By now you’ve heard about “Abu Ghraib”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56661-2004Apr30.html. If you haven’t seen “the pictures”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/throwingstardna/513278.html, you should, even though they’re hard to stomach. There’s a big difference between reading about them in seeing them, and in this case, the horror and revulsion of seeing them is something everyone should experience in order to remember just how bad we, the good guys, can get.

It’s true that 99.9% of the men and women serving in Iraq would never even think of committing such acts. But in this occupation, after this war, with all the mistakes that led us into it and all the hatred already directed at us, the margin for error is _zero_, not .01%. If “this Guardian article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1206725,00.html is borne out, then a big part of the problem is that unaccountable private contractors were involved, actually _supervising_ the soldiers in question. We should wait for corroboration on that point, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it were true.

It’s also true that these soldiers are going to be punished severely, and that no one anywhere is making excuses for them or trying to downplay the significance of their actions. That makes the gap large between us and the true monsters of this world, but — well, as “Jim”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_04_25.html#005301 put it:

Are we “as bad as Hitler?” No. Are we “as bad as Saddam Hussein?” No. Not So Far. _That’s not good enough!_

We have a long way to go.

UPDATE: More information in “this entry”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000387.html.

(Hat tips to multiple sources; I first came across the picture link and the Guardian article at “Amygdala”:http://www.amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ and “MetaEd”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/.)

* Congrats to John & Belle on the birth of their new daughter, “Violet Mai”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/04/little_mai.html. It’s weird how I’m a total sucker for baby pictures now.
* Check out the new “art blog”:http://www.edheil.com/artwork/ of . . . a fine blogger and friend who prefers not to have explicit, web-linky lines drawn from his regular blog to his art blog. But if you head over there you should be able to figure it out who it is.
* Let me second Gary Farber’s “complaint”:http://www.amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004_04_25_amygdalagf_archive.html#108319587824877650 against group blogs. Not those blogs that are conceived as group efforts, but those that toss in guest writers to increase posting frequency, thereby losing the individual voice that drew you there in the first place. Like the man says:

And you growl to yourself, as you have so many times before, that what you value about blogs, what makes them worthwhile to you, why you spend so much time with them is that they are individual voices. You become friends, in your own mind, at least, with the voice, because it speaks uniquely, has its own view, speaks in its own manner, says what it wants to say in the way that only it would.

* This is a couple weeks old now, but Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s “Things I believe”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005007.html#005007 is very fine.
* There’s no doubt that “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/ is the best blog I’m reading right now. He doesn’t indulge in personal narrative all that often, but when he does, “it’s groovy”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/04/pink_fountains.html.
* Aaron Haspel tackles the whole “difference between poetry and prose”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000543.html question with his usual aplomb. He’s a little hard on free verse, but that’s OK by me. Anyone who presumes to study, teach, or write about poetry should be able to analyze scansion the way that he does with _To a Dead Journalist_; I wonder how many of them actually can. “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_04_25.html#005296 beat me to the punch with some comments, but he expressed them way better than I would have, so it’s just as well.
* Speaking of Jim: back in the old days (like, a year ago or so) he used to regularly post his poems on his blog. But it’s been a while since we’ve seen one. What gives, Jim? More poetry!

Catching up on old business: I owe reader Jeff Brower a response to his comments on my entry Slippery Symbols. Here’s Jeff:

The other thing that it makes me think about is the whole concept of symbol as shorthand for cultural power. The cross (or any other religious symbol, for that matter) is indeed a symbol of political power, but that’s not its primary reference. I’d be interesting in knowing what you think about the postmodern tendency to mix and borrow symbols, extra-tribally, if you will. Once again, that seems to be about cultural power . . .

First of all I hesitate to call it “postmodern.” Not because I can think of historical examples of it happening, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they were out there. More because “postmodern” is a slippery term that, when used while referring to the culture as a whole, as opposed to a specific segment (e.g. “postmodern literature”), is often so broad as to have limited usefulness. But we can easily discard the term in this case, because the tendency Jeff describes is certainly out there, and it also seems pretty self-evident that that sort of mixing and borrowing is way more prevalent now than in the past.

