Antarctica is Burning

Gjelder Hele Svalbard

2011-11-04T21:47:00.004-08:00

We can't fight the isbjornen on their terms, so we carry Rugers and Marlins. Signs on the street warn us this territory isn't fully under the control of the human species. The brochures suggest we carry nothing smaller than a .450 Marlin. The .458 Winchester is preferable. Nothing smaller than a 12-gauge slug gun if you prefer the smooth bore. Ten gauge is the better bet. SKS assault weapons aren't recommended but they're in the gun case at the hotel.

Signs in the butikken remind us to check our weapons at the door. The grocery aisles are free of carnivorous predators. Here we have subjugated other species: relegated them to cutlets to provide us protein. Here lie the swine, the crab, the hvalbif.

"Hvalbif?" says the blonde haired girl. She hefts the vacuum packed chunk, red purple like a palm-sized blood clot.

The Lonely Planet guide to Scandinavia provides me the English translation, which like most Scandinavian translations is more like a change of accent than a contextual recoding.

I say, "Sound it out," and she stands lip syncing to the word in her head.

"Hvalbif. I don't get it."

"For instance, to the bears we're boybif and girlbif."

The guy at the coffee shop tells us the score. Much easier to get a high powered weapon than rent a vehicle. At least you've paid for the ammo and one way or another they'll get the gun back, is the thinking.

He says, "You should practice shooting, of course, before you leave town. Just to make sure you can work it. People get scared and shoot nothing."

"Where do you practice?"

He raises an eyebrow.

"I mean, can you just shoot anywhere?"

With the look of an amateur trying to decode hieroglyphics he says, "But not toward the people, of course."

"Sure but what if I decide not to take a gun? Wouldn't that just be safer?"

"Why?"

"Because they're dangerous?"

"Well it's okay. Anyway it's your life. We haven't had anyone attacked by bear for at least five years. Except for a woman last week but she wasn't in town. She was over on the hilltop, unarmed. Against strong advisement."

"Which hilltop?"

"That one."

"The one by the church parking lot?"

"Yeh."

"And how badly was she hurt?"

"Well absolutely killed, of course. Did you want anything on this coffee? Perhaps chocolate?"

Longyearbyen is further north than McMurdo station is south. The t-shirts in the duty free shops remind us we are north seventy eight degrees, thirteen minutes. Plow a road and you could be at the pole in a seven hour drive. Twelve by snowmobile, if you can possibly rent one instead of a rifle. The capital of Svalbard doesn't look much different than McMurdo. Sans volcano there are the same mountain ranges, the same sea channels, the same hyper-insulated buildings and dirt roads. But upon slightly closer inspection mighty differences emerge. One difference is you don't have to go to survival school to stay at the SAS Radisson Polar Hotel. Another difference is you take your shoes off when wandering inside. Nobody checks to see if you're cold in Svalbard. There are daycare centers and grammar school yards replete with kids dressed in inches of insulation playing tag under the seething aurora.

The school yards are surrounded by fences. Parents stand outside waiting for the bell to ring and the kids to be released.

"Do these fences keep out the bears?" we ask one of the mothers who has taken an interest in we rare polar winter tourists. Who comes to Svalbard in the 24-hour darkness?

Crazy people asking about polar bears.

"No bears come into town."

"But if they did, do these fences keep them out?"

"But we shoot them first so we don't worry."

We walk down the road to the channel, and then up toward the peaks, toward what appears to be nowhere in polar terms. There is a yellowish blue stain on the horizon through which it's hard to see stars. The glow illuminates the snowy land pierced by stark black mountains draped in ice.
Eventually we come to a sign. It's a triangular pictogram, edged in red, rounded corners, black inside and stamped with a white iconic ursine form.

"So there is an international symbol for 'polar bear,'" I say to the blonde haired girl. "What do you think the words say?"

She doesn't know.

Later we find out it means "True in force all over Svalbard."

The wind bites into our thick clothing and wedges into a gap I hadn't seen when I got dressed. I pull my balaclava up over my nose which I learned in Antarctica was one of the most frostbite-prone areas on the human body.

And unlike Antarctica we have not had to get approval from any agency to walk down this road. And no one has had to make sure we're well-enough equipped. This is Norway where everyone is responsible for himself, and not only is it not the duty of those in charge to see to our safety, but they feel they would be insulting us if they did.

The natives must think we're daft. We're passed by a guy on a snowmobile, who must not be Norwegian because he slows and points to the sling on his shoulder, then takes off at speed. The dark metal melts into the night and it isn't until his red taillight fades to a point that I realize what he means.
"I would have gone for the Winchester," I say. "We should have shot at some of that driftwood for practice."

"But they were closed," she says. "And I'm not sitting around all weekend waiting for them to open. How often do you find yourself on Spitzbergen that you want to sit around a hotel room?"

"Aren't you interested to see what's on TV in Svalbard?"

She doesn't dignify the question. So I say, "Well, anyway, I probably wouldn't even see a polar bear in this gloom until it was too late. Damned isbjorn could drop down from one of these hills in a few seconds. We'd probably wind up shooting each other."

We walk until we realize the only reason we're not shivering is because we're walking. Then we head back toward the man-made yellow glow.

And on the high-cost tourist treks the guides do not insult you by making sure you have prepared appropriately for your adventure experience. If you are not dressed well, you will freeze. If you have not eaten you will starve. If you are thirsty you will dessicate. Proficiency is presumed. Incompetence is a surprise and upon encountering it they will do their best to keep the polar-challenged from dying, but this will detract from the experience of the others on the trek.

So when one on our dog sledding party discovered she was plunging into hypothermia half way through our trip toward the glacier, the guide simply pulled off one of his clothing layers and gave it to her.

"But now he's missing a coat," I said to the blond haired girl.

"He must be used to it."

"But it's minus twenty."

"But he gave her his coat. He must know."

"Do you think he'll freeze? He's got the gun."

"Maybe you don't freeze if you're from here."

"All human flesh freezes at the same temperature."

"What do you want me to say?"

"These Norwegians are very hearty people."

"They are hearty."

And when the brochure says: "You will have the experience of dog sledding, from choosing your dog to mushing across the tundras," they mean that you should be ready to go to the kennel and take the animal from its house and lash it to the harness.

Have you never been dog sledding? Then you will learn how this is done. You will learn how not to be bitten, which is to stay away from the mouth.

Our guide is Ivan. He says, "The first 400 meters out of the kennel are the hardest. There is a steep drop and a turn to the left. There is the feeling of falling off your sledge so do not fall off."

"What happens if I fall off?" I ask Ivan. I was born one to fall off things. It took me twenty years to learn to ski. I am certain I will not become a musher in my first 400 meters.

"You will then try not to fall off. This is the strong advisement. Please do not fall off. It is very difficult because once the dogs sense there is no person controlling them, they show the tendency to run very fast away from everyone. And of course it is night and there are bears."

"But if I fall off you can get the dogs back, right?"

"With some difficulty, this can be done. But I advise you to not fall off and it will be okay. And if you fall off you will not let go of the sledge no matter what. Please- no letting go." The LED lamp on his head needs no adjustment but he moves it anyway, and in doing so causes my unconscious headlamp check. My light is pointing toward the constellation of Orion and not toward anything that needs to be visible to an amateur musher. This I fix.

I mount the sledge the way I have been shown - one foot on the runner, one on the brake. I'm wearing mittens over my glove liners, so gripping the sledge handle requires more force than I expect.
The dogs howl and yap the way my neighbor's dog did before it died of heartworm. The dogs who have been left at their little dog houses in the snow join in the chorus. Ivan says, "They know what is going on and that they are not picked."

"Poor doggies," I say, suggesting I should have more than six of them lashed to my sledge. These are little guys compared to the 120-pound Akita I have at home. They don't weigh more than 30 pounds each and look emaciated. I wonder how they could pull a que ball across a billiard table. Ivan says, "Don't worry, it's enough," and his sledge begins to move. When my dogs see the lead sledge take off, they lunge forward against their harnesses and even with all my weight on the snow brake the contraption lurches.

I ease up on the brake and we begin to move smoothly out of the kennel gate and toward the open expanse of arctic twilight beyond, but immediately my lead dog disappears over what I discover to be a small cliff. With pressure on the brake I head over behind them, worrying all the time that with my mass combined with that of the sledge I outweigh the small dogs by over two times, and if I gather momentum I will pass them and this is not a cartoon and dragging the dogs downhill will be some degree of inadvisable badness I am unwilling to withstand. So I am hard on the brake and apologizing to those tiny creatures who are pulling so hard -

"I'm sorry doggies. You don't have to pull so hard because I have the brake on."

God has blessed the simple creatures with the lack of a cerebral cortex, so they have no means to become resentful and follow only their instinct, which is to pull until they die.

The trail curves hard left while we are descending. On the off camber turn my uphill runner tips and loses contact with the snow.

I shift my weight and concentrate on not falling.

And I do not fall.

Later, however, when I am not concentrating I do fall but I do not let go of the sledge and manage to drag myself back onto the moving runners like a hobo mounting an empty train car.

And even later, on the way back I fall off the sledge and lose my grip on a steep downward slope. As I roll to a stop I see my dogs accelerating forward, enjoying the sudden lack of an extra hundred kilos.
So I start screaming because I remember the woman who was absolutely killed for not following the advice, and I'm trying to move forward in the fading twilight, in a polar valley thousands of miles from my warm California home, surrounded by polar bears who haven't eaten in weeks -- aye, the females hibernate but the males hunt all winter -- unarmed in snow up to my knees, unclear which direction is the right one except to follow the sled tracks in the never ending darkness, night blind since laser surgery, frigid Svalbardian air seeping through the gap between my wind pants and parka, having forgotten nearly all of my Antarctic survival training (does it even work in the arctic?) --
this is an appropriate way for me to die, I suspect. If they had asked me before birth: "How do you want to go out?"

"What are my choices?"

"Well, there's cancer. Heart attack. Dementia, maybe accidentally eat rat poison. Violent crime. Air crash. Losing your dog sled in the Bolterdalen valley and freezing/being eaten by polar bears. Auto accident. That kind of thing."

"Are there other choices?"

"Many."

"I kind of like the dog sledding idea. It's unique."

"Very creative. Shall we put you down?"

"Please."

But I do not die in the Bolterdalen valley.

Instead, Ivan stops my dog sled somewhere far from where I have come to rest on the hillside. And because he is Norwegian and this is not a vacation for sissies who want to see Mickey Mouse he holds my lead dog and waits for me to struggle in the knee-deep snow instead of trying to reach me with the dogs in tow.

Under my polar clothes, my DNA remains the same. Despite frequent trips to the polar regions of the earth, my corporeal form believes the president's name is Caesar and that Pompeii is just down the street from the sheep dealer.

I reach Ivan drenched in sweat craving pasta and olive oil.

The blond haired girl stands on her sledge, foot on the brake, waiting for me. I am expecting a snide comment from her. None comes. I am sure she is willing herself to materialize on a different mushing adventure.

Ivan is holding my lead dog's harness in one hand. "I fell," I say to Ivan as I mount my sledge.

"My advice is not to let go of the sledge, no matter what."

"Yes. I see this to be true, now."

He reslings his Winchester and quickly scans the snow covered slopes around us. "Are we okay to go?"

I tell him I am. We get back to the kennel without incident.

Later that evening the blond haired girl says, "You liked that mushing trip, didn't you?"

"Yes, it was fun," I say because there is no upside to any other response.

"Tomorrow there is nothing to do. Maybe we should go again."

"It was an expensive trip and I almost died."

"You didn't almost die."

"But it was expensive."

"I was thinking we only live once and we should go on the longer all day trip to the ice cave."

"Are we suggesting that if I can't be killed cheaply, maybe throwing money at the problem will solve it?"

"Oh come on."

"Seriously. I fell off the sled in the middle of the wilderness. In the dark. It's not going to be light tomorrow or even for the rest of the week and I can't even find my way to the bathroom in our house at night. And did you see? Those dogs just took off. And how good a shot you think Ivan is? You think he could hit a moving bear that came tearing down one of those hills at me while I was flailing in the snow?"

"He stopped your dogs."

"And have you read the brochure for the ice cave trip? It says, 'Not recommended for those who are either claustrophobic or fear entombment.'"

"Oh come on. You're not claustrophobic."

"And I have to pay, like a thousand bucks."

"How many chances will you have to say,'I went mushing in Svalbard and climbed through a glacier cave?'"

"Maybe we should take the Segway tour of Baghdad instead."

She bats her eyelashes and pouts. This is the woman who thought it was fun to be hung by a massive bungee from the open rear door of a C130 circling over the south pole station so she could get digital pictures from a good angle.

Since I can no longer sire young, I must provide adrenaline. This is what the woman wants.

And the next day, I am once again on the dog sled in the Bolterdalen valley in the polar twilight. And then I am on my belly 30 meters below the surface of a moving glacier, sliding through a smooth tunnel in the white ice, six inches high and four feet wide, remembering the guinea pig I had as a child to keep myself from thoughts having to do with being buried alive, the path ahead lit by my LED lamp, my helmet brushing against massive clear icicle stalactites that break and crash against my body inflicting welts and bruises

"I advise not to knock them down," says our guide.

"I agree," I say. "Looks like you could get killed if one of those really big ones hit you."

"Nobody this year," he says.

But it is the beginning of the year.

A Course in Miracles

2011-10-22T20:35:00.000-08:00

In this exercise the judgment of "fairness" is taken from you. It is no longer yours to bestow. In this exercise you will imagine that everything is fair. It is not unfair that a hurricane destroys the lives of thousands in Central America. It is not unfair that unarmed citizens are killed by police. It is not unfair that your brother got a bigger ice cream cone than you. It is not unfair that some babies are born into wealth and others are born to crack-addicted mothers. It is not unfair that your candidate doesn't win or that you can't afford a vacation in Miami, or that your retirement savings were depleted by a Wall Street debacle, or that you didn't get the job at Facebook, or that dictators slaughter their opposition.
There is no justice. There is no accounting.
Everything is the same. Equality is bestowed upon everything that *is*.
In this exercise you imagine the end game for the soul is not heaven. The soul's reward is existence itself.
Hold that in your mind for a microsecond if you can.
Then go back to thinking what you want.

In my dream last night I met Robert Fripp. I was walking the dog. There was familiar guitar music coming from a garage on my street. When the dog and I walked past, I saw an old guy with glasses playing an electric guitar through a Fender Pig Nose.
I said, "Hey, you're Robert Fripp."
"All my life," he said, not stopping his riffing at all.
Damn. Robert Fripp is one of my neighbors.
"How long have you been living here?" I asked him.
"Long as I can remember," he said.
Imagine that. Robert Fripp is one of my neighbors and I never knew it.
I continued walking the dog when it hit me, "Hey, this is a dream."
Maybe this is the exercise: Ask yourself if you're dreaming.
Then I woke up but I didn't. Dream-within-dream.
What differentiates dreams from other altered states of consciousness is that when you're dreaming, you think it's real.
Unless you can stop it.
Repeat while awake - "Am I dreaming?"
Eventually you say it when you're in an altered state.
Then -- I was looking out the rear window of my childhood home in New Jersey. The house began to tilt as if the ground had started to move. Earthquake. I could hear the studs cracking in the walls.
I said to myself, "What a dream."
The house began to shake violently. The wallboard came down. Cabinets full of plates emptied onto the kitchen floor. Pictures flew from the walls. Outside, water sloshed from a neighbor's swimming pool as if it was in a bucket being lugged by a two-year old. There came a TV announcer voice:
"Reports are it's like a nuclear explosion has gone off downtown. There's a mile-wide crater and the shock wave..."
I asked, "Where?" The announcer started to answer but I stopped being able to hear.
I was crushed in the rubble.
Then I woke up.
I came to write this.
Is this a dream, too?

Now everything familiar is taken from you. You are dropped into a foreign land and left with no promise of return. You speak the language but you're surrounded by strangers and odd structures. Home is somewhere in the stars. You don't know exactly where it is or how to get back.
You ask yourself repeatedly, "Am I dreaming?"
You never wake up.
The blonde haired girl's grandfather died. There was a memorial service for him in Alaska. About a hundred people gathered.
He worked for the US Forestry Service. He produced the seminal work on the forest of the state of Alaska. To this day his paper is referenced by the U.S. government as the baseline upon which they assess the total value of the Alaskan timber resource.
To be clear: my wife's grandfather counted all the trees in Alaska. It was his life's work.
He was a veteran of World War II and fought in France. He took part in the liberation of Paris. He became an expert in aerial reconnaissance, which he later used to count all the trees in Alaska. He encamped his family in the US Alaskan territory before there was an infrastructure. No roads, electricity, or public water. He fathered two children. Raised them in Juneau. In between he worked in the Alaskan forest. His decline began when his wife was killed in an auto accident. Eventually, he forgot everything and everyone.
His children put him in a nursing home in Paulsbo, Washington. He remained there, visited by them several times per week until he died of complications related to his age and dementia.
I met him exactly once.
He was a cheerful fellow who followed us into the car and then shuffled with us down wooded trail by the river. I walked beside him for a small way. We had been introduced some time before, and I expect he had no idea who I was those few minutes later.
"What a great day for a walk," he said.
I don't remember what I said in reply.
"Don't often get a great day like this," he said.
What I remember about him was that he was friendly and extremely cordial. He didn't stop smiling.
I wondered if I would be as friendly and polite if I had been dropped into a foreign land full of strangers with no possibility of escape.

My father dreamed of tidal waves. He said he'd be standing on the beach and suddenly the razor line of the horizon would lift into the sky.
He told me it was a recurring nightmare.
His exercise was: "What do you do when God is coming to kill you?"
If he ever found the answer before he died, he never told me.

The blonde haired girl told me her grandfather had always said that when his time had come, he wanted to be put in his canoe and he would take to the water and never return.
We got a call from my sister-in-law. Grandfather had escaped the nursing home. No one saw him leave. The police had been notified.
"He went to the river," said my blonde-haired wife. Her sister agreed.
Two hours later, the cops found him shivering and crying at the water's edge. Ankle deep.
In this exercise we will claim the right to our last breath.

At his funeral in Alaska one of his best friends stood up in church and told stories about the blonde haired girl's grandfather. They were stories about hunting and fishing, which is what they did a lot of in those days. There were stories about shooting moose and catching big salmon. About being treed by bears and stuck by porcupines.
At the end of all the stories his best friend choked up, as one would suspect at a memorial.
He said, "Up where I come from, we have a saying. It's this: 'a man who is worth his salt will take your oar and row with both yours and his when you cannot. That is a man you want in your boat when you take to the river.' He was always worthy to be in my boat. I hope I was worthy to be in his."

In this exercise God will not help you. Your prayers will not be answered. You are at the mercy of wolves.
You will be accompanied by persistent fear.
You will ask yourself if you're dreaming, and the answer will evade you.
You will ask yourself if you will die and you know you will.
In this exercise it is not for you to know if your behavior is moral or evil.
It is not for you to know if you are perceived as heroic or cowardly.
In this exercise you are reduced to a mote of dust in an infinite universe.
In this exercise you will get someone to find you, to stand and proclaim in firm voice that he valued your presence as much as his own infinitesimal life.

Is this a dream?

Telling Anna You Love Her the First Time

2011-01-29T15:37:00.001-09:00

I wrote this a long time ago, and I was a different person then. It needs a lot of editing, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to leave that young man's words alone, as if I had died and all that's left is this imprint in my diary.

Every writer has something they think is the best they've ever done. And for most of my life, this was it.

I'm older now. And though it may not be the best thing I've ever done,

I know, for sure, I never meant anything more.

-----------------------------------

Telling Anna You Love Her the First Time

You're staring.

If she catches you, you'll feel stupid but the way the sun plays tricks crashing through the strands of her hair before it gets to you reminds you of being born.

Somehow you were born to do this. Of all the things to do the world is replete with noble professions. Right now people are performing open heart surgery saving lives otherwise lost. Firemen are reviving victims otherwise dead. Airplane pilots keep hundreds suspended seven miles high so grandmothers can greet their descendents with hugs and birthday balloons.

And you were born to stare at Anna in the sunlight. In the morning.

It is a sacred thing.

She's smart enough not to look. If she catches your eye it all ends but she's merciful so you can do nothing. It's paralysis, for there is nothing else but Anna in the morning, sipping her coffee, poking at pages in a newspaper.

Outside a bird sings and skitters away. Your heart is beating. Your chest expands and contracts as your body does what it needs to, sustaining life, sustaining you.

You are now suspecting what you're afraid to admit. You can't say it to yourself much less her. You try to push it out of your mind but when your mind is empty there's nothing to move.

She glances quickly to where you're sitting at the other corner of the kitchenette in the house nobody can find when she doesn't allow. Cheesy linoleum top. Vinyl seats stick to your thighs, and she adjusts her bathrobe and leans forward so in profile her breast reminds you, diffuses you, evaporates you upon the viscous strands of sunlight that drip from her hair onto the table, the half-empty cups of coffee, your hands that haven't moved, time that has you frozen in jellified air.

Everything is brighter. For once in your life you have a favorite color. A favorite sound. People have told you about things like favorite smells, favorite blankets.

Now you know what they meant.

And you wipe at an eye in a feeble attempt to regain control. Maybe you're still sleeping and you need to wake up. But the only reason you're here is you know you woke up alone, felt the dent in her pillow and followed the scent, sat down silently, and she poured you a cup of coffee and sat in the sun and set to creating daytime.

"What?" she says, smiling, looking away. In that one word you feel there isn't anything you could have imagined she couldn't already know.

"I had a dream last night," you say.

She waits until the words waft like tea steam clouds and blow away on the springtime breeze, out of the kitchen nook, through the screen, into the world. Now you know that every word you say winds up in the world. Outside they're felt by everything.

"What about?" she says, and pushes the paper away. Her eyes are deep brown, a color God must have thought of when he was building mountains and strong horses.

You speak, mostly hear yourself speak as if the ideas themselves can make your mouth move.
"I came right in here. I got up out of bed and sat down right where I am now," you say, remembering the dream as if it were the trip you took to the grocery store yesterday.

"And when I came in here God was sitting at this kitchen table right where you are now, reading the newspaper, just like you are now."

She smiles, and you know it's because she thinks you're comparing her to God. But you're not. It was really God in your dream.

"And what happened?" she asks you, drawing closer and the robe slips toward the edge of her shoulder and hangs while the sun takes purchase and turns the room gold. Then you know nothing can hurt you so you say what you have to say.

"He asked me how it's going," you reply. "And so I told him. I told him my whole life but you know, like, he's God and he knows everything. But he wanted to know anyway. When God asks you something you pretty much just answer, you know?"

She nods that she knows and the smile on her face makes little lines that connect her cheeks to the corner of her eyes and anything solid inside you has long since melted. Bits of you are dribbling into eternity. There are parts you know you'll never get back.

This is falling. Pray she's there to catch you. You're dead if she isn't.

"He already knew your life and he asked you to tell it to him? That was the dream?"

"Yes." You say it and you feel some muscles in your chest tighten. For some reason your eyes tear. You're not sure how to handle this. "Yes. It's like, he wanted to hear ME say it. He knew everything I was going to say, but it was just so good for him to hear me tell it to him. He said he could listen to me tell it to him forever. He said that's what life was all about."

And you think you might cry and you have no idea on earth why that would happen. You think you don't remember how, but you're afraid your body will remember.

She takes your hand and kisses you and you can taste the salt from the tears you didn't see her shed.
You don't know why it's happening. This can't be happening.

"I love you," you say, the first time anyone has ever earned it from you, meaning it--meaning to put into yourself all this melting and pulling and wanting to sit forever in one instant of time that never changed.

How can you give her the feeling that you have a favorite horse breed and you never cared before?

How can you tell her the forces of physics have just exempted you from the need to be obedient?

Where did this caring come from if it wasn't always there? You could be a father now if you had to. You could teach someone small to hold a baseball, how to find the minnows in the shallow part of the stream, why you can't do wheelies if you're going too fast.

You think, "Help me God," and you grab at your chest a little because it seems to be coming from there and you don't know if it's bad or good.

Pray. Pray because nothing else would be powerful enough. Pray what you're feeling is good because there's no life if it isn't.

Pray she won't run away now it's out there because you can't come home. There's no way to go back.
You don't fit in the life you had only moments before. Everything has to be rebuilt from scratch.

"I love you, Annie." And there are no more words in you. That was the last line before the big tear in the script and now words are done. It has to end here unless she puts the words back.

She says, "I know. I could listen to you say that forever."

It's here and I am in it

2010-12-21T17:38:00.000-09:00

The undeniable magnitude of change.
2010

Treachery and lost job.
Love and Marriage
Friendship and new job
Published again, and my name alongside my heroes - Bradbury, Vonnegut, Ellison, and all these talented others.

A story I wrote 20 years ago lives again.

The Lightning Man

2010-10-01T13:16:00.000-08:00

The blonde haired girl wanted a Van de Graaf Generator so I made her one.
It makes me quite happy to write those words so I'll do it again, differently.

My wife wanted a Van de Graaf Generator so I made her one.

This is contentment on many different levels.

First, the idea - we've already got a Tesla coil, let's go for a static generator. Let's master two types of electricity in our garage. Let's get the whole lightning thing down so we can move on to warping space-time.

Second, the opportunity for construction. Let's figure out where we can get a big metal globe. Let's get some latex and some triboelectrically opposite pulleys. Let's figure out what triboelectric means. Let's turn some stuff on the lathe and cut holes with the drill press.

Third, the coolness of the results. Someone asks, "What are you building?"

"This makes lightning."

"I thought that over there made lightning."

"Tesla coil. Different lightning."

Fourth, the woman you sleep with on a regular basis thinks you're a better partner if you can make big lightning bolts.

I'm starting to get a handle on what women want.

Thank god it has to do with electricity.

----

This part of the article is to inform you that sex and lightning are the same thing, in case you didn't already know.

----

"There is a number of eggs," he says. He being me.

She says, being the northwesterner, "What?" Driving. Eyes on the highway. Cars dribbling along at twenty-five or thirty miles per hour. Three abreast. Miles of steel.

"There's a number of eggs. It's finite." I can't stop myself from thinking these things. Usually there's not much purpose in sharing. But sitting in traffic gives me an opportunity.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"As we drive along I'm looking at all the restaurants thinking -- hey, they all have eggs. And then I wonder how many eggs get eaten every morning. And you know, if you're in the egg business you probably know how many eggs you're shuttling around the state. Then multiply by the number of egg companies and the number of states, and you could figure out how many eggs are eaten every morning in America. And then world wide. And it's a number you could know. In fact, I bet there's an annual meeting of the Breakfast-egg-council and they probably have bar graphs and pie charts showing the increase in egg consumption every year. I mean, this is something you could know if you wanted."

"So?"

"Well it's out there. Waiting to be known. The number of eggs."

"So?"

"And you're happy to just let life go on without knowing?"

Apparently.

----

Wolfram Alpha suggests that on average the population of the United States consumes 139.2 kilograms of eggs per second.

Imagine how many chickens there would be if we stopped eating their eggs.

----

The triboelectric effect occurs when two materials come in contact and separate, and a charge is left on them. Some materials give electrons, some take. Rub wool against teflon, the teflon winds up with more electrons, the wool with less. Rub a balloon against your wool sweater, the balloon winds up with more electrons, and you can stick it on the wall.

A Van De Graaf Generator works by creating a vertical conveyor belt of some sort of triboelectrically "neutral" material - like latex rubber. The two rollers at either end of the conveyor are triboelectrically different - that is, one will tend to give up electrons and the other will tend to take electrons. You set this conveyor in motion, either with a little motor or you can crank it manually.

At the bottom end of the vertical conveyor you put conductive "brush". Imagine a bundle of thin wires with the ends hanging out in space like a bouquet of flowers. You put this under the bottom conveyor pulley without touching the rubber conveyor belt. And you connect that one to ground. You do the same thing on the top of the conveyor, only that bundle of wires you connect to a big conductive ball that surrounds the top of the conveyor. Note that the "brushes" don't actually touch the conveyor belt. Nothing touches the belt, except the rollers that make it become a conveyor belt.

As the belt runs the charge that builds up on the bottom gets drained to ground, leaving a net of the opposite charge to go upward toward the top pulley, where it is drained off onto the ball. Thus the ball starts accumulating a positive or negative charge. A static electric field is created. If you put something conductive in the area of that field which is charged in the opposite way, (like by simply grounding a piece of metal and raising it toward the ball) a bright spark of current will flow between the top of the generator. This is the same thing that happens when you rub your feet on the carpet in the winter and you get a shock when you touch a doorknob. Only worse.

----

I have friends who know I build electrical things. They pepper me with weirdness and innuendo. They want my approval, I suppose so they can say, "I know this guy who's an engineer and he says..."

I can tell it's coming when a sentence starts with, "I was watching the Sci Fi Channel last night and..."

Tim: "I was listening to Coast to Coast AM last night and they had this guy on who said he could levitate entire buildings with his Tesla coil."

Me: "Hey, do you want to go to the Indian place for lunch?"

"He said he did it by suppressing the sparks. If you can run the Tesla coil without the lightning bolts, apparently the energy goes into anti-gravity. He had some nuclear physicists with him backing him up."

"Well, they would know. How about sushi?"

"You know what your problem is, don't you? You're making too many arcs with your Tesla coil. If you could get the lightning to stop, you'd be creating a scalar electric field. That's what you have to do for anti-gravity. Create a scalar field."

"A scalar electric field. Uh huh. No sushi?"

"See, I can't talk to you about anything serious. You take this attitude."

"Sorry but this stuff is just way beyond me. I spent a lot of time going to school to learn that electric fields aren't scalar. Charge is scalar. Temperature is scalar. Gravity is not scalar. If it was, you'd fall nowhere."

"See, that's what I'm saying. These guys make gravity scalar, and so there is no more 'down.' It's anti-gravity. It's way beyond the understanding of conventional science."

"Conventional science doesn't understand anything. People do, or don't. People invented the idea of scalar and vector, and saying something like "scalar gravity" is just stupid. It's like saying Beethoven was a great NASCAR driver. That's why people don't understand it because it's just idiotic."

"Why do you always have to be smarter than everyone else?"

"I got it from Wikipedia. Why don't we go for Thai? It's cheap. Why is Thai always the cheapest restaurant?"

"It's not. Jack in the Box is cheapest."

"But it sucks. Thai is good. It's the cheapest good food."

"See what I'm talking about?"

And so on.

----

I was on the ladder in the garage, replacing the blown out controller board in the garage door opener when the blonde haired girl came in and said, "I'm going to bring the generator to class. How does it work if those copper brushes aren't touching the belt when it spins?"

"Well, it's electromagnetism. There's this electric field on the belt because when the rollers rub they gain or lose electrons, so the belt gets charged. The charge on the belt is moving so it induces a current in the copper brush. It's kind of like radio, sort of, only really short radio. Like radio that only goes an inch."

"Why couldn't you just tell me something simple? I have to explain this to grammar school kids."

"It is sort of simple."

"Not for kids."

"What do you want to tell them, then?"

"Something they'll understand."

"Tell them it's like when you get a shock from carpet. Tell them the conveyor belt is a carpet and the brush is a foot."

"But the foot is not touching the carpet."

"Your satellite TV isn't touching the satellite."

"Isn't there something else you can think of?"

"If you give them ice cream, they'll be happy."

"Something useful..."

"Two magnets can pull each other without touching. The earth pulls you down when you fall off a cliff without touching. Till the very end, of course."

"Is it really like that?"

"Yes."

"Why is our garage door opener always broken?"

"Because our Tesla coil keeps shooting lightning bolts through it."

"Why don't you take your Tesla coil outside, away from the garage door opener before turning it on then?"

"Because it's nicer in the garage."

"Take it outside next time."

"But..."

"Outside."

----

The world is full of things that I could understand if I had the time and the wherewithal to learn them.

The average number of complete revolutions taken by the ball in the tip of a Bic ballpoint pen during its lifetime. The number of snails living on the earth at this moment. What George Lucas was looking at when he came up with the name, "Darth."

Then there are things we will never know the answer to, and life is better for it.

I got married because I had a great loneliness in my heart that went away when I was close to the blonde haired girl.

Very ungreat writers and poets have told about the magnetic attraction between people. About fate and true love.

I'm pretty certain these things cannot be decomposed analytically. That makes me damned happy.

One less thing I have to worry about learning.

"Did you read that article I e-mailed you?" asked Rick. He walked into my garage while I was finishing up some tweaks to my tesla coil.

I said, "Um, no. Maybe. Yes....?"

"The one about the guy who's generating electricity with his magnetic motor?"

"Well, dynamos have been around for over a hundred years..."

"No, it's free energy. He's creating it with his Bedini motor."

"I thought we've been through this, already. I made you a Bedini motor. It doesn't produce energy. It's a regular motor that eats energy."

"Well, yours doesn't make energy. But this guy's does. Didn't you see the YouTube?"

"When was the last time you got laid?"

"Wha?"

"You heard me."

"Well, not so long ago, actually. Just last..."

"Are you going to see her again?"

"This Friday, in fact. What's this got to do with anything?"

"One is a mystery. The other is just stupid."

"Look, this guy's discovered a new law of physics."

"When I was a kid and a bunch of guys would get together, we'd talk about girls and how far we got with them. Why did growing up turn us into such weirdos?"

"You have to open your mind to this stuff."

"How many miles can you walk on a typical pair of New Balance model 993 running shoes before the soles wear out?"

"You're not listening to me."

"How many times will Jupiter orbit the sun in the typical person's lifetime?"

"Come on..."

"Why does it look like you're rolling uphill at the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz?"

"It's an optical illusion."

"Why do I not care about any of this when I'm with her?"

"Who?"

"How does she calm my mind like that? And I know it's all out there, waiting to be figured out and somehow, within my reach..."

"..."

"Watch. This is the lightning I make for her."

8: Faraway

2010-06-01T07:11:00.003-08:00

Here's the thing about hotel rooms. It's illusion.

You know it. The guy who gives you the key knows it. It's the job of housekeeping. Of room service.

You slide the key in the door and you're the first person inside. The first person who ever crossed that threshold.

You drop your luggage. You sit on the bed. Kick off your shoes. Thumb the TV remote.

No one else has touched these things. Not tens, not hundreds, not thousands. Nobody.

It's your illusion as your head sinks into the pillow - no one else has had their head in this spot.

It's not that you're Howard Hughes. It's not that you fear the microscopic vermin left by the previous tenants. It's not that you worry about the unmentionable outrage that may have been performed in that small space.

You have to sleep. It's better not to cloud the mind with theories and mental dissonance so you pretend you're the first. No one has ever been before you.

------

We got married. We went to Big Sur.

It's a beautiful place.

Someone said that Big Sur is the way God meant the whole world to look, but he got distracted along the way and out came South Holland, Illinois.

Sheer cliff faces drop into a sea as blue as the Caribbean. Lush redwood forests cloak the mountaintops in fertile green must. Everywhere you look, something is beautiful. Something smells fresh and life giving. Something feels soft and inviting.

