The Big Closet and Father's Day 2025

 Over my adult life I’ve occasionally or maybe frequently had a feeling of being buried under too much stuff. Things are cheap now and self-cheapening by extension. While it’s easy for material to accumulate, I’m not so great at culling things, so up it piles - books, clothing, kid toys, kid art, school projects, tools, old marine safety markers, music and recording equipment, CDs, duplicate photo prints, camping gear, extra dishes, you name it. The piles occasionally get compacted and pressed into closets and crawl spaces until those get full. 

Kid stuff in particular is hard to sort through, especially after a wrenching family separation, and especially in a house that is full of it in every corner, drawer and cupboard. The stuff isn’t useful. The space it takes up isn’t useable. There is a tightness in the chest whenever some of it spills out. 

Parking a dumpster under a window and pushing it all out, even if it was an option 23 miles offshore, wouldn’t really work for me, because I do want to pick out the 2% which has meaning and pass it to my kids for them to keep or toss. I also want to move on emotionally, which I’m about as good at as I am at prioritizing what to keep. 

I pull out a box of multi-category family objets d’vivre and freeze. I pick up a ceramic elephant from the top layer. Several questions hit me like a paralyzing dart. What do I do with it? How long will it take to decide and then actually get it out the door? How many things like that in each box? How many boxes? Is there any Jameson’s left? 

Aunt Belle’s has two very large room-length closets in one bedroom. This should be a good thing but in my case is an emotional challenge. I’ve made a few dredging and mining efforts in the past, but only gotten a foot or two in through the strata of fractured family geology. 

In truth, I’ve made a lot of progress. I’ve curated several boxes of things for one child and felt really happy to both spare them the sorting process and to provide unique and precious bits of their life that they can now enjoy. I’ve also toted a good few contractor bags and boxes of stuff out of the room and down the stairs. 

I found one print of my younger two on a jungle gym. The 4 year old is hanging and swinging and the one year old is looking at the camera perfectly resembling pictures of my mother around that age. 

It was a small moment that came and went, probably without me noticing, but I would pay thousands for 5 more minutes in whatever time that picture was taken. 

Digital Segregation and Erasure of the Individual

"...the way the hammer shapes the hand." Jackson Browne

I watch people who are very dear to me work to better understand themselves and improve their life experiences. Common approaches are some combination of professional assessment and counseling along with self directed research and engagement with various online communities. There are diagnostic terms and criteria. There are labels. I see these providing comfort for that sense of being out of kilter, not feeling settled or well fitted to one's circumstances and surroundings. If it can be named, sorted and boxed it can be tamed. 

At the outset, I question whether the sense of being a cat always on the wrong side of the door, always being in some way out of alignment, being otherly may actually be an inherently human and healthy force, the creative tension in life that moves us to strive, create, struggle, question, change. I question whether the labels and criteria help us on our way or perhaps divert us from embracing our unique struggles to be well-adjusted, organized, emotionally stable or whatever. It is probably both. 

What I am really writing about today is a different kind of categorization. The one which is king in the age of data harvesting and analysis. Twenty or so years of social media presence in our lives has fundamentally transformed how we see ourselves and each other. Tech giants make their billions by observing behavior, eye movements, clicks, scrolling and stopping, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not aware of. These galaxies of information are useless without categories to sort the data into in order to advertise us and manipulate emotions during elections and international conflict. Categories are not complicated. Gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, red, blue. They can be chopped finer and finer, but ultimately must be narrowing and limiting in order to be useful for data analysis and getting us to buy supplements or make political donations.

Despite the promise of the internet to expand and connect, in the age of King Data, our interactions and perceptions are narrowed and limited as we engage with technology - the way the hammer shapes the hand. We find community based on shared experiences of our categories. More importantly for Meta's and X's revenue streams, we also find villains based on categories. We've learned to self-segregate based on demographics because that's what is relentlessly programmed to us in our social media engagement. 

Since so much of our social engagement is now through these channels, the more natural and organic interactions with others, say at a party or gathering or just in passing on the street are now parametered by those same categories instead of what we see and hear right in front of us. Even though we step away from the phone/tablet/computer screen, we're still looking through it. We don't need Google glasses because we're already there. 

