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the daily betrayal

This morning I watched some old Pink Panther cartoons with Keaton before work.  It was awesome.  It was an awesome feeling, almost like when I was a little kid.

It was early enough that the light was that kind of all-over light where the sun isn’t up it’s just all-around.  It was foggy or just morning cloudy; the light diffused through all that water in the air and just was.  Keaton was in her Tangled PJs, blue bottoms with flowers and a big Rapunzel on the top, and I was in boxers and a white undershirt, beard still wet from the shower (no hair left to be damp, it’s the beard’s job now).  Sharaun and Cohen were still asleep.  Keaton cuddled up to me and jammed her feet under my thighs to keep warm.  I tucked her hair behind her ear (for some reason I love doing that) and patted her knee and laughed with her.

We watched about ten minutes together.  I didn’t want to go to work.  I could’ve made a pot of coffee and turned off my phone so the rapid-fire click, click, click of e-mail didn’t remind me of my delinquency.

At 7:50am I left it all.  My daughter, Pink Panther, the couch, the everywhere light of morning.  Left it all and went to work.

Again.

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maybe the wine did help

It’s not “writer’s block.”  It’s not.

It’s a day filled with too many other things, most of virtue, sure, yet “other” as compared to writing.  A shame, because I love writing and get all bummed when I can’t do it (either because of lack of time or writer’s impotence; the dreaded ‘ED,’ essayist dysfunction).  But you’ve heard it all before.  I got glass of wine, 6oz, I measured the pour first in the marked measuring cup (because ounces, bravely “out” and batting for both teams as liquids and solids, have always escaped my comprehension as a meaningful measurements).  There are apparently some ~130 calories in it.

A single calorie is something like the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of some defined measure of water one degree, maybe that degree is Celsius, maybe Fahrenheit; it does matter.  In what surely has to be some of the most convoluted math ever, if you burned this 6oz (wet ounces!) of wine, and placed one gram (or whatever) of water above the resultant blaze… you’d apparently raise the temperature of that water by some “meaningful” number.

The wine was an attempt to maybe whet the pen, or keyboard.  So many great writers are also great juiceheads, you have to wonder if there’s something to it.  I will never forget the feeling I had reading The Sun Also Rises (who cares if you’re supposed to underline that per MLA standards, I think underlining on the web when something’s not a clickable hyperlink is stupid; italics is more effective).  It’s such an alcohol-soaked tome, you can feel the pervasive state of drunkenness that enhances the clique (maybe fogs them, too?).  It’s funny, I’ve told Sharaun before how, when I read books about people who are abusing substances, like The Sun Also Rises and On the Road and Ham on Rye and The Naked Lunch, I feel an undeniable draw, almost a longing or an envy or maybe a sense of “what-if” wonder.  Same thing watching terribly depressing movies like Leaving Las Vegas; there’s something dangerously attractive (to me, at least) about selling your soul to the junk.

I don’t think this is what they call an “addictive personality” or anything.  If anything it’s more akin to how young boys dare each other to jump over big holes or spraypaint cursewords on their math teacher’s van (looking at you, Desi) – some kind of “bad is fun; broken rules are thrilling” adolescent mentality.  But anyway it doesn’t matter, I’m not here to write about my fatal attraction to mood-altering chemicals, I was writing about how I poured some wine to see if it helped me write… better.  I suppose better is subjective, and I don’t need to conduct a scientific experiment to tell you that there’s definitely some BJT-esque saturation region where the sauce wrecks and ruins the creative process, so… is there a conclusion here?

In the end I don’t think the wine helped, but the idea of drinking wine to help did help, so maybe the wine did help.

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not bad for freeloading

One of the most memorable things I’ve done in my thus-far far-too-short life was a thirty-six hour Greyhound bus trip from Florida to the hill country of Texas.  You wanted adventure, you got adventure.

Maybe not adventure like Bond would find in Monte Carlo, but adventure sort of what like Sal and Dean found on the road.  OK maybe thirty-six hours can’t compare, but there were some real now etched-in-stone moments for me during that trip.  When I visualize the time in my head I see that famous ending shot of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo and I hear the Simon & Garfunkel song, “America.”  I know, you’d expect Nilsson, but Simon’s bus-ride anthem lines about, “Michigan feels like a dream to me now,” and, “We smoked the last pack an hour ago,” seem to fit so perfectly.

