Anna Elizabeth

Our daughter, Anna Elizabeth Truslow, was born on March 29, 2010 at 4:35 in the afternoon. She weighed eight pounds and eleven ounces, and was twenty one and a half inches long.

We continue to update truslow.org with the latest photos of both girls.

The Crow

One of my favorite albums over the last year has been Steve Martin's bluegrass / banjo album called, "The Crow." As Steve once said in an old stand-up routine, "You just can't sing a depressing song when you're playing the banjo... When you're playing the banjo, everything's okay... I think it's the one thing that could have saved Nixon." The video above is the title song from that album, but if you click here, you can watch an absolutely amazing performance with Steve and other banjo luminaries on The Late Show with David Letterman.

Tyranny

The Gadsden Flag

The "health care" "reform" bill forced through the U.S. Congress this evening is unconstitutional, immoral and fiscally unsustainable. The process by which this bill was passed is deceitful, plainly corrupt, unbecoming of that body, and assures thirty more years of bitter, partisan divide ("hope" that President Obama would unite this country was exposed for the myth it was). The bill creates for citizens a new relationship with the federal government that is quintessentially un-American, and antithetical to the Framer's core belief that government is created to secure individual liberties. It is the most consequential (not to mention entirely untested) change to the American way of life in almost a century, and every one of those who voted for the bill should be removed from office come November.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."

- C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

State legislatures should act immediately to repeal the 17th Amendment and end this tyranny of the mob.

Don't Do That

Let the wild rumpus start.

From Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak

Don't Do That

It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything

hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red

along with some resentment I’d held in

for a few weeks, which was not helped

by the sight of little nameless things

pierced with toothpicks on the tables,

or by talk that promised to be nothing

if not small. But I’d consented to come,

and I knew what part of the house

their animals would be sequestered,

whose company I loved. What else can I say,

except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,

that bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown—

I’d brought him along, too. I was out

to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me,

but did not ask about my soul, which was when

I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red

to find the right kind of glass, and pour.

I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall,

then walked past a group of women

dressed to be seen, undressing them

one by one, and went up the stairs to where

the Rottweilers were, Rosie and Tom,

and got down with them on all fours.

They licked the face I offered them,

and I proceeded to slick back my hair

with their saliva, and before long

I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up

the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.

But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,

calm down, after a while they open the door

and let you out, they pet your head, and everything

you might have held against them is gone,

and you’re good friends again. Stay, they said.

This poem by Stephen Dunn was found in The New Yorker, June 8, 2009.

So... how ya' doin'?

"Falling Man" (Gold Butte, Nevada), by Kenneth Johnson

As Robert Plant once said, "It's been a long time since I wrote in my blog."

Fatherhood, jobs and whatnot have kept me frantically busy and away from the online project I envisioned at the end of 2008. I have interpreted 13 months of inactivity as a definitive sign that the project will not get underway soon. It is time to shelve hope (a common practice these days), and do what one can do.

Let me 'splain 2009. No... there is too much, let me sum up:

I spent the first nine months of this year being run ragged by employment and fatherhood. Thankfully, I was able to sneak in some joyful, notable events: I kept up with my running, including the ING Half-Marathon and The Peachtree Road Race (10k). We traveled to New Orleans for a Liberty Fund conference. I escaped to Baltimore to see the Chelsea / AC Milan soccer match. We visited Sewanee twice. I traversed the country by train, from Atlanta to Tucson.

In October, I turned 40 - thank you, thank you - and celebrated by writing two articles that were published. The first was on the subject of the 17th Amendment and was printed in Roll Call. The second addressed specific questions of morality in the health care debate and was printed in The American Thinker.

Then, at the end of October, I learned that I would have to leave GSU at the end of the year as a result of the university's accreditation process (too many non-Ph.D.s) and everything stopped - again. A full-court job hunt began. It was like having a third (or if you count parenthood, a fourth) job.

The year ended well, with a family (Truslow / Ferguson) Christmas trip to Jekyll Island, Georgia.

2010 will be filled with all sorts of exciting changes, fo' shizzle. I expect so many changes that I doubt I can keep everyone informed... unless I blog it. Watch for right-side updates this week.

So, here we are again.

And so it goes...

"I'm sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn't mean to do that. Please, continue. You were saying something about best intentions." - Jules Winnfield

I stopped blogging back in October with the very best of intentions: to free myself of the pressure to produce that had crept in during the previous year of writing online, and to resume with a more creative direction.

Then, as should have been expected, life intervened.

