He's Back!

Lynn Cheney announced that her husband and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. "Every family," said the Obama campaign, "has a black sheep."
Harper’s Weekly

We are making plans to spend Christmas with a son and daughter-in-law in Hanoi. (When I first typed that sentence, I spelled plans as planes, which likely tells you how Hanoi fits into my unconscious.)

That would be Hanoi, North Viet Nam.

You are likely already used to having a leading candidate for President be from an Indonesian father. Someone suggested the other day that it could be a race between Hilary Clinton for President, with Barak Obama (My spell check has never heard of him.) as her running mate, against Rudy Giuliani with Condileezza Rice (have you noticed that everyone is now referring to her as Condi, as if we all have gotten to know her better?).

Tiger Woods’ golf swing has done a lot to smooth the way.

Many a naturalist has pointed out that the fires that winnowed a huge piece of the most seductive part of southern California, were in areas that once burned regularly. nature’s way to manage the chaparral. Having made the biggest investment of our lives, we searched for ways to alter the inevitable and unwittingly became chaparral.

When I was being interviewed for a job in San Diego more than 20 years ago, I asked the people interviewing me if earthquakes frightened them. They had had this conversation with easterners before and they were ready.

We’ll put the number of people who have died in earthquakes in California in the past 100 years, they suggested, against the number who have died in hurricanes on the east coast, and see which is the most dangerous coast.

It was a silly question. One swim in the Pacific, one taste of a fig plucked from a friend’s tree, and I was there, earthquake or no. When, a year later, geologists discovered that the Rose Canyon fault, assumed to be dormant, was active and moving, I thought it was kind of funny. It comes ashore under the driveway of the apartment we spend the winter in.

God knows what goes into our making decisions or forming opinions.

A recent study suggested that the Republicans figured out some time ago that voters are a mass of emotions and prejudice when we pull the lever. (We still mark our ballot with a no. 2 pencil in Vermont.)

I had a horrifying thought recently: is it possible that no one except President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and their minions, has faced the reality that going on as we Americans have and as we all hope to, will, at least for the foreseeable future, require bullying our way into controlling the oil in the Middle East?

That such an agenda will likely end up fashioning the opposite outcome, and that not even the Vice President quite dares admit to such a thing outright, doesn’t alter the sickening possibility that it might be so.

I once heard Malcolm Muggeridge say that, next to showing Shakespeare around Stratford-On-Avon, the thing he would like most in the world to do would be to take Jesus of Nazareth on a walking tour of the Vatican.

I would enjoy telling Lyndon Johnson or William Westmoreland - or maybe Jane Fonda, - that I am spending Christmas with my family in Hanoi.

Do you think a 17 year old boy should got to jail for 10 years for getting a blow job from his 15 year old girlfriend?

The past few years it has become clear the mores and habits of teens, particularly their sexual practices, have become a mystery to me.

When President Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman," I was pretty sure he was lying. Not that I blamed him. At least for lying, with the stakes so high. I thought he was pretty sleazy for doing that with a much younger woman in such a precarious setting. To say he lacked impulse control is like saying Fatty Arbunckle eats too much.

But since then I have learned, that, by the rules of teen sex today he was telling the truth.

I have had a teenager tell me she does not regard a blow job as sex. Sex, she said, is when the male penetrates the female with his penis.

Last year Milton Academy went through the nightmare of high schools - especially private, exclusive high schools for the rich and famous, like the Kennedy clan - when the Boston Globe did an expose about a girl who was regularly providing blow jobs for the boys hockey team on the school bus.

A man who had once been head of a similar school told me that every school shuddered at the scandal, knowing it could just as easily have been one of their schools.

When I read Ian McEwan's new book, On Chesil Beach, I was taken back to the days of my young adulthood. McEwan clearly chose to place the book in 1962, the year before the birth control pill became widely available. It is incaluable how the ability of a woman to enjoy sex without fear of getting pregnant has altered the landscape.

