Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Looking east to Glacier Peak

Wait! Put down that shovel and brush the dirt off his face - I thought I saw him breathe!
Been kind of a busy end-of-summer (the real end of summer, not that fraud and travesty foisted off by The Virtual (but not Virtuous) Occoquan a few weeks ago. After the OSU -Washington game, my son and I drove a car that my mother in law had given him from Toledo back to Seattle. We had an enjoyable 4 days of experiencing the American landscape from ground level. For most of the last 15 years, I’ve flown any distance over 2 - 300 miles, and I wondered if I could possibly stand driving the 2,000 miles that I usually breeze over in the time it takes to read the latest New York Review of Books. And I have to say it was fascinating to stare at the terrain and landforms as they went by, even in the hot and featureless plains between the Mississippi and the Front Range.
The kid was advocating a quick trip with stops dictated only by biology and the frailties of the internal combustion engine (as in the Buffett song (Jimmy, not Warren), there’s a woman to blame), so there was no hope of stopping to tour the several plains pioneer museums advertised along the road in Nebraska that piqued my curiosity. We stopped briefly to peek at the Cabela’s retail store in Kearney, NE. I thought it might prove an interesting and outdoor-related break from the road, but once inside we both realized that it’s more of an animal-killer’s ordnance cache than a granola-powered REI clone. Kid was disgusted by a gaudy tableau in the center of the store featuring a cast of dead animals cavorting motionlessly. We escaped despite the lack of camo gear.
Once in western Wyoming, however, he became enthralled by the terrain, and I was able to con him into stopping for a reprise of the Grand Teton vacation my wife and I took earlier in August. We had a nice hike in the late fall heat, and he admired, as a fellow rock climber, the vista of the Grand Teton peak that his mother had climbed. Since childhood, he’s been a fan of pyrotechnics, and we also dawdled in the geothermal areas of Yellowstone before an epic push from there to Seattle.
Besides that trip, I also took my first camping trip in a kayak, on Sucia Island in the San Juans north of Puget Sound. Sea kayaks hold an incredible amount of stuff, and I loaded mine up like the ill-fated pilgrim ship in Lord Jim, including (god help me!) my laptop, thinking I might rekindle my blog. A glance will tell you how far that got, but I at least proved the concept of fitting expensive electronics into a dry bag and daring the sea to pick my pocket.
A day after my return, I was off to Milwaukee for a week of work, where I now am ensconced, in a Holiday Inn Express with free WiFi and an inexplicable Jacuzzi spa next to my bed, stroking my muse furiously and obscenely. She’ll thank me later.

I was alerted today to the above pejorative that the youngest generation uses to refer to my (and older) generations. It refers to the kind of folks whose houses you walk into and find a multiplicity of appliances reliably, faithfully, accusatorily blinking “12:00″ because their credulous owners ran to Best Buy or Circuit City or, if poverty of geography and circumstance and lack of the ability to make basic moral distinctions dictates, Walmart, and purchased something they thought would improve their lives and endear themselves to their grandchildren, only to be confronted with a cruel thicket of arcane and incomprehensible operating principles. (Was that a sentence? Judges?)
I make my living in technology, so I am not the sort of troglodyte who fears to assay a piece of equipment or software and engage it on its own terms. But I have become impatient with technologies that refuse to conform to some sort of intuitive set of expectations. I have a car stereo that I still cannot adjust on the fly, in the car, because its interface is so arcane that I need the manual to adjust the treble level or speaker balance. Even then, the manual is written in such a shorthand, because its meager number of pages must accommodate 3 or 4 languages, that much of its information is in the form of iconography instead of English text. This might be ok if there was a standard, or at least congruous, set of icons for basic electronic musical functions, but NO! Each vendor seems to have to develop its own set of icons, and I’m reduced to trying to adjudicate between “that’s a snake eating a rat” and no, it’s “a usb cable being plugged into a generic peripheral that just happens to have rodent-like characteristics”.
So, if your maiden aunt is unfortunate enough to belong to the flock of nuns that I run down in a crosswalk while trying to get Antibalas or some equally worthy musical number adjusted just right for the drive to my favorite watering hole, blame not me. Blame the inchoate miasma of technological design. And don’t set your watch to anything digital in my house.

