Soccer Saturday

The soccer infection seems to have spread.

Either that or we are becoming some sort of comic-book suburban family, because both my offspring have taken up kid soccer. Saturday I did nothing but soccer, kid or otherwise, it seemed.

Missy started us off in the morning with her little U-8 team playing on the football field down in Westmoreland Park in SE Portland. That's Little Miss wearing #4 in the photo above, by the way...

Most of the little ones don't really "play soccer". They run around chasing the ball; it's the worst sort of kiddie bunchball, for the most part. Missy's team was lucky to have Jazmine (wearing #12 in the snapshot above) who is not just four inches taller than the rest of the tinies but actually has some foot-eye coordination and some muscle memory skills.

Jazmine basically won the little one's first match; both the opposition (called, ridiculously, "Liverpool"...) and her own teammates were basically there to provide local color.

Pleasantly, neither Little Miss and her team nor her opponents seemed to care much about the game. They enjoyed the running around, and the cupcakes afterwards. Missy got in some good kicks and even provided Jazmine with an assist on one of her many goals.

My favorite part was the two teams turning the perfunctory post-match lineup-and-palmslap-good-game-Cheetahs! ritual into their own little vortex of kid energy, as they turned around and around four times giggling "good game Liverpool/Falconettes!" as they swirled and twirled.

The Boy's game was that afternoon and was an entirely more serious business.

Peep has decided he like playing in goal; he says he likes being the Last Line of Defense and being able to use his hands. Even giving up three goals in his half of play didn't seem to really discourage him. Good boy; I'd have been furious if I'd have shipped five goals in a half.

The afternoon was warm and lazy, and the sidelines were a Rockwellesque picture of soccer moms and dads, brothers, and sisters enjoying the day and uncritically applauding the play, good and bad.

Luckily for us we met a friend from Astor school and her daughter who shared Missy's love of all things My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, so the two little girls gleefully played ponies and thus whiled away the boring brother's game...

The Boy's team was rather handily thrashed, but this didn't seem to faze Number One Son, who hung around after ward to play kickabout with his pal (whose golazo was one of the few highlight for the "Cheetahs") and enjoyed the post-match chocolate shake-and-Burgerville-fries without a shade of remorse.

To top off the night I drove down to the Timbers match against Toronto FC. The team has been having a bad patch lately; injuries and suspensions have thinned an already-thin first XI and three meetings with first-place Real Salt Lake have resulted in three ugly defeats.

So going to a match lately has seemed less like "fun" and more like a chore; a disagreeable chore that has to be suffered through to help the team. As the troubles mount on the pitch it seems more critical to sing and chant and implore the Boys into the fight.

But it doesn't seem very enjoyable.

So it was an unanticipated pleasure to attend a match that exploded in a glorious cascade of Portland goals, four of them, and turned into a spontaneous party and outburst of happiness.

The tradition in Portland is that our lumberjack "mascot" Timber Joey saws off a slice of log for each goal and another for the keeper if he keeps a clean sheet.

As you can see, Saturday night's harvest was a pretty impressive pile of lumber.

Then - in keeping with the week I've been having - I had to drive out to Beaverton and do the recordkeeping for my workday Friday. It was early morning Sunday when I pulled up outside the darkened house to round out a day full of soccer with a sleep.

The Painters Depart

The hard bright skies and drought of summer are passing.

Mornings are turning cool.

The rains have returned, fitful late summer rains that bring with them the sullen bump and rumble of night thunder. The streets steam in the afternoons with the aftermath of the sunshowers.

The small urban animals have suddenly appeared in haste to find their winter's stores; the several species common to the city, the survivors and the scavengers and the scroungers willing or able to live close by Man. Starlings and scrub jays, squirrels and opossums and raccoons all reappear after their long summer loafing scrabbling for the late-summer fruits and the provender of the tray feeders as the closing of the Door into Summer warns them the long cold nights of winter are coming.

The schools reopen, the children, the adolescents, and the young men and women pulled back into them, disappearing from the streets like the lost children of Hamelin.

