The next g-generation

We were sitting at a gate in the San Francisco airport, waiting for our flight back to North Carolina.

In the seat next to me was a sixytish guy, about my age. I wasn't thinking anything in particular, when I noticed the man's late-teens daughter approach him to ask a question. The girl had an open laptop in her hand, and turned the screen toward her dad.

"Do you have, like, the link to that thing?" she asked

"What are you talking about?" her father replied.

Overhearing this, I was, like, almost lol in the next seat.

I didn't hear her reply, as dad arose and they stepped over to the mother's seat and got into a conversation about something or other. The fact that I find such profound humor in this indicative inter-generational communication is probably why Pat calls me "Mister English person" when she detects my occasional grammatical, syntactic, or definitive hair-splitting.

I suppose we are witnessing, during these times of cataclysmic change (such as David Stockman has documented) the inevitable Deformation of precise English, even as our parents before us had noticed it, and their parents before them, and so forth and so on all the way back to Chaucer or Cicero or Keynes or Krugman or someone like that.

In other news, pronouns are bad for you. I have figured out that they are the diabolical, insidious, imprecise source of, like, multiple myriads of miscommunications. More about that later, dude.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

The Path

After I had passed through the dark time

I came around a bend

and there ahead of me

was a bright path.

Then I knew my Creator

had brought me through,

and there would be goodness ahead.

I could see the light

scattered among those shadowy branches.

I turned and looked behind me,

down at the trail already trod

and knew the brightness

had been there all along,

though the morning fog

had obscured my view.

The light is there as I see it,

and yet it was there when I could not.

Thank God I knew

and now I could go on.

Glass half-Full

Resurrection

If the Creator of the universe

were to write some drama verse

and construct a four-act play

the great story to portray

just so the truth we would not miss

surely, would it be this:

He came down to worldly life

to deal with our human strife,

but we rejected his advance,

didn't give him half a chance.

We crossed him up instead,

but he rose up from the dead.

Now his great story's told 'round the world

to every person, boy and girl.

Haight Ashbury

At Haight Ashbury yesterday

we walked through

an I be blinkin thinking

was it raunchy like this

from the beginning?

From 1967 love revolution summer

to devolution sleaze street bummer

the magic's gone

maybe puff the dragon's on

methadone

or did the neighborhood fall into some

huckster hole?

Go ask Alice; I think she'll know.

Was descent from hippish sniffin

to hypish hawkin a given?

like destiny, always there to begin with

in the you-cant-put it-off-forever

headache stems and seeds,

Or did somethin fundamental change between then

and now?

I guess Life magazine left town

when the turn-on tuned out and dropped off;

the radicals crashed, their rose-colored dreams

trashed.

After the serious communards got their fill

of castles in the air and starshine dreams,

after they flipped out on fickle fellow-man,

fed-up with hangers-on and turn-offs,

they flew the coop.

No more roll-another-one-my-friend;

you gotta take this rough life by the scruff, and fend.



But then we passed into a Park or Golden Gate--

it was some everland beyond the Haight--

where there is music of the ancient human soul;

there breezes blow and children go.

Their parents' call out gentle admonitions

that seem to banish old perditions.

And I hear trusty horses as they carousel around,

while mamas give loving nudges in the playground.

Cool breeze beneath sequoia boughs then reassured my soul,

after we had passed through Alice's raunchy rabbit hole.

Glass half-Full

DOMAin

When two fit together as one

and love

from beginnin to end,

and they mend

each other's hearts

and do coitus

with their intimate parts

then all the world be better place,

'cause two take care

each other, make less burden

for society,

and good variety

when twenty-three wi twenty-three

make forty-six:

aint no tricks

'cause they get their kicks

wi each other

stead o spreading it around

all over town--

no EsTeeDee no Hiv

you see?

And when them two fit together

in most intimate parts

with beatin hearts

like screw and nut,

gut to gut.

Then later

when bambino slide out

wi joyful shout,

then life goes on.

be it daughter or son.

They make domain:

DOMAin.

Ask me again and

I'll tell you the same.

Glass Chimera

Fundamental Economic Growth

Here's the working stiff's explanation of why our economic recovery is in slow mode, and why we'd be better off to get used to it. My theory is that the days of 4 and 5% annual growth in Western nations are gone, for, probably, at least a generation or more, if not forever.

The following rabbit trail of rumination began when I read, yesterday, the article in last week's The Economist magazine entitled Where did everyone go?

In that article, Mr(s)?. Free Exchange--whoever that person or entity is--starts the column with Milton Friedman's comparison of the business cycle to a musical string that is stretched and then is plucked to produce a sound:

"How far the string is plucked determines how much it springs back; similarly, the depth of a recession decides the strength of recovery."

This analogy resonated with me, because I spent years and years of my life exploring the musical possibilities of plucked strings on guitars, fiddles and pianos. But even more productive, economically speaking, than those vibrato years of musical exploration were my twenty-five or so years of what seemed like high-multiplier growth-generating employment: building houses for people (. . .although those first three years of building stuff, back in the early '80s, were spent constructing an S-shaped bridge around Grandfather Mountain, on the Blue Ridge parkway.)

Anyway, back to The Economist, which is a very thought-provoking analytically opinionated publication that my son introduced me to several years ago, about the same time that I bounced out of construction work and into more age-appropriate pursuits such as maintaining apartments and writing novels.

