Category Archives: Ramblings, ravings

mush for brains

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My brain feels like it has been used as an ashtray at the smoker olympics. Just plain stinky mush. Too many things going on with our son, and his school, and their spectacularly ill informed view of homework.

We spent a healthy (if that is the word) amount of our time this weekend pulling together a project for his class. I’m glad Trevor got to study American Indians in more detail, but the work was WAY over the top. Its bad enough that its like pulling teeth to get him to focus, and do the work, but this much EXTRA work just makes him that much more resistant. I mean, if your goal is trying to get my son to hate his school, hey good job there.

Anyway, lots of other things going on, and not a lot of time to write. Not even for my fiction. Hopefully that will end soon. We’ll see.

9/11 ten years on…

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I don’t like this day, and I doubt I ever will.

The first one, the original 9/11, scared the fuck out of me. Scared, like when I was in the Northridge earthquake, trapped in a small dark room, shaken like the inside a paint-shaker, and all to the sound of four freight trains rolling right over your head. If you have ever been really close to something VERY heavy, and moving fast (freight trains are the worst I have experienced) if gives off a subsonic that is difficult to describe, but will set the small hairs on the back of your neck alight because your body knows that if you make one tiny mistake, you are fucking toast. That kind of scary. The kind that makes you mind go OMFG! and you balls suck up into your crotch.

On the first 9/11 we woke up to NPR. I think my alarm went off at 6:00 back then, but I don’t recall. We had just moved into our first house two months before, and had a baby boy three months old. In short we were already stupid with fear, and way over our heads. The slow painful tsunami of parenthood had not quite peaked on the beach of our single lives, but already we were soaked, and the beach was covered in junk. So when the radio came on with the news, I almost didn’t believe it. “Big fire in the World Trade Center,” it said, but the boy was still asleep, and the TV still had regular analog stations, so I wandered into the living-room and turned the set on. About a minute later Teri must have heard the panic in my voice when I said, “honey!” We spent the rest of that morning alternating between sitting on the couch glued to the tv, or calling friends and family, and pacing back and forth on the phone.

Together we watched that first fire with mild fear, but mostly with dumbfounded ignorance. We didn’t know the cause (although it you go back now and look there is an obvious airplane shaped hole in the building) as the news reporters were being good cautious citizens, reporting only what they knew or could plainly see. The truth at that moment was still wrapped in euphemisms like “sources say” and “it has been reported”, and my personal favorite,”unconfirmed reports”. The great subtext of that day was yet to unfold.

So we watched a sky-scraper fire, nothing more. And we were having thoughts like, “oh, those poor fucks,” for the people trapped on the top part of the building. Then we got that collective “surprise!” moment when that second airplane zoomed right into frame of the camera, and smacked into the other tower with a puff of an explosion and a rain of fiery debris. It was as if in mid cut another director had taken over our collective movie, in this case a chick flick, and decided to make it a horror movie instead. Even the newspeople were thinking WTF! at that one, it was such a punch to the mental gut. I distinctly remember how sick-to-my-stomach it made me feel. It was bizarre, surreal. Like having a favorite 5 year-old niece or nephew jump up and say “surprise,” which you think is cute until you look into the closet they are pointing towards and see they have butchered your favorite cat, and smeared its bloody entrails all over the inside. It was that kind of surreal. Your first reaction is to think, “oh, um, okay,” and your second reaction is to puke.

But the day wasn’t over yet. The third surprise of the morning was when the second tower collapsed on itself. By then I was already having a discussion in the back of my head about high-temperature fires and modern sky-scraper construction, so I cannot say the collapse was a surprise to me. It was more like an “oh, of course!” Only this “of course” was punctuated by the deaths of thousands of people.

It was the collapse of the second tower that made me say out loud, “Damn. I’m glad I’m too old to be drafted because this must mean war.” I didn’t know who was behind this, but I knew then we would be going to war. It was that simple.

That was also when my balls tried to suck themselves up into by abdomen. Yep, scared.

