Living in other people's (unoccupied) homes

It’s a fascinating experience living in somebody else’s (unoccupied) home.  At first it feels a little invasive, as if you’re intruding into a stranger’s life, gawking from the sidelines, almost pretending to live it for them.  You judge them by the art on their walls, the books on their bookshelves, the food in their fridge (and the liquor in their cabinet!).

If surface judgments can be trusted, our AirBnB host on a recent trip to San Francisco is probably somebody with whom we have much in common.  A software engineer, with a small no-frills apartment in the Mission (read: moderately low-rent district), minimal “stuff,” no television, no telephone, small collection of books, substantial evidence of travel (or ambitions for it) to Africa, Europe, Asia.  We’d seen most of the movies in her small DVD collection.  A postcard on the back of her door offering this adage (in part):  “Simplify.  Embrace the adventure.”

But then the novelty passes, of course–the longer you stay, the more it starts to feel like your home, and the mental images that you’ve constructed of your host, inferred from subconscious but studious analysis of his/her possessions, fade and lose their color and richness.  

I’d be lying, of course, if I claimed that these vignettes of other people’s lives are the main reason we utilize AirBnB.  Mostly, it’s because we can get a great apartment, with our own kitchen, in a vibrant neighborhood, for less than the cost of a (super-cheap) hotel room.  

But it’s also an irresistible thought exercise:  we want to go to San Francisco for X days–surely there are innumerable San Francisco citizens who will be out of town for those same X days...?  Why should their home sit idle, a waste of space and resources, while we rent a high-priced hotel room?  While their car sits idle, our car sits idle back home, and we all drive around in high-priced rental cars?

What could be more wasteful?  Only in a society intoxicated on consumer materialism would this be the norm.  Once you agree to step back from these social norms–customs that we’ve shaped and that have shaped us our whole lives–you can’t help but to start re-examining them.  

For example, I have a cordless drill.  It sits on a shelf in a garage that we use for storage space.  I use it once every month or two.  Why do I own this?  Why should this device, which would represent a revolutionary advance capable of transforming the lives of many who live in developing parts of the world, sit idle on my shelf, transforming nothing?  If we were able to locate, via satellite imagery, all the cordless drills sitting idle on garage shelves in a 50-mile radius around my own, how many would we see?  500?  5,000?  How much action would you guess each of those drills sees, on average (excluding those employed in the construction sector)?  Ten minutes per month?  Maybe less?

(And note that I’m not even mentioning the things that we NEVER use–rollerblades, pingpong table, racquetball gear–as we’ve already given these things away.)

Certainly, there’s undeniable convenience in having that cordless drill within a 30-second walk from the time and place I discover I need it.  But the drill is merely an example.  How much stuff do you own that sits idle for most of your lifespan, and almost all of its lifespan?  How much of it do you really need to access instantly?  How much of this real need is impossible to predict within a day or so?

For those of you who use your cordless drill regularly–I’m not talking to you.  If you avidly build things or fix things, for a living or just for fun–that’s different.  Some people in this world have to build things–I certainly won’t (because I don't have the skills).  And what’s more virtuous than fixing something that’s broken?

But how many cars (to pick another example), in North America, sit idle for most of the day?  Why are we okay with paying tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention operating costs) for a tool that we use an hour or two per day?  Hell, most families have two.  

To me, the instant gratification borne of excessive affluence and overabundance causes us to confuse effortless convenience for real need.

This is why we are excited to participate in the sharing economy, part of a movement toward “collaborative consumption.”  It’s based on the simple premise that we no longer need to “own” things to be happy–we just need to have access to things, if not on demand, then within a reasonable timeframe.  

We can use public transportation, or rent a car from ZipCar or GetAround, or we can get a ride from somebody on Lyft.  We can rent our music from Spotify, or ReverbNation.  We can circulate books through PaperBackSwap, get our movies through Swap a DVD or Netflix.  When we travel, we can find a place to stay on AirBnB, or Craigslist, or CouchSurfing.com.  Hopefully, soon, we’ll be able to borrow consumer goods (that damned cordless drill, for one) via Unstash.com.

The lingering question is this: why do we, in Western Civilization, insist on owning these things?  On having shelves full of books and DVDs, garages full of golf clubs and tennis rackets and power tools?  Why can’t we agree to house one cordless drill per 10 or 20 square miles, (with exceptions for professional builders, legitimate amateur tinkerers, etc.)...?  What are the obstacles here?  Do we not trust each other?  Will our needs go unmet when we don’t have access to the right stuff at the right time?  Will our economy crumble when people stop buying cordless drills at The Home Depot?  These questions aren’t necessarily rhetorical–I’m honestly curious to know what the real obstacles are, and I’m interested in playing my part in surmounting them.  

