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Stalled Blog Posting

The following Blog posting has been sitting in my “draft” folder for a week. It’s a Blog post about getting a wart removed. I’m not going to apologize for it, though I should: I’m just going to go ahead and push “publish”, and we can all get on with our lives. Kate’s Blog posting is much more interesting, and has fewer grossnesess.

I went to the dermatologist and had a wart removed yesterday. The wart was on my right forearm, and wasn’t very nasty, but it’s been on my to-do list ever since I noticed it three years ago, and I finally got around to finding a dermatologist, checking the insurance, and making the appointment.

I should have gone sooner: it was REALLY cool. Doctor Drew McCausland, in the West Chester Medical Building, turned out to be a pleasant, white-haired guy. He told me he “liked to kibbutz” with his new patients, and was struggling to find some stuff to talk to me about — then launched into a pretty interesting description of the shortcomings of his software, which will tell him how many pimples he’s seen by zip code, but won’t tell him which patients are the ones who have a history of canceling at the last minute. Every industry has its experts who make specialized software: Kate worked for Past Perfect, the most popular museum database, written in FoxPro by a retired telecommunications executive and his anthropologist wife. I just bought a copy of FTWO (For Two Wheels Only), which is basically a cushy Access database set up by a motorcycle rider to organize all your paperwork. Funny that doctors’ software overlooked such a big need.

Anyhow, Dr. McCausland shot a gob of novocain onto my arm using a little French pneumatic spitter. That was the coolest part: it was like a penlight with a piston, that shot globs of Novocain at high speed, so he doesn’t have to use a needle. Then he put my arm on top of my head and…

[Snip! Okay, that’s enough of that.]

What the world really needs: another rambling philosophy-and-motorcycles rant

There are a couple of basic questions around which philosophy is organized: epistemology, teleology, cosmology, being-a-loser-wearing-tweed-in-Barnes-and-Noble-and-trying-to-pick-up-college-sophomores-ology. The one I was most interested in was, and is, epistemology. “Episteme” was a Greek word for ‘knowledge’, but it also meant ‘message’ (like “epistle”.) Epistemology is the study of the philosophical question of “What can we know, and how do we know that we know it?” Solipsism is one of the topics of epistemology (“How do I know that I’m not the only person that exists, imagining everyone else?” “How do I know that the TV doesn’t stop when I turn it off?”) So is the brain-in-a-vat problem, cf. Keanu.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, epistemology was the problem that philosophers had to deal with. Descartes tried to fix things by backing up to the only thing he could trust: “well, if I’m doubting reality, somebody’s doing the doubting, so there’s a me, at least.”) Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza — the rationalists — tried to climb out of the hole by building structures of thought, making beautiful and well-organized frameworks to ground reality. Locke, Berkely, Hume &#151 the empiricists — took the other tack, working from the outside in and trying to connect the dots between percieved reality and our thinking minds. “THUS do I refute Descartes!” Berkeley is supposed to have exclaimed through gritted teeth after savagely kicking a boulder.

Things got better with Kant, who was able to synthesize the rationalists and the empiricists into a unified whole. But it was the German philosophers of the twentieth century that came up with the strategy that I like the most. Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer approached the corrosive problems of knowledge through phenomenology — the study of what we percieve, the stance we take towards what we percieve, and the way we act about the possibility that we are wrong or mistaken. Heidegger, in particular, cautioned us about ever becoming too complacent about the objects of our perceptions. As humans, we overlay the things that are with our expectations of what we think they are, and we have to be ready for the object of our perceptions to suddenly reveal itself as something totally else.

An object lesson: buying a motorcycle. Kate and I drove to Lansdowne on Sunday to deliver my starter bike to the winning eBay bidder. The buyer turned out to be a pleasant young guy named Dan, who just graduated high school and is working in a banquet hall over the summer. Dan came to the door sleepy: he’d been up late working the night before. He woke up quickly when he saw the bike, and he was excited. It was clearly obvious, that Dan was seeing the bike in the same way that I’d been looking at my new BMW while it was in the seller’s yard three weeks ago: it was a silhouette, a vaguely motorcycle-shaped outline sitting on its centerstand and exerting a strong gravitational but completely opaque pull. There were twin UJM-shaped outlines glowing in his retinas as he looked at the bike, and he confessed that he had completely forgotten all the stuff he was going to ask me about the bike.

Showing the bike to Dan, a first-time rider, was my first experience as a motorcyle guru. Watching him struggle to get the bike up on the centerstand (easy when you get the knack; awkward and embarassing until then), I recognized myself only five days before, as I stared at the BMW’s exhaust ports, my mind filled with New Motorcycle Fog, while Kate’s dad waved his hands in mystical patterns, looking for “air leaks in the headers.” And as I will be in three days, when I pick the bike up from the mechanic after a safety inspection, and try to look like I understand what the mechanic is saying when he talks about not using emery paper to clean the points. So I tried to fulfill my obligations by showing him enough to roll the bike around in his garage, but not enough to start tearing up the Pennsylvania Turnpike. (Dan, if you are reading this, GO TO MOTORCYCLE SAFETY SCHOOL!

So, anyhow, I learned again this weekend that the mental envelope we live in is malleable, and subject to strong molding forces. Some things — like new motorcycles — pull on our perceptions like black holes pull on the green grid lines in computer animations. Only later does the object of desire resolve itself into a real thing, with flecks of rust on the handlebars and a hard-to-polish spot on the exhaust where the previous owner (that’s me) kept burning his boot heel.

I got out of there as quickly as I could, so Dan can enjoy his new bike, not the bike-shaped silhuouette in his garage. And so if he drops the bike, he can do so in privacy. Dan said that he would email me the questions he forgot, and I urged him to go to motorcycle safety school. And now I’m going to go grapple with my own Teutonic phenomenological challenge: Das Bike.

