Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Corner Karma

I’m going to give myself a nice running start at this fine new Tuesday by disgorging an old scrawling that I’ve held onto for nigh these many years.  I was reminded of it by a few harsh words I let myself say last week to someone who really needed them, and then I suddenly found this little dialogue again in an old notebook.  It ain’t much, but really folks, it’s Tuesday - you don’t get much. 

* Are you standing here?
* What?
* I’m sorry, beg pardon, ask you a question?
* What?
* What is the name… the name of this place, this restaurant?
* K~.  K~.  It’s right here on the window.
* You see, I don’t speak - can’t talk with the… my mouth and head are not cooperative and I always never (degenerates into mutterings)
* What?
* I can’t speak the, say the words any more, native language is english, but the reading of wording is thinking of talking with (more mumbling)
* Listen.  Listen.
* What?
* Can you hear me?
* Yeah.
* This is not the time to start with me.
* Well you see I -
* Did you hear me?  This is not the time.  Don’t make me get mad here.
* Well I’m just trying to make myself....
* Don’t make me.  Just don’t make me. Not here.  What did I say to you?
* It’s not the time.
* Right.  It’s not the time.  Go on, now.
(unintelligible muttering, wandering away)

I’ve decided that this is Karma Week at the Chucklehut, for better or worse, as karma so often is, and this was Corner Karma.  Sometimes you just gotta stand up for yourself and your little spot outside the crowded restaurant.  I respect those who struggle to survive against the challenges of homelessness and mental illness, I honor their plight - but sometimes I just can’t deal with them.  Maybe that impairs my cosmic credibility but I’m looking back on that night of two years ago and I still feel justified.  And a little guilty.  Damnit. Okay, I guess my work’s cut out for me.  And isn’t that what Tuesdays are all about?

Monday, August 30, 2004

Straight to the Heart of Things

Hearts is not entirely a game of luck.  Fate, too, plays a hand.  And skill?  Skill is optional.  I should know, because I’m an expert.

Barry and Dave and Jon wanted to play and I wasn’t going to be the buzzkill.  I didn’t know the game, though, so they gave me a crash course and promised not to take undue advantage of me.  They rattled off the basic rules and I tried to absorb as many of them as I could.  The game involves everybody trying to win hands against each other and to avoid getting stuck with hearts - each one costs you a point in the end, and high score loses - just like golf.  Except with cards, and indoors.  Yeah, I didn’t get it at first either.

We started playing and I steeled myself against taking the competition very seriously, because I was clearly in way over my head with three of the smartest people I knew, all experienced players.... I lost the first hand, sucked up a heart.  And on the second hand, another.  Before I knew it I was pulling down hearts left and right and it looked suicidal.  It was.  I’d decided to play this little one-off game to its absolute hilt, if not beyond.  I was out to shoot the moon. 

This was one of those crazy desperate moves I sometimes make when absolutely nothing is riding on the results.  If any blowback could reasonably be anticipated, I’m typically risk-adverse.  But if it really couldn’t matter less what I do, I can be pretty aggressive with my doom.  I’ll push that goddamn button and see what happens.  It doesn’t have to suck.

That was my calm, rational decisionmaking process as I started playing to lose.  “Shooting the moon” meant somehow managing to lose every hand, to load up with every single heart, to acquire every possible point in the game.  If you do that, you win.  The scoring philosophy goes from golf to bowling - bigger is better. 

It took the boys a few hands to figure me out and then they started right in cooperating to stop me.  I don’t remember their weak little machinations; all I recall is that they failed and failed miserably.  I had the key cards and played them with Olympian wisdom.  My strategy was ruthless and instinctual.  At the end I had cleaned out every single heart and acquired them all as my own.  I had parried and feinted; I had looted and pillaged. I had literally cut out their hearts - a veritable Dr. DeBakey of cards.  I had shot the moon - a feat that had been explained to me before the game as so improbable an outcome as to render the strategy almost unworthy of serious discussion.

After completing this unlikely victory my friends were eager to play again and make up for the humiliation of losing so spectacularly to a rookie - nay, a mere novice, even.  I declined.  I’d risked it all to win that first game.  It was clear to me that I’d used up whatever quantum of heart karma I’d started with.  That victory would have to last me a lifetime.  I knew in my bones I didn’t have another one in me and I wasn’t going to play to lose.  Sometimes winners quit.

Friday, August 27, 2004

Tropical Tidbit Roundup

It’s time.  Time for me to leave for my conference, time for me to be back home.  I’ve been stringing this along for my own amusement for long enough.  Today I’ll wrap up my Tropical Tidbits, share the little epigrammatic notes I made for myself in the airplane back and on ensuing reflective days, all my quick notions and recollections, from which I’ve been taking my Tidbits to date.  I’m just going to go through the rest of them, unburden myself of a few more photos, and I’ll call it a day.  A workday.

Lagoons that are nothing less than lava-lined swimming pools of 90-degree water, clear and pure, so perfectly balanced to my own biology that I can float in them for two hours and my hands don’t even wrinkle.

