When My Neurons Get out of Synchronicity
Current mood: hungry
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

My son consistently conjugates the past-tense of "to eat" as "ote."  I have no idea where that's coming from.  I don't correct him, because it's so interesting to me.
Something happens to the structure of Halloween candy this time of year that causes its texture to break down, but I don't know what exactly happens.  (I took a religion class instead of chemistry as an elective my last semester of high school, and I'm certain that that has made the difference between my understanding of sugar molecules and my lack of understanding.)

I have a half-dozen rusted copper pipes standing upright in my mind.  How they got there, I don't know.  Someone planted them in the ground; in the ethereal, psychic cyberspace; in the organic, electric connections in the great web of neurons in my head.
Faint, visceral music, imperceptible - but immeasurably beautiful - emanates from those native, alien pipes when the wind blows across them, not with my breath, as my internal speech, but only when I think of the wind.  Still, where it blows from, I don't know.
The ground in my mind could tremble - perhaps, from a truck thundering down a road which winds through strange townships that only I would find vaguely familiar.  Its thick, rubber tires rub hard against the pavement; they're pressed oblong under the weight of the solid, imaginary truck.  The ground vibrates, and the pipes clang together with irregular, atonal, unknowable chimes.
The processes that put those pipes there in the first place are a mystery to me, my so-called conscious self.  I know that I don't know how I perceive things that don't exist yet do exist somewhere in my head and in my mind.  I am aware of the fact that my neurons are making connections, but I am not conscious of my own neurons.  I am aware that I am not self-aware.
And there they are, those copper pipes, rusted green as summer corn-stalks reaching for the sun.

11:15 PM - 16 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

How the Capital of Slovenia Got Its Name
Current mood: sweaty
Category: Travel and Places

Immediately before the war for independence of every neighborhood in Yugoslavia, the people in that country's Northwestern-most neighborhoods decided to band together to form a new country made up of 210 municipalities whose inhabitants hate the inhabitants of every other neighborhood in the region with varying degrees of loathing.  They called the new country "Slovenia."
Most people remember the wars that followed Slovenia's declaration of independence, but very few have any idea how much political wrangling was involved in deciding what to name this new capital.  Each citizen of the new country had a very strong opinion on the matter, and the situation was fragile and potentially volitile.
The Slovenes wisely recognized that the best way to satisfy the various populations of a wide-ranging state that included such diverse (and mutually suspicious) lands as Upper Carniola, Lower Carniola, and Inner Carniolia - just to name a few - was to hire attorneys to represent each neighborhood's non-negotiable interests.  To keep things fair, most people hired two attorneys from competing firms so as to ensure accountability and lawfulness.
They convened on June 26, 1991.
"As a representative of the German-speaking Anglican women," started Bozidar Lapajne, of Lapajne and Lapajne Associates, "I require that the first letter be J."
"With all due respect, Mr. Lapajne, the ethnic Italians, whom I represent, are going to have a serious problem with that.  They want the capital's name to start with the letter B."
Attorney Klopcnic then gave attorney Lapajne the famous "look" that has won countless negotiations with real-estate lawyers across the country.
"Very well, Ms. Klopcnic, we'll allow your clients the first letter, but the second and third letters must be J's. We cannot make any more concessions."
And so the negotiations began.
By the end of the ninth day, the Roman Catholic Serbians had managed to land their favorite letter - L - in the first and middle positions, only to lose the last letter to a coalition of ethnic Albanian Communists and Jewish Green Party members, who themselves scored two letter A's right next to each other.  Almost all the negotiators agreed that two adjacent A's would look ridiculous together, opening an opportunity for the Anarchist Party member to insert her N into the name.
France Prekmurjem, the attorney representing the conservative white gay males who make up a majority of the population one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the new capitol, managed to force Attorney Lapajne to concede his third-letter status to Mr. Prekmurjem's personal choice, U.
The last breakthrough came when the teenaged amateur representing the Goriska region's Ethnic Australian New Age bear wrestlers walked away from discussions on the 10th day, and the remaining 1,499 attorneys were able to come to an agreement on the letter N in its current place.
So, while the rest of the world set their eyes on the disaster unfolding to the southeast, the people of Slovenia agreed to a name for their beloved capital.  The next time you're headed through the center of Slovenia, and you see the sign, "Welcome to Ljubljana," you should remember the battle of egos that took place for the naming of that city.

