Fragments From Floyd

Alpha Male ~ Pup Abuse

We had an rough-cut neighbor of ours years ago complain about somebody he knew wasn't takin' good care of their cows. Made him mad. Said he ortta by gawd call the SPCA. "The WHAT?" I asked. "The SPCA. Th' Special Police Cattle Association" he explained in utter seriousness.

I'm afraid Tsuga may be making a call soon to the Canine branch of this organization. I've noticed that he's been keeping notes, and I'm afraid it's not looking too good for the defense here.

Just yesterday for example: Our cat, CJ is suffering now through her third dog... breaking him in, so to speak. Or shredding him into ribbon thin wafers, Sylvester-like, would be a better analogy. She's trounced him good, boxed his ears, hissed fearfully... he is still infatuated and watches her admiringly as she walks ever so tauntingly by, in complete control and just daring him to get into her rather wide personal space. She hasn't fully connected claw to ear or tender little black nose yet, but it's coming, and you can bet the SPCA is gonna hear about it.

Puppy's exhibit B: Large appliances used as objects of distress. Let it be known that 1) the litigant did have his long pink tongue slightly singed on the stove door as a cookie tray was being retrieved (it should be known that it was emanating wafts of oatmeal and chocolate and alluring beyond the abilities of a juvenile to resist thus constituting entrapment). And 2) Also, on the same day, the defendant's head did become slightly compressed in the closing door of the refrigerator while he attempted, dutifully and responsibly, to clean off the crusty tops of the Heinz 57 and Ketchup bottles that had been knowingly placed in the lowermost rack of the door, again, the presence of same in this location constitutes a cruel and unusual temptation rendering the litigant, Tsuga of Goose Creek, an innocent party in this obvious infraction.

And, at present unbeknownst to the young pupster, today after a period of exactly two weeks of constant reinforcement that he is in a secure and nurturing environment and that he can be assured of the continuous presence or prompt return of his caregivers, he will be spirited off to what his Uncle Buster called "Puppy Camp" for 36 hours for such trivial reasons as the visitation of a daughter and granddaughter in North Carolina. This is obviously a case of willful and intentional abandonment, and yes he may have the olfactory time of his young life and have his fur rubbed off by the kind attendants, but he is still pressing charges.

The dossier continues to grow, and no doubt more will be said about this deplorable situation at a later date.

Canada and the Criminal Element

In these days of heightened vigilance against those who would do our countries harm, it is understandable and right that those with criminal records of a certain sort be scrutinized carefully at the borders, such as the one that we share with our northern neighbor, Canada. Case in point: my son, traveling in a circuitous route from Goose Creek to Vancouver, BC was sharing the ride with a friend bound to Seattle to relocate there. The friend intended to join Nate in Vancouver for a few days before returning to set up housekeeping in Washington state. But no. The friend (and you could tell this from his apparent mild demeanor and soft voice, his vocation as a chef and his excellent grades back in college where he met my son)-- had a criminal record and was prevented from entering the country. Four and a half years ago he got caught skinny dipping in the college pond. And now is forbidden to cross international borders.

Thank God our son is a law-abiding upstanding young man free of a criminal record. Well. He is a very lucky kid is what he is. We only know the small crimes he's confessed to. But it gives one pause to think that had he been caught for the following escapade, he may have become persona non grata and may not have been accepted to his graduate program in Canada. Here's the tale:

In his senior year, somehow Nate stumbled onto the college mascot outfit-- a huge scottie dog suit with a paper-mache head with little peepholes in the dog's mouth-- in an upstairs storage area of a building on the edge of campus. Come to think of it, he found the dog outfit while he was in that top floor room for the purpose of climing out a high window onto the roof of the building (that looked south toward the Smoky Mountains) to write poetry (that itself was against the law-- being on the roof, not the poetry, which really wasn't as bad as that.) But the crime story doesn't stop there, no indeed. It seems he figured the ScottyDog costume would make a great disguise, and he donned it unbeknownst to anyone else.

He walked around campus doing the stadium antics of the mascot, and students and staff greeted him cheerfully, thinking this was some kind of off-season team spirit activity. His anonymity allowed him to enter the administrative building and literally tweak the noses and otherwise mildly mock those administrators he deemed worthy of some mild unrebuked ridicule. Thinking it was all a skit, the deans and chairpersons tolerated his hijinx, asking each other as he walked around playing the fool at their expense... "Did you know anything about this?" and "Who is in inside the dog?"

The next week, he held the suit for ransom (this was during the off-season and nobody much cared) sending in tips to the college newspaper complete with polariod images of the suit (with him hidden inside) posing in different familiar places on campus and with magazine-cut-out cliched ransom notes. His extortion 'payment' was some silly something I cannot remember...providing ice cream sundaes to all seniors on Sundays or somesuch. He smuggled the dog suit back into its usual place, notified the staff of its return, and that was the end of that.

As parents hearing of this stunt over the phone his senior year (and so close to actually graduating!) we were mortified and mystified but secretly sort of amazed at his daring and creativity. But had he got on the wrong side of the college administration (especially those whose noses were tweaked) he could well have been spending the night on the south side of the border with his friend earlier this week. As parents, you try to hold up the dire consequences of thoughtless carrying-on, and they think you're just being overprotective. Now ya see here sonny boy! The little prank wouldn't have been so funny if you'd been apprehended. (I can see the bust at the crime scene now: "Okay Scotty, put ya front paws on the top o' the car, hind paws wide apart, and don't even think about biting".

Rules is rules. But I am sort of disappointed that a skinnydip or a scottydog theft would keep an otherwise law-abiding person from crossing a national border. On the other hand, should the whole truth be known about any one of us, and if this level of misbehaving qualifies one for the part, I suppose we are all criminals without criminal records, and just darned lucky to stay out of official trouble. And fortunate we can travel to Canada with what seems to be a clean record. If they only knew.

Priorities

See. Here's the problem. Instead of doing the thing, I write about doing it. It's as bad as my making lists of my lists rather than getting to the task so I can begin to check off to-do's as done. I am writing about the writing that I ought to be doing if I were not distracted by a thousand other things. The weblog shares the role now of both blessing and curse: I would probably never have developed the discipline of writing daily without the threat and promise that someone would read my words. On the other hand now with the time spent entering my largely trivial and silly daily posts and getting sidetracked in the process on the various branches one ends up in when reading others' blogs... I am not finding the time to work on the little 'book' I envision. It would include both images and various of the 'better' posts from the first year of Fragments. This is still a viable issue, but the summer's events and my own distractability have not done much to move that project forward. I've got to get back in focus.

Task at hand: send required information to at least 3-4 publishers before resorting to self- or web-publication. By October 1: complete the following and submit...

• Include a cover letter that gives a brief description of the project.


• Include an outline of and/or introduction to the project.


• Include at least 30 pages of the text, preferably the first chapter.


• If the project will include illustrations or photographs, please send samples. Do NOT send originals. Clear photocopies are acceptable.


• Supply a market analysis of the book. Unless there is something about the potential market that would not be obvious to the uninitiated, this analysis should concentrate on the titles, publishers, and dates of all similar books, with an explanation of how your book differs from each.


• Send a biography of the author, including publishing credits and credentials in the field. If the project also has an illustrator or photographer, please include that biographical information as well.

To do this, I need to curtail my blogging. I know this. But I am weak. Does anyone know of a 12-step program for bloggers I could join? Or, is there a patch I could wear as I taper down? Does anyone have any good links to a blogger's version of the Serenity Prayer? Nevermind. I'll Google it and be back to you in an hour or so...and if I don't find one, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to write one.

Wait a minute. I lost my train of thought. What was I talking about?

Blogs in Class

From newly-discovered Syllabus Magazine by way of Stephen Downes Website.

In a very short time, blogging has moved beyond a niche activity for the hyper-extroverted to becoming the backbone of a new Internet communications movement. Although often deeply individualized, Web logging has revitalized the idea of online communities: many blogs have moved from obscurity to having a large and devoted readership—many blogging sites enable people to link their blog to other blog clusters, based on topic and the interests of the authors.

What, then, is the potential for blogs in higher education? ... more

See additional links at the end of the article.

Great Blue Lobelia

While flowers bloom unseen, I am being nibbled to death by mice. This pretty well sums up my self-pitiful mood this morning after a yesterday totally parasitized by you-know-who. The tension between caring for the puppy and caring about so many other things not done because of him is starting to take its toll on my attitude. And so you can read the title here in a booming voice in capital letters followed by an exclamation mark followed by the dog's name and disparaging, whiny comments about my self-sacrifice on his account. My muse has been gnawed away up to her lovely knees and I am taking some deep breathes to help me refocus on things rumoured to be going on outside the kennel. There. I feel better now. Let's see. What goes on out in the larger humanoid world on Goose Creek these days?

We will be talking to a representative of the Virginia Outdoors Federation next week about putting our land in the Conservation Easement program. Actually there are a half dozen contiguous neighbors who are possibly interested, and if this works out, there may be several hundred acres protected from development in perpetuity. The land can still be farmed and logged (on a prescribed schedule) and on our 80 acres we can build one additional dwelling. There could be some significant tax benefits or even some cash conversion advantages to help us pay off this place much sooner as well. We are located in an important watershed area of Floyd County. While almost all of the county drains by way of the Little River into the New River and thus to the Gulf, our area is drained by the Roanoke River (south fork formed by the confluence of Goose Creek and Bottom Creek) and important in water quality for the Roanoke Valley. I feel certain I'll have more to say on this as we talk with the folks next week.

The wildflower in the image is a close relative of the more familiar red Cardinal Flower, which should be but isn't growing in wet areas down here in the valley. I'd love to have some coming up along the branch beside the house just now, in with the orange Jewel Weed, mauve Joe Pye Weed, various yellow and lavender asters and assorted greenery that is changing now into it's muted autumn wardrobe. And the native yellow iris would do well there as well.

Ann is home today, and I think my attitude will be much improved by just one wildflower photo today. If I pull it off, I'll post it later in the afternoon. I hear wifey cooing in calm tones to the pup in the next room; maybe that means he's calmed down from his toothy early morning exuberance and it's safe to go get another cup of coffee without donning the kevlar socks. Wish me luck... here I go!

Prepare the Soil, Good People

Excerpt from a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Christopher, 10 April 1944:

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: The millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their 'causes' and 'effects'. No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

- from "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien," edited by Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin Co.)
via Sojourners Email Newsletter 082703

House Pet

I am reluctantly posting yet another picture of Mr. Big Stuff. On the one hand, I don't want him to know that people from all over the world have asked for more pictures of him, as it will go to his head. But on the other hand, I am hoping he will be on his good behavior if he knows I am going to be telling the blogosphere about his misadventures, and he may feel some accountability to his public if he gains a good reputation by these occasional snapshots during brief and atypical moments when he is behaving himself.

This image was taken in front of the house, and yes, the place is called HeresHome. Long story there. And you know I'm not much one to tell a story. (?) But I've posterized this picture somewhat, and am planning to use it on some greeting cards I will make for later.

When everybody's doing it...

... it makes me squirm.

Just in casually browsing this morning, I see that AOL, YaHoo and Microsoft all are poised to come out with their own BLOGGING tools/sites/propaganda ploys.

I guess I'll hang tight, an insignificant microbe destined to become even more microbial along the edge of the pond, as this medium sorts itself out and the numbers soar. Soon, we'll be issued a blog address along with our SSN's at birth. Everyone will write, and no one will have time to read. Still, my greatest pleasure, I suppose, is in reading my own words from days past in this little album of mine.

Whether I am one of a million or one of 100 million weblogs, Fragments will keep its relevance for me as an archive of the day to day changes that happen outside my window and behind my keyboard. It would seem that the 'goods' of blogging is making a big kersplash in the popular pond, but I do get squeamish swimming in anything that is becoming 'kewl'. Know what I mean?

Disappearing Medical Slang

In these litigious times, one must be oh so careful what one says, even if couched in non-offensive code. But even the intent to judge the value, credibility or pulchritude of a customer, patient or client is verboten, and so impoverishes the language of such wonderful acronyms as those below.

