After Disneyland was opened in 1955, for whatever reason (economy? inspiration? copycatism?), many communities seem to have opened small local theme parks.

I say this because every park I read about seems to have opened between 1958 and 1962.

In 1961, we didn't have much to do at home on summer days; we had longer summers (because school got out when summer started and went back when fall started, unlike today's ten week summer vacations). We had no home video, no arcades, no wii, no ipods and internet. We had to go someplace.

In the bay area, we had parks like Frontier Villiage, Santa's Villiage, Happy Hollow, Children's Fairyland, and Marine World.

These parks were simple, inexpensive to visit, often incredibly cheesy. They had no roller-coasters, minimal rides. They were more akin to what we'd think of as a carnival today. No one traveled here from elsewhere for them; they were local attractions. By today's standards they seem quaint and ridiculous.

However, for those of us who grew up with them, they were wonderful places.

Most of them are gone now; and I imagine that's true most everywhere. Victims of better parks with wilder rides, of increased travel, and later, of sheer quantity of other entertainment, few of them could make make it. hose that survive are mostly now part of chains like six flags, and cater to modern crowds with cookie-cutter rides.

A few of the old ones survive. One such is Happy Hollow, a park every bit as silly and down-home as it sounds. This is a park my family visited often in the summer. Decades later, the park survives, changing little and slowly decaying. I haven't been back since I was a teenager, even when my kids visited with other friends and family. I couldn't quite bring myself to go see how small and silly it had gotten when in my memory, everything was new, shiny, and huge.

This weekend, Happy Hollow auctioned off some old artifacts. The claim is that they will modernize without changing the look and feel; new attractions, more environmentally friendly rides (ie, no more diesel). I assume some of this is seismic retrofit, and some of it may be a need to bring things up to modern safety standards for insurance reasons. The story sounds good, and the park remains under the same ownership, not part of some huge corporation. I hope what they do is to preserve this piece of americana, rather than obliterate the other-time-and-place sense old parks have.

I hadn't planned to buy anything at this auction; I went more to see what the old park looked like, and to see what was being sold. But auctions, you know, they have a way of catching one up.

Next weekend I take delivery on the lamp, below.

This thing is fifteen feet tall; I've no idea who built it, but it was one of four, built in 1961.

Sometimes, one just has to own a piece of childhood.

I've had trouble doing any writing all week - or, in fact, any work at all, at least any involving a computer. This is a bit problematic given that at least 75% of my work day involved eyes to screen and fingers to keys.

The trouble would be more interesting it it was some existential crisis, some most of clarity about real life vs the virtual reality behind an LCD screen. Unfortunately the issue is purely mechanical. Something I did last weekend jacked my neck; maybe it was moving a seven-foot by fourty-inch bookcase (ah, I love new book cases) in from my truck. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was just several weeks of bad posture at work or the configuration of my twin monitors.

Whatever it was, I've spent the week feeling my neck cramp into an inelegant S curve; a shape the human neck is most certainly not made for.

This makes productivity at the computer hell; I can't be effective when I'm uncomfortable (pain? Sure. Discomfort? I don't have the patience for it). Fortunately, with repeated applications of ice, adjustment, and therapeutic chemicals, I'm finally starting to be able to turn my head again, and my shoulders are finally below my ears for the first time in a week. Ok, I admit it, only some of the chemicals were therapeutic; some were just entertaining.

I'd intended to write about the jazz I've been listening to, and the book I just finished (Art Pepper's incredible autobiography, Straight Life; that will have to wait though, until I have a chance to post some musical samples, and 'til I can fully process the book. I finished it last night, and was left quite speechless.

Meanwhile, tomorrow, I get tattooed, something I've been looking forward to for a month. Later, we can talk about art, and Art, and maybe the, we can get back to the sex.

The wound in my hand wasn't as bad as all that; the following morning the pain was gone entirely, leaving behind only a vague tenderness. More interesting, though, was the leathery texture my skin has now. It's like it's someone else's hand, when I feel it against my skin. The ridges and whorls are burned entirely away in a few places, leaving only the exact imprint of the pan's handle on my palm and fingers.

The only discomfort, amusingly, is when I put on my one my skull rings on my left middle finger.

In any case, marks lead to marks; I've been thinking about tattoos.

I think it's time I got back to work on long-shelved tattoo projects. With things at work getting back within the range of 'normal' at work, my mind's had a small amount of space to wander.

I called a local shop today, and sometime in the next three or four days I need to visit to pay a deposit and arrange a start date. I'm planning to finish my half-naked right arm.

It just feels like time. And the other things I'm obsessing over are harder, both financially and logistically, to manage just now. Yesterday I started to fantasize about boats and diving and tropical breezes, and spent a few minutes looking at trips to cozumel or la paz or some such lower-cost diving destination; though in truth the windows I have for travel this year are small, and, well, we all know what finances are starting to look like in the next weeks or months, for most of us.

It's not a surprise I'm a creature driven by desire; one of the things that tells me how hard I've been working, how buried I've been, is that my mind starts to re-direct the energy of avaricious thoughts into basic survival. I stop thinking about who and what and where I want, and think about how to get through a day without losing more ground.

It's clear that I feel better, despite (or even because of) a little pain and a visually striking injury. It's clear because I'm now looking at motorcycles, thinking, how can I swing a new bike; I'm planning tattoos, trips to warm, sunny beaches, and fantasizing about who-and-what I'd be doing in any given scenario.

