Getting ready to use wood panels from an old back deck to make a small privacy fence.
Hope it will cut down some of our noisy neighbour’s sounds.
Details later.
BTW, the ratinator put another mouse in the crawlspace into eternal sleep (i.e., return it to more basic forms of sets of states of energy):
More as it develops!
Thx to Gatco Inc for sending us four mounting brackets to reattach our Monterey style towel bars.
What does “family friendly” mean to you?
Out the fifth floor window of this hotel room, birds fly in the air or search a patch of grass for food.
Hundreds of motor vehicles, parked or moving, transport the sets of states of energy I accept as members of my species.
Rows of businesses take up 30 percent of my view which is accented by a nearly-full supermoon.
The sun sets behind me, having joined me from sunrise onward during this day of summer solstice.
I will soon return to Mars.
What about family-friendly, though?
Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin divorce their wives. I remain married to mine.
What is this family that is so friendly?
As people flock from one business to another — grocery store, cinema, restaurant, mobile phone sales, general merchandise shopping centre, etc. — what average, what mean, what hump under the bell curve would best describe a typical parent/child/spouse unit we would call a family?
And what is friendly to them?
A night out at the movies?
An evening of video games?
Watching/playing ball at the local sports park?
Bailing someone out of jail?
Sitting at the bedside of an ailing family member in hospital?
Is a single person — a party of one — a family?
What about pets or extended social media connections — are they family?
The moon and the stars? The birds?
How about the friendly faces behind the counter in the hotel lobby? Aren’t they my family now, too?
I drink a bottle of Jones cream soda flavored water, produced by the Jones family, independent since ’96.
Is death family-friendly?
Birth seems to be. So does the tradition of marriage.
To secure my household, I killed a rat, three mice, dozens of insects and several amphibians. I chased away a mother raccoon and her three babies. I attempted to scare off the ubiquitous squirrels. I also saved two newts and a box turtle, not to mention the tree seedlings I didn’t cut to the ground or the vines I removed from the side of the house. I cleared uncounted privet bushes and poison ivy that clogged part of our front yard, to open up a sunny spot for our Rose of Sharon bushes and forsythia canes.
So killing can be family-friendly in the right measure.
However, a family that commits murder-suicide is not friendly, is it? What if everyone was dying of extreme radiation poisoning? Would a humane death be friendly, in that case?
What about a family that had lived on the same plot of land for centuries but died protesting their recent or soon-to-be forced displacement? Is that family-friendly, dying for a shared cause?
Watching the cars, minivans and trucks cycle in and out of the shopping district across the street, which triggers my thoughts to fill in the required infrastructure that supports the luxury of internal combustion engines, cup holders, powered seats and large carparks, prelabeled clothing sizes, preapproved dinner menus, landscape lighting and traffic signals…well, I’m easily distracted, aren’t I, by GPS satellites, shopping centre architecture, local building codes and “green” technology implementation schemes.
Since tattooed ladies have walked out from under the circus tents and into suburbia, what is family-friendly?
Is family-friendly an arbitrary label for changing tastes in community standards?
Hmm… All the chain restaurants lighting up their logos for my attention.
Think I’ll go to the local Irish pub for a beer and a bite to eat for dinner tonight, family-friendly enough for my tastes.
Our story about Tony Soprano…
Many years ago, my wife and I stayed at a B&B near Lenoir City, TN, on the lake. The proprietor photographed all her guests and kept snapshots in a photo album.
We looked through the album and recognised the face of one guest.
The proprietor said that the guest was James Galdofini, an actor who at first hid in his room because he didn’t want to be bothered by fans.
When he realised no one at the inn knew him because they didn’t have time to warch TV, he joined the other guests and had a good time.
That’s all.
Despite my attempts to the contrary, I can find no conclusive proof that these blog entries have any effect other than rearranging bits in what must be, probably is, computer servers out there somewhere.
Therefore, I am, as I imagined in my first thoughts as an infant, truly alone.
I walk, I breathe, I speak, I listen — those activities have greater impact upon the world than these bits and bytes.
Nothing I do here influences or impacts the [American] football coaches of the Southeastern Conference college teams so nothing I write in this space would cause them to want to make comments about the level of competition that the University of Tennessee coaches, trainers, staff, stadium/field, training facilities and players bring to the SEC.
They alone have to defend their job perks/pay scales and physical abuse of young men in order to instill teamwork and self-sacrifice into “student-athletes” aligned with the much-maligned NCAA just so universities can virtually destroy a few student-athletes in the name of commerce, yet claim it’s all about educational opportunities.