I was a Free Love guy in the 60s, but it was all theoretical because my inner self was fully formed before the pill and the sexual revolution. I suspect readers under 50 would find McEwan's book curious, if not silly. But for those of us who are older than that it is painful and real.

AIDS and sexually transmitted disease has altered somewhat the free for all it looked as if sex would become among young people.

But it still doesn't resemble the world in which I grew up.

Intimacy, for which sex is one of the most powerful expressions, remains one of the most sought after and elusive pieces of human life. We were always told - and I believed - that sex was the whole story.

What no one told us was that infatuation and sexual urgency, which surely is the way intimacy - of there is to be any - often gets rolling. But - there are a million jokes about this - it doesn't last. And when it wanes - which is the issue for many more marriages, I suspect, than the total breakdown of sexual function that McEwan portrays - the choice is between abandoning the relationship for a new, sexally urgent one, or exploring the scary prospect of being deeply known by another.

But so long as we pretend sex is the whole deal - as sentencing a 17 year old boy to 10 years in jail for getting a blow job from his 15 tear old girlfriend, does - the chances are we will continue to abort real and lasting chances for intimacy.

So today, as fires in San Diego continue to burn out of the control of the most sophisticated fire fighting capability yet devised, I see that our president has warned Cuba that we will not tolerate shifting her government from Castro to his brother Raul.

Aside from the apparent fact that has already happened, how does the president propose to impose his preferred government on Cuba?

It is this overreaching, this apparent diregard for the simplest and most obvious limits on human power - the power of anyone, even the so-called most powerful man on earth - to make the world conform to his wishes, that strikes me as the most disastrous mark of the past seven years of the Bush Presidency.

He seems to believe he can bully Iran into capitulating on his nuclear program. He has - alas - bullied our nation, just about all of us, into supporting his disastrous wish to beat the world into submission, and now he believes he can do the same with other nations.

One would wish that tomorrow, when he does his obligatory fly-by over the still flaming city of San Diego - the nation's 7th largest - and sees what nature can do when she chooses, and how helpless we are in the face of her fury, he might be sobered and wonder if we, or he, is as all powerful as he may wish.

I am mostly philosophical about these matters. We are a species which, because of our mind/intelligence, tend to overreach and miscalculate our relationship to all that surrounds us. The earth has a survival interest, too, and when we threaten it, as we do every time we dig a compressed piece of ancient sunlight from the earth and burn it, she finds ways to rebalance things.

Six billion is surely more of us than the earth can or wishes to support. We have built our structures in places and in ways that insult the earth's ways of taking good care of herself.

The World Series begins tonight. Think of it; a game between 18 of us on a tiny spot on the eastern edge of one continent, and millions of us will watch it as if it were, well, as if it were the World Series. Astonishing.

Perhaps Dick Cheney ought to throw out the first ball.

- Doc says, You have three minutes to live.
- Anything you can do for me, Doc?
- Well, I could boil you an egg.
Excerpted from The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

While we’re wondering when summer will yield to something more fitting for late October in Zone 4, loving riding bikes up hills in our shirt sleeves through long lasting brilliant maple yellows, Zone 10 is on fire.

I have tried reaching friends in Zone 10 this morning, but they are all too busy trying to figure out their next move to talk on the phone. We are due to migrate there in a few days, if there is still there.

My most memorable vignette of climate change so far is Lacey on the screen porch, shouting at the incredible numbers of Canada geese that have chosen our pond for their staging area – a maneuver that in past years has lasted a couple of days, but this year has now been a month – “Don’t you birds know it’s past time for you to leave?!”

They remain unpersuaded, gliding tranquilly through the lily pads which, as partial redemption of our usual condemnation, they seem to be eating.

