Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Merkan Measures, or Take Me to Your Liter

Okay, here’s a little rant I’ve been saving up for a while, and since tomorrow is applications deadline day and I’ll be basically booked solid from then till October, this is a good time to let loose: If US opinion is relevant at all to the world-wide acceptance of metric standards, the metric system is as dead as Gabriel Mouton, the Gallic vicar who invented it in the 17th century.  We, as a nation, reject metricosity, despite having the world’s first decimal currency system, and it’s for a very simple reason: we don’t like French stuff.  From Citroens to citrons, from champagne to Catherine DeNeuve, we’ve had a crawful of their Ypres and hors de combat and all that French stuff they’re always going on about.  We make our own wine and cheese, thank you.  Julia Child kicked their asses au cuisine, and this great country is itching to reject anything with a frenchy name out of hand. 

Of course, this attitude is shortsighted and silly.  I mean, DeNeuve was a total hottie.  And as for metric measures, it’s easier to divide and multiply by (um, carry the three and add the remainder) TEN, than it is to do the “times twelve is feet, times three is yards, times whatever is a mile and don’t get me started on ounces…” stuff we go through.  I sort of wish that foreign speedometers didn’t freak me out with the suggestion I’m going 1.6 times faster than I thought I was.  Also, there are enough things that are sold in grams that it might make sense to remove the taint of drug sale terminology from that word.  It’s all about global harmony, people – despite our inbred distrust of what’s left of Charlemagne’s crib.  And in the interest of shrinking our rancid angry world so we can hate each other that much more conveniently, I have put my powerful brains to work on solving the US inertia on that whole metric deal.

The problem, of course, is that the words are all too, well, European.  Meter (or, more damningly, “metre”)?  Litre?  Hectare?  What the hectare do they expect of us?  In the past we have accepted, reluctantly, French words like fuselage, chauffeur and ordurv, but I think that’s about our limit.  They snuck those in when we were sleeping off that fine, fine California Zinfandel binge.  Now that we’re not only awake but seriously hung over, we are not going to let any more eurospeak inveigle its way into the purity of the American tongue. 

So, if this country is going to embrace the rest of the world’s measurement system, I think the only solution is to treat it as if we invented it - much as Russia did with basketball, or the Mayans with chocolate and tearing out people’s hearts.  If we like the sound of the terminology we invent for it, we’ll use it gladly and ignore the confusion.  If we’re stuck with goofball stuff like “centigrade” or “Celsius,” we’ll just revert to whatever we’re most used to. 

SO: I have, at no small expense (that is to say, no expense at all), invented ‘Merkan names for units of metric measurement. I demand that these be promulgated and utilized nationwide, preferably before lunch.  If necessary, lunch can be postponed for this purpose. 

First, the Metric system is the wrong name.  It’s the Merkan system of measurement, as in, “U-nited Statesuh Merka.” Got it?  Okay.

Now, the first challenge was the most basic unit of measurement.  Meter/re just reeks of low-quality eurodiesel and unshaved armpits.  And don’t give me that crap about how “meter” is based on the Greek word “metron.” If we’re blowing off the French, why do you think we’d make special allowance for Greeks?  Other than providing handy geographic nicknames for some of the more popular sexual variations, what have either of them done for us lately?  Meter just don’t cut it.  So what’s a more acceptable, Merkan alternative?  It’s so obvious – nothing is more Merkan than an eagle.  So, instead of meters, the basic unit of linear measurement would be an Eagle.  This then gives us the following taxonomy:

* Meter: Eagle
* Centimeter: Beetle (smaller but can still fly)
* Millimeter: Mite
* Kilometer: Condor

Taking this as a pattern, we can reform liquid measure as follows:

* Liter: Tuna
* Centiliter: Bass
* Millimeter: Guppy
* Kiloliter: Shamu

Weights are, of course, subject to similar treatment.  In this country, “gram” means a cracker that stops self-abuse.  This is inappropriate and offensive to those who wish merely to weigh things without invoking prurient excesses.  (I’m sure such people are out there.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.) So, what is a more suitable category of terms than the name of those dirty, dirty crackers?  Firearms and ordnance, naturally.  That’s a wholesome Merkan subject all right.  So that gives us:

* Gram: Cartridge
* Centigram: Pellet
* Milligram: Shot
* Kilogram: Bandolier (yeah, that one’s sort of viva-Zapata Mexican, but I think we can still get away with it under NAFTA)

Temperatures are pretty simple.  There’s only one word for them: centigrade, or Celsius, which is two words, and isn’t that just French?  Let’s cut it down to something that all Merkans can relate to: NOTCHES.  It’s two Notches below zero.  It’s gonna get up to 15 Notches today.  (If things are really hot, we might want to adjust it to “Nachos.” Maybe with jalapeños.)

One of the real benefits of the Merkan system is that you can just add a syllable to any basic unit of measurement to make it a power of ten bigger or smaller.  However, instead of relying blindly on the Latinate prefixes that have dogged the metric system since at least earlier today, I suggest getting rid of all the “millis,” “centis,” “decis” and such.  And don’t give me any crap about replacing Millis with Vanillis.  Go and love the ‘80s on your own time.  Instead, let’s use these modifiers:

* 10 of anything: a Buncha
* 100 of anything: a Bucka
* 1000 of anything: a _____ Large
* 1/10th of anything: a Dima
* 1/100th of anything: a Centa (not the Frenchy version – it’s from the penny, or cent)
* 1/1000th: A Mini

Finally, there are two last measures that require Merkanization – ones we don’t use as often but that are nonetheless very important.  Land area is now measured here in acres or square feet, which is a pretty confusing way to describe it.  Metric-heads describe land area in terms of “hectares,” which to my ear is not much better.  I suggest changing it to “Arbuckles.” It’s a nice friendly word with the subtlest suggestion of landmass. 

And of course, there’s the infamous Newton – not a measure of figs, but of force.  A Newton is the amount of force needed to move a 1 Bandolier weight a distance of one Eagle per second squared (see how this stuff just flows like melted butter off a hot beret?).  This terminology is not quite as tainted as most metric names, because Isaac Newton was English and we have less trouble with them, even though they tend to add superfluous “u”s everywhere and Isaac Newton himself was a paranoid alchemist who died a virgin.  I don’t need that mess in my physics, so let’s sever the euro-ties here too.  What is the best name for a unit of force, such that all Merkans would be not only proud to use it but would go out of their way to fit it into conversation?  Only one answer comes close, and it’s a surefire winner: the BAUER.  Use it henceforth or the terrorists will have already won. 

Class dismissed. 

Monday, January 29, 2007

Good Morning, Already

It’s a really low-key monday morning home with a slightly feverish zach, who’s getting much more than his RDA of video this morning in an effort to keep him resting quietly.  Meantime I don’t think I can do a half-hour of Clifford without a lot more bourbon and since I technically have to go to work by 1 today I think I’ll just take this moment to offer up a few random portions of pasta fazul:

I noticed in the Seattle airport about a month ago, the recorded message they kept repeating for us: “Unattended baggage may be subject to search, inspection, damage and removal.” I kept hoping I’d see it happen: a portmanteau abandoned at the gate, surrounded by TSA officials in their kevlar mumus, first searching it - looking at it very carefully, inside and out; then inspecting it, which is different how exactly?; then damaging it, hopefully with extreme prejudice; and then, with stony faces and somber ceremony, removing it.  I will have to route more travel through SeaTac so that I can try to catch the floor show someday.

