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Water St, Ketchikan, AK, 29 May 08

Steak and Whisky

Fires ring the valley. Last night’s smoke painted the entire sky with sunset. Our foreign guests wanted a good steak dinner and we drove to it through an apocalyptic twilight. We sat under a floor to ceiling wine rack and talked, and talked not of business. I had a local cabernet and a rib eye and for dessert, since it was all on someone’s expense account, a splash of the Laphraoig – smoke and oak and a dozen gentle flavors that were carried like cold steam, like the swirling mist of a fumarole, through every permeable membrane. Home to bed, a smoke-red half moon rising, then this morning’s sunlight attenuated as if hesitant to start the day.

More on Doing the Write Thing

“Hey, Frank.” Staff hadn’t started yet.

“Hey.”

“Written any songs lately?”

“Huh. Why do you ask?”

“Cause you write songs, or do music, or stuff like that.”

“Yeah. No, I have a book where I’ve written down some ideas, maybe like six songs’ worth, but, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Even on weekends, man. I need more time than that to quiet my brain and get in that space, you know, where I can write something. Can’t do it. Not working at IMC. This place just takes up way too much mental energy.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Boy, do I. But it’s nice to know it’s not just me.

Doing the Write Thing

So I'm sitting out on my driveway, the moon a light yellow balloon rising over the black silhouette of an oak tree, all the lights off, stars overhead. Distant dogs are howling, I don't know if at each other or the rich blood-scented presence of a coyote somewhere in the creekbed blackness. I'm sitting out here to be with my dogs. They were all alone for fourteen hours as I stayed at the office and about flew apart with joy when I came home, so I figured, if I'm going to do the write thing, I'll do it out here where they have the option of sitting at my feet.

Or not. I don't know where they are.

Oh, yes I do. How'd she get so wet?

Alone because my son is just waking up in Venice (It., not CA) and my other son is visiting a friend in San Luis Obispo and my wife is in a motel room near him, as they are on a college-sniffing road trip down away south. Alone because sometimes it's wonderful to be alone -- alone but for howling dogs and peacocks, alone but for crickets and the high-pitched white noise in my ears, alone but for the moon and seventeen oak trees and a thousand visible stars and two dogs and an outside cat. The cat says hi.

Long office days because we have customers who wish to ship product and cannot if our product in turn doesn't work exactly right or, as is often the case, something else in their design doesn't work exactly right and as the major supplier and partner, it is in our interests to help them fix it; and one of these very motivated customers has sent a small team across the ocean to encourage us. Very few things are as motivating to have in your office as a cadre of visiting Japanese businessmen. Or as pleasant, really. The Japanese national character is well refined. I mean, what if they were Germans? Agh.

At the present rate of decay, it will soon be considered impolite, and then politically incorrect, and then hate speech, and then illegal, to refer to concepts such as "national character". Be sure to get your truth now while you can still afford it.

Like any love affair worth remembering, let us keep this posting pointless and short. Howzabout a picture to close it with. Here's me after discovering the cruise ship has run out of Alaskan Amber.

More Randomny

Went to two parties last night.

First at a lovely little house with a cozy and fully shaded back yard full of flowers. Etta retired as a schoolteacher and filled her yard with friends, family, fellow teachers, and lots and lots of wonderful food: Ribs, chicken, salads, beer, a margarita bowl, cupcakes …

She was a delight: The happiest, lovingest person. Her story: Escaped a violent environment with her three young children, came west, volunteered in classrooms, was encouraged to go to Sac State, got her credentials at forty, and taught grade school for two decades while her kids went on and got college degrees.

The most precious moment, one I will never forget: A friend brought a present, a large frame beautifully wrapped. Etta opened it and her face blossomed into the most moving expression of wonder I have ever seen. It was a resolution, passed that day by the State Legislature, honoring her life, her years teaching, her contributions to the local schools and children, written and signed by Karen Bass, the first African-American female Speaker of the California Assembly. (Sort of an added bonus, that last bit.) I was very moved by the whole thing.

