Happiness Is A Warm Puppy

The old big dog wags and growls and wags. The little new dog flops around outside and is let inside and poops and is thrown out again. She is four muddy paws of curious energy and a mouth full of needles.


Just like dogs, working with engineers is a constant circus of hilarity and fun. We meet one day over bug reports. Validators of an audio subsystem report they are experiencing noise under certain conditions of operating system, background traffic, etc. Various driver patches and configuration settings are tried but to no avail. A hardware bug is suspected. Consternation ensues. Finally, a workaround is found and the day saved. The fix to reduce noise: Don't play Iron Maiden. Ha ha ha ha ha. Seriously, I don't know how I can stand it.


Trying to get what's going on around me is sometimes like watching a sport I don't understand. Once awhile ago I happened upon a game of hurling. A Belgian industrial designer and I were in a bar in Portland watching men run around on the flatscreen. No idea what they were doing, just a lot of noise and fury, sticks waving like swords, balls flying through the air, the crowd erupting at odd moments. Obviously it made sense to someone, but not to us. That sort of describes my work environment, except I'm on the field, and next week I'm going to wear a suit and tie and participate in giving detailed play by plays to some extremely interested parties who know more about it than I do. Well, maybe they don't. They're not supposed to. But I think they do.


Bailee Bailee
Wagging your tailee

Augh, Overworked

So my response is: Read blogs! Roy got me to thinking about the long-term consequences of what I do for a living. In pursuit of the goal of keeping our families fed, we continue to create more and more powerful and portable computers, until some day we will all look back with longing on those slow and simple days when only teenagers were constantly texting each other. Given one more technical generation, and every human alive will be connected at all times. One small step from that, and I expect the traffic will be sniffed out continually by some huge cloud of computers whose AI will extract the gist of every conversation. Oh, sure, it's to ferret out terrorists. Right.

Anyway, it's my job to enable this nightmare and avoid unemployment. Don't worry, I'm only one out of thousands of people happily and obliviously doing the same thing. In the service of this mindless directive, I'm suddenly being tasked with another trip -- thought my travlin days wuz over but I wuz wrong -- and this coming weekend will land at the place pictured. I'll probably let people guess all week where the hell it is. It's going to take me at least that long just to figure out what the hell I will be doing there.

Bailee

The house is warm and sort of aww-y with puppiness, except the dog who's not sure, and the cat who's, you know, a cat.

Daddy trampoline!

Judgment reserved.

Watch, learn.

I wants to grow!

Send it back.

All I Know Is, Someone's Day Started Out Worse Than Mine

More Fun With Oxygen Deprivation

So there we were at lunchtime doing Russians when someone said, “Figure out the one number between one thousand and two thousand that isn’t a sum of consecutive integers.”

By “doing Russians” I don’t mean we were pounding vodka drinks nor do I mean we were doggin’ up one of the non-Korean massage parlors. Russians are a weightlifting thing where you stand there and hold (say) forty-five pound barbells and raise them to your shoulders, first one, then the other, back and forth, kind of like you’re working a line of tequila shooters only you’re not. The tale is the Russian military determined it to be the most effective way to build upper arm strength, and I suppose they would know, since when I picture the Russian military I picture a brutal scenario of hard physical labor only occasionally relieved by a nice restful beating. The idea was to do five reps of these, repeated twenty times, the rest period being when other guys were taking their turns.

Quite the merry crew, what.

So to add to the hilarity one of them (who speaks Russian, by the way), said, “You know, most numbers can be expressed as a sum of consecutive integers, right?”

“What?”

“Like fifteen is four plus five plus six, and twenty-one is six plus seven plus eight, and, um.”

“Yeah, and ten is one and two and three and four.”

“Right.”

“So what?”

“So it’s like a mind puzzle. There’s only one number between one thousand and two thousand that can’t be got that way. The trick is to figure out which one.”

“Really? Just one?”

“Yup.”

“How do they know?”

A shrug and a smile. You know how that is.

So we’re pounding these weights up and down and up and down, and some of us have gotten sort of quiet. I don’t know if it’s an engineer thing or what, but there’s something about a puzzle, about something that you know can be figured out if you just discover the right approach. This is especially attractive if your brain is losing ground against physical exertion and your ability to deal with complexities such as proper English or interpersonal relationships or walking and chewing gum at the same time is steadily eroding. Maybe it’s just me but when my mind is starting to darken out, it sometimes turns to mathematics, maybe as a sort of last gasp effort to retain something of itself, some kind of connection to something more than pure animal pain. Prisoners thrown into solitary have been known to go over old math lessons to keep their sanity. I imagine former POW John McCain can relate to this whenever he’s stuck on a plane with Chris Matthews.

