12/22/02
Preface: My first year of college, and I'm living in the Pearne House and starting my memoirs, Pearne House Days And Stranger Things. Upstairs is a box of notebooks belonging to a woman named Andrea, along with a spinning wheel. Roommates tell me a bit about this woman, then I meet her when she returns to the state in November or early December – and she procedes to spend a few weeks living at the Pearne House, rummaging through her stuff and engaging me in some of the most intreguing conversations. She was 28 and living by the moment, smoking to keep her hunger in check. I was freshly 19 and knew the real world was out there, somewhere, so a guide or at least a map and a flashlight would be very welcome. She found a place to call her own after the powers-that-be said she couldn't stay there rent-free; a tin shack on a ranch on Lateral B, just a few miles away from the college. And such a bargain at $75 a month: woodstove, kitchenette, a bunk, and a place to keep her horse.
My family was going to Hawaii for Christmas, and I'd been trying to make it clear since July that I wouldn't be on that plane. (Why would I wanna be trapped on a fucking island with these people?) Andrea invited me to spend Christmas with her at the tin shack, and I accepted. It had snowed about a foot prior to December 24, so my best friend Randy gave me a ride out to her place since there was no way I'd be able to get there safely on my moped, and I made him agree to pick me up the next day at a given time. She was way the hell out. I arrived at her accomidations with a pint of ice cream and some small useful gift in hand, but before I knocked on her door I looked around. I was literally nowhere, or a few yards from the middle of it, and it was white as far as the eye could see, with even the ridge around the Valley blanketed securely in snow. It seemed like even the fences, the cattle, the horses, and the other galvanized buildings were hidden, or maybe that was my snowblinded perception of being... there, wherever There was, there I was. I was the only thing of color and substance in the picture. I turned and knocked on her door, and she welcomed me into her relatively warm home. I sat down at the foot of her bed and looked at the spinning wheel, which has been in use to turn bulk wool into one cohesive thread she could knit with. She offered me a slice of homemade bread, which was more like hardtack because of the lack of leavening and the fall-right-to-the-floor-of-your-gut effect it had as I ate it like a bloodless Holy Communion. It was vaguely sweet, and I had no doubt I'd put enough fiber in my diet after eating this.
She'd changed religions with the frequency of Bob Dylan, and in some of the same elections too. At this moment, she didn't believe in the celebration of Christmas but she wasn't free of her past so also didn't reject that giving someone a gift was the order of the day. I don't remember what I brought beside that pint of ice cream (and we reasoned that since it's food, it's useful). She gave me two things as well: the scarf she was working on at the spinning wheel, once she'd finished making it, and an original 1971 (UNI label) cassette of Elton John's Madman Across The Water. I tried to reject the tape, because she had been carrying it for years in that leather bag of hers, which held the few worldly possessions she clung to – I felt that if one hangs onto something for so long, so many places, par ardua, it must have some meaning to that person. Maybe so, she said, but I give it to you. She said she was just lightening her load, and she had borrowed my tape player when she moved out of the Pearne House so I knew she'd had the ability to play it, but no matter, she wanted me to have this. We sat around talking for the rest of the night, and since the room was lit with one exposed 60 watt bulb with a drawstring night fell on us too. The room was going as black inside as it was white outside, and it was becoming about as empty and desolate inside my head as it was outside the shack.
The next morning I don't remember. It was Christmas Day. Silent night, holy night, turned into day. I laid there as she went out to feed her horse. I thought for a moment about my family, how they were trying to run from their own mortality (we'd always spent the holiday with my mother's parents, who had died the year before and thereby Christmas of 1985 was mostly going through the hollow motions in hopes things would be the same) and hoped they were finding the distraction they sought. I was... there. Closer to what the Christ child saw when He looked around, but without a star or wise men presenting material wealth. Humble. All is calm, all is bright, as the sun reflected off the plains of white. Harrod didn't want me dead, but I was essentially already slain; I felt like a ghost, more or less invisible, blending in with my descriptionless surroundings. I think I did finally get up and dressed, and walked outside around the tin shack to make sure I was seeing the things I was not seeing. Andrea came back and we sat at the woodstove trying to have one of those remarkable conversations. The only sound we heard was Randy's car returning on schedule, by which time she and I didn't have many useful words left.
Postface: Randy took me to my aunt's house to get my gifts, the ones my parents had left there for everyone who normally came to the Christmas party as well as any others the extended family felt inclined to give me, and as we drove back to my place listening to Boston's much-belated Third Stage I said he could have any package in the box, didn't matter which. He was dubious about that, but I encouraged him and he pointed to one cubic box. I handed it to him. He says he was just kidding, but I tried to force it on him. He declined me again. Okay, I said, so let's see what you missed out on... it's a giant Hershey's Kiss. I open it to have a snack, and there's a $50 bill tucked underneath it. His eyes widened, realizing he would have hit it big, then swore that if he had accepted the package he surely would have given me the money back. I shrugged and said I wouldn't have accepted it, because I gave him the gift sight unforseen. He doubted me but at that moment I'd just gotten back from an absolute void, and nothing material mattered to me. Enjoy the nihilism while it lasts. A month after, Andrea has burned her spinning wheel for fuel. About a year later I gave the scarf to charity because other people needed a warm length of bulky wool more than I did, and I hoped that someone talented would find that and spin it even finer to make a sweater for a child. I was the last person Andrea saw when she left the Valley for good in 1991, which was pure coincidence because I worked at the gas station she was filling up her van at before she and her new Middle Eastern husband moved eastward. But the cassette... this was a meaningful gift and I still have it; this became my first Christmas album, and I've listened to it three times in the course of writing this. It's on the final song right now, "Goodbye":
and now that it's all over
the birds can nest again
I'll only snow when the sun comes out
I'll shine only when it starts to rain
And if you want a drink
Just squeeze my hand
And wine will flow into the land
and feed my lambs
For I am a mirror
I can reflect the moon
I will write songs for you
I'll be your silver spoon
I'm sorry, I took your time
I am the poem that doesn't rhyme
Just turn back a page
I'll waste away, I'll waste away... --#2
12/15/02
My household hasn't been in the Christmas spirit. Not that we haven't got the boxes of ornaments out, not that we haven't bought presents which are stacked to the rafters, not that we haven't put our antiques on display so others may enjoy them, but we simply haven't found ourselves excited that it's the most wonderful time of the year. We bought a tree on Friday and decorated it Saturday night, so the biggest obstacle has been surmounted (other than wrapping that mountain of gifts). We still haven't become enthusiastic. And I see that it could be a tough task since I work until 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve and we both have to be at work again on Boxing Day – so must leave work on the 24th and pick up the wife and her mother, drive across Snoqualmie Pass to the sis-in-law's house (arriving around 2am), find sleep, and make merry in the daylight then return across the Pass that evening because my spouse must work the next morning. Oy to the world! I have at least been finding myself reconnected to others: my mother emailed me (yes, mail the gifts please, no calendars!), I got a call from my bud MeLissa this morning (working graveyard shift at Toys R Us, groggy elves), and the other day in the supermarket I stood in line behind my old girlfriend Sheri (lost 100 pounds, moved 5 blocks away from me [yipe!], and took her mom to see Tori Amos).
I thought I met Jesus in the Safeway one night a decade ago. I was walking down the magazine aisle around 8 p.m. and came across a gentleman I knew from my church, standing there reading something. He'd been a Scoutmaster and had on a couple previous occasions asked me to join this service group for teenage boys, which he had been a leader in. Neither of those groups suited me despite the obvious chick appeal so I'd always turned him down. He said hello and we chatted for a moment about this and that, and he had this warm glow in his eyes. I was having a hard time getting past that warm glow, for it was fairly entrancing. I could smell the alcohol on his breath so wondered how much of this glow was the meat and how much was the sauce. And he starts speaking in religious terms, not in a preaching or a conversion way (since you can't convert someone who attends the same church, though I hadn't been there in a couple years) but more of a "you are loved, did you know that?" manner. It was attractive, alluring. The warning system in my head was searching for more data, trying to decipher whether this was the Savior embodied in an acquaintance or whether it was something sinister. I had a mental image of a scene from Disney's bastardization of Kipling's The Jungle Book – Sher-Kaa the python giving the Mowgli the man-cub the mesmerising eye while crooning "Trust In Me." It was all very convincing, and I haven't any doubt that a person can meet their Lord wandering the halls of a supermarket (consider John Denver meeting his maker George Burns in "Oh, God!"), but... I had to get back to my shopping, so I adjusted my doubting-Thomas cap and wished him well as I moved on, asking myself (as I often did) what the hell just happened.
Years later, while talking to a friend from the old 'hood, I discovered what could have been behind that moment (and to be completely fair, I can't rule out that he did have good intentions and was possessed of the Holy Spirit at that moment) – I hadn't known before, because I was a child when the story he told took place and kids are normally sheltered from realities as such, that this pillar of the community was a convicted tot-twaddler. My friend had been one of the boys he messed with, and ultimately the one who brought the anvil down upon him. That look of love in his eye potentially was a look of lust, it dawned upon me. There could have been a religious experience which had nothing to do with religion. I don't know (I don't need to know) what the truth of the moment was; I needed to tell this story to get it out of me and into the ether. --#2
12/10/02
When I first heard Trans-Siberian Orchestra on one of those late-night TV shows, I was entranced. A heavy metal cover of "Carol of the Bells"! So I spent a few sheckles to get their two albums the other day, figuring that's what they do. Well... Along with a couple (yes, a couple) hard rockin' renditions of old Christmas favorites, they've put in some acoustic versions (like you can't find those all over) and a few songs they wrote themselves which may or may not be destined to become traditional favorites someday (likely not). And they write on themes, which is swell if you're Roger Waters, but this is more like Dream Theatre [sorry Lance, I had to say it]. Disappointment.
Ever since the fourth grade, people have thought that I was gay. This has merely been annoying, never something I've gotten into a fight about because I was always outnumbered – and then there was the month few people were talking to me at recess in the sixth grade so I had the time and mental space to listen to what the world around me was saying, and that was when I realized people had no flippin' idea what they were talking about. I didn't feel so bad when I realized that the kids I went to school with couldn't define their terms, and if they could I didn't fit into it. That's where I realized also that homophobia is many people's Achilles heel; they fear or lack comprehension of anyone who is different from them (or very much the same but they don't want to admit it!). This came in handy a few years ago: I went to visit a female friend in her sedate neighborhood, and it seems this neighborhood had a disproportionate number of white trash bullies. So I'm waiting for her bus to show up, and they decide it's time to hassle me. So I start running across this empty lot to get more in the public view and my foot catches this juniper root... wham, down I go and cut my middle. I make it to the street, and they are circling around me using their homophobic taunts, and one of these charming twits is holding a fence picket. I see your pink slip, boys. I touched the bleeding wound on my side and said, "If you think I'm gay, you must also think I have the AIDS virus. I'm bleeding, so THINK CAREFULLY, *do* you want to make physical contact with me by hitting me??" When put into that context, their knees went out on them and after a minute of rumination they decided they had other things they needed to be doing. Stupid fuckers. It wasn't until college I met anyone who was gay (okay, found out a friend from high school was, and at that same time lived with a gay man at the college dorms), and this is where I defeated my own lack of understanding; some of the coolest folks I've ever known prefer their own gender and have an outrageous sense of humor. Yet this whole homo shadow has followed me for life, and I can think of a couple women who used the following phrase after they'd been in my bed: "I was sure that you were gay, but I guess this proves you aren't." Truthfully that doesn't prove anything, there are plenty of actual homosexuals who play it straight, but ladies thanks for letting me change your mistaken minds... Now could you go back in time and tell that to the girls I was trying to make hay with in school? (That's got to be the ultimate contradiction: girls turning down the advances of a boy because they think he's gay.)