Going into one of said lagoons for a dip after a burning session of bikram-style yoga on a humid lanai in a tropical rainstorm, and letting the warm water wash the sweat from my brow and extract the aching exhaustion from my muscles till all the energy I’d expended had been returned to me again.

Hawks in the sky by day, owls on the hunt at night.

Getting out of the car at a shopping center and unwittingly dinging the van we parked next to; Mary waited for me outside my drugstore to tell me that the other driver was angry and taking down my license number.  I stepped over with my license in my hand and apologies on my lips, professing my true ignorance and my readiness to make things right; as I spoke to the diminutive darkskinned hawaiian woman, her face lined with deep wrinkles and her dress a cheerful contrast to her demeanor, she began to thaw a little.... after a few minutes we were almost having a pleasant conversation when a sliding window moved in the back of the van and a huge voice told her to forget about it, and then we shared a few moments of relaxed conversation, the three of us - her tiny self, my average self, and the manmountain in the van whose hand, when he shook mine, was the size of a hubcap, thanking me for visiting his island.

Driving to our anniversary dinner in Hilo and getting stopped at dusk by a parade of slowmoving undecorated old pickup trucks with campaigners and banners for candidates for small local political offices; the sidewalks were lined with people who’d turned out for the dullest parade I’ve ever seen in my life but they all seemed to be having a great time.

At mile marker 5 on route 130: a public water faucet sitting yellowly on the shoulder of the highway; every time we went past it there was at least one person and often several lined up to use it, filling buckets and bottles with public water, day and night.

Hawaii’s only native land mammal is a bat.  And they don’t even barely touch the land anyway.

Geckos are ubiquitous both in popular imagery and actual living conditions.  Interesting fact about them: when one gecko attacks and eats another smaller gecko, the smaller gecko screams.  Loudly.  It’s rather disturbing. 

Weird fruits I enjoyed: starfruit (more like watermelon than I’d have expected), dragon (dramatic-looking both cut and uncut; the ones that are white inside don’t taste like much but the ones that are purple inside taste terrific), bread (a specimen of which had been left behind for us by early-departing friends; I cut it up and fried it in oil and it turned out very like a cross between green plantains and fried potatoes). 

Tom the Baker: a three-toothed character on Highway 19 north of Hilo who sells cheesecake and masaladas (portugese-style doughnuts) out of his garage; he’s garrulous and accomodating and his wares are delicious, especially the four different large cheesecakes and two masaladas that we actually bought and gleefully consumed.

Rocks on the lagoon bed surrounding geothermic vents host shimmering white algae, which gleams silver in the water-filtered light; that white algae then grows a yellow algae that turns the jagged grey and black boulders into huge gold nuggets around which magnificently colorful fish frolic in the heated streams that emit from under their gleaming confusion.

An admonition in the lisping lilting voice of a precocious and beautiful two-year-old girl: “Finish your beer, Kelly.  Don’t you want to finish your beer?”

Defending myself from the sun like poison, but achieving a healthy pallor anyway

West side graffiti, spelled out in white volcanic pebbles against vast fields of black a’a like a thousand asphalt parking lots torn up on top of each other as far as you could see: “Lita was fun.” East side graffiti, spelled out in commercially printed letters on a clean white board tied to a huge tree on the side of the road near a small creek crossing: “Bawana loves Tanglefoot.”

Swimming in crystal-clear waters with prescription goggles, watching the turtles and fish and eels and abundant life everywhere, and then having my vision obscured by a coruscating current of heated water behind which the scenery shimmers and fades, unintelligible; then, swimming through into clear water again to see that the big rock you thought you were was just beneath you is actually a huge sea turtle, its carapace four feet across and five long, covered with thick moss, chewing up the small seaplants that peek up from the ragged rocky bed of the lagoon and taking a jacuzzi on the ocean floor.

Beautiful fish - tangs and angels - surrounding the mossy turtle, feeding like toys on the moss that’s grown on its back.

Turtles, in Hawaiian, are called “Homu.” I think I grew to recognize two homu in particular who took their teatimes in our lagoon.  I named them “Hoju” and “Arigato.”

And I still have a few photos you might find interesting, and even if you don’t I’ll post them here anyway and have done with it:

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Role Models

Thinking back:

We had taken Cosmo to the superspecial clinic to get his stifle (that’s vet-talk for “knee") flushed.  We were in the waiting room when one of Kelly’s colleagues from the guide dog program walked in with a dog from work.  “Oh, what are you doing here?,” she asked brightly.  We gave the thumbnail description of Cosmo’s woes.  “And what about you guys?” “Oh, Roselle needs to see the vet again.” “Well okay then, good luck, see ya....”

During this bland exchange Roselle lay down on the floor smiling up at me, an ordinary-looking yellow lab with regular, warm eyes and a normal pink nose.  Roselle and her handler were soon ushered into an exam room; I figured, they’re corporate clients, they get special treatment, not like us peons.... Then Kel mentioned, “Roselle’s the WTC dog.” Oh, I realized.  This dog is getting special treatment because she’s earned it. 

