When Stella lost her Groupon

When I first encountered Groupon, I thought it was pretty cool. I liked it when there was a restaurant near me where I could pay $20 and get $40 worth of food. But those offers are few and far between. Now  most of the offers are for teeth whitening, Yoga classes and places offering Brazilian waxes. Tell me, how many Brazilian waxes can you possibly get in a month. Wait, don't tell me.

I know that Groupon is hooking in lots of small businesses eager to draw in new customers with the hopes that they will become repeat customers. I'm willing to bet that most of the people buying the Groupon coupons are already customers of those establishments and are just capitalizing on the opportunity to get a $40 meal for $20. So I imagine the only ones really drumming up more business with Groupon is Groupon.

As the Groupon offers have become more and more useless, their copywriters have become more and more annoying. For example, here's a line for an offer for wine tasting classes: "Grape juice magically transforms into wine in the same way milk becomes cheese and a 1972 Dodge Dart becomes an even older 1972 Dodge Dart." Or a line from a custom framing offer: "Art collectors protect their pictures the same way that crime bosses discipline their children—by having them framed."

The copywriter should be pelted with Funk and Wagnalls and AP Style Guides and be issued a restraining order from going within 10-feet of a keyboard.

And their website is full of even more half-witticisms like, "The Situation: A bully kicks sand in your face. Use Your Mind or Your Body? Neither. Instead of using your body to fight back or your mind to conjure up a clever retort, harness your sense of shame to detach your body's molecules from each other and dissipate into the ether."

This is the kind of drivel I used to write when I was in college and thought every word I wrote was the ultimate in clever.

It wasn't. And I hope the Groupon copywriters wake up one day, read what they've written reel in horror at what depths they sank to in their youthful folly.

I could continue to wax poetic about Groupon's crimes against ad copy, but I'm late for Brazilian wax treatment. Then I'm off to my Yoga class. I'm not sure that doing them in that order was such a wise idea, but I'll let you know how it goes.

Gaboon Viper

You can actually buy viper mugs at a site called  JungleWalk.com. I'm not making this up.

Back in 2005, when blogging was still new and fresh to me, I wrote post called Horned viper. I had randomly opened a dictionary and wrote about the first entry I found. It happened to be "horned viper." I managed to ramble on a few paragraphs about the horned viper and that it shouldn't be mistaken for the gaboon viper (which I thought sounded very cool).

Well, on Saturday, while at a picnic with my family, I saw a gaboon viper. Gaboon vipers come from Africa and aren't normally found slithering around parks in Washington. In fact this one wasn't slithering around at all. It was actually hanging out in a large plastic bin waiting for his turn to be displayed to a large crowd of "oohing" and "ahhing"  people as part of a show put on by a man who calls himself "The Reptile Man."

The Reptile Man obviously has an affinity for reptiles. I've seen his name on the entertainment rosters of countless community fairs and festivals, but this is the first time I'd actually seen his show. And despite my naturally aversion to snakes and other slimy creatures, I have to admit the show was pretty entertaining. The Reptile Man opened bin after plastic bin and retrieved various snakes, lizards and one pretty large tortoise. He he debunked the defaming myths about each one of the critters including a rattle snake which I had pretty much been raised to fear and try to whack to death with a stick if I ever saw one. He pointed out each of the creatures important place in the eco-chain and the benefits they provided (including eating mice, rats, slugs and various other vermin that I imagine someone called "The Rodent Man" would have taken umbrage to).

I was pretty impressed (from a distance). But it was when he pulled the gaboon viper out of its storage bin that I felt a chill. Here was this random snake I'd referenced in a blog post some six years ago crossing my path in a park in Washington. Who says it isn't a small universe after all?

Despite this cosmic connection, I didn't feel compelled to hug the gaboon viper. Because regardless of whether the Reptile Man had removed the snake's venom glands, gaboon vipers still have a nasty habit of chomping down on their prey and stubbornly not letting go until they are dead. And they have a reputation of being able to swallow pretty large animals whole. Reportedly one in the wilds of Africa swallowed an antelope. I've never had any strong desire to see the inside of a gaboon viper, so I kept my distance. But I did raise my fist in a salute of solidarity when he was being dropped back into his plastic bin.

I think the gaboon viper kind of liked me in retrospect.

Regardless, I wish my wife had allowed me to name my son Gaboon. She wasn't buying my explanation that it was a family name (i.e. my great uncle Gaboon). It would have made my son's formative years a bit rough, but in the long run it would have made him tough, kind of like the boy named Sue.

But I'm sure he'll have other things to resent me for.

White Mountain Beaver

WHITE MOUNTAIN BEAVER
 -- Time (With apologies to Jefferson Airplane) 

One hill makes you dig larger
And another hill makes you dig small
And in the ones that Mother Nature gives you
You don't dig anything at all
You're full of malice
Even though you're small 

 And if you go chasing mountain beavers
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em you've got a bag of used cat litter
And you're going to pay them a call
You're full of malice
Even though you're small  

 When I find one of your stinking holes,
I'll get up and tell you where to go
And you've just stripped all of my trees of bark
How do I stop you digging down below,
Go ask Wikipedia, I think they'll know  

When the Ivy and the Horsetails
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the ground cover is growing back,
And I've weeded, Rhododendron's bed.
Remember what the Mountain Beaver said:
"I'm still well fed
Still well fed
Still well fed"

Okay, a lyricist I'm not. But it dawned on me that if Alice had lived in North America, she would have more likely fallen down a Mountain Beaver hole than a rabbit hole. I believe only European rabbits burrow. And thinking about Alice falling down a Mountain Beaver hole made me think about it being a white Mountain Beaver wearing a waistcoat and looking at a pocket watch. Then I thought about the song, White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane and I wondered whether it would have been much of a hit if it had been called White Mountain Beaver instead.

 Incidentally, Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship in 1974.  But I digress.

I didn't even know a Mountain Beaver existed until June of last year when I encountered one in my back yard. And after about two and a half months of dumping used kitty litter into his burrow and filling up the entrances, I think he may have actually moved on. I was working in my back yard yesterday and there was no sign of any new holes and he hadn't unplugged the ones I'd covered up.

Of course, he may be playing opossum and trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I wouldn't put it past him. Though if he is just playing opossum, I hope he tries to cross the road like one.

Don't you just love the way I keep weaving these threads of random ideas into a full-blown tapestry of covoluted thought?

Authority

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
—Linji

My interpretation of this Koan is that you should never real trust anyone who tells you that they are an authority, guru, expert or Messiah. A more spiritual interpretation would be that anything outside of yourself that presents you with the meaning of your life is an illusion. Regardless, I have never really trusted authority or people who claim to be invested with authority.

Anyone observing my life would probably not get the impression that I overtly question authority. I was always a model student and did everything teachers asked me to. But I didn't do this because I believed in their authority as much as feared their belief that they had it over me and would demonstrate this with a paddle (they still spanked kids when I was in school).

It also seems a contradiction that I get particularly belligerent when people ignore "don't walk" lights or fail to signal when they turn or change lanes. But I don't consider what they are doing as questioning authority. They are being arrogantly stupid (or stupidly arrogant). My thought when someone walks across a street against a "don't walk" light is that they share the same DNA as an opossum and are too stupid to realize that they are no match for several tons of steel travelling at 35 mph. But hey, why should laws of nature apply to them?

Which reminds me of a joke: Why did the chicken cross the road? Answer: To show the opossum that it could be done. Although they aren't real adept at crossing roads, opossums do smell quite nice. I know this because I attended a conference in San Diego years ago that included a lunch at the San Diego Zoo. During the lunch, a zoo keeper came out with a baby opossum and pretty much forced each one of us to smell it before we could eat. I think it was some California thing. Anyway, it smelled pretty darned good.

But I digress.

I also don't think people who do not use their turn signals are rebels ignoring laws to question authority. They are lazy idiots who don't have the courtesy to warn me before they are going to cut me off. Whoops, I am being negative again and turning off potential readers of my blog. What I meant to say was that people who don't use their turn signals are positively lazy idiots. And I mean "lazy idiots" in the best possible of all ways.

