Ward No. 6

Back to the Leaderboard

2009-03-21T02:22:00.004-05:00

I was watching Good Will Hunting just now while sitting on the couch, idly going through the latest Sports Illustrated, page by page, skipping the game analyses and stopping for the off-the-beaten-path pieces, when I came to rest on a story about athletes who go broke. This isn't about that, because I haven't read it yet; I set it aside to read later. I actually want to know how someone who makes as much in a week as I'll make in the next six months, assuming I keep my job, can spend enough of his annual salary to end up broke.

So, I've seen the film before and have always said to myself that I enjoyed it and have agreed heartily how good it is when others say they love it. But as I watched, I realized I don't love it. There are a lot of scenes that make me uncomfortable, or are just boring. Psychoanalysis doesn't do it for me, because figuring things out has always been a passion of mine, and I dislike being told, through art, what I should be thinking. At least, I think that's what I don't like about it. It could be Robin Williams, who I hate to see in everything since I grew tired of his one-faced characters, excepting, for the most part, this film, in which he's excellent. Seeing him act so convincingly only reminds me of everything else, and I cringe when I see it.

Maybe that's not it either. Maybe it's because when I watch it, it makes me feel like I'm Will, that I am some kind of genius in a realm that doesn't make sense to anyone, and that I'm terrified of expressing it, except in little snatches which make me appear as if I'm bain dramaged. Don't know if I'm a genius. I do know that I'm dumber than I often say I am, and I'm pretty sure I'm smarter than I'm willing to test. And isn't everybody the same way? I wish folks would just open themselves up once in a while and show us what they're capable of.

The best parts of the film are also the worst for me to watch. It's what the plot (or is it the story? I always get them confused) is all about. It is in the scenes when the four friends are out together, riding in the car talking about sandwiches, standing on a porch sharing a beer and, the most, when after they've been drinking at a bar, they and Will's girlfriend walk outside and are standing there and I can feel it as if I'm there -- it's cool or maybe cold, they're underdressed for the outside but would have been hot inside had they worn more and they've got that warm feeling from the drink and the camaraderie and the sense of the moment that nothing else but alcohol mixed with friendship and a reluctant parting feels like. Right there, I had to turn off the TV, go to the fridge and grab a beer. Not a good beer, but something that would remind me where I was, give me the pleasure of the smell of it and the base taste, without the pleasure of the aftertaste.

I bought these beers on the way to poker one night. I went into Total Wine, which has quite a selection, unfortunately, almost none of it in cans, which I prefer because beers skunk or go stale less easily in cans for some reason -- this is the south where they wouldn't know a beer going bad if it hit them upside the face -- so, after maybe 10 minutes of perusing, I grabbed a six pack of Leaderboard Trophy Lager, made by the Top of the Hill brewery in Chapel Hill, NC, figuring, incorrectly as it turned out, that, because I'd heard of it before, it must be good and, in a moment of second-guessing, thankfully, also picked up a 12-pack of Amstel Light (in cans).

For some reason I told myself I needed to taste something not good, but still beer, to make an adjective where there is none, to force me to comprehend the experience of the film. Because the point it makes is all-too-simple and it isn't made through math or psychoanalysis or the love story or any of that -- the point is told via the best performance an actor can ever give -- give me that is, perhaps he wasn't acting at all. When Ben Affleck, who plays Matt Damon (Will)'s pal Chuckie, sits in front of the car and tells his friend that yeah, he loves to hang out and drink and get into fights and meet girls with him and he always will, he'd also love for Will to show the world who he is, to let them know what he sees in his friend to say, in effect, I think you're something special, so go show them you're special.

If I had anything in all my ramblings about the virtue of selfishness and the power of words and the value of verve -- anything at all to really say, condensed, it would be that. That there are certain people I know who I hope someday will stop looking at life as a series of nights out at the bar, as a series of good books to read, movies to reminisce over, arguments to make, publications to plan. Who will someday walk out of my life forever and show what they're made of. For better or for worse, it doesn't matter.

The movie isn't inspiring. It's torture. As it should be. I need to take my own advice, I suppose.

If you ever come to Chapel Hill, go to Top of the Hill and get one of those beers. Because you can't think about the future when you're too stuck enjoying the present.

On ice

2008-02-27T00:58:00.002-05:00

This blog may not, as of yet, be dead, but I'm going to put it in stasis for the time being so I can blog more about life as a journalist over at o-com.blogspot.com. Basically, it's a glorified title and format change while I continue blogging.

I may come back here eventually. I'm partial to holding onto the name of this blog.

See ya over at the o-com!

dave

House cooling party

2008-01-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

Ok, here's the pix of some of the things we need to sell or give away. There are also books and other miscellaneous. The cooling party was last Saturday, the 26th. People are still welcome to arrange to come by for other items.

A friend at our back deck

2007-11-22T22:51:00.000-05:00

I came down with a sore throat this afternoon, shortly after meeting my sister Nicki and family and a friend for Thanksgiving dinner, which we partook at Ted's Montana Grill over by the Streets of Southpoint mall in Durham. It was quite frustrating; seeing as the last time I got sick was during the last days I had off of work, also. So, as I sipped Coke and watched Chocolat with Beth, she cooked me some leftover macaroni and cheese, because I was hungry and she thought it might help more than just Coke alone.

I ate it at the table, a long, heavy, oak (I believe) table with wooden benches and end chairs. The whole time I was eating, the cat sat about a foot away from my plate, looking nonchalant, but secretly waiting for me to let up my guard enough for a bite. Or maybe she was waiting for a chance to lick the plate. We'd gotten into the habit of letting her do so after meals, which, of course, only makes her that much less responsive next time we say "NO!" in very firm words, rudely pushing her head away from our vittles. She was a bit sick yesterday, and so I told her that she wouldn't be getting any people food today.

In the film, Chocolat, a priest tells a parishioner his dog has no soul. I know that many people believe that, but I don't. At least, as far as I believe in the soul in the first place, I don't believe people have what other creatures do not. I guess I believe in some sort of life spirit, though I'm not sure of any divinity attached to it, in every living thing. Certainly, if there is such a thing as divinity in the animal world, our cat, whom we named Squeak, has something of it.

She first started coming by our back deck late last year, if I remember correctly. She was a stray that a neighbor, our retired town manager, C.L. Gobble, took in. The Gobbles gave Squeak to another neighbor to take care of. Tina lives just on the other side of the spring from us. The spring is usually dry and even when it's not, it's only about a half-foot deep. But, as we live on Tucker Drive, we refer to it as Tucker Run. Tina has one of those yappy dogs, a terrier named Grizzly. She named the cat Bear, to go along with that, and kept her outside because Tina's daughter was allergic to cats. It was a meager existence for "Bear," because she was a kitten and wanted friendship, I imagine. So she took to coming over to our place.

At the time, we didn't know she belonged to anyone. We thought she looked to well taken care of to be so, but she was around at all hours, and seemed so skinny, we weren't sure. It got very cold several times winter, so we began letting her in at night. Also, there was a feral white longhair cat that would come by our house at times and s/he was the terror of our neighborhood. The terror of other cats, I mean. She'd chase Squeak up into trees and pretty much scared the bejezus out of her.

Once we learned Squeak belonged to Tina, we began putting her out at night, of which she seemed so sad about. She'd try to run back in before we shut the door and would often stand out there in the cold watching us through the glass. We wanted to just keep her, thinking we'd do a better job taking care of her, but we figured the gift had already been given. But she kept coming by to visit, which we imagined was the best we could get.

Then, one day she stopped coming. Several days passed and we thought Tina might have finally taken her inside or given her away. Then, as Beth tells it, one night just before bed, she went outside because she thought she saw Fifi, our cat who died last year, sitting at the far end of the yard (a good 100 or so feet away), just a silhouette visible against the streetlight. When Beth went out, the shadow of a cat was gone, but there, at the foot of our back steps was Squeak, all tore up, her back legs not working properly.

We brought her in and I called Tina. Turns out the kitty had been struck by a car two and a half days before and had run off into the brush, presumably, they thought, to die. All that time, she had lain in the woods, but instead of giving up, she dragged herself all the way to our back porch, considerably further than our neighbor's. She chose us, the way we see it, so, with Tina's consent, we chose to take her to the emergency 24 hour vet in North Raleigh, to fix her up if possible. We were to keep her if he could.

He could, and did. She had a broken pelvis and a "degloving" injury, meaning the skin had been ripped from her back foot. Her other back foot was banged up as well. The doc put metal staple-stitches in where there was still fur to fix the foot, and gave us some antibiotics and instructions for her care. She got better eventually, and learned to properly use the litter box, eventually, and became a stronger, healthier, and maybe crazier cat that we now call our own.

The white terror disappeared; in probably a tragic fashion. She was a beautiful creature. And we kept Squeak inside for a very, very long time, but we do let her roam now, so long as she comes in at night and when we're away. She's a big cat now, her belly growing in size as mine has done, to the point where we both maybe ought to do something about it. It's hard now to see her as the little kitten that once appeared at our back deck begging for companionship.

Except, she never got her proper cat voice. She might purr like a tomcat, but her meow is still stuck in squeak.

Lest auld acquaintance be forgot (Part III)

2007-07-06T21:41:00.000-05:00

The blog is a good example of how easy it is to keep in touch other than phoning or writing. My sister Gabriella does so through a Flickr page; my sister Nicki’s partner Laura does so through MySpace. My pals at work (I work in a small room with three other reporters, all younger) all have Facebook pages and keep tabs with each other that way. Because they’ve bugged me so much about it, I now have a page too, but haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll do with it. I had a MySpace page, but having to have (company founder) “Tom” as a friend irked me, even if he was there to help, as did the number of solicitations you get from people wanting to be your “friend” just long enough to sell you something. Still it’s annoying that you can’t contact other people on their MySpace pages unless you’re a member. My cousin Dave has a content-heavy page, and I was tempted to leave a comment, but didn’t feel like signing in.

Which brings me, in the most god awfully-long roundabout way possible, to the point of this entire post. I was working late one night, not too long ago, when a song came on by the band The Cure and the name of the girl who introduced me to the band, M.J. Slazak, popped into my head.

M.J. was on the staff of the yearbook with me in college. We weren’t really friends, but had nothing against each other either. She was a bit punk, or Goth, or whatever they called it then, always wearing black and such, but she struck me as a kind of conservative in nature as well. I seem to recall her smiling a lot.

So, this song comes on and I think, “Whatever happened to M.J.?” And so I did a Google search or two and her name popped up, responding to something on someone else’s blog. I dropped her a note in response, bookmarked the page and put it out of my mind.

The other day I was cleaning up my browser links at work and ran across “The stream behind the house.” It tingled in my brain that I must have bookmarked it for some reason, but I could remember why, so I clicked on it. It took me to that same post of mine, but below it was one from M.J. herself, reacting in shock and surprise to my out-of-the-blue note.

I responded with a few words and reacted to her comment that she’d have to check out my blog by figuring I’d better get back on the blog again and make some posts. Hence, this very, very, very long post which, on advice from crazyjohn, I’ve broken up over several days).

I guess if I’m to try to keep in touch with long lost friends and acquaintances, I’m going to have to make myself more Internet-visible. And a call to George and Jeff wouldn’t hurt either.

Lest auld acquaintance be forgot (Part II)

2007-07-05T17:25:00.000-05:00

My best friends, growing up, Jeremy Riga, and George and Jeff Burnett, I almost never get up with. I can’t go into cool stories about growing up with them -- it would fill a book. They probably feel like I abandoned them. For me, the problem is either (1) I never feel like I have anything new to report, and as likely, (2) I feel like I haven’t succeeded yet. I have a successful marriage, which isn’t the easiest thing, I suppose, but I’ve been struggling to get by (financially) for some time. My problem has always been one of procrastination. Instead of going out and making my fortune, I always seem to think a magic caravan is just going to appear such as in that tale in the Arabian Nights (I think). On that note, I do buy the occasional lottery ticket. I know my chances of striking it rich aren’t too good that way, but as the old joke goes, chances improve if I buy a ticket.

Moving to North Carolina really severed my relationships. To follow it up, I took a job as a reporter. You meet a lot of interesting people in that job, but make few friends. The friends I have here I met working at non journalism related jobs. But the advent of mainstream e-mail and, of course, the Internet has made it so easy to not only keep in touch with people who live far off and who’ve drifted away, but it’s made it possible for you to find them again, should you care to do so.

I occasionally do.

I’d like to keep tabs with a guy named crazyjohn, which was his blog handle while he wrote one. He did it for exactly a year, and had a good number of adherents. We all met at an end-of-blog party at his basement apartment in Chapel Hill. The assortment of people was so odd -- not the people, most were pretty down to earth -- because their only connection was they were either friends of this guy or read his blog (and lived near enough to stop by). Crazyjohn started the blog to meet an end -- he is heading off to graduate school soon to learn to be a better writer and he wanted to get in practice.

That gave me the idea for my blog, to get back into what I call personal writing, that is, non corporate or journalism writing. I’ve been keeping in touch with the occasional friend or family member with the blog, better so than e-mail. But with all the writing I do at the paper, I don’t blog so much anymore, sort of defeating the purpose.

Of course, I could easily do it more, if only I could keep the length down to a few paragraphs or even sentences, but that is difficult -- it’s just not my style. Maybe I can make it my style. Obviously, this isn’t a good start.

Lest auld acquaintance be forgot…

2007-07-04T22:34:00.000-05:00

Part I
(The post is too long, so I've broken it up into three parts, which I'll post over the next couple days)

I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to keep up with old friends and acquaintances.

I remember this group of pals I had in fifth and sixth grade at City Honors Middle School. The middle and high school were actually one building, but the big kids took classes on the 2nd and 3rd floors while the young kids were consigned mostly to the 1st floor. In the basement were the lockers and cafeteria and I recall sitting at a table with three guys, Martin Krebs, a friendly kid with a wide grin; Nick Leuer, a red haired kid with a peaked nose, who always had that nose in a book during lunch; and this large black kid named Eddie, I think, though I don’t remember his last name.

That’s because he got kicked out of school, he said, for riding up and down the elevator. The elevator was one of those old-fashioned things, built for room for just one or two people, with a cage, if I remember correctly. It went all the way up to the attic, which I never saw and was off limits. The old hulking building had been used as several types of schools, and even had once had a pool between the 3rd and 4th floors, over the auditorium, if you can believe it, which was filled in after a girl drowned. That was the legend anyways.

So the elevator was off limits, but Eddie wasn’t one to do what people said, unless what they said generated some kind of fuss. That’s why we liked him, of course. He was strong and when we discovered he could smash an apple with his fist, it was apple smashing time thereafter. One he smacked on the edge and it took off in an arc and dropped straight down in Nick’s cup of chili. Once, we said, “Do this one, Eddie!”, but he was sitting at the end of the table by the wall and when his fist came down on that apple, there was suddenly applesauce all over the wall. And a teacher standing nearby.

