How Many Socks? All The Socks

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise Sock in Phoenix Arizona

If you think sock modeling is easy, you should be in my head while I struggle with what kind of background I should use or sorting out if I should include both feet or just one foot? Maybe just show a bit of sock using a close up to best demonstrate the immaculate and regular stitches that Caroline uses for my socks so there’s not a seam or even slightly bumpy area that could cause a hotspot, which in turn would cause blisters thus diminishing the pleasure I gather from wearing handknitted foot-gloves a.k.a. socks. I can proudly say of my yarntastic wife that the days of her having to fit my socks at various stages of the knitting process seem long gone as she now goes to work meticulously comparing her progress to that of another favorite sock of mine to ensure they are precisely the same.

The sad thing about being gifted such exquisite things that get used every day is that some of them wear out, typically under the front pad of my foot where they are rendered as momentary keepsakes that I’ve grown too fond of to just toss them away. Maybe you think they can be repaired? Not a chance as my sensitive feet would feel where the patch was knitted in and a fraction of the incredible pleasure would be lost so I wear them a few more times as the nostalgia builds that a particular pair is about to be retired.

Fortunately, Caroline’s busy hands and a backlog of maybe dozens of skeins of yarn await conversion into man socks, i.e. this man’s socks. Just how many socks John? All the socks.

[John bought this yarn in Stricklaedchen in Limburg, Germany, earlier this year. You can read all about his grand day out here. – Caroline]

Homeless, Bodyless, Signless

JWise Thoughts

Homeless Sign

The discarded sign of the homeless person who needed nothing else and so they left behind the only symbol that they were here and had existed for a moment. Of course, it could also be a situation where the fentanyl was disabling their motor skills, and in the process of lightening their load, the sign simply fell to the wayside. Or maybe their Uber driver arrived to whisk him/her/they/them to a new life not defined by begging, which also included the help to deliver them from the nothingness that afflicted them?

When we fall in love with celebrities, we are projecting ourselves into their role, be it sports professionals, musicians, actors, porn stars, or influencers. This obvious attraction due to our own desire to be seen, known, wealthy, and influential is an easy equation to relate to, but what is not so apparent is why we often have such visceral disdain for the homeless.

We can blame the trash and feces they leave behind, or the crime we perceive will arrive with them, or maybe we believe that they are capable of work but are too lazy to find the wherewithal to apply themselves. Not taking into account the specifics of what has led any one person or group of people to homelessness, I want to address where we, the not-homeless, are in this equation.

Witnessing success, we celebrate our hope that we might arrive there, too. The celebrity is the surrogate of our own ascent of the ladder to fame. The homeless person is the nagging ugly reminder that we, too, could end up in their tattered shoes. We need to hide these creatures away from our own neighborhoods as they represent a decay that plagues others but should not influence us or our children.

But this is the all too obvious and most apparent cosmetic delineation between us and them. I’d posit that there’s very little difference between the majority and this rarified margin of extreme success and failure. How many people are as empty as those they praise or despise? In this age of mass deterritorialization where ubiquitous media has insidiously stripped away the unique territory of the individual, many people are bereft of personality traits developed by their own explorations as opposed to those images and ideas of personhood pumped into them from the same hose that was feeding the rest of the herd.

The manifestations of the homeless are only the most obvious refuse of a society that no longer allows for a population of individuals sharing a common space but requires those of homogenous form and character to congregate in mass pilgrimages to consumption. When you fail to fit that mold, you have but a few options in American life: fame, destitution, entrepreneurial struggle, isolation on the margin, or expatriation.

Nobody is part of a community anymore unless you believe that belonging to nothingness is somehow a valid place and identity. Under most circumstances, the vacuous shell of political idolatry worn on a hat, the brand emblazoned on your computer, phone, watch, or your shared loyalty to some sports franchise are but junk food fed to you by the machine. The decades-long programmatic building of a population, according to a select group of California thinkers, has gutted individuality while they have been refining their tools to strip all semblance of meaningful character through social media and entertainment until we are left with the banalest citizenry of nothingness, reducing us to something less than the most useless of insects.