When I last went out to buy clothes, I tried on something that Old Navy was calling “painter’s pants.” These were blue jeans with some arrangement of pockets or other, and they hung a bit loosely on me, but the thing I couldn’t help but notice was how they crept up my crevasse.  As soon as I took a step in any direction, these pants were Melvining me in a vigorously intimate way.  From this I deduce that Painter’s Pants are pants that are designed, for some reason, to ride up my butt.  I anticipate with dread the introduction of Plumber’s Pants. 

Upon watching V for Vendetta with Kelly a few weeks ago:
me: “People who were really into the graphic novel apparently resented the love-interest aspect.”
kel: “People who were really into the graphic novel probably resent love.”

And finally, because Clifford will be ending so terribly soon: The translation of this poem is faithfully transcribed as inscribed on the pagoda pavillion on the island in Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park:
Two sister cities were made, side by side and hand in hand, is people’s well-being thus made.
Residing in this wide world, cooperating closely from our hearts, the universal brotherhood is thus made.
A scenic spot in USA for ascending remained, easterly coming culture, a real friend can not be wanting in this wide world.
A great ocean on ROC for crossing lain, westerly looking from Golden Gate, the world although so wide becomes as near as the neighborhood.
Mayor of Taipei ROC; Speaker of Taipai City Council ROC

Have a good monday.  a real friend can not be wanting in this wide world. 

Friday, January 26, 2007

Nuggets and Cootfarts

I’ve wanted to get another post up for days – that last one was only supposed to be #1 for a day or so.  Now it’s Friday and I’m scrambling to get a weekend-friendly nugget in place for your discriminating delectation.  And what I’ve got, really, is just a few weirdo bits of thought shrapnel that I am having trouble getting control over.  I actually wrote them down yesterday but I can’t figure out where now.  It was, like, four things worth wasting your time making you read.  Damned if I know what they were anymore. 

So instead I’m going to try a little exercise.  There’s this incident that was so funny when it happened that I sort of blacked out a little with laughter, and so did Kel, who’s usually more phlegmatic about such matters.  Since then we’ve both mentioned it to each other several times with unbounded hilarity.  But it’s not the kind of story you can easily tell someone.  Kel tried a few weeks ago, she says, but it sort of flopped.  So here’s my challenge: can I make this story even partly as funny in words as it was in life?

We were out by a nice lake in the park, one with long lazy lawns leading down to sculpted concrete banks.  Zach was chasing geese up the hill, and I had wandered down a few feet closer to the water.  Before me by the lakeside dawdled a few random ducks, a widgeon or two, and a desultory coot, one of those little mini-ducks all in black with a scrawny white beak.  They have feet that are not so much webbed as just kind of flattened out, and they tend to waddle right up behind their larger waterfowl brethren to scam the odd morsel of pondscum or whatever it is they eat. 

So that’s the set-up: me on a bucolic sloping lawn, with Kel and Zach playing a few yards up the hill from me, and more lawn and the lake in front of me.  I gazed over the rippled water, my mind blissfully empty.  A coot strolled up onto the grass near the lake, settling in on a spot directly in line with Kelly and me.  I serenely let the bird’s presence enter my consciousness.  It lethargically opened its beak, and then it sounded off with a very wet, rattly, rasping buzz of a quack.  It sounded, as Big Rodney once famously described, like somebody stepped on a duck.  More than that, it sounded wretchedly biological, a bilgebog honking that blasted loudly and rudely through the idyllic calm of the afternoon.

Horrified, I looked up the hill to Kelly – who immediately turned to face me, shocked.  I stood, gaping silently, on the grass.  I was between Kelly and the coot; she couldn’t even see it.  It didn’t sound like the kind of noise that would come out of a coot anyway.  It sounded a lot more like human posterior demethanization.  I stood accused, and, per ancient rime, I could not deny.  I could only helplessly turn and point desperately with both hands to the inoffensive little coot that sat on the lawn behind me, insensible to my discomfiture, silent as deadliness. 

Kel wasn’t buying it and smirked skeptically at me.  I turned back to the coot and mentally implored it to do something – anything - to vindicate my deflection of responsibility for that fabulously flatulent sound.  The coot looked at me with the cool detachment of a native watching a tourist get lost, and then, mercifully, it pulled back its head and quacked again – another low floppy noise, digestive and echoless.  I turned again to Kel – she surveyed the coot with surprise and amusement.  She looked back to me; I visibly hove a sigh of relief.  Then we both cracked up.  The coot didn’t seem to get the joke. 

And that’s the cootfart story.  I hope it conveys some little bit of how goddamn funny it was when it happened.  Or maybe you just had to be there.  Regardless, it was fun to try to write it up.  And in the meantime I found my notes from yesterday, so here are the points I wanted to raise:

1) I wrote a post a few weeks ago about all the spam I got in one weekend at work.  I’m now getting spam comments on that post.  I am inclined to leave them there for ironic purposes, though I usually clear such garbage out as quick as I find it.  My question to you, MultiNet InterWob: Do I run any risk leaving it there?

2) Strange career paths: Watching 24, it seems incredible to me that Hamri Al Assad, the erstwhile-evil terrorist mastermind now brokering peace at the cusp of nuclear catastrophe, started his career as the medical officer on the Deep Space 9 station?  Doesn’t that blow your mind?  Similarly, did everyone else already know that when Moses appears on South Park, it’s TRON ? 

3) (cootfart)

4) Finally, after centuries of the Wankel Rotary Engine and pornographic colorforms and caffeinated donuts, science has finally produced something useful: an actual ray gun!  I am thrilled to death, or to the point that I feel I am about to burst into flames spontaneously.  This initial model is a tad bigger than the ones I remember from the comix.  However, if you’re going to try to disperse a street full of angry protesters, you might want to have a nice big truck to stand on when you irradiate them.  There’s no reason to sink to their level while you turn them into screaming, weapon-dropping weaklings.  Democracy can and will prevail – especially now that it’s being promulgated by truck-mounted ray guns!

Okay, so that’s enough goodies for you.  I don’t want to spoil your weekend.  Coming up later, here on the Chucklehut: made-up names, presidio ghosts, and the rude boy on the bus.  Don’t miss a single installment! 

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

begin the begin: finally it ends, with goddam part THREE

yeah yeah yeah I’m still on about new crap, as if I’m the only blog-enabled protein tube in the contiguous hinterlands that’s ever started anything.  but with me it’s different.  because I said so.  shut up.  to wit:

And further on the topic of personal investiture and divestiture: I finally threw away about four expired years. The bulk of this material was a series of binders of annual day planner pages I’ve never looked at since I bound them away in their respective turn, but the part that really felt good was the time sheet file.  Somehow I never looked at those squat brown calendar binders but I always noticed that stack of time sheets every time I opened my main desk drawer. 

Though I’m ostensibly on salary, I still fill out bi-weekly timesheets to account for my vacation time and sick hours and such.  They’re classic NCR forms – press down hard for your automatic duplicate.  I’ve gotten a dupe for every timecard I’ve filled out since I started my job in aught-one, and stored each and every one of those cards in a hanging folder in my desk.  That means over 100 heavily chem-treated slips of yellow paper have built up in that folder, each one representing a precious investment of my scarce personal availability.  Inscrutable notations connect back to blissful weekends, miserable illnesses, serious trips for serious purposes and a nice visit to Korea to meet my son. If I were to cross-reference those time cards against my calendar (and possibly my bank register) I’d have a pretty decent diary.