Somehow the rhythm of the workweek is changed by the absence of these smaller people, as if the knowledge that they, too, are back to their work makes my own workday different.

The house-painters finish their work, touch up the last of the thin spots, take up their dropcloths and their paint rags and depart. The clean whiteness of the siding shines brighter gemmed with raindrops, the trim crisp gold and greed standing out from the new coating.

On the front porch the old fir planking shines rich red-brown, released from ninety years of darkness under layer upon layer of paint.

The Befreiungskrieg Mojo and I waged with our stripping gel and sandpaper fought through the wire-belts and bunker-lines of the years, beginning with our own forest green down through the gray left by The Former People to colors of which we had no understanding. Who had thought that the gaudy Christmas-Time Green was a good idea? Or the fire-engine red? And more gray? How much gray does a house porch need? Light gray, dark gray, medium gray...fifty shades of gray or more.

At bottom the wood of douglas-firs long reaped, nicked and scarred and darkened by long wear and hard use. Wood for the working day, cull of the straight-grain Twenties but clearer and smoother than anything sold as prime lumber today. Wood that feels smooth and clean under the hand and glows with antique character as I sweep the coats of lacquer across it.

In the grass of the yard outside the summer-sere gives way to the first return of green. A scattering of leaves whirls down, the first of autumn's cascade. Spiderwebs banner bush and limb and trail across your face as you pass; the garden spiders seem to suddenly appear in late summer with the other urban wildlife in a final burst of energy before the cold.

All of this I observe in passing, because the other late-summer change has been the rude uprising in my workweek. For most of the last half of August and the first week of September I have risen, dressed, and departed in darkness and returned in darkness as well.

I have observed the changes I've described almost as a passerby, stopping to assess the changes in a place he often visits but does not dwell. Noting the gross differences in color and shape, the subtle alteration of habit and use.

Smiling the secret smile of knowledge shared with strangers, at the shared recognition of small details that only the familiarity of long acquaintance can lend.

A Syrious Question

Thinking about this Syria tsurris, I have a question for the readership.

Let me start by saying that IN THIS CASE I see pretty much all the military options available to the U.S. as "bad". I don't see how anything short of a fairly massive effort will have any more than a nuisance effect, while anything short of a successful Turkish invasion and occupation (h/t to Sven in the comment thread over at MilPub!) has IMO a fairly serious risk of Somaliaizing this whole portion of the Levant. This particular case is one where the "First, do no harm" rule pretty much comes into force.

Now.

That said, what I'm wondering is whether the whole political drive from within the Obama Administration (aided and abetted, of course, by the usual Republican Warhawk Chorus Starring John McCain!) isn't a 2013 variation of the sort of thing that Great imperial Powers have always done to small states and peoples who irritate them?

At least here for the U.S. the actual "risk" is pretty minimal...there's little likelihood of losing three legions in a forest, or an entire punitive expedition in the Hindu Kush.

So while it's frustrating for U.S. citizens to watch our government do this stuff, I'm not sure how you avoid it unless you're sensible enough to not play the Imperial Game at all, and I can't think of a Great Power in history what hasn't, from the Expedition to Syracuse through Crassus' legions in Parthia to Adowa to Isandlhwana to LZ X-Ray...

I'm not trying to say "oh, well, it just is what it is.." or minimize the additional misery this will do to the already-pretty-damn-miserable country or that irritation with the ridiculous way it seems to being ginned up, but I guess I have wonder; is this another example of U.S. geopolitical/strategic cluelessness (as I think my man seydlitz would suggest)...or just a Great Power's instinct to hammer down any nail it doesn't like to see sticking up? Are Obama and his people making a unique mistake, or are they doing the same thing that Kublai Khan did in Java in 1293, Deng Xiaoping did in Vietnam in 1979, or Woodrow Wilson did in Mexico in 1916?

So my "big picture" question would be "...is there a way for the U.S. in particular to avoid this, or is this sort of thing a feature of being a Great Power, not a bug in this particular Administration or ANY U.S. Administration..?"

Because if the former, well, there would seem to be a way out of this damned rut. But if the latter...

I'm genuinely curious; what do you think?