But I haven't been completely chaste either. Yes, I maintain that I have never had a dick in my mouth or my ass, and never put it in any other guy's ass either. (Their mouth? Several times!) I have a bunch of stories I'd be glad to tell here, but for the fact that most of the people these involve are straight and wouldn't want people to know they had considered the alternatives. I never had to go looking around for curiosity because it seems these things always came to me. Only once did I ever debate which side I wanted to play for, which was in 1987, and even then I wasn't getting anything from anyone of any gender so it was a moot point. And that particular couple months of merely saying I was bisexual had one funny anecdote: I'd told a friend at that time about my stance, and five years later a former girlfriend came to me very angry about it – she'd heard what I'd said from the friend's mother in church. She of all people should have known I was straight, heh heh. And it was during that short period that I ever gave a serious flirt. I've never propositioned anyone for anything, save that time when I was 10 that after however many instances of the boy next door wanting to dingle with my dangler I said, "I'm doing all the work here, show me yours!" (He did, behind a bush. I had a thingie similar, just wanted to confirm we're all constructed as such.) But the flirt... My bud Wayne and I were in Budget Tapes & Records rummaging around, as we did all the time, and there was this counterperson by the name of Alex. And he was quite divine, avant, and angular. It's around 9 p.m. and we didn't know when the store closed, so he asks Alex, "What time do you get off?" I chimed in, in soto voce, "...and how?" He blushed! I think I blushed too. A couple months later I got a postcard from the store, telling me that this Art of Noise cassette I'd ordered couldn't be obtained (in the meantime I'd found it elsewhere, which had two stacks of the title), upon which he had written a missive saying that maybe we should get together and talk. Advertising pays, I guess, but the end result is that nothing ever happened; I could never get to town while he was still living there, he went off on Mormon mission for two years (during which time he asked me to mail him some Manscape magazines in a plain brown wrapper), was back for one week (during which time I visited him for a couple hours but we'd forgotten everything we'd discussed in our letters) before he headed off to BYU, and the last time I saw him was 1992 when he brought his bohemian girlfriend to Mel's Diner to meet me. End of that story. He wasn't the most tempted I've ever been – that would have been the gay guy who looked like Julian Lennon that I met at a New Years party, whom I had to politely turn down because it'd be rude to come over with one person then, uh, come with another, but had my girlfriend continued to piss me off (and had he been able to stay another half hour) history might have been different. :) People tell me all the time that they love how unabashèd I am in the Daybook; this is no different, I'm telling you something true that we're not supposed to be talking about, not for shock value per se but to express what I wasn't able to speak when it mattered most: I'm straight but not narrow... and as Ministry said, my favorite weapon is the look in your eyes. --#2
12/3/02
Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I survived it. To the readership residing outside of North America: Thanksgiving is a holiday in the United States (and Canada; same day but different reasons) where families and friends come together to eat turkey, watch televised sports, and chat merrily (or not) in rememberance of how the Native Americans saved the white man's butts in 1620. The white man promptly thanked their hosts by putting them into reservations or massacring them, but that was after dinner. My CD-RW, a Phillips 8x4x32, ate too much turkey and died twitching. That was a lousy way to go; at first the computer would crash at random intervals, then I was able to predict crashes by watching the read light on the CDROM go on without there being a disk in the drive or an application needing to read the drive. I booted into DOS and watched it do the same thing, meaning it wasn't a Windows virus. I removed the IDE cable from the drive, and watched the lights do their thing (without taking down the computer in the process) so it was indeed the drive going toes-up, six months after the warranty expired. So the next day [info for foreigners: the biggest shopping day of the year here] I went to a few stores and compared models & prices, and bought a HiVal 40x12x48. What a difference! Toast in under 5 minutes! But back to the festivities. I spent most of the day keeping the cat company (he doesn't like strangers so he stayed in my bedroom window) and working on my brother-in-law's bamboo flooring website. (Major update to be revealed there soon, it has to be approved by the council of elders first.) Speaking of Cheddar, I got to witness a social experiment. He's always been an only child, as far as I know (knowing nothing of his first four years). A couple of my neicephew had kittens in their van, so they brought this little black fuzzball in and I put it down in front of Ched on the windowsill to see what his reaction would be. It went something like this: Kitten hisses. Kitten hisses again. Kitten hisses once more. Kitten hisses yet again. Cheddar sits there with this look like, "what form of beast are you?" and cautiously starts sniffing the kitten's nose. Kitten hisses. Cheddar leans back and hisses in reply – but not in a threatening manner, he seems to be backing away in fact; hissing is in his vocabulary an adjective, not an interjection. I take the kitten away since Cheddar is no match for it, Ched forgets all about the conversation, and I hand the kitten back to my nephew, much to his chagrin because the kitten is very riled up and clawing anything that it comes into contact with (especially the boy's chest).
I saw someone at the store the other day who I haven't talked to in years. Long ago I was hanging out at a Christmas In July sale at the Deseret Industries thriftstore down the street, and there was this young woman working there. She was about to turn 18, fairly cute, definitely curvy, and had a good sense of humor; her name was Pauline. And I'd go visit her there once or twice a week, and sometimes we'd go to the K-mart next door for lunch. One day she reveals to me that she's engaged <squeal!> to this 16-year-old guy from her church. Okay, the wheels in my mind got a little gummed, not just because this tasty creature was "taken" but because of the absurdity of the concept of a kid talking marriage before he's even old enough to get a full-time job (he was a sophomore!!! finish puberty first, willya?) and more absurdly that she was taking him up on it. Hmm, loss of respect for her intellect set in, and that last day I saw her was her birthday so I wanted to give her a hug and wish her good things, but she refused the hug. Okay, I can't wish you good things then, see ya. Not long after she wasn't working there anymore. So I see her the other day and she has two kids above age 4 and a man in tow who looks like your average minimum wager. It's not my place to judge, sure, but sometimes you wind up looking at others and wondering what brand of Crack® they were smoking when they made big decisions. (Yes, the same thing can be said for my first engagement, but that wasn't street drugs, that was hardcore hormones. Different story.)
And if you happen to be in the area, please come to the Parkland/Spanaway branch of the Pierce County Library (137th & Pacific, Tacoma WA) to see our display of antique Christmas ornaments. I've filled the display case by the front door with all kinds of cheer from yesteryear. It'll be there for the rest of the year. And to the fanclub: No, we're not having our annual fête this year, we're overtaxed on our time as it is. Sorry! --#2
11/25/02
Last night I went to a nephew's high school play, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and it was really good on a couple planes. The play itself was a musical (that's ambitious) and a farce, and it wasn't quite an Andrew Lloyd Webber or a Neil Simon – as my spouse pointed out, the plot was a little contrived and the songs weren't memorable – but the choreography was surprisingly well done and there was that aspect you don't expect from high school plays: sex. And I don't just mean where the businessman tells a secretary by the name of Heddy Larue that he doesn't think it wise to call her by her first name. (Not as many people laughed as they should have.) That song called "A Secretary Is Not A Toy" where all the women drop a pencil and have to bend over for it, hmmm, and then there was the girl who played Miss Larue who probably gets ogled like that in real life as well (I couldn't have been the only one to notice that she was wearing a black bra through most of the scenes but when she's in a peasant dress at one point she's in a white tubetop, attention backstage crew...) laying the size of her 'talents' on thick. The woman from the personnel department in stirrups and a thong was a nice touch. We had an enjoyable night out on the town, saw that neice who was elsewhere when the rest of her family came over last month, and I don't think I've been to a high school play since my backstage dealings with The Emperor's New Clothes in 1986 (unless you count videographer a year later, which I don't since I didn't get invited to the party afterwards, and Crimes Of The Heart in college circa 1989 though it *was* about as skillfully produced). Kudos to the cast at Stanwood High for pulling off the singing and dancing! (as well as not being shut down by the school board two months earlier!)
Cryptic license plate, which somehow got past the State's Licensing Dept: PB4UGO We saw that on I-5 yesterday and I didn't notice any kids in that guy's Oldsmobile... And in other cryptic developments, the R.A.T. suggestion of the week is to amuse yourself with the absurdity that passes for marketing to consumers. I needed a lift last night so I plopped down on the couch and flipped between channel 2 (QVC), channel 26 (ShopMSNBC), and channel 64 (HSN). It was pretty prime – QVC was hawking a truly random assortment of items which changed every 4 minutes (exercise equipment, makeup mirror, handy dandy doodads, etc.) with someone who likely spent no time ever using any of the things she was raving about; ShopMSNBC was offering diamond jewelry, and somewhere between the excited New York Jewess ("oh-my-gawd!") and enthusiastic Pakistani ("I don't know what to say" he yammered over and over) the truth lies; HSN was featuring designer dolls and the woman was describing every minute and obvious detail in depth so that even the blind could enjoy the overpriced not-for-play critters. I couldn't laugh hard enough.
Like anyone with holiday megalomania, I buy a bunch of ornaments every year – here, it's mostly antiques but there are a couple new ones to expand the Old World blown glass collection. Christmas joy is my karmic catch-up for the malaise of autumn setting in. The problem is that I try to be a purist (try) and celebrate the season as previous generations did, but one pretty much has to be in a bubble to make that completely successful. Sure, I can put up my grandmother's ornaments on the tree, lit with C-6 lights and a string of NOMA bubblers, and buy a blown glass mushroom from Poland to hang next to the pickle hidden around one side, then warm up the wassail (un-authentically there's no alcohol involved, but that's just me). But this does nothing about the commercialization of the holiday. See, I'm sure that fifty to a hundred years ago, the folks who made holiday decorations thought what they were creating would be popular for a few years then disappear to give way to the Next Big Thing, which they'd be making then if they were still in the business. What happened is that the stuff made back then has endured, in actual object as well as in image; consider Radko's resuccitation of the Shiny-Brite brand from the 40's through 70's, some of these products are reproductions of things I own while others only look like they could have existed then, "just like Grandma's." The Christmas clutter of today doesn't have that soul – you can't tell me that in thirty years from now we're still going to be putting plastic balls on the tree with the characters from Monsters, Inc. adorning them. I can hope to Jah that in fourty years, no one would even remember what the heck those "#3" plastic light covers in the tattered box labeled "NASCAR" mean. And when thumbing through the Christmas cards in Grandpa's box, fifty years hence, people will not think that the picture of Baby Goofy and Baby Mickey trimming a tree with a red ball hanging off of Baby Pluto's upraised tail for Mickey to grab is on the same par as a Currier & Ives litho. (Or worse still, the picture is Baby Kermit and Baby Miss Piggy, with Baby Scooter handing an ornament up.) A friend asked how one gets away from the contemporary model of Christmas, to a place without advertisement and noise. I said I'd done that once, which is once more than most people ever do (and would ever would want to do, considering what it entails; hint: the homeless have a clearer view of that star in the east)... and in the near future, I'll tell the story of Silent Night. Stay tuned.
