isn't that funny?

being her creditor.

as for your friend... compromise is a curious word. both verb and noun.

learned helplessness

They have 2 kids together. She's going to school and working full time, so at least by starying with him she has someone to pick up the kids from school, etc. She wants to get into nursing school, is taking prerequisites; so she's going to be financially shaky for a few years. Right now they live in her parents' house; she's a phlebotomist, so doesn't make a lot of money. He spends a lot of money she brings in on drugs. He's been in and out of rehab (he's an ex-GI, so the VA picks up the tab). She once asked me to help her initiate divorce proceedings, but she chickened out at the last minute. The guy won't let her do anything; he doesn't even want her to hang out with me. Maybe sonme day she'll get fed up enough. But for now she's resigned to putting up with him.

Meanwhile, Viv's bankruptcy gets finalized this week-- just under the wire before the new laws take effect! As she put it, "gosh, my transition finally caught up with me!" Hmmm, that's the key to getting thousands of dollars of plastic surgery-- charge it all, them declare bankruptcy! Although really I have no way of knowing that that was how she financed it; she's never ever come clean about that aspect of it. But I smell a parasite!

Oddly, since I'm the leaseholder on the car she drives, I was listed as one of her creditors and got an official letter inviting me to the meeting of her creditors (I didn't go).

so why doesn't she leave him?

it's all sad.

I have a friend at work who's stuck in a crappy marriage. Basically, she's married to a controlling crack addict who can't hold a job. A cousin is a merchant seaman who has been on shore leave in SF for the past 2 weeks, and in a visit to her home he brought along his shipmate, who my friend struck up a friendship with. The shipmate is also married, plus they may never see each other again, so an affair was out of the question. Still, his last day in port was Sunday, and my friend desperately wanted to spend some time with this guy alone. I told her she could use my apartment, and use me as an excuse to get away from her husband for the evening (she told him she was going to a comedy club with me). My friend already had keys to my place because she takes care of my cat when I'm out of town, and I went to the movies for the evening (saw two of them) so they could have plenty of time. I habitually turn my phone off in the movies, so I was out of contact. When I got out I turned the phone back on, and there was a message from her. She said that she couldn't get the key to my place to open the lock, so they had to abandon their plan. I forgot to tell her that the lock is wearing out, and lately I've had to jiggle the key a little to get it to open. But she has the "good" set of keys, so I didn't think that would be a problem. If only I had had the phone on, I could have coached her through it (or if nothing else, left the theater and gone back to open it for them). Man, I felt so bad. That, and my annual evaluation at work sent me into a deep funk the last 2 days.

Two Women, A Man, and a Blog

how about Two Women, A Man, and a Blog?

i agree with diane. we should go private.

either private here or private at livejournal. seem the two most likely locales.

i don't want to share my vital essence with the ether. Or my precious bodily fluids either.

some insaniac

is commuting to Davies on a tandem. It's chained up at the bike racks in the parking garage almost every day. And it has a kiddie seat attached to the rack no less. I want to see who it is and find out whether it is two people "bike pooling" or someone grinding the tandem by him or her self.

that's the point

of a blog-- to impose your personality, views, etc. on the electronic ether. I always wondered why we don't just carry on an email thread. I mean, we're not even using all the cool blog features-- posting pictures, audioblogging, etc. Neither of you guys have even bothered to set up profiles! Have you even looked at my blog profile? Bet you can't guess what my picture is of!

or

all the cool kids are on tribe.net. We could have our own tribe!

ever read this guy?

