New link

I've added a link over on the right to Karmic Ironies, whose author, Erika West, lives in Oklahoma. I don't know her except to occasionally say 'hi' as she passes, but we are occasionally in some of the same places in the Red Cup/Galileo zone. As you'll see in her blog, she was at the Andrew Rice grand opening event, which I also attended.

At least, I think that's Erika West. I guess it could be someone else.

And it's okay to not know.

WiFi routers from HELL!

About three months ago my trusty Linksys WRT54G gave up the ghost. I came home to find it with all the lights stuck on red and the case almost two hot to the touch.

I panicked and raced to the store and bought the first WiFi router I could find... a D-Link.

(Sometime I'll post about Internet dependency.)

Well, the D-Link was okay, but not the equal of the Linksys. Still, it did what I needed it to do, and I was happy.

Today, I bought a new Linksys router for a friend, and was mentioning it to my next door neighbor. "Do you have WiFi?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"Is the name of your network ____________? I saw that and I knew it had to be you."

"Well, um yeah. I thought I had the SSID disabled, but I guess I didn't."

And I came in and immediately sat down to disable SSID.

If you've taken a laptop into a coffee shop (or at least a Mac into a coffee shop -- I don't know if PCs work the same way), the first time you turn on WiFi it will show you a list of all the WiFi networks within range whose SSIDs are being broadcast.

But you don't have to broadcast your SSID and unless you're running a public WiFi hotspot, you probably shouldn't broadcast it. I became a believer in WiFi security when I was sitting at my computer one evening and noticed my DSL modem light and my router WAN lights flickering even though I wasn't doing anything. It could have been some knucklehead trying to probe my home network from the other side of the router, but it could have also been someone parked on the street downloading or uploading who-knows-what with a laptop using my DSL connection.

I thought my home network name was known only to me and discovered from my neighbor that it was visible to the world.

But as soon as I disabled it, the D-Link locked up and died. Repeated resets did nothing but shift the thing into firmware update mode, which was no improvement.

So, out came the Linksys router which I had purchased for my friend. Unknown to me, some things had changed with the Linksys since I had bought mine a couple of years ago, and not for the better: a new, non-GPL operating system and a steep cut in RAM -- both apparently done to stop third-party developers from enabling features on the WRT54G that Linksys didn't want enabled.

(Sorry. If you're a router geek this is 'way oversimplified and if you're not a router geek it's 'way more than you wanted to know.)

After about 90 minutes of fiddling, I got the new Linksys router working. The web-server based setup is really buggy, which is probably because of whatever the new OS is, and I had to reset, reset, reset and reset again to get it running. Probably eight to ten resets in all.

More plants

Three more rose bushes planted today.

Dada dada dada dada, dada dada dada dada

So you're sitting at a red light, waiting for it to change, and a big midnight blue sedan with a bubble top and huge scalloped fins pulls up beside you.

It's the Batmobile! And there's Batman, in his mask and ears, waiting just like you for the light to change. He's gotten through beating the crap out of the Joker or something, and now he's on his way home.

So what do you do? Do you honk to get his attention? If he looks, do you wave? Will he wave back? Or will he just keep looking straight ahead, like, "Hey, I'm Batman. I know I'm the shit."

Aerosmith is on the radio, and over in the Batmobile, Batman is mouthing the lyrics: "Walk this way! Walk this way!" It's like Steven Tyler's voice is coming out of Batman.

And Batman listens to the same radio station you do! How cool is that?

He fiddles with his rear view mirror a little bit, then puts it back the way it was. Plays a little air guitar.

He picks up his cellphone. Who's he talking to? Catwoman? Poison Ivy? Denise Richards?

He gets off the phone, reaches down and pulls a Dasani water from the Bat-cupholder and takes a swig, then puts it back.

You can see the light turn yellow for the other direction of traffic. Batman eases off the brake and lets the Batmobile inch forward.

The light changes green. There's a brief squeal of rubber, and zoom! he's off to the Batcave.

If you lived in Gotham City, you could actually see this happen.

Gonna sell my house in town

I have a friend who has taken the Bodhisattva vow. At least I think she's taken it. She talks about it as if she has. So she'll come back, life after life, rejecting Nirvana, until all sentient beings are enlightened.

Master Gotama was a bodhisattva before becoming Shakyamuni Buddha.

Me, I don't know nothin'. Who am I going to enlighten? I have nothing to tell anyone (which hasn't stopped me from making 270 posts here since last November). I am no example by which to live.

You start thinking about what you have to offer the world, and realize how small your contribution is or has been.

My contribution is no greater or less than most other people's – I guess I've just become more aware of how inconsequential all of it is. Like ants carrying single crumbs back to the hill.

But of course it all adds up, and it's the cumulative effect one has to consider. Every ant does its part, bringing a crumb.

Soon, you have an anthill full of crumbs.

---

My allergies have been doing a lot better since I got the air purifier running. It's not big enough for the whole house, but at least keeps the area where I sleep relatively allergen-free.

---

And if I didn't mention it, the new VGA card arrived, and the desktop Mac is back in service. Sometime I'll post about Internet dependency.

Sunday night

I went for a drive tonight, just trying to deal with cabin fever.

I turned on an old air purifier this afternoon, one with a HEPA filter, and it has helped my allergies some, as long as my head is right over it. Someone recommended the air cleaners from The Sharper Image to me, but whoa, those are a little pricey.

Still reading "In the Buddha's Words."

Feeling kind of depressed and withdrawn.

Victim or vixen redux

Okay, I saw a copy of People today, and, God help me, I opened it and read more. It wasn't Heather Locklear's husband, it was her ex-husband.

So big deal.

The real story here is that, given the chance to turn my gaze away from this tawdry cheap celebrity melodrama and read something worthwhile, I caved in like a 70-year-old detached garage.

I feel dirty somehow.

Denise Richards: Victim or Vixen?

Heh heh heh. I saw that headline on a magazine at 7-Eleven this morning. 'Foreign Policy Quarterly' or 'The Nation' or something.

Denise Richards is a sentient being just like the rest of us, (This is easier to conceptualize if you didn't see her playing a nuclear scientist in 'The World Is Not Enough.') and I'm sure her pain is just like our pain and her needs are just like our needs.

Okay, maybe not. But stay with me.

So Denise Richards married Charlie Sheen, whom, through the miracle of Shit to Brain Osmosis, I knew to be something of a playboy and cad. Apparently Denise Richards is somewhat immune to SBO, because she didn't know it. He cheated on her or something, and they split up.

Victim!

Now she has –– well, what has she done? Something with the husband of Heather Locklear. Heather Locklear!

Vixen!

Anyway, the SBO crystal ball has not revealed the details to me yet, but I'm sure at some point all will be made clear.

Sorry, cats

Didn't make it to the pet store. I stopped at Home Depot and bought six star jasmines and two white rose bushes instead. That will make 16 new perennials I've planted around the house and yard this spring, plus a handful of annuals.

The jasmines go around the deck. One white rose went at the corner of the deck and the other across the sidewalk by the garage.

Still here

A drizzly, cool Saturday, and I'm at home. I'll go get cat food and other pet stuff later.

My allergies have been in full attack mode all week. I took some Claritin this morning and I'm okay right now, but I don't know how long it will last.

I made a promise to myself I would not talk about work here, but I will mention that my boss retired a week ago Friday, and this past week has been fairly hectic. It will stay that way until her replacement is hired.

I'm going in a little early most days, but I haven't needed to stay late.

But between that additional stress and the allergies, I've been really dragging.

---

I'm now reading –– I've forgotten the name of it –– an anthology of the Buddha's discourses, pulled from various texts of the Pali canon and arranged by subject.

Bhikkhu Bodhi is the translator and editor.

There are a zillion different flavors and varieties of Buddhism, but my particular lineage –– the Kindasorta (or 'Sport Utility Vehicle') School –– doesn't view the Buddha's teachings as 'God-breathed' (as some Christians describe the Bible), so if someone rearranges the text for better readability or understanding, that's okay.

---

The VGA card on my dual G5 cratered Thursdaay, limiting my ability to work at home. I'm thankful I also have the laptop.

There was apparently a known problem with the cards that came with the first dual G5s –– well, not known to me, unfortunately –– but reported in other places. In any event, my monitors are blank until a new card arrives from Smalldog.

