On peaches

Peaches are not my favorite fruit, but a fresh peach in August with a little milk and sugar is a delight not to be missed. I mean, I like strawberries and cherries more, but a nice ripe peach is a very special experience. I say this because the peaches sold in the grocery store during the rest of the year are horrific–wooden, tasteless, dry, bitter. They look perfect, but they are only a simulacrum of a real piece of fruit. I won’t have them in the house. As a child we would often have a lug of peaches or pears in the kitchen during the month of August, so we ate fruit morning, noon, and night. They were so juicy that I had to go outside to eat the fruit as the juice would run down my arm and drip off of my elbow. The fruit was sweet and juicy and wonderful. My question is this: why can’t the local grocery stores do that today? With a few exceptions, most all the fruit is harvested green, so that by the time it reaches the stores it looks good, but it doesn’t taste good. Peaches and pears are particularly vulnerable, but when was the last time you ate a tomato or a strawberry that was actually sweet? The strawberries look big and beautiful and red, but they are dry and bitter with only the ghost of a ripe strawberry lurking off in the distance as if it were a stranger in a strange country. And I get it: stores do not want to throw away overly ripe fruit everyday. They need as much shelf life as they can get or their profits go out in the trash. They won’t take a risk and let the fruit stay on the tree as long as possible because if they all do the same thing, the consumer has no choice but to either leave the “green” fruit in the stores or eat crappy tasting fruit. I find this corporate policy to be excellent business, but a poor policy. I leave the fruit in the store because it’s not worth taking home at any price, but I get the feeling that many people do take it home and try to eat it, and then they don’t complain, which puzzles me. I guess that many, many people just accept the nonsense that corporate America wants to sell them. If grocery stores could sell sweet peaches during August back in the sixties, why can’t they do it now? If it were only a question of effort, I would think that better trucking conditions would make transporting ripe fruit over long distances that much easier, but I don’t think it is a question of effort. I think it is a question of the bottom line. I suspect that lugs of peaches were a hook which stores used to get customers in the door. I doubt they made much money on the fresh peaches, but as people came in to get the peaches, they would also buy a lot of other things as well. So the peaches were a loser to get people in the door and spending money. In the meantime, we are offered bad fruit, hard peaches, and no alternatives. The peach is such a simple fruit–fuzz, flesh, juice, sugar–a hedonistic delight when served ripe.

On peaches

Peaches are not my favorite fruit, but a fresh peach in August with a little milk and sugar is a delight not to be missed. I mean, I like strawberries and cherries more, but a nice ripe peach is a very special experience. I say this because the peaches sold in the grocery store during the rest of the year are horrific–wooden, tasteless, dry, bitter. They look perfect, but they are only a simulacrum of a real piece of fruit. I won’t have them in the house. As a child we would often have a lug of peaches or pears in the kitchen during the month of August, so we ate fruit morning, noon, and night. They were so juicy that I had to go outside to eat the fruit as the juice would run down my arm and drip off of my elbow. The fruit was sweet and juicy and wonderful. My question is this: why can’t the local grocery stores do that today? With a few exceptions, most all the fruit is harvested green, so that by the time it reaches the stores it looks good, but it doesn’t taste good. Peaches and pears are particularly vulnerable, but when was the last time you ate a tomato or a strawberry that was actually sweet? The strawberries look big and beautiful and red, but they are dry and bitter with only the ghost of a ripe strawberry lurking off in the distance as if it were a stranger in a strange country. And I get it: stores do not want to throw away overly ripe fruit everyday. They need as much shelf life as they can get or their profits go out in the trash. They won’t take a risk and let the fruit stay on the tree as long as possible because if they all do the same thing, the consumer has no choice but to either leave the “green” fruit in the stores or eat crappy tasting fruit. I find this corporate policy to be excellent business, but a poor policy. I leave the fruit in the store because it’s not worth taking home at any price, but I get the feeling that many people do take it home and try to eat it, and then they don’t complain, which puzzles me. I guess that many, many people just accept the nonsense that corporate America wants to sell them. If grocery stores could sell sweet peaches during August back in the sixties, why can’t they do it now? If it were only a question of effort, I would think that better trucking conditions would make transporting ripe fruit over long distances that much easier, but I don’t think it is a question of effort. I think it is a question of the bottom line. I suspect that lugs of peaches were a hook which stores used to get customers in the door. I doubt they made much money on the fresh peaches, but as people came in to get the peaches, they would also buy a lot of other things as well. So the peaches were a loser to get people in the door and spending money. In the meantime, we are offered bad fruit, hard peaches, and no alternatives. The peach is such a simple fruit–fuzz, flesh, juice, sugar–a hedonistic delight when served ripe.

