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Round about we go….

 OK, here’s a question regarding driving behavior and roundabouts: Do you use your turn signal when entering one?

But before I get to that, let me just note that I love roundabouts. I find them civilized and much less prone to idiotic bullshit than your typical 4-way intersection. There’s no running red lights, and there are no pesky left turns which always gum things up. Studies a-plenty have demonstrated that roundabouts are not only safer (producing far fewer accidents per capita than standard intersections), they also move more traffic through an intersection in a given time than lights or the combination of four-way stops and relying on people to know the right-of-way rules will.

(On that last topic: People suck at right-of-way these days, and it’s only getting worse. What happens at YIELD signs always irritates me: if you have no sign and I’m sitting at a YIELD, what happens is YOU GO, and I wait until you’ve passed to do anything. What is not supposed to happen is you coming to a complete stop and waving at me to go. The same similar thing happens at 4-way stops all the time. If two cars arrive at the same time, the one on the right is supposed to go. What actually happens, if I’m the car on the left, is that the nitwit on the right starts waving at me to go. This shit drives me crazy and my approach is to ignore the waving and look the other way until they go. But anyway, back to roundabouts.)

I see more and more roundabouts in my travels these days. There’s been on in the village of East Aurora for years, and now there are several in the village of Hamburg (more on that below). I’ve even learned, via Facebook, that my old hometown of Olean has several roundabouts in its downtown! I’m sure this went over very poorly down there, just from what I remember of that city’s denizens: it’s a very conservative area that tends to be deeply resistant to change. Sure enough, a Facebook group I occasionally check out about Olean’s history had a thread recently about the roundabouts, and there was comment after comment to the effect of “I HATE THE ROUNDABOUTS!” And one fellow actually said my favorite talking point when people want to resist change: “Roundabouts work great in Europe, but they’re not for Americans!”

I always wonder just why such people think that “Americans are too dumb and/or stuck in their ways to do anything new at all, ever” is such a virtue, but again, I digress.

So, back to the roundabouts in Hamburg. There’s one right in the village core, and as we travel to Hamburg every week for a trip to a bakery there and to the Farmers Market in the summer months, we go through this roundabout more than any other. On this past Saturday we drove through there, and something odd happened. Here, via Google Maps, is the roundabout in question:

We were at the spot labeled B in the pic, heading west, into the village. Ahead of us was another car (who had already done a couple of confusing things, which made all this stand out in my head). This car was at position A, just about to enter the roundabout and therefore bear right, when they turned on their left turn signal. This is because they were heading for position C.

And I thought, “What the hell are they signaling for?!”

Now, I can see the logic, sort-of. If this was a 4-way intersection with a light or STOP signs, the driver at A would have been making a left turn, hence the left signal. But this is not a 4-way intersection! It’s a roundabout, and since it keeps traffic moving at all times and since each act of exiting is a right turn, I maintain that there is no need to signal at all when negotiating the roundabout, no matter which way you’re going. If you’re in front of me in a roundabout, it does not make any difference at all where you’re turning. There are only two possibilities in a roundabout: exit, or keep going around. Which one you’re doing at each exit point does not matter to me at all. There is nothing for me to do with that information.

What say you, folks? Am I all wet (and guilty possibly of crappy driving)? Should I be signaling my way into and through the roundabout?

(Note that this is only about this kind of roundabout, not the more complex ones you find in larger cities where there are things to contend with like lane changes.)

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From the Books: SEASONS OF A FINGER LAKES WINERY (On Geography in fiction and elsewhere)

 I’m reading a book right now called Seasons of a Finger Lakes Winery, by John C. Hartsock. The book is just that: a year in the life of a single winery in New York’s Finger Lakes region, a place where wine and winemaking have become a major industry and a vital part of the tourist trade there. I’ll have more to say about the book later on (I’m greatly enjoying it!), but for now I want to highlight this lovely passage that captures some of the geographical appeal of the region for me.

