GENERATION GAPS
Like so many others (mostly of my generation, commonly designated with an X) who spend way too much of their time fiddling around online instead of having “a life” (whatever that is – and when, may I ask, is at least one of the people telling me I need to get one going to tell me what one is, by the way? Just wondering, just wondering), I have been reading the vituperative outbursts of those my supposed peers who volunteered to collaborate with Cary Tennis on a multi-day piece entitled “Love in the Age of Irony” on salon.com with more than a little amusement.
The 20- and 30-somethings who wrote to answer Tennis’ opening question about what it’s like to be young now and what his generation (dum dum DUUUUMMM – the Baby Boomers) look like to “us” are a pretty diverse group (for Salon readers) but they all seem united in focusing all of their angst and incomprehension and ire on the people who were our age in the 60s and early 70s, which I can’t help but find humorous mostly because, well, they seem to think it’s something different.
As Tennis responded in one of his best audio rants to date, the flower power and the drugs and the hippie clothes and the no-strings, AIDS-free sex maybe look like fun on film and maybe sound fun when filtered through the increasingly addled recollections of BB-ers (who do seem disproportionately to have been represented in my experience and that of most of my friends by really annoying, self-righteous droners like the “ex-activist” soccer moms who infested the offices of a private charity for whom I worked during my early years in Boston, women who constantly berated their secretaries – who were all my age or younger – for not being out there being the kind of rampaging pains in the ass that they were when they were our age. Oh did it ever get old! So old that my friends and I all deeply treasured a cartoon drawing a flute factory worker pal of mine drew of what our Woodstock would look like, should we have one – obviously this was before MTV dreamed up Woodstock Jr. for the anniversary of that mud-soaked music mess – complete with a mushroom cloud, black helicopters and angry mohawked punks with boots bigger than their bodies stomping hippies into the ground), yeah, that all seemed fun, but the people doing it weren’t necessarily having so much fun. They’d grown up diving under their school desks to rehearse for missile attacks and, as Tennis put it, their teenage years were full of “fear of martial law, nuclear annihilation, and a madman in the White House” which... sounds kind of familiar to me, I who grew up with the Iran hostage crisis being the first big news story I was old enough to understand (I still remember where I was when I heard about it; I was at my friend Keri’s house making noises on my brand new trombone that were almost as obscene as the bleats coming out of her saxophone when her mother called out “Oh my god, those poor people!”) and debated nuclear disarmament in high school and knew as my first president I was old enough to follow a soon-to-be-Alzheimer’s-riddled maniac who was letting his lackeys sell guns to the same people who kidnapped those hostages.
The difference between the two age groups looks significant at first glance – the BBs in their nihilism got hedonistic, because tomorrow wasn’t going to come so what’s the point of denying yourself corporeal pleasure, recreational insanity, etc., while we in our nihilism wallowed in our nihilism because the Dionysian excess thing was *SO* over and it was *SO* much more clever to sing “We all gotta duck/When the shit hits the fan” than something so dated as “Everybody get together/Try to love one another.” But both schticks were about the same thing: young people growing up in a world that we’d somehow convinced ourselves or had been convinced by others was going to make sense to us someday, it made sense to our elders, didn’t it, but we were impatient for that time when everything would fall into place and nobody would be freaking out and that day would already be here, dammit, if everybody else would just see that we were right and stop acting like jackasses, dammit!
OK, I’ve firmly dated myself as a Gen Xer there, because I’m pretty sure the BBs would never call those who disagreed with them jackasses (well, some of *my* Boomer friends – I’ve there marked myself as some kind of culture freak among my kind because I have Boomer friends – would, but they’re from Wyoming and we’re always about 20 years behind current trends). Well, maybe Abbie Hoffman woulda, but the soccer moms who made my life hell in that office in Boston wouldn’t; they’d have called them misguided warmongers or something – I can’t be more precise because after about a month of knowing them I had firmly and unshakably installed the Charlie Brown filter on each and every one of them.
But that’s not the point; the point is that we’ve all of us, Boomer and X-er alike, grown up in a scary world in which the prospect of all of us dying off in one great burst of radiation has, yes, been a feature of science fiction but has also been a geopolitical fact, and still is even with the demise of the Soviet bloc, only the potential bad guy has changed; he’s got a turban now instead of a fur hat, claims belief in Allah instead of Lenin, etc. etc.
So what’s really going on here isn’t so much a real as a perceived generation gap, one that can only further poison life for my people who are facing the following real, hard, fact, as elucidated by professional demographer William H. Frey in his latest brilliant analysis of 2000 census data (no, LIANT readers, I’m not going to rant again about the Census Bureau, though they do still occupy a special place on my shit list): one in four Americans is a Baby Boomer.
A lot of my demographic peers are blaming everything they see as “wrong” in the world on 25% of America’s population.
That’s shit.
But what is really going on?
Pardon me while I quote at length from a letter novelist Michael Ventura wrote to dear, dear James Hillman (published in the duo’s 1992 book-length excursus We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse:
”...Let’s go back to the 1940s. Fundamental changes occurred in science and the arts at the same time. In science, IBM and Howard Aiken built the first major computer, the Mark I, in Massachusetts in 1939. Then in Pennsylvania in 1946, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert made the ENIAC, a computer one thousand times faster than its predecessors. The new pattern and sheer speed of calculation would change and intensify patterns of thought, influencing what we researched, how we researched, and the form (and therefore the data) of the result.
“During this same period, 1939 to 1946, musician-composers were coming up with comparable structural changes in music. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Thelonius Monk and Bud Powell, and drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach worked with sounds, patterns and speeds of music that had never been attempted before... Here was music paralleling in its form what was going on in he new field of electronics. The different mediums were hit at the same time with previously unheard-of forms of speed and complexity.
“Also at the same time, and in the same area, painters achieved something very similar. Abstract Expressionism and Thelonius monk go hand in hand, or ear in hand. Space is to painting what motion is to other mediums, and the painting of this era created impressions of vast inner spaces while playing as freely with shape as Bebop did with melody...
“...See all this in the light of another art, the art of behavior: acting. While scientists changed the speed and pattern of certain kinds of thought, and jazz musicians and painters did the same to sound and vision, theater people clustering around Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan transformed how human behavior would be interpreted on stage and screen. The new Actors Studio method expressed moods and realms of the psyche that had been off-limits to the more traditional acting of England and Hollywood, but those moods and realms were right at home with what was being expressed in the new painting and jazz.
“Again, the quality of speed was key, but the Actors Studio method of people like Marlon Brando slowed down reactions, doing with pace what many Abstract Expressionists were doing with space... There’s an air of being knocked off center, of having to regain your balance in every new moment, in the Actors Studio style... as though portraying the motivation of any character had to take into account that character’s being a bit dazed at the speed and intensity of the changes surrounding him. when you think of artists like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Gena Rowlands, a kind of suspicious bewilderment is taken for granted in their style.”
(Ellipses mine; the letter is far longer and raps in greater depth on the idea of spontaneous, seemingly unrelated but simultaneous changes in these very diverse fields of inquiry, but I think I’ve included enough here to make the point)
In other words, the world became a wildly different place during the period immediately before most of the BBs were even born (the childhood of my own parents, who watched the BBs with all of the annoyed amusement with which my friends and I watch the N’SYNC-listening, thong-underwear-and-baggy-pants-wearing, Spongebob Squarepants-watching youth of today, actually). The world, then, was already unfamiliar and fucked-up-seeming and bewildering and dangerous before the BB-ers were even shitting their (still) cloth diapers.
So does that mean it’s all the fault of the “Greatest” World War II generation with which my own peers seem so much happier to identify, share time, get together and bitch about the BB-ers with?
If that’s the conclusion you’ve drawn, then I’ve utterly failed at getting my point across in this essay. If that’s the conclusion you’ve drawn, then you’re still casting about for someone to blame.
People, it’s no one generation or ethnic group or leader’s fault, that the world is a weird and wacky place where it’s not safe to grow up or have sex or invest on Wall Street. The world has always been a weird and wacky and dangerous place.
The pace of change has sped up, yes, even as our lifespans have grown longer along with our bones and our periods of economic dependence on our parents (mine is still somewhat in force even though I have three, sometimes four jobs at a time) and our recorded history, but it’s just a new angle on an old, old curve that began with mankind waking and sleeping solely according to the sun and only in the last 100 years or so has brought our “waking” lives into the night with the invention of electric light. Do we blame Edison, then, for a generation’s downward mobility (delayed for many of us by the internet boom that catapulted into the home-owning, German car-buying yuppie stratosphere those of us who would otherwise have been categorized as victims of our own creativity – you know whom among us I mean, those of us who can’t bring ourselves to enter a cubicle farm even on a visit, let alone to work there, who eke out livings as temps or drug dealers or freelance writers because to accept a real 9-5 job-type job would be to sell out, and yes of course I include myself in this number, have done my time as a clerical whore for The Skill Bureau [“Do you do Windows? Sitting down? Top money for top computer skills” the yellow pages ad said when I arrived in Boston in 1993. How else could I have landed an $18 an hour job within 24 hours of coming off the Interstate?])?
Please.
More important than any of that is the need to simply recognize that none of us really knows what we’re doing, whether we were born in 1929, 1949 or 1969, that all of us are a little bewildered by what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, and that the only real differences between the generations are the physical ones, remember those? There are maybe unbridgeable gaps between those who have to take blood pressure or arthritis or osteoporosis medicines on a daily basis and those who maybe have to pop a tylenol after too hard a racquetball game and those who still think drugs are something you take at parties for fun, but those differences are not a result of the malice or thoughtlessness or poor planning or selfishness of any particular group of people, unless maybe you just blame it on the gods who made aging our ultimate reality.
Stupid gods.
See, that didn’t do much good either, did it?
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Monday, September 23, 2002
AHHH...FOOTBALL...
After ten years of east coast urban hipster indoctrination, I still have to pause a beat and think about which sport is actually under discussion when a companion of mine brings up “football” – my mental filing system is quite different from that of most people, as I proved in kindergarten when I recited all the Greek letters in order when my teacher demanded I prove I knew my alphabet already; had she wanted the English letters she would have asked for my ABCs, wouldn’t she? So after I shake thoughts of thick-legged foreigners with interesting hairdos and exotic surnames out of my head, I find myself oddly soothed and able to take on whatever lies before me.
Football, the kind my coffee buddies fret over and my hot pool and middle school buddies sweat over, is one of the most comforting things our culture has to offer.
I don’t suppose a lot of people find football comforting – serious fans crouched in poses of unbearable tension waiting for, e.g., a field goal attempt, a bowl of chips poised to fling across the room when the tension of the moment is finally, explosively released look anything but relaxed as they wait – but while the actual play and spectation of the game itself is exhilarating, frustrating, hilarious or painful (depending, this season, on whether one is watching the Denver Broncos, Saratoga High School, Saratoga Middle School or the Wyoming Cowboys), the fact that football season is here and has resumed brings a satisfying closure to what is always a tense and busy summer here in my valley.
See, most of my friends make most of their money for the year during the three or four months of “tourist season” so life during these months is a real, earnest and serious proposition. We may incidentally have fun on, say, a stolen afternoon drunkenly floating the river (though we have to share it with an ever increasing load of tourists) or a mid-week camping trip (if we can afford to close down our businesses or have reliable employees to whom to hand the baton for a Tuesday through Thursday - no weekends, of course, because again, the camping spots are full of, yes, tourists), but we don’t really relax through those because there’s always that background anxiety – ought one to have left the office/store/guide shop today? What business has been lost or turned away (Or in my case, what potential visitors have not found our website satisfactory and have decided not to leave their name and mailing address on our answering machine so that we can send them visitors packets or relocation packets or lists of local landowners who allow antelope hunting on their property and so have decided to spend their money in Albany County or Colorado or even somewhere in Nebraska, depending on what they were planning to do on their vacation/hunting trip/fact-finding tour for a high-circulation travel magazine oh god even thinking about this brings back the ghost of migraines past)?
Then comes football season, which gives us something new to talk about besides the lack of water in the river, the lack of butts in motel beds, or the way the Forest Service has mismanaged the latest timber sale in a wrongheaded and economically damaging way that will ultimately mean that our grandchildren will have to use hemp for toilet paper or something. The preseason starts, and we ignore it but keep an eye on the advance reports of Mike Shanahan’s latest stable of unknown but ultimately outrageously capable running backs and Vic Koennig’s latest pinheaded remarks about how this season the Cowboys are going to suck much less than they did last year and my own senseless babbling about how there’s a sixth grader who already weighs 150 and doesn’t cry when someone knocks him down.
Then the games begin... middle school games are glorious, giddy fun (in what other sport can a bystander on the sidelines – bystanders are allowed on the sidelines, if they have brought cameras – hear a brand new player, staggering off the field after his first ever down, cry out within hearing range of his mortified mother “Coach! That guy was humping my leg!”), the last refuge of the Statue of Liberty and other plays, the true bastion of the two-point conversion, the home of the double fumble, the run for a loss, and the 95-yard kickoff return.
High school games are, for me, mostly sort of a wistful, nostalgic experience, not so much because I remember when my own classmates played (the Saratoga Smurfs, we were called back then, because the average player height was a towering 5’4” and you don’t even want to know the average weight [bantam? We wished!]) – though it’s entertaining indeed at every single game to hear the same announcer who called our games quote a remark I made in that same booth when I was SHS’s statistician in 1986 and informed said announcer that I wasn’t sure to whom to credit a tackle because it seemed the accomplishment of “a plethora of Panthers” (he’s always most assiduous about attributing the remark to me) – as because I’m now watching kids playing high school ball that I used to hang out with on the sidelines at middle school games, kids I used to have to admonish between plays to try to forget that I was there and taking pictures and please stop posing with the ball in the middle of a down. They’re all grown up now – WAY up – and are no longer asking my advice on how to tackle or if that pass looked good or if maybe they should have schlumblededummed instead of frobishing the grindlewart (I have yet to master the intricacies of football terminology, if you can’t tell), preferring now (perhaps correctly) to leave such calls to the coach instead of the newslady...
College games I tend to ignore on television, but they’re fun to go to live, because, as a good friend of mine likes to observe whether we’re in the stadium or at the American Legion cursing at the TV, “Win or lose, we still booze.” This year we mostly booze. It’s not a high water mark the Cowboys are setting this year. I think the middle school team could beat them. I think the Cowboys would fall for the Statue of Liberty. More than once.
My sympathies go out to those who, like my parents, chose to get season tickets for this year. Hey, at least there’s beer. Lots and lots of beer. And you get to go to Wal Mart with relative impunity (i.e. at least you’re not making a special trip to do so, thus assuring the ire of yours truly the Shop At Home Nazi and her crack stormtroop of Saratoga merchants; you’re merely risking it if a fellow valley resident catches you in the aisles with items you could have bought at home in your cart). And maybe next year they’ll play better and make it all the way to the Holiday Bowl where they’ll get beat up by a PAC-10 or Big 8 team or something... Oh wait, that’s what they do now in the regular season... very tactless of me... so sorry.
Bronco games are all about circling around the modern day hestia of the American home, the TV set at my parents’ house. Two p.m. is Bronco time. I head up to the house with a load or two of laundry to do (Kate’s Landing not being equipped with facilities for same – hey, I’m lucky I have a stove that doesn’t require me to stockpile firewood) (as it is I’m going to be shopping for some space heaters real soon) (not at Wal-Mart), grab a beer and kick back, bewildered at the overwhelming spectacle football on that level has become, gawking at some 70,000 people crammed into a brand new stadium that cost more than our water plant, sewer lagoon, police station, town hall and paving projects combined and feeling a seductive pull to someday be in that number, not to see the game “live” since I’m pretty sure even the occupants of first tier seats need opera glasses to distinguish our Broncos from the very similarly clad Bills, but to be part of such a large and featureless crowd, to stop for once being the individual human being that I am, with my personal obsessions and problems and challenges and lack of fashion sense, and to disappear into a collective, to be subsumed in a greater purpose, to speak in a multitudinous roar and otherwise be silent, to think the thoughts of thousands of others as tiny, antlike Brian Griese prepares to hand off a flyspeck of a ball to tiny, antlike Mike Anderson so he can advance a centimeter or two and elicit again that many-headed roar.
I know that’s just a fantasy, though. Bronco games can’t be any different from Wyoming games (seven or eight times as many people, but it’s like the way Richard Adams has rabbits counting in Watership Down: one, two, three, four, hrair [many]); I have been part of record sellout crowds and still and all, though we yell as one and focus our attention on making that pigskin sail between instead of around the posts, there is no time when I am not still me in my own head and my own life, subject to the scrutiny of other individuals seated all around me and stuck listening to their gossip and their small talk and their often comical invectives hurled at poor Coach Roach/Erickson/Koennig/whoever comes next, poor slob.
But even trapped as I am in my own life, it’s still fun to yell at the referees whether it’s in the stadium or in the living room, to marvel at the Thucydidean wisdom of the announcers who, in split seconds, analyze a play and its flaws and its progress with razory focus (how many times have I been dazzled by, e.g. the swarming quality of the Denver defense and how they’ve utterly mastered matters on a down, only to realize that the guy that mattered, the one with the ball, got away?) and, let’s face it, comically inept metaphors. It’s great to think about something that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter a damned bit for a few hours and (best of all) not to be considered frivolous for it. I may think about things that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter a damned bit all the time, but while few of my townsfolk share my enthusiasm for Greek etymology or for figuring out which Beethoven fragment I’ve been humming the last five days or what species of moth my friend thinks he saw up in the mountains last weekend, none of them ever mock me for having spent two or three hours I’ll never get back again watching 22 people chase a dead hunk of pigskin up and down the field.
After ten years of east coast urban hipster indoctrination, I still have to pause a beat and think about which sport is actually under discussion when a companion of mine brings up “football” – my mental filing system is quite different from that of most people, as I proved in kindergarten when I recited all the Greek letters in order when my teacher demanded I prove I knew my alphabet already; had she wanted the English letters she would have asked for my ABCs, wouldn’t she? So after I shake thoughts of thick-legged foreigners with interesting hairdos and exotic surnames out of my head, I find myself oddly soothed and able to take on whatever lies before me.
Football, the kind my coffee buddies fret over and my hot pool and middle school buddies sweat over, is one of the most comforting things our culture has to offer.