The place is full of hippies. In spots Kennedy is still president.

We went to the Henry Miller memorial library. In case you forgot, Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer, which was banned for obscenity in the U.S. back in the 50's. It was the book to read if you wanted to be talked about.

The library is a bookstore. It's an art gallery. It's full of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

I picked up a 33RPM vinyl disc. Jefferson Starship Red Octopus. Still in good shape. A dollar.

They wanted $20 for a new copy of Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn, and the other Henry Miller books.

I scanned through the former.

"Doesn't seem so subversive," I said to the Blonde-haired girl, now my wife.

"Everything mellows with time."

"Shame."

------

We ate dinner at Deetjen's Big Sur Inn which is where we happened to be staying. Wondering what to say to my new wife with whom I have been making small talk and love the past five years, I picked up the fork at my place setting.

"How many mouths do you think this has been in?" I asked her. "How many different foods has it scooped?"

"Does it matter?"

"Only if it hasn't been washed well. They may not use dish detergent up here. This might be an all-organic place. Maybe they use river water and moss to clean their silverware. Some of these people don't believe in viruses."

She pondered my question as a meta argument. The look on her face, "What have I done marrying this guy? He's good in bed, but he's unemployed and most likely insane. Criminally."

But she said, "It's not worth thinking about."

"Did you see the bumper sticker on the car that parked next to us? It said, 'Don't believe everything you think.' That's what you're saying to me. Isn't it?"

"No. But it's a good idea."

We get some of our personal philosophy by reading the backsides of automobiles.

------

At Deetjen's Big Sur Inn the rooms don't have numbers. They have names.

We stayed in a room called, "Faraway." They gave us that room because we told them we were on our honeymoon, which we were.

When I spoke to the woman on the phone to make the reservation two months prior she said, "You're in luck. We have a good room for you. It's our most sound-proofed. You'll like it."

I wanted to argue with the implication. The insinuation that we would be loud. That we would be spending our time making noise in confined spaces. That one or both of our heads would wind up pounding against the headboard. That nails would be run across backs and wallpaper. That someone would be yelping or worse. In a fit of cognitive meltdown, I got echolalia.

I said, "Soundproof."

"Well, not soundproof. But you know. Privacy."

"Privacy."

"Unless you're really creative, that is. I mean, we can't guarantee it."

"Creative."

"That will be five-hundred thirty dollars. Up front. Visa. Mastercard. Amex."

"Up front."

"It's our policy. Oh, and it's non-refundable after 30 days."

"Pay now. Five-hundred thirty. Non-refundable. Policy."

I did what she asked. There didn't seem to be an alternative.

------

When we got to Deetjen's and checked in they asked me to sign the register. Made sure I included my name and address. The license number of our car. It seemed security was going to be quite tight as it was Memorial Day weekend in America. Lots of out-of-towners would be around. Thieves. N'er do wells out to fleece the tourists.

"You're in 'Faraway,'" she said. She pulled out a map. "You get there by going around this road. Park in the spot that says, 'Parking for Faraway.' Have a nice time."

She handed me a sheet of information for their guests. An FAQ to Deetjen's.

We got into our car to drive to Faraway and about halfway there I realized I had made some kind of mistake.

"Did she give you a key?" I asked the blonde-haired girl. "She didn't give me a key. Or I lost it."

"Maybe it's in the lock or something."

We parked in the requisite spot. There was no key in the door. It was opened. I was about to head back to the front desk when the engineering me examined the door hardware.

Not only was there no place for a key, the damned thing was unlockable. There was a simple hook and eye arrangement you could latch once inside. But that was only the stupid suggestion of a lock. It would hold the door closed in a stiff breeze. Maybe.

"There's no key because there's no lock," I said.

My wife read from the Deetjen's FAQ, "It says here you should lock all your valuables in your car."

"Goddamned hippies," I said, or something like that. "Like anyone can just walk in on us at any time. You can't even put a chair in front of the door because it opens outward."

"Relax. Just enjoy being in this beautiful place."

"Sure. When the gangbangers from Oakland team up with the Hell's Angels they won't even have to plan a home invasion. It will be a home invitation robbery. Come rob us. Locks on the door? Surely you jest. Have a nice rape while you're at it."

"Oh shut up."

"Who the hell picked this place, anyway?"

"I think it was you."

"Damn. They were the only ones in Big Sur who had vacancies on the holiday weekend. Now I know why. It's a hotel for professional victims. Let's sleep in the Jeep."

But it was too late. She had unpacked her stuff into the ancient chest of drawers. I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

It hit me. The woods. We were right next to the ocean and a waterfall.

"No heat. We'll freeze tonight."

"You won't freeze," she said.

"When we stop the love, I mean."

"No. You'll light the stove."

"That black thing is with the pipe sticking out of it? That's a stove? And what do we do for wood? Role play a little Dorothy and Tin Woodsman? This whole forest is one huge tinderbox waiting to go up, you know. One spark blown in the wrong direction. Whoosh. It happened two years ago. Google it. The smoke jumpers will find our charred remains."

"There's a wood box outside. Now it's our honeymoon and if you're going to keep up this paranoid bullshit, you're spending the night in the Jeep. Is that what you want?"

I shook my head. It was not what I wanted. What I wanted was what she was doing.

"All right, then," she said, and began unbuttoning and unzipping things.

------

Some moments later we ate dinner. And then some moments even later we were back in the room.

Worried the night time forest temps would drop to near freezing I got a roaring fire going in the stove. The room rapidly warmed to 70, 80, 90 degrees. Probably more. I wondered how to set it to something lower than "thermonuclear".

When I finally got into bed I said, "Five-hundred thirty bucks paid up front and you can't set the stove on anything less than eleven."

But she didn't answer me. Instead, she laughed at the book in her hand. It was one of the twenty or so hard cover books that were on the night stand beside the bed. I thought they were decoration.

"What's so funny?"

"These are journals," she said. "Everyone who stays in this room writes a couple pages in these books."

I picked one. The pages were rippled in places from where the book had been wet with one thing or another. The ink had run, and in places was blotted completely so you couldn't see the writing.

Each entry was handwritten. Different pens. Pencils. Printed characters. Script. Drawings.

I read - "We stayed here on our honeymoon. We hope you like oh-so-comfortable Mr. Bed as much as we did. Have a bounce and think of us, Ken and Sandy, Madison Wisc. 1995" and immediately felt a sense of unease.

Another entry: "We did it in the striped chair next to the window. Then in front of the fire. Then on the table where these books are. I am still naked as I sit here writing this. Jim the guy who brings the wood came in unexpectedly. We invited him to join us and he did. He and my new husband are spooning on the bed beside me. We can't wait for the maid to show up."

"Oh my god," I said to my blonde haired wife, imagining the threesome somehow superimposed on our own reality, as if they had just been there and I could smell the remains of their sex making. There would be parasites and disease. I needed to autoclave everything I could reach.

"Don't worry. It's not true."

"You say that with such authority. How do you know? This is where Richard Brautigan wrote Confederate General and you know what a lecher he was. And you have the ghost of Henry Miller right up the road. These people are hedonists. God knows what moral insults have occurred here."

"You can't believe everything you read."

"Well I believe this:" and I read aloud, "'If I were you I wouldn't touch anything. Including this book. Get some disinfectant. Nothing less than alcohol.'"

She looked at me with disbelief, but her eyes betrayed a sense of worry. I know her well enough. I looked on the page she had been scanning. In handwriting I could barely decipher I read aloud, "'Look up. See that stain on the ceiling? That's how far it shot.'"

Indeed, over my head, a faint coffee stain that housekeeping would never think to eradicate.

"How far what shot?" asked the blonde-haired girl.

Now it was my turn for disbelief. I furrowed my brow in by best Fred MacMurray imitation and said, "Now darling...surely it's not a mystery..."

------

We read deep into the night as the wood stove heated the room to well over one hundred degrees.

"You have to open the windows if you don't want to bake like a turkey," said one entry about the stove.

"Drink water. It gets dry," said another.

I opened the windows. I pushed aside the curtains.

"Don't worry about the privacy when you open the windows because the stove is too hot," said another entry. "Everyone here is a voyeur and the walls are paper thin. Privacy is an illusion, anyway. We just got back from Easlen and we've been naked for a week. You get used to it. We entertained the road crew for a two whole days. They couldn't believe Randy could keep it up for so long. The people over in Chateau Chaos can see you straight out their window. But it's okay because you can see them, too, and they don't have as good sound proofing as you. Carla and Randy, Austin Tx. 1999"

And so on.

------

We read the Faraway diaries when we weren't out sampling the Big Sur beauty. Many entries were simple and sweet. "Jim and Margaret spent their 20th wedding anniversary in this magical place. Uxbridge, England. 2001."

Many were simple soft-core pornography.

"We fucked like weasels until the couple next door in Stokes complained we were knocking shit off their walls. Damn, my new wife has a great ass. Dustin and Tara - June 2005"

Some people had drawn pictures. "Things we saw today: a seagull, a ghost, a racoon, the ocean, my breakfast, my beautiful wife, naked."

Some claimed the room was haunted. Some said they heard strange howls in the woods. Lots complained about the lack of locks. About the blast furnace heater. About the noise from the ever so scenic pacific coast highway, which was just a couple yards from the room.

Lots claimed they felt a strange and strong sexual energy in the room that drove them to lengthly bouts of lovemaking, the likes of which they never felt they had been capable of in the past.

"We can't seem to stop doing it. Every time I look at her she goes down on me and it starts all over. Bob and Laura, Watertown NY"

Of this is certain - the proprietors of Deetjen's put all their honeymooners and anniversary celebrators in the Faraway room, and most of them skipped the pleasantries of getting acquainted with the surroundings, succumbing immediately to their primal urges, and upon finding the diaries, added their stories to it.

"We have been married forty wonderful years," said one entry in beautiful script. "I wish you the same happiness, dear reader."

Happiness. Love. Joy. Sex sex and more sex. No one stays in Faraway alone.

"We have been married three days. The wedding was perfect. We came to Big Sur for our honeymoon. You're sharing our nuptual bed, and I hope it's as good for you as it was for me."

"I am now Mrs. Lundy. I just love writing that. I hope you will be as happy as I am right now."

"I was so scared before the wedding. I almost ran out. Don't tell her. But I'm so glad I didn't. She's beautiful. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me. My advice to you is to stick with it. Don't chicken out. You won't regret it!"

"Yes, we are two men alone here in Faraway. First we can dispense with the sex. Over there on the striped chair, and then here on Mr. Oh-so-comfortable bed, where you now lie. But there's so much more. This is the only place I feel we can be in totally unchained love. This is where we radiate. Tomorrow it's up to San Francisco to get married. I can't describe how happy it makes me. This vibe is strong, and I wish to you the same joy I feel today."

"Don't you feel strange reading this? Why am I writing it? Maybe there's some goodness. I stayed here with my wife twenty years ago. It was our honeymoon. We had three kids and then cancer took her. It was ovarian. It was slow and ugly and I almost ate a bullet. I swear, I would have done it if it wasn't for the kids. And now my Tina. Please don't hate me, but I've been so alone. We were married yesterday. I couldn't think of where else to go, and so we're here. It's weird, but it's good. I think I can begin again. I really do. She's good for the kids. It's not wrong, is it?"

I let the book fall to my lap.

"Did you read this one?" I asked the blonde-haired girl.

She nodded.

"Why do we need to know these things? Why can't this just be a spotless room in the woods? You know, like those paper bands they used to put on toilets in hotels - 'Sanitized for your protection.'"

"We don't need protection. They wish us nothing but happiness."

"But all the people. So many. All these lives passed through here. I mean, you usually don't know who's been in a room before you -- it's leaving a stain. You know?" I touched my chest where it could feel it the strongest.

"I know," she said.

"I can't get it off." I wanted to cry or laugh or yelp. Maybe the energy. "I didn't come here to become one of these people."

"Too late," she said, and turned off the light.

In the dark, on oh-so-comfortable Mr. Bed, we watched the ghosts waft past and listened to the howling in the woods.

7: The Makers

2010-05-25T21:05:00.003-08:00

There is a quote on some of our t-shirts. It is a fragment of a sentence Barack Obama said during his inauguration. The t-shirts say:

"...the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things."

This describes us and we are proud to be those people. We craft. We drill, cut, weld, design, envision, and build. We are the makers of things.

We are at the Maker Faire, a gathering of the diversity of silicon valley geekdom. This is our Ritual. This is our Sabbath. This is our Woodstock.

Our tribe gathers and we are at once one and the same. A collection of strange faces we recognize immediately. The creators of things both useful and abstract. The doers of stuff most people don't get, that the rest of us admire and covet.

Machines that transport us via pedal, steam, fire, explosion. Computers that reproduce Michelangelo on egg shells. Comic book rockets the size of buildings that fly to every planet in our imagination.

People who love us ask us "why?"

We thought you knew by now. When you caught us tearing apart the TV with rusty pliers and dull screwdrivers - when we had to be towed because the nitro injector we added to the Taurus blew out the headers - when we set the garden shed on fire modifying the lawn mower to act as a rocket sled - when monopolized the television watching every minute of space shuttle coverage - when we burned out the microwave making nuclear balls of plasma - we thought we were out of the closet. We thought it was clear.

We are this way. We can't help it. Some people just are.

And now there are hundreds of us in one place. The tourists laugh nervously at the chainsaw robots and the dragons that spit real fire. The compulsion that drives people to create such things seems the stuff of science fiction movies. Are these the evil mad scientists come to roost among us? Will they subjugate the world with giant robots?

Yes. Empathetically, yes.

The true participants great each other asking, "what's your make?" And nobody hesitates.

I make rockets. I make clothes that electrically respond to your moods. I make boats that cross the ocean without humans. I make houses you can pedal. I make 20' tall computer controlled steel giraffes.

"I make giant killer robots," says one.

Nobody blinks. Of course. It must be.

The blonde haired girl and I traverse the festival in the shirts issued to volunteers - red on purpose - the joke: "you are the red shirts," reference to Crewman #1 in every Star Trek episode.

We move furniture. Deliver power cables to the makers on the show floor. I direct cars in the parking lot while just beyond the gate two middle-aged guys launch towers of spew from 75 of bottles of diet Coke contaminated with after dinner mints to the cheers of hundreds. We are connected. We are part of the show so we are one with the energy that drives us all year to drill, saw, solder, program over and over the drawer full of Arduino boards, so full there is no room for my socks.

I was walking through the Festival Hall, returning to home base after my stint running the sound board at the stage in the Expo. I was moving between two points like any good line, when God himself spoke to me and I had to stop, captivated by the drum beats, thoughts shredded and blown like autumn leaves on the bass line.

On the stage, two 7' tall Tesla Coils shot 12' arcs of lightning that made music. Rock and roll.

It's not enough for these guys to simply command the lightning bolts - they made them sing.

I didn't move until it was over and the crowd that had gathered erupted into the sort of cheer that's reserved for the most famous of rock stars. A gutteral, visceral peal of pure ecstasy.

"I have never seen anything so cool," someone said standing beside me.

"...me neither," I said.

And it was true.

----

My happiest moment - the following day I brought my daughters to Maker Faire. The blonde-haired girl were not working this day, but rather, observing, participating attendees.

After the Tesla Coils blasted lightning music into the aether I looked at my children and asked, "What did you think of that?" and I was hoping, that for a moment maybe there would be some tiny connection - perhaps they would realize what kind of man I was, and what they had been witnessing all these strange years.

"Dad, that was unbelievably awesome," said my kids, wide-eyed, mouths agape. "I don't even know what I just saw. It was awesome."

"Yes," I said, knowing that for once we were on exactly the same emotional track. For once in nearly two decades they could appreciate something as I did.

I have rarely been happier.

----

We spent two full days at the Bay Area Maker Faire. I forgot to put on sun screen so I added to the sunburn I got while acting as an "extra" in a Mythbusters episode that was shot outside - and we were forbidden to put on sunscreen because it would wreck the experiment.

So now I am as brown as my Sicilian ancestors, like Archimedes, who made death rays and giant repeating arrow slinging bows.

And we are proud to be some of the doers, the risk takers, the makers of things. We are proud to be misunderstood. A commander of computers and lightning. A bringer of unforseen objects onto this sphere. And I have been one always.

Nothing that has been said about me, or done to me, can ever change that.

I am ready to build.

I am always building.

I am always making something.

----

"I have to go to Home Depot," I said to my daughter this morning before I left the house. "You'll probably be at school when I get back, so have a happy day."

"What are you getting?" she asked.

"Some wood."

"Building something?"

"It's for the Tesla Coil."

"Yeah. Cool. The Tesla Coil. How long till that's done?"

"Soon," I said. "We'll have lightning soon."

"I can't wait," she said.

With a bright heart and equally bright smile I got into the jeep.

Yes, I am a good father.

6: Creation

2010-05-05T06:35:00.002-08:00

We're waiting for the break out
And burning rods of tungsten
We're winding our secondaries
On low-speed lathes
If I could find a better way to love you
I'd have to rewire with four gauge

We can't see no difference
Between construction and demolition
Now that Shiva's using iPhone apps
To squash the old town and birth new worlds
If I could find a better way to love you
I'd need a thicker blast shield

I met dear Dr. Maxwell
By sticking screwdrivers in wall sockets
Pulling signals from the air
With varnished coils and copper in the trees
If I could find a better way to love you
I'd need a bigger ozone fan

Yes, darling. It's love.
Stand back.
Stay grounded.

-------

There's nothing good on the internet. The web is flooded with drivel and dreck produced by unemployed slobs regressing to unhappy childhoods, seeking the attention they never got from parents who were distracted by game shows and cigarettes.

I have to keep rereading my last hopeful e-mail. Hours go by. The glow fades. I have to read it again.

"We're interested. Stay put."

I don't know what's worse about being unemployed - watching the assets evaporate into the aether, unreclaimable like a children's birthday song moments after the candles are extinguished, or watching the world's wheels turning fluidly without me.

There is no blip. No interruption in the video stream. No change of plans. No moment of silence. One out of six billion is a very small number indeed.

Death is not nearly as terrifying as irrelevance.

I go back to the last hopeful e-mail.

"We're interested. Stay put."

-------

We are makers of things.

I married a woman who was happy to honeymoon at a machine shop. We learned how to turn metal on a lathe. We went home with our classroom results and had love on a bed I stiffened with 3/4" plywood.

When we are in trouble, we build things.

I made a jacob's ladder out of copper water pipe and a neon sign transformer. The sparks lit up our garage. We machine our parts, setting fire to titanium. Planting bulbs, pruning trees, hanging houses for the birds.

I write stories. She writes lyrics.

We have a piece for musical theater about the U.S. Antarctic Program. When we get sad I go to the piano and she hums a tune or two I pluck out of the air and press onto the keyboard. "Antarctica: The Musical" performed nightly behind our eyeballs, just underneath the forehead.

-------

I'm building a Tesla coil. A resonant high voltage power projector. I would never have built one before losing my job. Too dangerous. Too big to store in our tiny house with no closets.

I'm building a Bedini motor, if only to show my friends this wonderfully simple design obeys the laws of physics.

We are watching episodes of Mad Men and yearning for our days in Alaska.

I wish my children were still babies.

I wish my father was alive.

I would talk to him about my troubles, and he would remind me I was a good kid.

When we are distressed we create things.

-------

There's nothing but garbage on the internet.

5: Better Them

2010-05-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

Couple months ago I saw a guy I knew at the local Safeway.

I'd known him from back in the 1990's when we were both young engineers helping a burgeoning tech giant get to its legs. Things were good then. We were riding high on a wave of inflated stock prices, buying Corvettes and taking expensive vacations in cities where we couldn't speak the language. We were inventing new things weekly. You couldn't get any closer to the front of the technology spear than where we sat every day.

I hadn't seen him since those days. Nearly 15 years now. At first I didn't even recognize him. I think he recognized me. There's the way the pupils dilate when some visual blob resolves itself into an old acquaintance instead of a stranger or enemy. His eyes said, "friend," but the body language was pure fight or flight.

Given his odd reaction I didn't say anything at first but went on with putting my grocery items on the belt to be totaled and bagged. When I looked toward him he kept looking away, and his demeanor put me off on greeting him.

What was his problem? What was he hiding? Could it be I hadn't seen him in 15 years because he had been in prison or otherwise shamed to the periphery of society?

Finally I could avoid him no more. I looked him straight in the eye.

There was a look of panic. He stuttered, then said, "Paper or plastic." A thin line of sweat ran from his ear to his graying beard.

I said, "Plastic's ok." I looked at his name tag, just to be sure.

It was, yes, it was. I turned my gasp into a sigh. Maybe I could somehow, just for that moment, not be me.

I said, "Dave?"

He said, "One-twelve ninety-five. Need any change?"

I swiped my card. I shook my head.

He put the rest of my groceries into plastic bags. "Have a nice day."

Then he started swiping the groceries of the person behind me.

------------

I've had the opportunity to let go of a lot of people in my life. To "let go" is a euphamism for "firing". We like to say "let go" because more often than not the person losing their job didn't do anything to deserve losing his income. It's just the way it is.

Business goes bad, money gets tight, can't pay the same number of people anymore. Someone has to go so the others can go on. It's battlefield law. A couple get killed so the greater number can live.

When we go to work every day we don't think of it as a battlefield. We spend so much of our waking time at the endeavor we call "work" that we try to make that time as pleasant as possible. We bring in pictures of our families. The father's day paperweights our youngsters made us in school. We hang pictures of ourselves riding bikes or standing in front of amusement park castles. It's supposed to be an extension of our being, and generally speaking, we are all pleasant beings.

Over the years I had risen the career ladder to the status of "boss". As boss, I was in charge of bringing to an end a person's daily grind. Usually the reason for the termination was something nebulously called "downsizing". For whatever reason, the company wants to spend less on our activity. We can stop supplying pencils and high-end laptops, but it takes a lot of pencils and discount laptops to equal a working person's salary and benefits.

When you terminate someone, they say the conversation should start like this, "Joe/Sally/Bob/Betty/John/Mary - this isn't going to be easy."

It's unclear who made up that riff. I learned it back in the 1990s. I was taught it by a company called Challenger-Gray-Christmas, which sounds like some sort of mutant party organization group.

They taught me what to do when the person starts crying after you tell them the envelope in your hand is their last paycheck plus severance. They tell you what to do when the person becomes violent because upon receiving his last paycheck, he knows it will take him longer to find a new job than it will for the bank to foreclose on his home.

They tell you not to smile. They tell you to remain calm. You are just delivering a message. It was not your decision. They are victim of forces beyond your small conversation. They were killed by others, far away. All they can do now is accept their fate and leave quietly without upsetting everyone else.

Because they are all good people - they go to their offices and collect their Father's Day paperweights, the pictures of themselves smiling in front of the Disney castles, the company logo coffee cups - they pause in front of their papers and pens, can't stop the subconscious impulse - there's a big meeting on the calendar for this afternoon, need the notes?

And they head out to the parking lot to their cars as quietly as they can, avoiding contact with any of their coworkers. Because they're in shock. A big part of the process of being "let go" is having the shock tame the extreme emotional impulses.

The true pain of what has just happened won't sink in until darkness falls and the recently fired worker realizes he will not grab his coffee in the morning and head into the office. Then the anguish and grief will set in. Tears will fall. The man will avoid his wife because he has failed her. The kids will be kept away because no one has ever seen him this way. The woman's tears will fill the phone receiver and dot the bills on the kitchen counter.

How could this have happened to me? I was good. I worked hard. I delivered. I cared.

I've used that line, "This is going to be difficult," exactly once. I still have nightmares about it.

------------

Most managers are bad at it.

Bad managers are put in positions of authority by other bad managers. It's a Ponzi scheme.

This should surprise no one.

Every year corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on management training. They select individuals and place them into management roles and then figure that a couple days of training will set everything right. These people are usually as good at management as Vincent Van Gogh, Steven Hawking, or Elvis Presley. Which is to say - what the hell are we thinking?

Usually these individuals are selected because they have performed extremely well in individual contribution roles. Or because they are great individual contributors and their grandmothers won't be proud of them until they can come home and say they've been made "manager," so they're going to quit and go somewhere where they can get that title.

They are then offered the slot right in the company they're at, and to make up for that awful decision they get sent to a training course. This will fix it, thinks somebody in higher management who goes on to worrying about other things.

Then, the newly minted leader goes back to work to make life miserable for 2 to 100 people.

They may as well have been given a week's training in concert piano and sending them off to Carnage Hall to wow the whole world.

Things are going good when he takes over - then mistakes get made. Unlike when the new manager was an individual worker, every mistake is multiplied by the number of people in his charge. Tiny mistakes become very visible. The great employee doesn't make such mistakes, so they either must be hidden, or even better - they didn't happen. It must be the fault of the workers in his charge who either can't understand his wisdom or don't share his vision and energy.

Eventually the bad performance can't be hidden. Upper management wants to know how to improve things. They're hearing about bad morale and they can see the lousy productivity with their own eyes. They wonder if people shouldn't be let go. As easily as he ascribes blame, the new manager is scared to death of the idea of firing someone. He knows how he used to feel about it when he wasn't a manager. He doesn't want to become one of "those" managers. He's a man of the people. He wants to be loved.

But upper management wants to teach him the important skills of business. He must be crisp, direct, and ruthless to some degree. Too many things are going wrong. If he doesn't trim out the "fat" in his team, maybe he's the wrong guy for the job.

So he goes to the human relations department. They will tell him how to do this thing and stay legal. They choose a victim. Some days later a meeting is held. No one is surprised. Things were going so bad he was going to have to blame someone.

Words are spoken. "This isn't going to be easy."

---------------

There are fabulous managers in this world, the same way there are amazing guitarists and mind-blowng poets. And then there's just a whole spate of plain good managers, the way there are a lot of good piano players and plenty of pleasing novelists.

They get into tight situations like everyone else, only they tend to have the support of everyone who works for them.

You want to work for these people. You want to be one of these people.

Just because you want to, doesn't mean you can, any more than you can stay home next week and write a bestselling novel.

-----------

No one wakes up in the morning and says, "Let me go be a bad manager today." Or, "Gee, I'm a bad manager I should go do something different."

Most bad managers are frightened unhappy people who live in fear of things going wrong, and they always go wrong. But somehow things get fixed. The people who work for them come through every now and then and make things right. Then they can breathe easy.

They wake up in the morning and think, "Is today a day I should be afraid, or can I breathe easy?"

It doesn't occur to them these mood swings are caused directly by their own ineffectiveness. They figure things are happening to them from the outside. And things bad things happen to good people, all the time.

When it's time to figure out how to make something better, the bad manager will look to his people and try to penetrate their weaknesses rather than accentuating their strengths. The weaknesses are obvious to everyone, the strengths, sometimes hidden. And if it takes a while to come to a good conclusion, the company can afford to wait. If things start going bad, everyone sees it right away.

So the bad manager always has a list in his head. Who goes first? Next time I have to let someone go, who is it.

Then, when things get tight, he offers up his victim.

"This is going to be tough."

"I don't understand. What did I do?"

"At least," thinks the bad manager while his shocked employee's eyes well in front of him, "At least it's not me."

----------

"You didn't even say, 'hi,' to him?" asks the blond-haired girl as we drive home.

"He wouldn't make eye contact."

"You could have asked him how he was."

"I could see how he was. He's got 25 years experience in high tech and he's a cashier at Safeway. How do you think he is?"

We stopped for the red light at route nine. An old Genesis song came up on the satellite radio. It reminded me of being a kid.

"This really bothers you," she said to me.

"Well, yeah. Are things really that bad that a guy with Dave's skills is working at a grocery store? I don't think so. I think the business world is just populated by jerks. They've got a lock. The good guys can't win."

"Maybe you should go back and talk to him."

"That could be me - don't you get it? There's no difference between him and me."

"Then help him."

"How?"

"Offer him a job."

"We've got a damned hiring freeze -- I just don't know what I can do."

I made a left hand turn. The light was still red. Horns blared from all angles. We didn't cause an accident, luckily. There were no cops.

"I can't do anything..."

---------

Three months later I was fired by a bad manager who was afraid his weaknesses would be exposed and I would get his job.

I didn't want his job. I was happy supporting him and helping him out. But he was so afraid he couldn't imagine anyone helping him out, much less the guy he saw as a competitor.

He started the conversation: "Joe, this is going to be difficult."

Damn right.

4: The numbers

2010-04-30T06:43:00.010-08:00

She says, "Hush my love.
The numbers don't matter while we breathe.
Just breathe."

Miles per hour.
Atoms per cubic inch.
Thrust per gallon.
Ergs per Joule.
Volts per amp.
Dollars per month.
Percentage interest.
Principal balance.
Due date.
Breathe.
Apartment number.
Ten fingers.
Two toes.
Forget.
Miney moe.
T-minus to zero
How could I
Overfill the engines,
Over try to impress,
CATO at launch.

"Shh my dear.
There's
Infinite zero in nothing.
Forget everything."
Except one thing.
Palm to the bare curve of your hip.
"Sleep my darling dear.
One light in the distance,
Tower on the rocks,
Beacons through fog to repel
Lawful invaders.
Hush my love
It's a holy warning.
The roof is still above us."
While the foredigit dissolves in the storm,
The rest are
Infinite zero in nothing.
"Calm my love
Forget the mortgage and rest."

3: Poetry

2010-04-26T07:02:00.007-08:00

A note from the dead.
I am not.

I am watching them over my newspaper.
They slide into their driver's seats,
Balancing cell phones and grande non-fat lattes
While I sit here at a scratched oak table
Able to build and repair
To better my children, my country, and myself,
Instead
Watching stocks,
Typing drivel.

---------

On January 10th, 2010, I was released from a job I had performed, by any and all accounting, swimmingly. I was not downsized. I was not reorganized. I was killed by voices.

The decision was made by a fearful man who is haunted by ghosts of ambition and self doubt. He says he waited a long as he could. But the voices in his head grew too loud. And I have been counseled by those who care about me to project to him only continued love.

Instead I wish with all my heart
That frightened man a seat beside me
Here at the marred oak table
Watching them drive into the rush hour.

---------

There are miracles
In the midst of anguish
In a crowd of six billion souls
Against all laws of physics
And the law of large numbers
I found my wife
And I say to her

---------

Let's burn down the house.
You can pick the song,
And I will set the titanium
Tailings alight.
We can stand before the children
In our Carhartts and scorched sneakers
To provide example we declare,
"Yes.
This is it.
I love you."

---------

To those who gawk I say

A man has friends and sometimes enemies,
Often it's hard to tell between the two.
Maybe happiness lies in saving the energy
One would use trying to distinguish.

---------

I told them I was robbed by coworkers
Beaten and left for dead
Stepped over by paper-reading commuters
Averting eyes as they
Sip coffee from paper cups.
Yes they hurt me as hard as they could.
Don't look,
It could be catching.

---------

Then upon the writhing crowd some light,
As sunshine mottled through white cumulus,
Illuminates those faces -
The souls whom friendship renders unafraid,
To remind me life is brief and precious
And shared.

---------

Remember dear wife
I dreamt you in a catnap
Distant, vague and unreal.
You taunted me,
And hid at the end of the world,
When I woke I wondered,
Was it real?
Had you been born?

---------

This feels like love in wartime

---------

I once wrote a story
You wished was for you
I think it was
As are the words I wrote
For story him to tell story her.
Now you stand beside me
This most difficult time
They could be for no one but you

I would love you if you had never been born.

2: Fear

2010-04-21T07:51:00.003-08:00

No one would argue that disasters come in many forms. Could we consider, then, that disaster comes in many sizes? After all, what separates a verifiable "disaster" from any other bump in the road of life?

A friend of mine was on her way to bring her daughter to the pediatrician. The child had a fever of 104F. The cause was a virus. But the virus had caused congestion that had led to an ear infection and now the kid's health problems were becoming complex and intertwined. My friend knew she couldn't do anything about the virus other than waiting it out. But this ear infection was compounding things.

While she was stopped at a red light she glanced into the rear view mirror and saw her child convulsing in the car seat behind her. She quickly turned to pull over to the side of the road but as she did she crossed a lane of oncoming traffic and was hit. The collision was at fairly high speed, and both cars were damaged. The occupants were relatively unharmed thanks to passenger restraints and air bags.

While she fumbled in a fog for her cell phone to call 911 she heard a knock on the car window. Miraculously, there were already paramedics on the scene. They were taken to the nearest hospital. She and her daughter were released with minor injuries, and her daughter was given a prescription for antibiotics. Insurance covered the car repairs but it was determined to have been her fault. Even so, it was the first accident she'd ever had in 20 years of driving, so her rates were not increased.

Was this a disaster? Could it have been worse? It certainly could have gone easier. Had she more sense of situational awareness, she might have noticed that she was stopped at a traffic light metering cars that were exiting from a hospital parking lot. She needed only await a couple seconds till the light turned green, or even awaited a break in the traffic, then drove into the emergency room lane and taken her convulsing daughter right into the hospital.

Fortunately there were a group of paramedics standing beside their ambulance who witnessed the collision, and they were able to run to the scene. It certainly was not disastrous those paramedics got to the scene so quickly. In fact, had she not been concerned for the safety of her daughter, my friend would have considered the placement of her daughter's fevoral seizures a stroke of incredible luck.

Not to mention the damage to the car and the subsequent injuries could have been much worse had she been hit by a heavy truck or a vehicle moving much faster. In fact, people might have been killed in what amounted to a head-on collision. So wasn't it indeed a stroke of luck that the bad judgment exercised in panic did not result in the serious injury of additional people, who were associated in no way with the original problem of a child going into fever convulsions in her car seat.

While the world is full of genuine unmitigated disaster - tsunami, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other acts of God, I posit there are a much greater number of smaller issues turned into serious problems through mindless or even wanton acts of panic. Of course, we are fighting our instincts when we talk about the idea of keeping our heads in a crisis. Under immediate stress the vision focuses and we lose awareness of our peripheral vision. Blood flowing with adrenaline our muscles tighten, heart races, breathing quickens and becomes shallow, and we are put into a fight-or-flight mode which feels for all intent and purposes like drowning.

Reacting fearfully, then, puts us into a state of mind not unlike that of a dying person.

In my career I have witnessed perfectly level-headed managers lose all sense of propriety and purpose over minuscule events which to them become the nucleus around which aggregates an unnatural sense of fear. In this state they fail to see the obvious - we have a medical situation and we are 100 feet from a hospital. Instead, they focus on the problem at hand like a robbery victim focuses on the muzzle of the gun. They are literally blinded, drowning, and want only for the situation to end in any way possible, as quickly as possible. If others have to be taken out in the process of the panic, so be it. The higher mental functions give way to the raw animal emotion of the hindbrain.

Because the subconscious sense of dying overwhelms the individual he becomes infinitely manipulable.

