Category: Life

Ladies and Gentlemen, now that I am an industrial lawnmower kind of guy, I need hearing protection. So I bought (and exchanged a defective unit as aforementioned or aaftmentioned depending on whether you read daily or not) hearing protection.

Sort of.

Here’s the unit I bought:

They even come preset to the Dana Show (look at the photo of the LCD radio setting, it’s 97.1 FM, which is the talk radio station in St. Louis, he explained parenthetically).

Why do I say it defeats its own purpose?

Because it’s designed to protect your hearing from the lawnmower’s decibels. However, if you’re listening to a rock station, you’re likely, if you’re like me, to substitute the lawnmower’s decibels for Metallica’s decibels. Which ultimately doesn’t protect your hearing at all.

Maybe its purpose is to not to protect your hearing, but to destroy your hearing in a more enjoyable fashion.

You know, living in the country and driving down these old Farm Roads has really encouraged me to keep both hands on the wheel at all times.

So, the other day, I’m heading down Farm Road 182 towards Republic. I glance in my rear view mirror as I near the bridge over Wilson Creek and see a car pretty tight on me. I don’t like it, but as I skim the S curve surrounding the bridge, crossing the center line to straighten the curve slightly. Skimming the curve allows me to take the curve at a speed I won’t reveal since my wife reads this blog and trusts me to drive our children safely, and she would disagree whether that speed was safe. As I come down the large hill west of Wilson Creek, I see I have put distance between me and the car behind me. I’m pleased as I crest the next hill and head into the trough and then….

OH MY GOD, IT’S A FREAKING EMU RUNNING INTO THE ROAD! And not a regular emu, a freaking methed-up Carbondale emus. Running out of Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield as though General McCulloch himself we pursuing it. On a collision course with my truck speeding along.

I slam on the brakes. The bird, just off my front left headlight, dekes one step back toward the battlefield and takes flight. Now, the bird is eye level, windshield level, and I duck to the left as it barely clears the roof.

By this time, the truck is mostly stopped, and I mash onto the gas to avoid the turkey landing on the roof and to make sure that the cars behind me don’t rear end me. The turkey, which I recognized as a turkey belatedly given its actual height did not exceed the hood of the truck and that it freaking flew, survived. We survived.

I call it a draw.

This piece excerpts a book that echoes something I tell myself for solace:

Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent. One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people’s minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by “noise.” (254)

…

It is not as if were no alternatives. Time spent listening to great music, or seeing great plays, or thinking about issues of lasting importance, was not in this category. In those cases the object of one’s activities retained its interest and importance for the rest of one’s life. If I spent an evening listening to Mahler’s Third Symphony, that symphony was still going to matter to me in six months’ time, or ten years, or thirty: it was part of my life, for always. In fact such things more often than not increased in interest and value with the passage of time. If I spent two or three months saturating myself in, let us say, recordings of Mozart’s piano concertos, and then did not return to them like that for another four years or so, I would find when I came back to them that I engaged with them on a deeper level than before. And the same was true of most great art. . . .

There were times when I felt, after all, that I was living to the full in face of death. Many men of action who are also writers have described the bliss induced in them by the sound of bullets smacking past their ears, and said that it intensified their awareness of being alive to an intoxicating level. The things that came closest to doing this for me when I fully realized I was facing death were my love affairs and friendships, philosophy and the arts.

I’m pretty steeped in politics these days from the sidelines, and I get pretty agitated when I muse on the direction of the country and the inevitable and possibly in-our-lifetimes collapse of the Republic.

But spring is coming. The days are warmer, and when I spend time outside plotting and planting, I can hear the neighbors’ horses nickering, the cattle lowing, and the occasional punctuation of an ass. My children smile, I can wrap my arms around my wife (after washing up), and I can spend the evenings with a book and a glass of wine.

Throughout the sweep of history, people have lived their lives. History books tell of the ascents, descents, and failures of nation-states or city-states, but that narrative is only clear to the individual when read in a history book. One person’s influence, unless one becomes a ruler, is minimal. One should participate, but remember what is important to the individual person and to enjoy the joys of life more than one suffers from the disappointments and heartbreak of trying to turn the march of history.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

One, two.

