The great obfuscator

I'm fascinated by Watergate. Over the last few years I've read probably 20 or so books about the scandal -- from histories to memoirs of participants (Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean) to Art Buchwald's column collection "I Am Not a Crook".

And would you believe I still don't understand Watergate? I'm reading RN, Richard Nixon's 1978 memoir, and my mind still clouds over when I read sentences like this:

Haldeman asked Colson about Dean's disclosure that it had been Colson's call to Magruder urging action on Hunt's and Liddy's intelligence-gathering plans that may have precipated the Watergate break-in.

I know who all those people are, and I understand what was at stake, but I still have difficulty keeping track of who did what when and what it all means. Is that because Watergate was, in its essence, complex and murky, or is that because the president and his men did a good job of making it complex and murky?

Yesterday's news

We continue to unpack from our move, and as a result we are tossing a lot of crumpled-up newspaper into the recycling bin. Gazing last night at the full-to-overflowing bin, I flashed back to third grade and our teacher Mrs. Bridgeman's brief seminar on how to throw away paper. Never crumple up paper when you throw it away, she said, because it takes up more room in the wastepaper basket. She demonstrated with crumpled and uncrumpled paper. If only I'd listened.

Makeup test

I love so many things about our new house, but there have been frustrations. One was that the bookshelf that held all my LPs is too tall for the ceilings. Last week I bought a replacement, but I found it doesn't hold all the records. It was time to do something I should have done a long time ago, donate records I don't want to the thrift store.

I went through the collection -- I have 1,000 or so -- and chose ones to get rid of. They include many oddities I won't miss, things I'm not exactly sure how I came to have, 101 Strings Play Beautiful Hawaiian Melodies, that sort of thing.

But I'm also getting rid of duplicates, and some of them brought me back 30 years. That's when the rockers Kiss were at a commercial peak. I loved them very much. (My mom took me to a Kiss concert in 1979, when I was 8.) My brother loved them too, and in the name of domestic harmony, my parents let us each buy our own Kiss albums, so that if one of us wanted to hear, say, the Rock and Roll Over track "I Want You," the other "Calling Dr. Love," we wouldn't have to fight over the vinyl.

All these years later, I find myself with both sets. I probably don't need any Kiss records, much less duplicates. Still, I dithered over relinquishing these totems of my childhood. But in these troubled times, the mood is right for downsizing. So adieu, duplicate Alive II. Adieu, duplicate Love Gun.

Actually, for some reason I seem to have three Love Guns. Maybe one was the neighbor kid's.

Good word

"While the polls were closing in the East and Midwest, I treated myself to a long hot soak in the huge bathtub."

-- Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

Good word

"Protestant Zion would need to be perfect both for sniping at abortion doctors in North Carolina and for marrying lesbians in Vermont."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Kablooey

I saw a car accident this morning. I was waiting to turn left onto Midvale Boulevard from eastbound Mineral Point Road. The light turned yellow, and a little Plymouth in front of me started to turn left. A Ford Ranger heading west on Mineral Point ran the light and smacked the Plymouth's corner. The Plymouth spun about 90 degrees. Both cars stopped, and the guy in the truck ran over to the Plymouth. No one looked hurt.

It was sickening to watch. And to hear. The sound of cars smashing into each other makes me queasy. I am more and more nervous about the danger of cars these days, mostly I think because I have a much longer bike commute from my new house and am all the more aware of how vulnerable we all are out there.

I was on my way to an early morning screening at Sundance for my movie reviewing gig. I guess I had movies on the brain, then, because all I could think of were the flaming wrecks of cars in Godard's Week-end. They're devastating symbols of modernity. So was the crash I watched this morning.

Deep roots

This is the gravestone of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather John Brickey, who came from Virginia to settle in what is now Townsend, Tenn., just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He was born -- it staggers me to contemplate this -- 269 years ago. He is buried in Townsend's Myers Cemetery, near where tourists rent bright yellow and green inner tubes and float lazily down the Little River.

John's son Peter Brickey, my great-great-great-great-great uncle, bought the land that today includes my family's farm, where Ereck and I just spent two weeks' vacation. On the farm I gazed at giant boulders I climbed on when I was a kid; got water in the old spring house (unlike in olden days, this involves plugging in a pump); and dodged mud daubers in the attic of Uncle Peter's original cabin, a picture of which is on the Wikipedia entry for Wears Valley, Tenn.

Sometimes when I'm at the farm the hair stands up on my neck as I contemplate how rich my family heritage is there. Then I check to see what's on the Game Show Network.