I don’t know what he was doing there, but on the morning of September 11, 2001, a graduate of Guide Dogs for the Blind was on the 78th floor of Tower One of the WTC, accompanied, of course, by his guide dog.  When a jet-powered, aluminium-clad maldotov cocktail 500 feet long slammed into the building at 400 miles an hour and blew a fireball that seared the entire planet, they were stuck up there.  Needless to say, if the Pentagon hadn’t prepared for this catastrophe, neither had Roselle.  Regardless, she got her human to a stairwell and led him down and out to safety.  Along the way, smoke and particulates in the air got up into her sensitive snout. 

After they had made their escape, the man was hired by Guide Dogs as a public speaker, sharing his story of survival with audiences around the country.  Roselle, however, soon had to be relieved of her duties and was brought back to the school in San Rafael where she’d been trained.  The crap she’d inhaled had gotten to her - her lungs and nose started giving her trouble.  These days, she was spending a lot of her time with the veterinarians.

So I had been standing in a sunny cheerful waiting room in the company of two dogs - one that I knew only too well from personal experience to be braver and stronger, possessed of a morality and rectitude far beyond my own; and the other, a stranger to me, unprepossessing, soft and yellow and friendly, an ordinary dog to the casual acquaintence, but now I knew her to have survived one of the most horrific incidents ever to be perpetrated by humankind against itself, to have led a blind man down 78 flights of smoky chaotic stairs surrounded by shrieks and suffering, loyal to her duty and her friends regardless of the terrible detriment to herself.

Their four eyes had gazed up to me as if I had been a superior being; their two tails had wagged with the joy of sharing my presence.  Well, they might be smart dogs and all, but I knew one thing for sure - that I had been, in their company, utterly outclassed. 

And now, in case you thought I’d forgotten, here’s a few Tropical Tidbits for your delectation and the preservation of what’s left of my mental health:

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

More of My Goddamn Vacation

Today will be dedicated 100% to Tropical Tidbits, because I’m short on time and one of these doesn’t deserve to be relegated to second place to anything else, certainly not to my goofball stories about dogs and busses and card games and such, all of which I briefly considered putting before you here today - but no, I’m just going to toss out a few word-memories and then share more of my goddamn photos.  Hope it’s not getting too dull for you.  I find it therapeutic, myself, but then again, I was there. 

* Driving higher, steeper, and rougher than I’ve ever driven before - up the mountain, down to the valley, out to the green beach - three separate drives, three separate experiences that continue to stretch my notions of automotive travel.

* Mule nuzzle!  A wild mule walked up to me on an isolated valley road; I stopped in my tracks but it came right over anyway and gently rubbed its head on my chest, brushed its neck along my shoulder.  It was very soft and didn’t seem to have ever been owned by anybody.  I felt warmly accepted, even though it was just looking for a handout of an apple or powerbar.  I’m not really a “horsy” person but that was one cool mule. 

* Roach mobile: when we turned in the rented Jeep GCLaredo for a sporty convertible Sebring (the off-roading portion of our vacation being concluded and the indolent sunsoaking portion just beginning), we knew right away that the new car wasn’t as nice as the first one.  I called in once we got to the lagoon-side house where we’d be for our last week on the island to let them know that I hadn’t burned that hole in the back seat, hadn’t dented the driver’s door, and there seemed to be some little roaches running around inside it.  That night, though, the big boys came out to play.  As we got to the car to drive the short distance from Andy’s house to our own, I opened the door and a big roach (about an inch?) ran up the inside of the driver’s window and down the outside.  Kel picked up a map that was on the passenger seat - roaches scattered from beneath it.  She screamed and dropped the map but I tried to be firm - “we have to drive home, just get in the car and it’ll be over soon.” She picked up the map again. The roaches had already returned, scattered again in the light of the port-cochere.  What ensued was a very dark, poorly marked, excruciating drive - five minutes that felt like half an hour.  The next morning Kelly checked again, and when she lifted the floormats dozens of tiny roaches scattered everywhere.  And we know that, when you see babies, the parents are not far away.  Kel called and explained the problem to the rental company in terms so evocative and persuasive that they actually towed another car to us within two hours - no one wanted to drive it to us because they’d have to drive the roach mobile back.  The new Sebring, a stylish red, had almost no miles on it and, more importantly, no roaches in it whatsoever.  I know.  I checked.  Carefully.

And now, as the man says, a bit of fun:

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Masochasm

When it’s heavy enough
I can carry it anywhere
lift it from the ocean’s floor
and smash it through the very sky
When it’s too much for mortals
I can’t keep my hands off it
cradle it close to me
all through the night.

And if it might sting me
or cause me to shudder
as if I were injured
or wounded or worse
or only to clench myself into a fury
smoldering under the quicks of my nails -
if it causes me anguish
I love it forever
buckle myself to it
longer than life.