There’s something invigorating about participating in collaborative consumption, in this new sharing economy.  I'd encourage you to explore it, as well. In the words of Unstash.com’s manifesto:  Own less.  Live more.

Albus Dumbledore, RIP

Dumbledore’s dead.  It’s something I can’t pretend to have fully processed, even though I read the sixth Harry Potter book a number of years ago. Consider me mired somewhere in one of the stages of grief.  Bargaining, maybe.  Or Depressed.  

Some people are stuck in the very first stage of grief:  Denial.  Hilariously, the internet is rife with web sites, forum discussions, and social media chatter postulating that Dumbledore’s death was (and is) an elaborate hoax by Joanne Rowling.  

Rowling has since confirmed Dumbledore’s death, but only indirectly, and she seems to have remained coy on the subject, perhaps finding the question more valuable unanswered.

However, I’ll leave the dithering to conspiracy theorists and chat room groupies—I firmly and fully believe that Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in a stunning development that led to what is easily the most climactic literary experience of the new millennium (and perhaps the last century).  

That her Harry Potter series is a remarkable work of literary fiction goes without saying in some circles.  And though the literary elite invariably turn up their noses at anything that achieves popular success, in this case they’re wrong—Rowling is a master storyteller.  Although her prose is remarkably clumsy (full of long, winding sentences, incoherent expository dialog, and adverb after painful adverb), her character development is fairly unparalleled in the world of modern fiction.  Readers of all ages have no choice but to make deep emotional investments in many of the characters, to fully immerse in the 7-book-long narrative arc.  It’s no secret that strong characters drive strong narratives, and an astonishing number of Harry Potter characters are deeply drawn and wonderfully complex (a feat admittedly made more manageable when you have the scope of 4000+ pages, 20+ hours on screen, and 15 years to leave your impression).  

It’s easy to abandon the thought exercise, and dismiss this brilliance as genius—it almost seems futile, like pondering why Michael Jordan so dominated the basketball court in the 1980s, or Andy Warhol the pop art scene of the 1960s.  Why even bother?  

In my view, however, the more fascinating (yet mind-numbing) question is this: how could she kill Dumbledore?  How could she do that to him?  To us?    

As a wannabe writer of fiction, I’m amazed by the audacity, the chutzpah, the cojones she demonstrated in taking him away from us—after making us love him, need him, rely on him for so many pages, over so many years.  Fiction writers (good ones) will tell you that this is the wrong way to look at it—that she didn’t decide to kill Dumbledore.  The story finally revealed itself to her, bit by bit, and she merely transcribed what she saw—she told us the truth.   

I believe this.  But still.  How easy would it be to talk yourself out of committing this dreadful crime?  How terrifying was it to contemplate alienating your loyal readers, who put bread on your table, and whose love for your work sent sales into record-breaking territory?  The financial ramifications aside, how hard must it be to push your story blindly over the precipice, after putting your heart and soul into 3300 pages over the course of more than a decade?  All we (her loyal readers) had to do was keep reading—Rowling had to keep on keeping on, had to keep toiling away, in spite of the grief, guilt, apprehension, and self-doubt that surely dogged her. And she had to do it with a smile—while a resentful and restive reader base stood waiting, alarmed, in a rebellious mood.

Years ago, we started reading the series aloud to my now-eleven-year-old son Riley.  As we recently approached the end of Book Six (during which Rowling commits the crime), my apprehension mounting, I could sense the emotional connection he had made with Dumbledore’s character, and I wondered what effect his passing would have on Riley.  

We carefully arranged to arrive at the dreadful tower scene at an opportune moment, with sufficient time to pause, ingest, and talk through our feelings.  The tears I expected made a brief appearance, and I could see that Riley, at 11, was as devastated as I was at 30. Because Dumbledore is far more than a father figure—he’s a beacon of hope during dark times.  He’s the adult in the room, the rest of us mere children, looking to him to tell us what to do while he’s busy slaying the beast that has darkened our doorstep.  

Dumbledore’s death cut us off at the knees, left us all reeling.  How could we possibly battle the Dark Lord without him?  

How could she kill him?

It’s easier to know why she killed him (or at least to presume we can know), though not nearly as satisfying.  Surely opinions and interpretations vary, but I think most readers would agree that Rowling knows, wisely, that death lurks patiently, constantly, unrelentingly among us—it’s perhaps the only constant in life as we know it (taxes aside).  To paint a picture conspicuously absent of this reality would be dishonest—and honesty is, ironically, the fiction writer’s stock in trade.  

