The Aerie
I saw a flatbed scanner advertised for $39 at Best Buy. I don't shop
at Best Buy on principle, but I had won a $25 Best Buy gift
certificate through work, so here was such a deal.
However, hating Best Buy as I do, I was filled with skepticism. This
is the place, after all, whereupon returning an item sixty-one days
after purchase, the pimply "Customer Service Manager" behind the
counter said with a sneer, "Well, you know, your warranty is
two-thirds up."
So I was assuming I'd encounter bait-and-switch again. I was expecting
it. Hell, I was counting on it. I hate Best Buy and I wanted them to
suffer my righteous indignation, and cower at my threats of Attorney
General investigations. Sure enough, the first two stores I visited
did not have the item on the Sunday it was advertised. However, they
assured me, the store in Eagan had several.
Monday after work I drive down to the Eagan store. Nope, they don't
have any. Oh, wait: here's one which was returned, marked down to $29
! Great, let me look at it!
Sure enough, the only one they've got, and the UPC is cut off. Hm, now
why would that be? Aha! There's a manufacturer's $10 rebate available
for this item! Someone bought it, sent in the rebate, and then Best
Buy took it back without checking the box -- obviously they had NOT
waited until the warranty period was two-thirds over, but had come
back the same afternoon it was purchased!
So, I insisted, they must drop the price another $10, to $19, since I
could not pursue the refund. Grudgingly they agreed. I bought the
scanner, got $5 change on the purchase with my certificate, and walked
out of the store.
A $20 bill was lying in the parking lot.
So, in essence, I got a free scanner. Works fine, too..
[1]Last
Things belong in certain places.
For example, dogs belong in the country. Sorry, urban dog-owners out
there, but unless your dog is one of those mini-dogs, which can get
winded loping across the vast prairie of the living room rug, a dog is
not an urban beast.
Dogs, and I love dogs, are noble, powerful animals, descended of
Ice-age carnivores which had a thing or two to teach the upright
monkeys that invaded their territories about how to work as a team. I
suppose it's possible that the prehistoric wolves were the ones who
taught humans how to work in organized groups to accomplish goals
greater than any one of them could achieve alone. Certainly the sight
of a pack of wolves, shoulder-high to a man, bringing down a giant elk
or mastodon would have been a moving and educational sight for
creatures used to eating each others fleas for lunch. And by
condescending to accept humans into their packs, they showed the kind
of insightful willingness to adapt that led to a powerful evolutionary
team: humans and canines.
Dogs deserve better, in my opinion, than to be bred down into little
pipsqueak toys. They deserve to be as intelligent and healthy as we
can make them. And they deserve space.
Dogs didn't evolve to live in little wooden boxes. I could argue that
we didn't either, but that's another story. Dogs did nothing to
deserve to be caged in little postage-stamp yards in the middle of a
jungle of steel and concrete, while humans seem to cluster in mad,
snarling, self-destructive packs out of fear of the wilds that spawned
them. But dogs deserve to lope and run, unleashed and free, rolling
in dead animals and nosing each other's droppings.
And some people, even city people, understand this. They
conscientiously walk and run their dogs, they risk breaking
rarely-enforced leash laws to allow their dogs to run free in parks,
picking up the deposits left behind.
But they are the great rarity (oh, and I'm sure you are one of those
rare dog owners). Most people, by definition, do an average job of
dog-care, and over half do a below-average job.
One of the houses in my neighborhood is apparently under some kind of
canine curse, because the two most recent occupants of the home have
had this, this problem with dogs. The first was a woman who was
simply cuckoo: she adopted an older dog which had been brutalized to
the point of paranoia and misanthrope. She had to walk it leaning
back on the leash, because the beast was so furious to get away. It
once attacked my daughter, and another time a heavily pregnant
neighbor, but when the neighbors got the city to require a muzzle on
the beast, she went ballistic. First she painted a message on the
sidewalk running up to her front door: "Violence is words and deeds:
with their words and deeds my neighbors have done violence to me
today." Then she sold her house and moved, presumably to where her
new neighbors will have to learn about her dog on their own.