Send Laura some Red Cup Bucks!!

Laura is like totally one of us.

The glass is already broken

I used to say –– only half-jokingly –– that when I met an attractive or interesting woman, my imagination immediately fast-forwarded to the point where she told me she couldn't see me anymore because she was getting serious about her other, previously-undisclosed boyfriend, or the scene after the breakup where she's at the bar with her girlfriends telling them all what a bastard I was.

Later, I read a book which quoted the Venerable Ajahn Chah talking about a drinking glass. (This anecdote is told in a slightly different form here.) The gist of Ajahn Chah's comment is, "the glass is already broken."

Literally speaking, the glass isn't broken –– in one version of the anecdote, he's drinking from it. But someday it will be, so why make false assumptions about its permanence? View the glass as if it were already broken, and you have no attachment with which to cope when it actually does break.

Literally speaking, the relationships I visualized weren't over –– they hadn't even begun –– but their eventual end was as inevitable as the broken glass. So why attach to something (or someone) when the end is already in sight?

Nothing is permanent. I own a home for which I paid cash and for which there is no mortgage. I feel fortunate to have that security.

But someday, I'll lose this house. Maybe I'll sell it. Maybe I'll die. Maybe the government will take it from me so a new expressway can be put through. Maybe the taxes will grow so high I won't be able to pay them. Maybe a tornado will demolish it.

In any event, this house is a temporary shelter, not a permanent one. And part of the reason I'm not as obsessive about lawn edging and perfectly rectangular shrubs as my neighbors is that I think it's silly to spend so much of your waking life trying to fastidiously arrange every detail of an existence over which you ultimately have no control.

So the boxwood isn't perfectly square. Is the sun still shining?

My dog ran off. Is the grass still green?

I'm alone. Is the sky still blue?

Farewell (I think) to She Who Does Not Sleep

She Who Does Not Sleep jumped the back fence yesterday evening while I was napping and took off for wherever.

She's done this before, and always come home after thirty-forty minutes of running around. But this time she stayed gone.

This afternoon, I saw her down the block, being happily led on a leash by a girl of ten or eleven.

I think that's a good thing for all three of us. I need more sleep, the dog needs more exercise and activity, and the girl probably needs a playmate. So I think I shall let this new arrangement stand.

mcarp, book burner

Tonight I accidentally deleted a two-year running topic from a conference I cohost on the Well. For someone who is supposed to be tech-savvy, I can be a major dumbass.

Allergy fest

Today I am paying the price for spending yesterday evening wandering around in clouds of tree pollen.

I went to work but I sneezed and coughed and sniffled all day.

Home tonight just trying to rest.

Arts fest

Guess I can briefly mention that I went to the Arts Festival last night rather than my regular Red Cup hangout. Wandered around with the commenter known as soartstar. Ate a bratwurst and strawberries newport.

My boss's retirement party was also yesterday. I don't write about work, largely because I don't want office gossips and snoops logging in here trying to glean tidbits upon which to speculate and swap conjecture. But I will say that my boss created an environment in which creative people felt free to exercise their creativity. I have worked in environments where creativity, even from people paid to be creative, scared the hell out of some managers, and creative people ended up tiptoeing on eggshells to avoid frightening people.

I hope that our environment continues to foster creativity under our new director, whoever that turns out to be.

Follow-up two

In reply to a previous post 'anonymous' (and I have no idea whatsoever who this might be) wrote:

"You do a great many things on your laptop that required focus and self discipline, including learning photoshop rather well.
Is it possible that you have self discipline and that what you lack is the faith in yourself and belief that you can do well?

"I'll guess that you say to yourself that you're no DiVinci, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Newton, whoever and conclude "why try?".

"Myth.

"Logically insupportable conclusion.

"The world does not need a knockoff DiVinci. The world might well need an original Mike Carpenter.

"An artist is very rarely the best judge of his own work. You cannot be objective about yourself; it is only possible for you to be subjective about Mike Carpenter. Give it up.

"While you may not meet your own standards of perfection, I feel sure you are capable of good, excellent and/or superior."

I don't think much about the great minds of history. Mostly it's people I know.

When I worked in television, I was mostly around, to be honest, people whose goal in life was to be superficial and vapid, and they had succeeded.

I think I avoided artists and creative types in part because I didn't want to be constantly reminded that I had not done what they had done.

Now, in my AARP years, I'm hanging around with people who think more like I do, but everywhere I look, I'm reminded that it was within my reach to do more.

I have about decided there's no such things as laziness – if one wishes to define lazy as lacking effort or care. I think people who seem to show a lack of effort have probably just used up all their effort on stuff others don't see.

It was late in life, for example, when I realized that while I was very good at some things most people found difficult, there were a lot of basic life skills that others took for granted that I found very challenging. I didn't realize they were so much easier for others –– I thought everyone worked as hard at them as I did. I used up, and still use, a lot of personal effort to do small things that the average person does with much less effort.

Follow-up

Okay, Blogger seems to be working again, and I've had a night's sleep.

The key thing I lack as an artist is self-discipline. Actually, the key thing I lack as a human being is self-discipline. There's an upside to that: I haven't spent a whole lot of the waking hours of my life doing stuff I don't enjoy doing. A lot of people have spent more time waxing floors, washing cars, folding laundry and raking leaves than I have. I have had a lot more free time over my life to do whatever I wanted to do, even if what I wanted to do was just pointless doodling or typing.

I have a friend who is an artist – a real artist, not an occasional doodler like me. She told me once that I made her feel inadequate because she thought I was so much better an artist than she. At some level, I replied, that might be true. I might understand color better than her. I might be a better draftsman than her. My understanding of anatomy, perspective and foreshortening may exceed hers.

But over the past ten years or so, she has produced dozens of pieces, some of which you have no doubt seen if you've been around the city art scene during that time. I, on the other hand, have produced not a single finished work, unless you consider a flyer urging people to pick up their dog's shit to be a gallery-quality achievement.

The reason she is an artist and I am not is that she has a measure of self-discipline I lack. And that is as crucial to art, whether it be painting, singing, dance or whatever, as any natural knack for perspective or warm vs cool shading.

So, to get back to the Red Cup festival, I got to watch a lot of people who all have – every single one of them – more self-discipline than I do. And seeing that makes me think about what I've made of my life, which is not much.

This is a dangerous way to think. It doesn't necessarily lead to a burst of resolve that makes a man out of Mac. (Reference for those needing it here.) Comparing oneself to others is pretty much a no-win situation. I am not them, they are not me, I am not you, etc.

But I have regrets – not many, but some – about the way I've lived my life. I see people doing something they clearly enjoy, and which I might have enjoyed doing myself if I'd had the self-discipline to learn how, and I wonder if I didn't really screw up.

This is still not going anywhere, though. I need to think on it some more.

Talent/Self discipline

I spent much of Saturday - Earth Day - at the Red Cup folk music show featuring BuffaloFitz, Bridgewater and others.

I had something I wanted to say about talent and self-discipline here, but I can't quite get it to come together. Both are necessary to succeed in the arts. By success, I don't mean fame – just success in terms of being satisfied with one's own level of accomplishment, being good enough at a chosen art that one gets some satisfaction out of it.

But what I wanted to say about that isn't coming together for me right now. I'm ready for bed.

I'll be up again in a few hours. Maybe it will come to me then.

The rapture is coming... not.

Being a former fundamentalist myself, I would encourage you to read this Huffington Post article by Tony Hendra.

It's probably too strident to do much good, but Hendra's point is worthwhile, and ought to be considered – prayerfully considered, if you're a red-state Christian: the "rapture," along with most of the other tenets of US fundamentalism, are of relatively recent, manmade origin. The rapture is not biblical and it's not Christian.

Hey kids! What time is it?

2:52 a.m. where I am.

I'm awake, wish I could sleep.

Constipated thinkers are my bane and my curse and my nemeses and there are so damn many of them. They're everywhere... people who believe that creativity and fresh ideas are a threat and that dull-witted conformity paired with plodding obedience equal safety and security.

I want them all to go away, or for me to go away and live in Tibet or Nicoma Park. A big old house in a semirural area where cats, dogs and anarchists would run free and Promise Keepers would be stopped at the perimeter guard shack and allowed no closer.

