Late December

Remembering back before they put up the interstate, we had traffic round here, and visitors, and assorted good times.

No, I'm just procrastinating. I'm really good at that.

Another Day, Another Verbose Exploration of Nothing

Blogs used to be short and spontaneous. Still can be. I need to work on not being so damn serious.

This one's about done. Will expand on that later.

Spent the evening in my neighbor's garage assembling his new ping pong table and drinking beer from the kegerator. Lockdown, home of the Folsom Prison Brews. Pretty good stuff: Dark and heady with a rich nutty taste and just the slightest ale-like kickback. I actually like it better than the standard for local ales, Sierra Nevada, which comes out of Chico and I believe is distributed nationally.

Speakin' o' Chico, my mother was born there, because her parents eloped to there, because her father's family lived there, because her father's father had worked for Mrs. Bidwell and I guess they stuck around awhile after her death. It's through this connection that I'm only six degrees from Abraham Lincoln.

Says at Wikipedia that she knew John Muir. Well, I don't need that, I'm only two degrees from him thanks to my paternal grandfather, so nyah.

It's funny: This blog is now starved of interesting content in part because some of the good stuff gets said at Facebook, or in comments there, or in comments at other blogs, or even (surprisingly enough) in actual conversations with actual people. It's the latter that I wish to do more. Now, offline interaction is totally fair game for online content. Really needn't be mentioned in this context of already-said-can't-say-again. But words are still words, and somewhere along the line I developed an aversion to copying, so if I say something clever to someone, I really don't feel right repeating it here; and this is doubly true if I said it online somewhere. This is one reason why blogs (or mine anyway) are dying. Further, as blogs are to books, so Facebook and Twitter are to blogs. Ultimately, though we are all enabled for a form of self-publishing, in the end very few of us will contribute anything worth a damn. There will just be more words; and thanks to the impermanent nature of digital publication, those words won't last very long either.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, wot.

What blogs do I admire? These two, for starters. Why? Because he simply tells his truth. I stop myself from doing that. Most people do. Most blogs are purposely entertaining, or expand on a narrowly defined aspect of someone's life, or in some way or other obscure the real person underneath. Dr Zen is not obscuring. I am, because I must. I look to a day when I no longer need to. What that will require is yet to be discovered. May never happen. I've a sense that if I wrote truly and honestly about myself, I would create something ugly, and I don't want to create something ugly. So I remain vague like this, poised on the edge of changes that may never come. It's frustrating.

It's also why I keep blogging.

Zen, BTW, does not read this, because (he says) I am "an unrepentant racist". It would be enlightening to discover how this is so, but my breath I am not holding.

Xmas Past

Just past midnight already, so this will be short.

I dread Christmas, then get cranky about it as the internal pressure mounts ... Then it's here and by the end of the day I'm happy with it, content with it, so deep inside it I have a hard time imagining the world outside it.

That'll pass. But right now I'm all alone in a house quiet but for Anonymous 4 singing On Yoolis Night (and of course the buzzing in my ears), my chair an island in a sea of wrapping paper and piled boxes and indescribably multivarious objects. The tree glows, I'm getting cold (we didn't have a fire), I'm fading out ... So, what was Christmas?

Christmas was weeks of fretting over what to get for whom and when to go shopping. Shopping requires a mood, and long work days and evening meetings and the never-ending identity crisis were not conducive. But it always comes together in the final few days. Partly because I get ruthless and suddenly can't give a shit about my job. Partly because close deadlines wonderfully focus my attention. Partly because the spirit finally penetrates and I loosen up and find myself surprisingly able.

Until that time, I'm angry. Maybe that's not the right word, but it seems close enough. I'm made cranky and even more self-loathing than usual by the annual avalanche of realization that I buy things to show my love because I feel inadequate at showing it in other ways. I really don't think I'm inadequate like that, but there are pieces missing, instincts that are weak, parts of our various relationships in which I cannot show leadership and am more or less missing in action, and filling Christmas with the sort of cheer that attends wrapping paper and getting new things that reflect some thought and familiarity is at least something concrete that I can do. So the season progresses with me being cranky over that.

And then it starts to come together, and I find a thing here and a thing there that I know he or she will like and my heart suddenly fills with a weird joy that almost makes me cry and I think I must be emotionally unbalanced or something. But it passes and come Christmas Eve, all is well, and I am just happy.

Christmas was hours spent talking to Dell Computer and FedEx to prevent my wife's purple new laptop showing up at the door while she was home only to have it get delivered at the house anyway, and she even signed for it, and I felt like a total schmuck, and today she was pleased and surprised and had no idea and thought she was signing for our kid's new printer or something. So she said. I'm not so sure, because of an unguarded late-night comment a week ago, but such things can be forgotten, and no matter.

Christmas (Eve) was dinner at Mikuni and a stroll in sub-freezing temps down an over-decorated street and Lessons & Carols at Folsom's 150-year-old Episcopal church, where the comforting rituals of my childhood were somewhat informally replayed and my boys got a refresher glimpse of the church thing and my mother got to sit and sing with me and my family and I was happy to slow down and ponder the meaning of this mixed festival and holy day from within the thumping rhythm of old Anglican hymns, Venite adoremus Dominum.

Christmas was sleeping in and wondering at the phenomenon of everyone else sleeping in too, having presents at eleven or so, a late post-noon breakfast of eggs and ham, too much random food throughout the day, a new board game played, a new DVD watched, lots of drive-by huggings, homemade lasagna, self-absorbed playing with something new, shopping adventures recounted, and finally, while I'm trying to be quiet and focus, my mother carefully and not very quietly folding the colored tissue paper for next year.

Yes, we keep bags and tissue (for stuffing) and bows. Ribbons and wrapping paper are for the fireplace, but the rest of it lasts for years and years.

I've been at this for an hour? I'm a slow typist. Time to retire. I hope your Christmas was, like mine, better than expected. And if you don't do Christmas, that's fine, I hope it was a good day, I'm just not going to be unnecessarily polite about it.

