Synchronicity or Syzygy?

 

“God teaches the soul by pains and obstacles, not by ideas.” – Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence

 

“What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

 

S = ∫ (t1 to t2) L dt

 

Measured in joules / second, or accomplishments per unit of life.

 

Guitar Strap Height Guide

 

A very true and illuminating peek for non-musicians into the mind of the guitarist:

 

I played seriously in hard rock bands from 1986 to 1996, and my guitar strap journey started at the far right of the diagram, moved quickly to the left, then slowly rose again returning rightward. (Though I always referred to it as guitar strap length.)

 

For reference, Jimmy Page hovers at the far left, Robert Fripp of King Crimson at the far right, and someone like Alex Lifeson occupies the middle of the diagram, with Angus near Jimmy and Steve Howe near Fripp.

 

Gave me a chuckle this morning.

 

Dean Koontz

 

So I decided to end my year re-reading some of the novels of Dean R. Koontz.

 

I had such a great time re-reading Tom Clancy’s books earlier this year, from March to August. I wrote a couple of posts here detailing the experience. The re-reading was filled with nostalgia and the books still packed a punch, be it through shock or can’t-put-it-down suspense. I graded them all A’s, and threw plusses or double-plusses on the ones I really enjoyed. Most importantly, re-reading these books became a little oasis from the daily grind, the never-ending duel with issues and problems and curve-balls that work- and family- and personal-life consistently throw at me.

 

When I finished, I started seeking a new oasis. And I found it.

 

Way way way back in the 20th century I was hooked on Dean R. Koontz. This was even before I heard of Tom Clancy. I wasn’t keeping any records back then, but I think it must have been from 1989 to 1993 that I read through about 15 of his books. I have a hard time remembering which ones I read because a) it was a lifetime ago and b) his books tend to have generic titles.

 

I do remember the first book of his I read, 1989’s Midnight.  I was 22 and still living at home with my parents. A buddy, a fellow-reader, the guy who got me addicted to Stephen King in high school, recommended it to me one summer day. And soon enough I read through something like 15 more Koontz novels, most in the span of a busy four years. Busy because I was working full time, attending night school, managing a girlfriend, renting a house with two other guys then getting my own apartment, all while trying to launch a successful rock band. Yeah, even with all the partying I did back then I had so much energy I still shake my head in wonder. How I found time to read anything at all amazes me, but I did. It was an oasis back then.

 

Fortunately, the local library here stocks about 20 of his novels, all in hardcover. On Halloween I borrowed Midnight and burned through it in a week. (I am still reading the massive One Thousand Days narrative of the JFK presidency and am about 2/3rds done with that.) Later tonight I’ll take Patch out for dinner and stop at the same library for the next Koontz on my list, The Bad Place (1991).

 

Most of the Koontz books yield few specific memories save for a character or two, one or two shocking scenes, and a bare bones outline of the plot. For my re-reading list I’m using how I recall my gut feeling about the book. Midnight and The Bad Place give good vibes. I plan on reading four more to the end of 2024, for similar recollection of good vibes: Cold Fire (1992), Dragon Tears (1993), Twilight Eyes (1985), and Lightning (1988).

 

Two other Koontz’s I read and enjoyed back then, Whispers (1980) and Phantoms (1983) I would put on my re-read list then had I not re-read them in the early 2000s. I’d recommend either one to a reader interested in Koontz for the first time. They even made a movie of Phantoms in 1998 starring Ben Affleck (!) and Peter O’Toole (!!!). It was terrible, please avoid.

 

The last book of his I originally read up until last week was Intensity (1995), and it was the only Koontz I hated. I remember it as standard serial-killer cat-and-mouse humdrum, with a stretch of 40 pages describing a woman trying to free herself while tied in a chair. After reading that I moved on from horror in general, though I’m aware he started writing several series of interconnected novels, including an updated version of the Frankenstein saga.

 

Koontz is a prodigious and prolific writer, publishing something like 145 novels, if my counting of his Wikipedia bibliography is accurate, dating back to the late 1960s, under a variety of pen names. At least two other novels were made into movies, Hideaway (1992) with Jeff Goldblum (I liked the story but the special effects were atrocious) and the very-well received Demon Seed (1973), about a computer which forcibly imprisons and later impregnates a woman. That movie, from 1977, gave me many unsettling nightmares from my youth sneak-watching it in the early days of cable TV.

 

I’ll do a re-evaluation at the end of the year, similar to what I did for Clancy, on how the books held up over 30 years. Or perhaps how my memory held up. Regardless, it will be seven weeks of fun reading, a cool oasis from the hustle-and-bustle of Thanksgiving, Christmas shopping, obligations, and work for the remainder of 2024.