The aforementioned article, Where did everyone go, said this:

"The plucking (a string) model presumes that, after a recession, the economy returns to an underlying trend of growth. . ."

That presumption may have been sufficient for statistical analyses of past phases of expansive American economy. But not any more. The long tails of 20th-century bell curves now morph into new bell-jar graphs, representing 21st-century demographics and new value-added activities, if you catch my graphical drift. And here's why: the fundamentals are changing.

Back at the plucked-string analogy, a "fundamental" in music is the "underlying" vibration that defines all other modes of string activity. Let us say, for instance, that a stretched string on a piano, of a specific length/diameter will, when plucked, produce a vibration of 440 cycles per second; it is thereby named an "A" note, which is the fundamental sound heard when the string is plucked.

Economic activity in the developed world is now morphing from an "A" to a "C," which stands for "Could be trouble ahead."

As for The Economist's analogy based on uncle Miltie's plucked string. . . the fundamentals, or underlying trend, of economic growth are determined by:

"the supply of workers, capital, and technology."

Well, in my presumptive working-stiff naivete, I am going to identify here a fourth component of growth. It is an underlying element--the constancy of which the economists unwittingly assume-- because it has always "been there": natural resources.

Here is what is changing, big time, during our age: Every conceivable expense for gathering natural resources from the earth is going up, up, up.

I remind us of this simple oversight because of this: our basic level of natural resources extraction, and use of the earth itself, is the most fundamental change of all that is happening during the present age of human development. Retrieval of planetary resources will go down, down, down, as extraction difficulties and costs go up, up, up.

We are at planetary peak oil production. This is, of course, debatable, but I happen to believe that we are at planetary peak oil production. For more about that, go to http://www.peakprosperity.com/discussion/81169/peak-oil-science-and-evidence-please-help.

Here's another factor that will slow our growth: disappearing topsoil. We have depleted it, and it will take a long time to nurture our earth back into organic productivity.

Another problem is: minerals. We're having to go deeper and farther afield for every mineral we pull out of ole mother earth, especially the you-know-what one, the one we put in the car-tank every once a week or so. Tar-sands, rapacious open-pit mining and deepwater drilling-- all those intensifying recovery processes required to recover shale-oil or other minerals--they just add more labor and capital expenses. Getting oil out of the ground will never ever again get easier or cheaper.

Another thing is: lumber.

Wood. Here's the one resource about which I have some sweat-equity credentialed expertise.

During the 20+ years that I spent building houses, here is what I noticed, project after project, day after day, week after week, year after year:

The miners pull minerals out of the ground.

The manufacturers form the minerals into concrete block, insulation, plastic pipes, metal appliances, shingles, etc.

The masons lay up the concrete blocks into a foundation.

The carpenters nail wood onto the foundation to construct a house.

Where does all the wood and minerals for this process come from? The earth itself.

But the earth itself is depleted by past abusively extractive processes that generate, albeit along with useful products and projects, millions of pounds of industrial and consumer waste and climate-altering emissions. And processes for gathering these natural resources are injuriously invasive at a more-and-more precious cost, both economically and environmentally. There are multiple issues associated with these extractions that will inflict sore points of contention among political groups for many generations to come. Bottom line: they are another impediment to growth, and will result in slow development of diminishing resources, which translates to slower growth. Witness the XL pipeline controversy. This kind of thing between Greens and Chamber of Commerce types is not going away, but here to stay. Part of the territory.

Finally, the elephant in the room is wage inflation in developed nations, a major factor in the "workers" component of growth determinants listed by the Economist. The long and short of wage inflation is this: American and European workers have priced themselves out of the now-worldwide labor market. Hence. . . slower growth for us, if any growth at all is possible on a yearly basis, while developing nations do most everything cheaper, and using emergent technologies.

So, hey America! Good luck with all that. Better get used to it. Time for slow-growth innovations--work better and smarter. The days of 5 and 6% growth in developed nations are over--gone with the horse and buggy, the icebox, the VCR, cassette tapes, maybe even the desktop computer.

I know I'm all over the map with this essay, but so is the brave new world: all over the map.

And tha's what I'm talkin about.

Glass Chimera

Rwanda 19 years later

Somewhere in the world today, it's time for gifts to be opened, because the twelve months of Christmas just keep rolling on and on. This year, Samaritan's Purse presents more than 6 million gift-boxes to children on every continent. Probably every day of the year, a few of those presents get opened, somewhere.

Last week the celebration of gift-giving was in Kigali, Rwanda. My daughter, Kim, was there; she works for Samaritan's Purse, the distributor of yuletide surprises that extends generosity everywhere across the world, especially in developing nations. Kim's UNC photojournalism training launched her into a career where she could share these moments:


It may not be five golden rings inside the box, or a partridge in a pear tree. But whatever the surprise booty turns out to be, my guess is that the immediate benefit of each shoebox-gift being opened will be a pound or two of joy.


That's quite a change among the children in Rwanda, compared to the class warfare and genocide that was happening there nineteen years ago.


I would not suggest that Operation Christmas Child is responsible for ending the tribal strife that tore Rwanda apart in 1994; that peacemaking task was surely accomplished by the good people of that country who made some good decisions and then acted resolutely upon them. But now Christian givers throughout the world, whose presents were prepared last fall, are happy to have contributed some fun items there-- toys and toothbrushes, jump-ropes, dolls, crayons, cracker jacks and God-knows-what-all, along with the good news of our Creator's presence among them on this troubled earth.

Glass half-Full