I was driving along one night after having been out with a friend and I stopped at the local filling station. It was cold and dark and foggy as I pulled in, but I could see the silhouette of a petite female walking up the street uncomfortably. I hoped that I could fill the tank and then catch up with her, if she was needing a ride somewhere; it was not a night fit for man nor beast. I pumped my gas, and a few minutes later once I was back on the road I saw her again, about six blocks up the road. And she had her thumb out. I pulled over and she dashed to get into the car. I didn't catch her name, though she said it in a way that resembled it being spoken from the next room, and the dome light revealed she her face as fairly worn. Her two front teeth were either dirty or diseased, either of which was plausible because she was so bucktoothed that she couldn't shpeak shtraight. And it took about three second before I got a good whiff of the alcohol; she said she'd been drinking beer and got rather buzzed, but there was more malt than hops to the air so I presumed the beer was a chaser to a bottle of rotgut. Where to, mack? She wanted a lift home to 165th, and I lived down that-a-way so this wasn't much of an imposition, that and whatever conscience I had couldn't abide in the thought of anyone walking four miles in pea soup wearing a short leather coat, especially a woman (chivalry isn't dead, and trust me the average person who would consider my 'weaker-sex' presumption to be sexist wouldn't turn down a warm car with a clean-cut white driver when faced with walking four miles after midnight in 35°F mist). So she's chatting away while I'm being polite, keeping the speed limit so that I don't get stopped by any of the several police cars I've seen so far – and I told her I was surprised they didn't give her any notice since she'd walked by a couple of them a minute before I got to the gas station – and she asks if I date. Hmm, is she asking what I think? It wasn't merely the fact that I was taken that made me say that I don't, it was also grave concern for my health. She upped the ante a little and asked, "Can't you help a girl out? Twenty dollars." I don't have that, I said to her; I don't want that, I said to myself. "Ten dollars." I wondered whether her dignity was hidden somewhere beneath the bottom of the barrel, and shook my head politely. It'd be just my luck that the local authorities would want to stop me, either for speeding or for solicitation, so I was not going to give them reason to question either. She decided that since she wasn't going to get a buck or a fuck from me, and due to weather from anyone else, she had a better destination in mind, citing her roommate's heroin habit she didn't want to be around, so I took her to a friend's house a few blocks in the other direction. It was a long walk from where she had been (just not as long), so I was still doing a wayward soul a good deed. She opened the door and I could see her face again in the domelight, reinforcing that I didn't want to contribute to whatever she was fundraising for (and how she was fundraising). She took my hand and kissed it, and she thanked me for the ride. I said in earnest, "Please take care of yourself." And into the mist she vaporized. I drove home with the windows down to air out the car, since it now smelled of a distillery; I'd given her some warmth and in return I had to rid myself of it. I smiled and figured that I could now see out the sides of the car so this was a welcome trade. --#2
11/19/02
Some time ago, I purchased an uninterruptable power supply for my computer, so that when the power drops (as happens here frequently) the machine will stay on, giving me the ability to not lose everything suddenly if we have a sudden spike and stay on long enough to save my work if the outage lasts more than half a second. I admit I went cheap and bought a Wal-mart brand device which has this nasty habit of turning on when the power drops for half a second, then dropping itself a second later – tantamount to Clark Kent seeing a meteorite bearing down on you, saying "I'll save you!", he catches the rock before it hits you, then he trips on his own shoelace and crushes you with it as he falls. But anyway, this UPS has some indicator lights, and as long as I've had it the fault light has been on. The manual says this means there's a problem with grounding. But this is on one of the few 3-prong outlets in this old house, so I thought that was odd. So I finally got off my duff and decided to wire this outlet directly to the grounding pole, which is five feet away from where I'm sitting. A little drilling, a lot of banging on the plastic 'handy-box' the outlet is mounted in, some shingle removal, and I've got a copper wire going from the outlet to the pole. And the UPS is still reading that there's a problem, even when physically attached to the ground. I visit yonder hardware store for a new outlet (ground-fault interrupting instead of self-grounding) and an outlet tester. Get everything assembled and the tester says that indeed I still have an open ground. So I tried out the other outlets in the house. None of them are grounded, so what exactly are that grounding pole and all the copper lines going to it doing?! I figured out a solution, at last... a wire to the air vent right below the outlet. Ahh, there, we have ground. I attached the outside ground lead to that for safety's sake (grounding the ground?) and everything is good. Or until the next time the lights so much as flicker.
The two most powerful feelings a person can have, that which they can use for navigating through their day, are love and hate. Which are actually the same emotion pointed in different directions. There's a subtle branch of hate which I sometimes need to get me through my day, and that is disgust. It does fit in with Reality Avoidance Therapy quite well; when properly employed, disgust can help one pay no attention to their annoying coworkers, the picayunal trifles of their customers, the politics of the work situation, and the helplessness one can feel about their life and situation. But disgust doesn't come naturally to me, it must be cultivated. Oftentimes it comes at that place known as the breaking point, where I've hit my head on a wall and, like a good paramecium, this invoked a reverse and a turn of a few degrees to procede in a different direction. I'm not quite at the wall, but I am in its shadow, so before I see stars I feel I need to invoke disgust. The real solution to why I'd feel the need for disgust, as far as I can tell, is to get promoted to a position where not only do I not have to talk to incredibly challenging individuals [that's putting it nicely and obliquely] I also don't have to deal with emotionally grating coworkers. These positions exist, though every person I can name with such a job has had it since before I was hired and they're holding onto it like a pitbull on a T-bone – and what new positions similar I have seen open in the last year or two were phased out within a year, putting those lucky takers back where they started from (and behind some, they missed all the new information so have to catch up now). And these positions usually don't exist in the Seattle office I work in; every time something desireable comes along, the expectation is that the candidate will move to Pennsylvania or Georgia, which is fine if one is single and aloof, but I have a spouse and a mortgage, neither of which I'm not going to break my contract with. Let it be known I love my work and I have great coworkers. Let it be known those two entities are driving me batty because I usually dislike the callers and my officemates usually dislike me. Tonight I gave a teammate a ride home, as I often do, and we sat around and talked in the car for a long while about how neither one of us are popular, yet he is instantly is assumed to be shy and invisible while I am instantly assumed to be evil and ever-present. He told me a few things that one never hears because these things are usually said behind one's back, and while it's nothing I didn't know when I woke up today it was still information I didn't want to hear, because I don't want it to be true that people talk that way about me. Hmmm, inspiration for disgust, true. I have to be mad to be disgusted, not merely hurt, and therein lies the challenge. I told him that we've met coworkers who have no problem with being overlooked; they come to work, do their jobs, interact as little as possible with the people around them, and go home. I said that I've never been comfortable with that, regardless of the fact that's how it's been most of my life, ergo any overcompensation I make (like being a class clown) whether it is conscious or not. When he departed he asked me to consider everything he'd said, and all I could think were two things: a) you're telling me that one has to change their entire personality, something that is hardwired into who we are, to get anywhere, which isn't a viable option; b) I prefer my solution of getting away from that which bothers you, rather than trying to convince other people of how they should think [and remember, part of how I got the name 'Mushroom' stems from the acceptance that you can't change people's minds]. That's food for thought, the only way to be popular and acceptable is to accomplish the unrealistic and impossible. Fuck that. Hate me all you want if you don't have justification, just don't get in my way while I try to disentangle us from one another's hair. I'm checking the internal employment listings tomorrow, and while it won't surprise me a bit if there are no opportunities I'll never know until I look. There's got to be a positive use of the disgust I seek to feel raising in me. --#2
11/9/02
A coworker pointed out this link the other day and it bears sharing. Tech support isn't the only area where a person goes to work begrudgingly, deals with a bunch of substandard humans, cleans up messes entirely created by the customer that no one should have to get near, and hopes in the direction of finding a better life eventually. Okay, in thinking about it, a lot of jobs are like that, but anyway... This is the weblog of a 30 year old intelligent woman with a future, but her present is (and the last year has been) filled with being a clerk at a porno movie rental shop. It's a good read, very funny, and has many entries.
I had a bunch of snide things to say today but they seem to have disappeared. Which I suppose is for the better, though that does make for a shorter and less piss-your-pants funny Daybook entry. I won't call the people who came to install the new dishwasher yesterday "Amos & Andy" because they did the job quickly and professionally, and at the crack of an ass (8 a.m. on my day off), though one of them grabbed his wife's perfume instead of his own cologne that morning. (Paige tried to tell me the difference between perfume and cologne, which to most people is essentially the difference between a doll and an action figure: the gender of the person using the item. I said, "Darling, this was perfume; he smelled pretty.") Yes, the old dishwasher worked and it matched the other appliances, but my wife insisted (to her mother, who bought the device for us) that it did neither of those things very well. I will however call the people who are trying to keep their high school from putting on the Agatha Christie play Ten Little Indians because the title, not the content, is "racially insensitive", complete fucking idiots. Read the story yourself if the Montgomery County Gazette site is working (it isn't at the moment I'm writing this). The community in question is zero point five percent Native American, thus it isn't the Indians who feel this way, it's white people with too much time on their hands thinking on other people's behalf without proper consent again. I went to the first craft fair of the season, at the local high school, and reaffirmed that cute/country clutter/shabby chic/tolle painting still sucks. In two weekends the party will be at the local Lutheran college, and it's usually pretty cool since the vendors have nothing to do with the school and the students have nothing to do with the vendors. The one I went to, most of the vendors were parents of students, so it's a fund-raiser and I am all for that. The one we'll be going to in a few weeks, at another high school, is more commercial and while the vendors have almost nothing to do with the students or school (the occasional parent does sneak in), the students will be there to sell food and such, hoping to get a piece of the action. The shindig I really wanted to go to is at a local private school – a little cute stuff and a lot of rummage sale – but it seems that this was last week and I didn't know it until now. SHIT. Usually they advertise on a billboard down the street. Such events help me increase my antique Christmas crap collection; today I only got 7 (a box of 9 with two empty spaces) Shiny Brite ornaments and that was at the Goodwill, not the high school.
You know that phenomenon where a group of people will be talking or whatever, and suddenly the room goes totally quiet except for one person who was saying something, over the crowd noise to someone else, which they didn't want the rest of the world to hear? Something related to that happened to me when I was in the first or second grade, just a little more intense. I was at lunch recess at Outlook Elementary school and I had to go pee really bad. I kept waiting for recess to be over but it went on and on, and I couldn't hold it any longer. I looked for a place to pee where I could be discrete, figuring that going to the fence would be pretty obvious, and Jah only knows why I chose a tumbleweed in the middle of the playground toys because in retrospect that would likely be the least private place imaginable. But hey, I was a little kid and what back teeth I had were floating. So I looked around, no one seemed to be paying attention to me and this tumbleweed, so I let it flow. And three seconds into my whiz, there's the bell. Geesh, gotta finish this first. And this piss continued for an eternity (more accurately, a good ten to fifteen seconds), and I was getting nervous. I looked around as the stream continued without abatement, and now the entire playground is empty (that fast?!) but for a few stray kids who were within ten feet of the school – and me, in the middle of the playfield, facing a tumbleweed with my hands and body in the stereotypical urination pose. It finally ended, or maybe I just forced myself to stop since I'd regained a quart of my bladder back and couldn't stay there dead obvious any longer, and I raced for the building and hoped I wouldn't be considered tardy (this mattered to me, I was such a cowed and rule-abiding little kid). No one ever said anything about the matter, to my [further] relief. And I don't think I've broken a nervous sweat across my face going to the bathroom quite like that in the nearly thirty years since. --#2
11/3/02
I finally did it: I spent the weekend topping the overgrown crabapple tree out back. It looks much better now, though it's still standing and my original goal a year ago was to take the sucker down. It's not a willow but it is quite climbable. :) I also added a fan to my computer's behemoth case (unsure if that has any effect on internal temperature so far), replaced the 533 meg C: drive with a very fast 4.1 gig (8 second boot into Windows!) – but should you trust a hard drive you had to run through FDISK *five* times because of lockups during media validation? – and bought a joystick only to find that something's amiss here: my computer isn't recognising its presence, and my wife's machine isn't seeing it either. Guess I have to wait a bit more to play Pole Position. Yes, this is a new replacement... for a gamepad (did I ever mention how I hate modern videogame controllers?) which also wasn't being recognised. It's a new business, where I got these parts, and I gotta wonder (as the folks at the business do) about one thing: The map found in the ad in the Computer Source magazine the last two months points to the competition a block away. And in other news... Paige and I are putting our antique Christmas ornaments up for show in the Parkland/Spanaway Library's display case next month (we've done this before, in December '00), I found a copy of Level 42's Forever Now on a used music seller's website and it's coming in the mail (Nyhh! Nyhh! to the five people waiting for someone to offer it on Amazon.com) and my mum-in-law is bringing me more Wunderbars soon, yaaay!
Pardon me for a minute, I have a couple thoughts lodged diagonally in my brain and I need to pull them out. They may not mean anything to you but I have to excise them, and you might be amused or something. #1> The problem I have in looking back at mistakes I've made and stupid things I've done is that I find myself not so much wanting to have not done those things (which is the way we're supposed to feel) as to wanting to do those things slightly different to make them even worse (or better, depending on how one feels about committing whatever sin one is pursuing). Which is one reason why I'm glad that we can't go back and change our pasts, I'd have more things I'd need to RE-change. #2> My junior year of high school, I was going out with this girl from 60 miles away, who I think I've mentioned here before and there's a load of baggage associated so I'll just say that much. Seems I went to school for a couple years with this guy, Joe the Mumbling Ninny, who was her neighbor many moons earlier. I was coming home from school on a Friday and I had this feeling, "Karen's in town." But I figured that if that was so, she would have given me advanced notice or would call me sometime. Monday I get to school and Joe announces, "Hey, guess what? Karen spent the weekend at my house!" Shit, I was right about her being there, but wrong that she would give me the consideration I had come to expect. What followed is irrelevant, and a dear friend of mine who regularly reads this page was also romantically linked to him for a time after that event, so moving right along to what's jammed in my head: I've always thought of female attraction to Joe in the same way science thinks of flight to a bumblebee – it doesn't make logical sense and shouldn't happen, but somehow it just does.