So here we are, at the dawn of a new year: a good time to refocus and move forward. The creative theme will remain unarticulated for now, though I've provided a bit of a hint in the cartoon above. I'm interested to see if readers can figure it out on their own, or if it's simply too tangential and obscure for healthy folk. We'll see where this goes.

I wish you a happy new year.

Only connect...

February 7, 2009:  Updates are coming.  Seriously.

Blog Gone Bad

Today marks the end of Sed Digressio's first year. It was on October 15, 2007 that I moved some randomly assembled photos, paintings and poems first posted on truslow.org to this platform, and it's been an interesting experiment: to create a virtual home for myself, a place I could visit when I was traveling that would help me feel grounded.

I've decided to take a break, and resume blogging in November with a new direction. I'm not entirely sure what that is, yet, but I'm working on it.

You might be interested to know that over the last year, 2,300 visitors came to this blog 4,200 times, viewing 10,300 pages. The most popular content (in order) has been: Michael Sowa, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Wassily Kandinski, the photos, Hope, Edward Hopper and Edvard Munch. The interest in Michael Sowa has been especially keen: Almost 10% of all Sed Digressio traffic originates in Germany.

It's time to do something different. I hope you'll come back and see what transpires in November.

The Chief Digressor

P.S. During the hiatus, I'll still be updating Merrie Frances pictures on http://www.truslow.org/.

No kidding.

Almost a year ago, I posted what I still consider to be one of the oddest duets in musical history.  Take a moment to welcome a new addition to that list:  Norah Jones and Keith Richards, the rock and roll icon now known primarily for snorting the ashes of his father.

Over the line, Smokey!

Good comedy depends on an awareness of the audience's limits, the discipline to stay within them, and the wisdom to know when they can be trampled. It strikes me as a delicate social undertaking: the performer risks his relationship with the audience as he navigates between what little will succeed and the mass of what will fail.

On any given day, this blog endeavors to rise slightly above the gutter, usually to reproduce art, philosophy and music that transcends normal life. But today - perhaps inspired by my ignorance of the audience and my fundamental suspicion of lines - I push the boundaries by offering three of my favorite, all-time limit-testers.

These are not for children, and while there is nothing offensive about the video content, you wouldn't want your co-workers to hear the sound. Consider yourself warned.

The opening scene of the film "Chasing Amy".

From the television show, "Kids in the Hall".

Finally, I direct you to this link of Steve Martin performing a classic portion of his stand-up routine.

Sizzlin'

This morning, I ran my second 10k of the year (and, to be honest, ever): The Buckhead Sizzler - so named because the course is relatively flat and runners expect good finishing times. My Peachtree Road Race time on July 4th was shamefully near the 75 minute mark, and today my goal was 55 minutes.

I'm happy to report that I finished the Sizzler in 54:33 (an average of about 8:47 per mile). If the same rules apply to next year's Peachtree as this year's, today's results should qualify me for a "time group placement", meaning that I won't start in the back of the pack. My next goal is to run a 10k in 50 minutes, so maybe I'll speed up even more between now and next July.

I have posted my personal GPS track here. My GPS seems to think that I went a shade further than the official length of 6.21 miles, and so does GoogleMaps, and so does my car's odometer. At least the race organizers and I agree on my finishing time, which is all that matters. I can only tell you that it felt like a million miles, and it took everything out of me. Readers who are marathon runners continue to have my utmost respect (though increasingly I question your motives and sanity).

My Oscar Moment: I'd like to thank my parents (immortalized here in this must-see portrait), who came out and cheered me on, and my wife, who not only was the most enthusiastic fan on the course - baby in tow - but has made all my athletic growth possible over the last five months.

Jet Man

As regular readers are aware, I am not entirely a fan of man's technological quest to overcome nature. However, I would be willing to reconsider this philosophical view if somebody would give me a jet pack.  I have no statistics on this fact, but I suppose that every boy has had this dream.

In this morning's news, I see that Yves Rossy (here is the "Jet Man" website) will attempt to fly across the English Channel later today.

Yar!

In celebration of today - International Talk Like A Pirate Day - I offer this bit of wisdom: a family that plunders together, stays together.

Moose

As the weather turns cooler, I always think of Autumn in Montana, and the critters found there. Photo taken by Steve Wall.

Lingering beauty.

With only three previous posts this month, one might suppose that I have been on the road. Sadly untrue. August ushered in a surprising change in my employment situation (I'm now both here and here), requiring yet another fundamental modification in my life "plan" (ha).  Still, while one can take the boy out of traveling, one can't take traveling out of the boy: so on this final day of August, I write (as I did here, and here) to share some ideas regarding beauty from The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton.  

de Botton writes that "a dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me'".  To explain this more fully, he focuses on the philosophy of John Ruskin.

