humanity

here is more of the blacktop circus from a little different perspective.  i provide a deeper explanation at the end of the poem ...

my windshield cracks with a morning glint of head-on glare,

though I manage to see your feigned indifference.

a sideways glance lands sharply on my dash and

I stuff it in the glovebox with my out-of-state parking tickets,

covering leftover knapkins from a happy meal.

you imagine that my slackjaw gaze

begs for your attention while you float along in your vanity sedan.

you think it’s you,

or maybe even your car that I want, with its speedtrap promiscuity,

armani styling, and leather upholstery like fresh-buttered bread.

if it were given to me, it’s true, I would take it.

but I’d stand it in the driveway to glisten and fidget;

an impatient runway model with smeared mascara

while I, ignoring pomp, dig bulbs in the dirt of my garden.

my thought was humanity as I pulled alongside,

this road at sharp sunrise, lost, pan-handling for directions amidst these

mundane, vapid, pre-disco boomers.

commuter bumpers hooked in traffic, 8-tracks hooked in pop.

for this half second, before you snapped your look away,

you and I were equal distance from the sun and I thought

you might advise which high roads would take us to adventure.

I never thought it mattered what one drove;

my semi full of elephants trumpeting wildly,

late for the bigtop party.

-------------------

this poem is about a friend who drove an elephant semi for circus kirk in the seventies. he also played euphonium in their band. for the most part, he was adept at asking directions and an expert at u-turns with a trailer loaded full of giants.

  

blacktop circus

I hitch-hiked several cross-country trips in the '70's and '80's from Iowa to Boston; Iowa to San Diego, and this poem is an example of one of my first rides. it was indeed 'an experience': a carnie driving a trailer of circus animals, but nonetheless, it was meeting people by the generosity of their hearts and their curiosity to the human experience. I sadly fear those days of trust are gone ...

at the end of my last year of college

with a burning scalp in the sun and the itch

of highway freedom at 55 miles an hour, I stood there with

a stupid smile and my earth shoes planted in the

gravel like one of the burma shave signs

on the side of the road, pointed east.

no map.

I was counting on the like-minded kindness

of drivers pointed in the same direction as

my thumb and one guy stopped with a semi packed full of

elephants, I was aimless; he was

curious; and he asked me

“what about the circus?”

he had a Bozo weeble-wobble compass on his dashboard

and a picture of his girlfriend in full greasepaint, dusting

an emmet kelly five-oclock shadow, and I thought

about it … then I thought about all that shit

behind an elephant and

me with a shovel too small so i said

no.

I waved goodbye in Davenport then

wanted ‘yes’ for all the rest of my brass

carousel ride through life. but what a story

all those beasts and carnies, cargo trailers, ropes

and canvas tentpegs beaten into the ground,

zipped from lonely town to town,

split by KMarts and

their blacktop, whiteline parking lots.

I thought, “not now, the ride will do me just fine.”

and i could safely boast at

parties how I

almost joined the circus.

farther away

my wife and daughter are off to orlando, visiting family (not mickey). i wrote the poem "farther away" a couple of years ago when she had gone to Maine but it is appropriate everytime she travels. for clarification: we have two cats, but only one would ever actually answer the telephone or meet me at the door.

I called from work today to say hello,

like I always do but remembered the kids

were away at camp and you were

still visiting friends in Maine.

I call everyday because it balances me and

even today, knowing I could only leave a message

and erase it when I come home. I wanted the

cat to hear it, maybe he would respond to me when I

unlock the front door, maybe greet me in his cat way

and tell me that he heard the phone ring. He could tell me

that you also called to say hello and you were sure

the kids were fine,

and that you missed me while

you were having fun, somewhere else

farther away than I can ever walk.

Lost at Sea - Part One

Casting Off

I recently reconnected with someone I hadn’t seen in years who was a friend of my older brother Mark, from high school; Chuck. He was already working for a large corporation by the time I left school, and we had both turned hometown Cedar Rapids into our geographic midlands as we took separate North American coasts as home. Thirty years after our moves away we were pulled together again, if only for a few moments of renewal, by social networking and my older sister.

“Dan, my God, is this you?! I ran into Sally a couple of years ago in DM and she told me about Mark. One of the saddest days of my life. How are you ….”