The thing is, I have a pretty decent diary already and you’re reading it now.  I finally got rid of those calendar sheets for most of those years without prejudice to my better interests, and frankly I am not interested in reconstructing my time-off usage from 2003.  There’s just no point.  It isn’t going to happen. 

Those time slips represent accurate but irrelevant information.  Unfortunately, that’s the sort of information it’s easy for me to acquire and hard for me to disgorge - until now. 

For yea, I have yanked forth the file of defunct time cards and I have purged it of all materials predating last year.  The folder has shrunk form 2 or 3 inches thick to a centimeter or maybe less.  And yes, in this case, shrinkage is good.  It represents freedom from a slavish fascination with the retrospect – cleaving to the past on the vague suspicion it may someday be the key to the future.  But doing so kept my focus too much behind me, and my efforts toward progress were diffused and weakened by the ever-increasing litany of expired days I dragged in my wake.  Each time I opened that drawer, that grave of days seemed to swell up and overwhelm me.  Each new sheet I filed there tied back inextricably to every sheet that preceded it, creating a merciless inevitability of both future and past. 

By throwing away those records of bygone time, I feel that I’ll be able to commit to the days yet to come with a singleness of purpose that just wasn’t there when so many months of my life squatted, mocking me, from inside my desk.  It’s about time I took back my free will and random agency.  My time is not a set of lockstep links, stretching drearily from the creation to my need to take a half personal day for a visit to potential preschools for Zach.  Rather, I make of my time what I see fit.  What’s done is done.  And now, to the extent I didn’t need it, it’s gone. 

But wait there’s more: In my office building we have inexplicably oppressive security.  Honestly, I don’t get it – certainly, there are sensitive records and computers scattered around, but I don’t see why I need to use an ID card three times just to get to my desk.  I can’t even pee without my ID card.  Well, I could, but I’d be stuck there - I wouldn’t be able to get back to my desk.  At my building, your ID badge is your only way anywhere.  With it you can go from the mailroom off the lobby all the way to the gleaming 10th floor lunchroom.  Without it you’ll be lucky to reach your floor on the elevator, but you won’t get any farther than that unless you call someone to let you in.  Assuming they’re still around.  The point is, don’t go out without your card. 

That’s been a challenge for me because I can be so absent- minded. Oh yes I can, don’t even be that way.  I remember everything – just eventually, not always at the most opportune moment.  It can take me three or for shots before I can actually leave the house with everything I need.  I’m entirely capable of losing anything that’s not physically attached to my person – and even then it can be a toss-up.  So my ID card has had to become part of my basic costume or it would get left behind at any number of inconvenient times.  I’d arrive in the morning, toss my card on my desk, get up for a cuppa corporate joe, and wind up stuck out in the elevator lobby like some frathouse pledge wearing granny panties and soaked in karo syrup.  The card is in use too much to be secreted anywhere too obscure on my person, which is where it would be safest.  It has to be accessible but not so that I am at risk of leaving it behind me. 

Till lately that has meant tying it by a slender silver chain to my belt loop. From there the card gets slipped into a pants pocket and is always ready at a moment’s notice, or dangles by my knees when I don’t put it properly away.  I cannot walk away from it any more than I can walk away from my pants, and I’m not saying that’s never happened, but it’s rare.  The chain became as much a part of my daily dress as my shoes or my wristwatch.  Its presence comforted me and gave me confidence.  It swung low, like a delicate fob, yet it girded me.  Loinwise, I mean. 

This year, though, I’ve already snapped the little grommet in my card through which the chain passes.  That busted grommet means I can’t leash my ID badge to my own hip anymore.  That, in turn, means that I’ve got to start taking responsibility for my own ID badge. It’s a small thing – I still keep it in my pocket, just without the chain.  Sometimes I have to search for it a little; I’ve even left it at my desk twice already.  But in general, I don’t.  In general, I have it with me when I need it.  Plus, I don’t have a chain dangling at my crotch all the time anymore.  What once had seemed slightly fobbish had started feeling distinctly more foppish.  That silver strand was making me feel self-conscious.  Sometimes if I went out after work I’d forget it was still on me until I suddenly realized that it had gone from office expedient to inadvertent fashion statement.  That chain had begun to chafe. 

Well, just as it was really getting to bind me, I’ve cut myself loose of my ID leash.  Of course, not only does that properly render my habiliments less chainey and ostentatious, it also leaves me with an unfettered ID.  That seems to me like a sound psychological orientation, whatever else it may mean in the long run.  In the short run, I predict a downturn in chain-yanking in the general vicinity of my trousers.  And is that such a bad thing?

And finally: I don’t wear much in the way of accessories, but I do wear a watch.  I have always keyed in on matters chronological and I feel naked without a timepiece strapped to my wrist.  I’ve got a sweet collection of nice watches that require some sort of repair or other and which, consequently, I don’t wear anymore.  I just keep them, and wear my cheapie replacement. It’s a great wristwatch because it shows the day and date, has a stopwatch, is possessed of sofistikated stylin’, and - here’s the key – cost me a cool $20.  Yes, I’m all about the lo-cost timepiece.  I wore my budget chronometer with pride. 

That is, until I noticed the rash.  After two weeks with the new cheap replacement watch I got late last year, I couldn’t help noticing that my left wrist was all broken out and itchy and angry-looking. Reluctantly suspicious, I tried a little experiment – switching the watch to my right wrist for a week.  That felt weird and required some mental reconditioning, but more to the point, it produced affirmative experimental results: the rash on my left wrist slowly healed up and my right wrist (the “control wrist,” though not for the obvious reason) got all lumpy and scabrous and infratweaked.  The results admit no argument – I’m allergic to my own wristwatch. 

That’s left me going out watchless now for a few weeks, and I must say – it’s been surprisingly okay. There’s usually a clock somewhere if I need one badly enough, and my cellphone tells time too.  I’m learning that I’m not really missing out on anything by my watchlessness.  After all those years of watchitude, it may be time for me to move on to the next phase, unsynchronized and strapless.  It’s one more new frontier to explore this new year – the untracked realms of uncounted hours.  I have plenty of those now ahead of me, and I’d like to think I’ll find a way to make decent use of most of them – at first, anyway.  After the new year turns into just “the year,” though, in a week or three, all bets are off. 

Dang, that was enough of a new beginning for a couple of years at least.  I’m spent.  Bring me a mojito and a foot massage, and I’ll be back later with something pithier.  Perhaps, also, more vinegaraceous, but I’m not making any promises. 

Friday, January 19, 2007

Begin the Begin: In Medias Res - continuing what we begun yesterwhen….

I started this yesterday – a list of beginnings for this still-fresh year.  Let’s continue, shall we?

* Which brings me to my bag.  I’ve whined here before about it being too heavy, and eventually – late last year – I determined to do something about it.  What, you may ask? Some basic housecleaning: I stopped carrying three extra notebooks and two memo pads I didn’t need around me every minute of every day, several old publications I once thought would be handy but which had ultimately proven otherwise, and one hell of a lot of random extra dayplanner chazzerai.  As a result, the bag that used to torque my spine into a Twizzler on a twice-daily basis is now often so light and understuffed that it actually feels wrong, as if I’ve forgotten something important like a detonator or my spleen or something.  (Perhaps I should be watching less 24 and Scrubs?) But no, I’ve got everything that I actually need – and nothing, for a change, that I don’t.  The bag rests lightly on my shoulder and I have taken to carrying a clipboard in it to ensure that it maintains some semblance of its proper shape.  Despite that it can hold the world, I have opted to carry in it only the necessities.  Let me tell you, that feels good. Weird, but good. 

