Now what can you do for my aura?

So, last Thursday night I stumbled out of bed in the middle of the night to service a biological imperative,* as is the habit of men my age. My next recollection is of struggling up from the bathroom floor, with Biscuit standing next to me asking what happened.

I had sipped one or three beers and mostly skipped dinner the previous evening, but I really didn't have that much, officer, I swear. With no other explanation forthcoming at 3:00 am, I put it down to low blood sugar and fading stamina, made sure there were no bones sticking out, and went back to bed.**

The next morning I sat up, put my feet on the floor, and immediately fell backwards across the bed. I have experienced bed spins before, but never when it was light outside. I took another run at it, albeit more carefully, and found that once I got upright, things were more or less normal after a minute or so. Any significant change in the orientation of my head, however, sent the room spinning and started the process over.

A quick consult with Google pointed to some combination of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and possibly a brain tumor. Or inner ear problems, which (spoiler alert!) turn out to be much more common, but don't get as much internet traction. Of course I only ever take ill on Friday. I determined to wait out the weekend, assuming I would either be dead or getting better by Monday. It turns out there was a third option, and I spent the weekend like a drunken sailor in a hurricane, stumbling from one handhold to the next.

I don't have a regular cardiologist or neurologist, as they are expensive and frightening. I do have an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and she has never used the word "catheter" in my presence that I recall, so I went to see her. I think everyone in the office knew what was wrong about five seconds after I walked in, but they are nothing if not thorough, so I got a blood pressure check, another stroke test, a few hearing and ear tests, and a good listen through a stethoscope. Apparently they also have the Google. Right before leaving the room, the nurse said, "She will be in shortly. She's going to align your crystals!"

My view of the world for much of the last week.

After eliminating the scary possibilities, the doctor tested me for what she already knew was wrong with me, which is something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or BPPV. Unlike ED or RLS, positional vertigo is not something made up by drug companies, but a real thing that happens to a lot of people. Apparently, tiny rocks (the crystals) in the inner ear wander into a neighborhood where they are not welcome, and the social tension causes a miniature riot when you move your head.

She put me in Bugs Bunny's barber chair, raised me to a height guaranteed to break something if I fell off, and had me lie back and turn my head to the side. If she said "cough" I was out of there, dizzy or not. Instead, she held up a finger for me to stare at, and when I turned to the left and one finger suddenly became three, she said, "There it goes!" with a look like an arsonist at a bonfire.

The treatment turns out to be something called the Epley maneuver. While this sounds like a British military technique that probably involves a bayonet, it's just more lying down, turning the head, sitting up, and getting dizzy. It doesn't fix the problem exactly, but relocates the tiny crystals to somewhere less annoying in the ear until they resorb. Also, I learned a new word. Re-sorb.

I'm pretty much back to normal now, with occasional bouts of walking like a mildly drunken landlubber in normal circumstances when I forget and do something stupid like lie down and then stand up. I haven't tried driving yet. Maybe today. What could possibly go wrong?

---

* I'm pretty sure this is why they are called the "wee hours."

** Biscuit made me smile and blink, and whatever else you are supposed to do to check for stroke before she would let me go back to sleep. Apparently I passed, or she just got tired.

Ninety-five percent half naked

I have worn a St. Christopher medal most every day since I was fourteen. This is not something most people know about me. That's well into five figures of days, placing the chain around my neck when I dress in the morning, laying it down carefully before I climb into bed at night. I have long since grown accustomed to the feel of it, and in most cases I could not tell you without checking whether I was wearing it or not.

The current medal is actually my third, each a gift from a (different) woman who meant a great deal to me. The first barely outlasted the relationship that started it all, lost after only a couple of years. The second survived much longer, through my days on the road and other youthful misadventures. Unfortunately, the ex never really liked the fact that it was a gift from someone else, and it disappeared during the turmoil of our divorce.

The second medal was similar to this one. I always liked the Be my guide
inscription over than the more common Protect us. It seems less needy, somehow.

She needn't have been concerned. While the medals were important symbolic gifts, they were never strong reminders of the givers. They were my secret indulgence in superstition,  egotism,  ... different things at different times. But this little piece of jewelry (I really think of them as one object) has always felt like mine -- perhaps more than anything else I own -- and I associate it with my personal journey much more strongly than its own origins. I have worn the current version for over twenty years now.

It never mattered to me that St. Christopher was removed from the official roster of saints when I was a child. Actually, since I am not Catholic, it was a bit of a bonus. What was important was that we shared a name, and that he was the patron saint of travelers. As a fledging disciple of an eclectic mix of Eastern philosophies, I initially found the symbolism quite compelling. I no longer read the Tao regularly or consult the I Ching, but I still see life more as journey than destination, so the feeling of kinship with St. Kitt remains strong.

Yesterday morning I reached for the silver chain in its pewter tray, exactly as I have done thousands of times before, and came up empty. The medal and its chain have vanished, and a light search of probable locations has come up empty. I can't definitively remember the last time I noticed having it. You may as well ask when I last remember having my left pinky. All I know for sure is that I don't have it now, and I am beginning to feel its absence.