Well I feel better now; I don’t know about you but it feels good over here at ‘hut Central to articulate the angst that burdens me - and this one is a personal biggie.  Shall we turn the page and enjoy a few more uplifting notions, then?  Let’s do.  Here, then, as if you didn’t expect them, are a few more Tropical Tidbits:

* The gift shop for the mountaintop observatory that sold only certain kinds of candy: Milky Way bars, Eclipse gum, Starburst fruit chews....

* Noted after seeing a number of billboards for various political candidates: natives look really great in native garb, but white guys look really stupid in leis.

* Instructions on the label of my Australian sunblocker water-shirt which I used while snorkling: “This shirt will maintain 100 SBF whilst maintained in good condition.” I rather like that my clothing is using a more arcane vocabulary than even I do myself, and I’m a pretty arcane guy.

Okay, once again I’ve crammed a few photos into the extended entry.  I’m getting rather fond of extending my entries in this fashion.  Entry extension just makes me feel like more of a man.  So share the joy and click below if you dare - these photos include some shots of the creepiest place on the island.

Monday, August 23, 2004

Little Shop of Fetishes

Goddamn Monday morning.  Already I’ve written a breathtakingly beautiful post that vaporized as soon as I tried to publish it; also, I’m tired as hell - I watched Kill Bill II last night and after it ended at 11 or so, I lay in bed having waking dreams of Sanjuro and Zatoichi for hours, flavored with bits of Scarface, which I had seen Friday night.  Not exactly the stuff of sweet restful slumbers.  When I finally did fall asleep, it was only a short time before my adorable old cat started making kissyface with me at four o’freaking clock in the morning. Luckily, she only did so for 75 minutes, giving me a quarter of one of your Earth-hours before the alarm went off and NPR welcomed me to a new week of highly detailed work and stressful telephone calls.  My ass, as the sages said, is dragging. 

(Which reminds me of an observation Kelly made yesterday: we were driving past a bus that had a billboard on it advertising a circus.  It showed two elephants walking away from the camera, with the text, “We’re Back!” Kelly noted that, for purposes of accuracy, that it really should say, “We’re ASS.” She also saw an ad for Eclipse gum that, she insists, reads “Eat Crack; Yackety-Yak.” I am hopeful that these signal a trend toward more butt jokes in advertisements.  A man needs something to hope for, does he not?)

So I’m going to try to do a quick reconstruction of the previously crafted post, just so that I can feel as if I’ve made some damn headway into this week.  The more I screw things up, the more obsessive I am about fixing them.  It’s not healthy but if I can get things back the way I originally intended them to be, I might - just might - be able to move forward.  Otherwise, I will just sit and stew, and that’s not going to smell good by the end of the day.  There’s only so much aggravation I can accomodate in a given week, and I don’t want to blow my whole quota before noon on Monday.

So: on this misty grey morning where the fog is so thick the streets are wet and the trees rain dusty drops of precipitation from their leaves, I’ll try to reconstruct a Tropical Tidbit about a fellow we met a few weeks ago.  We had visited a beautiful valley on the north shore of the island and came back via a small town that was famous for a bakery we wanted to investigate.  The bakery closed at noon, however, as we discovered when we arrived there at 1:30 or so, so we just strolled up and down the main drag - about two blocks long - and windowshopped.  The town was quaint and visually entertaining, but we weren’t interested in anything they were trying to sell us.... On our way downtown we had passed a guy who caught my eye - tall, broad and heavy, redfaced and sweaty, with white hair under a nice straw hat, wearing a stylish aloha shirt and full-length khaki trousers.  On our way back to the car, he saw us peering into a window in one of three closed storefronts in a big brick-red wooden building where all the windows were shuttered, and asked us if we wanted to see inside his little shop.  He owned the whole building, he told us, and occupied all three storefronts - but he wanted to re-organize the stock, move some items into or out of storage, paint the place, restore it to its original condition.  Until he’d done that, the place was closed - but we could peek in if we were interested.  We were soggy with torpid lethargy in the heat of the afternoon’s height and easily conceded to view whatever it was he wanted to show us.  He took a key from his pocket and unlocked a padlock on the door of the middle storefront, opened it up and let us into a cool, dusty museum of international swag. 

Our eyes quickly adjusted to the murk, but only to be dazzled by innumerable garrish masks glaring at us from the walls - New Guinean, African, South American, Victorian.  Carved fetishes and statuettes populated every table and display case, clamoring against each other in silent frenzies.  An old card catalog cabinet burst with fertility carvings that erupted randomly from the drawers.  Exotic textiles and old carved model ships, drums and wall-hangings, spears and hats and objects that evaded description poured forth from huge antique armoires and covered most of the floor.  It was a long room with a high ceiling, filled with artifacts from everywhere.  “My grandfather,” the man told us, pointing to a portrait hanging high on a wall near the front door depicting a classic sea-dog with long white beard and jaunty captain’s cap, “was a trader - had his own ship and sailed around the world, buying and selling whatever he found.  My father too, till he came here and met my mother (she’s a native hawaiian, though you couldn’t tell from looking at me), and then he bought this building and opened this shop.  I lived on the mainland most of my life, but when my father died I came here to take over from him.  But for my life I can’t tell what to charge for any of this stuff.  A lot of it, I don’t even know what it is or where it came from.  I’ve got this store plus two other units in the building just for warehouses, crammed to the rafters with this stuff.  There’s ivory, but I don’t want to sell it - politically incorrect and all.  And there’s Hawaiian stuff but the locals don’t like me selling that either.  I want to repaint, reorganize, get this place in shape and start selling - but I don’t even know where to start.”

