Friday, December 29, 2006

A Fistful of Cuteness, plus Craggy McSnowsalot

I sort of promised some photos from my trip to the PNW, so here they are:

First, we must establish that Z loves chanukah:

Here he is with his first gift and grandpa herman’s menorah - DO NOT DISTURB a child in the zzzzzone....

He loved chanukah so much he’s like a menorah himself in a way -

He keeps going till he just burns out.

One afternoon, K and Z and I went to the Seattle Center (which is curiously eccentric, disconcertingly enough) to visit the Children’s Museum and whatever else they had going on.  The SC is where the world’s fair once was, and hence, where the Space Needle still is.  Here it is through a skylight of the big exhibit space/food court where we spent most of our time:

The lobby of this structure (the “Center House,” though “house” didn’t make any more sense than “center” does) had a big ol’ model train running on an enormous track laid out in the central area of the food court.  Zach wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it.

The Children’s Museum was a lot of fun and featured, among other exhibits, some “habitats” from other nations.  One was Japanese and included a train station variety kiosk where the japanese peoples buy all manner of comestibles.  This photo shows some of the drinks on offer in the display’s vending machine. 

For my fuller life, indeed.

Just outside the sun was setting and we were getting hungry so we just took some photos as we wandered back to the car:

A few days later we took a drive up through the Snomoshpit pass (I may have some of these details fuzzy) to a great “snow play” area, with plenty of authentic water-based snow:

Zach had never seen snow before and when he woke up in the car he was pretty dumbfounded - but as soon as he got out into it he was totally stoked, as I believe the young people put it:

We left as the sun began to drop behind the mountains and the air filled with an ethereal mist:

yeah, messed-up link, sue me I am moving on regardless to, finally, this tourist shot I took from the car on the way back to our place.

That’s all the photos we’re going to bother with right now, I think.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to post my “overcoming entropy” piece before the new year starts - it’s sort of thematic, if I can get off my ass to make it happen.  Right now I’m satisfied that I got these damn photos cropped down and posted.  Hope it’s a good way for you to conclude 2006.  It might just have to work for me.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

There and Back: a Saga

It’s been a holly, jolly freaking xmas at the hucklechut, which is of course, where chuckles goes when he’s not at home.  I flew north last Thursday morning for a yuletide visit with Tara, Phil, and the toddling Nater-tot, and we had a damn fine time REGARDLESS.  Regardless of what?  Hee....

We should have known things were up for a serious xmas-jacking when we gave T a call from the baggage claim upon landing to see where she was in the “picking us up from the airport” process, to discover that she’d mentally scheduled us for a PM pickup, not an AM pickup.  Slight freakout, easily overcome.  But then.... things got a bit dicier as, that evening, Nate started repainting the house with half-digested milk and cheese.  He got a stomach flu that would. not. quit, and his mom and pop were up all. night. long taking care of his sad, sad alimentary canal.  And no, the peristalstis was not purely of the reverse sort - he had horrific mudbutt and the accompanying monkeyred assfury too, just so he could be as uncomfortable as possible. 

I took the opportunity to get out of the house for a few hours on bikes with Phil and a neighbor, both of whom totally kicked my ass but I do have the excuse that I am not biking anymore or even remotely exercising.  I’m just proud I only fell badly enough to cut myself open once.  It was a fun ride through a forested park full of downed boughs, drowned gullies, and enough hazards that we kept stopping to saw through random branches over the trail.  It was a full-body workout and I enjoyed it. 

I’m glad Phil got out too, because the evil hurlgut got him that night.  It wasn’t till we left three days later that he was able to keep down more than saltines, and he spent most of his time with us (forcing himself to be sociable, no matter how he churned with agony) kneeling on the rug with his head down, trying valiantly but ineffectively to maintain digestive integrity.  Tara got it too, the next morning.  For most of our stay, all the members of our host family were yakking the chyme like Linda Blair on the Exorcism-a-Whirl. 

Regardless, we had fun on our visit and I’m glad I was able to help out a little.  At one point brother Frankie called, asking if Kelly, Zach and I had succumbed to the dreaded barfplague.  He asked after us by my surname.  Tara didn’t hear him well.  “The Assmagic?  Is the Assmagic okay?” It may not have been my name before, but now I’m having new business cards made up.  Hell, I may even be making up a new business altogether.  (Tragically, I can’t recall what we were talking about when we misheard each other and the conversation veered to the subject of monkey choad.  But obviously, it was a good conversation.)

