Flipping the Locus

Trying a New PCP ...

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

I got a new PCP recently.

All she does is read questions off of some "Provider-approved" checklist.

At first I let myself believe that I was benefiting from some sort of empirical thoroughness.

By the third visit,I took in the posters she had on the walls. All of it was about the evils of various bad habits and recommendations on the frequency of various tests.

I realized that she considered all my answers to be complaints:

"Are you an early riser? Yes, I wake up before six every day, and I start a 3-mile walk at seven."

She changed my answers to whatever she wanted. I realized she had a black and white concept of everything, while I had more of a multidimensional sliding scale view of everything which one might say occasionally veers into synethesia.

She started adding "lifestyle" scoldings for someone who has habits opposite of what I already told her: She actually told me I should set an alarm clock so I wake up every morning. For what, 4:30?

Pretty much an evil robot.

My bones are made of rainbows ...

2011-10-06T07:33:00.000-07:00

My bones are made of rainbows gathered each day at sunset throughout the world. I can split a cord of wood with a word. Once I drove through a national forest while singing along to the radio, and turned a whole ten square miles into a housing tract. New York socialites wear amber necklaces derived from my earwax, as a good luck talisman. I don't need a boat to waterski.

My heart is a V8 engine ...

2011-10-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

My heart is a V8 engine that runs on plutonium. My liver generates more kilowatts than 10 acres of solar panels mounted on oil derricks. I am made of the particle that's faster than the speed of light. Higgs Bosun Particle Blast is my favorite breakfast cereal. I am a compulsive truth-teller. HEEE HEEE HEEE! I've already lived out the future and I'm going back to my favorite pasts. I'm calling Einstein a dummy, and he loves me for it. There isn't enough alphabet to write my bra size. What gets me in trouble is all the good I do. I bought the world a Coke, but I couldn't stick around, which is where the problems started.

My soul is a hurricane ... HEAR ME!

2011-10-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

My soul is a hurricane roaring up the coast but threatened by my other soul, a giant asteroid, coming down on the hurricane like a flyswatter. I am a tsunami emanating from the impact of an asteroid that seemed to be chasing a hurricane, with a WILL! I am a brushfire that burns clouds, ignited by mist from the Hebrides, which could have been the angel's share of a store of casks of single-malt, ormaybe not. HERR HERR HERR! I am chasing crocodiles up the Nile with a magnifying glass and resurrecting the lighthouse at Alexandria. I am making icebergs collide in mid-air! It rains diamonds into the deepest part of the ocean! I am throwing gold at the sun! It is too late at night to wear pants. HEAR ME!

"Can You Be Taken Down As a Monopoly Just Bcs You're Super-Popular?"

2011-09-27T04:40:00.000-07:00

I was reading about Eric Schmidt going before Congress in an quasi-anti-trust inquiry into Google's market status: Was it a monopoly? I thought: Well, it isn't charging for views, it's giving search away, and charging for ad space ... for advertisers to ride on that popularity.

About 2004, I noted that the cost of media ran 10x the cost of creative, in the advertising world. I don't know what it is today, or if it can be quantified.

About the same time, I paged through a copy of Rolling Stone while doing a project for a concepting seminar. The ads in the magazine weren't trying to sell much product -- they mostly asked people to join up -- in one case, to the Army, in another, to Yahoo. The trend was moving toward advertisers collecting subscribers to their own media channels, rather than selling directly from Rolling Stone.

But ads used to ride with content, as media was formerly framed. Now they ride with access to content. Then there's the idea, "If you aren't paying, then you are the commodity."

Abe Lincoln's Flatboat Days

2011-09-01T07:52:00.001-07:00

conzatorium Connie Michener

In his flatboat days, Lincoln sometimes used the alias, "Samuel Clemens." #LincolnFacts

Blues Truism

2011-09-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

conzatorium Connie Michener

[_____]ing so much will always make you feel like you've never [_____]ed at all. #BluesFacts

"My soul ..."

2011-09-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

@conzatorium: My soul is an anvil, and my other soul is a swingin' hammer, and th'other one's my mouthharp I left on th'anvil. #BluesFacts

Blues & Physics

2011-09-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

@conzatorium: "How blue can you get" challenges the EM/visible spectrum; is likely a key to resolving ray vs. particle theory. #BluesFacts

Remembering: Bigfoot Posse With Dick Cheney

2011-08-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Here Dick Cheney and Joy were poised to go on the hunt for Bigfoot! We put together a great group of hunters for that trip ... uhh ... uhh ... I wonder where those guys are today? Didn't find Bigfoot, but we had some good times!

Remembering: Double-dutching with Al Gore

2011-08-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

Here Joy is double-dutching with Al Gore; Madeline Albright was one of the rope-swingers. We were singing "Iko-Iko." Unforgettable.

Mooshing th' TOC on Gravity's Crackers

2011-08-31T14:30:00.000-07:00

Here is my ToC to date on Gravity's Crackers. As you can see, it's pretty broad-ranging, very "Renaissance Bearish" -- I had no idea before I laid it all out! Still some tightening up to do, but it's all fun!

(Oh, noes! Somehow it's all LIVE! Wow! One could ... ... and ... here in Blogger ... hold on ... okay ... I've killed all the fake links ...)

Contents.

Gravity’s Crackers 1

Does your country have the gravity? 1

Preface 5

Draft Manifesto of Truth Fighters 6

Rant of Bear 6

Transmissions from Chiron on the Night of Last Vermouth 7

The great simultaneity 8

Everyday miracles inhibit my living of life! 8

What is it like to play after the game is won? 9

slow-motion state of in extremis 9

Joy Bear, Naturalist 12

Every Time Bear of Eat Tiger 13

Throw-down: Jaws! 13

Churchill’s Parrot 13

Grunting the Giant Idaho Worm 14

Communique to Kinkistan: Giant Squids Taking California; Please to Send Assistance 15

The Banana Tree in the Room 15

baby sharks snuggle in wetsuit make chafe the hotspot 17

Commercial uses of wolf spiders; spider-swine DNA splicing possibilities. 17

Ms. Kinkyboots interviews me on genetic experimentation 18

Frankly, I don’t understand unicorns. 21

Dog Breed Theory of Intelligence Differentiation 22

On Sandcastles 22

Bad Day at the beach 23

Carbon Footprints in the Sand. 23

I consider economizing, but can't bear not throwing money away 23

“People do get bored with sex all the time, and look to TV for relief.” 23

Joy Bear, Inventor 24

The Fun Patent 24

VR Goggles 24

Machine of Perpetual Movings 27

Lab notes; interim report. 27

Hot air balloon; propulsion as jet thrust fire of derision 29

Bear Make of Space Shuttle 29

Redneck Shuttle 30

Boomerang of No Return 30

Wicker Bus Commission for Helena Handbasket & c. 31

Currently in Bear Shop: Black Pepper Fountain! 31

Joy Bear, Business Bear 32

Unique Venture Capital Invest Opportunity! 33

Bear Tell: Technological Advances and Mr. Bin Laden 33

Bear gives Miss Cupid Advice: Cocoa Bat Speculation. 34

Fast-track Dating Videos in the works 34

Joy Bear Cook Show! 35

Magic th Beaver Dustings 35

New Brainstorm Invention: Toy Retrieve 36

Reduction, or Elimination of Acrimony 37

In Search of the Rare Knickknack, “The Creaming of the Sugar” 38

Bear's Survey: Bear curious to know about YOU! 40

Bear invite you to UNBELIEVABLE RETURNS! 41

Joy Bear, Diplomat, Nation Builder, Statesbear 42

Does your country have the gravity? 43

My red white and blue hoodwinkling 43

Flexecution: Flexetarian, goofy-foot, quick-move the keretsu, short-order, just-in-time the process! 43

Grunion supply chain issue 44

Trading up the Nut Heirarchy 44

Of SAUCE and SOUP 44

Trade Negotiations Proposal the Kinkistan 45

Bear Envoy Kinkistan Nation Bails of America Outtings 45

Improvements of debating format for think-tank team: Hopscotch 47

What is Vice President Do? 47

Xbox-Boys Army 48

Bear not agree to integrate with humans, sorry. 48

USA Envoy Prepares Special Moon Day 49

Strategic Requirements 49

Bear Nation-building: Establish International Prizes 50

Yes, we have no blackout bananas 50

Is weep of commentary sadness of nation! 50

Bigfoot Posse 51

Search on to find Cupid Kinkyboots missing! 53

Joy Bear, Social Commentator, Innovator 54

FIRST FALSE RECURSION 55

From the Coalition Against Tuneless Whistling Files 55

... So many portents ... 56

RE: Friends are like potatoes 57

CAPTCHA Expertise 57

… perhapsing, of the also! 58

Cats cannot be vacuumed in this country, it is the Constitution! 58

Transmissions from the future reveal: future still the full of dumbass! 59

Happy to 50 Years Antarctica Treaty Hooray 59

Joy Bear, Celebrity Confidant 61

Bear and Cherrystone 62

My Relationship with Sasquatch 62

Bear Jealousing Bigfoot 63

One time I rent of cabin woods of Norway… 63

Miss Rachel 64

"hipster asses": Hmmm, of coming out of woodworkings! 64

Come around sometime, and fix my screens. 65

constant infest predators of invade, you bait place with Cheetos make predator borings of set hooks refill wall drillings 66

Aug 12 Madonna et I “Dear Diary” 66

Madonna et I of wood shop. 67

Joy and Al Gore Way of! 67

Sometimes Dame Judy Dench Come Over Bear Cave. 68

Chuck Norris’ Aqua Velva 69

Say of once, Fred Rogers tell me ... 69

Mother Chemical, Keating, and Cheney 69

----------------- Original Message ----------------- 69

WU WEI 69

Of Flying Gourds 70

... pop-culture-less refugee ... 71

How I Saved Myself from Certain Death when Pop-Rocks Tore Open my Stomach 71

On Lemon Pledge 72

Towing the Line 72

Contemptu Cat Manifesto! 73

Joy Bear, Foodie, Gourmand 75

Chipotle-existentialism 75

creamed tuna over toast is a SIN in my religion 75

Ginger snaps 75

Book of Picnic 76

Is make have picnic ... 76

Consumption contests FIRST and then spiritual bonding 77

National Waffle Association 77

Maybe Cook Ideas Before of Hatch: ‘Baby Eats’ Club 78

Hornet Chrispies 80

Off his crackers 80

Joy Bear, Action Advisor 84

Rush the gun arm from the side 84

Explanations. 85

On Questioning Existence 85

How many thought-particles make a thought 86

Q: i want to BE. 86

Never Put the Cheese on Early

2011-05-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

Always remember, you can’t tamp it down after you put the cheese on, and also, don’t put the cheese on an uncooked side. You have to be done flipping before you put the cheese on.

We Have Nothing to Worry About but Worry Itself

2011-05-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have just learned that GAD -- generalized anxiety disorder -- is the number one cause of disability in the workplace in the USA -- and only a minute after I first learned the term. These days, people are finally getting serious about the insidious implications of bullying(cite) and ostracizing.
I read with interest the Social Brain Hypothesis (1998) by Robin Dunbar. In it, he more or less gets down to stating that success of an individual is dependent on how well an individual can achieve a state of relatively low harassment.
Do you know the Tall Poppy Syndrome? Crab mentality?
Reverse Dominance Hierarchy, (1993) as outlined by Christopher Boehm, is not just the primate precursor to democratic systems but also is based on members "ganging up" on anyone who is perceived as attempting to dominate the group.
We have adopted society from lower animals -- it is relatively recently in our history that we switched from pure evolution, where the most forceful rapists and murderers win the evolutionary game -- to a more social evolution, where we put those people in jail, in favor of consensus agreements.
More and more, psychology is finding that good mental health is due through having a secure attachment, rather than an ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized attachment. But only 55-65% of children have a secure attachment style, derived through an appropriate, loving relationship with a caregiver.
In smaller "society," such as family situations, we still see a degree of dominant strongman tactics being practiced.
But also, the projection of worry, rumination as a learned trait, hours of obsession over worries, and everyone still saying, "You worry too much," a criticism, rather than an assurance. A demand to deny worry, rather than addressing its root causes.
This kind of harassment, directly, and indirectly, through projected worry-focus, wreaks havoc on human potential.
Recently, someone was talking about motivation being a factor in intelligence measurement. Why, sure it is. How long do you try at something you simply don't understand? People check out; take a contrary attitude, wrap themselves in defenses for not knowing, appearing stupid; "No, I'm not stupid; this just doesn't interest me," people say -- it's not a scale of earnest trying; outside the circle of increasing reward for the correct answer are people apparently pursuing other interests, maybe harassing, or being harassed by, someone else.

"The Jig is Up"

2011-04-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

The jig is a dance; when the tune starts or stops, the jig is up.

The jig is a guide, a template that you follow with a cutting implement, or with which you form your material over. Often, it is clamped to the base plate of the equipment with the raw material; once the jig is up, you cannot expect what has been previously completed to align with work done afterwards, and you should take care not to work on the project while it is unsecured.

My Home is a Desklamp Graveyard

2011-04-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

I went to architecture school in the mid-90's, so, I was there at the confluence of the smoking experimentation of halogen desk lamps, which coincided with the ushering-in of the CAD era. In my program, we still spent most of our time at drafting tables, drawing, under desklamps. Oh, I had them all. As for the halogen ones. I had both the light spaceship one and the "curry brush" one that actually dries out the paper under it until it warps. But at least your hands stay warm.
As I explained in my last post, I've been drawing again, an interest rekindled after moving all my portfolios and oversized stationery around for a baseboard treatment.
But desklamps are endlessly breaking -- or should I say, are always in a state of disrepair, here. I have two in my car; one's the exact kind on the secretaries' desks in Mad Men, the other is an IKEA model in which the switch got too tight to turn -- I took it to Home Depot, and, standing in the switch aisle, I discovered both that it started working again, and, there was a slight alteration in the switch area that made the lamp non-standard, in terms of replacement parts. Well, so ...
Since my drawing recommenced, the lamp I was using, the big curry brush halogen, stopped turning on. I had been taking notes of where to find cheap desklamps; deciding maybe I should look on them like a commodity, like those big packages of toilet paper you buy every quarter; I could maybe just budget four lamps a year ...

Churning the home ... and the mind.

2011-04-14T05:28:00.000-07:00

A baseboard treatment meant pushing everything into the center of every one of my rooms a week ago. I had to ask myself about the things I was keeping.
Among the things were a folio of watercolors I knew weren't all that good, and some very good art paper. Setting the folio into a new home, I had a flash of the folio of drawings I wanted to have.
I moved a lamp, which had seemed broken, to a new place, and switched it on. It worked! I drew three really great drawings in the last week. But finally, the lamp stopped working.

Rare Logic versus the Monkey Mind

2010-12-08T06:17:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of a rare logic book for which critical pages were blocked out in Google Books. It arrived right after I read Anis Shivani's Huffington Post review of Decision Points, Bush’s memoirs, and all I could think of was the NLP machinations of the public monkey mind, and where would I ever be able to practice the rare and beautiful logic that I have been so intent on studying?

RE: How Did the Germanics Evolve on Atlantis?

2010-12-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

Their spawn were stored in the lighthouse at Alexandria, which toppled into the sea during an earthquake/tsunami, tossing them northward across the Mediterranian (Middle Earth) Sea and into the Alps. There, a band of all-female Neantertals inhaled the material, and the very next thaw, their goats gave birth to geese. These geese flew together, further northward, and settled on a mudflat high upon what is now the English Channel. They roosted there for an inordinately long time, laying eggs that grew sixfold their size after laying (and before hatching). The Germanics came from those eggs. Soon enough a lady with a Dutch accent came by with a flyboat, which has a shallow draft such as not to get caught on flats, and picked up the Germanics. They stayed with her in her underfurnished cottage and learned how to pick out catchy blues-based tunes on some old string instruments her father had left with her.

RE: Why won't anyone get in my van?

2010-12-01T15:07:00.001-08:00

Well, does it have good lighting and a nice bed? Do you offer candy, compliments, money, trips to nice places? DO YOU ASK? Really, do you really ASK them to get in the van, or are you just standing there with your foot on the guardrail post, with the van door open, staring alluringly? There are etiquette courses you can sign up for to help you, some offer videotaping, so you can watch yourself, and where you are making mistakes and losing opportunities. I believe I can help you. Feel free to contact me for a consultation.

"Heavy Snow:" Is it weighed?

2010-12-01T13:02:00.001-08:00

Yes, but the scales are actually measuring force as well as mass. The snow falls onto the scale like a fastball into a pitcher's glove. Soft is light and fast is heavy. Then there is the mass of the flakes -- it differs, unlike the weight of a baseball, which is standard. This complicates it, which is why meteorologists are paid more than ball players.

Steps for rebirth

2010-12-01T11:49:00.001-08:00

(To Yahoo Answers)

Becoming "reborn" is much better than becoming "reinvented," because all your sins are washed away. First, you have to slather yourself with some kind of goo, like body butter (try The Body Shop) an then pack yourself tightly into some sort of "womb." You'll need some help, and as for cleaning up, your best bet is to do it at the beach on a warm day. Get your friends to pack you in. You will know when you're ready to come out. You will feel both at one with the world and singularly yourself. You will have forgotten the past and be ready to face the future, grasping, as the infant does, all you need to yourself. Your will to be born will be an urgency of feeling that isn't nervous, isn't muscular, isn't mental, it will be a feeling coming from all your being. BE REBORN! Now go into the ocean and clean yourself up. Be refreshed! Get your friends to help you. They ought to be paying all their attention to you. They'll be a little annoyed, especially because you don't remember them, but this is about YOU!

My First Fax

2010-12-01T09:24:00.001-08:00

The first fax I ever sent was to a DuPont office in Belgium, from the DuPont Louviers office in Newark, DE. I was a temporary purchasing clerk, and had a phone relationship with several suppliers. The fax was on behalf of a small machinery fabrication operation waiting on a significant payment. How could I help?
I asked a seasoned purchasing agent who handled the hard stuff. He told me to say that the Belgian non-payment was "affecting Louviers' ability to do business with" the supplier. He told me to sign my name and the name of the facility, but not bother with a title.
It was 1988 and faxing was relatively new. The Louviers office had a telex room with a dedicated operator, and had newly established a fax room with a dedicated operator! I troubled over how to indicate that the document was a fax, and then decided on the cool words, "Via FAX" on a line by itself. I typed up the letter, had the operator fax it to Belgium, and send a copy via USPS.
In a few days, the vendor called and said I had saved his company's Christmas.

Curators

2010-12-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

RE: Rand's Blog, The Algorithm and the Cloud are Not Enough, 11/29/2010

“Opinionated, benevolent editors” is the way it’s going; ever since the Forrester report at the end of October that more people are getting on the web but content creation is flat, the term “curator” is popping up. The algorithm system, touted as the “virtuous circle,” really is me-too chatting up, that promotes the already-promoted, leaving other options of merit unnoticed. The curator is a promoter who can pick ‘em and knows how to release the kite into the social winds.

In Crisis, Opportunity is the Sound of an Audience of One-handed People ...

2010-11-30T10:33:00.000-08:00

RE:
Fastco: Mayhem on Madison Avenue, Danielle Sacks
Businessweek: Don Draper's Revenge, Felix Gillette

Six years ago, the cost of media versus creative ad accounts was 10:1.
Media costs were destabilized by the internet, as well as other factors. What we’re talking about here is chaos theory, a multiplicity of factors. The jarring Neilson report in what, 2005, that 1/3 of the young male demographic had left TV for video games as a main preoccupation rocked media buys. There are new ways to go where the people are.
Before the whole industry had been running on rule-of-thumb for media; ROI was relegated to DM, and was considered coarsely nonmagical. The faltering of print media, as well as clearer stats for other media, real numbers of eyeballs and click-thrus … new understandings of the value of word-of-mouth and the worth of influence … social maps and the paralleling attempts of social media. There are new ways to account for social influence; Gladwell’s connectors, mavens, and salesmen are starbursts in the social matrix. The effect of social – as tests run on pop songs have proven – is that the payoff can be larger, but it is also less predictable who the favorites will be.
Print media, is stabilizing under a new split delivery.
The funnel of the marketing system is still the same, and there are appropriate media for the basic processes of interest, research, purchasing, and retention, and for the customer profiles you’re trying to reach.
The ad business had become ritualized with media buying seasons, and formal reviews, and agency-of-record announcements, but that egg has been cracked open.
I don’t know where agency pricing stands today viz the media:creative ratio, but I would suppose media real estate has declined dramatically against creative labor. Everything has been bid down. People are examining measures they hadn’t before, like my dad watching the instantly-calculated MPG gauge on his Prius, where before he used to floor it to the stop sign and then jam on the brake.