6:12 AM - 10 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

You don’t say!
Current mood: okay
Category: Romance and Relationships

(This list will [prbably not] be updated periodically)
Things a man should never say to his wife:

"I've been thinking about living on a boat."
"She's good-looking" (don't bother adding "isn't she?")
"I want to get a computer chip implanted in my body so I can connect my nervous system directly to the internet."
"I masturbated six times today."
"I could live for a thousand years and never think to _____ (wash the windows; clean under the toilet; re-finish the cabinets; or any other maintenance item)."
"(nothing)"
"Wouldn't it be great if I could just fish for a living instead of (whatever I do to get real money)?"
"This movie sucks."
"OK, I'll do that."
"Why don't we take separate cars so you can leave whenever you're ready?"
"Yes, we went to a nudie bar." (Don't even say it sarcastically.)

2:15 PM - 11 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

A Boston Sports Fan’s Lament, or Why I am Awesome
Category: Sports

Some rules of web-logging:
1. Never post naked pictures of yourself having sex with someone who is related to your wife.
2. Spell-check, and make sure your Star Wars and Simpsons references are accurate.  Actually, make sure everything is accurate.
3. Never drink a ton of alcohol before posting anything.

So far, I've been able to follow most of the rules.  Web log April 19 (*oh crap, it's a relative's birthday - readers: go do something while I call him...)

Web log April 19.  Went to a bar.  My wife's client sent my wife and our son to the circus which came to town this month. The circus tickets were priced at US$600.00 apiece.  I figured, for that price, they got to eat a clown.  I kind of wish I could go, but I had some other things to do.

After I did all those other things, I needed to make a dinner choice: go to a bar.

When I was about 15 years old and experimenting with hippie shit, I discovered walking.  I was amazed - dumbfounded, in fact- at all the stuff I noticed at low speed on the road.  This was in the days before people threw their phones out their car windows, but the debris on the side of the road was still astounding.  The other things that I noticed were all the signs that life on this planet will go on, despite the fact that the planet's paved; things like the dandelions and crab-grass in the cracks in the pavement.

Today, as I walked down to watch the Red Sox beat some team that I didn't even know existed, I could see, hear, and smell all the signs that spring is back.  The salt and soot that accumulated on the snow all winter has condensed into black piles all over the landscape. The vernal puddles full of earthworms, the carefree cacophony of the robins, the the the the the the the the the the the of my neighbor's Harley Davidson brought out from its winter hibernation; everything alerts the senses to Spring.

I am awesome, just because.

(I guess I can't listen to anything.  Currently waiting for the fancy new rich-text editor.)

6:30 PM - 14 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

Title not working, so this one will do
Current mood: embarrassed

I'll make this quick; I don't have time, you don't have time, and I don't really have anything to say anyway, so there's no reason to waste anyone's time.

Caetano Veloso sucks.  My wife and I saw him last night or a week ago, and it was nothing to write about.  He played one good song in the two or three hours he occupied the stage; otherwise, he wasted mine and my wife's time.

Saturday I helped my in-laws move again.  Normally I look at that kind of thing as a sort of credit building activity, whereby I can earn onerous chore credits with my in-laws that I can spend whenever I need help moving furniture.  As it stands, however, I have more credit with them than I know what to do with, and the only reason I help out is not out of obligation to family, but just to keep them from thinking that I never do anything for them, just in case I need to ask a favor.  It makes me feel like I could be doing more interesting things.