***

You know, I think there should be an international limit on the number of OMFG!s on can experience on one day. After the first couple, the brain just goes numb, and then stays that way for a long time. Just like after being in the Northridge paint-shaker. One can only experience so much terror, and then the brain overloads. Perhaps this was Ossama Bin-Laden’s only mistake on that day. He could have gotten a much more dramatic effect if he had spread the four attacks over two different days, about two months apart. That would have been much more dramatic theater. I can only thank god he didn’t.

Anyway, there is another part to 9/11. Not the stuff that happened on that day, but the stuff that happened because of that day.  And it is this stuff, the political and social repercussions to that day, that REALLY PISSES ME OFF!!! It pisses me off so much that if I start to think about it for any length of time the rage starts to build, and I swear my eye starts to twitch. If Bin Laden may have made a mistake or two that day, by way of contrast our response was nothing but one mistake after another. With ten years of hindsight it is hard to believe how absolutely mind numbingly stupid we became. We did everything Bin Laden asked for, and wrapped it up for him like a Christmas present.

  1. Setting the situation up like it was an act of war, not a crime.
  2. Acting as if it was a war against Islam instead of a political war.
  3. Treating Bin Laden as if he was some “master villain” instead of as a religious lunatic hermit, high on crack, and living in a cave.
  4. For fuck’s sake, we even invaded Iraq over this. I mean, how stupid do you have to be?

Its like we got stung by a wasp, and our solution was to seek out every wasp nest we could find, smack them once with a stick, and then stand there and laugh. Of course if you act that stupid you’re going to get stung. I mean really, WTF? The English and the French both have these wonderful long histories of kicking the ant-hill that is the middle east and north Africa, and then getting covered in ant bites. Why the fuck did we feel the need to do the same thing all over again? Good Christ almighty, how dumb can one nation be? We’re supposed to learn from other nation’s mistakes, not do them over again for our own. Really, this is shit we could happily let someone else own. But we didn’t.

So 10 years on…

  • We are not any safer, and we are appreciably less free.
  • We have paid for the blood of our thousands spilled on that day, with the deaths of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Not to count hundreds of thousands of people that were displaced by out actions, made poorer by our wars, or lost loved ones and/or property for being in the unlucky position of being under the boot when our foot came down.
  • We have spent thousands of our precious lives and trillions of our national treasure.
  • We contributed almost nothing to democratizing the middle east. The leaders we did support now appear to be autocratic thugs, many of which have been overthrown by their own people. And the two places we did invade are not significantly freer then before we invaded.
  • The rest of the world (you know, the guys we do business with) thinks we’re either bullies or a bunch of newbs (or both!).

So good job, us. Get out your flags and wave, because  Yay, We Did It! Weee.

The sad part is, I think the only reason we are not doing more in the middle east right now is simply because we are broke. The collective conscious of our country still wants to cry and scream like a baby, pitching a fit, and stomping on every shadow. We haven’t learned that there is no “getting over” this day. There is no single bad guy to hunt down and kill like in a movie. There will be no final chase scene, and there will be no victory party when the credits roll. In fact, when the credits do roll we are going to see that we were not the protagonist at all, like we thought we were. No, in this film, in this reality, we’re playing the roll of the antagonist. That’s right, we’re playing the bad guys, we’re the ones with the black hats.

I say its time we turned in those black hats, and our sacred flags, for something much more appropriate; ashes and sack-cloth. Folks, we fucked up, and now its time we manned up and admitted it. I don’t think for a minute we were responsible for that terrible tragedy of 9/11, but we are certainly responsible for everything we did afterwards in response.

So today we put up our flag in honor of those fallen on this day 10 years ago, and to honor those fallen who bravely fought in the repercussions to the events of that terrible day. These were good folks, most of them great American citizens, and innocent, as near as I can tell, from any wrong doing. If there is any guilt in any of them, I say we let them take it up with their maker. I’m good with that. We also lit a few candles as a sign of our intent to peaceably remember this day, and what it means. Its not a parade, and we’re not waving the flag or watching some stupid crap on television. Really, I’ve cried enough, I don’t need to do more. There is no victory to this day, and by this point I doubt there will ever be. We had a chance for greatness, and we blew it. All that is left is for the rest of us to “get” that. For many Americans I doubt that day will ever come. Then again, I never thought I would see a black man elected to the White House, so I have to admit my powers of prognostication are not particularly impressive.

