So last night, we went to the local arcade 1984, and I again made the leader board on two different games, although it might look like I was going in alphabetical order:
I beat my previous high score on Elevator Action, but the current high score was almost 20,000, and I only got about 16,000. I also tied the high score for Omega Race right as we were leaving; perhaps I’ll focus on that one next year as it looks pretty easy to play and perhaps dull enough that the cool kids leave it alone.
Although it looks like 1984 thinned out its selection of games a little bit. Perhaps as part of opening a location in Branson this year. And the price has gone up. Still, ten bucks for a couple of hours of video game time is worth it as long as you, you know, play the video games. I think I again spent most of my time wandering around looking at video games.
As I often mention, gentle reader, I live my life with a bit of a double-effect narrator in my head. Even when I am in the moment, I recognize that right now will someday be a memory, so I tend to reflect on right now as though it has already passed even as it is passing. Perhaps that’s why I read so much Buddhism and Stoicism: they justify the way I already experience the world.
As such, certain sounds have always heightened this experience. One is the passage of wind through full trees.
I remember very acutely sitting on the back steps of the house down the gravel road. The back steps were really just three concrete steps from the door at the back of the garage. We didn’t have a deck. We didn’t even have a stoop. Just three concrete steps.
The steps looked out on the back yard. We had an acre or two, but only about one of it was level and clear; the remainder, across the creek, climbed up our slice of a hill and was heavily wooded. It was summer, about sunset, but it was already darkening on the eastern side of the hill. I was back from college for a couple of weeks, as most of my break time was spent in Wisconsin, working and going to festivals. I closed my eyes as the summer breeze tousling the treetops and recognized that my college years, my youth, were passing like that wind.
I’ve closed my eyes from time to time when sitting out on my back decks in Casinoport and here at Nogglestead when the wind has moved through full trees, and I could almost reach through the years and feel exactly as I did then, whether the then was sitting on those concrete steps at age twenty or underneath the crab apple trees at age thirty or the glider at age forty-five. To know I would likely again sit with my eyes closed and listen to the wind in the trees sometime in the future and remember now. I feel eternity a bit, I think, when I do.
About the same time as I was sitting on those back steps, Sting’s “Fields of Gold” hit the radio.
It was 1993, and I was about to finish up college. I was mooning over a girl who didn’t care for me, as was often the case in those years, so the thought of a love was a hopeful speculation at that point. But the song has the double-effect narrator who recognizes that the profound, eternal loves of youth pass like the wind through barley.
When I hear that song, as I did yesterday, I feel the very same melancholic nostalgia that I do every time–the same as when I first heard the song, before I had anything to really feel nostalgia for.
And when I hear it in the future, even if it’s just reviewing this post in the days or years to come, I will feel the same, and the connection to my youth and my now (which will be my youth when I’m older).
Even if my life isn’t facing a big transition as it was then (from college to post-college), these sounds remind me of the passage of time, and that I will transit to different things in my life and will only remember now, maybe, then.
As you might know, gentle reader, when I first moved to Nogglestead, I began planting an orchard of pear, apple, peach, and cherry trees.
It has not been particularly rewarding. To make a short story long, deer ringed the apple trees the first year–they stripped bark all the way around the trees, which killed them. I replaced them and resuscitated one, only to discover the signs of life it showed came from the crab apple root stock and not the grafted eating apple part of the tree. Then, we’ve had cold winters, late freezes, droughts, and Japanese beetles so that I did not get any yield even almost a decade later.
Until this year, when we have had a moderate summer and a wet spring which apparently kept the beetles at bay. The harvest of the peach trees in the front was small peaches and just enough for me to snack on them when I went out to the mailbox and back. Growing fruit here is a little like Edge of Tomorrow; every year, we get a little closer, but something gets the harvest.
Like a derecho wind this spring that blew through the Nogglestead side yard, where it knocked over a couple of apple trees and sent a large tree crashing against one of our side light posts, destroying it.
The apple trees were pushed over, but they were still alive. Until the deer came along and could suddenly reach all the leaves.