(Link to one seen at Marko’s.)

I agree with the overheated NBC commentators. Truly, I never will forget where I was when I saw on tape delay when that one guy, or maybe girl, overcame a tremendous obstacle in the personal life or maybe it was an injury to skate, ski, or otherwise compete against all odds and won a medal or maybe just won by competing and coming in 11th. It’s a moment etched into my short term memory until….

Hey, what’s the weather forecast for this week?

The online/print organica from Price Cutter Stores is entitled Liv Organically:

Sure, I know it’s harder to trademark something spelled correctly, but I hate to see expensive print publications spelled like they were created by 12-year-olds on a cell phone. Especially when they first bring to mind not produce but a slightly overweight woman in a frock with long, tangled hair.

A killer whale kills a trainer in Orlando, and all the quotes in the article are supportive of whales:

Killer whale expert Nancy Black said the whale could have been playing and the incident could have been an accident.

“They are very intelligent creatures. They have emotions, and feelings. Maybe it was unhappy in the situation, maybe it was bored,” Black said.

But this particular Orca has killed before:

Tilikum, the whale believed to be involved in Wednesday’s incident, was also involved in the death of a part-time trainer in Canada in 1991.

In 1999, a 27-year-old South Carolina man somehow entered a whale tank at SeaWorld Orlando after park hours and drowned. Daniel Dukes, who was carrying false identification, was found dead with a bite below his waist, according to autopsy results. He was bitten by Tilikum.

If we were a civilization on the upswing, Tilikum would be lighting lamps in Florida tomorrow night. But we’re not, so this beast will get passed along to another park and will lie low for a couple years before it snaps up another extra from the human race.

(Link seen on Althouse.)

Sorry for the light posting the last couple of days, but I am sick like the dog, again. Having children is like managing a medieval urban rat rodeo with accompanying exotic coughing flea chorus. I’ve been sick more times this year than I have been in the past decade.

Now pardon me while I wrap a blanket around myself again and watch yet another piece of children’s programming.

Back in the olden days of the early 1990s, I used to spend a lot of time and a lot of my disposable income at the local Mainstream Records because I could walk to it and because I could afford a couple of cheap audiocassettes for our weekend late night cruising expeditions. I gathered a reputation for finding old hits–old being from the middle 1980s–for us to ride to nowhere while learning to sing along. Back in those days, they offered cassette singles that featured, instead of a current song and a piece of filler from the album or a soundtrack, two hits by the same artist. On one of those excursions, I found “Electric Blue” by Icehouse, the best Australian band whose name was not just letters ever. The back side featured “Crazy”, which was pretty much all of their hits on one single since the paean to Australia required of all Australian bands who chart in the United States by an actual Australian law “Great Southern Land” sort of killed their charting in the United States.

The Mainstream Records only had one in stock, and I snapped it up to share with Deb and Chris in the comfort of Chris’s old Cutlass Sierra. Of course, by “old,” I mean it was only as old as the songs, but when you’re <20, there's a lot of things that are "old." During our rides through the Wisconsin dark, I convinced Deb I was singing to her, and she thought I sounded an awful lot like Iva Davies although in retrospect, of course I know I did not. So when an employee came along with the stone tablets that they used for ordering in those days, children, and noticed that Icehouse had sold, Mainstream ordered another copy. When that other copy arrived, I bought it immediately, and by immediately, I mean within a day or so of its shelving. As I said, I spent a lot of time there. I probably gave that copy directly to Deb. So when the Mainstream employee came along the next time with the tablet and chisel, he or she noticed that Icehouse had sold out, again. So they hammered a bigger number into the stone. Within short order, two copies of the Icehouse single arrived. Of course, I bought them immediately as well. One for Chris and one for my brother. Perfect! Then the Mainstream employee came along and thought he was seeing some revival of Icehouse or some strange musical fad blip, but this proactive Mainstream employee ordered four copies.

