The Oort Cloud

Gamera sez Sayonara!

2011-05-03T10:28:00.001-06:00

Supervoid

2011-04-21T10:11:00.005-06:00

The image above is a cosmic microwave background radiation map of the universe, bright colors hot, dark colors cold. The circled bit at the lower right is a part of the sky deemed too large and too cold to be easily explained by science.

The reason I'm posting this is because of one sentence in the explanation of the map and the CMB cold spot on the Astronomy Picture of the Day, where I found it. The sentence is this:

Published speculation has included spectacular progenitor hypotheses that involve a supervoid, a cosmic texture, or even quantum entanglement with a parallel universe.

These are actual scientists speculating about this, not addled callers to Coast to Coast. I'm not saying I understand what that sentence even means. But it sure is fun to read.

Excerpt

2011-04-18T13:51:00.003-06:00

The last time I posted an excerpt, it was of a paragraph I cut, as it was a little too over the top.

This one I'm keeping.

When he got the call in the middle of the night he packed the barely-awake kids into the back seat and drove to his mother’s home, expecting to be greeted by ambulances and the flashing lights of fire trucks, but of course they had all left by the time he had completed the three hour drive. Pools of fog lay in the pre-dawn fields and shallow valleys between his house and hers; months later now and he still thinks of grief in this way, laying low to the ground, indistinct, inert. He remembers how during the drive he wanted to gently pull the car to the side of the road so as not to wake the kids, get out and lie down in it, cool grass against his back, damp air against the skin of his face. How he wanted to be blanketed by fog, asleep in its arms, the rest of the world disappeared into the wide hazy distance forever.

Spooky Action at a Distance: The Home Game

2011-04-13T12:23:00.005-06:00

I saw this article a couple weeks back in Scientific American. If you have $28,000 lying around, you can buy a "quantum eraser," which will show proof that quantum entanglement is an actual thing (Einstein was leery of the concept, and called it "spooky action at a distance"). According to the article, the device

...produced pairs of particles that acted like magic coins: when flipped in unison on opposite sides of the lab, both coins always came up with the same side, either heads or tails. Aspect's apparatus produced about 100 spooky coincidences per second. The qutools kit, which would fit on a living room end table, sees more than 10 times as many.

What Einstein found spooky is that there's no way for the particles to communicate with each other, as the effect is simultaneous, whereas information can only travel at the speed of light. The only way for it to work is that the particles, even though physically separate, are entangled in some way that science doesn't entirely understand. We can prove quantum entanglement exists - from your living room coffee table, no less, thanks to the folks at Qutools - but don't yet fully understand the mechanism at work.

Waitress In the Sky

2011-04-06T13:57:00.008-06:00

Oddly, the most persistent memory from the trip is from the very end. About an hour from home, everyone is tired, cranky, hungry, after the long drive from California to Colorado. The kids are arguing sporadically. My back hurts. And, as if by magic, Waitress In the Sky comes on the mix CD, I crank it up, we all start singing along, loudly and happily. After the song ends we return to our former tired, cranky and hungry selves. But for that three minutes we are in a state of grace, singing along to The Replacements. And an hour later we are home.

Some more pix:

Hux, youngest, John Bader (an old and dear friend from college)

Eldest and me

John Bader and youngest

Eldest, in what appears incorrectly to be a Coke commercial. If Coke wants to pay me for the product placement, I'm open. Have your people call my people.

The Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief

2011-04-04T16:55:00.005-06:00

I was never a big fan of Disney growing up. Too cute, too soft, too cuddly. I liked the Warner Brothers cartoons: Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, Wile E. Coyote. They were anarchists. Trouble-makers. Anti-social slackers. Not a cute one in the bunch (well, maybe Tweety Bird, but even she was pretty cruel to that cat).

I decided Disney was evil with a small "e" after learning that they hired an army of lawyers and lobbyists to change copyright law so they could own their creations for over a lifetime (overturning the notion that artistic work falling into public domain contributes to the public good).

Disney became evil with a big "E" to my admittedly biased mind with their hyper-sexualization of pre-teen girls and glorification of celebrity on shows like Hannah Montana.

But I digress.

Disneyland is great fun (to help insure this, I left my prejudices at the gate). It's great fun because they do several things very well. Lines are long, but they get you on and off the rides quickly and efficiently. And while you're in line, there's stuff to do, things to look at (the people watching alone is worth the price of admission). It a well-designed park, laid out with crowd-handling in mind, and something for everyone always within eyesight. It's cheaper than I expected (much cheaper than, say, a major league baseball game). And everyone there does their job very well. They are knowledgeable, polite, well trained. The Mad Hatter and Alice even knew why a raven is like a writing desk!*

Most of all, though, they make sure that the illusion they want you to buy into is so wildly appealing you are willing to suspend your disbelief. The costumes and makeup and sets and animatronics are all so detail-perfect you are more than willing to throw reality out the window and just go with it.

There was a moment, at the very end of the first day, with the fireworks display lighting up that famous Disney castle, when Tinkerbell appeared over the castle, amid the fireworks. I couldn't figure out how they did it. She was higher than the castle! How were they doing this? She must really be...flying!

Minutes later, all the cordite in the air revealed the cable tethered between the Matterhorn and the castle, and you could kinda see how they pulled it off. But it was too late by then. I had already bought into the illusion, hook, line and sinker. I was a kid again.

Damn you, Disney.

*because Poe wrote on both

Pursuing More Than Trivia

2011-03-28T10:37:00.008-06:00

Disneyland was pretty damn cool, and I'll get to it in some future post, I really will, when pix are downloaded and my work week is not quite so harried. One central observation about the place: everyone who works there is very, very good at their job. That is no small thing.

However, first things first: our last night in Los Angeles I played an epic, tenaciously fought, five hour long game of Trivial Pursuit with three very good friends, most of whom I hadn't seen in decades. Clif Morts, John Bader, Toby Larson and I. Four very close, very smart, very witty, very competitive people; an evening of laughter, trash talking, old stories, and friendship. I felt honored to be among them, and thankful my daughters were able to witness the game, to hear the laughter echoing through the rooms of Clif's house, to see how friendships evolve, grow, and prosper across the decades.

Damn Leprechauns

2011-03-17T12:28:00.003-06:00

This a is a leprechaun trap. The Keep Out sign is to appeal to their mischievous nature. The shiny tin foil is to lure them in. They see the quarter, pull it, the string pulls the pencil, the box drops down.

You've caught a leprechaun!

At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory.

This is what we woke up to this morning. Those leprechauns are smart!

Grace and Commerce

2011-03-14T13:10:00.005-06:00

I'll lift the veil of vagueness just a bit here, to let some light into the past couple of posts, and my glancing references to wolves in the darkness.

We took our youngest to the doctor last week. She hopped up on my lap, and later Hux's lap, and told the doctor what was going on. She said what she had to say calmly, without fear, without confusion, without self-pity. She told it succinctly, and accurately, and well.

She became in that moment our role model, in terms of facing the vagaries of the future with grace and strength.

We will do our best to emulate her.

And with that, we're going to D1sneyland! It's Spring break, and things just fell into place to make it happen. Hux and I have mixed feelings about giving money to the mega-corporate monument to commerce that is D1sney (one of the first presents I ever gave her was Carl Hiassen's anti-D1sney diatribe "Team Rodent: How D1sney Devours the World") but who knows when we'll get the chance again?

We'll be staying with a friend of mine from my wild and reckless NYC days. He's a very talented writer and actor (here's his blog). I directed him in a handful of shows back in those heady days. They were good shows. We work well together. And he and his wife are opening up their house to our traveling circus of a family. For a week!

Thanks, Clif and Angela.

Bookending the week are the road trips there and back, cutting through New Mexico and Arizona. I'm looking forward to those drives as much as I am our destination. Blue southwestern skies, endless highways, greasy spoon diners, roadside motels.

All roads lead to the sea.

Wolves, Books, Moons

2011-03-10T12:55:00.008-07:00

Things are better, by the way, since my last post. They tend to do that. They get better. No more images of wolves peering in from the edge of the darkness. I'd be less vague were it my own life, but it is not. Or at least not mine alone.

So, I'll be vague. But things are better. Trust me.

Finished an excellent book last month, good enough that it deserves a passing mention. Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is a dystopian novel set in the very near future, in the waning days of the United States, a country that is broke, stuck in a military quagmire in Venezuela, and run by one party: the Bipartisan party. People are benumbed by commerce, by social media, glued to iPhone-like apparati that continually stream credit ratings, net worth, and f*ckabilty rankings to the masses.

The words alone and lonely seem to appear on almost every page.

No one reads books anymore. People find them smelly.

It's a very funny book, and very telling satire, but the truth worth of the book is that a turn of the page can find the book leaping to melancholy, to anger, to delicate lyricism.

Anyway, this isn't a book review, merely a recommendation, so I won't blather on. But you should read this.

My favorite moon, Saturn's Enceladus, has a unknown power source near its South Pole, one that vents geysers of water ice into Saturn's rings from huge cracks in the ground called the "tiger stripes." They've known that for awhile. What's new is that Cassini (the space probe currently orbiting Saturn) has found the power source is 10 times more powerful than anyone expected. Here's the key quote from the JPL report:

“The mechanism capable of producing the much higher observed internal power remains a mystery and challenges the currently proposed models of long-term heat production.”

Trippy. It churns out 15.8 gigawatts of energy, the equivalent of 20 coal-fueled power stations. What's hiding under those tiger stripes? Stay tuned.

Angels and Demons

2011-03-08T09:38:00.005-07:00

I have been down and out with a bad back these last few days. Watching the second season of Nurse Jackie, getting lost in the looping sentences of TC Boyle, keeping an eye on Spring Training.

Events have been unsettling here at Casa de la Clowncar as of late. Nothing to fret about, nothing we can't handle, but at one point I had an image of myself standing in the center of our living room, swinging a torch, keeping demons at bay. Predators lurking at the edge of the shadows.

So. I had a choice between going to a doctor and going to a chiropractor for my back. Equally skeptical of Western and Eastern medicine, I've been to both in the past, they both did the trick. But the chiropractor is in the neighborhood, I walk past her office daily. And, that keeping-demons-at-bay image has been in the forefront of my mind, and I kept thinking of the criminally underrated movie Jacob's Ladder, the literally angelic chiropractor who teaches Jacob the true purpose of hell.

"The only thing that burns in hell, Is the part of you that won't let go of your life. Your memories, your attachements, They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you. They're freeing your soul. If your frightened of dying, and your holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."

There's a clip, but you can't embed it. Here, go watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSzs4V6tkJQ

I went to the chiropractor. Haven't yet turned those demons into angels. But my back feels better.

Shimmer

2011-03-04T07:52:00.002-07:00

Jewels shimmering in the sky this weekend: Jupiter and a sliver of crescent moon right after sunset. Go out. Look up.

The Big Fat Dog And Other Dogs

2011-03-01T12:21:00.006-07:00

My oldest daughter is calling this her first novel. The happy implication being there will be others.

There is a darkness at the edges of this that as a writer I like very much, but as a father I find disquieting. I'm trying to get used to the tension between these roles, as this surely won't be the last time I feel it. Life can be a dark ride. They've seen more than their share of that already.

I like that she gave the chapters individual titles. Not a new trick by any means, but it is one she learned from me.

And that last sentence of chapter 3 is simply good, strong prose.

The Big Fat Dog And Other Dogs
By Shay

Chapter 1

The Dog Ran Away

So it all started with the dog. It was on a leash. The dog was fat. He was so fat that the leash broke and he ran away. The owners were sad. Their names were Lee Ann and Jade. The kid Jade cried all the way to school.
It was really sad. I had to go home. It was in the newspaper that his name is Marley. The next day the guy found the dog called the number the number changed. They had moved to California. So the he drove to California but they weren't there.
The person found the owner. They were happy.

Chapter 2

They were happy

The family was so happy. The people saw the tag. It was the dog. They were so happy. They played with the dog all day long and gave him a bath.
They got a new dog because their dog had died. They braided him. The second dog was named Mane. They were so happy. They could not stand it at all. They loved it so much they got more and more dogs. They sure love dogs. They had 5 dogs. They played with the dogs all the time. It was the dogs’ birthday. They had so much fun at the birthday.

Chapter 3

The vet

The dog was sick. We took him to the vet. He was ok. We love the dog so much. The dog had babies. We kept the puppy. We played with the puppies.
They are as small as a hand.

Chapter 4

The dogs had died except for the puppy. And the puppy was safe. The dog has food and water. He lived happily ever after.

The End

Gravity's Rainbow

2011-02-24T11:55:00.008-07:00

No, I haven't read the book. Hux has, but she is more tenacious than I. I gave Pynchon's V a try last year, and never even made it to the 50 page mark. I find him impenetrable. Henry James level impenetrable.

I digress. I'd been debating building one of those Estes rockets for a few months, and we finally pulled the trigger last weekend. Bought the kit, built 2 rockets Friday night (I built, the girls painted), let the glue dry overnight. Pictures are below; dig that crazy spaceman. I love how art begets art: you start out painting a rocket and end up making clay spacemen. Notice the clay heart and arrow off to the side.

The next afternoon I, Hux, the girls, my Dad, and a couple tag-a-long kids from the neighborhood, drove out past the city limits for our first test flights. Ten minutes of setup for 90 seconds of excitement, and well worth it. I doubt I'll become an enthusiast, but it sure seems like a fun way to spend a summer afternoon. Next up: double stage rockets. Woo-hoo!

Plus, I got to sneak some science in, about Newton's third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Next time out I'll talk about parabolas, described so elegantly by Pynchon as "gravity's rainbow".

Just because I haven't read it doesn't mean I don't catch the reference.

Solstice

2011-02-22T10:51:00.006-07:00

A new one. It's been awhile.

Solstice

The hard gray wall of winter had set in, with the flush of Christmas and New Year’s long past, the sugar fueled rush of Valentine’s Day still weeks away. Toby’s morning was typically harried, with his wife late for work and in the shower, his eldest daughter glumly searching the dresser drawers and clothes baskets for something to wear to school, his youngest home sick, huddled under a blanket on the couch watching old She-Ra cartoons, sniffling and sneezing, coughing with the violent shudder of a car backfiring. The doctor had told them both repeatedly not to bother with over-the-counter cough medicines, they did no good, chicken soup was just as effective, but how could you help yourself, how could you not try something, try anything, with the bark of each cough blasting through the brainstem like a guilt-ridden jolt of electricity.