The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto

Strategies for Survival
Notes on the Coming Transformation of American Life

by Jim Kunstler

I get e-mail from people who object to what they construe to be an excessively pessimistic view of our national scene. Well, what if you suggested to the people of Germany in 1936 that Dresden would be turned into an ashtry within a decade and that Berliners would cut down all the trees in the Tiergarten to heat their homes?
What I've been suggesting about the direction of our country is hardly that drastic.
I personally believe that there is much we can do as a nation, and as a collection of communities, to mitigate the problems I have been describing, even to create conditions in which American civilization can advance beyond the hardships of the early 21st century.
The overriding imperative task for us in the face of the problems ahead will be the downscaling of virtually all activities in America. This should not be misunderstood. I do not mean that we ought to become any less of a nation, or less of a democracy, only that the scale at which we conduct the work of American life will have to be adjusted to fit the requirements of a post-globalist, post-cheap-oil age. The future is already telling us very clearly what must be done. If we fail to pay attention, we risk very costly distraction in political turmoil, military mischief, civil disturbance, and permanent economic loss.
I will focus here on examples of three national "systems," so to speak, that will have to be downscaled sooner rather than later: retail trade, agriculture, and schooling.
America made the unfortunate choice (by inattention, really) of allowing nearly all of its retail trade to be consolidated by a very few huge national operations, the Wal-Marts and other gigantic discounters. Many Americans viewed this as a bonanza of bargain shopping without noticing the significant losses and costs entailed to their communities, and to the long-term health of their nation's economy. I have described the extreme vulnerability of the giant national retail operations to the vicissitudes ahead: disrupted oil markets, far-flung supply chains, and so forth. When these behemoths go down - and they will go down hard and fast - everyday retail trade will have to be reorganized in America. This is a tremendous task.
It will have to be reorganized at the local and regional scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances at multiple increments and probably by multiple modes of transport. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy - which is another way of stating we face a period of austerity - but it is apt to bring back many lost civic benefits in return. The national chains eliminated practically all the "middlemen," who were disparaged as parasites adding needless costs to everyday products. The fact is that these middlemen, the wholesalers, jobbers, warehousers, distributors, played necessary roles in a complex system that operated very differently than the current model. They were members of local communities; they were economic participants in their communities; they made decisions that had to take the needs of their communities into account; they were caretakers of civic institutions, and they were employers. We will need this category of business person again, as we will need the local retailer, the persons and families who run local businesses trading with the public at large. We will need a multi-layered system for the distribution of regular goods, even if it costs more to operate.
Some of the infrastructure needed to re-localize American commerce is there, though it is not in very good shape - the urban downtowns, small town main streets and business districts. Some of the big boxes might be integrated with it - dead Kmarts may be the local warehouses of the future, and some shopping centers and malls may be retrofitted into neighborhood centers - but much of this newer car-oriented fabric will more likely end up as salvage. The railroad system the US needs to replace the long-haul trucking system that we have relied on for decades is also in poor shape, but railroad track is much easier to repair and restore per mile than comparable amounts of interstate highway. Perhaps our biggest problem is that so many products we're accustomed to are no longer manufactured in the United States. The factories themselves have physically disappeared. Hence, another feature of the years ahead: for a period of time, Americans may have to make do with a lot less and with smaller selections of fewer products. This is another reason to regard the coming era as one of austerity.
It would be a mistake to take this view of the coming decades as nostalgic. The future will simply demand it. I happen to believe that there is much to gain in amenity from the downscaling of American life. We will benefit from knowing the people we do business with. There is a good chance that many people currently underemployed will find a gainful niche to occupy in the reorganization of American trade, and communities will benefit from their being gainfully occupied. But at the same time, we will be saying goodbye to a way of life which, however unsustainable and even crazy it might have been, was a set of arrangements we had grown accustomed to, and it is never easy for a culture to change the way it does things as fundamental as everyday commerce.
Agriculture faces a similar predicament. Today, we grow a few monocultures of grain or milk or beef or pork in vast quantities on gigantic factory farms, process most of the outputs at a similar enormous scale, and truck it great distances to gigantic super-stores. The end of cheap oil means this will no longer be possible. We are going to have to grow at least some of our food closer to home. We will have to do it with fewer petroleum inputs, the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. Our methods will have to be along lines that are today labeled as "organic." Farming will have to be done at a smaller scale, and it will probably entail more intensive human labor. A class of people will re-emerge on the scene: American agricultural laborers. Their lives will probably be far from idyllic. Don't count on this kind of work being done by foreign migrants when we are engaged in border disputes and demographic / territorial contests with Mexico. When the US economy shudders and stumbles, life will become worse by orders of magnitude in Mexico, which is already struggling.