Consider that all modern industrial conveniences, including their environment and intellectual harm, arose from an age where everyone had different backgrounds with a multitude of environmental and intellectual influences from across all geographies and disciplines. From that dis-order, the age of machines brought humanity a bevy of tools and devices that would compliment the comforts of many people on earth, but as convenience pandered to our laziest inclinations, it simultaneously removed the need for us humans to venture out to seek what our minds were hungry for – new stuff. Novelty was brought directly into our homes, and now we can gather new information no matter where we are. Smartphones and the internet allowed the pipeline of intellectual junk food to find the vein into our very souls.

Stripped of individuality and embued with the ever-present need for societal/group acceptance, we work hard to stay current with the newest gossip regarding celebrities, boss fights in video games, conspiracy theories, dramas between reality TV personalities, or some other narratives designed by the powers that be in order to find the excited enthusiasm of others who are lost in this non-sensical trivia that does nothing to help define a person. In another age, it was the sharing of anticipated weather conditions or who was getting married in the community that held the glue of being present in one’s surroundings. Today, we must be atop the news of Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian dating, the verdict regarding a kid killing demonstrators with an AR-15-style weapon, the release date of the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, or the sexual orientation of a Marvel Universe character.

So, should we all be intellectuals? Not in the least, but one cannot be an authentic individual if they are merely a clone, fractionally different from those around them. Just as there are not a billion people on earth having conversations regarding deconstructionist ideas from Jacques Derrida, there shouldn’t be a billion people discussing the merits of a Korean TV show that snuffs out the life of those trying to escape crushing debt as is found in Squid Game.

According to Google, there are more than 135,00,000 million books written that they know of. Obviously, not all of them are in English, but even if only 1% of those were in English, it would relate to a boatload of books read by Americans with a million different stories to share. But, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), only about half of American adults can read a book at an 8th-grade level. Well, that means there are only about 130 million Americans who can reasonably be expected to be able to even read a book. Compare those who could read a book with how Squid Game reached 142 million households and that the average household measures in at about 2.5 members each, which could imply that 355 million people have watched this program. Possibly the best-selling science book of all time, A Brief History of Time, written by Stephen Hawking, sold over 10 million copies, but it took 33 years to reach that number, and you can easily see that we want our content to be easy to consume and about as mindless as can be.

Why does any of this matter? We are facing a crisis of civility, pandemic, and environmental chaos, but the societal cohesion and collective intelligence required to wrestle with what amounts to purely intellectual problems is sorely missing and likely cannot be remedied with any quick fixes as there’s no amount of money that can repair stupid. From the vapid heights of celebrity to the person shitting on our streets, we are living in the midst of a mediocrity brought about by our own idiotic doing, in large part due to our desire to be entertained to death. The strata of dumb we must climb out of to begin understanding our dilemma is likely insurmountable, so just throw away your signs, enjoy the rest of your nothingness, and realize you were never really at home within yourself. You, me, all of us, are already homeless, but at least we’ll be celebrated as the most uncaring, superficial species ever to wreck the good fortune we once had.

That Was Then This Is Not

JWise Moments

Driftwood Coffee in Phoenix

Go places or don’t, read or write, dream or die. The routine, sad to admit, is only mixed up when I opt for a different coffee shop, I’m in a different book, or I demand I do something I’ve been neglecting, such as writing a blog entry after a long break. Feeling like it’s been a long time is not the same as really having been a long time. I checked and saw that I posted a list of things just six days ago, but that was a list, not a blog, in the sense that I want to interpret it. Though this is easy enough to contradict even before I even make my point, as the blog post should share something personal to me, is that really possible? You see, the last post about our diet is certainly something personal, and among some subset of people who live in Phoenix, Arizona, and enjoy food diversity, it is maybe nothing out of the ordinary and then, on the other hand, the majority of Americans would consider us culinary freaks.

This last statement is based on empirical evidence gathered while observing my immediate vicinity when, in one tiny slice of time, I find myself in a situation in which I am in the minority, ethnically speaking. Of course, this is easily proven by taking myself to a “major” supermarket where I find myself in a sea of similarity.

