Shuffling off the Buffalo

My post about morons wearing buffalo horned hats to storm the Capitol Building on January 6, 2020 made me think about Buffalo (the city). I visited there back in the early 1980s in January (so you can only imagine the weather). I was on a business trip to explore rail tunnels they had built. I was probably around 26 years old. 

The city of Buffalo has nothing to do with Buffalo (the animals or idiots who storm the national Capitol). The city of Buffalo in New York is named after Buffalo Creek, which was itself named by early French explorers.  One theory suggests that the name Buffalo comes from the French word "beau fleuve," meaning "beautiful river." Early French explorers in the region may have used this term to describe Buffalo Creek or the nearby Niagara River.

 While on the airplane to Buffalo we flew through Chicago and were stuck on an airplane with the entire New York Rangers hockey team who were playing a game that night in Buffalo. They were quite animated (especially since the average age of them was 18 and they were predominately Canadians who had never been on an airplane). I remember the goalies name was Rocky and he had no front teeth (don't ask me why I remember this). 

While sitting on the airplane watching the hocky players harass the flight attendants and climb over seats, one of my work travel companions struck up a conversation about what there was to do in Buffalo. He suggested going to the Anchor Bar where Buffalo Wings were supposedly invented.

The credit for inventing Buffalo wings is often given to Teressa Bellissimo, owner of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo. The story goes that Buffalo wings were created as a late-night snack for her son and his friends.

The specific details of the creation vary, but the most widely accepted version is that in 1964, Teressa Bellissimo deep-fried chicken wings and tossed them in a sauce made with a combination of hot sauce and butter. This sauce gave the wings a spicy and tangy flavor, which became an instant hit.

The Anchor Bar's Buffalo wings gained popularity locally and eventually became known nationally. Today, Buffalo wings are a staple in American cuisine, often served with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing on the side. They are enjoyed in various variations, with different levels of spiciness and an array of sauce options.

Long story short, while the Rangers were playing their hockey game we went to the Anchor Bar and I sampled Buffalo wings for the first time. Traditionally they are served with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing. I have no idea why.

I don't remember much else about Buffalo, New York other than there was lots of snow and I had only brought dress shoes and a thin overcoat. 

Again I was only about 26 years old. You live and learn.

Buffalo turds won't you come out tonight

 

It's January 6th and it is difficult not to acknowledge one of the most pitiful moments in recent American history when Trump incited his followers to storm the Capitol Building and prevent Biden from being certified as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election. 

And who can forget the self-proclaimed Shaman (more like Shameman) wearing buffalo horns (trimmed inexplicably with what look like raccoon tails) and carrying a spear with the United States flag attached to it.  The moron was arrested, convicted and received four years in federal prison. I don't think he served it all, but apparently he is now running for Congress on the Libertarian ticket in Arizona.

You can't make up this kind of shit.

What is particularly sad and criminal to me is that Trump, who started the whole thing, is still free and running for President again. Oh he has been charged, but he and his lawyers are playing the same games he has played his entire life and denying any wrong doing, playing the martyr and pointing fingers at everyone else including Bigfoot for his crimes.

He has been charged with essentially treason, fraud, rape, and using classified documents to wipe his rump. And still the morons who follow him think he is the second coming.

Scary thing is that if he does get convicted and goes to jail (which I seriously doubt will happen), his minions will chalk it up to liberal persecution and very likely will start a civil war.

Let's just hope they are just as incompetent as when they stormed the Capitol Building.

Eye of Newt

 

“Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”

--Shakespeare, Macbeth 

I am proud to have worked eye of Newt in here somehow. Though I don't imagine many people under 60 remember Newt Gingrich anyway. He was the 50th Speaker of the House, an asshole Republican and one of the political figures who used to irritate the hell out of most liberals until Trump lowered the bar.

 His name was actual Newton (though he is quite reptilian). He tried running for President in 2012 but lost the nomination to Mitt Romney. He was (an is) one of Trump's toadies. 

Oh and he is from Georgia.  'Nuff said.

 Anyway Newt would fit well in a witch's cauldron of foul smelling things along with most of the other conservative scum gibbering away in Congress and worshiping Trump's orange butt. 

I'm glad to slunk off into obscurity with the rest of the lizard's Newt. Hope you are boiling and bubbling somewhere warm.

No newts is good newts

 

I bought my daughter a new iPhone for Christmas and Apple offered me three months of free Apple news. I figured what the hell. I get frustrated all of the time because news stories pop up and I click on them and find out I can't read them because I don't subscribe to Apple news.  So now when a headline pops up that Trump was kicked out of a restaurant 20 years ago because he smelled I can read the entire article.

So I have been binging on sensational news articles and have realized that most of them are click bait written in many cases by my new best friend ChatGPT and designed to expose you to as many pop up ads as possible in a limited time and space. And so far I haven't really felt I am more informed than I was before just reading the headlines.

This made me think of the phrase "No news is good news." That made me think of "No newts is good newts." You get the picture.

Get it?

I toyed briefly with using a headline that read, "Eye of news, toe of frog" (which I personally think is a pretty damned intriguing headline, but maybe not quite as relevant).  So I went with No newts is good newts (which was an actual headline in England at one time when endangered newts were preventing some developers from building condos or something.

Gruuvinol' Man

 

My good friend ChatGPT describes Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man this way:

The Vitruvian Man is a famous drawing created by the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci around the year 1490. It is a representation of the ideal proportions of the human body, based on the work of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.

The drawing depicts a man standing in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart inside both a square and a circle. The square represents the proportional perfection of the human body, while the circle symbolizes the divine and cosmic significance. The Vitruvian Man is often associated with the concept of symmetry and the idea that the human body can be harmoniously inscribed within geometric shapes.

Leonardo da Vinci's illustration is a testament to his interest in anatomy, proportion, and the intersection of art and science during the Renaissance period. The Vitruvian Man has become an iconic symbol of the Renaissance and is widely recognized as a representation of the balance and symmetry found in the human form.

