Category: Life

We’ve reached a point in our lives where we’re actually decorating for Christmas. For a while, we’ve put up a Christmas tree, since we had a family. But we’ve gone past that now and into putting little Christmasy tchotchkes around the house. Well, the living rooms. We’ve not hit that middle-of-life suburban point where we swap out artwork on the walls–unlike a certain aunt of mine–but we do put up mementos. Mostly it comes from me, of course, with my personal-relicophilia. If my mother put it up on the shelf once when I was young, it represents a Christmas tradition going back throughout the centuries. Now that the number of people with whom I’ve shared actual Christmas traditions from my youth dwindles, I need these silly little memory triggers to make sure I remain increasingly depressed during the Christmas holidays. Now, what was I saying before I was rummaging through the junk drawer for single-edged razor blades?

Ah, yes.

So now that we’re doing the little knick-knackery for Christmas, we spread them out on hearths, on bookshelves, on the piano, and whatnot. We disperse them so that when you look, you might catch a little bit of the spirit or whatnot. However, at the end of the holiday season, when we take down the decorations in early January, we don’t always get all of the bric-a-brac back in the boxes. For a week or two, we’ll find another something here or there. A sleigh. A pine cone. A stuffed Christmas tree. Something that had faded into the background over the course of the month that our eyes skipped right over it when it was time to de-Christmastiate.

If we found it in a couple of weeks, we’d still have the wherewithal to pull the boxes out of the most remote storage location in the house, which we always reserve for Christmas gear (although at Nogglestead, it’s a small closet beneath the steps, where we have to bend and twist to get the things out, but it’s not as bad as the attic at Old Trees). But after enough time has elapsed, we sort of let it go and either tuck the tchotchke into a drawer or just let it hang out for the year.

This year’s Straggler of the Year is a little elf-bearing-gifts on the clock:

My Nana gave me that a couple years ago, sometime after my first son was born. I think it came with a little boy doll that she gave us to decorate his room. For a while, it did, but after we left Old Trees for Nogglestead, the doll moved to the basement and the little elf rightfully became a Christmas decoration. Well, it would have, if we put it away after Christmas.

But atop the clock, it’s outside the normal range of the eye as it travels through the room. I sort of hid it a bit behind the clock’s facade for much of the year, but now that it’s appropriate again, he’s stepped out.

Hopefully, one of you will remind me sometime in January to pack him away this year. Undoubtedly, though, next year we will have a different winner of this annual award.

Good god, man! Have we unlearned so much as to unleash this upon our young again?

Purple pants? Must we repeat everything of the 1970s again?

Allow me to dictate a rule of fashion to you people who aspire to be something like men, except with sore thumbs not from hitting them with a hammer while trying to be something like a man (a real man has evolved to hitting the actual nail) but from playing video games all day (although some real gamers would say they’ve evolved to have strong thumb muscles that no longer get sore, with which I would quibble over the word evolve). At any rate, the rule is:

No purple pants unless you are a clown.

Which is a bit of a tautology. If you’re wearing purple pants, you are a de facto clown. And not a scary, nightmare-fodder clown. A clown like Shakespeare would have wrote about. A buffoon from, well, not the country in the modern case, but rather from some enclave in the city where they have Brooks Brothers stores and where women smile warmly and not in mockery when walking next to someone wearing purple pants. Although I am not 100% sure that the female model in this ad is not laughing at the model in the purple pants.

I’ll not be shopping there, thank you. I’m holding out hope that George Zimmmer hasn’t loaded Men’s Wearhouse with these things so I don’t have to deal with them in the event that I buy a good suit in the near future. I’d hate to have to (and by hate to I mean “would really love to but would be conflicted by the expense of”) go to London to get a real bespoke suit.

So my six-year-old asked me about cannibalism the other day. I’m not sure how it came up; maybe he was talking to Marc or something. More likely, he’d heard something about it at school, since he got the idea that some people practiced it. “What state do they eat their enemies?” he asked.

“They don’t do that in any state; it’s a bad thing, and there are better things to eat then people.” That’s standard Daddy lectures about natural history and whatnot. Then the Brian J. lectures about history kicked in, and the misinformation commenced.

“Did you know that cannibalism and Canada share the same root word?” I asked.

I don’t know why I do that to the poor lad; he trusts me, well, at least as far as possible, and now he’s got the notion that Canadians are cannibals.

