Friday, October 27, 2006

Random Adages - as the door hits my ass on my way out

It’s time for me to leave - I’m heading out for a week with various subunits of my family.  It will be a fun trip and I may even have amusing anecdotes to report upon my return, but I make no representation that I’ll be updating this bad boy while I’m on the road. 

However, in my frenzy to get everything done before I leave, I do think it’s a good time to disgorge a small handful of weird phrases that I’ve had floating around my head lately, and that have wound up in my memopad with no where else to turn for public humiliation - hence:

* I’ve got an aglet for your grommet.
* Filling may be hot.  Damn hot.
* By the gladsome stank of Dan Tanna’s bandana!
* It’s one thing to be ignorant - another altogether to be stupid.
* Is the glass half-full with liquid gold.... or is this your urine sample? 

You can see why I was loathe to keep those to myself.  Enjoy them till I get back, at which time I’ll be expecting a full report. 

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Addenda

When I was like six years old I went to a school where they made me buy a little dictionary, and in particular, the Little Oxford Dictionary from Clarendon Press, and in particularly particular, the new 4th edition.  With addenda.  This has turned out to be the coolest little dictionary in the world.  It’s about 3x4, hardbound in blue, and it’s got most all the words you will ever actually need to look up in a non-technical environment.  It’s been in steady use since I got it. 

It strives to be concise and to include all words in common discourse.  I’ve often been impressed by its breadth.  For such a little book, it has quite a lot of words in it.  And of course after so many years I do have my favorites, but many of the best of those are from among the ones in the Addenda section - those that just recently “qualified for inclusion.” I’m not sure what that qualification process consisted of, but here is a list of:

18 of the 129 Words Appearing as Addenda to the first printing of the 4th Edition of the Little Oxford Dictionary (1969)

addictive: (a) causing addiction.

admass: (n) part of community easily influenced by mass communication.

afromosia: (n) ornamental African wood used for furniture.

ALGOL: (n) algebraic computer language.

benzedrine: (n) drug inhaled as stimulant etc. P.

bongo drum: (n) one of pair of small drums played with fingers.

breathalyzer: (n) device for testing amount of alcohol in breath. breathalyze: (v.t.) test with this.

cannabis: (n) preparation of Indian hemp, esp. for smoking.

COBOL: (n) computer language using common English terms.

D.J.: (abbr) disc-jockey.

enantiomorph: (n) either of two forms each related to the other as object and its mirror image.

flexagon: (n) folded-paper polygon, esp. hexagon, that can be made by further folding and unfolding to reveal different faces.

FORTRAN: (n) computer language for programming scientific problems.

hallucinogenic: (a) (esp. of drugs) inducing hallucination.

hippy: (sl.) person (appearing to be) given to use of hallucinogenic drugs; hipster.

hipster: (2nd def., n) person alive to or following the most up-to-date fashions in dress, music, etc.

meths: (n, colloq.) methylated spirits. 

spacecraft: (n) space-ship.

Words are like perfect golden fishes - too beautiful to touch, too heavy to swim.  No, wait, that isn’t it.  I don’t know what words are like. Sorry. 

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

A Whiff of Cyborg

It’s not just that it’s big – it’s very sensitive, I know how to use it, and it’s given me countless hours of indescribable pleasure.  Do I thank genetics for it, or just fate?  I’m hedging my bets and thanking them both.  Sometimes it’s a real handful, I guess, and sometimes it’s hard to keep it out of trouble; sometimes it’s so engorged that I can barely see straight.  None of that matters.  The plain truth is, I really like my nose.

I have a pretty sensitive sniffer, when all is said and done.  Of course, it doesn’t like getting punched, but even short of that, when Z rams his tiny digits up into it on a mission of juvenile exploration, it damn well hurts.  If I don’t take my allergy meds it can back up and make me choke and weep with discomfort and effluvium.  But in the big picture, such moments are by far in the minority.  As an overwhelming rule, my schnoz is there to make things better for me.  It conveys plentiful oxygen to my bronchioles.  It leads me not into temptation, or at least not into lame boring temptation.  And it endows me with a most discerning sense of smell.

I’m usually among the first to notice new odors.  I get lots of practice in this discipline on the bus and on downtown streets, but even apart from such exercises I pick up most scents pretty darn fast: biological, chemical, foodacious, whatever.  If something has a scent, I will notice it quickly and it will linger with me for a good long time.  Sometimes that’s a good thing – fresh fruit, redwood groves, cut grass, chocolate…. But of course that cloud of scent has a stinky lining, and I have no defense against those odors I’d rather not experience: septic scents, body funk, coffee breath and leachate, to name a pungent few.  And this brings me to Cyborg the 3rd. 

