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March 16, 2010 | 6 Comments

Skunk smell FTW

the bowling pins are a blurBack in DC, I bowled regularly, a.k.a. was in a bowling league. But not just any league, I was in a GAY bowling league. My colleagues had fashioned snarky team names like Men with Balls and Always in the Gutter. My team was called the Evil Bitches. This was much closer to how we wanted to see ourselves than our actual collective temperament, and there was more than one occasion when the opposing team members would shake our hands at the end of a night, only to say, “you know, you aren’t really that bitchy.” We considered changing our attitude to suit the title, but were too lazy to make it happen.

Blowing my knee out at my wedding, it was a while before I could execute my proper bowling approach and land my weight on my left leg. Seven months from my surgery, to be specific, and I felt a little unsure at first. But now the knee is comfortable. Good thing, since I joined a league again. A GAY league. Now now, there is no gay league in Walla Walla, but there is one in the Tri-Cities. This means that out of a population of 170,000 people (according to 2008 Census estimates), there are 40 gay bowlers, or GLBT bowlers, to be exact.

There are still the tongue in cheek team monikers—I’ll note here that a women’s team stole the “with Balls” phrasing in this league, Dolls with Balls—but at this point the similarities with DC’s teams cease. They are much more laid back players, classic Northwest, if you will allow me the indulgent reference. Gutter ball? No big deal! Missed the head pin? Just try again!

Trust me, I never, never saw this during my three or four years of league play in Virginia. I think people would have ejected their hearts right out of their chests if they’d had to actually say cheerleady things after bad throws.

Not that we weren’t nice out east. We just really wanted to do well, and reward greatness. We gritted our teeth after an errant ball and grunted, “next frame,” or the more desperate, “next game.” Sometimes these were followed with a half-sincere “it’s okay.” More common was the line of strikes and spares down one team’s frame, followed by cheering and high fives. There is so much high fiving in bowling that it is practically a sport within a sport.

The high fives are often done by teams who are very peppy, the kind of team that one hates to play because they’re just so in your face about their excitement, when all one wants to do is just figure out the oil pattern and throw a good rock or thirty. There’s the team that went to great expense to procure matching bowling shirts that look fantastic until you see the simply awful-looking attempt at a logo on the back. People, sometimes less is more, or at least, more easy on the eyes.

The funniest opponents are the teams who are either mad at each other that night, or who are so frustrated with their bowling that they begin taking it out on each other during the night. I can really mess with their already wobbly psyches, like telling them, almost condescendingly, that maybe this next ball will be The One, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. (Seriously? All hope for humankind rests on Ted Logan’s shoulders? I’ll never get over this.)

Such attempts at sinking a foundering ship don’t work in the Tri-Cities league, which is so close to the Hanford nuclear Superfund cleanup site that everything in that area begins with the prefix of “Atomic.” Atomic Muffler, Atomic Storage, and Atomic Bowl. The best part about this atomic neighborhood, in my opinion, are the little hydrogen atom graphics that accompany these buisneses, friendly little electrons that practically have a smiley face, as if the last thing they would ever dream of doing is harming anyone. Hanford, of course, is the place that created the nuclear material that the US dropped on Nagasaki. I don’t suppose those hydrogen atoms had smiley faces that day.

The folks in the Tri-Cities league are well aware of this history, and yet, they all carry on in what is basically a factory town’s final resolution, courtesy of the Department of Energy. Bowling is a release for them from their work days, to be savored and enjoyed, even if it is only a few pins knocked down at a time. For me, traveling the 50-some-odd miles from Walla Walla every week, it’s a way to be around geeky and fun gay people again, and to help string together things I’ve enjoyed before with my life out here.

It is a 50-mile drive, however, and it takes me right past the awful Boise Cascade paper mill. Last night I was relieved of the putrid odor by, of all things, a skunk. It’s saying something when dead skunk smells better than the process of turning trees into cardboard. How nice of Mr. Skunk to take one for the team.

March 14, 2010 | 2 Comments

Peach chicken noodle soup

chicken noodle soupI am a very good cook, if I do say so myself. I don’t brag often, or at least, I’ve been told not to brag, so in my attempts not to be a condescending ass, I button my lips rather than assert things I think I’ve gotten good at over the years. Perhaps it’s out of fear that someone much more gifted will be sent to my side the very moment I start posturing, and suddenly, I’ll be next to James Beard who will smile authentically, and I’ll just look like a total dipshit. And anyway, my list of things on which I have any hope of bragging is rather short.

But, at risk of sounding stuck on myself, I’ll go ahead and say I’m a good cook, and I’ve picked up a sense of tastes that go together, how to build a complex and enjoyable flavor profile, good ideas on textures and color and pacing people through several courses. I don’t have perfect skills—looking at a pile of minced onions, there is too much variation among the pieces for me to pretend at a French Culinary Institute degree. But I know the difference between minced, chopped, julienned, or rustic cut. I can make a mother sauce in the French tradition of Bechamel or Veloute, though I have no master’s sauce to compare mine, so it’s possible my vinagrette tastes like horse ass. I do presume someone would have mentioned this by now, however.