From 'Joy': Comments on Post-Y2K Machinery Rapture

2010-10-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

OMG, happened to me in Jersey last week. My plane was repo'ed mid-flight
by the machinery rapture that keeps the damn model in the 20th century
-- a Y2K thing -- how it got this far outta the 20th c., I don't know ...

RE: Does the machinery rapture affect toaster ovens?
'Cause that would really suck, especially if I was
right in the middle of makin' cheesy toast.

Well, yes, it could happen. But the thing to do is put your plate
under the toaster-oven, that way, the toast drops onto the plate
when the toaster vanishes. Is it a pre-year-2000 toaster-oven?

Newer toaster-ovens aren't entirely free from the machinery-
rapture phenomenon, but things are a little more stable in this
century, which isn't as prone to superstitious winds ...

Have to be careful in cases of toast-rapture.

I think back to the days of alchemy. They were much better.

From 'Joy': Concerning the attraction of free dirt

2010-10-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

Cupid tells me:

So I went and did a search for 'free dirt' on Craigslist LA and it returned 49 hits. Seems a lotta people are anxious to get rid of the stuff. 9 of the ads had pictures. Seems most of the people who are anxious to get rid of the stuff are too lazy to show what it is they wanna get rid of. That makes me kinda suspicious. I mean, why don't they wanna show their dirt? Is there somethin' wrong with it? Yeah, right - No wonder they're givin' it away for free.

Free dirt bein' what it is, it's still possible to get a really good deal on it. That's right, some free dirt deals are better than others. Like this guy in Long Beach...

FREE DIRT/BEER (LONG BEACH)Date: 2010-10-03, 4:42PM PDT
wILL HELP YOU LOAD. EVEN SUPPLY SOME BEER FOR YOUR TROUBLE!

So if you need some free dirt, this is the place to get it. But hurry, this is probably a limited time offer. [-- CK]

RE: FREE DIRT

Oh, it's all trouble unless you see the designation "CLEAN FILL"
If is doesn't say "CLEAN FILL," you can be sure it is full of
crumbling radioactive concrete chunks of Chernobyl and the
bones of Jimmy Hoffa. FREE DIRT can get you in a heap of
trouble. You go around taking FREE DIRT, especially when
there's beer attached to it, and if you don't get rolled, your truck
stolen, or set up for DUI and theft and vandalism of someone's
fancy landscaping, your own yard will end up a SUPERFUND
site. MARK MY WORDS! MARK 'EM! BE VERY WARY OF THE
FREE DIRT TRADE! -- Bear.

From 'Joy': Welcome to the Sanctum of Bull Crystals

2010-10-25T19:35:00.000-07:00

Hey, You got your Fortress, now I got my own, in the biggest geode ever discovered, inside a pile of bovine droppings in the field of the ragin'nest bull there ever was --

This is the Sanctum of Bullcrystals!

The most prized -- and expensive coffee in the world is that which has passed, as a bean, through the digestive tract of the jungle civet and again collected from its scat. Eighty percent of the world's workers are following jungle civets around to collect and process their poos to make this expensive coffee for the wealthiest 2 percent of the population who drink this magical elixir -- and these individuals crap out massive diamonds, when they aren't incredibly constipated, but, I digress.

What I'm saying in the rip-snortin' spirit of Yellow Jacket, the meanest bull ever, resides in the pile, which, now crystallized, is my home of kick-ass badassery.

Here, this is my space, where the magic happens, the alchemy of of creation called bullshit.
I am a devotee of Harry G. Frankfurt's slim volume, which, well, is actually a short bit of learning he took away from a visit to my abode. It's all kind of circular like that, so don't go thinking it all comes out of thin air, and thus, is somehow indefensible ... No. There's a PROCESS involved, a lengthy process of passing through thought-chambers, of mixing of chemicals, of fermentation; heating up and cooling down, biochemical exchanges, and, after, the long slow rot before finally in the fullness of time, I can stab a finger in the air and say,

"I have an IDEA!"

Reference:
kopi luwak
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/world/asia/18civetcoffee.html

Three startlingly good marketing/SEO copywriting sources

2010-10-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

I'm finding the creative in analytical ...
the balance of creative and analytical ...
something like that ...

Multi-Channel Merchant: Social Marketing Makes "Listening the New Black"
http://directmag.com/online/news/1011-social-marketing-listening/
http://directmag.com/mail/news/1014-successful-creative-crap/

Smashing Magazine: The Ultimate guide to A/B Testing:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-b-testing/

Copyblogger.com: All kinds of copywriting advice ...
http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/
http://www.copyblogger.com/seo-copywriting/
http://www.copyblogger.com/keyword-research-introduction/

Notes on Quality Management Tools and Methods

2010-10-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

(Assembled from several WIKI sources, these tools help for ideation, production, and marketing; in some cases, they help in overviewing all of them together, so there might be some knowledge to discover about a de facto business model.)

There are many established quality-management tools.
Here’s an overview of some methods used.

* 5 Whys – When discussing a breakdown, discuss why it happened; once that reason is established, ask why that first reason happened, and so on, subsequent times. It often reveals underlying attitudes or undeveloped ideas about maintenance that can be fixed to reduce future breakdowns.

* Analysis of variance (ANOVA) – Used to determine if there is a single issue or multiple issues at hand in variance of process results; can be used to prioritize areas for improvement.

* ANOVA Gauge R&R – (Repeatability and reproducibility), important factors are measuring instruments, operators (people), test methods, specification, parts (or specimens being measured). Repeatability is variation in measurements taken by a single person or instrument on the same item under the same conditions. Reproducibility is the variability induced by the operators measuring the same part.
* Axiomatic design – A systems design methodology analyzing the transformation of customer needs into functional requirements, design parameters, and process variables. Design axioms (without proof) are used. This addresses fundamental issues in Taguchi methods. The theory’s creator, Professor Nam Suh, says: “The goal of axiomatic design is to make human designers more creative, reduce the random search process, minimize the iterative trial-and-error process, and determine the best design among those proposed.” It uses a dependency structure matrix (DSM).
Axiomatic design is a decomposition process going from customer needs to FRs, to DPs, and then to process variables (PVs), thereby crossing the four domains of the design world: customer, functional, physical, and process.
In decomposing the design, a designer first “explodes” higher-level FRs into lower-level FRs, proceeding through a hierarchy of levels until a design can be implemented. At the same time, the designer “zigzags” between pairs of design domains, such as between the functional and physical domains. Ultimately, zigzagging between “what” and “how” domains reduces the design to a set of FR, DP, and PV hierarchies.
There are these two axioms: the independence axiom and the information axiom. (From these two axioms come a bunch of theorems that tell designers “some very simple things,” says Suh. “If designers remember these, then they can make enormous progress in the quality of their product design.”) The first axiom says that the functional requirements within a good design are independent of each other. This is the goal of the whole exercise: Identifying DPs so that “each FR can be satisfied without affecting the other FRs,” says Suh.
The second axiom says that when two or more alternative designs satisfy the first axiom, the best design is the one with the least information. That is, when a design is good, information content is zero. (That’s “information” as in the measure of one’s freedom of choice, the measure of uncertainty, which is the basis of information theory.) “Designs that satisfy the independence axiom are called uncoupled or decoupled,” explains Robert Powers of Axiomatic Design Software, Inc. “The difference is that in an uncoupled design, the DPs are totally independent; while in a decoupled design, at least one DP affects two or more FRs. As a result, the order of adjusting the DPs in a decoupled design is important.”
* Business Process Mapping – Defining what a business entity does, who is responsible, to what standard a process should be completed, and how the success of the business process can be determined – reducing uncertainty as to the requirements of every internal business process. Thus a business process illustration/map can be produced.

* Cause & effects diagram (also known as “fishbone” or Ishikawa diagram) – This is used in the cop show, “Without a Trace,” where a horizontal timeline is drawn on a whiteboard, and as the detectives discover possible relevant events in the missing person’s life, they are plotted on the board. But also, if you categorize everything that goes into a product, sources of measurement, materials, personnel, environment, methods, and machines, you can discover where more attention needs to go to reduce defects.

* Chi-square test of independence and fits – a statistical hypothesis test in which the sampling distribution of the test statistic is a chi-square distribution when the null hypothesis is true, or any in which this is asymptotically true. Pearson’s chi-square test, or goodness-of-fit. The chi-square statistic is calculated by finding the difference between each observed and theoretical frequency for each possible outcome, squaring them, dividing each by the theoretical frequency, and taking the sum of the results. A second important part of determining the test statistic is to define the degrees of freedom of the test: this is essentially the number of observed frequencies adjusted for the effect of using some of those observations to define the "theoretical frequencies".
* Control chart – used to determine whether or not a manufacturing or business process is in a state of statistical control. If it is, then data from the process can be used to predict the future performance of the process. If the chart indicates that the process being monitored is not in control, analysis of the chart can help determine the sources of variation, which can then be eliminated to bring the process back into control. A control chart is a specific kind of run chart that allows significant change to be differentiated from the natural variability of the process.
The control chart can be seen as part of an objective and disciplined approach that enables correct decisions regarding control of the process, including whether or not to change process control parameters. Process parameters should never be adjusted for a process that is in control, as this will result in degraded process performance.
* Correlation (of dependence) – Correlations are useful because they can indicate a predictive relationship that can be exploited in practice. For example, an electrical utility may produce less power on a mild day based on the correlation between electricity demand and weather. Correlations can also suggest possible causal, or mechanistic relationships; however, statistical dependence is not sufficient to demonstrate the presence of such a relationship.
Formally, dependence refers to any situation in which random variables do not satisfy a mathematical condition of probabilistic independence.
* Cost-benefit analysis – weighing the total expected costs against the total expected benefits of one or more actions in order to choose the best or most profitable option. Cost–benefit analysis is often used by governments to evaluate the desirability of a given intervention. It is heavily used in today's government. It is an analysis of the cost effectiveness of different alternatives in order to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs. The aim is to gauge the efficiency of the intervention relative to the status quo.

* CTQ tree – (Critical to Quality tree) decomposes broad customer requirements into more easily quantified requirements. Can be qualitative (delight) to qualitative (cost).

* Design of experiments (DOE) – is the design of any information-gathering exercises where variation is present, whether under the full control of the experimenter or not. However, in statistics, these terms are usually used for controlled experiments. Other types of study, and their design, are discussed in the articles on opinion polls and statistical surveys (which are types of observational study), natural experiments and quasi-experiments (for example, quasi-experimental design).

* Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) – is a procedure in product development and operations management for analysis of potential failure modes within a system for classification by the severity and likelihood of the failures. A successful FMEA activity helps a team to identify potential failure modes based on past experience with similar products or processes, enabling the team to design those failures out of the system, thereby reducing development time and costs. It is widely used in manufacturing industries in various phases of the product life cycle and is now increasingly finding use in the service industry. Failure modes are any errors or defects in a process, design, or item, especially those that affect the customer, and can be potential or actual. Effects analysis refers to studying the consequences of those failures.

* General linear model – The general linear model (GLM) is a statistical linear model. It may be written as:
Y == XB + U
where Y is a matrix with series of multivariate measurements, X is a matrix that might be a design matrix, B is a matrix containing parameters that are usually to be estimated and U is a matrix containing errors or noise. The errors are usually assumed to follow a multivariate normal distribution. If the errors do not follow a multivariate normal distribution, generalized linear models may be used to relax assumptions about Y and U.
The general linear model incorporates a number of different statistical models: ANOVA, ANCOVA, MANOVA, MANCOVA, ordinary linear regression, t-test and F-test. If there is only one column in Y (i.e., one dependent variable) then the model can also be referred to as the multiple regression model (multiple linear regression).
Hypothesis tests with the general linear model can be made in two ways: multivariate or as several independent univariate tests. In multivariate tests the columns of Y are tested together, whereas in univariate tests the columns of Y are tested independently, i.e., as multiple univariate tests with the same design matrix.
* Histograms – An intervalized and blocked-out bell curve, for the most part. In statistics, a histogram is a graphical representation, showing a visual impression of the distribution of experimental data. It is an estimate of the probability distribution of a continuous variable and was first introduced by Karl Pearson [1]. A histogram consists of tabular frequencies, shown as adjacent rectangles, erected over discrete intervals (bins), with an area equal to the frequency of the observations in the interval. The height of a rectangle is also equal to the frequency density of the interval, i.e., the frequency divided by the width of the interval.

* Quality Function Deployment (QFD) – a “method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process.” The technique is also used to identify and document competitive marketing strategies and tactics (see example QFD House of Quality for Enterprise Product Development.)

* Pareto chart – a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. Shows relative value of intervals/categories.
* Pick chart -- When faced with multiple improvement ideas a PICK chart may be used to determine the most useful. There are four categories on a 2*2 matrix; horizontal is scale of payoff (or benefits), vertical is ease of implementation. By deciding where an idea falls on the pick chart four proposed project actions are provided; Possible, Implement, Challenge and Kill (thus the name PICK).
Low Payoff, easy to do - Possible
High Payoff, easy to do - Implement
High Payoff, hard to do - Challenge
Low Payoff, hard to do - Kill
The vertical axis, representing ease of implementation typically includes some assessment of cost to implement as well. More expensive actions can be said to be more difficult to implement.
* Process capability – The input of a process is expected to meet customer requirements, specifications, or product tolerances. Engineering can conduct a process capability study to determine the extent to which the process can meet these expectations.
The ability of a process to meet specifications can be expressed as a single number using a process capability index or it can be assessed using control charts. Either case requires running the process to obtain enough measurable output so that engineering is confident that the process is stable and so that the process mean and variability can be reliably estimated. Statistical process control defines techniques to properly differentiate between stable processes, processes that are drifting (experiencing a long-term change in the mean of the output), and processes that are growing more variable. Process capability indices are only meaningful for processes that are stable (in a state of statistical control).
* Quantitative marketing research through Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) – QMR is the application of quantitative research techniques to the field of marketing. It comes from both the positivist view of the world, and the modern marketing viewpoint that marketing is an interactive process in which both buyer and seller reach a satisfying agreement on the "four Ps" of marketing: Product, Price, Place (location) and Promotion.
EFM is a system of processes that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization. EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and translators.
EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer specific real time interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.
Prior to EFM, survey software was typically deployed in departments and lacked user roles, permissions and workflow. EFM enables deployment across the enterprise, providing decision makers with important data for increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value.[1] EFM enables companies to look at customers "holistically" and to better respond to customer needs.
* Regression analysis – includes any techniques for modeling and analyzing several variables, when the focus is on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. More specifically, regression analysis helps us understand how the typical value of the dependent variable changes when any one of the independent variables is varied, while the other independent variables are held fixed. Most commonly, regression analysis estimates the conditional expectation of the dependent variable given the independent variables — that is, the average value of the dependent variable when the independent variables are held fixed. Less commonly, the focus is on a quantile, or other location parameter of the conditional distribution of the dependent variable given the independent variables. In all cases, the estimation target is a function of the independent variables called the regression function. In regression analysis, it is also of interest to characterize the variation of the dependent variable around the regression function, which can be described by a probability distribution.
Regression analysis is widely used for prediction and forecasting, where its use has substantial overlap with the field of machine learning. Regression analysis is also used to understand which among the independent variables are related to the dependent variable, and to explore the forms of these relationships. In restricted circumstances, regression analysis can be used to infer causal relationships between the independent and dependent variables.

* Root cause analysis – (RCA) is a class of problem solving methods aimed at identifying the root causes of problems or incidents. The practice of RCA is predicated on the belief that problems are best solved by attempting to correct or eliminate root causes, as opposed to merely addressing the immediately obvious symptoms. By directing corrective measures at root causes, it is hoped that the likelihood of problem recurrence will be minimized. However, it is recognized that complete prevention of recurrence by a single intervention is not always possible. RCA, initially is a reactive method of problem detection and solving. This means that the analysis is done after an incident has occurred. By gaining expertise in RCA it becomes a pro-active method. This means that RCA is able to forecast the possibility of an incident even before it could occur. While one follows the other, RCA is a completely separate process to Incident Management.

* Run charts – also known as a run-sequence plot is a graph that displays observed data in a time sequence. Often, the data displayed represent some aspect of the output or performance of a manufacturing or other business process. Run sequence plots[1] are an easy way to graphically summarize an univariate data set. A common assumption of univariate data sets is that they behave like:[2]
• random drawings;
• from a fixed distribution;
• with a common location; and
• with a common scale.
With run sequence plots, shifts in location and scale are typically quite evident. Also, outliers can easily be detected.

* SIPOC analysis (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers) – An overview of a process, for example:
1. Suppliers - grocers and vendors
2. Inputs - ingredients for recipes
3. Process - cooking at a restaurant kitchen
4. Outputs - meals served
5. Customers - diners at a restaurant
* Taguchi methods -- Taguchi methods are statistical methods developed by Genichi Taguchi to improve the quality of manufactured goods, and more recently also applied to, engineering,[1] biotechnology,[2][3] marketing and advertising.[4] Professional statisticians have welcomed the goals and improvements brought about by Taguchi methods, particularly by Taguchi's development of designs for studying variation, but have criticized the inefficiency of some of Taguchi's proposals.[5]
Taguchi's work includes three principal contributions to statistics:
• A specific loss function — see Taguchi loss function;
• The philosophy of off-line quality control; and
• Innovations in the design of experiments.
* Taguchi Loss Function -- is a graphical depiction of loss developed by the Japanese business statistician Genichi Taguchi to describe a phenomenon affecting the value of products produced by a company. Praised by Dr. W. Edwards Deming (the business guru of the 1980s American quality movement),[1] it made clear the concept that quality does not suddenly plummet when, for instance, a machinist exceeds a rigid blueprint tolerance. Instead "loss" in value progressively increases as variation increases from the intended condition. This was considered a breakthrough in describing quality, and helped fuel the continuous improvement movement that since has become known as lean manufacturing.
The Taguchi Loss Function is important for a number of reasons. It helps engineers better understand the importance of designing for variation. It drives an improved understanding of the importance of Variation Management (a concept described in Breaking the Cost Barrier). Finally, It was important to describing the effects of changing variation on a system, which is a central characteristic of Lean Dynamics, a business management discipline focused on better understanding the impact of dynamic business conditions (such as sudden changes in demand seen during the 2008-2009 economic downturn) on loss, and thus on creating value.

* TRIZ -- is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature" It was developed by Soviet engineer and researcher Genrich Altshuller and colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as "the theory of inventive problem solving" and occasionally goes by the English acronym "TIPS". The approach identifies generalisable problems and borrows solutions from other fields. TRIZ practitioners aim to create an algorithmic approach to the invention of new systems, and the refinement of old systems.
TRIZ is variously described as a methodology, tool set, knowledge base, and model-based technology for generating new ideas and solutions for problem solving. It is intended for application in problem formulation, system analysis, failure analysis, and patterns of system evolution.
The TRIZ process presents an algorithm for the analysis of problems in a technological system. The fundamental view is that almost all "inventions" are reiterations of previous discoveries already made in the same, or other, fields, and that problems can be reduced to contradictions between two elements. The goal of TRIZ analysis is to achieve a better solution than a mere trade-off between the two elements, and the belief is that the solution almost certainly already exists somewhere in the patent literature.

Genesis of creativity ...

