January 2008 Archives

Man, I love this song. I heard it last night on The Shield:

Heard that you are new in town
Someone said you party down
Well, later I'll be comin' round
We'll rack 'em up and suck 'em down

It's gonna be a long night - it's gonna be a catfight
It's gonna be a gang-bang

Listen here: It's Gonna be a long night by Ween

I spent last night trying to write; my family were out, and I was alone, and reasonably free of urgent must-do tasks after having worked most of the weekend.

I had in mind a short piece of erotica, something inspired by a scene in an episode of The Shield (the phrase 'take it' has a way of inspiring my erotoc imagination). I have characters in mind and the barest bones of a story.

Alas, I had a can't-sit-still moment. I felt like I'd been pounding Pimp Juice all evening;Iwound up fidgeting and twitching, couldn't stay in my chair long enough to actually keep my hands on my keyboard. Instead, I did laundry, washed dishes, and then finally managed to watch the season two opener of Torchwood (James Marsters snoggin' John Barrowman; I mean, come ON, how can you not love this show a little?).

At least I got something started, though, so we'll see. By boss is on vacation, and that used to be a good time to write, back when I had a little leeway to goof off; but who knows, maybe I'll find a couple of hours this week for producing slacking.

In other news, my truck is due back somewhere around the end of the week. I miss it like a walrus misses his bucket. I'm drivin' a tan mini-van right now, and I could not feel more out of place than I do in this vehicle. The only good thing about vans is that when the seats come out, there're a great place for a mid-day shag, but who has time for a mid day shag anymore? Plus, I just put a better stereo with ipod integration in my truck, and I'm about to tear off my own ears from having to listen to the radio.

I've said this so many times over the years; I figured eventually it would have turned up in google searches.

Seems not; so purely to get it googled, I'll post this.

How many times have you said this isn't working right, with your radio, your stereo, your vacuum cleaner, your computer, your network. And of those, how many times have you later said, oh, it wasn't plaugged in.

Dozens. Hundreds.

As a support person, and a solver-of-problems, I see it petty much constantly.

Hence over the years, I've come to describe this as the first rule of electronics.

It states:

Everything electronic works better when it's plugged in.

Now, we grant some leeway for values of plugged in; there are of course wireless things and battery things. But still; there is some value of plugged in that applies, even if it's only a virtual state (batteries in, wireless on - *power switched on*, etc). So it holds true, universally.

Sometimes a guy needs a new coat.

I had a coat like this in about 1971; a real vietnam-era vintage m65 field jacket. I loved that coat, wore it constantly. It was covered with patches with things like peace signs and the Sgt Pepper drum head and various hippy-dippy sentiments; I wanted Freewheelin' Franklin painted or embroidered on the back but I never found anyone who could render it properly. The left breast pocket was full of rat chew holes; I always carried my pet rat in that pocket.

My mom still has that jacket, and I started thinking recently that I wished I could get another.

The vintage ones are hard to find, and obviously, the commonly desired sizes like L and Xl are virtually impossible. So I started looking at new ones. They turn out to all be cotton-poly now, the new ones, which wasn't the same. And I didn't want a black one, or camo, just the same old green, cotton field jacket I had when I was a kid.

Then I found the jacket above; all cotton, vintage styled, skul-and-spade logo which, you know, is so damned me, and *on sale* for a third the price of the current GI surplus ones.

I couldn't be happier. Has kind of a travis bickle look to it, doesn't it?

My dear friend E asked me about making stock recently, and I figured I might as well do this in a blog entry instead of an email, so as to better share the wealth.

I make stock all the time. Basically whenever I have enough roasted birds carcasses collected in my freezer. I've talked about this before, but I didn't really talk technical.

Stock is simple. It's easy. If you think it's difficult, you're working too hard on it. In a nutshell, all you're doing is putting bones, and usually vegetables, in a pan with water, and simmering for hours. That's pretty much the whole story. You'll find books - like Michael Ruhlmann's Elements of Cooking - which will leave you thinking you need to devote days to making veal stock or why bother. Ruhlmann's book is great, but he makes that mistake of speaking as if to experts when giving basic tips. Yeah, I'm sure his results are great, but so are mine even when I do everything different that he says.

Make it easy, or you won't do it. You'll buy a box or a can.

I got in the car this morning to drive my 9 year old daughter, Ruby, to school.

I jacked my iPhone into the stereo and handed it to her as I pulled out of the driveway. Pick something, I said.

She spent several minutes scrolling around through my collection and chose something.

She chose this.

I listened for a moment to the quiet opening, puzzled.

What is this? I asked her.

The Bad Plus, she answered.

"You like this?"

Yeah, we played it last time you drove to school.

My little girl. This is added on to her taste that already ranges from High School Musical to the Beach Boys to Garbage. Eclectic, one might say.

I became aware of this because a commenter on my previous entry mentioned it. This tells you how on-the-fucking-ball I am lately, when readers have to mention significant dates to me. I mean come ON, I'm mister significant dates.

Today marks four years of blogging; four years of the pain and pleasure that is The Moronosphere.

But as with the new year, it's seemed that I don't have much to say about milestones lately. Maybe, to steal a quote from Iandiana Jones, It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. Maybe I've just had too many milestones and they're getting smaller with perspective.

Or maybe it's a symptom of everything else lately, the motivational drain of too much have to and not enough want to. I can't seem to get worked up much lately unless there's sex involved, and I can't seem to get the sexuality lined up with the creativity to turn that into something that lasts longer than few orgasms.

Who th' fuck knows, y'know?