I’ve enjoyed the Finger Lakes ever since the first time I visited them as a not-quite-ten-year-old kid when we moved to New York, but over the last fifteen years or so that region has become my dream place. If I were suddenly gifted enough financial resource to live any place on Earth, I would live among the Finger Lakes: maybe on the shores of Cayuga Lake near Ithaca, or perhaps on Seneca Lake up by Geneva, or maybe along Canandaigua or even a small cottage on one of the smaller lakes, like Honeoye or Conesus. I’ve been reading a bit about the Finger Lakes, off and on over the last couple of years, as research and story-fodder for a story sequence that I’d like to write one day, and this passage is from one of those books.

In this passage, Gary and Rosie–the owners of the winery on which the book focuses–are taking a day off from their winery operations, which are on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, to visit a different winery, which is on the western shore of Keuka Lake. As the crow flies, the distance is maybe fifty miles. The driving distance is at least seventy miles, depending on route, and a lot of that is two-lane roads.

Here is our author:

From Ithaca they turned west to Watkins Glen. It’s one of the anomalies of travel in this part of the world that most through roads generally run north to south because the lie of the lakes is north-south. If you could go due west the trip might be cut to forty-five minutes. But there were those lakes, a mile to two miles wide and up to thirty-five miles long that you had no choice but to drive around. In certain place names you can detect references to a long-ago ferry, such as King Ferry. But the days when farmers ferried their teams of horses and wagons loaded with produce across the lakes were long gone. The result is that today, with the automobile, most of your travel is north-south, with occasional short jogs east-west between the lakes. This was particularly true because of Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, the two largest and longest of the Finger Lakes. But it was also true of the other Finger Lakes–Owasco, Skaneateles, Keuka (the crooked lake shaped like a Y), and Canandaigua. Then there are a number of smaller lakes. Glaciation had decreed the north-south disposition, and in losing the east-west orientation you lost your bearings–travelers bypassed the region. The result was that the necks of land between the lakes seemed forgotten by time. One could see it in villages such as Mecklenburg, where houses had weathered to a washed-out gray from lack of paint. This region is, after all, the home of the original Podunk (just northwest of Ithaca), which is little more than an empty crossroad.

This is all quite true. New York is in two distinct parts: a region that spans farther north-to-south than it does east-to-west, at the top of which is Lake Champlain and at the bottom of which is New York City. This region tapers toward the long, somewhat narrow region that extends several hundred miles east-to-west but is only maybe about a hundred to a hundred twenty miles wide at its widest. Here you find cities along the northern portion: Syracuse, Rochester, Batavia, Buffalo; and you also find smaller cities along what’s called the Southern Tier, the counties that border Pennsylvania: Binghamton, Elmira, Corning, Olean, Jamestown.

And for about 75 miles in the middle, between the two tiers, is a sequence of eleven long, narrow, and deep lakes formed millennia ago by the glaciers that spread over New York and then retreated. These lakes, the Finger Lakes, make it so that for a large chunk of the middle portion of the state, east-west travel means going north and then south again, or vice-versa. You can drive straight across the state from Jamestown to Binghamton, and you can do the same thing from Buffalo to Albany…but if you want to drive a straight line from Dunkirk to Cortland? It’s not going to happen, because of the lakes and their deep valleys. (And also the deep canyon of Letchworth State Park, which might be a Finger Lake that didn’t work out because the Genessee River broke through and remained a river, instead of filling its canyon.)

When you read about the growth of the wine industry in the Finger Lakes, one word that always turns up is microclimate: the individual lakes, by the nature of their length and depth as well as the depth of their individual valleys (there are places where the vistas above the Finger Lakes put me in mind of pictures I’ve seen of the lochs of the Scottish Highlands), create very small regions where the climate is perfect for certain grape varietals. That climate vanishes just a few miles away in any direction, but amongst the lakes? Especially the bigger ones? That’s where the lay of this relatively small portion of land makes magic happen.

