The two main reasons I have for not writing here, the two I generally don’t want to admit to myself that are THE reasons this site lies fallow for a season at a time, are these: 1) I generally don’t think I can write anything in such a way that other people will find interesting, if not downright stupid, and 2) It takes a lot of effort to write.

The first point may or may not be objectively true. It’s something I struggle with a lot because I don’t feel I’m one to judge. The times I do post, I do so because I have a burning desire to get down in words whatever the hell it is that is bugging me at the time and the part of my brain that is my ego develops enough of a backbone to kick the shit out of the part of my brain that is my shyness or self-deprecation or whatever. The fact that I rarely get feedback doesn’t necessarily help. The Fetching Mrs. tells me she loves the way I write, but the self-deprecating part of my brain tells me that she HAS to tell me that, she’s married to me, even though I do like to hear the compliment.

A corollary to this, which feeds to self-deprecating part, is that on some level it’s really scary to put this stuff out there on the Internets for anyone IN THE WORLD to find. The thought of some random stranger in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania (real town, eight miles northeast of Intercourse, Pennsylvania) reading my stuff and not liking it is just too much for Self-deprecating me to handle sometimes. I am aware of how illogical that is, I don’t claim to be a rational being. Unfortunately, that part of my id has such a grip on my creative life that many things I could have done over the years were stillborn. I was so worried that no one would like what I did that I would not do it. Or I would start it but not finish it.

That last part feeds into the second point. I am inherently lazy so, unless I am over the top passionate about something, more often than not, actually doing the work seems too much like WORK and I lose steam and whatever I’m doing is abandoned half-finished. It’s hard to be creative. That fact is lost on most non-creative people…and Rush Limbaugh.

Now, in explaining this second point, I’m necessarily being somewhat superficial and you’ll have to excuse me, but it’s not something that I can really sink my teeth into and pull apart for you to understand. It has a lot to do with focus. Specifically, the concept of hard focus. There have been times when I started to draw or write or whatever and I soon lost myself in the activity. It happened naturally and I didn’t have to force it or concentrate to get into that state, it just happened. Getting into that state was easier when I was younger. I think I took it for granted and didn’t actually PRACTICE getting into that state. So now, NOW when there are so MANY distractions, I struggle to get there and find I don’t have the patience to let myself go and get lost in the act of writing or drawing or nude performance art (just kidding, Sally!).

So, what’s changed? Why am I taking the time now to write an overly long explanation of this? Well, two things (in the literary world, that’s called parallelism, see because I had two points from above and now I have two points…oh never mind). First, this year will be my forty-fifth trip around the sun and I’ve been having an honest-to-goodness mid-life crisis about a lot of things that are in my life and a lot of things that are not, and I don’t want to be on my deathbed bitching about the things that are not, specifically the things I didn’t create, whatever they may be. Second, recently I’ve had several different people tell me they like the way I write, they think I’m pretty good and find me funny (which is good, because for the most part, that’s what I was going for, funny)and they wished that I would write more. A comment from one of these people really made me think about all of this because of who that person was.

I have a Facebook account and have reconnected with a lot of people from my high school and college years, people who I have not seen or spoken to in at least 20 years if not 25. This is familiar to all of you in some form or another, right? One of them is someone from the first high school I went to and who was kind enough to say she liked my writing. What makes this significant to me is that I honestly have a VERY dim memory of her. Her memories of me are stronger than mine are of hers, I think. Yes, I’m sure part of my memory loss is chemically induced, I didn’t party much when I went to that high school. It was a Lutheran high school, after all. No, I did my fair share of better living through chemistry later on in high school after I transferred to El Modena and on through my college years. So from my perspective, she’s a distant acquaintance at best, a stranger at worst, and she took the time to read through the stuff on this site and tell me she likes it and wants me to write more. Her comment to me came out of the blue and was all the more powerful for that. She even had the unmitigated gall to remind me recently that it’s been a while since I’ve posted.

So the timing of her compliment fed into what I was thinking and feeling at the time (mid-life crisis) and added to what my wife and others were saying to me. I’m going to write more, here and other places. Here because it is good practice, other places because just having a blog makes me a blogger and that’s kind of 1990s. I’ll write, post photographs, and possibly sketches, drawings and paintings that I’ve done for all of you to look at and I won’t even care (much) what you think of it. But if you like it, tell me so, if not, well, that’s okay too, but I’d rather you kept that to yourself.

