"Why'd You Leave the Trail?"

I’d never hiked Big Elk Creek before, but despite the weight on my back and the mud on parts of the trail, I was enjoying myself.

I’m not in the best of shape, but I’m willing. I take up the rear, making sure any Scouts we’re hiking with don’t get left behind. Ahead of me is Sam, a Scout who’d never backpacked before in his life. He had a good pack, but the hike was long, mostly uphill, and he was getting a little tired. In front of him is Paul, my assistant Scoutmaster. He’s hiked this trail before. We’re in good hands.

To the left is the creek, bubbling over the rocks and through the tiny meadows at the bottom of the valley. To the right, mountains, some covered thickly with pine and aspen, others with tumbles of rock. There are mountains beyond the creek too, and as we hike the mountains get steeper, taller, and closer together. And we have a well-worn trail to follow. And Paul is leading us. No worries.

We cross yet another rock fall, stumbling here and there over a shifting slab. We walk across more rocks. And even more rocks. But we’re talking one to the other, marveling at the scenery.

That’s funny. The creek is smaller. And a bit further to the left than before. And – wait a minute – we’re climbing the side of the mountain, now scrambling over the rocks, and the creek is retreating further to our left.

“I think we lost the trail,” Paul says as we three sit on convenient boulders. “We shouldn’t be this high. We should be right next to the creek. But that’s okay. We’ll just work our way down.”

Just work our way down.

Over more rocks, now here and there punctuated with fallen trees, stripped of their needles but their bare branches still poking up like fence posts. We have to go through them, lest we turn around and lose distance, further falling behind our companions who stayed on the trail and are further ahead of us now. We wrestle our shoulders through the trees and over the branches, our backpacks get caught. We’re thirsty. Sam is out of water, so I share a bit of mine. And no matter how far we walk, we can’t seem to get down the mountain. We can still see the creek – we can even see the trail, brown amidst the meadow grasses, near the stream’s banks. But fight as we might, we can’t lose much of the altitude we’ve gained.

Gradually, inch by inch, log by log, rock by rock, we fight our way down to the trail. Our feet finally plod in the brown dust where we see our companions’ footprints. We walk through a glad,e take a turn and we see them, tents set up, a fire going. A few of them are climbing rocks. Others are splashing in the creek.

“What took you so long?” Benson, a scout, asks.

“We got a little lost,” I said.

“There’s only one trail,” he said. “How’d you get lost?”

“We kinda found a new trail,” Paul said.

“You should have stuck with the real trail,” he said.

Yes, we should have. But we were so distracted by the scenery and our conversation, we didn’t notice we’d left the trail until the landscape became a lot more difficult to traverse.

On the way home, we followed the trail. Paul, Sam and I stuck together again. This time we didn’t stray. “How’d we miss this?” Paul asked. Because it was clear our wanderings up the rock fall and the mountainside added at least an hour to our journey, as the hike from our campsite to the big rock fall where we recognized we’d lost the trail wasn’t all that long.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We weren’t paying attention, that’s clear,” Paul added, laughing. “Or at least I wasn’t. And you two just followed me.”

Ah, the lesson.

You knew there’d be a lesson.

God and life present us with two great influences: Our companions, and our free agency. Used well, whether in tandem or opposition, those two great influences will determine how difficult our journey through life will be.

Paul is a good companion. Experienced with the backcountry, with first aid, even with backcountry rescue. But I let my trust in him override my agency. Because, when we started climbing the rocks, I saw to my left, just lower down the slope, where the trail again emerged from the rocks. I could have used my agency to call out, “Paul, the trail’s down here!” and though he was further ahead, he would have descended, got back on the trail, and we would have joined our companions for a leisurely evening. Instead, I ignored my own senses and followed that companion up the difficult path, taking the trusting but hapless Sam with me.

Had I listened to myself, had I believed what I saw with my own eyes, a simple correction would have had us back on course. But I waited until that course correction was much more difficult and time consuming.

I surrendered my agency and three of us paid the price.