Step 2, then, is recognizing that what is most likely going to destroy our efforts is the ineffective management of personal fear. This is not to say we need all become war heroes. But rather, we must learn to function effectively when our senses are heightened by fear. We need to keep the higher brain functions engaged.

A manager who is paralyzed by his own fear, rational or irrational, is incapable of evaluating any act which considers the health of the team above the sating of his own immediate mental state. Thus he is incapable of leadership. Thus he is incapable of finding the best solution.

In such a state of fear, we are incapable of inspiring, evaluating, or performing miracles.

1: Magic

2010-04-20T07:34:00.003-08:00

Like all good stories this one starts with magic. With that we dispense with the trivialities of Newtonian physics.

After two brief sentences you want to tell me that magic isn't real. Master magicians perform illusions and illusion is not magic. The laws of physics are not suspended. Magicians display sequences of seemingly unconnected events through which the mind threads a logic that insists - "that could not have happened without activation of the supernatural." Yet we know that can't be true so we are amused. And there is no lasting value beyond amusement.

And we know that the best magic stories, The Harry Potterish, Wizard of Ozish mysticisms are simply tales composed by solitary writers converting their dreams to text and video. This is the world become Photoshop. These are fantasies we hoard, within which we would love to play but can only stand beside and observe.

You challenge my assertion of magic because you want to believe in that one true thing which is not bound by the pedestrian laws of life and pain and death. You want to kick the house of cards and leave it standing. You want to smash the wine glass and have it spontaneously reconstruct. You want to deny minds can be read, time can be altered, the dead will be born again. You deny because you want the assertion to withstand your best efforts and exist none the less.

Then you cannot be blamed.

Fear not, dear heart. You will not be blamed.

What do I mean, then, when I say I must start my story with magic? Am I simply taking you on an internal journey to a happy spot in the mental picture you construct of your world?

Au contraire, mon ami.

I'm talking about miracles.

Some years ago I was given a book entitled, "A Course in Miracles." The premise of the thousand or so pages of "A Course in Miracles" goes like this:

a) there is a God
b) he created you to be happy
c) not happy? It's your own damn fault.

The other 999 pages of the book provide exercises and excuses for convincing yourself the world at large is simply a fabrication of the logical mind, which is, in essence, your worst enemy. The logical mind is a piece of the whole spiritual being which is you, but for some reason it has an ego the size of a small European country and believes the world exists for it, and revolves around it, ignoring the other parts of the total spiritual you.

The trick to achieving happiness and thus miracles, according to the writers of "A Course in Miracles" is to convince the logical mind that it is full of malarky. You do this by turning your entire life into your own personal morphing painting by Rene Magritte.

You see a chair and you say to yourself, "This is not a chair." You see an open window and say, "The mosquitoes coming through there only bite me because I let them." On the way to work in the morning you say to yourself, "I am only doing this because I have convinced myself I need the money."

You do this sort of thing over and over until you convince your subconscious mind it is only temporarily trapped within the confines of your human body and the universe of physics.

Thus you modify your daily pattern of thought. Then the miracles happen.

By the way, if you have a vague discomfort with this notion, according to The Course, it's because the ego of the logical mind rebels against being broken down this way.

In addition, if you develop a sense of discomfort because that mode of thought could be aligned perfectly with the DMS definition of "schitzophrenia," you should not be afraid of this, though I don't know why.

In other words, when practiced perfectly, there is little difference between the miraculous mind and the minds of those we commonly sedate with powerful medications.

By the way, the authors of "A Course in Miracles" claim to be channeling Jesus. So there's some mighty fine authority backing up their assertions.

I had been studying "A Course in Miracles" because it was recommended to me by a fellow time traveler. We were taking a course in the hills of Virginia at the Monroe Institute, learning to get in touch with our prior and future lives.

Possibly, we would speak to dead people, but that would just be icing on the proverbial cake. What we really wanted was salvation and having rejected the world's major religions, we'd come to the mountains to have our brains zapped by ex-military intelligence officers who had discovered, if only accidentally, that out of body travel was possible through both space and time if only the brain were zapped with just the right sounds.

The Army had some years before abandoned the program, though, and now those involved had all retired into the civilian world. They made a living by teaching common people what they had learned about out of body travel, which interested us who were yearning for any form of spirituality. And it felt patriotic to help our former warriors, and also, in a sense, we were benefiting from our own tax dollars at work.

I had just come out of a particularly strong sonic brain zapping where I felt I had ascended through the roof of the training center and met with my classmates in mid air over the parking lot. This would not have been disturbing in of itself, but my classmates experienced a similar thing during their brain zapping, and in fact could describe exactly what I had seen and said during my zapping - which for all intent and purposes was a dream to me.

And I was pretty freaked to find out that what amounted to a dreamy mid-day nap was shared by everyone in the room. I suddenly felt like I had shown up to a college calculus class in my underwear only to find that today was the final exam for the course and not only had I not studied, but I didn't even know till that moment that I was in the class.

It was then that Martin suggested I read "A Course in Miracles."

It seemed like a good idea. At that point, I would have taken up bulldozer racing as a profession if it had been suggested.

I took the book and started reading it. It was, after all, a summary of the words of Jesus as transcribed by a couple of marriage therapists in Marin County.

Phobos and Deimos

2010-04-12T08:23:00.005-08:00

Phobos(Panic) - Deimos(Fear)

The two moons of Mars.

One of the bad things about moving to a smaller house is you have to give up all your Ray Bradbury books.

Their pages were yellow. The insides of the front covers originally monogrammed by some seven-year old kid, then signed in cursive ownership on the back flap by the young penman who left-handedly through Catholic school was assured he'd never master the art of script without learning to favor the right.

Away goes October, and Venus, and the Martians with the golden eyes and guns that shot bees.

Into the hopper at the library for thrift sales, destined to become those remaining items going for first a dollar, then fifty cents, a quarter, a dime. Fire hazard free if you'll get them out of here.

We think backward upon the days all books were new and want to protect the memories like eggs with fluffy pillows.

But the monogrammed Ray Bradbury books are gone along with the crushed brown oak leaves and the rocket launches on the horizon tracing golden threads to Mars.

Thus with them evaporate those once treasured desires, no longer held and felt in the heart, no longer the future of oval windows full of stars and boots scratched by the gravel of strange worlds.

Now they live in blurred dreams. Indistinct but present like the warmth on a seat just vacated. Now there are shapes in the clouds that must have been this way or that. Here the gleam of the sun from the metallic fin of a tall spacecraft. Here the humid remains of kiss on departure.

Would it be we were off to Mars with our robots and magic. Ah, the lives we would have lived. But now quietly uttering those farewells as those we love queue to board the craft, thus we are left behind, watching the tall ships ascend from a distance, steadying ourselves to once again bid goodbye, earthbound.

My eyes are bad in the dark. Age, and now the laser surgery have left me a bat with a failing magnetron, radarless in the night.

The others move cautiously, though more quickly in the blue white moonlight.

"You could read a newspaper," says George, the contractor by day. "Doesn't it need to be darker?"

Says Anne the realtor, "It doesn't need to be night. It's just easier to perceive subtle energies out of the glare of sunlight."

Anne has given us a psychic guarantee. This old place is haunted. The spirits are here and we will detect them. We will leave here tonight with a different world view. It the morning we will meet at the coffee shop downtown for a debrief and we will all have stories we can repeat around campfires for the rest of our lives.

I have the dual field meter I built from the kit on the Ramsay website. No electromagnetism will slip past my detection, and we all know the spirits manifest electromagnetically. I have an infrared thermometer gun I got at Home Depot. It's supposed to be used to detect insulation leaks in the house but now I will use it to detect leaks between the eleven dimensions of reality and the four Einsteinian dimensions.

I have unspoken theories about gravitons and quarks and gluons.

Maybe UFOs and the spirits of the dead are the same thing.

Maybe the Kennedys were killed by the CIA, and why the hell did WTC 7 come down in its own footprint like a controlled demolition when it wasn't even slightly damaged by the aircraft impact strikes?

Nothing is what it seems. I will experience the joy of knowing, finally, perhaps discovering one tiny answer to modern culture's great puzzles.

"Something touched my arm," says one of the women, Karen, the wife of the guy who runs that big chunk of Adobe. She owns the flower shop.

"That's good," said Anne. "Log it on your digital recorder. Log all personal experiences."

"Something touched my arm," said Karen again, quieter this time as she spoke into her recorder.

My EM field meter twitches and flashes the way it always does. The Home Depot thermometer says it's 57 degrees Fahrenheit. Then there's a big spike that lights up all the LEDs on the meter and a cold breeze that touches my cheek. The thermometer tells me the temp has gone down to 56.5F.

Then nothing else happens for three hours. It's two AM. Way past my bedtime and I'm no longer as interested in ghosts as I am in my finding repose.

Mostly by feel I fumble around the empty house, apologizing for the false alarms I cause the other ghost hunters while I locate Anne. "I'm going to head back up the hill," I tell her. "Thanks for the cool evening."

"Well, I hope you at least had some personal experiences."

"Oh, all the time," I say.

"And you'll come to the debrief tomorrow? At the Coffee Center on Main."

"Wouldn't miss it."

As I make my way to the door I bump shoulders with my friend Dan, the technologist from Intel. His body is rigid. Digital camera in hand, HD stereo, at half mast, filming nothing but the blackness where the wall meets the floor, recording nothing of the vaporous figure that first seems painted on the wall, then expands to three dimensions, smiles at us, then evaporates upward through the ceiling.

My EM meter flickers and dies back to quiescence. The temperature is stable.

"Wow. How about that?" I say to Dan, knowing he captured nothing in hyper resolution.

"What?"

"That was pretty cool," I say.

"What?"

"That thing. It sort of looked like a woman. Maybe in period dress, couldn't really see what she was wearing. I only saw the face."

"You're crazy. It's bullshit. A waste of time. Don't be crazy."

"Sure," I say. "No craziness."

He walks away from me. In the darkness I can't see where.

"How was it?" asks the blonde haired girl when I get home. She's in bed reading a book. "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthesien. I bought it years ago and never read it. I thought it was about mountain climbing Nepal, but rather, it's about a man's conversion to Buddhism.

"You didn't miss anything."

"Seems to me like an excuse for middle-aged single people to meet and go home together."

"That's the cycling club," I say, putting away my EM meter, and getting out of my street clothes. "Notice I'm not in that one," I add for emphasis because every waking moment of life as a couple is a test.

"Did you see anything?"

As is always the case with supernatural experiences, I have to think about what to say.

"What's weird," I hear myself say, "is that we go into these things prepared to record and accept information as if we're scientists simply recording fact. But it's so Heisenberg. Like there's no way to squeeze out the subjectivity. Like if you made it totally objective, nothing would happen. If the tree falls in the forest when nobody's there, it not only doesn't make a sound, but it doesn't ever fall. Does that make any sense?"

She looks over the top of the book she's not reading.

"What did you see?"

"Well, some ghost sort of thing. I mean, there's always the one thing. It's like a physical law. All the data you take, all the experiences you have, you can explain everything away but one thing. It's always like that. You could be there for a week and you'd be able to explain away everything but one thing."

"So you saw a ghost?"

I shrug. I nod but I say, "I don't know what I saw," because anything else would be unpalatable to absorb and make me sound nuts. And I don't want to be nuts.

I put on my bed clothes. I say, "Like there are going to be hours of audio recordings and video recordings with nothing but our footsteps and whispers. And then the one thing happens and you aren't ready for it. It's why all UFO pictures are grainy and fleeting. It's like, supposed to be that way."

"Who was there?" she says.

"Anne and Karen and Dan. George. Some people I don't know. Another Karen and a Nancy. Some I forget the names."

"Lots of women."

"Don't worry. They're all married."

"Doesn't mean anything."

"You could come next time."

"I'd rather watch ice freeze."

"I can set up a camera in the refrigerator if you want."

"If a camera is watching the ice tray in the freezer, does the light go off when the door closes?"

"There's no light in the freezer. I'll use an infrared illuminator."

In the bathroom I brush my teeth. She goes back to reading about Peter Matthesien's conversion to Buddhism. When I get into bed she says, "So, was it a ghost?"

"There's always the one thing. Everything else you can explain away."

"You're impossible. I thought you liked ghost hunting."

"Me too," I say, wishing I could express my disappointment more effectively. Then content to keep it to myself.

"They have proof of life on Mars," says the other Karen, warming her hands on a double latte. I've yet to find out what she does during the day.

"Yeah. We know. The meteor they found in Antarctica," Dan says.

"No - not that," Karen says. "They have, like, stone faces and these statues and transparent tunnels that go underground. It's all in the pictures. You can see them on line. I can give you the link."

She turns to me. "I'm surprised you didn't know about this."

"I - um - why?" My coffee is done and now embarrassed I've unconsciously disappointed someone I go to the drip coffee counter for a refill hoping my absence will force a change in subject.

No such luck. "Because you're all over this stuff," she says when I get back to our table.

"Me? I'm pretty sure I never heard about transparent tunnels on Mars. Send me the link. I'll check it out. Did anyone see the show on Discovery where the guy goes to Chile to find aliens and his radios start bleeping strange noises?"

"Ok - let's get back on subject," says Anne. "Who got what last night? George, anything?"

George is beaming. He's been booting his laptop. "Listen to this," he says, turning it toward us and tapping the mouse button.

We hear the continuous exhalation of recorded nothingness. A bang in the distance and then a voice, Karen number one stubbing her toe on something in the darkness. After a few more seconds George says, "Let me play that again."

And again, nothing, Karen muttering an epithet, and a few more seconds of nothing.

"That was me," says Karen number one.

"Yeah. I know. Behind you. Underneath that sound there's another sound. Can't you hear it?"

He plays the recording once, twice, four more times.

Anne brightens. "Oh, I hear it. A man. Like he says, 'More chocolate, please.'"

"I thought it sounded like a woman saying, 'Martin fetch the horses,'" says George.

Dan and I look at each other. The women shrug. Nobody else can make out anything other than Karen's toe hitting something solid, then her cursing.

After an uncomfortable silence Karen number two says to me, "I saw that show on Discovery. I have it TiVoed. I love that guy. They went to Transylvania and found some real vampires."

I remember the show she's talking about, but because she could be talking about something else I say, "I think I saw that show but I don't think they actually found the vampires, did they? Though the part where the guy gets flung into the air is pretty cool."

"Yeah. That, too," says Karen. "I have it at home if anyone wants to come see it."

She gets no takers.

"Dan, did you have any experiences?" Anne asks.

"Nah," he says, staring at his shoes. He glances at me, then back at the ground. "Total waste of time."

"That's too bad," says Anne. "And how about you?" she taps my forearm for emphasis.

"The EM meter went wild a couple times. Felt some cold spots. That's about it though my intuition tells me there's something in there. I mean, I felt a sort of oppressive presence."

"Oooh. That's what I was going to say," says Karen number two. "Kind of ominous, but in a nice way."

I say, "Or it could have been mold."

"Ok, who's in for trying again next weekend? Saturday. We can do the mill this time," Anne asks. Everyone nods except Dan.

I have to run some errands. Hardware store for some halogen bulbs for the bathroom lights. I bid my goodbyes and leave them at the coffee place. As I get to my car Dan catches up and gets into the car parked next to mine.

"Thanks for not making fools of us," he says to me, opening his car door.

"No problem. But hey..." I struggle constructing a sentence I think won't offend him. It takes a little too long.

"What?"

"It is ghost hunting, after all."

"It's bullshit," he says. "Dude. I thought we were here to get laid. These women are all nuts and they could all use a couple hours on the treadmill, if you know what I'm saying."

"Well..." I say, now not worrying about offending him. "Maybe you're in the wrong club."

"Exactly. You ride bikes. I heard the biking club is pretty happening. They're doing a century this weekend. I joined. Why don't you come with us?"

"To be honest, I like biking but I'm not in the market."

He smiles. "Fine. Better odds without ya."

He drives off. I went for my light bulbs.

Over lunch we had been discussing the improbability of the Tevatron creating a black hole that would suck the earth into singular nothingness when I changed the subject.

"I have a neighbor who's a Realtor. She gives ghost hunting tours of local haunted houses. Two nights ago I went along. Just for laughs."

"And..." Rick said.

"Maybe it was the reflection of some headlights or something."

"You're highly suggestive, you know."

"Your point?"

"Meaning you went off and did that men-staring-at-goats thing like, what, five times? You came back and told me about blue wizards and green fireballs and ghosts of living people. If I didn't know you better I'd be avoiding you, which most people do."

"I can corroborate. There were witnesses."

"Who are all just as suggestable as you are. Why do you keep doing this to yourself?"

"Because I'm not smart enough to satisfy myself with anybody's explanations the way you can. You've got like what, twenty seven advanced degrees in physics? Someone says, 'What about the black holes at CERN?' and you launch into a half hour about GeV and quantum chromodynamics and muons and kaons and you talk yourself into being totally happy in the maze of logic you're holding together with snot and brittle masking tape."

"Hmph," he said.

"I know you well enough. You lose yourself in the math to keep yourself from thinking about the gaps in the logic."

"You're dinging me because I'm an atheist and there's no way I'm going to buy into your..."

"Childish flights of fancy? What does being an atheist have to do with ghosts?"

"When you dismiss the supernatural you do it top to bottom, my friend. There simply is only the natural, and those natural forces of which we know very little."

"Tell me where in the physics it says there can't be ghosts."

"Because even if they existed they can't be measured --"

"Bull. Says who? You think they don't exist so you don't try measuring. They pinged the EM meter."

"Prove it."

I stuttered. Nothing intelligent passed from my brain to my lips. I remembered the EM meter flashing and bleeping when the apparition appeared, and the go silent when it was gone. But without any video evidence, or even a willing witness, what could I honestly say happened?

Rick continued. "If you can't repeat it, it's not science. Nothing supernatural nudged your EM meter because even if there were ghosts the massive body of recorded human history provides evidence that they affect exactly nothing. It's thousands of years of history versus your night in a house that needs a plumbing retrofit."

"All the world's great cultures admit the possibility of the supernatural. For instance -- organized religion."

"Things that happen exactly once with zero affect aren't things. Religion is not physics for reason. If you can't repeat it, it's of no consequence."

"Tell that to the guys at the south pole spending billions of taxpayer dollars looking for neutrinos."

"Look. We can't get into this argument," he glanced at his watch for emphasis. "There's no beer and I have to get back to work."

"Let me quote you, 'the world at the quantum scale is completely unlike the macroscopic world. All our biological intuition fails and we have only the math to fall back on.'"

"Don't try to argue ghosts fit inside Plank's constant. Don't even start."

"You, yourself told me nobody could intuit top and bottom and charm and strange quarks and gluons. What the hell does it mean to be more charm than strange?"

"I could show you the math. You'd understand it with a little coaching."

"So who's to say that ghosts aren't just artifacts of some form of matter being a bit heavier on the top side than the strange side?"

"That's... If you understood symmetry you'd realize what you're saying doesn't have any basis in our calculus." He wiped his mouth and tossed his napkin on the table. "I gotta get back to the office."

Because I had been doing all the talking I'd taken only one bite out of my chicken salad on rye. I wrapped it in my napkin and followed him out.

Rick said, "We need beers, old friend. Much beer. I sense an important theological discussion needs to happen."

"I would really like to not be crazy on this. Why don't you come with me next time? I'll give you all the instruments. You can do the physics."

His expression darkened, a mood I'd seen come over him many times. We stopped on the sidewalk before our cars.

"Look. I mean this as a friend, really. The thing with Dan dredged up some old crap for all of us - but you have to ask yourself: what is it in your life that's missing?"

"I'm just trying to find out what it's about," I say, reminding myself he's not trying to insult me. But it's hard to fight the feeling. "I'm looking for answers I can't get otherwise."

"But you're trying to disprove what you know is fact. There are no answers down that rabbit hole. You know that. But hey, it's okay. Go have fun. Fun is good. Just come back to us when you're done."

"Don't you ever get tired of having all the answers?" I say, trying not to sound as angry as I am.

"I don't have all the answers, buddy. Not even close. And I feel my losses, too. You don't have the market cornered on grief, so don't even go there."

"What if I can get some proof..." I say, instantly sorry for prolonging the conversation.

"Bring it Saturday. I'm eager to see it. Meanwhile, what time?"

"Happy hour starts at six. The blonde woman won't let me forget it."

"Love that gal. See you then."

In The Martian Chronicles Bradbury writes a man trying to escape Earth. It's the year 1999. He walks up to the rocket field near his home town in Ohio, grabs the galvanized fence weave in his fists and demands to go to Mars because the politics on Earth is all wrong. There's going to be nuclear war. He shakes the chain link. The guards see him an approach. They holster their guns when they get close.

This is not a terrorist.

As they're carrying him off to let him go a couple blocks from the field they remind him the first two expeditions have gone missing. The crews are probably dead.

No - the man insists. They've gone quiet because they don't want to come back. It's heaven up there. They've found the end of the rainbow.

It has to be better because it's up and out. Far away. Red and mysterious. Hanging in the void, replete with mountains and rivers all named for heroes of other races in unpronounceable languages.

Then the impact. The dull thud of engine start. Even the security people have to turn and watch. You never get tired of it.

They see the tall silver craft lifting off the pad, tracing a golden orange thread behind it as it arcs toward the setting sun, the arrow of a modern Icarus.

They let him go on 2nd Street and ask him please not to come back, at least not today. There won't be another launch for a couple days and they'd like some down time to play cards.

One of the guards retrieves the gray fedora that dropped from his head when they muscled him down the road. He holds in two fists as they head back to the rocket field.

And then on a breeze the words, "Hopes, all burned, ash in the ascension..."

It's as if his thoughts speak themselves into the air. Looks over to see a man on the opposite sidewalk squinting as the last traces of the rocket contrail merge with the evening clouds.

He says, "Someday.." and points toward the sky.

Says the other, "Never. It's better that way."

"What do you see?" A light touch on my arm in the blackness. My EM meter flickers. "It's detecting something." It's Karen.

"Nothing," I say.

"You were standing very still. Did you hear something?"

"Nah."

"Anne saw a black figure in the basement. We have the EVP on the recorder. It sounds like it's saying, 'more chocolate, please.'"

"A black shadow that asks for more chocolate."

She hesitates. "At least it's something."

"Something."

"Can I ask you --? Why do you come out here with us? You act like you're not the least bit interested. It's a downer, if you don't mind my saying. It's bad energy."

"Same reason you're here. Looking for ghosts," I say to her.

"Doesn't seem like it. Seems like you want something else."

"Answers, then. Maybe I'm looking for some meaning."

"Come on. You're a big boy," she slaps at my bicep. "There are no answers here. This is about wandering around in the dark with a bunch of fun people who are into it. You should join your friend Dan in the cycling club. Your chances are better." She walks away in the dark.

I want to tell her she's wrong but I don't know which direction I should face to speak. And when I'm alone again the shadow reemerges from the corner and gathers itself into a visible white like a whirlwind picking up dust, or an old bulb flickering into luminescence.

Above us the red star glows in the night, and the great Martian canals begin to flow with lavender wine. Its cities gleam in the muted red sunlight. We see it better when it's dark.

I think to say, "Hello," to the shape that wants to be.

Or is it the internal reflection of a car's headlamp careening off the surface of a droplet of saltwater on my eyelid?

It's easier to see Mars in the dark. It's easier to remember that after the select crowd of mourners disbursed Dan and were I alone for a couple minutes on the church steps - and he said, "I held her in my arms."

For months months I had monitored his hell and watched it track my own prior experience, never uttering the location of the terminus I reached. Things could always be different, but they weren't. The shunts and multi-syllabic drugs and the ever-fallible human practitioners who in impotent attempt to mediate life and death dispense ineffective hopes -- but nothing that makes the disease disappear.

We penetrate the dark and lonely nothingness yearning for the light that must be.

"At least I held her in my arms. She was in my arms when it happened," said Dan.

"When it mattered, you were there," I told Dan, feeling we were just two of millions that year whose love slipped through helpless arms.

"I am so tired of losing her," Dan said, face in his hands, fighting to speak. "This can't be the end."

A cliche' hand to the shoulder. Rambling sentences. Words like river water over slippery stones. There is more. There have to be cities that gleam beneath the light of two circling moons.

I say to the the ghost in the corner, "We miss you."

"If I could only see her again," said Dan on the marble church stairs. He looked up, tear streaked.

I looked, too. Mars was up there.

Tell Me a Story

2009-12-08T12:32:00.002-09:00

This was true not so long ago.

Though I may be the only one who remembers.

"Daddy, tell me a story."

"I'm reading the newspaper now."

"I know, but tell me a story."

"Once upon a time there was a father who got really mad at his daughter for not letting him read the newspaper."

"A real story."

"All right. I see I can't win here. Come over here. Sit here. I'll tell you a story. Ok. Are you situated there?"

"What's 'shitshooted'?"

"That means you're ready for a story."

"I yam. I sitting, too."

"Ok. Here we go. Once upon a time there was a princess--"

"Dad, how come there's once upon a time?"

"What?"

"How come there's once upon a time?"

"Once upon a time? That's, well, that's what we say when we're going to start a story."

"How come? How come we say that when we're having a story?"

"Gee. I don't know. I guess because that's the way it's always been."

"How come?"

"I think because it keeps away the monsters."

"The big monsters, or just the little ones like the Keebles?"

"The furry ones."

"Like Marvin monster?"

"What's Marvin monster?"

"He's in the book."

"Well, I guess like Marvin monster, then."

"Can you tell me a story about mommy, about when she was a baby and she eated stewed carrots and there was diapers on her bottom?"

"I didn't know your mom when she was a baby."

"How come?"

"Because we hadn't met yet."

"How come you hadded met yet?"

"Because I was a baby too and we lived far away from each other."

"But you could just drive to see mommy."

"I was a baby and I didn't have a car."

"I have a car."

"I know. It's nice."

"But it doesn't go on the street because you don't let me."

"Little kids shouldn't be in the street. You could get run over."

"And then I was flat and you will sweep me with a broom."

"And I would be very sad."

"But maybe if I would be flat, I will go under the house and live there."

"I would still be sad. So you should stay out of the street."

"When mommy and you gotted married, did you want kids or did you just want to play? Grandma saided that you were too busy playing and that's why you waited so long."

"Grandma should mind her own business."

"I tolded her that."

"What did you tell her?"

"I saided Grandma should do her own business all the time like you say."

"Oh lord."

"Tell me about when mommy was a princess."

"I thought your mommy was the most beautiful woman in the world."

"She was a princess."

"She was to me."

"And then did you live in a castle?"

"We did. We had big dragons and horses."

"No, you didn't have dragons. Daddy. Don't be silly."

"Yes we did. I had a big one but he burned down the grocery store when he burped so I had to give him to the zoo."

"Daddy."

"The zoo in Philadelphia. It's far away but he still lives there."

"Daddy."

"His name was Ralph."

"Daddy."

"He was as big as this house."

"Listen to me, Daddy."

"What?"

"Tell me about when mommy weared the princess dress."

"What princess dress?"

"The one in the picture."

"You mean our wedding picture?"

"Tell me about how you went to the hospital and got me."

"Do you want to hear about the wedding or the hospital?"

"Tell me about how you sawed the doctor and he told you, 'I have a baby for you in mommy's tummy' and then you got me."

"When it was time for you to be born, it was late at night and it was snowing. And we had to get mommy's clothes and get in the car and drive in the snow to the hospital."

"And then did you see the doctor there?"

"Not right away. We had to wait a long time."

"And then were you scareded to be at the doctor for so long?"

"Well, we knew it was going to be ok."

"But mommy told me you were scareded of being at the doctor."

"She said that?"

"She tolded me that you were very scared of being at that doctor."

"Well, it was...it was...we didn't ever have a baby before. So we didn't know..."

"Mommy said that they came and took her and then you were scareded but you yelled at everybody."

"Things were going a little rough."

"Mommy says I didded have it easy on anybody."

"You were coming out backward and your heart was slowing down. So I made them pay attention."

"And mommy said you were yelling at all the doctors."

"I wasn't yelling so much."

"She said she was scareded so much and you made the doctors make me born right away."

"Well, it was..."

"Because you wanted me so much that you wanted me to come home right away."

"Yes. We did."

"Because you knowed it was me in there."

"Yes, we knew it was you."

"Daddy, I going to hug you now."

"Ok. I'll hug you back."

"The next time, when you want to be born, I going to telling them to get you fast."

"Thank you. That will be nice. Isn't it bed time yet?"

"No, it's not bed time."

"I think it is."

"Tell me a story."

"I'm going to tell you the story of a little girl who stayed up too late and her father locked her in her room until she was twenty-two years old."

"Daddy. Don't be silly."

"Time for bed, punkin."

"How come you call me pumpkin?"

"Time for bed. Mommy's calling. Let's go."

"Ok. Hug."

"Hug"

"Are you going to read the newspaper now?"

"No. I think I can't read the newspaper now."

"How come?"

"Because it's not important. Now go to bed. Scoot."

"What's inportants?"

"You are, sweetie."

"I not a newspaper, silly."

"Go to bed. Go on."

"Ok goodnight Daddy."

"Goodnight, sweet pea."

These Lives

2009-12-02T10:03:00.003-09:00

What I want(because you asked)

I want to hear about the ones who died,
And why with trembling hand and chin,
You hide behind the smile,
That brought tears to your mother's eye when you were born.

I want you to know how by street lamp light,
Your face adorned in ghostly glow,
I imagine there was a time,
Or will be then,
We knew each other as those for whom the story goes,
The clock would not divide.

I want to tell you,
I've tried to cry,
And failing that, saved all of it for one split second,
Upon an ice clad hill so far away no one could hear,
Shouted to God to forgive such ignorance,
Or punish me with an answer,
And heard only million-year old wind.

I want to tell you this isn't a love poem,
But that which by the will of he who made me,
Requires by my hand to make from nothing,
What I can image from deep within,
The wake from where I've been,
And live no more.

my diary, Hughes Glacier, 2001

In 1996 Hurricane Fran flew over Cary, North Carolina on its way to certain death in the north Atlantic. Cary is so far inland they rarely make hurricane preparations. It had been fifty years since the last hurricane went through, and that one was a wimp.

Fran was force one when the eyewall went over my house in the dark gray haze at three in the morning. Sustained winds were in the eighties's of miles per hour. Gusts got to one-hundred ten. You have trouble standing in an eighty mile-per-hour wind, and you certainly can't in one-hundred ten.

We brought the children to the center of the house were there were no windows. They slept on the floor in the little sleeping bags we'd bought them to use when they went to pyjama parties. They thought it was fun to sleep by candle light.

I watched them sleep. I sat next to my wife keeping vigil, telling the kids to go back to sleep when the giant oaks fell and the thump of their trunks against the ground made earthquakes. We told them to go back to sleep when the tornado thundered past, a train off its tracks, howling like a disembodied spirit screaming through the long tube between life and death.

I couldn't protect them. I waited for the roof to fall in on us, and I knew I would throw myself over them at the first sign of cracking. I would try to die first.

The barometer needle dropped. The shrill wind drowned our inside voices. We could speak only in screams.

You can't run from a hurricane. You can get in your car and try to ford the flash floods and the tree limbs hurtling like artillery, but you have to make it for hundreds of miles, and you won't make it.

You can't escape the floods underground. The winds will destroy your flimsy wood home. Flip your car.

Across the street the pines had fallen into the houses. One had cut a slice through the Blum's two story home. It ripped a slit from the apex of the roof to the foundation. Mr. Blum fought to put a tarp over the gash. The wind took the tarp and Mr. Blum fell from the ladder. I was going to run out to help him, but he managed to get up and get back into his broken home.

We shone flashlights at each other across the road. Blinked them like "Victory at Sea". If only we could figure out how to make the blinks mean something.

When the sun rose and the winds died, I left my home in living color to step, reverse-Dorothy, into black and white.

Our neighborhood was destroyed. Homes in pieces. Roofs torn off. Entire sections crushed by trees. Cars flattened. Roads impassable, criss-crossed by five-ton tree trunks.

The horizon was different. Our little hamlet in the forest was now a broken village on a flattened battlefield.

I climbed over the tree trunks and stood in the center of my street, not knowing what to do. In the distance there was movement. Something sky blue, someone sky blue climbing over the fallen trees.

Doc Wheeler was in his hospital scrubs. We stood among the wreckage. It felt like the end of the world.

"We should see if anyone's hurt," he said. "You all okay?"

I told him we were. Our house had been spared major damage. All souls well.

"Good. We're okay, too," he said. "Let's go now and see if anyone needs our help."

He said, "our help," as if there was something I could do for anyone hurt in the disaster.

The night before my dad died he fell trying to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. The cancer ate him so bad his legs didn't work anymore, but he was stubborn. The last shred of any man's dignity is in being able to make it to the toilet alone.

And he fell on the two yards of carpet between the edge of the mattress and the bathroom door.

I had been staying in the bedroom that used to be my sisters', sleeping on one of the old beds too small for a six-foot man, so my feet hung in space off the back of the mattress. I didn't realize it was a loud thump that woke me up. Sleep had gone so fast I scanned through my dream memory like it was real life.

Then I heard the groan and I ran to his bedroom.

Without my glasses all I could see in the blue-white moonlight was something child-sized writhing on the floor like a creature from a Lovecraft horror, or a character from the X-files come to haunt my waking nightmare.

But I didn't stop. Sheer momentum brought me to it. I slipped my arms under it, Pulled it slowly, shaking, to its feet.

It was like a baby bird, trembling, a loose collection of bones draped in thin skin, tiny bits of life clinging to it like melting snowflakes.

The strongest man I knew said, "Look what's become of me."

I helped him into the bathroom. I lifted the toilet seat for him, and held him while he peed.

In my mind the words, "This is the man who is responsible for my life. This is the man who built my bicycles on Christmas morning. This is the man who nearly got into a car crash racing to the hospital so he could be the first to see my newborn daughter."

And in that yellow sixty-watt incandescent tiled daytime I wanted burn down the house. I wanted him to die so he wasn't that way anymore. I wanted to crash my cars and blow up the Brooklyn bridge.

When I got him back in his bed he said, "This life, Joey..."

Then the drugs knocked him out. But I was full of hurricane, the pungent spray of sap from shattered trees, blood from the splinters, fear of the falling night sky.

Because I could not forget there is no help, I did not sleep for days.

We walked through the valley, alone for hundreds of miles, a prehistoric landscape visited by so few people there were no footprints on the soft still earth. Around us the ground was scarred in frost heave's deep polygonal grooves outlined in white traces of snow.

She had grown up in poverty. Lived in doorways. Abandoned cars. School busses. The only time she'd showered or bathed was when a school friend invited her home, and the parents insisted. Somehow she was smart enough to finish school. College. Land a job with a major newspaper, and then a well-known magazine.

She had money, but no use for it.

Now we were both in Antarctica, hiking the Taylor valley, taking pictures, her for her major magazine, me for myself, my kids, anyone who would look.

"The whole northern hemisphere could disappear in nuclear war and we'd never know," she said.