So, one way or another, Eddie got himself kicked out of school, and now he’s only a cool memory in my mind. Nick and I went on to graduate from City Honors High School, meaning we just never left -- same building and all. It’s an acclaimed school, but I don’t know if that’s happened since I left, meaning I’d never get in if I was a kid now, or if it was that good back then. I’m no dummy, but I never did apply myself, but there was no test or waiting list for the high school if you had graduated the middle school.

Martin left too, I can’t remember why exactly, except I know he moved to a little town called Springfield (or was it Springville?), about 30 minutes south of Buffalo. I must have had his address, and years later I found it and sent him a post card and we got together once or twice to catch up. He’d become a photographer for the local newspaper and always kept an ear open for sounds of a fire engine or ambulance siren, which he’d follow to its location (like I said, it was a small town). He said once he followed it all the way back to his own street, to find a car had driven into his family’s front porch.

It’s been awhile since I tried to get up with him again. The same goes for other old friends such as Chris "Juice" Jerzewski, whom I used to hang out with in late high school. He built model rockets and we’d go to the park to launch them, some never to return to the earth again -- that we could find anyways. He went to Case Western, which is an army school, or something. It’s been a long time since I tried to call him. Nick Leuer I have no idea what happened to. If I still lived in Buffalo, I’d probably run into him or mutual friends every once in a while -- the town has that big-little city type of atmosphere, where it’s easy to bump into old friends, acquaintances (and enemies). According to Google, there’s a Nicholas Leuer who was to marry a Jill Coppola (a good Italian name) in May 2004. I don’t recognize the church name, but then again, there’s like 600 churches in the Buffalo area.

The back 40

2007-05-13T16:11:00.000-05:00

The “back 40” as we like to call the back lot, is entirely overgrown with clover and is in desperate need of mowing. There is clover elsewhere on the yard, but there it’s so thick and strong that the scent of it fills one’s head and makes one want to lie down on it like a bed and sleep. Of course, then you’d wake up crawling all over with creatures of the tick, chigger and mosquito variety; but it would be dreamingly pleasant for a few moments.

The clover and grass and weeds that look grass-like enough to pass for our lawn is so tall from the last two weeks’ rain, I’m not entirely certain the mower will go over it all without choking. Those blades need to be sharpened, for starters, and then there’s the fact we just got rid of our heavy grass and weed trimmer, figuring the yard was too small for it and it too large for our needs. Jay Lamm, a cartoonist who works with Beth needed something of the sort, and so he traded it for a garden variety weed whacker, but it’s electric and so won’t reach out that far regardless. It’ll do just fine around front and the immediate back yard, however.

Anyways, smelling the clover and feeling the cool breeze blowing when it was just humid and almost 90 degrees yesterday was very pleasant, as was getting up at noon and settling down on the couch with the doors open wide to read a book. The Two Towers was on TV last night and so of course I watched it, or at least, I watched the portions of it that don’t mar the book too terribly, of which there are many.

(Of course a book must be changed to make it into a movie, I’ve always understood that. But one needn’t wreak havoc on the characters that way -- when you put aside all the dragons and goblins and magic and fighting, it was the depth and the stolidity of the characters what made it so worthwhile. There were so many parts of those films where I felt I was watching a cartoon; Spiderman had much more depth and strength in its secondary characters than Lord of the Rings ended up with.)

So early this afternoon, I sat on the couch (with the kitty, of whom I shall tell you about in another blog) dozing on the sofa chair, feeling and smelling the breeze, listing to the chatter of squirrels and mockingbirds and reading again, as I have read many times before, about the beautiful country of The Shire, and of the adventures that visit several of its inhabitants and their friends.

Beth and I need to go shopping for groceries in a few minutes. As we always go out of town (because the stores here don’t have half the goods we purchase) into Wake Forest, which is about a half hour form here, the trip always takes several hours, especially if we stop to get something to eat first. So the lawn will get to grow a few more inches until Wednesday, when we both have some time off, and perhaps a few inches more if it is raining that day. Since I am working late on Friday and some on Saturday, it would be rough to have to give the yard a full other week to grow -- and I might have to get out a scythe to cut it or call Jay back -- here’s to wishing for no rain and a cool afternoon on Wednesday!

Gone digital

2007-04-10T20:24:00.000-05:00

Some pix shot with the D70 (and some with a cheaper Nikon digital) I use at work.

A problem in journalism

2007-04-09T01:16:00.000-05:00

The problem with being a journalist is one is perpetually behind. Now, when I work on any number of articles over five, I get literally behind and am forced to do the 12-hour-day (or two) early in the week to catch up. Instead of writing what I have during the latter portion of the week, I use that time to make more phone calls and inquires so that I will eventually be able to produce more content, i.e. articles.

Last week was a record on the low end -- I only had four articles in the paper, plus an editorial and photo page. Some things I bumped over to this week, making this week more hectic (by week I mean the news cycle week of our paper. Our week runs from Wednesday afternoon to Wednesday morning. Just when I need the two day weekend break the most, my new week begins).

But that’s not really what I meant. I mean one is never able to get to all of the things one would hope to be able to do to cover a community properly. Even though I’ve only been at the paper for a little over three months, I already have faced numerous challenges I’d love to sink my teeth into but did not have the time, resources, or in an occasional case, know-how, to do them.

I’d like to write it off to my own procrastination or slow writing style, but I can’t. For one thing, Beth said she felt this same thing when she was working as a newspaper reporter and editor.

You just never have the time to pursue all the things you want to pursue -- all the things you think you ought to pursue -- and so they perch there on the back of your brain, nagging at you for the eternity you remain employed at any particular edifice.

Some years back I interviewed the descendent of a Franklin County family who ran a mill that was considered historic, at least locally. She gave me some generic photos and sat down and spoke to me about the mill. The conversation was long, but she said nothing of interest. There are people who do that, who reveal all the mundane details of a person or place seemingly unaware (or unwilling) they are leaving out all the elements of a good tale. I never wrote that story and it still nags at me, like seven years later. Was she really that boring? Or did I just lack the ability to draw the good stuff out of her? I suppose I’ll never know.

So that’s a good example. Though in most cases, you don’t even get that far. You don’t even get the initial interview, or background research done, because you need to take a half day or day to do some research, which means you’d have to cut your story list down by five. That’s kind of what happened to me last week -- I wrote a feature based on an old man who walked into the office with three old newspapers. When I pointed to things featured in the papers (one of them was local and so featured half-century-old farming methods and industries) he would say: “I used to farm like that, pulling a plow behind two mules.”

So, after speaking to him for a bit, I sent him on his way. That weekend, I went over the three papers nearly word for word and extracted all the cool bits and pieces I thought would make an interesting story -- things that had some local or state reference, or that the old man had referenced. It took me hours to go through it all, and then to type it up. I re-interviewed the guy (his speaking style was very difficult to comprehend) and photographed him in his yard and put it all together for the paper. It came out pretty nice. Not beautiful, but cool.

I’ve got a few more of those historically-natured type of pieces on the back burner and several are getting pretty singed.

Eren makes me feel a little better. She’s a gung-ho J-school grad who is still in her first year working as a reporter. She works so fast she puts all of us to shame. She pumps out copious amounts of copy, on deadline, but complains of the same emotional/mental burnout I’ve always felt since my first year as a reporter. So, even when the day is done and she’s got time to burn, she’s too tired to think.

I feel better knowing that even someone who has time to spare runs out of steam at the end of the day. Meaning that I really shouldn’t fret too much over not getting to that story or not getting to that bit of personal writing I’d like to be doing every day or so.

Hence this late night entry, for a blog that is getting more and more stale. It doesn’t even matter if anyone reads it. I feel a tiny smidgen of relief just knowing I was able to get in that one extracurricular hour of writing. Even if it kills me tomorrow.

I was going to kill the blog, since I don't seem to have the time or the mental effort to get it these days. But I haven't done so, because I really enjoy my writing as of late and don't want to releagte my one talent solely to the field of work.

I just have this feeling, perched atop my mind like those hard-to-get-to story vultures, that if I kill my blog it'll be the death of me.

A new beginning

2007-02-28T00:43:00.000-05:00

So, I've purchased myself a used scanner (Yea Craigslist!) and fully intend on showing off some of my better photos. This one was done with the software that came with the scanner -- I need to configure it to work with Photoshop so I can adjust the photos' levels and colors and all that.

This first test photo was not posed. I shot the candid at Delaware Park for Joan Good around 1990 for a project she was working on about children for her graduate teaching degree.

Look for more good photos to come!

Heroin

2007-02-23T23:17:00.000-05:00

(a found poem)

I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a spike into my vein
And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same
When I'm rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

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I have made the big decision
I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death
And you can't help me now, you guys
And all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

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I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
In a sailor's suit and cap
Away from the big city
Where a man can not be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know

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Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off and dead
Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians makin' crazy sounds
And everybody puttin' everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds
'Cause when the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore

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Ah, when the heroin is in my blood
And that blood is in my head
Then thank God that I'm as good as dead
Then thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess I just don't know

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Still Life of a Reporter

2007-02-17T17:13:00.000-05:00

It took me a while, but I successfully gave up drinking Coke. I was exercising often, if not every day, and I was going weeks between ingestions of Tums. Then, my new job happened. And it's all gone to pot.

Lost and Found

2007-02-04T02:53:00.000-05:00

As fond as I am of found poems, I'm just as fond of found art. So I was pleased to run across the foundmagazine.com website, which features found notes, postcards, photos and the like which people have come across in their life wanderings.

What it reminds me of was this little junk shop on the side of 39 North between Louisburg and Henderson that I occasionally stopped by. And by occasionally, I mean like twice. The owner seemed to despair that far fewer came by his little lightless shop than they used to, or at least fewer than he expected to. Outside, among discarded refrigerators, furniture, tires and other junk too large to put on a shelf was a penned off area with the cutest puppies ever to be born in the wild and cared for by a strange man of indeterminate age whose dream of escaping his life as a handyman by renting a shack in the middle of nowhere and selling old Mickey Mouse glasses and old scratched up records by bands you've never heard of was clearly a failure.

I almost got one of those puppies, but we still had Fifi, our aged cat at the time, and she would not have been pleased. I was devoted to that cat and so would not have upset her intentionally. Beth's been taking it pretty hard since she died. It's been several months and she can't even tell the veterinarian why we haven’t been by -- every time she tries to call or pen a note, she can't do it. Thank God for "Squeak," (the subject of another post).

Inside the shop were rows of curios, boxes of clotheslike items, and other junk. I actually left the place with a $15 pair of used binoculars. They were the good kind, but have a loose part that you can hear when you shake them. But a new pair of that quality would be at least three times the cost, if not more.

What I didn't walk out with, to my later regret, was a box of letters and postcards that had been picked up from who knows where. The most interesting item in the box was this letter from a man to his girl. I recall that the man was writing from prison, though not much else, except that he professed his undying love to the girl. At the end of the letter, on the back, he had drawn a picture, using only his pen. It was a cat of some sort -- perhaps a lion. And it was beautiful. I don't believe it was a sketch from a photo; it was like a cougar's face peering from a group of flowers. Seeing that freehand drawing made me really sad. Here was a letter that had been discarded for who knows what reason -- a letter whose author had the raw skill to draw something that touched me through time but was wasting his talent away from behind the bars of a prison cell.

I don't know the story behind the artist and his would be lover, but if I had to guess, I would think that it would have any number of sad endings.

I wish I'd bought that letter, and the box of other ramblings, but I didn't and the place has since closed up, leaving me wondering what happened to those cute puppies, their benefactor, a woman who may or may not have loved a criminal, and a man whose artistic potential most likely never got the recognition, or exposure it warranted.

That's the tale of my piece of found art -- just in case you were looking for a little bit of melancholy to add to your day.

The Fat Pen

2007-01-28T01:42:00.000-05:00

With the fat pen writing is so easy —
Your slop sure style threatens to run off the page.
As if the quality of it all is too much joy to handle,
infusing these fingers intoxicantly
and then threatening again to drive
off the side of the paper
in a wanton act of irresponsible drunkenness.
But you jerk back just in time
to begin anew the second-by-second struggle
to stay between the lines.
Regardless of its recklessness,
just holding the fat pen is pure smile —
You don’t want to stop, rather let the sentence run on endlessly
to keep those digits buzzing toward
their end-of-run finish.
Will they lose all and careen off the surface?
Or win this stupor’d battle and make it
to that final stopping
point.

Times can't be that bad

2007-01-25T23:35:00.000-05:00

I was driving east on 440 yesterday when I passed this vehicle. I've seen houses being transported before and other structures, almost always it's because they have some inherent value and need to be preserved instead of bulldozed. For the life of me though, I can't figure out what someone would want to save this thing, unless the economy is doing even worse than I thought.

One for the road

2007-01-21T15:18:00.000-05:00

A former co-worker of mine has ended his own blog, one year to the date after he started it. It was always his goal to get back into the writing process, and then get a graduate degree in creative writing. He’s gone through the applications process and will likely soon be heading off to school somewhere.

His blog was pretty popular among a small group of friends and acquaintances, myself included. It was because of his encouragement that I began my own blog, much for the same reasons -- to encourage me to write more. The new journalism job will probably make creative writing harder, rather than easier, because I’ll be writing all the time, and not in a creative writing format (although it certainly requires some creativity to keep it fresh). But I’ll make the effort regardless, because creative writing is my goal.

So this blog will continue, even if his will not. I hope to post less lengthy thoughts and generate more poems or show more photographs in the future.

He’ll be removing his blog from cyberspace shortly, and I wanted to respond to some questions he put in his second-to-last post regarding the nature of his blog and blogging in general.

Some answers for you, CrazyJohn:

How did your persona-as-commentator differ from the "real you"? Did you feel like you were more honest when writing here than your normally are in your life?

I think and write in stream-of-consciousness. But until people get to know you, you have to tamp that down, because they think you’re crazy. So when I first meet people, I’ll often guard how much I let slip out. But in blogworld, you can say what you like, in any old artistic or ridiculous fashion, and as long as it is interesting and different, they tend to appreciate it. I have been more myself writing and commenting on blogs than I have been in a long time.

What should we do with our time now that we can't read/write here anymore?

We should pursue our dreams, as you are.

Any other blogs/websites we should transfer our attention to?

If you live in Raleigh, you ought to catch a cable access show of Monkeytime TV once in a while. I watched it years ago when I lived there, and even ran into the offbeat creator of it outside a bar one night. He came out with a friend, and looked askance at me because I was staring at him. And I said: “Hey, you’re Monkeytime TV,” and he was shocked, because he thought only his friends watched it. He has a Web page, which I have a link to on the right.

In the age of disintegrating communities, did this blog-space feel like a community?

