AAAAAAAAH!

TEQUILLA! Everything's going all...wobbly.... I could probably walk...minus the whole, like, getting around thing. It's like tunnel vision, without the tunnel. Like being light headed, but with all this weight. Like sleeping, except snakey 'cause my eyes are open. It's like...wearing off.... Okay...

I don't think I can hold my liquor very well. Not enough Irish gene. Bummer.

Tolerable Good Story

I have a story about the toil of generations overcoming adversity!

When I was five, my grandma had toy dinosaurs. The smallest was a bitty, rubber skeleton. The biggest of this set was a triceratops not much bigger than my hand; it was made of plastic, it had a gaping mouth, and it was completely hollow inside. And one day, I thought to myself, "That bitty skeletong would fit just right in that triceratops..."

And I was right. Unfortunately, little fingers couldn't fit into the triceratops' mouth. The bitty skeleton was well and truly stuck.

Naturally, I sought the aid of the mos' aged and experienced relatives. Mathematical dads, carpenter uncles, practically ancient grandfathers, armed with all manner of tweezing technology, found themselves defeated by this small dino-in-dino problem. But I, in my child-like orneriness, persisted. And for every visit to grandma's house, my goal was to carry this triceratops around and seek a new relative to try and extract the nuisance skeleton, which I had skillfully oriented face out, tail in, so it smuggly grinned out always.

But eventually...I outgrew my passion for playing with rubber dinosaurs, and forgot this dino-in-dino.

Some few months ago, my grandma decided that she'd just give my family a whole lot of the old toys. Dinosaurs among them. My little brother is five. Upon examining the dinosaurs, what discovers he? The bitty skeleton, still inside the triceratops, after some thirteen years. He bringeth it, most sincerely, to me and says, "This, sirrah, is not how it ought. Improve this inqualitous state, vassal!"

I then remember those early years, and the smuggly grinning skeleton. I know that the task cannot be done. I tell him the story of how the dinosaur became, and I give him back the triceratops.

But he is both persistent...and forgetful. And so he brings back this dino-in-dino another day. A day when I feel, fortunately, endeavoursome (take that, anti-archaism school of thought!). I think that not all toolage has been exhausted. There may be hope yet for the bitty skeleton...in hook technology.

Hook rug? Anyone? Anyone know what that is? No? Well, these things have these snazzy tools designed to...hook around things. I had one. I grasped small, smug skeleton--small pause for effect, pause over. Out it comes.

Thus, generations of toil solve bombad problem.

The End.

Happy Anniversary, Alice!

http://www.alicecooper.com/

Alice Cooper. Rockstar, personal buddy of Kieth Richards, possibly Ozzy Osbourn, and Satan--according to his announcer--and proud husband of one Sharyl Goddard, now Sharyl Cooper for thirty-two years, and mother of three little Alices.

...

So rockstars can pretty often have pretty stable relationships. Hmm.

Let us examine, what is a rockstar? A poet. A rage against the man poet. An "I am me--screw the world" poet. Which means what? We're talking self aware, here. We're talking self-awareness taken to an uttermost. We're talking understanding of oneself. Oneself being pretty damned messed up...but one not being a stranger of one, if that makes any sense. Most people, I have observed, have some confusion about who they are and what place they want to or feel that they can fill in the world. But rockstars have that figured out.

So where have we gotten so far? We've established that rockstars are honest. And what, little children, do Hollywood and other echelons of propagandist society agree with experience and reality on what sorts of things working relationships work best upon?

I'm just some kid, but honesty is one of the words I hear a whole bunch.

Rockstars is poets. Poets do poetry because they want to put the inexpressible into words. An emotional and romantic business, no matter how loud you shout it.

So rockstars are emotional honest people.... Why are we surprised they have working marriages? Maybe it has something to do with the eyeliner.

Gateway

My dad, when he was my age, decided he would go to the library, look at the sci-fi section, start at the upper left hand corner and work his way right and down. So he did.

Now, every now and then, randomly and out of the azure emptiness, he'll stick me with a book and say, "Hey, read this." I'll take it and say, "Yeah, okay, sure." And he'll go on to sort of say why he's chosen it, if not what wending mind-work and/or external triggers led him to this choosing. Hefty napkins-full of time I've spent wondering if this book was brought to his mind by a movie he'd seen recently, or if that one was inspired by his Russian boss who cusses like a couple sailors. But I haven't been able to figure it out.