I read this as if a message pulled from a bottle, adrift for years before settling near my path. The words had spoken deeply to me and I scratched a short reply, put it back into the vessel and threw it to the foamy, outgoing surf of my memories of Chuck and Mark. I thought if I didn’t hear from him again it wouldn’t matter because his note, brief and simple, returned me to another world and time that I retreated from. This moment was a spark carried back in the wind from a distant fire I had long ago doused in my past.

I really didn’t know Chuck that well -- he and my brother were seven years older than I and they used to pal around together. I was the deadweight brother hanging around their necks whenever they wanted to go out and have fun. Hearing the sidedoor hinges sharply squeaking from their attempted getaways, my mom would pop out of nowhere and demand, “Mark, are you boys going out? You need to take your brother with you!”

Great, on a Saturday afternoon I could be enjoying Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges, but the drawbridge chains started rolling and the moat opened up behind me – I had no choice but to follow along. oh yeah, here we go again, rolling my eyes to the back of my head. These forced tag-along outings quickly shifted from the ‘boys hanging around’, to the ‘idle tough guys ready to torment a younger twit’. It was my own damn fault for being there. They were saddled with the responsibility of watching me but they also benefitted from juicy opportunities for creative sibling torture. They had to be careful not to go too far – if you left marks or made the kid cry, you got into trouble. It was things like “open your mouth and close your eyes, and you’ll get a big surprise” (ryegrass, wads of clover, soap, carpet fuzzballs, dirt, you name it, and I always fell for it) or threats to throw me down into the bear pit at the Beaver Park Zoo, my god, the odor, or ditching me in the woods. That was their favorite one.

If we were an episode of “Leave It To Beaver”, Mark would be Eddie Haskell, and Chuck would be … Eddie Haskell – there was no Wally Cleaver; righteous, protective older brother. I kept wanting to believe they were kind-hearted, I guess they never pounded me to smithereens, and to Chuck’s credit, he sometimes offered light-hearted words for safety: “Don’t worry, Dan. Your brother’s really kidding, he’ll be back before tomorrow, just hang loose, my man,” then they’d ditch me.

They did their share of boozing as rebellious high school youths in the 60’s and like a 16 year old parolee, their driver’s license swung the iron gates open to freedom and excess. I won’t forget the next morning when Chuck slept overnight at our house after a night of partying. They’d had too many cheeseburgers along the way and he barfed several from the top bunk in Mark’s room. Imagine the splash.

And for Mark, there were the drugs; the Saturday afternoon community service. He’d had plenty of ‘issues’ about which I’d only found out later because my parents kept me in the dark, wanting to avoid the ‘drug conversation’ with their 9-year-old. I’m sure bringing up post-World War II kids in America wasn’t easier than any other time. Drugs and alcohol are never simple to deal with and even more complex when the language used to treat those problems hadn’t fully developed yet. I think my parents realized he was more than they could handle; they practiced avoidance, let him serve out his time with his community service then hoped for the best. He built a black plywood cave under the basement stairs as a quiet place to hide when he was high.

He had an active well of fresh resentment to my parents. There was some kind of behavioral infraction for which my father felt appropriate for punishment. Mark was an astonishing artist and was given oil paints regularly along with lessons. He painted The Matterhorn like Van Gogh from an encyclopedia and scenes from movie posters and it made the insides of the house smell like the pacific northwest, delicious with turpentine and linseed oil. There was one canvas in particular that he painted with glow-in-the-dark paints of the Creature From The Black Lagoon that he placed on an easel like a sentinel right around the corner from the bathroom. The blood red of the mouth was like lipstick and the pale green eyes pierced the dark like rapiers’ thrusts. It nearly caused me kidney stones because I was too afraid to get up in the middle of the night anymore.

He never let go of the evisceration he experienced when my father halted his art career - no more paints, no more lessons. It didn’t matter what he had done wrong and I don’t think he even remembered the details but it was enough to throw him into long term shock from the emotional abrasions to his ego. The punishment was not meted out to encourage time and reflection, but rather, to create a timeless, throbbing pain deep to the bone. I think Mark’s life after that was consumed with finding ways to smooth the scarring.