I also asked ChatGPT to describe "Guuvinol' Man." It was basically speechless.  This is probably because it is a word I made up to describe my riff on Vitruvian Man. I consider it a more realistic homage to the human body (well...my human body) than Da Vinci's. And I took the liberty of adding pants and a bitchin' Aloha shirt to preserve my modesty and protect the world from the "perfection" of my body.

I do seriously doubt that Da Vinci would have drawn his groovy old man body instead of the lean, mean one he drew. I somehow think body shaming isn't a new development and he didn't want the blow back on Instagram.

I started this odd journey because I mistakenly believed the Vitruvian Man drawing had been placed on the Golden Record that was sent on Voyager 1 and 2 back in 1977 (which was a year after I graduated from high school). The Golden Record was a metal phonograph record containing images and sounds that were supposed to convey what life was like on Earth. 

I can only imagine aliens finding one of the Voyagers and the Golden Record, being kind of pissed and saying, "What? Where are the CDs?" 

Anyway, I thought they included an image of the Vitruvian Man so I was going to post my Groovyol' Man with some commentary about my blog being like Voyager and people in the future would discover it and think WTF?

I imagine that may still happen in the not too distant future.

Resolution revolution

 I sort of had this idea that it would be cool if I resolved to write a post a day in 2024. But my track record with resolutions and doing anything because I have to isn't really great. I did have a great idea for a post today, but it  has required a lot more Photoshop work than I anticipated and I have had to postpone it until tomorrow.

Still, I felt compelled to try and post for at least the second day in a row for 2024 even it is a lame post about maybe resolving to post every day (which I am pretty damned sure I won't achieve). It's not that I couldn't do it. It is just squeezing time in between the nasty commitments of work and chores and eating and going to the bathroom and playing with my dog.

Oh and I like surfing eBay. 

But who knows. This may be the record year of unread blog posts instead of unwritten blog posts.

It could happen.

Author's note: I checked in with ChatGPT and apparently:

"Resolution Revolution" emphasizes a significant leap forward in the ability to visualize and capture details, whether in the realm of biological research or in the digital imaging and display technologies that have become integral parts of our daily lives.

Rest assured that, despite the random image above, Resolution Revolution had (or has) nothing to do with this blog post. If you came here looking for information about it, I can honestly say I was just wasting your time.

Reflections 2024

 

I did a version of this Escher sketch (I wonder if Escher ever used an Etch-a-sketch) years ago and thought it was time to reprise and update it. In the sphere of things it is a fascinating image (I do loves me my puns). It is a man (in this case me...cisgender even though it isn't cool). The interesting thing about this image is that you never really know where the drawing begins and the man ends (or visa versa).

That was a great deal of paranthetical sentences in one paragraph.

I actual don't do a lot of literal reflecting on myself in reality. I don't like mirrors or photos because too often it is like starting at a stranger. I do reflect a great deal on my inner self (whatever that is). It is why I am convinced I have never been overly successful as a blogger/writer. People don't care about what makes another person tick (unless that person is famous...and in particularly flawed). People care about themselves even when they are acting all benevolent and self-effacing. 

I read something the other day someone posted on Facebook (sorry). I think it was an Ann Landers quote. She said people worry about what people think when they are young, stop caring when they are older and then finally discover no one actually thinks about you at all. We all just think about ourselves.

It resonated.

It kind of goes with that blog post I made a few weeks ago about the Powerpoint presentation I made to my work team that was just about me thinking they would be fascinated and then discovering that no one cared or thought I was nearly as interesting as I assumed they thought. 

It is a sobering realization to realize your own insignificance (It's a Wonderful Life be damned).

Trump has obviously never come to that realization (nor do all of the insignificant lampreys that attach themselves to his orange ass).

I have always tried to laugh off my insignificance and harbor this hope that somewhere deep down, people really do think I'm amazing. But the older you get, the more you discover there is nothing further from the truth. 

This is not self pity. Nor do I think it is a bad thing. There is something freeing to discover you don't really matter. You don't have to write, look or act any particular way to keep an image alive if you have no image. It is part of that invisibility I ponder so often. 

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "see right through me."

123123

 

So it is almost officially 2024. And I can't say I have done much today in way of preparation. Oh, I did finally sell this old English Kitchen Cabinet I had bought umpteen years ago at an antique mall. I had it at my Shoreline house and kept dishes in it. It moved with me to two other houses, but I no longer have room for it. So I put it on Facebook Marketplace almost a year ago. But no one wanted to pay me near what it was worth until today.

This nice person sent her young husband by to pick it up. When I opened up the garage to show it to him he asked me if I was okay lifting things and if I could help him put it in his vehicle. I wanted to go pick him up to show him I am old but not totally feeble yet. I swear I'm giving off some senior citizen vibe. I'm still pissed about the guy at Ace Hardware saying, "Hello young man."

So I don't have a lot of hope for 2024 not being the year of ageism directed at my poor old gray head. I'm tempted to grow a ponytail to show them how hip and young I am.

Not going to happen. Growing a ponytail at my age would be falling right in their trap and admitting I'm an old fart trying to keep the Grim Reaper at bay.

Anyway, I wanted to get one last post in before the ball drops (though I believe it already fell in NYC because of the time difference). 

Happy New Year!

Down for the count?

 

I went into an Ace Hardware Store today to kill time before picking my daughter up from an appointment. Normally a hardware store wouldn't be my first choice for a place to kill time, but the Ace Hardware in our community is more of a general store than a hardware store. They pretty much have anything you can imagine in stock.  And I figured I would see what was on sale after Christmas.

Things started going sideways when I walked in and was greeted by the Ace version of a Walmart greeter. It was this nice older gentleman who looked about 20 years older than me. He greeted me with a "Good afternoon, young man, is there anything I can help you find?"