I don’t suppose a lot of people find football comforting – serious fans crouched in poses of unbearable tension waiting for, e.g., a field goal attempt, a bowl of chips poised to fling across the room when the tension of the moment is finally, explosively released look anything but relaxed as they wait – but while the actual play and spectation of the game itself is exhilarating, frustrating, hilarious or painful (depending, this season, on whether one is watching the Denver Broncos, Saratoga High School, Saratoga Middle School or the Wyoming Cowboys), the fact that football season is here and has resumed brings a satisfying closure to what is always a tense and busy summer here in my valley.
See, most of my friends make most of their money for the year during the three or four months of “tourist season” so life during these months is a real, earnest and serious proposition. We may incidentally have fun on, say, a stolen afternoon drunkenly floating the river (though we have to share it with an ever increasing load of tourists) or a mid-week camping trip (if we can afford to close down our businesses or have reliable employees to whom to hand the baton for a Tuesday through Thursday - no weekends, of course, because again, the camping spots are full of, yes, tourists), but we don’t really relax through those because there’s always that background anxiety – ought one to have left the office/store/guide shop today? What business has been lost or turned away (Or in my case, what potential visitors have not found our website satisfactory and have decided not to leave their name and mailing address on our answering machine so that we can send them visitors packets or relocation packets or lists of local landowners who allow antelope hunting on their property and so have decided to spend their money in Albany County or Colorado or even somewhere in Nebraska, depending on what they were planning to do on their vacation/hunting trip/fact-finding tour for a high-circulation travel magazine oh god even thinking about this brings back the ghost of migraines past)?
Then comes football season, which gives us something new to talk about besides the lack of water in the river, the lack of butts in motel beds, or the way the Forest Service has mismanaged the latest timber sale in a wrongheaded and economically damaging way that will ultimately mean that our grandchildren will have to use hemp for toilet paper or something. The preseason starts, and we ignore it but keep an eye on the advance reports of Mike Shanahan’s latest stable of unknown but ultimately outrageously capable running backs and Vic Koennig’s latest pinheaded remarks about how this season the Cowboys are going to suck much less than they did last year and my own senseless babbling about how there’s a sixth grader who already weighs 150 and doesn’t cry when someone knocks him down.
Then the games begin... middle school games are glorious, giddy fun (in what other sport can a bystander on the sidelines – bystanders are allowed on the sidelines, if they have brought cameras – hear a brand new player, staggering off the field after his first ever down, cry out within hearing range of his mortified mother “Coach! That guy was humping my leg!”), the last refuge of the Statue of Liberty and other plays, the true bastion of the two-point conversion, the home of the double fumble, the run for a loss, and the 95-yard kickoff return.
High school games are, for me, mostly sort of a wistful, nostalgic experience, not so much because I remember when my own classmates played (the Saratoga Smurfs, we were called back then, because the average player height was a towering 5’4” and you don’t even want to know the average weight [bantam? We wished!]) – though it’s entertaining indeed at every single game to hear the same announcer who called our games quote a remark I made in that same booth when I was SHS’s statistician in 1986 and informed said announcer that I wasn’t sure to whom to credit a tackle because it seemed the accomplishment of “a plethora of Panthers” (he’s always most assiduous about attributing the remark to me) – as because I’m now watching kids playing high school ball that I used to hang out with on the sidelines at middle school games, kids I used to have to admonish between plays to try to forget that I was there and taking pictures and please stop posing with the ball in the middle of a down. They’re all grown up now – WAY up – and are no longer asking my advice on how to tackle or if that pass looked good or if maybe they should have schlumblededummed instead of frobishing the grindlewart (I have yet to master the intricacies of football terminology, if you can’t tell), preferring now (perhaps correctly) to leave such calls to the coach instead of the newslady...
College games I tend to ignore on television, but they’re fun to go to live, because, as a good friend of mine likes to observe whether we’re in the stadium or at the American Legion cursing at the TV, “Win or lose, we still booze.” This year we mostly booze. It’s not a high water mark the Cowboys are setting this year. I think the middle school team could beat them. I think the Cowboys would fall for the Statue of Liberty. More than once.
My sympathies go out to those who, like my parents, chose to get season tickets for this year. Hey, at least there’s beer. Lots and lots of beer. And you get to go to Wal Mart with relative impunity (i.e. at least you’re not making a special trip to do so, thus assuring the ire of yours truly the Shop At Home Nazi and her crack stormtroop of Saratoga merchants; you’re merely risking it if a fellow valley resident catches you in the aisles with items you could have bought at home in your cart). And maybe next year they’ll play better and make it all the way to the Holiday Bowl where they’ll get beat up by a PAC-10 or Big 8 team or something... Oh wait, that’s what they do now in the regular season... very tactless of me... so sorry.
Bronco games are all about circling around the modern day hestia of the American home, the TV set at my parents’ house. Two p.m. is Bronco time. I head up to the house with a load or two of laundry to do (Kate’s Landing not being equipped with facilities for same – hey, I’m lucky I have a stove that doesn’t require me to stockpile firewood) (as it is I’m going to be shopping for some space heaters real soon) (not at Wal-Mart), grab a beer and kick back, bewildered at the overwhelming spectacle football on that level has become, gawking at some 70,000 people crammed into a brand new stadium that cost more than our water plant, sewer lagoon, police station, town hall and paving projects combined and feeling a seductive pull to someday be in that number, not to see the game “live” since I’m pretty sure even the occupants of first tier seats need opera glasses to distinguish our Broncos from the very similarly clad Bills, but to be part of such a large and featureless crowd, to stop for once being the individual human being that I am, with my personal obsessions and problems and challenges and lack of fashion sense, and to disappear into a collective, to be subsumed in a greater purpose, to speak in a multitudinous roar and otherwise be silent, to think the thoughts of thousands of others as tiny, antlike Brian Griese prepares to hand off a flyspeck of a ball to tiny, antlike Mike Anderson so he can advance a centimeter or two and elicit again that many-headed roar.
I know that’s just a fantasy, though. Bronco games can’t be any different from Wyoming games (seven or eight times as many people, but it’s like the way Richard Adams has rabbits counting in Watership Down: one, two, three, four, hrair [many]); I have been part of record sellout crowds and still and all, though we yell as one and focus our attention on making that pigskin sail between instead of around the posts, there is no time when I am not still me in my own head and my own life, subject to the scrutiny of other individuals seated all around me and stuck listening to their gossip and their small talk and their often comical invectives hurled at poor Coach Roach/Erickson/Koennig/whoever comes next, poor slob.
But even trapped as I am in my own life, it’s still fun to yell at the referees whether it’s in the stadium or in the living room, to marvel at the Thucydidean wisdom of the announcers who, in split seconds, analyze a play and its flaws and its progress with razory focus (how many times have I been dazzled by, e.g. the swarming quality of the Denver defense and how they’ve utterly mastered matters on a down, only to realize that the guy that mattered, the one with the ball, got away?) and, let’s face it, comically inept metaphors. It’s great to think about something that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter a damned bit for a few hours and (best of all) not to be considered frivolous for it. I may think about things that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter a damned bit all the time, but while few of my townsfolk share my enthusiasm for Greek etymology or for figuring out which Beethoven fragment I’ve been humming the last five days or what species of moth my friend thinks he saw up in the mountains last weekend, none of them ever mock me for having spent two or three hours I’ll never get back again watching 22 people chase a dead hunk of pigskin up and down the field.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Mr. David Vaughan of Tokyo, Japan (yes, Tokyo, Japan) came closest in guessing which bit o'Beethoven has been making its way round and round and round (and round and round and round) my brain lo these five days, that being the second (Allegretto) movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in A, Op. 92. He guessed the third, but that's close enough for me, especially since none of the rest of you even tried!
Many thanks to my own dear personal mom, who didn't even question me Thursday evening (she being, as you might suspect, quite accustomed to this) as I made a psychotic beeline for the music room in her house to spend some quality time with her LP collection and turntable until I verified my suspicion, and to the Sewer King who humored me by singing along with me during coffee on Friday... Dum, duh duh DA, DA... Dum, duh duh DAAH...
Mr. David Vaughan of Tokyo, Japan (yes, Tokyo, Japan) came closest in guessing which bit o'Beethoven has been making its way round and round and round (and round and round and round) my brain lo these five days, that being the second (Allegretto) movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in A, Op. 92. He guessed the third, but that's close enough for me, especially since none of the rest of you even tried!
Many thanks to my own dear personal mom, who didn't even question me Thursday evening (she being, as you might suspect, quite accustomed to this) as I made a psychotic beeline for the music room in her house to spend some quality time with her LP collection and turntable until I verified my suspicion, and to the Sewer King who humored me by singing along with me during coffee on Friday... Dum, duh duh DA, DA... Dum, duh duh DAAH...
Thursday, September 19, 2002
SHORT AND SWEET AND NOT A BIT SORRY
As today’s title might suggest, you’re not going to get a lot out of me today, dear readers, but I wanted you to know I am thinking of you, wishing you well, sorry I can’t entertain you more but some days are like that, you know? Some days are already way out of hand before he whose duty it is to shove the sun up in the morning has opened his eyes, stretched, chuckled and gotten out of bed, and this was one of them. I was behind before I saw a single ray of the sun and it only got worse when I staggered, uncaffienated, into action to exercise the dog, prepare for the board meeting, get through the board meeting, field the media calls, deal with the visitors.
I’m late now, as I type this. I’m due up on the hill at my parents’ house, where preparations must be made to welcome old family friends passing through (at least it gets me out of going to another meeting of the Economic Debating Club) but all I want to do is pounce into my mother’s record collection so that I can find out once and for all if I’m right or if the Minister of Fun is right about a snippet of Beethoven that I can’t get out of my head. I think it’s from the Seventh Symphony. I think I remember it being from the Seventh. I hum it again as I search through Amazon, CDNow, all the internet music sites I can think of. No one has a sample of it to download. It’s so insignificant, this fragment, that no one cares if it’s available at all. I’m just a weirdo. I hum it again. But mom has LPs of all of Beethoven’s symphonies. I can find out. It will just take some quality time with her turntable.
But not tonight, dammit, not tonight. Too much catching up to do, filling people in on everything on which I’m already behind because I’ve been obsessing over this Beethoven piece when I should be making phone calls.
Ah, screw it! I’m not going to feel guilty. I’m just one person and there’s only so much that one person can control, and right now I’m not even in control of myself; Beethoven is. Like he is quoted as saying in that movie about him, “Immortal Beloved,” music is like hypnotism, putting a person in the exact frame of mind as the composer. The listener has no choice.
Dum, duh duh DA, da... Dum, duh duh DAAH... Anyone know which piece I’m talking about? Allegretto, lots of low horns and strings... Dum, duh duh DA DA, Dum, duh duh DAAAAH...
As today’s title might suggest, you’re not going to get a lot out of me today, dear readers, but I wanted you to know I am thinking of you, wishing you well, sorry I can’t entertain you more but some days are like that, you know? Some days are already way out of hand before he whose duty it is to shove the sun up in the morning has opened his eyes, stretched, chuckled and gotten out of bed, and this was one of them. I was behind before I saw a single ray of the sun and it only got worse when I staggered, uncaffienated, into action to exercise the dog, prepare for the board meeting, get through the board meeting, field the media calls, deal with the visitors.
I’m late now, as I type this. I’m due up on the hill at my parents’ house, where preparations must be made to welcome old family friends passing through (at least it gets me out of going to another meeting of the Economic Debating Club) but all I want to do is pounce into my mother’s record collection so that I can find out once and for all if I’m right or if the Minister of Fun is right about a snippet of Beethoven that I can’t get out of my head. I think it’s from the Seventh Symphony. I think I remember it being from the Seventh. I hum it again as I search through Amazon, CDNow, all the internet music sites I can think of. No one has a sample of it to download. It’s so insignificant, this fragment, that no one cares if it’s available at all. I’m just a weirdo. I hum it again. But mom has LPs of all of Beethoven’s symphonies. I can find out. It will just take some quality time with her turntable.
But not tonight, dammit, not tonight. Too much catching up to do, filling people in on everything on which I’m already behind because I’ve been obsessing over this Beethoven piece when I should be making phone calls.
Ah, screw it! I’m not going to feel guilty. I’m just one person and there’s only so much that one person can control, and right now I’m not even in control of myself; Beethoven is. Like he is quoted as saying in that movie about him, “Immortal Beloved,” music is like hypnotism, putting a person in the exact frame of mind as the composer. The listener has no choice.
Dum, duh duh DA, da... Dum, duh duh DAAH... Anyone know which piece I’m talking about? Allegretto, lots of low horns and strings... Dum, duh duh DA DA, Dum, duh duh DAAAAH...
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
BY THE WAY...
...As I type this, we are one hour away from kickoff time for the Saratoga Middle School football squad's second game of the season. The Panthers play at 4 p.m. at Robert Hileman Field. The boys kicked some major adze Saturday morning, defeating Hanna-Elk Mountain-Medicine Bow 28-8 and showing some serious stuff on the field. So throw down those golf clubs and those fishing poles and those notebooks and those steaming piles of proposed ordinances that we're not going to vote on tonight anyway and go cheer on the Tiny Tanks!
(It's going to take all of the willpower and proper feeling I can muster to tear myself away from the action to go to a Hankless council meeting at 6 p.m. Sigh. The sacrifices I make for the sake of my village...)
...As I type this, we are one hour away from kickoff time for the Saratoga Middle School football squad's second game of the season. The Panthers play at 4 p.m. at Robert Hileman Field. The boys kicked some major adze Saturday morning, defeating Hanna-Elk Mountain-Medicine Bow 28-8 and showing some serious stuff on the field. So throw down those golf clubs and those fishing poles and those notebooks and those steaming piles of proposed ordinances that we're not going to vote on tonight anyway and go cheer on the Tiny Tanks!
(It's going to take all of the willpower and proper feeling I can muster to tear myself away from the action to go to a Hankless council meeting at 6 p.m. Sigh. The sacrifices I make for the sake of my village...)
A BLOGWORTHY JOURNEY
As recent readers of this page have no doubt noted, Rawlins, WY is perhaps my least favorite destination on the planet – not that I am so very widely traveled; I am, for instance, ill-equipped to compare Rawlins to, say, the Black Hole of Calcutta or the middle of the Gobi Desert or Black Rock, Nevada ten days after Burning Man, but still, within my sphere, Rawlins ranks right down there with, oh, Newark International Airport and Sucker Lake on my list of places I’d rather go to a dentist who’s fresh out of novacaine than.
My readers will no doubt be both surprised and perhaps a little relieved to learn that my opinion has dramatically not changed after this morning’s excursion, in which I conducted a dear friend of mine on an emergency voyage to the Department of Motor Vehicles so that she can renew her driver’s license before setting off on her primary voyage, that of moving all of her wordly possessions to Kearney, Nebraska so she can go shack up with her man (the selfsame river guide who was asked, lo these many months ago, by a really entertainingly uninformed tourist, at what elevation around these parts the mule deer turn into elk).
Ordinarily this would not be a big deal, except for the following caveats: 1. My car is still beached like a pithed walrus in my driveway because I gave up on starting it up every week during the five months it was sans license renewal tags and consequently that stupid, inaccurate little built-in dashboard clock that nobody really wants anyway drained my nearly-new battery so very badly that if vampirism really existed my car battery would now be stalking the nighttime streets of Saratoga, surreptitiously popping the hoods of other unsuspecting Fords and Chevies and Lincolns, oh my, and sucking those cars’ poor, helpless, yet strangely vapid and willing batteries dry themselves to prolong its own undead existence muhahahahahahahahahahahaha! Not that I’m complaining, because it’s my own stupid fault, but anyway, 2. Her car is a 1982 Jeep Cherokee that she recently bought for $200 that still needs some work, like a new roof liner and new floorboards and, oh yes, a new exhaust system, and 3. Apparently every single person with any kind of even remotely service-oriented job in Rawlins has apparently independently concluded that it’s more important to discuss their golf games long distance over the telephone at work than to take care of customers.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, as I sometimes do, oh yes! Ahead of myself, I say, because even before we left town, we had an adventure! Because just as my car was until very recently not a licensed one and thus not street legal, neither is my friend’s! She’s moving to Nebraska soon, so she was just going to register the beast in Nebraska! Originally, Outfitter Man was supposed to take care of this for her and send her the plates, but oh, no, the beast has to be inspected first, because Nebraska is a very Advanced and Progressive State! So the beast has no license plates whatsoever, just a big sign my companion taped into the rear window saying “in transit” with the operative dates! Woo hoo!
So anyway, before we left town, it was really best that we have the proof of insurance, etc., that Outitter Man had (we hoped) faxed to the Beastmistress c/o our local print shop... which... didn’t open until 8 a.m. Uh-oh! We were kind of supposed to be at the DMV at 8 a.m. Oh well, like those people were actually going anywhere, we sort of nervously reassured ourselves, trying not to think of what had happened yesterday when the Beastmistress made the same trip (with a different companion) to take her driver’s license test, only to find upon her arrival that the DMV was “all booked up” for tests that day and she’d have to come back tomorrow...
Fortunately, the fax was there and without much further ado, fanfare, or adjustment (except of seatbelts and whatnot; this car has seen little use since its transfer of ownership) we were off!
Soon the Beast’s entertaining lack of a proper dashboard, which gave we passengers crammed into the front seat with Molly the Border Folly cheerfully along for the ride (never, ever, was there such a car dog; once after a road trip with Erin Go Braless, it took a full 45 minutes and two hot dogs waved temptingly just out of reach to get her to emerge from the comfy back seat) full exposure to the thermal output of the Beast’s sputtery engine (considerable!) and the immediate need on the part of said Beast for the aforementioned overhaul of the exhaust system (fragrant! And only slightly nauseating!), became pretty much our sole topic of conversation as we trundled down the road. Hey, what else were we going to talk about, boys? There are none in Saratoga. That's why she's moving to Nebraska and why I... write this column!
Providence, however is always a factor in any venture we undertake, and soon we had something else to talk about: in our anxiety over getting the insurance information fax, we had forgotten to get gas! So we had to stop at Wonderful Downtown Walcott lest we be less conveniently stopped at some random point along Interstate 80 in distress! And we bought gas at an unbelievable $1.59 a gallon! Gasoline that apparently produced in the Beast something akin to what, say, refried beans produce in a flatulent cow! And so we were off! Again!