On a hot summer night

There are times when the inspiration doesn’t come, but you still feel like you need to say something. Maybe it’s a little existentialist angst brought on by high July temperatures, but maybe it’s not. You would like to write about something profound such as the meaning of life, but this evening you get the distinct feeling that life is just so much chaos with no real point at all. You feel tired, but don’t want to sleep, you feel isolated with people around you. Your spirit is unquiet, cranky, out of place, demanding, uncaring. You can’t find anything on television which interests you, and none of the books you are reading seem the least bit appealing. There are nights in this life which make you question everything, but not of the answers satisfy you either, as if you don’t want to hear any of the answers, everything rings hollow and superficial. Is the heat that makes me feel this way? Is it a hot, sweaty night that which makes everything seem fragmented, discontinuous, and chaotic? Or do we live with a constant illusion of order and objectives within which we create meaning for lives which really have no meaning? Or am I only dreaming? Nothing that I’ve tried to write this evening has sounded either truthful or meaningful, so much clanging of bells and the banging of fireworks–nothing, in other words. Perhaps the existential crisis of waiting for Godot is a little worse in the heat when the sweat runs down your neck, the sun beats down on your skull, and the temperatures rise all around you. You feel that your crisis of identify, your reason for being, your objectives in life, seem hollow and empty like the foam on a beach or an empty fountain pen. What does it all mean, you ask, but nothing echoes off of the empty halls of the night. You look everywhere for answers, but the best you can master is a bunch of meaningless graffiti. On a hot summer night, the wolves howl in the distance as if they knew what they were doing, but their solitude only reconfirms your idea that man (and woman) spends their entire life pursuing objectives so that they won’t end up alone, listening to their own lies. Perhaps what is magnified on a night like this is the true and profound loneliness of all human beings. The story of Robinson Crusoe is frightening not because he is shipwrecked, but because he is shipwrecked alone. So the soul ambles by itself on a hot night like this, looking for a place where it won’t be alone. I have no idea if life has a meaning or not. It may be something as mundane as the number “46” or as complex as non-linear equations. I don’t think it is either of those things, but it may be something as simple as “other people.” There is no way to know. In the end, life has got to be a question of faith–no question about it. There is no chance that rational empiricism or cold cruel logic will ever answer any question that is really worth asking. And I often wonder if we are capable of even formulating the correct questions for understanding our world or if we just think we do. The night settles in, sweaty and warm, solitary and dark, answers are hard to come by, and just perhaps the thing that saves us from ourselves, our doubt, or failure, is sleep, which puts a stop to our nervous thoughts of infinity out on the edge of the universe.