Saturday night was spent driving through driving rain for two hours to attend a birthday party for my wife's mother's sister's husband's cousin's girlfriend.  That's not an exaggeration.  I have no idea how old she is, and neither does my wife, but apparently it was such an important occasion that we had to brave a hurricane to attend the party.  The storm was the worst one all season to hit New England, and we drove right into the face of it.  Dodging downed trees in the middle of the road with ten-foot visibiliy, I thought of the people in Haiti and Dominican Republic who were left homeless and widowed or orphaned by the storm, just to keep things in perspective.  We got to the party and they had no power.  The boiler needed electricity to start, so there was no heat either, so we all hung around the fireplace and everyone had fun, while I worried that my son would have an asthma attack from the creosote and candle smoke just when there would be no electricity to power the nebulizer required to administer his rescue medicine.  Since it was freezing cold (maybe not freezing, but fucking, anyway), and we knew it would be impossible to sleep, we drove home.  It was a waste of time if you ask me.  (On the other hand, our son had a good time, even though he thought the birthday party was for their dog, and it may as well have been.)

Anyway, if I wasted your time with this, don't blame me.  You are the one reading this.  I'm not even going to proof-read it.

5:06 PM - 13 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Midsummer Daydreaming
Category: Travel and Places

The atmosphere over Massachusetts calms down this time of the year.  The thunderstorms come less frequently as the air cools down.  Occasionally a system will blow in from the plains and will bring with it the hazy prairie heat that swells into a climax of lightning and intense, urgent rain.  In the heat of the summer the water can never stay on the street for too long before it rises up and makes me feel like I'm walking at the bottom of a kettle pond, breathing it all in, absorbing the vapor into my skin and letting the thick air absorb me.

The heat can't touch the frigid North Atlantic waters off Cape Ann, and Gloucester harbor is painfully cold to swim in, even in July.  Still, the tropical storms from the south west bring great waves, and it's more fun to jump into a bay full of ice water than to sit on the sweltering beach and sip iced tea.  The sea breeze blowing across one's purple, goose-bumped skin is enough to make even the most hardened New England optimist complain.  Actually, I hate the beach, now that I really think about it.  The sun is too hot, the water is too cold, the sand gets in everything, and I'm always dehydrated from the heat and saltwater.  Ice cream loses its appeal because it just sucks up even more water, and even soda loses its ability to quench, with its 45,000 grams of sodium.  I prefer a wooded pond, with plenty of shade.  A pond's moderated tranquility is a refuge from the oppressive intensity of summertime.

The only reason for putting up with the beach this time of the year is because we have so few hot days here, and the best way to enjoy them is to stop whatever you're doing and cool off as fast as possible before the first frost.  I never felt the passage of time so acutely since I moved to Boston.  I don't know if it's because I started to get old and responsible, or if people are just more manic here, or if the extreme swings in seasonal weather simply highlight the passing of days and remind us all of imminent mortality and the urgency of the present vanishing moment.  Whatever the cause, I feel like I need to take in the season and enjoy it for what it is.

The crickets and cicadas sing a rare and different tune.

Summer means different things to different people, as it should, since we all live in different climates.  For some people in lower latitudes, summer starts in April or May.  For New Englanders, it starts in July and ends in July.  To me the seasons are astronomical events.  The associated weather of each season is a product of the planet's position and of my position on the planet; weather isn't a defining characteristic of the season.  Or it is.  Summer is lounging shirtless in the sea breeze, walking barefoot in the pine-needles.  Summer is blackberries and peaches. It's seeing Scorpio rise, and watching it cross the sky all night.  That's July and August in eastern North America, when the air is warm, the fruit is ripe, and the Earth is just past aphelion.

The autumnal equinox is impossible to see from this far away.  But things are definitely beginning to cool off around here.  My wife informed me that summer was over last Saturday.  Sure, today is cooler than a week ago, and the days are shorter than they've been since May Day, but we haven't seen the end of the dog days.  The air cools off faster than the ponds do, and as I stand on the shore with a line in the water, I can watch the veils of mist rise out of the sunset reflected on the glassy surface of the pond.  The atmosphere is stiller now that the season has mellowed out.  The lakes and woods are emptier of people, but it's still warm enough to wade in after sunset in order to surround myself in the pink and red clouds reflecting in the cerulean water.