When his wife was out of the shower and keeping half an eye on the girls, he made his way out to the car to make a run to the drugstore for cough medicine. The cold hit him like a rock to the chest. The trees and power lines were covered in ice, the sky was cloudless, a perfect blue. The sun hung low in the sky, shining directly down the center of the street as if it were Stonehenge at solstice, and Toby had to walk with a halting, old man’s gait, careful of the slick patches of ice amid the piles of snow. The car door was frozen in place, but flew open with a loud crack when he threw all his weight into the act. The report reminded him of his daughter’s cough. He started up the car, got out and scraped the ice off the windows, the fin of thrown crystals dazzling as stars in the sunlight. The car was reasonably warm by the time he was done, the heated seats doing their job and seeming not at all the luxury he had pegged them as when he and his wife had bought the car two years ago. He turned on the radio and eased out of his parking spot.

The first stop sign at the end of the block showed him in certain terms how slick the streets were when he hit the brakes and the car floated dreamily past the stop sign and into the cross street, barely even slowing. Toby sat at the wheel rigid with adrenaline and fear, a spectator. Luckily, the street was deserted. He drove to the drugstore at a crawl, feeling like that same halting old man who had walked to the car minutes ago but unwilling to speed up to gain a few relatively unimportant minutes. There was a traffic light at the busy intersection just before the store; he had to began pumping the brake pedal twenty yards before the lights to get the car to stop in time. The sun, now directly behind him, cast the low shadow of his car into the junction before him.

A rumpled young man and woman shivered at the entrance, hands out, eyes down. The car in the lot directly behind them was a swaddle of clothes, fast food wrappers, wrappers, sleeping bags; it appeared to be a makeshift home. Toby spotted what may have been a child’s booster seat peering from the back seats, started to look closer and decided he didn’t want to know. He reached into his pocket, held out a dollar midway between the two of them, not even noticing which one of them had taken the money as he hurried past them toward sliding doors.

It was warm inside the store, soft jazz playing, employees regarding him with half-awake smiles. Toby stood before the rack of bottles and pills, lozenges and inhalers, and finally picked the bottle directly in front of him because it was cheap and large and filled with brightly colored liquid, and because if they didn’t do any good anyway why did it matter which one he picked? He paid for the medicine, pulled his coat tightly around him, and walked out into the cold. The couple at the door were gone, but a sweep of the eye found them trudging down the icy sidewalk to the liquor store. Toby felt a momentary disappointment, but it didn’t last. He hadn’t told them how to spend the money. They hadn’t offered. You did what you did, Toby thought. You put your actions into the world and hoped for the best but it was out of your hands the second you let go of it, out of your hands and into the world.

He hoped that hadn’t been a child’s booster seat in the back of their car.

He got back in his own car, now cold but still so much warmer than the outside air, cranked up the engine, and rolled slowly out of the parking lot. When he turned onto the main thoroughfare he was greeted with a bright blast of sun from the vanishing point well beyond the end of the street, straight into the windshield and bouncing off the glass, the ice, the snow, the polished metal of the hood. Stonehenge at solstice. He was blinded by sunlight.

The traffic light hanging above the intersection was still visible as a vague dark shape, and he thought it was green but couldn’t be sure. He looked to the sides but was met with a featureless glare; no way to tell if anyone was coming, from the left or right. Or, if they were coming, whether they saw him. Or, if they saw him, were able to stop in time. No way to know. All he knew was that the intersection lay between him and his home, where his life was, where he was needed. He looked up, tried one more time to get a read on the state of the traffic light and failed, looked to the left and the right and saw nothing but the couple from the drugstore, standing patiently in the cold for the doors to open. The liquor store didn’t open for another two hours. It was going to be a very cold two hours. Out of your hands and into the world, he thought, easing up on the brake pedal and ever so gently pressing on the gas, bracing for calamity as he entered the junction as blind and vulnerable as a newborn, he on one side of the street and the whole wide world on the other, waiting.

Krishna vs. the Nephilim

2011-02-17T12:23:00.004-07:00

I heard this story on the alien-and-bigfoot-obsessed Coast to Coast, just as I was falling asleep. It does have a rather dreamlike quality to it:

A secret ancient technology has been found by the US army in a cave in Afghanistan. ...It is a flying machine called a Vimana, The report...alleges that a Vimana (a flying machine described in ancient Sanskrit epics) was entrapped in a “time well” in an Afghanistan cave, and that various world leaders had made recent trips there to view the discovery. “There’s a war going on, the Chinese, and the Russians, and the US, and everybody else is vying for the ancient technology,” he commented.

Quayle reported two years ago that US Special forces were in pitched battles with ancient demonic hydrid Giants know as the Nephilim.

Talk about burying the lede. We're in a war with ancient demonic hybrid giants, and it doesn't get mentioned until the end of the second paragraph.

Apparently, world leaders from Germany, the US, England and France have made secret visits to view the Damned Thing. Sadly, it is "entrapped in a 'Time Well' that has already caused the disappearance of at least 8 American Soldiers trying to remove it from the cave it has been hidden in for the past estimated 5,000 years."

Krisna drove one, it turns out. Wikipedia says it had some pretty powerful weaponry, including "Indra's Dart" which "operated via a circular reflector which, when switched on, produced a shaft of light which, when focused on any target, immediately 'consumed it with its power'."

Sound familiar?

Go out. Look up.

2011-02-15T10:02:00.004-07:00

There was an X-class solar flare on Valentine's Day, flinging a coronal mass ejection right at us, like a bullet out of a gun. Except faster. And much more powerful. It doesn't mean the end of the world, or even a zombie apocalypse, but it does mean some seriously cool auroras for the next several days. Don't know if it'll make it as far south as I live, but if you live in Minnesota or Canada, you might want to keep an eye on the sky for the next few nights. Could be the chance of a lifetime.

Here's what it looked like in Norway last night. Thanks to Space Weather for the pic and the info.

And thanks to John at One speed: Go for letting me bastardize his slogan.

Wherein I Continue the Kraken Metaphor

2011-02-10T09:22:00.008-07:00

A few weeks have passed since the girls last brought up their bio-parents and adoption documentation. Not forgotten, certainly, just dormant, waiting underwater, stoic and inscrutable. Then, youngest found an 8 year old phone number scrawled into the margins of the medical forms documenting her birth, with the note "need phone # of mom" above it.

The girls got all sorts of excited when they saw it. I spent about 45 minutes sitting on youngest's bed that night, patiently answering questions. Yes, we'll call it this weekend. No, I don't think she'll be there, it's a pretty old number. Yes, we can meet her if she answers. Yes, you can talk to her. Yes, she can have dinner with us at our house. Yes, she can spend the night if she needs to. No, she can't live here. Well, okay, if she doesn't have anywhere to live she can live here. On and on, well past bedtime, breaking my heart as I knew the eventual disappointment that would follow the call.

And so, the call was necessarily anti-climactic; we called (on speakerphone so all could here), I asked for the Mom's name, the man who answered said "wrong number." That was it. We went about our day. Their questions, their fears, their hopes dive once more fathoms deep under the surface of our daily lives, enduring, waiting to rise again.

This Is What Aliens Look Like

2011-02-08T09:32:00.003-07:00

Or their signals anyway.

It's a graph; the x axis is time, the y axis is frequency. The dots are background noise, but that big line is a signal. There's a slight but actual chance it really is a signal from extraterrestrial sources, more likely it is a glitchy GPS satellite.

The picture and the explanation are from APOD. I am merely the humble messenger.

Trippy

2011-02-03T11:22:00.005-07:00

This is a rock the size of a house rolling down a slope on the moon. It seems so unlikely; we grow up assuming the moon is a cold, dead rock.

Clearly, something is going on. Moonquakes, perhaps?

Maybe it's the same thing that causes this. Rocks rolling around in Death Valley. No one knows why. Trippy.

I've read (but am to lazy to bother Googling it for a source) that water molecules dance about on the surface of the moon when sunlight hits the surface. They fall to the ground when it's dark, take up the dance once again the next time the sun clears the horizon.

The photo is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. I grabbed it from Bad Astronomy.

Freemasons and Oddfellows

2011-02-01T09:56:00.011-07:00

Went on another outing in a cemetery this weekend, to look up graves for my Dad's Find A Grave website. Me, Hux, my Dad, the girls, as well as another little girl from the neighborhood. Gorgeous day, cut unfortunately short when all the kids started arguing and we had to go home (that youthful-energy-in the-face-of-death thing I wrote of before cuts both ways).

Outwardly, cemeteries seem to be an march of tombstones with little variation, little room for individuality beyond the names and dates, but time and attention reveal this to be false. Gravestones made of marble, of granite, of concrete, even of wood (found three of those, badly worn, all details long faded). Varying amounts of aging and wear, depending on the type of stone, the age. Symbols abound for Freemasons and Oddfellows. Christian Crosses, praying hands. Mentions of various wars (the Mexican American War the oldest I could find). Engraved pictures of favorite activities of the deceased, mostly fishing and hunting. Quotes, mostly biblical, with a few poems thrown in (Frost's "miles to go before I sleep"), a few personal quotes. Flowers, teddy bears, photos, painted rocks left on the cold earth with love, sorrow, regret, longing. Several had tinsel and Christmas ornaments; one was outlined with ornaments and tinsel and had a large plastic candy cane laid in the center.

The girls are particularly interested in the graves of infants. They've learned to do the math, subtracting the birth date from the death date, and will stand at the gravesites and wonder silently at the little girl who dies at the age of two, the boy who died a month after his birth. You watch them trying to grasp at the magnitude of it all.

Below is a song - ignore the video and just listen - that runs through the closing credits of the Coens' True Grit. I downloaded it immediately after coming home from the theater, and it choked me up the first several times I listened to it. I know the hymn from way back, from my Baptist upbringing. Now, of course, it reminds me of that white clapboard Baptist church in southeastern Oklahoma, that hard red clay, those resolute wildflowers scattered among the stones.

Jetsam

2011-01-27T08:44:00.011-07:00

I'm writing again, though still daunted by the idea of rewriting the novel.

Here is a paragraph that ended up on the cutting room floor, or the recycle bin, or wherever pieces of writing go that never see the light of day. It's a little hyperbolic, though it does have a nice rhythm working for it.

Jetsam, incidentally, is cargo that has been purposely discarded. Flotsam is unintended wreckage of a ship or its cargo.

People kept telling him to go see a counselor, go see a therapist, a priest, an old friend; get drunk, get laid, go to church, go for as walk, take up a hobby, lose a bad habit, and he wanted to give one or even all of these things a try, he really did, but never pulled the trigger. It was just too tiring to contemplate. Life was a river, they’d say. Life was a garden that needed careful tending. And the nature imagery resonated, albeit in unintended fashion, as life felt to him like half-starved grizzly bear that had wandered into camp late at night looking for food and found the beer instead, drank all of it and then found the whiskey, smashed the bottle to open it and got the glass shards in his throat and was now stumbling through the campfire, drunk and angry and hungry and mean, fur singed and stinking, mouth agape with drunken hunger, eyes burning demon red as the Damned Thing staggered in the dark toward the flimsy, listing tent where he and his family lay sleeping.

Zom-Be-Gone

2011-01-25T08:44:00.005-07:00

A great name for a zombie repellent, innit?

First things first: during my vacation from blogging in December, the zombie satellite came back to life. It's power supply fully drained, it died, then unexpectedly rebooted and came back to life. Ah, sweet resurrection! Sadly, my dreams of an interstellar apocalypse are now dashed.

I perfected my Alan Rickman impression during the Christmas break. Huzzah! The trick, it turns out, is not to try and ape his performance as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies, which is surprisingly difficult, but rather to hearken back to his dizzyingly effective work as the bad guy in the first Diehard, specifically when he pulls down the sweatshirt of the dead guy and reads "Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho." It's on Youtube, but embedding is disabled; seek it out, you can play at home!

I wrote last week about how my Dad is part of a crowd-sourcing find-a-grave community. Fresca commented that crowd-sourcing maked her feel optimistic about the human race. I'd agree. Here's more proof: KY Tunstsall asked her fans to recreate the music tracks behind her song "Glamour Puss" and submit them via Youtube. The result is a mash-up - video and audio - of their efforts. All that's left is her original vocal track; the music is all crowd-sourced. Pretty cool. Plus, she's kinda cute. Be sure and look for the guy playing the carrot.

Clockwork Universe

2011-01-20T11:10:00.007-07:00

This thing is called the Antikythera Mechanism, and according to the IPOD entry was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship, thought to have sunk around 80 BC. It's an analog computer used to predict the motion of the planets, sun and moon, and display the results on a clock-like face. It even predicts eclipses!

No one thought such mechanical sophistication was possible back in 80 BC, and some have offered it up as proof of ancient alien contact. More likely it is proof we don't give those old Greeks nearly enough credit.

Anyway, as cool as all that is, it is not as cool as this: somebody made one out of Lego! Not an exact replica, as is uses, according to the video, twice as many gears as the original. But still. For a discussion of some of the math involved, skip to about halfway through the clip.

Prairie Flowers

2011-01-17T11:40:00.007-07:00

My Dad is a member of a find-a-grave internet crowd-sourcing tool, where you can ask for pictures of specific gravesites, and in turn find graves for others. This weekend he and I and the girls drove out to the local cemetery to take pictures of graves for people requesting them on the site. It's a pleasant and relaxing task, walking the rows of gravestones, searching for a specific name, looking at the dates and doing the math, pondering the lives (and deaths) of others.

When I found one of the graves we were looking for, I yelled, and my youngest came running over, tripped and fell, cried for a few seconds, got over it quickly. My Dad told me that when my grandmother died, someone's boy was running around the cemetery during the service, and almost fell in an open grave. He said it was refreshing, to see such youthful energy at a funeral.

His sister Lois is in that same cemetery. She died when she was nine. Here is what he wrote about her in the family history:

Lois died 3 days before her 10th birthday. She received a small scrape on her foot that became infected. She died from what was then called blood poisoning.

It was the winter of 1934-35 and the whole country was in the grip of the Great Depression. The Wood family lived in the woods about 5 miles NW of Idabel OK. There was no money for funeral homes or caskets so her dad (Everett Ellsworth Wood) and her uncle Bud (Jesse B Clardy) made her a coffin of pine boards. Bud bought her a new dress in which to be buried. Walter Wood carried her coffin to Forest Hill Cemetery on the back of his truck. A line of wagons formed the funeral procession following the truck.