On a hot summer night

There are times when the inspiration doesn’t come, but you still feel like you need to say something. Maybe it’s a little existentialist angst brought on by high July temperatures, but maybe it’s not. You would like to write about something profound such as the meaning of life, but this evening you get the distinct feeling that life is just so much chaos with no real point at all. You feel tired, but don’t want to sleep, you feel isolated with people around you. Your spirit is unquiet, cranky, out of place, demanding, uncaring. You can’t find anything on television which interests you, and none of the books you are reading seem the least bit appealing. There are nights in this life which make you question everything, but not of the answers satisfy you either, as if you don’t want to hear any of the answers, everything rings hollow and superficial. Is the heat that makes me feel this way? Is it a hot, sweaty night that which makes everything seem fragmented, discontinuous, and chaotic? Or do we live with a constant illusion of order and objectives within which we create meaning for lives which really have no meaning? Or am I only dreaming? Nothing that I’ve tried to write this evening has sounded either truthful or meaningful, so much clanging of bells and the banging of fireworks–nothing, in other words. Perhaps the existential crisis of waiting for Godot is a little worse in the heat when the sweat runs down your neck, the sun beats down on your skull, and the temperatures rise all around you. You feel that your crisis of identify, your reason for being, your objectives in life, seem hollow and empty like the foam on a beach or an empty fountain pen. What does it all mean, you ask, but nothing echoes off of the empty halls of the night. You look everywhere for answers, but the best you can master is a bunch of meaningless graffiti. On a hot summer night, the wolves howl in the distance as if they knew what they were doing, but their solitude only reconfirms your idea that man (and woman) spends their entire life pursuing objectives so that they won’t end up alone, listening to their own lies. Perhaps what is magnified on a night like this is the true and profound loneliness of all human beings. The story of Robinson Crusoe is frightening not because he is shipwrecked, but because he is shipwrecked alone. So the soul ambles by itself on a hot night like this, looking for a place where it won’t be alone. I have no idea if life has a meaning or not. It may be something as mundane as the number “46” or as complex as non-linear equations. I don’t think it is either of those things, but it may be something as simple as “other people.” There is no way to know. In the end, life has got to be a question of faith–no question about it. There is no chance that rational empiricism or cold cruel logic will ever answer any question that is really worth asking. And I often wonder if we are capable of even formulating the correct questions for understanding our world or if we just think we do. The night settles in, sweaty and warm, solitary and dark, answers are hard to come by, and just perhaps the thing that saves us from ourselves, our doubt, or failure, is sleep, which puts a stop to our nervous thoughts of infinity out on the edge of the universe.

On dreaming of a white Christmas

So I live in central Texas where it was 81F today on December 3rd. But there is no such thing as global warming. This creepy warm weather is starting to get on my nerves, and it just does not feel like either December or the holiday season no matter how many Christmas carols I hear on the radio. There is no chance that snow will fall in any form within a thousand miles of Waco, Texas between now and Christmas. As a child in Minnesota I was used to all kinds of inclement winter weather–ice, snow, cold, wind, but today I had lunch outside and drank a huge glass of ice-tea and lemonade. The weather is almost surreal. The leaves are finally falling around here, but the heat and dry weather make it seem more like summer than late fall or early winter. The squirrels were frolicking about the quadrangle without a care in the world, fat and sassy, but maybe a little warm in their luxurious fur coats–pecans were a bumper crop for them this year, as were all the different kinds of acorns. I put my coat back in the closet a couple of days ago, and there it hangs, abandoned, forgotten, forlorn. Warm winter weather brings with it a certain melancholy which is hard to describe–cranky, out of sorts, sad, irked. When a person lives outside the influence of the four seasons, one also lives outside the natural cycles of weather. I wouldn’t suggest that people need the cold to feel right, but the changing seasons offer a series of variations that bring variety and hope to the daily lives of people who live every year in a cycle of spring-summer-fall-winter. Warm summer mornings give way to crisp fall days which lead to the icy winds of winter, which will eventually surrender to moist warming breezes of spring. The changing seasons each offer something different, and when you are finally ready for a change, a new season brings something different, and you never get tired of the change. It would be very nice to have a white Christmas, a foot of snow dampens the sound of nature, lowers the temperature to levels that bite at the nose and nip at the toes. The season is not living up to expectations almost anywhere in the country this year, except for a few ski resorts of the northern Rockies. Maybe I should go there. I know I’m idealizing this all out of proportion: that high temperatures in winter save the nation millions in heating costs, traffic accidents are down because of no snow and ice, and towns and municipalities are saving oodles of money by not having to do snow removal. Their budgets overfloweth. But then again, what about the people that make their livings because it snows? The snow removal people sit twiddling their thumbs. the snow shovel guys have boxes full of brand new untouched snow shovels, and the fuel trucks sit idly by, full, but no deliveries. .Warm weather in December cuts a couple of ways, but it does not inspire the spirit. The grow shorter, the nostalgia grows deeper, and the soul yearns to feel a nip in the air, some snow on the ground, and the world taking its long winter’s nap, so all I can do for now is dream. “White Christmas” you ask? Written by someone who had to spend the holidays in Los Angeles and had no white Christmas.