More so than anything I’ve felt in a long time. I shall miss it, but I think we all can get trapped in places and need to be given the proverbial kick in the behind to get moving on again. I totally respect your end-of-blogdom.

Any remaining secrets you want to reveal before the opportunity has past?

I tell everyone I’m a writer, but writing is torturous for me. I want to do it, but my mind refuses. Only the smallest poems or shortest articles come out fluidly, the rest are a chophouse process. My blogs, written in one long breath, are an exception. So instead of me trying to control them, to mash them into a square circle or whatnot, I just let them out as they come and run with it. Perhaps, doing so will help me figure out some control in the future.

If there's fellow-commentators you haven't met in person, did their personalities come through in their writing?

Tough to say. Most of us act differently in different situations regardless; if we’re asked to speak publicly we may come off differently than in a gathering of friends. The blogosphere provides a whole new forum for people to express themselves, and so they may have for the first time in their lives opened up, or they may have been bugged out by the whole throw-some-words-onto-the-net process, or they may have found themselves watching what they say so as not to offend, or otherwise. In the blogosphere, people cannot learn much about you that you don’t want them to know, so in many ways, it’s a less than honest appraisal. But who cares? I liked the community of CrazyJohn, and I shall miss it.

What will you miss the most about this blog community?

The author’s commentary of the life outside his window.

Do you regret saying anything in one of your comments?

I regret not saying things when I couldn’t make up my mind how to respond. My brain is still processing how to answer your question to describe ourselves (as commentators to your blog) so you can feature us on a separate page. What should I say? How should I say it? Which part of me shall represent me the best? I never did come up with an answer for that.

Does participating in a blog-community make us geeks?

Only participating in it would. Unless you’re geographically isolated (or somehow trapped inside your house), you ought to have some interaction with the breathing world for balance. If a solar flare knocked out all our communications tomorrow, who among us could adjust to the real world while we awaited for things to be replaced? Could you pick up a Frisbee and toss it? Could you make friends with your neighbors? Could you find work that doesn’t involve technology? Would we all end up in the library or bar?

Coming to the post-blog party on Saturday, January 20, here in Chapel Hill?

It was a nice time. My second blog party in a year, only this time I had something to say to the other attendees. It was a strange experience, meeting people you’ve only “met” through reading their observations on someone else’s blog.

That's all. Any other messages you want to pass on to all of us?

Not today.

No, this blog is not yet dead

2007-01-13T01:56:00.000-05:00

I just finished the hardest working week of my life. Perhaps there were harder ones, but if so I can’t remember them. But going from worklessness and high levels of stress worrying about having no money and no job, to working 10 to 12 hours a day and experiencing the heavy daily stress about whether I can cut it as a journalist once again when I haven’t picked up a reporter’s notebook in five years took its toll on me this week.

I interviewed for the job the Friday before this. I was offered the job that night. I started work Monday, two days to deadline. By Wednesday, I’d barely had enough time to learn how to work a digital camera (I still don’t know how to program it manually, or turn the flash on or off) or figure out the distasteful Mac software, but I had tracked down enough information for four news articles and pen a follow-up to a wrestling match.

Friday I spent all day at a town retreat where town leaders set their priorities for what they’re going to do for the rest of the year. You know, passing bonds and building sidewalks and lighting football fields all that. I knew maybe two people going into the meeting, and those I’d only met earlier this week. And I was familiar with only two of the (minor) issues discussed the whole, 8-hour day. I felt like Neo, being hooked up to the loading program to learn a year’s worth of Jujitsu training in a minute. Only, instead of martial arts and weapons tactics, I jacked into my brain the history of paving town roads; and the total number, volume and availability of water hookups to present and future town citizens; and the cost per square foot to add drainage to a city block. Stuff like that. A year’s planning worth. With no background knowledge. I took it all in, but I’m kinda worried about neural seepage. Better start writing it down today before there’s permanent damage, eh Johnny-just-Johnny?

I’m not complaining, not really, just tired. Exhausted. I haven’t gotten online for more than a minute all week. So, if I haven’t been blogging, it’s not because I’m giving up. No matter how much I get plugged back into the machine, I never want to wholly give up my creativity to a job again. I definitely will keep the blog going -- even if it kills me.

So, no this blog is not yet dead. Just really, really tired.

Time to go back to bed.

Rest in Pieces

2007-01-08T01:10:00.000-05:00

I just took apart my Quantum battery. It didn’t seem to be working, so I thought: maybe if I disassemble it and peer at its working parts, I’ll be able to discern what’s malfunctioning, and possibly fix it. Yeah, right.

I had to go through my camera gear this weekend because I accepted a new job on Friday night -- only six hours after I interviewed for it. What turnaround time! As I’ll be returning to my former life as a newspaperman, I figured I ought to dust off all that old equipment and get it into working order. Of course, we’ll be using digital cameras on the job, but my commute takes me through some 20 miles of the coverage area, so having an extra camera available to use -- digital or not -- is a good idea. This way, if aliens land in the middle of the night and bring Elvis back, I won’t be able to send my editor the images instantaneously (I have neither a digital camera or cell phone), but I will be able to record a photo for posterity on good old fashioned film.

I expect I’ll eventually buy a digital camera system, or perhaps an older digital Nikon which lets me use my existing lenses and equipment (the newest line of Nikons won’t work with pre-digital equipment). But until then, I intend to keep my FM2, film, lenses, and flash around just in case.

That’s where the Quantum battery comes in. Though, cumbersome, the rechargeable battery pack I used to clip to my waist during photo shoots was an essential part of my equipment. This thing allowed me to take flash photos up to 50 or 60 feet away with a quick reset. I bought it for $75 used from the now defunct University Camera in Durham right after I moved here. I don’t know how long a new Quantum of that type was expected to last, but the used model I purchased survived thousands of flashes (maybe tens of thousands). It’s especially useful when you need a lot of flash (nighttime) and you need to take multiple shots (weddings, sporting events). So if I ever upgrade to some serious new digital equipment, I’ll probably get another one.

I’ll have to, after “fixing” the old one.

Dinner at Bluto's

2007-01-06T15:26:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine invited me to a poker game this weekend. He did the inviting in December, to give people plenty of time to respond. I didn’t respond right away though, for several reasons: I was up for a job that would involve work on nights and weekends, and money has been so tight lately (yes, even more so than my usual bare bones budget) that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go even if I was available. As it turns out, that nighttime job was offered to me, which I didn’t take because I was a shoo-in for another job with better working conditions. I soon learned the relative value of the phrase “shoo-in,” however, as well as the value of the idea that the second interview is just a formality and nothing could possibly go wrong to hurt your chances. So, suddenly, I was out of two jobs -- one which I had turned down for the other, the proverbial bird in the bush.

When I’m not making any money, I have a hard time justifying the expense of it, including the cost of putting fuel in the tank of my SUV -- not the most economical vehicle to have even in fat years. But I decided to go anyway because those games never do get too expensive (I’ve played “home games” where $75 is dropped without a thought -- usually my $75). This game tops out at around $40, on a second buy-in, if you are unfortunate enough to lose your first $20 off the bat. It happens.

So my buddy, let’s call him Bluto, will sometimes grill before a game. Food before poker is a good idea if one is going to be doing any drinking. Drunk men don’t win poker games, nor do they make good drivers. My wife asked me to find out if I’d be eating at Bluto’s and I said I wasn’t sure, and she said it would be good because we have no food and no money for food in the house.

He is cooking out, so I’ll have dinner tonight. I guess Beth will eat some apples or cottage cheese. I know, it sounds brutal, but she actually likes cottage cheese as a meal. Not my cup of tea, you know. Of course, even though she’s got some years on me, I’ll probably die first. At the funeral, I picture her being expected to say some words, which she hates (being expected to, not speaking in general) and her quipping that if only I’d taken her advice on the cottage cheese and other healthy meat alternatives, I might have made it to 60. Just so you don’t the wrong idea about Beth, she’s not that type of person who Vegetarian Bible-bashes you to change your lifestyle. Instead she makes small, informed recommendations, which I usually follow, and lets me decide what is best for myself. And in return, I respect her choices, which, since she’s smarter than me on so many levels, may be the most intelligent thing I do.

As it turns out, we will be able to afford to go grocery shopping on Sunday, as I was offered a different job than the other two yesterday evening. I’ll be hitting the bricks again as a reporter for The Wake Weekly in Wake Forest; a burgeoning town north of Raleigh, not the university bearing the town’s name. That’s some 200 miles from here.

But even if I hadn’t had this turn of good luck, and was still broke come Sunday (meaning I hadn’t “cleaned up” at the poker table), I still would have been all right. When one doesn’t have a whole lot of money, one really does look forward to the smaller pleasures in life. In this case, a good grilled meal, some ale to wash it down, a circle of pals, and a friendly game on a warm Saturday night in January.

Maybe I am wealthy after all.

First Post of 2007!

2007-01-01T01:35:00.000-05:00

While sitting in front of the TV (that’s an idiot box, for you luddites) watching a Seinfeld marathon, I brainstormed resolutions for 2007. “Why pick the same things you always pick?” I asked myself. “Why carry over resolutions from a previous year?” That just stresses you out. “Instead,” I thought, “why not choose resolutions that you’ll enjoy attempting, that you may actually accomplish?”

1. Drink the rest of the beer in my beer fridge. That may sound like an easy task -- and it could be, seeing as I’m still unemployed I do have the time -- but you never know. Every time I get around to deciding to do some “cleaning,” something happens and more beer makes its way into the fridge. It’s like a magic beer refrigerator in a way. Except that it’s not free magic -- the suds cost money which, even when I’m virtually broke, seems to find its way into my pocket and then my hand and then the hand of the sales clerk.

Now, a beer fridge is a nice thing to have. Beth and I think it’s an attractive selling point for the house, at least for the man, or the dad, or whomever who works his way through the upstairs, looking at all the rooms in that disinterested, male kind of way, follows the real estate agent (often female) and his wife downstairs and into the basement, which is set up pretty decently as a workshop area. There’s the cabinets against the inner wall with a hard ply board nailed to the top for working, plus we have a workbench, half a dozen saws and mauling instruments in the corner, some rakes and a giant shovel which I hauled out of the shed this fall because it does a great job shoveling leaves. Yes, we had that many leaves. So he walks in and immediately perks up. “Ah!” he thinks, “that’s more like it.

Then, oh gloriously then, they all turn left into what the former owners used as a spare bedroom, and see a full-sized pool table done in red felt, a cricket dart board on the wall, boom box, backgammon board, and there, next to the couch, a mini-fridge. “I wonder if…” he thinks to himself, and opens the little door to reveal yes, as many beers as a man can jam into a mini-fridge. Now of course, people buying the home might just turn that room right back into a kid’s bedroom, but, like the TV show “Sell This House” reveals, people have an easier time imagining how much they’ll enjoy a place if you help them out visually. Plus, if they want it, the pool table goes with the sale. No extra charge.

But the beer ought to be fresh, though the guy can’t possibly know whether it is or not, and so it needs constant replacing. Problem is, whenever I have guests over, even knowing in advance that they will most undoubtedly bring beer (as they always have), I still panic at the last second and go out and buy a couple six packs. Then, the guest or guests come, all bearing sixes of their own. Some of said sixes get consumed, and the remainders crowd up the fridge. I’ll have one or two while playing darts or pool, but I usually only drink in company, so after a while, all those beers start to go stale. So, my New Year’s Resolution numero uno is to go through the entire lot, drinking what I can and chucking what is absolutely intolerable. Meaning the horribly stale beer, any skunked bottles and all the Natural Lights.

Empty fridge, here you come!

2. Sell my first country song. Some years ago I was sitting in a brew pub (that I no longer go to because I hate every selection they have) with two friends (who are no longer my friends for reasons I’d prefer not to go into) and we were joking about the hilarity of those “working man” country songs that seem to always involve romantic breakups and pickup trucks, when I started to sing my own make-it-up-on-the-spot lyric about how my dog ran away with my wife. I can’t recall just how the tune went, but it was pretty darn good. Or it seemed that way at the time. Of course, we were in a bar, drinking.

This afternoon, while the wife and I were engaged in a forced absence from our humble abode so complete strangers could walk through the rooms of the house peering into cabinets and commenting on the state of the paint job, we were sitting outside a Remington Grill (temps hit 62 degrees today) reading the paper and being subjected to the most God-awful series of jarring and discordant notes and vocalizations that anyone should ever have to hear. It was the latest -- and who knows, maybe the greatest -- in country music. While I sat there, trying not to gag, I thought to myself: “I could write music that bad.” So, maybe I will.

Well, that’s the list.

I’ve only come up with the two so far, but I welcome one and all to feel free to make some suggestions of their own. Be nice. Or not nice. To quote a tunester comic from Chapel Hill who once wrote a song about being sexually molested by Ronald McDonald (set to the tune of Charlie Daniels’ Uneasy Rider): “It’s the same difference -- makes no difference to me.”

Last Post of the Year!

2006-12-31T22:08:00.000-05:00

This is my last post of the year. Look forward to next year in which I expect to be blogging more often.

The madness War

2006-12-27T01:27:00.000-05:00

Saw an article today about an economist who estimates the total cost of the war in Iraq, financially speaking, will probably end up somewhere around $2.2 trillion. Staggering, isn't it?

Anyways, it reminded me of a poem I wrote, back when I worked in the type of place that actually had cubicles. The Borgish feeling of just being one of many was exacerbated by me placing plastic army men around my cube around the start of the war and by the fact that at the time, my project was depression (had to write about it) and, at that time at least, I was the only person working on the subject, leaving me virtually no one to talk to about my work. So, an escalating war, immersion into the realm of depression, and no one but four gray cube walls within arms reach to speak to, and little green men pointing their weapons at me from shelves and from behind stacks of paper really put me in a state of pseudo psychosis. From whence I wrote the following:

The madness War

The military buildup
is threatening my cubedom.
The rigid charging soldiers
with their arms upraised
may break my concentration.
In green and beige
they chatter into their radios —
the static hurts my ears.
Those little green men keep
marching around in my head.
they go round and round and round and round
until I Fall Down.
I guess it’s what I deserve
for getting stuck between gears.
Why can’t I get any peace?

Year of the Dog

2006-12-22T09:58:00.000-05:00

With all the warm weather we’ve been having lately here in the sunshine state, this Christmas holiday is really looking up. Rain is predicted for a day or two, but overall for the past few weeks, it’s just been gorgeous. That said, I’m really looking forward to the passing of the holidays and the introduction to a new year. I know it’s such an arbitrary thing, our measurement of the passage of time -- January 1st is really just another day -- but I think any kind of fresh start, even an imaginary one, would do me some good.