Dumbledore was far from the only casualty in Harry’s world.  We still all grieve for Sirius, Lupin, Tonks, and Fred Weasley (and, after some reflection, Severus Snape), not to mention several other minor characters.  We even grieve for Harry’s parents, James and Lily, though we never knew them.  The deaths of people all around Harry mark various stages of his burdensome journey to adulthood—a journey we agreed to take with him, and during which even the most cold-hearted of readers can’t help but shed a mental tear or two.  

Good people die, sometimes at the hands of bad people.  It’s easy to lose sight of this reality in the glossed-over, sugar-coated cocoons of modern comfort that we’ve built for ourselves here in the Western world.  

The chronicling of good triumphing over evil is far more honest (and believable) when it doesn’t varnish away the costs borne along the way.   For unflinchingly telling us the truth, we all owe JK Rowling a debt of gratitude.

Our complicity in the rise and fall of Lance

There's nothing happy about Lance Armstrong's recent fall from grace, save the grim rare victory of fair, honest competition that has been long overdue in the professional sport of cycling. The world had little to cheer as it watched a beloved sports celebrity icon, who had inarguably leveraged his astronomic successes into valuable, charitable givebacks to the community at large, finally admit to cheating on a large scale.

Reactions were mixed, of course. Some still refuse to believe it. Some think that it doesn't matter. Some stuck with the good, old-fashioned “everybody does it” defense, familiar to any parent of a teenager in the past century or so. Some were glad to see Armstrong come clean but were skeptical and critical of his claims of having raced drug-free in his final two Tours de France, in 2009 and 2010. Some feel redemption. Others don't consider it a real apology (and, from my view, this last perspective seems to have the most merit).

To me, the most bemusing aspect of the overall reaction to Armstrong's downfall is the degree of surprise and instant condemnation. As if we were all astonished and appalled to discover that a man we'd once worshipped was a liar and a cheat, turning overnight into a pariah. As if the emperor had finally admitted to running around naked for a decade, and we all now suddenly recognize his latent moral inferiority. The unspoken, inherent premise of such a perspective is this: Lance Armstrong cheated and lied to gain fame and fortune. He has nobody to blame but himself. How could he stoop so low, how could he let us down like this?

To consider this bemusing, to question this banal and lazy perspective, is not to suggest that Armstrong isn't a heel, or to defend any of his choices. How to even begin defending an admitted liar and a cheat? A man who, for years, erected a phony facade of indignation, arrogance, and provocation? A man who was openly derisive and vindictive toward his whistle-blowing detractors? Litigious, even? Armstrong took it to the next level—there's little doubt that the man has some fundamental moral shortcomings, and it's not unfair to now question his sincerity.

But in the aftermath, two questions loom.

First, is it really fair to suggest that he is significantly less virtuous than us, his condemning public? Examining this question requires a personal appraisal outside the scope of any single blog entry or newspaper editorial. But consider this: how would you behave under the spotlight of professional sports, under enormous pressure to perform and produce results, in the high-stakes big-money world of organized athletics? If you'd been groomed for sports since high school and through the college “General Studies” cake-walk, and then thrust into the limelight with scant skills beyond catching a football or swinging a bat? If fame and vast fortunes were at stake? If you discovered that widespread adoration and worldwide celebrity were finally within reach? If you looked around to see the vast majority of your “colleagues” laughingly skating circles around the various drug- and fair-competition-related rules and regulations? Would you never be tempted to “level the playing field?”

Second, aside from how harshly you might choose to judge him, what was it that brought him so low, after flying so high? Although fairly breathtaking in scope, Lance's lies are neither unique nor the last of their kind. But it's fascinating to consider how somebody can, in plain sight, skate so far outside the bounds of what we consider acceptable behavior.

A full reckoning is impossible without first stepping back and assessing the modern-day adulation of organized athletics (a term I use loosely to comprise both the various professional leagues and the big-time NCAA racket). Fame and fortune generally rot everything they touch, and the world of sport is not immune—it may, in fact, be the most egregious example.

Where, in modern society, is there more opportunity for fame and fortune than in organized sports? Our basketball teams are embraced with joyously open arms. Our football teams are the main attraction in our homecoming parades. The World-Series-winning baseball team is invited to the White House for exercises in mutual admiration. Taxpayers subsidize sports arenas. Fans fawn over the athletes, treating them like celebrities, inflating their egos while subsidizing their lavish lifestyles through ticket sales, TV revenue, and merchandising.

Is it any wonder, then, that the athletes will do anything and everything to gain an advantage? What part of the feedback loop ever discourages cheating? The occasional flame-out of those unlucky enough to get caught? The risk of losing your millions in sponsorships? Nonsense—when you haven't made it yet, you have neither fame nor fortune to lose.