Anyway, one day he gave me Gateway, an most ancient classic by Frederick Pohl. He said, "There is surprise at the end, m'lad. Read on."

He said the same thing about The Dispossessed. When I finished that one, I went and asked him what he thought the surprise was, because I missed it. He couldn't remember. After talking on it for a while, we still couldn't really figure it out.

So I had some skepticism about this Gateway surprise. It took me something like seven months, off and on, but I've just finished it. Hurrahz! And there was a surprise at the end. And it really surprised me. But it was in the last effing paragraph, which was, additionally, terribly short, which also annoys me. Up to that paragraph, the book had no meaning to me. Or very little. Almost none. Close to zero. Maybe a level four meaning.

And I could almost feel frustrated. Except that having finished, I really liked the ending. That last paragraph and its meaning-inducing brevity.

And so, though I was bored in reading it, and though the ending seemed to have next to no indication that it was coming, there seemed no probability that the plot was what the ending said that it was...even after all that, I'm glad I read this book. It felt like time wasted, and now it does not.

The book had a moral: life is fucking complicated.

Klingons have almost all the right parenting ideas

My brothers are yella. Yellow bellied. Why is this? Because they have been taught to value fairness and--oh my god, Paul McCartney is barefoot!

Sorry, lost my train of thought. To resume: Because they have been taught the value of fairness and cooperation. What the hell use to them are those values, I ask you? What use? I shall tell you now why they are of no use: because they assume the unity in community. Something that cannot be assumed. Fairness and cooperation necessity everyone being on the same page. We learn from sci-fi on the subject of utopian society that everyone being on the same page is not only really creepy, it's indicative of an underlying insidiousness which is invariably too terrible to be believed.

Fairness and cooperation are ideas that one believes in, but many must act in motivation of the same for them to come to pass. If an individual is taught fairness and cooperation he will expect it of society, and act in its interest only loosely. If many individuals do the same we are left with what?

Yella bellied hosers, that's what.

To improve society, values must be changed. We must look inward and rediscover honor and integrity. Know one ever really says honor anymore, not in a serious way. It's sad, it's insidious, and it's unfortunate. Because we can only ever really control our own selves. And if we all have integrity, if we all respect and hold honor dear, then fairness will follow, and cooperation will come. And we won't be yella.

Oops, forgot my soap box. I'll be back in a second.

fourteen, sixteen, sewenteen...

"It's not a caterpiller, it's a mermaid."--Nike, my four-year-old brother

I think about tiny children and their method of thought a lot. My Mom says there's an age, thirteen or fourteen, when kids actual develop the capacity for "rational" thought, and before that logic literally escapes them. My godfather--a wise fellow--says, "Babies are just as smart as anyone else, they just don't know anything."

Kids always seem to skip fifteen when they're learning to count. And I think I may have figured out why. (I may be deluding myself, but here we go.)

Fifteen and sixteen sound quite similar, especially from a distance. We make a lot of errors in speech, which we'll correct without preamble or pause. I think that small children are assuming that fifteen is an error in speech. And, therefore, logically, ought to be omitted.

An example of a child imitating for their behavior: the sound of R, as in round trip, and road kill, is a flaw in speech. It's a back of the throat sound, which started as a more front of the mouth sound; trilled, quick, or almost left out. W, as in wyvvern and wiley coyote, looks externally like R. So kids say, "wode wunner," "twiple play," "you pwetentious pwig." R is an unintuitive bad habit which must be learned.

Maybe fifteen is too.

Okay, that's sort of a stretch.

Other studies say that a child younger than nine months can be shown an object and two holes--hole 1, hole 2. The object is placed in hole one, and the child goes and gets it there. Then the object is taken away from the child. When they've quieted down, the object is placed, while they're watching, in hole 2. They go and look for it in hole 1, and don't find it. No matter how many times you show them that you put it in hole 2, they look in hole 1. There's only a period of about a month when kids are nine months old when this phenomenon is true. After that, they can reason out that a thing is where it gets put when it's moved around, and not merely where they found it the first time.... I'm not sure what, if anything, this says about the human animal in general. Except maybe that hope springs eternal. If we find twenty dollars in our jacket pocket one day, we'll keep looking even if we know for certain we didn't put a twenty in there recently.

Nike has just asked me if I could play with him. I said, "No. I'm busy." He said, "Awe, darn. Oh well." Almost verbatum.... I then said, "I can in a little bit, after I finish what I'm doing." He said, "Yay. Let's go now." I said, "No, I have to finish this." He said, "No, come now."

...

Yeah.