I've been dismayed by our culture's transformation to this point where we validate experience and validate people not by their individual character and life experience, but solely by the groupings and affiliations that fit the commercially useful recognized categories. In this way, vast swaths of our life experience and our collective selves are erased from our cultural landscape. 

I find it impossible to have a conversation about tough issues of the day or in history because the category filter is the only one given air time. Anything that doesn't fit the 21st century boxes into which human lived experience is sorted doesn't exist. 

And there again, the hammer shapes the hand. Tech companies don't simply have the power to fine tune content in order to sell our eyeballs to advertisers, they have the power to narrow, to segregate and to control our current lived experience. 

We want to hold onto the sense that we are unique and in charge of how we see our world. The reality is that Alphabet, which makes this platform available to me, knows what I'm thinking better than I do. Perhaps I should have asked Gemini to write this for me. Also in on the truth are political operatives, disinformation factories and governments around the world. 

This whole enterprise is about to take a giant leap forward as Palantir prepares to create a centralized database of personal information at the fingertips of the most powerful government in the world. It won't be tech competitors taking turns spinning us around blindfolded, but The One. 

Spring 2025, Matinicus - Somehow or other, it came, just the same

 It's a lot to get here to the island. Logistics, weather, cost, fear of getting stuck, fear of having to go back. The year round island community has dwindled, and friction escalated as fewer individuals take on more responsibility. The power system I rely on in order to write this has been overdue for collapse, and been coaxed, band-aided and willed to continue generating power, with success most of the time and appliance-frying brown-outs at other times. 

The flow of society is away from such unique and challenging locations and in the direction of a closer Applebees and a possibly false sense of predictability. 

When I'm away, I become slowly seduced by the convenience factors, the perception of safety and the handy grocery stores the mainland offers. Every year, I feel a resistance to the first trip out where I get the wood stove going with newspaper that's lost combustibility due to being in a dank unheated house for 6 months, and charge the water system, hoping for the pump to come up to pressure, and then hoping for silence rather than fissing of water escaping from where it should not, such as into wall or ceiling cavities. There are prayers for trucks and lawnmowers starting after dormancy, and devotional gratitudes for battery chargers and starting fluid. 

The seasonal get your-ass-out-there anxiety syndrome peaks with the launch of Compass Rose and the first push of the ignition button. Because I am, frankly, an idiot with boats and diesel engines, I'm always terrified of the engine not starting out of spite or a mean sense of humor because it knows I'm an idiot. Then it does and part of me is certain that at some point, one of the gauges will get way out of range and something will start smoking or leaking or an alarm squealing, most likely when I'm halfway across the 18 or so miles of Atlantic Ocean between Spruce Head and Matinicus Isle. 

Despite all my efforts to mentally manifest some problem into existence, here we are. We've set two boatloads of lobster gear after an easy first crossing. The apple tree where the kids swung and played is a busy community of chickadees, warblers, hummingbirds and bumblebees. Rhubarb pie from the back yard, crabmeat and lobster from our work this morning, upgraded with chive from the dooryard. My limbs are sore, but it's a good sore after months of office work where the brain is the sore part. 

I'll take the sore limbs, thank you very much. .

Lost in translation - Puerto Rico

 "Quick! What's the number for 911?" - Homer Simpson.

Megan and I were having a break from our none-too-strict agenda at the Rincon lighthouse, watching first the surfers, then the rain, then again the surfers at Domes Beach. Domes gets its name from the long dormant nuclear power domes nearby. After having visited a cultural center in Adjuntas, and seeing how they were able to boot the United States military out from bombing the shit out of Vieques for target practice, it appears to me that Puerto Ricans have something of a talent for recognizing and pushing back on bad ideas.

After picking up a couple of remedies for ankle-biters at the farmacia, and groceries for our get-together with friends tonight, we stopped in at Me Salve across the parking lot from Econo to look for a proper salad bowl.

I've been trying to show respect by using my muy pequeno Spanish, at least in greetings and thank-yous, and, in the process of that and looking at signs and magazines everywhere, to learn or recover some of the 4 years of Spanish I attended classes for during high school. I think my grades were mainly 'present.' Actually, I did pretty well, but the intervening 4 decades and change may have cost me a letter or two.

While checking out at Me Salve, I asked 'Como se dice' and showed the cashier the bowl. She said 'bowl?' I re-asked "en espana, es 'Bowl?'" She and someone stocking clothes racks chuckled, and she said 'I'll check on that translation.' 