And of course we couldn’t get out without more hugs, and assurances that we had enough to eat, and a promise to come back and borrow some books.

Then we went on to one of our pre-Burning Man things, held in a warehouse with a dusty half-acre backyard. I helped erect a tower that will go up on the playa, and there were numerous other projects of various sorts going on. Go see B/M pics, you’ll get an idea what I mean when I say a tall bicycle shaped like a palm tree, a huge toaster built onto the frame of a golf cart, a lit-up platform complete with stripper pole built onto the bottom half of a chopped Toyota pickup, a giant foam turtle motivated by the mechanical parts of several bicycles and lit up with battery-powered lightstrings. Other stuff, too, such as the consumption of beer and copious amounts of cussing when something went wrong. Fun.

Today I finally got my 220V line into conduit and into the eighty-foot ditch and the ditch refilled with dirt. One step closer to the backyard spa I was told I was putting in when my retaining wall was half done. Now if I only knew half the material I will be presenting to some eager young computer scientists on Monday I would feel like I accomplished something. I’m okay with these guys knowing more than me, I’m just not okay with me not knowing everything a so-called professional should about the platform architecture du jour. But I guess if I make it fun enough my lack of detailed knowledge won’t be noticed much. Or if it does, who cares, young punks anyway.

Speakin’ of young punks, let’s go politics. I don’t know what the big deal is with the Guantanamo ruling. So the young punks there are subject to the same rules if they’d been on American soil after all. Okay. I’m fine with that and McCain’s complaints fall on deaf ears here. We’re a shitload more generous with our combatant prisoners than Germany or Britain anyway, I don’t care how much they complain about us. Old punks.

“I have blisters on my fingers!”

Some young adults are playing rock and roll upstairs. Ooh, I hear my almost-adult’s trumpet joining in. Very cool. Boatloads better than those damn video games. Young punks! Get off my lawn!

Twenty

1988 — a year from graduating college (late) — thought we couldn't get pregnant — honeymoon plane tickets in pocket ...


2008 — one child out of high school, one still in — good times outweigh the bad — taking the rest of it one year, one month, one day at a time ...

Cruise Cuties

The stewards take pride in their mad towel skilz and I took pictures of some of the results. My fave was a hanging monkey, but I just now discovered I upf*cked and deleted it and who knows what else off one of my cameras before copying it off. Oops.

 
 

We won a book on how to make these by being way too entertaining when they dragged us up on stage. In fact I'm told that was when I was most relaxed on the whole trip. Too bad I wasn't so much during the karaoke contest -- I picked Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Tip: When competing with a bunch of fellow amateurs, don't try to be Art Garfunkel, just go with that guy from Creed.

UPDATE: I found the monkey!

Done

Thought I was. Sometimes when you have so much to say, it's better to say nothin'. But I was listening to some music and wondered who was that lady singing and OH! MY!


Everything else I have to say is better left un. Wait, no. Just some of it. The rest, okay, maybe later. (That picture is starting to cheer me up.)

The Smallest Primary

CA has another one tomorrow (Tuesday 3 June). Nothing on it but a couple of competing Props. Also a local primary for Congressman but I'm not registered Repub so probably won't get to participate. No matter. I'll vote anyway, however I'm allowed. It's never, ever too much trouble to use a franchise countless people have died to win, or suffered for lack of having -- and in too much of the world can still only dream of.

So what are these Propositions, you ask, you imaginary reader who gives a shit? They are about changing the State Constitution to make property grabs under eminent domain more difficult. It speaks well for our society that they have to sell these things as limiting government power. But according to what I hope is an objective comparison, one of them is a total scam. Boo, hiss, and no on that one. The other, among other things, phases out the possibility of rent control. Yay! I'm voting for that!

What? Well, I like things simple -- you might say I require them to be simple -- and simply put, rent control is bad. It's good short-term for a few people here and there who can't afford housing in a given area. But essentially it allows local government to control small property owners' rent policies, and this low-key fascism has actually reduced the quantity and quality of affordable housing in areas where it's tried. Quite the opposite of the intention. Here's something to read but let's not argue about it, okay? I don't have time.

