A Rogue's Gallery For Sure

Okay, I don't have any idea if I'm, to use the popular term, 'ready to date.' It's not like I'm lonesome, or like I have a huge hole in my life that I need someone to fill. But when I was last 'single,' I dated all the time. It was like breathing, nothing I put an effort into. I went and did the things I wanted to go and do, and I invited girls along based on whether I thought they were interesting, cute, or best of all, sexually irresponsible.

And I figure if I wait until I’m lonesome or have a huge hole in my life to try and meet anyone, I’ll do something dumb like seeing if any of those irresponsible chicks are still out there.

Of course, there was a huge advantage to being compelled to spend seven hours a day in the midst of 500 single girls roughly my age, girls who were mostly dying for any distraction from the class.

Another thing about that whole scene: when I was 17, high school girls were, basically, women. They had boobs, wore makeup, and none of them looked like children playing dress-up. I swear. I'm not interested in dating someone half my age, but when was it they quit stocking high schools with women and started putting these children in there? I'm off topic, but it's a real concern. If they keep it up, one of these days my own kids will be allowed to drive cars or something.

So being that I'm not in high school any longer, and that it apparently wouldn't matter since the hot chicks I went to high school with are now in their 30s, I decided to do something about meeting women. Women I could actually date if I had a life. Because the part about going to the things I want to, I don't really do that anymore either. I'm going to Hayseed Dixie at Davey's on Friday, and that's the closest thing to 'going out' in the sense of something I could theoretically take a date to, that I've accounted for since November.

I saw 'Shopgirl' alone in the theater and stopped off for a beer at a dive which has, as its main selling point, a collection of riff-raff who tell outlandish stories in the first person. Not exactly a date, but I was still married.

So anyway, interspersed here in my rant about dating are the pictures I posted to an online personals listing. It's as unpromising as it is inexpensive, but it beats at least one alternative:

I got a telephone solicitation from a brick-and-mortar dating service, went and heard their dog and pony show. It was just timing, their auto-dialers got me right around when I was curious. Except they really push the fact that their members are hot to get married, and since my divorce isn't even final, I'm thinking more like meeting to eat a bunch of caramels, no pressure.

I knew the fees would be high, someone has to pay the rent. I figured I'd find out what the deal cost, keep it in mind for someday and maybe. I was thinking they might charge as much as$50 or $100 a month, which is about $250 to $300 more than I can afford.

There was a questionnaire, a video, a pitch. They even had me pull up a couple of profiles on their database, to see that there were women there I'd want to meet. And there even was one, except when they finally got around to the money part, yikes.

The cheapest plan they had was $3000 if I was stupid enough to sign on the spot. Plus $30 a month. That was for a membership that would expire in a year. If you wanted to be able to continue past the year at ONLY $30 a month, they wanted another $700. For $3700 right this minute and $30 a month, you can keep using the service until you get married.

But there's more!

If you really want to blow a wad of cash, you can sign up for almost $6,000. For that, you get to keep paying $30 a month until you're married, and if that spouse dies or divorces you, you can renew for 'only' the monthly fee! How big a pessimist do you have to be to opt for that???

Oh, the $6,000 package comes with a cruise. A cruise I'm reasonably sure I could book for myself for about $1500.

So what kind of women would you meet through a service like that? Women serious enough about getting married to pay $3700 in hopes of meeting potential husbands? I'm not only not that motivated myself, I'm pretty sure I don't want to go on a date with anyone who is.

And no, I don’t think paying a fee like that proves she has substance, if I recall the term my ‘counselor’ used. I think women with substantial bank accounts mainly have them because they’re smarter than to shell out that kind of money.

Plus, at least one of the online places I’ve seen charges for guys but not for girls: they let the girls in free, ladies’ night style. So for all I know the women at this place see a price list that’s maybe 10% what I was pitched.

Oh, and annoying sales tactic: the prices they show are all $1000 higher than this. The claim is that it's $4700 if you sign up later, but by joining right this fucking minute, you save $1000.

Anyway, when I balked at the price (my 'counselor' didn't know I wasn't even willing to shell out $50/mo with no up front fee), she started trying to get me to finance the deal with them. $200 down and $125 a month (probably at credit card interest rates, probably until my second or third spouse dies or leaves me).

I hate high pressure sales tactics. In part because I have the urge to cave, I'm too damn nice. I don't cave, though, I sit there saying no and feeling awful about it, so then I get pissed at them for making me feel bad. And then I'm definitely not buying because I'd have felt awful for nothing.

I thought I'd found an out, told the lady that I hadn't even figured out the refi on my house, so I definitely wasn't in the market for a high-priced introduction service. I said I'd make a poor prospective husband if my house was foreclosed on because I'd put myself $125 a month out of my price range for my own residence.

"That is a great idea," my 'counselor' said.

"It is?"

"You could have your mortgage lender fold this into the mortgage. It wouldn't affect your payment more than probably $20 a month, you'd have the service and your house payment where you need it. That's a great idea. If you can put $200 down, I'm pretty sure I can work it so the rest could be done when you close. That way you don't lose your $1000."

Hello? That was not my idea. And I wouldn't be 'losing' $1000 by walking out: I've seen that trick before. If I can get something for $3700 today, I can probably get it for half that if I hold out. If I even want it, but my idea was to get out of there without being rude. Why was I worried about being rude???

"Have you gotten that high-pressure tactics don't work on me?" I finally asked. "You weren't gong to get $200 out of me today if that paid for the whole thing. You wouldn't have gotten $50. At this point I wouldn't give you $2."

She reminded me of the asshole at a Ford dealership who did everything but stand on his head and spit nickels to ‘counsel’ me into a mini-van I didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

So far, the far cheaper alternative has produced approximately zero leads. I've e-mailed a few women. Their profiles appear non-toxic, though I guess you have to assume a certain amount of outrageous lying, posting pictures of a much cuter sibling/daughter, or using a high school yearbook shot from 1985. The only one that e-mailed me back was with quick note that she'd met someone and was seeing how it worked out. It might have boosted my confidence if she'd said she met someone through this service, but I'm doubting it.

But maybe it's my pictures, which is why I've salted them through this post. I'm relying on the three readers of this blog, (well, two since one of them is my ex) to tell me if it's my pics that are doing me in. I tried to get decent looking, relatively current shots (including some I took for the purpose) while presenting myself honestly.

Is it the honesty that's dooming me? If everyone assumes a certain degree of image inflation, photo doctoring and outright deception, maybe they figure me to be a real cave troll who only looks human after extensive Photoshop work...

Also, this bar scene everyone is so burned out on. Where is it? And how do you tell a pick-up bar from one that just serves alcoholic beverages?

Spring On The Moon

I took the girls back to Moon Marble on our spring break tour of stuff that doesn't cost much.
I have to admit, taking Mo to a place with so much stuff made of glass is not free of stress. Worth it, though.
They have more than marbles. Chuck Palahniuk sent me a care package last year in response to pretty much the only fan-letter I ever wrote, and he could have bought everything from the severed finger to the sushi air freshener at Moon Marble. If he lived in Kansas instead of Oregon, that is.

In fact, he even could have bought pretty much everything on the necklace there. They sell semi-precious stones in the room with the marble Mo tried to heal by laying on hands.

The thing with marbles, like anything else, handmade is something you should expect to pay for. The marbles they pick for demonstrations are ones that can be made in 15 minutes. Figure it for yourself, whether you're a fry-guy or a CEO, what would you charge for something you could only do four of in an hour? What about a softball-size monstrosity that takes all week?
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Not that there's not room in the world for machine-made marbles. There are effects you can't get with machines, but it would hard to get the effect of millions of marbles available dirt cheap with old fashioned lampwork.

I Could Do That...NOT

Hopefully I havent' got this set so it will play wheter you want it to or not. I had the 'Fight Club' spoof trailer set to 'false' on autoplay and it still autoplayed. This one, I don't see the script code one way or the other.

Where Would I Even Begin?

Spring break this week, so I got bonus time with the girls, got them through Wednesday dinner. Took the week off work so I'd be available for whatever time I could get. I'm trying to get the tax-return ball rolling but I'm just licked, between trying to get remedial housekeeping taken care of and completing my longest solo flight as a newly minted single parent.

Or have I been minted? The divorce isn't final, so I guess I'm still in the die, newer than mint.

The fatigue is probably enhanced by Madame Blueberry. For the childless, that's a VeggieTales, one of their better ones. However, Mo's OCD tendencies kicked in on it, so it was played to the exclusion of all else. ALL else. She doesn't even watch it most of the time, but gets pissed off if the TV goes silent, or to the Wrong Program. At first this fixation was funny. It's checked out from the library, and I'm wanted for questioning there about the DVDs in my ducts they want back, so the ex-Frau asked me if I wanted her to burn a copy of it, but that was this evening when she was picking up the honyocks, and the first image that came to my mind didn't involve a DVD-R, it involved actual fire.

Saturday we went to Osawatomie. I wanted to check out my prospective digs. That's a Northest Kansas joke, there's a lot more to Osawatomie than a state boobie-hatch: there's also the John Brown Museum (it was closed), a cool park around it (which was open), and plenty of small houses crammed together like Kansas didn't have plenty of land.