 

Happy Halloween!

 

Imajica

 

 

© 1991 by Clive Barker

 

When I was a young lad I devoured a lot of horror literature.

 

In high school I mostly read Stephen King. I had a friend who had all of King’s books in paperback, and he’d feed them to me one by one. By the time I graduated I read every one from Carrie to the Bachman books, including his short story anthologies. The following year I read It, and the year after that, The Tommyknockers. I stopped reading Stephen King around the year 2001. I think Dreamcatcher was the last one of his I read.

 

In the late 80s I shifted to Dean R. Koontz. Within three or four years I put away something like 18 of his novels. Though somewhat formulaic, they all were quick, fun reads, always with a dash of horror, a lot of suspense, and usually a happy ending. The thing I liked best about his stories was the fact that you could never predict what the solution to the existential threat was. If Koontz wrote Dracula instead of Bram Stoker, the monster would be revealed at the end not to be a vampire of the traditional sort but a secret government black ops scientific experiment mixing human, bat, and alien DNA gone terribly awry. With some form of time or interdimensional travel tossed in. That kinda thing.

 

A few years ago I read on a message board that, broadly speaking, King could be regarded as the Rolling Stones of horror and Koontz, the Beatles. I agree.

 

I also read a smattering of other horror writers in my teens and twenties. Peter Straub, John Saul, Whitley Strieber, William Peter Blatty, Peter Benchley, Thomas Harris. And, of course, Clive Barker.

 

I moved on to Clive Barker roughly after reading through most of Koontz: Cabal, Weaveworld, The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, The Thief of Always, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, and, lastly, Imajica. Barker is quite different from the aforementioned horror writers. His stories are more fantastical, more occult-ish, populated by various forms of magic and myriads of strange, grotesque creatures, both good and evil. There is a sexual amorality (“anti-morality” I initially wrote) that is quite in vogue now but wasn’t so much 30, 35 years ago. While not on the same equivalence of, say, the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Barker seems to be well acquainted or aspires to such dark things.

 

Anyway, my Halloween reading back in 2019 was a re-read of Weaveworld. The next year, during the Summer of Wu Flu, I re-read The Great and Secret Show. The first took me 12 days but I burned through the latter in 5. In other words, both fun reads. The stories were weird and out there – in Weaveworld, a magic carpet that unfurls in our world and grows to enormous dimensions releasing warring factions that includes an all-powerful but psychotic angel and a salesman who’s jacket can cause anyone to do anything, and in The Great and Secret Show the inter-generational struggle of two men trying to master a form of sorcery known as “The Art” and control a mythical dream sea and the evil beings that inhabit it. Whew. Heavy and heady stuff. I read most of Barker’s works originally at my parents’ weekend house at Lake George in upstate New York, so a lot of that imagery was mixed in with Barker’s. I enjoyed the re-reads.

 

So it was with anticipation I cracked open Imajica on October 1. If I kept to a brisk schedule, I could finish the 827-page novel on Halloween night.

 

Alas, I set it aside three weeks in. I couldn’t finish it.

 

Now, I remember having difficulties wading through Imagica way back in the early 90s when I last wrestled with it. Recall a giant push for the last 150 or 200 pages to finish it. The memory’s very hazy. It seems, however, that the same thing happened to me this time around, thirty years later. Now I’m much, much more careful with how I spend my time as I’m getting up there a bit in years, and I just didn’t think a 150 or 200 page push to get the novel done was worth it.

 

Now, YMMV, as they used to say here on the internet a few decades back.

 

I don’t feel like rehashing the plot; perhaps a quick summary like the ones above might suffice. “Imajica” consists the five dominions, of which Earth is the fifth. The main characters meet other characters who know how to travel between the dominions. There are your typical Barkian malformed monsters and semi-human sub-species, there’s magic, there’s war between the forces of magic and those that want to eradicate it. There is an evil sorcerer Autarch who rules the four dominions (not Earth, the fifth, though that’s on his plate) from his palace in the first dominion. There are shapeshifters, dopplegangers, and lots of Catholic piety twisted slightly askew in that Barkish way.

 

 

I may not have enjoyed Imajica, but Charlie wants to give it a go

 

On paper this seemed to be an enjoyable read. A whole new worldview is developed for the novel with its accompanying landscapes, much more so than his prior works, even Weaveworld. I originally compared it to a warped version of Middle-earth. But it didn’t work for me, and I think, having ten days or so to reflect on it, I think its because the main goal and the main threat of the novel wasn’t fully developed or communicated to me, the reader. I didn’t feel the “ticking time bomb”, though there is one. The stakes didn’t keep me turning the pages. The characters kept having emotional crises and there are loads of indecisions and 180-degree turns that motivations did not seem to make sense to me. The main twist in the plot, which I saw early on during the first read and never forgot this second read, didn’t glue me to the pages in anticipation but just felt like another dreary task I had to wade through to get to the last page. And there was also one scene which, as a father of daughters, truly turned my stomach, a scene I did not remember first time around.

