The Mandatory Sentence

FaceBook se fue, pues.

2011-02-11T13:53:00.001-05:00

It's been maybe a month now that I haven't been hooked up to FaceBook. I got on it in the beginning because it afforded me a link with my eldest's adventures as he headed from his digs in Cincinnati to Portland, OR. He posted pictures along the way and gave us little tidbits about what he'd seen or how many times he got pulled over for speeding on open ground in Utah or New Mexico. Then I stuck with it 'cause I'd found a bunch of folks whom I'd known or with whom I had or did have in the past some relationship or the other. Cindy & the boys were on it. A bunch of Cindy's friends and some of my friends were on it. My former commanding officer in Puerto Rico was on it. A couple ham radio friends also had FaceBook accounts.
It was a social network thingie, just like they say it is.
It was also very time consuming and, due to my open nature about political, religious or whatever else views, it was a great way to go through the day arguing with folks about things that neither they nor I were willing to make concessions or reconsider as erroneous.
So I got tired of the fights.
After the shootings in Arizona last month, I made a comment about gun control that I figured most folks would at least give me some hedge for and leave me alone. I expected at least to see folks I know admitting that the access to firearms by anyone at all was source number one of the problem & cause of the shootings.
What I got in return was the usual NRA-inspired “liberty” and “freedom” illogicals that made me shake my head in disbelief, horror and dismay.
After a couple days of back-and-forth diatribes, interjected bits of logic from my kids, which interjections were summarily refused, I went up to the menu item to turn off my FaceBook account.
If you've done this, you know how it works: FaceBook wants to know why you're leaving.
I'm leaving, I thought, because I'm wasting time & I'm getting sick of the idiocy of some folks political viewpoints, even if the people presenting them are, to all other indicators, just folks like you and me.
I left, I thought, because I didn't want to waste my time or anyone else's trying to change the world digitally over huge distances & all that other computer culture stuff.
Of course, the minute I disappeared from the “friends” list of many of these folks, I was beset with emails & a couple phone calls asking me what it was that had caused me to “defriend” them.
Simple put, I hadn't defriended anyone. I'd gone off the FaceBook world and, unless the putative Messiah of creation suddenly showed up and told me it was going to fix everything in the world, including the superstition that makes Messiahs exist, I was off for good.
A week went by and I heard less about my not being there.
Two weeks went by, I heard from ham radio friends that they'd noticed my disappearance.
Three weeks went by and, yes, I have to admit it would have been nice to share my adventures building an antenna tuner via FaceBook's picture publishing thingie. But I didn't and time passed without much further turmoil
The turmoil, I can tell you right here, I have not missed one bit.
Of course, I've seen stuff other family members have posted, pictures and news and whatnot via Cindy's account. She says something and shows me screens. I look, I see and that's that. Not one bit of turmoil. No arguments about insurrectionist bullshit. No blather about who wouldn't have been killed if a bunch of folks had been armed. How the West was won. How the Mexicans are causing trouble.
No turmoil. No arguments. No news. No big deal.
It's been a month at least now and I have to say that I haven't missed it a bit. Instead of keeping the world aware of whatever minor point of existence had intrigued me personally and with total narcissistic attention, I've cleaned up the office (again) after finishing a rebuild of the entire ham radio antenna steering system, taken the time to fix a couple really nice Turkish recipe dinners and sat down and read a book about gun control & insurrectionism and another book about the history of the Latin language. Among other things.
At this point I seriously suspect that I won't be back on FaceBook again. The only things that would drag me back would be something where my communication with the world would be necessary for what are more mundane reasons than having my own Twitter posse. Like going out to Arizona with a bunch of data collecting doodads to find the places where Dad lived as a child and maybe take pictures of the school documents that are hiding out there in some historical society vault. And in fact, should I end up doing that trip, I don't really think I need FaceBook to track myself. I've cell phones and email and that should be good enough. Pictures? I'll post 'em in emails.
Other 'n that, there ain't much of a draw for me any more. It's quiet and peaceful and reasonable to just be with the folks I am actually, physically with. FaceBook may sound like fun to some. Cindy's on there every night catching up on what the eldest and his lady friend are doing. Cid can track the youngest's travails in New Jersey and the rest of the family can drop in for a couple photo shows. Fine and dandy.
Me? I don't need the trouble and waste of time. Or as Dad used to say with a wave of his hand, as if fanning away ghosts, “Chingado. Así sea.”

Guns & Newspaper Editors

2010-08-29T12:41:00.026-04:00

Since I dragged the 1942 Mosin-Nagant rifle into the hacienda, I've been catching hell from Cid about how guns are dangerous and guns kill people and guns don't belong in houses and cats and dogs might learn to use 'em and then they could bribe us for more food and warmer places to take crap.
I usually respond to this stuff by pointing out how many gun owners there are on the planet and how many guns are in the hands of people at any day of the week and how, except for members of active duty military units actually in combat positions, there ain't that much shootin' of other people. And how most of the guns on the planet are hangin' on walls, stashed in gun safes or cabinets, or holstered on belts, some of which might be on the bodies of policemen and other law enforcement folks. And yes, them's is both long sentences but that's how it works.
Guns in the hands of people kill people.
Guns in the hands of military folks trying to make the other poor, dumb sonovabitch die for his or her country kill said poor, dumb sonovabitches.
Guns on policemen's belts generally stay there unless they find themselves in combat-style situations, in which case the statement above applies.

And then there's the biggest one: Guns handled stupidly in social situations.

So up I get Sunday morning, awaked by a cat's plaintive call 'cause there was another, unknown cat on the front porch. And as much as I am sure the cat calling about the intruder probably would like to learn how to load and fire a Yugoslavian Tokarev and light off a few rounds at said intruder, I ignored the cat's demands for summary justice and hauled my coffee mug out of the dish washer.
Part of the paper's sittin' on the table. The rest of it's sittin in Cid's lap in the living room.
I put three pieces of old multi-grain, crunch-up-your-teeth bread in the toaster, which when toasted I then butter and slather on some Keiller's Dundee Marmalade.
I sit down at the kitchen table, look in the obits to see if Paul Simmons had made it there yet, read the cry-baby tantrum letters to the editor and then Cid brings out the front section. We trade. I turn to page A13 and there at the bottom of the pages is a picture with a cut headline that says “Horsing Around at the Cattle Baron's Ball.” At which point I know that if I mention what I see to Cid, she'll go off like a rocket.
I quietly read the bit under the picture and then go upstairs to write a letter to the editor.
Why?
Holy shi'ite, Mask Man, check out the picture!

A group of south suburbanites (Dayton, Ohio speak for “rich people”) are standing around while a grinning woman, identified in the paper as Sherry Oakes, holds a Winchester Commemorative 94 lever action rifle and waves the muzzle of the piece around. One of the guys in the picture seems to be turning away and pushing the muzzle out of the way of the guy next to him. The rest of the gang has the silly monkey look.
Right there on page A13 of the Dayton Daily News is the picture of someone doing something stupid with a very powerful, albeit pretty, Winchester. And there are other stupid gun tricks on the newspaper's website for the event.
Remember thing about guns and stupid people?
The “Guns handled stupidly in social situations” part?
Right there on the page, waitin' for Jimmy Nobrain lives down the street with his grandparents 'cause his own parents stupidly shot each other playin' with a couple .357 Magnums with real elephant ivory grips one evenin' while drinkin' whiskey shots around the family's nightly bonfire.
Right there on the page, waitin' for anybody who thinks that guns are dangerous and guns kill people and guns don't belong in houses and children might grab one subsequently shoot themselves, their parents, a guy drivin' down the street or their own little brother of three years age.
As, I will admit freely and with complete horror, happens every so often around here and likely elsewhere in Gringolandia.

So I get on my high horse of horror & disbelief and send a letter to the editor of the newspaper saying that they should be ashamed of themselves publishing that picture. I didn't mention that the person with the rifle in the picture should be taken out for brain scramblin', although not much would be necessary, given the evidence for having no brain at all presented in the picture.
At the same time – and I didn't mention it – the picture is all you need for Cid's proof, of course. Never mind that my Mosin is hangin' on the wall behind me with one of those obnoxious trigger locks on it that defeats any safety that the rifle might have had – which is an argument for ancient firearm design – by holding the trigger pulled all the time. Or that everyone I know who has a gun or guns gets real nervous when they pull the piece out of a holster or a gun safe or off the wall, even if they know that there ain't no way it's gonna light off a round, basically because, as I said in my letter to the editor

As a gun owner and veteran, I know such “horsing around” as a public invitation for someone to get shot or killed. Obvious in the picture is the simple fact that two primary rules of gun ownership and handling are being ignored.
Treat every gun as loaded is the first rule. The second rule states that the only safety on any gun is the person holding it.
It makes no difference whether you're talking about grandpa's 1890s pump action .22 rifle, Uncle Igor's 1942 Mosin-Nagant, a Winchester Model 94 commemorative, a rusty Tokarev pistol brought back from Vietnam or the 1911 Colt service pistol Dad carried in Guadalcanal.
All firearms are potentially dangerous and deadly mechanical contrivances. Nobody should “horse around” with any fiream. Ever.

And never mind how many gun owners there are on the planet and how many guns are in the hands of people at any day of the week and how, except for members of active duty military units actually in combat positions, how many people don't get shot. And how most of the guns on the planet are hangin' on walls, stashed in gun safes or cabinets, or holstered on belts, some of which might be on the bodies of policemen and other law enforcement folks. And yes, them's is both long sentences but that's how it works.

In the end it all comes down to stupid humans doing stupid things. Leaving a gun under a bed – as if you're gonna be awake enough to choose a target if you hear a bump in the night – is pure ignorance and a callous disregard for the curiosity of children. Keeping your father's 1911 Colt .45 auto loaded 'cause that's the way Dad carried in in the war is asking to get shot or to shoot yourself. And putting five rounds in the mag of your Mosin 'cause that's the way Uncle Igor carried in the Revolution when every day was strйggle and then install a trigger lock that turns the Mosin into a quick trip to the morgue is outrageously moronic.

The rules are simple:

Treat every gun as loaded.
The only safety on any gun is the person holding it.
Never point the muzzle of any firearm at anything or anyone you don't want to shoot or kill or maim.

Any firearm is a dangerous & deadly mechanical contrivance, as dangerous as a moron settin' his car to launch on a highway. As dangerous as a cast iron printing press built in 1875. As dangerous as a gas oven, an open frame high voltage power supply or that switchblade you bought in Genoa on the '71 Med Cruise that you carry in your right pants pocket.
You can die horsing around with guns. You can kill people horsing around with guns.
Wealthy society folks obviously don't understand that. Mental defectives.
And the Dayton Daily News should be ashamed to have published that picture.

And Now at the Dissertation Lounge . . .

2010-07-21T13:13:00.004-04:00

I've had three friends go through the academic system deep enough to end up with PhD after their names. One guy got his degree in chemistry, a task that I would consider absolutely more daunting that getting a PhD in, say, literature or communications. The other guy got his degree in history, but he did it in Portugal, which is "old Europe" and thus, at least to what I understand of education in Europe, a bitch. The third guy is hauling ass toward his PhD in biology, which I consider just about as daunting as a degree in physics or, even, chemistry.
One way or the other, each of these people put in serious reading time and huge amounts of personal energy by way of study and memorization, plus research time -- which is the whole point of the paper chase in the first place, some folks believe -- and all the fears and frustrations of going into something so deeply that you end up looking like the comic book guy on the Simpsons, all nerdy and obsessively focused on every tiny little detail you could ever find about a corner of a molecule somewhere on the skin of a cell.
Like that, yeah.
Now, given this preamble, let me say straight up here and now that I am in no way comparing my experience of writing a novel with the experience of my three friends. Sure, it's been a pain in the ass, all the editing and spell checking and rewriting this and inserting this bit of text into that. I've sweated here and there over how it looks, at the currency or specificity of this or that bit of info that is supposed to inform the reader of where the hell whatever is going on takes place.
But I really think that, after what looks like seven or eight months, not counting all the time I've thought about this or that part of the book just sittin' on the can or marching back and forth across the lawn with the mower, if this is anything like getting close to going for a PhD, I think I'll pass.
There's all the data, first of all.
You start out writing a book about a guy travels through time and space by way of having been found all dead and dried out in his little space ship by a very advanced extraterrestrial species, you're gonna run into trouble. Like the physics of time travel itself. That and the physics of going from one universe to another -- since true time travel would involve dimensional travel as well, given what little I understand of the physics of time travel.
And then there's the geography of things.
Where's this home world that this so-called "singularity species" called the Community come from? How'd it get to be like it is, this planet with this one organism covering it from sea to rippling sea? How does this species communicate with itself, given that it's got little brain nodes all over itself, everywhere it can stretch out and catch the sun on this home planet? And how'd they learn to travel through space and time?
And how did they find the main character? How'd they revive him? Did they just do that once?
I mean, you gotta settle that question, the grandfather paradox lookin' question about what happens if they send him further back in time than his own particular place in the timeline of the universe in which he was found.
If they find him -- which is one temporal event -- and they revive him with a copy of himself -- which is another temporal event -- what happens to the universe he came from when he's sent back in time to before human beings were what they are today? It's another temporal event, this sending back thing, after all. So . . .
Are you starting to get the idea here, chum?
'Cause I already did a half dozen times in the back yard, sittin' on the can, walkin' down the street and, yes, and even while I was writing all this crap.

Holy shit is it a pile now!

At which point we go back to that dissertation & PhD interrogation thing.
See, right now it's a 250 pages of text -- minus the few extra blank pages that are part of the typographic conveniences & the stuff book printers know about, with my access to such secrets being a completely different rant.
At 250 pages of text, it's almost big enough to be somebody's dissertation and if not that big a deal, certainly a chapter in one. In a dissertation, that is. Thus, for all intents, I will say that writing this thing has been about the same amount of time at the keyboard as most folks I know would have spent on the their dissertation, counting in all the pre-writes and the chapter-by-chapter hacking away at making sure the point of all this scrivening is understood by the reader. By the dissertation review committee and all that, that much work.
Only thing is, right here, there's a big difference between a dissertation on, say, a moderately well-known Latin American writer whose work spans not only decades but also political upheaval and a couple handful revolutions, juntas and take overs and the dissertation that my friend wrote for his chemistry degree.
See, there's the hard science part of a PhD in chem or bio that just has to trump the artsy-fartsy work going into a dissertation about literature. Yeah, sure, there's dates and names and publication dates and political moments and all that. But you write a hard science dissertation, you have written about lab-assailed & assured facts. Numbers and figures, equations and the simple bottom line of literature being very much a soft science when it comes to what is.
Science is about stuff you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Literature is about stuff you can tie together with other stuff, some of it facts but most of it figurines, to make the literature important to talk about.
Like William Faulkner, who, as far as I figure it with my meager credentials, is known today only 'cause somebody wrote a dissertation on him which might have become a book.
And it's here that the whole bit about writing a novel versus a dissertation comes under bleak inspection.
I think that I've suffered the work here on this book. I put in my time trying to get the physics of the book look at least something like the physics of the world I live in. I've worried the placing of the action, the actions of the characters, the interactions between various bits and pieces of the plot line, all that. I've worried out.
And I've worked on making sure the typography makes the story legible and readable, that. Which ain't nothin' in a dissertation 'cause the review committee and all them overlords have their own ideas of what is good typography so get over it and stand up like a man!
Dammit.
So, yes, I'm whining. Big deal.
But I think that what I've written -- beyond whether anyone later on writes a dissertation about it -- amounts to at least the same amount of work that a dissertation writer might have tossed into getting started on book of knowledge that every dissertation becomes. But I'm sure as hell not arrogant enough to think that my work on this book has any close glitter to the PhD that my friend is gonna have after his name in a year for spending all that time in the lab.
It's nice for me to think of it that way. And it's nice for me to think that this book -- and the one I'm going to start on once I get through the hell of making this first one "perfect" (and oh, what perfectionism costs, my children) -- are dissertation quality.
So I can hope.
As if.

While I Was Away . . .

2010-06-13T16:08:00.020-04:00

Back when it was still mørketiden, Cindy decided that we should hie hence to Portland, Oregon, to visit the eldest young'n. Personally, at the time, I was quite willing to sit in the northern wintertime darkness and fiddle hours away playing with radio junk, playing with printshop junk or collecting junk so I can be on Hoarders. At the time.
So up comes June and off we go, Cid & me, to Portland. We spend five hours crammed into a metal tube with wings and end up, eventually, at the same hotel we stayed at last time we did this dance, a year ago more or less.
We both nodded off a bit 'cause we'd gotten up plenty early our local time & it was afternoon when we arrived. A short recharge later we were down in the lobby with Ian and Sarah, ready to go. As if. And off we went, eating dinner together at some place I ain't sure I remember but that ain't all that uncommon any more, me bein' retired and all.
Then it turns out we were just in time for the Rose Festival Starlight Parade, which came at the end of a race of sorts. I say "of sorts" 'cause after all the serious sweating went by, along came the folks who just went on the run/walk for the hell of it. Including six guys in women's one-piece swimsuits with leotards and pink rubber shower hats, doing a pose-a-ballet as they went by. The crowd applauded & hooted in approval. After some more of that kind of silliness, the real parade started, with flags and politicians and clowns and service organizations, including ER medical staff in scrubs, waving and walking and having a good time.
About 10:30 pm, which would have been 1:30 am in Ohio, Cid ran out of steam and we left the parade to its own, well, devices.
There must have been fifteen highschool bands. And a band called The MegaBand, which went two blocks long and had all the instruments & marchers & musicians that didn't fit in the other bands, including the retired guys band, which was a hoot of its own.
So we went back to the hotel & passed out.
Up early the next day, we did some more stuff I don't remember, but there was a trip to Mt. St. Helens and to one of the northerly beaches.
Ian drove. I just looked out the windows.

It's been 30 years since Mt. St. Helens blew top and blasted out a range of destruction running miles off from the main crater. In all those three decades, a lot of the area has been re-seeded. Weyerhaeuser, which uses the land for a vast tree farm, sent in thousands of workers to replant the areas blown off the map. Thus today you can drive up the road to the volcano pretty much enveloped in green. Until you get to the serious blast zone, which looks just as lunar today as it did three decades back when everything over a micron off the surface was scorched, burned, pummeled, buried and snuffed out. Withered, weather-beaten, dried tree trunks stick up out of soil and rock nearly without any signs of life. Six different kinds of rock litter the area, covering some stuff and providing home to the tiny animals who can live in such arid devastation.
It's flat-out humbling.
At the same time, what happened on Mothers' Day in 1980 and what continues to happen at the volcano site today has advanced volcanology and volcano geological knowledge more in thirty years than all that geology knew previously. Add to this the Icelandic volcano activity of recent and we are getting a much better picture of how active geology works.
And if you are not into active geology -- or otherwise abjure the depth of time that the planet's been circling the sun -- leave now. If there were no active geology, we wouldn't be here today to argue about it. Period.
So we did those tours.
Then we took the two-stop electric rail car to the Portland train station and got on a train to Seattle.
I hadn't been on a train since I was a kid, probably something like 50-odd years ago. In truth, given the decline of the American dream to the level of know-nothing tea-baggery, I wasn't expecting much.
What I found was completely different. Like courteous folks with pleasant voices. Easy boarding and seat-finding.
And the room!
Oh yes, the room!
We could stretch out completely between our seats and those of the folks in front of us. We had big windows to look out of. We didn't have to fasten seatbelts of worry about where to stash our carry-on crap. And we got to see eagles in trees and one little Oregon town after another, simple, peaceful and quiet. We found ourselves asking why anybody would want to fly.
And me bein' retired? Hell yes! I'll let Cid fly to wherever 'cause she has to be there quick in and out. I'll take the train and meet her there.

Yeah, even cross-country.

So we detrain in Seattle, catch a cab to the Sheraton and take a break before meeting my eldest niece & her son for dinner at a very spiffy Hindi restaurant of their experience. I ordered the mattar paneer. Spice level three. It was delicious.
In the process of all this, either 'cause I once knew and have since forgotten or because I didn't think of it before, we find that Tiffany, along with her son and kinda her daughters, is one of them vegetableaireans. You know: no meat. Not quite "I don't eat anything that casts a shadow," but good enough.
Which ain't a problem, 'cause I tend to vegetables a lot more easily than chunks of meat, and that more 'cause it's better for me at 64 years, what with a desire to live longer than the old woman in Kazakhstan to lives off yogurt and is 162 years old, according to dubious Soviet-era records.
The next day Cid & I wandered around the market area of Seattle, a short downhill walk from the hotel -- and I must mention, should you go to Seattle, get a USGS topographic map so you can choose the less high angle slopes to walk around. We saw the flying fish market sites. I swear that Andy Montesano's doppelganger works there. We saw a food vendor truck that looks like a huge metalic pig. We listened to buskers making enough money to afford iPhones. We bought some expensively fresh fruit and some rolls for the next day's pre-departure breakfast. We saw the place they make cheese at. Very tasty cheese. Very expensive but very tasty cheese. And the guy who had a parrot did tricks and all that too. We saw that.
During all of this, however, we found time to sink more cash into a lunch at Cafe Campagne, where the chef is a madman who refuses to reveal the secret of the killer quiche they serve there. It was like . . . like . . . like buttah! Seriously. Melt in your mouth, nearly custard without being that dense, down good and tasty quiche. Something a real man would enjoy.
Then I found a place where Cid could put me in photo with one of my many tentacle buddies. You know, like the guys in anime . . .
And then we met Tiffany and Ryan again for dinner, this time at Wild Ginger.
Damn place had too many options on the menu. But the food was excellent and the conversations quite amazing.
We came to see that some parts of the clan are just as crazy as the others. Or that we're the normals and the other members of the clan with whom we have interactions may be, well, a bit this side of tetched, see?
And then it was back to the hotel, pack & crash and get up the next morning to catch a train from Seattle to Portland.

Did I tell you how cool it was, this train business? Well, it is.

Once we were on the train but before we left the station, they announced that the lounge car had some electrical problems and was being pulled from service. Thus there would be no vending point for sandwiches & drinks, such as one might want if one did not want to go to the fancy dining car like Dad did when we were kids. Go to the dining car.
Which is a neat segue to . . . When I was a kid, the dining car had cloth table covers and fancy china & all the amenities of a full-scale, kick-ass restaurant of the late 1940s. I know this 'cause I remember at least one time that we got breakfast on the train in the dining car. I remember that because the waiters were all thin black men in white uniforms like the guy on the cover of the Cream o' Wheat box.
This, of course, was back in the day when the train would have to stop now and then for the brakeman or some other organ of trains to go out and applied oil to the rags stuffed in the journal boxes (as opposed to the roller bearings that now smooth the ride of the train over the rails). This was back when trains had steam engines with multiple drive wheels larger than most large men. Back when railroad/road crossings had the crossed white thingies that said "Stop! Look! Listen!" and not those sissy "Watch out, you might get killed and it will be our fault!" crossing gates.
Yeah, back in the late Pleistocene.
And being as how Cid and I were enjoying the comfort of the train ride, we decided to eat lunch in the dining car.
At which point things got really interesting.
See, because of the demise of the lounge car, the dining car had to roll double duty. There was a line of folks going to the dining car to pick up what few sandwiches &c they had managed to squeak into storage on the dining car. From there, those folks, having lined up not to eat at the dining car, would take their stuff back to their seats elsewhere on the train and snack down.
We of the reserved space in the dining car, we were different.
We got to sit down "community style," as they called it, to eat with people we didn't know.
Kinda like in bootcamp but without the DIs and all that.
So our table partners were two women, one named Cindy and the other named Myken. Cindy worked for an environmental clean-up outfit. She reminded me of my back-door neighbor. Very friendly, killer sense of humor. Straight up person. Myken was a runway model.
I pegged Myken walking through the train station before we boarded. She was tall and thin and very attractive. Nearly slinky, but in a nice way. I said to Cid: "Very tall and very thin."
"She's probably a model," Cid replied. "I was wondering if you'd notice her."
Duh.
We chatted during the meal, of course. Afterwards, Cid said we probably sounded like a couple mid-west dweebs, the cat-lady and his wife, going off to see our son who has been in Portland a year and still can't find a job. And how the garage needed painted and it was so nice to see all those crafts at the Seattle public market. Something right out of Burroughs.
"Mother and I would like to know . . . "
Cid noticed that Myken drank two beers, ate nearly all the entre, including the salad and bread that came with it. I think Cid was hoping to see someone who played with her salad and then ran screaming from the room for having eaten too much.
I just noticed how amenable she was. Myken. Nice smile, friendly face, pleasant voice & demeanor. It was soooo PostModern.
Once we'd paid for lunch we all went our separate ways, back to the cars where we had our seat assignments.
The rest of the ride was pretty much like the first ride: eagles, water, riverways, green this and green that, and little railroad towns with quaint stations from a time when my father was a youngman, riding the rods, as he used to call it.

Now, out of all this travel -- and I'm not going to bore you with more details of plane rides or boarding passes or the woman who was traveling alone, on a plane, with six children, the oldest of whom was probably not more than ten -- I have come to see the need for a couple really strange things.
First, I must begin the finishing touches on the beginning of the next novel. Between where we ate and the whacked-out conversations we had with Ian and Sarah and the conversations we had with Tiffany & Ryan and the stuff we saw and heard or ate on this trip, I have tons of material to plaster the walls.
Twoth, I am seriously considering giving up on plane travel. Sure, it's quick and greasy. You can actually arrive someplace before you left. You don't have to plan for a couple days of driving or worrying about where you're going to sleep, should you be driving. But jebus in a hopper of malt for a Seattle micro-brewery, it is too much like being stuffed into a miniature submarine with almost no room to stretch while being surrounded by loud engine noises and the possibility of turbulent air interrupting your sit on the can. That and the hustle and hassle of all the trappings, baggage weight limits, people trying to make full army backpacks into carry-on luggage, and the vexation of trying to find a restroom after you get there, well, it gets old, yo.
It gets very old very quick.
And we won't even mention how close it gets to being strip searched before you get to the boarding gate. Thus I suggest to myself the following item:
Threeth, rail travel may take more time and it may require me buying a ticket with sleeping accommodations, and it may be more expensive in that frame, but holy hell, Hanna, look at what I get!
Room to stretch out without banging my shins of the seat in front of me.
Room to get up and walk about, should I feel the need, say, to visit the mobile outhouse or maybe go all the way to the end of the train -- as my father did with me over five decades ago -- to see the track running away from the train as it moves on down the line.
Big roomy cars with roomy seats!
Did I mention the room?
Dining facilities, which, even in their most minimal application, as much more commodious than a fold-down tray table that pokes at my belly, upon which I can put a little plastic tray with a bit of fruit and a small milk carton, all of which might at any time fly off the tray table as the plane runs into bumpy weather. (And I notice the airplane folks no longer say "turbulance." They say "bumps.")
And even if the sleeping accommodations are not as luxurious as they were when I was a kid -- mainly 'cause Dad spent money like a sailor when we traveled -- I'll gladly take a snooze in a chair in a position closer to prone than the horrible back aches I get from being stuffed into and sitting immobile in a metal tube smaller than a submarine torpedo room. Any day of the week.
Yeah, it takes three days to get from Chicago to Portland.
Fine.
I'll look out the window with my feet stretched out in front of me, resting on the foot rest, my laptop plugged into the nearby recepticle, taking notes as I slip along the surface of the countryside . . . while the rest of travelling humanity looks down a mile or more to where the train track looks like a scratch along the landscape.
And, as I did many times during this trip, mostly 'cause of the people I was with, I'll smile.

The Broad Side of the Barn Exercise

2010-03-30T21:58:00.002-04:00

So let's do the math: There are 50 rounds in the box. If I load six rounds each in the two magazines, that's 12. Then there's another 6 rounds in the storage case. I stop at the landfill by the wetlands and blow one round out the muzzle. So there's 49 rounds total left. I then go off to a shootin' range and lay out the two magazines at one target. I then load six rounds each into the three then-available magazines and light them off, which is a total of 12 rounds (2x6) and then another 18 rounds (3x6), which is 30.
Then I go home and spend some time breaking down the pistol & cleaning it.
I load 6 rounds into one magazine and 7 into the other. The third mag is empty, in the piece.
So, I went through 31 rounds, counting the 30 at the range, plus the 1 at the landfill.
And there are still six in the storage case, which totals out to 39. The 13 rounds in the mags plus the 6 in the case is 19. The 31 rounds shot plus the 19 unspent is 50.
All of which means that I didn't remember to count my shots, although I remember wondering when the slide was going to lock back when the mag was empty, which it did, much to my relief.
Then we can get down to counting the holes in the targets.
The first target has 10 holes in it, 6 inside the circle of the target area and 4 outside the circles. The second target has 13 holes in it, 2 outside the circles. Which means that I hit the target(s) in one fashion or the other a total of 23 times out of 30 shots. At which point I have ask myself where the other 7 slugs went.
I can only wonder. I say that 'cause in the post noise-making cleanup I came across one piece of metal that wasn't a 9mm casing but a chunk of copper such as one might think came from the front end of the pistol as opposed to the ejector. And that would mean that I left 29 shots down range and one that somehow made its way back to where I was standing without causing any bodily harm.
Lucky that.
Now for the grand total thingie, all that adding and counting comes up with a score of 76.6% just for hitting the target paper itself and 73.9% for hitting inside the target circle against hits on the target at all, or . . .
Out of 30 shots taken, only 17 of which hit the target inside the circle, gives me a score of getting a round inside the circle at 56.6%.

What this means on the grand scale is beyond me. What it means to me about owning a 9mm pistol is something else, most of which comes down to gut reactions. At which point I look at myself in the mirror and realize that I was really nervous pointing that thing down range at the targets and that all the concentration in the world added nothing to my nominal success.
In other words, I can sit here at this desk and put a pistol in my hands and try to do everything that I remember about shooting – which information is over 40 years old in itself, let alone relevant only to a much larger pistol in the hands of much younger man – and I can feel that I might win out.
The truth, as evidenced by the math of the target hole count, is something else.
The first of the truths is that the 9mm pistol, being a light & small object from a distant time of hammers & sickles, kicks like the proverbial mule. I caught on to that with one round at the landfill. Standing in the lane at the shootin' range proved again and again that the mule is very much there.
The second truth is that it's a damn loud thing to be around and, adding in the mule kick, the second or third shot was taken with a built-in flinch factor. As in: I knew as I squeezed the trigger – and I can only guess that I was "squeezing" it – I waited for my hand to be pulled off axis by the force of the recoil, discharge or whatever you want to call it.
And then there was the muzzle flash. Man was there a muzzle flash.
So I not only got hammered at the wrist, I flinched and I blinked.
Talk about disheartening & embarrassing.
At the same time, having gone this far once, I am going to take another stab at this again some time down the road. Maybe in a couple weeks, after I've assimilated all the stuff I have been thinking about since I took that first shot. The one at the landfill.
I have to consider what my hands were doing, shaking either from nerves or from my old stand-by, essential tremor. If it's that, I'm stuck with a shaky hand and a rotten score & hope to hell I don't scare anybody else doing this.
I also have to consider what it means to be ready to flinch, to blink, to do whatever it is that is, for want of a better term, disarming me as I take aim and/or squeeze the trigger.

I say all this with a distinct memory of a summer day in Puerto Rico, somewhere around 1969 or so, with a Colt 1911 .45 ACP pistol in my hand, round after round hitting the target and scoring slightly better than my shipmates, some of whom had already been to Vietnam & were thus already tested by the true fires.
And then there's the simple fact that, once I've gone through this much ammo and knowing what it's gonna cost me to buy more, I'm pretty sure that the PA-63 that I fired off today will soon enough be sitting in its case, two magazines probably filled as best I can get 'em to their specified seven rounds and that will be that.
After all, I didn't buy this thing to gather with Bubba and the other local mental defectives who seem to enjoy blowing a noisy hole in a quiet Sunday afternoon by fillin' the wetlands with the sounds of what I can only guess is a couple shotguns, a half-dozen pistols and at least one AK47 with full automatic kicked in.
Yes, an AK47 in full auto, jamming out lead right down the street from my house.
I bought this piece and the other'ns because I wanted pieces of history. A rifle with a hammer and sickle on it, for instance. The shootin' part? Well, I'll do that too. But I think it's a lot easier at the shooting range. And it won't wreck someone's Sunday evening dinner too.
Would like to improve my score some though.

The Other Half of the Other Gun Rant

2010-03-28T20:57:00.011-04:00

It has finally dawned on me, after nearly a month of dealing with my having suddenly become a pernicious gun owner, that part of the problem I have with being a gun owner is the simple fact that my life is already outrageously hypothetical as it is. This is another way of saying that I have noticed many – not a pile but at least a few – gun owners seem to predicate their need for a piece on a need to defend themselves. As in: they see an immanent possibility that someone is going to bust into their home, kidnap the cats, steal the refrigerator's refrigerant and haul off into the night with the family wine collection, leaving them a heap of quivering jelly on the floor.
Or: some gun owners believe that they're going to be attacked at any moment by sinister forces, the names of which we do not know and probably couldn't pronounce if we did.
Hypotheticals, dig?
"I have this gun 'cause I don't want to be stuck in the corner of my bed room in my flannel boy's town jammies while some armed maniacs rape my son. The one with the tattoos."
"I had to get a gun 'cause the world is just too flippin' like insane, see? I mean, like who knows what like might happen some night as I lay like sleepin'. Like a burgular (yes, that burg-you-lur) might like break in and I'd have to like shoot it or whatever."
"Well, I'm armed for the day the bloodbath race war starts between the crocodillians and the lizard people from Venus, that's why I have a gun!"
"There's killers out there roaming the streets and I don't want to get killed."

Those kinds of hypotheticals.

