we took matters into our own hands. Reading the morning's news accounts of Waxman's victory, a Californian can't help but shed a hopeful little tear of joy imagining the resurrection of the electric car (this time fueled by alternative renewable energy sources and who knows what better) and other utopia-mobiles (are you thinking of the Jetson space-car too?), hopefully building a whole new auto industry that will transform the economy with mass employment and wealth and well being for all. Indeed, sipping a latte before we head out to the Prius to get to yoga class, we're all dreaming of the new California power in Washington turning our freeways into paths of enlightenment where lightweight vehicles made of organic materials safely drive zen-like speeds of 40 miles-an-hour purring oceanscape music out of their tailpipes.

Auto-industry lobbyists might see Waxman's victory as bad news for Detroit, but they don't need to be such downers. If we get this right, the auto-industry will not only recover, it will be stronger, leaner, and healthier (kind of like it got a blue algae "seachange" spa treatment). It's the wave, the new wave, if you will, and you don't have to take my word for it. Even Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez saw it in describing the democratic party caucus decision: "You could almost feel the votes move in the room." Peace out.

Treading Water and Ding Dongs

I am always uncomfortable with those books that writers write about writing. Annie Dillard's A Writer's Life, Anne Lamot's Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. I read them years ago, and they each left me feeling like the guy who reads about weightlifting while eating a package of Ding Dongs or those people who take photos in museums and videos of aquariums. Writing this blog requires a good dose of humility. I think the assignment was to write about writing or to offer some insight into this luxurious form of on-the-job training. Part of my deal with the devil to lead a writer's life, it is his way of keeping me fit by making me tred water even though I'm exhausted from all the laps in the literary pool. But blogs need purpose, a niche, and here the Lady just wanders and thinks about things often unrelated to writing. I've always kept journals not because, like most people I want to record the moments that add up to a life that one day will unveil its meaning. I write them because I have a lousy memory and a very hard time processing my thoughts for speech. It now goes by the label Attention Deficit Disorder, which makes people like me and Malcolm and so many others for whom I now have great emphathy hate talking on the phone and cocktail parties and stay out of jobs like teaching, sales, and motivational speaking. All I knew when I started writing journals, and still know to this day, is that I have to wrestle every moment with my concentration, to filter through distractions while aligning my thoughts into a sequence that produces a coherent idea that never comes out right anyway when I say it. The process of thinking just takes too damn long. But with writing, I can take all the time I need to process the thought (and as an English major, it helped to have long stretches of time to reread or rewrite the line, the paragraph, the page.) It occurs to me that the Lady needs to stop wandering and find a niche. Except for the obvious and cheeky, I'm open to suggestions.

There. I forced myself to write about writing today and now I have a craving for chocolate.

Pour, Baby, Pour

David Benjamin, author of The Joy of Sumo and The Last Kid Picked (and other sure-to-be-discovered novels) and his better half, Junko Yoshida, E-in-C of EETimes print, made an overnight pit-stop here on their way from NewYorstraliapanadarisconsin. Benji was unusually quiet (Benji is NEVER quiet), but we assumed it was the globe trotting. Turns out, it was a touch of food poisoning from some old sushi. One wonders whether the same gurgly stomach and disquieting mood lingers after revealing in his weekly screed that a friend of a friend's daughter, "age 19, up and decided to write a book, went ahead and wrote it, and got published the first time out, just as easy as pissing down his leg." Now I know how food poisoning feels! Benji, who just finished the first edit of The Fenwick Wonder Boys, "believes that when one writer succeeds, even an upstart who's never paid his dues and has no idea of the real ordeal of writing and isn't even old enough to drink much less drink himself to death like Somerset Maugham or F. Scott Fitzgerald, all writers succeed." To Benji: please pass the bourbon, don't bother rinsing out the glass, and keep pouring til I have to take a piss.

Progress and a Prayer

Progress: Update on the tether and Malcolm's sense of stewardship: He's looking for community service projects. Whaaaat?

Prayer: he picked up all 347 pages of my manuscript, considered the plop factor, and said, "You know, if you shrink this down and bind it, you could call it a day!" (Please, please learn the value of "beginning, middle, and end." Before I die.)

Abstinence-Only Education: How's that Going for Ya?

(More posts to the ol' flog than usual while I conduct some research to fill in a vacuum created by a touch of writer's block.)

One thing about having kids well into your 40s, a friend recently confessed, is that those estrogen surges that keep you up at night coincide conveniently with 2 a.m. feedings, frequent visits from the night-terrored toddler, and childhood illnesses for which the wee hours favor fever, pus, and poop. For those of us who started families much earlier, we are grateful for these extra hours to catch up on our reading. More specifically, reading defined as a crash-course on the recent history of the world our late-parenthood peers optimized with advanced degrees, entrepreneurial pursuits, travel (that would be Jennifer), and career superhighways. When Mother Goose and Harry Potter displace literature, PTA meetings replace social-political discourse, homework supervision becomes your higher education, and harnessing the adolescent mind your only outlet for critical thinking, that's two decades of serious ground to cover. And so it was, between the hours of 2 and 5 this morning, I endeavored to bring myself up to date on an issue surprisingly relevant to this very topic: abstinence-only education. (You snicker, but just wait.) The recent issue of the New Yorker features an article by Margaret Talbot on the outcome of the red-state Christian paradigm to engender their youth with conservative attitudes towards sex and sexuality. In Red Sex, Blue Sex, Talbot does a thorough job of exposing the abstinence-only education myth. I have nothing to add. I'm recommending it here as one of the best cautionary tales of all time.

