blather

document

create

garage

code

info

october 30, 2002 - 08:01 - beastmaster mantra (neighbor h8)

so as to compliment the healthy dose of emf radiation emitting from inadequate shielding of my antiquated monitor, i have now begun to augment spike's daily dandelion rations with manbeef.

( soon, i'll begin exposing him to 24x7 christian-evanglist tv )

with such a regime in place, i imagine it will be short order before my complacent wooly bear will mutate-metamorph into a neighbor-loathing mothra beast!

...and the time for my revenge will be at hand.

october 29, 2002 - 10:15 - she used to like 'fun' too

funhater: NEIN
funhater: britpop is shite
funhater: im through
funhater: with britpop

october 25, 2002 - 21:02 - qwerty at 32,000'

skin slightly damp with prespiration, jack collapses onto the floor at the end of the bench near gate A5.  doing so, he drags sleeve through his freshly purchased ($4.00), made-from-chilled-powder frozen yogurt, and mutters under his breath.

'oh, where did you get the yogurt?', inquires a 20-sumptin', very la-looking, hispanic woman.

looking first at his coat, then the inquisitor, he bemusedly responds: 'um, on my sleeve?'  -then, as if to substantiate his claim, he holds up his right arm, and smiles like a dope.

clearly bewildered, the inquisitor mouths at the air like a freshly misplaced goldfish.  an instant later, he realizes she's been left hanging and conceeds to offer an escape...   'tasty treat, across from gate a2'

smiling, she stands up, vacating her pole-position seat, and fanny-shuffles in the direction of A2.

blinking at a sudden stroke of luck, jack rises, confirms she is in fact 'taking the walk' and then hurriedly sets about collecting his things, ultimately sliding into her still-warm seat.

(it's amazing, LA fashion today seems to bind the wearer in much the same way that cowboys of old might hobble their horses whilst they slept.)  -how can that possibly be comfortable?

...perhaps she lost a bet?

chuckling to himself, he licks his sleeve and looks out the bayview window before him; like clockwork, the craft he is intending to board approaches, lumbering up to the terminal directly towards him...

'sure is amazing how tight they can squeeze those planes...   he's going to be mighty close to that truck.'

'yep.  going to be very close...'

(outloud now) : 'ha!  he hit it!  crazy drivin' pilot!  sure wouldn't wanna have to pay his premiums... '

ignoring the gateworker who shoots needles with his eyes; right hand flashes to breast pocket, produces motorola even as left hand dances across keypad.

'hi.  yep.  plane hit a fuel truck.  no, i'm fine.  yes, i'm serious.'  (lowers handset temporarily and beckons still-doubtful gateworker towards bayview window)   'no, i didn't have anything to do with it!  just wanted to let you know...  uh-huh.  flight'll probably be delayed.'

terminating call, motorola dis-apperates within hidden pocket leaving jack to finish the thought under his own breath.  '...the question is, how much?'

october 23, 2002 - 11:11 - avogadro's constat = 6.02e23

wow.  rocket scientist sam brown is at it again; discounting the very print that i'd love to order.   this particular example of chaos theory has been my defacto Ti wallpaper since exploding dog originally published it.

...yo quiero!!!

by the way...  did you know that today is mole day?

october 21, 2002 - 07:10 - 19,000' and climbing

with particular audacity, jack, our seasoned jet-set protagonist, shrugs off convention and checks his bags in pre-dawn light.  it's easy to rationalize: there's plenty of time, and he'd rather not deal with the 'IP-phone-as-a-bomb' fiasco again.

as if picking up on the scarcity of this event, southwest finds reason to cancel, (first time in an uninterrupted run of 8 mos of almost weekly flying), the early a.m. transit with punitive excuse ('poor weather in san jose').

c'mon, who ever heard of poor weather in san jose?  i mean, really?

options are readily apparent.  (some flight prior, lacking reading materials, jack perused the fare scheduling, and had since found that the routing tables had adhered in memory...  -the sort of way that arbitrary facts or random numbers do, but obligatory names or birthdays do not).

choose: spend 5.5 hours in PDX airport, desperately seeking comfort in furniture purposefully designed to encourage people to move on, or jump to OAK-bound flight that should be departing in around 45 minutes.  --sure it'll get you there faster, but then you've got monday morning bay-area commuters to deal with.