But I see that, in addition to the remaining a couple of small apples (hopefully, not crab apples, it has sprouted some new leaves.
I’m not sure what I am to do with the tree and its smaller fallen brother closer to the woods. Perhaps in the spring, I will hook it up to my truck or my tractor (lawn mower, but I don’t feel as rural if I admit that) to try to stand it up or continue to let it grow crooked.
As my beautiful wife and possibly anyone who has been following my Good Album Hunting posts could have guessed, two tiers of record shelving, with roughly eleven linear feet of record storage, cannot contain all the records at Nogglestead.
So I quickly assembled a third tier, and as I was priming it yesterday, I noticed something.
When painting something, I always go from left to right or counterclockwise around the item.
I credit this to being old enough to remember a typewriter, and I’m just doing what the typewriter does with paint.
I dunno, maybe it’s more because that’s my dominant hand. But I like the typewriter analogy better.
Also, please note that I am not sure if roughly sixteen feet of shelving will be enough.
As I have mentioned a time or two, I scan the local society pages because, as Springfield is a smaller city, I can often see people I know or know of on the pages of 417 or in the photo galleries of the News-Leader.
And, to be honest, I started wondering when we would appear in those very galleries.
I mean, we have attended charitable functions from time to time, although we haven’t been back to a mega-ticket capital G-gala since the Springfield Symphony Guild Debacle of 2015. Even when I see the society photographer, he refuses to make eye contact. Still, I expected at some point I would be able to put down the beer and smile with my arm candy.
My beautiful wife has begun attending local business functions as she is a local business owner with a viable, proven software product on the market, and she is the first to the galleries with an image in the Biz 417 gallery for the Springfield Chamber of Commerce Luncheon 2019:
Two best friends in China have both been hospitalised after competing with each other to do 1,000 squats in one go.
Tang, 19, said she and her friend carried out the challenge earlier this month during a video call which lasted for about three hours.
* * * *
Tang went to a local hospital accompanied by her boyfriend. She claimed that her legs ached so much she could not even be carried by her boyfriend.
At last, she had to move slowly on her own to the hospital and was found to have a serious syndrome caused by muscle injury, known as rhabdomyolysis.
Rhabdomyolysis is a potentially fatal condition that occurs when muscles are injured and they release their contents, including a muscle enzyme, into the bloodstream.
That sounds dangerous. I’d better sit down.
Although trying to do 1000 squats sounds like something I would try. Fortunately, though, I tend to forget to do squats at all unless I’m at the gym or the dojo.
I changed the linens in the boys’ bedroom this week, and it was the last time I would make up my oldest child’s bed with sheets with cartoon characters on them.
They’ve had Spider-Man, Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mario, or Star Wars sheets on their beds ever since they had big boy beds. Oh, and how delighted they were when I would spend twenty bucks at the Walmart to pick up a new set and they would come home to vivid new colors and heroes. They were easy to delight when they were young.
They started out in separate bedrooms with their cribs and then their big boy beds–a set of bunk beds separated by a wall. A couple years ago, we moved them into a room together and activated the bunk bed feature of the bunk beds. We made the corner bedroom into a guest bedroom and painted it a pleasant orange, but we never got around to decorating it with wall hangings. It idled, as we haven’t had many guests to Nogglestead in recent years. Mostly, the boys used it as a playroom as their extensive Lego holdings resided in that closet.
This summer, though, as my wife thought she would spend a lot of time in the room after recent surgery, she ordered some art from a catalog, and I put them up. She didn’t end up spending much time in that room after all, but we’ve decided to again separate the boys into separate bedrooms, and the oldest will get the former guest bedroom and its full-sized bed.
So he’ll go to bed with adult sheets now and forever more (unless he’s a modern young man who might end up with cartoon sheets in adulthood). I guess it’s fitting; at 13, he has moved into adult-sized clothes that his mother often puts into my drawers.
But it puts one in a melancholy mood to start the morning. My children are growing up, and most of our lives will be spent apart.