Cyborg the First was bought new at Ikea and lives in the dining room.  It is finished and has no scent.  Cyborg #2 was bought new and unfinished at Ikea, and now back up the computer area – it smells like pinewood. 

And so it came to pass: that the boy rendered my old nightstand an unsafe area for himself and for items of a delicate or senitive nature.  Z delighted in pulling down the antique lamp, shuffling my bookmarks, and reprogramming, and then dropping, the clock radio.  He was figuring out how to pull out the drawer, which would fall heavily on him when he eventually worked it free.  Basically, that nightstand was an ever-more-serious disaster waiting to happen.  We needed to change that nightstand out.  Urgently.  Enter Cyborg the 3rd.

Kel found it at a used furniture shop - $50 for 100 pounds of solid oak construction.  It’s 40 inches tall, five feet long, with four heavy doors and lots of interior surfaces that the boy can’t trash.  It’s not great design, but it fits and it fits in.  I was delighted when we finally got it up out of the garage and into place. 

The damn thing was too heavy for Kel to handle half of it up the curvy steps.  It took close to a month before we got a burly friend over to give us a hand with it.  So, after we got it home, it lived for a month in our garage.  Plenty of time for it to air out, eh?  Then, before I slid it finally into place, I cleaned it thoroughly with furniture polish.  So I knew it was clean.  Yet the truth could not be denied: it continued to stink.  By the curse of the sniffer, I could smell its past in a chain smoker’s home. 

You know the smell of a beach where a driftwood campfire blazed the night before?  The scent of a wooden match, lit for a candle and then blown out?  The sharp tang of pyrotechnics, sour in the sweet summer air?  It doesn’t smell like any of those.  Cyborg III smells like many, many cartons of cheapjack cancersticks.  Inside and out, it’s essence of ashtray.  And not one of those nice hi-class ashtrays, either.  No gauloises or shermies.  This is pure cut-rate cut-leaf – generic, lowbrow smokes all the way and plenty of’em.  There’s no burns or stains, and it’s slowly getting more understated as time goes by, but the cyborg bears mute witness to countless hours of cheap smoldering cigs – and I can damn well still smell it every time I walk into the room.  I head to bed and the stench permeates my thoughts and turns them ashy-grey.  If I get chilly at night and pull out my fuzzy sleepycap from the cyborg’s convenient depths, it is redolent of rancid guttering weeds. 

I find all this smelling of some stranger’s cigarettes most disquieting. Kel doesn’t notice it so much.  She disclaims any awareness of the cyborg deathstench.  The stale rankness of a cherry flaring and smoldering in a dark room is my burden alone to bear. 

Thus is it all too often.  I solely own the benefit of my magnificent proboscis – but with the benefit comes the detriment.  I just need to make sure I even the score daily with a delicious scent or two that I can bring to mind as I get into bed next to Smokestink the Cyborg. It’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Update: I think I figured it out.  The outside was basically okay, but the doors were never left open for long enough for the insides to air out.  AIRING OUT THE INSIDES IS IMPORTANT, people.  Air yours out today! 

Monday, October 23, 2006

Amazing Race: Still Racy, if Marginally Less Amazing

First, I sat down to watch this episode with some fresh tapioca pudding.  All televisions should come with a pudding dispenser because it makes all programming so much more creamy and delicious. 

Channai – Gateway to South India!  (Unless you’re traveling north, in which case it’s the gateway to lower east-central India.

Girls, I hate to break it to ya, but some weird dudes out there probably wouldn’t mind being beaten by a couple of blonde girls.  In fact, they’d pay good money for it, but you might want to have those bills steam-cleaned before you touch them….

Peter – great use of the “medical emergency” line!  When you want to get ahead of people, your girlfriend is a cripple!  When it’s time for physical exertion, she’s your monkey!  How can you keep track of which one she is at any moment?  You must be very clever! 

James and Tyler are so bitchy when they realize everyone caught up with them.  Did you catch that petulant sweater-toss?  OH SNAP.  One more reason you never want to get a male model mad. 

Mumbai was not “formerly known as” Bombay.  It was formerly mispronounced as Bombay.  It ain’t like they pulled a Prince and just made up a new name for saag paneer and giggles. 

Now here’s a brainteaser: How’d the barbies get the pilot of that big long thick airplane to help them out?  You don’t get to be a beauty queen without knowing how to work your resources.

It’s fun to watch the Cho boys slowly getting ill up on the tower.  With each passing second the color drains from their faces.