I don't know if you can see from the photos, but I sometimes wonder where Kansas gets this reputation for flatness. I heard once that to find an area flat enough for the on-location shots in 'Wizard of Oz' they had to go to the Oklahoma Panhandle, which is...not in Kansas! Most of the state is rolling prairie, and then you have the Flint Hills and the 'Baby Ozarks.' It ain't mountains, but try chasing my kids through John Brown Park.

And no, there's no trick photography or Photoshop stunt here: Mo really does get that much air when she swings. The camera is at head level for me, about six feet off the ground and I am actually looking slightlyup. It's unsettling when she decides she doesn't need to hold the chains.


So then on Sunday I decided it was time to hit a museum that was open. I even went online and checked for hours and admission prices. We'd done the Nelson pretty recently, and while I don't think you can overdo a gallery like that, it's nice to mix it up a bit. So we did the Kemper, a much smaller museum but it's all modern stuff.

Emily was excited about the Warhol (Dennis Hopper, a screen on a shot from 'Midnight Cowboy,' I believe), a Pollack (the Nelson has one, but this was a different splat), and some of Pollack's disciples. A couple of cook Georgia O'Keefes, too. I'd show you pics, but no flash photography allowed. Fortunately they had no such ban outside by the spiders.

What was actually scary wasn't the spiders, it was the weather. The sirens had gone off Sunday morning though it wasn't even overcast where we live. Isolated supercells are the biggest source of tornadoes, and as their name suggests they are isolated. I've lived in Tornado Alley for 36 years and never seen a tornado; the closest call I had was in grade school, when I heard one from the saftey of the storm shelter. And that wasn't even close enough to damage structures around the school. Still, a bullet is pretty isolated, it doesn't make Russian Roulette safe.

There were 110 tornadoes spotted that day last I heard, nine fatalities. Sirens were going when we came out of the Kemper Museum and according to the radio there were confirmed twisers about ten miles from where we were. Tennis-ball size hail, too. Out further, where the worst of the tornado action hit, they had some softball size. When you think about the mechanics of hail, sucking that ice back upstairs, softball size is practically impossible. An updraft like that might take me up.

But I don't want to be a Disneyland Dad, so Monday was house cleaning. Okay, not 100% of Monday, but we hit it pretty hard. We also hit the Crayolas pretty hard. I was caught out on this last week, when Mo had homework that required crayons and I realized I didn't own any. At all. The sidewalk chalk and markers I had were used up, and crayons weren't even something I'd thought about. For one, Mo's had a history of eating them. Not a little bit, but enough where her developmental pediatrician questions whether she's covered by what the company means when they say 'non-toxic.' Plus she writes on walls with them when she can. That's really less of a concern since I have not a single wall that doesn't need a fresh coate of paint already, but I hadn't even been thinking of coloring supplies.

But coloring is a good outlet for her, and she'll do it about forever. So I bought the Old 96er (movie reference), the set of Crayolas that shames my childhood grail of 64. I remember having 64-envy when I was stuck with the 24 in school. Eventually my parents caved and got the 64, which seemed an amazing luxury. 96 isn't even the max these days.

The 96 was about four-and-a-half bucks. For three more I could get the 120. Well, according to my math, that's almost double the price for only 24 more colors. Unless those colors includes 'Human Blood Red' with real human blood for pigment, that's a bit outrageous. I think I know what they're doing, though. A friend of mine opened a burger stand years ago, and he specialized in overfeeding you. His regular burger and fries was more than I cold handle. My brother would split the fries with me and it was stilla gut-buster. But he had a double on the menu, a huge sandwich. When he added a triple, I asked him who could eat such a thing. He said he only sold two a week, but that he sold a lot more doubles with the triple on the menu, because the double had gone from being the maximum to being the medium.

I'm sure Crayola sells a ton more 96-color sets with a 120 to make it look reasonable.

So then I was going to take the girls to the Natural History Museum in Lawrence on Tuesday. I went with Em's class on a field trip and it was a big nostalgia trip for me, because I saw those same stuffed walruses when I was her age. It was open, and it was a 'suggested donation' thing, and it's not that far from home. But Em didn't want to do it, she preferred the Adequate Mall. No sweat, it's less gas to get there.



The thing with video games like the motorcycles is you don't have to pay. The previews alone exceed the attention span...



Oh, and we hit Target, too. For clothes and to browse patio furniture, it seems.

There's more, but I'm about to fall asleep at the keyboard here.

The Way-Back Machine

Gene Simmons overthrew Big Bird for me in about third grade. KISS worship wore thin by junior high and I moved on to stuff you didn't have to play backward to hear satantic messages. I liked Black Sabbath but when that first Ozzy solo album came out, it blew me away. Randy Rhodes was instantly appealing: if the simplicity of power chords appealed to me as a novice guitarist, it had worn thin without my even knowing it, and 'Blizzard of Oz' was a revelation.

So I'm passing through the gas station on the way to work this morning and 'Crazy Train' is playing on satellite radio.




Satellite radio is just the modern reinvention of Muzak. Ozzy on Muzak is a little startling, being that this was the music I cranked up to irritate my Dad when I was 14. It's kind of like finding out they're using a Dead Kennedys tune to sell sneakers or seeing Iggy Pop pitching car insurance. Which will probably also happen.

But it's not just the Ozzy thing. Last night I was listening to the Ohio Players. Damn, those fuckers could play. It's easy to think of them as a disco act, but they were more than that. A bari sax just flies in the face of purely 'dance music.'

And tonight, The Joy of Cooking, 'American Originals.' For the uninitiated, this is the original groove band. R&B, soul, and folk influences, it's sophisticated but infinitely listenable. If this band had been promoted...

Daddy, What's A Train?

Daddy what's a train?
Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grown up folks?
And little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house?
How can I explain?
When my little boy asks me,
Daddy, whats a train?

That's a verse from a folk song by the great Utah Philips. My Dad called on Sunday to see if me and the honyocks wanted to see a live steam engine.

Train nostalgia is kind of like steamboat nostalgia, except steamboat fans don't tell you that all your rush-hour nightmares could be solved if only we had a good light ship system.

I saw a steam engine on the move once. Union Pacific had a couple of restored passenger cars full of VIPs they were pulling behind one, and I happened along a stretch of highway clogged with people waiting to see it. I pulled over and waited, and it was worth it. It was a powerful thing to see as a guy who drives a car, I can only imagine the religious significance it had for people who got around on horses.

They had a line of kids and their parents waiting to check this puppy out. It was at Union Station, a tax-subsidized white elephant in Kansas City. If you waited long enough, they'd hoist you into the engineer's cabin and let you pull the rope for the whistle:

They blew the whistle to make the kids happy. It made them cry. It also made them hold their ears.



There was other fun stuff at Union Station, including restored railroad cars with living fossils who can regale you with stories of how it was to travel first class in the Pullman car days. It absolutely enthralls children.



But there's more. The train behind the steam engine was, if I understood correctly, a Mardi Gras theme 'Spirit of Louisiana' from Canada. Who decided to let Canadians manage a Mardi Gras thing obviously didn't take adequate notice of what Canadians do with bacon. Only in Canada can delicious crispy bacon be made into a Daisy canned ham. Not to mention CorelDraw and socialized medicine.



Yes, I click a lot of pictures. Em has dubbed me a 'shutterbug.' I think I'm compensating for years of sharing a camera with someone who got on my case for taking extraneous shots. If we were talking about film, where there is material and process costs, I can see it. But with digital media, where I can burn a CD for less than I can mail a bill, a picture costs nothing. Yes, a digital camera eats batteries, but with rechargeables even that expense is practically nill.

I have a friend who's a professional photographer cum photo editor. She takes amazing pictures, and I'm sure part of that is her education. Part of it is her equipment, cameras with huge lenses as big as her thigh. But mainly, she clicks a lot. I've known her to use six or eight rolls of film in a half hour. Statistics would tell you that there's bound to be a few good ones in a batch that large.

I've never had the confidence or the budget to snap that much with film, but with a digital, why not? I bought a 1 GB card for my camera because it was on sale for less than a 256 MB. And with 4 megapixel camera, a gig of card is enough for a week at Disneyland.

Oh, but back to the train thing: There was also the museum stuff they have all the time, including a huge room of N-guage trains that the aforementioned batteries failed me for. Miles of track for a train small enough to cruise into a prescription vial, pretty impressive. They also have a handcar and caboose and locomotive you can get in, including a modern computerized version that Mo ran to almost sure derailment.

And a diesel with an analog, 1970s sort of cockpit.


I hope Kansas City never gets light rail, I just want to put my heresy out front. I like trains as much as the next guy as long as the next guy isn't my nephew Marshall. But moving 100 tons of steel that happens to have a few commuters standing on it is about as 'green' as an oilspill. I even like subways, but until you convince another ten million people from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to move into the KC metro, it would be better if we each had our own Hummer H1s.

Oh, but back to our little field trip. Naturally, after a while, the kids got used to the sound...

Who Gave You A Job???

Mo's spring school pics came back. They looked like this:


Okay, she's my daughter so it means nothing when I say she's beautiful even though she is. So the outfit that takes these pics, they hold you hostage in the fall. Before the pics are even taken for the yearbook, they ransom you for the prints. They give you a retake, but the still charge like it is 1977.

Film developing is expensive, but digital previews are basically free. Yes, the equipment costs money, but if you're taking pictures as a trade, you're going to shell out for some equipment either way. Sears has digital previous because they don't sell a print unless they get a picture you'll be sucker enough to buy. The yearbook assholes, they don't care if the kid vomits on the lense at the retake.