Kel, Z and I got out to a kid’s museum for a few hours, and later, to the snow so Z could see it for the first time.  Fuller reports on some of that later, perhaps, with the photos, but let’s skip to yesterday, and the challenge of leaving our beloved relatives: On the plus side, Z had a great time at the airport: he met a 3-1/2 year old who taught him to hop and they ran and squealed around the terminal like piglets on mda.  I got some surprisingly good fish and chips for supper and Z asked for a taste of the tartar sauce on a french fry - to his credit, he swallowed it, even though he didn’t ask for it again.  In the airplane, when we started rolling from the gate he shouted “byebye!” to every item on the tarmac - painfully cute, if you’re not trying to sleep through it, which would have made it just painful I guess.  And when we took off, we flew through a serious snowsquall, which was cool to see from that perspective.  And then, once we landed we got lucky and were not soaked by the sporadic but torrential showers that drenched everything except for those brief periods when we were getting from the baggage claim to the bus stop, and from the parking lot bus to our car.  It could have been a lot worse. 

Of course, there were also the aspects of that trip home that were not so great.... The flight was delayed, and then more delayed, and then… augh… though we’d left at 6:45 pm to get to SeaTac at 7:30 for a 9:30 flight, we we didn’t board till nearly 11, and then there was no airport crew to “push us back” from the gate so we waited in our seats for another 40 minutes as Z got progressively more and more agitated and impatient.  Once we finally got airborne at nearly midnight, Z was a total dervish in our laps for an hour, spinning and slapping and yanking on the tray tables and spilling his crackers and generally being a handful.  He was asleep when we landed, though, and even slept through the world’s loudest floorbuffer - being test-driven that evening on the baggage claim floor.  But even the buffer was not as loud as the screaming squeal of benches being dragged back into place across the terrazo floor after the buffer was turned off.  The mens’ room in the baggage claim area was out of service.  The parking lot bus driver was kind of… wired; he spoke with a heavy accent and lots of energy and sowed much confusion amid the large group of tired impatient people who miscommunicated with him about where he was going and how to find their cars. There were lots of sour moods on that careening bus.  Turns out, several people could not find their cars and one of them needed a jump for a dead battery.  Things kept taking longer and longer.  The storm brought hard rain and heavy winds, which made driving home an adventure in caution and self-preservation.  I took the car pool lane to the bay bridge toll booth and discovered that it was so closed that I actually had to drive around a weird little parking lot to find a place where I could roll over barriers in the road to get back to an open lane.  Wind on the bridge was even worse and I was driving with white knuckles, but at least I knew the road really well - I just picked my lane and went for it.  Till CalTrans coned it off, of course, pushing all the traffic off the freeway for construction as soon as the bridge ended and making me fidget through surface streets to get home. 

Eventually, we did get home.  At 3:30 am.  Yes, that’s nearly 9 hours after we left.  For a 90 minute flight.  It’s a good thing I ate like a pig for four days prior and got about 2 hours in the gazebo hot tub before loading out for the airport and generally had such a lovely time with our dear family up north, because I felt like crap this morning.  But no stomach flu.  It’s the little things that make it all okay sometimes.  And with that in mind, forgive me if you’ve already seen this, but here’s my holiday message to you all: whatever life hands you, rock it all night long.  Let this poor emaciated gyno-eunuch be an inspiration to you.  Mainly because, I cannot even watch this all the way through even once.  Tell me how it ends, okay?  For now, I am out of here.  More later.  In fact, all the later you can carry.  Bring a later sack for convenience.  And don’t forget the laterhosen. 

UPDATE with additional amusement: Nicknames!  Phil has long had a great nickname: “Burma.” Tara got an even better one during our trip: “Jemima Curbjob.” With a nickname like that, a woman can get away with most anything!  Also, Kelly told me she was working on a good nickname for the parking bus driving.  The winner was “Nutty McSpeedBall,” but I think I prefer her runner-up: “Speedy McNutBall.” Something about a good nut ball at this time of year… it just says Christmas to me.  So maybe my problem is a speaking evangelical nut ball.  Or, alternatively, maybe not.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Navel Commission

I don’t have the focus to type up anything long, so here’s a few weird notions I’ve had to bat around my various lobes:

There is a new series of billboard ads going up around town to fight childhood obesity.  They show photos of cute kids reaching for a burger or a soda or something like that, to encourage parents to step in and make a difference.  I support that message, but I can’t help but wonder what it does to a child model’s self-image to see him- or herself as the actual literal poster child for childhood obesity.  Might as well give up on those Hollywood dreams now and take your greasy solace in those fries that fell out into the bottom of the bag….