The new neighbors are not cuckoo, but for some reason they keep
getting dogs. First they got a large, lanky tan beast, as sweet as
anything and about as big as their entire back yard. They erected a
kennel and kept the poor beast caged most of the time. It yowled and
howled, much to our delight.
Then that dog "went to live on a farm," and they got another dog --
marginally smaller, but with a distressed yap at being confined in the
kennel which sounds like it's being run over by a car. To add insult
to injury, they recently decided to "mulch" its droppings by piling
them in straw in the corner of their yard next to ours. Last weekend,
when it was a sultry 80 and the wind was from the northwest, the
neighborhood kids said "Let's go play in the back yard!" and after
five seconds in the stinking cesspool odor said "Let's go play in the
front yard!"
Such people should not own dogs.
And you know, I don't want trouble with these guys. I don't want to
be the Heavy who comes in and starts calling the animal protection
agencies and causing big, bitter glare-wars with the folks next door.
But what is it going to take to teach such folks that a dog is not a
sled, to be stowed away most of the year and taken out once or twice
for fun? And, most of all, these good, sweet dogs -- for if nothing
else they do have good taste in dogs, which is like saying they have
good taste in wine, and use it to strip paint -- deserve better than
these guys. Dogs deserve frequent attention, playtime, runs and
walks, and a decent place to live, preferably on a couple rural
acres.
They don't deserve a crappy kennel in a dinky back yard, and attention
twice a week. I'm pretty sure when the great wolf shared its prey
with his neanderthal colleague, it wasn't so that his posterity could
end up screaming for attention in a cage.
[1]Last
Wow, what a great concert! Having seen [1]Indigo Girls primarily at
Northrup Auditorium on the U of MN campus, a concert at the Orpheum
was a treat! We'd been to the Orpheum once before, but our seats this
time, row 10, far right end, were vastly superior to the second
balcony we'd had before. The acoustics in the Orpheum were far
superior, owing in large part to the vast central dome of the
auditorium.
The opening acts were exceptionally good. My wife joked that Michelle
Malone was Emily's opening act, and [2]Shannon Curfman was Amy's
opening act. I'm used to ignoring opening acts, but both were really
engaging, and Emily came out and performed with Michelle Malone on a
couple of numbers. Malone had a Michelle-Shocked-esque bluesy feel,
while Shannon Curfman rocked harder and louder than seemed possible
for a fifteen-year-old from Fargo...
To tell the truth, my wife and I had SEEN a TV story about Shannon
Curfman only six weeks ago. Sapphire did not make the connection at
all. I kind of made the connection -- I had an idea this might be the
same person -- until she started playing. Then I was totally convinced
I must be remembering incorrectly, because there was NO WAY this
power, music and energy was pouring out of a fifteen-year-old girl. So
I sat there, utterly convinced that she could not be who she was --
she was THAT impossible.
When Indigo Girls came on the stage, of course, the house went wild.
Do I need to describe them? No. Suffice to say that they were rested
from a couple of days off, had a couple of flubs that were
entertaining for showing how relaxed and real they were, and were
overall full of energy and joy, without the weariness I've seen coming
off an uninterrupted two week run of shows before reaching
Minneapolis. They played for nearly two solid hours without
interruption, and it was a thrill
The setlist:
Peace Tonight
Gone Again
The Wood Song
Scooter Boys
Soon to be Nothing
Ozilline
Least Complicated
Romeo
Trouble
I Don't Wanna Know
Power of Two
Go
Philosophy of Loss
Faye Tucker
Closer to Fine
Shame on You
Ghost
Chickenman
Encores
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Galileo
All in all, a fantastic set of songs. Emily lent power to Philosophy
of Loss by discussing the prior night's execution of Gary Graham and
the homophobia of most organized religions. Also, some twist of fate
had kept me from hearing "Wood Song" in concert, and it was so
beautiful and so unexpected that when she began playing I wept. I also
got a little misty listening to Power of Two.
The only shadow on the concert were the PEOPLE. I've never been
surrounded by a bigger set of dingbats than I was last night. Whining
follows, feel free to skip.