You know that saying 'You don't have to be crazy to be here, but it helps?' Wouldn't be good enough. You would actually have to be crazy to be here. I'd require proof. But crazy and smart. Crazy and stupid is no virtue. But if that's you, I hear they're hiring at the White House.

My dad's head. Orson Welles' body.

Ever heard that tape of Welles berating the producer on the frozen peas ad he was voicing? This is all over the Internet now as evidence of Welles' mercurial theater on the air temperament, but to me it sounds like he's the only one who's making any sense. In July? WTF?

3:18 a.m., Coordinated mcarp time. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick bong bong bong bong BONGGGGG tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

Also:

Happy Birthday tooooo yoooouuuuuuuuuu.

Happy Birthday tooooo yoooouuuuuuuuuu.

Happy Birthday soarrrrtstaaarrrrrrrrrrr....

Happy Birthday...

Happy Happy Birthday...

Happy Wild and Crazy Birthday...

tooooooooooooooooooo yooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

The picture Rena took

Rena snapped a pic of me with her new cell phone tonight at the RC.

And when she showed it to me, what I saw was my father's head grafted onto Orson Welles' body.

God, it was bleak.

Seriously, if someone had snapped this picture without my knowledge and had shown it to me, I would have thought it was my father.

How the hell did that happen?

And when?

S.N.A.P.

Semi-nomadic agro-pastoralist.

There, dammit. I said it.

And I'm glad I said it.

Love that glider

Spent some more time on the glider last night, after returning from dinner to pee the dog and take care of other household needs. Read for an hour or two. Maybe I'll love this glider enough I can spend all my free time there.

I'm the decider

Koo koo kachoo

Huffigton Post

For extra bonus points (especially you, Chase):

Name the other popular culture source cited io this song.

Glider tonight

This evening before dark, I turned the glider around so it faces east, toward the end of the porch, and pushed it back against the west railing which is covered with wisteria.

The porch light and the floor light at the living room window together produce plenty of light for reading. I stretched out sideways on the glider with my feet up and read 'On the Road' for about forty minutes.

I doubt this thing will ever make it to the powder coating place now. It has settled in and is part of the household just the way it is.

Part of me wants things that are fresh- and new-looking. Certainly my neighbors would prefer that (or at least the young couple on the east, who reminded me again this evening how great my yard would look with fescue and fertilizer, neither of which I have any intention of applying).

But part of me likes things that are old and beat up.

This glider has contact paper on it... wood grain contact paper which must have looked ridiculous because someone painted over it with brown paint. I cannot abide contact paper, and that may be the thing that gets the glider off to the paint shop after all.

By the way, those metal tubes in the chair are a large wind chime that had been hanging in the dogwood tree before it fell and cannot be used to construct centrifuges for enriching uranium. I just want to be clear about that, because my young neighbors to the east would really be pissed if I got our neighborhood nuked by Rumsfeld. Or maybe they wouldn't... who knows?

Photo

Glider news

When I first bought my house, I bought an assemble-it-yourself Adirondack chair. I don't know what is involved in making an Adirondack chair excruciatingly uncomfortable, but the designers of this one obviously researched the subject before sitting down with AdirondaCAD or whatever. So, the chair is still there, but I rarely sit in it.

Later, I bought a couple of canvas sling deck chairs. My grandparents had these on their front porch (just about a mile west of where I live now) for many years and when I was a kid, I would sit on the porch with my grandfather, tilted back in the canvas sling. But sling chair technology has evidently declined in the intervening 40 years. Mine, purchased from a well-known national chain, were disappointing, and one was actually defective.

At the Red Cup, from where I am blogging at this very moment, there is a forty-odd year old metal porch glider. After sitting in it a couple of evenings last summer, I knew I had to have one.

This afternoon, I was driving north on Western, just happened to glance to my left, and there it was -- an almost identical glider, sitting in front of an antique store. I immediately executed a Bat-turn, went into the store and bought it. It's got a little rust, and several coats of ugly paint, but it seems sound.

I'll pick it up tomorrow.

By the way... it's all about me.

Which ought to be obvious without having to read the whole six months' worth of posts.

Narcissistic? I dunno. Narcissus was stunningly beautiful, according to myth. He fell in love with himself (or, more correctly, became infatuated with himself) when he saw his reflection in a stream, and is still sitting there today.

Someone I read recently -- but I forget who -- suggested that narcissism is the opposite of egolessness, about which I've written previously here and here.

But again, going back to the source, narcissism suggests vanity and self-adoration. It's possible to be overwhelmed with self-doubt, self-criticism and self-loathing, none of which are like narcissism.

So it seems to me that while I may have a big self-involved ass, I am not a narcissistic chump.

Well down

The Well is down.

The ad hoc topic is here.

I wonder

Do other people spend as much time questioning the validity of their existence as I do?

I get up in the am and feel pretty good. Go to work, usually make it through the day. Muck around in the evening if I don't go out.

Go to bed, lie awake and wonder why I'm alive and how I'm going to make msyelf get out of bed in the morning.

Do other people do this?

Dogwood update

I mentioned in a previous post tbe dogwood tree blooming in my front yard.

Last Thursday, high straight winds came through and snapped the half of the tree left by last spring's lightning strike. Today my next door neighbor and I cleared the broken branches away.

But since just last Thursday, new growth has started to appear on a remaining branch. Rather than cut the tree off at ground level, I left three feet of stump and this one remaining branch about five feet long to see if the tree can still come back.

I don't know what sort of odd codependence drives me to try to save this tree. But it's important to me to give it every chance to survive.

Friday night

If I hadn't dumped a huge chunk o' change on the recent root canal, I might have bought art last night on the Paseo ArtWalk.

My friends know, because they've heard me say it, that I can't put large pieces in my house. I have only one wall with no doors or windows, and a medium-sized Jennifer Grover print occupies most of the space there.

But I saw many things I liked, and that would have been affordable for me.

Shields up, Mr. Sulu

After deleting two more robospam comments this morning, I've turned on the word verification feature.

So now when you add a comment, you'll be asked to demonstrate that you're human. and not a bot, by reading a distorted series of random characters like this:



I'm sure you've encountered these before.

Also, you are no longer required to be a Blogspot subscriber to post. I didn't realize this was optional until just now.

Trouble letting go

I decided a couple of years ago to look Jan up. I had forgotten her last name. All I remembered was 'Jan,' and that she had blonde hair, and that we had hung out together some.

In the first grade.

I never found her.

I think I have written about Googling Anita (that sounds like a John Cusack movie, doesn't it?), and finding one reference to her in a page deleted from a website but still cached in the Google index. I had known her in the early eighties. We worked in the same newsroom.

"You know what your problem is?" she asked. She didn't wait for an answer. "You're moody, temperamental and weird."

So of course I fell in love. I impulsively asked her to go to California with me. She declined. We stayed in touch for a while, but then she dropped out of sight. The web site referred to her, or at least a person sharing her name from the same part of the country, as the guest speaker at a 'prophetic prayer conference.'

Then there was someone who shall remain nameless, since she is still in town and you would recognize the name.

"You know what your problem is?" she asked. "You're dull and you're boring. And you're hooked on Moon Pies."

So of course I fell in love. But she was secretly dating the ne'er-do-well heir to the Fahrquahr Humate fortune and had never told me because it was on the DL, although no one said it that way that back then.

Crushed and humiliated, I didn't eat Moon Pies for four years, and had a small celebration when I finally defiantly bought one and ate it.

You think I'd crumble... you think I'd lay down and die. Oh no, not I. I will survive.

I also still think about my ex a lot. I wish I could make things better for her.

Just saying...

I have never had a cat give me shit for having human hair on my clothes.

Come down off the ceiling, sweetie

Not overnight, but the night before (ie, the wee hours of Wednesday morning) I had a dream in which I awakened, looked up, and saw my white cat Smudge hanging from the ceiling from all four paws, looking down at me. I couldn't figure out how she got up there or how she was able to hang that way.

I started to get out of bed. But as soon as I sat up, I realized Smudge wasn't stuck to the ceiling. She was standing on the floor, looking up at me, and I was stuck to the ceiling.

No sooner did I realize this than I came unstuck. There was a second of total disorientation, then I was on the floor, trying to regain my equilibrium.

Then I woke up.