Next … Part Two - A Search for Meaning

Stock Cars, Tulips, and the Stock Market

This week I watched the stock market take a 2.5% downward dive that would have made the Flying Wallendas fling their arms skyward and arch their backs with a gymnast’s pride. The simple ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ of markets are comfortable with a few points’ move on a daily basis – positive reports on the economy foster the natural rise of the markets, but it is the fear events which cause stabbing doubt in the minds of investors: fear diminishes oxygen; you sell or hyperventilate; prices drop; then prices drop more to where the falling price action becomes its own fear event and the Wallendas, Ventilators, and the Lemmings all fly off the cliff to the waters below … poof!

I could have said biff! bang! splat! or kapow! but those are really batman and robin terms, and those guys are so '60s' -- what would have been MOST appropriate would have been for me to say pop! because that’s what bubbles do and that’s what we’re floating inside right now. What happened this week was not yet a fullblown pop! but rather a correction.

In the late 1980s, a transformation began in the world economy whereby companies started selling debt obligations (bonds) to finance expansion, friendly takeovers and ‘leveraged’ buy-outs which were not always so friendly. It gave the company working capital to grow, which would in turn entice people to invest money into their stock which would surely rise in value. Michael Milken made millions as a bond trader selling ‘junk’ bonds from high-risk companies at high interest rates. The key word of this paragraph is ‘debt’. When you buy a bond, you don’t buy a product; you buy indebtedness from the issuer; it is a promise to pay with interest.

Take one speck of sand and toss it onto a beach and you’ll get the scale of one dollar in the world’s debt pool. It seems limitless but it’s finite and though it seems to naturally wash in and out with the tides it is still fundamentally a distortion of reality - most of the debt in the world way over-extends the currency said to back it up. It takes a minor quake -- small fear events to slap your cheeks like a 3-Stooges skit, or a 2.5% drop -- to see clearly that there’s more investment income promised than which can ever be returned. When a distortion like this is made evident, people start pulling their money until the scenario accelerates and the bubble pops.

People buy, people sell. Let’s say we put 100 people in a big room. 50 people have 5 pieces of gold each that they want to sell and the other 50 people are in the market to buy gold with the cash they brought in. Each cash-person has a good idea what their top price is to pay as a buyer, and each gold person knows what their bottom line is to sell their precious metal. Nobody’s in a hurry to buy -or- sell, everyone just wants a good deal. Ok, some vendor comes into the room with a salami sandwich and tells the buyers that someone lastnight robbed Fort Knox of all their gold. Holy Crap, no more gold … EVER! Buy, buy, buy !!

The buyers change their price guidelines and start buying in a mania – whatever the price, this may be the last chance to ever buy gold. Of course, one seller overhears the salami sandwich guy talking, and understanding human nature, becomes one of the first sellers to demand higher prices. Many of the sellers decide to wait, they don’t sell until the buyers have bid the prices up to an astronomical level and they make a killing. Some buyers desperately want more gold and they know that all that gold is still in the room and offer higher and higher prices, becoming very loose with their cash. Some order more salami sandwiches.

As a group, buyers start running out of money, sellers start running out of gold … but the mania continues … the sellers stay on the carousel, buying their gold back, thinking they can turn it around at a profit as the prices continue to skyrocket. Things are are moving so quickly, buyers and sellers flip sides frequently ... and then the salami guy comes back in and says oops, the robbery was a hoax and Fort Knox has decided to SELL all its gold at half price, and by the way, here are your sandwiches.

Holy Crap, the price of gold in the room plummets as the latest rumor spreads and sellers unload their gold for whatever cash they can get, knowing dang well that everyone else is doing the same and will accept lower and lower prices just to make a sale. They don’t care, they just want some cash, they want out cuz when they leave, they gotta pay the sandwich guy. The one poor seller gazing out the window at the pigeons on the ledge never heard the salami guy or the sales ruckus. When the trading din suddenly halts, he walks out of the room hungry, with the same measly five pieces of gold in his pocket worth less than a pigeon -or- a sandwich (or even a pigeon sandwich).

