One of those differences, of course, is that it’s in Europe, with all that entails. The course today went through part of Spain that’s mostly filled with dusty sand and olive trees, and while it’s true that I see an olive tree every day of my life thanks to the people next door, I don’t often see Spain.

Today’s race also featured a mostly naked Spainard running alongside the bike racers and, as usually happens, one of the American male commentators acted like a little girl when he saw him.

I don’t understand how or why so many guys react that way. The guy. from the glimpse we got, looked pretty ordinary, but the commentator acted as if this was the most horrific sight he’d ever had. Anything that can evoke that strong a reaction from someone interests me, and as usually happens with any naked male body, otherwise ordinary guys just go apeshit.

It must be some sort of peer pressure thing. When one guy sees another one naked, it’s like he has to follow some rule that says he has to make some “we don’t need to see that” comment and act all revolted. It’s like they can’t be too much of a drama queen and no sane reaction is enough for these clowns.

Women, I might add, never seem to have this tendency to over-react when they see another naked woman. While some I know may have the more natural reaction of appreciation, most simply shrug it off or maybe silently judge the woman. Men, it seems, cannot do that and stumble all over themselves to make sure everyone knows how offended they are.

It’s funny.

Totally out of proportion.

And I guess it makes them feel more like men when they act like little girls.

It’s funny how it works, with our minds latching onto new things and, in my case at least, trying to come up with a good reason why this new thing acts or is the way it is. I don’t pretend to come up with an answer, but I can’t just see something and let it go without coming up with some sort of explanation.

I’m pretty sure other people do this, too, but the difference is I’m old now, old enough to realize the important distinction between something that fits the bill and something that’s true. I have a hunch that most people stop when they come up with an answer that works for them while I get mired wondering about the rest of the infinite possibilites. I learned, early on, that just being logically correct, as any good answer must be, is only the first hurdle. Tons of explanations make sense … but that doesn’t meant they’re the right one.

Anyway, one of the outcomes of this way of thinking is not thinking any more. Habit replaces questioning, and actions and thoughts soon become ordinary and common. Instead of marveling, or wondering all the time, I just take my earlier reaction and do it again.

This, of course, saves a lot of time. It also reinforces past behavior, and that may or may not be a good thing.

It’s remarkably easy for me to get into ruts. I dress the same way every day without giving it any thought, which saves me the trouble of figuring out which foot gets the first sock. I catch myself sometimes doing this and make a conscious effort to dress the other foot first, or put on a shirt before anything else, or wash my right arm before my left one. Hell, sometimes I mix things up just to keep me from getting complacent, and I’m saddened and amazed at how much I do without thinking.

Part of changing is learning how, and only if I think about what I’m doing, can I mix it up. It’s turned into a game I play with myself, one that I haven’t grown tired of. Yet.

Some things, naturally, I can’t or won’t change. I’d be a fool to mess around with eating utensils, at least in public, or think of wiping my mouth on a pant’s cuff instead of a sleeve. While having already decided how to do or think about things means I’m not constantly baffled, it does keep me from seeing things through fresh eyes, something I think is both important and desirable.

So this weekend I’m wearing my belt backwards. Craig Ferguson, I noticed last week, had the tail of his belt facing toward his right. In all my years of wearing a belt I’ve always had mine facing left. I was more surprised than I probably should have been at his dressing that way, and I wondered how to do that.

I mean, the entire concept was so foreign to me that I first thought of having to put on the belt upside down. As soon as I tried putting my belt on his way, clockwise, starting threading it through the loop on my right hip, I was a little embarrassed by how awkward it felt. It’s the same unfamiliar sensation I get when I put my left leg first in my shorts, but I chalk that up to being right handed.

I don’t know. Do lefties put their right arms and legs into their clothes first when putting them on, too?

So I can be the master of events by attacking them fresh each time or a slave to them by reacting to them without noticing them or my reactions. I guess it depends on how much time I have.

I get it from all sides and persuasions and one of the things I learn from all this correspondence is that, although the mail is addressed to me, I’m probably not the intended recipient. If it’s to get me all fired up, I’m afraid it’s not working as intended. Pretty much all the issues that get people enraged leave me bored. I don’t know what it is exactly that’ wrong with me but where most people seem to live comfortably on the boundaries, it’s rare that I get out of the middle.

