Category: general

I have this purple shirt.

A solid-colored, long-sleeved, button-down purple dress shirt.  I love this shirt and think I look great in it.  I like wearing it un-tucked over bulejeans with black dressy shoes.  With that outfit on I feel special-sporty.

Problem is, everyone makes fun of my purple shirt.  No, not like some kind of bullying that’s serious – but that all-in-good-fun ribbing that you get from your coworkers.  People walk into my cubicle and feign shock and say things like, “Whoa, what’s up purple shirt?”

I laugh, because it’s funny; but maybe, just maybe, my purple shirt ain’t doing quite as much for me as I like to think it is.  I find this hard to believe.  Again, this shirt basically makes me into a paramount of fashion, I know this for a fact in my own mind.  Yet, still, people look at my shirt and take verbal jabs.

Come to think of it, I don’t see a lot of other men wearing purple.  I think I might be the only guy at the office who even owns a purple shirt.  But on the other hand that just means it’s all the more awesome.

No wonder people are making fun of it, they are clearly jealous.  As I stride around in the color of kings they weep.

That’s got to be it.

Oh hey, before I go, I stumbled upon this Wikipedia link the other day and felt extremely validated.

Goodnight.

Sharaun was watching a PVR’d Oprah tonight, one of the episodes where she “hooks people up.”

In these schmaltzy shows, Oprah does all sorts of benevolent things for people, some of them meaningful and of substance and some of them trivial and, in truth, folly.  During the parts I saw, she sent some Cher fan to Vegas to meet Cher, had Justin Timberlake give golf lessons to some pie-eyed woman, and invited will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas to completely pay off the mortgages of two families who were hit by the recession, had fallen deep in debt, and were at risk for losing their homes.  All very altruistic gestures, to be sure, but I think the houses-paid-off folks probably feel a little more gratitude than the I-met-my-favorite-famous-person folks.

How odd would it be to explain to people that the dude from the Black Eyed Peas paid off your house?  Think about twenty years from now when your kids, now grown adults in their own right, see a rerun of an old Oprah show (still in color, no less) where they learn how some pop-culture artifact plucked up off the top stairs on the stoop of the poorhouse.  What a strange twist to things.  Maybe something to keep in mind if things ever get that dire – don’t discount reaching to random rock star philanthropists.

Goodnight.

I made dinner Sunday night and I had to chop garlic.

Anytime I do this, chop some fragrant spice for dinner, typically garlic or onions, the smell seems to leech into my fingers and can linger there for days. It’s not something overpowering, you wouldn’t turn your nose were I to walk by or anything, it’s just a subtle note of the aroma when you’re close.

For instance, if I put my hand to my chin to smooth my beard, as I often do at work subconsciously, despite the fact that my beard is cropped short enough that it hardly needs “smoothing,” I’ll catch the scent on my skin. I can even increase the potency and notability of the thing by warming my hand; seems to bring it out. I do this, too; I’ll make a little tunnel, fingertips to palm, and blow softly therein. The warm moist breath spikes the residual scent, bring it more to the fore. Or I’ll wring my hands together, letting friction warm my skin.

Sure it sounds odd, but I like the “primal” feeling I get when I note that my hands smell like spices. It’s the same kind of ancestral “connected pride” I feel when I labor with my hands and find them rough for a day (before they regain their cubicle-dweller suppleness); throughout time humans were rougher and smellier and more physically tied to the things they did.

Sure fifteenth century nomadic Frenchman’s hands smelled of garlic and rosemary and whatever else grew in the folds of earth he hunted and abided in. Men and women alike probably also carried a deal more unsavory odors along with them; blood and feces and age-old sweat and dirt all other manner of “down in it” things. They were surely also roughened with work and exposure, hardened, creased and maybe even often pained. Tirelessly rooted to the elements that both governed and sustained them.

Yes, when my hands smell like garlic, I think of nomadic hunter-gatherers of the middle-ages. Strange.

Last night I had a dream which I woke me, I think, because it stirred such a horrid feeling within me.

