Sporting my canvas

Quick personal update as I scrounge for source materials on 1914 reconnaissance.

The divorce proceedings move on, with the "settlement" (the draft of the final decree) being in process. Nothing dramatic, just the slow dissolution of twenty-two years. Sad. I already miss my wife, and to a great extent, my kids. Even the cat.

And, to a surprisingly great extent, my old house. Where, in one of those "what the fuck..?" things, I ended up back working, taking down the old fence we built decades ago. Here's what the front of the house looked like in April 2003, several years after we moved in:

That's the left front of the house looking northwest. The former owner had planted tulips all along the top of the retaining wall that the cats are inspecting. Here's the opposite corner:

Some time in the next couple of years we built a picket fence along the wall, both to keep The Boy and Quinn the dog from catapulting off the edge. Here's the same corner as in the second photo above in March 2007:

We're already working to change up the suburban dream; the bulbs are still there, but we've planted a couple of natives. Pacific wax myrtle in the corner and the vinca at the base of the dogwood is already beginning to crowd out the non-native stuff. 

The fence outlasted Quinn and the Boy's random running days, but not time and the Northwest weather. It was a good fence. But it was time for it to go.

So...

Wednesday while Mojo was at work and the grown children doing...something, I drove around with wrecking bar and power drill and sawsall.

The panels came off and took a one-way trip to the Metro dump...

The Girl asked me to save the posts; she says she wants to run espalier wires or a trellis. So I took only the two interior posts, and replaced the rotting bannister on the lower steps, then painted everything with that thick "Kilz" anti-mildew paint.

 Panels off, pre-paint:

And post-paint:

Drachma, the idiot, insisted on sleeping in the work area. Of course, he got painted (a bit) too...

Thursday afternoon it was all done, painted and pretty:

And then I took my soon-to-be-ex-wife out for a beer.

It's...very weird. I really LIKE her. A lot. More and more I'm missing Mojo the friend, the good companion, the funny one, the salty, smart, wisecracking long time sharer of confidences, hopes, fears, and dreams.

Lovers? Those come and go.

But friends? Real good, solid, dependable, heartfelt friends like her?

Goddamn it, they're beyond price.

Well.

Last weekend I had my first political ground-game work; canvassing in the spendy Southwest Lake Oswego district. Hours of pounding pavement and ringing doorbells. Nice houses, polite people.

But.

My first encounter with The Portland Voter In The Wild was...not reassuring.

Lots of "well, I'm not really sure..." and "I'm pretty much an independent..." as if this November wasn't a black-and-white choice between a bog-standard corporaDem and a raving headcase of a lunatic egotistical madman and his pack of loony little fascist running dogs intent on a New Gilded Age.

What the fuck, over?

I'm back at it this coming weekend, too. Plus writing postcards (?) to hesitant voters.

Which is nice. But I'm getting to the point where I want to be throwing fucking bombs, not writing fucking postcards. I can barely open the news without losing my composure. It's not enough to "beat" these goddamn people. The GOP needs to be destroyed, root and branch, burnt hull and sticks, plowed under and the ground sown with fucking salt.

Oh.

And as a reminder that I'm Old, between all the canvas walking and being a good lad and riding the stationary bike once I got back in my legs thanked me by spasming and cramping so badly I was up half Saturday night and slept through kendo practice Sunday morning.

Ugh.

The only thing worse than aging is the alternative.

About the Troubles...

Got back late yesterday from a week of drilling outside Skagway, Alaska. 

 

VERY weird place; it's like a Gold Rush theme park complete with boatloads of tourists. 

 

I couldn't help thinking how the "gold rush" was awful - guys desperate because the economy sucked, being cheated and fleeced by an army of grifters, and most of them going home broke after a miserable time. 

 

It's like a Disneyland "Great Depression" ride. Who wants that? 

 

Apparently lots of people!

 

Anyway, regarding the troubles.

 

In the 22-plus years we've been married there are times when my Bride sort of...goes away.

 

She retreats within herself, barricades herself behind her tablet reading, doesn't engage. She's not nasty or rude about it, but she withdraws from our marriage more than a bit.

 

The result is that eventually I come to her. Ask her how she's doing. Remind her that it's hard to do things together if we're not, y'know, together. 

 

She always acknowledges what is happening, and slowly re-emerges and we're back together.

 

About a month ago I noticed that she was doing this again. This time the problem was exacerbated by chores from the big remodel that needed "couple" sorts of inputs; paint colors, decor, that sort of thing. So, again, I sat down on a Friday evening, got her attention, reminded her of what she was doing, and asked for her to re-engage with me. She said she needed to think and she'd reply the next day.

 

Saturday morning she and I went down to the Willamette, where she told me that she had looked into herself and could find no more love. No dearness. No "us" there.

 

I asked her if she was sure.

 

She said she was.

 

I was stunned.

 

Before I left I asked Mojo to take the week to consider whether we had a chance at finding a way back together, either rekindling what we had, or finding something new.

 

Last Saturday I couldn't wait; I called and asked for her decision.

 

It was "no". 

 

So we're done.

 

Tomorrow we go see our financial planner to get the bad news. The best I can hope for, frankly, is be able to find a way to not die homeless. We're looking at having to practically double our expenses without increasing our income unless I can find someone who will hire me full- or at least part-time and right now that's not looking promising.

 

I'd like to rage and scream. I'd like to be mad at how unfair this all seems...but the only thing I can really be frustrated with is that Mojo, like my first wife before her, said nothing to let me know that her love for me was dying (or I was helping to kill it and how).

 

With my...well, soon-to-be-FIRST-ex...at least there were priors to explain why; we had very mismatched responses to stress; I got angry, she'd withdraw, and so she kept everything inside until she was just done and past done.

 

But my Bride KNEW that! 

 

And she knew that - had I known what was happening with The First Mrs. Lawes, had I known with Mojo now - I'd have done whatever I could; pretty much made myself over, made our marriage over, done whatever I could to prevent that death of love.

