Category: blood

Family, easy!

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hiding from bullets

My little brother.
I miss my little brother. I don’t want him to go to Iraq.

Sure, I put on a strong face and talk tough about statistics and how low the likelihood is of him being hurt… but to be honest I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to him. I feel like we still need a few years… y’know… for our brother-to-brother relationship to really firm up. I guess I wish he wasn’t going, that he was staying here. It makes me sad that he’s going. I wish he didn’t have to experience the war and being apart from his wife and family. I don’t want him to have to kill anyone, or hide from people who are trying kill him, or any of that.

Goodnight.

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one night in a hurricane

Give up, dreamer.
Wow guys, I wrote tonight. I actually wrote. I also watered the parched trees in the backyard. Last year, I finished the sprinklers in the backyard specifically so I wouldn’t have to hand-water the trees. Problem is, in finishing the pavers I had to break some of them… and I never fixed them. So now I’m back to hand-watering. One tree’s dead, one definitely hurting. The smell the water makes when it hits the sun-baked dirt just reminds me how hot it is here during the day… I don’t know where the weeds get their water…

The other day I caught a story on digg (the new version of which, looks excellent, by the way) about the Flaming Lips releasing a new album in on online-only format. The article was interesting enough, then in the comments someone said, simply, “Best modern band.” To which the next poster replied, “Actually the best band this instant is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.” Which I found hilarious enough in itself – that someone is willing to make a blanket statement that not only acts like you should already know (the “Actually…” bit), but unequivocally tells everyone who the best band is “at this instant.” At that precise moment in time, should every hearing-enabled organism in the universe attend a band-off comprised of every band in the universe, CYHSY would be the hands-down winner. Not to mention the fact that PF had barely finished penning it’s glowing review of the group, no doubt where said enlightened reader had learned of them five minutes before posting (as I did). Some of you may say this is my bitterness at people digging “my” music, hopping on that train. But no, I’m trying to make fun of this guy. Anyway, it got me thinking…

“Right now, the best band in the entire world is a band you will never hear.” That’s what I thought. Indie-elitists would be crippled by intense multiple orgasms if they heard of a brand new band that was not only completely amazing, but was also the definition of underground or little-known. That got me thinking: How could I combine both these qualities and craft the perfect indie band? Then it came to me: Create a great band, an excellent, stupendous, sublime band – that no one, aside from gushing critics, will ever hear. If you get really creative about it, you don’t even have to have a real band – since no one will ever hear them anyway. You just invent a band and start raving about them… their varied influences and emotional lyrics, their powerful musicianship and defiance of convention, and their notoriously elusive import EPs. I can almost hear the indie kids popping hard ons in their corduroys now. Eventually, someone would say they’d heard them, at a friend’s roommate’s place, on a crackly podcast of a French radio show that played the EP one night in a hurricane – something huge and mythic. People all around would know someone who heard they were about to sign, or were playing a secret gig under and assumed name down in Deep Ellum next week. Then you could say, much to the chagrin of rare 7″ seekers everywhere, that: “Right now, the best band in the entire world is a band you will never hear.” It’s genius.

Yesterday, Sharaun was watching some show on the MTV, and there was a plumply young lady running on the beach. She was talking about how she’s going to school and “studying marine biology” so she can “hopefully swim with and train dolphins one day.” I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but I think there are a lot less dolphin-training jobs out there than there are people who want to train dolphins for a living. My brother wanted to be a dolphin-trainer once… or maybe it was Shamu. Either way, I remember we used to make fun of him for having a new passion each week. For a while, he had a hand-drawn picture on notebook paper, tacked to his bedroom door, that said something like “Shamu Riders Only” on it. The next week, it was Bigfoot flying through the air, complete with a debris trail in classic sfumato, its huge knobby tires inches from coming down on a crudely illustrated burning schoolbus and it read “Monster Truck Drivers Only.” Monster trucks gave way to fireworks-making, which waned right as Civil War Reenactor waxed. Man did we give him a hard time about that. But it’s good though, shows he had interests, shows he had goals – even if they were ever-changing.