I read two articles in the “Business” and “Lifestyle” sections of the daily newspaper yesterday which really caught my eye. The first pointed to the increase in lavish gifts Wall Street bankers, brokers, and pork barrel traders were buying for their loved ones this year -- apparently it’s been a really good year for them. We’re talking about $50,000 diamond rings, $1 million worth of private jet travel, $7,000 mink coats, $5,000 necklaces, $20,000 facelifts, $15,000 hair, makeup and wardrobe makeovers, stuff like that. This story warmed my heart. It’s nice to know some folks really are benefiting from the economy.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a new trend is catching on. In an effort to live more environmentally friendly lives, groups of people living in or about San Francisco vowed to spend no money for the entirety of 2006 on new purchases, excepting food, the bare necessities for health and safety, and underwear. Everything else was bought used or not bought at all. Apparently, this is a movement designed, presumably, to help reduce the average American’s eco-footprint on the world. The “Compact” movement has spread around the country, eliciting both progressive delight and spite from those who see these groups as out to destroy America.

A “compact” lifestyle has such a nice ring to it. I think I’ll start using it to describe my way of life. Just think, my very way of daily living has been on the cusp of a new eco-movement, possibly a green revolution.

And all this time I’ve simply referred to it as being broke.

I can’t say for certain, but I think all of my friends, lovers, and family members would agree that it would be nice if in this new year I could quit living an enforced sub-compact lifestyle and return to something a bit more normalized. Bad enough that Benjamin, Jacob, and Ryan went without presents from Uncle Dave this year, but even my attempt at an economical Christmas card has failed. I sent out a link to an online e-card, which has apparently been removed from the server. So instead of Santa and his deer singing a cheery Christmas Song, my message to folks was:

503 Service Unavailable
Apache/ProXad Server at badaboo.free.fr Port 80.

Perhaps I can follow it up with a 403 Unable to connect to the localhost Happy New Year message.

I was born in the Year of the Dog so I hoped that this would be my year. It hasn’t been, but I’ve been feeling a lot more like myself lately than I have been in years, so maybe that old dog just took his time getting around to me. Maybe the server error is just a final note to a bad tune, and I can get on to a better life starting today. I guess that’s how I’m going to think of it, because being depressed is no fun for me and this time of year ought to be fun.

Things are going to be better from here on out. Million-dollar Christmas gifts I can do without, but a voluntary sub-compact lifestyle would be heartily welcomed. By this time next year I expect I’ll either be mailing classic children’s books to my nephews, or mailing brand new ones to publishers.

It’s time to get to work.

I Stand Corrected

2006-12-17T08:16:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post, I claimed that the childhood nickname my parents called me by was Bumbalardee and was named after a Sesame Street cartoon that I loved, featuring a poor child’s birthday party with rats as guests. While I’m convinced that such a cartoon or puppet piece was performed, I must humbly apologize for the story of Bumbalardee itself. My mother recently wrote the following letter to me:

The name Bumbleardy (my spelling) is, indeed, from an old Sesame Street bit but it had nothing to do with rats. The number nine was the subject of the animated piece. Bumbleardy was turning nine and invited a bunch of pigs to his birthday party. They showed up early while his mother was out and behaved quite piggishly, more or less trashing the place. Bumbleardy, however, remained at ease in the midst of the commotion. We nicknamed you for him, not because of the piggish party, but because you were always so comfortable around animals. A favorite photo, from a trip to the African Safari in Hamilton, captures you at about two surrounded by taller petting zoo animals, donkeys and such, barely visible but totally relaxed.

Sure enough, when I did a Google search for the name Bumbleardy, it popped right up as Bumble Ardy. Not only was there a cartoon with the pigs and number nine, it was done by none other than Maurice Sendak, the author most well known for creating Where the Wild Things Are. Apparently, he has put the cartoon into book form this year.

So, I humbly ask for forgiveness from both my parents, Mr. Sendak and the folks over at Sesame Street for my faux pas.

Happy Christmahanukwanza!

2006-12-15T04:45:00.000-05:00

Trying to recover my former style of writing poetry (consisting of odd subjects, humorous expressions and non-living things turned inside-out) I put pen to paper the other day and this is what came out. Not my best work, but 'tis certainly the season.

Sip a draught of beer,
Or any available cheer.
Kick back your heels and rest,
There is no cause for stress:
Is there another time of year
Like Christmas to the New Year,
Where politics are cast aside?
Or should be; this is a time to bide
Others’ faults, oddities and beliefs,
Not a time for the giving of grief.
Bad spirits, sour grapes,
Comments about old drapes,
Begone! to the rest of the year
(Where forgotten, I fear
Is Christ’s mass and Christ’s word
And Christ’s name is used as a sword).
Would it that he could rise once again
And teach us to be, year-round, civil men.

All my references are humans

2006-12-13T03:56:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across these online and couldn't resist.

Ode to Coke

2006-12-12T01:07:00.000-05:00

I was going to write about successfully quitting my Coke habit, which is to say, stopping my habit of drinking the corn-syrup cola called Coke, or at least stopping my habit of drinking it every day as opposed to just when I go out to eat, which, if one is aware of my financial status, is not often.

I got addicted to Coke working at the newspaper. I didn’t need it during the day. Hell, usually, I was so busy during the day I didn’t have time to drink anything, except during lunch. My newspaper days were chock full of phone calls and short drives to school events and businesses and intersections to take photos of tree-sized logs that had come off the back of those log trucks -- you know the ones, with the little red flag hanging off the back on logs that look like they could fall off at any time? -- and had crush some poor soul’s Navigator.

So I was busy busy busy all the time and didn’t even have the time to think of caffeination. But production days always went on forever. We’d finish writing and editing the copy, drive down to our production office in Fuquay-Varina (that’s actually the town’s name. Dumb, isn’t it? I lived there for about a year at one point. The difference is there they had a 24-hour open Harris Teeter. Louisburg closes at 11) to lay it all out on the computers there (with the ads already done there -- otherwise the whole operation could have been done at my desk), scan in all the relevant photos (think pre-digital cameras) and all that jazz.

Well, that whole process always took all night -- longer because due to a scheduling conflict with the actual Fuquay newspaper (whose production offices we shared since we were part of the same chain) we would have to wait until they got done with their work first. There weren’t enough computers to go around. So after working eight hours, writing and editing, and answering the damn phone, we then had to drive to Fuquay (about 15 minutes) start production at 5 p.m. or later. So, to stay awake and aware (one of my duties was to proof the whole deal -- my editor was dsylexic and couldn’t be coutned on to cacth all the mitsakes) I discovered that caffeine was my very best friend. And to get that steady flow of pep, I would sip from a can of Coke all night until we were finished. That usually meant anywhere from 3 to 6 Cokes a night.

Later, when I worked as a proofreader for an agency in Durham, I found my attention would shift as well, unless I was constantly infused with caffeine. Coffee highs were too bell curved, plus I really don’t like coffee, and it gets cold. So I did the same thing. I’d usually consume about 3 or 4 16-ounce cokes a day there. So I got in the habit of chain Coking -- pouring it into a glass with ice, and sipping it out through a straw (to save my teeth), pouring more in when the glass would get to be half-empty.

Since I left that job, I’ve been steadily drinking Coke, adding to my waistline and compounding my heartburn and probably doing no good for my overall constitution. Until about two and a half weeks ago. I just decided to quit (or at least quit drinking it daily) and so I quit. I’m back to drinking Coke only as a treat. I drink more iced tea now, but that’s not really addictive, especially since the stuff I’m drinking doesn’t taste very good. And water. I drink a lot more water. I still treat myself when we go out to eat -- which, considering we often end up in the burg of Wake Forest, which seems to be totally shut down on Sundays, the day we shop for groceries, we more than not end up at Applebee’s, which only serves Pepsi products. I drink it, but it’s just not the same thing.

So, as I was saying, I was going to write about kicking the habit, but then I realized that some fellow bloggers like this guy or this girl might not like it so much, seeing as they are both addicted to the heavier stuff -- tobacco, I mean. You do know that nicotine is as addictive as heroin or cocaine, don’t you? So I thought, since they seem to always be blogging about trying to quit or being off cigs for 3 days or 6 months now, that quitting smoking must be really hard and so writing about quitting drinking Coke, or at least, learning to drink Coke in moderation, might seem a little offensive to say the least.

So I’ve decided not to blog about it.

Instead, I’ll just post the dedication I wrote to the drink I was an addict of for so long:

Ode -- to Coke

Sugar.
Water.
Syrup.
Color.
I willingly open my arteries to your sugar rush.
Sip.
Hold --
then you slide down over my tongue,
past my cracked teeth;
pouring pure sugarcane satisfaction
into me.

No dessert can rival,
no sweetener can match
the pure-pleasure,
open-addiction,
ecstasy-driven
lust
I derive
for
that in-credible,
un-challenged,
un-equaled,
one and only,
one
of
a
kind --
Coke.

Yum.

Cool Factor 10

2006-12-10T06:17:00.000-05:00

The AlterNet has a list of the Top 10 or so YouTube vids viewed online. There's some amazing stuff in there, much of it performed by Generation Next. A lot of talent these kids have these days that would never have gotten noticed except for on corporatized TV shows like American Idol.

The first two I'd already seen or don't care about. The Quick Change video has got a cool factor of about 9, even if you figure out the trick. The Pachelbel guitar boy is awesome, the rocker girls make you want to be back in school; and the urban ninja dude makes the mall look exciting.

The rest are just so-so. The soccer thing would be amazing if I thought it was definitely not faked. And if you haven't yet seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite -- don't watch the last one if you don't want to ruin it.

Years ago I was sitting at an outdoors table at a restaurant in Buffalo and I saw this little black kid riding his bike across the street. He was going through a parking lot and suddenly turned the handlebars the wrong way and went right over the top. He landed in a roll and came up unscathed. I was amazed. He rode off, but about 10 minutes later here he comes and does the same thing. It was a stunt move that he had taught to himself.

That's what the ninja guy and the other YouTubers remind me of. Nobody paid them to just be cool; they just are. Which reminds me of a story my pops told me once. He and his brother (my cool uncle Dave, who died a few years ago of a heart attack), who was several years younger than my dad, Jim, were always fighting when they were kids. So, after one contentious battle, when Jim got the best of my uncle, Dave hatched a plan to get his brother back that must have taken weeks to implement. Every day when he got home from school, Dave put a ladder up against the house and practiced jumping off of it, going up a rung each day or so.

He got to the point where he could jump from about the height of, say, a second-story bedroom window. Then, the next day he picked a fight with Jim, claiming he was stronger or tougher or whatnot and when my pops challenged him, Dave bet him he couldn't jump out of the bedroom window. So Jim said, sure, you first, and Dave threw open the window, climbed out and jumped, hitting the ground just right to avoid injuring himself. Not to be outdone, Jim jumped too, with the expected result of hurting his ankle in the process.

Now, my dad's a pretty cool guy -- he looks so smooth with a cigar clenched between his teeth, and he outclasses me on anything physical -- he used to get up at 5 a.m. to jog a couple miles before work every day, and he still holds his own in racquetball against anyone who isn't a total athlete. Plus, he is of the old school fixit dads who make great homeowners because there is hardly a repair job they can't handle. So he's definitely got a high coolness factor.

But nobody was as cool as my uncle Dave. Dave, with his deep, soothing and magical voice; Dave, whose childhood antics later developed into a love for garage rock; Dave, who always had the latest gagets and pinball machines for his kids (and nieces and nephews!) to play with. Dave, whose band members (that he was managing) played Amazing Grace on the sax at his funeral and whose family held up lighters in tribute.

Like the ninja dude, and definitely that guitar kid, I’d say my uncle was easily a Cool Factor 10.

Three aliens walk into a bar...

2006-12-06T16:52:00.000-05:00

Three Petterbine aliens and a human being named Jason are sitting in a snoosis joint on the inner cusp of Saturn's rings. "What do the Kek Comet, NGC 4214 cluster, Doradus Cloud, and the Cordites on the 15th moon of Pekus Prime have in common?" one of the aliens quips.

The Petterbines are renowned galaxy-wide for their humor, so Jason pricks up his ears.

"I dunno, what?" "Yes, what?" the other two ask.

"None of them is planet earth."

The aliens break out into spasms of guffawing laughter, pounding the table and falling off their chairs. The human looks from one to another in puzzlement.

"I don't get it," he says.

Who Likes Short-Shorts?

2006-12-04T08:37:00.000-05:00

I'm very fond of short stories. I like to read them, and when I'm feeling confident, write them as well. But there's real fun in writing limited-length short stories, which are referred to as short short stories. Or, if they're very short, they're sometimes called short short short stories. Arguably one of the best short short stories is Appointment in Samarra:

"A merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market. The servant returned, trembling and frightened. The servant told the merchant, 'I was jostled in the market, turned around, and saw Death.

'Death made a threatening gesture, and I fled in terror. May I please borrow your horse? I can leave Baghdad and ride to Samarra, where Death will not find me.'

The master lent his horse to the servant, who rode away, to Samarra.

Later the merchant went to the market, and saw Death in the crowd. 'Why did you threaten my servant?' He asked.

Death replied,'I did not threaten your servant. It was merely that I was surprised to see him here in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.'"

A bookstore whose newsletter I subscribe to recently sent me a list of 6-word-long short shorts published by Wired.com for some Sci-Fi contest. One complaint I've heard is that many are actually more like headlines or titles than stories. But there are some gems:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

Weeping, Bush misheard Cheney’s deathbed advice.
- Gregory Maguire

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news…"
- Steven Meretzky

The best of the six-word short shorts -- the one that inspired all the rest -- comes from the man who only wrote a single, one-act play in his entire life (which my friends and I performed while under the influence, some years ago), the man who took it upon himself to go U-Boat hunting off the Gulf of Mexico in a fishing craft during WWII, the man whose arguably best short story is being eradicated by global warming, Ernest Hemingway, wrote this:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Isn't that sumthin?

The reason I bring it up is I was looking for material I'd written creatively to show potential employers when I ran across a 64-word short-short I wrote for my own "Get a Life" writer's club, which has since gone defunct, been reborn, gone defunct again, and been reborn again, albeit with only a few remaining writers left to participate. These ones came from a title prompt of "The eyes have it":

Stella led her guests into the gloomy library. Shelves held jars of preserves, reminders of her husband’s glory days.
“Exquisite!” a vampire exclaimed, lifting a jar containing two withered hands.
“Yes,” Stella mused, “my husband was quite the… collector.”
“What is your favorite of Dr. Frankenstein’s collection?” another asked.
“Most people like the brains, but as for me,” she paused, “the eyes have it.”

--Angela Erwin

That sound. It hits my stomach before it hits my ears. It doesn’t register for a few minutes. But when I see the bright blood seeping into the asphalt, I know. Who could do something like that? Throw a kid into oncoming traffic. I look around for the answer, my gaze resting on two black orbs, and I find it. The eyes have it.

--Christine Gordon

The eyes have it — that heart-wrenching, pleading look. Twenty-three folk from outside town whose homes had washed away with the flood stood against the wall. Mayor Phelps had the deciding vote. Annex the community and help them rebuild? The cost might break the back of his tiny town. He stared long and hard into those eyes — then raised his hand. “The ayes have it.”