On the other hand, there’s not a lot of ways that could go wrong. Certainly, we’ve never had Patch, my Canadian co-pilot from my testing days, over for an actual meal and probably won’t any time soon, so the boy won’t worry about what’s in the pasta’s meat sauce.

And, on the other hand, it could actually benefit the boy if, after the disintegration of civilization, the Manitoban tribe comes raiding out of the frozen steppes. He and his family will fight to the last to avoid that fate worse than mere death.

“Hey, Dad,” my six-year-old son said as I passed by his doorway this weekend. “You know that war we had with the British?”

“We have had two, not counting miscellaneous guerrilla skirmishing amongst them,” I said.

“The one with the fort?” He gestured at something atop his cabinet, formerly known as his changing table. “With the rockets.”

I stepped into the room and looked at what he had created.

Continue reading “Not 100% Accurate” →

Going into a gun store today is gonna be like going into a Walmart on the first of the month.

Except, you know, government forms instead of government money.

UPDATE: Apparently, Tam K. gets her scrying apparatus at the same place I do.

“Well, it’s time to go weed the pickup.”

Well, maybe you also have to be a little lazy to need to say it, too. Maybe you don’t even have to live in the country.

So I was at Walmart this morning, checking out the clearance rack for cheap shirts (because you can’t be a cut-rate Cary Grant if you’re paying a full ten dollars for a dress shirt at Walmart). As I got back into my truck with my purchases, I saw an older man, an older man not bent but hunched a bit walking slowly, not with a shuffle but with the short steps of age, eating a candy bar, and I smiled.

Because it’s a candy bar, and it’s a simple treat in the world where young, healthy (and slightly older, healthier) zealots want to purge everyone’s diets of sugars, gluten, and processed-whatever-this-week, and this man has bought a candy bar and he couldn’t wait until he got to his car or his home to enjoy it. Like a kid, he opened it right up and enjoyed a little bit of calorie-laden joy at 8:30 in the morning.

You know what? He’s probably earned seventy-five cents worth of nougat in his life. And he’s not afraid to take it, and he’s not afraid of anyone seeing him take a bit of a preemptory pleasure before the rest of his day begins.

And that made me smile.

(Yes, I know, it’s entirely possible that his one sack was full of bottles of whiskey and candy bars he bought with government assistance money. But come on, I’m trying to break my usual gloominess with a focus on life’s little pleasures, and just for once I’d like to think someone in the year 4bo earned it.)

So Paladins was right in my wheelhouse as a fantasy enthusiast, at least as much fantasy enthusiasts as I am. When I played Dungeons and Dragons (so long ago that I spell out the and now), I often played characters who were of the class Paladin. As you might know, gentle reader, the paladin is a holy warrior, a Crusader of sorts fighting for a mythical god or church.

To most kids who play D&D, the Paladin is something like a televangelist with a sword. Unfortunately, a lot of kids who play role-playing games have a sort of slanted view of church-attending folk, so they don’t see a lot of depth in characterization within them. Paladins are always stuffy, self-righteous, and two-dimensional buffoons played for laughs as NPCs.

Which is sad. As I mentioned, I often played paladin characters as people, with quirks, foibles, and self-doubt.

• At GenCon one year, as part of this huge open game that took over one of the skywalks, I played a paladin of Tyr, the Forgotten Realms god of justice. This fellow was risk-averse to put it mildly, borderline cowardly in most situations where he could think about the risks involved in combat, but had the right instincts. So while he might shrink from a fight if he thought about it, but if confronted with danger without the chance of overthinking it, he would defend his faith and friends instinctively.
• In another one-off, I rolled up a paladin for a game and picked from the Forgotten Realms book the god of mornings and beginnings. This fellow carried a halberd, but he used it mostly as a walking stick as he jaunted along. Genial and genuinely optimistic, he didn’t have too much chance to do much before the fellows hosting the game ended the session so they could toss my friends and I to smoke some dope. I later learned my friends returned for another session without me–I had something of a reputation as a misanthropic ass even then–but that one session did lead to the halberd on my office wall as it was December, and when one of my guys asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said “A halberd.” So it was. But I was talking about paladins.
• Another character I played was not directly a paladin, since it was in the Dangerous Journeys system. Caryn was the third son of minor nobility in England, a ne’er-do-well brawler who hung out with the wrong people in the bars and whatnot until his older brother was killed Crusading. So Caryn, who did not like his brother, reluctantly takes his brother’s armor and goes off, indecisively, to avenge him with no clear plan in mind and no zeal to do it. He’s not a real paladin, just a Crusader, but he’s adopted the blandishments of churchliness and holier-than-thou behavior. Akin to the stereotype, but he doesn’t believe it, really. It wouldn’t have worked in D&D because the special abilities for the class come from belief, but in the context of Dangerous Journeys it was possible. Given the nature of the module we were on, I’d mapped out a character arc for Caryn to improve, become a better person, and maybe even a believer, but the hosts of this group, with which I gamed off and on for a couple years, (::cough, cough::) didn’t like me and forgot the character’s back story (he’s just a paladin, hey).