There was also a dream before that one, rather disjointed, in which I was in an apartment or a hotel room somewhere, a plave not my own, and there was a large plate glass window looking out on the street. The street was what I guess I'd call commercial/office. It wasn't a street I recognized or identified, but it looked kind of like Second Street in Edmond west of downtown but before you get to Kelley.

As I sat there looking out the window – and I was sitting on a bed or a chair well back from the window – a black car pulled up in the parking strip outside. The place had that narrow one-car deep parking area like a small business would have. The car was either a Z-28 or a TransAm, and it was dusty. You know how some black cars get that sort of brownish tint when they're dirty or covered with dust? That's how this looked. It was not a well-kept car.

So I'm wondering what this person wants, when he suddenly pulls out again and drives away, heading to my left up the street. I remember feeling relieved that he left.

Then I woke up.

Missing tie found

You can resume your normal lives now.

Politics

I thought when I started this blog I would be writing more about politics.

But my interest level has waned, for which I am grateful, since I was tying myself up in knots emotionally over what had been happening the past six years. And there are many people with better resources than I for political blogging. Some of them are linked at the right.

But with the departure of Tom DeLay (although perhaps no farther than a commentator's job on Fox News) I thought it was worth saying something.

Part of the reason my level of concern has eased up is because I see the Republican leadership going through this slow-motion implosion that was basically inevitable. The national party has been run by crooks since Nixon's era, and every time they're given power, they come to the same end. I have voted for Republicans at the local level in the past (though not lately) but I can't imagine who the Democrats would have to put up as a nominee to get me to vote for a Republican presidential candidate.

People are beginning to understand, I believe, what a sham the national GOP has become: religious crackpots posing as Christians, medieval feudalists posing as free market capitalists and small-town con men like DeLay posing as statesmen. That's a pretty shaky coalition with which to try to lead a country, and it's no surprise to me they haven't been able to do it.

There have been some complaints that the Democrats haven't been assertive enough in putting forward alternatives. Personally, I think they're doing exactly the right thing, and there's a certain Taoist method to their madness.

Observe and learn, grasshopper: if your enemy confronts you, threatens you, intimidates you and then begins frantically beating himself up like Edward Norton in that scene in "Fight Club," why should you act?

And finally, a big shoutout to James Madison and the other dudes at the 1781 constitutional convention. The final product, though dented and scraped, still holds. Karl Rove may be smart, but it looks like these guys were smarter. Thanks for saving our asses here in the 21st century, guys.

Technology fails to meet basic human needs

We can put a man on the moon but we can't make a necktie that doesn't stay all rumpled-looking after you've pulled it out from under the bed.

I need to go talk to that Sartorialist guy about this.

By the way, one of my Jerry Garcia ties is gone. Vanished. Poof.

Thanks for coming by

You know who you are.

What a great day! Too bad it sucked.

I guess I'm depressed.

Because life looks like crap, but nothing has changed since the last time life looked pretty good.

Depression comes on me like a bad cold. I've learned (as I've probably mentioned before) that it will pass, just like a cold, and I just have to tough it out. But right now it's pretty miserable.

This is also the time when aloneness is the most unpleasant and I'm feeling the neediest.

Dream

I dreamt I went to Chicago to meet my mother.

In life, my mother and I parted company when I was 14 and I never saw her again. She was hard partying, hard drinking, never slept with a man she didn't hate and hated every man she met, and died of a heart attack in her early sixties living in a shabby eighties-era frame house in Mountain Home, Arkansas, up in the Ozark foothills. She was dead three days before anyone found her, surrounded by cigarette butts, old newspapers and jigsaw puzzles. (Sorry to drag all that out if you already knew it, but I thought I should set the stage for the dream.)

In the dream, she was living in Chicago, in a small, old but still elegant urban apartment building. She was attractive but not beautiful or glamorous, well-spoken, a little aloof, and looked younger than I did.

She met me at the door and let me in. There was a little tension, but not as much as you might expect between a mother and son who hadn't seen each other in forty-odd years.

She showed me around the apartment. I had Haley with me, and she escaped and went barreling off down the street (second escaping pet dream this week!) Haley had never seen this many people in one place, and she was ecstatic with excitement. She would stop at random passersby and try to jump up on them, and almost yanked a hot dog out of a kid's hand. I finally got her back under control and into the apartment.

A kid came up to my mother's apartment to deliver the mail and a newspaper. He looked like Fat Albert... not the cartoon character Fat Albert, but Fat Albert might have looked like as a real person.

I told my mom about my hearing problem because sometimes I couldn't understand what she was saying.

I actually found myself warming up to her, in spite of my original trepidation at having to meet her. She seemed to be an okay person.

Finally I asked her, "Look, are you happy – no let's not go for happy – are you even comfortable with this situation?"

"Frankly, no," she replied.

I was about to tell her that I had a life of my own in Oklahoma and didn't really need to live with her or have some kind of reconciliation with her, even though my initial reluctance to meet her had gone. I was about to tell her that. But suddenly the scene sort of changed.

I was outside the apartment on the street again, and I levitated, flew or floated (or something) up to where I could see over the building's roof. It had become night, In the distance I could see the skyline – neither Chicago's nor Oklahoma City's nor any other recognized. I turned my head to the right, and there was the same skyline again. I was surprised and confused by seeing it twice, and it subtly shifted some, but not a lot. I looked in another direction and saw the dark structures of an industrial district silhouetted against the sky.

I tried to climb up on the roof, but hadn't gotten enough altitude for that. The roof was at about neck level and I couldn't get a grip to pull myself up. So I let myself float gently back to the ground. I was a little afraid to do that as well – I worried that once I quit consciously floating, I had just fall like a rock back to the ground. But I didn't.

There were some other elements in the dream, but I can't remember the sequence.

There was some furniture that was very restrained and tasteful, nothing like what anyone in my family would have ever owned.

My mother mentioned there was a famous veterinarian on her block who had treated an equally famous chimpanzee or orangutan who was alcoholic and was known in newspaper accounts as 'the drinking chimp.' There was alos a dog psychologist or something similar on the block who was quite well-known. Based on this information, I was able to tell my mother that she lived on the same block and perhaps even in the same apartment as my friend Stacy, who had once mentioned having the alcoholic chimp veterinarian for a neighbor.

(In real life, my friend Stacy has lived in many large cities, including Washington, DC at the moment. But never Chicago, as far as I know.)

And then I woke up and experienced a little cognitive jolt because the dream had seemed so real that I had forgotten or didn't know I was dreaming.

---

Earlier in the evening, I had two other dreams. In one, there were four glamorous women, all strangers, surrounding me and trying to seduce me.

In the other dream, the first of the three, I was playing Frisbee with Graham Nash from the Hollies/CSNY. We were in a grocery store or someplace like that. He was so far back among the shelves I couldn't actually see him – I'd see only the Frisbee (TM or ® or whatever) come flying out from the aisles. He had a technique where he could the Frisbee to float down almost to the floor then suddenly ascend again. I had trouble catching it.

Fine. Go ahead, laugh.

But when a freakin' meatball the size of Belgium is hurtling out of space heading straight for the neighborhood, don't say I didn't warn you.

Route 66, Arizona, 1947

There's a poster on the wall at the Borders on NW Expressway, back behind the DVD section. It's a photo from Life Magazine by Andreas Feininger called Route 66, Arizona, 1947.

You can see it here.

This poster kind of pulled me back in time the first time I saw it. Or, more accurately, the first time I noticed it, because I probably walked past it 200 times before I actually saw it.

I have a story that goes with this poster.

You're driving along Route 66, on your way from one place to another – Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, maybe – and you come to this little town, and you realize you don't to go any farther.

You can just stop here. And you do.

There's a 'Help wanted' sign in a little grocery market. You take that job. You had another job, in an office, in a complex, wore a coat and tie every day, on the way up, solid future. You don't even call them to quit.

You don't call your girlfriend or your friends or your relatives, either. It's as if they were a dream you had.

So now you're a grocery clerk. And you find a house for rent, a little house with just one bedroom, close to the highway, maybe just off the right edge of that photo. You walk to work. You're at work early and you're off early, and in the afternoon, you go back to your little house and stretch out on the bed. The window is open and sometimes you hear the wind rustling through the few trees. A dog barks. An occasional car zooms through the highway junction. You drift in and out of sleep.