Her mother, Ruby Lorene Clardy, refused to continue living in the house so the family moved shortly afterward. When she was in her 70's her mother said she still thought of Lois daily.

Tough family. Tough times.

I've tended her grave several times now. It sits on a hill next to a white clapboard Baptist church in rural Oklahoma, tenacious prairie grasses and wildflowers rooted in the hard clay ground between the graves. I will tend it again this summer, when we take my Mom's ashes to that same hillside, and scatter them to the wind.

Rising

2011-01-11T08:39:00.007-07:00

As most of you who read this blog probably know, our two girls are adopted, and came to our home at the ages of 18 months and 3 years. We've always been pretty open with them about the process, though what we tell them about their parents is necessarily abridged. There has been one exception to this: they have a sister. Somewhere.

We didn't tell them right away. I'm not sure why we held that one huge piece of information back. Partly to spare anxiety on their part, partly because we know so little about her. No name, no age, no city.

Regardless, we decided to tell all this past summer. We told them they had a sister, and that we knew nothing about her, not even her name. We took out the deep pile of documentation and paperwork and let them see it, take it to their rooms, read it. My office functioned as kind of a lending library for this bit; they had to turn in what they had to get any more (there were detailed and sometimes painful histories of their bio-parents buried inside, but you had to really dig to find it). They were obsessed with the papers for awhile. After a couple of weeks they quit checking out the documents, seemingly forgetting about them.

Hux and I combed the stack for any info about their sister in there, and found not a single word. We called Social Services, got no answer, called back and got no answer, called again and finally got a callback months later with some basic info: name, who she lived with, where they lived seven or so years ago when all this went down.

We told the girls their sister's name. Told them the town she lived in back then. The pattern stayed the same: they were tripping over their words asking us questions, then the questions slowed, then stopped.

Thst's not to say they don't think about her. I suspect they think about daily. But there are no more questions to ask, nothing to say. Their sister's presence has moved beyond words.

So. The reason I bring up any of this is because a metaphor presented itself to describe the experience. I just finished China Mieville's clever genre-bender of a book, Kraken, which, amid all the very weird goings-on, talks of a monstrous being, deep under water, in silent motion, unseen, its true shape unknown. The thing is worshiped by some as a God. And it is rising slowly toward the surface, this huge mass. Rising. And when it breaks the surface, when its true shape is known, the world will change irrevocably.

Now that I reread that last paragraph it sounds oddly apocalyptic, and while I did not mean for that note to sneak in there, I won't edit it out. There will be a day when their yearning will break the surface, and they will want to seek out their sister, meet her. There is no way to know how that will go. There are a million ways in which it can go badly. And a handful of ways where it can go well. All I know is that we'll help them find her, if they ask for our help. And we'll be there afterward, whether in celebration or in sorrow. Or, likely, both.

Tumble Into Darkness

2011-01-04T10:56:00.010-07:00

The hand-off of 2009 to 2010 was accompanied by a full moon (a full blue moon if I recall), and I love that image as a visual metaphor of year's end: one orb setting just as another rises, with you at the fulcrum, balanced between them, the past calling from one horizon, the future from another (Marilynne Robinson describes this much better than I in the opening pages of Gilead). The sky becomes a mirror of the mind. We watched the moon rise from the bluffs of the Arkansas last year, came home, celebrated the New Year six-ish hours later.

This December's lunar eclipse didn't fall on year's end, but it came the day before solstice, the day before the darkest day, and mirrored my own mental landscape so well it follows me into January, as I write this. Perhaps the sky is not the mirror. Perhaps I am the mirror.

Skies were cloudy, it was cold out, and I wasn't expecting much. But clouds began to clear as the eclipse started, just before midnight, so I fired up the clay stove and set up the big dumb telescope. Just before totality I woke the rest of the family up, dragged them outside.

Eldest lasted about a half an hour, til totality began, then stumbled back to bed, familial obligations fulfilled. Hux fared much better, well into the thing, but she too wandered back inside after an hour or so. And then it was down to me and youngest. We snuggled close to the stove, talked some, went to the telescope a couple times, but mostly just watched as the moon turned eerie red, then dull brown as the moon slid fully into shadow. It was a long, cold wait for light after that, but light, when it came, was dramatic. It was preceded by that same weird red glow, and then, not quite suddenly, the edge of the moon lit up, and light slowly spread across the surface as the red glow faded. Lovely, startling, moving.

After that even youngest gave up the ghost, went to bed. I tucked her in, poured myself several fingers of good bourbon, and went out to watch the end. Things were about half in shadow by then. I sipped my bourbon and smelled the woodsmoke and watched the moon slide into sunlight, surrounded by darkness, and thought about that tumble into darkness, that long cold time in shadow, and the slow but inevitable progress back into the light.

Analemma 2010

2010-12-31T12:10:00.005-07:00

What goes around, comes around.

A picture of the sun taken at exactly 9 a.m. 36 times throughout the last year (the foreground was superimposed; the neighborhood in Hungary from where the pix were taken). The bottom-most image was taken on the December 21 solstice, the top-most taken on the June 21 solstice. The middle bits: on the equinoxes, March 20 and September 23.

Have a very merry New Year's Eve. Drive safe. Make exactly as much of a fool of yourself as you choose. See you in the New Year.

Thamks to APOD for the pic.

С Новым Годом

2010-12-28T10:33:00.003-07:00

Not sure if it's Santa or Father Time (his watch says midnight, which points to the latter). Either way, С Новым Годом to you all.

The pic is a Soviet era Christmas card, reprinted by Roscomos, the Russian space agency. I learned about them from always excellent Space Gizmo. More cards are here.

I'll post in the new year. I really will.

Horse Latitudes

2010-11-29T11:00:00.007-07:00

I was in a parade last week. For Thanksgiving I cooked a turkey, dressing, gravy, which le Huque pronounced to be "a poem." Fixed a toilet. Weather-stripped a door.

Beyond that, not much else.

My Mom died in September, something many of you reading this already know. If not, well, she did, and now you know. Consequently, the wind has left my sails.

With Thanksgiving behind me, I can feel the mighty suck of the Christmas vortex, so in the coming couple weeks I'll be busy with all that hoopla. Lights. Tree. Presents. I enjoy that stuff, I really do. So that will, very soon, pull me out of these horse latitudes (allegedly that part of the ocean where the wind goes dead, and the sailors must throw horses overboard to lighten the load; almost certainly an apocryphal etymology, from what I've read this morning, as they would have eaten the horses rather than drowned them).

I'll spend what little down time I can find with a blanket and a comfortable chair and China Mieville.

Have a happy holiday.

Though Space Worms Would Be Cool

2010-11-22T20:33:00.004-07:00

No. Not bacteria. Not a herd of space worms. This a field of sand dunes in Proctor Crater on Mars. The dark bits are the dunes, blowing over the lighter rock beneath. Each one is about a football field wide.

For more cool, geeky details, go to the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

And have a pleasant Thanksgiving. If you are reading this, you must have access to a computer. And electricity. Alotta people don't. So be thankful, dammit.

The Bipolar Galactic Wind

2010-11-15T14:27:00.008-07:00

When I was a kid I read somewhere that there were bubbles of anti-matter above and below the galactic plane. I thought about that for years, conjured up the image in my head when I was bored, or when stargazing. I don't think anyone believes there is anti-matter there anymore. No matter. The image remained.

And then last week there on the internet was a replica of that very image I've been carrying for decades, as if they had crept into my dreams and stolen it from the folds of my brain. An X-ray map of the sky revealed giant bubbles of plasma in the exact same spots my anti-matter bubbles were, coming from the poles of a black hole in the center of the galaxy. Perhaps scientists are more humble than they used to be, as they now freely admit they have no idea what it is. They have named it, though. They're calling it a "Bipolar Galactic Wind." What a gloriously evocative phrase.

Right there with Io Plasma Torus. Fun to say. Go ahead. Say it. I'll wait.

The Io Plasma Torus is, sadly, a doughnut of plasma, not a bubble. But still pretty cool.

Get Well Soon

2010-11-11T11:10:00.006-07:00

Cassini, the hardest working probe in show business, is sick. It went into safe mode last week just before it was to do a close fly-by of Saturn's moon Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system, and the only one with an atmosphere. There are supposed to be lakes of liquid methane down there, and maybe critters as well (the conspiracy buffs on Coast to Coast believe Cassini isn't broken at all, but rather the scapegoat in a massive cover-up).

Not to worry. Cassini has gone into safe mode six times before, and came out fine each time. Plus, 53 other fly-bys of Titan scheduled.

The JPL says, "The spacecraft is very tolerant of error. It'd be hard to break it."

Menwhile, here's a gorgeous picture of Saturn and the rings Cassini took in healthier days, a tumble of light and shadow, spheres and rings. The triangular slab of shadow is the shadow of Saturn itself, so the sun must be off to the lower left, well out of the frame.

Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the pic.

It's a Hard World for Little Things

2010-11-09T12:53:00.006-07:00

There's a great article in Slate today about one of my favorite movies of all time, "Night of the Hunter." If you've seen it, you remember it. Robert Mitchum as "Preacher." HATE tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, LOVE tattooed on the knuckes of the other. He's come to town hunting for $10,000 in stolen loot.

The only movie Charles Laughton ever directed. Pauline Kael called it "one of the most frightening films ever made." I love the scene below; if the Preacher sees the world as a battle between good and evil, then think of this scene as a duet between the dueling natures of Christianity.

That's Lillian Gish in the chair, holding the shotgun. Make sure and watch the end, with the owl and the bunny, and that killer last line.

Scary

2010-11-04T13:47:00.010-06:00

Nothing says "well-adjusted" like a chalk drawing of a dead girl with X's for eyes and the words "You're going to die" right next to it.

Except, of course, this. A positive role model for the girls.

Scary.

Our front door. Note the cardboard tombstone. And the skulls and bones drawn on the steps.

The family that flays together, stays together.

Halloween and the Decline of Democracy

2010-11-02T09:54:00.002-06:00

There are fewer trick-or-treaters every year, and have been since I was a child and the apocryphal razor-blade-in-the-apple story began making the rounds. Jump cut to the present and our fear-based media cycle (terrorists! pedophiles! immigrants! flesh-eating bacteria! gay marriage! socialist president!) and you've got parents driving their kids to the mall for pre-wrapped candies and exhortations to consume! consume! consume! before being driven home and ushered into the house through the garage door so they don't ever have to meet the neighbors.

The result: the decline of community, the decline of democracy, a landscape where we stay in our homes, our children locked indoors, listening to the news on television telling us how scary it is out there.

Look outside. No kids in the park. No one riding bikes. No hide and seek til the streetlights come on. No pick-up wiffle-ball games.

Look in the paper. Voters driven to the polls by fear and anger. No one interested in dialogue, community. Us versus them. Throw the bastards out. Arrest the immigrants. Keep your hands off my paycheck.

See a connection?

Proof

2010-10-28T10:12:00.003-06:00

We have fake spiderwebs over the front door, grinning stuffed spiders hanging from the silk, and six pumpkins in varying degrees of scariness lining the steps (I was worried Halloween would bring up some disturbing imagery to the girls so soon after their Grandma's recent death, but it turns out the holiday is much too cartoonish to summon anything emotionally real). We have candy. We have costumes. We have roasted pumpkin seeds.

Adding to the flavor of the season: every kid in the neighborhood is convinced our house is haunted. I am not. I'm open to the idea of ghosts, though I've never seen one (with possibly one exception, but that's another post). But our house feels too sane, too safe, too comfortable. I will admit to visualizing a ghostly woman at the end of the hallway late at night, some nights, but I have a laughably active imagination.

The girls, blessed/cursed with similar imaginations, both say they've seen a woman walking past their bedroom doorways, in the same hallway where I imagine my own apparition.

Still, I am unconvinced. Bolstering my beliefs is the fact that ghost hunters actually investigated our house the year before we moved in. I say ghost hunters; they are a group of stoner kids that work at the Loaf N Jug down the street. But they've got ambitions, they've fashioned themselves into a team of ghostbusters, and so brought in video cameras and sound recorders, searched the house, found nothing.

No matter. Our house is 117 years old, it looks haunted. Add in the dusty attic, the Hannibal Lecter-ready basement. Who need proof? Not our kids, or our neighbor's kids. They have something much more powerful: belief.

The Future of American Fiction

2010-10-25T11:26:00.008-06:00

I helped with the spelling - note curious is spelled "cireis" in the illustration - but all words and pictures are K's.

The Cat
written by Kaylene Wood
illustrated by Kaylene Wood

I once had a kitten named Blake. I named my kitten Blake because he was a blake cat. And was very curious.

After that he accidentally ate dog food and got sick because he ate dog food.

He was very tired and so he dropped on the carpet.

Zombies in Space

2010-10-20T10:21:00.003-06:00

The Damned Thing just won't die.

The Galaxy 15 C-band telecommunications satellite went off orbit and out of control in April. It can't be repositioned, it can't be turned off, and interference from it is disrupting signals from other satellites.

Admittedly, the reason this is in the news at all is likely because someone nicknamed it a "zombie satellite." To my mind that is somewhat of a misnomer, as a true zombie satellite would not only kill other satellites but turn them into other zombie satellites as well. The glitch would go viral. Sadly, all the Damned Thing does is temporarily disrupt signals.

Still, scientists predicted it would die in August, after all its power was drained (the different orbit means its solar panels are not pointed directly at the sun anymore). What they didn't count on was that the satellite is able to save energy during periods it is in the Earth's shadow. No one expected that to happen. So it's still alive, still kicking, still spreading its zombie goodness throughout the solar system.

They have had to change the orbits of 6 satellites so far to avoid the zombie, and expect to have to change the orbits of 7 more between now and December. By then, the experts say it should die.

I'm hoping otherwise.

Democracy

2010-10-13T09:19:00.003-06:00

Hux and I took the girls and my Dad to the Gubernatorial debate downtown last night. John Hickenlooper, Don Maes, and Tom Tancrado. My proudest moment was when eldest pointed to the stage and said "which one is crazy as a loon?" The answer, of course, being Tom Tancrado.