Now don't get me wrong. There is always the possibility that someone will decide that I need to have a home invasion run on my ass. If such would happen, I'd end up like Grandpa Pitts down the street. I'd be slapped up the side of my greying head and left k-oed on the floor while the invaders made off with the large screen TV and that collection of tentacle sex videos I bought on the InterWebs.
It's happened down the road a bit from here. Couple miles. Could happen here.
Maybe.
Perhaps.
Ok, it could happen but . . .
And in such a case, yes, it would be somewhat consoling to know that all I'd have to do is flip off the safety, battery up a round and sit in the darkness at the top of the stairs until whoever it was broke in decides they want to check the family holdings aloft.
But then I'd have to explain why a possibly unarmed person is bleeding out at the bottom of my stairs. Yes, I could easily say I felt threatened. I didn't know if the moron was armed or not and I took my best shot & by some strange quirk of fate managed to hit the perp somewhere stalling.
Would I rather not have to explain?
Hell yes. I'd rather not have to have anyone unknown to me enter my house with the intent of making off with parts of it or intent on causing me harm.
Under such circumstances I can see where having a 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a seven-round clip, or maybe two seven-round clips, would be a deterrent.
And double the deterrent if we talk about a 7.62x54R Russian rifle with a bayonet on the end of it. Poke. Boom.
Just like that.
Which, despite all that one can say about protecting oneself in such circumstances, I'd be left having to explain why a possibly unarmed person is bleeding out at the bottom of my stairs from two different holes.
Yes, I could easily say I felt threatened. I poked the moron with the bayonet real good and then took my best shot and added serious bodily injury on top of serious bodily injury.
Could happen.
Maybe.
The only difference for me is the simple one of not sitting around thinking about having a gun from that perspective. I'd rather think of how the gun – whatever brand, model, caliber, historical unimportance, all that – is an interesting mechanism not too much different from my feelings about a well-written book or the typography of the printed page itself. I can consider the deadly meaning of the firearm – or if it's a relic of a former militaristic time – any time I want, just as I can consider the sort of person the author ended up being many times over in his or her tortured life. But I sure ain't about to sit here and think that I bought the damn thing 'cause I was afraid.

That is, after all, what this comes down to, and it's one of the reasons that I am not too eager to join any of the half-dozen guns-rights groups circling the planet like a series of satellites, preaching the need for preparedness or security or self-assertiveness in defense of Mom, the proverbial applie pie and whatever religious superstitionism is appropriate for the landmass presently under said satellite's shadow.
All that fear mongering gets me down.
Much the same as the short-sightedness of those who use fear mongering as their one and only heavy trump card in a hand full of otherwise useless pictures, symbols and numbers.
In truth, I'd be much more afraid of snuffing someone unnecessarily in the middle of the night 'cause I heard a cat jump on the table.
Happens a lot around here: cats making loud noises in the night. I think it's a union thing.
I am at the outset, much more fearful of causing unnecessary bodily harm in an accidental way than I am fearful of a need to defend myself against turbaned ruffians.
It makes me nervous just to cycle a round into the chamber to check the operation of any gun.
Once you put that round in the chamber you only have two options: You have to fire the gun or you have to remove the magazine and cycle the mechanism to eject the hopefully unspent round.
And then, if you're diligent in your safety practices, you'll check to see that there isn't another round in the chamber, even if you saw the one you put in there fly out when you cycled the mechanism again. Maybe twice.
At which point I then have to say that having a life round in a gun, even if I am fearful of who's makin' the ruckus downstairs, would make me just about as jittery as hearing the bumps in the night that drew me to load a round in the first place.
Could be a cat.
Could be someone I know. One of my sons. Maybe it's my wife down there in the kitchen getting a seltzer or an aspirin and I ain't quite awake enough to notice that she's not in the bed with me when I wake up to the noises.
Could be any cause at all for a noise downstairs. Water heater blows up.
I hear it, think there's somebody downstairs, go to where the guns are, load a round and then, in a state of awakedness probably a bit more toward sleep than ready, I'm standing in the dark at the top of the stairs with a chambered round in my barely cogent hand.

See, this is why I am not good on hypotheticals.

There's too damn many ways of the hypo getting to the thetical parts. Villainous marauders in the kitchen. Cats runnin' around high on nip. Mouse gets loose in the house and the cats go into planned attack protocols. My kid comes over in the middle of the night to fall asleep on the couch 'cause his roommates are all drunk and listening to the racist heavy metal music the guy two apartments down is listening to at 3:30 in the morning.
Could be anything or anyone and I'll be damned if I'm gonna say that's the reason I bought the gun.

So why did I buy the gun? Well, which one? The rifle, hell, that's easy: It has a hammer & sickle on the barrel. What a trip! Here it is, the 21st Century, there's a "man of color" in the White House, the Tea Party people remind me of Hitler's Brown Shirts and I have a rifle with a hammer & sickle on the barrel.
The 9mm? Same story. Hungarians built it, back in the day. And it's small, although probably not as small as the one Nancy Reagan had in her purse.
The CVA cap-and-ball revolver? C'mon, get real. It's old and goofy and it's almost like the one I wanted to have when I was a kid playin' wild-west. (Remember when it was "cowboys & injuns"?)
And the two BB pistols, well, that's cool. Everybody needs a couple BB pistols, especially if one of 'em looks like the 9mm & the other looks like, well, a BB gun from around 1956, which it is.
Never know when a ravenous possom's gonna scratch through the back door and use the microwave to make some popcorn so it can watch those tentacle sex DVDs.
"Make my day, marsupial!" Plink.
"Oh, shit! That hurt! I'm outta here!"

What If . . .

2010-03-21T13:36:00.001-04:00

Back when I was working on the ol’ book, I often had to face what would happen if the story took place across a different time frame. Like what would happen if, instead of cats & a savior delusion, the main character had been inspired to kill off, say, Hitler or Stalin.
Yeah, I know: same ol’ hypothetical bullshit as I usually get into. Nothing new going on, just a chance to bend the time line.
But you have to ask, as Spike Lee obviously did when he made the movie that few have seen, The CSA. And if you ain’t seen it yit, I suggest you do a Netflix or whatever to watch it. With an open mind, of course.
The movie aforementioned is based on the situation that would have become the USA, had the South won the Civil War. After all, it could have happened. Only needed one solid victory on the side of the South and a couple European countries would have weighed in, changing the dynamic of the po’ Southern States not having the industrial base upon which to support a truly powerful war effort.
Which brings me back to the hypothetical situation of Hitler having been blown to bits, if only Hitler had stayed at the podium in the Burgerbraubierkeller back in 1939.
I suspect that having been blown to bits, Hitler would have become a martyr for the Nazi cause. I also seriously suspect that there would have been a raging monkey bloodbath as the result of a successful assassination.
How this would have played out over time, of course, would require a serious amount of background knowledge and the ability to coalesce out of all the information, some idea of the possible twists and turns of the subsequently altered timeline.
Would the Nazi’s have risen to power at all without their hypnotic guru and leader? Good question, even rhetorically.
If the Nazi’s hadn’t risen to power, would the emperor of Japan been tempted to take advantage of FDR’s seeming lack of attention to what some think were obvious signs of an immanent attack on US military bases in the Pacific. Not many folks like to consider the connection between Japanese militarism and Nazi militarism, even with the story that Hitler had a fit when he heard of the Pearl Harbor attacks.
And then there’s the military situation between Russia and Japan in the years leading up to the beginning of Soviet military operations resulting from Hitler’s decision to repeat Napoleon’s attack on Russia. This played mightily into the decades of war that had been going on in various levels of simmer between Japan and Russia even before Japan went after US interests in the Pacific.
And while the rest of the world was bashing it out over Nazism and American liberties, China was going through its own revolution of sorts while also trying to get out of becoming Japanese colonial property.
Without Hitler at war with Europe and England, the Japanese would have been facing a completely different enemy. Hell, if you want to get real hypothetical, consider the world’s history without Hitler or Stalin.
A couple planned murders here and there in Europe and Russia and the entire planet would have lived a completely different post-depression/economic collapse. Without Hitler, would Mussolini have had a chance at becoming the political equivalent of Don Vito? It’s a thing to consider. Obviously.
Consider what it would have meant if the world economy hadn’t gone so seriously into the toilet in the very early 30s. It would have changed the base of discontent and frustration of the average person and in Germany would have made for a different set of speeches and scape goats in the rise of Nazism.
Without the economic troubles of the 30s, Lenin’s control of the newly-birthed socialist/communist government would have been running on a different set of economic values. You have to ask, had there been no Depression, would Lenin have been able to hold on to Russia?
Or, for that matter, what if Stalin had been assassinated instead of Lenin?
Maybe that’s one of the joys of being a whack-fiction writer. You know: the kind of thing that proposes a world familiar by names and titles but completely changed by the flow of circumstance.

All together, and more realistically, these sorts of hypothetical games are useless. They waste time and energy that could be focused on more meaningful pursuits.
But it’s the hypothetical at the basis of existence that spills over into what some folks might want to call art.
People make decisions every day on “what if” moves. Cross the street: it’s always preceded by a hypothetical question.
“What if I wait until after the cement truck passes?”
It’s the same old dream time stuff that we either get used to running as children or we never get hooked on good enough for us to turn into the fabled starry-eyed dreamers of legend, fame and fiction writing.
Me? Obviously hooked good.
If there’s any benefit – other ’n not being struck by a truck crossin’ the street, it provides me with plenty of deep philosophizing time, all of which time I could or should put to other uses.
But I always end up wondering “What if I don’t ask ‘what if?’”
I dunno.
What if you ask it instead? Would the flag be different today? Would Stalin have killed between 30 and 50 million folks? Would Castro have been a revolutionary?
Would it make a difference to you?

Monkey Lover

2010-03-11T16:02:00.003-05:00

The service line at the local meat market was slow. There were a handful of folks in front of me, further down the cases by the bacon and chicken parts. At my end, distant from the action, there was only a woman in front of me and, a few minutes after I got there, a mother and daughter behind.
The way the place works, you show up, wait at the far end of the display cases, past the freezers with all the stuff you might want if you were in a hurry. When one of the folks behind the counter finishes with whoever’s in front of you, the counter person will come over and ask “Who’s next?”
To which someone responds and the service of that customer’s needs begins. On and on, over and over like that. It’s pretty quick and painless.
Besides, it’s the only locally run, family-owned meat market in about a twenty mile radius and the quality and choices are better than the under-plastic stuff you buy – usually from who knows where – at the local chain grocery stores.
So there I was, in line, up by the sausages – which are usually too salty for my tastes or health – waiting for the next person to get free and come down to help the lady waiting in front of me.
The mother and daughter behind me made a comment about it being slow.
“I think they’re just busy. Not enough help right now.”
“It’s the black people,” the woman in front said. She was a short, pudgy person with small eyes, almost pinched closed, grey hair. All of that. “They can’t never make up their minds,” she said.
I snorted. “That's bullshit,” I said. “And you know it.”
The mother behind me said “That’s not fair.”
The woman in front said “I’m prejudiced.”
“You are, damn sure,” I said. “I’ve seen white people can’t make up their minds plenty. It ain’t some race thing.”
The daughter and mother behind me exchanged some words about racism. I was too hot to hear.
“Well,” the racist lady said, “They always go around causin’ trouble and crimes and such.”
“Bullshit,” I said again. “You can’t tell me white people are any better.” My voice was getting louder. “I lived next door to a family of sociopaths, white people, tore up my stuff, broke windows in my garage and when I went to talk to ’em about it they wanted to call the police for me scarin’ their kid! So don’t give me that crime and race shit!”
The mother and daughter behind me were silent. Then mom said “We used to get those pork shoulder . . .”
I turned and touched mom lightly on the shoulder. “And thank you for changing the subject.”
“Oh, that’s ok,” mom said, “I just didn’t want you to have a bad day.”
“I can’t have a bad day. This is my second week or retirement and I’m havin’ fun.”
Mrs. Racist was staring at me.
I lit into her again. “And many a time when I when was in the navy, a black shipmate helped me out. Saved my ass or otherwise kept me out of trouble. So don’t give me that shit either!”
The racist lady moved down the counter a tick. One of the help came up and started serving her up stuff. Then another person came and helped me through my light weight needs. A package of ground round and “Oh, what’s that there in the wrap?”
“That’s our home-made corn beef. We have it for St. Patrick’s day and all. Just this month.”
“Good. Give me the large one in the back, please.”
Got through that pretty cheerfully.
So I chatted with the mother and daughter about my plans for the corn beef. Cabbage and carrots and maybe some kugelis, the Lithuanian potato pudding thing that’ll stick an extra twenty odd pounds on you for just lookin’ at the recipe.
Then I was at the check out with the racist lady again.
“You know, I was in the military too,” she says.
“Yep. You got a lot out of that didn’t you?”
“Twelve years. My husband . . .”
I stopped listening.
“. . . Havin’ babies right and left. Welfare . . .”
“I have a dear friend who is raising his daughter. Has a good job. Solid citizen. So don’t give me that ‘common as dirt’ shit, either.”
She shut up, paid her bill and split.
I turned to mom and said “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Please have a nice day.”
“Ma’am, I can’t help but have a nice day, with good people around me.”
I paid my bill and split too. As I walked out to the car, I wondered if the racist lady was sittin’ in her car, lookin’ at me, memorizing my face. I could imagine her going home and telling her husband what had happened.
“Goddamn ni66er lovers,” he probably said. “Probably voted for that monkey!”
And, to be truth up, I did.

Every Day! Strйggle

2010-03-04T14:22:00.007-05:00

There are probably three dozen things that make my teeth wiggle. You know: things that get you to grinding your teeth so bad that they start to hurt and you discover that they're all wiggly as well. That kind of teeth wiggly.
One of these is soft-core evangelism. You get your mail out of the mailbox and discover that, just on the day when your most recent copy of Freethought Today arrived, there's a note about Jesus wanting to draw you back into his bosom or some such stuck under the mailbox edge. Not that I'm in any way suggesting that the appearance of the tract is directly connected with the arrival of the mail.
Another grinder is the absolute faith of so many in ignorance and irrational stupidity being a virtue. I'd rail on about this for long and overly verbose, were it not for the next grinder, which I consider almost as disturbing as belief in a just and loving god.
My most suppressed and curbed grinder is my having to be in conversations about firearms that end up going to something like "All gun owners are potential sociopathic killers waitin' for no excuse whatsoever to burst out of the closet like Rambo, guns a-blazin' and people a-dyin'."
Them kinds of conversations grind me 'cause, although I survived the '60s and was nominally anti-war and all that, I still have a certain pleasure holding a fine piece of low-rent firearm in my paws or holdin' it to my shoulder. And that, well, it's something that folks living outside the so-called "gun culture" don't get any more than I get puttin' tracts under the edge of the mailbox.
Kinda like when I was in the USN and we had what was then a regular occurance called the "Dependants Day Cruise." Folks would bring their loved ones or family or girlfriends or whoever to go out on the blue and briny to see what an aircraft carrier does when it ain't loaded down with family & friends.
There I was, standing on the port cat-walk forward of the comm spaces with Joy Eastman, watching one of the onboard jets fly by at supersonic speed, leaving a slam bang sound barrier bein' broken in our ears. The next bit, after deafening us, was the obligatory bombing of the fishes, during which a plane would zip by and drop a small device in the water, which device, upon hitting the water, would explode.
I'd seen it before. It was cool.
Joy didn't think much of it. She couldn't understand how we could see that happen and not think of all the death that such a device would cause, not counting the fish, if it were dropped on a village of poor Vietnamese villagers.
To which my response was "It's technology. I know what it does. I am powerless to do anything about it, and I signed up for this so I have to go with the flow." Or something like that.
Your garden-variety "it's just my job, man" bullshit.
Either way, even with a friend standing there next to me, my participation in the military's purpose, misguided or not, was some abrogation of my sense of human dignity, justice and the way of peace, man. As if.

At which point we get back to guns. Which is kinda like getting back to religion, which is kinda like politics, which is kinda like cognition, which is a direct drop in modern times to Cyril M. Kornbluth's novella, The Marching Morons, which is a whole 'nother rant.

See, to me a gun is kinda like the screwdriver doodad on your multi-purpose hunting knife. Or a keestered shiv, if you wanna get down in the streets is real, man, mode. Anyone can use a gun to cap some food or protect their family from wild hyena-coyote hybrids from the planet Grnszlpaq or go out and put holes in things to see how close you can get to leavin' no paper unshredded . . . or kill themselves, their friends, co-workers and the gang of kids play that horror core music down the street.
It's a tool that has multiple purposes.
As for the cappin' your food. Happens all over the planet in places ain't got a WalMart or a Food Lion or whatever.
"You hungry?"
"Yeah, I think so."
"Cool. Let's load up ol' Betty Mae and go get somethin' to cook."
Boom.
At the same time, guns are used in war and sectarian violence and violence against people, just as they were first designed to do, after cappin' some food. And when you think about it, it's the old "chicken and egg" conspiracy thing: Were guns invented to blow people away or to catch some meat on the hoof?
Depends on whether you're the army general of Tsang Tao Chun or whatever – bein' as how we think the Chinese invented all the powder & sparkle parts of it – or maybe you're the guy put together the idea of a projectile traveling at the speed of sound, which projectile would snuff a deer or a bear or whatever.
"Honey, I think I shot the neighbor's horse."
"Well don't just stand there! Let's eat it."
"I was wrong. I shot the neighbor."
"Oops."
But once we get the snuffin' of food or neighbors out of the way, intentionally or not, guns are machines made by people to do any of the above. Some folks like 'em 'cause they're just cool. You know, you've seen 'em. One of those "Have you seen the new attachment on my drill?" kind of deals.
Or some folks just like putting holes in chunks of cardboard or paint cans or whatever.
So be it. And therein lies the problem.

A gun ain't the same thing to everybody. The person who has a gun to protect himself, his family and his possessions, well, sometimes them people are as nuts as the crazies they fear or consider dangerous. I know, I lived next to one once. Total sociopaths. Had a sign in the door about "I have a constitutional right to protect my shit. And I'm armed and ready to do so!"
Then they'd cut their kids loose to come into my hard to break windows in the garage or steal shit out of my yard or mess with stuff elsewhere on the property.
Other folks have 'em cause they go out every year a couple times a year to kill some animal and drag the meat and horns home to show off how cool they are. I don't mind them folks. All of my grandparents lived at a time when hunting was another way to keep from killin' the cows and chickens. Many people still live that way.
And yes, I know: there are hunter/gatherer societies on this planet that have never had guns. They use poison darts and bows and arrows and bolas and such. (To which the come-back is something like "If they can live that way, why would you need a gun for hunting?")
To which I have no response 'cause I consider the question inane.
At the next stop in this way through guns-as-a-topic there's the so-called "sport shooting" folks, which probably describes my attitude toward owning and shooting a firearm. You know: clay pigeons getting blasted at a trap shoot competition. Black powder gun folks showin' off the craftsmanship of a flint lock or cap lock rifle or pistol at a meet, sometimes with obligatory shooting added to coincide with the amount of shooting off the mouth going along with that part of it. Them.
And then there's folks who like to have a piece of history, even if it's a repro .36 caliber cap-and-ball revolver like some unknown person might have died with in the Civil War or during a shoot out with the Apaches somewhere in Arizona. Or the guy who has a 91/30 Винтовка Мосина to hang on the wall 'cause it's the same as "rifle Uncle Igor carry in Revolution! Every day! Strйggle!"
And yes, again, yes: I know that guns are used in crimes, in murders, in assaults, rapes, religious sectarian violence, war, pestilance, disease, torture & general mayhem around the world. Been that way since day one the first barrel ever puked out a bullet. I know. I know.
I know, dammit! I know. But so have knives – even kitchen knives – and long poles with pointy ends and poison darts and even trip lines and them pits with pointy shit at the bottom of 'em you fall in you die. Or a toaster thrown in the tub while someone's innocently bathing themselves. Or cars driven into crowds. Or airplanes into buildings. You name it; it's a weapon.

But for me, bein' a kid of the era when Grandpa had a rifle (or maybe three) and maybe Uncle Igor had his service pistol from the Revolution (Every day! Strйggle!), I ain't a-fearin' of guns as things by themselves. I rather think they're interesting, like archeological stuff, like a flint arrow blade collection or a couple samurai swords that Uncle Takashimu used when he chopped up the gardener of Emperor Mung.
So I see the K98k Mauser rifle carried by German troops in WW II as an interesting piece of history. It and the Russian version of the same piece, the Mosin Nagant, are bizarrely anachronistic to my thinking. A bolt action rifle such as these two would have been a bad match – at least in my minor league mind of strategies – against the US military's M1 rifle or carbine, which was a semi-auto rifle.
Thus, owning a piece of history would be cool. Is cool. Ought to be cool.
And lettin' fire with something like that is cool, even if it is noisy and smelly and it scares the aliens out of the sky.

Them what thinks guns are dangerous have a point. They are dangerous. I fear 'em for what they can do, actually. Seeing someone with a gun in their mitts makes me a bit nervous, even if the person mitting the gun is someone I know and trust and have no reason to fear. It's the reality: you can get killed with a gun, even if it is only your gun and you're all by yourself in the kitchen checking the firing pin protrusion. Happens often enough.
But I also disagree with those who would ban all firearms completely, across the board. And as hokey as it might seem, there is a certain degree of truth in the statement that "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." You can go damn near anywhere and eventually find a firearm that will snuff Aunt Bessy's cat or Aunt Bessy her own self. It's a given.
For me it's more a cross between interesting history, the mechanics of the firearm – if not the history of the mechanics of firearms, which is another thing even more arcane – and where the firearms in question came from, how they were assembled and what happened to the poor dumb sonnabitch held this one last in his paws. Or the poor gulag inmate made it.
And I enjoy seeing how poor a shot I am with stuff that goes bang and shoots a bullet. Kinda like trying to play saxophone and thinkin' I'm a jazz musician. It's fun for a while but after I prove to myself that I can't hit the broad side of a barn, even with a backstop & all that, I'll empty the magazine or cylinder, get out the cleanin' kit, do that act and then put the gun back on its hook or rack or wherever else I want to put it.
And yes, I do like showin' off that I got one of whatever. If that's the most egregious vanity I can muster for a firearm, fine. Move along. I've rattled about this before.

Once again I'm at a loss for what this means to anyone but me. I don't get off on the NRA gospel of right wing fearful extremist conspiracy freak stuff about "they're gonna take our guns! Holy Mother Jesus Christ in Heaven Almighty, White and pure as the driven snow, please no!"
I also don't get off on the total ban of all firearms across the board. I gave my reasons before above. Live with it.
This leaves me in the middle of nowhere surrounded by a constant gibbering about loss of rights, suppression of liberties, end of personal protection, guardin' against the evil horde or prepping up for the invasion of whatever horde. It's like tinnitus. EEEEEeeeeeeeee!!!, on and on and on, day after day and minute by minute. And believe me, I know tinnitus. It's annoying.
For me, I figure it's a lost cause trying to explain myself to folks – like my dear wife, who has an abject, nearly frantic reaction of my possession of a cap-and-ball revolver takes half an hour to load. Thus I'll have my guns and she can not have hers and such is life. Uncle Igor will hang on the wall next to William Burroughs and maybe every now and then I'll take him down from the wall and haul him off to a friend's house to put holes in things at reasonable distances. A darn sight better fate than what he was originally used for, being the snuffing of enemies of the state and guarding the gulag.

Retirement

2010-03-04T09:01:00.003-05:00

Almost a week ago a bunch of folks gathered at work to celebrate my celebration of retirement. Thirty years at the university and I had a ton of folks as friends, colleagues, unindicted co-conspirators and cronies to show for it.
In truth it was a very sweet moment. Unlike my departure from the US Navy nearly 38 years ago, this time I knew that my departure was not going to be like current through a diode: once you leave you can't come back, at least not with the access and depth to which one might have become accustomed. The ol' university is built on glacial till and moraines. It's a large number of very impressive buildings, most of which are structurally sound enough to not be going off on their own like the moon will some day.
In other words, I will be back.
I have many friends at work, folks whom I've known for many of the past thirty years, and I have no intention of disappearing from their lives any more than I want to be left alone. Their place in my own mental and cognitive life is deep enough that not going back would be like turning off my frontal lobe 'cause I graduated from high school.
A few of the folks with whom I've worked over the years have knowledge and judgment that I need from time to time. If they feel the same way about me, that's cool. But the simple fact is that all of them – co-conspirators or just plain friends – are part of how my brain appears to be working & I'd just as soon keep that part of me going until I run out of heart beats.
In other words, I'll be back.
Tough love.
So, after the shindig in the computer department's neato lovely atrium/meeting room, I picked up a pile of stuff and shuffled out the door. The next Tuesday I drove over to see if I'd left anything that I really might in the future need. Of course, this came after I'd gone off on one of my perigrinations to find stuff I thought would be interesting in retirement.
Then Wednesday I drove over to drop a frozen chicken on Dale's desk. With a thunk.
Today I am going to head out to buy some lumber for a project needed in the office as part of the nominal process of de-cluttering and de-hoarding. I say "nominal" because it's not really something that looks all that important but I figure if it has a name (as in "nominal" meaning "having a name"), then I can explain it better.
Yeah, right.
So a week of retirement and I'm still finding stuff needs done. It would be nicer if it were warmer and I could do all the stuff that is far from nominally needing done, if not more like desperately needing done.
Like the attic, which looks like an episode of Hoarders.
And the outside radio shack/ET work shop, which looks like an episode of Hoarders.
And the office/radio shack which looks like an episode of Hoarders.
And the garage, which really looks like an episode of Hoarders, not that it's any less needing cleaned than the attic.
And then there's stuff I want to do in the yard, which will obviously need much warmer weather before I'll even think of turning to on that'n.
At which point I run out of really important stuff and can get down to the penny-ante stuff like building a shelf/rack unit for over the window in the office, which is a whole 'nother blog entry.
In all, this is looking to be a nice set-up, one that I'm glad I did, even if it looked a little (or even felt a little) like I was being shot out the port tube. I have time to indulge myself a bit here and there in ways that I hope will not look like a frivolous waste of money and I have time to work in a more leisurely fashion.
So there. And now if you'll excuse me, I have a nap to take.

Patience

2010-02-04T10:40:00.001-05:00

Back when I was a wee lad, my father took a couple pictures of me with his printing stuff. I’ve got what I can only guess are third or forth generation copies of these pictures. They’re framed and hand on the ratty walls of my garage clutter print shop.
Either ’cause I wasn't paying attention or maybe because I was, after Dad died, I ended up bit by the printing bug. I admit easily that I let myself be bit. His death took a huge pile out of me. Having the printery in my house or garage was a way by which I kept Dad alive and present in my paws on a regular basis. And even all these 25-odd years later, I still feel that way about the shop.
It's my animita to my father, a man whom I called Sarge more often in the last decades of his life than I called Dad.
And I admit straight up that the printery is also my own egoboo, a place where I can show off what I think of my untested and pretty much unnecessary talent.
I get to write stuff, most of it ad lib & “in the stick” (and back when I had the Intertype caster, I even wrote stuff out beforehand to set & then print). So there’s that.
I also get to play with type and color and paper, hedging myself against the possibility that I might have somehow gained enough insight into graphic design to make what I do end up printing at least pleasing to the eye.
And then I have to add that my attempt at getting an advanced degree in English comp so that I could teach added to this printery thing. After all: I was the son of a journalist & writer, of a school teacher who set me & my sister up to read before I got to kindergarten.

At which point the old man gets a CreateSpace account, which is where all this type and press and writing gets ugly.

First off, let me place no blame on CreateSpace. My experience with them, at this point, has been easy and quick. I had no problems with file upload or getting proofs or any of that stuff.
What I got back from them in the order of proof was excellent. If the eventually approved for sale book – about which I will squeak later – is anything like the proofs, I will be able to say that my book looks like a book that I’d be proud to have said came from my garage only better.
So what’s the case here?
Well, it’s like everything I ever told any student who suffered from my goofy pseudo-intellectualism and drawn out metaphors has come back to haunt me. All that. Like a long sentence at the beginning. Or a long one in the middle. Who cares?
I have learned by paying for my proofs that there is never a time when any work is finished, at least if you’re like me. Scatterbrained. Short-term-memory depraved. Loony. All that.

And impatient.

The book of which I squawk came to me as an afternoon on the can meditation about a long-time story that’s been floating in and out of my head for the past sixty years at least. It’s got time travel, aliens, genetic engineering, mind control, a blessed savior, godlessness and jihad all rolled up in a Burroughs-esque story line that jumps time tracks and reality with impunity.
And that’s William S. Burroughs, Jr Burroughs-esque, by the way.
Ain’t no Martian Chronicles here, yo.
As for the writing I spent a couple couple months on it at least. Started back somewhere in the end of last summer, cruising through tons of disk space in the process, and accumulating various versions of the same bits that eventually got tossed or used.
Truthfully, it was the craziest thing I have ever done, other ’n having childrens.
In the end I had a couple hundred pages of drool and slobber in words that I then turned into a book document, which subsequently got converted to a PDF and it was uphill from there.
I say that ’cause I have a horrible fault that leads me in circles of despair. It’s a simple lack of patience.
See, once you think you’ve written the next supernovel or whatever, you have to do something that I’ve told people for years: At the end of the book or paper or whatever, go back over the sunnabitch like you’ve never seen it before. Treat it as a cold turd on your porch. Give it the big time hairy eyeball over and over again. Don’t let it out of your sight.
Read it aloud if necessary.
But for Frank’s sakes, read the goddamn thing!
And then . . . Read it again!
Then go back and fix all the stuff you thought didn’t work, all the stuff you found with the hairy eyeball and all that. Fix that stuff and then go back and read it again.
And again.
Why should you do this?
Because every damn letter on the page or on the screen is important. Because every damn letter that’s in the wrong place or is part of a word that is in the wrong place or doesn’t belong there at all, even giving yourself a break of ponderous self-absorbed intellectualism, every one of those letters can make you look like a goddamn fool!
So read it again, fool!

And why am I excoriating you over this reading thing? Because I’m being rhetorical, that’s why!

Now it took me two proofs to find this basic law of writing dynamics, this kernal point in the universe of trying to write or having finished writing. And the sad fact is, the proof that is just now on its way to me, it’s got errors aglory. Like misspelled words, fer Frank’s sakes. And this is the second proof I’ve ordered, which means that once I get the proof on its way to me, I have to look for all the errors that I know are there ’cause I read the copy I uploaded last time and found ’em. The errors.
So even before the proof gets here, I know that I have corrections to upload and then another proof to peruse. Each of them at about $12 a whack, shipping costs figured in for kicks. And, I am sure that once that proof is proofed and the uploaded revisions are proofed that there will be errors a billion for me to deal with again and again.

Kinda like the old engineer’s design hassle: the engineer sets to designing a circuit, which he does successfully. But each time he gets back to the board, he thinks of an improvement or a change could make to produce a more economical product, which keeps getting held up for sale ’cause the engineer is full of new design ideas every morning before he brushes his teeth.
Which drives the marketing guys nuts ’cause they need to sell a product that has been in design forever.
Which costs the company money.
So eventually the marketing guys walk into the engineer’s office and tell him they’re taking over the project so they can market it. If the engineer is gonna design a better version of whateve mouse trap is driving marketing nuts, they suggest the engineer do that design as an advanced, upgraded or whatever product.
Just give us what you have now, monkey, and we’ll sell it!

Thus I am at this point: If I leave the proof on its way to me as the copy going up for sale, the worst case scenario is folks will read the story and wonder why I couldn’t spell embarrassed right. Or I had things like “that what happens in Dallas stays in Kansas,” when “that which . . .” is the correct form.
At least prescriptively.
’Cause I could easy up say that “that what happens is that what happens and that’s just the way I talk, see?”
Which, out of meanness and lack of any more patience, I might just do.

All this means, of course, that my attempt at breaking through the popcorn ceiling of self-published print-on-demand fame will probably suffer for a while from the circuit being sold with the improved (as in: correctly spelled &c) model will come out a little while later.
Thus, in the mean time, I would like to suggest that you get yer paws on my novel, Rising from Karuk, which will soon be available for sale from my CreateSpace eStore or from Amazon.com eventually.
After all, I have to make up for the money and time I’ve put into making a space novel about a guy’s afraid of turtles and loves cats. Even if the typography is gorgeous and the cover is beautiful in its simplicity.

Oppressive Rules

2009-12-15T12:17:00.003-05:00

There are things of this world that I do not understand. Obviously. First there's the stories of young women who are homeless, who may be pregnant or trying to care of a child while homeless. The kinds of stories that home-town newspapers like to publish so as to show folks that we are a community of caring individuals.
But wait! A pregnant woman who has no home. How's that work?
Are they suddenly in a family way and they're out living in a tent under a railway bridge?
If so, why?
Where's the father of the child?
Is the father of the child also living under a bridge? If he is, why the hell isn't he out getting a job.
Which makes me ask another question about something I don't understand: People living in tents under a railway bridge who can't get a place to sleep in homeless shelters because – and this is the part the boggles my mind – the don't like the rules they have to abide by to gain entry to the sleeping quarters of said homeless shelters.
"I'm homeless, man. I live under a railway bridge."
"Whoa, dude! Why can't you go to the homeless shelter?"
"Shit, man! Them people down there! They have too many rules!"
"So you sleep in a tent because you don't like the rules?"
"Yeah, that's it. They's oppressin' me down there!"
All of which means that someone lives in a tent because they don't like to play by the shelter's rules.
Like people don't want to work because they would have to work by somebody else's rules. And they can't find a job because having a job means you play by the rules of the employer.
Or you don't want to live somewhere because you don't like to live under the rules of whatever government there is wherever it is you don't want to live.
Which works great if you are, like, well, a Cuban and you don't want to live under a nominally Marxist/Communist, totalitarian regime's rules of conduct.
So you don't want to live in the US because the Republican party has been hijacked by Southerners. So you move to Canada – or sneak into Canada – and discover that you don't have any rights to insurance under their legal system because you sneaked in.
Snuck in. Whatever.