A melancholy solved by actual exposure to those siblings who begin squabbling the minute they awaken (hence the separate bedrooms soon). Suddenly, I’m Can I send them to military school starting today?
The other day, I found myself behind an International Harvester on Highway FF, and I thought of the Craig Morgan song.
This vehicle managed a speed of 15 mph along the state highway, but the song says:
Hoggin’ up the road on my p-p-p-p-plower
Chug a lug a luggin’ 5 miles an hour
On my International Harvester
However, this particular unit was a harvester, not a plower, so my experience does not counter the song.
I do, however, wonder what the combine was doing down by us. Most of the “crops” grown around here are hay. I can’t think where we have a field of wheat or corn big enough to warrant a combine.
Although perhaps that means I should get back into the habit of driving around exploring. I did that a bunch when my children were really young; we’d hop into the car to go for a ride and just drive around. Now that they’re older, we’re busy and don’t go driving around almost aimlessly. Which is a little sad.
To be honest, when I lived down the gravel road in the holler made by Heads Creek (the house actually had some creekfront exposure, but in the back), I lived midway down the holler. Maybe somewhere in the nasal passages of the holler, or somewhere in the digestive tract.
But this description of the neighborhood is accurate:
Some hollers are more populated than others and it isn’t uncommon for as many as 300 people to live up a single holler, if “the bottoms” are land and wide enough for enough mobile homes, three story “fancy houses” and simple cinderblock homes — a fascinating patchwork I’ve seen only in the Appalachian Mountains where the haves and have nots coexist as equal neighbors.
Although I don’t know if the head and mouth really apply, as Heads Creek moved through various hills and hollows. I tend to think of the “mouth” of the hollow as where Heads Creek Road meets Highway MM, as this was our access route to the rest of the world, and Heads Creek Road followed the creek south from there. My holler was not the one with the fancy homes in it.
And I wasn’t born there; I moved in in high school and lived there for two and a half years, visited twice a year for four years, and then lived there again for a year or so. So I wasn’t related to anyone then (although my frisky younger brother might mean I have relations there now), and I didn’t get many “firsts” there aside from my first time having a party line or the first time living where one could dust the trees.
The bike carrier still has the little sticker on it that identified it from when we moved to Nogglestead almost ten years ago.
While this might be an indicator of how we’re not serious cyclists (we’re not, except for my beautiful wife, who hasn’t been especially serious lately), it’s also an indicator of the fact that two of us (the boys) have had small bikes, and they could fit in the back of an SUV.
And when I needed to take my bike to the two outdoor triathlons I’ve done, I could easily throw it in the back of my late beloved pickup truck.
Now, though, times have changed; we’ve gotten the thirteen year old a full sized bike, and we will have to convey both his and mine to the Republic Tiger Tri in three weeks.
So now I can peel that sticker off. I did it for a long time with great pleasure because each was a reminder of the little damages done to our dryer and piano when six men and two trucks moved us from Old Trees to Nogglestead, and to leave those stickers on any box in the store room rubbed salt into that wound.
Friends, I must confess that we at Nogglestead, have embraced this trend because we frequently run 5k races, so it’s not uncommon for us to wear matching t-shirts on a Saturday morning.
And sometimes after, two of us will end up wearing the same shirt on a day.
Although I’ve never bitten the head off of one, so I’m not properly initiated.
I remember going one night with my father, where he and his buddies waded out into Lake Michigan with what seemed like a finer meshed tennis net, dragging a bunch of the small fish onto the beach. I mean, they were tiny, enough that my brother and I could easily wrap our elementary school fists around them.
My father tried to convince us that you weren’t a real smelt fisherman unless you bit the head off of one. I don’t know if that’s an actual smelt fishing tradition, or if my father was joking with us, but my brother actually did bite the head off of one. So in our family, he’s that one kid. Or maybe my father was.
Of course, I also remember from that trip putting my finger on the top of a lantern and burning it until it blistered. So I cannot make it out like I’m the smart brother.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
Years later, at my grandfather’s cabin in northern Michigan, I remember holding a completed sparkler and watching its metal turn from red to carbon color and touching it to see if it was cool. Which is was not.