CTD - Circling the Drain (A patient expected to die soon)
GPO - Good for Parts Only
TEETH - Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy
UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury

And from my own medical past:

TOBAS - Take Out Back And Shoot
OPD - Obnoxious Personality Disorder
GALP - Get A Life Program (suggested for some chronic whiners)

Do you have some you'd like to share from your profession? Send them here for safekeeping before the Humour Police come search your computer!

Alpha Male: Dog Has Worms

We distinctly remember, when we were first considering what kind of dog to get for the kids long years ago that Labradors as a breed were described as "wanting to be involved in all famiy activities." The new pup has not determined quite yet what that entails, but is already after a week beginnning to pick up the rhythms of life here with us. Unfortunately, that includes his biorhythmns syncing with the alarm clock, and so there he stood in the pale blue glow of the night light at the top of the bedroom stairs, ready for a new day, at 3:50 Saturday morning. There was no putting him off, and so we both dutifully got up, this just reinforcing his role as family rooster and official starter-gun for a day on Goose Creek from here on.

There is one job he is already fully involved in, and that is pulling weeds. I've done right much of that lately, because it is one planted-in-place job I can do just out the back door while waiting for the blessed bladder event or just getting Chucky's teeth outside for something un-upholstered to bite on. Tsuga loves to help with the weed-pulling. And an added bonus: he's learned that when he pulls snatches of grass from along the walkway where I'm working, the earthworms come out of the wet grass by the bucket-full.

Oh, I'm awishin' I was fishin'. I could have used these 6" beauties back when I fished for bream at East Lake as a boy, paying for a couple dozen wormlets so thin that when you stuck in the hook, it cut the thin pink line in half. Tsuga's worms would fetch a dime a piece, easy. If I could just train him to have a soft mouth and drop them in a bucket of mulch, I'd be in bidness. And to think that this wee pup already knows how to fiddle for worms. You do know about fiddling worms, don't you? Note that if you're going after maximum worm-fiddling efficiency, you take the chain off a chain saw and ram the bar in the dirt with the engine running to bring the worms up. Somehow, that doesn't seem quite sporting. At least Tsuga's method gives 'em a fighting (or squirming) chance.

While the dog has not fully found his niche in the house and family yet, I must say, he has already elevated our lives here. The toilet paper. The wicker basket of shoes on the bottom shelf in the bathroom. The long bath towels. All this and more... has been elevated since Tsuga came home with us. It looks rather like we're expecting a flood on the bottom floor. I can hardly imagine how it will be when his legs grow long, and he becomes imbued with an even higher power over us, and our well-chewed belongings.

(Lest you feel compelled to offer aversive training suggestions to prevent excessive puppy chewing, I confess I exaggerate the role Tsuga's mouth plays havoc around here. He's getting better every day, has his 'soft mouth' on about 80% of the time, and my forearms are healing nicely.)

Brave Weird World

After we had decided to eliminate what little television we watched from our lives by discontinuing the satellite subscription, I became aware of the book "Amusing Ourselves To Death" by Neil Postman ... another book that, although I have reached his conclusions, I would be interested in knowing more of his reasoning, which seems well-articulated and timely (the book was published in 1986 and things have only slud further, as Yogi would say.) Until I can spend more time pulling my thots together, here are some excerpts (following, from chapter five)....

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

and, from the foreword of Amusing Ourselves to Death...

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."

There will be a kindly pat on the head to the first one (should there be more than one) to explain to me "centrifugal bumblepuppy". I don't know what it means, but I think there is one eating puppy chow in the next room this very minute, and I will free hereafter to call him by this name whenever I can remember it.

You'll Go Down in His-to-ry

I admire people who set out with a purpose to do a big job and see it through. I cannot for the life of me, however, understand what must have been in the mind of the person who undertook to never rest until every last 'deer crossing sign'-- and there must be a hundred of them across 380 square miles of Floyd County-- had a round, red nose painted on the tip of the jumping deer silhouette. Hey! it may not be your life's work, but to some quirky mind, it was their reason to get up every morning.

Yes, it's odd, but not everybody is like you and me, called to a higher purpose, compelled each day to spill our guts or discribe the most mundane of daily blah to the entire world, publishing this little round red nose on cyberspace. Go figure.

Alpha Male Bonding ~ Day Nine

It is legendary how Labradors love the water. They were bred to swim out into the waves and fetch fishing nets in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic (and were originally called Newfoundland Dogs). They even have webbing between their toes that makes them excellent swimmers, and heavy insulating coats to keep them warm when wet. On Tsuga's second day with us, I couldn't wait to carry him down to the edge of the water knowing what a puppy joy it was going to be for him to discover that he would grow up on a place with two creeks right out his back door. You can imagine my disappointment when he was not only not interested in the water, but seemed to actually be afraid of it... ran away from it, as if it were coming after him. Maybe the fact that there was motion and noise set off his alarms, and it might be that he could not smell any signals-- of either friend of foe-- from this long undulating creature and this may have been unsettling to a pup with such limited exposure to this strange world where all the water he had ever known was mirror-still in a round plastic bowl.

Today, Tsuga was ready to get his feet wet, on his own terms. He hopped off the end of the bridge across the branch by the house and headed straight to the shallow water very intentionally, as if it was something he finally mustered the courage to do, and must do quickly before his fear could talk him out of it. Jumping into the trickle with all fours, he attacked the muddy bottom and quickly became, for the first time, a mostly black yellow lab. He looked for all the world like a little kid making mudpies and proud that he was really dirty now-- like a working dog. This seemed like it might be a good time to take him to the creek for a bath, but I would let him decide if it was time to face the bigger waters.

He followed me over toward the creek by the barn at the crossing. I sat just at the water's edge while he fumbled around in the high grass. Soon he came cautiously to the land's end, his paws just barely in the current. His ambivalence was comical-- he so wanted to see what it was all about, but had no idea what to expect. But his drive to exlore won out, and all at once he pounced with all four feet through two inches of flowing water for the very first time. He even flopped down with his pink tummy in the stream of cold spring water for in instant. You could see the glee and terror in his eyes! After no more than a few seconds, he tore out of the water past me and was heading for the safety of the house. But stopped in his tracks as if he had realized that he was wet, a bit cooler, but safe. And he came back to lie under my bent knees where I sat... taking refuge, chin down on his paws; then, creeping on his belly, he went back to the edge, then in, then ran around wildly, and back under my legs for protection... over and over again he tested the waters, again and again he returned to sanctuary.

It was the funniest, dearest-doggiest thing I had seen since Buster left us. I laughed til I cried, and this is not a figure of speech. I can't explain it, but the beauty of that moment, the pure goodness of the sunshine, crows and ravens and goldfinches all around on a clear, crisp autumn day; the innocence of a young life in the place of one I still remembered and miss so much; the rightness and goodness of this new bonding with another intelligence and the transcience of all of it... Sometimes there is a poignance in a Kodak moment that is ineffible and overwhelming, and so it is today. Thanks, Little Buddy, I needed that.

Turning Off, Dropping Out

I have just given my permission for them to pull the plug. I can't take it anymore. All I hear in there is crazy talk; rambling, rude, disjointed sounds without purpose; loud, empty noise lacking any real melody or lyric. Killing time in the same room with it seems so foolish, we have so little time. Watching that face for a flicker of skin, a car crash, a laugh at someone's expense... is obscene and petty and I feel controlled. I never trusted that cold flickering eye-- always felt it was sizing me up for the kill-- looking for my vulnerabilities that would seduce me to buy, to believe, to open wide and take it in and swallow what it fed me. For some reason, I kept going back, thinking "this time, there will be something in this interaction I will carry away, I will be truly fed this time... just this one more time."

We're pulling the plug. I've lost any hope of being a better person-- or even an entertained person-- for having a television in my home. Not physically better (except perhaps in my thenar imminences), not intellectually, morally or spiritually. I inquired from my Customer Service Rep if they might let me keep just the History Channel for, oh, a buck a month. They were not amused. That's what I told them was the dollar value I was getting out of my subscription, and please just let's not do this any more.

There will be a bit of monthly savings, even though at about the same time, we will be subscribing to a (slow end of the spectrum of FAST) DSL Internet connection as the tube departs. But it's not the money, or at least not only the money influencing our decision to once again be TV-free (as we were when the kids were growing up). We are stepping back across to the uncrowded end of the cultural divide. Count this as one small vote against the perpetual baptism in aspects of American popular culture that I could hardly care less about, and find increasingly damaging and unhealthy for my soul. I hugely regret the fact that this country so vigorously exports this vacuous commodity around the Coca-colonized world. But I can avoid importing it into my own personal space so obtrusively as the one-eyed brain-sucker can do so effectively and seductively.

We'll put a table cloth over it, set a plant on top of it, and poke a MASH tape in the VCR every once in a while. I'll miss the Gunsmoke reruns, but I'll get over it.

Alpha Male ~ One week Anniversary

Little Tsuga has indeed gone through some amazing transformations in his first week with us, as you see here in this recent image. You'll remember in the last picture, I commented on his proportionally small hind quarters, and those have continued to diminish and have become vestigial and practically invisible in the picture here. At the same time, also following a trend seen early on, his little teeth have become quite prominent. Also there is this odd little gibbosity on his forehead; I am strangely attracted to it somehow, but have not yet examined it fully as yet. But soon, as I am inexplicably fascinated by it.

The thrill of victory: He knows how to avoid the first impulse to pee and is now able to store it up, which will come in handy for later months when he goes out to advertize his boundaries. (This reminds me of a Gary Larsen dog, seen holding up a hose, drinking liberally. The wife dog says: I see you're getting tanked up for a night on the town with the boys!" Tsuga 'saves it' and comes to get us up (several times) to go outside with it, tiring of the same old braided wool rug, and now taking over the much larger back yard for this purpose.

New Favorite Place: He came up missing yesterday. I could not find him in any of this favorite spots to sleep (which he does intermittently during the mid-day especially). I knew he had not yet mastered the door knobs and must be inside somewhere, and I finally found him lying on his back in ecstacy, in the bathroom, in the shower stall. I think he was dreaming he was in a bubblebath with Lassie 'cause he was some kinda blissed.

So far, he has met only one other person besides me and Ann since arriving on Goose Creek. That's about par for the course out here... one 'stranger' per week; often less. The neighbor who cuts our hay came by and Tsuga was all over him wiggling like a nightcrawler on a hot sidewalk. And speaking of earthworms... but that is for another time.

The Moral Sense Test

"Most of our moral intuitions are unconscious, involuntary, and universal, developing in each child despite formal education. When humans, from the hunter-gathers of the Rift Valley to the billionaire dot-com-ers of the Silicon Valley generate moral intuitions they are like reflexes, something that happens to us without our being aware of how or even why. We call this capacity our moral faculty. Our aim is to use data from the MST, as well as other experiments, to explain what it is, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities and concerns about human welfare. The Moral Sense Test has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word “ought” — about the principles that make one action right and another wrong, and why we feel elated about the former and guilty about the latter."

I'd suggest that, whatever their conclusions from the results of the Moral Sense Test, they will be based on the presupposition that morality is a derivative property of Nature. C. S. Lewis sees "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe", where Natural Law is conferred on Mankind, not emergent from the genes only.

What's the "so what?" Failing to find any common currency, to discover any common human moral roots from within or without, we seem likely to continue the rapid slide down the slippery slope of moral relativism we've been travelling with increasing speed for the past half-century. How 'ought' we to live in this world?... a question worth asking, and not a new one. Some of the older answers are well worth revisiting. And I would mark the issue as 'urgent'.

Kibbles and Bits

Bugs Me: A Republic of Insects Ever read anything by Henri Fabre? And I thought I thought too highly of insects! Some other thots on our eight-legged contemporaries on the planet:

" I always felt that insects are the general rule, and everything else is a special case." Paul Bystrak

"To a rough approximation and setting aside vertebrate chauvinism, it can be said that essentially all organisms are insects." R.M. May

"Bugs are not going to inherit the earth. They own it now. So we might as well make peace with the landlord." T. Eisner

Look. Don't touch. Then burn. (May cause blindness).Hogweed from Hell, another imported pest that can 'survive for 10 years after pulling it out of the ground'. Neat image here. No, this is not a Photoshop retouch. They really are that big!

