Anatomy Trains

This morning in the early cool Quan and I turned away from the dramatic caldera view where all the pricey hotels are perched like birds (or guano, viewed from afar), and walked down the long apron of farms on the far side to the Aegean where the mountain of Anafi floats in the sky some miles out to sea. Oh, how I’d love to sail these islands! A few observations:

The old CD’s hang on strings and flash in the breeze to scare away the birds from the farmers’ crops.

The donkeys have stalls that are pumice caves into the sides of the cliff. The donkeys work all day carrying the tourists up the steep side of the caldera from the ferries and cruise ships to the tourist towns on the lip (“Asses for the asses”, quips Quan). With no natural water on the island, all the tomatoes and grapes and figs – as well as the donkeys – look dry as can be – and we wonder how they grow.

A large flat empty Go-Kart park filled a forest of every driving sign known to Europe, where they obviously teach the island kids how to drive (too bad so little of it sticks – we are honked at, swerved by, and it’s a miracle more accidents don’t happen). The ‘streets’ are very small; I imagine they use the numerous little dune buggies and ATV’s that are lying fallow tourist-free months of the winter.

After an hour’s walk, we cool our feet in the velvet sea, and meet an old widow gathering the red volcanic stones on the beach backed by badland formations of water-shaped pumice. I really have so little Greek, but as soon as I speak one word, she assumes and is off at 60 miles an hour, so I soon am at a total loss, but the gist is Obama up, Clinton down, Bush way down, and everything is expensive and going downhill. I am ashamed – I couldn’t carry on one coherent sentence in any language about current Greek politics, and this woman – certainly neither educated nor cultivated nor English speaking - knows more than many Americans about our election.

In the little harbor next to the beach, only two traditional caiquies remain; the rest are all fiberglass motorboats. Though the nets look the same as they ever did.

It was a long, hot walk back up the mountain, a couple of thousand feet up the squiggly road, back from the women sweeping the front terraces in their ‘jammies, back from the mustachioed men on their mopeds, back from the gangly children shuffling to school, back from the shady figs and hard green grapes, back into the indulgent world of the island visitor – the poolside sibilance of the Italian, German, and French sybarites taking showers on an island with no natural water.

Later, back in the tourist town, the Americans from the ships shuffling through the narrow streets among the Tag Heuer watches and €2000 gold chains and tacky Santorini fridge magnets have plastic stickers with numbers stuck to their chests designating what? Their boat? Their bus? Does it get any worse than this? Could they be any more like cattle?

Quan asks me what I will remember most, and the answer is the process of buying some religious icons in Oia, involving several trips to the dark below-street shop with its arching roof sheltering the angels and archangels, madonnas and apostles. We share coffee with the muscular painter with the ravaged face while both the art and the relationship are weighed, as that all figures in the final price in this negotiable culture. Another high point was sharing an hour of songs – trading back and forth between the English pop and the Greek traditional, using guitar and the tiny bouzoukis in the Mad Greek Michaili’s taverna served by the Californian who is a dead-ringer for Misty – hair, body, carriage, attitude. Bless her and keep her safe.

Within a few years, it will be difficult to find someone who speaks good demotic Greek, and the old signs, with the old Cyrillic alphabet, will be on sale in the shops as novelties. I suppose it is a good idea for world understanding that we are headed for one world culture, but in the particular, it just seems sad and demeaning to the establishment of centuries of individualized points-of-view.

George Kousaleos - head of the Core Institute, a ‘competing’ Structural Integration school, our host for this trip along with his wife Patty, and my co-teacher for the course part of it - is a large man. Not tall, especially, but broad and expansive, with an Old Greek smile that widens to take in his cheeks, and then his ears, and then the whole wide world. George has a flexible agility (he runs the morning stretch class, comfortably encircling his foot with his bear-paw hands where my thin artisan fingers are fighting my short hamstrings and bound hips to claw for my ankle), belied by his stocky legs and almost ponderous movement through his daily life. I feel like a darting hummingbird beside his calm ursine warmth.