Wordless Wednesday #3

Wordless Wednesday on Friday

Wordless Wednesday on Thursday

Wordless Wednesday #2

Wordless Wednesday on Tuesday

Wordless Wednesday on Monday

By Design

The most brilliantly complex systems come about by accident and evolution. Weather. Biology. Religion.

Our society has transformed Christmas into a festival of excess. Excess materialism, excess food intake, excess expressions of cheer. That's not all bad. Some of it is very good. There are also intense moments of introspection and spirituality and love of family, friends, people. All good.

Also a time of stress and melancholy, anger and suicide, sadness, family strife, and eleventh hour reconciliation. Name your nectar or name your poison, you will get more than you expect over Christmas.

As we've transformed Christmas, so we've transformed New Years. More excess -- but now it's a past-stress blowout. Fun, parties, fireworks (if you live in my neighborhood); or home alone if time and chance put you in that space -- and always the resolutions.

I don't make them usually, but I might this year. I feel it's a brilliant design to place new beginnings and new resolutions a week after the premier festival. So much about Christmas tangles our children and our childhoods and our marriages and our loves and losses, our families and those indescribable relationships, dreams not met and targets just missed, tangles all these and more -- faith lost, edging to restoration, almost there until the candles are blown out -- Christmas tangles all the loose ends into a beautifully lit ball and tosses it into our laps ... And then what do we do with it?

Roll it out onto the floor for a week and start a new year resolved not to do THAT again, or THIS, or SOME OTHER THING, and who knows, maybe this time one of those resolutions will stick.

I don't have any really bad habits beyond staring at a computer too much, but I can think of a thing or two I must resolve to change. So maybe this year, the brilliance of placing a few new bets a few days after reaping a lifetime's harvest of old ones will pay off. Time will tell.

The Tools

I keep forgetting to post these. Put an ad on Craigslist, two nibbles, no resolution as yet, and Annie wants to see the pics again, so here we are.

Of course I forget the d's and here it is midnight, I need to hit the rack. Suffice it to say the table saw and planer / jointer are fifty to sixty years old and run like old tractors (i.e. they'll never quit -- tho' the ripper doesn't rip quite straight anymore). The scroll saw and sander are newer and work fine and I want to toss the old originals in too. Wife's family stuff so she might prefer to get some $$$ for it but we also just want to clear stuff out.

I wrote down the makers / model numbers somewhere but I can't be arsed finding that now. I know the saw is a Power King 280 and a web search found an entire community of old woodworking tool geeks who collect, restore and use these old things. Who knew?

Friday Fourteen

Sunday after Thanksgiving. South bound. Two hundred miles to the next city. Gas light on. No idea where's the next gas station. Good times.


Monday afternoon, headed home, gas light on again, drove all along Highway 1, nary a fuel stop, I swear Newport Beach must have passed a law against gas stations. Finally solved it by going inland. Going back, Catalina Island out on the Pacific calm and bright, I can see the attraction.


Still find these things around unexpected corners.


I got out for a walk on the beach.



Every time I see this thing it fascinates me. It hulks over Huntington Beach. Still don't know what it is exactly.


The Pier at Huntington Beach as seen while making a right turn onto the PCH from Main St.


The highway goes under LAX. Top was down, camera propped on top of the windshield, yeah, I'm dangerous like that.


Walked about Venice Beach right around sundown.






And went for the freeway, and six hours home again.

Wordless Wednesday #1

attribution

Roads Taken And Not

My son is doing a paper for an English class and typical of students aiming towards Engineering, finding he doesn't have (or thinks he doesn't have) the right sort of mind to analyze a poem.

"There's really nothing there," he says. "Just the poem, and a bunch of people giving their opinions on it. Nothing definite."

Math and physics are definite. This is what makes them easier to do. But college also teaches us to write about things we will never understand. And so he is writing about Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It's a lovely poem, simple of imagery and rhythm and rhyme, and as a well for pondering, bottomless. I'm reading it so I can better proofread his paper later. I enjoy reading it. Rhyme and rhythm assist the mind in framing concepts. Freeform poetry also has its place, but honestly, a lot of freeform poetry is little more than offhand prose written by a lazy poet.

My simple take? Choices are choices. We always have roads not taken. Once done, our sigh may be of regret or relief, but the choice itself cannot be wrong. It's the choice we make and that makes it right. What we do on the road now chosen, how we seize it and make the most of it, is what makes all the difference.

Tree Hunting

The tree farm we go to is a little family biz up a side road an hour's drive up towards the mountains. Been operating forty years. They built a quaint little Christmas village.


I could be snarky but it's nice, really, not overly commercial. They sell trees (cheap!) and ornaments and hot chocolate. Boughs are free.


I used to always say, let's take this one! Then I figured out they weren't little kids anymore who'd laugh at anything.


I always bring a saw and someone always asks, why'd we bring a saw? And we never use it.


If you cut well above ground the tree will eventually grow another main trunk for someone else. We found one nearly perfect (pics later, prolly). To cut no more than we needed I climbed up onto the cut trunk of another, three or four feet above ground, and commenced with the sawing. It fell, and I was King! I was Man, I Cut Down Tree!


It's fourteen feet tall, more or less. Thirty two bucks, something like that.


I started to get in the Christmas mood and took this picture. I'll get over it.


They had the usual life-size creche thing and the baby in the middle was rolling his eyes and going "Dad! It's 4 B.C.! It smells like a fucking barn in here! Couldn't We have waited, like, a couple thousand years? I mean, building codes. Building codes! That's all I ask. And some decent Thee-damn music!"