 

Well...it's  too late. It's done now, and all I'm left with is grief. And the hope that I can, at least, endure that grief under a roof somewhere and not under a bridge.

 

Sorry, I know that's bleak. But right now things look pretty bleak.

Sunday check-in and a question

 Got a busy week, but wanted to stop by here and download a couple of thoughts. It's been that kind of day.

The good news is that the Bride's job is reduced only 0.1FTE. We can live with that. I'll have to pick up some more contract work here and there, but we keep ALL the medical coverage, and that's what would hurt the most.

The bad news is that the goddamn IRS refuses to believe that I don't have a quarter million stashed in the Maldives.

Long story, but the bottom line is that my mother's IRA didn't get correctly divided into two inherited IRAs - one each for my sister and me - and instead went 1) into her's and then 2) into mine. There it is; it didn;t get turned into hookers and blow, or whatever the fucking IRA thinks it did. 

But the paper trail is complicated, and I'm not sure how to get the sonsofbitches to see how it worked and that I'm not hiding the money. I've got a FTF appointment this coming Friday and I hope to try and lay out what I have and see if I can convince the guy to see reason.

And fucking Trump has never been dinged so much as a nickel for all his tax chiseling? What a fucking fuckstory.

One thing I've been following with increasing incredulity has been the whole "transpanic" thing.

Fortunately Oregon is fairly insulated from this sort of wingnut freakout. It's not that our wingnuts are less freaky - they are, believe me; nobody who's stupid and twitchy enough to think that it's a great notion to move the less-paved parts of the state into Idaho is anything less than a gibbering loon - but that they're much fewer and much less in-our-faces, living as they do out in the hinterlands far from the decadence of civilization.

But as I understand it the whole idea is that these nuts are utterly unhinged on the subject of transgender people who, as I understand it, are people who are born with one set of genital plumbing but don't think and feel in harmony with that.

I joke about "Sharing the bathroom with a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock" but apparently this is a thing and a thing that utterly drives some people out of their tree; someone who goes to the ladies room and pisses standing up in the stall.

Now WHY this freaks these folks out I have no idea.

I dunno know about them, but I go to the can to do my business and I could care less about what the other people there are doing or how they do it. More than that - I don't want to know. Those excretory and urinary functions?

NOT my kink.

But apparently the whole thing - and I can't believe that it's all purely electoral cynicism; some people HAVE to be genuinely freaky about this for it to gain traction - really DOES freak people out, to which my response is complete and utter bafflement.

Seriously?

WTF, folks?

Why?

Why do you give a shit?

If someone with a cock wants to be called Shirley? If someone with a uterus wants to grow a beard and hang out at the bar with the bros? If they want to be called "them" or whatever?

Why on Earth is it your business to even care, much less "do something"?

No, really.

I totally don't get it.

There's so many things to worry about. So many fucked up problems; global warming, MILF Manor, nonalcoholic beer, exploding freight trains, Dick Cheney, the collected works of Sonny Bono. It's almost impossible to list them all, much less worry and "do something" about.

And you want to fuck around with this?

Like I said; I don't get it.

Anyone help a brother out? No kidding; what's the deal? Not with the cynical GQP scum using it for "culture war" ammo, but the CHUDs out there they're driving with it. What's THEIR problem? Why are these gomers so arsed about this?

Whisper of the axe

 

Well, the news was bad.

My Bride's position will be cut. We just don't know how hard.

Mind you, she was just one of the three out of ten people who got the axe today. She described it as "Body after body goes into the principal's office, shuts the door, comes out sad."

It's worth noting that the heaviest cuts fell on the most junior, lowly-paid staff. Which is pretty infuriating when you think that the body of one Assistant Deputy Superintendant For Paperclip Procurement would probably keep four of those people at work in the trenches where they will be doing some good.

But that's the way outfits like public schools work, and the deal we made.

The real problem now is that we don't know how hard this will hit us.

If she gets knocked back to 0.8 or 0.6FTE? It'll be hard but we can probably make it for another five years until my Social Security kicks in.

But if it's 0.2FTE? Fuck, we're hosed.

So the bottom line is that I may have had the world's shortest retirement.

That sucks. But what can you do? We can't bargain or appeal; the District will do what it will do, and we wil have to suffer what we must.

UPDATE 2/3/22: Well...the bad news is...less bad than we feared.

The Bride's position is being reduced to 0.5FTE. That lets her keep our major medical - which means losing vision and dental; a shoutout to the "best health care system in the world", what, eyes and teeth aren't "heahtcare" you sorry fucks? - and she might have another 0.1-0.25FTE as a "float".

That's bad. But it's not "the worst", it's not the 0.2FTE that would sink us.

So while it's bad we all have the Plague...at least we won't have the Plague AND be living out of our cars.

Darth Maul returns

Sorry about the hiatus. Got some bad medical news. No, no, not The Plague...but, still, it's taking some time to process. I'll be here this weekend with an update.

Meanwhile, here's another cat picture (with The Bride, who was taking power-nap lessons from the moggies...:

The Queen of the Little Sea...

 ...is another year older.

How she manages to be so terrific while juggling me and two teenage kids and being Miss Debbie the School Secretary I have no idea. But she does, and does it well.

I loved you then and I love you still.

navigare necesse est; amare est necesse, etiam

Today and yesterday.

My Bride and I love our little PDXStrength gym. She's a committed gym rat, and I love what it does for her, and we both love our Sunday morning yoga class. And at 62, lemme tellya - yoga once a week (with the occasional sun salutation every other day or so..) makes a difference between "stiff" and "petrified".

But here's the State of the Union, starting with a typical class from a year ago:

The Bride is in there, but I won't dime her off and you can pick and choose. But this was pretty much standard for the class up until this winter.

The the Plague Year arrived.

Here's the very last in-person class, from February. Notice the social distancing!

This time I can't hide her - that's the Bride in the foreground.

Well.

This was yoga class today; our awesome instructor Jessica led us over "Zoom" through vinyasa in our living rooms.