With microclimate in mind, I would coin another word: microcharacter. Each lake feels like it is its own world in itself, and even though one lake is just a few miles from the next, there is always something rather unique about each one, and when you drive straight from one to the next, your course takes you up, up, up over a long rise–and then you crest and you know you’ve left that lake behind and are descending down, down, down to the next one. Every year when we travel to Ithaca we take one of these routes back at the end of the day, and since this annual trip is one of my most beloved rituals, it’s when we crest the rise from the Cayuga Lake valley and cross over into the Seneca Lake valley that I’m always saddest. That’s when I know that the day is over and that Ithaca is behind me for another year.

As a writer, this affect of the directions of the lakes is an important one as well, because this shows perfectly how geography affects character of a place. The nature of the land in the Finger Lakes region pretty much makes it impossible for an Interstate Highway to go through there: there isn’t even a north-south Interstate through the Finger Lakes, much less an east-west one. Interstate 390 runs from Rochester south, skirting the western edge of the Finger Lakes region; to the east, Interstate 81 runs from Binghamton to Syracuse (and beyond). Ithaca lies entirely off the Interstate Highway system, and it’s all the better off for that, I think. Could there be Interstates through the Finger Lakes? I suppose there could, but the question then would be…why? What would be gained from running, say, Interstate 286 from Owego northward to Auburn? Or a similar stretch from Corning, snaking between Keuka and Seneca Lakes, to I-90 someplace between Canandaigua and Geneva? And an east-west route between Geneseo and Cortland would be pointless, even setting aside the huge expense of constructing a series of really ugly concrete bridges across seven Finger Lakes.

Hartsock is right when he notes the “lost in time” feel of all the little villages in the Finger Lakes region, and he’s astute in noting why. One thing you notice when driving through the region is lots of train tracks: there used to be a lot of railroading through the Finger Lakes, but even that has slowed to a crawl, and some of the railbeds are being converted into walking trails. Again the geography shapes the region: the ever-ongoing speedening-up of commerce of the last century has largely left behind a region where the land itself acts as barrier to commerce. I do drive through all of those towns, not just the ones between the Lakes but the old rail towns north of them, with a sense that it’s a shame the world has left them in the dust, and a wish that they could capture a bit of their old prosperity again…but not too much. After all, if things get too rich, that’s when powerful people far away start looking at maps and seeing things like roads that aren’t there.

So, fiction writers (I’m talking about fantasy and SF writers here, who are working in made-up worlds) should think in terms not just of how geography affects things like commerce and trade and wars, but how geography affects a region’s entire character. What’s it like to be a young kid in a town that has gone several generations since the last trains ran? How does it feel to live in a village that was hewn from a rocky ravine more than two hundred years ago and watch the entire world heating up while your seasons remain pretty much the same?

And what’s it like to live in a place like that and make your living doing something that requires huge investments of time in a world that values investments of time less and less?

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Diggin’ Up Bones (#AmWriting)

 The other day I was looking for something completely different in my archives, and I found a post from July 2010, eleven years ago:

I haven’t talked about writing in a while, so here’s a brief note about it. My main energy lately has been going to the space opera project I’ve had in my head for seven or eight years now; it’s an idea that’s been kicking around and kicking around and kicking around, until I finally decided that hell, it was just time to start writing the thing. The entire long-form story involves two princesses from some planet who leave their world to take their first trip to the Galactic Capital, or something like that. But on the way, their starship experiences some [ahem] technical difficulties and they end up on a strange planet they’ve never heard of before.

All the set-up and such took me through eight chapters, all well and good. All the while I’ve maintained two files, in which I keep lists of my characters as I introduce them (or merely mention them), and lists of the locations I either use or mention. This way I’m not scrounging about later, wondering what star systems I needed names for, or who lives where, that sort of thing. I’m not one to make big encyclopedia-type profiles for my characters — my theory is that if the character’s favorite movie or preferred sleepwear comes up in the course of the story, my character will fill in the blanks when we get to that point — but I do want to be able to keep things straight.

So anyway, my two princesses have just arrived on Planet Whosis, which is ruled by A Guy, who has A Son.