We made it to Rawlins without further incident and pulled gratefully into the parking lot at the DMV’s new and very attractive facility near the McDonald’s, allowing one grateful dog to gratefully urinate on the DMV’s new and very attractive (and short) landscaping while a grateful Beastmistress gratefully and gaily traipsed into the building to see if somebody there would please verify that she was a competent driver more than worthy enough to get a new stupid piece of plastic with a really unflattering photograph on it (since I possess a current version of one of these on which my face is virtually indistinguishable from the new and very attractive artwork depicting Devil’s Tower which Wyoming licenses now prominently feature, I drove us over, never fear. We at LIANT do encourage good citizenship, responsible driving habits, and slavish compliance with even dumb regulations because they give us material for entertaining internet columns like this one) to replace her old stupid piece of plastic with a really, really unflattering photograph on it.
Unfortunately, She Who Administers the Driving Test had “just stepped out to the bank” and should be back “sometime soon, we’re sure.”
Meanwhile, the wind whistled through my dog’s hair and my very thin cotton shirt, making us both shiver uncontrollably; no dogs are allowed in the DMV building, which I should have known but hey, I don’t get out of town much and my dog is welcome in restaurants in Saratoga, we’re so insanely dog-friendly here. (Note to any health department representatives who may be reading this column: Look! Over there! That employee emerged from a restroom without washing his hands! Quick, Molly - hide behind the bar!). And meanwhile, the Beastmistress began, ever so delicately, to wail.
About 20 minutes later, She Who Administers made her leisurely return.
“I waited until 8:45 but you didn’t show,” she said to the Beastmistress at a point in the conversation in which most people say “Hello.”
“Of course you did! Fine! Hi! What do I have to do! I’ll do anything you want! Really! Just let me take the test!” the Beastmistress more or less replied (she might not have said “Hi” but artistic license is the name of the game here at LIANT, isn’t it?), with an exasperated quiver in her voice only those unique and rare individuals endowed with both souls and partially functioning ears could possibly detect.
She Who Administers sort of grunted and led the Beastmistress into the building.
I sort of huddled up against a wall with my dog, whipped out my notebook, and began to write a smutty story to pass the time. No, really, I did. I’m versatile that way. And I still aspire to get something published on Prairie Porn. The editor there says I need more practice, is all. Really.
An unknown amount of time later, She Who Administers and the Beastmistress at last emerged from the DMV building for the Administering of the Test itself, the Beastmistress sort of looking sidelong at me and rehearsing what would be her mantra for the rest of the day “I’m sorry, Kate, I’m so, so sorry.” My own mantra being “Huh? Oh, sorry; I was writing. What did you say?”
Well, of course the Beastmistress passed the test, as she proudly informed me between clenched teeth sometime later as we made our way to our second stop, the U-Haul dealership. Passed it perfectly; it all went as rapidly and smoothly as could be... once She Who Administers got done spending about 45 minutes (wow!) discussing her golf handicap over the phone while the Beastmistress stared at the Highway Patrol posters.
Alas, a similar fate awaited her at the U-Haul dealership, with whom she had made all necessary arrangements about a week ago to make her pick-up of the actual trailer with which she would haul those of her personal belongings not currently crammed into the Beast as quick and care-free as possible... which it was, it was... after the U-Haul man got off the phone, long distance, with his... yup... golf buddy.
By the time we were done, the Beastmistress’ repeatings of the aforementioned mantra were plumb operatic, and the Colly of Folly had clambered onto my lap to get off of the lack of floorboard’s scorchingly hot metal surface that all but sizzled whenever her paws touched down, poor thing.
She was soon very happy, however, sprawled out on my lap with her head hanging out the open window for our 40 mile drive through all the road construction and other delights that had made our trip into Rawlins almost as delightful as the trip back out (Rawlins being perhaps the single most beautiful sight one could ever hope to see in one’s rearview mirror) (well, except all that could be seen in this rearview mirror were the tops of very tall boxes full of the Beastmistress’s wordly possessions) (thank goodness for side mirrors).
Never have mileposts denoting one’s progress across the landscape been such welcome sights. Never have two women been so very glad, so very, very glad, to see the highway construction that makes traffic such an entertainment between Fort Steele and Walcott – so very glad because said road construction meant we were nearing Walcott and the turn-off to 130, glory be.
Sigh. We made it into town at 11:05 a.m., a mere two hours later than we’d orgiginally projected for our return, but it had felt like so, so much more.
But hey, I got a good start on a bad story! And the Beastmistress now has a flimsy, silly-looking piece of paper that says she is due to receive, in just a month or so, a stupid piece of plastic with an unflattering photograph of her – just in time for her to turn it in at the Nebraska DMV for a new one there.
Let’s hope for her sake the Nebraska staff don’t play golf.
As recent readers of this page have no doubt noted, Rawlins, WY is perhaps my least favorite destination on the planet – not that I am so very widely traveled; I am, for instance, ill-equipped to compare Rawlins to, say, the Black Hole of Calcutta or the middle of the Gobi Desert or Black Rock, Nevada ten days after Burning Man, but still, within my sphere, Rawlins ranks right down there with, oh, Newark International Airport and Sucker Lake on my list of places I’d rather go to a dentist who’s fresh out of novacaine than.
My readers will no doubt be both surprised and perhaps a little relieved to learn that my opinion has dramatically not changed after this morning’s excursion, in which I conducted a dear friend of mine on an emergency voyage to the Department of Motor Vehicles so that she can renew her driver’s license before setting off on her primary voyage, that of moving all of her wordly possessions to Kearney, Nebraska so she can go shack up with her man (the selfsame river guide who was asked, lo these many months ago, by a really entertainingly uninformed tourist, at what elevation around these parts the mule deer turn into elk).
Ordinarily this would not be a big deal, except for the following caveats: 1. My car is still beached like a pithed walrus in my driveway because I gave up on starting it up every week during the five months it was sans license renewal tags and consequently that stupid, inaccurate little built-in dashboard clock that nobody really wants anyway drained my nearly-new battery so very badly that if vampirism really existed my car battery would now be stalking the nighttime streets of Saratoga, surreptitiously popping the hoods of other unsuspecting Fords and Chevies and Lincolns, oh my, and sucking those cars’ poor, helpless, yet strangely vapid and willing batteries dry themselves to prolong its own undead existence muhahahahahahahahahahahaha! Not that I’m complaining, because it’s my own stupid fault, but anyway, 2. Her car is a 1982 Jeep Cherokee that she recently bought for $200 that still needs some work, like a new roof liner and new floorboards and, oh yes, a new exhaust system, and 3. Apparently every single person with any kind of even remotely service-oriented job in Rawlins has apparently independently concluded that it’s more important to discuss their golf games long distance over the telephone at work than to take care of customers.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, as I sometimes do, oh yes! Ahead of myself, I say, because even before we left town, we had an adventure! Because just as my car was until very recently not a licensed one and thus not street legal, neither is my friend’s! She’s moving to Nebraska soon, so she was just going to register the beast in Nebraska! Originally, Outfitter Man was supposed to take care of this for her and send her the plates, but oh, no, the beast has to be inspected first, because Nebraska is a very Advanced and Progressive State! So the beast has no license plates whatsoever, just a big sign my companion taped into the rear window saying “in transit” with the operative dates! Woo hoo!
So anyway, before we left town, it was really best that we have the proof of insurance, etc., that Outitter Man had (we hoped) faxed to the Beastmistress c/o our local print shop... which... didn’t open until 8 a.m. Uh-oh! We were kind of supposed to be at the DMV at 8 a.m. Oh well, like those people were actually going anywhere, we sort of nervously reassured ourselves, trying not to think of what had happened yesterday when the Beastmistress made the same trip (with a different companion) to take her driver’s license test, only to find upon her arrival that the DMV was “all booked up” for tests that day and she’d have to come back tomorrow...
Fortunately, the fax was there and without much further ado, fanfare, or adjustment (except of seatbelts and whatnot; this car has seen little use since its transfer of ownership) we were off!
Soon the Beast’s entertaining lack of a proper dashboard, which gave we passengers crammed into the front seat with Molly the Border Folly cheerfully along for the ride (never, ever, was there such a car dog; once after a road trip with Erin Go Braless, it took a full 45 minutes and two hot dogs waved temptingly just out of reach to get her to emerge from the comfy back seat) full exposure to the thermal output of the Beast’s sputtery engine (considerable!) and the immediate need on the part of said Beast for the aforementioned overhaul of the exhaust system (fragrant! And only slightly nauseating!), became pretty much our sole topic of conversation as we trundled down the road. Hey, what else were we going to talk about, boys? There are none in Saratoga. That's why she's moving to Nebraska and why I... write this column!
Providence, however is always a factor in any venture we undertake, and soon we had something else to talk about: in our anxiety over getting the insurance information fax, we had forgotten to get gas! So we had to stop at Wonderful Downtown Walcott lest we be less conveniently stopped at some random point along Interstate 80 in distress! And we bought gas at an unbelievable $1.59 a gallon! Gasoline that apparently produced in the Beast something akin to what, say, refried beans produce in a flatulent cow! And so we were off! Again!
We made it to Rawlins without further incident and pulled gratefully into the parking lot at the DMV’s new and very attractive facility near the McDonald’s, allowing one grateful dog to gratefully urinate on the DMV’s new and very attractive (and short) landscaping while a grateful Beastmistress gratefully and gaily traipsed into the building to see if somebody there would please verify that she was a competent driver more than worthy enough to get a new stupid piece of plastic with a really unflattering photograph on it (since I possess a current version of one of these on which my face is virtually indistinguishable from the new and very attractive artwork depicting Devil’s Tower which Wyoming licenses now prominently feature, I drove us over, never fear. We at LIANT do encourage good citizenship, responsible driving habits, and slavish compliance with even dumb regulations because they give us material for entertaining internet columns like this one) to replace her old stupid piece of plastic with a really, really unflattering photograph on it.
Unfortunately, She Who Administers the Driving Test had “just stepped out to the bank” and should be back “sometime soon, we’re sure.”
Meanwhile, the wind whistled through my dog’s hair and my very thin cotton shirt, making us both shiver uncontrollably; no dogs are allowed in the DMV building, which I should have known but hey, I don’t get out of town much and my dog is welcome in restaurants in Saratoga, we’re so insanely dog-friendly here. (Note to any health department representatives who may be reading this column: Look! Over there! That employee emerged from a restroom without washing his hands! Quick, Molly - hide behind the bar!). And meanwhile, the Beastmistress began, ever so delicately, to wail.
About 20 minutes later, She Who Administers made her leisurely return.
“I waited until 8:45 but you didn’t show,” she said to the Beastmistress at a point in the conversation in which most people say “Hello.”
“Of course you did! Fine! Hi! What do I have to do! I’ll do anything you want! Really! Just let me take the test!” the Beastmistress more or less replied (she might not have said “Hi” but artistic license is the name of the game here at LIANT, isn’t it?), with an exasperated quiver in her voice only those unique and rare individuals endowed with both souls and partially functioning ears could possibly detect.
She Who Administers sort of grunted and led the Beastmistress into the building.
I sort of huddled up against a wall with my dog, whipped out my notebook, and began to write a smutty story to pass the time. No, really, I did. I’m versatile that way. And I still aspire to get something published on Prairie Porn. The editor there says I need more practice, is all. Really.
An unknown amount of time later, She Who Administers and the Beastmistress at last emerged from the DMV building for the Administering of the Test itself, the Beastmistress sort of looking sidelong at me and rehearsing what would be her mantra for the rest of the day “I’m sorry, Kate, I’m so, so sorry.” My own mantra being “Huh? Oh, sorry; I was writing. What did you say?”
Well, of course the Beastmistress passed the test, as she proudly informed me between clenched teeth sometime later as we made our way to our second stop, the U-Haul dealership. Passed it perfectly; it all went as rapidly and smoothly as could be... once She Who Administers got done spending about 45 minutes (wow!) discussing her golf handicap over the phone while the Beastmistress stared at the Highway Patrol posters.
Alas, a similar fate awaited her at the U-Haul dealership, with whom she had made all necessary arrangements about a week ago to make her pick-up of the actual trailer with which she would haul those of her personal belongings not currently crammed into the Beast as quick and care-free as possible... which it was, it was... after the U-Haul man got off the phone, long distance, with his... yup... golf buddy.
By the time we were done, the Beastmistress’ repeatings of the aforementioned mantra were plumb operatic, and the Colly of Folly had clambered onto my lap to get off of the lack of floorboard’s scorchingly hot metal surface that all but sizzled whenever her paws touched down, poor thing.
She was soon very happy, however, sprawled out on my lap with her head hanging out the open window for our 40 mile drive through all the road construction and other delights that had made our trip into Rawlins almost as delightful as the trip back out (Rawlins being perhaps the single most beautiful sight one could ever hope to see in one’s rearview mirror) (well, except all that could be seen in this rearview mirror were the tops of very tall boxes full of the Beastmistress’s wordly possessions) (thank goodness for side mirrors).
Never have mileposts denoting one’s progress across the landscape been such welcome sights. Never have two women been so very glad, so very, very glad, to see the highway construction that makes traffic such an entertainment between Fort Steele and Walcott – so very glad because said road construction meant we were nearing Walcott and the turn-off to 130, glory be.
Sigh. We made it into town at 11:05 a.m., a mere two hours later than we’d orgiginally projected for our return, but it had felt like so, so much more.
But hey, I got a good start on a bad story! And the Beastmistress now has a flimsy, silly-looking piece of paper that says she is due to receive, in just a month or so, a stupid piece of plastic with an unflattering photograph of her – just in time for her to turn it in at the Nebraska DMV for a new one there.
Let’s hope for her sake the Nebraska staff don’t play golf.
Monday, September 16, 2002
SORRY, GUYS...
But nothing has come together for a column for today. I’ve tried lots of things - Henry Miller, the importance of always having a hair clip handy because you never can tell, the joys of completing overdue grant paperwork, the latest gubernatorial candidate forum, the importance of the fifth penny sales tax, everything, and I can’t come up with a single paragraph that doesn’t make me want to retch, throw something heavy, give myself a papercut on the lip, or take up shuffleboard.
So, rather than bore you with any of those, I’m going to go home and open a bottle of wine and get into some arguments with some squirrels and watch my dog wallow in the two inches of river water feebly trickling past Kate’s Landing and maybe see if I can’t make some headway on aorist mi-verbs!
Happy Monday, everyone!
But nothing has come together for a column for today. I’ve tried lots of things - Henry Miller, the importance of always having a hair clip handy because you never can tell, the joys of completing overdue grant paperwork, the latest gubernatorial candidate forum, the importance of the fifth penny sales tax, everything, and I can’t come up with a single paragraph that doesn’t make me want to retch, throw something heavy, give myself a papercut on the lip, or take up shuffleboard.
So, rather than bore you with any of those, I’m going to go home and open a bottle of wine and get into some arguments with some squirrels and watch my dog wallow in the two inches of river water feebly trickling past Kate’s Landing and maybe see if I can’t make some headway on aorist mi-verbs!
Happy Monday, everyone!
Friday, September 13, 2002
SEWERS ARE FUN!
I’ve been joking for quite a long time that one of these days I was going to produce an opus for this page explaining why I actually do prefer meetings of the Saratoga/Carbon County Impact Joint Powers Board to those conducted by the Saratoga Planning Commission, or, in shorthand, why sewers are more fun than zoning (and it’s not just because the Sewer King is one of my best pals; after all, my Enabling Assistant is the Head Zoning Nazi, and that still doesn’t make fussing over things like setback requirements and accessory buildings at all interesting).
Since I can’t think of another bleeding thing to write about today, and since I just sat through something over two hours of water and sewer talk Wednesday night (hoping, I guess, to drive away the incipient migraine with a good dose of bullshit), maybe, just maybe, this is going to be it!
Aren’t you excited?
So anyway, what’s so great about water and sewer meetings.
Actually, it’s all about the sewer.
See, our Scenic Saratoga Poop Lagoon and Wood Duck Habitat (tm) was once upon a time quite the sexy, state-of-the-art facility for a community this size, I’m told (I have to rely mostly on hearsay on this subject because a) It was designed and constructed back in the days when my idea of important stuff was finding a place to hide with my preteen sweetie so we could get in a little... reading of Piers Anthony (no, that’s not a euphemism; many of my readers still don’t get what a card-carrying, 24-karat dweeb I am), and b) I’ve so far been too lazy to dive into the records rooms and investigate this claim for myself). It took all the rules and regs and standards the state and federal governments could throw down its mighty gullet, digested them lickety split into their component molecules, and reintroduced said molecules into the ecosystem so that nature could have its way with them again until eventually they were craftily assembled by the nature-defending bureaucracies into... more rules, regs and standards.
Which brings us to our current situation. Like a fish tank left neglected in a kindergarten classroom over a long Christmas break, our Scenic Saratoga Poop Lagoon and Wood Duck Habitat (tm) (I’ll start abbreviating this as SSPLWDH (tm) if you don’t mind; more laziness, yes, yes, but it’s labor-saving techniques like these that help keep the migraines at bay, o yes!) (furthermore, since I’m using a computer to compose these immortal lines, I’ll just copy that abbreviation and paste it in as needed. THAT'S how lazy your favorite chamber chick/elected official/debate coach/internet columnist is, and is also, for those of you who are dying to know, how I manage to do all that! By shirking as much as possible! Yes! And you can do it too; it’s not a show!) has a bit of an ammonia problem.
Not that the SSPLWDH (tm) really has that much in common with a neglected fish tank, mind you – that’s just an especially vivid and stinky image I had recorded some time ago in my vivid and stinky image notebook and have been just dying to use ever since it occurred to me back in my days of hydrocodone and mono. For one thing, the SSPLWDH (tm) is not (supposed to be) a fish habitat, and for another, its ammonia problem has nothing whatsoever to do with neglect! The SSPLWDH (tm) is still working exactly the way it is supposed to, and working very well at that!
Rather, the ammonia problem arises from the new rules, regs and standards recently excreted by the state and federal environmental quality bureaucracies. Suddenly the amount of ammonia oozing from the SSPLWDH (tm) is too much! Even though the amount is pretty much just the same as it’s always been! But I digress! As usual! Because this isn’t the fun stuff!
No, the fun stuff is what we’re going to do about it!
Enter Random Consultant Man, hired by our Board to dream up ways to control our ammonia problem while still maintaining the SSPLWDH(tm)’s functionality and other desirable qualities. He came to see us all last month with a suprisingly thin but no less steaming sheaf of documents and data about some of the things we can do.
Which is where my enthusiasm comes in, because it looks like we are going to get to play around with microbes!
Finally all that pesky biology I learned in the Maitre d’Marquee’s class at Saratoga High School is going to get put to use! He’s going to be so proud! I’m sure he is already! And he’s going to be even more so when all of this is said and done!