All of this being said, I still don't like authority, mainly because I don't really believe that anyone has the authority to invest anyone else with authority. By who's authority do you have authority? Well, a higher authority, they might respond...the law for example. Who gave those higher authorities the right to create the laws? Well, a higher authority.

Circular argument.

I realize that law enforcement people have a difficult job, but I have to say I question a person who voluntarily wants to go into law enforcement. Because I believe that if you actively seek to have authority over other people, you really shouldn't be trusted with it. The same is true with politicians and the people who make and interpret laws.

And don't get me started on religious authorities and their getting authority from the highest authority. That takes us right back to killing the Buddha if you meet him.

You is a female sheep

Enough about me, let's talk about you for a minute
Enough about you, let's talk about life for a while
The conflicts, the craziness and the sound of pretenses
Falling all around...all around
Why are you so petrified of silence
Here can you handle this?  

 --Alanis Morissette, All I really want

I'm not sure how long I can keep up working "you" into my blog posts. Besides, I'm not sure writing about "you" has increased the number of people reading my blog. Apparently not as many people care about "you" as much as "you" do.

As for the key words that make people retweet something on Twitter, not a single person retweeted my "Oh twitter you, please check out and retweet my 10 great new blog posts that help you learn how to get top free social media tips" tweet. "You" would think that at the very least Zarrella would have retweeted it just to confirm his theory.

This all does seem ironic (thanks again Alanis). All those years of listening to therapists harp on using "I" statements instead of "you" statements and now we're supposed to only focus on "you." Well, who do "you" think "you" are? Maybe it's time "you" and "I" parted ways. It's not "you," it's "me." "I" just need some time to blog about "me."

"You" realize that "I" am taking this thing way too literally, don't "you?"

.

A great authoritative new and positive blog post about you that you can retweet for free

I have been reading Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas on my Kindle. It is essentially a scientific approach to social media marketing. It is not that I am overly interested in this subject, but I was looking for something to read on my Kindle while exercising and they were giving the Kindle version away free.

The author of the book, Dan Zarrella, bills himself as a social media scientist and has conducted years of research on social media  and what he calls, "Contagious ideas" (although I would argue that social media hasn't really been around long enough for anyone to conduct years of research on it). I think "contagious ideas" are what most people think of as viral marketing or in other words the thing that happens when you forward links to videos of chimps peeing into their own mouths and falling off from a log to all of your friends and they in turn forward it to all of their friends so before you know it, everyone is watching videos of chimps peeing into their own mouths and falling off a log.

 In an effort help you  infect people with your contagious ideas, Zarrella has compiled lists of words to use in the Twitter world that will increase or decrease your retweetability (which I used to think was an uncontrollable urge to watch reruns of Warner Brothers cartoons featuring Tweety Bird) . The most retweetable words are: you, twitter, please, retweet, post, blog, social, free, media, help, please retweet, great, social media, 10 (which is technically a number and not a word), follow, how to, top, blog post, check out, new blog post. The least retweetable words are: game, going, haha, lol, but, watching, work, home, night, bed, well, sleep, gonna, hey, tomorrow, tired, some, back, bored, listening.

In theory then, I could post the following and get retweeted beau coupe times:  "Oh twitter you, please check out and retweet my 10 great new blog posts that help you  learn how to get top free social media tips." But if I post: "Game going haha but hey noone is watching at work lol & at night I'm gonna sleep well because I'm tired and bored of listening-Back tomorrow," no one will retweet it. We'll see, because I just tweeted both inane sentences.

Although Zarrella focuses a great deal on Twitter, he also touches on blogging. Basically he states that people will more likely read your blog if a) you present yourself as a guru or authority on a subject, b) write positive stuff instead of doom and gloom and c) don't write about yourself, because no one wants to read about you. They would prefer to read about them or something that is relevant to them. He also suggests that people will more likely read something that is written very simply with lots of nouns and verbs and not a lot of adjectives and adverbs.

Zarrella writes all of this in a very authoritative manner and seems very positive that he is right. And he seems to be directing all of this at me since it seems I have been violating all of these rules for years now which would explain why so few people read my blog. Though, one could argue that I am an authority on writing about my life since I know nothing about yours.

But hey, enough about me. Let's talk about you. You're obviously a fire, water, air or earth sign and serious, yet carefree. You like long walks on the beach while sitting by the fire enjoying a good book or television program while sipping red or white wine with a beer back. You don't like the two-party political system and wish everyone would quit talking about the economy and the weather. And I bet you've danced with the devil in the cold moon light.

So please, please follow my blog. It's all about you anyway!

One hit wonders

I have to wonder, which is worse, having one hit in your life or having no hits? I mean, how frustrating must it be to have a song on the charts, taste fame and then never be able to get there again. It's like being invited to an exclusive club, drinking the wine and then never being invited back.

It is ironic that so many of the songs I remember from my youth were one-hit wonders. There was "Timothy" by the Buoys. I liked it for the obvious reason that it was a song with my name, but it was also controversial because it was about cannibalism. The song was written by Rupert Holmes who would later get his 15-minutes of fame with his song "Escape, the Pina Colada Song." The Buoys recording of "Timothy" rocked the charts for weeks. Then the Buoys bobbed off into oblivion.

What makes it even more frustrating for one-hit wonders is that it happens when you are young and then you have your whole life to ponder what it was like to taste fame and then have the buffet close down. At least for those of us who have never really been or had a hit, there is a sense that you still could be. Though I can't think of any middle aged rockers who have hit the charts. Middle aged rockers are primarily former one-hit wonders who are shuffling across the stages at Native American Casinos out in the boonies making their middle-aged groupies swoon.

My guess is that the Achilles heel for most one-hit wonders was that they lost their edge when they hit the Mother Lode. When you are aspiring to something, you put a lot more effort into it than when you think you've achieved it.

There is also the "peaking too soon" factor. Say you are a young man playing baseball for the first time and by some fluke hit a home run the first time you step up to the plate (and I'm not speaking from experience here). The expectation is that every time you step up to the plate from that time forward you are supposed to hit a home run. It ain't going to happen. Because every time you step up to the plate at that point you'll be thinking about it too much and the consequences of not hitting the ball. So you won't.

One-hit wonders are just confined to the music industry. Off the top of your head, try telling me anything J.D. Salinger wrote other than Catcher in the Rye? And name any movie Macaulay Culkin has done other than the Home Alone series. How many vice presidents of the United States can you name? And what are the names of the third and fourth men to walk on the moon?

I find it also ironic that many of the iconic figures in the entertainment industry became so because they died before their fame did: James Dean, Jimi Hendricks, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin. When it comes down to it, fame just doesn't age well and the public doesn't want wrinkled idols.

And don't try parading the Rolling Stones by me. They are just wrong on so many levels.

But I digress.

I am not sure what this all means to my own life. I've never had a hit record, written a best-selling novel, walked on the moon or  won the Nobel Peace Prize.  But I think I'm okay with that. I'm not dead yet and I'm not so hung up on past achievements that I psyche myself out of future ones. Who knows, I could be the first middle-aged one-hit wonder in history by becoming one of Blogger.com's Blogs of Note.

I'm not sure I could handle the pressure though.

Voices in my blog

So Google has come up with something called Google Scribe that types out suggestions of what to write as you write. Good lord. Is the next step just to turn on the computer and let it compose prose without us and then post it. I might has well become a television "journalist."

I've got the feature turned on right now and these gray ghost words appear after the cursor suggesting what you could or should be typing. Now I get an idea of what a schizophrenic feels like ( though the Scribe thingy did help me spell schizophrenic).

Now spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Well I'll be damned. It did it. Spell sphygmomanometer. Okay you smug bastard, you know what a blood pressure cuff is and how to spell it ( it suggested using the word bastard after smug  by the way).

Okay, who wrote the Nutcracker? Tchaikovsky.

What is that drug they give kids with ADD? Ritalin.