I'm glad I'm still safe and healthy and able to do this.

But this is our lives now.

I compared it to Russian roulette last time. But the more I think about it, as a military history buff I can't help comparing the Plague Year to the accounts you read by defenders and inhabitants of cities under siege.

The primary sense is of a slogging progression of days that combine the worst of human conditions; boredom, mild (or severe) deprivation, and lingering fear. All you could do is watch as the besiegers sapped towards the walls. Every new set of parallels, every new battery, meant you were one day closer to the moment when the storming parties broke in. You scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing the signs of a relieving army just as we read the stories of treatments and vaccines...but every unrelieved day is a slow trickle of dead and wounded, sick and weakened.

At least Vienna had Rudi Starhemberg. What have we got? Fucking Jared Kushner? The guy who couldn't lead four privates to a whorehouse?

Well.

Fuck.

Flown Away

Last Sunday I was bringing the Boy back from his first kendo class when I got the text message on my phone.

"Am at grocery store. Need you go home now. Missy just found Spots dead."

Spots Pecker Violet, as he was originally known, came home with the Girl back in November of 2013. He was a "hand-reared" blue-phase parakeet who was born in the little "BiZee Bird Shop" out in Beaverton.

Now my experience with pet birds up to Spots was limited to the Bride's companion, Oxey the Cockatiel, who blended in with me and Lily the Cat and Quinn the dog when we first moved in together back at the turn of the 21st Century, and a nastier, more snappish creature never lived.

He seemed to dote on mi esposa, clambering onto her shoulders and nibbling on her earrings, but he would hiss and bite everyone else, including his stepfather (that is to say, me...). He was grossly cagebound and nasty about it, and when he would get out of his cage he was nasty about that, too.

He could fly about as well as a paper airplane, fluttering madly while losing altitude until he ran into a wall or a window, whereupon he'd float to the ground and scrabble about on the floor, hissing and biting. He was so nasty that even the cats seemed intimidated. He really was a pill.

So I wasn't prepared for how sweet and personable the little budgie was.

He loved to climb on you, just as the cockatiel had. But he never bit. He would nibble; he loved the Bride and Missy's long hair, and he like to perch on my reading glasses and pull my eyebrows, which was incredibly ticklish but kind of fun. He was very patient, and would sit with you for hours, chirping and nuzzling.

He was a good little companion, and Missy was a good caretaker; playing with him and giving him the greens that he savored. We had to be careful, because the cats were unsurprisingly fascinated by him, especially Drachma, who would have caught and killed Spots if he could have.

Rotten cat...

Spots was Missy's beloved pet all through her childhood. He was her treasure, she was diligent and kindly, ensuring he got his playtime and healthy food and was kept safe and happy.

But children grow, and sometimes they leave their childhood joys behind. Missy is now a middle-schooler, a theater kid, has interests and friends outside the house, and slowly found herself visiting and caring for her little bird less often. Somethimes Spots could go days without leaving his cage, joining us only though his voluble chatter from his cage in the far corner of Missy's room.

Too late, she said afterwards, she'd idly noticed several days earlier that his chatter seemed less animated, and his movements less energetic.

But she told herself she'd check in on him later. And later became later until finally when she did go to him she found him lifeless in the bottom of his cage.

She was bereft.

There were shared tears, and we gave her lots of hugs and kisses. We grieved over him, and wrapped him in a soft cloth, and buried him out in the side yard, under the star magnolia, in what we call "Bryn's Garden". We got flowers for him, and still are pondering what to do with his vacant cage, a sad and empty reminder of the small life that is no longer with us.

And perhaps the most difficult part is that the Girl blames herself for not being more attentive, for not checking on little Spots sooner, for not saving him when he could have been saved.

And all I can do is hug and kiss her and tell her I love her.

Because she's right.

She could have, and that's a wound of the heart she will have to carry with her always, just one of a thousand tiny agonizing piercings, like the crown of thorns around the icon of the Sacred Heart, that will linger as long as she does, to remind her of that small moment of carelessness that led to her little pet slowly dying alone on his perch in the quiet of the empty room.

We are none of us guiltless.

But it is not the guilt itself; far too many of us stroll through life careless and reckless of the harm we do.

It's the knowledge of that guilt that weighs some of us down so heavily.

Love Means Never Having To Say "Wha...the hell? Gah! Get OFF me!!!"

One thing that often gets pushed aside during post-op recovery is marital...ummm..."personal time".

That, in turn, leads to inappropriate behavior as demonstrated at bedtime last night.

The Bride (already halfway towards unconsciousness): "Mmmm...can you nudge me tomorrow morning? I don't want to sleep through my alarm."

Me: "Nudge? Hell, I can do better than that. I can remove my garments and lie on top of you writhing with lascivious abandon."

Bride: (opening one eye): "Gah. Okay. I don't promise anything like 'enthusiasm', you understand." (Mojo is whatever you'd call the complete and utter polar opposite of "morning person"...)

Me: "I'm okay with that. 'Acquiescence' will do just fine."

Bride (snorts sleepily): "Mmmmhmm."

Me: "In fact, I can pretty much work with anything right up to 'violent resistance'".

Bride: "You need to go to sleep, Romeo."

Woolgathering

No real agenda today. Slow at work so I'm stealing company time to just idle around this shebeen without any actual purpose other than maundering, so please excuse my disorganization.

One thing I completely failed to post about was that the Bride and I had a very muted (Muted? Nonexistent, more like...) acknowledgment of our twelfth anniversary Monday week; it was back in October of 2002 that we wrested legal sanction out of the State of Oregon for our mutual concupiscence.

She was utterly whacked from yet another day tangling with The Boy and I was working late and still trying to get my hands on her anniversary gift. I did get it, a couple of days later, and we had a quiet moment last Friday remembering why we then, and still, long(ed) for one another. Along with her soft green scarf and handmade necklace I gave her this:

Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories,
O you my every pleasure, you my every duty!
You shall recall our pleasures and ecstasies,
The warm peace of our hearth, the evening's placid beauty.
Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories!