There may be feline involvement. I felt confident that the cats would not be interested in it, but I began to rethink my position when I saw one carrying a pill organizer down the hall this morning. If so, then it may turn up again, though both cats love to watch things disappear, and there are some suitable crevices and drain holes in our house.

While often proud of his possessions, Boy Cat was trying to sneak away with this undetected. Don't worry.
He doesn't have a drug problem. We use these to portion out fish food for vacation pet minders. The cats love fish food.

More likely the clasp gave way and it slipped from my neck in some random location on campus or in the yard. It has happened before, and while up until now I have always felt it fall, I assumed the day would come when I would not be so lucky. If this is the case, and I have seen the last of this iteration, I hope it has fallen where someone will find it. Like the two before this one, I like to think of St. Christopher helping someone else navigate life's strong currents.

Joys of Moving

As a footloose young man, I never met a move I didn't like. I graduated from high school living in the house where I was born,* and relocation possessed for me the romantic appeal that only comes from inexperience. Between my eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays I lived at eight different addresses in five cities in three states.

Of course in those days everything I owned fit in my car.** And half of it never got unpacked. Moving took about four hours plus driving time and however long I spent broken down on the side of the road. I probably would have done it more often, if not for utility deposits.

That all changed when I acquired my first live-in girlfriend, destined to become my ex-wife some dozen years later. Before I knew it I owned a pit sectional, component stereo, and my own refrigerator. A refrigerator, for Gods-sake. Suddenly, moves required U-Hauls and planning, and pizza and beer for friends. Soon I was hiring moving companies and putting things in storage.

This could be a post about the evils of acquiring things, but it's not. I really just want to make the point that moving sucks if you can't fit everything in one carload. And sometimes even then, depending on circumstances.

Why bring this up now? I'm glad you asked. The research center where I work has occupied various temporary homes since its inception, waiting for the fabled "new building" to be designed, funded, and constructed. That day has finally arrived. Or at least, it was supposed to arrive last September, then December, February, April, and latest of all, this week. Of course this requires packing our offices and labs into boxes, and sorting it out on the other end.

Everyone keeps telling us that this is our new work home. At this point, I will believe it when I show up and my stuff is there.

For most people -- or at least for me -- this is a chance to be rid of some old things that are obsolete, worn out, or otherwise no longer useful. In this case we have the added motivation of moving into a smaller space with glass walls. Unfortunately, my colleague and part time boss is a ... umm, let's go with "collector," so we've managed to throw away only a fraction of what we should have. As an example, we have a box labeled "paper scraps." I am not making this up.

Undiscouraged, we packed and sorted and taped and labeled and stacked. By last Thursday we were down to things we actually use every day, and the boxes for those things were assembled and waiting. There is not really any room to work, but we only have to endure for a couple of days, right?  The IT people were taking down whiteboards and preparing to move our servers. Then, around 4:30 in the afternoon, came the "Move Delayed!" e-mail with the high priority status icon. The main difference in this edition of the all-too-familiar-by-now message was that there was no "until" included. It seems there are some issues with the building, and all we know is that the move will happen some time in the future. The most persistent rumor I have heard is nine weeks.

Oh, happy day.

---

* Not literally. I was born in a hospital. I'm not that old.

** Except for my albums. The were held for safekeeping by my friend Winston. There were only two people on Earth in whom I would place this sacred trust, and the other was already married.

Road Stories: Fly like an Eagle

I love stupid jokes. One of my favorites is from a story told by Ron "Tater Salad" White, recounting a memorable flight on a small plane. At one point, after losing an engine, the nervous flyer beside him asks how far they can get on one engine. White replies, "All the way to the scene of the crash."

The month before I started at SHOWCO, Lynyrd Skynyrd took their last plane ride. Among the passengers on the Convair CV-300 that never made it to Baton Rouge that night were two of my future colleagues. DK more or less walked away with abrasions and some chest injuries. He remembered the crash site quite well, from coming to his senses strapped in his seat with one leg pinned back by a shorn tree stump, through the eternity waiting for someone to find them in the woods, with friends dead or dying nearby. He was back to work in a few months, and while he required a couple of stiff drinks to get on a plane, he would get on a plane. I flew with him several times, and he was steady, if a little hyper-attentive.

JO was less fortunate, though his injuries were only moderately worse than DK's.* He remembered nothing before the hospital, and it was a good long time before I saw him at work. Even then he moved like a ghost, and it was apparent to anyone paying attention that his worst scars were not physical. He didn't fly, and didn't particularly like riding in a car. Or much of anything that required interaction. Whatever wounds he carried took longer to heal than our association lasted.

The Convair CV 240. REO's was not nearly as nice as this one.

Image from here.

REO Speedwagon had a plane, a Convair CV 240** nicknamed the Flying Tuna. Our crew had a bus, and didn't fly on it as a rule, but occasionally they would bring someone along for a creative discussion, an impromptu morning party, or an extended ass-chewing. On one long overnighter, when we knew that the buses would be very late getting to the next gig, one of the sound guys and I flew with them so that we could get the trucks unloaded before the rest of the crew arrived. As you may know, REO was not my favorite tour, so you can imagine how I felt about being locked in a flying deathtrap with them.