Did Peter just tell Sarah to climb for him?  WHY DOES SHE LET HIM SIT ON HIS ASS AND SMIRK ALL DAY?  This man needs to take control of a challenge and then screw it up.  I can’t wait to see it happen.

Instructions for getting to the 6th Ring Road: “Go past the 5th ring road.” Yeah if I was Frodo these instructions might be helpful.  In the mid-east maze, I don’t think it’s as simple as it sounds. 

Oh boy the Choboys are going to take a bullet for their friends the minerfolk.  Ouch.  This has all the hallmarks of a “famous last ethical stand.” Let’s see if the television gods take mercy on them for being nice guys. 

Yeah, Mrs Minerman, Steve Segal will want you for his next movie.  He’ll cast you as the “lumpish harridan.” But just be ready: straight to video isn’t as glamorous as it used to be.

Yeah Kim - mosque, mask, whatever.  Those people have nothing to do with you anyway so why worry about their silly traditions? 

Karmic payback!  Chos get police escort and sirens!  It’s a nerd emergency!  The dorks are riding high! 

James and Tyler once again prove that being pretty makes everything easier.  And then, “we’ll stick with our muscles – OWCH.” He smashes his head on the car door.  THIS IS REAL ENTERTAINMENT, PEOPLES!  You can’t write stuff like that! 

I can’t believe that Peter chose a non-physical task for this detour.  He must be getting tired of sitting on his smug ass and watching his monkey climb stuff for him. 

Which male model was it who got the instructions wrong?  It wasn’t “malalala-lalala,” it was “Eat petrochemical death, perfect infidel!” But either way gets them to about the same place… lost in Kuweit. 

Miners win the race.  They are going to Negril?  I’ve been to Negril.  It’ll either scare the hell out of them or they will move there and start a mountain reggae band.  Either way, that vacation will deserve its own reality show.

AUGH!  My feed is scrambling.  I’m missing a lot! 

Peter is chewing out Sarah for reading the map wrong.  Let’s see him show her how it’s done.  For once, he has a chance to redeem himself for being so damned self-satisfied.  If there’s any justice, he’ll blow it worse than she did. 

Terry and Peter are so late but still make it in on time… I’m sure they’re gonna kiss when they make it to the mat, but maybe they’ll save it for the privacy of their pit stop.

Meanwhile Peter and Sarah are so freaking lost it’s pathetic.  They’re going backwards.  I think they’ll wind up back in Vietnam if they keep going.  Peter was going to show us how to read a map.  He’s showing us how to get to the challenge so late that they don’t even have to compete there.  A whole new level of pathetic.  Can’t blame this one on your monkey, can ya, smartyboots? 

Way to go, Sarah.  My feed is all sketchy and scrambly but I’m seeing that you are not cutting the weinerman any slack.  He’s saying you’re both too competitive?  That’s not what she says the problem is: you’re just not kind.  And she’s being very kind to put it that way.  As you walk away from the camera after your Philimination, there’s a lot of airspace between you – and the psychic wall she’s put up to keep you out of her life is almost tangible. 

Next time: looks like it might be fun.  I don’t recall what happens.  Guess I’ll just have to tune in, if I can.  I’ll be on the road, but I do have my priorities.  Meantime, to coin a phrase: Chuckles out. 

ADDENDUM: How could I forget VOICE-ACTIVATED R-C CAMELWHACKERS?  Auto-whipping - the mid-east way!  I’m sorry for every team that chose to fill sacks with foodpellets.  Autowhipping is the wave of the future - catch it!

Sunday, October 22, 2006

ESCAPE FROM LITTLE CREEK RANCH!!!!

So, this week coming up is the first of two travel weeks.  Things are going to be hectic and then they’re going to be in a different area code altogether.  It’s sort of cool to take a full-on hours-in-an-airplane trip to another state or two, and never get out of your time zone, but of course I am sort of dorky about that sort of thing. 

ANYWAY.s.  The point is that on saturday we took cap’n dangermonkey way the hell down to past half moon bay to a pumpkin patch.  It sounds like a long trip but really it was less than an hour each way in the car and it was a good day for a drive.  But why go so far for something that we could have done so many places so much closer to home?

This is why:

Little Creek Ranch was the mellowest pumpkin patch experience imaginable.  Daisy and Kaleb joined us with their parents Dave and Kim, and also Dave’s cousin and his wife M&M, the sweetest folks imaginable, and we all converged from distant points on this little piece of pumpkinirvana.  We passed up an incredible festival with haybale mazes and giant gorillas,

for a place with a petting zoo, pony rides, kiddy gym, and - oh yeah - pumpkin launching. 

The launching was awesome - those suckers go at least 200 yards and they’ve got a wooden target to aim for up the hill over the ravine.  There were a lot of sheep there but I didn’t see even one get nailed all day. 