See, both of the projects proposed by RCM involve shooting the SSPLWDH (tm) full of a cocktail of three different bacilli, Nitrosomonas, Nitrobacter and some super secret (but, RCM’s buddies insist, still naturally occurring, i.e. not genetically engineered or otherwise invented in some lab somewhere and programmed at the molecular level to, e.g. all die off at once at an economically awkward moment, causing us to have to hold hysterical bake sales and other fundraisers to pay for a whole new inoculation of critters) “ammonia eating” bacillus.
[NOTE TO MY READERS WHO DON’T AGREE WITH ME ABOUT THE INHERENTLY FASCINATING WORLD OF MICROBIOLOGY: Nanny nanny boo boo! You’re going to have to endure some biopedantry anyway if you want to find out how I’m going to end this column! Hee hee hee!]
This is some wild stuff, people. I’ll start with Nitrosomonas, which oxidizes (or “burns,” i.e. combines with oxygen) ammonia to make nitrites (NO2), which are almost as bad as ammonia because they can oxidize hemoglobin (the molecule that carries oxygen through fish – and human – bloodstream to those hungry, hungry cells) into methemoglobin, which can’t carry shit (metaphorically speaking, of course). Enter Nitrobacter, which eats nitrites and poops out nitrates (NO3), which are still harmful to fish (and remember, the ultimate goal of the SSPLWDH (tm) is to make the water that’s come out of your toilets, drains, storm sewers, etc. clean enough to go back into the North Platte River, where we all go fly fishing) if they ever build up, which happens from time to time, alas, alas, but for the most part are pretty OK because they're good for plants (which also live in the North Platte River).
Meanwhile, there’s also this super secret bacillus that eats ammonia and poops out nitrates directly, which is generally considered good because nitrates are good for plants and stuff. One would think that this wonder bug, then, would be the solution to all of our problems since it does in one cell the job of those other two microbes all at once, but the mix being prescribed requires all three, so clearly this mystery bug isn’t all that wonderful. Probably it’s being included in the mix just to take up the inherent slack in the nitrogen cycle created by the inconvenient facts that 1) Nitrobacter really can’t handle the presence of a lot of ammonia, so it has to sort of wait around for the Nitrosomonas to do its job and make a lot of nitrites for the Nitrobacter to eat and 2) Both Nitrobacter and Nitrosomonas need a lot of oxygen to live.
Making things even more interesting is what all these critters also need is habitat, because none of these microbes like to just float free in the water very much. They’ll do it if they have to, but they’d much rather have lots and lots of surface area to which to cling while they spam the SSPLWDH (tm) environment with lots and lots of copies of themselves (which is a good thing, very good, because otherwise we have to keep dumping in fresh loads of them every month).
And this is where the two plans diverge. And yes, I already have an opinion on which of the two plans I like better, which I’ll share with you all as your reward for slogging through all that microbiology.
Plan 1, proposed by the two cranky engineer guys whose lives I made slightly miserable Wednesday night with pesky questions about whether these organisms they were proposing were naturally occurring or proprietary creations of their own mad scientists, etc., involves creating a bacterial Disneyland by festooning the third of three ponds at the SSPLWDH (tm) with “AquaMats” (which sounds to me like something a certain Superfriend would lay on the floor of his AquaCar or something), which bear a humorous resemblance to, e.g., those great big dangly synthetic jellyfish that sort of towel off your car as it passes through the end stages of an automated, brushless carwash. The tentacles are made of a densely woven, porous synthetic fabric that provides lots of nooks and crannies for the critters to nest in.
They also last about ten years before they have to be replaced. And we’d still have to inoculate Disneyland with new shots of bacteria a couple of times a year, mostly because the critters already in the pond would get sluggish and start dying off in the frigid water in the wintertime. Boo!
Plan 2, though, has the disadvantage of being more expensive by like an order of magnitude, because it involves the creation of a constructed submerged wetlands. What this basically means is we fill the big hole where the third pond now wallows with layers and layers of gravel of different finenesses so that it creates a nicely varied mass o’surface area for the bacteria while still allowing water to run through it and out into the river after the critters have done their jobs. It’s a submerged wetland because the top is covered with a layer of gravel, soil and some carefully selected plant life (the plants use a lot of those pesky nitrates, too, by the way) – meaning there’s no big stagnant surface water to breed mosquitos and other nuisances!
RCM and I agree, too, that chances are very good that if we follow this plan, we might not have to re-inoculate the mess with critters at all, because they’ll be just fine down there in the gravel and water, even if it gets really cold. So maybe no replacement costs at all, no maintenance, and a projected life of 100+ years!
So even though Plan 2 is pantloads more expensive to initially construct, I think in the long run it will be the better solution, especially with inflation being the unassailable fact of modern life it is: a good chunk of change now (half of which will probably be paid through grants from the same agencies, more or less, who are forcing us to do this anyway) and little or no expenditure down the road, versus a smaller chunk of change now but bleeding a little more out of the district’s coffers every year, and every ten years squeezing out another medium sized chunk... I dunno, it seems pretty obvious to me.
NOW: Contrast this with zoning issues, a typical example of which comes when some guy shows up crying at a Planning Commission meeting because he was just told by Superman (our planning/zoning/streets guy/engineer for the Town of Saratoga) that he’s going to have to build a dwelling on his residential property, or else he’ll have to tear down that stupid steel storage shed. “I didn’t know that,” said citizen usually whines. “If I’da known that I’da sold out a long time ago or something.”
Followed by “Well, well, well, the guy across the street from me has a building up just like this one and you’re not making him build a house there.
To which the unsatisfying response is inevitably something along the lines of either “That building is in a light industrial zone and it’s perfectly fine,” or “That guy has been told the same thing and he’s being fined $X per day until he complies” or “He says he’s living in it.”
YUCK, YUCK, YUCK, YUCK, YUCK.
So anyway, I’m hoping I’ve made my point to everyone today. Either I’ve proved conclusively and for all time that sewers are more interesting than zoning, or, at the very least, I’ve proved that I’m probably way too much of a nerd to be participating in electoral politics.
Hmm!
I’ve been joking for quite a long time that one of these days I was going to produce an opus for this page explaining why I actually do prefer meetings of the Saratoga/Carbon County Impact Joint Powers Board to those conducted by the Saratoga Planning Commission, or, in shorthand, why sewers are more fun than zoning (and it’s not just because the Sewer King is one of my best pals; after all, my Enabling Assistant is the Head Zoning Nazi, and that still doesn’t make fussing over things like setback requirements and accessory buildings at all interesting).
Since I can’t think of another bleeding thing to write about today, and since I just sat through something over two hours of water and sewer talk Wednesday night (hoping, I guess, to drive away the incipient migraine with a good dose of bullshit), maybe, just maybe, this is going to be it!
Aren’t you excited?
So anyway, what’s so great about water and sewer meetings.
Actually, it’s all about the sewer.
See, our Scenic Saratoga Poop Lagoon and Wood Duck Habitat (tm) was once upon a time quite the sexy, state-of-the-art facility for a community this size, I’m told (I have to rely mostly on hearsay on this subject because a) It was designed and constructed back in the days when my idea of important stuff was finding a place to hide with my preteen sweetie so we could get in a little... reading of Piers Anthony (no, that’s not a euphemism; many of my readers still don’t get what a card-carrying, 24-karat dweeb I am), and b) I’ve so far been too lazy to dive into the records rooms and investigate this claim for myself). It took all the rules and regs and standards the state and federal governments could throw down its mighty gullet, digested them lickety split into their component molecules, and reintroduced said molecules into the ecosystem so that nature could have its way with them again until eventually they were craftily assembled by the nature-defending bureaucracies into... more rules, regs and standards.
Which brings us to our current situation. Like a fish tank left neglected in a kindergarten classroom over a long Christmas break, our Scenic Saratoga Poop Lagoon and Wood Duck Habitat (tm) (I’ll start abbreviating this as SSPLWDH (tm) if you don’t mind; more laziness, yes, yes, but it’s labor-saving techniques like these that help keep the migraines at bay, o yes!) (furthermore, since I’m using a computer to compose these immortal lines, I’ll just copy that abbreviation and paste it in as needed. THAT'S how lazy your favorite chamber chick/elected official/debate coach/internet columnist is, and is also, for those of you who are dying to know, how I manage to do all that! By shirking as much as possible! Yes! And you can do it too; it’s not a show!) has a bit of an ammonia problem.
Not that the SSPLWDH (tm) really has that much in common with a neglected fish tank, mind you – that’s just an especially vivid and stinky image I had recorded some time ago in my vivid and stinky image notebook and have been just dying to use ever since it occurred to me back in my days of hydrocodone and mono. For one thing, the SSPLWDH (tm) is not (supposed to be) a fish habitat, and for another, its ammonia problem has nothing whatsoever to do with neglect! The SSPLWDH (tm) is still working exactly the way it is supposed to, and working very well at that!
Rather, the ammonia problem arises from the new rules, regs and standards recently excreted by the state and federal environmental quality bureaucracies. Suddenly the amount of ammonia oozing from the SSPLWDH (tm) is too much! Even though the amount is pretty much just the same as it’s always been! But I digress! As usual! Because this isn’t the fun stuff!
No, the fun stuff is what we’re going to do about it!
Enter Random Consultant Man, hired by our Board to dream up ways to control our ammonia problem while still maintaining the SSPLWDH(tm)’s functionality and other desirable qualities. He came to see us all last month with a suprisingly thin but no less steaming sheaf of documents and data about some of the things we can do.
Which is where my enthusiasm comes in, because it looks like we are going to get to play around with microbes!
Finally all that pesky biology I learned in the Maitre d’Marquee’s class at Saratoga High School is going to get put to use! He’s going to be so proud! I’m sure he is already! And he’s going to be even more so when all of this is said and done!
See, both of the projects proposed by RCM involve shooting the SSPLWDH (tm) full of a cocktail of three different bacilli, Nitrosomonas, Nitrobacter and some super secret (but, RCM’s buddies insist, still naturally occurring, i.e. not genetically engineered or otherwise invented in some lab somewhere and programmed at the molecular level to, e.g. all die off at once at an economically awkward moment, causing us to have to hold hysterical bake sales and other fundraisers to pay for a whole new inoculation of critters) “ammonia eating” bacillus.
[NOTE TO MY READERS WHO DON’T AGREE WITH ME ABOUT THE INHERENTLY FASCINATING WORLD OF MICROBIOLOGY: Nanny nanny boo boo! You’re going to have to endure some biopedantry anyway if you want to find out how I’m going to end this column! Hee hee hee!]
This is some wild stuff, people. I’ll start with Nitrosomonas, which oxidizes (or “burns,” i.e. combines with oxygen) ammonia to make nitrites (NO2), which are almost as bad as ammonia because they can oxidize hemoglobin (the molecule that carries oxygen through fish – and human – bloodstream to those hungry, hungry cells) into methemoglobin, which can’t carry shit (metaphorically speaking, of course). Enter Nitrobacter, which eats nitrites and poops out nitrates (NO3), which are still harmful to fish (and remember, the ultimate goal of the SSPLWDH (tm) is to make the water that’s come out of your toilets, drains, storm sewers, etc. clean enough to go back into the North Platte River, where we all go fly fishing) if they ever build up, which happens from time to time, alas, alas, but for the most part are pretty OK because they're good for plants (which also live in the North Platte River).
Meanwhile, there’s also this super secret bacillus that eats ammonia and poops out nitrates directly, which is generally considered good because nitrates are good for plants and stuff. One would think that this wonder bug, then, would be the solution to all of our problems since it does in one cell the job of those other two microbes all at once, but the mix being prescribed requires all three, so clearly this mystery bug isn’t all that wonderful. Probably it’s being included in the mix just to take up the inherent slack in the nitrogen cycle created by the inconvenient facts that 1) Nitrobacter really can’t handle the presence of a lot of ammonia, so it has to sort of wait around for the Nitrosomonas to do its job and make a lot of nitrites for the Nitrobacter to eat and 2) Both Nitrobacter and Nitrosomonas need a lot of oxygen to live.
Making things even more interesting is what all these critters also need is habitat, because none of these microbes like to just float free in the water very much. They’ll do it if they have to, but they’d much rather have lots and lots of surface area to which to cling while they spam the SSPLWDH (tm) environment with lots and lots of copies of themselves (which is a good thing, very good, because otherwise we have to keep dumping in fresh loads of them every month).
And this is where the two plans diverge. And yes, I already have an opinion on which of the two plans I like better, which I’ll share with you all as your reward for slogging through all that microbiology.
Plan 1, proposed by the two cranky engineer guys whose lives I made slightly miserable Wednesday night with pesky questions about whether these organisms they were proposing were naturally occurring or proprietary creations of their own mad scientists, etc., involves creating a bacterial Disneyland by festooning the third of three ponds at the SSPLWDH (tm) with “AquaMats” (which sounds to me like something a certain Superfriend would lay on the floor of his AquaCar or something), which bear a humorous resemblance to, e.g., those great big dangly synthetic jellyfish that sort of towel off your car as it passes through the end stages of an automated, brushless carwash. The tentacles are made of a densely woven, porous synthetic fabric that provides lots of nooks and crannies for the critters to nest in.
They also last about ten years before they have to be replaced. And we’d still have to inoculate Disneyland with new shots of bacteria a couple of times a year, mostly because the critters already in the pond would get sluggish and start dying off in the frigid water in the wintertime. Boo!
Plan 2, though, has the disadvantage of being more expensive by like an order of magnitude, because it involves the creation of a constructed submerged wetlands. What this basically means is we fill the big hole where the third pond now wallows with layers and layers of gravel of different finenesses so that it creates a nicely varied mass o’surface area for the bacteria while still allowing water to run through it and out into the river after the critters have done their jobs. It’s a submerged wetland because the top is covered with a layer of gravel, soil and some carefully selected plant life (the plants use a lot of those pesky nitrates, too, by the way) – meaning there’s no big stagnant surface water to breed mosquitos and other nuisances!
RCM and I agree, too, that chances are very good that if we follow this plan, we might not have to re-inoculate the mess with critters at all, because they’ll be just fine down there in the gravel and water, even if it gets really cold. So maybe no replacement costs at all, no maintenance, and a projected life of 100+ years!
So even though Plan 2 is pantloads more expensive to initially construct, I think in the long run it will be the better solution, especially with inflation being the unassailable fact of modern life it is: a good chunk of change now (half of which will probably be paid through grants from the same agencies, more or less, who are forcing us to do this anyway) and little or no expenditure down the road, versus a smaller chunk of change now but bleeding a little more out of the district’s coffers every year, and every ten years squeezing out another medium sized chunk... I dunno, it seems pretty obvious to me.
NOW: Contrast this with zoning issues, a typical example of which comes when some guy shows up crying at a Planning Commission meeting because he was just told by Superman (our planning/zoning/streets guy/engineer for the Town of Saratoga) that he’s going to have to build a dwelling on his residential property, or else he’ll have to tear down that stupid steel storage shed. “I didn’t know that,” said citizen usually whines. “If I’da known that I’da sold out a long time ago or something.”
Followed by “Well, well, well, the guy across the street from me has a building up just like this one and you’re not making him build a house there.
To which the unsatisfying response is inevitably something along the lines of either “That building is in a light industrial zone and it’s perfectly fine,” or “That guy has been told the same thing and he’s being fined $X per day until he complies” or “He says he’s living in it.”
YUCK, YUCK, YUCK, YUCK, YUCK.
So anyway, I’m hoping I’ve made my point to everyone today. Either I’ve proved conclusively and for all time that sewers are more interesting than zoning, or, at the very least, I’ve proved that I’m probably way too much of a nerd to be participating in electoral politics.
Hmm!
Thursday, September 12, 2002
WRITING FROM RIVETING RAWLINS…
I’ve been tricked. Hornswaggled. Bamboozled. Had, I tell you, had!!!
My beloved Mayoral Crank, perhaps as his way of getting even with me for declining to attend a vitally important meeting of the Carbon County Council of Governments held in Dixon, WY (where the red star appears on that map) late last month, informed me that the vitally important meeting which I could not decline to attend, that being the organizational/what-the-hell-do-we-do-now meeting of the committee to persuade the good voters of Carbon County to renew the fifth penny sales tax (about which much more anon, I assure you), was going to be held today (he got that part right) in the County Commissioners Office in the courthouse in Rawlins (that’s right, too) at 4 p.m. (wrong, wrong, wrong, I wish there was a way to type the word “wrong” to convey the powerful, John McLaughlineseque way in which this information is WROOOOOOOONG, NEXT ISSUE!
That mayor of ours (who is off in Tuscany so he can’t hear me howling for his blood) sure has quite a sense of humor, doesn’t he! Woo-hoo, there are tears in my eyes from laughing so hard, yessireebobcattail!
But here’s the real stink of it, though: Since I do not currently have in my possession the actual, physical piece of paper in his handwriting which conveyed to me the date, location and time of this meeting, I can’t unequivocably say my being two, possibly three, hours early for this meeting is his fault. See, I stopped bothering with a datebook, PDA or other accessory item for keeping track of my appointments some time ago, because, well, there are two reasons really. One is that such a device invariably becomes truly terrifying to behold when filled with my schedule (no one ever wins a game of dueling datebooks with me, let me tell you. There are heads of state who have emptier Daytimers than mine was even when I was just a lowly lit major/student newspaper editor/EMT/shuttle van driver/lifeguard back in college) and generally makes me cry to contemplate. The other is that maintaining one is, well, more work than I generally like to do on something that doesn’t directly result in a paycheck, a dinner invitation, or a foot massage.
So it might just be that I remembered it wrong.
I am getting up there, you know. Isn’t that how the typical aging algorithm goes nowadays? 30, 31, 32, senility?
So I’m trembling precariously on the frightening brink of senility.
Anyway, as my dear readers can observe, at least I found something productive to do with my time. Actually, several things!
I got my car, beached and unlicensed lo these five, nearly six months at Kate’s Landing like a pithed walrus (and it’s pretty much the same color, under the treesap and birdshit), registered so that I will never again (or at least until the next time I slack off and let it go because what do I need a car for, anyway) have to use the glorified rollerskate that is the Town of Saratoga’s Chevy Malibu.
And I went shopping, or what passes for same in Rawlins, Wyoming, that retail Mecca of the western world, at Pamida. Yes, Pamida! It still exists! And it’s pretty much stocked with all of the same stuff it was the last time I went there which was, well… I’ll have to think about that for a moment. I believe I bought a Duran Duran cassette there – and this was back when Rio was a new release, so… Yeah.