Were there times, I wonder, when one of the sons of Mosiah saw the correct path, but instead of calling to his companions to set them on the right way just went along with his friends, up that difficult road that led to an angel descending from heaven and sending Alma the Younger into a stupor in which he was wracked with torment. “Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation” he says in Mosiah Chapter 27, verse 28, “repenting high unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God.”

“My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity,” he continues in verse 29. “I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.”

What pain Mosiah’s sons and Alma the Younger – sons of the king, son of the prophet – could have avoided had one of them, somewhere early in their journey, noticed they were off the path if even only a little bit, and said, “Gentlemen, the path we want is over there.”

A quick correction based on what I could see with my own eyes would have prevented a lot of weariness as we backpacked Big Elk Creek. I chose, however, to surrender my agency – and three of us suffered the consequences. May we all choose our companions wisely, and love them enough to offer correction, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Reading the Old Testament

As a family, we just finished reading the Old Testament. And I’ve got to confess, reading the OT really reminded me of good ol’ Frank Costanza.

It wasn’t all like that. And most of the grievances aired therein are probably justified. But as I enjoy the privilege of turning to other scripture for comfort as well as chastisement, the constant barrage of grievances wore a bit thin.

Reading the Old Testament has strengthened my testimony of scripture, particularly of the Book of Mormon, where we get a slightly different shade of chastisement, much more often mixed with compassion and mercy. An institute teacher long ago said he believed the theme of the Book of Mormon was God showing us his “tender mercies,” and for what it’s worth, I think he’s right.

I’m proud of our familial accomplishment for spiritual as well as secular reasons. Spiritually, as Christians, I think it’s important that we have our children read the scriptures. Not reading them, well, it sounds a bit funny. We had some great conversations, particularly about the chastisement, the anger, and often the violence shown in the Old Testament. We tried to navigate and separate the spiritual from the secular.

On the secular side, I’m proud our kids read the book, particularly as we read it aloud. I hear many other children their same age read the scriptures aloud – or anything aloud for that matter – and they struggle a lot more with the archaic language than our kids do. We still may not agree on how to pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” but we can at least approach the name with gusto, having read it aloud so many times.

Also, I got to show this video to my kids when we discussed Moses and the Ten Commandments. What could be better than that?

We’ve often speculated that one of the “missing” commandments was “Thou Shalt Invent Paper Really Quickly So This Does Not Happen Again.”

We have now read, as a family, all four of the standard works of our church. That’s a good feeling.

Farewell, Mr. Sallis

“Mind how you go, Gladys. Best of luck from all us pigeons.”

-- Norman Clegg, bidding farewell to the pigeon he released after the funeral of Compo Simmonite

 

Peter Sallis may be Norman Clegg. He may be Wallace of the Wrong Trousers.

 

But to me, Peter Sallis will always be a connection to my father.

 

I have to admit it was Compo Dad likes most, with his scruffy clothes and insatiable admiration for Nora Batty, aside from her wrinkled stockings.

 

But as Dad sat and watched and laughed at Compo’s shenanigans during his weekly viewing of Last of the Summer Wine on PBS, it was often Cleggy I noticed.

Now Clegg, like Dad, is gone.

 

Clegg, the quiet, often mousy man, caught in the middle of Compo and Foggy – Last of the Summer Wine will always be Clegg, Compo, and Foggy – is the man I noticed most. He so wanted life to be quiet, to be left to him to putter away his remaining years. He never had much fun in life, or so it seems – he claimed his light of passion went out when he was all of twenty-three). He’s much like me, I think (except my light’s still going, fortunately enough). Happy to go along with Compo and Foggy, but certainly happy when the adventure was over and he could have a pint or a cuppa.

 

He knew he was a pigeon, and quietly relished it.

 

Yes, he was part of a trio that never really grew up. But he was more often than not the adult in the room, even if he was impish.

 

Kinda like Dad. Dad never really grew up. Even in his later years, he wanted goats in the back yard. He loved driving his 1948 Ford truck, or his 1985 Nissan ZX, or the ’47 Willys Jeep we had – in which I learned to drive, even if Dad was the one shifting the gears.