Have you seen the blue camos?  They’re like the green ones you might have for the forest or swamps, or the tan ones they use for the desert, or the tan and grey ones for “urban theaters” (sounds so refined!)…. And now you can get them in blue, too, different shades of blue from indigo to cornflower in overlapping, intersecting, coruscating closed curves of varying shades.  They’re very easy on the eye, but they do raise a question for me: in what environment would they perform the camouflage function of making one less visible?  The word “camouflage,” as we know, dates only from 1917, deriving from the French word camouflet – a “puff of smoke,” on the notion of “blowing smoke in someone’s face.” The British navy in World War I called it dazzle-painting.  This information is from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which has endeared itself to me permanently by both introducing the notion of “dazzle-painting” to me, and the image of camouflage as the pigment design equivalent of blowing smoke up someone’s… is it the face up which they blow smoke in France?  Well what a world.  Anyway, the blue camos: are they so you can sneak around unseen underwater, or through raspberry jello without being detected, or what?  If the tank top came with the jello, I would have to get it just for the marketing tie-in.  Come on, jello-tops are sure to become a collector’s item instantly. 

(cf: potato wrestling)

I also want to give a shout out to the good people of Oregon, where you can pay a little extra and have a license plate that does more than tell on you when you make illegal U turns – it also supports the common cultural trust.  Ancient traditions, keening melodies, painstaking craftsmanship and emerging artistry – all this is our entrusted culture and we should all cherish it just as we cherish the natural environment, benevolent technology, and our elected overlords.  I think it’s very cool that there is a special license plate just to support this phenomenon. HOWEVER: it’s got the weirdest damn image on it I’ve ever seen on a government product.  New out of the box it looks like it’s been fading on a fencepost for a decade.  I finally went to their website and figured out what it actually is: NOTHING.  It’s abstract, meant to elicit the phenomenon of culture, rather than any culture in particular.  It’s devoid of actual visual meaning, save what you project into it.  Well thank you Oregon DMV, for blowing my mind.  You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?  Don’t be so damned smug.  Just because you make the plates doesn’t give you free license to play games with them. 

Costume idea: Islamo-hippie woman.  Very simple: just two items needed!
* Burkha
* Burkhinstocks

Well, I had a couple other brainspasms to share but one of them just isn’t worth bothering with and the other one, I just plum forget what it is.  I’ll remember soon enough and I just got me some killer memobooks to write it down in then (thanks sis!).  Remembering things, that’ll be me from now on!  Meantime, sorry, four random bits of lint from the itchy navel of my mind is all you get.  Don’t forget to floss. 

December’s Child

Hey, been partying a bunch and not writing so much, and I’ve also been surprisingly busy at work so there’s no “supplemental blogging” for chuckles this week.  In the meantime, here’s a taste of what you’re missing at my place:

Zach seems to enjoy dreydel games:

Sunday night Z’s favorite playfriends came by to shriek and cavort:

Here’s the man with his blue bear.  NOTHING HAPPENS WITHOUT THE BLUE BEAR.  Make sure you keep a close grip on the blue bear at all times.  Yeah, like that, little man!

Our friend DaBombala makes fuzzy hats and she gave one to Zach.  He looks a bit like a cossack hippie in it, and that’s the way I like it!

Finally, the holiday theme: a menorah of blazing dreydels.  This menorah was my grandpa Herman’s - it’s old old old.  Z figured out the dreydel bit himself.

That’s gonna have to do it for now.  Wish me luck getting through what’s left of the week and I’ll try to throw down some wordosity before I leave for an xmas visit to sis-in-law!

Friday, December 15, 2006

The Death of Civility

Here’s a quick policy rant, just to keep my hand in (as they instructed me upon boarding the tram).  It comes from the frustration I feel upon hearing something I think is wrong, thoughtlessly parroted in the media until its wrongness becomes attenuated and, while not “right,” it becomes an obfuscating factor, obscuring actual accuracy and dulling intellectual vigor.  The promulgation of the mispronunciation “nucular” is one example.  The one that’s got my goat right now is the idea that we may be facing a civil war in Iraq.

This seems to be the great debate: are they in a state of Civil War?  Because, if they’re not having a civil war, we can help them establish peace - but if civil war has broken out, we are entitled to impose order. Or maybe, to advise in the imposition of order by one faction against another.  Actually, maybe it means we should butt the hell out and let the victims of our benevolence fight it out among themselves.  Nobody seems to have a really good consistent position on what it means if they’re having a civil war in Iraq.  And really, I think it’s totally beside the point - because just using that phrase “civil war” seems intellectually dishonest to me.  You can’t have a civil war without a central authority - the “state” - against which the war is fought, and in Iraq, there is no such central authority. The state, if it ever existed since we took out Sadaam, has failed. 