I snapped a couple of pictures, trying to keep myself from imagining a horror my family could endure without me. No--if there was going to be a nuclear cataclysm, I'd be best off evaporating with my wife and kids than hiding out at the bottom of the earth.

"What a life," she said, stepping onto a boulder the size of a small car. "You come here, you feel just like a kid again."

"All this is here whether we are or not," I said gesturing to the glaciers, the ventifact stones, the frozen lakes, imagining I'd said something profound. But she squinted when she looked at me, and so I know I was missing her point.

"You know how many people in the history of the world have been here?" she asked.

"Not many."

"You can count them. They're all numbered. We know who they are from the time Scott first discovered this place to now."

"Cool," I said, or something equally unattentive.

"Do you know what it's like growing up with nothing?"

I told her I didn't. We weren't rich, but we had things. Always.

"Of course you did," she said. Then she started walking. I followed her in silence for about a half a mile, not wanting to disturb her. Something had struck a nerve, and I was hoping it wasn't me. I had a good childhood. Considered myself successful. Maybe that was getting to her.

When we got to the base of an ancient blue ice glacier she stopped and stared.

"When I was young, I never knew we were poor. I thought everyone lived like we did. I never felt I was missing anything until I grew up and saw how other people lived. Then I wanted clothes and toys and my own bedroom."

I lifted my camera. I wanted to be as quiet as a stone. I wanted to be ice.

She took pictures of the miraculous nothing of everything around us.

"You might feel lost, but you never are. You have everything, you know?" she said, taking my picture against the backdrop of the void from which we would never return.

The first time I saw the woman I married, I knew I would.

I was seventeen, drinking underage in a sleazy dive called "Down the Hatch" in Highlands, New Jersey.

There was a band playing. The song was Getting better, by the Beatles.

She walked in with a friend who recognized the guy I was with. We were trying to be inconspicuous, gleefully swilling ilicit light beers in a dark corner.

The women came over to us. We bought them beers because their fake ID wasn't as irrefutable as ours. We drank and talked about going dancing.

I couldn't take my eyes off her. When she looked at me I saw my whole future. I smelled baking bread and saw Christmas tree lights. I poked myself with baby diaper pins. I bought her glasses of chardonnay and drove her to surprise parties.

She tried to teach me to dance, but I was hopeless. She laughed at me on the blonde hardwood floor, the band playing song after song while I sweat rivers trying to mimic her steps, moving like an ostrich shot in the foot.

I wrote her love poems. I wrote her stories. When she was gone I ached for her and music came out my fingers.

I wrote our wedding song and coached the band we'd hired how to play it "right".

We've been together twenty years. I've seen every line on her face form and deepen. I've seen her crying in pain giving birth. Spent days in hospitals with her, surgery upon surgery. We've bought houses together. Driven through deserts. Hurt each other. Tried all the sex we could imagine. Sat through endless weddings together, funerals for countless family members and a couple of close friends.

I know the smell of her breath at midnight. When I press my ear to the mattress, I hear her heartbeat.

"Did you ever think it would turn out like this?" I asked her at breakfast. The kids were out of earshot. They had scarfed down their yogurt and orange juice and were collecting their books for school.

My wife got worried. That was the kind of question a husband asks from deep within a mid-life crisis, right before he runs away with the 25-year old blonde who can't tell you the name of Jimmy Carter's vice president.

She scowled for a minute. "You know, it's never any different."

I said, "When I was a kid there was this song, 'What's it All About, Alfie?' It was on the radio all the time. It was my mom and dad's theme song. Everytime something disappointing would happen, my dad would lose a job or something expensive would break in the house, my dad's moment of philosophical introspection was to look at the sky and say, 'What's it all about, Alfie?'"

My wife drank her coffee and went back to her crossword puzzle. She'd heard a variety of versions of this story for most of our life together.

"But then he died," I said, trying to figure out what I was feeling, how to say it, and whether it was worth the trouble. It took a few seconds of listening to the kids rattling around in the hallway, pushing and shoving each other on their way out the door to school. I wanted to complete the thought.

She already knew I didn't want to be like him, and that I was afraid I couldn't help it.

"I don't think he ever figured it out."

Every night, before she goes to bed, my youngest daughter finds me and kisses me goodnight.

The other kids gave up the practice when they got older. This one, almost a teenager, never did.

No matter where I am or what I'm doing, she waits until she can come to me quietly, and says goodnight, and kisses me on the cheek.

"Goodnight daddy."

"Goodnight sweet pea."

High School Reunion

2009-12-01T09:16:00.003-09:00

My high school alumni association has tried to get in touch with me for years. The only address they had for me was the one in the student records. My mom still lives there.

"Mater Dei wants to invite you to the class reunion," my Mom says.

"They weren't exactly my best days."

"They keep calling me. Can I give them your number so they stop calling me?"

"Please don't give them my number. Tell them I was sucked up by a tornado while storm chasing in Oklahoma. Tell them you think I'm in Oz."

"I see them at church every Saturday night and they ask me about you."

"Tell them I'm wintering at the South Pole and am subsequently unreachable."

"Why don't you tell them yourself?"

"Because then I wouldn't be unreachable."

My sister lives in the same house as my mom. So does my brother-in-law. He was in the same high school graduating class as me. They go to the reunions.

Richie says, "You should consider coming to one. Brian Williams came to the last class reunion. He said he remembered you. You should come to this one."

Brian Williams is the anchor on NBC News now. In high school he was a tall lanky guy from the track team who was one of those in-between guys. Not a jock. Not in the "cool" crowd. Not a geek. Not a loser. Just one of those guys we went to school with, like me and Richie.

Richie installs gas furnaces in Newark. I run an international engineering team. Brian Williams is on TV every day and flies on Air Force One. Life has taken us all in weird directions since high school.

I ask Richie, "What would I say to people?"

"What do you have to say?"

"What did Brian Williams say?"

"He said,'Hi. Nice to see ya.' He shook everyone's hand. He sat for dinner with me and your sister. It was nice. Like the old days."

"I don't know about you, but I had a pretty rotten time in high school. Richie. You remember -- nobody actually liked me. I hung around with the public school kids."

"Nobody remembers a damn thing. They all think they liked you."

"But they really didn't."

"It's fun. I'm telling you. Seeing all these guys with gray hair. It's a scream."

"We have gray hair, Richie."

"Like I said. It's a scream."

My high school alumni website has an obit page.

I scanned through it. I recognized all the names. Some of them, well, we always figured they wouldn't last too long. Others are a surprise.

"Look at all these dead kids," I say to the blonde haired girl.

"They're not kids."

"I don't have any compartments in my memory where I know them as adults. They're all kids in my memory."

"You're living in the past. You should go to a reunion and see how everyone turned out."

"-- Sharon Luchenbach. I can't believe she's dead. We used to sneak Mars bars into study hall. I asked her to homecoming and she wouldn't go with me. Actually, nobody would go with me."

"I find that hard to believe."

"She went with Bill Harold. He was a wrestler."

"No. That nobody would go with you."

"You didn't know me then. Girls didn't like me. I asked three different girls to the junior prom. It took me nearly a month to get up the courage to ask each one."

"By then they had other dates."

"They were waiting for certain guys. They all wanted to go with John Gianni. They told me. They asked me if I could get John to go with them because they knew I sometimes hung with him. I took my sister's girlfriend. She was a Sophomore and was dying to go. She would have gone with me if I had ulcerous leprosy."

"Don't you think you're overstating things just a little?"

"You weren't there. It was awful. I was so happy to be out of there, I didn't ask anyone to sign my yearbook at graduation."

"Sounds pretty petty of you."

"Look at this. Jennifer Mason. Gone. Good lord. I think I asked her to one of the dances. She wanted to go with John, too. Can't believe she's gone. My God...Craig McCanns. Damned nice guy."

"It's bound to happen."

"Bill Pigett..."

"Cut this out. Read something else."

"They keep bugging my mother. They want to rub my nose in my high school persona."

"Is there any possibility they just want to stay in touch because...ahem...they actually liked you?"

"Nope."

"What in the world happened to you in high school?"

"It was awful."

"Come on. Tell me one thing."

"Gimme a break. I have PTSD. I don't remember any of it and it's never coming back. It's sealed in the inner reaches of my psyche and giving me high blood pressure."

"Just one thing."

"No way."

The only person of my generation I know who liked high school is my brother. He was immensely popular. Girls swooned over him. He dated a different girl every month. Sometimes two at a time. Everyone liked to be around him. He was magnetic. Funny. Always getting into situations that could become good stories later.

He organized my bachelor party. Got me so drunk in the first half hour that I passed out. They took me back to my apartment and tossed me in the bedroom.

I'm told my bachelor party was great after I got dropped off. Even now I have a sketchy picture of what happened that night.

"I remember your sister's fiancee ate a Heineken bottle," says one of my friends who was there and is now living out here in California. We were sitting in his back yard at his house in the hills overlooking the bay and San Francisco. I was on my second boilermaker - Boddingtons and Macallans.

"Not Richie," I say.

"Nah. The biker dude. What was his name?"

"Don."

"Yeah. He was pretty colorful. Must have been shitting blood for weeks. Can't believe he didn't wind up in the hospital. He divorced your sister, right? Ever hear from him?"

"My mother says he's selling tires in south Jersey."

"I remember he drove away with some girl on his bike. I think she was naked," he says. Then adds, quickly, "It wasn't your sister."

"I've heard. That's probably both good and bad at the same time."

"So you've said."

"The alumni association wants to know where I am."

"Engineering School? Don't tell them. You'll never stop getting the calls for donations."

"Too late for that. They already have me. This is the high school."

"So?"

"I don't want to talk to them."

"So don't."

"They won't leave my mother alone."

"So talk to them."

"I hated high school. I don't want to relive it."

"How can you possibly relive it? Do you know how long ago that was?"

"Maybe you don't know me. I can harbor a grudge for a really long time."

"Apparently. By the way. Your brother told me his 20 year high school reunion was a total blow out. The restaurant had to kick them out at 2AM. They were dancing on the tables. Even the spouses got along. They all needed to get cab rides home. You went to the same school, right?"

"Yah -- but he was three years behind me. My class was different."

"Why didn't you go to your reunion?"

"Why bother?"

"I heard Brian Williams was there and everyone had a great time. You could have talked to Brian Williams about what it's like to hang around presidents. The guy goes to war zones and interviews combatants. He has to be interesting as hell."

"Brian-- who?"

"You know, your brother has a lower blood pressure than you -- by a lot."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"He tells me. He tells everyone."

"Goddamn it."

"You really need to find a way to make peace with this whole high school thing. It would be good for you."

"I take pills. They lower my blood pressure."

"People would like you more."

"Thanks."

"I'm not kidding. I may be the only person who can stand you. By the way, there's more of that in the refrigerator."

"I'm switching to Guinness."

"Go get your own. All the ones in the refrigerator are for you. Nobody here touches the stuff. On your way back grab that bottle of Stag's Leap."

Ravi comes into my office, arm outstretched. In his flat open palm is a bright orange fruit, the size of a doll's head. Shiny and smooth.

We usually speak every day for the better part of an hour. We talk about technology. We talk about customers. Sometimes we go to lunch and talk about our childhoods. I grew up in [New Jersey]. He grew up in India in a town whose name I can't pronounce.

He was poor. He was determined. He came to America without any money. He got off the plane and just wandered out of the airport to find some friends he knew had moved to somewhere in California.

I admire Ravi for all he has done for himself and his family. He built his entire life. He didn't give up.

I don't like to tell Ravi about New Jersey. We had too much. We had heat and electricity and sewers. We didn't have to have an entire family working in near slavery to get us into school.

When Ravi comes unexpectedly it is to complain about something. Or he comes in to warn me about something about to happen. He's my canary in the coal mine. He's watching my back.

My mind is bracing for impact.

The water supply is contaminated with arsenic. Everyone's getting smallpox. The Russians accidentally launched all the missiles and we've got 30 minutes to live. They're turning off gravity.

His hand is steady. His pose is awkward, but comfortable. Like something Boticelli would have painted that he would have had to pose for, remaining still for days.

The fruit is iconic. I think of that word as if it is pushed into my head from above. Icons mean something, I think to myself, like someone says it to me.

"Do you want a persimmon?"

"I like persimmons." I take it. It's cool and heavy. Organic. Living evidence the earth tries to provide.

"We have a tree. I came out of my house and it fell onto my head. I thought of you."

I was speechless, so I did what speechless people do.

Ravi says, "Most people don't like persimmons. Yet there are so many trees around here."

"Some are good," I say.

He says, "Well, there was something I wanted to talk to you about."

Here it comes. Aliens have crashed all our computers. Ravi stares at the ceiling. He looks out my window. He examines the map of Antarctica I have on my wall to remind me I once breathed the air there.

He says, "No. It's Fred I have to talk to. See you."

He leaves my office.

Leaves me holding the persimmon. In the middle of my e-mail. In the middle of the phone calls. In the middle of the worrying about tomorrow's meeting. I am not typing or talking to someone. Just holding an orange globe. Had you said to me an hour before, "In an hour you will be sitting in this chair holding a tree fruit," I would have said you were crazy.

Then the impulse. I went on line and typed my address into the alumni association website. I gave them my e-mail address.

I looked at the obit page and thought about the kids I knew who are dead.

We look at obits so we can sneer at God. I'm still here. You didn't get me.

I thought about Jennifer. She turned me down for homecoming dance. Nobody remembers that but me.

How much is now lost forever, gone with them?

Ravi pokes his head in my office. "Now I remember what I was going to say."

"Are they firing all of us?"

"No, it's the thing you said yesterday about your old classmates. You know I went back to India, to my old school."

"How was it?"

"We have saying. It doesn't really translate. It's sort of like, 'This is the way it is. You got all the way here. Be happy about it.' We all take different paths, you know?"

"I think so."

"You worry too much. You know that you have nothing to worry about."

I thank him. He winks and leaves.

This guy who grew up on the other side of the earth from New Jersey.

Came all the way around to the other side of the world to hand me a persimmon.

The Water Works

2009-11-20T13:15:00.004-09:00

There are places in this world you cannot reach, roads visible to the eye and as obvious as the corner market that somehow remain untraversed though seen day after day. There is a field of young grass in the middle of a populated neighborhood no one has ever crossed. There are houses near the center of town, weathered and unkept, forever under clouded skies: old Victorians like the homes of witches in a child's picture book within which a single living soul has never been found. Untrodden dirt paths snake into wooded lots. Abandoned factory buildings emit smoke from tall stacks.

Someone points to the building behind the chain link fence and asks, "What's that?"

But no one's ever been there. So no one knows.

*

When I was young and my mind had yet to be filled with the facts: that dandelion fuzz doesn't fall up, that rain isn't angel's tears, that the music in the walls is knocking pipes and the lights in the sky are flights of tired commuters, then there were big blank places inside me where the imagination I was born with pooled like the remains of a spring shower within the muddy dents of a wooded path. When uncovered those ideas were more real and important than knowledge I gained in class. They seemed like something wondrous long forgotten.

Later came first kisses. Later came sparkling eyes for which I sold my heartbeats to pay bills. Later came time in which everything was clear, where everything had an explanation and surprise was something to fear.

Elders taught me the earth circled the sun, that gravity was a warp in space made by stuff, which needed to exist to define space. That light was the speed of time. That Santa Claus was a myth perpetrated by my parents. That someday I would die.

"Thou are dust, and unto dust thou shalt return," I was told, and a smudge of dirt planted by a priest's thumb on my forehead to remind me.

And it was so confusing that after a while I didn't know what to believe. So I played along while imagination drifted away as unreclaimable vapor. Into the sky.

I was a child and my parents were worried I wasn't eating enough. I was very thin.

While trying to get me to eat my mother told me a story about a boy who like me, wouldn't eat his dinner. He got very skinny. One day while he and his mother were coming home from the park a thunderstorm rose suddenly. The sky went black and a big wind came and blew the little boy off the ground. His mother held onto his hand, but at the last moment, the wind was so strong she lost her grip, and he flew away into the dark black clouds.

His mother called to him as he was dragged upward. But the wind was so huge, and she was just a woman.

She watched him getting smaller and smaller, crying for her as the storm clouds consumed him.

"But he came back," I said to my mother.

"No he didn't."

"Not ever?"

"Never."

After that, every time the sky went dark, I was sure I could see him up there, lost forever in the sky, a victim of the winds.

*

We were six-years old. Michael Noone said, "Here they are," and pointed down. I was captivated by the fence before us that seemed to stretch into the clouds.

"I wonder if that's real barbed wire?" I said, looking at the steel coiled at the top of the chain link fence.

Clouds drifted overhead in the blue like the reflections of leaves on a stream.

"They're here," he said, forcing his hand through the fence's diamond braid to the grass on the other side. "Look."

So I did. In the deep green a patch of clover attracted none of the bees in the weeds around us. He pulled some clover out by the roots and for a second couldn't get his hand through with a clenched fist. He yanked hard, grunted, and it came free. He was holding a clump of clover trailing a tiny ball of dirt and roots.

"Every one," he said, and he thrust it toward my face. "Like I said."

Every clover flower had four leaves. I'd never seen a single four-leaf clover, and here was Michael holding an entire handful.

He said, "They're all four-leaf clovers in there. And they're all three-leaf clovers over here. That's because it's magic in there."

"What's in there?"

"It's the water works," he said, mocking my ignorance. And he flicked a thumb toward the massive tower that shadowed our neighborhood. It was a dark green cylinder, featureless except for the words "Priceless Water" painted at the top. At the base were several white brick buildings with black impenetrable windows. There were no signs on them. No logos or designations. Like the fence itself, there were no entrances. They were the type of buildings I would have drawn in kindergarten, clumsy abstractions of something real.

"What's the magic?" I asked.

"Water, stupid. Don't you know anything?"

"How do they get the four-leaf clovers to grow?"

"They come from the lights," Michael said, as if I should know that, too. "At night you can see them. They drive around the ground and take off and fly in the sky."

That didn't make sense. "Cars fly in the sky? Don't they just have regular cars in there? What about the cars for the workmen?"

"Nobody works in there," Michael said. He stood and chucked the clovers. I followed him along the fence, around the corner where it ran into the woods, down to the Rahway River where the sunlight fell in droplets through the trees, where in the cool and damp we caught frogs and sunfish and snails you could put in a bucket one day, and come back the next to find four more.

Behind us somewhere the river fell over a concrete embankment. We could hear it beyond the fence, like a giant's sigh. But from where we stood, it drifted past apathetically, carrying dead leaves and tiny twigs, as if it didn't matter it was going to wind up inside the water works.

*

We lived in a two family house. My grandparents lived upstairs.

One day in the summer my grandmother came downstairs to use our phone to call the phone company. Hers was broken. She told my mother it was picking up airplanes.

After she scheduled a service call, my mother and I followed her back upstairs and listened to her phone. When she took it off the hook, there was no dialtone.

My mom held the phone to her ear while she said she heard the radio. Music, like the top-40 hits.

Grandma listened, and said she heard airplanes.

When I put the phone to my ear. I heard voices.

It was as if every conversation happening on every telephone on earth was streaming through grandma's phone all at once. A huge crowd of talking. It was like walking through the World's Fair. Every now and then you'd get close to some people and make out their conversation. Fractions of sentences. Bits of words. And then you'd get far away again and it sounded like a giant's sigh. Like a waterfall.

The thousands of voices seemed to be making the same message over and over as some of the conversations got closer, and some farther.

"Don't be afraid. Wait for us."

I told my mother that's what it said.

She grabbed the receiver from me, put the phone to her ear, listened hard, then slammed it down in its cradle.

She sent me outside to play.

Later that day, the repair man came and fixed grandma's phone. She said he told her there were radio waves bouncing off the tower in the water works. They were aiming right to her phone. He just put a little shield on her phone so the radio waves couldn't get in anymore. Then her phone was working again.

My grandma was happy her phone was working, but said the phone man made her nervous. He'd come in a truck that didn't say "Phone Company" on it. His uniform didn't have a name tag. He acted like he didn't see her standing there.

She was happy when he left, but she watched him get in his truck and drive down the street. He didn't turn down St. George's Avenue like everyone else did. It looked like he'd gone into the water works.

*

The first time I was inside the water works I was looking at Michael and he was staring into the distance with a half-squint like he was trying to make something focus that wouldn't come clear.

It was white inside the buildings and it felt like you were holding your breath. It was white and far and someone told me that in here, if you were going to make a globe of the world it would look different. The seven continents would be gone and there would be other land and other sea.

Inside the water works it was white nothing that went on forever, and numbers didn't add up straight and if you flew into the sky, you'd come up out of the ground. And you didn't ask how you got in, because everybody knew.

Inside the white buildings were people as white as nothing. So much nothing that all you could see of them were their black eyes, dark as the space between the stars. And there were animals like horses and dogs that could speak to you by casting words into the world on waves you felt in your stomach.

The first time I was inside the water works we met the boy who'd become lost in the sky. He was still trying to get home.

It made me sad for a long time.

*

When my first daughter was born we lived in Edison, New Jersey, which is pretty close to Rahway.

One day when my wife was tired from a long week being a mother, she asked me to take the baby so she could have some time on the weekend to go out with her friends and do whatever it is wives need to do when they've been mothering too long.

I put the baby in the car seat and figured I'd drive to the park on the other side of town. But I had the idea to go past the old two-family house in Rahway. So I did.

It was smaller. The mimosa tree in front my grandfather planted nearly reached the roof.

I showed my daughter the window to my bedroom where I'd looked out and seen the lights Michael told me about. She was chewing on an arrowroot cookie and had cookie-saliva goo all over her. I wiped her clean with a Wet One.

Like my old house Rahway River Park had grown a bit smaller. The grass was less green. The wooden bridge over the river had been torn down. Only the concrete footings on the river banks were left.

I carried my daughter through the park and down into the woods where most of the park visitors wouldn't go. I carried her into the place where the sun fell like drops and the somewhere beyond the chain link fence the river fell and sounded like a giant's sigh.

The buildings inside the fence were gray and unkept. Paint peeled from the cinderblock. A couple of the windows were cracked and there were bent aluminum blinds behind most of them.

I found the main entrance. There was no lock on the gate and a sign clearly read, PROPERTY ELIZABETHTOWN WATER COMPANY, NO TRESPASSING.

The water tower was still there. It was painted yellow now, and at the top was the name of the water company.

I found a patch of fresh cut grass between the water works and the park and set my baby down. We picked through the weeds. Blew seeds from dandelion puffs. I made a whistle with a blade of crab grass. We swung on the swings in the park. She drank juice from her sippy cup and I got a soda from the hot dog guy.

When it was time to go home I put her back in the car seat beside me.

"This is where I grew up," I told her, wondering if she could understand English.

She looked at me for a second, and then put her fist to her mouth.

I had to stop her from eating a handful of four-leaved clover.

Jackie Delbecq is Dead

2009-08-25T15:48:00.003-08:00

In the snow
I remember Jacqueline was with me the afternoon I decided I knew what love was. The ground is powdered and the mountains draped in white.
In my mind
the atmosphere is smeared with the haze of brilliant summer sun. Sweaty legs stick to the beige vinyl car seats. Windows open, I hide my words under the noise of the road and the cars we pass.

She hears me anyway.

"You're never supposed to say that to anyone. You promised you wouldn't."

I couldn't have been but nineteen. Yet, I knew everything I knew.

"But it's true," I said, for once not pleading.

She cried. She was not afraid to die of hurt beside me. I had to pull
over.
And then over
she said through her tears, "You said you would never say that to me."

Parts of my history make me want to remove my mark from the earth, George Bailey style,
unsaved by angels.
Not out of spite. Not for anything other than to erase the pain I've caused I would like to undo my birth,
to allow all the goodness and badness of things to have happened without me.
I could hide in anonymity behind the television screen,
switching channels when the suspense got too high -
like I was a spectator watching a home improvement show. Someone else's hammer hits someone else's thumb. Someone else measured incorrectly and so now the boards don't fit. Someone else carries the bricks from the front yard to the back.

There would be no note of me, no regret because I would never have been. And the house would have never been built.

I never told her I loved her, but she said she loved me. It wasn't supposed to matter.
I was free and clear.
I never told her.
That's the way it works.

Today the air is filled with snow.
Inside my boots my toes ache from the cold.
The bald eagles are all grounded and the frigid breeze carries no raven's call.

I sing along with the improbable song in my head, exhaling a warm cloud that is all that remains of a day in the summer when I told her I did not love her and would not stay with her.

In the snow
I wonder what I might have become had I not been so sure. Today I ask God to consider I was only a child making those decisions. I ask for a lighter sentence as I could hardly have been expected to act with any degree of the greater wisdom I have acquired with age.

Would that I had not spent the rest of my life escaping the summer for the cold.

I did not sleep with Jackie. It would not have worked out at all.

She assured me there would be no problem. Something in her childhood made it impossible for her to bear children. There was little that could happen beyond being caught by her parents.

The thought of it terrified me. You might think there was something wrong with me, a healthy nineteen year-old heterosexual boy turning down an invitation to a girl's bedroom in an empty house.

It was a summer day between high school and college. A warm humid morning. Everyone was at work, but we were pre-responsibility. All the time in the world and nothing to do. My car was at the curb. I'd answered her phone call, promised I'd stop over. I stood on her front lawn next to the Norwegian Elkhound, looking up at her at her bedroom window, reverse Romeo.

"I can't come up. I have to go."

"But where are you going?"

"To work."

"You're not dressed for work."

"Well, to Mike's then."

"Wait, I'll come with you."

I waited. Honestly. I want to be that person. I don't want to remember I left before she got to her front door.

She wrote me letters. She called. When I went away to college, she went to my house and hung out with my parents. My mom's tinny telephone-compressed voice told me through my Miami dorm room receiver: "Jackie stopped by."

"Uh huh."

"Why?"

"Stanford doesn't start for another week."

"But why is she coming here?"

"I don't know. I have homework."

But I did know. And knowledge is not truth. Truth is not certainty. I was not her true love. I would not be.

Now it turns out that the girl I was seeing, with whom I was convinced there was true love, broke up with her boyfriend and he began seeing Jackie. The two of them got married as did the girl and I some 23 years ago.

And is wont to happen with the massive available connectivity of the internet, I found my old high school on the net. They have a website now, and an alumni association which also has a website. Next year will be the 30th anniversary of my graduation from high school.

In that time, CD players were invented. Personal computers became a household appliance. Iran/Contra and Greneda gave way to two wars in Iraq. The Japanese took over the American television set industry and put out of business such staid names as RCA, Magnavox, and Zenith. Apartheid ended. The Berlin wall fell. Yugoslavia burst into tiny genocidal pieces. The human genome was sequenced. We got pictures from the surface of Titan. The face on Mars proved to be a hardly-face shaped mountain.

Why does the past weigh upon us so heavily, then? What are we looking for that makes us ask those questions we neither want answered nor will benefit through having answered?

The site put me in touch with some former classmates. We hadn't had the need to converse for 30 years and being cordial didn't give way to anything more than polite civility.

I found that my so-called best friend from high-school was working as a barista at a coffee house in Philadelphia. He shunned the internet and anything to do with his youth in New Jersey. He didn't sound pleased I'd contacted him, but he didn't try to end the conversation prematurily.

And he answered quickly when I asked him about Jackie.

"She died."

I think I said, "Wow," or something to hide the gut-punched grunt I couldn't hold in. "Of what?"

"She was sick. It was a long time ago, though."

"A long time."

"Jeeze. Like almost twenty years."

"My God. She was young."

"We were all young."

I loved to read stories by Ray Bradbury. And even though I couldn't understand some of them, the mood they engendered poured over me like warm syrup and enveloped me in the possibility that unseen things could be.

There was one story of which rereading could not improve my comprehension. The action is simply a child denying a grandparent her own childhood. It was important to the child that her grandmother say that she had never been young, and the way things were, were the way they had always been.

Now I scan the electronic web pages of my high school alumni newsletter and see faces attached to names. Graying men smile through bifocals. Lines crease faces that suggest resemblances to girls I once fought shyness to ask to the Homecoming dance. Their children are taller than they are and it seems they are imperfect copies of a truer group of people that I know existed, in a time that is real to me.

The adults in the pictures are not the teenagers I remember. These middle-aged men in golf shirts could never have been the ones who spray painted the red barn. These are not the shadows of the ones who drank vodka and orange juice before math class. These are not the ones with who made fires on the beach and at midnight streaked naked past the lovers writhing in blankets near the pier.

Now I know I will not find among them anyone who claims to be her.

At night I lie awake in awe of the sublime truth, that life treats us the way waves wash shells to and from the sand. Now I cannot sit with her anywhere but in my mind. And she never said she loved me. And I never had to reply.

I am absolved from wondering that had I possessed the courage, another life would have happened. It's the way life works. I'm in the clear.

Because the way it is now is the way it has always been. And I grieve for something that never was.

Weird Headless Death Cult of Writers

2009-08-22T19:45:00.001-08:00

"Your problem is you just do it," Kat says. She puts her iced coffee on the sticky metal patio table. We're sitting in the outdoor area at the coffee house, on those metal chairs that are about as comfortable as an autopsy table. When you get up there's a grid on your ass.

It's spring and everyone is thinking about sex. I am, and Kat must be but I don't really wanna go there with her because I'm married and she's engaged and besides, that sort of thing is bad between friends who want to stay friends.

Middle-aged guys walk by, unconsciously sucking in their guts as they blare mental images, days they used to catch frisbees, shirtless on tan sand beaches.

A woman glides past on rollerblades, her long auburn hair trailing in the slipstream, bikini top over jeans shorts, the world whispering past in her black plastic sunglasses. She slides through the lacey shade cast by the eucalyptus trees and I follow her with my eyes, soaking up summer Ray Bradbury style, a kid with brand new sneakers that speak the freedom of running on marshmallows. Reminds me of a time on spring break. Fort Lauderdale. Must have been something like 1979. What the hell was her name?

Remember the song was, "Always and Forever." Sing the first few words.

Kat tells me to cut it out, that it's rude to be having coffee with one woman and stare at another, which makes me forget for a moment that she's criticising me.

"What are you singing?"

"Little things can make you drift in the springtime. I'm singing a memory. My whole life has this maniacal soundtrack. It's stupid sometimes. Stuff like disco got stuck in there back in the seventies. I still remember them playing 'She's a Brick House' at the Homecoming dance I went to stag. Bad time. But that girl on skates...damn...reminded me someone a long time ago made me feel like like I didn't care if the world detonated and left me floating in space surrounded by sand that used to be California. Give my fortune to feel that way again."

"Fortune? You?" she asks, looking over the top of her sunglasses in a way that makes me really want to kiss her bad--(ly). So so bad.

"When I get one," I say. Then, "Why are you sitting all the way over there?"

"In your dreams," she says, stays where she is, goes back to telling me why she's not reading my book.

She says, "Writing is art. You...you just do it because you can, not because you love the art of it."

Kat's a professional writer. Been published in lots of the big magazines. No books yet, but all over the newspapers and national weeklies. Journalist. Some short stories not sold. Once her novel sells, she'll be my hero. For now she's just a friend who's better than me at what I want to do more than breathe.

"But I love writing," I tell her. Stutter a little trying to figure the words. "I love to be with writers. It's why I love being with you, right?"

"That's the only reason? Because you think you can get writing advice from me?"

"Shit. Damn. NO. I that's not what I mean. Okay--can we just rewind? Put one on the scoreboard for woman-kind. I fucked up. Fine. It's not what I meant and you know it. Don't jerk me around that way; you're not my wife. Why the hell are all my friends women now? What happened to all my guy friends?"

She says she's sorry and that I drove my guy friend away. Just teasing. Goes back to telling me why she doesn't like the short story I sent her, and the book I have a contract to produce even less.

"Your stuff is like a movie. I see everything that's happening, but I don't know what anybody's thinking."

"Uh huh," I say, remembering the cardinal rule of constructive criticism is you shut up and listen. But I'm thinking really hard I always put a lot of thinking in my stories.

"They're just not...I dunno. They're not enough... Maybe because it's like, I KNOW you. So I know how you think and when I read your stuff it's like...personal. Why are you doing this to me? This is hard."

"I'm doing this because you said you wanted to read my book and the short story for Bill's Antarctica anthology and then three weeks went by and you said nothing. I mean, I can take, 'Billy-bob, this shit sucks really bad.' Of course I want to hear, 'Billy-bob, you're a fucking genius.' But nothing is death. Stab me through the heart sort of death. Do you realize of the eight people I gave the book to, Laurie said she cried her eyes out, Paolo loved it, and the other six of you writer-types just went into your shells. So if you hate it, just say so. You're killing me with this bizzare non-functional kindness. Say something or let me go back to mentally masturbating about beautiful semi-clad women, thank you very much."

Kat rubs her head like something uncomfortably hot is going on inside. I take a swig of my iced latte wishing I could get on with the rest of my life, but I'm stuck. I have no job for the first time in 20 years. My writing seems to be selling, but then my best friend critics are saying zero about it, which makes me think it sucks. And even then I couldn't support my family on those earnings. Still need some kind of other job.

Two girls walk by in tight hip-hugger jeans and tube tops, wide white belts around their waists, hair flowing down their backs like Julie from "Mod Squad". It's like the 70's all over again, only now we have killer viruses you can't cure with a penicillin shot. I was too young for free sex in the 70's, too married in the new millennium.

Grew a beard in Antarctica and it's showing a little gray. Sheep dog kind of thing. Kat likes it.

I would much rather be having sex right now than thinking about being a failure at everything I do.

So I tell Kat she's not being helpful and I suggest something else not helpful that's coming from the sun and the hormones I still have even though I'm a lot older than spring break girl, Fort Lauderdale, Always and Forever.

"We could go somewhere and fuck. Ever wonder why the characters on 'Friends' don't just have one big pile-on orgy? How the hell can you have that many attractive people in one place and they all act like they're oblivious to the fact they're in their prime breeding years?"

She says, "Because the show would be over in two episodes. Joey would cut Chandler's throat and the women would throw each other off the balcony. The survivors would commit suicide. You don't fuck your friends, Billy-bob. Not ever."

I say, "Wait. Okay. Strike, 'Fuck.' Make that--make love. Look, I'm thinking we head over to the Marriott across the street, check in, get naked and play with each other's soft parts all night. Then tomorrow we catch the next flight to Toledo. Tire capital of the world. You must have always wanted to see it, right? Or Borneo. Auckland, New Zealand and we can raise sheep and I promise not to fuck them. Whatever. I got a fricking Amex Platinum I can probably run up about quarter a mil on before the love of my life cuts it off. Then your fiancee would dump you and kick you out of the house, my honey would divorce me and take every cent I had, my kids would disown me, my mother would pretend I was never born, and I'd be totally unemployable because I'd have a mental breakdown. Doesn't that sound like a great idea? I'm thinking, hmmm, yes. Yes. Great idea. Whadda ya say? We go wreck our entire lives on one hormone-enraged act of supreme stupidity and then you don't have to explain what the fuck you mean that my book seems to be good but written by a guy who doesn't want to be an artist. It makes about the same amount of sense."