--David Leone

Fell free to deposit a 6-word or 64-word short short on the comments page.

Bumbalardee and the Tunnel Rat

2006-12-01T14:11:00.000-05:00

I attended a moderately small college run by Jesuit priests in Buffalo NY. It was only a few blocks’ walk from the family home on Summit Ave., which was nice, as was the tuition, which, me being a son of a faculty member, was free. Anyways, even though it was located on Main Street in the middle of the city, it was still a somewhat cloistered environment. It was a largely middle class black community and the student body was largely white, suburban, or white, countryside. So there wasn’t a lot of mixing going on with the neighborhood folks. Since quite a few students were from downstate, I guess the term is, and lived on campus, and because it was kind of a catholicky place, the overall atmosphere was, well, kind of conservative.

So, I had this small fish in a small pond experience that came to mind recently after a long time. A guy named David Eliot e-mailed me about my blog, which he happened across during a “vanity search” on Google, and mentioned that he has already, at the age of 34, published two independent newspapers. Publishing my own rag is a sort of a dream of mine, though I’m not locked in on it, I would have a ball. I even recently drew up plans for an indie entertainment newsmag, but I gave up because I figured (A) it likely wouldn’t make any money and (B) that I had no seed money to get it going.

So, I was lamenting my launch pad status, when a friend reminded me that I did put out two issues of a really small independent newspaper when I was still in school. Crazy that I forgot that. It was called The Tunnel Rat, named for the system of tunnels that connected much of the Canisius College campus while I was a student. The tunnels are still there; only the campus has really grown, so “much” probably doesn’t apply any longer. Most of the student activity clubs were in those tunnels, beneath the student center, and I spent a good portion of my 5 college years living the life of a tunnel rat.

I’ve always identified with rats, inasmuch as I think they’re really cool animals, albeit frightening to find taking the lid off one’s garbage can (happened to my mother once). My father’s nickname for me as a child was Bumbalardee. This came from a Sesame Street cartoon where a really poor kid who has no friends instead invites the tenement’s rats to his birthday party. I scarcely remember it, but my folks claim that I loved it as a kid. So, naming my “underground” newspaper The Tunnel Rat had extra meaning for me.

I only put out two very short (a few pages each) issues, mainly because I couldn’t afford the printing costs. It caused a bit of a stir, this being a small, conservative pond school. How conservative, you ask? During my first senior year, I had a goatee going, not because I liked beards (I didn’t then), but because I had been too lazy to shave. A whole plethora of people and school administrators strongly suggested to me that growing a beard was wrong and that I’d better shave it. I’m serious! Try living in a small town sometime (or perhaps, Greensboro) and you’ll likely run into that same kind of attitude.

I promised them all I would shave it off, as soon as I could go a week without getting nagged about it. It took until Christmas break.

So anyways, to make a short story far too long to read to the end, I decided to publish my own paper not because I felt some kind of need to stir up trouble, but because I had just finished reading this cool book my sister Nicki had given to me (upon the promise that I not mention she did so to mom and dad) and I wanted to quote it in an op/ed piece for the Griffin, the college paper I was an editor at. But they wouldn’t let me use all the swearwords, which I thought were essential to the quote, as it knocked the press itself, so I created an entire publication so I could put the quote there.

It’s the scene in the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which, high on acid and other stuff, Raoul and his attorney pal are checking into a hotel when in Raoul’s eyes, everybody starts turning into reptiles and chewing each other to bits. Raoul exclaims to his attorney:

‘”But what about our room? And the golf shoes? We're right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody's giving booze to the goddamn things! It won't be long before they tear us to shreds. Jesus, look at the floor! Have you ever seen so much blood? How many have they killed already?’

“That’s the press table,’ he said.”

So I threw the essay with that quote, a one sentence entertainment review by my childhood friend Jeff Burnett, a nostalgic look back at record players by another friend, and a short story done up Mike Hammer-style about a campus police detective wannabe titled “Diary of a Dick.”

I played on an ongoing controversy with the English Department by doctoring up a group photo of them for the 2nd issue; I penciled-in satanic symbols and Led Zeppelin onto their shirts and books and ran it on the front to show how bad they were. I understand they got quite a kick out of it. (I’d show an image from the issues, except that I found out what is wrong with my scanner -- it’s busted. So, no scanned-in images from me until I get a new one. You know, when we have money again.)

A year later, my buddy Eric published a final issue of The Tunnel Rat on his own, causing much more strife, in part because he and I stood out on the corner and handed the issues to kids coming in, and in part because it was a lot racier and more fun and addressed ongoing controversies better than I ever did. If any student remembers The Tunnel Rat, it’s Eric’s issue that he remembers, I’m sure. For example, he played on the health ministry’s decision to excise contraception information from a campus magazine by including a dotted-line condom that students could cut-out and glue together before engaging in sex.

That one perturbed no small number of people -- self-important students and administrators alike -- who actually believed that if no mention was ever made of sexual activity, then by God the students wouldn’t engage in it! I’ve seen these kinds of attitudes persist during school board meetings, church socials, and of course, at the federal level, in just about everything Moral Majority types go on about.

So just today I was wondering if I might be able to find a reference to The Tunnel Rat, -- it being one of the few a vanity searches I’ve never conducted -- perhaps in some guy’s web page reflecting on his school days.

Nope. The only mention I found is so small as to make it a sort of a found poem. It’s mentioned, for some obscure reason, in the root directory of the campus computer mainframe. This is the whole of it:

Tunnel Rat - Lampoon
Publication – totally anonymous (Bootlegged)
File: 21/0

I guess if I want people to remember me for something unique and wonderful, I’m going to have to try something new.

Shutterbug

2006-11-25T17:58:00.000-05:00

I miss photography.

At first I let it go because photography played such a big part of my job. I got so sick of carrying a camera around (I carried it to every assignment) that I didn’t want to be bothered with it in my off time, and moreover I didn’t want to think in frames during that time. One of my favorite movies is a piece starring Joe Pesci called “The Public Eye,” in which he plays a Weegee type of shutterbug who lives off the New York City police radio and contracts his work out to area newspapers. Two things make this film excellent, and the storyline and plot aren’t them. It’s his portrayal of the consummate newshound -- who isn’t afraid of anything -- or rather is terrified of everything, but ignores it for the sake of the picture. The scene in the Italian mob restaurant is priceless, because it is the type of event that every news photog dreams of; catching the daily violence as it happens. But what makes this movie a film is how it shows how he doesn’t just take pictures, but sees all the life around him in frames. You ever see those budding film school directors walking around with that finder thingy and putting it up to their eye all the time? It’s like that, only without the thingy. This film completely captures both the feeling and the effect it has on the photographer.

I was recruited right out of college by the yearbook rep to be a partner in his photography business; he liked my candids so much. Dave had a debilitating condition from a stroke and knew he’d need more and more help as time went on. But I turned him down. I had been a photographer for all of my 5 college years, and had only gotten into writing for the paper’s op/ed and features later, and only started news writing in my last two years. But I felt two things that made me not want to take that excellent opportunity. There was that energy of youth that made me want to take my talent and run with it: perhaps to become the consummate journalist, perhaps something else. The position would primarily have been taking group shots and portraits at local high schools and doing some of their homecoming dances and football games and such as well. But just starting out and jumping right into high school was a very distasteful concept to me at the time. Even considering my situation today, I’m still glad I turned that job down. I could see then how, 10, 20, 30 years later, I’d still be doing the same thing. It was an appalling vision. The other thing was that feeling of living photography. I made a conscious decision to go into news and not photography upon leaving school. I knew that, were I to become I professional photographer, I would have to eat, drink, and breathe photography. A photographer is never off duty, you see. If he doesn’t take his camera everywhere he goes, and misses a great shot, he’ll always rue it. And if he takes it everywhere he goes, it becomes an anchor, dragging the spirit of the moment right out of his soul.

So I got the newspaper job at The Apex Herald (and later at the Wake Weekly), in large part because of my photography skill, which as far as candids are concerned, is excellent. That, and as the publisher (his name was Biff) told me at the time, because I “could put a sentence together.” So, for about 5 years, I took photos with nearly every story, and many non-stories (kids on the playground, car wrecks, that kind of stuff). Like a maroon, I didn’t save most of them, as the film didn’t belong to me and I never had free time to make enlargements.

Today, I was raking leaves (oh, how many of them there are!), and noticed a giant grasshopper on the screen door. They’ve been really big this year, which is cool, because you can see their faces and antennae and everything. I grabbed my FM2 and my 70-210 zoom (a Vivitar Series One, one of the first lenses I ever bought; think 1988) which has a macro capability. Problem is, with the macro, the incoming light is reduced, and so you need either more light, or a slower shutter speed. Plus, at macro, the focal plane is cut down to centimeters, making staying in focus very difficult. It was getting late, and so I was forced to slow the shutter speed down to about 1/60th of a second. I was shooting T-max B&W, on which I splurged recently and bought a couple rolls. You know you’re poor when 4 rolls of film seems an outrageous expense. So I took a few shots, but on only one was I still enough, I think. Anyways, I was frustrated because I have clearly let my sedentary life weaken my arm and wrist muscles to the point where I can’t sit absolutely still for 10 minutes waiting for the perfect shot. So, I figure I’ll do two things. I’m going to start exercising more, and take more pictures. One of these days, I’d like to watch The Public Eye again. It’s an excellent film.

When I figure out what’s wrong with my scanner (currently suffering a communication breakdown with my PC), I’ll put some more of my better photos on the blog.

Insomniac Theatre

2006-11-24T04:07:00.001-05:00

One thing about persistent unemployment is how easy it is to have one’s schedule get all messed up. I’m kind of a night person anyways, so staying up really late just gets all that much easier if one is intent on getting all the way through a good book, or stuck in the middle of a marathon game of Civilization.

The problem is it’s much easier to get stuck into an awake at night and asleep during the day routine than it is to get unstuck. I can’t force myself to sleep if I’m not tired and there’s few exertions I can do at night to make myself tired that won’t wake up the sleeping party of the house. Basement activities are heard right above in the bedroom, so I can’t just get drunk and play pool or darts all night while listening to music. And this being autumn, and our house being situated on an acre of deciduous trees, there is certainly no shortage of leaves to be raked up -- a very exhausting activity -- but one can’t rake in the pitch of night.

So I end up sitting, as I said, at the computer or the TV, or reading on the couch, and while I do eventually get tired, usually that occurs between the hours of 6 and 10 a.m. Often I’ll tell myself to simply get through the next day. Eight o'clock would do, but I rarely make it to eight. So I sleep from noon to midnight, or 4 to 2 a.m. and then start the whole beastly process all over again.

I’d have to say one of the only things that helps me pass the time so well is the preponderance of decent serials to watch on early morning TV. If I didn’t have those I’m sure I would be quite out of my mind by now. Have you ever seen the tripe that comes on early in the a.m.? It’s no good turning to CNN or other news channels; they seem intent on exhibiting the most trite and insipid casts of happy morning people talking about TomKat’s wedding -- they actually use that expression, TomKat -- and other such exciting world events.

But lucky enough for me, the folks at TNT have decided that there are just enough lost souls out there with naught better to do than watch TV all night and early in the morning to play contiguous episodes of Angel and Charmed. Buffy is on FX, I have recently discovered, but that show is a lot harder to watch. They all have a lot of soap opera elements to them, which is barely tolerable to me. But Angel, which is a show about a brooding vampire hell-bent on destroying all the elements of evil in Los Angeles (think Blade without the guns and swords), is far less soapy, or is soapy in a much more supernatural way. People’s loves are lost not because they got a better job and moved to Seattle, but because they were taken by a great horned daemon into the hell of upside down sinners. Much more dramatic and imaginative, I think.

I’ve pretty much gotten to see the entire rise and fall of the vampire called Angel. By the way, the final episode of that show -- in which he and his cohorts all go out fighting the forces of evil in a prelude to the apocalypse -- is pretty awesome. Nothing like ending on a high note.

Buffy and Charmed center around primarily female casts, which seems to lend itself to far more discussions about why their Saturday night dates never work out and far fewer about what to do when the end of the world gets here. I think Angel, a Buffy spin off, must have been created to give the male fans of Buffy a way to regain their sanity. Likewise, Charmed, which I must admit initially attracted me because I had a thing for Alyssa Milano, was cool because of the supernatural sets and effects and the writers and directors’ love of soft pedal comedy. The show incorporated the gamut of myths and legends ever envisioned and dropped them all down onto the three sisters’ heads in a San Francisco setting. One of the coolest things to happen on that show was when Milano’s character Phoebe fell in love with a daemon called the Source, i.e., the source of all evil. Any evangelical Christian who had rationalized his viewing up until that point was thereby dismissed. But the female leads themselves were really annoying. There was no end of whining about love lives and such and when they brought a baby into the mixture it was all she wrote.

Buffy was all that coupled with a high school setting. Think Saved by the Bell with the occasional human sacrifice. If it were more like the movie version -- with a Pee Wee Herman vamp that refuses to die -- or something like Idle Hands, I could have taken it better. But then, the cast would have all died early and the series couldn’t have run until its high school heroes were getting gray hair.

But criticisms aside, at least I had them to watch during my all night Insomniac Theatre. It could be a whole lot worse. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the Sci-Fi channel will drop the all night infomercials and run the entire Dr. Who series from its inception. That, or a job and a workday schedule would be nice.

Bad for Bizness

2006-11-19T04:45:00.000-05:00

I'm actually not fond of the following type of poem because it's more a stream of conciousness bit of prose broken down and made to appear a poem. Many people write poetry this way, taking long sentences and adding a lot of returns and getting published in big name journals and winning awards and such. So, I'm not fond of it, though prosaic language does occasionally fill my mind. When it does, I feel compelled to put it to paper. Which is what I did, early last Saturday, while sitting in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Research Triangle Park (I was helping with the writers' network fall conference), while reading the Wall Street Journal.

As I say in the poem the writer makes barely an effort to hide his doubt that the new congress won't bring down Wall Street with regulatory legislation. There's a point to that, I guess. After all, if the poor and downtrodden start making or saving more money, that means someone else won't be posessing all that money any longer. Or, to paraphrase the economist on NPR's Marketplace: When someone gets a great deal, someone else gives it up.

So I present to you a little bit of proestry about how I was feeling after reading a very well written, and, truth-be-told, very informative indictment of the Big 'D' crowd taking the reins of our little 'd' republic for just a little while.

4 a.m. -- too hot to sleep.
Blendbuzz of a lobby waterfall/humming lights/Musak mixture
trickling into the top of my semi-consciousness.
Too tired to really read,
I slowly pore over the new day’s news.
An election.
A change of pace.
A nation has voiced a single word:
Democrats, Democrats, Democrats.