“So,” I said, wheezy from my last effort. “All odd numbers are out, cause any odd is the sum of two consecutive numbers.”

“Right.”

“And, um, any even number that can be divided by three is out, cause, like, forty-nine and fifty and fifty-one are one hundred fifty.”

“Okay.”

I figured that idea extended to all like numbers.

“So too if it can be divided by five, or any odd number, cause, you know.” I was thinking of an easy example like twenty five, because …

25 / 5 = 5

… and …

5 + (4 + 6) + (3 + 7) = 25

… or in a similar vein,

56 = 7 * 8 = 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8

= 8 + (7 + 9) + (6 + 10) + (5 + 11)

= 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11

That much was clear. Obviously there was some formulaic way to discover the answer. By now, after several sets of Russians and a time or two on the tummy-cruncher bench, it was pretty clear my brain was depraved on account it was deprived. I couldn’t stop.

“Ooh! So, huh,” I said. “So since the sum of integers from one to n is n squared plus n over two. And the sum of some arbitrary consecutive series is that minus the lower end series you didn’t use …”

“Uh …” he said.

“… so we got,” I said, “ …

( (n² + n) / 2 ) - ( (m² + m) / 2 )

… to get any good number, in other words the number we want is the one that can’t be found with this equation. So all we gotta do – I need some paper for this – is we take this equation and make m less than n and set it up with some algebra …”

“Dude.”

“… and find the number for which it can’t be made to work …”

“Dude, you’re making this way too complicated.”

“I am? Oh. Yeah. I do that with everything.”

But a couple of the others had been puzzling away on their own and offering thoughts on the solution (“It’s not, like, something stupid like fifteen hundred, is it?”) but gotten nowhere, and I wasn’t going to quit either, not yet. I was actually getting tired from this bizarre workout (we had never done this particular one before) and my lower back was starting to hurt, probably because I wasn’t doing it right, so I bent over and touched my toes to stretch my back out and thought, well, it seems a number is a sum of consecutives so long as if you keep dividing it in half you eventually reach an odd number and can’t divide anymore. I’m not sure what subconscious processing of numbers led to that insight, but it was related to my intuition that the number in question had to be even and be summed with a series that does not have an odd number in the center of it. In other words, if you keep dividing this hypothetical number, you will never reach an odd number, cause if you do, a series can be constructed around that odd number that adds back up to where you started.

Something like that. It isn’t easy to reconstruct thoughts that took place in a state of physical stress and were never meant to be articulated in human speech anyway.

Anyway, from that, I suddenly blurted out the answer, the one integer between one thousand and two thousand that is not the sum of consecutive integers. The guy who posed the question smiled, and everyone else asked how the hell I did that. I didn’t really know, of course. After the exercise some of us went for a run and got REALLY tired, and it’s probably a small mercy that I can’t remember thinking about anything. I probably didn’t. I think my brain went into one of those impenetrable early afternoon comas because at one o’clock I had a meeting to go to anyway.

The toxicity of our city

So my unintended brush with poison oak deposited an unknown amount of urushiol on my skin. Urushiol is one of the most potent toxins known to Man: For sensitive types like me, one nanogram is enough to cause a rash. One quarter of an ounce is enough to rashify everyone on Earth. I don’t know if that includes the mining colonies out amongst the asteroids.

I also don’t know why the web sites have to mix metric and standard like that.

I’ve been sleeping in pajama-type things, with arms and legs on them. Very weird. Usually I just wear boxers. But I’m a walking toxic chemical spill and it’s to keep from infecting my dearly beloved. As is taking two showers a day, and tossing everything that touches my horribly diseased body into the washing machine. And applying a smorgasbord of stinky lotions. So far, done all right. In fact, it’s getting better, and she never really got a rash from me. Much.

Getting better enough I went back to the gym today. I don’t go because I’m Stud McMuffin. I’m not even Dash Riplock. I go because the other guys that go will give me a ration of shit if I don’t. Last week I begged off, not really wanting to place my red and oozing arms and legs on the benches. Once I described that in sufficient detail, they gave me a pass. Enthusiastically. But now the patches are turning from red to pink and getting all dryish and flaky so I went today. Result: my palms are black from the weightlifting gloves and it doesn’t wash off. Weird, because usually it does.

