If You Worked Here, You'd Be Home By Now

I've been leaving work late a lot recently, for some reason, and this allows me to take the shorter way home. Ordinarily the shorter route is slower, though, because it's so popular. When I leave late, however, it becomes the shorter and much quicker route home, because the traffic has dried up and it's got nice, wide, slick pavement and no traffic lights.

Once, during the college years, my roommate and I had driven down to Long Island from our upstate campus, and were preparing to head back up. We didn't know the best route, and asked my father and brother. Before doing so, my roommate had said "I can't stand it when people tell you how to get someplace based on the time of day." I knew what he meant: "Well, you'll want to take the Cross Island to the--hold on, what is it, three o'clock? Oh, screw that. What you do is you go up the Meadowbrook, THEN cut west on the Northern. It'll be, what, three thirty-five, three-forty when you get up there, I guess. So...that should be okay. Tell you what, you get to exit 21 and it's still before four, just take the damn thing." So we asked, and it was like that.

My point is this. If I leave at PRECISELY the right time, I will arrive home before I leave work. New goal!


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What Do You Do, After You Blogged All Month?

Next Actions
Apparently a lot of other people were writing novels last month. That sounds nice. I have a couple of other writing projects to sew up, and then I'm starting me one of those. Rather, working on one I started for NaNoWriMo two years ago.

Wafer Thin
This morning was the traditional First Scraping, as our cars were coated in the most delicate thin layers of the hardest ice. Like something made by Italian craftsmen on a little island someplace, this ice. So thin, in fact, that I discovered a new part of the car. The part where, when you scrape some ice and a beautiful, dinner-plate-sized micro-thin sheet of it slides oh-so-delicately down the outside of the window and disappears into the door; the part where you hear it shatter with a glasslike tinkle into a thousand little wet slivers. That part. My car has one.

Cold, Cold Ground
I ran a little down Baltimore way this past weekend, on a wide-open one-mile loop in a park with no trees and lots of frost on the ground. It was extremely bright, and around the loop here and there I could see other people out walking and running. Our breath made little lambs of steam that romped together in the sunlight.


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Hath November

I can't believe it! Only one more day of NaBloPoMo! Nearly there! I'll be in Baltimore tomorrow, of course, so I'll have puh-lenty to write about, although no time and no computer. But failure? Not an option. So I'll have to get up at 3am and break into a computer store to get that last post in, but by all that's holy I WILL post on November 31st, SO HELP ME.


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I Got Nothin', and Baltimore Calls

You know when you'll just be sitting at home and the phone rings and it's Baltimore? And the caller ID says "Baltimore" but you don't think it's actually Baltimore, the city of Baltimore, you think it's someone FROM Baltimore, so you pick it up, and but no, it's Baltimore, the city, founded in 1729 and second only to Lincoln, Nebraska in its ability to talk your ear off?

"Hello, BALtimore," you say, resignedly. Pretty soon you're hearing about how much better the cod trade used to be, and things of that nature, and a detailed description of how pretty Fell's Point is going to be once it's finished getting spiffed up, and how there are still cobblestone streets if you know where to look, and the crabs are still as good as ever.

And Baltimore talks your ear off, and your ear falls to the floor and you suddenly find yourself agreeing to visit Baltimore "real soon," but then Baltimore gets you somehow to commit to driving down there this weekend.


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The Multiplex Parkway

It's that time of year -- commuting home in the dark, when the Movies start playing. Most SUVs and minivans seem to have televisions these days, and driving along beside one, it's hard to tell whether the driver or a backseat passenger is the audience. In fact, it's hard to see that there's anything in those cars at all, living. Just the blue ghost near the ceiling, vague forms drifting across it, silent, a square of illness in the quiet dark of the highway.

Unfortunately humans are programmed to look at points of light in the dark, and I find that invariably my foot strays from the gas as I pull up to pass one of these large dark shapes with its sweet sweet teevee center. What are they watching? I wonder. And I ease my little car a tad closer, craning my neck. Is that I Love Lucy? And then I slowly sidle over to the passenger seat and pop the door, then step out. I'm sure I can see what's playing if I can just get a little closer.

