Here’s a few pictures I took of Jeff and Jason (who he is a Big Brother to — not the Orwell kind of big brother, the ‘helping out a kid without a dad in his life’ kind) putting up the Christmas tree. I officially helped because I placed two bulbs and, I think, a candy cane.
I’m not sure what Jeff was doing in the fourth shot but I took my best guess.
Jeff and Jason begin assembling the never-needs-watering tree.
Jeff and Jason begin assembling the never-needs-watering tree.
Jeff ponders the utility of the tree as an umbrella.
Jeff ponders the utility of the tree as an umbrella.
Partly I wanted a change, partly it was tacit acknowledgment that my hair was thinning and getting thinner, as if suffering under some kind of gypsy curse (or just bad genes). And partly it was because my hair has always been fussy and kind of stupid and not having it makes it much easier to deal with.
As a bonus, I got a tribble out of the deal:
Fortunately I only have one head to shave so there is no risk of a second tribble and the subsequent infinite tribble breeding that would follow the two meeting up.
Here’s another bit of poetry I wrote back when I was forced to do so in that creative writing course I took in college (you can see a couple of other entries here).
This is one in a series of poems I wrote using the title The Ride. Put together, the set of poems was like a concept album in handy text form. Or something. This ride is not as terrible as some of the others but it should provide some evidence as to why I did not go on to become a poet. It’s a love letter to the rollercoaster. Maybe one day I’ll try reworking it sometime to see if my poetic terribleness has changed with age.
The Ride (number eight)
Wooden girders challenge
dare, invite
I cannot resist.
There is a certain smell here
Something faint and not easily determined
Cotton candy wispy, its sweet scent
catching the breeze and riding away
Corn dogs and greasy tacos, a trace of dust
peeling up off hot pavement
and into my face
Memories of others who have stood here
fifty years before.
I queue up, handing a rumpled ticket
that has spent too long in my pocket
A boyfriend squeezes his girl,
laughing as she shudders
A spandex suit with a woman poured in
giggles with apparent excitement
A gang of boys, each trying to outdo
each other with trendy clothes and
unique mousse stylings, declare their
lust for the ride; this is the tenth
time they’ve been here today.
I step up to the gate and watch
as a train pulls in, its passengers
whooping and screaming and swooning
and laughing and sitting utterly still
with no expression at all.
The gate opens and I bravely slide into
the front seat. The woman in spandex
squirms in beside me and a
padded metal bar locks on our laps.
There is no escape.
The train clatters out of the station
and turns to the first hill.
A chain takes hold and we are tilted back,
lifted toward the sky.
An indefinable moment exists
when the train reaches top
There is no feeling of movement,
no sound as the car is released
from the chain
Only the sky, completely clear,
neither far nor near
Then my stomach lurches upward
and I let my arms fly
My tuckus rises out of the seat
and I wonder why people do this
But I know why.
The sensation is reversed going
back up; my organs bob in confusion
What have we done to deserve this abuse?
Wind roars and the car trembles,
seemingly more frightened than its occupants
as it lifts and falls, turns and
hurtles into deep valleys
All too soon it ends.
Distant and not so distant screams
whistle away, the train breathes more calmly
and we are back in the station.
A uniformed and geeky sixteen year old,
blessed only by a lack of acne, quickly
motions us away.
The spandex woman is babbling incoherently.
I think she liked the ride.
She asks if I want to go again.
My endorphins answer for me
and we queue up for another go.
With the release of Minecraft 1.0 our little multiplayer group has started over on a new world based on the number 3. After establishing a main base of operations beneath a floating island we set out on individual projects. Circuit is building a giant house surrounded by Minecraft’s patented Wacky Water®, Q has been making rail lines in the sky in every direction, Postal is making his usual assortment of towers and castles and elf has burrowed underground where he has constructed a fiendishly efficient monster grinder. I’ll document all of those in a later post but for now, here’s my first big project.