And… that is why I don’t like this day. I doubt I ever will.

Cool story snippet: The IBS

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In the future everyone will have a internet blog score (IBS), which is maintained by a third party and is comprised of all of an individual’s internet input (included  any aliases they may use) and rates that person for integrity, politeness, mental health, aggressiveness, and other factors. This IBS is used in job interviews, dating services, etc, to help weed out the crazies and limit potential legal action.

On Roller-Coasters

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I love roller-coasters. They are awesome, plain and simple. Hop on one and you get to safely come close to death; to cheat him, as it were, and still walk away without having to give him your soul at some later date. Sure it costs a few bucks, but that’s cheap compared to being dead or losing your soul.

But here is the real reason why you should love roller-coasters: They are the perfect metaphor for your creative process.

What? you say. What are you talking about? What metaphor? What creative process?

Well I’ll tell you. You know that feeling you get when you’re going down the track, and you can see it drop away in front of you? You know, when your breath catches in your throat, and your arms grip the cushions (or your boyfriend’s arm) really hard? Its that part where your body is saying, “oh crap. I’m about to be launched into space,” but your face is smiling because your brain knows it’s only going to last for a moment. It is that duel reality part, where your body is saying one thing (Holy Shit!), while your brain is saying another (Weee!) that makes the ride so wonderful.

You see most of the time we listen to our bodies, and do what they say. So when your eyes see a car coming at you while you are crossing the street, you jump when it tells you “Watch out!” Or when you see a cute girl (or guy) walking down the sidewalk, your body says, “hey, check that out,” and your head follows. Most of the time this is a good thing. Its good that we don’t get run over, and its good (or at least pleasurable) that we notice attractive people. However, the problem is that sometimes the messages the body sends are not so good for us.

You see, your body will respond with the exact same fervor when it senses the danger of a car trying to run you over, as it does when it senses the danger of a new idea of yours being criticized by your best friend. On the one hand, the body’s response is helpful and appropriate, but on the other had, not so much. Mind you, your friends criticism might be hurtful (although probably not as hurtful as a car accident), but then again it might not. In fact, it might be helpful. And therein lies the rub. Unlike the black and white response to a speeding car, there are levels of grey involved with the creative process. But the body doesn’t know this, and so you get the same “Oh shit, we’re about to fall” feeling when you’re on a roller-coaster going over the edge, as you do when you are creating something interesting.

So here’s why a roller-coaster is so helpful to the creative person. Because it teaches us to listen to the “oh shit, we’re falling” response from the body, and yet do nothing about it. With the creative process, that “oh shit, we’re falling” message the body sends is crucial. Not because you are about to die, but because you are on the right track. It is your body’s way of telling you that you are getting to the good stuff. That you have struck a rich vein, and it’s time to dig hard.

You see, creativity requires risk. Sometimes big risk. I will even go so far as to say without the risk there is no reward. But your body doesn’t know this. When your are hurdling down the roller-coaster track, and fly over the edge, your body can only see the track drop away, and then quickly calculate the likely result. In other words, the risk. This is all our bodies can understand. It is what they are trained to do. This is why you hold your breath, and grip the cushions hard. Now it is your brain, on the other hand, that knows perfectly well your body will be safe (far safer then the automobile drive to the amusement park) so it allows you to smile even while your knuckles turn white. The brian knows the reward will come at the end of the ride, and doesn’t panic even while your body is trying to.