In Defuniak Springs Florida a young overweight guy took the seat next to me.  I didn’t really want to talk, but he did.  I can’t remember his name, but whatever it was it should’ve rightly been Bubba.  Bubba was leaving his dad’s house in Florida and heading to his Mom’s somewhere I can’t remember.  Once there he was going to finish one more year of school and join the military.  His innocent eyes gleamed with the recruiter’s details: A career, authority, fat pockets and world travels.  On the bus in the first place to go visit my buddy in the Air Force and not wanting to knock the military, for there really is no reason to do so just because it’s not your chosen path, I played it non-committal and agreeable.  Turns out Bubba was a downright nice guy, like nearly every person I met on the bus, actually.  I saw him off somewhere in Alabama or something.

Somewhere, still in Florida, I decided to take up smoking for the rest of the ride.  The knot of folks gathered as they indulged at each stop was what convinced me; it was where the socializing happened.  I bought a pack (one of probably a handful I’ve ever bought in my entire life) and joined them astride the coach to talk about whatever bus-folks talk about in the middle of the night while they share cigarettes.  I didn’t even think about eating, they never stopped long enough to consume anything proper.  When hunger started to kick in I bought a family-size bag of potato chips and one of those pre-made sandwiches from a gas station.  In thirty-six hours that and a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes were my sustenance.

That night a dirty skinny dude got on from the middle of nowhere Louisiana, likely going nowhere to boot.  Guy had the shakes, DTs, white-horse  jazz-step, whatever you want to call it.  He sat a couple rows behind me, bopping and scratching and mumbling.  Made everyone around pretty uncomfortable with his retching sounds and junk-sick ticks.  Somewhere near the Texas border, in the middle of the damn night, the driver stopped the rig and actually put the sad sucker out, said something short like, “It’s my bus and you’re not on it anymore.”  Right out onto the road into the middle of nowhere from whence he came.  I remember feeling so bad for the character, turned out into the dark with only whatever hooch or scag he had in his backpack to last until those shakes and visions came back.  Hope he got where he was going.

The time I spent in Texas was awesome, one day I’ll write more about it (I’ve done a little already, again from the tobacco angle), but this was about the bus.

My bus back left Dallas on New Year’s day.  The station was absolutely packed to the gills and every single bus was running late.  I couldn’t find a place to set up camp inside so I wandered out into the pull-through area where there were already several groups of folks sitting around on the concrete.  I settled down near a group of not-yet-old black guys who were sitting atop their suitcases and duffle bags, situated in a circle tossing dice, smoking, and seemingly having a grand old time.  After a while the asked me to join them and I enthusiastically accepted.  By this point the whole trip had me pretending I was some windblown road-dog character from a novel, out cutting his teeth on the world or something.  I had a great time playing some Dallas bus-stop variation of Gin with the guys, smoking menthols and swapping stories.  When it got late (or early, maybe) I excused myself to curl up and sleep.  The guys gave me a tip before they wished me well, “Better sleep on yo suitcase ’round here; else it might not be there when you wake up.”  Good advice, and I did.

When I did wake my new friends were gone and my bus was still not in from wherever it was.  It was going on first light now and I wanted to get out of Dallas.  I saw folks climbing aboard a bus marked for Atlanta, which seemed a heck of a lot closer to Florida than Dallas.  I walked up like I belonged, handed my suitcase to the porter and watched him stow it below the bus, and walked aboard.  When the driver walked the aisle to do his ticket-check, I feigned sleep.  Soon I was Georgia bound, and it all felt even more romantic, breaking the rules and all.

In Atlanta I played dumb, pretended I had no idea how I’d got on the wrong bus, things were crazy in Dallas, all messed-up, I’d said.  The agent took pity on my ignorance and told me she could get me as far as Tallahassee.  Better, but not home yet.  In Tallahassee things went much the same as Atlanta, but this time I was only looking to go another few hours.  After a short terminal nap I lucked into another bus headed further south.  Before I left I called Sharaun from a payphone (no mobiles in those days, my friends) and told her I was five or so hours away.  In the end I beat the bus I was booked on by three hours, not bad for freeloading.

Man that was a fun trip.  Never again.

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don’t find any crabs or spiders

A co-worker told me this morning that OCD is an inherited trait.

But I didn’t learn that today.  No, no; I’ve known (via empirical evidence) for a few years now that OCD is an inherited trait.  I’ve seen it firsthand, passed on (passively, at least) lovingly from me down to our daughter.

First, some setup: We’re not talking OCD like those half-hour shows you see on cable at night where the girl washes her hands so many times a day that they are bleeding and raw.Not the kind of OCD like the guy who locks and unlocks the door to his apartment nineteen times when coming and going.  Nah… this is just the kind of OCD like I have, where, when I see a tableful of magazines and papers and remote controls I want to stack them in a neat pile according to size.

