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THIS BLOG IS RATED WWW-MA.

Update 2020-12-16: (True sticky posts banned; click to read.) So, owing to the evolution of the internet, or at least my own approach to it,...

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Memorial Morrow

Did you enjoy Memorial Day? Did you remember fallen soldiers? Did you partake in celebrations of the free life for which they presumably died? Or, are you like me and slept through most of it?

On the one paw, I didn't get invited to any barbecues. On the second hoof, it was pouring rain most of the day, so it's unlikely there were any barbecues to be invited to. On the third tentacle, what do barbecues have to do with memorials, anyway? Were the soldiers particularly big barbecue fans when they were alive?

I think my maternal grandfather fought in World War II. Or something close to it. Pretty sure it was the big one. I never really got to know the man. I was three or four when he died in civilian life. And even then, he was living some six thousand-plus miles (ten thousand-plus kilometers) away from where I was and still am. But I understand he was a fairly jolly soul with a sense of fun and smiles.

I never knew my other grandfather either. They both died during my early childhood. My paternal grandmother wasn't too far behind, done in by the effects of smoking circa her age 70, my age 7. I remember their half of a duplex in Skokie better than I remember them. A near-wall of plants overlooking the round, dark wooden table. Red carpet beneath the low coffee table in the living room, in turn beneath my grandmother's ashtray and game of solitaire — you know, with actual, physical playing cards. Dull beige couches and the old recliner. The black metal railing with swirly-cue bits. The rotary phone in the spare bedroom. Rust coming out of the bathtub faucet. The dark but tame basement, with its big freezer full of "goodies". Baby Linus and Lucy, wherever they feel like being. The memories fade, perhaps like the pictures that I'm sure we have somewhere. If not here, then certainly at my aunt's house, in which basement the low coffee table remains. Along with other relics.

Edit, an hour and change later: I'm told that, in fact, both my grandfathers were World War II soldiers. Fitting. Yes!

My mother's mother remains. Unfortunately, she does so in Israel, as I say, a continent and a half plus a major ocean away. Our communication is limited more or less to annual "snail-mail" cards (she doesn't do computers), and, every few times out of her weekly phone calls, I'll attempt a conversation via that medium. I tend to have nothing much to say, and she can barely hear my deep voice over the phone anyway.

A couple months ago, one of my cousin's friends whom I met at her wedding and subsequently befriended on the 'Book, playfully out of the blue listed me as his grandson. Joke's on him; I accept. Yay, I have a living grandfather! He's in California.... but still closer than Netanya!

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Spring in Suburbia, Part II

Lest I didn't make it so clear in Part I, two posts down, I despise suburban lawns, and I particularly despise my own being drafted to maintain such a lawn.

So you can imagine how utterly thankful I am that I survived this past week, which was hell in that department. The old mower had been scraping on the ground in a way that it oughtn't after I posted Part I, and so it had been in the shop since the beginning of the month. Fifteen days later, when the grass had grown taller than the dogs, we got on the horn with the shop, and, after a brief exchange, we told them to keep the old one, and went in search of a new one. We chose a store on the polar opposite end of our twin towns, and from it a mower with an electric start up (to replace our old mower's "pull"-start). Two or three drives back and forth to the store — me as a nerve-wracked passenger in my father's stick-shift car, I might add, which I have not learned to drive, and Father ain't so hot at driving it either — essentially taught us ⒜ that the handle is set by default to be right where it can stop the blade dead, ⒝ any time the blade can't move, it causes a chain reaction that means we have to go back to the store and replace a part that allows the electric start to work, and ⒞ that means that the simplest clog results in the thing being dead until we get that part replaced every time. Two days and all of my mother's hysteria over the matter later, we traded it in. Simple pull-start mowers from here for us. And even with the new mower, the tall, thick grass that had grown over some eighteen spring days took hours to mow. And despite the gloves, my hands hadn't been that sore since the Edible Arrangements gig in Nashville with all the pineapple.

But, yay, finished stuff! At least until the grass grows back again. And my mother isn't hysterical about the lawn anymore. But not to worry; she'll find more things to be hysterical about. The terminal lack of employment among my father and myself, for instance. Or my magically vanishing eyebrows that she claims will cement my joblessness. (Will it?) Or whether what my father's set to record on the DVR will override what she wants to record. Or whether we failed to do some minor household task during the given afternoon. Ah, well; time to go somewhere else for a while.