 

I dunno. Mixed feelings are still washing over me. I wanted to like it, truly. But I’m a different man than that young lad of 30 years ago. Horror is no longer an upfront interest for me, and Catholic piety is much more so in my daily life (or at least the struggle to attain it). I do seek out new literary worlds, but I need something more enlightening, more expansive, something I can take with me, possibly, beyond the grave. Not sure if this makes any sense, to you or to me. But these are my mixed feelings over Clive Barker’s Imajica.

 

What is the Midway Point?

 

Here’s a neat mathematical riddle to use on your friends to prove your genius bona fides. It sounds unsolvable until, well, you hear the solution.

 

Question:

 

What is the exact middle point between zero and infinity?

 

In other words, on this number line from negative infinity to positive infinity, what is the halfway point between zero and positive infinity on the right?

 

Any guesses?

 

Hmm?

 

Seems kinda impossible to figure out, right? At first I thought so, because infinity, that sideways-number-eight, is not really a number, like 3, 17/50, or π^cubed is a number. Yeah, 3 and 17/50 have exact locations on the number line, and even though π^cubed, like pi itself, is not an exactly defined number (it is an irrational number whose decimal expression goes on, it has been proven, forever), it pretty much has an exact location on the number line. But infinity is not a specific number but an idea. A mathematical concept. So it really doesn’t have a location on the number line, except a vague neighborhood that lives ever, ever, ever rightward as you heading that way down the number line.

 

Hint #1 (minor):

 

So the trick is not to think of the question spatially. Not as in the case of 18 inches being the midway point of a yard, or 500 meters the halfway point of a kilometer.

 

Think of numbers themselves, as in types of numbers.

 

Any guesses?

 

Hmm?

 

Hint #2 (major):

 

Every number on the number line can be expressed as a reciprocal. A reciprocal of a number is one-over-that-number. The reciprocal of x is 1/x. The reciprocal of 3 is 1/3. The reciprocal of 17/50 is 50/17. The reciprocal of π^cubed is 1/π^cubed.

 

So what’s the halfway point between zero and infinity?

 

Answer: 1

 

The reciprocal of 1 is 1/1, or 1. 1 is its own reciprocal. But for every single number greater than 1, from 1.0000000000000001 to a googolplex (10 raised to the power of 1 with 100 zeros following it), there is a corresponding reciprocal. Every single one. And that reciprocal is LESS than 1. Every number greater than 1 has a reciprocal less than 1. Therefore, 1 is the midway point between zero and infinity. Not physically, as in a spatial distance sense, but in the number of actual numbers that occupy the intellectual space between 0 and 1 and 1 and infinity.

 

Q.E.D., as they say.

 

Now go and riddle your most intelligent friend.

Fall Comes to Texas

 

With a week of 70-degree day weather – dropping down to the low 50s at night! 

 

But that was last week. Now we’re back in the mid-to-upper 80s. True, that’s about 10 degrees above average for this time of year down here. Still, the leaves are starting to color, and some are even falling. The sky’s dark at 7:30 and the nights are longer, colder, windier. The grass has stopped growing as nature seems to be rummaging through her closet looking for some heavier, more comfortable, clothes to wear.

 

Me, I’m still in the thick of my Kennedy book. I decided to set Clive Barker aside (and that’s a post for later in the week) and have moved on into more existential horror for the season. For music, I’m currently enjoying the tone poems of Richard Strauss on vinyl, an area I’ve always been aware of but never really dug until now. Timing is everything, even in music, I guess.

 

More posts on the horizon …

 

Pagetrotting

 

 

October thus far has been quite the busy month. Aside from the usual ephemera, otherwise known as the daily grind, and other interesting but not blog-appropriate adventures, I have been delving into two thick, hefty worlds of literature, each reminiscent of the adobe bricks found in the Chama Valley of New Mexico. Both laid on a scale would rival the poundage of a newborn.

 

It’s not just the physicality of the two books that are thick, hefty, and brick-like. The subject matter is just as impressive. The word “worlds” used above is not just a metaphor, as each conjures an entire sociosphere and a globe-sized universe of culture, character, and plot. One is of a time now long past, the early 1960s; the other is of a time that’s never been save for within the mind of the author himself.

