Traffic!

It's time to play...

Where's that traffic?

To play, using the comments feature of Hermits Rock!, all you have to do is correctly guess the city and state of the traffic you see in the picture below! Good luck!

posted by Greg at 6:55 PM

Traveling Mercies

Growing up ascetic, it is still difficult for me to acknowledge the very real failings of spiritual people. It was scandal, I thought, when a teenaged woman at our church got pregnant not because she would soon be a single mother, but because her pregancy showed that she was having sex at all. About the time the baby was due the girl disappeared, and I didn't know where she had gone, but a couple of months later, she returned, not pregnant anymore and with a real baby on her shoulder. She did not, however, remain much longer at our church. It was certainly not the case that none of the other teenagers were having sex, but it was understood that neither sex, nor cursing, nor alcohol, nor rebelling, nor any of the other things that teenagers are prone to do vigorously were ever to be the topics of conversation, and if you were me, then you not only avoided talking about them, you also avoided doing them as earnestly as possible. I had not read Augustine, but I nevertheless count his old age as that which most informed my youth; time is still to tell whether his youth will ever inform my old age. For that matter, nor had I read Anne Lamott, in part because her own book of confessions, "Traveling Mercies," was yet to be published. If it had been, I probably would have approached it with skepticism, if I approached it at all. However, to read it at arm's length would have marked the folly of my youth, so I say now that it is a lovely meditation on the power of God and spirit to act in the life of one very screwed up woman, herself a single mother and former alcoholic, bulimic, and all around basket case, as she grows up sometime after her thirtieth birthday. Lamott's is a memoir driven not by Lamott herself, though she is the single mother whose story is redemption, but by those people around her to whom she gives warmth and spirit in her writing. Out of a generous, poor old women who sits in the back of her church mumbling, "Yes, Lord, thank you, thank you," to her best friend from high school, to her son, Sam, Lamott listens and finds the still, small voice that Elijah heard in the back of the cave after the thunder and the wind. Indeed, learning to listen to God by shutting oneself up is what Lamott reveals has been the most difficult part of her spiritual growth, but also it is what she reveals as the most important part of it. As she puts it in one essay,

I listened to the sound of the ocean over the sound of my own breath. I used to lie on beaches stoned and think I was hearing was the sound of the universe breathing. Where else can you hear this? Hardly anywhere, although sometimes crickets have the same wonderful sound of infinity, of something lightly sawing away.

In moments like these, it's only when Lamott catches herself listening that she realizes how much she boxes herself in, and sometimes, her God out. Most important of all, though, is that she acknowledge the fact that, when she was young, she was stoned when she listened. Lamott's is a book not of pithy holiness, but of holiness that has been discovered and, finally, cherished. So she writes of her dreadlocks, of her several boyfriends; she describes her son as sometimes acting like "a total little shit"; she is impatient, sometimes caustic, overly critical and often funny. What she does not write about, however, is how awful everyone else is, how unsaintly, impious, and unChristian they can be; in other, perhaps not-quite-exact words, Lamott is not ascetic. Thank God.

posted by Greg at 3:57 PM

metrosexuality

Metrosexual (MET.roh.sek.shoo.ul) n A dandyish narcissist in love with not only himself, but also his urban lifestyle. here they are: hugh jackson, ian thorpe, david beckham and who could forget marky mark and the thinking woman's hunk: viggo mortensen...who is not only an actor but a speaker of danish, an artist, a photographer and poet... according to the guardian Metrosexual man · The "metro" refers to metropolis, and in the 1990s "metrosexual" meant young men with money and an interest in fashion and beauty, who lived within reach of a city · They were thought to be a sophisticated, deeply narcissistic breed, heterosexual, aged 21 - 35 and afraid of ageing. Metrosexual icons were David Beckham, and the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe · Metrosexual man is now described as "any straight man who has a salmon-pink shirt in his wardrobe". But he is less self-absorbed and vain. His two priorities in life are to grow old with his partner and have happy, healthy children · He struggles to take on feminine characteristics to adapt to the new gender equality which sometimes confuses him · He describes himself as caring, nurturing and open-minded and is unlikely to refer to himself as "sexy". Although he fancies Kylie Minogue, he is not interested in affairs · He strives for a perfect body and approves of male beauty products, although not plastic surgery · He feels good grooming gives him a head-start at work · Metrosexual man has little interest in military hardware or heroism and wants his friends to support him "unconditionally" so i wear linen in the summer and wool slacks in the winter. i am too embarassed to admit how many pairs of shoes i have...let's just say that 7 of them are european and one of those is red. at the suggestion of my hairdresser i've started waxing my eyebrows...because now men have many beauty products as women...we've come a long way baby! my hairdresser, whose a 40 year-old guy named royer, and refers to himself in the 3rd person every once in a while, digs my bones...and i'm fine with that. so how metrosexual are you?