I was inspired by Q’s pyramid on the last world so I built my own on a 64×64 grid on the desert not too far from our main area. When it was done I decided, like an unsatisfied Pharaoh, that it was too small, so I built another one beside it on a 128×128 grid. Having completed the second and massive pyramid I am beginning to understand why it too the ancient Egyptians twenty years and thousands of men to build these things — and mine was only made of pixels! On the other hand the ancient Egyptians never had to face creepers, either. The pyramid’s outer shell was completed with only two creeper incidents causing minor damage.
This is the view from the high point of the sky rail line that comes out to the pyramids.
To the left you can see a stone bridge and path connecting to the main base, with the rail line in the center of the shot. Next up will be the pyramid interiors and everyone else’s kooky stuff.
Minecraft is strangely soothing as you work out the most efficient ways to build silly things. And smiting creepers is always good fun, too.
Here is my sad story. But it has a happy ending, so read on.
There were a couple of things I did wrong in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2011, the main one being that I didn’t really prepare at all. Sure, I had come up with a few ideas to choose from in October:
Last year’s unfinished project.
A story idea I’d been kicking around for 20+ years.
A short story idea that I felt would cork in longer form.
An idea that was nothing more than a neat-sounding title. Why not?
Why not? In order:
Unfinished project: Maybe it was unfinished for a reason! I scratched this one off the list pretty quickly.
Story idea 20+ years old: I actually think the idea is fine but the story is beyond the scope of a 50,000 word 30 day dash, which I will get to in more detail shortly.
Expanding the short story: the idea is a good one but it requires research. Too much research (see #2).
The neat-sounding title: Yeah, I’m going to write a 50,000 word novel in one month based on nothing more than a neat title. In a fever dream, perhaps.
And thus problem #1: not enough preparation.
November also turned out to be Health Hell Month for me or HHM as I like to call it. When I went to dinner at a friend’s I mentioned I’d been experiencing a sudden health issue. The first word out of her mouth: “Prostate?” Yes, I am a man in his mid-to-late 40s. Yes, the frigging prostate. And then other ailments followed, minor but annoying and I found myself taking a mix of antibiotics (the ones I’m not allergic to), anti-inflammatory agents and dealing with discomfort, outright pain and when everything finally seemed to be mending back together I caught a nasty cold.
Problem #2, then: stupid body.
Another significant issue I had was trying to fit my ideas to the format, the main reason for the deaths of ideas #2 and #3 as outlined above. I didn’t want to write an epic that would go on for 200,000 words then consider myself a NaNo winner when I completed the first 50,000. I have no problem with others doing this, but it wouldn’t work for me. I needed something that could be written quickly, succinctly and with the ending reached before November 30th. My 2009 project was perfect for this — some people get on a late-night ferry, monsters hop on board and a night of snacking and horror follows. Simple, direct. None of the ideas I latched onto this year fit into a tidy little box like the ferry ride of doom. My ideas were too ambitious, effectively sabotaging my effort before I had even started writing. Sure, I might have pulled off one of them somehow if I had persevered but the chance of that happening was pretty slim.
Problem #3 can be thus be thought of as having square pegs and a whole lot of round holes.
I had suspended work on the second draft of my 2009 novel to work on NaNoWrMo 2011 and in that first week of November I found myself wishing I was working on that instead of flailing about with the current contest. This is not the mindset of a successful NaNoian.
And so it was that my mind and body, working together, defeated my attempt to write a slapdash novel in 30 days. And that’s not such a bad thing, really. National Novel Writing Month is a great way for a would-be writer to light a fire under his butt, to get that motivation going, to get into that very simple habit of writing every day, instilling discipline and reveling in the sheer joy of banging out words. But in a way I think I’m already there and this year’s NaNoWriMo came as a distraction. I didn’t need it.