Three Sentences

I don't know if it's because I'm getting older and my brain is fossilizing or if it's because there is just too much unresolved nonsense rattling around in it or if it's because I've finally reached that age where the things I always really wanted to do -- e.g. travel, write, take single-malt tours of Scotland -- increasingly seem more Important and Significant than the day to day of this career begun nearly thirty years ago that's fine as jobs go but was really only meant to pay some bills, but the end result is a signal inability (if not unwillingness) to focus on the work that needs doing and instead obsess on how cool it would be if they added cable and tower tours to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Another result may be the demise of this particular blog but not yet, not until I try comment verification to fight off the rising incidence of unsolicited ad-related comment spam, a strategem that unfortunately makes a weird sort of economic sense on an internet increasingly crawled by spider-like robots weaving their sticky ad-like webs to trap errant ad-clicks and thus generate income, penny by penny, for the nameless robotmasters who lurk in windowless spam-dens when they're not lurching through harsh Floridian rays to the strip clubs that form their only connection to living, breathing human beings, never caring that this connection consists of a velvet hand reaching under their overstuffed Hawaii shirts and lifting wads of cash as the price of a smile and an aromatic whiff of fake feminine hair and other fake feminine accoutrements; these overfed grease-faced greed-heads who have perverted the web's possibilities of communication into a mine of pointless penny-snatching click counts.

Apologies for the inconvenience but the readership has declined tremendously anyway (another sign of an impending need for decision as the decline is attributable, beyond Facebook, to a signal lack of compelling material and/or consistency) and so I will consider comment verification an experiment, see if it kills the Anonymouses and their useless links which annoy me even if no readers have noticed, see what other effects there are, and enter this winter season resolved to make changes of several different types in the life that pulses quite outside the bounds of this peripheral vanity and which indeed account for the distraction and ill focus alluded to at top.

What Am I Doing Today

I know you want to know. Forthwith: Randomity.

The weather is fantastic: Clear and bright and somewhere around 70F. Yesterday it rained. The outdoor life is good.

I'm listening to a Pandora mix whose last several songs were by Kevin Yost, Animals on Wheels, Infected Mushroom, Karsh Kale, cEvin Key, Shpongle, Lali Puna, Sasha, Enigma ... You ask? Electronica with an Indian flavor. I'm diggin' it.

The Big Game is happening sometime today. I won't bother. Not a regular football fan, and I didn't go to Cal, and I don't really care that much beyond GO BEARS!

I'm reading The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. It is a fantastic book. A history of the struggle between the Russian and British Empires for domination of Central Asia and, ultimately, India. Hopkirk writes with such flair I find it a series of adventure stories I cannot put down. It's extremely topical, of course, Afghanistan being as central to the aims of the great powers now as it was then.

I'm often convinced that people who wish for an end to war are idealists who've never understood history, nor just what hangs in the balance in every conflict. Other times, I hope for the day health and security are spread more or less equally and war will not have to result from everyone protecting their own. This has to happen organically. Give it another millenium.

I'd as soon us out of Afghanistan anyway. Instead we should assist Pakistan in serving its own people, whether it really wants to or not. Undercut the appeal of the Taliban and fellow travelers, reduce the risk of those nukes going rogue, and leave the Afghans to their own devices. Fighting terrorism is just a pretext. Even with that, we don't need more troops. If we were to work effectively with the tribal leaders (which some Americans have done quite well) and make service in the Afghan army more attractive, the place would settle down well enough. Eventually.

I'm easily captivated. At any given time there are sure to be several mild infatuations in my universe. A girl smiled at me yesterday at work, a real smile, teeth and all, completely unbidden except that we've both been around for a few years and nodded in passing. She's young and tall and dark and luminous and my romantic side wonders if she's a Pashtun, distantly related to Roxana of Bactria.

Modern Balkh is one of those ancient hidden cities I'd love to visit, but it's in northern Afghanistan and that might have an impact on my life insurance rate.

I'm hesitating over placing my first Craigslist ad. My wife's father's father worked at the shipyards at Hunter's Point during the war, and was a woodworker all his life (as well as a musician), and we still have his old power tools taking up space in our garage. I need to sell them -- table saw, planer, sander, scroll saw. They are bolted to tables he built, as are the large electric motors that run the belts. We're talking old school tools here: Exposed belts and wheels turning fast. One false move and you lose a finger, or an errant small child a hand. Surely someone will want to drive out here and give me fifty bucks for the lot.

If not, what to do? We have too much stuff. Somehow the objects left by previous generations keep washing up here. None of it is particularly valuable nor especially worthless. But having it around has helped me to see how material possessions weigh down the spirit.

Catullus 85

In another forum, Hope reminds us of the timelessness of experience.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why does this happen, perhaps you ask?
I know not, but I know that it happens and I am tortured.

Catullus lived and loved and wrote in the first century before Christ.

The modern scholarly resource Wikipedia notes that Anakreon laid down a similar riff four centuries earlier.

I love and yet I do not love,
I am crazy and I am not crazy.

This is exactly what I've been saying. I've been saying I'm crazy, that I love, that I don't love, that all this trouble stems from actually being sane.

It ain't workin'.

I wrote a lot more and deleted it. It suffices to say I must be crazy. The poets say so.

Blinking in a Brighter Light

I called an old friend, just to see how he’s doing. He’s sitting in the house he grew up in, watching his father die.

I left a comment at a blog because I didn’t like the music. The comment was deleted because, said the owner, his mother reads it and he won’t allow that kind of language. I don’t remember what I said. I try to keep the obscenities down. Apparently I don’t try hard enough.

Maybe I’d been drinking. I doubt it. I don’t drink, particularly. When I do I’m a docile drunk, silly and meaningless. Then I get tired and that makes me cranky and then I might not be the winner of many popularity contests. But I wouldn’t swear about music I don’t like.

It’s hilarious what we can learn about ourselves if we open our eyes. I might do that someday.

My friend and I hadn’t spoken for a couple months. He sounded like he had been crying. His father was a big man when I knew him three decades ago, not at all the Berkeley type, with his guns and custom trucks and admiration for certain politically incorrect historical figures. He was deeply in love with the woman who lay dying then of an acute arthritis, in the dining room they converted to a bedroom when she could no longer be taken upstairs. Now he lies dying in that room too, and his son is watching over him, feeling helpless no doubt. We didn’t talk long.

I went back to the blog and listened to the music again. This time I used headphones and let it flow over me and discovered the music I didn’t like before kicked some pretty good ass. It was electronica of some form or other (there are dozens), deep and rich and well orchestrated and full of surprises. Reminded me of the music that serves as a constant backdrop at the Burn, especially at night, when a hundred dance clubs sprout like lemonade stands and the strange lights, chai tea, lovely women, oddments of booze, unbelievable costumes, dust, aching feet, three days unwashed hair, and general awesomeness of people letting loose and sharing the fruits of their hard-worked creativity run through you like electric currents and life is simple and good.