All this said, I don’t always use a recipe when I’m making something. In fact, I rarely use instructions unless it’s a cuisine I don’t know. So when Susanne, sick on the couch with a croaky voice asked for some chicken noodle soup, I said sure and headed to the basement to get some organic stock. This was only because I thought I’d used all of my homemade chicken and duck stock for a beef noodle soup I’d made earlier in the week, also to help soothe her cold. And there is nothing that doesn’t feel a little more luxurious when duck stock is added to it. Nothing culinary, that is. I don’t advise adding duck stock to say, one’s Mark Twain first edition book collection.

(Note to college students everywhere: if you are hacking up your gallbladder all over passersby on your way to class, just turn around and go back to bed. Your professors don’t like it when you make them sick or give them laryngitis.)

I chopped up some chicken tenderloin and threw it in my pot with some heated olive oil, letting it brown and crisp up a little, then deglazed the pot with one box—the last box—of stock, making a mental note to get some more from Costco next week, because well, we buy our cooking supplies in bulk. This meant I’d made about 4.5 cups of soup.

A while later I added some egg noodles and once they’d plumped up, saw that the stock had cooked down a bit too low. I just couldn’t bring myself to add water. That would kill the gorgeous balance of flavors and seasonings I’d added, not that Susanne’s palate could taste them at the moment. It has been scientifically established that chicken soup boosts one’s immune system, so what would watering it down do? Weaken it, I supposed.

Not acceptable. I opened the fridge, remembering Susanne telling me that we still had one jar of homemade stock in there—cue the little oval of Susanne over my shoulder, saying “we still have one jar of homemade stock in there,”—and I stuck my head in, looking for something beige in color, liquid, and in a mason jar.

Alas, this is not as exclusionary as I would have hoped. I smiled, seeing my target, launching my hand upon it, grasping it with my opposable thumb, my marker of humans’ dominance over this realm for the last 50,000 years, and triumphantly emerged with my prize. It did not occur to me that I should check the contents, primarily because the back of our refrigerator is like Siberia, and things only dream of decomposing there. I think there’s a member of the czar family back there. It really limits the usable space in the rest of the fridge, which is kind of annoying.

I will say that I had a moment, half a second at best, where I wondered why the jar didn’t have any fat floating on top, but that thought didn’t slow me down, not one bit. I poured in the entire jar and stirred the pot—lest I be lazy and not really combine the new contents well, or something—and put the lid back on, letting it simmer a bit more before I served any to Susanne.

Several minutes later she passed through the kitchen on her way to the bathroom and noticed that jar of the peach syrup I’d made last summer when canning peaches was sitting, empty, on the counter. Even in her sickened haze, she knew what the jar was, and lifted the lid to the soup. A unique odor of savory chicken and syrupy, peachy goodness greeted her.

She put the lid back on the pot.

I was on the couch, giggling at some news story or other. Oh, the French Canadians! Or oh, that silly Glen Beck!

“Honey,” she asked me gently, “why did you make peach chicken noodle soup?”

“What,” I asked. The poor dear, she was losing her mind. I should do more for her to get her better.

“You put the jar of peach syrup in the soup. Why did you do that?” At this point, she began chuckling.

“Oh no, did I?” I thought it was chicken stock. . . .

“Mm hmm.”

“Crap.”

She did her best and ate half a bowl, and honestly, I think it was only possible because she couldn’t taste a darn thing. For my part, I poured it down the toilet this morning. It’s not a flavor anyone needs to try. Just take my word for it.

Photo by Kevin H. from Flickr.

March 10, 2010 | 3 Comments

Chatting for dummies

Everett on camAs an avid watcher of the Daily Show, I watched this week when Jon Stewart “investigated” Chatroulette. For those of you blissfully unaware of this impertinent corner of the online universe, Chatroulette is a Web site in which you get on your Web cam and are randomly matched with someone else on their Web cam. It’s an anonymity-loving paradise, except that, as Jon showed, it’s mostly filled with horny middle-aged men. And reporters looking to find out what the story is.

I wanted to know if that was the beginning, middle, and end of the whole thing, so I fired up my built-in Web cam and I moseyed on up to the Wild Wild Web. Okay, I don’t have to fire it up, it’s just automatic because it’s a Mac, but whatever. I sallied up and got ready for some roulettin’ good time. I will say I was annoyed by my camera, because to be able to see my screen is to have it aimed at a really unflattering angle for my face. But I need to see my screen, so double chin it was.

My first random assignment was . . . a black screen. And yet Chatroulette was telling me to feel free to start talking. Talking? To what? This was weird, too weird. Was it talk therapy? A technical glitch? A–and suddenly, my “partner” disconnected from me and hopped to the next shuffled cammer.

Cammer? Okay, I was a fish in a frying pan with a pool of spilled milk next to me. I was a mess of metaphor. No sooner had I been bumped by the first person than I was wham-blam bumped two more times in extremely rapid succession by other people I barely even saw! Gee, maybe my ego isn’t ready for this, I wondered. It was rapid-fire rejection! After 18 months of job rejection, and 7 months of query letters to agents rejection, could I take this? Was I up for this?

Of course I was! It’s Chatroulette! I steadied myself as the computer hunted for another random assignment. What’s taking so long, I wanted to know. And then, out of the darkness, came. . .