My habits are the result of my place in a tiny subculture in this great galaxy of ours — I do not qualify them with labels like “good” or “bad.”
For, you see, I have my own personal secret to success that prevents me from S everyday — I am waiting to die and every day until I die is a bonus I didn’t have when I contemplated S the day before — the only friend of mine when considering the big S is procrastination — there will always be time tomorrow to say hello to S and goodbye to the rest.
I never have been a very good team player. I blame my parents, who brought a rival for their affection into this world — my sister — and I’ve been in a personal war against the world ever since.
From then on, it’s been a mental struggle to tell myself that the opposite sex is one part of two-gender trait of our species (to be honest, I’m still uncomfortable including LGBTXYZ in my universal view), that we should work together to make this planet a better place to live, etc.
I am an uptight dude, who never has felt comfortable relaxing in front of others, constantly switching personality masks to accommodate and please people around me so I can wall/fence them off from the parallel universe inside my thoughts, where I truly live, happy in my private misery and/or miserable in my private happiness.
Men are not my rivals — everything about them is some part of me, and they are what they are in their hairy, testosterone-driven imperfections.
Women are my rivals and always will be — there will never be a time when I can get back to those happy moments with my parents before my sister was conceived — whatever women do, I will compete against them; when they’re better than me at some task/skill, I will feel an immense jealousy/envy with which I will either find strength and choose to compete or feel deflated and concede defeat.
Before my wife and I followed in my parents’ footsteps and bought season tickets for Univ. of TN football home games in 1991, we enjoyed weekend getaways to B&Bs around the country.
If the exploitative college football system didn’t exist, my wife and I would probably be traveling the world.
Instead, I have driven us six or seven times in the autumn of the year back to our parents’ places in order to schedule family time around trips to Neyland Stadium.
A week ago, my wife and I decided to change seats in the stadium, giving up our South End Zone, upper deck spots in Section LL, Row 9, Seats 14-15, that we have held since 1991, in order to move to the North End Zone upper deck, our “Annual Fund” (formerly the Volunteer Athletic Scholarship Fund) donation level staying the same.
We also took advantage of buying four tickets to the “away” game in Tuscaloosa for this year’s UT-Bama game, traditionally held on the third Saturday in October.
I have no idea who the players are or will be for either team but I’m pretty sure that they’ll be in the 17-23 year old age range, the youngest players being a third my age, remembered for decades by kids who’ll attend the games and cheer for their favourite players just like when I was a kid and cheered for the likes of Condredge Holloway, a young man from Huntsville, Alabama, who ended up playing quarterback for University of Tennessee because the University of Alabama head football coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant, told Condredge that he’d never be a quarterback for Bama because his skin was the wrong colour for the times. Probably still is in the heart of Dixie.
Doesn’t matter to me how many national championship trophies that the University of Alabama football team claims to have because I’ll always remember a fellow male, George Wallace, standing on the university campus barring people with dark skin from attending classes.
How many national championship caliber quarterbacks for Bama have not been white?
When will the first national championship college football team have a woman on the first team, let alone at quarterback?
These are questions I can wait until the day I die to see answered outside of this blog because I’ve already seen them played out in the parallel universe of my thoughts.
In a few months, I’ll watch traditional male-dominated football teams hold a controlled fight/wrestling match while women and men cheer on the sideline, knowing, despite increased ticket prices and major stadium seating capacity upgrades, nothing has changed in 50 years:
I’m still a set of states of energy alone in my thoughts, committed to my marriage and my family, but otherwise not much of a team player when I don’t want to be, never that happy-but-apprehensive-of-the-big-wide-world one-year old ever again.
So, while I was contemplating the pleasures of making rat/raccoon/mice stew (we woodsmen eat whatever meat we trap), I got to thinking.
Now, I ain’t much of a thinker, to be honest.
I flunked out of 13th grade and had to start over at another one of them institutes of higher learning.
Not like I can’t solve world hunger if’n I put my mind to it, though.
Of course, I ain’t got no mind but I got a mind to tell you what I was thinking.
See here, it’s like this.
We got this global employment imbalance, that’s what I’m saying.
It don’t take no rocket scientist to see why.
Why, I ask, why?
Well, if them experts is right, we have just about as many female breadwinners as men.
And, on top of that, many of them is single mothers trying to feed their babies.