On any 1-10 scale it seems most people rate things either one or two or nine or ten as far as importance goes. I live pretty much in the four to six world, which isn’t anywhere near as dramatic. Whenever I take one of those surveys that range from strongly agree to strongly disagree, almost all my responses are in the center of the column.

Really, I think these one to ten scales are excessive. If I separate things, I usually need only five categories (bad, poor, average, good, and great).

Anyway, today was election day here in California, so I voted.

When they’re not busy making me feel inadequate as a human being because I rarely share their passion, these e-mails remind me of some of my elitist tendencies. I read the them and then wonder about the wisdom of giving whoever first wrote them a vote equal to mine.

I was no history major, mind you, but there’s an awful lot of outrage nowadays about politicians being, well, political. I think as long as humans have been around, people have been political and using arguments to convince people about the wisdom of following their suggested course of action. People who are politicians are incredibly skilled at manipulation, and instead of being outraged when it’s used against some position I hold, I often nod in appreciation at the good play.

I mean, I guess what I’m saying is, none of this stuff is new.

Maybe most people don’t get HBO and weren’t able to watch their series Rome. Julius Caesar, it turns out, was pretty good at politics, giving his enemies high ranks that required them to get the hell out of Rome and as far away from power as possible. That’s a pretty good move, I have to say.

Years ago in California, some guys bought up a bunch of arid land in the San Fernando Valley and then got the people of Los Angeles to pay to have an aqueduct built to bring water to Los Angeles. What they did to make it all legal and right, was bring the water to their crappy land in the valley and then made the valley part of Los Angeles.

Say what you will, that’s a pretty inspired maneuver. Brilliant, even.

Instead of celebrating politics, we’ve gotten to the point of just yelling at and about each other. That’s sad, embarrassing, and just far too dramatic for me. I sometimes can watch a Keith Olbermann or Ann Coulter for entertainment value, but I can’t help wondering how many people just suck up what they say. I wish they could all see it as the sort of deluge of cheap shots, truth stretching, and exaggeration that I do, but I know better than to believe that. People want to hear things that reinforce their viewpoint, and now that it’s grown to encompass calling the other side names, making fun of them, and diminishing them in every way possible, no one’s enjoying good political moves any more.

I like to argue positions or at least discuss them. I don’t have all, or even many, of the answers, but I think most things are a lot more complicated than most of us like to think. It’s wheels in wheels, I tell ya, and the only thing that’s changed in my life is how acceptable it’s become to be outraged.

I could be wrong about its use and the facts surrounding it, but since I wince whenever I hear some character mention using dental records to identify the victim of some disfiguring murder, I think I’m right.

I don’t think they work that way.

In a lot of stories, from crime novels through TV shows to movies, some John Doe is always washing up on the beach or discovered by the side of the road or in the wreckage of a car or building and for some reason, whoever wrote the damn thing feels compelled to bring up searching through dental records to identify the body. It doesn’t matter if they were burned or chewed up by an animal, if there isn’t a wallet on the body, there’s always a nod to checking dental records.

Why this activity, which is never successful, needs to be mentioned in the story is a mystery to me. It’s become a cliché, as if some attentive viewer would object if the procedure was neglected and old find his or her enjoyment of the work obliterated.

The thing is, though, that dental records are only useful for answering the question “Is this John Smith?” and is totally useless for answering “Who is this?”

If you have a body that you think may be some particular person, but aren’t sure, I think it’s reasonable (and maybe even necessary) to have them identify the body. If they can’t because it’s too disfigured, you can find out who the dentist was and then he or she can use dental records to determine if the body is who you think it might be.

What you cannot do is identify some totally unknown person by dental records. You need to have a possibility in mind and then question the dentist.

An attempt to identify some complete stranger through dental records could only be done if there was some nationwide (or greater) storehouse of everyone’s dental records, which is preposterous if not silly and that was updated constantly by every dentist on the planet after every change to their patient’s teeth.

The dental records I’ve seen use templates showing 32 healthy teeth and the dentist draws on them to indicate fillings, missing teeth, and stuff like that. Although it would take an army of clerks to keep updating the files, it would take two or three more armies to somehow classify all these pictures so that all those with fillings in teeth 17, 22, and 6 could be quickly located. And yet, this is what writers expect us to believe is what happens when dental records are used for identification.