And I don’t have names for any of them. Not the Planet, not the Guy, not the Son (actually, I do have a name for the Son), not the Possibly Evil Councillor, not the Leader of the Rebel Faction, and certainly not the Odd Looking But Extremely Lethal Weapon They Use On This Planet.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time I mentioned in this space the writing project that became Stardancer. At this point I didn’t have a title for that book, and I certainly didn’t have a title for the entire series! I didn’t come up with The Song of Forgotten Stars until not long before I had to have the book ready for publishing. At this point I had my main characters: Tariana, Margeth, and Lt. Rasharri, and not much else. Tariana’s name was actually Tarina at first, but I didn’t like the way that sounded so I added the extra vowel syllable. I seem to recall modifying Lt. Rasharri’s name in some way, but I don’t recall exactly how.

At that point I had the basic scenario down, but one set of character relationships didn’t work at first, so I had to make some significant changes, making Prince Joskin not the son of the actual mad King but of the son of the mad King’s brother…and at this point I had no idea that Master Gharanas, who was just a guy who showed up at one point where I needed a hot-tempered young man to burst angrily onto the scene, would stick around as the story’s single most important male character and eventual love interest to Princess Tariana.

Now I’m writing the fifth book in this series, this many years later, and looking back at the very beginning feels…interesting. It’s like looking at something that’s familiar but isn’t quite a memory, if that makes any sense. And to think that the main idea for The Song of Forgotten Stars actually came to me ten years before that….

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Something for Thursday

 Here’s a deep cut from a classic musical! Singin’ in the Rain would be my favorite musical of all time if not for My Fair Lady, and like all the greatest musicals, it is packed with songs and numbers, some of which are classics in their own right. But there are several other numbers in the film that aren’t as well-known, for one reason or another. One of these is the “Beautiful Girl Montage”.

This number appears in the film just after the silent film industry has been absolutely rocked by the first “talkie”, The Jazz Singer, which is forcing all of the studios to adapt to the new sound format. Among other things, the arrival of sound in motion pictures kick-started the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, which this montage illustrates. But after a brief montage in which several songs (“I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling”, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll”, and “Shall I?”) are mashed together (mash-ups aren’t at all new!) in a pretty frantic, zippy sequence before the tempo slows and we settle into a single number: “Beautiful Girl”.

In the film, “Beautiful Girl” is a number that is being shot for a new movie by the studio that our main characters work for. It’s kind of an odd-duck of a number that features exactly none of the main leads, except for Debbie Reynolds, who is in the number only as one of the “girls” who looks adoringly at the guy who sings the song (who is only seen in the film long enough to perform this number).

As for “the guy who sings the song”, he’s an actor named Jimmy Thompson who seems to have had very little by way of a career. He had thirteen credits, the biggest one probably as one of the crewmen in Forbidden Planet. He would show up in another Gene Kelly musical, Brigadoon, but for his one big number there, “I’ll Go Home With Bonnie Jean,” his voice was dubbed. Come to that, I don’t know if he was also dubbed for “Beautiful Girl”, in which he seems to have a bigger, actually impressive voice.

“Beautiful Girl” is not one of the more popular numbers from Singin’ in the Rain, but I’ve always loved it as a bit of scene-setting and world-building, with its 1920s aesthetic. It doesn’t really move things along other than to provide and in-universe reason for Debbie Reynolds’s Kathy Selden to be in the same place as Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, but so what? I’ve never been one to insist that the plot must be advanced at all moments. Plus, I love some of the wordplay in this song and it’s swinging tune.

Here’s the “Beautiful Girl Montage” from Singin’ in the Rain.

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Tunnelin’

 When I was a kid and my mother’s family still lived in the Pittsburgh area, we would obviously go to visit on occasion, which meant a lot of driving through that city. If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh, it’s a very hilly place, and when it came time to build expressways through the region, this involved the construction of tunnels, some of which are quite long indeed. There are two very well-known tunnels around Pittsburgh, one through the Fort Pitt hill and another through Squirrel Hill. The video below takes you from the Fort Pitt Tunnel all the way to the Squirrel Hill one.