Legal sanction is all well and good. But there must also be ecstasies.

Did I mention how I so don't have anything to say about politics because my growing conviction that between the idiot "news" media and the idiot 27% (and you have that pin-up of Cheney in your cubicle so you know who you are...) that we've pretty much achieved Peak Stupid, and that whatever I could say would either be superfluous or ignored?

Yep.

I'm not sure which disgusts me more, the whole "To arms, to arms, the Sunni militia is coming!" nonsense, or the headless panic over a blood-borne pathogen that has a total U.S. morbidity of three and mortality of one.

On the former that fat bastard Brecher has been right all along, and on the latter...well, I don't know how to put it better than Pierce, so I won't:

"There evidently is going to be a strong constituency on the committee for some kind of travel ban on the countries in Africa on which the disease is laying waste, even though every expert in the world is saying that this is a terrible idea. (Governor Rick Perry, whose state is ground zero for Ebola in America, apparently believes there already is a travel ban on flights from Europe, to which he has brought the Spectacles Of Wisdom to "burnish his foreign-policy credentials," which is putting a shine on a sneaker, but never mind. This is leadership? Has anyone told Ron Fournier?) There also is going to be a lot of election-year posturing and political bloviation. Fear will be mongered. Distrust will be sown. And the statistics will tell us that, throughout last year, we lost 30 people a day. No, wait. That was due to firearms. My bad."

My pal Lisa over at RAW had a good point about one of the real problems these fucking idiots should be worried about; that after thirty-some years of treating medicine as a commodity the for-profit medical community has internalized the profit-first-"customer"( i.e. patient)-service-whenever rationale of the rest of the "market". Take it away again, Pierce:

"In case you joined American democracy already in progress, this is the way it is going to work. The private, for-profit hospital in Texas completely screws the pooch. (They sent the tubes containing blood from the late Thomas Duncan through the hospital's general delivery system? This is moronic.) The CDC comes in -- admittedly, after it should have, but there are regulations, beloved of our private-sector fetishists, that got in the way -- and the privatizers and anti-government types set up the CDC to take the fall for the hospital.

(The hospital isn't a terrific place to work at the best of times, as a nurse named Patricia Lawson found out to her sorrow.)

In prepared testimony, Daniel Varga, the Chief Clinical Officer for the Texas company that includes Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, apologized to the House committee. "Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes. We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry," Varga said.

Gee, that's awfully nice of you. Anybody get fired yet?"

As my old pal Struthers would have said, what a fuckin' fucked-up fuckstory.

But are We the People going to act with deliberate care, in light of the best information we can glean from scientific medicine?

Fuck, no, why would we want to do that when we can run around shrieking whatever nonsense Laura Fucking Ingraham, the Tammy Faye Baker of CNN, vomits into her lapel mike?

Gah. I say it's nonsense and I say to hell with it.

Speaking of insanely crazy things, how about this: Iceland - yes, Iceland, famed for herring and...well, herring - defeated the Dutch soccer team - the Oranje, the dreaded Clockwork Orange, World Cup quarterfinalists just half a year ago - 2-nil in Iceland.

Iceland! Sure, the goalscorer plays in Europe but I think the Icelandic keeper is the boxroom guy at the Rekjavik Safeway or something like that. These guys are minnows in the soccer ocean.

This was every underdog story come true. My only regret is that there was no Icelandic announcer to go utterly spastic after the victory: "Queen Juliana! Jan de Hartog! Famke Janssen! Eddie Van Halen! Hans Brinker! We have beaten them all! We have beaten them all!"

Don't get me wrong; I have always been partial to the Oranje ever since the disgrace of Argentina in 1978, when the original Clockwork Orange - Cruyff (who refused to play in the bloodyhanded Argentina of the Dirty War), Neeskens, Rep - was disgracefully robbed of the title. But I love to see these little teams upset the big, rich nations, and in soccer, Holland is very much a have and Iceland very much a have-not.

Except for this once. Wish I'd had the under on THAT bet...

There's a million tales in the naked Facebook; this one is mine.

Back when I was in college, and then later for a while when I was in the service, I had a sort-of-girlfriend.

(BTW, in case you aren't familiar with GFT conventions, people whose likeness I am neither at liberty blue to nor desire to seen blued all over the Internet are always shown from the ankles down, if possible. So this is her, over to the right there, and I should add that whilst I yield to no one in my appreciation for my Bride's attributes my old sort-of-girlfriend still rocks the black slippers...)

I say "sort-of" because I could never quite figure out where I stood with her, or what we were doing. I liked her. We were definitely friends. But we were never lovers, and I'm not sure that we were, either of us, really sure what "love" was, or how to love each other.

I know that I wasn't, and while she was, and is, a very beautiful, dear, sweet, kind, and loving woman I'm glad we didn't end up together back then for, as my first wife found out to our mutual grief, I was not then fit company for any woman of worth.

Still, we seemed to have some sort of very-close-but-not-quite relationship for quite some time that finally, as such relationships often do, drifted away when we were separated by time and space. We never even had a "breakup" in any real sense. Our association just kind of...stopped.

Decades later, while searching a completely different subject, I came across a short video clip of my not-quite-inamorata singing (and she had, and has, a lovely voice) that led me to suspect that she had moved to the Midwest and married. Several years later, motivated by a sort of vague nostalgia and curiosity, I looked her up on the dreaded Facebook and there she was. Using her maiden name, so, apparently, divorced or separated. Living in Missouri, and now an ordained minister in one of the UCC congregations there. We then resumed our friendship in the modern electronic-epistolary form of Facebook.

And from what I've seen as she was then she is still today a very good person; full of love and kindness, the very sorts of things that it seems to me to be very good for a cleric to be given the responsibilities of the job; caring for the sick and the distraught, guiding the afflicted, celebrating with the joyous and comforting the dying. She seems to me to be very likely to be a terrific pastor.