Armstrong, for example, stands to lose several million dollars in sponsorships. Why? Because Nike (among other corporate animals) now recognizes him as a liability, and no longer an asset. While your sympathy for Armstrong's financial plight probably stacks about as high as mine does, what does this tell us about our complicity in his rise and fall?

We created the high-stakes world of professional sports. We reward athletic performance more prominently than academic performance. We tolerate taxpayer investments in football arenas and baseball parks. We worship the successful athletes. We opt for Sports Illustrated (the People magazine of the sports world) instead of picking up the newspaper. We buy more Nike shoes and apparel when endorsed by people like Lance Armstrong, world-famous bicyclist. We buy more tickets, and tune in, when athletes like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire threaten to shred long-standing records. We donate more money to charities like the Livestrong Foundation when endorsed by world-famous bicyclists. We point to successful athletes as paragons of virtue, as role models worth emulating.

And then we're shocked (shocked!) when we learn that some of these athletes are found cheating. Shock is soon followed by cardboard outrage, as we willfully continue to ignore our own subtle but consistent underwriting of their behavior.

Take it from one of the most revered coaches in the history of professional football (who popularized the words of a more obscure NCAA coach): Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing. This is the commonplace ethos of modern-day professional sports. We only seem to care about how they play the game when the audacity of the cheating makes it impossible to avoid seeing it. When Armstrong finally admitted to cheating and lying, we weren't angry at him for betraying us—we were angry at him for temporarily pulling us out of our stupor.

We'd much rather continue to watch the emperor prance around naked, thank you very much. So until we're willing to come to terms with our complicity, the Lance Armstrong scandal will simply fade into the distance in our rear view mirrors, another inductee into the growing American sports hall of shame. Next scandal, please.

On Zero Dark Thirty

As many critics seem to agree, Zero Dark Thirty is a highly competent film, with a strong story line, tight dramatic execution, and conceivably enough factual accuracy to stand up to modest scrutiny. Most would agree, too, I think, that the most striking aspect of Kathryn Bigelow's depiction of the pursuit and demise of Osama bin Laden is its framing of a controversy that has raged since the early years of the Bush administration.

That torture is an effective and essential component of intelligence gathering, one that yields accurate, unambiguous, and actionable intel, isn't merely posited in the film—it's casually and nonchalantly asserted as fact, even common knowledge. With nary a question as to authenticity, nary a nod to the long-brewing controversy.

Some may quibble with the film's authenticity, and rightly so, but few seem to be suggesting that it falls significantly outside the Hollywood norm. Sure, some are suggesting that the characters are based on composites of multiple players (a common technique), that the script offered a simplistic and cartoonish portrayal of the mundane realities of intelligence gathering on a large scale, or that some of the mundane details (like what kind of bus was blown up in London) were clumsily fumbled.

But the most serious quibbles, of course, stem from the film's depiction of torture as a fundamental (and effective) interrogation technique. Inevitably, the CIA director has issued a statement disavowing the film. "The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding bin Laden,” he says. “That impression is false.”

It's possible that the film's torture scenes, comprising much of the first third of the film's 157 minutes, weren't originally intended to be so defining, to frame its whole narrative, to serve as the backstory foundation for all the action and story that later unfolded. It's nonetheless clear that, for most movie-goers, the torture question remained front and center long after these opening scenes played out.

So what to make of this ugly business of torture? And what is Zero Dark Thirty's contribution to a long-running national discussion?

The theme that stayed with me long after leaving the theater was that of the general perversion of public policy (and its implementation) by the very emotional investment that its participants are required to make in it. And without emotional investment, there is no torture discussion.

The story unfolds to depict Maya (played by Jessica Chastain, in an Oscar nominated performance), a plucky, dedicated CIA agent leading the charge on the hunt for bin Laden, piecing together enough intel to set her sights on a man named Abu Ahmed, whom she's convinced is a high-level Al Qaeda operative with direct ties to bin Laden. Maya's dogged pursuit, her persistence in the face of the skepticism she meets at every turn, and her emotional investment in connecting the dots and finding Abu Ahmed (and then bin Laden) form the narrative's dramatic backbone. Even the most unsympathetic viewer is left no choice but to root for the spunky young woman—of course because we're also rooting against the bastard behind the 9/11 attacks, but also because, well, she's cute and cuddly and has oh-so-much heart.

As she faces more and more criticism and skepticism from those around her, Maya digs in more deeply, learning to play the man's game, dropping F-bombs when she needs a credibility boost, pounding the table when she's not taken seriously. As the years go by, as the setbacks and dead ends accumulate, as more people die at the hands of the very terrorists she's pursuing, the stakes continue rising, and she repeatedly doubles down on the Abu Ahmed lead, following it to a high-security compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where she convinces herself from circumstantial evidence that bin Laden is hiding out.