After this good-natured cultural exchange, Megan looked it up with señor Google, who informed us that 'Bowl' translates as 'Bol.' So concludes today's language training. 

White Truck Tale of Woe

 I believe in Hell. With the capital H.  It is a place where the innocent must deal with the evil creations of automotive engineers. This subset/splinter faction of the engineering profession has the mission of placing as many impossibly small tabs, clips, bolts and retaining rings in the most unreachable, unseeable and unwrenchable places possible, and creating a gauntlet of steel and plastic torment for all those whose life choices brought them to this desolate and cramped Forum of Absolute Suffering. The most comfortable truck repair yoga pose for me was on my back in the driver's side footwell with my feet in the door pocket.

Perhaps I'm overdramatizing, and thank god Orris saved me from creating a practice fire for the Matinicus volunteer fire crew, or going all Jack Nicholson and putting my splitting maul first through the windshield and then through every other surface on my once beloved Silverado 2500 HD. I don't golf, so the maul would be the next best thing. Better really. 

The actual problem presented when Megan went to move the truck in order to mow the lawn. The shift lever was flopping about in all positions at once, none of which would result in the vehicle moving off that patch of lawn. 

After my routine assessment of everything I've done wrong in life which brought me to this place, and my usual self-blame for simple mechanical failures, I ordered a new shifter cable from NAPA. Henry, my mechanically gifted nephew, was coming out the next weekend and agreed to install it. 

The report back from Henry was encouraging with one exception, which is that he didn't get the new cable properly entwined around Satan's own support bracket, resulting in the new cable breaking apart when he shifted into drive. 'Support bracket' is a little misleading in that this is a sturdy metal silly-straw-shaped contrivance bolted to the upper and inner surface of the steering column in a place one cannot see or reach into. The DIY videos mostly skip this part because it does not cause people to like and subscribe. 

After a good bit of diligent procrastination, I ordered a second cable from NAPA and watched videos, including Henry's where he stuck his phone into the upper under-dash orifice to conveniently identify the proper routing of the cable through Lucifer' silly straw. 

I started fresh around 7 a.m. and promised if I wasn't making progress by 9, I'd just find something else to do. Aside from the really hard parts, almost every step of the process of removing the broken cable and installing the new new one showed me the malevolent face of pure evil from automotive engineers. Each fixture presented a fresh set of tests of my fingers and my sanity and my ability to be upside down for lengthy periods with flakes of rust falling into my mouth while I was trying to utter long strings of profanities.

The cable comes in an upper and lower segment and there are no re-do's when connecting them. Once joined, three bishops and a cardinal could not annul the union. 

And so I pushed the halves together. Pretty much. By pretty much I mean I couldn't get them apart, but things did not look right. There was much fiddling with plastic locking collars and other elegant horrors created by said engineers. When I thought I had things connected, I tried to start the truck with no luck. I assumed the battery was dead from sitting for 2 months, which would prove incorrect. 

For whatever reason, the automotive engineers also had great concern about 35 pound truck batteries floating up out of their snug sockets, and so placed a retaining bolt in a place requiring a very long socket wrench extender. Thankfully, this is where I called Orris for such an extension.

He and I wrestled, jumped and used a battery booster go-go box thing to try to start the truck with no luck.

Then he took a look at the not perfect union between the upper and lower parts of the cable and suggested disconnecting the cable at the steering column end. With that piece of mechanical insight and a good bit of shoving and growling, the ends and all the elegant plastic horror pieces went together properly, at which point the truck shifted into park and started right up. 

I like to find meaning in these struggles and I suppose this time it is the collective wisdom of Henry, Orris and I against the dark forces of automotive engineering. 

Henry and the Red Truck

 The other ancient truck in the island fleet is a bright red 1995 Ford Ranger, which hadn't moved since some time last September or October. My crude diagnosis was a bad fuel pump or wiring or fuses because if I fuffed in a good charge of starting fluid, it would fire until the ether was gone and not a moment longer. I couldn't hear the buzz of the fuel pump. I had replaced that component once before, but not so long ago in the mileage life of a truck limited to a habitat of a 1x2 mile island. There it sat until this morning.