A bald man, with furrowed brow, staring very closely at his screen. I could have sited good places for hair plugs on his scalp. I disconnected. I! I took the power, my power, into my own hands and clicked next! Banished, middle aged staring man! Next up, a bald man? And another. And another.

You know, there was a mid-semester fall break that I took my sophomore year of college, and to save on gas I gave a couple of people a ride back with me. One of them lived in central Pennsylvania, so it wasn’t very far out of the way between Syracuse and New Jersey, but it was unfamiliar enough that I didn’t really know my way around there. I dropped her off and had one more friend in the car, who lived in Clinton, NJ. We tried to find our way back to the highway, but we’d gotten lost and just as I was certain we’d been riding in circles, we spotted a restaurant of the Pennsylvania/New Jersey variety. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a low building with 70s-era brownish brick, big industrial windows and a bakery counter at the register. The only thing not making it a proper diner was the lack of polished chrome and the absence of tableside jukeboxes. It was that kind of restaurant. And even though it was late, it was open, with ten million cars in the parking lot. We walked in to the front, relieved that we could be back on our way soon, until we saw who was in there.

Every single person other than the hostess was a middle aged bald man. 250 bald men.

It’s not a bald thing, really. I’m losing my hair; I know I’ll be among them someday. If they were all blue I would have been just as rattled. Or wearing the same clothes, whatever.

I whispered to the hostess that I needed to find the highway. She wrote down directions for me. I leaned in and asked if this was a convention group.

“How’d ya guess,” she asked me, blandly, chomping on her gum and looking at me like I was the stupidest person she’d ever seen. Not only was I driving around with no idea that the highway was three roads away, but I couldn’t even put it together that the bald convention was meeting here. Sheesh.

We left quickly, agreeing that we should never speak of the experience again. And apparently I have left Georgette in the dust on that one. Sorry, Georgette.

Anyway, maybe the bald men of America have moved into the 21st Century and are now meeting on Chatroulette.

I clicked again, and there it was, a man and his little man. And I mean little. I moved on quickly, hoping to rid my retinas of the sight in short [sic] order.

Three teenage girls sipping at drinks obviously procured at 7-11, giggling. Perhaps they’d just seen what I’d just seen. I made a mental note that any future teenage girls in my household will not have access to Chatroulette. Maybe the Web will be gone by then.

A very fat woman in a light blue bra and matching panties. The moment my face came into view on her screen she began jumping up and down. I clicked next.

Someone had put a Jesus bobblehead figurine on his desk and left the camera there. I heard myself laugh on his computer.

Along the line somewhere, I had drifted into performance art. I tried to look behind me to see the bend I’d gone around.

Another wanker. He and I clicked next at the same time. I wondered who he was looking for. Those giggling girls, I guessed. That thought made me frown, and my next “partner” saw it and typed, “why the sad face,” before they clicked next. It was a rhetorical question, apparently.

Two teenage guys lying on someone’s bed, looking bored. I suspect they were gamers, because they next’ed me faster than anyone else.

A whole room of young women. I waved and clicked next. I was too intimidated!

Another blank screen. Again, what am I supposed to do here, I asked myself. “Hello? Are you there?” No response. Okay, that was just creepy.

Two teen boys again, one in profile. I could hear that they were getting yelled at by a female authority figure, probably because they were on Chatroulette.

I exited the screen, having had enough of all that.

On Twitter I had posted that I’d checked out Chatroulette and sure enough, five minutes later I had three Chatroulette-affiliated friends following my Twitter account. One of these led to some funny screen captures of the way two random chatters can juxtapose in funny ways: two people dressed as Jesus (so maybe Jesus is a thing on the site?), one person dressed as a cop while a wanker looks rather afraid, a person playing air guitar and someone looking like some approximation of Jimi Hendrix.

As a cultural text, it could be interesting. As a way to chat with people, well, I didn’t actually “chat” with anyone. I learned no names, knew any of their stories, and really, I didn’t care to know. But wow, there are a lot of lonely guys out there. I’d say it warranted some evaluation by the government, but I don’t care that much.

Next.

March 9, 2010 | 7 Comments

Northwesterners wear black in spring

This year winter was like a photo negative of last year; except for a few inches of snow in December, none has fallen on the streets of Walla Walla. The last month didn’t even bluster much, with a few days of overcast and a few days of rain, and a whole lot of days during which we didn’t ask much of the heater in the basement, so it sat there like a sleeping dragon with a chest cold, happy not to cough up any fire for us. Back out in DC all of our friends were moaning, then foaming, then apoplectic about the endless bands of snow that covered absolutely everything. They posted angry statuses on Twitter and Facebook. They took pictures as evidence. With way too much time on their hands, they made time-lapse movies of porches increasingly blanketed, forgotten toys buried, and personal vehicles inconveniently blocked in by an inconceivable amount of frozen precipitation. I watched this all from 3,200 miles away, exhaling in wonder and relief that my nonconsensual isolation in the house from 30 inches of snow and no plowing last year did not repeat itself. It would have been some kind of very cruel irony if I’d been back in DC this winter. And to everyone who had copious amounts of time with their loved ones while they were instructed to stay home, day after agonizing day, you have my sympathy.