In honor of the upcoming festival of creepiness, we had an experience fraught with horrors, to wit:

*and I can’t get this last one to show up as a thumbnail but I think it’s my favorite so don’t overlook it!

But once we left the haunted confines of those sinister precincts, we had a lovely drive home.  Since I was passenging on this leg of the ride, I got to take some photos.  Since we were headed north, most of them don’t have the ocean in them, but believe, me, it was out there and it was really looking good.

So that was it for the pumpkin farm experience.  Then DDKK came over for burritos and beer and I went to bed on time and slept like a goddamn rock.  You’re welcome. 

Illumination

Some nights, I’m not ready to turn out the lights when Kel is.  She needs to get up early, but I don’t; she’s all worn to a frazzle by a long exciting day of competitive sports and international intrigue, but I’m not.  Sometimes that means I stay up late at the QWERTY keyboard or the television, but that’s not always the right choice.  Sometimes, in fact, I enjoy coming to bed and just reading my big book (barely 100 pages left in 7 Pillars!) or writing my little writings.  It’s a relaxing way to invite some gentle slumbers.

For me, it’s relaxing, anyway.  I lie there with my book or my pad and ease my mind by the light of my grandma Delores’ 2nd Empire vaselamp. She had a pair of them wired up, as I recall, from antique vases she’d bought in France.  We need to replace the plug on one of them; the other continues to grace my nightstand.  However, it’s not what you’d call “focused” lighting.  It pretty much lights the whole room up, really.  And, given that, sometimes it interferes with Kel getting the sleep she needs. 

Well, I may have come up with an answer to this dilemma – one that doesn’t involve Kel having to wear some sort of photon-blocking technology: it’s a mini-lamp, a “reading light” that clips to my book with a small, bright LCD lamp on an adjustable gooseneck wire.  It’s just enough to illuminate one page at a time, leaving the whole rest of the room delightfully dark.  Kel can curl over and sleep peacefully, unconcerned by startling brightness, and I can read or write in the strange isolation of a burst of light while otherwise surrounded by stygian darkness.  The little lamp even makes the rest of the room seem, by contrast, that much darker than it really is. 

This experience of localized illumination affects my experience as a reader and a writer, too, in unexpected ways.  As I read 7 Pillars, which remains one of the most idiosyncratically punctuated and obscurely vocabularized 750 pages I’ve ever hefted, the words seem to swim up to me out of the dark of my bedroom, a century-old story rising to the level of my awareness by virtue of a few precious square inches of blue-tinted light.  Shining thus in isolation, the text seems to reflect new meanings back to me – intended, unintended, expanded, ironic…. Under the spotlight of the reading lamp, Lawrence is brought back to life in a manner that almost seems deeper, if not more real, than reality could have been.  As I sink towards sleep, tempted to drowse by the darkness all around me and by Kel’s deep, regular breathing beside me, I feel the book oscillate between literature, truth, and dream, with the spotlight leading it, and me, from each to the next.

My experience of writing, too, is altered when undertaken by the tight beam of the reading lamp.  I take my ratty little notebook in hand but, familiar though it is, under the small blue beam in the blackness of my sleeping chamber, it seems – not just fresh, but strangely unfamiliar The blank page lures me and coaxes me.  A notion that spawned a brief notation in my memo pad is magnified in the hole in the darkness. My attention, uncontested, focuses on that shred of thought, locks in on it and examines it microscopically.  Each word I write seems imbued with depth, gives rise in its ellipse of light to new ideas, different directions, and shadings of meanings as various and subtle as the gradations of light and darkness on the page.  I write, in my spot of light, as if the words were rising up out of the page, or were born, dreamlike, of the very darkness. 

In the morning when I review my newly-minted words on the bus to work, I can’t tell any difference between readinglamp writing and the usual crap I always come up with.  It reads pretty much the same.  But while I’m at my writing or my reading under that $2 gooseneck LED, I experience a whole new dimension of the word “illumination.”

****

As an admission how long I’ve left this in the notebook, I finisheded 7 Pillars about a month ago.  The last section was very stirring and much easier to read.  I don’t recommend it, but I’m glad I read it.  Twice. 

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Hey Beardo!

A list: of hipster beards, appearing now on self-satisfied faces in your downtown arts district TONIGHT!