2010-09-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

I was reading Midnight Disease, a book by an MD with research access to an fMRI. She wanted to link creativity to bipolar disorder, which was an idea I found annoying. She was saying about how creative people wrote, on paper, in long-hand, and they went back over it and highlighted and underlined stuff, and categorized it with different color pens. "SO WHAT ?!?!" I was thinking by this time ... good grief ... maybe people weren't allowed to synthesize new ideas, to develop systems, to have generative thought in whatever kind of proscribed consciousness this woman had been stuck in. But creating new structures like that, to me, is the ultimate productive consciousness, and it often happens on paper and not through the intermediary of the computer.
I have gone over David Allen's Getting Things Done a few times. He talks about optimum and lesser states of consciousness and choosing the right kind of work, errands, list-making, planning, full-bore project work, dependent on an energy level, a current state of consciousness, that one can more-or-less plan and count on. Also, he talks about knowledge workers' needing to decide how something should be done, more than considering the on/off state of "doing" or "not doing."
It is interesting to me how I am finding a dialog between examinations of individual consciousness and management practices.

The Geese

2010-09-22T18:18:00.001-07:00

Then one day I noticed they were aligned to watch the cars on the street. They aren’t particularly good at even saving themselves from traffic. One day I rushed some to see them fly out of the way, and I had to brake hard, realizing they weren’t going to make it.
So one day I was in the park, and noticed them aligning to look at the road and along came a UPS truck. It stopped and the driver carried out a stack of packages, set it on the curb and gestured for the head goose to sign. Each goose in the gaggle that was waiting tore open a package with its bill and took out a waterproof iPad, and waddled down to the riverbank and dropped it to the bottom. It took a week before someone cleaned up all the trash, and people were grumbling “typical …,” but the geese were happily iPadding away underwater.

Making my Cyborg Self Work for Me

2010-09-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

I was very taken with Clive Thompson's essay in April's WIRED, "Advantage: Cyborgs."

I suppose I had launched into every new web endeavor with a sense of reinvention. Not that I was drastically changing my identity each time, mind you, although sometimes I was exploring different themes, and mainly with whole new groups of friends.

So, my concept of myself, as it has been on the web, is an unconnected center with spider-legs radiating out from it.

Now, it seems some bloom is off the rose with social marketing; the days of freewheeling friending are passing. Link-chasing, because someone says so, has lost its luster for me. I am less in awe of all the things I can find and the fact of finding, for instance, related Youtube content keying into the key theme of a friend's blog than more targeted pursuits. I suppose I am no longer game for shoulder-shrugging casual play, as I see what this thing can do.

I recently read Dan Schwabel's Me 2.0, and started thinking about how to take these disparate personae and make myself a more singular, cleaned-up, image.

The idea of being "on message," with the robotic repetition of the same phrases over and over again, does not appeal to me as a multifaceted individual, as a writer, as a funny person, as a problem-solver, as an inventor, as a genius of making-do.

But slowly, I'm bringing things together.

Re-reading: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

2010-09-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

I was going over the table of contents of Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (1996). Something about a program I am developing made me want to recall what can be known about chance and decision-making. [I had, at some point, tucked into the book an article dunning Bernstein for his optimism about derivatives.]
The contents of the book is organized as a history:

To 1200: Beginnings
1200-1700: A thousand outstanding facts
1700-1900: Measurement Unlimited
1900-1960: Clouds of vagueness and the demand for Precision
and, finally:
Degrees of Belief: Exploring Uncertainty

Bernstein makes the point that without probability, great bridges ... power companies ... polio vaccine ... airplanes ... space travel would not happen. Also, "... the free economy, with choice at its center, has brought humanity unparalleled access to the good things in life. The ability to define what may happen ... and to choose among alternatives lies at the heart of contemporary societies." It had not hit me before the absolute importance of mathematical understanding to the growth of civilization.

What struck me was that to a large extent, the story is about examining what we are uncertain of, and trying to find ways in which we can know something about these things. [My last examination of cognitive uncertainty concerned, among other things, uncertainty about the rightness of decisions that had already passed as well as uncertainty in cases where an experience does not necessarily become an accrual of personal skill.]

Bernstein points out that the ancient Greeks were inclined to make singular mathematical proofs of things, but did not throw dice repeatedly to make a determination about "tendencies." In other cases as well, he writes that a fatalistic mindset might have kept some peoples from drawing rational conclusions about probabilities for which they had already figured out the math.

Note: Behavioral Economics

2010-09-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a podcast of David Fetherstonhaugh on "Behavioral Economics," in which someone asked how to find an overview of the history of the topic. He responded by saying that behavioral economics had come out of cognitive psychology, as it advanced from sensory input observations (at the time I studied it, to my constant disappointment) to the more complex variables of decision-making.
He said the best place to start was with the book, Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein (2008), and work back from there.
The book is largely about "tricking people into doing what they ought," like, planning and saving for the future, by designing programs that ride on their natural inclinations in decision-making. While I would prefer a pro-active, reasoned, caring explanation of what I ought to do; here, in real life, is the more ad-hoc husbanding of [what people do] to [programs that will take care of these oughts]; they even use the term, "paternal libertarianism."

News-searching Habits

2010-09-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

I use my twitter account, @conzatorium, mainly as a news aggregator. I follow about 350 sources, including general news, high tech, marketing, Boston-area events, and comedy.

For news, I like to hit Google news first thing in the morning, but that doesn't give a satisfactory number of headlines. I also punch "Business" and "Sci/Tech" from there.

Some people breathlessly post links on Twitter that sound interesting, but when I follow them, I find myself spending more time trying to figure out if it means anything at all rather than absorbing what it means. Often it has one, two or three interesting buzzwords or -phrases, but it doesn't constitute a whole notion.

Takin' a Mark Twain break ...

2010-08-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

These are rants from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

***

Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed brass mounted copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me!

I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! – and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m about to turn myself loose!

**

Whoo-oop! I’m the bloodiest son of a wildcat that lives!

**

Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow’s a-coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working! Whoo-oop! I’m a child of sin, don’t let me get a start! Smoked glass here, for all! Don’t attempt to look at me with the naked eye gentlemen! When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the ..Atlantic Ocean.. for whales! I scratch my head with lightning and purr myself to sleep with thunder! When I’m cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it; when I’m hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when I’m thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread! I put my hand on the sun’s face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather – don’t use the naked eye! I’m the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property, and I bury my dead on my own premises!

**

Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread, for the pet child of calamity’s a-coming!

**

SANDCASTLE-AVERSION EXTINGUISHMENT THERAPY [Orig. 06-02-09]

2010-08-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

Can one go through one's whole life without encountering sandcastles?

It's time to face up to the problem.

Wherever you go; job interviews, important new clients, people standing between you and the food you eat, the beverages you drink, and the air you breathe -- they'll be there, asking that you admire and appreciate the sandcastle, and everyone who gets along in this world knows -- THIS YOU MUST DO!

Without fear or hate in your eyes, without trembling, without a twitch of distaste, hesitation, or reservation, you must, to get on in this world, EMBRACE THE SAND!

That is why I recommend to you:

SANDCASTLE-AVERSION EXTINGUISHMENT THERAPY

I'm not saying it's easy; I'm saying avoiding the issue only makes one's life smaller and smaller, as you avoid a neighbor's BBQ, or eventually fear peering into your car because a flash of buff color makes you suspect a sandcastle has self-assembled in the backseat, and finally, die of fear one morning, the sheet pulled over your head, convulsing in panic that a sandcastle looms at the foot of your bed.

In a safe environment, with the volumes of water at-hand to destroy sandcastles if they become too unwieldy, you will conquer your fears through direct confrontation with sandcastles, on a growing scale, such that you can battle, observe your feelings, and process them. Millions have benefitted from this two-week program, often covered by employer or state compensation packages!

SANDCASTLE-AVERSION EXTINGUISHMENT THERAPY
Storm the gates -- Slay the sandcastle -- Make your dreams come true.

Wireless turtleneck pants [Orig 11-18-10]

2010-08-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

I bought a pair of such pants at the Sharper Image, oh, years ago, the late 80's, when I was visiting San Francisco.
I could have gone to Sharper Image at the Montgomery Mall back home, and if they didn't have the pants on-premises, I could have ordered them from the catalogue, but that was the thing: It was an impulse buy.
When they said wireless, they really could have said wire-full; the antenna ran throughout the fabric of the pants to get the best reception; it was like a radio-wave skimmer. Truth be told, the novelty wore off pretty fast on wearing the pants, but I did drape them over the barbell and press bench in my room and listen to them every morning while I was getting dressed for work.
There was always the caveat that "WATER RESISTANT is not WATER-PROOF," such that, if it said "Water-resistant," it wasn't guaranteeing anything, they just didn't want you to freak out. Thing is, the most perfect place to have them would probably be the beach, if anyone ever really wanted to wear pants on the beach, especially turtle-neck ones. I did reserve them as my winter-hiking pants, and much enjoyed one afternoon of hiking along an Appalachain ridge, listening to some AM cowboy station out of Wyoming. When I recall the events surrounding the pants, the San Francisco visit, the hiking, the songs I heard once but never again, it seems I'm triangulating on heaven.
I took them around to the dry-cleaner a couple of times, but the cleaner always said they weren't sure how to clean them, and couldn't make any guarantees, so every time I left with them, not ready to give up their unique functionality for cleanliness.

Opening Day, excerpt [Orig, 11-22-2009]

2010-08-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

Opening Day (3)

If you want to be successful, it is worth it to look into things, ask a question or two. One time when we were stocking the creek, I thought I’d just ask the man in charge just what these particular trout were used to eating.
“That’s not a question …” My father said, leaping in to defray the situation, and turned to the man, smiling an apology for my forwardness.
Uncle Bunny told me, a week and a half later on Opening Day, that he drove by the fish farm, and tossed in handfuls of Circus Peanuts, and the rainbow trout loved them, and here, he had some in a sandwich bag, which I could try. Imagine! Uncle Bunny having cheated this way! Not merely inquiring about the secret meal of farm fish, but actually going to the farm and getting the fish used to the bait of his choice! I didn’t like the idea of cheating, but I did want to hear more about the fish farm, how far away it was, and what it looked like, and where he parked his car, how he sneaked up on it, and whether there were fences or dogs, and how the fish looked when they came up to eat. He thought I had far too many questions. I suppose he would not want to implicate me, a good girl, in all of that subterfuge, but it seemed to me a fascinating thing to learn about, and if I knew what town it was near, maybe I could ride there on my bike and check it out.

Bird Wings, I, II, and III [Orig, Jan. 3-5, 2010]

2010-08-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Bird Wings

Bird wings apparently evolved first as thermoregulatory flaps, but as the birds still couldn't get cool enough, they started climbing up things and jumping off.

Bird Wings, 2

A goose could cook itself by simply refusing to flap its wings.

Bird Wings, 3

The phoenix, like the quetzel, has feathers that don't stop growing. When the phoenix's feathers get so heavy it can't flap its wings or fly, it also gets so hot it spontaneously combusts, either burning off enough feathers that it can, quite dramatically, fly away, or just turning the whole bird to ash. It is not true that the bird can reconstitute itself if it is entirely ash.

A Note on Altruistic Systems [Orig. 02-20-10]

2010-08-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

A Note on Altruistic Systems, from On the Origin of Stories,
Brian Boyd; pg. 57.

For ALTRUISM to work robustly a whole suite of motivations
has to be in place:

SYMPATHY, so one is inclined to help another.

TRUST, so that one can offer help now and expect it will
somehow be repaid later.

GRATITUDE, to incline one, when helped, to return the favor.

SHAME, to prompt one to repay when they still owe a debt.

FAIRNESS, a sense to intuitively gauge an adequate share or
repayment.

INDIGNATION, to spur one to break off cooperation with, or
inflict punishment on, a cheat.

GUILT, a displeasure at oneself and FEAR of exposure and
reprisal to deter one from seeking the short-term advantages
of cheating.

Cheaters will thrive in exchanges with altruists unless altruists
discriminate against, refuse further exchange with, or actively
punish cheaters.

Now I'll tell you about onion powder ... [Orig. 03-14-10]

2010-08-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

RE:
"Around 1470, the Turks began disrupting the overland trade routes east
from the Mediterranean. In Western Europe, there were pepper shortages
and the price of pepper skyrocketed. So European explorers sailed West
and South in search of an alternate trade route. Historian Henry Hobson
stated: "The Americas were discovered as a by-product in the search for
pepper." "

The space race began over onion powder.
Mid-century, last century, there was a series of onion-crop failures around the world.
French's had just perfected freeze-dried onion soup mix, and had managed to create a world-wide ravenous hunger for this product, often consumed in off-label methods. This, atop the usual onion-lust of 20th century people, who considered the onion an aphrodisiac, as well as a spice, flavorant, and foodstuff.
The onion blight had sent nations on the run, looking for those bulbs of sweet potency. It was far worse than the Dutch tulip bulb bubble of 1637. Thing was, 20th century peoples were crafty -- no, innovative, no, they liked to think of themselves as agents of PROGRESS, and in truth, they reached the height of PROGRESS, 20th century people WON THE GAME of PROGRESS, but, as you see, there's never really only one game going.
It was rumored that the moon was made of onion powder, placed there by Marco Polo during his forays of discovery between the Orient and the Venetian Republic, over the turn of the 14th c.
The nations of the 20th century vied to cash in on that orbiting cache of the "spice of life," sent into orbit by means of a trebuchet, well on its way to perfection since the time of Archimedes ... sorry, I know you know some of these things, but I cannot suppose you know all, this is why I bore you with these things you know so well.
So, you know, throwing a thing up in the air is not nearly so fraught with peril as having a thing come down; thus a great deal of time passes between the perfection of the trebuchet and that of the rocket. By the mid 20th c., it came down to the Russians and the Americans, and the Russians were the first to manage rocket orbit, as I know you know, still not besting the accomplishments of Marco Polo.
With Sputnik orbiting, the Americans committed to make it to the moon first, and this was done in 1969! The astronauts scooped up a couple of shoeboxes of the moon powder, but they could tell already, they could feel, even with the sensory deprivation of bulky spacesuits and breathing apparati, that it was not onion powder.
Still, they had gone to the moon, and that was something.
In the spring of 1970, the onions came back full-force. No blight, no fungus, no mysterious sliming or withering. People simply didn't mention it after that, but I'm telling you now.

The Dirt on Nessie

2010-08-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

Well, it's one of those things ... do I care too much or do I care too little? Is it her or is it me? Am I being deliberately jerked around or is it a case of someone just not having that much time or consciousness for me? Am I a whiny junior-high-schooler? Am I socially retarded when it comes to summing things up? Finally, some friends help me get a consensus on Nessie.

***

My Experience:

The Loch Ness Monster is always dogging me for a buck twenty she lent me in 1998, but I swear, I threw the money back in the lake the next day, and she knows it, so I don't know where she gets off. Our friendship is at a standstill, but truth be told, I felt it was me always bringing fresh and new material into it, her always asking me, over and over again, "What's new?" like it's wholly my job to entertain her (not that she cares what I say) and she thrives on everyone getting all excited when she almost-shows-up. She's kind of a sadist that way.

From TH:

Oh, don't worry. It's not just you. That bitch Nessie, I dunno. Had to cut ties back in 92. She acted all happy to meet me, then I saw her on the shore and waved and she just looked at at me like who the hell are you. And I said fine. Fuck it. Two days later she was calling me asking what was wrong. It's complicated, I said. What's that, she said. The "depth" of your sociopathy, I told her.

From Me:
I'm afraid my friends and I encouraged her. We threw a lot of monster parties in the late eighties, in ....London...., around ... told her to come on down, we'd fix her up with a great Thames-monster. She'd be all game, but got in the habit of disappointing us. We made light of it, thinking she was going through some rough times. Then it just seemed like she was making fools of us all.
When I stopped by privately, she always kept the upper hand. I remember she seemed to be saying encouragingly, "Neither a borrower nor lender be," when I asked if I could read her Patrick O'Brien series. It seemed like she was saying "Don't touch my stuff," and "My stuff is yours," at the same time, like it was some kind of challenge. Well, so I borrowed them one by one, and she was always calling me and asking if I had the book, and I thought maybe there was loneliness behind her pettiness, so I would arrange to bring the book back and have a visit, but by the time I got to The Reverse of the Medal, I couldn't take it anymore. She was trying to thrust it into my hand, and I set it firmly down on the table. She took me to the surface and handed it to me again, but I threw it right back into the water at her. It was bobbing back up to the surface and I turned on my heel and never looked back.
I haven't thrown any books into the water before or since.

From Bosco:

the one thing you must learn is that the loch ness monster runs a small counterfeiting operation at the south end of loch ness. there have been reports that something fishy has been going on for years in that loch, but no one has ever been able to witness the printing presses, the specialized ink-dying machines, the digital color copying equipment, nor any of the several tons of palletable materials normally associated with a professional operation. but, several unreliable sources have suggested that there is no such thing as counterfeiting. it's a conspiracy brought about by the federal reserve bank and charles keating to dissuade the public from investigating the real crime: grunion are not freshwater species! in additon, they tend to flock in wild packs of curdled crab cakes, near transmission towers high above chiron.

..

My Experience:

I did read somewhere that the Loch Ness Monster is supposedly the Queen Mother of all grunions.

..

My experience:

Everybody's telling me how the Loch Ness Monster has been terrorizing them! It's really something! I thought I was the only one! I used to go to her house, and she'd put out a plate of really nice hard cheese -- but with a spread knife -- so I was afraid to even try to take a slice, because it would come out all crooked and crumbly -- so I'm sitting there, seeing and smelling the Loch Ness Monster's nice extra-hard cheese, and I can't have any! Did this ever happen to you?

The Stalking Koala

2010-08-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

Just before my friend CK became such a big star that her handlers won't let us correspond anymore, we had this exchange of stories.

..............................

CK: So I'm at the gas station and this guy walks over and asks me if I've got a quarter. I said yes, because I did.

.. ..

ME: RE: Gas Station … So, were you there with your car, or just hanging outs? Did the rabbit food guys get a load of you yet, with wheels on?

.. ..

CK: Was I just hangin' out at the gas station? What kinda girl do you think I am? I'll have you know that when I wanna get gas, I go to Del Taco and order the 1/2 lbs. bean burrito.

.. ..

ME: 1/2 lb bean burrito! That's like 2/3 of the can !!! So, um, did you get up to ..Big Sur.. last weekend maybe? A little camping ??? ... Do you know there's a campground in ....MALIBU.... ??? Yeah! ... Or maybe WAS ... Camped there on spring break one time ...

.. ..

CK: Oh yeah, I used to go camphikin' around there - ....Will.. ..Rogers.. ..State Park.... - with The Ex. A can of beans and a can of chili make great campin' food.

.. ..

ME: RE: Will ....Rogers.... State Park; Didn't he say "I never et a canna beans I didn't like"?

.. ..

CK: Will ....Rogers.... loved Rosarita.

.. ..

CK: We never had none of those fancy campin' stoves or nothin'. Just a book of matches and a pile of rocks. Go get some wood for the fire, Cupid. How come I gotta go get the wood? Because building a fire is a man's job. Oh, really? Yes, really. I suppose you're gonna do all the cookin' then, too? No, cooking is a woman's job. Well, I can't cook 'cause I don't got a fire. You'd better hurry up and get that thing goin', fella. I will, just as soon as you go get some wood. Forget it, I'm not gonna gather no wood. Then we won't have a fire tonight. Fine by me. I'll just eat my beans cold.

..

ME: RE: Men's and Women's work, camping style

H'oh, boy, yeah, that's a hard dance. The worst is setting up the tent. It's a man's job to pick the level clearing and woman's job to clear the twigs, then the man's job to inspect the twig-clearing, then the woman's job to put all the pole joints, with the elastic running through them, together, then it's the man's job to check all the pole joints and make sure they're all fully seated, then it's everyone's job to thread the poles through the nylon pockets at once, and it's a race a girl does and doesn't want the man to win, because it blows, and then there's the simultaneous erection of the bubble with the tension of the poles, seated in the base pockets, then there's the woman staking and the man re-staking, then the woman rolls down the "windows" to air out the mildew, then the man is the crew captain of the setting of the fly ... oh, man ... I think I want to go home!