Speaking as someone with an ankh tattooed to his shoulder blade, I’m all for it. The down side, I suppose, would be that such a callous use of symbols potentially dilutes their significance even for the people who attach importance to them. On the up side, we get to bring symbols into circulation that might not otherwise be seen or considered, which in its own small way gives people the power to define themselves in ways not limited by their immediate cultural context. It is about cultural power, and it’s more power to the people: the ability to define yourself instead of being defined.

Jeff goes on:

. . . When an artist uses a religious symbol in a incongruous way, it seems that they are trying to acheive in the observer a kind of liminal stage, of being in-between all categories. Unfortunately, when that goes in hand with an offensive artistic use of the symbol, like immersing it in urine or morphing a fish symbol into a darwin-dog, that openness is lost.

First of all, the liminal stage Jeff’s talking about isn’t limited to artists or to religious symbols: I’d say it’s what goes on whenever there’s a bit of symbol-borrowing. What’s achieved isn’t always liminal in the sense of being perpetually in between categories, but it does very often involve escaping the categories that exist, and most times, as Jeff suggests, also creates openness. I think the two examples of “offensive artistic use” are different, though. The urine-soaked cross—though I’ll heartily defend the artist’s right to make it—does seem to lose openness. Whether or not you find it perverse, it’s certainly not robust, semantically speaking. The darwin-dog I don’t find so much offensive as silly. First of all, it would be a lot more elegant if you took the DARWIN letters out and let the feet speak for themselves. Then you’d have the basic implication, “evolution replaces Christianity,” with a nifty added layer, “Christianity is something you evolve out of, just like a fish crawling on land.” It would all be quite clever if it wasn’t predicated on the nitwit notion that Christianity and evolution are mutually exclusive. So here I guess we have a case of failed robustness, and a lack of openness based not on the symbol itself but the narrow-mindedness that inspires it.

For pictures of a darwin-dog, and to see how far down that road the symbols have gone, check out this site. In most of those cases the original reference to the Christian fish-symbol has been left behind, except insofar as one connects the dots from the original Darwin fish. I got a big kick out of the description of the Happy Shark Emblem:

If you’ve lost another emblem to the holy war, consider one of these sharks – just for the sturdy tape. Some people like these sharks because they illustrate the hostile nature of some popular American religions. Some members of those very religions like to display shark emblems as a symbol of their “muscular christianity.” Still others just like sharks . . .

It’ll symbolize whatever you want! It slices! It dices! The shark, like most of the stuff on that page, is an example of Jeff’s “postmodern” symbol jamboree—a vapid and harmless example. One of the reasons I’m generally for symbol proliferation and tinkering is that they create significance but don’t really take any away from the root symbols they draw from. A urine-soaked cross is certainly ugly, but even it doesn’t dilute the power of the cross as a symbol itself.

All of this takes on some concrete importance for me, since I will be getting another symbol brazened on my flesh in the near future. (Suanna and I have decided to get tattoos every five years on our anniversary, though this time it’s been delayed since she was pregnant during anniversary #10.) What to do? I’m thinking of Kali, riding a tiger bareback, holding a laser rifle. Too busy?

Via “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ I came across “The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged”:http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/05/04_200.html, a somewhat skeptical take on the importance of blogs to the political process this election cycle. No doubt others will take issue with the author’s condescending view toward blogs generally; my pet peeve is a bit more specific. All the way through, George Packer speaks of “blogs” and “the blogosphere” when in fact he is only talking about _political_ blogs. Now, it’s likely that those are the only blogs Packer knows or cares about, but it’s still falling into the common fallacy of generalizing content in a new or little-understood medium.

Just as the Packer piece assumes that all blogs engage in political commentary, I’ve read similar articles in the past which assume that all blogs are just a bunch of links to wacky stuff on the web, or that all blogs are just personal diaries. Those three categories, taken together, do account for a lot of blog content, but what people have to start getting into their heads is that blogging is a _medium_. It can be about anything.

What I never seem to see is anyone talking about a blog as a platform for cultural and occasional political commentary, personal narrative when inherently interesting and/or appropriate to a larger point, and additional material focusing on the idiosyncratic interests and/or expertise of the author. That describes a huge number of blogs, and most of my favorites, but it’s harder to generalize about so it doesn’t get talked about. Phooey.