Our kids were only two kids in the audience, it turned out. And they behaved very well, though youngest and I went out to the lobby a couple times to get her wiggles out, and watched much of the debate from the back of the room. It turned out to be a good vantage point: TV cameras, reporters, lotsa folks typing on laptops, lotsa aides running around.

Tancredo got my vote as the guy I'd most want to have a beer with, though I disagreed with virtually everything that came out of his mouth. It's odd to say something like "there is no money in green energy" in a small, job-hungry town where a wind turbine plant is creating employment for hundreds of people. My pick - Hickenloooper - did not do particularly well. He's not well spoken. But he'll make a good governor, I think. Made an excellent mayor of Denver. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. My kinda guy.

Democracy is being driven close to the breaking point by an over-reliance on television ads, as opposed to actual public discourse, and the ensuing huge sums of money those TV ads entail. It's become a game for billionaires. So it was refreshing to see a full auditorium where people applauded and booed and shouted questions at three flesh and blood human beings who were asking for our vote. And after it was over, we all walked out into the cool autumn evening, toward our cars and bikes, towards home, where the debate likely continued, in kitchens and bedrooms and bars. No celebrities telling us how to vote. No attack ads with foreboding music and lurid claims. Just real people, discussing real issues. Democracy.

Whatever’s here is just here.

2010-10-07T15:01:00.004-06:00

Burial Rites
by Philip Levine

Everyone comes back here to die
as I will soon. The place feels right
since it’s half dead to begin with.
Even on a rare morning of rain,
like this morning, with the low sky
hoarding its riches except for
a few mock tears, the hard ground
accepts nothing. Six years ago
I buried my mother’s ashes
beside a young lilac that’s now
taller than I, and stuck the stub
of a rosebush into her dirt,
where like everything else not
human it thrives. The small blossoms
never unfurl; whatever they know
they keep to themselves until
a morning rain or a night wind
pares the petals down to nothing.
Even the neighbor cat who shits
daily on the paths and then hides
deep in the jungle of the weeds
refuses to purr. Whatever’s here
is just here, and nowhere else,
so it’s right to end up beside
the woman who bore me, to shovel
into the dirt whatever’s left
and leave only a name for some-
one who wants it. Think of it,
my name, no longer a portion
of me, no longer inflated
or bruised, no longer stewing
in a rich compost of memory
or the simpler one of bone shards,
dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes,
the roots of the eucalyptus
I planted in ’73,
a tiny me taking nothing,
giving nothing, and free at last.

Just Married

2010-10-05T12:08:00.007-06:00

My Mom and Dad, 19 years old. Just married (Dad wasn't sure until he spied the wedding ring on his finger). It looks to me like Mom is pulling Dad's hand up to somewhere more appropriate, but Dad's theory is that the photographer just made a risque remark.

They sure look happy. Off in their own little world.

After my mom graduated from high school in Idabel, Oklahoma, she hung around town for a couple weeks, helping around the house. One morning she helped her Mom pick blackberries, went to her brother John to borrow 8 dollars, and left town. Took the next bus to Dallas, where she stayed with an aunt, and waited for my Dad to return home from the Korean War. It was a leap of faith into an unknown world.

She died last month, on September 21. She was 78 years old. A life is so much more than just memories, but memories are what remain. She lived a long and courageous life. She will be missed, and always loved.

The Jiffy Pop Effect

2010-09-16T10:55:00.007-06:00

Got a new story up at Fiction@Work. Baby Teeth. An early version of it appeared on this blog. It's a little cleaner now. I'm fond of it.

The novel rewrite is going well. About a quarter of the way through. Two chapters cut, one major character cut, and another seriously downsized.

What's making me feel good is how the surviving chapters are plumping up (I think of this as the Jiffy Pop effect; do they even make Jiffy Pop anymore?), even as I cut large chunks of the novel away. Stories, regardless of length, kinda harden after awhile. They turn brittle. You pick apart a sentence and realize your changes affect three other sentences later on. It's been too long, there's too much distance. Happily, the novel is still alive, still reacting to changes, still capable of surprising me. New character details, new plot points, more dialogue. At one point two characters just started talking to each other at the end of a chapter. I let them. I'm glad I did. I learned from them.

A concession I am making to the marketplace is to give the couple in the novel a more traditional love story. I'd strenuously avoided that during the first two drafts, as I felt it was important thematically for the two lovers not to communicate well, to show their interactions as stumbling and incomplete. I realize that's not a very satisfying experience for the reader.

Now I'm beginning to see how to approach the theme of disconnection from the other side, by showing those rare and meaningful moments when they do connect as a contrast.

The Copenhagen Suborbitals attempted manned space flight last weekend was a scrub, but they vow to continue, and launch next year. They designed their own rocket, their own submarine, their own floating launch platform. They'll figure it out.

Life Imitating Photoshop

2010-09-14T09:16:00.009-06:00

This looks like a badly Photoshopped picture, but it's real, and required a half an hour of Hubble telescope time to get enough light to resolve the image. It looks like a ghost of a dead galaxy. Sadly, it is not. It's the result of the death throes of a carbon star, throwing off material, and because it's orbiting another star the ejected material comes out in a spiral. Think of a rotating sprinkler head to visualize the effect.

What I like about the picture is that it looks like this, another example of life imitating bad Photoshop. But this spiral was caused by entirely different circumstances: a missile launch gone bad, spewing fuel in an exact spiral. I love the recurrence of certain basic shapes and patterns in nature. Spheres and discs, spiral arms. The golden mean. Fibonacci numbers.

Thanks to APOD for the pic.

We went to a campground with Tolstoy and the boys this weekend. We have a recent habit of arbitrarily choosing Colorado campgrounds, showing up, seeing what it's like. This time the campground was maybe 300 yards from the Interstate. You could see a McDonald's sign and three different motels from the tent. You could hear the dull throb of traffic day and night.

Still, it's hard to be unhappy while camping. We had several ponds and a rubber raft to play with. We saw an egret, a HUGE heron, several killdeer. The campground was formerly a series of gravel pits that were filled with water and turned into a wildlife refuge. Traffic noise notwithstanding, it's hard to argue with the result. And a gorgeous Saturday night sky, despite the lights: Jupiter anchoring one end, Venus and a thin crescent moon anchoring the other, and Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Sagittarius and Scorpio spread out on the canvas between them.

The Forge of Memory, pt. 2

2010-09-09T09:45:00.004-06:00

Memories rarely stick when you think they will. You can't make them stay. They do or they don't; you aren't allowed into the decision. They're ornery that way. It's a neural hat trick, which events stay embedded in the folds of the brain, which get discarded. It's alchemy.

I remember few Christmas mornings. You're supposed to, of course, that's where the emphasis goes, what all the commercials point to as the most important moment. It's what everyone prepares for, when everyone takes out the camera. Why some families spend hundreds of dollars on presents and decorations: to make a perfect family memory. But it doesn't work, not very often. You can't force a memory. They do what they wanna do. Like I said: ornery.

My Christmas memories are of being on the roof putting up Christmas lights in the weeks beforehand, of playing with Play-doh in the languor of the days after. Of wondering what the giant present hidden in the closet is. Of watching my sister open wrapping paper with the cat's claw so she can see what the present is, yet preserve deniability by blaming the cat.

Toys breaking, I remember. Arguments, I remember.

Several years ago, the girls and I were putting up Christmas lights, and a deer wandered onto our block, elegant, unhurried, strolling from one lawn to the next. I called the little Hux out to watch. Then boom!, a backyard dog began to bark, the deer vanished in a series of leaps, pogo-ing away, all four legs pumping at the same time.

It's a reindeer, said the eldest. It's flying!

That, we've all remembered.

The Forge of Memory

2010-09-07T13:49:00.012-06:00

The State Fair dominated the week, beginning with the parade on Saturday morning, ending with the way-past-bedtime stroll through the midway Friday night. I grew up going to the Iowa State Fair (as well as various county fairs), and now, decades later, the best bits are pretty much unchanged. The Tilt-A-Whirl (the girls ran to hux afterward yelling "Daddy didn't puke!" which would make an excellent tee shirt). Six separate rides on the bumper cars. Corn dogs and funnel cakes. Sheep and cows and roosters and petting zoos, yada, yada, yada.

The memorable piece came at the very end, and was memorable primarily for what did not happen. Friday night was packed, and the line for the bungee jump was long, so we saved it for the very end. Took over an hour to get to the front, and you'd expect that to be a recipe for full tilt whining and are-we-there-yet level boredom. And yet. The bungee jump itself was almost an afterthought. Three girls were in front of us, and our girls talked and played with them the entire time. It helped that the eldest was fourteen, making her a Rock Star in the eyes of our own girls. Helpful as well was the summer night, the hint of the coming fall in the air, the bright lights of the midway, the flirting teenagers, the smell of the corn dogs and the funnel cakes, the clamor of the sideshows and the crowd and the creaking machinery. They all conspired to push the moment out of the ordinary, into the bright alchemical forge of memory.

Copenhagen Suborbitals

2010-09-02T14:04:00.005-06:00

Copenhagen Suborbitals is trying to put a man into space this weekend, by launching their very own rocket on Saturday. It'd being launched from a floating platform also of their own design. The floating platform is being towed into place by the Nautilus, a submarine also designed by these guys. So, to recap: their own rocket, floating launch platform and submarine. Clearly, a creative bunch. Nemo would be proud.

Copenhagen Suborbitals is a non-profit group, entirely funded by donations. Go visit their site. You can give them some money, or at least buy a very cool t shirt, like I did.

My favorite aspect of this is that they named the rocket Tycho Brahe, one of my favorite astronomers ever. Tycho had a silver nose, as his actual nose was cut off in a duel. He made incredibly accurate measurements of the stars and planets, and their positions in the night sky, but never concluded the Earth revolved around the sun, choosing to instead cling to his own theory that the Earth was the center of things, and the movements of the planets could be explained by "epicycles," or circles within the orbits. After his death his assistant, Johann Kepler, took Brahe's results and pretty much nailed down the heliocentric solar system model, by deducing the heartbreakingly elegant three laws of planetary motion from the data.

Zombie Ants

2010-08-31T10:01:00.004-06:00

I'm not sure how trustworthy this site is, but Ms. Dancehall sent me an article from there entitled "Zombie Ants Controlled by Fungus." How can you not love that headline?

The gist: a fungus in Thailand infects the brains of carpenter ants and gets them to climb down from the comfy tree canopies they prefer to hang out in. They descend into the low leaves, and then clamp down hard on the leaf stem right before they die. Why? Because it's the perfect spot for the fungus to grow.

After the ant dies, the fungus continues to grow inside it. By dissecting victims, Hughes and colleagues found that the parasite converts the ant's innards into sugars that help the fungus grow. But it leaves the muscles controlling the mandibles intact to make sure the ant keeps its death grip on the leaf.

I, for one, welcome our new fungal overlords.

Smile, dammit

2010-08-30T09:40:00.004-06:00

My sister micromanages my facial expression inside a photo booth at Woolworth's in Otummwa, Iowa, in the mid-sixties.

Happy (belated) birthday, Jennifer.

Pg Up

2010-08-26T11:55:00.007-06:00

I mentioned in my last post that it took me 2 hours to get through 6 pages of a rewrite of the Novel. Didn't write Tuesday, as full tilt first-full-day-of-school craziness took over the household. Hilarity ensued.

Last night, I didn't feel like writing. Dead tired. And yet. I made myself do it, and got through the second half of the first chapter, and the entire second chapter. In addition to the feeling of accomplishment, I'm beginning to see a path where dumbing down the novel might make it a better novel. More focused. Leaner.

My Page Up button quit working yesterday. This morning I pried the little plastic key off, blew off a bit of something that had been trapped underneath the key (I'm guessing a Cheetos crumb; I'm a pig). I've been struggling ever since with getting the little plastic key reattached to the keyboard. It is consuming my workday. Your tax dollars at work.

Snail news. Since I last reported on the miraculous reappearance of the snail, it has disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again. And just yesterday, it reappeared yet again! It's back in a jar of moist peat moss and rocks and an errant baseball card. It is no longer named Prince and Princess, however. It is now named Pedro Martinez. After the baseball card.

More Cassini: this picture is of an unnamed moon causing ripples inside Saturn's A ring. A movie is here. Notice there are ripples on either side, traveling in opposite directions. Cool, huh?

Crawling Bats, Flying Turtles

2010-08-24T10:47:00.007-06:00

Back to school yesterday. During the weekend we bough school supplies and new shoes, instituted wildly unpopular earlier bedtimes. About 10 p.m. on Sunday the girls ran into the hallway screaming. Bat! Bat! We saw a bat in our rooms!

Hux and I were at first dismissive (it's just a bad dream, go back to bed), but there were so adamant about it, and we did have a bat sighting several weeks back (crawling along the carpet of the dining room no less, a seriously trippy sight to see). So. Hux and the girls dragged their blankets and pillows downstairs into the living room, and slept huddled around the couch til morning.

Started the third rewrite of the New Novel on Monday as well. Getting rid of a major character, big changes to another one. Smoothing out the abrupt shifts in tense and point of view I was so proud of when writing it. Yes, I'm dumbing it down a tad. Yes, I'm hungry to get it published.

The results of my first day of rewrites? Two hours to get through the first 6 pages. Yikes.

New school year, new draft of the novel, and who better to guide us through these new beginnings, these challenging straits than Gamera, friend to all children, protector of boy scouts. In the original Japanese, with English subtitles. Come on, Space Monsters, bring it on! Let's cut and poke!

Have fun. Do your best.

2010-08-19T10:47:00.003-06:00

I've been coaching my daughter's tee ball team this summer. Yesterday was the last game. I will miss it.

The rules? Score keeping is not allowed. Everyone gets to bat, every inning. You swing til you hit the ball. Even if you're out, you stay on base. So, some innings have no outs. Some have five or six.

Errors are so common there is no stigma. Making a play correctly is met with joy and disbelief (did I really just catch the ball?). And the look on a kid's face when they do the job well is quietly eloquent. That sense of accomplishment is something that will follow through to writing, to music, to math homework, to preparing and presenting a good meal.

I end every game by asking them, what are the two rules of tee ball? The answer: have fun, do your best.

I fed the girls their first barbecued ribs a couple weeks back. At first they couldn't figure out how to eat them. Once they did, they were hooked. Like crack for carnivores. Youngest said, and this is verbatim: I just had a minute of heaven.