Really though, at some point in life, who didn’t think it would be cool to be a professional Shamu rider? There’s a difference though, between that and majoring in marine biology with hopes of riding dolphins. I’m not sure, but I just don’t think there is a big market for dolphin-riders. Just like majoring in hospitality in hopes of scoring one of those Travel Channel gigs where you fly around the world and review posh hotels… I can’t say for sure, but it’s probably not going to happen. And kids, I’m not telling you not to chase your dreams – maybe just make them a bit more attainable, eh? If there’s only one guy in the world who’s job it is to test the satisfaction-index of different condoms with different women – there’s likely a large line of prospective replacement candidates. Just count the Shamus in the world, then count the number of people who ride those Shamus on a weekly basis, and figure in the Shamu-rider turnover. Yeah… not lookin’ as real as it was before right? On the other hand, there must be hundreds of Bigfoots… and I’m pretty sure those guys don’t really need degrees…

Mmmm… finished early tonight, 9pm. Calling it good and putting it on autopilot. ‘Night.

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good enough forever

....purrrr....
This weekend I was a cat. I did all the things cats normally do, and nothing more. I ate all that was put before me, full or not. In my spare time, I slept. I slept without guilt, often thinking that I might be coming down with something, as tired as I was. In between eating and sleeping, I used the toilet, and in between those – I played. I played at a city park with my family, throwing frisbees and reading in the shade. I played at the waterfall park too. Man, it was an awesome weekend… relaxed to hilt, at ease to the nines. On Monday, my pop and I tried, unsuccessfully, to program his car’s built-in garage door opener to open his garage door. It’s the second time I’ve tried to make one of those built-in things work, and from my experience you’re just better of using the transmitter that came with the opener. Tonight (being as it’s still Monday), we’re going to meet up with Ben and Suzy and the family for fireworks in the park. I’m excited, I love fireworks.

The Bleat is what I aspire to as a “personal” blog. Posting every day without exception, each day with compelling comment and colorful, interesting wordplay. The ‘I’ -less style of writing is good, and I’ve even caught myself slipping into it the more I’ve been following the page. The guy writes for a living (and must do so all the time, considering the amount of content he regularly posts), so he kinda has an unfair advantage out of the chute. My paycheck, however, comes from doing something completely unrelated to writing… so you’re gonna have to weigh that when considering the quality and quantity of my material. Owell, I dunno if I’d enjoy writing for my food anyway – I’d have a huge fear that I’d “dry up,” like I know I tend to do when things get busy.

My dad isn’t active in the music scene, neither is Sharaun’s, nor anyone else’s parents that I can think of off the top of my head. In fact, you expect old people to like old peoples’ music. They have radio stations dedicated to music as the aged remember music. A child of the 60’s? Tune into Kool 105.9 to get your dose. Standards your thing? Lock KSWG 104.7 on your dial for the best of the swingin’ 50’s. What I’m getting at is that, at some point in their lives, peoples’ tastes in music get encased in ice. No longer are you stalking the aisles at the local record shop looking for your next favorite album, no more keeping up with what’s drawing the critics’ praise or riding the underground buzz. At some point, what you already know is good becomes good enough forever. I wonder when that point is? Right now I can’t imagine keeping one eye peeled for the next groundbreaking record. Is it just that, at some point as you grow older, the current generation’s music changes so radically from what you were weaned on that you simply can’t grok it any longer? What makes people turn away from discovering the new hotness? Maybe it doesn’t happen as much with die-hard music lovers, the kind of people who’ll bed an LP for a week and then leave without offering even a cigarette or phone number. The real users and abusers. Who knows.

11:11pm. Sharaun alseep on the couch, me in the back room writing and listening to music. We’re back! It feels good too… I can’t lie. Although I have to go into work tomorrow, it’s good to be home sleeping in our own bed. And now, I think that’s exactly what I’ll do…

Goodnight.

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a place to sleep

Good for the skin.
Man… just woke up from a hardcore nap, it’s about 9:30pm. Fell asleep on the couch watching TV, that damn flickerbox robbed me of another evening of productivity. I had big plans: unpack from New York, because my suitcase is still sitting on the bedroom floor; repack the camping equipment from this weekend, as it’s still piled in the garage from when I aired it out after returning; start picking up around the house, as it’s still littered with debris from the bridal shower and party Sharaun had here more than a week ago; I would’ve even settled for just doing the dishes from this evening’s meal. But man, I’m so out of practice with the regular chores that I’m really letting them slip. I feel like I’m all out of continuity or something. I set my alarm for an hour early on Monday, thinking I’d get up early and do some tidying before work – but of course I snoozed that entire thing away. Anyday now, I’m ready to get back into my routine…

