Driving out of Los Alamos, we found the place that I had been seeking at the Las Conchas Trailhead in the Jemez Mountains. If I had been hiking alone, I would have started here, and wandered for days.
We saw a rockclimber there, too.
But it started to rain again, and all of the camping was too far in to haul…
I have to share something, since it not only turned into a running gag throughout the night but also prompted an increasingly rare brainstorming session for me today.
We were visiting last night with our friends Kim and Stephen before going off to what turned out to be a late dinner (Atlanta Fish Market, I had sushi and a huge bowl of steamers). Ben was going to spend the night there (our children have been friends for almost their whole lives). They have a big back deck, and we sat out there, and talked, and sipped two of their killer-delish Cape Codders (with cranberry-raspberry juice and mandarin orange vodka – mmm).
I will not be able to convey exactly why this became so very funny. It stands by itself, but for me much of the hilarity – and charm – flowed from the manner of Kim’s delivery. I will always see her face and hear her voice in my mind’s eye when I think of this.
She said that she had seen the funniest bumper sticker ever.
She leaned forward and, with eyes wide, she said:
“Where are we going?”
(pause… beat, beat)
“And why are we in this handbasket?”
Laughter gently roiled up, built, cascaded. Kim’s face looked like it was going to implode. Then both of us burst into uncontrollable, almost hysterical laughter. It may have started out as soft giggling, but it went right into the entire-body-flailing and very rare kind of laughter that feels like a catharsis of the soul.
From then on, it only took “where are we going” for us to start giggling again. John and I continued it later, too.
Thank you Kim! I’ve put that one away as a nugget of gold for when I need a good laugh.
(I’ve made some graphics. Right-click and save, no hotlinking please.)
None of us knew the etymology of the phrase “hell in a handbasket,” and I couldn’t stop speculating about it. It’s really a very odd idiomatic phrase. It rolls with the alliterative ease that its content suggests, so it’s one of those examples of textured language that I always love.
My own brainstorming came up with this:
Since it generalizes from the specific onto a widespread and or/universal diagnosis, it works as as shorthand/catch-all diagnosis. It is a very curmudgeonly phrase, associated more with older, conservative people than with the young. To me, it signals a lack of flexibility with respect to cultural change. The “hell” part is self-explanatory.
There is a sense of ease in the “being carried” – not unlike the “slippery slope” metaphor – and the pace seems fast. The “going” has already been in progress for a while, and the speed is increasing. We’re already past the point where stopping would be possible.
It is never a command (“you go to hell in a handbasket”), but always a description of perceived conditions (“this country is going to hell in a handbasket”). 
Although it is a reactive statement, it also functions as an implicit critique of passivity with regard to the condition being criticized.
There is a cognitive dissonance for me in the visual image of a handbasket.
A handbasket – a small basket with a handle – is something that is typically used for gathering flowers, or berries, or garden veggies, or Easter eggs. I imagine a very carefree, happy little girl, carrying something through the woods – like Little Red Riding Hood? 
One of the things that made the bumper sticker amusing was the idea of a wide-eyed someone asking the “carrier” where they were going. The context of the bumper sticker suggested the automobile as the conveyor, so it was a surprise to have it switched out for the handbasket. Then there was also the implication of children asking “where are we going?,” like “are we there yet?”. Multiple surprises.
Moving on. What would be of an appropriate size to be conveyed to hell in a handbasket?
A baby, like baby Moses being carried down the Nile? (Do you remember that weird song “There’s something in the bag – Mommy, Mommy?”?) Some human parts? The heart, the head, the hands?
Or, looking at the other end of the scale problem, perhaps the being doing the carrying is… very large?
Another interesting consequence of the passive construction is that agency is completely unspecified. Who is carrying the handbasket? That’s an interesting question. I have no answer.
So, what – something or someone – a huge demon, perhaps – is skipping through the woods, conveying “this world” or “this country” to hell – in a handbasket? 
One of the gods – or goddesses? The more you think about it, the stranger it is. The scale is all off (at least for Western thought, it is).
So then I went to search. There’s not really that much hard evidence on the etymology – but post if you’re aware of anything else of interest.