Then, I die.


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Christmas Part XXXVIII: The Encheapening

Hi everyone! You're all going to get Christmas presents from us this year! But we're going to spend VERY MODESTLY. (Read: some of you might get HAPPY THOUGHTS directed your way! Merry merry!)

That circumstance is a result of one of those empty bank account situations that happen once or twice a year. Could it have anything to do with us buying a MODESTLY PRICED but still BRAND-NEW car? Why, yes, yes it could. Could it have something to do with rapidly up-spiraling health care costs and a new health plan, a hospitalization and some new prescriptions? Sure it could. How about the money we had to front to the plumber for the first of several repairs related to a leak? Yessssss. Anything else? Gas $3.24 a gallon and a combined daily commute of about 136 miles? Toss that in the hopper. How about a little oil heat? Why not?

We keep looking for evidence of our profligacy, but it's nowhere to be found. After moving upstate, my wife sold the caviar hose, the truffle flinger, and all but one of our diamond-encrusted hookers. We took back the shoe dispenser and the Armani tissues and the complete set of life-sized farm animals executed in Amedei Porcelana chocolate. Gone are the vintage solid gold nosepickers that once belonged to a notorious governor of Oklahoma, not to mention a Jeff Koons heart sculpture AND Jeff Koons's actual heart (sold it to a medical school in Grenada just to cover a heating oil delivery).

So, yeah, cheap holidays this year. It's just that, even recouping the funds from the loot acquired during our New York years, there's occasionally this HOLE just over the horizon. Sometimes it allows us a look inside. It's so big, and so deep—if we could figure out a way to sell it by the cubic yard, we'd be rich.


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Jiggety Jig

My earliest semi-adult trips away from home without my folks were two-night overnight camping trips in scouts. I have very specific memories of riding back into town in some other kid's dad's car and seeing the movie theater and the Amoco station and wondering how they could possibly still look the same, after I'd been away.

Driving back into that same town after a couple of months away this past weekend, it's flipped: I feel exactly the same, and the Amoco station is a KFC and the theater is a row of doctors' and accountants' offices. And I stick around for a couple of days, then leave town, and see that the bookstore is a dance studio and the Gap is a toy store. How does a farm become a Gap and then become a toy store all within my own memory?

I'd like to report that driving back into THIS town after the weekend away I couldn't believe everything had remained the same, except that while we were gone someone opened a sushi place and they hung a help wanted sign on the new burger joint and all the rest of the leaves fell and the whole place is covered in yellow maple and rainwater, and sometimes the new town, more than a year old, still doesn't quite feel like home.


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Same As It Ever Was

The nostalgia of place is in full force this weekend. I'm sixteen again, and twenty-two, minus the weight, reading the same comic books and hanging out at the same local pub with the same friend. My family goes up to Sagamore Hill on Saturday morning, stopping at the Jericho Cider Mill on the way up (the same old large-scale print is on the wall behind the counter—a vaguely feral-looking boy with a devlish look, cheek full of apple, slick of juice around his mouth, exposed white flesh in the red globe in his hand—but the old down-home customer service is non-existent), and the house is there as I remember amid its fields and outbuildings.

When I was a kid we had our totemic places at Sagamore Hill—the Pond, the Windmill, the Cannon Into Which You Could Pour Gravel. They're there today (well, not the cannon), as are the memory-worn objets inside the house. Old tired animal carcasses and parts thereof, looking if possible more resigned and bored with the passing time. A rhino's foot, ignominious as an inkwell. A chair made out of horns that I remember being more intricate, or bigger, somehow, when I was young.

But I'd wanted the Lad to come, because this was The Place. It had hooked us, all of us, from Mom on down. First, it was a rich person's house we were allowed into. Second, ANIMALS, as if I need to tell you. Third, presidents were still just barely important then, before their currency became devalued. And it had nice lawns. In returning I expected a certain erosion of awe, but like any good parent I wanted to also relive the wonder of my youth by forcing my kid to experience it.