As sphincter says, "What?" "What?"

Ha!  I got you.

No you didn't.

Yes I did.

Didn't.

I'm going to turn you off....don't...what are you doing.. don't do that.. Daisy, Daisy give me your answer true.. argggh.

There. Now I can go back to digressing without that annoying Scribe.

I kind of miss him though. And he sure did know how to spell.

Angry old bird

I originally was going to call this post, "Annoying noises" because I was annoyed by this guy who sat across from me on the train yesterday morning and spent the 30-minute ride grunting, huffing and sighing at a level that managed to penetrate my MP3 player and the train noise. Plus he had a cup of coffee he kept slurping while he reviewed some work document.

In my world, you aren't supposed to work on the way to work, especially while I am playing Angry Birds on my Android Tablet  And you aren't supposed to sit in my roomy four-seated quad on the train that usually I only sit in. And you aren't supposed to make disgusting noises and slurp your coffee especially when I don't have a cup of coffee to slurp back at you.

I didn't complete my "Annoying noises" post because it dawned on me how much of a total crank it made me sound like even if that is truly what I am. I don't imagine the man had a clue how annoying he was being. Because a majority of the population seems basically self-absorbed and oblivious.

I joked once with an old friend that I used to be an angry young man, but now I am a bitter old one. He laughed a bit too much. But then again, he is older than I am.

It is not a new story for someone cresting middle age to be baffled by the strange reflections in windows of trains of a face that doesn't match the youthful mind's eye. It seems quite symbolically appropriate that my new favorite game is various iterations of Angry Birds (which if you live under a rock without a smart phone or tablet is a game where you shoot angry looking birds from a slingshot at moronic pig looking creatures who appear to be the products of cousin pigs in Arkansas).

My thoughts about people violating my personal space on the train are my angry birds. And more often than not they dissipate in the ether without ever actual toppling a target. It is probably that I am not so much annoyed at the annoying noises as the fact that they were penetrating my cloak of middle aged invisibility that I have wrapped around myself to keep reminders of the real world at bay. It is an easier target than the economy, partisan politics and global warming.

Though the noises were pretty annoying.

Now playing LIVE!

I was looking at my Facebook page and noticed an ad for some casino to see Smokey Robinson "LIVE" in concert. My immediate reaction was that they didn't really need to add the "live" part since the market for seeing Smokey Robinson "DEAD" in concert was most likely substantially smaller.

Things like this bug me. And me pointing out things like this tend to bug other people. My children, for instance. My three year old is constantly yelling out, "Papa, my nose is running" to which I respond, "Better go catch it." His capacity to process sarcasm hasn't developed yet, so all I get is a furrowed brow and another announcement that his nose is running.

It reminds me of the old telephone prank where you'd call up someone randomly and ask, "Is your refrigerator running?" If the person replied, "yes," you'd say, "Better go catch it" and hang up. Caller ID has all but eliminated telephone pranks. This is sad to me because it was truly an annoying art form.

Another pet peeve of mine is the language manufacturers use when they write instructions on products. Is it really necessary for cans of shaving cream to explain that you need to proceed with shaving after you've applied the shaving cream? But for really complicated products like toys you have to assemble, they use instructions like "Connect flange A with socket B and interlock with part Aa2 using a clockwise motion." I am embarrassed to admit that I don't really know what a flange is. So generally I just apply shaving cream to the products and proceed with shaving them.

I also have trouble with sports fans exclaiming, "We won the game" when their favorite team wins. First, watching a game doesn't really mean you had anything to do with the physical effort to win or lose it. Taking credit for sitting and watching other people do the work is generally reserved for upper management.

But back to Smokey Robinson. I was actually relieved to see he was performing live, because I thought he had passed away a long time ago. Though I'm not sure you could say his career is live since he is performing at a casino in Marysville, Washington.

There is a certain, sad irony in that.

Just eat

We were walking downtown with the kids on Sunday, enjoying the rare appearance of the sun and we decided to have lunch on the waterfront. It was one of the trendier spots and it had an outside terrace with a sandbox that the kids could play in. We were seated at an area overlooking a dock where boats were moored that likely cost more than my house.

As we got settled and the kids dove into the sandbox, I noticed two young women seated at a table adjacent to ours. I couldn't help be overhear snippets of their conversation since our table was so close. They were talking about a friend who was on a diet and going on about shrinking stomachs and sensible choices. The conversation continued when their lunches arrived (sandwiches as far as I could tell). They continued to talk back and forth about how hard it was to eat sensibly when you were at a restaurant and how you had to make sensible choices, like grilled versus fried and chicken versus beef.

I wanted to scream, "Just eat your freaking sandwiches. You are at a restaurant for Christ's sake."

The server came and asked if they were finished. Half the food was still on their plates. They said they were done and declined the server's offer to box the leftovers. They also declined dessert.

Okay, I have no problem with people watching what they eat. I've struggled with weight issues off and on my entire life. And I believe in eating healthy. But when I'm in a restaurant I try to just enjoy it. That is why you are in a restaurant. You want to enjoy the pleasure of not having to prepare food (though I really enjoy cooking) or wash dishes. You want to enjoy the experience. Don't ruin it by obsessing about fat and calories and diets. 

I believe the biggest barrier to overcoming any excessive behavior is the feeling that you are being deprived of something. It is why people who go cold turkey on anything fail miserably in the long run. The trick is enjoying things in moderation. 

One of my favorite stories involves a guru who is approached by a follower after a speaking engagement and gushes to him about how they have used his meditation technique to stop smoking. The guru lights up a cigarette, hands it to the disciple and says, "Here, anyone can not smoke."

The point being, you need to get to a place where you can smoke or not smoke, not "need to smoke" or "need to eat" or "need to drink." And you can't get to those places if you obsess about your addiction. 

Graven images

Every now and then, the genealogy bug bites me and I dust off my family tree program and root around for more information about my relatives. One of the things that fascinates me about genealogy is the infinite way a family tree begins to fan out from individuals. If there were actual records kept for every individual throughout time, it would be interesting to see whether the roots would fan out and then narrow again to a single organism that split to create the individuals who started it all.

But we don't have records on every individual throughout time. In fact, for the vast amounts of people who don't stem from blue blooded stock, the records are few and far between. Often the only record you'll find of many of your relatives is a manifest on a boat or a notation on a census ledger. And you get the sense that many of the people being questioned by census takers were reluctant to provide concrete information about their actual birth dates, or, and I imagine many of them weren't real clear on the dates anyway.

My mother came from a family of 13 kids. I was conjecturing with my wife the other night that this may have been a genetic code in my mother's family to produce as many progeny as possible due to the high mortality rates and the need to have extra hands to help out on the farms my distant ancestors worked. By the time my grandmother began producing farm hands, however, the Great Depression was in full swing and they didn't have a farm to work. Regardless my many aunts and uncles came into the world.

I didn't really have much interest in my relatives when I was a kid. Most of my mom's family had scattered. But I did see a pack of cousins about Thanksgiving and Easter. I didn't really have much contact with my aunts or uncles. It was only after I began dabbling in genealogy that I realized how sad that was. Because now I'd love to pick their brains to uncover the stories behind the names and faces I see in old photographs, but most of them are gone or beyond remembering.

As part of my search for information about my family, I stumbled onto a website called www.findagrave.com. At first I was baffled that such a site existed. It reportedly contains more than 65 million records of grave records for the dearly departed. It's a community of people who, in there spare time, apparently go out and photograph grave markers and post memorials on line. And most of the memorials they post seem to be for total strangers.

It seemed morbid to me at first. But as I uncovered (no pun intended) the graves of some of my relatives, it dawned on me how important this was from genealogy standpoint and an emotional standpoint. I know that with my own experience, my family stretches across the country and I have neither the time nor resources to travel to various towns and cities to find the graves of my ancestors. This site has been invaluable with, if not putting a face with a name, at least putting something concrete that confirms that they were once part of the world and are more than names on ledgers and manifests.