So, as I said, there’s a lot of room in the paladin class for interesting characters, but in most cases I’ve seen, that’s marginalized, probably because the normal D&D gamer doesn’t know a lot of healthy, church-going folk and only have their resentments and stereotypes of the same to draw from.

Dude, I just got called out by a presidential candidate. Who isn’t a Libertarian; Libertarians presidential candidates get involved in bar brawls all the time. But Republicans?

Ladies and gentlemen, John and Charles (I’m not saying that John is a lady nor Charles is a gentleman), I present to you the knob of the door leading from my dining room to the garage. I have not seen this doorknob since I moved into Nogglestead, three years and four days ago:

Look how shiny it is, unlike the other doorknobs in the house that have been grabbed by a variety of sweaty father mitts and, more importantly, pasta-encased little child mitts.

That’s why it’s so clean and shiny, you see; for the last three years, it’s been protected by a child proofing mechanism, one of those knob covers that spins freely unless you squeeze the tabs on the sides to make contact with the underlying knob.

But my children are four and six now, and we spent all summer with sliding doors open, and they know to operate those and never showed a tendency to wander out on their own. Additionally, we removed the protection from the knob on the front door earlier this year, as it not only flummoxed our children but also our house guests. The children haven’t shown a tendency to go get the newspaper or go out.

So one aesthetically pleasing step later, and our door knobs are free. But it’s a bit sad to an old sentimentalist like me. Because I recognize that any de-childproofing steps measure a portion of the past, of my life with babies and toddlers, is moving into the past and lost but for my memories. Although the times haven’t always been joyful or easy, it’s only the joy I’ll remember and miss.

Not enough to keep a ceremonial childproofing door knob cover as a personal relic, though.

Also, I give the shine on that door knob eight days, maximum.

No, not something I wrote; I wish. Instead, this month’s Missouri Times, the newsletter of the State Historical Society of Missouri (available in PDF form here) has an article on Carrie Francke, a woman in the state Republican Party who ran for a couple of offices and lost, before she died in an auto accident in 1989.

I helped on Ms. Francke’s campaign for Congress in 1984. It was the year we’d moved from Milwaukee into the basement of my oft-mentioned rich (that is, struggling middle class) relations in St. Charles. My uncle was politically active and volunteered for this particular campaign, which is why I found myself canvassing Augusta (I think), knocking on doors to tell people about Ms. Francke. I remember seeing a phone booth that only took a dime in that small town (Augusta, I think), which was something prevalent in the novels I was reading at the time (at age twelve, I was already reading pulp fiction from the 1940s and 1950s) but not so much in the real world (where phones were a quarter).

I thought about clipping the article for my uncle, one of the political lions I’ve referred to over the course of this blog, but he passed away in April. So the story from the historical society, that thing I remembered live, I’ve got no one to share it with except the uncaring Internet via this blog.

Now that I have, I’ll drop the clipped article into the recycling bin.

On Wednesday night, I went to Kohl’s and got the shams. Yea, verily, that does sound like a disease instead of decorative pillows, and it’s just a destructive to one’s manhood. So I went to the shooting range yesterday for the cure.

Actually, my mother-in-law had wanted for a very long time to take a basic handgun course and to practice with the little Smith and Wesson Combat Masterpiece her brother gave her for self-protection a decade ago, and I went along for lunch and for moral support.

We got a 30 minute talk about gun safety and how the revolver works, and then we got a chance to put some rounds down range. Well, seven yards down range. Is that far enough to be “down range”?