This is not an election story -- that’s three days past.
It’s a not-so-subtle lament; an ode to the old guard,
with its old crowd doing things the old way.
“Bad for Business,” the headline reads,
disguised in the language of the upper crust,
of moneyed men.

Mugs of newly guilted, “anti-trade” congressmen
line the news jump like police photos of murder suspects
topping the crime news.
The mention of “jobs” or “labor” seems an afterthought,
or a distasteful necessity,
first making mention halfway down the page.
“Views of a troubled economy”
(voiced by those who really work for a living,
or aren’t working, more to the point),
doesn’t poke its mole head out of the background
until well into the jump. Fifteen paragraphs in, to be precise.

But the writing -- oh the writing --
barely attempts to conceal
the contempt
that this new guard, this big ‘D’, will be
Bad for Bizness.
Specifically, their business, the business of getting richer
(initial richness a benchmark long since attained).

“Things are going to be bad,”
the editors and publishers of the bi-zness papers and pages
(who can’t find a layoff they can’t spin aright)
are afraid to say out loud.
So now, say it softly, if not so subtly,
pen a frustration-laden,
knock the new guys,
pouting piece
that claims, clear as this new day,
that steadfast belief that workers
-- perish the thought! --
ought have no say
in the decisions affecting
their American workplace.

Perhaps this week I’ll find a job.

The Song of You

2006-11-15T06:25:00.000-05:00

A house for sale is a clean house
with everything in its place.
But a lived-in house is always becoming askew,
bit-by-bit
by its inhabitants.

Less by those who clean up after themselves,
more by those who let things lie where they fall.

A dropped magazine,
letters on the floor,
water filled bowls tipped or overturned,
crumbled bits of clay scattered across the floor.

You would leave things crumpled
where you stood, sat or lay on them.
Rolled up prints, someone’s clothes,
even pizza boxes weren’t spared.

You kept yourself clean, of course,
though one can be fastidious and careless all at once.
Floors and mats were in constant need of washing.

You were diminutive: four legs and a tail,
made no sound padding down halls.
Yet even when you could not be found,
disappeared into some cabinet, crook, or closet corner,
the feeling of you was evident.

Visible even when invisible,
the song of you was everywhere.

No longer.

The halls are silent.
The soundlessness of your footfalls
continues to be silent.

But whereas before the knowledge of your presence,
somewhere within these four walls,
filled every empty space with life
and love, resonating in my heart,
the now toneless silence is deafening.

Dogs with Dignity

2006-11-10T02:35:00.000-05:00

My sister Nicki’s dog, Sugar, may be dying, news which is rough to hear so soon after the loss of our last surviving cat, Fifi, and the death of one of her other long living dogs, Woola. Sugar’s mother, Clea, is also getting up there, and has been experiencing the numerous old-age problems that occur in convalesced mammals. Fifi had a flea problem over the last couple of seasons; Beth and I were wondering if the body’s aging doesn’t also affect the inner body, slowing down the immune response and whatnot, and if so, if the fleas and other bugs (including the microscopic variety) somehow know it.

With Clea being old and kind of pitiful, it’s still easy to think of Sugar as the “young dog,” even though she was probably less than a year old herself when she gave birth to him. So it’s tough for me to see him as a dog that’s had his day.

Anyways, what’s wrong with Sugar is an enlarged kidney (or is it liver?) and he has developed a growth inside his body which may or may not be cancerous. If it’s not, they might try to remove it, so he can live on a while longer. If it is, they’ll probably just skip the procedure, and take care of him, surrounding him with love, until he dies.

I know this because my sister has taken him to the emergency animal hospital for a biopsy. He’ll need a more invasive biopsy performed with anesthesia to determine the true extent of his illness. This is not an exact science -- and Sugar could die during the biopsy operation itself. She may prefer to not go that route, and bring him home to die at his own pace, where he can get the best quality of life care an old dog can get: the love and care of his human and other animal friends and family.

Beth and I did so with Morris and Fifi (Socks died unexpectedly). Morris had a stroke and was clearly out of his head, so we put him in a basket with blankets and laid him by our bed. We gave him water until he could take it no longer, then, after a while, he died. As I wrote in an earlier blog, we did the same with Fifi. We didn’t want the sometimes frightening feeling of the veterinarian’s office to be the backdrop for their last moments.

Even in this day and age, with veterinarians treating pets for cancer and other ailments, with all night emergency rooms for dogs and cats (we took Fifi to one once -- she was in diabetic shock, the vet cured her with some sugar water), advanced food formulas, medications specialized for their body types and breeds, designer toys, etc. etc., even now, nobody bats an eye at the idea of allowing the animal to die with dignity when his time is up.

So why is it we can treat our pets this way, and not ourselves? Why do we insist on getting the last breath out of people who will never awake again to experience it? Why do we send our elderly family members away to die, instead of keeping them home with us? Why do we pass legislation to prevent the pulling of plugs? Why do loved ones go to court to refuse the rights of people to seek out their own treatments, to eschew expensive and poisonous medications, and to choose the approximate time and place of their own expiration?

Is it because we love our animals less? Because they can’t engage legal representation? Twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now, will humans treat our own deaths more sensibly? Or will we be putting our pets on life support?

I don’t have a definitive answer to any of these questions. But it’s something to think about.

Nicki, kiss Sugar on the schnozz for me.

After the Fall

2006-11-08T06:23:00.000-05:00

Many years have I still to burn, detained,
like a candle-flame on this body; but I enclose
blue shadow within me, a presence which lives contained
in my flame of living, the invisible heart of the rose.

So through these days, while I burn on the fuel of life,
what matter the stuff I lick up in my daily flame;
Seeing the core is a shadow inviolate,
a darkness that dreams my dream for me, ever the same…

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves…

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, find an exit
from the fallen self…

But dipped, once dipped in dark oblivion
the soul has peace, inward and lovely peace.

--from D.H. Lawrence

The most important call, ever

2006-11-05T15:46:00.000-05:00

I just got a call from Rush Limbaugh, asking, no, imploring me to vote conservative Tuesday, to prevent liberals from taking over the government, and assumedly, ruining it. Rush called me -- David Leone! What an honor. What importance this election must be for a syndicated millionaire addict talk show host to take his valuable time to call a guy like me. I’m so honored. It’s incredible. If only I could vote for Rush for congress. What a better world it would be then!

Rush didn’t let me get a word in edgewise, which my wife suggested means it was actually a recording, but I know better -- that’s the way he always talks! Rush. What an honor! Better stay by the phone tomorrow; maybe I’ll get a call from a major TV figure who’ll convince me that liberals can’t be trusted because they make up statistics during debates or in books, and even use them again when corrected, or because liberals pad their resumes with awards they never received. So, maybe I’ll get a call from Bill O’Reilly! Or Ann Coulter! I’m giddy at the possibilities!

Hey, maybe I will vote conservative. Because if there’s one thing I don’t want, it’s to ruin a government that any totalitarian dictator, kleptomaniac, or crack-addled idiot would be proud to call his own.

Let me just run down my list of modern conservative values. I thought I knew what values were important: honesty, integrity, taking care of the elderly, hurt and destitute, respecting the liberties of others, wishing for a robust economy that raises all boats, that kind of stuff. But oh my God if Rush Limbaugh thinks those are actually evil values, I must be wrong! That’s what I get for looking to scum like George Washington and Jesus Christ for my values.

But wait, what are conservative values? If I’m going to re-elect these important candidates whose morality is above reproach, I have to know just what values to look for in a politician. Maybe I can look through the news for some examples.

Ah! Here’s one: Marriage is between a woman and a man. And his mistress. And his crank-supplying gay lover. Gotta remember those family values.

Oh, that’s right; I also have to make sure to vote for people who are pro-life. Unless they’re against executing the possibly guilty. Or saving the lives of mothers seeking abortions. Or saving the lives of muslims caught up in an indiscriminate dragnet. Or those caught in a crossfire. Or those who live within a country or two away from where the 9/11 terrorists are hiding. Or those who need a doctor but can’t afford it. Got it.

Aha! I remember -- I have to vote for people who have an undying respect and honor for the 2nd amendment to the Constitution: the right to bear arms. That one’s easy because I already believe in that. Only I have to make sure to pick the people with the properly nuanced beliefs. I absolutely cannot vote for someone who also respects the 1st amendment: the right to free speech and religion. Or really, the 5th and 6th amendments, because terrorists might be able to exploit those freedoms. I mean, c’mon, civil liberties need to be restricted to only those people that non-corrupt politicians, cops, judges, and district attorneys are certain are really innocent. It’s a good thing I’ll be voting conservative -- that will guarantee that I won’t be electing corrupt politicians, who will undoubtedly guarantee that law enforcement personnel and soldiers won’t make any mistakes or act maliciously against anyone who might not be guilty of a crime. Whew! That’s a load off my back. I don’t know why I haven’t been voting conservative all along!

Are there any more values I need to think about? Oh yes. I need to elect people who provide good American jobs by ensuring that giant filthy rich corporations make more money then ever before. Because we all know how wasteful rich people are with their money. Just think of all the lavish things they’ll buy that will need to be made by minimum wage workers. That’ll keep us all employed, no doubt. But really, I’m hoping that my conservative congressmen vote to do away with the minimum wage altogether. Just think of it, if there was no minimum wage, you could pay 5 people the same amount as one person now. For $10 ten people could be producing goods. Unemployment would be zero! Imagine all of the products that will be made, shipped and sold, all putting enormous amounts of wealth back into the pockets of the companies. And then, you know it’ll happen, a few pennies on every thousand dollars will come trickling back down into our own pockets. It’ll be a utopia. Damn liberals.

That’s all the values I can think of right now, but there must be more, so I implore readers of my blog to help me out with some others, so I can be fully prepared when I head to the polls on Tuesday. Just think of the glory that this country would be if we all regained our senses and voted conservative. The possibilities are staggering.

UPDATE: No one bothered to respond, so to punish them, I voted Democratic. So there!

Fifi Ten Blankets

2006-11-03T00:27:00.000-05:00

My cat died today (Nov. 2).

She had been getting worse lately; she was somewhat deaf and meowed really loudly, she had some vision loss -- cataracts, I guess, and some arthritis or weakness in her legs, but otherwise she was pretty spry. She could still hop up onto things -- and when we let her out nearly every day she’d wander over our whole lot, into the neighbor’s lot and disappear. Usually she’d end up lying on the cool creek bed -- a spring that only has water when it rains. But she’d eventually make her way back to the house, by feeding time at the latest, picking her way through the tall grass and leaves. She was especially unsteady on the 31st. I figured the cool weather was making her legs stiff. Probably she was already on her way -- she’d had a fang fall out a few weeks ago from an infection in her mouth and we’d been giving her antibiotics, but I gather now that the tooth problem was likely a symptom of her overall condition and not a sole condition.

Anyway, the point is that she was a very old cat, and we knew her time would be coming soon -- this year or perhaps within a year or two more -- but we still were caught off guard a bit by the suddenness of it because we didn’t see her visibly ailing. Last night though, it was clear she was hurting, or especially stiff, or something. We sat in front of the TV and she slept on Beth’s lap for hours, got up for a little dinner, and then got on my lap (my belly, actually -- my too-large-for-my-frame stomach has been a nice resting place for her body for some time now) and went to sleep for hours. I tried to sleep with her but it became obvious to us that she was failing, maybe not for the last time (she’d scared us before, only to recover and live on again). But she was definitely sick. Then, in the middle of the night, she started losing motor control and began meowing loudly. Not sure if she was in pain or just frustrated. It took a few hours from then: we put her in a clothes basket and brought her to the bedroom and comforted her in her pangs. Then, around 7 a.m., she died.

Fifi (short for Ophelia) was about 17 years old. Which is pretty darn old for a pet. Beth rescued her and her brother Socks (Socrates) from the wild and when we got married, the two siblings and another cat she’d also rescued, Morris, became my cats too. They were my family, and while I am very aware that they got to live much longer lives than they would have if they’d stayed in the wild, it still is very sad to have lost them. Morris must have been around 18 when he died in winter of 2000 after suffering a stroke. Socks, who was pretty fat, died 4 years ago on Nov. 1, due to complications from his diabetes. Fifi also was mildly diabetic, though it never seemed to affect her until recently. She was also born feline leukemia positive, meaning she was definitely a carrier and could have developed terrible complications and died early, but she never did. The vet doctors all recommended that feline leukemia cats be put down when it’s discovered -- apparently they are all convinced that no cat would ever survive it. But Fifi never had any troubles from it.

I guess I don’t have anything especially creative to say. I just felt I needed to talk a bit about her. I loved that cat -- I loved all of them; they were as much family to me as other people’s kids. Of course, you don’t feel the same about kits as you do kids, because kits are adults that pretty much take care of themselves. But Fifi, Socks and Morris were all as much a part of my family as humans would have been. They are all three buried in the yard now. Morris is in the back, under some trees (we call it Morris’ Woods), Socks is amongst the trees to the north of the house and Fifi went under the rich soil in front of the bushes in the middle of the yard where she used lie, taking stock of things.

We gave them a nice home here, and my continual unemployment provided me some very top quality snuggling time with the Pooks (one of many nicknames for Fifi). She would lie on my belly on the couch, trapping me in front of the TV, forcing me to watch endless movies for hours at a time, much of which was spent on American Movie Classics. Clint Eastwood, I know ye well. Those sessions would often leave me too hot to sleep. I’ve got this temperature thing, if I get too hot I can’t shed the heat -- Beth has posited that this is because I’m actually some sort of reptile. Very recently, I made the comment that I didn’t need a blanket if I had Fifi on me because she was the equivalent of 10 blankets. So, in addition to Ophelia, Fifi, Pooks, Pooky, Pook de Ville, Fiferlie, Pretty Girl, Her Fifiness, and other nicknames, we can remember that cat by her American Indian-style name: Fifi Ten Blankets.

Life would be a lot cooler if we all went by Indian names, don’t you think?

life is sweet

2006-10-28T11:49:00.000-05:00

when the air is crisp and leaves turn gold
and you’ve got the legs and luxury of going outdoors
to enjoy it
you think for a moment that life is sweet

when you’ve got your cake and cream soda and your choices
of comings, goings and in-betweens too
and you know you can complain out loud
then life seems sweet

when favor is your friend and your friends and family
like to do you favors
and the only ones to hate you really just hate people like you
you ought to know that life is sweet

when you have stress but you’ve never really been stressed
and you look in the paper and see some who have
and think: that will never be me
you say out loud ‘life is sweet’

but when you feel the heartbreak of the tens
of thousands who don’t have the loves or a life
resembling yours
you truly know that life is sweet

White Noise

2006-10-24T02:10:00.000-05:00

I wrote the following poem when I was immersed in the machine, without focus for my creativity, without any goals for my life. These days I feel as if an entirely different white noise is sparking inside my head; it is a thousand-plus different ideas that are screaming to be put to pen: to poem, to story, to essay, to book. Whereas before it felt as all confusion, now it seems more as a fire, pulsing and spitting bits of passion. It's torturous to try to separate one thought from the next, one idea from another, but I need to try to get it down on paper, bit by bit, before I wake up one day like the old artist in O Henry's "The Last Leaf" with only an empty canvas to represent his life's work.