Clues to the origin of “going to hell in a handbasket,” meaning “deteriorating rapidly or utterly,” are, unfortunately, scarce as hens’ teeth. The eminent slang historian Eric Partridge, in his “Dictionary of Catchphrases,” dates the term to the early 1920’s. Christine Ammer, in her “Have A Nice Day — No Problem,” a dictionary of cliches, agrees that the phrase probably dates to the early 20th century, and notes that the alliteration of “hell” and “handbasket” probably contributed to the popularity of the saying. Ms. Ammer goes a bit further and ventures that, since handbaskets are “light and easily conveyed,” the term “means going to hell easily and rapidly.” That seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I do think the addition of “in a handbasket” (or “in a bucket,” as one variant puts it) does sound more dire and hopeless than simply “going to hell.”
This phrase, meaning “to deteriorate rapidly”, originated in the U.S. in the early 20th century. A handbasket is just a basket with a handle. Something carried in a handbasket goes wherever it’s going without much resistance.
James L. Rader of Merriam-Webster Editorial Dept. writes: “The Dictionary of American Regional English […] records ‘to go to heaven in a handbasket’ much earlier than […] ‘hell,’ which is not attested before the 1950s. The earliest cite in our files is from 1949 […]. ‘In a handbasket’ seems to imply ease and and speed […]. Perhaps part of the success of these phrases must simply be ascribed to the force of alliteration. DARE has a much earlier citation for another alliterative collocation with ‘handbasket’ (1714), from Samuel Sewall’s diary: ‘A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a Handbasket as soon as he would pass it.’ I suspect that ‘to go to hell in a handbasket’ has been around much longer than our records would seem to indicate.”
I would think that the metaphor would be more directional, more path-oriented. “Going to hell in a handbasket” implies that we are going the wrong way. It’s not under our own steam, as it were, but simply being carried along by…something…a larger agency or force. I guess that’s the danger in “going with the flow.”
So the timeline goes from “head in a handbasket” to “heaven in a handbasket” to “hell in a handbasket”… hmm.
I wonder if the history of the phrase had anything to do with beheading… I know that there was a basket to catch the head as it fell off from the stage of the guillotine. Before that, swords were used. Beheading is a quick way to the afterworld. No-one seems to have made this connection. I wonder.
Here’s another thought, the most literal: “Hand Basket” = a basket full of hands. The possibility certainly haunts the shadowy corridors of interpretation. “Handbasket” is an unusual word, somehow. Thieves’ hands, perhaps? I wonder how far back this expression really might go.
I’m not sure how the meaning of “deterioration” would have come into it, exactly, unless someone actually was carrying around a head, or a basket of severed hands – in a hot climate. And who carries them? And how quickly? Hmmm.
What happens to the heads or hands? Would they have been burned, by any chance? City dump, fiery pit, anything like that?
“The Jig of Life” by Kate Bush has been playing in my mind since I got up this morning.
It has had an effect.
I planted more lavendar, and golden thyme, and french thyme, and some patches of mondo grass, and a new annual called a chartreuse leafed lemon talinum (which has tiny little pink beads on its stalks that are supposed to erupt into tiny rose-pink flowers).
Then, I got into water, namely our little pond. I mean I really got in. I pulled out the dead leaves, and cut back the drooping iris, and trimmed the evergreen grass, and pulled out some of the more than abundant green stuff in the water (I forget what it’s called, but the fish eat it and it sprouts little white flowers), and arranged the arrowheads, and put the lotus a little off-center, and cleaned the pump off, and rearranged the rocks so that the water flows down in a more interesting pattern.
One song. Just one song did that.
I’m so glad that it wasn’t a Flock of Seagulls song.
(I got the song and the little embedded player from IMeem.com. I saw it at one of my Care2.com friend’s site. I’ve just joined up – add me as a friend.)
We promised Ben we’d go see Spiderman 3. Personally, I was pushing for the latest Shrek movie, especially after getting a tirade about violence and horribleness from another mom whose slightly younger kid wanted to leave Spiderman after about 15 minutes. Of course, they saw the IMAX version, and that’s probably a bit more intense.
Granted, there is probably a bit too much marketing toward the kids for the level of of the movie, but hey, there’s a megaton of money being made on those figures. Every mom and dad in America knows that.
Action figures are better than cigarettes, anyway.