Which sat on the Mainstream shelf probably until the record store went out of business in the middle 1990s. They had no way of knowing that I was only a small-time taste maker and that the sudden surge in Icehouse’s popularity in the northwest corner of Milwaukee was very limited in scope indeed.

I would like to have arm-wrestled Robert Heinein and lost.

If you don’t understand that sentiment, you don’t understand what it means to have heroes.

I noticed pretty quickly that the Directv piped in music changed today from SiriusXM to SonicTap.

On one hand, as a SiriusXM investor, I’m saddened by the news since this indicates I am probably going to lose the last sleeve from the shirt I’ve been losing in that investment (I should have sold when they signed Stern and the stock zoomed to like $17 a share briefly).

On the other hand, SonicTap will probably have playlists that include more than only 24 hours of songs for each music channel, unlike SiriusXM. Even if not, I can hope it is at least a different 24 hours of songs to give me enough novelty to get through the week.

On the third, mutant hand, I can take pride that I am probably one of a mutant handful of people attentive enough to notice the change.

So I received a free gift print from Ducks Unlimited to induce me to renew or as a reward for renewing. I don’t know which, or maybe it’s both, since I received another one in the mail a week later.

In most cases, I throw these things into the recycling right away, I put them aside and wait until a later time when I’m cleaning up years later to put them into the recycling, or I throw them into a box for a yard sale and then, after the yard sale passes and they don’t sell, I throw them into the recycling bin.

This time, though, I took the reward and framed it for my children’s rooms, since their larger rooms have blank wall space these days:

Those pictures will hang on the boys’ bedroom walls until they’re old enough to replace them with something more to their tastes. Some days, in the far future, they might come across one of them in a box and recollect it fondly, wondering why they had duck hunting pictures in their rooms when their father wasn’t a duck hunter (assuming, probably safely, that I don’t become one between now and then).

Maybe they’ll know that I joined Ducks Unlimited after my father passed away to keep his contributions alive and so I could order the camouflaged hats that I leave on my father’s grave in lieu of flowers. Maybe I won’t get the chance to tell them that. Maybe they’ll only have the mystery.

One of the most evocative things about living in the country, at least for a guy who was pretty much a city boy up until the end of September 2009, are the animal sounds you hear in the nighttime that you cannot identify.

I recognize the sounds of the horses, cattle, chickens, and donkeys from the barns and fields. I know a number of bird cries from crows to hawks to whatever it is that seems to call Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy. But sometimes I hear things I don’t recognize, and most of the time I hear them at night.

The first night I spent in the house, I reached it after watching the movers load the truck in St. Louis and an afternoon drive down to Springfield. I led my wife to it so she could see it a second time–she’d seen it just once, when we initially looked at it, and I was the one present for all inspections thereafter. So we walked through the empty house together so she could see what we’d wrought, and as I walked her into the near-complete blackness to her truck, I heard something just outside the circle of the porch light.

I’d like to describe it for you, but I find it hard to characterize it. Given the height, it was coming from the trees, so I expect it was a nocturnal bird, perhaps one of those screeching birds. But it might have been a vacationing Jersey Devil for all I know. I didn’t, and that’s what made me uncomfortable.

Then, Saturday morning at 4am, my wife and I were awakened by a high, canine packish sound from outside. Sometimes, the wind whistling around our skylight can make sounds like low children moans or whistle like a maelstrom. The sound didn’t come from the skylight. I looked out a couple windows to try to catch sight of the source, to see if it was a pack of wild dogs or, heaven forfend, actual wolves.

As an aside, when I lived in Jefferson County, we had a pack of wild dogs that roamed the valley in which we lived. They were lost and abandoned pet dogs, so there was a mixture of mutts, none of which topped 80 pounds. It’s hard to be scared of a bunch of feral Yorkies, but one could be in a bit of trouble if a bunch of 80 pound and smaller dogs take you on.

I didn’t see what was wandering outside our house on Saturday morning. I’m uncomfortable in my ignorance. And believe you me, I sweep my eyes from side to side as I drag my garbage cart forty yards down my driveway into the blackness and wonder what lies out there that I don’t know about.

Imagination and ignorance makes life exciting!