The C. Everett Koopinator (or Funky Mennonite)
The Grizzly Damn
The Ornette Lipdribble
The VanDyke Hootchieface
The Imperial Roachtrooper
The RenFaerie
The Kareem Abdul Chingrizzle
Stan Lee’s BattleBurns
The Beardo Royale (also available with cheese)
The F. U. Manchu

Monday, October 16, 2006

Mostly Saturday and the Fruity Dots, with Amazing Race Notes for Extra Credit

It was a good weekend, and I sure as hell needed one so that was a relief.  Saturday we went to the zoo.  Zach hadn’t been since he was really small and didn’t much care, but this time he was all, “Whoooo!” and “Wow!” and “Ghaaaa!” It was really fun to watch.  We didn’t come close to seeing everything and there’s a good playground there too, so a membership doesn’t seem like a bad idea. 

We got home, ate a very satisfying and super-easy lunch, and took an all-family nap.  As we awoke the phone rang – Jackie was inviting us to join her family for supper.  We settled on Q, cleaned up a little, and then walked over.  We always eat well there, but I totally scored with the special “smoked and drunk” tri-tip on mashed potatoes with tomatillo sauce and green beans.  The meat is marinated for two days in beer and spices, and then cooked in a smoker.  But, good.  We skipped the dessert menu for chocolate at Jackie’s, plus some tasty chamomile grappa that significantly loosened the conversation.  All I really recall is that I somehow wound up with the nickname “White House,” and I really like it.  It is now authorized for general use.  Best nickname I’ve ever had. 

On the way home we walked past so many little neighborhood spots with nice parties going on – at Cinderella bakery and café, and at the tiny sushi spot next to that place we couldn’t figure out what they did there and left other puzzled pedestrians staring into the window when we left…. and others, too.  It’s a nice neighborhood and I want to give it full credit for helping to complete a very nice Saturday.

The last part of Saturday worth mentioning was the box of Apple Jacks I finished after getting the boy to bed and cleaning up the house a little.  These were the AJs with the “eyepopping” marshmallow eyeballs, and I really enjoyed them.  The jax have always had a high spot in my pantheon of sugared breakfasts, and you just can’t go wrong adding marshmallows to cereal.  But the good folk at Kellog’s were using the vehicle of the Jax box to advertise this other product, little fruity boogers wrapped in a yogart-flavored shell.  They call ‘em “Yogos” and a little pack came inside my cereal box.  After I finished the cereal, then, and completed all the puzzles on the back of the box IN INK because I had figured them all out during my prior weeks of cereal eating, I pulled out the sample and read about it as I munched the dozen or so sugarnuggets I’d found.

They are “YogartY-Covered FruitY Dots.” I added some capitalization there, to point out that they are not committing to being either yogurt or fruit.  But they seem to have been richly inspired by them both.  (I grow suspicious.) There are three flavors, each of which bears the disclaimer, “natural and artificial flavors”:  Strawberry Slam (okay, I know strawberries, and I like them, so slamming one isn’t so distasteful to me), Crazy Berries (um, I like berries but I don’t know about the crazy ones, I like rasp and black and straw, like I mentioned above, but maybe crazies are best left to others, this is not a flavor I want in my mouth, like “bipolar boysen” or some damn thing), and – here’s my favorite: Island Explosion.  With natural and artificial flavor.  The natural and artificial flavors of exploding island.  Taste the sulfur!  Savor the pumice and magma!  With the real (and artificial) flavor of exploded island in every yogurty-covered dot!  “Hey, get me some of that essence of Kilauea, some Blue #4, and another bottle of Krakatoa Lake #7!” No, sounds like too much for me to enjoy, but some rock-eating kid out there is probably ripping open boxes of Apple Jacks just to get samples of it. 

Okay that was Saturday.  Sunday was good too, but I don’t have time to get into that.  But for those who care, Amazing Race notes follow in the extended entry.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Sign Me Up

So, in my neighborhood there are a lot of crosswalks near big boulevards or highways, where ignorant and thoughtless people frequently wander into traffic.  Tragically, they are not smashed by trucks and promptly voided from my reality; rather, they cause screeching auto accidents and untold drama as they gape like brain-damaged deer into the oncoming headlights-with-the-right-of-way.  I mean, I think it’s a good idea to walk if you don’t need to drive, but have some common sense, people.  Stop-look-listen.  These boneheads who wander into traffic deserve what they should be getting, which is a fender in the gut and a quick trip to the wide, welcoming pavement.  And plenty of delicious sutures.

Instead, they got a nice bright crosswalk with the wide paint-stripes that run like piano keys from curb to curb, so they can strut their geriatric, culturally-displaced, or simply thoughtless selves safely from one side of California Street to the other.  And for those vehicles unfortunate enough to get caught on the wrong side of those tottering oafs, the good people of Signs-a-Lot have installed two – yes, two! – special signs on little posts in the middle of the street.  These seem designed to keep drivers from forgetting they’re not actually allowed to plow right through the dribbling strand of enfeebled humanity that block the traffic like baconfat blocks my cardiac arteries.