..

RE: Gathering wood

I remember gathering chapparel in ....Malibu..... Smelled great. We also stayed on the ..Mill.. ..College.. campus in ....Oakland.... that trip, and it's in a eucalyptus grove. AHHHH!

..

CK: Fully seat the pole joints? Simultaneous erections and setting of the fly? You sure you're talkin' 'bout campin', girl? Tee hee!

..

ME: Camping is one big damp spot.

.. ..

CK: That's what you get for pitchin' your tent in a puddle.

I'm just glad you didn't get attacked by any koalas while you were in that eucalyptus grove, girl. They're killers. One time I was watchin' Animal Planet and this koala jumped outta a tree right onto this guy's back, bit his finger off, and ran back up the tree. They had to shoot it to get the finger back.

..

ME: RE: attacked by koalas

In fact, I was attacked by koalas right there. It was on the return trip, so it didn't ruin spring break so much as put me in the infirmary for the rest of the semester. They bit off all my fingers on my right foot and toes on my left hand, and ten koalas had to be shot to retrieve my extremities. There was only one koala left, and he's stalked me ever since.

.. ..

CK: Good thing they weren't hungry.

..

ME: RE: Hungry koalas

Well in fact they WERE hungry ... as you may know, koalas only eat one thing ... and that's CANS OF BEANS !!! ....Mills.. ..College.... had the same spring break as us, and someone neglected the arrangement of a can-opening enabler to make the precious koala food accessible to the ravenous beasts ... when I strolled under that canopy of eucalyptii, I was a SITTING DUCK !!!

.. ..

CK: Maybe you should've used a spoon to eat your beans, instead of your fingers. No comment about your toes.

..

ME: RE: Maybe you should've used a spoon to eat your beans

Well, sometimes roughing it is pretty rough ... especially with koalas around.

I have to say I was a little bit embarrassed by the event, and as a consequence, developed impeccable table manners, which I fastidiously maintained until recently. The whole while I was hoping to win back some dignity and wholeness I might have never even had (except physically, because of the torn-off fingers thing), and that might be entirely unattainable, or not.

..

CK: I'd say. You can never be too careful around those little marsupial bloodsuckers.

..

ME: RE: those little marsupial bloodsuckers

After all the miscellaneous mishaps and tragedies, I would say it is untrue that koalas only eat one thing.

Well here's the thing, like there's a controversy over pit bulls being violent, but people keep them as pets, and then the controversy about koalas, which no one would ever keep as pets, not that they don't give it a thought, but they imagine the shipments of fresh beans coming in all the time, and the cost and the mess, and decide it's not worth the hassle, and HEY, aren't koalas and pit bulls the same thing, like, have you ever seen a koala and a pit bull in the same room at the SAME TIME ?!?! ... RIGHT ???

.. ..

CK: Nobody keeps koalas for pets 'cause they're just too vicious. Duh. And they had to outlaw Pit Bull / Koala fights 'cause the dog lovers got all freaked out when a cute little koala wiped the floor with a supposedly mean beast. Yeah, right. Like a Pit Bull could ever take a koala in a fair fight. Not even in an unfair one, either. Koalas were specially bred by Aboriginal Witch Doctors for pit fightin'. They only way you can really control one is with a plate of refried beans, and even that's an iffy situation.

..

ME: OMG, when I was in junior high, all the tough girls had these koala clips -- you could clip them in your hair or on your lapel or on your girl scout kerchief or on your purse strap -- or on your finger, except they had a totally deadly kung fu grip! One time a bunch of mean girls held me down and clipped a bunch of them all along my forearms! Damn, I'm glad they're finally outlawing bullying! (They should call it KOALAing !!!)

.. ..

Well, you're a good friend and all, but if there were ever pit-koala/pitbull fights, even if they were mega illegal, like, a cardinal sin illegal, they would be on the Youtube!
... Hmm ... but ... yeah ... um ... ergh ... I'll be back ...

.. ..

CK: That's don't call it finger food for nothin' Koalas, I mean. You were lucky to get away with your life, girl. They used to throw people into koala pits as a form of capital punishment in ....New Zealand.....

.. ..

ME: RE: lucky to get away with your life ... Lucky to have two friends right there, both with 5-shooters, to take out those koalas like that!

.. ..

RE: They used to throw people into koala pits … I'll tell you what's unbearable about that; the way their fur tickles! And the static charge! They're like the eels of the forest, the way they're all shocky!

.. ..

CK: Yeah, but at least koalas aren't all slimy the way eels are. You see, that's the way they trick you - with their unsliminess. Then, when you think it's all okay and stuff, they pounce down from their eucalyptus nests and bite off all your fingers.

..

RE: that's the way they trick you - with their unsliminess

OMG !!! ... I never thought of that! You are right! ... I touch everything that doesn't look slimy! It's important; helps me keep the nerve endings alive in my formerly severed fingers! ... But I hate when it's an electrical transformer or both terminals of a car battery at once!

... Then the other thing, koalas are like venus fly traps or moths that look like butterflies, or rattlesnakes that look like corn snakes and hold their rattles pinched so you don't even know their attacking! OH! That's why koalas look like pit bulls! They're trying to get us to cuddle up with them and let them in the house!

.. ..

CK: Unfortunately, there's no Venus fly traps big enough to catch a koala. On second thought, maybe that's a good thing.

..

RE: there's no Venus fly traps big enough to catch a koala

I was killing time in Glasgow, Scotland one time ... and I had visited all the known Charles Rennie MacIntosh buildings ... and so I walked over the hill from the place I was staying, on Hillside by Glasgow University, and I found a big park with a giant greenhouse in it, like the Crystal Palace that was built for the World Expo in 1851, and for a fraction of a pound I could walk inside, so I went inside, and it had several sections, even underground sections, and the most amazing collection of begonias, which when you think about it, have the most amazing genetic variation of leaves and flowers, and I found this immense venus fly trap, but it was only big enough to trap a hamster, not a koala.

.. ..

CK: Yeah, but did you go down into their secret underground genetics lab? That's where they hide the special koala eatin' fly traps. One day they'll unleash them on the unsuspectin' koala populace, just you wait and see.

.. ..

ME: RE: Yeah, but did you go down into their secret underground genetics lab?

Uhm, no ... for 20 pence apiece I could buy a hamster from a gumball-like machine and feed it to the venus fly trap. I feel a little bit guilty about it now, but I bought seven hamsters and stuffed every trap the plant had ... when I got bored with that, I left and went to the transportation museum to look at wooden bicycles and models of camoflaged ships.

.. ..

CK: Underground genetics labs and transportation museums? Wow, ....Glasgow.... must be a really swingin' place.

..

ME: RE: ..Glasgow.. …

....Glasgow.... is fantastic. Tho I don't know who it might have been who was working on the special koala-eatin' fly traps ... I believe the kaleidoscope was invented there, along with a lot of other optics stuff ... the Scots invented all kinds of cool stuff like steam engines and stuff ... Paisley is right next to Glasgow, and there are bunches of looms there -- hard to say which invention parts are the Scots and while are other countries ... except they did the steam-driven automation ... but 'we' were there for a computer audio conference. Hey, maybe the kaleidoscope could mesmerize the koala and make it fall into the trap ... and the plant can have like, a steam-driven wheelchair to get koalas !!!

..

CK: Now you're thinkin'. Good thing ..Scotland.. is part of the British Commonwealth, like ....Australia..... That way they can share inventions and stuff. Like steam driven Venus fly traps.

.. ..

ME: RE: Good thing ..Scotland.. is part of the British Commonwealth, like ....Australia..... That way they can share inventions and stuff. Like steam driven Venus fly traps.

Bah! ..Glasgow.. probably had closer ties to ..France.., and even the ..Near East.., on account of the textile trade on the River Clyde. At least until the steam train was invented [and it was just as easy to go long distances on land as by sea]. Ha! People were probably trying to go to the ....Netherlands.... from Gibralter, and got lost ... But yeah, if it wasn't for wanting to make koala-eating fly traps on wheels, our entire combustion-engine-on-wheels transportation system would not have been invented!

.. ..

CK: So basically what you're sayin' is - koalas are responsible for our modern transportation system?

.. ..

ME: RE: koalas are responsible for our modern transportation system

I guess that's what really gets my stalker-koala totally cheesed off, the irony that I can drive and fly and ride the rails with ease, and he's afraid to get out of a tree on account of a venus fly trap in a Hoverround is circling the tree trunk all of the time!

KAPOW! Bah-dum-dumt!

CK: [Pic of koala]

ME: ... That's one CHEESED koala! PERFECT! Thanks for the FUNS!

The Dinosaur Queen

2010-08-09T14:06:00.001-07:00

So, then Dinosaur Queen came to me in a vision and said,

"Now you're having so much trouble with the space aliens, don't you regret killing and eating all the dinosaurs?"

I shot her and set up a fire for a big a barbecue.

On Bees Giving Up on Hive Living

2010-08-09T14:05:00.001-07:00

I am reading this morning that too many bees have taken to divorcing the hive and going their own way, largely in favor of academic pursuits, abandoning the old bee ways, letting hives fall apart. Some people say it's a neurotoxin causing it, and that it's a disaster for the food chain, but I am confident the bees will come up, through their studies, with a good way to automate and off-shore pollination.

Hornet Chrispies

2010-08-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

One time? I had this popcorn popper?
The kind with the plexiglas top with a spout, and the spinning and heating thing, and the horseshoe-shaped butter tray?
And instead of putting popcorn in it I put a hornets nest in it?
And I plugged it in?
And the hornet's nest whirred around?
And the hornets started to pop? And a bowl full of hornet chrispies tumbled out of the spout?
And they were like all crispy and slightly sweet and a little venomous?
And I guess they were kind of a hallucinogenic ...
and certainly addictive ...
you can never eat just one.

RE: Birthers

2010-08-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

Pish-posh!

If a non-natural born citizen were elected president, the original constitution would catch fire and burn a red, commie flame, shooting high above the Capitol, for 50 nights.

The Pope would have to be summoned to reset the unitedness of these United States, and then a quest would have to be made to find the ONE TRUE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, someone whose ESSENCE was TRULY AMERICAN, and that quest would have the House Ways and Means Committee scouring every mountain village of THIS EARTH to find the child whose eyes shine with that particular glow, who, with his or her tiny fingers, demonstrates Presidential dexterity and mein.

Beginning at that moment, the Living Document would begin to heal from the ravages of the 50 days of flame, and we would know for certain we had found the One True President. Then the child would have to sleep on soil extracted from the west side of the North Bridge at Concord for 13 days.
After that, our nation would be returned to its rightful glory. Every schoolchild knows this. It exhausts me to have to recall these early grammars for you here.

If any of this were true [Birthers], the whole world would know. The whole world would hold its breath ...

08.09.10: RE: Simply throwing off of cliff

2010-08-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Ah! Our Orville Brothers used the throwing-off-of-cliff technique to make the first popcorns, served with BBQ turtle wings! The air friction as the kernels accelerated in their downward fall caused water in each kernel to heat up and then POP!

But the popcorns were made soggy by the waters of Atlantic Ocean!

So, it was many more years before Orville Brothers' invention was made useful! They developed a bicycle-powered popcorn dryer, and that was a BIG DEAL! ... Except that it tended to fly up in air, lifted by its big fan-propeller, and crash! BIG PROBLEM!

But we have American Ingenuity! And know how to use a power ratchet!

... Problem BOLTED DOWN! HOORAYS!

Staupitz Gets Unstuck

2008-12-18T12:20:00.001-08:00

“Pssst! Missus Staupitz! … What on earth have you gotten into now? We were expecting you at the chateau this morning.” It was my runner, sent to check on me, since I hadn’t made it to the first checkpoint on my mission.
Once again, I couldn’t talk. I was caught up in a desolate square, bound in this group by a paralyzing fog of some sort of nail salon product wielded by a small-time municipal flunky.
A lot of times I get asked, “Wazzit like bein’ a talking horse?”
“Well, I’m a horse, and I can talk! I’m much stronger than you, and I look good in the nude, even though I never shave, and really, I’ve read -- hey, I’ve probably eaten -- more books than most of you monkeys riding my back have ever read,” is kind of what I usually say.
But in truth it isn’t easy. More people than you think don’t warm up to talking horses at all. They get suspicious. I might be asking directions to somewhere, and they think that I’m escaped, and try to detain me for a reward for themselves. They rarely offer me decent by-the-by information. There’s a lot more “what do we do about the talking horse” than straightforward dealings – and the inexplicable fear of some people!
“If voice recognition software ever catches on, talking horses will take all of our office jobs!” some people actually say aloud, and I watch them massaging their precious digits together. Other times, all they’ll say to me directly are one-line statements and commands, as if they want to keep me down – and I’ll hear from some other person complaints about how that person is quite verbose. Whateves, I give it right back to them.
So, I’m saying, it’s actually kind of lonely. Sometimes I keep my head down and don’t say a word all day. Oh, I’ve gone whole assignments – I won’t kid you – but I expect in the end to have a good laugh with friends.
Tell you what, with that crazy old farmer woman sticking to me like burrs, and trying to be all in-my-face nicey-nice to prove a point to that damn vagrant, I hadn’t even had a chance to read to the bottom of my orders. But I knew it was best I didn’t go it alone. I’m always asking HQ if they can’t set me up with a tolerable partner, a reasonably good conversationalist with proper dressage, with some degree of understanding of what it’s like to be me. Fat chance. Guess one has to take what one can get when one can get it.
I couldn’t figure out what the deal was with the vagrant and the little dude. If he could either keep him on his person or just let him be gone when he went running, I might be able to count on him, but I didn’t want to go chasing them over hill and dale in some kind of short-handed foxchase. Time for me to hold my course, whatever it was to be.
The rent-a-cop and the beauty-supply woman were preoccupied, and then further distracted when the little dude got loose again.
“Okay, here,” the runner said, “apple cider vinegar’s got like 1,000 uses … plus, the inventor of the glue gun just died …” He poured some on a blanket and threw it over me, then started rubbing down my muzzle with a dampened cloth. I felt everything release at once in a nearly audible crack. I don’t know which it was, or if it was even either, but I guess sometimes just trying things will do the trick. And now I smelled like Applejack. I am used to outrunning bees, let me tell you.

Vicarious Lusts of a Bird

2008-12-17T00:41:00.000-08:00

I told you Double-A didn’t always drive people off, but sometimes played matchmaker, in an attempt to satisfy vicariously his own avian lust, I suppose. I never knew if I was being set up with a tennis pro whose phone confessions I had already been suffering through for months out of my own charity, or maybe there was some man at the bar.
He started arranging outings with the group. I could never really fathom why, but obviously he needed a little practice socializing, and working through his anxiety, which was probably extreme even for a bird. I didn’t have anything better to do so I obliged and went.
Double-A would dare me to talk to a group of men, to kiss a man at the bar, and I did. I would report back to him their names, and what they did for a living, and other things. He’d dare me to kiss one. I would, and maybe play patty-cake with him, and have a laugh, then come back.
Apparently patty-cake is taboo in the bird world. He would get upset.
“Braaaakkk! … You played PATTY-CAKE?!?!”
“Well, yeah … that’s pretty standard where I come from – that’s how we greet one another.”
“PATTY-CAKE?!?” I suppose in the dark, hellish jungle where he originated, it was considered vile taboo to exchange elaborate and agreed-upon felicitous mutual palm-touching. From what I observed of him, that made sense.
What was I to say?
Double-A would want me to go back again, making suggestions beyond what I was willing to do; that disgusting bird. I never let it get to the point where I might find out what this really was about, whether he wanted to ride on my shoulder to some assignation – it was beyond anything I was willing to discover right then and I wasn’t going to do it at the behest of some dirty-minded, molting old bird.
I recalled a time I came in to find he had had designed a crude harness and informed me that he wanted to sell rides on my back. I humored him and let him put it on me, and I gave him a short ride around the office. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror, and was shaken by the look of it, what I had submitted to. I finished neatly, pulled his harness off and cast it on the floor. That night, I wrote him a note telling him the idea made me feel degraded. It seemed maybe he had taken my point, but still insisted on calling me oversensitive.
“Why, Double-A, why the pressure? Why can’t we just have a good time? Here, ask me something else …”
Again, his chuffing, little chipped beak clicked a few times. We’d finish our beers. He hated when I talked, trying to shut me up and call me a liar if I went on too long, so I didn’t say anything.

Chronicles of the Tormented

2008-12-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

At this point I feel like any time I put on a freshly-pressed blouse to go out for a job interview, he could be hiding behind the corner of my building with a squirt-gun full of shit. Because I am very much bothered by his hunger to get into what I'm doing, while professing to care, but only ever trying to get under my skin, interfere, and insult me. I really don’t believe I did anything to deserve his ambushes. I think he believes he is funny, although I have told him several times that he is not, to me. Could it be his insistence that I find him funny? As a child, I was often tickled until I had the hiccoughs. I didn’t like it.
Was a time, I wanted to connect with him – I had hired him, after all. Then, since it got me nothing but grief, I didn’t want to connect to him. He used to call me up and say, “What’s up?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s up?’ – You called me!” He never seemed to take the point. I had no trust left for him.
First I tried to roll with it.
How many times had an interlude ended in egregious insult, finding me relieved it was over, only to find him asking me the favor of creating an IM account and IMming his watch, or the favor to send photos to his cell to see if it works; or the favor to greet him the next day?
Then I tried to reason.
Then I tried to compartmentalize it by not telling him any of my plans.
Then he started openly calling me "crazy," and I told him privately to stop, and then publicly, and then he threw me out. I asked him to tell me why and he wouldn't – back to the reasoning phase, where it was made apparent that he can’t be held to, or asked to explain, anything he says ... So, fine, finally, we’re done.
Then he started posting my own jokes to me on IM.
***
And I ask you, is there anything one can have less patience for
than a person who treats you badly trying to butter your bushes?
***
I closed out of it. Where I could have blocked him, I just gave up on IM altogether, finding my IM relationships really, after all, annoying ... then he called me up, but, besides criticizing the way I answered the phone, he wouldn't speak, so I summarized our relationship to him, told him the things I hadn’t yet said of him, waited some more to see if he had any intention of squaring with it, and hung up.
Now this. I have only learned about this type of behavior since that time.
I should have left no "provision for rats." Perhaps “not blocking” is tantamount to “consent.” I suppose I still imagine he’ll want to set things right, yet he never has when I’ve put his feet to the fire previous.

Practical Advice for Dispelling Personal Guilt: Do’s and Don’ts

2008-12-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

It seems my blog has been making its way to the party this is intended for.

Look, I didn’t realize the connection until the day I wrote about it. I haven’t been out to embarrass you; funny how things happen that way. I didn’t plan to write this, but now I’m angry, and I’m sure it’s fine advice for anyone, anytime, anyway.

Don’t:

Probably the lowest and most irresponsible thing you can do is spy on your victims, checking in periodically to see if you can either surmise that your offense is minimized by their actions, as they have managed despite your offenses or, conversely, to be the first to discover the body – that doesn’t make you “good” or “caring;” it makes you “creepy,” and you are probably not going unsensed by your victim. Don’t attribute your stalking to positive feelings for the person; positive feelings bring about honest connection.

Consider where you stand in this regard. Admit you’re spying for your own satisfaction. Note the fallacy of thinking any subsequent action of theirs mitigates your actions or that a good cry makes you a good person. If you feel personally responsible, be personally responsible for your part in things. Don’t moralize about how life should be lived, putting yourself up as a model that your victim can’t even see. Don’t think assuring yourself makes others feel assured.

Do:

(Adapted from Nathaniel Branden’s book; do you still have the copy I gave you?)

1. Own the fact it is you who took particular actions. Face and accept the full reality of what you have done, without disowning or avoidance. Own, accept, take responsibility.
2. Seek to understand why you did what you did. Do it compassionately, but without evasive alibiing.
3. If others are involved, acknowledge explicitly to the relevant persons the harm you have done. Convey your understanding for the consequences of your behavior. Acknowledge how they have been affected by you. Convey understanding of their feelings.
4. Take any and all actions available that might make amends for or minimize the harm you have done.
5. Firmly commit yourself to behaving differently in the future.