Get Syrious

I honestly have no idea what the hell is going on in the heads of the Very Serious People running my country with regard to this Syrian chemical attack.

First, let's start by assuming that Assad's guys did pull this off and slimed their own civvies.

Yeah, that pretty much sucks. Not exactly Final Solution or Armenian Genocide sucks, but up there on the scale of suckage somewhere.

Still.

My country has been happy to ignore this sort of nasty suckage when it wants to. What's magical about this?

Well, it's chemicals.

Now believe it or not, I actually buy that there's an argument that We the People have a national interest in ass-kicking people who throw chemical weapons around.

I don't AGREE with the argument, but I'll agree that there IS one.

To wit: We're the 800-pound gorilla of conventional war. If nothing else, Gulf Wars II and III convinced pretty much every other national leader with a functioning hindbrain that taking on Uncle Sugar in a conventional donnybrook was just stupid. You would get creamed. Period.

But bugs and gas (nukes, too, but those are ridiculously hard to get hold of or make) are great levelers. They're the sleeper hold of warfare. Comprehensively slime U.S. troops and you go a long way to reducing their combat efficiency to the level of just any other gomers.

(Now, obviously, the problem with this is that most Second and Third World troops are WORSE at operating in a CBR battlefield than US forces, but, whatever, if you're Assad you know your guys are just shit on toast anyway, right?)

The U.S. foreign policy (and military policy, since our foreign policy has become very militarized...) is to brook no peer foe. You try and compete with Sammie's Arsenal of Democracy? Here's some incoming for you, Tojo!

U.S. policy, as it currently stands, cannot accept the possibility of some crappy little ruler of some crappy little country trying to use chemical weapons to level the military playing field.

So clearly the U.S. doesn't want to encourage ANYBODY to think that way. So fuck Geneva and international law; it's in the U.S.'s best interest to remind anyone who even thinks of using chemicals that the result will be a massive ass-whupping of the most medieval sort. Peer through the fog of humanitarian bullshit (and that's not to say that some of the speakers don't ACTUALLY want to punish Assad for sliming his own people, assuming that his guys in fact did and in fact did it deliberately, something I consider still speculative at best...) and you'll find there's a hard core of naked self-interest here.

That's fine. Kinda shitty, but that's what nations are supposed to do; suss out their "interests" and act on them.

Again - that self-interest proceeds from the notion that the U.S. defense policy HAS to be based on bitchslapping everyone who even looks capable of cocking a snook at us.

I don't agree that this is a smart defense policy.

But it appears to be the one currently accepted in D.C. So I understand that the "leaders" there see the situation above in just the fashion I've described it. And, therefore, see a burning need to use force to "punish" the reckless foreign leader that crosses the line into chemical war.

BUT...again, here's my problem with this situation; the notion that punitive force is a "deterrent" or a "punishment" in this case is laughable.

Assad is playing the Game of Thrones in Syria; he wins or he dies. And he is, if not losing, at least not winning. So at this point he has little to lose risking American "punishment". He knows that the Yankees have no love for his enemies, and that they cannot do more than give him a love-tap for fear that his chaotic mess of rebel foes (who make Libya's TNC look like the Athenian civic improvement society, from what I can tell...) will up and take over.

Plus, frankly, for the U.S. to do this while ignoring all the other vile crap we've either encouraged (or at least ignored) in "friendly" states or places we didn't care about, from Saddam's sliming the Iranians back in Gulf War I to Rwandan genocide, to "yellow rain", to the Egyptian coup...well, if you're a person sitting in darkness it sure looks less like "justice" and more like the strong doing what they can...

I find it interesting that the British lawmakers aren't playing. They got into the clown car back in '03, and they've seen where this idiot carnival ride ends.

Put all of this together - the sorry record of the U.S. on this sort of "humanitarian" beatdown, the actual win-or-die facts in Syria, the huge mass of "unknown unknowns" surrounding what happens when the U.S. makes parts of Syria go boom - and it damn sure looks like a mug's game to me.

The only reason to do this seems to be so the Good People can say "We did something."