I feel like me when the low, simmering desire begins to come back. So that must be a good thing.

Remind me, though, not to shop for any new motorcycles. At least not this week.

I sort of intended to blog about my short trip to hollywood as it happened, every stripper-encounter, every meal or drink in a local hot-spot, every random celebrity sighting.

It didn't quite work that way in practice; work chased me down over and over, and I spent the majority if the two-days-three-nights in SoCal fielding questions and answering email.

That's not to say there wasn't fun to be had; but I didn't manage to write any of it down as it happened.

When I say fun, of course, I mean, well, a celebs-eye-view of paparazzi action.

The party mentioned here was going on in my hotel wednesday night; I walked through the middle of it as I came home from seeing a show, after waking past an absolute phalanx of paparazzi to reach the door.

I was sitting in my room later in the evening watching celebs like Paris and Nicky Hilton, Gary Dourdan, Adrian Grenier, Gene Simons, etc etc, leaving the party and getting mobbed - and note that all those links are photos taken that night, as I was watching it from the hotel side.

I didn't spend a lot of time actually *at* the party, other than walking past Elvis Costello and Diane Krall, Natalie Portman, Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer, Matt Leblanc, and likely several others. The real entertainment was the view of exactly how insane the papaprazzi swarm was. Even when I couldn't recognize the particular people from the back as they left the party, I could tell exactly how big a deal they are at the moment by the number of flashes that went off as they walked down the driveway.

It's a nutty life, being a celebrity; seeing it first hand from the inside really drove that home. And it's funny to walk into a scene like that and have every eye go to you, asking the silent question are you anyone?

I've talked about it before; I will again. I don't think a lot of the idea of valentines day.

Pink candy hearts and paper cards are not part my celebration of carnal, physical love, nor are they pat of my celebration of romantic love.

My kind of love leaves marks, bruises, welts. It leaves one spent. It doesn't include a sugar rush and a lot of packaging.

All that aside, though, love is what we make it, and it needs to be celebrated. We need to remember to say it out loud, and to show it with forgiveness and acceptance, respect, an open mind and an open heart.

For those to whom I've not say i love you enough lately, I do, even when I forget to say it. For those to whom I have said it, I mean it. Those words don't come lightly from my lips, and when I say they, they are absolutely real.

Happy Valentines Day, people.

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?

Legate yourself here.

(Thanks,E!)

Someone on another blog pointed out the significance of today's date.

The trouble with a birthday on a wednesday is that it limits the amout of trouble I can get in somewhat. Wednesday is not the ideal day to celebrate anything.

Still - lift one for me wherever you may be.

I've been having' one of those days - weeks, actually - when I'm just craving a cocktail.

But not - you know, just alcohol. It's not really alcohol I want. It's the time, the place, the, you know, the thing.

There are those places you miss; not a place place, not Hawaii or London or the Scottish Highlands, Venice or New Orleans. That's bigger, and sadder. That's a spirit, a feeling.

No, I mean that smaller scale sense of missing. A coffee shop where one once sat, eating greasy food and drinking bad coffee after late nights. The book store where one used to sit and read in a dusty corner. The bar where one once met friends and heard local bands.

And it doesn't have to be a hangout. Some places I've been, they got under my skin after one visit. A pub by the river in York; a fish n' chips stand on the Royal Mile; a bar down below canal level in Brügge.

One such - and the place I've been visualizing now - is a silly place indeed. You know the place if you live in Hollywood; you know it by rep if you read about LA. If you've read crime novels by Michael Connely or Robert Crais or Jonathan Kellerman, you know the place as if you've been there, eating steaks and drinking mid-day with rough men.

Musso and Frank. Hollywood's oldest eatery they call it; it feels like it. It feels like it's seen more old hollywood action than any studio or any mansion. You can imagine Welles, Chaplain or Valentino; the Mark brothers or Clark Gable. You can imagine writers, Bukowski, Faulkner, Hemmingway. They live on in the dark walls and worn tables.

It's the kind of dark, wood paneled room, the kind of old-fashioned chop house ambiance, that just seems to have ghosts and seem to inspire dreams.

Aside from that kind of cuisine, aside from the feeling that someone very important or deeply sinister may've sat in this same seat yesterday or may tomorrow, the thing one goes to musso n frank for would be martinis. And that's what I've been salivating for. Ice-cold, served with an odd, tiny carafe on the side (so you get an extra pour), this is place that understand exactly how a martini should taste.

And I've been sitting here all day, trying to concentrate on incredibly dull but important data gathering (to prove with numbers what everyone already knows to be true). But my mind is in that dark, smokey room, (because never mind the silly laws, in my head it's smokey, like it would have been in those days), with a fine, mysterious dark-haired girl beside me, and we're drinking icy cold martinis.

Outside it's daylight - because it has to be. But here inside, I shade my eyes with the brim of a hat, and I breath in the perfume of her, and sip icy cold gin - always gin, never vodka.

Thats where I am today. But the martini I might make when I get home - or not - wouldn't taste the same. Because the scene is what I want, and the company, the company of ghosts and beautiful, mysterious women. The drinks? Well, they're just the taste on my tongue.

Damn, I wish I could get a day where no one else wanted anything, needed anything, had to have something fixed, looked at, cleaned up, or taken care of.

You know, there's a down side to being problem solving guy; namely, when do I get the bandwidth to work on some of my own?