Such professionalism. It's spooky how bad a fuck-up you can be and still get a job.

This spring pic was actually pretty good compared to some we've had. Autism doesn't lend itself to a posed shot, Mo can smell bullshit and she has a low tolerance for it. I dig that, makes me proud.

But here's what you get when you just point and click with a digital. I think this picture was taken by Miss Linda, it's from Special Olympics bowling a little over a year ago:


That beats hell out of any yearbook picture I've seen.

Beware the Diet Industrial Complex

A fellow blogger and friend put this up recently. I posted a comment but started to run on and decided to just take it on over here.

The diet industrial complex makes a gazillion dollars off making healthy people believe they're not healthy; and eventually making them not healthy. More precisely, $30 billion (with a B) a year spent by people who want to be happy on things that actually make them miserable. And fatter than they were to start off with.

Yes, I'm a diet heretic. I don't deny Americans are too fat, but I truly believe we'd be healthier if there was no such thing as Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Deal-A-Meal, Atkins, South Beach, etc. I know you can point to anecdotal success stories, but so can faith healers and snake oil salesmen. These programs make people fat.

When you fast, your metabolism crashes. Then, when you binge, your body is working double-time to store fat. Yeah, yeah, these programs all tell you not to fast, but in reality, if you're miserable, you're going to cave sooner or later.

So you set out to do whatever program, and it really doesn't matter which one. You go six days or two weeks with a full head of steam, tons of resolve. You're miserable but you think it will be worth it in the end. Then you give in when someone orders pizza for your department at work, or you sneak a couple of candy bars. You say to yourself, Self, you rocked hard for those six days, this won't sink the ship. Get back with the program now.

So you go back to the deprivation mode, your body thinks its starving and the next time you cave, you're maximizing the amount of fat your body puts on those 'problem areas.'

The worst part is, almost everyone on these diets is JUST FINE. Or they are when they first get sucked in. My friend talks about 7th grade, when she was alarmed to find she could 'pinch an inch' as they were saying Special K marketing. An inch? Few women can look like women and NOT be able to pinch that much. I doubt Hugh Hefner could have launched Playboy if he'd had Twiggy to work with instead of Marilyn. For starters, he'd have been arrested for obvious child pornography if he'd used the underdeveloped girls Calvin Klein uses today.

The old saw about insanity is that it's doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. I'm not saying I couldn't stand to lose a few, but Richard Simmons crying and holding my hand is not the answer.

The Adequate Mall

On our junket of the Adequate Mall today, we did some ice cream. I'm trying not to think about the fact that I'm breaking the final $20 bill I have in cash-on-hand, but Mo asks for ice cream every weekend, and I keep forgetting to get some. Oreos I remember, even if I don't lay them in fast enough to suit her.

I was the one that decided to look in Java Jive. I was mostly interested in Rosterie coffee, a local outfit. The owner came and talked at the breakfast of last weekend's homebrew competition, and he seemed pleasantly surprised at how much beer snobs have in common with coffee snobs.

He had made a 5 gallon urn of coffee for the deal and it was gone by the Q&A time. Of course, these are homebrewers who don't think 30 gallons of beer is a lot to have in the house. I think we probably, on the whole, pass the 2.2 cup average before most people have thought how glad they are not to be in the Army.

There I go again, ripping on Army recruiting ads from the early 1980s.

Not to mention the 'coffee generation.' That was the 'got milk' campaign that wasn't.

Anyway, my brother is a coffee fanatic. He's the awake version of my beer fascination, and besides that has some balance to his life. He roasts his own beans, and as soon as gourmet restaurants went espresso he had to have French Press, when they went with the presses he went to some wonky carafe. I suppose he has his next coffee-brewing device scouted out for when $50/plate restaurants catch on to the funky carafe. When it does.

The divorce has me questioning all kinds of stuff I hadn't before. But even before I was cast into this niche, I wondered who supports some of these stores.

Yes, it would be nice to decorate the house without thinking like a rodent. Or a bear with found furniture.

Still, I confess a weakness for this Southwestern stuff. But between that and the ice cream and the Monkey...and all the other stuff I did with apparently deadly drive-Em-nuts accuracy, I guess I wore her out.

The DVD Return

I'm now down three DVDs to the local library. Mo puts them in the air return and other vents of our furnace/ac. I've done my best to scare her out of it, and since the seperation have made big efforts at controlling access to the materials and wrapped the vents in screen.

So imagine my thrill to find a couple more missing.

Where did the disc go? No response. What did you do with the disc? No response. I need the disc. Bring the disc to Daddy.

After several repititions, this got a disc back. She went to the furnace vent nearest us, reached in and produced a disc. While she was in time-out I felt around other suspects to find the other (she'd actually removed the plate, so a screen wouldn't have prevented this).

No go. So when she was free again, I asked her for the other disk and she went to the bathroom, where she climed a vanity and reached until I was worried she'd cut herself on sheet metal.

When I got up there myself, I foundout the power lines for the medicine chest light rack run through a hole big enough for...a DVD.

It's an air return she bent double in spite of the screen, and if you can see it, it isn't air. Right?

It's hard because I know these compulsions are totally real to her. I'm trying to talk electricty out of going to ground and I don't have a say-so about it.

But is it Art?

Another thing at the Adequate Mall (they call it the Great Mall, but since Jeepers closed,it's really not that great), this funky art store. How they can make it when Jeepers can't is beyond me, but they do have this cool car.

Jeepers, RIP

Yes, once again we passed by the grave of good times. Mo asked for the 'roller coaster dragon' and cried when I told her (again) that it was gone.

America at its Americannest...

I still haven't worn the new off my digital camera. It's not fancy: the coworker who tried to help me buy well could hardly hide his disgust. I avoided the impulse-buy version they hang by the memory cards, not by a lot. It's not junk! It has megapixels, plural, whatever that means.

But now I don't have to worry about using more than my half of 'our' camera. Amazing the things that crop up when you're of a mind to look for resentments, but in my head a digital camera means click first and ask questions later. Digital media is ridiculously cheap, and the photographers with actual skill I know get the great shots by being liberal with the button.

So now Em tells me I'm a shutterbug. She told me this as I took a picture of this stretch Hummer sitting outside a church in wait of a wedding party. If only she knew how hard I had to restrain myself to just taking a picture of the car and not trying to rescue the groom.

I'm Gonna Shoot That Guy...Let's Have Some Pie!

Social situations are a dilemna. They stress Mo out even while she seems to have fun. The risk of damage by her tends to stress out adults who might be held responsible for irreparable damage to a grandfather clock ro a purple grape juice stain in an heirloom quilt.

But the alternative is to be a shut-in. Fuck that noise.

So I took the girls to a get-together for a B'Hai holiday. Something about how they have a different weird calendar than the Gregorian one. A pie party, according to the invite.

I was in transit to this affair when I happened to think a pie party might mean one where everyone is expected to bring a pie. Fortunately, that wasn't the expectation. Melissa had made a ton of them. Grasshopper, chocolate-orange, Key lime cheesecake, etc. It was enough pie to put a platoon of Klingon Space Marines into diabetic comas.

Mo did really well with it, all things considered. And Em had a blast with her defacto cousin and the herd of vague relations and friends her age.

My host asked me how I was doing. He knows about the divorce but not in detail. His wife is also a friend of the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster, so it's a little tricky. Fortunately (or not), he and his wife have each been through the divorce mill a couple of times.

If there's anything we can do...

That phrase: I've said it, but if anything there's generally relief when no ideas are forthcoming. I've heard it and it always reminds me of the times when I said it. So I told the truth, 'A few grand wouldn't hurt.' But then there's that 'can' word: he asked about things they 'can' do, not about things they'd do if they had god-like powers.

I Would Have Bought a Jock...

If I'd known they came with fingers.

Why Indeed

Who does this thing with the shoes? What does it mean? And are they thrown up by people who are disposing of their own shoes, or is the idea to mug someone else and steal their shoes, using the power line as a sort of permanent 'keep-away' game?

My kids don't know either, so there goes the logical first sleuth.

But why does anyone do anything?

My brother is a pretty hardcore Xtian, though one who is willing to admit doubts, questions and even anger related to God. He believes enough to trust this God character, which is either more or less faith than I can muster.

I hear people excuse addictions and odd behaviors as 'whatever it takes to get through it.' Through what, exactly?

My bro's faith is cornered in part on the 'why believe anything at all?' thing. For the uninitiated, this is the idea that you believe in God because the alternative is too horrible. Or that a population believing the alternative would be too horrible.

Horrible for what? Why DO anything at all?

I can cite all kinds of intelligent reasons I do my job, support my family even when it's not quite a family as I understood it, but it's all bullshit. If I quit doing that, there are things that would follow as consequences, but what would it mean?

Nothing, same as everything else...

Cat Fish

I judged beer this weekend.

Not the way you probably think: people hear you're a beer judge and they say things like 'I judge beers, and I know what score I'm going to give them...'

But really, I'm the suds edition of a wine snob. Actually, the competition was held at a winery, and a very good one. Finding good wineries in Kansas is no small beer, but Les and Michelle work with hybrids that do well in the area on their 30 acres. Try the St. Vincent, a nice dry red. I think it won a double-gold at the Pacific Rim competition a few years ago, and that's going up against California, Australia and New Zealand. Not an arena-league event.