* And furthermore: We scaled back last year in a significant – but only partial – way: we switched out our nice Danish dining table for a sort of scruffy little round café table.  I think it’s led to less lifedross getting warehoused in the dining room, and more meals spent around the dining table – plus, it gives Z more room to play in the front of the house.  It opens up the space and makes it more useful to us all.  We’ve embraced the change with no hesitation - except, of course, we couldn’t bear to get rid of the old table.  What if we needed it back suddenly, like for one of those expected spontaneous dinner party? It’s so much nicer than the one we’re using now…. I haven’t been able to stomach the idea of just jettisoning it so it’s been propped up in pieces against a wall in the study lo these several months.  I’ve been nervous it’d fall over but we didn’t have a better place for it.  That room was already a jumble of projects and piles, so one more didn’t really bring it down too much farther.

For the new year we’re turning that around.  I went and reassembled that ol’ dining table right there in the study and turned it into a project table.  Phased-out toys now hide beneath it, books to be shelved teeter atop it, and the room takes a more coherent shape around it.  It looks good in there with the table in the corner.  That large piece of furniture has gone from being an encumbrance to an eyesore to an anchor for a newly-functional space.  I didn’t have to give up anything, and I have already gained so much.  Thus may it be for the entirety of this year, though somehow I doubt it. 

* Yet additionally: It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to think of myself as a bike rider.  It’s just been too damn long since I put in the necessary saddle hours.  I used to ride a lot; my grotesquely hock-like calves bear witness to the miles of blacktop I covered in my youth.  Back then the bike was my escape, my release, my meditation.  I rode it like a hamster on a treadmill.  And then, later, up here – the trail work, Bolinas and Railroad Grade and all those rugged little headlands loops on the mountain bike… I sat tall in the saddle and I knew how to cut my turns. 

It’s been years, though, since I’ve put in any serious time on my bike.  I broke my wrist in a bike accident not too long after upgrading to a new ride and now, five years later, it still seems pretty damn new.  I hardly feel that I’ve even properly broken it in (though the opposite, I suppose, is true enough).  One problem has been that, since my accident, the bike’s seemed a little out of tune.  It was just one shifter, really – it wasn’t getting me into my small crank.  Though it seemed like a little problem, it got rapidly bigger as the hills got steeper.  Everything else seemed fine; it was just that one little thing that seemed wrong.  So I took the philosopher’s tactic: I did nothing.  I just avoided riding that bike.  For months.  Or, as it turned out, years. 

This is not just lame because a tiny simple adjustment would have fixed everything.  It’s particularly lame because I actually own a book that explains how to make that repair, using clear simple language and large photographs.  I just never dethroned myself and made the effort to put the information I possessed to practical use. 

This year, though, began with a great stride forward, in the form of a small simple bike repair.  It required one Phillips-head screwdriver and took almost thirty seconds to complete.  I have yet to test my handiwork on any decent hills but I think I’ve solved my shifty little problem.  If I play that right it may also solve my biking (or “not-biking”) problem.  And that would be cool in a lot of different ways.  A fellow can start to miss those padded shorts after a while. 

* And lest we forget: I allowed my gym membership, at the beginning of the year, to unlapse: I’m once again entitled to hit the Y whenever I see fit.  But this time I’m doing it differently: Instead of throwing myself indiscriminately onto various diabolical machines like a crazed doughboy into a grenade-infested foxhole, I went and had someone set up a workout for me and show me how to perform it properly.  I’ve got a circuit now of 10 or so “resistance” exercises.  That used to mean I resisted doing them but now it’s just strength training, and I am actually doing it.  I’ve given myself four weeks to exercise regularly enough that it doesn’t feel weird and wrong anymore.  However that works out, I now have some rudimentary gym skills, and that’s a weight simultaneously added to and lifted from my increasingly bulky shoulders. 

Good stuff, eh chappie?  Oh shut up then, I don’t need your troublemaking.  I’ve got a few more beginnings yet to divulge.  I’ll try to finish this weekend, or early next week.  I need to finish this before I’m talking about middles.  They’re often cremey and delicious but they just don’t pack the inspirational punch of beginnings.  Then again, neither do I. 

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Begin the Begin

Written a few mornings ago on the first page of a new tablet:

Again I stare down another new notebook, an untested easel for my projections, hundreds of pages of glacial purity, perfectly clean and square, as if its eventual contents might be envisioned as something matching its current elegance - a coherent series of text dollops, beyond prediction in variety but all neatly trailing each other as a group, a chronological chain of consecutive writings….

As if, as if.  My last notebook suggests differently.  I’m leaving it behind now for the first time since I started using it as my “primary,” about ten months ago.  Once it too held the promise of the tablua rasa, but it’s been a long time since then. I’ve filled it pretty well and cleared it too.  My writing is often a cumulative process – something I write in a few quick bursts will then be read and re-read over several bus rides, and is usually significantly edited if not rewritten each time.  This results in a notebook in which nearly every page is covered with increasingly miniscule scrawls, bus-clumsy and variously in pen, pencil, different pens…. Each page has been perused and scrutinized several times; the intensity of that scrutiny still seems to permeate each sheet of paper.  The cover, once a cheerful turquoise, is now worn and chafed.  It’s still a reliable, solid notebook, but it is spent. 

Rather, I’ve moved on to this new notebook.  It’s classy – plastic covered with rounded corners, ripstop binding sheath, good pocket action and an interior divider.  Hell, it even comes with note cards.  It’s going to do well for me.  I just can’t let its apparent perfection discourage my using it.  It’s a little game I play on myself with every new notebook I get – I don’t think I have anything worthy to be the first thing in such an unspoiled resource, so I carry it around for several days trying to work up the gumption to give it an initial sullying so I can use it without further reservation.  This time, though, this hesitancy to get started in the new notebook seems to have hit particularly acutely – perhaps because it’s coming at a time of so many other beginnings.  It’s not just that it’s the new year, though that’s rife with sufficient symbolism right there.  But there’s the cumulative effect of the other, parallel steps out and forward and into new beginnings that I’m facing these days:

* My omnipresent little spiral memo books are now a thing of the past.  I like to carry a booklet for scrawling the briefest of notes to myself – reminders, notions, phrases, but not actual composition.  It’s always been a top-bound pocket pad, but those tended to look sloppy after a while and the wire binding inevitably got crushed under the weight of my pure physical presence.  But the holidays brought me plenty of fabulous “cahiers” memo pads by Moleskine™, which are now my new official first and only choice in memo memorialization.  Slim, elegant, tightly lined, pocketed and thread-bound (much like myself in many ways), these now go everywhere with me.  No more sitting on wire bindings; no more floppy sloppy covers.  It’s less substance, with more efficiency.  That’s a big step in the right direction. 

