Dizgraceland

One Way Street

2008-09-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

I see the sheeplike press have taken up the politicians clever "Main Street" not "Wall Street" rallying cry. And Congress failed to act on a bailout bill that may have stemmed the nosedive our economy is taking (along with my retirement fund). Even I, a person without a shred of economic savvy knows that perception is everything when comes to people's spending habits. Regardless of whether the bailout would have literally helped, it would have given people some hope and perhaps got them spending again (cash not credit).

I don't claim to understand the nuances of sub prime lending or how it is bringing down major financial institutions. I do know that trading on Wall Street is like throwing firecrackers in front of sheep. They'll stampede in the opposite direction at the slightest hint of bad news. And with it goes our bank accounts and retirement funds that are inextricably tied to the value of stocks.

I have never been one to use credit cards to live. I hate being in debt. I have a mortgage, but it kills me knowing that I owe somebody money for my house. And with the panic of the latest economic situation, I probably couldn't sell my house if my life depended on it. One no one is lending and two, there is a glut of foreclosures out there that the vultures can swoop down on for pennies on the dollar anyway.

So I sit like everyone else, wondering what will happen and what it means to my family. Oh, and I don't give a rip about Main Street or Wall Street. I care about my street.

Debating the hook

2008-09-29T10:53:00.001-07:00

I tried to watch the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain. We even taped it so we could watch it at our leisure between diaper changes and feedings. After about 45 minutes, changing a dirty diaper seemed more interesting.

First, I couldn't get past the fact that Obama and McCain's message experts came up with the same clever play on "Wall Street" versus "Main Street." The luck of the draw allowed Obama to use it first and then McCain, obviously coached to make sure he said it spat it out in his first two minute ramble.

Having been in the messaging business, I also cringe when I hear the words, "accountability" and "transparency." I give the debate to Obama mainly because I couldn't take McCain pointing out all of the various places he has travelled to while in public office. "I've been to Kandahar. I have a very nice pillow cover I picked up at the airport there and I tell you that the people of Afghanistan are pretty skilled at embroidery."

It could spark the next college drinking game.

The value of debates is debatable anyway. I still think you watch them with your mind made up and wait for the guy you aren't voting for to screw up. I came away from watching the debate thinking McCain seemed a bit too much like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now for my taste. And Obama needs to work on hiding his look of disgust at stupid comments or he'll never be able to sit through all of the State dinners he will be required to attend as President.

Oh well, it's almost over.

The shoulder of giants

2008-09-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

"nanos gigantum humeris insidentes"

I'm actually amazed that humans have as much knowledge as we do. Because think of it, we all have a life span of say 80 years. In that 80 years, we have to learn as much as we can from those who came before us and pass as much knowledge on to those coming after us. And in that time we also have to sift through the misconceptions, half truths, myths and outright lies that are passed along from generation to generation to arrive at our best guess at what really is the truth.

Collective consciousness aside, none of us are born knowing everything. So why is it some people insist that they don't need an education? Education is that giant's shoulder we stand on to review what past generations have learned so we don't have to start from scratch as we venture out into our world. And every generation someone suggests a better way to build a fire or else we would still be rubbing sticks together.

But still I am impressed at how advanced our species is considering we are all just marking time here. Scratching on cave walls advanced to pencils on paper, tapping on typewriters, and now clicking away on computers. I marvel that I can store and listen to my entire music collection on a mp3 player the size of a matchbox. I still can't believe something as big as a 747 can fly. And I really can't believe I can receive 300 different channels of television via satellite and still can't find anything decent to watch.

Despite the old adage, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," there is still this propensity for our species to repeat the same mistakes over and over even after reviewing history. Perhaps it is the folly of youth to consider themselves immune from the pitfalls from following the same paths as their fathers.

Or perhaps there is a danger when perched on the shoulders of giants of having our vision obscured by clouds while the giant plods off a cliff at the end of the path.

Oh well, I've mixed enough metaphors for now.

And they call it monkey love...

2008-09-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

I was watching the History Channel while using the elliptical machine at the gym today. I'm not sure what program I was watching, but it was about a program Stalin funded to try and cross breed apes and humans to create hybrid army of man-apes with extreme strength.

A Soviet scientist went to Africa and tried unsuccessfully to artificially inseminate chimpanzees (talk about spanking your monkey). When that didn't work, he returned to the Soviet Union and tried to use orangutan and gorilla sperm to impregnate human females. And thus was born the World Wrestling Federation.

But seriously, the experiment apparently never worked. Though the Soviets always had a pretty decent team at the Summer Olympics.

I thought this was a pretty odd experiment. Even if it had worked, how did the Soviets suppose they were going to train this army of man-apes? And how would anyone take seriously soliders with names like Bobo, Bonzo and Cheetah who were just as likely to spontaneously fling feces at the enemy as throw a grenade at them.

The experiment did make me think of the Planet of the Apes movies from back in the 70s. I remember going to a Planet of the Ape marathon back when I was 15. I think I watched five Planet of the Apes films in a row -- Planet of the Apes, Beneath Planet of the Apes, Escape from Planet of the Apes, Conquest of Planet of the Apes and Battle for Planet of the Apes. That Roddy McDowell was one underrated actor.

I don't admit this very often, but when Escape from Planet of the Apes came out in 1971, I kind of had a crush on one of the chimpanzees --Zira. And when I say a crush on the chimpanzees, I literally mean Zira the character, not Kim Hunter the actress who played Zira. Give me a break, I was 12.

Well, enough monkey business.

Blogaversary

2008-09-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

Damn. August 4 was my 4th Blogaversary, and it blipped by me unnoticed. I think it had something to do with my son being born. Funny how life has this way of taking priority over blogging.