Oh, but the catfish thing. I took the girls Friday night due to a family emergency. Zeus, my father-in-law and my daughters' super-grandpa went into the hospital for complications with his kidney ameloids and pneumonia. Not a good scene, but if anyone can lick it, he's the one.

So Sunday I oversleep. I had an alarm set but no kids throwing wedding crystal off the deck to wake me up. The dog barked at nothing and woke me up three hours late.

I took the girls to Nebraska Furniture Mart, which doesn't involve going to Nebraska anymore. Then we hit Cabela's, where I tried out the cheapie digital camera I bought from Warren Buffet. (The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster took 'the camera' with her when she moved out.) If you've never been to Nebraska Furniture Mart, you don't know the full meaning of a Stuff-Mart. I didn't see any air compwessahs, but damn. Cabela's is roughly the sporting goods equivalent.

The taxidermy displays are a bit creepy. But the fish, that's amazing stuff. They have these huge aquariums, I got this shot with Em in the frame for a sense of scale. This is a Leviathan of a catfish might eat your fishing boat. Makes those noodlers seem pretty brave.


So while we were there, I fed the girls at the restaurant. This isn't something I was amped to do, I'm struggling to figure out how to make ends meet. And I'd just bought a digital camera, which cost more than the $0.00 I had in mind. It's a bit more than a film point-and-click camera, but you don't have to pay a photo-mat to develop every 12 or 24 misguided shots.

But then Mo said the word 'vacation.' She had translated our twenty minutes of six-lane and two places she had either never seen or hadn't seen with me or in recent years, and translated it to a road-trip. So alright, why not a vacation?

We had a restaurant meal with foods they've never tried.
Not the pickle, she loves those. But figuring she liked ham, I got her wild boar. I had a bit of elk myself, and she at some of both.

'Obviously you don't have a problem with eating wild things,' Em observed as me and Mo powered down our game-meat.

Nope, no problems here.

I asked Em, what was better: run free and wild, then die, or live in a pen and die. She said the pen was better, because a wild animal has a bunch of predators, but a cow has just one, the farmer.

There's probably political significance to this, especially since Em used to tell me I couldn't eat cows because 'they live in the field' (this, after explaining that lobsters were off limits because 'they're buddies' and 'they live in the water'). I figured her to be annoyingly vegetarian right around when I bought a Steak & Ale franchise or something.

Anyway, we did the Adequate Mall after Cabela's so Em could introduce me to the Piercing Pagaoda employee who stabbed her lobes. And it must have been a vaction because she put her mean-face on for the camera, showing way too much angst for a ten-year-old.


After all that, when we were back at the house, Mo was pointing out items and naming them. Which is great, she needs the reinforcement and it's a non-harmful obsession.

In the process of labeling stuff, Mo touched the box of gross moist cat food I buy because the world's oldest cat doesn't do hard food anymore. It's supposed to be fishy, but smells like anchovy paste vomit.

Mo dubbed the box 'cat-fish.' That's logical, right?

The Dick Cheney Code

That's the title of a spoof I've never read, a play on Dan Brown's little fad.

But now, it turns out, the VP is into attempted murder. Or Tom Lehrer's trophy case (two game wardens, seven hunters and a cow).

Good thing he didn't have this thing. It's so grotesque I blogged it just for the hell of it, not knowing it would become relevant to current events in a few days.

Help! Help! I'm Bein' Repressed!

Just so you know I'm not one of those hypocritical anarchists who only hates laws that infringe my personal good time. The drug laws are bad enough, but this is really wild:

It is illegal to give or receive a tattoo in the state of Oklahoma. Oklahomans aren't ink-free, of course. They simply throw their shotgun in the pickup, grab a couple of jars of 'shine for the road and go to Texas or Kansas.

Or, I don't know, I suppose there are guys with the needles in their basement, ready to spread hepatitis to the young, the trendy, or the occasional redneck lacking the ambition to drive to the border.

So I'm outraged, even though I don't have any plans to get tattoo, and come to think of it, don't live in Oklahoma.

Now we see the violence inherent in the system.

Seeking the Gutter

Jeepers turned out to be a non-starter, so I was casting about for an alternative birhtday activity for Mo. A party like we had for Em wouldn't be a treat, it would be torture for her. Such gatherings inspire her to hide out, act out and even flee the house. For that matter, Jeepers would be improved greatly if they took out most of the arcade games and all the other people. I mean, without soaping the windows and posting a 'closed' sign.

Chuck-E-Cheese was suggested, but they don't have rides, the most important thing at Jeepers. 'Curious George' is showing, but Mo's already going to see that on a field trip Monday. I never got to go to a movie theater on a field tirp, but these modern times...

Cosmic Mini-Golf was something I considered. It's an indoor putt-putt lit mainly with black lights and using flourescent balls and with flourescent borders on the edges of the greens. Well, they're not greens, they're blacks, it's really pretty spooky. Mo likes to walk around the place but I wasn't sure how she'd do with something as organized as golfing, and they were surprisingly busy when we went by there. Go figure, it's usually a ghost-town so they get busy the one time I consider popping for a game.

Mo has bowled with Special Olympics in the past. I thought that'd be a fun trip, and even scouted out the lanes SO uses so there'd be continuity.

She did pretty well with the first game. She seemed to be enjoying herself, though I had to get on her for the overhanded throw. I know it's an eight-pounder, not a full-weight ball, but I still figure it'll bang a dent in the wood when thrown from four feet in the air. I got to see the gutter-ball dance, which I'd only heard about before. Mo loves a gutter ball.

I think I know why. A gutter ball is incredibly orderly. It goes in a perfectly straight course and leaves all ten pins standing. She dances for gutter balls like I dance for a spare. I don't have a strike dance because I don't think I've ever gotten a strike.

Okay, I don't think I've ever posted a three-digit score at bowling. I should use bumpers.

I turned bumpers on for the second game, because Em was getting frustrated and I thought maybe Mo would grove on the novelty of knocking some pins down. Em had actually gotten a spare in the first game, and on a pretty ugly split, the 1 & 10 I believe. The ball looked like it'd go right between them, then it veered into the 1-pin with more noise than it's visual speed seemed to predict. Good on her.

Em loved having bumpers, though. She doesn't find any elegance in a gutter ball, and some of her pitches would go in a graceful arc down the wood, threatening to smash straight into that first pin only to had into the gutter about a foot from the balls.

Mo got a strike. Em got a spare where she knocked down all ten on her second ball, which seems like a strike to me.

But bumpers pissed Mo off. She actually threw a ball on top of the bumper, and she attempted something that, like the gutter-ball dance, I'd only heard of before. She threw the ball onto the neighboring lane, where some fairly serious bowlers were playing. The guy who was about to go when Mo's pink eight-pounder came into his field of view was a good sport about it.

So Mo was getting whinier with each frame, and I decided to get some refreshments for the honyocks while I tried to figure out how to take the bumpers back down on her name mid-game. I took them to the concession stand, where Em asked for a cookie. Mo wanted a cookie too, or so I gathered, but she got fussier and fussier and said 'machine.'

I thought she meant the vending machine, which was down a ways from the concession stand. I thought maybe there had been a routine related to Special Olympics, so we went to the vending machine. I asked her what she wanted, and she said, 'Chocolate!' So I fed a buck in and asked what kind. She hit the coin-return, grabbed the emerging bill and headed for the miniature arcade. She looked, seemingly at random, for a game that took dollars, and after she settled on one, and it had taken her dollar she walked away from it. Em tried her luck at it, but Mo was still unhappy.

I led the girls back to our lane, trying to get Mo to focus on the game again, but the next time Em was up, Mo bolted for the arcade area, cutting through several people's tables and I had to run around a bunch of kids who were trying to change their shoes on the fucking floor in front of the shoe counter (isn't there an etiquette about that???), and when I caught up to her she was in full core meltdown, so we packed up and left.

Oh, and I'm not much of a bowler, but when did they invent this slicker-than-grease shit for the lanes? On my second or third frame, I thought I was a little forward with my plant-foot. Turns out, I thought right, as I bruised my knee and elbow and pulled at least two muscles in a Jerry Lewis follow-through. Didn't hit a single pin, either. They have a warning sign, I noticed later, about that foul-line meaning business. I guess they're trying to use all the silicone they don't put in women's chests these days into Lane 20 at Mission Bowl.

It was embarrassing, though not as embarrassing as explaining to the library that you've lost another DVD to the cold-air return...

Jeepers?

I used to take the kiddos to this place. It was like Chuck-E-Cheese without the annoying rodent and it had rides. All indoors, but they ad bumper cars, a roller coaster, a centrifuge dubbed the 'Yak Attack.' This is all good fun, wears kids out, and it's not too annoying that hungry arcade games are all over the joint.

I used to take the kids there when I was alone with them on the weekend. Mo's first seizure followed such an excursion, when she'd ridden the Yak Attack for about 45 minutes straight. The vestibular stimulation was healthy according to the autism literature, but according to her new neurologist, the rides caused seizures and were a no-no.

Except they're not. After four or five years of not taking Mo to Jeepers, of thinking I'd never even get to take her to Words of Fun, I find out that there's no conclusive link. Stress, tiredness, these things can lower your seizure threshhold, and excessive amusement park time provides that. So does getting married, having babies, chaning jobs, etc.