In front of us, on the aisle, was a woman with a bad knee. She was NOT
a dingbat: the dingbats were plagueing her more than anyone else.
First there was the Rabid Fan. She was a six-foot-tall dork who was
clearly fanatical, not merely a fan, of the Girls. She plopped herself
down in front of Bad Knee, and weaved constantly from side to side,
preventing those behind her from using look-over-one-one shoulder to
see the stage. Bad Knee went to all sorts of exertions to compensate
-- getting a chair from the ushers, standing as much as she could,
etc. We even offered to switch around some seating with her, but to no
avail. Rabid Fan kept snapping flash photos (most of which will
feature only back of the six-foot-four hairy giant in front of HER),
scooting up to the stage, getting shooed back, and dancing from side
to side.
When Rabid Fan wasn't dorking around, we had the Kudro Twins in front
of us: a pair of preppy girls with their frat-boy dates who had
apparently come for Shannon Curfman and stayed because they actually
owned "Come On Now Social." At least, those were the only songs that
engaged them: they stood like trees during the others. The Kudro Twins
wouldn't have been so bad, except that they and the Frat Boys kept
running to get drinks, or pee. And each time they did, Bad Knee had to
get up, dislodge her leg from the the support chair, move the chair,
hobble into the aisle, and let these dingbats past. She probably had
to do this about ten times during the performance, despite the fact
that the dingbats were in the middle, and could have exited from the
other aisle!
Those were the worst. More common annoyances were the Screech Sisters
behind me, who sang every word in every song using only the flatted-E
note that they were screeching at birth. There were the [3]Curfman
Fans to our left, who stood patiently waiting for the concert to end
after Curfman left the stage. An audience energy sink, they were
courteous but astonishingly unmoved by the Indigo Girls music pouring
over them. And the Front-row Twit Sisters, thirty-something fanatics
who stood for the entire concert (doubtless to the consternation of
the people in the second row), signifying and gesticulating and waving
their arms dramatically through EVERY SONG. They looked like a pair of
incompetent ASL translators who didn't know which way to face. All
these I could have ignored, except the batter of my annoyance was
already risen and these guys became icing on the cake.
By the encores, Rabid Fan had shoved her way up against the stage
where the ushers could no longer shoo her back, and after the show she
cajoled the setlist out of one of the engineers doing cleanup.
Meanwhile, Bad Knee was pale and almost in tears as she hobbled out of
the auditorium.
So that was a lot more content than I had intended, and the bitching
at the end was probably a bit over the top. The concert was great,
especially when I was able to concentrate on Indigo Girls and their
music, and wasn't being distracted by hobbling, giggling, screeching,
spazzing, drunken fans all around me.
Really, these concerts would be perfect if it wasn't for the
audience...
[4]Last
I'm sitting here at the Barnes & Noble Cafe in Har Mar, trying to
write and procrastinating. I'm on the cusp with this novel I'm
writing, and I think part of me is afraid to cross the ridge and begin
the long, high-velocity race through my nascent plot. So I divert
myself into trivia, writing lengthy passages about my characters
hemming and hawing over details. I've got to get past this.
Kitty-corner across from me is a young fellow with Christian Slater's
good looks and a rollerblade tattoo above his left ankle. He's been
sitting here longer than have my wife and I. He's got a book and a
magazine open in front of him, and a pencil in his hand, but he has
spent most of the last hour talking very quietly into a his cell
phone, with only momentary breaks. Now the fellow next to him,
directly behind my wife, has also started talking on his cell phone,
rather less quietly, about Powerpoint presentations..
Only a generation like the Boomers, a generation raised on tales of
telepathy and afternoon adventures with backyard walkie-talkies, could
evolve a technology like the cell-phone. All the utopias and
dystopias that included telepathy missed this: the notion of crowds
of people sitting individually at public tables, talking or whispering
into nothingness. A society of telepaths might be eerily similar to
the crowd around me now.