Moving on to my next pet peeve, here’s something else from the article:

Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication.

Say it with me now: blogs are a medium. They can be written any damn way the author wants to write them. In fact, what Packer’s describing here is pretty much _bad_ blog writing, which I’m sure I’ve been guilty of from time to time but isn’t characteristic of the best blogs at all. It’s true that the medium may _tend_ to encourage a certain type of writing, just as email tends to encourage shorter, punchier texts than snailmail letters do. But the tendencies don’t constrain the possibilities, and as time goes on we’ll be seeing even more diversity of both content and style in them than we do now.

Halfway through The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe’s mind-bending fantasy/sci-fi tetraology, I knew I wouldn’t have a lot to say about it when I was done. Not due to a lack of things worth talking about, but simply to avoid embarrassment—it’s one of those works so dense, allusive, and trippy that you can’t really say you’ve read it until you’ve read it twice. And, having read it in fits and starts over a period of several months, I can barely say I’ve read it once. Indeed, if I was smart I would just shut up now, and save my comments for after I get a chance, someday, to read it over again.

But what fun is that? So here we go. For those who haven’t read it: The Book of the New Sun is the story of Severian, a member of the torturers’ guild in a far, far future society. So far, in fact, that the sun is old and dying and the civilization that currently exists on top of the ruins of the dozens before it is rather medieval in technology and sophistication, though those in power (the Autarch and his court) have access to the high-tech goodies of the past. That description, though, doesn’t convey just how far-future weird things can get, though. In the capital city of Nessus, there’s a sort of botanical garden where the different rooms apparently exist as separate dimensions and/or times. In the second novel Severian meets the Green Man, a guy who’s traveled back from a time when humans have synthesized plant matter onto their skin so that they’re literally fed by the sun. The Autarch’s elite troops include animal-human hybrids and flying warriors with angelic wings. In one particularly bizarre chapter, Severian encounters in the wilderness the ruler of Earth from a previous age, who has survived by grafting his head onto the body of a new host, alongside the existing head. Plus, the first time Severian meets him he’s a shriveled two-headed corpse who somehow gets re-infused with life—I forget how. Probably the Claw. Don’t get me started about the Claw.

You may be wondering how all of these details hold together in a cohesive story, and the answer is, they only sort-of do. We know from the outset that the narrative tracks Severian’s life from growing up in the guild to his improbable ascent to the rule of the land as Autarch. That path is not so much a natural progression as as picaresque series of encounters, usually disconnected from the one before (unlike a picaresque novel, though, there’s real and deep development of Severian’s character). I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn from a Wolfe expert that many of these encounters are metaphors or even allegories of assorted philosophies and political theories that Severian must consider on the way to the top.

The Book of the New Sun is Severian’s first-person narration of his ascent to the throne, told at some later date. Actually, that’s not true—as the notes at the end of each book indicate, it purports to be Wolfe’s translation of Severian’s as-yet-unwritten autobiography, a “study of the post-historic world.” Severian possesses an eidetic memory, a fact he is constantly reminding the reader of in his narration. But there are inconsistencies in his tale—far more than I noticed in a single reading, I’m sure—so there’s an indication that he may be an unreliable narrator. Toss that into the mix with a plot involving time travel and you can see why one reading barely scratches the surface. (Indeed, in this future world, travel through space, travel through time, and travel across alternate universes appear to be pretty much the same thing. Einstein would be pleased as punch.)

The translation conceit adds another odd level to the experience. Rather than invent new words to describe the myriad oddities of this world, Wolfe mines the O.E.D. for obscure and defunct words that suggest what he wants. At the same time, though, since Severian’s narration is treated as a post-historic document, Wolfe does the reader no favors when it comes to exposition: concepts and creatures are introduced offhandedly on every page and often aren’t fully described or understood until much later. Just one example: the first time you read about someone riding on a destrier, you probably imagine a horse, whether from context or because you’re enough of a word geek to know what it means. Only several chapters later will Severian mention a destrier’s claws, which forces you to revise your mental picture. After having your chain yanked a few times like this, you find yourself distrusting your mental images and holding off (as much as one can) until Severian gives you a bit more information. This approach is paradoxically immersive and anti-immersive at the same time: the lush vocabulary and historical stance draw you in, but the constantly shifting landscape of detail keeps you at a distance. I found this experience alternately delightful and annoying; whatever else, it’s definitely unique.