We wandered around the warren of teak and koa and ebony and other exotic woods, the crazed eyes of carved gods following us around the room until our heads were as packed and busy as the room itself; it was time to move on so we shook our host’s hand, thanked him for the tour and history lesson, and wandered back into the afternoon sun.  I can’t shake the feeling now, that somewhere in that menagerie of statuary, tucked back in one of the attics or warehouses, there are now little figurines of us, waiting for another tourist to wander in, waiting for a chance to plead with silent wooden features for release back into the outside world. 

The cool thing is, that is a true story.  And below, please enjoy a few true pictures.  These are from our trip home from the mountaintop observatories that I posted photos of last friday.  The traditional way of getting to that mountaintop is along a lonely two-lane highway called Saddle Road, that used to be in terrible condition but now is just austere in the extreme.  However, while at the visitor’s center up at 9200 feet, some other tourists suggested we’d enjoy taking Mana Road back - it’s a left turn just before Saddle Road, onto a dirt track that wends halfway around the mountain through utterly unpopulated reaches of wilderness right back to the town where we were staying.  We took their suggestion and here’s what we found:

Friday, August 20, 2004

Intense

I live in a unique part of a unique city.  One of the special things about my ‘hood is that there are houses on only one side of the street, which usually means plenty of parking.  The exception is the sunday morning church rush: the San Francisco Bible Church holds forth in a small building at the end of my block and those damn holyrollers clog up all the parking on Sundays.  It’s enough to turn me to Islam, but then we’d have no parking on Fridays and that might be just as bad.  So I try to find it within my soul to let them co-exist with me on this shabby old planet of ours. 

But I think I may have cut all the slack I have to offer these good lambs of the shepherd.  The church has posted a city zoning notice prominently on an outside wall, advising the public at large of a meeting to discuss their plans for a variance to permit “an intensification of an existing religious facility.” Not bigger, or taller, or less lawn or more bell-ringing - it’s just going to be more intense. I must say, I’m not sure what it means but I don’t like the sound of it.  These people are intense enough as it is.  If they need city permission to get more intense, I can only think I’ll need state protection from them.  Sundays are for mellowness, people.  You want intensity, go back to work!

And with this cheerful sentiment, I will hasten to resort to a few more Tropical Tidbits, because they’re easy and I like things that way:

The Locomoco was a locomofo.

The full yellow moon’s creamy light on a quiet country road through pastures.

Hoping that the “smelling strangers’ farts” part of my day has come to an end.

And, since I’m not actually getting any complaints about it, here’s a few more photos from my vacation.  Get mellow, people - that’s what’s called for in these days of municipally-sanctioned intensity!

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Kimono My House

In solidarity with Tara and Phil, who have a lot on their plate as of today, here is a shortie from Tara’s last visit:

I was feeling a little burned out, what can I say.  Tara’d only been with us for about 24 hours but we made the most of every one of them; we cleaned, we hung pictures, I worked on my bike and my reading and by the time we got out of Yogi Steve’s Power Asana Weekend Freakout my body was just tuckered.

We ran to the store on the way home so I could apply a cold beer to my sore hamstrings, but the thing that really helped the aches subside was to get out of my wet workout shirt and compression shorts and into some light cotton lounge pants and a full-length silk kimono - royal blue on the outside, vibrant scarlet on the inside.  I was trucking around the place like a masterless monk, serene and enlightened… I felt my vitality returning to me through the fabric itself as it slipped easily and smoothly over my aching shoulders and exhausted legs. 

The kimono might not be totally practical for all uses and purposes, I warrant - but when it’s the right thing to wear, nothing else will even come close. 

Now I’m out of time, and I can’t find one of my little notebooks.  That means I need a Tropical Tidbit or two more than usual, and, just your luck, you’re along for the ride.  Once again, we’re working today with purely visual tidbits, and I’ve hidden them in an extended entry to protect them from prying eyes.  Not very successfully, but that’s my style.  Hey, at least I have one.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Head of State