The problem is, when you start to do a creative process, your body senses the risk, and responds like it is supposed to do. “Danger, Will Robertson. Danger.” It senses the risk, and responds in the appropriate manner. If you are not used to this, you will sense this risk, and stop being creative immediately. The danger signal will overcome your creative impulse, and shut your brain down, just exactly like it will take over your thoughts to get your body out of the way of a speeding car. Alas, this is the exact opposite of what you need to do when you sense this risk, because the thing the body is of afraid of is usually the good stuff, the rich vein of ID, the mother-load of creative ideas. In effect, it is exactly as if your body is working against yourself, trying to keep you from being creative.

But this is true only if you are not expecting it; if you don’t know how to react to the “danger” signal your body sends. Once you know that the “oh shit, we’re falling” signal can be a positive thing (at least in terms of creativity) you can turn it around, and use it as a tool. It is a signal that you are on the right track. That you are digging down the correct mind shaft (yes, I spelled it that way on purpose). That you are going in the right direction. Yet to do this trick, you have to learn to separate what your brain is saying about your creative process, from what your body is saying. And that is not such an easy task. Which is why a roller-coaster is so darn handy. In a blink it does what no amount of thinking or talking can do; it separates the brain/body signal quite cleanly, and for very little cost. Certainly much cheaper than a session with your therapist.

So the next time you find yourself at an amusement park, ride the coasters, and dream great big dreams.

I dream of peaches

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I had a strange dream last light. I was opening up a bag of frozen peach slices, and eating them. For some reason I knew these slices had been prepared by my paternal grandfather. The taste triggered a memory of his large wrinkled hands carefully cutting and bagging the slices, before putting them in the freezer. It gave me a sense of connection to him, the peach piece was something he had touched in his hands just last year, and now it was in my hand.

When I woke up I remembered that Pops, as we called him, hadn’t died last year. He’s been in the grave for 30 years come this fall. Funny how your time sense is distorted by dreams. i also don’t recall him ever freezing fruit, although I’m sure he did it. The man kept a HUGE garden, and was happy to pass off fruits and vegetables to us whenever we visited. As a kid we thought that anything grown by Pops was bigger and sweeter then anything else you could buy. This was a rule we all believed earnestly up until his death made it impossible to prove otherwise.

He did freeze the trout we caught every time we went fishing, but I don’t recall peaches. Except for last night.

Full fathom five

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When my father died,
he took with him,
things I will never see,

Yet are as much a part,
of the man I am,
as these lungs which help be breathe.

-ERK
7/10/2011

For some reason the term Full Fathom Five fell into my head today, so I looked it up on wiki. Reading the Shakespeare poem/song that is the source brought to me a whole host of emotions, all associated with the death of my father, and my father-in-law. Hence the poem above.

As I write this, I am 48.  On the whole I have found being older to be a great benefit. Its as if the dross of your life is burned away slowly by time, leaving nothing but the hot undiluted self behind. Every year I feel like my thinking becomes clearer, at least in terms of being me, while my surety that the world runs only a particular way falls off more and more. That is, I am more sure about myself, but less sure about everything else. This I think is a wonderful trade-off, a nice balance of pride and humility. Something I actually look forward to, and see as a benefit that more than overcomes the physical imperfects that also come with age. But there are parts about becoming older that are not so fun. One of them is burying your parents.

It is easy to assume if you are male, and over 18 that you are in fact a man, but I will tell you right now, you really do not know what it means to be a man until the day you bury your father. That day, and all the days that come after. That is when you really sense the full weight of manhood resting hard upon your shoulders.

My father does not lie five fathoms down. One was sufficient. And let me tell you, that one fathom is the heaviest amount of dirt I have ever felt.

On why I hate television news, and why being ignorant about math is stoopid

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I was having a discussion with an e-buddy of mine on the great depression the other day, and I challenged him to find a measure in which the current economic climate was worst than back then. He almost immediately provided me with this link from CBS news: Chronic unemployment worst then Great Depression. There are several things in the article of note, but the key finding is right here:

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

(note: CBS has actually chaged their page. Look here to see what the older version said)

Well somewhere back in my dim past, I actually received a degree in History, and while I am no expert on the history of the Great Depression, I can do me a bit of research. So first off, lets see what the unemployment numbers are like for then and now:

Great Depression Unemployment

Today’s Unemployment

As you can see, they are not even close. Unemployment topped out at 24.75% in 1933, while it was 10.6% in January of 2010 (the actual yearly average for 2010 is lower, in the 9.5% range). But rather than going with peak unemployment numbers, lets even them out a bit. To make the argument fair for CBS I’ll use 9% as the current unemployment, while using 17.5% for the depression era unemployment (the average of all of the 1930s).