Life is good and life is temporary. The more we know of it, the shorter it gets too. We all struggle, I think, to come to terms with that. I struggle now, just learning to see the need. No, I’ve never been complacent, nor in the least bit comfortable. But that doesn’t mean I’ve had my eyes open. What then does it mean? That I should sit still and weave stronger connections with people, for one thing. And other things, even more mysterious.

Written to music generated by entering "Shpongle" into Pandora.

On the Terminology of Racism and its Origins

Early in San Francisco's history (the early 1850s), the Chinese community was highly regarded as moral, hard-working, thrifty, and dependable, a source of stability with a relatively low crime rate. In an era when skin color was destiny, the Chinese were nearly considered white men, and superior to some white men (e.g. the Irish). They were thought to represent a new partnership that would civilize the west, merging Christian and non-Christian forever. It is not by accident that Chinatown occupies the same neighborhood where San Francisco was founded, around Portsmouth Square.

Times change.

Since most Chinese immigrants were sojourners, intending to go home once they made their pile, they had little incentive to integrate, learn English, or change their mode of dress and ponytail. Self-contained communities are often thus. Look how Europeans behaved in Shanghai. This engendered a sort of suspicion, which encouraged racism and led to resentment and hostility. Before long the Chinese were considered a threat to "real" Americans' wages, their efficiency an affront to white ambition, their misunderstood culture a threat to common decency. Populist politicians and newspapers grabbed the mob by these sensitive short hairs, and bad laws and bad times followed.

I'm interested in the earliest days, when a hopeful light shone on a young community. Temporary good times are always interesting. They contrast sharply with the popularly-held image, and then lead to the drama of the down-slide; which in San Francisco's case was long and dark. Chinese remained in a second-class status well into the 1900s.

"Chinee" is considered a racist term. I'm not sure it should be, not in terms of its origin. I have heard a Chinese person say "Chinee". This is because the Chinese languages often de-emphasize closing consonants. In those many words that end in "ng", for example, the "ng" is heard much less when spoken by an Asian than by an American. While in Shanghai I tried to learn some Chinese and one of my greatest difficulties was in hearing those subtle word-endings. I wanted it spelled out in my alphabet so I could know how to form my mouth properly: Is that syllable "muh", or "mung"? My ears couldn't tell me.

And so when an American in 1853 heard a Chinese man say "Chinese", he heard him say "Chinee", and no doubt thought it both humorous and a useful sort of shorthand to mimic what he heard when referring to men from China. Not strictly very polite by modern standards, but not evidence of a pernicious racism either. Using it today would be taken as such, of course.

Same goes for "Chinaman", I suppose. It doesn't offend me at all. You wouldn't expect it to, but "Dutchman" is more or less the same when referring to us Germanics, and I simply don't mind. Indeed, the only person I know who ever says "Chinaman" is 3rd-generation, straight from Guangdong through Angel Island. Of course, he's a Bay Area kid and not subject to strange racial insecurities.

What I don't entirely get is why "Oriental" is taken as offensive. "We're not Oriental, we're Asian." Well, yes, if you must be accurate. It's true that "Oriental" means "eastern" hence reduces a people to being of a geographic aberration. Taken that way, I can see the problem. But it's a minor one, if you take our current civilization as being an outgrowth of both ends of the Eurasian continent. We only got here by different means: You by orienting yourselves to the Golden Mountain, and us more or less by occident.

Writers' Block

I stopped doing NaNoWriMo on the second or third day. The first day I started late and pumped out just under a days' worth of words derived from the experience of the night before, putting flesh to the skeleton of a whodunit I vaguely outlined a few years ago. The second and third days saw me staring at the screen, unable to weave more flesh, writing speculative story directions and self-directed curses. By the fourth day, Wednesday, still unable to continue, I decided I wasn't going to be able to. The well was empty. There simply wasn't anything there.

Too much in my head about real life. There's no escaping it, not this year. (The ten to twelve hour days with nightly conference calls to Asia may have been a factor also.)

But I also suffer from technique. I tend to try and write as though I am reading a book that I have to write so that I may read it. This means sit at a table or up in bed or in a chair with my little netbook in my lap and craft the story, beginning to end. Side notes are of course allowed. But it's a very narrow technique and it doesn't work.

Techniques vary as artists vary. The trick is to free yourself to find what works. Here is an article about some authors whose techniques work, a Writers' Block of artists for whom writer's block is an occasional annoyance but by no means lethal to the process.

Zone Ball

Picture as requested, but I'm not posting this to Facebook.


I looked a lot better in dim light. Always do. But we were both cute, and my skirt was almost as short as hers. All right, Egyptian kilt thing, whatever.

More pictures of the event in these albums here. A radio station event, sort of a local version of San Francisco's original.

Sacramento gets a lot of ribbing as a cow town, especially in comparison to the world class city an hour and a half down the freeway. It was therefore fitting that it was held in the pavilion used for livestock shows during the State Fair. It still smelled a little of cow manure. I'm not kidding.

Acres and acres of flesh. Just about every female took the opportunity to dress up their inner slut. That's not a complaint. But as the evening wore on more and more barely twenty-one year old males showed up in little or no costume except for the gangsta attitude. I especially liked it when they walked like penguins. You know, that side to side shuffle with the arms sort of hunched in non-verbal communication of all sorts of stupid shit. There was a fight early on, and some diminutive hard-ass covered with tattoos got hauled off by the sheriff, but otherwise little trouble beyond some of the punks occasionally trying to be intimidating. Failure to do so was complete.

Sex shows up on the stages had the look of an introductory course in low-level deviance offered for the wide-eyed wonder of young men still in college. Of course, their wide-eyed wonder might have been less at the overweight and badly acting blonde being "punished" with hot candle wax than at the disturbing sight of women their mother's age in heels and garters.

