The Aerie
Have I mentioned recently how much I HATE cancer?
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the death of my friend Steve. I found this appallingly difficult to believe. The Anniversary arrived like Monday morning after a three-day weekend: miserable and altogether too soon.
Yesterday my wife and I went to First Avenue to celebrate Steve's life. Once again I was struck by the incongruity of the situation: spike-haired, pierced punkers had gathered together to honor a man gone now for an entire year. Nobody can say anything bad or stereotypical about punk rockers to me anymore. These people cared about each other, and were willing to go to some effort to show it.
And it was familial. One of the punk bands, Pumpkinhead, included two of Steve's nephews by marriage: the lead guitar and vocalist was 16, the drummer 12. Both of them cooler at their respective ages than I have been or ever will be.
We stayed through Plate-O-Shrimp, at which time it was pretty late for us old-timers. After the rather deafening celebration, I discovered that I had a message on my cell phone. It was my paternal-half-brother, who asked me to call him on something important. I knew that couldn't be good.
I called, and learned that our father - my birth-father - has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given only three to six months to live.
Have I mentioned recently that I LOATHE cancer?
I'm beginning to get the distinct impression that I'm just not meant to have a father figure in my life of any sort.
My adoptive father is is dead of brain cancer, and my birthfather soon will be dead of pancreatic cancer, both of them well before age 70. Dr. Noel Johnson, the high-school teacher who gave me my vocation, died in 1989 of brain cancer.
The message I'm getting here is that I'm just not going to get to have anyfather figures during this lifetime. I guess I just get to go it alone, and fashion my fathering out of fantasy, fiction, and whole cloth.
In addition to my various adoptive, birth, and circumstantial fathers dead of cancer, we have my friend Steve, dead of cancer, my wife's second cousin, dead of cancer. Cancer cancer everywhere.
So now I have a whole 'nother reason to visit the East Coast in September. The wife is even planning for the whole family to go on the trip, but we'll see about that.
Have I mentioned already how my present contract is reminding me how much I hate working corporate? Never mind that this huge company is thoroughly Dilbertized, the real problem for me is the way 8-5 work makes the weeks evaporate. The months fly by at incredible speed, and I barely see my family.
I was doing these Dad-and-Kid Days, where I'd take each of my kids individually for a day with Dad. I haven't been able to do one for months. My weekends get consumed with special events like family picnics or camping, and my evenings are either spent exhausted or catching up on non-workplace chores.
On the other hand camping with the family certainly counts as family time with the kids, so I'm not saying that I don't get any time with the kids. But I do enjoy my Dad-n-Kid days.
But we did go camping recently, and that was a lot of fun.
We visited Madeline Island, travelling across on the ferry. Madeline Island is a lush, undeveloped rural island off the north coast of Wisconsin. There are few local residents, but lots of expensive summer homes. We camped at Big Bay State Park, which had very nice facilities including beach access. We travelled there at the invitation of a number of our neighbors, who have visited Madeline Island annually for several years.
There was lots of wildlife. Only a few hours after arriving I was on an errand and passed a deer standing on the side of the road. It was very tame, completely unimpressed by my arrival. We saw deer around our campsite on a couple of occasions.
We spent Sunday swimming. My friend Cheryl visited from Ontonagon with her niece Ashly, ad we took the kids down to the beach. Adding in the neighbors, there were a lot of kids playing. Fortunately they discovered a floating log, and spent the day goofing around on that.
The neighbors also brought a pair of kayaks which everyone took turns using - even yours truly. Paddling across the bay to identify my curiosity about a distant rock protruding above the water, I was concerned that I would suffer heatstroke, or a sunburn, or horrible muscle aches in my shoulders. As a result of all my precautions, I ended up without any of those things: instead I got a wicked sunburn on the tops of my feet! Sheesh!
So camping was fun. We took a good four days to do it which was very nice, a good period of time to rest. Speaking of rest, however: I'm gettin' too old for this nonsense. My worst injury was a back cramp from sleeping on the ground, and it was a doozy. Kept me hobbling around at home for a couple of days!
So for the last week my car has been making this little "clunk" sound when I drive. Accelerate, "clunk", decelerate, "clunk."
Fifteen years of listening to the Car Talk guys told me that this was going to be a loose tie rod or a ball joint, but either way I needed to take care of it. In fact, yesterday I even biked to work, specifically so that I would not have to drive the car.
Today I drove to work intending to go from there to the dentist's, and immediately thereafter to the garage. After work I parked in the lot at the garage, went in, and told them what was wrong.
The man went out, got in my car, and drove it over to the service bay.
As the nose of the car entered the service bay, the left front wheel fell off the car!
Been listening to too much Air America recently, and I'm afraid that I may be losing my mind.
As a progressive, I enjoy the programming itself - except for the pro-Democratic-Party rants against Ralph Nader. No, it's the advertising that's driving me mad.
I can hardly wait until they can improve their advertising sales. It's a motley crew that advertises on Air America right now, and each ad is repeated at practically every break.
Home Depot has a generally well-produced advertisement - nicely mixed, attractive music, etc. Then about halfway through they start to get cocky. "When you buy as much as we do, you can afford to sell for less," the announcer proclaims proudly, "that's the power of buying power." You can hear the sirens in the background as the trenchcoated agents of the Federal Department of Redundancy Department raid the recording studio.
Less well produced is the Verbal Advantage ad, a product that professes to improve your verbal skills. Fair enough. But then the overdramatic announcer tries to be reassuring: use Verbal Advantage, and have "No more embarrassment at how to express yourself."