Spring clearly has sprung around here, has been springing for a while, actually. The wineries are readying for the tourist onslaught, and people are smiling with notable more frequency, often looking at the big yellow ball in the sky, so happy for their skin to generate some vitamin D, even as their retinas fry away from the radiation.

But this is the Pacific Northwest, well, kind of, and damned if we’re not all still wearing earth tones and lots of black and gray and navy blue. We have to separate ourselves from the color of daffodils, after all, for we might confuse pollinators otherwise. It’s an ecological imperative, see. We feel that much warmer when the sun beats down on our black hoodies than if we were simply wearing a white t-shirt. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing a down vest over a dark gray long-sleeved shirt (or even better, a black hoodie), even if it’s 74 degrees outside because look, just over there, see the mountains? Snow on the mountains! Never mind that they’re 3,000 feet higher than us. If we can see snow, it must be cold.

Some Northwesterners complement these heavy jackets with wool socks and Birkenstock sandals. It’s actually a rather popular look, and it separates the wheat from the chaff; people with any hesitation about wearing socks and sandals together, especially with cargo shorts, have simply not lived in the PacNW long enough. People who wear this combination and live in some other geographic area, you need to put everything you can fit in your car and move out here, because you have some like-minded crazy people out here who really, really want to meet you.

Sure, we enjoy spring. We don’t want to compete with it. We’ll walk through wildflowers and scrub brush, and all the sage that survived becoming tumbleweeds over the reasonably short winter, but we’ll walk through it in ecologically friendly clothing and gear, we’ll take reusable water bottles with us, and some of us will  cover up our tracks on the way back, lest we leave anything behind that wasn’t there before we passed by. And when the temperature hits 100 degrees in June, then fine, okay, we’ll ditch the socks. But the synthetic down vest stays.

March 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

Speaking of lies

I try to listen when the universe at large brings up points for me to consider. A few weeks ago, the message I heard was “be comforting.” I was actually told no fewer than three times, by three entirely different people—a student with twitchy senioritis, a transgender woman on the edge, and a professional who is having difficulty with a superior—that my words to them were comforting. These conversations happened in the midst of the anguishing last stages of a woman’s life here in town, a woman about whom I’ve written before and for whom many people have a particular fondness. And as I’ve seen her caretakers looking increasingly exhausted, the concept of what is comforting, when, and for whom have swirled around in my head. We often forget, it seems, to support the caretakers, and they, the front guard, need a lot of comfort themselves.

On another level, we attempt to provide comfort for the terminally ill, in the form of hand-holding and increasingly desperate dosages of opioids. It’s the medical equivalent of building a sea castle. We wring our hands when we fear our efforts aren’t enough, and of course they’re not enough. And so we hope that our well wishes, our prayers, our food offerings—for surely they can’t concentrate on cooking, for God’s sake—will do enough for now. Sometimes hope and a bite of warm supper is all we have.

The message this week, if I’ve got it correctly, is not to lie. Surely this is something my parents and a plethora of clergy attempted to teach me when I was a child. The script back then was simply that lying is wrong, a concept predicated on a young person’s monolithic understanding of morality: you do right just because. You avoid doing wrong just because.

What I see about lies now, on the cusp of my fourth decade, is the devastation in their wake, like the wrecked ideals of a partner who has put such effort into someone he then realizes doesn’t have his best interest at heart. Or the sudden calamity that avalanches down on a person who gets laid off after disingenuous promises from her boss that she can trust him. It’s not the lies themselves, necessarily, that are wrong, because who really wants to hear that they look awful in their favorite pair of trousers, it’s the shock wave from the lies and the intent in the heart of the liar that we want to avoid.

In an online writing chat today there was much discussion about lying in fiction. Yes, I know, it’s fiction. I think “lie” stood in, on several occasions, for “believability.” It does raise an interesting question to me. We’re so quick as readers to spot flaws in what makes a story believable or not—we come into a book with cynical expectations and have our guards up for the first sign of trouble. But these are just books. Raise the stakes and talk about people and relationships, ask us to make an investment in what they mean to us, and we become myopic, willing to believe even preposterous tales just to keep our vision of reality stable. And then we lose, bit by bit, our own sense of well-being and comfort, because while we may not want to admit to it, our confidence erodes under the constant swell of those lies.

I am not immune to any of this, and when I was ten, fifteen years younger, I went to lies as a coping strategy, oh sure, I did. I am a storyteller, after all, but I’d lost sight of where make-believe was okay and where it wasn’t. I’ve spent time in the prison camp of cowardice, aligning myself with dominant personalities and then wondering how I could squirm out from under them. Mostly I just figured out how to exist in the cramped space they allowed me, but one of those survival skills was lying. It didn’t even matter after a time what the lie was about, as long as I had something all to myself, a tiny corner of truth about which they didn’t know. These were infinitesimally small victories; stacked all together I could have fit them on the head of a pin, but they were mine, mine, mine, and somehow they were enough, mostly because my dreams were absurdly small.

And then, though they were so tiny, they were numerous, and like the Big Bang that arose out of a submicroscopic particle, they exploded all over me and I had to admit to them and myself what I had been doing. I was a juggler of little lies who had slipped. But it helped me to see what a waste of time all of that nonsense really was. I hadn’t been ready to let go of them, but they left all on their own, and lo and behold, I found new ways to meet people. In fact, I met better people, ones who would never corner me until I found my 5-year-old self’s coping strategy. It was like moving to a house with a dishwasher, me promising never to go back. Who wants to go back to scalding their hands, after all?