Everythang a Big Bad Wolf Could Want. The Hood, going back... way back. See the version your momma read to you at bedtime? via exclamationmark

Walmart to depend on Net for electronic purchase orders. Oh joy. And as the W-World goes, so goes commerce in America, then the larger world. And great will be the fall thereof in the next blackout, and the next, and...

How likely is that? "Neville Ebin died in Bermuda when a taxi knocked him off his moped. A year later his brother was killed on the same moped in the same street by the same taxi driven by the same man and carrying the same passenger. And, best of all, in Massachusetts in 1965 Roger Lausier, aged four, was saved from drowning by a woman called Alice Blaise. Nine years later Roger saw a man drowning on the same beach, dived in and saved him. He was Alice Blaise's husband." More likely than you think.

Doc Rocs!

Stop over at WritingOutLoud and give DocRoc a welcome to the Left Coast contingent of bloggers. I think I can safely say, there will be good words from this page. Already we have a pithy letter to the "PowerPoint is Evil" author quoted in a Fragments post the other day, and DocRoc's elaboration on the concerns of technology using people... an especially pernicious bondage when our children are the victims.

Not of This World

True Fact: Lewis Carroll had our new family member Tsuga in mind when he wrote this otherworldly poem years ago. It was the uffish thought I observed in the 'dog' yesterday that made me see the truth of it. He whiffles, he burbles and he bites. He is, in fact, a Jabberwock.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

And I am gyring and gimbling and rathing outgrabe. I am also looking for the Band-Aids.

Outlook Expression

Free and it works. If you have been exasperated by Outlook Express's poor handling of quotes in your replies, OE-QuoteFix works painlessly to improve what MS should have fixed to start with (sound familiar?). Link via Lockergnome via RSS by way of AmphetaDesk.

Infantile Amnesia

[...] Some people can recall a few memories formed when they were as young as 2 or 3 years of age, but most of us can recall much more from when we were 5 or 6 years old. Studies suggest that we're not simply forgetting what happened during our earliest years; far fewer autobiographical memories exist from early childhood than simple forgetting predicts. So the fate of early memories remains puzzling; solving the mystery of infantile amnesia may go a long way towards a more general theory about how we remember and why we forget.

more...(from brainconnection)

Everything's Got to Have a (Power)Point

Whadda I know? I was miffed when my recent factory-installed copy of MS Office did not include Powerpoint. (Didn't it use to? I know I never ordered it separately and used in for years, off and on, from my Dell-loaded software.) Mind you, not that I anticipate needing to put together more talks on the physiology of chronic pain (the last big one I did about three years ago) or need it for another class like the one I took at Va Tech this Winter (where the grand finale was a PowerPoint extravaganza on Tourism, Culture and Identity in Floyd County).

But I understand why this man thinks little of the cognitive style of Powerpoint, and if I were a parent, I would resist the bulletizing of my child's expressive abilities. Good article (from Wired).

Clean and Jerk

Sorta broad in the shoulder, narrow in the hips, and everybody knew ya didn't give no lip to Big Tsuaga.

If you cover up everything in this image but Tsuga's back quarters, you'd think you were looking at a tiny dog with very big feet. This perspective makes him look like Mr. Upper Body with a Russian weight-lifter's gut: I give you Tsuga Wudjabuzoff!

He's gonna get me one day for showing these baby pictures. I gotta go. Time for the 3:00 feeding frenzy.

Like a Rainbow

Swing over to visit Ian at his new site on TypePad: Panchromatica. He's just settling in, and has things look rather pert, don't you think?

Poem for Rana

"Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them
too early in your life.

You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime,
and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end,
you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions
(one has emotions early enough)
- they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people
and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly,
and know the gesture which small flowers make
when they open in the morning...

More... (from WhiskeyRiver)

Love and Lacerations

Teeth. There are no teeth in Tsuga. And thus his name, while commemorating our vanishing Hemlocks, leaves out the essence of who this young dog is. He means no harm with his mouthing, chewing and nipping, but can cause it just the same. His brain homunculus (see human version) is without a doubt 95% tongue-lips-jaws, the rest paws.

And so, as I have learned quick reflexes to pull away or offer a chewable substitute to digits, I have wondered about alternate names for da pup: Crocodile Dundee. Great White. And-- since we so often say it -- the name Harm: "let's put (this or that, or both this and that) up out of harm's way.

About this time in Buster's young life, we were considering adding the name Dammit to his official pedigree, since it was so often a part of the epithet when invoking his name. "Dammit Buster of Walnut Knob" I wanted to call him officially. Ann poopoo-ed it. And speaking of poopoo... but that's another story.

Got another puppy picture coming. Stay tuned.

Baby's Breath

If I said that something smelled like a new puppy, would you know what I mean? For me, it's one of those olfactory memories from early childhood-- like the smell of zoysia grass cut with a push-mower (I hear the whirr of the curved blades too, now that I think about it); the smell of bread baking (not in our house, but downtown, near the Merita Bakery) or the smell of summer rain on hot Alabama sidewalks.

Puppies smell the way they always have since they were first invented. How do you describe a smell but in terms of other smells? What combination makes "essence of puppy"?

Your turn.

The Angry Red Planet

Don't Forget Mars

On August 27, 2003, Mars will the closest to Earth it has been in 59,619 years. On the evening of August 26th and into the early-morning hours of August 27th, Mars will appear brighter than Jupiter!

The best place for you to be to take a look at Mars is one with a good view to the south and one that is away from city lights. To find the red planet, look in the southeast sky after sunset. Weather conditions will determine how impressive Mars looks, so please check out the projected sky conditions on AccuWeather.com. What makes this event significant is that Mars will not be this close to Earth again until the year 2287, so if you have not observed Mars recently, or ever, now is the time! (from AccuWeather).

Angry Red Planet. A really, really bad movie from my childhood, it featured "Dr. Iris Ryan - Nicknamed "Irish," she is here to scream at all the scary monsters. Her entire face unhinges. I swear the woman is part snake."

Bush Wages War

from Common Dreams...

Homeland security? T.A. Barron suggests that "our wilderness and public lands must be at the core of what we seek to defend."

"Not for President Bush and his team, however. Fueled by zealous anti-environmentalism and corporate special interests, they have launched what amounts to a sustained and systematic attack on America's public lands. Instead of honoring the public trust that requires protecting these national assets for our children and grandchildren, they have aggressively pushed exploitation by the mining, timber, oil and gas, and snowmobile industries. Well aware of the public outcry that such radical policy changes would provoke, they have pursued this war with stealth and deception."

Whah? Stealth and deception from these stalwarts of virtue?

"Recently Interior Secretary Gale Norton summarily removed any portion of 262 million acres from possible wilderness protection, thereby paving the way -- literally -- for extractive industries. By renouncing all federal authority to study or protect wilderness values in these lands, this action removed even the possibility that future generations might ever choose to conserve them."

"Behind the scenes, Bush and company have forced sweeping changes in public lands management policies, abandoning decades-old bipartisan approaches in favor of immediate exploitation. [...] Aware of the radical extent of these changes, the Bush team has worked hard to hide them from public view. Norton's action affecting 262 million acres, for example, came after no public hearings, open debate, or congressional oversight. It was not even announced on the Interior Department's web site. It was simply revealed in a legal settlement with Utah and released on a Friday night, after reporters' 5 o'clock deadlines, just after Congress had left for spring recess."

This is just sleazy and this is NOT okay. Twenty-five years later, and I still feel the need to read Monkey Wrench Gang one more time.

Let us Spray

I had an hour layover at the Charlotte Airport last week in my trip to B'ham. One of the first stops many travelers make after getting off the plane is to run by the plumbing facilities. And so, as I walk down the concourse looking for the familiar doorways, there, between MEN and WOMEN is FAMILY. A Family restroom? I did a double-take. Now I have heard that 'families that pray together, stay together'. I had to wonder: what happens to families that, well... I'm confused. That's all.

SARS Copycat?

SARS-type virus causes Canada scare. A milder form of the disease, to be sure; but originating in China, and now, possibly, a variant appearing on the other side of the world... in Vancouver, BC? Be sure this will get heavy attention. Sure caught mine, as our son Nathan arrives in Vancouver to begin coursework in a week. More here.

Homebodies

From the looks of Fragments recently, you might think I didn't have any family members with fewer than four dewclaws. While I won't have the chance to wax loquacious (or even talk very much) about my recent visit 'home' to Birmingham, let me take this quick respite from tummy-rubbing (the dog's of course) to celebrate some other family members. Moe here is an adopted family member who was introduced last weekend in my brother's church as my 'father', and I'd gladly accept that association any time. He and mom have been best friends for 18 years now. Moe just turned 80, and even though they were contemporaries in grade school, somehow mom is only 45. She claims that recently her children have grown older than she is. Hi mom. Thanks for a great homecoming.

Talk About Yer Fragments

Briefly, in snatches, between episodes of ominous sounds from the next room (which sometimes can be that of absolute suspicious silence) I have snuck into the Command Post here-- while Tsuga roots around among his toys-- to post a few random bits. Let's see now...

Oh to find the ULTIMATE idea organizer! Could this be it? Considering the source, probably not. But OneNote seems to be making some steps in the right direction. I really must find a replacement soon, as my PIM once known as the Higher Learning Centers of frontal and parietal lobes are making some ominous static-y noises from time to time, and frequent rebooting is necessary (I prefer to call them 'powernaps').

It's a floor wax! NO! It's a desert topping! Google is now a calculator.

Yippee! The word "new" has been used in association with Fragments, and by association, moi! At 4:00 when you-know-who woke me up and was oh-so-briefly entertained by a rawhide chew, I was able to check email and visits, and behold!.. Fragments was Number One in theTechnorati Top 50 NEWcomers. I'm new! Does this mean I get a new warrantee on parts? (Here's how the Technorati Illuminati describe the purpose of this new Newcomers page).

The three dusty, parched and wounded cowboys are wounded, running out of ammunition, losing hope of ever seeing another day, when-- what's that in the distance?-- they hear the bugle-call of the Cavalry approaching to run off the Warlike Indigenous Persons who have been tormenting them for days. Our cowboys will live after all! I understand how they must have felt. Although she is sleeping 'late' (heck, almost 5:30 now) Ann will be home today to rescue me from this wild In'jun of a dog and I can do, oh let's see... five days worth of outside stuff...finally. I think I hear the bugle calling now! Yes, I see the pastel colors flying and the dust of her bedroom slippers appears beyond the mesa just over the horizon. She's up! I'm saved! The END.

Alpha Male ~ Day Five

It could be a mistake, but last night -- night number four-- was by far our most peaceful since pup came home with us five days ago. The crate had confined him through the long night beside the bed for the first three nights, but we endured an agonizingly long period of raucous resistance and plaintiff wails that break a mother's heart. Ann was tied in knots by the time the cage-rattling and moaning finally ended, exhausted by the time to get up early the next day for work.

Last night, Tsuga went to sleep curled up on his soft monkeytoy in his new favorite spot in front of the wood stove -- in a very Orvis-like pose-- and we left him there and slipped quietly off to bed. He was still asleep, and with no wet places on the floor, when Ann got up to plug in the coffee at 3:50 this morning. He has made himself some cozy little nests of security and quiet, and is able to tolerate separation better every day. We're still trying to find our comfort level, balancing the pup's safety and feeling of belonging with our need to preserve our sanity and our furniture and get a good night's sleep. Tsuga wanders into his crate with his favorite toys for short periods, and generally seems a lot more 'at home' here and with us already.