I decided a week or two ago it was high time I went to visit a male friend of mine down the street I haven't seen since winter turned to spring this year. This wound up being a two-for-one deal, to my surprise: not only had my friend's girlfriend left him (for a bagboy at the supermarket) and the relatives he was keeping warm over the winter moved along, but a woman I never thought I'd see again was sitting in his living room. My bud and I met by our mutual appreciation of the Apple //GS long ago, when he was married to this woman's "sister"; that marriage ended about four years ago and the last time I saw her was a year or two before that, when she was about to move to Colorado. She's back in town, those two women are no longer friends, and so where does "family" go when they need a bite to eat and a perch? Yeah, he never figured he's see her again either but everything changes with time. I sat gabbing with her for a couple hours, watching The Simpsons over and over, and seeing how her two oldest girls and his daughter had grown since I first met them. Oh sure, there were a lot of other strange relevations beyond the bagboy tale, but that's someone else's head-spinnin' laundry; I only air my own. Can repeat one amusing quip: somewhere between a backhanded reference to Anna Nicole Smith in a promo for MAD TV and an advertisement for Reba McIntire's sitcom, I said that not everyone should have a show about them, and my bud said that he has one themed after himself: The Jerry Springer Show. I replied that it beats the original program about him, COPS. Oh, and a cryptic thought, courtesy of the woman, and this was spoken to her 18-year-old daughter who was on the phone with a guy who was asking her to the theatre: "If this boy has a restraining order against him by Children's Protective Services whereby he can't be alone with his younger brother and sister, do you really think you should go to the movies with him?" (the girl's answer: "Duh, it's a free movie.")
Storytime! One year (1985) at summer camp, I met this girl by the name of Dena. She wasn't quite like you or me, she was herself; meaning, no one ever told me what specifically was wrong with her, but a lot of people recognised that she wasn't like them and tried to stay out of her way. I figured this wasn't a good enough reason to avoid someone, and camp was all about friendship and love to my understanding, so I befriend her. Through that week I had a good friend that I could talk to and go places with, and coincidentally so did she. This friendship was not without its demons, which came in the form of the people who thought that different was bad or wondered what a person like [one of us] would want from a person like [other one of us], eyeing our happy chats with suspicion. Whether she ever knew just how feared or protected she was by other people, she never really let on, except maybe the occasional comment about her brother Bryan who had long been a fellow camper but yet I didn't know him that well. (All I really knew of Bryan was the time he was talking in his sleep, mostly into his pillow, then he rolls over and clearly states, "hey, I hear that red-headed girl likes to go cruisin'." It's 1 a.m. and Randy Quillen and I are wondering what the hell Bryan was dreaming.) She knew he was looking out for her, he always was even when she felt she didn't need him, and as his sister she knew that this was more or less expected behavior so she resigned herself to knowing he was around. I figured it was a good thing when a brother cares about his sister, so I accepted that fact too. The week goes past and I can say we had a good time together, just being friends and never falling into the traps people feared we would be lead into. Dena was a smart cookie, one that knew she would make it in her life even when many people who knew her, and most people who didn't take the time to know her, didn't see a strong future for her. Camp is wrapping up and Bryan steps up with his camera, and says that their mother would like a photograph of Dena with the guy who treated her with such respect all week. (Yes, he actually phrased it that way.) He was smiling, and in all the years I'd sorta-known him this was a first, and his respect for me was an honor that I'd apparently earned. Dena went back to her coastal town and I went back to the center of the state. She and I wrote each other for a year or two, and we talked on the phone once or twice, then we fell out of touch. In 1990 my mother handed me a new letter from Dena's family; Bryan had died in a boating accident and in the family sorting through his belongings they found the list of names and addresses they gave us at the end of that camp week – and my name had been starred and underlined, so they figured I was someone I was someone relevant to him. I was surprised since it was his sister I was significant to, but I was happy someone alerted me to what happened nonetheless. The obituary enclosed mentioned that Dena was married to a soldier and living in California (if I remember correctly, I don't feel like digging through boxes), and I smiled upon seeing that... the girl had made it somewhere afterall. To Dena: Thanks for being my friend that summer and after, I truly appreciated knowing you, and believed that you'd get somewhere because it was written in the glow of your eyes. And to Bryan, wherever you are: Thanks for caring about your sis, and for giving me a fair chance to be a friend to her; it was one of the happiest moments I ever had at camp when you let me know I'd done right by you. --#2
10/27/02
Once again I have proved my theory that I'm a bitch for the week before my birthday, and once it passes I'm mostly okay. Thirty-five doesn't seem as intreguing as I thought it would be. My coworkers were blissfully ignorant except my friends in customer service, my comrades on TechComedy.com were supportive (thanks Obie), and there was no cake or candles for this birthday boy but I actually liked it that way. My wife had the day off from work so we spent the day running around paying bills and had barbecued ribs for dinner. I guess the day was most enjoyable in its mundaneness; I was too busy doing my casual weekend thing to feel either ignored (as usual, since I don't take my birthday off from my job) or the center of attention (the typical birthday thing). And I found what I want for Christmas this year: one of those $85 DVD/MP3 boombox-like thingies made by Koss from Target, though they seemed only to have the purple mosaic and pink floral patterns onhand. The website says they have plain grey. (Gwen: Plain grey.) No, I don't own any DVD's beside the Dolby 5.1 sampler that came with the Blue Man Group's "Audio" but on November 26th a Depeche Mode double disk set comes out. :) (Paige: November 26.) Which reminds me, I have to buy something for my gimpy brother-in-law for Christmas this year. Luckily he's easy to shop for, he'll likely want a DVD movie or a video game cuz he has no life. (Robert: What'll it be?)
The woman next door now has her teenage grandson living with her. I don't think it's anything about her health, because she's quite fit; I figure it was time for him to move out of his parents' house but not actually go anywhere. Kinda like me when I started college; I lived in the same town as my family and as my school but I couldn't stay with them, so they put up my room & board across town (putting me a mile further away from the school than I had been but that's another story). He seems like a nice enough chap, and he has a big blue penis. Er, let me clarify: it's a Honda 150cc motorcycle. With plastic pieces that come off for easy cleaning, and he parks his penis at the end of the driveway every day so he can polish them (it's not like he ever gets it dirty). He's not shy about his big blue penis, and happily his penis isn't very loud. But it's approaching November and riding a crotch-rocket can get one cold, as well as it is dangerous on ice. I should know, I drove a moped to school for four years in snow; and my last moped was a pink Riva Razz scooter – my parents gave me a vagina. Anyhow, since he can only use his penis now for show, he's also got himself a glowing, throbbing black cock. Er, let me clarify: a car with a boomin' stereo, expensive rims, neon around the license plate and blacklights inside, and the other unnecessary geegaws today's middle-class white youth need to keep up with the minorities. His black cock and his blue penis have indeed attracted some cute girls, though they're only there to pick up their younger brothers who have come to visit him. And like the Asian cocks he's trying to emulate, his black cock is small (like a Honda Civic two-door or something) but that's to be expected since he lives with his grandmother (she drives a minivan, so there isn't enough room in the garage for a full-sized car as well). And I could swear today as I was trimming the dogwood out front (yes, finally, and trimmed the huge rhodie out back too; in a few weeks I swear I'll saw the fuck out of that crabapple) he had some young boy up against his cock looking like he was going to kiss him... that's where I turned away, thinking of that time when I was a teenager that me and the older boy next door sat in his brother's Jeep playing Billy Swan's I Can Help album on the tape player, and we nearly 'had a moment' to the last song on the album, "Loving Post-Mortem." (I'm not sure which is weirder: going gay over a country song, that anybody ever would write a song by that name, or that Johnny Cash's driver was even given a record contract.) And he only throws parties when his grandmother is out of town, as evidenced by the cocks in the front yard every night a few weeks ago. I'm just hoping that his penis doesn't get him in trouble, because those things are hard to control in slick conditions, and that some day soon he'll take his cock to a hole of his own – I don't know if he's in college or working or what, but having a place of your own and paying your own way is important in learning responsibility. I'd think that pretty quickly my neighbor-lady would get tired of his penis in the garage, his cock blocking her in the driveway, and his lame dick friends just hanging around. Oh well, she can handle these things. --#2
10/18/02 Mushy #2's 35th birthday
My sister is in Taipei. Before she left, her son apparently was given
the instructions to look for the "really big roaches" that they
undoubtedly have in Taiwan, it being a very hot humid place. Since
those damned bugs live everywhere but Antarctica, and off of everything
even $#@#$ (isn't that a gross thought, that thing crawling across your
floor at night has WHAT on its legs?)... I was naturally really grossed
out when my sister sent me my nephew's narated letter telling us of his
findings.
However, he is a little boy so what can you expect. I trying very hard
to be a good auntie at least tried to push his... um... creativity in a
positive direction (unlike his other auntie who just wanted him to gross
out his mommy) and introduced to him for the first time the word
ENTYMOLOGY (the study of Insects) and reminded him of the first time he
met his Uncle when his Uncle was working in an entymology lab. I also
gave my dear sister (both sisters, one for education, the other to just
gross her out) some websites with cool graphic pictures of bugs. I mean
hey, if the boy is interested, let him look at the pictures... maybe one
day he will see something other than the gross out factor at least.
Isn't that how we all get started? I'm sure, all Chemists start out as
Pyromaniacs... but you have to start somewhere. Your fascination with
fire leads you to think, how can I make more and more fires?, and
eventually it leads you to chemistry, where you can have your own
personal fire every day, and hey, it's all fun and games until somebody
loses an eye, and that somebody might just be you! That's what it's all
about folks, self mutilation. The best scientists are the ones who are
so true to their work, they are willing to experiment on themselves.
That's why you don't see many memoirs from chemists... --#3
10/16/02
This last weekend my home was the site of an amazing event: my wife's sister's family, being the soon-to-be ex-husband and five of the six kids (we missed you, Clara!), came over for the afternoon. We hadn't seen these people in five years. It's not that they live far away physically, though it is a couple hours' worth of driving, but rather the emotional distance that the sister had created between Us and Them. (See this month's Rotating Rant for more details about the whats and whyfores.) Four of the kids we missed seeing grow up, and two of them came along after the Iron Curtain was dropped so we'd never met them before. We were glad to host the kids and their father, and I'd do it again. This time with thinner hamburger patties or at least a second working grill. Our Christmas list has just doubled in length, back to how it's supposed to be.
Hello, Kat! The website finally got an email to our new contact address (see graphic on front page), and it was written to Chrome, R.A.T. #1. Cool beans! If you wondered, which you may: He's still doing his computer bit in ya-KEE-ma WORSH-ing-tun, is trying to get a defective mainboard replaced, and his family & the Guard never cease to amaze him how illogical they can be. I haven't heard much from Emmer, R.A.T. #3, lately 'cept that she's in school again. And the only thing I have to report is that I spent a bunch two days beating on a friend's computer to find out why Windows could only boot into Safe Mode, and discovered the brand new video card she had put in was dysfunctional so required replacement – then once that was rectified and the machine was returned to her, she plugged in her own monitor which was twice as funked up so she replaced that herself today. As my old college bud and newspaper co-editor Shannon always said, "computers are diabolical."
