Fragments From Floyd

Ancestors: The Grafted Roots

The roots of my family tree run shallow and short. Someone gave me the "First" coat of arms as a gift when we were married; I appreciated the thought but it connected me only to the lineage of a biological stranger and a name not my own. Any meaningful connection with my father's paternal lineage was severed by divorce in the 1930's; my surname by true inheritance should have be Strickland. This is a twig of our small tree I have not been able to trace with the little information that I know. My mother is an only child. I never knew her father who died in a hunting accident when she was very young. Her father's Dillons go back in remote history to Ireland (Henri of Lion migrated to Ireland in the 1100s'-- du Leon becoming O'Doullin, then Dillon over the centuries). Mom's mother's Harrisons disappear in the genealogies earlier than the mid 1850's when my granny's grandparents moved to Mufreesboro, Tennessee.

I can walk the same dark high school hallways and over the summer camp trails that my mother walked; and I can visit neighborhoods where we lived in Birmingham as I was growing up. Beyond that, I cannot stand in hallowed places known to known ancestors. I cannot conceive what it must be like to have relatives spreading across the hollers and back through time for five or more generations as many of my neighbors here in the southern Appalachians do. For me, there will be no retracing ancestral footsteps to the places from which, in some sense, my true roots arise. Nevertheless, with the quick passing of decades, I do feel some need to find roots. If I am to know ancestral places, lacking any of the old-fashioned kind, I will be happy to adopt them: this old house, this patch of land, the Blue Ridge Mountains... and the people who have loved them long before I did. If they will have me, my belonging will be here to these places, these hills, these people.

Since we've been married, eight places have been "home" for us. It was not until a year ago that it dawned on me that, even after both Ann and I had marketable careers that would pretty much let us find work anywhere, we have consistently chosen to find our place in the southern Appalachians. This must be our home, as warm a hearth as we are likely to find in this life. We've adopted its traditional music as our own. The particulars of the language have settled in comfortably along the margins of our speech, modulating the rhythm of our neighborly conversations with snatches of the Elizabethan English that our geographical ancestors brought into these mountains two centuries ago. The gentle grandeur of the Blue Ridge seems to appeal to us as if we had known these broad ridges and gentle valleys in a lifetime long ago. Yes, I've adopted all of this, but there seem to be unknown lines of pull that make the Appalachian hills lay a deeper claim on me.

But what of my children? They suffer the same rootlessness and lack of history I have known; they cannot go back 'home' unless they are content to visit a half dozen houses in which others now live. This patch of earth I look out on, lying peacefully in a natural bowl between two little creeks; an old farmhouse that comes with a history and kindly ghosts of its own going back a hundred and thirty years, full of memories; the rugged hillsides and slender pasture bordered by the old stone wall, and the crude field-rock foundation of a little barn where ash trees are growing from it's center-- all of this recently claimed ancestral ground can become 'the old homeplace' to my children's children. Perhaps here we can lay down a soil in which future roots can grow, where unborn feet can walk and hearts can feel with deep certainty that "those from whom I come walked here, they sat on this old wall, saw these same high ridges swept by west winds that sounded just like this wind today, and I belong here".

My children and theirs may have these buildings and creeks and ridges to hold their history. But having this daily journal as a record of the everyday details of life here on Goose Creek, I'd have to hope that it too can become part of the ancestral roots of those who come after me and from me, though I will never know them. Those dear ones, as they age and wonder about the infinite regression of generations past and future, as I do, will not be ignorant of the peculiar lives of ancestors at the turn of the twenty-first century who adopted a region, then birthed a homeplace in the flesh-- one that will carry on, perhaps, into future generations of Southern Highlanders.

The topic this week at the Ecotone:Writing About Place is "Ancestral Place".
Read the posts, join the discussion.

When A Good Dog Goes Wild

I go away for less than an hour to cut some firewood up the valley. "What could he get into" I say as I think how well Tsuga has learned his way around the house, how responsive he's become to our wishes, how grown up.

Little could I have known that as soon as he heard the truck crossing the creek, he was in the pantry having himself a grand ol' time. And no, he doesn't get in the Milwalkee's Best. He goes straight for the Killians I save for special occasions. Like Wednesdays, for instance. And worst of all, he didn't even bother to chill it and is drinking it right out of the bottle. I thought I'd trained him better than that. What is a father to do?

Bigger, Deeper, Longer Lasting

No, not that. A new search engine. Try it and report back at oh-eight hundred hours for debriefing. No, not that. TurboTen: its test time.

Trees: Walnut ~ The Perfect Wood

I didn't know any better. It was winter and the leaves were off the trees. I could key them to species by the leaves back then, but I was a clueless flatlander when it came to knowing a tree by it's bark. My division chairman at the college said "cut what you want" from the tracts he owned where houses would soon go up. He thought surely I'd leave the cash trees: the walnuts. I burned them in the woodstove that second winter living in Virginia. Felt a little guilty, and a lot warm. I still burn walnut, but I never take it for granted that it is a valuable wood indeed.

Our hilly acres here have all been, at one time or another, in pasture. It's hard to believe, given the fact that on the slopes, you go up five feet for every five you 'walk'. We find remnants of the stacked-rail fences that once served to separate one steep bit of grazing space from another. Down in the valley, along the edges of the bottomland and the road, squirrels use to sit on chestnut rail fences and eat walnuts from up on the hillsides, burying some of them in protected spots near the bottom rail. And now, along these sheltered margins, gnarly walnuts have come up and in turn, served as living fence posts for stringing barbed wire; the chestnuts have finally after decades on the ground succumbed to decay.

The cold valley winters and rocky soil here don't make for tall straight boles free of knots. Our squirrel-planted walnuts unfortunately will not make us or our children rich sold as saw logs. But they make us rich in other ways. I must confess, I do not grieve to find that one has dropped a large, dead branch or succumbed to age and died. The wood is a woodburner's dream. Dense as ash and almost the energy equivalent of oak, it is relatively dry when green, dries fast and burns hot. But, as they say, one should enjoy the journey and not just the destination, and it is in the cutting as much as the burning that I find walnut a winter joy.

If you want to impress your city friends, learn to recognize walnut. On the stump, the smaller branches, when broken, have a 'chambered pith'... the softer center core is divided into little compartments and very distinctive. The wood, of course, is difficult to confuse with any other. The outer sapwood is very light, while the heart wood... much prized by furniture makers... varies from a deep choclaty brown to a pleasant muted purple-brown aubergine. The grain is clean and straight. The stove lengths free of knots (I hesitate to confess) I often split on down with the hand axe to make wonderful lengths of eggplant-colored kindling. A bonus of so much splitting is the wonderfully odd smell of cut walnut. Smell being a very idiosyncratic and subjective observation at best, I'll tell you that to me, walnut smells astringent and medicinal... blending the faint aroma of iodine, a hint of freshly opened Band-aid with an underlying foundation of varnish. Trust me. Walnut is the smell of cool weather itself.

And here in this first week of cool weather, on this first frosty morning of the season, a few sticks of walnut are sending back the warmth and light of summer through the glass door of the silent, steadfast woodstove. Later today, I'll gather a bucketfull of hull-less nuts from along the road and pretend I wear a squirrel's hat, and plant walnuts along the pasture by the creek. I'd like to think decades from now that my great-grandchildren will inherit both the walnut trees and the inclination to get to know them as I have.

Previous Walnut Tales and Images here and here.

Making It Up As We Go: Language

Conglubrious: adj__ meaning: people getting together talking and having a good time.

Nope. You won't find it in the American Standard Dictionary. Or any other dictionary for that matter. Our son made it up, incorporated it into a high school essay, and almost got away with it. On the final revision, his teacher caught his creative impulse to forge new words. I think she actually marked his grade up for his brazen attempt to smuggle a new word of his own into the language.

Here's a veritable compendium of English words that once were in the King's English (some only for a very brief span) but now are found nowhere else on the internet but here, in the Compendium of Lost Words.

But backing up even farther in our utterances, peruse this brief account of the long evolutionary origins of modern language-- ours and the rest of the worlds'-- and their common ancestry from "Indo-European" roots thousands of years ago. Fascinating. Don't you think?

A Veritable Cornucopia of Goodness

Too bad none of it is mine. But hey, I'm only a little jealous, slightly covetous and mildly green with envy. But of course it's only noon, and I have just begun to blogbrowse.

My Hero, Al Franken from WriteOutLoud

MouseDroppings from Field Notes

Sunday in the Cove from Switched at Birth

Dumb Tourist Questions at North Coast Cafe

Just everything at Fishbucket, formerly Semi Compos Mentis. An extravaganza, as always.

Seasonally Affective

If there are manic and depressive seasons, summer is depressive with it's heat and lethargy. Fall is manic. Today with the first cool weather and a little fire perking along in the woodstove, I am falling all over myself with things I want to do, and am holding back a veritable geyser of things to write about... the fall wildflowers, the smell of woodsmoke, more about trees, an overabundance of images ready to post, words about words and language, and musings about where our sciences and technologies are taking us. But more about all that later, after raking leaves, splitting kindling, covering up the tomatoes against tonight's frost, and generally putting the garden to rest.

Oh yeah. And before I go, I must remember to tell you that the biweekly topic for October 1 at the Ecotone will be "Ancestral Place(s)". If you just want to read what others write, stop by the Ecotone Biweekly Topic on Wednesday after posters have had a chance to get their writings up. To offer your own contribution, if you aren't familiar with wiki format, email me and I'll be glad to help you get on board. Should be an interesting group of responses, do drop by.

Trees: Walnut ~ #2

The big walnut by the barn ~ September 2003

There was a walnut in front of the barn above the creek... good sized but smaller than the huge one beside the barn. It seemed anchored solidly in the rocky soil, had been there through the storms of at least fifty years. But one day three years ago this month, in a late summer thunderstorm, I watched out the window as it came crashing down, roots lifting out of wet ground, falling across both the creek and the road. When the lightning moved on and the rains slowed, I cut and hauled the treetop away from the road. I left the bole of the tree intact, and later in the day, called our friend Lynn, who was always looking for lumber from which she would craft beautiful furniture and cabinets. She had it planked into boards. Today her house has a magnificent walnut desk and massive walnut bookshelves. A friend finished the work she had started on these pieces after she died quite unexpectedly. I'll never know if it was our walnut that went into her last beautiful creations. I'd like to think so.

A Pox on Ye, Blockish Grutnols!

They Don't Make Invective Like They Used'ter. Take your choice: next time your significant other leaves the toilet seat up (or down, depending on the laws in your house)... launch forth with one or preferrably a half-dozen of these utterly damning (if unintelligible) epithets in rapid succession. After all, when's the last time you enjoyed a really invigorating, vitriolic diatribe. Hmmmm? In 1653, buddies, you could let fly the vituperation with reckless abandon.
(from WorldWideWords)

Try these on for size: prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets

The Web From Semania

Do you keep hearing about the Semantic Web? Scientific American has a good (not too techy) overview of it's purpose and ultimate composition. I'm not sure I look forward to participating in the "new and improved web" of the future. When it arrives we will have unprecedented power over 'resources' and access to facts and control over objects and ideas; but it will also carry the potential to separate us further from nature and the 'softer' humanizing aspects of our culture.