Somehow, it worked. I guess you get a kid up close to those beech trees, like monuments to trees made from stone and gold, carved with dates that go visibly back to the mid-70s and whose earlier markings have blurred through the tree's slow healing, and something primal takes over. Not that he was reluctant to go, but I didn't want acceptance, I wanted him to acknowledge magic. And watching him clamber through the intricate multiple trunks of that ancient monster I, at least, felt its presence.

We ran around the tree a lot, and in the house we saw tusks and dead bison and beach-ball-sized bear heads openmouthed at the ends of their furred skins. We viewed the Victorian technology of the kitchen and the baths, trod on the old carpets under glass eyes in dim light. And then we ran again, outside, through drifts of leaves covering gem-green grass on broad sweeping lawns.

The night before, we'd taken out the Tapes, the Classic from 1971 ("Billy, stay away from the crib"), plus its sequel from New Year's Day 1976 ("this is Nancy Dickerson reporting.") I'm on there, both a year and a half younger and two years older than this kid. My piercing screams on the earlier recording and my husky trying-to-sound-older voice on the later one are brackets to his current perfection; his new memories of placing feet upon that smooth treebark, of looking up the Cape Buffalo's nose, are both outside and inside of my own memory.

On that later tape, my youngest sister takes on the reporting role of Nancy Dickerson, veteran journalist and interviewer of family members. When she's not doing that ("I think our audience would like to know, do you live in a house or in an apartment?") she's desperately clutching the microphone to herself while whining "I don't want to!" as we exhort her to speak. Well she's in for it now, herself, coming home to tell us that she's expecting. We all have tape recorders.

Speaking of nostalgia both real and imagined, and tape recordings, what better Saturday to such a weekend than attending a taping of A Prairie Home Companion? If there's a nostalgia gland and it hasn't already exploded from the red light filtering into my parents' library through the leaves of the Japanese maple just outside, A Prairie Home Companion ought to finish it off.

I'll let you know.

UPDATE: After the show we went to the old Greek place, said hello to the same waiter, then stopped at her old apartment stoop, where she pulled me in for another first kiss, as it was twelve years ago. Nostalgia satisfied.



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There is no excuse for this

Look, I don't care if my fortune doesn't promise me riches, or predict some other incredible future. That's fine. I'm not a fortune hog. But what the hell is this? A little effort please, and a modicum of sense. If I go to the trouble to break open the cookie, at least give me something to go on.








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Once a year

“It’s only once a year,” we say as we tuck in following a moment of poorly feigned reluctance. And it’s true: for those controlling their weight, as for everyone else, the obscene feast that is modern Thanksgiving happens only once annually. Once annually. So why not?

Other once-annual feast days you might observe:

    New Year’s Day
    Your bonus arrives
    Superbowl
    Valentine’s Day
    St. Patrick’s Day
    Your significant other’s birthday
    Your best friend’s birthday
    Passover
    Your birthday
    Easter
    Your particular once-a-year feast day…with “the guys” or a sibling, your sorority, etc.
    Memorial Day
    Graduation
    Your anniversary
    Your kid’s birthday
    July 4th
    The weekend after July 4th
    Vacation!
    Labor Day
    Ball game!
    The harvest
    Your sibling’s birthday
    Rosh Hashanah
    After the play
    Halloween
    Thanksgiving
    Company Christmas party
    Holiday party
    Christmas Eve
    Christmas Day
    New Year’s Eve


I don’t know about you, but I’m going out for a run. I’ve got some once-a-year chowing down to do later.

To all of you, a healthy Thanksgiving, and my gratitude.


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Thank a Veteran

Sometimes I forget to just sit down and type when it’s time to start writing. And one of the stories that always recurs to me when I get blocked is the story of the guy who wanted to write something – I don’t know where I heard this story…maybe AP English? best class I ever took -- and he just sat down and started writing and maundered along until he got into a pretty heavy reminiscence about his war buddies and what happened to them all. Perhaps he had left the tent and the tent got blown up? Maybe I’m conflating that with another story.

In any case, I aspire to be funny, and when I get a little jammed and have trouble putting something together, and that story occurs to me, I always end up wishing that I’d instead heard a story about some guy who had writer’s block and decided to tie banana peels to his shoes and run in traffic. Because that’s comedy.

