For several years now I’ve been threatening to write about a concept I was introduced to in college by one of my favorite professors, Gene Fitzgerald, which he called “The Rainbow of Texts”. It was one of those mind-blowing concepts that is fairly simple on the surface but keeps getting deeper the longer I think about it. And I’ve thought about it for a long time.

I took my second year of Russian Language concurrently with a Russian History course from Professor Gene Fitzgerald. It was around the time Russia started to open up in the 1990’s, and I thought there was going to be a lot of opportunities there. However, I didn’t take into account my terrible ear for language. I did learn a lot of things that tangentially helped out a lot through my life, so don’t let anyone tell you a liberal arts education is only good for waiting tables.

The core thesis of the two-semester Russian History class was that we are all surrounded by a rainbow of texts that acts as a filter in how we perceive the information around us, as well as how we express ourselves. These texts are everything we take in through media, experiences, and interactions. Everything is a text and it colors the texts we take in and alters them as we experience them. Dr. Fitzgerald pointed out that two people who shared a great many texts could communicate much better than those with fewer texts in common. To better understand and communicate with Russians, you didn’t just need to know the language, but also their texts, such as history, art, and literature. We were required to read some of the near-universal Russian texts, such as Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”, Zamyatin’s “We”, and of course, “Eugene Onegin” by Pushkin.

I did pretty well in that class, and I even got an A on my “Notes from Underground” paper while it was still in rough-draft form. It was probably the first paper I really enjoyed writing and put my feet on a compositional path, which I shirk to this very day. It did get me seriously considering my methods of communication. I had always felt like I was speaking my own language, and I started to see that in effect, we all are. The people with whom I connect most easily are people that understand the pop culture references and in-jokes that I continually reference. I worked with a guy about my age for a couple months at a tech place. We didn’t have a lot in common and at one point I showed him the Star Wars fan film “Troops“. He sat through it patiently without much of a reaction. At the end he asked me why the guy wore that mask the whole time. It turns out he doesn’t really go to movies and had never seen Star Wars, or even seen enough related Star Wars stuff to recognize the references in the video. In the end we found common ground in fishing and technology and became friends, but it was really an eye-opener to how different we can be, even in the same communities.

One day, while helping with a wheel throwing pottery class, I passed a couple students on the first day. The beginners get a demo and then are turned loose to suffer on their own for a bit before we start stepping in and helping correct the problems. These two students were throwing at wheels facing each other and the boy was doing pretty well, and the girl was starting to really get frustrated. I heard her ask the boy across from her, “Have you had this class before?” He simply said “No”, without really looking up from what he was doing. I saw her face fall at this and could feel the heartbreak of “why can’t I get this?” I backpedaled a couple steps and said to the boy, “Did you have a throwing class in High School?” He said he did, and the girl started to get a little angry. She said, “That’s just what I asked you and you said no!” I stepped in a little and asked the guy if he was majoring in science, and he confessed to being an engineering student of some flavor. I told the girl that she’d asked a specific question with the tag “this class”, which he responded in the negative. She thought it was a little pedantic, and I tried to explain that his answer wasn’t a personal affront or some sort of trickery, but was a reaction to an absolute that scientists tend to evaluate without thinking. I don’t think she really bought it, but it lives on in my personal rainbow as a prime example.

The big drawback is now I tend to evaluate, and often over-clarify, my meanings. People ask me questions and are met with a blank terminator-like stare half the time as my brain scrolls down the list of responses, evaluating and choosing what is actually being asked, and how the response will be taken. I’ve been told this is off-putting and makes me look like I’m practicing a lie. I’ve often had my meanings misinterpreted, and on several occasions mistaken someone else’s intentions. One time in high school I asked a pair of girls if they were going to the game on Friday. It was a common social pleasantry that I had adopted to fill conversational voids while trying to masquerade as a human. One girl answered that they had a Laurel’s (LDS young women’s group) activity that they were going to. She added, “Do you want to come?” I laughed, thinking it was just an attempt at humor, and not realizing it was a date activity and I was being asked out. In fact I didn’t know about my faux-pas for a couple classes until I ran into the other girl alone and she gave me an earful. I did manage seek out the girl I’d hurt to apologize and accept the invitation in a sheepish manner. Up until that point I’d really not had a text in my rainbow that covered the possibility of me personally getting asked out on a date.