By the time she's inevitably trotted out in front of the various White House bigwigs to sell her theory, she no longer simply believes that she's on the right track—she now really, really wants her lead to be legit and accurate. Not necessarily because she wants or needs to be right, to prove wrong all those doubting alpha white males jockeying and posturing around her. And not necessarily because her career is on the line (though it clearly is). Both the script and the actress are too powerful to give such simplistic motivations any currency—there's never any doubt that her fundamental desire is to rid the world of its most prolific terrorist.

It's Maya's emotional investment in the theory that she's pieced together over nearly a decade that compels her to pursue it at all costs, that convinces her of its (moral as well as factual) rightness. This deep emotional investment is never so clearly depicted as when she's asked to sell it to the CIA Director, National Security Advisor, and other high-level patriarchal devil's advocates. As the other experts in the room paint an uncertain picture, pegging the likelihood of bin Laden actually being at the compound in the neighborhood of 40% – 60%, Maya's audacious but unsolicited estimation is a solid, black-and-white, no-nonsense 100%. “OK, 95 because I know certainty freaks you guys out,” she back-pedals slightly, “but it's 100.”

Clearly, she wants the certainty to be 100% that bin Laden is in the house, she wants to put this exhausting chase to rest, she wants to ensure that the deaths of numerous colleagues were not in vain. Where the film loses its footing, however, is in the way that nobody around Maya calls her out on this emotional investment. As the CIA Director ironically points out, they're all smart people at these discussion tables. But although many of her colleagues express skepticism and doubt, none of them articulate what was painfully clear as day—that her emotional investment was clouding her professional judgment.

I can't help but wonder if the same sort of emotional investment convinced the architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion to overestimate their chances, or convinced Cold War intelligence analysts to badly overstate the general health of the Soviet Union in the late eighties, or convinced Bush's war cabinet that American forces would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. Groupthink, held together by the glue of emotional buy-in.

In the end, Maya turned out to be right. But being right does nothing to change the fact that, amidst all the complexity of reading the tea leaves, of connecting the dots, while under intense pressure to deliver results, people can get emotionally wrapped up in their conclusions. Emotional investment doesn't add credence to these conclusions, as Zero Dark Thirty implies—it compromises them.

It's this same kind of emotional investment that perverts the entire torture discussion.

The standard (and only) defense of “coercive interrogation” is an emotional appeal. If a terrorist were holding my family hostage, threatening to kill them, and if collecting intel from him or an associate were the only means of saving them, would I then be willing to assent to extraordinary rendition, torture, or any means possible? Of course—hand me a rifle, and I'll shoot the motherfucker's kneecaps off, myself.

But although it makes for great drama on screen, and forms the grist of many an anarchist vigilante's wet dream, an emotional, morally-compromised state isn't a foundation for sound public policy. Aside from the emotional context, there is no sound defense of torture as an interrogation technique.

Because this very emotional context gives the torture debate currency, though, it is in fact useful to examine the question of whether or not torture tactics are effective. Whether torture works. An extremely complicated, context-driven, nearly-unanswerable question.

Some (Leonard Pitts, for one) feel that the question itself shouldn't even be entertained. The general thinking here is that because we are a nation of morals, of human rights, of unassailable ethics—indeed, one that lectures much of the rest of the world on their own human rights records—we have no business engaging in torture of any kind. Period. It's barbaric, and beneath us.

I certainly don't disagree. But, to me, the question of torture's efficacy lies at the very heart of the discussion. The most common defense of torture centers around simplistic, highly theoretical constructs. Usually, something along the lines of a detainee knows everything about a bomb that's planted on a train in Paris, set to kill 100 people. Are you really willing to let 100 people die because you're more concerned about the detainee's human rights?

Although clearly an absurdly simplistic scenario, this type of contrived hypothetical has gained much traction among the chattering classes and the television talk shows.

But the moral underpinnings of “coercive interrogation” crumble when you insert them into the context of the real world. To follow this theoretical through to any useful conclusion, you have to be willing to accept so many assumptions as fact. That you have the right suspect. That the suspect knows the details of the bomb plot in question. That you'll be able to distinguish the right answer from all the deceptive ones that terrorists (and intelligence personnel) are trained to recite under pressure. And that you'll get the right answer at all.

There's very little moral ambiguity attached to this simplistic scenario because it's unencumbered by the uncertainty that taints everything we know about the real world. Intelligence is always murky, uncertain, ambiguous. Collecting it and acting on it requires field personnel to rely on gut and intuition. They never have all the information that they'd like to have—but we still expect and need them to act in our best interests. To sometimes make guesses, rely on intuition, and exercise their judgment.