Anyway, I've been at this for four years now. It seems like 40. And it seems like four days. Time has no meaning in a blog. And a great deal has happened in four years. I got engaged, married, sold a house, bought a house, turned 50 and had two children. I'd say that it has been a pretty eventful time.

I didn't even know what a blog was when I stumbled into blogging. I'd been slogging away with my own Web page before that, writing HTML and then experimenting with programs like Dreamweaver to create pages. As irritating as Blogger.com can be, it is still light years ahead of hard coding pages with HTML.

Having been blogging for four years, I still can't really tell you what purpose it serves. Sure, it provides an easy and cheap (translate in most cases to free) outlet for writers and artists to publish. But at the same time, people tend to value things according to how much they pay for them. And with 14 million (give or take a few million) blogs out there spewing words for free, trying to get someone to read your blog and take you seriously as a writer is about as easy as a Jehovah's Witness making money selling Watchtower religious pamphlets in Las Vegas.

I suppose blogging is a social experiment more than anything else. Most people seem to stumble into it the way I did and get overwhelmed by the immensity of the blog community. It's a world with it's own rules, language and social pitfalls. There are trolls, lurkers, flame wars, stalkers and other virtual bogeymen. Since it is a one and two-dimensional world primarily of written words, it is fraught with misunderstandings and miscommunications. People make friends, enemies, allies and foes.

Blogging is carnival mirror of life.

Some people get burned out and stop blogging. Some take breaks and never come back. Some vow never to blog again and then blog the next day. I have gone days and weeks without blogging, but I have never really got tired of blogging or been tempted to stop. Maybe it is because I try not to make blogging an obligation or work.

Maybe I should write a book about blogging. I could call it Blogging for Dummies, but I tend to think that would be redundant. There is no formula for blogging. There is no plot, no real structure or format. It is the lack of a "right or wrong way to do it" that makes blogging so attractive to people. It is also why blogs will likely never be considered great literature in the classical sense.

But that is not necessarily a bad thing. All art needs to evolve. Perhaps out of the chaos and primeval ooze of blogs a new form of literature will evolve. It could be the expressionist movement or abstract art of the written word. And it may not be recognized in my lifetime as an art form.

I don't kid myself that I am a pioneer in this new way of writing. It's hard to consider yourself unique when millions of others are clicking away at the same thing. But I like to think that my blog is uniquely mine and not so much like any of the other 14 million out there.

Oh, and the sun revolves around the earth.

Perchance to dream...

2008-09-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

Everyone thinks it is funny to ask new parents whether they are getting any sleep. Ha, ha, ha...I never get tired of that question. Of course we are getting sleep. I just comes in fits and and starts like an old Fiat. The good thing about never sleeping more than five minutes at a time is that you tend to dream a lot...even when you are awake.

But are they all dreams?

I was getting my Grande Americano at Tullys (a far superior coffee chain than Starbucks that is also based in Seattle) when I noticed the crack head who hangs out there eating raw onions and nursing a drip coffee with his bare feet up on one of the tables was wearing a straw hat ala Tom Sawyer. No one but me seemed to think this was odd. So maybe it was one of my dreams.

And I keep seeing an Asian dude with a robe walking around downtown with a bunch of freshly cut bamboo strapped to his back. I saw him on two separate occasions, so I am thinking that he probably isn't part of a dream. Yesterday was a full moon after all.

The gay nude beach my train goes by in the afternoon on my way home has been particularly active. I certainly hope that is not one of my dreams or Freud would be rolling his cigar around nodding at me. And why is it that nudists (particularly gay ones) seem to resemble Jabba the Hut?

I think Roan's teddy bear (that has a sound feature that simulates the heartbeat within the womb) sounds like the sound effects from the old computer game Doom. It has been freaking me out.

I almost put the cat in the dishwasher the other day. Fortunately he was sleeping and I got him out before the second rinse cycle.

We went to Costco over the weekend and bought a case of baby wipes, diapers, 20 rolls of paper towels, a 30 pound box of cat litter and a bottle of laundry detergent the size of a Volkswagen. I wish that had been a dream.

Somebody pinch me.

Blogging for the Pulitzer

2008-09-14T20:45:00.000-07:00

I really don't think they give out Pulitzer Prizes for blogging. If they do, something tells me I likely won't be on the short list to get one. I think more that five people have to read your stuff before you are considered for a Pulitzer Prize.

Besides, I'm thinking that actually being successful as a writer wouldn't be all I've built it up to be. Getting one book published, for instance, would just put a lot of pressure on me to get another one published. And I'm starting to develop this theory that most writers only have one great story in them. Then they spend the rest of their career trying to crank out another one.

Don't wave Stephen King in my face, either. He has written maybe one great book, The Stand. Everything else he has published is pretty much the same story rewritten with a slightly different plot but the same characters.

And being a successful writer doesn't seem to be good for you emotional health anyway. I read today where author David Foster Wallace hung himself. I have to admit I'd never heard of him, but his obituary said he wrote a 1000-page novel called Infinite Jest that had earned him a "genius grant" from some foundation and a gig at Pomona College teaching Creative Writing. I'd hazard a guess that reading one too many freshman short stories contributed to his suicide. Plus I'm also guessing he didn't know what to do once he'd achieved genius writer status. How do you top being a genius? No matter what you write from then on is held up to that "genius status" and you are pretty much screwed.

Not that I'm speaking from experience. My writing is usually categorized in the "interesting" category, which is like telling people with an ugly baby that it "sure has lots of hair" (my son, by the way is pretty darn cute and has lots of hair).