I can see why Wolfe is so highly regarded among the conossieurs of the genre. Which genre, you ask? In a technical sense, undoubtedly science fiction, though like Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels, the tetraology straddles the genres and confounds the usual definitions that distinguish them. If I hesitate to include it on the list of Great Works, it’s because The Book of the New Sun is as much game as story: something not just to be read and experienced, but also puzzled out. It’s the work of an extraordinary genius, and an excellent prose stylist—a rarer trait than it should be in these genres—but sift out all the mind games and esoterica, and the story that’s left is good, but just good. And as regular readers should know by now, in Polytropian Aesthetics, story trumps style, philosophical sophistication, and certainly cleverness. Now if we could just come up with a decent definition of “story,” I’d know what that means . . .

Chad Engbers “almost met Frederick Buechner”:http://www.locustwind.com/archives/000022.html; he writes about in a way that reminds me that the world would be a better place if Chad had time to blog more often. I went through a big Buechner phase right around the same time as he did, and, like him, still rate _Godric_, _The Book of Bebb_, and _Telling the Truth_ as first-rate books. Unlike Chad, though, I _would_ feel the need to say something to the guy, and would inevitably embarrass myself as a result. In the past I’ve managed to say stupid and/or stupidly obvious things in front of Suzanne Vega and Dave Barry, and been stunned into silence in the presence of “the Johns”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000157.html. There must be others that I’m forgetting. The only celebrity artist I’ve managed to carry on an intelligent conversation with is John Barth, and that’s because we were stuck in a car together for a couple of hours and I had only read one of his books. Turns out you can go far on a shared love of Scheherazade.

People who write reviews for a living would be in big trouble if it weren’t the fact that griping about faulty movies is far, far easier than writing praise for good ones. That’s mainly why I haven’t mentioned “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/, which I saw last week and found very fine indeed. Charlie Kaufman has finally come into his own. _Being John Malkovich_ was good fun, if not quite as clever as everyone gave it credit for, and _Adaptation_ was grossly overrated. But in _Eternal Sunshine_ all that Kaufmanesque reality-bending is done in service to the story, not as ornamentalism or coy self-reference. And what a sad, sweet tale it is, too: emotionally powerful while never devolving into sentimentality, and speaking the truth about every romance that’s ever lasted more than a couple of months.

And Kate Winslet: ho boy! She’s right back on my Top Five list after this performance. There’s a vacancy, too, ever since Kate Beckinsdale’s prompt ejection on grounds of Unforgivable Romanian Accent in a Film Trailer. Jim Carrey performs well, too, and there’s even room for his physical comedy in a way that, again, is done in service to the story and not just to See Jim Be Funny.

Definitely wins the B.M.S.F.T.Y. award.

It will take some time to determine whether or not Kill Bill marks a dip in Quentin Tarantino’s career, the beginning of a precipitous decline into irrelevancy, or the outing of him as an overrated hack. Some folks have held the latter view all along, but with three excellent movies to his name, I’m inclined to give the guy one more chance.

Mind you, I kinda liked Volume One, and looked forward to see some of its promise fulfilled in Volume Two. Instead, everything fell apart. The word of the day, ladies and gents, is “self-indulgent.” Set aside your notions of Tarantino’s violent epic being underappreciated by skeptical studio bigwigs, so that rather than do damage to his masterwork by slicing it down, he insisted on releasing it in two parts. It’s now clear that slicing it down would have been doing it a great service—and I say that as someone who appreciates the patient, even languorous cadence of much of Tarantino’s camerawork. But Volume Two was downright boring at times, because the dialogue only occasionally lived up to what we’ve come to expect. There was the Hanzo stuff in Part One, and in Part Two . . . I dunno, Darryl Hannah was good, and maybe about 40% of Michael Madsen’s lines had the old familiar punch. But the old Pulp Fiction vibe, where you could have listened to Vincent and Jules just talk about any old stuff for hours, is long gone. Many scenes in Kill Bill, including the ho-hum final minutes with Bill himself, sound like a high school kid imitating Tarantino badly.