* But also: My biggest personal millstone has for ten years been an overstuffed daily planner.  When Kel first set me up with one it was a key tool for managing what was then a life teetering at the brink of chaos.  With a new page each day larded with plentiful room for notes, prioritized tasks, appointments, and aspirations, the main binder only held three months of pages at a time so I had to “month up” with new pages from a reserve binder every month to keep a proper set of sheets on tap.  This process of “monthing up” was an integral part of my planning and involved a dozen steps: installing new pages; removing old ones; indexing all notable events of the prior month by date; marking the upcoming birthdays for the next 60 days; reviewing all telephone messages received in the prior month; reviewing the prior month’s index of notable events; reviewing the prior year’s index of notable events for the current month; reviewing the Master Tasks list and updating as necessary; inputting the office administrative calendar into my monthly and daily planner pages; identifying my hours worked on a separately-funded project; and reviewing my “goals and aspirations” list.  My current checksheet for performing these functions goes back to 2002.

Well, over the past several years I’ve progressively internalized most of the organizational fundamentals that my old day planner institutionalized for me.  Less and less have I found significant benefit to my elaborate monthly planning rituals.  At the same time, I came to realize that the planner had hundreds of blank memo pages I never used, dozens of outdated address pages and others I’d never get around to filling in, superfluous guides and tutorials on effective daily planning, and of course all the stuff I stuffed in it myself – photos and business cards and little bits of funny crap… it was a mess, clumsy and heavy and monolithic. 

So this year I made a break and got me a new planning style – a slim, no-frills week-at-a-glance calendar, softsided and unencumbered with extraneities.  So far it’s doing a great job keeping me on track – maybe better than my heavy, clunky eight ring binder did.  I’ve got a full year on one two-page spread, cheerfully color coded to give me the big picture instantly.  Every time I use it I revel in its efficiencies, and each time I slip it in my bag I am impressed with how small and light it is.  It’s another case of giving up wasted space, wasted time, wasted bulk and wasted weight, for getting the job done faster and more cleanly.  And since the job, this time, is “making everything run more smoothly,” I’m okay with making some progress on this front. 

What, you think I’m done?  No, I’m just beginning the “just beginnings.” More later - like tomorrow, maybe.  Assuming the “new year smell” lasts that long. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Lovely Spam

Well, it’s been a fun-filled dream-fulfilling accomplishment-accomplishing weekend at Chuckle Central.  We had two fabulous meals with friends (both, curiously, featuring brussels sprouts, which were, first, delicious and, then later, equally delicious), cleaned up the back room some more, got lots of financial work done, washed five loads of laundry, went to the zoo, got another humidifier for the grown-ups’ room, worked out at the gym, bla bla guh-Bla bla bla… lots of good stuff. 

Now it’s late on a Tuesday and I’m feeling a bit thick in the skull.  I had a long meeting to get ready for another long meeting tomorrow and there’s only so much more mental acuity I can bring to bear here at the Desk of Wisdom and Benevolence whereat I labor.  I’m going to go home soon and maybe try working up a sweat or something, but in the meantime, I thought I’d give you a glimpse into my seediest underbelly: my cyberbelly.  This is your chance to see what kind of email I get on a typical three-day weekend.  It’s not so much, but it’s enough for a giggle.  I’ve deleted the FIVE items from my in-box that were actual messages for me.  The rest are more like potted luncheon meat, in that they’re hardened containers for highly questionable content.  I’ve listed my spam e-mails in chronological order by sender, “re” line, and (in parens) the general nature of the inquiry, or key phrases if they were good.  Hope you enjoy them.  There will be more tomorrow but I don’t think you’ll need them any more than I do.

Heracleitus Bomar - Re: to atticis (rxs) (which means, for the rest of this post, impotence drugs or sedatives)
Sylvia Adcock - Impotence medicines for the best price (rxs)
Simonenko Colleen - Never thought that so small member exists. ("Yo Dude I don’t care why your Johnson is so small...")
Marlin Hatcher - Go devilish my remitting (watches)
Rudolph Navarro - soft Viagra:buy and save your money with us (rxs)
Pinksheets alert! - MHILOB Best terms and conditions for your investments (stock tip)
Quotes.com Alert! - MHILOB you must know nad use all of it’s suggestions (stock tip)
Jerold Whigham - Re: to bodic (rxs)
Benjamin - stork less caveat (rxs)
Little Hey - Get Started Win and play (on line casino)
Jonathan Tyson - Be pretty (watches)
Jan Henderson - Re: We accepted your loan request (financial services)
Ava Bowman - My of pronounceable (watches)
Fifth Third Bank - Fifth Third Bank - confirm your accounts records [Sat 13 January 16:27:51-0800] (confirm personal information)
Lye F. Deb - Re: (rxs)
Dodoes P. Hank - Re: (rxs)
Hafiz Samples - Re: my philanthropis (rxs)
Johnson Angel - Small thing not big problem anymore! ("The Most Potent Male Muscle Boosting System! The better and most powerful product to enlarge your prick available on the market!")
Rae Mason - Which of the ponderous (watches)
Lacy Mcguire - Of excretion go shim (watches)
Nita Barton - Be do banister (watches)
Citibank - Citibank: account notification! - Sun, 14 Jan 2007 10:20:13-0800 (confirming personal information)
Jacklyn French - so a gmt (watches)
Smirnoff T. Carousal - Re: (rxs)
Ballrooms M. Shirted - Re: (rxs)
Ingega Strange - Re: my northweste (rxs)
Rosalinda Leathers - Re: my freshl (rxs)
Improve Fix - Get Started Win and play. (on line casino)
Concepcion Huffman - Not in sheen (watches)
Marietta Shaw - Or remitting he shawnee (watches)
Rodger Harden - Get less anxious (watches)
Sonnyz Crossl - Watch this stck go on r (stock tip)
Otccb Alert! - You must buy MHILOB right now!!! Hurry up The Alert is ON!!! (stock tip)
Knight Rafael - change your size from S to XL ("Hei Chap Don’t tell me why your schlong is so small, I will better help you to make it realler Bigger!  Why bigger?  Because over 74%R of all women need a longer one-eyed monster to satisfy their desire!")
offers companies - Through will now (rxs)
yore - Get Started Win and play. (on line casinos)
Lurlene Young - Afternoon (rxs)
Fifth Third Bank - Fifth Third Bank: official update. (confirming personal information)
Israel Silveira - Re: my backgroun (rxs)
Annamaria Watkins - Great fun this wkend (rxs)
Dispute R. Liliput - Re: (rxs)
Luz - Ci@li$ for you*+*+* (rxs)
Melba - Cialis soft for $2.22 per 1 pill (rxs)
Spring Reid - Re: Im sorry (rxs)
(270) 818-7244 Carmen - Fw: Too busy to go back to school, {} but need a Universiyt {}Degree{} to get ahead? ("In as little as 2 *weeks* you can have a masters degree from a national university. [] We supply all the stud ymaterials []")
Rath Safak - Gain up some Inches for your darling ("Hello Chap I don’t care why your sausage is so small, but 84% of women do.")
Bellona Warrior - Re: with bloo (rxs)
Vincek Crenshawe - ravish brushed burgeon gown jwljj (stock tip)
Colette Pettit - It really works (watches)
Orba Canipe - Re: with blottin (rxs)
Vanda Snyder - How happy are you (rxs)
Southwest Airlines - Your Ticket on Southwest Airlines ("Powered by Your Top Brands - an independent rewards program for consumers and not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned above. Your Top Brands is solely responsible for all gift fulfillment.  To receive your gift, simply[...]")
Genaro - ester more than laxative (rxs)
Octbb Alert! - Double or triple your investmetns just per 1 week.  Go MHII.OB! (stock tip)
Bank of America - Official Information for Bank of America Client! - Tues, 16 Jan 2007 2:09:45 -0800 (consumer information)
Karyl - Re: Whats Up (rxs)
Gregoria Snyder - Can you see this (rxs)
Diann Mathis - in expiration the sailboat (watches)
Olavo Germany - Re: with longe (watches)
Gelle Crotts - Re: with hemispher (watches)

The total is 60: 28 offers to increase my manhood by means of chemical intervention, 15 offers to sell me replica timepieces, six stock tips, four requests that I confirm my personal information to banks with which I do not do business, three invitations to try my luck at an on-line casino, two offers of financial services, one chance to get a college degree, and one opportunity to win free air travel.  What a goddamn waste of the internet.  Don’t these people know I have some serious surfing to accomplish? This crap is just slowing me down.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Burning Impressions

Here you go campers, the last of three stories from the not-so-dark side.  Have a good weekend.  Monday is MLK day - a good day for moving back to the light, wouldn’t you say? 