We made this drive a lot when I was young. My grandmother and my uncle lived in one of the eastern suburbs, which made this stretch of road a necessary jaunt when we went downtown and back again. Later, when my sister was in college in Pittsburgh, we’d still make this drive occasionally. Those tunnels were always very exciting. We drove through the Squirrel Hill tunnel a lot more often than we did the Fort Pitt one, but that Fort Pitt Tunnel is very exciting if you’re northbound, because as soon as you emerge from the tunnel and into the light, there before you is the entire city of Pittsburgh, just across the Monongahela River. Then, if you’re on your way to Monroeville and points east, you cross the river and turn right, following the Monongahela a bit longer before the river turns away to the south. Eventually you get to the tunnel under Squirrel Hill.

Pittsburgh is an exciting town to drive through, as this video shows. I like that there are videos like this! I’ve no idea when I’ll get to Pittsburgh again, but for now, this video brings up some happy memories.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

 There’s a quote by composer Gustav Holst that strongly resonates with me:

If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you’re in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be ‘a success’. If he’s a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he’s capable.

Those words come to mind as I consider the work of American Modernist composer Charles Ives. For much of his life his music was completely ignored, and thus he was able to toil on his own, following his own interests and go where his own ears took him. By the time his work began to gain some renown, Ives had produced some of the more shockingly original music of the 20th century, all by following his own guiding light. Ives lived to the age of 79, but he stopped composing almost entirely in his early 50s, for reasons that have led to much speculation. He did live long enough to see his work gain acceptance, though, as he finished out his working career not as a musician but as an insurance agent.

Ives is always an interesting listen, though he unquestioningly, unhesitatingly, and unapologetically puts unusual demands on the listener. This was very much a part of his character. He once said “I don’t write music for sissy ears,” and he responded to another audience member’s distaste for a dissonant work with a caustic rejoinder: “Stop being such a goddamned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?”

I haven’t heard a great deal of Ives, but he is always fascinating and, indeed, moving. His work stands outside most of the traditions of his time: he is certainly not a jazzman, though he does incorporate popular songs here and there, nor is he exactly an atonalist, though he does experiment with alternate tonalities and things like quartertones.

The piece I feature here is a chamber work called Central Park in the Dark, and it’s one of Ives’s early works, written when he was just thirty-two. It starts as an atmospheric piece of tone-painting, but it becomes more and more raucous to the point of sheer cacophony, and we hear snatches of popular song and general noise. Of this piece, Ives himself wrote:

This piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night….The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness – interrupted by sounds from the Casino over the pond – of street singers coming up from the Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days – of some “night owls” from Healy’s whistling the latest of the Freshman March – the “occasional elevated”, a street parade, or a “break-down” in the distance – of newsboys crying “uxtries” – of pianolas having a ragtime war in the apartment house “over the garden wall”, a street car and a street band join in the chorus – a fire engine, a cab horse runs away, lands “over the fence and out”, the wayfarers shout – again the darkness is heard – an echo over the pond – and we walk home.

This is what Charles Ives was composing in 1906. By way of context, George Gershwin was only eight years old at this point, and Igor Stravinsky was still seven years away from premiering the work of his that would hit the musical world like a lightning bolt of intense Modernism, The Rite of Spring.

Here is Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives.

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Seven Four Twenty One

 As another Independence Day arrives, I find myself increasingly unable to really understand what’s happening in America. I find myself these days oddly optimistic about the future of humanity, but a good deal less so about my country.

Here’s a piece I just saw for the first time this morning. It was written last September, before the election, but you don’t have to change many words to make it relevant for this day, today, this morning.

From “A New American Manifesto”:

From the People of the United States of America: From time to time in human societies, things get so bad with the governments that we set up that we have to take a step back, stop being citizens of that government and just be basic humans again, loyal only to the primary needs of humanity. This is one of those times and it’s only fair if we are going to take such a drastic step, that we first explain why. We owe everybody that.