I have no idea when the practice started, probably during a war, but it makes sense to check the body’s teeth against a dental record to determine their identity. It makes sense, that is, if you’re trying to figure out if the body is some particular person who is known and whose dental records are handy.

If the writer isn’t assuming there’s some huge depository of dental records, are we supposed to believe a dental chart of the victim is made and sent to every dentist in the world to see if, possibly, it was one of their patients? Does this make any sense to anyone? Since the (invariably negative) results are known quickly, I can only imagine that in this world all the dentists drop whatever they’re up to whenever one of these “please identify” faxes shows up and responds within a matter of minutes.

Yeah, it’s just a writer’s trick and shouldn’t be closely examined, but why do so many writers bring it up at all? Since it fails to get results in every story I can think of, why is it even mentioned? Other than continuing the myth that dental records can be used in this way, just leave it out.

Or, only use it to determine if the body is that of a particular person, the way it’s used in the real world.

I’m either a huge fan of the Olympics or a sucker for them, depending on your point of view. No matter how obscure the sport, I get a huge kick out of watching these people from all the world trying their best at them. My fasciantion, of course, isn’t served well by American coverage, but maybe I’ll get to that later.

I run only slightly faster than an oil spill and my skiing experience is limited to one downhill run. I would have done more, but I never got the hang of turning so my descent was a series of straight lines and tipping over to avoid running into trees. I was exhausted from all the standing up by the time my ex completed four complete runs, smiling and waving at me each time she passed.

I’ve never handled a javelin, discus, or shot, so the field events are as foreign to me as ice skating. In short, I’ve never been much of an Olympian, but did finish in second place at some thing at our local playground, finishing just behind my best friend of the time and ahead of no one. His dad was a gym teacher who took great delight in signing us up for sporting things no one else in the world was aware of.

Anyway, the Olympics are over and my eyes can remember what it’s like to go hours without tearing up. No, the heartwarming personal stories that interrupt the coverage don’t do much for me, but seeing the smiles of the winners moves me. I learn all I need to know from listening to the five second commentary that introduces them while they compete. Their faces, though, speak volumes to me, and I can’t look at any cheering crowd all decked out in their country’s garb without thrilling for them.

See, that’s the thing. I feel as happy for the French when someone from their country wins as I do for the US when we claim the prize. Maybe even happier. We’ve got a lot here in the US, which makes a medal for Croatia or Finland all that more precious. We’re the world’s super power last time I looked, which taints our victories for me and reminds me of Kramer’s wins in Seinfeld over his karate class of ten year olds or Monty Python’s student-teacher soccer match.

I’d like to see more of the actual competition than just the Americans and those who tip over, but as long as I’m outnumbered in this country, all I’ll ever see is how great we’re doing. That’s not very sporting to me, but unless the games come to a city near me and I can attend in person again and sit through a day’s boxing matches between people I’ll probably never hear about again, it’s what I’m stuck with.

Which reminds me: If anyone needs to prove Andy Warhol’s fifteen minute thing, watch the Olympics. That Canadian woman whose mother died just before her skating is someone I don’t think I’ll hear about ever again. I wonder what she’ll do with her life.

Not that the language minds, or even notices.

I love how language changes over the years, how it grows, but I’m never very happy when the change costs us something and gives nothing new in return. Without changes, we wouldn’t have such great new words as fo shizzle, website, or Branjelica. These words, and many others, are ones we need.

I’ve grown used to, if not fond of, Internet thread board people co-opting most of their terms instead of coming up with their own, but I wish they’d come up something new instead of grabbing spam, troll, and the like. It was bad enough for me when spam moved from Usenet postings on a wide number of groups to include any e-mail ad, but lately it’s been dumbed down even more and now is used to disparage any comment someone dislikes.

Dammit, I love this language and all the nuances it lets us convey. A pretty girl isn’t the same as a cute one, and calling someone brilliant means something different than saying she’s smart. When we need a new word to describe something, English lets that happen and, over time, the word becomes part of our shared language.

When some word with a long and recognized history, such as chocolate, is broadened to mean just about anything that contains any amount of coca, for example, we don’t gain anything and the larger meaning dilutes the meaning of the words we use to communicate our thoughts without ambiguity. I know, I know, no one except lawyers and philosophers care about such precision, but I don’t want a language that ends up losing the distinction between an abode and a house.