Okay, I know what it means when someone greets a senior citizen with a clever, "hello young man." It's tantamount to asking me to see my AARP card and direct me to where they stock the Depends. 

But I smiled nicely, muttered I was just looking and slipped off to see what was on sale. I found a box of smart lightbulbs marked down, likely because Ace couldn't sell them to the other senior citizens who were still trying to figure out how to send a text message on their flip phones. There were the type of bulbs that you can not only ask Alexa to turn on and off, but also to change colors or dim. I snatched the last box and went off to another aisle. 

I swear that at least three other sales associates asked me if I needed help. This Ace is not that big of a store but they have an army of sales associates. I was starting to get really annoyed because unless I'm in a hardware store looking for a specific part for a toilet, I pretty much want to browse on me own.

I found the tool aisle and picked up a riveting gun set I've been kind of wanting for awhile. Because you never seem to have a rivet gun when you need one and I've got a couple of guitar cases where the handles have broken off.

I made my way to the cashier dodging several more helpful sales associates. The cashier rang up my purchases and I put my debit card in the keypad. It was one of those overly sensitive ones and it kept erroring out if I even looked at the wrong button. I swear the cashier was shaking her head in pity at the poor senior citizen trying to remember their pin number. She gave me my receipt and said a bit too sweetly to me that she "hoped I had a better day." She might as well have patted me on the hand and said, "There, there dear."

I scurried out of the store to my 2006 Hyundai wishing I was driving a Dodge Charger that I could have spun out leaving the parking lot. 

Why do I feel like I'm approaching that stage in life where people are trying to get me to step onto an ice flow and tell me to "Have a nice trip?"

Counting down

 

I've been around the block enough times to know that nothing really changes when the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve and it officially becomes a new year. Putting aside all of the different time zones, the artificial nature of calendars, the abstract nature of time in general, a new year means nothing but another countdown to whatever you countdown to in the new year.

So we should just be content to celebrate the dropping of the ball in Times Square (or the obscuring of the Space Needle with firework smoke in Seattle), the kissing of strangers and the opportunity to drink and blow party horns when the clock rolls around to midnight.

Not that most clocks strike or roll anymore. 

Prince was all about partying like it was 1999 because lots of people thought the world would end when it became 2000. For some reason they thought that because of software glitches that somehow didn't account for a new century. But nothing happened. And there were a lot of disappointed people with hangovers.

It's not like I ever partied big time on New Year's Eve anyway (though you'd think differently looking at the above photo...just a random moment captured out of context...not sure what the context was though). I don't think I ever did kiss a stranger at midnight (at least not on New Year's Eve). Most of my single life was spent thinking I needed to be coupled up (which is the kiss of death if you are trying to meet someone) and when you are married, New Year's Eve generally means trying to stay awake until midnight and mutter, "Whoopee."

I suppose it is better that we don't each have our own countdown clock that tracks how much time we have left. Depending upon your circumstances it could be inspiring, annoying or depressing (especially for procrastinators). But it would put things in perspective and we might be less apt to waste time.

Or not. 

Let the countdown begin!

To know, know, know me...

 

To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him 

Just to see him smile, makes my life worthwhile

To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him 

And I do (and I do, and I, and I do, and I, and I do, and I, and I do, and I)

--Song by the The Teddy Bears written by Phil Spector

Part of me wanted to write, "to know, know, know me is to loath, loath, loath me." Or maybe, "to no, no, no me..." 

Ironically, Phil Spector wrote and performed this song with his singing group the Teddy Bears. The song was inspired by a quote on his father's tombstone, "To know him was to love him." His father had committed suicide.

After having the one hit, "To know him is to love him," Spector went on to become a record producer. And to say he was a control freak was being pretty generous. He produced a great deal of successful music but Phil Spector was basically a bona fide nut job. In 2003 he was arrested for putting a pistol in the mouth of an actress visiting his mansion and killing her. 

He denied killing her, but the evidence was pretty overcoming. He showed up to court in a variety of bizarre wigs. He ended up going to prison and died in a prison hospital in 2021. 

So to know, know, know Phil Spector is to pretty much know he was a certified whack job.

Which is a round about way to come to the point of this blog post. In my experience, the more you know, know, know someone or they know, know, know you, the less either of you will really want anything to do with each other.

So thanks, Phil. You produced some pretty great music but you proved that no matter how you crack it, a nut is still a nut (and maybe better off left in its shell.)

Ghosts of Christmas' past

 

This was a photo from Christmas 1974. I'm the half-awake skinny teenager on the left. My brother Dan is in the middle in a robe and my father is on the right. I was 16, my brother was 20 and my dad was almost 60. My mom is likely the one taking the photo and my oldest brother was married by then and would likely be coming over later with his wife to open presents from my parents.

I was wearing a scarf I think was knitted by my  first girlfriend. It was the only reason I was wearing a scarf. Scarves weren't a big thing in our house growing up and I didn't really see the purpose in wearing one. 

We are sitting in front of the tree in our family room which had wood paneling, a Franklin Stove and god-awful orange shag carpeting. The room looked the same up until the house was torn down after my mom died about 38 years later. I imagine we would have had a Christmas dinner later that day when my brother and his now ex-wife came over (she was the first of three wives). I was in high school of course and had just started dating that spring. I don't remember what I got my girlfriend for Christmas that year. I was still trying to figure out the complicated rituals of gifts and girlfriends. No matter what it was, I imagine it was the wrong thing.

I don't remember what else I got for Christmas that year. The 70s were a time of 8-track tapes and polyester shirts. My brother is holding a mug from his burgeoning mug collection. It may have been when he started on the path to being a borderline hoarder that he is now (and I am being kind to refer to him a "borderline" hoarder). I'm not sure when he set out on the path to being a Trump groupie. 

My father was a few years from retiring as a custodian at the local university. He had worked at a hardware warehouse for 25 years before the company closed and laid him off when he was 55. He was a good custodian, though. And he brought home crap he found in the garbage all the time so that may have contributed to my brother's hoarding tendencies, too.