It is when I think of her that it occurs to me that one of the things that sickens me most heartily about many "religions" and those that preach them is the often-outspoken belief that having breasts and a vagina and ovaries somehow makes a person less...spiritual, less fitted for the business of contemplating, or interceding - if it is your nature to want to and try to so intercede - with the Infinite.

"Let your women keep silence in the churches..."

Fucking Paul of Tarsus really has a lot to answer for in my book.

My former-almost-girlfriend is too gentle to do that good work, but give me the Wayback set to 42AD and a good sturdy baulk of dimension lumber, and old Mister Road-to-Damascus would have been getting a solid two-by-four upside the head.

Asshole.

Speaking of soccer and patriarchal religions, I finally got to watch the Portland Pilots-Brigham Young University women's match from last week.

The game was utterly one-sided. BYU is for real; those gals are solid from front to back, and UP is gonna have trouble making the NCAA Finals with this year's young squad.

But my real thought as I was watching the play was that "Cougars" is an utterly lame name for teams from a school named for a scarey Victorian theocrat with high double-digit wives. Cougars? When the heck was the last cougar exterminated from around Provo, anyway, something like 1888? And, besides, you and I both know that cougars are not what Utah and BYU are all about, right?

It's all about the Mormons, baby.

So. The BYU men's teams really need to play as something like the "Patriarchs". "The Mormon Battalion" would be fine, as well as historical. Or how about "The Sword of the Lord"? Can you imagine the headlines in the sports section: "Sword of the Lord slays Pepperdine"? "Sword of the Lord beheads St. Mary's"? "Sword of the Lord eviscerates Bulldogs"?

Fucking stone cold awesome.

Then the women's teams, seeing how the Mormon Church feels about women in churches and all, could play as the "Handmaidens" or maybe the "Helpmeets" or the "Yeah, We're The Ones Being Fucking Silent in the Churches, You Happy Now, Asshole?"

Either that or both should play as the "Jackmormons". Except I think there's already a band named that.

Whatever. But "Cougars"? Sorry. WAY lame.

And while we're on the subject of "White People That Colonized Places" along with "Lame Stuff In General" I note in passing that the annual Columbus Day contretemps reminds me of the thing about the Admiral of the Ocean Sea that drives me more wild than anything else; his math.

Because, you see, in order to sell his expedition to the Spanish Crown he had to make the idea of sailing west to reach Japan, China, and the East Indies plausible. The farrago about the world being flat in 1492? Bullshit. Learned people knew that as early as Eratosthenes a couple of thousand years before Greek (and Arabic) scientists had figured out that 1) the Earth was a globe, and 2) that it was about 20,000 miles around, give or take a Roman mile or three.

But our boy Chris had to know that short of a ginormous expedition that Reconquista Spain didn't have the cash, the naval technology, or the inclination to outfit a fleet to sail across some 7,000 or so miles of open ocean. And he had to know that even if they had that there was no way in Hell that Ferdinand and Isabella were going to equip some sketchy Italian adventurer with that sort of fleet.

So - through a combination of ignorance, wishful thinking, and plain damn stupidity, Columbus came up with a figure of about 16,000 miles for the equatorial circumference of the Earth and a completely ridiculous distance of 3,000 miles to Sumatra. Here's a good little summary of the sort of bone-headed mathematical and navigational errors that the cack-handed spaghetti-bender had to commit to manage that.

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of Columbus: “His calculation is not logical, but Columbus’s mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit.” Morison seems to find that admirable. I find it as moronic as panic over a bunch of raggedy-assed Arab guerrillas or a West African disease.

But maybe that's just me.

Okay. Enough meandering. I'll leave you with a couple of images:

You sleep in public in this house at your peril. This is "Drachma the Merkitty"; the thing on his head is supposed to be one of those seashall-bra things that mermaids are supposed to wear, but it wouldn't fit over his head, so its a crown. Little guy didn't wake up during the whole dress-up process, so he was pranked for hours whilst he slept.

I tried to explain that this was Cruelty to Sleeping Pets, but the small people merely laughed and continued to prank the little possum. He was quite the surprised kitty when he woke up, too.

I should add that our housecats have a long tradition of that kind of thing. When Maxine was a toddler she would announce a cat-sighting with a noise we called her "cat-scream", a loud squawk that was Maxine-speak for "Aha! Strange furry creature unlike anything ever seen in my orphanage, I shall pat you now!" and would precede a round of violent head-slapping that was her version of "petting the cat".

The calico, Lily, was smart enough to grab a hat at the sound, but Nitty (a.k.a Few Kibbles Shy Of A Full Bowl) would hunker down on the principle of "if I make myself REALLY small she can't see me". Which worked about as well as you'd think it would.

And this:

...is a mural from Honolulu. Naiad sporting with vicious aquatic pandas? Wahine frolicking in the surf with hairy racoon-like menehunes?

Your guess is as good as mine - I got nothin'. But I liked the image, so there you are.

I should really finish up my Panama stories. Soon. Promise.

Half a word

Today is "Mother's Day" and, like all these sorts of Hallmark-Card-type holidays the importance is purely in the outlook of the individuals concerned.

My bride likes to be cosseted on Mother's Day.

The problem was that this weekend was ALSO the Boy's eleventh birthday party, so Saturday the house was utterly insane with adolescent-boy energy. Mojo had to do a lot of the birthday-partying because I indulged myself and went to our Portland Thorns match, where I was well-served for my faithlessness when the wenches from Seattle shocked us in the 89th minute and sent us all home disappointed.

So Sunday morning I got up and wrestled the kiddos into submission so the Bride could sleep until ten. Then the urchins and I went out to "Presents of Mind" down on Hawthorne and got her some sweet (or funny) cards, a bar of fancy soap, and a vanilla-scented car air freshener (don't ask, the Boy's idea...). And came home and gave her the treats, and hugs, and then she got a foot massage...

...and went back to sleep.

Finally I made her a chorizo-and-mushroom omlette and went out to mow the lawn and help the Boy out back to assemble his soccer kick-back net.