eager to stay in motion, jack opts for the latter, and soon resettles into the exit row of the second aircraft in under an hour.  after a warning or two about possible fog delays, (didn't this airline mandate that pilots have INSTRUMENT accredition?), the flight eventually slides out onto the runway and laborously lunges up into the sky.

it is the reassuring spinning of hydraulics, (retracting drag inefficient landing gear), that jolts jack out of half-concious daydream and encourages him to finally consider the implications of his hasty decision.

in particular, a moment or two of this heavenly ascent is dedicated to a particular unassuming duffel bag bearing his name that is (probably not) in the hold just below.

(...)

october 19, 2002 - 23:01 - policy of dancing

flirting with, if just for a moment, triple digit speeds along the straightaway at PIR, i sit up from my crouched position and click down through the gears in rapid anticipation as turn 1 comes screaming out of the horizon.

sliding up towards the tank and then down to the right, i timidly extend my right knee outwards and mouth breathless words to the bike beneathe me: sway when i sway.

as if still learning to dance with a new partner, i am timid at best, and check velocity with particular trepidation going into almost every corner.

it was only later, after i'd ridden home and washed my bike, that i discovered that i had managed managed to rip the tell-tale track dingle-berries (is there another name for these?) past the chicken strip of the previous owner and far out onto the sides of my antiquated rubber.

(kitty will be so proud of me...  err, just as long as she doesn't remember that i did it in my connies; my boots haven't arrived just yet).

smiling to myself, i reflect upon my virigin rz-track experience, only hours before, and reflect on the amount of reservation i carried into every turn.

yes sir...  with a new pair of shoes, this bike'll make a just fine dancing partner, me thinks.

btw, bl: the swirl this morning was enough, okenfold as a chaser would have killed me.  ;)

october 18, 2002 - 12:17 - if cats could talk?

i found the following excerpt at: http://wwwndo.ak.blm.gov

In the high Arctic, the arctic wooly bear caterpillar spends most of the year frozen, surviving temperatures as low as minus 94oF (minus 70oC). Growth is slow since the caterpillars thaw out and eat only one month a year. They are usually 14 years old before they are large enough to metamorphose into an adult moth, which reproduces and dies a few weeks later.

thought a: a 14 year old caterpillar?  wow.  that's fodder for a miyazaki film; surely he could talk by then, and if so inclined, he could be legal to drive in some states.

thought b: can you imagine spending the entire span of your life (14 years) striving to become something else, and then upon reaching that goal, recognizing you've only got a few precious weeks to enjoy it?

...sure must be sweet to be able to fly.

(actually, i guess i'd do the same; though, i'd trade weeks for minutes, were i offered the moon)

october 16, 2002 - 07:57 - madd fer dandelions

this morning, when i came into the office with my breakfast to sign on, i had brought spike his breakfast too. (a couple blades of fresh cut grass, per the various instructions we'd found online.)

during the night, he had climbed up onto his perch, and was chilling in the leaves like an alien flower.  although he came down to checkout the grass, he quickly retreated, returning again to his perch.

just before she left, kf brought us a fresh dandelion leaf, and lifting the orange roof, i placed it in spike's house.  ( most of the doc we found yesterday suggested that although spike could survive on fresh grass, wooly bears were known to love dandelions.)

sure enough, placing the leaf in the the cage, he came running down, inched across the length of his digs, and is now hiding underneathe.  it makes me sad i can't see him, but i guess it's cool he's happy.

october 15, 2002 - 17:22 - last one out, please turn off the lights

i just found out that the company laid off the lay-off person during last weeks' round of 'redundancies.'  (which sucks, because i was friends with this individual, but really...)

