Adios

I managed to post something every day for three weeks. That run stops here. There is still a LOT to do and as it says below, we are about out of time. See you in a number of days between eight and infinity!

Weekend Pupdate

Someone knows he's cute.


Sometimes mom and daughter chew together.


Sometimes mom runs off and plays in the creek and comes back all wet and happy like a bad girl.


We'll miss em this week. When we come home they'll run run run!


And hug and laugh that we're home again!


But that's later. Right now we're awful busy getting ready for this thing, just like a couple tens of thousands of other people who probably won't sleep much tonight cause they're doing their last minute sewing and stitching and gluing and cooking and packing and loading and.

Inurnment, Memorial, Reception

Two o’clock. Silveyville Cemetery. Three digit temperature. Suit and tie. Seats on the lawn, a canopy. Relatives assembled from their cars. Hugs and quiet helloes. Simple Methodist service. As requested, I stood back in the shade and softly played Amazing Grace on a trumpet. Urn placed in a small square hole. Flower petals – I jumped in line to be by my mother’s side in case she stumbled. She did not.

Three o’clock. Dixon United Methodist Church. The old element of the small town filled the pews: Lions, Soroptimists, farmers, business partners. Short service. A few family members spoke, including me. A few friends and colleagues spoke. Two hymns, including Oh God, Our Help From Ages Past. My mother’s choice: The tune is also associated with Cal Berkeley. As I sat in front and contemplated the carpet, there was peace, sitting in this fine old farm town church built in 1866, a train passing just outside every fifteen minutes or so.

Four o’clock. Jess Jones Winery. A vast tent, catered food, wine, beer, out between the vineyards and tomato fields. Visiting with family, with my cousins and their old friends. Now us kids are in our fifties. There is a warmth I never sensed before. Though my cousins’ friends were only at the periphery of my life and I at theirs, way back then when we were all just launching into our lives, somehow now with a large circle of some thirty years seeming to close, I feel as though we were always friends all along.

Is that a legacy of my Aunt Mary Louise? I don’t know. She and Art were a very hospitable pair and well loved. Now they are well missed. But neither would want us to dwell on that.

Fun at Fry's

Got Skzx's new computer for school last night. He moves hundreds of miles away in a few weeks and needs time to verify Facebook works correctly on it.

Went to Fry's. Once upon a time that was the place for the geeks of Silicon Valley to get all their electronic components and gizmos to invent new stuff with. Now it's just a big-ass electronics dealer with branches all over. But it's real electronics. Besides TVs and washing machines they still sell a lot of parts and tools. I like browsing.

We narrowed the field and got him something with, as they used to say about Rolls-Royce engines, "sufficient" power. One more thing to check off the list.

I hate shopping. But I love shopping with ma boys. Invariably. Doing just about anything, really.

It was also fun to look at one of the netbooks and say to the sales guy, oh yeah, I've got the innards for that one all over my desk. Powered up, guts out, trying to solve a problem the manufacturer has found. He sort of gave that little smirk that people do for an instant when they think something's cool and don't want to show it. That was fun.

Naysayers

SfGate has their BMan page up again. Note the discussion on why you would never go to Burning Man. There are some good reasons. The event really is something other than what some of its promoters would have you think. But who cares? Fun is fun. And as for people who grouse about desert camping conditions: Screw them, no mercy. More dust for me (or more something).

Bed

Last year I designed and built a platform to sleep on in the bed of the pickup. Last night I assembled it in place for this year. It's very simple and very effective. It provides plenty of room above the wheel wells, and storage below, and once a carpet pad is taped down and a few layers of comforters and sleeping bags are laid in, it is super comfy.


Also I hinged it for access to the storage area underneath and to get it up out of the way when we are using the tailgate for something, such as preparing dinner. I had to shape it to get around the mounted toolbox and to fit under the shell when all the way open.


Creative construction is fun. You should see the "octohut" (but I have no pictures). Basically eight pieces of plywood jigsawed to fit together like a 3D puzzle that form a very solid hexagonal hut, eight feet tall and nearly that wide, with a roof made of triangle sections out of a ninth piece. You can cut doors and windows in it as you please, hang sconces, an air conditioning unit, whatever. It hauls flat on a trailer and can be up and ready for action within an hour. We're thinking to make a bunch next year. Paint 'em desert gray, seal out the dust with duct tape, build a little village. I'm thinking to make mine out of roof sheathing with the reflective inner coating to make a mirrored little love shack.

