The Bird Is the Word

A bird on the table is worth four in the air

My usual Thanksgiving dinner of 12-to-20 guests is canceled this year due to you-know-what and the state directive to restrict dinner companions to those "with whom you've been with throughout this pandemic.” That would be myself and two vegans. Um…yeah. My dis-invitations to the usual suspects went out a few days ago. I still plan on consuming the usual poultry and accompaniments by myself largely for reasons of sensory nostalgia, but the turkey will be a small one. 

As a kid, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. Oh, the playfulness surrounding Halloween made October 31 a close second, but back then (as now) the license to gorge on a full-blown feast tipped my scale of good things toward the 4^th Thursday in November – despite how it subsequently tipped the bathroom scale. Besides, the holiday always falls within a few days of my birthday (sometimes on it), and there always has been enough Narcissus in me to regard the holiday as a sort of extension of that. 

Thanksgiving feasts were common in the American colonies as harvest festivals – first by the Spanish and French in the 16^th century and later in the English colonies. A Thanksgiving (by that name) held in Virginia in 1607 preceded the “first” one in Plymouth colony by 14 years, though the latter eventually caught on as the mythic origin story. The holiday was celebrated sporadically in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. It was first declared a US national holiday by George Washington as a one-off event in 1789. This was the first year of his Administration under the new Constitution. He made no mention of the Pilgrim story. Rather, the holiday was for Americans to give thanks for “an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” Thanksgivings were declared intermittently in subsequent years by presidents and state governors. In 1863 in the midst of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln made the holiday permanent. FDR gave it one final tweak: he fixed the holiday on the 4^th Thursday of the month instead of, as previously, the last (some Novembers, of course, have five) as an economic measure in order to extend the Christmas shopping season. 

As a kid I cared nothing about any origin myth. As an adult I don’t care more. It was always about food, friends, and family. It was convivial. Unsurprisingly, the ancient Roman term for such an event was convivium. One festival called Mercatus Romani was held in late November and was accompanied by convivia; “mercatus” means “commerce” and accordingly the festival involved street markets and seasonal shopping, which has a modern ring to it too. 

Yet, the roots of Thanksgiving-like late-autumn banquets are far older than the Romans. There is something deeply atavistic about a ritual blood sacrifice at this time of year – in the modern version, commonly a turkey. One may point out that only the bird is sacrificing anything since the rest of us get to eat the critter, yet even this aspect of sacrifices has deep origins. Hesiod in Theogony (c. 700 BCE) tells how the already age-old practice came about of people placing bones on altar fires for the gods while keeping the meat for themselves. When humans’ relationship with the gods was still unsettled, Hesiod tells us, in order to decide how a sacrifice should be divided between people and the gods an ox was slaughtered and divided into two portions. Prometheus (who had a soft spot for humans – go figure) made the division. For one portion he stuffed meat and fat in the ox’s gross, slimy, ugly stomach; for the other he sewed up the ox’s bare bones prettily inside the skin. He then let Zeus pick between the two. Zeus picked the pretty pile. He was irate at having been tricked into choosing bones but he didn’t go back on the deal. (There is more to the story involving fire and the punishment of Prometheus, but let’s not get sidetracked.) I won’t be offering up leftover turkey bones on an altar. They’ll be tossed in the woods for the delectation of the local wildlife (the remains are always gone by morning), but that is an offering of sorts to Nature. 

In any event, while the upcoming November 26 may be shy on conviviality, the date is arbitrary anyway. My current thought is to do a “Thanksgiving in February” (or whenever) for the usual crowd when vaccines and growing herd immunity make that feasible… and not likely to prompt a visit from the police. Turkeys beware. 

A Vegetarian Option

A Clash of Verses

Istanbul #2461

Pursuant to some comments the other day on an online book chat group to which I belong, I revisited some of Aleister Crowley’s poetry at Poemhunter. Playing on the stereo in the background was Bob Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. Normally I can ignore background sounds when concentrating on some other task, but music and poetry are so closely related that on this occasion they clashed in my head. I turned off the stereo. Yet, that very act also distracted me from Crowley whose verses I also clicked off and will revisit some other time. The question of how the two forms are similar yet different nagged at me instead. It is the sort of question that in order to explore once required a library trip and an immersion in card and microfiche files. It’s a trifle easier now. 