There’s no doubt that he was trying to live up to his previous successes, so the question is, why does he fail so thoroughly? Something I’ve long suspected, based on the how he comes off in interviews and other publicity, is that he has no flying clue what made his first couple movies so good. Kill Bill has little cohesion; it ends up being a series of cool moments—or rather, moments that Tarantino thinks are cool. He’s only right some of the time.

Another, darker failing of his that has finally become clear to me is this: he finds abhorrent violence terribly funny. One of his strengths has always been the fact that he does not sugercoat violence, or pussyfoot around its most graphic and troubling aspects. He doesn’t allow us to get comfortable. But I’m afraid this may be accidental, because for him the violence we’re talking about—a goon splurting blood from a lost limb, a woman thrashing on the floor after losing her last eye—is already comfortable for him. If this is true it is rather damning of the man, not necessarily his work, though this particular movie seems to be a clear expression of his personal quirks unfettered by editorial critique or high inspiration.

Maybe the old meme is true, that it was Roger Avary who was responsible for all that was good about Pulp Fiction. There, the contents of the suitcase are left a tantalizing mystery; in Kill Bill, the Bride’s real name is a similar enigma, bleeped out every time somebody utters it, until halfway through Volume 2, when we learn that it’s: Beatrix Kiddo. Huh? That’s it?

I still disagree with Aaron Haspel, though, about the importance of Tarantino’s originality or lack thereof. The man’s a master of pastiche, and until he transcends that he’ll never join the ranks of Great Directors, but in doing so he is hardly alone. The bare fabula of Kill Bill holds promise:

A story of revenge in which a young woman seeks out those who tried to kill her and (she believes) caused the death of her then-unborn child. Inspired by her rage, she overcomes impossible odds and, leaving a bloody wake, arrives at the home of her enemy, who is also the father of her lost baby. She discovers the baby was not lost, but that her enemy has in fact taken her daughter and raised her as his own. He explains that he did what he did in order to punish her for trying to leave her life as an assassin. Knowing all this, the young woman must decide what to do. She kills her enemy and leaves with her daughter.

There’s a good movie to be made out of such a premise; this one fails because of haphazard and at times halfhearted execution. The final scenes are particularly bad, with meandering, mediocre speeches and the use of the Bride’s daughter as a trite emotional bludgeon.

Given all this, why am I giving Tarantino one more chance? Partly because I’ve been here before; after going out of my way to watch the abysmal From Dusk Till Dawn on the strength of the QT writing credit, I told myself I’d give the guy one more chance—and he turned up with Jackie Brown. Also, there’s some stuff to like in Volume Two. The fight between the Bride and California Mountain Snake is a thrill, though for that we can credit Yuen Wo Ping. The RZA’s score remains great fun. I’ll give Tarantino credit for the whole buried-alive sequence, which is claustrophic, merciless, and gripping. Across Volumes One and Two there are perhaps half a dozen scenes like that which remind you of what he is capable of. All in all, a rather poor showing for several years’ work.

Postscript: I try to make a point of not looking a commentary on a movie ‘till I’ve seen at myself and written about it if the whim strikes me. (I did read Aaron’s comments before writing this time, but I already knew what he was going to say.) Having just did a brief scan of some of the reviews out there, I have to say I’m surprised at the generally positive notes for Volume Two. Was I just surly when I saw it? Did my aggravating experience immediately afterward color my impressions? I doubt it. Someday I’ll go back and give Kill Bill another chance: if his next project turns out to be a more unqualified success.

Livonia, MI is on the outskirts of Detroit. If it has a charming historic downtown area, or a pleasant meandering suburban residential district, I don’t know where they are. Livonia appears to be a vast grid of hotels, motels, chain restaurants, and really big stores. I’ve spotted a Target, a Meijer’s, a Walmart, and _two_ Costcos within a couple miles of the Holiday Inn which I’m calling home for a couple of days.

