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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Screw Facebook

Yes, I keep going. I have to know what's going on! But are we gossipers, or are we writers? As I make more efficient my real life, I plan to make more time for writing practice, not less; not for Facebook, nor the endless sharing of links that some people's lives have reduced to. Note to peeps who fill Facebook with links to other stuff: I ignore almost all of it.

Why am I writing this note? Moment's distraction. So much to write, no time to do it, but at least now I feel like I wrote something even though I really didn't. Till next time ... !

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.

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.

Nothing Important, in Short Paragraphs

We hit the road tomorrow. Motel in Santa Ana. Google says it's 442 miles. Another 7.7 miles to UC Irvine. That's where Skzx will be continuing his eddication. We're all going for new student orientation.

I enjoy driving. Even that long straight stretch of I-5. People complain, but not me. Maybe it's a temperament thing.

We have to take the car. Really isn't room for three adults in it, unless one of them is very small. None of them are. But the back seat can be a cozy place to read if given enough pillows.

Car because the truck is going to blow a pulley bearing and we don't want to take it anywhere until it does and is then fixed. Truck doesn't have an awful lot more room anyway. When we bought it the bairns were not yet full-sized and didn't mind the back seat was not designed for full-sized people. It's used for long trips even so, and we manage all right. But not this time.

About a week ago the car's CD player jammed up and nothing I could do yesterday fixed it. Apparently CD changers are unreliable. Also it didn't have an auxiliary audio input. No way we were going that far with nothing but radio. After much hawing and gnashing I went to Fry's and bought a new one. Took me all frickin' weekend to put it in.

Battery had reached its end too. Original with the car, six years old. So with the dash all torn apart I went and did the battery, which adventure included searching high and low for a battery carrying strap because mine broke, and replacing the terminal clamp on one cable because the old one had corroded away and was holding together mostly out of habit. No one anywhere sells carrying straps anymore and I had to borrow one and was lucky to get that. Oh, the stories I could tell.

Why all weekend? Well, you know, new radio replacing stock, nothing fit, multiple trips to the hardware store, etc. etc. But it's all in now, and it's cool because it has a USB port. All I have to do is fill a USB thumb drive with MP3 files and I am set. Love it.

We will miss our puppies.

Lost two today. New owners took them to their new homes. I can almost hear them crying for mama. Only six and a half weeks old! They are so cute, the very essence of adorable if essence can include the pervasive odor of puppy shit. Indeed it's drifting out of the open garage window and up and in through the open window right by me here upstairs. Gosh, will sure miss that.

They're not just hairy blind mole rats anymore. They are full of play and mischief. Come to their pen and they will run to you and crawl over each other to get close. Step in and they will crowd you and bite your ankles and untie your shoes. Mix of labrador and golden retriever -- we could sell them for a lot more than we do but we're not in it for the money, we just went puppies and friends to be happy together.

I believe strongly in capitalism but I'm not very good at it myself. I'm more in it for the individual liberty angle, which more well-meaning systems never really manage very well. I could never sell something at a price set by demand. Just give me what I think I put into it.

Doesn't feel like vacation. I'm taking my company-issued laptop and will check on things periodically. How can I not? My group has three people in it. Two if you don't count me. And though it's late Sunday night to me, it's mid Monday afternoon where the action is, and judging by email, the action ain't slowing down. So as a self-preservation measure I'm going to sort of work now and then -- self-preservation in the sense of avoiding a total conflagration of escalating issues by the time I return next weekend.

I don't mean to sound important. Some of what we do is put out fires, essentially. And letting them smolder gets you burned if you're not careful. That's all it is. Nothing important.

Sparks and Carnivals

Amongst my greatest personal failings, ill-discipline takes the dominant place.

So does bad writing. Let me try that again.

I have to admit: I'm not lazy, I'm not weak on ability, I don't hate my job. I just ain't got no discipline. And rather than force myself into some role, maybe it's better I try to live within my nature.

In other words, I'll work better today if I do something creative first. Even a dumb little blog post sharing pictures. Three's a magic number, will go with that.

And guess what? As usual I'll write too much. Less is only more if you're disciplined.

Sat. night we went down to the shopping mall for the fireworks show. The mall was built in 1970, back when Aerojet and Mather AFB drove construction of new suburbs out into the farm country. Now the farms are completely forgotten and the AFB is closed and Aerojet a shadow of its former self, and the suburbs run down and oil-stained, full of people by no means envisioned by the original developers: Gangs, immigrants, the working poor. And me.

Thus the crowd had a peculiar misshapen look to it. Actually, that's just a matter of style. Anyone in an over-long t-shirt and shorts down to their ankles and a haircut inspired by watching gangland documentaries looks misshapen to me, and that about covers everyone under thirty-five these days. So, I dunno, the crew-cut little kids being pushed around in strollers by slouching couples buried in tatts and bad hair will probably grow up to be very prim and focused. Fascists, most likely.