But "something" isn't always the sensible or useful thing to do. The old rule of medicine is Primum non nocere - "First, do no harm" - meaning that if you can't do good, actual good, foreseeable good, than the next best thing is to do nothing if doing "something" might do harm.

Frankly I see no reason why blowing the shit out of some barracks and ministries in Baghdad will do good, or nothing, instead of harm.

The sad and sorry part about this is that the U.S. has blood and treasure to piss away on this nonsense. We will drop a scattering of ordnance on Syria like Lady Bountiful's largesse and walk away whistling. There really isn't a downside to beating down these poor bastards a little further. We'll probably end up doing it and walking away whistling. A couple more dead camel-jockeys. Oh, well.

Except within ourselves, where we go a little further down the road to Iron Rome.

A little smaller, a little meaner, a little stupider. A little more willing to accept idiotic things, brutal things, pointless things, violent and secret things, evils, small and great, done with neither our assent nor our demur but instead with our bovine indifference. We stare at the television screen showing us the deaths and horrors of others as if they were a play, or as if it were a joke, or a sport, like bored children throwing stones at animals.

But as Plutarch says; the boys throw stones at the frogs for sport but the frogs die in earnest.

It seems that someone somewhere in Syria will die soon at the hand of my nation. The death, it seems to me, is unlikely to do anything but add another mite of misery to that miserable place.

And I have absolutely, positively, utterly no fucking idea what to do, or say, about that.

I am as clueless as any Senator or cabinet officer, and ten thousand times more powerless.

Hey! Get those nuts off that cat!

I have a thing for soccer scarves. And I SO have a thing for this one:

"The Rose City Riveters have teamed up with the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon and we’re selling a scarf to benefit them."

Hell, I'll wield the little kitty-gelding pliers myself...

...to get my hands on one of these sweet mufflers.

The link here, by the way, is that our big-league soccer field has a bunch of feral kitties living down in the bowels of the stands. I blogged about that back in the spring of last year; if nothing else it made for a great two-stick.

And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that our own Nitty Kitty has lost her organs of generation, just in case you were thinking that I was one of those "no foolin' around for you but it's OK for me..." sorts of people.

Right, Nitty?

What whine goes well with salmon?

Driving home from field work up in the 'Couve today and I caught a ginormous version of this sticker on the back window of a pickup truck:

Get the picture? Naughty sea lion, stealing salmon off the hook.

You tend to see these stickers - I think they have a name something like "the salmon thief" - on various places and objects connected to sport fishermen around here, where salmon and steelhead are the grail of most anglers.

I won't kid you; every time I see one of these I either fucking laugh out loud, or sneer and shake my head at the joker flying it.

Because growing up my family drove home to me in the strongest possible terms the conviction that the worst thing a man or woman could do was whine.

If you got the dirty end of the stick you were welcome to rage to the people or person who handed it to you. Anger? Go for it. Fighting? Fine. Scorn? Hatred? Fury? All good. You were welcome to move heaven and earth to the extent you could if you had been wronged.

If that didn't change things, though, you sucked it up and drove on.

(That attitude helped me a lot in the Army, by the way. In case you were wondering.)

I learned that the very worst response to Life bitchslapping you was to sit there and whine about it.

That's what this salmon-thief sticker says to me. It's a pictoral whine; some guy with a boat and a fishing rod and the time to enjoy both of them pissing and moaning about a freaking marine mammal.

Thing is, the western North American coast pinnepeds - the California and Stellar Sea lions - evolved along with the salmon. The furry rapscallions have been gutsing delicious chinook and steelhead since the end of the Ice Age. They're also very bright and adaptive predators, and it was pretty much a no-brainer that when the hairless monkeys threw up a great big ginormous concrete wall to stop salmon swimming upriver that the sea lions were going to show up there for the buffet.

Duh.

Humans blaming the sea lions for chowing on salmon that humans penned into a big ol' manmade fish trap is like blaming the hammer for hurting you when you fucking hit yourself on the head.

It's pretty damn stupid to whine about that, and it's pretty damn stupid for sport fishermen to whine about sea lions taking the salmon.