 

Dad was the kind of quiet guy who quietly knew everyone.

 

I hear a lot of Dad in Norman Clegg:

 

Vicar: How’re you keeping?
Clegg: Me bowel’s playing up a bit. God moves in mysterious ways.

 

Clegg: It used to be a tradition here if you were hungry you could knock on any door and without a moment’s hesitation they’d slam it, straight in your face.

Compo: Well, that’s that got to do with owt?

Clegg: Huh, just shows they had character. Now we’re into an age of compassion. The world’s full of folk hating folk for hating folk.

 

Pearl: How long have you been interested in balloons?

Clegg: Oh, it’s just a passing fancy.

Pearl: Well, I hope it passes a bit quicker than some of Howard’s.

Clegg: Basically, it’s just to keep me occupied until my skateboard comes.

Only One Meme

So this happened today:

So I have to ask myself (instead of “This is not my beautiful stapler, this is not my beautiful chair!” what, exactly, is a meme, and how is a meme different than “just images with text.”

I went a-searching.

Which led me first to Richard Dawkins. I know. Eerie.

Per Wikipedia: a meme is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture,” quoting Dawkins. Wikipedia adds “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.”

More on memes here. Pretty much the same thing, though this site helpfully provides a lot of examples, and a more straightforward definition: the concept of memes “is either really deep, or really, really obvious,” with most of them sporting an element of humor.

(I, being an uncool person, have no idea if the sites I’m getting the information from are accepted by the meme purists.)

The Urban Dictionary emphasized the viral quality of an image, a “virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable.” That makes me wonder how impressionable ThePsychoipath is. This definition may help explain why the jet fuel image is a meme while the others aren’t, until you hear arguments that the other images on this particular list are also viral – within their respective cultures. Does a meme have to cross cultures or leave its culture to become a meme? The world may never know.

Question: Does this commercial come packed with memes? We’ve got the Yes Man – a meme from a different medium – a Peter Lorre imitation, and probably other memeified items I don’t even recognized because they’re just that far outside my cultural knowledge.

Since I’m not inside the head of “ThePsychopath” I cannot directly discern the origins of his/her pedantry, but I’m going to make an assumption that said pedantry stems from the “cultural ideas” and the “within a culture” portions of the meme definitions.

In other words, since the jet fuel “meme” carries cultural weight to those in the culture of 9/11 skepticism/denialism or research, this unit is the only one that qualifies as a meme in ThePsychopath’s” assessment of the other images on the list.

However, if I were to put on my English Major Hat, arguments can be made in favor of all of the other images – whether they be true memes or just images with text – being memes in their own right.

No. 2, for example, carries cultural ideas within the culture of Furries, right?

And I’ve certainly seen enough re-use of medieval art with modern captions to let me assume there’s a culture out there fascinated with looking at this art with modern eyes.

And tell me, ThePsychopath, that nos. 8 and 13 don’t scream of cultural ideas blossoming within the culture of Star Wars fans . . . even slightly creepy ones. (I don’t know enough about the faces the suns are pulling in No. 17 to address whether this image appeals to the Star Wars culture, another culture, or represents some kind of crossover – but certainly it, too, bears cultural ideas within that given culture, whatever it is.)

So I think the question here – what is a meme, and what counts as one – will have to be at best left open, at worst left open to interpretation. If you know ThePsychopath, however, have him/her drop me a line. I’d love to discuss this further.

Web Curation Ain’t Easy

Once in a while, I get a whim to visit one of my old blogs.

In case you’re blind and can’t read what’s in the column to the left under the “My Other Blogs” rubric, here you go:

http://kidsfridgeart.blogspot.com/

http://treasuryoflaughter.blogspot.com/

http://cokesburypartyblog.blogspot.com/

Yes, I have to tell myself. There were times, heady times mind you, when I actually had the time to do this kind of thing. And by “this kind of thing” I mean blog about a party book from the 1930s and a treasury of humor that was ancient when I found it used at the thrift store.