To tell her ahead of time or not? Well, if she knows we're going to Jeepers and she feels like the birthday celebrations at Grandma's house aren't going fast enough, she might act out to get the first part over with. So it was later that I told her we were heading to Jeepers. At this point, we had a couple of stops to make but nothing huge or time consuming.

But I told her. Then took her to th Great Mall, parked the car and led my daughters to the closed sign.

I was going to do this last month, to coincide with Em's birthday, but I could not afford to do it twice in short order and we already had a pretty elaborate party planned for Em. So I put it off for Mo's birthday, and now the closest Jeepers is in the Chicago area.

So now I'm back to square one. Let me know if you know anything that would really replace a long lost indoor roller coaster to a nine year old girl.

Pull!

Okay, this video is pretty hefty, so if you're on dial-up, don't even click the link. It's over six MB, but that's what it costs if you wanna be fucked up for life, right?

Very obscure movie reference, but at least one of my two readers will get it.

For the record, I am not a gun nut. I have tendencies, but I own no firearms and sometimes go years without firing a gun. I like to target shoot and blast skeet, but it's a rare treat to do so.

And I haven't looked, but this shotgun probably costs as much as an entry-level German luxury car, though if that's the case and I had an even-up choice I might still be tooling around in an '88 Buick. And spending a lot more time at Powder Creek.

Though part of me says that shooting skeet without making your shoulder into a blue-green contusion is somehow cheating. I'm not sure if it's worse because the thing will crank the rounds off so fast it sounds almost like a full-auto. I suppose in the unlikely scenario that you have to hold off a platoon of Delta-Force commandos, being able to squeeze of twelve rounds of buck shot in under two seconds would at least allow you to die knowing you'd at least harrassed the opposition.

Aside from the macho considerations, the guy shot what, 50,000 rounds in five months? Obsessive-compulsive much?

I realize this is the same personality disorder that accounts for NFL players, NASCAR drivers, and winter Olympians. And he probably gets free ammo from someone for a similar endorsement.

Too Stoned for Sturgis

That's the title of a Tim Wilson song that offers some curious examples of seemingly impossible extremes:

Too old for Lawrence Welk,
And not young enough for Mickey Mouse,
Too steppin' to Steppenwolf,
And too greasy for the Waffle House...

Also such oxymorons as too ugly for the Rolling Stones (rhymes with too stupid for Jenny Jones), too important for the New York Times (rhymes with too immature for LeAnn Rhymes).

Anyone who watched the Super Bowl half-time show can attest that too ugly for the Rolling Stones is bad. Brings to mind another commedian I remember, a guy who had one memorable line that 'you know you've got problems when you gag a plumber.


When you're too fried for bikers (the song goes) you're pushing the fried envelope. I love hyperbole like that. It's what makes Don DeLillo work when he does. My friend Jay couldn't stick out 'Cosmopolis,' and I think I understand why; I've struggled with some of DD's books, that one managed to connect with me.

Anyway, Yorkist Rose posted a response that I'm obliquely, and probably badly addressing. I'm too tired at the moment to edit it more fully, and I've probably already lost almost anyone who stumbled on my little blog by now, since me typing is even worse than Tim Wilson singing.

I've been married to the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster for 13 years. This leads me dangerously close to those goofy numerologists with the 13 hang-up, because the 13th of the month is also both my daughters' birthdays; they're 13 months apart, etc. If I was a triskaidekaphobic, I could take it further. 'Our song' was actually a divided title. I was rather lopsided to the jazz side (still am), and always thought of our song as 'My Foolish Heart.' This is true because one of the times early in our dating when we were more or less on a break, I played that tune on crappy synthesizer and broke through whatever we'd fought about. But for a 13 tie-in, it doesn't work unless you consider the chromatic scale or circle of fifths.

As I say, we had two 'our songs.' This is probably not a good idea: If you're getting serious with someone and can't settle on a romantic song, get out while the gettin's good. Seriously. Our other song? 'For The Longest Time.'

Okay, you can all say 'awwwh,' but that was the other song we focused on. The then frauline who aspired to lobster status put that tune on a mix tape for me. Remember mix tapes? When there was no such thing as a CD burner outside a factory somewhere, this was how you ripped tunes. There's a catch, though, because you can't tape a song off a record faster than the record turns. A mix-tape recorded at 4X would sound like a chipmunk festival. Back then, taping an album or a mix for someone meant you'd spent at least 90 minutes cussing because the needle-drop came through on the goddamn tape, or puking off the balcony of your apartment because you drank a whole pint of gin making a tape of tunes you'd added up the times for and the whole project was ruined when the last four bars of the climactic tune was cut off by the end of the tape.

No blue bar to tell you there was 90 minutes and 35 seconds of music you were trying to cram onto a 90 minute cassette.

Oh, but the Billy Joel connection isn't obvious, is it? Nope, but I saw an interview with him a few months ago. He was rehearsing for his 'Tired Old Has-Been' tour. Like he couldn't play those songs in his sleep by now. The interviewer had to pretend stupidity, kind of like the U.N. Security Council (the IAEA is going to report Iran to the Security Council, because the Security Council doesn't have CNN, and so has no idea that Iran is a spooky theocracy with nuclear ambitions). The interivewer asked Billy Joel what song he was most sick of, out of all the tired moldy-oldies he would be trotting out in this dog-and-pony show. Joel played the first few bars of 'Just the Way You Are,' and the interviewer (playing dumber than even U.N. ambassadors), had to ask why.

I paraphrase, since this is a fairly vivid memory but I didn't write it down or anything. 'I married a woman who said she loved me and it was forever and it lasted thirteen years.'

There's that damned 13 again.

Oh, but I mentioned Yorkist Rose in a vain attempt to keep even one reader this far, so I better at least pander to her.

You might have guessed, I know Yorkist Rose's 'true' identity. Her actual name is Yor Kisross, a Finnish defector living under a barely-assumed name in Eau Claire. She is a computer hacker by day, and a dairy industry saboteur by night.

Anyway, I won’t hold her illegal status with INS against her, or the fact that she is on good terms with my wife. Almost all my friends are also my wife’s friends, which is why I’ve (as noted in a previous post) worn out my welcome with the few friends I can speak freely with.

But Yor raises a good point. A lot of these mutual friends helped my wife move out. I don’t hold it against them; they were helping a friend who asked for a favor. I’m not happy about it, and when it’s boiled down, I don’t even respect the decision. But it wasn’t them egging her on, at least I'd hope not.

For that matter, even my wife is welcome here. If I wanted to hide something from her, I’d put it somewhere else than the World Wide Web.

Annals of Recapitulation

I guess I still have a soft spot for Woody Allen's 'Side Effects,' where he cites one of the works of his absent-minded professor character as 'Styles of Modes.'

I've been reading (yes, still) Prague by Arthur Phillips. I don't know if I'd relate to it as much if I didn't have some friends run off to Prague in the 90s. Oh, but the book's set in Budapest. Which skirts the fine line between clever and stupid, but I think he gets away with it.

One of the themes of the book is the history of nostalgia, or the idea of people being nostalgic for that which they've never experienced. That probably registers a little easier on me these days, too, because when things are going poorly, it's natural to think of better days. I remember a few weeks ago...

But of course a few weeks ago I wasn't really happy. Or rather, it doesn't seem possible that I was doing anything but conning myself. Especially after exhausting the friends I can talk to about the divorce: I'm not about to try and recruit mutual friends of ours into an Army of Scorn. I don't think she'd do that to me, and more significantly, I won't do that to my friends. After thirteen years of marriage, the list of friends of mine who aren't friends of my wife is...okay, it's ridiculous to call three people a 'list.'

Oh, I guess the list would include the hired friend, I believe he'd be considered a mental health professional. Except he's not crazy that I can tell, so he can't be a psychologist, right? He's seriously helped me a lot, probably about as much as a professional can.

But as I say, the tendency in mulling things over at this point is to remember the scars, wounds, frustrations and slights. Not to defend that, because when you start talking yourself out of nostalgia for this time and that time and the other time, you end up...well, I won't speak for anyone else. I end up thinking that the only time in my life I was really happy, with no regrets, was half an hour my junior year of high school.

Which is ridiculous if you know me, because I'm a pathological optimist. When I had the heart attack, I'm convinced the doctors kept me an extra day to impose the grim truth of things on this peculiarly up-beat and absurdly young patient. A while before that, when I had risen by Peter-principle from a job I was good at to a job I still don't comprehend, and was called to a meeting with the President and head of HR (which could only mean termination, that formation never signaled anything else), all I could think of was what I could do with the severance money and what a relief it would be to wake up unemployed instead of incompetent.

Still, a glass that's half full can just remind you how incredibly thirsty you are. And I don't suppose I'd register as human if I was without contradictions...

Your Real Job

Pat Walsh tells the story of meeting someone at a party who worked for a circus. He was excited at the thought and asked what that was like. ‘A lot of paperwork.’

A friend from high school has one of those cool jobs, though. Some jobs suck to even a casual observer. I think that at a certain, young, age, whatever your Dad does for a living seems way cooler than it could possibly be. Insurance actuaries and astronauts are probably on about the same footing until their kids get to Kindergarten. Even a diesel mechanic can probably milk the ‘cool job’ image to when his kids hit puberty.