A “state” is a phenomenon of political theory, and I draw heavily on Wikipedia for some of the following details: A state is a set of institutions that possesses the exclusive legitimate authority to make the rules that govern the people in one or more societies, having internal and external sovereignty over a definite territory. The state includes such institutions as the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy, courts, and police.  Super-sociologist Max Weber defined it as “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

There are four main theories of what constitutes a “state”.  Marxist theory sees the state as the apparatus for managing the common interests of the bourgoisie, which will wither away once the need for protection of “private” interests is obviated.  Pluralist theory suggests that the state is just the neutral forum in which competing viewpoints apportion (compete for) power.  The constructive theory of statehood says that a state is formed when certain requirements are met, such as a permanent population, a defined territory, government, capacity to enter into relations with other states.  Finally, institutionalist theory suggests that a state is the institutions that comprise it - legislative bodies, providers of services, judicial and prosecutorial bodies, each of which possesses physical assets, tenured incumbents, budgets and constituencies, and is inextricably insinuated into the lives of those it ostensibly serves.  In this theory, a state can be equated with the objects and people who constitute its tangible expression. 

That’s a nice broad philosophical range we’ve got there.  From Weber’s crude mechanistic definition to the touchie-feeley utopianism of pluralists and back to the simplistic tautology of institutionalism, there’s a lot of ways we can conclude that a given population in the world lives in a “state” (as opposed to a colony or a province or a dependent subdivision or if they’re just wild natives in a state of nature ("free for the taking")). 

Let’s compare these theories with what we’ve got in Iraq.  Certainly, under Sadaam there was central authority, law and order, and territorial unity.  All power flowed from Sadaam, who governed absolutely in internal matters and spoke for the nation on external affairs.  He maintained a functioning judiciary, internal security forces, army, and diplomatic corps.  The population was stable, excepting massacres.  Ordinary Iraqi citizens did not enjoy equal access to the rights and privileges that favored individuals received, but there was a structure in place and no one was fool enough to rock the boat.  The brutal suppression of all unfavored voices was itself proof of a vigorous (though fascisticly undemocratic) state. 

Now, we have now: There is a government that sits in Bagdhad.  I’m not sure what its status is at present but it clearly can’t control what’s going on inside the country.  Without wading through reams of depressing news releases, I know there’s been dreadful looting, graft, kickbacks, misappropriation, and theft of reconstruction funds - by all sides, though the point is that the Iraqi government is obviously incapable of doing anything to stop it.  Iraq now has the fastest-growing refugee population in the world, its displaced populations running from destroyed homes, threats of violence, religious extremism, and economic ruin. 

The city of Bagdhad does not enjoy civil order; neither do any of the other major cities in the nation.  Murders, mayhem, bombings and torture-executions are perpetrated on a daily basis by an ever-expanding list of malefactors.  Some seek political gain, some seek spiritual goals, some seek revenge or money or maybe they just want to satisfy the blood lust that we see in the school shootings and highway sniper attacks and serial murders of prostitutes that we civilized avatars of western culture still seem to endure. 

I don’t pretend to know why there is so much killing going on in Iraq, but I’m pretty sure that there is no single reason for it.  For comparative purposes, we could look at all the killing going on during the US Civil War, and we’d see most of the deaths were battle-related or otherwise martial.  Our War of Independence was a civil war - and it was not distinguished by random bloodshed in all the cities for no discernable purpose.  I’m no expert in this area of history, but has there ever been a civil war declared to exist on the basis of widespread unfocused mob violence without the presence of identifiable opposing forces clashing for specific geopolitical gains? 

If you check good ol’ Wikipedia on the subject of Civil Wars, you’ll find something along the lines that “A civil war is a war in which parties within the same culture, society or nationality fight against each other for the control of political power. Political scientists use two criteria: the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second criterion is that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.  Some civil wars are categorized as revolutions when major societal restructuring is a possible outcome of the conflict. An insurgency, whether successful or not, is likely to be classified as a civil war by some historians if, and only if, organized armies fight conventional battles. Other historians state the criterion for a civil war is that there must be prolonged violence between organized factions or defined regions of a country (conventionally fought or not).”