"You're nuts," she says.

"Yes, I am nuts," I assure her. "I went to Ant-fucking-arctica. I got a fucking book contract. I'm a fucking silicon valley electronics company executive, not a novelist explorer. Or maybe I'm an adventurer. Maybe I'm a latent adulterer. Kat, goddamn it. I don't know what the fuck I am anymore. What I am is defined by what I'm not, rather than what I can do and it's killing me. Is this a midlife crisis? I'm not anything. Not working. Writing crap people don't want to read. Not in Antarctica dying of exposure. Not fucking blonde bimbos when my wife isn't looking. Maybe I should start robbing banks. Why the fuck can't you tell me why my stuff is not good? What's wrong with me that I can't write bad enough to be bad and not good enough to be good? What's with all this fucking 'not'?"

She says, "Are you done?" Folds her arms and stares at me.

"No. I wanna fuck or I wanna do something that can get me killed. Maybe drag racing. Winter mountain climbing in Alaska."

"Go home and fuck your wife," she says. "You're a good writer. Stop acting like a baby."

I pull down my sunglasses and flutter my eyelashes. "You sure you can resist me?" And truth is, I wouldn't know what to do if she said she'd go with me, but everything inside is hurting way too much for me to act like I don't care anymore. In my brain I've got a picture of her naked with a chapter of my book in her hand, glasses on, reading aloud while I'm over her making babies that will never come because I've been neutered by some Air Force surgeon with a sharp knife.

"What's wrong with me?" I say.

"You're freaking yourself out. Look, work harder at your writing. Read something once in a while. Try to tell stories instead of flipping metaphors around like you don't have to do anything but give people analogies. People want to know what's happening, not how you feel about the landscape."

"My book is already sold. It's going to be printed," I say, knowing she doesn't have a book contract and wants one bad--(ly).

"It will have to be fixed. You have a lot more work to do," she says, and my heart sinks like a rock through hydrogen. Alcohol. I need to be getting drunk now. Really bad--(ly).

"I found this place on the web," I say. "It's full of writers. Good ones. They're all over the place like some kind of weird headless death cult of writer apostles. I've written some things for them and they're NICE to me. They tell me if they love stuff or hate it. They threaten to castrate me when I insult the bands they like. I feel like I'm home. These people, they think like me. It's called Everything2. They have these rules. Dole out points. It makes them write better, they think. They really try to make each other happy with their writing. They can't stop. They write and write because their genes make them do it. Are you sure we can't go somewhere and fuck? How about just oral sex? No penetration. A hand job. I'm cool with that if you are."

Kat whacks me with her empty coffee cup and makes me love her by reminding me you don't go fucking your friends, figuratively or literally. It just doesn't work. There's no such thing as casual sex. She's been there, done that, and there are bodies in shallow graves all along highway 80 to prove it.

She says, "That thing you wrote about Blink 182. That's the funniest thing I've ever read from you. Why don't you write more like that?"

I say, "That was funny? You laughed at that? What's wrong with you? That was a sensitive piece about making my children happy. You tempt me with your feminine wiles and then mock me with your insolence. Harlot!"

Kat knows nothing serious is going to happen anymore. She gets up and fishes the car keys from her purse, says, "I'm going now. I'm going to call 911 when I get to my car. I'm going to tell them to look for a crazed 40-ish guy molesting rollerbladers by the coffee roasting house. If you're not gone in fifteen minutes they're going to feed you Thorazine and take you away in a hamster cage. I promise."

I pull out my Amex card. Wave it around. "In half an hour we can be at the airport checking in. Toledo is waiting, darlin'. All that rubber. More steel belted radials than could fit in Madison Square Garden. All you have to do is say, 'Yes,' and your retread days are over."

She says, "You can't tempt me with Toledo. It's Akron where the tires are, honey. Go back to your Anything-2, or whatever that writer death cult is. Maybe they can help you." She turns to walk away and stops, says, "Tomorrow? Same time?"

I say, "Sure," and wait for the men in white coats.

August 1st 2009

2009-08-19T15:51:00.001-08:00

So life is a juxtaposition of people and places
And things that happen
And everyone we meet for some reason
Things we see and do
And can never take or give back
Everything true and none of it false
When you really get to the heart of it
Everything is always true

For other people it's different but for me it starts and ends at the office:

---- Them -- you have to go to Germany and Armenia and probably Italy, before November
---- Me -- great, wonderful. You know why people have heart attacks? To get out of shit like this.
---- Them -- please don't have a heart attack.
---- Me -- Sometimes I'm really tempted, you know?

Radio loud on the way home from work - Dave Matthews, sotto voce, at the start of "Time Bomb", I think of sometimes

"Relax." Then he sings a song.

Relax. In my book
If Lyle Lovett had become a plumber there would be no reason for country music.
Though some would argue he's not exactly "country". More "Texas".
Amazon lists him as "alternative country".
He's got this cello player that comes out in the middle of a song and does a classical solo.
And a black gospel backing group
And a modified mullet.
And Tonto saying, "Kiss my ass," to the Lone Ranger.

We were in the third row and when they played "Penguins" The blonde haired girl broke out in uncontrollable laughter over the lines

"I don't go for fancy clothes
Diamond rings.
I go for penguins
Oh lord, I go for penguins.
Penguins are so sensitive.
Penguins are so sensitive
To my needs..."

so much so that the rhythm guitar player kept looking over and grinning.
Maybe he hadn't been around people who had paid $120 a seat to see Lyle Lovett and his Large Band
And didn't really know the music at all
During the economic downturn when people are being bankrupted by medical bills
We are laughing at Lyle Lovett
In the cold Saratoga night

We will always have the penguins, the blonde haired girl and me

**And I will rise up.
Though I be a dead man...**
Etc.

"Tomorrow we will play in Monterey, in an air conditioned theatre. Inside the way you're supposed to be in the summer," says Lyle about the fact it's 58 degrees F and dropping fast in the damp ocean breeze.

This is really country music, apparently,
To play jazz with a Gospel group and sing

"If I had a boat
I'd sail out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat...
me upon my pony on my boat."

Which made me think of kids. It's a kid thing, to wish to ride your pony onto a boat.
So then me sentimental--a stressed out old sap--nerves frayed from weddings three days prior.
Shell shocked by the impact of the visiting ex's, and their accusing glares and my-life-was-ruined-head turns
then having to dance with your married daughter thinking -

I already did this once
She was just a little kid
Very small smiley criey blue eyed person thing
Head in the palm of my hand
Legs splayed on either side of my forearm
In one hand I held her dancing in the living room
To the vinyl music on the stereo
Stop crying till mommy comes home
No need to cry for I will slay lions
Bare handed and sharp toothed
Work to the bones for you

One day you will be married and I will be old
One day you will leave the same way I did
And everybody everywhere
else

**And I will rise up. Though I be a dead man.** Lyle's choir sang and me thinking - dear lord, when I was stoned last Thursday I thought it was the same as Alzheimer's. Just more of the distance that's already forming.

"You know, when I was a kid I thought you wrote this song for me," my wedding-dressed daughter says in my arms about Paul McCartney singing her name.

**And I will stand tall, until I meet my end.** I could knock on the door of many Gods. I could demand audience and they would speak to me.

"I did," I told her before I couldn't talk anymore.
"We'd like to invite the father of the bride to dance with his daughter."
"The Beatles stole it from me."

"Gina's worried you're going to try to ground her."

The younger sister's got her own car. She's got her own job. She lives in Santa Barbara. I could ground her about as easily as I could become Governor of California.

"Are you okay, now?" the bride says to me while we do that movement in embrace that seems like dancing to the people doing it and some kind of circular rhythmic walking to people watching. There is a story here about my eating some confection, fresh out of my freezer, that tasted of chemicals, and I found myself tripping through the rest of the day when I should have been doing errands. Everybody laughed. I sat around wondering about things most of the time. Like is this going to go away before I have to drive to the wedding tomorrow.

I ran errands anyway. Just like the 93-year old guy who drives into the farmer's market in Santa Monica killing 7 and maiming 12.

"Something wrong?" said the car wash lady who took my money when the stuff kicked in and I could barely count. I shook my head, wondering how I was going to drive off the lot, trying to remember which pedal was the clutch. What do the kids see in this? Is their reality so vivid they need to beat it into this real-time imagination? Oh, yeah. My friend Mark was there. He drove me home.

"Got your back, buddy," I remembered 200 times per second.

"She said she told you not to drive," my daughter says in my arms.

"She shouldn't poison her father," I say, forgetting the waltz.

"You shouldn't just eat random things," the bride says, sticking up for her miscreant college age sister.

"But it's my house."

"Well, okay." She says.

"You never did things like that. You were always a good kid."

"Daddy, I love you," she forgets she shouldn't say things like that when the camera guy is around. Too late.

**Though I be a dead man I will stand tall till I meet my end **

"He just spent the whole meeting yelling at us," says my chief technologist about the meeting I missed while dancing with my daughter. Because life gets in the way of work.

"I spent my whole night staring at the ceiling, imagining how I was going to confront him and probably lose my job," I say, because it's true

If I had a pony on a boat I'd sail into the ocean.

"Don't do that," says my technology guy.

"Don't eat stuff people put in your freezer," says my daughter.

"Weddings make me very sad, " says the blonde haired girl, nearly in a catatonic stupor.

"You have to tell them on Tuesday what we're doing - " says the sales guy. "Oh by the way, congrats on your daughter."

"Thanks."

"You can make it at 7AM, right?"

"No problem, I'll just hit the road by 5."

"He tossed out the preso we worked on."

"The one we spent the week on?"

"Yeah, he wants another one, by Monday so he can see it before the Tuesday meeting."

"You know why people have heart attacks?" You know why I'm dizzy all the time and can't remember where my glasses are?

"I love you, Daddy," says my daughter "Relax," says Dave Matthews. "If I had a boat and a pony," says Lyle Lovett. "I will stand tall."

Though I be a dead man. After the drugs and the emotion wears off, it feels like waking up. All the time.

While waking up for hours I scribbled this to me - please don't forget
And write it the way it's supposed to be written

The Undeniability of Fish

2009-08-18T10:15:00.001-08:00

"This is ridiculous," I said, "look at this." The book was on a cart at the front of the store. One-dollar bargains.

The blonde-haired girl zoomed in, looked at the cover, then at me. "So?"

"I always thought the worst fate an author could face was to find his own work in the one-dollar bargain bin. And this guy deserves it."

"I don't get it," she said.

"Doesn't the title sound revoltingly stupid to you?"

"'Learn Electricity and Electronics...'" She shrugged.

"Learn electricity. Repeat that to yourself a couple times. Learn electricity. How the hell do you learn electricity?"

"So, it's missing a word. Learn about electricity. So they left out the, 'about.' So what?"

"It's madness. Simply madness." I put the book back onto the bargain bin cart. "No one is paying a dollar for this. Nobody. We come back in fifty years, that thing will still be there and electricity will still be unlearned, as it should be."

"Let's get some ice cream."

"But it won't restore my confidence in reality."

"The rest of us are really not worried about that."

"My point, exactly."

"I mean - the rest of us are not worried that you don't have confidence in reality. Reality is just fine for us."

I picked up the book again and held it to her. "Well, then why not learn electricity for a dollar?"

"Because I already know a dollar's worth."

I put back the book. We got ice cream.

Everything stayed the same.

I have decided that the fatal dose of Zolpidem is six. I have gathered accidental data.

The blonde-haired girl and I were on a plane home from Paris and I had been poisoned by French food. My temperature was elevated and my entire alimentary canal, though previously emptied of all contents, ached and complained it wished no further participation in sustenance of my corporeal self.

I tried to sleep on the 12-hour flight from Paris to San Francisco, but the pain was constant. Lucky for me I had my bottle of prescription sleeping drugs, and so I took one Zolpidem.

The effects come on quickly and in fact I did fall asleep rather rapidly. Though my sleep was to be interrupted repeatedly by severe stomach pain that penetrated the drug-induced sleeping haze.

After half an hour the pain subsided but I could not get back to sleep and I decided to do something I had never done before, which was to eat another Zolpidem. Fifteen minutes after the second pill, I was asleep again.

Over Greenland there was some severe turbulence - enough to rouse me from my two-Zolpidem sleep.

Now, one who believes he is conscious after two Zolpidem only realizes there is no such thing until after the effects are worn off and one remembers the stupidity in which one had been engaged under the influence. As for fully-drugged me, the terms reasonable and unreasonable were fluid and interchangeable - so it seemed a great idea to remain unconscious through g-force turbulence by eating yet another pill.

That made three, for those keeping count.

My next memory is of trying to exit the plane in a mental fog in which I was quite unbound by the requirement to control the physical self. I got through border control and customs, reclaimed my luggage, wound up in the airport limo and then later, home in my own bed all due to the watchful guidance of the blonde-haired girl.

When I next awoke in full possession of my mental facilities I was overcome with the horror of how totally I had poisoned myself, and how close I had come to being comatose, and how it felt to be barely connected to the Earth at large. I reasoned then, and still do, that a fourth Zolpidem would have rendered me completely inert, and a stretcher would have been required to get me off the plane.

Scientifically, then, I conclude that five Zolpidem probably would have killed me, but who knows - maybe net body mass it would be fatal for some people and not others.

Six is a death sentence. I am sure.

I remind myself of this every time I take one to get myself into a blissful sleep which nature has long since ceased to provide.

Each night I am 1/6th the way to death.

My ex-wife once asked me, "You mean, if I had asked you to stay, you would have?" about my leaving after we decided to get a divorce.

"Yes," I said. "But you didn't."

This is another form of death.

You can put that on my tombstone.

And this is another form of death:

The day before my daughter's wedding I ate what I thought was a peanut butter / chocolate candy and wound up under the influence of powerful drugs. The substances were placed in my refrigerator for safe keeping by the college students who frequent my home. The error in their thinking was that somehow I, the owner and primary inhabitant of this house, would never appropriate food placed haphazardly in my refrigerator freezer.

The packaging of the dosed confection did not provide any clue of its true content. I simply figured one of my family had tossed the candy into my freezer and had long forgotten it there.

Their loss, my gain, as is frequently used against me to stake claims to tasty foods in my home.

Things wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't eaten so much.

But I did. And they were.

The effects of the substance were slow in coming, distressing at their peak, and long lasting. For me, an individual with high blood pressure that is hardly contained by handfuls of prescription medications - the accelerated heart rate alone was tantamount to a near death experience. And indeed, in the state of altered imagination and heightened sensory input I was certain that I would not survive the drug trip, not because of the alteration of reality with which I was already marginally familiar from my youth, but rather, due to the maintenance of presence of mind with which I perceived my BP had reached levels that would cause permanent damage to my already fragile cardiovascular system.

In retrospect, though, I am disappointed at my behavior. I now realize that when threatened with imminent death I am not the brave soldier I frequently imagine I might be - because I was not able to focus on my surroundings and how my condition was affecting others. Instead, I fixated on the foreboding visceral pain in my chest, the chemically induced fear which I could not distinguish from actual fear, and during the worst of it, the fight for consciousness rather than calculation of a rational solution.

In this state I counseled myself, my subconscious speaking to me like a doting parent. The voice was my own, calm and collected, and it wanted information. While I suffered a sentient piece of me wanted to gather as much information about this event as possible for future use.

"It makes no difference what has happened before or what will happen later. Now is. Be, now," I repeated to myself over and over, wondering why I was thinking that. My memory was hopelessly distorted by the drug and I could not track from one moment to the next. The linearity of time was disrupted, which another piece of me found unlivable. My mind fractured and I recognized that the ego is the piece of the self that wishes ultimate control of reality. But like the verses in "A Course of Miracles" it was horribly evident that the ego itself was an artifice which was neither immortal nor ultimately moral. I realized that the ego is a device for functioning in the "real" world and it can be pushed aside.When that happens the real "you", whatever is buried under egos and ids and subconscious musings, finds itself in a battle for supremacy with those other fractious mental shards for the role of coordinating input from the outside to the self and constructing a model of the world at large.

My ego is a fierce fighter. It worked hard to reassemble a time line from the distortion it was receiving from my senses, and when it began to fail, it became fearful and angry. It threatened death to the rest of me.

"Now you feel what it is like to die. Total loss of self. Complete obliteration."

I did not like these thoughts in my head. They became concrete reality. Every thought amassed substance and I could not hide from the onslaught. It was like trying to dodge a rain of hammers by hiding under a cardboard box. I realized I was on the floor, shirtless, trying to merge with the Earth, some part of me talking to the blond-haired girl but most of me unable to comprehend what was being said by the piece of my mind in control of my mouth.

The calm me tried to get the rest of me to look aside from that.

"Cease to be concerned for the time line. Time is a perception construct, rather than a physical reality. True time is mutable, as any physicist can tell you."

But as imperfect as it is I - the ego "I" - did not want to lose my grip on my life because I knew that track of "me" through "time" is what I called "myself". Therefore, when it left I would die irrespective of whether or not by body survived.

And it occurred to me this state was indistinguishable from insanity. The failing structure of the rules of my mental processes was completely observable and I could "see", as if from a distance, exactly how and why some people exhibit mental dysfunction and some don't. I imagined my existing state of ultra-heightened sensory input and failing time line to be similar to that described by Oliver Sacks in those who have autism. A fire hose spewed sensory input brutally combined with internally manufactured ideas and I could not escape from the torrent.

The mechanism for hallucination became obvious. Normally, all senses and thought are filtered through this ego that separates its notion of fact from fiction and through the course of life we become comfortable with this discrimination as definitive God-determined truth. When the ego fails, the thought and sensory input become inextricably intertwined. The soul, then, cannot differentiate what is "real" and what has been manufactured by the imagination. Remembrance becomes concurrent with touch/smell/taste/sight/sound. In this state the time line provides no reference, and what you think may have happened is synonymous with the physical consensus reality others can verify.

So you find yourself asking others - "Did you see that? Did you hear that? Tell me I didn't imagine that."

I paced in circles. I was only comfortable focusing on material processes that had neither beginning nor end. I had to turn off the television. I could not track music. Another's touch set off alarms in my mind as if I was being shocked. The setting sun disturbed me so I closed the windows and focused on the floor as I walked without counting my steps. So I struggled with myself for hours that felt like days, reminding myself that my body would remain on the earthly time plane no matter where my mind went. So what seemed like hours to my mind was only truly minutes to my body, and the reason my body was not tiring as quickly as I expected was that it was firmly of the earth and would remain attached to it.

My cardiologist had warned me any pain in my chest warranted attention and could be the portent of my untimely end and I felt as if a panel truck had been parked on top of me. But was this physical death to be the end of it all, or was I merely experiencing my ego's struggle to retain control of that which was impossible for it to manage?

I paced in circles which had no beginning nor end, struggling to understand the value in this form of existence, understanding perfectly that the condition could, and would, last forever in one universe or another. The infinite was perfectly clear.

"Concentrate on being now," a part of me reminded the rest of me. "I will get through this, and then I will go back to work and living, and I will get through that, as with the rest of life."

I don't remember how it ended. When my heart rate reduced I wound up in bed and was able to sleep. When I woke I wished I could buy back the time I had wasted in that purgatory. For if there is a meaning to this life it is to live within it.

There is infinite time for the other.

I have written of that which I remember, but I am sure there was more. The blonde-haired girl tells me I spoke of energy fields and a struggle between opposing forces inside me.

I spoke of dying. Of knowing that if I lost consciousness I would not return.

What disappoints me most about the experience is that I could not find the strength to focus my attention on how my words would affect her, or frighten her for my safety.

Then I fully realized the strength of the zen masters, who upon escaping the bounds of the ego's time line, find themselves literally groundless and practically insane, and yet in this state master all their fear, surrender to the nothingness, and help others in the process.
I am a very long way from that.

I imagined I should find a way to significantly punish my offspring for poisoning me. But my creativity is lacking in the parental correction/retribution department. Perhaps I can take solace that the quantity of what I consumed might have cost a significant sum, though it doesn't seem adequate given the severity of the experience.

Perhaps I can send her my next EKG trace.

Most likely, I will continue to do my best to see she has better opportunity going through life than I did.

This is what fathers want for their children. It is an unalterable trait baked into DNA at birth. I can only love her and want her to live well.

Talks can be had and were. All of which is another way to say I am helpless in this regard.

During the experience, filled with dread and conflicting thought, the idea of learning electricity made perfect sense. Thus I determined there was a context and subtext to every human endeavor. While that author might have consciously produced a training manual for people interested in the fundamentals of home electronics, he had subconsciously produced a philosophical tome outlining the wisdom in the physical processes.

The meaning of life, as it were, is to be in this reality and gain from it. In that context learning electricity, gravity, motion, light, heat, exothermic reactions, and rolling friction, are all paths to God.

"I will never do that again," I said to the blonde haired girl, holding the dog leash. The dog snuffled and rooted around a patch of ivy, looking for a place to pee.

"Me neither," she said.

Until she said that, I had forgotten what we had both done. I had forgotten checking on her inert form over and over to make sure she was still breathing. But it was like something I had seen on television, rather than something lived my me. A chunk of time was missing as if it had been stolen and lived by someone else who got away laughing and sent me a scratchy video to gloat.

I said, "I kept checking to see if you were alive," trying to remember the mental movie plot. It was fuzzy.

One, ten, a hundred times I went to see if she was still warm.

"Maybe I imagined it," I said.

A week later: "Did that really happen? Did we lose a whole night? What day was that?"

"It must have been Friday because the garbage cans were still on the driveway Saturday morning when we got up."

We walked the dog to the park at the end of the block.

"Maybe we died," I said.

She said, "I have some salmon steaks for dinner. I could broil them with lemon and rosemary."

"We could get the ice cream for dessert and get those kids to smoosh the heath bars into it."

"Let's concentrate on the fish. It's good for you. You need your omega-3."

"Sure. More omega. Omega is full of reality."

Meanwhile the dog sniffed a gopher hole.

"What is life if we can change it so easily?" I said. "We can get right to the edge. Look right over like the grand canyon only scarier. Maybe none of this is what we think it is."

"Rosemary and lemon and butter. And I have that broccoli rabe you like from the farmer's market."

Ghost Hunters

2009-06-11T10:02:00.003-08:00

There was a red thing in the distance. In the wood beside the road. Bits of flat red between the tree trunks. Not moving. Big as maybe, a house. They'd be there in a moment and then they'd see if that's where they were going.

The girl said, "That was a dead woman driving that Prius. The blue one."

"Dead?"

"The car we just passed. I saw it. Her mouth was open the way dead people get before their skulls pop through their skin."

"Probably just old."

"She wasn't moving. I swear. I watched her the whole time. Maybe the electricity keeps her alive."

"How'd she get in the car in the first place?" said the boy.

"Somebody put her there. Like some mortuary guys just take these dead bodies and put them in electric cars and they come to life from the electricity so they drive around."

"Why would anyone do that?"

"Just for fun."

"Kind of an expensive way to have fun, having to buy a Prius for every dead guy you come across. There's a waiting list for those, you know."

"What's that red thing? Is that it? It's like that Clint Eastwood movie where they painted all the houses in blood?"

The boy said, "It wasn't blood. It was just red paint to scare the outlaws. I've been looking at that thing for the past quarter mile." He slowed the car and looked at his GPS as they passed. They weren't even close. Five miles to go.

"It's a just a dirt mover," said the girl. She settled back in the seat.

They passed the construction zone. The boy sped up.

Then the girl said, "Maybe she was an alien."

"Who?"

"The old lady in the car. Aliens disguise themselves as humans. They're all around. They do their observing and we hardly know they're there."

"I thought aliens were small and gray and had no mouths."

"Shows what you know."

"What movie are you talking about, then?"

"It's not in a movie. It's in a book. The one about the aliens that take those old people out of bed and do medical experiments on them."

"You actually read a book?"

The girl balled a fist and punched at the boy's arm. He squirmed without letting go of the steering wheel, and she missed. She said, "You don't read any books or watch any good movies so you're totally unprepared. You think I'm an idiot but you're the one who's clueless."

The boy complained, then said, "I don't think you're an idiot. It's just that I've been with you for two years and you never once read a single book. Not even a trashy beach novel."

"Shows what you know," she replied. "I read a lot of books when you're not looking."

"When is that?"

"When you're at work. Sometimes when you're sleeping I get up and read a book."

The boy raised his eyebrows but did not take his eyes off the road.

"How come I never see..." he said, and the GPS interrupted him.

"NOW - MAKE A LEFT TURN AT DESTINATION."

He turned into the driveway. They checked the address. They gathered their backpacks.

There was no answer at the front door so they went around to the back. The old lady was hanging clothes on a line. The young people had never seen anyone hanging clothes outside on a rope. The girl whispered she thought it was some sort of exorcism of textile.

"Her clothes may be possessed."

"That's a rug," said the boy.

The girl called out, "Mrs. Warner? We're from the N-J-G-H-S."

The lady pinned up a towel.

"Which high school? You've already been here. I bought the magazines from the other kid so the answer is, 'no.' I don't need any more. Can barely see my own feet with these god-damned glasses and I don't have a parrot so I don't need any more newspaper."

"It's not a high school," said the girl, "It's the New Jersey Ghost Hunter's Society."

The old lady pushed her thick glasses up to the bridge of her nose and examined the young people in front of her. Then she said, "No - you neither. Already been here."

She grabbed her plastic laundry basket and headed for the back door of her house. The boy and girl followed.

The boy said, "That wasn't us. That was the GHoNJ. The Ghost Hunters of New Jersey. Completely different organization, funded by advertisements. Didn't you see the grocery store logo on their equipment? We're not funded by any large commercial concerns."

"We're completely independent," the girl said, grabbing at the handle of the aluminum screen door to open it for the old woman. "We're totally unfunded."

"Except for her baby-sitting money and I work at Home Depot but they don't sponsor us."

The woman swatted at the girl's hand. "Leave that alone. Don't you kids have anything better to do?"

"We're here to help," said the boy.

"My eye."

"No really," said the girl. "We can help."

The woman said, "With what? The last time you kids were here you kept me up till 4 in the morning taking flash pictures of the walls and screaming. Scared the bejeezus out of Caesar." She motioned to an old yellow lab who was chained to a decrepit dog house in the yard. "He had loose bowels for a week. Now scram. Skeedaddle."

"We heard about that. That was the GHoNJ," said the boy. "They're totally untrained and unprofessional. We can only offer our apologies for our unfortunate colleagues. We represent the NJGHS, and professionalism is our mission statement."

The girl pulled open the screen door for the woman, who stepped inside and continued into the house without further comment. The girl let go of the door and it closed on its spring. The young people stood on the small concrete step staring through the screen.

After half a minute the girl said, "Should we go in?"

"We haven't been invited. That's like, rule number seven."

"Screw rule seven," said the girl. She went inside and called for the lady. The boy followed fiddling with his digital recorder. It wouldn't turn on.

He bumped into the girl who was standing still in the hallway.

"Move," he said.

She said, "Woah."

He looked up and saw the interior of the abandoned house. The walls were covered with grafitti. The floor littered with bottles and empty food wrappers and the place stunk of urine.

"What a slob," the boy said. "No accounting for the way some people live."

"No. Woah," said the girl.

"What's wrong with you?" The boy went into the living room, then looked down the hallway of the small ranch house. "Mrs. Warner?"

"She's not here," said the girl. "Well, actually she is here, but she's not here."

"Mrs. Warner. If we could just get your permission to stay the night. We just want some pictures. And of course we want to do the EVP thing, but that doesn't make any noise." The boy poked his head into each of the bedrooms as moved down the hallway. Each room was more of a disaster than the last. Stained mattresses. Cigarette butts. Crumpled snack wrappers. Empty glassine envelopes. Broken windows. Everywhere the stench of sewage and burned rubber.

He turned to go back to the living room and bumped into the girl again.

"Can you please watch where you're going?" he said.

"I think that was it," she said.

"What was what?"

"That was the ghost."

"What movie are you thinking this is from?"

"You're an idiot," she said.

"Ok, so it's a disgusting place. But I can handle it for the night, can't you? Let's just find Mrs. Warner and get her permission. She's probably in the washroom with the clothes."

"We already went through the washroom. When we came in the back door."

The boy was about to complain some more. Then he didn't.

He said, "That's stupid."

The girl screamed at the top of her lungs, "Mrs. Warner! Caesar!"

The dog barked in the back yard. There was no sign of the old lady.

The girl said, "See?"

The boy went back to the car and got into the driver's seat. The girl stopped to pet the dog, then joined him in the car.

"This is stupid," the boy said.

"I think that was it."

"We didn't get any evidence."

"Nope."

"Where are the clothes on that rope?" said the boy. His eyes began to tear. "Where is that rope?"

"Don't cry on me," the girl said.

"This is really stupid. Is the dog real, at least?"

"I think it's the neighbor's dog."

"We didn't get any evidence." The boy's chin quivered.

"Nope," said the girl. "Why are you crying?"

"This is so stupid. It's not supposed to be this way." A tear ran down his cheek.

"I can't believe you're crying. Are you sad about that old lady?"

"I'm not sad," he said, now barely able to speak.

"Then what?"

"I thought she was real," he said, his voice now a frog's croak.

"Me too. You don't see me crying about it."

"...it's supposed to be...night...white figures...voices..."

"Why are you so upset?" said the girl. She put her hand on his arm and leaned her forehead on his shoulder. She could feel him shaking.

And when she looked at him, she saw him staring at her as if about to scream.

He said, "I don't know...what if... Is this real? Oh god..."

He got out of the car and ran away into the wood beyond the houses.

The girl started to follow him but stopped after a few steps.

She had read this in a book.

Bella Luna

2009-05-12T05:44:00.000-08:00

I have seen a moon rocket. With my own eyes.

I have been in the presence of the massive machine. Five F1 engines capable of administering the thunderclap of Zeus upon which men would be propelled toward the holiest grail of the earthbound dreamer. It was a skyscraper painted white and black in a mosaic of roll patterns. Adorned in lettering that informed everyone the United States owned that beast. Designed it. Flew it.

Stand within three miles when it was launched and it would thump the breath from your lungs.

In 1972 my dad drove mom and the four of us kids down to Florida from Chicago on family vacation, with the objective of visiting a new theme park Disney had put up in a swamp outside Orlando. And in those days Disney was afraid of spinning its guests too violently. The so-called "rides" were placid excursions past well-painted dioramas in the adult equivalent of a pram. I enjoyed it about as much as I did wearing a starched white shirt while sitting in a pew at church for an hour on a stifling hot Sunday morning. No doubt most of my disgust at the milquetoast brand of entertainment dealt out by the Magic Kingdom was driven by my nuclear obsession. By the knowledge that in all my thirteen years of life I had never been closer, and might never again be within spitting distance of it.

Fifty miles east of Mickey Mouse we were sending men into space. There were computers and trajectories. Calculations and orbits. Weightlessness and a sky so black if you looked between the stars you could see the inside of God's mind.

I was obsessed with the space program. I loved everything about it. I knew all the astronaut's names and backgrounds. To this day I can't hear the name James Lovell without immediately thinking of Frank Bormann. Together on Gemini. Together that Christmas eve in 1968, looping around the moon, reading from the Book of Genesis, first men to see the dark side of the moon. They will always be Bormann - and - Lovell to me. (And then I think of poor Anders, who's name doesn't map with the same syllabic beat.)

I knew the stats on the rockets. I watched every second of news coverage I could get to when I wasn't in school. I grew familiar with the newscasters covering the space flights and their idiosyncracies. Jules Bergman on ABC. Walter Cronkite on CBS. John Hart and Roy Neal on NBC.

Even though they couldn't appreciate it the same way I did, on the eve of my thirteenth birthday my parents dragged my younger siblings over those fifty miles, away from Mickey and Goofy, toward the coast where America was launching rockets.

I remember that trip. How the cumulus clouds loomed like floating aircraft carriers over the flat yellow-white Floridian soil. How the brilliant sun pressed down on my shoulders like a thick mat of warmth. Miles of scrub and occasional palm trees until we reached the shore where the contrast between the white sand beach and the blue-black ocean drew a line that split everything into earth and sky.

And there on that line was the tremendous cubic VAB, visible for miles, hovering on the horizon in the distance and seeming to follow along with you as you drove the way the moon does when you come home late at night from Grandma's. The Vehicle Assembly Building, so huge if they didn't circulate the air fast enough it would rain inside. The Vehicle Assembly Building, so massive that when you're close enough to see it in full, the cars parked at its base are mere pixel-sized dots in your visual field.

The VAB in which Saturn Vs were put together. The twentieth-century's answer to the pyramid. Spaceport U.S.A. Gateway to the stars.

I remember my brother yelling at me, in those days before automobile seat belts, when in my zeal to keep my eyes on that human artifact I climbed over him on the seat. I remember walking into the visitor's center, past the reclining rockets of the past. The Mercury Redstone. The Titan. The Atlas. There's the launch umbilical tower, bright porous red, a massive steel monument to human achievement. We will own the sky someday, we will.

My father at the cashier -- do you want the 1-hour, the 2-hour, or the 3-hour tour?

Three. It must be three. And my mother rolling her eyes, trying to figure out how she's going to pacify my three siblings for whom this trip is torture to be endured before returning to the Dumbo ride.

The Dumbo ride. Spinning in a fiberglass baby pram, versus crossing hallowed ground. John Glenn has stepped here. Neil Armstrong. Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White died right there, the only Americans to have died in the space program and it happened on the ground during a test.

High pressure oxygen. The door that opened inward. Do you want to know more, Dad? Gus Grissom of Liberty Bell 7. Ed White, the first space walk. Roger Chaffee -- to be his first flight. Mom, that thing on top is not an antenna, it's the escape tower rockets. It pulls the command module off in case the Saturn V is in danger of exploding.

The difference between a missile and a rocket is that a missile is unmanned.

The size of the American flag painted on the S-IC stage is the same size as this bus. That thing that looks like a launch pad on tank tracks is the crawler. They put the rocket on it and they drive it to the pad.

We are a mile away from the most powerful vehicle ever constructed by mankind. On launch day, we couldn't get within three. And the astronauts are going to be on the pad soon for a dry run. When they are in the command module, we can't get this close, either. They may have to eject.

Those engines are twice the height of a man. Millions of pounds of thrust. Engines built by Rocketdyne. The LEM by Grumann. The S-IV-B by Rockwell. That's the third stage. One engine.

You want to know what I want to do when I grow up? This is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to build these. I want to ride in these. I don't know why I love it so much but I do. Can I have your camera? Can I take pictures of this? I know it's just a piece of concrete. It's the launch bunker for the Redstone.

It is the eve of my thirteenth birthday, the Saturday before Easter, Apollo 17 stands at the tower, waiting to be fueled. The last moon rocket. It will be sent up at night a few days from now and I will be back at home. Can we stay for the launch? Is there any way?