I have a gift - it's the thing that turn up on my work reviews, even when I've otherwise completely screwed the pooch, work wise; a knoack for debugging things, for seeing the root cause. Well, THERE's your problem, and Jaime Hyneman might say. I'm just good at knowing, through some combination of intuition and observation, what makes a system work and thus what's making it not work.

So I find myself forever in that role; the better I get, the more constant the need.

I don't mind, you know? It's not just what I do, it's who I am. It's what I enjoy. That lightbulb moment, when seemingly un-connected points of data suddenly assemble into a picture, and I can see the point of failure. It's the tiny highlights in generally drab work days. And more, at home, in real life, when I say, this is the failure point and can apply, or help apply, some solution, it makes me happy.

There are points, though, load exceeds structural resistance and I want to simple give in, let the crushing weight win.

There are the points when I need time away from every single ounce of need, want, issue. No one saying help me or this is broken or can you fix.

This is, of course, the kind of blog entry I usually don't post. I've written it a couple times a year since I started blogging, and rarely does it see the light. Because as much as I don't want to help, I don't want any help.

I need a vacation from the universe. And it makes me understand why people find the spike to appealing; let me go away from myself for a bit. Only then there's another need to manage, and the cycle gets smaller and tighter.

The list of things I need to do gets longer only - never, ever shorter, and the list of what I want to do is almost forgotten under load. I was trying to recall the other day the last time I felt free enough of pressure to cut loose and create, and I cannot recall; it's lost on the blur if the last year and a half. Even on my last vacation, never did I have a day where I could say, this is my time, forget what other people are doing or want to do.

I feel the edges of a crazy sort of rage at the edges of things. Sadness and anger are lurking at the back of my skull all the time now, and I need someplace to put them.

A good friend asked me the other day if I was ok - really, really ok. And I had to think back a long time to the last moment I felt really ok; moments of time, too soon gone.

I need to be back there, in those fleeting, warm, soft, truly happy moments. And I don't know how to get back there.

I spent far too much time this weekend in tropical fish stores.

After years of down-sizing my tanks, I got fed up with the one little tank I have. So I did the typical thing, and shopped myself up, and up, and up, and by the morning I was just about ready to drop the better part of two grand on a 75 gallon hex tank with furniture quality stand, high-end lighting and a built in wet dry system.

And then I thought about the tattoos I could spend that on.

I've been doing that see-saw for a couple weeks, trying to figure out how to get the fucking thing without spending a stupid amount of money. But after finding an amazing new fish store in San Jose (King Aquarium, which was, amusingly, in a shopping center along with 'king eggrolls' and 'king cigarettes'), I was in full on fish-geek mode.

I'd settled on a hex tank because I have a space in my living room where one fits exactly; no wall space for a big tank, and the viewing angle winds up poor if I put up some flat thing. But they haven't gotten any cheaper over the years, and oddly, the stand was going to cost me twice what the tank would.

I'd pretty much talked myself out of my own price range though.

Then I want back to what started me on this silly idea. I just wanted a slightly bigger tank than the 20 gallon hex I have now, and an inexpensive 47 gallon tank in sort of a tall cube configuration I'd seen at a local pet super-emporium would work. But the tanks, on special a couple months ago, were all gone from my local store.

Today, it occurred to me to just, you know, call the other branches.

I wound up with the tank I really, originally meant to buy, for only a little over $200 including stand and filters.

Sometimes things just work out of you hold off pulling the trigger.

Now, my living room is a jumble of fish tank parts, and I have to figure out how to migrate existing livestock and gravel while (hopefully) not killing anything (which won't be too hard given the sheer number of fish tanks - both mine and my friends - I've moved over the years). But I'm looking forward to a tank full of bright, small fish again, which I haven't had for quite a while.

I miss the tanks. I once had nearly twenty of them. I just don't have time for much of the hobby that supports it. One tank though - well, I seem to be able to manage that.

It's a funny thing how a writer's block shuts one down.

A friend asked me the other day, 'when will you write me something'. And I stared at the message and thought, when will I fucking write me something?

Buck made mention in a recent comment of good stuff I've been writing and I wondered who's blog he's mistaken for mine. Mine, you see, has become a series of place-holder posts, made just so I still have some change on this page, or because I've found some funny lolcat or a song that fit my mood particularly well.

I look back and can't even find the last entry I'd call writing.

Where in the fuck did my creativity go? The worst thing is, most of the time, I don't even care. I look at my blog editor, ecto, and have nothing. Nothing at all.

I was accused of starting a new, secret blog, but if that's true, it's so secret even I can't find it. If you find it, let me know, ok? Because maybe I left what used to be a decent ability to write over there someplace.

Even writing this is a struggle. The effort seems ill-spent when I know I'm getting nothing.

My collection of writing ideas is growing, and yet, they're notihng but a line, a concept, a description. I can't convert to narrative. I can't find the voice I need.

Last night I was watching Moonlight, the new angel rip-off series about a vampire detective. I wanted to like it, for all the heavy stylistic borrowings; vampire as hard-boiled detective. The show's got some good actors, and a lot of appeal. Yet the writing was horrible; a grab-bag of hard-boiled cliches linked with clumsy dialog and self-conscious pop-culture references. And I couldn't stop thinking, god, I could do this so much better. I can do hard-boiled. God knows I've read enough of it to know all the hammet/chandler/thomas/macdonald/parker cliches. I can write that stuff in my sleep.

And then I thought, no, I can't. I can't even write a blog entry anymore.

Where'd it go? And why don't I care?