Fortunately for me I was exhausted, and slept from the time the motors started until the plane bounced onto the runway at Where the Hell are we Today Municipal Airport. This was not particularly easy since the heat was out in the cabin, and it was like 4 degrees in there, but roadies are world class sleepers and I had no trouble at all. In fact, I slept on road cases backstage during concerts on more than one occasion.

But I digress. The point is that I slept through the flight, and had to hear this story from my colleague the sound guy.*** About halfway through the flight he noticed fluid trailing back along the wing from the engine on his side. Since we had already made countless tasteless jokes about the similarity of this plane to Lynyrd Skynyrd's, he was understandably concerned, and summoned the woman who served as the hostess on the flight.

After he informed her of the growing stain on the wing, she didn't even bend over to look out the window. She just asked him how wide it was.

"What?"

"How wide is the trail?"

"I don't know, about four inches?"

"Oh, don't worry about that. We don't even have to get nervous until it gets to be this wide," she said, as she held up her hands about a foot apart. True story.

Most people assume that we would prefer to fly than ride the bus, but flying was miserable, even on real airliner with multiple jet engines and a professional crew. A bus or a crew van was like a rolling hotel, and you could claim your own tiny space and not have to pack up every day. More importantly, everyone but the driver was asleep by the time the vehicle rolled out of the parking lot, and could stay asleep until we rolled into the next one. Sometimes there was a Denny's stop for breakfast, but only if the drive was not too long. And waking up for that was optional.

If you were flying, you had to take a rent car back to the hotel, sleep, pack up, drive to the airport in time to catch the sunrise flight, turn in the rent cars, drink two Bloody Mary's on the plane, wait for luggage, get more rent cars, go to the next hotel and fight with the manager because it wasn't time to check in yet, and then get to the gig in time to miss breakfast. The time for "sleep" usually ended up being an hour or two.

As unpleasant as flying is becoming these days, maybe buses will make a comeback. If they do, count me in.

---

* Both had pretty significant facial lacerations. A plane crash will apparently create a large amount of jagged debris moving at good speed. Or maybe it's more accurate to say it throws a lot of debris in the path of the oncoming victims, who are moving at good speed.

** The CV 300 was  a CV 240 with newer engines. So yes, REO's plane was identical to Skynrd's plane, except slightly crappier.

*** Lighting people and sound guys have always had a friendly rivalry about who's most important to a show. But we sincerely hated them for the fact that the got more sleep than us, and generally had less equipment to hump. And unless sound check ran really long, they got to dinner first. This is part of the reason we insisted on calling them "sound guys" instead of "audio engineers," which they preferred.

Compulsive much?

Image from here

Sometime during my high school years my father's construction company remodeled the four story Arkansas Game and Fish Commission building in Little Rock. My summer job started just in time for one of the final tasks, which was hanging one hundred and ninety-six steel doors in the building. That's almost two hundred doors times three hinges per door times six screws per hinge, which is, well, a lot of screws.

After inspecting the completed remodel, the client insisted that we were not finished because the hinge screws on the doors were oriented in all different directions. Seriously. After a brief but lively argument between the client and my father, I and one other worker were assigned to go through the building and turn one-hundred ninety-six times eighteen screws a quarter turn or less so that the slots on all of them were perfectly vertical. It took two days.

It's funny the sorts of thoughts that wander through one's head while working systematically through a huge empty building with a screwdriver. Thoughts like, "Well, if they all have to be oriented some direction, they might as well be the same." Or a little later, "My, these sure do look nicer like this, all uniform and consistent." Every so often I would find one that was already vertical through sheer chance, and I would celebrate a little.

I guess you see by now where this is going. For many years I made sure that virtually every screw I tightened was oriented in some specific direction. Luckily for me, Henry Phillips' screw head* technology has almost universally replaced the slot head screw in everyday use, and the visual effect with the Phillips head  is not nearly as striking. The one notable exception has been electrical switch and outlet cover plates, which have retained the slotted screws until very recently.  So if you go through my house, you will notice that every screw on every cover is oriented exactly the same. How about yours?

You're welcome.

---

* As we all learned in school, the Phillips head screw was actually invented by John P. Thompson, who sold the rights to Phillips. It's always the money guys who get the credit.

Movie Sunday: Grey Gardens

 

Images from here. And here.

Like many young people, I experimented with thespianism in high school and college. I wasn't really very good, but it left me with an appreciation for the difficulty of professional acting. And I've always liked crazy people. So this pair of movies was right up my alley.

That's right, there are two movies called Grey Gardens, and if you accept this mission you need to watch them both.*  Both are about Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. The Edies lived like hermits in a rambling mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, and got crazier by the day as the house fell down around them. They had a lot of cats, and raccoons that they may or may not have thought were cats.

The original film is a documentary made in 1975. Some press in the early seventies had caused enough  family embarrassment that Jackie O and her sister dumped enough money into the place so that it would meet code. It also got the Maysles brothers interested enough to come follow them around the house with cameras. But even having a film crew there apparently didn't convince the Edies to pick up after themselves or take out the garbage.