These signs deserve a little more attention, because, well, I say so.  The signs are tall thin rectangles that have a small red triangle - the “yield” symbol, then the word “TO”, then a little stick-figure pedestrian in full-on street-crossing mode.  But there’s one more thing: at the top it very clearly says, “STATE LAW”. 

Here’s my question: why would they need to say that?  Do they think that we’d just ignore the signs because we’d think they were just making it up, about not running over people in the street?  But there wasn’t room to put in “OPTIONAL SUGGESTION”?  Or “NEWS FLASH”?  Or “EXPERTS AGREE”? 

And then, it’s not just that they’re telling us that the street sign about stopping your car before you smush somebody in a crosswalk describes current law – it’s clearly specified to be State law.  Like if it was a local ordinance, you’d just roll on over those poor suckers, but since it’s coming out of Sacramento, we’d better pay a little more attention.  The whole thing really seems redundant.  Redundant.  Needlessly repetitive.  That is, redundant. 

UNLESS: here’s where I get into the creative thinking side of this post: maybe it’s not saying what I think it says.  Maybe “STATE” isn’t an adjective – it’s a verb.  Maybe they want to inculcate this important nugget of public safety legislation into our heads through the classic pedagogical tactic of recitation.  They aren’t saying, “don’t drive your Hummer through a chain of pre-schoolers because the Traffic Code prohibits it” – they’re saying “Say it with me, peoples!  Yield it up to them Pedestrians!” It’s a little call-and-response chant!  State your name.  State your business.  State the law: Triangle to Walkingman! 

Now I feel that I ought to repeat it every time I drive over that crosswalk.  And I would, too.  It’s just that those old people keep getting stuck under my car and distracting me. 

Friday, October 06, 2006

the constant heart

we all miss you constance

Thursday, October 05, 2006

The Break

I’ve had some sad news today, and I’ll be busy and preoccupied for a few days.  Given all that, I will not be updating for a short while, but believe me, I will be back soon.  In the meantime, I’d like to leave you with something for the hiatus that jives a little with my own mental state right now.  I wrote this a few weeks ago and each time I reread it, it brings up a series of feelings and emotions that seem particularly relevant to where I am here and now.  So, here it is, and I hope you enjoy it.  Either way, I’ll see you here again soon.

The gig was, I went to the depo with the client.  I’d keep the process moving, maximize opportunities, minimize damage, and take lots of notes.  It was boring as hell but usually the people were nice, and many of them were folk I’d never have met otherwise.  This guy, though, was one of the special cases - he got a home video depo.  These got set up only when the plaintiff was so sick that he wasn’t expected to make it through to trial, and since there would be causes of action that survived his demise (like consortium) and some that were triggered by it (like wrongful death), all the lawywers wanted to make sure all the testimony was well-preserved for the record, fully crossexamined and appropriately refreshed.  Which is all well and good until you factor in that the plaintiff was too weak to visit the bathroom alone. 

The home video depo is a complicated affair.  Mine usually happened in remote corners of the state: Victorville, Oroville, Lewiston - places where folk retired to after a lifetime of pipefitting or high rigging, way out in the boonies where they’d once built a dam or a silo or something.  Plaintiffs were pretty much stuck at home by this stage of their disease, unable to withstand the rigors of driving to Oakland to spend four days in a court reporter’s office.  Instead, six or ten lawyers drove out to whereever these guys called home, to drink their wives’ coffee and breathe the worn-out air of their sitting rooms.  I was always very busy at these events, making sure that everybody behaved themselves and the testimony was as clear and damaging as possible - but there was only so much I could do.  When you get right down to it, there’s only so much anybody can do. 

This guy I have in mind lived up in Lewiston. For those who haven’t visited, there really isn’t much of a town in Lewiston.  My motel had a poster on the lobby wall that featured a mock-up of a box of “Spotted Owl Helper,” and the only businesses around seemed to sell used stuff back and forth between themselves.  Chickens outnumbered people, and there weren’t that many chickens. 

This guy, as I call him, lived at the end of a rough and dusty dirt track in a decrepit doublewide.  He was too sick to stand up more than a couple of times a day, so we set up around his easy chair and sat close so we could hear him.  His oxygen tank was huge and it sat right next to him; the tubes up his nostrils had been there so long they’d formed permanent divots in his face.  Like all my clients, he was a thorny old dude with no patience for soft-handed pencilpushers like me, but I was on his team so he took out his short-tempered aggravation on the others.  I had to stay right on him to keep him in line, and it was an uphill battle every step of the way.