This topic of understanding has been really on my mind lately as I’ve been experiencing the seeming splintering of online society into tiny, vocal, like-minded groups that form their internet tribes. A post on a social media site that gets opposition from adversarial groups seems to have no real communication and lots of hurt. This is responded to by counter attacks and escalation. Doxxing and character assassination seem to be seen as valid responses. Very little actual communication takes place. When one party tries to reach out and explain their position the effort seldom seems to be accepted as genuine and nobody seems to find a commonality in the texts. I believe I frequently see both sides are more in line than not, but the language each side is using doesn’t have the commonality needed for a meeting of minds. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, and I know that, once again, I don’t have any answers. But I do think we need to take some time in attempting to understand each other rather than just refuting and rearming.

The Russians have a saying: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

And then where will our rainbows be?

So here’s something a little different. On Saturday I decided I really needed to borrow Jack’s framing nailer to do what I had hoped would be the quick roof fixin’ job that I rambled on about last entry. I called and asked if he was using his nail gun as he’s on a home addition project of his own. He said it didn’t look like he was going to be using it, so I ran up to Bountiful and picked it up.

Along the way I made what was probably a somewhat ill-advised stop to take a look at the pile of rubble where my studio was.

It was kind of heart-wrenching, even knowing what was coming, but I don’t really want to think about it tonight.

Anyway, I got back home and made a sandwich just in time for Jack to call and see how long I thought I’d be needing the nailer as his contractor had shown up and was looking on getting to work. Fortunately I had already cut all the pieces I needed for my repair on the roof and just needed to whack them into place. I told him to come on down to get it and I’d be done by the time he got to my house. It worked out pretty good, except for having to have us both make a trip out of our way on what was a heavy traffic morning.

In a way it makes me want to have my own framing nail gun, but Jack and I have kind of a pooled resource of tools. My pool isn’t so big, but I have a metal bandsaw that lives at Jacks, and his MIG welder has been at my house for several years. It works out well, because nobody has room for all the tools they need, and even less time to put most of them to work. It just happened this day the gun was in high demand.

I was taking a break from the heat, I guess I’m supposed to avoid it for the MS thing, but I’m finding it hard to not be outside in the half of the year I find tolerable. Jack and I have serious that-reminds-me issues that can be near interminable. Along with never having enough time for tools, time for conversations is usually at a premium. As the conversation stretched out we sat on my porch and Jack noticed a wasp flying into the small tubes of a wind chime over my head carrying a dried blade of grass. It would go in from the top, and right away the blade would sail out of the bottom and land on me. Earlier I had noticed a pile of grass building up on the porch, but hadn’t thought about where it was coming from.

The little builder came and went for quite awhile. Occasionally I would reach up and ring the chime and cowardly duck down fearing the worst, yet too lazy to actually move. Finally she brought a big curly piece of grass that managed to jam in the tube. I decided this was a bad sign and slothed into action taking hold of the wind chime and attempted to loose it from it’s stay. The ring from which it hung caught repeatedly on the bent eyelet. For several seconds I became increasingly agitated and worried as the ring flopped back and forth and stick on the mouth of the hook and I was really starting to fear a serious amount of stinging was headed my way. Twice I almost just gave up and ran for my life, but in the nick of time the whole thing came free the chimes jangling like an alarm, and I hurled it off the porch to the middle of the lawn. I confess I laughed a bit sheepishly at my own antics, and we continued our one more thing goodbye a bit longer. When Jack left I retrieved the chime and thought I’d put it in the garage for the rest of the season. As I was walking back to the studio I peeked in one of the chime tubes. I couldn’t see through it. I checked the others and three of the tubes had already become nurseries for the little beasties. Half of them were filled with nests and larvae.

I took a stick and cleared them out, but it was no easy task. The grass was all bound up in what looked like a web. I’m going to have to read up on wasps to see how it’s actually done. I’m a little afraid the wasps might be part spider. Part of me is always kind of sad to interrupt most of natures cycles, unless it involves cockroaches or yellowjackets. Those bugs get no quarter.