I bask in the energy of the presence of the greatest technical achievement that has ever been in the history of human engineering. They built pyramids and Sphynxes and one-hundred ten story office buildings. Hanging gardens in Babylon and the Hoover Dam. But now we are going to the moon. The universe is wide open for exploration. Today the moon, tomorrow, Mars. My grandchildren will be born at a base in Clavius crater. Pan Am is taking orders for the first ticket to the moon, and they will get there just like we saw in that movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, I know they will.

When I was thirteen I felt passion for the first time in my life. Now I knew what it meant to be ecstasy -- to be outside of myself with such focus that I was not conscious of my own safety. From that day forward, I would become an engineer. I would become an explorer of worlds and a conqueror of the mystical religion of technology.

For years I had the pictures from that trip in a Scrapbook I kept under my bed. When I moved away from home in 1977 and I abandoned everything that made me a kid the scrapbook with my picture of the Saturn V disappeared. My mom probably trashed it.

I eventually did become an electrical engineer. It was clear from the time I was seven that I'd never become an astronaut with myopia as bad as mine. And besides, I'm too tall to fit in an Apollo-era space capsule. But I did go to Antarctica, which was my Sea of Tranquillity. I can look at myself in the mirror and say without hesitation, I never lost that passion I had as a kid, and given the chance, despite any risk, I would go to the moon.

Yes I would.

*

On the eve of my forty-sixth birthday, I saw Neil Armstrong. He gave a lecture at our local community college.

Now, thirty six years after his moon walk, he's seventy-four years old. He wears glasses as thick as the ones I wore when I watched him on television as a thirteen year-old. He stutters. He still gets choked up when he talks about standing on the surface of the moon, looking at twenty-three degrees above the horizon and seeing the blue-blue earth hanging in the infinite blackness that is our universe. He leaves no doubt that flubbing man's first words on the moon were a result of his speech patterns, and that if he were to do it again, he'd gladly make the same mistake. "It's just so Neil," would be the way one who knew him would say it. It humanizes the grandeur of the achievement. As it should. Because all our achievement is human.

On the eve of my forty-sixth birthday, I was in the same room as my hero. He's a very affable human being. He's doing his best to remain a simple man. Handles the public spotlight in his down-home, midwestern way. Does speaking engagements to pay the bills.

He's got to be careful about what he says. He can't be overly critical of anything, lest one organization or another seek to use his persona to further their cause. He makes jokes about politicians. He's an environmentalist without being a tree hugger. He's a conservative without the religion.

He avoids answering questions he doesn't want to address in the same manner as a skilled politician. By now he's done so many press conferences and state visits, handling the press is encoded in his DNA. Yes, he flew the LEM to within some few seconds of engine burnout. Yes, Buzz Aldrin took the Catholic sacrement of Holy Communion on the lunar surface. Yes, some people think they see UFOs, and there are strange things out there but they're probably not evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Yes, flying the X-15 to 4000 miles-per-hour was a rush.

The goal of going to Mars is probably attainable, but is more of a pipe-dream than an actual program. Why not go back to the moon, which remains almost entirely unexplored, with an order of magnitude less effort?

In the 1960s, he flew a Gemini space ship around the earth, did mankind's first-ever docking in space, and successfully landed in the ocean to within eye-shot of the carrier, all with the aid of an analog computer whose memory capacity was 2k and whose interface was a single yellow light and a 7 digit display. Imagine what could be done today, he says without saying.

He talks about the dangers of space--the risks that were taken. A single solar flare would have killed them all, subjecting them to five times the lethal dose of ionizing radiation in an hour -- and they were lucky that in all the Apollo missions there was never a solar flare during the flight, even though the sun was at a sunspot maximum during that period. That problem should be addressed before we think about spending two years in transit to and from Mars.

Yes, he has spoken to every man who went to the moon, and the 12 that walked on its surface, and yes, every one internalized the experience and emerged with a heightened sense of spirituality. They all feel more concerned about the fate of the environment as a result. All feel closer to the creator. But Neil is not a man who has ever worn his heart on his sleeve, so he leaves it at that.

Seventy-four years old. Thick glasses and a stutter. He thanks us for our time -- says it's the greatest gift one person can give another -- both at the beginning and end of his talk.

Here is the first human being to set foot on a celestial body other than the earth. Astronaut. Pilot. Explorer.

My kids sort of understand what he means to me, but mostly they don't. I can say that he is one of my heros and I feel like I'm a kid again when they run the reel on the moon landing. "One small step..." the compressed voice comes through the thirty six years, the grainy black-and-white picture we've seen over and over.

And there he is right in front of me. Bowing and smiling. Perhaps it's hard for the people who love me to understand that I would not be me without him.

*

What do kids do these days? Who are their heroes? When they dream of reaching the unattainable heights, where do their minds go?

When I was thirteen I stood on the front lawn of my home in the Chicago suburbs and looked up at the moon in the late afternoon sky and I knew there were men on it at that very moment. Men had traveled in a rocket I had seen, and were traversing the lunar surface, collecting rocks, looking back toward the earth while I looked upward at them.

That doesn't happen anymore and I think there is less hope in the world because of it.

People should have childhoods. Nowadays we expect kids to be adults from the time they can select a channel on the satellite TV. We subject them to "adult situations" as the TV/Movie raiting system calls it. We prosecute them in our courts as if they've the benefit of decades of world experience. We push them to achieve from the time they're born. Here in silicon valley, parents brag about ten-month olds who utter sounds that seem like words. There are two-year olds who recognize printed text. There are three year olds who can tell you the difference between a symphony and a fugue.

Yet we score lower on tests than those of other countries. We're less literate, less capable around numbers.

I had an actual childhood. I was treated like a child, to my chagrin, and the only responsibility I was afforded by my parents was to keep my grades up and keep my siblings from burning down the house when my parents went out with their friends on the occasional weekend evening.

When I was a kid, we were sending men into space and we knew we'd have colonies on Mars someday. We could go as far as we wanted. I knew that was true and to be part of it I would have to excel in my studies and distinguish myself as a student.

Because I knew that all astronauts are smart. They had a mastery of math and the sciences. They were in tip-top physical condition. They served their country and their families. An astronaut was brave. An astronaut was virtuous. You could trust an astronaut with your life savings or your best girlfriend.

When I was a kid that's what a lot of us wanted to be. Virtuous. Brave. A man who lived in service of God and country, and who explored the far reaches of the universe. Someone who designed and worked with machines that could bring you to the brink of incredible terror -- the terror of distant nature, so huge and uncaring that the fear it inspired became awe, became love.

We are all born explorers and whether he likes it or not, every kid has all of life to cross into. From the nothing before birth, a kid has to learn everything adults take for granted. It's the nature of a young person to seek and learn.

If I was young today, what would I hang onto to give me an explorer's hope? What would take my breath away the way Apollo 17 did? Who would I most want to emulate in life?

Even though I know there would be something to replace my desire to become a lunar astronaut, I don't know what it could possibly be.

*

Over the past three months I built a model of Apollo 17. It's five feet tall. It's meant to be flown, so it has a place for a big "G"-class model rocket motor. It has kevlar parachutes.

I got the kit from Apogee Components, which is a one-person company in Colorado. Two-hundred dollars worth of cardboard tubing and paper diagrams came. Three months later I finished it. Though it could have been painted like any of the 10 Saturn Vs, the decals on mine are arranged in the exact configuration of Apollo 17, the very last moon rocket, the one I saw when I was thirteen.

I probably will never fly it. I don't want it broken.

It didn't really fit anywhere in my home, so I brought it to the office. And immediately, my colleagues came into my office to look at it. Most of them are my age. All of them are engineers. The same thing happened to all of them.

They stared at the model and got one version of misty-eyed or another. They each said, "I became an engineer because of this," and, "how come we don't do things like this anymore?" and "I remember when I saw Apollo 15 and the lunar rover," and, "Did you know they had eye charts in the early Mercury space craft because they didn't know if their eyeballs would pop out in the low pressure atmosphere?"

"How long did it take you to build?" one asked me.

"Three months," I said.

And I expected him to ask, "Why?" but he never did. Not one person asked me why I would spend three months of my spare time sanding and painting cardboard tubes to create a 1/70th replica of the moon rocket.

Because it is our first true love. Guys my age learned about falling in love following the space program. We all fell in love first with rockets and space, and later with our spouses.

Thirty six years ago, each of us was going to be a part of it. We read Boy's Life and built plastic models from Revell and Monogram in preparation for the real thing -- and knew without doubt that someday there would be a real thing.

Because when I was a kid, it was possible for an engineer to do anything.

*

Today, on the eve of my birthday, I think about the space program. I have seen an Apollo moon rocket and now Neil Armstrong. I was extremely fortunate to have been born when I was. I was never drafted and taken away to Vietnam. I saw the fall of the Berlin wall. I participated in the explosion of the semiconductor industry, and worked at Intel at the time when microprocessors became a ubiquitious appliance.

I was thinking about the stars. Watching Apollo 11 lifting off the pad with Neil Armstrong himself standing under the screen, Neil and Buzz and Mike floating in space, the first steps on the moon, it reminded me of the big hole we left in the lives of lots of young people by not doing the things that inspired some of us. Yes there were critics. For every mission, there are hundreds who will extol the virtues of staying at home, fixing things here, and things always need fixing. Always. There's no lack of reasons to not do something. Expense. Time. Focus.

Let me say to you, these critics will for now and always remain outside the effort of human advancement. They're there to test you. You will never achieve any of your potential listening to people who advise you to avoid the risks and play it safe and to not waste money with your head in the clouds when there's plenty of work right here at home.

Bullfuckingshit.

It takes a kid to decide a person should go into space, an adult would never do it. Too impractical -- because there's nothing in particular out there. But kids know there's everything in particular there. It takes a kid to decide we should walk on the moon, not because it has a fiscal, religious, social, or political purpose, but just because it's the plain ordinary fucking coolest thing a person could ever do, and the very idea of it is gold to the rest of us. The very idea of it makes us what we are.

I think we're lacking as a nation. I think the lack of a government-sponsored exploration program -- to explore ANYTHING -- makes us berift as a people. We have a gigantic hole where our imaginations should be and we've filled it with the soil of human nature that takes the place of anything we fail to do. We've filled our lack of exploration with fear. We're becoming a society of fear. Fear of terrorism. Fear of disease. Fear of lack of oil. Fear of despots. Fear of traffic accidents. Fear of financial ruin. We are afraid of everything and it's getting worse. Like a cornered animal we're showing our teeth ever more frequently, forgetting the moral obligation we have as the strongest to withdraw from arms. My dad used to tell me I would face his wrath if he caught me striking a girl or a little kid, even when one hit me first, because as the stronger party, I had the obligation to take the punishment and walk away. Revenge is the haven of the weak of spirit, the unimaginative, and the enemies of hope.

Because we no longer explore and face the dangers nature has to offer, we have nothing better to do than to culture our fear of each other, and use our technical might in the pursuit of the destruction of an ever growing list of enemies. And the list grows as our fear grows, and as our fear grows our pain grows, and we find others upon which to exact our revenge.

We need a space program. We need exploration. We need to be able to follow the reality-TV event of the year when man sets down on the moon again. When someone walks across the red plains of Mars. We need human exploration because without it, we are simply ants in a colony, aimless pursuing further existence without the potential to BECOME.

I nearly burst into tears watching the men in Houston leap for joy when they heard the words, "Houston: Tranquility Base, here," because it was an achievement of such grandeur and innocence. The motivation for the space program was all about beating the Communists -- but had absolutely nothing to do with it in the end. In the end it was a couple of guys on the moon, eating communion and flubbing their lines. Short guys who fit in space capsules. Human achievement, despite the cold war.

Something a kid could grab onto and hold for his whole life.

Last night with my own ears I heard Neil Armstrong flub another line -- he said: "Someday I believe we will send unarmed men to Mars. I mean, manned and unarmed vehicles. Well, always unarmed."

But I knew it wasn't a misstep, because he didn't screw up a single sentence the rest of the evening.

I guess if you knew him, you'd have said, "That was so Neil."

The Book Of Life

2009-05-08T07:37:00.000-08:00

Since my divorce I have bought a new home where I live with my girlfriend. I do my best to encourage my children to visit as much as possible. I have no other purpose at the moment.

This weekend my daughter had some friends come over, and one was driven by her father. He came into the house and stood in my doorway. After saying an unnecessarily elaborate "goodbye" to his daughter, he continued standing in my doorway while my dog barked at him.

Suspecting he wanted to learn more about the occupants of the home to which he'd just committed his child, I introduced myself to this tall, slender man and silenced my animal.

He told me his name was Fred and after we finished the usual "I'm the father" pleasantries, he did not seem inclined to leave. I opened up a few other topics: that we'd just moved into the neighborhood, and the work he saw us doing was our typical weekend home upgrade/repair to which we were enslaved for the coming months having bought a "fixer upper". He listened with a bright smile but offered very little conversational support. After that brief, one-sided discussion was over he didn't seem any more inclined to leave or talk so I decided I'd resume my tasks by working around him.

He followed me to the garage where I went to retrieve my Makita drill to put anchors in the wall to put up the new towel racks.

He waited for me to come out with my drill and said, "Since the divorce my kids won't talk to us anymore. They don't want to have anything to do with us."

I said, "I'm so sorry," and then offered my own experience, "I know how it is. No matter how correct a decision it seems to be, it's extraordinarily difficult. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. It feels like --"

I concentrated on putting up towel racks to keep myself from falling through the earth's crust. I thought about it so hard I thought I could make a brass towel rack materialize right there on my concrete walkway.

He started to say something but wound up gasping as if the world had suddenly deprived him oxygen. He said, "My wife. She thinks it's right." He rubbed his eyes.

And I couldn't think about towel racks anymore. I imagined him and his family on Christmas morning amid piles of wrapping paper. I imagined him opening a flowery birthday card signed by his wife in cursive with tiny smiling hearts where the dots should be. I imagined him at his daughter's birth. I imagined he couldn't figure out why it had to end with him living alone in an apartment in San Jose.

He said, "My wife..." and I could barely breathe.

He got into his old white Mercedes and drove away.

I have not felt well, since.

My dreams are full of ghosts.

There are not supposed to be any stupid questions. The stupidest smart question I have ever heard asked was to a writer. The question was, "How do you do it?"

To which the writer answered, "Huh?" And then there was silence.

One could imagine the writer composing a cogent response mentally, and when the mental gears got fouled, he was thrust into a caustic zen silence that ate through the very fabric of reality.

How, indeed, does one do it?

The answer to that question is in the drawer right next to the answer to the question, "Where am I in my brain?"

This isn't to say we won't someday possess a satisfying answer. But at the moment we don't have one.

Indeed. Nobody knows.

I am becoming more forgetful as I get older and I'm realizing there's a certain degree of freedom in it. It can be pleasurable to forget one's troubles at midday. Not remembering bills can lower the blood pressure.

I feel strongly enough about this to think that Alzheimer's is probably an issue only for those without it. If you can't remember what's happening from minute to minute, you're liable to be perpetually unsettled or perpetually calm. Either way, there's no internal mental alternative to the situation.

However, I'm realizing the act of writing something down sears it into my permanent memory. Every now and then I think to myself that I should keep more lists. If I kept a list of all the important things I have to do every day, I'd never forget a single thing.

Every now and then I try keeping a list and I remember everything on it. I remember writing the list. I remember how the pen felt in my hand and the texture of the paper. I remember it so well I can see the list in my mind without actually holding it. It's so clear to me that writing the list in the first place seems like a waste of energy.

And then I stop keeping lists and forget everything.

If there is an answer to, "How do you do it?" about writing, I might suggest that the act of writing is the summary of the things that are clearest in my memory. Possibly, I only write things I've written before when I was worried I'd forget. But if I write down everything about you then even if the plaque in my brain kills all my memory cells, I'll still remember who you were.

Etc.

I'm quite sad Kurt Vonnegut has died.

For as long as he was living there was the possibility that I would be able to meet him. If I met him I would say, "Kurt, make me young again," as Kilgore Trout said to him at the end of Breakfast of Champions, the second greatest book ever written.

Because I am a character from a Kurt Vonnegut novel he would be able to grant my wish.

Back when I first thought of the wish I was quite young, still a teenager. I had a lot of dreams and I've had a good enough life that I've been able to experience many of them.

This one will never happen, though, and I'm sad that as I get older I have to watch many of my dreams drop off, one by one.

I've been thinking of making a list:

List of Dreams

* Going to the south pole - check
* Playing in a rock band before a big audience - check
* Publishing some short stories - check
* Doing a regular radio show - check
* Publishing a novel -- uncheck (Frank hated book)
* Meeting Richard Feynmann -- uncheck (blew the one chance I had, Feynman dead)
* Meeting Kurt Vonnegut and asking him to free me -- uncheck (Vonnegut dead)
* Staying married till death -- uncheck (marriage wrecked)
* Making a guest appearance on the Today Show -- ? (could still happen)
* Making a movie -- ?
*
* Retiring on a mountain overlooking the ocean -- ?

I can't forget my dreams because I've listed them. Long after they're dead, their ghosts rattle inside me.

I have become a maraca.

There is another way to look at Vonnegut's death. Now that he's gone, there need for another one. I officially throw my hat into the ring. I'm ready to write awe-inspiring novels about ludicrous religions, alien contact, and impossible chemistry.

Please look my way for ground breaking material, soon to come.

I can't shake this one. The question, "How do you do it?" is nearly always insulting. How do you jump 72 school buses on a motorcycle? How do you catch flies in mid air with your bare hands? How do you play jazz piano?

How do you write what you write?

These are foolish questions at best and ignorant inquisition at worst.

However, there is one way in which the question could be posed in which no offense could possibly be taken by anyone. That is if the question was asked by an alien.

If an alien from another world asked a human, "How do you come up with those stories?" we would sit it down and talk to it about human experience, the miracle of the human soul, and the grace of divine inspiration. And as long as it did not eat or vaporize us, we would feel honored to provide information on behalf of our species.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that we could have a great laugh at his expense by saying to each other after his death, "Well, I bet Kurt is in heaven now."

He would have liked to have known his death provided us with some mirth. The statement provides mirth because Kurt was an atheist. Maybe an existentialist. He figured that the human experience arose from chemical processes in the body and that after death, when the chemistry stopped, poof: no more person.

While this philosophy seems tragic to some people, I can vouch for the plain fact it yields incredible love, peace, and freedom. If this life is all you'll ever have, the thinking person is led to the inevitable conclusion there is nothing else to do with life than to be the best living thing you can possibly be. Love everyone. Be as helpful as you can in assisting all other creatures squirming in life's web.

I know. You think: he's got it wrong. It's the opposite. God says so.

You'd have to try it to know for sure. It's like becoming a vegetarian. How can I do without a hamburger? I really like bacon and eggs for breakfast.

But then if you really do it, you change and you can't imagine how you thought the things you did before the change.

When I was in my 30's I was a vegetarian for several years. I lost unnecessary weight. I felt light and quick all the time.

When I was in my 20's I was an existentialist for nearly a decade. I was unhappy about my own life, sometimes, but it was very easy to suspend judgment on everyone, and everything. Lacking the energy to judge my surroundings gave me peace.

I don't think like I did anymore. It's sometimes hard to imagine how I had the thoughts I did about not eating meat or the non-existence of life after death. My memory assures me that I had those thoughts and they assisted me in living a decent life.

Now I have different thoughts that help me.

My thoughts say, "Kurt is not in heaven now. But he's figured out that what happens after you die is that you're not really ever dead, because time doesn't exist, so you're always alive and dead at the same time, which is why saying, 'Kurt is in heaven now,' is still funny."

I think I'll have a breakfast burrito.

In case you haven't tracked so far: this piece is about ghosts and dreams and death, and perhaps the ghosts of dead dreams.

Sometimes the author doesn't do enough to let you in on the gag. He sits at the keyboard thinking, "the smart ones will get it but to everyone else it will seem like random patter." That sort of thinking is what always irked me about High School English class. I never got the joke. I never understood the writer's motive.

People worry, no matter what. If you don't believe in life after death, you worry about value. This writing provides value in two ways. First, there's value to me for having written it. Second, it may convey a feeling to someone who develops a resonance to it. Resonance is what makes us like music and things we read.

If my piece develops resonance in someone then I have provided value to that person and it makes me happy to know that might happen.

See, really, we're all about value.

Last Sunday evening there was a ghost in my dream.

In my dream I was speaking to the ghost of a good friend. He had chosen the setting for the conversation, as ghosts are wont to do. So we found ourselves in a prison visiting room.

I was terribly sad. My friend was awaiting execution after a murder conviction. In fact, this was to be our last meeting as he was to be executed within the hour.

"But why are you crying? This is my fate," he said to me.

I was crying because the sentence was unjust. My friend had been wrongly accused of murder. After DNA evidence proved conclusively he could not have been the one to commit the crime, he was acquitted of a first murder. But the District Attorney had him charged on a second murder which had been sitting on the books. Even for lack of any evidence at all, my friend was convicted on the power of the DA's courtroom theatrics.

See, in the U.S. a trial has nothing to do with truth. It has to do with guilt or innocence, which are human terms bearing no similarity to physical properties.

And so he was on death row because the DA needed more convictions to illuminate his career.

"This is my fate," my friend said. "It has nothing to do with you, or this jail, or the court, or the District Attorney, or the executioner."

Then guards then told us it was time for me to leave. They moved me to the door. I waved goodbye to my friend, and then as dreams are likely to be because time does not exist, I found myself outside the jail looking toward it from a great distance.

I awoke to the sound of a trap door opening.

Telling Anna You Love Her the First Time

2009-05-03T13:51:00.001-08:00

You're staring.

If she catches you, you'll feel stupid but the way the sun plays tricks crashing through the strands of her hair before it gets to you reminds you of being born.

Somehow you were born to do this. Of all the things to do the world is replete with noble professions. Right now people are performing open heart surgery saving lives otherwise lost. Firemen are reviving victims otherwise dead. Airplane pilots keep hundreds suspended seven miles high so grandmothers can greet their descendents with hugs and birthday balloons.

And you were born to stare at Anna in the sunlight. In the morning.

This is a sacred thing.

She's smart enough not to look. If she catches your eye it all ends but she's merciful so you can do nothing. It's paralysis, for there is nothing else but Anna in the morning, sipping her coffee, poking at pages in a newspaper.

Outside a bird sings and skitters away. Your heart is beating. Your chest expands and contracts as your body does what it needs to, sustaining life, sustaining you.

You are now suspecting what you're afraid to admit. You can't say it to yourself much less her. You try to push it out of your mind but when your mind is empty there's nothing to move.

She glances quickly to where you're sitting at the other corner of the kitchenette in the house nobody can find when she doesn't allow. Cheesy linoleum top. Vinyl seats stick to your thighs, and she adjusts her bathrobe and leans forward so in profile her breast reminds you, diffuses you, evaporates you upon the viscous strands of sunlight that drip from her hair onto the table, the half-empty cups of coffee, your hands that haven't moved, time that has you frozen in jellified air.

Everything is brighter. For once in your life you have a favorite color. A favorite sound. People have told you about things like favorite smells, favorite blankets.

Now you know what they meant.

And you wipe at an eye in a feeble attempt to regain control. Maybe you're still sleeping and you need to wake up. But the only reason you're here is you know you woke up alone, felt the dent in her pillow and followed the scent, sat down silently, and she poured you a cup of coffee and sat in the sun and set to creating daytime.

"What?" she says, smiling, looking away. In that one word you feel there isn't anything you could have imagined she couldn't already know.

"I had a dream last night," you say.

She waits until the words waft like tea steam clouds and blow away on the springtime breeze, out of the kitchen nook, through the screen, into the world. Now you know that every word you say winds up in the world. Outside they're felt by everything.

"What about?" she says, and pushes the paper away. Her eyes are deep brown, a color God must have thought of when he was building mountains and strong horses.

You speak, mostly hear yourself speak as if the ideas themselves can make your mouth move.

"I came right in here. I got up out of bed and sat down right where I am now," you say, remembering the dream as if it were the trip you took to the grocery store yesterday.

"And when I came in here God was sitting at this kitchen table right where you are now, reading the newspaper, just like you are now."

She smiles, and you know it's because she thinks you're comparing her to God. But you're not. It was really God in your dream.

"And what happened?" she asks you, drawing closer and the robe slips toward the edge of her shoulder and hangs while the sun takes purchase and turns the room gold. Then you know nothing can hurt you so you say what you have to say.

"He asked me how it's going," you reply. "And so I told him. I told him my whole life but you know, like, he's God and he knows everything. But he wanted to know anyway. When God asks you something you pretty much just answer, you know?"

She nods that she knows and the smile on her face makes little lines that connect her cheeks to the corner of her eyes and anything solid inside you has long since melted. Bits of you are dribbling into eternity. There are parts you know you'll never get back.

This is falling. Pray she's there to catch you. You're dead if she isn't.

"He already knew your life and he asked you to tell it to him? That was the dream?"

"Yes." You say it and you feel some muscles in your chest tighten. For some reason your eyes tear. You're not sure how to handle this. "Yes. It's like, he wanted to hear ME say it. He knew everything I was going to say, but it was just so good for him to hear me tell it to him. He said he could listen to me tell it to him forever. He said that's what life was all about."

And you think you might cry and you have no idea on earth why that would happen. You think you don't remember how, but you're afraid your body will remember.

She takes your hand and kisses you and you can taste the salt from the tears you didn't see her shed.

You don't know why it's happening. This can't be happening.

"I love you," you say, the first time anyone has ever earned it from you, meaning it--meaning to put into yourself all this melting and pulling and wanting to sit forever in one instant of time that never changed.

How can you give her the feeling that you have a favorite horse breed and you never cared before? How can you tell her the forces of physics have just exempted you from the need to be obedient? Where did this caring come from if it wasn't always there? You could be a father now if you had to. You could teach someone small to hold a baseball, how to find the minnows in the shallow part of the stream, why you can't do wheelies if you're going too fast.

You think, "Help me God," and you grab at your chest a little because it seems to be coming from there and you don't know if it's bad or good.

Pray. Pray because nothing else would be powerful enough. Pray what you're feeling is good because there's no life if it isn't.

Pray she won't run away now it's out there because you can't come home. There's no way to go back. You don't fit in the life you had only moments before. Everything has to be rebuilt from scratch.

"I love you, Annie." And there are no more words in you. That was the last line before the big tear in the script and now words are done. It has to end here unless she puts the words back.

She says, "I know. I could listen to you say that forever."

Grand Canyon

2009-04-30T18:25:00.003-08:00

We drove the old familiar road and my wife said, "When we were kids we used to ride our bikes to that ice cream stand. I used to love those vanilla cones dipped in chocolate."

"You still do," I said. "And when I was a kid I rode my bike to that hardware store for nails to build forts. I remember we built a two story deal out of scraps in the back wood where they tossed all the construction cast offs."

"Two stories? You were lucky you didn't kill yourselves."

"Not only for that," I said.

From the padded plastic car seat in the back my 2-year old daughter said, "When I was a lion I used to eat birds and mice."

"Were they tasty?" I said. A quick glance in the rear view mirror. She was straining to see past the sides of the car seat and out the side window. A small group of crows ascended from the bank's front lawn.

"But I don't eat them now," she said.

"How about mice?"

"But maybe I can have a mouse."

"For dinner?"

"No, silly. To live in the mouse house."

My wife said, "When I was a tiger I used to eat chickens."

Tiny mental wheels calculated. The child said, "Mommy, you not a tiger. You're mommy."

I said, "Daddy's a lion."

"No, Daddy. You a bird."

"But don't the lions eat the birds?"

"But you don't need scared, Daddy. Yesterday I a lion. Today I Michelle."

And then twenty two years went by.

Last week I stood with my toes on the edge of the Bright Angel limestone, looking down past the Redwall to the Vishnu Schist. From the south rim tourist area there's only one place you can get a glimpse of the mighty Colorado that carved the Grand Canyon and I was not at that place. But if I could get some height, fly out over the abyss, perhaps then I could see it.

"I first saw this twenty five years ago," I said, trying to remember how it felt to fall through miles of open air and then catch myself as if my toes touched the rug at my bedside.

"What?"

"It was like I'd never been born. I felt so small."

The blond haired girl joined me at the edge of the precipice.

She said, "And then what?"

I thought about flying. Adding the gyrations of up and down to my usual two dimensional motation, and how this version me of doesn't well tolerate amusement park spins and drops. When I was younger, I craved it.

"Am I remembering a dream?"

"Are you?"

"I'd lived in the suburbs of big cities my whole life. So many different places that are all the same. The farthest you can see at any one time was either to the next stop light or upward to the moon. When I got here, I thought I'd reached heaven. It's an epiphany in rock. One of those indescribable visions you have in a dream that dissolves to nothing when you turn on the bedroom light. I remember standing here thinking angels were speaking to me. I think they are."

She searched me with her eyes and I wondered if my emotions were visible. Maybe she could decode them. Explain them to me the way a doctor tells you which pains are benign, and which require chemotherapy.

But she said, "Ok. So you saw the great outdoors for the first time and it opened your eyes to something new."

"Maybe that's all it was." A lump of something firm and sad rose in my throat and I swallowed it down. Keep it down.

"What's wrong?"

In my mind I repeated, "It was something else," but none of the words made it to my lips.

Instead, my eyes welled with tears and I took her hand and led her from the brink of the most beautiful descent on earth, back to the rental car.

The canyon is different every second of every day. As the hour hand arcs, sunlight swings through crevasses and over wide plains simultaneously revealing what had been in shadow and hiding what had been baked under the oppressive heat of full day. Rocks turn from golden, to orange, to red, to brown.

Distances are deceptive. A small head-sized chunk of granite a few feet away turns out to be a house-sized boulder a mile distant. The green thread of river seen from the rim becomes a seething monster at the shore, replete with man eating standing waves and rapids that pulverize human contrivances with an ease that borders on thermonuclear. This is the water that ate through the earth. This is the power of Shiva, there to remind you that the dispassionate destruction of solid rock yields a silent gargantuan beauty.

Every death is a birth.

Twenty two years ago I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a few other engineer friends from RCA in New Jersey. We took the South Kaibab trail to the Phantom Ranch. It's a steeper yet shorter route than the Bright Angel. As the trailhead is not close to the tourist centers, it's less traveled. Though unlike the Bright Angel trail where running water is available every 1.5 miles, there is no available water on the Kaibab. So one must carry his own - enough to assure safe arrival at the bottom. This quantity amounts to about a gallon for the downward journey, provided one leaves before daybreak and walks in the colder part of the day.

We took our trip on July 4th weekend. Temperatures at the rim were in the 90's Fahrenheit, and at the bottom they would be closer to 120F.

I had been anticipating the trip for the year it took to plan. After my first look at the canyon some two years prior I had been yearning to get back the way Roy Neery needed to meet the aliens at devil's tower. I dreamed of the canyon. I read books. I reviewed the photos I had taken over and over.

And then I was there at the banks of the Colorado at the Phantom Ranch. It was 118F in the shade.

That didn't stop me from filling up my canteens and walking up the North Kaibab trail so I could say to myself I'd been closer to the North Rim than anyone else on our trek.

I remember sleeping fitfully in a bunkhouse with 7 other hikers. Being roused at 4AM by the rangers, fed a pancake breakfast at 5, and being shooed off on our way back up to the south rim before the July temperatures turned us into a death statistic in the Park's Department register.

My friend Mel and I made it from the Phantom Ranch to the south rim tourist centers by 10AM. We were young and full of energy. We pulled away from the rest of our team early on, and walked most of the journey with only each other as company.

The whole time I was certain there was someone walking with us. I could hear footsteps behind me.

Later in life I read the story of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance, and how when crossing South Georgia island he felt there was a fourth member of the team hiking along side them.

With perfect historical hindsight we can develop the explanation that by the time Shackleton and his men reached South Georgia he was starved, sleep deprived, dehydrated, and probably close to death, and that in that state a man can hardly be blamed for hallucination.

But I was none of those things.

And I am not now. And the companion is with me, next to me as I write.

We are born and we die many times in one life. Each death teases us, lures us into the complacency of stasis. It's far easier just simply not to try than to endure the trials. Each death suggests silence. Calm. Remain and all is well.

Each birth, an elevator door opening on a room we've never seen, home nowhere in sight.

At each juncture, the opportunity to speak.

At each of those times the angels pause, listening, awaiting our guidance. They can't live down here. They can't even breathe. They watch us they way we absorb television pixels.

-What made you decide?

-What will you do next?

-We can't believe you got this far. Look at what happened.

-How does it feel?

The Grand Canyon is sacred ground to the Yavapai, Havasupai, and the Hopi.

Far from the tourist trails there is a cave. In the cave is a Kiva. At the center of the Kiva is the Sipapu, a hole in the ground that descends beyond the center of the world to the beginning of all creation. It is the channel life took to Earth's surface. It is the origin of all of us, all time, all things.

I know it is here. Standing on the white shale at the rim it vibrates the stones under my feet and sends a pure note through on the wind. The camera laden tourists push past and every now and then one will pause and ask another, "What was that? Did you hear that?"

I was like that, once.

"Are you okay?" said the blonde haired girl.

And I could hear her the way someone lost hears the the rescuer's calls echo off the stone.

It's been a lifetime since my last descent of the Grand Canyon. My lifetime. Now in climbing it steals my breath. It tears at my heart and legs. The thought crossed my mind on the ascent once, maybe twice - I won't make it.

Now at the rim after seven hours climb she asks, "Are you okay? What's wrong?"

The Canyon is immutable. Though it changes constantly, I would recognize its brink through the darkest night and deepest snows. But I am no longer the young man who ascended from the Ranch in five hours. That one is dead and this scarred and imperfect replica has risen in his place.

I can put my feet in the same places I did those years ago and stare out over the gulf to the shattered rock knowing that the Canyon is measured in millions of lifetimes since the first being emerged from its depths. But likely, only one lifetime from now I shall not stand again in this holy place.

"What's hurting?"

And because we live poetic lives, an osprey swooped down from behind us and soared into the abyss. We watched as it became a silhouette became a dot became nothing against Shiva's temple.

I said, "When I was a bird I killed small animals and taunted the lions."

But no one needs fear me now.

Today I am just a man.

No User Servicable Parts Inside

2009-04-22T13:47:00.001-08:00

The good thing about being old is you've lived to tell about it. It's an unavoidable fact of living that after a couple of decades of breathing one will have had several occasions to slip the mortal coil through one's own stupidity, and it's the folks who manage to tally up sheets of documented bogosity as long as a cow's leg that owe the most debt of gratitude to the forces of the universe.

When I was in engineering school in the early 1980's they were still interested in teaching some of us about big thick wires hung from aluminum towers you needed helicopters to visit. While my degree was to be in semiconductor physics, a discipline involving things so small everyone is sure magic is involved, I decided I wanted to learn how the other half lived. I wanted to see the great big turbines. The big ball bearings. The megavolts. The multi-Tesla magnets. The big boy toys.