Consider this quote from a good basic description of the "Semantic Web" by Eric Hanson:

XML can represent real-world objects like used cars, but it can also represent concepts and ideas. Just like the ontology for a used car could unite the used-car selling and buying people of the world, an ontology for an idea could unite the people of the world around a single idea. Using XML to represent the idea that the president should be assassinated could unite would-be assassins in a single online community. XML will unite people with common interests and goals in ways never before possible. Scarry thought huh?

Our world is beautiful and complicated and cannot and will not be classified or categorized. By stretching a net of approximate categorization over our earth, a line is drawn between those things that can be classified and those that cannot. Mass produced goods take on all the beauty of a grey lego block. Things that can't be captured in this web, things like art, music, literature, nature, stand out and shine brighter. XML and the Semantic Web will profoundly affect our earth and the way we think of it. It will challenge capitalism as we know it, and unite people around common interests no matter how obscure. How soon it will take off is anybody's guess but it has the potential to revolutionize the world as we know it.

Counting Crows

More and more crows are flocking to more and more towns and cities, and more and more people don't know who to shoot. This, from an Orion Magazine piece by Peter Sauer...

"No one understands the cause-and-effect relationship, but over the next decade crows began to prefer urban over forest trees for roosting. Ornithologists speculate that lighted city trees may allow the birds to escape from great horned owls. Whatever the reason, by the end of the '80s crows were roosting in small cities from Maine to Ohio, Mississippi to Michigan, and virtually every attempt to drive them away spread them into new neighborhoods and increased their numbers. Though the critical crow-mass varied from city to city, the dilemma it triggered was the same. Humane crow removal programs were expensive and notoriously ineffective while methods that involved killing "innocent" crows were intolerable to many citizens."

Solution: Turn the problem into a grand war with the wildlife! Give everybody guns! Call it a tournament!

[...] The tournament began on the gray, still morning of Saturday, February 1, 2003 -- one month before the anticipated start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Before dawn, the first protesters spread dog and cat food beneath city trees to entice the birds to stay and feed in the city, where discharging firearms is illegal. In the countryside, meanwhile, the hunters set up decoys and crow-calling sound systems around their blinds.

Suffice it to say, they have not found the "final solution" against the crows.

[...] By replacing real crows with abstractions, both sides were diminishing their own humanity. But then, this dispute had come to have little to do with crows. This was February 2003, when the abstractions du jour were collateral damage and shock and awe. The tournament was a ritual for a human society preparing its flocks for war.

Wonder if they ever thought of baking them in a pie?

Rainy Weekends No Coincidence?

Workweek Causes Climate Fluctuations

But nah, man's activities haven't a thing to do with climate change outside of cities. Right, George?

Alpha Male ~ Month Three

We call it "porpoising". The grass in the pasture is just a bit higher than Tsuga's back, and when he runs in it, he appears and disappears as he leaps and lunges like a rollicking dolphin. With his mouth gaping, by the time he clears the tall grass (captured here in mid-lunge) there is a good bit of rye grass raked into his open toothy mouth as he plunges and plows his way towards us like a demented herbivorous tiger.

I've tried a couple of times to take 'moving pictures' of the dog (snapshots of him in action) and realize something now. I remember those pictures of the early pre-astronauts training for space, sitting in the big centrifuge, spinning around at several "G"s; and we've all seen the distorted jowls of high-speed runners or jumpers... the unflattering effect that motion has on the plastic tissues of the face. And so it is with dogs. Motion turns Tsuga into his own cartoon character, as you see here. He has allowed me to show this one of him in somewhat unflattering countenance only if I promise to show you some more noble images next week. I have signed papers to this effect.

Today is the pup's three month birthday and this is the week Tsuga began to 'get it'. He has made the connection between scolding or withdrawal of attention with the offending behavior. He understands and shows signs of wanting to comply but is still under considerable control from his inner Wolf. It is as if someone flipped some switches on that were off since we brought him home. And indeed, this is literally true, in a sense. Pups or baby humans aren't capable of certain age-related degrees of coordination, learning or 'thinking' until fields of synapses connect up with other fields in the brain. When that happens, and two and two computes for the first time, voila! A little personality grows by leaps and bounds. Memory and learning happens in pup and it's human as they grow together. And the bonds of companionship begin to take shape, each molding the other to become best friends.

Previous posts about the struggle to be the Alpha Male around here...

How Much Information?

Fascinating. We talk about the "overload" of information. This tells where it's growing, who generates it and how it's likely to change in coming years. Explore. For instance, check out the charts for starters.

from: Berkeley School of Information Management

Say What?

I had slipped into my southern rural persona when talking to someone a bit out of that melieu, and when asked what I would like to do about (the farm, my writing, retirement... don't rightly remember what)... I said "If I had my druthers..." And the person I was talking to acted like I'd slipped into speaking Afghani. I'm sorry, maybe not everyone has druthers. Do you?

I was hunting around, interested in the origins of the term (a contraction of 'would rather') when I came across this potentially useful page that I've bookmarked and filled under "Writing Tools" (when the truth of the matter is, I'll go back and play, killing some time clicking through a lot of the neat word origins and other "facts" compiled over the years at alt.usage.english. (This is more or less their FAQ).

Trees: Walnut #1

Walnuts at pasture's edge, taken from twenty feet south of the mailbox, framed by the big maple

I used to think, as I hurried along the county roads of Floyd County to work, that some day, I'd like to start a pictorial study of trees. It would be mostly silhouettes of trees against sky, isolated whenever possible from a lot of background so that form would be primary. I even had a couple of subjects picked out, and toyed with the idea of stopping someday to ask the owner of that old barn on the hill with the ancient apple tree next to it if I could please just come and hang out, watch the light change, pick an hour and a day when conditions said just what I wanted that old apple tree to say. But I was in a hurry, and it was other things more practical than trees that won every time.

And so, maybe this year, this wintertime of bare branches and monochrome, I will start attending the trees again, starting with the walnuts near the house here, realizing how different are the feelings that a stranger feels seeing trees that are merely trees, and what I see, knowing these trees personally. Even that tree in the neighbors pasture, having studied it, learned its particulars, its personality if you will, makes the photograph quite another thing to the photographer. So just indulge me.

Got NEDS?

New Economy Depression Syndrome. I don't have it. Much. But it's a wonder that I don't. Let's look at some of my risk factors: socially isolated with few face to face contacts for days; male; spends more than 30 hours on the Internet each week; and I'm a "digital immigrant" ... not native to this landscape, being over the big five-oh having to compete in a novel, technologically demanding world unlike the one that nurtured me. Thats for starters.

NEDS seems to be a dis-ease of our times of "inforuption". I understand it, but thank God, I don't carry a pager, don't have 250 corporate emails a day, don't tote a cell phone, and live in a "love" environment that Yahoo Senior Executive Tim Sanders says is the "killer App" against NEDS. It sounds fuzzy but the man has a well-articulated point and the statistics to back up his arguments. Here's how NEDS is described; see if you see yourself here:

NEDS is a self-reinforcing depression brought on by information overload and frequent interruption leading to an erosion of close personal relationships. Symptoms of NEDS include anxiety, exhaustion, burn-out, difficulty making decisions, irritability, sadness, and sleep disturbances. Tim believed underlying many of these symptoms is information overload. For example information workers scan hundreds of pages of information daily while enduring a constant flow of interruptions from cell phones, blackberries, instant messaging and pagers. At the same time, many people lack quality interaction in relationships. Some of us even email the person in the cubicle next to us instead of walking five feet to ask a question. There are also countless others whose primary communications and contact occurs in cyberspace. This combination of information overload, constant interruption and social isolation can be emotionally and physically devastating.

Nevertheless, as an indication that I need to get out more, I'll confess that I heard this interview with Mr. Sanders on Windows Media Player (WebTalkGuys) while multitasking in the middle of a gorgeous autumn afternoon. I rest my case.

Grabbing my Fancy

Start a shoe tree in your neighborhood. (Ours would be sadly bare... too few feet in these here parts. And it would be full of old boots). Thanks for da linkBoynton. Enjoy your spring!

Make Green Goo (wish we had kids as an excuse to concoct this wonderful blob on a rainy saturday!)

I can't stop coming up with captions for this picture. I'll spare you. Make your own. Send them as comments. It just begs for comments, y'all. Keep it clean. This weblog is rated G for grampa (or was it Grumpy?)

One of my favorite pictures of our Head of State. And a well-written article on Bush's Religion by Jim Wallis... a man I've watched walk the talk for twenty years.

My favoritest radio station, WNCW in Spindale, NC... what a great eclectic mix of music. Not kidding. Dar Williams on now... the Babysitter's Here. Great.

Eye Candy for storm watchers like moi. Thanks, Mark.

Stop it! I mean NOW! Stand back from that keyboard. You'll be glad you did. Your wrists will hug you for it.

It's not too late for you to drive away in a 1989 Volvo 740 Turbo Sedan that still has some remnants of leather interior and also a steering wheel. Looks like I'll be driving it for a while til the doc can figure out why my Dakota Truck has coughed up a lung (well, a radiator) for the second time in eight months. The Volvo actually has ample headroom and I actually can sit up straight--if I open the sunroof.

Well that's all til I get some coffee in me and rub me some considerable puppy belly to ease the separation anxieties of a certain mongrel thankfully contained on the other side of the barricade that makes this my room and that one, his. Last night we had the horrible thought, as Tsuga with great difficulty alligator crawled under our bed at lights-out. What if he is growing so fast that in the morning, we'll have to call the Jaws of Life at 911 to get him out! And while on the subject of Hisself, when Ann asked for a daily review of his behavior when she got home from work yesterday, I actually found myself using the words "Tsuga" and "sweet" in the same sentence. Eureka!

I can't promise you I won't add to this list during the day. I have that lean and hungry look and can't be trusted. But you know that.

Why...

...is this building in the wrong contest? Hmmm?

Spaces Between Words

Or, the sound of one lip talking. (link via BoingBoing)...

Hear the "language-free political debate" from California that deletes the meaningless campaign words from the podium and leaves the, er, ums, uhs, uh, and such.

Hey man, I'm loving this DSL. I listened to the wise wordlessness of every one of the candidates there in a mere fraction of the 30 minutes it would have taken on dial-up!

Anybody Lose a Shoe?

There's a lot happening over at the newly spiffed up Proboscis site, and most of this activity involves those squinty eyed bugs called curculionids... Weevils to most of you... and this informative blog originates, if I'm not way wrong here, from the very campus of Weevil State University. Get on over to Proboscis and sign up for a few hours of credit. Possum-related curricula are still open for enrollment.

Carnival a Three Ring Circus

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is up again, and the Fat Lady with the moustache and the Dancing Elephants are in fine form over at Pathetic Earthlings. Get in on the act. But watch your step. The elephants got into the prunes again.