Behind me a couple of old fellows are playing a labored game of
chess. At first I thought they were old friends the way they bickered
and debated each move, but now they are telling each other their
life-stories of coal and oil ships and terms in the Navy. One fellow
was on the heavy cruiser Newport News in Viet Nam. The other was on a
cruiser passing Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. There's an
undeniable nobility to their stories, and a sadness of sorts that they
aren't afford more respect, but I can't say that nostalgia is a
terrific basis for continuing the practice of warfare. Like logging,
strip-mining and whaling, some occupations are too costly to preserve,
no matter how noble their heritage. So it is with soldiers.
[klingham.jpeg] On the shelf to my left is a copy of 'The Klingon
Hamlet,' and what surer sign could there be of the decline of American
culture? The left pages are in English, and the right pages are in
Klingon which looks like nothing so much than a measured output of
text generated by the proverbial infinite number of monkeys. Even
they, however, would likely rip the Klingon pages from their
typewriters and tear them to shreds, snarling, dancing and defecating
upon the tattered pages. I suppose anything that conveys Shakespeare
to Star Trek fans is in its own way a good thing, but it's a dose of
aspirin lacing the strychnine. (My Microsoft spell-checker does not
recognize the word "Klingon," and I hope that's a good thing. After
all, Microsoft also didn't recognize its own product name,
Powerpoint. On the other hand, it knows strychnine, but doesn't know
dystopia.)
Well, Christian Slater is finally off the phone, so that should be my
sign to get back to work, although Powerpoint Man is still chattering
away...
[1]Last
I realize that you're sitting on the edge of your seat with
anticipation of my announcement of the final results in the [1]recent
weather experiment. Therefore, I will delay no further: the weather
was (drumroll)...
Cool, partly sunny, with a few intermittent sprinkles! [7.gif]
Ah, wipe those tears of joy from your eyes, yes, yes...
The family had a marvelous time. At first we were a bit disconcerted
that we'd been [seagull5.jpg] moved from the beloved quarters we have
occupied for the past three years, but were mollified at having two
rooms and a fireplace. Later we discovered we'd been bumped because
our old lodgings had been knocked down, and replaced with more
luxurious although more densely-packed lodgings. Still, it is sad
never to return to the obnoxiously-slamming screen-door, the shower
with the window for ventilation, or the wonky L-shaped room with the
mosquito-ridden back-deck overlooking the public boat launch...
*sniff*
The Friday Party was terrific, Theresa and I got to be adults while
the kids remained entertained until midnight at the Kid's Pizza Party.
Saturday was the usual drudgery of
sleep-in-eat-free-breakfast-nap-by-pool-swim-lunch. I tellya, such
work!
Saturday afternoon I took the unusual step of going to play
volleyball. I am not the least-athletic person that I know, but I'm
pretty far from the most athletic. Much of my antiathleticism springs
not from a profound sense of laziness but from ancient fears, still
harbored close to my heart, of those get-picked-last gymnasium
tortures that I fled after tenth grade.
But this year's motto is "No Fear!" and so recognizing this fear, I
decided to ignore it and do what I wanted to do. And what I wanted to
do was have a break from the family for a couple of hours and get some
exercise, so I went.
The volleyball itself was a lot of fun, and I was less bad at it than
I had feared. Our team did respectably well, beating the leaders in a
consolation set two games out of three, and I headed back to the
family in a good frame of mind.
After dinner we took the kids to the free carnival on Saturday night,
with a break to watch the magician. He was a hoot, and I still can't
figure out how he got a playing card, signed by a subject from the
audience when picked, to stick to the ceiling of the hall...
Before breakfast on Sunday my kids gave me Father's Day gifts and
cards that they had made. Really, they're all quite skillful and
clever at making cards! After breakfast, swimming, and lunch, we were
on the road. Sunday was a beautiful day for driving, [gerryellis.jpg]
partly-cloudy and cool. And this year, for the first time, I was able
to motivate myself to put away all the travel stuff -- laundry,
toiletries, etc., as soon as we got home, so it's not sitting around
the living room all week.
A great weekend, and, compared to last year, truly exceptional.
Of course, last year it rained all weekend, it was colder than we'd
packed for, and two of our family returned home with strep throat...