I’m inclined toward direct, unwavering truth-telling these days, even as it has sometimes meant making difficult decisions, like oh, turning my life upside-down and living as the opposite gender (and not just so I could write a book about the experience). But it is a life unafraid, at least.

And uh, I take comfort in that.

March 1, 2010 | 5 Comments

Next to the Blue Mountains is a roastery

I come here on Monday afternoons because my favorite coffee haunt is closed, but truth be told, they make a very good cup of coffee at this place, which I suppose one can achieve when one has roasted the beans that very morning. This place also has the benefit of sitting at the foothills of the Blue Mountains, so if one cares to say, type on one’s laptop outside, on say, an overcast day in which one can actually read one’s screen, one can take in the beauty of snowcapped moutains, even in July.

Walla Walla, February 2010There is a downside, namely a professor from one of the town’s institutions of higher learning who tends to date his students. He does that lean in too close to gauge your reaction thing that pushy people do. I mean, this is never directed to me, of course, given that he seems to focus on people other than fat, nearing-middle-age men who wear wedding bands. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet, I suppose. But he absolutely flees my presence whenever I show up. I’ve never said one word to him, though I’ve heard several of his conversations with coeds. One time, at the start of the fall semester, a newly minted alum sat across from him, at the table next to me.

“I’m so glad we waited,” she cooed, not nearly enough under her breath.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” He has, it goes without saying, unwavering eye contact. Their hands were mere inches from each other, teasing at touching.

“Summer took so long,” she said, and I felt a shudder of uncomfortableness go through me. “But it’s so worth it.”

“You packed everything,” he asked. My mind, against my will, flashed to a pill container of ecstasy, some bright pink rope, and a French maid’s outfit. I cursed myself for forgoing my iPod that day. I would have listened to anything to drown them out: metalhead, steampunk. Slam poetry. And I really detest slam poetry.

Before I was an unwilling witness to this grotesquery of a dating lead-in, he didn’t really notice me if we were in the same space. But since then, he has absolutely fled the room when I come in, or if I’m somewhere ahead of him, he doesn’t stay for long. I wonder if I’ve raised one too many eyebrows or if he realized I was disgusted by his machinations with the barely-legal set. I don’t speak to him, so I don’t know.

A few months ago I decided to conduct a decidedly not scientific experiment to see if maybe we were just two ill-timed ships attempting to pass in the night, like the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. Well, that didn’t go so well, I suppose. But, I thought, perhaps this was just a schedule conflict. And seeing as I have this amazingly flexible schedule, well, why not sneak a peek into some kind of insight?

I have thus showed up at the roastery at 11am, noon, 1pm, and 2pm. And each time I come in, if he’s here before me or comes in after, he stays an average of 14 minutes and then skeedaddles. Sometimes he’s had to gulp down his beverage, other times he seemed to be blithely carrying on, typing into his laptop or grading papers. But in each case, he was gone, usually less than a quarter hour later.

I’m not sure what this is about. I don’t think of myself as an intimidating figure, in my Merrel sneakers and comfortable hoodie that continually proclaims “Capitol Hill”, confusing anyone from that Seattle neighborhood. (It’s for the other Capitol Hill, FYI.) Maybe he’s embarrassed that I heard him that day, which means he knows what he’s doing is wrong. Or perhaps I’m just so handsome he figures he has no chance with a pretty girl if I’m even in his vicinty, and the idea that he’s cock-fighting with me nearly drives me into peals of hysterical laughter.

Anyway, he’s around so often when I’m writing that I’m a little concerned he’s going to make it into one of my stories, or that sexual predatory-ness will become some kind of unconscious theme in my work, and then people will be wondering about me, not him.

And then, at long last, the terrorists will have won. Damn it.

February 25, 2010 | 2 Comments

Garbage in, more garbage in

Nobody I know spends much time talking or thinking about garbage. Sure, there’s the nice abstract “I’m against landfills/I’m so green I’m Kermit” comment that comes up now and again, mostly when people have drunk a bit of locally produced wine and someone brings up Hummers, disposable diapers, or plastic shopping bags. And then there are the avid composters, which out here are more common than say, in northeast DC, where one has, on average, enough space to compost as a couple of used coffee filters and some uneaten toast crust. Although on a side note let’s recall that there have been not one, but two, compost fires in Walla Walla in the last three years, as the sun really starts cranking out the gamma rays midsummer, so while we may have space aplenty, we still need to consider safety. You hear that, compost-people?

But garbage needs its due consideration beyond knowing when one’s household garbage pick-up day is. What can’t go into the garbage? What should be recycled? What needs to be taken directly to a landfill, and how should one dispose of unused medication?

I’m not saying I know the answers to all of these (I do know that you fill up the medicine bottle with water, let the pills dissolve, and then throw it in the trash once it’s become a solid mass), but neither do my neighbors. And not even my neighbors—I’m speaking more of the endless stream of people who drive up to the recycling center across the alley from us, looking confused at the locked gate. These people intentionally put cardboard, old cans, and 13 gazillion empty wine bottles into their car, only to find the center closed. This is because the recycling center at the college is only open from 8 in the morning until noon, Monday through Friday. Certainly this is for the general public’s convenience, because who is busy then?