...just how is one supposed to interpret that?

october 14, 2002 - 22:10 - i named him spike

today, the girl brought me a new pet.  a caterpillar!   he's all spikey, with black and brown stripes.  she made a little house for him, with leaves from his home to eat, and things to crawl on and so i can watch while i'm sitting at my puter.

i've never had a pet caterpillar before...  had to research who he was (a wooly bear caterpillar), what he eats, ( dandelions), and what he might become : (isabella tiger moth).

a tigermoth?  maybe i can train him to attack my god-blastin or gangsta-rappin neighbors!  how cool would it be to have a pet mothra? -- gosh, i hope the little guy'll make it that far...

edit: (17:25) the girl came through again..  a man page on wooly bear caterpillars!  perfect

october 13, 2002 - 11:48 - just a pefect day (go fly a kite)

everyone expresses concern for the overwhelming nature of overcast weather in the PNW.  so far, my experiences in pdx seem to mimic those of university; sure it's cloudy, and it rains, but when it's sunny, it's really sunny.

everybody's outside.  windows are down, doors are open.   people walk down wet streets in bright colored clothes, say "hello," breathe fresh air, interact.

it is as if, without a little weather, it's really hard to appreciate a nice day when it arrives.  (relativity?)  my experiences in sc (host to an average 300 sunshine-laden, postcard perfect days a year) seem to confirm the reciprocal.

it was the second of three such delightful days yesterday, a day where the weather drew me to the garage, a scooter drew me to the island, and a challenge drew me from the scooter.

maize maze;  a tourist trap, oregon style.  an acre or two of overhead "maze", carved deep into a corn field.  on such a lackadaisical day, how could one resist?

i lost my companions, and then, finding a quiet path, i lost myself.  squeals of laughter, and shouts between strangers drew fainter as i walked farther out, in quite obviously the wrong direction.

ultimately, i chanced upon a seldom-used path, readily apparent by the unevenness of the ground, and the narrow, almost over-grown nature of the stalks on both sides.  sitting down, then lying on my back, i become captivated, staring up through 12' stalks swimming with the breeze against a sea of blue sky.  heaven.

i'm not sure how long i was there, but with time a young girl, with blonde hair pulled back in blue ribbons, jolts me out of my daydream.   --small enough to walk upright beneathe much of the foilage, she has appeared off the path, just to my left, having just made one of her own.

smiling, she greets me, 'oh, hello.'

startled, i can barely reply before she's gone again, just as suddenly as she appeared, hence the way she came.  (did that just happen?)

taking this as a sign, i rise again, collect my things and solve the maze, remount my scooter and return to the open road.

bored with doubling back, i opt to head out farther, to explore along the backside of the island, with the intention of full circumspection.   this is rural country; there's no traffic, and no intersections.  4th gear, steady cruising, 45 mph.

(plink) -- the indescribable sound of insect body disintegration on helmet visor.   (plink) and another one, and...  (plink)

i'm in the middle of a swarm of ladybugs.  slowing, i find that i can push through the mass at ~25 mph without collecting their insides.   some land on coat, headset, cruise with me for awhile.

for three miles, we swarm.

then i turn left, out of the pack, and onto a gravel road between a recently harvested pumpkin patch (i think) and a vinyard.  at the apogee of a gradual slope, i find the perfect condtions to draw the bandit from my scooter-mounted kite holster, and walking downwind, begin laying the lines.

...just a perfect day indeed.

october 11, 2002 - 17:07

at the end of the month, i've taken to running a report on the access log for this site using webalizer; although the result is brimming with data that i'll never bother to read, my favorite metric (by far), is that of the top 20 search strings that have lead 'information seekers' to my dark little corner in the ether.

these are a few snippets from september's logs:

• analysis of santa ana's leg
• beating heart flash movie free
• cadillac taillight condensation
• daily trivia of particle physic's
• experiments of the conscience on roller coasters
• fast mini motorbikes colored green with a 7 on it
• flame-throwers boys
• giant light switch

i cannot help but to wonder the psyche behind each; where they were going, and if they found what they were looking for...

on the other hand, i wonder what events in my life may have turned up keywords or references that the various search engines saw fit to consider as relevant.

in a way, it's kinda like looking back on your life through a memory-distorting kaleidoscope.

october 11, 2002 - 07:41 - i can use chopsticks too

so, there i was.  illuminated by a field of blue LED's, i could see my reflection in a sleeping lcd panel; bright red jumpsuit, a dark-haired wig, and silvery techno sox that seemed half space boot and half leg warmer.