And this is your life. This is your world. You and the grocery store and your little house and the Texaco station.

Have a Pepsi.

The end of the world, coming soon to your neighborhood

The way I figure it now, we've pretty much hit the end of the road. Global warming is here to stay and accelerating. Our seacoast cities will be underwater in my lifetime. Hurricanes the size of Alaska will roar through the Gulf.

If Jesus comes, he'll rapture some third world people who've always gotten the short end of our stick and tell us to drive our SUVs straight to suburban mall hell.

With luck, the world will end on a Friday or Saturday night and we can all hunker down at the Cup and listen to folk music and pretend nothing's wrong right up until the second a five-mile wide tornado sucks the air from our lungs and sends us into oblivion and the moon crashes back into the Pacific.

Have a great weekend.

Root canal

The root canal is done. The dentist said I was a good patient. The TV stations were doing 'continuous coverage' of severe weather as I was being treated.

Use your imagination, or ask me at the RC, 'cause I ain't sayin' nothin' else.

Dating sucks.

I briefly had a crush on White Tara, the Asian goddess of motherly compassion.

From ReligionFacts

"Her white color signifies purity, wisdom and truth.

"In iconography, White Tara often has seven eyes – in addition to the usual two, she has a third eye on her forehead and one on each of her hands and feet. This symbolizes her vigilance and ability to see all the suffering in the world. The "Tara of Seven Eyes" is the form of the goddess especially popular in Mongolia.

"White Tara is seated in the diamond lotus position, with the soles of her feet pointed upward. Her posture is one of grace and calm. Her right hand makes the boon-granting gesture and her left hand is in the protective mudra. In her left hand, White Tara holds an elaborate lotus flower that contains three blooms. The first is in seed and represents the past Buddha Kashyapa; the second is in full bloom and symbolizes the present Buddha Shakyamuni; the third is ready to bloom and signifies the future Buddha Maitreya. These three blooms symbolize that Tara is the essence of the three Buddhas.

"In religious practice, White Tara is believed to help her followers overcome obstacles, espeically those that inhibit the practice of religion. She is also associated with longevity."

Wouldn't be great to meet someone like that? I guess that sounds silly, and perhaps to someone who believes the 21 incarnations of Tara are real it sounds like sacrilege.

Well, I eventually got over it.

Had a brief thing for Green Tara on the rebound, but I got past that, too.

One can visualize the wise, knowing Taras in their myriad incarnations floating down to earth, their gentle smiling expressions filled with compassion and care for humankind.

Then, looking at my junky minivan or the cat hair on my clothes, they say 'Eww!' and ascend heavenward again.

Dating sucks.

Dream

Some military general is talking to me. He's balding, has beetle brows and his large eyes are made even larger by the lenses of his eyeglasses.

He's telling me about the informal agreement he and the other generals have among themselves regarding protocol in the event of imminent nuclear war –– an agreement intended to reduce the likelihood the threat will turn into an actual nuclear exchange.

I feel a little better, I guess, knowing this. But the general looks like some famous character actor, and I'm wracking my brain trying to remember who.

Then there's some sitar music int the background, which turns out to be real, coming from my iTunes as I woke up.

Overnight dream

Society has collapsed in the aftermath of global warming and rising sea levels. We're in a Ford Econoline van, driving cross-country to somewhere in the desert southwest where we've heard there is some last semblance of civilization. I'm driving, and Leslie and a few other unidentified people are in the back.

We've arrived in a small town somewhere in the midwest in the early afternoon. Me, Leslie, some others. We're in some small town. The streets are quiet but we know it's controlled by a right-wing fundamentalist militia so we're trying to maintain a low profile.

I look out the window and see Beasley the cat a half block down the street. I brought him with us but he's gotten out. I call him and he looks around, sees me and comes back, but Leslie doesn't realize he's my cat and lets him out again. I call him, but this time a small piglet jumps in the van, then promptly jumps out the opposite window.

I see Beasley again and call him a third time and he comes back. Then I wake up.

Ever have that feeling?

The feeling that you could go live in a shack in the woods the rest of your life with the amimals for company, never see another human being for the rest of your life, and sleep like a baby every night?

Humans. Social contact. Bah.

What the hell's he doing with that camera?

I'm no photographer, either. But I took some pictures Saturday night for a project I'm working on –– candids, taken in a certain local coffee shop.


Fortunately, there is no expectation of Cartier-Bresson-like greatness here.


I probably crop better than I shoot.


I also have an advantage in that the web is very forgiving of crappy work. These would never print well.




If I could be said to have a 'style,' it would be that I look for oddball moments, and like to collect two or more people in a shot doing disconnected things.

Slow weekend

Not much going on in my corner of the world this weekend. Still taking antibiotics for the tooth abcess.

Spent much of the weekend at the Red Cup, as usual, and slept a great deal.

That's about it.

I got yer drug-induced delirium... right here.

Happy spring

I just saw snow.

One man's tragic burden: facing a root canal alone

I'm okay most of the time with being alone, as I've said before. But when you're lying there in bed, popping painkillers and trying to sleep, it crosses your mind that it would be nice if there were someone else in your life who cared about you when you were sick.

The Tao is about, in part, the balance of contrasting forces –– including masculine and feminine. Obviously I don't get a good balance cooped in my one-man monastery all the time.

Well, Bodhidharma (not a Taoist, of course) sat at the wall for nine years and I'm sure he got sick once in awhile, too.

Spam asshats

I got email today indicating that someone named 'Mazy' and/or 'Britney' had posted three spam comments somewhere in this blog. I can't find them.

Those of you who use Blogger know what happened: I got the email notification containing the posted comment, but nothing suggesting to which post it had been added. There's a link to an online payday loan company in each comment.

I want to delete them, of course, but I can't find them.

Okay, enough of that. Let's talk about me.

I'm on some huge blue and pink antibiotic for a few days until the swelling goes down. Then it's off to the dentist for a root canal. I've had enough of these now that I'm pretty humdrum about the pain.

It's the injury to the bank account that really hurts - almost $800 for this procedure. Ouch. I could buy a 1-terabyte hard drive for that much and have money left over for cherry pie.

What it is, yet again

Once again I feel compelled to post a link to John Long's Blogbah!!! and encourage you to read the whole post.

Even if you're not in recovery or working a program, there's a lot there from which anyone can benefit.

God bless you, John. I mean that.

Reality check

Maybe everybody does this and I just never realized it...

Once in awhile, I have to look around my home, take stock of the shape it's in, and make a note of things that are out of place but which I would normally not notice.

For example, there's a fork from the kitchen on the floor here beside me. I was probably eating soemthing at the computer one day and the fork fell on the floor when I was done eating. I was in the middle of something else, so I didn't pick it up. Now, who knows how many days or weeks later, it's still there. I've looked at it a dozen times at least, but without it quite registering in my mind, 'That fork is on the floor when it should be in the kitchen with the dirty dishes.'

I don't know why things that are obviously out of place don't make an impression on me. But somehow, they often just go right by.

So, on occasion, I go through the house, almost trying to pretend to be a 'normal' person, thinking, "Okay, that old magazine on the hall floor doesn't mean anything to me, would someone else be offput by it?"

I must love pain

"You must love pain!" – RJ.

Well, it's not so much that I love pain as that I'm used to it. I got my first really bad toothache when I was nine or ten, and my parents were in no hurry then to act on it. The first abcessed tooth came not long after that.

So I know what to expect.

I grew up with what I think is probably the typical poor person's attitude about dentistry -- too expensive and too painful.

After getting past that first dentist -- the one with the huge hands -- I've never had a really unpleasant experience with a dentist. But old mindsets are hard to change.

Update II

Looks like I've got a golf ball in my mouth this morning. I'm calling a dentist at 8.

I still hate teeth.

Update

My face is swollen and it feels like I've got a soccer ball between my cheek and gum.

Praise the lord, I found some Tylenol with codeine unused from some previous doctor visit and I've stayed stoked up on that.

I alweays stayed away from Tylenol with codeine because when I was a kid, they warned me that codeine would turn me into a duck-tailed, spit-curled junkie with my cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of my T-shirt.

But I'm 53 now, I don't have that many years left ahead of me, so if I end up being a codeine addict, so what?

I hate teeth. Tell me again about intelligent design.

Teeth

I hate 'em.