In those states populated by Christian evangelicals who teach abstinence-only education, the lesson appears lost on their daughters. Presumably to ennoble their heirs with the the promise of secure marriages, large families, and happy futures, abstinence-only educators inform the sexuality of their youth with messages of shame, sin, and foreboding. Consider the consequences once those young couples bring that particular brand of sexuality to the marriage bed. You got it: high divorce rates. Some of the highest in the land. (Ironically, teenagers who live with both parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not, the article reports. Can you say legacy?) It appears, unsurprisingly, that few evangelical teens get to realize the virginal marriage, though they do bring along their ill-informed attitudes (and presumably end up passing them on to their own sons and daughters.)

Consider some of Talbot's points (some written verbatim, some edited for space) based on findings in a government study of adolescent health known as Add Health, national studies, and interviews with family-law scholars and sociologists -- all cited correctly in the article:

*On average, white evangelical Protestants make their sexual debut shortly after turning sixteen.
*Evangelical Protestant teenagers are significantly less like to use contraception
*Only half of sexually active teenagers who say they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time.
*By contrast, sixty-nine percent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or other trusted adult consistently use protection.
*More than half of those who take a pledge of celibacy before marriage end up having sex before marriage, not usually with a future spouse.
*Communities with high pledge rates also have high rates of STDs
*In some schools where celibacy pledge rates exceed thirty percent, the special identity is lost and the formula collapses.
*Red-states populated by social conservatives have the highest rates of divorce and teen-pregnancy, while blue states had the lowest rates. Red states had lowest media age of marriage; blue states had highest. People in red states tend to marry earlier - in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than seeking an abortion. Yet nationally, women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later.
*The paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in her life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing. (Couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including education -- There's that pre-40/post-40 parenthood thing.)

You get the picture. One of the most fascinating parts of the article is an examination of the new middle-class morality. According to Talbot, middle-class moral teenagers"see abstinence as unrealistic and are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage, they just tend not to practice it because it puts too much at stake. They are tolerant of contraception and abortion but are more cautious about premarital sex. They want to remain free from the burden of pregnancy and the embarrassments of STD. They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about their nascent sexuality." Evangelicals might want to check that out.

Talbot goes on to review the drawbacks of both red-state and blue-state sexual attitudes and behaviors, and then she offers some well sourced recommendations. A must read for parents just beginning their families or those sending theirs off to face these issues on their own. Thankfully for them, I'm learning as I catch up on the culture, that the Internet, celebrity sex scandals, all-sex-all-the-time-TV, and sex-driven commercialism hasn't completely destroyed it while I took the stroller for a walk around the block.

Sunrise Yellow Noise

I have never been able to memorize a single poem either, except this one, which stuck the first time I read it decades ago:

Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait 'til judgement break
excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,
be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
interrupt this ground.

Emily Dickinson

Post script: where ever it was I first read "Ample Make this Bed" (Sunrise Yellow Noise seemed a catchier blog title), the last line read: "break this hallowed ground." That's how I memorized it and recited it all these years. In fact-checking my punctuation, the version I looked up along with every other source I went to after that, uses what reads less ironic (or balanced, if you like) in comparison.

Raptor-otica

Unless you're an avid birder or in kindergarten, the whole migration thing isn't exactly an academic turn-on. Ah, but then you've probably never been to Hawk Hill this time of year. And if you're still not interested, you're probably not a raptor geek. If you are, Hawk Hill is the most erotic biology field trip you'll ever take. Hawk Hill is the raptor geeks' porno convention, where we raptor groupies go to see Red-Tails, Coopers, Sharp-Shinned, Swainsons, Red-Shouldered, Broad-Winged, Kestrals, Peregrines, Merlins, and even Ferruginous Hawks, Rough-Legged Hawks, and the Golden Eagle, if we get lucky. Hawk Hill is the eastern facing promontory in the Marin Headlands at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It offers a panoramic view of the Pacific, the Golden Gate, San Francisco Bay, and the Richardson Bay all the way over towards Berkeley and Oakland. It's where the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory conducts its raptor watch every year. For everyday raptor buffs with the right pair of binoculars, raptor-watch is a veritable skin-flick of raptor migratory behaviors. For the hundreds of volunteers who work in two-hour shifts counting the population of the raptor species that find their way to Hawk Hill, however, it is a serious empirical exercise. Raptors are a bellweather species. Since they are at the top of the food chain in their ecosystem, declines in their numbers can indicate problems within that ecosystem. What makes Marin the go-to peep-show for raptor counting?

By the time many raptors reach the Golden Gate Bridge, some of them have flown from as far as Alaska and Greenland, Tennessee and Virginia (banding programs tell us). Once they arrive, they suddenly stop at the Golden Gate and linger for long periods of time like tourists in the 70s who discovered our sensuous temperate weather and penchant for hot-tubs. But instead of hot-tubs, the warm thermals and updrafts on the wind-facing hills entice these birds of prey to join the big raptor orgy. Well, it may look that way, but something more amazing (and scientific) actually is going on. Embedded in North American raptors' genetic code is not only the instinct to migrate to the southern hemisphere, but an orientation for the only two ways to get there if they've never been before: the coasts. Juvenile raptors have no imprinted route south. But they know if they get to the coasts, it will lead them to where they need to go. Now, birds prefer to fly over land, which they can do most of the way. Problem is that little gap between Marin and San Francisco counties. That they don't like. So, it's not actually an orgy among the raptors at Hawk Hill; they're all hanging out on the thermals playing truth-or-dare to see who takes the leap over the gap. Most do, though some don't.

Next year, I get to join the banding program for the raptor observatory. But for now, because I'm not allowed to deflect my attentions outside the writing discipline, I am enjoying my own little hawk hill peep-show right here on the Corte Madera ridge. Today, I spotted two red-tailed hawks, a juvenile red-tail, and a cooper's hawk. Talk about a turn-on!