So lets see here, the current chronic unemployment rate is 45% of those unemployed. That is 45% of 9%, or 4.05% of the total population. That roughly means 4% of the Americans are chronically unemployed, and 5% or Americans are now unemployed, but will likely find work in the by next year.

Now, lets compare that to the Great Depression. The article says the chronic unemployment rate is worst now, than back then. For this to be true, the older chronic rate must be lower then 45% of those unemployed. (Note: the revised article now says the chronic rate was about 31%, so I’ll use that figure). So 31% of 17% were chronically unemployed, which works out to be 5.425% of the population were chronically unemployed. This also means a little over 12% of the population were unemployed but likely to find work in the next year.

So stacking them up we have:

The current situation:
9% unemployed, 4% chronically unemployed.

Great Depression:
17.5% unemployed, 5.4% chronically unemployed.

In what universe is 4% worse than 5.4%? In what universe is 17.5% preferable to 9%? Do you see the problem I have with this? Yes it is true that a chronic unemployment rate of 45% of those unemployed is worse then one of 31%, but as soon as those number are put in the proper context, any claim of being “worse” is flat out ludicrous.

What is “worse” than the initial report, was the fallout from it. The initial report came out on 6/6/11. The very next day websites from all over the political spectrum had linked to the CBS page, and were citing this statistic as fact. (do a google search for “unemployment worse than great depression” and see what I mean) I could find no page saying, “Hey! Wait a minute here,” even though it should be obvious at a glance.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Now there are all kinds of issues with my analysis.  Unemployment data from the 1930s is sketchy, as the government did not start keeping good records for a lot of things until the 1950s. I have no idea how CBS determined that the chronic unemployment rate was at 31% when the government did not collect such data back then. And obviously I’m greatly simplifying a complex problem just to make it easier to show. The fact that I’m even close is pretty obvious as CBS has subsequently changed their article, but there are lots of websites out there repeating the same wrong data, as if it were fact.

Shoes

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Today, a little tool that looks like this saved my life.

Well, not really my life, but it did save my shoes.

You see, I have me a bit of shoes. About 10 pair or so. The problem is they all reside in a vary narrow closet space, stored in sort of an amorphous pile. This was starting to annoy me as some of them would fall out every time I opened my closet door, so I thought I would build some shelves to corral those suckers (maybe it was from reading This Old House Magazine on my lunch break). Anyway, I went out to the garage to look though the spare lumber pile, picked a likely piece, and prepared to start cutting. Seeing this, Teri came over and casually mentioned, “what about your old shoe rack? You know, the one collecting dust in the garage?”

“Oh yea,” I said intelligently as I went to go look for it. “The shoe rack.”

Now this shoe rack was a hold-over from our old house. It was sitting in the garage because it could not fit in the narrow (23.5″ wide) closets of the new place. I intended to sell it off at the next garage sale. That was 10 years ago when we moved here. So I pulled the rack out, and looked it over. Besides it’s width, it was perfect. The problem was that the darn thing is made of metal tubes with plastic interlocking end pieces. Somehow, the metal tubes had to be cut.

I don’t know if you know anything about cutting metal tubes, but they can be a right pain in the ass. Put too much pressure on them, and they deform (meaning compress). After that, they are a ring-tailed bitch to get the ends round again. The problem is, the ends needs to be round so they can be pressure fitted (read jammed) into the plastic end pieces.