And again, IF they are on my ballot, I will not vote for Ose because he's a smarmy political scumbag, I will not vote for McClintock because he's an out of work carpetbagger scamming for a job, I will not vote for Jones because she's a straightforward Republican newbie and though I like the straightforward newbie part I don't like the down-the-line Republican part, and I will hence vote for Terbolizard because he's a San Fran native and goes to Burning Man and is a radical property rights activist who probably smokes pot, yee hah.

Randomny

I'm back. Seven-day cruise along the Alaska Panhandle. Pics later, maybe.

Apparently 33% of people don't send in census forms, so the gummint is thinking to add prize drawings. That right there tells you our society is on the verge of collapse. Serving on a jury and filling out your census forms are civic duties you have no business not doing. Well, unless you have a philosophical reason not to send in your family info. If you don't do it for an actual reason, I respect that. It's a free country, or could be, so go ahead and don't send it in. But if you're just lazy, then what the fuck, huh? You need a fuckin' prize drawing? Puss.

I am so sick of Obama. He has no credentials beyond the ability to get elected to the Senate and run an exciting Presidential campaign*. I am so sick of Hillary. She is bound and determined to prove either that a Democrat can be a fighter, or that the Democrats are hopelessly broken, or that she's a psycho control freak. I'll take the first one, but I don't really believe it. And now Moveon is trying to make McCain look Bush-like. Of course they are, they're desperate, especially now that they oppose free speech.

* - Obviously, given history and all, this is not a disqualification.

Gawd. I go away for a week and the world gets even stupider.

Yes, McClellan is a scumbag, especially for claiming he knew the shit was wrong even while he was spouting it. He's worse than McNamara. It's one thing to lie for the good of the party (or of the corporation, after all, I'm in marketing these days), but if people are dying for it, you need to stop cold, or face a chain whipping. But! If he can make one last sad buck writing a book about it, let him. This is America, after all.

The cruise ship was full of old married people. I so wanted to ask them how they did it. I really want to know. But I wouldn't get the whole story. "Oh, we're in love," or whatever. No. That's not how men work. They have their own ways of keeping their sanity through decades of getting older and meaner while married to someone getting older and meaner too, and the immense profitability of pornography and worldwide prostitution under various labels proves it. Given endless news stories about substantial news-worthy men getting caught dining out on the wrong gash, I have a hard time believing more than a small percentage of us nasty old boys are truly keeping it where it belongs. The vast majority don't get caught, is all, and have found ways to maintain a veneer of rare innocence. This is, of course, why prostitution remains illegal. The lawmakers have to maintain their cover just as much as everyone else. I hate the hypocrisy*. But fuck, it's probably all for the best. We can't go back to the days of well-heeled men keeping mistresses, evidently, and paying for it outright is just so soul-less, so empty, and damages lives and the whole bit. At the end of the day, this enlightened age probably owes its stability to women who let their husbands go away on long fishing trips.

* - Which is why I don't do it, which is why I'm getting even meaner as I get older.

Four seventeen a gallon! And we don't even use all that much Middle East oil. My preferred supplier (Arco, cuz they're cheap) uses none. Evidently someone fucked up predicting demand for diesel fuel and this is driving up the raw oil price? I don't buy it. Even NPR's sober explanation of this business made no sense (last I heard, which was like two weeks ago). Doesn't matter anyway. We need to shift off the oil base. There's plenty of it still out there, in our own territory (can you spell ANWR?), and we should use it not to keep the prices down but to keep the prices under control, rising steadily but not at a catastrophic rate, so that we maintain a strong enough economy to pay for development of the next big thing. After all, R&D is expensive and simply doesn't happen when too many people are starving. The time to switch is now and not when we're desperate. Of course, our government is at cross-purposes on this, as you'd expect any government to be. And the oil companies are just trying to milk their investments, like good stewards of capital should. Bastards.

Enough pointless raving. Time to go get the dogs from their puppy doctor visit.