Nature doesn't equip a seven-week-old puppy with much in the way of speed, strength, or smarts, but what they are equipped with is sharp puppy teeth. When they are with their litter mates, their mouths help them establish a pack ranking and identity. It will take some time for him to find other ways to relate and find his place in the local heirarchy (with the two others in his suddenly-smaller pack) other than by using his needle-sharp incisors. Meanwhile, I am thinking maybe I'll see if I can find one of those kevlar suits or shark-proof cages.

He is learning to keep a 'soft mouth' and when possible, I'm sublimating his need to mouth and bite to acceptable substitutes for fingers and toes. I can see him catching himself at times when I know he wants to lunge at my hand hanging over the edge of the couch, and he lunges and licks instead (mostly). He is showing some submissive postures now, will turn over and let me rub his tummy (none of his litter mates did this and it is taking some time to lie back and enjoy it, which he does with a silly grin on his wrinkled little face).

Tsuga has the advantage (and therefore so do we) of a very supportive, relaxed early puppyhood. His breeders are nice, caring people and gave the little ones a lot of early attention. I'm not sure Buster had the same beginnings, living his first weeks in a paper-strewn room in a trailer of a man recently divorced. This may account for Buster's almost autistic early weeks with us versus Tsuga's shot-out-of-a-cannon self confidence. Tsuga's breeders are having a puppy reunion in October, and as many of the eleven litter mates as will come are invited. Their owners, too. We'll be going for sure.

Boy Named Sue

The Gender Genie -- four times out of four, from writing samples -- sez I am female. Too many personal pronouns. A male, I guess, merely grunts and points. How do you fare?
link via Dustbury

More Baby Pix

Well it has helped to set the shutter speed to 1/125th so the BlurMeister at least has sharpish edges. I'm afraid we aren't yet going to places that make for nice backgrounds, so there will be way too much yard grass surrounding Mr. Tsuga for a while. It would be easier I think to lasso a fish than to get him to stay still long enough for a decent composition, but already it is apparent that yellow labs are immensely easier to expose than BLACK, which have been almost impossible to balance against their backgrounds. Thanks for puppy behavior modification tips, keep'em coming, this one is going to be a handful! Don't let his 'innocent' puppy eyes fool you!

Fate or Destiny?

Chris O'Donnell celebrates his 12th Anni today with a story about his serendipitous close encounter with his future wife 4 1/2 years before they finally walked the aisle. Go read his story, and wish him a happy.

Chris's description of dating espionage brings on a tale involving the Fredster here getting caught in a three way trap when I kept building bridges d'amour and failing to burn the several earlier ones still under construction. Be sure your sins will find you out. I'll have to see if the pup will give me enough slack before jerking my chain again so I can weave this little yarn.

The Dark Side

We still don't know the truth about the blackout. Claims are being made. If not this time, then the next, it may indeed be an intentional act of sabatoge. According to WorldNetDaily...

Al-Qaida has claimed responsibility for the worst blackout in U.S. history which affected 50 million residents across the Northeast and Midwest as well as parts of southern Canada, according to the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat.

[...] The director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare said al-Qaida has been advertising for a long time that a catastrophic attack on the U.S. power-supply infrastructure was something it wanted to do. He added that the current theories being floated by industry officials that three transmission lines in Ohio apparently started a chain reaction that caused the widespread outage "don't hold water."

And here, once again, it seems the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing as the spinmeisters control what these days passes for "TRUTH" in the news.

Jewels, Revisited

We have written recently about 'weblogs as place' at the Ecotone. Several of those who contributed this time, myself included, feel that our weblogs serve in a quasi-physical way to ground us, giving our inner-writer a rootedness and connection to both self and the places that fill our vision and thoughts and memories. And there is more than that for me in this electronic journal. I am discovering the weblog is becoming a way of calling back calendar pages from a year and more, when I first began to talk to myself about the weather, my own moods, and the not-so-small wonders that I discovered here as I became immersed in my own fields, garden, ridgetops and creeks.

It feels like Autumn today. And after my first year of keeping a weblog journal, I find that when I see or smell or hear some thing in the changing season that would have sent me back in distant memory to Autumns past, now too I remember back into the less distant archives to what it was I felt and said about that very same catalyst just a year ago in the weblog. Writing has given me a way of collecting days in the way my camera captures and holds light. I wonder what I would read about if I had been blogging twenty years ago when I was so inconsistently and illegibly journaling in short dabs -- when the kids were small and so many wonderful people and beautiful places and the great ideas of great men passed through my plesantly busy days.

Last Fall, in the midst of a prolonged drought, only a few of these "Jewels of August" came up along the branch that is burbling out the window this early morning, out of our abundance in contrast to last year's lack, flowing down from deep waterfilled rock that lies under the steep hills up back of the house. In writing about it last year, I described at some length the natural history of this flower that adorns the edges of our yard by the thousands this week. And too I wrote of more distant memories of our children gleefully afraid to make the seedpods of the "touch-me-nots" 'explode', and of baking the seeds into cookies. Looking back, I see there have been very few new pictures or rambling, whimsical nature-notes this cool, soggy summer of failed gardens and lost companions.

I wonder: will I still be journaling in a weblog-- or whatever this medium evolves into-- twenty years from now? Will reading about today bring smiles? Tears? Will I remember these days then, or only think that I do, confusing my words this morning for memories of an old man? This I cannot know. But in twenty years, I know there will still be "jewels" growing in profusion along "our" little branch. And from our porches, someone else will likely be watching the hummingbirds' blurred buzzings between tentacled, hanging orange flowers that look as though they might have risen up from a coral reef underground.

Alpha Male ~ Day 3

When the world offers you lemons, make lemonade. When it offers you a puppy, wrap some words around it and call it kennel journalism. Since I will not be able to gather too many thoughts on any other topic for a while, I will be keeping Pup Chronicles (Alpha Male) to remember Tsuga's first month (and maybe beyond) accompanied from time to time with pictures to see how he has grown. This is for us, but you can share if ya wanna.

6:00 a.m. Tsuga slept from 8:30 til 4:00 without a peep (after the 10 minute sea-lion imitations on first entering the dreaded crate). Even so, he got up too early. Finally after Ann left this morning at 5:45, he went to sleep on my lap. This is the first time he has calmed down enough to sit close and not be gnawing fingers or belt or watchband. I slipped him off into the crate, and he settled down without protest, nestled next to one of my old unwashed tee shirts, hidden by the towel that blocked his view of stuff going on in the house. I left the radio on NPR as company, and actually had about 30 minutes to have a life apart from the new conscript.

7:30 That little respite is over now; and after wandering around in the yard eating the Corepsis, clumps of mower grass and a few earthworms, we're back inside again. He is so sleepy, and I'm sure he hasn't been getting up at 5:00 a. m. when he was with his liter mates. The second attempt to put the groggy little guy in the crate was not successful, and he's making a racket Ann would never have tolerated. Unfortunately, the computer is in the part of the house with carpet where we want Tsuga to stay out of. So, if puppy is awake, I will not be computing. And so it goes. I am reading what I can find on "separation anxiety", because just today, he throws a fit when I leave his sight even briefly. He is so exhausted. When I come in the room he runs up and lies down between my feet before I can sit down; but he will not rest in the crate. I don't know what we're going to do tomorrow when I have to be away for 2-3 hours.

9:00 Finally, he's konked out and I've been able to get into the front room for a few minutes. I have been saying that I need to do more reading. Well, I think the opportunity has presented itself. I can read outside or in the room with the hardwood floors while he snoops and sniffs and attacks things. Computing (including some way-overdue writing/editing) will just have to take a back seat. Note: I can tell that his face has darkened since we brought him home. And his back legs are stronger, less prone to scissor. He is remembering that when I hold up two fingers, that means STOP, and a light tap on the snout with the fingers when he bites too hard or pulls at my shirt sleeves or chews on the braided rug seems an effective reminder. Re the house training: failing grades so far.

RE: Chewing... yes, we are aware of the great KONG. But are some folks carrying this bit too far? Take for example, AUNT JEANNIE'S ARCHEOLOGY KONG (for advanced dogs) LAYER ONE (deepest): roasted, unsalted cashews · freeze dried liver bits LAYER TWO: dog kibble, cookies or liver biscotti · Cheerios · sugar-free, salt-free peanut butter · dried banana chips, apples and apricots LAYER THREE: carrot sticks · turkey or leftover ravioli or tortellini · Kong Toy (the larger the better!) Pack as tightly as possible. The last item inserted should be an apricot or piece of ravioli, presenting a smooth "finish" under the main opening. LIGHT VERSION: substitute crumbled rice cakes for cashews, Caesar croutons for freeze-dried liver, fat free cream cheese for peanut butter.

How did you meet your wife/husband?

The subject has come up in a couple other blogs and emails, so I thot I'd offer my short story. Any volunteers out there to add you own? Send us links in comments.

The year was 1968. My room mate Mike had met this gal Judy and been out with her once. Once was enough for Judy to know that if there was a next time, she needed reinforcements, as Mike didn't waste much time on the getting-acquainted part of a relationship. Mike is coaxing her for the second date on the phone, and Judy at the hall phone in the dorm sends out a distress call: "Anybody willing to back me up with the guy I met, his room mate is available?" Ann just happened to be standing near by, and bored, and there ya go. The rest is history.

A Day in the Life...

... of a dog. How fast they change. In the one full day we've known Tsuga, there are definite changes in his coordination, awareness, acceptance and courage.

Yesterday when we brought him home he could not get up the 8" riser onto the back porch. Today (Sunday) he can get up readily (if not consistently or gracefully). Getting off the porch yesterday was a slightly controlled fall-- today became a joyous leap into mid-air like a hunting retriever plunging off a pier to fetch a brace of downed ducks. He has a ways to go on sticking the landing, however. He was so funny yesterday watching him try to negotiate the sloping yard; he had not been outside very much at the breeder's house (ever tried watching 11 puppies at once!?) and even at that, had been out on level ground. He had no proprioceptive experience adjusting his stance and gait to a slope where two legs were lower than the others, and he fell all over himself in every conceivable direction. He couldn't walk five feet without falling. Today, you could tell he accommodated the slope much better, and purposefully body surfed down the hill rather than falling all the way down it. Yesterday on day one, all his first ventures expanding his experience of the yard were tentative, leaning, creeping forward cautiously; today, he charged to the edges of his 'known' universe here, but got a little less brave at the frontier. Every day he'll learn more about his body and his new 'pack' and his territory. I'm glad we got a puppy just to watch this happen.

You know, having a puppy around is not altogether unlike having a baby on board. We take turns eating/showering/sleeping so one of us can be in charge of the 'baby'. We tiptoe around when he sleeps so as to have just a few precious personal moments before all of a sudden he's awake and ready to play. We maintain a constant vigilance so that Tsuga doesn't get into too much trouble, put something in his exploring mouth that might hurt him, get too near the edge of a wall or into a mess of ants or hornets. At this point, he is 95% mouth like a newborn human, but with lightning fast speed of a diminutive greyhound. He communicates, too, with his mouth, and biting and mouthing is his language. And I have many of his words etched on my forearms. He's getting better about being too aggressive, realizing now that he does'nt have to bite harder and faster now that he is apart from his dog-eat-dog liter mates. We must stock up on a variety of mouth-safe toys, or be nibbled to death by an exuberant piranha puppy mouth!

We drove over to get him yesterday wondering 'what have we done?' thinking how irrational this venture is in some ways. I know that as much as I was needing some time for my projects, with the pup around, they are not going to happen as I had envisioned. They will get done in fits and starts while puppy naps, at least for a few months. If we had it to do over again, yep, we'd do it, and I'd hope to get a new dog in our lives just like the one we brought home.

(Remind me I said that in a few weeks. I'll probably deny it.)

Waste, Want and the Material World

David Ehrenfeld in this Orion essay relates the Biblical story of Joseph, who's austere actions saved the Canaanite people during a period of catastrophic changes in their ability to sustain their civilization. He compares Joseph's strategies for survival to modern day choices that we can and must make now, on the brink of chaotic changes already taking place in our energy, security, and biological states. He offers three types of change that we must implement (perhaps apart from and well ahead of governmental changes) if mankind is to avert cataclysmic decline in the best parts that civilization has brought us.