Maybe the urushiol is causing my body to mutate. Soon I will lose all feeling and be impervious to bullets and napalm. Not very bloody useful given my line of work. But the feeling loss would be a benefit, if the alternative is to keep on with the ceaseless tickling that if touched, if even just by clothing, becomes a horrible itch, and if scratched or rubbed in any way at all turns into a burn. Then I have to sit still and not touch it no matter how much the itch surrounding the burn and the tickle surrounding the itch cry out to me, not for about an hour until it calms down and leaves me alone. Well, it’s not like that now, but it was last week. I would have gladly taken the napalm.

pages turned to dust

Father Luke’s appeal is in the simple and truthful art of choosing words. He creates the skeleton of a world, and I like to visit it in part because I can fill it in.

I’m not very sensitized to poetry, just as I’m not sensitized to hip-hop or to a good cigar. I like his work because I can relate to the life it describes. Some of this is geographical: I know Santa Cruz – I can smell the eucalyptus in the morning fog, I can hear the Dipper rattle, I can see the light on the swells, thick with seaweed. I’ve seen the people who’ve washed up there, spoken to a couple. Santa Cruz is one of those eddies where folks find their wandering ends. Berkeley’s another.

But a lot of it is even more personal. His life, drifting and bemused, is similar to the one I lived on that other channel, you know, the one that comes in late at night in black and white: Some guy looks at what might have been – college, wife, kids, house, career – and decides what the hell, at least he did it his way, and dies old and poor and satisfied – and I’m the guy he might have been, touched by a ghost when the real world looked in on me, and I’m left wondering, what the hell was that?

Father Luke never looks at what might have been. He looks at what is, and says just enough to let us in but not enough to keep us out. That’s art.

More and more.

Saturday Dusk

Through Technorati I find I'm linked from a blog in what looks to me like Portuguese. No idea who or why. Probably at random but why does one do that? I don't mind, of course. Far too egotistical to mind any attention that isn't actually hostile.

I don't believe in egotism but I am egotistical. Why wouldn't I be? I'm male, a Leo, and terrifically insecure.

I do believe in egoism, to the extent that I believe in anything. I also believe I just wrote and deleted a bunch of off the cuff text on the subject. Who the hell wants to read my amateur philosophy at this time of day?

So anyway, mention in the preceding post’s comments of Lovecraft and his classic story At The Mountains of Madness led me to discover that a movie script is under development and ultimately to a self-categorization that is of course not news to anyone who knows me but sort of worth mentioning anyway, though I’d be hard-pressed to say why. I don’t know about anyone else but I proceed through life from a sort of default outlook that doesn’t quite match the person whose life I lead, and though that life is of a man with a family he loves and a house he always fusses with and a career whose arc will fill a major portion of his legacy, my outlook is still, mostly subconsciously and mostly under the surface, that of a teenager cutting high school. Despite all the action items and commitments and production that everyone within my comprehension right now naturally expects me to be motivated towards, all I really want to do is find a cozy comfortable atmosphere and write stuff. Right now, it would be stuff inspired by the story and movie mentioned above. Another day it would be something else –- regional amateur detective stuff, or regional-historical, or off-beat travel writing, whatever ... whatever it was I dicked around with when I was cutting high school.

I cut high school a lot. I kept careful records of my attendance so that each semester would end with my absences being just under the allowed limits which, being the mid 1970s, were quite generous. I spent a lot of that cut time at the local public library, some of it with my unfortunate girlfriend (meant in both senses of the term), and a little of it wandering around the campus of UC Berkeley that was just blocks away. Thirty plus years later, I still want to cut class and go wander and find a spot as I used to do where lines of energy and environment converge to a point, and align my mind with them and see what is produced. Sometimes it is words, sometimes it is music, sometimes it is merely peace. But whatever it is, it beats the hell out of any high school class assignment, or lab experiment or design review or presentation for staff.

Music? Yeah, this is the sort of nerd I was: Sometimes in class, instead of taking notes I’d write music for brass quintet. Had the blank music paper and everything. Did it in ink. It was uninteresting stuff, mostly derivative of Bach (probably because he created such beauty out of mathematical structure), with odd harmonies thrown in because I liked the way they sounded. But I had little formal training in theory and they came out the musical equivalent of a short story written by a kid who’s read nothing but a few tales by Jack London. Now, of course, I wish not so much that I had kept those particular efforts but that I had kept at them, and thrown caution to the wind and studied music without regard for career prospects. But this paragraph is a spur road that ends in the trees, so let’s go back to the main line.