 

The first book is A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, a 1964-biography-of-sort by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a liberal historian who served as a Special Assistant to the President during the 1961-1963 Kennedy administration. A darling of and expert in the history of the American left, Schlesinger won a second Pulitzer Prize for this work. Taken with a grain of salt (i.e., one must wear hagiography-repellant glasses when reading), this is a deep immersion into those hectic, heady days of the ’60s prior to what you thought were the hectic, heady days of the ’60s. Back door politicking, the Cold War, Cuba, Khruschev, and a changing culture pushed in large part by the sainted Massachusetts president.

 

The second is Imajica, which I can best describe, for better or worse, as horror maestro Clive Barker’s go at a Lord of the Rings. He conjures up his particular brand of gory, somewhat-occultic fantasy, a journey through five worlds or “dominions” to set free the lands from an evil sorcerer Autarch. There are macabre and freakish races of creatures as a substitute to the well-worn tropes of Elves and Dwarves etc. There’s magic, dreams, societies, and a half-dozen detailed plot lines racing with the characters to the Autarch’s palace. Plus heavy doses of Barker’s subversive sexually-tinged horror.

 

Each has its strong points and weak points. I plan on writing reviews on both upon completion. Each is an investment in time.  A Thousand Days is 1,031 pages and Imajica is 827. With a par of 20 pages a day I should finish the Kennedy book just before the 61st anniversary of his assassination in Dallas. In the past I always read something JFK-related in November, so this is a throwback to that. The pace is doable and I am on schedule. Imajica, however, is more a challenge. It’s this year’s “Halloween” reading, and in order to finish that I need to reach 26.7 pages a day. I am slightly behind schedule at page 390. But I’m up for the challenge.

 

After these two books I think I’m going to spend the last two months of the year deep-diving into Dean R. Koontz. I so enjoyed my retro-reading of Tom Clancy this past March to August that a return to Koontz strikes me as a fun way to end these twelve months. Back from, say, 1989 to 1991, I believe I read 15 of his books. There are five which I’m interested in checking out again: Midnight, The Bad Place, Twilight Eyes, Cold Fire, and Dragon Tears. This might be a bit much for two months, especially with Christmas festivities and all, so it might extend into early 2025. We’ll see. I’m up for the challenge.

 

Anyway, happy readings, all!

Neil Floyd or Pink Young

 

Forgive me a cliché, but –

 

I was today years old when I found out –

 

The song “Breathe,” the first sung song on Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, has the exact same chordal structure as Neil Young’s song “Down by the River,” the side one closing tune on his 1969 record, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

 

Well, almost exactly.

 

Down by the River:

   Em7 to A (four times)

   Cmaj7 to Bm (four times, ending with a D on the fourth)

   G to D to A (three times for the chorus)

 

Breathe:

   Em to A7 (four times)

   Cmaj7 to Bm to Fmaj7 to D9

 

Well, it sounds more similar on my guitar than it looks like on the electronic page here.

 

Man, I wish I knew this back in the day. I was familiar with both songs, but just never made the connection. The guys I hung out with way back then were more into Neil Young than Pink Floyd, though we did manage to see both live the summer of 1988:

 

   Pink Floyd at Giants Stadium, June 4, 1988

   Neil Young and the Blue Notes at Pier 84 in NYC, August 30, 1988

 

As a side note, that was a great summer for concerts. I also saw AC/DC that May at the Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands and the famous Guns N’ Roses / Deep Purple / Aerosmith concert at Giants Stadium two weeks before Neil Young at the Pier. That was the concert where they filmed the video for “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Though I was probably already sick of the omnipresent overrepresentation of GNR on the radio by then, let me tell you, the vast majority of the crowd was there to see them, not the two dinosaurs of 70s rock.

 

Oh well. Let’s see … what else can I play on my guitar …

 

UWTB

 

Salo, Rumfoord’s crony on Titan, was a messenger from another galaxy who was forced down on Titan by the failure of a part in his space ship’s power plant. He was waiting for a replacement part.

 

He had been waiting patiently for two hundred thousand years.

 

His ship was powered, and the Martian war effort was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness – that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness.

 

Many Earthlings are glad that Earth does not have UWTB.

 

As the popular doggerel has it:

 

Will found some Universal Will to Become,

Mixed it with his bubble gum.

Cosmic piddling seldom pays:

Poor Willy’s six new Milky Ways.