The re-localization of farming in America is going to be very difficult. Our relationship with land the past half century has been one almost exclusively of brutal commodity exploitation. A lot of farmland in California is close to being ruined from over-irrigation; you can see the salt precipitates in the fields off Interstate Five in the Central Valley today. Some of the best eastern farmland has been paved over. The years ahead will require us to rediscover a relationship of caring for land and doing so by hand, tenderly. In an age when the farmland around our towns and cities seemed to have value only as potential development - for monocultures of suburban houses and discount shopping - stewardship was regarded as merely prissy. In the future, our lives will depend on how we take care of the land.
The re-localization of agriculture presumes that many so-called value-added activities will take place on a more local and regional basis, too: the conversion of milk into dairy products, the production of meats, hams, sausages, wine, preserved foods, and so on. Europeans never stopped doing this. Their models and methods exist to be emulated, and we will have to do it as the end of globalism becomes a more emphatic condition of life. Today, there are probably fewer than fifty immense factories producing most of the cheese in America, all absolutely dependent on long-haul trucking based on cheap diesel fuel. Twenty years in the future, there may be thousands of smaller dairies operating across the US. They will probably put out better products. They will employ people in complex vocations. They will have regional differences.
The downscaling of agriculture presents some obvious problems. Farms take years to establish. The knowledge for running diverse, small-scale farms becomes a little more lost every day as elderly farmers die and the culture of farming dies with them. Theend of the cheap oil economy may bring dysfunction so swiftly to our current arrangements that we will not have time to make an orderly transition. This could result in a specific food emergency in the US that might go on for years. As the Chinese proverb goes: a well-fed person may have many problems but a starving person only has one problem - another reason to be prepared for political strife here in the US. In the meantime, we may see swiss chard and potatoes sprout where formerly the monocultures of Kentucky bluegrass, stoked by oil-based turf-builders, grew so luxuriantly on the lawns of suburbia.
School, is another major system facing drastic reorganization. The failure of schooling in America is already manifest. Our inner-city schools are in nearly complete state of entropy due to the effects of our overall disinvestment in cities - the school buildings themselves are crumbling while books and supplies are beyond the point of critical shortage - and to an array of social conditions ranging from the disintegration of families to the absence of standards of normative behavior. Whether these might all be lumped together as the consequences of poverty is debatable, in my opinion, but the effects are not debatable. These schools are not producing literate citizens with adequate social skills.
Gigantic alienating schools are producing so much anxiety and depression that multiple slayings have occurred at regular intervals in recent years.
Our schools are too big. The centralized suburban schools with their fleets of buses will become rapidly obsolete when the first oil market disruptions occur. The inner city schools will be too broken to fix. The suburban schools will be too large to heat economically (especially since the overwhelming majority of them all over the nation, regardless of climate, are sprawling one-story modernist boxes). School will have to be reorganized on a local basis, at a much smaller scale, in smaller buildings that do not look like medium security prisons. School will be required for fewer years, and with more deliberate sorting of children into academic and vocational tracks. Children will have to live closer to the schools they attend - the yellow bus fleets will be history. Children and teachers will benefit from being in physically smaller institutions where all will at least have the chance to know one another. In a post-cheap-oil world, teens might be needed to work part of the day or part of the year.
Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and one of the leading reformers of education in America, has argued that people need to finish regular school by age 16 and assume a new set of responsibilities to increase their sense of adulthood. He advocates abolishing high school as it is now known altogether. Years from now fewer will go on to college. Colleges, too, are likely to go through severe downsizing, especially the enormous state universities, as college ceases to be a mass consumer activity. Real life may not be so easily postponable. Vocational trades requiring real skills may gain in status and some professions such as law may lose status (and earning power). Some occupations - public relations, travel agentry, authoring books - may shrink or disappear altogether. Work for many may become a matter of making oneself useful to others with the added benefit of earning a living.
One hazard to the enterprise of reforming education will be the psychology of previous investment. We have poured our accumulated national wealth into building gigantic central schools and galactic-scale university campuses, with their semi-professional sports facilities and vast parking lots, and there will be a tendency to try to make them work no matter what conditions prevail in the real world. But circumstances will demand nonetheless that we change.
What is liable to happen to these three major activities, retail, agriculture, and school is also true of virtually all other things we do in the US. Everything you can imagine from banking to real estate development to church-going to professional sports will have to reduce its scale and scope of operation or fail. The problems ahead will compel us to move from being a culture of quantity to a culture of quality. We will have to make do with fewer and less, and we can compensate by demanding that it be finer. We will have to live locally and we can benefit from the restoration of robust civic relations.
Many of the beliefs and accepted dogmas of the late 20th century will fall away as a new and very different reality asserts itself. Cultural relativism will be discredited in an era when it becomes necessary, even for intellectuals, to make distinctions between good and bad, between excellence and worthlessness - because our lives may depend on the ability to make these distinctions. Hierarchies of value will become normative. Elitism will no longer be a pejorative but rather a recognition that some things really are better than other things.