James Lovelock, perhaps the most hyperbolic of the doomsday climate scientists, believes it is too late for our belated green consciousness to turn things around. He calls for building nuclear plants, the only hope we have for providing anything approaching the energy needs of humans. And he says it is time, now, to consider how to manage the destruction of agricultural land (he thinks bio-engineering is out best bet), the flooding of low lying coastal areas, and mass migrations. Not to begin now is, he believes, to ensure the globe – which will then have fewer than a billion people - run by warlords by century’s end.

Yesterday my mountain-man bike-riding comrade, Conrad, and I took a beautiful ride, turning up a side road for a few miles, through rolling country suitable for decorating calendars. As we passed a 19th century farmhouse, Conrad pointed to the field behind it and said, When my uncle lived here that was an apple orchard.

For the next two miles, he described the people who had lived in every house twenty-five to a hundred years ago. More than half of them were his relatives. He told of working on one of his uncles’ farms the summer he first had his drivers license, chagrined at hitting every one of the apple trees with the thresher, clear that farming wasn’t his future.

I told Conrad there isn’t a place on earth – with the possible exception of the cemetery in Sewanee, Tennessee, - where I could track my family history like that.

Two weeks ago I read an article about a show of the work of Kara Walker at the Whitney Museum in New York. A young American black woman, she has devised odd ways – in silhouette, painting, collage, shadow-puppetry, light projection and video – to portray what at first seems a study of race and gender, focused on slave life in the pre-civil war South. As one looks longer her work unpacks a much more complex panoply of how we humans meet each other.

I showed Lacey the article and she said, Let’s go see it.

Last time I braved New York was when I met a friend at the old Madison Square Garden to go to the Mohammed Ali – Joe Frazier Fight. 1974.

Last Thursday we drove to Albany, took the train along the Hudson on a ride that illuminates the Hudson River School of painting, and went to the exhibit. In 75º, we walked from 75th street to 33rd on 5th avenue, gawking at buildings, store windows exhibiting priceless treasure and, most of all, fellow humans in unimaginable number and contour.

That night, back in Vermont, I woke around 4am and looked out the window. Though the moon was a sliver, the tombstones across the street cast a subtle gray shadow. The only sound was of leaves brushing against limbs as they floated to the ground.

20 years ago, as a brand new pastor of a big church in San Diego, I was preparing for the monthly meeting of our vetsry (lay leaders) and turned on the radio to hear that the stock market was plummeting.

Having just come from a parish in suburban Boston, in which many of the lay leaders made their living in investments, I was particularly sensitive to the trauma a day like that could cause. My first thought was to cancel the meeting, figuring everyone would be too distracted and in an emotional turmoil and trying to focus on events in the parish would prove futile.

But it was too close to the time of the meeting, and would have involved trying to reach people by phone (remember what that was like bfore cell phones?), so I decided simply to show up and see if anyone else did.

Came time for the meeting and we not only had a quorum, we had 100% attendance, rare during the best of times.

I began by asking how everyone was doing. Many murmurs of, "Fine, thanks."

Then I said, "Before we begin our business, maybe we better take a moment and go around the table and see how everyone has weathered the day."

Stares from around the table as if I had grown another head. "What about the day?" someone asked.

"Just before I came into this meeting, I heard the Dow Jones Index had dropped over $500. I thought we might all be a little shell-shocked."

"Oh, you easterners all think the sun rises and sets on the stock market," one of them said. "This is California. We have our own separate economy. We don't give a damn about the stock market."

Within a couple of months, when the shock wave reached the west coast, they were singing a different tune. And it was a full year or more after the market and the eastern economy finally began its climb back up, before the California economy began to show signs of life again.

Today the Dow marked the anniversary with a drop of $366, not nearly the percentage drop the $500 drop was in 1987, but still enough to get one's attention. With communications having shrunk the world dramatically in those two decades, it is no longer true that California feels like a different world from the east coast. In fact, despite an economy that is larger than all but 6 countries in the world, California is very sensitive to things like the crash in the housing market and the drying up of the credit markets.