 

   - The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut (page 138 of my Dell paperback)

 

I am enjoying Vonnegut, as I have the couple of times I’ve read him in the past. However, with this novel I’m detecting a small but significant undercurrent of creeping leftism. Now, I’m not a Vonnegutian scholar or anything like that, not even a proper fan, having only read a couple of his books. But there’s this vague odor of condescension or derision in his work, particularly when addressing religion. I don’t recall sensing it previously, though the last time I read him was in the late 90s and my radar wasn’t attuned to that frequency.

 

But it does subtract a little bit from the pleasure of reading his prose. He’s a genuinely funny guy, a brilliant writer, an excellent storyteller than keeps the reader consistently guessing what will happen when the page turns. Despite his leftish pet peeves, I’ll still give The Sirens of Titan an A-minus. The book I read prior to this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, I like a little better, so I’ll grant that full A status. And I’ll still seek out his novels in the future, shall my paths cross with theirs.

 

The best image that comes to mind is that the novels of Kurt Vonnegut (at least Cat’s Cradle, Hocus Pocus, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Sirens of Titan) are kinda like a more high-brow Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Though “high-brow” might not be the best adjective. Think of the comparison with Vonnegut and Hitchhiker more like Obama-era SNL versus Clinton-era SNL. I think that might be a more accurate analogy.

 

Anyway, I have a very ambitious and exciting reading project for October which I’ll post about later this week.

 

Oh, and September – you were an OK month. No, better than average. But, please, can you tell October to lower the thermostat down here? Thanks.

Average or Awesome?

 

So I got this from management where I work:

  

It’s a candle. I must admit when I first took it out of the bag I thought it read, “Thank You For Being Average”!

 

😊

 

If I really was “awesome,” though, wouldn’t they give me a raise, like a two-percent increase? Or maybe a one-time $500 bonus? Or even a $25 gift card, maybe every now and then when I do something “awesome”?

 

Not to be bitter, though, the company does give us a lot of perks. Wednesday they catered for the entire Finance Department (about 200 of us), and I feasted on barbecue brisket, turkey, cheese macs, and a couple of chocolate chip cookies. They also raffled off a ton of swag, but I didn’t win anything. I did win a fleece hoodie two years ago that I gave to Little One. Last year they gave us all t-shirts that, honestly, are pretty decent. I still wear mine 2-3 times a month.

 

A little work humor to end the week …

 

Vonnegutia

 

“Also, Barbara and her husband were having to look after Billy’s business interests, which were considerable, since Billy didn’t seem to give a damn for business any more. All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet … “Don’t lie to me, Father,” said Barbara. “I know perfectly well you heard me when I called.” This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano.

   - Slaughterhouse Five, pages 28-29 of my Dell paperback

 

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarified, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes – “with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

   - same, page 87.

 

Forgot how much I enjoy reading Kurt Vonnegut. Read two of his books in the 80s as a high schooler and two others in the 90s as a single lad in a bachelor pad. Always an interesting read, and, as the excerpts above point out (at least to me), every paragraph a small gem of something quite humorous or something that makes me nod and pet my beard saying, “Wow … that’s unexpectedly deep.”

Currently reading Slaughterhouse Five with The Sirens of Titan in the On-Deck Circle.

 

Another Trip Round the Sun

 

 

Is done.

 

My birthday was this past Tuesday, but we celebrated on Saturday night. And it was everything I wanted at this stage in my life: Family, doing family things together. I find myself desiring that more and more as my wife and children get involved more and more in their own lives separate from the family, sometimes in separate locations as Little One, living 45 minutes away at school.

 

The girls custom-make me a big birthday dinner every year. Since we alternate and last year was homemade lasagna, this year was the old juicy steak, potatoes and asparagus combo. Three of my favorites, and each lady handled a different part of the meal. And it was delicious. I washed it all down with my favorite N/A craft beer, Free Wave by Athletic Brewing Company and was pleasantly stuffed.

 

Afterwards we sat down together and watched a heartwarming family film, A Quiet Place: Day One. Just kidding. It was suspenseful and violent with a touch of gore, but Little One and Patch are big fans of the Quiet Place franchise. I thought the movie was okay after the first watch, but on reflection a lot of it doesn’t work and it’s probably the weakest of the trilogy by far. We took a break midway through for a dessert of fruit tarts.

 

I opened my gifts, embarrassed as always by the profusion of love and good will. Little One bought me a spiced pumpkin Yankee candle (my favorite fall scent if it ever decides to drop below 90 degrees down here). She also got me a book that hadn’t arrived yet; she said she thought it was titled “What did you do Dad” or something like that. Each page has a prompt for me to write something about, er, me. Kinda like this blog, I suppose, but handwritten.