Cidermaking Musicmakers

I don't think the boys would object to me spreading the good word about some good music. I must say it went down especially well with good friends, cold cider and Killian's Red on a crisp September day. The fellas in the picture represent the core of the New Roanoke Jug Band, and brought along the traditional musical jug, several washboards and a kazoo. They'll be playing at Oddfellows in Floyd on October 25 and we'll be going if you want to join us there. Bet ya can't sit still. Below, from Bluegrass Now:

"For some raw, unadulterated old-time music, the New Roanoke Jug Band's "Play It For A Long Time" is the album for you. Inspired by the Roanoke Jug Band's music of the late-1920s, native Virginians Jay Griffin (fiddle, washboard), Scott Baldwin (guitar, banjo, jug, slide guitar), and Andrew Thomas (bass) offer a number of blues, rags, and songs that evoke nostalgic images from the front porches of rural America. With over 78 minutes of music (24 tracks), this album is jam-packed with uncluttered, energetic picking and singing.

Besides tunes from their namesake, the band draws material from such sources as the Carolina Tar Heels, Andrew and Jim Baxter, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, Hobart Smith, Jimmie Strothers, Frank Stokes, and Clarence Ashley. This album also contains four bonus tracks, recorded by the original Roanoke Jug Band in 1929. For a hot time in the old town tonight, this album will get you singing, toe-tapping, hooting and hollering right along. On "Play It For A Long Time," Baldwin, Griffin and Thomas are ably assisted by six friends (Jim Barnhill, Russ Harbaugh, Kinney Rorrer, Kirk and Lisa Sutphin, and Mac Traynham) on some of the CD's tracks." (review by Joe Ross, staff writer, Bluegrass Now)

Walnut: Nut of the Gods ~ Part One

Somebody once said that the best kind of wood to cut for your wood stove was whatever you've got. We've got tulip poplar; and we've got walnut. We've got lots of walnut, and this year, they're bearing a bumper crop of nuts. Yesterday I watched a little red squirrel hoist one up the maple off the front porch, its silhouette at first puzzling, looking like a hydrocephalic rat on a limb... the nut was three times the size of the head, which I couldn't see for the round, green nut. I understand that the oaks haven't done much in the way of acorns this year, so walnuts will have to take over for our squirrels. We might include some walnut in our diet again this year, too, for that matter.

The nuts, husks and all, fall from three trees that arch over the road down by the barn. The couple of vehicles that come down the road each day run over the nuts that have fallen on the gravel road the night before and dehusk and even break a few of them. And so at first light, I'll stand at the window with a cup of coffee and watch the crows, clever fellows, picking the meats out of shells way harder than they could crack, even with their impressive black bills. The nuts are falling in the yard by the road, too, and every year when I think of fall, it's associated at least once when I almost fall because my foot's come down on a perfectly round hidden walnut underfoot on the slope where I'm mowing the grass under one of the trees. One or more of these trees probably should come out; they're shading the garden, and although the closest is maybe 25 feet or more away, the roots and leaves of walnuts produce juglone that is toxic to many plants and stunts or prevents their growth. The stuff is so toxic that crushed walnut shells were used (among other plants, including our very abundant Poke Sallat) to stun fish.

Walnut is a close relative of butternut and pecan, and all of these nut trees can be useful for dyes used in coloring yarn and also in basket-making to create a brown or gray color. Walnuts will color the hands of a picker as well. Once we lived near some "less fortunate" folk who supplemented their welfare check by collecting, shelling, and selling walnuts. One of the little gals knocked on our door. She'd called first, said she was bringing us something. A while later, there was a knock on the door. I was stunned: the child's arms were a sickly gray-black, fingertips to elbows. This was the first time I'd seen just what a powerful stain comes out of those husks. So, we'll be wearing rubber gloves during the harvest this year.

Juglans nigra or Juglans regia is the scientific name in the US and Europe, respectively. Regia, of course, denotes royalty, and the genus, Juglans, is a contraction of Jovis glans, meaning regal nut of Jupiter. It was believed that only the gods ate walnuts, while us common sorts ate chestnuts and acorns. Interesting to note in the following a possible connection between nuts and manhood:

Walnuts were thrown to Roman wedding guests by the groom to bring good health, to ward off disease and increase fertility. Young boys eagerly scrambled for the tossed walnuts, as the groom's gesture indicated his passage into manhood. In Rome, the walnut was thought to enhance fertility, yet in Romania, a bride would place one roasted walnut in her bodice for every year she wished to remain childless. During the Middle Ages, Europeans believed walnuts would ward off fevers, witchcraft, epileptic fits, the evil eye, and even lightning. The Chinese believe crickets to be a creature of good omen, and would often carry musically-trained crickets in walnut shells covered with intricately-carved patterns.

Well, I've way passed the average blogger attention span with this little woodsy tale, but only half finished, so you'll just have to hold your horses, folks, to see how this Uncle Remus story comes out. Meanwhile, I got to get me one of those cricket thingies. Wonder if I could train the little critter to sing "When You Wish Upon a Star"?

I Brake for Toads

The rolling turmoil of green hills has nestled under a soft comforter of down, lying out for miles into the distance, just below the broad gray blanket of cloud. I have seen it many times like this-- the highest point in my trip down Stonewall toward the hiway. It always gives us something. Sometimes we can look out over the little cleft of pastured valley beyond the standing worn-empty farmhouses and see all the way to the Buffalo. At times like tonight though, the view is pressed down to this thin bright sliver between the comforter above and the skin of autumn aging below. Tonight, it was raining. And there was an odd smell coming in my open window. Even though I'd be late for my meeting, I'd better get out and check this out, wetness be damned.

I am a product of cities, an obligate parasite on those who care to ratchet and calibrate and rimfrazzle the dingalongs of car engines. Consequently, I feel a certain unaccustomed manliness on the few occasions I actually pull the latch and lift the hood of my truck. Not that there was anyone close by to be impressed by my handiness, as I stood there gawking into a dirty hood, umbrella in hand (the best mechanics always keep one handy, I'm sure). Ah, I said to nobody, there's the source of my mystery smell: a rather elaborate mouse nest of kleenex and shreds of a rug I didn't recognize (not my vehicles upholstery this time) sitting on the hot engine block. If there was a mouse in there, he was now poached properly for disposal into the bed of the truck along with the other tied plastic bags I didn't take time to toss at the green boxes. Gotta hurry along to my meeting.

It rained so hard we could barely carry on the discussion, and I wondered more with each tireless speaker if I could get home across the low-water bridge with this much rain. It blew across the road in sheets. White-knuckled, I was happy for each mile toward home, especially those without the headlights of folks working just as hard to stay on the road as our headlights blinded each other for that tense close encounter between the white lines edging submerged pavement. The lightning was spectacular, but made me remember I had not shut of the computer before I left. I dreaded the "I told you so" from a certain wife if I lost any portion of my system from this oversight.

There was that smell again, and it couldn't be mouse this time. Whhooomph! came a muffled noise from under the hood, and the temp gauge swung immediately over to HOT just as I should have turned back down the deserted darkness of Stonewall headed home. It was a half mile to the Southern States. Nobody there, but some lights overhead, some shelter from the rain; maybe a phone, maybe some water to fill the radiator? No phone, no water, no signs of life. Think brain think. What would McGiver do here stranded in the middle of our own private hurricane? Ah! A resource: the trash in the back of the truck. Found: a milk carton. Fill it with water running off the roof of the Feed n' Seed. And so after ten minutes of chasing the wind-whipped torrent of roof water, I had a pint... enough to pour into my radiator and hear it spatter immediately onto the blacktop. Okay, McGiver, I'm SOL. Help me here. What would you do?

He would impose on the kindness of strangers. He would stand outside the lighted window, outside the fence, bewaring of the certain large dog that would come out the door after some indeterminate period of arm waving and whistling. Sure enough, after some soggy period of time (by now wet to my skivvies and looking like flotsam from Mr. Crusoe's beach) a young lady came to the door and invited me in to use the phone. Ann was home from her own meeting, having battled the squalls north as I battled them west. After what seemed like hours sitting in my exsanguinated truck fogging up the windows, she arrived. I was so frazzled, in very uncharacteristic fashion, I didn't even insist that I drive. Being a passenger in the car with my wife of thirty-something years is not a familiar experience, and it has lead to a recognition of more major differences between my dearest and me. She does not brake for toads.

Come Fly With Me

Time for said rostral portions to come up off the grindstone for a few minutes to play. I'd bookmarked Terrafly weeks ago, for later, 'when I get DSL' because it was painfully slow with dialup. Now it--well-- FLYS! You can move more or less continuously over any given terrain at various degrees of magnification, or altitude, as it were.

I've already learned some things about a couple of places around here, as in one thing in relationship to another, the fact that there are a couple of ponds not far from here that I didn't know about... but then if you know me, it's like Ann says: set me down with a map of Tinbuktu and I'm happy as a pig in mud. (Note: the link will open a 'control' subwindow and a "FlyFrame windows" where the actual images will appear.. may take a few seconds). Fly careful, now, ya hear?

Faster

We just had DSL service connected (not a very fast one, mind you, but f a s t e r than before.) Curiously, I find I feel that I have to type faster, read faster and compose faster. Oh my gah, I hope my fingers were ready for this latest technology. Mayhaps I should get them some little running shoes.

P.S. Please read this quickly and report back to me at once if you see any improvements so I can feel like I'm getting my moneysworth. Hurry!

The Cider Makin'

In an attempt to keep my rostral portions to the abrasive wheel this morning, I'll just post this picture from yesterday's cider making at our friend Joe's. A good time and a great deal of fresh liquid autumn in a cup was had by all... not to mention the great music, with maybe some pix of the musicians up here in a bit-- if I can be duly responsible and actually finish something as I ought. Ah, but to just slip outside in a few minutes after Ann leaves for work and the house is quiet-- to watch the sun, slower to rise each day, begin to wake the birds on the morning of their trip south, hear the first drip drip of last night's dew from what leaves remain on the maples by the branch, feel the invigorating autumness of the dawn air... surely that would help me do an even better job when I settle down for real and get to work. Just maybe thirty minutes sitting out back in a lawnchair with a cup of coffe, that's all.

And the Muse said: Don't make me come down there!

Guess I'd better be shakin' it here, boss. See ya later.

Gee Whiz

About 20 miles as the dodo bird flies, due north of Goose Creek, lies this massive Terascale Cluster at Virginia Tech. Think of the recipes you could store on this puppy; and Mindsweeper? It'll blow your hat in the creek.

Food for Thought

I'm still happy with the beta of FeedDemon as a News Aggregator, and find that yes, I do use it every day and moreso as I find RSS feeds that interest me (as opposed to some of the preloaded geeky places the software offers from the git-go... but there are also many sources I've kept from their initial offerings). The field is certainly growing, and there are almost too many aggregators to chose from. I'll see what happens when my free beta expires. The suggested $29 charge will force me to look around some more. But so far, I like what I see.

And oh, for both of you who use them, your News Reader can bring a fresh copy of Fragments right to your door each morning. Fragments RSS Feed here.

The Sound of One Hand Typing

I had the opportunity a few weeks back to read something to a small group of writers that I planned later in the week to read to a larger group of listeners at the little Floyd Writer's Group's first "Spoken Word" night at a local eatery. New to the group, they are still trying to get to know who I am, and what and how I write. Having read the practice piece, one of the group commented that the words had such a nice rhythm in spoken form, did I write the piece to be read?