First of all, we start by taking for granted that nobody’s life should matter more than anyone else’s. Everyone should have the right to live their life without people oppressing them. At minimum everyone should have the right to live. Nobody should be prevented from moving around freely or doing whatever they want as long as they are not causing harm to someone else. More than that, every human has the right to seek out things that bring them joy.

These are basic things that humans need.

The whole reason we create governments is so that communities can come together and agree among themselves to set up structures that make sure that ALL the humans among them have access to these fundamental needs. If the structure that they set up stops functioning properly, if it becomes corrupted, if it stops serving the needs of the people, then it is critical that those humans be allowed to dismantle that structure in order to build one that does a better job. They need to be allowed to create new structures that are better at keeping them safe and happy.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Not unlike a similar missive, written in ink on parchment, and signed two hundred and forty-five years ago by a gathering of wealthy white men in Philadelphia. Later, some of those same men would gather to bang out some ideas for how to go about forming a more perfect union. Imperfect men, imperfectly representative of their new nation, doing incomplete work in forming a nation that somehow always feels…incomplete.

Well, that’s America, and we do still have it in ourselves to make a more perfect union. 

This is a harder and harder country to love, but hope still flickers. A little, anyway.

Flicker on, America. Flicker on….

(Comments are closed on this post)

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

 Maybe I should just start calling this feature “Something for Friday”…but then I’ll start screwing it up and it’ll just become “Something for Friday (Saturday edition)”, so why not stick with what’s kinda-sorta working…

…anyway, here’s a song by Taylor Swift, because I think Taylor Swift is awesome and so should you. This is a recording of one of my favorite songs of hers, and one of her first big mega-hits, though this particular version is the newer version that she re-recorded this year in her ongoing bid to reclaim control of the rights to her own music. (It’s all a mess, but apparently some other schlub owns the rights to her first bunch of albums, but as she is the singer-songwriter of the songs, she retains recording and performance rights for the songs themselves, so she’s hit on the elegant solution of simply re-recording all her old material anew.)

Here’s “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift.

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“I’d rather die living”

 I suspect these little controversies have been erupting all over the United States over the last few months, as the COVID-19 vaccines have rolled out. My local version had a prominent member of the Buffalo Bills, a wide receiver named Cole Beasley (who is quite a good player indeed) opining quite loudly that he will not be getting vaccinated, because of, well, reasons. As his reasons are almost entirely transparently goofy anti-science BS, his entire position ended up boiling down to amorphous concepts like “Freedom!” and “Personal choice!” and “Respect my opinion!” and, in one very strange utterance, “I’d rather die living.”

I’m not going to prosecute the scientific case against the vaccinations, because in my estimation there simply is no such case and I’m not going to pretend there is just for the sake of balance. (And if you intend to use my comments section to make your own anti-vaccine arguments, don’t bother. Moderation is on and no such comments will be published, nor even read past the point it takes me to recognize the game.) I am, however, interested in this notion of “I’d rather die living”, because it represents a deeply strange way of looking at life.

I’ve heard various versions of this sentiment all throughout the pandemic, and in some contexts, even farther back than that. A particularly weird individual, an Ayn Rand-loving Objectivist, with whom I occasionally crossed swords on a particular geeky forum before I realized how far out the dude was and stopped engaging entirely. But at one point he was holding forth on the “metaphysical consequences” for not thinking logically (i.e., conceding the superiority of every one of his opinions), though he could never exactly say what those “metaphysical consequences” might be. I do recall him quoting a line from the movie Braveheart, in which our hero, on the eve of his public execution, says “Every man dies, but not every man really lives.” Seems to me the same kind of notion as Beasley’s “I’d rather die living”.

Here’s my question: I got vaccinated, just as soon as I was eligible to do so. Does this mean that I’m not “living”, in Beasley’s head?

Seriously, what does that mean?!