Hilary has been kind enough to give my post on the tenacity of weeds a Post of the Week award. Hil, you are too kind. Go visit her here. She's really nice.

Three Cool Things

2010-08-17T10:33:00.006-06:00

My favorite citizen of the solar system, Saturn's moon Enceledus (the moons that switch orbits every four years are a close second and third*).

Three cool things about this picture.

One: that tiny flare of light coming from the bottom of the moon is caused by ice geysers, spewing ice hundreds of miles out into space. Carbon particles have been found in the ice. Water, carbon, and a heat source that causes the geysers. Sounds like Arthur C. Clarke's monolith is at work deep under the ice. It's full of staaaars....

Two: that faint line behind Enceledus is Saturn's E ring, composed almost entirely of ice particles form those crazy geysers, settling into orbit.

Three: look at the pattern of light and shadow on Enceledus. The bright crescent of light on the left, the dark bit, and then another bright section. There are two light sources! The bright crescent on the left is caused by sunlight. The light on the right is Saturnlight, the glow from the planet 150,000 miles away.

Thanks to Cassini, NASA, and Bad Astronomy for the pix and the info.

*the mysterious clump of particles orbiting Saturn that may or may not be a black hole is a distant fourth.

Pas de Cinq

2010-08-11T13:14:00.007-06:00

It keeps getting better. Saw three of the four planets low on the horizon yesterday just after dusk. Venus was very bright, Mars and Saturn less so. Mercury was hiding in the glare of the setting sun. I'll look again tonight.

For the next few days they'll be joined by a sliver of a crescent moon, technically marking the beginning of Ramadan (more commonly it's marked by the new moon, but some say you have to actually SEE the crescent following the new moon). And the gravy: Venus and the crescent moon form a facsimile of the Islamic flag.

Actually, the flag is more accurately the facsimile of the actual thing. But you get the drift. Assalamu alaikum.

MORE GRAVY: as Artsparker points out, the Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight! Wait til after midnight, when you're on that part of the Earth that is plowing directly into the comet dust. Set your alarm.

Hedwig and the Happy Meal

2010-08-09T13:11:00.005-06:00

Had a wonderful blogger meet-up this weekend: Hux and I went to a play with Irrelephant, Mrs. Phant, Dancehall and Tolstoy. Sans kids! Went to see a very good production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I won't say great, as I had a few quibbles with the production - the music is kinda forgettable - but the brilliant long monologue that weaves between the songs and the pure theatrical power of the guy doing the monologue (Nick Sugar) more than made up for it. Good dinner beforehand, conversation and laughs and cigars in the backyard afterward (I was only a spectator during the cigar bit, fearful the tobacco would reawaken my long dormant cigarette habit).

I love theater. It's hand-made, not focus group tested and mass-produced, with merchandising tie-ins at McDonald's (though if they threw little Hedwig action figures into Happy Meals I'd buy one). It's intimate; you're right there in the room with them, you can look each other in the eye. Each production is different, and each night within an individual production is unique as well. No two shows are exactly alike.

If all the movie theaters burned down tomorrow, people would come together in garages and living rooms and act out stories. And sure, they'd churn out a few Diehards and Pretty Womans - hey, I liked Diehard too - but I'm guessing it's far more likely people would tell stories of their lives, the lives of the people they loved, stories of the world around them, the sky above.

The Unlikely Tenacity of Weeds

2010-08-04T08:38:00.004-06:00

Backyard existentialism.

The Unlikely Tenacity of Weeds

I rarely mow my lawn. No need to. The relentless sun, the lack of rain. The weeds have an easier time of it than the grass, dandelions, bull thistle, henbit, they grow faster, are more hearty. No bother, the weeds are easy to control, and colorful. I do not use poisons or herbicides. I pluck them by the roots, or ask my daughters to pick them, a penny a stem. I feel no need to eradicate them. I like bio-diversity. We maintain a cautious truce.

I fight a losing battle with the junk trees, the alley trees, the ones that go by the giddily euphemistic term “paradise tree.” They are voracious, predatory, tenacious. Nothing can be done to eradicate them, and only with great effort can they be fought to a stalemate. So. I fight. Weekly. If I do not they will take over the front yard. I stoop to pull them out by their shallow roots, foot by foot, limb by limb, I stoop until my back cries in pain, stoop knowing they will be back in one more week, only to be battled again.

I rented a roto-tiller and plowed under a large section of yard this spring, in order to plant a garden at the side of the house, and pulled out a large swath of the tree’s root system, the roots shallow, misshapen, bulbous as fetuses. I piled them in a unlikely tangle on the sidewalk; they look like something found in a carnival sideshow bell jar. I wondered at the time, and continue to wonder often, why weeds have not taken over the world, with their efficiency, their unstoppable energy. It is a wonder there is room for other life to thrive. But other life does thrive, I only have to look around me to see it to see the improbable flowers mixed in the weeds, the wild roses, the tulips, the day lilies. Most I do not know the names of. This house is over a hundred years old, with perhaps a dozen owners, each with their own garden, their own floral tastes, the seeds now mixing through one century and into the next, intermingling, hopelessly tangled, a history told in a confusion of perennials.

I finish plucking trees from the front yard, I turn the wheelbarrow of treelets around and head for the compost heap. So much wasted energy, but the trees make for good compost fodder, so perhaps it is not wasted at all. Perhaps nothing is wasted. My hands smell of the sap, an unpleasant cloying scent that will not easily leave the skin. It is hot. I am irritable. My back hurts. I stop at the garden by the side of the house to turn on the faucet, pull the hose toward the dry cracked garden earth, it catches on an errant stump, I flip the hose and watch the wave travel the length of it, leap lightly over the stump to freedom. In some way this small victory me feel better, as does the feel of cool water on my hands, my feet my shins. I move to the clutter of the back yard. Naked muddy abandoned dolls. Sports equipment, water toys. Scooters. And yes, this is a family of four, but we have seven bikes, seven, four current bikes, two outgrown but still used by neighbor kids or when one of the main bikes gets a flat, one still too large but bought to be grown into, like shoes, like clothes, like college funds. I disentangle the wheels and handlebars and kickstands, put them away behind the shed one by one. The dolls I leave in a disturbing heap by the back door for my daughters to pick through. So much broken, so much left behind. I lug all the sports equipment, the water toys into the shed, bats and balls and rings and racquets, pools and tubes and wiggly water worms. Bats are bent, balls discolored and lopsided, the tubes and pools leaking air the moment they are filled with air.

I pick my way out to the compost heap. At our previous house I built a compost bin that was over-full mere weeks after building it, and so built the one in this house extra large so as to accommodate us and still find it is nearly full. So much waste, so much discarded, so much left behind, and yet so much remains, we are overfull. Shoes, clothes, college funds. I dump the trees into the heap, then shovel the bottom of the heap toward the top, cycling the trees in with the leaves, the weeds, the eggshells, the coffee grounds, all of this will go into the garden next Spring; some will cycle back into the heap as leaves and vines and the chopped ends of withered vegetables. Perhaps nothing is wasted. I look back across the back yard, the lawn, the side garden, bursting with life. Eggshells, baseball bats, discarded dolls, tangled bikes. Overfull. So much discarded yet so much remains, too much, this stubborn gift of life, this refusal to hew to boundaries, this ridiculous prodigal giving, the unlikely tenacity of weeds.

Magic In the Science

2010-08-02T10:26:00.003-06:00

On Sunday morning the youngest covered a piece of construction paper with glitter glue, then asked me to put my hand on it. When I lifted my hand, and the paper stuck, she began laughing and jumping up and down, screaming "it's magic in the science, it's magic in the science!" This was her mantra for the next 20 minutes or so, after which it was forgotten, and never mentioned again.

I remembered, though. I feel that way all the time.

Ran across this quote in the Sunday paper: "The past that has not been tamed with words is not memory, only a sort of spying." It's from Laura Restrepo's novel, "No Place for Heroes." Love the quote, even though I disagree. Taming the past with words alters it, sculpts it into a shape that fits your personal narrative better than the actual events. Some aspects emphasized, others left in shadow. Though perhaps that's Ms. Restrepo's point: that the personal mythology is more important than accuracy. That the altered memory is in some important sense more "true" than a bald retelling.

While we're on the subject of memory, Fresca has posted pictures of the depression era Band Box Diner, where I worked the graveyard shift, 11 p.m.-7 a.m., as a short order cook for several years. I waited tables, cooked the food, served the food, washed the dishes, all by myself (it helped that the place held 14 people tops) Paid $5 a hour, under the table. One of my favorite jobs ever.

Thirty years later, my breakfast making skills are still a wonder to behold. Hash browns, bacon, eggs over easy.

Pas de Quatre

2010-07-30T17:29:00.002-06:00

Nice twilight sky this weekend. A four planet dance.

Step outside. Feel the cool air on your skin, listen to the crickets. Look up.

Faces

2010-07-28T12:34:00.011-06:00

There is a face plant challenge going on at Artspark Theatre. Make a face, post it by August 2, let her know via a comment. I assume found objects are part of the aesthetic, but these free spirited visual artists aren't too keen on rules, so do whatever you want.

Random beach toys laying around our cluttered back yard. Had to scoot these around with my foot a bit to make the face, but they were all within a five foot radius of where I was standing.

Scary gargoyle face from youngest's pottery. Gotta dig those ears.

Salt dough beards. Youngest in the middle, two neighbor girls on the sides (we call them the tutus because, well, they are always wearing tutus). I believe that's Dora they're holding. She's got a beard too.

A homemade kite, created by the eldest. Look closely and you can see a bit of the beach toy face peeking out from behind.

A pottery "fairy house" made by the eldest. The face? Look at the fairy perched on the roof. She's smiling at you.

Angular Banjos*

2010-07-27T09:16:00.010-06:00

Me and the hux, the little clowncars, Tolstoy and the boyos, and even Nancy D. for a day. Thirty-six-ish hours of music in three days. The music mostly functions as background, a soundtrack as you play in the water, doze in the hammock, play catch, hang a pinata, tube the river, paint rocks in the art tent, hula hoop. There are alotta different flavors of bluegrass, and when you find one particularly matching your tastes you crowd up to the stage, dance like a blissed-out hippie, return to the water. Or the hammock. Or the beer tent.

Maybe a third of the attendees are families, so there are lots of little kids around. They run in herds. The adults there function as a collective family. You see a kid skin a knee, you give them a bandaid. You see a kid trying to learn to hula hoop, you teach them how. Yeah, there's a little weed, lotsa beer, but you rarely see someone out of control. It's a three day safe zone. In an over-policed society where our kids are cocooned in living rooms and bedrooms with cellphones and televisions, where they are told not to talk to strangers, where they are driven home from school and enter the house from the garage so they don't have to set foot outside or encounter anyone they've never met before, it's a welcome respite.

Anyway. Rant concluded. I believe I have a new favorite band. The Horse Flies. They played the last set, Saturday night. The kids, usually unable to stay still for more the five minutes at a time, were rapt. So was I. Watch the video. At least until the chick with the violin cuts loose. Trust me.

If you want to hear more of them, they have individual songs and entire concerts available for free download. Someone should really tell them they'll never make any money that way.

*a reference to Aja. Steely Dan. I've used it before.

More Saturnian Weirdness

2010-07-21T16:34:00.013-06:00

Curiouser and curiouser.

In this week's headlines: Saturn's moon Prometheus is creating giant snowballs in the wake of it's gravitational field. It pulls the material off the F ring, and the gathered material creates enough gravity on its own to clump together into snowballs, following Prometheus around like ducklings. Prometheus also creates these weird "fans" in the F ring:

More curious still are "mysterious tumbling objects" that go ricocheting back-and-forth across the F ring before vanishing from sight. Sometimes they have comet-like tails, and their orbits can't be tracked. Note that UFO abductees are not reporting this, NASA's Cassini probe is. These things are real. There is such tumbling chaos in Saturn's rings, billions of tiny particles in orbit, pulling and colliding, but from out of this chaos spins rings and moons and ripples and spokes and fans and propellers. So much stunning complexity, born from Kepler's three simple, elegant laws of planetary motion. The idea that these structures form out of the infinite permutations of a few simple laws of physics fills me with more awe, more childlike wonder, than the notion they were created by a God.

Going to Rockygrass this weekend. Three days of bluegrass and hula hoops and friends and beer and camping and dozing in the hammock and playing in the water. Big Fun. Summer revolves around Rockygrass in the same way winter revolves around Christmas. It lies in the sweet spot, at the center of the season.

Hearing Voices

2010-07-20T09:12:00.007-06:00

This item has been languishing in my bookmarks since January: Many children 'hear voices'; most aren't bothered.

The gist is that 15-ish percent of kids hear imaginary voices, and that the majority of the time, the voices don't interfere with their thinking or cause them much distress*. The voices aren't linked to schizophrenia, violent behavior, or any real ill effects. It's part of their lives. Part of how they think.

What struck me at the time is how much of my own thinking could be framed as "hearing voices." Don't worry, the neighbor's dog isn't telling me to kill, aliens aren't informing me of imminent planetary destruction. But I often think in a babble of voices: friends, family, voices from books and movies. Often it's a dialogue between me and the other voice. When I'm writing I hear character's voices talking. Sometimes I talk to a younger version of myself (usually asking him "what the f@ck were you thinking?"). And while I can't speak for the inside of anyone's brain but my own, I'd wager most other people are the same way. Linear, orderly, point A to point B thinking occurs in bad novels and Psych 101 classrooms. Which is why I don't like most interior monologues in fiction. Easy. False.

The unpredictable, wandering minds of real people, engaged in real life, is more subtle, more fractured, and much messier.

I like messy. I trust messy.

* an interesting footnote: "Although urban children were less likely to hear voices, they were more troubled by them."

News of the Weird

2010-07-15T08:35:00.010-06:00

One of the weirder headlines of the week: Giant Propellers Discovered In Saturn's Rings. It's a tad misleading. They don't spin or anything. And as far as I can make out, they aren't even really solid. The center is a brand new class of moon, one that is mid-size and embedded in the rings, and (I think) there is material streaming out thousands of miles in both directions, held in place by gravity and resonance, a concept I must admit I don't entirely understand.

As opposed to gravity, which no one understands. There was an article in the NY Times yesterday about a theory that gravity doesn't even exist, but is rather a byproduct of thermodynamics. I didn't entirely understand that either.