"Effective writing has the illusion of speech without its bad habits" .I don't know that I've ever written something with reading it aloud as the end purpose. But I can say that if I am really concerned about the feel of the sounds the words make, their order in making my point or desired sensory effect or just plain making sense, I print the piece and read it aloud... mostly last year to Buster; lately to myself as Tsuga has not developed the critic's ear just yet (only the critics's teeth). Chip Scanlon makes just this point in a quote from Don Murray: that it is "the ear, not the eye, that is the final editor". Elsewhere I've seen it suggested that a further refinement in this process is to ask someone else to read it back to you because you will hear things in it... flaws of logic, timing, word combinations... that you will miss if you are both reader and author.

I guess this article grabbed me because I so agree with this relationship between the written and the spoken word. I'll have an opportunity to convert page lines to air waves again this week, recording another little essay for the radio. It may be weeks before it airs. I'll let ya know.

Alpha Male ~ Ownership

Today, September 19, 2003, at 1:30 p.m. EDT... at the age of 11 weeks and after five weeks of careful consideration and thorough background checks, Tsuga (Chewga, Shoega, Barricuda, and other aliases apply) has decided to keep the place. We officially signed our property over to him because he gave us no other options. Why 1:30 on this particular day, I do not know... only that at that point, like somebody flipped an internal switch, he was no longer content to just hang out on or near the back porch. It was as if he realized "I belong here; and here; and over there" and his perimeter of confidence expanded across Goose Creek like a supernova. He claimed the branch beside the house, running back and forth in the silty bottom snatching jewelweeds out of the ground, dragging them along behind him like streamers, in a most celebratory fashion. He climbed high on the hill behind the house-- farther than he has ever gone before, even with one of us. And as you see here, Tsuga has lost his suspicions about the moving water, and made sure there was a clause in the agreement giving him water rights.

And, adding no small portion of additional status to a pup already too big for his britches, today Tsuga became a hunter: he stole an already-dead soggy female goldfinch from the cat; and alas, he discovered a Darwinian reject from a litter of chipmunks over on the New Road that had just enough life in it to claim it as a "kill". Actually, he has already discovered the Carcass Redemption Program with which Buster was so familiar. "I give you this very dead groundhog carcass I've been carrying around since catching him over behind the barn, you give me a puppy cookie in exchange". It is a form of canine barter we had best just get used to again.

The dog we brought home five weeks ago could easily walk under the belly of the long-legged dog that stands peeking over the barricade at me in the other room right now. It's rather frightening, really. It brings to mind the childhood images I have of Baby Huey, the gargantuan diapered dimwitted duck. And there are other memories of things getting too big too fast. When I was small, I often heard my mother refer to fast-growing things as "growing like Topsy"; I haven't the foggiest notion the source of this little phrase... perhaps someone can enlighten me, since we will be needing a variety of descriptors to account for Mr. Mushroom here. In our family, we experienced a small boy, our son Nathan, who as all children do, suddenly enlarged like Alice eating the Bigger Pill. Someone commented on how he had grown, to which Nate replied "Yeth! I went out in da garn and growed!" He had heard us so often talk about things growing in the garden, he just assumed that his having been out there amongst the tomotoes and squash and tall corn accounted for his sudden spurt in height. In which case, I'd better turn on electric fence and keep Baby Tsuga out of the garn at all costs!

Previous posts about the struggle to be the Alpha Male around here...

Prickly Tease(L)

Wish I'd snapped this one. Teasel is an old friend, and I remember the first time we met.

Long centuries ago my systematic botany class from Auburn took a field trip to North Georgia to see things you can't see in southern Alabama during a hot summer semester (as everything bakes to clinkers by mid-June, you see). In each car, there was one driver and 3 to 5 botanical rubber-neckers stalking for new specimens to add to our required class collections.

Whoosh! "What was that!?" one of us cried as a tall unknown zoomed past. Screech! Driver slammed on the breaks, and a volunteer (that would be me) jumped out and ran back a few hundred yards along the Georgia secondary highway to fetch the plant for keying. Grabbing it to make a quick getaway, I immediately appreciated the uncuddly nature of the plant. It is covered with short, stout clear spines (as is apparent in this photograph). I let go, quickly. It bites.

I've hoped since early July to get a picture of the teasel patch growing across from the Pilot Post Office; I've seen it every time I've hurried past going somewhere I should have been 15 minutes ago. It is not terribly picturesque and good photographs not easily obtained, requiring just the right lighting to do it justice. I never got the image, so am thankful for this one at North Coast Cafe. I did not know, however, that the little rain-filled basins at the axils of its leaves harbor microcreatures. Some day, when I get the two toys I still really, really need (a microscope and a telescope), I'll go see who lives commensally with my old friend Teasel. Rotifers? Protozoa, certainly. Maybe, oh maybe... Water bears?

Harvest Time

... and Buster is not here to help us dig potatoes.

So many things about ol' Buster we took for granted. How he anticipated our plans, cooperated with our tasks without complaint, enjoyed whatever the job of the day happened to be, as long as he was part of it and especially if it involved him getting to ride in the truck... even if it was just to the end of the valley. Tsuga, some day, when he outgrows his baby teeth and baby self-absorption, will be a joy to be around, feel like he belongs, happily be a member of our little family. But Buster was one of a kind, kind and sensitive to a fault. I don't think Tsuga will ever be guilty of being too gentle, more like Tina Turner... he likes to do everything... nice... and rough.

Goulash and Galoshes

By Fridays, my biorhythms are cycled around to the lowish point, and it shows up in the blog. I look at my little notebook of things I could say and it looks like the picked-over carcass of last week's water buffalo. I ought to be content just to keep my mouth shut on Fridays and say nothing at all. But no.

Of course, we survived the night without incident. We had way worse storms this past spring than what Isabel brought us, at least this far west, while a dozen or so people are dead, east, because of the hurricane. I took the dog out at 4:00 when his alarm went off (coincidentally with our electric alarm). I stepped out into humid, warm darkness full of the vapors of African rains spun over and over near the edge of the atmosphere and finally dropped on Goose Creek. There was just enough light that I could the house is basted in wet maple leaves like yellow sequins on a fall dress, our leaves blown in place overnight by alien winds coming from all directions, swirling cyclonic torrents of air. We got a few inches of rain but the creek's roar is tame enough this morning. I can't see how high it is yet, but I'm certain I'll be able to get over it later today in the truck to start working on some of the summer's deadfall. Lord knows I didn't need Isabel to make any more work for me, firewood-wise. Leave it on the stump 'til we need it, please mam.

We had expected this weekend to entertain my good friend Dennis, and his wife and "their" six year old (it's a his and hers family, blended as they say). But sparing me the details, he called yesterday to say only that they just couldn't make it. I could hear the exhaustion in his voice, and I understand. Lives are just so busy and full of obligation and responsibility that by the time it comes to booking your discretionary time, all you can do with it is try to recover before the next wave surges in. Well. Better to travel hopefully, as I say. I had looked forward to some 'face time' with a true friend, in those years we worked together, that knows where I've been, who could come here and see where I am and offer perspective on this so-called life as we know it. And it's just one more sign that old friendships get harder and harder to maintain -- not that more evidence was needed. This friendship, too, is being diluted as the years apart make the waters between us deeper, wider, isolating us from those shared times that get harder and harder to recall. I had thought the weblog would be a way of keeping my life a bit more accessible to old friends like him-- he in particular had requested once that if I ever wrote anything else like (whatever it was I'd written), be sure and tell him. I've written every day for the past 15 months now. I've told him (and others) several times about Fragments, and he's not once visited. I'm disappointed, but my expectations of folks these days are set low enough that I'm hardly surprised.

Last biweekly topic at the Ecotone was "islands and place". I didn't participate because I thought I didn't know anything about islands. But I guess I could have. Sometimes this place seems like a remote and lonely island. Especially on a wet gray morning after a hurricane.

Too Whupped to read?

Then listen! All about bedbugs (coming soon to a interstate motel near you!) and an interview with Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger and called the "the Anne Frank of this war."

It's Raining, It's Pouring...

the old man is snoring. Went to bed and he bumped his head and didn't get up in the morning. I'm sorry. Don't know where that one came from....a old girl's jumprope song, I think. I'm losing it. Well, as I was saying... it's raining 'right smart' and the leaves are blowing sideways (with way too many of them landing on my roof, soon to be in my gutters on the high side of the house where my 20 ft ladder doesn't reach). We're looking at some winds up to 60 mph later tonight, but if it follows the typical pattern, we'll not get anything like the folks who have built up on the ridges.

Down in the valley at the house, we hear the angry winds rasping away at the trees on the crests, but unless they are from the south, which is uncommon, there are few unimpeded winds along our little stretch of Goose Creek. It's been raining since 1:00 and the ground is fully saturated by now, I reckon, so what we get between now and daylight will pond up and find its way to the creeks. Ann doesn't have to go in til after noon tomorrow, so we at least won't have to face this mess in the dark in the morning, provided the house weathers the storm without problems, and we trust this will be the case.

Ann and Tsuga just came in looking like drownded rats. The rain freaks the dog... he can't figure out who's flinging the water in his face and he gets mad and growls, then gets the run-around-crazies because it feels so good to him to be wet and cool. Silly mutt. Uhoh... lights are flicking, I'd better get this little update outta here. Hope to be around in the morning.

Nighty night. And don't let the bedbugs bite. Hey. That's a post for tomorrow.

The Big Blow

Time to clean the junk out of the back of the truck so I can haul home a truckbed full of milk and bread. Storm's coming, and everybody knows that human metabolism requires extra allotments of these vital nutrients before a storm (but mysteriously, not during or after). Actually, I mentioned this at the Express Mart last night (while buying these particular items) and the girl at the register says, nah, it's cigarettes and beer that are the hot items. S'anyway, we're fixed for the necessities as Isabel now seems to be veering more east of here, bringing us 45 mph gusts according to the latest guess. But there are still some things that need tending, soon as it gets light.

Got to pull the boards that we've laid down across the creek... our makeshift bridge. Since we almost always wear our 'barn boots' on our pasture walks, the boards are more for getting the mower over the ankle-deep water. By this time tomorrow, the creek could be waist deep... or higher, and the not-inexpensive treated lumber washed downstream, hung up in the middle branches of an alder along Goose Creek.

It's been chilly enough lately that, after this storm passes, we are probably going to need to start our first little fire in the woodstove. For this, the purist needs the perfect twigs. We are a wee bit snobbish about our twigs, especially Ann, who only choses the top grade. Twigging has been a great family hobby for years. And now Tsuga will be oh so much help in this, later this morning, before the rains come in.

Better go over and secure the big barn doors so they don't blow open; put extra ballast on the tarps covering my firewood; pull the truck and Nate's old Volvo up into the drive, just in case the water comes up higher than we've seen it in four years. The lifers from the valley tell of some serious high water down here from hurricanes in past years before we moved here. I've looked at the topo, wondering what path we might take to the road up top of the ridge behind us, should the valley see a hundred-year flood and we have to hike our way out of here.