So I pull into a regular gas station of mine, swipe my new American Express Card, start filling the SUV full of boys with 87 ‘tane, and start washing salt off of the windows. Why the windows are salty here in Springfield, where most places didn’t treat nor plow the 6 inches of snow we got around Christmas, I don’t grok. But that’s not the head scratcher.

After I finish with the back window and then the front window, less of a priority because it has better internal salt removal systems, I figure that the half tank’s worth of pumping should be done. The pump is not actively forcing fuel into my vehicle, and its internal mechanisms have shut it off at five cents’ worth of gas. .021 gallons, if you’re wondering.

I figure the seal between the pump nozzle and the tank has triggered. My pickup truck has a faulty seal here so that I have to pump gas by hand at slower than the lowest automatic notch or it will trigger the nozzle shut off. So I’m familiar with the vagaries of these systems. But when I depress the nozzle trigger, it does not pump at all.

So I wonder, is the gas station’s tank empty? Or has it stopped because that’s all my credit card authorized me? I push the help button that should intercom to the cashier inside to ask him what was going on.

No response. I’d have gone in, but that would have required unloading a pair of boisterons (the physics term for energetic male children) to ask a 30 second question or to leave them for 30 seconds unattended in a car, which is felony child endangerment in 21st century America.

So I instead replace the nozzle, take my receipt for five cents, and swipe my credit card again. This time, the pump says that it cannot accommodate credit card swipes at this time. The gas station attendant hasn’t replied yet, so I take my nickel of gasoline and leave.

Wondering, of course, what happened. Credit card problem? Computer problem? Or some problem with my newish credit card, perhaps a fraud alert. Maybe there’s an APB out for me in Battlefield, Missouri, even as we speak as they search for the three desperadoes in a vehicle that’s safely hidden in a garage.

Whatever else it is, it give me something to think about and to ruminate upon all afternoon.

When I’m turning left like a bouncy-strided NASCAR driver on the track in the local YMCA, I’m not one to steal a glimpse of the women in their workout clothes. Not that I would admit on a blog my wife reads from time to time, anyway. One thing turns my head every time, though: a metal door marked YMCA Staff Only opened to reveal the workshop within.

Beyond that door lies more than a janitorial closet, although certain supplies are stashed within for easy access on the second floor. In addition to those supplies, the shelves contain various and sundry implements to perform the most basic of repairs throughout the facility and upon some of the machines within. Then my long limbs carry me beyond the doorway.

There’s something about a professional workshop that triggers a certain wistfulness within me. Upon each professional’s bench, implements and tools relevant to the job at hand lie within reach according to a logic and preference to the guy doing the job. He’s got the screwdrivers arranged as he uses them and the lead mallet on a shelf where he can grab it on his way to the end of the printing press to pound the empty paper roll from its roller. When I see the workspace, I can almost see myself doing the job, and in that moment, I slightly transcend myself.

I don’t get that sense in an office environment. If you’ve seen one cubicle, you’ve seen them all. Most of the customization from one job to another involves a different desktop wallpaper and set of applications installed upon a computer. A different set of binders on the bookshelf, if any. A different set of photographs or cutesy individual touches.

But workbenches, they have different tools and different things. I’ve worked enough different non-office environments that my different workspaces had a variety of implements. My produce back room had machete-like blades for splitting watermelon, knives for trimming ears of corn, Styrofoam trays for packaging product, and a toolbox containing numbers and signs for pricing. My art store shipping and receiving station had a tape gun for closing boxes, sundry pens for counting products, and trays for packing lists. My print shop workbench contained two bottles of highly caustic cleaners, numerous cans of differently colored soy-based ink, screwdrivers for adjusting wheels and for unlocking plates, and the aforementioned lead mallet along with a poem hanging on the file cabinet for me to memorize for my open mic nights.

Maybe my fascination with workbenches stems from my desire for a lost youth where I worked these jobs and marched ever higher in positions and placements until I broke the barrier into business casual and a career. Maybe I long for those olden days when I made something or moved some physical things every day.

Or, just maybe, they continue to trip my imagination in ways that office-based careers and their environments cannot.