Peaeater

I walked home from the gym this morning in the rain. I passed the Seagull Lady's house and she was hosing off her driveway. With a hose, jetting water, in the rain. I stared at her but she's the Seagull Lady so it's not like she even noticed. 

The Seagull Lady throws her garbage out into the backyard for the gulls. That's why she's called the Seagull Lady. They go all crazy, swoop, dive, and scream at each other. The crows come, and they sidle in and grab things while the gulls are busy pecking each other's eyes out.

I can see her backyard from my office window, so I get a great view. It's Spring right now and tree foliage is blocking me, but I can still see the s***hawks bombing in at 75 degree angles.

We do our own bit to feed the birds, but we mostly get sparrows, finches, nuthatches, chickadees, juncos and squirrels. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Probably not enough banana peels and leftover spaghetti.

I listen to a lot of music during a workday. A real whole lot, and I get bored with my existing iTunes library. So would you if you listened to music 8 hours a day. I need it to concentrate, but I can't download music fast enough to satisfy the demand.

Sometimes I go in the opposite direction and purposefully play two songs on repeat. This actually works best for multi-hour concentration-fests. An unfortunate side-effect is that the songs do to my brain what boys in love do to tree trunks with pocket knives. If you peeled open the side of my head, and I beg you not to, you would see deep gougy scars left by these multi-hour song-repeat marathons. (It must be two songs, in case you're wondering. Not one. Not three. Two.)

I've tried internet radio. Not bad. Pandora at www.pandora.com is pretty good for listening to music you haven't heard based on music you already like. I also recently discovered www.criticalmetrics.com. It keeps track of recommendations and playlists from all over the place so you can try all sorts of new music. I'm currently listening to their 100 Songs We Love playlist. I'm on number... um... 32: Laura Barrett - "Robot Ponies."

This is one of those that's good, that's bad stories.

This morning I got up to make coffee. That's good!

There were no coffee beans. That's bad!

I made tea instead. That's good!

The teabag contained miniscule amounts of actual tea. That's bad!

So did the next one, and the one after that. They were anemic. That's bad!

I needed 3 teabags to make a single cup of strong tea. That's ridiculous!

Barry Pitcher is an RCMP officer with the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. He's a great guy, doing good work there training Afghan police, and I hope he stays safe. That's him in the blue.

Anyway, I played around with Yahoo Pipes and made one of Barry in Afghanistan. and RCMP in Afghanistan. Pipes allow you to combine news and web search and Flickr photos and what not in a visual editor, and get a feed out the other side.

Image from militaryphotos.net.

I have two writing moods: manic, and low. The first comes after coffee, or on sunny mornings, or after a puzzle successfully solved. The second creeps on the heels of alcohol, or defeat, or the world in shadow. While in the grips of mania, I can be funny. Rockabye in the cradle of the downside deeps, it's all Eternity, and Flame, and a trip down pale and winding stairs.

It's not a bad thing. I can feel parts of myself now fighting to shutup and conform and deny I ever think that way. I really detest those parts.

Sometimes I don't even think I know myself until I land again at the bottom on my back surrounded by stars in a black limitless sky. Like I've forgotten, like I've been a ghost since last time. There are many versions of myself. The thing is, it's not depression. Depression is a state I find myself in when I can't get here. I am more alive when I am like this, is all I can explain, and words and ideas get big and take on a kind of glow.

When I was younger I ate psilocybin mushrooms on an occasional basis. If you did not know this about me, then we should have a conversation about it, because those experiences were among the most powerful in my life, and I certainly don't regret them. I have asked many people about their experiences with mushrooms, and their responses can be very instructive about who they are as people. For me it was an opportunity to face myself, my inner self. I have been both frightened and delighted by my self. Even now I can draw strength from realizations I was forced to make while stripped mentally naked. And remember how thoughts and words burned up and out of my mouth as easily as breathing. 

It's been a long time since I've taken anything mind-altering. But I have always been influenced by metaphor, image, language and magic, and occasionally a combination of these can get me down to a similar ground-state where life becomes Life, if you know what I mean. And then I feel I need to say less and mean more.

Sing a song of stupor
little songbird
bring the nightingale narcosis

Here comes a leaden Mongol horde
a dart in chains
a thought lashed about with loops of iron

Lie still little corpse
let the grave pull you in
you are too heavy for light and air and green and growing things

You will sink
light collapse around you
a crackling shell of radio density
armored in uncertainty
with these dark halos
you will blacken the night

What now is sundered will draw to you
like love to a bed
The sky will fall about your feet in adoration
when it is made low you will be highest

You will pull up the edges of Earth
its tethers will be loosed,
you will take its mantle to your fiery heart

Here's Flipper. Or Tumbler, if you're on that side of the family. The ultrasound yesterday found a quiescent little squeak. That's right, Flipper, sleeeeeeep. I hope this is typical.

fig 1. Profile

fig 2. Legs

fig 3. Hands and face

No clever word play here. He just smells like crackers. Especially after sleeping, behind the ears. So what if he is Demandor, King of Unreasonable Requests at Six A.M.? His pleasing buttery fur smell pays all debts.