And that was this year's Mother's Day.

Frankly, I think the whole "Mother's Day" macguffin is just a ridiculous commercial gimmick to sell more crap. But I love my Bride dearly, and she is as much Mother now as she was Lover when we met, she is utterly crucial to our children's lives - both for her gentle love and her fierce expectations - and since our children are now a central part of our lives together regardless of the silly "holiday", for her, and for me, every day is a mother's day.

Hugging the bowl

It took a while for me to get beyond Bryn's birthday this year.

Between that, and an exceptionally busy work week, and the Boy's continuing story, and a personal fascination with whatever-the-hell is going on in the Crimea I just haven't had the time to get back to this blog.

Sorry.

Blogging will be light for the next week, too, as I will be working on the Battle for this month: Glorieta Pass, 1863.

But I did want to poke my head up and look around so's you didn't think I'd gone into hibernation or something.

So, some minor bloggage.

Fucking CPAC.

What a goddamn shitshow. The fact that these idiots invited, and then cheered, Ollie Fucking North pretty much puts a stake in whatever-functions-as-the-organ-that-conservatives-have-instead-of-a-heart. Certainly not a brain; anyone who would do anything in the vicinity of Ollie Fucking North other than spit on him is a damn lunatic. The man is a walking skid mark on a U.S. Marine uniform pant.

And to top that there's Scooter Fucking Libby? And Bernie Fucking Kerik? Is this supposed to be a conservative convention or a damn parole board meeting?

Pretty much sums up modern U.S. movement conservatism, though. Neither benevolent nor intelligent, just a seething, wretched hive of angry, vindictive scum and villainy. Not with Extra Felons.

Sheesh.

And in other "conservative" news..."conservative Christians" are upset because of "historical inaccuracies" in a movie about...Noah?

Wait.

What?

No, this isn't "The Onion".

Seriously, Jesus-pesterers are having kitten-fits because this movie, whatever else the hell it does, doesn't fit the version of a made-up ancient Hebrew version of an older made-up Sumerian tale about a guy who builds a big-ass boat and stuffs animals in it?

(Extra points to the Jesus-pesterers who seem to have spent a ridiculous amount of wasted time trying to reconcile the logistical requirements of a gajillion animals by trying to hammer the Hebrew word "kind" (as in "two of each kind") as ever-larger phylogenetic categories. Apparently there's even a special Jesus-pesterer term for this - "baraminology" - which is essentially the same thing as the "science" of describing the types of ponies in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.)

The linked article at The Panda's Thumb is made of 100% awesomesauce, BTW; check it out.

"Historical inaccuracies."

Snort.

Speaking of dead conservatives...or were we?

Whatever. Point is, Shirley Temple Black kicked the bucket last month.

I know, I know...she's a film icon, the prototype Child Star and bigger in American film history than Lassie. My problem is that I discovered her in my teenage years and from the lofty maturity of fifteen her juvenile films always seemed cloying, childish, and twee. I've since developed a greater appreciation for her early talents but never quite to the point of loving her or her child work.

My loss, I suppose.

Thing is, I love the heck out of her late Forties work. After the war Shirley had matured into a damn good little comic actress.

She goes toe-to-toe with the heavyweights in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and is wonderful as a teenager in Since You Went Away. I've also seen her do delightful work in a piece of postwar comic nonsense called Honeymoon; she really had the chops to make it as an actress in light comedy. It's too bad she didn't manage to keep working past the late Forties, and you have to wonder if her childhood success didn't have something to do with that.

Seriously, think about it. Here was a young actress who was attractive, sexually attractive, but who was indelibly associated with the audiences of the late Forties and Fifties with a six-year-old girl. I mean, imagine; the ick-factor of getting a boner looking a little Curly Top?

Yeah, that.

I should add, though, that it's also probably good for her memory that Pete McCloskey beat her for the 11th Congressional District in 1967.

She ran to his right - she was a pretty conservative Republican for the middle Sixties (not that she'd be considered "conservative" today, mind you) and so we remember the child star, the promising young actress, and the gracious apolitical hostess and not a more divisive conservative Congresswoman in the Nixon (and possibly the Reagan) Era.

My favorite story about her?

Anne Edwards' biography says that when she was invited to the White House in 1935 she shot Eleanor Roosevelt in the ass:

"Temple and her parents traveled to Washington, D.C., late in 1935 to meet President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. The presidential couple invited the Temple family to a cook-out at their home in Hyde Park, New York, where Eleanor, bending over an outdoor grill, was hit smartly in the rear with a pebble from the slingshot Temple carried everywhere in her little lace purse." (Edwards, p. 81)

So maybe even then little Bubbles was a red-meat Republican.

Probably just as well we'll never know.

This was kind of intriguing in a very odd way:

"China Southern flight CZ628, operating as a code-share with Japan Airlines Co. (9201) as flight JL5021, was headed to Shenyang, China from Narita airport in Japan when North Korea fired the missile at 4:17 p.m. yesterday, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok said today by phone. The jet was over international water at an altitude of 10 kilometers (32,800 feet) at 4:24 p.m. when it crossed the trajectory of the missile, which reached a height of 20 kilometers, Kim said."

Despite what the article says the two objects were not actually very close in time; seven minutes is a hell of a long time at 400 miles per hour (or more, for the missile).

This wasn't a close call.

The odd part about this for me was that when we used to range fire on Fort Lewis, Washington part of our ballistic arc for high-angle fire was within the flight path for aircraft landing at SeaTac Airport in Seattle. Range Control would close the range for some time, ten minutes before or after (I forget the exact envelope) when an aircraft was scheduled to fly over.

That used to drive us bugnuts. The phrase you'd hear repeatedly was "Little bullet, big sky". But there was no room for any sort of miscalculation when a freakish mishap might kill 200-plus people.

We didn't shoot.

The corollary to this - for me, anyway - isn't that the Norks barely missed a civilian airliner. They misse by a mile. It's that they just didn't give a shit; their impact area was downrange of a commercial air corridor and they just popped off rounds without bothering to check and see if there even WAS anyone out there to hit.