But, like the rest of the country and the world, we now seem finally to have acknowledged that the behavior of money markets, like weather around the world, while a huge factor in how our lives unfold, is determined by so many variables - many of which we have yet to decipher - that it is anyone's guess what they will do or what makes them rise and fall.

There are so-called smart investors, who make lots of money in the markets, selling short in faling markets and long in rising markets, but if you look at how they do that, it is by taking breath-taking risks that pay off hugely when they have bet right, and also suffering heart-stopping losses what they have not.

Few of us have the stomach - or the cash- to do that.

Being a child of a child of the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, I have some fear of losing everything. Not nearly the level of fear my father had, but much greater than the fear of my children who have known only prosperity and a growing economy for their entire adult lives.

And, being a child of my father, my investment strategy - until recent times - has been to buy stock in good companies that make a good product and are well managed, and never even look at them for months and years at a time. In truth, unlike my father, I have relied on an investment counselor to do that for me. Knowing my unease with large risk, I am largely invested in diverse funds rather than in individual companies.

And, because I have said I am willing to miss big run ups in order not to suffer catastrophic losses, my portfolio has been an unspectacular but reliable source of the money I need, in addition to my pension and Social Security, to live a reasonable middle class existence.

But there is always that nagging piece of my mind, reminding me that this is another Las Vegas sort of game. Maybe there was a time when the country was growing so predictably at such a steady rate, that almost any sound investment was going to prove profitable. Now my investment guy, a good friend and counselor for 20 years, endures my unanswerable questions with equanimity and good humor. All the while avoiding making promises or sounding as if he really knows what the market is going to do.

Winning wars, selling our goods to China, matching our currency against the other currencies of the world, driving American cars, filling their tanks with cheap gas, all things I once thought just went along with being the United States, are now up for grabs in a global market and connected world in which the rules - if there will be any - have not revealed themselves.

A few moments ago - knowing it wasn't going to be pretty - I went to the web site of my financial advisor to take my every Friday look at how I fared theis week, and to make sure some identity thief hadn't drained me dry.

"This site is currently not available. Please try back later," came up on the screen. The part of me that didn't panic, was relieved.

The recent shift in language among environmentalists seems a good thing to me.

From hysterical calls to save the planet, the language has taken on a softer, gentler tone.

Mostly this is for strategic reason. Recognizing that angry shouting, accusations and threats have the opposite of their intended effect, crusaders are trying to learn from advertisers how to seduce. And with "going Green" having entered the language and quickly become a common buzz term, it seems to be catching on.

My take is a little different.

While I agree that attacking people for their profligate habits usually makes them petulant and more profligate, I think we humans are just beginning to see the inevitable results of our own foibles. And it seems doubtful to me either that we can learn new behavior, or finally figure out how we might act in the best interests of our long term habitation here.

Mind/consciousness, the quality we are most in love with about ourselves, may turn out to have been a fatal wrong turn in the evolution of our species.

Not that it isn't dazzling - like the impressive size of the dinosaur when it looked to be on course for dominating the earth indefinitely (Yes, I know we now think the dinosaur became extinct after a meteor hit the earth, throwing up a layer of dust that blocked sunlight and vegetation growth, but stay with me on this argument for a moment.).

So dazzling, in fact, that we have come to believe that it not only jumped us up a significant notch in the evolution of species, but it even raised us to a status above and apart from the natural sources from which we came.

And we think we can use our unique mental agility to manage and control nature for our benefit.

Who knows what the tenure of our species might have been like had we understood our mind/consciousness as another interesting branch of evolution, alongside bird flight and the exchange of 02 and C02 between air breathing creatures and plants? What if we had explored the possibilities for using this development to enhance life for all the species on the earth?

It might have come to nothing anyway.

But because we understood our particular peculiar abilities as a tool for subduing the other species and the earth for our own increased comfort and luxury, we now find ourselves with an untenable future. Too many of us on the earth and a species that requires greater and greater portions of the earth's resources to maintain ourselves.