Now about this old Volvo: could I interest anybody in a 1989 740 Turbo sedan with 165K miles? The car dealerships just laugh at me. I could put a fer sale sign on it out by the garden, and in a month, eight people would see it. Asking $2000 or best offer. Hey, it's Nate's college tuition sitting out there. Maybe I should park it in the creek tonight and hope it gets washed away... worth more dead than alive?

Stay tuned. I'll update this hippy-dippy weather report as the day goes on, as long as we have power. Meanwhile, here's what the radar looks like... we are a stone's throw from the Nexrad tower just up the hill.. the FCX on the map.

This is Your Web

This is Your Web on Speed

I was telling somebody about this the other day. First saw these aberrant spidery webs illustrated twenty years ago, and they have now resurfaced via a link at Exclamation Mark.

I just have to wonder if I couldn't spin beautiful coherent sentences if it weren't for caffeine, beer and cashews. Sigh.

Cemetery

We lived with a cemetery for a neighbor. It stood on the hill above our first country house. From the gentle crest I once judged you could see three hundred square miles of Virginia valley farmland and the little town five miles east. It was the only cemetery where I knew some of the names on the shiny granite tombstones... the family names were those of our neighbors whose families had lived in this part of the county for more than a century, and here they left their dead. Some of the stones bore the names of people we knew from the little country church-- alive, having outlived a spouse, their name already engraved on the matching headstone, the date left eerily blank.

Cemeteries are places we avoid, but should seek out. We flee from signs of our mortality. We should grapple with them instead, not morbidly, but as a means of reorienting the maps by which we live so that the steps we take in life are guided by the shadow of death. I will fear no evil.

I shouldn't be writing briefly on this matter. There is so much to say, especially in autumn, a season of endings, of turning in, when there is so much dying just outside my door and life goes underground til resurrection begins in January and becomes apparent again in April flowers. But I wanted to share with you a visual cemetery I find remarkably poignant and beautiful.

Don't walk here today if you don't have time to view it contemplatively. Click on each of the tiny crosses and see each season in turn. Be sure you have sound turned on from the very first frame. Regardless of your understanding of death and eternity, you cannot fail but be touched by the photographer's selection of images, his marvelous use of just enough interactive effects, and the wonderful painting of light taken from the beautiful world of the cemetery. Pass it on.

Go North, Young Man

Pay a visit to relative blog newcomer North Coast Cafe. Seems a nice place to hang out, with a pleasant ambience and a readerly feel to the site. Don't make the mistake I did and assume it comes from the North of the West Coast. Nah. As in Great Lakes coastal. You can read there of another lost pet, a pointless calamity, poor kitty.

Carnival's First Birthday Edition

And many more.... Go over to BigWig's warren and thank him for conjuring up the first Carnival of the Vanities a year ago, still going stronger than ever. Catch the anniversary edition up today!

Don't Try This at Home

Freshman's nuclear fusion reactor has USU physics faculty in awe.

Okay. I'm emboldened to invent the first WayBack Machine in my barn. Think I'll go back to the Eisenhower years. See you then.

Alpha Male ~ A Hole Month (sic)

An Uneasy Peace: "I dare you to step over that line, said Calvin the cat."

All puppy all the time. Not the blog, mercifully. Just everything else around here, now that we are 'celebrating' our one month anniversary since bringing home Tsuga the Barracuda. He's been with us (24/7) long enough that on first seeing each other in the morning or on the rare occasions I leave (the kennel where we live) and return, there is the joy of hello, followed almost instantly by knuckle-gnawing with me as the gnawee. It's just me he wants to masticate. And hump. A guy thing, I guess. But we're getting there, and he is growing (and I cannot emphasize that word boldly enough) into a pup someone would want to be around. Not quite there yet. Not quite.

Yesterday we forgot that we were housebroken. Standing verily at my feet in the kitchen after having been outside for a half hour he squats down and unloads a pint of pee on the throw rug, dribbling a trail as I vociferously carry him at arms length out the door. Is this a form of canine defiance? a sign of deep-seated emotional trauma? or, as I suspect, rebellious psychological hazing of would-be masters? Hmmm. The most egregious sin this week involved an open pantry door. Don't tempt a good dog to go bad. Or Tsuga, either. He found a large unopened pack of saltines and first crushed them into a fine powder inside the wrapper (like we used to do in grade school before pouring this crackerdust into our mouths or our soup.) Then he expertly incised a large distribution hole in the wrapper and did one of those Family Circus zigzagging romps all over the first floor of Chez Tsuga, spreading pixie dust in a remarkably uniform pattern across 300 square feet of hardwood floor and rug. For an instant there I thought I was trapped in a really bad Hoover Vacuum commercial, but the cheerful housewife in the lace apron never came. Damn dog.

He has his tender moments. Missing for a moment this morning, we looked up to find his little face peeking innocently out of a large wicker basket where we put our boots. I think he's telling us it's time he had his own place; I am adamant that he will not get the keys to my truck at this time, however. Perhaps his most endearing moments are when he tells us he is ready to rest (Oh joy!) by hiding under our feet wherever we are standing (and does the same thing under flexed legs on the john, which is not so cute). He wimpers like an overtired child in need of a nap. Especially on the hardwood floor, his feet slide toward all four compass points. He just collapses when he can take it no more, all fours splayed out, belly flat against the floor: a dog can't get more two-dimensional than this. He looks for all the world like the hide of a coon tacked on the barn wall, a tawny yellow X against oak, and he is dead to the world, saving up energy for his next romp du jour. Enjoy naptime while it lasts, mister. Cause White Fang gonna rise again.

~ Read other Alpha Male tales ~

Quoth the Raven...

Quoth the Raven...

• The Risk of a Senior Moment:

"Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car." Evan Davis
• Well I'm glad somebody understands why I'm so tired:

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." Albert Camus
• How'd we end up with these crummy joints?

"I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either." Jack Benny
• Greater Tuna, Lesser Floyd:

"The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O." Martin Mull
• And Tsuga argues:

"No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation." Fran Lebowitz

-- from Quotes of the Day

Isabel Isa Proaching

Not out of the woods yet. Here's the latest map from the NOAA Hurricane center. Goose Creek is somewhere directly below the "V" in WV on the map. Looks like coastal NC and VA are in for a rough day or two.

Today is Brought to You by the Letter B

B from Venomous Kate (can you find Fragments?) and B from OneFineJay (also Fragmented link to the letter B).

Also today happy for visits from the interestingly written Gangstories (with a nice blogroll link, thanks!) and several visits over the last several days from a useful aggregation of links called JournalistExpress. UPDATE: Never mind. I just got comment spam from this site. DON'T GO THERE!

I'm thankful for my blogging community today, you make a difference in my odd hermetic life, and you broaden my horizons. Go look especially today at this evocative description of an island that is no longer an island off the coast of Newcastle, Australia where Jenny and Geoff and kids give us Mulubinba Moments, complete with some great photos.

Noontime news says western Virgina where we are will likely be spared the worst of Isabel. Eastern Virginia, however, is in for a very rough time of it, it now seems. Keep those people in your prayers, folks.

Engines of Calamity

I don't know how things are where you live, but around here, if something's broke and you can't fix it yourself, you might as well throw it in a sinkhole and forget it. The day of the 'fix-it' handy man seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. The unofficial backyard-garage repair shops that use to adorn every neighborhood are disappearing. I've asked around: Who can I take this balky generator to for a carburetor kit? Who sharpens handsaws? Know anybody with a spare Stihl AV26 handle bushing? Nope. Not a clue. The small engines that couldn't are accumulating all across the county.

The prevailing thought appears to be, if it's broken, toss it and get another one. There are a few official lawn and garden shops left in our area. They are the ones that you wouldn't go to unless you were desperate... they charge you and arm and leg and make you miserable with their indifference and surly attitude... and these days, if you want something fixed, you are desperate and they got you by the tender parts, Jack.

Even so, with Isabel bearing down on us, following the same track that Fran did back before we moved here (but we've heard horror stories), t'would be nice if both chain saw and generator were in working order. We could be barricaded in down here by fallen trees and flooded creeks for a week. Got plenty of propane for cooking, wood for heat, and an artesian well that can give us milkjugs of water for washing, drinking and flushing. The chainsaw works; but the generator don't gen. We'd lose what's in the fridge and freezer; can't just stick the rump roast out on the north side of the house in an icechest, or stuff it in a snowbank, like you can in a winter storm.

It is a strange feeling we suffer at the hand of our abilities to prognosticate. When this house was built in the 1870's, the people who lived here hadn't a clue of a storms arrival until the shingles began peeling off the corn crib roof. We, on the other hand, have the benefit and bane of foreknowledge without certainty. We will prepare for the worst and pray for the best. There is only so much preparation one can do against the massive energies generated by oceans and air.

When it comes, if it comes, no matter how much defense we make against it, we will be helpless spectators... mere observers of the physics of forces holding trees in place and those which would snap them apart, lay them down like summer corn in a thunderstorm. Then again, sometimes helplessness and a sense of our own frailty is just what we need to reset the gauge by which we determine our place in this world... an antidote against human arrogance and false self-sufficiency. I'll try to remember this if...when... the mindless engines of weather howl over our rooftop in the dark on Thursday night.

Running against the wind

Some of you wonder why the photos of the T-dog have stopped coming. It's because he has not stopped going; and going; and going. Which is of course what young creatures seem to do, no matter whether they have two legs or four. Fine. Got to challange those motor pathways, create new circuits that promote coordination, overload muscles to build strength. I'm all for play. But none of this is compatible with a digital camera slow to focus on motion, and with a lagging stutter in the electronic shutter; sometimes I miss my old Minolta SLR with the fast mechanical parts. These two images were taken shutter-priority at 125th second... not fast enough; obviously. I'll go to 250 next time.

Meanwhile, everywhere that Tsuga goes, he is r u n n i n g.... top image (ears UP) is from up the valley near our 'meditation point'; and bottom image (ears DOWN) from the pasture, the barn is in the background shadows.

(Psssst: can somebody tell me how to put these images side by side without using an html table?)

UPDATE: Thanks, Ian, who writes that the two images appear side by side in his browser. Mine too, if I maximize the window. Duh!

Carnival Turns One

Gee. Seems like just yesterday there were a mere handful of us little Vanities squirming around looking for readers in the very first bigwig-inspired Carnival #1. This week, CoV turns ONE, and I'm betting there will be a really good turnout. Come on, jump in... ol' bigwig is getting no sleep with a newborn in the house, might as well pile it higher and deeper. Just watch him. He'll get it all ready for posting with one hand tied behind his back. Send your best shot to bigwig AT nc.rr.com, and bring your noise makers and funny hats and join the craziness at Silflay Hraka on Wednesday. Y'all.

This is Your Brain

This is your brain on microwave.

At least it's too late for me to become senile prematurely. I also will never die young, live fast, or leave a good looking corpse. But that's another matter.

Leave out the Middle

Aoccdrnig to rsereach at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

I could not find the source of this 'research', only lots of folks quoting this block of text. Interesting. I think I may start writing my entire blog this way. What! You say? I already do?