Ben is still collecting his Star Wars stuff, and Power Rangers, and Transformers, and Fantastic Four, and even Batman. He’s already got a fair number of variations of the basic Spiderman figure. He loves them, carries a couple everywhere, has very complex worlds and plots involving them. Basically, I think they are dolls for boys, but I have to say that these articulated figures sure worked to retire anything like a Ken or GI Joe. For that I am grateful. I won’t tell you what I did to the few Barbie dolls I ever had…
Anyway, the movie was a rollicking good time had by all. Any movie with this heavy dose of vaguely uncanny doppelganger fun is good with me. Two photographer nerd superguys with the same basic taste in women – a blonde is a redhead, who is a blonde – mirrored kisses and guys who just don’t get it. Bits of temptation and hell, bits of redemption and caring – very intercontagious and structural. Instead of making truly complex characters, they separated out the good and bad and mixed them up a bit in color-coded quick time.
A little comic relief here and there, a couple of snappy insulting lines (nothing as good as “this is so not Spandex). All the women were great, although none of them got to be superheros. I loved the scenes between Peter Parker and his aunt May (Rosemary Harris) in particular. I don’t know if they pulled a Natalie Wood on this one or not, but if she was doing her own singing Kirsten Dunst has a very pleasant voice.
Sandman showed up, although he seemed a bit more like a sandstorm. I thought he was a sympathetic figure, actually. Nobody ever gives his daughter and ex a darned thing (big of you to “forgive him” though).
Let’s get Swamp Thing and Concrete into the action – what, they don’t count for anything? They’d rock.
Note for Spiderman 4, Spiderman Continues, and Spiderman meets Scooby-Doo: Never spend a lot of camera time on crying guys with bulgy eyes, especially if they do funny things with their mouths too. Tobey Maguire should not be allowed to cry on camera – he does not do it well. A death scene was almost ruined for me when I had to stifle my laughter for a second. Stick with the Goblin guy, and Sandman, for the crying parts. They both have better faces for it.
I think Tobey (Spiderman/Peter Parker) got a bit ripped off in this movie. Everybody else had better lines. The interesting part for his role was when he was briefly “wrestling” with the internal evil displaced onto the black meteorcrud-crystal lube-symbiote-thing. I liked the dancing, and many of his expressions were actually more appealing (to me) but no matter how they muss his hair or add mascara, Billie Joe Armstrong he’s not.He was starting to remind me of that guy that played Frodo, Elijah Wood. Ok for a hobbit, not so much for a superhero. I liked most of the other characters more.
I had seen Topher Grace (Christopher John Grace, b.1978) several times before I recognized him at all, and that was only because of a fleeting expression on his face. My, the gawky boy (Eric Foreman) from “That 70’s Show” sure turned out well. I’m guessing that, except for the costume, it must have been fun for him to play Eddie Brock/Venom. 
I wouldn’t have thought he could have done it. You can’t tell from the available stills from the movie, but he had a serious yum factor going. Well, he did until he became Venom – the teeth and little snaky black bits of symbiotic goo were fantastically scary and wonderful. And so was the Spock/Austin Powers raised eyebrow action, although the makeup was just that tad too heavy.
I’m picky, huh? Well, I actually enjoyed the film very much. Two movies in two days. We haven’t done that in a long time. I think the last movie we went to before that was Superman. Oh yeah, that reminds me. The flag moment was a bit gratuitous, wasn’t it? At least they didn’t go all Captain America on us for this one.
Final message: You always have the choice to do the right thing.
Actually, you don’t always have that choice, because sometimes you don’t have enough information.
Sometimes you don’t have a good way of making a decision.
Sometimes there is no right thing to do.
Sometimes you know the right thing to do, but it is not within your power.
But I know what they mean. It’s a little streamlined for clarity. And we need the reminder that we can make choices.
The choices you make create the character that you are, which affects the way you think, which affects the way you make decisions and judgments, and the way you start to habitually make the same kinds of choices, etc. etc. When you have a choice, do the very best you can to think it through, and feel it through, and consider everything you possibly can – and then do what you judge to be the best thing, the right thing, in that context. All of that wouldn’t do very well at the end of a movie…
Just remember, even if you think you’re doing the right thing, you might still be wrong, and life isn’t fair.
Joe Frank has pointed out rather persuasively that while the truth may be slippery and elusive, you are always the author of your own lie.
But that’s a whole ‘nuther kind of movie.
Ahh, yeah. Time to sleep. ‘Night.