In some neighborhoods she might have seemed a little edgy, but there, just off the lower Haight, she was really pretty mainstream.  Her hoodie, ruffled skirt and tights seemed all the blacker in the washed-out light of that afternoon.  It was a December Saturday and we were going to my cousin’s house to bake schnecken with the whole fan-damnily.  And, since our labors would take us to nightfall and the timing was appropriate, we’d have a little Chanukah service too.  I’d even brought my own menorah along, the slick chrome job from the old country.  So it was me and the mrs and little Korean Z, all of us in the most comfortable clothes we could wear in public and toting the chanukiah of my forebears, and her, clomping up the street in combat boots, with a friend who was, of course, as authentic and jaded-looking as she was. 

It’s not that I felt no connection to her as we passed each other – I sensed an actual disconnect, that somehow we were walking on different streets altogether at the same place and hour. 

This impression was short-lived.  As we hit that key point of space and time where we shared an intimate but transient propinquity, her eyes ranged over us, sparkled, and she smiled broadly and brightly.  “Pretty menorah!,” she exclaimed. 

And that was it – we and she were all already back on separate tracks, proceeding into unrelated futures from a common point.  However, when she undertook to express, unilaterally, her hamish familiarity with, and warm appreciation of, my family’s heirloom ceremonials, that common point felt more harmonious than merely coincidental.  Whether a bond was created at that moment or whether she’d just divulged to me a pre-existing relationship to which I’d been, apparently, intentionally blind, I now know that, if our paths hadn’t crossed and I’d somehow missed her, I would certainly have missed her. 

Thursday, January 11, 2007

regothing

Here’s a second little story about people who are not so dark as they might have appeared:

There’s a curious little alcove I pass on my way to work: In the pedestrian lane, just off Mish, there’s a dry cleaner’s shop on the ground floor of a tall office building.  Its main entry looks like every other dry cleaner in the city, but it’s also got this little service alcove set back from the main wall of the building a few yards further down, a yard or so deep and just wide enough for a door.  What you get then, is a long tall wall with a little cubby built into it, about two or three feet square, with a door in the back. 

What’s curious about this alcove in particular is that the door in which it terminates is clad in highly polished stainless steel, hung so deftly that it forms a permanent mirror.  Had some alterations done?  Check’em out in the alcove – make sure those cuffs hang straight.  And of course, you always see people sneaking peeks of themselves as they walk past.  Some are brazen and some are coy, or even seem embarrassed by their own opportunistic self-examination, yet still I see them do it all the time.  The reflecting alcove is a place to be seen seeing oneself. 

One dreary morning a few weeks ago I came trucking my truculent way to work and made ready to steal a quick sartorial once-over as I went past the alcove, just to make sure my pants weren’t on backwards or anything, and that’s when I saw:

He is crouched at the corner of the alcove in a dark trenchcoat, like a big black scarab.  His hair is waved and pomaded and so black I think it might be blue; his pale skin glows with subdued lividity and the ground at his feet is strewn with cosmetics.  The containers are white, pink, ochre and ebony, but the colors they contain are monochromatic – bonewhite or inky dark.  Hunched thus over his pallid palette in the early morning, a haunted look on his youthful brow, he is preparing for his day in the corporate trenches at the beck and call of somber, pasty people by making himself paler, yet darker, than all of them put together.  He has already freshened his pallor with a new coat of powder, and now he’s applying more graveblack to the orbits of his sunken eyes. 

Judging from the number of cosmetics littering the pavement where he kneels, gazing raptly at his reflection in the alcove, it’s a complicated process.  Regardless, for his impending stint in the artless, humorless, stubbornly normal world he’s about to confront, he must gird his loins for the effort and properly re-goth himself. 

I’ve got one more of these little “not so dark” gems for you.  I suppose you’re saving all your comments till the series is complete.  I mean, I’ve got to suppose something. 

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Hide in Plain Sight

and now, the first of three stories about people on the street who aren’t so dark after all:

I saw it from the lofty perch of my bus seat, but then again, they probably wanted me to stick around and keep watching.

We were crawling past Union Square on a sunny summer afternoon.  It’s a busy park in the middle of the city’s prime retain district, recently re-landscaped with a declension of broad grassy steps leading down to busy Geary Street.  Folks come from far and wide to sit on those steps and bits of lawn to rest and watch the street go by.  On a nice day like this one was, the sides of the park are packed with a crazy random sample of city folk.  It’s great peoplewatching – especially for peoplewatching the peoplewatchers.  People enjoying the sidewalk menagerie seem to forget, as they gape and pass judgment on the passersby, that they themselves are wide open to scrutiny as well.  The observing of the observer, one might say.  It is an ancient conundrum, and one we’d all be wise to keep in mind. 

I sat on my bench on the bus, then, and watched the parkside crowd slowly unfurl as the square crept past my window.  And that’s how I noticed those two:

They were a couple, sitting close together on a grassy step mid-way up.  In the riot of bright summer colors and tan skin around them, they stood out in dusty worn-out black denim and leather, pale skin and dark tattoos, reluctantly relaxing.  Their combat boots were clunky and scuffed; their clothes bore numerous safety pins, band patches, and extraneous zippers.  They looked pretty retro glam-punk, were I forced to make up a cultural hybridization for their affected style.  Her hair was coiffed in a revised pageboy, with lots of complicated parts and poufs.  His was, by contrast, much simpler: a razor-thin four-inch Mohawk in vibrant fuchsia.  As they chatted languorously in the bright warmth, the garish blade of his radical, radial hair carved jerky patterns in the air. 

What really caught my eye, though, was the woman in cargo shorts and a knit golf shirt, aiming her pro-sumer digicam with its 15” lens at him, cowering in a deeply twisted posture beside a low step about six feet in front of them.  Was she trying to evade detection as she snuck a photo of him, right out there in the open with her gigantic camera?  I mean, could she be any more obvious if she wasn’t trying to hide?

Well, I reconsidered as the bus pulled me away, maybe she doesn’t need to be so concerned about being detected by the Mohawk glampunk.  That dude certainly didn’t seem like such a master of subtlety himself. 

fun, eh?  more to come here at the Hut.... for now, goodnight....