HBO made the second Grey Gardens two years ago, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore cast as the Edies. Many of the shots in the film mirror scenes from the documentary, but the story covers much of the two women's lives.

The acting is what fascinated me about the HBO version. Actors almost always pull traits or behaviors from real people when they are building characters. But building a character who is a real person, especially one who has appeared on film, must be a special challenge. Both women do an excellent job. They are as good as Brian Keith's Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion, which is high praise coming from me. I have to give a slight edge to Jessica Lange. Critics really loved Drew Barrymore's performance, and it was certainly very good, but I didn't think she was quite able to capture the East Coast intensity of the real little Edie. It's not her fault. She's from California.

So if you like old crazy women, this is the pair of films for you. If not, just watch The Fifth Element again. You really can't see that too many times.

---

* Actually, there are a number of plays and books as well, but let's not go overboard.

Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out, Part 2

This is one of the few artifacts to survive the ex-wife's great purge of 1984, 

when she threw away anything that meant anything to me, in retaliation 

for making her stay behind and sell the house when I got transferred.

So when we left our intrepid hero, I was screwing up the climax of REO Speedwagon's concerts and getting reamed for it every other day. I called the office after almost every show, begging them to ship me the real special effects board. But they were on some sort of cost-cutting kick, and decided that I should let Flash Gordon rewire the controller they had given me, because at least that would shut him up. I was positive this was a bad idea, but was given no choice.

Now, in their defense, the bomb cues were not coming off as planned. In my defense, this wasn't my fault. Each band member was playing to a different beat, the lighting director seemed to have no sense of timing, and the equipment was faulty. I ended up doing this sort of thing for many of the biggest acts of the day, including work for the late Kirby Wyatt, SHOWCO's own lighting director, a man whose fastidious attention to detail and standards of perfection make Tim Gunn look like a Squidbilly by comparison. This tour was the first and only time I ever had a complaint about cues.

The rewiring happened on a day off we had before REO headlined the Rockford Jam, an outdoor show at the Rockford Speedway in Rockford, IL. If you've never been to Rockford, don't sweat it. Life Magazine once said it was "as nearly typical as any city can be." It's probably best known in the rock and roll context as the home of Cheap Trick. The Rockford Jam that year featured Head East ("Never Been Any Reason"), The Cars, REO, and someone I can't remember. Since Bob was traveling on a different bus, there was no time for testing his work, but Flash wasn't concerned.

The Rockford Jam was remarkable, mostly for its lack of planning and nightmare logistics. Whoever produced this piece of shit knew nothing about outdoor shows. We had no alternate way in, so we sat in traffic for almost two hours before arriving backstage, where there was no place to park the trucks or buses. We rolled or carried the equipment piece by piece through the mud, and by the time we got the gear onstage and plugged in, it was time for the first act to start. There were no walkways cordoned off in the crowd, so every time one of us needed to go from the stage to the lighting and sound consoles at the center of the infield, we were required to walk over the crowd, trying not to step on the people, or their growing collection of fluids and other leavings. This also meant we had to run all of our cables over or around people*, and hope that no one unplugged anything. The whole day was a come-from-behind clusterfuck of epic proportions.

To make matters worse, the music was horrible. You don't take a job like this if you don't love live music, but Holy Hell this was bad. I knew by then that REO would be bad, but I assumed some of the other groups would make up for it. The first band, whose name escapes me, reminded me of the band that played my junior high dances. Head East sounded like they had all been born deaf. Worst of all, I had really been looking forward to seeing The Cars, but they were bored, wasted, off-key, and thoroughly unimpressive. Eventually, it was time for the main event.

Unfortunately, Flash Gordon wasn't even smart enough to realize that a fog curtain would be worse than useless outdoors, so I got to drag all of that crap through the mud, knowing that we would be lucky if any fog made it to the stage at all. And also knowing that it would put the band in a foul mood once again. I finally got the pyrotechnics prepped during what should have been dinner, plugged in my newly rewired pyro box, and waited for my cue.

This is the part where I have to teach you more than you ever wanted to know about concert pyrotechnics. A flashpot is generally some sort of metal container, wired with an electrical cord. The ones that are sold commercially are a couple of inches on a side, and are recommended to use up to a half teaspoon of flash powder. We used roasting pans and washtubs, and loaded between a half an ounce and a quarter pound of powder in each. An electric match or squib would be connected to the terminals on the pan, and placed in contact with the powder. When current is applied to the circuit, that's rock and roll.

Image from here.

There are any number of ways to close the circuit, from foot switches to plungers to just touching bare wires to a battery. Our board used 12 volts direct current generated by a 110 volt transformer, and had military-grade safety switches, like the setup shown in the professional grade artwork below.

Artists misconception: this isn't even right. There were

twelve switches, a push button for each, and one key 

to arm the whole system. Just work with me on this.

Each flashpot had it's own circuit, with an LED, a safety switch, and a little red button. When the key was turned, the LED's for correctly wired circuits would glow green. When the rocker cover was raised and the switch was thrown, the circuit was armed, and the light changed to red. After that, pushing the button would set off the explosion. Or at least that was the plan.