I know there’s nothing unique in a man who proceeds with a self-image an order of magnitude or two less responsible than the persona he presents the world. Probably there is more uniqueness in a man who does not. But I don’t really know, because most of the time I am surrounded by hundreds of men (and many women, though to say “dozens” would be an exaggeration, my work being an engineering environment which, for reasons I can’t fathom, does not attract females in equal number as males) diligently pursuing the objectives of their jobs and careers. So far as I know, it wouldn’t occur to a single one of them to want to be doing something else – and also so far as I know, every single one of them does want to be doing something else. The truth is somewhere in between, of course, with career success following those who more successfully draw the line and make themselves most effective at what they are actually doing. I imagine many people would say that the ability to do that is simply a sign of maturity.

Which raises the question: Why would I still be a teenager? I should say “teenager” in quotes, of course, because I’m very much not teenagerish in a lot of ways, and I don’t just mean the weird gray hairs that grow out the tops of my ears. Maybe it’s not my inner teenager but my inner homeless person calling, I don’t know. The inner marginally-employable creative type, anyway, who works in a video store and spends his life writing and playing guitar and writing some more –- and I guess it’s conceited of me to think that such people are also stuck in their teenage years, only perhaps more then me at a practical level and correspondingly less so at an emotional level –- the person who has remained (childishly) free of responsibility to anyone but himself ... and that’s a ball he can drop whenever he likes. What if, instead of throwing to second for the out, he just lets it lie and looks over the outfield fence and watches patterns form and merge as the breeze moves the leaves in the trees? What if?

Someone, I forget who, was describing the failure of her marriage, and the difficulty of her husband’s childhood (drunken abusive father etc.), and said the counselor had said that oftentimes people who grow up in dysfunctional households remain teenagers emotionally for their entire lives. Stuck, in other words, in a stage of life they never successfully completed. That certainly described her ex-husband (their son, on the other hand, who had both the experience of having a close family while young and the experience of witnessing his father’s self-destruction, was mature beyond his years, and understood exactly that his father was stuck in an emotional state he himself had long passed). This being stuck in teenagerdom, if it applies to me, would not apply because of abuse of any kind. But it’s less evil twin, the benign neglect of divorced parents distracted by their own lives, is undeniable. It is impossible not to draw connections, but very swiftly I have to stop that train and point out (to myself if to no one else) that there’s only good in analyzing the past if it helps you design the future. To drive your life, and not be driven by some vague sense of helpless inevitability, is the worthy path. That much is clear to me and since that leads to speculation of how I should be driving my life and avoid being driven by the fallout of circumstance, I am led, believe it or not, right back to the original question but turned sideways. Rather than, why do I want to go be an artist and drop all this materialist conventionality, I should be asking, why am I not doing just that?

Well, the short term answers of course are a) that I’d much rather ensure my kids’ passage through college, b) I want a chance at a decent retirement (whether I get it or not, better to have tried), and c) Lovecraftian stories and movie scripts are pretty lightweight fare upon which to make decisions –- and it's much better, as some Hobbit must have said, to make decisions on a full stomach.

You know, I'm going to have to stop with that, because I'm not sure I know what it means. I feel like I've drawn three quarters of the circle here. Probably if I let it percolate another day I'll have the rest of it but, you know, naah.

The Door Is Ajar: A Melodramatic Life Essay

The door is ajar; shall I fart in it to save gas? Or is the boat afloat, festooned with flowers and slowly waving princesses? No, indeed no. My leg is aflame. Aflame with the howling passions of invisible poisons, poisons excreted by one of the most pernicious plants on the face of the planet.

I went down into the hollow Saturday to rip out a fence. The hollow is terra almost incognita, a depression in the corner of the lot County-defined as part of the 80-year flood plain, thick with brambles and downed branches, concrete rubble, an old hot rod tire under thirty years of leaves. It’s where chickens are thrown after they die. I built the fence in 1999 when we first moved in and needed a place for the dogs: Horse fencing wired to t-posts, out from the barbed wire along the property line and back again, anchored to oak trees where convenient. It never worked. The younger dog found ways out no matter what I did to prevent him climbing over or digging under. The older dog nodded sagely and chuckled at my frustration. We built a better dog run behind the house, and let this one come down piecemeal as the use of the lot evolved. Finally after many years there was only one section left, obscured by long grass and curling blackberries, down where no one goes. I chanced to see it under the light winter vegetation and thought, hm. Clean-up time.

