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salty-tangy

Writing for me lately has been hard.  Writing for me this week on vacation has been beyond hard.

I’ve had so much time to do other things than write.  Things on the beach.  Things at the park.  Things even in the room.  But above all things with Sharaun and Keaton and friends.  And in the end, what’s better?  Forcing some writing while in a slump or taking a little break and enjoying some coffee while the ocean breeze rides the sun, tangy-salty through the open window.

Last night we went to dinner at a place called Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles.  It’s down near Crenshaw in L.A. and it’s exactly what it sounds like: fried chicken on top of a waffle, syrup and all.  The restaurant was lit inside by red and yellow neon and overhead fluorescents.  Walking in the place looked like something right out of a Tarantino film.  We did this sans kids and went late; Roscoe’s is open until midnight.  We had spent the afternoon at the beach and had worked up a good appetite.

Today we’re going down to feed the ducks at a big pond.  Sharaun is perpetually excited that we’ll run into celebrities (we’ve had sushi with McSomebody from TV and a second-handed brush with some world-famous surfer guy).  Maybe we’ll run into Natalie Portman at the duck pond.

I’ve been sinning though; checking work e-mail regularly on the phone.  Not responding, but checking.  So far I count four “aww craps” I have to react to.  I’m trying to hide from them just for another couple days before I have to come back to reality and face them.

And now I’m going to hide from the reality that is blogging; goodbye.

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alliteration

A week off work is welcome.

We arrived yesterday in Southern California.  Stayed in a hotel and had dinner with local beer.  We woke early to dine on continental breakfast; although, technically, I think the eggs and bacon and biscuits and gravy actually disqualify it from being truly “continental.”  On the road again and through the bizarre California coastal geography: rocky mountains covered in eucalyptus and yucca that simply dead-end at the sea.

We made straight-away for the beach.  Got there early, the fog had yet to burn off but it wasn’t too cold.  The kids stood in the wash and dared the waves to come get them.  The waves rose to the challenge and eventually took out all three girls: Keaton and her friends.  A roller with force pitched them all into the surf.  Oh it was tears and shock for a minute, but the trauma was soon forgotten and they were back taunting the waves in no time.

Up early tomorrow to try and do the vacation workout routine.  I want to run on the beach but I hate running.

Goodnight.

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shipping off

This was a good weekend.  The weather was perfect.

Sundays are even more fantastic when you’re not thinking about the fact that they’re the capping days of the weekend.  Last week I barely wrote; work, work, work.  But this week: this week is vacation.  And that means that right now, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, this day is even sweeter and more appreciated than usual.  With no coming week of work to look forward to all that’s in my head is what has to happen to prep for the time off.  We’re spending a week at the beach down south; roadtripping our way down through the valley tomorrow.  I’ve got the laptop loaded with Disney movies and the screen hooked up in the car for Keaton… and Sharaun’s getting the requisite road snacks.  I’m excited to get out of town and spend some time with the family.

Because I’ve been having such a difficult time writing lately, I decided the best sure-fire way to get some content, any content, up on the blog was maybe to do a picture post.  So I took a gander at a couple weeks or so worth of pictures I’ve taken on my busted iPhone and found a few worth talking to.  Below is what I decided on.  A nice collection of random images from the phone.  Each picture comes with a caption.  Even with an entire weekend at my disposal, this is seriously the best I could come up with.  I mean, this is some awful writer’s block I’ve got going on… anyway enjoy the pictures.

[nggallery id=40]

And now it’s after dark and I’ve spent the day in leisure.  Time to pack and prepare for our week away.

Goodnight.

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the sun < my day

Tuesday and the week already blows.

Tomorrow I rise before the sun, get on a plane just as the sun is showing up, and get back home on that very same plane sometime after the sun is gone again.  Who knows, if there are no windows in the conference room I’ll call home for the day I may not even see the sun for a whole twenty-four hours.  I suppose day-traveling like this is somewhat redeemed by the fact that it’s not commercial.  No parking garages; no security lines; no taking off shoes; no burned-tasting airport Starbucks.  Just a sleepy hour or so with other corporate commuters I plan to iIgnore, buried in the music.

It’s a quarter till ten at night.  A have a meeting at ten that’ll burn forty minutes or so.  After that Sharaun wants me to get out the ladder and climb into the rafters and pull down a bunch of old books and picture frames and other stored-and-forgotten who-knows-whats for some junk-swapping party she has tomorrow.  I take this to mean that, even though I may temporarily cheer the removal of some amount of junk from our house, an equal amount of different and new junk will come back tomorrow night to take its place.  The new stuff then, will enter the rotation, and something else will no doubt move up into the rafters where it will await next years junk-swap.  This is a very suburban-American thing to do.

After the romp in the rafters I need to hit the shower and shave my head.  Yes; I shaved my head.  Bald.  100% bald.  I called it my “last haircut.”  Something I’ve been thinking about for a while and went through with just this last weekend.  “Last haircut” is a misnomer, though, as I find myself shaving the thing every two to three days to keep it nice and slick-shiny.  And since tomorrow I’ll be holed up with the various high mucky-mucks at the sawmill I feel a need to look my slick-shiny best.  Shaving at night seems safest, even though I’ve yet to cut myself having done it solo twice already.