There was a carnival filled with about thirty thousand brats whose parents bred too young. We walked through the press, enjoying the sights, sounds, smells. Rickety vomit-rides hauled off truck trailers, "games" where gravel-voiced barkers exhort passersby to win faded plush toys of last year's fad animal-character, a single "food" concession beset with hundreds of people yearning for that elusive perfect corn-dog. Warmth recycled from the July sun rose into the night air from the asphalt.


Further out in the parking lot was the rock station tent, handing out bumper stickers, and around a corner there was a concert going on. Local blues-harp phenomenon Kyle Rowland was down with a solid band. We saw him at the Jubilee -- just fifteen, and an amazing musician. Really enjoys himself too. If he keeps that happy spirit and avoids the pitfalls of most young talent, he will have a great life.


The fireworks were cool, always are. Out in the back parking lot, music provided by numerous random car radios all tuned in to the same station, people out in their lawn chairs basically tail-gating. It was fun, a happy crowd, a family crowd. Afterwards we predicted the traffic would be ridiculous and went to a bar to wait it out, enjoyed watching the stop-and-stop traffic for a full hour as people tried to thread their way out of the mall and through the intersection.

3rd of July

Everyone knows about the 4th but yesterday I got the day off and I was so excited about that, I took the day off. Not every week you get two Saturdays in a row. I spent it doing an hour-long job on the Jeep. Yes, the whole day. It's a simple matter to replace a power steering pump, especially if you just did it a week ago. A very simple matter indeed. First, borrow a turkey baster from the kitchen to suck out the power steering fluid. Then loosen a bunch of bolts. They are either 1/2 or 9/16, depending on which socket you don't have on your wrench. They are also impossible to reach with a socket wrench, or indeed any kind of wrench unless you are lying on your back in the gravel getting foxtails in your shirt and snaking your arm through oil-soaked steering linkage, or leaning over the top of the engine far enough to ensure your reading glasses, your best ones, the ones you could find, keep slipping off into a grease-covered maze of wires and hoses. Then, if you squint and grunt and contort your fingers in unnatural directions, one of your various wrenches might fit.

After loosening the last bolt one excruciating eighth of a turn at a time and then the last-last bolt which was previously invisible and is the one that allows you to loosen the serpentine belt and force it painfully off the pulley, it is time to consider turning off the hood lamp lest you lack battery power later when you need it. There is no switch, of course. It turns on automechanically when the hood is open. Nor can the connector be disconnected without destroying the plastic housing that has become brittle through twenty years of inland California temperature swings. But there is a ground wire attached with a hex-headed sheet metal screw, and pulling that off will work, and since Jeep is an American brand it is sensible to try your 1/2 and then 9/16 sockets on it. Neither fits, and when you come back out of the garage with your metric set and squint to read a 12 and find that is too large, and you find an 11 is too large, and you rummage around and find a 9 and discover that's too small, you then have to go back to the garage because your set is missing the 10mm socket. There's one in another socket set, and eventually you find it, pull the ground wire, turn off the lamp, and see about removing the pump from the engine compartment.

There's no difficulty with this part, it comes right out once you detach the two hoses and ensure the ground absorbs a pint or so of toxic fluid and twist and turn the damn thing three different ways to extract it from amongst numerous other engine components. My difficulty was philosophical: We had just put in a new one because the old one leaked and was twenty years old. The new one didn't leak but it didn't work either. Not at idle -- worked fine going down the road but the power assist gave out if the RPMs went under about 1500, and this was most disconcerting when taking a corner with the clutch in. It basically felt like the steering had locked up the instant you really needed it, when turning a corner with some litigious-appearing old dame in your path at the stop sign, watching with baleful eye as you screech to a halt half an inch from her newly-waxed left-rear quarter-panel. My son figured out how to rev the engine while turning and thus reduce risk of collision but to my old brain it was backwards to hit the gas while slowing down to make a turn, and after talking to the auto parts store and the pump manufacturer and a handful of home mechanics at work I decided the smartest surrender was to assume the new pump was bad and take it back. I hated doing this because the odds of getting a bad pump seemed somewhat less than that I had done something wrong, and the odds remained somewhat better that I would do the same thing wrong when putting in yet another new pump. I also had a theory that the first new pump had the wrong fluid control valve in it. I'd much rather replace the valve than the whole damn thing, because it was easy to get to. But auto parts return doesn't work that way.

Pulley replacement is fun too, because it involves an obscure tool that costs half as much as the pump itself and is good for nothing else, an old torque wrench, a combo wrench stuck in a length of pipe (for leverage), two legs braced in opposite directions, room on the ground to spread out in, and an assistant who is either very brave or has never done this before.