Coffee shops are like seas of similarity, too. As I focus my photos on my isolated work setup, there are the obligatory tattooed baristas, man-bun-wearing big bearded hipsters, a homeless person, two people talking shit about the friend they each talk shit about the other with, the random man in a suit (I’m in Arizona where people don’t wear suits), four to seven computers open for work each with their white illuminated Apple logo, and someone like me (an arrogant wanna-be writer looking in disdain upon these empty souls trying to find a viable way to spend part of the day that would otherwise be empty and devoid of meaning).

Black Rock Coffee in Phoenix

And then the next day, I do it all over again, except now I’m further along in the book I’m reading, or maybe I’m editing the embarrassing piece of writing while I’m leery of sharing the same old thing I’ve lamented about 45 other times or maybe it’s 55. I am not sure because I don’t track my worn-out threads because admitting with precision how repetitive I might be could derail my efforts to fill a space so few eyeballs will ever discover.

Is it ironic that this act of attempting to blog is a disruption to reading The Age of Disruption? Well, maybe not if you consider that I’m also reading Radical Animism by Jemma Deer (it’s on-screen), and if I consider that my blog post is a kind of object in nature, then these words take on an animism; so maybe taking a page from her book to tell some story or other is in line with adding to the realm of our earth.

Should you, at this point in this pointless entry, be wondering what this has to do with the title of That Was Then This Is Not? Well, the beginning of this post about whatever I was writing then is not where I’m at now, so maybe you follow that what I wanted to say was I don’t really have anything at all to say.

Food Diversity

JWise Photo of the Day

Grocery shopping in Phoenix, Arizona

Shopping for food here in Arizona is both a luxury and a chore. In order for me to collect the essentials for Caroline and my diet, I have more than a dozen locations I visit to find my desired ingredients. At the moment, I’m fasting which should be an indicator to my lizard brain to NOT visit anywhere that serves or sells food of any kind, but it’s inevitable that towards the end of food deprivation I go a bit nuts. The photo above represents a few things from nearly half-a-dozen shops I’ve patronized in the past 24 hours.

On the left is a loaf of German coarse rye bread from Heidelberg Bakery, the yellow container of Goldsaft sugarbeet syrup is from the same place. The ginger required me to visit three Asian stores as one had ginger that was drying out, the other had this rhizome that had experienced freezing which made it slimy, and then finally at H-Mart Korean grocery, I was able to nab the 11 pounds I require for a Burmese salad ingredient I need to replenish. While at H-Mart I also picked up silky tofu we use in the Korean dish Sundubu Jigae I’ve mentioned here before. The pomegranate and cashews are from Costco. There’s a bag of Khatta Meetha and a jar of Gujarati Methia Mango Pickle, both of Indian origins that Caroline and I bought at Turmeric Indian Cash & Carry. Below the pickle is a Chinese Szechuan Pepper Pickle we purchased at Lee Lee’s Asian Grocery where the Mae Ploy Panang Curry Paste was also found. The black currant compote from Poland was also found at Lee Lee’s but typically we’ll fetch that kind of stuff from somewhere like our nearby Balkan Bakery or another Eastern European grocer. Finally, the Rhubarb soda is definitely not from America and had to be ordered through Amazon like so many other things including our favorite Italian vinegar, bulk Himalayan salt, peppercorns from the four corners of the earth, two-year aged soy sauce, and various bulk and ethnic items.

But we’re not done. Not only did I buy other stuff at all those stores while I was out shopping, part of our repertoire includes stops at Whole Foods, a Carniceria around the corner, Food City (another Mexican-centric store), Mekong (Vietnamese-centric), and Nelson’s Fish Market, along with some of the traditional American grocery stores. Other online sources include Mangalitsa Estates for their pork (just look up Mangalitsa pig to see them), a place called Walleye Direct where we buy frozen walleye and perch, two different California growers from whom we buy bulk almonds and walnuts, Honey Pacifica because only eucalyptus honey will do, and Alma Gourmet when you’ve just got to have authentic Guanciale (pork jowl) from Italy.