It was fun, because people watching is fun, and it was a hell of a deal for people watching. But when the best music of the night comes from the opening act who are dressed up like robots and playing an eighties mix, and I find myself really hoping there's another fight, I have to conclude that, overall: LAME.

Weekday Morning

A pile of emails, follow-up questions, research that could take all morning; documents to proofread full of tables and obtuse register descriptions; a presentation or two to hone; floating above all that the directive to Do More, Do Something Big, so that I get noticed in some positive way and can edge away from the ever-present threat of being perceived as less competitive ... What more to do, though, is never clear. Not to me.

Success in a corporation requires being good at being successful within a corporation. You might say No Duh but many people, many of us, myself, we tend to assume that if we are good at several aspects of our job and bring a unique personality and creativity to meeting the needs of our various customers -- from hallway colleagues to foreign factories -- then we will be successful. We are wrong. Those things must be done. But the differentiation between the successful and the not-so have little to do with the work actually done or the cheer and humor we managed to bring with it.

I'm leading up to what does make people successful. I'm not getting there. I really don't know. There is a vague concept floating just out of reach of making the right impressions on the right people -- ensuring the next level of management knows who you are and not for the wrong reasons -- but I can't quite grasp it. It doesn't make sense to me. Work makes sense to me: Explaining architectural details, debugging failures, controlling the public documentation. Protecting my position in the annual ranking and rating does not make sense to me and I am finally old enough to know it never will.

So I look at my screen and I am filled with a wish to inform and entertain, not the next level of management, but real people, people who like to read, people who would like to read what I have to say if only my mind was quiet enough to choose what needs saying and to find the words that work best for it. The capability is in there. Most of us have it, really. Everyone has an amazing story to tell and most people have many. The trick is in molding that internal clay into an external sculpture, a thing of beauty, wisdom, strength. Only so many of us are driven to do that and though the capability is in there, it is buried under years and years of trying to grasp how to be good at being successful within a corporation. That's a different sort of creativity altogether.

Today, I feel I've tried to trade one sort of creativity for the other, only to find I've cut one in half just to bring the other up halfway and can not succeed at either one. So I'll go downstairs to the cafe now, breakfast on a few things, and come back to at least do the things I know how to do. There's more than enough of that to fill the day.

Writing about Whining and Whining about Writing

Part I

Where have all the writers gone? Gone to Facebook, every one. I think they've given up on the social aspect, the groupthink. Remember the camaraderie we used to share? The wit? Gone. A writer hooking up into Facebook and all its games and article-sharing is like a mathematician on a daily dose of sloe gin. Was blogging not as bad? Was it a shot of caffeine, or just thin hot chocolate? It did provide a challenge. The challenge was to produce some quality every few days. Few ever met it. Most everyone seems to have given up.

A few still write. Away from the crowd, as perhaps it should be done. NaNo should be that way. I will go to coffee shop meetups because I need social interaction, to feel a part of things. But writing is essentially solitary.

I'm guessing the bloggers decided either they would ride the Facebook to nowhere or would just get their writing done and quit talking about it. I hope so. Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work.

I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end.

Part II

Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work. I falter at my job (or so it feels sometimes) because it requires studying technical stuff and collaboration with other people on technical stuff. But when I light the fires under my brain it doesn't lean that way. No, it wanders off in search of dreams to mold, and characters to build, and vibrant language. It's a daily chore to switch the train over onto the right track and chug it up to speed. Today, that didn't happen. All my train did was crawl out of the shed, take a slow turn around the yard, and idle at the back edge, leaking steam.

And it's no secret and I don't care who knows it. My old brain is just plain tired of trying to fit. That engine wants to get lifted out of the old iron frame that hauls freight around on rails and settle into something light and buoyant and start tracing words and music into the ripples of a trackless sea.

This is a bad attitude. I want my boys to get through college without any financial hitches and so crank away, crank away, crank away is what I need to do just like everyone else. Just like everyone else. It's funny: Part of me is still the youngest child who thinks he is special and unique and can get away with relative poverty because no one needs to depend on him. The major portion is of course a man engaged with the world in some productive way who knows we are all in the same boat together and thus holds the deliberately unproductive (this includes lazy and/or under-talented writers) in low esteem. This tension won't go away.

And yet, still I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end. Except for music. Music can stay. And food. Music and food and warm autumn sunsets. The rest of it, begone. Begone, I say! People with nice smiles can stay. Nice people, food, music, sunsets, and the sound of rain or of a distant train passing. All that can stay. But the rest of it: End! Begone. We gots writing to do, doesn't we?

South Southeast by Southwest, Part I

I have to vent over my quest to get a wireless internet connection in Anthem, Arizona. I thought Starbucks offered this service, so long as you buy something. I wanted a mocha anyway, so I found one at the corner of two of Anthem’s many identical boulevards (which are not laid out in a simple grid, by the way, but meander like coyote trails, no doubt to make the brand spanking new suburb seem a little less like a brand spanking new suburb). Stood in line awhile and then asked if they had a functioning wireless. Only if I had a Starbucks card, quoth the barista. I don’t buy memberships so, no, I had no card, and I left feeling very annoyed that the silly woman could at least have tried to sell me one, or clarify that I’d get access for free if I bought something, or otherwise been encouraging. But no! All she could do was suggest the library. Libraries generally don’t serve food and drink. So I went back to my cousin’s house to search again.

Right, my cousin has internet, but not wireless, and for reasons too obscure for me to grasp, when I connected the RJ45 on the back of her cable modem to the RJ45 on the side of my laptop, a network was detected but never connected, and I was simply never able to do what I needed to do. Which was mate my work machine to the net and get a VPN going and do some triage on a couple days’ worth of work email. Really wanted to spend a lot of time doing that.

“Wireless network anthem az” netted me a possibility in the form of a café at the local Safeway. All right, I could do work at a grocery store, why not. I meandered along the coyote trails at a crawling forty miles an hour really enjoying the fact that Maricopa County had decided to impose a thirty five mile an hour speed limit on roads that could easily support eighty, and eventually, after many long hours passing decoratively transplanted saguaro cacti, found the Safeway and the Starbucks within. I asked if the wireless worked, the guy said probably, so I tried and sure enough caught a signal. Fool optimist that I am, I bought a venti mocha and a piece of pumpkin cake and sat down to enjoy my breakfast while wrestling with warning pages and out of date certificates and all manner of general network dysfunction. Money well spent! The workers had no idea. But by now I had eaten something and decided the library was worth a try.