The detainee in custody might be the person you think he is. Or he might be an unlucky innocent who happened to physically resemble a suspected terrorist who was vaguely described on some bureaucratic federal agency's terrorist watch list. He might be a high-level operative of an active terrorist cell, or he might be a low-level courier, or driver. He might have intimate knowledge of the next bomb plot, or he might know nothing about it. The intelligence is never clear and unanimous on questions like these—there is no such thing as a "slam dunk" in this game.  

And if it turns out, after coercive interrogation tactics have been exhausted, that the detainee doesn't have any useful intel? That we physically tortured a human being for nothing? Should we chalk that up to the cost of doing business, to the inevitable broken eggs in the pursuit of that omelet?

Because it's often implemented in the heat of the moment, public policy is best designed in cold blood, by those who have little invested in the intended outcomes, and with a bias toward civility and restraint.

Too bad that cold blood makes for boring cinema.

My wife and I are homeless

My wife and I are homeless.

I mean that literally. At present (January 2013), Anna and I have no permanent residence—not since May of last year. We've chosen to move through life without a house, apartment, or any other kind of dwelling that is dedicated to us. We're not, of course, living on the street—we hop from one short-term rental to another (thank you, AirBnB, Craigslist, and Google), occasionally renting a camp site and pitching a tent. Our last (and longest) stretch in a tent was eight days, leading up to Christmas, just a few weeks ago (living in Southern California, tenting in December is actually possible, though it can still be somewhat chilly).

As we share custody of my 11-year-old son with his mom, we're committed to remaining in the North San Diego County area, in general terms, though we do some traveling (San Francisco and Wallagrass, ME are two of our most favorite places on Earth). But, quite literally, we have no permanent physical address.

Is this prudent? Sustainable? Sane? Hell, I don't know. We don't know. Just experimenting with life, at this point.

It's not as crazy as it sounds, though. We actually have some dedicated real estate, having converted my son's mom's garage into an office, where we work most days, and where we store some of our belongings (much of it camping gear). My son's mom and her husband also generously offer us their guest bedroom, between short-term rental gigs—so we have an easy fall-back. We've only punted to an unplanned motel room once or twice in the last seven months.

My wife and I telecommute (can't really say that we work from “home”), doing IT support and web app development. This, of course, can be done from nearly anywhere, and I'd like to think that we do it effectively and efficiently (having telecommuted for nearly seven years now). We do this mostly from our office (with a big, fat, fiber internet pipe), but we also like to get out to the coffee shop from time to time.

I'm happy to say that my wife and I contribute significantly to my son's upbringing. Because our office is in their garage, and because he's home-schooled, we see him nearly every day. We participate in said home-schooling (Anna more so than me), and we play chess, ride bike, talk about the news and what's happening in the world, and read books together. He has a permanent home, where he can learn about life's responsibilities, like mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, taking out the trash, vacuuming the car, cleaning his room—making his contribution to the household. But he also spends some time (Fridays and weekends, usually) at our various short-term rentals, where we always have a bed (or an air mattress) for him. And where there are still dishes to wash, floors to sweep, laundry to fold, etc.

We've been forced, of course, to cut a lot of clutter out of our lives, to relinquish a good chunk of our material possessions. Books that we've stopped pretending that we're going to read. Movies on DVD that we'll never watch (or watch again). Superfluous dishware, cookware. Furniture, of course (save for some office furnishings). Sports equipment—the rollerblades that we never managed to use, the racquetball gear that had been gathering dust, the man-tools that had long sat idle. Clothing that permanently adorned the closet.

We don't own a television. We lease our one (very small) car. We own some movies, all on a portable hard drive—but we can only watch them on laptop screens. We try to buy most of our books on our iPhones, magazines on the iPad.

We can't shop at Costco or Sam's Club, or buy more than a week's worth of groceries at a time. We can't have a pantry full of canned and boxed “food.” We can't have a loaded wine rack, or a fridge full of beer and soda. We can't store a closet full of rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. We can't have a garage or an attic full of junk.

Most liberating is the fact that we don't have a household to laboriously maintain. We don't have to mow the lawn, keep up the landscaping, do the spring cleaning. Laundry can't pile up very high, because our wardrobes are fairly spare. Our house is almost always clean, because a) we've only lived there a few weeks, and b) we simply don't have enough stuff to create a lot of clutter. We wash the dishes after every meal—we have to, because we don't have enough dishes, and because our rentals are usually so small that there's no room for dirty-dish clutter (and no automatic dishwasher).

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not a man's man. I don't tinker in the garage. I don't ever open the hood of our car. I don't like to fix things. I'm not very savvy with power tools. I don't know how to convert that unused closet into an office, or how to build a deck.