I washed my hands first, so the dogs don’t smell like gasoline (much.)


For Mother’s day, I filled two previously-placed gift orders and made sock dogs for my mom and Kate’s mom. They turned out pretty well; that is to say, they all have the correct number of legs and tails, and I only drew blood once during the process. I made them out of some expensive-but-deeply-marked-down socks I found in a Nolita boutique in January. Which is about the first time I’ve ever found anything useful for me in one of those stores: the women’s clothes are always really cool, but the men’s shirts are usually only for tiny hipsters with forward-combed hair.

Other news from a suburban lifestyle: I raked out the moss in the shady areas of the front lawn, overseeded with fresh grass, and put down a bed of granulated Scott’s fertilizer. Before that, I mowed the lawn while wearing a set of turf aerator sandals, which have two-inch spikes attached to them, making me look like some sort of GWAR golfer. I had a good time stomping around the lawn on those.

Kate’s dad came back from France on Saturday with lots of good stories, including major surgery on his bike in the watertight hold of the Channel ferry, in which he had to reassemble his Triumph Bonneville from parts in time to drive it down the ramp when the boat arrived.) He was enthusiastic about my new BMW, which was a great relief, and he and I caravaned to Main Line BMW Motorcycles, in Devon, where Joe the local airhead mechanic will tell me what’s going on with the bike’s innards. Fingers crossed for no bad news.

We also visited the “Vassar Show House”, which felt a little bit like when Captain Haddock returns to Marlinspike and finds a road rally parked in the front yard. I kept trying to fight feelings of possessiveness, though: while I may have spent a lot of time at Ivy Cottage, I never lived there, and I’m very glad that Vassar seems to have stabilized a lot of the past ten years’ neglect. Kate and I seemed to have missed the Valley’s heyday by about fifty years: when we knew the big houses, they were already dark and relatively empty, not filled with revelling fox-hunters and madcap adventuresses in sheepskin flying helmets. Pictures here.

I’m selling my starter bike to (among other things) buy the black-and-silver, or maybe black-and-blue Aerostich suit that I’m gonna wear. I started the bidding at $75.00, and it’s been climbing slowly every day. Bidding has now surpassed the Kelly Blue Book value for the bike, which makes me realllly realllly happy. (Note to bidders who are reading this: it’s still a bargain.)

link to the auction

…and, when you’re done looking at the auction, check out the BEST SCOOTER VIDEO EVER MADE. Seriously, go watch it. Stop reading this, click the link already.

Yellow card! Yellow card for the husband!

Kate took me to the Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale at Christie’s last night. I’ve been to one evening sale before, which are the main event of a particular auction: that’s when all the highest-value lots are offered. The people-watching is fantastic at Christies, because it’s a rich art crowd. You get to see all the sartorial nuances of the privileged classes. I’ll list all the types of which I saw at least three representations:

• Art professionals, male: Skinny; tight, double-vented suits; windowpane-check shirts in yellow or celadon; white handkerchief in the lapel; large, vulpine heads, big artistic hair.
  
• Art professionals, female, under 40: Tall; long, flowing dresses; expensively coiffed long hair; dominatrix heels.
  
• Art professionals, female, over 40: Short; tailored suits that cost as much as a German sports car; bobbed haircuts that cost as much as an Italian sports car.
  
• Rich clients, both genders, employed: Blue or gray suit; standard-issue business tie or scarf, somewhat bewildered
  
• Rich clients, male, independently wealthy: short gray hair, square black nylon windbreaker, European man purse.
  
• Rich clients, female, independently wealthy: Boxy shantung Mandarin jackets; chiseled artificial jaws. Tiny cell phone in a tinier purse.
  
• Art students, female: Ripped jeans, tight Old Navy shirt with plunging V-cut neckline, large cell phone in large purse.
  

  
  

• Finally, Christie’s professionals, female, under 40 (NY Office): Alert, conservatively dressed, deployed in a hoplite phalanx in the center of the main lobby. Duties: to scan the crowd for VIPs and alert the specialists of their presence (see art professionals, over 40 above.)
  
• Christie’s professionals, female, under 40 (Philadelphia Office): Elegant, intelligent, funny, blindingly beautiful, good-natured about picking you up at the train station when your motorcycle won’t start. Duties: pass along tidbits of information to clients that give the auction an insider frisson. “The same group of Giacomettis was offered at Sotheby’s last night, but it didn’t sell. This one is painted bronze, so it’s rarer.”*
  

I had a great time seeing the art. When a famous Cezanne is presented at the far end of a room filled with hundreds of people who regard it as an object of desire, there’s a movie-star thrill to seeing the painting in person that you don’t get in a museum. And it was entertaining to see the art go for millions: A Degas Petite Danseuse sold for approximately ten point two bazillion dollars. The auctioneer, Christopher Burge, was tall and impeccably elegant, and owned the room with his plummy British accent. “Two million two hundred fifty thousand? Well, since you asked so nicely…”

We drove home, getting to West Chester about midnight, so I left my car at the train station. Bringing my total number of vehicles at the station to two, or 66% of my available vehicular inventory. Kate set the alarm with enough time to get up and give me a ride to the station, but I committed a husband foul this morning: I neglected to set my own alarm, getting up at her scheduled time and blocking the bathroom with lots of gargling and yodeling. Ach, du lieber! That’s a marital yellow card, I believe.

* Duties the other 98% of the time: fill out paperwork, arrange shipping, and politely field any number of inquiries from sellers who would like to consign the “genuine Picasso” they discovered at a garage sale.