I’m all for women’s librarians, what they like to call themselves “Women’s Lib.” We should’ve taught them lady friends how to read a long time ago. The more they can read, the more they can follow instructions and become real good at their jobs — don’t matter to me none if they’s a baggin’ groceries or rocketin’ toward the Moon.
What I want to know, though, is if a family run by a woman is spending as much of her money in the consumer economy as a family run by a man.
That there might explain why we have such a global employment imbalance and might even explain the income inequality problems we’s a facing in these here troubled economic times.
I’m just an old country boy trying to survive.
I scrape ticks off my body every day. I swat at mosquitoes without knowing they’re there. I scratch at my poison ivy boils like clockwork. Red ants think my ankles is a biting post.
I shake my fist at varmints eating my figs and mulberries. They done broke my persimmon tree in half.
I ain’t much but I’m something.
My house is so chewed-up and broken down, you can’t tell it from the rusted truck and old jalopy with flat tires hiding in the weeds.
You women-folk has got to do your part, if’n you’s gonna claim you’re just as good as us men were when we ruled the roost and had the economy running full steam under the moonshine still — you better get them rich folks and their corporationalisms to open their rainy-day piggy banks and help you out of this pickle.
Otherwise, there’s a world of hurting about to hit us, if the creek don’t rise and the tornadoes don’t blow over the outhouse ’cause them foxes has done got into the henhouse and fertilized some eggs.
The Patriot Game never ends…
Lyrics to The Patriot Game :
Come all you young rebels and list while we sing for the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame and it makes us all part of the patriot game.
My name is O’Hannon and I’ve just gone sixteen. My home is in Monaghan where I was weaned.
I’ve learned all my life cruel England’s to blame and so I’m a part of the patriot game.
It’s barely two years since they wandered away and it was with the local battalion of the bold IRA
For they’d read of our heroes and they wanted the same to play their own part in the patriot game.
This Ireland of ours has for long been half-free. Six counties are under John Bull’s tyranny.
So, we gave up our boyhood to drill and to train and play our own part in the patriot game.
And now as I lie here, my body all holes, I think of those traitors who bargained in souls.
I wish that my rifle had given the same to those Quislings who sold out the patriot game.
There’s nothing like being in a sexy mood, alone at home with my wife on a Saturday morning, when two ladies carrying Watchtower Bible tracts ring the front doorbell and want to talk about why there’s no world peace.
Talk about a mood buster!
Hey, ladies, in a town supported in large part by the U.S. military, world peace is not a primary goal — please change your door-to-door script.
SNAP!
The rat trap clamped its plastic claws shut in the crawlspace of Lee’s home.
Back on Earth, Lee returned to his favourite hideout, away from curious onlookers, far from paparazzi and their pesky drones — his home, his cabin in the woods.
Half-asleep, he looked up at the stars, but it was not the white, sparkling dots that woke him from a late evening nap.
A tiny black shape, outlined by stars, galaxies and planets, grew bigger, as if…
As if a spider was dropping from the ceiling.
It was.
Lee ran through the mental map of his head, the unexplained red bumps and festering sores of the past two days quickly coming into focus.
* * * * *
Guin straightened her posture, reaching for the perfect core dance position.
Her dance instructor, a teacher of teachers, Plantainyifan, made Guin adjust her position by sucking in her stomach a quarter-inch more, turning and tilting her head an eighth of an inch back and to the right.
“There! Now hold your position for five minutes! When I return, I want to see you have not moved. If so, then we will start this all over again until you get it right!”
Guin sighed by letting a single cubic centimeter of air puff out of her nose.
* * * * *
Rolenmec completed repairs on the replicator.
Meant to simulate the physical quirks and habits of Earth-based humans, the electromechanical products of the replicator, known in the trade as “Daft Drafts,” acted on behalf of their original counterparts, carrying out tasks and taking adventures that the Earth-based humans desired but did not want to increase biochemical damage from space travel and extended living periods on Mars’ surface.
* * * * *
Lee watched as the spider dropped to a futon armrest.
The spider’s eyes reflected the flame of a coffee-scented candle Lee had lit for smells he could not get on Mars.
An object like a ninth leg stuck out from the spider’s body.
Lee realised the spider was not natural-born. The ninth “leg” was an antenna. This was a land-based drone, designed to use web-like strands to move between distant objects, avoiding even the tiniest whirring sound of a flying drone.