Love days off. Don't you?

Last night we went to a 3rd of July celebration: Cul-de-sac of midrange private homes, second and third generation owners and renters, fireworks in the street (the legal kind), beer and pool table in the back yard. I enjoy hanging out with my fellow suburbanites with their tatts and piercings, biker-chic slash blue collar style of dress, alternately polite and horrible children, undersized RVs, oversized motorcycles, redneck facial hair styles (e.g. shaven head and full beard), and hard but generous nature. Family men all, and I've noticed that family men who've been to prison are more polite than those who haven't.

The County is out in force this year to clamp down on illegal fireworks and our hosts were warned directly. No wonder, a house burned down behind their cul-de-sac on the 4th last year. It was abandoned, more than likely an insurance job, and clever enough to get done on the 4th of July, but this left the authorities no choice but to be suspicious and vigilant. They could not, however, hang out around the corner all night, and about ten or so an explosion above the rooftops grabbed our attention as a volley of twenty or so airborne Mexican-made fireworks lit up the night and set off the dogs and car alarms. It was a fitting end to a fine low-key evening. Tonight we're off to a shopping mall, where the rock radio station is hosting a display. We're thinking to fill our Nalgenes with beer and wander the crowd, watching faces, looking for familiar ones, and enjoying these magical times when our children are independent and still close to home.

Healthy Trend

I also call it the Facebook Effect.

Social networking is all the rage now. Bloggers are getting their faux friendship fix on Facebook, and the blogs are drying up. Twitter is the big thing -- next year I'm hoping it will be last year's big thing -- such that idiot twittering congressmen made the news at the Inauguration, every celebrity has a flunky managing his tweet equity, and even news radio takes it as having a given value. Capital Public Radio (local NPR affiliate) ran a piece this morning about the attorney general or state comptroller or some such official, and closed their report by saying, "And, he tweets!"

Fuck.

(By tweet equity I mean something akin to brand equity. I take that as being self-explanatory.)

Fuck, again. Tell you what: I'm going to knock down all the cell phone towers and crash all the Wi-Fi networks just to watch you people squirm. Fair enough?

I guess the final straw for me is when bloggers blog about twittering. I mean, I understand using a fake interaction medium such as this to write about real stuff (family, writing, photography, life), or about unreal stuff (politics), or about virtual stuff (other blogs). But when we blog about tweeting or tweet about blogging the overload of fakeness, the confluence and merging of twin rivers of nothingness, it just kills me. Reminds me of that Dilbert cartoon when he was reading -- reading the manual for his new computer golf game -- reading a description of a pretend version of an activity that is almost a sport. I dunno. It's like drinking non-alcohol lite beer to me, only much worse.

So. I tried Twitter for a couple weeks and then killed my account. I do Facebook because it's easy and there are non-bloggers there and, like I said, it's the current place for our faux friendship fix. I blog less but not just because of Facebook, I really am online less, or I'm a lot less interactive anyway. I'm actually online a lot thanks to this crazy job.

Segue!

Crazy online job right now! I am out on the porch swing, in darkness save for the glow of the LCD screen. A headset blares into my right ear, attached to my cell phone, through which I reached a local number that patches me into a meeting taking place in several geographies. Microsoft® Office Live Meeting fills my screen with presentations and notes, and minutes being typed by a team lead in Bangalore, talking to folks in Shanghai and in California, on subject matters far beyond my ken. I'm here to absorb it, a bench player, except I don't get the game. They're talking software stuff. I grok software to an extent -- I got my fucking Master's in it -- but really I hate the shit and besides, this isn't about development or anything cool and creative. It's all about some very involved and extraordinarily boring coordination of drivers, fixes, patches, and the schedules for validation and release of same.

I'd almost rather live in poverty. The Padre seems happy enough.

(You know who I mean, or you don't.)

This whole online almost-friends thing started for me in Usenet. No, it started in dialing up local BBSs. No, online debates started there. Then moved to Usenet where I got to know real people, many of whom are truly the cat's pajamas. Friends, okay, but we never met. And then I found the interaction took way too much time and energy. Quit Usenet completely. Should say I've been backing out ever since but no, blogs had (still have) potential for some great creative expression and interaction. Some blogs express genius at that. Wanted for awhile to pull something genius off too, but the focus / energy aren't there. So, you get this. And posts and traffic are backing off. Like I said, a healthy trend.

There's a cat rubbing against my legs.

Swine Fever

I read The Stand and I read Earth Abides. I enjoyed the latter many times (the King book was fine in the small but the larger story was crap). I've had my share of childish fantasies of everyone just GOING AWAY, leaving a hardy few to frolic amongst the ruins. Here's my secret: Thought of a deadly pandemic sweeping the world still gives me a thrill. That's because it's so far away, of course (never mind three cases at a middle school a few miles from my house). If my frolicking had to be more like for these two I'd have different feelings about it.