The facile answer, of course, is that songs are sung and are (usually) accompanied by music while poetry (usually) is not. Poems might not be an auditory experience at all but just read on a page. But while that distinction is both obvious and key, there is more to it than that. When reading lyrics, it becomes clear pretty fast that Carol King did something different from Robert Frost. 

To be sure, there is overlap, most obviously in rap (Kanye West’s All Falls Down in original form was a poem he recited at a poetry jam in 2003) and the once-popular recitation songs in C&W (e.g. Ringo by Lorne Greene). Songs and poems alike are verse, and both can impact us with an economy of words that prose can’t match. (The impact is visible on brain scans: See the 2017 NIH paper The Emotional Power of Poetry: Neural Circuitry, Psychophysiology and Compositional Principles.). Indeed, songs are a part of every culture for this reason. The very first literature (not business contracts and tax records, which came earlier, but literature) is poetry. Yet there is a difference. In his acceptance speech for a Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan (though he took the prize money) pretty much told the committee that it had made a mistake: 

“But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

Matthew Zapruder in The Boston Review said something similar: “Words in a poem take place against the context of silence (or maybe an espresso maker, depending on the reading series), whereas, as musicians like Will Oldham and David Byrne have recently pointed out, lyrics take place in the context of a lot of deliberate musical information.”

There is a history of snobby professors (most often without music skills) valuing poetry over lyrics, which is why one is taught in school while the other generally isn’t. Yet the latter in toto are, if anything, more complex, requiring musical sensibility as well as a facility with words. So, while one can sing a poem or recite a song, something typically feels off about it, as though shoe-horning one art form into another. It is why Steve Allen’s recitation of rock lyrics on The Tonight Show in 1957 still holds up as comedy. What matters is whether the music is integral to the effect – whether you lose something essential by removing it. 

Bob Dylan referenced Shakespeare, which provides a good excuse to use him for illustration. Some of Hamlet's lines were sung in the musical Hair (Will’s iambs make that easy: I once saw a musical Macbeth with a blues score), yet are plainly still poetry. Compare them with Sigh No More, which Shakespeare intended from the beginning to be a song in Much Ado about Nothing. The difference is unmistakable. 

In my case these musings are purely academic, since my own attempts at verses (whether lyrics or poems) always have had clunky results, to put it kindly. (I prefer to talk about myself kindly: one can’t always count on others to do so.) My sister was the poet of the family. I posted some of her verses at Echoes of the Boom. If she ever wrote lyrics, I’m not aware of them. 

In any event, the question now has ceased to nag. It’s time to return to the stereo and Poemhunter – but not both at the same time.

Steve Allen (1957)

Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps - Be Bop a Lula

Serenity

Decades of research link major stressful life events to increased risk of sickness and death during the events themselves and in the ensuing year; the risk extends to everything from cardiovascular disease to common infections. It is not established that stressful events increase the chances of a person catching or developing a disease in the first place; rather, they make the expression and progression of it worse. That is to say, they depress a body’s immune responses and general resiliency. Among the major personal events associated with increased risk are divorce, death of a loved one (spouse, parent, sibling, et al.), a move to a new place of residence, a financial crisis whether from the loss of a job or some other source, and even (sometimes) the loss of a pet. Most people, it is important to note, do not get sick in the wake of these events. Once again, the events probably don’t cause disease; they just exacerbate it. Whether we get ill or not, we soldier on as best we can. 

I had my own annus horribilis in the year straddling parts of 2000 and 2001. I checked every one of the boxes for the risky events mentioned above: got divorced, moved, struggled with finances, and lost both parents – and a pet. By luck I avoided getting sick on top of it. The corona viruses trading around back then were of the common cold variety and they happened to pass me by. It is a year that sticks with me though, informing a larger part of my later-adult identity than any year since. It comes to mind today because I passed Hilltop Cemetery on the way to the post office this morning. This is not unusual. The cemetery is three miles (5 km) from my house and is on a route I travel a few times per week. It is not my common practice to stop there even though my parents and sister are buried there. (Yes, there is room for one more; my parents were kind enough – if that is the right expression – to purchase a spot for me.) My mom didn’t see any value in cemetery visits. “Give your flowers to people when they are alive,” she always said. I’ve taken her advice to heart, though on rare occasion (maybe once or twice per year) I stop briefly only to see all the familiar names. I grew up in this town and know more of the local people six-feet-under in that place than I do of those walking above ground – most of the latter being relative newcomers. Anyway, I took more notice than usual while passing there this morning for two reasons. First, “an ongoing narration” about Hilltop Cemetery written by an old friend of my parents (he introduced them in high school) came into my possession via my aunt a few days ago. Second, I noticed on my car’s display that the date is November 6. That is the date my mom died 19 years ago. 