No one I represented at a depo believed me when I told them how hard it would be to get deposed.  It’s just talking, right?  They all knew how to talk.  They didn’t expect to need my help.  But when we went on the record with the cameras rolling and the reporter typing away, and defense counsel started in with the intense scrutiny and mindnumbing detail that characerized those proceedings, and the deponent started getting confused and bored and anxious and tired, and then veered got off point or got defensive or forgetful, and then they started saying things that would hurt their case and I had to jump in every few seconds to rehabilitate, move to strike, make objections, counsel and advise, or go off the record for a private consultation.... well, they realized then that talking can be harder than a hardworking man figured it was. 

We’d been at it all morning and hadn’t gotten far.  The client called for a lunch break and the other attorneys were glad to consent.  I shoo’d them out of the room and came back to check in with him.  He was digging under his seat, his skin bluish and mottled and his hands clumsy and trembling.  This guy just looked like hell.  With one hand he yanked the oxygen tube from his nose; with the other he fished out a pack of smokes he’d secreted under his ass and jammed a cigarette into his mouth.  I had stuff to go over with him, but when he started lifting a lighter to his cigarette I got scared.  The oxygen tank was right next to him and the tubes , still hissing gas, hung around his neck.  “Can you hold off on that till we talk?,” I asked with partly-concealed anxiety.  “This comes first,” he told me sourly, trying to work the lighter.  “You bastards are sucking what little life I have clean out of me.” I told him I’d catch up with him after lunch, stepped outside, and hoped for the best.

Lunch was usually a burger or burrito at the least noxious-looking stand in the vicinity, but Lewiston didn’t offer that convenience.  Instead, I had brought along a grocery deli sandwich and a little three-bean salad I’d picked up the day before on my way into town, anticipating the dearth of services.  I got into my car, drove a piece down the highway to a state fishery, and had myself a little picnic.  The area lay beside a dammed stream in deep redwood forests that smelled of sap and oxygen, and I easily found a lonely rock by the water’s edge whereat to take my sustinence. 

As I ate my unimaginative repast, the cleanliness of the earth and stream refreshed me from the inside out.  The stream was calm and flat, a perfect reflection of tranquility.  Under its semisilvered surface, fingerling trout schooled and swirled, metallic and impossible, bright hyphens of thriving life.  As I munched my perfunctory lunch alone on the riverbank, I lost myself in the patterns of their movements and left my morning’s labors swirling downstream. 

A sound overhead caught my ear: the sound of a raptor aloft, one cry, questing and unfettered - but subtlely different than the calls I’d heard before from the redtails and harrises and other hawks back home.  Scanning the sky, I soon saw why: this was no hawk - it was an osprey, a sea-eagle, resplendent in white plumage with a cruel curved beak and anxious talons. 

As I watched, the osprey circled, motionless, climbing; then it stalled, and then it fell like an amazing glorious rock, like a meteor, like broken hope.  It dropped straight down, a streak of white, headfirst, heedless, wings folded, talons outstretched, into placid waters that splashed up in shock upon its impact. 

It was oly a second or two later that the bird emerged again, water dripping from empty claws.  As it lofted itself back into the air with powerful flaps of broad winds, it shrugged itself dry with a fluid movement that rippled from its beak to its tail, and droplets shimmered from it like rain.  I ate and watched the osprey dive for submerged prey again and again, each time emerging unvictorious, each time shuddering away the crystal liquid from its fletch.  Beneath it, the water always instantly returned to glassy smoothness, leaving no trace of the violence done upon it, and the fish continued swimming in their familiar way, untroubled by the hunter overhead. 

I finished my sandwich, my salad, my lukewarm bottle of water.  Still the osprey circled, dove, and emerged from the water already in flight.  It would hunt until it fed, but my lunch was over.  I stood, unnoticed (or, more likely, ignored), and returned to my dusty car.  The drive back to the doublewide felt tragic, but at least it appeared that my client had finished his smoke without untoward incident.  I stumbled through the debris and detrius of his front drive and we had our conference. The depo concluded uneventfully.  I have no idea how his case turned out, but I’m pretty sure that osprey eventually got its lunch. 