[2]Last
Okay, so a couple of days ago the weather forecasts from the various local meteorologists suggested that this weekend was going to be a bust: rain, rain, a glimpse of sun on Sunday to let you know god had his eye on you at church, and then rain.
Now we'll compare. My assertion, remember, is that the meteorologists predict the worst, so that you'll tune in later in a desperate hope that the weather improved...
[B]The following section was a cunning set of graphics, now lost to server migrations and time[/B]
Site Two Days Ago Today
[1]Channel 4000
Fri Sat
[rain_am.gif] [chanceofrain_am.gif]
Morning Actual Sat
[cloudy_am.gif] [partlycloudy_am.gif] [cloudy_am.gif]
[2]Paul Douglas' Star Tribune Forecast:
Fri Sat Sun
Fri Sat Sun
[3]KARE11:
[12.gif] [7.gif] [15.gif]
[7.gif] [7.gif] [15.gif]
[4]KMSP:
[06.gif] [04.gif] [03.gif]
[13.gif] [03.gif] [04.gif]
KARE11 goes out on a limb to give us yesterday's forecast, too...
[12.gif] . Now THAT takes some guts!
Okay, so what do we see?
In almost every case, the weather is worse in the long-range forecast! The only one where the weather is worse in the short-range forecast is, again, KMSP.
So based on a single nonscientific example, I rest my case:
television meteorologists are mostly the yapping running dogs of their capitalist masters, forecasting doom and gloom to get you to tune back in later on to see whether or not things have improved!
My work here is done...
[5]Last
I hate weathermen. Well, weatherpeople really. And I think not for
the usual reasons. No, I hate weather forecasters not because
sometimes they say it will be sunny and it rains. Quite to the
contrary: I've come to the conclusion that TV and to a lesser extent
radio meteorologists have been persuaded -- by management, by ratings,
or just by hard experience -- to present the most controversial
weather forecast that can be feasibly offered.
For example, this weekend is my company's annual retreat weekend.
Year after year, despite the fact that the company has grown from a
seven-person shop to rival the population of a small town, the company
takes all employees and their families north to Brainerd, Minnesota,
where it takes over several resorts. It used to just go to one
resort, now it takes over three.
This being a very important weekend I have been anxiously eyeing the
weather since Friday the 16th started turning up on the five-day
forecast. Each day shows the weekend as being rainy.
But a five-day forecast is about as reliable as the word of an
alcoholic that they'll pay you back for the damages done when their
car parked in your living room. Really, they could put anything in
for the fifth day of the forecast. But since they want us to tune
back in later on, they put in the worst thing imaginable (well,
feasibly imaginable -- they aren't forecasting flaming meteorites) and
predict you'll tune in again to see if the forecast changed.
Of course we do.
So let's see: if I check the [1]National Weather Service local
extended forecast -- which lacking banner ads cannot be said to care
how many hits it receives, really -- I get:
.EXTENDED FORECAST...
FRIDAY...BREEZY WITH A 40 PERCENT CHANCE OF SHOWER. HIGH 65 TO 70.
FRIDAY NIGHT...A CHANCE OF SHOWERS. LOW IN THE UPPER 40S.
SATURDAY...A CHANCE OF SHOWERS. HIGH IN THE LOWER TO MIDDLE 60S.
SUNDAY...DRY WITH A LOW IN THE MIDDLE 40S. HIGH IN THE LOWER TO MIDDLE
60S.
Okay, so I get generally cool, a "chance" of showers on Friday and
Saturday.
Now, we run out to the local sites. [2]Channel 4000 reprints the
National Weather Service forecast almost verbatim, replacing caps with
upper and lower-case letters. But here are the graphics they use for
each day...
Friday: [rain_am.gif] , Saturday: [chanceofrain_am.gif] .
I dunno, I look at those icons, I say "It's gonna rain both days."
Here's [3]Paul Douglas' Star Tribune Forecast:
Friday: , Saturday: Sunday: .
And here's [4]KARE11:
Friday: [12.gif] , Saturday: [7.gif] , Sunday: [15.gif] .