 

Patch bought me a giant sombrero that I can wear while mowing the lawn. Yes, we all laughed, but yes, also, men do wear them down here while doing yardwork. Texas sun is strong. Sometime over the summer Patch and I were driving somewhere and I noticed a sombrero-clad mowerman, and loudly announced “that’s exactly what I need!” And lo and behold, she made a note of it on her phone and now I have a sombrero to wear. Pics to follow, maybe.

 

She also picked up two albums for me – Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in Dm and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in Dm. I dunno, must’ve been a D-minor day at the record store. Anyway, both worthy editions to my growing collection, both compositions by composers who I do not have. My collection is now up to 41 albums in just under two years, and Patch alone has gifted me 11 of them.

 

The Mrs. bought me three books on the Next Step in My Career. Rather, the Next Step in Finding a New Career. They say (don’t remember who “they” are) that the average American wage slave has seven career changes in his life. By my count I’ve had three. But I’ve been doing payroll accounting for 22 years now and my God is it ever time for a change. Hopefully these three books can help me un-stick myself from my stuckness in figuring out what the heck to do next.

 

She also bought me a box of “high-end chocolates” – a dozen truffles of dark chocolate from the Swiss company Laderach. Which is kind of funny, if you combine this with those three books. I’ve been joking for a while that I’m ready to chuck the spreadsheets and calculators and go after my dream of becoming a revolutionary chocalatier.

 

Who knows? Maybe this time next year, after yet another trip ’round the sun, I’ll be trading in that sombrero for a chef’s hat …

 

Hopper's Cave

 

Where I sit, busily overwhelmed in the occupation of earning a few extra shillings to satisfy the increasing costs of the rents and groceries. The corporation which employs me has seen fit a week ago to terminate the employment of my “partner,” who was quite discontent with the position, responsibilities, and workload, and in this case the “squeaky wheel” did not get greased; it got replaced.

 

Hence the dearth of posts of late. I anticipate more in the week to follow after a quite busy “birthday” weekend coming up – both of myself as well as my youngest daughter. In two weeks my oldest enters her third decade (she turns twenty) and there will be more celebration, though more muted as she’s technically away at college. September is the month we’re officially broke due to all these festivities. However, that “squeaky wheel” has provided me with the opportunity to earn a few more coins as extra responsibilities and workloads and an expanded position have fallen in my lap.

 

Oh well. Birthday recaps to follow later in the week.

 

Carry on.

 

Klaus

 

After the rush to flee Globe Life Stadium with the stink of defeat upon us (the Yankees lost in humiliating fashion to the Texas Rangers), we managed to get out of the stadium parking lot ahead of the vast majority of hometown fans, still celebrating wildly. My wife was driving as she’s naturally more adept for situations like this, her career having her negotiate New York City, Washington DC, and now Dallas city streets on a near-daily basis. We quickly found ourselves on the highway heading home, around 10:15 pm, a 45-minute drive from Arlington.

Anyway, to entertain the Mrs., I monitored the Yanks’ twitter account and some fan blogsites reading aloud comments and commentary on the night’s debacle. To be honest, it was really quite funny. New York fans are the best and come up with some of the choicest one-liners. Most, however, were vulgar and I can’t really post them here. Regardless, we were chuckling and the shock of the night wore off as my wife turned off the main highway and drove the few streets before turning onto our block.

And there was Klaus in the middle of the road!

Klaus is the large Doberman who lives in the house diagonally behind us. He’s the size of a small pony and has a thunderous bark that often keeps us up at night, especially if he’s out in his yard chasing bunnies. He has a companion, an ancient bulldog named Champ, built like a fire hydrant made out of concrete. Though they’re both intimidating on first sight, they are sweet animals. Klaus is spastic and full of energy, about seven or eight years old, and Champ meanders along like a tank. I know this because I have met them several times. My youngest daughter Patch walks them every now and then for $15 an hour, and she always brings them by when she does. These dogs are the epitome of “bark-worse-than-bite.”

 

Patch and Klaus

 

My wife slammed on the brakes a few feet away from Klaus. Because I knew this dog, I rolled down the window and called his name over and over. We realized he was off the leash, escaped from his yard and wandering the neighborhood. Klaus heard me and paused, but by the time I got my shoes on and jumped out of the car he bounded down the alley behind my house.

I ran after him calling his name. Not sure what I’d do, since he was collarless. But perhaps I could re-assure him, pet him, calm him down, and maybe Patch could call his owner or even walk him back to the yard herself. I was halfway down the alleyway when Klaus stopped. Turned. And began growling at me, a low, menacing rumbling from his big chest.

Uh-oh.