It seems to be a slap in the face of democracy.  We try to get an election going that gives us a choice.  We winnow contenders down from 12 to 2, and the annointed incumbent and upstart challenger vociferously assay to contradistinguish themselves: I’m not like him, he’s not like me.... But it can be hard to tell the difference on the campaign trail.  They both have skilled speechwriters who help to make each of them sound like a good choice.  Sure, one is a decorated war veteran and one is a failed baseball team owner; one is an articulate attorney and one is a mushmouthed businessman; one is renowned as personable and easygoing and one is as interesting as a slice of three-day-old toast… but they spout the same tired list of issues and values, cast the same veiled aspersions at their opponent, stand before the same backdrops and wave the same victory sign.  To the uninformed, they could be on the same ticket.  But at least I thought they were coming from different places.  Silver spoon versus purple heart, privileged scion versus scrappy activist; native aristocrat versus immigrant mudblood; patrician versus plebean.  Turns out, I was wrong.  I must be one of the last to hear it, but both our contenders for the chief executiveship of our ship of state did not only attend the same college - they’re “brothers” in the same mysterious, elitist secret society.  I have it now on good authority (the internet) that both Kerry and Bush are members of Yale University’s Skull and Roses Club.  Talk about a buzzkill.  I guess everybody’s playing in that heart-of-gold band now.  And I used to think being a deadhead made me such an eccentric… now it doesn’t even disqualify me from the presidency.

Well, that’s enough cynical handwringing for this fine foggy morning.  How about a few more visual Tropical Tidbits, fresh from the land o’ Aloha?  I’ve hidden them below, in case you’re not ready for such intensity of mellowness… you can save them, in such case, for after the election.  That is, if the nation survives.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

And Still Counting

We’ve been eating a bit more healthy-like over the past year or so, and I like the results.  I’ve grown four inches, doubled my muscle mass, and increased my intelligence to the extent that foreign governments are starting to recruit me for their breeding programs.  But the funny thing is, the damn stuff also seems to taste pretty good a lot of the time.  It’s gotten to the point that I am not eating my daily frozen car-o-mel Ho-Ho because I’m all full up of blueberries and sawdust.  And, inexplicably, I like it this way. 

One of the mainstays of my new diet has been the Ak-Mak cracker.  It’s an unassuming little baked good, crispy and unsalted, easy to eat with my lunch every day (which is already so healthy you could puke).  A few days ago I read the copy on the back of their box, which I found ideosyncratically amusing.  It’s a wordy treatise on international grain choices, biblical versification, nutritional standards and wheat biology.  The whole thing is entertaining enough to merit a read on its own, but the good Ak-Makkers at Ak-Mak Enterprises have made it even easier for this on-the-go era where even the earnest story of a humble cracker can be too much for some of us to digest. 

Instead, the copywriters have highlighted the bits they seem to consider most important with some of the strangest choices in underlineation I’ve ever seen.  About a quarter of the whole text is underlined, and I just don’t see the logic in what got underlined and what didn’t.  However, even though reading only the underlined portions doesn’t really tell you the whole story of Ak-Mak crackers, I think it tells enough of a story to merit standing on its own.  I therefore present, with a healthy pride, the underlined portion of the Ak-Mak story:

Monday, August 16, 2004

Pull My Taffy

I’m still having internet connectivity problems at home and it’s EAF budget season at work which means I’m up to my ass in shiny new grant submissions, hundreds of projects I have to evaluate and track in the next six weeks, so I’m not able to share any of the more substantial ditherings I’ve been keeping down in my spiderhole.  Instead, here are a few random thoughts about some candy.

Last night I wandered into a 7-11 with a friend and we discovered, to our elation and detriment, that they were having a sale on Old Fashion Taffy - one of my all-time favorite candies.  I convinced Dave that we needed six sheets of it, each of which is merely a single serving anyway.  I wish I’d saved a wrapper so I could describe it but the sugar rush was way too intense for me to focus on that kind of detail at the time, and all I can tell you about them is this:

* These are easier to eat if kept in the fridge.  They unpeel more smoothly and snap satisfyingly into little bite-sized chunks - if they’re at room temperature, they’re gooey and sticky.  Then again, there are occasions when gooey and sticky is exactly what my sweettooth demands. 

* Two of these is enough for me, even when I’m really jonesing for them.  It’s pretty intense stuff. 

* The taffys came in different colors, which we understood to reflect different flavors: orange, yellow, purple and red.  Turns out these colors actually were the flavors.  Though usually I think of “yellow” as “banana” and “red” as “cherry” and “purple” as “grape” and “orange as “the fruit called orange,” these were actually the flavor of artifical candy colors.  Dave’s comment about the purple: “Hm, that’s pretty weird.” About the yellow: “This is really artificial.” They are the very flavors I remember from my childhood, and they never tasted like fruit.  They taste like fruit-flavored candy, and that seems about right. 

And because it’s a good way to maintain my nice vacationey feelings, I’ll leave you with a few of my nearly-trademarked Tropical Tidbits:

* A beach of green sand at the southernmost point in the US, which we reached by four-wheeling over a very rough, sometimes almost unreadable, dirt track for miles… at the end, the water was rich vibrant blue and the sand a soothing soft olive, and a young man stood with his back to the dramatically grooved and caved rockface that cradled the beach, playing jazz standards and smooth improvisations on a gleaming golden saxaphone.