I loved climbing trees in my youth, especially willows because they're just so climbable. Both of the houses I grew up in had willows, and the one out front of the place I spent most of my younger years was particularly fun to climb. My sister and one of my brothers and I had our preferred perches in that tree, and sometimes we'd race around the perimeter of the tree ten or so feet up in the air. I was so comfortable with my particular perch that people knew that's where to look for me, and I recall two times I took naps laying on my branch. I was fairly sad when my father had the willow out front cut down, because it made the yard less complete and I didn't have an airborne place to call my own anymore. There's driveway there now. The willow that nearly cost me my life was one in the back yard; along the fence between my yard and the neighbors were a couple very tall yet fairly narrow-trunked willows, and one day in the late 1970's Ben Comer, the proverbial boy next door, proposed we have a climbing contest. We each climbed onto the fence (the trunks being fairly lousy to try to scale) and then got ourselves onto our respective trees, and up we went. We were up pretty high, and I could swear I was more than twice the height of the house when I looked down at it. So was Ben, hidden among the leaves somewhere, plus another eight feet so he was winning. I was shinnying up this branch when the bough I was standing on snapped, and down I went. Some catlike instinct told me to reach out horizontally to catch whatever I could. The first two branches my hands contacted couldn't handle my weight and velocity yet probably slowed me a little before also quickly giving way, but the third branch I caught rebounded me and stayed intact. I shouted up frantically to Ben to come help me down, and from way up there he looks down and says, "You're 3 feet from the ground, let go, you're safe!" I looked down, now that my wits had caught up with the rest of my body, and by golly he was right, so I made a two-point landing and waited the ten minutes it took for him to get down. I don't recall ever climbing that willow again, but now I wish I had gone up more than once. --#2
10/6/02
Yes, I took the Master Tech test a couple days ago, last Thursday night. Apparently I wasn't the only one who was elsewhere that week, so it was reissued – although I took it alone because the other person who was supposed to be with me (he'd been out on military manoevers) took a powder because he felt the test was a farce. I don't rightly know; I haven't talked to anyone who passed, I've only talked to the smartest people in the company, who somehow missed passing by a point or three. The only farcical things I saw were that they asked some Windows 3.1 questions (you don't edit Trumpet Winsock data files, you trash and reinstall!), and didn't offer the correct answers as choices on a couple questions. I'll know the results today or tomorrow. [Update: the guy who I was told bowed out of the test did take it, he did pass it, and I did not pass it – 70%. Well, shit. My boss said "You did better than last time" but last time I got a 66% so thanks...]
I was leaning out the window at my stand at the Fair a few weeks ago [c'mon, I've been waiting to tell this story!], questioning the pants today's female youth wear – just say No to crack, and how are you going to get a decent man if you put big tribal tattoos in the small of your back? – while Marty scammed on the Japanese girls passing by, when suddenly appearing in (and blocking) my view was this middle-aged couple. She was an earth-mother candidate who does shave her legs, and she looked the dictionary definition of "dumpy" but at least you couldn't hide a lawnmower in her straw purse, like some urf-muffins carry. She'd be a Yuppie if someone gave her a boost or a crowbar. Her husband was the one who spoke, and by golly he was more an earth-mother than she was. Thrift-store grey suit, bad combover (there is no other type, if you want the truth), colorful signs of hippitude sticking out from under the outer clothing, and he is asking me where the drum circle is. I'm thinking, You're "Iron John's" towel boy! I told him that I didn't know there was one, partially out of truth (drum circle? I know the pig races are over there <pointing right>) and partially because I didn't want the poor guy to get laughed back to Mama by people half his age & twice his body hair density. Thank you for playing.
There's a real Rant posted today, but here I wish to drop a smaller one. I have submitted the Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul gallery to Yahoo's Hobby:Found Photos list a couple times several months ago. It never shows up there. I figured it was due to lack of updating, since they do tell you they get a lot of submissions and will only guarantee expediency and consideration if you give them $400. Yeah, bone that. So I checked out the list the other day for somethin' to do and... there are three new entries. None of which are my site. One of which sounds really great but contains like six pictures when you actually click on stuff. Mine has 55 and counting. That shitteth pisseth me offeth!
How to make a good impression dept.: In my junior year of high school, I was going out with this girl by the name of Cassie Garnes. Really nice person, and I found out I'd met her years earlier at the city swimming pool – she was the tall redhead that swam in the deep end, who despite being out in the sun every day of the summer, she was still blindingly Irish irridescent white. One day I was in her neighborhood so I stopped by her house, and this was the prime chance to meet her family. I came in and was greeted by her mother and her younger sister, Crystal. I have a seat over here by the kitchen and start talking to her mother, we're getting to know each other and all that, then Crystal walks in holding one of their two cats. I like cats. Crystal decides to give me the cat by tossing the puss into my face. Kitty did what kitties do and extended her claws to catch hold whatever she landed on, which was as said my face. Surprise to myself and the cat and the girls' mother. Quickly a cool damp washcloth is applied to the hole on the left side of my upper lip. I'm now bleeding moderately, holding a washcloth on my mouth, and trying to carry on a conversation at the same time. That was fun. Since there's equilibrium in the universe, or lightning does strike twice, some time later on post-romance when I was visiting (I liked Cassie's mom, what can I say?) I was in the kitchen and I put this Tupperware bowl's lid down on a stove element for a minute while getting something out of the bowl, and – well, seems that element had been used a few minutes earlier, so while it was not on it was still very hot. And the lid melted onto and into the element. I was mortified. She was a Tupperware dealer so the lid was no big deal. As for the element... I don't know what ever happened. I used a paring knife to get off what I could and figured the rest would come off with low heat and a little work (or just replace the element and call it done!). That's today's silly story... --#2
9/27/02
Top 10 Customer Questions At The Mad Greek - and notice that only two relate to gyros:
10 - Do you (or anyone) have falafel or souvlaki? (nope, but we have baklava)
9 - Where are the scones/Krusty Pups? (pointing to their nearby signs)
8 - What's on a veggie gyro? (tomato, onion, lettuce, tzatziki sauce, cucumber, feta cheese)
7 - Where are the pig races? ("by Kaleenka's Piroshkis," pointing right)
6 - How much is the SlingShot ride? ($30 for one, $50 for two, like their sign says)
5 - Do you have a restaurant? (no...)
4 - Where is the bathroom? (Blue Gate, pointing left)
3 - Where is Kaleenka's Piroshkis? (pointing right, "by the pig races")
2 - What's the difference between a beef/lamb gyro and a chicken gyro? (the meat?)
1 - Where are the deep fried Twinkies? (Green Gate, other side of fairgrounds) --#2
9/25/02
Ooh, I want you
I don't know if I need you
But, ooh, I'd die to find out.
-- Savage Garden, "I Want You"
Ann and I were leaving the fairgrounds a few days ago, talking about the world, and she stops me at the fence near the Taco Bell. "I've figured something out about you," she said with her standard metallic smile and eye sparkle. What ever could this be, I asked, never knowing. "It's a matter of authenticity," she says as she leads me in, holding that word like a picket one has found laying on the sidewalk. Okay, so what do you have to say about authenticity, I prodded. She surveyed the picket in her hands, examining the color and the plane of the wood, then took a swipe like it was a little boy's pirate sword: "Seems to me you are genuinely without any," she said with that tone in her voice like she wasn't serious yet she wasn't joking. I caught the wood in my hand, since it wasn't a hard cut, and instantly the phrase this is the pot calling the kettle 'black' came to mind; I chose to be piqued instead of pegged. Elaborate for me because I'm curious, I replied in the same intonation.
"You're a complex person," she said as she looked up the street, "so you show different faces of yourself to different people." That's pretty undeniable. I said of course, people speak differently to a child than to an old man, and there's a matter of common context. "I don't mean it that simply," she slid back, not implying that I had missed her point but rather that I hadn't hit it. So I responded that there are two ways a person can portray their facets to other people: they can be truthful, or they can make up parts to some or all of the people they speak to – and I insisted that everything I say to anyone is the truth. She looked dubious. I followed that nearly everyone is some degree of complex, and that we probably know a few people who show the same thing to everyone, like they were handing out business cards, and I prefer to use a notepad to give out my details. Still she wasn't secure in what I'd said, like I was missing something she hadn't yet pointed to. And the headlights bearing down on us were those of her mother, so she didn't get to her point. She dropped her picket as she moved toward the car, but I had to ask a question before she was gone: So is there something wrong with giving people what they can handle? She wasn't sure how to answer that, but did get out that she could only agree with me on half of what I said, and as she climbed in she shouted she'd get back to me on my question. She didn't, predictably.
— — —
So the Fair has ended for another year (or the little puyallup April 10-13 of next year, but my people don't work then) and I survived. And the first thing I did after I survived was... called in sick. Head full of snot, bin full of bills to attend to (looks like a majority of my Fair pay will go to late charges on bills not paid during the Fair, sheesh), and a little psyching myself into going back to tech support. The psyching part didn't work, for the record, but I know that I can't sit idle for more than two days or I run out of worthwhile things to do so it's back to the grind. Surprising my desk wasn't ransacked in my absence, though my idiot deskmate did make himself a little more comfortable, and I forgot the password for the customer database because it forced me to change it the day before I left. And bonus news: The other guy on my team who was supposed to take the Master Test was also out of town, on military duty, so come Monday of next week we'll be doing the test. Small wonders. And the October update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul has been posted today.
— — —
"I figured out the answer to your question," I shouted across the counter as I passed by on my way to my own booth on the last day, "of what kind of R.A.T. you are." She had been curious two weeks earlier when I told her how a good R.A.T. fools herself to survive but is cogniscent of the fact, while a bad R.A.T. is the only one who believes the blather, which variety I thought she was, and at the time I didn't have enough information. She looks up and smiles, and jokingly asked if I concluded she was the bad sort. My gentle nod was completely involuntary like a Freudian slip, but some truths go straight to the subconscious. Her jaw dropped and her eyes opened wider. And having said everything by saying nothing at all, I announced, "We'll talk about it later, I'm late to my stand" and bounced off. And predictably we didn't see each other again. Say something uncryptic and leave feeling relieved. There was no spite in my assessment, for the record: there were plenty of examples of her believing certain things about herself that she simply didn't exhibit, which she seemed blissfully unaware of, and certain double standards came into view – straight Reality Avoidance Therapy dictum with secondary proofs. And with that, I can drop the subject. --#2
Dream another dream, this dream is over.
-- Van Halen, "This Dream Is Over"
9/18/02 11 p.m.
In other silliness... I work at the Fair with this nice young man by the name of Chad. Terminal acne, a hell of a st-st-st-stutter, and sometimes you don't want him to breathe on you, but he's a real sweetheart and he always has something nice to say about his stepsister, Princess. He went to the counter with a smile as a friend of his approached. This friend caught my attention because he was wearing a black T-shirt which in white writing said "Two beers: $4. Three mixed drinks: $9. Four tequila shots: $12. Taking home the girl who drank all of these things: Priceless." I noted my approval, and he said that he's done that before and worse. Hmmm, short spiked hair, looks about 16, talking to Chad... suuure, doubt sets in. Doubt confirmed when I notice that he has electrical tape holding his thick glasses together. But I'm game, so I told him that the strangest pick-up line from a girl I ever heard was, "Wow, I just met that guy I was kissing about 10 minutes ago; I need a place to crash, could I come to your house?" He says he's got one better. I scoot in closer and put my elbows on the stainless steel counter, head in my hands, to hear what could be more bizarre than that. "When people are reading the fortunes out of their fortune cookies..." I finished the sentence: end the fortune with "in bed." He continues, "And when someone is talking, you can embarass them by adding `that's what SHE said` to the end." I wandered off, realizing this was a battle of wits with an unarmed junior-high-intellect nerdboy, while those two struck up a conversation about mythical sex acts a female classmate has engaged in near, but not with, them. [Here's to the high school youth who aren't off screwing everyone in sight and reproducing before graduation. More accurately, here's to the subsection of those youth who aren't like that because of some kind of moral ethic, but because they couldn't get laid in a whorehouse and never get invited to keg parties. I feel for you, I was there. But without the complete dweebiness; I was merely a computer geek.] --#2
9/18/02 2 a.m.