Okay then, we’ll just apply this to Iraq and see if it fits.  I don’t think it’s fair to say that Kurds, Sunnis and Shiia represent the same culture, society or nationality - the Kurds are ethnically and linguistically diverse, and the Sunni-Shiia rift has been a political fact for almost a millenium.  You can say all the fighters are from the same “country,” in that they’re all in Iraq, except for the significant influence of border-crossing agitators and footsoldiers who are fighting as spiritual mercenaries on behalf of leaders with political agendas.  I am not clear that the purpose of the fighting is to control “the political center,” whatever that means.  I don’t think anybody can really say definitively why they’re all fighting.  It’s clear that well over 1,000 have died in sectarian (and criminal) violence, but I can’t say that it represents “100 per side” because I can’t say what the “sides” are, and most of the deaths are random victims of mass destruction, not members of any “side” at all. 

Iraq may be looking at a potentially major social restructuring, so once the dust settles this fighting might be deemed a revolution - but it will be a long, long time before a “victor” could install a social structure to fulfill the role of a “state,” however we define it.  And this insurgency, as our leaders so often refer to it, does not consist of organized armies or conventional battles.  If you can say the factions in conflict are “organized,” this might support the application of the term “civil war” - but I really think the factions are not organized because there are innumerable factions right now, fighting alongside and against purely criminal and anarchic elements. 

If we get to a point where the country is completely divided between Kurds, Sunni and Shiia, and the fighting is pretty much limited to establishing their respective rights and borders, then we could probably invoke the phrase “civil war” without bending it too much.  But unless someone can lay out the organization of the factions now “warring” with each other, I think there is no basis for calling this a civil war.  There is no effective state against which to fight, and no organization among the fighters, logistically or philosophically.  It’s a goddamn mess, is what it is. 

We in the US have gotten sloppy with our use of the word “war” ever since Viet Nam. Congress never declared that one - it was an executive police action.  Same for Grenada.  I don’t know if we ever actually declared war in 1991 against Iraq, but we definitely didn’t in 2003.  Congress authorized the use of force, that’s all.  We call it a war but it’s an executive action.  Similarly, I keep hearing people calling what’s going in in Iraq a civil war.  I don’t think so.  I don’t even think it’s a war.  I definitely don’t think it’s civil - quite the opposite, it seems that the violence is designed only to destroy order, not to replace it with anything better. 

And most importantly, there is no state against which to fight a civil war: there is no accepted central authority that controls anything throughout Iraq.  Iraq cannot engage in international relations because it cannot fulfil its own duties to its citizens, much less to the international community.  The courts are in thrall to violent fringe groups that execute their own judgment in the streets.  Nothing works.  Children cannot go to school; mothers cannot shop for food.  Risk and death are everywhere.  What was once the nation of Iraq is now, I think, truly a failed state.  The fighting that’s going on there now is the free-for-all that results from a power vacuum. 

We saw it in the Balkans; we see it in Sudan.  There is no reason to put Iraq in a separate category.  Except, of course, it would be an admission that we really screwed the pooch on this one.  And of course, it would be an invitation to all violent factions in the region to increase their efforts at destabilization.  But really, they don’t need to be encouraged, any more than a boulder needs to be instructed how to roll down a mountain.  Eventually it will find its senseless destructive way to the bottom, and whatever you are calling it, you had better get the hell out of its way. 

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Bab Grag

I almost can’t believe that this is a for-real thing.  It’s not quite a mile straight down, but it’s close enough.  I get the jeebies just looking at the artist’s rendition.  They will be cantilevering it out early next year.  If I get there I will give you a review, but if you beat me to it, please let me know what it feels like to be on a structure 4,000 feet above the ground.  If you can wait till the vertigo-induced nausea subsides before we discuss it, that might be better for both of us. 

Today we had food at our monthly departmental meeting in honor of the saturnalia or whatever you’re on the cusp of celebrating this month.  I ate well - very well.  Then I got one each of four of the five varieties of cookies available for dessert.  One of those cookies had walnuts in it.  I’m allergic to them but I figured this was a pretty minimal dose.  For the past five hours my mouth has felt stung and shredded.  I may have an inflated view of my superiority to walnuts.  That one in my cookie was definitely a mutha. 

Finally, since I don’t know a better place to share the joy, this charming shop has been brightening my strolls through the neighborhood lately.  Hot dog giveaways?  Invent your own record and break it?  Just when I think the ‘hood has gotten a little stale… weirdness reasserts itself.  Bless its pointed little head.

That should be enough for me for now.  Thanks for playing.  I’ll see about a “real” post sometime soon.  But till then, I’ve got some beer to drink!