But that's all for next year. For this year, down to the wire. The Eagle thing done, we can now focus on BMan prep. Have barely started. Will be a hectic 5 1/2 days.

Worthless

See, exactly seven days from now I expect to have set up camp and be under-dressed and bicycling in the desert heat on the lookout either for free drinks or an active dance bar or both, my senses filled to reeling with other like-minded weirdos similarly under-dressed or set out in odd post-apocalyptic Mad Max attire or strange creative costumes or slowly driving in a daze as they seek out a campsite, the sun slowly dropping towards the dark razor's edge of a nameless Nevada mountain range in a perfectly deep blue sky. I find this just distracting enough I can't get a fucking thing done at my job.

The under-dressed part really isn't necessary to being a part of things, it's just my personal style. We all have our uniquities. I just made that word up. I expect to make up a lot of words out there in the creative maelstrom. Words and modes of living. BMan is a deeply spiritual experience for some people, the reason being once you drop your structures and your expectations and your inhibitions and your programming amongst an uncountable number of other people happily trying to do the same things in their own way, great windows open up by which you can look into your soul that simply wouldn't open before, and the trip can be life-changing. Yes, drugs can open those windows too, and some people use drugs out there, but not many, and they really ain't necessary. Not to mention there is a significant law enforcement presence: Federal officers of the BLM, the Pershing County Sheriff's office, the Washoe County Sheriff's office, and the Nevada Department of Investigations, to name a few. I also recall seeing some Tribal Police cars last year. All of these have overlapping concerns but needless to say, torching a spliff in public is a dumb idea.

My camera broke on the first day last year and it was a freeing experience. Leaves me with a conundrum: Leave the camera at home, or take it anyway for when I just have to have keepsake photographs? There is no shortage of pictures on the web, at Flickr and elsewhere. But they are rarely of the specific things or people that mattered to me. So, yeah, camera will go, the little one that fits in a pocket. Maybe it will break too.

Maybe you can't know the building level of excitement. It's impossible to grasp if you haven't been there or if the images and stories you find on the web don't interest you. I felt I got it just from web research, and once I got to know people I found I was more or less right. Maybe it attracts my long suppressed but deeply ingrained Berkeley hippie soul. For others it's about finding appreciative audiences and participants in their love of inventing vehicles and other mechanical contrivances. There is a lot of yin-yang flowers-and-fire sort of duality generating energy in this community, men who work with their hands to make machines and art and flame, and women who also make art and dance with the flame and share their beauty, and there are a thousand other archetypes besides, but this ancient coupling as between Vulcan and Venus seems most common and generates a huge amount of creative beauty and energy, just as you might expect.

Well, it's no wonder when you drive up to the gate, they hand you your packet and say, "Welcome home!"

Cannibal

Here is the picture that the Eagle Scout chose.


Here is the cake with the picture that the Eagle Scout chose.


Here is the Eagle Scout destroying the cake with the picture that the Eagle Scout chose.

Eagle

Board of Review was two months ago. Court of Honor is today. Busy!

No Wonder

The internal home page here for Infamous Megamulti often includes an informal poll question submitted by an employee. Today's:

In your school days, what was your favorite subject?

• Mathematics
• Science
• Language
• Social Studies / History
• Music / Arts / Physical Education
• I had no favorite subject

After answering, I saw the results had Math and Science adding up to 63%. My choice, Music / PE, was at 11%. The other two, 6 and 10 resp.

I can't count the casual conversations that include tales of being a science geek in high school, of wanting to be an engineer since Day 0, of college life as an eighteen year old math whiz. My part was always the silent part. I hated that shit back then. I liked science, of course, but as a source of wonder, not as a set of tools. In high school it took two tries to get a passing D in geometry (I never, ever studied). Okay, that has more to do with parents than with me, but still. These conversations always leave me feeling like an outsider. So do conversations that are in any way about density of computational power or platform features or performance metrics because, chryst, I just haven't ever cared. It's a job. It is not a passion and you have to be some sort of alien if it is. Or a former high school math type. Just not me.

So, no wonder. On the plus side, I don't think anyone is ever really supposed to feel like they fit in at their job. That just wouldn't be natural. Would it?

Paddling Redux

I like this old post and am going to link to it after the bonus pic.