Maybe.

Anyway, I'm doing nothing different. But IMC has launched some sort of Pandemic Leadership Team (PLT) to coordinate the panic and today the Russian work crew put these up all over the place. (Is it just here that Russians have pushed Hispanics and Southeast Asians out of the lucrative secured-facility labor market?)


Never fails to amuse me how whenever anything unusual happens, the Type As who dominate this place immediately coalesce into task forces and tiger teams and apply acronyms and publish powerpoint plans and take the reigns and make no mistake that someone has it covered. All right, so when I see an underbanked curve I think how cool the car crashes must be before I think someone oughta fix that. Just the sort of passive way I am, I guess. I'll wash my hands when it's time for dinner.

The Times Can Suck My Ass

I almost stopped blogging, didn't I? But then the New York Times leads the pirate story with

The Indian Ocean standoff between an $800 million United States Navy destroyer and four pirates bobbing in a lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military as it faces a booming pirate economy in a treacherous patch of international waters.

What the FUCK are they trying to say here? Only a hugely idiotic fucking idiot would try to draw some sort of ironic line between the high cost and power of an American destroyer and the fragile thread of human contact by which a single American life is hanging. As if to say, Oh, we have all these nukes, but were powerless against four guys with a knife to a man's throat, oh, we suck, oh, oh! God. Words fail me. I can't believe people still read that swill. Death to all newspapers.

Boldly Go

Sometimes you stop at the gas station and right when you’re out in the open space between the pumps and the mini-mart a huge gas truck comes barreling down the road and turns into the gas station and you think, damn, if that guy’s having a bad day and or his brakes are out this going to be a day when everything changes.

Big-ass gas truck is hurtling down the road, I can hear it, and there’s really nowhere to go and avoid it. Either it will hit me or it will not but either way, everything is going to change.

Not just kids moving out, empty nest looming. That’s the driving factor but not the only factor. Instincts proclaim it is time to change things around. Yes, because the kids will be going but also yes because my long-suffering is tired of the drama. Kid drama? No, no, well, yes, but I’m the kid. A life struggling against the box I put myself in. Time to break the box. Time to be bold and risk it. All of it.

Because it is for the most part inevitable, it really shouldn’t be so hard.


That’s how it felt last weekend, as I hung from a rope, one foot on a mud-slimy rock wall, the rest of my skinny ass hanging out in space. I really didn’t need my foot on the wall anymore. I was way past the point it did any good. ‘Deed it was above my head at that point. I just didn’t want to let go, to lose my touch on Mother Earth and trust everything to a slim winding of fibers. But I was already trusting them completely. A booted foot touching a wall above your head isn’t much use if the rope breaks.


So I pulled my leg in and spun a bit and kept on going. Fed the rope, looked down, enjoyed the view. 165 feet is more than far enough to make thought of anything going wrong fairly pointless. Just do it! Go, and boldly.


Repelling and spelunking at Moaning Cavern. Camping amidst rain-wet scrub oaks and soaring eagles at New Melones Lake.

Darwin's Doughnuts

How to show you is smart:

1. Party hearty at Beer Can Beach
2. Go for a cigarette run
3. Spin some doughnuts in your car before you go
4. Forget where the river is

I'm not unsympathetic. Terrible all around. But geez.

That Was Close

Facebook has sucked a lot of the energy out of the blogs lately, and since it evens and leavens and homogenizes everyone it isn't nearly as interesting. In a weak desperate moment I started browsing misc.writing, where verbose idiocy reigns supreme and begs, begs for one to put foolish people into their places. But I already know what good that'll do so I backed out again. Geez. Looking for online interaction -- that's mighty pathetic. The obvious answer is to get off of this crap completely.

Well, except for posting pictures now and then, and random things that Must Be Said. It's the looking for interaction online that is simply nowheresville. Yup. That was close.

Road Trips

Local boy. Twenty seven. Riding his motorcycle. Had a few drinks, a good time. Cop picked him up going seventy on the boulevard. Figured he'd burn the cop: turn this way, that, up the two-lane side streets. Ran the stop down from my house, sideswiped a van, bounced into a telephone pole.

Helmet didn't help him.

Many comments at the news site say he was a great guy and so on. I don't doubt it. I don't know anyone who doesn't make a foolish decision once in awhile.


Quiet valley town.


Trains pass through often. Fast. You just have to pay attention to the signals. Now and then someone doesn't.

Roadside memorial caught my eye.


I parked, walked around. Sat on the cold steel for a minute, listening to the night. Cars rumbled over. I don't know who or what.


I wish their families peace.