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

a sturdy solution for the Bariatric individual

The ergonomic chair for the employee who will crush anything else!  What scares me is the height range - down to 5’4”, and the weight range - up to 600 lbs.  You’re really talking about a human wrecking ball at that point.  Steel bracing!  Welded arm brackets!  The philosophers spake truly when they told us that one big and tall chair does not fit all.  (from Merriam-Webster on line: Main Entry: bar·iat·ric: relating to or specializing in the treatment of obesity.  This must be an ADA compliance product.  It’s a strange and wonderful world we live in....)

Monday, December 11, 2006

Silver Spoons

It’s not that often that I get the yen for ice cream, honestly.  I usually prefer something less cream-based.  The ice is fine, I’m fine with the ice.  But the cream usually winds up feeling kind of heavy to me, and leaves me feeling overdense.  It’s delicious, sure, and feels great while I’m eating it - but all things being equal, I’d go for a nice bread pudding or a fruit tart. 

I know that this admission probably amazes, or even shocks, you - indeed, you may not even be comfortable reading any further.  Let me reassure you: I’m not a hater.  There is room in my heart for all the desserts, and this here is all about loving the ice cream experience.  Optimizing it.  In fact, I’ve been optimizing my ass off for two days straight now, and I never want to stop.  The key was the sundae straw. 

I learned of the sundae straw at age 8 or 10 or so at Nana’s place in Ohio.  Not grandpa’s place, Nana’s: the kitchen.  She had this drawer full of wonderful old kitchen toys, and among them was this set of long thin silver straws with little leaf-like spoons at the bottom.  If you got some really cold root beer on a really hot day - and damn but Lima Ohio had both of those in abundance in the summertime - and you plopped in some ice cream that wasn’t totally frozen solid, you’d get a killer float.  Little ice crystals would grow on the yielding spheres of ice cream, creating food in a fugue state between solid and liquid, just melting into itself as the root beer goes thick with dense foam and creamy butterfat.... Oh man, it’s a good way to have ice cream.  And then you had the refined slender aperture of the straw, and the sweet little spoon that’s so tiny you need lots of spoonfuls to finish the job, and when you lick it clean it’s got those little scalloped edges and etched veins, and those impenetrable imprints on the back, and the straw itself so cold and weighty in your fingers....

I remember the childhood visit to the grandparents’ place on which I discovered the straws, and then, a year or two later, a trip back to visit the straws again.  Then, nothing.  I didn’t see them for years - so many years that they slipped from my recollection.  I rarely thought of the sundae straws, and when they came to mind I misrecalled where I’d found them.  A friend’s house?  Antique shop?  England?  They were moving into the realm of legend for me. 

So anyway, I lost track of the sundae straws - till I got a box of Nana’s things after she passed.  I got a bunch of cool stuff, some stuff that may once have been cool but no longer was, and some stuff that goes way beyond cool: the chrome deco menorah, the jumbo yellow-glass martini set, and one sundae straw.  In my hands again.  God, it felt good.  Just exactly as I recalled - slender, strong, delicate, ingenious.  We’d finally found each other.  It had finally come home to me. 

That was about two years ago.  We use most everything we still keep from Nana - goblets and fancy plates and lots of handy little items.  But I somehow completely failed to utilize the sundae straw.  It wasn’t that I wanted to protect it or save it - that would imply, at least, some conscious agency, the quashing of an active desire.  Rather, it just didn’t occur to me to use the damn thing.  It sat in a drawer and I never thought to myself, “I’ll make a root beer float and whip out my straw and break that bad boy in.” I had no such thoughts at all.  I’m just not a big ice cream eater.  I’m sorry.

But the first step to recovery is admitting the problem, and somehow I seem to have leapt that hurdle.  A few nights ago I’d been a bit more helpful around the house than usual, so Kel asked what she could do for me in return.  Myriad excellent responses chased each other around inside my head, but the one that popped out, almost without my even thinking, was, “Stuff for a root beer float.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  Cold root beer and good vanilla ice cream.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  See you when the baby’s down.” Then she went out shopping while I went in to strip, bathe, dry, lotion, and diaper the baby, clothe him in pajamas, read him a few small books and fed him a cup of milk, and then finally stuff him in his crib.  Easy as pie.  Ice cream pie. 