knobs, dials, switches.  again, ubiquitous arrays of LED's that dance like future pop at a goth club, they stand out, but are tolerated in the dark.  above each bank of controls, a carefuly engraved plaque hosts hieroglyphs etched in white against a black polished background; i recognize them as kanji, but cannot decode their intent.

ultimately my gaze falls just to my right, where framed in a little portal of thickly paned glass, spins our blue planet, rotating silently in the infinite darkness below me.

not so much speech, but as unthrottled exhalation, air rushes from my chest with the dawning understanding of my predicament; 'major tom to ground control.'

my head is pounding in time to my heart, and placing hand to face, i see that i'm bleeding slightly from a cut on my forehead; "how on earth did i get here?"  --i remember an explosion.  no, that was the launch.   it was before that.

oh yes...  the draft.

...........

shrouded in secrecy, the chinese had recently ramped up their aspirations to step beyond placing other countries (or corporations) satellites into orbit, and had boosted funding to their shoe-string space program, in the quest to bolster national pride and become one of the three space bound superpowers.

cloaked in this silence, hundreds of hand-selected hopefuls had begun training deep in the mountains; these were the bejing's brightest, the people's yuhangyuans, chinese astronauts.

as a parry to the mainland's advance, the taiwanese govt. (fueled by unnamed western agendas) had begun its own program, formed its own pirate plans.

through some series of events, she had secretly been selected by this organization as one of a dozen hopefuls, and i had been asked to be responsible for delivering her safely to the island in the east.

our passage (and purpose) was almost discovered a dozen times over, but somehow we always were just a step ahead of our faceless pursuants.   her return to taiwan was uncelebrated, and no loved ones had been informed, or were present to meet us.

in the weeks that transpired, she fell deep into training, and i took to riding a borrowed bicycle through crowded city streets, revelling in the color and smell.  (and dying in the smog).

ultimately, the day came, and we were smuggled deep into china, onto the base itself by underground taiwanese sympathizers.  at the inner gate to the launch area, her forged credentials carried us through the main entrance, a proud yuhangyuan escorted by an american scientist.

(we walked as a literal projection of two heavily restained forms that even now skulked in the back of a rapidly shrinking van, hastily racing back in the direction we had just come from).

a shiny aluminum lift carried us hundreds of feet, where we finally exited, near the top of the tower.  there, standing on a bright yellow gangway we gazed down the elegant length of the rocket before us.

it had been christened 'the long march', and stood now, defiantly, as a symbol of chinese ingenuity, a proud exclamation to the west (and dissidents in the east) of their technical prowess.

just to our left, where the yellow walkway met the rocket, there was a dark opening, where a red panel, adorned with yellow stars, slid out from the steel surface, (a symbolic break in the continuity of the chinese flag, carefully applied in paint to the side), exposing the shadows and uncertainty inside.

after months of planning, the next few minutes seemed like instants.   two guards, sympathetic to our cause, drew their weapons and ordered the disarmament of nationalists.  one overzealous young man adjacent to us managed to squeeze his trigger, and in the instant before he was cut down from behind, the brief burst of lead rain that sprang forth sullied almost all our hopes.

she fell down suddenly, her red jumpsuit growing dark with a sticky wet that swelled from her right leg.  her face white with the pain of realization; dreams were escaping now through the same small hole that her blood flowed forth.

t - 5 minutes, and counting...

we began scrambling. unaware of the events that were transpiring, the chinese govt. continued with their plans to broadcast the historic walk to the capsule.  due to my familiarity with the launch sequence, i was selected to step into a red jumpsuit of my own, and dawned a wig that crudely reflected the cut of her hair.

a special ops agent, one of the earlier guards, tended to her wound and began dressing it per her demands that everything continue as planned.

to que, at t-2 minutes, another of our undercover guards races up to the rocket, and on live television, lays a blue decal adorned with white star over the existing five yellow stars, transforming, in an instant, the chinese flag into that of taiwan.   our move was now public, and the improbability of our success was broadcast to the rest of the world.

it turns out, we were a slight bit too zealous.

t - 1 min, 27 sec.  she stands again, and biting her lip in pain begins the walk towards the now-blue door.  i have now completed the prelaunch sequence, and tossing my notebook to the side, reach up for the latch to allow her entry.