Sometimes I cringe at what I read. But most of the time, it’s not the writing – it’s the extras. Mainly the YouTube videos that are now vast blanks that link up to the big ol’ empty. A reminder that the Internet, no matter how ubiquitous it is, is not permanent.

The Internet is the largest collection of temporary information the world has ever assembled. And unless you personally download or copy or hoard whatever it is you link to, there’s a good chance it’ll be gone after a few years, leaving sad little broken error messages when your descendants get online to see what the hell gramps was up to back in the day.

This post, for example, doesn’t feel particularly old – it was published April 18, 2010. But those of you familiar with the Internet know where I’m going. Because as far as the Internet goes, this is ancient history. I don’t even remember what this clip was, nor do I remember what the YouTube Flash API was, nor even if I knew what it was then. I just know the video is dead, lost to the ethers.

Scarily enough, I have links to stuff I did on the Internet – and it’s still there simply because it was so basic – back in the late 1990s. I may as well brag that I was there when the Lascaux cave drawings were made, if you know what I mean.

But even when it is all of your crap, curating the web ain’t easy.

I like, once in a while, to peruse the junk James Lileks collects and displays. But so many of his sites are loops now, promising much but delivering only a little. For example: This link promises a swim through 40 pages of old radio logos. But just count how many you get through before you’re back where you started and with nowhere else to go.

And Lileks is even more ancient to the Internet than I am. And maybe he’s written an introduction meant to stand the test of time while the rest of the stuff goes up in 2017. That’s fine. But it should, perhaps, be explained, so grumps like me don’t go on grumping about it.

So I have two options:

1. Go through each entry and update the videos or links as best I can, this time preserving them in amber so they don’t get lost again.
2. Leaving things as they are because, hey, it’s only a few crappy blogs.

To the Idaho State Board of Education

In case you're wondering what this is about.

Greetings Board Members,

As a resident of Bonneville County – specifically the city of Ammon – I’d like to be considered as a member of the Board of Trustees for the College of Eastern Idaho.

First, a little about me. I’m a life-long resident of Bonneville County. I graduated from Bonneville High School in 1990 and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Idaho in 1997. I worked for various local newspapers until 2005, when I accepted a job as a technical writer at the Idaho National Laboratory. In 2009, I earned a master’s degree in English with an emphasis on technical writing from Utah State University. I have worked at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex for 11 years. For the past three years, I’ve also worked part-time as an online adjunct faculty member at Brigham Young University-Idaho, teaching English.

My wife and I have three children, attending Hillcrest High School and Sandcreek Middle School. We also volunteer extensively with the Grand Teton Council of the Boy Scouts of America, me as an assistant round table commissioner and scoutmaster, my wife as round table commissioner and as the council’s food coordinator.

I’m also a property tax payer in Bonneville County, and am interested in seeing citizens get a good return on their investment in education.

I’ve seen firsthand what it’s like trying to get an education in Eastern Idaho, as a student, as a teacher, and as a parent.

I was lucky enough to find a technical writing master’s program conducted entirely online by Utah State when I was looking to further my education. Being able to take classes online meant I could still work full-time to provide for my family – we’re a single-income household – while getting the education I wanted. Online classes made that possible, but isn’t yet an option for everyone in this area, no matter what technical advances have been made.

As an online instructor at BYU-Idaho, I see a lot of non-traditional students such as myself going back to school to earn degrees that for whatever reason they were not able to earn earlier in their lifetime. Again, online classes and inexpensive tuition are making their dreams come true, and I believe the College of Eastern Idaho could do the same for many who are not of the LDS faith or who want a live classroom experience closer to home.

As a parent, I’ve tried to navigate the many programs offered to high school students to earn college credit. While the programs are beneficial, they’re also a bit Byzantine. Of ten our questions on the program are met with “I don’t knows” or shrugs from those in the schools who should be able to help us sift through the bureaucracy. A local college would present high schooloers – and those freshly graduated – with the opportunity to earn college credit from folks whose business it is to help them do exactly that at a low cost.

Thank you for your time and consideration.