[Personal msg redacted.]

Almost worked out ...

2008-12-15T19:14:00.000-08:00

It was my natural assumption that I could expect a basic level of reason from everyone, as long as I hadn’t observed a person clinging to an unreasonable assumption, in which case they were to be avoided. Most likely people would remain good-natured if challenged or asked to explain a thing. Of course at times one runs to the end of one’s current knowledge, into territories as yet unexplored or ones the individual finds uninteresting; or perhaps there are reasons some things are not revealed, competition, or some kind of pain or insecurity; these are all things to take into account.
But eventually I found some individuals mimicked the tone of someone who knew what he was talking about, and recycled criticisms of their own behaviors as criticisms of others, when they didn’t really fit. The effect was often bewildering. Perhaps too much booksense had led me to think there must be some truth in it – then again, it’s the less one reads that makes one believe in the phrase “gospel truth.”
Or, they might approve or disapprove of something, a small action, comment, or physical change, and this would lead me to think they had larger goals in mind and inquire as to what they were. This generally met with alarmed disapproval, the gate rattling down at the service window, as if whatever the larger plan was, it was to be kept from me. Well there was a challenge. If not now, when would it be revealed? Certainly one can hit a target much better if one knows where it is. What kind of game was this? Why did they treat me not just as a contestant, but a champion of all, and then not give me every help they had? Was there a page of the rules missing, or was I being controlled again?
I came to see it was a game I couldn’t win. Another one. I had taken to foot-dragging, to looking for the longest distance between two points, to mental strikes to protest a game I didn’t have any interest in and couldn’t seem to find my way out of, and here, my subsequent inclination to tarry, my dawdling, my desire to find an ever longer way home, a confusion between distraction and inspiration, had brought me into another drama that wasn’t any more likely to prove useful.
These were the kind of hucksters who not only took your ticket, but robbed your house and duplicated your keys during the performance, and closed the show on a queasy note while compelling you to buy a ticket to the next.

The Clutch

2008-12-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

I told you before these eggs looked much fresher than Double-A’s usual one-offs, which he laid when he was particularly juked up. These were a range of pastels, similar to the colors of Jordan almonds, but larger, and the shells were sort of leathery. Whatever was in them was having a hell of a time breaking out, thumping and rocking and causing twists and finally rents in the shells.
Out of a pale yellow egg, a tiny hoof kicked through, and I watched as other hooves and a little head came out, and a beautiful red pony stood up in the wreckage of the shell, almost immediately.
A little yawning pteranodon, looking a lot like Double-A, knuckled its way out of the next egg, and immediately began nipping at the wobbly legs of the pony. They moved off in an ever widening circle, the flying reptile worrying the pony at intervals.
Another egg popped open. The board game, “Mousetrap” tumbled out and assembled itself as easily as a Hoberman sphere.
A starfish came out of another, its limbs all drawn together in the shell, they punched out like flower petals, and the starfish muscled itself over, its inside becoming its bottom, and looked for a surface not covered with shells and paper.
The next egg was full of butterflies, and they all tumbled out like spilled papers, and righted themselves on their little legs, and began separating their wings, airing them after the cramped dampness of the shell.
The last egg seemed kind of still; something told me whatever was in it wasn’t going to come out of its own accord. I cut the top off with an exacto knife. Inside was a folded piece of paper. I pulled it out and opened it.

City of Tomorrow

2008-12-15T19:09:00.000-08:00

“Congrats on being chosen to design “The City of Tomorrow.””
“Not to worry, still provisions 4 rats”

We are taking care of the rats.
The rats will be taken care of.
We have foodstuffs for the rats.

At the end of an hour, the director said he’d simply state his own prejudice in the report.
The consultants said they weren’t going to keep changing things back and forth; they wanted to hear from “one voice.” I laughed; twelve dressed-up people in the room for an hour already, making noises with their mouths, and they make a point to tell us they only want “one voice.” The director reiterated that he would state his prejudicial opposition to the material at hand, and the rules would be abided by.
I asked if material prejudice would be the rule.
He said I’d be surprised.
I liked him, even with his autocratic, mid-20th century style.
I get a little freaked out when people look at me when I talk. When I sing, I like it. The meeting broke up and I collected a couple of cards, but had to run out of the room to laugh.

The café owner complains bitterly to us about slow sales, and about small-spending clientele. I did not tell him that the ex-personal-trainer to one-quarter of the ladies in town spends half the day sitting in front of the pastry case. Watching people eat traumatizes him. One night I had to help him through a catatonic fugue induced by watching two fat people bingeing at close range when we were out with the gang. He rocked on the barstool and moved his head more unnaturally than usual. I suppose he is trying to extinguish his feelings about that by watching it over and over; but of course I am guessing. Brave and hard going, that kind of self-therapy.

He’s not so much a rat as a miniature hippo. The thing about the hippopotamus, I’ll remind you, is their method of “marking.” As the hippo sprays shit out of its anus, it twirls its tail around, scattering or spattering it widely. I was not entirely surprised some had gotten on my cell phone, which was in my bag.

Perhaps I’ve taken that lesson.

Unpinching

2008-12-10T17:00:00.001-08:00

Woop! Wrue-oop! Wuppa! The blade flexed as he tried to move the saw.
There is no deft and graceful way of backing out a pinched blade. It is all trying, tugging, wriggling, sharp edges, ominous flexing and cussing to take back time; go back to a minute before and kick out a little more sawdust as you go, not be so fast, so direct, so precise as to not leave wriggle room, tolerance.
All the worse that I was watching. Witness is the villain of the incompetent. Witness the maker of glory and shame.
“Well! … Stupid girl!”
All of the sudden a call came from the far side of the orchard.
“Randall! C’mon, we gotta get back to the cove!”
Randall shot me a dirty look, rubbing his cheek with the top of his arm. He had cherry pitch and dust on his forearm and outer palm.
Then he ran away.
The handle of the saw flopped down from where the blade held into the trunk, and bounced a little. I picked it up and started working the blade out, pulling back on one side and then the other, then again, and again. It took so long, especially because I was worried Randall would come back. But it came out and I put the handsaw in my net. If he came back, he’d have to have another saw to saw anything down.
The cherry trunk had a wan little frown, drooling shiny pitch at the corners.
I decided to find some other part of the island, away from the orchard, to explore.
I hadn’t thought about having a saw before, but now I had a saw.

… handsaw and cherry …

2008-12-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

It was a boy with a handsaw.
“Hullo.”
“Hullo. I want something. What’s in the net?”
“Things I got. Why you have a handsaw?”
“I’m cutting down these trees – you’ll help me!”
I liked looking at his skin and the way his limbs moved inside it and especially the specifics of his eyes, if I could get a good look without him catching me, because it seemed to bother him a lot. The things he said were perplexing – more to interesting and fascinating than bewildering and dumbfounding, but not yet by any amplitude – if I could get him to say more, that would be the thing. Here was someone endeavoring to do something I had never considered. If I could only understand, it would increase my ability to draw motives, such that I couldn’t see for players in my game. There was so much more I needed to understand.
Besides, I could see he wasn’t very efficient with a handsaw. I could show him how to use it without saying anything about it, and maybe things would become easier all around.
I put the saw to a limb that would be better pruned and made quick work of it.
“There! … Want to take a turn?”
“That was just a little one – not a whole tree!”
“Why you want to cut down a whole tree?
“ ‘Cause.” He took the saw and stepped toward the big cherry tree.
“Aw, that’s not one to cut!” I said, hiding my panic as casual advice. “Here, do this one!” I said, pointing to a decrepit pear tree, its trunk half-dead, mostly ready for burning without even any curing.
He sidestepped up next to the big cherry.
“No, really, I like that one to stay!”
He put the blade against it.
“Look, it has cherries on it right now!”
He pushed the blade forward.
“You can’t cut a big, healthy trunk with a blade like that – it’ll just get stuck.”
He started sawing with a deliberateness tinged with fury. Of course the blade pinched at its depth. I could see he was angry. The air already smelled of cherry wood. I waited to see what he would do next.

… currents and tides ….

2008-12-08T07:32:00.002-08:00

One has to understand the way of tides and the movement of currents to get around. If you look across to one point on a near island’s shore, it might be easy or impossible to get there, depending on whether the tide is in your favor or opposing. If the tide is going out, and running in conjunction with an outwardly-moving current, you could get pulled out into open water, beyond the grips of any other power. Four hours later when the tides running in again, you can scoot across to the same point pretty as you please.
So there are right times and wrong times for everything. Sometimes you just have to wait.
Starfish sleep most of the time. You can only get a good three or four hours of alertness out of them any one day, and part of that they’re goofing around, yelling and yodeling and blowing bubbles, as I’m sure you have remarked on your own. You can’t just start lecturing them any old time, and it has to be something they’re interested in, after all. It takes a few tests to find out what it is they’re about, what kind of temperament they have, and eventually you can determine the things they need to learn and unlearn, and the best way to relate. Sometimes you’ll just have a conversation like this:
“John Cusack in High Fidelity?”
“No, Ben Stiller after the tragedy in Zoolander.”
“Oh, so sorry …” You see? And now you know how to take it from there.
Sometimes you find one that is quite magnificent, but isn’t doing things in the ordinary pattern, and perhaps if you indicate the thing that’s lacking, it would do better, not founder so much, yet you sense it knows what it’s doing, if not absolutely deliberately, there’s some reason it isn’t going the usual way. So you might drop the most subtle of hints and see what happens. Maybe it’ll go your way, or maybe do something more interesting.
I did really think there was something about starfish being in the shoreline environment, and so I’d take the best of them for “walks,” bring them ashore and set them in the water for a few hours while I tried out my land-legs and investigated the myriad things there were to be found around land. The island closest to the cages had been inhabited, but was abandoned. There were buildings covered with lichens and an orchard where I could find fruits of all sorts, in season. I brought a net to haul back all the stuff I found, some to look at, some to work with my hands, some to eat. I could be fascinated just looking at land things for tide after tide. And then one day I saw someone there.

Between Wax Paper

2008-12-08T07:32:00.001-08:00

There was a boardgame stored in the shanty on our fishpens; it was a knock-off of the game “Monopoly,” and it had been prepared for being kept on the sea. All the little colored moneys had been oiled to translucent and the board had been pressed between wax paper to preserve it, but it made it difficult to read in parts. Mother wasn’t much for boardgames, she’d say, and I never could get a starfish to deal with pieces, die, cards, and money at once.
The instruction booklet was in a folded envelope of wax paper that I gingerly unwrapped and read again and again. For a period, I read it at bedtime every night and kept it under my pillow, in the wax paper envelope. The last thing I did before turning down the lamp was tuck it back in the envelope.
In lieu of play with real opponents, I read the rules and extrapolated how the gameplay would go.
Then, I set up the board and played with multiple opponents. The hard part was forgetting what my intentions were as another player, which I did to make it fair. Other times it seemed I couldn’t recall, once it was the next player’s turn, every bit of the thinking for that particular player, what attitude they took toward risk and why, what her GO/NO GO setpoints were and by what formula they had been derived, the whys and why nots that each one might choose, ways of going about things, methods of counting. There was always a real me, and so there was the matter of if another opponent had a particularly favorable advantage, not letting the real me know, but really wanting to. But fair play was tantamount to understanding how these things were going to work.

Starfish Husbandry

2008-12-04T22:39:00.000-08:00

I grew up on a starfish farm, on the chilly waters off the coast of Maine. Mother kept a running advertisement in the Bar Harbor Gazette, and signs posted around the Bass Harbor ferry slip that said, “Starfish – for food, ornament, or pets.” I spent all day balancing on the rim of the cages, and walking the lines like tightropes. It is a tricky deal you have to judge carefully, the tide and currents, and the timing of the swells, such that the line is taught enough to hold your weight without dropping you in the drink.
We fed the starfish different meal, depending on what we wanted them to be, big or little, blue or red or yellow, midnite black, whatever was the fashion in the gourmet, ornament, and fish fancy magazines, and whether we wanted them to be smart or not.
My schooling was training trick starfish for circus shows and the movies. I could teach them to do every trick a dog does, sit up, roll over, beg, bark; whatever I had time to get to in a season before they got sold or cut up to make starfish for the next season.
That was always a weird thing; I would think I knew “who got the brain” in a separation, and over the days of regrowth, I wouldn’t know for sure, and be amazed sometimes that the shortest stub of starfish tentacle, with just a tiny couple of suckers on it will grow back into a cartwheel-tumbling, multiplications-table mastering chameleon starfish that would steal my heart and be the pride I would have to turn over to the highest bidder at the Ellsworth Hydroculture Fair. They say you shouldn’t give bay fish names, but what else is a girl to do with her time?
Sometimes I took the dinghy and went ashore the nearby islands. It was disorienting to walk on dead granite, or the springy high moss on black dirt under the pines, in which one does not have to correct for the push and pull of the rolling water. And it was so very dirty, too. I couldn’t help myself; I followed the deer paths and climbed the trees, and I was streaked with black earth. As much as I’d have to swim to wash it off, I may as well have towed the dinghy back to the cages we lived on.

Lead Grinder

2008-12-02T12:18:00.001-08:00

There are stories you hear that are ordinary stories, festival stories you hear every year, stories that tell you what is important and how to keep it together and how to make resolutions and exchanges and what one might expect will happen, and then there are stories you don’t hear so often, stories that are only told at initiation, stories people try to distract you from really listening to, and when they see that look on your face, they say, “That’s not about you, dummy.”
And you wonder what is about you after all and what it is about you after all and why is everyone so goddamned miserable, damned if you do and damned if you don’t and don’t think you can ever come back here again.
All I ever wanted was to belong somewhere and I never could quite get it. I’d be in the thick of things and hooray, but it wouldn’t last. People would start cycling stories closer and closer together such that soon there was the tedium of hearing the same story every single day, or suddenly they’d stop mid-sentence, and make a hand-gesture, that you finish the sentence for them – how is one to know how it ends if it is not one’s own story, and even then. I would tell my own stories and not hear a word. Not anything. One time I tried a different story every day all summer long, trying trying trying to find something to say that would make a difference, turn the key, a catalyst of untried alchemy; and then the chief came up to me alone and asked if I knew anyone who was prepared to speak at harvest council.
No, certainly I know no one and nothing at all. I was too ashamed to say I wasn’t getting on with anyone, anymore. The harder I tried, the more they stared at me dumbly. I was about to break from the pain. We were supposed to belong together, we were supposed to be the same, interchangeable, even, but I was different. I caused trouble with no mischief even in mind.
I would run away weeping in the night, run for days, until I might be consoled by another people. A new young friend would find me by the water’s edge and we’d splash each other and play tag and it would be the easiest fun I’d have had in a long time, and near sunset, he’d ask where I was going and I’d say I had nowhere to go and he’d say, “C’mon, dummy, stay with us!” And so I would, and make myself useful, inasmuch as they allowed and there were always funny rules that didn’t seem to make any sense to me quite yet and I would be reluctant to say the things that came to mind lest the chasm begins to grow again.
At times I was surprised to find a chum or group of pals who would fight for me, and say, “Watch it, he’s with us!”
Was a time I had a friend who would sit and talk and we could not stop and white light would split into rainbows around us and we both giggled like tinkling bells tied to lambs in the meadow running after clusters of daisies just a few romps forward. He liked my ideas and gave me advice and we made stuff up and it made sense. He never said he didn’t have time for me but everyone else told me so, and when he died his mother stood by me and spoke strangely, and the order was wrong. I could not correct a grieving mother, and what did it matter, anyway. The light was bound together again tightly.
What was compromise? What was belonging? Perhaps it was all just singing for supper and coffee and resentment. But if I had that kind of friend again, I would choose him over an army of others who claimed me and I would not let anyone tell me different.

Through the Automatic Car Wash

2008-12-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

No one else ever even cops to having been conscious in a half-formed state. I don’t know what the big deal is. I remember when my front side was done but not my back; I recall when my face was only ¾ ready, I remember when I had no bones. Does it betray some weakness? Is it a gift? Is it a mistake to talk about it? It is what it is.
--
Sometimes you meet people who haven’t walked through their souls yet. Maybe sometime they’ll be going through an automatic car-wash and the soul will be hovering there in the stream of suds. Maybe it’ll drift right through the windshield or maybe it’ll be repelled, pushed up and away, like those jet blowers. You’ll see them on Monday morning, and say, “Chaz! … You look good!” And then you wonder if your sudden burst of exuberance will be misinterpreted. And you realize it’ll only be worse if you say what you really mean.
--
Yes, I went back and looked and of course I saw it; it exploded for me and fractured into an array like a firework. I don’t know now why I had to pretend to you that I didn’t see it, and ask you if you weren’t referring to another thing. It is true and not true. It doesn’t matter and it matters. It is my current project. It is the wedge I try to expel. It attempts to sever the vital side from the rote; thoughts and feelings and belief from action, and I say no, even though I don’t know what I am saying yes to. This is the thing I have not been able to see. I look every day and it is very close, I am very certain. But you know that making assurances is a big deal for the other side.
So, it takes time. Doubling back, and redoubling my efforts. Meantime, please excuse the double-speak; it is strangely necessary. And doubly thanks, from Miss Winnicott, as well.

School Days

2008-11-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

When I was in the second grade, my reading teacher allowed a few of us to do a self-paced series of workbooks. She promised me a better life if I learned to read well. I looked at her hard, and she nodded her over-bright face vigorously. I can’t tell you how much this motivated me. My home life was wretched and hopeless, and this woman was so very sweet. Coming to school for the allowed 180 days of the year was a fantasy theme-park of nice ladies, age-appropriate activities, other children, close to my own age, that I was not responsible for tending, rationality, rules-before-punishments, my own desk, and plentiful supplies.
In a matter of weeks, I completed the workbook series, through the fifth-grade level, and awaited my prize. That welching bitch just smiled and praised my amazing accomplishment, and not a thing changed in my shitty life.
In the third grade, I ran through my "language arts" stuff, faked my math homework, and sat in a corner reading "Where the Wild Things Are" every day. Knowing, I suppose, that I was smart enough to recover from a motivational setback, that I had already proven that I was “good for it,” the teacher ignored my strike, even when a chorus of tattlers tried to make her acknowledge my open cheating on math homework. Nah, I think after all she just avoided the issue for her own sake.
In the fourth grade, they demoted me to the bottom track, where I made a nuisance of myself, to the dumb bewilderment of that class' inhabitants. Enraged by the school’s tactic to humiliate me, I found motivation: I put my hand up immediately to answer every question, finally deciding to keep my hand up through the entire class, ready to answer whatever it was the teacher would choose to ask next. After a few weeks, the teachers informed me at the end of recess that I was being retracked, and that also, I would go to counseling instead of language arts, one morning a week.
By then I was deeply suspicious of authority, and my mother let on that she was in on this, so I knew it pretty much stank – she told me the teachers and the principal and herself had got together to discuss me – it was an immense conspiracy against me now -- a game that I could not win, with no one I could trust, and I should not let on to anything, just do whatever it was they wanted. But now they wanted in my head, to fix me. Now I see Mother was just pulling rank and blowing smoke, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I guessed I just had to “buckle down;” as my father would say; concede that they had won, keep looking forward, and try to perform above reproach, and without any showy-ness, such that they would leave me be.
In the fifth grade, I was one of the top three girls in my class, and then Diana was promoted straight to the sixth grade. We talked at recess. I told her I was hoping to get a promotion, too, so I could get out as soon as possible. I asked around about it, and eventually learned it was unlikely; I was the youngest person in my class since the beginning, and I was always considered “socially unready,” whatever that meant. I would do whatever it took to get over that, short of bringing someone to my house – but then there were other things I wasn’t allowed by mother to do, and even if she did let me go to a sleepover or something, she would be unbearably sad over me leaving her, and I would resist doing it again.
In the sixth grade, the school instituted a “gifted” program. I can’t remember whether I was informed that I would be in it, but no one explained it to me. I stayed in my seat when it was time for it to start. Karenthea and Vince went. Both of them came back and told me I was supposed to be in it with them. “Why are they sending you to get me? Let them come and tell me that themselves,” I said. Both of them looked at me with wide eyes. And they left me alone.