Before I tell you about the freaky-deaky stuff that's happened in the recent past, here's today's cryptic thought: I was passing by the Democratic Party's booth at the Puyallup Fair and they had a poster for some candidate of Irish descent, which said "Friends o’ Flannery" (or a similar last name, doesn't matter to me). Someone put a large sticky-note over the "o’" and penned "OF" on it. Begorrah! What warranted that? Oh, and speaking of politics and stupidities, this just in: It seems that one of the local incumbents will possibly not be heading back to office due to a little faux pas along the campaign trail. The first strike against Norm Dicks (or as the edited yard signs & stickers say, "NO DICK") was that he elicited one of those telephone campaign dealies where people call your house to say, "Don't forget to vote for Dis Guy", which is enough to get a lot of people to pull the other lever; the second strike is that this project musta been outsourced to New York because the calls started hitting Washington (the state) phones at six a.m. Oopsie...
I'm having a great time at The Western Washington Fair and will be really surly when I have to return to my desk at Major Internet Provider Whose Stock Is Currently $5.76 A Share next week. Like I'm not salty enough about them folks as it is – here's the results of my test: they fucking didn't register me for it, despite my being scheduled to take it for three weeks, thus I wasn't able to take it, and won't get another chance until December or January. Second time in a row that they screwed that one up, go figger. But anyway. It's all that aggro music they play at the 'slingshot' ride next door, and the same songs every 20-40 minutes at that, sorry. (I was fine hearing MxPx's "Move To Bremerton" on the half-hour, but it's when they put in U2's Greatest Hits that I was about to snap. Fuck Bono, he ain't God, got it?) I'm enjoying my little summer camp, serving gyros left and right, and I work with some fine people... such as Marty, who makes work a lot of fun by ogling Japanese girls (ewww!) and taking rave pharmacuticals. And I found out that Doreen, the biznitch that on Sept 3 paid absolutely no attention to me when I tried to train her, was rude to coworkers and was impatient to supervisors, isn't such a bad person when you get to know her – she's completely useless and totally lazy, however, but not the pain in the ass I expected. Small mercies. Okay, let me disparage on one more person, this is kinda fun... Her name is Ann, and she works for the slavedrivers who spin cotton candy. Really cute girl, very intelligent, and told me on a couple occasions when we'd be sitting around talking that she found me fascinating. Which I am, of course. Yet this is someone who would say "sure, we'll get together on my break" then mysteriously vanish five minutes before the break was to start, then later possibly apologise but never explain. I didn't see her around for two and a half days (the half is when she had the day off but came in to meet a friend in the morning) but she admits she was there working during that lapse. The reason why this all sticks in my craw is because when somebody expresses fascination, hangs on your every word, and gets into conversations about friendship and trust, then suddenly is nonchalent, nonverbose, and exhibits none of the qualities they claimed to own or appreciate in others... I hate it when that happens. It is more of a work-up than what usually happens, where no one really pays me much attention at all. Pttthht, enough of that.
Call me whatever names you will for investing $230 in a pair of Kangoo Jumps, which are springy boots that provide 60% less impact when running and make one work a little harder so there's more muscular motion / calorie burn / oxygen intake. I've heard it all, mostly from my wife. But my ankles don't hurt when I'm in them (all this standing at the Fair is wrecking my feet) and people watch me bounce by and think they're pretty unique. My impetus, beside the part about the ankles, is that I've gained nearly a pound per month during my stint in tech support – and I've been doing this for 2½ years, do the math – so I must take this off and change my ways. My two favorite exercise activities are skipping and pogo-sticking, so this fits right in. And it definitely is as fun as it looks. I tell people I always admired the spring shoes that Wiley E. Coyote wore in the old Roadrunner cartoons...
One hour improved my whole day the other day. I had just come back from lunch and there was this tall guy standing at the corner of the counter, near where I normally prop myself (filling drinks keeps a piece of wall between the setting sun and myself) so I said hello. He says, "Mushroom?" Now I know we're getting somewhere, because no one at the Fair calls me that. It's this guy I know through TechComedy.com, Obie, who has been known to post to the Guestbook Thingie™; he came up from Portland, Oregon on a whim to Do The Puyallup. (You can do it at a trot, you can do it at a gallop, you can do it real slow so your heart don't palpitate... just don't be late.) It was nice meeting him <wavies> and we gabbed for nearly an hour. So as we're busting up the party, someone I went to high school with walks by and only half-recognises me so I have to run over and buttonhole her. Turns out Alicia lives nearby and works for the City of Puyallup; it's a small world but I wouldn't wanna paint it. And much like me, she still looks almost exactly the same after 20 years.
So I'm going to take my silver 5 Year pin, my red rubber clown nose, my bouncy shoes, my green string of Winner's Beads from The Traveling Gameshow, and the Foster's Imposters watch (not on the website; $15 from the "On The Loose" tour bus) and hit the hay. And to anyone I haven't replied to their email as yet, or until tonight, my apologies – I sent you a postcard, as any friend on vacation would. --#2
9/7/02
Yes, there was another jaunt to Yakima this weekend and I hope you'll pardon my using the same style as last week. I try not to 'blog' and be like everyone else, but my adventures to the east tend to be worth mention. I'll start the tale at 7 p.m. Thursday, where hunger was striking me at work and I found a chocolate-covered espresso bean in my desk drawer. I figured just one couldn't hurt me, it'd just get me through until the end of work at 11 p.m. and the drive home. That's all the hunger suppression and awakeness I needed. I got plenty more however, thus I didn't sleep a wink but rested nicely.
I started working at the Fair at 10 a.m. Friday, with a quick stop at the cotton candy stand where my friend MeLissa works to say "hi, why didn't you call me all summer?!" For a timeframe where we'd been warned that everyone was going to be searched at the gate so expect long wait times to get in (golly, how fun!), it was pretty heavily populated – and it appeared to be Differently Abled Day At The Fair. I'm drinking artificial lemonade (all the sugar, none of the vitamin C) mixed with 7-Up for the bubbles, and at around 11:30 a.m. that damned coffee bean finally stops working. What to do, what to do… Along comes Amanda from the energy drinks booth with a can of Red Devil. (Not Red Bull which gives you wings, Red Devil which gives you horns. And they light up.) Okay, I'm back in the land of the conscious, and then some. After my shift, I had some time to kill until my former coworker Stacy shows up to kick it with me for awhile, so I visited Amanda's stand, and she's giving me the whole tour of what flavors and powers they have… mental image of one of those drug parties from the 1970's where someone's got a bowl of capsules if all colors, and someone picks at the bowl like it was Chex Mix. Despite having not eaten since 1 p.m. and it was now 9 p.m., I was not hungry. Rumbly in the tumbly, poor baby was empty, but I was not hungry. The word here is "hyper." And what's next on the agenda? The perfect thing when you're sleepless: driving winding roads for 3 hours!
My former brother-in-law's memorial service is 200 miles away at 11 a.m. Why wait, head over there after a change of clothes and some ramen (first time I can recall eating that since college). Yes, I had no trouble staying awake and alert on the trip, in fact I was zippin' right along merrily. And very glad that I was alone on this trip, no one would have tolerated how I drove or how often I stopped to take pictures. I get to my destination, conversate with relatives for a little while, then head to bed. When I woke to use the potty, I realized I'd been asleep for 40 minutes but it felt like five hours. How can some people survive on energy drinks? So comes the dawn, the stuff must have worn off sufficiently to make me stay in bed for an hour longer than intended. Fine, it's off to the Yakima Arboritum to remember Dave.
It was a nice service, nothing too religious and nothing too dry. And this is where a piece of the puzzle fell into place. See the July 15 Daybook entry; I'd had this dream where I didn't know who it was that was with me. Let me parse that a little: it was one person in appearance and another person in essence. I figured out who the essence person was fairly quickly, it was someone I'd worked with a year earlier. Now I know who the appearance person was: she showed up at the service, my neice's best friend who I don't remember meeting at her graduation but I know I did. She said I looked familiar too, in a TV star way (and to my relief, it wasn't Bob Denver or Jim Carrey, the usual suspects). Musta been, for once literally, in my dreams. I feel a little better with that question answered, though would like to know how the little girl in the dream fared and where that friend of mine was intending to take me. Now back to Yakima, already in progress… After I paid my respects and picked some pears, I went to my next three adventures. The first one: Rosehips have 50x the vitamin C of oranges, and the lake I lived on grew them wildly on rambling rose bushes. However, some shmuck decided to rip out the bushes at the edge of the lake to put in a dirt road that goes nowhere (seriously, it stops at the end of where the roses were because it's a 45° incline after that) so every year at this time I pick a bunch for myself and reseed that area. It's Mushy's version of reforestation of the land. Used to be I'd toss half the hips I picked back, but this time it was 1/5th because my efforts have been working.
The second: I have this mental image of taking photos at the Wenas Cemetary outside Selah, WA but I seem not to actually have any photographs from the event. I went out there and made up for that, and the grave I always pictured was right where I'd pictured it (and where it has been for a century) but it didn't quite look the same and the girl whose headstone I was leaning my head against was 17, not 3, at the time of passing. [hiya Lauren! No, it's not private, just unlock the gate and browse.] Then I headed back into town and stopped at the Pioneer Cemetary on the edge of town, which I'd never been to before. It's surprising the number of white pickets sticking out of the ground representing someone is down there but there's no further mention of whom. And a surprising number of people buried there were small children, though there is one large stone mentioning their names so they've not been quite as forgotten. Now, time to head home through the Ellensburg Canyon, where another inspiration came for the third: Many years ago my mother had told me that when she was a little girl, a stretch of the road went through a tunnel in the side of the hill. I located that particular quarter-mile; to avoid the Department Of Transportation 'No Trespassing' signs I didn't follow the road to the tunnel, I drove around the hill and hiked up the side. It hasn't completely collapsed, so I walked through and took pictures. Kids and their grafitti, I tell ya. There's a peach tree outside the entrance, one of the few I'm confident doesn't have any pesticides or growth stimulants on the fruit (and surprisingly, no bugs either) so I picked one for home consumption – which is saying something because I insist I hate peaches. To doctor a line from the Frank Zappa movie 200 Motels, "You are eating zee History Monocotyldon." (Pardon my spelling, Life Science class was almost 20 years ago.)
Drove back to the homestead in rain. Because I'm that sort of creature, I went to the Fair to say hello to a few people. Amanda handed me a carrot beverage which ain't half bad, I had a hit of orange milk at the dairy barn (you know those little orange and vanilla ice cream cups kids eat with little wooden spatulas? think melted yet cool), and who has shown up for the weekend? Truth. And they're handing out t-shirts to the 12-to-24 year olds as a means of passing the word to their peers that smoking kills. Right freaking on!! [hiya Blair! see the banner ad on the Likes page?] I'm back to work at the Fair tomorrow, and I think I've purged all the stimulants from my system so I should be asleep in an hour. --#2
9/3/02
We loaded up our shit and hopped in the car around 11:15 a.m. Saturday to head east. First we had a few errands to run, and when we passed within a block of our house again around 12:10 p.m. we figured it was par for the course that we hadn't gotten anywhere yet. Enough lollygagging, let's hit the highway! We're driving out to the middle of nowhere, enjoying the scenery (trees, trees, more trees) and passing through the occasional small town. Now we're getting somewhere -- more signs with sillohuetted deers on them warning that you may meet Bambi in the next few miles. First stop is the gas station in Morton (a.k.a. Moron, someone keeps swiping the T from the front of the Post Office) for a SoBe herb-enhanced chocolate milk. I'm a big fan of chocolate drinks you have to shake (Yoohoo, Choc-Ola) but I have to say – SoBe's chocolate milk defies my understanding of the genre. Paige visits the little boys' room (horrendous line to the women's loo). So once hydrated we get on the road to the sawmills (passing a campaign sign suggesting nominating someone named Berry to be the coroner, ahh, the joy of irony) and cruise on. Interesting feature seen in the middle of nowhere: a house with five huge satellite dishes on the side. Hum along with me to Bruce Springsteen: "(Three thousand, two hundred and) fifty-seven channels and nothing on..."