The abused word of the day is tragedy. This incredible word has a noble pedigree which lends to its every use an air of fatality* and greatness. It is unfortunately being eroded by the tendency to label mere accidents or disasters as tragedies. This is wrong. Let me tell you why.

If you can handle reading Chaucer, he has a fantastic definition:

Tragedy is to say a certain storie,
As olde bookes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in great prosperitee
And is yfallen out of high degree
Into misery and endeth wretchedly.

He who is fallen out of high degree into misery and who ends wretchedly. Here are the keys to tragedy: a fall from a high position to a low, and death without having recovered from, and even resulting from, the misery of such a downfall. So a sad ending, certainly, but not merely sad or regrettable.

I had the luck to be taught Greek Tragedy by a man who had both a vast knowledge of his subject and a rubber-limbed knack for physical comedy. So he said, with much leaping about: "A car accident is not, you know, a tragedy. If I were to raise my arms to the sky [he did so] and declare to the universe that I can drive FASTER THAN THE VERY GODS!!!! Then, then if I had an accident, that would be a tragedy. Because obviously the gods would have struck me down for my hubris."

So you see there is this implied sense of being pushed down by a vast hand. Of course we may struggle with the notion of whether it was fair or justified, whether we are just the gods' tennis balls, etc., but the event, however wretched, has marked the victim as worthy of the gods' attentions. The universe didn't just roll over and crush that person in its sleep, it sought him out, and looked at him, and squashed him. That makes him pretty special. Even Great, in the human order of things.

We all want to embiggen our lives with the notion that Fate knows us and would recognize us in the street. We're all special, in some way or other. But we can't all be Great.

* The state of being fatal, as in "proceeding from destiny."

Do you ever criticize yourself? Have past regrets? Well fret no more with the revolutionary Past-B-Gone, now in new lemon-scent spray-on formula!

Stain on the carpet? No probalo! One little spritz and the carpet never existed! Trouble with underarm odour? Apply once, and... you were born without underarms! Hitler? History!

That's right! Mistakes are a thing of the past, with... Whoops! No they're not! The past has been obliterated! Mmmm... lemony!

WHY CAN'T I GET PAST 850 POINTS IN Wii TENNIS???!!!!????

Frick, I win a best-of-5 match with 3 games in a row, and I gain a paltry 13 points. I lose a best-of-5 match by one stinkin' game and get -20.

GAARRRRRRHHHH!!!!!

If you like Sherlock Holmes like I like Sherlock Holmes then you will like this Sherlock Holmes who is both like and unlike the Sherlock Holmes we like: A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf

It's the seminal A Study in Scarlet, (the first story in which the character of Sherlock Holmes appears), but set in a post-Cthulhu-returns world. Yesss! A short read, with a cool twist. (Not counting the twist wherein the Great Old Ones rule the whole world. Whooo!)

Ye gawkers at the title of this post will best be served by playing the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, for which I remember having to create a whole group of characters before the start, due to inevitable, uh, character depreciation. The more you found out, the more your wits slipped through your fingers like runny jello. Just reading a forbidden book could put you in a mental hospital, so it was either go on to solve the mystery as a striped-night-shirt sporting, asylum-escaping, bug-eyed gibbering lunatic (which could actually be pretty entertaining), or pass the torch to your old school chum Phineas Dowd, Ph.D., investigator of the paranormal and crack shot with a pistol.

Q. Which is the slowest mollusc on land: the slug or the snail?

A. The squid.

I'm re-reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series.* I plunder the youth section of our library fairly regularly and last time they happened to have every book of the series on the shelf, and I gathered them up in my arms and headed straight for checkout, baring my teeth and hissing at the children who got in my way.

The Dark is Rising series is "high fantasy" and has all the ingredients I love. Old magic. "The Dark." A group of plucky schoolchildren. Cornwall. A mixture of Celtic and Arthurian mythology. And a peculiarly English sensibility when it comes to danger and horror. When I read this following bit I thought: "That somehow sums it up exactly:"

Upstairs, Simon paused in the little corridor linking the bedrooms, clutching his head in a kind of despairing fierceness. "This is ludicrous! Crazy! One minute we're in the middle of some awful great... watching that, that thing... and then Gummery turns up, and before you know it he's tucking us up with cups of cocoa."

-- Greenwitch, Ch. 10

I mean, the stereotypical American reaction would have been: "Git me my shotgun, Maw." But the English reaction is to fight fear and despair with a quiet intensification of ordinary life. I cannot help but admire it. It's surely a naive and oversimplified romantic admiration, but I don't care. I will always feel a deep kinship with the the British Isles. And their young adult fiction.

* Hey! I just discovered, in making a link to the Wikipedia article on The Dark is Rising, that there is a film version coming out in September 2007! With Ian McShane! You *must* see him as the villanous Al Swearengen in HBO's Deadwood. OH!!! And now I see he is doing a part in a movie version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass to be released in December 2007! The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass, all in one year? My stars, I feel faint. Fetch the smelling salts, Amelia!