Dreams of a Mare

2008-11-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

Patient forbearance only goes so far, but at a point one really has to act. The Pilgrims set out hoping to find more agreeable company in the New World Savages than they did their English brethren. In appreciation of the new feeling of trust they found, they invented a holiday where they incapacitated themselves with dolorous-making New World foods that left them defenselessly listless for days, where they could languidly relish the relative safety of abiding by their new friends.
I had lost my bid to get away with the handsome and crafty vagrant. The worst happened when he decided to enlist both of us in his quest to find a man who might be any kind of animal, who was perhaps miniaturized or perhaps a giant, and who may or may not want to be found, but was last seen running away. What this man had that Mustafio wanted was still a mystery to me, as much as in my travels before coming to this place, I had heard random tales of Mustafio's associates, always unsatisfactorily incomplete.
Well, hey, at least we'd get out of this barn and this ridiculous stand-off where somehow circumstances had appointed this wanderer as "judge," by dint, I suppose, of him being the closest to enjoying true freedom.
I was rethinking my idea of finding a "new best friend," somehow it just doesn't ever work out. I was still stuck with that controlling harridan who kept me penned until such time as she had tasks for me, and did not allow me even a few kite-building materials and a little time in the meadow to try out recreations of the flying contraptions I remembered and dreamt of in my days as a foal. Why don't grown horses play with kites? It's a sad question to contemplate. I longed for the day to make it untrue. Certainly, I would cooperate once again with the vagrant.
"Sssst! … Frau Staupitz!"
I saw my agent, whom I had long thought gone, appear in a chink in the siding. There were so many things I wanted to say, starting with "Where the hell have you been?" But instead I just stamped a hoof and snorted recognition. He left a package for me and retreated.
Mister Atomic was keeping Mustafio fully engaged in a real or mock hysteria of epic drama, on his favorite subject, so no one noticed me sidle over to the bundle and put it in my pocket, very much looking forward to hitting the road.

Unknown History

2008-11-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, of course, it’s the easy push and pull of things, if not accelerated into calamity that makes the world go around, for the most part; the driving of the hammer stroke, the drawing of the rake; whether to rise up to meet or to flee.
Some people can do the same thing forever, and not feel they have missed the other, their natural inclination is fixed; while others might have a broader repertoire, or simply, at one time or always, an inclination to change. But how much to follow these inclinations, and could they, through some persuasions, become falsified, deluded as to their value, or unduly influenced by the ordinary coercions well known to all? Could they be made wicked by over-ruling expectations, alone?
Thing is, I come from raking. “Live to rake, rake to live” never made a whole lot of sense to me until external forces tried to curb my raking to shape their own agenda. But now here I was making massive profits for the order, and they really couldn’t deny me a cut in it.
With the fortune I accrued promoting the hammering of sand, I went back to the art of raking, the development of a school for the enhancement of its practice as a language. In my lifetime, I came to see contracts of both worldly and sacred nature raked out in courts and temples well beyond all the lands I had ever travelled in that jibbering caravan of hammer-swingers.
And sometimes, when challenges were made to such contracts, I, or other interpreters were called to make sense of the rakings; the crossings, the curve patterns, where here lines flowed together and there they repelled one another, the methods of mirroring and whether the line of delineation, the slice point, had been properly determined. I much enjoyed debating with colleagues, whether we were in agreement or opposed, the constructions of those pronouncements, much respecting a sturdy position in opposition to my own.
If still a solution could not be found, the raking would be crated out for winnowing, for all to know what holds weight and what flies away on the wind.
But the better rakings stood. Eons from now, they will find fossil record of those rakings, and eventually decode the language anew, perhaps to resurrect the practice.

Hammer Train

2008-11-24T10:21:00.000-08:00

I hadn’t realized in the pre-dawn the impact my sudden decision to change the method of preparing the court would have, not having foreknowledge of the Dauphin’s arrival. Although I felt a bit of fear at the time, and the air was strange, all things considered, if I had known the Dauphin was coming, I would have stuck to the usual, maybe going over the rakelines double, fussing to make it the best raking ever.
I was heartened by the Dauphin’s approval and Master’s comment. My uneasiness was gone. But suddenly Kotto-Re’s emblem was changed to that of a mallet, and the whole monastery and region was elevated in the status of the order. We made up little mallets to sell to the pilgrims who came, where only vagrants came before, and the pilgrims bought the little mallets and replicas of sand courts, in which they could hammer out sand hammerings in their free hours.
As for me, the monastery booked me on sand-hammering demonstrations throughout the countryside, and a grand assembly of carriages were commissioned to carry me and my entourage. The carriages walked on a system of crawling hammers, and had swinging hammer whirlygigs on the top. Precious tool-quality hickory was used throughout the carriages’ construction. We carried temporary sand courtyards which could be reconstructed anywhere there was room, and always, hammers. I was given charge of numerous young apprentices, especially bright, strong, and resourceful, and I was no longer ever alone, unless I ran into the woods to find aloneness, and even then, I was spied on to see if I would reveal the secret of that was manifest that early morning. As much as I needed this time, I had to learn to have a light hand with curious and audacious young interlopers, especially when they approached at the wrong times.
Several other hammering troupes sprung up, and all manner of other daily ceremonial court preparation methods were tried. Proposals were made to write sand hammering into the canon. Alternate sand hammering canons, none by me, were put before the Dauphin, who requested my review of them. My life had altered considerably, from quiet contemplation to the center of hubbub. Sometimes I felt I’d never want to see another hammer again, nor the road, or the coterie of companions. I practiced raking to relax. I could never let anyone catch me doing this; they would think me a hypocrite. In fact, my road manager didn’t allow rakes on the procession, but I had my own compartment where only I was allowed to store things.

The Mallet of Kotto-Re

2008-11-23T17:54:00.000-08:00

At the monastery of Kotto-Re, Master advocated raking the sand in the courtyard, but I wasn't aware that it was a hard-and-fast rule. There was not a single word in the canon of scripture about the necessity of raking sand, in any particular way, but only of preparing the court to be a delight to those who come upon it. I was a raker, the most highly ranked in my raking ability, and I was roused in the pre-dawn to do the honor of raking twice as often as any other raker. While I performed my work, I reflected on the concept of delight.
One week, Master appeared distracted and unhappy. As far as the raking went, it seemed far from his mind; he neglected to remark upon the disposition of the courtyard at all. The raking squad was deflated. Then things got worse. An order came that next morning, the most highly ranked raker was to prepare the court. There was no word on why, but a strange excitement was in the air.
I roused in the pre-dawn and went out to the shed. It was not a normal morning at all. The sky was evenly distributed with stratus fractus, and the air was filled with a nearly acoustic thrumming. The moon was near setting. Instead of the rake, I picked up a large wooden mallet, and walked with resolution to the courtyard.
There, I hammered all the sand throughout the courtyard with a consistent moon edge facing the West. I can't remember each mallet strike, but sometimes as I wended around the perimeter of a rock or celebrated a chapparal bush with a radiating, rather than a concentric pattern, I was struck with a feeling of the correctness of it. Excited but still anxious, as I had not seen the court prepared this way before, I returned the mallet to the shed, and returned to rest until the others stirred.
In some aspects when official morning starts, it is as if the day before never happened. Some discussions that were settled the day before come unsettled, some open issues are discarded, their importance evaporated.
On the matter of the appearance of the courtyard, Master blanched and nodded.
The Dauphin Emperor arrived at noon. The first thing he did, upon riding to the center of the court, is look around in a wide sweep from right to left, and smiled.
"I have never before been honored with the likes of hammered sand!"
"Ah yes," Master said, "Hammering sand is very much the specialty of Kotto-Re! We wished to honor you especially, Dear Dauphin, with this hammering!"

Vantage and Expectations

2008-11-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

I had odds on him being gone by first light, and really, given the high probability he’d turn out to be incompetent with a shovel, I wouldn’t count it as any big deal.
If he were gone, I could make an easy summation of what it meant; one really bad day: Torn up flower bed, broken down barn, worn-out tractor clutch, ruined tablecloth, broken plate, sore feelings, one pair of cover-alls, a whole lot of wasted scrambling around. And I would be able to tell the story of that feckless, block-headed gypsy. As they say, “a stitch in time saves nine.”
If he were still there, well, what then would it mean? I took a shotgun with me in case he was there and I realized for certain I didn’t want him to be. I kind of relished the idea of seeing his backside running away down the drive, moving unencumbered by the damped flywheel choke that kicked in right before the yoke is placed on such a beast.
So I waited until after sunrise to venture out to the barn.
What made me think he’d be gone? I had detected a sullen, nervous, unhappiness in him toward the end of dinner which I found uncharacteristic in the type of pontificating boor I had earlier decided he was. And I couldn’t make him talk about his friends, and how he had come to be chasing a tiny man down the alley.
I threw the door open, and the first thing I saw was his hand up, holding off that crazy mare, who was flaring her nostrils at him.
“Morelle! Get off of him! – Don’t mind that crazy-ass horse; she’s been in heat ever since I got her back to health! … Gee, I’m sorry, I would have warned you …” I put the gun at my side. “I bought her at auction … the NYC Pound said she was meandering through the tunnel traffic at Varick Street, out of her mind; she raves like a madwoman to anyone who looks at her. She’s filled out and glossed up and got her sass back, but there’s no accounting for her manners.”
I patted her withers and she pulled away.
“Bitch.”
“Now, Morelle, that’s a fine ‘Thanks for the oats!’ – You, you all right there?”
He nodded, still bleary and confused.
“You must be sore, after yesterday. Well, have I got a job for you lovebirds! I’ve staked out a section of meadow behind the springhouse – gonna extend the cold cellar! I figure the best way to do it is plow off the top with a small plow ‘til we can’t any more, then switch to shoveling. I brought you a bucket of biscuit-n-eggs, and I’ll get Missy there hooked up to the plow. – I spent half the night tinkering in the shed, and I’m on to something, so I’ll get back to it and check on you at noon.”

Bagpipe Shadow Puppet

2008-11-21T05:07:00.000-08:00

One thing the farm has is space; the farmer can easily store things she has no use for in a loft of attic or in a currently unused chicken coop, as the demand for eggs has been met by other local sources. Like facts and uninterpreted memories stored in the human preconscious, those things are there and available for when need or fancy meet human ingenuity at the crossroads of now, or not.
A jar of twine, bits of cloth, the Studebaker, a single-horse sleigh, an egg basket full of blown light bulbs. Random things come and it is not necessary to wonder whether there is a place to put it. It is quite possible, in the future, that such an item will meet some ultimate, ingenious use, unknown as yet. There isn’t trash pick-up; what is unwanted is dumped in the wooded ravine at the edge of the field. If you change your mind, you can go dig for it, but there’s a chance some other animal has taken a fancy to it. One time I saw an otter in the creek cradling a bottle of Evening in Paris, unscrewing the cap, sniffing, dabbing it on, winking at me, and screwing the cap back on again. Also, the beavers decorated the entry of their dam with bright yellow lawnchair tapes.
Of course there are pressing needs, getting the vegetables in before the frost, canning them before they rot, loading the wagon to be on time for market day. Feeding time. Bolting all the shutters closed with the news of a tornado.
Sometimes you might leave overnight to go to a conference on cow milking, and you grab what you thought was an old suitcase, but upon opening it, find it full of crystals and transmitters and wires and when the light hits the little solar panel, the case turns over, appendages pop out, and it scurries down the road, or stays a while, holding a digit against the base of an incandescent lightbulb, humming.
Some time in the evening when there’s plenty of kerosene, one can indulge in tinkering, sorting out the bounty of randomness and putting it into a new context, coax the meaning out of a thing, or, in some cases, figuring out what its purpose was, finally, after all this time of puzzling.
Some items had a persuasive bent, others, “un truc,” what, what, what, one wants to ask them what they are for, what do they do, what is their plastic and elastic limit, is this agent or reagent, catalytic, stable. If there isn’t too much other stuff tying you down, you have to try a thing, especially if you know you’re not supposed to stay here, see what happens, and have set aside enough to do it again, lest it’s become useful, maybe important, and the material is wasted.
Sometimes in a flash one can make a plan, an assembly, of bunches of those things, hovering between useful and useless, a repurposing to truer purpose; if there was ever a reason those things in particular were chosen to be here, and not passed along merely by the whim of another.

Mister Atomic's Plan

2008-11-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

I saw right off how he took to drink, so I had emptied the liquor cabinet and hid all the bottles under my bed. I locked the cabinet again – we'll see just how honest he is. Between spying out the window to see that the fool hadn't lit the hay barn on fire, I hid the silver and stretched a needlepoint over the Bracques that hangs in the mudroom. The needlepoint was a traditional embroidery sampler given for weddings in the region, and was writ, "Women have many faults but men have only two: Everything they say and everything they do!" I don't wish to talk about why I have it now, but with this young man in the house, it cheered me to see it up on the nail.
The acrid smell of burning clutch rubber wafted in by fits. Whatever was I thinking? A performer who makes his bread by defecating on-stage, and expects applause as well as payment for this kind of display. Such a man, as ignorant as he was, has never learned the magic in "How do you want it, Ma'am." If I didn't talk fast and give him some idea of expectations, he'd break the whole place down like a mule in a corncrib.
I had yet to fully plomb his ability to take instruction, advice, or correction, to see if he could be made useful in some way he was not now. So far, all the questions or comments he made were not in the order of cooperation, but to catch me out, prove me wrong, get the better of me. But I had to think underneath it all, he was trying to understand something, but on his own. When things got particularly tense, I approached him, my right hand extended toward his right hand, no tricks, no charge, no context. He'd oblige and shake my hand. I could see in his face the electrical rearrangement going on in his head; he'd nearly giggle, and then be much calmer. But beside the handshake, and specifics around the farm that I allowed as his domain, he would neither offer nor agree to any accord; we could not agree to disagree; he would run roughshod over my caveats same as he did my carrot patch.
I resolved to send him on his way, but first there was a project that had been on my mind for quite some time. Years ago, a veterinarian buried the entire contents of his chemistry lab in a big trench at the bottom of the pasture. There were quite a number of bottles and ampules, liquids and gasses sealed in glass; some things I was curious about, things I thought I might get some good money for.

... Perhaps a call for ’Temperance’ ?

2008-11-19T10:32:00.001-08:00

The first day out that drunken ass yanked out all my hostas with a pitchfork and then set to bellowing at the draft horses until they pulled down the north wall of the stables in fright. I watched them rolling end over end down the meadow, with the section of wall they were still tethered to, that moron provoking them all the way. I breathed a tiny sigh of relief every time I saw Nut or Bolt get to his feet "Thank goodness they're okay …" and then he'd start at them, they'd rush back in fright, pulling up a section of wall, and around and down they'd go again, until they were stopped at the creek. At least I had a nice dinner planned. You know what proud creatures men are; best you let them clean up these messes on their own, but I was livid – is he ignorant or wholly, wholly evil? Maybe it was the whiskey. The hostas couldn't be recovered – what could I say? But he got Nut and Bolt back in the stable and dragged the wall back up and nailed it back on with a ball-peen hammer and roofing nails, reinforcing it with bailing twine. Maybe I'd outline his job a little more explicitly tonight and send him into town tomorrow so I could repair the wall properly, and assure poor N & B, while he wasn't around – or maybe not. I wasn't prepared for his table manners or dinner conversation at all – exasperating! He started by picking up the gravy boat and draining it into his gullet – flashback to the way he tossed back that whiskey – and then asked if I could fetch him some more soup! It didn't seem he had ever heard of a noodle clipper in his life, and he picked his back teeth with the pork knife, as if he were giving me a demonstration on what dental hygienists do. Also, Oh, oh, let's just say, 112 years of "Mind the Battenburg" down the tubes in an instant! I was quite beside myself.
He was pontificating on modern art. He had derived this subject by reflecting on the little-dutch-boy-n-girl salt and pepper shaker set on the table. Just amazing, I thought, how these cosmopolitan types sniff at the "choice" of something that was inherited and really quite serviceable, and they know everything but don't know how to DO a damn thing, and when they get the chance, they'd rather prove it than ask any questions.
I told him that while he was bucking and pitching and near ruining the clutch on my tractor towing a windfall up to the woodshed, I went around and had a look at the north wall of the stable. The masses of roofing nails were gobbed in groupings that looked like galvanized-aluminum fungus. Ha! Once all those nails are pried out, the wood was going to look like it had been gnawed away by termites. I don't know how he managed to do so much damage, so quickly, while using all the wrong tools -- his mad, nervous energy, I suppose.
I waited until he pulled the knife away from his gumline before I threw the plate at his head, a blunt strike at the temple. Ah, what now? Peace.

Usage

2008-11-19T06:27:00.000-08:00

The lexicon was made up of complete words, but all expressions of the language used only contractions of these words. It was hard for me, as a foreigner, to interpret each sentence, for there were no complete words to look up.
Also, it seemed that, after all, in the contraction, some bit of the concept of the word was being deleted as well, such that, say, the word "allow" might be contracted to either, "al" or "llo" or "ow", and each showed different measures of allowance.
The first, "al," a hearty, encouraging endorsement, the second, "llo," a more neutral resignation to the will of the object, and the third, "ow," a statement of begrudged compliance, acknowledgment that the claim of the other could not rightfully be denied, but an inherent vow that sulking, foot-dragging, and resentment would follow indefinitely.
So,
“Y’ al’ ‘tk” means: “I am so glad you have made this decision. I will help you as I can.”
“Y’ ‘llo’ ‘tk” (double L is pronounced as vowel ‘y’) means: “I hear you.”
“Y’ ‘ow’ ‘tk” means: “Just try it; I will make you pay one thousand times over.”
Or that is my interpretation as it stands today, for the particular dialect of that region. My interpretation of the spoken usage was even worse; I would try to lip-read the difference between "al" and "ow," and it's considered very coarse to have missed the distinction, so I avoided asking, and looked for other signs of interpretation. It's taken years for me to make sense of anything.

Rest and Not

2008-11-18T10:30:00.001-08:00

I recall it gave me pleasure to hold his little body in the palms of my hands, lightly, I’d stroke over his wings, smoothing the feathers down, and then cup my palm to the wing, my fingers extending over his back to his spine.
When he was fully awake, he didn’t allow it; he’d squawk and lift his talons and spit: “I’ll put out your eyes!”
But if he were drowsy, and not in a cranky and defensive mood, he’d lean into my palm and maybe I’d pick him up and hold him to my bosom while untangling the floppy tabs of his cockscomb, or rest him in the crook of my elbow, or prop him up, there on my drafting table, between my hands.
Then I could appreciate the wonder and beauty of him as a living being, unconflicted by all the wrongnesses of the quasi-conscious state he lived in typically. There was peace in the disengagement from our constant bickering, our utter aesthetic differences, and lack of acceptance of them, in this proximity. Truth be told, our bickering was legendary; people gathered to watch us discuss matters, sometimes exaggerating things to provoke greater dramatic outrage. I proposed that we call ourselves the “Truth Fighters,” not to labor the point, but to say, it was hard to guess if we were in league with each other or were enemies, and hard to say whether we were for the truth or opposed. At the time, he snorted at the suggestion and turned his head aside.
When he gave into sleep this way, he was making some kind of concession as well, unspoken, but real: he was giving in to me.
I’d hold him, however it was, for a few minutes, feel the chill on my own shoulders, and then put him in his own little bird bed, wash my hands, and find something else to occupy my mind.