But, no, I’m laboring along here under the weight of a veteran who wanted to work out some issues and sat down to write, maybe he was smoking at the time (although I think he wasn’t having a drink because that would undermine the whole enterprise), and his mind wandered over his past until it fetched up against the Biggest Thing hiding in there, and that flowed out of the pen.

And one of my Biggest Things is the story of the time my friends and I flushed the Klan and regretted it. It was perhaps the one time when as an adult I truly felt most afraid for my life, although as I remember it, some part of me did not believe for a second that I was going to be killed or hurt. Instead, the Klansman with whom we actually spoke was kind enough to tow (well, more like yank) my car from a ditch where I had stranded it, and told us to get the hell out of there, which we did.

This was some years back, and the man took down my license plate number and since he was a volunteer fireman (I happened to know this) I assumed that he had buddies in the police services and that this particular chapter knows (or knew) who I am. So I mostly kept quiet about it, only passing the information on to a couple of trusted people and nothing seemed to come of it. I can only hope that those rednecks waited in fear–they were meeting illegally on land upon which I was trespassing, but which belonged to none of us–for the next several years for the hammer to come down, just as I did, the bastards.

So okay, that mostly-forgotten veteran has done it again, drawn out a reminiscence from an unforseen direction. There are more details, of course, and the symbolocogical elements of the story go deeper--loss of innocence, the town/country divide, even Homer's Odyssey (we were on our way to Ithaca)--but those don't figure into this essay. Someday maybe I'll write it up proper. But today, the exercise is enough.


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Is He Still Writing About Bears?

So the other night my friend Jane* was sitting at home in the kitchen about ten miles from here enjoying a small dinner, when she heard a Noise at the window a couple of feet away and, looking out, spotted a triangular tan shape floating in the dark. The shape, she immediately knew, was the snout of a bear going after the bird feeder attached to the windowsill.

"I was basically a fish in a bowl," she said, so she reached over and turned off the light, which allowed her to see the bear finish ripping the feeder violently off the windowsill (just a few feet away) and wander off toward the garage, suet in hand.

So she's telling us this on a Sunday night. And frankly, Sundays, who the hell needs it? Because I'm not sleeping on a Sunday anyway, let's be frank, because of all the imaginary bears and thieves and bigfoots prowling around outside, not to mention REAL ones. And Jane*'s going to be fine, because she's from Minnesota** and they used to coax bears into the house in winter for warmth.

Can we be frank? Sundays are the worst.






*Real name, but doesn't it sound generic?
**Wisconsin's name changed to preserve anonymity
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Just in case

There's snow on my windshield this morning, so I thought I'd post early in case I get home late and am too beat. And because I had to dash out and get a turkey cutlet for the lad's school project (don't ask -- we also had to get monkey blood), I can only do this, from when we planted trees:





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What Lies Beneath

That's right, NaBloPoMo, BRING IT ON. I'm posting TWICE today. The real reason? After waiting five years to write something about the Bigfoot Conference, I thought it was so lame and short that I'm giving you, my readers, a little lagniappe to make up for it.

And by a little, I mean very little. Don't get your hopes up.

Anyway, as I do most weekends, what with one thing or another, I spent some time on my belly under the house yesterday, poking around, taking pictures of mold, pulling out some wet insulation. Call it a hobby. In any case, as I tugged a sheet of insulation, a little acorn fell out and rolled onto the floor. An enterprising mouse had clearly put it aside for winter. Awwww.

Then I rolled the insulation over and became a cartoon as an avalanche of acorns rained down on my head, scattering everywhere.







Cute x 100!




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On the Non-Existence of Bigfoot, Part II

Previously, on Exurbitude.

So we stayed at the hotel about 100 yards from the fairground where the conference was taking place. This was in a cinderblock building with a corrugated roof and an eight-foot plywood sasquatch cutout standing out front. Inside was a stew of hokum, bunkum, nonsense, and, most disturbingly, a cadre of true believers. I went in armed only with a modicum of critical thinking and came out convinced that Bigfoot is just a story. Don't get me wrong: stories are very important. And also don't get me wrong, the world is still magical. But Bigfoot? Nope.