My neighbor Ron saved me. We were talking “over the fence” the other day and I mentioned that I’d been taken down by bad muscle spams in my back. It turns out that along the way of his medical training, he also picked up a chiropractor license. He said he’d stop by later.
I was thinking he’d “crack my back” with an adjustment. Nope. He asked some questions, tested out my range of movement, and then brought out a strange looking instrument.
It looked like a cross between a door jam and a syringe. He said that dentists used to use them to crack teeth (maybe they still do?). The door-jam part could “aim” the slight jarring jolt it gave to a fairly precise location. You could adjust the strength of the jolt by twisting the thing…. wow, this is a really bad description. I need some vocabulary – hold on…
Ok, it’s variably called a Chiropractors’ reflex gun, tapper, muscle activator, adjuster, impact tool, or chiropractors’ adjustment tool (CAT). Evidently, it can release a force of up to 32 pounds to a very localized area. It belongs to the genre of “thrust adjustment” devices (I will resist the impulse to make a bad joke, I will resist…). 
He tapped a few spots on my back, tested my range again, tapped a few more spots.
And guess what? The pain subsided quite a bit, and I immediately had more range of movement.
I’m unclear about how this thing works, something about muscles firing and impulses and “resetting” muscle groups. I haven’t been able to find much on the theory, except for some verbiage about muscles that have gotten out of balance. Clearly I’ll have to do a little more research on this. 
It looks like you can get one of these for something like $150-200. I’ll be looking on EBay, etc. It really made a difference. Or maybe I’ll just use a hammer (grin).
I undid a lot of the good because I had to ready the house for Ben’s birthday party – including the cleaning, lugging supplies, doing decorations (including the helium balloons), moving a table outside, etc. I’m pretty creaky today after doing all that yesterday from 7-2.
If Ron hadn’t rescued me, I honestly don’t know how I could possibly have pulled it off. My back was slowly improving, but I was still waking up unable to turn my head to the left, unable to sit for any length of time without stiffening up, unable to move around much without spikes of pain, the whole thing.
I would have felt awful if Ben’s birthday party didn’t come off as planned because of Mommy’s back pain.
Now if only I could get a good massage…
Friday night we had some very special dinner guests, including my beloved friend “death of God” theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer. The other guests were Tom’s son John and his wife Sandy, and Professor Mikhail Epstein, a wonderfully interesting guy in his own right.
I don’t often entertain guests. This was a big occasion for me, and preparation was intense. Like the post title says, I’m no Martha Stewart. I could really use a wife – that housecleaning gardener nanny planner decorator hostess person that I hear so much about…
We didn’t have more than four of anything, and dinner was for six. So I went out and got settings for eight. On my limited budget, this basically limited me to Target, but I found a Zazen Lime glazed set that I really liked in their global collection. Then John went out and got some wine glasses.
Tom gave me a couple of DVDs – one on his whole Emory history and the “death of God” controversy, and another on depictions of Jesus in art. I’m looking forward to watching them.
Benevolent Deities Inc. answered my prayers, and provided warmth and sunshine enough to eat outdoors. The circling bats arrived at twilight and made everything magical.
I served mixed olives, chips and salsa and guacamole, and fresh papaya with lime for appetizers. The wine was Seven Deadly Sins Red Zinfandel throughout (how could I resist such a name, and it’s good), although we also had a white and some import beer on hand. The main course was ginger jerk salmon, sweet potato souffle, and asparagus with Parmesan, with a salad (spinach and tomatoes and feta and some of that broccoslaw stuff) and a couple of baguettes. For dessert, a choice of creme brulee or raspberry chocolate mouse from Alon’s. Note to self: I need a tray to carry things!
We talked politics and apocalypse and resurrection and the white whale and the coincidence of opposites, and the growing divide between dominionism and credible theology, and the growing
gap between rich and poor, and Jesus art, and all manner of other things.
It was a lovely night.
Then, last night, we were supposed to go to a party in Tom’s honor, but our babysitting arrangements fell through so I went alone. Synchronity! The party was at the home of the brother of one of my favorite undergraduate professors at UMass. A good time was had by all, and Tom told us a very amusing story about Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Mircea Eliade.
So today – well, I’m enjoying the clean house…and the feeling of having nothing to do that I don’t want to do. It’s cold and windy, and it’s my birthday, and I’m snuggled in.