Last photo taken of my mom

We always remember the date a parent dies. (No, it doesn’t seem that long ago.) Everything internal changes at that point even if the outer trappings of our lives (where we live, where we work, how we live) do not. While a parent lives, a part of oneself (no matter what age) is always someone’s child. Afterward, that identity disappears. We are forever the adult in the room, whether we choose to act like one or not. There is also no escaping a greater sense of mortality. 

My grieving days are long past, so I doubt I’m at any elevated risk from it should I happen to wrestle with this year’s corona virus, a bug that has brought so much more disruption into our daily lives than the ones current in 2001. To be sure, moments of nostalgia do and always will recur from time to time (such as today). Even though Civil War doctors often listed “nostalgia” as a contributing (sometimes only) cause of death, I doubt I’ll be dying of that either. That doesn’t mean I’ll forget. I won’t…and for all this year’s unpleasantness, I’m grateful that 2020 is (for me, at least) more serene than two decades ago.

 

Just a classic Glenn Miller number to which I remember my parents dancing:

Artificial Reckoning

One of the books on rotation on my bedtable this past week was Artificial Intelligence: The Quest for the Ultimate Thinking Machine by Richard Urwin. This is by no means a technical manual but (unlike most general audience books on the subject) neither is it entirely simplistic. Urwin describes, with examples, the various approaches to Artificial Intelligence: fuzzy logic, subsumption architecture, swarm intelligence, evolutionary computing, etc. He explains how each is suited to particular contexts and how they could work in concert in general intelligence. The book provides some brief and basic insight into the minds of our future robot overlords. Just kidding…maybe. Networked AIs are everywhere in our lives today. They recommend books, adjust our furnaces, and trade our stocks. Even modern toasters often have remarkable computing power, not because they need it to toast bread but because chips are cheap and can provide extra features. (Back in 2016 hackers exploited this by hiding computer malware in household appliances with wireless capability.) It is helpful to understand a little about them and how they operate.

The three types of AI are Pragmatic, Weak, and Strong. The first is purely task oriented: as simple as a Roomba or as complex as a self-driving Tesla. At the upper end these AIs might approach the intelligence of an insect; they don’t need more than that to do their jobs. The second type, requiring hefty computational speed and power, simulates general intelligence, e.g. IBM’s Jeopardy champion Watson, some of the more sophisticated medical diagnostic programs, and the conversational robot Sophia by Hanson Robotics. The key word is “simulates.” They do not think in the way people do. Using (sometimes evolving) algorithms they plow through millions of possible responses to a query and find the best match with machine efficiency – and machine cluelessness. There is nothing aware about them. Strong AI would think like a person. Strong AI is aspirational rather than something that yet exists, but many researchers are working with artificial neural nets, genetic algorithms, and other technologies with this as an ultimate goal. It is an open question whether such AI ever could be conscious, defined as that meta-state of not only knowing but knowing that one knows.

To a user, a sufficiently sophisticated Weak AI (one that acts as though it is conscious) would be hard to distinguish from a Strong AI, but there would be a difference from the AI’s perspective. It would feel like something to be a Strong AI; not so Weak AI, which doesn’t feel anything. Weak AI doesn’t have a perspective any more than your desktop calculator has one. More than a few sci-fi plots (e.g. Ex Machina) center on the difference.

In science fiction, machine consciousness usually ends badly for people, whether it is HAL deciding to off Dave, Skynet deciding to off the human species, or Cylons being the ultimate rebellious offspring. It was the plot of the very first drama to use the word “robot”: R.U.R. (1920). Despite the semiautonomous robots proliferating on the battlefield – the next generation fighter aircraft probably will be unmanned – this doesn’t worry me much. The people giving the machines their objectives and directions always have been and always will be more dangerous. AIs are very unlikely to develop animus toward people on their own accord; they don’t, so to speak, have skin in the game. Plenty of humans, though, have animus toward their own kind. Some want to destroy people with different beliefs or characteristics while others want to destroy everybody. Witness the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo whose members sarin-gassed the Tokyo subway back in the 90s as an intended step toward bringing about the end of the world. Grumpy AI is pretty far down the list of potential risks.