I digress. These space propellers are several miles wide, several thousand miles long. Their orbits are thus far unpredictable; they've been photographed before, but no one is sure when and where one of the Damned Things will turn up next. A picture of one is below. Unlike the propeller, the red arrow is not actually embedded in the rings. That would be weird.

Odd headline #2: Frustrating Zombie Satellite Still Adrift In Space. Apparently it is out of its intended orbit and can't be controlled, but is still sending out signals, and signal interference could kill other satellites. Following the zombie analogy, those satellites it kills would then turn into zombie satellites, causing all sorts of mayhem up there, but I think I may be stretching the analogy too far.

Photo by NASA's ever-fascinating Cassini probe.

Sleight of Shell

2010-07-13T08:22:00.004-06:00

The girls are in an awesome Art Camp this summer, and a couple weeks back, in addition to the weekly armloads of pottery and puppets, they brought home snails (it was Slime Week). Big ones too, maybe two and a half inches when stretched out and in motion. They put the things in jars, from which they promptly escaped. We have three cats, I assumed they would dine on escargot that evening.

Last week youngest found a shell stuck to one of the table legs, almost a foot off the ground. I plucked it off, put it on the table, figuring it was dead. Minutes later, youngest squealed and pointed; the snail was out of the shell and extended, speeding across the table on a trail of slime.

I read up online how to care for snails, made it a cozy little tupperware home: peat moss, rocks, water, lettuce. They live up to ten years, I figured we should take it more seriously this time around. I named it Booger (because of the mucus trail it slides on), but the girls would have none of that and renamed it Princess. I told them snails were hermaphrodites, explained they had both boy and girl parts and could make babies all by themselves. They re-renamed it Prince-and-Princess.

We sprayed it and fed it for two days. Snails are fun to watch (particularly those weird little antennas), and more active than you would think. One morning it was gone again. The lid had been put on loosely and it slipped out (another factoid I learned on the net: snails are strong, and can lift 10 times their weight).

So. Prince-and-Princess is on the loose again in the wilds of our house. He/she's a survivor, for weeks now, so we're keeping out eyes peeled for that tell-tale shell. Or for a smug canary smile on the face of one of the cats.

Independence

2010-07-12T12:02:00.007-06:00

My fiction writing has been dark of late. Not sure why.

Well, that's not entirely true. Anyway.

Much of this one is simply straight reportage.

Independence

Hot and humid 4th of July in Houston, gunmetal stratus clouds scudding low overhead. By late afternoon my brother-in-law’s kitchen table had a large mound of fireworks on it, as people stopped by to drop them off. The beer and liquor were left on the floor next to the table.

The party started around dusk. We drank and smoked and played pool in the rec room above the garage, and at surprisingly regular and increasingly joyless intervals the party would spill out onto the end of the driveway, where we set off fireworks, using cigarettes to light them. I had quit smoking months earlier and found the cigarette moving up to my lips unbidden, every time I held one. As the night wore on, and people got progressively drunker, the fireworks went farther afield, and when a bottle rocket hit the picture window of the house across the street the old people who lived there threatened to call the cops, but never did. Or if they did, the cops had better things to do. There was a fight on the lawn around ten, though it didn’t last long. Around one a.m. an M80 blew up in some guy’s hand, and in the stunned silence after the blast they got a dishrag around his hand and pushed him into the backseat of the car and drove weaving down the road toward the hospital.

It rained in the night. The next morning I woke up late, hungover and exhausted, to the loud cold buzz of the air conditioner and a vicious argument between my sister and her husband downstairs. I looked out the second floor window to the front lawn, littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, the spent firework casings below blackened, crushed, sodden, like dead birds.

Your Mind's Eye

2010-07-08T10:32:00.013-06:00

Took my big, dumb telescope out to a state park early this week for a very satisfying stroll around Sagittarius and Scorpio. This is right where the center of the Milky Way galaxy is, which is part of the allure of that bit of the sky: a black hole millions of times the size of the sun is hiding behind all that dust. You can't see it (and there's a metaphor there I won't bother exploring about the most massive thing in the galaxy being utterly invisible to the human eye). But because you're looking toward the center of things, it's more dense, there's more stuff to see.

Like this.

It's the Omega Nebula. It didn't look nearly as defined in my own scope; I could only see the inner bit that looks like a sitting duck (this is also called the Swan Nebula, for that reason). But that's much of the joy of amateur astronomy, so much of it happens in your head, sketching in the details, seeing it in your mind's eye.

Here's another critter I saw that night. The Triffid Nebula, which brings to mind the great John Wyndham novel Day of the Triffids.

It didn't look quite this clear in my own scope either, though I could just make out the dust lanes. But there is a wealth of activity going on in there, stars in their first birth throes, flinging out tremendous amounts of gas and dust, forming spheres, pillars, small dark knots called Bok Globules (love that term). A detail of this nebula, taken by the Hubble:

So yeah, what you're seeing in your eye is a smudge of white and gray, with a few discernible dark lanes inside it, the barest hint of color. But in your mind you know there is so much more lurking deep in there, waiting for your inner vision to discover it.

For those of you keeping score at home, I also found M22 (a globular cluster, very pretty, picture below), M25 and M28 (open clusters, and disappointing), and the gorgeous Lagoon nebula. My electronic starfinder has been broken for a year, so I found these all the good old fashioned way, pointing it up at the sky and poking around til I found what I was looking for.

Crazy Eyeballs

2010-07-05T15:28:00.014-06:00

I have another flash up at Everyday Weirdness: Feral. I like this one. Kinda Twilight Zone-y. In a good way.

Started a long short story this weekend, so no more flash fiction for awhile. May be the start of something longer.

We went to the city fireworks this weekend. The music was some pleasantly bland new-age-y thing, and while I prefer old school marches, the fireworks themselves more than made up for it. Several kinds I'd never seen before. Very delicate, less over-the-top bombastic than what I'm used to. Which might explain the musical choice.

When we got back home we lit our own fireworks with a few of the neighborhood kids. Sparklers and small fireworks we bought at a tent earlier in the day (my favorite is something called Crazy Eyeballs). Hux and I lit them, with five kids dancing and screaming in the noise and light and smoke. A small perfect moment. You could almost feel the folds of your brain storing the memory.

Six years ago, on July 2nd, the girls came to our house. Being so close to the 4th, there were loud fireworks in the dark that night, and the next several nights. I cannot fully imagine how frightening that must have been, a strange new house, with strange new parents, and loud noises outside the windows as they slept. They cried. Of course they cried. Wouldn't you?

Things are better now, but shadows of those fears remain. After the front yard fireworks our youngest had an angry meltdown, no doubt from all the excitement of the long day. She had to be calmed down and consoled before we put her to bed. It's alright. We held her, sang her a few songs. 500 Miles. Blowing in the Wind. I carried her up the stairs. We tucked her into bed. Good night.

that dirt we call earth

2010-07-02T17:05:00.006-06:00

Grabbed this off of larabee's and liza site. Starts outs so simply, grows quietly luminous by the end.

The Simple Truth (by Philip Levine)

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

Easily Amused

2010-07-01T08:31:00.012-06:00

Got two new toys to play with this week. Took my first ever surf onto the wonder and glory that is eBay and bought a USB microscope for $30 from some guy in Hong Kong. Results are below. In order: a wasp's nest, eldest's tongue, a chrysalis, youngest's hair, a dead wasp, my gross nose hairs (adjective supplied by the girls), and an insect wing. Cicada, perhaps?

We had a slug in captivity, but it escaped before we could video it.

Also, lil hucky responded quickly to my none too subtle hints and got me an early birthday present: a didgeridoo!

This whole deal got started because hux saw an article in the NY Times about sleep apnea, and showed it to me (I don't have apnea, but my ability to snore borders on the preternatural). Although only one sentence suggested didgeridoos are a cure for apnea, that was the sentence that caught my interest. And mere weeks later, here we are.

My goal is to get the circular breathing, continual drone thing down by Rockygrass. Hucky will no doubt argue that I already have the drone thing down pretty good, with my snoring. But the didge is more melodic.

Boom Boom Clap

2010-06-29T11:15:00.000-06:00

Eldest had a birthday party last week, at the little red caboose in City Park. My back took the stain remarkably well. Tolstoy and his boyos spent the night, and after the kids went to sleep we tossed back a few cold malted beverages. Fun evening. Great cake.

Oh my God, was it great cake.

Eldest has a tendency towards the treasuring of material things, for reasons I will not go into now, so it is heartening to me that the birthday CD mix I give her every year is always among her favorite gifts. She keeps them all; if they break, she asks me to burn a new one.

This year, a new wrinkle. All her favorite songs up to now have been culled from the tastes of the lil hux and me: Dylan, the Beatles, Springsteen, Alanis Morissette, KT Turnstall. This year new influences are entering the mix, bubblegum tweener pop music, mostly Hannah Montana. It was a sweet moment to hear her (and boyo one, no less) sing along to it on the ride home. I could summon up some snark about Ms. Montana representing pre-packaged pop stars and the idolization of celebrity, but since I was singing Monkees tunes at about the same age of my own boyhood, it would ring false. I like the Monkees. And it is hard to get more pre-packaged than them.

And here's a confession I feel free to make since few of you know my real name: I have a sneaking fondness for Hannah Montana's "Hoedown" ("boom boom clap, boom de-clap-de-clap"). If you accuse me of this in my actual life I will of course deny it, and promptly delete this post. But I feel my secret is safe with you.

Don't let me down.

Horizontal

2010-06-22T12:51:00.003-06:00

So. Had a great time for the first 4 innings of the Father's Day baseball game Sunday. I was at the concession stand getting hot dogs and beer, turned around to get some ketchup packets and snap!, a sharp pain in my back, like a knife. It was hard to even breathe, let alone walk. Took me several minutes to get my composure, then I made my slow and painful journey back to the seats. Incredibly, I took the beer and dogs back with me. No spills.

We stayed for the rest of the game. I was relatively pain-free as long as I remained standing, supporting myself against the railing. There are worse places to throw out your back than in the middle of a baseball game on a gorgeous summer afternoon. And the Sky Sox beat the Las Vegas 51's, 13-4. It was a fun day. Got to play catch on the field with the girls before the game. They got free baseball gloves. And they're actually pretty good gloves!

Getting out of the stadium and into the car was pretty dicey (another reason we stayed: avoiding the crowd). Out of the car and onto the downstairs couch (where I've been ever since) was similarly difficult. And the first night was painful and spasm-riddled and not something I ever want to experience again.

Better now. I can't get up or down from the couch without help, and pain. Lying motionless I'm fine. And I can lie on a couch motionless with the best of them.

So. I'm reading undemanding fiction and watching whatever movie I can snag on the DVR. Last night was Dreamcatcher. Absolutely awful. I rather enjoyed it, but that's just the muscle relaxants talking. Tonight is Ride With the Devil, which is about a period of the Civil War I'm pretty familiar with. Ang Lee directed it, which bodes well. Jewel is in it, which does not.

p.s.: Got another story published. Baby Teeth, in fiction@work (an early draft is here). Had to tussle with the editors about the last sentence. I like tussling with editors. It means they give a damn about the story.

AAA

2010-06-17T09:53:00.000-06:00

That new header image is of Ida and Dactyl, an asteroid with its very own tiny moon. I've always loved the photo. Reminds me of a parent and child, bonded by gravity, rotating around a common center. Plus, I didn't know asteroids could have moons.

A coupla cool comments about the photo in my last post (see below). Margaret said it looked like a stellar semi-colon. Laurita said her kid told her it looked like the moon was hanging by a thumbtack. Nice. I will never look at the Venus-moon pas de deux quite the same way again.

Woke up at 4 a.m. yesterday to drive out just east of town and look for Comet McNaught. Didn't find it. It was oddly enjoyable still; I parked on a country road and cracked open a beer and scanned the sky right around Perseus with binoculars til the beer was gone. Went home, went back to bed. I'll look for it next month, after it's passed around the sun and is heading back out to its home in the Oort Cloud.

The Mets have won 6 games straight. A half a game outta first place. Of course, this weekend we play the Evil Empire (the Yankees, for you uninitiated), so anything could happen. We're also going to see a AAA ballgame on Sunday to celebrate Father's Day. Free gloves to the first 1500 kids! And we get to have a catch on the field before the game. Big Fun. Hot dogs will be involved.

Balm

2010-06-15T11:11:00.001-06:00

Bad photo. Lovely sight.

My favorite night skyscape is the crescent moon and Venus hanging in an evening sky. I like the rhythm of it, the way it occurs in bunches, Venus and crescent together for two or three nights in a row, then gone for a month, then back. And after a few months Venus will go away for awhile, loiter as a morning star for as long as a year. But it always comes back. And the whole dance begins again.

Had a long, difficult day yesterday. Being greeted by this sight at the end of it all made me better.

Rambling (+ Zombies)

2010-06-14T10:39:00.005-06:00

I cleaned and organized my shed this weekend. I cannot overstate how much satisfaction this gave me.

Mets swept the hapless Orioles this weekend. First to last to first to last to second place. Like being on a pogo stick.

Do they make pogo sticks anymore? Are they considered too dangerous for children, and gone the way of the lawn dart?

Because I'd really like one.

I'd also like a didgeridoo, and have asked the Hux for one for my birthday. We shall see.

Enough rambling. Here's some very dramatic video of the problem-plagued Japanese Hayabusa Asteroid explorer returning to Earth over Australia this morning. The fireball is the probe burning up in the atmosphere; the little dot below and to the right is the hardened bit that contains asteroid samples. It was recovered in the Australian outback this morning.

So, if things go all Andromeda Strain on us, and the zombie apocalypse begins, you'll know where it came from.

Baby Teeth

2010-06-10T09:29:00.000-06:00

I wrote this as a 10,000-ish word novella some years back. It had its moments; overall it was a little misshapen, a little unwieldy. I condensed it to a paragraph last week, and like the result better. If I had simply done it this way in the first place I coulda saved myself a summer of writing.

