A Pilgrim’s Digression

Yesterday afternoon, while I was in meetings, my wife left the names and numbers of two doctors on my voice mail. I don’t know whether to call them doctors, or therapists, or psychiatrists. One of them referred to herself as a counselor, which always reminds me of the perfectly useless “guidance” counselors in my old high school.

I can’t shake the impression that a counselor is someone who shows no interest in the fate of fellow human beings, unless they are an athlete with schools lined up to dole out athletics scholarships.

The word “counselor” also reminds me of those laconic students assigned to me in lieu of an adviser, during my first two undergraduate years at the state university. My student “counselor” always sat in a metal folding chair at the end of a hallway down which stretched a long line of students waiting for her signature on a registration form. Don’t ask her any questions, please. Just let her sign her name so we can all get the hell out of here.

I have a long-standing dislike of counselors.

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Philip Larkin, the jowly, bald man in black-rimmed spectacles, stubs out a cigarette in a souvenir ashtray. On the ashtray is depicted the Tower of London, complete with heads on pikes.

Mr. Larkin is looking out the window of his rented room, glumly watching the high window across the street, where a young woman sits at a desk in her own rented room, writing. He has seen her on the street with a young man, both of them quite affectionate towards one another. Every time he sees two young people together, he wonders are they fucking and is she wearing a diaphragm or taking the pill.

Sex only became legal in 1963, you know.

At night, Larkin gets potted and falls asleep in his chair, waking at four to watch the gray winter light gradually stain the curtain edges. Always in the corner of his eye, just out of focus, is the dark thing that will one day stand out plain. Many things in life never happen at all; this one will.

However, when he finally buys a home at age 60, the poet mows his own yard. He once killed a hedgehog with his mower, and he wrote a poem about it. He listens to Sydney Bechet and sometimes writes well-regarded Jazz criticism. Alone, the poet and University librarian catalogs his pornography collection.

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While Lynn and Brendan went to church this morning, I went to Lowe’s to buy supplies for the painting project beginning tomorrow. When we bought our home, it was only recently constructed, and the contractor left the walls primed, but unpainted. So finally, we are paying someone to paint the interior of our home for us.

We had settled on a color awhile ago, a kind of beige called Hopsack, but as I waited for the paint to be mixed, I browsed the color swatches, thinking of colors that might look good in the spare bathroom and our bedroom (the only rooms we are considering painting ourselves, since they are out of general public view).

I am always intrigued by how smart retailers sell products, doubly so when the product is paint or some other item that most people don’t put a lot of thought into beyond color and price.

I noticed that some of the color swatches had a label in one corner that said “National Trust Historic Preservation.” Looking more closely, I discovered that these colors were, apparently, the same colors as could be found in historic landmarks across the country. Most of the landmarks were hotels, but I did see a color labeled “Mark Twain House Oak.”

Then there was “Coral Gables Biltmore Mediterranean Mocha” and “Cincinnatian Hotel Nichols Taupe” (who knew Cincinnati had any famous landmarks?), and “Lyndhurst Victorian Rose.”

I found myself wondering if I visited the Cincinnatian Hotel Nichols whether I would indeed find the walls to be painted this particular color of taupe, and at the same time, ironically drawn to choosing only colors with the “National Trust” label.

After all, who would paint their walls a plain Victorian Rose color when they could paint their walls the same color of Victorian Rose as the Lyndhurst?

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Thursday night, I did our taxes using H and R Block’s online tax preperation software. I’ve prepared my taxes online every year for the past three years, but I thought this year might be an exception, and that we might have to hire a professional to prepare our taxes. Since we bought a house this year, we were going to have to itemize. In the past, we have just taken the standard deduction.

And in the past, we have always owed taxes, sometimes as much as three or four hundred dollars in taxes.

This year, I even had more taxes taken out of my pay, in an attempt to prevent us owing money to the IRS. Nevertheless, despite itemizing, and despite having the extra taken out, we still have to pay. We owe $90.00 to the federal government.

But we are getting a sizable refund from the state. What does this mean?

New iPod. Oh yeah.

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This post is going to mean absolutely nothing to people who don’t play World of Warcraft, so I give you fair warning. The half-dozen or so people who don’t play the game can stop reading whenever their interest wanes.

If you do stop reading, I nonetheless recommend that you take a look at this online comic series, The Noob, by the artist Gianna Masetti. Masetti has hilariously parodied the experience of entering the world of a role-playing game, even titling her fictional RPG Clichéquest. It’s a fun read, and hopefully even someone not familiar with this type of game can appreciate the humor of it.

Having just initiated my best friend to WoW over the past couple weeks, I’ve been thinking about what my experience was like when I first started playing. Specifically, I have been remembering some of the humorous, or stupid things I did as a n00b–as a new player. Again, a warning: these may not be humorous if you don’t play the game.