I waded in with gloves and pliers. Last year’s blackberries cracked underfoot and whipped around me. Thorns left red trails on my arms and embedded themselves in The World’s Best Pants. Obscure natural objects, twigs and leaves and spiked seedpods, crawled into my socks and flew down my shirt. I cut the mounting wires one at a time and wrenched the fencing away from the t-posts, struggling against eight years of jungle. It was all dead and dry, brittle in some places, strong as rope in others. I stomped my way over dead branches to where long ago I had foolishly nailed a section to a tree, felt the teeth of a long-dead vine, and watched a dark red stream wind its way through the hairs on my forearm. How picturesque, I thought: Blood artfully splattering along the back of my hand. A warrior of the garden am I.

I didn’t want it to get on my clothes but the next thing I did was inadvertently lean on my leg and put a great dark stain on The World’s Best Pants. Fuck, said I, and walked briskly to the house, stripped in the laundry room, threw the mess in the washing machine, cleaned off my arm, saw to its healing, found an old pair of shorts, and went back to work. This was the inflexion point exposing the great error and with it, I exposed my legs to a monstrous botanical. In correcting a bloodstain on The World’s Best Pants, the wisdom of the choice of wearing them was forever rendered as wrong.

What are they, these World’s Best Pants? A product of REI, light and washable, quick-drying, dark in color. They are the Best because they are perfect for everything. I have worn them to Home Depot and in pleated style on professional visits. They have dried themselves quickly after getting caught in tropical Shanghai rainstorms. I have worn them on a fifty-mile backpacking trip nine thousand feet above sea level, and on a hundred mile canoe trip in a Utah desert. They’ve walked past fog-enshrouded ruins by San Francisco Bay and past the sun-drenched Duomo of Milan. They’ve been to restaurants and concert halls and never, at any moment, were they anything less than the perfect selection of attire.

Excepting, perhaps, that dark day I exposed them to blood and thorns and, thus crucified, to the dark whirling depths of Maytag, whence, here on this the third day, I do not yet know if they have been resurrected. In hope my faith clothes me.

Just punishment, perhaps, are the angry red rashes now crawling along my left leg. Poison oak is an invidious thing. In wintertime her telltale three-lobed leaves are not in evidence. Her seasonal shootings are dead, lost amongst the dead of a hundred other plants. But her oils, her flaming treacherous oils, lie in wait on random branch and twig. One slight brushing, one microscopic introduction, and infection is assured. Itching and burning, she dares me to rub it, scratch it, tear it away! but I know I must not, I must resist, I must bear it lest the slightest disturbance set it to spreading. I’ve had worse before: At nine or ten I was enveloped in Webelos campfire smoke rolling from burning deadwood that had lain nigh a small shrub of poison oak, and missed a week of school for a swollen burning face and half-closed lungs. The experience left me unable to approach a three-lobed leaf without activating triple levels of instinctual alarm. But with those leaves in abeyance, there were no alarms, there was no warning, and now there is no relief. It crawls along the entire back side of my leg, itching and tickling and burning. A hundred nibbling termites, a thousand hungry ants, twelve hundred dozen tiny needles inscribing the tiniest little circles under the first layer of my skin. Every step tickles the infected area with light brushings of cotton pants-leg, disturbs the leg-hairs, awakens the nerves, encourages the poison to bump up the agony one more notch. Nor can I touch it: Any disturbance will send it into my bloodstream, and it will pop up in some other part of my withering carcass. Already I itch on the inside edge of my kneecap, and the underside of my left arm, and the back of my neck; and a dozen imagined discomforts from eye to ankle call out to my shaking, quaking fingernails. The night is young, and the door is indeed ajar – the door … to Hell!

Sniff Me Out Like I Was Tanqueray

So I never heard of Amy Winehouse until some news headline flashed by, and here she is winning Grammys ‘n shit. Popped her name into pandora to give a listen. Sounds fine, whatever. She’s got a pseudo-R&B thing going on, and maybe I don’t listen to enough pop radio to keep my pseudo-R&B ears tuned in to the subtleties. I like Alicia Keyes, maybe they’re a similar genre, what do I know. The great thing about the article I read was it said Herbie Hancock won something too. Yay jazz!