His large head is necessary for all those brains; his bull neck was forged in rugby and football; only large ribs could encircle such an expansive heart. His girth probably started with a Greek’s love of food drenched in olive oil, but additionally I recognize a brother: he has been playing the role for a long time that I took up only a couple of years ago – that of padrone. He is literally a grandfather, with a Greek’s eye on the extended family of cousins, nephews, and assorted associations. But he also has his school, his employees, his students, and the bodywork community under the umbrella of his generous care and intelligent concern, and after a time this responsibility begins to induce a gravitas inside that expresses itself in a belly-centered heft outside. Or so I’ve found.

George and I have just discovered we were both at Harvard at the same time. He completed his degree in the famous Soc Rel (Social Relations) program that was sweeping Harvard at the time, which combined psychology with sociology in a world-saving reach. The real opportunity at Harvard, besides Widener Library, was that one could get close to truly great people, leaders in their field. While I was being inspired by the sonorous tones of the playwright William Alfred in Mem Hall and Shakesperean actor Dan Seltzer and learning evolution from Ernst Mayr, George was across Prospect St. in the William James building, riding the elevator with B. F. Skinner, and learning how to bring people back from addiction with Erik Erikson. What a playing field!

But the late ‘60’s was a rebellious time. George’s rebellion was not to complete his doctorate, a sin with which his father (“I’m only thinking of you and your future!”) beat him about the head. I was an English major (what you did in those days if you didn’t know what else to do, though for me it was a way of getting credit for what I would have done anyway – hang around the Loeb Theater), a year ahead of George.

In the ferment of ’68, when the ‘revolution’ was in full swing and the cops in the baby blue helmets clubbed us out of University Hall, I dropped out – not because of the heavy-handed response to the war protest, but because in the aftermath there was suddenly a socialist revolution, with all these classes on Fanon and third-world farming that I, television revolutionary, found unutterably boring. My father, a Republican WASP, kept his counsel with only a disapproving look on his face that well I could read. I went on to a minor college to study with Bucky Fuller and never went or even looked back to Harvard. George, however, is still associated with the Harvard Admissions, and says he could help me complete my undergraduate degree based on my book and other work – tempting.

What George and I both share from that time, more than any intellectual snobbery or revolutionary fervor, is a deep and abiding conviction that the body means something more than a vehicle for the mind, that this rise in massage and somatic education is more than just an upper-middle-class indulgence in sybaritic excess.

Both of us were inspired into this field based on an intuitive flash, and only later realized the fuller social and evolutionary – essentially anthropological - implications of the ‘Me Decade’, better named at the time as the Human Potential movement. Both of us stayed in it despite the re-appellation ‘New Age’ and the population of well-meaning but needy do-gooders who tend to populate the associated professions. Both of us conform to the laws and rules of schools, buffeted by market forces and everyday business realities rather than hiding in the tenured womb of academia.

George got his SI training from Bill Williams, one of the first of Ida’s ‘buds’ to feel the frost of the Rolf Institute’s exclusivist attitude that lasted 30 years until the formation of IASI, though it still remains in some hearts and minds. I confess to having the same thoughts myself – that CORE and Soma and Hellerwork were ‘cheapening’ the work by teaching it … what? Too short, not high concept enough? not in the direct line from Ida? – some such bullshit until in 2000 I myself was outside the pale and the scales fell from my eyes. In any case, George combines a massage school and the SI program, and has had deep ties with the development of massage as a whole and is a leading light in the AMTA, sports massage for the Olympics, and school standards – but his heart remains with the structural work. I lay on the table for him to demonstrate his take on Logan Basic, and I defy any Rolf-trained teacher to do a better job of freeing the back.