For one thing, the sport fishermen are the kaiju monsters of Columbia River fishing. They've pretty much already stomped the gillnetting captains flat and no agency or politician wants to mess with them. They get the real lion's share of the fish coming up the river.

And for another, the sea lions aren't the real problem.

The dams are the real problem.

Don't get me wrong. I like electricity. I would have been right there on the banks of the Columbia in 1934 cheering the first trainload of concrete into Bonneville. I understand why we built the dams and why we still keep them today.

But they're fish killers. The dams - not the sea lions, not the dredging or the pollution or the logging or the development (though none of that shit helped) - killed the great runs that astounded the first white men, the runs that left them awed and talking about "walking from Oregon to Washington on the backs of the salmon".

The dams are the real salmon thieves.

But for the sport fishermen to take on the dams they'd have to actually punch up; take on the huge and powerful interests that line up with the dams here in the Northwest; the Bonneville Power Authority, regional power companies like PGE and every little pud-pulling Public Utility District. Dryland farmers addicted to cheap irrigation water. Cites and towns, industries that loves them some cheap hydropower. Homeowners, rate-payers, state legislators.

That'd take some actual grit, some real cojones, to try and force all those people to make the big changes in the dams that would need to happen to save the wild salmon runs. To rage and fight at the real salmon thieves. Instead of driving around with a silly goddamn sea lion sticker on your truck.

Ain't that America, though?

So when I see these silly sea lion stickers I can't help but sneer, sheeyah, nice, monkey boy, punching down the evolutionary tree you big man, you.

How about some nice baked chinook with that whine?

Morning Talk with Missy

Little Girl - I think I've told you - lives to get up early.

So do I. Or, often, I have to get up early to get to a job site before seven or so.

It isn't unusual for the two of us to share the morning hours just after, or sometimes before, dawn.

So it was the other morning when, sitting at the computer in the front window, I heard the soft scuffle of blankets and the then thumping of small feet coming down the hallway and turn to see Little Miss emerging from the hall; tousleheaded and sleepy-eyed, clutching her favorite pink kittycat blanket in one hand and her beloved "stripey wubbie" in the other. She did as she often does; airborne-shuffled over to the couch, made herself a nest of blankets, wubbie, and pillows, and curled up near the armrest in a warm little-girl pile.

And I did what I often do; went and got a cup of coffee (black as night, hot as sin, rich and earthy and sweetened with cream) and sat down on the couch with her.

She took a moment or two to rearrange herself so she was cuddled up against my side and tucked her glossy black head under my arm. From the way she was sitting I could tell that I was in for a busy morning.

Sometimes the Girl get up but doesn't really wake up. When she does she just drapes herself over me and goes back to sleep. Or dozes on top of me quietly.

Those are very peaceful mornings, but rare. Usually once Little Miss is out of bed she's ready to start asking about the world around her. I enjoy hearing what's on her mind, and we are both more morning persons than not, so I waited for her first question.

Missy is the Girl of A Thousand Questions.

What is air? Why are ducks? When did you live with pre-Mommy? Why was Quinn Dog so dumb? She can and will ask questions about anything and everything. She also asks questions that you know she knows the answer to, or questions to which you have just told her the answer; she seems to do this because she likes making you answer. The Girl just likes to ask questions.

This morning's was: "Why did you and Mommy get married?"

I explained to her about how I loved Mommy and wanted to be together with her, and how we got certain tax breaks for being married, and plus it was a promise we made to each other that meant that we felt a special way about each other.

"What are tax breaks?" asked Little Miss, but before long she got bored with the explanation and asked:

"Why was The Boy in Mommy's tummy when you got married?"

I reminded her about how we had lost Baby Bryn, and how we wanted to have another baby, who turned out to be her big brother.

She thought about that for a while, and then asked: "When DID you make Baby Peeper?"

I tried to think the timing back, and explained that we had made him some time earlier that year, probably in the springtime.

"How do you make babies?"

Hmmm. Okay; well, I explained that grown-up men and women made babies by having sex, making love. From there we embarked on a digression about heterosexual reproduction, which involved discussing plants and animals and how they were the same and different than people. Missy said that she knew how people made babies; by humping. I said that Mommy and I had felt safer staying with the tried-and-true methods, so that was how we had made Baby Peeper.