The space beyond my eyeballs
is fraught with random noise.

My daily trip to work,
plodding jobs,
endless encounters,
and discussions.
The end is not in reach.

The bang that began it all,
left an explosion of matter and light.
Is the Universe expanding,
or is it all just in my head?

The noise that clouds my sight,
the buzz that fills my ears.
Is there any reason to it all,
the white noise that is my life?

Ignorance is Bliss

2006-10-20T00:14:00.000-05:00

The little town of Apexlehem has been in the news quite a bit lately, for a fire at a used chemicals transfer site, as I noted in an earlier blog. Turns out the fire probably could have been a lot worse than it was -- environmental quality experts haven’t found much contamination in the air or water -- and eventually, those folks living right next door will see their housing values climb back up again. But what has been absolutely killing me is reading the daily newspaper interviews with town officials, who have been falling over themselves dissembling that they had no knowledge, no way of knowing, no possible inclination that EQ Industrial Services had harmful chemicals within spitting distance of the residences of the good people of Apex.

As a former reporter whose coverage area consisted primarily of that town, I found their comments quite distasteful. It is possible, technically, that most of them didn’t know what was there, as EQ took over the site three years ago from a different company, EnviroChem Environmental Services, which had been conducting the same type of work since 1987. But what kind of defense is it really, to say that the people elected and appointed to be in charge of the safety of the townspeople were ignorant of what was going on just under their noses? Several also claimed ignorance of EQ’s failed inspections of just six months before.

What they certainly did know was that the area sandwiched between all those new single family homes on Ten-Ten Road, the old downtown district and U.S. 1 is and has been designated for industrial use for many years. The old Pine State milk building is there; as were several other defunct plants and warehouses. That is, until the town’s thinkers got newer, light industrial and strictly commercial companies to move in, turning what was once a kind of a miniature rust belt into a modern business district. All very commendable and very good for the heart of the town. Change is slow, you know, so, since these town leaders clearly have been doing a good job in making lemonade out of this lemonlike district, one can hardly blame them for some of the leftovers still souring parts of the town.

But one can easily blame them for being ignorant of what is doing the souring. Personally, I doubt that town officials really didn’t know what was going on at EQ. I imagine their claims of ignorance were possibly technically true: they might not have known the exact types of chemicals on the site, while still knowing what type of business it was. But it’s possible that the mayor and town board members weren’t fully aware of what was stored on site -- town council meetings tend to deal with zoning issues, and less often with business proposals. Quite possibly, the previous company was there when they all arrived, and as such, the new company, performing the same type of work, might not need to present itself to the town at all, other than for certain permits.

So, while officials might really not have known what was going on under their noses, certainly somebody did. Which is why I have an especially hard time accepting that the town manager’s office was unaware of the situation. It just seems too farfetched.

But a really good mayor, a really quality town council, and of course, any town manager worth his salt (Bill Sutton anyone?) would have known what EQ was doing, which brings me around to my central point: either they were lying about the situation, or truly ignorant. Which one is better?

And so, as all this coverage continues, and the Apex mayor gets compared to Rudy Giuliani in the press for his presence, and the town leaders hold hearings on the issue, and everyone claims they want what’s best for the town so they’ll try to stop EQ from rebuilding, which all sounds fine and dandy. But the reporter in me is thinking of two things.

One is that I am pretty sure that there used to be a business in town that acted as a temporary storage facility for low-level radioactive waste (from hospitals and labs, etc.) before it being shipped off to some dump somewhere. Perhaps my memory serves me wrong on this issue, but certainly there are other businesses inside the town limits (with residential areas within a mile’s radius) which have hazardous materials stored on site. It’s nobody’s fault -- it’s just the town was way back never expected to grow up all around these places. So why can’t anyone admit it to their constituents? Is it truly better to have people think that city life is perfectly safe even if it’s a pipe dream? Is the image of Apex more important than the reality of Apex?

And the other is that all that time we wrote about Carolina Power and Light (now Progress Energy)’s planned expansion of their high-level radioactive waste storage on the site of the nuclear power plant in the rural New Hill area south of town, town leaders (excepting former town board member Doug Meckes) gave the issue the official brush-off. So what if the storage facility was not designed to hold that much waste? So what if shipping the waste to Wake County from nuke plants in Wilmington and South Carolina increased the dangers of a train accident or sabotage resulting in a radiation leak or fire? So what if CP&L wanted to use an existing facility built decades before instead of possibly a safer, but far more expensive storage process? So what if the energy company officials refused to consider the potential danger of a terrorist attack (in 1999) in order to release the radiation into the area? So what?

The town officials seemed to regard the entire issue as an episode of “not my business,” even though the business is truly in the town’s back yard. Should, God forbid, anything bad ever occur at that nuke plant, any environmental and economic impact would affect the nearby towns of Apex and Holly Springs the greatest.

For the record, our newspaper never took the stance that the nuclear waste expansion was a bad idea, but we agreed with the NC WARN protesters that there should have been a full public accounting and review of the plans by qualified non-company experts. This was an accounting we never got, and we certainly never got any help in the asking from the officials in the town of Apex.

So, while I find it entirely possible, and even plausible, that the duly elected and salaried leaders of the pleasant town of Apex, North Carolina didn’t know what was going on under their noses, and therefore can’t possibly be held accountable for a chemical storage facility with a shaky record going up in smoke and sending 17,000 residents fleeing for their lives, maybe, just maybe, that level of ignorance is simply business as usual.

Promise for a Cure

2006-10-16T01:39:00.000-05:00

A home away from house
in some forgotten ‘cale.

A journey to a place
beyond sight of heart and mind.

A vision of tomorrows
more interesting than today’s.

A place inside of time
where spirits roam unchecked.

A halt to endless questions.
A finish to the fear.

An arrival to the certitude
of a life worth living.

You shall get there.

Brother can you spare a second?

2006-10-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

I don't intend to use this blog often to rant, but I figure it's okay to do so every once in a while. I've been dealing for some time with living on the edge of being broke. Sometimes I use the term "poor," but broke is more apt. We're not poor; Beth and I "own" our own home, which really means that it belongs to the bank and we're renting-to-own. But after making the monthly house payment and forking over sums for the various utilities, groceries, and credit card bills, we have nothing left. And I'm not speaking figuratively here. So when it comes to seeing the enormous costs that come with the war in Iraq, (not to mention Afghanistan -- anyone remember that war?) and threats that we may need to use military force in Iran and North Korea, I really start to lose it.

That's because these days, I think of money in terms of $10 bills. My current temp job pays about $10 an hour, and so, when I take my lunch break, I sit back and think: "After taxes, Dave, you've just pulled down a cool $25." I'm not kidding, I do that. But then, if I take the luxury of buying a newspaper to read over lunch, I invariably see some figure on the current costs of running a federal government. Or worse, grandiose initiatives are referred to without mentioning the enormous price tag that accompanies it. So it doesn't take long for me to get to thinking what I could do with even a tiniest bit of that money.

According to nationalpriorities.org, based on congressional appropriations, the current cost of war in Iraq alone is about $333 billion. That's a lot of money. According to the Web site, if we funneled a mere $24 billion of that into fighting world hunger, we could cut the number of starving families this year, by half. In fact, at that rate, we could feed half the world's hungry for more than 13 years. A mere $10 billion per year would stop the spread of AIDS, according to retiring UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Or for a paltry $3 billion a year, we could vaccinate most of the three million kids who die every year of preventable diseases. Of course, that many surviving children would create other problems, but even if we did all three for the next 5 years, we'd still have $148 billion left over to address that.

Actually, this is how I used to think, back when I just had one of the lowest paid white collar jobs in the workforce. Nowadays, I only think about how I could spend even the smallest amounts of that money myself. It's hard to keep up with the counter on the page, but it appears that we are spending about $9 billion a day in Iraq. That's about $38 million an hour, $683 thousand a minute, and $10,000 per second. That's right, I said $10,000 per second.

Now, I know that pretty much everyone visiting my blog could find an economical use for 10 Gs, but since we're pared down to the bone, I could really use it. I figure that if I had a single second's worth of what we're paying for the war in Iraq, I could live on it, tightly, for about 8 months (untaxed). On two seconds' worth, we'd get by for a year, and I could probably afford to renew my weekend newspaper subscription, and visit either the dentist or the doctor for a checkup. On three seconds -- whoo-whee, we'd be in the lap of luxury. A minute's worth, spent and invested wisely, could last the two of us the rest of our lives.

Gotta go -- time to check my Powerball ticket.

I’ll take (pictures of) Manhattan

2006-10-09T19:03:00.000-05:00

I went to NYC for the turn of 2000-01 with two friends, and that was the year that the city was snowed in. My friend, Eric, was on the very last flight in -- the rest were cancelled -- which was fortunate, that he made it, I mean, because I hadn't bothered to copy down any of the hotel information, or his cell phone number.

I had actually for years planned on going for the '99-00 turn of the millennia, but I panicked that year figuring it was too large of a celebration not to get hit by terrorists. I always think about stuff like that, which is one reason I was miffed when after 9/11/01 people kept claiming that "nobody could have imagined the terrorists could strike in the U.S." Actually, what really bothered me were people working insipid jobs, like some Hollywood gossip columnist, saying things like "It just doesn’t seem right to report on who is dating who right now." As if somehow, in the other 51 weeks of the year, every year, writing a gossip column is a serious business necessary for the survival of humanity.

But I digress. Here we were, trapped in Manhattan in the dead of winter, and the snow would not stop falling. Transit was shut down, as were city services, like garbage trucks, and there was a blanket of white over the whole town. It was an excellent first trip to "The City" for me. I took a boatload of photos, but most of it is still unprinted. I'll get around to building that darkroom, someday, when we have the money. But I have a shot or three that I scanned some time ago, so I figured I'd post them here. When I get around to scanning some of my other better pix, I'll toss them up on the blog as well. If Eric ever emails me any of his good shots, like the one of the working women hanging out at the bar, I'll post them as well. If you haven't met Eric yet, he's the one leaning up against the wall in the 72nd street subway stop.

the floodgates of the heavens were opened

2006-10-07T16:58:00.000-05:00

The heavy rain last night made me think of these photos I took at Kerr Lake.

What Goes Up...

2006-10-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

The town I used to work in blew up yesterday. Well, the whole town didn’t blow up, just a hazardous materials facility in the middle of it, which sent a plume of toxic fume into the air and some 17,000 people had to be evacuated. You probably saw it on the news -- it happened in Apex, North Carolina, a once small town turned suburb of Raleigh.

The mayor was on TV, calling it the worst disaster in the town’s history, which is a pretty serious comment, considering the entire downtown burned to the ground in 1912. I recall an old man talking about how they thought they might be able to save his father’s general store, “but when that black powder caught,” it was all over.

A single burning building might not seem comparable to losing an entire downtown, but then again, this building supposedly stored toxic and dangerous chemicals that don’t react too well when exposed to the human lungs. Apparently, the release of such chemicals into the immediate environment could also be a serious concern -- what goes up must come down -- and the rain that followed on Friday will run whatever was released right back into the water table.

You know how they always tell you not to pour your used grease, motor oil, or other substances down the drain? Well that stuff eventually works its way back to the reservoir where people and fish and birds and deer get their drinking water from, or it seeps down into area wells. The release of hazardous chemicals works the same way. It gets into the air, attaching itself to dust particles and whatnot, then falls or is rained down onto the ground, settling on fences and cars and houses, and trees and people, and every where else. The rain helps keep it out of the air and out of your lungs, of course, which is very good, but it’ll probably concentrate any contamination to certain places, which could be bad as well.

It all really depends on what was being stored (the paper said industrial wastes including paints, solvents, pesticides and weed killer) at the facility and of that, what was turned into smoke. One of the biggest hazards of smoking cigarettes is not the tobacco itself -- I mean to say, tobacco is bad for you, but that’s not all that’s bad for you -- but the combustion of materials within the cigarette that the human lung was never designed to accommodate. Cigs are chock full of preservatives like formaldehyde, and agents to boost “flavor” like cyanide and the stuff they use to make battery acid. Those, and the bleached white paper that burns while you smoke it can be downright caustic.

So, any building fire can have the same immediate effect. The chemical reaction caused by the intense heat and fire releases bits of all sorts of toxic fumes into the air even in a normal building fire -- but when you add mass quantities of, say, pesticides into the mix, it could be extra dangerous. They’re not saying yet, but according to the news, nobody seemed to have been seriously hurt yet.

So anyways, the whole time I’m watching this on the news, you know what I’m thinking? That I wish I could be there. I was a reporter, you see, for the Apex Herald newspaper, a weekly covering the town and a little of the surrounding county, from 1995-1999. Leaving that job for a better one is what got me to buying a house in Louisburg. The better job didn’t work out, and eventually, after dabbling in some corporate work here and there, it got me to where I am now -- unemployed.

So I’m watching the coverage on TV, all the while my mind is racing to think of what I’d be doing if I were there. The interviews I’d conduct, the people I’d consult, the residents I’d speak to, the photos I’d take, the questions I’d ask the mayor during the press conference he gave. And then the information I’d get from the town manager, his assistant, or perhaps the planning director, that the mayor doesn’t have a clue about.

Something I’ve noticed about the daily papers -- is they always want to speak to the mayors of the towns affected during any big issue. Town blows up? Call the mayor. New business opening up? Call the mayor. When I was a reporter I never went to the mayor for information. Even a guy like Keith Weatherly who has been mayor in Apex for nigh on 10 years, and commissioner before that, and who must know a heck of a lot about his town -- it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind to go to him for anything other than a feel good comment. I mean, when you really want to learn about something, why go to a politician for information? I’ve never understood it.

It’s exciting to be a reporter, especially during times of conflict, or disaster. It’s what you live for. Plus, if you do any even decent coverage at all during such times, you’re a shoo-in for some kind of press award. It’s no secret that the trials and triumphs of the human spirit are what bring one the little recognition that you can get as a weekly newspaper journalist. But more than that, just being in the thick of it -- the tension, the apprehension, the dangers, the excitement of it, really, is like juice to the blood of the journalist. We live for those things.

So for a few moments, I get to run the investigation, beat the street with my feet, bump elbows with the daily and national press, muscling room for a better photo, call all my contacts, stand at ground zero of the blast, seeing, smelling, feeling the story seep into my bones, then spend all night and several weekend days pounding all that raw data out into a story, two stories, three, four, editing them, calling for confirmation, reviewing the pictures, choosing the ones for the most impact and poignancy, perhaps throwing them together for a picture page, perhaps spreading them all over the front page, and then watching it go to press, taking a half-day breather, and then starting all over again next week.