There is only one agreed-upon stop we have on our trek to Packwood, despite the hundreds of yard sales and other diversions: the Randall firehouse. Every year we miss the pancake breakfast. This year the yard behind the firehouse was quite a collection of sellers, whereas last year there were less than a dozen, and the third dealer on the right has caught my fancy: two (which turned out to be three) strings of glass Christmas garland, and the woman lets me have them both for 50¢, which blows my socks off because I paid $5-$10 per string last year at the antique dealer near my house. I pass on this other person's 3 Atari 5200 cartridges because he wanted $5 for the lot. After some poking around, we get back on the road. We reach the Packwood city limits around 2:45 p.m but the traffic is at a standstill. We actually get into town around 3:30 and now have to find a parking space – and they no longer allow on-street parking as of this year, what the hell?! I shell out $3 to a field owner immediately behind the park where the rows of sellers are, we get into full-tilt yardsailing mode, and I'm seeing thousands of interesting items but nothing I wish to purchase. Paige buys a vinyl M&M sticker for her car (what's next, a tribal tattoo around her arm below the shoulder?) and my eyes don't really light up until I come across the estate dealer who has two boxes of photos (I bought 4 @ 50¢ each, and eventually they'll show up on Laughter Is The Spackle Of The Soul… they date between 1957 and 1962). And around dinner time we conclude our shopping extravaganza and go over to Paige's sister's house in Wapato, with first a visit to the neice unit at her new Dairy Queen job because that's the sort of aunt & uncle we are: embarassing. And we see another stroke of the ironic on the corner of Summitview and 16th in Yakima: running for the auditor's position is someone named Bill Lover. No kidding.
The next morning, once I had seen quite enough of "The Pee-Wee Herman Story" on E! (enough, for me, was them mentioning Paul Rubens had an HBO special in the 80's but giving absolutely no details about it – John Paragon's Paragon Of Comedy, for you who are doing a websearch and finding nothing useful, as I was yesterday, and take it from me it was pretty damn funny), we went down to Toppenish to take photos and visit people. House where I grew up: the whole front yard is missing! Seems the landscaping my father did to cut down on the amount of maintenance one had to do resulted in having to do even more maintenance (which is easier, cutting the lawn or pulling weeds when you remove the lawn?) so the new folks have taken everything out. House I spent my first year of college in (see The Pearne House): overgrown hedges and still needs a paint job, but the flower beds are being maintained. House I stayed in for three years after that: behind a chain-link fence, surrounded by a dead lawn, but still inhabited – seems the old stodgy neighbors won their battle to not have their road connect to the new Yakama Nation low-income housing development, but lost the fight to keep the neighborhood so xenophobic so they moved; AHAHAHAH bastards, I was the least of your worries. The landscape is indeed changing. I told my wife and my friend Wayne's mother that I was going to go visit another mate but, sigh, never quite made it there… I spent an hour standing in the driveway of my family's former neighbor's house talking to her, as well as a lot of time visiting a college friend. Wayne told me the next day in email that he was out of town, and that Rich was in Seattle, so I couldn't have seen any of them anyway!
Time to head home. We stop in Ellensburg to fuel up the car and ourselves, and this is the last time the Texaco card will ever work for us (every attempt at every other station, including this one later, fails). Paige visits the little boys' room (maintenence work on the women's loo). We purchased a quart of bottled water and a few miles out of town Paige says, "What does this water taste like to you?" I took a hit, and my response took no pondering: "Gin." Must have come off of a sloe glacier. We finally get home around midnight. We never did make it to the lake to pick rosehips, and it's the perfect time! We had a great time in the Valley, and I got the photos of the old advertising art I wanted.
...And the great time was crimped by life turning on a dime. When we had left Paige's sister's house, our neice was packing her stuff so that when she got off of work she could spend the night at her father's house in Yakima. Right around the time we were getting home [and if I have some details wrong, all apologies, I'm just reporting what I've heard so far], our neice's father was visiting the significant woman in his life, standing in her kitchen having a conversation with her, and, as a punctuation mark the likes of which you can't get from mere typography, midsentence he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head. . Picture if you will in your mind an 18-year-old girl, recently graduated from high school and very much adoring of her always kind and calm father, being awaken from sleep at 5 a.m. at his house by the police with the news that he isn't coming home.
Today I go to orientation for The Fair, then in a couple days the event begins and continues for two weeks. Pardon my silence if I don't post much during that time, I'll be occupied… that's a handy excuse. Expect to see something about the Master Tech test, I take it on the 10th if my company can hold to a schedule for more than a few hours. :) --#2 goodbye Dave
8/28/02
It's time for a stream of consciousness, random affairs, pick the meat from your bones of contention, take potporri for $100 Alex, variety-show posting. It all makes sense in small gulps. This weekend I go to Packwood, Washington to shop the citywide yardsale, then Toppenish to photograph nontourist attractions, with hopefully a stop at Lake Bergstrom for rosehips. Then with the occasional interruption, I won't be seen at work for 3 weeks while I sling gyros at the fair. Nice of my employer to schedule Master Tech tests during my vacation. At least I know they still like me, I got my review yesterday -- only a month and a half late. Major criticism the boss unit had was that I can multitask (chat, browse, etc. while the caller wanders into traffic), and that I make sure my callers are fixed 30% of the time instead of less. Sometimes the metrics contradict each other, but I'm a tech, not a bean counter; if the folks paying my supervisors' salaries are happy with how I handled them, they'll keep paying my supervisors and me, thus it all works out. And honest, it's no crime to call a dipshit a dipshit after they've hung up, I only do that to see who is paying attention. Gotcha, Nick. Found out a childhood friend is now a popular entity in midwest radio, good for him. He didn't seem to have any response for the anecdotes I emailed him, but he did say he had tried to block the Yakima Valley out of his mind so... And back over the brink and into the drink is my earth-mother friend Andy, hauling old husband and new teenage babies to the Rez so they can see just how gawddamn fun the city Where The West Still Lives really is. Run while you can! Found out via a book on 1940's-1950's Christmas ornaments that some of the cheaper, cheesier ornaments found in bags at the thriftstores with the ornaments I wanted are actually the ones with the high values assigned to them. Life is funny that way, especially when you discover the things you'd been letting the preschoolers bang on then gave away are worth a bundle. Ordered a few items from a seller on eBay and the package arrived today: despite the entire arrangement being on the computer thus everything was done in typed characters, the package still was addressed to "Brian Mannack." (That isn't even close, though my wife saw that and said "Brian Manic?!" and thought that was fitting.) Story time, to make up for the lameness of this entry?
The truth can be told now, it's been 15 years so the statute of limitations has passed. <breaking the seventh seal> I was leaving some school affair around 9 p.m. one night when I noticed the shop area, which I had to walk past on my way home across the schoolyard, was left wide open. Either one of the teachers of that building was careless or, well, there is no alternative, Rob or Tweety fucked up. So I wander back there and have a gander into the greenhouse. Tomato plants on pallets getting roasted, other various items because horticulture isn't their forte'. I dropped my pants and left a little orange-brown fecal calling card, just a squeep that was reminiscent of what Jay left in the public library several years earlier, between two rows but not in anyone's way, per se. I locked up the gate behind me out of social responsibility; you never know who is going to go back there with malevalent intentions. So the next morning I mousse my hair up in to a New Wave wave, trot off to school, and ere long I get called into the vice principal's office. Mr. Black-n-White, as the civics teacher always referred to him, was aware that I'd gone into the shop area, though I was never sure how he knew (I assumed it was because his back yard faced the shop area, he lived closer to the school than I did). I wasn't going to deny that I'd been there, I'd done him and the whole school district a favor by locking up the area. However, as for that matter of poopie... That I denied. He had no evidence that it was mine, or even human, and I reasoned that it may have been a dog that got in there. His concern was marked in the first words he said when I walked in: "Is this becoming a senior prank?" The previous year, someone had borrowed a welding helmet and taken a huge steaming dump in it, then left it on Rob's desk. Mr. B/W had pursued one particular patsy for a whole week before the guy confessed to make him go away, and most of the student body knew that he didn't do it (though he was certainly stupid enough to). I said no, no senior prank here. It took a few hours, but the man bought my story that I hadn't done anything wrong, and had done something right by locking up. Tweety materialized in Mr. B/W's office shortly after I did to ask how I got my father's keys to the shop. (My father had a portable classroom near the shop building.) I blankly asked why my father would have keys to HIS area, and said that I certainly didn't have or need any such device because HE had left the gate open, and I'd done him a favor by closing it. The egg was sliding down his face. He went away without another word. The next stupid thing I heard from shop geeks was when Rick and Danny, two guys I played with when they were in first grade but were nowhere as cute or smart by high school, stopped me on the sidewalk to accuse me of wrongdoings, and Danny (Assholeman, as he was popularly known) was cursing me out because he'd stepped in it on command to see what it was. "Hold on," I said, making no attempt to hide my laughter, "you're saying the teacher TOLD you to step in shit, and then you did?" Er, mutter mutter. They went away without another word. I do suppose there was some senior prank to it, but to my knowledge there was never a third fecal strike in the series... then again, most of my classmates didn't know there was a second one, or didn't until I confessed at our ten year reunion. People were eating when I went to the podium to tell the story, so I suppose the staff at the Holiday Inn had a little extra cleaning to do that night. Since I've come clean, I feel it fair that I appologise to vice-principal here: I'm sorry I duped you that way, and am so very glad that you believed me. You were a most admirable administrator, and I'm telling the gawd-honest truth that I chose coming back to Toppenish High from being at Eisenhower so there would be some form of discipline and order -- I was proud that you were there, keeping the ducks in line and the campus clean with your 'bucket brigade'. And I will never forget the time some kid was smoking at the edge of campus and you started walking in his direction, the dumbass thought he could run away but you were on him like a duck on a junebug (you were the basketball coach and jogged daily, who did he think he was dealing with?)... that shit-shocked look on his face as you dragged him by the scruff to your office was priceless. Respect given, if belatedly. A pat on the back to "slob on my knob Rob" for dealing with more shit, real and metaphorical, than he really deserved. Still no sympathy to Tweety for being a total prick (and Mac user) but I suppose some things can't be helped... lock the hell up, and yet I grant two points for making a dipshit dip into shit. --#2
8/18/02
Here's what I don't get: I've had a MasterCard since the mid-90's, and any time I was a day late in paying the bill or had maxed out the card (which didn't happen until I got married four years ago, we footed the wedding bills ourselves) the thing would stop working, then I'd have to make calls to get stuff fixed. Fair enough, and this happened two Decembers in a row (both times at the same Christmas boutique!). But my wife has a Visa and a Discover, and neither one of them ever stops working -- even when the bill hasn't been paid for two months, even when they are $1000 over their limits. The logic is simple; when $49 is tacked on as an overlimit fee and $29 is tacked on as a late fee, and the service fee or interest on the principle for merely having the card is some stupid amount, yet the "minimum payment" requested is $60-$100, a couple dollars to absolutely none of the payment goes toward the principle. You never get out of debt, and if you pay an extra $100 every month (as though you had that extra dough laying around) it only seems to dent the principle (but admittedly that's progress, just don't use the card in an emergency for a year or two). I'm under the limit on my MC and pay a little more than what's requested each month, and pay on time too, yet for some bizarre reason after not using the card for a year I'm only about $100-$200 below the limit (and yes, I read my statements, there has been no useage) -- ten dollars a month of what I pay goes toward the principle. How the hell does that work out?
We now enter the third full week of August, which means that every regular session of camp at Lazy F in Ellensburg for the year has come and passed. I went to that camp for eight years in my youth; one week a year thus two months of my life. I credit the camp, and the Methodist church from which it springs, and the Columbia River United Methodist Youth (the CRUMY Team) who scripted and produced and directed what happened at each session (they had half a dozen sessions per summer, broken down by grade level) for keeping me alive. I'm not bashful about saying it: I didn't have a reason to live except to go to camp. I was disliking my schooling, I was hating my parents and had no use for my siblings, my friends were unfulfilling, and my religion was merely holding a carrot out on a stick. Summer camp gave me a purpose -- I could get away from my usual friends, my dreadful family, that sweaty town, and even my twisted mind for five days. It's hard to take a vacation from yourself but I managed, and it was very much needed. During my junior and senior years of high school, the period when « the mushroom » was more than just a name I used but how I felt about myself and the world in general. I used the name of the camp as an affirmation; the first thing I'd think or say when my eyes opened in the morning was "Lazy F." That's what I was going to make it through the day, the week, the next few months to get to. I think my mother had some idea of the value, though certainly not the whole sum -- instead of saying I couldn't have dessert or couldn't watch some TV program if I wasn't conforming to her whims, she'd say she wasn't going to send me to camp, and I typically reacted in the same manner as if one were told someone was going to kick the power cord to their iron lung out of the wall. (This was more desperate than a modern respirator, this required thrashing unto one's last breath to... not have that be their last breath.) And I made it eight years in a row, hell or high water, with some quantity of subsidization by the local church ($10 to $60 from the United Methodist Men's group or similar), thus you see me here today.