By the time I emerged from the child’s sleeping chamber, all I’d asked for had been produced for me.  I pulled down one of the big green goblets and a nice silver scoop, and set about my business - filling a 24-ounce goblet one-third of the way with ice cream.  Then I pulled out a nostalgically-shaped plastic bottle of frosty-mug-tasting root beer, cracked it open and filled my dessert tureen on up with soda and velvety foam.  I scooped off some foam, ate it from my silver spoon.  It was both foamylicious and creamtastic.  I finished the pour and took a full-on silverstraw swig of the nectar borne of my efforts.  I felt the soda rising in the channel of the straw, felt the silver go cold in my hands as soon as the liquid passed through it.  It was just as good as ever.  I gulped it down, sipped up some more, and then scooped a dollop of ice cream from a mass that floated brazenly in the foam.  The spoon encountered little resistance as it pierced the thin shell of ice crystals that had already formed, crystals that shattered delightfully in my mouth as I wantonly consumed the ice cream, drawing repeatedly on the straw and devouring spoonful after spoonful till I awoke from gluttonous reverie to find an empty goblet in my hands, its moist interior a map of bygone gratification.  My ice cream experience had been everything I could have dreamed.  I had achieved ice cream actualization. 

I’ve done a sundae spoon RBF a couple more times since then.  Each time was the same: divine.  I don’t eat ice cream often, but now I know that, when I do, I can really maximize the experience.  And sure, the Container Store is now selling these fabulous ice cream enhancement devices.  I’m sure they work fine.  But they can’t possibly hold a candle to Nana’s own silver sundae straws.

Friday, December 08, 2006

Saqtorque Antidote

Yesterday I splurged on myself and got a 15 minute chair massage across the street from my office.  It was a powerful, deep tissue assault on my knotty delts, and I’ve needed it for a long time.  The office was mellow and played good music.  I’m really glad I went.  In honor of the marginal improvement in my spinal condition, here’s a recent screed about my dorsal region:

I’ve been in a quandary, frankly, about the messenger bag.  It’s a standby: familiar, reliable, nigh indestructible.  I know how to hide things in it, and where it hides things.  I know how to swing it up to my shoulder with a freewheeling panache that gives me great satisfaction…. But lately, that’s where the trouble has been starting.

The bag’s ability to carry heavy loads has encouraged me to, well, carry heavy loads, and the bag is often sufficient laden to leave me feeling, at either end of my bus-borne commute, rather scoliotic.  When I hang all that weight on one shoulder, letting it dangle next to the opposite hip, the torque tweaks my spine – a classic torque-tweak, if you’re keeping track. The point is, I’m literally getting bent out of shape by my own messenger bag, my faithful helpmate, my inseparable pal.  Et tu, Timbuktu?

It wasn’t till a recent morning that I figured out an antidote.  The smart solution, of course, is to carry less, and I have a plan for that, oh yes, and a good one.  But for now, before I can put that plan into effect, I have this – an antidote.  It’s significantly better than nothing.  In fact, in some ways, it’s better than anything. 

It was hell morning for Kelly.  For any number of excellent reasons she had to be at work as early as possible, so she just attended to that and I got Z and me together and out the door later on.  I woke him, changed him (twice), got him fed and dressed and kept him out of trouble while I did the same for myself, with one additional changing thrown in….

And then we bundled into jackets and went out to wait for the bus.  I held Zach in my right arm, the bag was slung over my left shoulder. They weren’t quite balanced counterweights, but they offset each other fairly well.  I didn’t really notice, though, because the bus came quickly.

We sat down and rode six blocks, and then got off to walk two-up-two-over to daycare.  This was far enough for me to notice the extra weight, but I noticed it in a pleasantly unexpected way: After a couple of blocks I got the hang of playing the weight of the baby off the weight of the bag.  I didn’t feel torqued.  I felt engaged by the forty-five extra pounds on my frame; they were pretty well distributed.  My shoulders and hips creaked into synch again.  It felt good.

I think it somewhat startled Zach as I began to stretch a little into this new orthopedic orientation and my back popped and clunked audibly back into alignment.  It did make a pretty big thunk, I have to admit.  But right afterwards I just hugged him a little more closely and carried him a little higher, and I think he was cool with it.  It was definitely cool with me.  By the time we got to his day care, I was having a bit of a revelation: If I’m carrying so much crap around with me that it’s turning me into a human corkscrew, I have an antidote.  I should lift up my son and hold him close to me for a while.  That will set me right in no time flat. 

Have a good weekend.  I know I will.  Plenty more to post, just hard to find the time to get it up here...