So I took an elective in power generation and distribution systems.

The nice thing about power distribution and generation was the math was absolutely trivial compared to the partial differential world of quantum physics. All the answers involve the square root of two. Most power systems math can be summed this way: take a really big number and multiply by the square root of two. You can use three sometimes, but only when things are totally out of control.

Now that you know the math, you're ready to be an engineer.

For instance, take two really thick copper wires. Bolt them to a big piece of concrete on the floor. Send a couple hundred amps down them at once. The answer about what happens is something times something times the square root of two. It's cool to watch. The bolts fly out of the concrete sending shrapnel everywhere. The wires try to go to opposite ends of the universe taking the building and everything in their way with them. The smoke fills the lab and sets off the fire alarm. Enough ozone is created by the arcing to replenish the hole over Antarctica. Burning is everywhere.

The professor, who has been in the teacher's lounge the whole time, comes in and sees the lab wrecked and screams something about Lorentz. Then he goes to work in 7-Eleven selling Big Gulps because kids aren't supposed to be left alone with so many amps.

Why would anyone bolt big wires to concrete and shoot lots of juice down them? The answer is simple.

Women.

Women make boys want to burn things. And when there's nothing to burn, they want to blow things up. And when there's nothing to blow up, they make rail guns.

In our case, before our gun's self-immolition, the projectile (a thick aluminum bar we stole from the ceramic lab) imbedded itself in a cinder block wall. Despite our efforts we were not rewarded by being killed by our invention because God loved us that day. That's what Al said, anyway. Then he went and became a priest.

Even with Al out of contention, we still didn't get any dates.

Lack of women sent me to power generation lab. In the lab they have a big machine called, the synchronous machine. It's basically a rotating shaft with a bunch of wire coils around it. Some of these coils turn with the shaft, some don't. The ones that don't are called stators, and the ones that do are called something else. There are commutators in there to get electricity in and out. Etc. You know what you need to know. Multiply by the square root of two. Things spin. Meters deflect. You make graphs. They give you a degree. You go to work in nuclear power plants.

Of course, that might not happen. Let's say you connect the synchronous machine to three-phase 440V 60AMP, 60Hz power. This may not sound like much to you, but you could run a big ride at Disney World on that alone.

So let's say you put that juice in one synchronous machine thing and get it spinning. Then you connect the synchronous machine to a diesel engine, just because you're a boy and you can. Then you crank up the engine so it's really torquing the synchronous machine. You can actually help the electric company supply the world. Your electric meter runs backward and you suspect you've just discovered a great way for the university to save money through the totally inefficient, indirect generation of power through diesel generators.

I was admiring the backward running electric meter, holding two wires in my hand. These two wires represented one of the three phases of the 440V, 60A supply we were dealing with. I was waiting to plug these wires into an important socket when June Eccleston came into the lab.

June was one of the few female engineers in our class and having her in the lab outside class with so few guys around gave me odds I could never have otherwise. My mating genes engaged. I was ready to show all my feathers.

What I did to convince her I was worthy of breeding was that while trying to get up the guts to ask her to the Devo concert I casually touched my thumbs to the bare ends of the wires, forming a circuit that went from Jersey Central Power and Light's plant in Livingston to my left thumb to hand to arm to body to heart to arm to hand to right thumb and back into the universe of electrons generated by the power plant.

In this case, the square root of three is involved when calculating the total charge I conducted. And then you have to consider real versus imaginary power -- where only the real power was involved in the actual cooking of me. When I woke up my arms were frozen in a contracted position. There was smoke coming from my shirt. Something was burning, and it smelled like hamburger. It turned out to be coming from the machine. We ground up some sort of vole in there.

My lab partner was sure he saw an angel of God tearing one of the leads out of my convulsing hand. Either that or it was the wire melting. He ran off to become a priest. He was out of the running for the women, but it didn't make much difference.

Instead of having me expelled, professor Rankin gave me an 'A' for that class because I was making adequate use of the square-root-of-two key on my calculator. My arms returned to normal after a couple of hours.

June didn't seem to care. Later I would learn that probability of survival is something a woman looks for in a mate, and nearly frying yourself alive in front of one was unlikely to help win her heart.

The aplomb with which I absorbed electrons or survived their catastrophic propulsion earned me some noteriety. (Actually the US Army suggested I might be a good candidate for their pulse-power conditioning lab where they generate titanic electrical pulses to run huge lasers to blast missiles out of the sky, but I never did that.) I kept my concentration in physics where except for the poison gas, the small, non-lethal voltages would keep me out of trouble.

When you get a graduate degree in electrical engineering, the first thing people say to you is: "Hey, when are you going to come by and fix my TV?" After a while you get tired of telling them engineering is not TV repair. You get tired of hearing them say, "So what good are you?" You start thinking the matchbook course on TV and VCR repair would have made you more popular than working for a big electronics company that does things nobody understands.

People understand when their TV works and when it doesn't. The fact you helped put satellites in orbit or put megahertz in someone's computer pales in comparison with bringing Jerry Springer into people's homes.

So when my mother-in-law's TV broke, why couldn't college-educated me fix it? I did know something about complicated TV electronics, didn't I? After all, physics is one thing, but TVs are God's work. And by the way, Bobby Sweeney from across the street fixed his mother's TV when it broke, and he was an accountant.

If you kill yourself by sticking your wet finger on the flyback transformer of an active television set, your life insurance agent laughs at your widow and child and sends them away penniless. So every moderately educated person knows not to do that. Everyone who has ever opened the back of a computer monitor or television set knows how to discharge the great big capacitor that stores enough electrons to burn your aorta to a chip. Everybody knows how to take the screwdriver and short the terminals to the case to prevent the laughing during the eulogy.

I had determined the thermally-actuated crowbar circuit in the Sony's power supply was kicking in prematurely and shutting down the TV. I was smart enough to figure that out. I was smart enough to figure out which transistor was causing the problem.

Because there isn't enough college education available to humanity to help a deeply and fundamentally stupid, suicidal person, I decided to do some testing with the TV turned on, to make sure my fix was going to take. I defeated the safety interlock that prevented one from switching the set on with the case opened. The yellow sticker that said, "No user serviceable parts inside" was a taunt. The little international symbol man being zapped from the sky by God only meant "sinners need not pass these sacred electronic gates". For I was a holy man of lightning.

Didn't they know who I was? Did they expect I could be demeaned by being catalogued a "user"? They, who invented stickers, had never met me. I vowed the "they" who did these things would be sorry someday.

It was hot. My home's tiny airconditioner wasn't cooling down our living room, where I had my in-law's TV in pieces on the coffee table. My shirt was off and I was covered in sweat.

I was holding a high-voltage probe from a fluke multimeter against a terminal of the thirty-thousand volt power supply when something made me move. I think I was reaching for a sip of coca-cola. Or maybe I was raising my hands to prayer, or maybe I just wanted to scratch my tongue, because the truth is that those brain cells have been char-broiled and are now rattling around in my skull like dried mexican beans.

I woke up sitting upright, wobbling from side to side. The lights in the house were flickering. There was a streak of red across my chest and a thin trail of smoke where the hair had been singed off. The electricity had gone from one wet finger across my sweaty chest to the other, burning a track as it went.

When my wife came into the living room and saw me burning on the floor she said the only thing worth contributing to the world of knowledge and altruism when confronted with a self-destructive engineering idiot.

"Did you fix it?"

It turns out I had, and so was now on par with Bobby Sweeney, the accountant TV maintenance genius from across the street.

A few days later, I met Bob in the town bar and I asked him about fixing his mother's TV, because after all, between amateur TV repair and becoming a navy seal, it was unclear to me which was less dangerous.

He didn't remember fixing the TV. Just that the remote needed batteries.

House Full of Ghosts

2009-04-21T08:06:00.004-08:00

Note to Government: Make Love, not war.
Note to Teenagers: Make Music, not love.
Note to Musicians: Music is not war.
Note to Self: There would be no music if lovers never went to war.

*

I don't want to be a writer anymore.
I'm tired of the self-destruction.
Is it all to justify the pain,
Or to cause it?
Once I asked my dad if he thought there was an end to it.
He was younger than I am now when I did,
And I remember that he said to me,
"No. It never does,"
That back then it brought me such hope.

*

My TiVO captures a show called "Ghost Hunters."
I like this show.
People go into dark houses and try to capture shadows and mists with digital equipment, all to prove in playback such things occur.

Inevitably, something happens. Most of the time the results are inconclusive. Once in a while the things are so clear we suspect trickery.

A few episodes ago they captured the voice of Princess Caroline saying, "Yes, I hear you. Who's there?" across the decades, the seemingly impenetrable boundary of life and time.

Then they cut to commercial.

We turned off the TV. We went to Costco. We needed to restock our supplies of dried nuts and unsalted butter.

*

I remember watching the lights in the sky, standing in the airport parking lot under an afternoon rain in Juneau. A brilliant blue white star pierced the cloud deck. After a few moments, I could see the black shadows behind the glare. The red and green wing tip lights. Then the fuselage as the nose tipped slightly upward and the landing gear extended to grab the asphalt.

The rumbling came as the pilot reversed the engines and the plane rolled past and slowed, reached the taxiway, and pivoted toward the terminal.

I remember I waved, not knowing if they were sitting on the left or the right, or if they were even peering out the windows at Alaska.

What were they thinking, then, my three? My children coming to visit after the divorce. Could they see me? I waved harder. I shouted. The plane docked at the gate.

Both hands above my head.

"Hey."

I'm here.

Everything I still loved in the world sitting in row fourteen. My precious cargo.

Could they still see me?

*

I remember my friend Bill, standing with me in the cold rain outside a restaurant in Los Gatos, right after I told him my wife of 23 years and I were breaking up.

The accomplished author, university fellow, award winner: he asked me, "Do you think it will make you a better writer?"

It seemed insulting - but Bill didn't have a mean streak. So it had to be something else.

"I'm not getting divorced to have more time to write."

"No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

"Because, right now I don't care if I write another word in my life," I said.

"Of course you don't." He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Let's go inside. I'm getting cold."

*

When I get to the top of the mountain on my bicycle I make a point to talk to the dead people. I thank them for having been in my life when they were. I do not try to capture their responses digitally. It doesn't matter I bring back "proof", and it doesn't matter that I speak to them on a hilltop or in the restroom at my office.

Because time doesn't matter for them, they may already be captured and speaking through some advanced time/space warping device developed in the year 2221. Maybe then people know life and death are as interchangeable as matter and energy.

Or it's all illusion.

If the dead do speak they tell us that in the afterlife they yearn for the one real thing. It's what they say to the ghost hunters, to the mediums, to the priests and witch doctors.

How ironic. It seems it's what I want most to avoid, but spend the most time trying to produce.

*

Mornings can be the worst. Waking up requires we reset ourselves. We have to bring back the diurnal cycle after we've been floating in timelessness.

I expect to see my bedroom shadows resolve to timeful reality.

I expect to hear my children arguing about the television channel, or who got the last of the sugary cereal.

Once in a while I accidentally say my wife's name.

That's when the ghosts surround me reminding me matter and energy are interchangeable.

And I never want to write again.

*

"What's wrong?" asks the blond haired girl.

I say, "Nothing," as I have since I could speak. I say, "Nothing," as a six-year old stealing his father's tools. I say, "Nothing," as a four year old drilling holes in the living room floor. I say, "Nothing," as a teenager dropping Molotov cocktails down a storm drain to create admirable fireballs.

I say, "Nothing," because she is not part of that madness and it is cruel to drag her into it.

I say, "Nothing," because it is my past, not hers. "Nothing," is my decision, from the start. "Nothing," is what I do to my seconds, minutes, and earthy years.

Ask the psychics what they get from the other side.

"Nothing," is sitting at the lawyer, agreeing on everything and him saying he has never seen this before and asking if we are sure.

"Nothing," is the end to that life and the beginning to this.

"Nothing," is how effective some of us are at creating the hurt.

"Nothing," is what the Ghost Hunters record on their memory sticks and infrared video.

Because I am the envy of all the disembodied spirits.

"We have proof," says the lead Ghost Hunter. "Listen. It was dark and nobody was around."

"Nothing."

From the ether, clear as a bell.

Glass is a Liquid

2009-04-10T09:35:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago one of my daughter's friends was swept out to sea off the California coast. This happened a couple months after one of the upper classmen on the high school football team dropped dead from a blood clot to the lung while walking between math and science class, and before the freshman girl committed suicide.

I had just found out the guy had gone missing because it was in the newspaper. The blonde haired girl came to me with the San Jose Mercury. "Have you seen this?" she asked. I hadn't.

"This is the guy your daughter had a crush on for the past 3 years. She used to sit on the sofa in front of the TV staring at her cell, hoping he'd invite her to the movies or a school dance."

"I didn't know that."

"No, you didn't."

I went to work in the attic to install some lighting and discovered two switches had been wired badly by the prior owner. Somewhere the black and white wires had been crossed and it was causing me problems with the new in-ceiling lighting I was trying to install. I had to crawl back out of the attic and go over to the garage to hit a circuit breaker.

Stepping off the ladder I almost ran into my daughter who was waiting for me, quietly. She asked, "Dad, do you have any wire?"

I have a lot of wire. Call me Mr. Wire.

"What kind of wire do you need, honey?"

"We want to put a memorial poster on the beach and we don't want it to blow away so we want to tie it to some rocks with wire."

I looked at the sign they had made. It was a piece of white cardboard with the words painted, "We love you Dennis." There were hearts on it. They had glued pictures of the boy to it, and pictures of themselves. A bunch of kids had signed it. My daughter's eyes were misty but her voice was steady.

I told her I had wire but my mind spiraled around the thought that when I was a kid, kids didn't die. Ozzie and Harriet didn't divorce. What had I done to my children? Why did my kid have to go through this trial when I had it so easy? How to take this burden from her shoulders?

I found a spool of bailing wire in the garage. I showed my daughter how to use a lineman's pliers to cut the wire and twist it firm. She watched me quietly. Asked no questions.

She took the wire and the pilers and the sign and got into a car full of kids headed to the beach where Dennis was last seen alive. They were not smiling and hooting. It was less a car full of teenagers than a carload of senior citizens heading to the clinic for injections.

I went back to work on the house wiring as fast as I could. Deep in the attic amid the insulation and wiring a man can shut off his headlamp and not be seen.

Sometime later, while crawling on my hands and knees through a particularly narrow part of the attic I decided it was a good time to cry.

I didn't go through with it, at first.

This is what I told myself I was thinking: I was calculating how to get my hands and knees on the ceiling joists so I didn't fall through the ceiling into the living room. Then the image of my daughter's face came into my mind.

Then I was too weak to stop it.

Sometimes I am not a very strong man.

"She told me she'd had a crush on him since grammar school," said the blonde haired girl about my daughter. She was making dinner in the kitchen. I was unloading the dishwasher. My daughter was still at the beach putting up signs for the boy who was swept out to sea.

"Did they go out?"

"He never knew."

"So he wasn't her boyfriend. Just a friend."

"Sometimes I think there's a glimmer of hope that you actually understand women. But then you say something like that."

"I'm glad she was at her mother's birthday party and not at the beach party with the rest of them. I doubt she would have tried swimming in that surf, but to have been there when the guy disappeared. That's the kind of thing that really damages someone."

"I'm not sure it makes much difference right now."

"I think I need to be cut a break."

"If you keep talking nonsense..."

"When I was a kid we were all immortal. We did all sorts of stupid things: we drove like idiots, we climbed rotten trees, we went into abandoned buildings, we swam during hurricanes, I actually went scuba diving during a lightning storm - that should have killed us, but it didn't happen. All those bad things happen other places to other people. How come my kid can't have that kind of childhood?"

"I don't know."

"Nobody knows," I said, "and I'm getting sick and tired of nobody knowing anything."

I broke a glass, then. I wasn't intending to, but my body made the point my mind was screaming.

My father was a glass man. He ran factories that made bottles in the back yonder when things came wrapped in brittle glass, and not flexible hydrocarbonized envelopes.

The first plastic bottles promised "UNBREAKABLE", and when my mother brought home a soft drink so packaged, I tossed it to the kitchen floor, upon which it exploded under pressure spewing froth from wall to wall.

"But it said..." I said, because we were glass people in a glass house. She handed me a towel. It took me hours to clean it.

My father told me, "Glass is a liquid," because even when it hardened, it flowed on a geological time scale. Stained glass windows in ancient churches were thicker at the bottom than the top. These things happened, even though we didn't see them. Puddles of glass that were our bottles and watch crystals will greet our future distant progeny.

My father made mayonnaise jars and soda bottles. He would pick up any glass container he saw and make a recitation about it. He would flip over the mayo jar, look at the markings on the bottom, and tell you the name of the company that made it, and on which date.

I believe that from years of listening to him opine on things glassine, I still can, too.

And when the blonde-haired girl comes home I tell her these things about my father and me. I point to our flowing glass house windows, and the gentle flow of the virgin olive oil container, structured from glass (not plastic) blown somewhere in Sicily, birth home of my grandfather.

I hope these information morsels can make my memories real to her. So she can think of them as I do, and perhaps she could think of me as my mother still thinks of my father in the lost decade of the mind.

"Midland glass company," I tell her, upside down mayo jar in hand. "They're still around. See this? Glass. Not plastic."

She grabs my wrist and twists the jar upright, too late - the top falls from the jar and it emits a blob of mayo to splatter upon our kitchen floor.

"Don't dump the condiments," she says. "You clean that, now."

"I was just reading the bottom of that jar."

"Great. Can you make sure the lid is screwed on tight before you do it again?"

"Not many people can tell you what the marks mean on jar bottoms."

She hands me a wet rag. As I commence to clean I explain, "It's a lost art."

"Not very useful," she says.

"Art doesn't need to be useful."

"Do you want pasta or soup for dinner?"

"This is something I can do. You never know when it will come in handy."

"Chicken or lentil?"

"So we've already decided - soup?"

"Can you go get the bag of lentils out of the pantry?"

"There are many reasons to love me, you know. I'm a plethora of lovability."

"All the soup bowls are in the dishwasher."

When I'm sad I think this way. I do normal things and my mind erupts into bad poetry. These words in my head while I walk in the dark, trying to escape myself. I think:

My love, I wear your Petzl at night. We walk in the grass on the mountainside, me and the dog. This is the dirt trail that leads to the summit. The dog can see quite well, but I am night blind and helpless without your Petzl.

The eyes of forest animals reflect the headlight. Mostly green, sometimes red - but mostly green. The eyes of the deer. Feral cats. Raccoons. Ocular doublets, animated plant light, frozen to camouflage as part of the inanimate universe.

Fear not for it is I, man vulnerable. Unable to suss the rocks and pits in the ground I am prey without my technical head-mounted contrivance. Though, assuming my position at the top of the food chain, I take my right to violate this space with my prosthetic sun, thus I freeze the forest inhabitants as if they were the abductees of UFO aliens.

Then on the dirt trail before me, glints of crystalline blue. Brilliant blue like fractured cobalt glass. Deep blue - a careless hiker's gems knocked loose from the setting. Droplets of liquid electricity.

Then close, these are eyes staring upward into my beam. A tiny brain cogitates. A couple of neural bits at most have taken hold in a non-mammalian carbonized automation. Even the dirt is intelligent, it seems.

Until closer I see the wolf spider.

When I hear a good song I think of my children and whether I could convince them to like it. I would share with them the times I spent tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, traffic bound, driving to work or school or home. Flipping toll quarters from down rolled windows (when windows were rolled, and not button-pushed) daydreaming of the future when everything would track through the greased grooves I'd laid as a young man and they would benefit from the fruit of my labor. Inching through summer traffic on the Garden State Parkway, in my faded blue Mercury Marquis, back when paint faded and cars rusted, when computers were only ownable by corporations and states, and man had walked on the moon, I was a the guy who wondered who they would be.

When I hear a good song I become part of the historical record. And I explain to my children how things were different then than they are now - and I would leave out all the parts about how I wished for time to pass quickly to get to the parts of life where stress and strife were minimized by the benefit of experience. How I would get to the "when," when things would be better, then.

And they would enjoy and become part of that history and like the songs I like for the same reasons, and sing along in tone-driven ecstasy, marking life with the same music, and the same movies and books.

This is what I have left. These memories of these songs on endless drives between obligations.

They would see me with eyes shining

and love the things I love.

So there would be no choice.

They'd have to love me, then.

"Let me hug you again," I say to my daughter.

"Dad..." she says in that condescending, correcting voice you get from teenagers who want to explain to you that it is highly improbable that you understand them.

But she doesn't pull away from me.

"I have to get all my hugs in before my arms fall off. You just have to put up with it."

"People's arms don't fall off just because they get old."

"Mine might. Did you put up your sign?"

"Yes. Thanks for the wire."

"Did you put the lineman's pliers back in the tool box?"

"Yes."

"Ok, let me hug you some more. I feel my arms coming off."

"Daaaad."

I chose electronics for my career because I wasn't a good enough writer or musician to starve for my art.

The basis of electronics, these days, is silicon. It used to be germanium and selenium and various other inorganic compounds. Now it's silicon.

We in the silicon business like to say we're in the sand business, because sand is silicon dioxide and most electronics parts start off as sand that gets melted down and turned into crystal boules that get cut into wafers, have circuits printed onto them, then diced and packaged for insertion into iPods. And it's cool to suggest we are magicians who take the beach sand you wash from the lining of your bathing suit and turn it into satellite receivers.

But it's actually sort of true.

I remember walking through the glass factory with my father, watching orange globs of molten glass drop from pipes in the ceiling into molds that turned them into mayo jars and coke bottles.

The molten glass came from furnaces heated to thousands of degrees by massive electric coils.

"What are you melting in there?" I asked my dad. He could barely hear me over the din of the factory - churning greased gears, conveyor belts, and high-pressure air.

"Mostly sand. Glass is made from sand."

For my 50th birthday the blonde haired girl and my children surprised me with a dinner at a fancy California restaurant.

We ate strange foods like bacon ice cream and basil foam.

I poured wine for my under-aged daughters, because at 50, even in America a man is able to do that without fear.

"How do you hold the wine glass?" my middle daughter asked me.

So I explained how white wine was different from red, and that the serving temperatures were different, and white wine glasses should be held by the base or stem so the heat from the hand doesn't warm it up, while red wine glasses are larger and bowl-like and you could cup them in the palm so the aromas hit the nose.

And she accepted what I said without comment, trying out the wine holding procedures I outlined.

"I never know these things," she said.

"Well, you're young and you have to learn. That's what you do when you're a kid. You ask questions and people tell you things. I have a lot of things to tell you if you're interested."

"Yes, we know," said my youngest, sarcastically.

"Did I tell you that when he was young my father used to make glass bottles?" I said, keeping up with the whole glass motif.

"Yes, Dad. A hundred times."

"Did I tell you that glass is made from sand and sand is also what we make electronics out of?"

"Really?"

"It's true."

My oldest said, "I don't think any of us are going into a glass business, though."

I said, "That's ok. You will all do your own thing."

"Dad," said my middle daughter, "the side view mirror is coming off my car and the car place said it would cost $300 to fix it, but my friend told me you could buy one of those for $60 and put it on yourself."

"That's probably true. It's always cheaper if you do it yourself."

"Well, I wish I knew how to do that."

"I can show you if you want."

"If I get a new mirror can I come over and you can show me how to put it on?"

"Yes of course. Please come over soon. We can work on it together."

"This bacon ice cream tastes weird."

"Did you know glass was a liquid like water? Only it's really thick, like ultra-thick pancake syrup."

"No. How can that be?"

"It's true. And did you know that some spiders have blue eyes? Check it out."

"I don't think..."

"And did you know that song you were humming to in the car on the way over is by David Byrne?"

"Yeah."

"And did you know before that song he had a band called the Talking Heads?"

"Dad, you don't have to tell us everything tonight."

"But have to tell you everything. Before my arms fall off."

"Dad, nobody's arms fall off."

"My father's did. And now he can't hug me anymore."

"Dad..."

Lancaster Rainbow

2006-10-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

We're lying to ourselves. Rainbows are not to be trusted. We're full of them here in Juneau, and there are no pots of gold. They're the source of endless frustration. There's no touching them. There's no eating them. There's no spending them. They lead you from where you are to somewhere they're not. You get there and look around, the rainbow's gone.

Then you're out from under the protection of your guardian angel like a rabbit in a pasture surrounded by wolves.

A quick visit to the utility muffin research kitchen verifies our suspicions.

...
You can’t run a country by a book of religion

Not by a heap or a lump or a smidgen

Of foolish rules of ancient date

Designed to make you all feel great

While you fold, spindle and mutilate

Those unbelievers from a neighboring state

TO ARMS! TO ARMS! Hooray! That’s great

Two legs ain’t bad unless there’s a crate

They ship the parts to mama in

For souvenirs: two ears - Get Down!

Not his, not hers, but what the hey?

The Good Book says: “It’s gotta be that way!”

But their book says: “REVENGE THE CRUSADES!!!!...”

With whips an’ chains an’ hand grenades...”

...
Listen, we can’t really be dumb, if we’re just following God’s Orders

After all, He wrote this book here an’ in the Book He says:

“He made us all to be just like Him,”

So... If we’re dumb... Then God is dumb...

An’ maybe even a little bit ugly on the side

...

Dumb All Over

Frank Zappa 1981

The prophets have come and gone. Here on a twenty-five-year old vinyl scroll entitled You Are What You Is we find the proof. We missed it.

While we were scanning the skies for strange lights the messiahs made tiny marks, unnoticed. And we're left hanging out with idiots who all have their fingers on nuclear triggers, bad sneezing allergies, and untreatable cases of Tourettes.

What is with the Amish? Are they of this earth?

A man comes into their community and kills their daughters and they offer only forgiveness. Where is the quest for vengeance? Where is the righteous indignation? Where are the demands for compensation and the appearances on TV talk shows?

Instead, to the family of the killer they say: "Do not leave this area. Stay in your home here ... we forgive this man."

What is forgiveness? Is it constitutional? Has it been legislated by a liberal court that doesn't understand forgiveness is a sign of weakness?

They will not let terror change them as they did not this society change them. To them, electricity, the internal combustion engine, and indoor plumbing share the same status as brutality. To not be changed is to not be changed. Their God is all powerful. Nothing this earth can throw at them changes their relationship with the omnipotent universe.

They invite the family of the killer to the funerals. To their tables. Their forgiveness frees them from fear and hatred. It is how they bear the pain of their losses. It is how they go on with their lives, and how they help the others to move on.

Imagine someone suggesting that they are free from fear. What is to be believed in such an idea? Where are their ropes and chains? Where are their focus groups and outraged parents protesting the government's failure to protect the weak and defenseless? Where is their voting block? They must not be human, that's it. That's how they practice this strange concept: forgiving killers of children.

Who has the nerve to wonder: what if we had done that after 9/11? What if we had said to the Islamic nations of the world: "Do not run from us. You have nothing to fear from the United States of America. We know you are not the terrorists and that you do not agree with their extreme behavior. We forgive these terrorists the pain they have caused us, and invite them to join the brotherhood of peaceful nations. Meanwhile, we invite you, the families of the terrorists, to our table and to our funerals. Pray with us for the dead, and the survivors. Let us all move forward from under these deaths. We are still alive. We share this life."

Who would suggest our response: to cause war in an irrelevant nation - is anything but sanctified?

What blasphemer suggests you imagine: what would have happened if we turned the other cheek? What would have happened if instead of legalizing torture and threatening our allies and destroying our own civil rights we believed in an omnipotent God who could not be moved by anything that happened on this planet?

Would we have been annihilated by splinter groups, or like the Amish, would we be free to go on with our lives?

Who dares to imagine that freedom from fear might actually be - freedom?

They believe they are Christians. They have been persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike over the centuries. Yet they persist in their insistence on simplicity. In the simplicity of their laws, which they believe are handed down by God in a document they call "the Bible" which seems to bear some resemblance to a book others hold in similar reverence without the benefit of reading comprehension.

Other groups profess the same philosophy. Yet there is a contrast.

I don't know about you, but even though I enjoy electric light I feel there is something to learn from their example. In fact, even though I like my computer and my running shoes, I am put to shame by the wholeness and truth of their respect for humanity.

I am become nothing in light of their forgiveness. I wither in the shadow of its beauty. I have lost myself and live in the grief of separation.

My sorrow is insignificant.

We are connected to things around us through first our minds, and then five or six senses, and then our families and neighbors, and then the electronic tendrils of the media: television, radio, digital networks. Information is brought to us many different ways and we have all had to develop a form of autism to filter only what we can handle.

But what if there is a message? What if we're missing it? What if it's:

"Be prepared to lose everything. What you protect will be taken. What you cherish will be destroyed. On this earth you have only your soul, and even that you must give to another."

We see war and death and misery and do nothing. We see happiness and progress and beauty and do nothing. We can't cope with the torrent of information that collides with our minds, and so we ignore it.

It's all a human being can do.

But meanwhile, we may be missing messages.

Rainbows may be messages. And the message may be:

The world is full of things that exist only because you looked for them. Some of these things are beautiful. Some are not.

Many are forever out of your reach, and yet part of you because they exist for you.

So be mindful.

Forgiveness is a rainbow.

Disagree and commit

2006-10-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

Has anybody here seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he's gone?

The Republican congress is imploding under its own weight proving once again that most in politics fail to live up to their own ideals.

I am Joe's judgmental projection.

Despite my displeasure with the maneuvering of this administration, the meltdown doesn't make me the least bit happy because this disgrace belongs to all of us. I believe in democracy. I may disagree with fairly elected officials but I support the system, and at some level it is the duty of each citizen as said Intel founder, Andy Grove, to "disagree and commit".

Shut up and get with the program. The majority have spoken.

The argument will boil forever. When we invaded Iraq I remember writing a couple notes in the chatterbox that made people think I was drunk. I was not. What I said in 2003 was that as a U.S. citizen I was required to continue my disagreement in private but salute the fairly elected commander in chief in public. A family doesn't take its disagreements into the street.

Yet every day I listen to the news I can't help but wonder: what the hell are we thinking?

Here is the standard and embarrassingly customary litany of pre-election congressional malfeasance. Here is the standard dodging and lying and hoping that by saying something repeatedly, it will become true. Here is the customary disdain for the public's intelligence. Here is the immoral, criminal behavior that is somehow not illegal.

I remember a similar litany a decade ago, when the sitting Democrats were subject to the cold light of scrutiny and were exposed as failing. Then, the populace expressed its displeasure by voting for the opposing party. The same will happen now.

Good riddance, we think. Throw the bums out.

Yesterday Bill Moyers wrote on TomPaine.com:

Once upon a time the House of Representatives was known as "the people's house." No more. It belongs to K Street now.

Is that an opinion, or truth?

Could it be that the issues are irrelevant? That moral standing is irrelevant to an election? That there is no more "people's house"? Has the concept that a small town could band together their votes and send Jimmy Stewart to congress a quaint anachronism?

Sure.

Unfunded candidates do not get elected in our country. End. Of. Story.

Poorly funded candidates may get elected. But once in Washington their ability to influence the seat of power is nil in comparison to those backed by billion-dollar international concerns.

This is the system we built. I support it because I think that despite how bleak it may seem it's better than many other systems of self-governance and it's actually possible to modify over time. Lots of time.

Despite Republican fear mongering, I have little concern that a Democratic majority in congress will lead us to more terrorist threat. What concerns me is the moral fiber of politicians as a breed. Politics attracts scum and we are just plain out of FDRs and Jack Kennedys.

So, we will replace the likes of Tom DeLay and Mark Foley with equally flawed individuals who two to eight years from now we'll have to sweep out of their offices in handcuffs.

Yesterday I saw Mark Foley's Democratic challenger on television. Tim Mahoney is now running virtually uncontested. The Republicans have named a replacement for Foley, who will be languishing either in prison or a halfway house on election day. But the replacement's name will not be on the ballot: Foley's will. So the election is all but locked up for Mahoney.

But it's evident why Mahoney was trailing in the polls. He doesn't have "it". He appears weak. He spouts platitudes instead of offering ideas. He does not project confidence. He withers under white-hot questioning.

Most Democrats are lily-livered, save for the likes of the old guard: Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahey, and a couple others who have strong convictions but who have zero credibility in terms of nationwide leadership. Meanwhile, most of the conservative candidates seem controlled by beams of radiation from the holy mother ship.

What do Democrats stand for except to say they're not Republicans? Where are their objectively defined morals in all of this controversy? Clever politics suggests that the "smart" tactic is to do nothing, stand back, and let the Republicans destroy themselves. Don't get dirt on yourself. Yet for the party that stands for stronger centralized resources they seem to be terrified to offer an opinion with the excuse that by standing firm on any particular point they will open them up to criticism they cannot defend.

It reminds me very much of some business colleagues I've had through life. There were those whose track record of accomplishment certified their incompetence. But because they had conviction to one or many concrete ideas they rose in the organization on the strength of having any conviction at all. And then there were who had a long list of successes but had "topped out" career-wise. After a long stint of disappointing promotion "pass-overs" they settled into risk-free scheme for success that consisted of blame avoidance while casting doubt on everyone who took action.

Once I questioned my Vice Presidential colleagues why so-and-so had been promoted when someone clearly more adept had been passed over.

One said: "Because he's not confused." That was in 1990, before Donald Rumsfeld, when W was still doing lines off random womens' tits.

Republicans have done their best to not appear confused, while Democrats appear to be soul searching. It's a frustrating - "fiddling while Rome burns" approach.

The baby boom generation grew no heroes. This is a "bad scene" in the truest Dennis Hopper sense. And come November, when nobody gets what they want this election, we're going to be combing the countryside for Abraham, Martin, and John.

The first iceowl broadcast radio show took place on October 1, 2006, on KTOO radio, Juneau, Alaska 104.3 FM.

You missed it. That was intentional. My slot came up with less than 24-hours notice. And I had exactly 5 minutes to learn the operation of the board & other studio gear before the last song ended and the promo played and I had to turn on the mic and say "hi" to the world at large.

So I wasn't looking for a large audience. I want to generate some humorous anecdotes about my first big-time broadcast radio appearance. But I can't. It was pretty straightforward. And it was a lot of work. It took me about 6 hours to develop the playlist for the 2-hour show, to plan my breaks, and to work in the necessary station IDs, public service announcements, and promos. I think it went off without a hitch.

Of course, nobody listens to the radio at 9PM on a Saturday night. Not even in Alaska. And especially not public radio.

Though it hit me on my way out of the station, when I left the late-night DJ alone in the studio where I had been, that for two hours I had completely control of a broadcast station. There was nobody in the building but me. Had I decided to start reading my E2 writeups over the air, they would have had to send in the police to stop me.

But the thought never occurred to me to do anything but what I had promised to do, which was to play blues/rock CDs and say nice comforting, family-oriented things.

KTOO has an internet feed. Had you known I was on the air, you could have listened on line. But as I didn't tell you, there was no reason for you to look for it.

