A Charlie Brown Depression

I realized a few years ago that I'm subject to wintertime seasonal depression, and when I felt it coming on this year around Thanksgiving, I decided that exercising every day would help fight it. And sure enough, it is helping.

This evening on the treadmill, though, I was flipping channels as usual and happened upon the annual broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Several years ago I wrote about how I loved "Peanuts" when I was a kid, but later became repelled by its unrelenting pessimism, which all too well captured what life was like for me as a child. To that I can only add the opening words of the script, which echoed tonight like the prelude to a recurring bad dream:

CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.

I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

LINUS: Charlie Brown! You're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas, and turn it into a problem.

Breaks my heart every time.

Desert sojourn, day 30

Queen Valley, Joshua Tree National Park

Christine and I went hiking in the Queen Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park (here's the official map [PDF] if you're interested) and had a great critter experience: we saw two tarantulas. Here's video of the first one:

The second one was motionless at the edge of a hole right at the spot where the first one had appeared -- they live in holes in the ground. Christine pointed out that it was mating season and that "males usually don't survive mating... Maybe she bit his head off."

After our hike, we drove a little ways to a parking area for something called Wall Street Mill, a historical attraction we didn't actually visit. Instead, we took a different, unmarked path that led to these ruins:

She said that this used to a store of some sort and that it was open as recently as the early 1970s -- or so she had heard; there was nothing to tell us what we were looking at. We had already been talking about the officially approved activities in the park -- camping, hiking, rock climbing -- differ from the things you can do in the park but which the park staff doesn't want the public to see or know about, such as precolumbian petroglyphs and other relics. She told a story about going to an officially undocumented archeo-astronomical site -- a place where the indigenous people of the area had arranged rocks to mark astronomical events (of which Stonehenge is the best known example) -- one solstice before dawn, and being detained by park rangers who literally jumped out from behind bushes to ask what they were doing there. It was very different when the park ranger assumed his or her police function, she said, suddenly they're no longer this friendly person in a Smokey Bear hat, suddenly they're a cop. And the rangers were very uncomfortable with anyone knowing about the archaeoastronomy site.

Of course, I understand why the park wants to protect culturally significant sites and objects -- they don't want them to get trashed (like, for example, these vandalized petroglyphs). Other sites, such as the Wall Street Mill mentioned above, or events such as the shootout between two crusty pioneers, fit into the Old West narrative the park wants to present.

But the ruins of the store -- if that's what it was -- have no explanatory plaque, no signs pointing to the site, no mention of it on the map. (Here it is on Google satellite.) The 1960s aren't part of the official history.

By now we were standing beside a large piñon pine tree about a hundred yards from the ruins, close by some sheltering cliffs. "There will never be," I said, "a commemorative plaque about the 7000 great acid trips that people took while lying under this tree." And Christine laughed, because that's the kind of thing we used to do.

Sins of silence

Daniel Ellsberg interviewed in the L.A. Times, reflecting on his role in history:

Although he was attacked by political opponents for betraying his country, Ellsberg's regret is rather that he didn't leak documents earlier -- in 1964 when the conflict was still escalating.

"I'm one of a few dozen people who could have prevented the Vietnam War," he says, drumming his finger on his wooden table with every syllable. A Democratic Congress would have turned on Johnson, he thinks, if they had seen how bogus his war justifications were. "But I was very inhibited -- I felt like I was breaking my promise."

It's human nature that troubles him the most.

"Humans are herd animals," he says. "They depend very much on being part of the group, and to remain part of the group, they'll do anything. And a much larger number will go along with anything. And the broadest form of that is keeping your mouth shut."

'This is what you guys have come up with?'

In the March 2 New Yorker, Ariel Levy turns in a massively entertaining portrait of a group of lesbian separatists of the 1960s and 70s, the "Van Dykes," so called because they all bought vans and went on the road, and because they all took "Van Dyke" as a last name. A now sixty-ish protagonist, whom the reporter calls "the last of the Van Dykes," reminds the reporter not once but twice that she is disappointed in her, the reporter's, generation and their version of what it means to be a lesbian.

"I don't want a wife," she told me. "I want sometbody that I can run around with, like Batman and Robin, you know? ... Your generation wants to fit in," she told me for the second time. "Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?" There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else -- an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television -- we didn't sit around looking at screens," she said. "We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted."

That is the end of the article, but at the bottom of the column is printed in small type:

NEWYORKER.COM
An audio interview with Ariel Levy

I haven't listened to it, but I get the palpable sense that after that scolding, the reporter -- born in 1974 -- will be only too happy to put in her two cents. That being said, she is a staff writer for the New Yorker -- it's not like she's some housewife with deferred dreams who hasn't done anything with her life.

But I do sympathize with the article's subject. Though I was much more one who, in the 1970s and 80s, did "sit around waiting for a screen to give a signal to do something" than I was a bold actor, I've shared the sense that the goals of generations X, Y and Z are somewhat paltry compared to the dreams of mine. We really did believe that by the time we reached our parents' age (i.e. now) we would see viable alternatives to capitalist institutions. Instead, we're splitting hairs over digital copyright issues, pretend "carbon offset credits," and even more ephemeral things like online identities and whether our airline frequent flier miles will ever be worth anything.

To sum up my generation's pitiful state, I offer this squib from another magazine, the back page of The Atlantic for March, where a columnist asks people to coin neologisms -- that's the whole conceit of the column. A reader writes in:

Often my wife and I will decide to watch a DVD, and then she will delay coming to sit down, thereby subjecting me to the repeat-loop sounds and visuals of the DVD's main menu. What the word or phrase for this interminable experience?" -- David K. Prince, Lansdowne, Pa.

I have only two words for you, Mr. Prince, the epitome of a man who "sits around waiting for a screen to give you the signal to do something": kill yourself. Preferably in the Grand Canyon, at Niagara Falls, or in some other way that your wife won't have to clean it up.

Karaoke crowd freaks when actual rock singer shows up

Mickey Dolenz, who sang many of the Monkees' hits, was having dinner at Elaine's in New York when someone realized that people in a karaoke club a few doors away were all singing along to one of his hits, "I'm a Believer." Dolenz was summoned, entered the karaoke bar, and the result was pandemonium.

The best part of the story was that it was a coincidence that Dolenz was nearby when the song -- which was repopularized in the 2001 film Shrek (YouTube clip here) -- was chosen by the under-20s at the karaoke club; they didn't know he was near.

You say you want a revolution?

May 1968 -- revolution is in the air around the world, but Paul McCartney and Andy Williams are having a nice lunch. From the book "The Beatles: a Diary" by Barry Miles and Chris Charlesworth:

May 21, 1968: Paul and Jane [Asher] had lunch with Andy Williams and his French wife [the singer and actress] Claudine Colbert. That evening they attended his final Royal Albert Hall show and the end-of-the-show party afterward.

It must have been very relaxing.

technorati: Beatles, Andy Williams, Sixties