(Well, just ignore 'em and they'll go away! Yuk, yuk.

I wish.)

Apparently this headache/jawache/sinusache from yesterday has its origins in a bad tooth. Feels a little swollen this evening, but I don't know if it's abcessed or just swollen from having been bumped around while chewing, being explored with my tongue, etc.

Thank god for Orajel. I had a tube in the bathroom that must be ten years old, at least. Fortunately there's no 'best if used by' date on Orajel. I guess it lasts forever. Plus I'm loaded with aspirin.

My front teeth are all in good shape. The molars are a disaster area, full of crumbling 45-year-old fillings put in by a 6'4" dentist with huge nostrils and hands made for the NBA.

I don't know how old my Dad was when he went to full dentures. No one in my family made it to retirement age with all - or any, I guess - of their teeth.

About seven years ago, I began a lengthy process to have all my teeth upgraded, patched, resurfaced, redecked, energy efficient lighting, whatever. Spent about two thousand dollars on the first round of work, then lost my job and could go no further.

Every time I get a toothache I think of that song "Ol' Dan Tucker" –– he died of a toothache in his heel, the song said. I've never heard of anyone actually dying of a toothache, but it seems like it could be possible. So, I'll lie awake tonight worrying about that.

I hate teeth.

Art

For someone who is supposed to be an artist, at least kinda sorta, I haven't been around a lot of art. I astonished (I think) someone today by telling her I have never been inside the new downtown home of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

So I went to see The Mexican Masters (not a golf tournament!) exhibition this afternoon, in spite of a nagging headache/jawache/toothache/sinusache/side of faceache that impeded my enjoyment and made it difficult to focus, physically as well as mentally.

I apologize to my companions if I seemed out of it. I was out of it.

I live less than five minutes from the museum, and I still stopped for aspirin at 7-Eleven on the way home... I was that desperate.

What the hell happened?

I mean, with anything. What the hell happened?

New toys

Had to be done, really.

Bought Macromedia Studio 8 to get Dreamweaver and Flash up to date, plus installed them on the laptop.

"This is a dream, isn't it? I want to stay."

We're in a car, myself and a couple of other guys. Brian the carbonated lasagna inventor is driving. We're going north on May Avenue, and we're out past the north edge of town.

The sky starts getting dark as we drive under lowering clouds. We're talking about something but I interrupt to point out cloud-to-cloud lightning crackling overhead to our right. Everyone stops talking to watch it.

Ahead to our left, there is what looks like a row of small fires running on an east-west line down a hill - perhaps started by lightning. The sky is quite dark now. As we get closer, I see there's an amusement park on the side of the hill and the lights I thought were fire may actually be some sort of lighting display in the park.

Suddenly, there's a tornado behind us coming up the road and crossing diagonally from southwest to northeast. Brian is about to turn east - it seems like we're at Edmond Road, but there's something about us going to Quail Springs.

"Don't turn! Don't turn!" I yell, because turning right would again put us in the tornado's path.

Brian keeps driving north. A smaller, less well formed tornado comes over the hill, travelling south and coming straight at us. It's smaller, and we can see clear through the dust it's kicking up. Brian hits the accelerator and we barrel straight through it. The car is bounced around some but we reach the other side. Another tornado appears, exactly like the one we just encountered, and we barrel through it.

We're still driving beneath the dark clouds and another funnel appears behind us, traveling north and gaining ground on us. Then, ahead of us, there is suddenly a huge, and I mean huge, piece of heavy road equipment. There's a flat cylindrical wheel like the ones on steam rollers, only it's the width of the entire road and maybe twelve feet high. There's some sort of superstructure above it that I can't clearly make out. The thing is barreling along at a surprising speed, but not as fast as the tornado closing in on us from behind.

The machinery is too big for us to get around. The tornado is behind us and gaining ground. Then suddenly there's a second road machine behind us and we're sandwiched between them, with the tornado still presumably behind it.

The driver of a small car ahead of us sees a little opening beneath the structure of the road machine ahead and darts through, making it by only a hair's breadth. There's no room for us to get through.

"What are we gonna do?!" I yell from the back seat.

Brian turns around and yells, "Relax. It's a movie."

Suddenly we are watching the giant machine on a screen. We're no longer sitting in the car, but in a theatre, and the audience is applauding. Is the movie over, I wonder, or are they applauding because Brian finally got me to quit yelling?

Now on the screen is a scene from another source, seemingly built into the plot of this film, about a child who also somehow confuses reality with a movie. While this scene seems familiar to me as I experience the dream, I don't as I sit here writing whether this was something I saw once, something I dreamed in another dream or something made up as I dreamt tonight. But sitting in the theater, I notice the nested levels of confusion between reality and film.

I also notice we're watching this on some sort of huge TV screen. There's a swinging hinged door which has been opened out to make the screen visible. Below it, a conventional movie screen has been covered with a drop cloth held in place with duct tape.

Suddenly I'm in a new location. It seems to be a college campus. There are other people there, but not anyone I was traveling in the car with. Another tornado appears behind me, bearing down on me, but I'm walking into a large sturdy brick building and the approaching tornado doesn't fill me with the same dread the others did.

As I walk in the building, I'm in a spacious lobby area and there are several other people around. "There's a tornado coming," I say calmly. "Maybe we should head to the basement." Everyone moves to the stairway, but no one seems frightened or alarmed. One of these people seems to be Larry, a photographer whom I knew many years ago in TV.

We're down in the basement. I glance up through a window near the ceiling and see the tornado hitting the building above us. Some windows break and some guttering or other metal is torn off and crashes againt the wall, but other than that, the building holds.

I'm standing in a corridor. Several other guys are down there standing around.

"This is a dream, isn't it?" I ask. No one replies, but a couple of them look at me with a Spock-like arched eyebrow. "I don't know what's going on here," I add, "but I want to stay. I don't want to wake up."

"You were never groomed for leadership, were you?" one of them asks. His tone is sympathetic, not mocking or condescending. He opens a door -- one of those big double doors that separate hallways in school buildings -- and disappears behind it.

Next I am sitting in a room. It looks like a college classroom, new and well-lit. I'm sitting at a table and there are two or three men across from me. One of them hands me a piece of paper. "Do you know what this is?" he asks.

The paper is about a half-sheet of typing paper, folded and unfolded many times, well-creased and dog-eared. There are some hand-written notes on it. The writing is small and crabbed and the lines uneven. The paper has been wet at some point, and the notes are smeared.

I can't read all of it, but I recognize the words "Lyndie England" and "CBS News."

There are two or three more men sitting at a separate table to my left, placed perpendicular to the one at which I am sitting. They look at me quizzically. I feel like I'm being interrogated.

I start to explain who Lyndie England is in 'my world,' that is, this waking life. They look at me like they don't believe me. They seem suspicious. I look at the note again, feeling some pressure to decipher it and explain it, but I can't.

And then I wake up.

There were no women anywhere in this dream, except among the audience in the theatre, for whatever significance that may have.

---

Since about 2001, I typically have had dreams involving tornados when there were important decisions approaching in my life. One may be approaching now, although I can't discuss it here yet.

More kittens (not at my place, thankfully)

Backtracking through my "who links here" data, I found the Watermark blog, which in turn reported this crucial link:

The Daily Kitten

I'm too old and morpse to love kittens, but I do anyway. (Should there be a comma between 'do' and 'anyway'?')


Addendum: 'Morpse' is not a word. It was supposed to be 'morose.' But 'morpse' has a nice sound to it, don't you think? More found art.

Reading

By the way, I've finished 'The Dharma Bums,' and I recommend it to the 35 other Americans who haven't already read it in college or wherever.

I'm now reading Robert Thurman's 'Inner Revolution.'

Chop wood, carry water

"Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."

- old Zen proverb

"You know you're in trouble when you see one of those 'house of squalor' stories on the 6 o'clock news, and it doesn't look as bad as your place."

- some guy on a web conference somewhere

I hate chores worse than about anything. I use big industrial-grade mops, brooms and such because when I do get around to cleaning, it's always a huge chore. I broke a mop handle in two the other day trying to get some kind of crud off the kitchen floor back where the doorway leads to the enclosed back porch.

I've had philosophical discussions both with myself and with others about hiring a housekeeper. And a lawn person. And someone to clean out the minivan, get the oil changed, etc. But good lord, who could I ask to undertake such a task?

