Everyday Life – Page 118

The Satisfactions of the Small, Found in the Large

January 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.

(William Least Heat-Moon)

Not from whiskey river (one of The Missus’s favorite poems):

I Am Too Near

I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from him
under the roots of a tree. I am too near.
Not in my voice sings the fish in the net,
not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too near. A big house is on fire
without me, calling for help. Too near
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too near to enter as a guest
before whom walls glide apart by themselves.
Never again will I die so lightly,
so much beyond my flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. Too near.
I taste the sound, I see the glittering husk of this word
as I lie immobile in his embrace. He sleeps,
more accessible now to her, seen but once,
a cashier of a wandering circus with one lion,
than to me, who am at his side.
For her now in him a valley grows,
rusty-leaved, closed by a snowy mountain
in the dark blue air. I am too near
to fall to him from the sky. My scream
could wake him up. Poor thing
I am, limited to my shape,
I who was a birch, who was a lizard,
who would come out of my cocoons
shimmering the colors of my skins. Who possessed
the grace of disappearing from astonished eyes,
which is a wealth of wealths. I am near,
too near for him to dream of me.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper’s had
and it is numb, full of swarming pins,
on the tip of each, waiting to be counted,
the fallen angels sit.

(Wislawa Szymborska;
translation by Czeslaw Milosz)

Finally, an undisputed master at the reverse: finding large things in the small (click Play button to start):

[audio:billcosbychickenheart.mp3|titles=’Chicken Heart’|artists=Bill Cosby]

A Cat’s Departure

January 22, 2009 by John 10 Comments

Cat nap, c. 1993

[With a cat — Dilly, I’m told, but to me the stripes
rather say, Nameless — sometime in 1993.]

Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together.

As with her predecessor, Nameless, Dilly probably would have gone anonymous for a while — we’re notoriously indecisive about most things, singly and as a couple — except for one happy circumstance. She needed happy accidents at that point, too. She’d been in the animal shelter with her little brother; The Stepdaughter-to-be had gone there with a friend who was looking to adopt. The friend pointed the two little kittens out. (As I recall, the backstory to that point was that Dilly and her brother had been abandoned by the side of the road.) The Stepdaughter-to-be, on behalf of her mother, “adopted” Dilly. (To this day, she remains haunted by uncertainty about whether the little brother got adopted, too.)*

When she arrived at The Missus’s place, then, the kitten still had on one foreleg the ID bracelet from the shelter: D1L, it said, and voilà — with the substitution of a letter for a digit, she had a name.

(She acquired a couple nicknames over the years. Dillybutt, for one — a reference to the “elevator butt” that kicked in when you so much as approached with an about-to-pet-her hand, sometimes when you merely spoke her name. Later, there was Dilgoyle: the cat who’d be sitting on a windowsill, as if carved there, when we got home from work or a trip.)

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Forward Bravely, into the Past!

January 21, 2009 by John 8 Comments

This March — the 12th, and isn’t it interesting I remember the exact date? — marks my 30th year as a computer guy.

When I started out at AT&T, my job title was Member of Programming Staff (with a digression into Managerhood); at my present job, I’ve been a Distributed Systems Specialist, a Business Systems Analyst, and a Database Analyst. (Oh, and throw in whatever you call a departmental Webmaster, too. Probably exactly that.)

And then I’ve built and maintained other Web sites, as well, and RAMH is, like, my fourth or fifth blog since 1999-2000 or so.

By now, you might think, I’d be right up there in the vanguard doing the Pied Piper thing, urging everyone else to join the cyber/systems/virtual revolution.

Er, no.

Into my Inbox recently drifted a plaintive email from a young guy with a computing question. In purchasing a new computer, it seems that he had to choose between two options: a souped-up whiz-bang up-to-the-minute model? or scale back on the computer itself, and spring for a really nice monitor?

I counseled him to choose Door #2, introducing it with the (perhaps surprising) claim:

I tend to be conservative in matters of computer hardware: I don’t want my computer to make my heart race; I want it to be INVISIBLE.

