Arnold Runs The River Dry

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Wipe that salvia off your face

Yet another fairly harmless herb is about to get proper governmental treatment, i.e. outlawed. We can't have people enjoying themselves!

The fear is that salvia seems to be appealing to a growing group of young people, drawn to the drug by the fact that it's legal and natural. (SFGate)

There's no surer logic than that. But wait, there's more!

The main concern of opponents to the drug is what people might do while they're hallucinating -- get in a car, for example, or react violently to their surroundings. (ibid.)

Good thinking! It's for this reason we outlawed alcohol, and leaving the house after having a fight with your spouse. I feel so much safer now that those are illeg--

Wait, sorry, not yet. Forgot it's still only 2007. Those other things, and a lot more besides, will get their turn later.

Body Of Message Goes Here

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At home, paying lots of attention to a conference call. Between this old cordless phone and the corporate voice network I can hardly understand it. It's like listening to a conversation in a nightclub. Now and then a word I understand filters through, and if I put those words together I get a general sense of it. Evidently the schedule prototype mechanical fit firmware SDK status tracking issues blocking item. Groovy.

Blogging is total impulse. That's why the graphic up above, and this paragraph.

Yellowjackets don't like it when you go into the garden shed they have chosen for their real estate development, pick up a shovel and knock their non-rent-paying ass out into the yard and then stomp all over their new home and crush all their babies. They don't like it at all. Fuck 'em.

After a three-mile run this morning I sat in the garage staring into space when a mud-dauber passed through that space and started feeding her baby in its neat little mud hut affixed to the top of the door frame. I grabbed a saw and hacked the happy little family in half. There's now a nick in the door frame but there's also no gaw damn mud-dauber living in my garage.

Said run took a break at the high school where there are chin-up bars. There were also a large pack of brand new football players getting a sense of how fat and soft they are even for oversized fourteen year olds. I understand their pain because of why I got an engineering degree.

Why I got an engineering degree: One day many years ago I was doing what my boss was paying me to do that day, which was deepen and widen a ditch out amongst the tomato fields just north of Dixon, CA. The temperature was about a hundred and six and the ditch was muddy and humid and home to many mosquitoes. I decided then and there I needed a job where there is always air conditioning.

Call's over. Should I IM the organizer and ask him what we talked about? No. Few dictums hold more truth in the corporate world than Proverbs 17:28:

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise:
and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

Or as we say in the real world, better to be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and hock a lugie into the general manager's tazo chai tea latte.

Oh fer hevvins sakes

All youse peeps -- you know who you are -- who suddenly up and quit yer blogs. This is like the third one I've seen recently where all the old posts are suddenly gone, comments disabled, nothin' left but a pert little I'm-outa-here message. Bah. Drama queens, the lot o' ye!

Okay, right, I did that once too. But still!

(I could continue with why blogging is such a bad idea anyway, but that would be kind of a silly thing to blog about, wouldn't it? Besides, no harm if you don't put any time into it. Short stupid stuff is fine. Short stupid stuff, and pictures. That's all you'll see from ME anymore. Huff!)

Evolutions

We need more public transit, no question. The trouble is paying for it. While it's not so tough to get hundreds of billions to spend on half-baked adventures in foreign countries, getting tens of billions to spend on our urban infrastructure is another matter. Never the less, some people are thinking about it.

Fifty years since BART was organized. My grandfather was a high-ranking county official at the time and got one of the draft documents. As a teenager I would pore over the three-ring binder full of proposed train routes and elevation studies and station design concepts. Even then I knew it was a document of historical interest. Alas, my sentiments were not shared and after he died it disappeared.

Things disappear. But not people. More and more of them all the time, and in urban areas we need to get them out of their cars. The only good way to do this is provide alternatives that get them where they want to go when they want to get there, in a way that's somehow better than driving. A vastly expanded rail system is an answer, possibly the best answer if it's designed right.

Being as most Americans are disaffected not only with the President but with Congress and pretty much the whole shooting match right now, maybe we can hope for a change. A slow but sure sea change away from enabling the sport of kings* but instead, through a renewed sense of community, building up our country, maybe we can hope for that.

Yeah, and while we're dreaming, why not just go straight to anti-gravity.* - In spite of a few flaws it is an interesting and telling list.

Ovations

A bright, athletic, popular high school senior came down with acute myeloid leukemia, but she's a fighter, and everyone loves her, and there was a lot of applause and a lot of tears as she took her diploma with all the other young people out on the football field a warm evening two weeks ago. Her story.

Rivers Flow

My firstborn graduated high school yesterday. Pride, tears, lifelong friends, the great unknown, lots of food, presents. He also turned eighteen and legally became an adult. More unknown, more presents. Like anyone reading this, I could write about that all day long. But I won't.

That's cuz I have to pack. While he gets set for his post-high school trip to Hawaii, the rest of us leave early tomorrow and drive over eight hundred miles to get deep into Utah, then go another hundred miles down the Green River. We will be in canoes. It will look something like this.

June Begins

I leave work and go to Baskin-Robbins to get my son an ice cream cake. It’s round and brown and festooned with Oreos and whipped cream and is big enough for two dozen. I have them write “Happy Birthday Skzx!” on it (except they write his real name). I crank up the A/C and am highly conscious of the late afternoon sunlight hitting the passenger seat and its cargo. I want everything to be right, as always, and melted ice cream cake isn’t quite right.

We gave him presents over a week ago. All it is tonight is a party. Kids, burgers, cake, whatever. I drive up to my house and it is hidden behind a parking lot. The driveway, the side yard, the cul-de-sac, all covered in cars. I park on the only space left, the weed-bare dirt below the lawn.

When did my youngest child get to be old enough to have friends who drive?

There are eighteen or twenty boys and girls in my house. A few still not yet to full height. A few quite fully developed indeed. Music (jazz!), laughter, crazy in-crowd humor, video games. Everyone is friends with everyone. Popularity has installed itself at, of all the unlikeliest places, my house.

Life is good. I’d say let’s not ruin it but the great thing is, here in this house, on this street, where the low sun cuts through the surrounding oak trees and birds twitter and happy young people drop each other off and talk to their moms on their cell phones and summer vacation peeks around the corner like a great benevolent god trying to hide his smile, we couldn’t ruin it. There’s no way.