So, bad… but not really life-impacting.  More like this stuff, or these things, or maybe a little of this.  Strange; odd; eccentric; but overall nothing more than the the human cruft we all come with.

Now then… here I am to tell you another endearing story, the germ of which is the ongoing joke about my daughter’s inherited OCD.  This story is about Keaton’s somewhat ritualistic morning “goodbye” routine.

Some mornings when I leave for work, Keaton is already awake.  Some mornings, she’s still asleep in bed.  But nearly every morning, regardless of her waking state, she manages to communicate the following to me before I close the garage door, get into the car, and drive away for the day:

Daddy!
Don’t work too hard.
Think about me and how much love that I give you.
Don’t find any crabs or spiders.
Tell anyone I know that I said, “Hi!”

Always those exact words, always those exact phrases, always said in that particular order.  Almost every single day.  Even on days when she’s hard asleep and I make it all the way to the car backing out of the garage she’ll sometimes burst into the garage in her pajamas and wait for me to roll down the window so she can say her little piece.

Most of it makes sense and is expected “goodbye” fodder… all but that bit about “crabs and spiders.”  Who knows… maybe she really doesn’t like crabs and spiders (I’ve always thought they look sort of similar anyway, so maybe they’re equally undesirable to “find” in her mind).  Good advice in the end, though, I suppose…

I really do love that little girl.  Goodnight.

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ain’t no flies on me

At the top of my lungs I yelled, “I DIDN’T WRITE YET THIS WEEK BECAUSE I WAS BUSY.”  The emptiness of the void brought my own voice back to me, diminished just a little, ‘I DIDN’T WRITE THIS WEEK BECAUSE I WAS BUSY.”  Turns out that few minutes each night I don’t write where I feel pangs of regret and maybe even some kind of personal-guilt (which is, I think, a mostly Catholic thing) really don’t matter.  There’s much to be proud of of and happy about.  Out here in my corner of the internet are some 900,000 words, so there ain’t no flies on me.

I guess the past two nights I’ve been doing work.  Not sawmill-work but instead the lustful work that is getting to 80% on the itinerary for our coming RV odyssey.  The approach has been more structured than I first thought it would have to be.  At first I was trying to fit a trip into a number of days, but realized quickly this wasn’t working.  Realizing I had to first set some boundaries, I instead started by defining the average miles we’d be willing to drive on a driving day.  Next, I defined a driving vs. not-driving ratio to ensure we had sufficient “off time” to where things would feel like a vacation instead of an extremely long drive with no real destination.  With those two guideposts, it was easy to come to reasonable totals for both total trip miles and total trip days.

Oh and things are moving forward.  We have a start date, we have budget, we have an end date, we have a better-than-rough route, we have a good number of “zero days” sprinkled throughout.  In fact, today I put $300 down to reserve our thirty foot RV.  Not only that, but I made the motions at work to get the slotted time away.  I mean, things are coming together, and I’m a little more sure this thing is actually happening – even if the cost is somewhat “extravagant” for a family vacation (although, as six-week-long vacations go… eh…).  One day in the future, when I get each night’s campgrounds defined, I’ll share a more detailed itinerary.  But tonight I’m excited enough about the major stops and locations that I just wanted to run them down.

8,200 miles.  Where are we going?  What are we seeing?  A day at Crater Lake.  A stay with my family in Oregon.  Four days in Yellowstone.  Half a day at Mt. Rushmore.  A morning at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  A day at Niagara Falls and a day at Antietam.  A couple days to tour DC.  A two-day drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway with a back-country overnighter.  A dip into the deep south to hang with our southern folk.  A day in the Ozarks.  The better part of three days in the Grand Canyon.  Hoover Dam and a day in Death Valley.  Independence day with friends in the California high desert and then back home again some forty-five days after we leave.  Those “days” I mention are what I call “zero days,” no-driving days, stoppage days.  On top of that we put thousands of (hopefully scenic) road underneath us.

Yes I’m sad that we had to cut Glacier and Badlands and Arches and the Rockies and the Keys and New Orleans.  But man, I think we’re doing really well for six weeks.

There’s still lots to be defined and tons of details to settle.  That means I should get my nose back in these books and websites and sign off now.

Goodnight.

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rocket dream

No re-read; streaming direct; how bad is it?