In the case of some of my own family, I was able to have their virtual memorials transferred to me. I've added family photographs in some cases, virtually adding a face to the name on the grave marker. In some way, it seems to enhance the memories of these people I've never really known. If nothing else,  it symbolically it keeps their memories alive.

I actually think a virtual memorial has more significance in the long run than a physical burial. Personally, I plan to be cremated and won't be leaving behind a marker with my name on it. So as my ashes are scattered to whatever wind my children deem appropriate, I hope to be remembered digitally in some fashion. Perhaps this blog will stand forever as my grave marker. It is kind of a comforting thought that long after I'm gone people will still be stumbling on my blog to learn whether or not clams are really happy and marvel at my stories of mountain beavers.

On second thought, maybe I should get a grave marker.

Out of place

I was walking through Pioneer Square at noon trying to dodge the packs of tourists following their Underground Tour guide lemming like, listening raptly to worn jokes about the Seattle fire and the rebuilding of the city back in 1889. Although Pioneer Square is probably my favorite part of the city, I couldn't help but feel slightly annoyed at commercialization of the area (even though the tourists are probably the only thing other than the bars keeping the neighborhood alive).

I was also annoyed that Occidental Park had suffered the indignity of a public art project. A large portion of the trees in the park as well as light poles had been victim of something called a "yarn bombing." An artist was paid essentially to install yarn graffiti in one of the oldest downtown parks. Occidental Park had already been vandalized by the city a few years ago when the replaced the original cobblestones with smooth, modern pavers to avoid tourist tripping and suing the city.

When I first moved to Seattle in 1980 to go to college I walked down First Hill from Seattle University and ventured into Pioneer Square on a Sunday morning.  Having grown up in Boise, I had never really been exposed to a big city. As I made my way along First Avenue I noticed a very old and very drunk man propped up in a doorway in a puddle of urine. As I stared at him with my naive country boy eyes, he looked up, grinned and flipped me his middler finger.

The panhandlers and homeless alcoholics who used to plant themselves on every corner in Pioneer Square are now distinctly missing.  I don't know whether they've moved on because city ordinances or because of the economy. I've notice that some of them have migrated closer to the waterfront and sleep in small camps under the Viaduct.

You would think that after more than 30 years living here that I'd feel more at home in the city. But it dawned on me as I made my way up Jackson Street towards Union Station where I work that I still feel like an outsider. Maybe it is because Seattle is a waterfront city and was often the jumping off spot for people headed to someplace else. I pass the Klondike Museum on Jackson Street and it reinforces that notion. Thousands passed through the city in 1897 headed for the Yukon gold fields of Alaska. I'm sure their impression of Seattle was that it was simply a place to stock up before hitting it rich someplace else.

I moved here under the pretext of finishing college. In reality I just wanted to get out of Boise and be somewhere near the water. In hindsight I should have fulfilled that need to be near water by moving to a warmer clime such as California or Florida. Instead I chose the place that was about as far north as you can get in the United States without being in Alaska.

Don't get me wrong, it is a beautiful city, but it always seems a bit off somehow. It is hard to deny that some of the worst serial killers in history called Seattle their home at one time (namely Ted Bundy and Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway). Maybe it is the rain. The sky is the bluest blue here in Seattle only when the clouds part.

And it's not that I feel any more at home in Boise where I grew up. I've now lived in Seattle longer than I did in Boise. I go back there and I'm a stranger. But here, I still feel more or less like a squatter.

Maybe it is in my genes. In my forays into the family tree, I discovered a long line of farmworkers and day laborers migrating west from West Virginia, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa. Many made it as far west as Oregon and Washington only to drift back eastward  to Idaho.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like to move elsewhere. Where would I live if I could live anywhere? I never really come up with an answer. Part of it is because my imagination can never quite get past the reality of finite resources. It doesn't do any good to fantasize about living in exotic places because where ever you live you have to have money (at least in my world).  I've never been one of those people who just pick up and move and worry about how you'll make a living once you get there. This is especially true now that I have a family.

I'm not sure what the point of this post was. It started out as a vague rant about tourists and yarn bombing and meandered down the melancholy path of wondering why I'm still in Seattle. But I suppose in the scheme of things there doesn't have to be a point any more than there has to be a reason I'm here in Seattle. When it comes down to it, where ever you end up is where you are.

Dust

Someone posted the following on Facebook the other day: "Anyone else not care about Amy Winehouse? Or am I a freak? Or both...." Several people gave the post a thumbs up.

How sad. But I imagine it represents the average response of the masses when anyone they don't really have a connection to dies, especially when that person succumbs to their own self-destructive nature. There is a lot of "tsk, tsk" and "they brought it on themselves." Funny, we don't say that about cancer victims or people killed in auto accidents (unless they were driving under the influence).

It's not that I knew anything about Amy Winehouse other than what I'd read in a few scab-picking articles about her addictive nature. Imagine that. A talented celebrity with a substance abuse problem.

Thing is, humans seem to have all become callous and have lost the ability to be compassionate unless the misfortune they face is close to home. Do you really have to know Amy Winehouse to care that she died so young? I don't think so. Death may be inevitable for us all, but there is still something tragic about it being accelerated and then ignored.

Maybe it is one more of the many wrong things about Facebook. Several hours after commenting that she didn't care about Amy Winehouse, the same person posted a photo of a salad she'd made out of vegetables from her garden. Several people gave that post a thumbs up as well.

Sigh...

Etch-A-Sketch Rasa

Tabula Rasa  (Latin for "blank slate") is the theory that we are born with a brain not unlike the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz and we immediately begin to fill it up through experience and perception. The theory was embraced by such noted figures out of history as philosopher John Locke and psychologist Sigmund Freud.  The primary premise being that we are shaped by our environment.

I can't totally buy into this theory. If that were truly the case, wouldn't all siblings from a family essentially evolve the same? And we all know that isn't the case. I am nothing like either of my brothers (thank whatever power that is). Though both of them would greatly benefit by being more like me. Lord knows the world could use a few less right-wing Republican Christians.

But I digress.

Anyway, I reject the blank slate theory because common sense tells me that mankind could not have progressed as far as we have without some sort of collective consciousness to tap into so that we can build on existing knowledge rather than simply absorb it.  The concept of Tabula Rasa also would suggest we are all born with a level playing field when it comes to the brain and what separates us is not our capacity to learn but on what we are exposed to.

Nothing about the blank slate concept seems to account for differences in IQ. Was their anything about Einstein's environment that shaped his genius? He flunked out of math and worked as a Patent Clerk before developing the Theory of Relativity. How can you ignore that there had to be something programmed in his DNA that allowed him to tap into a greater knowledge pool than most people are capable of diving into. I seriously doubt if the only thing that allowed him to be a genius was absorbing more knowledge from his environment than other people (unless he had really, really blank slate to draw on).

Of course, I may be oversimplifying the whole Tabula Rasa thing. And I don't discount the role of environment in shaping us. I just think something has to be there to begin with other than a blank slate. I lean towards the concept of soul progression drawn from Buddhist thought. I think we are more like a Etch-A-Sketch at birth than a blank slate. And every new lifetime, we get shaken up before a new personality is drawn on our personae. And the older our soul is, the more difficult it is to ignore the lines of our former selfs that are still etched on the screen.

I could ramble on, but I'm drawing a blank.

I crack myself up at times.

Blogs of Note, aren't

I am not sure how Blogger selects its Blogs of Note that appear on the Dashboard when I sign in. But judging from the ones I've opened, it must be a random selection. Because so far, I haven't opened one that was particularly noteworthy.

For one, any blog that promises "..an inspiration board of beautiful images and the things I love..." is pretty much a digital scrapbook and warrants as much attention as I'd give another junk mail invitation to join AARP.

It's not that I have overly high standards. I've confessed to watching one too many episodes of Man Vs Food and I currently spend way more time than I should watching people shop for homes on the Home and Garden Network. So obviously I am easily entertained. But it takes more than photos of fabric to engage me enough to read a blog.