I was driving, on our street, heading towards home.  Keaton and Cohen were with me, Sharaun wasn’t.  As we passed our neighbors’ houses on the way to our driveway I looked out the passenger window and was startled to see a large wild animal loping along the sidewalk in the opposite direction.  In the dream the animal was non-specific, as dream-things often are, yet I knew that it was both a) scary and b) man-eating.  When I woke I thought maybe it was a hyena or coyote or something, but I don’t think it’s important.  Still shocked and now a bit concerned, I made sure to fully close the garage door before thinking about exiting the car.  And even though it was clearly headed in the other direction, I checked the mirrors to try and be sure the thing hadn’t followed us in.  Once satisfied that we were safely separated I proceeded to take Keaton and Cohen out of the vehicle and head inside.

We weren’t five steps inside the house when I heard it: A gut-wrenching scream from outside.  In my dream I knew the scream was from a child, a little girl maybe of eight or nine.  I also knew that she was screaming because that animal had found her.  Over and over again she said “Oh my God,” and pleaded at the fleshy edge of her screams, “Please!  Someone help me!  Please!  Oh… God!”  I froze, not even through the laundry room that separates our house proper from the garage.  I had set Cohen down on top of the dryer upon hearing the screams, and Keaton and I stood staring at the wall in the direction of the noise.

I was absolutely terrified.  I moved to pull Keaton close to me, but then realized I needed to help this poor girl who was, as I knew from that dream-knowing you get in dreams, being killed by the beast.  But I didn’t move right away.  I stood there while she called out and I knew the time to intervene was running out.  Finally I was able to un-root myself.  I told Keaton to stay inside and lock the door behind me and I left Cohen on the dryer in his carrier.  I went into the garage and grabbed some heavy metal implement, then I grabbed another and one more still.  I opened the garage door to silence.

I was already too late and I knew it.  My hesitation cost the girl her life.  But I still made a cursory walk of the block, recruiting other neighbors as I went and arming them with the extra shovels and breaker bars and whatever else I brought.  I led a circuit search with them behind me eager to help, but I knew that it was of no use.  All I could think of was where the thing had drug her body away to, and I remember hoping that we didn’t actually find it on our hunt – it would be too hard to see what I let happen.  Because I knew she’d be rent and broken and gone from the world and I knew it was because I failed to act quickly enough.

I awoke with my heart beating fast and I felt utterly ashamed and sad.  I’ve languished in the deepest pits of despair over real-life sins of commission, and I swear the dream-inspired shame and sadness over this sin of omission matched it.  Sharaun was sitting up in bed next to me feeding Cohen and the room was dark.  I told her about the dream and it made me feel better to acknowledge the un-reality of it all in doing so.  The feelings slowly lifted out of my chest as the realization that it was all in my head sunk in, and soon I rolled back over to re-join sleep.

Dreams are neat.

2:30pm and truth be told it’s too hot to still have the house open.

Doesn’t matter; I’m stubborn about it.  Throw open the windows and throw open the doors.  Raise the blinds and turn on the ceiling fans.  Doff your longpants and don some shortpants, consider something that “wicks.”  “Too hot” be damned, what do we know from “too hot?”

For one thing, I love the fresh air.  You close a house for a few days and the air starts to feel “stale” to me, breathed to many times; recycled through dusty air vents too many times; stagnant.  It’s a psychological thing.  I also like the idea of being miserly and not running the air conditioning.

Hundreds of years ago the land where we live now was home to a Native American tribe that built stick-huts to shade themselves from the heat of the day.  Sometimes they’d dig down into the ground a ways before erecting the structure to increase the cooling capacity.  I feel like, if they made it through these 100°+ days with a dugout stick teepee, I should count myself lucky.  Somehow, thinking about the days those folks fared naturally makes me even more loath to trip the thermostat.

Sharaun, however, thinks that if the Indians had AC they would’nt have been so dumb as to not use it when it was hot.

She may have a point.

Goodnight.