posted by Jeremy at 12:57 PM

The Cynic

When I moved to Iowa in 1999, I had little idea how much the presidential campaigns could affect the Iowa summer. My first month here I drove to the State Fair in Des Moines to see the famous Butter Cow and do the kinds of things one does at a State Fair: eat meat on a stick and watch clowns heckle crowds from the dunking booth and ogle piglets demanding teats from thousand-pound sows framed by photographs of Iowa pork chops that dwarf pork chops from anywhere else. Most prominently that day, though, walking the fairway I saw all seven-feet of Bill Bradley, dwarfing everyone with whom he shook hands. Indeed, these summer days, politics looms. Sunday afternoon Kathy and I drove with friends to Ottumwa, Iowa, infamed in M*A*S*H as the hometown of Corporal Radar O'Reilly (and only an hour's drive from Riverside, where Captain James T. Kirk will soon be born), to see the CSPAN taping of Senator Tom Harkin's "Hear It from the Heartland" forum with Dennis Kucinich, Presidential Candidate. Every campaign season in Iowa begins early because the Iowa Caucus takes pride in being the first major step on that long, dusty Road to the White House. First is not a position New Hampshire concedes easily, so every four years the dates of the next election's primary, and soon after the next election's caucus, drifts closer and closer to New Year's Day. As a result, so too does the campaigning. Our friends are excited Kucinich campaigners who frequently extol his virtues and even hosted a picnic in June which he attended. Kathy and I missed the picnic, so when they asked us to join them in Ottumwa, we happily agreed. It's high time, we decided, to finally become interested in the presidential nominations. It's an important election, after all, if only because it will be what defines the real opposition to the juggernaut of simpletonian ideology that has gripped the Republican party since the President challenged, "You're either with us or against us!" There is a real possibility that the opposition will be no opposition at all, and there is a likelihood that it will descend to its own sort of simple-mindedness, as when one woman exclaimed to Kucinich, "You're going to win because you have to! You're the only one who can fix what's happening in this country!" I suppose, because I know that no man, no party, no nation, no idea will ever repair this broken world, I still hope for complexity in politics and want nuance and reality to matter beyond that hope. But politics paints with spray cans, not bristles, and I do not hope much. Dennis Kucinich is a compact man with jet black hair that hides behind his ears, beady eyes, and no eyebrows. He was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1977 at 31 years old, a man Studs Terkel remembers as one who could "pass as anybody's office boy." Now, at 56, Kucinich still looks like he could pass as an office boy. Dennis Kucinich is a vegan, though we couldn't see that about him when he walked into the TV lights Sunday. We could see that, in spite of the fact that he is widely cast as the candidate who can't win the nomination, Kucinich exudes an infectious optimism that grows from his roots as a New Deal Democrat. Indeed, because he advocates the reinstitution of such public works programs as the WPA, much of Kucinich's platform could be described as what might happen if the New Deal, Roe v. Wade, Greenpeace, and P.E.T.A. met at a party, had a foursome, and birthed a born-again Christian. Predictably, Republicans are already deriding Kucinich as run-of-the-mill tax-happy liberal, but at this point to say as much is to do little more than dismiss him as unelectable, as others, such as the centrist Democratic Leadership Council is doing. Yet one thing I realized Sunday as I listened to Kucinich was that politicians mean different things when they speak of government. The difference between governments is like that between religion and spirituality, as when Anne LaMott cites, "Religion is for people who are afraid of hell; spirituality is for people who have been there." Ideologically government, to those who deride it, is nothing more than religion, an ocean swimming with sharks and parasites and a beach full of hypocrites who say the water's okay for swimming. In contrast, government, to those like Kucinich, is the hope of spirituality, an island where swimmers meet, set up beach houses and surf shops, live, and love each other. Kucinich, unlike any politician I've ever heard, frequently speaks of the life of the citizen as joy. After meeting Kucinich, Kathy exclaimed, "He renews my hope that people actually have good in them!" Certainly it's a hope that is difficult to hold when the party in power declares, with every declaration and policy, that humanity is fundamentally, irrevocably, jealously self-interested and that to feed the self-interest of the powerful is in the best interest of everyone. In certain contrast Kucinich cites the prophets in his speeches, including this from Isaiah: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? . . . If you do away with the yoke of oppression. . . then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday." It may be a paradox that one who seeks power cites Isaiah, but isn't it the kind of paradox worth accepting as one's own? When Dennis Kucinich's speaks, his beady eyes expand and envelop you in the passion of his words. His is an eye contact that is difficult to meet and even harder to hold, but when he met me, I met him. But as big as Dennis Kucinich's ideas may be, as passionate a presence his is, throughout the day I remained nonplussed. Outlining his plan for prescription drug coverage, I withered; revealing his wish to make the national energy resources green, I sighed. I couldn't help but think what I think is realistically: "The lobbies are too big to get this passed"; "A president can't do that without Congressional support." Even to tell myself that such is the nature of a stump speech couldn't break my self-illusion. Today, Kathy asked if I am a hopeless cynic, and I realized, as I have realized lately and often, that I relish too much the repetition when the prophet asks, "Watchman, what of the night?" What is the measure of a man? What use is cynicism in this world? To pose the question is as close as I can come to an answer. Next week, when Dennis Kucinich walks the fairway at the Iowa State Fair, I know that when he is there, though he will not be difficult to miss, he will be difficult to see.