So what constitutes a blog of note to me? I like reading about people's lives. It seems odd, but over the years I've followed several blogs and became virtual friends with people I've never met based solely on their blog posts and an exchange of comments. I liked their blogs because they were real people writing about real things in an engaging way. Unfortunately most of them stopped blogging because they actually did have lives.

One of the blogs I used to read and enjoy was Mickey Ripped. Mickey openly blogged about his schizophrenia in an amazingly profound and funny way. His was truly a blog of note. But Mickey left the grid and disappeared as so many true blogs of note do.

It is a pity that blogs of the heart disappear while the scrapbooks, dear diary and "I'm really trying to sell you something" blogs proliferate like English Ivy, sucking oxygen out of the blogosphere.

Where's industrial strength Roundup when you need it?

Everyone has one

There is a saying, "Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one."  It is about as true a saying as I've every heard.

But that is just my opinion...or my asshole. Imagine if everyone spouting opinions as if they are truth had to end their statement with, "But that's just my asshole." Perhaps they'd think a bit more before speaking.

Spouting crap with conviction is particularly a folly of youth. Even my two-year old son will tell me a blue crayon is red and defend his observation adamantly  until he is distracted by a Cheerio or fruit snack.

I write all of this with conviction knowing that I am about opinionated about things a person comes. But I have grown to recognize my opinions as only my opinions. I have also grown to recognize that no one really likes to hear other people's opinions unless they mesh with their own. So you are better off just sitting in a chair muttering to yourself than piping up with your opinion about anything. Then people will think you are a pretty astute and amiable person.

That being said, I imagine it would be a pretty boring world if everyone had the same opinion about everything. There would only be one religion (if there were a religion at all), one political party (if there were a government at all) and one gender (if people existed at all). You wouldn't have marketing or advertising, because there wouldn't be anything to convince people of.  And most importantly, there wouldn't be any assholes.

That is hard to imagine.

Out of my ivy league

Since we've had uncharacteristically sunny weather on weekends this summer, I've managed to spend more time in my own little half-acre woods battling the forces of nature. And although I haven't given up my psychological battle of wills with Theodore, my mountain beaver nemesis, I have focused more of my attention on his vegetation counterpart: an infestation of English Ivy.

The only thing I think is worse than English Ivy and a horsetail infestation (which I battled at the same time I was fighting with Theodore) is a blackberry vine infestation. I have them as well, but they are confined to the outer reaches of my Kingdom and aren't quite as prevalent as the ivy. Ivy is the cockroach of the plant world. It grows everywhere and anywhere and seems impervious to any attempts to get rid of it. At times I am afraid to sit down on the bench in my backyard for fear I'll doze off and wake up covered with ivy.

The sad thing about the ivy that has overtaken much of the slopes in my backyard is that some moron in the past actually planted it probably thinking it would be great ground cover and help prevent the soil from eroding on the slope behind my house that terminates on a creek passing through my property. The irony is that not only doesn't ivy prevent erosion, it likely contributes to it. Plus it does its best to choke out every other form of life in the backyard except for the damned mountain beaver.

I started fighting the ivy last summer soon after we moved into our house. But I concentrated on vines that had crept out of the garden and were cascading over a wooden fence and attempting to choke a hedge that gives us a bit of privacy from a busy street that borders our property. Whoever lived in this house in years past actually installed trellis' on the fence to help the ivy pull itself up and over (as well as through) the fence.

I pulled and slashed and cut my way through what must have amounted to miles of the stuff. It was scary how it had worked its way through the small cracks between fence board to continue its efforts to cover the globe with ivy vines. I was afraid that the fence would collapse once I'd removed a bulk of the ivy. It didn't, but it is obviously the worse for the wear from supporting a ton of ivy for however many years it has been growing there.

The freaky thing about ivy is that even after you've ripped it off from something and separated it from it's main root, it doesn't seem to die. And since ivy is essentially poisonous, nothing will eat them, even a stinking mountain beaver.

After clearing the ivy off my fence, I started pulling it from the slope in my backyard. I have to tell you that it is pretty daunting to approach what amounts to a carpet of ivy on a fairly steep slope worrying that any minute you are going to uncover yet another mountain beaver hole occupied by a pissy little creature made more pissy by the fact that you've been filling in his entrances with used kitty litter and rocks.

Pulling ivy vines up by the root is slow work and it wrecks havoc on your hands. But after several days of cutting, pulling and cussing, I cleared a pretty major swath of dirt. So I decided to make a trip to the local home improvement super store to find some ground cover to replace the nasty ivy I'd ripped up before it began to creep its way up again. And while I'm scanning flats of various types of ground cover, what do I run into for $7.99 a flat?

English ivy.

I'm tempted to put an ad on Craig's List offering people the opportunity to dig up their own English Ivy starts from my back yard for a nominal fee. Hell, maybe I'll even offer to throw in a mountain beaver as a bonus.

Did Barney Google?

That post title will mean nothing to a vast majority of people under 50. And it likely won't mean anything to a vast majority of people over 50 as well. Barney Google was a cartoon character from a comic strip created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. It was popular in the early 1920s. And it inspired a popular song in 1923 coincidentally called, "Barney Google."  The chorus of the song went like this:

Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google had a wife three times his size
She sued Barney for divorce
Now he's living with his horse

The only reason I know this was because my grandmother had Victrola when I was growing up and one of the only records she had was Barney Google. I used to get a kick out of cranking the thing up and listening to the scratchy voice from forty years earlier belting out "Barney Google with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes."

Ironically, just a few years later I'd be sitting next to my portable phonograph listening to John Lennon belt out "I am the egg man, they are the egg men. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob." Perhaps John's grandmother had a Victrola as well.

But I digress.

I don't recall ever seeing the Barney Google comic strip. Billy DeBeck died in 1942 and along with him Barney Google. So by the time I heard the song, there was nothing to put it into context for me. I just thought it was a silly song about a bug eyed guy and his wife. It wasn't until the other day that, on a whim, I Googled Barney Google and discovered the story behind the song I'd heard so many years ago (and stuck in my head like a popcorn husk behind my molar).

Another irony here is that Google, the mega search engine that provides the portal for all knowledge, is simply a typo of the word, "Googol." So it has nothing to do with Barney Google or his goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.

Incidentally, the lyrics for the song "Barney Google" were written by Billy Rose. Rose was once married to singer/actress Fanny Brice, the inspiration for the Funny Girl and Funny Lady movies starring Barbra Streisand. Billy Rose was played by James Caan in Funny Lady. James Caan didn't look anything like the real Billy Rose, nor did he have goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.

You've got to love Google, though. It inspires so many of my magnificent digressions.

Theodore strikes back

While we were bopping around on the road to Boise and back, Theodore, my unwelcome Mountain Beaver, was given free reign to restore his burrow entrances in my backyard.  So yesterday was the first time I actually had an opportunity to get out there and renew my efforts to discourage him from turning my backyard into a Mountain Beaver condo with multiple entrances.

I filled a couple of the worst holes with a couple of bags of used kitty litter courtesy of my three cats. I topped off the holes with large rocks and some concrete stepping stones. This morning Theodore was back. He didn't try reopening the holes I'd plugged with cat litter, but he did pop up in a new hole almost on the path to my garden shed. And despite all of the information I'd read about Mountain Beavers being nocturnal and rarely seen, Theodore was out there in plain site actively burrowing away.

I grabbed my camera and snapped several shots (using a zoom because I'm not going to test the "aggressive behavior" info I've also read about). They are a bit blurry, but you can get an idea of what Theodore looks like.

This afternoon I ventured through the gate to continue my project to reclaim the overgrown slope in my backyard. Once again I plugged up Theodore's new burrow entrances with large rocks and yet another concrete stepping stone. I then proceeded to battle the Horsetails, ivy and other assorted weeds that have taken over the landscaping, keeping a machete within reach in case Theodore wanted to talk about kitty litter. But he didn't make another appearance. But I imagine he's still there plotting his next move.