For a few moments, in my mind, I felt the journalist again. Then I switched off the TV.

On Monday I go back to work at a temp job.

More Bondage Found On the Web

2006-10-04T03:21:00.000-05:00

I'm very fond of found poems, which are essentially things people or companies have written which, looked at in a different light than intended, appear poetic, humorous, ironic, or the like. Found poems are gotten easily online, where one can browse through hundreds of pages at any sitting, and also because lists of things appear frequently online. Sometimes one only needs to print the list as is, without any modification whatsoever. Sometimes, it helps to remove the title, or introduction, or just print the relevant portion that turns it poetic. And sometimes it's worth monkeying with just a tad for effect.

Following are three examples of some found poems I have collected/made. Can you guess what they came from?

Physical Sensation During Injection

1. Cold, wet tingling in arm
2. Bitter, dry, metallic taste
3. Very hot feeling
4. Sensation of urination
5. Nausea

Page 1

One dead.
Terror threat level:
Explosion imminent.
Today's teens
expand and modernize
sickness.
Poverty and terrorism are twin evils.
Crackdown kills 5 marines.
We know the pain of terrorism
sided with the drug industry.
Intentional under-reporting or a cover-up
green light revenge.
The working poor
pressured to have sex.
Bush administration
deadly virus:
Diarrhea, stomach pain and vomiting.
Chimps, gorillas and other monkeys
at a crossroads.
A stable and secure society
knowingly sold contaminated products;
wait for destruction.
This is a time to celebrate, this is not a time to boycott.
No comment.

More Bondage Found On the Web

Compaction
Injection
Compression
Transfer
Extrusion
Blow
Rotational
Expandable bead
Foam
Vacuum plug assist
Pressure plug assist

Plastic mold
Continuous Molding
Lost wax
Slush or slurry
Die

Deformation (forming and shearing):
Forming
Hammer
Drop
Upset

High-energy-rate
Cored
Rolling
Shape
Ring
Transverse
Stretching (expanding)
Drawing (shrinking)

Stamping
Sizing
Bulging
Necking
Nosing
Extrusion
Spinning
Bending
Miscellaneous other

Explosive
Electroforming
Staking
Seaming
Flanging
Straightening
Shearing
Slitting
Blanking
Piercing or punching
Follow-up

Trimming
Shaving
Notching
Perforating
Nibling
Dinking
Lancing
Cutoff

Pulverizing
Crushing
Jaw crusher
Gyratory crusher
Rollers
Grinding
Ball mill

Face
Chemical
Turning
Boring
Knurling
Cutoff

Drilling
Reaming
Countersinking
Tapping
Broaching

Shaping
Horizontal
Vertical
Special purpose

Open-side
Pit-type
Grinding
Abrasive jet machining
Honing
Lapping
Spindle finishing
Vibratory finishing

Abrasive belt
Polishing
Buffing
Tumbling
Grit- or shot-blasting

Hobbing (hubbing)
Ultrasonic
Electrical discharge
Joining
Pulsed
Short circuit
Spray transfer
Submerged
Stud
Impregnated

Resistance
Spot
Projection
Seam
Flash butt
Upset butt

Percussion
Solid state
Explosive
Diffusion
Hot press
Vacuum
Friction
Inertia
Forge
Cold
Roll

Pencil
Induction
Flow
Torch
Dip
Soldering
Iron
Hot plate

Adhesive bonding
Epoxy
Modified epoxy
Miscellaneous other powders, liquids, solids, and tapes

Metal fasteners
Screws
Nuts and bolts
Rivets
Pins
Retaining rings

Stitching
Stapling
Shrink fitting
Quick-release

Empathy, offline

2006-10-01T06:26:00.000-05:00

I’m not fond of reading poetry online,
it hurts my eyes from the staring.
(docs will tell you to look away for 5 minutes
every 15, but who can do that when you work
all day at that machine, staring for hours straight
even though you rarely pay attention).
And the doing of it lacks the empathy I feel when
immersed in a book of poetry, or even a scrap
of paper torn from a journal.
I feel little connection with the author (or the subject,
or the predicate, or the vowels, or anything)
because of the nature of the net;
the poem is not in my hands, I carry it not in my head,
walking with me where I walk, breathing into me as I inhale
and carrying with it the forum of my mind upon exhalation.
Instead, I see it only as pixels reproduced on my screen,
while the reality of the poem is stored away in some far off,
air conditioned-cold, subterranean server room,
an entire author’s works crammed into an area
smaller than my fingernail (one electronic hiccup
and everything that ever was Sandburg is gone,
sloughed off into cyberspace).
A poem in my inbox is better, because I feel as if it has Arrived,
as if via special delivery (my own personal copy
of The Fog, or Dickenson’s No. 6) as the author
must feel when that poem is first Published.
But I still feel a need to print it out, and take it to the couch
for comfortable perusing.
No, I really need book in hand, and my sandwich in the other,
while sitting at the lunch counter, or on stone steps,
or with my back against a library wall (places where one
can appreciate the world’s workings and mechanisms)
to properly inhale the endeavors of one mad mind or another
(if poets were sane, they would not write)
before adding to the exhalation my own demented musing.

Atheism vs Davidism

2006-09-30T14:05:00.000-05:00

Someone asked me once: Is atheism devoid of meaning?

I take issue with the term itself. Atheism can mean different things, depending on your view. The term is derived from ancient Greek’s atheos, meaning without gods. Later on it became a more definitive “ungodly,” or basically, “immoral.” My thought is that since the term was created by the religious to marginalize those who seem to fit into a certain category, to a certain extent, anyone identifying themselves as an atheist will always be allowing someone else to define how they believe.

Put it this way: To some Muslims, any non-Muslim is an "infidel." Or non-believer. Very few of these so called infidels would be willing to allow this definition to go unchallenged, I think. But why should any non-believer of the Muslim religion have to explain his spirituality in the context of Islam? Likewise, why should anyone who doesn't consider themselves "Christian" have to explain their spirituality, worldview, or anything in the context of Christianity?

In my view, atheists only exist in the context of Christianity. For all we know, there is a god or gods, who consider the search for knowledge the greatest spiritual practice. If the earth was seeded with life by a fairly superior alien race, would they also not be gods? Simply believing that our universe started with a big bang might be considered a religious view, depending on the context.

Which is why I think that anyone identifying themselves as "atheists," are allowing their beliefs to be defined, (or undefined) by a religious group. Because of this, the religious group will always have a skewed perception of who you are and what you believe in, because you have been categorized into a package that they find easier to deal with.

They see Christians, Jews, Muslims, other "major" religions, sects, atheists and agnostics. They do not see how each of us creates his own belief system based on experience, upbringing, learning, soul searching, etc. And certainly, many of them do not understand how it is possible for someone who does not identify themselves as Christian, Jew, Muslim, etc. to have a spiritual belief, in some fashion or the other.

Even the very open-minded religious person can fail to make this connection. When people asked me what I am religious-wise in the past, I used to say "atheist" or "agnostic" depending on my mood, because my belief structure is constantly changing. Were I to define myself solely through a Christian lens today, I'd probably say agnostic. But to many, the term no longer represents what its coiner, 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley, meant, that: "only material phenomena were objects of exact knowledge."

In modern parlance, it means you are non-committal and need to be saved.

So today, when someone asks what I am, I’ll usually say I'm a "Davidist," after my first name. It explains everything.

half-empty

2006-09-28T09:21:00.000-05:00

“You see your glass half-empty”
the optimist says to me
over beers one sticky afternoon.
“Aye!” I says to him.
“Order another pitcher of Guinness.”

Merry Pranksters

2006-09-26T20:18:00.000-05:00

The death of musician Etta Baker, and a question in my daily paper asking why people like TV pranksters so much, both brought to mind thoughts about some of the famous people I’m a fan of, and why I cotton to them.

Whenever the news pops up with the death of some famous or well known person, there’s this feeling as if we’re all supposed to nod our heads and say, “oh that’s terrible -- that person was so important.” I guess it’s just another way of living vicariously through others; those who do what we wish we were doing, or who do something worthwhile or who attain recognition for something they’ve done with their lives make us want to identify with that feeling of accomplishment. So we pick our favorites, jaw about them when they are alive, as if we know them, and when they “pass” (as the southerners put it), we breathe a collective sigh, because in an esoteric way, a part of ourselves has passed as well.

I never used to react in any way at all when famous people died, and never understood the importance to others when they did. That is, until John Candy died. At the time, I was floored. I so identified with him, not on an interpersonal level, but because he made me laugh. I loved him in most of everything I saw (Canadian Bacon notwithstanding) and really felt a sense of personal loss when he was gone. I guess it’s more than just identification, I guess it’s the selfish realization that this entertainer will no longer be around to make one smile.

Later, when Phil Hartman died (in a murder-suicide committed by his wife!), I also felt something of a shock, though lessened by the fact that it wasn’t my “first.” And I was hit kind of hard by the news of the death of physical comedian and actor Chris Farley. Farley’s antics almost uniformly involved making his own too large body the butt of the joke. There’s a scene in the movie “Tommy Boy,” in which Farley nearly kills himself trying to change into a suit within the too-small-for-most confines of an airplane bathroom. Every time I see it, even the 10th time, I burst out laughing.

I guess Farley’s death hit me hard because there was such potential for so much more of such antics. According to his friends, Farley felt so much pressure to perform, even in his daily life, that he was driven to drugs and alcohol, which is what killed his heart. So, while I mourn the loss of my funnyman because he’s not around to entertain me any longer, I wonder if it isn’t my needs who helped to kill him.

Sunday’s “What’s Up” section of the Raleigh News and Observer mentions the sequel of the movie “Jackass” and asks: “Just why do they, and all the other pranksters on the pop culture scene, do what they do?” It’s a rhetorical question, answered inside with the classic over-analyzation of pop culture that movie and music critics often employ. “The joke is on us,” is the inevitable reply, because we must be somehow morally bankrupt to prefer Stooge-like antics to Shakespearian wit. Not to say I love pop culture, there’s plenty of it I can’t stand.

But there’s a reason why the Three Stooges shows are still in syndication half a century later. And that reason is simply that it makes (some of) us laugh.

A Roomful of Magic

2006-09-25T16:28:00.000-05:00

I just heard that Etta Baker has died. For those not in the know, Etta was a blues guitarist, but to me, her music is much less traditional blues and not even close to Stevie Ray, and much more like traditional folk and bluegrass. I have one of her albums, One Dime Blues. Hers is kind of a cool story, in that while she played with her family as a youngster, and kept in practice most of her life, she only tried to do so professionally after she turned 60.

Anyways, I really like that album, and wish now I had gone to see her in one of the local festivals she used to play at. I know that with rock musicians, a lot of their music sounds better live, but often, a lot of it sounds a whole lot worse. But with good folk, bluegrass, and to me, blues music, the smaller and the more personal the setting, the more enjoyable it is.

When I first moved to North Carolina, my good friend, music guru and all around fantastic guitarist Laura McLean introduced me to her circle of musician friends, who would gather together on someone’s porch or in their living room and jam for an hour or two. Boy oh boy, the first time you hear a fiddle played up close is magic. Coming up, the word “fiddle” to me was a word I could use to insult violinists: “That’s a nice fiddle.” Never did it cross my mind that I would eventually fall in love with the sound of such an instrument played so differently than in a concerto. I have some photos of those sessions. One day, when I figure out how to upload pictures, I'll post them.

Such was my introduction to North Carolina life: a roomful of friends, playing the guitar, banjo, harmonica, fiddle, and sometimes concertina, spoons, rattles, and themselves thrown in; it was truly magical.

Etta Baker was 93 when she died, so I imagine her musician friends went on long before she did. But, I suspect there are many, many, many folks who at one time or another, at an outdoor concert, a back hall gathering, or even in a car listening to her CD, experienced a touch of that “roomful of magic” themselves.

Listen to Baker here: WMP, Real, MP3.

"You should have a blog"

2006-09-23T19:29:00.000-05:00

People always say to me: "David, you should have your own blog." Actually, they don't sound so formal. It's more like: "Why don't you have a blog?" It's because I'm always spouting stream-of-consciousness type stuff about every subject under the sun, and always in a convincing tone, whether or not I myself am convinced it's right. Maybe they’re acknowledging some kind of natural writing ability on my part, or maybe they're just hoping I'll shut up and write the stuff down instead of bothering them with it.

But, because I'm sort of behind on the technological revolution I haven't done it yet. I had a MySpace page for about a week, but the "everybody is suddenly my friend" aspect drove me crazy in no time. So I deleted it. I can't even find a Google archive of it, I dumped it so fast.

I'm not behind techwise because I'm some kind of Luddite, nor due to some kind of fear of all things computer, like a lot of older folks have. Nope, with me, I just ended up working a bunch of low paying jobs where the companies were too cheap to do anything online, or I was assigned to some non-web project, or the project I was assigned to for the web took a nosedive and was trashed before it was ever published online.

And, since I'm a writer -- don't know if you knew that (although, in my view, anyone with a blog is a de-facto writer, something which peeps like crazyjohn should realize and not waste their money on graduate school for writing, especially if they do it well, which he does, crazyjohn, I mean). Since I'm a writer, I of course don't get the kind of jobs that make a lot of money, except that time I worked for an "agency," in which time my spouse was unemployed, so we were barely afloat and sort of broke anyways, so I've never had the money to buy all the things I want, like Photoshop (I'm also a photographer), web software, publishing software, and stuff like that.

But blogs are free, which is a nice service, even if they do make money somehow, because I'm a fierce defender and promoter of the people's Constitutional rights, including the right of people to write or say whatever they please, even if it's the kind of thing that will make a bunch of other people so mad they want to tar and feather you.

Speaking of agencies, these companies that produce marketing writing and graphics and stuff like to refer to themselves as "agencies" because it sounds more Rico suave and cool, I guess. Which is fine, but having grown up reading John Le Carre spy novels and a good Tom Clancy yarn (Ronald Reagan's term for The Hunt for the Red October), to me, an agency will probably always mean spook central, the CIA, the Mossad, the KGB, Mi5, or a place to get airplane tickets. What I wouldn't do for one of those agency jobs now. They do pay well, especially for writers and editors who are used to working for peanuts, though I've noticed that writers who start those jobs right out of college are less appreciative, because they aren't as aware that writers are supposed to be always broke and/or out of work.

So, these days, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I say: "I'm an out-of-work writer." That pretty much says it all, I think. Maybe someday soon, I'll be able to tell them: "I'm working on an in-depth human interest piece on the lives of the homeless. I've been undercover on the assignment for about a month now." And then, some years later, when I'm still living amongst the homeless, those old friends will be able to point me out to their companions and say: "Now that's an investigative journalist."

It'll be worth a Pulitzer, let me tell you.