There’s no way any living language can remain static, stay the same, become entrenched, calcified, or stagnant, and there shouldn’t be. Still, when a word or phrase I love is used to mean something different than it’s always meant, what it was designed to convey, a little part of me dies, and it hurts more when we lose an exacting, defined term and gain nothing.
I’d rather spend a week in jail than a night in prison as long as those words mean what they were meant to mean. If I’m gonna be precise, that is.

Every day, from every side, I hear people in America talking about our Founding Fathers, a group of people with whom I’m admittedly ignorant. Yeah, I know some of their names, but I don’t know very much else about them.

Anyway, to make some point, partisans usually call on one or more of these Fathers to reinforce their position. Whether it’s arguing for small government or nationwide health care, these historical people are brought up to prove whatever’s being argued.

Like I said, I can’t claim to understand if the viewpoint of the long dead person is true or not, but I don’t think it matters one way or the other. Not only does it seem that to every Founding Father there’s an equal but opposite Founding Father, but I’m not convinced what someone said 250 years ago even makes a lot of sense any more.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think those guys did a great thing in setting up this country. Our constitution is a remarkable document and not just because it’s almost completely silent when it comes to policy. It’s a great frame for running a country, and I think it’s done a pretty good job of holding up.

What concerns me is this idea that what Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, or whoever believed in 1770 is what they would think today. I’m thinking these people, as much as anyone, would be as influenced as much by their environment as they would be by any internal tendencies.

I didn’t take many psychology or sociology classes, either, but I have a hunch that we’re shaped as much by where and how we’re brought up as we are by anything. Kids learn from their parents, and either carry those same things on or rebel against them and take the other side. We all grow through adolescence and the self-obsessed twenties, and some of us stop along the way and others continue to grow throughout our lives and find their positions changing.

My point is, not everyone is static and I’m not even sure that we can say with any certainty that how anyone turned out was ever fixed. A kid raised in Portland in the 1960s might have an entirely different set of political or cultural beliefs had she been raised in Salinas or Houston.

The people who grew up in New York in 1827, I’m thinking, might not even recognize themselves in the mirror if, instead, they were raised even ten or fifty years later. I just think where and how we develop is a huge factor in determining who we are.

If that’s true, a contemporary George Washington might not believe what the one from history did. If we permit people to change, if we brought him back to life, there’s every reason to believe he might even change his mind about whatever it is he’s most known for thinking.

I guess this is all just to say that I have no idea what lesson I’m supposed to take from arguments based on these old guys.

I guess I can see why it became so popular with the kids, who are almost always at the forefront of changes in lanuguage and usage, but that doesn’t help me feel better about losing another perfectly fine word.

Over my life, I’ve seen quite a few words come and go, change meaning, or take over slang and become popular. Some, like gay, have had their meaning restricted, with no new word popping up to take their old place and meaning, which reduces our language by exactly one word. Others, such as jungle, have become politically incorrect and necessarily replaced by cold, dry, descriptive phrases (tropical rainforest) that have absolutely no emotional response. Sure, I may picture the same thing as before, but tropical rainforest doesn’t bring up memories of drums or all those movies I saw as a kid.

After a few days of rain, we’ve had a couple of sunshine here in Los Angeles. It was bright and sunny earlier this morning, but now clouds have returned and I changed from shorts to long pants. When the sun pops out, I can turn my face toward it and feel its warmth, and trying to fathom the enormous power of something that far away being felt by me and making a noticeable difference astounds me.

The explosive power of the sun is awesome. It gives me pause, causes me to feel awe, in a way no slang use of the word even approaches. A new song or remarkable play in a sporting event doesn’t make me feel that way, but without thinking, that’s the word we use to describe them. Awesome has now become simply filler, much like uh or like, added to speech or writing but adding nothing to the idea being brought forth other than “I like this” or “I think this is good.”

I thought it was bad when incredible became cheapened by use and went from its original “impossible to believe or credit” to doubtful or, worse, unlikely. I hadn’t realized that language needed to change to eliminate the nuances our individual words were invented to convey, but I guess that’s the way it goes.

It’s not awesome, this evolution, it’s erosion.

One of my longer lasting problems comes with the notion of secret. For some reason, I keep thinking of in terms of a stronger, probably non-existent word that would refer to something that I, and I alone, know. I know, I know, most secrets are between two people, but it always feels to me as if more than one person knows about some thing, it’s not the same as a real secret.