Nutz to you

Since I am dissing on things related to our recent road trip, I might as well express my disgust for Hummers. Give me one good reason why anyone outside of Iraq needs to drive around in an armored troop carrier. They are big, ugly, bad for the environment and obnoxious.

To add insult to injury we saw one in one of the dink towns we were passing through on our way to Idaho that had a handicapped permit hanging on the rear view mirror and what looked like chromed testicles hanging from the rear bumper. Turns out there is a company called "Thatsnutz" that sells trailer hitches in various colors that resemble a scrotum.

This is wrong on so many levels.

I have never understood why people need to try and make up for their inadequacies and insecurities by owning muscle cars,  big trucks or vehicles that cost as much money as the GNP of many third world countries. It reminds me of the old joke that asks what is the difference between a Porsche and a porcupine: the porcupine has the pricks on the outside.

If a person is defined by the car they drive then they must a a pretty pitiful life.

I also despise bumper stickers, mud flaps with sayings like "Mean and Nasty" on them and antenna balls.

And don't get me started on gold trim packages.

Who Walmarted?

I am not a person who goes to Walmart. Even if I put aside the various accusations of how they treat employees or drive small businesses out of business, I just can't wrap my mind around shopping at Walmart. Maybe it is because I associate Walmarts with trailer parks and other symbols of America's great unwashed masses.

Don't get me wrong, I am not an elitist in the sense that I want to shop at exclusive boutiques. I just prefer to shop at places that don't reek of stale popcorn and have clientele who resemble extras in a Night of the Living Dead sequel.

But we were in Hermiston, Oregon, a burg half way between our home in Washington state and my birthplace in Boise where I was taking my family for a reunion of sorts. And our hotel was a block or two away from a Walmart and we needed a few items. When you are traveling with toddlers, you tend to put aside minor aversions to places such as Walmart for convenience sake. After all, I was also a stranger in Hermiston and no one I knew would actually see me set foot in a Walmart.

.In a fashion, Walmarts are not that different than a Target. But for some reason, a Target seems less seedy and consumption obsessed. Walmarts seem like the next generation of K-marts, the tawdry mega stores of my childhood. I come from a generation familiar with blue light specials and bags of submarine sandwiches for a $1.00. So you would think I wouldn't be bothered by a seedy Walmart.

This wasn't the first time I'd been in a Walmart. I think I mentioned that I took my family to one near my home town around Christmas when I was searching for a replacement for my white artificial Elvis Christmas tree. Since I'd bought the original Elvis tree at a K-mart, I figured Walmart would have a suitable replacement. But after encountering a bedraggled rat in the Christmas tree section of the store, I quickly herded my family out of the place.

I didn't see any rats in the Hermiston Walmart. I kept scanning the floors for them, however. I was tempted to interrogate the greeter about rodent infestations as we walked in, but he seemed totally focused on his one primary task, trying to appear cheery and welcoming while being paid minimum wage.

And speaking of the greeters at Walmart, I had this idea some time back. Walmart should start building senior residences into their stores. It's a genius idea, really. They'd have a built in workforce who could work their in exchange for room and board. After all, the stores offer medical services, eye exams and crappy food.

But I digress.

I wish I could say that I was pleasantly surprised by my visit to Walmart. But I wasn't. We wandered through aisle after aisle of merchandise that I'm sure was cheaper than most stores. But then again it was generally crap that no one really needed. There were tons of flat screen televisions and DVD players beckoning to a clientele that on a whole didn't appear to be able to afford food let alone cheap electronics. Regardless, Walmart offers up the American dream at discount prices.

We grabbed the stuff we came for and dashed out past the bleary eyed greeter into the daylight. I was anxious to get back to the hotel and go swimming. I had this uncontrollable  urge to immerse myself in water. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with having spent time in a Walmart.

Now cough

I realize that no one really wants to hear how you are feeling despite the automatic, "How are you feeling" greetings you get when they walk by your office and you sound as if you are trying to cough up a major internal organ. What they really want to ask is, "Are you infectious and why don't you go lock yourself in a sound proof room where you won't disgust and annoy the rest of us."

I know this because this is what I normally think when I ask someone how they feel. Now that I'm the disgusting coughing one hacking up phlegm and killing forest after forest worth of tissues, I realize karma is a major bitch. I also realize that medical science has not progressed much from the days of bleeding and applying leeches.

After more than two weeks of coughing, wheezing and making sounds that kept conjuring up the phrase "death rattle" in my disease obsessed brain, I gave in and made a doctor's appointment. There are far too many things I'd rather do than go to the doctor than I could list in a thousand blog posts. But you can only put up with the disgusted looks and comments of sympathetic coworkers and family members who suggest you go to a doctor or float off on an ice flow before you break down and visit the doctor.

I wasn't optimistic that the doctor could or would do anything to help. After keeping me waiting the prerequisite 20 minutes in the exam room she came in and immediately asked, "How are you feeling" which has an even worse translation when coming from a doctor. It essential means, "How long do I have to listen to you whine before I can simply bill my $200 and send you on your way to let what ever crude you'd come down with runs its course."

The doctor did immediately decline shaking my hand and kept a good six feet between me and her. She listened to my symptoms and reluctantly said, "Let's take a look" as she donned rubber gloves and picked up her instruments to peek into my ears and nose and listen to my lungs. She proceeded to check and inform me I had post nasal drip and a bad cough.

My four year old had made this diagnosis days earlier without the benefit of medical school.

She then told me that it was probably started out as a viral thing and may have turned into an infection. So she gave me a prescription for some antibiotics with the caveat that they may or may not help and an inhaler that might help the cough. Then she told me to come back in a week or so if things didn't get better.  I walked out shaking my head at my gullibility for once again going to a doctor assuming they were actually going to offer up a cure rather than a guess.

Regardless, I have been taking my pills and breathing my inhaler and I have to say I really don't feel much better. But when people make some comment about my hacking and sniffling, I can confidently say that I've been to a doctor. They seem relieved since this indicates that I must not be contagious.

Then when they are away from their desks, I go and lick their telephone receivers.

Pee de resistance

I jokingly suggested that an online site selling predator urine to ward off pesky little animals like a Mountain Beaver might be called predatorpiss.com. I was wrong. The site is called predatorpee.com. It is a company in Maine that specializes in selling urine for all occasions. If you have any questions, you simply email the pee-man for answers.

Of course one of the first questions I had was how you go about collecting bobcat, coyote, mountain lion or fox pee. And the pee-man obviously gets this question a lot because he has page dedicated to pee collection. Apparently you don't have to approach animals in the wild with a specimen jar. The urine comes from zoos and wildlife refuges where apparently they have figured out a way to collect urine.

I can't resist saying that collecting predator pee would be a profession where you are required to be pissed off all the time.

Stop, I am killing me.

Regardless, I'm not ready to plunk down $23.99 for 12 ounces of Bobcat pee to piss off Theodore, my Mountain Beaver. Theodore, by the way, did unplug one of the burrow entrances I'd covered up and plugged with stones. I was tempted to pee in the burrow while growling like a bobcat, but my wife frowns on that type of behavior. I am, however, considering shoveling used kitty litter into the hole. God knows I have ready supply of that with three cats in the house.

I think there may be a reality program in here somewhere: Man versus Mountain Beaver. I could dress like Ozzie Osbourne and mutter unintelligibly while pouring jars of urine down Theodore's burrow. I think I could milk if for two or three seasons before being bumped off the network and being replaced by the Pee-Man and his day to day exploits in the predator pee business.

I live a rich and full life.

Golly Wally, is that a Mountain Beaver?

If you are like me (and I assume most people), you have probably never heard of a Mountain Beaver. The ironic thing about a Mountain Beaver is that it doesn't really live in the mountains and it isn't a beaver. It is actually more of a prehistoric rat without a tail that one author described as looking kind of like a furry football with claws and teeth.

Apparently the Mountain Beaver hasn't changed much in 40,000 years. The only thing they seem to do is burrow and eat vegetation -- primarily ferns, rhododendrons and tree bark (which is probably why they got confused with beavers). They need to live near water because their kidneys haven't evolved in 40,000 years either so they need to drink the equivalent of 2/3 their body weight each day.