RIP, Alfred Peet

If you love coffee, this man should be one of your culinary heros. He's one of mine.

Ever wonder where the funders of starbucks got the idea? From Alfred Peet, that's where. The guy who founded Peet's Coffee - the guy who pretty much started america's current love affair with quality coffee. Odds are, if you're not from the Bay Area, you've never heard of Peet's; but next time your drink your extra-hot-no-whip-de-caf-fat-free-soy-milk-uber-grande-complicato, thank Alfred. Cause he started it all.

I won't buy any beans but Peets, and their short-pull espresso has spoiled me for anyone else's. No one else does it right.

Thanks, Alfred.

Here's a good pic of the house I was staying in last week, on Hanalei bay, Kauai; view from the edge of the bay.

I post this as a visual reference. Between the house and the vantage point from which this was taken lies the main road that runs through Hanalei and on up to the very far northern drivable point.

Saturday, I want to a borthday bbq for a friend; a friend from a big gang I used to hang out with a lot, but have faded out of lately for various reasons. Old San Jose music scene people, bands with names like frontier wives, sugarbombs, exploding cadillacs, sioux nation, and a bunch of others only san jose scene people would remember.

One of these people was my pal lex.

I post this because I found out saturday, he and his lovely wife Kelly were - literally - less than a mile away from my on Hanalei Bay the entire time were were there. They drove by our house every day on that road (nearly pictured, above), ate in the same restaurants, grocery shopped in the same store. And neither of us ever knew it.

We spent satrday's party alternately comparing recent tattoos, and lamenting the fact that fate got us that close in a place that stunning, and never crossed our paths.

Fuckin' fate, man.

We also talked about getting our backs tattooed, something Lex and I have been talking about since we both turned fourty, *cough* years ago. Neither of us have yet started; it's almost a race at this point though I'd ahead, since I actually have a design picked out.

In other news - there is no other news. I am hit hard with that post-vacation malaise, the lack of any interest in work or the details of real life. Back to work, back to bill-paying and errand-running and housework. Back to school for my kids (when the fuck did school switch to ending and starting in the middle of summer? When I was a kid, early june we got out, mid-september we went back. When did this stupid before-labor-day thing get started?)

I can't really even work up energy to send email, and I'm only managing to read because I have this awesome
short story collection by Dennis LeHane; I can't get unough focus for anything longer.

Plus there's the Harry Potter hangover. We recently finished a marathon out-loud reading of Deathly Hallows, and how can one not feel spent after that book?

All in all, I just want to be sandy and salty and not have to come the fuck back.

The tattoos on my feet are (as expected with foot tattoos) healing slowly; these things are as irritating to heal as they are to get. I'll post pic in a week or so when they start to look healed and are no longer flaking off like a sunburned comics page.

Monday. I think I'll go back to bed.

Sometimes words fail me.

I wonder if they had consonants on sale also.

You think the 911/pot brownies thing was all about *bad drugs?

Think again.

This fuckin' thing is about bad drugs.

*when I say bad drugs, i of course mean good drugs. You know what i'm sayin.

One can add only three words to this.

"What The Fuck"

(I had to move this after the cut because for some reason it totally fucks my formatting in safari)

some weeks just seem made of days that conspire against you. I am now in one of those weeks.

Grumble.

More on this theme when bullets stop flying over my head.

One of those things i think is just plain good for the psyche every now and then is to work with kids.

Now, I'm not one of those people who's just nuts for kids. I'm not above describing a child as an asshole, and my tolerance for any kid, even my own, isn't that long. I was, for most of my life and including some moments after having them, firmly against the idea of having kids. And I could not get the big snip fast enough after I reached child capacity.

But sometimes proximity to childhood just makes one feel good.

I got shang-hai'd into being a chaperone today for my older daughter's seventh grade class (i know, what are they thinking - me, the very picture of bad influence, as a chaperone) on a field trip, and this was my first with a public school class. My kids have both been in smallish private schools, so it's always been a small crew, small trips, usually with parent drivers.

Today's trip, the group of parent chaperones was larger than my kids whole grade at the old schools. Seven buses - big coaches, not yellow school buses), something on the order of three hundred kids. Again, bigger than the whole school in days of yore.

I had a crew of five thirteen year olds. And was warned abundantly by my daughter that I had a couple of the grade's bitchiest girls (she didn't say bitchy - if she said bitchy, she'd have then had to go wash her own mouth out, but I can't recall the word she actually used), and a couple of the grade's biggest trouble-maker boys.

I wasn't in any mood for any of this. My week's a fuckin' mess. The same old story about work, ad infinitum, and personal business matters that are getting further and further behind. I agreed to do this a couple months back when I didn't quite have the foresight to know I'd but buried. Plus, you know, morning. I'm not the world's happiest morning guy - I'm an ogre before coffee (not the cuddly green shrek kind), and while after, I'm awake, I'm not particularly what you'd call gregarious. So having to get up an hour early for the task didn't help.

But once I started talking to to kids it didn't matter. The four or five I knew said cheerful hellos, and the teachers (whose job never gets quite the respect it deserves, if only for shepherding skill) gradually got the amorphous crowds of kinds formed into lines.