(Note for my out-of-town, out-of-state readers who don’t know what the hell Pamida is: Think of a way, way, way downmarket version of what K-Mart was in the early 1980s or so. Minus the housekeeping staff. Yikes! I’m even scaring myself, and I was just there!)
I bought some gum.
Then I went out for Chinese food! Yay, Chinese food! And best of all, since it was only 4:30 p.m., I was the only person in the whole restaurant (well, except for, in some special spiritual sense, Henry Miller, whose novel Tropic of Capricorn I… had finished by 4:45 p.m.), and so I… got served really, really fast. And since I didn’t have anyone to talk to, I ate pretty fast, too, so… that didn’t kill very much time.
But the soup was very, very good, especially for Rawlins Chinese food ca. 2002 (Lu Jiao being a long-gone, fond memory around these parts – he dates back to that dim, prehistoric era when my parents were courting and Rawlins was actually, they insist, really insistently, they’re not crazy, really they aren’t, it was so different then, Kate, you’ll never understand, a really fun town).
And now here I am, ensconced in the Carbon County Public Library, who mercifully added internet terminals fairly recently (actually, this is a godsend in more ways than one, as now even Saratoga’s branch library has internet access, so they won’t keep sending every transient lowlife who wants to look at porn or read his e-mail down to my office!) so that I could emit these immortal words and post them to this page and share with you, my loyal readers, my happy, happy Rawlins experience!
Anyone who tries to tell you that being elected isn’t what it’s cracked up to be has a bad case of in vino veritas!
I’ve been tricked. Hornswaggled. Bamboozled. Had, I tell you, had!!!
My beloved Mayoral Crank, perhaps as his way of getting even with me for declining to attend a vitally important meeting of the Carbon County Council of Governments held in Dixon, WY (where the red star appears on that map) late last month, informed me that the vitally important meeting which I could not decline to attend, that being the organizational/what-the-hell-do-we-do-now meeting of the committee to persuade the good voters of Carbon County to renew the fifth penny sales tax (about which much more anon, I assure you), was going to be held today (he got that part right) in the County Commissioners Office in the courthouse in Rawlins (that’s right, too) at 4 p.m. (wrong, wrong, wrong, I wish there was a way to type the word “wrong” to convey the powerful, John McLaughlineseque way in which this information is WROOOOOOOONG, NEXT ISSUE!
That mayor of ours (who is off in Tuscany so he can’t hear me howling for his blood) sure has quite a sense of humor, doesn’t he! Woo-hoo, there are tears in my eyes from laughing so hard, yessireebobcattail!
But here’s the real stink of it, though: Since I do not currently have in my possession the actual, physical piece of paper in his handwriting which conveyed to me the date, location and time of this meeting, I can’t unequivocably say my being two, possibly three, hours early for this meeting is his fault. See, I stopped bothering with a datebook, PDA or other accessory item for keeping track of my appointments some time ago, because, well, there are two reasons really. One is that such a device invariably becomes truly terrifying to behold when filled with my schedule (no one ever wins a game of dueling datebooks with me, let me tell you. There are heads of state who have emptier Daytimers than mine was even when I was just a lowly lit major/student newspaper editor/EMT/shuttle van driver/lifeguard back in college) and generally makes me cry to contemplate. The other is that maintaining one is, well, more work than I generally like to do on something that doesn’t directly result in a paycheck, a dinner invitation, or a foot massage.
So it might just be that I remembered it wrong.
I am getting up there, you know. Isn’t that how the typical aging algorithm goes nowadays? 30, 31, 32, senility?
So I’m trembling precariously on the frightening brink of senility.
Anyway, as my dear readers can observe, at least I found something productive to do with my time. Actually, several things!
I got my car, beached and unlicensed lo these five, nearly six months at Kate’s Landing like a pithed walrus (and it’s pretty much the same color, under the treesap and birdshit), registered so that I will never again (or at least until the next time I slack off and let it go because what do I need a car for, anyway) have to use the glorified rollerskate that is the Town of Saratoga’s Chevy Malibu.
And I went shopping, or what passes for same in Rawlins, Wyoming, that retail Mecca of the western world, at Pamida. Yes, Pamida! It still exists! And it’s pretty much stocked with all of the same stuff it was the last time I went there which was, well… I’ll have to think about that for a moment. I believe I bought a Duran Duran cassette there – and this was back when Rio was a new release, so… Yeah.
(Note for my out-of-town, out-of-state readers who don’t know what the hell Pamida is: Think of a way, way, way downmarket version of what K-Mart was in the early 1980s or so. Minus the housekeeping staff. Yikes! I’m even scaring myself, and I was just there!)
I bought some gum.
Then I went out for Chinese food! Yay, Chinese food! And best of all, since it was only 4:30 p.m., I was the only person in the whole restaurant (well, except for, in some special spiritual sense, Henry Miller, whose novel Tropic of Capricorn I… had finished by 4:45 p.m.), and so I… got served really, really fast. And since I didn’t have anyone to talk to, I ate pretty fast, too, so… that didn’t kill very much time.
But the soup was very, very good, especially for Rawlins Chinese food ca. 2002 (Lu Jiao being a long-gone, fond memory around these parts – he dates back to that dim, prehistoric era when my parents were courting and Rawlins was actually, they insist, really insistently, they’re not crazy, really they aren’t, it was so different then, Kate, you’ll never understand, a really fun town).
And now here I am, ensconced in the Carbon County Public Library, who mercifully added internet terminals fairly recently (actually, this is a godsend in more ways than one, as now even Saratoga’s branch library has internet access, so they won’t keep sending every transient lowlife who wants to look at porn or read his e-mail down to my office!) so that I could emit these immortal words and post them to this page and share with you, my loyal readers, my happy, happy Rawlins experience!
Anyone who tries to tell you that being elected isn’t what it’s cracked up to be has a bad case of in vino veritas!
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
PI EYED
I have a dramatically unhealthy fascination with/fixation on the film “Pi,” that mathematical head trip that entertainingly ties in corporate paranoia with Mandlebrot sets and the Qabbala and the stock market that also features the most sickeningly perfect, painfully evocative, frighteningly accurate depictions of the experience of migraine headaches ever committed to film.
Not that there have been that many attempts, mind you. It’s only assholes like me and Darren Aronofsky who would even want to convey this thing, not so much out of a quasi-Nietzschean belief that “shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased” as out of a desire to torture others as we have been tortured. As I said, admittedly, assholes.
It starts with what feels like an ordinary headache, except it keeps moving around; one moment its behind the eyes, the next it’s under the occipital bun, the next it’s throbbing under the mandibles where once wisdom teeth ground into the skull, slowly and inexorably packing that skull into a tighter and tighter wad as though the teeth were seeking eventually to divert the entire blood supply of the head their way so they could feast on all of the rich nutrient broth and grow and pack and shove their way right out of that head so they could begin their evil, decade-old plan of eventual world conquest, the next it’s right beneath the scalp so it feels like every nerve ending in every hair follicle has been simultaneously pummelled with a jackhammer and bathed in sulfuric acid, the fumes making the eyes water and the breath catch, and then the whole head starts to melt...
Then the fireworks start, and every jet engine that fired up at Shively Field last week (last week having been the week for the annual gathering of the Conquistadors del Cielo, Spanish for Conquerors of Synapses and Sleep, oh, I mean Sky) sounds off directly into the ear so that all of those famously sensitive little hairs within feel just like the hairs on the head proper: trying with all possible might to rip themselves right out of the follicles to escape this terrible, terrible racket that Jesus Christ no one else hears it at all what the hell did I suddenly turn into a brown myotis bat with super hearing and perfect sensitivity and please somebody get me to a completely dark and soundproof room right away why are you all looking at me like that did I throw up already oh Jesus Christ...
Right now, at 13:28 on 9-11 I have the beginnings, maybe, of such a headache. There are ways to prevent these from developing all the way (and no, no known pharmaceutical or other cocktail has had any effect), like ice cold showers in complete darkness and silence, but since those are hard to come by on a typical workday I settled for snagging all of the ice cubes out of my iced tea at lunch, packing them into a napkin, and packing it up against my head, frantically following the “source” of the pain and probably looking entirely ridiculous into the bargain (probably, hell – my own dear personal mother, seated at my table for the whole spectacle, could scarce restrain herself from laughing, but assured me that she was certain everyone else in the packed restaurant would probably just chalk it up to “Kate being Kate”).
For extra fun, at coffee this morning I thought I had developed a whole new symptom, as for the first time ever the intermittent flashes of blinding light were sometimes red, like the blood dripping blackly from the Hasid’s hand during the hallucenatory migraine sequences in Pi (shot in black and white for greater intensity and effect; it’s especially shocking to realize, after several seconds, that that ambiguous mass quivering in the poor protagonist’s bathroom sink is actually a brain, his, one suspects as the dentist drill whines grind on in the background), as though someone were shining a laser pointer into my eyes just for fun, the bastard...
But no, no bastards there this morning, Fat Cat Republican or otherwise.
What there was, however, was the Sewer King, today inexplicably armed with an enormous, shiny radio hanging off his belt like a giant tick or something. The radio was turned on, and came equipped with at least one tiny little blinking red LED (aha!) and furthermore, had at least one surface so very shiny and reflective that every time the SK moved, blinked, laughed or breathed, it caught ambient light from the room and flashed it in my direction.
Of course, it took me a good half hour to figure this out, during which time all I could really do was sit there, focused on nothing (I had on my little-used-in-Wyoming “bus face,” that slack expression adopted by users of public transportation and standers in queues to avoid too much psychic input from the teeming masses of other humanity packed into a tiny space) and offering up any sacrifice, anything, up to and including any theoretical children I might someday theoretically have if I haven’t someday just sliced off my own head in an attempt to dig out the pain amplifier put in there some years ago by like some particularly evil cheerleader or something, if whatever malevolent or bored god-things out there in the universe would just please spare me just this once or at least let me get through this day, please?
So far, I’m holding steady. I gulped down some placebo that claims not to be placebo but might as well be placebo for all the good it does (they haven’t entrusted me with, e.g. one of those air-powered mega-hypodermics that the protagonist in Pi shoots directly into his brain pan when the hypersonic shrieks of a thousand bats start resounding in his ears) and grabbed more ice to mash into the side of my head from time to time.
There are moments of relief when I scoot back up to my computer and bash out another sentence or two, which is probably making the problem worse but then again it oddly relieves some stress because at least when random idiots come barging into my office to ask me stupid questions at least I’m looking productive and typing rather than cowering over behind the photocopier in a fetal position, which probably looks a bit slackeresque to the untrained observer.
On the other hand, if there were gods or any other kind of justice in this universe, I would be able to project my current experiences directly into the skull of the complete assface whose diesel engine has been running nonstop for the last 45 years right outside my office door – or into that of the admittedly quite pleasant but still rather thoughtless business owner just down the street who chose today, a day of inversion layers and unfortunate anniversaries and grinding skull pain, to apply several coats of highly volatile and aromatic stain to every bit of wood on the new addition to the saddleshop.
As it is, it is probably wise that I have not yet taken the step of routinely packing any kind of firearm or other weaponry during the work week.
O’well. At least my Wolfburger is staying down.
Oh, wait...
I have a dramatically unhealthy fascination with/fixation on the film “Pi,” that mathematical head trip that entertainingly ties in corporate paranoia with Mandlebrot sets and the Qabbala and the stock market that also features the most sickeningly perfect, painfully evocative, frighteningly accurate depictions of the experience of migraine headaches ever committed to film.
Not that there have been that many attempts, mind you. It’s only assholes like me and Darren Aronofsky who would even want to convey this thing, not so much out of a quasi-Nietzschean belief that “shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased” as out of a desire to torture others as we have been tortured. As I said, admittedly, assholes.
It starts with what feels like an ordinary headache, except it keeps moving around; one moment its behind the eyes, the next it’s under the occipital bun, the next it’s throbbing under the mandibles where once wisdom teeth ground into the skull, slowly and inexorably packing that skull into a tighter and tighter wad as though the teeth were seeking eventually to divert the entire blood supply of the head their way so they could feast on all of the rich nutrient broth and grow and pack and shove their way right out of that head so they could begin their evil, decade-old plan of eventual world conquest, the next it’s right beneath the scalp so it feels like every nerve ending in every hair follicle has been simultaneously pummelled with a jackhammer and bathed in sulfuric acid, the fumes making the eyes water and the breath catch, and then the whole head starts to melt...
Then the fireworks start, and every jet engine that fired up at Shively Field last week (last week having been the week for the annual gathering of the Conquistadors del Cielo, Spanish for Conquerors of Synapses and Sleep, oh, I mean Sky) sounds off directly into the ear so that all of those famously sensitive little hairs within feel just like the hairs on the head proper: trying with all possible might to rip themselves right out of the follicles to escape this terrible, terrible racket that Jesus Christ no one else hears it at all what the hell did I suddenly turn into a brown myotis bat with super hearing and perfect sensitivity and please somebody get me to a completely dark and soundproof room right away why are you all looking at me like that did I throw up already oh Jesus Christ...
Right now, at 13:28 on 9-11 I have the beginnings, maybe, of such a headache. There are ways to prevent these from developing all the way (and no, no known pharmaceutical or other cocktail has had any effect), like ice cold showers in complete darkness and silence, but since those are hard to come by on a typical workday I settled for snagging all of the ice cubes out of my iced tea at lunch, packing them into a napkin, and packing it up against my head, frantically following the “source” of the pain and probably looking entirely ridiculous into the bargain (probably, hell – my own dear personal mother, seated at my table for the whole spectacle, could scarce restrain herself from laughing, but assured me that she was certain everyone else in the packed restaurant would probably just chalk it up to “Kate being Kate”).
For extra fun, at coffee this morning I thought I had developed a whole new symptom, as for the first time ever the intermittent flashes of blinding light were sometimes red, like the blood dripping blackly from the Hasid’s hand during the hallucenatory migraine sequences in Pi (shot in black and white for greater intensity and effect; it’s especially shocking to realize, after several seconds, that that ambiguous mass quivering in the poor protagonist’s bathroom sink is actually a brain, his, one suspects as the dentist drill whines grind on in the background), as though someone were shining a laser pointer into my eyes just for fun, the bastard...
But no, no bastards there this morning, Fat Cat Republican or otherwise.
What there was, however, was the Sewer King, today inexplicably armed with an enormous, shiny radio hanging off his belt like a giant tick or something. The radio was turned on, and came equipped with at least one tiny little blinking red LED (aha!) and furthermore, had at least one surface so very shiny and reflective that every time the SK moved, blinked, laughed or breathed, it caught ambient light from the room and flashed it in my direction.
Of course, it took me a good half hour to figure this out, during which time all I could really do was sit there, focused on nothing (I had on my little-used-in-Wyoming “bus face,” that slack expression adopted by users of public transportation and standers in queues to avoid too much psychic input from the teeming masses of other humanity packed into a tiny space) and offering up any sacrifice, anything, up to and including any theoretical children I might someday theoretically have if I haven’t someday just sliced off my own head in an attempt to dig out the pain amplifier put in there some years ago by like some particularly evil cheerleader or something, if whatever malevolent or bored god-things out there in the universe would just please spare me just this once or at least let me get through this day, please?
So far, I’m holding steady. I gulped down some placebo that claims not to be placebo but might as well be placebo for all the good it does (they haven’t entrusted me with, e.g. one of those air-powered mega-hypodermics that the protagonist in Pi shoots directly into his brain pan when the hypersonic shrieks of a thousand bats start resounding in his ears) and grabbed more ice to mash into the side of my head from time to time.
There are moments of relief when I scoot back up to my computer and bash out another sentence or two, which is probably making the problem worse but then again it oddly relieves some stress because at least when random idiots come barging into my office to ask me stupid questions at least I’m looking productive and typing rather than cowering over behind the photocopier in a fetal position, which probably looks a bit slackeresque to the untrained observer.
On the other hand, if there were gods or any other kind of justice in this universe, I would be able to project my current experiences directly into the skull of the complete assface whose diesel engine has been running nonstop for the last 45 years right outside my office door – or into that of the admittedly quite pleasant but still rather thoughtless business owner just down the street who chose today, a day of inversion layers and unfortunate anniversaries and grinding skull pain, to apply several coats of highly volatile and aromatic stain to every bit of wood on the new addition to the saddleshop.
As it is, it is probably wise that I have not yet taken the step of routinely packing any kind of firearm or other weaponry during the work week.
O’well. At least my Wolfburger is staying down.
Oh, wait...
Monday, September 09, 2002
ANNIVERSARIES...
Today is my own dear personal dad’s 64th birthday. A year ago today, my mother and I took him out for dinner at the Hotel Wolf after several week’s fussing over whether he really meant it when he suddenly informed us that he no longer wanted a skilsaw for a present. We all had prime rib, split a piece of hideously rich chocolate cake-like stuff, and perhaps chugged down a little more alcohol than our family physician (seated with her newish husband at the next table) would maybe encourage. It was a nice evening, conclusion to a nice (and football-laden) Sunday.
It was also, of course, our last activity as a family before a certain set of buildings were destroyed on the east coast – which is perhaps why my memories of this quiet little birthday celebration are more vivid than they might otherwise be; the contrast between that nice Sunday and the horrific Tuesday that followed (Ramcharger’s birthday...!) (and the wedding anniversary of the Emperor and Empress of Hardware) close behind being so very, very great.
And of course that contrast is still with us. Leading in the larger world right up to this week right alongside my father’s and my friend’s awareness of an impending next tick of the clock has been an overwhelming (and yes, drearily predictable) torrent of reminders and retrospectives of what one network called the “New Day of Infamy” and another called “Attack on America,” etc., etc. The Sunday edition of the Casper Star-Tribune, normally a deep repository of Wyoming news along with a sprinkling of Hollywood and a dash of New York (only in the financial section, mind you, unless the UN is up to something), spoke of little else (well, except for the Cowboys’ embarrassing loss to Central Michigan in football, bringing the team’s record to “Uh-oh and two”) – yes, even out here in outré, isolated Wyoming, the second largest third world nation in North America (though as Mexico’s economy improves steadily, we may become the first, the only), our news media is completely fixated on making sure that we “never forget.”
As if we could.