well "fuck!" seems appropriate to me.

odds and ends

Ten days ago I was winged by a truck while riding my bike on a busy street. I had just gone through an intersection and found myself squeezed between cars parked at the curb and a FedEx truck passing me on the left. I thought "this is too tight, I'm not gonna make it," and indeed the last foot or so of the truck grazed my shoulder, I lost control, and went down. I landed on my hands, face, and hip. I think my beloved Julbo sunglasses cushioned the impact, because they were mangled but face sustained a small scrape, lots of bruising, and a marble-sized hematoma on my chin. I screamed "fuck" 3 times when I went down, which got the attention of passersby. As soon as I got up from the pavement (and that's always my first impulse, get the fuck out of traffic), there was a cop and 2 other men there asking me if I was okay. Someone called 911 and there was an ambulance at the scene within minutes. It took me up to Davies, where they cleaned me up and x-rayed my hand. Nothing was broken, but I did get a nice juicy script for Vicodin for my troubles.

reminisence

laurie is 4 years older than me. when i was in 1st grade at Blue Ash Elementary she was in 5th grade. It was the only time we were in the same school together.

Gregg is a year and a half older than her.

and Gary is a year and a half older than Gregg.

And then Gordon is 3 years older than Gary.

Laurie's a bit of an enigma to me. We had a bunk bed together when we were young. I had the lower bunk (i was the baby after all). We were downstairs. The older boys had the upstairs rooms. Gordon as the eldest had his own room. Gary and Gregg shared. Then the boys moved downstairs and took over Dad's bedroom. I went upstairs and took the bedroom with the built in desk and bookshelves. Dad took the other bedroom. It was that proximity that drove me crazy -- having to hear his snoring!! I hated it. That was 3rd or 4th grade when I got my own room: 1970'ish i guess.

which was also the year Gordon graduated Sycamore. and lucked out by drawing a high draft number. and he bought that dark blue Opel Manta at some point with the matte black racing hood. What a cool car.

And then Dad bought the Mazda RX2. Dubbed the Deathmobile by the time I got a hold of it in 1978-79. The same car I got stuck in a construction field one night somewhere in Montgomery. I can't remember what the heck we were doing out there, other than trouble. Fun little car. Rotary engine. But not good in a field.

Laurie graduated a half year early (after Xmas in January 76). And she immediately moved out, and moved in with her boyfriend Jim. They got married on my birthday a year later, which was television premiere of the Holy Grail, which I missed because of the wedding! grrr.

Laurie had this farm in Harrison that I just loved. Big old house. I used to go out there and visit a lot. We had Xmas there every year. And often Turkey Day.

When I was home on leave from Korea I went out there. Their daughter was just a toddler barely.

And when Aud and I were first together we went camping with them - and waterskiing at Lake Brookville. But Aud didn't like Laurie - and we grew apart.

Now they have a big farm in Indiana, and a big big modern house. Jim is actually a nephew of the Lindner's apparently. Although not a close one i guess.

Anyway. Goodnight.

You had a sister?

How did I not know that or somehow forget it? Gosh. How old is Laurie?

my siblings

are the same as they've always been, only more so. we're all liberal misanthropes. godless malcontents. anxious losers. i speak to my sis maybe every other month. i like her better now that she's single again. no need to pretend that she's got some kind of great life. now she's back in the pit with the rest of us. phil's cool when i speak to him, he's mellow and thinks pretty much the same way i do. i never speak to him for months, sometimes years on end. but if i called him up right now i'd have a good time shooting the breeze with him. greg-- whenever i do talk to him, which is maybe once a year, he's cool, but he seems more like a stranger than phil or tara. but then he always did. i kinda wish tara lived nearby so i could do stuff with her, but if she did, we'd probably get on each other's nerves after a while. weird.

now there's a question.

my brother Gary got religious, and it's weird. sometimes he's like his old self. and other times there's all this god stuff. and some of it makes sense from the old days. sort of. and i remember sitting and singing along with him playing the guitar folk songs and john denver and jackson browne. and then i think did i ever really know him at all.

i've invited gregg to go to the west virginia vs cincinnati game at nippert in november. which will be the longest time he and i have been together alone in probably a decade or maybe two decades. so that'll be interesting.

and gordon has crawled into a cocoon.

and laurie i haven't spoken to in years. not since my separation. i guess she was disappointed i didn't get divorced?

My brother

is down in New Orleans. But he's not in the House of the Rising Sun or anything. He's in the Army. He got back from Kosovo last March and got a job with some financial company. We didn't communicate much when he away last year. I don't know why. The older I get, the more I feel I don't really know my brother and sister as well as when we were kids. I'm not sure why that should be surprising to me, but it has been. Sometimes after I spend a week with them in person, everything feels normal and okay again, but I haven't seen my brother in a couple of years, and when I get his emails I'm just bewildered by some of his comments. I expect he feels the same way about me.