At the beginning of the movie, his daughter, who is afflicted, has her 8th birthday. Immediately after, she catches a cold and goes into respiratory failure. She survives but the scare causes Crowley to flip out a bit and he leaves a staff meeting to go to Nebraska, where Stonehill is doing his research at the University. He stalks Stonehill and begs him to see his research. Stonehill tells him he is underfunded so Crowley promises Stonehill 500 large from the Parents of Pompe Kids or some such bogus group he makes up on the spot to keep the brilliant but lacking in any redeeming social skills scientist from telling him to fuck off. Things pretty much progress from there, with the end result an enzyme that helps Pompe kids process glycogen. The movie ends happily with the two Crowley kids, who were able to be the first Sibling drug trial for the enzyme through some yelling by the cranky scientist and some passive aggressive manipulation by Crowley, giggling uncontrollably from their first ever sugar rush, proof the enzyme is helping their bodies process the sugar.

The movie is pretty linear and somewhat emotionally flat. Yes, there was the requisite tearjerker moments, but the movie seemed manufactured, as if the director pulled out all the parts from Tearjerker in a Box kit and assembled them in order according to the instructions. What made it interesting was the fact the movie was filmed in and around Portland.

This is how much of a big dork we Portlanders can be. In the opening scene Brendan is trying to get to his daughter’s birthday party and he misses his train. Look, it’s Pioneer Courthouse Square! Portland’s Living Room! (seriously, they call it that). And he misses a Blue Line MAX! The party is at Big Al’s? I’ve been there! But that’s cheating because everyone knows Big Al’s is all the way over on the east side of Vancouver which is really on the other side of the Columbia River in Washington and the MAX doesn’t go there.

Hey look! Portland Rose Hospital is really OHSU (Oregon Health and Science University). How clever is that?! There’s the tram lobby. I’ve actually sat in those chairs! How cool is that! The first time there was a shot of Mt. Hood, I shit you not, I saw a guy in my row actually point at the screen and say Mt. Hood, as if we didn’t know that because we’re all not really from Portland, where on clear days you CANNOT miss seeing the mountain, it’s right there.

I’m poking fun. Seriously, I have to admit I was just as much a dork about it as the rest of the people in the theater. I just didn’t go pointing at the screen every five minutes like that other guy. No, I whispered locations in The Fetching Mrs’ ear, instead. I guess it’s because movies aren’t filmed here very often, we get all exciting looking for our favorite spots. Even when the plot involves Portland the movie is made elsewhere, like Shreveport, LA (Mr. Brooks, I’m talking to you).

This movie had Portland all over it and it looks like they shot it in early to mid summer, really catching the area’s good side. Everything was lush and green and the sky was that intense, deep blue I’ve not seen anywhere else. I really felt proud to live here.

If that makes me a dork, I can live with it.

I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks for me. I’ve read a fair bit of Anderson in my youth. Most notably his Time Patrol stories and his Psychotechnic League stories.

I picked up a paperback copy of Ensign Flandry at Camerons’s Books in Portland, OR. If you live there, or are passing through, Cameron’s is a bibliophile’s used book store erotic dream. Southeast of the larger and infinitely more well known Powell’s books, which also sells used books and could arguably be called a bibliophile’s screaming orgasm, Cameron’s is Powell’s hot younger sister.

The plot of this one caught me by surprise. When I saw it on the shelf, I wanted to read it because the Flandry series had a large influence on one of the biggest roleplaying games of my youth, Traveller. Anderson’s terse writing style lulled me into thinking this would be a textbook example of space opera, a homage to E.E. Smith.

It is that, surely. And it has all the attendant qualities of good space opera: a handsome young idealistic hero who can fight his way out of any scrape; exotic, sexy aliens with a beautiful, sexy female leader with the hots for our hero; and bad guys who have nothing but malice for the good guys and a plethora of evil plans with which to exercise that malice.

Well, that view lasted until about Chapter 3 where Anderson introduces quite a bit of ambiguity into the setup. The Terran Empire is in conflict with the Merseian Empire on the planet Starkad, using the two dominant sentient races as proxies. The story gets complex and Anderson deftly weaves layers of intrigue and politics into the story. He wrote this one in 1966 and it became clear to me that, on one level, the story can be seen as an allegory for the Vietnam War.