Mis-wired circuits didn't light, and I always liked to turn the key a minute or two early, so that I would have time to run around and fix any connections that may have come loose during the show. This time when I turned the key, one of the pots exploded. Hmm, that was weird. The band members turned to me as one, and gave me a look that was, by now, all too familiar. All the lights were green except for the one that had just gone off, so I waited. A half minute later, when I threw the first switch to arm the first flashpot, the one at the front right corner of the stage went off. This was right in the middle of Gary Richrath's big guitar solo, so Kevin Cronin just happened to be dancing around on the right front corner of the stage, and the explosion was about three feet from him. If I close my eyes I can still see the fury in his face, his bro-fro blowing in the breeze from the big wind machines onstage, as he dropped any pretense of being involved in the music and pointed at me in the expression that universally means, "You are dead!" He remembered where he was after a second or two, and turned back to the crowd.

Flash was thoroughly panicked by now, and was yelling into the headsets, "Turn it off! Turn it off!" I flipped down the rocker switches to disarm the rest of the pots, and another bomb went off. When I turned off the key, one of the washtubs exploded. By now, the band barely knew where they were in the song, and everyone backstage was looking at me. The real bomb cues were approaching, and the best way to disarm one is to set it off, so in the end I just randomly turned things on and flipped switches until  all of the remaining pots were expended. A couple were even on the beat. To this day, I can't tell you what the problem was, but it seemed like everything I touched was connected directly to some common firing circuit.

As soon as the show was over,** Kevin Cronin stormed over and gave me a cursing such as I have never heard. And I've worked retail. He cursed me, my company, my ancestry, and pretty much anything else he could think of, for probably two minutes. He was actually clenching his fists and stomping his little feet, he was so angry. It was like Richard Simmons impersonating Yosemite Sam. I may not have helped when I responded to this tirade with a cheerful-sounding, "Thanks for your feedback!" as he walked away. He turned and gave me another round, and I think he would have jumped on me if I hadn't been about twice his size.

I assumed I was fired, which was going to be the only thing that saved the day. Unfortunately, once people calmed down and things were explained, the band sent one of their minions to apologize for Kevin's outburst, and I think they even sent me a beer. Of course, not one of them was man enough to come himself, and Kevin always managed to be somewhere other than where I was after that.

By now, even the shop was convinced, and they shipped out my effects board the next day. One of our sound guys rewired the control box to bypass all of the safety circuits and interlocks to get us through the next couple of shows. I threw it in the dumpster behind whatever arena we were playing when the real board arrived.

I stayed on the tour for a few more weeks, when I was saved by Paul McCartney's tour to Japan. He was scheduled to use every special effect we owned, including bubble machines, so I was needed back in Dallas to get all that together and put it on a boat to Japan. That ended up being a fiasco of a different color, but that's a story for another time.

I'm only now getting to the point where I'm able to listen to a few REO songs all the way through. The onstage sound mixer for the tour, who has remained a good friend of mine, still can't make it past the opening synthesizer blast from "Ridin' the Storm Out" without suffering a minor panic attack.

---

* Typically, the control cables were run along the edges of arena floors, or along the side of the cordoned walkways for outdoor shows. This also tended to be the most convenient place for people who overindulged, or maybe suffered from hairballs, to relieve themselves of their gustatory burdens. You did not want to be the person whose job it was to roll up these cables at the end of the night, especially for a band like REO. And you could find the box those cables traveled in by smell alone.

** And I mean as soon as the show was over. He didn't even leave the stage after the song. The people in the front row were treated to an encore they did not expect.

Window world

I know. I've been busy.

Anyway, I promised a conclusion to the story of our latest home improvement project. It was really kind of anticlimactic, which is one reason I haven't been more motivated to write about it. I was sure that our adventure replacing the 40 year old windows was going to lead* to a hilarious post, including Monte Python-like shots of huge chunks of glass embedded in one of us, and arterial blood spurting all over the patio. Or at least some disgusting animal carcasses that we would find in the wall when we pulled out the old, rotten frames.

Alas, the whole thing went like clockwork. At least maybe if we're talking about an old wooden clock that has been left outside for a long time.

For those just joining us, our house was designed and built forty years ago by an engineering professor at the university where I work. She had very definite ideas about what she wanted. Most everything in the house is nonstandard, and much of it was built onsite. Our living room -- dining room combination** is paneled in native cypress, and features three large picture windows with cypress frames. Unfortunately, the water splashing on the patio had rotted the outsides of the frames, like so:

They didn't look quite this bad until we pulled off the paint and trim. 

Funny story. A few years ago, when we first noticed this problem because of gaps under the windows that lizards were crawling through, I temporarily filled the holes with Super Foam, the duck tape of the twenty-first century.  This was going to last the few weeks it took to make new frames. It was lovely, and Biscuit was thrilled with the look.

No, the tape is not left over from hurricane season.  We were 

at least attempting not to kill ourselves removing this glass.