He's 35 and he still sounds so twenty-something, and he's always trying to sound so tough and hardass, and he's really anti-women right now because he claims they all just want to know how much money he makes and get married and have babies, and he's gotten so rightwing Republican and agrees with everything my parents say about everything, and is gradually losing his goofy sense of humor. I don't know how to have a conversation with him any more. What's worse he'll agree with me about certain things, and then tell Karen or my parents something completely different, so I never know when he's being sincere or just diplomatic.

Do either of you ever feel this way about any of your sibblings?

we're planning another Superior trip...

on a somewhat tentative level we've begun to plan for another trip to Lake Superior for next summer.

this one would be two weeks - although i'm getting some push back on the circle tour vision.

so i guess we'll see.

we would link up with our friends in St. Paul again however we do it.

***

ouch! you should get your hand checked out. how can you work that way? maybe you need to switch from riding bikes to reading about other people riding bikes, you know? :)

***

Other news? .....hmmm. Bengals are 4-0. Haven't done that since the last time they went to a Super Bowl: 1988 or 89. Who knows. Maybe this time all the way.

My friend Jerry from Huntington Beach (L.A.) was out here for a couple of days last weekend. We played golf, of course. It seems the only time I play nowadays is when I go out there, or he visits here. We introduced Helen to
The Settlers of Catan which is a really fun board game -- very suitable for kids and adults. It supports logical thinking, there's some random luck which throws in some excitement, and there's some competitiveness without truly being warlike. There is a winner and a loser, but people do not get defeated or blown off the board (like Risk). Everyone plays to the end of the game. I had wanted to get Helen interested for a while, but hadn't. So, this was a perfect opportunity. I had actually already gotten Owen interested in it two summers ago at Origins, but it's not really possible to play with Owen and NOT play with Helen. She doesn't like to be left out. Who does?

So... hopefully we'll play again soon. :)

I took Jerry to Boardwalk in Mt Lookout Square and then introduced him to the famous Zip Burger next door - which was always a favorite routine for Jim and me. We also found a new game store at the top of the hill to Mt Washington.

the most exciting thing was that when we were trying to leave the golf course at Shawnee Lookout my car wouldn't start. The power lights all went dark. Turns out one of the connectors to the battery corroded and broke apart! We got a jump, and then brought it back home, and were able to repair it by sawing off the bad part and melding it into a replacement piece. It obviously is not a permanent repair, but a lot cheaper than a Volvo Battery Cable Kit. So far it works. What more can one ask?

NHL hockey returned last night. Bout time.

Helen had hockey practice last night too. Her skating is getting better and better, and she's showing a lot more confidence. Not leaning on the stick. Just skating.

so, did they ever go through with that face transplant?

i can't believe they'd been stalling for over a decade because of ethical qualms.

i feel like a timid rodent poking it's nose out of its warren. "is it safe to come out? are they really blogging agin? is this just a ruse?"

i guess i'm sposed to check in about local weather as per protocol: typical SF fall. maritime fog has diminished to being only an occasional annoyance. sunny and mild every day. achingly clear skies. all i want to do is ride the bike. don't worry, the rains of november are coming.

my thumb is starting to feel better; i can shift now without pain. i wiped out on my bike almost 2 weeks ago. the "break your fall with your hands" reflex kicked in, which is good; but the hand (just the right one) got pretty banged up. may have broken the thumb, who knows. didn't go to the ER or anything.

i'm prolly gonna buy a rehab bike today with a big basket on the front so i can take my cat to the park with me (now i have to put her in the kitty carrier, which is a pain). actually, the new bike phenom are these junk bike shops where they rescue throwaway bikes from the waste stream and rehab them to sell to young urbanites. or, you go to the shop, tell em what you're looking for, pick out a junk bike frame hanging on the wall, and they cobble together the beater bike of your dreams from an assortment of new and used parts. usually for between $200 and $400. But unlike traditional used bike shops, which are run by crusty old retired guys, the new breed are run by heavily pierced and tattooed young retired mike messengers.

i always wanted to go to professional bike mechanics school (yes, they exist) so i can put bikes together from scratch (i could maybe do it with my present skills, but it would be a horribly painful mistake-ridden process).

in other news, Google wants to give the entire city free WiFi. sweet.

i go sky diving next Saturday. woo-hoo!