Baby Teeth

Her name is Betty Bowens, though all the neighborhood kids call her Betty Bones, and she lives in the old house at the end of the street with her three dead children. They are dead; she is not, merely old, very old. Her children died of different causes, at different times: hit-and-run, cancer, suicide. Two were adults when they died, the cancer and the suicide. Her boy Tristan, poor lovely Tristan, he was the hit-and-run, he died at five. But here in her house, in Betty Bones' house, they are all children again, all toddlers again, their trikes endlessly squeaking down the sidewalk, their food endlessly spilling down their bibs. They need comfort when thunderstorms loom, cold washcloths on their foreheads when they are hot with fever. They gather in the living room every Christmas morning. They blow out candles on birthdays. They are losing their baby teeth, over and over again, forever smiling at her with loopy gap-toothed grins. She finds the teeth in odd places. Tilting in the drain of the bathroom sink. Rolling in the backs of kitchen drawers. Curling in the gray tendrils of her hair as she combs it out at night. She keeps them all in a fragile teacup perched on her windowsill, the cup now filled to overflowing, tiny enamel pearls dropping to the porcelain saucer below like tears, bone white and shining.

Travelogue

2010-06-08T11:07:00.005-06:00

Our first day at the Sand Dunes. The water winding through the sand. The beginnings of the first sand castle. Our youngest, the Lil Booger. The dunes behind her, the blue sky above.

After supper that night (steak and hot dogs!) we watched a hailstorm cross the plains towards us. We didn't know it was a hailstorm, saw the wall of rain, saw the dust getting kicked up on the land. Seconds before the thing hit, it became clear we should get inside. Called the kids, grabbed the food, ran inside, pelted the entire time. This is the sunset that followed.

The second sand castle. Two seaports, irrigated fields, towers for the royalty and the rich, small mounds for the commoners. I asked the girls to name it, they had no interest. We'll call it Clowncarnia.

The Hux and I at the base of Zapata Falls. Nice and cool up there. The water is melt-off from mountain snow, it makes its way down and around the dunes we played in all weekend. When we got back home, it was 102 degrees. Yikes.

Church

2010-06-03T09:48:00.004-06:00

I was raised Southern Baptist, back in a day when the Southern Baptist Church was not nearly as conservative as it is now (it made a hard right wing turn in the early 80s). We'd go to church Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nights. I enjoyed it, though I am not involved in the church now. I remember them as nice people. I also remember being hopelessly bored, sitting in the pew, as the preacher spoke.

I thought I remembered resenting having to go to church on Wednesday nights because it meant having to miss Star Trek, but I just checked the Wiki and found Star Trek aired on Thursdays. Weird how memory intersects with reality.

One of my favorite memories about Sunday evenings is this: after the service, as the adults did whatever they did inside the church, the kids would gather in the deepening shadows at the back of the church with the pastor's son, Randy Nail (his nickname was "Rusty") and tell ghost stories. He told most of the stories, though I think anyone who wanted could take a turn. But the job of the littler kids like me was to listen, and listen in deep awe. I don't remember many of the stories. One was about people bowling with human heads. One was about a ghost in a river, a woman crying for her drowned child. I think most of the stories were made up on the spot. In retrospect it seems very much like an attempt to construct our own metaphysics, a religion designed for kids, one that made more sense to us than abstractions about original sin, heaven and hell, the vengeful Old Testament God vs. the New Testament turn-the-other-cheek leanings (although Revelations did have a Jason and the Argonauts flair I found appealing). Our metaphysics was built on stuff we understood, stuff that scared us, blood and skeletons, witches and vampire bats, bits we could stack and build and piece together like Lego bricks.

It's a life-long process, the architecture of belief, regardless of your faith, or lack of faith. Forever incomplete. I suppose Catholics would see the resultant structure as a soaring cathedral, all stained glass and basilicas. I see a modest wood and brick building that Midwestern Protestants inevitably produced, built on a human scale, low to the ground and sensible, surrounded by a well kept lawn, green and soft and free of weeds, beckoning us to play.

Manhattan-henge

2010-06-01T12:53:00.002-06:00

Went to the drive-in this weekend to see Shrek (not that good, but as I've said before, and recently, the movie is secondary to the experience). The interesting bit: at the time we showed up the lot for Shrek was just over half full. The lot for Sex and the City 2 had exactly two cars in it. Two. Clearly, not alotta demographic overlap between folks who want to see Sex and the City and folks who go to drive ins. Not too many Manolo Blahniks at the concession stand.

Couldn't get to sleep when we got home, so tuned into Coast-to-Coast, who had an actual astrophysicist on (Neil deGrasse Tyson!), as opposed to the usual parade of alien abductees and ghost whisperers. He discussed, among many, many other things, Manhattan-henge. On May 28 and June 12 the sun lines up directly with the grid of the city streets in NYC and sets right at the vanishing point between the canyons of buildings, in the center of the street. Every city with a flat grid of streets and an unobstructed horizon (e.g. no mountains) has two "-henges" a year. The exact dates depends on the orientation of the streets.

The most interesting he said about it was that centuries from now, when anthropologists dig up the ruins of New York City (a simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic prediction; NYC will be in ruins, yet the human race will still be around), they'll conclude we were a race of sun-worshipers, and built the entire city to celebrate two dates: May 28 and June 12. Or, Memorial Day and the All Star Break. They're belivve our two greatest religious holidays honored War and Baseball.

As NYC grew to become the capitol of the world in the heyday of the 40s and 50s, during the post-WWII boom and the great baseball troika of the Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers, that doesn't strike too far off the mark.

The World As It Is

2010-05-26T09:52:00.001-06:00

Artsparker has a gift for connections: verbal, visual, artistic, personal. She pointed me toward a startlingly lovely poem at the Larabee and Liza site a couple days back to read Carolyn Miller's poem, copied below. There are "no ladders, no descending angels" in my worldview, so it had some resonance with me, in particular the comfort found in sideways Orion, trembling Venus, firefly Jupiter. Or, to use John Prine's more plain language, "to believe in this living is just a hard way to go."

The World as It is

No ladders, no descending angels, no voice
out of the whirlwind, no rending
of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only
water rising and falling in breathing springs
and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling
and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass
and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Only
the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways,
Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly,
Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon,
appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming
and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately,
wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea
rises up and follows.

-Carolyn Miller

Thank you Susan. Thank you Laura. Thank you Carolyn.

Ol' Shorty

2010-05-24T12:08:00.001-06:00

My Dad told me last week that his grand-dad, Papa, referred to death as "shaking hands with ol' Shorty." I've been turning this delightful bit of information around in my head ever since, looking at it from different angles. It is unclear whether ol' Shorty is God, Jesus, or Satan, though my Dad's money is on God. I'm less certain.

Papa would occasionally go into town in a horse and wagon and get drunk. When he fell into the wagon and passed out, his horses knew to take him back home. His wife would lead him out of the wagon, put him to bed, sometimes read to him - old western novels, by the light of a coal lamp - til he fell asleep.

My Dad had some of his memories of growing up in Oklahoma published in a magazine called Oklahoma Edge. Here's a short bit on Papa:

"Quite often when we left church on Sunday we would go by and get Papa out of jail. One night he came into the church and sat quietly on the back row. Someone from the church called the police and they came and arrested him. I always thought this was hypocritical on the part of the church people. I thought at the time, and still do, that Jesus would not have done that."

You can get the entire two-part series from Oklahoma Edge here - order the March and April 09 back issues. Or just come back to the blog, I'll be posting excerpts on a regular basis. It's a great read. He's a good writer.

Comet McNaught

2010-05-20T11:46:00.011-06:00

There is a brand new comet in the dawn sky, one that'll max out in brightness next month. You'll probably still need binoculars or a telescope to see it, but still. Comets make me giddy (admittedly I am easily made giddy). They are leftover bits from the beginnings of the solar system, chock full of water and amino acids and at least partly responsible for bringing those things, and possibly life itself, to Earth. Plus, they come from...wait for it...the Oort Cloud! The Oort Cloud is a largely theoretical sphere of ice and rock chunks at the very fringes of the solar system, about a light year away. The comets lurk out there in cold storage, slowly revolving, unseen, until something tugs them out of orbit and sends them hurtling toward the sun. As they get close to the sun they form tails, as solar wind boils off ice from the main body of the thing.

This one is on its first trip in from the Oort Cloud, so no one knows quite what will happen. Comets are notoriously unpredictable. They might fizzle out, they might soar in brightness, they might disintegrate as they swing around the sun and gravitational stress rips them apart. Stay tuned. This one is already slightly brighter than predicted.

Below is a chart telling you where to look in the dawn sky (I'm never up at dawn, but will set my alarm one or two mornings mid-month to look for it). The star Capella is very bright, so using it as a guide will help. Comets are fairly easy to pick out from the surrounding stars. They have fuzzy, indistinct edges, unlike the pinpoints of light formed by stars. They are dimmer, larger than stars. Sometimes you can even make out the tail. So get up early, get out your binoculars and search the sky. Even if you don't find the comet,you'll probably find something cool. There's lotsa cool stuff up there.

No (pause)

2010-05-17T17:57:00.000-06:00

I’m not sure what this is. Not a poem, exactly. Not even fiction really. It’s based on conversations we’d hear the girls have on the baby monitor late at night as they lay in their beds, years ago, when they first came to us (an earlier version of this appeared here a couple years ago).

Been thinking about adoption quite a bit lately. About the notion of the Other Mommy. Of sisters having whispered conversations in their beds. I believe a New Novel may be taking shape around this.

No (pause)

Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
What’re you thinkin?
About Other Mommy.
What about Other Mommy?
Where she is.
Where is she?
In the Other House. She lives there.
Can we go there?
Yes.
Will you take me there?
No.
Why?
We live here now.
(pause)
Can we go there tomorrow?
Yes.
Where Other Mommy is?
Yes.
(pause)
Where is Other Mommy?
Across the ocean. She lives there.
Where the war is?
Yes.
Can you see her?
No.
Is she in a hole?
Yes.
Can we go there?
Yes.
Will you take me there?
No.
Why?
We live here now.
(pause)
Are there holes there? Where the war is?
Yes.
Is that where the dead people go?
Yes.
In the holes.
Yes, in the holes.
(pause)
Will you take me tomorrow?
Take you where?
Where Other Mommy is.
Yes.
When?
Tomorrow.
To Other Mommy?
Yes.
(pause)
Where is Other Mommy?
In a hole.
She’s in a hole?
Yes. She lives there.
She lives in the hole?
Yes.
In the Other House?
Yes.
A hole in the Other House?
Yes.
Can she talk to us?
Yes.
What will she tell us?
It’s time to go to sleep.
(pause)
Okay.
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
Is that other man with Mommy?
No. He’s gone.
Is he in a hole?
Yes.
In the Other House?
Yes.
In a hole in the Other House?
Yes. He lives there.
With Other Mommy?
No. He’s in another hole.
A different hole.
Yes.
Different from Mommy’s.
Yes.
Can he talk to her?
No.
Can he talk to us?
Yes.
What will he tell us?
It’s time to go to sleep.
(pause)
Okay.
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
Is it time to go to sleep?
Yes.
I’m going to sleep now.
(pause)
Okay?
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.

This Just In

2010-05-15T17:51:00.001-06:00

My Godzilla Haiku was posted. Such sweet satisfaction.

Putting the AZ in Nazi

2010-05-13T12:27:00.002-06:00

This is funny, funny, funny. I like that he appears as if he is going to literally explode at any second.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Back in Black - Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Kitty Treats

2010-05-12T08:58:00.001-06:00

The first sentence is non-fiction. Everything else spun out in my mind as I was putting away the ladder.

Kitty Treats

Toby’s daughter was sobbing, sobbing, sobbing because her beloved cat was trapped on the roof of the three story apartment building next door and he tried calling it, then shaking a can of kitty treats to lure it down but no cigar, so he grabbed a ladder from the shed, lugged it up the three flights of rickety wooden stairs built on the back of the building and climbed up, holding onto the lip of the roof with one hand while shaking the kitty treat can with the other until the cat strolled unhurriedly over. He had the animal comfortably in hand just as the woman living in the upstairs apartment flung open her back door to find out what the ruckus was all about, and the bottom fell out of the world. He was tossed three stories down onto a gravel driveway, spent eight weeks in the hospital, and over time developed a taste for Oxycontin and the handy workers comp check that came in the mail every month. His wife left him about a year later, took the kids, let him have their house, the three stories of the apartment next door looming over him like an Old Testament God. His daughter is in college now, though he doesn’t talk to her much anymore. But she calls him on his birthday every year, and always remembers to thank him for saving her cat.

Secret Garden

2010-05-10T11:52:00.001-06:00

The girls and I were at one of the criminally underused neighborhood pocket parks last week (and as an aside: a beautiful day in a neighborhood full of kids - why is almost no one playing in the park?) when two little girls walked up to us. I don't quite remember how the subject came up so quickly, but within a few sentences the older one told me they were both foster kids. I told her brightly that my daughters were adopted, and for a brief moment an intense, inward stare clouded the face of the girl. All the girls ran off to play together, they all got along well, while I read under a tree.

But that expression that crossed her face has stayed with me. I have seen variations of it on my own children. It wasn't loneliness, or sadness, exactly. It was, I think, an "aloneness" particular to adopted kids and foster kids. Everyone feels alone, I know, in some way or another. You're born alone, you die alone, yada, yada, yada. Some feel it more acutely than others. Writers and artists might feel it more than others, or maybe they are merely better at exploring its depths. But the lack of a biological family creates an emptiness I can empathize with but never fully understand. It's different than coming from a dysfunctional family. Different than family members dying.

I don't think it's my job as a parent to fill that empty space. I don't think I should, or even can. Rather, I think my job is to acknowledge it, protect it, to make it a safe place, a welcome place, a part of their identity they can one day embrace, and nurture, and cherish.

Sci Fi

2010-05-06T09:50:00.003-06:00

I don't generally read much science fiction, though I watch quite a few sci fi movies. Don't know why that is. I prefer, for instance, reading crime fiction to watching it.

While writing the last novel, which had some sci fi elements, I read none, not wanting to pollute the waters. Now that I'm finished I've been reading lots of it - new writers, not the old masters - to get a sense of the current state of the genre. Most have not been very good (though Caitlin Kiernan has some game). But I just finished Charlie Huston's Sleepless, and was impressed with it. I think it's being marketed as a zombie apocolypse, but that's just commerce: there are no zombies, no undead, no brain eating. It's sort of a sci fi/noir hybrid, concernings a mad cow disease type prion finding its way into the food supply. What it lingers on is a crumbling American infrastructure. The growing gulf between rich and poor, the digital and the real. It's a good book. Thoughtful and disturbing. I recommend it.

If anyone out there knows of any other good current sci fi writers out there, gimme a shout.