Let's face it, being considered a great writer pretty much amounts to a death sentence. Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun, Hunter S. Thompson used a .44 magnum, Spalding Gray drowned himself, so did Virginia Woolf, Yukio Mishima committed Hari Kari, Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven, and John Kennedy Toole sucked on his car's exhaust pipe (in all fairness this was before his novel Confederacy of the Dunces was published and actually won a Pulitzer). Wikipedia actually has a complete section on Writers who have committed suicide.

Maybe being an interesting writer is okay. I'll probably live longer.

No muse ain't good news

2008-09-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

Having been out from work for a month on family leave after the birth of my son, I haven't been much on writing. Maybe it's because the Monkey Playing Cymbals was at the office chattering away and I wasn't there to be inspired by his banana-baited breath.

I missed the Monkey.

I've been back at work two days now. The Monkey has been ignoring me. He's a bit pissed that I left him alone for a month. There is nothing worse than a monkey scorned. I need his chattering as a laxative for my writer's constipation. Though too much chattering can lead to run on sentences. Ha, ha.

I could also use some sleep.

The month off from work was the longest time I've been off work since I started working full time 26 years ago. But it went by in a blink of the eye. And I feel guilty going back to work. Because trust me that working isn't near as much work as taking care of a toddler and a newborn.

I think the Monkey is forgiving me. He is smiling at me. I think I have my muse back. Give me a couple of days and I'll be producing Pulitzer Prize material again.

Or at least a real blog post or two.

Death Sentence

2008-09-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

Death Sentence is the title of a 2007 movie starring Kevin Bacon, Kelly Preston and John Goodman. It is the story of a business man who witnesses his teenage son murdered with a machete as part of a gang initiation. He then goes Rambo on the gang's ass and kills everyone but only after they've killed or maimed about everyone in his family first.

Watching Death Sentence is more like getting a life sentence. But Tess and I watched the whole thing because despite several hundred DirectTV channels, we can never find anything but Seinfeld reruns to watch. And much as I love Seinfeld, I've just about seen everyone of them 50 times and yadda, yadda, yadda.

I don't think Kevin Bacon is a bad actor. I don't think he is a good actor (I do find the fact that he looks like Lon Cheney Sr. in the original Phantom of the Opera a bit disconcerting). I just think Bacon peaked after Footloose. But I think he has done some okay movies. I'm not sure what he was thinking when he accepted the part in Death Sentence. I suppose it was the same thing John Goodman was thinking...paycheck.

Don't get me wrong, I like a good vigilante film as well as the next guy. Who hasn't secretly longed to blow away street scum with a 12-guage Mossberg and a .357? But this film challenged my "willing suspension of disbelief" meter.

First Bacon goes from a milk toast business guy teaching his boy how to ride a bicycle to a avenging psychopath with superhuman strength in about five seconds. He is surrounded by 40 or 50 tattooed skinheads with automatic weapons and he beats them to a pulp with a key chain. Apparently these bloodthirsty gang members have never been to the shooting range either, because they manage to shoot at Bacon from two feet away and constantly miss.

Goodman plays the gun dealing father of the head gang member. He plays the same character he played in the Big Lebowski, but this time his writers were obviously smoking crack. He was neither quirky nor funny. He was just creepy in that same way as the sweaty fat guy with Tourettes Syndrome that sits down next to you on the bus is.

Kelly Preston really had no character whatsoever and was only in the film because she is married to John Travolta. I'm willing to bet the Scientoligists backed the film as well.

What adds insult to injury for me is that I Googled this film and read several random reviews raving about the "action packed psychological thriller" and Bacon's superb acting job.

Once again I am reminded that I live in my own world.

God I hate politics

2008-08-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

When my son and daughter are napping, we turn on CNN just to here something besides nursery rhymes and Barney. I'm not sure it is any better. There is nothing like a Presidential election to bring out the political pundits and the minutia of politics.

Senator Obama attended a barbecue in Wisconsin today as his wife arrived in Denver to get ready for the Democratic Convention. CNN neglected to tell us what Obama ate at the barbecue and in what order, but since it was in Wisconsin, I'm willing to bet there was cheese involved and he was well briefed before he made his choice.

I'm not sure where McCain was, but he appeared to be shaking the hands of larger dock workers in overalls. Meanwhile his "people" have launched a couple of commercials attacking Obama's choice of Biden as a running mate instead of Hillary Clinton. They are hoping to woo the Clinton supporters who feel slighted by Obama's dissing of the former First Lady. Call me wacky, but it would take more than that for a committed Democrat to vote Republican. I'd personally rather vote for a weed whacker for president than vote Republican.

So the big question now is who McCain will choose for his vice presidential candidate. Some think it will be Romney, but my money is on Walt Disney's frozen head. If McCain and Disney get elected they could pump big federal bucks into cryogenics and figure out a way to bring Walt back to life (and McCain for that matter). Plus, if you can get Mickey Mouse on your side, you may actually convince some Democratic fence sitters to throw out their entire belief system and vote for McCain.

CNN did note that bloggers are playing a bigger role in this election. Some have even been given press credentials to cover the convention in Denver. This disgusts me beyond belief and not just because I wasn't asked to cover the thing. I've been to Denver and though it is a nice city that gave us John Denver, it's not high on my list of places I want to go to again. I'm really disgusted that so called professional journalists are selling out to a bunch of blowhards with laptops who high on their 15 minutes of fame and the fact that some one is reading their crap.