Enter a couple of job changes, a hurricane, and the absolute impossibility of buying clear cypress lumber that is ten inches wide and two inches thick, and we lived with the foam longer than I care to admit. And since some of these boards cost more than the glass we put in the windows, I was being very careful.

Also, I removed the inside trim from the frames when this whole thing started, so that I could get exact dimensions and see exactly how the boxes were constructed. The trim laid on the floor of the dining room for the duration of the project, just to add to the overall trashy effect.

Cats love home improvement. 

But all good things must end, and eventually even I was able to finish the window frames. Biscuit applied the paint (outside), stain and polyurethane (inside), since she has just the right amount of OCD for wood finishing. All we had to do was wait for the hottest weekend of the summer, and we were ready to go.

The work itself went surprisingly smoothly, and there was only one brief episode of loud cursing and minor bleeding. Once we escalated to the 2 lb. hammer, and after a few minutes of planing, things slid more or less smoothly into place.***

For some reason, it never occurred to me to take pictures of the frames before installing them. 

Combination of wine and obliviousness, I think. 

We lived with plywood in the frames for a couple weeks, until we were able to get the glass people out.

You have no idea how happy I am to finally have this done.

Just in time for the annual hummingbird migration. So now all we have to do is paint the rest of the house. And I can get back to finishing the bathroom remodel I was working on when this whole window thing started. Seriously, it's been going on for a long time.

P.S. In other news, I spent a week at a super-nerd computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. I learned how to create a virtual water droplet that is up to 40% more watery than the current state of the art, as well as many, many other things equally as interesting. I considered writing about it, but couldn't think of a single person who reads this that would not want to poke their eyes out after one paragraph. It's already happening, isn't it?

---

* I found out while reviewing academic papers this past weekend that an increasing number of people have stopped using "led" as the past tense of "lead," and just treat it like "read." WTF, people!? Is us just give up on word forms and spelling completedly?

** I said it was the sixties, right?

*** That's what she said. ****

**** With the impending departure of Steve Carell from The Office, I'm afraid I'm going to have to retire twss, as well. The wife is devastated.

Letting go of the rope

A dear friend of my family is dying. Inexorably, painfully, hopelessly dying. Some days are better. Some are hard to bear. But the eventual outcome is not in doubt.

Along the way, he will have spent a double-digit number of weeks in the hospital, an unknown number of days in a rehab facility, uncounted hours being shuffled between the two, and no time in his own bed. He is finished eating, walking or going to the bathroom unassisted. He has so far engaged eight or ten specialists, and not a single general practitioner.* It will -- has already -- cost a fortune.

This is a man who was a proverbial captain of industry only a few years ago. An actual son of a share-cropper, he worked tirelessly to improve his lot and provide for his family for most of the previous century. He created a thriving business, became a pillar of his church, and a force in political discourse. A generation ago, he's a man who would have died unexpectedly in his sleep, or pitched over into his dessert after a big steak dinner and a couple of martinis. Today, he is a frail, frightened shell of his former self, his body struggling to maintain the minimum requirements for continued existence.

It is the way of life, and American medicine, that many of us will live our final days undergoing every procedure, and receiving every medication, for which our insurance will reimburse the medical corporations whose representatives are working so hard to bring our vital signs back into the range where they may consider the course of treatment complete. There is no talk of cure, or even of going home. Address the current issue, get the patient stable, discharge them from your service, and hope for the best, seems to be the only strategy.

I think the end of life is like water-skiiing. When you feel your balance slipping, you can try to right yourself, or let go of the rope and glide to a stop, more or less under control. The trick is in knowing when to let go. Release your grip too soon, and you may miss a chance to correct and ski on. Hang on too long, and you end up dragged face first through the water, sometimes with your swimsuit floating in the water behind you. It's not exactly drowning -- assuming you let go eventually -- but no one would call it fun.

I've reached the age where I think about these things. Not because I want to, or because I think they are interesting, or significant, or cool.  I think about them because they are happening to people close to me. And because I can feel it in my future, the way we once saw graduation, or marriage, or a new car, just over the horizon. It's all the same journey, but the scenery gets darker towards the end.

Ultimately, hanging on or letting go is a personal decision. Maybe the most personal we ever make. I'm not surprised my friend chose to hang on. It is his nature to struggle, and I always assumed that he would not be one to go gentle into that good night.

For myself, I hope I can be less Dylan Thomas and a little more William Cullen Bryant. Of all the ways we can measure the quality of a life, length is not high on my list. Every story has an ending, and I hate stories that go on too long.

---

* Because we don't have those anymore.

Bury my heart at Port Fourchon

I didn't want to write about the oil leak. I really didn't. After all, I think anyone who wants it can find plenty of writing, and talking, and blamestorming, and conjecturing about the Gulf. But after trying to write on several other topics, I realize that this is all I've got. It won't let me go. And vice-versa.

I am obsessed with the underwater robot cam. I read everything I see about the blowout, and each successive attempt to control it. Every conversational lull finds my mind drifting back to the 500 gallons or so of oil and gas spewing every minute into the icy darkness from the hole in the bottom of the sea. I am cursed by my just-enough-to-be-dangerous knowledge of the sciences involved, and my recently nonexistent but growing knowledge of deep water drilling. Mostly, I am increasingly depressed and concerned.