I woke to what sounded like the thump of sliding barn doors if they're not latched during a windy day. Looking out the northerly bedroom window to my wind-gauge, which is a large horse chestnut tree off the end of the house, I saw no movement. I started to fall back asleep, but heard more shuffling and was concerned that I'd left the shop door open, inviting raccoons- after they finished looting the bird feeder- to rummage through my pantry totes. 

Descending the stairs at 5:50 a.m. on a Sunday, I see Henry walking from the mini-bike he salvaged and revived off the beach over toward the red truck with his prospector head lamp illuminated. Henry is my nephew, and he and his iPhone can pretty much figure out anything mechanical. I went outside to offer coffee and a warm place to take a break, but didn't stay long owing to my bare feet on a morning in the high 30s. 

I checked in a couple more times in between making coffee, starting the diesel heater and getting a fire going in the wood stove. Henry quietly mentioned relays and went about putting the multi tester into various crevices and places mechanically minded persons know about. He also had pieces of wire stripped at the ends and talked of hot-wiring this or that component to figure out if the problem was upstream or downstream of the pump, connector, relay or other things Henry has insight into, but which, to me, are just pieces of the unknown. 

At one point, I looked out the kitchen window and saw him bending over the engine and then taking a sudden small jump upward. "Did ya get bit?" "Yeah. I think I'm hot on the trail though." Looked like. 

After coming indoors to plug his phone in, he pulled up the wiring diagram for the truck and explained in a language I've no fluency in about the issue being upstream of the fuel pump relay. I saw lines and markings on the diagram, but could not follow. 

After a bit more fiddling, I joined him again at the engine compartment. Henry was trying to figure out some element of the chain of wires and components, but then opted instead to wrap his sweatshirt sleeve around a wrench and place that across 2 poles or bolt ends coming off the fuel solenoid. This created an impressive display of sparks immediately prior to the 'careful what you wish for' moment. 

After coughing a few times, the engine started. With great enthusiasm in fact, owing to a stuck throttle linkage, and then roared loud and high enough to possibly disturb the shore birds on the far end of the island. There was also a luxurious cloud of white smoke engulfing the truck and ourselves such that it was more like the early stages of a spacecraft liftoff than a small pickup truck waking up. Henry moved very quickly to shut off the ignition key. He does not tend to overstate things and suggested in his steady way that we "probably want some WD on that."

The culprit turned out to be a different relay which Henry left on the seat of the truck where I couldn't miss it. All of this at a very early hour on a Sunday with no fanfare or trace of self congratulation. That is Henry. 

April and an Old Truck

 It’s a gradual awakening. For me and the house and various machinery as well as the lobstering business I insist on staying in contrary to any common sense.

Here at 33 South Road, Matinicus Isle, Maine, the Easter vibe comes not in pastel or fluorescent pinks, oranges or yellows, crocuses, daffodils or forsythia blossoms, but in dirt-crusted black. 

The truck Megan paid $800 for in 2014 is now in its 11th season here. Hundreds of trips have been made up and down the island with as many traps as would stay stacked on the bed. The black Mazda pickup truck has had its share of malfunctions and breakdowns, but picture tightening battery terminals after lugging the battery up out of the basement, tipping some fresh gas in, sweet talking the dodgy starter until she comes to life and then watching the black beauty rise up out of the dead grass as the tires are inflated. That is resurrection. 

The lawnmower obliges, though it feels wrong to just about need mittens to cut the grass. Buoys get inspected for weak bridles and cleaned prior to this year’s fluorescent blue and orange coat. A few need my initials and license number re-branded into them.

So it goes with me as well. I really do my best to adapt to the mainland, but once I’m boots on the ground here I realize how much I need the crazy that comes with this remote island; how much I need the raw connection to the environment; how good it feels to be picking up dry broken limbs off the yard and warming myself with them a little later by the stove. I realize how much I cram down and out of sight the suffocating sensations of the suburbia that the mainland coast is becoming. As wonderful as it is, it’s usually not working for me by April, and I don’t consciously realize why I’m such a drag. Then again in November, the fear of cold man winter will have me grateful for a comfy nest. 

Thinking further out than just the yearly migratory cycle, this place reminds me I need the wildness and impracticality, if for no other reason than to remember how showing up here one April long past felt like being released from confinement. I felt there was adventure ahead in life and I was right. I often do not feel that way these days, so it’s good I came out and fired up black beauty one more time in April.