I post this photo, not because it was a particularly memorable Christmas. It is just one of the few photos from that time. And it does capture the spirit of the 1970s and my particular teen spirit.

Santa has a beard

 

As with most things on my blog, I have written about growing a beard many times.  One of the best posts was To shave or not to shave back in 2010. It pretty much captures my history of facial hair.  I've had mustaches, goatees and very occasionally experimental full beards.  The full beards never quite panned out.

I generally just defaulted to goatees. Even during the pandemic I resisted the trend to grow a COVID beard. But recently I started letting my beard grow again and I have to say I like it. Here's an actual photo sans the social media filters.

The one drawback I've found with having a full beard is the amount of product you need to keep it from looking like you just rolled out of a refrigerator box on the sidewalk. This includes beard wash, beard conditioner, beard oil and beard balm (brought to you with no little expense by companies with cool names like Grave Before Shave). And you need a beard brush and a beard comb to work those products through your beard. But be prepared that your teenage son will like take a shine to both your beard brush and beard comb for god knows why and use them instead of the four or five combs and brushes you provide him for his long hair.

I am particularly pleased that my new, longer beard does indeed hide my old and ever expanding double chin. It also makes my face appear longer, adding to the illusion that I am getting slimmer as I age (at least in my face).

I also think the full beard makes me look even more like my great, great, great grandfather George Knox who had a pretty bitchin' beard if I do say so myself.

This prepares me join thousands of people who each year join in to inexplicably reinact battles of the civil war. My great, great, great grandfather was in fact in the civil war and received a pension including compensation for suffering chronic diarrhea.

I don't think it had anything to do with his beard, though. But I have big footsteps to follow in.

What's so funny?

 

I have always thought my best attribute is my sense of humor. I've always enjoyed making people laugh. And I've always enjoyed laughing. 

But you know, it is another thing that I feel like I'm losing with old age. Or more correctly, it is another thing I am seriously (pun intended) doubting as I get older. 

I've blogged about this before. But what haven't I blogged about before? Though in all fairness to me, I have blogged about thinking I am funny instead of about having a sense of humor. I suppose they aren't the same thing.

Doubt has set in on both fronts again. A week or so ago I was supposed to make a presentation to my staff meeting at work. I was the facilitator and the facilitator at our meetings is required to make a presentation about anything they want. It definitely doesn't have to be work related. Some people present about trips they have been on, or hobbies. Some even present about themselves.

So I thought it would be funny to do an entire presentation about me and how I came to be where I am in life. I started from the beginning and worked my way from being a baby, though kindergarten, grade school, junior high, high school, college finally work. I thought I was making it clever, entertaining and informative. It was also an opportunity to show photos of myself before I was old with white hair a beard and a very tired face.

Before the presentation I had slides running of my series of Mindless Thoughts from my YouTube channel. I wanted them to see how clever I could be. No one even noticed them.

I started the slide show with a clever photo:

No one cracked a smile. All of my awkward childhood photos and stories fell flat. And I kept going. I showed a video of me in my late 20s when I thought I looked pretty damned handsome. Not a single gasp or comment.  Finally I reached the end and realized I had taken up way more time then I intended and hadn't managed to endear myself to anyone.

I wanted to crawl under a rock. I had shared photos of myself no one had ever seen and told stories I assumed were entertaining. And I finally had the revelation that none of them cared. No one gave a rip. And I also realized that it was highly likely that the stuff I had shared would never be seen again by anyone (except for the random photo or two I post here). 

You see, the difference between someone who is famous and the rest of us is that people want to know everything thing about them and especially love to see photos from when they were young and attractive so they could marvel at how much they have aged and let themselves go. I fooled myself into thinking I was famous in my tiny little microcosm of life. 

But no one but me saw it that way. They barely even humored me let alone found humor in what I had shared. So it put things into perspective for me. First it confirmed that the people I work with are just that. For the most part they aren't friends. Secondly it taught me something I should have learned (or relearned) a long time ago. I'm not nearly as funny as I think I am. The more I stop and think about what I am going to say when I am about to try and be clever, the better. 

I know this all sounds like one more trip to the punchline bowl at the pity party, but it actually helps me to put my life in perspective. It reminds me of this barfly I ran into at a bar in St. Thomas years ago. He told me to never forget seven words to live by: Never forget how great you really are.

I can't help but edit those a bit for my slide show experience: Never forget how great you really aren't.

Blarney

 

Blarney sounds like an Irish rip off of the purple dinosaur we all used to hate. But Blarney is loosely translated as the Irish gift of charming gab. Legend holds you could get that skill by kissing the Blarney Stone which was used to build Blarney Castle in...you guessed it...Ireland six hundred years ago. 

The photo of a much younger me with an unfortunate ponytail above shows me pointing at a portion of the Blarney Stone that was in the wall outside of Fitzgerald's Casino in Reno back in the 1990s. It was always one of my stops when I'd visit my friend from college who lived in Reno and worked as a Slot Supervisor at Harrah's in Reno. We'd always swing by the Fitz, rub the Blarney Stone for good luck (there was no way I was kissing a rock on a building in downtown Reno) and go through what we called the Lucky Grotto inside the casino. It was one of the casino scams to draw in tourists. You when by displays of lucky charms like Buddha's belly, the Blarney Stone and leprechauns to give a spin on a wheel of fortune.  Although I technically you could win cash, we almost always just got a Leprechaun keychain, a four-leaf clover keychain or a pen. I think we once also got a Fitz trucker hat.

We never really minded winning cheezy things on the wheel of fortune at the Fitz because it was all part of the fun. Unless you were pretty stupid or a degenerate gambler, you didn't go to Reno to get rich. You went to drink, gamble a little and forget your day to day mundane existence. 

