You know how it is. You’ve worked hard all week saving orphans from fires, framing condos, sewing up knife wounds, digging coal from deep caverns, painting interior walls and trim for senators, forging steel death machines, composing reams of prose that will probably win a Pulitzer – basically being industrious and brilliant, just like Mom always hoped you’d be – then Friday afternoon comes along and you’re exhausted. Depleted. Stupid. Just screwing the pooch until you can get to the bar.

When I run out of juice on Fridays I compose lists on the principle that it’s better to write something than nothing, even when that something serves no useful purpose in the world. Sometimes the list is nonsense. Sometimes it’s a ridiculous waste of time. But once in a while it will sort itself into a kind of poem. Here’s this week’s offering:

WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU GOOGLE “GOT MORE TROUBLES THAN”

“I got more troubles than there’s bubbles in champagne.”
– Ward Hayden, “Girls, Guns, and Glory”

“I got more troubles than a diamond’s got shine.”
– Sam Roberts, “The Pilgrim”

“I got more troubles than your eyes can see.”
– Fingercheese

“I already got more troubles than I need.”
– Delbert McClinton, “Honky Tonkin’ (I Guess I Done Me Some)”

“Got more troubles than you’ve ever had.”
– Phil Ochs, “Sing Along With Me”

“Got more troubles than I could ever use.”
– Thaddeus Dale Johnson, “Shitload of Blues”

“They got more troubles than a trailer park.”
– Dr. Phil, about the Republican Party

Burritos! Quesadillas! Flank steak on the grill! Anything on the grill!  My friends and I were tending the grill while our wives drank wine on the patio and we fell into discussing the cultural phenomenon of men taking over in the kitchen. Just about every man we know under the age of 60 does most of the cooking. Why is that? I brought up our childhood chemistry sets as a possible explanation. Does following a recipe differ much from stewing up a mess of chemicals, other than there’s less chance of an explosion?

But explosions are why we played with our chemistry sets, said G.

And who follows recipes? said J.

Don’t glamorize it, said R. We cook because our wives work. We have to split the duties somehow, and cooking is a hell of a lot more fun than vacuuming or laundry. I’d rather cook any day than scrub toilets.

Oh yeah.

Hell yeah.

Grab me another beer while you’re up

Anybody have thoughts/instincts/insight into this cultural phenomenon?

Gail’s photo of some of 2011′s bounty

Ah, the season of bounty! Morels started popping weeks ahead of schedule here in northern Michigan and are still going strong. I found a couple on March 26, a consequence of that freakish spell of hot weather that everyone is still talking about — first time ever I’ve found them during that month when the woods are usually still clogged with  snow. Now the big whites are showing up in the usual places: along roadsides, in grassy patches around ash and apple trees, in the neighbor’s yard.
And morels are just the start of it. As always in spring, it’s tough deciding whether to spend my free time hunting mushrooms, fishing, canoeing, or birding, so I’ve been combining them all into weekend Bacchanalias. Here’s to trout, warblers, ‘shrooms, and J-strokes! As the great Kinky Freedman said, find what you love and do it ’till it kills you!

With morels on everyone’s minds, it’s a great time to check out this splendid new book from The University of Michigan Press: The Art of Cooking Morels.
And though many of Ruth Johnston’s recipes are a bit elaborate for my taste (and abilities — I’m a toss-’em-in-flour-and-fry-’em-in-butter guy), they might inspire you to try startling and innovative ways of preparing this tastiest of fungi.

And there’s a terrific bonus on the cover and throughout the book: The stunning illustrations by David McCall Johnston, as below. An utterly delightful — and delicious — book.

What an honor  it is for an author to learn that his work is giving a reader he has never met some much needed comfort in a comfortless place. This is a young soldier named Nick Warren, on patrol in northern Afghanistan, reading my memoir of growing up outdoors, A Place on the Water. Nick wrote to say that the book has given him a taste of home, and he can’t wait to get back to western Michigan.