Turtles come up for air at sunset in the small bays and coves in ponds all around here.  I don't know where my fascination with turtles comes from.  Maybe it's because they hide all day.  Every evening just after sunset a snapping turtle the size of a hubcap comes out from hiding on the eastern side of a cove in Spot Pond opposite Interstate 93 in Stoneham and swims in an arc across the water to a wooded drop-off on the north side of the cove.  I don't know if he's male or female.  I don't know what he does all day; I don't know why he travels the same path at the same time of day; and I don't know where he's really going or what he's going to do.  I think it's the mystery of turtle's lives that draws me to them.

Turtles really are more common than I realize.  In Ell Pond near my house, there's a cove where they come up by the dozens at dusk.  I rarely see them because I'm most often in my air-conditioned office, or I'm headed there in my steel-trap car or the tin can train, or I'm coming back home or getting ready to go back to work.  I keep thinking that I don't have time to stand with my wife and son and watch the Earth progress in its orbit from a vantage point on the edge of the water in south-eastern New England.  I wonder what I really have time to do.

Currently listening : Wildflowers By Tom Petty Release date: 01 November, 1994

4:13 PM - 14 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Three things I thought were important

First of all: Man, I love the internet.  Despite all the flames and misunderstandings by amateur writers and inept communicators, this is a great forum for free thinking and discussion.  Someone does something, and BAM! it's all over the internet from homicidal right wing crazy web logs and government-fed news pages, to depression-induced masochistic pleas for unwanted attention - everyone's having the national discussion.

Ok, secondly: I think the separation of powers doctrine is meant to prevent power from being consolidated into one branch of government or another.  That's really just a guess, though.  I mean, what do I know?

I thought this morning that this year's FBI raid of a Louisiana congressman's office was prudent because it was an efficient way to stop a member of Congress from abusing his political power for personal gain.  In this case, an incursion by the executive branch into the legislative branch's territory was necessary in order to limit an illegal use of political privilege.

This afternoon I thought that similar incursions into executive privilege by Congress are justified for the same reasons.  Well, there are a couple that I can think of.  The first is the subpoenas of Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, with which the president is refusing to comply.  It's pretty clear to me that Bush has a legal right to deny Congress their testimony.  They're direct advisors to him and la la la.  I changed my mind about that one.  An important reason to get testimony from these two women is to get to the bottom of the Bush's power grab so we can be collectively appalled by it and take steps to prevent future presidents from following suit; but I think Congress is barking up the wrong tree here.  Executive privilege needs to be honored and rule of law should be respected.

The other assault on executive power is Congress's attempt to withdraw troops from Iraq.  The argument against this is that the President is Commander-In-Chief per the Constitution, and our military and our state (or our military state) will be weakened if we allow the legislator to infringe upon executive territory.  I say that that's a crappy argument because the President has to answer to someone, and if he doesn't then he's effectively a military dictator.  Congress needs to assert its power over the presidency if we are to remain a state ruled by law.

Thirdly, my wife and son have been in California all week, and my house is a complete mess.  I haven't eaten in three days because I don't know how to use the stove.  I love my new-found "independence," though, and I am not looking forward to my family's return.  Anyway, most of that's not true.  I miss my wife, even though I've cooked some pretty good meals (alone... *sigh*).  The house truly is a pigsty, though.  It's amazing what I'll let sit around because I have no one to hold me accountable.

7:37 PM - 9 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

A Few Words On Summer
Category: Pets and Animals

I'm certain that every cynical gardener in history has resolved this:  Next year I'm going to plant a dandelion patch where my lawn is and grow a lawn in my garden.  I used to laugh at the guys who waged a never-ending war against nature in their gardens.  This afternoon it was me, out until sundown, pulling up grass where I thought carrots should be.

It got too dark to know the difference between nascent grass and radish sprouts, so I sat back on my patio and reflected on the honey bees in my clover patch.  I took a swig of beer and caught sight of some child's balloon rising up past the evening star in the west.  I followed it across the hazy sky past the half-moon glowing through a veil of cirrus clouds, until it sailed over my garage and off to sea.  As I gazed at the grey indigo colored sky, feeling the westerly wind caress my legs and watching it guide the clouds across that stubborn moon, a swallow flew up over my garage's rooftop and I followed it back across the dome of the sky towards the last gasps of the day's twilight.  The feathered layers of clouds shot out of the shining horizon as if they were trying to escape into the darkness.