It was only August 31 of last year that I installed the game, but in some ways the period prior to August 31, 2006, seems like a previous era of my life. I have devoted hours and hours to this game. In some ways, it has come to seem as real to me as real life, or as gamers call it, RL. To some extent, we have to distinguish between our real life and our virtual life, for sanity’s sake, but when you spend as much time–if not more–in a game than you do socializing with “real life” friends and family, is the game in fact becoming your real life?

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I took Brendan to the barber today.  We arrived at eleven; the barber closes at noon on Saturday, so the shop was quite crowded.  There were three people ahead of me.

Walking in, it was one of those moments where as a parent, you think, “Do I really want to wait this long with a five year old?”

But he needed a haircut, as did I, and there was nowhere else to go at nearly noon on Saturday except the salon at Wal-Mart.  Frankly, I’d cut his hair myself before taking him to the salon at Wal-Mart.  The beauticians there always do a real whack job on my little boy’s hair, for some reason; whereas the elderly, African-American barber I prefer always does a quick, precise job of it.

As it turned out, except for asking if it was his turn yet every five minutes, Brendan was good as gold for the hour we spent in the barber shop.  He sat with me and looked at a Sports Illustrated, far from my ideal reading material, but the only thing available.  I explained to him what little I knew about each of the sports.

“Do you want to play basketball some day?”  I asked him.

“No, I’m not any good at basketball,” he said authoritatively.

I said, “When have you played basketball?”

“I don’t remember,” he said, “But I know I’m not any good at it.”

I said, “You don’t have to be good at it, as long as you enjoy it.  If you think it’s fun, then you should do it.”

He didn’t say anything.

Then he saw a picture of two boxers punching each other simultaneously.

“What are they doing?”  He asked.

Have you ever tried to explain boxing to a five year old whom you have tried to shelter from knowledge of violence, to some extent?  It’s almost as bad as explaining how baby sister got into Mama’s belly.

“Well, in boxing, two people punch each other until one is bloody or unconscious and can’t fight any longer.”

“Why would they do that?  Hands are for helping, not hurting,” he said, repeating a phrase he learned in his Montessori pre-school.

On the subject of golf, Brendan opined knowledgeably, “I’ve played golf before. It’s really difficult.”

“When did you play golf?”

“I played with Grandpa when he took me to the beach last summer.”

“Oh, you played miniature golf.”

“Yes, I played golf,” Brendan said.

Soon, it was Brendan’s turn for a haircut.  He climbed up into the barber’s chair and sat on a board that the old man placed across the arms of the chair.  The barber cinched an apron around Brendan’s neck, tucked in a paper napkin around his collar, and went to work.

My part, from here on out, was to tell Brendan regularly, “Hold your head still.”  Or, “Don’t move, Brendan.”  Or, “Close your eyes,” when the barber went to cut his bangs.

But eventually, I noticed Brendan picking up small handfuls of his hair from the apron and holding it in his fist.

“What are you doing that for?”  I asked.

“I want to keep it,” he said, “as a reminder of my third trip to the barber.”

He has been to the barber many times before.

I said, “I don’t think you should.  You’ll get it all over the car.”

“But I want to.”

I didn’t argue with him then, figuring I’d deal with it at the end.

Later, it was my turn in the barber chair.  My haircuts don’t last long, for reasons that are obvious to people who know me.  I always tell the barber “Just set your clippers to one and shave it.”  I don’t have enough hair to bother with, and I like the convenience of having even less than what little remains.

Brendan sat on a bench and watched me get my haircut, and then after awhile he came over and picked up a patch of hair off my apron.  He went back and sat down on the bench and started rolling my hair into a ball mixed with his hair.

“Ewww,” I said, “Why are you doing that, Brendan?”

“I’m making a friendship ball.”

“What’s a friendship ball?”

He replied, “Well, you take some hair from one person and hair from another person and you roll it all together into a friendship ball.”

“Who told you that?”  I asked, still a little disgusted.

“No one.  I just thought of it.”

“What do you do with a friendship ball?”

“I’m going to put it in my treasure chest because I like you.”

Brendan has a small, porcelain pirate’s treasure chest where he keeps a lot of his personal “treasures.”

I said, “If I’d know you liked hair so much, instead of buying you Christmas presents I would have just combed the cat’s fur and given you a fur-ball.”

The barber laughed; Brendan didn’t get the joke.

I said, “Well, I guess you can take that home.”

Now, Brendan has a ball of our hair in an envelope in his “treasure” chest.

There are several news stories across the Internet today about the “foes” of President Bush’s troop surge plan, who are apparently uniting in an effort to derail the troop increase.

Maybe I should not have been surprised at the opposition from Democrats, but the strength of Republican opposition is really quite startling. I fully support a Congressman’s right to change his or her mind, but really it’s going a bit too far to oppose a troop increase now, when not so long ago many Senators were calling for a troop increase.

Some might say this change of heart on the part of Republicans and Democrats has more to do with hypocritical political posturing than true belief. It is truly disgusting to watch. The proverb about rats and sinking ships comes to mind. One might also think of hyenas ripping apart a wounded animal.

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