posted by Greg at 1:17 AM

and now, for some sex...still from the (recycled) news

so we've identified it now...jeremiah's rut. the news. this one, though, may be a little more edgy than the last few posts. this one, had it been a year ago, would have boiled some blood...would have prematurely brought about the hermits' sabbatical, maybe. the caption reads: Sen. Strom Thurmond, who inches closer to his 100th birthday in December, is greeted by Meg Gregory, left, 24, and Rainey Chancellor, 28, both staff assistants for Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., in the Capitol on Tuesday in Washington. this innocent picture of the elder statesman being greeted, well wished, congratulated, pick the word of choice, (you can hear the breathy voice of marilyn monroe singing "happy birthday" to the president) by the wispy blond and fake-n-bake brunnette received absolutely no comment from the press...not even from the smallville paper that ran this a.p. photo. at the time, of course, the nation was in a tizzy, and rightfully so, for the off-the-cuff remarks about the dixie-crat's presidential aspirations. i am not one to knock a man when he's dead, nor kick a man when his political capital seems to have been repossed by the government, but notice who sent his nubile staff assistants to well wish the senior most person on capitol hill. the question that lingers in my mind, is why in the world are lott's staff assistants wish this man whom they hardly know a happy birthday? why in the world would their picture have been taken? is this really all that different from monroe's bizarro birthday song to kennedy? oh don't get me wrong. i am not trying to say with virginia slims...you've come a long way baby!...because do we? have we? will we ever move beyond this type of exploitative stuff? or, am i, as usual, reading waaay, waaay too much into this?

posted by Jeremy at 11:24 PM

bye, bye herbie

forget that they were the original volks-auto, with all the conotations that volks had in the ideology of national socialism. forget that they were the auto of the gestapo. forget that they were the auto of choice for a number of the police squads of a number of latin american dictatorships. we had herbie, the little car that could. in fact, by some accounts, they were the little car that lifted germany out of the post-war period. 21,529,464 have rolled out of the factory and onto the streets of the world, and on wednesday they will stop forever. stop today and slug somebody. show your love for the love-bug. what kind of vw are you? Which VW Are You? by Auto Glass America

posted by Jeremy at 11:17 AM

in the (recycled) news...