Now, look at those icons. All three ([5]KSTP wimps out, or at least I
could not easily find their five-day forecast) show Friday as being,
well, inclement. Not a day to plan a picnic. But what does the
weather service say? "40 PERCENT CHANCE OF SHOWER." Excuse me? Does
40% chance of shower equal [12.gif] ?
Finally, however, I turn to KMSP's weather, and get a little sanity.
Friday: [06.gif] Saturday: [04.gif] Sunday: [03.gif]
It's lovely -- a few dark clouds, but they don't put in any
raindrops. But the best part is the forecast text underneath each
symbol:
Friday: "Chance Showers", Saturday: "Shower Late?", Sunday: "Shower
Early?"
Stop the madness! A straight answer! The kind of answer that got
Jesse Ventura elected! "Shower late? Shower early? Hell, we don't
know!"
With the exception of [6]KMSP, all the local publications are like
your annoying great aunt who's always telling you "Oh, oh, I'm gonna
DIE and look how you're treating me! I could be dead TOMORROW and you
treat me this way!" And yet, she she keeps refusing to die so your
wife can have her Hummel collection. KMSP at least has the decency to
admit that a five-day forecast is a crapshoot, and they trust you to
to come back later. All the others try to scare you into it.
And if it doesn't rain this weekend, I'm gonna LAUGH...
[7]Last
Back from the weekend. Crickey was it hot yesterday! Spent most of
the day holed up in an un-air-conditioned Lutheran church in North
Branch, because it was too damned hot to play on the nearby playground
with the kids. All this for a 45-second period in which my daughter
tossed rose petals down the aisle.
By the end of the wedding I was tuckered out. By the time the food
arrived at the un-air-conditioned reception, I was exhausted. We ate
brunch at 11:30, and dinner wasn't served until 7:00 p.m. After eating
I went and laid down in the sweltering minivan and lapsed immediately,
albeit briefly, into unconsciousness, which restored enough energy to
get through the last bit of the reception.
The wedding was lovely, the food when it arrived was exceptional and
everything was very nice -- but without the air conditioning and with
95 degree weather, I was just tapped out. I'm not spoiled by A/C as a
rule -- we don't have it in our home or cars -- but I've always been a
little susceptible to heat.
The recent "Slow Traffic Keep Right" law was voted down by the
legislators, and on this weekend's trip the opponents were out in a
vengeance. Both on the trip up to North Branch and on the trip back I
noticed that the only time I passed anybody was on the right. This
was particularly noticeable during the crowded trip up: time and
again I'd move over to the left lane, and start losing ground. Then
an opening would appear on the right, and I'd pass ten cars. Dodge in
left, pass one car, dodge in right again, pass another ten. It was an
amazing demonstration of Minnesotan orneriness.
I mentioned that we went up to North Branch by taking Snelling up to
694 to 35E. Coming back we just took 35W south, and my knees went
weak when I discovered that 35W was one lane north and south between
694 and the 35E junction. My little "let's try this" detour on Friday
dodged us one major delay! *Whew* It was the type-A-driver's
equivalent of discovering that the flight I missed went down over the
Indian Ocean...
We were listening to the radio coming home (The Point 104.1 in this
case -- no, we don't have CD or tape in the van, and 91.1 was playing
that gawd-awful pretentious "Jazz Image"), and they played the
ubiquitous "Meet Virginia" song, as they do three times every hour. I
was struck once again by what a horrible song it is. I mean, first
off its a song about white trash, which is always an invigorating
topic. But any song that rhymes "mediator for the President" with
"rip on the President" isn't really a song, it's a song notion which
hasn't yet been completed.
Right after that they played the latest Sinead O'Connor song, "I am no
Man's Woman" or somesuch, which was sponsored by Arista Records.
"Sponsored by"? Hello? Isn't that a euphemism for 'payola?' Why not
have the record industries just "sponsor" a radio station, and play
only their artists?
Maybe I shouldn't even post that notion...