At which point we come to the question of why all these folks are homeless or why they don't want to play by the rules or the father of the child of a homeless woman is himself homeless or completely vacant from the life of the child and mother after having participated in getting the women pregnant in the first place. And we ain't even going to ask why a woman would bed down with a man who she must have known in some small measure would disappear the minute he had finished inseminating her.
"Ah looooves you, Billy June!"
"Ah looooves you too, Thelma Lee!"
"Let's have unprotected sex in this tent over here under the railway bridge."
"Ok. If you get me pregnant . . . "
"I'll run from here like hell's a poppin' an' you'll never see me again."
"Oh. Well, ok. Let's do it right here and now with the train goin' over 'cause it's so Freudian!"
"Ah looooves you, Billy June!"
And so the cycle of procreation continues, as for the animals of the field and the flowers upon which they dine, so too with every living thing in the sight of the railway overpass of the divine . . .

Don't get me started.

See, what I see in all this is the ongoing degeneration of human society to little more than what it has always been, despite our technological prowess and our abilities to change the world around us so we can all live comfortable little lives.
The baseband lot of human beings is nothing more than what every animal enjoys, if enjoyment is the appropriate term.
You're born; you come to maturity; you procreate; you grow old; you die.
All the same stuff everywhere you go, high order primate or collection of cells around a hot well of water at the bottom of the ocean.
So for all we think we know and think we can do, we're still a bunch of stumble-bum monkeys when it comes to making sense of what we're doing. And actually, it might be that monkeys and badgers and even your occasional platypus makes more sense than what we do, even with a free-to-the-masses railway bridge under which to pitch our tent.
Only difference is that the possum takes up a space in one of my outbuildings or the snake that one of my cats plays with don't have the gift of communication across time that we humans get from language and literacy.
One snake lives in one hole and bites a cat that just happens to be stumbling by. The cat gets sick or dies. No cat writes down the event to warn the rest of cat-dom about it. No snake sits back in a conference room and projects the number of cats the snakes as a group can bite in the next six months.
We have language. The rest of the animal kingdom, communicate though it might within groups or even between generations, have no way of passing things on or discussing outcomes.
Which makes us special?
Nah, not really.
We still act like animals, regardless of the simplicity of a tent over a collection of tree branches or decaying outbuildings where animals hide out, procreate, live and die.
Which says a lot about us & our foibles, don't it?

It comes down to the choice between being humans and being just another stupid, shufflin' monkey in the middle of the field with the tigers closin' in.
We fail miserably when it comes to asking ourselves, at that moment just before action, if what we're about to do or what we have done is really what makes sense.
We ain't rational, see?
Instead we go on about our day to day, stumbling along as if what we are doing was representational of reasoned process all along. We don't think about what we're about to think about because no other animal on the planet really ever does that.
It's the same old 10% thing again.
You only use 10% of your brain because the other 90% – the part that's more animal than any of us would willingly admit – is keeping the first 10% out of trouble. At least from the animal perspective.
From a human perspective everything looks just fine for the moment. Then when the moment is passed and we're faced with homeless pregnant women not knowing where the impregnator is – or even who the impregnator is – livin' in tents under railway bridges.
You can't get more Freudian than that, yo.

Enough Taxes Already!

2009-09-14T12:42:00.004-04:00

It has come to my attention after weeks of infamy, that there is a movement in the United States to kill off as many tax items as possible, thus leaving more money in the hands of consumers for the crap they think is more important than stuff the taxes pay for.
There is also a movement in this country to make sure that the first African-American president in the history of this country fails miserably as president. Part of this is based on the suspicion, fomented for the most part by entertainment news figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, that the president is a tool of the left-wing revolutionary socialist agenda pushers for the total conquest of the world, as opposed to a white man that they'd rather see in the White House.
Black man in the White House, he bad juju.
White moron in the White House, he plenty savvy man tru.
Or to quote Mel Brooks from Blazing Saddles, "the sheriff is a nigger."

That having been said, here are my suggestions for getting past this "Tea Party"/"No more taxes"/"I want my [white, slack-jawed-yokel-worshiping, beer-drinking, noisy-car-drivin'] country back" bottle-neck:

Rent the Roads: Everyone pays whoever they like to keep the roads that they use all the time nice and straight and pot-hole free. You find a guy does asphalt and/or concrete driveway resurfacing by auction bids on eBay. You then pay this person an agreed-upon sum to make sure that the road surfaces that you use all the time are clear and smooth.
Road Rent Enforcement: You find on eBay a company that will patrol the road surfaces that you pay for clear of any traffic but you. You pay this company to keep others [people who don't pay for your road surface] from driving on your road. This and similar companies will also make sure that you don't drive on anybody else's roads unless you pay a road rent fee to the company and person whose road you wish to use. Use of intra-state roadways not directly included.
Rent Police/Fire Protection: You find on eBay a company or persons who will wear a spiffy uniform and patrol the areas where you feel in need of law enforcement. You then pay this company to drive around your neighborhood looking for possible miscreants & other "types" of people who give you the willies. They park in front of your house or roam your property as need be so you feel safe. Same-same a company that will rush to your house should a fire break out or should you need help 'cause you've had a heart attack or some other medical emergency. [It's kinda like fire insurance but with real people standing around waiting for stuff to happen. May include flood and storm protection (offer not available in some areas).
Rent Atmosphere & Environmental Safety: You find a company or group of persons on eBay who will cover you from diesel smoke or bad water or stinky air or any other environmental problem that keeps you up at night or makes you cough and hack or whatever you got. These folks come out and make sure nobody fouls your air or water rights on your property. They will punish or fine those who offend your environmental sensibilities. Does not include global concerns such as global warming, solar cooling, or any other environmental concern that won't affect you personally.
Rent Courts & Law Applications: You find on eBay lawyers and people who will supply services to punish miscreants and others who break the laws you pay rent on to protect yourself and your family and/or possessions. You then pay these folks to process through the legal system those who offend you, your family, your sensibilities and/or possessions.
Charge Rental on Law Enforcement: Make the perpetrators pay for the jail time. If someone offends you or messes with your stuff, you have your rental enforcement guys arrest the individual and take them to court. The court, for which you pay by way of rental [one-time fees may be possible here to your advantage], then decides the innocence or guilt of the perp. If the perp is found guilty by your rental court system, the perp must pay for his or her jail time. You don't need to pay for someone messing with your stuff. Let those who mess with your stuff pay for their punishment. And the people necessary to guard them, the facility in which the perp is incarcerated & so on.
Rent Military Protection Services: You find on eBay a company that will stand watch so that no one invades your country, or at least your part of the country for which you have contracted said bunch of soldierly guys. You pay this bunch of guys to guard your part of the country as professional soldiers. This service protects only you & your family (if you're using the family protection option) and your stuff. It won't protect your neighbor's stuff or family (unless you and your neighbor set up with the same guys, at which point a group purchase may be worked out). If anyone tries to invade your country or that part of the country for which you are paying, they'll fight world war three or worse to keep you and your family save. Restrictions on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons apply. See small print for details.
Rent So-called "Natural" Resources: You will need to have water and air and such. You find a company on eBay that you can bid to purchase water, air and weather from. You pay this company to make sure that you are surrounded by a breathable atmosphere and that you have water to drink & a pot to piss in. If global warming is a reality, you can pay this company to assure that you don't have to worry about it. (This can be part of the "Rent Atmosphere & Environmental Safety" program above.)
Rent Health Care & Health Care Facilities: You find on eBay a way to make sure that, should you have to call the emergency squad (covered in "Rent Police/Fire Protection" above), they will be able to take you to a hospital with which you have contracted (also via eBay) for your health care and health maintenance. (May include "Doctors & Nurses Care" option.) This way, if you get sick, there'll be a place where you can go to get treatment or help.
Rent School & University Education: You find on eBay the school that fits your pocket book. If you don't want much more than using a pencil and making change, you buy that much education. If you have a kid with a learning disability, you rent a school takes care of that. If you yourself are a slack-jawed moron & all you need is a part time job at a burger bar, you buy that much education and get out of the way.
Rent Coverage of Everything Else:You find on eBay a batch of folks, companies and groups of people, to cover whatever else you got needs covered. Emergency room service. Disability insurance. Occupational health and safety coverage & enforcement. Interstate highways. Kindergarten. Remedial classes for your kid on Ritalin. Stuff like that. You bid it out on eBay and pay and you get the service, protection, treatment, whatever it is.

Of course, all this bidding and outsourcing means that you will be safe & healthy, protected & assured within the confines of your house, yard & driveway, not counting the streets you pay to use.
Thus, if you want to go on vacation and drive from Ohio to North Carolina, or drive to Cincinnati International, you will have to arrange via eBay to have your use of some other folks' highway and street system validated. You will also have to make sure that you have transferred health coverage, air quality control, police & fire protection, military protection & other such assurances to whoever is in charge of such stuff between where you are and where you wanna get.
This way you get what you want from the sources available for a price you can bid out on. If the cost is high and you don't like that situation, you can opt to have no service in that area. If it costs too much to have a fire department at your disposal, you can forgo that necessity. This would mean, of course, that your house would burn to the ground if it caught fire, since you ain't got protection. If you get sick, you'd have to pay a lump sum to get a doctor to even think of looking at you, should you forgo having a hospital or emergency room available to you anytime you want. Same-same you don't pay for military protection: comes a war and the country is invaded, those who haven't paid for military coverage would summarily hand their land, house, children, whatever else, over to the enemy outright.
Saves on messy treaties and the like.

Of course, how this saves you on taxes is you don't have to pay for anything you don't need. It does mean that services and locations necessary for your continued existence can charge you whatever they think is cool and you have to pay up or do without.
No more big government to provide disability payments if you have multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy or total renal collapse so bad you need daily dialysis treatments. No more big government paying for your kid's university education. Who needs that anyway? The kid's a moron, right? Let him learn how it is in the real world.
The real world. Yeah, that's the ticket.
The real world doesn't need any government assistance. No rent support. No money for education. No road upkeep or snowplows paid just to sit in a barn until winter comes. Hell no!
No more taxes takin' money from you that you can use yourself to buy the services and functions that you can bid for on eBay.

Ah, the world of the future: No taxes. No big government tellin' you how much it costs to cover your snivelling little ass. You want: you pay. Simple as that. The invisible hand of the Free Market at work in your life, your family, your neighborhood, your country, your planet.
Oh, I'm sorry, you didn't pay for the planet to support you?
Line up for the death panels.
That much you know from ignorance will be real.

Practice, practice, practice!

2009-09-07T12:23:00.000-04:00

I got the word back from the who's-it-alls that I'm gonna retired on February 28, 2010. That's a Sunday, for you believers. To me it's gonna be another winter day hiding from hypoxia, overreaching the snow shovel and sitting around the house thinking of making lentils and rice a la Turk. Or maybe a la Punjab.
Same thing, really. One's in 7/8, that's all.
So with that retirement point in mind I took the past week off to practice. For retirement.
I went to the store and bought a bunch of stuff to make fancy food with. I went to the hardware store and got all kindsa parts for my antenna tower project, which I hope to have completed 'fore the snow flies & all that. Better.
I don't wanna mow around the tower layin' in the yard.
So the ten-days-o' practice report is: I could use some help with the tower but that won't come for a week, at least. Cluttered up the backyard with the tower project. I had some interesting culinary experiences, most of them thanks to Nasser's place down in Dayton. Made a pizza with Cid last night for dinner. Read a bunch of weird stuff while snacking on lunch bits when Cid ain't home. Wrote some more of the ongoing story of D.S. Wilson and his cat experiments. Set a bunch of type – after distributing something like 12 pages (20x30p).
Took three (count 'em! three!) naps from overexerting myself with the tower project. (Thirty feet of steel tower loaded with rotor, thrust bearing, ten foot steel pipe mast, cabling & hardware weights I don't know what but it's damn heavy to even lift a few feet. And I ain't got the antennas on it yet even!)
Watched a little TV with Cid, mostly National Geographic HD channel stuff about places I'd been to or wish I could see.
Thought a lot about Portland, where Cid & I went to visit Rishat & Rema and Ian and Sarah couple weeks back.
Enjoyed not having to do much more than keep my spending down. And Enjoyed big time not having to go to work and hussle through crap should have been done by someone else during the summer 'cept that person was worried that recent command line changes were gonna force him to work forty hours a week, dammit.
And no office rumors, politics, snarking, howling, kvetching and scouting out. No Don Testosteroni walkin' around smug.
It was great. I hope the next six months burn off fast so I can enjoy it some more. Which reminds me: how often can I call in sick a week without anyone thinking something's up? Couple guys get away with like at leas t one day a week if not more. And the guy worried about having to work 40? Hell, he comes in around ten most days and is gone by three. Unless he "works from home."
Yeah, I think I'm gonna like this.

Obama Not Using His Powers of Certification . . .

2009-07-31T12:52:00.004-04:00

Ok, it's been a week almost since Henry Louis Gates got busted for forgetting his keys. The president of the United States has weighed in and out of the go-down. It's been deconstructed on the Daily Show and it's been editorialized by Leonard Pitts, among others, in the local newspaper.
And you have to ask yourself "Is it time to move on?"
Well, maybe.
See, one of the things that I noticed up front about Obama indirectly apologizing (twice already) for having said the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" was that he hadn't taken the certification course.
It works like this: you take the A+ certification course so you can be a "real" professional IT person, eventually you have to take the test. And one of the questions on the tests is

48. A customer complains because he has been put on hold several times. What should you do?
1. Apologize for the inconvenience
2. Tell him you will find out who keeps putting him on hold.
3. Explain how busy everyone is.
4. Give him your personal telephone number.

The correct answer is . . .

1. Apologize for the inconvenience.

At which point we get back to Obama's apology, in which he said that he should have "calibrated" his words.
Calibrated?
That sounds like something you'd do with a volt/ohm meter when you were lookin' at that yeller wire in the PC power supply without a wrist strap and the grounding mat!
Calibrated?
Damn, bro! You sure did decide to talk some shit there, buddy!
Yeah, buddy!
Yeeehah!
Calibrated?
Man, somebody please that this guy in for certification training!
First thing you do after you get the name &c is apologize!
It's in the friggin' manual, dude! On the test! Catechism grade stuff, here, yo. You should know it by heart, a-fearin' of the iron cross rosary of Sister Merry Discipline, fer cryin' out loud. As in:

"I'm so sorry to hear that my stupid remarks about stupidity messed with your mainframe day, sir . . . How can I be of assistance?"

And next time, fer Chrissakes, remember your keys!

Beach Vacation '09 Reportage

2009-06-17T16:19:00.001-04:00

You go beach vacation with Cid, you get up every morning early up and go for a walk. Cid takes great pride in being up and mobile around 7 a.m. She likes to collect her electronics & go marching off up the coast toward whatever promontory she has set in her sights, up to wherever and back with the little GPS doodad I got her a couple solstices back cluing her in on her prowess as a marcher.
Me, I’d rather take a nap, truth up.
So while Cid is up and mobile, I’m still aslumber. By the time I finally get tired of fighting the intrusion of sunlight into my cognitive fluidity, Cid’s probably half way up to wherever and ready to come about for return. That’s when the cell phone bleeps and I thus get informed that I should meet here at some point in the morning activity.
I usually get about halfway to halfway. I go along for a while & eventually come to rest on a dune or walkway or such. Off in the distance I can make her out, resolutely stomping along, usually barefoot. Me? I’d rather have shoes on. Beach stomping takes a toll on footleather.
As things go, it usually works out pretty well.
Now this year, like so many before that I have lost track, we ended up beach side one row back. To get to the beach we trudge our crap across the street and over the gravel of public access beach parking. Chairs, umbrellas, bags of sunscreen, stuff all around carried over the asphalt & gravel, over the dune, down to the tide line of the beach, where we all sit around and sometimes go out to fall in the surf.
This year, I ain’t been but once to the sea, as in feet in the water, but only once.
As if that were hinted, this year, among the things I didn’t remember to pack were my swimmin’ shorts. Been here three days and ain’t once had the need any. But having made remark of how I’d forgot, Glen (Cid’s brother’s wife’s brother) loans me a pair of his special.
I thank him, go on with what I was doing and then take a nap.
I must have needed the nap ‘cause I was out like a light – even with Cid openin’ the windows for more light – for something like two and a half hours at least.
And if that ain’t a hint, I ain’t had the radio gear on real big time yet ‘cause one of the other things I didn’t pack was the telescoping fiberglass pole that usually serves as a support for the sky wires. Which then gives me a reason for not getting totally psyched for the early morning E-skip and tropo that allows signals from Puerto Rico to cross over my head on their way to Europe.
At which point every nap becomes a sign of just what’s going on here.
Nothin’.

See, for me, there are vacations and then there are vacations. One kind of vacation, the kind with which I am probably the most familiar owing to the serial nature of their happening, involve going somewhere and staying somewhere at a nominally great expense so as to do nothing but drink beer, cook food, eat with many relatives similarly travelled and then sit on the beach or sleep off the drinking the rest of the time.
Which is exactly where I am today, three days in on this trip, taking naps out of sheer, well, boredom.
I prefer not to dwell on that so much, that napping and doing nothing out of sheer boredom, ‘cause it makes me think of the things I could be doing, were I not a large sum of cash and many hours on the road away from things I could or would rather be doing.

Now the only way to get past that set up is to consider what I’m gonna do the rest of the summer while Cid is back at work and I am back at the ranch, with things to do.
First, of course, is to finish printing the last pages of the next penny dreadful for the APA. And subsequently distributing the type set for that, with plans for the next edition in the works already in my head and on paper.
Then there’s the fixing up of the garden/back door shed where the cats and their night visitors sleep. That will involve hanging insulations, putting in trusses and other lumber to make that happen, followed by laying in of some masonite deck plate material that I’ve had for 25-odd years just in case I needed it. Once that’s done I have to figure out how to make shelves &c for the cat nesting boxes, which are needed so the outside cats & friends will have nominally warm places to park their fur during the winter months.
Not to mention the lawn mowing, the house cleaning, the office clearing out & other such things as I am wont to do when I have time on my hands and the beach ain’t out there calling me to take another nap.
Not that I won’t nap when I take vacation at home.

If you sleep like I do – in fits and broken bits of tranquility – you’d understand.

So I’m halfway through a week at the beach, ain’t been to the water but once and even then barely, with a dinner reservation thingie coming up in a couple hours, all set to go but nowhere to go, other ‘n maybe to the USS North Carolina Museum. And I had a very nice nap, thank you very much.

Honk! Honk! Gesundheit!

2009-04-27T09:52:00.000-04:00

Ok, let's get this straight: The Swine Flu thing is two presidential administrations old. It's kinda like the economy, which Cheney & Bush told us was sound. Not to worry 'cause we have it under control, the we in this example then being Cheney & Bush.
Sometimes you just have to trust people.
Yeah, right.
My own take on this all is a bit different: I think the swine flu thing is being used by the Mexican government under influence of the Gringo government (but not this government 'cause we're still running on the inertia of the past administration, as Cheney & Bush assured us was happening in their administration many times enough to choke on).
More directly: The Mexicans are using the swine flu to control the drug cartels.
See, they've been havin' trouble down there recent 'cause of the drug gangs going around blowing each other up. Kinda like here – where a guy was shot at the memorial for the guy that was shot at a memorial for a guy who was shot -- but with beaners instead of them.
At the same time, there are other things to consider.
Like chemtrails.

Either you are hip to chemtrails or you're not. If you hip, then you either believe there's a plot by the government (or some forces outside of or inside of the government, either extraterrestrial or human, and if human perhaps some semi-Jewish kabal or maybe communists or maybe alien hybrids who may be communist, among other troubling paranoias) to poison people or make us weak & easier to conquer or you don't believe and it's all weird shit voodoo to you.
If you believe, well, then you're either psychotic or deranged or have actually fallen to not thinking rationally about this, or you're already poisoned and thus, due to your poisoning, you believe it's true.
If you don't believe it's either because you're poisoned already and thus, due to the poisoning, brainwashed into not believing, or you're a rational human being who sees things they way they are and knows from experience and investigation that there are millions of better ways to poison the livin' shit out of entire populations that don't require huge amounts of aviation fuel to sprinkle pixie dust on anybody from a couple miles up and downwind from the intended targets.
Either way it's obvious that you've been co-opted by the extraterrestrials living under the Denver airport or in the tunnels under Dulce NM. Or maybe it's 'cause you're too stooped and sheeple-ish to not pay your taxes and thus avoid things like government help in keeping aliens and extraterrestrials from freeing the Guantanamo terrorists to run amok through decent, clean-livin', god-fearin', white racial purity Amerika.
Which means that you're already carrying the swine flu and hard set in your easily controlled mind to killing off as many Mexicans as you can before they all turn into chupacabras and eat your brains for a snack.
And you'd have accomplished this already if Cheney and Bush hadn't held up funding for stem-cell research that would have helped find a cure for swine flu before it found a cure for AIDS, which we know is here 'cause god hates fags.
You do know about the hating and all that, right?
Ok, well at least we're all on the same page.

In the end it's simple: While Cheney and Bush were ruining the strength of our military by allowing Colonel Saunders and Pizza Hut to replace good old-fashioned, worked-for-my-father's army chow halls run by Halliburton, they could have gotten this swine flu thing under control and the entire freakin' population of this country, except for the Mexicans & them, inoculated against the swine flu in the first place.
And they could have used the chemtrails to do it.
But did they?
No!
They went on about their namby-pamby ways, making money for rich people off the hardworking backs of American citizens and their nice lawns and trailers up on blocks outside some Indian reservation ain't got a casino in Enon, Ohio, for cryin' out loud. Just like that!
I said "No!"
"NOOOOOooooooo!!!!!"
Which is why this swine flu thing is so important!
"KAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnn!"

See, the swine flu has been a known subject for at least eight years, counting in two terms of the Cheney/Bush administration. Eight years. And over the past eight years there have been innumerable times when it has caught the attention of the media, liberal or biased or both. And over that entire time the Center for Disease Control has told us again and again not to shake hands with pigs or birds, to wash your hands often and regularly with soap and/or alcohol or any other substance like sand or whatever before we go to the . . .
And in all that time what have we gotten from our government, controlled by alien beings with lizard skins or not?
"Oh, don't be such a worry-wart! It'll be just fine, ok? Here, have some cheese."
Yeah, just about that.
So we've gone to war with a very persistent enemy, an enemy that has the power to transform itself from crazed warriors into just a bunch of diminutive people dressed in black pajamas or turbans or whatever. And against this enemy, which wants to kill us all off and replace human kind with another kind of human, we have turned all our attention.
We've sent people on missions in vehicles that would blow up like a can of cat food left on the burner unopened.
We've improved our intelligence about the enemy but we haven't been intelligent enough to figure out which enemy it is that we're really fighting here.
And thus, as the Mexicans use the swine flu to control vicious infighting of the multi-faceted the drug cartels and gangs, we've done nothing.
So here's the swine flu comes to the USA and we got . . .
Nothin'!
Nothin' is all we have and, if the tax revolt loonies have their way, nothin' is what we'll have 'cause not even the government will have the money to do the research that it should have been doing all along these many years.
People will get sick and die.
The disease will spread as a pandemic around the world.
The aliens under the airports and the big spraying UFOs disguised as supersonic intercontinental jet liners will be of no help; they won't come to our aid.
But the world will never blame it on Cheney or Bush, 'cause that ain't the way we do things in this PostModernist Limbaugh & O'Reilly universe.
Not any more.
So it's good bye and thanks for all the germs, yo.

In Yer Face, Book

2009-03-24T09:07:00.000-04:00

Cid says I spend a lot of time at the computer. Maybe I do. There's one at work that pretty much tags my day with job schedules and other appointments of travail and the sweat of my brow. There's one at home that keeps my records, allows me to have a good typewriter & gives me access to things like circuit board drawin' software and such. But then, Cid's got a laptop downstairs that usually accompanies her watching of her favorite television programs, usually into the evening light.
It's a work tool. It's a householding tool. It's an entertainment and communications device, that computer. All computers, actually.
And being as how computers are now so ubiquitous between family members and such, what else is there to do after cleaning the house, doing laundry, mowing lawns, changin' cat litter, feeding cats, feeding the humans and in general not doing anything that involves the computer, computers are part of the 20th Century domestic toolkit. Like the chip flakin' stuff our long-distant Paleolithic ancestors hand.
They had their flint and dolomite chips.
We have our computer chips.
Which, I guess is a way of saying that, yeah, I do spend a lot of time at the computer. But I'd bet that, keystroke for keystroke & mouse click for mouse click, Cid and I spend just about the same amounts of time at the machines.
Nothing makes this more clear than family communications.

See, a couple weeks ago the eldest who, having been employed with a money firm down in Cincinnati, came up jobless. He was basically jobless and soon enough he was ready to move on. His target was Portland, Oregon, where, he claims, many of his friends live and work. And, as most tech heads know, there's money in computer-related businesses out there in the Northwest earthquake zone.
So off he goes, now homeless as well as jobless, in his fancy red car.
And given as how he's computer literate & all that, he promised to keep in touch with the rest of us by way of FaceBook.
If you don't know FaceBook you spend almost as much time at the machine as I.
I didn't know FaceBook until a couple days ago last week when the eldest hit the reciprocating engine-related highway. But the desire to know where he was at and how his trip was going made it necessary to join the rest of the family.
Seems Cid's been on FaceBook for a month or more now. She's found old school friends and folks she hadn't heard from in decades on FaceBook. She's got a "friends" list. She's got links and bits and pieces of her life, some of her photos and a whole bunch of info & interchanges with other folks. She's "on FaceBook."
Being thus pressured – and after lookin' at what she could do with it – I reluctantly signed on and got "friended" by my sons, by Cid, and by some folks who I had otherwise known elsewhere but otherwise didn't have any connection with.
Now I know FaceBook. I am a FaceBook person.
I have arrived.
Yeah, right.

Right up front, FaceBook looks like a great way to keep track of other folks and for other's to know what you're up to.
It's better 'n Twitter, so I've been told.
And knowing absolutely nothing about Twitter beyond that which has showed up on the Doonesbury comic strip, I'd have to say that Twitter would be annoying as hell. Who needs to know whether I'm washing dishes or takin' a crap? Good grief!
But FaceBook is different, they say.
Yeah, I have yet to see a FaceBook day covered from underwear to shower stall, as Twitter has been portrayed in the daily papers.
But I do know that there is a certain amount of egoboo to it.
Why else would I take the time, at the start of my day but before the official work day begins, to keyboard in the fact that "Nils Young is on watch and station"?
And what's with that nautical verbiage, yo?
Seriously.
But there I am, a week and some on FaceBook and already I've logged myself on to say I was logged on and I've uploaded pictures of stuff that I've got stashed elsewhere as well and I've provided links to things that I doubt anybody gives a true rat's ass about. And I've done it with naught an quiver or shake of shame.
"Me!"
"No, ME!"
"No, goddammit! ME!
"No! ME!!!!!!!!
"No!"
"Me!"
"Yeah, right."
"Get a grip!"
"Get a life!"
"Stupid neck beards!"
"Whatever."

After two some odd weeks with this high-end locator & communicate system going on the various computers to which I have access, I can tell you right up front that I know where the eldest son is. I know what he ate for dinner and I can tell you how much he paid for a speeding ticket in Texas. I can see pictures of his dinner and one of his deserts. It's all there on his FaceBook page and you can't see any of it or read any of it unless you have a FaceBook account.
So there.
But I can also tell you that I have logged many hours of finding friends and discovering where old ones might have been.
And out there in the middle of all that, I found an as-of-that-moment unread email from someone who had found one of my blog pages – and I believe it was this 'n here – wherein I mentioned another old friend.
And the person who read that blog sent me a missive to inform me that the person I'd mentioned had disappeared over the Atlantic, flying around in circles spotting targets for fishing trawlers.
Good news.
Bad news.
All of it brought to you the machine upon which you are reading this.
It couldn't get any better.
Could it?

On Setting Childish Things Aside

2009-01-22T09:44:00.003-05:00

So here's the deal: A teacher in a classroom is using computer-organized media as a teaching prompt. Maybe the teacher is using presentation software provided by the publisher of the text book. Maybe the teacher is using a presentation package that the teacher designed for the class. And maybe – and more that likely in my experience – the teacher is using a presentation package put together by a graduate assistant or teaching assistant.
So at some point in the presentation, in front of a room of kids, most of whom already know what the presentation looks like 'cause they found it on the InteWebs, the podium monitor or some other gizmo toasts out. A puff of smoke and an electronic screech.
So the teacher gets on the phone and calls the department on campus that is responsible for the equipment. A few minutes later a technician shows up and upon entering the room, catches hell from the teacher.
"Why do I have to be stuck with equipment like this?"
"Why can't you people keep this running right?"
"I always have trouble with this junk!"
"I'm not here to chit-chat! Fix it!"
Only problem is, the fix ain't that easy. That's 'cause the department in charge of keeping the media presentation stuff running is so compartmentalized that the fixes are under the purview of someone else. And that someone else more often than not is not on campus. Be in later. Home sick or at the dentist or taking an aging dog to the vet. Not feeling well. A thousand excuses.
And the spare parts are locked up like you little sister's diary.
So there stands the technician in the classroom being attacked for something that the technician cannot change over a piece of equipment for which no spares or parts exist.
"How do you expect me to teach with this junk?"
"This is cutting into my classroom time!"
"I can't teach like this!"
"Fix it!"
A room full of young people watching a nominal adult person with a high degree of education act like a petulant little ragamuffin sniping because there are three pieces of fish on the plate instead of four and the juice from the peas is running into the mash potatoes.
Neanderthals might have acted like that on a bad day in the Pleistocene but a university professor?
You gotta be kiddin' me.

Of course, in my perfect world, one of the students would have stood up, walked to the front of the room and taken a piece of chalk or a dry-marker from the rail and handed it to the teacher.
"Here, ma'am. If the technology is broken, you can always go back to old-fashioned teaching."
At which point the teacher lights into the student as the technician slinks away.
"How dare you!"
"How dare I, ma'am?"
"Yes! How dare you!"
"I dare ma'am because if you cannot teach without technology, then you may as well be a television monitor and the university could just roll you into the room at the start of class and haul you back out at the end of it."
"Leave this classroom right now! Get out!"
"Nah. I want to watch a grown up person attack someone over something that broke. Kinda like my kid sayin' he broke his arm 'cause a rock jumped up and hit his skateboard."

Evidently the class was going on when President Obama said that it was time to put childish things aside.

Have a nice day.

The Divine Permission Again

2008-12-05T20:30:00.003-05:00

For the most part, the massacre in Mumbai at the hands of coked-up members of the Muslim ummah is a past event. We're only reminded of it in our daily approach to Christianity's founding moment by occasional pictures in the newspapers and other hand-wringing.
Move along. Nothing to see here. Gotta get to the mall.
But if the deaths of hundreds and the ruin of thousands of lives had been at the hands of atheists or disbelievers, we all know things would be very different.
Disbelievers and anyone who was not a regular church-goin', schul-attending, es-salaat-reciting, puja-performing believer would have been long since rounded up and shown the justice of an angry divine hand at the hand of the believers.
Nobody would wait for divine vengeance.
Nobody would think twice about getting out the hangin' rope and the burning post. Nobody would pause one moment in collecting the right size stones or filling up containers with acid.
Those without belief would be dead at the hands of believers, not much different from the deaths in Mumbai at the hands of that gang of believers.
Now if you find that fitting and just, as my long-gone Sunday missal used to say of the divine hand, I must simply question what makes the difference.
For all the things you can say about Hitler (who was a Catholic by most accounts) or Stalin (who once attended seminary before becoming a fund raiser for Lenin) or Idi Amin (who probably believed in his own version of the divine hand) or even Mao Tse-tung (who was a fabulist sociopath all by himself), nothing at the hands of anyone without belief comes close to what happened at the hands of adherents to the religion of peace. Nothing is in my mind anywhere that I have ever read about, heard about or seen reported on television shows disbelievers being as disgustingly self-righteous as those believers in Mumbai.
Nothing.
The simple fact is that God gives us an excuse to kill.
The Mumbai massacre and the more than 12,362 acts of violence perpetrated since 11 September, 2001 in Allah's name bears witness to the power of superstition and religionism to ruin even the most simple of life's pleasures. You know: breathing; watching our children grow up to become adults; enjoying an evening dinner with a spouse or friend, or even puttering around in the garden on a warm summer's day. All of that falls into the grinder of death when the delusional belief in an imaginary friend and protector enters the world.
The horrible deaths in Mumbai are just one example of how religion ruins everything. And if nobody remembers that in another two weeks, I know one disbeliever who will.

Just Like Now . . . Only Different

2008-11-21T14:47:00.002-05:00

Just in case you didn't get wired right when they put you on this planet, only certain people get to channel beings from other galaxies or dimensions. Thus, beings of light who live in the size twelve dimension do not get to talk to everybody all at once in the fifth dimension. Or our dimension, so it seems.
Right to it, there's a pile of youtube devoted to Blossom Goodchild's channeling of whatever beings it is that she has had cross dimensional contact with, even with a preposition at the end of the sentence. The youtube video linked above is from some time in October post the date that Blossom had predicted that on 14 October , 2008, alien beings from some phantasmical whatever dimension would be here to turn us on to our true destiny or whatever.
So, as you can well guess, Blossom had to explain why this hadn't happened as she had prophesied, which explanation appeared (with obviously hideously poor audio [can't extraterrestrial channelers at least get good microphones?]) on youtube somewhen around 16 October, with other subsequent disexplanations showing up a few weeks and/or days later.
Whatever.
But that's not the point.
The point is that Blossom – or at least the Blossom who recorded the post 14 October explanation & who was subsequently rumored to have fled to Chupacabralandia – was not aware of what had really happened. What happened was something that even the least polymorphous being of light would have understood even dead drunk in the middle of Lawrence, Kansas just outside the Mexican restaurant down from the hotel by the interstate.
See, if you ask anyone with any brains about what the future will be like under the guidance of any extraterrestrial alien invasion, they'll tell you just like it says in the Book of the One True Salesman: the future will be just like now . . . only different!
Which is what the Blossom Goodchild who gave the apology about missing the date on 16 October didn't understand, proving that she had no prophetic powers at all.