Okay, I am not thrilled with the choices for President. I don't believe Obama offers change and I think McCain has been eating soup with a fork for a bit too long. I have tried to figure out what each candidate plans to do about the war, the economy and global warming, but as near as I can decipher, all they do is shake their heads and talk about how sad it is that the average family can't afford to fill up the tank of their Hummer any more. I don't look forward to three more months of political analysis and polls that are about as effective as studying bowls of the candidates poop for signs (but very similar).

But at least the freakin' Olympics are over.

A test

2008-08-22T13:52:00.001-07:00

Perspective

2008-08-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was growing up Christian Scientist, but I have never liked being in hospitals. I suppose no one really likes them (except maybe doctors). But having spent several days at the hospital this last week witnessing the birth of my son, I realize there are parts of a hospital that aren't tinged with the despair of illness. It's hard not to be uplifted when you are on the floor with the Maternity Ward.

Of course, I was buoyed with the optimism of my son's birth and the enthusiasm of my 22-month old daughter as we walked the hallways of the small maternity floor at Stevens Hospital in Edmonds, Washington. People couldn't help but smile as they looked at her beaming face and her "Big Sister" t-shirt. It was one of those hallways that stretched in a circle around the floor passing 13 birthing suites, a nursery and a small operating room where c-sections were done (and my son was born).

We walked the halls for several reasons. One, Enya-Maria, like most toddlers, has a short attention span and a long need for stimulation. Much as she craved her mother's presence, she needed movement. The other reason was for both of us to get out of the way during the seemingly constant influx of nurses, doctors, dietitians, lactation specialists, and photographers.

They were short laps for me, but I'm sure they were pretty challenging for EM. She didn't seem to find any of it boring. I resorted to reading the plethora of signs on everything. One door was labeled: THIS DOOR MUST REMAIN CLOSED AT ALL TIMES. I mused at the oxymoron. What is the purpose of a door that should never be opened.

EM always took a detour when we passed the waiting area near the front desk to peer into an aquarium that had very few "fishies." Still, ever the optimist, she watched and babbled at the ones that peered back at her from behind fake coral and mock pirate ships. Then we'd wave goodbye and continue our rounds.

We passed several pregnant women and their dutiful husbands and dazed looking husbands walking in the opposite direction. I resisted the urge to call out, "Pregnant woman walking" every time we passed one. Discretion is the better part of humor, especially when in a Maternity Ward.

But it was when we'd pass the nursery that I'd be filled with a strong sense of the importance of where we were in the hospital. This was where the journey began for hundreds of babies a year. This was the center of life. I could feel the positive energy. I could feel the sensations of my daughters small hand clutching mine as she soaked in the newness of everything and I could only imagine the flood of sensations that were washing over my newborn son back in my wife's room.

As we rounded the corner and returned to mom and brother, I let EM run screaming to mommy. I went to my son's crib and reached for his hand. He clutched it and confirmed my new perspective on life.

Random dreams

2008-08-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Q: If you dance with a cow, who leads?
A: The one with the tie.

I made this stupid joke up in my sleep (obviously). I am beginning to believe that listening to the Wiggles (an Australian based children's group) is taking its toll on my brain. I'm assuming this joke stemmed specifically from one Wiggle's song with lyrics that go something like, "I'm a cow. I'm a cow. I eat green grass and I give white milk, I'm a cow. I'm a cow." There is some mooing that goes with this song, but I'm not in the mood to transcribe them.

See what I mean.

For those agriculturally impaired people, the cow joke works (although weakly) on a couple of levels. Cows are female for one and generally don't lead while dancing. You can lead a cow around with a roped "tied" around her neck or if you are male wearing a "tie" you traditionally lead while dancing.

I'll be the first one to admit that if you have to explain a joke in that much detail it isn't much of a joke. But for a joke conceived while in a dream state, I'd say it is pretty good.

For a cow joke.

Maybe Blackbeard the Pirate was just misunderstood

2008-08-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

Play name that pirate and nine out of ten times people will probably bring up Blackbeard the Pirate. He is probably the most famous pirate there is (before Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow). The peculiar thing is, although everyone knows of Blackbeard no one really knows about Blackbeard.

Oh there are plenty of stories about Blackbeard. But you scrape the surface on most of them and you discover that they are fourth hand stories told to the barber of Uncle Ernies third cousin. And his barber read about it in a magazine written from an eyewitness account. Only the eyewitness only overheard the story on the bus. As the pirates say, "Arrrgh." Wait, no one really knows if pirates said, "Arrgh," all the time either. It was something a 50s actor developed when he was playing Blackbeard in a movie.

When you get down to the facts of Blackbeard, the only thing for sure was that he had a beard. I'm not convinced that it was truly even black. Bathing wasn't really fashionable back in 1717 when Blackbeard career was at its two-year peak. So he may originally been Blondebeard.

No one really knows where Blackbeard came from in the first place. Some papers suggest England, others Jamaica and still others Philadelphia or North Carolina. His seafaring career may have begun as a privateer in Queen Anne's war between 1702 and 1713. Since a privateer is basically a legalized pirate sanctioned by a government to rob ships of the enemy, it isn't a stretch that Blackbeard took up being a pirate after the war ended because it was the only thing he knew how to do. He just stopped quibbling about which ships he robbed.

Some people think Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach. But that could of been Thatch, thach, Thache or Drummond. Anyone familiar with genealogy understands how this could happen. Spelling and accuracy in written records didn't come into vogue until recent times. And the modern phenomenon of texting is taking spelling out of favor again.

Even Blackbeard's legend as a bad ass is questionable. Legend has it he was slashing off fingers, making people walk the plank and drowning puppies and kittens at the drop of a hat. However, there is no documentation that he actually killed anyone. He'd take your rum and pieces of eight, but apparently he'd then let you go about your merry way.