Those of you on the Well will probably have already heard this story: a few years ago I bought one of those 'take control of your clutter' books. I lost the damn thing that same day and didn't find it until two years later. It was under an unopened Homeland Security size package of Double-Cloud Soft Unscented Charmin.

(I call it the 'Homeland Security' size because it's got 48 rolls, or 24 rolls of 2-ply, or 18 rolls of 2-ply with a tiny roller core or whatever. Anyway, it's a huge wad of TP. If the worst happens, I figure I'll get by without the duct tape, but I sure as hell don't want to run out of toilet paper.)

Well, anyway, getting back to the story, the book was under the Charmin and the Charmin was under some laundry, as I recall. But I finally read it, and made up my mind I was going to declutter my life.

I threw away and gave away tons of stuff. Old suits and sport coats. Sweaters that didn't fit when I bought them, and fit even worse as I gained weight. Old hard drives and shorted out USB cables. I usually fill about a fourth of city trash can every week. For twenty-something weeks in a row, I filled two of them full.

And I am still awash in crap.

And it's not just clutter. Some of it is plain old dirt.

Men, I think, are more prone to this than women. Lint and dust on the toilet between the seat and the tank mean nothing to us. It's just lint and dust, after all, and it's not like any part of our body comes in contact with it. And it's hard to get out of there. So why bother? It's not like it's hurting anything.

And men who are prone to depression are worse than those who aren't. You really don't want to get back there behind the toilet seat if you feel life is a pointless exercise in any event.

Buddhists talk about having an 'empty mind.' I tend to think of this as like having an empty room. If you walk into an empty room, yeah, it seems bare. But it also seems spacious and calm. It's ready to be filled with furniture and mementos and whatever – until it gets too full and if you can afford to, you empty it out and start over. So we do the same thing with our minds (again, just my interpretation/visualization), emptying out prejudices, assumptions, worries, old grievances, bad habits and so on until we have an empty room in which to work.

After I got into the 'empty mind' concept, I realized that the 'empty room' concept has some literal validity, too. A clean, simple, minimalist environment can encourage calm and serenity. Maybe eventually I will have one.

But at the moment, I am still awash in crap.

||||||||||

I'd like to be able to say I care about something, anything, but right now I don't seem to. The dog is sleeping, and I think I shall do the same.

Two Elvis impersonators and Frankenstein

I went back to bed at 3:30 or so.

I dreamt I was watching something on TV. There was a swimming pool, and people were jumping into it. But after they jumped, and just before they hit the water, they disappeared. There would be big splashes where their forms hit the water, but the jumpers themselves were invisible. One of them was Brian, inventor of carbonated lasagna, but the rest were strangers.

Then there were four people standing at the edge of the pool, right in front of the camera. One was a game show host kind of guy, two were Elvis impersonators, and one was the Frankenstein monster.

One of the Elvis impersonators was a Las Vegas Elvis in a white jump suit and the other was an Ed Sullivan Elvis in a tangerine-colored sport coat and white shirt. The Elvises were arguing about something and the game show guy was trying to stop them while the Frankenstein monster just watched.

Then I was at my front door. There were two guys there. They were talking to me but I couldn't hear them because my ears were ringing. I have mild tinnitis in real life, but never so bad that I can't hear. At first I thought they were upset about something, but then I finally realized they read about Haley, She Who Does Not Sleep, on this blog and wanted to meet her.

The front porch of this house was not the front porch of my house, but seemed more like the porch of the house where I lived when I was in high school.

Then I was back inside, and there other people in the house and more were arriving. It was a party of some sort. Don, a college friend of mine with whom I also worked (but who is a different guy than the one I described from the dream in the earlier post) was there, along with an identical twin he does not have in real life.

The house became really crowded. There were too many people and I started to feel uncomfortable.

There was a woman walking through the house -- a stranger -- with two bags of groceries. By this time I realized I was dreaming. I told her to put down the groceries, which she did. I took her in my arms and kissed her, which she seemed to enjoy. I looked up, and there was another woman standing there. I decided to kiss her as well, but then I woke up.

---

I laid there awake for I guess five or ten minutes. I fell asleep again, and the dream picked up where it left off. Most of the people had left, and I guess I was trying to encourage the others to leave as well.

Something else happened after that but I don't remember what it was.

Or maybe not

I have to think some more about that previous post.

Am I in the right place?

I was driving around Saturday evening a little bit lost, looking for something in a rather unfamiliar part of town.

"Am I in the right place?" I asked myself.

And it occurred to me that the answer to that question is always, "Yes."

New blog

Well, new to me.

You may have noticed a couple of comments here from "The Rambling Taoist." I'm adding a link on the right to remind myself – and you – to check his blog frequently.

I'll especially recommend this list of Taoism books, some of which I've read and some of which I've never even heard.

Ghosts

With Haley sleeping in the bathroom (and growing more acclimated to it with each passing day), I getting more sleep at night. Nonetheless, I still find myself awakening in the wee hours, mind rambling along too fast for me to quickly get back to sleep.

Three times in the past few days, I have had dreams about people from my past. The first was a dream in which I walked through a house and found my ex-wife sitting on a sofa in the living room, crying. She looked as she does today, not as she looked eight years ago when we were still together. I knelt beside her and asked what was wrong, but I woke up before she could answer.

(Parenthetically, I'll mention that my ex is a wonderful person. She deserved better than she got from me and better than she got from life in general.)

When I fell asleep again, I dreamt I was walking through a different house. All the doors to the rooms were closed, and each had "2003" written on them... in Futura Extra Bold. I understood that in the dream to refer to the year, noit that they room numbers. I could hear voices coming from one of the rooms, and they were talking about my friend Bob who died over the New Years holiday. I went from door to door looking for them. Some doors were locked and some opened into empty rooms, devoid even of furniture. I woke up before I could find the people who were speaking.

Just now I had a dream about some of my current coworkers, and someone with whom I went to college and later with whom I later worked suddenly entered. I haven't seen that guy in probably 15 years.

Trading places

I'm sleeping on the futon and the dog is sleeping in the bathroom.

Lark the Cat returns

Lark the Cat reappeared tonight, after being at large since last October or thereabouts. She winters across the street, then comes to my place in the spring. I assume she's with kitten, but it was impossible to tell in the dark.

Dog

The dog's up. I'm up.

Carbonated lasagna

There was a cultural watershed event tonight at the Red Cup, and even many of the regulars missed it. Years from now, many will no doubt say they were there even though they weren't.

Kathryn, Brian, Hugh and I put our heads together in an outside-the-box brainstorming session, and laid the groundwork for concepts that, years from now, will be so much a part of our everyday life that many will simply take it for granted they were always there, and marvel at the stories told of the evening they were first expressed as the germs of ideas.

Kathryn revisited her baby-caught-in-a-pipe air bag, but in a collective free-wheeling jam session we added that the bag, originally conceived to stop a baby who had fallen down a pipe from falling any further down pending rescue, could actually be deployed with a sudden burst likle an auto airbag, thus popping the infant into the air to be caught on descent by waiting firefighters.

Hugh suggested the formation of MABIP -- Mothers Against Babies in Pipes -- to help raise the level of baby-in-pipe awareness.

Your correspondent suggested flavored nose spray -- black raspberry being my personal favorite -- to help relieve the discomfort that occurs when one inhales too much in one sniff and some of it runs down your throat into your mouth.

But Brian had the most innovative idea of all -- carbonated lasagna that goes off in your mouth with a subtle popping sensation.

The man is a culinary Edison!

So there you have it. Tanner was there, but no one else. If, years or decades from now, you hear someone else say they saw it happen, well, they didn't.

Maybe you should print this page out and save it for future reference, just to keep the record straight.

All this thinking wore me out. I feel exhilarated but exhausted. I'm going to go to the bathroom and get some sleep.

Later.

Slept in the bathroom again...

...all night this time. Gosh, it's quiet in there. I could hear my alarm clock ticking for the first time. It was dark, too.

Haley slept on the other side of the door and I heard her get up and thump around a couple of times, but nothing like what she does when I'm asleep on the futon. Not being able to see me seems to calm her down.

Ties update

I have just completed the online purchase of three extra long Jerry Garcia ties.