The article is full of carefully reasoned points of action and it is difficult to select only a few of them here. I strongly encourage you to please read it all. Perhaps it is because Mr. Ehrenfeld is a biologist that his logic seems so solid to me. I am biased in thinking that biologists make excellent economists, even if they may lack MBA's and law degrees. They tend to understand the systems that are at work in the world in very different and important ways to Mr. Greenspan et al and their vision of what makes the world go round. I'll clip just a couple of short excerpts from Dr. Ehrenfeld's concluding paragraphs...

... if local communities revive at the expense of centralized authority, we should be ready to deal with a resurgence of parochialism, prejudice, and intolerance -- implementing the transition from excess to moderation will challenge both our ingenuity and our humanity, if the best of modernity is to survive the end of materialism.

THE TIME TO START DEALING with the energy crisis is now, while we still have the resources and wealth that allow us to act. This is the Joseph Strategy. A modern approach will have the three components, each with advantages and drawbacks. A judicious mix of all three -- rationing, investment in technological change, and the voluntary reduction of consumption -- will serve us best and do the least harm. These components can work well together -- for example, in a less materialistic society, wise rationing of energy would not be onerous. And our willingness to jettison gross materialism may well evoke the kind of adroit and farseeing leadership that Joseph provided, but leadership now more by example than by command.

Things that Go Bump in the Night

Headache, Dizziness, Confusion, Ringing ears, Vision disturbance, Loss of balance, Memory loss (amnesia), Difficulty concentrating, Difficulty concentrating, Difficulty concentrating...

...signs of concussion. I am certain I experienced a mild one this morning, according to the categories of severity. I am happy to sitting here and able to Google the condition, find out there seems to be nothing too serious, and write about it. There for a half hour, I was not sure I wouldn't be in an E.R. with a sleepy intern shining a bright light in my eyes, having me count his fingers and taping various tendons with a pointy rubber hammer. But here I sit. And the most important thing: the puppy is okay. I didn't drop the puppy.

As for surviving the first night with Tsuga, I'd have to say it coulda been worse. Even though we had not had much time to acclimate him to his little pet carrier crate, after about 10 minutes of various vocalizations imitating sea gulls, he hushed and slept, more or less, until 2:30. He and I had a quick walk in the wet grass for a prolonged dewatering, and after another bout of howling, he slept until about 5:00 this morning. I was going to let Ann sleep, so grabbed the pup and started out through the lower level of the house, closing the bedroom door on my way out. I stepped up the two steps that go up in to the 'upper level'. What I had forgotten in my groggy sleep-deprived state and could not see in the dark was the 2 x 6' piece of thin paneling we had put across the doorway to keep pupster confined in the rugless part of the house.

Of course when my feet hit the board, there was nowhere for them to go. I remember a sudden bright light as my head hit the door jamb and the realization that we had a problem, Houston. I sat on the top step with the dog in my arms, telling Ann "Yes, I'm fine" knowing this was not exactly true but temporarily losing my orientation, able only to sit and see what had happened. There was a period of wifely catastrophizing during which I continued to sit in a clammy cold sweat, her anxious face coming and going and my awareness coming back enough to think "this may be the big one, Martha". Apparently it was not. Other than a busted nose and various lacerations and contusions, I am in about the same sorry state I was in before the fall, and at least lucid enough to compose this little word cluster about the memorable second day of Tsuga's life on Goose Creek.

Meanwhile, I hear our new boarder in the next room, doing his choirboy imitation in which he throws his head back, shapes his mouth into a perfect "O" and howls for no apparent reason other than that for one brief instant, he must not be the very center of the known universe. I guess I'd better get in there and rectify that deplorable situation. And I will make certain to step OVER the barrier this time. Maybe I should consider protective head gear until Tsuga has me house trained.

Tsuga the Toddler is Home!

Oh Lordy, we have our hands full with Mr. Personality here. He is waking from his most coveted first and only nap since we got him home about two hours ago, and I can say with certainty that "Happiness is a Warm Puppy -- Sleeping!" Mr. Tsuga is going to keep our little hinnies on the move. I'll post his first debut picture here, then need to get ready to deal with all those little teeth and paws and goofy cavortings again.

In short: I think we have a winner. Buster would be proud to have him as a little brother. The cat, on the other hand...

I promise, Fragments won't become "All Puppy, All The Time"... but it might seem that way for a few days. Sorry!

Crate Expectations

We're in the final preparatory stages for our ride over to Allisonia at noon to pick up our weanling pup. What to put in the crate to mark it with our scent and help little Tsuga adapt to his new home? Ah, Ann found a couple of pair of old cut-offs up in my closet... dress khakis I used to wear to work, which when they became too embarrassingly threadbare in the knees and seats became work pants. When the knees finally split open, the were raggedy cut-off shorts. Now they will be puppy padding/people potpourri. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from complete multiple use of something. This doesn't seem to happen too often these days.

A while after we reached the decision about the cut-offs for the puppy, I found a pile of buttons on the kitchen counter. "Where'd these come from?" I asked. Ann had taken a fine pair of scissors and snipped the perfectly intact buttons off the old pants pockets. They'll find another life soon if I keep popping the waist button off my old trousers. (Do you hear the word d i e t implied in this message?)

The very first time I went out with this gal (a blind date and subject of a future post to be sure) she was wearing -- and I'm not making this up-- a home made dress made out of feed sacks. (No, they weren't burlap). She reminded me how her mom used to take the worn collars off her dad's white work shirts and turn them around and sew them back on. The frayed part then was hidden under the turned down collar.

I have no idea how to turn this point in the conversation back around to the pup. Oh, except maybe to say that we have had a lot of wasted table scraps (well, at least a smear of gravy now and then) since Buster has been gone that will certainly be cycled one more step now, converted into blond fur and canine energy and a welcomed new member of our little Goose Creek gang.

A Time to Unificate

The first time I saw John McCutcheon, he was jamming in the college cafeteria with some student musician-friends of mine, back in the mid-70s. Over the years, he has become a well-known musician as well as a musicologist of acoustic music, and we have a half-dozen of his hammered dulcimer and other albums.

Now, he has taken his turn in perserving the very words of wisdom of our Most Supremest Leader, using Mr. Bush's very own words, in this spoken song you can listen to by MP3 (scroll down to the bottom of the linked page to Hail to the Chief) or just read the lyrics, but the full impact of this presidential compilization really comes across in John's vocalific version. Hail yeah. A brief excerpt:

NOTE: If you go to the lyrics page to read "Hail", srcoll back up a page to "Our Flag Was Still There" that John wrote with the consent and help of Barbara Kingsolver.

Above it All

We seem likely to lose power any moment now-- the lights come and go and my surge protector is developing a nervous tick. Maybe I'll just go up above it all where the sun always shines, above storms and rain and the failed powers of men. There is something about the perspective of thirty thousand feet that brings a person back into a healthier relationship with human scale. How much more this must be true of space travel. Should I live so long...

What do Dogs Want?

So. We'll be dog-parents tomorrow. Wait a minute: "dog parents"? Especially in Ann's family, a dog used to be more like a tool on the family spread... something that barked at intruders, ate up table scraps, and occasionally got a scratch behind the ears. I just talked to our FedEx delivery man who has two new dogs (in addition to his massive Malamute called Sampson). He gets up in the middle of the night and comes back to bed to find them sleeping on his pillow! Has our relationship with our 'best friend' Fido changed over the years? Have pups become "the spoiled and idle surrogate child of emotionally needy humans" as this Boston News article suggests? Do our dogs want to be responsible for our mental well-being, or do we make them crazy?

Katz worries that regarding dogs as therapists with fur might not be good for them. These descendants of wolves were bred to hunt and work. Now they are being dumbed down and infantilized, turned into obese neurotics like their masters. Yet according to one scientific study he cites, pampering dogs does not necessarily lead to behavior problems. Dogs fed from the dinner table, in fact, proved less likely to misbehave.

[...]the evolutionary success of dogs to their knack for faking love and loyalty, and our own compulsive anthropomorphizing. ``If biologists weren't victim to the same blindness that afflicts us all, they probably wouldn't hesitate to classify dogs as social parasites,'' he wrote.

The important thing will be to keep our dog's place in our lives in perspective. We had one friend that did a good job of this in the naming of her dog: she called him Justa.

Where-blogs and Place

* Is your weblog a place in itself? How do you locate it in the scheme of things? What kind of map is it on? What's your relationship with your weblog? And with those who visit it?

A weblog is typically considered a means of "self-publication". I often think of mine more as a broadcast from a place. Hitting the "SEND" button to post a daily entry to my weblog brings to mind my early 'radio days'. I would tune in my shortwave to just the right frequency and pick up transmissions of real people-- merchant marines, missionaries or wanderers -- in remote places on the globe. Their listeners could tune receivers just so, pulling the exact radio signals from among thousands of wavelengths, and so maintain a connectedness with their communities on the other side of the world. Now decades later we take for granted that communications-- not only of voices but of images and all manner of digital information-- can move instantaneously to any point on the globe. From any computer desktop in the world, words can be transmitted instantaneously with no more than the modern equivalent of the Smith-Corona electric I used in 1980.

Millions of us are pouring our opinions and reflections, hopes and fears through our fingers and into keyboards and hitting the "Send" button. The transmission is remarkably easy. But tuning in to any one of those countless blog 'broadcasts' is far less likely than my finding the one of a thousand frequencies on my shortwave whose words from world travelers I could understand and that had some particular meaning for me. My weblog now is one of millions of such 'broadcasts', and finding receptive readers who would care to listen still relies for the most part on random chance of Google, or friend of a friend of a friend referrals.

But my weblog emanates from a real and permanent "address"... a term used metaphorically to locate any webpage. Fragments from Floyd comes every day from a literal address-- the same desk in the same green valley of Southwest Virginia. Many blogs' political or technological opinions and fact-streams have no bearing to their location of origin-- which may even change from day to day now that road-posting and hand-held blogging is possible. Other webblogs, fewer in number, could be thought of as "where-blogs". For these bloggers, place is central; and for some, the person and personality behind the keyboard is also integral to the information being transmitted.

Fragments for me is a way to transmit the small wonders of my daily life beyond my own perceptions, past these walls and well beyond the small world I inhabit here; it is a way of self-validation that says "I am still here and here is what makes me smile, reflect, wonder". Readers who come here over a longer period might feel that they know what I see and feel, and even what I smell, see, hear-- from Goose Creek in Floyd County-- and know, in some sense, who I am. I transmit on a weak frequency, as blogging statistics go, and not many folks 'tune in' to my frequency here on the margins of the blogosphere's map. And yet for those who come regularly and intentionally, their 'visits' seem in a way like neighbors-- recognized but mostly not well known-- dropping in for a quick hello. I know about their places too, know who they are when I see their visit records, and I can imagine their desks in their own quiet houses in towns and neighborhoods from which they broadcast. There are elements of community in the links formed by this world of self-publishers, but with great potential yet to be realized as the medium matures. Much is needed yet to facilitate the bringing together of geographic and special-interest clusters of bloggers, creating better ways to find others 'in place' in the increasingly complex and broad world of weblogs.

Meanwhile, somewhere in this burgeoning babel of voices, Fragments tiny beacon is from time to time picked up by a listener dialing across the million frequencies and they stop, tune in, and leave some indication they might come back again someday. And in this, there is the sense that my weblog has become a point on someone else's map of the world of weblogs. The reception of my words and pictures by others in other places has been a means of connecting to a sort of 'real' if largely faceless community. I have set about writing, mostly, to hear the sound of my own words, to make memories, to tell my story to me and my family -- to know what I think by seeing what it is that I will say or images I will show each day. That there are a few interested readers who want to look over my shoulder while I spin these tales and daydreams and foolishness makes the effort seem a bit less self-indulgent and certainly worth the effort.

* Biweekly topic for August 15, 2003 at the Ecotone.

Bric or Brac?