I had a vague idea it was down this way and indeed I found it, nestled within the grounds of the local high school. I didn’t feel like waiting in line at the information desk so I took one of the plush little reading chairs in back and found a network and enjoyed the familiar experience of warning pages and invalid certificates. I went back hopefully to the help desk line and at my turn was told that indeed their wireless worked fine, I just needed to have a library card. All out of quibble, I bought a thirty-day one for five bucks, was given some codes and instructions, and, nestled back in my corner, was finally able to plug in to the employer matrix.

As usual, about a dozen things had blown up since I left the office late Wednesday afternoon, and by the time I had addressed a few of them well over an hour had passed and my enthusiasm for doing work while on vacation was getting thin. So now it is noon, I am back at my cousin’s house, and everyone is either out getting their toenails done or lying around fast asleep. I guess that’s standard for mid-day in Arizona. Well, I’m on vacation, and the idea presumably is to relax. But my nerves are humming like harp strings. Only one thing to do: Get a beer, find a cool place, damage my eardrums with the very loud music stored on my netbook (I don’t own an MP3 player), and read the Raymond Chandler short stories I brought along. That’ll do me, for a little while.

Cold Weather Has Its Points

More Pix

You didn't ask but surely someone wants to see the rest so here. (Sac Decom 10 Oct 09)

Poetry of Phone Spam

Outlook and Communicator are integrated with the phone system, so missed calls and messages appear in an email folder. This means I know the number of every phone that tries to reach my desk.

Sometimes I punch unknown numbers into a search engine to see what I get. If they are phone spam, which unknown numbers from some other area code usually are, I find a bulletin board where other people have reported the same number. They complain about the sales pitch, or the rudeness, or what have you. I don't leave complaints. I just do this to validate my suspicions.

Found the most interesting complaint today:

me git a call and tey hang up. i duont call back. i get messege and man is dead but spirit caling. he is ghost. -- melikileya kootamaata

Not interesting: Inspired. Is this the reflection of a distant culture, a person late of the forest who sleeps with spirits and has recently moved into a world of flashing lights and cell phones? Or was this someone with a poetic sense of irony, who sees many existential layers at one time and has made their phone spam moment into an opportunity to create beauty?

All of the above and more.

Okay, now I wish I had a stronger sense of humor, cause this was probably really funny and I missed it.

Conference Whines and Chicks on Cop Cars

Wonderful to have a job and not minding at all the 7pm to 9pm phone calls with engineers of various sorts eight time zones to the west who are focused on technical issues of enormous significance to a computer manufacturer over there, and the company, and in some small way myself -- small in that the socio-political dynamics that determine who gets the fame and who gets the blame are entirely beyond me hence I proceed with the confidence and certainty of an eight-point buck in a thinned-out forest full of deer blinds.

SO, that all leaving me without time to write stuff but still wanting to publish something, anything, I will print without further comment one of the better pictures I took last weekend at a party. We've found a fun bunch of people to hang out with.

Fun Where the Hell is Waldo Game!

I Spy ...

A naked thigh!

A truck under a portable carport!

Eight hundred seventy two lost or stolen bicycles!

In the center of each these images is our campsite. We erected the carport Monday (Aug 31st) after sundown during a rising wind. Imagine tying two hundred square feet of waterproofed canvas down to a brace of lightweight aluminum poles while the wind kicks up to thirty and brings about a pound of dust per cubic yard of air with it. But once it was staked and roped and the truck was under it, all set up for campin', it was quite comfy.

The scene on Monday September 1st:


The scene on Saturday September 5th:


Now for fun that will engage your favorite eight year old for hours and hours!

Find the above location on these two images!

Satellite photo, Sep 1st

Satellite photo, Sep 5th

Better yet, pour a strong drink and crawl around these crazy wacked-out scenes yourself.

All right, here's a Burner's-eye view. Tame. We're not up to the level of creative camping yet, we just like to survive. But it's hecka comfortable in there. (Supportive carpentry illustrated here.)


Some more general notes:


A - Our little campsite

B - Camp shower, trailer mounted, cold water from 55-gallon drums, complete with surrounding evaporation pond

C - Some weird art car made out of a golf cart that showed up one night

D - Li'l Pearl the Turtle, about which more later maybe

E - Open bar and general mess-around dome tent for our neighbors the Karma Chickens (another Sac crew)

More random shit will follow as it hits me to slack off at work and post it.

Written While The Meeting Starts

I call in and the coordinator is talking.

"... and I don't even--"

Beep!

"Hello, who just join?"

"This is Don."

"Hello, Don."

"Hi!"

Silence. Extended silence. I open Live Meeting and nothing is being shared. A full minute passes.

Beep!

Silence. It's weird. You never know if they're just being relaxed about starting, or have gone on mute and are discussing secret things. Of course we are all one big happy corporation so there are no secret things. But who knows what goes on in the minds of the inscrutable transpacific--

Beep!

More silence. I guess we're waiting for someone whose presence matters. Live Meeting has four attendees, then six, then eight. More beeps, more silence. She doesn't ask about them. Why did she ask about my beep? Was my beep different somehow? Did my phone beep with an American accent?

Ah, we start. I must listen carefully. The phone system muffles people and everyone has an Asian accent of some sort or other, including the two other guys based here in the States. It's not uncommon for each sentence to be about one third incomprehensible to me and another third context-based guesswork on my part.

Honestly, I am very impressed when folks for whom English is a second or third language listen to folks for whom English is a second or third language, and whose first languages are radically different, and who can understand one another better than I can understand either one. Imagine a gentleman in Bangalore explaining technical matters to a lady in Beijing while I am listening in California, and I have a hard time understanding either one yet they have no apparent difficulty understanding each other. It's frustrating. Makes me feel like nothing but a dumb old white guy who never got out of Mayberry and I hate that because I grew up in a famously cosmopolitan college town surrounded at all times by folks from all over the world. This should be like nothing to me. Urgh.