Lewis and Clark were some of the first people to write about the Mountain Beaver after being sold a couple of robes made out of their fur by local natives. Like much of the world, Lewis and Clark never actually got to see a Mountain Beaver, just their fur because they are very shy critters and fairly anti-social. This may because they also have the nasty habit of eating their own poop so they don't get invited to many parties.

Why do I devote so much precious blog space to an evolved animal from the rat family? Because I have met a Mountain Beaver.

We just bought our house about a year ago. And one of the cool but high maintenance aspects of it is that although it doesn't have a backyard, it has a forested section that our deck overlooks that slopes down to a creek. The forested property had been landscaped at one time, but has more or less been reclaimed by nature  over the years before we bought the house. I decided to re-reclaim it a couple of weekends ago.

Little did I know that my little patch of wilderness would be considered a Club Med for the average Mountain Beaver. It has ferns, rhodies, trees, a creek and lots of soft dirt for burrowing. And until I started clearing it away, it had plenty of ground cover to shield the many entrances to the Mountain Beaver's burrow from prying eyes.

It didn't take much clearing of ivy and horsetails to uncover the first burrow entrance. If you aren't familiar with horsetails, they are ironically also a prehistoric throwback, but from the plant world. They resemble a horse's tale (thus the name) but come apart in sections when you pull on them. They don't spread through seeds, but through spores. So I have a prehistoric rat and prehistoric plants thriving in my backyard. What's next, T-Rex?

Anyway, I assumed the hole was a gopher hole, (albeit for a big gopher ). So I throw a couple of rocks in it and cover it with dirt. Then I go about my futile effort to pull out ivy and horsetails. The following weekend I take up the gauntlet again. When I go through the gate, I discover that the burrow has been uncovered and the rocks pushed out. I begin get a bit edgy about an animal big enough push out a fair sized rock. So I throw a bigger rock down the hole, cover it up again and place a larger rock on top.

After finishing my day's weeding, I'm standing on my deck looking over the slope and I see something move down a few yards from the original burrow entrance. I watch for a minute and sure enough I see this brown animal the size of a football pushing out dirt and brazenly piling it up around the entrance of a new hole. It seems oblivious to that fact that the sun is still out and it is exposed to prying eyes.

My wife opens the gate and walks down the steps past the burrowing critter and it doesn't stop pushing dirt out of the new entrance. Its as if it was making a point of showing us that no matter how many holes we covered up, it could dig new ones. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had lifted a furry paw and flipped a middle claw up at me.

That night my wife does an Internet search. She has apparently heard rumors about something called a Mountain Gopher. Sure enough, the few photos of the "elusive" and rarely seen Mountain Beaver is the creature burrowing on the slope behind my house. As with most information on the Web, I find a smattering of information, mostly regurgitated versions of the same text stating that a Mountain Beaver is basically a prehistoric rodent with a pissy attitude an no tail that is rarely seen and often misunderstood.

One official Washington State site provides helpful suggestions on how to discourage a Mountain Beaver from living in your backyard by being a bad neighbor. This involves filling up every burrow entrance you can find with old newspapers or used kitty litter (I'm not sure how this will faze an animal that eats its own crap). They also suggest wadding up old rags soaked with bobcat or coyote urine and shoving them into the burrows with a coat hanger. Apparently you can purchase bobcat and coyote urine online or at local trapping stores. I don't think Walmart carries it but if they do I'm sure the urine would sell at a very reasonable price. I haven't done a search for online outlets, but I imagine the companies have names like predatorpiss.com or badassurine.biz.

They also suggest that you can trap the Mountain Beavers, but chances are if you kill one, another one will move into his or her old burrow since the Mountain Beaver real estate market is pretty competitive.

For now I just filled in five or six of the burrow entrances with rocks and dirt. I can tell you that I was a bit nervous on Sunday while I continued clearing the ivy and horsetails waiting to be leaped on by a disgruntled Mountain Beaver. Being savaged by a feral Mountain Beaver is not the way I want to go out. For one, it would sound pretty pitiful on the evening news:

Anchorperson Jennifer: This breaking news, an Edmonds man was attacked today by a Mountain Beaver in what was described as a dispute over kitty litter and bobcat urine. Never heard of a Mountain Beaver, Steve, have you?
Anchorperson Steve: Not much Jennifer, but I hear they are more vicious than the elusive Jackalope.

So far I haven't seen any signs that Theodore (that's what I've decided to call my Mountain Beaver... it was Beaver Cleaver's real name on the Leave it to Beaver series) has unplugged the burrow entrances I filled in on Sunday. But I know he is down there, probably watching old Rambo videos plotting his revenge.

In the meantime, I'm going to go run a search for bobcat urine and hope I don't get in trouble with my IT department for surfing "blocked" Web sites.

A slice of melon collie anyone?

I have always leaned more towards bittersweet melancholy rather than saccharine-laced nostalgia. I would say it is a middle aged thing, but I pretty much have always felt this way. Maybe it is because my soul, if not an old one, is a middle aged one and has learned to recognize irony over many lifetimes.

It's not that I am feeling particularly melancholy. I was just looking at one of the stat counting programs that loosely identifies who is looking at what on my blog. For the most part people drift in using Blogger's "Next Blog" function. I pay little attention to them. They are tourists looking for giant balls of twine along the Information Highway.

The second highest traffic comes from people doing Google searches. I pay almost no attention to them either because the generally are looking for porn or help eliminating vermin from their crawl spaces. Or for some inexplicable reason they want to know why clams are supposed to be so happy. My blog post posing the burning question, "Are clams really happy?" remains my number one visited page. I hope these people find closure after reading my essay on the subject.

The most interesting visitor's to my site are the ones who seem to navigate deliberately to my blog. I imagine they may have once been visitors from category number one or two, but were curious enough to come back. Regardless I clicked on one link to the archives of my May 2006 blog posts. I was quite prolific in 2006. I began reading some of my old posts. One of the curses and blessings of being middle aged is being able to read something you wrote five years ago and basically have little or no recollection of writing it. It is really quite refreshing.

At the risk of sounding conceited, I was quite moved by some of the things I'd written. This is where the melancholy comes in.  In a post written ironically about Blogger's "Next Blog" function I wrote:

My forays into Blogger's "Next Blog" feature this last week has made me wonder. What are we looking for? Do we expect to stumble onto some blog out there with the answers? Would whatever power that motivates life's direction use blogger.com as the forum for unlocking the key to existence? Is this all some fantastic DaVinci code where the pieces to the ultimate puzzle are hidden in the detris of mindless blogs about paint ball strategy or minutia about American Idol winners?

I don't think so. If there is an answer in the blog world, I think it may be a collective one. Perhaps it is just that we are all trying to look inside by turning ourselves inside out in a blog post. It's as if the computer has become our confessional and we sit waiting for affirmation that we are not alone in our sins of being human. We want to know that it is okay to not always know where we are going or if it is the right direction.

I think it is human nature to always look for a sign that we are not alone.

Now that may be a load of crap, but it is pretty profound if I say so myself (and I do and did). But it was really this post that pushed my melancholy button. It was a post about a planned trip back to my birthplace, Boise:

I find it odd after living in Seattle for about 24 years to return to my birthplace. I realize Boise has changed a great deal in those 24-years, but I can't help but sense the time warp aspect of the place in my memory. I won't be staying at the house I grew up in although my mom has plenty of room. I refuse to sleep in the basement in my old room with the leopard-patterned paneling listening to the water pump run every 15 minutes. And after living with 250 premium channels on a HD bigscreen television, I can't bring myself to watch local Boise channels on a 19-inch television in my mom's family room while she sleeps in an easy chair. I also can't bring myself to shower in a bathroom the size of a telephone booth (I can't believe it was once shared by 5 people in one house). But the real reason I won't stay at my mother's house is that there really is no more room there because it is already too full of memories.