It works like this: Blossom Goodchild gave a prophetic statement about the 14th of October. So up comes 14 Oct and what should happen but the Blossom Goodchild who gave the 14 October prophesy got whisked away into time and space.
The Blossom Goodchild that gave the 16 October apology is in this dimension, with the rest of us who never saw the space aliens arrive. She just doesn't know that she's never given the prophesy because, well, this particular Blossom Goodchild is not that particular Blossom Goodchild who gave the 14 October date prophesy.
Thus the correctly predicting Blossom Goodchild is right now sitting in the lap of luxury, recognized around the world as the person who linked time and space between them what was supposed to arrive and them what was gonna see 'em arrive.
The Blossom Goodchild who gave the wrong date is still with us, and we are obviously not those who saw them arrive or we wouldn't have to listen to the wrong Blossom Goodchild said in the first place or the apology she made in the second place.
It's the Ship of Theseus paradox.
What was correct is no longer of this dimension, having been whisked away by the arrival of the aliens. What was wrong is no longer of the dimension where the prophecy was correct and is thus with us in this dimension where the prophecy was wrong.
Simple as pie.
Country simple.
Dead on.
What happened, happened, with the happening taking place in a correct prophesy universe and the not happening not taking place in the incorrect prophesy universe.

So if you missed it, it's 'cause it weren't supposed to happen. At least not here. There, in the other universe, well, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?
Maybe.
See, in the correct prophesy universe there would be a large number of folks who would have, for any number of reasons, not seen the aliens arrive and would not have been contacted by the aliens so as to see the arrival. And this would happen because, as mentioned aforely, only certain people get to hear the voice of truth. The rest of us have to sit around and be told by them what does hear just what it is the voice of truth would have the rest of us know.
So in this universe the voice that we thought was the truth – or more importantly the person who decided that she was the voice of truth – got the info wrong and thus we are off however many days, years, months, centuries or millennia it'll be before we get the straight shit right the next time. But in the universe where the voice of truth was right, well, we ain't in that universe. But if we are in that universe, it's only because there are multiple universes.
And how do I know that?
Well, it's simple, actually.
I know that there are alternative universes because, first of all, everything doesn't go right all the time. Sometimes things go right and sometimes they go wrong. If things go wrong in this universe, it begs believing that they go right the other half of the time in the other half of time. Or times, for that matter, since there are millions of possoms and there are millions of ways to have possoms show up and do whatever it is possoms do in keeping the number of possombilities to a reasonable number.
Secondly, since things don't always work out the way we plan, then there are places in time and space where they must turn out as we plan. Or not, depending on which universe has the most number of right and wrong possoms.
Possoms are, after all, the point of departure.
I have a fifty-fifty chance of getting sick from the handful of moldy pistachios that I just ate. If I don't get sick, then it goes to reason that the possibility of my having gotten sick will be extended across the fabric of time and space to include a universe where I died outright, choking to death on a bit of pistachio that I accidentally inhaled while getting back to typing this piece.
And of, of course, if I did die in that universe, I might not die in

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2008-11-07T09:19:00.028-05:00

First off, let me say this: I am, like the Norwegian minister for the environment, glad that this is over. As Herr Solheim so eloquently put it upon the concession of John McCain to Barack Obama's victory in the recent presidential election, "what a relief."
Of course, Herr Solheim went on to say "Eight years lost to the world under Bush are over."
That too. I agree. We've spent enough time in the retarded squirrel ward. Now it's time to go back to living with competent, intelligent human beings. Or as William Burroughs put it somewhere in his voluminous work of commenting on his white tribe, "What are you doing over here with the apes? Get over here with the men, where you belong." And yes, I know he was parodying something else.
Of course, such an attitude is considered arrogant and elitist by the arrogant dumbasses who vote, no matter what, for whoever it is the present-day versions of Father Coughlin tell them to do. Ditto heads, they call themselves. As if that were a badge of honor.

But I digress.

Back when I was a college student learning how to become a Midwestern elite liberal, I knew a guy who played saxophone. This was back when I thought I was a jazz musician. The guy I knew, Marvin Holzinger, may still think he's a jazz musician. Hell, he might even be one.
But I remember the first time I went over to his digs. He had a piano and we were gonna play some music and bullshit ideas for a while. I arrived at the door and upon entering his house where he lived with his mother I saw an upright piano on the opposite wall from the door. And above the piano was a portrait of FDR.
At the time I thought this was weird, having been brought up in a Catholic house where all my mother's kin had the picture of Jesus on their walls in some prominent place, maybe even over a piano. I've been places in subsequent time where the same Jesus picture was plonked up on the wall of the living room. One of those "this is my home and this is what I believe" kind of nonverbal tribal statements that are almost as ubiquitous as the "in case of rapture this car &c" bumper sticker.
Now for Marvin and his mother I'm sure that FDR was and could be today still considered the savior of mankind. FDR got us pushing in the war and he got the atom bomb research started and had he lived, I'm sure he'd have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a moment's conscious doubt.
And he stopped Hitler and thus prevented the total decimation of all of European Jewry, an act that obviously makes him savior to that part of mankind, of which Marvin and his mother were part.
So I can dig the portrait over Marvin's piano.
And I can dig how that portrait thing (the "this is my home &c") works for me as well. After all, it's only human to present signs of allegiance and devotion to those entering a space.

You walk into my ratty, little, cluttered office/ham radio room and you'll see on the opposite wall a picture of William Burroughs. On the wall opposite that, above my desk & collection of radio deteriorata is a picture of my father at his desk in the newspaper.
You walk in that space and you know where I am.
I consider William Burroughs to be somewhat of a linguistic/cognitive messenger of trooth. Back when I was a hippie and self-medicated, it was Naked Lunch and Ticket That Exploded what got me to thinking of the brain side of language. It was those books and others that made me consider how much of language was just what's going on in our brains and how most of that, I came to realize over time, is just a matter of the unluck of chemistry.
And I would not have gotten that far in the orientation if I had not been introduced very, very early on in life to the concept of language as a societal determiner, even if I'm out to lunch by all outside estimators of the Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis. That one I got from my father and I am forever in his debt and more deeply so than to ol' Bill Burroughs either. Or at all.

But I am beset now with a serious conundrum.

There is damn little space left on my office wall space for the next portrait that I have found to frame and use as a declarative marker. The Burroughs wall is full, mainly 'cause I have the bookcases there & beneath and beside them are other piles of clutterata that preclude any other picture hangings.
The wall off left of that wall is full already with a huge stock of books and saved magazines, computer disk paraphernalia and whotnots. The fat pig sculpture takes up its share of space and it in turn is surrounded by battery packs, FRS radios, dust piles and other stuff I have no idea what's up there. Off from the corner is even more stuff and eventually you get to the shelves with the radios &c on 'em. And more books. And stuff piled on the desk I don't even know what.
And the other wall off left from there is the wall with Dad's painting of his home digs, his portrait and a bunch of other framed doodads, awards, license certificates &c. And the pile of antique home-brew radios that I some how collected off eBay and my own home-brew crystal set &c.
Not a lot of room at all.
But now I have this new portrait that I wanna put up. Kinda a sign of the times sort of deal. One of those "this guy is gonna fix us up finally" kinda portraits. Like ol' Marvin & his mother had over that piano.
You may have seen the face before.
Yeah, him.
Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, thanks to some reasonably good footwork, grass-roots organizing and dedicated volunteerism.
Don't tell me Democrats are asshole arrogant elites.
You didn't hear McCain or Barbie talking about family values, did you?
You wouldn't have: McCain divorced his wife of some fifteen years and married a rich hottie. Like that. Some family values there, no?
And Palin? Well, lets just let her disappear into the Alaskan midnight sunrise and we'll be done with that aberration.

No, this portrait is not the sign of a proven redeemer. This is not the face of a man who's gonna miracle work the country back to being undivided and less factionalized. He's just another guy not much different from the rest. But he has spoken clearly, honestly and firmly in the face of ad hominem attacks of the most facetious superfluidity. He's taken the high road of diplomacy and stayed damn well clear and gone from the sort of brainless simpering that McCain fumbled off for the past two years and some on the way to failing to gain the White House.
For the first time in a long time, I feel good about the future. I feel good about this country and I feel good about a large portion of my fellow species. Not a huge portion, since there are still Rush Limbaughs and Karl Roves enough to keep the Hitler mission going, but some of us at least. The ghost of the radio priest is with us yet. With us yet.
I'm glad it's over, this election stuff.
I'm happy with the results.
And strangely enough I'm feeling a bit more optimistic than a couple days ago when everything was seriously and totally doubtful.
And even though I know for a fact that the Bush gang of rich-boy pluck-wells are going to go a scorched earth policy before they leave, thus leaving Obama with a real shithouse to clean up, I'm hoping for a better day.
My country – as much as I can get involved in what Burroughs called (and I'm remembering this from a long time back, incorrectly & inaccurately more than likely) the father-mother, family-tribe, country-nation con – is starting to look a lot more loveable, a lot more reasonable. Even if it is a dream. Even if it is a dream.
At least it's possible to consider the dream an eventual possibility. For the first time in a damn long time.

Time to Start Burnin' Them Watermillions!

2008-10-16T13:18:00.001-04:00

The story goes that Cid's grandfather played trumpet in a band. Not just any old band, but a band very particular to the area. It was the sort of band that organizations used to keep for public displays of the organizations presence in the community, a band to keep the rhythm and the pace of a march through town.
It was the "klan band." The Ku Klux Klan band.
Right through the center of town, be it Springfield or St Paris or Enon or any other small village in the area that had such groups during the very early part of the last century.
See, grandpa was born in 1900. He herded cattle down a path that later became one of the main post-war highways for the local air force base. He saw the introduction of the automobile into his life, a life that included being thrown by his horse in the middle of a blizzard coming back from playing basket ball with some friends. He walked in the fields of the area, hunting. He saw men walk on the moon.
He buried his son when he was 82 and his son was barely 50.
Max died after his third kidney transplant.
Grandpa used to play trumpet in the Ku Klux Klan band.
And one afternoon, watching TV, he said something very unexpected.

Max had just gotten home with his second kidney transplant. He and grandpa were watching the news on TV. There was a report of some local incident involving black folk and white folk.
Grandpa looked at the screen and said "Why can't they just let those people alone? They just want to live like anybody else?"
Cindy and I had to hire riggers from Indianapolis to get our jaws up off the floor.
Grandpa had changed his mind.

Now all of this came to mind early this morning as I drove off from my little village driveway to work.
I'd gotten up, eaten breakfast, took my blood pressure meds, gave Cid a hug and went out to my car. As I pulled out of the driveway I noticed that the Obama/Biden yard sign that we'd had down by the curb for a week or so was missing.
I pulled into the neighbor's driveway, turned around and parked in front of the empty wire frame stuck in the ground. I got out of the car and looked at the frame.
There was some sort of detritus hanging on the wire.
Someone had set fire to the sign.
Just like a Klan cross burning.
In my front yard.
With Grandpa dead now some twenty-odd years.

I went in the house and told Cid. She'd said earlier that, if the sign disappeared, she was "callin' the media in a heartbeat."
I reminded her of saying that. We had a brief discussion about waiting until she finished dressing. And how I had to get to work.
I grabbed my camera and took some pictures in the dark at the base of the street light. I went inside the house and grabbed the shoe for the camera's memory card and went back to the car.
Then I drove off to work.
Later this morning Cid called and said that the sheriff's office had already heard about the burning sign. Someone had evidently seen it burning and stopped. Whoever it was had called the sheriff & then left. So at least the sheriff knew about it.
Cid said she was going to call the Springfield newspaper.
I said I might do the same for the nearby large-distribution daily.
Then I sat down to write this.

My misanthropic nature is not quite yet a well-known feature of my being here. Sure, there are people who see me as dour and dark, expecting the worst in most cases and generally getting the pay-off I expect. I see most folks as shufflin' orang utans, making their way through life on testosterone poisoning and a considerable amount of brute bullying, abuse and intimidation. I am a pessimist, for sure.
I don't expect much from the general bell-curve of humanity.
The folks who run against my expectations, even if they hold opinions contrary to mine on the existence of god or the political urge of the moment, such folks give me a reason to smile.
Otherwise, I'm worst-case-scenario guy.
Humans are bad juju and that's that. Plain and simple.
Events such as I have been considering all the way from my driveway to this keyboard do absolutely nothing to inject any possible scintilla of a ray of hope for the future of the human species, let alone this country and the world of humans in general.
The only folks I can figure set fire to a yard sign expressing my political orientation would be Klan members or folks who think like Klan members.
Redneck cracker f#@ktards.
Morons.
The usual list of mental defectives.
And no, I don't think it was a couple kids "having fun."
It was somebody come by my house in the middle of the night and wants to send me a message about my position on a political decision that will mark the beginning (or the end, if you're like me looking at a McCain victory) of a new world for the three hundred-odd million residents of the United States.

See, McCain and Barbi win, we're in for another four years of the same crap that has led George W. Bush to be positively terror-stricken by the state of the US economy and the continued spiral into a depression around the world.
Government – as a failed right now and flawed in the future administration – will try to prop up the failing economies while at the same time saying that we are not headed toward fascism (in which the government owns & controls the banks & economy directly) or socialism (in which the government owns & controls the means of production and the distribution of wealth).
As if.
Such a future will be pretty damn dismal, the way I see it.
The media – for all the belly-aching that the Rush Limbaughs of the world go through on a daily basis by way of their self-absorbed anti-intellectual blather – will be controlled by the government's propaganda ministry.
Production or lack of it will be controlled by the government's production statistics, which will be dicked with before being publicized by the government's propaganda ministry.
People will go broke and people will lose their jobs and the entire global economic system, despite all the fiddling that our government will try to do, in part with and in part in spite of other world governments, to rein in the collapse of the money system.
Racism and bigotry will come loping into view again and again as small-minded, anti-intellectual followers of Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove urge on the division of society into them what believes and them what don't.
Religion will become an enforced part of life, even as we claim war against the oppression of Islam, rightly held or not.
Shit will hit the fan.
No yard signs to the contrary will be tolerated. Teams of redneck cracker f#@ktards will see to that.
And, if we're really lucky, there will be no future elections for president of any United States 'cause we will be living under martial law. That and roving gangs of home-brew militias – Klan and Aryan Nation sorts among them, good Christian people and all – will enforce that which they consider to be the will of the people.

And if Obama wins?

Honey, hold on to your bloomers. Racism and bigotry will come loping into view again and again as small-minded, anti-intellectual followers of Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove urge on the division of society into them what believes and them what don't. And roving gangs of home-brew militias – Klan and Aryan Nation sorts among them, good Christian people and all – will enforce that which they consider to be the will of the people.
And Obama will be stuck with all that shit going on, plus having to stay alive.
Why?
Well, if they'll burn a yard sign in the middle of Main Street, just think of what they'll do if they have to put up with a black man being president.
And being damn good and misanthropic, I hope to hell Obama wins.
Even if either way, Obama or McCain/Barbi will prove my point.
I don't expect much from the other members of my species. Just 'cause we have reflective consciousness doesn't mean we ain't a bunch of testosterone-enraged monkeys lookin' for some other monkeys to blame our poop on. Or sling the poop at.
I know us all too well, all us third chimps. What I know ain't nobody I'd like to live next to most of the time. Being as it's political season, and being as political season always brings out the worst monkeys, my few true beliefs don't take much to be propped up real good anyway.
And burnin' my Obama yard sign is a perfect case in point.

In the meantime, my plan is simple: I am going to get a chunk of plywood & two fence posts. I'll put the fence posts in the ground & bolt the plywood to it. On the plywood I will paint the words "Obama/Biden" and then I'll add the proviso "Burn this, crackers!"
Once I've done that, I'm gonna go out and buy as many watermelons as I can fit in the back of my car. I will take the watermelons around to different houses at night, houses with McCain/Barbi signs, and I will burn the watermelons on the yards of the houses with the McCain/Barbi signs.
Ain't no way I'm lettin' The Man mess with me, yo. Them crackers are gonna see what happens when they piss off the descendant of a black irish immigrant, dawg.
Right on! (Insert terrorist fist-jab here.)

Another Example of the Failure to Coincide

2008-10-10T08:49:00.003-04:00

I have to admit that I don't spend a lot of time listening to politicians. I dislike immensely the feeling of being less than smart enough to understand that, for the most part, how the world works or how my money is going to disappear when the politicians show up. That and the fact that I've spent a great deal of time on this planet paying attention to what it is that makes language so damned necessary and ultimately overly annoying.
Let's face it: it's like, you know, like how they're all like, you know, and I'm like, you know, and like that also.
Or, as George W. Bush said once not too long back, "There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says: 'Fool me once...' [pause] '... shame on...' [pause] 'Shame on you...' [pause] 'If fooled, you can't get fooled again.'"
And with that having been said, we can get right to it: Sarah Palin's weird verbiage clicks right in there on the old politician-savvy beacon line. And yes, I know, some academic sort has already proven that some of the things Sarah Palin says are impossible to diagram as sentences. I have yet to run Palin's speech through my own version of the great generative grammar processor but I'd bet from what I've heard that some of it would just come off like, you know.
Along with this is Hart Seely's having taken Palin's on-the-record pronouncements to the bench of poetics, which gives normals like you & me the chance to see where that mind, what there is of it, happens to spend time.

"On the Bailout"

Ultimately,
What the bailout does
Is help those who are concerned
About the health care reform
That is needed
To help shore up our economy,
Helping the—
It's got to be all about job creation, too.

Shoring up our economy
And putting it back on the right track.
So health care reform
And reducing taxes
And reining in spending
Has got to accompany tax reductions
And tax relief for Americans.
And trade.

We've got to see trade
As opportunity
Not as a competitive, scary thing.
But one in five jobs
Being created in the trade sector today,
We've got to look at that
As more opportunity.
All those things"

Seriously.

That's Palin's words coming back atcha as free verse. Yeah, that.
Looking at what she says – as opposed to trying to understand what she says as she speaks – makes it pretty obvious that Richard Mitchell may well have the right idea when he says that "Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. ^[1]"

See, the deal here is that we've had eight years of listening to the president talk just like the candidate for vice president. We've been dumbed down by the process of trying to figure out just what it was that the president might have been thinking and now we're getting the same old shit from John McCain's Pancho Sanza. (That appellation for Palin came from a George Will article in the most recent newspaper here in the middle of non-sequiturlandia.)
I can't think of anything more disordering to my thought than the inanity that rolls so obviously and easily out of the presidential chops. And now I have the opportunity to hear more of the same whatever from the person selected to perhaps be the next president of this country at the end of the American Century.
Which is coming to an end, if Wall Street, Congress, the presidency and all the moneyed interests of the world have anything to say about it.

Which brings up the entire process by which the "trouble" in the "financial sector" has been mythologized via inanity to the point where not only does none of it make any sense but none of it makes any sense.
Never did.
But I always had a problem understanding money.
Not that I am as clueless as Palin, whose ego must be so overpoweringly huge that her own ignorance is hidden from her.
So here we are again, beset by the end of the world with the end of the world like talking to us about how the end of the world ain't comin' and don't pay any attention to that man and woman in front of the curtain.

I can only wonder what the rest of the world, in places like Germany or France or Australia, thinks of what's going on in this country. I remember the front page of whatever British tabloid asking, after Dubya was re-elected, how 250 million people could be so stupid. Here we are, acting like the world's police force, swat team, moral & ethical center, crown of education and creationism, mindless of the complete collapse of the gringo dollar's worth & the astounding idiocy of our political parties.
The mouthpiece of the republic can't even quote a country homily and the prospective molly in chief can't even produce a single sentence that shows that she has any understanding at all of what's going on in the world today.
It's the deal where the tough kids are so sure they can whip anybody's ass that they don't see the gorilla hiding under the bridge with a chainsaw.
So like there you have it. Betcha!

Or:

And Don't Believe the Spinach . . .

2008-09-16T13:35:00.003-04:00

According to all the info I can find, which ain't much, given that I'm gonna rant about a new disease, the rise of what's called Crohn's Disease in this country is not that much out of line. That's 'cause Crohn's Disease – which is when your immune system attacks the lining of your gut – is prevalent in First World countries that rely extensively on what's called "industrialized agriculture." Factory farming. Huge tracts of land put to the plow with all manner of chemical treatments to produce high-yield, deeply designed crops that will fill millions per acre, year after year.
Which agricultural product is then run off to factories where it is treated, processed and adulterated so as to get the most money out of whatever it is got pulled out of the ground, chemical underpinnings and all.
In other words, Crohn's Disease shows up where people eat lots of mass-produced, mass-processed and pre-digested food. Not cheese but cheese food substitutes. Not rye bread but bread made to look like rye bread that might just have more in it than the mass-produced, over-fertilized, adulterated grain products, special colors and vitamins added for your health.
Like the tamales that came out of a jar I picked off the shelf in a supermarket. The kind of tamales that my father used to say were put together by Greek ladies working in a Norwegian food factory in North Dakota. Them tamales.
And then there's the deal where we live too clean, which makes weird therapies for Crohn's like infecting the patient with nematodes kicking the disease into remission. That and MS and asthma, two other AI diseases that are also connected with Crohn's and which – along with Crohn's – appear to have a genetic link as well.

Yeah, baby, we eat too good and we wash our hands too much. And we's all cousins, too. Special your little brother keep him in the basement so as he won't scare your cousin when she comes over to play doctor with you and squeal like a little girl.

Now all this adds up when you have to ask if the American voters are gonna be so shallow as to be swayed by a good-lookin' woman being runnin' mate to an old guy's had who knows how many melanomas hauled off his chops.
I mean, we have evolved ourselves in this country into a flock of marching morons. We have processed our food so good that it's got quantitative limits on rat feces, and the meat has to come from virgin animals never ever seen once an intestinal parakeet, and we are so consumed with cleanliness that we hand out sanitary wipes at the entrance to the grocery store to wipe off the handles of the shopping carts with.
And we're lookin' at a political feast that will either make the Republicans have to fix what they've done or the Democrats be demonized for overhauling a failing federal monetary system that's propping up the economy worse than Turkey was last week before they revalued their currency for the seventeenth time in eight days.
Yeah, baby! I am a dyed-in-the-synthetic-wool-like fiber pessimist. I shall never want for things to bitch about. And I shall never be disappointed. Say "Hallelujah!"

Hallelujah!

Now all of this brings me around to my favorite general purpose rant about the extinction of the species. I know this bothers a lot of folks 'cause it sounds like I'm willing to give up and let the entire planet die. As if my disappearance or the disappearance of the entire species itself would do that.
See, first off, if every human suddenly disappeared – and it would be a shame if we didn't get at least enough warning to let the dogs and cats out of our houses, lest they die of starvation cooped up like that – nobody would be here to notice. We'd be gone. Nobody but humans gives a shit about us being here, and, in view of the fact that we're not too concerned about anything other 'n us being here, given extinction rates related to human social activity, there would be no one here to make note of it.
Like John Rechy said "One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."
With the addendum that " . . . and someone has that very day come in to take your place, whatever that might have been."
'Cept there wouldn't be anyone human coming in. It'd probably take a couple million years but I'm sure some other species might get their act together enough to evolve to reflective consciousness, build a minor version of civilization and maybe even get to wondering where all this rusted out Vega shit came from.
But we wouldn't be here.
And nobody would be the wiser for it.
How this would happen depends on your mente.
If you're a bitter old guy like me, there are two very easy extinction scenarios. One is a very big rock and the other is a very tiny germ. Or virus, if you must.
With the rock, any landing would be nice, although I have my own preferences. An oceanic impact would be spectacular environmentally. We'd be breathin' snow and rain filled with whatever didn't burn up on the way up or down for years. The wave front from any possible tsunami would be spectacular for those on high mountain tops and those living closer to shore would end up as part of the biotic paste, ground down in the splash and splat.
A terrestrial impact would be neat for all the tectonic activity that would result. Mountains would have a chance to climb or collapse, thus wiping out whole subcontinents or hidden valleys &c. The antipodal tectonics would be splendid, what with the crust breaking open so the mantle could escape and slosh around like a lake of fire and brimstone. Landing in a hugely overpopulated or overexploited area would be good too, since it would inevitably lead to guerilla warfare and retribution against anyone who might have prayed hard enough for such a thing to happen.
I mean, there are so many things about the big rock adios that make it so marvelously elegant, to borrow a term from the deconstructionists.

The germ'd be good too. All by itself it would have the effect of just sweeping over the earth like a cloud. And barring geographic limits – most of which have already disappeared owing to international plane flights &c – it would work out all the way around in both directions at once. Comin' in from the east, it'd roll over New York like squarshing a bug. Comin' in from the west it'd make LA look like, well, LA.
And all around would be the wail and moan of the dying and the not-dead-yit, trying to hang on for the cure that will never come.
Sure, it'd hurt and a lot of folks would suffer horribly. But it'd be the end of it, once and for all. Every single last breathin' human soul gasping for the last one, knowing that there weren't no more coming, finally just giving up and layin' there like a possum waitin' for the last half of that Kenworth to go by..
Thu-bump.
Ba-boom and thu-thump.
What a way to go. Say "Hallelujah!"

Thu-thump.

You have to admit, however, that it's likely such scenarios, such events, will come the pass one way or the other. It may be during some high times for the human species, after we've conquered breast cancer and whatever hemorrhagic virus still pesters us. If so, it will come amidst a spectacularly vaunted fit of prayer and beseeching of the divine whim. But it'll happen.
Of course, it might happen after the entire world has gone nuts with religious frenzy and the Muslims and the Christians have gotten down to the last three guys on earth, complete with a spectacularly vaunted fit of prayer and beseeching of the divine whim. But it'll happen.
One way or the other, it will happen.
You can count on it.

Now the reason for all this counting – as in: my counting of ways to see the human species to its last vestige – is simple enough. One way or the other, we are going to run out of time. Plain and simple.
The dinosaurs got something like 150 million years.
We've had six million so far and most of that was crawling from australopithecus afarensis to homo erectus.
Given that sort of possible actuarial futures, we might get another 144 million years and have little more to show for it than the crumbling buildings of Wall Street and that picture of a monkey getting off an airplane somewhere with the guy looks like the Penguin.
Or we could snuff it outright quick.
Now it's easy to say that such thinking is defeatist or pessimistic or maybe even misanthropic. And it is. Country simple. But you have to look at a couple things head on to get the right slant.
First there's our change of how weather works on the planet. Yes, it rains in summer and snows in winter and all god's chillin are just having the usual time. Party of their lives, in fact, unless you want to live off bugs and rats in the jungles of Papua/New Guinea, which, in fact, is pretty much how more than half the people on this planet live. (And I'm good for that ratio being more like 85 to 15, the smaller number being them what might have a refrigerator or at least a can opener.)
Then there's the debt load we put on the environment trying to grow enough food to feed that nearly 90% of the planet who actually get to see food in boxes or cans most of the time. We shove chemicals into the soil to grow engineered veggies and grains which we industrialize into food for the small group of humans who belong in the 90% aforementioned.
What makes the growing so important is, aside from the industrialization of agriculture, the simple fact that as the number of humans increases, the needs of those humans for a space to eat, sleep and crap goes up. And it's an exponential growth pattern there too. So you have to weigh the number of humans needin' food against the amount of land that you can spare from housing and health to grow the food. At some point there's a zero sum gain. More people means less area to grow food. Less food means more starving people, which leads to the next great leveling power besides disease: war.
So here you have a scenario that's up to date and on your iPod: people at war over what you think is their imaginary friends or their political ambitions or the need of the rich of any society to maintain that gas-guzzlin' lifestyle we all see on TV. Just factor in how much of that war might be even now over who gets to eat.
After all, it takes a lot of gas and diesel to keep those agrindustry farms running. All those agrindustry farms where they grow all the wheat for all the bread that all the people who can find a Kroger's get their food. And all those farms with all those tractors &c, they cost money and that money comes out of your pocket.
So when Amir Svensen can't get food for his wife and kids, he might consider getting grandpa's rifle down off the hooks over the fireplace and going out with his buds for a little aggravation. You know: war.
Right into this you can drop the rock or the germ.
Don't make no never mind which, being as how the wars of the future will be house to house and town against village. To hell with that community values, soldier. We're here to get what's ours & screw the rest.

And that, children, brings us straight back to how Gringos eat versus the rest of the nearly starving world. As before, we are used to getting our food out of sanitary packages, which food has been summarily tested for germs & rat poop and which food we trust 'cause it's, well, it's supposed to be good for us.
Preprocessed, flash frozen, preheated & predigested for us all.
Yeah, that's it.
And we wash our hands too much.
Makes me wonder, however: How much of this civilized activity are we gonna get away with before some tiny germ comes up and turns us all into Crohn's patients?
No, that's not a rhetorical question.
I have no idea what's up about this. I ain't no scientist with a time machine. But I do have this feeling that, as we move further forward with food processing technology, we will also push the germs and contamination possibilities ahead of us. Sooner or later – like all that spinach got throwed away last year or maybe last year and the year before – it's all gonna bite us on the rearward parts. At the same time, thanks to the wonders of technology, we will become more complacent, fat and stupid. The world will, eventually, be covered over with one single species that will feast long and happy on whatever we have done to preserve garden-variety garbage for as long as it takes for the sun to go out.
Like the man said, said "One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too and someone has that very day come in to take your place, whatever that might have been."

Dead People in China Again

2008-07-09T10:38:00.000-04:00

The Chinks killed five Muslims today. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, were it not for the fact that the Muslims in question have been taking shit from the Chinese government since before Mao. And the best of that is that Mao didn’t really give a shit one way or the other about the ethnicity of the Muslims recently snuffed.
See, the folks recently snuffed were Uyghurs. They’re part of the hugely unnoticed Altaic tribal group with a language that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Great Wall pretty much unaltered by the differences. Gringo coordinates for that change, given that most Gringos have no idea at all that there is any other language than English, would be like the linguistic difference between Spanish as she be spoken in Argentina and Brazilian Portuguese. Simpler? Ok, how about between Castilian Spanish and Portuguese?
Got that?
Ok, so here are the Uyghurs, kin to the Kazakhs and the Kyrghiz and the Uzbeks and Turkmen & all them other turkish folks, living in a chunk of the planet that has been pretty much theirs to enjoy, at least until Leninism hit the big time.
Up until then they’d been farmers, herdsmen, tradesmen, merchants and such, living among themselves in their tribal units (which is another story), eating yoğurt & livin’ to be a hundred & something for the Dannon commercials. But when Lenin got hot and the Russians needed to validate their territorial imperatives, the locals got inculcated and then Mao ignored ‘em long enough to think it’s cool to be Commies.
Good commies, mind you. We do business with China like they was old boys on Wall Street, which they will quickly enough soon own.
But I digress.
Islam came to the region early, mainly as the result of the spice and silk trade, by which the future attackers of the European civilizations aided in making the European civilizations some of the most prolific, profitable and advanced for the past millennium and a half. When Islam rose up out of the tribal superstitions of the Arabian Peninsula, it eventually spread – by the sword more than by any price of religious or superstitionist truth – out to the East, where its sole competitor was Buddhism with a little animistic superstitionism thrown in for flavor. As Islam spread eastward, it became part of local tribal lore in much the same way that Christianity bled into African animism to become the Caribbean versions of santaría or voudoun . Thus the blending of honor killings, virginity rites and similar ancient arcana became part of present day Islam.
Don’t ask Muslims if this is true, however. They don’t like to think that the message given by the prophet was anything but pure as the driven snow, even if there ain’t no snow in Arabia, if it was a small snow and you wanted to put your hand in there anyway. Thus we arrive at the recent executions.

Even before the Soviet hegemony discovered what the US hegemony has been trying to avoid recognizing, Islam was a problem to the Russian imperialist leitmotif. While the fervor of jihad did pay nicely into the Leninist/Stalinist mindset of total subservience and dedication to the expansion of world socialism, the simple fact that it was action done according to divine command rubbed the Soviets the wrong way.
Not that they didn’t take advantage of the situation.
There’s a beautiful chunk in the middle of the Reds where John Reed is standing in the middle of a theater sort of place, surrounded by local tribesmen, giving a speech to the locals on the advent of Leninist socialism. The audience picks up a chant from the translation of Reed’s speech and suddenly Reed realizes that his speech has been mistranslated.
The crowd which he thought was hell-bent for socialism is actually calling for a jihad.
That’s pretty much the same deal in China today, ‘cept that it ain’t Reed and it ain’t Mao and it ain’t no jihad you or I or the next dhimmi would recognize.

The Uyghurs have been watching their culture disappear under the Maoist yoke for decades. They’ve watched their herding lands and their mineral rights and their homes and schools and mosques turned into Maoist instruction centers under the hand of Han Chinese. In other words, the Han Chinese have been displacing the local Altaic folks for something like forty years now.
Where once the signs and language as Altaic, now stand banners in gold Chinese characters against a red field. Where once the children spoke the language of their parents, now they learn to speak Chinese.
And, to be sure, where once the tribal manners were maintained, today the Chinese socialist way is the only way . . . at least as long as you put on a good show.
And it’s at the putting on the show that we end up with five Uyghur şahidler who were executed for being part of a militant Muslim group with obvious intentions of overthrowing the local Han Chinese administration and instituting their own Islamic government.