I doubt that even test pilots seem exciting to their teenage offspring.

And maybe it’s just me, but it seems like even my ‘real job’ doesn’t stack up that great against where some of my friends from high school ended up. ‘Commercial artist’ sounds pretty cool, but not as cool as anesthesiologist. Maybe ‘anesthesiologist’ sounds cooler than it is.

But I backed into my career. I was working in gas stations mostly, with stints as an ‘operator standing by’ for an 800-number clearing house whose clients included Fat Magnet and Tummy-Sizer, a professional phone pest paid to torment people with radio-program surveys, jobs which had only one common denominator: they were not as bad as washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant. Meanwhile, friends of mine were majoring in something besides avoiding a job you’d have to keep secret even from a three-year-old son. And they went on to get cool jobs, with titles like ‘photo editor.’

For what it’s worth, the Mexican restaurant in question is one I still patronize, which is notable in that after seeing what went on behind the wall in other food-service jobs, I never recovered my appetite. I’m sure other places I eat re-fry hushpuppies dropped in murky puddles on the floor or serve fish the manager bled all over trying to filet frozen cod after not thawing enough to get through the dinner rush, but ignorance is palatability. Still, while the Tex-Mex establishment was clean and professional, the dishwasher gig will never, I hope, be trumped for the worst job I ever had.

So my friend the photo editor was in journalism school when I was violating the no-smoking policy in a kiosk, doing my best to alienate customers so they’d quit bothering me. Instead of getting a degree, I gradually quit bothering with classes, instead hatching a variety of embarrassingly naïve plans for conquering the world of commerce. One of these was to launch a magazine, which I fancied would be a hybrid of libertarian/conservative journals like National Review and American Spectator, cross-pollinated with Playboy’s sexiness, and erudite fiction in the mode of a premier literary magazine. I’m not sure which was more absurd, that I thought I could edit and publish such a magazine, or that I thought anyone would buy it. I hadn’t yet looked up to notice that no one else in America was reading anything.

While I failed to become a long-haired William Buckley in smoking jacket surrounded by twenty-something girls who pretend not to mind pipe smoke, I did manage the commercial artist thing. It’s not a glamour gig, it’s a steady paycheck and decent benefits.

Still, to call me an artist, that’s weak. Which is almost as much of a stretch if you’ve ever seen me try to draw, or even write legibly. Luckily, you don’t need to have any artistic skill, aptitude or even a creative spark to be a commercial artist. You only need a computer, a cubicle, and a willingness to do unbelievably dull things with corporate logos.

Oh, wait, this post is about my friend. I mentioned that, didn’t I? She’s a photo editor for a ‘major metropolitan daily newspaper.’ If you’ve never visited one of these, you probably have images of chain-smoking cub reporters bringing down a President with honesty and hubris. I won’t disabuse you of that, the glorious image is one of the few things to offset salaries and benefits that make the circus look like a golden parachute.

And it does sound cool, when you call someone out of the blue on a Saturday afternoon and they have to go, right now because they’re due in a ‘page-one meeting.’ Which means my friend is either relatively important, or page-one is composed by people who couldn’t convince their boss that their kids’ soccer games would be missed if they didn’t get out of the office by noon on Saturday.

I tried to call my friend the photo editor the other night. George Bush was blowing hot air on Congress, which I wasn’t watching, but her boss sent her to be an ‘on-site’ photo editor. This struck me as an odd assignment. I guess I assumed a photo editor did things like shrink the jowls on the Vice President or take the crow’s feet down a decade on the Senator from New York. These are easy enough to do with Photoshop, but they’re also things you can do anywhere. You certainly wouldn’t need to be at the Capitol for the State of the Union address.

And you picture a photo editor, too, being a veteran photographer, spending hours with loupe in hand, going over contact sheets for ‘the photo.’ So imagine my disillusionment when she explained to me that she ‘shuttles disks from one end of the building to the other and make sure the names in the captions are right.’ Apparently, ‘photo editor’ was a title they came up with in lieu of salary when the last photo editor quit because he was sick of being called a copyboy.

Divorce School?

Yes, it turns out there is such a thing. Complete with homework. It's a class though the county, modeled on Kids' Turn a program developed in San Francisco. I don't know why they changed the name to Kids' Voice if they bought the SF outfits curriculum, complete with a video that refers to it as Kids' Turn, but as the Emperor Joseph II, the George W. of the Hapsburgs might say, 'there it is.'

DISCLAIMER: I realize 'Amadeus' is a fictional deconstruction of Mozart's life. I have no idea if Joseph II was anywhere near as stupid as Bush II, though I guess it's possible. It seems Joseph II would probably have at least been a moron who spoke several languages, and W. seems unable to articulate even a sandwich order in his supposed native tongue.

I want to get my kids through this mess without scars, or without worse scars than they are already doomed to from the marriage. This is an easy thing to say, not such an easy thing to do.

The classes are focused on the kids, getting them to talk and getting them around other kids going through the same thing. Which is fine as far as it goes, but Mo doesn't really communicate all that verbally. It's not that she can't talk, it's more that you're not going to have anything typically described as conversation with her, not at this point. She's almost nine, plus huge for her age, so people tend to assume that verbal instructions and questions will get processed on a twelve-year-old level. Very often, I suspect she comprehends well beyond her years but that doesn't necessarily yield the result you're after. And asking her to talk about her problems, forget it. If you listen to what she does say, you learn a bit about what's on her mind, but you're not going to have a linear Q&A.

One of the things that struck me as remarkable about the adults in my parental pod is how long some have been going through the process of divorce. Some were recently separated, but the separation was long planned; others had been in the process of divorce for years. Years! I don't mean years of the process of picking up the pieces, years of slogging through negotiations, hearings, etc.

Mo was ready to bolt during the introductory video, and my Dad took her for the rest of the class, which might be the best thing for both of them. He was the one who bird-dogged this class, even paid the fees and offered to meet us there each week to help with Mo. This is a huge step forward for him as a grandfather, because the past few years he's been scared to deal with her one-on-one. Typical kids scare him bad enough, throwing autism and epilepsy into the mix brings it to the point where he doesn't even deny that he's freaked out. And in fairness, it's not as if there's no reason to be nervous: she has a terrible aptitude for endangering herself; she's a flight risk and hits zero to sixty in zero-point-zero seconds; she can destroy anything; she's stronger than you (no matter who 'you' is). And a lot of those attributes will serve her well as long as it can be channeled, but it still makes it a daunting baby-sitting assignment, one I probably wouldn't take with a stranger's kid.

Em was pleased with the deal because they bribed her with Doritos and a Capri Sun liquid sugar bag. Mo and her Grandpa found the speech pathology room in the host school, which had tons of goodies Mo was glad to play with, including a cool Gonzo plush toy.

No Coach's Coffee For Me...

The term 'coach's coffee,' as I understand it, is not crudely roasted or otherwise plain coffee in the traditional sense. In the good old days of professional sports free of anti-doping regulations, amphetamines were even more available than steroids. Candy jars of greenies and coffee laced with Dexedrine were standard, famously in baseball. It figures, baseball is boring, and requires an unhealthy capacity for concentrating on mindless stuff. A center fielder who can hit is great, but he plays even better when you get him grinding his teeth and sweating from the crank in his java.

'Coach's coffee' is like a virgin Bloody Mary to a veteran of clubhouse speed, which is to say a recovering addict.

But none of that for me. Today I was so dead on my feet I actually drank coffee, something I never do. I've always preferred my caffeine cold, but I needed a bolus dose today. If they'd offered coffee with amphetamines, I'd have bought that.

Mo was tired last night, went to bed early, then decided to get up at midnight. For the day.

Is it early in the morning or still last night? I guess a lush figures it's five o'clock somewhere, and Mo figures it's morning somewhere. I did get her to go back to sleep some, but she wanted to snuggle in my bed and that meant her periodic flopping, kicking and vocalizations woke me up at least once an hour for the three or four hours I was more or less in bed.

I wish I had that kind of energy to attack the day with. I doubt there's enough speed in a large trailer park to do that.

Cruel and Unusual Crushes

The Crush Calculator

This is a mean kid with a magnifying glass if ever there was. But I'm a little cranky. Still, incase you're touchy about privacy, use made-up names for everyone including yourself. Really.

Negotiating With Idiots

Come off your high horse if you think refusing to negotiate with 'terrorists' is a realistic plan. I'm totally not defending suicide bombers, but no terrorist group has ever mounted a serious threat without popular support, and popular support indicates legitiate (if sometimes incorrectly understood) grievances.

If you let Hamas candidates run in an election, you have to know they might win, right? Look at Northern Ireland, and ask yourself if it's better to have exploding trains or elections that don't turn out like you planned.

Also ask yourself, if you had to choose, do you want to board a commuter train that blows up or have your house sprayed by a helicopter gunship? If you're anything like me, you don't think that's much of a choice, yet one is supposedly terrorism and the other is a 'security measure.'

Personally, I wouldn't say that any nation state has the 'right' to exist. Nation states have governments, and governments are not a good idea, whether you put Hamas or the GOP, the ANC, the Communist Party or the fucking Taliban in charge.

Can You Use That In A Sentence?

Yes, that was an option, asking the chick to use the word in a sentence. Kids did that when there was probably no homonym even in an unabridged OED. Which is fine, gives them a chance to collect themselves, but they have to remember to ask.