We are all doing our best to revivify and re-incorporate a society gone mad into somatic alienation, where physical education and remedial medicine daily walk ever closer to the robotic, disembodied way of doing things where human beings are just adjunct pieces to be used for the good of the stockholders, whoever they may be. George’s intellect, coupled with his intuitive sense, is a force for re-inventing our society in its fully psychosomatized form, where we prepare our children for the demands of the 21st century, where we teach the Neolithic bodies our children are born with to live fully, successfully, sensually, sexually, and autonomously in this electronic world. Thank God for his intelligence applied to this problem, for his calm warmth, and for his steady, water-like pressure on the cold logical machine of maximum profit and minimum involvement. George is a human, in the sense the Greeks invented them.

We have our first view of the Santorini caldera exactly at sunset (I am sure George engineered it this way).

Easy enough to find pictures; hard for those pictures to convey the drama of emerging from the close little alleyways of the town (almost Arabic in their coolness, though totally cruise-ship oriented in their contents - good jewelry, bad painting, “We ship anywhere” on crockery) to a sudden view of the whole circle of the volcano - raw, edgy, dipped into the sea opposite us, but clear in its crescent moon-like embrace of 24 square miles of ruffled water dotted with ships, bigger than Haleakala in Maui, with us perched on its highest point above the absolute black cliff straight down a couple of thousand feet into the harbor far below.

The explosion of this volcano, around 1600 BC, shook the Mediterranean world. The ash has been found in the Greenland ice, and in the rings of fallen sequoias in California. It produced a tsunami of 500 feet (the Javan tsunami of a couple of years ago was 60 feet). The island of Santorini itself was of course obliterated, and the island of Kriti (Crete) to its south took the full force of the tsunami and earthquake, and these two islands were the seat of the ancient Minoan civilization, that of the House of the Ax and the Labyrinth, the bull dance and the mosaics of Knossos, which ruled the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps beyond before the rise of the Phoenicians, the Athenian states and the whole Platonic school (Plato himself, writing many centuries after the event, theorized that the earthquake and volcano sank Atlantis, placing Atlantis here in Santorini), and way before the Roman triremes ruled the waves. The mighty Minoan empire was wiped out in a matter of days, never to rise again. See Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for a fictional but brilliantly realized tale of this time.

And oh yes, one other minor effect of this huge cataclysm: the initial pull of the tsunami drained the water around the head of the Red Sea, allowing a small group of escaping slaves from a minor tribe on the Levant to cross to safety from Egypt to the Sinai, while the pursuing army was caught in the returning water of the tsunami itself. “Pharoah’s army got drownded, Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”

“Oh, Greece”, I cry with my arms outspread in prodigal welcome and heartfelt love of your wine-dark Aegean under your flawless turquoise sky, love of your good-humoured folk with their seductive gift of gab fronting for their fundamental generosity of spirit.  My cry is tinged with despair and nostalgic regret at the invasion of American music and Anglophonic Europeanism into your unique corner of the world.

We are but a mile or two from our arrival spot, a jetport on the ancient island of Thira, known to all now as the island of Saint Irene – Santorini.  I have never visited here before, but I have visited dozens of islands just like it here in the Cyclades, so it feels like a homecoming.  And a homecoming one both welcomes and holds one’s hands against – the tiny fishing village of the 60’s that would have had a pension with a couple of rooms for the few Germans intrepid enough to cross the island by donkey is now a distended strip of tourist restaurants, with menus in English and French, everything written in the Roman alphabet.  Restauranteurs solicit the tourists like touts, with a bit of the old Greek insouciance, but a tiredness and desperation that speaks of a Johnny-come-lately to the European Union grasping for euros in place of the old drachma, no longer the proudly independent inheritors of the cradle of Western civilization.  Now they’ve inherited the printed towel maps and the crappy tourist dreck that follows the money everywhere.

This morning I stirred at 7 to find a cloudy day.  I slipped from our bed and put on my sneakers to climb through the village to the switchback road that led up through the olive groves to the pass between two mountains. It was an hour’s upward walk, getting wilder and windier as I rose above the beach and town.  The winds were flaring down off the slopes across the sea, cat’s paws and williwaws among the few caíques moored offshore.  By the time I get to the crest of the pass, the tops of the mountains on either side are shrouded in swirling cloud, the wind so strong that I am being pelted with small stones as I stood leaning into it and looking down to the similar beach town far down on the other side of the island.