I have pointed out before that Reno was the blue collar version of Las Vegas. It was low key and low rent. Oh, they had bright lights and lots of slot machines, but it never pretended to be classy. And while Las Vegas bragged about what happened there stayed there, Reno pretty much didn't give a shit one way or another. That's why I liked it.

So why am I waxing poetic about Reno? I was at a Goodwill store a few weeks ago browsing the bric a brac and I found an ashtray from the Sands Casino/Hotel in downtown Reno. It reminded me of all of the ashtrays I used to pocket from various Reno casinos in my day even though I don't smoke. It was my way of sticking it to the man. I think at one point I was walking around with eight ashtrays in my pockets.

The ashtrays have long since gone the way of many of my obsessive collections from my younger days. I found them in a blue plastic bin I had stored in our garage for 20 or so years. I purged most of the stuff during the pandemic by either selling the stuff on eBay or donating it to Goodwill. I think that's where all the ashtrays ended up. 

Ironic, don't you think? Because now, when pretty much no one smokes or goes to Reno, the casino ashtrays have become trendy "trinket trays."  

On this day in history (of my blog...well this day tomorrow) 2010

 Since daylight savings time is still plaguing us and went into effect last weekend, this post seems particularly relevant even though it is 13 years old. Now granted I don't have to change as many clocks because Alex and Apple take care of most of that, I still have to figure out how to change the clock in my car while not deleting any bluetooth settings or letting the air out of my tires. My kids are no longer small but try explaining daylight savings time to two cats and a dog who trust their body clock more than the government. But so do I. Anyway let's fall back to this post:

Making a withdrawal from my daylights savings

I'm not a big fan of Daylight Savings Time. For one, it means I have to figure out how to change the time on 40 clocks and appliances scattered about my house. And I have to figure out how to change the clock in my car with one hand while driving because I never seem to notice the clock until I'm on the road and trying to get somewhere.

I also don't like the government arbitrarily messing with my body clock. Because just because they theoretically give your hour back in the fall after ripping it away from you, your body never really catches up. This is especially true if you have small children in the house. Setting your clocks back in the fall has absolutely no meaning to them and they will now get up when their body clock says it is time to get up.

I think the clock read 5:30 a.m. this last Sunday when my two-year old son sat up and declared he wanted to watch Tickerbell and the Lost Treasure. He then proceeded to sing the theme song from Little Einsteins while slapping out the drum beat on my back. This was followed by repeatedly putting a pillow over my face and pulling off and crying, "boo." My four-year old daughter quickly joined in the fun. My extra hour slipped out of the room along with the cat, both being chased by toddlers.

Dante has a level of hell just for whoever came up with Daylight Savings Time.

Personally, I like walking to the train in the morning in the dark. It is peaceful. And this is Seattle. Even if the sun is out in the morning, its behind a cloud, so giving me an extra hour of daylight means absolutely nothing.

You can bet our ancestors didn't try messing with time. I'm sure they dragged out of their caves as soon as the sun came out and scrambled back in as soon as it when down. They didn't need the village elders to decide they could save firewood by going out an hour earlier in the spring or an hour later in the fall.  The carnivores waiting outside in the dark dictated strict adherence to nature's clock.

Oh, I am sure there is a federal agency somewhere with the sole responsibility for defending Daylight Savings Time with a vast arsenal of charts and graphs showing us how much energy and money we save each year. Honestly, I don't care whether they are right or wrong. I just want them to leave my body clock alone. Go regulated plastic bags and bottles and leave my freakin' clocks alone.

On this day in the history (of my blog) in 2005

 

This one is truly a golden oldie from the past. I haven't worn a tie for almost a year. But 18 years ago it was still an occasional obligation as part of the work day. Since the pandemic, ties have pretty much gone the way of powdered wigs. Come to think of it, so has wearing pants. So something good did come from the whole mess. Anyway, tie this one on for size:

Tie one on

I've had to wear a tie two days in a row now because I was sitting on an interview panel at work and it is making me more than a little cranky. I am not a tie person. Its status as a symbol of conformity doesn't rest easy with me. And besides, the damned things are like wearing a noose around your neck.

And why do we wear ties? Blame it on the Croatians. Apparently in 1635, a group of Craotian mercenaries came to Paris to give their support to King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. And the distinquishing article of clothing that made the Croats stand out amongst the usual dandies of Paris was a scarve around their neck tied in a distinctive "Croatian style" previously unknown in Europe. The fashionable expression, ’a la croate’, soon evolved into a new French word: la cravate. Thus the cravate or necktie was born.

I'm not a Croatian. I'm not in the Court of King Louis XII, yet almost four Centuries later, I'm walking around with a bit of silk around my neck like a dog on a frilly leash.

Well, this dog don't hunt, he just howls.

Other than serving as a personal garrote, the tie really serves no practical purpose than emphasizing your beer belly. And the fashion dictators add insult to injury by varying the width of the tie you should be wearing at any given time. Just before we moved in August, I must have tossed out 50 ties ranging in one to five inches in width.

I suppose wearing a tie is a right of passion all men must endure. After I graduated from clip-on's my father taught me to tie a tie. But that was only after he got tired of tying them for me and slipping them around my neck. Not that my father wore ties very often. He was a foreman in a warehouse and had the blue collar luxury of only donning the yoke of oppression for church and funerals.

But I had to go to college. Every time I think I need to look professional, I button that top button and slip the noose around my neck.

It could have been worse though. The Croatians could have thought it was cool to wear dead fish around their neck and we could have adopted that fashion. The higher you are on the food chain, the bigger fish you'd have to wear.

"Honey, have you seen my Blue Marlin?"

"It's in the closet next to the Mackeral."

Yes, there could have been worse customs we adopted from the Croatians. Though I think I would have looked pretty good wearing a Salmon.

The commute from hell

 

I don't commute as much since the "end" of the pandemic, but I was riding the train home last night from downtown Seattle and snapped these photos of one of my fellow passengers.