I wanted to add my voice commemorating the release of Star Wars, one of the single biggest events to have an impact in my life. I also wanted to delay this posting past the 5-25-77 milestone because in 1977 I was just approaching 10 years old, and there was quite a bit of discussion as to whether I would be allowed to see the movie. You see, this movie was rated ‘PG’ and I hadn’t ever been witness to the horrors of anything outside the ‘G’ rating.

I wasn’t taken to see the movie until after most of my friends had seen it a few times. In fact, I don’t believe I saw the film until late in July or early August, but my memory on this is hazy. I also don’t remember how I came to be aware of Star Wars, I just know that at some point I became obsessed. I read everything I could get my hands on about it. I distinctly remember picking up the Readers Digest that had Star Wars on the cover and reading everything it had to say about it with great relish. I knew the whole story before I ever saw it. It seemed that hardly a day went by that there wasn’t some sort of avid discussion somewhere in the neighborhood about hyperspace and light sabers. This was in the time before SPOILERS and we didn’t care.  I remember telling my parents that there was only a little blood in one scene where a walrus guy gets his arm cut off, but they don’t show the arm getting cut off, just laying on the floor. I’m not sure how this was supposed to help my argument. I’m sure my parents knew as much about the film as I did*, but they never gave me much reason to believe I was going to get to see the movie.

When the day finally came we went to the only place that it was playing locally, the Center Theater downtown. I couldn’t believe the size of the screen and how many people would fit in the audience. When we first see Princess Leia’s ship pass from overhead followed by Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer that just kept stretching on and on and on I was in total heaven. I had been a space nut ever since the NASA Apollo missions I watched as a wee tyke, and now it felt like I was really out there.

So many of my memories of the movie are still so vivid. I remember being really scared of Darth Vader as he strode about the wreckage of the opening battle and being afraid for Princess Leia as the floating interrogation droid floated into her cell. C3PO and R2-D2 falling away from the rebel ship in the escape pod is etched into my mind and the trading card of their pod falling towards Tatooine was always one of my favorites. The Millennium Falcon was the coolest spaceship I’d ever seen, easily supplanting the Space 1999 Eagle in my mind, but the TIE fighters were the ones that I really wanted to fly myself.

I’m sure it was the impressionable age at which I saw the film that cemented it as the high point of cinema for me as it did for many kids. It doesn’t really hold up to close inspection, as a magnificent film, but it is, still, probably the movie I’ve seen more than any other. The feeling that, just maybe, something could spirit me away from my dreary existence in a moment and catapult me into my destiny like Luke was a staple of my fantasies for so long. I spent hours explaining what was going on to a robotic figment of my imagination when I was trying to figure things out, although it was a cool robot like R2-D2, and most certainly not C3PO.

For some reason the subsequent movies** never really did much for me. I don’t know if it was because they couldn’t live up to the first-time experience of Star Wars, or if by the time the sequels rolled around I was so steeped in science fiction ala Battlestar Galactica, or Buck Rogers that my universe was getting crowded. I only just added Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to my collection this year.*** They have some nice parts, but they just can’t match what I imagine was that particular Saturday afternoon in mid-to-late summer 1977.
* well, maybe not as much, but a reasonable amount.
** until Rogue One, but that’s another story
*** again, another story

Sheryl Crow’s has been one of my favorite artists quite for some time. Much of her music really moves me and the lyrics are often spot on with feelings I have. She hits that connection I don’t often get  where I feel an artist is accurately expressing things I’ve experienced. The Red Hot Chili Peppers do it with “Soul to Squeeze”. Garbage does it with “Medication” on the 2.0 album. But Sheryl Crow knocks it down more often than any other single artist.