When I was in the second grade, our teacher had a small squarish picture-book dealing with “hobby sports.” It had full-page action shots of people doing different things, with the title of the activity at the bottom of the page. There were pages for skiing, skydiving, surfing, boating, etc. I can remember looking at the book and flipping the pages. One of the pages seemed a little thick, too thick to be one page. Upon closer inspection I discovered that it really wasn’t a single page, but two pages that were somehow stuck together. Being curious, I carefully tried to pry apart the stuck pages. Turns out the were stuck together purposely, by our teacher, because one of the now hidden pictures portrayed the sport of “skin diving.” With the pages torn apart, I could make out the nude forms of a male and female diver. (Is it proper to have my pluralized “forms” be mated with the singular “diver” in that sentence?) At this point, I either began showing this to other kids, or Mrs. Kline spotted me – either way I was found out. I can remember her lecturing me for “ruining” her book. I think that’s kind of unfair. You glue two pages of a book together and expect inquisitive second-graders not to pry them apart in curiosity. How about cutting out the offending page, or not using the book at all – it was probably 15 pages max anyway.

Got a call from my little bro over the weekend. He’s busy making all the preparations for his tour in Iraq come December. His unit finally got their orders the other day, and they will be stationed at Camp Liberty (Camp Al-Tahreer in Arabic, and also formerly known as Camp Victory). Camp Victory is “… one of the largest US overseas posts built since the Vietnam War, [and] … lies northeast of Baghdad International Airport…” It is planned to be able to accommodate 14,000 troops at capacity. For a long time, my brother telling me he was going to Iraq was pretty much just that – nothing too scary. But hearing him tell me where he’d been ordered, and how he’s making preparations to send his wife home to her folks while he’s away made me really think about it. I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of fear for his wellbeing, I feel like he can handle himself and that the odds are with him… but all the same I wish he wasn’t going. I can’t imagine how it’d feel on the eve of leaving all the things I know and love for a year. Bugs me.

As much as I’ve been looking forward to our upcoming high school reunion next month, I’ve been dreading it nearly as much because tickets to FL are running between $500 and $600 per-person right now. Considering we’re only going to be there for a couple days since Sharaun’s scheduling around work, it was just hard for me to justify dropping more than a grand on the trip. So today, out of desperation, I started reviewing my various airline miles. Turns out, that we could fly for about $240 if we’d be willing to each fly a different airline. I called Sharaun, presented the ~$800 savings scenario to her, and she was down. So, I’m on United and she’s on Continental – but at least I was able to score pretty similar flight times so we’re not too disparate. Yeah, it sucks – but we already shelled out a hundred or so just for the reunion festivities… I am really looking forward to it, despite my lamentation. More importantly, it’s another trip to the airport and some more quality time on an airplane!

Need to make reservations for my trip to Shanghai, apparently I’m needed the 1st week of August. Also wouldn’t hurt to book travel for the (now two-week) September Taiwan trip. I’ve never been to Shanghai, so I’m looking forward to it – since I’ll know some folks in town who can show me around. Taiwan is Taiwan, we don’t need to go into that again until the time comes. I brought some work home tonight, y’know, to work on; never got to it.

Oh, and Wes is right about McD’s, I had already forgotten the whole McRib incident… a textbook example of repression. Goodnight.

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judgement day

Will he make it?
My dad’s birthday was this past weekend. My cellphone even went off to remind me, and I snoozed it telling myself to send a card. But, alas, I missed it. That puts me at three missed-birthdays for my folks (two for mom, one for dad). And yeah, it really makes you feel like shit. Having spent years perfecting my avoidance strategy with respect to uncomfortable situations – I’ve yet to call my pops and wish him a happy belated. What kinda kid chronically forgets his folks’ birthdays? One in his late-20s you say? Well yeah, that’s what I’d like to think too. My negligence is a product of my self-centered age bracket… where my life hinges on my friends and my job. I swear dad, I knew it was your birthday, and I mean to send a card… I even went downstairs at work to pick one up. Who knows what happened. Put another tick in the “terrible son” column and go back to loving me unconditionally OK? Thanks.

Today I came home all motivated to put in another 6hrs of work, but as it turns out I fell asleep on the couch and am now writing instead. I think I’ll get to some work tonight, but perhaps not quite as much as I did yesterday. Now, tomorrow evening at 5pm is my big pre-conference review meeting, where I get to debut my far-behind-schedule materials. I’m less concerned than I was previously, mainly because I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s just gonna be a photo-finish. I’m OK with that, I just hope I don’t get torn up over it too much in the meeting.

Wait… no one wants to hear about this, right? What do you want to hear about instead? What’s in-vogue with bloggers these days? Music?