"By humping?" squealed Missy incredulously, confronting for the first time (but probably not the last) the icky possibility that her mom and dad had...you know...ick!

And I should add that Missy knows about humping because...well, she does. I don't know where kids pick up this stuff; probably from one of her daycare or first grade pals. She does know about dogs humping, since she's seen it, and that Quinn the Dog used to hump his beloved chewie toy Mister Prickles and sort of understands what it means when people do it. I have questioned her and understand that she doesn't know exactly how it works, which is exactly what she then asked me then.

Nothing like a clinical question about sex from a seven-year-old at 6:30 in the morning to jump start your brain. I tried to figure out how to explain this without using terms that Little Girl wouldn't understand.

"Ummm...well, the thing is, the man has his sperm (remember, it's like the pollen from the boy part of the plant..?) inside his 'nards. And he uses his wiener to put it inside the woman's body, into a place where she has an egg called the uterus."

"How does he get it in there."

"Well, he puts his wiener in her puff-puff."

"In her puff-puff! That's GROSS!" the little one cried.

Well, yeah, it's a grown up thing, I said. Right now it seems pretty gross to you and it SHOULD.

But that's because you're little and your body aren't ready to make babies. When you're older, about 14 or 15, though, your body is going to change. You'll get this thing called "puberty". The shape of your body will change, and some things it will do will change (and if you think I was then going to get into the subject of menstruation, you're fucking nuts...), and most of all it will change some things inside your brain. You will start thinking about other people - boys, maybe, mostly, though some girls think this way about other girls - not just as people but as people that you might make babies with."

"Ewwww! I don't want to make babies."

Not now you don't, and that's good; you shouldn't want to make babies. But when your body changes it will change some of the way you think about things and people. It will want you to make babies so it can do with it's made for. So it will make you think differently about some people, even people you probably shouldn't want to think that way about, because it's not smart and just wants to make babies. Sometimes your body isn't very smart about making babies."

"Why does it want to make babies?"

So there will be more people. It's the same with flowers and trees and kitty cats and people; our bodies, like the cats and the flowers, are designed to make new people and cats and plants. But...here's the thing; we're smarter than cats and flowers. We don't HAVE to make babies unless we want to, or until we're ready to. So when your body says "Ooh! Make babies! Make babies!" your brain has to say: "Shuttup, you dummy! I'm not ready to make babies!" So you tell your body that it's not time for humping.

And sometimes that's hard, because your body gets kinda stupid. So you have to be smarter than your body.

"I don't want to hump anything, so I'm smarter than my body or you or Mommy or Peeper, 'cause he probably wants to hump stuff."

I suggested that he probably didn't and received a skeptical look in return; her brother is often the Root of All Evil. But the answer seemed to satisfy her.

Missy sucked her thumb for a bit, and peeped up;

"Who is smarter, you, or Mommy?"

I looked down at the warm little body curled up beside me, remembering her lost older sister and her mother's grief for her, how her mother cried in the night during the seeming endless fortnight in China, her soul flayed by what I think I described as "...the fraying delicacy of closening exhaustion" as she pursued the dream of a little girl to raise and love.

Of how so much of who this little person is - her warmth, her love, her curiosity, her feisty gentleness - mirrors her mother because my bride's bottomless well of patience and love has instilled them in her or fostered those of them already there.

Of how much of our success as a family is because of my wife, her mother.

Of how bright and curious and intelligent the little girl beside me was growing, and how clever (and know-it-all-ish and independent) her brother has become.

How lucky I am to have a houseful of smart, loving people around me.

I smiled out at the growing light, took a drink and pressed my coffee-warm lips to the cool sheen of her hair.

"I think you are, Little Question. Then Mommy. Then Peeper. Then maybe me."

"Well, you ARE pretty dumb, Daddy." she signed happily, wriggling deeper into her blanket-nest, silent for a moment. I listened contentedly to the silence.

For a moment.

"Why did Quinn like to hump Mister Prickles."