I backed up as he advanced on me, slowly then more focused. Something had made him upset, very upset, and he obviously did not recognize me in the dark. I retreated up my driveway. I knew I couldn’t outrun him, and the only defense I could see was my giant recycling bin. Could I hide behind it? Could I throw it at him? These thoughts raced through my head as Klaus advanced up my drive. This all happened in something like ten seconds.

The Mrs., still in the car in the street facing the alleyway, illuminating the area with her headlights, fortunately hit the garage door opener at this moment. Klaus halted, spooked by the sudden noise of the door rumbling up and the new light from our garage shining in his eyes. I trotted inside the garage where there would be more items I could defend myself with – fold-up chairs, a broom, a weed whacker, even. But with all this new stimuli the dog turned on its heels and raced down the alley into the darkness.

Patch came out at this time, calling Klaus sweetly, with no luck. The wife pulled into the garage and we debated a course of action. Patch texted Klaus’s owner with no answer. She was confident that Klaus wouldn’t hurt her. In fairness, she has spent about a hundred times more, uh, time with him than I have. But I didn’t want her to go by herself. So for a half-hour we walked the neighborhood, calling his name, attuned for any motion or any barking. Nothing. All was silent and the only thing on the move were the foraging rabbits. Eventually we got in my car and slowly drove down to the ponds and a few further streets, again luckless.

We turned in for the night around midnight. Then – the owner texted Patch back! Klaus did, in fact, escape the yard when the woman got home from her job and let the dogs out. But he returned and she let him back in the yard before reading her texts and not seeing or hearing us looking for Klaus.

Lesson learned: Never, ever, ever approach a strange dog. And unless you’ve scratched his belly, all dogs are strangers.

 

Rangers 7, Yankees 4

 

The same company that sent my wife and me down to the ice to see the Dallas Stars for the first game of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs gifted us with tickets to see the Texas Rangers take on the New York Yankees. The account exec over there is well aware my wife is a huuuuge Yankee fan and came through on his promise to send us to see Aaron Judge and his teammates the next time they came down to Arlington.

 

As a transplanted New Jerseyite, I’m not a big fan of the Texas Rangers. In fact, I’m not a fan at all, really. We’ve been down here three years and this was our fourth trip to Globe Life Field. I did watch some of the playoffs last year when the Rangers knocked out the despised rival Houston Astros, and I think I watched the last game of the World Series where they defeated the Diamondbacks to win their first World Series title.

 

I’m also not a big fan of Globe Life field. In fact, I kinda hate it. Picture a humongous Abe Lincoln hat, then bury it in the ground. That’s the stadium. It’s a giant cylinder two hundred feet below ground level. It has a retractable roof that’s square in size which makes the ceiling look weirdly disproportionate. Its sort of like the architectural style of “brutalism” applied to a sports stadium. Around the rim, street level, are dozens and dozens of fast food, beer, and memorabilia stands, interspersed with elevators and bathrooms. It’s like a mall and a steampipe factory had a baby.

 

Also, since the roof has always been closed the four times I’ve been there, the stadium is a great big echo chamber. After every pitch the sound system blasts out excessively decibeled distorted music that, after the third inning, reminded me of why I hated the club life I was forced to participate in during my twenties by the simple fact of having friends. But I go to these games because the Mrs. is a dedicated Yankees fan, and she doesn’t get enough Yankees down here just north of Dallas.

 

My head pounded for another reason, late in the game. For this game will forever be known as the Great Yankee Clay Holmes Implosion.

 

The author and his wife during better times, 

i.e, the third inning

The first half of the game went quickly. Lots of three up three downs. A pitchers duel. Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodon was striking out a lot of batters. Yeah, he did give up a solo home run in the bottom of the fourth, but other than that the teams were equally matched in performance. Our seats were good, about twenty rows deep just off the right of home plate. Lots of foul balls came out way, the closest only seven seats down from us.

 

Then the Yanks got some runners on base in the seventh and eighth and scored two runs each inning. The momentum was clearly on their side. The crowd – which comprised, I estimated, of about 30 percent Yankee fans and I spotted at least forty or fifty 99 jerseys – the crowd began chanting “Let’s Go Yan-Kees” and cheered them on. Texas fans surrounding us seemed depressed, that is, those that were not drunk or on the way there.

 

Then, with the Yankee relievers entering the game, and peppered by an error and defensive miscue, the Rangers put two runs on the board in the bottom of the eighth. Going into the final inning, the Yanks held a 4-3 lead, and, little did I know, being used to more dominant Yankees from my time up north, this was thin ice territory for Aaron Boone and his team.