KTOO has purchased two additional radio stations which will come on line next month. When that happens I may get additional shots at the airwaves. There's a possibility I'll get a slot on a spoken-word program. They liked the "My Alaskan Life" series I was posting here on E2.

I will do these things because they are completely apolitical and they calm me down. Yes: stage fright quells my outrage over politics. I plan to do it as much as I can.

This weekend Juneau-based Alaskans are putting on something called, "The 24-hour miracle." Here's the idea:

At 8pm on Friday eve four writers will be handed a topic. They will then have twelve hours to write a one-act play on said topic. At 8am Saturday morning the authors will hand over their scripts to a director who has been chosen directly to them. A cast for the play will be chosen. At 8pm Saturday eve the four plays will be performed on stage in downtown Juneau for the public, who will pay $5/seat each to watch.

I was not chosen as a writer by the central committee. However, one of the writers who was chosen chose me as an "ace in the hole". I get to co-author one of the plays, though my name will appear nowhere on the final result.

I am Joe's aching ego.

Sunday I will do my first live radio "remote". I will set up a broadcast of a Jazz band from Doc Waters' pub in downtown Juneau for KTOO. The band goes on at 4:30 local time. I will not be on the air. I will be providing the air for others.

But when things go poorly, I will be one of the guys to blame.

I am Joe's masochism.

Purgatory

2006-09-28T15:43:00.000-08:00

My country is at war. With itself.

It is a terrible war that turns brother against brother, that turns truth into concept at the speed of thought. It comes complete with computer graphics, rendering and theme music. If the cold war were still on, we'd blame the Communists for the divide.

Maybe it is.

I don't know where it started. I think the most brazen activities were probably initiated during the Clinton administration where the American populace was shocked to know our president would dare to suggest we didn't understand the definition of the two-letter word, "is". As shocked as we could be, nothing could have prepared us for the onslaught we are forced to withstand day after day as our politicians and their paid media minions write history in pencil then erase and rewrite it to their individual profit.

We have managed to convince ourselves we are in living in a time that demands the uprooting of our most closely held values as citizens and even as human beings. Our leaders feed us barely hidden lies to get us to follow them, and then wink snidely as if to let us know we're all in on the joke. The lie is that we need to unhinge 200 years of law. The lie is that our Constitution and 200 years of judgment is faulty.

Technology allows this cooperative deception to occur on a massive scale. We are fed bullshit through computer networks and cable television that are free from the restrictions of decency imposed by the archaic rules mandated by the government who limits itself to protecting only the free airwaves.

And consequently we are manipulated by tiny vicious men who send our children into war to do their bidding. And we don't care.

We get what we deserve. America is crumbling. What will fill the vacuum that is left by the implosion of the last great bastion of the free and brave? Who will stand in our place? Lucky for our former allies, we've relegated them to the sidelines, and they'll watch in horror as the giant whirlpool takes us all down into the sewer of history. And then they'll go about their lives.

I have ceased to be amazed that rational people are willing to believe what they're told in print and by shining spots on screens before their eyes. I have ceased to be amazed that people can continue to believe a lie after it has been uncovered before their very eyes like an audience who insists there are ghosts even after the magician has showed us the mirror and the smoke machine.

We are getting what the majority wants: a choice between the agonizing death of a thousand cuts, or the life-crushing pain of untreated cancer, all because we'd rather believe the screen than our eyes.

I want to believe a change of political party will cure my country. But it won't. We'll replace one set of corrupt, self-serving ideologues for another.

There is no hope but for people to turn of their computers and televisions and look into their own hearts.

And Rupert Murdock will never allow that to happen.

We are the TV generation. It is our true God. And God is selling our souls into slavery.

The Alaskan Panhandle is known to all as Southeast Alaska and abbreviated to "Southeast" by residents in speech. Southeast is a different country than the interior, which is again a different country from the Aleutian chain, over 1500 miles to the west. Due to spherical geography Alaska spans as many degrees of longitude as the continental 48 states. Due to political edict Alaska comprises a single time zone to the four in the lower 48. Our clocks in Juneau are set to the same time as those in Adik, even though they're 50 degrees of longitude to our west. Imagine New York and Los Angeles having their clocks set identically instead of 3 hours apart.

Almost nobody lives in Alaska. There's not a lot of concern about the sun rising at three in the morning and setting at ten AM in Okmok. It makes things easier for people elsewhere, which is how things are in Alaska: easier for everyone else.

We are into the rainy season in Southeast. Natives are used to the sun disappearing behind the clouds at this time of year. It's not supposed to be sunny in the "ber" months. It adds to the gloom as we lose four minutes of daylight with each 24-hour cycle. It seems we have gone from daylight for all our waking hours to a sunlight rationing system.

The tea-colored muskeg puddles fill faster than they drain. The streets glisten perpetually. The air is dense with fog and raindrops.

"What is your favorite water?" the question goes.

Insects have all drowned.

"What is your favorite animal?"

The bears have all found their sleeping places.

"What's the difference between a brown bear and a grizzly?"

Free. Wild. Nothing. How did you kill your last insect?

Yesterday, the last cruise ship of the season came and left. Now the ship dock will be empty for six months and I will no longer have to give directions to the Greek Orthodox church or the State Assembly chambers to people whose maps are too wet and crumpled to use.

We are once again in self-imposed isolation. Rain pelts us ceaselessly. Ravens practice their ten different calls.

Are you a Republican, or are you a Democrat?

Raven's wings sound like ropes whistling through the wind. When they pass you swear a bullwhip flicked past your ear or the sails were lifted on a distant schooner. They represent a deity to the Southeast natives. One out of many.

Clever Raven created the world. Bald eagle is a vacuous beauty, concerned more with looks than substance.

There was no rain the year I moved to California from New Jersey. We could only wash our cars on alternate Sundays. It was illegal to water the lawn.

Every day the sun sailed across cloudless blue. Every night the high fog clotted and formed a billowing ceiling that reflected our sodium lamps. In the morning it melted to blue clarity.

Free under the blue infinity, Californians will try anything.

People are cautious where the weather changes. In New Jersey, bad luck hides like a wolf in the brush, waiting to pounce upon the brave and the unaware.

"That's how they get you," my father used to say. It was a multi-purpose phrase.

As far as he was concerned there was a reason, a victim, and a guilty party to every misfortune on earth.

His phrase is suitably followed with: "I hate them for that reason."

There was the story of the man who broke down on Route 46, on the bridge that went over another highway, Route 1. It's an old two lane bridge. There's no shoulder, and only an old ivory-colored concrete barrier between the bridge surface and the roadway below. He set out flares and reflectors and parked as far to the right as he could, but eventually someone wasn't going to stop.

A tractor trailer did not stop. There was no place for the motorist to go to avoid the accident. Seconds before the truck collided into his stalled car at highway speed the man leapt from the bridge - and broke both legs in awful spiral fractures when he hit the route 1 fast lane on both feet.

His legs demolished, he had to crawl to the shoulder of the road on his elbows before the light changed and the traffic resumed and crushed him. And he as he started his crawl his broken car was hurled off the bridge by the collision with the truck. It hit behind him at the spot he'd just left while he slithered on his elbows.

What a bad day.

"That's how they get you," Dad said about the truck crash. "They never slow down. Not for any reason. I hate them for that reason."

"Far be it for me to be a ray of sunshine, but maybe the guy was totally lucky. He lived."

"Luck would have been not having a piece of shit car that breaks down on an overpass."

Luck would be having a better paying job and a career that led to a bright future instead of driving a Plymouth Dart with a leaky carburetor float. Luck would be living in a 6-bedroom home with a gated yard and a gardener named Luis who'd be appreciative for big tips come Christmas time. Luck would be owning a fractional Gulfstream IV.

Because we didn't have a jet, we'd be prey to those out to get us. And they were. And we would be got. And we would hate them for it.

"That's how they get you."

"You hate them for that reason."

"Yes. I do. You have anything else to say, smartass?"

"Nope. Not me."

How you answer to water is your subconscious preference for sex.

How you answer to animals is your subconscious preference for friends.

How you answer to killing insects is your subconscious preference for handling difficult situations.

How you answer to Republican or Democrat is your subconscious desire to please your parents.

Does God want us to be cautious, or carefree? Do you live in the sun or the rain?

We ask this way because you can't answer a direct question. Because everything means something, which is something else.

I can't help but think in this endless Southeast rain

of everyone who died who loved me. You have, in purgatory, only the hope you have brought with you. There is no sun I'll see again until I am forgiven my sins by those who no longer have a voice here. The resurrection of the dead. The return of the spirit.

On track, the motel rug

I pace step after step

As if I was anywhere

We could be anywhere

I have been anyone

A businessman killing time

A musician not sleeping midday

Wringing my hands

It's always too early for the show.

My father was a Democrat, but he might have become a Republican had he survived. He would have enjoyed the demonization of strangers and random events. There were times that having someone to hate gave him purpose.

It would never have occurred to him that taking fate from God and handing it to the Devil turned his world into purgatory, and that he could change it by refusing to strike our when his luck turned sour.

The formula is that anger is a release for the frustration we have built wishing we had when we don't. We are sold on the idea our lives will improve by patronizing the advertisers. Because we measure our happiness in terms relative to those around us, we can only "feel" the changes in our lives. So we must continue to patronize the advertisers. And when we have built up a high enough tolerance for that drug, we turn our efforts against ourselves. Then the politicians give us the chance to free ourselves from self-loathing by channeling our frustration into fear and hatred.

So that they can patronize the advertisers.

That's how they get you.

That's how they make you hate.

No Zen Radio

2006-09-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

Garbage Bears are Zen

Compared to other people, we have no problems.

We are not dying of cancer.

We have not been ordered to our deaths on suicide missions by inept leaders.

We are not being round up and shot by extremists.

We are not being tortured with power tools by Ba'th separatists.

We are not poking holes in alkali soil looking for water and food.

We have not been written off by the federal government.

We have not been unjustly convicted and sentenced.

We have life and the right to live it.

We could be Zen masters.

Stress is ruining my life.

Lucky for me I can take out my frustrations on our current political situation.

Lucky me.

Rah.

Evolutionarily speaking, given the ubiquity of misery it must be a necessary component of survival. If misery wasn't useful, it would have been mutated out of the gene pool by now.

No one has the market cornered on misery. We've all got it to some degree. While there are depression experts among us who have mastered the art while under doctor's care and powerful drugs, most of us practice amateur misery, intermixing it with occasional mirth.

We are not pure. But we are many.

I have known naturally happy people in my life. They tend to be very successful in their endeavors. The analysis is simple: you get more things done and endure tribulations better if you can remain happy. It seems unfair that some people are naturally cheery, given there may be a body chemistry basis to where someone is on the misery/mirth spectrum. But physics doesn't develop by or respond to parameters like "happy" or "unfair".

So we have to live with it.

Mind control is unnecessary. Polls are unnecessary.

These days everyone has a blog and I wonder if we can consider it a phenomenon of monumental importance that you can find the thoughts of millions of people simply by perusing the internet. We tell everyone what we're thinking. We are a marketing service's wet dream. A pollster's joy. A therapist's nightmare.

Due to our on-line confessions we have given up our opportunity to run for any public office.

Or maybe not. Compared to accidentally getting America into a war, my worst social faux pas is strictly a Care Bears level problem.

Yesterday I had to go out in the dark of the night. I was in my Jeep. As I drove down my street a bear crossed my path.

There are bear icons all over Juneau. Stuffed bears. Bears carved from tree stumps. Bear talisman painted by the native Alaskans in that cool northwestern graphic arts style that existed before white people invented graphic arts.

Previously, I had to go see the bears. There are a couple bears at Mendenhall glacier near the visitor's center. They hang out entertaining tourists and locals who follow their every move, moving back and forth across bridges and footpaths the way tennis fans lock eyes onto the hurtling ball at Wimbledon.

These bears-at-the-glacier are wild in that the theory is nobody feeds them and they are free to maul whomever they choose. However, they are inured to photo flashes and video cameras and the continuous "ooh" and "aah" of the crowd. They come back year after year to put on their wildlife show. The older male bear is called "Hollywood" by the faithful, and he has met riverrun face to face. The baby bear is now 2+ years old, but is still in danger of being killed by his father, so he keeps a wide berth. Momma bear has ceased keeping a close eye on the baby. She's off pursuing a career as a featured artist on Wild Kingdom.

The bear I saw was much more wild than the bears-at-the-glacier (not to be confused with "glacier bears", which are a particular breed of bear). When I mentioned to the kids at work (yes, I work with a lot of kids) that I saw a bear last night, they said, "Oh, it must have been a garbage bear."

My first truly wild bear, and it's a garbage bear. Unphotographable. Unremarkable. About three times the size of a golden retriever. Yes, capable of killing a grown man, but being killed by a garbage bear would be tantamount to being run over by a two-year old who accidentally hits the gearshift in mommy's running car.

Not a bear who's going to take down a caribou for dinner, or even fish for salmon. But rather, a bear who's going to lick clean your cast off tinfoil TV-dinner plates. A bear who's going to eat your moldy leftovers. A bear not worthy of being labeled by any legitimate Latin term.

Ursus odoriferous.

I used to write about sex. Sex is on the minds of a lot of untroubled people. It was on my mind back then, back before I had to worry about everything. Sex is a life-affirming activity. No one having sex is miserable. Everyone having sex is lucky.

Once I had sex with a woman who looked at the sky in the middle of all of it raised her arms and shouted, "Yippie!"

"What the hell was that?" I said, figuring grunting and moaning were the appropriate aphorisms of sexual approval.

"Wah hoo!"

"Wah hoo?"

"WAH HOO!"

It was one of the happiest things I'd ever seen while incarnated in human form.

The good thing about something like that is being able to remember it when it's rainy and blue in your head. You can remind yourself it's a good world. It's a good life. People love you. There is love to be got and love to be given.

Yippie.

Then this gets into my head. The Bush Presidency. The Anti-sex. Anti-fun. Anti-goodness. How can anyone who hates as many people as our president smile so much?

Or is it just me. Maybe they're reasonable guys. Maybe it's all in my head. We're not sending under equipped soldiers to Iraq to fight an ill-defined war. It's a dream. It's a J.K. Rowling episode. It's going to end with wizards and spells.

My hands are writing what I can't stop thinking --

How do elected officials get away with it? I heard it said, yesterday, that the Vice President claimed he never expected there would be such an insurgency in Iraq - as if to say - I didn't think we would be getting into an actual "War" over there.

And yet he is aggressive and forceful. The people he speaks to are sheep. They cower when he opens his mouth to spew his lies and conundrums. I dislike him as much as I dislike those who oppose him while they back themselves into corners, shielding their faces like frightened children. The Democrats do not deserve to beat these beasts. They're right about one thing: the war on terror requires we adopt some new methodology. To beat the Republican zealots we will have to counterattack with equal viciousness, lovelessness, fanatic stupidity, and hatred. They will understand nothing less and there is no one with backbone in the Democratic party.

I am coming to the conclusion that only Republicans can beat the neocons. And that may be the strategy they're developing - distance themselves from Bush so that the party can live on despite the incompetence of these despot wannabes. I don't care. If I have to, I will support a Republican. I will vote for John McCain. I will absolutely vote for Rudy Giuliani. Unless the Democratic party puts up someone with enough guts to stand up and say: It is only a degenerate who feels the morals of civilized men need further "definition" Make no mistake, there is no confusion - I will hold sacred the Geneva Convention - I will hold sacred due process - I will hold sacred the tenets upon which this nation was formed - Unless someone with guts and the ability to back it up runs against this demonic juggernaut who hides behind the Bible I will campaign for a Republican who can wipe out the neocon scourge.

They've won, and we're all idiots.

Surely, this is not the first lying administration. Surely, this is not the first administration that has argued we need to torture prisoners of war and increase surveillance of our citizens and further break down the carefully erected barriers between international and domestic intelligence agencies. Surely, this is not the first administration that has suggested due process of law does not apply to those we select and label enemy combatants. Surely this is not the first administration to accuse its critics of treason.

Or is it?

How is it that it hurts so much with these people?

I should have more sex. Think less politics. Smile. Be happy.

Yippie.

wahhoo

Electric Sheep

2006-09-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

There's a three-legged dog on our street. It's a Shetland sheepdog. One of those miniature nuclear powered Lassie dogs that would wear a hole in the Earth's crust running in circles before it ever got across "Timmy's in the well." It's missing its left front leg.

The dog gets around as if having been born with four legs was a mistake of evolution. It dodges and weaves and barks and generally makes a nuisance of itself whenever you pass its home. The Dog Whisperer would mention it was bred to tend herds. When it runs up its driveway and onto the street yapping like the broken wheel on a grocery store cart, it's keeping us away from its herd of imaginary Shetland sheep.

The first time I saw it, I didn't know it was missing a leg. It got around like a quadruped. One day my landlord said to me, "Watch out for the three-legged dog," and I thought she was cautioning me not to step on it.

If it was human it might have been lying around feeling sorry for itself, bemoaning the loss of it's paw, complaining it couldn't run the doggie wheelbarrow races anymore. But it was running and weaving and yapping, just like it was born to do.

It antagonized me and my dog as we walked past the driveway it was protecting, hopping around madly like a weird transpecies creature: a bird going through surgery to become a mammal. Occasionally my dog would look up at me with that, "What exactly are you going to do about this?" look that pack members give the alpha male. "What is your plan? You do have a plan for dealing with this, don't you?"

But there was no plan.

"You should kill that so we don't have to worry about it biting us and maybe we can eat it," my dog seemed to say.

What I said with my body language, the only language a dog can really read from a human, was, "Let's get the hell out of here before one of us gets bit. I am much bigger than you, but I am stupid and planless. I am not worthy to lead."

What I said with my mouth in a language incomprehensible to my beast was, "Come on. Leave it. Leave it."

That's what dogs are all about. They see what is there, and not what you say. They do what they're born to do from the beginning to the end with no complications. People might not like what a particular dog is doing. We may scoop them up off the city streets and euthanize them. But sane people can't blame a dog for doing doggie things any more than you could blame a bear for doing bear things or a fly for being a pest.

As much as we would like for everything to fit our pattern of thought, the physics of life knows no need for such compliance. Things are rarely as we say they should be, were, or are. We talk about our existence as if it's a film we're directing, where we control the lighting, the camera angles, and the actors.

But it's not like that.

Dogs know it.

Primary day in Alaska was August 29th. The big race is for governor. Sarah Palin won the Republican nomination, soundly defeating everyone, including the incumbent governor.

Tony Knowles won the Democratic nomination. He has been governor of Alaska before.

Lots of other races were decided. I will not list them all here.

On primary day lots of citizens were out on the streets carrying campaign signs. In the capital city, every street corner was populated by one or more supporters of a particular candidate who were waving signs and encouraging cars to honk their horns.

It was a generally peaceful scene, save for Anchorage, where someone shot at the Frank Murkowski supporters.

All of that was interesting and is now in the past as we veer onward toward election day.

Yesterday as I was driving in to work I noticed a group of people standing on a prominent street corner waving signs and banners, encouraging people to honk their horns. These were supporters of Randy Wanamaker, who is running for state assembly.

As the primary is in the past, it is unclear exactly what these people were doing. While there is no reason they could not support their candidate at any time they chose a Tuesday morning to do it. It was a Tuesday that happened to be the primary day in other states.

And so it looked like the Randy Wanamaker team was a couple weeks too late and presumably, a couple dollars short.

Perhaps they'd erroneously entered the Alaska primary date on their PDAs. Perhaps they overslept on primary day and were having a make-up day. Perhaps they felt they should support their candidate on non-election days or perhaps they were drunk.

Whatever the reason, their being there, vigorously supporting their candidate on a Tuesday upon which no voting was occurring in the state of Alaska suggested to the casual passerby that they were less than the sharpest tacks in the box.

This is an example of at least one way in which trying to do something good politically can backfire on you.

Politics can be fun, but it's probably time I took a step back. I've been watching too much MSNBC. Reading too many internet blogs.

It's time I took stock. Why am I so worked up about politics? Why does the mere mention of the name of our president make my stomach churn?

What is my truth?

I would like to go back to being a moderate "fence sitter". I would like to be able to vote for Republican candidates without feeling I'm committing America to further fascism.

I'm tired of politicians of any breed. I'm tired of being told bald-faced lies by any administration. The difference with this administration is I'm being told I'm not American for not believing the lies. Prior administrations at least let me believe casting my vote meant something other than "you're either for us, or against your children's future."

I would not like to see a Democratic sweep of the legislature in November and the executive in 2008. Generally, I don't think they're strong people. I think they are wimps for the fact they can't administer the coup d'grace to an administration that is mired in its own hubris and the blood of nearly 3000 soldiers lives squandered slashing at Republican windmills. While there is less coordination of ideology in the Democratic party than the Republican party (and so the Demos would be less likely to force a national religion down our throats) the tension needs to be maintained. I want to see the branches of our legislature unbalanced. I want them all to debate in public. It shouldn't be that a couple dissenters from the majority party have to drag the whole thing into the light of reason because their consciences won't let them continue to administer and follow the lies.

I think we have lost the war and not one Democratic incumbent or candidate has the guts to stand up and say it. The administration did it by sending our fathers and brother and mothers and sisters into harm's way without the proper equipment, with no plan, and no clear objective. Get our people out of there - or - come up with the means to equip them and a goal they can achieve and a plan to get them there. This has got to be fixed. We have allowed ourselves to be blindsided by idiots.

Legislative gridlock would be better than this mess.

This is what I think about when I try not to think about politics.

It is beautiful in Alaska this morning.

When it is sunny in Juneau, there is no prettier place on earth. The morning sunlight turns the glaciers orange-pink. The bay turns azure and the bald eagles soar against a deep blue sky. The air is crisp. Snow-capped mountains far in the distance pierce the horizon like the remnants of a dream from which you've just awakened.

When it's sunny in Juneau each tree stands straighter, proud to have its own shadow. Fingers of light touch the forest floor and filter through the soft pine needles to animals sleeping below. We are an outpost of humanity in the mountains, surrounded by ice and trees. A place where visitors wonder how all of us came to be here, and why we would ever think to leave.

I have had a fight with my brother. In our lives we have had many disagreements, and several fights. When I was younger, they were fistfights. As adult males, both in our forties, they're wars of words.

My brother is a highly skilled, highly principled person. He tries to practice the rules he sets out for himself and he is merciless on himself when he strays.

He has been very concerned with his family matters, to the exclusion of everything, and everyone else. And his family matters have been numerous and serious. There are health issues to be considered as well.

So when my own family matters became all-encompassing, I could not expect to turn to my brother for help, and I didn't. When he offered his advice and judgment on my situation, I was unaccepting.

The therapist I was seeing recommended that I do not confront my brother about how action he has taken has hurt me and my family. She felt he would not be accepting. In fact, could not accept someone else's plight while he went through his own trials.

I didn't take her advice.

I'm not sure where we stand now. I have friends in this world but I only have one brother who has been my partner in trudging through this messy life. He has been my best friend, though I doubt he would say the same of me. I have never really known how to reach him through the thin veneer of attitude and stricture which kept him from every really expressing any strong feeling toward me that wasn't a criticism.

It's certain, I'm not a saint. Takes two to tango. Etc.

And as much as my brother has held me up against his own barometer of behavior, I have held him to mine. At times, we have both found the other grossly lacking.

But he is my brother.

I don't know what's best in this world, anymore. Times have been hard and I have been taking out my personal frustrations on the politics of the world. Now I understand the pundits and pollsters. When you have a big hole in your life you try to fill it with other things. Politics is easy to adopt as a scapegoat for frustrations.

When you get on the plane they tell you - put on your oxygen mask first before helping others. This is because you will quickly fall unconscious if you don't have oxygen. When you're unconscious, you're unable to help anyone else first.

My brother would argue that it is better to die while helping another put on his mask first than to help yourself during the limited valuable time another has to live. They might be dead by the time you get your mask on and regain the presence of mind to help them. And besides, he'd add, it's a stupid thing to consider having to do.

I say I would follow the airline's instructions.

In reality, neither of us has been in that situation, so neither of us knows what he would do. I only know what we are doing now.

Would it have been better to have not said a word and maintained tranquility till a time when we could discuss it more rationally? Or is it better I don't have those feelings eating at me anymore? Do either of us have the energy to try to understand the other, anymore?

I only ever had one brother. I miss him.

I suspect he doesn't feel the same way.

What separates men from Shetland sheepdogs is we claim to have the ability to step out of our skins and observe ourselves from a distance. We not only think, but we can think about thinking.

We can examine our behavior and correct it where necessary, or applaud it where appropriate.

These days I feel like a three-legged dog who's too busy protecting his imaginary sheep to realize that people aren't threats - that they admire him for how well he gets around with his handicap. And that their admiration hides the glaring truth that there are no sheep to guard, so perhaps there really was never any need to get around so well on only three legs.

A Juneau State of Mind

2006-09-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

Sunday seemed like pizza day. And in my Juneau, pizzas are sometimes delivered.

I got out the Juneau phone book and looked up the local pizza parlor. There was no ad listed in the yellow pages. Nor in the white pages.

Realizing that this is, after all, Juneau, Alaska, and business disappear as quickly as they appear, I figured that pizza place was gone.

My landlord, who was also interested in pizza, said, "Which phone book did you use?"

"Which? 'The.' I looked in 'the' phone book."

"There's your mistake," she said. She went to the desk under the telephone, opened a drawer, and pulled out four phone books of different origin, each proclaiming to be the ultimate directory for "Juneau and Vicinity".

She said, "The number is probably in a different phone book."

"Which one?"

She shrugged.

"Is there a phone book to tell you which phone book has your number?"

"Don't be silly." She went back to the useful thing she was doing, while I pursued the number in one of the other books.

But I could not find the number. I suggested the owners had closed up and moved to somewhere civilized. Antarctica, perhaps.

My landlord said, "That's ridiculous. It's still there. I just passed it on the way home from work, Friday. It was open and serving pizza."

Then she pointed out I was looking at the "Vicinity" part of the phone book.

"Those are the listings for Wrangell."

"Wrangell? Where the hell is Wrangell?"

"It's a 150-mile ferry trip south of here."

"A 150-mile boat trip is '& vicinity'? What's wrong with you people? That's a different country."

The pizza place was not listed in that phone book. I tried another, and was sure not to be looking up phone numbers for people and businesses located on moving ice floes. There it was.

"'The Pizza Store'. Good evening. How can I help?" said the cheerful male voice that ended the ringing.

"Hi. I'd like to order a pizza to be delivered to my house," I said.

"Sure. What would you like?"

"Large pepperoni."

"Large pepperoni. Any drinks?"

"Nope. Just the pizza."

"We have a special going. A large pizza, a liter of Coke, and a gallon of buttered popcorn for only $19.99."

"It'll just be the pizza today," I said, wondering if he'd appreciated how he'd mixed the metric and English systems in one sentence without commentary.

"By itself, the pizza is $18.99. For a dollar more, you get popcorn and coke."

Pepperoni pizza is on my cardiologist's list of things that will kill me dead before I have the chance to join the AARP. Manufacturing depleted uranium bathtub toys is safer for me, apparently.

Pizza with popcorn is on his weapons-of-iceowl-destruction list.

"Nah. Thanks. Really. Just the pizza," I said.

"Amazing," said the pizza guy. "You're the first one who didn't take the deal. Ok. What's your name?"

"First one today?"

"No. Like. Ever."

"Wow."

"Name?"

"Joe."

"Pizza will be ready in 15 minutes, Joe."

"Don't you want my address?"

"Address?"

"Um, for the delivery?"

"Delivery? We can't do that."

"But your ad in the phone book says, 'Free Delivery'"

"Which phone book?"

"Juneau and Vicinity."

"Damn. Those are all wrong."

"So you don't do delivery?"

"Nope. But let me give you another number to call."

When I dialed the other number he gave me, I got a machine.

Machine: "Welcome to The Pizza Store. Your phone call is very important to us so don't hang up. Please press '1' for directions to 'The Pizza Store'. To hear the menu, press '2'. For home delivery, press '3'. For take out, press '4'."

Good now we're getting somewhere. I pressed '3'.

"The Pizza Store. How can I help?"

"I'd like to get a pizza delivered."

"No problem," he said. And he took my order, name and address. He did not try to sell me anything else.

Because I am the type of person who after successfully defusing a fuel-air bomb, becomes immediately disappointed he deprived himself of a nice 'boom', I asked him, "Hey, aren't you the same guy I talked to a minute ago?"

"Yeah. Wait. Um. No."

This sort of thing should probably have stopped surprising me months ago, but it makes me worried that sooner or later they'll turn off all the gravity here, and then I'll be floating in the sky with angry halibut and idling sport-utility vehicles.

The Tour de France was going to be run and so I needed the Outdoor Life Network so I could watch the coverage. That required getting cable TV.

There was a cable already run to the house, but my landlord had cancelled the service. When I convinced her to turn it back on in the name of international cycling, the cable TV people offered her phone service as part of the package. She took it.

The day they switched over the phones from the old Alaskan phone company to the cable company, the phones stopped working - in the sense that a phone is a conduit of information. They still emitted sound. But it wasn't human.

It probably would have been better for the line to go completely dead. Then we could complain he had no phones at all. Instead, a call could be interrupted by random warbling, static, and a sound similar to that of a pod of orcas slaughtering baby seals.

It was, after a fashion, phone service. The cable company claimed we had it, and that we should stop complaining.

But we complained and complained. My landlord is a professional science writer. She has to interview people over the phone. When a conversation with an atmospheric chemist was interrupted by the sound of a Sears lawnmower running over a case of Michelob empties, she had taken all she could bear. She responded by stamping her feet and pulling the phone cord out of the wall.

"The phone company isn't actually connected to that wire," I said. But she could only respond with molten hatred. Her phones had been working before I insisted on watching a bunch of short skinny guys pedal up steep hills.

I called the cable company. They sent a guy out named Raoul. Sensing the arrival of a repair man, the phones worked for exactly one hour. When he left, our callers were treated to a tour bus load of senior citizens being electrocuted by neon sign transformers.

My landlord threatened to set my bed on fire.

I called the cable company. Raoul came back. He came while everyone in the house was at work. He left a note on the front door handle. It was on one of those hanging things, like the "do not disturb" signs you find in hotels.

The note said, "Your phone is making a lot of noise. Raoul."

"Confirmation!" I said, waving the note when my landlord got home from work. "See. They acknowledge the problem."

She picked up the phone. Held it to her ear. Winced. From where I was sitting I could hear a tornado destroying a mobile home park. People were dying.

"Make them fix it."

"Raoul says..."

"Fuck Raoul. Fix the fucking phone."

I called the cable company's 24-hour service line on my cell phone.

The call center guy said, "Wow. Raoul was there."

"And he left a note," I added, trying to support his helpful mode.

"He says your phone is unusable."

"Yes. Totally."

"Maybe you need a new phone."

"I don't think so. It was working right up until you guys switched over from the Alaska phone company."

"What kind of phone is it?"

"Uniden."

"Those things have a tendency to just, go. It can be really coincidental."

I'm in the electronics business. I had to admit, sometimes that happens.

The next day I came home from work. The new phone I had bought was missing. My landlord was in the kitchen running the blender. It sounded like she was shredding mahogany saplings with a weed whacker. She turned it off. Her eyes were glassy and red.

"I figured it out," she said. "This is the sound the phone was making. Exactly. Tried a lot of things. The closest I could get was when I rolled a garbage can full of mirrors down the driveway. I almost settled for it. But this is it, exactly."

A thin filament of blue-white smoke rose from the overworked machine.

I nodded toward her handiwork. "It had caller-ID. Built in voice mail. There was a fax attachment. I thought it would be good," I said.

"No," she replied. "It didn't suit me." And she turned the blender back on.

I made the call on my cell. "My house Bedlam because of you. Bellvue. I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night with my toes wired to the 220-line. I can't watch the Tour de France, because every time I turn on the television it reminds her you broke her phone and she can't do her job. You have to do something."

"Has Raoul been back?" said the guy on the cable company help line.

"No sign of him."

"Lemme get Raoul out there."

"Please get someone out here."

When I came home from work there was another hanging note on the door.

"Your phone is broken. Nothing has been done to help this phone. Raoul."

When she came home, my landlord found me sitting on the sofa staring at the blank television screen. I'd planned it that way. The idea was that if it was suddenly impossible for me to enjoy the Tour, somehow her pain would be more endurable.

But she put her hand on the television, realized it was warm, and saw through me in a heartbeat.

"What's that?" she said, pointing. I'd still had the door tag in my hand.

"Raoul. Phone's still broken."

She stormed upstairs, closed the door to her bedroom, turned on NPR on the clock radio, and screamed obscenities at "All Things Considered".

"Wow. Raoul says nothing's been done to fix your phone," said the cable guy.

"Has anything been done to fix this phone? After all of this, have you guys done one thing?"

"Well. Honestly. No."

In the lower 48, he'd at least have had the decency to lie. But this is Alaska, and we're all heavily armed.

"They're not our phone lines," he said, amplifying his position. "They belong to the Alaska phone company. We can't touch them. We put in a service request when you first called, but, gee, I gotta tell you, they're not really responsive to us when we take their customers away."

"Ok," I said. "What do you suggest?"

"Huh?"

"Make a suggestion," I said, now quite angry because upstairs my landlord had gone into my room, tossed my breakables into the laundry basket, and I could hear her trying to get the hallway window open. Thankfully, the window had been painted shut decades ago.

Then she went to the basement and passed me on her way upstairs with a hammer and chisel.

"I could send Raoul out again," said the guy on the phone.

"The next time Raoul comes out here, there'll be nobody alive."

"I can let you talk to my supervisor."

The sound of a chisel breaking through a window casement dislodged an idea. I said, "I don't want to talk to your supervisor. I want you to pass him this message before my cell phone battery runs dead. You tell him we have poor cell service out here. Tell him all we have is the phone that we've been paying you for the past month and can't use. Tell him that I am a heart patient. I'm on lots of heart medication and liable to drop dead at any moment. If we call 911 and can't get through, I can't promise you my heirs won't sue your company. And you know the way rulings go up here. Hell, if I fall out a window or am hit in the head with a wood chisel, I'm going to need medical services. It the ambulance doesn't come because the sound of an earthmover rolling over a bag of puppies is too heart-rending for them to stand, I'll have to sue. Tell him that. Tell him that I'm holding an ungrounded skil saw in one hand and my foot is in two inches of standing bathtub water and I can't call the plumber for help because my phone is broken. Do you get the phone books? You know that lawyer that advertises on every one? As soon as I recharge my cell phone battery, I'm calling him. Bye."

Two hours later, there was a knock on my door.

"I'm here to check the phone," Raoul said. I let him in and he picked up the receiver of the latest phone I'd bought.

"Works," he said, holding it out to me. The receiver hummed with the sound of a pure two-note dial tone. I gave it back to him, and he handed me the pink copy of a multi-part form he'd written on.

Raoul drove away, smiling, without my thanking him.