On the way down, loath to take the same route home, I followed a little path across the steep slope just to see where it would lead, and ended up at one of those ubiquitous Greek shrines – a little building of blue and white so small I had to duck as I entered.  I cross myself not in homage to the Olympian gods or God of the Book, but to the Greeks and their orthodox faith.  The tiny building is full of icons to St George, St Nicholas, and the Virgin Madonna, and incense and candles and spent matches and little burners for the faithful who make the climb to this altar nestled into the rocks in the side of the cliff.  A little more investigation and I find out why it’s here in particular – a cave snakes into the hill from behind the building, and deep within, my eyes adjusting to the trickle of light, is a trickle of water that has made, over centuries, strange-lipped pool formations in the cave.

The water is presumably consecrated in some way; people use it for offerings.  I suspect, as in England, this little church is a Christian overlay on a pagan sacred site, an intuition later confirmed: this was a sacred source of water for the ancient Thirians priests who had their acropolis fort at the top of the hill. Putting thoughts of bat-shit and snakes aside, I scramble into the dark, following the sound, and drink the sweet water, tangy with the mineral earth.

As I descend the smaller switchback path, braking myself with my jelly-like quads, the peculiar heaviness, almost grief, that comes from descending back into the human world from an accomplished height accompanies me back to the sea-level hotel.  The town of Kamari is now up and moving - cleaning the streets, opening the stores, setting out the racks of postcards, and the early tourists out to get their sun cream and plan their days, overfilling them as they do at home, spreading their endless money indiscriminately among these ever-more impoverished people – in my opinion, having known them when they were really poor but still rich in culture.  Blessed, sayeth the Lord, are the poor in spirit.

New York, this time, is by turns wonderful and awful.  From the pleasant spring sunshine of Maine, I dive into the canyons of the city, where a cold wind tunnels down between the buildings, turning umbrellas inside out and getting in your crevices.  The clerks seem hostile, the traffic aggressive, the streets dangerous.  Intending to take a long walk, I get some water instead and quickly return to Michael’s loft, softly lit, warm furniture, full of good cooking smells.

By yesterday the sun is warm and the clerk at Starbucks gives me a coffee rather than break my $100 bill, and I am so warmed I come back to give her both the money and a tip later when I have change.

The course - my last in a long string of traveling gigs - is likewise up and down as we search out a modus vivendi for conveying what we have in bigger ways to the yoga, Pilates, and personal training professions.  Sometimes I feel we have a coherent message, and sometimes it feels as if we are being spread way too thin, but such is the nature of experiment and working into new areas.

But I am too tired to really pop in the class, so let’s go home and see if there’s a rest available for me to recharge the batteries for another round later this year.  Fatigue is something I often feel temporarily, but this  - 45 of the last 54 days teaching or traveling (so those 9 recovering, packing, doing laundry) – feels a deep tiredness – systemic, a more profound level of chemistry, and a Dantean level of lostness that goes along with it.

The fatigue spreads like a virus – I am tired of the election.  I am tired that after one or two debates last winter where, for one brief shining moment it looked like we might have a discussion of the truly pressing issues at hand.  But instead we have been dragged back into old-style gutter politics by the very first woman who had earned our grudging and then genuine admiration as the first woman to contend on the playing field of the presidency.  I am tired of the non-work on energy and the silly prating of the chattering classes while the world spins out of control and we, the people, can seemingly do nothing, and evince no interest in doing so.

So it was with some interest that I emerged onto the street to the sounds of 60’s protest chants, and the sight of banners across the sidewalk.  It was a small but well-organized protest by W.A.R. – a PETA-like group called Win Animal Rights – who had discovered that Roger Waltzman, an executive with ties to a lab that kills test animals, lived across the street, and was embarrassing him to his family and neighbors by holding this noisy protest outside his home.