My daughter brought over my small group (what's the collective noun for a group of teenagers anyway?), and introduced them. One of the girls shares my daughter's name (Olivia); I greated her with I have your name tattooed on my chest, which was data she seemed utterly flabbergasted by. The two boys proceeded to try a flim-flam on me by quickly switching up names ("No, I'm nick! No, I am nick!"). I pointed at the tall one and said, "no, you're Beavis", and to the short one, "and you're Butt-Head. Clear?" They looked at each other and started to giggle, but didn't play the name game with me again.

Later, my daughter reported the over-heard conversation;

"Olivia's dad is scary."

"No, he's not really"

"He is, kind of - imagine meeting him in a dark alley."

In other words, we now had our understanding.

And so, into busses and off to San Francisco zoo, on what you might call a typical San Francisco late spring day; foggy, damp, bitterly cold.

I have mixed feelings about zoos. I love animals; while I don't really like owning pets, I'm endlessly fascinated by the behaviors of wild animals. I grew up watching documentaries (and in fact, when I find time, still turn to cable channels that play nature stuff), I used to endlessly study books on all sorts of animals. I grew up learning about simian social behaviors as my father studied it (he was a communications teacher, and I grew up on evolutionary biology and communication physiology).

But zoos, particularly older ones, are very often filled with too-big creatures in too-small enclosures.

As with many older zoos, SF zoo is gradually replacing out-dated enclosures and building more natural exhibits. They've a long way to go, but they're heading the right direction, and many of the older enclosures (like the elephant house) are closed down right now while entirely new exhibits are built.

So the trip didn't leave me with the usual sense of sadness I tend to have when I leave an older zoo. Maybe that's cause my main focus wasn't on the wild animals that live there, but the wild animals that I had under my temporary care.

I haven't spent a lot of time with packs of free-range teenagers (at least, since I was one). And I was pleased to see that, even though in some ways these suburban thirteen year olds are much older than the calendar shows (my god, a lot of them seem to be dating already, and a lot of the girls are wearing clothing that could have made me insane at that age), in many ways they were very much kids. They wanted begged to see the petting zoo, first thing after we finished visiting each child's assigned animal (where each child in my group did a small public recitation of facts about black rhinos, chimpanzees, meerkats, kangaroos, and hippos - the recitations being their own idea, not part of the assignments). They were dragging me in five different directions at once at some points in sheer excitement over howler monkeys, tapirs, lemurs, prairie dogs, and capybara.

Despite the fact that the day was freezing and none of us was dressed for it, none of them bitched or whined. There was no show of i'm too grown up for this, no jaded eye-rolling. When it was time to go, not a one of them wanted to leave. Only the fact that the bus was warm and that the wind was getting colder got them out the gate.

I've spent a lot of time on field trips with classes from pre-school through fifth grade; I was afraid this was going to be a completely different experience, particularly when the kids I had today were described as so-and-so and so-and-so's girlfriend, in both cases. I was wrong; they were just kids, and I remembered why, every now and then, I think working with kids would be a great thing to do for a living.

Of course, I got to leave them all at school and get in my truck and go home. Which is what lets me think that from time to time. People who do this every day have a calling, or a level of patience I can't fathom. But doing this every once in a while - getting the hell out of work, watching kids be kids, and showing 'em that authority figures can be cool, weird people who get it, it just feels like a really good way to spend a morning.

After the medication wore away, I was left with a soup of words. It wasn't a fetid thing, but it was un-refined, incoherent. The ingredients were there, but inexpertly mixed.

It wasn't incomprehensible; it was simply kaleidoscopic.

This is something like what I was trying to say the other night. I'm not sure it makes as much sense now as it did then, but what sense it makes is more readily parsed by those outside the writer's own skull.

it just turned summer somewhere between friday and monday - i can't quite tell when because I was well and truly out of it all day sunday.

But it's 75 already and headed the general direction of 90, and i can NOT get my head around the concept of work today. I keep thinking, don't go don't go don't go. Only thing is, work laterly has nothing to do with progress, it has to do with run-as-fast-as-you-can-to-slow-the-backwards-motion. Which, in a word, sucks, and which drains me slowly of all will to work.

It's goin' to hell anyway, I think; instead of fighting it, let's facilitate it.

There' part of me that wants to step back from anything that looks like a sinking ship and add fire; if it's going down, send it down in a spectacular fashion. Don't just crash your car, roll it and send it off a goddamn cliff.

I don't like to do things in small ways. Subtle, to me, means use a smaller sledge hammer.

Of course the sinking ship and crashing car analogies are hyperbole; nevermind though. That's the feeling the struggle sometimes has, when the struggle is not toward good or great, but toward mediocrity, and when the cause of the struggle is corporate strategy meets corporate schedule. The result for me is an excercise in frustration, and of all things, I tolerate ongoing frustration least well.

But let's get back to summer. Because it's summer, when the sun shines and the clothing decreases, when skin darkens, that I most long for days by the sea, boats, the scent of sweat and coconut and rum. I walk out into the bone-dry northen california heat and wish, desperately, for that island-dark girl who's supposed to be bringing me my drink.

Instead, I spend a monday morning, as the mercury creeps up, in a DMV waiting line to replace a lost driver's license. No sea, no rum, no coconut. No beautiful dark-haired, nut-brown girl beside me on glittering black sand. No salt on my skin, no smell of ocean, fruit, tropical flowers. No afternoon trade winds. Just a queue, bored government workers, a large room filled with people who wish, like me, to be anywhere else.

One of my literary heros, Kurt Vonnegut, has shuffled off this mortal coil, as they say.

Cory says it better than I can.