• Don't forget the upcoming Ecotone Biweekly discussion topic I told you about. Tomorrow is the day!
• Got our son a Dell Latitude to replace his fried ThinkPad. His future college in Vancouver registered their preferred system with Dell, so instead of another refurb where "battery is not guaranteed, may not hold charge", we have fallen into even more computer-debt, but sonny will have what he needs for the next three years of studenthood.
• Recently received a package from the Rather-Far North and will be upgrading the former computer system with XP Home, thank you very much, kind benefactress.
• New pup Tsuga (we got our #2 pick of the litter) will be coming home with us on Sunday. Bringing a new puppy home is not entirely unlike adopting a small, incontinent, demented child with very sharp teeth.
• Our near record-holding longest-duration friend Tim is visiting now from Ohio. He wants to learn about weblog publishing, considering it possibly for the university library where he is reference librarian. So, I'm going to see if I can get him to write a bit of whatever and post here later today. Make him welcomed, y'all.
• Tim has told me about Sun Magazine that looks like a good read, and a possible place for me to submit some little fragmented essays from time to time. That is, if I ever get back the writing momentum I lost back in May. Need to head back over to Whiskey River for some inspiration.

Reflections at Moonrise

From an evening at Altadena Lake ~ Birmingham ~ August 2003

GORP

With all my recent computer woes, I began to think more and more highly of the GORP... the Good Old Reliable Pencil. Alas, the pencil lacks the DELETE key; but it does have one redeeming asset:

...writers erased the first unwanted pencil marks with a ball of moist bread. Nearly 200 years later, in 1752, the French Academy of Sciences concluded that caoutchouc (condensed latex), obtained from the rubber tree, could be used to remove the marks. The first scientific description of caoutchouc had surfaced during a French geographic expedition to South Africa in 1735. In 1770, British-American chemist Joseph Priestly coined the word "rubber" to describe the product, since it was used to rub out pencil marks, the newsmagazine says.

My earliest pencil memories are of the cigar-sized, heavy, soft-leaded variety issued in the early grades. The rounded lead made marks a quarter inch wide on wide-ruled, low rag, gray-brown paper. There were no erasers on these impossibly thick but unbreakable pencils. (How did they expect us to learn to hold a pencil of this sort that could only be clutched in a tiny fist!) The erasers were separate, issued out of a big box and assigned to the upper right corner of our tiny desk. They were of the square crumbly tan variety, and when our bold mistakes were erased, more often than not, it made great conspicuous black graphite smears across the page, accentuating our failures and causing permanent setbacks in penmenship pride. I remember how the erasers smelled. And how the end of the pencil tasted; for some reason, one could not resist chewing the end of the pencil. Some of my friends nibbled the erasers as well, come to think about it. I guess they probably use PDA's in first grade now, and don't get to experience the physical joys of erasure. Pity.

The Jet Sat

Well my little summer expedition to B'ham has zipped past, ending with a Grand Finale of a fire in the Charlotte Terminal. The lights went off for a while, and all security check points were frozen, the air conditioning stopped as the place operated on emergency power for at least an hour. The traffic control tower was evacuated so there was nobody minding the store; and you can image that the resulting log jam didn't do anything to make up time lost in the two hour delay I had already experienced leaving B'ham.

Giving a new meaning to the term "jet set", this is just what we did at Charlotte last night. We stalled here and there on the runway for an hour or so waiting in a long line of delayed flights as a fierce thunderstorm came closer and closer, rocking the plane on the ground as it passed over us. When we finally raced down the dark rain-drenched runway with the props churning and roaring, the flight took on the unreal qualities of a B-grade movie. Lightening flashes projected the round shapes of windows in blue light on the cabin walls; I would have sworn there were stage hands outside rocking the fuselage by hand at dramatically important moments determined by the script. And finally, after a nice midnight bottleneck on I-81, it was good slip onto smaller and smaller roads and climb into the hills, and to smell and feel the familiar air of Goose Creek. I swear, I wonder if people don't have some of the salmon's instinct to smell their way back home. The air is just different here, that's all. I have a lot to tell that will mean something only to me, I suppose, and will struggle later with how much to say about what. Trips anywhere generate a lot of words, thoughts, impressions; and trips home the more so.

Meanwhile, I will unpack, sift thru piles of mail on the desk, answer a dozen emails, and get ready for out of town company coming in later today. Thanks for those who have dropped by in my absence (more than I would have expected). I was poorly able to keep up with email or blogs using mom's WebTV and you can't imagine how nice it is to sit down here to a computer customized for JUST ME! Back in the saddle, kiddos! More, perhaps, later... including a few pictures, most likely.

Writer's Life

"A writer's inner life matters: it is hard to imagine that anything matters more. Nor is this inner life something that anyone else is privy to, unless and until the writer wants to share it. It is a private, secret hotbed of activity, an unruly, unquiet, unholy cauldron bubbling with the best and the worst thoughts a person can think." - Eric Maisel via WhiskeyRiver

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

Actually, I leave on a Dehavilland Dash 8 TurboProp, but that was too long to put in the title (and would have made for sorry lyrics for Mr. Denver, don't you think?)

Thankful I am that I don't have to deal with the likes of Atlanta's airport in my travels this afternoon. The Roanoke Airport is very accessible and half the drive there is very nice, and the other half on my least favorite truck-infested interstate, I-81. The terminal will not be crowded, and it is oddly homogeneously monocultural as airports go, so not as great for people-watching as a larger airport. It's a short hop to my brief layover in Charlotte, which is considerably greater in size and buzz and ethnic diversity; and then another hour or so to Birmingham. I have a window seat on the side away from the sun and not blocked by the wing; I love being able to chose my seat when I book my flight. Having the window seat, of course, means that I will have a stiff neck by the time I arrive because, although I will carry a book, I cannot stop myself from looking out the window if there is any visibility at all-- even if it is just cloudtops. Just cloudtops. How unique in the history of man it is to be able to look down on clouds. And for me, the experience of finding myself in a metal tube going 400 mph always gives me a sort of 'out of body' experience. The alone-time with my thoughts and this vision out the little round window offers a valuable perspective of 'place' in time and on the planet and in my life. Or so it seems to me in my infrequent flights of fancy.

We had serious storms again overnight. I had to get up and close all the windows it was blowing so. I found my way around the house easily in the blue-white stroboscopic flash on flash lightning. Later in the deepest sleep, something crashed. Sound finding its way into the sleeping brain is merely raw percept -- a loud sound -- enough to shock you awake but without the benefit of the cognitively 'aware' part that says where-what-why that the conscious brain would add to the perception, so I'm not certain. I think it was a tree or large limb falling. We know it didn't block the road that Ann travels at 5:45 on her way to work, because the guy in the old brown truck comes that way at 5:35 if the road's not blocked; he showed up on time this morning. I'll have to go out after sun-up and see if I can find the rain-heavy broken limb or the tree that lost its mooring in the semi-solid ground. Maybe it will be good for firewood-- a true windfall. I already have probably six or seven pick-ups-full of windfall to cut up for firewood that we will burn two winters from now.

I can already imagine my little notebook and tiny digital recorder-- not to mention my mental buffers-- becoming full of snippets of ideas to think and write about from my trip. My list is already way longer than I will ever get around to fleshing out in any fashion, but I hear it's good for old brains to keep stimulated lest they nod off into perpetual twilight; so my too-long-list is probably a good thing. I'll be able to stay in touch with my blogging friends, sort of, from my mother's apartment via WebTV, so stop by and tell me hello, even if there aren't updates here for a few days. This may be it for the duration, and if so, I'll probably be back in the Command Post here by Tuesday night. Meanwhile, check out last August and September's archives (serving suggestion). Pix are missing in places due to an unfortunate server relationship, but it's always interesting to see what was happening 'a year ago today'.

Talk amongst yourselves. Think good thoughts, and good words to ya.

Thinking Outside the Box

We've decided that using a crate (in our case, a borrowed plastic Pet Porter) is a good way to go in early training of little Tsuga when he comes home with us in a week or so. I've read lots of net resources on the matter, and it all makes sense, except for this:

You're supposed to have them sleep in the crate in your room on the first night home, they tell me. In other places, I read about gradually acclimating the young dog to the crate over a week or so, first wooing them in with treats and food with the door open, starting with short periods, working up to the critter being in the container for 2-3 hours between trips out to the bushes. Seems like a disconnect here somewhere. I dread the first week of nights with a wee bladder in a box at the foot of our bed whimpering.

We will do the Puppy Aptitude Test to see if we can select out any overly-fearful or too-dependent animals before we chose between the ones left when we see the litter. But I wonder how much of very early puppy personality is indicative of how a mature dog will respond to a good environment, regardless of early aptitude. And I know when it gets right down to it, we'll pick the one our hands land on first. They all seemed energetic and well adjusted. I'm not sure the future pup would make the same assessment of his new owners. He won't fault us for neglect or indifference; of this I am certain.

Say It Isn't So

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The Cumulo-nimbus Oracle Has Spoken

The results are back after exhaustive testing by the Shroud of Turin Forensics Team, and here are the conclusions regarding the TRUE vision inscripted in the cloud:

Obviously, what you are seeing here (as outlined by our expert technicians to facilitate your grasp of this occult apparition) is a regally pampered and immaculately groomed, rather small Pink Poodledog Princess, lying on its side expectantly (facing left of image) on an affordable, adjustable deluxe Craftmatic Dog Bed at firmness setting FOUR.

Most significantly, our experts, by means of highly-technical graphics enhancement techniques, have revealed an astounding element of the image that was initially just out of view to left of image, showing the Finger of the Hand of God approaching, poised to tickle the Royal Belly of the Heavenly Poodle. I think you will agree, this is life-altering. I may start my own denomination. -- Friar Fred of Floyd

And here are the reverentially considered pronouncements from mere terrestrial skygazers, whose visions ranged from snowman poop to last year's Michelin Man.

Looks like a bear pointing at something in the distance. Perhaps the other side of the mountain. Mark

Tears of a clown Jeremiah

An extremely (and uncharacteristically) ferocious English sheepdog? That malevolent eye in the middle . . . I CAN'T be wrong about THAT. Rhonda

looks like snowman poop craig

Giant dog with cherub in its mouth (centre & top); mythical-type creature (halfman/half animal) fleeing from dog in foreground. Jenny

A baboon (full face looking off frame right)a small cherubic face with pursed lips (slightly right of center) feste

I see an odd-looking boy growing out of Godzilla's left jaw and a very tiny clown peeping out of Godzilla's mouth, but i've no idea WHAT the extra eyes go to. Perhaps i sould try again after the jello shooters wear off. Anne

The Hulk bogie

The first thing I saw was also a sheepdog. Chris

I saw Godzilla too! Dave

Read on for last year's cloud-diviners' answers ....(yes, this is a re-run with interesting new interpretations!)

I think it's the Apotheosis of the Michelin Man, painted on an 18th-century Viennese ceiling. The cherubs and pegasus-chariots and the Empress Maria Theresa (smiling, clutching a wreath of laurel to her bosom)are just outside of the frame to the left. Barbara of Pinniped

This is some kind of sneaky Rorschach, isn't it?! I see a crazed Michelin man, mouth open in an angry roar, leaning forward with his right arm extended... to do what? Who knows. susanna cornett of Cut on the Bias

I see a man drowning, trying to keep his head above water. (She wonders if it might not be O. Bin Laden, hiding up there). Michelle Catalano

It is a dalmation puppy on his back, in a vice. (The head is the roundish greyer part at the top.) Ol' buddy, Dennis Stamper

I see a large curly haired dog with a pronounced brow that shades its eyes, a large bulbous nose perched above an open mouth which holds an invisible regulator because it is certain this dog is scuba diving (tank at upper right) I also see .. if you take the dog, it's nose becomes a young lad along with his sister to his right, on a magical journey on the open-mouthed flying clam they are lying upon. The sister has one leg kicked up and points at something below, or perhaps at the mouth of the clam. Maybe it had an itch. If you want to make it sinister, the children are unaware of the beast whose bulky paws hover right behind them, and whose beaked head looms above. The forementioned scuba tank/monster also looks like Gonzo the Great. Jen the Imaginative (who left no forwarding address but may be out grazing among the funny mushrooms somewhere in a Texas pasture, under high puffy clouds -- FF).