 

And they lived up to it – er, down to it – in spectacular fashion. Relief pitcher Clay Holmes, who makes $6 million this year from what I scanned online, came in as the closer. And immediately loaded the bases, throwing pitches into the dirt, out of the strike zone, and, for the last batter he faced, right down the middle, to be hit out of the park for a walk off grand slam.

 

The crowd was on its feet as one. The volume was ear-shattering. The celebration seemed worthy of a second franchise World Series win. We slunked out of our seats and bolted up the stairs amidst Rangers fans hugging, taking selfies, and breaking out into group pockets of orgiastic cheering. Up on the ground level we scooted out with several hundred Yankees fans, sideswept by departing Rangers revelers, and left the stadium in record time. The Mrs. wouldn’t even allow me a trip to the rest room, that’s how fast she wanted out of there.

 

I sensed this was historic. I haven’t been following the Yanks or any MLB baseball this year (really since the league went woke around 2019 or so), but on the drive home we checked out the fan response on Yankees twitter and on the fan site Pinstripe Alley, and had a lot of belly laughs. I am now somewhat up to speed on the fiasco that is Clay Holmes, the erratic mismanagement of manager Aaron Boone, and see now why the Yankees organization can’t give Aaron Judge a ring to cement him as one of the all-time greats. It seems this is the eleventh blown save of Holmes this year, and the record of 14 is well within his reach as Boone doesn’t seem willing to bench him.

And then I was almost cornered and bit by a Doberman! But that’s a story for later this week …

Verdict on the Summer of 2024

 

Wow, that went fast.

Summer started for me when Little One swept in from Europe back on May 18. Three whirlwind months later we packed her up and dropped her off at school for Junior year, a 45-minute not-too-far but not-too-close drive away. It’ll be a week tomorrow, and already the house seems much more quiet, even though she’s often quiet as a mouse herself.

Though I’m blue at the moment, the summer had its high points. But also, bizarrely, it seemed empty to me, and I feel much like one of those wind-up figurines that parades out of a medieval clock every hour on the hour to circle about doing its thing and then returns inside. A lot of the summer felt rote, by the book, task A to task B to task C wash rinse repeat ad infinitum.

My life here has kinda devolved into pure routine: Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the office doing accounting; Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays hanging in the home office doing accounting. Mow the lawn and trim the hedges every ten days. Water the grass every other day. Put out the trash and recycling every Sunday night. Church. Chipotle on Friday nights.

The highlights were Patch’s confirmation ceremony and the party that followed. Father’s Day was an enjoyable experience for the four of us and not just me. We had a unique Fourth of July where we kinda snuck into an event, watched a brilliant fireworks display, then snuck back out, avoiding all sorts of traffic and the oppressive humidity of the day. I bonded with my dog the two weeks the girls went away to Pennsylvania, followed immediately by another week when they left with the Mrs. to visit her mom in South Carolina.

I continued bonding with my youngest for Thursday movie night (a routine I fully enjoy). We watched some interesting flicks (“psychological thrillers” is the term she uses), ranging from A Beautiful Mind and Awakenings to A Perfect Murder and Psycho II. We still do Saturday errands together, and we did that with her older sister when she wasn’t working her summer job, an activity that I heartily enjoy with my girls and have since they were toddlers.

Me, I look back and feel somewhat empty. Yeah, that fence thing took a full work-week out of my life, spread out over eight summer weeks. But I didn’t really accomplish anything of note. Yeah, I burned my way through five Tom Clancy re-reads from May to August, and that’s all fine and good, but I didn’t do anything creative, other than these scattered blog entries, and that’s a growing thorn in my side.

A couple of days ago I pulled out an old notebook and did some brainstorming – I wanted to list ten projects I could do. No limitations, no prejudgment, no holds barred. Only things that I would like to spend my time on, even if ultimately they came to nothing. After 45 minutes I came up with six ideas. This’ll be a subject of a future post, but I’m hoping these will inject a spark into the daily grind of existence.

Perhaps this is a bit of existential angst that’s come over me. I do have a birthday coming up.  But life is not all meaningless for me; far from it and I don’t want to give that impression. My reading ranges all over the board and is a source of education and entertainment for me. I listen to all sorts of music daily and play my acoustic guitar at least 30 minutes a day (“Ramble On” is my latest obsession). I’ve been working out since the end of July and have the physique of a young Schwarzenegger (when he was about 12, I’d estimate 😊). The Mrs. and I do periodic date nights and we generally enjoy our time together, as much as the average couple married for 23 years. I walk around the ponds by my house, I chat with the people at work, I’m soda and booze free and have a clean bill of health from the docs.

Sigh.

Time’s just going by too fast.

Verdict on the Summer of 2024?

Solid B.