All this means I won’t be in bed before midnight… leaving me with a scant five hours to sleep.  Not enough by at least two hours if you ask me.

Finding time to write at all was hard.  Goodnight.

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sharp sticks & throwing stars

Afternoon; most gorgeous Saturday on record; someone call the Almanac.

Sonic Youth is on the stereo and “Teenage Riot” sounds fuzzy and sunny and just perfect for the moment.  You might ask why I’m not outside doing something in the gorgeous weather… it would be a good question.  Sharaun’s down at a local park doing a changing-table “outreach” thing for her mom’s group and I’ve got Keaton plus two more girls (daddy daycare up in here), daughters of our friends.  And even though the girls and I played outside for an hour or more they soon tired of the warm sunshine.  So we’re back inside.  The day played out perfectly, capped with one of those perfect fireside endings where you’re just tight enough to have a burned-in smile and quick wit.

I can remember when my brother and I discovered that we could put sharp edges on things by scraping them on the concrete over and over again.  At first it was just sticks honed into spears, quite serviceable too, at that.  I imagine mankind has been making this same discovery for thousands of years.  One man scrapes a stick on a rock and realizes it’s now sharp and he can throw it at things and it’ll stick.  Hit a moving animal with one and it might die and then you can eat it.  Over and over again until we progressed enough to fashion smarter weapons and didn’t need sharp sticks anymore.  Then sharpening sticks becomes a discovery of young boys.

We turned it up a notch when the K-Mart in town began selling blunt-edged, but made of real metal, ninja throwing stars.  We each had one and we’d spend hours scraping them back and forth across the roughest parts of the driveway, perfecting each tine into razor-sharp points.  I do believe we made them truly deadly.  We could sink them an inch deep into the broad side of the fence when thrown with force; even deeper into the soft living wood of neighborhood trees.  We were the real deal; we had ninja-branded skateboards and we rode around flicking throwing stars into inanimate objects like wild mini-ninjas on wheels.  Back then if anyone in our mostly sleepy little Southern California farming town would’ve stepped to us we could’ve quickly dispatched them.

Stay back.  Goodnight.

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the right time to write

Friday.  Finally.

A long week and barely any entries.  That happens when I don’t write on a Sunday.  Sunday writing has become the key to a good week of entries.  Typically, I’ll get at least one full post knocked out (Monday’s) and a couple outlines or ideas captured down as drafts.  Then I’ll work on those drafts during weeknight evenings or over lunch break at work.  But when I don’t do Sunday, and I don’t crib down ideas… I’m stuck for the week.  Work wrings any free thought from my brain and I end up staring at a blank page most nights.  Such was this week… there was a bunch to write about but never the right time to write.

It’s 9:30pm now and I’m just thirty minutes out of my last meeting of the day.  I’m reclined on the couch, typing, and my toes are icy cold.  I’m wondering what I can snack on.  I finished off the bag of Goldfish Sharaun got in the bulk aisle upon getting home from work.  Sharaun, in some fit of sweet-deprivation, baked a box of pre-mixed chocolate chip muffins (I didn’t even know we had them), but I don’t feel like that.  Late night snacks should be spicy.

I shaved my head last Friday, and have shaved it twice again since then.  I like the way it looks, all bald and smooth.  Keaton also likes it and has taken to calling me “bald head.”  Sharaun is not so sure.  I’ve taken to calling it my “last haircut.”

Goodnight.

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challenging the sea

I used to be scared to death of walking on piers.

It was a thing related to scale; not a fear of tiny docks you’d moor a fishing boat to but of the large above-ocean boardwalks of Southern California.  There were a few near-ish our house when we lived there in my youth, and occasionally we’d visit.  I’d walk so cautiously, all the while looking down through sometimes inch-wide cracks between timbers at the waves rolling slowly in so far below.

The whole construction seemed to tenuous to me.  Here’s these stupid overly-confident humans… they are going to cut down trees and build a stick-bridge out into an environment they cannot natively survive in.  Like I shouldn’t be walking there; like the whole thing was just a bad idea.  The bravado of our race is summed-up by things like piers.  Fleeting instantiations of sentient meat that do ridiculously stupid things like shoot themselves into space and invent fireproof clothing and build roads though hulking mountains of stone.  The cocksure novelty is perfectly human.

The cries of gulls wheeling above, the creosote pungent in the air, the stiff breeze off the water – all doom-inspiring to me.  The farther I walked out to sea the more certain I became that a fall would mean death.  No one could save me down there.  If the fall didn’t take care of it I’d surely be washed into the barnacle-encrusted pilings and shred to bits; if not that then a simple drowning.  It all felt so… so creaky.  Like the whole thing was held together with spit and mud and every wave withstood was another miracle.

Who challenges the sea?  A fool, that’s who.

Goodnight.