Perhaps I’m just rationalizing my failure but I am confident I don’t need NaNoWriMo anymore as a tool to get me starting to write. I’m already there. How about NaNoWriMo as nothing more than a fun way to crank out a quick book? Sure. But that’s not what I wanted to do during the 30 days of November. And so I didn’t. Not in the way I might have planned, of course, but the destination was the same in the end.
I look forward to continuing to write, whether it’s forum posts, this blog, a short story or a novel. And maybe next year if I really want to write a quickie novel, NaNoWriMo 2012 will be there for me and I’ll use my foreknowledge to actually plan properly. Assuming the Mayans were wrong, of course.
R.E.M. has released their final album, a compilation that for the first time covers their five albums with I.R.S. as well as the 10 they recorded for Warner. Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011 also includes the obligatory new tracks (three, in this case) to lure completionists into buying the double disc set — a tactic that worked better before the ascendancy of digital music. Now an R.E.M. fan can just buy the bonus tracks separately. Record executives somewhere are shaking their fists over that.
Here’s the total list of tracks via Wikipedia. As one would expect of a retrospective, it covers the band’s entire career and includes all of the singles/hits along the way. It’s also clear — since the band chose the tracks themselves — that they have a few personal favorites (Automatic for the People gets four tracks).
They picked 40 songs so I’m going to do the same and pick my favorite 40 songs and see how our lists compare. Like R.E.M., I’ll pick at least one track from every non-compilation album, including the Chronic Town EP released in 1981 (30 years ago, egad).
Stumble (Chronic Town)
Sitting Still (Murmur)
Catapult (Murmur)
Pilgrimage (Murmur)
7 Chinese Bros. (Reckoning)
So. Central Rain (Reckoning)
(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville (Reckoning)
Pretty Persuasion (Reckoning)
Feeling Gravity’s Pull (Fables of the Reconstruction)
Maps and Legends (Fables of the Reconstruction)
Begin the Begin (Lifes Rich Pageant)
These Days (Lifes Rich Pageant)
Fall on Me (Lifes Rich Pageant)
Cuyahoga (Lifes Rich Pageant)
The Flowers of Guatemala (Lifes Rich Pageant)
Finest Worksong (Document)
Exhuming McCarthy (Document)
It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) (Document)
World Leader Pretend (Green)
Orange Crush (Green)
Losing My Religion (Out of Time)
Texarcana (Out of Time)
Nightswimming (Automatic for the People)
Find the River (Automatic for the People)
Crush With Eyeliner (Monster)
Bang and Blame (Monster)
New Test Leper (New Adventures in Hi-Fi)
Bittersweet Me (New Adventures in Hi-Fi)
Electrolite (New Adventures in Hi-Fi)
Suspicion (Up)
At My Most Beautiful (Up)
Daysleeper (Up)
Imitation of Life (Reveal)
Leaving New York (Around the Sun)
Man-Sized Wreath (Accelerate)
Supernatural Superserious (Accelerate)
Discoverer (Collapse Into Now)
Uberlin (Collapse Into Now)
Oh My Heart (Collapse Into Now)
It Happened Today (Collapse Into Now)
My original list had too many songs (five from Lifes Rich Pageant alone) so I culled a few to get down to 40. I found it especially difficult to pick only a handful of favorites from Murmur, Reckoning and Lifes Rich Pageant — each of these albums are remarkably lean, each song equally worthy of inclusion. A big surprise was finding four songs from Collapse Into Now. Although it sounds drastically different than something like Murmur recorded 28 years earlier, it’s perhaps R.E.M.’s most thoughtful and mature work, but free of the pretension and torpor that afflicted lesser efforts like Around the Sun. It is, in other words, one of their best albums.
Comparing R.E.M.’s list to mine, we overlap on 18 songs, roughly half and we both matched on at least one song from every album. And looking over the official listing I see they included “Bad Day” from the In Time compilation album. Cheaters. It’s a worthy song, though, so I could probably find some song to punt in order to squeeze it in.