Abundance: The Documentary
Many days I would cheerfully trade my pen and paper for a state-of-the-art video camera. Cinema is so clearly the dominant artistic medium of our age that we who practice older arts often wonder if we’ve become irrelevant. Not yet! I shout, despite the seeping doubt — and the tottering piles of draft and notes that threaten to bury this aging fool beneath an anachronistic mountain of rubble.

Footage is what I need. And an editor in a cutting room. And a staff of energetic young people skilled at translating images into narrative.

If I had such a staff I would direct them to follow, with a camera, the actions of a man taking inventory of his earthly possessions with a video camera of his own. This, I’m told, is a standard tactic for those who worry about collecting homeowner’s insurance in the event of fire, flood, storm, or burglary. The subject would walk from item to item, filming each and identifying it in a clear voice, thereby demonstrating the abundance of physical items in an American household, as part of my larger project of getting at the point of whatever I’m trying to get at. “Microwave, GE Spacemaker II,” he would say. “Food processor, KitchenAid, Model H236ST4.”

Then a narrator informs us that, according to a 2005 study, the typical American family owns more possessions than did any Egyptian pharaoh.

[CUT TO EGYPTIAN TOMB FILLED WITH TREASURES]

But everyone knows that true abundance has nothing to do with what can be bought or measured or priced. It means a full life, love, the gifts we give and receive. It means recognizing that the world is inhabited by an inexhaustible number of things, each singular and actual, each a mystery and an astonishment, each in flux, with a history and a lineage of equally singular and astonishing links reaching back to the beginning of time and projecting forward to the end of it. Creation is not a set number of things, it is a continuous creation. It is a fountain.

So now we cut to a dripping tropical forest where dignified avuncular biologist E.O. Wilson is on his knees identifying some of the hundreds of plants and animals living in a randomly chosen square meter of what he assures us is the most biologically diverse ecosystem on earth, with thousands of species that we know and thousands more yet to be discovered and named and, of course, tested for possible beneficial uses to mankind (this last inserted to placate the shrunken black hearts of lawmakers who value only what is quantifiable).

Then, to suggest the fountainous cornucopia of life in all its forms we cut to:

– rows of open drawers in the American Museum of Natural History, each lined with hundreds of mummified neotropical songbirds, tagged and labeled,

– the halls of a Walmart,

– a crowded bazaar in Istanbul,

– a close-up of faces in a crowd (football game, rock concert, public hanging)

– and, in a series of quick cuts, a landfill teeming with garbage and gulls, a storage unit crammed with surplus furniture and other crap, the time-lapsed frenzy of a robotically-run automobile factory, the stomach contents of a shark laid out on a blanket (Frisbee, kangaroo skull, set of car keys, full bottle of Budweiser, shriveled human hand).

All of this to make a point visually that is perhaps impossible to articulate verbally: That every moment of our lives we live within a roaring and sometimes overwhelming waterfall  of phenomena [CUT TO NIAGARA] — the unimaginable, flowing, spewing, drifting muchness of things in the universe and their apparently endless and endlessly various interactions with one another. All this raises a corollary to the contemplative philosopher’s question of why there is something in the universe instead of nothing. It is: why is there so much of it?

[CUT TO STILL-SHOT OF THE PERIODIC TABLE OF ELEMENTS]

[CUT TO LUMINOUS GASES VAULTING BALLETICALLY FROM THE SURFACE OF THE SUN]

[CUT TO ARMY ANTS SWARMING ACROSS AN ANIMAL CORPSE; MOB RIOTING IN STREETS; TERRIBLE TSUNAMI SURGE; CATTLE STAMPEDING WITH MUCH DUST]

[CUT TO TABLE OVERFLOWING WITH FEAST; AND CHILDREN LAUGHING IN GREATEST JOY]

Meanwhile, the narrator says:

“We want to eat the world. We hunger for the mad and rowdy physicality of existence. We are exuberant, ebullient, open-eyed, open-armed, open-mouthed, and flat-out ravenous for this mysterious, astounding, delicious, brutal, and bountiful thing we call life.”