We don't drive Gondolas in your Toilet so don't Pee in our Canals

Not Counting Down

It’s impossible to describe. I’ve tried, but don’t know if it worked because I can’t compare the listeners’ understanding to my experience. My experience, the one time, is nearly impossible to remember. A haze of all-night raves, great objects embedded in the desert floor, flames in the sky, thirty-foot smoke rings, trust and friendliness from everyone, free drinks, sexy outfits, weird creative outfits, cock rings and clean-shaven cunnies, brightly painted bodies, brightly illuminated costumes, messages written to family members on a temple made of recycled material, weeping as they flamed and smoked to the heavens, countless personalized bicycles, barbecues and homemade firepits, playing with a mound of Legos on a dusty Persian carpet, long quiet conversations, stars above, wind-borne dust, parachute acrobats, fire dancers, stilt walkers, gymnasts, singers, dancers, roller-blading on a rough plywood platform, riding around in a motorized double-decker barroom, a camp shower that provides little privacy and fifteen seconds of cold water per button-push, and of course the porta-potties running out of toilet paper with four days to go. I mean, none of that tells you a damn thing.

But it’s that time again and I am having a hard time focusing on work. This year will be different than last. Wife and I will try a different sort of participatory dynamic. What the hell that means I don’t know. More participation, less awe-struck observation, less time together thus more freedom to follow our individual muses, like that. But it’s still a weird year. So many people aren’t going, or can’t make up their minds. Many, many cannot afford it. Jobs and incomes lost. Entrepreneurial types finding business is down and they can’t afford to shut their doors for a week. A weird vibe darkens the idea for some who found last year too big, the city too much a victim of its own success. Yet every year is different, they say, and for me personally, there is no apprehension. Once I feel I have time to really prepare -- next week? -- somehow it will come together, as it will come together for thousands of others equally disoriented, and magic will once again rise out of the bare dry earth.

You really have to ignore what people say about self-important latter-day hippies and just go.

ML

My aunt died last night. I Facebooked the fact, and then an hour later deleted it. What was I thinking?

I was sad when I heard the news and felt like crying for a brief time. Never really did, though. There are a lot of blocks to emotional outlet built into the human machine. Maybe later, when I see those grieving who were closer to her.

She was the only sibling among my parents, my only aunt. Her husband was my only uncle. Eighty years old. Failing health, short string of strokes. Not a surprise. More of a relief as is usually the case at this stage.

She only moved away from home into assisted living a few weeks ago. I visited her there once, a couple weeks ago, and she was fairly alert, her usual somewhat sardonic self. I couldn't tell if she was happy to be there or not, I mean if she really understood the implications, or was just putting up with it, or what.

I think underneath the surface where she didn't need to talk about it, she knew it was her final stop before going on to be with Art again.

They had such a love affair. The emotion wells more when I think of that than anything.

I told office people I am going for the afternoon to go be with family. But my mother has already gone back home after meeting with her sister's daughters, and mostly they just have to pack up their mother's room and deal with the funeral home and such, and I will pretty much be a fifth wheel. I'll go anyway to show solidarity, give hugs, snag a couple hours' open road time out of the office ...

Now both gone, Art and ML were the married couple who proved the exception: They stayed together. Oftentimes I wanted to drill into their heads and find out how they did it, but there was never a chance for that. Of everyone in their generation and the next one who got married, they are the only ones who stayed married -- them, and my wife and I. And though we've surpassed twenty one years I have no sense of how people stay married and am hungry for insight into how they do it.

(And my brother. Let us not bow to convention. Though they have been denied recognition of their marital status, S and A's relationship is outlasting us all. I'm only being honest is saying I am still getting used to taking such a simply conventional view. And so now I am shocked to realize that the two children of The Divorce are in fact not following the pattern.)

They met on a blind date, perhaps in San Francisco, and at some point partied on the Eureka where Art had a job as night watchman. Prior to that, shortly after graduation from Cal in ~1950, she had a mysterious government job in Trieste when the Cold war was less about missiles and concrete barriers and more about watchfulness and human interactions. Over the years she built a reputation as a somewhat prickly person, hard-headed in business, unlikeable to some, tactless to others; but somehow I never saw that side of her. I liked her directness and her matter-of-fact refusal to see the sunny side of life and the dark humor that came out, sometimes in such a way I felt I was the only one who got it. So for that and for being family, I'll miss her. My mother has lost her little sister, and will miss her much, much more.

Mary Louise (Wiggins) Taber 1929 - 2009.

Run-ku

Blazing summer breeze
Lucky I still have my knees
God I gots to pees!