so this happened two years ago...yes, that i would stoop so low as to comment on something that happened two years ago demonstrates my utter lack of creativity; my parasitic nature; my love of juicy gossip; and the funniness of this story "We can confirm that the pig traveled, and we can confirm that it will never happen again...Let me stress that. It will never happen again." the spokesperson said. not only did the pig travel, it traveled first class. not only did it travel first class, it traveled as "a therapeutic companion pet, like a guide dog for the blind." the two women with whom it traveled stated that they had a doctor's note prescribing the pig as a hog on the job. this traveling therapeutic companion pet, though, became unruly, got loose, and, much like the little piggy that went wee, wee, wee all the way home, ran through the jet, squealing and trying to get into the cockpit. "Many people on board the aircraft were quite upset that there was a large uncontrollable pig on board, especially those in the first-class cabin," the incident report stated. i think i am going to get a therapeutic traveling companion. of course, apparently one needs a note from a doctor...though alleging that one has a note seems to work just fine. of course, it can no longer be disruptive and disturbing. unfortunately for all those cute little pot-belly pigs, u.s. airways no longer allows companions of the porcine family anymore. so let's go with something a little more tame...what about my gold fish? it won't jump out of it's bowl. i promise.

posted by Jeremy at 9:57 PM

cut

tonight in childbirth class, i watched a video of a c-section. i'd never before seen someone's skin get slit like that. neither had i ever seen someone reach through a slit in someone's gut and pull out a person. of course, we've also watched a lot of films that linger on little infant heads sticking out of vaginas. that was new to me, too (unless you count the time i was the infant with my head sticking out of someone's vagina). "but what does all that have to do with the kobe bryant scandal?" you ask.

posted by Chris at 11:13 PM

traipsing through the tulips

Come see my new (nearly finished) course web site, including an experimental class blog, "The Interpreter." Comments, criticisms are of course welcome Interpretation of Literature

posted by Greg at 9:30 PM

So you wanna take a vacation...

i mean sure, you're like most of america and you do your fair share to keep inflating the ballooning personal debt ($5B a month is charged in the u.s.)…but who gives a damn about money in this country anyway? it's all in the places you go, the clothes you wear, and how you get there. and you've got morals…you don't want to see a bunch of topless beach-whales; you know that cruises dump raw sewage into the caribbean. and you've got standards…all resorts look the same anyway (a palm tree here, white sand there, turquoise ocean, topless 65 year-old beachwhale (i mean, if she were bo derek from the days of dudley more and "10", you would even throw the moral argument out the proverbial copa-cabana window; but, they're all so bland); you know that the alcohol included in the all-inclusives is pretty crappy rotgut that's been highly sugared up. WELL, how about taking an ethical vacation!!! in fact, the The 10 best ethical holidays have already been selected for you. there's the eco lodge in Ecuador, where you will be guided by the Achuar people who were unknown to the world until 30 years ago. Tourism now accounts for up to 45 per cent of the Achuar's income and the beautiful lodge was built respecting local traditions - without a single metal nail. or you can live with a count in transylvania and track bear and wolf…though since it's ethical no shooting please. you can help tag lions in africa. you can gawk at locals in andalucia where your stay: in the tiny village of Algamitas will provide you with a real insight into traditional local lifestyles, and help support the rural economy in Spain's poorest region. so that's where ethics comes into the picture, so that your vacation won't be the proverbial vacation from ethics...on these vacations you can help the poor, who were fine not knowing you and your expensive shoes and hiking gear existed, become dependent on the fickle tourist. so go out there and find an undiscovered tribe and start passing out the beads...their life depends on it!!!!