A lot of the people in my life, at least, are really, really disgusted by this media focus, and I can definitely see their point. We’ve all spent the last year dealing with what happened in our own ways – checking up on the Koran to see if it really does contain encouragement to commit heinous acts against infidels, making pilgrimages to Ground Zero, donating blood, turning overnight into military history junkies, whatever – and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even the most overwrought tragedy voyeurs among us have come to at least enough of an understanding or acceptance (while, hey, sorry to say this, but many others of my acquaintance absorbed it right away, found a way to deal with it that worked for them, and got on with life without having to visit a single counselor, pharmacist, clergyman or elected public official) to move on. To such as these, in particular, the media-generated melodrama of, e.g., the hauling out of the last girder of the WTC buildings in July was more sickening than saddening – I heard everything from expressions of disgust at the way these events were “still being milked” to expressions of relief that now “maybe everybody will shuddap about it” (fat chance) – has been annoying, to say the least, and ridiculous, to say the worst.
And yes - I’m fully aware of how callous that sounds, but realize, folks, that this is the way a lot of people really feel. There are hundreds of reasons to be sick of hearing about this, including another common perspective I encounter that it’s wildly hypocritical to be fixated on this but not to be worried about the typhoon that just hit Korea or the massacres in Rwanda or the continuing horrors experienced by “citizen-refugees” in out-of-the-way parts of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Talk to them about callous.
Stipulating that a lot of people – including me – are not wild about this continuous commemoration and coverage, though, there’s still a good reason for it, i.e. the human need for ritual, for closure, for a chance to stop and consider and question and try to learn something from what has happened (not that I think a full day of MTV’s idea of “inspirational” music videos and commentary by the loathsome Carson Daly is really going to encourage contemplation).
Culturally, we don’t have a lot of built-in rituals to begin with; we’re too damned diverse, for a start. Whose religious ceremony should we follow, for instance? Whose traditions for burial and mourning? Whose doctrine on revenge is really all-inclusive of America? Certainly nothing in our patchwork of scriptures, ethnic traditions, folk beliefs; nothing really from the past (maybe Pearl Harbor. MAYBE. But PH was followed by years and years of real combat, real threats, with obvious targets and objectives and enemies that I, at least, am not seeing now).
What do we have in common now? Well, pop culture and the news media. The purveyors of which have payrolls to make, shareholders to please, taxes to pay, etc. Plus a huge, diverse, demographically incomprehensible audience upon whose continued attention it all depends, which means said purveyors pretty much must, by definition, avoid criticism and controversy at all costs; which boils it all down, for them, to the question of whether to annoy the people who’ve already accepted and moved on or whether to pooh-pooh and offend those who are still freaked out and crying.
So, uh, duh, our current 911-o-rama, about which there is nothing we can do. It’s a collective phenomenon and more sensitive heads have prevailed on how it’s all going to go.
All the rest of us can do is turn off the TV Wednesday and go fishing.
Today is my own dear personal dad’s 64th birthday. A year ago today, my mother and I took him out for dinner at the Hotel Wolf after several week’s fussing over whether he really meant it when he suddenly informed us that he no longer wanted a skilsaw for a present. We all had prime rib, split a piece of hideously rich chocolate cake-like stuff, and perhaps chugged down a little more alcohol than our family physician (seated with her newish husband at the next table) would maybe encourage. It was a nice evening, conclusion to a nice (and football-laden) Sunday.
It was also, of course, our last activity as a family before a certain set of buildings were destroyed on the east coast – which is perhaps why my memories of this quiet little birthday celebration are more vivid than they might otherwise be; the contrast between that nice Sunday and the horrific Tuesday that followed (Ramcharger’s birthday...!) (and the wedding anniversary of the Emperor and Empress of Hardware) close behind being so very, very great.
And of course that contrast is still with us. Leading in the larger world right up to this week right alongside my father’s and my friend’s awareness of an impending next tick of the clock has been an overwhelming (and yes, drearily predictable) torrent of reminders and retrospectives of what one network called the “New Day of Infamy” and another called “Attack on America,” etc., etc. The Sunday edition of the Casper Star-Tribune, normally a deep repository of Wyoming news along with a sprinkling of Hollywood and a dash of New York (only in the financial section, mind you, unless the UN is up to something), spoke of little else (well, except for the Cowboys’ embarrassing loss to Central Michigan in football, bringing the team’s record to “Uh-oh and two”) – yes, even out here in outré, isolated Wyoming, the second largest third world nation in North America (though as Mexico’s economy improves steadily, we may become the first, the only), our news media is completely fixated on making sure that we “never forget.”
As if we could.
A lot of the people in my life, at least, are really, really disgusted by this media focus, and I can definitely see their point. We’ve all spent the last year dealing with what happened in our own ways – checking up on the Koran to see if it really does contain encouragement to commit heinous acts against infidels, making pilgrimages to Ground Zero, donating blood, turning overnight into military history junkies, whatever – and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even the most overwrought tragedy voyeurs among us have come to at least enough of an understanding or acceptance (while, hey, sorry to say this, but many others of my acquaintance absorbed it right away, found a way to deal with it that worked for them, and got on with life without having to visit a single counselor, pharmacist, clergyman or elected public official) to move on. To such as these, in particular, the media-generated melodrama of, e.g., the hauling out of the last girder of the WTC buildings in July was more sickening than saddening – I heard everything from expressions of disgust at the way these events were “still being milked” to expressions of relief that now “maybe everybody will shuddap about it” (fat chance) – has been annoying, to say the least, and ridiculous, to say the worst.
And yes - I’m fully aware of how callous that sounds, but realize, folks, that this is the way a lot of people really feel. There are hundreds of reasons to be sick of hearing about this, including another common perspective I encounter that it’s wildly hypocritical to be fixated on this but not to be worried about the typhoon that just hit Korea or the massacres in Rwanda or the continuing horrors experienced by “citizen-refugees” in out-of-the-way parts of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Talk to them about callous.
Stipulating that a lot of people – including me – are not wild about this continuous commemoration and coverage, though, there’s still a good reason for it, i.e. the human need for ritual, for closure, for a chance to stop and consider and question and try to learn something from what has happened (not that I think a full day of MTV’s idea of “inspirational” music videos and commentary by the loathsome Carson Daly is really going to encourage contemplation).
Culturally, we don’t have a lot of built-in rituals to begin with; we’re too damned diverse, for a start. Whose religious ceremony should we follow, for instance? Whose traditions for burial and mourning? Whose doctrine on revenge is really all-inclusive of America? Certainly nothing in our patchwork of scriptures, ethnic traditions, folk beliefs; nothing really from the past (maybe Pearl Harbor. MAYBE. But PH was followed by years and years of real combat, real threats, with obvious targets and objectives and enemies that I, at least, am not seeing now).
What do we have in common now? Well, pop culture and the news media. The purveyors of which have payrolls to make, shareholders to please, taxes to pay, etc. Plus a huge, diverse, demographically incomprehensible audience upon whose continued attention it all depends, which means said purveyors pretty much must, by definition, avoid criticism and controversy at all costs; which boils it all down, for them, to the question of whether to annoy the people who’ve already accepted and moved on or whether to pooh-pooh and offend those who are still freaked out and crying.
So, uh, duh, our current 911-o-rama, about which there is nothing we can do. It’s a collective phenomenon and more sensitive heads have prevailed on how it’s all going to go.
All the rest of us can do is turn off the TV Wednesday and go fishing.
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
A RHETORICAL INTERROGATIVE STATEMENT
Do any of you – I mean ANY of you little darlings out there still know what a question is? At all? Are you familiar with the usage, the intent, the meaning of the word?
Here, I'll give you some assistance, because I know to what depths our educational system, particularly in the realm of English vocabulary and grammar, has sunk. The most common dictionary definition of the word is "An expression of inquiry that invites or calls for a reply" (emphasis mine).
“Reply,” of course, commonly meaning a response or answer, the underlying assumption at work in the whole question and answer process being that the querent, or person asking the question, is seeking information he or she does not currently possess, or perhaps a new opinion, from the queried, or person to whom the question is being posed.
I am perhaps falling into the habit of the pedant in troubling to lay all of this out so clearly, but there would appear, judging from my own recent personal experience, to be a lack of clarity on these very points, to wit, a conversation I just had on that most infernal of time wasters, that most punishing product of human insanity masking as ingenuity, that most pernicious of pointless pieces of desk equipment, the telephone.
“Kate,” the conversation – no, perhaps that is not the right word, implying as it does an exchange of words (“con” meaning “with”) rather than an utter monologue – began, innocuously enough, “Do you have a second?”
So far, so good; if I didn’t have a second, I would have let the answering machine take the call (oh, the glory of hindsight. If only, if only... but really, while I’m not going to get this half hour of my life back ever, what else was I going to do with it? Pet my dog? Oh wait, yeah, I was taking care of business in the form of visitors to my office who were actually seeking information). Easy enough, then, to answer this first question: “Yeah, I have a second.”
“Good, because I have a question or two for you...”
Which seemingly innocent, clear and self-evident statement was followed by around 20 minutes of incoherent rambling that may have seen to the party on the other end of the phone to be a narrative (but certainly not a question) but which seemed to me the most tedious thing I have ever endured since the last... you know, I can’t think of any comparison to make to finish this sentence? I really can’t. Either a significant portion of my precious brain capacity dribbled out of my ears while this person was babbling, or this really was the most tedious thing I have ever, ever endured – and I was a literature major at a fancy liberal arts college and used to report regularly on the doings of the Massachusetts State Legislature (Wyoming’s, thank the gods, only meets two months out of the year, and so experiences a certain sense of urgency during its proceedings that produces a comparative reduction in fillibustering, etc. as they run up against the Constitutional deadline for their sessions - Vote NO on Amendment “A” for pity’s sake. If they can call themselves into special session without the governor’s approval they’ll never shut up!).
At the end of this blather, I did hear that characteristic rising inflection of voice which, in generations prior to mine, almost invariably signals that the statement being made is in some sense an interrogative one (but in my generation almost invariably indicates that the speaker is making a tremendous effort not to seem domineering or controlling or subscribing in any way to the outdated and non-post-modern notion that there can be such things as “right” or “wrong” opinions, “true” or “false” statements, “good” or “bad” ideas, etc. by being so crass as to be – gasp! – direct or declarative).
But there was, really, nothing for me to say. He had not asked my opinion or my input, was not seeking information, was not even trying to catch me out in saying something stupid or agreeing with some ludicrous proposal like launching a pre-emptive strike against the nation of Liechtenstein if it did not allow us to station troops along its border with Iraq.
He basically just wanted to rob me of a half hour or so of my time in the interests of, of, I don’t know in what interests, actually.
Maybe he was trying to distract me from the little gnomes he’d smuggled into the storage room of my office the last time he was physically here so that said gnomes could go undisturbed about their business of stealing the last few bags of two-year-old Cheetos that are gathering dust back there.
What do you guys think?
I mean, besides that I'm getting cranky and maybe losing it, of course.
Do any of you – I mean ANY of you little darlings out there still know what a question is? At all? Are you familiar with the usage, the intent, the meaning of the word?
Here, I'll give you some assistance, because I know to what depths our educational system, particularly in the realm of English vocabulary and grammar, has sunk. The most common dictionary definition of the word is "An expression of inquiry that invites or calls for a reply" (emphasis mine).
“Reply,” of course, commonly meaning a response or answer, the underlying assumption at work in the whole question and answer process being that the querent, or person asking the question, is seeking information he or she does not currently possess, or perhaps a new opinion, from the queried, or person to whom the question is being posed.
I am perhaps falling into the habit of the pedant in troubling to lay all of this out so clearly, but there would appear, judging from my own recent personal experience, to be a lack of clarity on these very points, to wit, a conversation I just had on that most infernal of time wasters, that most punishing product of human insanity masking as ingenuity, that most pernicious of pointless pieces of desk equipment, the telephone.
“Kate,” the conversation – no, perhaps that is not the right word, implying as it does an exchange of words (“con” meaning “with”) rather than an utter monologue – began, innocuously enough, “Do you have a second?”
So far, so good; if I didn’t have a second, I would have let the answering machine take the call (oh, the glory of hindsight. If only, if only... but really, while I’m not going to get this half hour of my life back ever, what else was I going to do with it? Pet my dog? Oh wait, yeah, I was taking care of business in the form of visitors to my office who were actually seeking information). Easy enough, then, to answer this first question: “Yeah, I have a second.”
“Good, because I have a question or two for you...”
Which seemingly innocent, clear and self-evident statement was followed by around 20 minutes of incoherent rambling that may have seen to the party on the other end of the phone to be a narrative (but certainly not a question) but which seemed to me the most tedious thing I have ever endured since the last... you know, I can’t think of any comparison to make to finish this sentence? I really can’t. Either a significant portion of my precious brain capacity dribbled out of my ears while this person was babbling, or this really was the most tedious thing I have ever, ever endured – and I was a literature major at a fancy liberal arts college and used to report regularly on the doings of the Massachusetts State Legislature (Wyoming’s, thank the gods, only meets two months out of the year, and so experiences a certain sense of urgency during its proceedings that produces a comparative reduction in fillibustering, etc. as they run up against the Constitutional deadline for their sessions - Vote NO on Amendment “A” for pity’s sake. If they can call themselves into special session without the governor’s approval they’ll never shut up!).
At the end of this blather, I did hear that characteristic rising inflection of voice which, in generations prior to mine, almost invariably signals that the statement being made is in some sense an interrogative one (but in my generation almost invariably indicates that the speaker is making a tremendous effort not to seem domineering or controlling or subscribing in any way to the outdated and non-post-modern notion that there can be such things as “right” or “wrong” opinions, “true” or “false” statements, “good” or “bad” ideas, etc. by being so crass as to be – gasp! – direct or declarative).
But there was, really, nothing for me to say. He had not asked my opinion or my input, was not seeking information, was not even trying to catch me out in saying something stupid or agreeing with some ludicrous proposal like launching a pre-emptive strike against the nation of Liechtenstein if it did not allow us to station troops along its border with Iraq.
He basically just wanted to rob me of a half hour or so of my time in the interests of, of, I don’t know in what interests, actually.
Maybe he was trying to distract me from the little gnomes he’d smuggled into the storage room of my office the last time he was physically here so that said gnomes could go undisturbed about their business of stealing the last few bags of two-year-old Cheetos that are gathering dust back there.
What do you guys think?
I mean, besides that I'm getting cranky and maybe losing it, of course.
Friday, August 30, 2002
YES, IT’S TRUE, DAMMIT!
For the last two days, while I’ve been waiting for certain other intriguing phone calls to happen, my phone here at the office has been ringing with numbing regularity and repetitiousness.
Had I known it was going to be this effective, this little advertising campaign I put together more or less on the fly, I would have started taking notes on the phone calls, because I think an interesting radio-mathematical dataset could have been developed that someone with better statistics skills than mine (say, Stillllllaaaaay or Canter38 or one of the other Sec-J guys at STATS, Inc.) could use to plot exactly when every single airing of a certain radio commercial I wrote took place, and how effective it was.
Were that going on, it would be much more entertaining to edure the endless iterations of this same bit of dialogue I shall paraphrase here:
“Good morning/afternoon/evening, Saratoga Platte Valley Chamber of Commerce...”
(pause for inevitable cellphone static, either mine or the caller’s depending on the time of day and whether or not I’m at coffee or lunch)
“Hey little lady, I was just listening to the radio and you wouldn’t believe what I just heard.”
“Um, okay. What did you hear?”
“Well, I heard that Gene Watson is playing for free in Saratoga. Is that true?”
“Yes it is.”
“The Gene Watson?”
“Yes.”
“The guy who sings -” insert name of famous Gene Watson song that I had never heard of before I wound up putting together this ad campaign here “That Gene Watson?”
“Yes.”
“So what was the ticket price again?”
“It’s free, sir”
“Ain’t no such thing as free. What are you trying to pull here? You’re not going to bring out some Gene Watson impersonator are you”
(OK, OK, no one has asked me about Gene Watson impersonators. But you have to admit it’s pretty funny, and nicely conveys the depth of skepticism with which I am dealing here)
“No, it’s really Gene Watson.”
“Well hell, where is Saratoga, anyway?”
From these conversations, I feel I can safely conclude that 1) I did a good job picking radio stations and packages to plug this thing and 2) I did a bad job at writing a credible ad.
Maybe it’s because, to be perfectly honest, I’d never heard of Gene Watson at all before this thing came up. And I still wouldn’t know him if he walked into my office and said howdy as I’ve half-feared might happen all week because that’s just the sort of thing that does happen around here.
Fortunately, intimate knowledge of what I’m promoting isn’t always necessary. I know next to nothing, for instance, about what goes into maintaining a chariot race team; I just have to persuade people to come to the Donald E. Erickson Memorial Chariot Races (February 15 & 16, 2003, everybody!). I couldn’t tell a barn swallow from a bank swallow from a tree swallow, but I can still say “Hey birdwatchers, grab your binoculars and get ready for the Platte Valley Festival of Birds!” (May 24, 25 and 25, everybody!).
It’s a good thing, too.
Still and all, though, this event has driven me maybe more crazy than any other. I don’t know what it is about Gene Watson fans, but on the whole they seem completely incapable of imagining a human being who is not of their number. Of course I know all of his 35 top 40 hits! Yes, I know the lyrics to whatever song that was you just mentioned. Yes!
It makes me think of that woman in the original Blues Brothers movie who mentions that her bar features both kinds of music, Country and Western.
Shrug.
As for me, I’m going to go hide in the Lazy River Cantina while this thing is going on tomorrow night. Warren Keldsen is playing, and you all know how I feel about his stuff.
So it goes.
For the last two days, while I’ve been waiting for certain other intriguing phone calls to happen, my phone here at the office has been ringing with numbing regularity and repetitiousness.
Had I known it was going to be this effective, this little advertising campaign I put together more or less on the fly, I would have started taking notes on the phone calls, because I think an interesting radio-mathematical dataset could have been developed that someone with better statistics skills than mine (say, Stillllllaaaaay or Canter38 or one of the other Sec-J guys at STATS, Inc.) could use to plot exactly when every single airing of a certain radio commercial I wrote took place, and how effective it was.
Were that going on, it would be much more entertaining to edure the endless iterations of this same bit of dialogue I shall paraphrase here:
“Good morning/afternoon/evening, Saratoga Platte Valley Chamber of Commerce...”
(pause for inevitable cellphone static, either mine or the caller’s depending on the time of day and whether or not I’m at coffee or lunch)
“Hey little lady, I was just listening to the radio and you wouldn’t believe what I just heard.”
“Um, okay. What did you hear?”
“Well, I heard that Gene Watson is playing for free in Saratoga. Is that true?”
