Why does he do the things he does?
Why does he do these things?
Why does he march
Through that dream that he’s in,
Covered with glory and rusty old tin?
Why does he live in a world that can’t be . . .

--What Do You Want of Me, The Man of La Mancha

This is the song that has been going through my head of late, since I end up listening to it every time I ferry my daughter to and from school, ballet class, voice lessons, her SAT tutor. Wherever. We listen to it (well, she sings along, so I listen to it) since she’s thinking of auditioning for that part in the up-coming school play. She’s rehearsed it so often, though, that it is now lodged in my mid(-to-middling)-term memory. Which probably accounts for why the words came on thick, accompanied by full orchestration, last night when I went to my son’s ninth grade parental mixer.

Because—what a bunch of bluster that was! Twenty-five bucks a plate, endless wine refills and hot hors d’oeuvres from roving people-in-waiting, main course of roast beef—medium—and blackened rosemary chicken, two kinds of salads, four kinds of dessert, and plenty of adult puffery, all at a former Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s ex-abode. A stone’s throw from CalTech and light year’s away from my income bracket. Enough to get my pipes working on that other La Mancha tune: ”The Impossible Dream.

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*So, let’s say that your Mom and I asked you if we could smoke marijuana with you and your boyfriend.”
“Well—Nooo. I mean, that completely would not happen.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because . . . you don’t smoke marijuana . . . do you?”
“Yeah, but . . . if we did?”
“Well, then . . . no. . . “
“Why?”
“Because . . . we don’t smoke marijuana.”
“So, does that mean that you aren’t on the bus and we might be?”
“Well . . . ”

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This year my project is to help grow my kids. After a couple of years in which they toiled in a foreign country on their own (submerged in a different culture, trying to negotiate a radically different set of cultural rules, saddled with an alien set of meanings and expectations), we are together again. And, although, they have done an amazing job—adapting, expanding, persevering, diversifying, blossoming—they are eagerly welcoming my active participation in the next stages of the process.

A major part of that will be rounding out the rougher edges of their education. Yet, within the first few hours into it, I am realizing that this might not be as easy as, say, fielding a lazy fly ball in shallow left. After all, our first conversation has touched on shared marijuana tokes as exemplar, bus rides as metaphor, teens opening up about their private behavior. Life upside down and me adrift inside it.

Ha! This might be much harder lifting than I had anticipated.

Imagine that.

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When I was younger I believed that dreams came true
Now I wonder
Cause I have seen more of dark skies than blue
Now I wonder

-- Chris Isaak, I Wonder

I’m not as grey a guy as ol’ Chris, quoted above. But still, traveling around this great globe of our’n gives pause. In so many ways, it sets a man (and probably a woman) to a-wonderin’.

One thing that I wonder as I wander is this: what if life wasn’t about order?

I know, our bodies – to select but one immediately available counterexample – are self-contained packages. Bundles of nerves, integrated compilations of sinew, carefully crafted architecture of bone. There are highly complex chemical processes that all follow logics which are deducible and predictable employing the highly-honed methods of science. Physics explains some of how it all holds together; bio-chemistry perfectly accounts for others. Medical and psychological and sometimes even sociological theories make fine sense and are occasionally sustainable. They all offer evidence (if not proof) of fundamental order.

Or do they? I wonder . . . 

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Andy Warhol, perhaps the first person to be famous for being famous, is credited with the idea that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

We are not yet at that point. (Yet). But the way that the world is evolving—unflaggingly plugged in, exponentially commercialized, stimulatory kinetic, endlessly poly-tasking, audio-visually peripatetic, increasingly standardless, intellectually uncritical, morally undiscerning—we are likely to get there. And maybe even faster than in 15 minutes!

In fact, looking at the way that celebrity operates of late, it is likely that Warhol’s 15 will become transformed into something less. Less than minutes.

Possibly seconds—though perhaps even nano-moments. Whatever those are (but coined here to capture the light-speed evanescence of contemporary renown).

It is less inevitable, I would reckon, than rational. Seeing as how we have such limited attention spans. 15 seconds is probably longer than can hold most of us in place. Besides, there are simply too many of us now. And for more and more of the many of us, we now seem to crave more attention from a world that:

1. has more outlets for expression;
2. more means for attention-securing; and
3. less concern about the types of attention it is willing to accord us.

Call it the O.J. phenomenon . . .

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… And I’m never going back to my old school -- Steely Dan, circa 1974

It’s not, as Thomas Wolfe would have it, that you can’t go home again, it is more like: why would you want to? Me? I was of the Fleetwood Mac generation, so on the subject of return my view was always more resolute, more defiant, possibly even more – dare I say it? – philosophical. More like Lindsay Buckingham, vowing:

been down one time
been down two times
and I’m never going back again

Of course, words are cheap. It is deeds that are determinative. And, caught now in the midst of a deedly act: here was I in the flesh, with a carload of baggage. History incarnate—in the form of a couple of blooming kids—and the woman who had helped me make them (!)—their mom by my side. The woman I had met, two decades or more, right here – right outside this very front windshield. Inside that building . . .

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Pop cult lore lisps its way through my hippocampus.

And all I was doing was passing through a small village in the southern tip of New York.

But Sufferin’ Succotash! You know how life is—I’m sure you can relate to the moment. There you have the perfect cumulation—all the stars aligned, top-o’-the-world kind of vibe going—taking a casual cruise up Route 9 (target: Adirondacks - with hills full of that Grand Ol’ American Pasttime-supporting lumber) with your meaningful other(s); in and out of a string of folksy Norman Rockwell-pastiche towns. Vertical wooden two-stories, a church steeple jutting heaven-ward every three blocks, an American flag atop the stationhouse wafting in the late-afternoon breeze. No hurry, no worries. One of those Boston tunes on the box, punctuating your pathway:

Well I’m takin’ my time, I’m just movin’ on
You’ll forget about me after I’ve been gone
And I take what I find, I don’t want no more
It’s just outside of your front door.

. . .  and then the Daffy Ducks of the universe descend on you like a blight of bad credit. Blotting out the sunlight; darkening the horizons; distorting the crystalline images of your world. They—the Daffies, not the Norman Rockwell images—come barrelling down the two lane blacktop in their metallic-blue Hyundai SUVs and slam into you rear end, jarring you out of your middle-American, pre-post-industrial paradise.

Or they slam into the rear end of someone else who slams into you, thereby jarring you out of your pre-post-industrial paradise.

Making someone do their daftardly work for them.

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