That pretty much sums it up.

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The Real January 20, 2009 Post

January 20, 2009 by John 4 Comments

In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.

It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll be a good President, let alone a great one.)

And yet, and yet…

I’ve been with my current employer since 1993; until today, they’ve never offered the use of conference rooms and video facilities to watch an Inauguration — except possibly for the simple but godawful swearing-in in November 1963.

And truthfully, I have not been able to stop smiling.

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No Saturday Post

January 17, 2009 by John 7 Comments

We lost a great cat today.

(Bye, Dilly — we’ll see you later!)

Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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The Culprit

January 13, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I couldn’t wait for the plumber to arrive.

Just for him, I’d cleaned out the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and put a bucket under the trap. I’d emptied the (dirty) dishwasher. I’d spread a towel on the floor, thinking that his knees — even more than mine — might appreciate the cushion. I’d left the cabinet door open, and I gestured at it and the sink when I led him into the kitchen. “There they are,” I said, as though he might might have expected more than one sink and drain in the kitchen.

He took in the scene, nodding vaguely at my tale of frustration and woe:

The tale extended back in time hours, days, weeks, to the dawn of time, and it involved gallons of Liquid Plum’r and first a 25-foot and then a 50-foot auger, or “plumber’s snake.” (Perhaps that was the creature which had defeated Adam in the Garden.) The tale involved a dishwasher frothy with gunk-dissolving chemicals, a dishwasher run through multiple (brief) rinses and drain-and-dry cycles. The tale involved mopping and sweeping and more mopping and it merited, by God, a little manly sympathy.

The plumber walked around the kitchen counter and pointed with his thumb to the sliding glass door to the deck.

“All right I use this door?”

“Uhhh… yeah, sure, no problem.” Like, I didn’t know — maybe he and his partner would need to… um… trace the line or something. I pictured the two of them criss-crossing the yard, with GPS units in their hands and pipe-clog-detecting electronic sounding gear strapped to their backs and heads. Plumbing had obviously embraced the 21st-century World of Tomorrow. I opened the door, showed them out, and sat at the kitchen counter to watch.

No plumber(s) for a minute or two. Maybe I’ll just run down the hall to use the bathroom for a few secs, I thought. On my way through the living room, I glanced out the picture window at the driveway. Yes. The two of them were getting their gear. Probably emptying the little van.

As I returned to the kitchen, I heard a metallic clatter and crash out on the deck. What the—?

It was an extension ladder, propped up against the wall outside the kitchen window. The assistant plumber even now was climbing it, in his hands an industrial version of the apparently puny one which I’d spent so much loving, thrashing, cursing time wielding over the last few days.

A pause, the world in suspended animation. From the kitchen ceiling, suddenly, the sound of diamond miners drilling through our roof.

I went out onto the deck. And there I saw the culprit.

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Flange: A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas (Part 2)

January 10, 2009 by John 2 Comments

(written by human John’s co-blogger gargoyle Flj,
but please to call me Flange, how pronounced anyway)
(edited by John for clarity and, um, readability)

You already read Part 1 of this series, yes? If not, it here.

There you learned things about gargoylish Xmas decorations and such.

(Ed. note: Asides in a couple of subsequent posts added some additional factoids.*)

But that post did not explain true heart of gargoylish Xmas, just like human variety: matters of spirit.

Surprised you may be, gargoyles, hideous beasts you probably think of us, even have souls (other than spirits, evil we consume). Let alone that think about and even celebrate spiritual matters. Humans only creatures with souls, no? with theology?

But yes, is true: gargoyles spiritual too.

About Xmas, the souls of gargoyles (much cleverer than human souls) know these things:

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Surprising the Audience

January 9, 2009 by John 4 Comments

[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]

My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.

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Fire and Paper

January 8, 2009 by John 5 Comments

A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.

Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.

But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.

You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:

It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”

My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.

Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.

[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]