Peek-a-boo

2008-11-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

I was coming in from coffee one morning and I saw him going out the window, just a green flutter of wingtips, and the dust, that bird-dust, that I was really slightly allergic to, curling off of him and glinting in the sunlight. Good. I was glad he was taking in some sunlight, and getting around town, talking to people. But we always got in a sticking point over his mad penchant for calumniation. I was struck dumb by his need to tell me every incident he had seen flying over back-alleys from my office to the quay – and always people I knew! Judge W. changing his girdle by the dumpster, Mrs. C. shaving in quite the reverse order – and out-of-doors! Mr. R. scavenging the dumpster for old muffins from the coffeeshop, and then sitting in the bottom of the thing, legs splayed in an "L," the balls of his feet pulled back, eating the whole trashbag full of them. I skipped over the question of why was he telling me these things to what I really wanted to know:
"What, Double-A, are you telling people about me?"
His beak would chatter a bit, and then he'd say, "You're paranoid!"
I didn't want to hear the dissembling any more than I wanted to hear the gossip. It was evident by the way people tried to take up in the middle conversations that had never started with me that the bird was up to something. Or it was just endless, senseless, niggling noise.
Perhaps I should have mentioned I have a disorder that gives me very bad reaction to big surprises. And to vague hinting around. How had I gotten stuck with this creature?
Still, I liked and could tolerate, and was trying to build tolerance for, a steady stream of small, pleasant, and maybe delightful surprises, by some controlled measure.
I worked all day, and he hadn't come back. So before closing up, I went in to change the papers under his work area. Something told me it was time to take a look.
First, he had a scrapbook, or collage kind of thing, references of some sort he had torn out of the celebrity magazines he loved. There was the Alien Queen that Sigourney Weaver fought, the queen's ovaries and breasts strung out and wound around and along the trusses and conduits of an immense basement. There were all kinds of collapsed things, wrecks of sorts. There were a bunch of popular images, the random mass-marketing-assigned cravings of the 18-44 male demographic.
Then there was the model, the thing. It looked like it could make toast, except it had round slots and the electrical cord hanging from it was frayed to look like a dandelion. It was on collapsed scissoring legs that had no way of being extended. The legs flopped around a bladder with a peek-a-boo window displaying dishwater with potato peels, oatmeal rubber, coffee grinds and general filth. Set back from the toaster console, the thing had some kind of suctioning device that smoked the ends of cigarettes in an enclosed bowl that was sealed well enough that I hadn't smelled it. All of it delivered the feeling of want without redemption, empty offerings. I suppose I had guessed he was making a gift for me, but this thing repulsed me, and the idea that he might present it to me made me nauseous. I wheeled around, and spotted a mess in the corner I hadn't seen before. The wall there was streaked with stains that all pointed toward a mass of rumpled papers. Moving closer, I saw he had lined it with the strips from burst perforations of my invoice forms, and in it were eggs, quite a prolific number, and not like the eggs he had been laying before, but fresh, and pulsing with internal effort.

From the Breath of a Talking Squirrel

2008-11-17T06:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it was a matter of a confusion between the treat being withheld as punishment and the forbidden thing one is being punished for having, but no matter. I was never taken off punishment, and couldn't remember whether any one thing was inherently bad or instead, that I had once appeared to enjoy it. There was no sense in asking; that only ever made matters worse.
I told you I had only ever written one spell. I had specifically been forbidden from making any of "my magic," but sometimes when one is in the woods, and is approached by a talking squirrel, it seems only civil to hear him out and make a reply. By increments, by the aspiration of another's breath during conversation, and the social necessity suggesting particular pairings of syllables suddenly dangerously close to taboo incantations, some hidden world was sparking. Intentions were there, not fully formed by utterance, nor action.
"Monsieur Squirrel, according to the schedule I have been given, the time is not now."
"Oh, but it is! The time is always now!"
This hadn't been true before, but suddenly made a whole lot of things true. There was a lot to be sorted out.

A Day at the Other Desk

2008-11-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

I was way behind on my collections, and decided I really needed to devote a full day to calling on overdue accounts.
The first place I called was the Atlantis Company, for which I had formulated "invisible paper."
"No, I don't recall that project ever going on here," the purchasing agent there said. "The purchase order isn't in our system, but if this is something you contracted directly with one of our engineering groups, send us the contract, but from here I can't see any evidence it ever happened." I made a note to dig out the contract, and hoped it was as I had remembered.
Next I called Bendeye Inc., about a four-way mirror I had devised for a specific optical application. They said they had paid me in full, and didn't understand why I was still sending late notices. After being transferred through several departments, I found someone who said she'd look up the cancelled check and send me a copy. I was certain there was no check.
I dialed up The Excellent Group, and told them I really needed to close out the balance on the Bigness-intensity capacitor farm I had finished setting up for them last quarter. The switch-flipping party had been totally off-the-hook; I was afraid to ask for the check at the time – I thought my own person was going to be torn to confetti in their general rioting over the project's success, so I thought it would be a bad idea to be carrying said document right then, lest it be shredded as well.
"Oh, man, about that," the Project Lead said. "We kind of haven't been getting the bignesses this past month, and demand is way low …"
"What has that got to do with me? I delivered …" I could tell this was going to be drawn out.
I checked in with Deflex Inc., on some schematics I had sent them pertaining to a hydroplaning boomerang ferry they were setting up on a holiday route between Dubai and Madagascar.
"As we recall, that was speculative work on your part that we decided we had no interest in picking up – we're sorry; we're still not interested."
"Excuse me but -- how could I have made that project up? Of course you had asked me to do it!"
Now it seemed the Director was insulted that I thought his idea was stupid, after all, or insulted that I thought he was stupid enough to come up with such an idea, and now I wouldn't claim it as my own.
"… I'll send a copy of the work order."
Next I called the Everlong Corporation about a time machine I had delivered to them, oh, man, I can't believe it, it was back in 2000, so that they could take a pallet of baseball trading cards back to the beginning of the national game's inception, and front-load the past of the trading-card market. There had been a big race on to do this, and I charged a RUSH premium on it, but had never seen the check. I couldn't believe I had kept my head down, working on new stuff, without ever looking into this since the year 2000.
"We wouldn't have any paperwork on that," the clerk said. “It all gets shredded after seven years … I think there's a statute of limitations, anyway."

Nutter, Honey

2008-11-14T14:36:00.000-08:00

I'd practice my final presentations with Double-A. He was always hanging around, after all, so I supposed he had some interest, something to say about things, and I wanted a second opinion. He had listened in on all the client conversations. Maybe he'd see something I missed.
I showed him schematics for a corkscrew ring. For a public fountain made of giant cascading titanium tacos. For a rainbow machine to mount on parade floats.
"Rahk! What is all this FOR?"
I was a little crestfallen that he wasn't following the design intention, after all. How could this be so? He had handled interim client calls flawlessly.
"whaddya mean, what is it for? You know what it's for!"
"What?"
"What?"
"WHAT!"
"HWHAAT!" I had the lung capacity to blow him off of his perch, and I was angry enough to do it, but I checked myself.
"It's just …" Then he'd huff his little, whistling huff.
"Go ahead. Tell me what you want."
He'd hide his eye under his wing.
Roller skate stilts, Hydraulic clocks. Dust-powered lamps.
"Rahk! Why are you doing this?"
"Whaddya mean, why I am I doing this?"
"It's CRAP!"
"It's not crap, damn you! Tell me why it's crap … Oh! Who are you to say it's crap."
He was quite willing to look over my shoulder all day long and watch me work, but he approved of none of it. I kept the window open, and reminded him every time he gave that little bird-sigh, "Double-A, the window is open."
Then he started building models from some balsa and scraps I had in a canister in a space I used for storage, hidden behind a Chinese screen. I was glad, after all that time, if he didn't have one constructive comment to make, if he was going to condemn the lot of it, if he was going to keep saying "There's a better way! There's a better way!" and not tell me what it was, yes, I was glad that he had finally found something else to keep himself busy.
I'd check in:
"Whatcher doin' Double-A?"
"Nutter, Honey!"
"Okay, I'm not looking!"
If he didn't want me to know, that was fine with me. Sometimes I worried when I'd hear him using the Dremel or the jigsaw, or when the smell of glue was getting too intense.
Before leaving at night, I'd look in just to see that the area was in order, that he hadn't left the burnisher on, and I changed the newspaper in the area he generally habituated during the course of the day. But I didn't look at his project, since that was his stated wish.

Apt: 'Bodies Sive Eidolons'

2008-11-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

Hey, everybody, everywhere has got a tater tot pressing hashbrowns into her potato jacket, all the time. But is that the story or specifically other-than-story? Sometimes there's a thing to be learned, and sometimes it's just so much noise. But okay. I will.
Perhaps it's the reverse of what I thought: So action is the horse and theory is the cart, but I've always had to plan carefully what I do, and liked to think I was a rational being, worth being reasoned with, and if you leave it to the horse's judgment, she'll stay out in pasture until afternoon and you'll get lost on the road to Kilkenny, and never even get to market by nightfall. Yes, I know the other thing is true, too.
But action wasn't what that period of time was about. I had lost my identity, and not for the first time, and hoped to reassemble it in a more stable manner, starting with confirmed empirical observation of my current disposition.
I believed that doing things, and showing them to reasonable people would net me reasonable advice on how to proceed with my presumed goals, as my training had been based on cool-headed, reasonable critique. I wanted to know the answers to the questions I was asking. Why choose him as a cipher? There were things he knew and things he hinted at knowing, and why not, I had to start somewhere. I did try to check the provenance, examine the hallmark, as it were, but he was resistant. I am not incurious, but I want to force nothing. Given the murky nature of my own origins, I was willing to let this pass, after all.
"You're NOT NORMAL!" He'd yell in my face. Relieved that there was suddenly something to learn, I'd ask for an explanation. But he'd refuse to explain just how he meant it. It seemed a condemnation. I'd be relieved we were through, but he'd start talking to me again the next day, despite everything, telling me something either kind of sad or nonsensical, and throwing a little tantrum when I did not laugh, but was sad and quizzical. Finally, I told myself that words would come out of his mouth while we were in proximity to each other and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I ought to do about it, it was of no consequence. Myself, words mattered to me, but in this unique case, they couldn't. As someone helpfully explained, he was "Cuckoo." Oh!
He seemed to think this was the funniest thing in the world, but I am my own standard of "Normal." I've assumed everyone else is just like me. I see now I've put too much truck in consensus, but still, how am I to judge?
I see: If you try to apply the polemics of a fighter to the ever-finer-grit polishing necessary to remove the burrs from precision-machined pieces, the tolerances go all to hell.
One thing I assume is true for everyone is that we all have a great deal more to say than we're saying, but after so many false starts, we all wait to see if we've really got a listener. And still we choose the story carefully to match the audience.

Kewaunee

2008-11-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

We had ridden forever
our every waking moment
pedalling through rolling dells,
a long thread being drawn out
behind us and in front of us is
the mass of tangled darkness
our bicycles as spinning wheels
making fiber into bound yarns
of memory, somewhat crystalline
and somewhat pliable yet fixed,
malleable, to be made into stories
we had yet to fully discover
the stretch through time and space
here, a long taut thread
setting our range from coast to coast
we were far-ranging animals on machines,
machine animals;
our purpose was to be far-ranging, to see
far, to live just about everywhere, to have done it.
The messy jumble of the to-and-fro daily life
of running in the same circles again and again
was untangled somewhat, or the knots
pulled to tightness, the organization of
our thoughts on the recognition of
the necessities in the constantly unfamiliar
and we rode as if
we had dropped from the sky riding
we had come from nowhere, from over the
horizon of yesterday, from the between times
and we were born like this and we had always been like this
and this is what we knew which was everything.
We found our way and we threw ourselves in
ditches or rested on banks of fog on in the swirling
eddies of rivers when we could find them.
Yes pain and hunger, but the moving, the keep-going,
the absorption through all senses the experience.
Nothing else was, Nothing else mattered
the rumination of bottom brackets and miniscus and the throwdown
of the derailleur and we just were is how we came to be and
sense only had to be made later on.

Exercise Sombrero

2008-11-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

He had a propensity to tell stories that ended just as they might get interesting.
“Me and James, we were walking in the woods, and we came to a river.”
My interest piqued, I’d say, “Well, what did you do?”
“We came to a river.”
“Did you find a place where you could wade across? Did you take all your clothes off and hold them over your head while swimming across? Did you walk along it until you found a bridge? Did you have a picnic or look for snakes? Did you turn back?”
“No!” He’d say, and stamp his foot, and retreat.
I got the feeling he had never been in a woods, or had come to a river, at all, ever.

I will not lie for him: The handcrafted acrylic knit exercise poncho is not his invention but prior art that he and I both witnessed with our own eyes. I could tell the idea shook him to his foundation, and he’d never be able to get it out of his mind. That’s more his thing than mine.
However, together we did develop the idea of the exercise sombrero. I animated its use on a stack of his business cards, stapled together, which he proudly showed everybody. He wanted to make an accompanying video of its use, and I tried to persuade him to do a simple WAP version for mobile phone and PDA, as the mobile phone companies were gaining an appetite for marketing this type of thing for amazing profit. We’d need only make one sale, and they could market and distribute it right through people’s phone bills.

But I don’t want to talk about it. He was a fine subject for observation, but obviously, being highly prone to false negatives, and to jumping or abandoning the script, he was not the best subject for my controlled scientific experimentation. It wasn’t helping matters at all.

Differential Settlement, plus one.

2008-11-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

I believe I have worked with your cousin before; Steve. Perhaps you can confirm or deny my working theory about him: That his parents used an old microwave turned on its side as his bassinet and kept it on low power all the time to keep him warm.
We were very much at cross-purposes, which was very hard for me to figure out, on account of his lying, his refusal to answer my questions, and his refusal to state his reasons for refusing to answer my questions. Smarter women simply left the facilities, but I was desperate, with nowhere else to go, and odder and odder gossip coming out; stirring up relationships that had been in a benign stasis for years. Can’t be friends with everyone. Women whose snubs I had come to accept as a matter of fact suddenly licked their lips and asked me provocative, presumptuous, and impertinent questions. Was I to leap at the chance to unburden myself to someone who had been occluding fifteen degrees of my field of vision for months, without the slightest nod of acknowledgement?
I was creeped out. I did not want to know what it was about; I just wanted it to go away. The idea of setting this all to right, a particularly hard case, since these women appeared so entirely misinformed, exhausted me. I wanted them to just go back to being who they had been.
The whole place was built on a filled in pond. On my own maps, there was still a pond there. Sometimes the ground belched up sulfurous odors that the management tried to cover up with splashes from a 55-gallon drum of mint. Massive potholes showed up, inside the building and out, from time to time, on account of the differential settlement of the pond sludge, washed out in pockets, seasonally.
A creek remained and looped around the complex, pouring in and out of culverts under the busy road. One time Steve and I watched a ragged cat, going frantic and mewling in the parking lot.
“It doesn’t know what to do. It’s trapped by the creek and afraid to cross the road.” I said.
“Barbara’s like that.”
Barbara had been the worst offender. The first few times I had given her a hello or a nod, she wheeled around on her heels, and went the other way. I let it alone. So be it. But now she was openly insulting me, and encouraging people to join her in “golf applause” as I entered the building. I was asking Steve’s help in figuring out how to put down her attacks. I really didn’t want to know what her problem was, but now it had perhaps become my business.
“Okay, then: Tell me what the deal is with Barbara.”
Steve looked at me hard and walked away.
More than once he boasted that he knew smart people. He teased me that he knew someone who could be both very profound and very dirty at the same time. I told him I would very much appreciate an introduction to such a person. He sniffed, and made a quarter-turn away while thumbing his phone.
I am recalling he mentioned you once. I said given my own history, I was not aware of you, but I was willing to believe that you were as real as he said, and please, tell me more. He refused.
So, how to believe, how to believe how to believe my own bullshit? If truth belonged to the past, then my compulsive truth-telling bound me to keep living it. If things were to be different, I would have to be able to see things as other than they were, to put aside the truth as I knew it.
Take the hydrogen car … by now one can watch video demonstrations of one on Youtube. Oh, yeah, a car that runs on water; what an amazing extension of the potato clock! But no, it didn’t come from the potato clock … it came from people who wanted a car that runs on water. And it still didn’t meet the standards to be licensed to run on an American street. Maybe it would only work for a few days until its works got gummed up with the patina of oxidation or bubbling corrosion. – a car that needed its cylinders re-bored with every fill-up! Oh, there I go again.
For a time, I tried asking people who believed in me why it was they did. Their answers quickly disintegrated into tenuous and sad personal comparisons: Really, I was alone.
One time Steve’s family had given him a book on fixing vision through muscle control. “Oh, really, a book on squinting?” I said. He got angry again.
I can only recall one spell I’ve made in my life, and it was for Steve, who incessantly complained about his life, and specifically about being a coward. His pain, about things that he could and couldn’t control, to my mind specifically related to his cowardice; became my preoccupation, as I tried to find a way to end his high-pitched bleating short of stuffing a towel down his throat. This spell was the “Inverse Pinocchio.” [I’m having trouble finding it for you in my journals at the moment. It used to be in the SENT TEXTS of a cell phone I no longer have.]
I couldn’t tell if the spell had helped him out. He would never let on if I was right, and besides his cowardice, he had a tendency to impulsive idiocy that threw everything off at the last moment.

Frost Heave Surfer

2008-11-07T16:54:00.001-08:00

“Okay, because see, I’d like it if you choose what you want to do with the eggs, and I’ll choose my own friends.” He’d drape his wizened, decimated wing over his head and slyly peek out through a gap. We’d have to see if that would stand, because I could see his ideal was to hold the whole disposition-of-the-eggs thing over my head while screwing up my associations according to his whims. Finally, he got caught up in a hawser and strangled while fishing on the docks. It was purely accidental, but I felt bad about because I really did want him dead.
The thing about William was this: The bigger mess of promises he made to the client, the bigger the mess I cleaned up, the bigger the mess of money I made so I could go off in the woods and get over it all by myself. The comfort of others never quite did it for me. Better would be a recitation of logical axioms and small theorems, and a listing of elemental concepts: There was certainty one could rely on..
As much as I kind of wished it could be a peaceful stasis all the time, the fact is, bullshit makes the world go around. And, even, it’s fun. The ridiculous jams that William put us in made me laugh. Of course I wanted to run, too. I wanted to just throw it and yell, “You’re on your own!” over my shoulder. At times when I wasn’t being torn apart by having to deny far, far too much of the reality that I felt I had to grip with all twenty digits, every second of every minute of every waking hour, until I could retreat into my own subconscious where I maintained my own properly-corrected gravity such that I could rest on a surface without violent lateral upswells smacking me around.
I was aware my neurotic attachment to the factual truth held me back. It was a rigidity in my own mind. that I couldn’t throw off one reality for another. Sure, I could make things up, but only in a very ploddingly aware, conscious way. I would ask William, quite earnestly, how did he rectify the replacement of one old set of lies with a new set of contradictory lies? I really wanted to know how to do it, as it would help me get on with things, but it just pissed him off. That was rather unfair, I thought.
William seemed to think of what I did, applying knowledge to effort, as magic. Called me “Rumplestilskin,” but I thought I was more like the hapless maiden; besides, I quite remember doing the work.
I knew it was a drag, too, to need to know, to have things make sense. But the footings have to be 3’ deep at this latitude to prevent frost heave. Maybe frost heave was just the thing. I could become a frost heave surfer …
Because I had already learned just about every fact there was, about everything, and it hadn’t done the trick for me. Something eluded me. If I knew all the facts, what was left?
Believing. What beliefs should I believe? Finding my first ideas of belief intolerable, how much belief would do the trick? I had to believe, at minimum, that I was capable of believing. Okay, Check. And what did I believe? I did believe I could beat this thing.