Vonnegut's short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, was one of those books that opened my world. My first significant sci-fi, my first read by someone who'd be considered a major, modern literary figure, my first encounter with short stories. Pieces like Harrison Bergeron, Monkey House, and Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog made huge impressions on my young mind; possibly the still influence my thinking to this day (certainly I still refer to Bergeron often.)

One more hero gone off into the sunset. Hey, Kurt? Say hey to Hunter for me, k?

I ran across a bit of dialog in a book I was reading last night - a CJ Cherryh novel, one of Fantasy/Sci-fi's perennial greats, and in my opinion, one of the greatest writers working today (even if her recent books have been someone off her usual mark). She's a brilliant, insightful, lyrical writer, someone who seems to understand human beings on a more deep and fundamental level that most, and someone who can take that understanding and build characters with the full, conflicted, confused richness that comes with being human.

Strangely, some of her best observations on the human heart and mind come from the point of view of non-human intelligence; as if humanity's real nature is best seen from outside.

This quote then is from such a character, Tristan, from Cherryh's Fortress series.

"This too: love you must have, love that come to you from outside, un-bought and unasked for. Do you understand? You cannot hold it. You cannot compel it. But you must keep it when it comes."

"How do I keep it, then?"

"Deserve it".

This captures something that is central to the way I try to live and what I expect in others. Love isn't a thing to be expected, assumed, compelled, or demanded. Love is something that is earned; one gains it by being deserving of it. One keeps it my striving to remain deserving.

I tried to express this the other day, and failed, and then found this quote; That, I said to myself, is exactly what I was striving for.

Christ, I wish I could marshall my thoughts enough to post something coherent. I just keep wanting to post songs that have the feel of the moment. I've started to post Richard Thompson songs, Be Bop Deluxe songs, Miles Davis songs, Graham Parker songs, and several more I can't quite recall.

What I really want though is to post my own words, and they're just not... coming... together...

It's just been a bitch of a time since the new year; so many little or not so little things have gone wrong or needed attention or consumed my time and energy. I have a list of shit that needs doing that just gets loner and longer, and the things I want, like writing, like taking off from work here and there to appreciate the beautiful things, like just catching my breath, are off the fucking table completely right now. I'm having to steal minutes for myself, not hours.

Work is a fucking pressure cooker. we're working on some new product or other (and as usual, no, I don't know what it is, and if I knew, I couldn't say, and if I told you, I'd just have to kill you), and it's one of those projects where we need eighteen months to do it, so are asked to do it in three. My team, being the support-and-infrastructure people, have to deliver everything from new internal web sites and wikis to CAD tools and licenses to new machines, to new development methodolgies, and we have to do it yesterday. We're all spinning and the work, the real design and engineering work, hasn't even started yet.

I feel like I ain't had a day off in three months, and I'm not seeing the end of this when I look forward. My team went into this short handed by three people and have effectively had our workload doubled.

I am, how you say, a bit stressed.

But what bothers me is that I can't tap into the creative center to even express it. I'm just bitching here, and I don't want to bitch. Bitching-blogs are a royal bore (almost as bad as how-great-is-my-sex-life blogs). In the past I've been able to get angry and I can't even work that up for any prolonged rant. I wind up with low-grade irritated rather than that big seething angry that I can channel into sex and violence. THAT makes me feel better, this, I just wind up fed up with myself.

Feh.

Seems I've pretty much given up blogging.

I could claim it's for lent, but I've given religion up for lent.

In fact though, it has more to do with time than with anything else. Work has become a fuckin' whore, a new project starting up, a new team in lower-middle-upper-management and a re-org, bringing with it a sea-change in priorities that switches direction as often as a witched-up wind.

We're short of hands and long on tasks, and the hoped-for new staffing is still a dream, not even a hope.

I've tried to work up the energy to be creative, or even communicative; it's not coming, aside from a burst of inspiration in a blog comment or other. In truth only minor moments of joy are getting me through the day without my head exploding.

Little things, like the ipod jack that came stock in my truck, finally letting me choose my own music and getting me playing several bands I hadn't listened to in a while.

Little things like the ring I'm due to get any day from my pal Carlos at Sinners Inc.

Little things, like watching firefly with my daughter; she's old enough to get the sci fi now, and old enough to handle the more adult moments, without understanding jokes like I'll be in my bunk. Plus, no one else appreciated the fact that I own the exact same bowie knife Jayne carries (including a replica of the sheath) quite as much as Olivia did.

Little things like looking out my east-facing window and seeing winter turning into spring, and knowing that way lies better things and better times.

Little things that make the day better. Shiny, as they say on firefly. Shiny little things.

I have a Verizon Razr I *just bought* that I no longer need, as I just switched to cingular.

Like this. Plus! It has this super-cool skin.

If you can use it, i'll sell cheap (it cost me like $200 bucks but I just wanna get some of that back). Talk to me...

EDIT: The phone's gone, I found a victim buyer. Thx baby, and you know yer gettin' the goods.

Between work and real life issues, I'm completely failed as a blogger lately. I'd say I'm taking a break from blogging only that's far more organized than i feel right now. I don't even have time or bandwidth to think.

My world's gone into hyperdrive - and I'm not seeing anything to slow that down for a while.

I think I'm only updating because I'm tired of seeing the same post sitting here day after day.

I posted the caricature version of me from that bar-mitzvah-on-the-bay; here's the real version.

(click for full size)

That's Alcatraz to my right (your left), and the city of San Francisco on my left (your right). The bridge you see is the SF bay bridge, and if i were looking over my left shoulder I'd be looking at the Golden Gate Bridge.