Idiot Dreams

Sometimes I guess its okay to have insomnia so that I will appreciate those more typical nights when I actually sleep most of the time I'm in bed. Not gonna happen now, so I might as well give my fidgetty body something to entertain it. And so, hello. It's 2:00 a.m. and I have spent the past four hours locked out of the Sanctuary of Somnolence; or maybe I should say, in self-imposed exile-- my own worst enemy. Watching Blackhawk Down! on DVD off and on all day Saturday probably had much to do with my restlessness and unease. I don't generally indulge in watching movies of any kind on my computer... it just seems too decadant and lazy (not that I sit any harder to watch a computer movie than to blog). The awful true story of our failed "regime change" in Somalia hit just a wee bit too close to home in the light of the current quadmire where our young men and women face the same angry crowds who would gladly tear them apart.

It's way too warm tonight. I hadn't anticipated this because I was watching a movie all day, and did not pay my usual homage to the weather radars. Must have had a tropical airmass move over us from the east, I dunno. We went to sleep with all the windows closed because it has been so very cool of a night lately. When I finally got up, I was stuffy, claustrophobic, and I was filled with a vague sense of dread. All the bedclothes but the sheet on my side were on the floor. I was amazed how balmy the night air felt on my bare legs when I took the dog out a few minutes ago. Stepping on a cat-saliva-soaked dead mouse on the welcome mat in the dark I think was the last straw against sleep. The dog has been getting on my last nerve all night. Just when I might possibly be able to doze off, he is awake, restless too, chewing on the metal frame of the bed; pleasuring himself with gutteral slurping noises; or hiccupping, making percussive sounds like a hammer dropped on a trampoline, over and over and over.

It's hard to say on nights like this which is the chicken and which is the egg. Do the jumbled near-dreams cause sleeplessness, or are they the result of the absence of delta waves of deep sleep? The particulars of idiot dreams vary, but the theme is familiar to me, and perahaps to you as well, from nights when dreams go badly or not at all. This kind of non-dream always has to do with frustration and futility. I've just spent several hours in a mental sheltered workshop trying to create blog template changes using the menu from my digital camera. Or vice versa. I keep retracing my steps, but can't figure out where I'm going wrong. I can't quite remember the details because they come from non-sense. This is not the kind of thing that lays down memory traces. While I may benefit from remembering dreams, this static I do not want to remember. I just want to wipe the slate clean, squelch the noise, lie down and sink deliciously into the cool sheets and be enveloped by the soft oblivion of a warm ocean of sleep. With no slurping.

Okay. There are no noises of bedchewing or hiccupping coming from the other room now. The overindulgent pet-mistress has got up and soothed the savage beast, knowing that the pet-master has been wroth with him and she does stroke his tawny pelt and whisper to him in cooing tones lies and fables of his greatness and tenderness, lo even his dagger teeth she doth deem tender, demented night-wraith that she be. Sorry. I must be dozing, thought I was in King Arthur's Court (on trumped up charges) there for a minute. And I think I have finally figured out that if I set shutter speed to 120th, light meter to 'center weighted', and color balance to 'fluorescent' I can put another column on Fragments front page template! Don't know what was so hard about that! Maybe I can sleep now.

Here's Your Sign

Got a visitor today reading from the archives, and I had to go back and see which old post they were reading. It was the one with the Pit Bull Farm sign, and to that post back in July, I had gotten the following reply-- about signs-- from Jan in Sydney:

I remember driving in the Hills district here, an outer area of Sydney. A sign caught my eye: roobubs for sale. Joeys, baby kangaroos? Some new strange species? All was solved when I reached the stall further down the road. All that was being sold was rhubarb.

This reminded me of one of our favorite grassroots roadside signs from the countryside we used to drive through when the kids were small. Tacked to the side of a tree, and there for years, in the way-back-country was a hand-lettered sign that said

* BABY RABBITES FOR SALE *

I always pictured fuzzy little bunnies in yarmulkes.

Some Off the Top?

There was a young fella hanging out, Ralph the barber sitting in the chair, the visitor propped back against the wall just inside the door like he was holding it up; he backed out with a goodbye that said "I'll probably be back to continue this conversation" when a paying customer cast a shadow across the doorway that framed the midmorning skyline of downtown Floyd.

"Hey Ralph! You got one more haircut left in ya?" I asked, as if I was a regular customer. He would recognize me without really knowing much about me, other than I used to have a physical therapy clinic just across the street. I looked out through the clinic window at his silhouette so many times, paused in conversation beside a customer who had come in as much for the conversation as to get new sidewalls over his ears. There were usually two or three more fellas in worn boots and overalls sitting slumped in the faded naugahyde chairs; they had no intention of giving the barber anything more than an account of their abuse at the hand of their wives or a few good-natured jabs about what a sorry barber he was.

"I'm 'bout half here this morning" Ralph told me lazily, shaking out the cotton coverlet with a snap as I sat down in the leather chair. My hand fell naturally on the arms worn smooth by a hundred thousand calloused hands over the thirty years Ralph has stood behind that swivel seat. His feet shuffled on the floor padding so thin I'm sure it doesn't do much to absorb the weight from his new hip joints.

"Well if you're half here, be sure and start with the back half that needs it most, and I'll give you three of your six dollars if that's as far as you get before you give out on me" I said, already back in the small town rhythm of see-saw banter that came so naturally when I worked in town. Folks like Ralph had lived here long enough to be part of the landscape and there was a palpable barrier in the conversation if you seemed too proper and polished.

I have to confess: Floyd the Barber from Andy Griffith pretty well spoiled me, so that when I looked across the street at the Floyd Barber Shop, I was always half expected to find Floyd from Mayberry standing in the doorway in his starched white jacket, hair slicked back with a half tube of Bryllcream, scissors and long black comb sticking impressively out of his top pocket. I could hear him humming pleasantly to himself while he waved to passersby. But Ralph is the next best thing. Plays music with his customers, especially Friday afternoons before the Jamboree next door at the Country Store.

Party Trick

"Here. Get me a big knife" said Trish to the total stranger, our best friend Joe whose home we were visiting for the purpose of helping him move some large items before next week's cider pressing.

She held the bottle of champagne Joe offered us, using our tiny efforts of help as an excuse to celebrate.

"No, get me the biggest knife you have" she said; and Joe hunted down a veritable kitchen machete.

"We'll *&%%$##\@ the champagne open" she said enthusiastically, using what was obviously a slurry french word to describe what it was she intended to do to our bubbly beverage. "We'll have to go outside" she said, as we followed her out the side door quite dumbfounded by what it was she intended to do with that huge knife and the cold green bottle, now with it's foil and wire wrappings removed.

What happened next is a blur, as people often say after an accident. Things run together. Trish was standing there holding the bottle pointing toward a passing cirrus cloud, knife blade laid down along the slanting side of the bottle, butt of the knife toward the cork. In the fog of the moment there was a quick motion of the knife, cool amber bubbles gushed forth and obviously the bottle was now somehow open. The decapitated head lay on the driveway, intact cork surrounded by a collar of dark glass. The abruptly truncated neck of the bottle, headless, was perfectly round, perfectly smooth, as if an invisible weld had been miraculously released. We filled our glasses, Ann suspiciously, looking for broken glass slivers as a vigilent mother must always do.

Maybe this happens every day in the urbane existance of my city-dwelling world travelling blogger buddies. But here in the backwaters of the bigger world, the Sabre à Champagne is a thing worth at least two columns in the Floyd Press. And you can be darn sure, Joe will always remember our friend Trish. And Trish, did I get the quotation marks "right" this time ? :-}

You can read about this phenomenon, in a quirky French to English translation. Eeees a hoot, no?

From the Vault of the Heavens: September 11 Meditation

It is the season of floating spiders. And it is this that I will see in my mind's eye on this crippled day. I saw them first, years ago, by accident or by fate. And I will be looking for them again today and every clear September day, and imagine them souls set adrift, rising, following the invisible bridge back, to their source. You can see them too, if you are still, and look up, and can see the light just so. Look for them. Especially today.

A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isoloated, Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launche'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductle anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Wittman, Leaves of Grass

Take Two Prozac and A BiggieFries

... and call me in the morning.

Why so many Americans fat and depressed? It's not in our (j)eans, or the fact that fewer and fewer of us can get into the ones we wore last year anymore. Maybe the root of the problem is that the American Dream is an investment trap and illusion, and it is making us sick. James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, in this curmudgeonly piece from Orion, questions the sources of American's propensity toward being 'big and blue':

Have any reporters noticed how we actually live here in America? With very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated, and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the rural hinterlands. In other words, we can't walk out of town into the countryside anywhere. Our "homes," as we have taken to calling mere mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments piped into giant receivers -- where the children especially sprawl in masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on cheez doodles and taco chips.

Kunstler sees a obligatory correction in our lifestyles that could result in a resetting of our national priorities, and frankly, I hope he is right about life on the other side of the bulge:

There may be a lot of hardship and difficulty, but in the process we are going to get some things back that we threw away in our foolish attempt to become a drive-in civilization. And most of these things we get back will have to do with living on more intimate terms with other people, getting more regular exercise, eating better food, leading more purposeful lives, and rediscovering the public realm that is the dwelling place of our collective spirit. Paradoxically, when that happens fewer of us will need Prozac or the Atkins diet.

Peace in the Valley

God is in his heaven and all's well with the world. At least just at this moment. And the warm fuzzies are not just more mildew growing on this addled brain behind the keyboard. There is a lot that seems right at this instant, and one has to seize the Kodak moments as they scamper by, don't you know.

The children are well. Son has finally appropriated the computer from the Canadian extortionists customs people and is approaching email-connectivity soon from Vancouver, likes his housing and professors and is just gushing with good things to say. But of course, he could live happily in a dumpster. Dau, meanwhile, has been asked to be one of the 'queens' on the high school Homecoming float (in the little town where she works near Rapid City) and this only substantiates once more that she is indeed a Princess... lest we be tempted to forget. We'll see neither of these chillun for at least another six months, maybe a year, so it is good to have the illusion that they are in a healthy steady-state of normalcy, even though there is no such state in life as we know it of course. I'll settle for the illusion.

While I find myself most of the time scratching my head, wondering about this blogging thing that absorbs so much of my time, today at least, it seems a healthy and positive endeavor. Blogging does seem to be about community, if not being one in a physical sense. I could tell of so many good examples of ways in which others in the blogging world have had a positive impact on my life in the past month; and even a few cases where I may have been of small benefit to some of them.

This past weekend, we had a very nice young couple-- Seth and Jessica-- drop by. Having read Fragments for some time, they decided to visit the town of Floyd and arranged to come by Goose Creek for a walk and a piece of cake and conversation up on the porch. Another couple I've met recently via Fragments will be visiting in about a month. I have been introduced to and now 'know' such a nice crowd of highly articulate and widely experienced people who blog from around the world. I have seen their maps, their children's faces, know and sometimes share their opinions, and they mine. This medium makes me think and it makes me write. I will be broadcasting another essay gleaned from Fragments on the regional public radio station soon, and maybe someday, publishing in a paper form those few lines of worth that clunk out of this keyboard in the early hours of each day. There would be no words if there were no listeners.