“Huntington Life Sciences Kills 500 Animals Every Day – Novartis Pays Them to Do It” read the headline on the paper they were passing out.  Huntingdon Life Sciences kills these animals for product testing – toothpaste and tanning lotion in the eyes, poisons, cuts, burns, broken limbs – if it is all true, then more power to these folks, at least they are up and doing something.

Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, publishes Netter, a great service to our trade.  But if you want them to stop being associated with killing animals, you can email Roger Waltzman at roger.waltzman@novartis.com, or follow up with WAR at http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights.

May my children, real and children of spirit, rise up and take control of our country.  “The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases,” I paraphrase Nietzsche, “and one of those diseases is Man.”  Are we a disease or an embryonic demi-urge?  The next few generations will tell, and it seems a pretty close run question to me.  I am interested in the continuation of the human experiment, but not at the cost of all these innocent animals, all these innocent children, all these nascent countries, and the exquisite resources of the earth – our yolk sac for this developmental journey.

Cheney has amassed $40 billion out of this war and the attendant oil profits. The continued ascendancy of him and his ilk is the most fatiguing thing of all.  He deserves to be on trial in Den Hague.

I suppose one must admit the primal landforms shimmering in lovely light, with cool dawns and dry warm days, and towns full of rugged individuals.

But underfoot, the entire desert southwest of the United States is one big catbox; everywhere you walk off the road, it feels like kitty litter.

(thanks to Kathleen Mary)

For one day, the weather finally clears in Oslo, and in the lingering evening from my tiny 15th floor balcony (reminiscent of a hot-air balloon basket – I have the sickening feeling that my evil twin is going to grab my body, leap to the railing and jump wildly for the waterfall) I can finally see more than the pounding spray below me. A sliver of cupped moonlight follows the sun to bed, and far to my left, the harbor – I didn’t know I had a sea view until this moment - reflects the last orange of the daylight.

By tomorrow, according to CNN, it will be cold rain again, and Patreus and Crocker will be tossed softballs by Congress for an easy hit into more war, more lives lost, more disruption for the poor people who were unlucky enough to be in Dick Cheney’s way. The way they got this war started – Rummy and Cheney and Perles and Wolfowitz – that’s got to be a form of cheating? It is hard to keep going sometimes, having faith that the political and the environmental degradation will not overwhelm this human experiment before the work that we do – preparing the next generation of children for this 21st century world - has a chance to take hold.

Each day I travel down the hill to the class in the town center on a five-minute tram ride. The ticket is 30 kr., about $6. No one checks whether you have a ticket,. My American sensibility suggests that $12/day is a bit much, and for reasons too complicated to explain, I have trouble getting Norwegian cash. In any case, I confess to jumping on and off again without a ticket some mornings.

The ethic that we grew up with in the hippie era – it’s ok to stick it to ‘the man’, including the phone company, the government, or anyone corporate, while maintaining a high personal ethic with our fellow individuals. (Supposedly – in fact we were sexist in our treatment of both women and gays.)

Nowadays, this kind of petty cheating is very rare for me – this one was remarkable for its appearance. Nobody wants to pay more taxes than they have to, so that’s simply a form of disguise. But not only can I afford the things I used to rationalize cheating on, but decades have shown me the humans in the corporations – and of course I have a few of those corporations myself these days. I still think ‘the people’ are getting screwed, but the sharply-drawn blacks and whites have all gone for the gray wash like those a friend showed me on some drawings in a museum in Edinburgh.

I have spent nearly $1300 replacing 2 shirts, 2 pairs of pants (a shirt has two sleeves, but it’s not a pair of shirts – why is that?), underwear, and a belt and a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo – and not even high quality clothes. Surely that’s enough? Doesn’t that justify some cheating? But what does the Oslo Transit Authority have to do with British Airways?

In some form of poetry, British Airways coughs up my suitcase in my literal last hour in Oslo – I collect it and drop it onto my flight to Munich. BA offers to pay me £35 ($70) for having lost my luggage – surely that’s a form of cheating? Not even worth filing for, as it will take more time than it’s worth.