as the inner bolts slide free and the door pushes open, i am blinded temporarily by the sunlight, which surges forward, as if violently fighting for a chance to return home.

then, over her shoulder, shadows recoil and reveal flood of forces, all dressed in black, spilling out onto the brightly colored gangplank.   she is taken, and having no route to escape, i slam the door closed again.

a man is yelling at me now, screaming in a language i can barely comprehend.  his face, twisted and cartoonish, is distorted through thick glass like the spherical curve of a vintage t.v.   so hopeless, so sure of my own end, i can't help but laugh.

then, deep below me, a rumbling that sounds like plates of the earth moving against itself; recorded over a thousand years, and played now in fast forward...

..........

ok.  so that's the last time i read air and space magazine before going to sleep.  i'm sorry.  i wont do it again....

...at least, not till tonite.   (i'll make it to the moon somehow ;)

october 10, 2002 - 15:46 - dragon envy

um, dragonspeak 6 is out, with an impressive array of ah, new features, that i can't imagine how i have, umm, ever survived without.

• Nothing But Speech (NBS)™, a tool that filters out fillers and sounds between dictation-such as "uhms" and "ahs"-to avoid insertion of unwanted words.

ah, that's a super-whipper-snapper-go-faster-mo-betta-feetcha if i've ever, um, heard of one!  yaaah, uh, i, um need, i need.

october 9, 2002 - 21:17 - i'm wearing red pants; see?

so, i think tonite might have been one of those unspoken turning points in our relationship.  this evening, the girl took me to washington to go drag racing.

there is a facility there, just over the border, that has an indoor track and allows people to rent and race high-performance go-karts.  turns out that ladies night is wednesday, and they get half off of the $16 track fee.

of course, somebody got the bright idea to inquire if guys in drag were similarily eligible..  --i don't think the girl behind the counter quite new what she was getting into when she shrugged indifference.

so, there i was.  standing outside the establishment in a borrowed (modest, ankle-length) techno skirt (my fav., actually.. has all these neat pullcords and zips), a white top, scarf, and orange wig.  catching my own reflection as i approach the doors, it was hard to quell the feeling of being a poorly dressed extra for the fifth element.

yep.  worked well enough.  $8 gets me in, and my mc full-face saves me on the helmet rental.

sadly $8 can not help redeem the events that transpired next.

once i was strapped in by the local flunkee, it became immediately apparent that the loose skirt was going to be an issue in the open-frame karts, especially as they neared top speed on the front straightaway.

fears confirmed, i found quickly that the billowing material was much happier fluttering about my waist than even pinched between my knees; thusly corner speed was dramatically effected by my predisposition towards preventing public viewing of my red flannel penguin pants.

a lap or two later, my jeans-clad girlfriend actually laps me, and i conclude that i'm wholly unsuccessful at either decent driving, or public decency, so i decide it's time to go for style points instead.

i take to flashing unsuspecting bystanders my underpants, whilst going into rather technical corners.  it is a foolish and unsuccessful attempt to feign my indifference to the race unfolding around me, or of masking the pain that little steering wheels cause arms with WHD.

the highlight, of course, is about the time two cute boys on the side that have been playing along have me worked up enough to lift the skirt up above my head along the back straight.

throwing it down again for the quick left at the end, i get the slippery material entwined in the steering wheel.  impeded like this, i'm entirely unable to get a good grip, and ultimately end up crashing into the wall, at speed.

cute boys fall down laughing.  girlfriend laps me again, (this time shaking her head), and i wait in idling silence for the flunkee to free my kart from the barrier.

yah.  that was truly a hilight of my life.  honest.  ;)

october 8, 2002 - 13:42 - bored with the dub

whilst shaking my head through another front page on current affairs, the elementary nature of this iraq issue dawns on me:

clearly our boy dubya has worked himself into a veritable corner; his rally call of wrong-doing and empty threats have now reverberated through the playground with ill effect.   there is quite simply no way for him to let the issue die now and still save face.

it is in this realization that i had a dystopian shakespearean vision.

either gw (romeo?), or sadam (the prince of cats?), or both must join mercutio in the shadows.