So, the Desaparicidos were a one-off thing. As much as I loved that album, I can live with the fact that there’ll never be another one. Sometimes it’s better that way, like with the Unicorns’ Who’ll Cut Our Hair…, I don’t think the could’ve followed up that record. But, even tho I’ll never hear Connor with the Desa’s again – this new album by Little Brazil works nicely as a stand-in. A little bouncier and less afraid to slow it down, but it elicits the same rockish excitement when I hear it. Vintage sounding, with catchy phrasing and hooks, I’m all about it. Check it out if you’re not a pussy. Oh wow, I just read up on this band – and the bass player is the bass player from Desaparicidos! I swear, I didn’t know that before writing this paragraph. He either plays a super distinctive bass (hard to do), or has a lot of creative influence on his bands.

Roughly three months to go and this website turns two. Two years of writing. That’s a lot of writing. Some of it is good, some of it isn’t. I like to use the “random entry” link on the sidebar on occasion, just to see what comes up. It’s fun to remember writing certain things. I’m actually happy I’m still doing it, I couldn’t really have known I’d keep up with it back when I started. Based on the page’s statistics, I still don’t have a very big readership, and even less of what I do have are what you’d call “regulars.” But, I do see some IPs pop up pretty frequently – so thanks for sticking with me when I was boring, or when I was drunk, or whatever. I sometimes surprise myself by finding the time to write every day… but I’m glad I do it. Two years… man, that seems like forever. I tell you what, I’ll keep writing if you promise to check back every now and then and keep reading, OK? Deal.

Stumbled across this the other day online, and I love it. What a cool idea. This is the kinda stuff I love the internet for.

Goodnight.

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scrobbin away

Under the gun.
Ahhh…. I took Thursday and Friday off from work, which, coupled with the Monday holiday, made this weekend seem blissfully long. With family (sister- and brother-in-law) in town, we had a busy time trudging from coast to mountains. And now, although it’s Monday, and I have the day off, and I have a myriad of things I could be doing, I’m sitting here doing nothing. It’s been a good do-nothing day though, since we got up at 6am to take our visiting family to the airport – making it feel like I’ve already slacked for a full day when it’s not even noon yet. Of course, I have the appropriate guilt that’s associated with this level of laziness. I just don’t care. I’m not motivated to do anything… how crappy is that? Ugh…

Let me tell you what’s been keeping me up at nights lately. I have a pretty big-scale conference mid-month at which I’m a presenter. This is a pretty big deal for two reasons. First, the topic of my material will be a very high-interest one, and in fact the two times I teach the class are already booked to capacity. Second, I am woefully behind schedule in regards to developing my content. Normally, I wouldn’t be too worried – I am, by nature, a procrastinator, but I also work well under pressure, so it’s normally not that bad. The difference here is, I am teaching a class about a subject I’m really unfamiliar with. So, in addition to the normal task of developing the material, I also have to educate myself on everything. I have roughly two weeks to do this. However, per the development schedule for the conference, my material should be at 95% this week. People, my material is at roughly… 5%. For the first time in a while, I’m worried about pulling something off. Not that I won’t have the material ready in time – that’s just not an option, my real worry is making a fool of myself.

I’ve given bad presentations before, and I know from experience that it is a low, low feeling to not know your subject matter – and to have that fact be painfully obvious to your audience. Oh, I can still remember the searing embarrassment and desire to run and hide under a rock for the rest of the day. I do not want to experience that again… I’ll do anything. So, I’ve set myself a strict regimen this week. I’ll not only work during the days, but also log hours at night doing as much time-clearing work for the following day as I can. I’m dedicated to reading several pages an evening on the material I’ll be talking to – to get myself properly educated for any probative questions from the peanut gallery. From now until I leave this next-next Monday, I’m going to try and be the world’s most effective worker, cranking out not only my daily requirements but producing a top-notch presentation, as well as a sponge for information that may help me pull off the required feat. I realize that, in doing this, the blog may suffer. But hey, this seems to be the month of the suffering blog… so I might as well roll with it.

Sunday my truck broke. Yeah… just wouldn’t turn over. It’s not the battery, and I only know that because the extent of my car-problem knowledge is what happens when you try to start a car with a bad battery – and this wasn’t it. The thing would sputter and sputter like it was trying to come to life on a winter day, and when the engine finally bit and started to turn over it’d run for all of two seconds before just shutting back off. Perhaps the cracks in my exhaust manifolds that have gone long-unrepaired spontaneously turned into full-on ruptures and I have no back pressure. But honestly, I have no idea what that last sentence even means and the only reason I said it is because I know there’s some key relationship between exhaust pressure and the whole engine bit. So, painfully ignorant to the inner workings of my prime method of conveyance, I left that thing in the parking lot. And that’s where it sits today… waiting for me to play my AAA card and have it towed to some shop so I can be taken advantage of. Stupid truck… what did I ever do to it? Why can’t all machines be like refrigerators? Seriously, when’s the last time your fridge just up and broke down? I don’t care how exponentially more complex a machine an automobile is – that’s no excuse.