On dreaming of a white Christmas

So I live in central Texas where it was 81F today on December 3rd. But there is no such thing as global warming. This creepy warm weather is starting to get on my nerves, and it just does not feel like either December or the holiday season no matter how many Christmas carols I hear on the radio. There is no chance that snow will fall in any form within a thousand miles of Waco, Texas between now and Christmas. As a child in Minnesota I was used to all kinds of inclement winter weather–ice, snow, cold, wind, but today I had lunch outside and drank a huge glass of ice-tea and lemonade. The weather is almost surreal. The leaves are finally falling around here, but the heat and dry weather make it seem more like summer than late fall or early winter. The squirrels were frolicking about the quadrangle without a care in the world, fat and sassy, but maybe a little warm in their luxurious fur coats–pecans were a bumper crop for them this year, as were all the different kinds of acorns. I put my coat back in the closet a couple of days ago, and there it hangs, abandoned, forgotten, forlorn. Warm winter weather brings with it a certain melancholy which is hard to describe–cranky, out of sorts, sad, irked. When a person lives outside the influence of the four seasons, one also lives outside the natural cycles of weather. I wouldn’t suggest that people need the cold to feel right, but the changing seasons offer a series of variations that bring variety and hope to the daily lives of people who live every year in a cycle of spring-summer-fall-winter. Warm summer mornings give way to crisp fall days which lead to the icy winds of winter, which will eventually surrender to moist warming breezes of spring. The changing seasons each offer something different, and when you are finally ready for a change, a new season brings something different, and you never get tired of the change. It would be very nice to have a white Christmas, a foot of snow dampens the sound of nature, lowers the temperature to levels that bite at the nose and nip at the toes. The season is not living up to expectations almost anywhere in the country this year, except for a few ski resorts of the northern Rockies. Maybe I should go there. I know I’m idealizing this all out of proportion: that high temperatures in winter save the nation millions in heating costs, traffic accidents are down because of no snow and ice, and towns and municipalities are saving oodles of money by not having to do snow removal. Their budgets overfloweth. But then again, what about the people that make their livings because it snows? The snow removal people sit twiddling their thumbs. the snow shovel guys have boxes full of brand new untouched snow shovels, and the fuel trucks sit idly by, full, but no deliveries. .Warm weather in December cuts a couple of ways, but it does not inspire the spirit. The grow shorter, the nostalgia grows deeper, and the soul yearns to feel a nip in the air, some snow on the ground, and the world taking its long winter’s nap, so all I can do for now is dream. “White Christmas” you ask? Written by someone who had to spend the holidays in Los Angeles and had no white Christmas.

On the Yankees

The Yankees were eliminated in four straight games by the Detroit Tigers. Four and out and into the off-season, pitchers and catchers will report to Spring training in February. I am both fascinated and repulsed by the Yankees as a team and as a sports phenomenon. If you had all the money in the world so you could buy all the best players, who would you get, and how could you possibly lose? Well, this year the Yankees didn’t lose very often, and they won the Eastern division. Baltimore pressed hard during the final weeks, but the Yankees can always find a way to win–the best hitters, the best pitchers, the best fielders in the league. I suppose that all leagues need their bullies, their high class hitters in their tailored uniforms and luxury club house. The Yankees create conflict, drama, suspense, romance, comedy, pathos in a continuous narrative of wins and losses, mostly wins, highly charged in a mediatic circus that runs 24/7 during the baseball season. Even when the Yankees lose and get eliminated, the media will make a bigger deal out of that than the fact that Tigers are going back to the World Series. In other words, even when they lose, they are a bigger story than the team that beats them. No matter how they play, they always get coverage from the national media, and they are the object of speculation and analysis, interviews and opinions, and the highlights always feature both their triumphs and their failures, making no distinction between either. When one of their players is injured, dates a movie star, hits for the cycle, or makes an ad for underarm deodorant, it’s national news. One gets a little tired of always hearing about the Yankees, who is playing well, who is going to disappear, who they are going to buy next. Today the Yankees were eliminated by the Tigers, but no one was interviewing the Tigers, they were listening to the Yankees manager talk about the loss. The Yankees are a good team, they should win, so it’s surprising when they collapse. I guess that’s why they play the games because you never know how they might turn out on any given day. The Yankees are supposed to be the heroes of the narrative, the knights that always slay the dragon, that always overcome the opposition. They always occupy the head of the table, get fed first, always get the girl, always ride off into the sunset at the end of the season. All of the rest of the players in the league are just a bunch of also-rans that carry the Yankees bags and act as patsies and victims for the heroic men in pinstripes. The problem with these expectations and hyper-narratives is that they don’t always jive with reality because in the end the Yankees are just men, fallible, weak, tragic, just like all the rest and deserve no more respect than any other team or player in the leagues. I imagine, though, the media is pissed because they won’t make as much money off of a non-Yankees World Series because now the New York area won’t tune in to see Detroit and St. Louis. The commentators will continue to discuss the Yankee “collapse” and wring as much blood out of that stone as they can even while the season goes on without their heroes.