Ah, we have a visitor from a circuit design group explaining the root cause at the silicon level of an issue that, as is often the case with issues that come to my attention, was discovered during customer test. In other words, a great big OEM that provides a lot of our revenue found the problem that's our fault before we could. We really hate when that happens. Normally, or at least preferably, we find our own mistakes and fix them before anyone else finds out. Anyway, he's in Texas and speaks with what to me is a slight Hispanic accent despite the fact his name is entirely Italian.

You wonder why I am fixated on accents. One reason, it's cause I can't tell you what we're talking about so I say what it sounds like. Another, I'm not always a very effective teleconference guy and I've isolated thick accents as a reason why. If they're going on and on in excruciating detail about verifying adjustments to factory test parameters (which has little or nothing to do with me) and they are doing it in the particularly difficult accents of Malaysian Chinese, I easily lose the thread and wind up faffing about on the internet and undercutting my career prospects and I end up a permanently unemployed old fart in his fifties because who the hell would hire a fifty-plus white guy to do engineering work? Get real, people. You can get twice the energy at half the cost if your prospects speak putonghua or yue and have their green cards. They're more focused, too, and probably got better grades. So to avoid that scenario I'm being more aware of accents and how I should avoid letting them enable me derailing myself. Clear? No? What?

Hot Desert Dude Seeks Friend for Mutual Cup Cleaning

God that sounds nasty. But I really was hot. Even in a woman's shirt that I got at the BRC Boutique and cut the sleeves and collar off of to make a vest, I felt prickly and overdressed. And my sippy cup was pretty nasty by this time (see image in prior post).

Anyway this picture has been in my pictures to be posted directory awhile and I don't feel like waiting anymore for the right context so here. It's the only one taken of me at Burning Man despite about twenty five thousand pocket digital cameras going off constantly. I made the necklaces out of .223 brass I'd been saving since my amateur survivalist militia days in the early 1980s. I finally found a better use for them.

Party Time

Burners can't sit still. It's Decom time! And ours is a lot more fun than SF Decom (which is the next day) because it's small and intimate and you'll make real friends and not just add Friscoite Burners to your contact list. Come one, come all! Or just watch.

Short Post in Celebration of Life

I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.

I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.

I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.

Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.

I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?

Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.

I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.

Take-off

Back in the 60s they tore down one of the area's oldest farmhouses to put up a gas station. An ugly, ultra-modern, Jetsons gas station.

Now that gas station is really cool, and I hope they never tear it down. These old Orbits should be preserved forever as historical architecture, reminders of a bright and brief moment when the future was coming and boy did it shine.

I took this because I'm afraid they will tear it down someday when I'm not looking. I tore in the other morning because I had to take the Jeep to work and it was dry. It was dry because the Jeep was the college boy's car until he moved away. Now it's more or less mine again. That doesn't mean I get to drive it. At the beginning of the month (yesterday) it went off the car insurance. There's way too much wrong with it to drive it enough to justify paying for insurance. But I drove it on its last legal day because the Mustang was in the shop. The Mustang went in because the differential sprung a leak. Turned out to be the pinion seal. No big deal because we had it fixed before all the fluid leaked out. Suppose we hadn't noticed the leak and didn't go in until it sounded like we were being chased by the cops everywhere we went? That would have meant a new differential, and that would have sucked.

But it didn't suck, and neither does this classic old gas station which I hope is still there when we really do have flying cars. Maybe by then tail fins will come back too.

Sunday Sundry

It's not over. Merely continuing to evolve, and more interestingly in these interesting times. Serves me right for getting personal on a blog, now I feel like I owe updates.

Really hating on meetings. As I type this I am online with Tokyo and Penang. The subject is not exactly trivial. But I am deeply annoyed at the level of detail people need to launch into. Especially technical detail about a couple of options the customer might choose that we all know in fact the customer will not choose (the customer is a well-known OEM). Oh, management needs to know all the angles! But no, they fucking don't, not if they have any god damn common sense. And they often do, actually. But due diligence is expected of the troops anyway. Maybe I'm just old and cranky and no longer have the patience to weigh all that wasted time against the corporation's expectation that we all execute as programmed.

My neighborhood is not THAT good. The man across the creek who started his own company must for various complex business and personal reasons put his house on the market. That's of interest to the rest of us who wonder what our homes might be worth. But I think we all agree that the price he's asking is a we-e-ee bit of a stretch. Two thirds of it, maybe. If not half. Of course, I wish them every penny of success. And granted, it's a hell of a lot nicer property than ours. But at that price I don't expect any change in neighbors before spring.

Good thing I love classical music. No one else wanted my father's four linear feet of phonograph records. The eye-catchers are classical records with album covers designed in the 1970s. Very colorful, even psychedelic, but still the music of Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Dukas, Respighi, et al. Since these records are worth approximately nothing in the vinyl market, my only plan is to digitize them so they might get listened to again, by me. I only mean to do it once in awhile so the project will probably take decades. Is there something else I could do with them?

Not why I got sick! You take your own cup around Burning Man in case someone is serving drinks. By the end of the week mine had held multiple samples of beer, vodka, whisky, wine, coffee and tea. Oh, and water. Other than that I never bothered to wash it. And stuffed into the water bottle holder on my bike, it was also subject to the elements, i.e. a thousand square miles worth of dust blowing around. This is what it looked like by the time we got home. I still think I got sick from talking to some dude who liked leaning in and tended to splutter.

Exciting Lunchtime

I left at twelve eight and went to the big box bookstore. Shelves had been rearranged since my last visit. Books and people filled the space. The books were on lines of shelves. The people were spaced evenly among them. Mostly women, schoolgirls, men of retirement age. Once I walked in I felt like leaving to go find a quiet space to write. But there is no such space, so I stayed.