My family and I were living in a condo by the beach, maybe the sixth or seventh story, high enough that we were afforded a view.  On the south side of the living room there was a large two-panel sliding glass door through which, to the north, you could see the beach, the waves themselves.  Directly outside and below was that kind of pre-beach landscape, dunes and clumps of tall windblown grasses and those kind of ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand.

One afternoon we all sat together, watching something on television.  Sitting nearest the glass doors, I noticed a small Jeep making its way through the dunes and grasses and ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand, bound for the surf.  I thought it strange, but not too strange.  In the back of the truck I could see what appeared to be several lengths of large-diameter PVC pipe.  I hmmmph’d and turned back to the TV, but only until I saw the smoke.

Now parked on the beach, I could see two figures outside the Jeep.  What I thought was pieces of PVC were now lined up in a row on the sand, the men moving from one to the next.  Suddenly, one of the pieces of PVC belched fire and smoke at the sand-end, and shot upward into the sky at high speed.  That’s when I realized: the things were some kind of rockets.  At first I was amused, thinking maybe these two guys were launching some high-grade fireworks on the sly, hiding out below the dunes to lay low from the law.  But once I saw one zoom higher and got a look at it from eye-level before it disappeared in a point far above my head, I realized they weren’t toys.  That’s when I got scared.

I turned to tell my folks, who were by now also looking outside with interest, when one of the rockets already in-flight seemed to lose power a few hundred feet above our level.  I watched as the metallic nosecone dipped towards the earth and the thing began to fall.  Before it could turn completely nose-down, however, the thruster re-engaged and began propelling the thing nearly horizontally.  I tried to say it out loud, “It’s coming right at us!,” but the thing was just too fast.  It was simply too quick to react, it was smashing through the window.

Directly across from me, I assumed my dad would be a direct hit.  Instead the thing, which I could see now was about a foot round by five feet long and had separated from the conical silvery top, lay smoking and faintly buzzing just to his left alongside the couch.  For what seemed like one terrifying, and shameful, minute – I simply cowered in a catcher’s position with my hands clamped over my ears, expecting to be consumed in a fiery explosion.  I don’t know why my reaction was inaction, I only thought it strange it after I woke from the dream.

After realizing we were all alive and that the thing which had crashed through our window still lay in two pieces on the other side of the room, I came out of my duck-and-cover position and tried to think fast.  Still very much afraid for my life and wondering if we’d all be blown up, with an edge of desperation in my voice I asked my stunned family, “What should we do?!  Should we call the cops?  Should I throw it out the door?!”  No one answered.  I began to panic.

I grabbed the body of the thing, tossed it out the shattered doors.  I watched as it fell, hit the ground, and bounced unrealistically high, near on-level again with our condo on the sixth or seventh floor.  Rockets shouldn’t bounce, I thought.  The thing dropped again, bounced again, lower this time.  Again and again until it settled in the tall grass and sand and those kind of ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand, seemingly now malignant and much less threatening out of the room.  Tearing myself away from watching it, I similarly tossed the metal nosecone.  Same thing; bounce-a bounce-a bounce-a and an anticlimactic ending in the dunes.

I love it when I remember dreams this well.  Goodnight.

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providence is something

Keaton got into kindergarten.  Most of the fears I wrote about yesterday were unfounded.

Turns out there are schools in the district who do the “queue-up” thing ala Zeppelin tickets, but Keaton’s future school isn’t one.  Sharaun simply swung by early, grabbed a registration packet, brought it home and filled it out, and returned it.  Turns out the school was fine with a passport instead of a birth certificate, and our city utility bill proved residence in place of the county one they wanted (but that we didn’t have because I stopped paper billing on every bill that would allow me to).  In the end, I believe Sharaun walked away feeling redeemed and good about the whole thing.  Sure, maybe we weren’t strictly prepared, but it all worked out.  Providence is something we’re certainly never wanting.

I haven’t written because work has been crushing.  Sharaun calls around 6pm and asks me if I’m going to be working much later.  I respond, quite honestly yet also facetiously, “I could work until midnight and still not be caught up for tomorrow.”  And I could.  I’m behind.  Maybe a full eight hours worth from where I’d like to be.  It’s funny how the brain prioritizes stuff; in my case almost subconsciously.  Things naturally drift to the bottom, stay there until someone brings them up again.  Our inherent inefficiency; our inability to multi task.  I know I write about the ebb and flow of stress at work, write about it a lot… but sometimes, when I cast my mind back over the day and what there is to write about, if nothing “abstract” pops up I’m left with either not writing at all (last night) or writing about what dominated the day.  So I do.

Goodnight.