On the Yankees

The Yankees were eliminated in four straight games by the Detroit Tigers. Four and out and into the off-season, pitchers and catchers will report to Spring training in February. I am both fascinated and repulsed by the Yankees as a team and as a sports phenomenon. If you had all the money in the world so you could buy all the best players, who would you get, and how could you possibly lose? Well, this year the Yankees didn’t lose very often, and they won the Eastern division. Baltimore pressed hard during the final weeks, but the Yankees can always find a way to win–the best hitters, the best pitchers, the best fielders in the league. I suppose that all leagues need their bullies, their high class hitters in their tailored uniforms and luxury club house. The Yankees create conflict, drama, suspense, romance, comedy, pathos in a continuous narrative of wins and losses, mostly wins, highly charged in a mediatic circus that runs 24/7 during the baseball season. Even when the Yankees lose and get eliminated, the media will make a bigger deal out of that than the fact that Tigers are going back to the World Series. In other words, even when they lose, they are a bigger story than the team that beats them. No matter how they play, they always get coverage from the national media, and they are the object of speculation and analysis, interviews and opinions, and the highlights always feature both their triumphs and their failures, making no distinction between either. When one of their players is injured, dates a movie star, hits for the cycle, or makes an ad for underarm deodorant, it’s national news. One gets a little tired of always hearing about the Yankees, who is playing well, who is going to disappear, who they are going to buy next. Today the Yankees were eliminated by the Tigers, but no one was interviewing the Tigers, they were listening to the Yankees manager talk about the loss. The Yankees are a good team, they should win, so it’s surprising when they collapse. I guess that’s why they play the games because you never know how they might turn out on any given day. The Yankees are supposed to be the heroes of the narrative, the knights that always slay the dragon, that always overcome the opposition. They always occupy the head of the table, get fed first, always get the girl, always ride off into the sunset at the end of the season. All of the rest of the players in the league are just a bunch of also-rans that carry the Yankees bags and act as patsies and victims for the heroic men in pinstripes. The problem with these expectations and hyper-narratives is that they don’t always jive with reality because in the end the Yankees are just men, fallible, weak, tragic, just like all the rest and deserve no more respect than any other team or player in the leagues. I imagine, though, the media is pissed because they won’t make as much money off of a non-Yankees World Series because now the New York area won’t tune in to see Detroit and St. Louis. The commentators will continue to discuss the Yankee “collapse” and wring as much blood out of that stone as they can even while the season goes on without their heroes.