So. Here I am in early fall where the view is like the crest of a wave, the highest peak from which to look back at the receding summer, ahead at a looming fall, not overwhelmed by either of them, exhilirated by the view, by the motion, by the smells of this lovely in-between season that one only can take in from this high place before the onset of the preamble to winter. At this moment, I feel ready for a season of turning inward. For those things that I cannot do, places I cannot be and words I cannot say, I can live in a sense through the youthful strength of an innocent pup, the world travels of my beautiful children and the wise and caring words of those weblog friends I can visit in the neighborhood every day regardless of the weather and with no knee pain whatsoever.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled whining, lassitude and NSAIDS.

Whatever You Do: Don't Squint!

Well maybe not dead. But you won't get there on time if the airport security computer pulls you out of the line at the airport. Can you imagine being in the 1% who gets pulled because they forgot to pay their utility bill last month; and have squinty eyes?

Most people will be coded green and sail through. But up to 8 percent of passengers who board the nation's 26,000 daily flights will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening at the checkpoint, according to people familiar with the program. An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers also will face police questioning and may be arrested.

Don't Look at This!

The Expanding Cushions extruded out of my monitor onto the desk and they are now creeping across the carpet toward the door. I hope there are natural predators for them or I may have unleashed the next Kudzu. ANd the Rotating Snakes that are churning in front of you when you first go to this page (but of course you've been warned NOT TO) put me into a deep hynotic state and I drooled on the left hand group of keys on my MS Natural Keyboard and the letters A and S do not work any more, which is very unfortunate as I had intended to write a long treatise later today on sassafras, assassination, and sarsparilla. Oh well. You were warned. (Seductive eye candy link via BoingBoing)

Beginnings of the Baghdad Blogger

Salam Pax tells how he began his weblog from Iraq and surprisingly ends this account with these words:

"The blog for me will always be a wonderful personal reminder of the times I, my friends and family have been through in the past year."

To Everything There is a Season

Just as the hottest days occur sometime after the longest ones as heat continues to build in the soil and rock of the summertime earth, so too the humidity, a month after the end of the rainiest season in memory, seems to continue to permeate everything indoors and out, and adorn our interior with a fine blue blush of the powdery fuzz of mildew. Closet doors stick, the kitchen cabinets meet each other before closing fully. In the angular sun of the late afternoon, the hardwood floor in the big room shows cupping where it has taken on water with no room to expand sideways... the edges turn up. The whole world would seem in need of a diuretic to restore the system to a non-bloated state. At least soon we'll be firing up the dry heat of the woodstove, and that should help with some this indoor sauna of summer, the wettest I've ever known.

The boys in the Feed & Seed say it'll be a bad winter for squirrels because what few acorns set in the branches have rotted on the ground. Those who cut hay for winter feed will be hard pressed for even a second cutting-- much less a third. Our garden just stopped growing, arrested at about the mid-June level of growth except for the Purselane and Gallinsoga which leapt ahead like it had been soaking in Miracle Grow. Yesterday, when I was sure no neighbors would see me do it, I took the lawnmower to the garden, to everything except for the spindly corn and blackening vines that will still hold green tomatoes at first frost as soon as next week. I mowed my garden... a failed effort to grow vegetables hydroponicly.

Next year, if I knew ahead of time it was going to be this wet again, I'd consider looking in the Burpees catalog at their rice and sugar cane varieties. Go with the flow. And we've had plenty of that this year. Still, given a choice, I would rather have our recent excess of water than drought. This time last year, the creeks went dry and we were wondering if it would ever rain again. Now the aquifers are full of the rains of May and June, stored in the dark cold for dry months that will come again.

Barbaric Yawp: Debut Album

Tsuga has suggested that he would like for this image to become part of the cover graphics for his first solo album, Barbaric Yawp. By the way, he has already been practicing for his debut appearance in song, and so far, I'd have to say he has a bit of a Bob Wills Texas Swing flavor, with all the yodels and yipps and his characteristic signature wild warbling yawp. On the other hand, there is an edginess in much of Tsuga's early work, a heavy-metal angst he prefers to call "Rawhide", bringing a certain dental penetration to his hard hitting riffs. This, by the way, will be the only album cover of "The T" as he prefers to be called, without decorative hardware in his nose and at least one ear. Tatoos, however, are made almost impossible by his premature hirsuitism, but Raspberry Punk Hair Dye will certainly set him apart from the common type of country dog. Just wait until the LitterMate Reunion in about a month. They won't know what hit'em.

I'll let you know when the studio cuts become available and may allow Fragments readers to preview them in MP3 format. Stay tuned.

Losing your Place

These folks writing in Common Ground from Britain are on the right track, and I think there is something in their words we can use here in the fast-growing urban-homogenising towns of southwest Virginia, as you may find some usefulness in identifying and preserving your own place's "local distinctiveness" while there is still time to do so.

"Local distinctiveness can encompass so many things and affects everyone. In exploring the idea Common Ground has found it useful to work around key words, which allow reinterpretation for every different circumstance: detail, particularity, patina, authenticity. We are talking of quality in the everyday. Because these things are not straightforward or easy to pigeonhole, often involve emotional attachment and are hard to communicate they are treated as 'soft' by the media. Because they are impossible to put a money value on or to explain through equations, these unquantifiable 'intangibles' are likely to be marginalised by the professionals. Debate rages, and decisions arc taken which often leave out the very things that make life worth living."

... and they conclude:

The forces of homogenisation rob us of visible and invisible things which have meaning to us, they devalue our longitudinal wisdom and erase the fragments from which to piece together the stories of nature and history through which our humanity is fed. They stunt our sensibilities and starve our imagination.

And as Bachelard has said 'imagination separates us from the past as well as reality, it faces the future. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee'. Our interest in local distinctiveness is a profound concern for our common future.

Be sure and take a look at their "Rules for Local Distinctiveness" and consider if there are ways to incorporate these simple ideas in the changes happening in your own neighborhoods.

Pet Heaven

Read about a dead puppy going to church. Great true story, link via BeneDiction.

And so there is not any confusion, Tsuga is very much alive, and an hour ago, made the Great Leap from the back of the couch onto the table, and was found munching the Zinnias out of the vase this morning while I pretended to write and Ann made cookies. He was genuinely perplexed at what all the fuss was about when we freaked. Humans are weird, he says.

Death is a distant rumor to the young. ~Andrew A. Rooney

For Student Essayists: an Automated Grader

So. Whaddaya thin, CynicalCyn... DocRoc... Punctilious... Artichoke Heart? You educators out there: Why not let a machine grade essays? (Requires NYTimes registration / Free)

Alpha Male ~ Can-do Doggie

"Just this once", you may recall, T-man was allowed on the couch. We increased the distance between couch and table so he wouldn't be tempted to take one giant step for puppykind. But alas, he was tempted, he did take the leap across the chasm and when I got up to see what the commotion was, he was hanging from the edge of the table by his front paws, rear legs churning in the emptiness of space with this guilty, terrified look on his innocent-seeming little face. He wanted me to show you this picture just to prove that he can get up the couch by himself, anytime he wants to, just this once.

After three weeks here, Tsuga is learning his way around the house, if not the whole valley that Buster used to own, and I can leave him in the yard unsupervised for short periods to do the important stuff outside while I pretend to get the less important people-work done inside. He is still uneasy leaving the house very far and it's a bit of a struggle to have him keep up. If you pick him up to carry him, he wiggles and squirms furiously (he used to be happy to be carried) and I remember so well when our small children suddenly rejected being coddled or carried or treated "like a baby", insisting "I can do it myself!" They couldn't. But needed the illusion that they could.

And so a walk down the valley away from the house consists of 50 yard dashes: we walk, he balks, we turn and call him and he comes gallumping down the truck tracks in the pasture, but takes at least one headlong tumbling face-plant on purpose, into the cushioning tall pasture grass. This is the canine version of jumping harmlessly into a pile of October leaves or into a January snowbank. On the return trip to the house, he requires no prompting, following our scent and knowing at the end of the line is the safety of his yard. And of course, the cozy couch.

Alpha Male ~ entries so far...

Falling

There is a certain excited melancholy in the coming of the first fall-like days... a letting go and a welcome all together. I sit here in the cool shade with my feet stretched out into the slanting sun, warm and beneficent and watch yellow leaves of walnut and locust flutter and sift toward the spent soil of summer even while tiger swallowtails lift and spiral as if to put those yellows back in place for just a few days more. While the forest seems green from a distance, a closer inspection will find no leaf untouched by the changes that shorter days bring; their surfaces are lightly filigreed by insects that could not have made a meal of them while a leaf was in its healthy prime of summer. Some leaves, like the Striped Maple, show patches of discolored spots, like ringworm, where fungal threads wind their way through the spongy spaces between upper and lower surface. Soon the fungi and bacteria will consume it all, especially after it leaves the relative safety of the twig, and becomes humus. And then, like a thrift store shirt, its matter will pass on and on, handed down until there is nothing left but buttons and bare threads.

Puppy Longstockings

The pupster is turning into Mr. Longshanks. I swear, I think you could actually see him growing like Jack's beanstalk, and I fantasize about being able to see him in time-lapse imagery over this first six months of his life as his body proportions vacillate back and forth from surging growth in limbs to trunk to head and back again. He is now ten weeks old (and three of those here with us as of today) and has just passed the 20# mark. Toting him in and out in the wee (or I guess I should say wee-wee) hours is getting harder each day, and I'm wishing we'd requested the dog breed that comes with the little pull-out luggage handle with optional shoulder strap... for easier portability. And while we were requesting, I've also thought that we could have asked for the self-cleaning model as well. Anywho...

I did manage to sneak off a few shots of Tsuga yesterday, and will post ONE A DAY for the four decent images. The fourth one is my favorite... you can see it on Tuesday.

For Where Your Treasure Is...

Are you on the rich list? Probably, by global standards, yes, you and I are rich. And yet we are constantly bombarded by suggestions (even edicts from the White House) that the American Way is to spend our paths to happiness and prosperity. See where you rank in the world's measure of riches by plugging your annual income in dollars or pounds into the window. Here's what this webpage Rich List is all about...

WHY ARE WE DOING IT?

We are obsessed with wealth. But we gauge how rich we are by looking upwards at those who have more than us. This makes us feel poor.

We wanted to do something which would help people understand, in real terms, where they stand globally. And make us realise that in fact most of us (who are able to view this web page) are in the privileged minority.

We want people to feel rich. And give some of their ‘extra’ money to a worthwhile charity.