I'm not personally, no-reason-to-go-on depressed. I am just sad for the people of the Gulf, and the people who don't even know how much they depend on the people of the Gulf, and a beautiful place, and a lifestyle, and a wonderful set of communities that may very well be lost. More than that, I would be hard pressed to imagine a more poignant example of the conflict between our current global culture and the planet on which we all depend.

I don't believe the chickenest of the Chicken (of the Sea) Littles who say the floor of the Gulf will collapse into the rapidly emptying cavity. I doubt that the Gulf will suffer the fate of the Dead Sea, or that the Atlantic Seaboard will be fouled with tarballs and oiled terns all the way to the Jersey Shore, or the Cape of Cod*. But the Gulf of Mexico is home to a complex and little understood food chain, on which any number of fish, and birds, and creatures of the land depend. It depends on marshes, and estuaries, and open ocean, and the deep waters of the Gulf, and damage to any one of these environments can break the chain.

And guess who is at the top of that food chain? Exactly. And it's about more than fresh seafood. This ecosystem feeds a lot of people, and many more animals, in a world already running low on food and ways to make it.

In other news, a new virus is devastating casava plants halfway around the world. Why do we care? Casava is the third largest source of calories for humans in the world after wheat and rice, even before corn. A blight will create upward pressure on food and fuel prices, as well as exacerbating civil and humanitarian crises in the third world. Also, starving people make bad consumers. It's going to become ever harder to justify turning food into fuel.

And we can't stop drilling, or even slow down. As many as half of the people in the world literally cannot survive without at least as much petroleum-fueled food as we produce today. The United States -- feeder of the world -- puts about five calories of oil energy (including oil-based fertilizers) into every calorie of food we put in someone's mouth. And the pressure is increasing. Even with their draconian measures, the Chinese have only managed to slow the growth of their population over the last fifty years, not reduce it.

Speaking of the Gulf, Mexico, which is one of the United States' largest oil suppliers, is predicted to become a net importer of oil within three years, following the path taken by the U.S about forty years ago.

So what will happen? Who knows? My guess is that the food chain in the Northern Gulf that supports commercial and sports fishing will suffer significant damage, and may well collapse. The already diminishing wetlands will accelerate their retreat, further damaging both freshwater and saltwater fish populations, and the animals that depend on them. Agricultural chemicals will continue to expand the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi, since our country needs corn more than Gulf culture. And the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival will never be the same.

Right now, the hard part is the waiting, and the abstractness of the whole thing. There aren't any people to rescue from rooftops, no felled trees to cut up, no power to restore. There really isn't much to clean up or rescue. Whatever damage is being done is mostly far away, and too diffuse or small to be seen. The real effects can only be inferred in months and years to come, if ever.



So we wait, and we watch. Sometimes we cry. And we try to hope.

---

* On the other hand, I guess we had better see how long this goes on.

Now I really can't go home again

I got an e-mail from my mother a few weeks ago informing me that my childhood home had been demolished. This wasn't completely unexpected, but still came as somewhat of a surprise. My parents sold the house in the mid-1980's to an attorney who had plans for it that apparently fell through, and it has sat empty most of the time since, slowly decaying. It had become both an eyesore and a hazard, and reminded me a bit of Miss Haversham's place in Great Expectations. While I was considering writing this post I realized that I don't have a single picture of the house or property. I'm sure I lost a few just being a young man who moved a lot, and the rest left with my ex-wife.

Unlike most Americans of my generation, I lived in the same house from the time I was born until I left home. And it was no ordinary tract home in a subdivision, though it was certainly not a McMansion, or any other sort of mansion. The house was a modern* split-level on a wooded two and a half acre lot that was essentially given to my parents by the man for whom the street is named. He owned a very large tract of land and "just wanted good neighbors." We had only two other houses within a half mile of us. It was practically wilderness when I was a child, surrounded on three sides by woods, with a small creek running across the property. By the time I graduated from high school, the street was four lanes, there were subdivisions on all sides and I could see McDonald's from the driveway.

The house was very unassuming from the front, but from the back it was two thousand square feet of glass overlooking a large brick patio and a small hillside. My father designed and built the house in three stages, using a combination of subcontractors and child labor. By the time he was finished we had five bedrooms, three baths, two fireplaces, a living room and dining room, den and game room with a pool table, poker table, seating area and a wet bar. He had also put in a large swimming pool with an outdoor kitchen, gazebo and dressing rooms. A friend told me one time that it was the sort of place that should have a name.

Our house was not only the center of our lives, but a frequent stop for a number of overlapping social circles. Between casual gatherings, band rehearsals, poker parties, pool parties, church socials and a ridiculously large all day Independence Day party every year, our house was known by people I didn't even know I knew. To this day, when I meet people from my hometown -- many of whom I may be meeting for the first time -- they are much more likely to ask about that house than about members of my family. In fact, just last week a friend I haven't really seen since high school mentioned the house in the first e-mail message we exchanged after being out of touch for almost twenty years.