Four years blogging. I'm not even sure what to say of it. I was surprised to be still at it after one, amazed after two, and still thrilled with what this whole experience has given me in terms of friends made and experiences had, not to mention with the pleasure of simply having an audience for my words. At three, I had les to say, simply observing that it'd been a Long, Strange Trip.

At four I find still less to say on the matter; but maybe that's because in the last year, my written output has radically decreased from the previous year.

I find myself compelled to graph this:

And yes, I spenty 20 minutes goofing with excel for that, as a way of avoiding writing more words (you know the ratio of worth, pictures to words, after all).

Yet, what I see when I graph this isn't that my output has dropped near zero, as I expected. It was dropped to near 2004, but that is certainly not zero. This in some way gives me hope; it tells me I'm not done with this. I considered graphing by months, but that I fear would show me an unfavorable curve, and I think I won't look at that, at least not today.

What I will do, though, is set myself a challenge; I *must* write something fictional before January is gone, even if it's only a scene or a bit of dialog. I do not need to *finish* it, but I need to publish it here, just to prove to myself I haven't lost the gift of it, and I guess to say fuck you you fucking fuck to my recalcitrant muse. I've tended to use distractions and workload and issues with attention span to justify not writing; I must stop that. I must write, even if it's only a few words. After all, so the anecdote has it, James Joyce once sat disconsolate in his study when a friend dropped by. "I've only written seven words today", Joyce told him. "But James", reassured his friend, "Seven words is a good day for you". "Yes," wailed Joyce, "But I don't know which order they go in".

If seven words were good for James Joyce, I should count it a success if I can make a baker's dozen.

(thanks to Taro's Travels for that quote, I couldn't quote recall it)

How this happened is rather a long story. Let's just say there was a lamp-post, and a concrete garbage can. Was, because they suffered sudden, catastrophic failure when introduced rather rudely to my truck.

"Hello lamp-post,
What cha knowin'?"

This is the aftermath vis-à-vis y truck. The other parties faired less well and are now more or less expensive land fill, but alas I seem to have no photographic evidence.

There was absolutely no intoxicant involved in this. I swear. Unless you count Hunnid Racks.

I tend to like to write something at the end of a year, of the beginning of the next, looking back and forward, as I've done most years since I started this blog.

This year was funny, though.

It's been a while since I've done much partying on new year's; long years since I've found myself in a new year's kiss with some luscious stanger, and several since I've gone farther than to a neighbor's house to greet a new year.

But this New Year, more than most, was simply a Day Off.

New yera's eve,I watched a ball drop on tape from some other time zone, watched confetti fly, and heard my children whooping out in the street as the yelled happy new year up and down our quiet suburban street. A digit rolled to a new year that should seem an un-imaginiably high number for this tail-end baby boomer.

And I shrugged, and put the kids to bed, and put on another DVD of Entourage.

I woke on new year's day with no hangover, no lipstick-of-unknown-origin anywhere on my body. I made my coffee and ate what toast, and wasn't aware of the date until I switched on the TV. I spent the morning watching hockey, and the afternoon in Monterey, CA at the aquarium with my family.

Today, I starting thinking about new year's resolutions; which I generally don't make, and when made, always break. But it's been a year where things seemed to get away from me.

Time, I think, is the biggest one; it seems where two or three years ago I managed to write, and to party, and to just hang out a lot more. I spent time away from work, taking off mid day for no reason other than because I felt like it. This last year, work's begun to overwhelm me in ways I can't recall it having done in years.

I have, at the best of times, a poor attention span. People tend to blame too much on things like add/adhd these days, seeing an acronym that describes a pattern of behavior as a medical diagnosis that covers everything they think might be wrong with them. In truth I have trouble sitting still, and (as those of you who know me in real life are well aware) I always seem to have my mind on five things at once. Much of the time, though, I manage to make that a career strength; I can handle many problems at the same time, several dialogs at once, and can get things done in starts and stops. It's why, in part, I'm good at triage and emergencies, why I do support for a living, why I'm the one you want around when the sky falls.

This year, though, it's gotten away from me. Even when I'm not actually working, my brain keeps switching focus, and I lose threads mid-way. This is getting in the way of dialog with friends, with home-front tasks as simple as paying bills. Worse, though, is that it's making it hard for me to focus at work when things slow down. This last couple of weeks, my project moved to a phase that leaves us breathing room, and this is where I should be able to back up and say, what have we put aside for later these last six months? But I can't. I keep task-shifting even though there are no urgent tasks to shift from and to.

This jumpiness is frustrating; because it makes me hesitate. I don't start writing projects, knowing I'll distract myself. I don't make plans with friends of family, out of an instinctive feeling that I'm going to have to bolt at the last second because of some emergency. It's like I can't stop looking over my shoulder.

Over the last month, I've sat down to write at least a dozen times, and have nothing to show for it but titles and ill-formed thoughts that would have been essays or stories before.

It's not just my creativity, my productivity, and my friendships that suffer. The ache in my joints isn't just from being on the far side of 45; it's from too many hours with my shoulders wire-tight, neck bent, eyes drilling into a monitor. It's too much, too long; too many hours spend being there for everyone, everywhere.

As with everything else, time for my own care slips away from me. I haven't been to the gym in months and months, havn't maintained my general habits of good eating. I haven't done things I enjoy or things I feel I need to do.

Something needs to change.

I do not, as I've said, make resolutions. And yet, the custom of self-review that goes with resolutions seems worthy, and if not at year's end or year's beginning, then when?

So I tell myself, as I listen to rain and thunder outside my window and think of what I've let slip away, get control of it. I need to stop feeling driven by my world, by the clock, by what other people want and need, and step back, and take what I need. I've given too much, the last couple of years, let too much slip between my fingers. And time is where it needs to start.