1001 Uses

2010-05-05T11:33:00.000-06:00

Our youngest daughter has plantar warts. The doctor told us to put duct tape on them, and they'd go away. Who knew?

Fragment

2010-05-04T09:56:00.000-06:00

Our daughters are adopted. A few months after they came to live with us, we went over the Sangre de Cristo's to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and stayed in a motel there. They tumbled into the room, jumping on the beds, excited that they had a new home, convinced they were going to live there. Youngest had been in three homes by then, the Eldest in five. They thought that's how life was lived, that you changed homes every few months.

Spiderman was on television that night. They were convinced for years afterward that Spiderman played on all motel television sets, every night.

Shadow Biosphere

2010-04-29T10:42:00.001-06:00

Bliss Imperfect sent me this article a few months back, thinking it would be fertile ground for fiction. In a nutshell: Mono Lake in California has built up over the millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon believes that the microbes in the lake's mud may utilize this arsenic in it's own chemical make-up, rather than the chemically similar phosphorus that the rest of life on Earth uses. She is exploring, and a great quote is coming up, if these microbes' "biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet."

A shadow biosphere. Life springing up independently not once, but twice on Earth. Perhaps more than twice.

What brought this article to mind was one in yesterday's news, stating that water and organic compounds have been detected in asteroids, and likely supplied the early Earth, and every other large body in the solar system, with water and complex carbon molecules.

Life has been found in every conceivable niche on Earth, from underwater volcanic vents to Antarctic snowfields. Complex organic compounds have been found on asteroids, on comets, on the moons of Saturn.

We live in a prodigal universe. Endless summer.

Ripeness is all.

Ketchup

2010-04-26T09:59:00.002-06:00

Mets won six of seven this last week. Leaped from last place to second. Lotsa luck involved in the streak, but a win is a win.

La petite huque, the little clowncars and I planted tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeno and Anaheim peppers, strawberries, carrots. Some drought resistant grasses (stil haven't pulled the trigger on the buffalo grass). Framed two small gardens for the girls to call their own. They found worms while digging, and after screaming (less out of fear than the delight of screaming) put them in jars of dirt and declared them to be pets. One is named "Wormo." One is named "the Mets."

A new flash fiction is below. Well, mostly fiction.

Ketchup

He is in a McDonald’s with the twins and their brother. Sadie wants a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets, Madison wants two cheeseburgers and fries, and he is unable to learn what Jaden wants as Jaden is happily engaged at the condiments counter, filling an endless series of small plastic cups with ketchup from the dispenser. He is sure Jaden has ketchup on his hands, his clothes, the counter, the floor. He is too tired to look, too fearful at the unholy red mess he is certain to find.

Long minutes later, when the food is finally delivered, the kids all trudge to the white plastic table with little hands full of napkins and ketchup cups and little paper salt packets and greasy bags of food. He tags along irritably behind them, as if herding sheep, keeping them in line, on task.

He does not often let them eat at McDonald’s but they have eaten there seven or eight times this last month, too busy to cook after the visits to the hospital, the homes of various relatives, the funeral parlor.

He would like to compose some snarky irony comparing the sterility of the McDonald’s to the antiseptic nature of hospitals but cannot, it does not ring true, the McDonald’s is not sterile in the least, there are splotches of ketchup on the floor, grains of salt scattered on the tables, crushed French fries at their feet.

It is messy.

Life is messy. An unholy red mess.

To be honest, the hospital wasn’t all that antiseptic either.

The house is a pigsty. Clothes, dishes, newspapers, mail. There is so much cleaning up to do. More than anything else he wants to mourn the way people on television mourn, staring into a serene sunset, walking on a beach as waves crash and gulls coo, but Jaden is putting French fries up his nose, desperate for approving laughter, Madison needs to go to the bathroom, right now, and poor Sadie looks on the verge of tears. He needs time, needs silence and solitude, but the situation immediately at hand does not allow it, things will not fall into place, this untidy business of life just goes on and on and on.

Community, part 3

2010-04-21T10:35:00.002-06:00

This is a comment by Land of Shimp, left on a post of mine last week about drive-ins. Such a wonderful, self contained narrative, and such a startling final image, I just had to post it. Thanks, Shimp. Now it's a memory of mine.

My grandmother, long gone now, told me a story about the first drive-in she ever went to, many years previously, in the forties. She and my grandfather were in Oklahoma, as my grandfather was covering another teacher's year long leave.

There had been a terrible drought in the area, and the entire community feared for the growing season. A new drive-in opened in town, and as happens with new attractions, just about everyone for miles showed up, ready for the feature when...and you knew this was coming...it began to bucket down rain.

Everyone got out of their cars, and danced around in the rain, cheering, clapping as Joan Crawford towered overhead.

That was long before I was born, and I never even met my grandfather, but it's the strangest thing, that's my most powerful memory of a drive-in. One I wasn't even witness to.

Community reaching across time, eh? I can see it in my mind, Crawford's rather severe face, obscured by long prayed for rain.

Crawford's stern face hanging in the air like a disapproving God, as the community celebrates below. Lovely.

Dance of Ghosts

2010-04-20T10:13:00.001-06:00

This is not a visible light image, thus the ghostly aspect. It is an X-ray portrait (I love the 50s sci-fi sound of the term "X-ray") of the center of the Abell 400 galaxy cluster, a dance of high energy particles as two massive black holes orbit each other. These black holes - the two bright dots at the center - are gravitationally bound and will one day collide, in a burst of gravitational waves and cosmic waves that will be seen and felt quite literally across the universe.

The plumes shooting along the diagonal of the image are jets of super-charged particles shooting out from the poles of the things. The swept back appearance of the jets is due to both black holes rushing through a cloud of hot gas at 1200 kilometers per second. Think of a smoker exhaling smoke out of the open window of a speeding car.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory took the picture.

Free Show

2010-04-15T13:50:00.000-06:00

Glorious crescent moon, Venus, Mercury grouping in the sky tonight. Right after sunset.

As a bonus, Gordo sez the possibility of aurora borealis is high tonight, due to a giant solar promenance. So turn off your TV and step outside.

Community, part two

2010-04-15T11:08:00.000-06:00

My Dad and I made our annual trek up to Denver to watch the Mets play the Rockies yesterday. Good game. Extra innings. The wrong team won, but baseball is not always about winning. It's about the slow and steady cadence of the game, balls and strikes and outs and innings. The cycling through of the batting orders, one through nine and back again. It's about discussing the game with the people around you, regardless of what jersey they are wearing. It's about the almost mystical recurrence of the number three, and multiples of three, throughout the game. And the gravity and mystique given to other numbers, made famous by uniforms and record books and decades of fans: 7, 42, 61, 511. 60 feet, 6 inches.

And I'm pretty sure baseball is the only sport where everyone stands up and sings together in the middle of the game. Sure, most sporting events begin with everyone taking off their hats and being led through the national anthem. But few sing. Almost everyone sings Take Me Out to the Ballgame. And there's no leader. We do it ourselves.

Community

2010-04-13T09:34:00.000-06:00

The lil hucky and I, deciding it is obscene to waste precious water on a regular lawn out here in the high desert, decided to plow under the back yard and plant drought-resistant buffalo grass. To that end I rented a roto-tiller and went at it. Tiring, bone-shaking work, but fun. The most interesting bit was ripping out the extensive root system under the soil and discovering all manner of weird looking roots. The predatory, weed-like paradise trees trees in our area form these bulbous, misshapen nodes for new trees to grow out of. So alien looking, but those curving, fractal lines kept reminding me of fetuses, all day long. Odd image, I know. In a sense, though, I guess they are fetuses. For baby trees.

Afterward we went to the drive in. Longtime readers of these posts know of my abiding love for drive in movies. Packed up the kids and the lawn chairs and the twizzlers and the sleeping bags and showed up before the gates were even open. Played catch til the movie started. We saw Alice In Wonderland (better than I expected, but still way too much emphasis on art direction, not enough attention on story and character and narrative coherence). The movie is secondary. The trippy experience of being able to watch a movie in a lawn chair with stars and clouds overhead is the thing. The community of it all: teenagers flirting and necking, people walking back and forth from the concession stand with corn dogs and popcorn, whole families spilling out of the backs of vans and pick-ups. People talk. Babies cry.

The best part was that the car next to us was a gaggle of four sisters, aged 8 to 12. They set blankets on the ground next to the car to watch the movie together. Our eldest, who does not make friends easily, joined them, snuggling with them under the blanket as the night got colder. Not only did she make friends, she got to hang out with Big Girls! She came back to the car beaming.

That kind of thing doesn't happen in a regular theater, sitting in the dark and silence.

It certainly doesn't happen when you rent a movie to watch at home, doors and windows closed to your neighbors, the magic of the night sky unseen and forgotten.

It happens at the drive in.

Excerpt

2010-04-08T12:04:00.004-06:00

Got a story published, Grace, in Tomlit this week. It's here. Proud of this one.

And while I'm sharing writing, this is from the novel. Toward the end.

Hey, Bug, she said.

Hey, he whispered back, motionless.

It’s Auntie.

I know.

Silence wrapped itself around them, not uncomfortably. She looked out the window. Warm, early afternoon light streamed through the glass. She sat down on a chair next to the bed.

I’m sorry, she said.

I know. Then, did she die?

Yes. Has no one told you?

They say she’s gone. They say she’s passed. They don’t say die.

Well, honey. Yes. She died. I’m sorry.

When they say she’s gone, I think maybe she went to the store. Went to get food or something. They don’t say die.

I know.

Why don’t they say die?

They don’t want to upset you.

He moved for the first time, turning his head to look at her. But she died, right?

She died, honey.

How?

I don’t know. She slipped, I think. She was trying to protect you, I think, and she slipped into the water.

Is she going to be in the ground? Are they going to bury her?

Yes, she said. She took her time with what she said next, knowing the boy would spend hours visualizing it, agonizing over it. There is going to be a funeral, she said. They are going to put her in a casket.

Like a box?

No, not really. It will have very soft fabric in it. Like pillows. And it will be very pretty fabric. Like a bed. Like a newly made bed. And they will lay her down on it. Soft and pretty. And they’ll put her in a room, and people will go up to her, to look at her one last time. You can, if you want to. You don’t have to. But you might want to. You might want to see her one more time.

She’ll be dead.

Yes. But you might want to see her. One more time.

Yes, he said.

One more time.

Yes.

They’ll say very nice things about her. The preacher will, other people will. I will. I promise I will.

Okay.

And then. Then they’ll take the box outside. To the graveyard. They’ll carry it out to a gravestone. Very pretty. Made out of stone. So it’ll last. And they’ll lower her down.

With ropes?

Yes, I think so. With ropes. And they’ll cover her with earth. With soil. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word dirt. She wasn’t sure why.

He asked, will it be dark down there? In the soil?

Yes.

Will she be cold?

No, honey. She won’t be cold. She’s past being cold, ever again.

Will she be bored?

No, honey.

Will she miss me?

Yes.

Will she still love me?

Of course, honey. Yes. Always yes.

He turned, looked up at the ceiling again. His voice dropped lower, nearly monotonous. Is she going to heaven?

She didn’t want to lie to him. She was there to comfort, but she was unwilling to lie. She told the best truth she knew, as simply as she could.

I hope so, honey. I don’t know these things. I don’t know anything anymore.

I hope so too, he said, after a time.

She cleared her throat. She said, I’m afraid I wasn’t always very nice to your mother. I’m sorry for that.

It’s okay. He looked at her again. He said, do you remember that time we prayed together? All of us, on the floor?

Yes.

Why did we do that?

To feel safe, she said. To talk to God. To ask for help. But mostly to feel safe. Close together, holding hands. Family. Blood. I was hoping it would make your Mom feel safe. Make you feel safe. Did you? Did you feel safe?

Yes.

Good.

I don’t feel safe now.

I know, sweetie. Me neither. It’ll get better. One day, it will. You’ll see.

She stood from her chair, kissed him on the forehead, ran her hand along his cheek. She lay down next to him, inches away, but not touching. They lay like that, side by side, on top of the covers, as the last of the light faded from the windows, as the stars appeared and traced a lazy circle in the sky outside the walls of the room. The darkened room filled with the rhythm of their breathing, the quiet pulse of their hearts. After a time the boy fell asleep.

Every Changing Shape

2010-04-06T09:57:00.001-06:00

No one knows if there is life on Mars, but the planet itself sure behaves like a living thing, displaying a startling variety of faces. Puts me in mind of that wonderful TS Eliot line: "I must borrow every changing shape to find expression."

Maybe we need to broaden our definition of life.

This first one, reminiscent of zebra stripes, of tattoos, is from the sand dunes in the middle latitudes.

This one is from one of the poles, right after an avalanche, which evidently accounts for the variations in color. Looks less like a landscape than a painting of a landscape. Feels like you could dive right in to those deep blues.

Got these at either Space Gizmo or Bad Astronomy, don't remember which; they've been in my pocket awhile. Ultimately, of course, they are from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Sisters at Dusk

2010-03-31T10:03:00.004-06:00

The elusive Mercury is out for the next few days, right after dusk. I've only seen it four times. Copernicus allegedly never saw it (though this month's Sky and Telescope begs to differ). Should be easy to find too, because of its proximity to Venus: draw a line between the sun and Venus and Mercury will be there. Pretty, pretty, pretty.

Halo Round the Moon

2010-03-29T14:00:00.003-06:00

The worst bit first: we broke camp in sleet and freezing rain as our eldest had a nuclear level meltdown inside the tent (she didn't want to get dressed because it was too cold; in her defense it was pretty frikkin cold). So cold that lil Hucky and I had to go into the car and put our hands right next to the heater several times just to keep them from going numb. We had to shake a layer of slush off the tent before we could fold it. With the eldest finally calmed and our soaked tent and sleeping bags packed, we departed camp like wet, bedraggled dogs.

The other bits are mostly good and in no particular order. Climbing with the youngest as she told me about her new friend, an invisible polar bear named Botticelli. Chicken fillets and burgers and brats cooked over a campfire. The girls earning their Junior Ranger badges. A glorious halo around the waxing gibbous moon the night before we left. Coffee percolated over a fire. Learning to belay the girls on the rock climbing wall at the Y the day before we left. Watching the first 5 Harry Potter movies.

Still, glad to be home. The cats missed us. We missed them. And the warm and comfortable familiarity of our beds as well.