* Kayaking across Kokocrispy Bay to snorkle at the Cap’n Crunch Memorial, and returning home on the scenic route with a brief pause to catch our breaths at the Kellipuki Rest Area.

* Problem: you’ve just overcooked the best ahi you’ve ever bought.  Solution: add rum liberally to ice.  Drizzle in some guava juice for color.  Consume and repeat until ruined fish returns to irrelevancy. 

* Biological oddity: it wasn’t just me.  Everybody was peeing more in Hawaii than ever before in our respective lives. 

* Special personal moment: Falling on my ass, really hard, twice, at the same exact part of the same mossy boatramp, on the same exact part of my right cheek, on the same day, and then, as I try to regain my equilibrium and dignity, having a total stranger make a sympathetic comment.  Dude, you should see me in my normal shoes on dry ground.  When I’m not in swimfins ankle-deep in algae and the coursing tide, I do pretty well staying vertical.  Meantime, that was a nice deep bruise I developed on the ol’ okole. 

See you again soon.  God willing, the computer will be humming cheerfully by then and I’ll be able to express myself more fully.  If not, I guess you’ll just get another crappy pointless post.  You know, like usual.

Friday, August 13, 2004

The Era of the Fresh Sack

Today I got me some great sack service, and it’s about damn time.  That is to say, I’ll been letting my sack slide for some time and I wore the poor thing out.  And by “letting my sack slide,” I mean that I’ve been setting my bike messenger bag on the floor of the bus and sort of scootching it along with my feet as I adjust my position to the ebb and flow of the other passengers.  Three years of this and my fabulous sack had bitten enough dust - it gave up and split apart.  For the past few weeks I’ve been using a backpack, which once used to be my portmanteau of choice but now seems hopelessly disorganized and inconvenient.  Too many zippers!  Too many dark recesses!  Too hard to tote it around unless it’s riding my back!  Yes, these are complaints many of us have about many things, some of which may even be luggage-related.  I can’t help you with those problems anymore.  Mine have been solved.

Here’s a shameless corporate plug: Timbuk2 gives good sack.  They make a sturdy product, they permit a lot of personalization, and the turn-around time will make your head spin - I submitted my custom order two days ago and in less than 48 hours I had a fresh sack, resplendent in ballistic nylon, a vision in dark green, black and grey - the colors of my heart, if you will.  For the price, it can’t be beat, and I’m sure this sack will wind up carrying memories as important to me as the old one.

That old sack… we had some good times together.  It bears a wine-stain from a great dinner party, a little tear from a memorable moment of clumsiness… but one sad morning I looked into my sack and saw the floor beneath it.  It was finished, having been rendered impotent and unsuited for its intended purposes.  When I emptied it out, caused it to disgorge its contents all over the bedspread, that’s when the trip down memory lane really started.  It gave me a renewed perspective on myself.  How’s that, you ask? Well, inside that mysterious sack, I found:

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Thursday Febrility

Thanks for sticking around today; I’ve been way too busy to do much writing but I’ve had lots of interesting ideas which I’ll be exploring in upcoming days through a combination of modern dance and food sculpture.  Bring a bodysuit and a washcloth tomorrow. 

Yes yes yes the Chucklequiz: What, I asked you, do you do with an elephant with three balls? 

Heed well then this answer: Walk him and pitch to the giraffe. 

And for that one, thanks, dad.  So instead of writing something up that’s actually worth your time to read, I’ll give you a tropical tidbit (tm) and a glimpse through a soiled window into an even more soiled psyche.  Sounds fun?  Oh shut up.  In my day we blogged where they told us to blog; I had to blog seven miles through the snow to school; you kids got it way too easy. 

THE TIDBIT: this is tropical because I heard it while on vacation, but otherwise has nothing to do with the tropics, and I realize you may object to this loose descriptive manner, so if you have any sand lying around, feel free to pound some.  That’s more tropical, isn’t it?  The story, as Charles tells it, goes something like this: there was a man whose mother told him one year that she had started reading Bukowski and really liked his work.  He was surprised, but relieved to know what to get mom for xmas - a collection of Bukowski’s short stories, a really pungent volume choking on its own bile and anger and brutality, a book (as I imagine it) dripping with the most distasteful excrescences modern society can wrench from a debased soul.  Mom received the book dubiously, and after a few pages, appeared put off by it.  Turns out, she liked Buscaglia. Well, we thought it was funny.  Oh go to hell. 

And now, as promised, THE SOILED GLIMPSE: The following is taken from a notebook from which I do not post.  There is a lot of stuff I write that does not belong on this blog for any number of reasons, but I never had a good place for it.  Over the holidays last year I got a very cool little notebook (thanks pea) which was the perfect place to unburden myself of thoughts that would never go on line, but I had to overcome some psychic resistence to the notion of having a specific place to write them out, which implies accepting that I have these thoughts in the first place.  It took me a while to feel like I owned both the book and the process enough to engage them both, but eventually I scrawled out the following on the first two pages or so.  I’ve reread these words many times since then, and I recognize them now as something that I can share - even though it is an introduction to things I will keep to myself for a very long time:

Enter the Quizzler

Sorry, though I know you don’t care, but I’ve got so much work to do that idiom escapes me.  (A coworker just came to me for comments on an evaluation document I apparently used extensively last year, as to which I have no recollection whatsoever.  This is a good sign.  OF TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY.  Otherwise, it’s a bad sign.  Yeah well, the damage is already done I guess...)