Much of Blackbeard's legend seems to stem from his appearance. He was apparently tall for his time and he is said to have stuck lit fuses in his braided beard, stuck a burning piece of rope under his hat (supposedly he thought the smoke surrounding his head made him look fierce) and pranced about his ship deck brandishing a cutlass and musket. This was obviously quite a spectacle, but he sounds a bit like a modern day heavy metal singer to me. I think Blackbeard was a poser.

Even Blackbeard's death was exaggerated. On November 21, 1718, British navel officer First lieutenant Robert Maynard of the HMS Pearl tracked Blackbeard to his hangout off Ocracoke Island off North Carolina. After many drunken taunts from the pirates Blackbeard boarded the Pearl and was killed after much belly bumping and clashing of swords. Although legend has it he had taken five musket balls and 20 sword cuts, the official record suggests he bled to death after nicking himself breaking Maynard's sword in a fight. Maynard then cut off Blackbeard's head so he could get a hundred pound bounty the governor of Virginia had offered. Blackbeard was a ripe old 28-years old when he lost his head.

To give you a little insight into Blackbeard's character, here is a excerpt from one of his ships logs aboard his captured ship, the Adventuress after he was killed:

"Such a day, rum all out: ? Our company somewhat sober: ? A damned confusion amongst us! ? Rogues a-plotting: ? Great talk of separation ? so I looked sharp for a prize: ? Such a day found one with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again."

Doesn't that suggest history's most famous pirate was just party animal looking for an open 7-11 to score beer for his next party? My rambling point here is the once again history teaches us that nothing is as it is presented to us. This is an important thing to keep in mind as we prepare to be inundated with ads for the November election.

And yes, I know that was a long way to go to make a political statement. Arggh...

Ebb and flow

2008-07-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

Genealogy is as addictive hobby. I may put it aside for months at a time and then suddenly I open up my family tree software and begin my search anew. With the impending arrival of my son, I have been inspired to taking up digging around in the roots of my family tree again.

I am struck that the current of my family has oozed across the country like the tides. I find streams beginning in places like Ohio, Missouri and Virginia. They trickle through to Iowa, Kansas and Oregon. Mine washed up in Idaho. Then I drifted on to Washington and sit on the shore in Seattle watching the boats. Some of my mother's family ended up in California and also sit on the shore watching boats. I had one uncle who ended up in Hawaii for awhile. But then he drifted back to California.

The trouble with family trees is that they only tell you where your family was at any given time, not who they were. I begin to understand how archaeologists feel as they piece together bits of information to try an know something about the people who were here. Census reports were obviously recorded by people with various levels of education. I imagine the prerequisite was that you could write.

Information is recorded, but it is obvious at times that the census taker either didn't bother to ask how to spell names or the person providing the information didn't know how to read or write anyway to help the census taker along. My great, great grandfather on my mother's side was named Austin Clark. One census records his name as Oston Clark.

You can get snippets of soap opera as you dig through records. One of my widowed great aunts is shown in one census living with her son and a boarder. Ten years later, the boarder is listed in wedding records in Idaho as her new husband.

Occasionally I see names I recognize from my mother's stories of her family or labels from old photographs that I can now put in context. The irony about genealogy is that the more you piece together the puzzle, the bigger it gets and the more pieces you find missing.

I am in awe, at times, of the way families stretch back exponentially through time. And it challenges my OCD nature to stick to one thread of family without meandering off on another as they branch and weave through time and geography. I wonder at times that we aren't all somehow related somewhere at sometime.

I do this in a way for my children. I want them to know where their parents came from physically, emotionally and demographically. As near as I can tell, my roots were primarily farmers and laborers scratching livings out of the dust of history. I suppose part of me wishes they were all heroes and great figures out of history. But I suppose knowing what I know about public figures, it is better that they were just simple people living out their lives.

In a way, my children are a product of me looking at my roots. A few years ago, not that long after Tess and I married, we were driving to a friend's birthday party. I'd been working on the family tree that weekend. Suddenly I turned to her and asked her if she felt we were missing something by not having children. I could tell by the look in her face at that time that she believed we were. Now three years later we have a lovely daughter and are awaiting our son.

The tides are flowing.

Note to self

2008-07-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

Note to self: Flesh out a synapsis for Dirty Harry, the Musical and submit to some big Hollywood studio. Also shoot off a query letter to the FOX network for a reality program about casting for Dirty Harry, the Musical. Both projects reek of major dough, ray for me

Note to self: Figure out how to launch Dizgraceland, the podcast.

Note to self: Remember to learn to play the banjo.

Note to self: Trim eyebrows.

Note to self: Unpack and organize my animal skull collection that has been in boxes in the garage for three years.

Note to self: Figure out a way to keep my wife from disposing of my animal skull collection (if she already hasn't).

Note to self: Hire someone to do my day job at half the salary. I would keep collecting the paychecks, pay the surrogate and collect half my salary without working. I could even get several jobs, do the same thing and make major bucks without working a lick. And no, this isn't a pyramid scheme.

Note to self: Create a with bristles made out of double-sided tape. This puppy would pick up everything.

Note to self: Figure out how to get dirt out of double-sided tape broom.

Note to self: Think of a way to keep the millions of people who read my blog from steeling my great "note to self" ideas and reminders (though if anyone wants to trim my eyebrows that would be cool).

Disengaging the enemy

2008-07-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

I was riding the bus from my office to Seattle's waterfront to go to a meeting the other day. That in itself is not unusual. I have been using public transit for 26 years. I work in the industry. This particular day it was a bit chilly and looked like it might rain so I had grabbed a jacket from my office that has my company logo on it. As I sat down on the bus, a young man with a backpack got on behind me and sat a few seats away. He looked at my jacket, saw the logo and asked, "Are you a bus driver?"