“Yes it is.”
“The Gene Watson?”
“Yes.”
“The guy who sings -” insert name of famous Gene Watson song that I had never heard of before I wound up putting together this ad campaign here “That Gene Watson?”
“Yes.”
“So what was the ticket price again?”
“It’s free, sir”
“Ain’t no such thing as free. What are you trying to pull here? You’re not going to bring out some Gene Watson impersonator are you”
(OK, OK, no one has asked me about Gene Watson impersonators. But you have to admit it’s pretty funny, and nicely conveys the depth of skepticism with which I am dealing here)
“No, it’s really Gene Watson.”
“Well hell, where is Saratoga, anyway?”
From these conversations, I feel I can safely conclude that 1) I did a good job picking radio stations and packages to plug this thing and 2) I did a bad job at writing a credible ad.
Maybe it’s because, to be perfectly honest, I’d never heard of Gene Watson at all before this thing came up. And I still wouldn’t know him if he walked into my office and said howdy as I’ve half-feared might happen all week because that’s just the sort of thing that does happen around here.
Fortunately, intimate knowledge of what I’m promoting isn’t always necessary. I know next to nothing, for instance, about what goes into maintaining a chariot race team; I just have to persuade people to come to the Donald E. Erickson Memorial Chariot Races (February 15 & 16, 2003, everybody!). I couldn’t tell a barn swallow from a bank swallow from a tree swallow, but I can still say “Hey birdwatchers, grab your binoculars and get ready for the Platte Valley Festival of Birds!” (May 24, 25 and 25, everybody!).
It’s a good thing, too.
Still and all, though, this event has driven me maybe more crazy than any other. I don’t know what it is about Gene Watson fans, but on the whole they seem completely incapable of imagining a human being who is not of their number. Of course I know all of his 35 top 40 hits! Yes, I know the lyrics to whatever song that was you just mentioned. Yes!
It makes me think of that woman in the original Blues Brothers movie who mentions that her bar features both kinds of music, Country and Western.
Shrug.
As for me, I’m going to go hide in the Lazy River Cantina while this thing is going on tomorrow night. Warren Keldsen is playing, and you all know how I feel about his stuff.
So it goes.
Thursday, August 29, 2002
YEAH, I GUESS...
...The gods want me to be a writer.
There’s no other explanation for the unfathomably weird things that can and do happen to me in the course of a nominally uneventful week.
WTOTD (Weird Thing of the Day): Someone out there has a very intricate and confusing story to tell me, to judge from a slightly anguished pair of messages that were waiting on my office answering machine this morning when I finally sauntered in at 11 a.m. (after a hilarious morning with Tad the Grocer and Ramcharger the Lumber Guy and the Fat Cat Republican Banker managing to turn every innocent beginning to every conversation into an off-color joke about lubrication. No, don’t even try to imagine it. The Jeweler and I are both still in shock from the spectacle. Turn a sackful of eight-year-olds loose at a bachelor party in the Playboy mansion and you might begin to get an idea. We still don’t know what got into them).
See, sometimes, every once in a while, someone can walk into my office for a casual inquiry and wind up staying all day bullshitting with me. We who have the gift of the gab usually also have a complete inability to resist any opportunity to employ it without outside coercion, and there’s not a lot of outside coercion associated with my office hours. I sink or swim here, often as not in complete control of my schedule and modus operandi, if not of my workload overall.
And sometimes, someone can walk into my office for a casual inquiry and wind up staying all day NOT bullshitting with me, but rather having one of those rare and life-altering real conversations that leave both parties happily stunned, somewhat shaken, and careening off on new trajectories forever more.
Guess which kind of someone *I* met yesterday.
Within just a few hours, we felt like best friends. Within a few more, we were making plans to sneak away to an out-of-town jazz festival together this weekend. We had it all planned out, the time table, where we’d stay, where we’d get out of the car on the way and exercise our dogs (his is half border collie, half lab - in mannerisms, all border collie. Great dog). It was exciting, exhilirating, ludicrious.
Then my would-be traveling companion had to shoot over to Laramie for the night or so, but we’d head out as planned on Friday, be ready, this is going to be awesome, we can’t believe we’re doing this, it’s nuts, it’s unbelievable, holy shit, Kate Sherrod is actually going to get out of town and do something fun... with a person she just met....!
But then the answering machine struck this morning. In slightly vague, slightly annoyed tones (of all the times for me to have let my cell phone battery run down; I could have been fully briefed on this still-mysterious situation. Could have. But of course, counterfactual conditionals are always true because the premise is always false), my new friend informed me first that things were looking iffy but I’d know more later when he got through on my cell phone, and then that indeed, he was going to have to go to Boise and I’d know everything later when we actually got to talk, and would I please leave a message on his voice mail and tell him when the hell I might actually be reachable because there’s no way he’s going to get the whole backstory to this surprise onto the answering machine with its fascist time limtations.
So of course I called, just because it sounds like a doozy of a story and because I almost had a doozy of my own - succinctly put, the Collie of Folly almost cost us the trip anyway because it is only through a by-gods miracle that she does not currently and thoroughly reek of skunk.
And now I’m waiting to hear the story.
It’s like being a teenager or something, this day. Every time the phone rings – and it’s been ringing a lot because my latest advertising campaign seems to have been a stroke of genius – I gear up to hear the story, find out why I’m staying in Saratoga again this weekend after all.
Sometimes the cell phone rings, vibrating in my hip pocket and making me jump about 25 feet into the air.
But it’s all still, at 5 p.m., a perplexing mystery.
Guess this will teach me to make vacation plans with strangers, huh?
But you gotta admit, it would have been a great adventure, and as it is it makes a pretty good little story.
Bewildering, bewildering.
Hey, at least I found some words...
...The gods want me to be a writer.
There’s no other explanation for the unfathomably weird things that can and do happen to me in the course of a nominally uneventful week.
WTOTD (Weird Thing of the Day): Someone out there has a very intricate and confusing story to tell me, to judge from a slightly anguished pair of messages that were waiting on my office answering machine this morning when I finally sauntered in at 11 a.m. (after a hilarious morning with Tad the Grocer and Ramcharger the Lumber Guy and the Fat Cat Republican Banker managing to turn every innocent beginning to every conversation into an off-color joke about lubrication. No, don’t even try to imagine it. The Jeweler and I are both still in shock from the spectacle. Turn a sackful of eight-year-olds loose at a bachelor party in the Playboy mansion and you might begin to get an idea. We still don’t know what got into them).
See, sometimes, every once in a while, someone can walk into my office for a casual inquiry and wind up staying all day bullshitting with me. We who have the gift of the gab usually also have a complete inability to resist any opportunity to employ it without outside coercion, and there’s not a lot of outside coercion associated with my office hours. I sink or swim here, often as not in complete control of my schedule and modus operandi, if not of my workload overall.
And sometimes, someone can walk into my office for a casual inquiry and wind up staying all day NOT bullshitting with me, but rather having one of those rare and life-altering real conversations that leave both parties happily stunned, somewhat shaken, and careening off on new trajectories forever more.
Guess which kind of someone *I* met yesterday.
Within just a few hours, we felt like best friends. Within a few more, we were making plans to sneak away to an out-of-town jazz festival together this weekend. We had it all planned out, the time table, where we’d stay, where we’d get out of the car on the way and exercise our dogs (his is half border collie, half lab - in mannerisms, all border collie. Great dog). It was exciting, exhilirating, ludicrious.
Then my would-be traveling companion had to shoot over to Laramie for the night or so, but we’d head out as planned on Friday, be ready, this is going to be awesome, we can’t believe we’re doing this, it’s nuts, it’s unbelievable, holy shit, Kate Sherrod is actually going to get out of town and do something fun... with a person she just met....!
But then the answering machine struck this morning. In slightly vague, slightly annoyed tones (of all the times for me to have let my cell phone battery run down; I could have been fully briefed on this still-mysterious situation. Could have. But of course, counterfactual conditionals are always true because the premise is always false), my new friend informed me first that things were looking iffy but I’d know more later when he got through on my cell phone, and then that indeed, he was going to have to go to Boise and I’d know everything later when we actually got to talk, and would I please leave a message on his voice mail and tell him when the hell I might actually be reachable because there’s no way he’s going to get the whole backstory to this surprise onto the answering machine with its fascist time limtations.
So of course I called, just because it sounds like a doozy of a story and because I almost had a doozy of my own - succinctly put, the Collie of Folly almost cost us the trip anyway because it is only through a by-gods miracle that she does not currently and thoroughly reek of skunk.
And now I’m waiting to hear the story.
It’s like being a teenager or something, this day. Every time the phone rings – and it’s been ringing a lot because my latest advertising campaign seems to have been a stroke of genius – I gear up to hear the story, find out why I’m staying in Saratoga again this weekend after all.
Sometimes the cell phone rings, vibrating in my hip pocket and making me jump about 25 feet into the air.
But it’s all still, at 5 p.m., a perplexing mystery.
Guess this will teach me to make vacation plans with strangers, huh?
But you gotta admit, it would have been a great adventure, and as it is it makes a pretty good little story.
Bewildering, bewildering.
Hey, at least I found some words...
MY LIFE...
...Is going to make a magnificent surrealist novel someday. Someday. Right now, I just don't have the words.
Men. What is it with you guys? You're all insane. You hear me? INSANE.
But you're also really nice to have around, so what is there to be done about it all?
I just don't have the words.
Maybe this splendid, splendid, warm bread, freshly baked by my Enabling Assistant (not her real name) will help me find them.
Mmm... bread good.
Uh, give me a while.
...Is going to make a magnificent surrealist novel someday. Someday. Right now, I just don't have the words.
Men. What is it with you guys? You're all insane. You hear me? INSANE.
But you're also really nice to have around, so what is there to be done about it all?
I just don't have the words.
Maybe this splendid, splendid, warm bread, freshly baked by my Enabling Assistant (not her real name) will help me find them.
Mmm... bread good.
Uh, give me a while.
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS...
It's just shy of 9:30 p.m. as I type this (though you'll not see it for at least 12 hours; Kate's Landing has no land line, so I cannot post, I can only type) and the sky is a battleground all around and above me, alternately illuminated so brightly I could read a book by its glare and glow, and sunken in darkness that seems to coat even the brightness of the street lights whose glare causes such complaint among our town's would-be stargazers.
There is lightning flashing like the sky around a sinister house in a grade B horror flick, one after the other, sometimes simultaneous, huge and sky-rending, fractally jagged like cracks in pottery, splitting the sky into shards that look ready to fly into each other, into us. Will they hurt when they hit us, those shards? Will they make a noise? What kind of damage can pieces of sky do?
And they're all over the sky, these explosions, these fireworks that were missing during that dud of a meteor shower a few weeks ago. They chase each other from quadrant to quadrant, siginalling frantically from one part of town to another. If the British are coming, they're coming by every known form of transportation, land, sea, flying carpet, spaceship, transporter beam, even the goddam Enterprise itself.
The sky has been invaded by giant fireflies and it's their very last chance to find mates before the freaking apocalypse.
It's strangely noiseless, or nearly so. This lightning looks like it's going on right on top of us, but the sounds are so late in coming (and so faint when they do come) that one can't tell which boom went with which flash... so one never knows at what point one's dog, walking cautiously alongside one in fear where usually she bounds along, pulling at the leash in hopes of locating a skunk to chase, is going to completely lose it and try to hide and cry between one's legs.
For yes, the Collie of Folly and I got caught out in this storm that is no storm. The sky is tearing itself apart, and the wind wants to rip the trees right out of the ground, but there's not a drop of moisture falling, it's all concentrated in the thick, towering clouds that glow periwinkle when another flare goes off. We were walking home from fiddling around at my absent parents' house (whenever the parents are out of town, I have to head up there and peek at the sports channels to see if maybe, just maybe, there's a soccer game on) when the air really got violent.
My dog made a beeline for my closet and buried herself in the overflow from the laundry hamper the second we entered the cabin at Kate's Landing. I had to dig her out from under it all just to disconnect her leash – and she's not budging. She's entrenched like a tick in flesh in there and won't come out for a dog biscuit, a hot dog, or anything. Guess I'll see her in the morning.
What finally did it for her kind of wigged me out as well, I think. Just as we crossed the bridge over the North Platte, the wind really whipped up, to such a frenzy that it was forcing the river to reverse its natural course and flow south. How it was I was seeing whitecaps in a streamflow that can barely float a duck's toy boat I am at a loss to explain except to say the wind wanted it that way, by god, and it was going to make whitecaps.
And still the lightning flashes on. I expect a power failure or something any minute (not to malign our local electric power cooperative, which as those things go is pretty much top of the heap as far as I'm concerned) and am smugly pleased that for once the lithium ion battery on my good old iBook is fully charged, that my alarm clock is also completely battery powered, as is my coffeemaker.
(God lord, I am turning into the Unabomber)
Actually, this storm is getting pretty eerie. When I wake tomorrow with no power (really, this storm just demands a power outage; it might be the thing's entire raison to cause one), will there also be a sinister carnival mysteriously arrived by rail in the night (the railroad runs right to the sawmill, which is just a block away; I'll feel the carnival train's passage disturbing my sleep and causing me nightmares) set up on the football field? Will Cooger and Dark be stalking the town with the Dust Witch in tow, looking for new victims?
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Oh yeah, just what we needed.
It's just shy of 9:30 p.m. as I type this (though you'll not see it for at least 12 hours; Kate's Landing has no land line, so I cannot post, I can only type) and the sky is a battleground all around and above me, alternately illuminated so brightly I could read a book by its glare and glow, and sunken in darkness that seems to coat even the brightness of the street lights whose glare causes such complaint among our town's would-be stargazers.
There is lightning flashing like the sky around a sinister house in a grade B horror flick, one after the other, sometimes simultaneous, huge and sky-rending, fractally jagged like cracks in pottery, splitting the sky into shards that look ready to fly into each other, into us. Will they hurt when they hit us, those shards? Will they make a noise? What kind of damage can pieces of sky do?
And they're all over the sky, these explosions, these fireworks that were missing during that dud of a meteor shower a few weeks ago. They chase each other from quadrant to quadrant, siginalling frantically from one part of town to another. If the British are coming, they're coming by every known form of transportation, land, sea, flying carpet, spaceship, transporter beam, even the goddam Enterprise itself.
The sky has been invaded by giant fireflies and it's their very last chance to find mates before the freaking apocalypse.
It's strangely noiseless, or nearly so. This lightning looks like it's going on right on top of us, but the sounds are so late in coming (and so faint when they do come) that one can't tell which boom went with which flash... so one never knows at what point one's dog, walking cautiously alongside one in fear where usually she bounds along, pulling at the leash in hopes of locating a skunk to chase, is going to completely lose it and try to hide and cry between one's legs.
For yes, the Collie of Folly and I got caught out in this storm that is no storm. The sky is tearing itself apart, and the wind wants to rip the trees right out of the ground, but there's not a drop of moisture falling, it's all concentrated in the thick, towering clouds that glow periwinkle when another flare goes off. We were walking home from fiddling around at my absent parents' house (whenever the parents are out of town, I have to head up there and peek at the sports channels to see if maybe, just maybe, there's a soccer game on) when the air really got violent.
My dog made a beeline for my closet and buried herself in the overflow from the laundry hamper the second we entered the cabin at Kate's Landing. I had to dig her out from under it all just to disconnect her leash – and she's not budging. She's entrenched like a tick in flesh in there and won't come out for a dog biscuit, a hot dog, or anything. Guess I'll see her in the morning.
What finally did it for her kind of wigged me out as well, I think. Just as we crossed the bridge over the North Platte, the wind really whipped up, to such a frenzy that it was forcing the river to reverse its natural course and flow south. How it was I was seeing whitecaps in a streamflow that can barely float a duck's toy boat I am at a loss to explain except to say the wind wanted it that way, by god, and it was going to make whitecaps.
And still the lightning flashes on. I expect a power failure or something any minute (not to malign our local electric power cooperative, which as those things go is pretty much top of the heap as far as I'm concerned) and am smugly pleased that for once the lithium ion battery on my good old iBook is fully charged, that my alarm clock is also completely battery powered, as is my coffeemaker.
(God lord, I am turning into the Unabomber)
Actually, this storm is getting pretty eerie. When I wake tomorrow with no power (really, this storm just demands a power outage; it might be the thing's entire raison to cause one), will there also be a sinister carnival mysteriously arrived by rail in the night (the railroad runs right to the sawmill, which is just a block away; I'll feel the carnival train's passage disturbing my sleep and causing me nightmares) set up on the football field? Will Cooger and Dark be stalking the town with the Dust Witch in tow, looking for new victims?
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Oh yeah, just what we needed.
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A BUSINESS MEETING!
Agenda items: Economic development efforts in Carbon County, town hall politics, the gubernatorial race and its potential effect on this valley, the literary and other merits of Samuel Western’s Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming’s Search for Its Soul (about which more anon - since it apparently takes a while to ship. Until then you can read this excellent article Western published on the same general subject in 1999), the hard truth about the fantasy of Wyoming as a land of rugged, independent individualists when its really the most foolish flower of welfare statism, and my role in planning, fixing, and implementing all of this.
Participants: Me, and a specialist in ranch preservation and other high level business and finance issues, who is currently one of the powers behind the push to create a small and high quality ski resort near Encampment, Wyo.
Sounds a bit grim and heavy for an early morning meeting, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t, not only because said specialist/guru is a cherubically cheerful and fabulously well read and thoughtful person who is rapidly becoming something of a hero to me, but also because of the
Setting: A trail winding through Section 36, formerly a state school section, now the future site of the aforementioned Grand Encampment Mountain Resort!
This was, in other words, an ambulatory meeting. Very ambulatory. To give you some idea: the Collie of Folly, who is normally a basket case of pent up energy and excitement by 4:30 p.m. each day, is still calmly napping under my desk, somnolent in a sleep so deep she’s not even having one of her amusing pelican-chasing dreams. This is one tired dog – and no wonder.
My guru/drinking buddy/fellow effective dreamer is a hiking FOOL, folks.
More business meetings should happen this way. We live in Wyoming. What the hell are we doing sealing ourselves up in conference rooms gussied up to look just like conference rooms in the tremendous glass and steel towers of the big business districts in huge, silly cities like Denver, LA, New York, etc? Especially now that things like cell phones with wireless web access exist, making pretty much any information we might conceivably need pretty easy to access (miraculously, I had a cell signal even at the top of the mountain)? Why pretend we’re just like businessmen everywhere else, when we can trek and talk and get just as much done as they do – all in sight of our beautiful, beautiful landscapes?