I see a big curmudgeon, but what I notice the most is how much the picture looks like an illustration by Howard Pyle or N.C. Wyeth. Possumblog Terry, The Esteemed and Philosophical, Pensive and Erudite Chief of the Pouched Mammals.

A roasted marshmallow ready to be eaten. Kevin McGehee

Without having read the comments from others, I took one look at this picture and saw the exact same thing as susanna...a malevolent cloud-god staring down and to the left with a look of fury and wrath. Yikes!!! Curt the Curteous from Hotlanta

I saw the figure of God reaching out to man from the Sistine Chapel. Kehaar/Siflay Hraka

I see a herd of cats in Fez's. Bene Diction Blogs On

A de-horned Minotaur, sitting at a small circular table, conversing with an owl perched on an overturned napkin dispenser. Bigwig/Siflay Hraka

AND LASTLY... I remembered when I posted another cloud picture last year, Sid "Big Wig" of Silflay Hraka saw (and this was right in character) "a sheep dog, but in particular, Ruff, Dennis the Menace's dog, with a corncob pipe in his mouth, holding his head at a jaunty MacArthuresque angle".

Sore Looser

The part du jour is: The Right Shoulder! Another day, another reason to take a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication (or anti-inflammable as one patient used to call Motrin and its relatives). For forty years, the response to a new pain was to try to pin it to overuse or minor bumps or such; but these days, a new pain could crop up without any known provocation at all. It hurts because you have exceeded the contracted limit of 750 million shoulder flexions. Sorry. After all these years, sir, the warranty has expired and management is not required to give any explanation for broken or malfunctioning parts. Yes, you can file a complaint with the manufacturer if it makes you feel better; or take a few more Advil and just hush.

This time, now that I think about it, I can link pain with activity. Somehow there is a comfort in a known cause and effect versus spontaneous decrepitude. The shoulder pain is mulch-related for certain. After sitting out all night in the rain in the back of my pickup, by yesterday morning it was nice and saturated and brick-heavy to the tune of maybe twenty pounds per pitchfork full times a hundred repetitions. I had to get the job done yesterday between showers or else leave the truck in Long Term Parking at the airport full of shredded tree bark. Okay. It's muscle soreness. I can live with that.

Hmmm. The right shoulder. Mulch. Wheels turn, prompted by the sour smell of wood chips and I can think of other things to blame for this affliction. When I was in the eighth grade, I got interested in high jumping. When you watch the sport today, you see jumpers using the "Texas roll" as I think it was originally called, where the right leg goes over first approaching the bar from the left. They land on their sides on four-foot-thick foam pads. That jumping technique was new back then. I had learned using the scissoring 'leading leg first' method in which you land on your feet.

Having just discovered the wonder of gender difference by that time, I was determined to win the track meet high jump and impress a certain young lady, and so experimented with learning the 'shoulder over first' rolling method that the serious prize-winning jumpers were using. I tried it only once. We used pine chip mulch instead of four-foot-thick foam pads on the other side of the bar. Up and over the bar I went, turning face down as I crossed the bar, falling face down into the unyielding pit of mulch, with most of the shock taken by my right shoulder. They called it an acromio-clavicular separation. See... right there that big lump on my right shoulder.

I decided that given the pitiful absence of shock absorption in our high-jump pit, maybe I'd better stick with the old jumping technique. I won first place at four feet ten inches. But I didn't get the girl. She'd been watching when I did the face-plant in the sawdust and was not impressed. Women.

Rosy Maple Moth

Moth mystery solved thanks to Troy at Troy's Photo Gallery, who knew it right off. Don't ya just love the net?

The Republicans of California...

Are gonna kick your A_ _ . Or turn it into cover art.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Larry Flynt may both be running for California governor. Sheesh.

Dank

...boggy, damp, dampish, dewy, fenny, humid, marshy, moist, muggy, rainy, roric, roriferous, sticky, swampy, tacky, undried, wet, wettish...

When all the doors stick and your boots never dry out. When the potholes in the road by the mailbox always hold the reflection of the maple tree in brown liquid. The firewood stacked in rows is sodden and dark, the air thick as syrup. Trees crash in the night, unable to hold in fluid soil and gray is the dominant color of the day. The house smells of mildew and the cellar is an aquarium full of air. So saturated is the soil that earthworms swim on the grass without fear of becoming long withered raisins. Drops on tin overhead are so pervasive I am alarmed when I notice it is silent save for the thousand voices of the creek. And it is raining again.

Bill Grogan's Goat

As an old working buddy used to say before taking a trip: "I'm gettin journey-proud."

I'll be flying home to the Hot of Dixie this weekend, back far south to Birmingham, dropping through the clouds into another realm-- a place both familiar and alien. It is the place I know best in some ways, but it is not the best place I have known. For reasons I still ponder, there is more to finding one's true place than the accident of birth or parental choice that lands you in the town you grew up in. And yet so many tendrils from those days and urban places extend under the surface of years, wrapping around the present like a climbing vine that will not die; the past is a growing thing-- not the central trunk or branch but an essential epiphyte, a honeysuckle twining that I carry along with me farther and farther away toward the edge of age. And so it is with Alabama, and Birmingham, and my old neighborhood of Crestwood, but especially with Camp Winnataska.

I had an affair with summer camp. While married til death-do-us-part to real life with its demands and raucous babel and ill moods, summer camp was a place apart, unfamiliar and forbidden, but permissive in ways I did not know at home. For the first time away from home for a week or more, I became a me I had not met while belonging to parents and neighbors and expectations of my city-self. Camp was my tiny woodlot magnified a thousandfold, full of other Lost Boys. Together we found Never-Never Land and each other, were in love with the place and bound to each other at first sight. When I think of home and belonging, Camp Winnataska is one of those venerable vines that grows verdant into my present, and one of the few places I must go while I am back down under those clouds in that Other Place I used to know.

I don't know where to begin, and I am certain that I won't be able to end this tale before I travel. And so I think I'll just slip back to those days remembering the sweet, warm smell of pine forest, and by recalling some of the old camp songs (many are unfamiliar in these lists, but more remarkable, not a few are the same songs my mother sang when she went to Winnataska by train when she was a young girl). If I write of this, I'll do it when I get home next week. I've called to make arrangements to get in to visit camp on Sunday, and still awaiting a reply. As a former staff member, I used to have the key to the gate. I would drive there with my fishing pole as a pretense to go and sit at the foot of Kelly Falls in perfect solitude. With my bare feet in the clear green creek, I wondered about worlds below the water and about time beyond that present when I would be a boy no longer.

Personal bookmarks related to this entry: The images of clouds and Lost Boys in this poem from August, 2001. Fishing and worlds above, below in Gone Fishing.

About Place

I think we may hear more about it in the coming week, but for now, know that four of the California Ecotone writers were interviewed yesterday on KWMR up in Field Notes Lisa's part of the world. Lisa has some thoughts that state very well what the point is in learning how to know and talk about place. If you have had any interest at all in the discussions at Ecotone, I encourage you to go read Lisa's words (and her comments) and come back to the Ecotone and the various bloggers' sites for further discussion in the coming days.

G'bye, Y'all

One of the stupidist things a blogger does is point out neat sites where he sends his readers, who.... DUH... leave his site and never come back. And so why is it that I am pointing you once again to Gospel According to Mark for his Sunday Click-a-Rama where you can view the toaster I grew up with (TheToastmaster, Model 1B14), the longest urinal in the world and where you can test your eye-paw dexterity in the Clay Kittens Shoot (I didn't beat 3/10 in three games, before I was overcome by guilt. Our cat was just outside the window and wondered what those little cat Yahoooos! were all about.)

It was nice having you around. Mark, send them back to Fragments from time to time. Sniff.

Pale Mute Beauty

I remember seeing this moth for the first time on a hot summer night next to a front porch light in one of our housing incarnations in Alabama, North Carolina or Virginia-- I'm not sure which. It was outside our back door one night this week, and there the next day so I could take it's portrait. I have never known the common or scientific name for this creature and would appreciate it if you'd tell me if you know. Til then, this pastel moth of warm summer nights I shall dub the "Dreamsicle Moth" or the "Sherbert Moth".

Weblog as Place

Is your weblog a place in itself? How do you locate it in the scheme of things? What kind of map is it on? What's your relationship with your weblog? And with those who visit it?

This is the biweekly topic at the Ecotone coming up for August 15. Every blogger could write to this topic, even if not typically a 'place-oriented' writer, so I hope you'll put this on your calendar. Last biweekly posting on "Trees and Place" was interesting, with (at this moment) eighteen submissions. But back to the subject at hand.

This topic is timely. I find myself once more wondering about the "scheme of things" that is encompassed by the domain dysphonically called blogging... a silly-sounding word that may be more, or less, than its odd name would tell those outside the genre.

While there are people behind every weblog, not all weblogs are personal. Some are staffed more by opinion and persona than the authentic person behind the keyboard; reading this kind of weblog over the course of months tells no more about the blogger than his pseudonym and his politics. Others pour themselves into their pages, often more than readers care to know, and see the weblog as a very real form of sharing and community and self-expression. Where do you fit along this continuum?

As I consider the Ecotone topic coming up, I wonder if my place in the blogging world has changed awfully much from last summer when, early in the life of Fragments, I was pouring myself into my writing to find my bearings, to discover my purpose in a world newly unsettled by the loss of my job and profound disappointment with my profession. As I read back over the Strange Farmer of Erehwon written in July 2002, I still can see Fragments through the farmer's eyes. Some things are different, and I hope to write about those in the Ecotone piece. But much is comfortably the same, and for this, I am grateful.

Rover, Fido or Fang?

Thanks for puppy-picking tips and encouragement. I printed and will take with us the Volhard Puppy Aptitude test (link sent by black lab owner and just-next-door blogger Ron Bailey and thank you very much) and we will do some of these little 'tests' on the five males that remain to chose from on the 17th. This test gives a basis to make this difficult decision on some basis other than 'he has sweet eyes'. Ever seen a puppy without sweet eyes, for cryin' out loud?

And re the name. The original proposal tossed into the ring was "Ender" (child prodigy from the Orson Scott Card book, Enders' Game, and also to connote the very real possibility that this pup would be the end of our puppies, with only older less energy and patience demanding dogs for pets after this). More recent possibilities include the rather euphonic and color-descriptive "Barley" for a yellow lab. It also has agrarian overtones which seems fitting. Lastly, and front runner in Nate's opinion is another botanical name I came up with at Ann's prompting. We were driving down the lane a few days ago pondering puppy names, using most anything as a trigger. Just then we passed under some drooping branches of a dying Hemlock (there is no other kind for hundreds of miles) and considered "Hemlock" which I translated into the genus name for Hemlock: "Tsuga" (pronounced Sooga).

Ya have to think about this. We want a large dog in small part as a deterrent to unsolicited visitors. You have to admit, there is a psychological difference in the shock value in the sound of shouting "Kill, Barley!" compared to "Kill, Fang!" Tsuga is a little more Fang-like, but not too much. Who am I kidding. With labs, the command might be something like "Lick, Buster!" This he might obey as this licking a stranger is something a lab is prone by temperament to do. Still, Tsuga has a kind of soft power to it and an element of mystery and I think it is front runner for the moment. As our hemlocks die, Tsuga grows on Goose Creek.

Well Kiss My Grits

Who in the world could be sending us the "Gourmet Foods" package that the UPS man just handed me? It's not anybody's birthday or anniversary or anything. I searched the label for clues. Then I made the connection.

A year ago I praised a new 'southern food' we had recently tried from our grocery store, and even blogged about it. A year later, I was still getting rather regular errant email about 'my company' because net surfers read right over my very clear disclaimers on the original post saying I was only a satisfied consumer of these products. The emails kept coming, and I finally wrote the company just to tell them apologetically about my traffic and at the same time, reinforce our pleasure with their canned foods, especially the spicy greens (which we tend to mix with more bland garden fare like Swiss Chard).