Never worn by copier salesmen or Jay Gatsby or James Bond.

Solitary confinement

I just don't like using the bathroom as an isolation cell.

But Haley went into another of her 'why-are-you-sleeping-get-up-get-up' anxiety attacks at about 4 a.m., and I was desperate for sleep.

So I shut myself in the bathroom with the pillow and the blanket, and slept pretty well on the floor there for another couple of hours.

Kind of reminded me of being a young man.

When I was a young man

When I was a young man my ambition was to sleep on a mattress on the floor and have a home full of easels and drawing tables.

Then my unplanned career came along, and I spent 25 years as a walking advertisement for mediocrity, consumerism and superficiality.

I would have been better off sticking with the original plan.

Now I'm a tired old dumpy grumpy consumer struggling to be something more by being less and not doing such a great job of it.

Prajna the cat has lately become very interested in attention from me. She is such a tiny critter... still the size of a kitten at age two and a half and light as a feather. She's the second-smallest of the cats behind Midget.

Why am I here?

I've been out for a drive, taking pictures. Man, is it nice out tonight.

This would be a good evening to sit outside with five friends and some wine in a box and argue about whether Alan Watts was a Taoist when he died. But here I am at my computer. Monday night is the 'dead zone' in my corner of the world. No Galileo, no Red Cup.

Nor I have I sat in about a week.

Instead, I wore a necktie to work today. That is my achievement.

I need to hear a human voice.












































Bat shit.

First necktie since September '98

I had forgotten.

I wore a necktie to work today for the first time since September '98. It was an old regimental stripe rep tie, Kenneth Gordon make, and it had been in my closet since probably '91 or '92 and maybe earlier. Fortunately, it was conservative enough to be no more dorky than it was 15 years ago.

I knew intellectually I had grown unfond of neckties.

But I had forgotten how viscerally I had come to despise them.

At 6'0" and a 17" neck, I have a hard time finding ties that fit, anyway. The short end is always 'way too short, and at my current weight, the tie accentuates my stomach, especially in profile.

I'm always fiddling with the knot, the way I fiddle with my handlebar moustache when I have one.

I hate neckties.

Okay, one Oscar® result

I just looked at the current "Cutting to the Chase" (which see.)

Hey –– don't you guys know I'm reading "The Dharma Bums" over here? I can't have my mind polluted with all that worldly crap!

Oscar® results

I don't know.

And it's okay to not know.

What a great day.

It was just an all around great day today... sunny and 72.

The Red Cup crowd decamped to the patio for the first time since fall. Well, there are some people who stay out there when it's 35 degrees, but today there were more outside than inside... a general hubbub of people including many who had not been seen in weeks.

Cristen brought her kids and Amy brought Bella (certified as World's Cutest Puppy®), so they played together around the grownups.

Lesley moved from table to table. Brian gave Kat with a K a shoulder massage.

I have these times in my life when everything just seems 'in the zone.' They may last only an hour or two –– perhaps even less –– and they just have to be enjoyed as they come, and then let go of when they are over. This morning was one of them. I wasn't even actively participating, really; just sitting quietly, surrounded by lives being led.

I am reading "The Dharma Bums," the first Kerouac I have ever read (I frankly had a very incomplete education) and it has been a revelation, especially on such a clear, balmy day when one can easily visualize oneself sitting on a mat in a guy's house and talking about Zen versus Tibetan Buddhism.

I also assembled the new doghouse and aired up the tires on my bicycle.

Thank God spring is here.

Clothes III

James Bond is probably not the most-referred to fictional character in men's fashion magazines.

That would be Jay Gatsby, of course.

Proof of how far I've backslid.

Escape Dog!

I was able to watch stealthily this morning as Haley, She Who Does Not Sleep, plotted and executed her escape from the back yard.

It was a perfect demonstration of the principle that persistence pays off.

Haley is probably the least intelligent dog I've ever had. But she spent ten minutes sniffing around a newly-secured section of the fence looking for a way out, before finally squeezing herself through a tiny opening between two pickets.

More work is required.

Clothes II

I learned years ago that if you read 24 consecutive issues of GQ or Esquire, you'll absorb pretty much everything they have to say or will ever have to say.

The classic navy blazer is part of the foundation of a man's wardrobe blah blah blah. Chinos were popularized by GIs returning home from WWII blah blah blah. English suits are blah blah blah, but Italian suits are blah blah blah. The classic rep tie is blah blah blah for any blah blah blah. The Duke of Windsor blah blah blah. Your cummerbund should be worn blah blah blah your symphony tickets blah blah blah. Only a blah blah blah would wear a button down shirt with blah blah blah. Lightweight worsted wool is blah blah blah. Your martini should be stirred, blah blah blah Bond, James Bond blah blah blah.

(I think James Bond is the single most-frequently referred to fictional character in men's fashion magazines. And when they talk about James Bond, they mean Sean Connery as James Bond. There is still no other.)

I thumbed through one of the magazines -- I couldn't tell you which -- at Borders yesterday afternoon.

Blah blah blah.

I can see now that my fascination with clothes back in the eighties and early nineties was in part a way to try to buy an identity for myself because I didn't think I had come with one pre-installed.

Maybe I didn't, but now that's okay. The sage neither seeks attention nor avoids it. Having no identity simplifies life enormously, and simple is always better.

But at work, where I am about the only guy in the building who doesn't wear suits or even ties to the office, I think my non-business business dress draws attention. It has become a manifestation of ego. And as I've written before, the way I see ego now is that it's just more clutter in my life.

But I don't like dress clothes anymore. Too expensive. Too uncomfortable. Too high-maintenance. Too boring.

And yet.

And yet it seems like it is time to begin dressing to not draw attention. Neither overly natty, nor assertively counter-culture. Bland, frankly.

Further complicating the issue is that I do not have the physique of Sean Connery as James Bond. I have the physique of Edgar Buchanan as Uncle Joe on "Petticoat Junction." My own fault: I am a sloth. But I'm an off-the-rack 48R, up from a 42L in my twenties, and nothing I buy is going to make me not look like an overweight middle-aged man.

I do not want to look like a copier salesman. But I'm too penguin-shaped for the clothes I'd like to wear.

On the other hand...

The Sartorialist's Blog

Clothes

Dogwoods in bloom

Dogwoods are one of the first things to bloom around here in spring. Last spring, when they were in full bloom, the trees looked like they were covered with snow.

The blooming of the dogwoods is the announcement, at least in my neighborhood, that spring is here and that other plants will soon be following.

Last spring, the trunk of the dogwood tree in my front yard was split in two by lightning from an overnight storm. I didn't even hear it. But when I walked out the next morning, half the tree was lying on the lawn.

I wasn't sure the remainder would survive, but all the branches are blooming this weekend. The photo was taken in the early afternoon.

Tonight

I fell on the futon almost as soon as I got home. I was asleep by 7:30 and didn't wake up until 10:30 or so.

AWOL

Twice this week, She Who Does Not Sleep has escaped for two hours or more. She's missing as I write this.

The weather has been nice enough that I've just left the back door open, hoping that being able to come and go as she pleased would calm her down, and it worked some. I didn't worry about intruders because I figured she would scare them off.

But although I thought I had the fence secured, both times she found a new way through.

And both times I discovered her absence by waking up and noticing how strangely quiet the house was. No pacing back and forth, no grumbling or slurping or growling or snarfing or belching or farting.

The first time it happened, I woke feeling good for the first time in weeks, because I had actually slept for a couple of hours instead of dozing through the series of 15-minute cat naps for which I've had to settle -- ever since she started having these nervous fits caused by my every cough, or a dog barking down the block, or a cat stretching in the living room.

Last night, I bought her a dog house at PetsMart, planning to assemble it this weekend and start letting her stay outside more often.

She will probably come back today after the sun's up.

I desperately want some decent sleep.

7:16 am update. She's just come back home.

Or maybe it's just my meds...

...because I cried at this, too.

Kittens represent youth and innocence. "The Joker" represents, well, youth and innocence. I was 21 when the original was released. So it's, like, all nostalgic and shit.

Plus, it's kittens. What are you gonna do?

What if?

What if Microsoft designed the packaging for the iPod?

Maybe it's just me, but I laughed until I cried.

By the way... what is this music?

Update: I have changed this link to point to a better vesrion of the same video.