So even when truly disheartening subjects came up, subjects like the hilarious irony of listening to people fussing and fussing over the attractiveness and up-to-dateness of the playground equipment in the parks in a town that has next to no children in it (almost as hilarious as that of gubernatorial and other candidates thundering on about the need to improve educational opportunities for those same all-but-nonexistent children... so that someday they, too, can leave Wyoming and go somewhere it’s actually possible to make a living, one must presume) (but hey, at least the primaries are over, and we’re down to just two would-be governors, at least one of whom [I’ll leave it to you to guess which] has seen the irony and is giving the matter appropriate attention) – even when we turned, too, to matters of truly grave import like the fate of Saratoga if a buyer is not found for the sawmill Louisiana Pacific Corporation is still convinced it can sell off as part and parcel of its entire lumber division, it was impossible to succumb to gloom or bitterness or cynicism, impossible because of the glorious views opening up to us at every bend and because of the entertaining antics of the Collie of Folly (seeking out absolutely every opportunity to get wet in the tiny little – but still substantially flowing; as we discovered today at one flume, Willow Creek is running at sufficient CFS to meet the town of Saratoga’s average water consumption – creeks all over the section) and because of the very somatic experience of the strides, the breathing, the sweat, different surfaces, different grades, lactic acid in the legs, autumn allergens in the nose, getting used to the “rest step” (new to me, though I’ve been hiking all of my life; my guru used it in his record ascent of Mt. McKinley many years ago, and still swears by it and I can see indeed its metabolic benefits but boy does it feel weird), and bodily gratitude for the many miles ridden on the bike through and around town this year that left me very well prepared for some serious hiking even though this (and how sad is this?) is only my second hiking trip this year!!!
Nothing happened this morning to lighten the load as I snapped photo after photo from the northwest corner/top of Section 36, but in such circumstances carrying it felt like no problem at all.
Best of all, on THIS hiking trip, I didn’t have to report any new forest fires!
(My only other hiking trip this summer, with the Minister of Fun and the Beautiful Cop [not their real names], was highlighted by our having discovered and reported the Hinman Fire in Colorado when it originally flared up. Of course, when we called it in it looked to us like it was burning in Commissary Park, which made it feel a lot more painfully urgent to us when we found ourselves desperately arguing with a dispatcher over whether or not what we were seeing was just some drifting smoke from the Bear Mountain Fire. Obviously a woman 40 miles away locked up in a windowless room would know better than we did what we were seeing. Obviously.)
Agenda items: Economic development efforts in Carbon County, town hall politics, the gubernatorial race and its potential effect on this valley, the literary and other merits of Samuel Western’s Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming’s Search for Its Soul (about which more anon - since it apparently takes a while to ship. Until then you can read this excellent article Western published on the same general subject in 1999), the hard truth about the fantasy of Wyoming as a land of rugged, independent individualists when its really the most foolish flower of welfare statism, and my role in planning, fixing, and implementing all of this.
Participants: Me, and a specialist in ranch preservation and other high level business and finance issues, who is currently one of the powers behind the push to create a small and high quality ski resort near Encampment, Wyo.
Sounds a bit grim and heavy for an early morning meeting, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t, not only because said specialist/guru is a cherubically cheerful and fabulously well read and thoughtful person who is rapidly becoming something of a hero to me, but also because of the
Setting: A trail winding through Section 36, formerly a state school section, now the future site of the aforementioned Grand Encampment Mountain Resort!
This was, in other words, an ambulatory meeting. Very ambulatory. To give you some idea: the Collie of Folly, who is normally a basket case of pent up energy and excitement by 4:30 p.m. each day, is still calmly napping under my desk, somnolent in a sleep so deep she’s not even having one of her amusing pelican-chasing dreams. This is one tired dog – and no wonder.
My guru/drinking buddy/fellow effective dreamer is a hiking FOOL, folks.
More business meetings should happen this way. We live in Wyoming. What the hell are we doing sealing ourselves up in conference rooms gussied up to look just like conference rooms in the tremendous glass and steel towers of the big business districts in huge, silly cities like Denver, LA, New York, etc? Especially now that things like cell phones with wireless web access exist, making pretty much any information we might conceivably need pretty easy to access (miraculously, I had a cell signal even at the top of the mountain)? Why pretend we’re just like businessmen everywhere else, when we can trek and talk and get just as much done as they do – all in sight of our beautiful, beautiful landscapes?
So even when truly disheartening subjects came up, subjects like the hilarious irony of listening to people fussing and fussing over the attractiveness and up-to-dateness of the playground equipment in the parks in a town that has next to no children in it (almost as hilarious as that of gubernatorial and other candidates thundering on about the need to improve educational opportunities for those same all-but-nonexistent children... so that someday they, too, can leave Wyoming and go somewhere it’s actually possible to make a living, one must presume) (but hey, at least the primaries are over, and we’re down to just two would-be governors, at least one of whom [I’ll leave it to you to guess which] has seen the irony and is giving the matter appropriate attention) – even when we turned, too, to matters of truly grave import like the fate of Saratoga if a buyer is not found for the sawmill Louisiana Pacific Corporation is still convinced it can sell off as part and parcel of its entire lumber division, it was impossible to succumb to gloom or bitterness or cynicism, impossible because of the glorious views opening up to us at every bend and because of the entertaining antics of the Collie of Folly (seeking out absolutely every opportunity to get wet in the tiny little – but still substantially flowing; as we discovered today at one flume, Willow Creek is running at sufficient CFS to meet the town of Saratoga’s average water consumption – creeks all over the section) and because of the very somatic experience of the strides, the breathing, the sweat, different surfaces, different grades, lactic acid in the legs, autumn allergens in the nose, getting used to the “rest step” (new to me, though I’ve been hiking all of my life; my guru used it in his record ascent of Mt. McKinley many years ago, and still swears by it and I can see indeed its metabolic benefits but boy does it feel weird), and bodily gratitude for the many miles ridden on the bike through and around town this year that left me very well prepared for some serious hiking even though this (and how sad is this?) is only my second hiking trip this year!!!
Nothing happened this morning to lighten the load as I snapped photo after photo from the northwest corner/top of Section 36, but in such circumstances carrying it felt like no problem at all.
Best of all, on THIS hiking trip, I didn’t have to report any new forest fires!
(My only other hiking trip this summer, with the Minister of Fun and the Beautiful Cop [not their real names], was highlighted by our having discovered and reported the Hinman Fire in Colorado when it originally flared up. Of course, when we called it in it looked to us like it was burning in Commissary Park, which made it feel a lot more painfully urgent to us when we found ourselves desperately arguing with a dispatcher over whether or not what we were seeing was just some drifting smoke from the Bear Mountain Fire. Obviously a woman 40 miles away locked up in a windowless room would know better than we did what we were seeing. Obviously.)
Monday, August 26, 2002
APOLOGIES...
But today I must be brief. I've been spending all day working on The Official Steinley Cup Web Page and I can't stand one more minute of staring at a computer.
Plus, I just got invited to go on an early morning hike in the Sierra Madres with the Green Mountain Boys (not their real names) and Molly, the Collie of Folly, is having digestive issues originating from some roadkill I caught her trying to eat this morning. She's very dainty about these issues, as she is about all things (including her dining habits, if not her choice of menu items) so it's amusing enough to warrant further discussion, but that's going to have to be at a later date.
Off to give the pooch and my overstrained eyes some relief!
But today I must be brief. I've been spending all day working on The Official Steinley Cup Web Page and I can't stand one more minute of staring at a computer.
Plus, I just got invited to go on an early morning hike in the Sierra Madres with the Green Mountain Boys (not their real names) and Molly, the Collie of Folly, is having digestive issues originating from some roadkill I caught her trying to eat this morning. She's very dainty about these issues, as she is about all things (including her dining habits, if not her choice of menu items) so it's amusing enough to warrant further discussion, but that's going to have to be at a later date.
Off to give the pooch and my overstrained eyes some relief!
Sunday, August 25, 2002
BEGINNINGS
Today I did something I haven’t done in years if you don’t count things like community choir
performances or major holidays: I went to church.
I’d been thinking about returning to the church in which I grew up ever since I came back to
Saratoga, but something in me always held back. Part of it might have been pride; very few of my
actual peers (by which I mean 30-something semi-hipsters with whom I went to college, hang out
now on my trips to Chicago, correspond via e-mail) have made any kind of organized religion part
of their lives - for many reasons which I still share, including dislike of authority and authoritarian
institutions, dislike of anything that smacks of the herd mentality, disdain for rules and standards
of conduct that aren’t convenient to keep, not to mention the whole crutch/opiate of the masses
doctrine that seemed a lot more realistic and reasonable to us when we were teenagers who
weren’t in a mood to believe anything we were told.
I didn’t give up on religion completely when I hit college, but I came pretty close. I went to some
Quaker meetings in upstate New York, and liked the structure (or lack thereof), the kinship they
had to a really good seminar or group discussion. They had a lot in common with the better kind
of class at Bard, these meetings: there was silence and thought and opinions expressed carefully
and with great consideration, and those who listened to a speaker listened with a care and
attention that I’m sure many a professor would wish for. Something was missing, though, so I
drifted off into secular life, another jaded, educated doubter, like so many others. I eyed devout
people with suspicion and a little bit of a sneer, found them either superstitious or smug or just
plain silly.
I still kind of do, but as I said in the first paragraph of this essay, I’ve been considering a return to
church life since I moved back to Saratoga three years ago. I’ve missed the sense of community
within a community that I enjoyed under rather unusual circumstances growing up here, and while
I think what I had is gone forever (it was a product of a deep friendship among the Presbyterian,
Episcopal and Catholic clergymen who manned the pulpits in the mid to late 1970s when I was
first learning to think about things greater than myself. We celebrated holidays together, the three
congregations; I remember Maundy Thursdays and Christmas pageants over at the Catholic
church, I remember the Presbyterian sanctuary crammed with people come to hear Mike Cole talk
and his wife sing - sort of hippie Presbyterians and people whom I still miss deeply - and how
much I adored ex-footballer [in the European sense; I just recently learned this man was once on
the Irish national team in World Cup soccer!] Father Sheridan, who I know now is at the parish
over in Rock Springs. Look out, Tommy; I’m old enough to gulp some of your whiskey!) there’s
still something there, as I was reminded today.
The occasion was something special, and I think unique to the Presbyterian church in its
methodology: the election of a new pastor. And the candidate was really something else! I had
met her (yes, her!) in passing earlier in the week, and many with whom I met her encouraged me
to come and check her out on Sunday, since they knew I’d kind of been thinking about coming
back into the fold as such anyway.
So I said I would. And I did!
I’m still sorting it all out at this point, some eight hours later. Yes, the woman we elected is
remarkable, as one of my friends observed, to listen to her is to definitely feel one has been to
church, but it’s not just that. There were points today when I cried. Usually while singing. And I
wasn’t prepared for that.
Oh, not tears of repentance, though sure ‘nuff I’m a sinner like everybody who’s at all honest with
him or herself knows himself to be. No, it was something about singing with everybody in that
particular congregational way - maybe six or seven people in the crew really knowing the tune and
the rest of us sight reading like mad, or else listening and guessing, or else just sort of chanting
like plainsong, rendering most hymns a cheerful, vaguely musical din - and realizing that while the
mantles I’ve assumed are heavy (and getting heavier for the conflict and the disappointment that
inevitably come with them) and while I’m the one to whom they’ve been given in name, I’ve
never been required to carry them alone. And no, I’m not talking about God - I still don’t believe
in that God they told me about in Sunday school or that character that appears in the canonical
bible, the Gnostic gospels, the Apocryphal Old and New Testaments, the Zohar or any of the rest
of that vast shelf of religious literature I’ve been sifting through since high school. Sorry, that’s
just going to be a really, really hard sell.
But what is there in that church on Sundays is people, people I can’t remember ever having
actually met, I’ve known them for so long (we’re talking people who have memories of me before
I could read, which is more than I have), and people who came to call this valley home while I
was still off playing city girl in Boston and New York and who have since become my friends
through trips to the opera, festival committees, sports spectatorship and politics (yeah, sometimes
that happens). They’re people who come together once a week to spend an hour or two outside
their own heads, their own concerns, people who, for a little while at least, accept how little
control we each of us individually has over what happens to us, and how that is still OK... people
who can bring themselves to rejoice even amidst tragedy and fear... people who are, like me,
actively hoping and planning for the future.
I need that.
As for the new pastor, I had a feeling about her already, but she confirmed it today. She preached
well and with passion and humor and all the qualities I would want in such a person, but what
confirmed it for me was when, during the congregational meeting after the service, when we were
to debate and vote, she told us very candidly of something that not many people (in my experience
at least) will talk about so openly, especially to strangers: a vision. She had had a vision of a map,
the center of which denoted Saratoga, when she was pondering whether or not she was being
called away from her ministry in Australia.
You see, what finally set me on my way from Boston back to Wyoming was also a vision. I woke
up one night from a dream of Lake Marie and I was crying. I was crying because I missed that
lake and all that goes with it, and because I knew that nothing was going to feel quite right again
until I returned to it.
And it proved to be true, as hers proved to be true, because she did indeed receive a call today.
Good luck, Reverend!
Today I did something I haven’t done in years if you don’t count things like community choir
performances or major holidays: I went to church.
I’d been thinking about returning to the church in which I grew up ever since I came back to
Saratoga, but something in me always held back. Part of it might have been pride; very few of my
actual peers (by which I mean 30-something semi-hipsters with whom I went to college, hang out
now on my trips to Chicago, correspond via e-mail) have made any kind of organized religion part
of their lives - for many reasons which I still share, including dislike of authority and authoritarian
institutions, dislike of anything that smacks of the herd mentality, disdain for rules and standards
of conduct that aren’t convenient to keep, not to mention the whole crutch/opiate of the masses
doctrine that seemed a lot more realistic and reasonable to us when we were teenagers who
weren’t in a mood to believe anything we were told.
I didn’t give up on religion completely when I hit college, but I came pretty close. I went to some
Quaker meetings in upstate New York, and liked the structure (or lack thereof), the kinship they
had to a really good seminar or group discussion. They had a lot in common with the better kind
of class at Bard, these meetings: there was silence and thought and opinions expressed carefully
and with great consideration, and those who listened to a speaker listened with a care and
attention that I’m sure many a professor would wish for. Something was missing, though, so I
drifted off into secular life, another jaded, educated doubter, like so many others. I eyed devout
people with suspicion and a little bit of a sneer, found them either superstitious or smug or just
plain silly.
I still kind of do, but as I said in the first paragraph of this essay, I’ve been considering a return to
church life since I moved back to Saratoga three years ago. I’ve missed the sense of community
within a community that I enjoyed under rather unusual circumstances growing up here, and while
I think what I had is gone forever (it was a product of a deep friendship among the Presbyterian,
Episcopal and Catholic clergymen who manned the pulpits in the mid to late 1970s when I was
first learning to think about things greater than myself. We celebrated holidays together, the three
congregations; I remember Maundy Thursdays and Christmas pageants over at the Catholic
church, I remember the Presbyterian sanctuary crammed with people come to hear Mike Cole talk
and his wife sing - sort of hippie Presbyterians and people whom I still miss deeply - and how
much I adored ex-footballer [in the European sense; I just recently learned this man was once on
the Irish national team in World Cup soccer!] Father Sheridan, who I know now is at the parish
over in Rock Springs. Look out, Tommy; I’m old enough to gulp some of your whiskey!) there’s
still something there, as I was reminded today.
The occasion was something special, and I think unique to the Presbyterian church in its
methodology: the election of a new pastor. And the candidate was really something else! I had
met her (yes, her!) in passing earlier in the week, and many with whom I met her encouraged me
to come and check her out on Sunday, since they knew I’d kind of been thinking about coming
back into the fold as such anyway.
So I said I would. And I did!
I’m still sorting it all out at this point, some eight hours later. Yes, the woman we elected is
remarkable, as one of my friends observed, to listen to her is to definitely feel one has been to
church, but it’s not just that. There were points today when I cried. Usually while singing. And I
wasn’t prepared for that.
Oh, not tears of repentance, though sure ‘nuff I’m a sinner like everybody who’s at all honest with
him or herself knows himself to be. No, it was something about singing with everybody in that
particular congregational way - maybe six or seven people in the crew really knowing the tune and
the rest of us sight reading like mad, or else listening and guessing, or else just sort of chanting
like plainsong, rendering most hymns a cheerful, vaguely musical din - and realizing that while the
mantles I’ve assumed are heavy (and getting heavier for the conflict and the disappointment that
inevitably come with them) and while I’m the one to whom they’ve been given in name, I’ve
never been required to carry them alone. And no, I’m not talking about God - I still don’t believe
in that God they told me about in Sunday school or that character that appears in the canonical
bible, the Gnostic gospels, the Apocryphal Old and New Testaments, the Zohar or any of the rest
of that vast shelf of religious literature I’ve been sifting through since high school. Sorry, that’s
just going to be a really, really hard sell.
But what is there in that church on Sundays is people, people I can’t remember ever having
actually met, I’ve known them for so long (we’re talking people who have memories of me before
I could read, which is more than I have), and people who came to call this valley home while I
was still off playing city girl in Boston and New York and who have since become my friends
through trips to the opera, festival committees, sports spectatorship and politics (yeah, sometimes
that happens). They’re people who come together once a week to spend an hour or two outside
their own heads, their own concerns, people who, for a little while at least, accept how little
control we each of us individually has over what happens to us, and how that is still OK... people
who can bring themselves to rejoice even amidst tragedy and fear... people who are, like me,
actively hoping and planning for the future.
I need that.
As for the new pastor, I had a feeling about her already, but she confirmed it today. She preached
well and with passion and humor and all the qualities I would want in such a person, but what
confirmed it for me was when, during the congregational meeting after the service, when we were
to debate and vote, she told us very candidly of something that not many people (in my experience
at least) will talk about so openly, especially to strangers: a vision. She had had a vision of a map,
the center of which denoted Saratoga, when she was pondering whether or not she was being
called away from her ministry in Australia.
You see, what finally set me on my way from Boston back to Wyoming was also a vision. I woke
up one night from a dream of Lake Marie and I was crying. I was crying because I missed that
lake and all that goes with it, and because I knew that nothing was going to feel quite right again
until I returned to it.
And it proved to be true, as hers proved to be true, because she did indeed receive a call today.
Good luck, Reverend!
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