Can't Stop Now

EVEN YET I am immersed in the production of a roughly hour-long video commemorating my son's life up to high school graduation. Can't imagine how many hours into this thing. Nearing the end, though. Deadline looms. Need it done before next weekend. Not only so it can run during his Eagle Court of Honor, but so I at least get a few days to prepare for the Burn. Man. I am just not ready. This is definitely a year where I just go, not very prepared, and make the experience up on the spot. My job's kind of like that too: Too much going on to get anything really accomplished. It's like I'm driving by too fast to read the roadsigns, and even when I try I can't make them out. Which is why I suddenly like this picture I took a couple years ago.

Running On Empty

Brandon mentions in passing a minor surgery of the sort I had, gawd, fifteen or sixteen years ago. So that seventh grader isn't mine. And no one wants to hear surgery stories except retirement home folks who politely pay attention because they know it'll soon be their turn. So I'll cut it short. My M.D. at the time was a sports doc about thirty who had the bluff and hearty manly act down to perfection and just bade me strip em off and lie on the table, here, let me swab this shit on you, it'll sterilize and kill any pain (for now, haw haw), say, do you mind if I have a pre-med student watch, you know, kind of a training thing.

I said no, no prob, happy to help.

If you know anything about men you know that they are hardwired to view any girl or woman who is in any vague way attractive as sex meat and though years of pretending to civilization have taught us discretion the hard thrusting reality under the surface is that to appear vulnerable and impotent to a young female of the species causes much inner cringing and chagrin. Therefore it was no surprise at all for the trainee to be an adorable redhead in her early twenties. The TRUTH on the SURFACE is I didn't mind or care but the irony given any natural assumption that I really did was enough to make me laugh. I'm sure they put that down to nervousness.

I did not watch the procedure and I didn't feel a thing until later when the anasthetic wore off and I spent a couple days about as comfortably as if they had attached clothes pins to my nuts. I don't mean the saggy skin-only part either. No regrets, though. Are you kidding?

Splish Splash

Filed under Benefits of Corporate Life are the Team Building and Employee Appreciation programs. Today we get our annual Quarterly. Okay, we do get quarterly Quarterlies, but usually it's either bowling or somehow forgotten about. Today's the real one. For today we employees paid $15 per guest (employees themselves are free) to come eat and play at Sunsplash. I shall extrude from the orifice shortly.

It's a great thing for workers with young families. Waterslides, miniature golf, video games, eats. Lots of good memories taking my young wife and young children to these sorts of things, dating back into the early 90s. Today's a little different: My eldest isn't going and my youngest is taking two friends and I won't see much of them. Us oldsters will slide a few times and then float around on the endless river while I try not to piss and moan about my stupid broken-feeling arm. I'd almost rather stay in and work. I'm behind enough on shit. I only have myself to blame for that, nts.

I am not going just to see Bondgirl in her swimsuit. No, I am not. Bondgirl may be a beautiful and exotic Russian woman with two engineering degrees, a sweet personality, auburn hair, and an athletic physique that combines pronounced calf muscles, fluid feminine hips, a narrow waist and a heavy chest that inexplicably defies gravity, but so what? It may be that last year, I arrived before my wife and kids and found her all by herself, wearing naught but a bikini, resembling one of those exaggerated dreamgirls painted on the glass backs of pinball machines, giving me a friendly smile and lamenting she had no one to hang out with, thus forever cementing in my mind the quandary of every married man that can only be answered with brief small talk and an excuse to get the hell away. She may have one of the most delightful accents ever released into a happy world on contralto tones that are to music as brown sugar is to oatmeal. All of that is irrelevant detail, quickly and easily forgotten. You can so how completely I've forgotten it already. No, indeed. No! I am going to get a cheeseburger. And chips!

Running Half Empty

I get my best ideas while running and then completely forget them.

I run with two other guys at noon on Mon, Wed, Fri. But I missed yesterday and can't tomorrow so I went alone today. Down the hill to Folsom Boulevard and back, about 3 1/2 miles of agonized self-punishment, pounding the concrete that winds between piles of ancient river rock and new half-empty office buildings. It was about 95F and my arm brace got all soppy.