Now, nothing and no species is forever. 99.99% of all the species that have ever inhabited the earth are extinct. No matter how we had conducted ourselves, we, too, one day would have been and will be extinct.

But how curious it will be if, when some other Being one day examines the artifacts we leave behind, that Being concludes that the fatal flaw in the development of the human being was our becoming conscious. It was then, they may say, that homo sapiens turned aside from our natural origin and design and tried to create a new agenda that might transcend the one that gave birth to us.

I was pleased - sort of - when Al Gore (and the UN scientists who wrote the report on global climate change) won the Nobel Peace Prize. It seems a little odd to me that it was the Peace Prize rather thana Science Prize, but I do understand the business about how climate change, with its effect on water, coastal land and agriculture likely will create conflict.

I was pleased mostly because I see it as the world poking another stick in the eye of those in this country who have held sway the past generation, who think they can, by the sheer impetus of their political clout, define the terms of existence around the globe. It's not only that they (this "they" refers largely to American business leaders whose commitment to the notion that unfettered commerce is the way to create a better world, has led them to oppose any efforts to help those who are left behind, or to regulate commerce, unless it is to aid their interests) believe they are so powerful they can create reality, but that they are the regents of this era, with a divine appointment.

The rest of the world has watched with increasing frustration as we have wielded our unmatched power - which has come to us as much by odd circumstance as by our own doing - without regard for anything other than our own growing dominance. And one result has been the rape of the natural world.

The Nobel Committee - one of the few entities beyond our broders, maybe thanks to its multi-million dollar awards - to be able claim our attention, has broadcast to the world, and to us, that, while we may make fun of the likes of Al Gore, they prize him.

The "sort of" in my being pleased comes from my sense that global climate change - much of which we have no doubt caused, and much has to do with natural phenomena we don't control - not only may be about much more than human behavior, but is likely beyond our ability to effect in any lasting way.

An interesting issue is how the human mind/imagination/consciousness - our most prized attribute - has not only led us to innovation of which we are justly proud, but it has led to endless unintended consequences which are inimical to our ongoing life on the planet, and to the planet itself.

Because we see consciousness as what places us at the pinnacle of all species, we believe we can think and innovate our way out of any dilemma.

When some Being, many millions of years from now, examines the era of human habitation of this planet, that Being may well conclude that it was the development of the human mind that led us down the path to our extinction.

Our ability to manipulate our environment - even when we hadn't anticipated some of the consequences - caused a cascade of events that eventually made our ongoing life here unsustainable.

Now, because we have a survival instinct, we will, and should, use our wiles to try to work our way through this challenge. And it is likely we will see some breathtakingly imaginative solutions proposed and tried in however many eons remain to us.

What we seem to have forgotten is that we are a part of a larger system. Our minds, fascinating as they are, have not exempted us from the forces that move the entire system. We are one of the phenomena of the era in which 02 breathing beings, in cooperation with C02 breathing beings, covered the earth. The climate provided for this.

This era is, like every era, for a season.

A mouse has died and is decomposing somewhere in the walls of my writing studio.

So as I sit at my kepboard looking out on a scene of pastoral perfection - the pond reflecting the reds and oranges of the foliage- my olfactory nerves are being assaulted by the stench of the rotting rodent.

I can't find it. The terrier goes frantic rushing around the room, sticking his nose as far under the baseboard heaters as he can. But he hasn't come up with it either.

The irony is that, having heard the scurrying feet of mice several days ago, I baited a trap with peanut butter and put it on one of th exposed beams. Where it sits now, three feet from where I sit. Still set, untouched, the peanut butter hardened and intact.

Jasmine, the 15 year old Siamese, is still fast a lightning. She waits for me to come up the stairs, lying on the other side of the railing, until I am wist high beside her, when she pounces, snapping her paws through the rails with such speed and force, it startles me if I haven't seen her take up her station earlier. Even though Lacey keeps Jasmine's front claws cut short so she can't destroy the unpholstry, I am cautious about playing this game with her, because of how primitive and wild her attacks feel even if her cuffing is soft instead of sharp.