Well, so today is my Faux Father's Day -- the family has decided that
since the annual company retreat is always held on Father's Day
weekend, it's not fair that I never get a Father's Day. I resisted
this for a couple of years, since what could be more
"Father'sDayEsque" than to spend it canoeing around Gull Lake with the
family? Then last year Sapphire and Leo came down with strep throat
during the trip, and I spent Father's Day driving a sick family home
in the gray rain. So this year I'm embracing Faux Father's Day
wholeheartedly. What I should do with my day off is a mystery, but I
thought, well, I'll post a journal entry in the morning rather than at
10:30 p.m. at night. What a difference a day makes -- at least I can
think while I'm posting this...
Anyway this is done, so I'm off to discover what the day holds. Maybe
I'll grab breakfast at Al's (if it's open, I can't remember if they're
open Sunday but I think not), or someplace, then do some writing? Who
knows!
[1]Last
A day full of frenetic rushing about. My own fault of course. My
daughter is flower girl in a wedding in North Branch, with the
rehearsal tonight at 5:30. However, due to my own carelessness, I'm
still at work in Roseville at 4:00. I fly home, drawing not a few
angry glares from the drivers I cut off, we hurl everything into the
car, and hit the road at 4:30 bound out of the city like every other
driver in Minnesota.
My coup was that I avoided the highways. Coming home on Transfer Road
I'd seen that 35W northbound was a parking lot. If I'd taken that
route, I daresay we'd still be in line for the entrance ramp!
Instead, we went Marshall-Prior-Pierce Butler-Snelling, and Snelling
all the way up to 694. Once on the freeway I drove quite rudely,
doubtless enraging several other drivers, to whom I apologize
abjectly.
As we curved past Forest Lake, I pegged the speedometer at 85 mph.
Hey, it's a 12-year-old minivan full of people, for us, that's fast.
We reached the church in North Branch at 5:40.
So that was just too much rushing around. With no lunch, again my own
fault.
Dropped of wife and daughter, and took the boys to the North Branch
McDonalds PlayLand, where they tore around along with several other
children while I worked on the novel. The novel is getting to be slow
going, not the least reason that I've been encouraged to expand the
beginning chapters, which calls for extensive rewrite, although not
replotting. Plus I'm impatient to get to the rising action - I've
been working on the opening chapters for months! Still, they need to
be right or the rest of the chapters will be screwey.
After McDonalds I let the boys play video games in the hotel. One was
a broken Pole Position style motorcycle game: the acceleration
twist-grip had worn away and been covered in duct tape. The duct tape
had worn away, and now the twist-grip accelerator was both sticky and
sticky. You really had to wrench on the accelerator go get it to go,
and my youngest boy wasn't up to the task. I helped out, and he was
thrilled just to be playing a video game. My older son and I played
an interesting Star Trek pinball, with three flippers, multiple balls,
animation, and lots of rails everywhere. Still, at 50 cents a game (3
for a dollar) pretty expensive - fortunately someone poor soul had
dropped a single quarter in, so with three more quarters that was (for
me) three games for three quarters.
With so many kids having video games at home, you'd think the appeal
of arcade games would have waned, and the prices dropped to keep them
alive. Instead the price of video games has increased, albeit
modestly. Still, 50 cents a game if not a dollar a game is
commonplace. I just don't get it. Why pay a buck when you can play
the game at home, or on the Internet?
That's another thing I've been waiting for: when are these video games
going to start using the Internet? I mean, even if interactive "Doom"
style games wouldn't work (and I don't know why not), couldn't they
let you establish an identity and collect high scores? Play at home,
play at the mall, play in Timbuktu, and your scores track in a central
database. By breaking down the demographic, you could offer even
average kids the chance to be in the Top Ten of Beginners Left Handed
Eight-Year-Old Red Haired North-African Third-Wolrd Single-Parented
Bantamweight Category. But like the auto industry, the video game
industry is trapped by its own success into turning out items in the
same old paradigms as before. No creativity.
Well, it's dark in the hotel room and I'm tired. Time to hook in,
download and hit the sack.
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I ought to write these when they come to me. More reason to get
wireless Internet...