Notably absent from my list are some prominent hits like “Stand”, “Shiny Happy People” and “Everybody Hurts”. I’m not one of those who hates R.E.M.’s silly songs nor grinds my teeth at their ballads but I felt in each case there were other songs on each album that resonated more for me (even if they were ultimately overplayed, like “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”, the song that was my R.E.M. gateway drug).
And now a bonus list, my picks for R.E.M.’s best five albums (they released 15):
Lifes Rich Pageant
Murmur
Automatic for the People
Reckoning
Collapse Into Now
It’s fashionable to think of Automatic as overrated and over-serious but I still appreciate that the band produced a richly dark meditation on mortality that expanded their musical palette with confidence (and was more successful than the various experiments of Out of Time). The simple beauty of “Nightswimming” and “Find the River” lift the album significantly.
The worst album? That would have to be Around the Sun. It’s perhaps the most personal album, nearly all of the songs centering around relationships, but the pacing and energy of the songs never picks up. It’s the musical equivalent of a car stuck in second gear. Even the allegedly peppy songs like “Wanderlust” never generate much heat. The musicianship and vocals are fine throughout but they are in service to songs that are ultimately dull (“Leaving New York” is a solid opener, though). While Up and Reveal also had their share of so-so songs, neither album falls into the slumber of Around the Sun.
This should really be a Facebook non-content post but I only post on FB every six months or so as the mood strikes.
I have a cold and I don’t get colds very often but they still do indeed suck. The stuffy head, the lack of energy, the desire to nap at non-napping times, the urge to do a lot of nothing.
As I said to someone, I feel like a kitten — weak and fuzzy, but cute. More scruffy than cute at the moment. Maybe more of a tomcat kitten than an adorable one, perhaps.
Back in October I espied a strange sight at my old jogging grounds at China Creek Park. It was this sitting on the northeast baseball diamond:
At long last (and with summer long gone) the city had decided to bring in fresh bark to spread over the badly-deteriorated trail at China Creek. Hooray!
We then move forward to November 19th. With summer even more long gone than before, I noticed that the number of bark piles had shrunk:
Apparently more bark had been delivered and various people had in turn spread it around the trail at the park. This created a visual effect not unlike that of a burrowing Bugs Bunny. It also made the trail entirely unusable:
Not to be deterred, the jogger below simply chose to run inside the trail, with the added bonus of making each lap a tiny bit shorter. Also note her colorful attire. Not many people can successfully pull off combining green, blue, black, pink and turquoise. Actually, I’m pretty sure no one can.
I will be strolling by China Creek in the next few days and will be curious to see what the state of the bark is. For the sake of the joggers, the walkers and even the misinformed dog owners, I hope it’s all nicely spread out. Well, moreso than it is now.
Yes, it’s been one glorious month of not-running. My weight at its low while running was 143 (that’s pounds, not kilograms — weight in kilograms as it applies to the human body is one of those things I could never quite wrap my brain around. It’s like a kilogram is too big so I could never properly relate it to what I learned using pounds). Today I weight 155 and I am fairly certain the extra weight is not from newly-developed washboard abs. Let me check. Nope, definitely not from washboard abs. In fact I have been quite naughty on my diet but have been taking steps to correct this of late. I’m hoping to avoid my peak non-running weight from earlier this year (157), so we shall see.
Thanks again, stupid ankle.
With no money for a bike helmet I am really hoping the friend of Jeff’s helmet can be found soon™ as riding is a way I can keep in shape without hurting my apparently delicate lower legs. There is still swimming to consider but I would still need to actually learn how to do it. I already know how to ride a bike and I’ve been assured my years of collective wisdom that one does not forget how to ride a bike. I would hope I am not the embarrassing exception to the rule.
I am still entertaining the idea that I might be able to run after two months, so I am planing on giving my ankle a good talking-to, followed by poking and prodding come mid-December. If all goes well I will try a short run. By then we may be knee-deep in snow but I’ll just consider that a bonus if I get tired and need to collapse, as a nice cushy snow drift would work well for that.