Instead of living this moment in the year's prime of life, I'm writing a blog entry and thinking about my Myspace friends.

I have a giant cell-phone tower looming over my neighbor's house.  It dominates the western sky, but it's better on the eyes than my cinderblock garage.  When I started this entry Venus sat on the south side of this tower, and she has since fallen to the north.  The obvious sign of passing time has filled me with that old New England sense of urgency.  The last robin has gone quiet.  I'm left alone with the mosquitos, the bats, the crickets, and that soft summer wind.

I saw my first June bug of the year last night.  It was a pleasant surprise because it was only last week when I saw my first mayfly. So, I thought summer was going to come late for us, even though the crickets started chanting weeks before the solstice.  This year they couldn't wait to sing their message that this isn't the season for gathering my thoughts and blogging them out; this is the time for listening and living.

8:05 PM - 7 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Not Drunk, So What Is It?

And my brain isn't connected right anymore, either.  I can't tell my left from whatever's different from left.  I had some dreams about Lyndon Johnson lately.  Wholly crap.  Sometimes I'll read a book and feel discouraged about my writing because I know I'll never be as good as the author, but I just finished reading a whole bunch of blogs, and while I can see that the particular blog writer I was reading is really good - I mean that blogger's got talent- still, I don't think I should be feeling as low about my entire life just because I think a writer is really good.

Too much online stimulation has numbed my nervous system again.  That's not supposed to happen.  I'm supposed to be uplifted by this electric stream.  If I get some sleep I'll feel better, I suppose, but I don't want to have to face Lyndon again.  Who named that guy anyway?  Did he have a brother named Pyne? or Hyckory?  Sicamore?

web log stops when brain stops

I'll wake up on Monday and wonder what I w

6:10 AM - 8 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Support and Satori
Category: Romance and Relationships

[note: This is part 2 of a 4-part blog entitled "To the Victor Go the Spoils".  The other parts are written by Ken, Minerva, and Slacksploitation. Please check out their excellent blog pages for the full story.]

In India, they drive on the left side of the highway. Janet Bancwirth remembered that much, and rocketed up the onramp in her convertible Mercedes CLK, which, Janet presumed, could be converted into an airplane or a space ship. She couldn't remember how she had gotten to India, or what she had planned to do there. She certainly hadn't planned on the enormous hunks of raw meat that were now hurtling toward her at a hundred miles an hour. Janet swerved to the right side to avoid a giant filet mignon careening past her, and then quickly cut left again to miss a thousand-pound pork-loin flying at her. A blob of ground sirloin the size of a pickup truck blew past with a sound like an air horn blaring at her. It was, of course, a pickup truck, and Janet was not in India. She was on the wrong side of Interstate 10 in Santa Monica, California; she had simply forgotten what country she was in.

Janet was able to drive for a short distance in an unending span of time with the meat-cars pointed in her direction, cars that were driven by people probably just as scared as she was, and trying just as hard as she was to get out of the way of the oncoming surprise. Monsoon winds blew into her car, and pages of her book began to rise up from the passenger seat and whip out onto the highway.

The book wasn't really hers; it was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five. Janet had bought it from a homeless man on the sidewalk for a buck, so the book belonged to her, even though it wasn't hers, and technically it wasn't really even a book. What we call a book is what antiquity scholars call a codex, which is a stack of written pages bound on one side. This particular artifact was printed about the same time that Janet was born. It had apparently suffered much in life. The cover was stained and dog-eared, and the edges were piss-brown. When she opened the book, the binding began to fall apart in her hands. She couldn't turn the pages so much as rip them off their spine, and she eventually ended her book with a musty yellowed stack of pages containing a story that roughly outlined her mental state.