I know about this stuff as little as I do for as much as I know because I have two friends, both refugees, who are Uyghurs. Each of them has had opportunities enough to know how the Chinese "organs" work. They are intent on being contributing members of Gringo society and they have worked hard to become such folks. I consider them my friends, a son and daughter, members of my family.
As I got to know these two folks and become acquainted with other members of their ethnicity, I became more familiar with their homeland situation and with their relationship with the folks who basically built a wall to keep 'em out.
At the same time, they know that I am not a believer. They accept that as far as they can and understand – so far as I know – how I have come to that. They also know that I have almost as jaundiced an eye for Islam as I do for the Roman Catholic church's self-proclaimed hegemony over whatever it is that the accretion of Mythrasism onto another Judaic heresy which led to the Pauline letters becoming part of the Jesus myth.
Yeah, like that.
So here I am torn between my feelings for the people of a distant place who have representatives within my life & family circle while at the same time feeling that the Uyghur Muslims who where rounded up and shot by the Chinese organs are probably just the tip of an iceberg in the oceans of future diplomacy & desires for peace and harmony worldwide.
On the one side, nobody, regardless of their language, culture (providing it's at least as egalitarian as I think I am), ethnicity or whatever deserves to be cleansed from the earth just 'cause they are different in some typically simian prejudice way.
On the other, Islam has become very vicious of late. The war that the rest of the world thought was over 1400 years ago has been hiding in the closet, waiting for the hired help to leave before bursting out of the darkness to kill everyone that doesn't agree with it.
And there ain't much of anything even Muslims seem to agree about any more.
So it's simple prejudice and genocidal politics versus another damn pack of sociopaths who happen have taken Islam as their shield on the way to dessimating the rest of humanity.

As I said, this leaves me in the same condition I’d be in if all I had for breakfast was a half-ett toaster strudel and the coffee maker was broke. Sure, I can get by thinking that what happened to these folks is a racist move on the part of the Commie Chinks. Or I can get uprageious about it saying that the Chinese are moving to cut off the incursion of Islam's more dangerous political elements before the jihad hits Beijing. And it will.
Count on it.
Which statement puts me back in the clear light of whatever passes for day in these dark times. I have to admit that there is no love lost between me and the delusion of religion. I ain't a believer and, although I do have no problem with most believers, I ain't all that good on religions which seem to be based on piracy, plunder, slavery, subjugation and violence against those who don't believe or believe as they should.
I ain't even good on Christianity 'cause it's got its own history – not the least of which is being forged every day as I write by the likes of Karl Rove or the Bushies and the rest of the pack of Liars for Jesus – and because of what it's become in today's simplistic and dumbed-down political depravity.
I'm tolerant of Buddhism 'cause it's so back burner about conversion, belief or disbelief. In fact, there are parts of Buddhism that are plainly disbelieving in the main. At the same time, reading the papers about a gang of Buddhism monks set buildings on fire 'cause of an argument makes me laugh.
Judaism, well, that one's a good 'n 'cause of the same things that make Mormonism so bizarre: there's no serious archeological proof for anything in the Bible, new or old testament. And if Jews are a private race within the human species, then that beggars the position held by some that Jews are an anointed and blessed people, which is another way to hide your own version of racism and elitist delusion masquerading as belief.
And then there's Islam, which we all know has been hijacked, although most of the Muslims I know don't talk about that much 'cause, well, they either accept being hijacked as the status quo or they're in on the hijacking and don't care one way or the other. Or they're just simple believers who'd like to be left alone just as I, a disbeliever, would enjoy being left alone about all this stuff.

And then here come's the Chinese organs, rousting a bunch of Muslims in a nominally break-away province of the Commie Chinese geopolitical hegemony and I'm not sure where I stand.
I have friends among those people.
I have very little respect for the world-view of present day Islam, which puts me at odds with the co-religionists of the Uyghur people.
But these folks – these two folks in particular and members of their ethnicity whom I've met as well – are close to me, mind and spirit.
The attack on the Muslims may have been justified by the Chink organs and police state politics since, after all, the dead Muslim Uyghurs were, by someone's definition, jihadis. They were working for the end of the Chinese hegemony and the eventual imposition of Shar'ia law across China (and the rest of the world in the process).
At the same time, these are just folks want to be left to be Uyghurs.
All of which leaves me conflicted. And sad.

Truly, this is another case in point of religion and the delusion from which its ugly little head doth spring ruining everything. Everything. Every last single human concern & compassion burned on the edges, if not in flames all around, by the fire of religionistic superstitionism.

And I don't know what to say to my friends, believers they be and all that.

The Consciousness of the Bladder

2008-06-06T11:59:00.002-04:00

I was talkin' the other day with my friend Scott Watamaniuk. He's a professor of psychology at the university and he's been teaching a course this quarter on perception. Eyes, ears, taste, touch, all that. And no, I will not be dragged off tangent by the reality of there being way the hell more than five senses.
Scott and I were talking about the way we build the concept of self based on what we perceive. How we have this innate sense of ourselves as individual beings with a world "out there" beyond our sensory cells.
It's like what Steve Quakenbush (who also taught at the university) said about language: "The failure of the self to coincide with itself is at the root of the nature of language."
Same-same consciousness.
And how did I get from perception to consciousness?
Simple, monkey.
The failure of the self to coincide with itself is at the root of the nature of consciousness.
See, it's like trying to calibrate a voltmeter by using the voltmeter you're calibrating. You can't do it 'cause, well, every change you make in bringing the voltmeter up to calibration will result in a change of how the voltmeter measures the voltage. Feedback loop of a sort, it is.
With consciousness – as a result of perception as much as the interaction of the individual with the world thus perceived – you have a problem in defining consciousness. And then there's the problem of just who gets to have consciousness, once you figure out what consciousness means, presuming that you can figure out who it is you want to assign consciousness to.
The voltmeter again.
So for a long time – and I'm working of Scott's ideas here without any serious background myself in the matter, other 'n havin' been conscious in one way or the other for the past 62 years, including the 60s, which is another form of consciousness maybe – folks have been reluctant to figure out consciousness.
If you say that consciousness is being aware of the environment or "outside world," then single-cell entities like germs and bacteria and protozoa in the oceans have consciousness. So it'd be you and all your single-cell buddies hangin' out at the beach.
If you say that consciousness is being aware like that, what do you do about sleep, which most folks think is a sort of downtime, consciousness-wise? You go to bed and fall asleep and forget to turn down the heat. So there you are under the covers and the heat is on and soon enough – especially if you're going through menopause – it's too hot to sleep, so you wake up and remember you forgot.
So who or what woke you up?
Yeah, the heat. But the heat was something got perceived by your body and thus your mind while you – the consciousness you consider yourself (which is another question) – were asleep. Was your body conscious of the heat and you weren't? If so, which is it? You are a conscious being or your body is a conscious being and you're just sittin' in the control room takin' a nap?
Yeah, I'm sorry about the homunculus thingie. But that's part of the problem.
Cat's are aware of their environment. Cats are conscious beings. They know.
Large whales are aware of the smaller orcas. The orcas gang up and kill the larger whales all the time. Whales are conscious beings. They know. Hell, they talk to each other with them songs and such.
If whales are conscious and cats are conscious and you and I are conscious of cats and whales knowing stuff, what the hell is consciousness now?

Good question, ain't it?

From a philosophical perspective – and this was Scott's suggestion to me – it might be fun to wind through all the crap about consciousness that philosophers have been gibbering about since the first philosopher asked why. But then you'd have to look at consciousness from a philosophical perspective, which, even with all the science we have at our disposal to investigate the biological or physical or chemical nature of consciousness, would be a helluva long dissertation.
Even so, philosophically, consciousness demands explanation.
And from the little suggestions I gave above, it's obvious that consciousness is a way wider field than most folks would even be tempted to tackle. You'd have everything that can recognize another of its species and make a decision about the four Fs regarding that other individual. And then there's the question of consciousness involved in the four Fs themselves.
Four Fs?
Simple: every entity is faced constantly with four questions about "outside" data that lead to behaviors. The four Fs are simple. An individual in the environment has to decide which parts of that environment are friend, foe, food or f**k.
Friend? No problem.
Foe? Fight.
Food? To eat or not to eat, that is the next question.
F**k? Mate and keep the DNA around.
Simple as that.
Any individual that faces those four Fs has to be conscious.
Which is great except that humans, by the way in case you didn't notice, are very species centered little animals. We have a hard time giving other animals or any other life on this planet any qualities which we think are part of our own "mind kit."
Cats, dogs, whales, bugs, all of 'em are aware of their environment enough to deal with the four Fs. So are we.
But we know about the four Fs, even if we don't want to think about 'em too much. Human children, kids, get hatched, grow up and go on to their deaths blissfully unaware of the four Fs even though they face 'em and respond to 'em every day, all the time. Mean kids are avoided. Hungry kids beg for food. Middle school girls get pregnant.
Mean kids pick on weaker kids. Mean kids steal food and mean kids don't give a shit about the girl down the street they got pregnant.
Screw her! I got mine! Every crumb for himself!
And all of that takes consciousness.

Yeah, Scott got me started on this and now it's his damn fault. More stuff to think about and obviously more stuff for me to take home and enter into conversations with my son and wife. And then read some more stuff and go out in the print shop and clean up while thinking about the four Fs and consciousness.
Then I take my meds, lose consciousness and fall asleep. When Cid comes to bed later – she's hooked on Lost -- she turns down the overhead fan and turns off the other fan. Later on I wake up and realize the fan ain't on. This happens right after I go into the outhouse and come back to bed. My bladder wakes me up.
Is my bladder conscious?or

"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt."
Die Verwandlung
Franz Kafka – 1917

Active Geology & the Preservation of DNA

2008-05-29T10:46:00.001-04:00

Couple weeks back we had a little shockie. That was the earthquake in Illinois/Indiana what I felt while eating breakfast at 4:30 a.m. on 23 April last. Supposedly there were a few other high-power window rattlers came along later, none of which I noticed. Even more unnoticed were the USGS recorded some 20-odd aftershocks within the same geological formation over the next week or so.
I thought about what it would all mean pretty much from the get-go, being as how you can't shove a milk bottle into a full fridge without something else, like the ice tea pitcher, falling out on your toes at 4:30 a.m., breakfast on the table or not.
If a chunk of rock lets off some pressure by sliding or jittering past another chunk of rock somewhere, you or I feel it in our toes by way of buildings falling down or losin' a few bricks or breakin' a few windows. That's your garden variety explanation of an earthquake. Even from an academic perspective it's still a chunk of rock comin' into contest range with another piece of rock somewhere.
Now if you figure that this is a fixed loop system here – at least as regards the mass of rock which makes up the planet – you have to admit that moving a rock in one place is gonna move another rock somewheres else. The milk bottle analogy.
Thus the minor league rattler here would seem to be related – and yes, in a way it is, even if you don't like the non-academic way I'm figuring this – to the earthquake went down in southern China last week. The one that's guesstimated to have killed 80 some-odd thousand folks outright. Dropped buildings on 'em and all that. Killed 'em quick and simple, leaving the injured to die later in the rubble unless they was rescued by the army guys coming around to find survivors.

Three things about this recent quake in China make the event stand out. First of these is the Chinese government even saying that such a horrible catastrophe could occur under Marxism/Communism/Maoism. Announcing the carnage to the outside world shows a great depth of difference between what is and what was leadership in China.
Second is the acceptance of help – albeit mostly unnecessary from an economic viewpoint – from outside, non-Commie countries and NGOs.
Third, and this is a kicker in my mind, tied to the albeit note above: for the first time in the history of the Chinese government since about 1800, China has enough money piled up to pay for the carnage a bit closer to twice, not that the money will ever truly undo the damage.
Point by point, however, there's a lot to consider. And since money is the biggie for most of the planet nowadays, let's follow the money.

Since about, what, 2001, the Chinese government has been investing in gringo dollars. We owe them, the Chinese, big time for what our money's worth today. Whole federal reserve vaults are all now bought up by Chinese money.
Never mind that money, as a concept, is just stolen land or stolen time.
Remember what your dollar is worth.
Remember when you could get 99 cents Canadian for a dollar?
Remember when you could get 75 cents Canadian for a dollar?
Or worse yet, do you remember when you could get a couple Euros for a buck?
Well, forget about it.
All our cash is backed up with Chinese yuan. Thus you can get a couple bucks for a Euro, which means that it costs you more gringo dollars to go out to eat in France than it ever did before.
A fifty dollar meal is now a hundred dollar meal.
And for the first time in the history of the Chinese government since about 1800, China has enough money piled up to pay for the carnage a bit closer to twice, not that the money will ever truly undo the damage.

Under that consideration, you might ask why the hell anyone is volunteering to send money & or other aid to a government running a country full of a billion people (minus the dead & dying from the earthquake) what can probably well afford without too much help at all. You might ask that but I won't.
Eighty-thousand guesstimated as dead, well, that's a helluvalot of folks dead. And consider that for decades now the Chinese government has held its population at a nominal zero-growth rate by demanding families stay at one child per couple. With a large portion of the estimated dead being children who were killed in collapsing school buildings, the one-child game is now a detriment . . . unless you figure that a negative-one birth rate is a blessing on a global scale.
Tell that to the mourning survivors.
Me? I figure anyone who can help out ought to. From the pictures, even with all the money in the bank what China's got on us, it's gonna be a long & hard haul getting all the mess cleared up, not to mention rebuilding. And don't forget that the rebuilding's gonna involve meeting safety requirements for earthquake proof – or at least earthquake resistant – buildings.
Add in the serious possibility of disease from the rotting corpses, human or not, and the danger of flooding rivers dammed up by debris flowing into the rotting corpses and then spreading various contagions & the like on downstream. You get the picture.
All of that's gonna cost money & the money, whether it's in banked chunks of Gringland real estate (yeah, those banked chunks) or hedge money put on gringo dollars. Even with almost all American concrete going to China, it's gonna be a lot of building materials. Even with all those millions of soldiers and government organs trying to get folks fixed up so they don't spend the next three years livin' in tents and tin shacks, it's gonna be a huge cost in lives and money.

So you have to wonder how the government leaders came to the conclusion that it might be just about time to show how open and free the Chinese leadership has let folks get.
Here they have plans to put on the Olympics and now this happens.
"Goddamn Mongolians! Don't tear down my shitty wall!"
Here they're pouring hours and millions of dollars and who knows how much other peoples' building materials into an Olympic show place and all of a sudden the earth goes a catching up with itself and eighty thousand people are expected – at present rates of recovery – dead.
They had no choice but to show their openness and communicative stylee.
Either we tell them some serious shit goes down or we don't. If we don't they'll find out about it when they show up to prove their greatness by winning over our athletes. If we tell 'em they'll send us help and we'll get past it.
Like that.

And all the while in the back of the shed, there's another pile of rocks somewhere waiting to get down and nasty with another pile of rocks. It won't be anything as greasy and mean as, say, Islamic whackos runnin' up against Christian whackos, however. It'll be a pile of rocks don't give a shit we're here at all, bustin' it up with another pile of rocks don't know we're here and that will be it.
Somewhere a rock moves.
Somewhere another rock waits its turn.
On and on like that, hundreds or millions or billions of years at a time, here an earthquake and here the dead. There another earthquake and there the dead. Nothing we can do will ever give us an early warning. The earthquakes will go on until the northern lights stop flickering . . . and when that happens, well, it won't make any difference.
The irony of it all is the geological forces.
It's ironic that active geology is so much a part of the evolution of any species and it's active geology that accounts for all the earthquakes, which involve the loss of life and serious injury.
As environments change because of earthquakes changing the positions of continents and distributions of water & land upon which plants can grow (and from which plants animals can get food), species undergo the stressful process of evolutionary change leading to survival.
And no, it ain't a progress upward. It's a progress from possible extinction to continued life among species.
The evolution that takes place because of land/water/vegetation changes leads, in the case of humans, to a change in cognitive ability. This change makes us what we are among the primates. We's the smartest little dumb crackers on the block, plain and simple, Maureen.
At least the smartest little crackers got hands.
As a result of this increase in cognitive potential, we build stuff that falls down on us when earthquakes happen. This causes death and destruction, disease and injury. From that, according to the above little saw, you'd think we'd have evolved to not build stuff where the ground shakes a lot or where the winds blow us away or where the water don't rise and flood us out permanent.
You'd think that. If you were simple-minded about evolution.
The simple fact is that evolution is a response to environmental change which provides for the ultimate survival of the DNA.
That's it.
The purpose of life is to keep the DNA around.
If it ain't us, it would have been the dinosaurs evolved to sentience & reflective consciousness. And then they would have built the multi-story buildings that collapsed on their young'ns when the ground shook bad.
And even then, in truth, the DNA would have survived 'cause there's an abundance of redundancy in DNA and in species and in the broad swath of life that covers the planet.

Now this may all sound cruel and inhuman. And if you's a human and you love your kind (and even if you ain't got that much softness in your heart for most of the rest of humanity for whatever reasons), what's happened over the past week and some in China is disheartening. You and me and the next human grieve over the loss of life – especially the lives of children & infants – resulting from the earthquakes.
Yeah, earthquakes, plural. There have been that many major aftershocks.
To think of all those kids crushed to death or brought to death's door by injuries that might have been fixable, had the children been rescued in time, well, it makes you and me pause to shed a tear. We think of those kids and we think of how it might have been our kids or even ourselves if we connect with the kids by remembering our childhoods.
And we grieve with the parents of those children and the grandparents of those children. We grieve with the parents who have suddenly become orphans themselves from the death of their parents, grandparents to their children.
We grieve in that usually complex & reflective way that humans do because we evolved to have this level of awareness of the world outside our own little lives just because of such things as earthquakes & the disease and loss of life that comes with 'em, them earthquakes.

The simple fact remains, however. Life, as the late Stephen J. Gould once said in an NPR radio interview, is a terminal illness. Nobody gets out of this alive. Some of us come to the end of life in such a way that those left behind see the death as having happened too early. Some of us last until the last lingering breath, dying out in advanced age and usually by then seriously compromised cognitively & physically. Either way, death is the end of life on an individual level, but life as a phenomenon of this planet goes on.
Of course this means very little to those who knew or know the dead and injured.
Everyone at some level knows this and recognizes it and has to deal with it.
Death ain't a pretty business. But then life ain't pretty either.
"One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."
We're here because we survived the changes. We'll be here until the changes become so enormous that we can't survive any longer. And we'll also be here until we fix it so that any of the changes, no matter how small, will be enough to kill us off.
Yet again, we'll be here until we evolve so finely that the most insignificant change will be enough to set us on the road to extinction.
Even we can become cheetahs.
At the end of it all, whether we're here or not, what powers active geology and thus the earthquakes, continental drift, plate tectonics and the physiognomy of the planet itself will eventually end. Some day there will be nothing to hold back the solar wind, probably long after the last drop of hydrogen has been wafted out into space. By that time, of course, life on this planet will have devolved to protein strands on a parched and cracked planet facing a bloated and blistering red sun.
When that happens it won't make any difference if we lived long enough to leave this planet for another or not. The solar system will come to its end as surely as each of us does and that will be that. There will be no one left to grieve the planets or the end of the oceans at the end of time. On that day we will all be silence and empty space.
But our tears for each other reaching back into the past will still be real enough in time and thus will not be in vain.

Memorial Day

2008-05-27T09:16:00.001-04:00

Most national holidays and Memorial Day & 4th of July in particular, my across the street neighbor gets a box of little 8x10 flags on sticks and posts 'em in the lawn of all the houses on both sides of the street on our block. She puts 'em in the right-of-way green space between the street curb and the sidewalk. So when the parade goes by – as it does every Memorial Day and 4th of July – people will be standing along the route with patriotic markers on the path.
Some people might think this is hokey. I might have at one time in the long-back, but for the most part I have no problem with the flags. I go out and keep 'em straightened out and after the parade I go out and pick 'em up and later hand 'em back to my neighbor so she can use 'em again next holiday.
It's like a tradition, dig?
So this year I got out to the curb to watch the parade with Cid and there's all the little flags along both sides of the street and folks come out to watch the parade. One or the other of my former neighbors and such are out there in lawn chairs. They bring their kids and the kids stand at curbside waiting for all the candy that the political candidates & such pass out as they go by.
In front comes a sheriff deputy to lead the chase, then the various veterans' organizations parading the colors and then the high school band. Sometimes there's a couple high school bands. Then the local Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts & such. Then various civic organizations, like the local historical society. The usual parade stuff.
At the end of the parade is the line of cars got held up by the parade goin' by and a couple Mexicans in pick up trucks going to the bank to cash their pay checks.
Then life goes on and at some point I come out and collect the flags.

This year the parade is on Saturday morning, as usual. Cid got up around 7:30 and started doing whatever it is she didn't do last night 'cause she was up til midnight watching Lost season whatever. I'm snoozin' pretty good but soon I can hear the band tuning up in the school yard a street over. I get up, drink some coffee and eat a croissant what I bought Friday just for the shindig.
The parade goes by. The flags are all at attention. Sunday comes up and we go have a cook out with Cid's brother in Columbus. Nice gathering. We pick up grandma and drop her off afterwards. We come home & the flags are all pretty and spiffy in the grass like they was waiting for another parade. I think about pickin' 'em up but pass on the idea 'cause I get distracted easy.
Then Monday comes up and Cid's out in the yard planting stuff and pullin' weeds. The flags have been out there all night and the day since Saturday morning. The eldest comes over & we cook up a pile of chow: lamb chops a la grec, fried egg plant, salad, taters, the usual stuff. It's a nice day, even if they have forecast storms &c and we all have a nice bright & spirited conversation across the kitchen table.
Then it's time the eldest took his possessions back to his digs – don't ask, it's a difficult concept – and we all go out to the street to see him back his red car out of the driveway.
The flags are in the street, some and the rest are out in the lawn.
Somebody's come by and busted 'em off at the ground level & laid 'em low in the dirt & road surface.
I start picking up all the busted over flags. Cid & I both comment on what kind of asshole it would take to do something this stupid, even if they weren't patriotic. And for once I don't think of Osama bin Kurtzenschlange.
Then one of the down the street neighbors calls out to me.
"It was a couple kids that did this," he says.
"What kind of stupid shit would . . . " I say.
"It's them kids, one of 'em's red headed and a shorter kid on bicycles."
"Red head kid ain't got no neck?"
"Yeah, that's the one. Comes by here all the time. Little shits."
I remember Cid and me talking earlier that day about livin' in a cloistered community with all them codes and regulates and rules about what color paint you can use on your roof and how many cars you can have in your drive way over 48 hours and such. You know: yuppie pain-in-the-ass kinda place what don't allow towers and you have to get a permit to put up a fence & even then they tell you what kind of fence you can get. And you have to come through a gate at a fence just to come home from work.
One of them places.
And just as we're talking about the flags, me & the neighbor, I can hear again for the n^th time that day the sound of one of the morons down the street one street over goosin' up his high-cam-liftin' dumb-ass briar hop no-neck grease monkey "race car."
Ba-lap-lap-lap-lap--lap-lap-lap-ba-lap-a-lap-ba-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
At 125 db
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
over the threshold of
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
pain.
Ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
Followed by a quick run down the street at some stupendously ignorant speed
Ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
with gas going for
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
nearly four bucks a gallon down the street at the
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
drive through
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
where this jackass probably buys his beer and cigarettes. Or snuff/chewin' tobacky. Whatever.
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap

Back when the eldest was a pre-teen goin' to the local middle school, ridin' the bus every day to and from, there was this kid used to pick on him. Got so bad I had to go to the school and have a nice conversation about how the school was letting this kid bully not just my son but other kids and how it would have to stop. And here's a card from my lawyer if you need further details. Y'understand?
Took three hours and the bullyin' stopped.
So the eldest goes through middle school and graduates from high school without further incident and goes a couple years at college when one day I'm out in the yard and there's this red head no-neck kid standing in the street over a short frame, small tires bicycle, talking to my eldest on the curb. I welcome my self to the conversation and my son introduces the red head no-neck.
It's the kid used to pick on him.
"Oh, you're the kid used to pick on my son, eh?"
My son smiles.
"Uh, yeah . . . I guess so."
"And you've sure moved up the evolutionary ladder, ain'tcha? Ridin' a kid's bicycle around town while my son's got a car."
The no-neck grinned nervous-like.
"Nice to meet you, hot shot."
Never saw the no-neck again. At least until a couple months ago when I started noticing a doppelganger for the original no-neck red head moron walking around town with a couple other of the local inbreeds.
Or maybe they's clones.
Either way, there's another example of how there may well be about 6.993 billion too many of us on the planet.
And another example of why people really do get to the point where they'd rather have a discussion of German cinema's influence on the weltanschauung of the European population as a result of the First World War. Or which episode of Lost resembles the redemption myth in hippie culture than have a couple no-neck motor-heads livin' down the street with the oil slick in the drive way matching the condition of their long, straggly hair with complementary neck and upper torso tattoos.

The most unfathomable part of all of this societal degeneration – accessing not for the moment Pynchon's tendency toward explanation of entropy – is that we've gotten this far on our own already. The longer I live and the longer it takes me to pee, the more sure I am that the species will implode from superstitious idiocy and allegiance to the unnecessary long before we ever manage to weedle the laws of physics so we can travel to other planets around other stars.
I see in the future for my fellow nominally-advanced & educable primates little more than a rote running in circles after artificial bananas while the forest bursts into flames and all the birds of the air shit themselves silly on our shambling, worthless heads. And I say that admitting full well that my best attempt to add a bit of intelligence to the future of life on this planet rests in the hands & heads of two men whom I will go to my grave respecting as very worthwhile individuals.
Within that frame I don't think there's much more than maybe a thousand years on the inside and only slightly more than that on the outside before the planet belches the human species back into the same oblivion which faced the dinosaurs or the giant sloth or the wild felines of Africa who have inbred themselves into a certain death at the corner of the evolutionary office cubicle.
Given that, I still expect the no-necks to come out on top to such an extent that they will be the last living examples of the human species. They'll be found by some putative extraterrestrial exploring team, hands wrapped around the faux-leather steering wheel covers of their rusted-out racing hulks, eyes squinting into the near distance of eventual extinction, sure that Jesus or the Mahdi will come back any day to fix the world that they have so marvelously screwed up.
Ba-lap-a-lap-ba-lap-lap-lap-lap
The world that my father-in-law, my father, my cousins and uncles and aunts and shipmates all wore a uniform to defend will be then covered in the slime leftovers of the human species.
The shame will be that none of the parades and none of the flags will make a difference. The no-necks will inherit the earth and finish the job that the rest of us have unwittingly been doing for the past six million years. Then we will be gone and there'll be no one to break the flags off their staffs in the green patch of dirt between the sidewalk in front of my house and the road surface just beyond.
And, merciful life being the terminal illness that it is, I'll be so long dead that it won't make a difference to anyone that I feel this way at all, unmemorialized and all that included.

Shake, Rattle & Toil: The Earth Is Movin'

2008-04-23T12:31:00.002-04:00

I get up every weekday at 4:40 a.m. By around five I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen, suckin' down my coffee & amaretto and wolfin' down some cereal or toasted waffles or whatever. Takes me about half an hour to eat. I eat slow.
So there I was, sittin' at the table with my rice crispies last Friday, wondering why the newspaper weren't here yet & reading the back of a cereal box. It was still dark outside but the days before had been nominally warm enough for things to start turning green. And bein' as it was Friday, I was feeling pretty optimistic for a change.
Somewhere around 4:40 I heard what sounded like a gust of wind.
Then the house kinda bounced. As if a good wind had come up all of a sudden and struck the side of the house real good before rolling on past.
I thought about it for a moment, that bounce.
There was something strangely familiar about it. I'd felt it before, first, and secondly it just seemed like something more easily explainable than blaming it on some stray wind.
I got up and went into the dining room. The plates on the wall were rattling.
I looked out the window. Then I made a cognitive decision.
The bounce was the P-wave.
The rattling plates was S-wave.
It was an earthquake. That's why it was so familiar. After forty-odd years I could still tell you what it was, even if I only learned about it in geology class and came to experience it later when I was in the USN. Puerto Rico sits on the Puerto Rican trench, a subduction zone that forms a crescent under the Atlantic that marks the ring of island that stretch from Cuba eastward and south to the coast of Brazil.

I went upstairs and googled earthquakes in North America and ended up on the USGS website. There it was, marked out in all its beauty by some seismologist. A R5.2 level quake, 11 km below the surface, near the Indiana/Illinois state line around Bellmont, Illinois. And right there, under the listing was a little link marked "Did you feel it?"
Yeah, I thought. I did feel it. I clicked the link, put down my experience in words and noted that I was going to check on the chart recorder at the university's geology department after I was at work.
When I clicked on the report invitation, there was a single page of reports. By the time I clicked back to the list of reports there were three pages. I went downstairs, finished breakfast, brushed my teeth and went back upstairs. Now there were over 20 pages of reports. I went in the bedroom and checked to see if Cid was awake. Barely. She asked me what was up.
"You didn't feel the earthquake?"
"No. Was there one?"
"Yeah. Earth doesn't move for you any more?"
"Not without some help."
I went back into my office and looked at the reports page. Now there were nearly 40 reports, some close in to the epicenter, the rest out as far as Ohio & West Virginia..
I got my act together, went downstairs & grabbed my lunch and bag. Outside the birds were busily chirping at each other. The cats were looking at me funny. I fed 'em, got in my car and went to work.

When I was a kid there were earthquakes in Hawaii and Alaska and such. Never really knew about earthquakes back then. Stuff happened. I could still watch Tom Corbett & His Space Cadets on the old Sylvania B&W. The nuns were mean as snakes, the pope was some austere dude lived in the Vatican. Sometimes there'd be a real bad storm and my folks would hustle me and Sis into the hallway or down to the basement but I don't remember a single person talking about earthquakes as local events. The Midwest was geological stable as far as I knew or heard. No problem.
I knew about earthquakes only from school textbooks or hearing some someone who'd been in California. I got through all twelve grades of school before college without so much as a giggle in my brain even thinking of earthquakes at all. And even after that I didn't think much about it.
About the second year of college I ended up interested in rocks and earth science. Not as a real science but just something to take. Geology. Invertibrate paleontology. Sedimentary environments. Physical geology. The usual stuff.
But there was this new subject, plate tectonics. Sounded interesting. I signed up.
Now you have to remember: in 1966 the idea of continental drift was a hypothesis. It wasn't a theory or a pile of serious laws of physics. It was a hypothesis that happened to be part of the program. The professor, Ben Richard, was a young guy with new ideas and a very personable teaching style. I learned about the angle of repose. I learned about mountain chains being part of a huge collection of encounters between large blocks of pretty much solid & unchanging planks of the planets surface. And I learned a bit about the idea of deep time, by which most humans without any time to think about it often get the idea that just 'cause it ain't moving fast right now, it probably won't move fast in the future. Or the past.
And there was a field trip too.
Back before satellite pictures of topography or such, the garden variety way for geology students to pick up on how plate tectonics works was to stand on one side of a valley with an open rock face before their eyes. Taking human imagination for what it's worth, the student then looks across the valley to see a similar band of rock on another exposed rock face in the distance.
You look at any Grand Canyon shot & you'll see the layers of rock echoed across the gorges and washouts. That's how it works. Here is rock A. There, over there across the valley you can see rock A". Sweet.
At one point in the field trip we were standing on the side of a road in Virginia. Directly in front of us was a rock fact that rose some sixty feet into the air. Running across the face of the rock was a unique pattern. Rubbed one way, the surface was rough. Rubbed the opposite direction, the surface was stippled but otherwise smooth. The face of rock before us had been broken and shoved up into the air by geological forces. Tectonic activity. Mountain building.
We were standing on one side of a fault line and staring at the face of the other side of the fault line. Our side of the mountain had either dropped or had stood its ground and the other side of the mountain, the face of rock before us, had either moved up relative to the other side of the faultline or it had stood its ground and our side of the mountain had dropped. The rough/smooth test told us which side moved which direction.
And the time it took to move that rock sixty-odd feet in the air?
Maybe months. Maybe centuries. But the pattern on the rock before us told us a simple possible answer to the question of how long. It had all happened at once, boom. Just like that. Maybe just over a few weeks or less, worst case scenario.

There have been twenty-six seismic events in the direct vicinity of the event last Friday (as of 21 April, 2008), near Bellmont, Illinois. Twenty-six bumps and grinds of the earth in an area about the distance between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio over the past five days. The Richter scale values for these events vary between the 5.2 that started the shakin' and Sunday evening's event at 1.0. The first one was felt by folks as far east as West Virginia and as far south as the middle of Georgia. The reported disturbance of human life varied between zilch to R2 or R3.
I only really felt the first one. I kinda stopped paying attention after that because, well, I stopped paying attention. Such complacency does have its merits. This way I'm not standing around, nervously waiting for the next shoe to drop. And given the exponential method of the Richter scales I doubt if I'd notice anything less than the slight bump and rattle that I experienced Friday morning as the cereal went limp.
The lesson isn't missed on me, however. I've always paid attention to the signs, even if they were arcane little flutters of the ground. And sitting as I do on the disbelieving bench, I look at things like earthquakes and volcanoes & the like as hints to the seriously ephemeral nature of all life.
It could end any time, this paradise.
The five things that give life a chance on this little speck in the middle of nowhere special are really simple good fortunes.
The planet happens to be in just the right orbit (right now) for generally comfortable conditions. We're not too far and we're not too close to the sun and the planet's tilted just enough to modulate the weather so we have seasons.
There's liquid water in a large amount (right now) to support life.
There's a breathable atmosphere (right now) with just the right ratio of the right molecules to interact with the carbon-based life that's around (right now).
And the planet has a molten core & active geology, which keeps the environment moving around, which stresses the life forms to evolve. The active geology also leads to the existence of a magnetic field, which protects the surface from nasty rays from space as well as holding off the solar wind so the oceans and atmosphere don't get blown away by the solar wind.
You want a comparison?
There's earth with exactly those five things and there's Mars with barely one (the distance from the sun) and none of the other four, especially a magnetic field.
Mars is a dead subject.
Earth has life.
And as part of the bargain, we get interesting geological activity, which makes us pause now and then after the house bumps and the plates rattle to think of how little it would take for all of this – ALL of this – to disappear in a puff.
Not that it makes the rattling plates and the bouncing house any easier to take. After all, if the earthquake that everyone is agonizing over or trying very hard to ignore the predictions about ever does take up course in the middle of the North American continent, living in a tiny village in Ohio isn't going to mean much.
All of the possibilities are thus aggravated by the severity of the fault structure and how long nothing's happened around there. But even more important in figuring what might happen next is the simple increase in global population.
Back when the New Madrid fault did its last big dance – around 1895 – there were much fewer humans hanging around. The global population back then is estimated to have been around one billion. Not much more than that. Now there are nearly seven billion of us crammed into the space barely able to support much less than two billion, at most. That many folks take up a lot of space & because the space they're occupying doesn't give a rat's ass one way or the other to how many there are or how high quality their lives might be, even a modest earthquake (like the one last Friday) is going to get more notice and cause more trouble.
So in the middle of the messed up windows and the broken plates and the fallen bricks and the need for reinforcement of the kitchen floor, there's the extreme likelihood that last Friday's event wouldn't have caused much damage in a world of half as many people or less.
Those who suffer in any way from the earthquake can blame it on their neighbors or on the government for not letting them know that this might have happened. Or they can complain to their favorite imaginary friend and beg him or her not to send any more destruction and misery their way.
Or they can pick up and go on, knowing that it's all gonna end eventually some day, one way or the other. Eventually the continents will drift back together. Eventually the churning core of this planet will cool its jets and the magnetic field will collapse. Eventually the sun will run out of fuel. Eventually there won't be anything here in this corner of the universe but a blue cloud of disturbed gasses and maybe a handful of cinders & rocks.