Now granted, it was Halloween and more than likely this was someone who dressed up for an office party.  But the "person" stood on the platform waiting for the train wearing the mask, a hood and holding onto a scyth. They boarded and sat down and began scrolling through their phone (which confirms there is cell service in hell...I'm willing to bet Boost Mobile is the provider).

It did give me pause because you don't really want to see the Grim Reaper on your train barreling along at 60 miles an hour on tracks that are prone to mud slides. And yes, it was Halloween, but what better time for death to relax and not worry about being noticed as they head home for the evening.

Funny thing about it was that no one seemed to notice that the Grim Reaper was sitting on the train going through their phone (maybe checking their "to do" list). Even I tried to act like it was nothing and snapped my photos discretely. I suppose it wasn't like people would be jumping up and yelling, "There's Death!" and asking for a selfie.

Though it would have been cool.

Fortunately nothing happened. I got off at my stop (which wasn't the "last" stop) and headed home without incident. 

I can't speak for the rest of the trip.

Post haste

 

I know it is a bit lazy to copy and post old posts in a blog instead of starting from scratch and posting something new. But after more than 1450 posts in 19 years you occasionally run out of things to say. Fortunately no one pays me to write this blog. And I've firmly established that very few people read it anyway.

I did feel compelled to get some posts up for October since statistically I haven't posted much in October in the past. So what if I artificially inflate my numbers by digging up stuff from the past. It's not that this is a diary and I have to record what I've been up to for Halloween.

Though I did manage to decorate our yard this year. It is the first time in a few years. The pandemic and a remodel from hell curtailed my Halloween spirt. This year I put up lights, a new graveyard scene and turned one of our trees into a carnivorous creature.

We also made a trip to a local pumpkin patch to stare at some pigs, chickens, geese and pheasant and then walked through some fields decimated of pumpkins. Though I've recently learned that decimate originally meant killing one of every ten of something to teach a group a lesson. The pumpkins apparently didn't learn their lesson by eliminating one of every ten of them. There wasn't much to choose from. Regardless we were able to find two that I could buy for $30 and avoid paying a tenth of the cost at the grocery store.

Tonight I imagine we'll sit home and eat candy waiting for trick or treaters who may or may not arrive. Neither of my kids go trick or treating any more. Plus they both just got their COVID and flu shots and aren't feeling much like doing anything.

And since I don't have little kids I won't be putting on any costume tonight. I pretty much vowed a few years ago that I would never wear a costume on Halloween again. 

Well, maybe just a little make up.

On this almost day of the dead back in 2014

I posted this on Halloween 2014 when Google put out an app that allowed you to turn your old (and new) photos in Day of the Dead images. It was a pretty cool app that I imagine died some time ago. But the photos live (?) on:

 Día de las muertos fotos

“ On October 31, All Hallows Eve, the children make a children's altar to invite the angelitos (spirits of dead children) to come back for a visit. November 1 is All Saints Day, and the adult spirits will come to visit. November 2 is All Souls Day, when families go to the cemetery to decorate the graves and tombs of their relatives. The three-day fiesta filled with marigolds, the flowers of the dead; muertos (the bread of the dead); sugar skulls; cardboard skeletons; tissue paper decorations; fruit and nuts; incense, and other traditional foods and decorations. ” 

—Frances Ann Day, Latina and Latino Voices in Literature

In honor of Halloween and the Day of the Dead, I've taken advantage of Google's Halloweenify yourself app to honor (?) my family. I suppose it is also a way to welcome the spirits into my blog. God knows it has been dead around here. 

My great, great grandparents and my grandmother

On the day after this day in (my) history 55 years ago

 I originally wrote this post back in October 2006. It was about what I believe was the last time I went trick or treating as a child. There were four of us. We were all in the 5th grade and pretty good friends at the time. The two friends on the right in the photo (Dave Little and Jim Lonnevik) have passed on. I am the one second from the left. The kid holding the plastic school on the left is Robert Tullis. I lost track of him after junior high. 

Anyway, I've always liked this post and it seems only fitting that it should rise from the grave of my blog archives on the eve of Halloween.

Halloween 1968

In 1968 Vietnam was still going strong, Lyndon Johnson was president, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the first heart transplant was performed, Elvis made his comeback on national television, Lisa Marie Presley was born, the musical Hair opened on Broadway, Helen Keller died in her sleep, Robert Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for president, riots erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Jackie Kennedy married Greek millionaire Aristotle Onassis, Nixon was elected president, Apollo 8 orbited the moon on Christmas Eve and I turned 10 years old.

It was an eventful year.

On a more disturbing note, Vanilla Ice was born on Halloween day in 1967. And we all know how scary he was. Fortunately none of us knew who or what Vanilla Ice was. And as Halloween approached, my best friends -- Robert Tullis, Dave Little and Jim Lonnevick -- and I were more concerned about what costumes to wear than the body count in Vietnam. We had decided to go Trick or Treating as a group and I convinced them that we should all go as characters of one of our favorite television shows at the time -- Dark Shadows.

On this day (five years, six months and nine days ago) in history (of my blog)

 I wrote this post on April 18, 2018. And I do confess that I like this latest trend I've created to repost old blog posts and avoid having to come up with new crap. Though this post deals with lots of my worst writing habits including repetition, digressions, overuse of parenthetical statements and other annoying mannerisms. So it is technically not new crap. It is lots of old crap. Still, it is crap.  But I kind of like it anyway. But with out much more adieu:

I do confess

I was going to title this post "Laughing matter" but since I search my past posts these days to prevent too much repetition I discovered that I've written a few too many posts with similar titles and tone (I do confess 1,223 posts to be exact). So I chose "I do confess" instead. I googled "I do confess" and discovered that Shakespeare used that line often in his plays. So I feel I am in rare company using the line.

"I do confess" may be my new "but I digress."  But I do confess I think I replaced "but I digress" with "Pause for a lugubrious howl" some time back. I also confess that I don't really remember half the time.