That's almost scarier than if they were trying.

It's Saturday morning and if I thought that the end of the week would bring some relief I was kidding myself. Friday is the kids' "game night", so there were video games played from sunset to damn near midnight (okay, 10:30, but close enough...).

Then it was the Boy's "night to sleep with mommy", which is a toddlerhood ritual that he loves to reenact when he can. But the Girl tends to toddle out to the couch - which is where I sleep when the Boy is doing his Oedipus Junior thing - at the wee hours of the morning, so Peep-Mommy Night is always on a night I can sleep in the next morning.

Usually everybody is happy with this, so it was a bit surprising to be awakened sometime in the dark predawn by the sound of someone being violently ill.

It was my Bride, who was wretchedly hugging the porcelain chalice, shivering and gulping. In the Little House it's hard to escape one another so her struggles were everyone else's. The Boy retreated into his bedroom and shut the door (he's still in there at 9:30...), the Girl toddled out to ask what she could do, and I lay down in our bed listening to the sweet little voice and her mother's strained answers.

The Bride is back asleep now, finally at rest, the Girl is watching some sort of bizarre Minecraft video, and I need to get dressed and wake the Boy so we can go to futsal in a moment.

Just another day, and I promise; more substantive blogging when I return.

Ex GOP semper nihil

Posting light, what with Thanksgiving and the new crewman here in the Fire Direction Center:

The little fellow there on Missy's hand is Spots Pecker Violet, or "Spots", for short. My bride was with the Girl when she picked out the baby budgie and claims she tried to steer young Miss into something more...conventional, like Polly or Mister Crackers, but no luck.

Regardless of things pecker, the Girl is a very good and devoted bird mama. Hopefully the little guy thrives on her attention.

I have also been to see the kid counselor.

The Boy has been having some real problem with his mother.

He has been picking fights with her over, well...pretty much everything.

He picks on his sister mercilessly, the Girl screams out of pure frustration, Mom tries to break things up and the Boy flat out refuses to listen to her. He is alternatively sulky and defiant, and she has called me several times over the past month or so completely driven to distraction.

Unfortunately, that tends to trigger my reflex, the one that was developed in the process of buying a brown flat-brimmed hat, and I show up bringing the heat. The Boy is physically cowed but internally furious, and when I am next away he turns it on his mother and sister.

Jean, the kid counselor, recommended that I dial back the fury. And so I have.

That has been something of a double-edged weapon.

The Boy does seem to be happier, and pleasanter to his mother and sister. He has been fairly decent about listening to her, and me, but...in the absence of the paternal roar getting him to do almost anything - from homework to chores to simple hygiene - is like water wearing down a redheaded stone; a constant steady drip-drip of reminders. Peep, your clothes? Peep, did you pu your clothes in the hamper? Peep, I was in the bathroom and your clothes are still on the floor. Peep...

He detests that and so do I, frankly, but the alternative is kid clothes littered all about and kid-toys heaped every which-where.

I have to say; much as the drip-drip is sort of crazy making I prefer it over the fear-up, too. Not nice having your kid fear you. Makes for those Daddy Dearest sort of post-puberty tell-all books.

Also researching the December 1914 actions in the North Sea collectively known as the "Scarborough Raid" for the Battles series; pure indulgence on my part, but I hope it will be worth reading; a little-remembered action that is one of history's great "what-ifs".

And, speaking of what-ifs...

I've been pondering since October a subject that came up - again - over at the MilPub. To wit; is there something peculiarly toxic, something unprecedented and awful, about U.S. politics circa 2013 - that "something" being the reactionary nihilism of the teabaggers.

My friend seydlitz, strategic thinker that he is, says yes; that the primary reason for the current and recent run of domestic and foreign misadventures (from sequesters to invasions and back) is the result of this pathogen invading the body politic.

My thought on this has always been that the U.S. has seen this before; that it has been sickened by, and then recovered from, similar Know-Nothingism and tribal greed whether in the form of lynch mobs, whiskey rebellions or treason in defense of slavery.

But I was thinking about that this morning as I waited for my drill crew to finish clean-up, and something occurred to me that hadn't before, and inclined me more towards seydlitz's position that there may be something uniquely toxic to American politics about the teatards.

The thing is, yes, we have seen this sort of thumb-sucking idiot before. Time and time again, in fact. They are a feature of human societies, not a bug; the greedy, stupid, shortsighted man-sized infant.

Every society - every human group - has one or two at least. They're the selfish ones, the grabby ones. Like infants, they want all the common goods but don't want to share any of their own.

And, like infants, they think that things magically appear because they want them to - not because of things like good government, regulations, and standards. They think that railways and overpasses and sewage treatment just happen and that somehow "private enterprise" would do just as well at all those public services, from heating houses (the evidence of Enron be damned) or fighting wars (the evidence of Blackwater to the contrary) or treating sick and injured (the ridiculous cost-benefit ratio of the fee-for-service healthcare "system" notwithstanding).

Fundamentally they don't believe in "the common good". They live by my father-in-law's rule; everybody's out to screw ya so watch your back. If they've got theirs, fine - everybody else can just fuck off and die.

Okay, so far, so bad, so much bushwah that we've seen before.

Assholes don't share, are assholes, believe government is bad when it tells them they have to share and not be such enormous assholes - so they don't really believe in government at all outside the occasional aircraft carrier or three.

But here's the thing that got me thinking.

Even back in the dark days before the Civil War the people who were trying to wreck the U.S. government were trying to wreck the U.S. government because they wanted a DIFFERENT government.

Not because they fundamentally didn't believe in any government at all.

And that's really what's happened to the current GOP; it is either run by - or runs in terror from - people who don't believe in government at all.

So I guess I have to admit; I was wrong. and my country is in much more danger than I ever imagined.

Because the barbarians aren't at the gates.

The barbarians are inside the walls and controlling one of the two political parties we've permitted ourselves.