Definitely not the smart brother.
(But, yes, I eventually learned the meaning of “hot,” thanks.)
Facebook is very cautious. It thinks this is German:
Translated to English by Facebook, this text says:
That, as you know, gentle reader who probably also delves into eldritch tomes by the mad Arab, is not the real translation, which is:
In his house at R’lyeh, dread Cthulhu waits dreaming.
I was finta say that Facebook is being overly cautious here in hiding the meaning of unholy phrases, and that Big Tech is a conspiracy to keep this knowledge from the masses, and that no dictionary sites offer pronunciations for these words to help those who’ve only read them, but….
never mind.
Every time you watch that video, you strengthen the cult magic that seeks to raise the Great Old One.
That was mildly interesting, so I set it to one side. I bought my present Lexus RX-mobile* from their used-car lot, with exactly one key for it; maybe they found the others?
You know, when I traded my old pickup truck for an SUV last year, we ended up with an older Lexus with a then-luxe interior including a cassette deck. It came with two keys; when we got into the car, I gave the key with the fob (lock/unlock/panic buttons) to my beautiful wife, put the key without the buttons on my keyring, put the key in the ignition, turned, and…
Nothing.
I could not start the vehicle, and after a few tries, I started to get angry. I thought about the lemon law, storming in and demanding my old truck back and whatnot, but she (my beautiful wife, not Roberta X.) was really sold on the vehicle. The salesman came out with obviously artificial regret, but this particular vehicle only came with one key that could start the car–one with the integrated chip–and one that could unlock the doors, maybe. We could order another key with an integrated chip for a couple hundred dollars.
Which we did, because she was very taken with the vehicle, and I spoil her.
But I’ve added another thing to check when buying a used vehicle.
Between this and buying houses, I’ll know all the gotchas to look for after I’ve bought my last car or house. Although it’s probable that I’m too optimistic in thinking I can ever know all the tricks.
Actually, it’s not even on the fishing fishing spectrum: Magnet fishing.
Some folks in southern Wisconsin find themselves facing a magnetic attraction to the region’s hidden heavy metal scene.
They have taken up what’s known as magnet fishing, a hobby that — measured in terms of social media — is all the rage in Europe but is just now becoming a pastime in the American Midwest.
The hobby consists of attaching a powerful magnet to a rope, then tossing the magnet into a waterway. Once the magnet hits bottom, you drag it until it locks onto something metal. Then you haul the item to the surface.
Sometimes the result is treasure, most of the time it’s junk, and sometimes what you haul to the surface is just plain weird.
As you might recall, gentle reader, I read a little about being a “treasure hunter” back in 2011 when I had to get a metal detector to find a part for my garden tiller, but I never really got into the hobby mostly because there are a lot of rules and laws about where you can and cannot use one.
Perhaps I should jump into this hobby and spend the $100 for a magnet and kit before I discover rules that would preclude me from doing it. After all, who owns the middle of the river or a lake? (Someone, and if you find something really good, they’ll want it.)
So I went out for a run last night, which makes it sound like I’m a runner, which I am not. I am not the sort of person who’ll take off from my driveway and go for a little run, mostly because I don’t really like to run and also because I live in the country, and a run from my house is likely to include near-misses by trucks on two-lane highway-speed farm roads and the threat of loose dogs of dangerous size.
I mean, I did do this, once, when I was in college and under the influence of Spenser novels, but I didn’t like running then, either, so I only ran around the neighborhood in northwest Milwaukee once even though I was impressed when my military friends would come back and run to the mall and back because it was only ten miles.
At any rate, my boys’ cross country coach tries to keep his kids in shape by holding voluntary fun runs twice a week in the summer, and I try to take them as often as possible because, for some reason, it seems that every year my exercise goes to hell after the Y Not Tri, and this year is no exception. I end up about a month away from the Republic, Missouri, Tiger Triathlon wondering how I’m going to get into shape enough to endure it.