As the plane peels out over the rugged and extraordinary coast, I contemplate what constitutes cheating, and rapidly move from the convoluted but navigable pathways of the mind to the wild and stormy uncharted domain of the heart.

I recently had to tell a good friend that he hadn’t made the cut for a team. From the brain’s point of view, it was a straightforward call, but my heart – my compassion and my fear all mixed up – blew the communication, and the friendship was shot out of the sky. I never did team sports as a kid, and I guess I missed out on how to do these things kindly but quickly and clearly.

More recently still, I had to tell another friend - who was much younger emotionally than I ever suspected – that her fantasies about our ‘deep connection’ were just that. This was a blow, as I had thought I had a good friend, with none of the clutter that can gum up the easiest cross-gender friendship (at least in my generation – Misty seems immune to the problem and has equal friends in both genders). But the empathy and charm I use to create the bonds of friendship is all too easily mistaken for seduction, so - all unintended – I was the cheat. I must be so careful, and I hate having to be so watchful, so closed-hearted, so vigilant. Must I so close my heart to live as I am in this world?

But: Thou shalt not commit pain.

And I did.

My dear, sweet, infirm and insane wife understands the pathways of the heart better than anyone I know. A lot of good it has done her (not). Some people ‘get’ her and celebrate her wisdom, some (like my family) see only the surface and shake their heads in disbelief that I am with her, and gloriously happy with her, despite our differences, despite the frustrations, despite the fact that in learning her, I have committed pain.

The human heart is minefield, a battlefield, a stormy ocean, and a nightmare of phantasms all rolled into one. Of course it’s an Alpine meadow, a calm Aegean sea, and an exhilarating flying dream as well. Right now, though, with my body breaking down and my mind running on fumes from too much travel and too little reflective time, my heart and everyone else’s seems terra incognita, ultima thule, one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

I look forward to time off the road, out of this plane, in the arms of the one who sets straight the paths, calms the storms, and sorts the complexities out in simple, direct, and refreshingly earthy terms. Quan, I celebrate you.

With the typical English superficial horror of / secret delight in inefficiency, the newly opened Terminal 5 at Heathrow went from ‘All hail!’ to shambolic within hours of its grand opening. I had seen it on the news from my hotel in Edinburgh, and so took the precaution of checking the bag only to Heathrow. I fetched it, rechecked it again to Oslo so it wouldn’t get lost, and went back in through security. Since the plane from Edinburgh was an hour late, I was running and puffing through this process and made it just in time for the Oslo flight.

Terminal 5, handsome though it is, is, was indeed a mess – hundreds of men (and a few women) in security yellow coats with BA (British Airways) or BAA (British Airports Authority) on the back - were wandering up and down the corridors, in and out of those doors you and I may not breech, carrying flashlights or clipboards, but obviously lost, trying to look busy so no one would ask them anything or send them on an errand even more foolish and hopeless than the one they were currently on.

Passengers, meanwhile, with no information, no luggage, no signage or anything to help them along, went to pieces in queues or in corners, manifesting all five stages of grief.

I needn’t have bothered with my extra trouble – they lost my bag anyway. So here I am, high in an apartment building over the Aakers Elve Falls with only the sweaty clothes I threw on to make the trip, and BA has no idea, this next day, where my bag is or when it might arrive. CNN says there are 28,000 lost bags in Heathrow, so it could easily be weeks.

Oslo feels a bit lonely and sterile – and I am bound to this apartment for the evening in any case, since I have washed out my only clothes and have hung them to dry for the morning. (I hope). The falls are my straw to clutch at the moment, a beautiful cataract whitewater feature running full force down through the city, the old mills that line it now gentrified into boutique apartments and clever little shops. I look down on it wondering how one would run it in a kayak, a feat I will leave to younger bodies and reflexes.

The constant tumult of white water and spray is a balm to the eye, and background noise so like and yet so unlike the roar of an airplane, which I would welcome if it were the one bringing me my bag with the phone charger, the visual aids I need for class, my shaving brush, and a hundred other things that it will, in the fullness of time, be possible to replace, but I would really rather not.