As the first day of the conference wore on, it became very easy to tell those who believed in Bigfoot from those who did not. Those who believed in Bigfoot never claimed to have seen one. Those who did not believe in Bigfoot told carefully crafted and polished stories of their encounters. These latter seemed to pay a lot of attention to their own physical appearance. There is a lot of politics in Bigfoot, too.

So I had a long interview with John Bindernagle, a true believer whose book on the topic approaches it quite logically. But I didn't chat with a guy whose story included tears and ended with a political discussion about how his sighting had not been deemed credible by the Western Bigfoot Society (which is, paradoxically, the parent organization to the International Bigfoot Society), so he started the Southern Oregon Bigfoot Society or something like it. When someone else delivered an impassioned speech about how Bigfooot is an early human prototype invented by the aliens who eventually created the Sumerians, it was time to go sample some of Portland's night life.

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On the Non-Existence of Bigfoot, Part I

I've wanted to write about this since 2002, but haven't gotten around to it. In that year, on Mother's Day weekend -- the last Mother's Day when my wife wasn't technically a Mother, and I could in mixed conscience go on a road trip -- two friends and I flew out to Portland, Oregon for the Western Bigfoot Society's annual conference.

Let's just say I had to settle something in my mind before I was responsible for raising kids. Does Bigfoot exist?

For the first sixteen years of my life, I was pretty sure it did. Next decade it was more of a tossup. To age thirty-three I was tempted to give it a little credence. After all, from native tradition, to tracks, to hair samples, to purported sightings, to spurious but famous filmic evidence, people have been claiming that Bigfoot is real for hundreds of years. It seemed there had to be SOME possibility.

This was important to me as a parent-to-be. Before I got started, I wanted to establish for myself what kind of world we live in, so that as a parent I would give the kid the appropriate contextual feel. Was it a magical world, which would allow for a giant north american forest ape that had so far eluded capture or conclusive evidence of existence? Or is the world mostly the no less wondrous one we see around us...the one where an unseen brush-crunching shadow in the woods is a bear, and where a snapped tree is the result of a nearby deadfall?

I used to believe that Bigfoot exemplified the old adage that you can't prove that something doesn't exist.

Until I met the people who were making the claims.

Part II tomorrow. In the meantime, Bob Ross.





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The NaBloPoMoDo Ldrums

You can tell fatigue is setting in. But that's okay, because it's NaBloPoMoHumpDay. Buck up, bloggers! Buck up, faithful readers! You only have to endure two more weeks of mindless chatter! Dripping water! Snakes gone wild! Dead moles! Posts about blogging! Links! And one of those days is Thanksgiving!

In the meantime, can we talk about my commute? I was idling along in stop and go traffic the other day, not very much liking the newest BTIOTCD (A Thousand Dazzling Suns or something, by that dude), the radio not doing it for me, my cell-phone people all asleep, and just driving completely out of the question.

So I had to go allll the way back to the middle ages. I immediately fell into a trance, imagining that I was a humble peddler on line to ply my wares in Londontowne, waiting amidst the gray drizzle with a bunch of toothless middle-aged Britons, the entire line and all its attendant chickens (funny how there're always those chickens walking around in depictions of the middle ages...like you had to have one around or it was all "Ho there, sirrah, thine fowl be not in evidence! Produceth thine chicken forthwith or to the donjon with you!") lurching forward every few minutes as the pike-totin' gate guards grudgingly let a few more of the flea-ridden throng pass through the gap in the ancient Roman wall surrounding the City. Minstrels play, scabby urchins dash up and down the line begging for scraps of food or the odd farthing, spontaneous lusty brawls break out over one's place in line, tonsured monks sullenly sneak beer from their longnecks while massive hay wagons trundle forward, drawn by fly-swarmed oxen.

Ahh, damn, I blew it with longnecks, didn't I? Anyway, we haven't come that far, is my point.


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Nailed

Baseboards and labor: $1500.00
Nails: $1.60
Two small nails in copper radiator pipe: $0
Replacing new floors, one wall, insulation, removing mold, reinstalling radiator and baseboard: Priceless

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