That would be my film.

Simplify, Simplify
For years Gail and I have been trying to simplify our lives, but we haven’t made much headway. The effort always makes me think of Thoreau, who famously scolded us to “simplify, simplify,” then set to work weaving a deliciously intricate tapestry of a book. It’s as it should be. Books are like natural communities and human cultures: their complexity makes them strong. Those thousands of words in intricate and seemingly infinite arrangement magnify our view of the world and remind us that we’re surrounded every moment by an unimaginable abundance of stars in the sky, of snowflakes and falling leaves, of swarms of insects, pollen, people, ideas.

Of course we turn to the spare and elemental to give ourselves a rest, seeking quiet moments in nature and at home for the same reason the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis reads poetry: “He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.”

Those words thrill me every time I read them. The white space around the words is why I read poetry. And why I need to walk so often in woods, fields, along Lake Michigan, under the stars.

But we are not simple creatures. Bare moments can’t hold us for long. Eventually most of us require more than white space and cloud spout; more than the twice-warming flames in a fireplace; more than the monkish austerity of a single room, a candle, and a few books. Henry’s enthusiasm is infectious — “Think of our life in nature. Daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!” – but I suspect that his passion and the complexity of his mind and the boldness of his assertions interest us more than the simple life he espoused. It could be that the louder Thoreau crows in praise of simplicity, the more convincing becomes his argument against it.
*
Thanks to everyone who has written in recent weeks with comments and observations. I’ve been working long hours to put a new book to bed, so these postings will continue to be intermittent.

The new book, by the way, is titled The Windward Shore, and is about a winter I spent living in other people’s houses, from a log cabin on Lake Superior to a 20-million-dollar mansion on Lake Michigan. During those months I took note of time, weather, waves, snow and ice, agates, birds, books, our place in nature, and much more. In a way, I guess, I was siting my life in white space and becoming conscious of my breathing. It’ll be out in September from the University of Michigan Press.

Just Curious
We’re drowning in information but we don’t know diddly. For a few thousands years we’ve labored tirelessly to fill our libraries and databases with notions, theories, observations, opinions, wishes, dreams, passionate outcries, wild imaginings, shameful whining, obstinate dogma, and pointless babble — but we still don’t know how we got on this rock or how we’re supposed to comport ourselves while we’re here.

Spiral Galaxy, courtesy of NASA

We don’t know the most fundamental things. Physicists are unable to explain why, for instance , galaxies continue to fly away from one another at an accelerating rate, in defiance of everything known of gravitational law – and of every other natural law. They decided it was caused by something they would call “dark energy.” But what is Dark Energy? Nobody knows. The laws of nature as we know them do not apply to it. [This according to an article in the June 3, 2008 edition of the New York Times -- read it here.]

Nor do they apply to the weighty mystery of something they have named Dark Matter. Physicists know (but I don’t know how they know) that the weight of the universe is composed of 74 percent Dark Energy and a mere four percent of atoms. The remaining 22 percent? Well, that’s something else. Nobody knows what. They call it Dark Matter.

A final example: nobody can explain why at some point early in the development of an embryo one cell divides from another and begins to develop into a brain. The biologist Lewis Thomas was obsessed with this mystery. “No one,” he wrote, “has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in my life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out.”

It occurs to me that in a universe of unknowns the most admirable human quality is our urge to know. We can learn the names of things, study the works of great minds, gather insights into laws, systems, and connections that seem to hold things together, and with diligent application maybe see a little deeper into the mysteries of the universe. But it has to start with curiosity. And as anyone knows who remembers even a little what it was like to be a child, curiosity begins with wonder.

Never before has it been so easy to satisfy curiosity. Are you curious to know which element is the most common in the universe? How many taste buds are on a tongue? The difference between bourbon and whisky? Ask Google. In a few seconds, like magic, you have the answer.

So here’s the question of the day:  Has instant access to information made us less curious or more? Tell me what you think.