Of course thinking this way doesn't sound very optimistic. Talking about the eventual demise of the solar system and the galaxy and our self-absorbed, self-important little brief snatches of life in the vast deepness of time isn't the kind of thing people want to hear. They'd rather talk about an imaginary friend and trust the words in a book of dubious parentage and provenance.
"Don't tell me that we're running out of water. Jesus is coming back and we won't have to worry about a thing, those of us who have faith in the Lord God Jehovah and the redemption of the blood!"
Sorry, it don't work that way.
Science shows us with a definitely more focused eye what's happened in the past and leads us to understand the possibilities of the future in a world that is quite unavoidably real, physically present, a place & time that we can touch & feel and occupy every sense.
Religion tries to tell us – in a language and with metaphors no better than a child's imaginings – that we're going to live forever.
As if we could stop – or some imaginary roaring thunderer will stop – what's going to happen next. Ain't nobody that powerful. The rocks prove that.

If you listen real good you can even hear 'em sing. Lot easier to hear than that voice of god you've been waiting for all these millenia.

Adoption Time Again in Felixlandia

2008-04-17T11:20:00.005-04:00

The weather's getting good again & now it's time for the cats to get adopted. I bring this up because I have five guys who live outside who really, every single one of 'em, would make absolutely pleasant house cats. And I know there are at least three other wanderers who come and go. Plus one new little kitten who survived the winter 'cause she found out that I was feeding the rest of the tribe.
So this is my "Please Contact Me to Adopt One" bit. If I had place inside my house for these guys, they'd be there and I'd be up to my nose in cat litter boxes. But at least they'd be happy and I wouldn't want for cattention.
Each of these animals has at least been brought up to weight and all but one have been neutered with their shot cards up to date. The only cat outside that range right now is Skiffy, whom I will introduce soon enough.
So here's the gang . . .

The Foot will be two years old come May. He was one of four survivors in Droopsy's first litter. He was one of four kittens born still hosed up to the placenta after birth. His hind feet were bound up in his umbilicus but once that was fixed he grew to be a very charming, talkative, energetic cat. (Droopsy tried to move her litter after they were a couple weeks old. We didn't think that was a good idea because we wanted the kittens to get lots of human contact as socialization for potential adoption. We moved the ones we could catch in with Goldie's litter. Goldie raised the extras without so much as a hiccup.) The Foot has beautiful orange highlights in his fur not visible in this stingy picture. He loves to roll over and get belly rubs. He's very friendly and deserves a loving home. He's a real charmer, easy-going and sociable. Loves to lay around under chairs and watch the world with one eye open.

Baxter is also two years old & littermate to the Foot. Baxter was raised by Droopsy but eventually came to visit and now is a regular guy. He's very affectionate although not a lap cat. He prefers to sleep under a chair. He loves tummy rubs and gets along well with everyone. He & Goldie are good buddies. In bright light you can make out dark red markings in what looks like jet-black fur and he has little white patches on his chest and belly and under his two front legs. He's also somewhat talkative.

Goldie joined the tribe three winters back and gave birth to a litter of four the following summer, three of which survived. She also raised three of the four survivors of Droopsy's first litter. Goldie is very playful & affectionate. She is not as talkative as the rest of the tribe but she does squeak and meow when she wants attention. She still takes care of the Foot, whom she raised through to weaning. She's also one of the roller-over & tummy-rub group. She is a beautiful lap-loving, fall-asleep-in-your arms cat. She'd make a beautiful indoor cat.

Albert showed up last spring with Droopsy, who showed up pregnant. After Droopsy died he came and went. During the day when Cindy or I were outside, he'd come around and rub up against chair legs and such. He was then a very nice lap cat. He didn't purr loudly but he did appreciate attention. Over the winter he's become somewhat skittish but otherwise is just the same charmer he was last summer. I hope to get him more socialized again this summer but I'd just as soon find him a home where he could sit back and take it easy. Being outside all winter has not done much for his sense of security. Another cat that I'd love to have inside with the rest of us, Albert definitely deserves better.

Monk showed up last summer with Albert and Droopsy. He hung around on the edge of the yard for weeks. One day he was out in the periphery of the yard, looking at me. I hunkered down cowboy style and stared at him. He looked away, then back at me. This went on for a while but at some point he just trotted over and meowed at me. I petted him and he purred.
Turns out Monk was abandoned or had wandered off. He's a neutered, de-clawed male cat with very thick fur and a wide belly. Over the summer he'd come up to whoever was outside and rub against us. We discovered that he loved being brushed, petted and held. If you start petting him and then stop, he'll reach up with his paw and tapped at you. If you ignore the tap he'll nibble at your hand. I guess you could call him a baby. He's almost demanding but in a nice way.
Over the winter he got fleas or some other tension drove him to lick away most of his fur on the right side, licking it up into a thick matted patch that was obviously driving him to more licking. I took him to the vet & got him a full series of shots and had him checked out. The vet shaved off a huge patch of matted fur on his right side and on his left. He looks pretty ragged right now, but at least he's healthy enough. He's about six years old and he has some sort of strange heart valve thing going on. He's not in bad shape and he's not unable to run and play. He's obviously been somebody's pet but whoever had him shoved him out one day and he found me. Or he found us, me and the other cats.
I'd love to see Monk get a home inside where he can lay around and get petted and combed and brushed regularly. He's such a sweet guy. He nuzzles up against my hand to start getting petted. He's litter-box trained. I know this 'cause he's been living in the garage printshop since he showed up all matted. His fur is starting to grow back around his sides now and he's going to be just as pretty as ever by summer.

All of these sweet, adorable, friendly, affectionate, deserving-of-attention cats need someplace better than the collection of nesting boxes they now swap back and forth in the garden shed. They need nice homes, inside with humans and a food and water dish and a warm place to relieve themselves. They are all good people-cats and, except for Baxter, all of 'em will sit in your lap for a while. I'm sure that Baxter, once he got used to being with someone, would become a good lap cat too. At the very least he'll flop down in front of you and roll over so you can see the tips of his canine teeth under his upper lips, waiting to get a belly rub.
If you think you could give one of these guys a nice home – and if you live near enough to come get one of 'em, which is the Dayton/Springfield, Ohio area – I'd love to pass 'em over to your care. All you have to do is contact me. My email address is [nilsbull{at}juno{dot}com]. Believe me, as much as I love cats and keeping a batch around for fun, I'd rather the ones who visit me were house cats somewhere warm and friendly. Which raises my only serious thought: if you can do justice to my friends, contact me. If you have any doubts at all or are the least bit unsure, don't bother. Taking care of animals is no different than taking care of family. Once you accept the responsibility, live by that promise. Otherwise I'll take care of these guys and maybe someone who really feels deeply about providing homes to animals will contact me.

About Half a Mile

2008-04-14T14:20:00.005-04:00

For many years now Cindy's been gettin' all up in my grill over how much exercise she thinks I get or don't get. She's into the Nautilus machines at the local Y. She goes there three times a week for a couple hours of joggin' on the belt & runnin' through the weights and all that. She gets a lot out of it, not the least of which is weight control and a better spirit. I have no problems with her going & I have even so much as tried to go there regular for a while before it just got to be, well, something I was never into.
Because of my lack of interest in the set-up, Cid cut back from a family to an individual membership with the Y and that was that. We – me and the young'n – didn't go or seem interested, so it made little sense for Cid to buy a membership for herself and two non-attenders when a single membership for her was cheaper by a few bucks.
No problem there, neither. The less she has to spend trying to make sure me and the young'n is healthy, the more we have to spend on things like heavy desserts, high-kick lattes & espressos & spumoni ice cream.
Yeah, that stuff.
But still Cid gets up in my grill over this exercise thing. She doesn't think the mile I put in every day at work before 8:30 a.m. counts, even if it does involve going up or down stairs and pushing carts into classrooms so teachers can amaze their students with such computer savvy as they can muster without too much effort. Nor does the many walks I take every day from one end of the campus to the other simply to show somebody which buttons to push.
And yet it ain't enough, seems.
All this, of course, falls flat on it's little complicated noggin when you consider the amount of effort that I can put into printing 200 copies of something trivial.

See, I have an old-fashioned letterpress print shop in my garage. Actually it's Cid's garage but she lets me park my three cast iron presses, a half-ton of type & other printerly accouterments, a paper cutter and a print shop cat in there next to or in front of or around the side of her fancy car with the moon roof and all that.
Just moving the stuff in there was exercise. But then it makes sense that such would happen, given that the largest press is listed in a 1928 ATF catalog as having a shipping weight of 1800 lbs. Shy of a ton. And the smallest press weighs in at about 500 lbs, shy of a quarter ton. But that ain't the point, all that weight.
One of the presses, which was built in the days before electric motors could do much more than amaze people by their size and heat, was originally sold with a treadle. Like one of those things you stomp on rhythmically with your foot so as to turn a crankshaft which imparts motion to some other parts of whatever mechanism. That press, the one with the treadle, weighs about 1050 lbs according to the catalog. It was built between 1874 and 1900 by the George Phineas Gordon Press Works in Rahway, NJ. The chase, which is the frame holding the type, is designed for a 9x13 printed space, although it'd put some serious strain on the mechanism to print something that large. The day it was made it sold for about $250, shipping charge of $20 not included. It's a helluva machine and it's over 130 years old.
It's motive power is a treadle. Remember that: a treadle.
Many a time, presses of this size and age are usually run – or were usually run, back when there were more of 'em – by a belt over the flywheel and a small electric motor on a plank of wood behind the press. At that point you or I or anybody with quick hands and an understanding of the machine as possibly dangerous could get maybe 1000 copies an hour of it, all things considered. A fast person with the press running off steam (as it was originally advertised) or motor might get up to 1500 but that'd be pressing one's luck.
Now, when I originally bought this press from John Renner back in 1983, he was running it with an old washing machine motor on the floor. I dragged it into the garage and ran it that way until, one day, the motor went up in spoke. From there I hosed up a treadle with a 2x4 & some aluminum strap. Ran it like that until I gave it to Tom Ebbert, who, upon discovering that it took five treadle pushes per impression, put the motor back on it. He ran it like that for a couple years and then got a larger, more 20th Century press.
So last December I got it back from Tom and set to restoring it to operating condition. And no, I didn't pressure wash it and clean each and every tiny little part and make it look like it was a piece of statuary in a studio. I got the rollers recovered by a company I just learned about in California, Ramco Roller Products. Then I got a treadle from Hern Iron Works. And once that was done, I took some type that I'd set for Treasure Gems, a limited edition communal publication of the Amalgamated Printers' Association, and plonked into the chase & set up to run.
I put the ink on the press and got that pretty well distributed by treadling the press a few ten or so impression cycles, which works out to about fifty pushes on the treadle from five revolutions of the flywheel going into each impression and the flywheel turns once per push on the treadle.
Then I had the stock counted out into stacks of 50 and turned to with the printing.
I got the first 50 done and took a break. I was getting a bit winded.
I printed the next 50 and took another break.
The next 50 I pumped with my right leg. I'd pumped the press through the first 100 with my left leg only. And the last 50 I treadled off with first the right leg and then the left.
Then I took a break. I went inside and got a drink and went out and cleaned the press up. Another fifteen or so impressions to get the ink dissolved in the cleaning fluid (usually mineral spooks or kerosene) and then maybe one or two more treadled impressions and I was done.
Then I took a break.
The next day I got up, cleaned up the shop some and distributed some type. Stuff I'd set for another job that I'd run on the C&P, the larger press that runs off a motor, although I could get a treadle from Hern Iron Works for that one too.
Later on that afternoon I put the other side of type on the Gordon and treadled off the next 200-odd impressions, taking breaks along the way every 50 copies. Then I cleaned up the press again and took another break.

Monday morning I got up and went to work. My legs weren't feeling bad. I was ready to do my morning walk about and push equipment into rooms as needed and all that. While I was at it I counted out the steps around the central building core tunnels. It came to about 400 footfalls of one leg counted each step (as in two steps, left & right, equaled only one step, in this case the right leg only) for a quarter mile. I compared that to the 1000 kicks of the treadle that I'd had to push just for the 200 copies (not including the ink up and clean up treadling that I'd done) and figured that three trips around the core tunnels would have been 1200 kicks.
So I ended up with a bit more understanding of how much exercise I was getting out of having this press out there in the garage. And I was thinking also about having had another treadle press out there, a 7x11 Pearl of early 20th Century vintage, upon which I could have printed the piece that I'd just done.
The Pearl was easy to treadle. It had probably never been run any other way and its mechanism is much more simple and less convulsive than the Gordon. But I gave the Pearl away because I didn't have the room for it, even if it was a foot smaller in two dimensions than the Gordon.

Thus I know now how long it takes to print 200 copies of something on the Gordon. It's not that long, really. Just a little more than half a mile.

Here: You Build It. I Won't Even Watch

2008-04-06T16:10:00.000-04:00

Now that I've had the chance to smash the shit out of my hands building a shelf for the rehabilitated printery, I have finally gotten the message: Stop now. You don’t need more and you ain't gonna be able to build it. Throw the tools in the trash and get the hell out of building shit.
That's pretty much it.
I learned this lesson years ago with ham radio stuff and now that everything is surface-mount & miniaturized down to shit I can't see without an electron microscope, I don’t' build anything. I either have someone build it for me or I buy it already built.
Done deal.
No more worryin' about whether or not I have the tools or havin' my hands shake or lose parts or whatever.
I don't build.
Radios.
I don't build radios or anything associated with radios. All I can do to even think about putting up antennas, truth be told.
I'll have somebody put the next one up for me.
And now, it's the same deal with the carpentry/fix-up.
I don't build.
Walls, windows, shelves, cabinets, doors, whatever. I have people do it for me.
I'm giving serious consideration to the resurrection of the old Gordon press too. I figure I've got a handful of pieces need fixed and repinned and all that. Gonna have somebody else do it for me. Somebody's got a machine shop & the right tools and all that.
The gripper cam race: have somebody finish that. Maybe even have 'em install it.
The roller arm needs rebuilt: find a machine shop.
Yeah, sure, it'll cost me money. But the money I spend will be well spent 'cause I won't have to do a goddamn thing.
Here's the stuff. Here's what it's supposed to look like. Go at it.
And here's the money.
I mean, think of it: no more smashed fingers. No more fighting with shit I can't lift or see or get to work right. No more having to measure. Hell, no more having to search for the measuring tape 'cause I can't remember where I put shit and can't find it often enough right under my own damn nose.
All of it.
Not my job.
Here's the money.
Yeah, I can life with that. Live a lot longer too, seein' as how it won't be my blood pressure going up and it won't be my hands getting messed up and it won't be me trying to figure out why I wanted a shelf six feet long and four feet high and then bought lumber to make a shelf four feet by three feet. Even with a written-out parts list.
Here's what I want.
Here's the money.
Thank you. It looks great. Here's some more money.
Want a beer? I do. All this payin' for shit makes me thirsty & I want to enjoy my not having to put up with the hassles of building the goddamn thing.
Want some more money?
Yeah, it means that much to me, this calm and peaceful world where somebody else builds crap for me and I get to use it and enjoy it without having to do much more than hand out the cash and the parts list and come back later to find it done & finished.
Yeah, it means that much to me.

All I need to do is get back with my old contacts. The guys in the theater scene shop, all those profs and students and tools and everything. I just have to walk in there and say "Hey, Tim, I got a project. You know any students want to make a little green?"
He points 'em out.
I hand 'em the parts list or the scratched out semi-intelligent design and some money and they build it for me. Hell, paint it even probably.
Yeah, I can live with that. Live a lot longer with that.
And what'cha know: here's Tim's number.

New Webs Page Announcement

2008-03-17T14:38:00.004-04:00

When the InterWebs first became available to mere mortals I was only peripherally involved in what's today called "educational technology." Soon enough, however, I learned that it was quite easy to use any number of software programs to build a web page. Of course back then all that really happened was the software's taking your graphical cues from mouse & keyboard settings and turning that into HTML, which was subsequently displayed more or less the way you want it to.
Over the course of time I soon enough learned the basics of HTML code, which allowed me to do things that the original design software either ignored or was outright incapable of fudging into what I wanted. Added to my growing understanding of how easy it was to use somebody else's design code for my own page work, this made it easy for me to dream up work-arounds in other folks' code so mine would look a bit different here or there in the process.
Then I discovered blogging.
Once I had my first blog up and verbose, I began looking at how the blog's basic background worked. Now this was a bit after I'd come to understand – for a little understanding as I might ever know – how consolidated style sheets (CSS) worked. Together with that knowledge and my working out the arcane code structure involved in the blog pages I eventually settled on a background and look that I could mess with and still find graphically inviting to readers.
Soon enough I set up my second blog, which was my first truly disbelief &/or anti-superstitionist writing. When I set that one up I took a different tack in the coding of the page lay out and eventually was able to adapt different versions of it for my third blog, a ham radio foray named after the ham radio gang I hung with back in the early 70s, Late Night Radio.
At about this point I went back over my then-extant web sites and gave them the renewed look of what I was happy with on my blogs. That, of course led me to cut back a lot on the stuff I'd done in web page construction and eventually clean up what was a real hell-hole of butchered code & horrible lay out.

Which brings us to today . . .

One of the many things that I liked about the InterWebs and the abililty for normal bean heads such as myself was the public exposure. And even when "they" said that such exposure only opened a person up to identity theft & all its wonders, I still thought "Nah, not me."
As if.
Simple fact is, and plainly put, having a web presence is like asking for trouble.
It's like living in a hippie house back in the 60s and hanging a big sign in the upstairs window that screams "BUST ME! BUST ME NOW!" at passing police cars.
And having gone through that once in my life, I'm reluctant to even think about having it happen again. Which it did, I might add, at some point in the not too distant past with the sudden appearance of six different people with my exact names on three or four web sites & chat/instant messenger boards.
Even one of my co-workers had a conversation with me while the real me was sitting right there next to my co-worker watching this all go down.
The wimp pussied out when I took the keyboard.
Undaunted by even that, I have kept some web presence for my ego to gloat over. Along the way I managed to clean up my basic pages and even develop a page set for the ham radio hobby side of my being. And, as President Kennedy said ". . . and do these other things."

So here and now, at this very moment unless you read this later, I am finally putting up a web site about my printing hobby. It's full of gratuitously self-promoting bullshit about me, how I came to learn how letterpress printing works and how I have managed to cobble together a collection of abused and ancient pieces of gear in the pursuit of hoarding stuff in my garage.
Little else can explain it.
So there you have it: I have letterpress print shop web site. You can go to it now, if you wish. Just remember, when you do, that I am really not quite done with it.
Before long I'll have even more pictures of stuff nobody wants to know about and even a database that you can download to view of my collection of type by face, font, foundry, case number & approximate estimated date of casting.

Have a nice trip. Mind your ps and qs

The Other Mandatory Sentence

2008-03-10T14:21:00.004-04:00

As should have been evident when I first brought up the subject some months ago, I've gotten back into hand set type & printing on an old platen press. Them what ain't hip can use the link to get to one of the many rants that mark the start of this recidivism.
Among the many things that preceded my putting this blog on the InterWebs is the fact that, prior to this time, I had spent many years as a member of what's called "the amateur journalism" community. Folks with their own printing equipment and just enough free time and disposable income to print up, on a regular basis, whatever thing it is that strikes their fancy or interest at the moment. These folks print up however many copies are needed to mail to the membership of whatever "aj" association they belong to. Sometimes that's 350-odd copies. If they belong to two or three, the number of copies goes up accordingly.
It can get very expensive and become very time-consuming to do this stuff, this "aj" stuff. Back when, I was a member of the AAPA and the APA. I'd print up a regular "paper" for both organizations, 350 for the first & about 160 for the second. The press run went over 400, obviously, more often than not something like 450, which took some time, even at 1500 impressions an hour. And for me, that's cranking.
Print first one side of the sheet, then, 24 hours later, the other side. Had to wait for the ink to dry some between runs. So for each sheet that was 900 impressions, more or less, which was an hours worth of press time, give or take a few db. If I had planned on a eight pager, there'd be another press run for the inside four. Plus the folding and mutilating and stapling and all that.
I could end up with a couple hours easy on all of that, maybe more if you figure in cleaning the press or washing up afterwards. More time on cutting the paper. All that.
But the biggest amount of time spent went to composition and distribution.
Remember, we're talking about hand set type here. One letter after the other, one at a time, into the composing stick and then, when the stick was full, into a galley. Proof read? Maybe. Sometimes. Most often I just looked over what I'd set and see if there were any really big deals going on. Dropped words. Dropped lines. Dropped out of the planet for many hours a week, setting type.
Then, after it was all set & printed and folded and all that, I'd end up with a couple galleys full of what they call "dead metal," the type that'd been used. Already been printed, no longer needed. Kinda like when you get old at work and they've wrung the last ounce of sweat out of you and it's time to retire.
Like that.
So then, line by line, I'd sit at the case and return to each individual box that letter which was stored there. Es in that largest box of 'em all, there on the left third of the case, near the top, on the right. On and on like that, line by line, letter by letter, until the type was all distributed and the galleys were empty again.
At which point I'd start over, setting type for the next issue. I usually ran a two pager or four pages once every couple months.
Yeah, it took that long.
It was like my father had done when he was younger, working in some print shop, some newspaper out in Arizona or Utah or New Mexico. Set the type. Proof the type. Print the paper. Distribute the type. Clean up. Start all over again, almost unceasingly, type out of the case and back into the case. A whole shop full of guys doing this work, this printing work, this journalism for real work.

Then one day, after having done this stuff for years upon years, I looked at what I was doing and thought about being outside in the yard with a cold beer. There I was, standing at the press, probably sweating in the heat, the press churning away and page after page going into and coming out of the jaws of the press, for nothing more than being able to say that I'd printed something.
If anybody read what I wrote and printed, they'd send me a letter once in a while. Or they'd mention that they'd read what I'd written in one of their publications.
Yeah, kinda like this blog but with real concrete evidence of a readership.
Only evidence of a readership I get here is the rare and occasional comment or an email saying they'd seen my stuff and thought I was undermedicated.
So I got tired of it.
I got tired of my own stuff and really tired of other peoples' stuff and I wanted to just sit in the yard and drink that beer and maybe, if I was feelin' really sparky, turn on one of my low power ham radio doodads and maybe talk to somebody else sittin' in their yard with a cold beer in their mit.
Like that.
So I got tired of it, cleaned up the shop and turned off the light and went in the house and from there into the yard and hardly touched any of that stuff until, well, until I got fired up to do it again.
Which weren't often.
I printed the invites to my eldest's wedding and the graduation announcements for my youngest's high school commencement. I printed a couple half-dozen QSL cards for friends and I did a couple business cards.
But the "aj" paper that I'd started, The Mandatory Sentence, well, it slipped into silence along with my memberships in both those organizations. All of it, turned off the lights and closed the door.

But then up pops a guy at work gets his ham radio license and I find myself out in the shop printing 1013 copies of what I think is a very nice QSL card. I printed them thousand and some, three colors, over a period of maybe three weeks. I spent time in the yard with the beer and the cats, but I went in the shop & printed the cards. And the whole time I'm in there printing, I'm thinking of how my father printed my cards with some of this same type & tools. And I'm thinking about my father having died before Christmas twenty five years earlier and how I'd gotten into this printing stuff to keep his spirit alive. And how that spirit had kept me alive, goofing around with type and ink and color and paper and linoleum block prints.
All of that, I thought about it for 1013 impressions in each color.
Truth is, I had a long series of conversations with my father's ghost. Not too bad for an atheist, I'd say. And out of all those conversations and all those memories and all the things that I'd come to know about how things worked and how Dad had worked, I started to enjoy the printing stuff again.
I got so interested I sent off and reclaimed my membership in the APA. I figured that would work: only have to print 160-odd copies of whatever I wanted, four times a year, and I'd have membership & printing aplenty.

Well, the other day I was out in the garage shop, setting type out of the same case I'd set type out of before, some 60 lbs of 10 pt Century Schoolbook, probably half of it ATF foundry type and the rest from F&S Barco, cast twenty some years ago. I sat a couple 20 pica columns and printed them, two up. Then I set some type for a "prop card" and printed them up, both designs, 200 some copies each run, three colors.
And I started looking over the design format that I'd used all them years back for the in-print and of-the-ink version of this blog, back when blogs didn't exist yet, and I started setting type.
I've got the first page set & in the chase. Two columns, fifteen picas wide, with a colophon in the right column, in a box. Haven't printed it yet because I'm waiting to get the rollers and treadle for the Gordon, not that it means anything, since I'll print what I've got on the C&P anyway.
And this weekend, in the middle of all that snow, I started the back page. Got nearly the entire 20.5 pica wide column all set. Just some more egoboo, and then I'll set the 8 pt on 10 pica, just like the old days, with the fists pointing at each new item, highlighted or started in 8 pt Modern Antique.
Then that'll all go on the press and get printed over a couple days' time.
Yeah, The Mandatory Sentence has come full circle.
Here I sit writing about writing about stuff and printing it with real metal type on a cast iron press made a year after my father's mother took her life and it feels just right. Yeah, sure: I'm gonna have to distribute all that type. Ain't doin' no harm as it is, way I figure it. I'm still using the stuff and it still works for me and the crazy ideas that don't end up here will end up in paper and ink.
Yeah. Makes perfect sense to me.

Here's a Poem I Wrote About It . . .

2008-03-04T10:23:00.003-05:00

Follow my facile ruminations for a minute here. I'm gonna start out with a quick description of some of the small books & other deteriorata that my father left behind, among which are a couple books from the Roycrofters. Now if you know not about the Roycrofters, join the club. Basically it was an artist commune sort of deal in East Aurora, NY, sometime about mid-nineteenth century through the first three or four decades of the twentieth. Started by a guy named Elbert Hubbard, not to be confused in time or space with L. Ron Hubbard, the quack psychology guy who started what is today the Church $cientology cult thingie.
Ol' Elbert Hubbard was influenced by William Morris, a British guy who is considered the founder of the so-called "arts & crafts movement." If you ain't hip to the A&C movement, it's basically based on the philosophy that what comes from the hand is better than what comes from a machine and that what comes from the hand should be designed for utility & not show. That this sounds a lot like Amish meets Hollywood, well, that's 'cause it does by today's understanding of the form over function argument.
See, ol' Elbert was a soap salesman who gave up the lucrative bit of selling soap to establish, at first, a private press/little magazine publishing business so he could have his writings & ruminations available for people to read. This is based on the concept that what ol' Elbert wrote was stuff that folks would want to read.
In addition, after some work getting himself recognized as a great thinker, the Roycrofters' press began publication of what would today be called "little magazines." Either of the two I know off -- Fra and Philistine -- became part of the arts & crafts proliferation of similar "little magazines" focused on, well, arts & crafts issues.
And there is some contention that Elbert Hubbard – anti-superstitionist that he claims to have been – was somewhere along the line tied to the Rosicrucians.

What a tangled web . . . & all that.

Now into this fray we pitch all the stuff my father left behind. Like two boxes of stuff that I can remember having processed. Yeah, the books by the Roycrofters. That and a copy of Philistine and some other stuff.
So here's my father, on record as having never graduated from high school, extremely intelligent, self-educated maybe, a painter and a writer and a printer. I have a handful of linoleum blocks that he carved himself to print with, one of which ended up as the background on the labels he printed for my maternal grandfather's honey, the product of the bees my grandfather kept.
And then, somewhere along the time I was still in high school and halfway to serious doubts – as opposed to unspoken little doubts that anybody's subconscious sends out over the course of days of paradoxes and non-sequitous religious prattle – my father decided he wanted to find out about the Rosicrucians.

So there we stand with two pieces of subjective as hell evidence for nada. But we need to add that my mother's family home was in Kersey, PA, outside of St. Mary's PA, just south a couple hours drive from Buffalo, NY, which is near East Aurora, NY, where the Roycrofters had their ashram. Er . . . collective.
I can add my Uncle Ted's visit to our house in suburbia, if I want to wonder what brought Uncle Ted all the way from Shirleysburg, PA to Dayton, ostensibly to buy a copy of A Message to Garcia, written by Elbert Hubbard.
So while I'm standing in the middle of a perfectly good day trying to metaphorically create a windstorm from which I want to pluck pieces of straw, I might even wonder if, among other follies, my father had not had some previous interaction with the Roycrofters, by way of artisanship or involvement in their printing press operations – both Dad and Hubbard's shop had a Pearl – which might have led to Dad's desire to start his own "little magazine" focusing on arts & crafts issues.
Now it would be one thing if this were a once-and-gone thing. But, after leaving Amarillo, TX for Indianapolis, IN, Dad tried to set up a crafts magazine again in the garage printery. The little magazine he tried to run then, entitled Craftsales and ostensibly under Mom's editorial guidance, suffered two or three issues before it subliminated into a hobby publication for the American Amateur Press Association, to which Dad belonged on and off again for a while.
And then there were the bits and pieces of half-finished or never-started projects that Dad seemed to collect from various arts & crafts kit sales outfits. And his own projects, paintings, printings, art carvings &c.

All of this adds to my quite obviously subjective assay of my father as a human being who, for all the organization and discipline that he demanded of himself (and other) in life, was just another guy with too many good ideas and marvelous talents stuck in a job that he endured only to have enough money to live in reasonable comfort.
Maybe it was that – and his mother's suicide when he was eleven – that drove him to drink. Or maybe it was his own muse demanding inebriation in exchange for a painting or a project.
One way or the other, my father probably spent as much time trying to be a solid citizen as he did trying to satisfy that crying urge to just go off and be an artist. Such an internal conflict and ongoing internal conversation were obvious in all the little bits and pieces of his life that he left behind on paper or in ink or on canvas.
At the same time I have to admit that, if Dad were associated with the Roycrofters or if he had been involved deeply with the arts & crafts movement so as to know about them, it was not such a bad deal for me. Little else would explain why I also enjoy painting and building and fiddling with stuff and recycling my world so a miserly sort of spendthrift trash picker leaves crap all around the house. In the end, then, I have to admit, as I have many times before, that my parents made me what I am today.
I'd bet they'd be satisfied.
I am.
Here's a little painting I did about it.

At which point I can get back to something inherent in this entire diatribe, that being the fact that my father had to balance in his life that space where his creative skills sat waiting for someone to open a window and the space where he knew from his experience as a nominal orphan the need – absolute & overpowering – to have a job.
Thus he went into printing, probably 'cause he was headed that way by one of whoever many uncles & relatives helped him survive his mother's suicide and the madman drunk, my grandfather, with whom my father & his brother were thereafter shackled. Printing gave him a skill which, once it moved into journalism & writing, provided a pretty fair hedge against economic collapse.
Now, it don't go unnoticed by me that my father managed to live a life of an artist one way or the other. He was a recognized and respected print and radio journalist all his life. All his life. People knew him, trusted him and expected every time they spoke with him that they would not look like idiots on the front page of the next day's paper. They knew that he would quote them fairly and that he was open to at least hear their views and ideas and plans.
In that he used his talent to keep people happy, a bizarre form of quasi-prostitution to which all of us at some time or the other must attend.
At the same time he had his painting and his linoleum block engraving and his printing and his own writing to keep him from going completely over to outright drunkenness and despair.
If my father was involved with the Roycrofters – which I consider an outside remote but possible case – it at least somehow kept him going. If he was not and yet found some of their stuff to be interesting enough to collect and keep, that too is a sign of his survival.
In many ways I can see the common thread of a man making himself into some image or the other: Elbert Hubbard wanting to be recognized as a polymath and genius (upon which the jury will likely forever be out) and my father wanting to be recognized as a creative individual whose abilities could keep him & his family well enough off without taking every ounce of his energy for somebody else's cause.
It's a game we all play, for sure.
And by the way, here's a poem I wrote about it . . .

I Sold My Soul on eBay at the End of an Era!

2008-02-05T13:06:00.000-05:00

In a moment of madness bordering on true delusion, I recently parked a bid on eBay for some type. I'd never done this before and I ain't too sure I'm gonna do it since, being as how I was outbid in a high-handed and grand manner by someone who is called in eBay parlance, as I recently came to understand, a "sniper." This is the sort who sits back and watches the screen as the minutes tick down to the finish and then, just at the last minute, tosses in a bid just a few cents higher than the last – and presumed winning – bid. So type that I put $45.07 on got grabbed at the last minute for $62.51. Or something like that.
But I learned my lesson quick.
The next font of type I bid on sat quietly at $73.92 until just the last few minutes, when it went out the door, after a flurry of last minute sniping, for $112.68.
So I modified my behavior.
The next font – one which I would really have liked to put ink to – went for $86.37 in the wee hours of the morning while I dreamt of something.
And so it went for something like three fonts of type further that I had thought interesting & maybe putting a few bucks over $80 on. I figured that 'cause the antique faces on sale at Barco run between $70 and $200 in price, depending on size & complexity of the casting process.
And then the prices of what is called ATF type (but which is really being cast on old Barth casters from the ATF works by another semi-retired hobby printer turned commercial type founder) on the one website that sells the stuff go for every bit that price if not more.