I shortly thereafter received a kind email reply from a representative of the company, and a few weeks later, I received this mystery package that contains-- among other items new to us-- their Peppered Vinegar! Makes me wanna swaller my eye teeth thinking about this stuff on a plateful of crowder peas and diced onions! Glory be, that's good eatin'. And once more, I do not own stock nor am I involved with this fine organization other than as a consumer. I don't know how else to say it. But I do know how to say "thank you" to the folks that contributed the Peppered Vinegar.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown!

We must be living in the Computer Black Hole of southwest Virginia.

As of yesterday, my son's ThinkPad 600 has errors 08611 and also the ever-popular 00301 and some system board error-demons that suggest we are suddenly in the laptop shopping business, here while still computer-broke from the happy experience with Dell some few weeks back. Tomorrow he leaves for three years in college in Vancouver, and we need the system waiting for him there by early September!

I'm open to suggestions for finding the lowest-dollar highest-reliability system we can for his meager word processing needs. It will have to be a remote purchase as there are no refurbs in the flesh for 200 miles. Any thoughts? Arrgh!

Bows and Flows of Angel Hair

Cloud watching must have been one of the earliest forms of human entertainment. Free. Widely available. While the mind wanders, they drift silently overhead, lofty and unreachable, boiling, evanescent, solid-seeming...then vanishing in a wisp of vapor. Clouds present the eye with shapes and forms seen through the lens of imagination and wimsy.

What do you see in these clouds that I photographed from the jet window, two years ago this week?

Cloud creatures can range from the sublime to the ridiculous (and we can already guess a few bloggers have potential for imaginations on steroids). This week, Fragments welcomes your vision and the benefit of your insight into the TRUE and REAL thing depicted in this cloud formation.

That's right. There is one right answer, and I alone know it. I will reveal the TRUTH of this cloud revelation on Friday August 8, and will post the ten most original submissions on Friday's Fragments. You will be shocked and awed by this Enquirer-worthy story!!

UPDATE: Oh you folks are all over the map of imagination on this one, and a couple of you have some tendencies in The Right Direction. But be patient. The Answer awaits on Friday. Promise.

How Much is That Doggie

A decidedly bad mix: Tevas, toes and a pit full of puppies. Eleven blond furballs were all very asleep when we got there to see them. Hoping that this visit, The One would show himself unmistakably to us, it was a disappointment to see almost a dozen peacefully rising and falling puppy tummies all around the corral, all looking exactly alike, save for the crude Magic Marker number found on one ear of each male. With our poking and stroking they did finally wake up in twos and threes, then maybe half the lot at once, each competing to see which one could untie Ann's shoes or grab my little toe exposed in my open sandals and make me holler (and bleed) with their impossibly sharp teeth (what must a momma dog experience at feeding time!). There is one 'runt' among the males, and beyond that, we'll be happy with any of them.

And yet, it seems there should be a way to find the one that is the perfect fit for us. The two fellows who will have first choice this week are looking for a hunter. Cleverly, they trolled for their puppies by tying a dove wing to a fishing line and pulling it through the midst of the puppy village to draw out that special bird-oriented future fetcher. This test met with equivocal results, we understand, but is a great concept. We are thinking maybe to employ a converse sort of test next time we visit, and will place a pair of underwear on the fishing line and choose the ONE PUP who DOES NOT grab the item of intimate wear and proudly parade about with it hanging moist and mangled (as Buster was wont to do as a very effective attention-getter).

How do we decide? It will be Number 1, 2, or 4. One of these numbered unknowns will come home with us on August 17, and our lives, his and ours, will become layered and fused and intertwined with each others' in that wonderful, heart-breaking way that happens only between human souls and the spirits that inhabit your dog.

Incredible Journey

I am only faintly apologetic for revisiting my calendar-- as recorded in more detail than at any time in my previous years-- on the pages of Fragments. Among other tales from last August, a favorite family story about our first black lab, Zachary, was one of my longer true stories. I've shortened it since, and the shorter version was published in PetLife, a national animal lover's magazine in December of last year. The Long Way Home is a story of one dog's devotion to his humans, and of course, verse visa. It seems especially fitting here as we anticipate the puppy we will bring into our lives. Who will he be and how will he change us? What sacrifices will we make to each other?

Fred Unplugged

My great thanks to TravelerTrish for gracefully enduring a months-worth of words (not even the dog to listen to me now for a month) about writing and writers and me! me! me! After close to a year of blog-acquantance, Trish's first visit yesterday was a pleasure for all of us Goose Creekers. Trish scored extra points when she was willing to go the extra mile on our walk... in the rain!

I think if we work on her, we can get her over to the Blog Side. She speaks wisely and with ease of her wideranging experience (that now is recorded in her Live Journal) and would become a widely-read blog presence, even if she didn't write something every day. Thanks, Trish, for kicking my writer's-butt and yes, I'm doing my homework already. Come back up soon and we'll do downtown Floyd and the Parkway and next time, I promise... I'll let you talk.

Garden Heros and Villains

Contrary to this too-cool too-wet gardening season, this time last year we had a lot of green tomatos hanging heavy on the bush. We also had quite a few of these creatures, and I was delighted-- not with the foliage munching caterpillars but with the little white appendages you see above. Go here for the story from this day in August from last year.

Bright Wing Politics

Call it Atheist Pride. They are coming out of the closet and Richard Dawkins (who I've been painfully aware of since his Selfish Gene days) is unashamedly "bright"...a term he (seriously) appropriates (although suggested for this purpose by others) from the English language to obviate the past negative connotations of being godless. And of course, not unintentionally, this term relegates those benighted souls like me who slink around afflicted by the pathetic dark 'superstition' of Christianity onto the other side of this great divide: Theists of any stripe become The Dim. The Darks. The UnWise. The Marginalized Pre-scientific. Dawkins boasts...

Brights constitute 60% of American scientists, and a stunning 93% of those scientists good enough to be elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences (equivalent to Fellows of the Royal Society) are brights. Look on the bright side: though at present they can't admit it and get elected, the US Congress must be full of closet brights. As with gays, the more brights come out, the easier it will be for yet more brights to do so. People reluctant to use the word atheist might be happy to come out as a bright.

Geisert and Futrell are very insistent that their word is a noun and must not be an adjective. "I am bright" sounds arrogant. "I am a bright" sounds too unfamiliar to be arrogant: it is puzzling, enigmatic, tantalising. It invites the question, "What on earth is a bright?" And then you're away: "A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic world view."

I tried living in their world. Examined as if the answers made all the difference, the data didn't fit. I decided that C. S. Lewis was correct when he said "What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience". These brilliant scientists have their own conceptual blind spots and bring their presuppositions with them when they ask the Big Questions. I believe these hyper-rational bright people have wrongly excluded from Nature the very Truth necessary to know it and ourselves. They are right about a lot of things that can be known by physics and mathematics, and their conclusions may be correct if there is no thing outside the closed universe of matter; if they are wrong, they will some day be shocked to find it out.

For what a man had rather were true, he more readily believes.
- Francis Bacon

Right Place, Right Time

As I frequently do during the day, and especially on days like yesterday when it drizzles and drips for endless hours, I stepped out onto the front porch to "take the air" as they used to say. It had rained softly for most of the night, but stopped about first light, though it was still very foggy and cool. And yet I could hear a pretty good patter of drops still falling, but only under the big maple that covers our view of the eastern sky near the house. The tree was alive with birds bouncing back and forth in the wet branches in a frenzy, and I slipped back inside quickly for my binoculars, though I could hear most of what I wanted to know.

While I've forgotten way too much of what I used to know about bird songs, I had no problems recognizing the nasal honk of the nuthatches; the scolding sound of the chick-a-dee-dee-dees; the peter-peter of the titmice; and another sound that was at first familiar but unnamed. I tried to visualize the unknown bird call as if it formed a musical pattern, and then it came to me: I could see a series of saw-toothed up and down notes in a buzzy wee-see-wee-see voice. And when I trained my binocs on them, I verified that these were black and white warblers-- as good a view of them (and there were at least four) as I've ever had. All these birds, and also a few white-eyed vireos and an unknown silent yellow-green warbler were working the maple over in what seemed to be a 'feeding guild' where all niches of the tree-- from trunk bark crevices to crotches, leaf undersurfaces and terminal twigs-- were being gleaned systematically by the various bird specialists working more or less cooperatively.

Soon, this crew began moving off a few at a time to a nearby walnut, starting their feeding assignments over again with a fresh plate. I'd pay good money to see such wonderful displays of animal behavior... but I'm truly glad it's free and I can experience it in my bedroom slippers. I just love living country.

Trees and Home

I have lived a long life among tall trees and remember trees, as much as I recall the Appalachian hills and coves that have given them root, when I think of places I have lived and known. It is individual backyard trees that I first remember as significant markers of place. I recall them as favorite barriers to hide behind in hide-and-seek; branches to climb in and fall out of; horizontal limbs to swing from, letting go the rope and falling into muddy creeks; and of course, for their blessed shade from the blazing Alabama sun. Later on, I have clear memories of the sweet clean smell of pines at summer camp; of arching Live Oaks festooned in a tinsel of Spanish Moss on our deeper-south vacations; and the scrub oak of second growth forest where I often explored with my BB gun-- these forests of broad summertime leaves have become inseparable parts of my personal ecosystem of place.

Few who live here would know or care that we inhabit what forest science calls the Temperate Broad leaved Deciduous Forest-- a living realm or biome that consists of a collection of habitats similar to just a few other forests in the world (see the map). Where I have lived-- in the unglaciated southern Appalachian part of this biome-- is found the greatest diversity of broad leaved trees in the world. These tree species characteristically burst into flaming color in the fall of the year, then drop their leaves and live dormant and bare for six months. This alternate dressing and gaudy undressing of the forest creates the Jekyll and Hyde vegetative calender and paints the backdrop in which southern mountain lives are lived out. In this, there must be myriad ways that trees create in us a sense of who and where were are, where on Earth we belong, effecting our rhythms and cycles in ways that would be unknown to one living in treeless places, or in evergreen forests that change little through the seasons.

While the treescape that surrounds me here in western Virginia most certainly has an impact on my way of thinking and of fitting into place, the forest -- and this is true of any vegetative script no matter where you live-- is itself the consequence of just so much moisture, a particular range of temperature through the growing year, a certain period of daylight and dark, of soil pH and depth and chemistry, and the effects of succession or change over short and vast stretches of time. And so if we are 'at home' in a world of particular tree species, it is also the climate and geology and history of that forest or prairie or desert that we are connected to by our familiarity with the plant life in those unique places. We live anywhere we chose; plants are tenants who must live where they can get along with the elements over the ages. There is a stability in this that I find grounding and comfortable.

Even though the southern forest was right out my back door while I was growing up, I confess I was an animal bigot for all of my precollege years. I thought plant study was for sissies until I had an eleventh hour botanical conversion midway along the path to a Masters in Zoology. Since that enlightenment in my mid-twenties, trees and flowering plants and lichens and ferns have consumed much more of my attention than snakes and mammals. I have taught field botany to college students, led innumerable field trips, and enthusiastically shown slides of Appalachian native plants to groups young and old. My family will testify that I can barely keep my eyes on the road or the trail for attending the trees and flowers and ferns that go by.

Today from my window, I look out on a vast green forest of rhododendrons and tulip poplars, mountain ash and basswood, spicebush and white pine. I watch the wild flowers bud and bloom from creek bank to ridge top. I can name them, and they are like old friends. The trees from our wooded valley here built this house, where the walls, floors, and ceilings are made of old, slow growing heart pine and the siding crafted from poplar trees that took first root on this piece of land more than 200 years ago. Our forest is inseparable from our weather and our bedrock's history, its trees are built up around me and shelter me, and it is among the whispering shadows of these wonderfully adapted fellow creatures that I feel truly at home.

This essay is written as part of the regular biweekly topic post at the Ecotone, where this week the focus is "Trees and Place".