... 11-07-08

2008-11-06T22:49:00.001-08:00

We had rescued an ancient parrot from the ship, and the first week we kept it in the office. Birds aren't that good at sums and such, but they're really pretty good at reading moods, which mainly means they'll do what they can to get under your skin rather than even you out: The joke's always on you.
More and more the parrot sidled closer to me and watched me with his eons-stained eye. It wasn't the kind of beast you would want to pat or coddle and I was never one for enticing animals with treats. So, well, there he was, without any encouragement on my part, trying to badger me into laughing at myself.
I was working on plans for a hotel in upstate New York, and because I was bored and the client irritated me, I put in an extensive tunnel system accessible from the wine cellar that led out to the back of a waterfall at a nearby river. I set a date in the future to raid the cellar and have a picnic behind the falls. The whole time the Admiral was pecking at the chelenque that decorated my hat with his broken beak. The bird's breath was like rotting melons.
"Guilty conscience! Best good girl! Midnight oil! Toe the line! Stand and deliver! "
"I don't think so, asshole."
"Admiral!"
"Admiral Asshole, it is."
The bird began to tear things up if he wasn't with me, and the kind of people who were more willing to take in an ugly old bird such as Double-A were the kind whose feelings were more readily hurt by his constant niggling and insults. So, he was my "pet," or, I was some kind of loosely-held captive of his. He was actually handy at driving away people I'd rather not talk to; it was his one concession to cooperation with me, except when he wanted to play matchmaker.
Although I was assured he was a "he" -- his big scaly purple coxcomb was said to be the definitive sign -- he had an odd habit of laying eggs whenever he was overexcited. It was weird that each egg looked as old as he was -- they looked tattooed and gessoed over, heiroglyphics and runes, several layers deep, were scratched into their worn out, chipped nacre.
Each time, he'd look at me and say, "What're you gonna do with it?"
"What do you want to do with it, Double-A?"
"Pickle it!"

Where what was none of my business becomes all my fault.

2008-11-06T14:35:00.001-08:00

I know you’re under stress and you are flaming out every week. That it seems to be about me this time, but yet looks nothing like me, is not surprising. Last week it was over a mutual friend who deleted you out of the blue. I tried to tell you that I knew she had priorities to set in her own life and MySpace took a backseat to IRL. Everyone who has known you for any length of time knows your propensity to blow things out of proportion.
Even with the “Mike” thing, you didn’t manage to show him to be any more than a button-pressing dickhead. Admit it, there are other things in your life more stressful than knowing that an asshole breathes in Arizona.
I think your general tactic of preying on the unhappy by empathizing with them and pumping them for information, sitting on their heads and then noisily threatening to dump them is reprehensible. Whether you ARE Sonia or are merely manipulating her with your spy characters, I find your behavior in either instance despicable.
That you appear the most vulnerable at the same time as you are most despicable is a problem. You make yourself appear so unable to deal with reality and I have no wish to destroy you.
As to your dealings with me:
When I ask you a straight question, your secret societies of interconnected “colleagues” keep getting in the way of you giving me straight answers. Your attempts to control my relationships with other people by hinting vaguely at how I am aggravating their secret pains smacks of plain manipulation.
If a girlfriend cannot answer a girlfriend: “Is that guy flirting with me,” and “You said you know him; is he available?” Then what good is said girlfriend?
Even though I appreciate your enthusiasm for my April-May project, “Mumsy Darling,” I have come to regret keeping confidences with you.
I wrote on a page for you, knowing full well you were trying to attract the attention of someone whom you would not name for me. I was actually drawn in mainly (and what other reason would I have, besides my sheer delight in writing [but in this instance, not under my own moniker]) by wanting to know the object of your deceit. Is that so wrong, considering? You micromanaged me, and apparently other writers, right off of the page. It was hard to freely write without crossing your secret agenda(s). Think about that. No one can help you when your goals are so unclear. What do you really want? Consider where your tactics take you, time and again. Your dramatic calls for pledges of felty from people who really are unable to help you is painful to watch. I wish that you could keep for yourself more of the self-worth that you deserve for the things you have accomplished in life. You treat yourself and others as buckets or sacks that are either grandiosely full or entirely, contemptuously, devoid, dependent on the current wind. That is not how it is.

gingerbread

2008-11-06T13:20:00.000-08:00

Of course it had to be in drydock. It's tricky these days with the big ships. A draft too deep keeps them from going into more shallow ports, making some really exciting small transactions, but of course offers a lot more stability, more amenities, more freightage, economies of scale.
On the side I worked on a dove-winged nautilus balloon I planned to take up the Appalachain Trail. I would walk it some days, the balloon tethered to my wrist, and fly on days when the wind was right. I wouldn't have to set up camp but instead tie or stake off the balloon and climb up for the night. It broke up the monotony of having to hike every day, and gave my knees time to recover. And I had a compact studio up there. Last time I planned such an adventure, there was a following. People said I did it for the attention, but that wasn't true; I did it to see what would happen and for my own delight. Only now do I think that maybe I should have paid more attention to the people. I only worked until I had enough money to be away. Save for a very few, people drained me. A certain type worked me like a handpump until the water stopped running clear, then cursed me for taking their attention.
Then there was some other stuff. I had a habit of "taking it back to first principles" that I knew drove everyone else crazy, but I couldn't stand working on a small section of the problem, cutting all the facets right there for some precision optical piece, to reflect back maximum sparkle from light coming from an expected angle of incident that in truth would never occur in this hemisphere. Frankly, I didn't trust anyone. There were times when I'd dive right in, saying, "I will suppose everything you say is true and complete; here we go …" But other times, I'd check the reasoning, Then I'd check the math. Then I'd look hard into his eyes, trying to fathom why he'd think he'd said enough for anyone to go on. "Are you shitting me?"
"That's not what it's about!" William would yell at me.
"What do you mean, that's not what it's about?" I'd say. "You're telling me that doing this project will somehow make the sun shine from the North?"
"It's a drawing; just a little razzle-dazzle. We're just trying to get everyone on board."
"On board with the sun coming from the North, and then we'll just change everything around?"
These things were left to me. William would "yes" the project into total untenability and then bring me in, toward the tail-end. Wagging the dog. Later, the client would be belching my phrases at me out of context, historically technical terms coming back with smarting, personal connotation. "Gingerbread!" I would know William tried to straighten-things-out-without-really-straightening-things-out. He was a boneless mask I spoke through, desperate to be the "good cop," out of his depth but demanding the authority of his position, so frightened to make necessary corrections that the issues were pushed to absolute absurdity. And I wasn't the "Bad Cop," I wasn't "being negative," I was just going through the caveats and necessary steps to make the thing really real. Was it or wasn't it the goal? We'd make the thing, no? Or should I get off of your cloud?
There was some other kind of necessary step I wasn't getting. That's why my balloon had to be built up from salvage, scrap-wood, and used building paper from a demo site. I considered myself a genius of making-do.
I envied William, but I didn't understand it, that part where he'd do a little dance, shine the client's shoes with fresh donkey-dung, inhale and sigh, pull a silk cord and have an anvil land on his head, waddle forward, de-accordionate himself, bow, and take a money shower.

[cont.] ... That's nothing (2)

2008-11-05T20:08:00.000-08:00

I felt I had become used to being disappointed by him. I have known architects who design the same building over and over again, in some cases, chasing after what the client wants, giving more of what it was that brought the greatest eyebrow-raise, to see if, eventually, POW! His chair would topple back from the force of his eyebrows, then his arms, following, shooting up; Hooray! … And it would all be because that arch, the way it sprung from the capitals of the columns, its traversal through the great overhead, had been finally perfected in form and scale and placement to cause utter astounding delight.
Larry told me this: “When all the juniors are presenting drawings to him, I study his face. And when I see he likes it, I look and see what it is and what he’s talking about. The next time, I DRAW THAT EXACT THING! I COPY IT! I draw into the design EVERY ONE of the elements he admired that day!”
It took me years before I figured out he was trying quite earnestly to give me kindly advice. I thought he was complaining about how desperate he had gotten and how bereft of inspiration and enslaved to that single client he was. He was broken. He told me all the time he was a hack with no self-respect. “But YOU …” he’d say, and never finish.
And the client was a simpleton who liked the same forms over and over again, and wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t remark that he was getting the same oatmeal as he had had the day before. Some people not only tolerate familiarity, but prefer it, clasping their hands together and sighing with time-tinged fond delight to hear an old story once again. Comfort! Standardized tests are being devised now not for the college set, but for retirees wanting to be placed in retirement communities where everyone agrees with their positions, and no one has to feel the gnawing dissonance tearing at their brittle, drying, rubbery cracked skull pudding. No to say there isn’t something in it, but then the most terrifying thing would be going for potluck and finding oneself badgered by remaindered crackpots all day.
Perhaps I could take a different tack. Perhaps clients didn’t come because they wanted to be actively engaged in the pursuit of their own delights, but they didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t have any bigger ideas beyond the liking of the trace of a Bezier curve. All-righty, then.
The new project involved the redesign of a massive ship that had been burned down to the waterline, a few charred ribs holding up a small bit amidships. It had loped into the harbor, laboring over gentle rolls, a single sheet on its one remaining withered, charred mast and now lay swamped in the slip. I could probably just start completely over, but everyone, myself included, wanted to make it “just as it was, only better.” There were things a ship was supposed to be and have and do.

[cont.] ... That's nothing

2008-11-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it seemed I had become merely a boiler-gauge watcher and fire-stoker, throwing my painstakingly-designed delicate precision machinery to be smelted by his ravenous, fickle-yet-indiscriminate passion; the molten sludge of my designs’ own material oozing through the filigree of the tines and borings of cogs, carefully-set parallels giving way to the buckling of hub-bars and precision-filed disks.
I had met with Franklin more than a few times. He wore the sheen of fellow-well-met over a seething vat of infantile lust. No, he was as charming as a fat, happy infant. But just as one dangles the pendant from one’s necklace in front of him to see his delight, one realizes he is not an infant, but a man, and there were consequences to consider.
He seemed delighted for my company, but at the same time wary, unable to let down his guard. Each time we met seemed some kind of contest. It was hard for me to say who had won at the end of any session; his “You’re catching on” chuckle was only a slight intonation different than his “You’re just not getting it” chuckle and it was as if we were playing “You’re getting warmer,” with him knowing no more about the end but “I’ll know it when I hear it.” Sometimes all the easier to tell him what it was he wanted, but other times he just seemed to be brooding, and making me run back and forth across vast tracts of logical territory. Then I detested him and detested my own earnestness. Where did it end? Something always came next, there was always next time, and his little bent-fingered waggling wave good-bye. “Toodle-Ooo!” he’d say, his bifocals twinkling and throwing a little coin of light down the front of my person. It drove me mad. I’d go back to my drawing board and draw mechanical methods of transport that would carry me away, read the Gazette and make applications to newly-staked-out western cities in need of everything that makes a city.

... That's nothing: Ben Franklin

2008-11-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

… That's nothing compared to the international melee between Philadelphia, Boston, and to a lesser extent; Paris in making claim to Ben Franklin. There were offers of tax abatements and gorgeous books; fantastical developments of screw conveyors and fountains; one city even allowed that he could tinker with local time as suited him.

The disorienting phenomenon called the “Bermuda Triangle” was torn from its moorings at its still-suspected longitude and latitude, and resituated over Cambridge, Massachusetts in misjudged attempt to improve the kite-flying conditions in nearby environs.

I myself reviewed numerous drafts concerning provisions for firehouses, pumper trucks, ladder trucks, excessive carrillons beyond the acoustical acuity of any ear, swim tanks in which he might test various mounts and strappings of fins and webbing and “electrocution salons;” any manner of constructions that might appeal to Mr. Franklin’s tastes. I was quite aware, myself, that the man hated to be bested, and that it was wise to present him with hints, such that he would not be surprised by the blueprints, but believe that he had ordered the drawings himself.

So, it was a delicate balance. All work-for-hire arrangements can be kind of dicey this way: Does the cost of security have to be a grating constant denial of value? I pace myself. An eighth-grade health teacher was explaining it to us once: “There’s VOCATION and there’s AH-VOCATION; one you do for money and the other you do for fun, like a hobby, and you don’t expect to be paid for it.”

“So does that mean you’d rather not be teaching here, and no one can expect to make a worthwhile living at what they enjoy?” comes from nowhere.

The nights in the Northern Liberties were filled with the wheezing of bellows and the clanking of non-stop bottling of ale. Days were filled with delighted, excited chatter about new things coming to be, “An order that shew up after closing time, this contraption that I couldn’t help but make up right away to see if it were even possible,” and “Why had it not existed before.” Certainly haste is required in the rectification of the world’s deficit. In truth, those are the only times I feel alive, when some of the gaps are filled in, and I can see a little progress is being made. The boredom of otherwise is painful.

I devised a cipher of several concentric wheels of paper, every manner of material and endeavor and method and individual I knew about town recorded on the outer perimeter of each that I could continue coming up with inventions to stay ahead of the competing burghs. Thus I could turn the wheels a few clicks until I found an intriguing combination, and tell it to one of the girls, who would whisper it to Franklin. I would rather take my inspiration from watching the work of carpenters or blacksmiths, wandering the hardware stores, seeing power looms and printing presses in motion, but I was less and less able to take time from the city office.

We had a series of spies on horseback along the stage road and working on the docks and custom-house that went through the crates and mail packets, kept me informed of our rival’s correspondence and gifts, and arranged the forgery of return letters.

"Careful forgetting"

2008-10-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

Comes a time in the execution of matters and the following of stricture and living of the life where one might make a comparison between aspirations and their reception and ask the simple question:

"How is that workin' out for you?"

The supplicant is perpetually approaching on knees to make the kind of bargain that is made between equals, and here, here is what I offer, but moreover, here is what I want.

Here we exist on an equinox plain between the sacred and the profane, and laugh; the funniest joke is that they are the same. And yes we see the solstices do no correspond with the hottest and coldest of the year's offerings, the effects are not immediate, it takes time and regular reconsiderations of variables; the question.

The sea, it shows its waters to the North Star, which casts its light upon it; steadily, unwavering, in sustained mutuality.

Careful forgetting makes renewal.

The opposite of an unlucky penny

2007-06-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

I think I've read this essay before, but is the opposite of a lucky penny an unlucky penny or an ordinary penny? If the opposite of magic is ordinariness, there's a vote for ordinary, but if the opposite of "good magic" is "bad magic," then that's a vote for unlucky ... but in the scheme of things, there can be lucky, unlucky, and ordinary.

Let's just say there are no pennies that are not lucky.

Where I've been ...

2007-06-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

I decided to try MySpace. There's more feedback there, more of a method of promotion.
Not saying I won't come back to this; I haven't made up my mind.

But I'm also at:

www.blog.myspace.com/constancex

See you around!

Yoga shirt on Cafepress.com

2007-03-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a yoga shirt I sell on cafeshops.com. It shows the sequence of the sun salutation from left to right, with small figures on one continuous line.

You can go to www.cafepress.com/poweryogacntrl/ to see it better/buy one!

Thanks!
Connie

Herding cats should be easy.

2006-11-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

Cats are "herd" animals, actually, their groups are called "prides." So cats don't have to be herded. They hang that way, naturally.

Karaoke Divas Unite! UH-oh, Catfight!

2006-11-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

The Battle of the Songbirds ...

I made this T-shirt for myself this summer that said:

I'm the
Patsy
(Cline)
dammit!

You see, in karaoke, Patsy Cline songs are kind of easy and fun to sing, in the alto range, so almost any woman can sound melodic, if she's capable at all, you just need to learn the songs, which aren't hard. There's plenty of room to perform inside the songs; they're just great.

So, it's always a competition to see who does, who is, the Patsy. Sometimes sopranos will encroach on Patsy territory, swooping in to peck at an alto who is getting too much attention.

I sing a lot of Patsy. Did I say before? I'm more Patsy than Patsy. I could be the reincarnation of Patsy, but my big friend ChrisPy says he is, and his birthday is closer to her demise. (He's hetero, so you know.)

So, I had this T-Shirt made. What I do is make the graphic up in Photoshop, post it to CafeShops.com, where I can choose a shirt to put it on, and then order the shirt. I wore it one night this summer, to rave reviews -- it was almost too powerful, in fact I haven't worn it there since.

EVERYONE noticed and commented. EVERYONE talked to me and smiled, EVERYONE called me Patsy. I was the belle of the ball.

The karaoke hostess punished me for all the attention I garnered by alternately excessively speeding up and slowing down the songs I chose of the next two weeks. I went on a wild musical detour into uncharted song territory (and expanded my range), trying to shake her off my tail. Some nights I bombed, but it was all worth it.

It's a sleeveless shirt, so I don't know if I'll be wearing it anytime soon.

But the thing is: Last night a STRANGER ordered the T-shirt from CafePress! I was thinking it would be fun to have duelling Patsies, in fact, I ordered another shirt I might give to ChrisPy's sister (although she's mad at me right now for singing Blue Bayou, which she was trying to work up the nerve to sing.)

Pun-numb

2006-11-10T06:03:00.000-08:00

Pun-numb: Having become unable to absorb or acknowledge any more clever word plays when one is in the company of a habitual and serial punster; the inability to raise the eyebrows, nod, or turn up the corners of the lips, as the need of a companion for one to acknowledge his cleverness with language is not sated; often identified by the punster as a loss of sense of humor.

on beauty

2006-11-09T21:11:00.000-08:00

When I woke up this morning, the percentage of women who are beautiful had changed from about 8% to 100%.

... on the phone with AT&T Universal Card.

2006-11-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

Today I called AT&T Universal Card. I had paid my balance in full three days before the due date, according to their statement, but they still assessed a finance charge.

The call was definitely received by an Indian call center. They immediately withdrew the charge without making any expalnation as to why it was there in the first place, and said something about me being a longstanding customer. I suppose they wanted me to think it was some kind of favor, when it was their "mistake." I do have a hard time believing this kind of thing happens by accident.

Then the attendant, Jevi, launched into a pitch for credit card protection. It was an interminably long script and was delivered unintelligibly at parts -- but it was one of those scripts where you have to be rude -- there is no out -- they keep asking why, and is that okay, and, and, -- til I just say I have to go.

I feel like it's a scam -- either you let a finance charge slide or suffer a pitch. I used another card for the rest of the day, but I suppose better punishment is to keep paying the balance in full.

Dealing with a difficult mother's visit

2006-11-09T18:28:00.000-08:00

G.'s mother came to see her while G.'s husband was out of town. Apparently G. had only planned a lot of couch time with mother, and mother didn't tell her what she wanted to hear.

I told G. when a difficult mother comes to visit, you have to plan a lot of activities to stay away from that kind of thing, like, if she says she's coming, say: "Great! We need to dig a new trench for the septic system."

"This is how men would work it," I say. "Then she'll be out to prove she's stronger with a shovel than you, but you profit from her labors."

G. just came off of a summer chock-a-block full of craft camp stuff. She learned blacksmithing in one session and then went for another session of lost-wax casting. "You must have beaten her in the 'foundry' portion of the visit," I say.

"You must have beaten her in the kicking portion of the visit." We were in S.'s Tai Kwon Do-based class at the time.

"How did you do on the heroic consumption portion of the visit?"

I told her: One time, my mother came to visit me in NYC. I wanted her to experience the delights I had discovered there, to share, and maybe to impress her. I took her to a sushi restaurant in Greenwich Village. It didn't occur to me that another person from Cold Cut County, PA would not have the same delight and fascination with the discovery of eating fresh, raw fish as I did. I suppose there's a reason people choose to settle in Cold Cut County, that doesn't figure into my sensibilities at all.

Mother "won" the sushi-eating contest, by not eating any at all. I ordered tempura for her, and with every bite I had of sushi, I had to listen to her exclamations of disgust.

"Eeeuuuww! I can't believe you're putting that in your mouth! What if it has parasites! ..." You know the rest.

The first lesson I learned in dealing with a visit with a difficult mother is BRING AN ENTOURAGE.

Mother will spend so much energy convincing everyone that she's a cool mom that she won't have time to sink her claws into you. Most likely, she's a little bit boy-crazy, and she'll try to win over the young men with her coquettish charm. Yes, at the end you will have to hear some of your friends say "Your mom's so cool," but consider what you've sidestepped.
Another pitfall of this technique is she will tell embarrassing stories about you -- my mom tells absolutely humiliating ones, intended to make me seem more defective than any other human being. Guess what -- they'll backfire on her, showing her to be the viper she is. It will be good to get fresh opinions, and to see this coquettish side of her.

Rule two is always overplan events. Do NOT leave hours open for sitting around the table or sitting on the couch talking. Go, go, go! She always comments on your weight -- work that fanny! You have the strength of youth on your side. Run her through a decathalon of activities. Throw a few in that she can win. Throw a few of the competitions you know you could take easily. You know who you are despite her B.S.!