I got to get t'movin' baby I ain't lyin'
My heart is beatin' rhythm and it's right on time
So be my guest, you got nothin' to lose
Won't ya let me take you on a sea cruise
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
Won't ya let me take you on a sea cruise

I had another of those plaguing 3am wake-ups last night; 3am, which I've taken to calling the worrying hour for it's always the hour at which people wake to brood, or dread. It's the hour when we stare into the back heart of despair and can't see a way out.

It's not a singular thing that wakes me up at 3am; the BIG ISSUE I can sleep on; i know it, I understand it, I can cope. No, it's Bukowski's Shoelace, it's the small, sharp implements of life, boring tiny holes into the skull. You can hear them at 3am; the world, and the mind, quiet down, and let in the grinding, scraping sounds of creeping madness.

I lie awake at 3am and stare at an invisible ceiling and make fatigue-addled lists of things I need to be doing; lists in my head that will be gone before morning, sleep or not. I let hopes run away with me, dread both named and un-named all the while dragging me down into the mire.

I dare not hope at 3am; it's the meat the night's demons feed on.

I lay in the dark for two hours, chasing elusive sleep, knowing that around me people blissfully slept, or rose for jobs that start at ungodly hours; finally one thought drew me from bed.

Coffee.

I sat in the dark waiting for a sunrise, drinking hot, black coffee and thinking; giving in to thoughts and hopes and dreams but not fears; they're swept away with the cobwebs of sleep, at least for a moment. Chased by caffeine and sunrise, they retreat into dark, grim holes of night.

I look for a battle to fight. Enemies evaporate like smoke; I've nothing to smite, and the prize of my mind's eye remains just beyond reach.

I hate nights like these.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and she mentioned how many years she'd been working without a break.

I started to do the math for myself.

I started working when I was 18 or 19. Seriously working, full-time working.

The next couple of years I went through a few jobs, fired twice (once my own fault, once not, and then a few temp or short term jobs). Started my own business doing hauling and odd jobs, working as hard as I've ever worked in my life for crap pay (but damn, I looked good, tan and fit, hands calloused, covered with bruises and scratches. My hair was long and sun-bleached, I looked like a surfer and I was my own boss).

While the work wasn't constant, there was no break; when I was outta work I was also completely out of money, no one taking care of me, no one funding me, and constantly struggling to get work.

By the time I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I had full time work (at Seagate). I worked there for three years, and then was laid off, and went to a startup company as quick as I could find work. That also ended in a layof,f after a couple years where I built computer systems, tested them, managed inventory, worked shipping and receiving, wired computer rooms and phone systems, and drove the company truck. After that I went on to my other most physical job, working in a used computer parts warehouse; a filthy, dusty warehouse full of the most amazing junk you've ever seen. I ran the warehouse, driving a forklift (god DAMN I was good at that), packing weird, heavy equipment, climbing pallet racks like a monkey to get shit we could not reach with a forklift. I came home every day sweaty, filthy, covered in greasy black dirt. The job sucked, but not because the work was hard; I liked that. No, it sucked because my boss was not just a crook, but a madman in all the wrong ways. But again, it was work that made me strong, and work that connected me, via a random association of friends-of-friends, into some friendships I still have today. And I thanked the boss when he fired me, saying I needed to get myself the fuck out of here.

From there, I went directly on to temp jobs; Apple being one of the places I work for a short time (in what's now the iPod team headquarters building, though in between then and now it's been several other companies), and then went to Sun; not a break in between.

Six years at Sun; hard work, and connections made, friends I still have. Some of them even read this blog. And then Cisco, a job I had before I even left Sun. Nine long hard years, where I learned to be an engineer (a complete career re-boot), got a taste of managing people, and burned myself out in a lot of ways, working harder and harder for little or no recognition (but for a good chunk of money thanks to the dotcom era). Cisco was where I learned how big corporations eat people alive.

And then out of Cisco and to Apple; another career reboot, moving from software to hardware; six and a half years now, both some of the best times and the worst times in my adult life (for reasons that have little to do with work, yet which make getting through the day and getting to work even harder than usual).

I add all this up, and I get something like twenty-seven years. That's how long I've been working. Twenty-seven years, and while there are gaps in there, the gaps are times when I was trying desperately to find work. Not times when I had time.

Almost 8000 work days. 16000 commutes. 64000 if we only count eight hours a day; though I average more like ten hours a day in truth.

The numbers freak me out a little bit. This wasn't quite how I visualized my life; wage slave.

I was talking to my friend Jeff - my long (very long) time friend, my tattoo brother, my former boss, my current bosses bosses boss (or something like that); and it was one of those bizarre conversations you can only get with a long time friend. It started with Jeff peeking over the divider between urinals while we were taking a leak; he's theatrically checkin' out the business; I of course, with the week I'm having, didn't even notice that the man next to me was looking at my cock.

"You're extra spaced today", he said, and I had to agree. And Jeff is the kind of guy who's seen me as spaced as I get, so he should know.

We started chatting - we don't see each other as much as we used to at work. We talked about how hard we're working, how burnt we both are; we talked about the tattoo I'm getting and my choice of who to do it. He asked how old my kids are now, and was aghast at the numbers I gave him. We stood looking at each other, shaved heads no longer tight and shiny, 5 o'clock shadow hair-lines receding now on their own under the shaving that has always been a style choice. Both of us with bright silver-gray threads in our facial hair that were not there a year or two ago.