Are spelling bees ridiculous? On many levels I'd say yes. Em mentioned in her distress about finishing third, that she didn't want to be in it, but honestly that was sour grapes. She wanted to win it all, and nothing else was acceptable to her. Part of growing up is she'll have to learn that even when you're awfully good at something, others will have better luck or success that may or may not be 'earned.' And remember Nancy Kerrigan? She had the world at her feet to endorse and then had a fit over only winning a Silver in '94? You have to learn to get beaten with a bit of class.

On the other hand, if Em thinks only first place is acceptable, I don't have to worry about her underachieving. Since many people never give their best to anything, that's half the battle, the other half is teaching a kid that sometimes your best isn't good enough, but you can't let that make you miserable.

The Unbearable Spelling of Bees

I went to my daughter’s school today for the spelling bee. Can you use that last word in a sentence, please? This was asked by kids on words that have no homonyms I know of. And then, my spell-check addiction was called up by a surprising number of words I mentally spelled along with a kid, thought they’d nailed only to hear, ‘I’m sorry, that’s incorrect.’

It is? Control+Z, biatch.

Last year, Em got knocked out in the first round because she stammered, the stage fright. I was prepared this year, knowing that she can spell pretty much anything, including words she doesn’t know the meaning of. She learned where her gastrocnemius was clear back in Kindergarten, still knows it and even knows it as a ‘c’ in it that has no business being there. Even with Latinate words, that’s too much.

But she got to the 9th round this year. Surprising stage poise for a kiddo who freaks out at an audience of two, and the person giving the words was hard to understand. A boy in the opening round was given ‘ear’ and between the distortion on the PA and the fact that he couldn’t believed they’d give him a word so obvious, he spelled ‘E-A-G-E-R’ and was told, ‘I’m sorry, that’s incorrect.’ I don’t believe for a minute that anyone thought he heard ‘ear’ and added a ‘g’ and ‘e,’ but the rules are rules.

The ninth round had four kids left, and the kid before Em blew a word I thought he’d nail. I was surprised, it was a word that would have tripped up the kids to fell yearly. None of them were terrible spellers, they started this affair with the three top contestants in classroom contests.

Em was given ‘photography,’ and she nailed it. Except she started to say the letter ‘f.’ She caught herself, but you could tell what she started to say and the rules are explicit about redoing letters. Even though she said ‘Photography eff... P-H-O-T-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y,’ she was told, ‘I’m sorry, that’s incorrect.’ They were then down to the twosome, the head-to-head to see who gets to perpetuate this misery at a county level next month.

Betweem rounds, disqualified kiddos left the stage and reemerged in the gym, but Em didn’t do the latter. I got worried and it turned out I was right. She was bawling in the hallway abut her miserable failure after placing third in her school. You’d think me and the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster pressured her, which did not happen.

Well, according to Em it kind of did. Last year we drilled her a lot before the bee. It was in part because we knew she stammered when she was nervous, and we thought practice would help. More significantly, it’s just cool to find out your kid can spell words the don’t comprehend. We were at lunch with friends and Em spelled some word about ten times harder than ‘photography’ and Frau Lobster said ‘see, idiots can give birth to geniuses.’ Em was quick to defend me (though I didn’t ‘give birth’ to her), ‘Not, it’s not Daddy’s fault!’

Ahem, teach me to gloat about her brains.

Anyway, kids emerged from the gym and Em was still crying, even as I assured her it was awesome that she was even on the stage, let along that she almost took it all. She is aware that nothing I say can be trusted, and she reacted accordingly. But her classmates were congratulating her and she was still inconsolable. Later, in the truck after I signed her out of Hell, she said none of the kids had any sympathy for her.

Sympathy? That’s because they see you on the bronze-medal dais, and they don’t see where there’s any call for sympathy. Except for the two kids who made it past round nine, you beat them all, where’s the sympathy to come from? Did you show sympathy to the kids you whipped?

But I’m speaking logic to an emotional pre-teen kiddo. It didn’t seem to comfort her that one of the spelling bees I can remember from my childhood ended when I fucked up the word ‘rhythm.’ That’s a word that needs to buy a vowel...

Blasphe...ME!

Okay, if your'e an Xtian, you might want to skip this. Or not, if you're an Xtian with a sense of humor. What would Jesus download?

If you're tolerant and have high speed, click here.

If your'e intolerant and/or have a dial-up connection, just think about Fred Phelps. I may be an asshole, but no one's about to advocate a new state law to balance me out.

And I have no idea where this came from except it came from a friend in Caulifournya, so who knows what intellectual property rights I'm wiping my ass on.

I'm Back?

One or two of you might be aware that I have literary ambitions. That's if the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster still reads this at all.

And what are literary ambitions? Guaranteed to be frustrated, unprofitable, bad for home life and work, pretentious, arrogant, selfish and unrealistic. You'd have to be a hermit to pretend anyone reads books these days, and if they do it's not like they'll run out of titles.

Writing a novel is not something your coworkers will understand. If you tell them you're doing it, they'll ask, 'Why?' It's a surprisingly good question, because writing a novel supposes that you've read or are at least are aware of Herman Melville, the Greeks, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and so on. Plus you're probably aware of lesser lights, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Terry Southern, Thom Jones, Lionel Shriver, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Lethem, Mchael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Vonegut, Bradbury, PKD, and so on. And you've probably read a bunch of other stuff, best sellers like Alice Sebold, oddballs like Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, DeLillo. You might even have read Tom Wolfe and John Irving, and wondered why they don't like each other since they write almost exactly the same sort of book.

So the 'why' question turns out to be good, despite the fact it's generally asked by someone who has read little but TV listings and the instructions on a macaroni box since high school. The question is more accurately, 'who the hell do you think you are?' You have something to add to this literary dowry?

Of course if you’re the sort of person who even needs to decide whether to risk the 'why' question with a coworker, you already have an answer: 'Yes, I have something to add.' It's ridiculous, but like sexual preference, it's better not to fight it.

So where's my contribution? Don't look, it's not decent. It's embarrassing, but some parts are brand new and some have suffered a dozen revisions. The total is numbingly long, and I haven't worked on rewrites in earnest for most of the past year. It sucks. If I die today, promise me you'll burn it unread.

I haven't had the courage to face my own ms, but I have done something almost as good. I've done a critique in a writer's workshop I've been in for a couple of years. Critiquing has always helped me more than critiques, because in finding the problems with a stranger's story, I inevitably find problems in my own. Not that feedback isn't helpful, it's just not 'as helpful.'

As an added bonus, I've been fallow in the workshop long enough I don't know most of the writers as authors and fellow critics. The downfall of any workshop is when friendship trumps the awful truth that 'X' doesn't work or 'Phrase Y' is too purple to be believed.

Fake Recreation

A guilty pleasure of mine is playing poker. Three major obstacles thwart this as a form of recreation: I don't have any friends who play who are close enough to me to invite me in; I'm no good at it; and I don't have the money to lose even if I knew people and thought I could play.

Of course there's online games, but that only gets one of those obstacles out of the way. Well, there's play-money games to be found, but when anyone can click for more chips, they gamble idiotically. I may not be any great player, but I know you don't go all-in to see the flop. No pockets are that good. Also, if it's fake money, you're way, way more likely to get beat at the river.

But I occasionally go on a fake money site and play a few hands. It's mildly amusing in small doses, and playing against people is more interesting than playing against a machine. There's personalities, even if the play is distorted by the fact that it doesn't hurt to lose enough money to pay off your house on a single hand. Unless you're awfully attached to worthless cyber-chips.

But my most recent trip to the fake-money tables I saw a player who didn't have a personality, they had a fixed pattern. You could see in very few hands how this character was going to bet, and it wasn't that they were doing badly. Factoring the style of play with Monopoly Dollars and figuring pot-odds, probably a pretty rational way to play. Except too rational.

Come to find out, there's software you can use to play these games. It's a semi-sophisticated macro, I'm told, that bets for you. I'm sure it was developed to help people cheat at poker for real money, but some clown is using it for play-money.

Hello? What's wrong with this picture?

I realize online poker is of marginal value as recreation, but if you have to let your computer bet for you, isn't that kind of like faking an orgasm while masturbating?

Actual Leadership

The founder and CEO of the company I work for, he's an unusual cat. I enjoy Dilbert and Max Barry novels, but really, I don't work in that kind of cubicle farm. It's a cubicle farm, true, and I have shared a cubicle for five years or so with a guy who won't speak to me except on the phone, but still.

What makes it different? Well, the aforementioned guy had every reason on earth to fire me a few years ago when I was a supervisor. I'd risen by Peter Principle to my level of incompetence. I don't even know what an emotional competency is, and I don't even want to know how to fake one. Neither does the CEO, but he knows what they look like and he knew I didn't have any.

So instead of firing me, he offered me to the chance to go back to what I was good at without even making me take a pay cut. I took a pay cut but that was because I was sick of working nights and I couldn’t take the shift differential with me or it wouldn't be a shift differential. If I'd been willing to continue coming home in the pre-dawn hours and nailing the coffin lid shut, I'd have kept the differential too.

How do I explain to people not just that it's an unusual president who offers such a chance to a guy like me, but why I'd take it so gladly?