So when I take my boys to the fun run, I try to get in a little running on my own. Last night, we went to Sequiota Park, which has a pretty straight line trail leading out of it north and south. If you run north out of the park, though, you run across a road where the trail walkers, runners, and bikers have a stop sign.
Lacuna Street
Which probably suggests some Lacuna Coil on the running playlist.
Or it would if I used Spotify or something. I don’t actually own any Lacuna Coil.
But perhaps you’ll see it on one of my musical balance posts forthcoming.
How was the run? you might ask if you’re interested in that sort of thing. 1.8 miles in 18 minutes, keeping with my base pace of about 10 minutes per mile. I’d like to see that go up, but you know what I’d have to do to get better? Run more.
“Is that Jordan Binnington?” my twelve-year-old asked.
“It’s a signed limited edition print by an artist I know in a series of 200. How much do you think it’s worth?”
“$1000,” the twelve-year-old said.
“$200,” the eleven-year-old said.
It’s only 20 bucks at his Web site, and you’ll want to get one before they’re gone, because if you wait until my estate sale, the price will have gone up dramatically.
It’s funny; “an artist I know” means “a guy who worked for a guy who sublet from a place where I worked thirteen years ago.” Matt is also second cousin once removed from Al Hirschfeld, the celebrated caricaturist from New York (according to this piece in the New York Times, but Matt’s Web site doesn’t mention the familial relationship).
So I “know” Matt less than I do the comic book artist in St. Louis; I met them both long ago and am friends with them on Facebook, but that’s what I’ve got as the equivalent of knowing everyone on the block like a noir detective since I live in the country and the other houses are far, far away.
So I’m watching the video for Herb Alpert’s 1987 hit, “Diamonds”, from his album Keep Your Eye On Me which is the only Herb Alpert album I own on cassette (which is okay, because I have a cassette player in my new-to-me truck and get to listen to the album all the time).
At any rate, the track not only features Janet Jackson, but the story of it is set at a dance club of the 1980s:
So I got to thinking, “How prevalent was the dance club culture, actually?” I mean, if you watch the movies and whatnot, a lot of scenes take place at clubs, but I didn’t go to clubs a whole lot when I was young. I am pretty sure I can count them on one hand:
By George in Columbia, Missouri, when I was dating this hot chick in the area who loved to go there and dance.
Excalibur in Collinsville, Illinois, where I took said hot chick because it was the only dance club I really knew because they advertised heavily on the radio.
Fallout, a gay dance club that a friend (not that kind of friend) took me to in college, perhaps to make me uncomfortable. But I didn’t get hit on; everyone could see by my lack of dancing prowess that I was straight.
I was always more of a music festival kind of guy, being a native son of Milwaukee.
So I really cannot judge based on my experience how prevalent clubs were. In my coffee house days, whenever I hung out late at the Grind coffee shop in the fashionable Central West End, a lot of the people there would decide to go to Velvet, a club down on Washington. I never did though, as it had a dress code, and I attired myself pretty much in dark jeans and sneakers in my pre-going Grant days. But the people hanging around at the Grind included a lot of college students, many of foreign birth, and au pairs. So I don’t know how that segment of the population counts.
It’s just as well; I’m not very good at dancing. Most likely because I’m very self-conscious.
I have, however, been to music clubs, with seating to enjoy music.
Yoshi’s San Francisco which I went to because it was Yoshi’s, and we saw the Gospel Gators, a local college’s gospel choir.
The Blue Note in Columbia, MO, to see one or more folk acts favored by that hot chick who became my beautiful wife even though I cannot dance.
There are probably a couple more if I really plumb the depths of my memory.
Of all of the ones I listed, only the Blue Note and, apparently, Excalibur are still around. Coupled with yesterday’s post about poetry slam in St. Louis, and suddenly I realize how old I’m getting.
It also doesn’t answer a question I often have about how different the depictions of life and youth in culture, even that of the time or the new retro nostalgia costume dramas, vary simply from my life or do they vary from the experience of the majority of my generation? I suppose I could ask someone my age if I get to talking to them.