Inside I cringed. I am not a bus driver and people assume that anyone working for a public transit agency either operates a bus or is a mechanic. I do neither and trying to explain the other functions required to operate transit systems is not my favorite topic.

It is not that there is anything wrong with driving a bus, but I knew that this question was a precursor to either a complaint about the bus system, suggestions on how to improve it or a detailed description on how many seats there are in the standard 40-foot coach. The fact that the bus wasn't operated by the agency I worked for wouldn't matter. Regardless, I shook my head and replied, "No, I work in their marketing department."

They young man was quiet for a minute and I prayed briefly that I had dodged the bullet of a prolonged discussion when all I wanted to do was play backgammon on my Blackberry. But then he began speaking. He complained about where we were putting our new light rail system and how we shouldn't have buses or trains that use fossils fuels. He complained about the cost of riding the buses and the trains and recounted how it used to be cheaper to drive than take public transit. Then he complained about how the cost of gas was driving him to the bus.

I nodded politely.

Then the young man began his tirade on environmentalists, off shore drilling, spotted owls, the timber industry and government waste. Fortunately I got to my stop before he could begin providing his solutions.

I smiled at him and scurried off the bus while he turned to look for some other captive audience on the bus to pontificate to. I shook my head as the bus pulled away and chastized myself for wearing anything that identifed where I worked on a bus. It is the equivalent to wearing a kick me sign.

In my younger days I may have engaged the young man in a debate and pointed out his misconceptions, corrected his facts and suggested alternative viewpoints. And he would have been more passionately engaged and rigid about his point of view. I've encountered hundreds of such people at parties, at public meetings or just riding buses. Other than the fact that he votes and likely will reproduce progeny that he may be able to imprint with his narrow point of view, he is probably harmless.

I learned long ago that when you work for a government agency you give up having personal opinions when you are identified as a government employee. If you voice one in defence of your company, you risk being repremanded for taking a stand that may be perceived as the company's. At the very least you risk being mired in a neverending debate with a person who has no interest in facts, regardless how rational those facts may be. Because everyone knows government lies and private industry (and citizens) always tell the truth, right?

So I've learned the path of least resistance is to nod, smile and say things like, "That's a very unique way of looking at it" or "You make an interesting point" (which is the equvalent of telling someone with an ugly baby that "he sure has lots of hair).

Deep down, though, I feel like I've taken the coward's path when I don't stand up to people with really twisted opinions or are just blatantly wrong. Because there are too many times in history where people just nodded, smiled and tried to ignore very scary points of view.

I wonder if Hitler rode the bus?

You wouldn't believe me if I told you

2008-07-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

I watched one of those thought provoking films the other night, The Man from Earth. It was a 2007 independent film written by late screenwriter Jerome Bixby. Bixby is best known for episodes he wrote for the Twilight Zone and Star Trek. He apparently finished the screenplay for The Man from Earth on his death bed in 1998.

The cool thing about The Man from Earth is that it is entirely comprised of dialogue between intellectual characters sitting around a living room by a fireplace. There is no action, no special effects and no nudity. By Hollywood standards that translates to no audience. Shoot, by my normal low standards that sounds like a snoozer.

I loved the film.

The premise of the film isn't new. A college professor is picking up and moving after ten years teaching at a school. His friends don't understand why. They ambush him at his home where he is packing up a pick up truck with his possessions that include what one professor identifies as a pretty darned good rip off of an original Van Gogh painting.

The main character then proceeds to tell his circle of friends that he moves every 10 years to prevent people from questioning why he never ages past 35. He then proceeds to tell them that he is 14,000 years old give or take a couple of decades. He goes on to tell them he was a Cro Magnon man who was driven away from his tribe when they couldn't get past the fact that they were getting old and dying and he wasn't.

Of course, all of the professor's friends think that he is pulling their collective legs or that he is a major nut job. He proceeds to describe being a student of Buddha, a crew member of Columbus' ships and a friend of Van Gogh. That doesn't help much.

I don't want to ruin the movie for any of you who want to see it, but the guy really freaks out his friends when he claims to be a major character out of the New Testament who later has a rock opera named after him by Anthony Lloyd Weber. One woman practically has a breakdown because, if he is telling the truth, it counters every religious belief system she had.

Okay the plot is a bit reminiscent of the Highlander (sans the action and bad acting), the dialogue is a bit too pat and the intellectual friends a bit too cerebral and glib, but the overall "make you think" factor of this film is pretty impressive. It presents a fairly practical look at immortality and reinforces the reality that coming clean about being Jesus is a sure ticket to the funny farm. As Jack Nicholson said in a movie some time ago, "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth."

I don't think anyone wants the truth if it means giving up something they have believed in for a long, long time. Even in this day of instant information and cameras everywhere capturing reality every second, most people don't believe what they see, read or hear. You can watch video clips of a politician's speech where he claims to be the Antichrist and 99 percent of the people who watch it won't believe it, especially when the politician's image consultants move in afterward and begin recreating what was said with carefully crafted messages and misdirection.

So god knows how many times Jesus or Buddha or L. Ron Hubbard has returned and been committed, ridiculed, discredited and locked up because no one really can believe the truth.

Now ain't that the truth?

Hiding the elephant

2008-07-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

I have a tendency to size people up, categorize them and file that impression in my head. Once they are in a file, it is pretty hard for me to refile them. I'd say a good percentage of the time I've put them in the right file. But occasionally, when I get to know a person better I come to realize that maybe they belong in a different file or even more than one file.

