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.