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Another Goddamn Weekend, plus the Amazing Race

Oh snap, it’s still only Tuesday and it feels like it should be Thursday at least.  My back is sore and my head is tired.  If these colors don’t look right to you, try stronger drugs.  Meantime, I’ve got so much verbiage stuffed in my little notebook that it’s getting ridiculous, yet I continue to ad-lib the sort of pointless catch-up event-laden “howzitgoin’” post that made Blogsylvania the cultural void it is today.  And I am cool with that.  I’m just so fascinating a personage that the details of how I spent my weekend are still more interesting than most infotainment programming on your local network affiliate.  Do I sound cocky? Well some folk can’t help it, slim. Points of proof:

We went to the park on Saturday to visit the De Young tower and get a glimpse of the construction of the new science museum.  I can’t watch these videos where I’m sitting now but I think they’ll give you a sense of how COOL this place will be once it opens.  Our little sightseeing expedition included a view of a large wing in which they’d just finished welding together an enormous three-story globe, all girders and tubing, so large that it looked as if the building had to have been built around it.  The exhibits will be fun once they get them installed, but the building itself, with a living roof and integrated aquarium exhibits coursing all through the structure, will totally kick ass.  Scientifically speaking, I mean.

On Sunday I went to the park again for a run.  I’d been indolent for weeks, not even barely stretching out, and didn’t feel much like getting into running duds, much less going out and working up a schvitz.  But I did it anyway because.... I don’t know.  I just did it, and I’m glad I did.  As soon as I started running I felt better - a strange “ewphoria” (a nice feeling you get from something you’d expect you’d rather not be doing).  The music was high-tempo and I kept up a fast pace as I zipped past myriad parkgoers enjoying the weather.  I noticed a lot of soccer-playing guys and it put in my mind, that I’m a terrible soccer player.  I tend to overkick - I can get to the ball, but once I’ve given it a good whack no one else can get to it.  I kick too hard, and without aim or control.  Maybe it’s because I never really played soccer, or maybe that’s why I never played soccer.  In either case, I sort of envied those dudes just hackysacking the soccerball from knee to knee to instep to forehead to toe to toe to toe, dribbling the ball without letting it touch the ground.  As I ran my route with increasing strength and speed I thought, hell, I could probably do that if I tried.  I just need not to try too hard.  I bet I could do it, though.  In fact I’m sure of it.  As this thought entered my mind, I saw, several feet ahead of me, a short stocky guy with a soccer ball, playing with himself, so to speak - the ball popped up from his feet to his shins to his shoulders to his forehead and then - damn, he was screwing up in front of his girlfriend - he mis-played a kick and the ball rolled fast away from him.  Toward me.  Hee.  I altered my trajectory by a degree or two, added a little more speed, and stretched my stride so the ball and my left instep neatly intersected.  It wasn’t a kick - just a collision of foot and ball.  The impact knocked the ball back into the air, spinning slowly, and it came back down right in the center of the dude’s sternum, rolling neatly back down his leg where he went back into his kicking game.  It’s been a long time since I kicked a soccer ball, or anything, that felt so satisfying.  What a kick, huh?

On Saturday and Sunday we awoke to the sounds of chainsaws and woodchippers.  The greenbelt across from our house has recently been reclassified from parkway (under CalTrans authority) to parkland (under city parks authority), and city crews were working all weekend long to clean the place up a little.  Saplings were removed, ivy curtains came down, mowing was performed in places mowers have never gone before, and arborism was, generally, manifest.  We’re happy about this - it’s about time someone opened up the cloistered dingles that have invited encampments, public self-sanitation, and other acts most suitably performed in private (if at all).  Maybe it’ll cut down on the scummyfolk who so often trash the ‘hood.  But I must admit, the city park workers on this job looked like they’d give any hardened homeless population a serious run for their money.  Everyone looked tough as hell.  Men with rock-hard wiry bodies and mean little beards, women with tough sneers and flinty eyes.... As they loaded a huge treestump festooned with ivy onto a pickup’s flatbed, I could easily see them doing the same with a big screen television that “just fell off the truck.” These guys were seriously hard-core.  If I’d have been a tree I’d have just gotten the hell out of their way. 

Finally, Saturday we took a short trip to Target for to shop for Halloween costumes for the muffinman.  Things didn’t go so well as far as that goes, but one important discovery was in fact made: it’s berry season!  BOO BERRY season!  Yes, I guess they hold off till Hallotober to put the blue ‘shmallows back on the shelves.  For less than $2 I got me a whole box of magnificent purple crunchies and those delightful cereal marshmallows.  There’s even a maze and a “find-it” game on the back of the box, to keep me entertained as I indulge my juvenile sweet-tooth.  Temptation, thy name is Mills, and thy rank is General....

Well that’s enough of my weekend to incite your amazement and jealousy, so let me move on to the climax of the epoch: The Amazing Race.  It’s been a few days since it aired but I have not had time to see what anyone else had to say about the episode, so here are my notes (written as I watched, in the extended entry) and if you don’t care for the program, I invite you to entertain yourself otherwise.  You know what I mean.