I presume people don’t know about garbage (and its more popular cousin, recyclables) because this is where they do something that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever:

They see the locked, 6-foot, chain link fence, and they walk across the alley to our house, and throw their recycling in our personal bin.

This makes me lose my mind. I find it soon after, little bits of gravel and dust clinging to it as it cowers in a corner next to the non-functional air conditioner, but I lose it nonetheless.

And not only do they dump their recycling, they dump their illegal recycling. This tells me a couple of things:

1. They’re not reading the instructions on the recycling bin

2. They’re not reading the instructions on the bin because they either can’t be bothered, or they know they’re doing something wrong.

I began trying to dissuade these cardboard interlopers and trespassers in much the way I used to try to keep deer out of my vegetable garden in New York. I put down dog hair. Okay, I didn’t put dog hair on the gravel, but I’ve tried moving the bins. And when that didn’t work, I put the car right next to the bins, sacrificing space to swing the door open, and making it so that on Wednesdays, the day before pick up, I’d come nose-to-stench with the garbage bucket each time I left the house or came home. Still, they contorted themselves around the private car in the private driveway to the private recycling bin, across the alley from the space declaring itself available (if not open) for their discardement. Faced with other people’s castoff glass, which is fine to recycle at the center but not in the weekly city pickup, I’m faced with a choice I don’t want. I can pick out their glass and take their recycling to the center, 40 feet from my kitchen, or I can leave it in the bin and get chastised by the recycling crew.

All of my determent failed last week, and the bin nearly didn’t close from all of the crap stuffed inside. I fumed. Susanne fumed. I picked up my mind again, brushing it off and promising it better, brighter days. Grabbing a marker from my office upstairs, I formulated two signs, one for each bin.

FOR USE BY

RESIDENTS OF

37 MERRIAM

ONLY

Maybe that would get through to them.

Unfortunately, I put these signs on the bins the day before trash and recycling pickup, so this morning, I was met with a scrawled note from the recycling  pickup staff, telling me NO GLASS.

It’s not me, I cried to nobody. I take my glass to the recycling center! I am abiding your rules! I just don’t want to touch other people’s crap! Please don’t make me touch other people’s crap!

A squirrel on the front lawn looked at me quizzically. I hissed at it.

Hopefully the signs in big, bold letters will work for us.

If not, I’m buying locks next week. Or I’ll fit the bins with an exploding Jack in the Box. That’ll show ’em.

February 23, 2010 | 6 Comments

Scott Hamilton is a pissy jerk

So I’ve been watching the Olympics in Vancouver, or as Stephen Colbert calls them, the Quadrennial Cold Weather Athletic Competition. Hopefully he won’t sue me for using his language. As an aside, I do keep trying to trademark the phrase, “I love you,” because whoa, think of the lawsuit-generated revenue! I mean, if I can’t use the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” when I may actually need that sentence someday, in dire circumstances, if that is taken away from me, then I think I should get a piece of the pie, too.

At any rate, the Olympics were tantalizingly close to us this year—just a 4-hour drive to Seattle and a couple more hours north over the border into Vancouver. But alas, they’re right smack in the middle of the semester, and even curling match tickets were $65. So we decided we’ll have to go to some other really close Olympics sometime.

Watching from home, I was a bit taken aback by the coverage of men’s figure skating. I wouldn’t call it my favorite sport, but I can see that it requires fitness, balance, endurance, and an oil tanker load of practice. In my book that counts as a sport. But then there’s the judging. In football, unless you’re committing an illegal move, block, or tackle, it doesn’t matter how you run, hold someone off, or bring them to the ground. The ball is the indicator of the action, the referees only looking to ensure the rules are followed objectively. In fact, people get very upset if they think the referees are being unfair; they’re so hawkish for signs of bias that they’ll yell obscenities even when nothing is wrong. Millions of dollars have been spent on instant replay systems just to make sure nobody’s pinkie toe broke the plane of the sideline, because surely then, the integrity of the entire NFL would come crashing down.

It would be utterly absurd for the line judge to say, call the refs and umpire over after whistling the play dead because he didn’t like the angle at which the center was holding the ball, but in figure skating, all of the athlete’s hard work is reduced to whiny judgy-ness. At least if Scott Hamilton is the Judge in Charge. Some of his comments really floored me, accusing Johnny Weir, for example, of not practicing hard enough. He’s at the Olympics, dude! How many people try to go to the Olympics and don’t make it? He had to have spent at least a little bit of time on a slab of ice!

One after another, the skaters took the ice for their short programs. With nearly every axle, lutz and salchow, Scott had a comment, usually negative. “Oh, he really had to struggle for that one,” “just barely made it,” or “that looked bad from the start,” peppered the music in the background, and made me think we were watching Snarkfest 2010 instead of the Olympics. Perhaps these are the voices he hears in his head when he skates, I can’t say. But I felt like calling Scott and telling him that you know, this stuff is recorded and/or sent out to millions of people, so maybe some of those thoughts should stay in his brain.