"We're fucking old, Jeff" I said to him, and he shook his head.

"This wasn't how it was supposed to me," he answered. And I agreed.

"We were supposed to be dead by now," he said.

"That's what I'd planned on on."

He's right. We didn't figure, when we were twenty, on someday being tired, over-worked middle-aged guys. We rode our motorcycles and did drugs and didn't always do safe things, we didn't worry. We looked for risks to take. We were not afraid. We tattooed ourselves and pierced ourselves and didn't think about what it'd be like to be old men.

Jeff's right. We really were not meant to live this long; Jeff and I were our own sort of warriors, and we should have gone into battle of one sort or another, shone bright, flashed, and then gone down. Fight and drink and die.

Somehow we didn't. And neither of us are sure how that happened. But it's nice to have a brother there who understands.

I was going to post some fluffy light-hearted thing today about it being the anniversary of three years blogging. Today though I don't feel like a party.

I feel more like a silent, angry brood. I feel more like banging my head against a wall than like waving the big foam finger.

Why? Fuck if I know. Maybe I just slept wrong. Maybe I'm just grumpy 'cause it's a holiday yet I'm working. Maybe I'm exhausted with other people's problems.

Whatever.

This is the kind of day where i tend to take my blog down 'cause I'm generally so out of sorts it just makes me angry. So if this all goes away, you know why.

EDIT:

I for some reason woke up in a total fuckin' funk this morning. Dunno what's up. I somehow managed to turn my day around a bit by just gettin' outta work a little early for a change. So I'm not feeling anywhere near as sullen and I did this morning.

I would have deleted this entry if there were not already comments on it. But I'm nowhere near as crabby.

This is so utterly fucked up.

"Immolate Me Elmo" - click to play

Uh, props, or something, to Cory at boingboing for that.

I sit on new year's eve. I'm drinking wine, cooking for family. And thinking of those not present.

My mother, alone in the prison of her home and her infirmity and her fear; she could come here, but will not.

My father, my brother, dead now ten years or so; the first, a heart attack because he loved his cigarettes and brandy and bacon better than he loved - well, than he loved anything; my brother, because he chose self-pity and the need to justify himself, to himself, over treatment for an ailment that was mostly between his ears.

My father in law, who lies now in a hospital bed, drugged into insensibility because waking forces him to deal with his own mortality; a surgery that took half his insides to save his life. He sleeps, thanks to chemicals, with the innocence of a baby, while tubes bring him nutrients and fluids, and take away his waste; machines help him breath, and insure his heart keeps beating.

And I imagine others; some who should be here and are not, friends with families or loves or responsibilities; or those across a country or an ocean, missed, longed for, desired.

I drink to you all; be ye here, or me there, or all us in some fine, warm place where the new year can be welcomed by the light of bright stars.

My wine glass sits empty, and i've a pot of soup to stir, stock from christmas' roasted turkey, a bounty of vegetables, butter and cream and herbs and fresh baked bread perfuming my kitchen.

Happy new year, friends, lovers, loved ones, relatives, readers.

Happy new year, those gone, across a distance of miles, or years, or below a layer of simple dirt. Happy new year all ye; love to all, and I drink to a better year for us all.

Some days you just wake up fuckin' mad at the world.

You know what I'm sayin'. King Kong on the big 'ol building, swatting away annoying insect airplanes. Pissed and with all the power in the world to do nothing back to life's tiny, maddening annoyances.

Bukowski said it better.

I want it to be pissing down rain or better yet, white-out ice storm, thunder and lightening, sturm und drang to match my mood inside. Instead i look out my window and it's a dull, gray sky and a dull, gray city.

Though sometimes, some small spark comes out of it all and lights up a day like this, something that makes one feel better. I try to smile, and take pleasure in life's smaller joys, rather that it's over-whelming small annoyances. Otherwise, i just go looking for ways to hurt myself.

Hell, when i left California, it was fall, almost summer weather.

Now i come back and it's freezing - literally. That is a cruel trick to play on someone who's been wearing a kikepa/pareo and flip flops and nothing else for most of the last three weeks.

brrrrrr!

And yes, that means I'm home. More to say, and pictures, as soon as I get time.

I'm incredibly wired.

If you've met me you know this isn't unusual. But I mean, I'm incredibly wired even FOR ME.

It's just sunk in that i have one week before vacation, and at least three weeks worth of things to do; mom to take care of (my mother's having some health issues and is needing a little help but mostly a whole lot of emotional support, and being the only surviving relative it's been me and only me for a couple months now); work, which means all the things no one else (literally, no one else in the whole company, i'm one of THOSE people) knows how to do have to be written down in my wiki so that people have a chance of being able to get through a week without calling me. I have to gather up my scuba gear - unused for two fucking years if you can belive that, i havn't been underwater since fiji in August of '04 - and make sure everything's working, replace what needs replacing. I have to pack that up (more gear than it used to be, now that my daughter's diving), i have to take care of my in-laws computer melt-down (which, typically, happens at the worst possible time).

And of course i have that time-compression moment where the mental list of things to do feels bigger than it really is, and the time feels less, in inverse proportion.

What this all does it put me in a near-fugue state where I'm vibrating so fast I'm still; i can't get anything done for task switching. I'm about to split in two and fire off in different directions.

One more week i keep thinking. Soon that will be good. Right now I just feel the stress and can't see pa