And that don't sound like no "end of an era" to me, Jasper.

Sounds more like the so-called "Letterpress Revival" is really turning into a neat way to keep the old craft alive by charging what the market obviously is easy to allow. So the price of type freshly cast goes up and the stuff on eBay, by way of the auction mentality, goes up just as high if not higher.
Which some of I can understand.
After all, ain't nobody I know got mats for the Moslem face that Boston Type Foundry cast in the late 1890s and which I have 'cause I salvaged a shop some twenty years and some back.
That or Celtic. Or Rivet, which is another weird, pointy-looking face, caps and small caps only. And the truth is, I like 'em. Maybe it's 'cause I got 'em cheap or 'cause they're not something I've seen elsewhere.

But the two fonts of Latin Condensed that were up on eBay, man, that was a lesson in modern-day, bidder wins a chicken economics that I haven't seen in a while. And it makes me wonder what my estate auction will look like. And it ain't that I don't have my suspicions, either.

Most folks look at my garage print shop and shake their heads in disbelief. Either it's 'cause they have no idea what it all means to me to have such a pile of lumber & heavy metal at the rear of the space nominally assigned to cars, lawn mowers and beach chairs, or they can't believe that Cindy lets me take that much space with all the crap.
That is what it is to most people: crap.
There's the black, oily, old-fashioned looking printing presses, each of which most folks wouldn't give a second thought to, especially if they had to get rid of 'em at the end of an estate auction.
And the type, well, I think I've already covered that.
In the end it all comes down to what you want to do with it.
If you want to make money, it goes on eBay, 'cept for the presses and the paper cutter, both of which are not quite shippable by common standards of today's opulence. Nah, them's is gonna go to the scrap yard quick.
But the type, well, if that goes on eBay, the story's already been told and you know the end of it.
Highest bidder gets to melt it down for musket balls.
Or it appears again and again on eBay, each time getting just about what the snipers what to pay for it, even if they do it over and over.

Time was the word went out that someone was looking for some old type or that someone had pile of type & some equipment available and the hobby printers would show up and pay reasonable prices and that would be that.
A press in a field would get rehabilitated. A paper cutter would end up in another garage or in a basement.
The type would get parceled out and everyone would come away feeling that they'd saved some old stuff for others to have fun with.
Back in the day.
But I afear that the "back in the day" days are over.
I saw 'em go for pretty high to some eBay sniper just this afternoon. All of 'em. Which makes me wonder how soon they'll show up on eBay again, guessing that the "sniper" bid the stuff high so he could watch someone lose, but now being stuck with the type, has to sell it at the highest price he or she can find just to break even. All done by bidding against yourself, more 'n likely.

It's the end of an era. Yep. True that.

The Half-Ass Job

2008-01-24T14:53:00.001-05:00

One of the most important life lessons a person of 62 years behind the nose can say is an every day event in the sense of being a beginner. Part of the way this works out is a nearly Zen attitude toward cognition and existence, whereby the sense of self that exists within the neural chemistry is a moment-by-moment phenomenon. You or I get up in the morning pretty sure that what we knew yesterday should still be pretty valid. We start out the day and do the stuff we always do and think naught of it. Training trumps ignorance. Knowledge enhances facility; facility produces results.
Simple one-on-one situations where answers are always right there, waiting to be invoked & problems thus solved.
And from all of this one might say that fear of failure or inability to solve a problem comes only to beginners. You know you ain't a beginner & thus your world and life go on without too much serious introspection.
'Cept for them problems you suddenly have to stop and think about.
And even there you wouldn't call yourself a beginner, even if you've never seen this or that problem before, even if you might have seen it tangentially. Experience being the master you might not even think about how your inability solve a problem is a sign of beginnerism.
But that's where the Zen thing comes back and smacks you in the face.
See, there's folks out there just now getting into letterpress printing. I have it on reliable testimony that letterpress is big in California. Maybe around here too, for all I know. But one thing about letterpress and being involved in letterpress is the amount of technical knowledge that you must have to do the job right.
Even if you're just funnin' around like I do most of the time.
So someone gets bugged and goes out to spend money & space on putting a truly ancient kind of messaging into their lives. They have to buy a press. They have to buy type. They have to buy paper and ink and a pile more tools and whatnots that are part of printing by letterpress.
And for them what don't know about letterpress, it's really simple. It's like old Johan Gutenberg did: you have letters cast in metal type that you arrange in a block of text, which type is then inked and pressed to paper. The ink transfers from the type to the paper and you take the printed sheet and set it out to dry. Letters of metal get pressed against paper and you have printed something. Letterpress.

Now the folks who I know as letterpress printers are, most of 'em, my age, older 'n me or a few younger 'n me. Some of the old folks are just picking up on the hobby, which I think is interesting, since most older folks – and mostly folks my age or older – have various health issues that preclude things like lifting heavy objects off the floor or shoving insanely heavy objects across the floor. And there's some younger folks too who have these problems. But one way of the other, there's all these folks interested in letterpress.
Some of 'em even spend serious money and have delusions of the amount of money they can make printing stuff.
And all these folks – the beginners – come to the process of printing with letterpress without so much as a cat's whisker broke off in a snow bank in Idaho's worth of knowledge about it. Some see it on youtube. Some see it in a history museum or a workshop at the local art center. Some just come by it for some reason – alien messages or whatever – and decide they wanna get involved.
At which point the picture changes.

Every one of these beginners has a choice to make that goes beyond the choice of money or time or energy or space they're gonna spend. That single, overarching choice is simple: how much energy & time are you gonna spend on learning how letterpress printing works.
Like a erstwhile-high school friend once said, probably quoting his father, "You can do a half-ass job or you can do a full-ass job."
And the way to start off, half-ass or full-ass, is to go to the library or get on the InterWeb and find books and information on how letterpress works. How to set type. How to put the type into a block of text. How to put the type on the press and how to secure the type so it won't fall out of or into the press. How to put ink on the type, press the type to paper and take the paper out of the press.
Simple things like that you can't not do and expect to print stuff.
Ah, but there's the problem.
Some folks come to letterpress and see what a couple other pikers have done, most of it wrong 'cause they themselves – the pikers – haven't put the time into learning how to do it right that has been part of letterpress since back around 1500 when Gutenberg finished off the invention.
And from all that half-ass information and half-ass method comes half-ass printers who can't solve problems that they shouldn't be having, simply because they have never learned how to do it right.
To wit: The following little block of text appeared on a letterpress discussion group

"I’m such a new printer. I just got my new rollers in last night and set my first chase of type. The results were not so great—very uneven printing as far as the letters are concerned. Every other letter dropped out and weren’t inked. (so it’s not a problem with the press, but with the type).
Please send me any suggestions if you can. I have a new (old) Kelsey 5x8. I assume there are some tips or tricks on how to ensure that they’re all at the correct height for printing, I just don’t know what they are."

To which a couple folks responded, one of them saying this:

"If you have letters that are straight up not printing, they are either damaged or not locked in straight.
If only the sides of some letters are printing, your lines are probably too short, and locking them in pushes them out of perpendicular.
I’ve had some frustrating moments with the 5x8."

To which, in a pique of nasty-old-man-ishness I was driven to respond with the following

"A proper lock-up should not push letters “out of perpendicular.” A properly leveled (planed) form should print clearly across each letter. A form with uneven type will not print without extremes in make-ready. A properly packed platen should be level & exert only enough pressure so the type kisses the paper evenly across the form without punching through. Properly inked type (with rollers adjusted to roll across the face) should print evenly across the form.
All this & more is in Polk’s two books: Elementary Platen Presswork and/or The Practice of Printing. Available now on Abebooks.com (Polk’s Elementary Platen Presswork and Polk’s Practice of Printing
Nils
The Tagalong Press

To which, I am sure, some folks are going to say that I was being too snippish or that I was not showing any concern for the beginner's self-admitted state of confusion.
Yeah, right.
More, however, I was looking at that piece of advice about "lines too short" and "locking them in pushes them out of perpendicular."
I can only imagine what the advisor's lock ups look like. I can imagine immediately that whoever said that does the kind of work that I've railed on against and about before on my letterpress blog.

The simple fact is this: if someone wants to learn how to do something with as long a history of improvement and technological stability as letterpress printing, the only way to start is to get out the books and see how it's been done – or had been until recently taught – according to the methods of common teaching. You wanna know something? Get the information from reliable sources, long-standing sources where the information has stood the test of time for centuries (as it has in letterpress printing).
That and find someone who has been doing the job for a while or someone who has made it his or her certain knowledge that the solidly-proven ways of doing something right have been and are being applied.

It's as simple as that: you can do a half-ass job or you can do a full-ass job.

And that, kids, is how it works. If it's snappish, maybe it's because I have been trained by a master to do this stuff and I know for sure that what I'm doing is right. But even more importantly, there's the Zen thing going on.

Every single day, hour by hour and second by second, who I am as a person and what I know as a person is constantly being moved around and shoved into new corners of my neural chemistry. Who I was yesterday and what I knew yesterday – even in the days when I was much younger and thus more of a whiz-bang know it all with a good memory – is gone. Finito. Nada mas.
What I know today, as much as I like to think that it might be otherwise, is part of a constant flux within my head. What I know today is modified by what happens today and what I might know tomorrow will definitely include what I learned last week, plus what I forgot this morning.
Truth is, we're all beginners.
Every time I walk into the shop I have to think about what I'm doing. I have to remember where the letters are in the type case, even if that memory is so deeply encoded that it seems I'm flying through the alphabet laid out before me in little boxes. When I lock up a form, it's a new form every time, even if it's from the same session of setting type or carving a lino cut as it was yesterday.
We're all beginners.
What makes the difference between rank beginners with no experience past the thrill of having spent the money on type, press, paper & ink, is the desire of the rank beginner to accept the lessons of the past, as corny as that might sound.
Letterpress printing works because it has proven the test of time. The way letterpress printing works is the way it works because of the experience of millions of people over five centuries of work.
Bullshit don't make it. Learning how to do it right makes the true difference between a beginner and a carping old shit like myself who, on a good day, might not completely pi a form on the way from stick to galley.
The difference between a half-ass job and a full-ass job is how much time the beginner wants to spend learning the right way of doing something, especially when doing it the wrong way is a waste of time and a waste of time. It takes no great effort to read and what is in the books I listed in the example above is the truth, the way and the right way of doing it. Everything else is just, well, the stuff that comes out of asses.

What's That Space? Between Your Ears?

2008-01-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

While back I got rambling about crazy people. Crazy Muslim time; Crazy Hindu time. Crazy time. People going around like wild Geladas, killing each other over words or choices of living standards or food taboos or names of their children or names of whatever holy man is supposed to be easily insulted in this life now that he's in the afterlife. Or killin' each other over whatever is supposed to not happen in the before life, even if you didn't get any virgins or not.
That kind of crazy time.
And then there's the caste issue, which is allied somewhat tangentially to the crazy time issue, in that people who think that all must remain within their station in life, hereditary to the max, are willing to kill or maim others over said station-switching.
Like you get on the southbound Kenoga Falls bus, pick up a transfer and, instead of transferring to the cross-town Valleto Spremo bus you transfer to the northbound Grandee Flats bus, thus going outside your station in life.
That kind of crazy.
And that brings me head around to the continuing amazement that I have for humans to have gotten this far in the first place, even if that place is within the stations of the cross town bus.

First there's these so-called "kitchen accidents," which occur in India on a regular basis, if I can trust the word of the web and the local mainstream media (as opposed to not the web and no media at all). And it seems, from what I can gather & even get subjective about, that the entire problem with these fires in kitchens is the Hindu caste system, about which I have already railed at moderate length.
And it ain't that "kitchen accidents" are something hidden in the back of the cultural warehouse. Fact is, the use of these so-called accidents as a legal way of getting rid of those who have dishonored the family name by marrying someone who "ain't quite good enough" for the rest of the family. Even the terminology is weird.
The investigation of the deaths is called "medicolegal autopsy." And the deaths, all 2055 of 'em in one study (cited just last), end up being tied to some 300-odd deaths from these "kitchen fires."
Three hundred & some kitchen fires. In a year.
That's a helluva lot of folks getting stupid with the oil & the dal. I say this with 60 years of watching people cook or doin' my own cooking & not having yet set fire to the house once. And of all the cookin' I've done with life fires – like out on the grill or with one of those hibachi doodads – I ain't never yet done much more than scorch the oven mitts. And that's just me, the ol' stumble-bum, shaky-hands, can't find stuff unless it's got a bright colored handles Gringo goof-ball. Me. Not once. Never fired up.
So it comes to me hard to believe that three hundred some odd people in India are so careless in the third-world kitchen that they set themselves and the entire damn house on fire. But then, maybe they's got help.
See, the guy who most recently raised the awareness of folks to this madness is supposed to have use gasoline as an accelerant (the stuff makes an arson fire get its freak on quick) to snuff his daughter, son-in-law and grandson in the resulting fire.
Helluva way to die.
And the excuse given by the father (alleged arsonist) is that his daughter was clumsy in the kitchen.
Yeah, right.
You want clumsy in the kitchen? Come watch me cook. Hell, come watch me with a soldering iron in a workspace environment. I'd frickin' dangerous, I tell you! Dangerous! Make a fireman shiver in his galoshes, watchin' me will.

So in addition to wanting to kill people 'cause they won't submit to Allah and wanting to kill people 'cause they want everybody to submit to Allah or wanting to kill people 'cause they won't live by the standards of high Hindutva, we can now add killing people 'cause they's low class.
Yeah, you're low class. Snuff it, mofo.
Think what this would do for your recurring problem with them trailer trash neighbors I had. Why, I could pour some gasoline around the back door & window and then, when the investigator came to figure out how the gas got there ('cause you know they're gonna know about it), I could just say "Why them's was the clumsbiest pack o' crackers I ever done seed in one place, yessiree Bub" and nobody'd know the better.
Kinda like that apartment house down the street burned to the ground a couple years back 'cause the guy owned it was tired of dealin' with the landlord issues.
Local fire department was at the scene but the place burned down to a pile of timbers in a couple hours. Fire crew finished off the fired good enough & then back to the station house they went.
Lot's still vacant.
Must have been the wrong station.

Yep. Sure does make me even more secure in my belief – and it's one of the few true beliefs that I have – that the species ain't long for this world, high or low or whatever.
We're gonna burn ourselves out one way or the other, thermonuclear fire or terrorism fire or kitchen accident fires. One day you’re here and that's fine . . .
And the best part of the entire adios will be nobody standing around to explain how clumsy we were 'cause that excuse, not even in the slightest by anybody's reckoning, will not wash. We'll be gone. That'll be it.
The silence of time and the wind in the trees will not tell the story at all.

Etterslangeren Slanger Tilbake

2007-12-06T10:50:00.000-05:00

Regular readers – if any such loonies exist – may note that some time back a friend of mine got his ham radio license. And since I have been printing my own ham radio QSL cards for a long time, with the earliest having been printed by my father on equipment very similar to what I've got, I said I'd print a batch of cards for my friend. Which I did.
Now many years ago, before Cindy decided she didn't want to have to wander in the snow drifts cleaning off her car, a portion of the wall in the garage separating my print shop from the rest of the wild and wooly was yet up. There was a door with a lock, a ventilating system, good lighting & an ergonomic placement of the various cast iron monsters used in this sort of printing. There was even more stuff outside, like a huge Chandler & Price 12x15 old series platen press cast into metal a decade before my father was born. And an Intertype C3 caster, which was a marvel to behold and not so hard to keep running, at least until I joined the bifocal brigade and the shaky-hands squadron.
It was quite a place.
On the other side of that wall to starboard is a 23-inch C&P paper cutter. Made in 1900, it has gold pin-striping around the casting at the top for the clamp. Gold lettering tells who made it. I went for a long time without a paper cutter and when this one showed up down the street in a pile, it came home with me in a borrowed truck. I've got an extra blade for it; the one that's been in use all this time is still reasonably sharp.
In the long-back I was a member of the American Amateur Press Association, the National Amateur Press Association and the Amalgamated Printers' Association. The last one I'd joined mainly 'cause my father had been a member for a while when I was in the USN. I remember him showing me all the stuff that came once a month in "the bundle," a manila envelope stuffed with things that other members had printed to show off to others. Some of the stuff was out-and-out ephemera: business cards, joke cards, occasional little eight or twelve page booklets, serious work and fun.
To that end, somewhere around here I have 200 copies of a newspaper that Dad had set & printed to send to the "mailer," the officer of the group who coordinates the stuffing and mailing of "the bundle." Dad's piece was a four-fold 11x17 sheet in two colors. At the bottom of the last page he had printed in red that the newspaper was an occasional family holiday mailing, hand-set and printed "letterpess."
Yeah, "letterpess." That one error in his spelling, that one error out of the four pages of various column widths and using three different faces of type in a press run that probably took days, that error kept him from sending the 200 copies to the "mailer." And thus, after Dad died, I found all 200 copies folded and boxed under a bench in his basement shop.
That's the way Dad wanted to play it. Precise.
Of course, thinking that always reminds me of the probable hows-and-whyfores that might have led to Dad learning the printers' trade when he was younger. How he got from the death of his mother when he was eleven to being a nominally responsible working man in Arizona around Flagstaff, Sedona & Scottsdale is unknown. He was pretty secretive about his past before he met Mom after the war.
One way or the other, from my childhood onward, there was always some sort of printing press somewhere in the house. In Texas it was a Pearl. In Indiana at first it was a Pearl. Later when we moved to another part of Indianapolis Dad had a C&P 8x10. When we moved to Dayton around 1957 Dad had to satisfy himself with a 5x8 Kelsey. Only after we moved to the house from which Dad passed away did he get his hands on something substantial: a 12x18 Chandler & Price Old Series with a Kluge feeder. The press he kept. The feeder was unreliable and hard to keep working, so Dad scrapped it.
The sound of a press is one of my earliest memories, the thump of the impression, the clank and clang of the toggle turning the ink disk, the whoosh of the rollers and the clatter of the gears. That sound and the smell of the ink I identify immediately from those very early days.

Letterpress equipment ain't easy to move and it's not cheap. It seems that every time I renew my interest in this old stuff there are tons of other people – artists and similarly delusional creative types – out looking for the stuff that got scrapped out of grandpa's barn two weeks ago. Either that or I missed by hours getting my hands on something that hadn't been used for hundreds of years until a person who thinks they can make money printing wedding invitations shows up just by some stroke of luck to take a whole shop away for free.
On the other hand, what I've got pretty much came to me in bits and pieces over the past 25 years for very little or damn cheap. Yes, I had to buy type when it was pretty expensive but not as expensive as it is now, even accounting for inflation. Yes, there were places I could go to find printing stuff cheap and easy but not as easy as it is today with the InterWebs. And yes, once and for all, I am not doing this because I can get rich even slowly.
But here I am, trying to figure out how to put that damn wall back up and the web is full of pages and blogs about printing letterpress in the day of laserjet and the InterWeb itself. And it's an amazing discovery, that.
The press I dragged in bits and pieces out of a late printer's back yard cost me about $300 for the rehab and the rollers. It'll probably last another fifty years before anyone even thinks of having to return journal surfaces. Today such a press on eBay goes for between $1k and $4k. The type cases are going for $12 or so each, down about half of what they were when I first got into this hobby (and it's obviously not a hobby to them what's paying today). Some of the hardware – the type case cabinets, the imposing surfaces, the trimmers and cutters and composing sticks and quoins and gauge pins – I came by helping folks go out of business from going into business. But I bought a helluva lot of what I've got now, even the antique type faces from foundries out of business for a century and a quarter.
So it ain't been cheap. And as a hobby, it probably compares with ham radio for the amount of seriously frivolous cash that gets blown into the wind. But at least I can say that I got here early enough to know what these new folks are in for. I can also say with a certain amount of pride that I got here first, taught by a man who lived with this stuff in his mind and body for probably six decades, and what I have and can do today is definitely worth it to me. I've got certificates on the walls attesting to my printing, my graphic design, my writing and my simple publishing skills. When I did the stuff that led to those awards I never thought I'd get that far at all. I was surprised then and I'm satisfied now.
And oh, how these new folks have it easy! All the organizations and the individuals that I had to chase down with library research and letters and phone calls, all of that's a drop in the pan on the InterWeb. There are at least fifty blogs about letterpress. There are three sites right off the top of my vacuous head with helpful hints and links and suggestions. And there are all those shops with pretty work on display.

Back when I was a kid, Dad taught me that the type should kiss the paper. And there was a reason: type that gets punched into paper eventually gets rounded off and brutalized. The impression of type against paper involves around 170 lbs/inch2. I know from experience that setting the platen that far into the type costs money in replacing what's been smashed.
Such is not the deal today, evidently.
Many of the blogs on letterpress that I've found show work involving serious punch. Beautiful work, beautiful color choices, type face choices, all of that, pushed into the paper in such a way that, if the photos online are any clue, there must be a lot of lead going into and out of the caster every time a new job comes along.
Not that there aren't ways of keeping good, clean type on hand. There are still a few hot metal type casters about.
Nowadays, however, as I have discovered, typography that I once set by hand is being generated on a computer and the computer "picture" of that design is then turned into a photopolymer plate which is subsequently inked and punched into paper. Just like Dad told me not to print.

Thus I'm standing in the cold garage with my wife's car staring at the flywheel of the press – and on summer days with birds sneaking through the soffit and getting trapped in the open expanse – looking at printing QSL cards or whatever for whomever again and realizing that a new "rebirth" of interest in old-fashioned type-on-paper printing is going on. I find that thought somewhat ironic, in that the folks who taught my father and the folks who worked with my father are long gone into the deep recesses of the human story. These new kids don't have to listen to me. They won't, more than likely.
One artifact kept alive by an anachronism is soon to be replaced by a renaissance surrounding a misinterpretation running on a whisper of a nearly-forgotten dream.
Ain't nothin' unusual in that, as I see it. That's how change happens these days. Like an ancient Native American settlement that was "rehabilitated" by the WPA in such a way that the original stones are nowhere to be found although something that looks like the original building does stand, the next generation will think itself blessed to be able to continue what nobody thought would ever fade away. And that, all the while, happens as the curtain falls from the window and the outside wind whistles through the rattling panes in a rotting frame.
At that point I recognize again the look on my father's face the last time he talked about his printshop, hidden in the basement, which was inaccessible to him as age took his balance and sureness of foot – let alone his manual coordination in front of that press. I know that face. I see it looking back at me in the reflection of the window. I've been here before.
The strange fact is all too easy to encounter.
A search on the InterWebs rings up over sixty different versions the letterpress & small books/chapbooks/ephemera publishing. Some of the websites are nicely constructed and easy enough to read and navigate. Most of them are intrinsically artsy. In all it's obvious that there are many folks, most of 'em young folks, who have taken an interesting the anachronism of letterpress printing as a door to publishing.
One site, named "Get Rich Slowly" is a linked resource to all kinds of back-of-the-kitchen home-brew businesses dealing, among other things, in letterpress-printed items.
That and there's a couple listings on eBay for letterpress stuff, two of which are for Chandler & Price presses, a couple made two centuries ago and one in the recent 21st Century. All of those presses are blessed with starting bids in the thousands of dollars and one flat-out says no bids under $2k will be considered.
So there's life in the old ways yet.

I have no delusions – as I once did – about chapbooks and limited editions and pretty choices of paper for folks to fondle when they hand me the two bits I'm asking for something that took maybe a hundred or two dollars to print. It's far to easy to get snookered into thinking that there really is a "big market" for such fancy. Nobody I know writes well enough to sell, including myself, and nobody I know would spend the time & money on anything that I could possibly find interesting enough to print or publish.
I have no interest in wedding announcements or a weekly newspaper for the thousand or so neighbors with whom I share this knot of nominally civilized society in the shade of a freeway. I know better than to think of posters or anything more than a digitized t-shirt design. The folks who are making money on letterpress printing are either – by my assay of the situation – supported by other funds or living in a community where off-the-center tradesmanship is tolerated with the nodding attention of a rich woman's social club meeting.
Letterpress is a great way to spend money. It's hardly a great way to earn it. And by what I see on the websites I've found, nothing I could do and nothing that anyone I know could do would be worth much to anybody else. I ain't an artist. I don't live with artists and I am not surrounded by artists sipping mint tea on the front porch with clove cigarettes in the ash tray.
Not that I'm not tempted to finagle a way to add 12 ft to the ass of the garage and put the shop into that space. With a front porch under an eave where I can sit and pet the printshop cats. There's six of 'em. I've got spares.

In Preparation for Joulu

2007-11-26T14:05:00.000-05:00

Back when I was a kid in Catholic school, it never occurred to me that the present-day Christmas season would be or could be such a powerfully deep-time accretion. All I knew about Christmas was what the nuns told us or what we were allowed to know. Combined with the liturgy and the ponderous & pompous nature of the prayer & service cycle that was part of Christmas, the overall effect was one of complete abjuration of anything the least bit revelatory.
There was the usual bit about Santa Claus being a character based on a Saint Nicholas, which saint was thus entrusted with wandering around his vicarage tossing money into the windows of those in his favor. The fact that it was money & not presents or the conditions for receiving the money and not some end-run on another grace myth was never left for us kids to ponder. The lord and savior of the universe was going to be born back in time & we were going to celebrate it in the present.
With presents.
Looking at it that way from this far ahead of who I was then, I'm struck by two metaphoric chunks that may well be the balance point on the entire Western mindset.
The first is the transubstantiation of time.
Here we were, celebrating long after the fact the coming of god to earth in the birth of a baby. The stable & helplessness of the parents were part of that package and it pulled at our collective heart strings to think of a baby, already defenseless enough, being born in a straw manger in the company of base animals, although cute animals. So those of us in the present, two thousand-odd years after the real birth of the putative savior, were going to celebrate the coming of the savior as a way of saying "Shuck'n's, Lord, we thank yew for helpin' us out," which thankyou was done almost mindlessly.
This turn on time, wherein we were combining our present sense of being with the actions of the divine in the past put us clearly – at least to me in retrospect – in the camp of establishing a sense of what it must be like to be god. By way of the metaphor of birth and pending redemption having been in the past, when we put ourselves in the present into the past by way of the story, we could feel what it was like to transcend time and space.
And for greedy little suburban kids, it was both time consuming and timeless.
We wanted our gifts and we wanted them now. The nuns would remind us, however, that our greatest gift had already arrived, in the person of Jesus, our savior. Not only were we stuck back in that cattle shed, we were supposed to recognize the remission of sin that would take place a few months later at Easter.
Doing something like this to small children, whose minds are always much more agile than those of their elders simply because they are in a state of constant discovery, made the entire Christmas season not just all-consuming mentally but a time of ecstasy when we were beside ourselves with the unrecognized but functional sense of being outside of everything beyond the Christmas story and the savior myth.

The second metaphor was the result of the deep-time accretion of the entire savior/hero myth cycle that is common to every human society. For us – and only us as the church would have it go – there was this wonderful moving among us of the divine spark in the person of Jesus. That the story was truly a horrible tale of self-imposed isolation from every other thing that makes us human we missed completely. Our participating in a long passed torture and murder of what we had been taught to see as a very holy man who was, strangely enough but never explained, also god itself here on earth went past our little ears. We were headed toward Jesus' having been here already oncet.
The entire story of Jesus after his birth in such squalor and his coming to be a man respected by the believers and reviled by the Jewish temple staff was awash with denial and hermitage. Jesus asked his followers to drop whatever they were doing and go off with him. Jesus suggested that he had come to separate children from their families and strip the society of its domestic foundations. Jesus chided his followers and pointed forward on the time line to us for lack of faith or lack of determination. And he told everyone in his time and across the expanse of the time of the Christian belief system that he was going to die a horrible death so that the world would be free to believe in a life everlasting.
Here we were then, children in the 20th Century, by constant repetition of the story, aware of but unable to recognize the theme of the savior/hero myth, swept up in the turmoil and pageantry of a celebration that must go back hundreds of millennia for the species and certainly twenty to thirty thousand years for the present edition of the human species.
And we were presented with this story and its meaning in such a way that all of the predecessors and former versions of the story simply melded into one man's fate and our sense of being released from bondage.

When I look back on my childhood at Christmas, as I do just about every year any more, I am not ashamed to say that I can't believe how easily I was led to believe what is so unbelievable. The ecstasy of time and space, the overwhelming sense of something grand about to happen, the story's implication that I was not really quite worthy of the redemption promised (and quite unwilling then to think of what would happen as we marched the ecclesiastical clock toward Easter) overpowered me. I can truly say that I was only aware of being sparkle-eyed in anticipation and reluctant to think of what would happen next. It was a powerful feeling and it still is, on those occasions when I sit back in the non-critical light of the tree's decorations or the incessant repetition of the gigabytes of Christmas music that Cid has stashed on her iPod, which iPod is connected to the family "entertainment system."
It truly is a powerful time of the year – at least for those of us north of the equator. The sudden onset of winter weather after a pleasant summer and springtime drags anyone to the back of the cave for a hibernational nap. And here we are, celebrating the return of life before it's even gotten here, simply because, astronomically, the sun has gone as far south as it will go for the next twelve months.
Seeing it that way, of course, takes me right out of the hard-core "hail fellow well-met" joviality of the season. And it isn't that I get dreary and dour myself – although I do have to admit that seasonal affective disorders are deep in the genetic blueprint. It's more like I smile at the folks so easily overcome by a ritual that's got to be as old as the end of the last glaciation some thirty thousand years ago.
At the same time, because of the way people begin to treat each other at this time of year, the old curmudgeon in me comes out and I become very, very misanthropic. Snippy people barking at cashiers usually sets me off the most. I try to be very cheerful under those circumstances, especially if the snooty, snippy person is within earshot – which they usually are – and I have a tendency to snort past such snoots with the same brusque, childish manner that they find so easy to fall into.
Again and again at this time of year I am reminded of how little we have advanced since our primate ancestors decided to move instead of taking any more shit from the loudest monkey on the ridge. Nasty people look too much like the neighborhood's α-Gelada-borne sociopaths, barking and sniping at the rest of the group just because someone shit on someone else's favorite rock.

But I really get down with the season the most when I have time or cause to consider how many other hero/savior religious fantasies have occupied the human mind over the past ten or fifteen thousand years.
The garden variety savior myths like Isis or Mithras or Apollo and including Krishna and/or Buddha have been around for a long time. The fact that none of these religions (or cults, if you want to consider a religion as a cult with more members) survived past the Roman Empire's coming under the influence of the Constantine emperors says a lot about the luck of a good public administration system tied to a militarist background template. With the former the early version of the Christian church was able to legalize itself and any policies that became dogma before anyone noticed outright that the world had been hoodwinked. With the latter it was possible to put a militarist campaign in process by which to prevent people asking questions or finding alternative viewpoints.
Mithras' fabled birth near the winter solstice hit nicely the target of the various Saturnalia festivals in the ancient Mediterranean region while at the same time establishing a system of reinforced – and prescriptively enforced – doctrines that became dogma quick enough.
The roman governmental administration, kept as it was by the militarists who ruled in Rome made the dogma and the doctrines nominally uniform on the basis of fraudulently created documents & legends.
Over the course of the ensuing centuries the socio-religious elements of human life were normalized by the simple expedient of accretion. If it could be adapted to the developing Christian belief system, it was adopted into the belief system. Various festivals from various so-called "pagan" religions eventually found their way into the world of a loving Jesus who whipped the money changes in the temple before proving by his death that the temple was passé.
And it doesn't take too much energy or a lot of web time to find all the sites that point to the silliness of what has become the major money maker season for most of the western world and a huge pile of interesting things for Christian missionaries to sell to the natives.

With all this in mind, I come once again to the beginning of the great sell-abration of the Jesus myth cycle. Now I'm not going to say that I don't enjoy being happy and all that. Anything – other than forced participation in the entire religionistic endeavor – is better than sitting around in the dark at the back of the cave waiting for the sun to warm things up enough so the cats' water dish doesn't freeze over ten minutes after I've filled it afresh. Anything is better than moping around with depressive thoughts going through my head like a heavy wet blanket I must carry to the end of my days. Or until it gets warm again & the date for the Dayton Hamvention approacheth.
So, yeah, it's Christmas time again. I'm down with the narrative, yo. But I can't help but think that one new-ager is correct when he says

"We can understand with some sympathy the desire of the traditional churches to put Christ back into Christmas, but it becomes even more desirable to put Christmas back into December!"

And with that, have fun at the mall. I'm doing all my solstice shopping online, dude. It's just as expensive, it takes less time, and I don't have to put up with snippy little shits bothered by the fact that they're too stupid to stay home and do all that shopping in front of a keyboard & mouse with a warm cup of hot chocolate spiked with two shots of amaretto liquor so they can be snippy with the cashiers. And it all comes out of my wallet the same whether here or there or Jesus or Mithras or Frank.

Message from the Mother Turkey, Turkey

2007-11-22T10:37:00.001-05:00

Some serious time ago I used to think that alien beings were going to come from outer space and fix things up or at least nuke us, as a species, into submission. Kinda like Islam but with technology advanced beyond the 8th Century and a little less based on barbaric brutality and desert pillage & plunder rules.
I used to think that because, well, I read a lot of science fiction in my early years and, for a while as the NASA program continued to keep the plebs entertained, because I thought it was a serious possibility.
We monkeys made it into space by the seat of our pants and a prayer. Why wouldn't another bag of monkeys somewhere within this galaxy be able to do the same. But quicker & with time & space problems resolved by their advanced technology. Seemed sensible at the time. But that was before the end of the Soviet hegemony, the rise of the moron monkey followers of a nomadic tribal moon goddess cult with concomitant disregard for personal involvement in scientific & technological advances.
Nowadays I don't see a cellophane snowball's chance in hell that there's anybody out there, headed this way 'cause they heard some whispering on the hydrogen line or managed to catch Hitler's TV broadcast from the 1936 Olympics. It's more likely that whoever out there might have evolved to our level of reflective consciousness and self-aware mindness state most likely got stuck there and never advanced. Or they got there and then advanced enough to completely snuff themselves. Or they were so involved in worship and placation of their imaginary friends that they eventually devolved into something a bit higher up the consciousness chain from Geladas and killed each other over who was the god most demanding or worthy of worship & placation.
See, I don't have much faith in my species to get past our present delusions & claims by idiot savants that their imaginary friends demand we kill each other over that sillyness.
Nah. I figure our species will hang around at about this level of technological advancement while a huge portion of our species still lives hand-to-mouth between stinking deserts and steaming jungles for maybe a century or two to come and then we'll just snuff it.