Monday, December 04, 2006

FREAK YOURSELF OUT! Volume 1 - The Bathroom Nebula

I come crawling to you now out the back end of a very nice weekend.  I did a bunch of clothes shopping (with surprising success), ate good food and did a little home cookin’, and had some great times with Zach.  Tomorrow I think I’ll be having a good day again, but today I’m just sort of under the weather and I stayed home to gather my strength.  Zach took the opportunity to be very high-maintenance, tearing the place apart and refusing to eat when appropriate, or to nap, or PLEASE little man take it easy for a few… anyway he’s been forced into a nap now and my head is only barely spinning, which of course puts me in mind to return again to a brand new game that I think is best called, “FREAK YOURSELF OUT!” Today’s installment is called, Floating in Space in the Middle of Your Bathroom.  It’s easy and it’s fun.  Come on, I’ll walk you through it!

I did this as one of a variety of recreational perception experiments I undertook in college.  This one is distinguished not only in that it is suitable for publication, but also in that it was particularly compelling on a sensory level. But you should judge for yourselves.

You need a smallish, tidy, totally light-tight room, and about two dozen (at least!) of those long flexible tubes with the glow goo in ‘em.  Not the big thick chunky ones – the long flexible ones, 15 to 18 inches long, are what you want.  You know the ones I mean, you see kids and ravers use them as necklaces or bracelets.  They usually glow green but you can probably find other colors if you look around.  Multi-color sounds cool.  Back in my day we only had green, and we thought it worked just fine.  Then again, we had to walk 3 miles through snowdrifts just to use the Xbox.  Those were hard times. 

Okay, you’ve got your freakout supplies.  From here on, move fast - the glow goo loses intensity every second, so you don’t want to dawdle.  It might help to keep the tubes in a freezer for as long as possible.  I don’t know.  Just don’t waste time.  Freakout waits for no man. 

Go to your tidy little room with some wide dark tape and clean out the room as much as possible - all the clothes, all the stuff on the walls, the shower curtain, the tubes of unguents and bottles of poo (sham or authentic) - give yourself a nice clean canvas.  Use the tape to block all possible outside light sources; use heavy paper to tape over the windows if there are any.  Once you’ve taped over everything else, get your glowtubes and then close the door and tape around the edges of the doorway.  Test it with the lights off a few times - let your eyes get used to the utter blackness and then see if any glimmer of light seeps through at all. Cover every chink. It’s the key to ensuring a convincing and thorough freakout - and that’s why we’re here, people.  Try to keep focused. 

Now, in your light-sealed room, turn on a bright light, stand one good arms-reach away from the lightswitch, and cut the ends off the gootubes.  Hold the tubes by the uncut end and twirl them around in all directions so they spill their contents everywhere.  Do a couple at a time.  Really spatter the place with glowing goo - ceiling, floor, all the walls.  Try not to get it in your eyes, and maybe I should have warned you earlier that it might stain your clothes, but whatever.  A good freakout demands sacrifice.  If you don’t have a flawless yearling or an ephah of new barley, the least you can give up is a t-shirt.  The freak gods demand it. 

The important thing is, stand still.  Do not touch the walls; do not smear the floor.  Try not to move at all - except to turn off the light.  And thus the freakout begins:

The goo will have emerged from the tubes in drops of varying size, generally forming circular spots on every surface of the room.  The dots will be sufficiently similar in shape that your mind, in the absence of competing cues, will try to perceive them as effectively identical.  They’ll be of different sizes, though, and the quick-fading goo will show up with more intensity in fresher spatters, so different spots will be larger or smaller, and will shine with different degrees of brightness. And in response to all that, your mind will interpolate distances and obscurities to account for the unexplained variations. 

What I’m saying is, you’ll think you’re seeing a bunch of identical dots at widely varying distances, occasionally hidden by translucent clouds.  The walls and ceiling and floor will seem to disappear in a sea of stars.  Your heart wants to shoot into your throat but you’re comfortably standing, motionless, floating in deep space as if it were your own damn bathroom or something. So long as you don’t move, the illusion is quite amazing.

Of course, once you move even a little, the parallax receptors built into your stereoscopic skull will kick in and even a miniscule violation of the rules of perception will shatter the illusion.  Plus, it doesn’t last long.  As soon as the goo hits open air it starts fading.  You need to move fast, as I mentioned before - cut, spatter, kill the lights and float through space for a minute or two.  I have no idea if it’s hideously toxic, carcinogenic, a gold-plated invitation to death. This might be the most foolhardy suggestion anyone ever gives you.  But I can only tell you, in response: something this cool is totally worth it.

Now go into the wide, wide world and freak yourself out.  If you’ve got any other ideas how to do so, I warmly invite you to share them.  It’s been a while since I got a good new freakout to enjoy.