Janet reached her hands up to grab the wayward pages, and as her grip on the wheel released, her grip on reality began to loosen in direct proportion. The pages fluttered across the sun, creating a strobe effect. Janet's arms stretched up in block motion that jerked her field of vision in increasingly extended intervals until finally she froze in time like an Italian Renaissance painting. Giovanni Bellini, Janet Bancwirth in Her CLK350 Cabriolet, 1507, tempera on wood panel, 49x95 cm, St. Polycarp Church, Stanton, CA. This unusual painting presents Janet Bancwirth dodging the meat, an event which nearly ended her life along with the lives of her twin sons, Saints Chrysostom and Polycarp of Cambridge, who are posed facing backwards in the rear seat. The viewer's eye is drawn from the approaching beef tips through Janet's upward-reaching arms. Note the dramatic effect of sunlight on the pages which themselves cast dark shadows on the subject's face. The gleam from Janet's diamond ring forms a halo over heads of the twin saints who are credited with insuring the Church's unfounded sense of control over its congregation through the arcane study of ancient near-eastern texts.

The ring was a gift from her husband, but we'll hear more on him later. Let's go back to Janet.

"I want to be rich," Janet announced. In school she always knew what she wanted to be when she would grow up. One year her father - Victor Petroskey, the insurance tycoon - told her she wanted to be a doctor. Another year she was to be a lawyer. Finally Janet figured out what she really wanted, and she set out to do whatever it took to get rich.

Janet did well in school; she didn't have her sister Sarah's creative streak or her brother Peter's genius, and the lack of both enabled her to sit down, study hard, and get good grades. In the short run those grades bought Janet love from her father in the form of gifts, but the real goal was a good school with a medical program. Medicine was really her father's plan; after all he couldn't support her forever. In college Janet found out that biology made her queasy, so she transferred to law.

It was at Harvard Law where she met her destiny: during an internship at the Boston office of Winston P. L. Bancwirth, attorney, she fell in love with Winston himself. Winston was a wise man, and he convinced Janet to drop out of school and become his wife. He turned out to be a dream husband and a perfect replacement to a doting father.

Winston gave Janet everything she needed, which was really just a big allowance and a new car every three years. He even, unwittingly, gave her twin sons. It wasn't his intention. Janet's housekeeper convinced her that a child would fulfill any sense of emptiness that Janet might feel about her life. The children were a mistake that Winston would not repeat.

As Janet grew older, and then bigger with pregnancy, and then eventually began to spend her evenings and weekends with her boys instead of going to dinner and cocktail parties, her value as a wife began to depreciate. He finally gave Janet a divorce. Winston P. L. Bancwirth was a shrewd divorce lawyer; he gave Janet custody of the kids, her car, and one thing she had never received before: independence.

"I can't live on my own," Janet sobbed to her sister. Sarah had offered to watch the babies while Janet interviewed for a paralegal job in downtown Los Angeles. "I've always depended on somebody else."

"Of course you have, Janet," consoled Sarah. "It's the human condition. We need each other to survive. You think you need material possessions from the people you love, but all you need are the people."

Not knowing what to say, Janet reached into her pocketbook to pay her sister for babysitting services. She had a single dollar bill.

"I don't have any cash to pay you," Janet confessed.

"Don't worry about it, Janet."

"I need to pay you."

"You need your family. In the end it's all anyone has."

That afternoon Janet strolled along the pier in Santa Monica. Out on the strand she saw a man sitting down with all his possessions on display for a hopeful sale.

"How much for the book?" she asked him.

"Fifty cents."

Janet talked the man up to a dollar because it was all she had. She read it on the beach while her boys napped. The book began to fall apart as she read it, and Janet began to break apart inside. It told a story a man whose disconnection from reality enabled him to discover that the only thing necessary for human life was human life.

A cold front was beginning bring some unseasonable weather to the coast. Janet placed the boys in their car-seats and headed back downtown. She dreamed of leaving town and starting over in some developing country where most people have nothing but family. She had lost touch with reality, and wanted to go back.

In a flash, Janet realized she had gotten up on the wrong side of the freeway. She quickly maneuvered to her far left, avoiding oncoming cars, drove down the on-ramp, and tossed her ring out into the cool twilight.

10:07 PM - 12 Comments - 25 Kudos - Add Comment