Charles Stross described another possible future in his novel Saturn’s Children in which the characters are humaniform robots. In Stross’ book the robots inadvertently had long ago killed off the human race through love, not war. Humans so preferred their AI love-bots to other humans that the species simply died out. This has a strange credibility. The fantasy of robot love recurs repeatedly in books, songs, and movies over the past century. A few examples from among countless: the movie Metropolis in 1927, Connie Francis’ hit single Robot Man 60 years ago, the movies Cherry 2000 and Making Mr. Right back in the 80s, and t.A.T.u.’s Robot in the 2000s. Today, simulated lovers can be created on computer games such as New Love Plus+ and phone apps such as Metro PD: Close To You. Many gamesters already prefer them to the real thing. Combining these creations with life-size physical robots can’t be far away.

If humans are to disappear, I suppose there are worse ways to go. Meantime, I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s poem (A Considerable Speck) in which he notices a mite on the page in front of him.

 

“I have a mind myself and recognize

Mind when I meet with it in any guise

No one can know how glad I am to find

On any sheet the least display of mind.”

My take on AI is much the same.

 

Hanson Robotics’ Sophia

Can You Keep a Secret?

People vary in their definitions of success in life, but one classic vision still resonates with many: an upscale income to finance an upscale suburban home in an upscale neighborhood shared with a desirable spouse and two kids whom you drop off at a desirable school in one of the two Audis you park in the garage. It’s called “having made it” or “living the dream.” At least it’s called that by enough people to keep real estate prices in those upscale neighborhoods frothy. By most definitions the upper middle class consists of about 20% of the population, but in a populous country (such as the US with 332,000,000) that’s a lot of people and a lot of neighborhoods. (I live in one of them even though I don’t check those other boxes and have no desire to do so.) The risk of defining success and self-worth in this manner is that the way of life is fragile. Finances, health, relationship circumstances and other factors can alter radically and quickly. How far might some people go to defend against threats to their lifestyle – or just to their chance of achieving it in the first place? Sometimes the threat can be a simple secret. 

Harlan Coben, native of Livingston NJ (very much one of those upscale neighborhoods), writes consistently good page-turning thrillers and mysteries. The Stranger (made into a 2020 Netflix series that I haven’t seen) is a little different from most of his books, but is still intriguing. The central protagonist is Adam Price who checks all of the “having made it” boxes in the upscale (fictional) suburb of Cedarfield NJ; a dad of another player on his son’s high school lacrosse team actually says to him, “We’re living the dream.” His comfortable life is then threatened by a secret – or rather by the revelation of one. A stranger walks up to him at a bar and tells him his wife Corrine had faked a pregnancy and miscarriage; he tells exactly what old credit card charges to check online that will verify the story. The stranger then raises with him the question of paternity since one big lie makes another more plausible. Adam is not alone in hearing life-upturning secrets from the stranger. One woman gets the news that her college daughter is an escort. Others hear secrets ranging from sexual indiscretions to financial improprieties. It seems that a few young computer-savvy entrepreneurs (including the stranger) are using the resources of modern tech to discover dark secrets and make money from them. This proves more dangerous than they anticipated. 

The yarn is a good one in its own right, but it raises unsettling questions about privacy in the modern world. Everyone has secrets. Some are tame and some are not. Some are not even ours, but secrets we keep on behalf of friends. They might include financial secrets (e.g. hiding a bank account from a spouse), theft, infidelity, deception, romantic desires (even if unpursued), or outright criminal behavior. Sometimes secrets are kept out of a sense of shame, and these can be burdensome to the secret-holders. Even those who shamelessly reject conventional morality and are perfectly comfortable with their secrets may still fear the practical personal, social, employment, or legal consequences if the secrets are revealed. Such fears are often justified. 