posted by Jeremy at 9:47 AM

More in the "don't call me not-a-news" category

the title of this new category that i will occasionally post on comes from paradise hotel. unfortunately, i won't be able to post on that interesting bit of gossip, because i don't watch the show...but my fellow grad-students keep me informed...so i can keep it real...like j-lo apparently, the best comeback that one of the boys on the show was able to come up with to the insult; "you're not even a man!" was "don't call me not a man!" (reports have it that had he been a bison or a ram, he would have soundly lost that round of rutting) but to the point, making it onto the frontpage of the ajc this friday...and getting a full 5x7 picture and headline, thus shunting blaire and bush to the side with only a small pitiful snap of them rapturously looking at each other as they deftly fielded questions from the press...was coverage of the Running of the brides unfortunately, the ajc has the better sense not to keep the photograph of this event in its archives...but for the curious...you can read all about it. Lei Lydle, the Founder and Editor of a website solely dedicated to business of wedding in city of hotlanta has a whole something dedicated to it. it has everything from etiquette as in the appropriate apparel for striping to your skivies in a store to try on a dress, etc., to comments of happy shoppers. the first shopper lined up at 4:30 pm the day before...rumor has it she doesn't have a rock on her finger yet shoppers call it "crazy," "a wonderful site to see," "more fun than anything else"

posted by Jeremy at 1:13 AM

BAH! Critics!

So, in humble but mischievous honesty, I pose to my friend, author of this review of Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing", what is "complete appreciation"? Can laughter truly be trained into "complete appreciation" simply by a read-through, or does something strike one as funny when it will, regardless of training and in spite of oneself?

posted by Greg at 12:15 AM

My mail today

• Hot on the heels of President Bush's African safari, Mr. Ademola Williams, of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly of Nigeria, sent me, "a [potential] dependable and trust wordy foreign partner," an urgent request. Mr. Williams, it would appear, has been entrusted with $20.5 million of the Congo's money, and he wants to use my bank account to store it until such a time as somebody can use it. "Though we have neither seen nor met each other," Mr. Williams writes,

  the information We gathered from an associate who has worked in your country has encouraged and convinced us that with your sincere assistance, this transaction will be properly handled with modesty and honesty to a huge success within two weeks.

  Sincerity, modesty, honesty: no longer do they belong solely to the sentimental heroine, they're the traits of the savior of Africa, ME!
• Hot on the heels of President Bush's African safari, and only a day after he called to say it was in the mail, Senator John Kerry sent me an eight-page brochure telling me why I should caucus for him between now and January. From in front of an American flag Kerry poses on the cover, the crow's feet around his thin eyes, the whitening scrub of hair and still-dark, disheveled eyebrows, triangular grin showing lips pink as bubble gum. The brochure's a disseminator of sound bytes, such as Kerry's desire to recover the American flag from the Republicans, and colors unfortunately reminiscent of John Deere tractors. Indeed, I wonder if Dean Lane of Newton, Iowa, one of the many talking commoners' heads in the brochure, wasn't included partly because he posed for his picture in front of his own John Deer. Kickoff for the 2004 election season is in January, so buckle your seatbelts kids: I can already see it's gonna be a tractor ride!

posted by Greg at 4:14 PM

the toughness

yeah, so hermit chris gets to post the welcome back hermits blog...which isn't that hard a blog to post. we apreciate it berry mash though! especially all the work hermit chris has put into it. it's just a hard act to follow. so do you go political? isn't that part of what sent these crabs into hiding? not that there's anything wrong with political-posts. so i thought that a nice almost human interest story would be a good place to start...something to warm the cockles (to keep with the crustacean theme of the last paragraph). apparently, even the post-giuliani administration is hard on crime.... so hard on crime that they've arrested a kitty cat. well, the union station policepersons held the cat while its owner a well-known "subway recidivist" (this very pejorative and labeling moniker was used by the d.a. to refer to angel mendez) was in jail for bringing the four-footed fuzzy with him into the tunnels. if anything good came out of the experience it was a better understanding between melendez and his cat. said the "subway recidivist" as he was freed: "After being locked up, I feel like an animal, like my cat." also, it allowed for a lot of ooglers to ooh and aah over the kitty-cat, named Gizmo, while completely ignoring the human being...which will only intensify the attention-seeking that landed him in jail in the first place. i guess the times, now that they aren't making up their stories are really, really hurting for meaningful, critical reporting of what's going on in the world.

posted by Jeremy at 12:03 PM

do over

yay! welcome to the cleaned-out, streamlined version of hermits rock!, where everything is fresh, shiny, and new. return visitors will note the lack of clutter and the lack of all of our old featureswhich took tons of time to update and made the site seem more of a pain than it should have. all visitors may note the lack of content. bear with us...we'll try to make this place interesting.

posted by Chris at 11:09 PM