Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Santa Monica Sunset

      I learned a few things yesterday that change my worldview. Most notably, I’m not the Skee Ball player I once was. Someone’s got to finish last. I provided enough evidence to convince myself, grudgingly, that I’m not as good as my wife and daughter. So be it. More importantly, I suppose, was spending the time with each of them.

      The Santa Monica Pier is a classic California beach pier, jammed with people watching the waves roll underneath while the sun drops towards the horizon. The arcade and amusement park rides were active, despite a chilly breeze off the Pacific Ocean. Dining choices were strictly fattening and a bit greasy, and nobody seemed particularly concerned about the lack of kale and spinach smoothies on the menu. There’s plenty of that elsewhere in California, this place is for fun.

      Route 66 terminates at Santa Monica Pier. You could drive your car from Chicago to Santa Monica, park on the pier and watch the sunset with some fried dough if you want to. I settled for the sunset, which seemed a great way to wrap up a brief few days out west.

      There’s no doubt this place is touristy, but the beach and rolling waves back it up with substance. Sometimes we just need to forget the world’s problems and have some fun. This place has offered up fun for generations.

    • Desert Decisions

      Caffeine and alcohol hit you a bit differently in the desert. The desert sucks you dry. Here, you’re always skating the line between chaos and disorder with dehydration already. Pour in some stimulants or depressants and see how it goes. Looking around Las Vegas, it seems it often goes badly.

      Las Vegas can be invigorating and off-putting all at once. Jaw dropping moments occur regularly, from the extraordinary talent of the performers here, the sheer decadence on display, the choices some people make balancing their wardrobes with other decisions they’ve made in their lives, or the gritty, desperate living death of those cast aside all around you. You see things you want to see in Vegas, but good god you see things you you never wanted to see too.

      The desert dryness is catching up with me, but so too is immersion in this place. I’ve spent a lot of my ration of days in a place I’m completely ambivalent about. Life is very much encapsulated in Las Vegas. We can live boldly or slide sideways off track. For all the incredible, wonderful people making something for themselves here, there are others who descend into the abyss. If this city teaches you anything, it’s that we become what we focus on, one decision built on the next.

    • Trust, but Verify

      “Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.” — Thucydides

      We live in a world where sound bites and headlines are the primary news source for far too many people. Monetization of blue checks on Twitter seem to be the topic du jour, calling into question exactly who is telling you what. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating exponentially into our new [un]reality. What we see doesn’t always measure up to what we hear. In these moments, trusting the information we consume without verifying its validity places us in peril.

      There have always been scammers and charlatans, the only thing new is the tools of their trade. It’s possible to release a lie into the universe that can be believed to be true by millions. It happens every moment already. Diligence and trust are harder work than simply believing what we’re told, but don’t we owe it to ourselves and our future to try a bit harder to see beyond the face of what we’re told?

      Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves. This works equally well for the individual as it does for mankind. So just what kind of story do we want to believe? Trust, but verify.

    • By the Handful

      ‘You only go around once in life, and I’m going to grab a handful of it.’ — Steve McQueen

      The world is not back to “normal” post-pandemic, for there’s an increased state of madness and fragility buzzing around us all, but it’s clear that people are living larger lives. Who’s to blame them? Shouldn’t we be grabbing our handful of bold and earnest living in the face of it all? This is our time. Carpe diem.

      Las Vegas offers hope and distraction and a chance to step out of ourselves, just a little bit, and try new things. Sometimes those things are big and bold. Sometimes it’s a $10 dollar mechanical bull ride. Watching a line of buzzed glory riders ride the mechanical bull at Gilly’s late into the evening, I was struck by the parallel to McQueen’s statement. Each character climbed aboard, tucked one hand firmly onto the grip, the other high in the air and went for their crazy ride. Each held on for their time and no more. The bull always wins in the end. Still, the riders declared that we can each make something glorious before we’re thrown.

    • What Doesn’t Happen in Las Vegas

      Las Vegas keeps growing, and growing more crowded. If your desire is to immerse yourself in thick waves of people looking for their moment that stays in Vegas, it may be just what you’re looking for. To be fair to the city, the Strip has never looked so spectacularly lavish. Every time I visit they’ve thrown up another massive structure. Casinos and arenas grow bigger and more elaborate. The classic older casinos remain the familiar smoky maze that brings comfort to a certain crowd. The new casinos draw in the hip, young, and beautiful with their seemingly unlimited bank accounts. To walk through one and then the other is to see almost the entire history of this place. One can become almost invisible to the throngs staring in wonder at the visual display around them.