This one is a page turner and when it ended, I was left very pleasantly surprised and hungry to read the rest of the books in the Flandry series.

View all my reviews >>

Anyway, the link describes what will happen to the working poor in this country as a result of the employer mandated healthcare provision.

We stayed glued to the news for quite a while as news of the attack on the Pentagon came in and then flight 93 crashing in Pennsyvania. It must have been an hour or two at least. When they announced that all of the airports were closed, including Sky Harbor, I remember jumping up as if out of a fog and ran in to get dressed and figure out what I was going to do to get home. Greyhound was an immediate choice, but within an hour after Sky Harbor closed, all of the bus lines were closed too. I tried renting a car, but all of those were snapped up pretty quickly as every other stranded person realized the same thing I did at the same time.

I remember a constant stream of phone calls to and from Sally in between calls to car rental agencies. I remember being frustrated by how long it would take me to get home by bus. It was late morning as I looked at getting a bus ticket and I wouldn’t get home until almost 8 PM that night. I remember being glad I didn’t bother to try to get a ticket after the bus stations were closed.

In the end, Sally, my mom, and I agreed to meet halfway. My mom and I would drive to the California border and I would get a hotel room in Blythe, wait for Sally and then drive home the next day.

I remember being angry, so fucking angry that someone had the temerity to do such a heinous thing. What sort of sub-human animal could so callously sacrifice human lives like that. As the news began to report who had done it, who this Osama bin Laden guy was, I remember thinking it would a very good thing for our military to reign fire down on his ass, or better yet, how it would be very nice for him to be captured and presented to the families of the victims and how that meeting could be televised for the world to see what righteous, justified anger looks like.

In the weeks that followed and as details of the plot, the hijackers, and Al-Qaeda came to light, I remember trying to come to grips with such hatred that defied all logic and reason. Even if you grant that whatever grievances they felt towards the West and U.S. are valid, what they did on 9/11 went so far beyond what a rational human would do that it boggled my mind. It still does. It was an act of war, this generation’s Pearl Harbor and what makes it worse, what fucks up the equation is how it was an extra-national organization which pulled it off. How do you declare war against a group with no single defined home country?

The drive from Phoenix along the 10 is some of the loneliest stretches of road anywhere. There is literally nothing but rocks, dust and heat between Phoenix and the Colorado river. On a timescale that we live by, nothing changes, everything is the same. I remember that drive vividly because as I looked out at a landscape that never changes, everything else had. The drive out was pretty quiet. My mom and I were pretty muted in our conversation, the occasional dirty joke, which normally would lift our spirits, did nothing.

Once we got to Blythe, and I was alone in my room waiting for Sally to show up later that day, I remember feeling empty. Something vital has been ripped from my soul, something I didn’t know was there until it was gone. A part deep down that connects each of us to each other without us consciously knowing. It was ripped out violently in a ball of ignited airplane fuel and what bothered me the most was that I didn’t know what to do to get it back. I felt helpless. When Sally finally showed up later that night with my son Ian, I remember hugging them with enough force to actually go through their bodies.

It’s been eight years now and a lot of what I felt then has been absorbed into the background radiation of my day to day life, but I have a superstitious fear that if I ever go visit my mom again, something like 9/11 will happen again.

I know. For a person who puts a lot of stock in logic and reason as a means to get through life, being afraid of somehow causing another 9/11, like some sort of cosmic joke butterfly effect, is pretty damned stupid. I’ll go visit my mom at some point in the next year and nothing will happen. That doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about it.

Didn’t rent one of those big, bad boys, but I did rent a 4X24 belt sander. Got it home, plugged in with a new sanding pad and set it on the deck. I looked at Sally and said, for the record, “This will either be the best thing ever or the worst Tim Allen moment of all time.”

She looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“You know. Home Improvement. We could have a Tim Allen fucks with the dishwasher and now it belches fire moment.”

She just shook her head, sat back on the jacuzzi step and took a drink of her Bubble Up*.