My son and I hopped a redeye last night to the place he calls “the land of excessive school spirit”, Columbus, OH. I’m here to play with the Ohio State alumni band (aka TBDBITL) on Saturday night when OSU plays University of Washington. Coincidentally, my son is a student at UW, but there’s no big football rivalry - he pays virtually no attention to sports in which he doesn’t participate. I’m dragging him along because it’s a rare chance for him to hang with his uncles (my brothers) and my parents.
The OSU band reunion is different from class reunions in that it is “vertical” rather than “horizontal” - it spans a wide range of ages. The oldest participant (attending and playing) is in his 90s, and the oldest marching participant is in his 80s. At the other end, last year I sat behind two women who had just graduated the previous year. One leaned to the other and whispered excitedly, “I’m pregnant!” There will be around 650 alumni band members participating.
The game was played at night, an infrequent occurence at Ohio Stadium, and the atmosphere was celebratory and electric - you might get a sense from the picture above. Since they erected that scoreboard with eye-candy video in the south stands, it’s really weird to be marching up the field and look up and see yourself as you’re performing.

Embracing a Social Complexity
A week or so ago Susan Paynter, a columnist for the Seattle P-I, wrote this piece about the arcane protocols of men hugging men. The catalyst for the article was a front-page picture of two cops hugging at the funeral of a fallen peer. Paynter interviewed various men about appropriate times for guy-on-guy embracing (most seemed reluctant to comment, even off the record), but the consensus seemed to be “deaths and sports championships”.
I’ve never been a real touch-ya kind of guy, regardless of whether you’re man, woman, gay or straight. It just doesn’t come natural, I can’t be both this snipe-and-run conversationalist one second and be clinching and squeezing the next. I’m probably even more careful with women and touching, having attended many HR seminars where harrassment is explicated, and, here in Washington, watching the stunning demise of Senator Brock Adams and the sorely-missed liberal warrior Mike Lowry as a result of unwelcome grippings and gropings (of female staff, not each other). Plus, my wife just climbed Grand Teton (the mountain), her blood’s overstocked with hemoglobin, and she’s capable of breaking my arms in such a manner that I couldn’t squeeze the Charmin, even if in dire need.
So I encountered a sort of hugging conundrum when we were in Wyoming. My wife and a climbing friend had hired a guide with whom they had been acquainted in Seattle, who was now guiding Teton climbs professionally. I had met her only briefly in Seattle. After arriving in Wyoming, we headed over to the guide station to meet up with her and get scheduled. When we espied her, happy hellos ensued, and she hugged first my wife and then her climbing partner, and as she approached me I was taxing my underpowered male social processor chip with the calculations - they knew each other well from before, they were fellow (!) women and women hug anyway, she was gay and perhaps any wan cordiality towards me would only be professional courtesy (half a step away now) and the answer flashed across my dim pixel-poor intracranial display: “Handshake, non-emphatic”. I began to extend my hand just as she began to open her arms for a (probably spontaneous, generous and uncalculated) hug. It was reminiscent of the old “scissors, stone, paper” game - we both hesitated for a second, then seemed to agree that, like paper, the handshake wins in that instance. Then came the recriminations - what if she thinks I hesitated to hug her because I knew she was gay?
Later in the week I accompanied the three intrepid climbers partway up their approach hike to the mountain, and the guide and I had a delightful 5 mile long conversation, despite the altitude and 3,000 feet of elevation gain, and we all parted in a marmot-ridden meadow, I to return to delicious Snake River Pale Ale, an elk chili-burger and a warm cabin, they to freeze-dried cuisine and a cramped and crowded hut at their base camp at 10,000 feet.
The next night when they returned from summitting and then a grueling downclimb and hike out, we greeted them at the trailhead with cold pizza and watery margaritas. We dropped the guide off at her office, and in the roseate afterglow of their feat, there was no calculation or hesitation - we embraced and I calculated nothing except gratitude for guiding my wife to the undisputed high point of her year. Now that I think of it, it qualified as a sports championship, so that’s at least one green light I didn’t misinterpret.

Well, this blog has crossed a boundary of sorts. No, not the improvement in content or energy or even its merciful disappearance that you might have hoped for. No, through an overexuberant burst of technical advice on blogs I gave someone, my wife wrinkled her (porcelain and otherwise scantily experienced of wrinkles or other blemish) brow and asked, “So, do you have a blog?”
Deer in the headlights time, and maybe three seconds to decide. I haven’t told her, or anyone else I know, that I was blogging, simply because I wanted to determine what it was and where it was going before I stirred up any expectations beyond my own that I would feel obligated to cater to. Well, as my grovelling locution above suggests, I acknowledged to her that I had, indeed, been toying with one and told her how to find it. I was tempted to point her to something terrific and polished like How To Save The World or the Preacher, but it’s certain she would believe in neither the erudition of the former, nor the faith and general good-heartedness of the latter, so in the end I just owned up.

The advantage is the guaranteed hit statistic - maybe multiples if I really piss her off with something; the disadvantage to you, dear reader, is the suppression of further tales of my wild erotic life and my career as a Formula One racedriver. I quickly deleted all such prior references, and will post no more until I can get another blog started under another pseudonym.