the answer? : solved in 1984, and reffed by tina, THUNDERDOME!  'two men enter, one man leaves!  two men enter, one man leaves!'  -c'mon dubya, how much a cowboy are ya?  ;)

hell, i bet they could even sell tickets on pay per view, and use the funds for something useful...  like relaunching the apollo program and sending me to the moon.

october 7, 2002 - 13:01

it takes a special kind of madness for one man to look at another with all seriousness and inquisitively utter the word 'thunderdrome?' in the silence of a darkened living room.

surely, it's a kind of shared insanity, as the yet silent form glances at his watch, and looking up, suggests that at 11:51 pm, there were still 9 minutes left to pick it up from the video store.

a special kind of madness indeed...

for interests in personal safety, one might inquire what crazed series of events might lead to this rare state?

although i'm not so sure myself, i might suggest that the unspoken sense of accomplishment related to spending the wind-down hours of a lazy sunday watching the first two episodes of the madmax series in rapidfire sucsession: mad max, and the road warrior, might have had something to do with it.   ;)

it's the kind of madness that forces you to stand up, and sing "we don't need another hero" with tina turner at 2 am in your living room, just as loud as you can, neighbors be damned.

(as for the next morning guilt..  i'd like to say it was there, but, well, it wasn't.  in fact, we were so unabashed in our bad movie spree that we followed this morning with a copy of madmax on h20, thinly disguised (for those not in the know) by the name 'waterworld.' )

do you know how hard it is to find a truly tasteless movie like waterworld these days?   - dancing on the fine line between celebrated b-cinema and bad (like really bad) hollywood cheese can lead to a sort of no-mans land that took us three video stores to find the bottom of.

october 5, 2002 - 16:57 - high viscosity expectations

sarah takes the fifth, alters her life forever.  jack redirects funds earmarked for airfare to acrylics and art board instead.  an unmet neighbor continues her saturday ritual of broadcasting the god channel for the salvation of the street.

..........

everybody's life is changing today.

..........

earlier, when i went to the art store, it was cold outside so i wore my bright orange scarf;  it's the first time this fall i've been able to do so.        i really love that scarf...

october 3, 2002 - 21:12 - who misses molly? - {i do}

so, i just received word from a good friend that he too, was in a mc accident last weekend.  (confirming, yet again, that september is bad news bears).

leg pinned between motorbike and a hard place results in fragments where femur once was; now he too boasts rods of steel to stand upon.

in good spirits when we talked, he had actually called to inquire if i was interested in repurchasing my (well, used to be mine) rally 180; turns out he had promised a significant other that another event like this would result in the rapid sale of his two wheeled inventory, to which he was now obliged.

i told him that bmw has a solution.  i told him to see the one;  she will help.

in the meantime, i'm trying to keep talking myself out of readopting another scooter...

october 2, 2002 - 7:25 - turtleneck takeout

how the rain from yesterday folds into crystalship-crispness of last night (constellations and breath condensation in 40' airswim ) which lies obscured in the fog outside my window this morning; weather as variable as a love affair. -that's what i love about it here.

so futuristic ---> so rustic?      ( the fall...   the fall. )

just falling.  although, as my friend bl pointed out, it's not soo much the 'feeling of letting go' itself...  instead, i propose, it's the 'feeling of letting go of the expectation,' -the very notion that you might be able to somehow control your descent.

the act relaxing, finally letting things happen on their own.   falling in love, falling from buildings; quite the same, really: exhilerating?  scary?  fast?

and then, when fall crashes into winter, and the crunchy leaves finally lie quiet and broken all around, then the cold-dark-chill of a new season sets in, and we can all wear turtlenecks and wool pants and drink coffee and talk sartre.

october 1, 2002 - 9:16 - i've waited all year for this...

so much confusion
when autumn comes around
what to do about october
how to smile behind a frown?
it's hard to settle down

it's so bemusing
will they cancel the parade?
we marched each october
now they say we were never even saved
we must be very brave

     shall i rewrite or revise
     my october symphony?
     or as an indication
     change the dedication
     from revolution to revelation?

so we're all drinking
as leaves fall to the ground
because we've been thinking
how october's let us down
then and now

( more )