The intra-skater rhetoric started simmering, too, in the days of the men’s competition. After the short program, Evgeni Plushenko castigated the gold medal winner for not attempting a quad jump, which, among all the other garbage that came out of his mouth, made a little bit of sense to me; after all, a home run counts for one no matter in which inning it’s hit. Same for basketball, lacrosse, futbol, tiddlywinks, and marbles, and virtually every other game I can think of. But in skating, a pretty hard jump done late in the routine is worth more than a harder one done first, to reward the skater for doing something hard after fatigue has set in. Thus Plushenko could have done the same thing, omitting the quad jump and not fiddling around with stupid-looking spins for the last minute of his routine, but actually still making and landing some jumps at the end.

It made me wonder how these guys talk to each other behind the scenes, if they’re so audacious in front of the camera. “He’s okay but his toe loop sucks” could be something to overhear in the Olympic Village cafeteria, who knows?

Plushenko has been such a baby that now his Web site lists his latest win in Vancouver—he took second place—as a Platinum medal. Seriously. Perhaps he needs to try another jump, because that boy needs to get over himself. (Ba-da cymbal crash!) So just to put things in better perspective, here’s a site of funny faces during the competition thus far.

The people in curling have been much nicer, and the whole endeavor seems much more friendly and stereotypically Canadian to me, so I’ve been watching that ever since, eschewing the ice dancing competition.

It’s a good time, of course, for British Columbia to advertise itself as a tourist destination, and there are plenty of folks out there updating their tourism sites. One of them, apparently took a picture of me drinking tea at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC, and posted it up on the page she manages. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered or horrified, but really, my only question is why she changed my name to Erin. I do hope, however, that the image of me enjoying the Empress’ house blend tea (and hiding a chin pimple) encourages others to take high tea at their establishment. I wonder if I should have trademarked my image.

Meanwhile, I hear that the Indianapolis Colts, after their Super Bowl loss earlier this month to the New Orleans Saints, are metalsmithing a platinum World Championship trophy to commemorate the achievement.

February 22, 2010 | 2 Comments

Politiclasm

I grew up in a place blandly referred to as “Central New Jersey,” an area of only a few counties, caught between aging farmland and boomer-driven suburbia, outposts that crept away from the two behemoth cities, matching the invisible demarcation of property values affected by those urban centers. Lower prices here, put up a development. Lower prices further away, put up a development there. So in the late 1960s, that line was Mercer County, home to the state capitol and a rather well known Ivy League university. I went to elementary school in that town, the once was national headquarters for politicians, before they moved it to its final resting place of Washington, DC.

The nuns taught me to love the sinner and hate the sin, to separate bad behavior from the innate goodness in people, and even though these messages were fraught with many contradictions and a near-constant failure of memory on the part of their congregants, I tried to buy the principles. I asked many questions, and got a lot of non-answers, such as:

“What do you mean there’s always been God? How could there be no beginning?” This was met with a “It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

“How can there be three beings but only one being?”

“It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

And on, and on. There was that point my senior year in high school during which I finally figured out the grand logic, much to the chagrin of my erudite instructor, but for many years, I attempted to content myself in the not knowing.

But I did get older, and I expected better answers than I’d received from lazy-minded or otherwise resistant grownups. I could tell that there were competing schools of thought on all kinds of philosophies, although I didn’t really know how to boil them down.

As I approached 18, I asked my Mom how she voted, generally speaking. She looked at me with a curious expression, somewhere between disheartened and cautious, as if she were talking about a close friend who had The Consumption.

“We vote Republican in this house,” she told me, a little above a whisper. Maybe it was a stage whisper, though that would have been silly as we were the only two home at the time.

“Why is that,” I asked, not really surprised at her answer.

It was, she explained, because my father was a small business owner, and he steadfastly believed that the GOP was more small business friendly. And this may have been true at the time. But what interests me is that I didn’t, in all my years of grooming to be a conservative, feel a burning hatred in my heart for the Democratic Party, even if I may have laughed at a liberals joke here and there. But hey, there were a lot of inappropriate jokes in the 1980s, many revolving around who blew up where and how in the Challenger accident.

I made it to college, spending the first few weeks either not believing my good fortune, or decrying my random roommate assignment, a privileged kid who actually told my mother, to her face, on Moving In Day that Syracuse had been their choice because of its reputation as a party school. I sought the refuge of new friends, minimizing the time in my own dorm room.

One of those friends was in a new club called the Campus Crusade for Christ. She had convinced me that they were a better way of understanding God and spirituality, that there was a fantastic benefit of not having to find meaning through the priest-God conduit. I figured I would check it out.

It was not for me. It was really, really not for me. Now I’d gone from getting no answers to having answers all over the place—explanations for everything under the sun. If some question didn’t have a ready made answer, it was only for the fact that nobody had thought of the question yet. All of these answers were supposed to arm us when we went out as missionaries to convert other people to the Walk with Christ. I was beyond uncomfortable. I pulled away from the group.

One of the things that troubled me the most was that even though I was reading the Bible more than ever before, we as a group were listening to it less and less, and giving more credence to the CCC leader. And it wasn’t long before he started delving into politics. Which politicians we should vote for, which party stances for righteous, and which were the devil’s own design.

There was no more split between behavior and personhood. People themselves were good or evil, saved or under the control of satan. For me, this had gone off the rails.