Yet, as many have learned to their cost, secrets are difficult to keep against a determined investigator in an ever more monitored world. The tools for tracking people have multiplied over the past two decades. The location of cell phones can be tracked by a simple app. EZ Pass registers the times and places of road and bridge tolls. Police cars automatically scan license plates of passing vehicles. Security cameras proliferate. Where were you last April 17^th at 10:20 a.m.? It’s very likely this can be determined. Nothing posted or stored online (or even on an individual computer) is ever really secure. Nothing is ever safely deleted – someone may have a copy somewhere. It is entirely possible for a 30-year-old to be suddenly confronted with something stupid he or she posted or emailed in high school. (There are certain advantages to being old enough for one’s teen years to have predated World Wide Web.) Then there is DNA testing, which is not just a forensic tool anymore. DNA test kits that sell for under $100 can be bought at any pharmacy. They come with warnings that the tests may reveal uncomfortable family secrets. About 30% do: not just the obvious paternity question but grandparental surprises, sibling surprises, and even some maternity surprises. 

So secrets aren’t what they used to be. Nowadays, most people keep their secrets only because they aren't worth anyone else’s bother to dig them out. What if they were? That eventuality didn’t work out well for Adam Price and Corrine. It probably wouldn’t work out well for us either.

The Pierces – Secret

When Pumpkins Grin

It’s that month again. Like all major holidays since I was a kid, Halloween has expanded its domain. It now rules the entire month of October and stretches Cthulhu-like tendrils back before the equinox all the way to Labor Day when Halloween candy suddenly appears on supermarket shelves. (For non-American readers, Labor Day is the first Monday in September.) Though Halloween did not originate in the US, the American way of celebrating it (well over a century old) has become popular even in places (such as Japan) completely removed culturally from the holiday’s Celtic origins. Perhaps this is not surprising. Around the world there are parallel notions of a time of the year when the boundary between the living and the dead is permeable and ghosts walk the earth more freely than usual, such as the Day of the Dead in Mexico or the Hungry Ghost Festival in East and Southeast Asia. Some celebrations of those parallel holidays are hardcore, such as ritual disinterment of the remains of family members for home visits in Indonesia. (See From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty for a description this and other death-related rituals.) I can see how carving pumpkins, dressing up spookily for fun, and cadging candy could make inroads as alternative activities – or at least as additional ones. Many Halloween costumes seem far removed from the influence of the graveyard, but cavorting with ghosts and tweaking the nose of Death still remain at the core of the holiday.

Ghosts are part of the mythic heritage of every people on every continent. What surprises those of a skeptical bent is how much they remain a part of modern belief systems. In a 2019 US study 45% of adults admitted to believing in ghosts, defined as spirits of the dead who can manifest to living people. (A solid majority believe in spirits if you count spirits who have moved onto someplace else.) Another 20% are unsure. This is pretty typical of advanced countries including ones that are highly secular in the usual sense. This may be an undercount since some people are embarrassed to admit to believing paranormal things. Counterintuitively, belief in ghosts rises with education. In a 2006 study by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward Jr. of the University of Central Oklahoma (reported in the Skeptical Inquirer) 23% of college freshman believed in the general gamut of the paranormal including astrology, clairvoyance, and ghosts (40% believed in haunted houses specifically, with another 25% unsure), while 31% of college seniors did, and 34% of graduate students did. Science majors were no more skeptical than other students. From Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism (2012) by Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl: “Across all three samples, the correlation between test scores and beliefs was non-significant... In other words, there was no relationship between the level of science knowledge and skepticism regarding paranormal claims.”

Choosing a seat at my
kitchen table

Ghosts have never been a part of my personal belief system. As a child my parents told me they didn’t exist and I believed them as uncritically as I believed their story that Santa Claus did exist. By the time I was able to think more critically for myself I saw no reason to change my mind – about the ghosts, that is. Yet, around half of my friends (including highly capable professionals) to this day are believers or at least are unwilling to say they are disbelievers. About a quarter tell me my house is haunted with two claiming to have seen apparitions. My house in the woods makes a lot of creaking, knocking, and groaning sounds as it heats and cools; the floorplan and lighting result in odd shadows – some of them cast through windows from trees that move when the wind blows. I don’t think about the sounds and umbrations except when teasing guests, e.g. “Don’t worry, the troll downstairs gets restless but he is securely chained.” Not all of them are amused. There is at least one grown man who doesn’t like to go to my basement alone.