The school went to a local jazz fest recently and it reminded me of my storied youth, though I admit the best part was seeing a band from another school with a kid in it we’ve known since baby days, and his parents. There are some fine young musicians out there. I always tell ‘em, don’t give it up. I can still hear an old neighbor of mine, telling me when I was seventeen or so, don’t give it up! Well, I did. But the genetics ring true and both my boys are performing, one way or another, and the day isn’t over for me yet either. Seriously thinking of getting a replacement horn and cranking it up again. What’s an hour a day when all I’m committed to otherwise is a serious new job, working out daily, real writing (don’t laugh), revitalizing my ancient Jeep in time for summer trips and getting some of the landscaping done we’ve been putting off all decade. What’s another hour a day, right?

The next obvious question has this answer: It helps somehow, I don’t know why, it just does. I suppose if I really needed to stop blogging I would, but then I may as well stop checking the online news, or reading other people’s stuff, or I don’t know, and would that really serve a purpose? Noop.

So what about the singing, you ask. You don’t? Anyway, we had a great quartet, we did, but it is defunct, as one guy retired and another one quit the firm and took his wife and four kids and moved away to Montana. And then last week I ran into him in the stairwell. Seems he couldn’t sell his house. No surprise. Then he couldn’t get an engineering job in Montana. It’s like you have to know people or something. Well, um, yes, or rather I should say: DUH. So he came back and the good news is the company hired him back but the bad news is he now works for the other guy who was in the quartet, and he’s getting to know him a whole lot better than he ever really wanted to and doesn’t think he could take singing with him on top of working with him. So no reunion. I said I understood totally, and it was true. I know exactly what he’s talking about. And that’s where I leave it.

So, speakin’ of jazz, doesn’t Family Guy have the best music? And The Incredibles. I may have to go get the soundtrack. Every house needs some faux sixties secret agent music, and I don’t mean just tracks from Austin Powers (though we have that too). Yup. What was that music Bob Wilkins played on Creature Features again? I don’t care if it was cheesy late-night seventies television, it was absolutely brilliantly inappropriate to accompany second-rate horror movies.

I’m beating myself up here. Why do I think blog posts should be short and have a point? Something’s nagging me about it. I’d better post this before that nagging voice compels me to do something rash. (And I don't mean put in even more links.)

Don't Really Feel Like It But What The H

It's like when the odometer rolls over. Do you notice? Take a picture and blog about it? Or just let it pass because after all, you're not quite THAT much of a geek. Well, I am. Last night at quarter past eleven this blog got its ten thousandth visitor. They were running XP and IE7 and surfing off a Verizon server in Virginia, whence they searched on Twitter backgrounds and decided to check out my post about mine. (I don't twitter anymore, btw. What a stupid waste of time and bandwidth that was.) Now I'm posting about it because there are small and unexpected stories in pseudo-random numbers. Well, 10,000 isn't pseudo-random, is it, it's, I dunno, semi-arbitrary. Whatever.

Super Duper Pooper Stupor

Saturday I went out into the light drizzle and fed the chickens. Whenever they see a human, they start up a righteous cackling. Not the cackling of the fine-feathered matrons of River City, but a horrendous bird-brained racket. No pick-a-little talk-a-little pick-a-little talk-a-little cheep-cheep-cheep talk-a-lot pick-a-little-more backed by the Buffalo Bills singing Go-o-ood Ni-i-ight Ladie-e-es in euphonious barbershop harmony, but instead ten harsh throats going ka-kaaa and pa-kaaa and pe-kreee with absolutely no musical or aesthetic sense whatsoever.

They rushed the gate as I ducked in, but I sent them scurrying. I picked my way to the feed can across a slippery slope of inch-thick mud and chicken shit hoping to God none of them managed to trip me, and tossed them a few cupfuls of laying pellets. They ignored me from that point and fell to like the ravenous omnivores they are; and just like certain other denizens of this planet, even though there was plenty enough for everyone, there had to be one or two who just couldn't let others have any at all, not if they could help it anyway.

Thus occupied, they didn't interfere with my egg hunt. I found four. This is not a productive time of year for chickens cooped up under a leafless oak tree in the dead of winter. Two of the eggs were truly disgusting. Probably all right to eat, but the shells were so enormously filthy I just couldn't bring myself to take them to the house. They were crusted with chicken crap and stained with brown liquids that looked like the bloody execrations of a very sick animal. Rather than bring these pestilential objects into the kitchen, I tossed them to the ground for the chickens to consume. But they didn't break: they just went thud. I picked them up and threw them down: thud. I tried again with greater force. Thud again, leaving egg-shaped indentations in the wet ordurous earth. Truly the eggshell is among Nature's finer feats of engineering. Finally I wanged 'em against an upright support and they cracked, and their mothers and aunts rushed to the scene like cannibals after the missionary's daughter and they were gone. I took the other two with me, closed the gate, and left. I left my shoes in the garage before going inside.