As can be expected, this gets me into lots of trouble, but only with myself. I like to think of myself as one of the more discrete people around, and anything I think shouldn’t be public or even divulged to another person is locked up tight in my head. I don’t have much trouble keeping these things secret and I don’t remember ever hearing anyone gossiping about me as blabbing, but maybe they do and just keep it a secret from me.

I’d like two terms, one for things I share with others and another for things only I know. I suppose I could distinguish them by calling the first one confidences, but it’s not likely I’d remember to do that all the time. Still, it’s a good way to keep the two things separate.

There are any number of things I’m aware of that no one else knows, but they’re not all worthy of being called secrets. I think a secret has to be something I’m hiding, or that I don’t want other people to know. I mean, right now no one knows which toothpaste I used this morning or what underwear I have on, but it’s not like I wouldn’t tell anyone who asked. Those things are unknown to the world, but that’s more a matter of happenstance than reluctance.

What’s weird about the confidences is that I have a hard time considering them as secrets because even if I never mention them, someone else knows about them and could talk about them. Since I can’t really control if no one else learns about them, I have a hard time considering them as secrets. If I die, the secret won’t die with me and that, to me, pretty much keeps them out of the realm of secrecy.

Then again, a confidence, I think, is something that I’m told about, not something that arises on its own. Just like the toothpaste, I’ve done a lot of things with other people, but only the ones we don’t other people to know about should be secret. Even more troubling, a lot of those things, now that I think about it, are things I’d have to check with the other person to find out if I can talk about it or not. I know what I’m not telling anyone, and those things are secret, but my not talking about something doesn’t mean it’s a secret. It would have to be something I know, or have been told, not to discuss with others.

So, in my overly complicated world, there’s more to the matter of secrets than would seem to be necessary. There’s probably thousands who’ve had access to my super secret Social Security Number so I guess a secret boils down to something someone doesn’t want others to know, no matter how many already do or why.

Still, ideas presented in a few of the scenes stick right in front of my mind and I use or remember them, if not daily, at once a week (and have since I first ran across them). They’re probably not crucial to the story and I’d doubt if they’re popular with anyone but me, but for some reason, I call on them whenever they seem to fit.

The first is what I call the Holden Caulfield theory of Catholicism. At some point in the book he remarks to the effect that you can always tell a Catholic person by how they try to find out if you share their faith. The example he gave that I remember is Catholics asking you for the location of the nearest church and how that showed the subtlety they employ in trying to discover if you, too, are Catholic.

I can’t say that anyone has ever asked me that, but I’ve expanded or adapted the idea to how women often use similar things to let you know about their availability. It’s rare for me to talk very long with any woman and not have her bring up her husband, lover, or boyfriend if she has one. It’s never in response to a direct question, something I don’t think I’ve ever asked of anyone, but she’ll usually work her relationship into the conversation.

One reason for that might be because her love and status is so important to her that it’s the focus of her life, and I can’t argue with that. Or, it may just be an efficient or safe way to let me know her boundaries, but whenever someone, however awkwardly, introduces their relationship into the conversation I grin and remember Holden and his Catholics.

The other thing Salinger brought to my attention through Holden is a question he wondered about when he spent some time with a prostitute. Instead of thinking about sex, which I would guess to be the extent of the matter, he wonders if the sales person who sold the girl her coat (or dress) knew that it was a prostitute that was buying it.

Again, I expand on this idea, not having a great deal of interactions with prostitutes, and frequently wonder about those who sold things to the people I talk with know that he or she is … whatever.

The things I learn about those in my life aren’t very often secrets only we share, but I do learn some things that I guess aren’t public knowledge. It’s sometimes a very minor thing, but I wonder about the grocery clerk or shop assistant not knowing that this person has a mole somewhere or that she went to Scotland or some such place when she turned twenty.

The closest I ever came to matching Holden’s experience was when I took a writing class and one of the other students was an exotic dancer. I couldn’t help but wonder if, when she bought the fishnet stockings she once wore to class, the sales person knew that this girl would be displaying them to anyone with a pocket full of singles.

Anyway, Salinger enriched my life, and I’m sorry that kids today don’t appreciate Holden. I haven’t read the work in decades, so maybe it didn’t hold up well, but I can’t help feeling a little bit sad that it’s cool to hate on him.