More often than not, when I am trying to think of something to write about, I reread some past posts. Sometimes I'm surprised, sometimes I'm amused and some times I'm embarrassed. A person's writing style is a bit like their fingerprint. They are all unique and if you read some one's stuff enough, you could pick their writing out of a writing line up (that's the one, right there, I'd recognize that dangling participle anywhere).

On this day in (my) blog history

 Back on October 26, 2009 I posted this:

"Notes in bottles

Years ago, when I was probably about 11 or 12 years old, I was fascinated by the concept of notes being placed in bottles and cast in the ocean to be read by someone thousands of miles away. Since Boise was about as landlocked of a place that you could find, I was in a quandary about how to fulfill my burning desire to cast my words upon the currents of the world.

I settled for tossing an old Gallo wine bottle with a note into Lucky Peak Reservoir, the largest body of water in Ada County. It was more of a childish prank actually then a real effort to connect with the world at large. I traced a copy of Thomas Jefferson's signature on a piece of brown paper and soaked it in oil, thinking it would look like aged parchment. Then I wrote out this convoluted note saying that I was a dying old man and wanted to leave this valuable signature to whoever found it in the bottle.

My friend Dave Little and I paddled out into the middle of the reservoir on inner tubes, chucked the bottle, and paddled back to shore. Within minutes, we watched as a Sheriff's patrol boat that cruised the reservoir monitoring the activities of drunk water skiers, whizzed by, stopped and retrieved the bottle. I'm sure they were just removing it as a potential hazard to the above mentioned drunk water skiers (who I am sure they blamed for tossing a wine bottle into the main boat channel of the reservoir). But Dave and I hightailed it out of there, sure that cops would be showing up at our door any day having traced fingerprints from the Gallo wine bottle.

For some reason they never traced the prank to us.

A moment in Tim

I think a lot about time. I've written about it a great deal (including my last post which began in a very similar fashion...I repeat myself a lot, too). Time is one of those abstractions that we chase down rabbit holes thinking we can actually figure it out. 

In my experience, we can't. Or at least I can't.

I do note that we often treat time like a commodity. We've got nothing but time. We have plenty of time. He has too much time on his hands.

I think we also acknowledge that it is fleeting. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, into the future. Time is running out. If I could keep time in a bottle. We have no more time. Time's up.

But it is those moments in time (aren't all moments in time) that we cherish or hate. Those are the memorable times we think about fondly and wish we could relive or regret deeply and wish we could change.  Time, however, has nothing to do with either scenario. Apparently there is no time to go back and relive or redo. We do literally keep slipping into the future.

Or do we? That's where my ponderings start chasing their tails and get tied up in knots. If time isn't linear how can we slip into the future. Shouldn't we be slipping in all directions at once?  And if that is the case, then shouldn't there be the possibility that we could crisscross over something we've done before? 

I guess I'm referring to the metaphysical "we" because I don't think the physical "we" can do much of anything except age. The metaphysical "we" has more leeway to get all cosmic with theories about time, space and the whole universal enchilada. 

Past future theories of the past (and future)

 

And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end
The way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I'd have had to miss the dance

--Tony Arata (Performed by Garth Brooks)

I have blogged a great deal over time (ironically) about time. Some of it has been quite profound and some of it has been quite simplistic. And obviously I have come to no conclusions because I still haven't figured it out. 

Now granted I am not a Physicist.  I suck at math so that has never been one of my possibilities. I do have lots of hunches. Some of them are triggered by memories. I sometimes have the strong sense that my past is going on right now in all of the layers of my experience.  And I also have this sense that I will someday either relive or repeat my past.

In some cases this would be okay. But the wild card is whether I will do so with full knowledge it is happening. Because my now Tim would give an earful to my then Tim. And many of the pronouncements would begin with, "You don't really want to do that."

If the then Tim actually listened to the now Tim is the question. And I wonder if I would want to change things if it meant that experience would totally go away. Because in some cases I enjoyed the beginning of an experience but not so much the eventual outcome of that experience.  As Garth sang, you could miss the pain, but you'd also miss the dance.

Though in some cases the dance isn't worth it.

Photos of me as a young man

 

My saga of scanning my old photos and negatives continues. And I have to admit that it weirdly takes an emotional toll on me. Each photo reminds me of a time in my life.

Well, duh, but anyway it is weird to think of what consumed me emotionally at different times in my life. The above photo was early in my career when I wore suits to work every day. I wouldn't be caught dead in a suit these days. 

I suppose that probably isn't he best way to phrase it considering my age. Not that I plan to be buried in a suit. I don't even plan to be buried. I plan to be cremated. And although I've worn a few suits in my time that should be burned, I'm not sure wearing one for my cremation is necessary.

The strange thing to me about the above photo is that I remember looking like that and how it felt to look like that. I just have a difficult time aligning the photo with how I look now probably forty or so years later. Time is an asshole.

Yeah, yeah, I look like I do now because of choices. I've put on a few pounds, my ears and nose are bigger and my hair is gray. I also have a shaggy beard that I hate to admit is a vain attempt to mask a double chin.

I guess I actually had no choice in having a bigger nose and ears. Or the gray hair. Though I could have solved that early on with dye that would give me that sad Bela Legosi look that too many men my age have adopted. 

Bela Legosi was the actor who originally played Dracula for those non-Boomers who wander into my blog. He had jet black hair slicked back with what looked like black shoe polish.

Shoe polish was this stuff that came in paste form in a can or liquid form in a bottle that you put on black shoes to cover up scuffs and make them look like new again. Shinola was a famous brand of shoe polish. It was so popular that it was used to describe a stupid person as "not knowing shit from Shinola."

I hate having to explain what used to be common place in my world especially to generations of people who don't know shit from Shinola.

But back to my narcissistic discussion of photos of me as a young man. I look at the young me face and it is familiar but it still seems like a stranger. The eyes smile. I like that. My eyes don't smile much anymore.  It's not that I am not as happy as I was at that age. It's just that weariness sets in and the smiles don't show as much.