Later, I had to go somewhere, and was met when putting those shoes back on with a most arresting combination of olfactory experiences. I decided the shoes needed cleaning. I cleaned them as shoes are best cleaned: with a walk across a wet lawn. I kept going, through the weeds and across the sodden lot to the property line, where I noticed one of my neighbor's trees had been knocked over by the great wind of a week ago. If I had a working chainsaw I'd work him a deal for firewood, but I don't, so I walked back and got in my Jeep and went and did whatever. Whatever became whatnot, and then this and then that and then the other thing, and I moved on into other stages of life, until tonight when it all came back to me in a pungent rush as I drove home from work and understood what it means to allow the slightest amount of mud and excrement to curl up the side of your shoe and escape the cleansing effects of damp grass, only to flake off onto your truck's floorboards and develop a finely matured fragrance over the course of a sunny winter's day. By the time I got home I was fairly giddy with it. Good night, ladies!

Stupor Tuesday

I guess a bunch of people vote tomorrow, including me. But since I registered as Decline To State, I can't vote for a presidential candidate unless I request a ballot from either the Democratic or the American Independent party. I really don't care to choose between Clinton and Obama -- I'll happily leave that to the more interested and qualified folks. Obviously I also can't be bothered with the American Independents (I think that's who also threw open their primary, don't really remember). If memory serves (love that phrase, learned it from Mr. Spock), they consider themselves to be strict constitutionalists, but they are not, holding instead a number of predictable right-wing positions. They mainly exist so a bunch of small-government malcontents can band together and have tax-deductible dinner meetings and feel they are doing something rather than sitting on their behinds complaining and you know what? Nothing wrong with that. It's like these idiots in my home town. I disagree with the Boy Scouts' and the Marines' gay exclusion policies but also disagree that the Berkeley City Council should strip public access away from them for it. However, I have to hand respect to the people of that city for getting down to the public meetings and doing something, whether I agree with it or not, rather than just sitting around complaining.

(That my position on the BSA etc. amounts to enabling bad policy is a good subject for another post. Not this one.)

(No cites for the Berkeley thing but basically, the city has driven Boy Scouts out of schools and the Sea Scouts away from the Marina, and is now trying to drive away a USMC recruiting post.)

So, this election. The really big issue in our great state has to do with adjusting a few Indian gaming arrangements. All I know about it comes from the TV commercials.

Vote YES because it will generate more gambling tax revenue for a state that is suffering a horrible budget shortfall, and the opposition is in cahoots with the casinos in Nevada.

Vote NO because it will benefit four tribes but none of the others, and the money won't go to education, and it's all a big scam anyway.

Well, I don't know. The one thing no one talks about is where this alleged windfall will come from.

It's a fact that California's Indians got screwed by history, not just via the initial slaughter of gun and disease but also by subsequent isolation and enforced impoverishment. They are to be commended for coming up with a means to attract revenue into the reservations. This helped spread some of the good fortune enjoyed by the tribe or two whose lands happen to sit above productive oilfields. I oppose gambling but I also oppose undue restrictions on what people can do, and if people can make a living running a casino, fine, let 'em.

Trouble is, a liberal attitude like this can lead to problems in the wider society. That's why we end up with laws against gambling or drug use or street-walking or smoking in restaurants. If an action harms others, even indirectly, it is appropriate to consider outlawing it. So California doesn't allow Nevada-style gaming. But the state doesn't have jurisdiction over the Indian reservations (until now, I guess, with this attempt to tax them somehow), and so here we are.

Here we are watching a crowd of proud and calm-visaged Native Americans assembled by a marketing team to maximize this powerful image and encourage a vote for a structural change that will allow the "in" tribes more slot machines and thus allow them to help not only themselves but our very cash-strapped state as well. Good message, but.

Casinos create no wealth whatsoever. They do an awesome job of redistributing it. They redistribute it FROM retired persons and gambling addicts and TO the gaming professionals and consultants who have either come from Atlantic City or defected from Nevada, and to the tribes that hired them, and to the local services that ride their coattails, and to the local governments that tax them in turn ... but it comes FROM retired persons, gambling addicts and (according to my unscientific surveys) Asian immigrants, who can ill afford it too but there are matters of culture to consider, I suppose.