I started thinking, hypocritical as it may seem, that it would piss me off if I discovered that other people classify and file me as well. Who wants to be generalized? After all, we are all multifaceted and individuals. But unfortunately life is too short and time is too precious not to segment people into categories to help manage our expectations of them. So I imagine I am pigeonholed the way I pigeonhole others.

I'm one of those firm believers that perception is reality. And self-perception is a powerful force. I know how I'd like to be thought of (or pigeonholed if I have to be). But I can also give you a list of character flaws a mile long (though I fantasize that I'm the only one aware of them). I hate the realization that, if I can see my flaws, so can everyone else. You can put a tablecloth over an elephant and pretend it is not an elephant but it is still an elephant. And lately my intense self-reflection (self-absorption and ego to some) has been pulling up the corner of the tablecloth and poking that elephant with a stick.

It is paralyzing to some extent to unveil the elephant, because the ability to act decisively depends a great deal upon having the self-confidence to forge ahead without tripping over self doubt. You have to believe what you are doing is the right thing.

I have never really fancied myself a leader. Throughout my life, however, leadership has been thrust upon me. Teachers were always putting me in charge of study groups, class councils, and science projects. I was a safety patrol lieutenant, president of the chess club in junior high and 9th grade president (I ran unopposed and won by a landslide). I was made a drum major in band in high school. But I learned being made a leader by school authorities and being accepted as a leader by peers are entirely different things. I wasn't comfortable with being a leader.

In my work life I tried to keep a low profile for years. Writing, after all, is a solitary profession. But I eventually had to accept that unless I became a best selling author, making progressively more money as a writer would require me to take on more responsibility. I progressed to managing projects and programs. Finally I was faced with managing people. And as I had learned in my school leadership days, being a manager and being accepted as a manager are very different.

In my fantasy world, being a manager would mean having people do things the way I want them to do them and being in control of my own destiny. But I never took into account that everyone, even the people you manage, have a fantasy of everyone doing the things the way they want them done. And the quirk of managing people is that you also are managed by someone else who wants you to do things the way they want them done and direct other people you supervise to do things the way you have been told to do them.

In other words, unless you become a millionaire by winning the lottery, you never really get to do anything the way you would really want to do them. Even if you have a boss who is open to you expressing your opinion about the best way to accomplish something, you will more than likely be constrained by some corporate police, guideline or directive dictated by something worse than a manager who wants things done their way -- a committee. A committee is a group of people all wanting to do things their way at the same time.

What does any of this have to do with trying to keep that elephant hidden? A great deal. Being a leader at any level puts you under scrutiny by everyone above you on the org chart and everyone below you on the org chart. And unless you are the rare person who is liked AND respected by the people who report to you and the people who supervise you, you aren't going to fair well when people start analyzing, categorizing and filing their perception of you.

So the best I can do is take the table cloth off the elephant and admit I am not a perfect manager. Then at least they can pigeonhole me as honest. Though I still have the urge to cry out, " I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man (ager)!"

Dear Tim_Id:

2008-07-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

I am in receipt of your whiny letter of July 9. Thank you for your interest in communicating with your blog. Your letter will be filed with the rest of your whiny letters about your age, your weight, the economy, your paranoia and your lack of the ability to interact with people (you were pretty dead on with that one, by the way...after all you are writing to your blog as if it were a human).

In the interest of full disclosure, we generally only accept blog posts that are on a particular topic or describing some amusing anecdote from your life. We realize that you have likely exhausted your amusing anecdote supply and will accept letters to your blog as a temporary measure until you get your shit together.

In the meantime I want to take this opportunity to thank you for using blogger.com. It is bloggers like you that make the blog community what it is.

Sincerely,

Your Blog

P.S.
I am fine.

Dear blog

2008-07-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

How are you? I am fine.

Okay, I'm not really fine. My sinuses are still infected. My joints ache and I could lose some weight. I wish I made more money. I'm not thrilled with the economy, rising gas prices or the political climate.

Other than that, I'm fine.

Sort of.

I mean, I'm still freaked about being 50. I find myself questioning everything I believed in at one time or another. No one gets my sense of humor so I am beginning to believe I don't have one. I seem to have lost my ability to communicate. Which is okay because I still feel invisible most of the time anyway.

But I'm fine.

A bit paranoid though. I pretty much believe everyone is out to get me. But I know that is my imagination.

Or not.

But I'm fine.

I've been writing a lot of blog posts lately. My blog stats, however, are at an all time low. Did I mention I no longer think I have a sense of humor and I've lost the ability to communicate?

I don't think anyone likes me. But that could just be the paranoia talking.

Other than that, I'm fine.

How are you doing? I'm pretty much okay, other than all that low self-esteem stuff and the paranoia.

Oh well, take care.

Your friend (or not),

Tim_Id

P.S.

I'm fine.
Sort of.

Taking liberties

2008-07-07T20:31:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy, I thought myself patriotic. The Fourth of July was one of my favorite holidays. I believed the stories about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and Abe Lincoln never telling a lie. And though I'm sure they were relatively good men, I know now that those were just the myths created by presidential press secretaries.

But I suppose all holidays are built around myths: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Pilgrims sitting down with the Indians (or Native Americans if you want to be politically correct about it), and Leprechauns. Let's not forget the little people from the old sod. Why shouldn't the Fourth of July be built around myths, too. So what if Paul Revere never really warned the people of Concord and Lexington that the British were coming? And who cares if the Sons of Liberty were really barflies and bullies pissed about taxes that really weren't that big of a deal. Okay, Ben Franklin was a womanizer and Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves.