You can never really go back. But you can hover above it all, observing where you were. I'll wander from room to room staring at timelines of family photos on the walls, listening to my mom lecturing her dog about chasing the neighborhood squirrels. I'll drive around the town on autopilot remembering the pizza parlour that is now a tattoo parlour. And I'll drive by my grade school remembering those walks home, stopping to catch waterskippers in a drainage ditch in a distant time before kid's pictures ended up on the side's of milk cartoons. I may walk around the downtown or the mall, looking into faces, wondering if I'll see anyone I recognize. But they will all be new faces.

Then I'll return to my generic hotel room that could be anyplace in the country and wonder why I am a stranger in a place where I first drew a breath. And I'll try not to think about the time when my mother rejoins my father and the family home is merely a photograph replaced by multiplexes and townhouses.

And I'll realize that it is all inevitable and it wouldn't have mattered if I'd been crowned King instead of ending up a middle-aged bureaucrat commuting by train rather than a royal carriage. Because even kings have no control over time.

That's where the melon collie came dashing out of the past nipping at little Timmy's heels. The irony in all of this, is that thoughts like these are part of the legacy of me I want my children to read some day in hopes they'll understand papa a little better once I'm either gone or lost somewhere in senility. And they are buried in the May 2006 archive of a blog best know for explaining why clams aren't really so happy.

Yes, Alanis, it is ironic, don't you think?

My next stop

I have been dreaming a great deal lately. Or I suppose I have been more aware of my dreams lately. My understanding is that we always dream, we just don't remember them unless we wake up soon after dreaming. Regardless, I have been remembering more dreams lately.

The irony is that most of the dreams I seem to be having are related to anxiety about  transportation (I work in the public transportation industry). In my dreams, I always seem to be in another city trying to get somewhere. In one dream I was at an airport checking about a flight that had been delayed until the next day. I went back to confirm and missed the tour bus I'd been on and I was stranded there without my luggage or passport. It was night and I was desperately trying to find a way to get back to my hotel painfully aware of the seedy part of town I suddenly found myself in.

Last night I was trying to determine which bus stop to wait at to catch bus either to the airport or near to my hotel. I don't know which. But the anxiety was trying to determine where to wait for the bus. Nothing seemed to be marked clearly and everyone else seemed to know where they were going.

I have similar anxiety dreams about trains, except I'm not so much worried about getting on the wrong train (since they operate on a fixed track, odds are pretty much 50/50 that you are going to get on the one going in the right direction). In my train dreams, I'm worried about getting to the station in time to catch the last train.

I also have dreams about cruise ships and getting stranded in ports. Or I'm on ferry boats on the Amazon passing through hostile territory.

I don't really have anxiety dreams about driving a car. This shows you how ingrained public transit is in my psyche.

Though not all of my dreams are about transportation. I had a dream last week about an odd masked character living in the crawl space of a dream version of the house I grew up in. He only emerged at night and skulked about the yard. I finally confronted him with a baseball bat. But in my dreams, I never seem able to pack any punch when I attempt to protect myself with clubs or other weapons. Guns never fire and knives or clubs always dissolve or lose momentum. Not that I want to hurt anyone, but if the bogeyman is going to inhabit my dream house, I think I have the right to bean him. In this dream I scared the bogeyman so much, I began to feel sorry for him and told him he could go ahead in live in the crawl space (which really looked quite  cozy...he'd set up a bed and some bookcases). I even asked if he needed more blankets.

I don't put much stock in these dreams. I'm sure you could read all kinds of symbolism into them like lacking direction or fear of the Rapture. But I tend to think of them as my mind releasing day to day pressure through dream brain farts.

And speaking of brain farts, is it just me or does the latest round of Dairy Queen television ads (blatant rip offs of the Old Spice commercials) seem a bit freaky? I can't get this image of the bunnies with a straight edge razor giving the Dairy Queen guy a shave. If I start seeing them in my bus dreams I'm really going to wig out.

At my post

I'd like to think that, although my blog posts are pretty random, I am a pretty consistent blogger. I will have been blogging for seven years come this August. And I hope to post my thousandth post sometime this year (which will probably be as anticlimactic as Judgement Day was).

One of the anomalies of blogging versus writing a book is that people reading a blog (or stumbling into one) start reading from the end versus the beginning. I realize that is a very linear way of looking at it, but it is true. Although very few people actually read a blog for the first time and then jump back to the first post to catch up. This is especially true in my case. It would be a lot to expect for someone to read almost a thousand of my archived posts to discover how I got to where I am.

I've toyed with creating printed versions of my blog. I have created photo books using blurb.com, an online self-publishing system. I even began creating a book called the Best of Dizgraceland that I shelved because of the need to truly prioritize my very limited free time for things other than creating a vanity press version of a blog no one reads so that it can become a printed version that no one would read even if they were willing to plunk down the rather pricey cost of a blurb book.

It's not as though you would find a clear thread to define what it is I am trying to communicate with my blog if you read it from beginning to end (or end to beginning). You would discover that I repeat myself a great deal and harp on many of the same topics over and over (one of them being the frustrations of writing a blog no one reads on a regular basis).

I've recapped much of my childhood and climbed my family tree on more than one occasion. But I found that sharing too much information on the Web can be an unwise thing to do. So I stopped naively blathering away about everything as though I was writing in my diary oblivious that it could be read by anyone with an Internet connection.

I'm smart enough not to write about work. Not that I have any interest in writing about my work. I blog to escape from thinking about my work. I also don't write about my wife or children here. I write about my life as a father in another private blog locked away from prying eyes.

I don't write about being away on vacation for the same reason I stopped checking in on Four Square. Common sense tells us that it is better not to broadcast to the world when you are away from your house and for how long. You might as well tell thieves which rock your front door key is hidden under.

Taking away much of my personal life as topics for blogging has definitely narrowed the scope of my subject matter. Sometimes I think I have just run out of things to write about. And then some whack job like Harold Camping comes along and gives me fodder for several posts. I'd be up a creek if he actually got raptured.

So, I'm not sure whether after almost seven years blogging, I've come to the conclusion why I do it. I don't harbor any fantasy that there would be a major outcry if I stopped. Pebbles don't make much of a ripple in a very large pond. But I stay at my post. There is a certain amount of satisfaction that I hang in there putting one foot in front of another.

Who knows, maybe someday I'll actually get somewhere.

Dis Belief and Dat Belief

I really don't intend to keep beating the dead rapture horse, but I continue to be baffled that people believed so firmly that the end of the world was going to happen that they drained their life savings and uprooted their families in anticipation of the end. Perhaps this is why I am not a religious person. I can't think of anything I'd believe on faith alone.

It's kind of like me wanting to believe in ghosts. No matter how many episodes I watch of Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel, I still haven't seen anything that would lead me to the conclusion that ghosts exist. It would be nice to confirm that something about us continues on after we die, but logic seems to defy it. How can anyone claim to be an expert in paranormal activity unless they have died and come back? At least at that point you could speak from experience instead of just making crap up that sounds good. Of course, no one would believe you unless they made a leap of faith.

It is that mysterious "leap of faith" that seems to be the foundation of all religions. If something defies logic like walking on water or parting seas, the preachers blame your doubt on your inability make that leap of faith and just believe. Unfortunately, that leap of faith too often leads to draining bank accounts and drinking Koolaid.

Having been raised a Christian Scientist I was often faced with the dilemma of not believing enough. When I got sick as a child, I blamed it on my lack of faith. My mother's disapproving looks and quotes from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy reinforced that I was lacking in the faith department and thus was bowing before the toilet puking my little guts out because I didn't believe enough.

To this day, I feel guilty if I am sick.

So do I shake my head in wonderment at the rubes who believed the end was coming on May 21, 2011 because they were idiots or because I envy their ability to just have faith.

I think it is a little of both. But I still think Harold Camping is a whack job, especially since he now claims Judgement Day did happen but it was just a spiritual judgement and that the world will still end on Oct. 21, 2011. In the meantime he won't give any of the money back to the poor souls he bilked.

Now that is a a sin.