This is really the crux of the matter to me. The money they are all talking about does not come from some industry that develops products of value to Mankind and sells them at a profit to the world, thus building California's economy (e.g. semiconductors, oil products, rice, almonds, movies, computer games etc.). It all comes from Californians who, to one degree or another, have a problem that the proximity of a casino is only making worse. And no one who thinks it's a good idea to fund police and firemen on the pocketbooks of even more families left on the edge of ruin by a gambling-addicted mother or father is going to get any support from me. So I will vote NO on those propositions, even if by doing so I'm not addressing the real problem. (Unless of course I change my mind before morning.)

UPDATE: Read about 'em here and am even more convinced they're a bad idea. All they do is allow more slot machines and give the casino operators a pass on environmental impact. The only difference between these sweetheart deals and the deals that handed so much of the state over to oil, water, gasoline, tire and large-scale farming interests in the past century is that those bad guys were white men in dark suits, whereas these are fronted by a few well-chosen representatives of everyone's favorite noble-visaged victims of same.

Stupor Bowl

OK, I admit it, here before any score, though I really don't care about New England or New York or New South Wales or anyplace else so far away, I kind of want the Giants to win. Why? Teams that never lose piss me off.

UPDATE:
*Whoo!* Ha ha ha! Yes! Ha. Yeah. Woo. Well. That was fun. *sigh*

Three Oreos and a Warm Root Beer

I stop myself from writing in this blog a lot. Sometimes more than once per day. I have a peculiar attitude about the whole thing and can never seem to wrestle myself into any sort of consistency.

The trouble is I don't want to be trivial, not in a trivial sort of way. I don't mind being trivial if it's sort of interesting -- oftentimes interestingly trivial blogs are the very best kind. But it's very hard to see anything interesting in my own trivialities. So I come up with a dumb title and write a couple paragraphs and then go, what the flip am I doing, and back out without saving.

I could have done that just now. But I didn't, somehow. I seem bound and determined to write something, to go to the world, hey, you don't care but here I am. Here's me. Yep. Right here. Hey.

The real trouble, of course, is a) I am altogether too serious ... charming and humorous enough in person if I want to be, but put a keyboard in my hand and the light wit and dancer-like physicality go right on out the window, and b) I have way too much on my mind of a nature that I just can't share with y'all, much as I'd like to, much as it would probably help me to, but that would be selfish, and really, you don't want to know. Other people's strangely inexplicable problems can be diverting for a little while, but only a little while, and you didn't come here for that, so why start.

But tonight is different. Why? It's no secret to those whose opinions matter (and a few whose don't) that I'm deeply conflicted over this married-going-on-twenty thing, that I've got strong impulses yanking me in diverse directions; yet it seems that when my wife is out of town, I just can't get anything started, and I end up losing the entire weekend to a weird sense of uncertainty, like a ship tossing in the ways without lines to hold her in or sails and oars to take her out. Her thought was, hey, you've got all weekend, you can write. My thought was, hey, I've got all weekend, I can focus on some household project or other that people are usually in the way of. The reality was, hey, what have I done anyway. Pretty much nuthin'.

So I blog. Blogito ergo sum. A reminder I'm alive (breathing was never much proof of it).

Well, I did order tickets. That's a commitment. It will be interesting to see what we do with it. I need to break up some mental concrete and that's one way. Indeed, it's been all I can think about. The need for escape is that great. I don't mean marital escape -- we're going together. Maybe it'll be a make it or break it thing. That's fine. Truth will out.

Also went to Borders, because I have several gift cards in my wallet and I'm tired of sitting on all that bulky plastic. Cruised around. Leaned against a shelf reading bits and pieces of various books in the "19th Cent US History" section. Went away without buying a thing. I don't like to stack up unread books, and I've already got a stack. Besides, whenever I read something, I feel like writing; and sometimes I actually start to, but it doesn't go very far, mainly because my thoughts cannot stay on topic but instead fall off into the myriad channels that I claim I can't (or won't) write about here. It is possible that I'm simply going crazy. Sometimes I think that would be the easier path. But it doesn't really work that way, does it.

I'm surprisingly positive for one thirty in the morning. Must be the Oreos and root beer.

So here's what I got at the silent auction that was part of a fundraiser for the high school jazz band. We had a spaghetti dinner, and I spent an hour and a half shoveling spaghetti onto plates before I got to sit down and eat some. When I saw this thing, I had to have it. If you have to ask why, well, you know how that goes.


It's a telephone.