You can have haggis.  Like the pig intestines in Taiwan, everyone urges me to try it, each assuring me that this recipe or that restaurant transcends the bad reputation to achieve edibility, while each one actually manages to approximate a different kind of cat food.  I will somehow survive without delving further into this line of nutrition.  I don’t expect you to try raw oysters or urchin roe or clam chowder when you come to my house either.

I walked up on Costorphine Hill this dawn, ahead of my presentation for 100 or so therapists.  It was colder and windier than it looked, ruffling my shirt so I buttoned my cuffs and sought out a pathway up through the woods. After a sleepless night (there was a wedding at the hotel, and the DJ had the whole building thumping until well after midnight), it felt good to let the muscles loose and the mind coordinate to the rhythm of feet on the ground.  At the top was a beautiful view east over the zoo to Edinburgh, certainly one of the most comely cities on this planet.

Walking along the ridge among the mossy trees and lichen-covered rocks, I scared up a bunch of rabbits, small like Quan’s, and similarly poised between curious and scared.  The wild rabbits at home – used to hunters and beagles – are seldom seen and disappear like a shot if discovered, but these fat and happy little beings were clearly protected, as they loped calmly out of my sight in the ferns and rocks of the glen.

God knows if I used the word ‘glen’ right.  It means ‘shallow’, as in glenoid fossa, the shallow shoulder joint, but these Scots are as fiercely protective of their language as they are of haggis, so my natural tendency to imitate is not received kindly, but rather with severe looks, declarations, and dismissals.  It is with joy, not ridicule, that I affect assimilation, but they have had enough of English dominance, and American attempts at badly-accented chumminess are about as welcome as ‘MacDonalds’ – a perfectly good Scots name that is known the world around for the bland reliability of its mediocrity. .

Ducking into the men’s room in the midst of the Schipol polyglot after my ride over the pond, I came across something I had heard about, but had never seen.  The report said that putting a fly in the urinals improved men’s aim.  Sure enough, they had etched or somehow engraved a black insect shape into the white ceramic.  Despite the fact that it looked more like a trout fly than a real one, and despite the fact that I clearly knew it was a simple image, it was irresistible.  One’s aim is indeed truly drawn toward trying to hit the fly, even though one ‘knows’ it will do no good.

Of course it does do some good, because the fly is placed where it is on purpose, as this is the spot with the least ‘sprayback’, so aiming there reduces cleaning and public hazard.  So simple, and such a strong psychological effect.

We’ve been pooping and peeing for 350 million years, and we’ve been dealing with the result of waste accumulation due to crowding since Hammurabi wrote out the first law of sewage.  We’re still not doing every well.  As I walked away from the from the wall of gleaming porcelain mouths, my unit tsked, clanged, and whooshed a couple of gallons of water through, mixing a pint or so of liquid waste with perfectly good water, and then dumped the whole lot into a system that produces nothing but cost.

We do the same with solid waste, and back at home, we are about to spend a great deal of money for the privilege of mixing our waste immediately with tons of good water and running it gradually out through our dense Presumpscot clay ground to filter it.  The first builders of latrines and privies had to deal with the smell, which isn’t, of course, pleasant.  The invention of Sir Thomas Crapper’s toilet, on which modern toilets are based, had the wonderful advantage of allowing you to void waste inside your shelter without having to put up with the smell.

Today, the waste of good water is more a problem than the waste itself.  What we now have available to us is technology that could rapidly dry out the waste (thus eliminating the smell also) which would give is a net gain in good water, and incidentally, give us the basis for a dry composted material.  This may sound disgusting, but the composting toilets my father installed in 1972 still produce, over time, a dry and odorless dirt that can be added to a garden without penalty.

Why should we mix our bodily waste with clean water and then run it underground to settle out without using it again?  It is another of the ways of human beings that make no sense.  Pollution is just a resource in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If we could capture some of the resources we waste, everyone – even the poor Zimbabweans trying to vote today – would succeed.