Today I had a living example of why. We have added on to our building, tripling the space we have to work with. The old building is going to be gutted and remodeled to be up to code for the new size, being that the rules are different at 120,000 square feet. It's been fun watching it go up, they brought in concrete Lego things to make the walls, and it was fun to watch guys ride cement zambonis on the huge new floor. Oh, but the example.

Moving cubicles to the new building, professional movers do the nut and bolt stuff but we move our shit over with hand carts. When it was my turn I loaded up my stuff and was waiting on an IT guy to move my computer when the CEO I'm talking about showed up and pitched in. This guy started the company from a bankrupt farm about 20 years ago and built it into a $20 million a year business. The dude is in blue jeans on his hands and knees feeding me cables for my computer through the desktop of my new cubicle. And it was the most natural thing in the world. I wasn't thinking that the CEO should be in a suit and above doing anything that involves crawling around. This is not a guy I see every day or anything like it, it's just a guy I work for, and you can't not bust your ass when you work for a guy like that.

Sympathy For The Devil Elmo!

I don't have anything to say about this picture, I just liked it. I stumbled on this shot in a stock photo search, but I was looking for something I could actually use. I forget what, it doesn't matter. Unless someone is selling Eagles albums, I don't imagine anyone would ever need this picture. And if they are selling Eagles records, I want to know: why? The Eagles were awful. I won't even say they sucked hard, because except when smoking pot, I don't think they were ambitious enough to suck hard.

But it dislodged something I thought of Christmas morning, while Mo was playing with her new Elmo, prior to incapacitating it with scissors. Now he's a scary plastic skeleton that sings 'Shout.'


No, my daughter doesn't hate Elmo. She worships him. And I signed off on the IEP with the OT goal of getting her to use scissors a few years back and you can't un-ring the bell. You can try to keep scissors away from her, but if you can get to them, she'll get to them. Eventually you find that anything with a lock can be opened. Anything that can be pryed off is not really nailed down.

Yes, we had 'Tickle Me Elmo,' and 'Chicken Dance Elmo' and so on. The batteries wear out, but not before the novelty of the song sung in a lo-fi version of the Muppet voice.

But with the 'Twist & Shout' version, they are bordering on picking up music you might hear without being in a Kindergarten room, on the 'Barney' studio set, or at a wedding reception. I got to wondering what would be next?

'Highway to Hell Elmo?' Or give Elmo a mohawk and program him with a Dead Kennedy's tune: 'Kill The Poor Elmo,' or 'California Über Alles Elmo.' Em told me that no one would ever want to buy an 'I Kill Children Elmo,' but that was before Twist & Shout Elmo's foot had been pressed 465 times a day until he was slurring the words, the low batteries making him sound drunk.

Since the punk thing was pissing Em off, I headed back to the relatively tame waters of hard rock. I don't know any Ludacris or Eminem bits, so I couldn't outrage children of all ages with speculation about Elmo's potential rapping career. Then it hit me, the perfect song for Elmo to do next Christmas:

'Sympathy For The Devil' by the Rolling Stones. The 'hoo-hoos' are even in Elmo's natural register. And while it's technically a 'satanic' bit, the baby boomers who buy these things for their grandchildren probably wouldn't connect those dots. They'd just remember the killer weed they had the night they saw the Stones perform that tune, think it was cute that Sesame Street was tying in with classic rock material.

Yes, I know there are people who will rail against 'Sympathy For The Devil Elmo.' I saw in the paper today where a woman is trying to get an entire shopping mall in Olathe reclassified as an 'adult business' because she was offended by something she saw at Spencer's. But assholes who think that way are a good reason to have things like an overtly satanic Muppet.

Sucking..Hard

If I say something sucks and Em agrees, she'll add the modifier, saying 'It sucks hard.' This is amazingly cute in a ten-year-old.

One of the things that sucks hard is housekeeping that's been neglected. My brother brought his shop-vac over last week and we kicked ass on my house for a few hours. His shop-vac made me realize how pathetic the one in my garage is. In fairness, it was free. It has a tiny motor, small capacity and a busted coaster. I didn't even see any as wimpy as it for sale at Home Depot. But I did see monsters like my brother's, and since it had done such a great job on a variety of tasks, I decided to pop for one. They're not expensive, I found a five horsepower 12-gallon model for a little over fifty bucks. It's big enough to hold the entirety of its underpowered predecessor.

Yes, it sucks hard.

I was using it in the bedroom, figuring I'd get a bunch of dog hair and other detritis up, and suck the toothpaste caps out of the drain in the bathroom sink back there (yes, the drain was clogged with toothpaste caps, kids can be so charming). I was still kind of getting my sea legs with it, seeing what it would and wouldn't pick up.

I did not mean to suck up a pair of underwear. Really.

But I underestimated what five horses sucking hard can do. What they can do is suck up a pair of extra large men's boxers. What they don't seem to be able to do is deliver them to either end of the ribbed hose. I tried both the blower and the vacuum ports, and they're not moving. The hose is long enough a broom stick wouldn't push them out, which was the longest thing I could find in the appropriate diameter. No luck snagging them with a coathanger either.

So until I find something to dislodge the shorts, my big new shop-vac is pretty much useless. Talk about sucking hard.

Company

I just love that new book smell, don't you?

This is something I just don't do as a rule. Order a book, full retail price, on the strength of the author. Even if I loved the book before it, there's too much risk. I was reminded of why I don't do this when I made an exception for Chuck Palahniuk's 'Haunted.' When Chuck is on his game he's one of my favorite contemporary writers, but the connective material meant to turn that collection of cute stories into a novel was awful.

Another example is Craig Clevenger, who's debut 'Contortionist's Handbook' is a masterpiece. I was lucky enough to get a 'street team' preview of his follow up, 'Dermaphoria,' and I didn't go around telling people how great it was because it wasn't. Kind of like a literary 'Kill Bill,' Clevenger took his considerable talents and squandered them on another drug-culture tale. I might read the rest of it, from the library. Might even pick it up as a remainder if I see it and it's cheap enough, but I'm not rushing out to buy it in hardback.

Still, while Max Barry's first novel, 'Syrup' was my favorite of his first two, 'Jennifer Government' being somewhat less riotously fun, I've rushed in again, just as I did with 'Haunted.' Even faster, actually.

The publication date is January 17, but I bought the book today. It was actually in yesterday evening but I got the message too late to go fetch it. As of Max's blog of two days ago, even he hasn't seen a proper, finished copy of the book. I thought perhaps a mistake had been made and one of his other books had been ordered by mistake, but nope, it was 'Company.'

I thought maybe Borders was messing up, but I wanted the book so I wasn't going to rock the boat. It turns out that while some books are released with a 'lay down date,' prior to which a retailer can be tortured by ex-KGB agents for selling a book, they aren't all (or even mostly) released this way.

Ironically, it was 'Jennifer Government' that made such hay out of the marketing practice of withholding goods to stimulate demand. Maybe part of why that book wasn't as funny as 'Syrup' is Nike is pretty much as portrayed in 'Jennifer Government,' where Coca-Cola, besides being on the other side of America from where Max places them, is probably a few years away from marketing 'Fukk' to the masses.

But I'm falling down on the job as a sneezer. That's the marketing term for obnoxious people like me who rant and rave about how you have to try 'X' or read 'Y' because it's the best whatever in the history of whatevers. Nothing wrong with sneezes, it's the most honest form of marketing there is. If I rave about a book because I loved it, even if you find the book irritating, you at least got an honest recomendation. If I constantly recommend books you hate and have nothing good to say about your favorites, then my endorsement still tells you more than an advertisment can.

I haven't read 'Company' yet, only admired the cover. I'm about halfway through 'Americana' by Don DeLillo and haven't put it aside to read the new Max Barry. It's next, warming up in the on-deck circle. I just blogged about it and I haven't even read it. I guess that's a sneeze of sorts. I won't tell you to run out and buy it since I haven't read it yet. But if you feel like running out and buying it, you don't have to wait for the 17th.

The odd thing with 'Americana' is I shouldn't like it. Except that I do, so far anyway.

In God (and Alan Greenspan) We Trust

Ariel Sharon is having blood drained from his head, last I heard, and apparently he's following the example of our Commander in Grief, who was quoted as saying that Sharon is a 'man of peace' (didn't he put on a nice firework show for the people of Beruit in 1982?) and said he was 'praying for' the Israeli warlord, I mean Prime Minister.

On a more serious note, either cell phones have struck again, or mining companies are heartless, money-grubbing machines preying on the economic plight of Appalachian people. Any reason why these need to be mutually exclusive?

Oh, and with the Chiefs aren't in the playoffs, I want to officially throw in with my redneck friends, all two of them:

GO BENGALS!!!

Until next year, I think they're coming back to Arrowhead for the season opener. But the Bengals are so due, and since I hate the Colts both for being a whore franchise (one that moves to soak up taxpayer money, as opposed to the rest, engaged in stationary extortion), and for what the Colts did to the Chiefs in the playoffs our 13-3 year. Also, if I understand the brackets, to make this wish come true, the Bengals will have to beat Denver, which would be sweet. And if Tampa Bay makes it to the Super Bowl, I'd have to root for the Bengals because Em still hasn't forgiven the Bucs for the '04 season injury to Priest Holmes. Something which, no matter how many times I explain the inherent risks of the game, she insists proves that the Bucaneers are 'bad twerps.'