****

Meanwhile, this past day in Cyberspace: A tornado wiped out an Oklahoma City suburb, Ray Manzarek touched the earth at 74, and Grumpy Cat is enjoying all the bad news. As tired as I am of all the Grumpy Cat (aka Tardar Sauce) memes, I can quite see her way sometimes.

Here's the late Manzarek with the Valedictorian, paying tribute to his old band. (By the way, more music and multimedia on my other blog, Lucy Dream!)

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

I chirped these separately in the early morning of March 10, save for the opener, new to today

I hear the beating
of dull drums — dem ol' doldrums
beating down on me

Stifled so much that
I want to take my own life
up into my hands

my own tied up hands
my entire tied up mind
suffocating me

suffocating me
my head badly, horribly
crammed senseless with muck

crammed sleepless with muck
symbolically release streams
as words in a form

a forming of words
from the primordial ooze
of wild shapeless thought

shapeless thought emerge
from the haze of this mind state
sleepless thought, converge

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Each of us woke up one moment, and here we were in the darkness.

(This title a line spoken by the ballerina in The Twilight Zone's "Five Characters in Search of an Exit"; click to watch via IMDb/Hulu.)

I'm in a rather bizarre place. It's loaded with trees, and the ground is doing this crazy up-and-down business. I think I've heard that referred to as...hills? A while back, there was a stretch of civilization or something like it. I think it was called "Oceana". It had these gas stations I've never seen before: "Chevron" and "Sunoco". Since then, I've seen occasional dwellings amid the trees and neighboring creek over which there have been little, rickety, wooden bridges through which I'd think a car would bust but perhaps not. A "Logan County" sign was legible not too long ago. I've momentarily pulled into a driveway off this road which has only been labeled with an eerie "10" in a box — to write this "journal". So, what I know is this: I'm on State Highway 10 in Logan County, somewhere in the United States. And I figure I'm in the United States because every other country that has Street View has nice, clear, high-definition, where I can actually read signs (unless they're auto-blurred) and occasional license plates (that should have been auto-blurred). We only have some of that.

This is just one of my "hobbies" that I've taken up in my nights and often days with the computer in the corn and soybeans. I put on some good music, zoom the Google Map all the way out, move it around a bit, switch to label-less satellite view, center it roughly around the eastern States — eyeballed, y'know; sometimes I miss. I haven't tried this in other countries yet, although this low-resolution imagery in this country is rather persuasive in that direction. Anyway — I click on the zoom scale to go directly all the way in, drag around until I find a road with Street View, drape a thing over the upper left of the monitor so I can't see the informative pop-up that Street View provides, and proceed to "drive" until, through recognition of highway signs and other clues, I've sufficiently figured out where I am.

I've gotten to know some of the States: Indiana and my state of Illinois have square-shaped state highway logos with their names in them. Kentucky puts their state highway numbers in circles. Tennessee mixes squares for the thruways and triangles for the more "roots" roads. Ohio has Ohio-shapes, Arkansas has Arkansas-shapes, and Missouri has Missouri-shapes (with lesser "letter" highways in squares). But I've yet to pick out this state, which is crazy hilly and wooded and only uses plain squares with plain numbers. And I've yet to hit a US highway or interstate, which would help me gauge how far north/south/east/west I am. I'm tempted to say I'm in Appalachia, but I really don't know.

By the way, a quick tip for American travelers, be they in real life or, like me, on Street View: For interstates, lower numbers within two digits are generally farther west (for odd-numbered roads, which primarily go north/south) and south (for even-numbered roads, which primarily go east/west). For the old US highways, it's the opposite: lower numbers are north and east compared to higher numbers. Triple-digit interstates are specific to one metro or otherwise not so long. And state routes seem to be total chaos. As can be the occasional diagonal US highway. (Where is 52 going?) So, New England gets US highways 1 and 2 and interstates 95 and I-don't-know-what-even-number, while Cali gets US's 101 and who-knows and I's-5 and 10. Florida gets I-4, and the rest of us get numbers in the middle somewhere. Me, I'm physically at the intersection of US 45 and 150, and I 74, 72 and 57. And virtually, I'm in a delightfully bizarre place (except, too many churches). And I'm fixin' to see more.