I found a book in the section for 19th Century American history and took it to a deep and well-worn leather couch. I read about Theodore D. Judah’s career in the 1850s as a brilliant civil engineer. People thought him monomaniacal on the subject of a Pacific railway. Eventually he earned his fame by solving the problem of crossing the Sierras. I learned that as a side job, while in California between bouts of learning how to lobby for railroad funding in Washington City -- a place then obsessed with the looming problem of secession and war -- he laid out the railroad that briefly ran within a mile of my house. Nothing is left of it now but a short causeway in the park, and a cut in someone’s yard down near the old Lincoln Highway bridge.

I am fascinated by details and remnants. I examine the landscape as I pass it by for signs of changes made to its natural flow. An old weed-filled railroad cut excites me. So do the foundations of a long-gone bridge, or a long-forgotten roadbed scarring the hillsides above.

At the end of the chapter I put the book away and went outside. My car radio clock said it was one oh four. Time to go back.

In Which I Ramble On While Hiding Away In A Random Unused Cubicle

Yes, there are tales of Burning Man in the oven, but they are slow going. Mostly because I am slow going. Like most men I don't handle being sick very well. For ex, last night, after a long and (I thought) fairly pointless telephone conference with a customer in Tokyo, I came home so wiped all I could do was nuke some old pizza and crash. The good news: I may have slept ten or eleven hours. The bad: Though I needed the sleep, today I'm not any better. So my brain remains a fairly useless organ, and that's not always bad news if some other organ rises to fill the gap, but alas these days it is my brain and no other that is needed most.

Some of that writing got done on the trip this past weekend, bouncing down I-5 in the back seat of our crew-cab pickup. It was an environment. I've read that more often than not, in order to be productive a writer must create a space to exercise his craft. For me this is certainly true; and it's typical that I've responded to this requirement by doing nothing about it. I have nowhere at home to write. No one's fault but mine, I hasten to add, and now that our number of at-home children has been cut in half I have even fewer excuses. I look forward to fixing that, once I get this done ... and that ... and the other thing ...

Lately I've been daydreaming to distraction about the open road. It seems I want nothing so much as to just hit the highway, with a reasonably dependable car, my little netbook for travel-blogging, and sufficient funds. What funds would be sufficient? I don't know. I hate to spend money on lodging if all I'm going to do is sleep but it seems unavoidable. I would camp a lot to save money. Crash on dark unpatrolled side roads (the Mz and I used to camp in random locations when we were young, it was fun AND free). I don't eat a lot. Maybe I wouldn't need so much. Really, I don't know. Probably the adventure would devolve to hitchhiking and taking buses. Possibly you would never hear from me again. I am quite looking forward to it. Maybe next year I will find a way to make it happen.

Of course, that's false. I would get lonely, and then I would get tired of it all, and then I would go home again. I predict three, four weeks.

I would visit friends, however, friends made via the internet, old friends from school, as well as my cousin, and my brother. Actually, no, I wouldn't get lonely. Not right away.

The meat of such daydreaming remains unwritten. Given the nature of daydreams, that's appropriate.

This open-road daydreaming is a direct response to driving nine hundred ninety nine miles this past weekend, down to the dark side of the state and back. A lot of folks hate I-5 because it goes on for hundreds of miles with little to look at. But all that does for me is make me want more. Not necessarily more of nothing to look at. But there is so much world out there, and so many people in it. Every single person has a story, and every little place too. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look was the defining space at some moment for some life somewhere; a place of birth or death, of unexpected sex or romance or drama or pain, of hours and hours of brutal life-changing labor. I see worn old scars along the hillside and wonder about the men who spent years making those scars in the course of their lives, lives spent scratching a living the best way the knew how, herding and fencing cattle, building flumes and canals, planting orchards only to find a decade later that the climate just wasn't right for it. The remnants of hay barns, of houses, of dormitories for migrant farm workers long since converted to one-night shelters for itinerant homeless families; and rest stops.

Deep in my distraction I read about rest stops. The state puts these up along the freeways. We've all used them. They're bloody necessary when one is driving for hours and hours. They are also homeless shelters of a sort. Some of the larger ones, it is alleged, are home for entire families living in, say, a camper van that they move every few days while they live off the largesse of other travelers. At our last stop a lady asked for gas money. I said I had no cash. Frankly, if you are in your fifties, you need to have run your life a wee bit better than to depend on guilt-ridden strangers who never learned not to feed the animals, as it were. Sorry, but cold truth: I don't believe in encouraging and enabling destructive behaviors. We are all better than that. And yet it pains me, especially when there are children involved. The world is a huge and very cold place if you are not so fortunate as the rest of us, the rest of us who had a role model or a parent or some means of support while growing into adulthood. Honestly, I've always felt a kinship with the homeless, a kinship yet to be explored and explained. This kinship does not make me more charitable: The homeless are fellow human beings to me, and not merely opportunities for giving. The fact that I get to eat when I want does not translate into a moral need or directive to "give". I see them much more deeply than that, and (this is weird, perhaps) have always felt but a couple of steps away from being one of them myself. Does this explain my less merciful attitude, the fact that I don't see a fence between them and myself? Perhaps subconsciously I see giving to panhandlers as akin to giving myself a break thoroughly undeserved, and every bit as harmful. I don't know, like I said, this is largely unexplored.

I have thought of spending my next extended vacation partially immersed in that world. Talking to people, serving in kitchens, living as though I don't have a credit card and a bank account and can escape whenever I want. Slumming, you call it, and to many it is thoroughly despicable, an opportunity to see how much "better" we are than others, to get insight into how those others somehow "deserve" their unhappy state. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe you're right. In honesty I can't say what my motives really would be.

There is research, of course. One of my reasons for wanting to experience everything is so I can write about it with authority. Imagination is fine, but we've all read novels where the novel situation just doesn't ring true, and others where it does. The difference isn't just in the author's skill. You can tell if he's ever been there, and if he has not. And thanks to life's opportunities, I've been here and there and I have worked those experiences into (NaNoWriMo mainly) attempts at story-telling. But there's more, always so much more.

And if I have to choose between experiencing life and writing about it, I will choose the experience. Let some other poor sod who sits all day do the writing, if that's what it takes.

All right, enough hiding, I'll go back to work now.