Monday, January 08, 2007

Aural History

Travelers who fly into or out of Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport may already know that it’s a pretty kick-ass exhibition space. They set up museum-quality installations in a long hallway next to an automatic sidewalk, and I’ve dawdled among those display cases many times while waiting for a flight. I’ve seen any number of really thought-provoking exhibits there, but the last one I saw might have been the best: a history of audio equipment. Going back to Edison’s own designs and devices, they walked us (some of us, automatically) through recording technology, playback devices, synchronization with motion pictures, and lots of consumer electronics - like a suitcase-sized proto-boombox from 1976, an elegant little MP3 player from the early ‘90s, the first magnetic tape recordation device, as big as a room and almost as cozy.... I gazed at the slablike crates for 78-rpm disks, the nouveau designs embossed on the trumpets of victrolas, and even some stuff from the here-and-now - and it all looked like it belonged there on display in a museum exhibit.

I took my time and really immersed myself in that collection, but it now occurs to me that there’s one great installation that they had to leave out. In fact, I happen to pass it on the bus quite frequently on my way to work: it’s a low-key facility on Bush Street called Audium, and it is a living museum of audio excellence - circa 1972. On the outside it’s just a windowless first floor, faced with slotted slats and painted in understated, unfashionable brown. There’s a metal grill gate across a small entryway, and the work “AUDIUM” appears on the wall above the door in bold white letters four times over, each iteration rotated 90 degrees so the four form a tidy (but tilted) square. It really doesn’t give much away from the outside.

Then, there’s the inside.  You walk in past a “labrynth” of flowing sound to an audi-torium to the gentle sound of a waterfall. The room feels like a time warp to a past future - Logan’s Run style rendered in solid-state technology. The room is circular, lit indirectly in amber - a color choice that bring to my mind both a piece of old-school audio equipment, and the accidental preservation of somthing ancient and beautiful, like a prehistoric bee with its very buzz. And speaking of the buzz, the ceiling and walls and the floor beneath the seating platform are a veritable hive of speakers - the best the Nixon era had to offer. They’re big boxy affairs, each as voluminous as a whole home theater sound system would be today. There’s about 150 of them all together, ringing and lining every surface of the room. The whole chamber is basically a speaker housing, from an era before the invention of Dolby. The seats, in concentric circles like a planetarium’s, are a rich brown color shaded not too lightly with dust and age and years of use.

It doesn’t take too long to drink in these details. The next five or ten minutes allow you to relax into the surroundings, letting the indirect light and the plinking of flowing water unravel your cognitive knots. You begin to breathe more slowly and deeply. Some autonomic unclenching eases your hypertension. And then the lights fade to black and the volume slowly rises and the show begins:

Audium was a NEA-grant-funded experiment in art and engineering, an early effort to create a purely auditory environment. Sound moves over, around, beneath and through the listeners, creating a three-dimensional environment that is purely experienced through the ears. The music is a mix of pre-recorded loops that originated in the early ‘70s and has never been updated - what makes it performance art is the way the recordings are routed through and around the room from a big analog control panel.  When I attended 15 or more yeas ago, someone sitting near me mentioned that he hadn’t been there for 20 years - but the music was basically the same. “Would you come again?,” his friend asked him. “Naw, probably not,” he admitted.

And honestly, today’s audience can’t go there expecting the installation to hold up so well these forty full years since Audium opened. You hear more auditory innovation now in a 30-second movie theater promo for THX than you do in close to an hour of Audium’s well-worn repertoire. It’s fascinating to hear, but as an artifact, it has survived beyond its acutal relevance to become true living history.

Each day that I whip past Audium on the 1BX, my earbuds bubbling syncopations directly into my brain, my iPod possessed of a larger library than radio stations had in 1972, I acknowledge that place as a monument to an unusually ephemeral phenomenon - the State of the Art. Art has moved on, and its State has been radically transformed, since Audium reduced it to a concrete pinnacle. This was as good as it got 40 years ago, exactly this.  Now it’s a museum - not a museum of the possible, but a museum of our historical experience. We’re so far past the limits Audium approaches that these limitations themselves become our reason to visit, so we can look back and see how we got where we are. We need these institutions to preserve bygone culture as it actually existed, not just as we recall it. By showing us the path we’ve historically taken, they illuminate so many more possibilities before us and help us choose wisely among them.

I consider myself very lucky that I stumbled onto the audio exhibit at SFO. As I readied myself that afternoon to board another boring jetliner so I could transcend again the bounds of space and gravity, I appreciated the reminder of the innovation and artistry engaged throughout the course of the technological development of sound reproduction that I now take so for granted that I wonder if something’s wrong if I don’t hear recorded music around me. And I’m even luckier to go past the permanent wing of that exhibit several times a week. Yeah, I’d probably go back to Audium again - just to take a little vacation in the past. 

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Demonstration

This is posted for three reasons:

A) it shows the glasses I speak of in the post below - see how I wear them right on my face?

2) it is a useful lesson in why you should not let 5-year-olds decorate your cranium with wigs and lipgloss.

#) it makes me smile. 

That is all.  (except, of course, thanks DKDK, for the great party and for forwarding the photos!)

Friday, January 05, 2007

Entropic Antidote

It’s a long day today for Daniel - I picked up a cold yesterday afternoon, went to bed early with boring drugs and fuzzy socks, and now I’m back at my desk for the duration or maybe just a little bit less, writing follow-up letters about site visits I did not make.  The TheraFlu is wearing off and I have diminishing hopes of staying up late enough tonight to watch the V for Vendetta disk that’s been waiting for me for more than a month (I’m a lazy, lazy renter, which is why NetFlix just adores me).  However, the general malaise and weariness, together with the bright sunny weather and the still-barely-tarnished new year, prompt me finally to type up and post this little story about moving forward and feeling better about it:

Entropy is incremental - it gathers quietly, building up so slow that you don’t notice it till everyting creaks to a stop. How could all that laundry be dirty again? Where did that dust on the television screen come from, and how long has it been there? And of course, who snuck in and fingerpainted my keyboard with fruit juice and hot sauce? (I’d love to blame that on Zach but I’m talking about my keyboard at work here.) The everyday things in my everyday life are a measure of entropy, showing me the gradual disordering of the universe. Leave anything alone for long enough and it’ll fall apart. Keep it with you and use it every day and it’ll happen all the faster, though you might never notice.

All this comes to mind because of my eyeglasses. I’m myopic and astigmatic enough to need them every day, pretty much all day long. I’ll whip’em off to read some fine print, then slide’em back on for the big picture - and I do it from when I stumble out of bed in the morning till I stumble back into bed at night. Those slender, sturdy spectacles hang with me (and on me) through thick and thin. They consequently endure a lot of wear and tear, and as a further consequence, entropy catches up to them with a vengeance. The lenses get filthy and I don’t know how. What spattered my face? Whose thumbprint is that? And of course, how in the name of a benevolent Magneto did they get so twisted out of shape?

This last symptom - the misalignment of templebars, nosepads, and lenses - produces three inconvenient results: First, my specs start slipping down my nose, demanding regular repositioning.  Then, even repositioned snugly betwixt bridge and brow, they don’t offer the correct correction - my acuity drops in direct relation to the increasing impact of entropy.  And, finally: this is a problem I cannot fix on my own.  I like my glasses, and I need them, so I’m reluctant to be twisting them around like some kind of optical cruller.  I’m pretty sure that, if I do, I’ll snap’em in twain before I even realize it.  And since that would suck, I don’t try to restore this particular entropic deficit on my own.  This is one of those unhappy situations where I need outside help to re-establish my initial fully-charged and properly-oriented valence.  What I’m saying, in my obscure countrified way, is that I need to hit up the oculist every so often when my glasses get overly out of whack.