We Are So, So, So, SO Fucked.

Back side of dreamtime

That was a lot of Grenada, wasn't it?

OK; no more Grenada. I promise.

Instead, I'm going to tell you a story.

It's a funny story.

At least I think it's funny, and it's my blog so, there you go...but, I should warn you first; it's a funny SEX story.

So be warned; there are things in here that are not wholesome for impressionable young children. Or naive adults. Or people who are shocked by people talking about carnal matters. Or anyone shocked by nudity, because there's some nudity, too.

Are we clear on all of this?

Good.

Kids all out of the room?

Aunt Sally safely immersed in that Golden Girls re-run?

Alright, then.

First, let me say that I think I am a very lucky man.

I have a bride who I not only like as a person and cherish as a companion but desire as a woman.

I find her delightful and delight in her. For me she walks in beauty like the night; all that's best in dark and bright meets in her aspect and her eyes; thus mellowed to that tender light that Heaven to day denies.

One pleasant side-effect of this is that occasionally I have lovely dreams in which she and I are the principals.

Often these are merely diversions; we revisit places we visited in the light of day, or reenact things we did while waking.

Occasionally, these dreams are more...intimate.

But...and I hope nobody reading is disappointed when I confess this...they wouldn't make very good Penthouse-letter-reading.

(Which reminds me; has anyone even seen a "Penthouse" lately?

Remember when those glossy stroke books were the ultimate in smut, the Nirvana of porn, the K2 of wankerdom? Remember going into...well, almost anywhere there were magazines and seeing them and Playboy and the other heavy-bond paper porno periodicals?

Seen them lately? Yeah, me neither.

Was there anything that the Internet killed deader than those glossy porno rags? If there is I can't think of it.

Sorry. Lost my thread there for a moment.)

Anyway...even in my erotic dreams I'm afraid I'm just hopelessly, boringly conventional.

They are usually nothing more daring than boringly wholesome hetero sorts of dreams, the Hallmark Channel of salacious imagination. Making love to my wife on a white sand beach, romantic trysts before a roaring fire, sex under the Christmas tree (without the annoying pine needles poking me in the ass)...you get the idea.

Nice. But...well, sorta vanilla, right?

No frantic kinks, no forbidden pleasures; no S&M, no sweaty pileups, no her dressing up like Mrs. Claus and swinging from the chandelier with four stalwart lechers pulling at her legs.

Nope. Just plain old boring romantic-ish married sex.

That's just jake with me, but it doesn't make for a thrilling blog post read, now, does it?

But...

About a week ago I had a dream.

It started off fairly typically; the two of us lounging in a huge white bed in this enormous tropical-sort of room; long white bedcurtains, huge windows with venetian blinds screening out the blazing white sunlight.

On the silky sheets my bride's pale skin glowed with the sort of luminosity you only see in photographs or in dreams; her whole body seemed to radiate a sort of lush intensity, a warm and fecund sheen that promised all manner of lubricious delights, as did her slantendicular smile below her lowered lids.

In my mind she looked at me and ran her palms down her thighs in a gesture of pure invitation.

So far, so good - and so far, so standard.

So I was dream-shocked when my dream-bride rolled onto her side, loured at me, and murmured in her best throaty dream-voice:

"I want you to make love to my ass..."

Whoa.

Look. I understand myself as well as I hope I possibly can. And - understanding that - I understand that I will take whatever licentious liberties I am offered.

(We're like that, men, most of us, I'm afraid...)

Like most men, though, I won't take what is not offered.

And so far as my bride is concerned - my real bride, my waking-hours bride - that particular form of congress is most surely not offered.

No fooling around back there. That's a one-way street. No trespassing. Do not enter.

Mi novia finds nothing enticing about the notion of having someone poking about the distal end of her digestive tract.

And that has always applied to my dream-wife as well. We don't cavort inside my head in ways we don't in real life - including that way.

At least, until the other night's dream.

But...even in my dream I couldn't really buy this sudden wifely desire for the entry into the Forbidden Zone. Dream-me was suddenly as still as the bunny when the hawk passes overhead; every nerve-ending jangling with the sense of imminent danger.

"Are you sure about this..?" I asked, motionless.

In answer my dream-bride writhed in what can only be described as an utterly shameless fashion. "Oh, yessss..." she moaned, "I want it. I need it."

I just sat there staring.

"You're kidding me." I said, finally.

"You really want me to have anal sex with you. Butt sex. Up the ol' dirt road. Drive the Hershey Highway. Bloop you up the doody chute. You're one hundred percent dead solid no-kidding abso-lutely sure you want this?"

My dream-spouse responded by rolling onto her elbows and knees into a position that in the higher primates would be called "presenting".

The sane part of my dream-brain was shrieking like an air raid siren (Warning! Warning! Danger, Doctor Smith, danger! Warning!) but my little dream-head was doing most of the thinking by this time and that thinking was "Well, OK then...".

I got to my knees and shuffled across the sheets. "You're absolutely sure you want this?" I said as I reached for the delicious fundament waggling before me.

In return I received a lascivious moan and a tremor-inducing whole-body wriggle.

Well.

Okay then.

I leaned forward in anticipation, and...

...with the blinding speed and vicious intensity of a striking gaboon viper my inamorata whipped around and instead of the view of her enticing nether regions I was confronted with a face of righteous wrath and an accusatory finger aimed directly at my nose.

"You were gonna fuck me up the butt, weren't you?!" snarled my dream-lover.

"Weren't you!?!"

"A-HA! You WERE!" my dream-bride crowed, pushing me over backwards with an extended palm and climbing decisively off the big round bed.

"And you know I don't go for that stuff, too."

"You...you...pervert!"

And with that she wrapped the robe that appeared in her hands around her body, wagged her finger at me one last time and stalked away, her bare heels beating out a martial rhythm on the shining wood floor.

I lay there dreaming aimlessly a long, long time.

Until my night-wanderings transmuted into something about cleaning the kitchen counters and unloading the dishwasher.