Throughout the day I have these deep, profound thoughts. Well, they
seem profound at the time. But then when I sit down here to type
something what comes up? Nada. Nothing. Blank-sheet-of-paper.
I suppose that's the point of these things, though: to teach me to be
more aware of the opportunities to note down ideas and thoughts. To
seize the proverbial moment and actually record some of the mental
trivia that rips through my head every day.
Today was okay as days go, good as weekend days go. The whole family
was in a good mood. We got some chores done around the house with
only the minimum US RDA of whining, kicking and screaming out of our
kids. When the boys set up their Hot Wheels track in the living room
I knew it was time for them to clean their bedroom. It's 20 feet long
and 12 feet wide, and it was covered end to end with discombobulated
toys. Before we could get them to clean it, Sapphire had to scream at
the top of her lungs, and fend off a head-butting attack from our
youngest boy.
Got my hair cut finally, I looked like a shaggy beast. Got new
sneakers at Duggans, an old-fashioned shoe-store on University
Avenue. I paid more for them than I've ever paid for any two pairs of
sneakers before, but the fifty-year-old clerk in the family-owned
store knew her stuff. She had me stand on a pad to measure my arch as
well as using one of those foot-slide-rules. Turns out I've been
wearing the wrong size, too small and too wide. I left with a pretty
good pair of sneakers and a big hole in my wallet...
While I was waiting for my haircut appointment I stopped at the Bosa
Donuts across from Duggans. What a hole that place was! Behind the
greasy counter was a spherical man built of sweat, hair and anger who
told me in no uncertain terms that there was no decaffeinated coffee.
The donuts were good, though.
Went home after that, mowed the lawn, started cleaning the rust off of
Croft's old weights, laid some sand underneath the sidewalk out back,
which is sinking into the ground. Unfortunately the damage has been
done: Squeezed repeatedly by the frozen soil of winter, the pavement
is crushed and cracked in too many places to salvage, and we'll have
to replace the sidewalk.
Tomorrow we're supposed to plan this East-Coast trip in August, and
I'd like to get some writing in. We'll see!
Thus ends a particularly uninspired journal entry.
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Wow, it's June already! Almost halfway through the year!
Another lull in the journals. I can hardly apologize. Time is
ripping past me like I'm on a rocket-sled to Hell. Be warned, kids!
Time accelerates as you age! You're middle-aged when you're
seventeen, because after that weeks will pass as quickly as days do
now, and months will flash past like weekends! It's like being on an
express-train, and watching the weekends go by like skipped subway
stations... whoosh! whoosh! whoosh! there goes another month!
Pathetic, ain't it? Complaining like an old man, and I'm not even
forty.
(My spellchecker is complaining that "ain't" ain't a word. Excuse
me? Hel-lo, Microsoft, who do you have building your dictionaries?
Some dour old linguist hauled out of the basement of an Ivy-league
library? "Twenty First Century Computers, with Nineteenth Century
Dictionaries" Are we the French, now, that we must fight the
introduction of words to the lexicon in some vain attempt to keep our
language, English, the bastard mutt of all human languages, are we
trying to keep it pure?)
Sorry, back to time. I've always been cursed with the Long View,
however. No short-view, unfortunately, just long-view: I see the
meager span of years allotted to each of us as the flare of a match,
the vast scope of history in which all human endeavors are a sudden
growth on the planetary petri-dish. But I can't remember what we're
doing this weekend, or where I left my car keys.
The upside of this curse is that I have perspective. I appreciate my
children now, because next month they'll be different, bigger
children, and soon they'll be men and women living in other places. I
don't waste a lot of time -- well, not a lot -- watching TV or doing
nothing, because I can see the end of the track and the train is
picking up speed.
The downside is that I live with a persistent low-level anxiety that I
am wasting time, which tends to turn me into a workaholic. If I'm not
working for work, I'm writing a book, working on something around the
house, or working on this. And meanwhile my kids are getting bigger
and I'm getting older and...
Well, enough. I'm out of time, and my daughter is Student of the
Month, and it's time to go watch her get her award. Like I said, time
is passing...
Now where is my damned wallet?
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