Lee ran a systems check of his body, a habit he had dropped two days ago for no explainable reason after returning to his home planet. Sure enough, he detected foreign objects in his skin and blood, objects which had attached themselves to many internal body parts.
He kept a few strips of artificial skin in case of emergency cuts. Reaching into his pants pocket, he applied a strip of skin to his forehead and pulled the bedcover over his head, exposing only a small area in the center of the artificial skin.
Thirty seconds later, Lee felt the spider insert its “jaws” into his artificial skin. Lee closed the bedcover around the spider and flicked it into a beer bottle on the end table beside him, pressing a coaster over the beer bottle opening as he carried it to his closet laboratory.
* * * * *
Guin felt sore but relieved after the six-hour dance training session.
Having cracked her ribs too many times to remember, often in line with the 11 times she’d had a head concussion, dancing either made her rib cage hurt or feel better.
Today, she felt better, thanks in large part to her friend, fellow dance instructor, and personal masseuse, Bai.
Bai had been working with Guin for a few years, showing her the way African dance movement flowed right into the Western dance techniques Guin had learned as a child.
Guin grew up on a farm, playing with cows and breaking in horses, in addition to her boxing matches, offroad races and skydiving shows that kept her upper body in shape and her reflexes heightened for quick, athletic weekend ballet performances.
She married her sweetheart soon after high school, presumably “until death do us part,” but, six years later, Guin found herself in a lawyer’s office, revising a divorce agreement over custody of a dog.
Not just any dog.
Not natural-born, anyway.
Her dog and the dog’s sister were identical clones.
Although she had cloned the dog herself while at a veterinarian’s office — the vet a friend of Guin’s father, both of whom had taken Klingon language classes together and spoke the language fluently, a passion not passed on to Guin — Guin’s soon-to-be ex-husband had grown fond of the dog and wanted to take custody even though the dog had been cloned a year before he and Guin were married.
* * * * *
Lee placed the artificial skin patch under a microscope and zoomed in on the area where the spider had inserted a few foreign objects.
Lee spoke out loud. “Self replicators?”
He watched as the objects reproduced themselves, splitting apart like single-cell organisms, but instead of identical copies, the next “generation” seemed to be specialized for attachment to specific chemical signatures.
That at least explained why the objects in his body seemed to congregate at certain points and in only a few organs.
* * * * *
Rolenmec scanned the latest batch of Earthian profiles, amazed at how commonplace most of the tasks and adventures that were requested by timid Earth-based humans afraid to take the long trip here.
Why did no one want to conquer the planet or make Mars a jumping off place for points unknown, one’s replicated body nearly indestructible, able to travel light-years with little maintenance required?
One profile caught Rolenmec’s eyes.
To protect Rolenmec from knowing whether a replicated body he met on Mars was one he had replicated himself, the names of the Earth-based humans was not part of their profiles.
Surely, though, Rolenmec would know this “person” when he met it.
It was no person at all. The profile requested that the body shape be that of a spider, a spider that was to return to Earth with a batch of life science experiments.
The spider’s sole function was to “bite” people, insert a few microorganisms that contained code which caused their reproductive offspring to spread through their host and turn into a large broadcast antenna, sending signals from a source not mentioned in the Earth-based human’s profile.
“Now that’s what I call a real dream!”
Rolenmec activated the profile and started the replicator.
* * * * *
Guin noticed her dog had been acting strange lately. She compared her dog to the dog’s sister and noted an infection had caused the dog’s joints to swell.
She took the dog to the vet because Guin did not recognize the genetic code of the infection.
The vet, too, was perplexed.
* * * * *
Lee felt a strange sensation.
It was as if he had suddenly received all the memories Guin had lost after a bad wreck in a Mars dune buggy race a few years ago.
Arguments, pain, years of childhood dance lessons, horseback rides on Earth, schoolwork, love, migraine headaches…
His thoughts were overwhelmed by new thoughts not his own.
He walked into his office and sat down as the central nervous system mapping station.
* * * * *
Rolenmec felt dizzy.
He put his left hand to the wall and slid to the floor, stopping himself with his right hand, which looked red and puffy.
He ought to remember what he was just doing but he couldn’t.
The…the replicator? Was it still on?
A spider flung itself out of the replicator and landed on the wall above Rolenmec, followed by another.
Rolenmec’s head swam. Were the spiders heading for the lab hallway? How many were there?
* * * * *
Guin’s dog playfully bit the vet on the wrist, jumped up and down, its tail wagging, and bit Guin’s little finger.