Instead of working up a decent post for you decent people who are decent enough to pay me a visit, I’ll just provide an interim postlet - a cite to this article which answers (or maybe just addresses) the question, if you like to choke yourself into unconsciousness when engaged in self-stimulation, are you necessarily suicidal?  I know that’s one that’s been keeping me up at night. 

I’ll try to work up something more substantial later on today, but in the meantime, here’s a Chucklehut Quizzler: What do you do with an elephant that has three balls?  Answer to follow later this afternoon.  Till then, may your complicated escape mechanisms enable you to survive your day.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Don’t Toy With Me

Things are not as they might be, I suppose, but I am back and of course I missed you all terribly, each and every one of you.  It’s a bit disturbing to return to my site and see that all my lovingly-crafted posts have slipped off the page, stale and superannuated; I’d be at home eagerly typing crap up and preparing some of my seven thousand photographs for posting but FedEx has inexplicably delivered my computer, ostensibly freshly repaired by HP, to a crabby neighbor who has not been around since we returned from our wanderings late monday night.  I’m a bit miffed about it, but mostly because I like using the word “miffed.” If she isn’t around tonight so we can get the damn thing back from her, I’ll have to have FedEx buy me a new one.  That’s how it works, right?

So, how was my trip?, I hear you asking in your overworked anxious little minds.  (Yes, I can hear that stuff in your minds, and you should be ashamed of yourself.) It rocked, my friends.  I’ve got Aloha coming out my ass and I don’t care who knows it.  Best Vacation Ever.  I might have a little tidbit or two about it as time works its wonders on us all, but in the meantime, we got the pets out of hock yesterday and Kel brought Coz home with a plastic bag on which she’d written a note before leaving it with him at the kennel: “Chewys for Cosmo - Give every so often, he might not be interested.” Damn, how could he not be interested in it?  Inside the bag were five leftover anatomical curiosities that any self-respecting dog would beg for.  I’m shocked he needed a doggie bag.

Maybe I’ve just gotten cynical in my post-vacation old age, but dogs are getting some damn gross chewys these days.  Unbelievably repulsive items are being salvaged from the weiner factory for special treatments to turn them into dog toys.  Materialistic dog owners and slaughterhouse proprietors may already be up on this disturbing trend, but we didn’t buy Coz many “special” treats until recently, and I’m frankly freshly revolted by the gruesome selection now available for canine nutritional entertainment. 

You may know about the pigs ears already, I suppose, and the snouts and the forelegs severed at the knees - select cow or pig, at your pleasure.  All these are available basted and flavored so as to render them irresistable, because god knows I’d resist them pretty damn rigorously myself, all things being equal.  But dogs love them.  “Give me that good tasty ear or snout,” Cosmo invariably implores us with his limpid greedy gaze.  And it’s so hard to say no.

Sometimes, in fact, we say more than “yes” - we’ve gone and gotten him a big flavored tendon to crunch and savor.  These days, though, his favorite chewtoy is the pizzle.  Cut from a steer or bull, so they tell us, the pizzle is an external organ signalling secondary sexual characteristics.  It’s a tight slim rigid tube, brown in color, which we get in the 15” length though they are available in a variety of convenient sizes, much like they are in real life, I suppose.  They are simply jerked cattledix, and Cosmo loves them. He’ll sit with one propped up between his paws and gleefully suck on it, nibble it, gnaw on it with his enormous jaws, wedge it between his legs and start shredding it, yanking it into isolated fibers and sodden masses until what was brown has gone grey, what was rigid has gone flaccid, and an odor of baked-on goodness emenates from it that fails to mask a deeper natural raunch that disturbs me on almost every level. 

The one thing we can’t be getting is the trachea.  Yes, steer tracheas are now being prepared as dog treats.  They look, curiously enough, like tracheas: gaping cartilege tubes, stiffened and flavored for that extra meaty tang you just can’t get from untreated tracheas.  And this is where I find solace: that I am not the person who had to write the following copy for the packages of flavored tracheas, tendons and mojumbos: “We naturally enhance their color and flavor by slow roasting them in their own natural juices for up to 53 hours.” No joke, this is exactly what the packaging says.  I’m not sure how natural it is to “enhance” a donkey shlong by slow roasting it in anything for up to 53 hours, and the thought that the roasting is taking place in said organ’s “own natural juices” does not render it any more palatable to me.  I don’t like it much, but I have to put it out of my mind - don’t look at it when I hand it over to him, don’t watch him as he crushes it into a protein mush.  It makes the dog happy, and I guess the donkey isn’t using it anymore.