Unsurprisingly, songs that strike me are mostly explorations on feelings and usually have somewhat of a melancholy tone. A couple of Saturdays ago while going to finish firing the last kiln in Bountiful I was set for a moody song and iTunes obliged me as dawn was breaking over the mountains by serving up Sheryl Crow’s “Good is Good”. This is an odd one for me in that so many of the lines really score:

When your friends are gone
You thought were so worth keeping
You feel you don’t belong
And you don’t know why

and

She put your books out on the sidewalk
Now they’re blowing ’round
They won’t help you when you’re down

The one issue I’ve had with this particular song ever since the first time I heard it is with the part of the chorus that goes:

And everytime you hear the rolling thunder
You turn around before the lightening strikes

And the fact that lightning proceeds the thunder kind of grates on me, and I feel that it’s kind of the heart of the song. I’ve spent a long time thinking about it and I believe that I’m just being too literal. Maybe you turn away from the storm as it starts and avoid closer lightning. Maybe it’s just a song and I shouldn’t pick at nits. But that morning driving along the freeway, for the first time, the unordered sequence didn’t seem to matter and I just soaked up the rest of the chorus.

And does it ever make you stop and wonder
If all your good times pass you by

The video for Good is Good

Once upon a time somebody didn’t listen to the instructions on how to make a pinch pot. They further didn’t listen to the suggestions on what needed to be done to make it eligible to be worthy of being graded, much less fired. This pot ended up on the reject shelf and abandoned by it’s student creator. It failed on so many levels it was kept around for a couple semesters as an anonymous example of what not to do. One day I thought it would be funny to scratch my name into the bottom of this weighty clay monstrosity. Eventually one semester I was helping with a new class of students learning beginning hand-built pottery. As it happened this more-than-humble-pot was being used as an example and Diane, the instructor, said, “I don’t even know who made this pot,” and glanced at the bottom. She immediately looked at me with a stern look, and exclaimed, “You did not make this pot!”

This got a good laugh from the class.

After a few more semesters went by John, Diane’s husband and the wheel throwing instructor at the time, became concerned that people might see this pot on the shelves and not realize that it was a warning and not an ideal, so the pot was decorated with a marker to warn people that this was not to be emulated.

Now this was in the long, long ago, and more than a decade has gone by. The pot is no longer used as an example of what not to do, but simply stayed on a little corner of a shelf with the visible warning. Today, as the last of the remaining ware was being disposed of, Diane brought this pot to me and said that she thought I should have it.

I wonder how long it will clutter my studio before it meets an apt ending.

Today was my last firing of the last kiln load at the Stoker School, the ceramics studio at the Bountiful extension of the University of Utah. It was mostly my work with some of Chuck’s large pieces. His last work, too. I’ve been there more than 20 years, learning and helping teach beginning students along the way. I’ve written about it before, and I’ll probably mention it a few more times. It had a real, and significant, effect on my life.

Before sunrise, with pink clouds and a stiff East wind, I drove the automatic path I’ve worn into I-15. I was mentally cataloging all the ‘havetas’ that are coming sown the pipeline. Summer has, for a couple decades, given me an extra evening as I don’t often help with classes in the summer. I started thinking about the things I might be able to get done with an extra night a week with no responsibilities at the studio. No more, ever. I started to think of adult life as being a juggler. You start off by keeping two objects in the air at once. Then three, and maybe a fourth. Then someone tosses you an egg, or maybe a live mouse. You begin to sweat it a bit. The stress goes up, but just when you are getting the hang of it, or maybe successfully tossing the egg of to an audience member someone throws you a running chainsaw.

I’m always looking at the horizon. The place where I can see the opportunity to hand off the mouse and maybe catch a ball on one foot things will get easy. After Christmas, once we get the party behind us, when class finishes, then! But the holidays go by and when you’re finishing washing the dishes after the reunion and are ready to breathe that sigh of relief, something else appears at the skyline approaching with purpose.

Adult life is just taking these new things and thinking, well, it’s a plate spinning on a stick, but if I put it on my chin I can probably still keep these balls floating on, and it will be a good show. There really isn’t any end to it, or even much respite. But seriously, if we think about it, there are probably a few spinning plates that if you go goggle-eyed, shake your head, and mug for the audience, nobody would think ill of you. You might even get a laugh.

Of course, you don’t get to defer choosing everything that comes your way. Sometimes you have to take the chainsaw, sometimes you even have to drop the egg to do it. But I believe you should always try to do it in a way that gets a laugh from the audience .