The vet shrugged her shoulders as if to say the dog was just overexcited. “I’ve taken a blood sample and will let the ISSA Net analyse it overnight. You should have the results before you wake up tomorrow.”
Guin and the vet absentmindedly wiped drops of blood from their new wounds.
Guin took the dog for a walk and then returned to her flat in the main Mars compound.
* * * * *
Lee sent a mental image directly to Guin’s thoughts across the ISSA Net emergency message channel, reserved for important interplanetary communications.
“What was the last memory you remember before the wreck? What is the first memory you remember making after the wreck? Must know immediately but I think I can give you the answer already. Don’t open your regular message inbox until after you’ve responded to this one. See if I’m right.”
Lee returned to the futon and fell into a deep dream state. He wouldn’t wake up for the next four days.
* * * * *
As soon as Guin saw Lee’s message in her thoughts, she recorded a response and sent it back. She waited a few hours for Lee to answer but received nothing, not even the normal acknowledgement.
Feeling tired, Guin lay down with her two dogs and took a nap. She wouldn’t wake up for the next 3.893 Martian sols.
* * * * *
Acting like an automaton, Rolenmec stood up, walked down the hallway and opened a door into the life science lab. Several spiders followed him.
A few did not.
Instead, they headed toward the sleeping habitation rooms that specifically contained personal pets.
* * * * *
Lee woke up, having forgotten all the items on his daily to-do list.
Guin’s memories flowed through him as if they were his now. He could not tell the difference nor was self-aware enough to know that he couldn’t tell the difference.
* * * * *
Guin woke up, her first thought that she needed to take her dog with her to work.
* * * * *
The veterinarian tried to reach Guin for four sols. Meanwhile, she noted that the microorganisms the ISSA Net had isolated from the dog’s blood were remarkably able to modify their genetic code much faster than could be explained by natural evolution.
The vet sent a request on the vet hotline for crowdthink.
While waiting for a reply, the vet went from cage to cage biting the pets in her animal hospital, unaware she was doing so.
How do we award, reward, reinforce and otherwise encourage our behaviour?
There is beauty and there is the beautiful.
A scar across one’s face may lend one an air of distinction but we see in the mirror only an ugly scrape across our once unblemished visage.
Perception vs. reality.
At mid-life, I see my skin and its many changes due to sun/UV damage, knife cuts, wrinkles, blood donation needle entry points, and cat scratches.
None of these external marks on my body have affected my ability to drive a motorcar.
With age, however, my reaction times have slowed.
Therefore, my driving capabilities are diminished from the time, a year or so after getting my driver’s licence over 30 years ago, when I was best able to speed dangerously fast on backcountry, twisty roads, racing other kids in their late teens and early twenties.
There is, in other words, a time and place where our health, both mental and physical, is and isn’t detrimental to our sharing highways with other drivers of multitonne killing machines.
Yesterday, while dining with my wife at Nick’s Restaurant, a young man of 18 years crashed through vehicles at a traffic light and then proceeded 1.5 miles to the next intersection where he crashed into several more vehicles, killing a ten-year old child in one of them.
According to comments by readers on a local news company’s website, the driver is “Very sweet kid, good student and athlete!” and “an amazing kid and a close friend of mine he is diabetic”.
Yet, here we are looking at a dead child and many injured people because of one driver.
Should people with known medical conditions, which could endanger others — epilepsy, diabetes, old age related reaction times, etc. — be kept from driving, much the way aeroplane pilots lose their licences due to findings in medical examinations?
What is the threshold we’re willing to set that puts the best qualified people behind the wheel of a vehicle?
We already set age cutoffs.
Another reader commented, “How do you pass out from low blood sugar and keep driving? I know the family of the little girl who died. I am absolutely heartbroken for them. Praying for all involved.”
We could look at statistics which point out the benefits of a road system that sets a relatively low qualification threshold for driving a vehicle has increased our economic output higher than the detrimental effect of death/injury by many magnitudes much like we can say that the economic costs (gains?) of our “war on terror” is magnitudinally higher than the economic loss of dead/maimed military.
A ten-year old girl didn’t wake up to see the sunrise this morning or eat breakfast with her family.
Why?
Because an 18-year old boy drove when he shouldn’t’ve.
Perhaps cars and trucks of the future, before they’re all autonomously-controlled, will use technology that could have prevented yesterday’s tragedy.
Perhaps…
Let’s hope so.
The life of your ten-year young child may depend on it.
treetrunkdings 