But she won't kill mice. She will chase them around, bat them, even catch them in her mouth. But she doesn't really bite them, preferring to let them go and then chase them until she tires of the game and lets them escape.

Plastic is a different story. Ever since she was a kitten, Jasmine has liked to chew - and swallow - plastic. Our bedroom closet door - it's the only closet in our old farmhouse, farmers never had a lot of clothes - has never closed properly, and when we hear it creak in the middle of the night one of us will leap from bed and chase Jasmine from the closet before she can chew on a plastic bag shrouding a clean dress or suit.

Because, if she manages to persevere, an hour later, as Jasmine is lying on the foot of our bed, she will begin to lurch, and then park a gross concoction of plastic, supper and hairball on the bedspread. If one of us wakes and is aware we are about to suffer this nasty and messy indignity, we will use our feet to try to flip her off the bed onto the floor, hoping she will vomit on the wood floor rather than on one of the throw rugs.

The geese seem to have disappeared overnight, leaving only the two or three families of ducks.That's happened several times already this fall so I'm not getting my hopes up. Yesterday more than 100 Canada geese held a meeting on the pond, noisily carrying on about their travel plans or whatever it is they argue about. They behave very differently this time of year. If that many of them even showed up at the height of summer, our fields would be impassible for the duck poop. But for some reason they don't come onto our fields now.

There's an awful lot I don't understand about all this.

Life in the wild. I may have to wait for the mouse to rot and dessicate.

This may be one of those times I trust no one is going to read this and I am composing away here at my desk and sending the writing into the vast emptiness of cyberspace.

I have long known I write mainly for myself, both because I get some sort of mysterious physical pleasure out of the exercise, and because it is how I discover what is going on inside that covered brain/mind (if that is indeed the location of thought).

For the last decade or so I was a parish priest I was nervous that someone would one day come right out and ask me if I believe in God.

My answer would have been, Yes, but not how I think I know you meant the question.

Reminds me of something I read recently in which the writer said that a woman asked him if he knew Jesus. "I am a Catholic," he responded.

"But do you know Jesus?" she asked again.

"No," he answered honestly, "not in the way I think you mean that."

I can still remember reading Paul Tillich, the great figure in systematic theology who taught at Union Seminary in the 1940s and 50s. He said that belief in God is idolatry. Because, as soon as you posit a belief in God, you have made a construct the size of the human imagination, which can only be an idol. An idol is a humanc creation to represent something that is beyond human knowing.

Today a friend gave me a book by one of the scientists insturmental in deciphering the human genome. The book is an attempt to defend belief in God alongside sophisticated modern science. His argument comes down to his discovery that there seems to be a moral imperative in the universe, a sense of right and wrong that is common to all. That, so he believes, has to come from God, the Moral Absolute.

Although I don't believe there is a moral absolute, but rather a common - but by no means identical - sense of what promotes and what harms human community, even if I did believe that, it would not seem to me a compelling argument for a conventional belief in God.

Some have tied belief versus non-belief - whether agnosticism or atheism - to the issue of life after death.

I have come to understand this question as a part of the Ego issue. We - especially in the post-enlightenment west - have come to udnerstand the ego as an essential part of the self. It is our sense of identity, the way in which, as we mature (if we mature), we differentiate ourselves, understand our uniqueness, our vocation, purpose.

For some the ego is a problem, the cause of narcissim that distorts the world, making it seem as if it were designed for me. For others ego merely defines an important part of the self that we might call personality.

But whatever we make of it, it is what we imagine would have to survive our death if there were to be some continuing existence. And, say some, to believe in an ongoing existence is to believe in God. And not to is to not believe.

Immortality strikes me as a contradiction to everything we understand about the nature of reality. All life is born, all life dies. In death the cells uniquely arranged into that being are dispersed, scattered and become parts of other new life. Death is composting, lending to new life.