I'm a reasonably good runner. Have the physique and all. What slows me down is my brain. It's too god damn heavy. If I make the mistake of letting it think something, I slow way down. Today I jogged up the hill, dripping sweat and grunts, and dictated silently an entire conversation. It was pretty good: The guy who'd been running the telegraph office in Hangtown met for the first time his counterpart in Sacramento, and found out the guy he'd replaced himself with up there didn't know Morse code, but the line was running smoothly anyway because (unknown to the Sac guy until now) the autistic black kid he'd left behind in the emergency was doing all the translations while the replacement took all the credit, and meanwhile he needed to find out if anyone had come by with a negro woman prisoner and what steamboat were they taking to San Francisco, and yes I'll find out, come back in an hour or so, and and and ... The reality was a lot more interesting but alas it's gone now. Nor will I spend this time reconstructing it, after all, I'm at work here!

But once at home: Gone. Inspiration: Gone. All requisite looseness of mind and spirit: Gone.

Iono, I could get me one a them digital voice recorders like reporters use, strap it to my arm. Cept I don't talk. Talking slows me down even more. I'm a mouth-breather when I run, what can I say.

Best Present Ever

They were gonna get me a garden cart or something, and while at the big box store my sons wound up playing with large sharp objects. Their mother made them stop lest someone lose a hand, and my elder son looked at the tool he was holding and went, aha!

He inherited my fascination with swords and knives along with the creativity. Quite under my radar, he took this implement and secretly made of it a work of art, presented on my birthday.

Thrifting

Two reasons I go thrifting: Miscellaneous threads suitable for modification a la Burning Man, and polo shirts. The former could be anything. Once you're out there on the playa, the very last thing you want to do is dress normally. Accept it: You are human, you are a herd creature with a tinge of independence, you are happiest expressing your individuality in the same vein as everyone else. And so if shorts and a t-shirt truly express who you are or who you want to try being a little bit, fine, but you're going to feel foolish and oddly left out. The best way in BRC to not feel like a sartorial idiot is to dress like an idiot. There's simply no escaping it. People who don't -- and there are a few, no doubt demotivated by a misplaced shyness or overdone reverse sense of rebellion -- they stick out like sore thumbs (or pinky fingers with a torn tendon, to use a personally applicable example). More importantly, I don't think they have as much fun.

Polo shirts are something else, though. Merely work attire. I pretty much wear polo shirts only, and I'm sick of the company-related and customer-given old shirts I have. So I go to the various thrift stores to see what they've got. The selection is very limited. Most polo shirts are in truly hideous colors. This befits their use at bowling alleys and country clubs. It cracks me up that for a stupid and elitist game, golf also has the ugliest damn clothes. But here and there I find a treasure, something in black or navy with a logo that meets my criteria, i.e. has nothing to do with:

a) Polo, Ralph Lauren, alligators, or any other fashion industry icon
b) Computers or computer networks
c) Golf
d) Major league sports teams
e) Anything else disinteresting in the moment

What I'm wearing right now, for example, says

Sutter Medical Center
Sacramento
Top 100 Hospital
2001 & 2002

embroidered in various attractive fonts and colors. Cool, eh? Totally random. I'm particularly fond of construction companies and concrete suppliers. Today for under two bucks I got a polo shirt for the parts department at a Subaru dealer. But did I get anything Burnish? Seriously, you have to go there and find me if you care to find out.

Expectation Reset?

Roy had a good idea: Get back to posting, keep it simple, keep it short. Blogs, he said, are well suited for short stuff. Longer serious things, no.

There are some great longer serious blogs. But they are more like self-published opinion columns and though I once wanted to, I don't aspire to that anymore.

The challenge for me is keeping it short. And suppressing my incessant, long-winded analyses.

So in the spirit of keeping it simple and light and staying on simple and light subjects, I'll only say we went to my father's yesterday to continue his move into assisted living. Obviously there's nothing much to be said about that. There are no thoughts or feelings to associate with such a trivial step.

I lifted a piece of furniture that wasn't so heavy -- used my right arm to stabilize it and my left to lift it -- and both felt and heard ropes snapping in my inner elbow. I put the piece down.

Wrapped in ice hammer-crushed in a leaking zip-loc bag held in place with packing tape, it lay like an injured animal on the console while my wife did the driving home. It hurts -- and in the wrong position REALLY hurts -- and can't lift anything, but I think it will get better. In a couple three months.

Burning Man is only in three weeks, but I really didn't want to roar through one last savage round of weightlifting and outdoor running to prepare for an under-dressed week in the desert. No, no, a little jogging and my usual half-ass attempts at food intake control will be good enough.

That and my cheerful disposition.