This yields massive amounts of free time, right? Funny you should say that. It doesn't seem like we do have a lot of free time. I guess life fills in the cracks, no matter what choices you make, and despite your best intentions.

Still, we make an effort to focus on the things that matter. We read. We write. We talk. We exercise. We watch an occasional movie. We do crossword puzzles. We plan our next adventure. We tinker with photography, with jewelry-making, with crocheting. We meditate, contemplate, and pray.

I realize that we sound like hippies, or new-age fruitcakes. And I guess there's some truth to that—we've certainly come to feel that hyper-consumerism is a serious drag in much of the Western world. We agree with Tyler Durden, when he said, in Fight Club, that “advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”

But we don't pretend that we'll do this forever. It's fairly stressful, especially for Anna, who handles nearly all of the logistics of rental-hopping (and the meal planning, laundry requirements, etc.). We've also been trying to have more children, which would admittedly complicate our vagabond lifestyle. If/when we have kids, we'll likely cut back on the troubadour game, maybe do 12-month rentals, say. We agree that the needs of a child don't completely mesh with life on the go. But we do feel that making a child feel at home isn't about living within the same walls, under the same roof, on the same street, or in the same town for many years. It's about being consistently surrounded by the same faces, and having real, lasting engagement, with real relationships—more talk, less TV. These are the intangible ingredients that shape loving, responsible, well-rounded human beings, but that compete directly with paying the mortgage, and the cable bill, and the cell phone bill, and the health club membership.

Who knows what the future holds for our family? We don't pretend to know, and we try not to sacrifice today for what is always an uncertain tomorrow.

So for now, we're re-thinking life, one day at a time. I'll let you know how it all turns out.

Guns and the Chattering Classes

Because wading into the gun control debate in America seems to tacitly endorse its shrillest and most partisan participants, most of us don't. And that's a shame.

A recent status update funnelled through my Facebook news feed, for example, suggested that a friend of mine had “[b]een trying to dodge the Fbook/Gun control shit show, but...” and went on to depict a cute-and-funny gun-related bumper sticker.

Even calling it a “debate” is a stretch—sadly, “shit show” is, in fact, a fairer characterization of the “conversation” now taking place.

Another Facebook user recently commented, in response to a verbose but thoughtful post in support of gun rights, thusly: “um is this a history class or facebook? i need a frickin cocktail. phew.” Sorry, no room for substance here. (Love, love, love the response: “it depends on what you think facebook is used for. if you think it should be for short silly things about dogs and cats, then this is the wrong place for this [gun control] discussion.” Hear, hear.)

Sadly, our new media world, dominated by Facebook, Twitter, texting, and tagging, has coarsened political discourse in America in two significant ways.

Firstly, it affords little room for nuance, for substance, for the recognition that many thorny political issues are complex, multi-faceted dilemmas. How can you share a nuanced perspective in 140 characters on Twitter? How can you make a persuasive argument on a bumper sticker, or on a road-side billboard? You can't. You don't. Sure, you can hyperlink to your blog, or somebody else's, where you can pontificate across as many virtual pages as your heart desires, but how much of the mainstream does this really penetrate?

A bias against verbosity and substance permeates Facebook's every nook and cranny—from the way the app is designed, to the peer pressure that governs commenting etiquette. People don't want to talk about serious issues on Facebook, at least not in America—they want to share “silly things about dogs and cats.” Serious issues are uncomfortable, unless they're delivered in a way designed to discourage actual discourse. They are, in fact, what we're seeking to avoid when we run into the arms of our new media gadgets. Reading a newspaper is laborious. Grazing Facebook and Twitter is relaxing.

How many substantive, thoughtful arguments, for any contemporary political or social issue, have you recently read on Facebook, or Twitter? And then: how many snide, stereotyping, exaggerating comments have you read, from ranting partisans, sarcastically referencing “our tax dollars hard at work,” or pillorying “the gun nuts,” or snidely lamenting “so much for global warming.”

In the age of copy/paste, why bother composing any original content or argument at all? Simply click your mouse to share that mindless info-graphic lambasting Mitt Romney (or Barack Obama, or the villain of the day) that you found in your news feed. Share. Re-tweet. Even the very design of the devices we use most often to bat this banter around seems to demand brevity and encourage the trivial—how many times have you typed out War and Peace on one of those tiny keyboards?