I could say a lot, and a lot of things, about the camp and its people, or tell anecdotes left and right... but to do so, I'd have to reminisce and while I like doing that, sure, there is a certain quantity of sorrow involved in how this is something I couldn't and can't continue doing. (I have shared a few, like the Sandy & Lynette stuff a couple months ago.) The entire time I was a camper, I swore that I'd one day become a counselor, so I could return the joy that I found. Uh... I haven't tried to get into that position, and I haven't been to church in years to establish myself as someone to consider for the position. I always felt the closest to God and could feel His love while I was at camp (a "camp Christian" we called it, but I didn't mean it in the same manner as how some joke that people they know are Christians on Sundays and hellions the other six days -- I meant that I could be who I really was, and feel what I felt I should be feeling, during that week, and during the other 51 weeks of the year I had to keep what joy I could feel to myself because no one else around me shared it or understood it), and since I haven't been there since 1986 my faith has been, shall we say, lackluster. For awhile the camp was offering booster shots for grownups -- the Young Adult Weekender, right about in this timeframe now, for ages 18-30, which seemed a reasonable concession for people who no longer had Monday through Saturday free. They stopped doing that session (to my knowledge) when I was still in high school, and even if it still exists, I'm 34 now. The closest thing I have to going to camp nowadays is working at The Fair ("Mushy's adult summer camp" as Paige said the other day), which is not the same thing because of the lack of religion and the escape being from my regular job, not from my mind and life. I've felt bad a time or three in the last 15 years about the fact that I haven't tried to become a counselor, but it isn't too late if I apply myself -- some of the best counselors I had were about my age now and older.
Two things brought this up. First, that I was in the back yard today trying to burn the stump out, so the smoldering wood and eye-watering smoke was reminding me of the campfire we sat around every night. I think my head would have exploded if I got a whiff of Cutter Evergreen bug-repellant spray too. Second, the damndest thing happened recently. The last two years of my camp experience [1985 & 1986], the deans (what we called the head honchos of a session) were two pastors from the Lower Yakima Valley, Bob and Floyd. Bob was a nice guy, the pastor a few dear friends had at their church, and I liked him. Floyd resembled a leprechaun, and there were a couple times (usually involving my friendship with Danny, the assistant cook who was a year younger than me) that he and I didn't see eye-to-eye. That's putting it nicely, since I can't hold onto animosity very well, though I think his only crimes were to be bristly to people and to threaten to send me home [see earlier on how well I take such an offer]. I volunteered as a dishwasher for a five-day elementary age camp -- which is one thing I've given back to the camp, and was glad to do it -- the week before my own session (the first of the Bob & Floyd pairing) and there Danny was, we got along and he helped me see through a tough situation, became fast friends, he shaved me for the big dinner and it was an otherworldly experience, blah blah. Bob & Floyd had good intentions and good messages, like "Taking Off The Mask" which was the theme the second year, but the results of what they'd propose were not what they were expected, and things would get ugly. But back to the damndest thing story. A few months ago the United Methodist Church a mile down the street swapped out its pastor, as Methodist churches do every five to ten years, and so the name spot of the sign out front was vacant. Just recently the new pastor arrived and the name spot on the sign was filled again... and whose name appears? Floyd's. That's enough to make me question whether I'd want to start attending again, and I admit that's not a fair judgement (and is a total blast from the past!) but unlike most of the congregation I've dealt with the guy... and is that the same pickup he was driving back then, out front of the church?! I'm probably projecting. Anyhow, I'd like to give an "I hope everything went well, have a good year until next time" to the campers, counselors, planners, kitchen crew, camp managers and their families [and a tip of the heart to Karen Strausbaugh, wherever you are... because of you, I am no longer living in a mush-room] and others who make camps such as Lazy F work. I couldn't be the only person who has seen a glimmer of light shine upon a week between late June and early August, a glimmer of hope for recharging the batteries and making life tolerable. (I'm resisting the urge to break out with "I Am The Resurrection" here...) --#2
8/12/02
Hello, one and all. I decided to lay off for a week so everyone could see the other two R.A.T.s are alive and sorta-well. I too am doing fairly fine... been trying to kill that tree's stump and suckers (have gone through five pints of Ortho Brush-B-Gon so far), downloading all kindsa music before we have to pay a royalty for merely humming a merry tune, and learning about satellite Internet transmission because I have to start taking those calls today. A note for the curious: Satellite is to cable what ISDN is to DSL -- a more expensive and slower form of broadband for those who don't live close enough to a provider to get the real thing, containing a limit to how much you can actually use it not found on the real connection. What cracks me up is that the satellite service we offer isn't available in Hawaii and Alaska -- the two places where you'd expect (and need!) unwired service. And I'm all set and scheduled to work at The Puyallup Fair September 6 through 23, my fifth year slinging gyros, and am taking two weeks of vacation to do so. Ahh, no PEBKACs for half a month...
The other day Paige brought home a book for me to have a gander at, titled Simple Internet by Jeffrey Cogswell (The Waite Press, 1994). That last thing there intregued me... 1994? So I thumbed through it, and indeed it explained how, in Windows 3.1 (and the Macintosh platform wasn't mentioned as existing), to launch TERMINAL.EXE to dial up and log into a shell account. It detailed a bunch of things you'd want to know about FTP, Gopher, Finger, Archie, email, news, and Telnet... and not a word about the World Wide Web, which didn't yet exist. Yes, people, the Internet is not the fucking Web. If you can reply to your email, ping and traceroute to an IP, FTP 'get' a new version of Netscape, and read alt.geneology.fun.fun.fun but your browser says "Page cannot be displayed," don't call me and ask "is the Internet down?" No, it isn't; we're punishing you for being so narrow.
I was reminded yesterday of this guy from my neighborhood, let's call him "Spud." That was his nickname in high school; he thought it was because he was a Devo fan, but it really was because he was a fat lump in the dirt. Last I saw him he was a tribal policeman ("wears mirrored sunglasses but the mirrors face the inside," as Robin Williams said) who lost his front teeth in his teenage years, just like some of the injuns he hassles ER I MEAN serves; pretty fly for a white guy. Even back in school, he did the most wicked unflattering imitation of the Yakamas, "wit' da shunflower sheeds and da Pepshi, goin' to the smokeshack to cash my per-capita check." Ironic they sign his paycheck. And even back in school he was a power-hungry dickweed; he once speared me in the groin with the business end of a loaded AR-15 machine gun (happily it wasn't his). Spud once threw a lit sparkler through my bedroom window onto my bed; a neighbor resolved the mystery of Where Did Mushy's "Epoch-Man" Handheld Game & Clock Go when he located it in Spud's desk drawer (the neighbor didn't recover it like he said he would, but he did pour black pepper into the can of Copenhagen that Spud had left at his house, heh heh). Crooked as a dog's hind leg he was. What brought this guy to mind yesterday was me musing in the shower about how in high school he'd come over to my house after school sometimes to improve his standings in school, which was particularly funny when I was a sophomore (and he a freshman) because he asked me to forge this teacher's name on a note and I didn't even go to that school so had never seen the teacher's signature. He only needed that favor once, and I have to admit (later when I was going to that school and received homework assignments for students I tutored) he was right, that Mr. Lott's handwriting was so generic it could be emulated by anyone. Usually the ruse was when Spud would get his report card, this long computer-printed thing, he'd need my assistance... and my typewriter. His trick was to turn minuses into plusses by putting the paper in sideways and rolling the platten until the minus die could be pushed into the paper exactly in the middle of and perpendicular to the minus on the paper. It took almost as much effort to fake a slightly higher grade as it did to do the classwork to raise the grade for real. What was so funny about this was that his mother worked for the school district. Did he think he could pull off such a forgery when she could see his grades even before he received them? (My parents are both teachers and they did that on me, I'm pretty sure -- and even if they didn't, I knew they could so didn't risk it.) Also, did it occur to him that the GPA rating at the bottom remained unchanged while the value of the grades went up a couple tenths of a point, so simple math could expose him too? ("Hmm, why if you have three B+'s is your GPA around 2.80?") But conversely, as far as I know he did he get away with these things (or never admitted that he got caught)... which is the story of his life, proving that cheaters sometimes prosper. Don't try this at home, kids; you'll never become President. Oh wait... --#2
7/30/02
Oh My. At first blush this seemed like a rather amusing tidbit... however,
upon further reflection, I must say it could be just desserts indeed.
Christine, once again I shall beg you to reconsider your path in life. If you
are still siding with the forces of the Marketroids, I shall pray for your
redemption. If you have already realized the error of your ways, then you have
my hearty congratulations that the first step (at least) has already been made.
Also, please do not contact me about offers for my domain names. The domains
I have any responsibility for all fall into only these categories:
(1) Topping *all* search engines in topic already
(2) Still in planning
... and last, though hardly least ...
(3) Completely dead (read: depracated)
Thanks for your time,
d.c.
On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, The Mushroom wrote:
>Hey Chrome! You know how we *love* getting emails about our sundry domains
>from that vixen, Christine@trafficmagnet.com? It seems she spammed the
>wrong person because now someone's (intentionally? unintentionally?)
>using her email addy to spam out Klez. Seems like just desserts. My clues
>that it wasn't our cyber-girlfriend was that she is always courteous about
>our search engine rankings (this doesn't get mentioned), doesn't normally
>send files, speaks fluent English ("I wish you would like this"? Only if
>she was sending a photo of her bare chest!), and didn't bother to ask
>whether either of us were using XP before sending. :)
>
> « mush »
>
>>FORWARDED MESSAGE
>>
>>From: christine <christine@trafficmagnet.net>
>>To: themushroom
>>Date: 7/29/2002 9:28:28 PM
>>Subject: A WinXP patch
>
>This is a WinXP patch
>I wish you would like it.
>
>--DB20x309Wlm2Qw0K66b61613bb38p0
>Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
> name=return.bat
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
>Content-ID: <I856Vp45q9K73jbKz>
--#1
7/21/02
I've only smoked pot once. This messed up some of my favorite brain cells so I decided I'd done my experimentation (complete with lab coat and clipboard) and could move onto other things people do in college then laugh about later. Seeing as how I have no political aspirations and hold a job where one can blaze up the bowl during breaks (not me, I'm too busy going pee), I'm willing to tell the story. Kids, I'm not condoning doping so let this be a cautionary tale; imbibing in any illicit substance isn't good for the cells and can get you into trouble with the law, so do what you will but whatever you do -- a) do it because you want to, not because others want you to; b) do it in moderation and with adult supervision, lest you discover your threshold is lower than you expected; c) remember that we live in a world where everyone wants to know what you did in your youth and your spare time, then judge you by it, yet (at least in American society) setting your mind free for a few minutes can preclude you from various positions whereas fornication on the job will not but you'll hear a lot more about it from the press.
Jimbo came over to my house one day to hang out, and he announced he had this green herb from Coeur d'Alene called "Idaho thunderfuck." Somewhat curious what kept your average resident of CdA sane, what with all them ultra-right-wing armed hermits nearby, I made the uncharacteristic request to try some. Jimbo only needed verification that I had indeed asked for a smoke before he in two deft movements fashioned a bong out of a Western Family Cola can. In mere moments he was showing me how to operate this device, and the substance lived up to its name. This was no shake, no stems-n-seeds shit, this was some sticky green bud that once ignited turned my floor into a beige magic carpet. I was having trouble walking, it felt like my feet were six inches off the ground and my pantlegs six inches too high. Focusing my eyes was a little challenging too, and once I'd walked on the cushion of air a
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