"One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."

Needless to say, if there are any advanced civilizations out there looking for other civilizations to visit, they'll be put off by our blatant ignorance and delusional behavior and thus stay the hell away. Or they're out there thinking that we might make good pets. I doubt seriously that any advanced civilization has found another civilization closer to its homeworld than maybe a century of lightspeed travel away.
And there's always the possibility that, by the time they can ignore time and space, they have no need for chummy relations with other civilizations even remotely near their level of development. Which would mean that there's a technologically advanced civilization sitting out there on their home world watching "I Love Lucy" reruns poolside at the country club.
Or they may have advanced so far into technological equivalents to what we call life that they don't have any need to worry about cell structures or oxygenation or any of the other things that we organic water bags consider terribly important to the continuance of our rather bitter existence.
And don't forget the Fermi Paradox, which more or less already covers the last two screens of rambling rant.

So, even as much as I enjoy the late Carl Sagan's optimism and have a somewhat nostalgic & childlike view of the future of our species, I am that way only because it beats the hell out of sitting here thinking that what I expect will be the next century and some, maybe, we will have devolved through war and religion & out-and-out bull-headedness to the point where it'll be caves and fire rings around the planet about equator high.
I do seriously think that we, as a species, will be toast and pissing off within the next hundred and fifty years. And I feel that way because we seem to be tied to our own millstone and tossing ourselves into the lake. We worship non-existent imaginary friends and we kill each other over which imaginary friend is supposed to be superior to the rest while at the same time claiming that there's only one imaginary friend at all, which imaginary friend is determined to have us licking its tuchus for eternity. We kill each other over paper to which we have assigned some arbitrary value, which value changes by the day depending on which group has the most of the paper and/or whether or not the paper is better than imaginary figures charted in our technological equivalent of the smoke signal & and signal fire. We try to con each other out of whatever we think is important, usually by the amount of land that someone might "own," even if the ownership falls straight into the toilet when any person supposedly owning the land snuffs it and is thus no better than a kewpie doll on the shelf of time.
All in all we have too much weird shit going on between us and against us to last any longer than a hundred years and some. Most of that shit, when you get right down to it like I do (instead of falling down to my knees) is the modern & human equivalent of the 90% of the time shit that any gang of monkeys & the Gelada baboons in particular spend their days on.
Thus I suspect that, if life has evolved on another planet and has gone through any sort of evolutionary process such as would bring any species on that planet to our level of self-awareness and consciousness, they will have followed a very similar track to get to whatever technology they acquired before blowing themselves up or blasting themselves back down the evolutionary ladder where they came from.
Yeah, that's a long sentence. But read it again.
I'm saying that we will never be visited by an advanced species from another planet 'cause time & space don't play that way. Time and space take hostages and any species gets that close to undoing time and space will lose. They'll never get past the stage of killing each other over their gods, their money or their sense of entitlement. They'll die out before they learn how to slip the bonds of time and space. They'll never get that second foot off the ground.
Never.
And I say that for a very simple reason: we have been on this planet for maybe a hundred thousand years in this model. Archeology shows us that civilizations rise and then fall. Whatever comes along after the last fall usually ends up building on the ruins of the last one. This works great as long as the ruins are better than the ruins below the most recent. So here we sit, in this 21st Century, able to launch rockets to other planets and robot explore distant moons and peer fourteen billion years into the universe and the best we can show for all of that on a species-specific scale is flying airplanes into office buildings in the name of an imaginary friend because the buildings represent the money that the imaginary friend in question has not given its worshipers.
We're too stupid and too delusional to get any farther than we are now.
Period.
Given those circumstances and what we can see of societal collapse over time, it's pretty obvious that we're at the end of the stupid rope and their ain't no smart rope to swing to and grab hold.
We're done and we still can't stop stickin' the fork in ourselves to prove it.
And that is why there are no visitors from another planet landing on the White House lawn or in the Forbidden City or just to the west of the Grand Mosque at Mecca. There ain't no visitors 'cause no civilization ever evolves anywhere past where we are now. Not here. Not there. Not in a chair with a grizzly bear.
It's not that we're all alone in the dark and cold vastness of the universe. It's that we're not alone in our holding to stupidity, delusions, make-believe and fantasy.
It comes with the frontal lobe, all them problems.
There might be planets awash with life like we have it here on this beautiful but seriously disrespected tiny spec in the middle of nowhere. There might even be planets that would make a nice place to live if we could move there. But there ain't nobody gets to leave and there ain't nobody comes to visit.
After six million years and some of human evolution, all we have to show for it is hatred and greed and delusion. Six million years. Hell, the dinosaurs got at least a hundred some million and they's daid. You think we can do any better?
I sure don’t.
And don't even start in on the UFO reports.

Yeah, them. I take them pretty much the same way I take god: I ain't seed one yet and I ain't heard a divine voice yet and I don't see any UFO landing and peeps coming out of it to save us from ourselves. It will have to be an overt, in-all-cases, everywhere event for me to accept that there might be UFOs & aliens from other planets, just the same as it will for me to see there's a god.
I don't hear or smell or see any UFOs and I sure ain't seen or heard any god yet. In my ear, in my visual field.
So they ain't comin', them aliens. And as for the divine, well, I've already made enough references to that to take care of my knowledge and trust.

Now go eat some turkey & other richness, be glad you have this bit of life you got. It's the national day of thanksgiving and even for nonbelievers it's still a chance to appreciate what we have and how we've managed to keep sane all these years. Lift your glass and toast the DNA. And if you can see this, thank the trilobites too. Even the curlied-up ones under the fridge.

And if you hear from the mother ship, tell 'em I still need some help putting up my antenna tower.

And That's Fine Too

2007-11-20T08:19:00.000-05:00

I was slitherin' around the InterWebs the other day looking at things that piss me off when I was suddenly inspired to Google "end of human species." This got me a huge pile of Wikipedia stuff about how we're all gonna die because of something.
Now, when I read this stuff – and I do so only because I have the desire to know whether anyone agrees with me on this – I am always challenged by what I see as a sort of Bambi-Gets-an-UZI sort of world where all the blissfully sweet and gooey goodness of creation (and I use that word only 'cause it's a metaphor) collapses in on itself and we snuff it.
One day it's butterflies and moonbeams.
The next day it's shit-up-to-your-nose and poisonous river snakes comin' up the toilet pipes.
"Quick, Ma, get the plunger!"
Or as it says somewhere in a John Rechy novel – and I've "normalized" the exact quote – "One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."
And yes, I did actually read John Rechy.
A couple times. Two books. City of Night and Numbers.
Which, when I think about it metaphorically, makes perfect sense.
This a sort of "here today/gone tomorrow" sort of quality to the stories in those two books, paralleling the way things work in the so-called "straight" world (where it's all a matter of a wide stance) and in the universe altogether (where stance has nothing to do with anything).
And that's just about how I see the human species.
Of course I come to that view by way of having spent enough time in geology courses to have a sense of deep time (or at least an appreciation of what it would take to have a sense of deep time) and to recognize that every animal gets a chance and then it dies. And that death can be over a long period of time within a species or it can be a hugely long period of time across the expanse of deep time.
So the rocks tell the story and it's always a story of here today/gone tomorrow.
Just ask the chickens. They know. They were here when the dinosaurs snuffed it, same as the monkeys will be here when we monkeys snuff it.

See, it all comes down to a couple simple rules. The first rule is that shit happens. The second rule is that shit will happen no matter how much work goes into it not happening. Like global warming (GW).
You can agree with GW and say that we should try to stop the slide toward a hot house vegetable garden planet but it won't make any difference one way or the other whether you agree. Or not. That's 'cause humans have been around in this package with this much knowledge for less than ten thousand years. That's not much against 700 million years of life in general or against the 100 million years that dinosaurs were pissin' in the oceans and shittin' in the forests. So with less than ten thousand years under our belts and despite all the things we think we can know by searching the geologic record, the simple fact is that we are part of the planet, not apart from it.
This means that the shit of GW might be the way we go, but if it ain't that it'll be something else like glaciation setting in so good that the only unfroze oceans will be down by the equator and they won't be that much fun to look at even then.
So you have your shit happens and then there's shit happens.
Against this we think we know how to change weather. Yeah, right. Ask my brother-in-law about his adventures in the windy place where the Native Americans told the gringos not to live. Or my friends who ain't here 'cause some illness snuffed 'em or the illnesses that some friends are trying to survive by means of modern medical technology.
Chemistry, really.
Yeah, that kind of shit happens.
And you can damn sure betcha that if it'll happen to an individual it will happen to a group of individuals and if it'll do a group, then it'll do the planet and none will be the wiser or stronger or more likely to survive.
As in individual life, so in the life of a species: when your numbers up, you're just another number.

"One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."

At which point we get back to the end of the human species. And we can do that simply because we know that it's going to happen. Either a big rock will fall or a gamma ray burst might go off somewhere close enough to cook us good or a germ will mutate or a virus will become impervious to whatever countermeasures we rely on or the world will shift in its orbit or something equally catastrophic and the human species will disappear.
Just like that: finito.
"Damn, Ma! This plunger ain't working! Gimme my shotgun!"
The best part of any of those scenarios – or even ones that I haven't thought of to say anything about – is the way that nobody will be left to explain this all to whoever comes by next. Animals from a far planet might land here and look around and recognize that we were able to build a bunch of stuff and not kill each off outright (although that's a possible scenario too) and we might have even figured out a lot of science. But that'll be it.
If nobody shows up from somewhere (which I think is extremely more likely), whoever evolves to reflective consciousness when we're not around will find the rare and deteriorating remnants of our presence and likely wonder what the hell it all means.
Either way, one day we're here and the next day we're gone and it won't mean jack to anything or anybody.

It is the finality of death that makes us dream of an afterlife. Even for all the toil and trouble of ensuring the breathing process, each of us finds sufficient cause to wish to live. Makes no difference the animal; we all want to live as long as possible, and in the case of believers, forever.
The extinction of a species offers the same ghost, the same fear.
Although no one ever notices outright, the disappearance of a species seems to make us wonder about the inevitability of our own species' demise. That we have neither the sense of time nor the sense of deep time that would provide us examples over the course of life on this planet, we still know from meager experience that extinction is a distinct possibility.
Families die out. Why shouldn't the entire species?
That becomes the paradigmatic question.
'Cause if we are willing to admit that it's possible the human species will snuff it, then we have to figure what is going to mean in the long run. And by long run I'm talking about from now to that last human. Which brings us back to Bambi.
See, as animals go, we're too gooey sweet to be worth much on the pages of survival. We care about stuff. We care about our families, our friends, our continued existence and the continued existence of those we care about. Of course we're easily baited into thinking that killing off every other sonovabitch on the planet is within our purview and a dutiful one at that. Thus inspired to love and hate at the same time, we are stuck like a mobster in tears when it comes to figuring it all out.
That’s the purpose of superstition, religion and the verbal fluff of philosophic ramblings such as this.
If, however, we are willing to stare blankly into the cold and dark face of the night-time sky, we'll have to admit that not much of any of this matters in truth. We will be here for a while & then we will go out like the dinos. Yes, it's a hard concept to accept and I'm sure that someone will gladly point out when I approach my own passing that nobody wants to die. But what nobody wants and what nobody gets are not the same things. Death is inevitable. Life is a terminal illness. If along the way we catch other terminalities, so be it.
As a group of animals with reflective consciousness we may not be too willing to look hard into the cold reality but as a group of beings who have discovered over time that nothing lasts forever, we should be able to accept our own impending nothingness.
And just because I can talk about it this clinically does not mean that I look forward to the end of my life or the life of my species with any glee. I will be sad to leave and I will be and am now sad to know that we will all leave some fine day.
We have to get used to it, this eventual disappearing act.
Makes no difference who we are or who we sleep with or what we think or believe.

"One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."

Courage

2007-11-11T10:07:00.000-05:00

My father served with the 614th Ammo Ordnance Company in WWII. The company was assigned, over the course of years, to provide support on the islands of Guadalcanal, Bougainville & New Caledonia. I have that information from Dad's service jacket (that's a service record for you civilians) and from the stories of his escapades heard while sitting on his knee. Some of the stories involved the South Pacific creole language, Tok Pisin. Other parts were connected to the Australian song "Waltzing Matilda," and other parts were things I found out many years after he had died.
Much of the history of my father's life is mythic. Its relationship to the truth of fact or reality was as much a part of his telling the stories as it was his obfuscation to deny the least hint at his having been any sort of half-ass participant in his own life.
I don't remember the date that I realized my father was a heavy drinker, but I do remember coming home with Mom one evening to a house that smelled heavily of whiskey. Dad came out from wherever it was he had been hiding with a smile on his face that I can today only call forced. It was the grin of a madman, but it did not strike any terror in me. It was Dad, he was drunk, and that was that.
Between the booze, the stories, his sober counsel (which took up far more time than his drunkenness, at least to me) and the truth of his life, Dad tried mightily to be someone else than the son of a rage-filled drunk and a mother whose life ended at her own hands. And now, at an age ten years younger than Dad was when he died, I think I understand quite well who it was that wore the uniform in a jungle with a cigarette between the fingers of his right hand. I truly believe – which for a man without belief is a huge leap of faith – that I know who my father was as a person, as a journalist, as an artist, a leader, a disciplinarian, a friend, a teacher and a tortured soul. And while I claim no true sense of torture in my life, I can, by inference and referral, say that I know the man my father wished he could have been.

Dad never graduated from high school. His performance in school dropped like a weight on a line the year that his mother died, 1922, when he was only 11 years old. By the time he was in high school he was torn between abject disgust for life and a courageous need to soldier on.
Maybe that's what make his military experience so important to him, even if the story of his military experience was fable mixed with sly suggestions and a handful of barked orders.
Dad arrived at the command in the jungle not as a soldier but as a journalist. He was one of what today they would call "embedded" troops, guys hired to keep the folks back home apprised of the situation at the front. As the son of a suicide and as a man who was badgered by depression all his life, it must have been strange to take what was a deadly situation and turn it into something that would give hope and solace to the folks at home with pictures of kin in uniform on the mantel.
But that's what Dad did: he was a newspaperman.
I know that he became a journalist the hard way, the Mark Twain way, starting out in the composing room and then working his way to a copy desk. He wrote with a crimped style, fingers moving fairly quickly over a typewriter keyboard. Anyone who's ever sat before a Linotype machine keyboard will recognize the style: hands turned slightly inward, the manual version of crows' footedness, eyes bouncing from the copy to the keyboard and back as the lines filled out the page.
Even so, Dad worked in the newspaper business before the war, as we can figure who have bits and pieces of copy that he set in type and then later wrote on paper.
When the Japanese airforce destroyed the fleet at Pearl Harbor, Dad was thirty years old. He would have been a bit past the prime draft age but still close enough for him to have considered the options. As a foot soldier anything could have happened, from office work to a bullet in the chest. I suspect that is what drove him to sign up. He did admit that much once. But he was part of a very strange and separate group, the kinds of folks who would likely never get that close to the front but still close enough to smell the smoke and decomposing bodies.
Once in his later years while he was in hospital and in a reverie caused by the heavy sedation he'd received, he relived his journey from wherever home was for him then to Chicago and the Army and beyond. Bits and pieces of mumbled thoughts, shouts and ravings, it's likely he was the least drunk of the bunch of soldiers and thus was entrusted with the paperwork for the entire group.
From there the story shifts to the creole tales, the contention of receiving a Purple Heart for having his jaw broken in a ammo dump fire, a bit about the local Navy Sea Bees either making dummy Jap flags to sell to the boot campers and driving through the jungle to the site of the fire, which Dad said saved his life.
How he survived his childhood, his youth and his test in the Army is anybody's guess. He had been so close to death his entire life up to that point, what with his mother's death tearing a hole in him that never healed except in his last moments. But he did it. He survived. And somehow out of all of that came the smile and the gentleman who met my mother, fell in love with her and married after the war.
The Japanese surrendered to the US & Allied forces in August of 1945. I was born in the early morning of 2 January 1946. That suggests that Dad was home from the war before then easily enough around 1944 or so, to meet Mom and start the family.
I remember as a child how he talked about military discipline and tried to enforce on us that which, by dint of his fondness for booze, he was never able to totally impose on himself. I remember him telling the story of the ammo dump fire, the Sea Bees, the flags and all of that. I knew names of those with whom Dad had served, not knowing that his comrades during those island-hopping assignments had been at the front and at the edge of death much more closely than he ever admitted to being.
When I discovered Dad's real role in the movements and activities of the 614th a couple years ago, all the little pieces of what I knew of my father came apart like a broken comet and then, eventually, under the weight of their own gravity, fell back together again. Every day since I have thought of who my father thought he was and who he had always been to me.
At first I felt a bit betrayed. But I soon learned that we are not born into the world to parents who are finished business. Our parents are human animals like the rest of us and each of them continues to learn until the final lesson escapes with that final breath.
Today I can see my father in the jungle, cribbing notes for newspaper reports, smoking with his comrades, knowing that he could die at any moment but that his presence there was preceded by much more deadly action than he would ever see. I see my father as a young man of 34 getting out of the army, going to radio journalism school in Aberdeen, Maryland, writing copy for a style of radio reportage that has long since fallen out of fashion. I can see him working his way back into civilian life, his uniform slowly changing to casual t-shirts and slacks, taking a basket out into the countryside around his soon-to-be inlaws for a picnic with Mom. I can see him being chased again and again across the continent by the booze and his own depression – likely as much from his sense of being an improvised fake & failure as from anything – eventually ending up with the ultimatum that changed his life when I was maybe ten or twelve.
He had to sober up, assume his position as a solid citizen protecting and supporting his family or his world would disappear. Sober up or get out.

Dad loved my mother with a crazy, adoring passion that anyone back then might not have seen. She was a beautiful woman to her last breath: vivacious, smart beyond any doubt, educated, reasonable, faithful, kind, generous, caring and solicitous, a woman who could have been a professor, a doctor, a counselor or a nurse. In all of those qualities my father found the solace that he'd been missing since he was eleven. Mom became his mother and his wife. She took care of him, put up with his drinking, dried him out, took him home, got him started again and then hoped & prayed that the last time would be the last time.
Before we moved to Dayton, Ohio, that was the last time.
From Dayton onward in time and space, our family changed. Dad worked like a madman to hold on to his sanity and his job. By this time my sister and I were entering puberty, so our sense of the rational and sense of what our parents were doing when they said they'd spent the day at work was less concrete than any putative Jesus. We were entering that phase of our lives when we would be nothing more than trouble-making brats.
As with our father, it took us over thirty years to straighten that part of our lives out enough to see clearly what our parents had done for and put up with from us.

So today, while the rest of the planet that believes as Americans do honors the memory & courage of those who have served and those who are still serving this country in the uniform that invites madness against all courage, I sit here thinking of the absolute courage that my father and mother had in their lives.
The world came apart for America on 7 December 1941. My mother was 34, living with her parents on the family farm outside Kersey, Pennsylvania. The rural electrification project had just brought a street light to their tiny corner of a suddenly very tiny universe. There was a large, wooden-cabinet radio in the parlor and I imagine that Mom and her family sat around it that day and listened to President Roosevelt set the country to war. And I suspect that my father heard that message too, perhaps seated on a bar stool somewhere out west.
Together my parents fought for freedom, each in their own way. Mom's brothers served, one in the US Navy, the other – as family legends go – in the Army. Dad, of course, joined up, as did his brother. And it was years later when Dad, who thought his brother was lost and had thus given me his brother's name, got a phone call from California. The person on the other end of the line told Dad that he was a hard person to track down. And Dad asked who it was to whom he was speaking.
Another ghost entered his life again that day: it was his brother.
All in all my family, my parents in particular, and even myself in my own stumbling way, have served this country in uniform or in support of those who wore the uniform. My wife's father served. Some of my cousins have served. We've worn the suit. And although it would seem that I would point the spot light at myself, I point that light instead upon my father in particular and the rest of my family as well.
Dad spent his life on the edge of failure. Mom held his head above water more than anyone else. And it was my father who told me many years ago a simple statement that defines him better than anything I could learn about him or write about him. It's the sort of thing that one never expects to find repeated, a statement so basic that it shows the depth of the person who says it. In that I have been blessed.

"It takes more courage to admit that you're wrong than it does to step onto a battlefield."

Kun Kjærligheten Varer

2007-11-09T17:26:00.000-05:00

I got a very nice email back from Anne Thommesen at the Norsk Folkemuseet yesterday. Ms. Thommesen is a photo archivist at the museum and she was responding to an email that I'd sent earlier with some suggestions on the identity of some of the photos that I'd found on the museum's website.
See, there's a search system there and, if you snakker norsk, you might be able to find all kinds of photos of relatives within the museum's collection. I'd gone there on a chance search for a look at my paternal grandmother's face. Grandma Young, who
was Helga Bull before she married Grandpa Tom (Thomas Wilfred Young), had died when my father was 11. I'd never seen her face and this one chance search had led me to the museum. In the process I found other pictures of family members in the archives, some of which were not completely identified.
Thus my email & thus Ms. Thommesen's reply.
So here's the deal: First there were the pictures of my grandmother. One was of her walking down Karl Johans gate around 1890. Another was of her walking with a sister in a park. There were a couple other candid shots and then the portrait that I posted earlier. And there were other photos within the collection that obviously showed my grandmother in the company of her four sisters.
But the one that stood out for me was the one of Grandma Helga in the park with one of her sisters. In the shading of her hat and the lighting of the day and the detail that got lost in what was most likely as glass plate negative I could see very clearly the outline of a face that I'd known since birth and had not seen for two decades and some. It was the face of my father, his jowl, his eyebrow, his nose.
In fact the nose seems to be a family trait.
Meanwhile, there were all the other portraits. Like the one of my grandmother's sister, Johanne, who had taught at a school in Oslo, which information I came to by accidentally coming across a photo of the house in which my great grandparents had lived in the 19th century and the first decade and some of the last century. And between the photo of Johanne Bull and my grandmother, there was a portrait photo of all five of the daughters of Nils Rosing Bull and Fanny Reinhardt Bull. They were arranged in descending order by age: Emma, Johanne, Alix, Fanny & Helga, five women looking at various points of the camera's perspective, not a one with a smile.

In fact, it seems that not smiling was the way of photos in those days. The only smiles I saw in any of the photos that I found were in the candid shots, like the one of my great grandfather after whom I am named walking with his fourth oldest daughter. He's got his hand at his hat, as the way of the times (tipping one's hat to another person, a sort of non-military salute that has obviously gone out of fashion, along with the tall hats themselves), with a smile on his face.
And in that smile I can see the human being who was part of the human being who sat me on his knee when I was just a little tyke to tell me about his mother and her family in Norway.
In the end I was able to get some perspective on the people from whom I am descendant and the people who are part of my family's past.
We in this part of the madness of today's multiculturalism miss out on the way in which family and heritage mean nothing much any more to many. Most people in the Middle East, owing mostly to the arch-conservative & hideously over-zealous nature of Islam, have no idea of their family's past back more than one or two generations. To know that there was a person in the 1500s from whom it is possible to chart the growth and expansion of the family name means little to those folks. But that is their loss, not mine.
I am glad to know who came before me. It not only gives those peoples' lives a reason to be beyond keeping the DNA around, it also gives me some idea of the humanity that is involved in just being here at all.
Five women were born to a couple in Norway, a couple which had very close ties high up in the government of the country at the time, and all five women got married. Out of them only three are known to have had children. One was Emma, the first, with two daughters by her husband, Reidar Müller. The daughters' names are not recorded.
It's easy to reconcile the lack of info on daughters born at the end of a family name. It wasn't the nature of those times – any more than it is today, despite all our egalitarian claims of human worth – to consider that the offspring of daughters were just as worthy of being remembered and traced as those of the male line. If the end of a branch in the Bull clan tree led to daughters, then that was the end of the show. No questions asked, no names taken, to witness marked.
My father, bless his curmudgeonly heart, didn't think that way and thus passed on to me the family name that his grandfather (my great-grandfather and the man after whom I and my uncle were named) had probably thought would die with him. I ended up knowing just enough to be dangerous in a time when family heritage & information about descendancies became communicable at the speed of light, minus the velocity factor of the comm link and all that.
But I digress.
Here I sit, looking at the pages of a family history that my great grandfather started, seeing his name & his wife's name and the names of all five of their daughters and the names of the daughters' husbands and cryptic notes that say "three daughters" or "two sons."
In the case of my grandmother Helga, those two sons were George and Nils Young, men who went to their graves aware of their mother's heritage and quite sure that they could and would pass it on.

I look at the other pictures at the Norsk Folkemuseet found under searches for other names, not the last of which is my last name. I get some interesting hits. Like this one of a woman and a child, taken around 1913, when my father would have been two years old or so. I like to think that the picture, catalogued with the name Young is more than just a simple shot in a family album. I wonder at the woman's face, looking for any shape that would remind me of mine. I look at the child and think how much my father took pleasure in my having served in the US Navy – or about that sailor's hat he got me when I was just a little tyke on a bicycle.
Anything can happen.
Look at the pictures that I've already found. Sure, it's hard to be that lucky that many times in a row. And sure, I can fantasize all I want: I may never find pictures of my father's family anywhere, although I know that his picture is in a couple school records at the Yavapai County/Camp Verde historical society's museum, to my potential good fortune.

I'm left now with a couple questions for the archivists of family histories. First, where are those three daughters? What were their names and who did they marry, if they did? And what happened to their offspring, my somewhat distant cousins?
I can imagine that out there in the great void of genetic drift there are people who are alive today because a few of the five daughters of Nils Rosing Bull and Fanny Reinhardt had kids of their own and thus might have had grandkids to spoil. I can imagine that I might some day meet those folks, those sons and daughters of my grandmother's sisters. I can imagine that such a meeting would be fraught with the usual half-hearted, hesitant greetings that might evolve into friendships, at the very least, or occasional contacts to keep track of who comes next in the line. In the end, as always, it makes me wonder at the foolishness by which we high-order, third of a distant line of chimps live when we allow life at all.

I know that my life and all other life on this little green planet of the clocks will be as unofficially permanent as the photons fighting their way to the sun's upper layers and out into space. Somewhere along the line there will be nothing left, on a time scale that makes of my brief time considerably less than the nerve impulse that turns into a blink of the eye. I know this with a cold, firm steadfastness that makes people wonder how I can get up in the morning and carry on. But it's that knowledge, that sense of the absolute impermanence, that admission that only nothing lasts forever that makes these tours through records and time to old faces and faces never seen before – at least by me – that do give importance to what we do with our lives.
On the one hand, nothing we think is absolute and valuable will remain of this place in the universe millions of years hence. On the other, it is only our lives that give meaning and value to life. If we choose to see life as something we have to do in preparation to die – such as Islam and Christianity propose we do, sometimes with a rabid vengeance that reveals the truth of those lies – then who we are and who we come from means nothing. But that also allows some to chose for me when I should die and that I reject out of hand.
Life and the lives of those who have brought us into being here are more important than any imaginary friends or putative gods. And no, we are not gods. We are lucky animals who can see that we are lucky animals, at least if we try. Our childish make-believe of divine agency are useless frittering away priceless energy and time.
Live is important only if we want to make it so.
We don't need gods or prophets or saviors or wizards to do it for us.
We make life important.
And all those who have led to us being here, whether we wish to admit it or not, know this now in their absence as much as we should know this now in our presence.
Thus I take joy in knowing what my grandmother looked like as a young woman, even if I do know that she took her own life because she lost her fear of the dark, that after years of torture from the rage of my father's alcoholic father. I am sad that my father never sought to speak of this to me. I am sad that he never told me about his mother's grave in Arizona, unmarked, unheralded, unremembered but in a cryptic note in a ledger hidden now in a museum. I am horribly sad for that.
But I know who my grandmother was and the family from which she came. Dad was proud enough of that to pass that on to me. And I am proud to say that I am the son of George Bull Young, son of Thomas W. Young and Helga Bull, two tortured souls whose importance to me is outshown only by the importance that I give my father & mother all these years gone.
Dad became an orphan when his mother died. I became an orphan when my sister & I buried our mother, Audrey Elizabeth Schreiber Young, next to her husband. But my sister and my father and my mother's family are still here in my blood and bone and in my sons' presence on this planet.
Sis & I are lucky to have been given as much of the story as we got. We were blessed by the love that blessed our parents and that is more than enough to last forever too.

Er Denne Frøken Hun, Min Bestemor?

2007-11-01T13:27:00.000-04:00

You gotta love the InterWebs. They're a bunch of tubes, see? And the best part about the InterWebs and the tubes is how much stuff there is in them tubes that you can get to and look at if you are patient. Or if you're a patient. Don't make much difference. Either way, you can find stuff you didn't even know existed and some of it still don't exist. That's what explains things like Ted Jesus Christ God running for president. And it explains how, if you speak Norwegian, you can find pictures of your long-lost grandmother who died when your father was just a little tyke.
At which point he never spoke Norwegian again.
Which is another story.
So, there I am, poking around on the InterWebs, cruisin' the tubes, when it occurs to me that I have never seen a picture of my paternal grandmother. And being the delusional sort that I be, I google up my grandmother's name & a couple Norwegian words and smack the return key.
Zippo-bang, just like that, up pops a link to a Norwegian website where, a couple clicks later, I end up staring at a couple photos, taken in the late 1800s, of a woman who might just be my father's grandmother. One of the photos I recognize real quick 'cause the face of the person in the photo is a person with my father's face.
This leads me to confer with the text.
I have both the 1936 and the 1976 edition of the family history, first published from the hand of my great-grandfather at the end of the 19th Century. These books I am able to read – sometimes with the help of a dictionary & most times with the hopes that I'm getting it right 'cause the words in the dictionary don't make any sense to me – because my mother, who taught me to read when I was about four years old, got me a book on the Norwegian language back when I was maybe 11 or 12. Before puberty kicked in, which explains why it was so easy to learn.
We won't talk about German.
Conferring with the text leads me to the discovery that there were three people of approximately the same living in Norway at the time my grandmother was alive & living there. All three people had the same first name. So I have to wonder which of the three women with the same name belong to the photos that I have found in the museum's photo archive. With a little bit of stupid luck, some fiddling with numbers and by looking at the other photos in the same archive, I manage to figure out that it's extremely likely that the woman in the pictures is indeed my grandmother.
After all these years.
After all the years of silence in which my father guarded his loss and sense of betrayal, after all the non-stories and the significant absence of any real details about his mother or his mother's family, here I sit looking at the face of a girl who would become my grandmother and who would take her own life.
It was both revealing and relieving to see these pictures & to recognize my father's face in them. Revealing in that I could finally put some sense in the physical structure of a face that I remember from my earliest moments on my father's knee. Relieving in that I was able to say that I now knew who my grandmother was. She wasn't a collection of separated & somewhat obfuscated details; she wasn't just a name and a country. She was a face, a person, a body in space and time, her image caught all those decades ago, likely well before she left Norway to meet my grandfather. She was real.
So the first thing I could do from there was to pass on the links to my sister, who has a billion some pictures of my mother in her possession, which I have been begging copies of for years now. As I made my way through the links & pictures and expanded my search or abandoned other searches, the pictures and the times began to fall together.
I could see my father being told that if he got lost he could always ask a policeman to take him back to a street number, now engraved in my memory from the repeated tellings, which street number in a Googlemaps search leads to nothing at all. I could see the name of the street and the numbers getting confused in his mind, and how the street itself maybe didn't exist. Perhaps he was remembering more than one memory. Either way he did change when his mother died. Probably a large part of what he had as a child died with her & he was never ever after able to reconstruct the scenes of that time in his infancy when he was a Norwegian kid.
The pictures of my great-grandfather and his daughter pretty much confirmed it for me: I was looking at family. I even found a picture of a woman, listed by last name only, whose name was that of my father's maternal grandmother, the widow whom he visited with his mother in 1914 after his maternal grandfather's death.

In the grand scheme of things this was a minor league discovery. Anybody could do it. All they need is a good sense of the language they're searching in – or the complicity of an online dictionary system – and good enough luck to have the things they're seeing be available on the InterWebs. In another sense this entire enterprise is a naught for nothing game.
Neither my life nor the lives of my parents or their parents on back to the first proto-life organic molecule will count for much in another 500 million years or another five billion years. Eventually all of this, our planet, our hopes, our confusion and delusions and dreams will be dust in the darkness. The Parthenon and the Great Wall will be out there in bits and pieces, waiting for the next conflation or collapse into gravity. Whoever comes along after that will never know that we were even here, providing they even come to be and evolve to the level of consciousness that leads to archives of pictures and paintings with unsure provenance or identity.
We can guess that this might be the second time that our solar system has been involved in a project like this. If so, anyone who lived through the first trip through gravity, time & space is a blank cipher, basically zero. Nothing. If there were anything like us before, it lived and died and disappeared into time without any connection to us other than the molecules we share today with that past.
The same will be our future.
Still, it is satisfying to me to get this far and know this much about who I am and who came before me, who today are part of me like the atoms of the sun might include someone's face from a time long since.
That's why these pictures are important to me. It's also why I am amazed by the luck of finding them. The satisfaction of having made the discovery is almost as great as the surprise at finding all these little bits and pieces of my face in a record that we have mainly by luck.
And finally, I know what my grandmother looked like. I can see her eyes and know about mine and my sons' eyes. It's really pretty cool.