This list is hardly definitive but is merely an example of some of the sources we are able to utilize. It is also meant to be a reminder to myself how fortunate Caroline and I are to be willing to take advantage of the food diversity we have access to. Certainly, a fair amount of time has to be invested in learning about the ingredients we have grown fond of or have an interest in while the time to collect these foodstuffs must be taken into account, but the luxury of sampling the breadth of earth’s many cultural offerings is never lost on us. While certain items can be pricey such as the two-year-old soy sauce, vinegar, Mangalitsa, and various German foods, the secret of it all is that Asian, Indian, and Hispanic stores have incredible bargains due to the way their commodities are bought, i.e., bulk as nobody only buys a pound of rice, an ounce of turmeric, or canned beans when dry beans in a 20-pound bag are so cheap.

There’s another reason for this post and that is the sense of disappointment we encounter when shopping in the various ethnic grocery’s around the Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe area. You see, we often notice that we are but a couple of a small handful of white customers. Many of the other white customers are with spouses of various ethnicities so that’s their way in. The black people we see shopping in these shops are often Guyanese, Jamaican, or African and are well accustomed to buying whole fish, goat, various organ meats, and bulk spices that help flavor the world’s foods beyond salt and pepper. The problem is that the dominant cultures are not present which means they are stuck in their tiny patterns of eating what they know and not supporting these stores that offer us culinary luxuries from around the world that we can try in our own homes.

Friends

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise, Steve Alt, and Caroline Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

You might remember that a few weeks ago, we picked up Scottish friend William “Willy” Mather from the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport here in Arizona and brought him to Flagstaff to start his rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon? Well, today we are back at the airport, but this time we are picking up Steve “Sarge” Alt who finished a rafting trip down the same river just a few days after Willy finished his. Sadly, schedules didn’t allow for Willy to join friends Sarge and Frank “First Light” Kozyn on their trip and so while they were probably less than 50 miles apart at any given point during the past few weeks, their paths didn’t cross. But our paths did cross and even if we only have the opportunity to visit for a few hours, it’s well worth the time spent with these guys.

Sarge was on a seven-hour stopover which allowed us to pick up sandwiches and head over to Papago Park where we could pull a shaded picnic table and sit back to hear a few stories about this most recent river trip and a bit about the Selway trip up in Idaho that we had to bail out of this summer. While a small part of me wants to lament that Caroline nor I were on any white water river trips this year, I’d have to admit that I have nothing in the world to complain about.

Serb Fest or Not

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise and Caroline Wise at Serb Fest 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona

I started writing this post before we left home for attending Serb Fest here in Phoenix, Arizona. While we’ve traveled both here in-country and abroad, this is our first festival in years (due to the pandemic) and hopefully not our last. We’ve discussed revisiting the Renaissance Festival this coming spring but this event just recently came to our attention when our friend Brinn told us about it.

I’m sharing this much before we even get there as I can’t even be certain we’ll attend, even after driving out to it. You see, we must get cash (a pain in the butt) then we must contend with parking, a potential other pain in the butt. Once we are on the grounds, I’ll be making a quick evaluation about how I see the attitudes of the other attendees and how many are smoking; if they are poor impressions, we’ll bounce. I’m well aware that these attitudes are not helpful in advancing the potential of our attendance, but when the real payoff is the time spent with Caroline as she reads to me on the way there and the way back home, I can’t help but have great expectations of where I’m willing to offer my time.

So, if I can overcome my anxieties, we’ll be enjoying some ćevapčići and maybe a few other Balkan favorites this afternoon. Along the way, I’ll grab a photo or two to accompany this post with content-appropriate imagery, or maybe just another photo of Caroline reading a book to me. Time to go pick her up.

Obviously, we made it onto the grounds of the Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Church and we were joined by the aforementioned Brinn, who took the photo. It’s great to attend these types of events, but at the same time, it often occurs that we feel like we are on an island as though everyone else attending can easily see we are not of Serbian heritage and thus shun us. Or maybe it’s because we don’t smoke and drink or speak Serbian, know how to dance, wear the right clothes, or have the wrong hair color? This is definitely not unique to this festival and has typically required us to make a serious effort to engage in talking with someone but that’s not always convenient when the other people attending are celebrating the day with close friends and family. As happened with our visit two years ago we managed to hang out about 90 minutes before bailing out, well at least some money was spent with the Serbian community that in part helps support their church and a way of life worth cherishing.