No doubt you wonder, dear reader, how I might find myself in such a hellish situation. ‘Tis one of the burdens of the stay-at-home father. Suanna has a meeting here for work; she doesn’t want to be away from Ella for that long; therefore, I don the nanny apron and come along.

It is in my nature to hate places like Livonia; it is in the nature of parenthood to need them. A classic example: when we got in last night we realized we hand’t packed enough baby wipes. In many places, addressing this problems would have taken considerable time and effort, but ’round these parts you can’t throw a spear without hitting some sort of sprawling superstore with several aisles of infant-related products.

But there’s a ray of hope in all of this: one that I only knew to look for thanks to “Ed’s”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org searches for wi-fi hotspots in Grand Rapids. “Panera Bread”:http://www.panerabread.com is the jewel shining brightly in the middle of the sloburbs. Decent food, good soup, and free, reliable wireless Internet. Having carefully timed my arrival to coincide with Ella’s nap, I’m afforded a chunk of time to jack in and catch up.

And while there’s no wetware or sensory overlay involved, it really is jacking in, isn’t it? I’m seven hundred miles from home but I’m accessing the Internet with the same machine in the same way and going to the same places. Physical location is irrelevant except, in my case, whether or not the men’s bathroom has a changing table.

So, all hail Panera! With its help, I think I just may survive Livonia.

If you watch a movie at Union Station in Washington DC, the guy at the theater will stamp your parking receipt on the way out. But a “Three-Hour Stamp” does not mean you get three hours of parking for free — you still have to pay a dollar. Not a big deal. The way they get you is that if you stay for longer than three hours, the price goes up to six bucks, even with a Three-Hour Stamp.

I was aware of all this when I parked at Union Station tonight, and even bid early farewell to my moviegoing companions in order to make it out of the parking garage in ample time. I did not despair when I found several cars ahead of me at the exit; I had ten minutes to spare. Those minutes were quickly eaten up by the excruciating slowness with which the lady in the booth ahead of me conducted each and every transaction. Nevertheless, I pulled up to the booth with a minute to spare, according to the clock on my cell phone. I handed over my parking receipt and a dollar bill.

The lady in the booth looked at my receipt. “Six dollars,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “Two minutes over.”

Staffers of parking booths the world over fall into two categories: those who hate catching a customer just two minutes over, and those who love it. This woman was definitely one of the latter. In anticipation of my objections, she turned her monitor so that I could see the screen. “I go by this,” she said. By both my cell phone and the little clock in my car, the clock on the monitor was four minutes fast.

Thus, my moment of choice. Not unwittingly, I had stepped into the jaws of a petty commercial trap, by choosing to park at that garage in the first place, knowing full well how the pricing structure there worked. Now, face to face with the personification of that petty greed, I had to choose whether to make my stand.

Mind you, the most pathetic thing to do would have been to quibble: to point out the discrepancies between the clocks, or to complain about the fact that I had taken pains to exit on time and was thwarted only by this very person’s lethargy. To take a stand, none of these things need be said — certainly the woman knew them full well. To take a stand, I would just have had to wait. Wait until the horns started honking, until the shouts of the impatient queue came bubbling up behind me, the shouts of other customers caught in the same bind as me and seeing their parking fee multiply by six in the space of a second. Wait until this woman came to believe that I would wait as long as it took, until those angry customers started coming out of their cars to find out what was going on, until I started a scene, until the cops arrived. Unless she was a true master of her godforsaken profession, she would, before that point was reached, raise the gate and let me leave.

I thought about it. I really did. All that was ugly about modern America was caught up in that moment, and I thought that if I fought it, I’d be doing my small part, at least for that one day. But in the end I coughed up the extra five and drove home. It wasn’t a case of picking my battles so much as retreating from the field. At least in this case retreating — i.e. making a mental note never to park in that stupid place again — does some miniscule damage to whatever company runs the place. This is a war that will be ultimately won by disengagement, though it will never be won by one person alone. Opportunistic greed in the form of raw deals for the customer isn’t limited to parking garages, and one can only disengage so far, especially when one regularly finds oneself at Babies R Us buying diapers.

Next time, though, I’m taking a stand.