Plus, at that age when the photo was taken, I still didn't really know shit from Shinola. 

Regrets

 

I suppose when most people talk about things they regret in life they are big things like not becoming an artist or traveling to the Great Pyramids or quitting a dead end job. Okay, I regret all of those things, but it is some of the little things I regret more. Or at least I roll my eyes about them.

Until it became politically incorrect to portray cultures as mascots, I was proud of being a Boise High School Brave. I was proud of being the band drum major and dressing like an Native American Chief (or an Indian Chief or an Indigenous person Chief). I used to feel so cool donning the leather buckskins and headdress and applying war paint. 

But I remember when I showed my daughter photos of me dressed as the Boise Brave, she was pretty disgusted. I was confused at first. Maybe she didn't understand that to us growing up the brave was a proud symbol. A brave was a warrior. A brave was something to look up to. But to her, I was treating a people as a mascot. 

I tried the arguments that have been pointed out to me are white people microaggressions, like "No one objects to the Fighting Irish, Vikings, Cowboys, or Mariners." But those are white people cultures (which is ironic because I'm told quite often white people have no culture). Bottom line, to my daughter at least, being the Boise Brave was embarrassing.

So I tucked away the photos, my old moccasins and any other symbol of my misguided past as a Boise Brave and accepted that in high school my only accomplishment was being a band geek and graduating ninth in my class of 491. 

I see dead people

 

I suppose most people get into genealogy because they want to find where they came from. But I have found that it creates more questions than it answers. There are currently more than 6000 people in my family tree. And I use the term "tree" loosely, because it is more like an upside down tree with these roots that spread out seemingly forever and you keep uncovering them wondering where they end or begin.

The depressing thing is that most of the people you discover in the roots doing genealogy are dead. You don't find out much about the living part of the tree. Privacy laws prevent most of that. So you may find a few names, especially if they are close relatives, but the only ones you really find much about are long dead.

But as I pointed out in my last post, even the stuff you find out about all of your dead relatives is a paper trail of where they began, wandered about and ended up. The internet has made that easier, but also more complicated. I suppose before computers you had to spend your time mucking about in county courthouses and libraries sifting through documents. Now AI does much of that work for you but gives you lots of crap along with substance.

Still, it can be depressing. I have found more than my fair share of people who have been murdered, committed suicide or died way to young. I have also found so many babies and infants that only lasted a few days or weeks. And the staggering number of marriages, divorces and remarriages blow my mind. It adds to the confusion with some people having three or four different last names and children with several different spouses. 

Ancestry now also taps into yearbooks and provides photos of many people who no one has bothered to upload images of. It is endearing and sad at the same time. I like those photos so much more than the ones they dig up for obituaries. Obituary photos all seem to be of a weary, worn person  staring at the camera with a perplexed look wondering when they got old. At least yearbook photos capture people who still had potential.

I've mentioned before that my roots spread far into the dirt of America. My ancestors were farmers, farm hands, laborers and drifters. There wasn't any blue blood fertilizing those roots. Many served in the military but it seems out of necessity.  There are a lot of young men who were drafted and served as Privates and left as Privates. I don't appear to come from a long line of leaders.

I wonder what it is like to be royalty and born into a lineage that is well documented and clear. I am sure none of the Royals bother with Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com seems to be for those of us trying to unstir the melting pot and figure out what the original recipe was.

For the most part I am just left shaking my head wondering what the head cook was thinking.

Like a rolling stone (not Mick Jagger)

 

I wrote a post in September 2009 called, "Remember me." It was the only post I wrote in September 2009. Heck, I only wrote 22 posts the entire year. I think I was preoccupied with my newborn son. Priorities. Anyway, the post (since most of you won't follow the link and read it) was about fame and how it is probably worse to have it and lose it than to never have it at all.  I made the pronouncement that if no one recognizes you or knows who you are, you can't be forgotten.

I think that was pretty good.

The reason I bring this up is that I've been doing a lot of work on my family tree on Ancestry.com and tracing the meandering roots of my family into the distant past. And as I uncover brother- and sister-in laws of my second cousin twice removed, I am saddened when there is nothing but census records and city directories to prove that they existed. I hate looking at these faceless squares on my tree. 

At the very least, I like to find photos of headstones courtesy of Find a Grave. At least then they have a slab of stone with their name on it to prove they were here. But occasionally I find that some relative has loaded a photo of the person either from when they were young or very old. I like the young versions best. I like looking at those faces on my tree when so much life was ahead of them.

Some of the photos show character.  I particularly like this one:

This was my relative's wedding photo. I love that he is dressed in a baseball uniform and his young wife has this look of, "What have I done?" on her face. These people come alive to me. Statistics of when they were born or a photo of where they are buried just don't do it. Who wants to be remembered for a slab of stone covered with weeds? Or even the large orb of stone at the top of this post at a cemetery in Ohio that seems to roll around by itself?

Sometimes I do uncover more from the data about a person that tells a story. Like a first cousin of mine (twice removed) who married a young sergeant during World War II:

He was killed in action in  March 1945 and buried at a cemetery in Norway. She died three months later. There is no information in the information I can find on Ancestry on how she died. There is a brief death announcement with no information.  But there is a record of a baby named "Sargie" who was born and died two months after his father and a month before his mother, so my cousin may have died from complications due to childbirth. I hate to think she may also have killed herself. 

It is the challenge of piecing together family history after most of the people in the tree are dead. I had never heard of this cousin. She died more than a decade before I was born. I wonder if my mother knew about her and her sad story. She never spoke of her to me. But my mother had so much going on in her life then and she spoke sparingly about tragedies in the family.

My point, I guess, is that there is so much more to a person's life than a headstone or a birth certificate. At the very least they deserve to at least have a photo on a family tree that at least speaks to who they were at a moment in time. But there are thousands of people in my family tree who have nothing but their name to show they were here. 

I think there should be more.