I’m not immune to the creepiness of shadowy houses at night. The scariest Halloweens of my life have been in them. My dad was a builder and construction sites have a special appeal to marauding teens on Halloween (and the night previous). They don’t always confine themselves to spreading toilet paper and soaping windows. They sometimes did substantial damage including breaking windows, spray-painting obscenities, and slashing tires on construction vehicles. So, by my later teens I had been drafted into guard duty at unfinished houses on the last two nights of October. If you want to experience a spooky Halloween, spend it alone (with no cell phone) in a dark half-built house on a wooded lot at night. It wasn’t ghosts that worried me, of course, but the possibility of confronting beings with pulses. They are always the greatest hazard at any place or time.

In my own home, no ghost ever has done me harm, so if I’m wrong about their nonexistence, I figure at least they are friendly. Perhaps they’ll even do me the favor of scaring off some marauders with pulses.

 

Bessie Smith – Haunted House Blues (1924)

Good Enough

I grew up with films of the 30s through 50s: what we now consider classic movies. At some hours there wasn’t much else on TV. Until the end of the 1960s TV stations, even though there were just a handful in each market, were scrounging for content. Some stations (even major ones) simply went off the air at night because they had nothing to broadcast. Others, however, during non-prime hours of the day and late at night played classic films, the rights to which they had acquired for a song. Nowadays a youngster always can find something more suitable to a kid’s taste any time of the day or night on one of 200 other TV channels – or online. Back then we settled. 

These old films varied a lot in quality. The bulk of them were B-movies in every sense, but I wasn’t a particularly precocious youngster and so wasn’t a very good judge. It is interesting to revisit them now with an adult eye. Even some of the bad ones still have a nostalgia value for me because I remember having watched them at age 10 when I should have been in bed. I re-encountered one such film on TCM the other day that I barely remembered from youth. Lured (1947) is a noir mystery in which a pre-I Love Lucy Lucille Ball plays a taxi dancer who co-operates with Scotland Yard by acting as bait to catch a serial killer. In truth, the movie is contrived and not very good, but it isn’t altogether bad either. It is good enough to enjoy for 102 minutes. 

As I’ve grown older I’ve become a fan of the good enough. To be sure, I appreciate excellence as much as anyone, but that is a rare commodity and not always worth the cost. Voltaire warned that “the best is the enemy of the good.” He meant, of course, that demanding nothing but the best (including from oneself) may mean you don’t get or achieve anything at all. It usually means that. We are often discouraged from writing or painting or building something by our own concern that we won’t be great. The truth is, we’re probably right – especially by contemporary standards. Kurt Vonnegut once remarked that in a Neolithic village the totem carver was Michelangelo as far as the villagers were concerned. The rock painter was Picasso and the campfire singer was Elvis. In the modern global village we are up against world class performers, not just a hundred locals. It accordingly is easy to become discouraged by comparing ourselves to them. Excelling on a global scale is tough. 

Even by Roman times this was an issue. Vergil was so unhappy with the Aeneid that on his deathbed he directed the manuscript be destroyed. Fortunately, his dying wish was ignored and this classic of Western literature survives. In 1908 Monet destroyed a number of his paintings: “I know that if they are exhibited, they’ll be a great success, but I couldn’t be more indifferent to it since I know they are bad.” So, sometimes we are wrong about our own work. However, even if our judgment is right (as is more likely), it’s worth giving whatever we like to do a go anyway. Maybe it won’t be great. It probably won’t be. Yet it might be good enough to bring pleasure to oneself and perhaps to others. Once again, there is something to be said for that. Just yesterday I did a good enough job of mowing the lawn. The result won’t win any landscaping awards but it doesn’t look bad either – and it was cheaper than hiring professional lawn care. 

I’ve had occasion to contemplate what a life filled with good enough can be like: a good enough job, a good enough car, good enough home, and, yes, good enough relationships. It sounds like a pretty happy one to me. I’ve experienced stretches of life filled with extreme bests and extreme worsts, and I’d be willing to trade. 

Maybe I’ll check what is playing this evening on TCM. If it’s something like The Philadelphia Story (definitely a best), that’s wonderful. But if it’s something good enough like The Falcon’s Alibi, that is OK, too.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Good Enough