This was the situation in which I found myself a few weeks ago as I sat at my desk enduring a lengthy and dull telephone conversation.  I’d taken off my glasses and was rocking them back and forth on my desk, marvelling at how far they’d gone out of true (which was plenty far, believe me).  This I already knew, from months of regularly repositioning them and squinting.  Opened on my desk, they teetered drunkenly.  I picked them up again for a closer look, and that’s when I discovered how far I’d decayed from my original state of optical grace:

Templebars: eh.  They seem tired, maybe bleached by the sun and sunblock I’m always supposed to wear on my shiny head.  Lenses: oy.  Scratched and smeared and maybe that’s a ring of grime all around the edges where they fit into the frames.  And the nosepads: Hmm.  Had I ever noticed this before? When I got these glasses, those nubbins of plastic were clear.  How’d they turn black?  Photoreceptor cells?  Global warming?  Anti-war protest?  Still on the phone, still “uh-huh"ing at appropriate intervals, I made a more thorough examination. 

The black - or was it dark, dark green? - was on the inside of the pad; the side that rested on my shnoz was friction-polished to a steady glow.  I picked up a paperclip, experimentally unbent it and slid the end along the darkened surface....

Oh god.  It was all I could do not to say it aloud - God, what is that I’m chipping off my nosepads?  Chunks of black plaque started calving off to my desk with each gentle probe of the wire.  Oh yuk.  I know what it is - it’s me.  It’s my skin, my sweat, the dirt from my fingers, the darkness of my tears.  It must have been building up, steady and imperceptible, since I got these glasses - nearly five years now.  And I had never noticed, even as I occasionally cleaned my lenses, that the pads were getting a little fouler every time I stuck my spectacles on my face. 

It didn’t take long before I’d carefully, delicately cleaned off the upsides of both pads.  They were clear again, a manifestation of my own aspirations for myself.  I swept up the pile of dross I’d removed out and put on the specs.  They promptly slid down my nose, but that was okay.  I could go to the optician and get that fixed.  The important thing was, I’d seen how far I’d let things get, and I took steps to correct them.  Maybe no one else can tell that my noespads are clean - I certainly wouldn’t have noticed myself.  But I knew they were clean, restored to how they’d been half a decade before.  I’d turned back the clock.  I’d reduced the entropic quotient.  Apart from the phone call I was still enduring, the cleansing of my nosepads represented sufficient accomplishment for me for the time being.  I was more than happy to call in a professional to finish the job.  Acuity and clarity aren’t always self-endowed, but you gotta start somewhere. 

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Picking Up Where We Left Off

Well welcome the hell back, and don’t let the door hit you in the groin on your way in!  2007 just didn’t feel like a party year till you showed up.  So, what have I been up to?  Oh goodness, all sorts of suchlike.  Which is to say, other than the boy being totally off his sleep schedule, not one hell of a lot. One thing I can’t help noticing, though, is that it’s a new year.  Let’s look at that more closely, shall we?

Year End Breakfasts: it’s important to celebrate all important events with the most important meal of the day, apart from the one you might scarf compulsively upon returning home buzzed and hungry a little later than you expected to.  But the other most important meal is breakfast, and I take it very seriously.  Consequently, I spent the first part of my Saturday, Sunday AND Monday off work making sure that there was a damn good meal to be consumed before the sun rose above the yardarm, or whatever it is above which celestial bodies rise these days.  Thus and therefore:

* Saturday I made pancakes, with cinnamon and allspice, vanilla and dried cranberries.  They were okay, but not the best pancakes I’ve ever made.  From now on my pancakes will be better because I got a special pancake flipping spatula at BB&B.  But I could tell, saturday morning, that I had some ground to make up.  Consequently:

* On Sunday I tried my hand at Rabanada - Brazilian French Toast.  At TJ’s on Friday night we’d been given a big ciabatta loaf for free as we left the store (they were going to throw it away, they said, and who am I to call them liars), so I let it get a little stale, cut it on the bias, toasted it lightly, and dipped it, first in milk, then in beaten egg.  Then I fried it to golden-brown on both sides and finally sprinkled it generously with cinnamon sugar.  It was pretty good for french toast but the rabanada at DeLessio is much better so I’m still looking for recipes. 

* Finally, Monday morning we had our traditional eye-opening bagel-and-egg sandwiches, with havarti cheese and butter broiled into the bagel halves and the egg over easy so it bursts in a golden yolky cascade when you first bite in… they were so good we forgot to drink beer with them, as is traditional.  Though tragic, the oversight does not appear to have been an immediate harbinger of specifically bad luck. 

So, that all was good.  We also had some nice parties to visit - the “ghetto farmhouse” NYE celebration in M&C&E’s 1880’s spread in the central Mission district, a gritty urban zone that totally evaporates once you get past the wrought gate to their palatial new digs; and on NYD we went to Daisy’s 5th birthday party, which was delightful, as always.  Z stayed up as late as he possibly could every night, and has been waking up early too, so I hope he is good and tired tonight and crashes before 10.  I’ve got some serious television watching to catch up on before 24 comes back. 

Then there are the symbols of a year come to its natural ending and the resumption of the cosmic cycle of our experience of the fourth dimension:

* Each year we get a big box of baked goods from the inlaws for the holidays.  The box says “Wake up and smell the muffins.” Now that the year has begun and I’m feeling so heavy from all the carbs, I’m thinking every time I see that box, “Wake up and sniff my biscuit.” That’s a year-ender right there for ya.

* On the night before NYE, we drove out to Bed Bath and Beyond for-to redeem some holiday generosity, and were surprised to see a big untidy line filling the sidewalk outside a convention center down in the Potrero Designer District.  We gaped around for a few moments before we saw the sign: String Cheese Incident was playing their New Year’s concert series.  Years past, I’d have known about the show and probably made a strong effort to attend.  This time we just shrugged and went on shopping for a crock pot and a humidifier.  That’s not just the end of a year, it’s the end of a goddamn era. 

* Zach is among the calmest, most reasonable babies on the planet.  He fell asleep on my shoulder at the NYE party, rather than let the party go on without him.  However, two weeks of crazy diets, crazy sleep schedules, crazy sleeping arrangements, and overall disruption have taken their toll on the little man.  He got home from Daisy’s party last night and went into a tantrum that lasted, on and off, till nearly midnight.  When Zachary the Calm goes off the deep end like that, I know that something has come to an end. 

* Kel got an amaryllis for the holidays - a bulb flower that sends up tall shoots and then erupts into huge red trumpet-like blooms.  Z was enjoying our daily demonstration of the new growth.  But when we got home a few nights ago we found it lying on the floor in a pile of humus and potting soil.  The damn thing had grown so festively enormous that it lost stability and took a suicide plunge off our kitchen counter.  When the celebratory flowers off themselves, I guess I have to accept that the party is over. 

And with that, I see it’s time for me to hit the road and wander back to the homestead.  It’s been a quiet day, and I’m hoping for another one tomorrow.  You know what that means, internet: Entertain me!  Till then, I respectfully take my leave of you for the evening.  Hope it’s a good one for us all.  Pray for sleep.  You know, that stuff I would do before I had to watch Elmo back-to-back from 9 pm till midnight.  gak.