Ruskin believed that "there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. The most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so."

de Botton explains, "If drawing had value even when practiced by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see - that is, to notice rather than merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it."

Can you imagine lingering in a place for 20 minutes to draw a scene that has captivated your attention, rather than pausing for 5 seconds behind your camera and moving on? What about coming home from a trip with a book of sketches, rather than a disk of images? Which one is more inclined to help us truly possess that which we experience when we travel?  Ruskin too "began to note the devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practitioners.  Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it."

I gave up photography for over a decade, returning to it half-heartedly only three years ago, for similar reasons.  I found that with my camera in hand, I became preoccupied with the question, "does this make a good picture?" rather than, "how does this place, this scene, this moment, impact me?"  Even though I am happy to have our new camera, I still fear that photography is giving me a false sense of permanence, an excuse for not living in the present moment: "With this photo, I can always come back and re-live this again some day." Not true.

Besides, can you imagine trying to draw the Bavarian chaos above? Okay, bad example...

Words Matter ("Liberal")

Back on April 6, I digressed briefly on my frustration with the emptiness of contemporary political language, specifically: words that have substantive meaning have come to mean so little. In that post, I went on to provide a robust definition of "conservative." As I try to make sense of all I've seen and read this week, I feel compelled to contrast "conservative" with a definition of "liberal" (with a nod toward Lincoln's answer to his own question, "What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?").

As I did with "conservative", I take this definition from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot.

In general "a liberal" (or "a radical", as they often have been and often are still known) believes in

1. "The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity toward violence and sin.
   
2. Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes.
   
3. Political leveling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.
   
4. Economic leveling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.
   

The radical, when all is said and done, is a neoterist, in love with change."

Portrait above is "Jean-Jacques Rousseau" (1753), by Maurice-Quentin La Tour.

Inside.

Inside of each of us is a thing of beauty - perhaps beauty itself - a glowing thing of life that wants to get out.

It is trapped under mud and rock and hurt and fear and sin and memory and habit and it cries and yells to get out - except on the empty days when it doesn't.

Inside some of us is a bridge, or a painting, or a poem.

Inside me is my life,
my own beauty,
my song to God,
my connection,
my peace.

Why couldn't I have a bridge?

- anonymous

Photo of Mathematical Bridge (Cambridge) by this artist.

And on, and on...

I have been tracking the progress of Roz Savage, who I learned about on Will's blog. Observing her cross the Pacific has given me a lot to ponder about my own limitations, capacity for dedication, and drive for achievement. I have long considered one of my life's goals to be a bike trip across America, but with my life transitioning as it has over the last two years, I'm thinking that for now I should settle for goals I can accomplish closer to home. Still, keeping my long-term, but relatively minor bike-ride objective in mind as I watch Roz is good perspective.

Over the last week, I've done some reading on people like this, folks who do extraordinary physical feats because they want to, or feel that they simply must. For example, this article in Wired has started me thinking about my own running primarily as a mental challenge (a belief my brother has long held). Let me also share this link to Karl Meltzer's website, where we can watch Karl try to run the entire length of the Appalachian Trail faster than the current record holder (yes, people keep up with this sort of thing). He started this morning and seems to be moving along. Because.

Release the hounds!!!

Gareth Armstrong, as Shylock

“The mere receipt of an order backed by force seems, if anything, to give rise to the duty of resisting, rather than obeying.” – H. A. Prichard

Canine "leash laws" are a matter of controversy, even among friends. It turns out that they also can be the foundation of bad relationships between neighbors. Living on my street is a man - we'll call him Shylock - who persistently and obnoxiously believes in the letter of the law, and thus objects to the practice of off-leash dog walking, no matter the total isolation, late hour, harmlessness of hypothetical dog, nor other circumstance. Conversely, others on my block believe merely in the spirit of such laws: dog owners must be in complete control of their dogs, and are absolutely responsible for their behavior. After all, if a dog bites, do you care if she's on a leash? I have heard that Shylock's zealous support for the letter of the law has resulted in calls to "the police", though not surprisingly, I have yet to see a Fulton County Animal Control officer on my street... ever.

I make my living by promoting ethical behavior in organizations, a neighborhood being but one example. Not taking into account Shylock's arrogant and bullying style, the ongoing conflict troubles me deeply from a moral point of view: Is a violation of the leash law also a moral wrong? Do we have moral obligations to obey every law, no matter how silly we think one might be?