Tonight, taking a cue from the only blog that I regularly read, I checked into audioscrobbler.com and setup an account for myself. Audioscrobbler is like a natural extension of what I was trying to do with my “currently hearing” section on the sidebar. Except, audioscrobbler is much better. It gives you infinite history as opposed to my sidebar’s puny “last 7” or whatever, and it also assembles your listening habits into meaningful (at least to music buffs) data that can show trends and favorites. For someone like me, that’s a pretty intriguing idea. Not only does audioscrobbler scrobble together your personal listening habits, it offers aggregate stats for all the users of its service. So, you can track trends, and even get suggestions from other peoples’ playlists for things you might like based on what you tend to listen to. It will take a while to build up any meaningful data, but I think as a long-term thing I’ll replace my simplistic “currently hearing” output with some more interesting statistics.

And, once again, rather than wracking the old brain for more stuff to write – I’m calling it a night. Oh, and before I go – some pictures from our weekend hiking-season break-in hike up Pyramid Peak. We didn’t make it to the top, lost the trail in the snow, but it was a great day outside and a good way for me to remember how horridly out of shape I am.

Goodnight friends… goodnight.

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not old enough

The best babysitter.
Even though work is, for me, probably more busy now than it’s been in… well… in forever, I’m taking today and Friday off. My sister-in-law and her husband are in town and we’ll be doing the standard Northern California tourist jaunt. Today is San Francisco, this weekend is Tahoe. Tromping around the state is a sure-fire way to not get my work done… and although I have some level of guilt, I’m gonna do it anyway. But before that, I wanted to try and at least get an entry done.

There’s a certain CD that plays every single night in Henry’s Bar, Taipei. It’s a solo piano album; nice, quiet, uppity-sounding background music for an up-scale bar. I know this CD by heart. I can whistle every refrain of every track. I’ve heard the songs so many times, drinking Taiwan Beer while talking to the staff, drinking Taiwan Beer while talking to friends, and sometimes just drinking Taiwan Beer. Today, I was making travel reservations for my upcoming trip to Denver, and a very similar sounding piano number came on as the on-hold music. My brain was immediately taken back to Henry’s Bar. I got that familiar lonely-cold feeling in my gut, knowing I’m a world away from home but somewhat comfortable in a place I’m very familiar with. I could almost feel the just-a-little-too-cold air conditioning on my skin, and here the glasses clinking over shouts of “Hello! Good evening!” in stilted English. I even missed my wife and felt a little homesick. It’s amazing what music can conjure up in terms of vivid memories. I’ve heard that smell is the number one memory-associated sense, but hearing must be a close second.

When my family first moved to Florida, I was in the 6th grade and my brother was in the 3rd. During that first summer vacation, I guess our folks didn’t feel we were quite old enough to fend for ourselves all day while they were at work. So, we had a babysitter. Every day, we had a babysitter. Over the summer I think we went through two: both in their 20s. The first one was short with red hair cropped to her head like a boy’s, and I can’t remember exactly what the other on looked like, other than she very much not boyish. Me being in the 6th grade, it wasn’t very long before I had developed a crush on the second. She would lay out in the backyard in a tiny swimsuit, and I would sit safely behind our tinted sliding-glass doors and watch. She used to tote along her stuff in a largish beach-bag, and she’d leave her changed-out-of clothes in it when she went outside. I can remember ever so carefully peeling apart the top of that bag to glimpse the stringy white underwear inside.

Over her time babysitting us (which was considerably less than the time the redhead did), she began to talk to me more and more. Alas, when summer ended, she was gone. Then, one evening, maybe a week after I’d last seen her – the phone rang and I answered it. It was the babysitter, calling to talk to me. She wanted to tell me that she’d been in Miami the night before, and caught a 2 Live Crew concert (a band we’d talked about together before). I remember her calling me by my name: “David, blah blah 2 Live Crew blah blah…” How odd… a 20-something babysitter calling a 12-something kid to talk about 2 Live Crew. The conversation lasted less than a minute, but at the time, was a huge deal to me. All that, and I don’t even remember her name.

Not much, but I think what there is is OK.