Couldn't they have thought of a better way to say that? "No longer be embarrassed by clumsy phrasing!"
Then there's Charles Schwab, who speaks for his own corporation:
"When you're dealing with people's [long, odd pause, since the topic of the ad is money] money. When you're dealing with their financial dreams, you've got to hold it with the greatest of care."
What? He's a multibillionaire, and he doesn't know from matching plural nouns with singular pronouns? Fire the staff grammarians! (With $3 billion you could have a staff of grammarians and an estate to house them.) Listening to a multi-billionaire make a grammatical error three times an hour really starts to get under your skin after a while.
And of course there's there pharmaceutical ad for Flonase... a product bearing the Latin name for "Runny nose". My favorite part is when the annoucer proclaims, "Fluticazone proprionate nasal spray, fifty micrograms!" in a perky voice. Very 'Blade Runner'.
Don't get me wrong - Air America is a worthy venture seeking to establish itself... or at least stay in business until November 3rd! And the programs keep me sane while I'm working. But, man, these ads are going to drive me mad.
Poop.
Well this is just wrong.
I'm sitting at my favorite neighborhood cafe... and I'm on the Internet.
I know, I know - wireless hotspots are all the rage, yeah. But I come to the Blue Moon in order to escape the Internet, escape work, escape e-mail.
I just realized, I could actually sit here and do my work. I mean, my work-work, my 40-hour-per-week contract job. I could do it here.
That's just wrong.
This is where I should be able to come and have no more opportunity for distraction than another pointless game of Solitaire, or eavesdropping on other people's conversations.
Instead, here I am, IM'ed and blogging and fetching my e-mail.
You know what else is depressing? Here's what's depressing. I was going to say "Cripes, by the time I'm fifty, they'll have chips implanted in your brain and you'll always be online..."
But of course, by "fifty", I meant "At some incredibly distant time in the future."
But as soon as that thought formed in my brain, an answer cough up...
"No, that stuff won't exist in eight years."
Fine.
Great.
I'm going to be fifty... (FIFTY!?) in eight years.
No wireless internet chips in the head. No flying cars. No space travel. I'm going to be OLD, and I can't hide from it in the shelter of my favorite cafe.
I guess that I'm just going to have to learn to live with all these distractions...
Ah, there's nothing like a trip to Uncle Hugo's, only the best Science Fiction store in the entire world. I received a gift card for Father's Day, which I finally grabbed a moment to use.
Picked up five books. "Adulthood Rites" and "Imago" by Octavia Butler. I just finished re-reading her first in this series, "Dawn".
I enjoyed "Dawn", give it maybe eight out of ten stars. One phenomenon I've noticed in writing is that if you have a protagonist who becomes extremely powerful and skilled, the protagonist tends to "drift away" from the reader. Butler does a good job in "Dawn" of avoiding that situation - not perfect, but good. As the protagonist becomes more and more powerful, she remains accessible and even helpless in the face of some events.
Also picked up "Revelation Space" and "Redemption Ark" by Alastair Reynolds. I have no idea about these books, but they look like (i.e. the first few pages read like) some nice crisp space opera, and that suits me just fine.
I'm fairly rigorous about how I select books. First, I go by the cover. Sorry if that sounds appalling, but cover art for books is more than just a pretty illustration. It has evolved into a complex iconography that tells you pretty clearly what you're getting inside. Both the Reynolds books feature gleaming chrome spaceships in front of planetary arcs against the black backdrop of space. That says "Space Adventure" in the language of cover art.
Butler's books, on the other hand, show various nudes in attitudes of contemplation or grief, overlaid with eerie floating spheres and stylized DNA strands. This tells you quite clearly that it's going to be an Examination of the Human Condition against a backdrop of genetic engineering.
Those are the flowers that draw one in. Having been attracted to the book sufficiently well to pick it up, I then read the first few pages. I don't read anything else: I don't read the back cover blurb or any little preview page, I read the first few pages. This, in my estimation, is actually how books are meant to be evaluated. Having caught my eye with the cover - a necessary evil when there are so many books on the shelves - I then read the first few pages. If they work, I buy the book. If they don't, I don't.
The final book I grabbed was "A Fistful of Sky" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. I picked this one up because the cover art said "mystical exploration of otherworldly events". It reminded me of the cover to "What Dreams May Come", which in the edition that I own uses the art from the movie (hence the link to the DVD). Also I have to admit that the a cover blurb read "This generation's Ray Bradbury", which was sufficiently intriguing as this generation has needed a Bradbury for a long time.
So with almost half a dozen books to read, I hope that I can nonetheless continue to get other things accomplished. But I must say that it's been so long since I had something new to read that I'm really looking forward to diving into these works...
Had a nice little interlude this morning. I was driving to work when I stopped for a stop sign. On the other side of the street, an attractive young woman was walking her dogs. Now it was a little distressing to me to realize that my definition of "young woman" has extended to women who are probably in their early Thirties, but be that as it may she was very attractive. She was wearing shorts and sandals, and a thin, summery tank top.
As I came to a stop I glanced at her and our eyes met. She didn't smile, she just gave me that neutral look that one gives to harmless strangers.
It was a nice moment: a pretty girl looked at me and didn't laugh, didn't run screaming down the street! Yes, it's gotten to the point where I'm simply happy to be invisible, but harmless, to attractive young women.
Hey, when you're me, and you're driving a Geo Metro, you take what you can get.