The truth doesn't make for good PR. But we need our myths. The truth rarely inspires. And history needs polishing or heroes quickly tarnish. Just like my parents, I have no desire for my children to grow up too quickly disillusioned by the lies of our forefathers.

It is too easy and cliche to blame the government for everything. The government isn't a thing. That is most people's mistake. They view the government as an malevolent entity that conspires against them. The government is simply people. And people operate out of one basic principle -- self preservation. Bureaucrats have families, too. Government workers have mortgages, pay taxes, buy groceries, and worry about their children. If there is a conspiracy in government, it is based on individuals trying to hang on, survive and pay bills.

I don't necessarily believe this is true for politicians. Politicians aspire to power. And anyone who aspires to power should be suspect and not trusted with power. Even the ones with good intentions bend to the addiction of power and sink into various forms of corruption to hold onto it.

There are other bogeymen people seek out to blame for our woes. Small businesses blame big businesses, Protestants blames Catholics, Christians blame Muslims, Blacks blame whites, whites blame minorities, Republicans blame Democrats, Liberals blame Conservatives, freaks blame straights, environmentalists blame industry, workers blame intellectuals and just about everyone blames WalMart.

I personally blame reality TV and Deal or No Deal for the downfall of civilization...or at least prime time television.

But the one person no one blames (as I've said before and forgive me for repeating yet again) is themselves.

And that is probably the one person who is really to blame.

Is there death after life?

2008-07-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

Now that's a better question than, "Is there life after death?" It doesn't presuppose that you die first (which technically means you cease to exist) and then wonder if you go on living (a paradox). So the real question becomes do we die after we live or does death really exist??

Merely semantics, I'm sure some people think. But as a writer, words are my mathematical formulas and they have to add up properly or they are just a series of letters strung together.

I don't want you to think that I am preoccupied with death. I firmly believe that we should be preoccupied with life. It's just that nagging question of the afterlife that pops up when the spectre of our mortality rears it's ugly little head.

I wouldn't really want to live forever. I think it be frustrating to eventually have to say, "Been there, done that," to just about every suggestion. I don't mind doing things I like over and over, but eventually even fun things can grow stale if there isn't something to break up the monotony.

Perhaps that is what death is. It's something to break up the monotony of living. It is a reasonable theory. But it's flaw is when you ponder the tragedy of a young person or a child dying. That breaks my heart. It puts death back into the random, senseless realm. And if death has no rhyme nor reason, how can life?

Sometimes I feel as though my thinking processes are patterned after a dog chasing his own tail. I am a writer/philosopher chasing his own tale.

But perhaps it is the pondering of death that holds the clue to it. If we live and die and poof...that's it, where does the collective knowledge and experience that permeates our DNA come from? I mean, one person can only theorize about death for so long before they die. So how is that theorizing passed on so that the next person pondering death doesn't have to start from scratch?

Damn you, tail...tale!

Is there life after death?

2008-07-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

If you think about it, it is kind of a stupid question. Death means the end, finale, the final caboose, that's all she wrote, etc. It reminds me of the old Mad Magazine bit about snappy answers to stupid questions, like "Is this the end of the line" when 50 people are obviously lined up, facing in one direction.

Is there life after death? Well, no.

There I answered that one. I think what people are really trying to figure out is what happens after you die. Is it like a video game and you have to start over at the first level? Or do you get to start where the game left off? Or do you start a completely new game?

The dumbest option I can think of is that you float around in the spirit world, hanging out where you died or lived a long time and hope that someone takes a photo of you that appears to be an "astral orb" or uses sophisticated recording equipment to try and capture your spiritual wisdom and all you can whisper is, "Soooo..."

I used to want to believe in ghosts because I thought it would ease that cosmic fear I have of death just being the end and then you are nothing. I still don't want to believe that. But I also don't want to believe that death means being put on hold in a limbo world listening to elevator music.

This post was prompted by a program I watched today on the History Channel while working out on the elliptical machine. It was about a group of ghost hunters who put tons of cameras and recording equipment in several rooms of the Lizzie Borden house to see if they could capture the ghost of Lizzie or her murdered father and step mother (remember the nursery rhyme, "Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks...When she saw what she had done, gave her father 41").

After about 50 hours, the best the ghost hunters could come up with was a recording of what sounded like a whispered, "Sooo..." after the ghost hunters were packing up the rest of the equipment. Oh, and they took an infrared photo of a trunk in one room that liked like the bottom of the trunk was hotter than the top part.

Apparently the next world doesn't have cable so spirits spend lots of time trying to figure out how to communicate with this world. They think of clever things to say like, "So," and "yeah" (perhaps all spirits are teenagers). And they heat up the bottom of trunks.

Maybe death just being the end isn't so bad after all.

Fourth of July 2008

2008-07-05T01:16:00.000-07:00

We spent the evening at Gasworks Park in Seattle overlooking Lake Union and watched the fireworks. It was Enya-Maria's first Fourth of July in the United States. Since the fireworks didn't begin until 10 p.m. she was fast asleep in her stroller. She slept through the entire show.

So this post is dedicated to her and to allow her to see what she missed.

I have to admit that I was just as enthralled by the spectical of skyrockets as I used be as a kid laying on the roof of my grandma's garage watching the starbursts from Boise State Stadium. I'd never been so close to a show as we were at Gasworks (other than the time I when out on a tug pulling a fireworks barge for a freelance story I never wrote).

Ashes rained down on us as we thrilled at the explosions. And yes, I'm sure it wasn't good for the environment. Nor were the hordes of onlookers who rushed back to their cars to avoid the inevitable jams getting home.

But those few minutes of fire in the sky were somehow worth it.