      Finishing a dinner at the Paris Casino, a business associate and I chose to walk back to the casino we were staying at. Our other associates chose to take a taxi back. We beat them by twenty minutes. That doesn’t speak to the briskness of our walk, but the crush of traffic from one to the other. The sidewalks might be crowded too, but at least you can keep moving along. I shudder at the gallons of fossil fuel burning wastefully as the long line of cars awaits the next light. But that’s part of Las Vegas too. Building a city in the desert necessitates an embrace of wastefulness. Water, electricity, gasoline and lives drift away in unison.

      Las Vegas has built itself up to be whatever you want it to be for yourself, so long as you’ve got the money to fund your life choices. Gambling, fine dining, shows, sex, drugs and alcohol are all here awaiting those who choose to embrace it. Some of these choices will be lifetime memories, some will be things you’d like to forget. Always choose wisely. No matter what the slogan says, some things don’t just stay in Vegas. Being a prudent practitioner of what doesn’t happen in Vegas is a sound way of having just enough fun to make it out unscathed.

      This may read like an indictment of Las Vegas. It’s not meant to be. Simply put, it’s hard not to have fun in this city, and I always find it enjoyable, just in more moderation than the majority of people around me. This has always been my way. Give me quiet places in abundance, and the madness of this adult playground to remind me of why I choose those quiet places far from here.

    • Art With a Spritz of Lime

      “Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life.”— Peter Altenberg

      A close friend has a flare for living well. He’ll spritz lime on a potato dish and make something extraordinary of what was moments before thought to be disparate produce. He’s always looking for the exceptional in an otherwise average day. And he drives many people mad as a result. Like that burst of citrus in a starchy dish, I find his perspective punctuates life perfectly.

      This business of living artistically is something to aspire to. Capturing moments with a bit of magic and moving through the ordinary with je ne sais quoi, these are the things that matter very much in a world that wants you to fall in line and fit right in. Certainly, we must do our job and do it well, but why always settle for vanilla?

      We each live on both sides of ordinary. It’s a gift to be human at a time and place when you can express yourself freely. We ought to use that gift and add more flavor to our days. Like every gift, we must choose to use it. Art is a deliberate act, expressed uniquely. What might we bring to the table if we have the gumption to try something new?

      We all know the expression: when the world throws you lemons, make lemonade. There’s another clever expression I once found on a kitchen magnet that adds a twist: when the world throws you limes, make margaritas. To this I’ll add, don’t forget to save some lime for the potatoes.

    • The Book Stack

      “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

      “The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” — A. Edward Newton

      I wrestle with books. I love reading, and stack more books than I ought to into my life. Settling down with a great book is one of my favorite activities, so why do I pile on more than I can possibly get to? The stack of books taunt me. Even as I write this I can see them in the periphery, mocking my use of time when it doesn’t involve them.

      We live in a time where we’re blessed with abundance in everything around us, and cursed with the same scarcity of time. We must be prudent in what we add to the pile, and what we edit out. Reading is just another experience in a brief life that contributes to its richness and meaning. The rules of good nutrition apply. Beyond the required reading of a formal education, we get to choose our information diet. But we also then live with the consequences. When we use our reading time wisely we enhance living substantially.

      Imagine my delight when my Twitter feed offered up the two quotes above within a few days of one another to perfectly summarize my… situation. We live an impossibly short life for the sheer number of books available for us to read, and then pile on the distractions of life (like Twitter), and how are we ever to get to everything we want to read? The very act of writing this blog is stealing time from reading, even as writing fuels my hunger to read more. Which experience is more valuable in the moment? Isn’t life a quest to find balance between what we do and what we consume?

      And therein lies the answer; reading is just another form of collecting experiences that build a life. As with other experiences, we are what we prioritize. We can’t do everything, but we can certainly do the most important things. So it is with reading. It’s not just a stack of books and an infinite jumble of words, it’s the building blocks carrying us higher and higher towards a richer perspective and broader potential. It’s ours to realize, or to leave on the shelf.

    • Everywhere

      “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag

      What’s next? Where to? These are things the earnest world traveller considers in between days. Just back from one country, scheming the next, what meets the strict budget of time and money? The world is calling, and life is so very short. Yet we simply can’t be everywhere.