Enter the tool: The Superior Tool model # 35030 Mini Tubing Cutter. I bought my Superior Tool tubing cutter to cut the small brass tubes used for converting the motors on CD-ROM drives into model airplane motors. That was about 8 years ago, and the darn thing has been spending all its free time hanging out with the other model airplane tools. So I dusted it off, attached it to one of the metal tubes for my shoe rack, and gave it a go. Sure enough the darn thing worked flawlessly. Not only did it cut the tube without deforming it, but it also rolled the ends of the tube inwards so they would be easier to fit in the plastic end pieces.  Within an hour I had cut all 8 tubes, filed and sanded their edges, and reconfigured the new thinner shoe rack in my closet.

Boy my shoes are happy right now. And I feel like a manly man. The best part is there is one less thing in our garage I have to deal with. Until we move again, that is.

on music

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Today I listened to some music while working out in the garage. That happens to be where I keep my stereo (not enough room in the house). I recently picked up the album Crime of the Century by Supertramp. That I referred to it as an album tells you right off how old I am. I remember when that album came out on a Criterion Collection special high quality vinyl. This was back before there were CDs.

The music is deep, and highly polished. It is prog rock, meaning that it reaches back into the classic music closet for ideas as opposed to the blues, jazz, or country closets. So odd meters, odd chords, actual counter melodies in the bass line, deep meaningful lyrics, etc. But there is more to it than that. I have Rush albums from that time, and they are good, but not this lush. Yes albums from the same era are wonderfully complex, but not as commercial. Not as slick. These are albums in which a lot of time was painstakingly put into the craft of recording and producing high quality music. In today’s digital world, where recording is so much easier, I wonder if something is being lost. I can’t think of a modern CD which was written/produced like this album. I don’t think anyone builds songs like this anymore.

Listening to it today brought me back to summers in Clovis. Driving around in Carl Christenson’s car, music blaring. I discovered this album, and this type of music in high school, back when I was VERY ERNEST about the world. It was impossible for me to listen to the music and NOT talk about it. I had to point out every cool part, every interesting note. It seems very compulsive to me now, but I suppose at the time that it was just our way of working out our intellects. Finding something we could be adult about, and hammering away at it until we appeared practiced and urbane.

I’m older now, and really don’t have much time to just sit and listen to music. I tend to use music as a tool, either to set a mood for writing, or to help be focus on retouching. Rarely do I take the time to just listen, letting the lush orchestration flow over my ears. So today I cleaned out pool equipment that has been sitting on my workbench since last fall when we put away the pool, and enjoyed Supertramp, followed by Ambrosia’s self titled first album. The only one in my collection that is missing  from that time period is Dark Side of the Moon, which is sitting in my Amazon shopping cart, waiting for me to make the purchase.

Oh frabjous day!

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It’s 8:30 and already I’ve had the most wonderful morning. You see I was walking Trevor to our local public school, like I do every school day. To get there we have to cross the treacherous and swift moving Burbank Blvd. where more than once I’ve almost been hit by passing cars. So today, when we round the corner and spied the villainous street ahead, we saw there was a roving gang of jack-booted thugs on motorcycles, enforcing the local traffic standards. They even had an undercover “troll” who crossed the street – at the cross-walk, and always with the huge lights flashing – just to reel in more suckers.

Let me tell you, it was beautiful.

12 to 15 motorcycle cops were out, and they just were throwing down ticket after ticket. Half way across the street I looked west down Burbank Blvd., and off in the distance I saw three different sets of flashing lights behind pulled over cars. It was like Christmas in May. On the way home, while I was thanking the fine officers for being there, our corner crossing guard went back and forth across the street twice. Each time two or more cars would zoom past him, and each time another motorcycle cop hit the gas, and that little bit of siren song sounded.

I didn’t feel the least bit bad for the poor unsuspecting cars. That corner has been a nightmare for us for 5 years. I’ve been almost hit countless times while crossing the street with my son. You try crossing a street with a small child, and have the cars miss you only because you jump out of their way, and tell me how you feel about it. Cars will not only fail to stop, but they will zoom right pass you and flip you off.

But not today mother fuckers. Let me tell you. Not today.

So how has your morning been?