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, these instant-gratification vehicles seem especially effective at facilitating echo-chamber dialog. Preaching to the choir. “Let me get this straight... [insert disingenuous comparison]... I think it's time to re-examine our nation's morals” is not an effort to persuade or convince—it's designed to rile those who already agree with you. If you hate Barack Obama (or Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Barney Frank, etc., etc.) and think (consciously or subconsciously) that I share this sentiment, why would you bother explaining to me your hatred? Your anti-[insert politician] rant on Facebook isn't intended to speak to the portion of your friend pool that disagrees with you, or that might yet have no opinion on the matter—you know they'll simply scroll through your rant and give it little thought (if they haven't already removed you from their news feed). It's designed to elicit the mindless “like times a million” and “couldn't agree more” and “yeah, what he said” and “EXACTLY” comments. These are the currency of the medium—the squirts of dopamine and ego-boost that keep us going as we trudge through the workday.

Liberals talk to liberals, and conservatives talk to conservatives, via bumper stickers, info-graphics, and mindless platitudes. And the rest of us post links to laughing baby videos, and humblebrags, and photos of our kids being cute.

So, here's my contribution:

I believe that the constitution's framers intended the right to bear arms literally and liberally, but not completely devoid of regulation. I believe that law-abiding citizens should be able to own many types of guns, but not military-grade assault weapons. Yes, this requires sacrificing a “freedom” that some may be reluctant to surrender, but remember that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. The state has a legitimate interest in limiting gun ownership, to a reasonable degree. Sure, rational beings can disagree on what constitutes a “reasonable degree,” but both ends of the spectrum on this question (all or none) are equally wrong, by definition.

It might be pithy (and magnanimous) to quote Benjamin Franklin and suggest that “those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither,” but this glibly ignores the fact that the entire social contract on which all modern democracies are designed fundamentally represents this exact trade-off—we reasonably trade away some freedoms accorded to us in our natural state, in return for a more orderly, secure, and rational society. As Hobbes put it, life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” A friend of mine (thanks, Mitch) recently suggested that this natural state “can still be found in the modern world, but it is more likely to be in West Africa.” Where I am sure they would welcome Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh with open arms.

On the other hand, I fully support concealed-carry laws, and think CCW permits should be granted more frequently. I believe (as asserted here, attributed here) that CCW permit holders commit crimes at lower rates than the general population. And I believe the data that show a complex relationship, but no direct correlation, between crime rates and increased gun ownership.

I think that “gun-free zones” are counterproductive, and that it's absurd to post “gun-free zone” signs on college campuses and other public buildings, foolishly offering criminals an invitation to do business. I believe the data that suggest that states (and nations) with more liberal gun laws (i.e., permitting gun ownership) see fewer “hot burglaries” (home invasions when the home is occupied at the time) than states and nations with very limited gun ownership rights. I have no sympathy for the simplistic assertion that eliminating guns altogether will make us all safer.

I believe that the mainstream media's perverse obsession with glamorous and gory crime obscures the fact that violent crime rates have been falling for years, and that mass shootings are no more common today than they have been in the past, in spite of the surge in gun ownership and CCW permits—a clear negative correlation.

But I don't believe that guns kill people. Guns being used irresponsibly and/or maliciously kill people. So we shouldn't ban or eliminate guns. We should regulate them, just as we regulate other things that, when used irresponsibly, can harm people. Like cars. And nuclear waste. And food. And drugs. And dangerous chemicals. And ATVs. And kitchen appliances. And commercial food preparation. And barbers and hairdressers.

I believe that, thanks to the power of the NRA and the complicity of politicians of all persuasions, the gun industry enjoys an unparalleled free pass when it comes to regulation. Why do we require seat belts in cars but not trigger locks (or other reasonable safeguards) on guns? Why does the gun industry stand out as virtually the only industry with blanket immunity from consumer litigation?

I also think it's silly to suggest that the answer to school shootings is to post armed guards in schools—that the answer to gun violence is to make gun laws more permissive. This reasoning only makes sense if a) you're the NRA and your objective is to promote gun sales and rile up your power base, or b) you're sufficiently afraid that bad legislation (excessively restricting the right to own a gun) will follow good legislation (reasonably restricting the right to own a gun). Which is the very same argument used by liberals to oppose reasonable restrictions on abortion.

However, I also believe that a blanket ban on guns of all kinds will be as effective as a ban on marijuana, or heroin, or alcohol. I agree with the sentiment that “if we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” But it should be difficult to acquire a gun permit, with suitable background checks, mental health histories, waiting periods, and other forms of light regulation. The absurdity of the gun-show loophole should be exposed as such, and eliminated.

Finally, I don't care if gun-related legislation is implemented at the state level, or the federal level. Any argument one way or the other is a disingenuous one, akin to the same specious argument made by racists in the civil rights era (remember “states' rights?”).

Altogether, these are my (varied and nuanced) opinions on the gun control debate, from which both partisan liberals and partisan conservatives can pluck something to mock and hate. But, because all of that won't fit on a bumper sticker, these words won't be read by many. Thank you for being one of the minority.