I squat down, grab the handle, place my other hand on the front grip, not too tight, and squeeze the trigger. The sander leaps forward like my Ford Mustang at a green light and wobbles around three or four boards before I get it under control. I stop it and look at my initial ‘handiwork’. Bare wood is showing in long, flowing curves which follow the contours of each board. I laugh and make ape noises, turn that bad boy back on and get to work.

Thirty minutes later and two sanding bands later, we’re done.

*I had bought a ‘vintage soda’ 12-pack from New Seasons. Three bottles each of Dad’s root beer, Bubble Up, Nugrape grape soda, and Nesbitt’s Orange soda. For the record, Bubble Up is SO much better than 7-Up.

The snows of December and early January are long gone and we’re getting close to the official beginning of Spring. Usually this means rain and lots of it, but so far things have been pretty mild. An hour ago, I went out to get a sandwich under partly cloudy skies. Just now I looked out the window of my office and was startled to see fog.

But it wasn’t fog. It was just a LOT of rain. Big drops of rain coming from a fat thundercloud poking its head over the edge of the West Hills to see what he could get away with. The sky in the east was clear so sunlight was reflecting off Ol’ Mister Thundercloud’s offering, turning the millions of raindrops into millions of bright white lights and the illusion of fog.

And as I write this, the rain has stopped and the sky above my office is clear even as Ol’ Mister Thundercloud’s buddies are slowing rolling in from the west, great folds of dirty cotton brushing the edge of the hills.

This unpredictability is what makes Spring in Portland one of my favorite times of year. Nature is grandiose in her offerings. Why rain when it can RAIN, gods damn it.

Beautiful.

Regardless of what you call it, the simple fact is we are in the third solid day of snow and freezing rain. The third contiguous day of a string of days stretching back to Sunday last, when the first round hit with cold, dead fingers. Since then, I’ve worked from home three days, four counting today. There is a bit of symmetry to it; I was able to get into the office on Tuesday and Thursday and stayed home Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The pattern would seem to repeat itself this week if I wasn’t already off the 24th and 25th. Although I seriously doubt I’ll be going anywhere tomorrow. The Boy gained an extra week of holiday because of this mess, for which he is thankful. Not so much in June when he finds he has to go to school an extra couple of days on the ass end to make up for now. Like he cares, he’ll take what he can get now and let June worry about June.

It’s pretty and all, but honestly I could do with a respite. The Fetching Mrs. and I were able to get out Saturday and I’m grateful, but our entire neighborhood is covered in at least a foot of snow. We tried to get out in the Mustang yesterday to stock up on foodstuffs, but that had folly written all over it. Even with chains, I barely made it to the end of the street and got stuck in my driveway coming back.

I’m getting a little bit of cabin fever. I suspect that may be partly due to stuff happening at work. None of us can get out of our various neighborhoods without herculean efforts and or a giant hair dryer to melt the snow, so we all remote into our desktops at work and ignore the fact that Windows Messenger does very little in the way of providing the visceral feedback you get from being in the same room with the people you work with and with whom you are currently engaged in solving nasty, business-stopping bugs.

Chat is a weird medium to communicate in. When I read what my co-workers write, my brain automatically uses their voices, but it’s soft and spoken as if from a distance. Almost like having an out of body experience or waking up from a coma or serious accident in the ICU where you hear the voices talking about your lost limbs or that big hole in your chest from very far away. Right before you open your eyes and it all crashes into your experience in that instance before the morphine kicks in. But with chat, you never wake up.

Not that that’s ever happened to me, or anything. Anyway, so, things are white all over and very, very cold. The source I have on my browser states 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit, before wind chill is considered. If I do, I’m sure it’s colder than a witch’s tit in the arctic.

Here are some pictures taken earlier today, documenting proof that Al Gore was right and the world is getting warmer :

This is looking out the front door. Notice the gate isn’t closing anytime soon.

Closeup of the bush in the previous photo. The gate gives some perspective of how deep the snow drift is in our front lawn right now.

Here’s the backyard deck. Know that the top of the deck is at least 2 feet higher than the ground.

Another angle on the backyard. It’s almost like a giant snow lake.

A shot down the street we attempted to get out on yesterday. What road?

She’s rich, she can pay off those debts and still have enough left over to wax her enormous thighs. She doesn’t need you, you co-dependent, submissive twit.

Hat tip: Liberty Girl.