The idea seems to be an expression of a particularly annoying brand of American individualism. I’ve seen a lot of the past 18 months in America as yet another in a lifelong (and longer, actually) sequence of events illustrating just how spectacularly bad Americans are at thinking collectively, in terms of being a part of a community and the idea that a society has moving parts, and those moving parts are people. The very notion of doing any one thing that you might not want to do, on the basis that by doing so you will assist others, is anathema to a great number of people in this country. I mean, sure, they’ll do voluntary stuff, because that makes them feel good. They’ll donate to charities and attend the Basket Raffles to benefit some cancer victim, but suggest that we all contribute via our taxes to a nationally-administered health program that meets the healthcare needs of the people at significantly less cost per capita and ends the possibility of bankruptcy for people who get sick? Well, that is unacceptable.

We’ve seen this all over the place in the last year: You can’t tell me not to go to a packed theater! I’m an American! I have freedom!

You can’t tell me not to eat at a packed restaurant or get takeout only! I’m an American! I have freedom!

You can’t tell me not to go to a baseball game with forty thousand other people! I’m an American! I have freedom!

You can’t tell me not to wear a mask! I’m an American! I have freedom!

And now?

You can’t tell me to get a vaccine! I’m an American! I have freedom!

Just imagine that: thinking that your freedom to refuse a vaccine to beat a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 of your fellow citizens as of this writing is somehow more important than protecting the lives of those people in the first place.

To me, this represents a pretty sick version of freedom, and it’s pretty clear to me that there are limits beyond which protecting life is a finer goal than preserving certain “freedoms” that aren’t exactly existential in nature. In fact, I believe the ways that life might be made better through collective action greatly outweigh the benefit of any abstract “freedoms”.

I don’t mind giving up my freedom to drive my car 90mph whenever I want.

I don’t mind giving up my freedom to drink a bottle of scotch and then go out driving.

And those are just the obvious examples. I don’t mind giving up my “freedom” to quit my job tomorrow, because the benefit of showing up to work and doing a good job far outweighs the exercise of my “freedom”.

And you know what? I’m still living, in every sense that matters.

By choosing to accept wearing a mask and by getting vaccinated against COVID-19, I wasn’t choosing to not live. I think I was choosing to live more than Beasley is: I’m choosing to do my part in squashing this pandemic, and hopefully bring about the ability to do the things I love all the sooner. And while doing those things, it’s not like I was sitting in some sort of ascetic withdrawal from society. We went out, we went for walks in the woods, we went on long drives, we got takeout food from favorite restaurants. We watched movies, had fires in the backyard, read books, walked dogs. We adopted two cats. We listened to music. We lived.

For Cole Beasley’s “I’d rather die living” notion to be true, then the converse would also have to be true: By choosing the mask and social distancing and vaccination, I chose not to live. Beasley thinks his existence is somehow richer than mine, simply because he’s taken the ignorant path against vaccination. And I find that notion…stupid and insulting.

You know what I’ve been doing, Cole Beasley? I’ve been living. And part of that has been helping to ensure that other people live, and that the people who need me and rely on me will still have me.

I’ve been living. And I’d rather continue living.

Because show me a person who died living, and I’ll show you a dead person.

I’ll get there soon enough, I guess. But for now, I’m not going to elevate it in some weird way.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

 Returning to the work of Black American composer William Grant Still today, and yet another work by a Black composer that makes me think, “Why have I never heard that before?” It’s a work of American Impressionism called Kaintuck, and from what I’ve read it’s intended to express Still’s own feelings and impressions of mist-covered blue grass meadows of Kentucky. It’s not a long work, but it packs a lot of thoughtful lyricism and introspection into its roughly ten minutes. We open with the solo piano playing a motif of leaping intervals, and then the orchestra comes in and meanders thoughtfully with the soloist before fading out with just the soloist again. It’s quite an evocative, wonderful work. So, why have I never heard this before?

As with most such cases, I’m afraid I have a pretty good idea what the answer is…or at least, what it partly involves.

Here’s Kaintuck by William Grant Still.

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