On autumn

There is no autumn in central Texas. I have reached this conclusion after nineteen summers of disappointments. Day-after-day I hope that the air will cool, that the days will grow short, that the leaves will change, and that I might need to put on a sweat shirt to stay warm. These are all illusions that never come to pass. The temps go down a bit, but not really. All you can say is that instead of really hot, it’s just less hot than the day before. Cool, nippy air stays in Vermont and Wisconsin, afraid to venture south. The leaves don’t change on a live oak, but they do stay a creepy olive drab for the entire year before the tree starts shedding a bit in spring–creepy and unnatural. The rest of the leaves just turn a tired brown and fall off. Nothing either aesthetic or romantic about brown leaves. The days grow a little shorter, but before you know it, they start to lengthen again. Autumn never comes to central Texas. Even when it rains, the rain is still warm and has no relation to the arctic fronts that blow across the Dakotas or Minnesota. The endless heat of summer wears on the soul like a song you’ve heard too many times. It’s warm when you get up, it’s warm when you go to bed. This is the endless cycle of the boring hot weather where I live. The endless string of hot days leaves me with a profound sense of malaise and melancholy. Autumn was always a break from the heat of summer. The leaves would start changing to beautiful yellows, oranges, and reds. The lush green coats of summer are put away, and the festive, bright colors of fall are pulled out of the closets in celebration of the coming winter. A blast of color to announce that summer is over and that the icy winds of winter will soon be blowing through the streets. The changing seasons give life a sense of continuity. The rhythms of nature vibrate in these changes which reassure everyone and everything that the cycles of life of birth-life-maturity-death are always true and functioning. Living in Texas I often get the feeling that nothing changes, that there are no cycles of life, and that life is just one long decadent boring summer of ‘52 afternoon. There is no frost on the grass. The squirrels do not sleep away the dark hours of the cold winter. The ponds and lakes do not gracefully freeze over to wait for spring. One never catches a whiff of burning leaves. The bugs and mosquitoes just never go away. It’s as if autumn just never gets a chance here. Autumn is a festival of life that gives nature a chance to recognize that winter is close, but since winter does not exist here either, autumn is superfluous. So I give in to my nostalgia–candy caramel apples, strange snowy days, icy morning puddles, frost everywhere, dying tomato plants, bare trees. Autumn is a time of change, and change is good. It invigorates the soul and enlivens the spirit, clears out the cobwebs and cools all that summer sweat. Just how many days in a row of sunny and 95F can a person stand, anyway?

On autumn

There is no autumn in central Texas. I have reached this conclusion after nineteen summers of disappointments. Day-after-day I hope that the air will cool, that the days will grow short, that the leaves will change, and that I might need to put on a sweat shirt to stay warm. These are all illusions that never come to pass. The temps go down a bit, but not really. All you can say is that instead of really hot, it’s just less hot than the day before. Cool, nippy air stays in Vermont and Wisconsin, afraid to venture south. The leaves don’t change on a live oak, but they do stay a creepy olive drab for the entire year before the tree starts shedding a bit in spring–creepy and unnatural. The rest of the leaves just turn a tired brown and fall off. Nothing either aesthetic or romantic about brown leaves. The days grow a little shorter, but before you know it, they start to lengthen again. Autumn never comes to central Texas. Even when it rains, the rain is still warm and has no relation to the arctic fronts that blow across the Dakotas or Minnesota. The endless heat of summer wears on the soul like a song you’ve heard too many times. It’s warm when you get up, it’s warm when you go to bed. This is the endless cycle of the boring hot weather where I live. The endless string of hot days leaves me with a profound sense of malaise and melancholy. Autumn was always a break from the heat of summer. The leaves would start changing to beautiful yellows, oranges, and reds. The lush green coats of summer are put away, and the festive, bright colors of fall are pulled out of the closets in celebration of the coming winter. A blast of color to announce that summer is over and that the icy winds of winter will soon be blowing through the streets. The changing seasons give life a sense of continuity. The rhythms of nature vibrate in these changes which reassure everyone and everything that the cycles of life of birth-life-maturity-death are always true and functioning. Living in Texas I often get the feeling that nothing changes, that there are no cycles of life, and that life is just one long decadent boring summer of ‘52 afternoon. There is no frost on the grass. The squirrels do not sleep away the dark hours of the cold winter. The ponds and lakes do not gracefully freeze over to wait for spring. One never catches a whiff of burning leaves. The bugs and mosquitoes just never go away. It’s as if autumn just never gets a chance here. Autumn is a festival of life that gives nature a chance to recognize that winter is close, but since winter does not exist here either, autumn is superfluous. So I give in to my nostalgia–candy caramel apples, strange snowy days, icy morning puddles, frost everywhere, dying tomato plants, bare trees. Autumn is a time of change, and change is good. It invigorates the soul and enlivens the spirit, clears out the cobwebs and cools all that summer sweat. Just how many days in a row of sunny and 95F can a person stand, anyway?