The instructor fired three to show how the gun works, and then my M-i-L and I alternated a couple of loads. She fired twelve, and I fired eleven. And I have to say I did pretty well for someone who hasn’t fired a gun in nearly four years:

I put about half of my shots into the 10-ring or the X-ring. I think I like the wheel guns better, at least at the outset here, because you can see the mechanism working and know with better certainty when the bang is coming and you can pause en media res better to make sure you’re still lined up on the target.

Comes a self-defense situation, though, I think I’d still want more bullets.

Now my mother-in-law has expressed interest in taking a concealed carry class, and it’s entirely possible I’ll be along for moral support again. We’re a mutual excuse society in that.

So it was a good time, and almost enough to make one forget that one knows the difference between American and Euro shams. Although, in my defense, I have a beautiful wife who wanted the shams.

Last night, on our way home from dinner and some shopping (where my beautiful wife somehow walked out of a Kohls with several articles of clothing, two high-end pillows, and a king sized 8-piece bed set for twelve cents that she happened to have in her wallet), we saw a fire truck turning off of our road. Uh oh, I thought. They don’t tend to just cruise the neighborhood, and when my wife pointed out it was a Nixa fire truck, it meant something bad.

But not mortally bad as it turns out.

Fire crews were called out to a hay bale fire in the 4400 block of S. Farm Road 115 Wednesday afternoon.

. . . .
A horse trailer was also caught in the fire, but no animals or firefighters were injured.

It was Cheyenne‘s barn, if you’re keeping track.

My children are back in school, including my youngest, who has begun a full-time Pre-Kindergarten program this year. For the first time in many years, I run errands without toddlers toddling behind me, without having to keep my head on a swivel to watch for malfeasance or just childfeasance. I can’t help myself, though, continuing to chant things like, “C’mon, laddies,” or “Stretch ’em, short legs,” as I’m moving through the store.

Even though there’s no one trailing me.

Suddenly, I am Exidor.

I used to be Mork, but now, with the inclusion of giving navigational instructions to people who aren’t there, I’ve elevated to a new plane.

Brian J., you ask, why do you keep everything like you do, especially books, pamphlets, and some ephemera (but not as much as Lileks)?

Because someday I might need it. For research.

Of course, when I was young, I imagined it would be for important works of literature that would speak to readers about the journey of man from life to death and the struggle for meaning along the way. But that was back in the 20th century. Now I know better, of course, and my 21st century sights are set more along the lines of After civilization collapses, my physical books will be the things that brings Man out of his new Dark Age, and by that I mean the bastard that shoots me down will warm himself for several days by burning my tomes.

Aside from that, though, I do go to the books now and then. Continue reading “My Library Is Deep, As Are My Archives” →

A couple things that have just disappeared, and their disappearance has gone unnoticed for the most part until someone points it out.

• When police used the word “suspect.” Now, of course, no one is ever a suspect. They are a “person of interest” until the time they are arrested. I don’t get it. Was the term “suspect” sexist or racist?
   
• Rusty cars on the road. When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to see cars with rust on them. A lot of rust on them. Partly that’s my cohort of the era, but also it’s because fiberglass and plastic have replaced metals in vehicle exteriors, so there’s nothing to rust except the three pins holding the cars together. Of course, one might say that one does not see as many old cars as one used to, but you know what? Old cars look a lot like the new cars. Sometime in 1993 or 1994, the design of cars changed forever to accommodate CAFE standards, and they’re all wind-tunnelled-to-death blobs of fuel efficiency, and Tauruses from 1998 look a lot like Camrys from 2012. And then the car starts to get to that breakdown point, it fails expensively from the inside, and in the course of a year or two, there’s a great Automobile Rapture that calls all instances of a model home. Remember Neons? Remember Saturns? The roads were lousy with them, and now they’re just….gone. Without rusting first.
   
• Tags on shirts. Remember those? They used to itch, sometimes, but most importantly, they allowed you to dress in the dark since you could feel the tag and orient the shirt. Now, I spend many morning hours walking around in shirts that are inside out and backwards because the shirt manufacturers want to save a couple ha’ pennies’ worth of paper and a couple stitches.

If I were Andy Rooney, I could probably get 600 words out of each cantankerous thought. But Andy Rooney was a professional, and he got paid for it. If I were getting paid for it, I could stretch that out, too. But since you’re a freeloader, you get the steno version, gentle reader.