Laws are statements of minimal social norms. Societies create laws to describe behavior that is either required or unacceptable. Given this absolute quality, one hopes that all laws - which are coercive by nature - are grounded in some sense of shared morality, but the inescapable truth is that The Law is morally fallible, and specific laws are corrected or even repealed using this very rationale. The reality is that some laws unjustly restrict a citizen's liberties or infringe on personal rights and obligations without a compelling moral argument for doing so. These immoral laws should be resisted on principle. Do "leash laws" fall into this category?

I believe that some do. Many leash laws in Georgia do not go so far as to require an actual leash, specifying only that the dog must respond to voice commands and be "at heal" in the presence of others. This makes sense to me, because those laws articulate a reasonable expectation of responsibility and control, but do not dictate the type of control. However, the overly sensitive Fulton County statue to which this neighborhood is subject requires a six foot fixed length lead. Why? Why six (why not seven)? Why fixed? Who can say? From a practical perspective, these leash laws are motivated by the bad behavior of dogs that have not been trained properly by their owners. All the dogs I know at the center of this conflict are small, harmless, non-agressive, and well-trained. If the specific dog is small, harmless, non-aggressive, and well-trained, then what, exactly, is the law trying to achieve in this case?

The Fulton County leash law (and Shylock) is attempting to force dog owners to perform in an arbitrary way that may or may not have any relevance in a given situation, and as such is an inappropriate government infringement upon individual personal liberty. The law actually prevents the dog owner from taking personal (voluntary) responsibility for his own (or his dog's) actions. Much like helmet laws, leash laws start from the presumption that citizens are dumb, insensitive to context, and in need of parenting. So, Fulton County would like to be my daddy, but can I say no?

I encourage all responsible dog owners who have harmless, non-agressive, well-trained dogs that respond immediately to voice commands to resist overly aggressive leash laws by practicing civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is a violation of the law without any loss of respect for law and the other basic political institutions generally acknowledged to be fair and just. Speaking most generally, civil disobedience is that act which knowingly violates a law, committed in deference to a higher order (like natural rights), or in support of a cause greater than the actor himself (like liberty) and the law itself. Under John Rawls’ strict interpretation, civil disobedience is a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.

Civil disobedience is a form of political statement, an invitation for others to join in a just cause. Civil disobedience is deliberate lawlessness, and can be classified as either direct (by breaking the very law that is objectionable) or indirect (by breaking laws which are not objectionable, but which call attention to the wrong). Lastly, acts of civil disobedience must be conscientious, which generally means that one acts out of an honest and sincere conviction that what one is doing is the uniquely correct thing to do, no matter what the personal cost. This stipulation rules out the motives of private or personal gain, or malevolent emotion as primary factors. The actor’s willingness to suffer inconvenience, expense, threats, real danger and punishment helps to demonstrate that his purpose is to protest a greater social injustice or wrong and not to achieve some immediate gain for himself.

So, if you are a responsible dog owner, act on principle and release the hounds!!

The false self.

In a previous post, I quoted a well-known passage in Henri J. M. Nouwen's book, The Way of the Heart, a work I had not read. I'm reading it now, and finding it very thoughtful. Here is a more lengthy excerpt:

"The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions.  'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated, or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a business man, or a minister, what maters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends.

These very compulsions are at the basis of the two main enemies of the spiritual life: anger and greed. They are the inner side of a secular life, the sour fruits of our worldly dependencies. What else is anger than the impulsive response to the experience of being deprived? When my sense of self depends on what others say of me, anger is a quite natural reaction to a critical world. And when my sense of self depends on what I can acquire, greed flares up when my desires are frustrated. Thus greed and anger are brother and sister of a false self fabricated by the social compulsions of an unredeemed world."

The image above is "Versace Veiled Dress, El Mirage" (1990), by Herb Ritts (the artist who took perhaps my favorite image of all time).

Flight of fancy.

I have fallen for the first season of the HBO production, "Flight of the Conchords". It is one of the rare television programs that is consistently funny, creative and yet somehow oddly relevant. The show is part absurdist / deadpan comedy, part musical theater. It's also a shade risque and a little edgy.

Above is the probably-not-safe-for-work song, "A kiss is not a contract". Here are other random (neither boss nor child-friendly) video clips of their music: a) Business time, b) Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros, c) If you're into it, d) She's so hot, e) Mutha Uckers, and, f) Sugarlumps. Each makes me laugh out loud.