      What of here? Don’t we give place short shrift when we look to the world with wanderlust? Life is presence. Life is right here, wherever we find ourselves, not everywhere all at once. We are what we pay attention to.

      The thing is, we each reconcile the possible with the probable. We see the time flying by, see people around us passing away or saddled with restrictive illness, and we wonder why we aren’t out there meeting the universe while there’s time. What are we to do?

      Distraction is merely comparison run amuck. It’s what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. We live in a noisy world, full of distraction and the temptation of what might be next. We fixate on what we don’t have instead of celebrating what we are blessed with. Our lives are right here, right now. It’s the universe offering us the moment. We dishonor the gift when we reject it for the next one.

      Celebrate here and now. Plan for there and then. Everywhere may arrive in time, in its time. Here is where it’s at, for now.

    • How We Interact

      I was looking through some old pictures for images of an uncle who passed away over the weekend, images that would be part of a collage of images of interactions he’s made in his lifetime. It occurred to me that he’s never joined Facebook or Instagram. If you wanted to interact with him you needed to do it the old-fashioned ways with a call, a letter, or best of all, face-to-face. Technology is handy, but it will never substitute for a conversation with an engaged, interested human being.

      Writing this, I sit at a desk looking to my right to a Mac screen. Looking left, I might interact with a PC screen. I’m technology-agnostic in this way, as most of us must be. Work to the left, personal to the right. Throw in work and personal iPhones loaded with apps, a Kindle, iPad, and both an Apple and a Garmin watch and it seems I can interact with the world in all manner of ways. But I still prefer talking to humans face-to-face. Call me an old soul if you will.

      Technology makes us scalable and efficient. I can click publish on this blog post and it’s possible for the entire world to read it in an instant. We both know that’s not going to happen, because the entire world is pushing out their own content too, making it a very noisy tech world indeed. To rise above the din you must be louder and more committed to connection, not just more interesting or introspective. I’ve come to realize that accumulating followers is just not me. I celebrate organic growth, but dwelling on it is counterproductive and artificial. I’ll just keep doing my thing, quietly interacting with you and the occasional five hundred-ish other folks, from now until it ends.

      One of these days I’ll fix the blog, to make it easier for people to interact with me. Or maybe not, but just know it’s not because I’m not interested in the humans on the other side. Just not so much the technology that connects us. There’s irony in that statement, but it’s not meant to be clever. It just means I’m more like my uncle than I thought I was.

    • On Valentine’s Day, Accept Þetta Reddast

      In Iceland there’s a saying that speaks of resilience and hopefulness. In only a few days there I heard it several times, evidence of the shared belief of her people, . Þetta Reddast means it (Þetta) will all work out (Reddast). In case you’re wondering, as I did, Þetta Reddast is pronounced “thet tah red ahst“. As with countless visitors before me I fell in love with Iceland almost immediately. And I also learned that she won’t always love you back but not to worry because it all works out in the end. Þetta Reddast, friend.

      On Valentine’s Day, we celebrate the love we have for that special someone. But love is a fickle and evasive thing indeed. Live a few years and you’ll experience the good, bad and ugly of love. Some of us are lucky and find a lifetime partner. Some of us never find love at all. Most are somewhere in the middle sorting it out one day at a time. As with Iceland, it all works out in the end, mostly. Enjoy the chocolate either way.

      I say love will come to you
      Hoping just because I spoke the words that they’re true
      As if I offered up a crystal ball to look through
      Where there’s now one there will be two
      — The Indigo Girls, Love Will Come to You

      The thing about finding true love is you can’t expect it, but you have to have faith that love will sort itself out for you eventually. It’s never perfect, for none of us are perfect, and to expect it to be so is a fools game. It’s simply two people finding each other at the right time and place in their lives, when the single track trail becomes wide enough for two to walk the path together. But trails narrow and widen as we keep hiking, don’t they? Þetta Reddast. Remember it will all work out in time.

      My bride and I went to Iceland looking for adventure and a glimpse of the Northern Lights. We found adventure, but we danced with Iceland’s notorious weather and wind each night instead of the Aurora Borealis. Looking at the Aurora app, we could see epic reds, oranges and greens dancing just out of reach. We learned quickly to accept the truth in Þetta Reddast. It just wasn’t our time to be on the dance floor with Norðurljós. Perhaps, as with love, our paths will cross some other time. I’m hoping just because I spoke the words that they’re true.