The bidding that took place in the room was part of a mania. Bubbles are the end results of manias, or distortions; irrational reactions to news that compels selling or buying at prices way outside the normal curve or company valuation, with expectations of an endpoint in profit-land. In the Netherlands from 1634 to 1637 an investment mania happened when a certain slow-growing hybrid tulip bulb with lovely mosaic stripes became so popular that people would pay in tracts of land to own just one bulb. On February 3rd, 1637, bidding ratcheted up to one more notch in the bulb markets and then suddenly people simply stopped buying. Nobody could sell because nobody was buying, sellers began lowering their prices hoping to unload their bulbs but the prices quickly crashed and the market bottomed-out. The bubble popped and countless people lost their life savings in an over-valued speculative venture. Those that got out the day before when the bulb markets opened for that week became filthy rich.

When the stock market crashed in 2008, it was the default of Lehman Brothers (another big debt-seller using mortgages as collateral) and the mind-boggling prospect of unravelling their gordian-knot of debt that acted as the pin that popped the real estate bubble. Two weeks after they declared bankruptcy, a rolling ‘Wave’ started spinning through the ballpark grandstands, with the markets falling 400-500 points a day, ultimately dropping 14% and compelling people to pull out their life savings and stuff it back under their mattresses.

The Bubble had been inflating for years with gusto and hope of profits, and was coming from the lightspeed expansion of investment paper tied to residential mortgages. What am I talking about here?! Owning a home with a porch swing and picket fence was the American dream and real estate prices were rising steeper than the first turn at Talladega. Imagine all those loan officers fanning mortgages on the racetrack sidelines with the drivers hanging out the windows grabbing them one-by-one at the Start-Finish line at 216mph and you get a pretty good picture of the velocity of debt-related documents making their way to the investment underwriters.

This was the Real Estate Boom -- loan sales couldn’t keep up with demand and the normal safe-practices cycle of credit-rating reviews and income documentations were replaced by sales-incentives and robo-signers -- distortions of reality -- mortgages churned faster and faster into sellable debt packages; securitizations called Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS). Just like bonds, these MBSs produced a monthly income through interest paid on mortgage loans. Investors could sink their money into an MBS and hope for a handsome income from their investment. To make it worse, these MBS’s themselves were tied even more insidiously into overlayed securitizations that created over-leveraged debt obligations that were so incomprehensible at the time of the Lehman’s request for bankruptcy, that the lawmakers in Washington simply washed their hands of it and let Lehman’s rubberband ball unwind on its own.

Discussion gets complex after this but what we’re looking at is financial pornography – that being, derivatives. Derivatives are the pole-dancers of the investment community. They’re hot and supple and for a couple of bucks they’ll do a lap dance on your life savings. The problem is that in the previous paragraph I used the word ‘hope’. You hope for reliable monthly payments. To create the velocity of mortgage sales (and justify hiring all those danged robo-signers) you gotta settle for lower quality borrowers: that’s right, sock-it-to-me SUBPRIME, baby. Just like Milken in the 80’s, less attractive credit ratings meant higher interest rates (yeah, baby!), and a higher monthly income to the investor.

Whoopeee! uh …. pop?!

Don’t get me wrong, discretely letting off a little gas at a party is ok, but a 2.5% drop is letting it rip. Nonetheless, a drop like this is still not a bubble popping; it’s a release of pressure. The stock market has been building steam ever since the Federal Reserve began the TARP program to prop up insolvent US banks. Um, because they bought too much junk from Lehman? But now that we’re nearing the end (June 30th) of their dollar print-o-mania (called QE2) we’re noticing improvements in the economy aren’t we?

Anybody bought a steak recently?

9.1% unemployment, a housing doubledip, oil at $100/barrel, gross purchasing for manufacturing is down. No, we’re not improving. Mark Vitner, Senior Economist at Wells Fargo indicated on NPR June 3rd that if the Unemployment Forecast was unfavorable [it was], we can expect another year of No Growth [uh-oh]. The latest drop in the market is a precise indication that things have not improved. The market is in a distortion where the stock prices of far too many companies do not accurately represent their underlying valuations. Like I said, when investors wake up to these distortions they pull their money very quickly and stuff it in a safe place.

Tulips photo courtesy Tamera J Edwards(FB)