The question of God is whether the reality of death, of the end of my life, negates the value of having been here. Is it so cruel to have teased me with the excitement of being alive, that death is the supreme dirty trick? Just got me fully engaged, really interested, wise enough to taste the heady elixir, and then...

For me, being here is more than worth it. As a friend said, I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

That is affirmation of what I mean by God.

We moved from Boston to La Jolla, California in 1987.

I loved it from day one. Right on the ocean, a mean winter temperature of 63º and summer 74º. What's not to love?

Lacey didn't take to it so fast. She's a lifelong Yankee and an interior designer. She looked out our window and, instead of the 180º view of the Pacific I saw, she saw a busy city and its cement going down the hill all the way to the beach. Nature usurped by human avarice.

Walking the beach and looking up at the houses hovering over the sheer cliffs, you did wonder if the beautiful ocean view and perfect weather had seduced people into retiring their good sense. Millions of dollars for houses that look like a good rain might wash them into the ocean is an unnerving equation.

When I retired in 1996 we moved back to our 19th century farmhouse in Vermont. We did that because New England was home - I had lived in the Boston area for more than 20 years, Lacey in Connecticut and Boston her entire life before California - and because it was the only place we owned. We never had the money to get into the California real estate market. And it was so off the charts that I don't know that we would have if we could.

We hadn't figured on what a score of southern California winters had done to our tolerance for New England ice and sleet. The first year, when the sun disappeared and it began to rain, my morale went down with the sun.

Lacey continued to have work in California. In April I flew back with her. We stayed in a friend's apartment on the beach. I took a long ocean swim one afternoon and by the time Lacey came home from work, I had made up my mind.

No more Vermont winters.

We found a sweet little apartment on the beach and moved our things into it. We have spent the past 11 winters there.

Yesterday we heard that some chickens came home to roost in La Jolla. Houses, which all cost well over a million dollars, were buried in debris when a big road simply slid down the hillside.

Now the geologists are saying everyone should have known the hill was formed by ocean sediment that was thrown up there during an eruption of the Rose Canyon fault several millions of years ago. It is loosely packed and destined to oooze eventually. Which it did yesterday.

Our apartment is on the flat, by the beach, where the Rose Canyon fault comes ashore. The hillside won't slide as far as us. One day the Rose Canyon fault, which geologists tell us is active and due for a major shift, will move and we will either be swallowed by the yawning chasm, or have the resulting tsunami break over us.

In the meantime we will enjoy the warm winter by the ocean.

For years I wanted and worked to be an optimist.

Even though it was always clear that an optimist is one who thinks things are going to work out the way he hopes.

And not only have I always been pretty agnostic about what I hope - always imagining my hopes are often a pale imitation of what actually is - but predicting outcomes has never been a strength of mine.

Nor am I a pessimist.

Not because I can't conjure up plenty of scary possibilities, but because even when things seem to go wrong, I am often surprised at how things unfold from there.

So I am loving the explanations the "experts" are offering for why the stock market is hovering around nose-bleed highs, while the economic news is mixed to bleak.

The day the Dow Jones index went back over 14,000 and a record close, was the day Citi Corp announced a 60% drop in third quarter earnings.

The explanation I heard was one I have heard countless times. The market hates uncertainty, and ever since the housing market tanked and the sub-prime lending spree hit the wall, investors have been wondering whether the ensuing credit crunch was going to annihilate all lending and borrowing on which international business depends.

When Citi Corp - and several other banks - announced that they were going to write down a huge amount due to non-performing loans, the markets said now they know how bad the damage is. Knowing the bad news in the investment world, beats uncertainty, even about potential good news.

What's more, the news was so bad, they figured the worst was over and it would get better from here.

You could make the case that this way of seeing things is whistling past the graveyard.

Or you could say that, knowing that nothing is forever, it is smart to make hay while the sun shines.

I guess I go with the latter.