But here we are, a score of years later, and many, many people buy these messages part and parcel. I am left scratching my head. Is the anti-regulation push good for small business? Not if it means the banks collapse under their own greed and the credit market tightens past the extreme most business owners can handle. But we don’t put those things together, we limit any cause and effect conversation to what bad people are doing to us. The illegals. The gay agenda. The terrorist Muslims. We stick awful names on communities to make them seem even more hell-bent on the destruction of society, even though the vast majority of undocumented workers have been here for decades and in jobs that other people won’t take, even though people under the GLBT umbrella can’t agree on what movies to list in their film festivals, much less have an actual agenda, and even though the people committing terrorist acts aren’t actually Muslims, but opportunists who are ripping off a few passages from the Quran. Let’s paint the world in hate-colored glasses, and we can see whatever we want.

There’s a Tea Party group in Walla Walla now, and they have an earnest, if not grammatically challenged Web page, filled with lots of anger-inspiring invective, as invective is designed to do. The contradictions are many, but this one is the best:

The government is distant and does not care about you.

The government is too big and too into your business.

They also spend a lot of screen space on rhetorically assuming that because the US Constitution says we have inalienable rights, that this means we have the right to “own the fruits of our individual labors.” This vague, intentionally archaic language could mean, really, any of the following:

We get to keep the Ford trucks we produce as car assembly line workers. No wonder the Big 3 are in trouble.

We own the children we have birthed ourselves, into time eternal. This almost seems pro-choice to me.

If we are landscapers, we now own the lawns we’ve groomed and the plants on them. It’s like 40 acres and a mule, all over again.

I could go on, but I’d rather see more examples in the comments.

Here’s the thing: if none of my income went to taxes, I would have no government, right? Unless they’re thinking about taxing businesses more. But I don’t suppose that’s the case. I’d just have to hope that if I have a medical emergency, I won’t need an ambulance, that if my house catches fire, I can put it out with my own hand-held extinguisher. Or that when my kid wants to go to college, some bank will give her a loan, after all those years of home schooling, since there’s no more public education. Maybe when my mother loses all of her marbles we’ll just drive her to downtown Omaha and tell her to hope for the best.

I think the political landscape has gone off the rails, or if it hasn’t, that it sure looks like it has, and I wish my Dad’s brand of conservatism were back. At least he didn’t drive around with bumperstickers on his car saying “Up Yours, Obama.”

February 19, 2010 | 0 Comments

Cows on the wrong side of the fence

There’s nothing like reading the newspaper of a quiet farming town to make one feel like their own tiny city is a bustling metropolis of activity. The rag in Dayton, Washington, for example, seems to have composed its crime section from the entirety of phone calls to its police office. The headlines read like some bizarre melding of David Lynch and Dave Barry:

Lotion Squirted on Car, No Suspects

Dead Skunk Still Lying on Patit Rd

Cow on Wrong Side of Fence

If I lived in Dayton, I’d be tempted to pull my own pranks and then call them in as complaints.

“Hey, those crazy kids dumped a mess of cow manure on the mayor’s truck again.” *click* And a few days afterward, I could scour the paper to see if I’d made the crime section.

My other idea is to replicate some of the news bits over here in Walla Walla, picking up as many of the details as possible so the police force won’t suspect a copycat. But maybe it would be like all of those television crime dramas, and I’d be foiled either by confessing to the drone of some low, ominous cello, or I’d like, use the wrong brand of lotion.

“We left out that the lotion used in Dayton was Avon Skin So Soft,” the detective would growl at me. “You used Aveda rosemary mint, so we knew you were just trying to fool us. The question is . . . why.”

Okay, who am I kidding? This county doesn’t have enough money to drive the plow it owns to clear 30 inches of snow from five main roads in town, they’re not going to do some molecular analysis of skin lotion.

But hey, good cops would know to use their noses.

My ruminations aside, I have learned a few lessons this week, one of which of course is not to commit crime. Okay, perhaps I learned that lesson at 7, when I stole a remarkably cute stuffed animal from a Hallmark store and my mother caught me in the parking lot and made me take it inside to tell the proprietor that I was a thief. Three or four bats of my big brown eyes and she crumbled, saying I could have the little orange donkey if I wanted it. My mother was outraged. How was I going to learn this important life lesson if I could just flirt with older women and get away with anything? And thus it was that I determined that the life lesson was to flirt with older women to get away with most anything.

It’s Friday and I’m rambling. My point is, I’ve learned a few things this week. Specifically:

1. No matter how much it annoys one, one should not attempt to remove overly long nose hair with needlenosed pliers or superiorly sharpened scissors.

2. No espresso drinks after 2PM.

3. Be careful when teaching one’s friends’ children cute little sayings. For example, teaching a child of 22 months to say, “Oh, snap!” may in fact result in the child enunciating “Oh, shit!” (Apologies to my friends’ children’s playmates’ parents.)

4. Be aware that the older the man, the more dedicated he is to his science fiction hobby, and the far less he is to his own personal hygiene. This is especially useful to remember when attempting to look for books at a local organization book sale.

5. Lots of food tastes great going down but makes one miserable later. It’s helpful to know which foods are on one’s own list, so that when out in public one can at least plan for sudden moments of abdominal pain and wincing.

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