It broke my mother's heart to sell the place and move, and I know she suffered watching it erode and finally fall. She raised all of her children there, and poured her own hopes and aspirations and pride into making it a showplace. For my father, I think the loss was balanced by the opportunity to build a better house and avoid some of the mistakes he made with the first. I feel it more than I thought I would, but it's a tragedy of much less than human proportions. After all, it's been twenty-five years since I've seen the inside of the house, and the memories are still with me, even if the building is no longer there.

There is a sort of diffuse, low grade sadness in knowing the place is really gone, sort of like hearing that an old classmate or neighbor has passed away, even if they were never that close and you haven't spoken since childhood. I guess it's just another reminder that time and entropy make fools of us all. Still, when I'm home for the holidays I think I'm going to have to drive by and see the hole. Maybe I will find that G.I. Joe I lost behind the wall.

_____________________________

* Modern in the 1950's architectural sense, with a flat roof, clean lines, natural materials and lots of glass. My father was a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Things Fall Apart

Did you ever notice* how some periods of your life are happy and sweet and would make a nice montage, while other times it seems like entropy is having its place fumigated and has come to stay at your house for a while? I've been having one of those second kind of times lately. Thankfully, the major components of my life -- marriage, career, health -- have so far been largely immune to this phenomenon, though there was some craziness with the ex a couple of months back. It's just been little annoying things, one after another.

I think it started with computers. A few months ago my Sony laptop started performing so poorly that I was sure it was infected with something. It wasn't until this week that I realized it is only recognizing half of its memory and there is no way to fix it. It turns out I am part of a class action suit against Sony over the design of this particular motherboard. But of course I won't get anything from the settlement. This would not have been quite so upsetting if my Toshiba laptop had not suddenly decided it was only going to boot every third time or so that I turn it on. The Wife went through a similar process with her Toshiba, and it doesn't end well. My Dell desktop is "venerable" by computer standards, so this pretty much left me without a useful home computer**.

Then there are the tools. I burned up a table saw pretty early in the shed replacement project. It was a donation from a friend moving to California, and he had used to it put concrete siding on his house, so I wasn't really that surprised. But it was something else to be dealt with. Then last week the motor on the planer/jointer quit working suddenly. We don't even use the thing that much, so I am really not happy about that one.

The kicker came this past Monday when I backed my car into the wife's truck as I was leaving for work. No major damage to either vehicle, but enough to require some repairs to both. It was really not my best day.

This has all happened against the backdrop of broken light fixtures, mailbox posts, vacuum cleaners and blenders that are a natural consequence of a modern American life. Maybe the possessions are trying to get back at me for talking bad about material things. If so, I take it all back.

_________________________

* Did you ever notice how old men all eventually start talking like Andy Rooney? I'm looking forward to rocking eyebrows larger than my head.

** So I have three computers at home. Plus two at work. Sue me.

Old Friends

Today my mother told me of an old friend of hers who had passed away unexpectedly over the weekend. Earlier in the week an old classmate informed me of her grandmother's passing, expected but never welcome. Last weekend it was another childhood friend relating how her husband and all of his buddies had lost their fathers in the last few years. The previous day there was the former colleague whose lifelong friend had passed away that morning, taken by a disease that progressed more quickly than expected.

This is the life of those eligible for AARP.

It is an insidious but profound transformation for many of us just on one side or the other of the half-century milestone. Our parents’ generation attains the average life expectancy for Americans in the early 21st Century and our own generation reaches the age that Samuel Shem called “young enough to die” in his novel House of God. The increasing number of funerals and “I thought you would want to know” phone calls and e-mails inexorably turn our attention to thoughts of health, retirement and our remaining time in the world.

As the days before us grow noticeably fewer than those behind, hope gives way to regret; for loves abandoned early or never explored, for friends betrayed or forgiveness withheld, for all that we are finally forced to accept will never be ours. Last chances spin past us with the accelerating turn of the seasons. We are getting old. We grow tired. We realize that it takes fifty years for most of us to really understand what it means to be mortal. As my ex-wife always liked to say, growing old is not for wussies, though that’s not the exact word she used. She was classy.

Perhaps the ultimate cruelty is that age does not diminish our desire to do and see and experience new things. We still wish to have adventures and fall in love and be popular. The spirit is not only still willing, it still burns with the same pride and desire and ambition that it has in decades past. But the flesh grows steadily weaker, we are reminded at every turn that we are no longer twenty-something and that even if we are as good once as we ever were, we are not as good as we once were (with apologies to Toby Keith, and to everyone else I know for quoting Toby Keith).
The upside to all of this, if there is one, is that those of us who are paying attention begin to appreciate our time more. We stop thinking “some day” and start acting. We make our bucket list, or start that business, or spend the occasional day at work completely screwing off. Because in the end, there will never be enough days if your life is sweet. But one perfect day can make a life worth living. So if you can see the Old Folks Boogie in your future, don’t waste another day worrying about the past you didn’t get exactly right. Use every day you have left trying to make that perfect day. And if you are too young to know what I’m talking about, just try to take it easy on the old folks. They may be having a hard time.