Business of Writing

"If you write something that only you could write, and you write it well, I believe you will be found. I came out of my experience in publishing believing that even more than I believed it when I began. I saw and experienced every horrifying thing about publishing, and yet I also remember those sweet moments when everything came together for someone deserving, someone who had worked for an unfathomable amount of time by themselves on a book they would not compromise, that they would rather destroy in the burn barrel than turn into a pack of marketable lies. These were those rare people who, somewhere along the way, had found a reason to write that didn't depend on the goodwill of editors and publishers and critics, who were not much stirred by rejection. Under those conditions - when a mind, an intelligence, a will, is let loose to do what it wants - the most wonderful things emerge. You cannot believe what people are capable of dreaming up when they let themselves go. And it's the originality, maybe even more than the craft, that makes those books stand out. Working on your craft is important, but working on your mind - teasing out that thing you have to say - is even more important. And most people can't do it when their minds are clouded by concerns about the publishing world, and the marketplace, and who their agent should be."

by Duncan Murrell (Delivered at Peace College, July 26, 2003, during the closing session of the Elizabeth Daniels Squire Writers-in-Residence Program)

Good timing, this voice from the business, as I vascillate between the burn barrel and the book proposal. Link thanks to TravelerTrish who is one of those people who has 'let themselves go' to the most wonderful places, geographic and creative.

Applause

"What I know in my bones is that I forget to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves."
- Terry Tempest Williams

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
- Isaiah 55:12

OucH Canada!

Just a quick word of warning so as to avoid sticker shock: if sending anything of value into Canada from the States, call the package "cookies" and value it at $5.00.

The Dell laptop we ordered for our son's Vancouver college experience was delivered here to the house so that I could configure XP for him and load a few things I wanted him to have before sending it on. UPS charged $33 to send it in 5-7 days, insured for the price of the computer, and everything was copesetic. Until...

Our son calls and says "do you know how much it costs to ship that computer to me?"

"Yes, thirty-three bucks" I said proudly, thinking of all the packages of cookies and winter clothes we would be sending that way over the next three years. "Not bad, huh?"

"No, dad. There was a $382 (Canadian) tariff and I have to get a bus and go to (Someplace) to pick it up".

I'm afraid I sputtered little flecks of saliva all over my computer monitor. That's about 20% of the cost of the computer, folks. Do we do the same thing to little computers coming here from the north? Something is not right here. Is this a form of punishment so as to force residents to 'buy Canadian'? (Well I guess that's what a tariff is. Eh?) So sonnyboy, you want momma's cookies, you're gonna have to find some nice little cannuckian momma to bake'em for you! Or fly home and carry them back duty-free in your suitcase... the price of an airline ticket may be cheaper than the 'fee' for importing from Goose Creek.

Not Lovin' It

MacDonalds has a face-lift underway, and you're gonna love it (or so the six million dollar jingle goes). It's not advertising, they say. Oh no. It arises from a desire to remake the experience of being in their facilities. Huh? That's not adverting?

We had the dubious pleasure of eating fast interstate food on our revent travels to NC last weekend, and I thank my lucky stars this All-American Pop Diet only happens to me maybe twice a year. For others, it is a daily fare, and you could pick out the 'regulars' from their pudding-faces at the front of the line. And not all got there in the family SUV, either.

Somewhere in my mental stereotypes file drawer-- in the folder that houses the image of a "young man and woman on a motorcycle"-- the young woman, riding behind, is svelte and tan, she used to work in a diner and her long blond hair is blowing in the wind (you know the one I'm talking about). That folder is being replaced, because now 95% of biker duos we saw last weekend were dunlops.. both he and she dunlopped over the sides of the poor motorcycle seat as the couples tour the MacDonalds of the south. I'm sorry but the corpulent adiposity of America always shocks and saddens me, and maybe moreso in highly stretched black leather at high speeds.

And the most amazing thing (and I think you'll agree this is a universal experience in this country of fast-fooders): in every Hardees, Wendys, and Burger King I've had the desperation to visit in the past three years, I've seen the same little shriveled-up white lady with frizzy once-blond hair under her spiffy baseball cap. She's always the fries specialist, and wears a tiny silver cross around her spindly neck. How does she get from one of these places to the next before we do? It makes one suspicious of either cloning, or teleporting, or both. You look next time you feel like you deserve a break today. She'll be there. Wait and see.

You know... I had the naivete when first reading this bit about the corporate make-over to think for a split second that the MacD image redo might have something to do with contrition about it's fat-sat foods and shameful marketing to young people. Nah. More of the same, shrink-wrapped in new fluff.

You want liposuction and a CABG with that?

Feed Me, Seymore!

You can't turn around these days without hearing the advantages of any alternative to email spam, and besides the various faulty filters, the conversation almost always turns to syndicated information that the viewer asks to come into his computer. Sort of vaguely aware of RSS and XML and RDF and such, I have had no burning interest to syndicate Fragments or seek out other sites for regular pulling into my viewspace.

Until this past week. I've tried a half dozen News Aggregators... installed, then uninstalled them, unimpressed. But I like FeedDemon, find it actually could grow to be quite useful, and will keep it around. It's free in the current beta mode. I would like to know of News Feed Aggregators that might be comparable before I shell out bucks. Shed some light on me, Enlightened Ones. What else should I be looking at?

I'll Show You Mine...

...if you'll show me yours. Map, that is. At the Ecotone site this week, a dozen of us discussed "Maps and Place" and it was interesting to see how closely we identify with our maps, even if they are just mental-- not the folded, worn paper kind with the diamond-shaped hole from countless refoldings just exactly where you need to see a critical road number.

I'd like to see where you live. Have you ever found your homeplace or neighborhood on the Topozone maps site? Why don't you, then, within the next week, say... and post it on your site or send it here the body of a comment or email and if you want me to, I can collect them and post them as a group one day next week. (Just type in the city name, name of a local land feature.. mountain, creek, etc and the Topozone search engine will find your map, then just copy the url).

Follow the link to Fred and Ann First's place on Goose Creek. Our house is the black dot above the red cross. You get the sense of they lay of the land of 'our little valley' that I so often speak of at Fragments, and see the 'nameless creek' that flows south-to-north to meet the headwaters of Goose Creek running along the dirt road between the house and barn. The "ford" disappeared in 1970 when the road was improved; ours was the last state-maintained road in the county that ran through a creek.

Now, think about finding and sharing your map. I think this would be fun. But then, this is just weird Uncle Fred talking. And you don't have to humour me. I won't go away and that's a promise. Or is it a threat?

Alpha Male ~ The Slippery Slope

As I always say (and I truly do always say this) it's easier to get into something than to get out of it. Life has a way of offering those tantalizing temptations that make it easy to stick the finger into the monkey puzzle, but... here we are, stuck with our permissive fingers locked into the bad puppy behavior we have created by our 'quick fixes' and there will be no going back. If only 'we' (read 'she') didn't feel so guilty about the recent puppy day care trauma. Poor little thing. Just this once...

Just this once, we would let him spend the night nestled quietly on the rug beside our bed like a decorator-dog from the Orvis catalog... just until he returned to his routine of sleeping in the other room as he had done before his PTSD. Last night was the third night of 'just this once'. We have at least closed the closet door now so that we don't hear him munching contentedly on our shoes in the wee hours. But when the lights go out, he moves straightway under the bed... with just a nose or two rear legs peeking out from under the bedcovers, and less than that when you go to drag his snoring body from the dark recesses of his new nocturnal puppy-cave. We're going to put him back in the front room soon, now that he seems to be relaxing at night. Oh sure we are.

And since he was being so sweet this morning, 'just once' Ann left him on the couch after she got up, and he lay there sleeping in a picturesque pose of utter tranquility. Until he discovered a bit later that it is a short step from the back of the couch to the dining room table, where the house-husband had been sorting clothes from the dryer. Tsuga thought that was the greatest cafeteria style toy store he'd ever run across and selected one of each... a washrag, a sock, a tee-shirt and one pair of purple panties. Life don't get much better than this. But.. just this once, you understand.

All of these new perks have given the lad quite a shot of courage, to boldly go where no yellow puppy has gone before. And so now he just pushes his way right through the closed door of the bathroom (where the silly solitude seeker forgot to put down the latch) and makes himself comfortable at the base of the porcelain library, licking blissfully behind the knees of the hapless library patron, munching occasionally on the corner of the delicious old National Geographic that bobs there above his head. Hey, you were sitting down, he says. You sit down, you're in my world. That's the rules.

Alpha Male ~ What's come before

Bean Brain

I'm sorry I have better things to do than to try to find the man's head among a random pattern of coffee beans. No, come to think about it, I don't have anything better to do. Except maybe.. drink coffee. I give up. My right brain has left the building. How 'bout you? If you see it, draw me a picture. BeatnikSalad ~ link via Incoming Signals

UPDATE: Duh! I thought this was going to be a pattern among the beans forming a head in one of those 'stare past the picture' mosaic things. But no. That's all I'll say, and I want a rematch with better instructions! -- FF

Above it All

The View from Everest. Be sure and pan across the whole wide image. Man, it makes me dizzy (not to mention COLD!)

Citizens of Nowhere

... and the importance of place (and matters related to some of the dis-ease at the source of the global resistance movement) from Paul Kingsnorth in the New Statesman:

"...what lies at the root of it is something rarely discussed in modern politics but which, through its presence or absence, defines life for all of us: place. It has long been a touchstone of "progress" that place, and attachment to it, is an anachronism. Our communities are no longer geographical but communities of interest. Barriers are broken down by the mass media, technology and trade laws. Rootless, we gain freedom. Placeless, we belong everywhere.

Yet placelessness and rootlessness create not contentment but despair. Ask an unwilling refugee; ask an alienated twentysomething working in a bank in any of the world's megacities; ask a postmodern novelist. Capitalist globalisation is building a planetary monoculture of malls, asphalt, brushed aluminium and sliding doors. The rising tide of this global progress, we are told, will lift all boats. The trouble is that some of our boats are anchored; anchored by place, tradition, identity, a sense of belonging. Anchored boats are not lifted by rising tides; they are overwhelmed, and sunk with all hands."

Alpha Male ~ Day Care Blues

In order to travel to North Carolina to see our two-legged puppy in pigtails and her mom this past weekend, we had to leave Tsuga with strangers after two weeks of building his trust, letting him know we were not going to abandon him, and establishing a relationship that did not require him to gain the upper hand by biting, as nature has equipped him to do in dealing with his litter mates. This was his first visit to the kennel... a trip that Buster used to love, and would come home having been smothered with attention and full of wonderful and exotic olfactory memories.

The experience was not so wonderful, obviously, for young Tsuga. Essentially crated on a concrete floor for a day and a half (including, we were told, frolicking in his own poop requiring an unplanned bath and I am afraid, resulting in a case of PTSD (Puppy Turned Stinky Dog) has made him forget anything his two weeks with us might have taught him. In fact, it is my belief that instead of our dear puppy Tsuga, we were given his evil twin, Chewga. Chewga curls his lip and bites hard, barks wildly while running circles around the dining room table, and has forgotten how to 'sit' or 'use a soft mouth' or relax while his tummy is rubbed. We took in a kindly cute canine to the kennel on Saturday and brought home Cujo on Sunday. Yes, Tsuga got back in touch with his 'inner wolf' in this short regrettable stay at the vet. How quickly our pets and our kids revert to their feral stages without and sometimes in spite of a constant flow of attention, allowances, and the keys to the family car.

The problem seemed especially to do with the dominance issue between us guys. He was not terribly mean to Ann, but seemed determined (as he was during his first several days with us) to show me how tough he is and I, in turn, was determined in like manner. He'd lunge and I'd deflect him gently out of the way, over and over again; he'd latch his teeth onto my forearm and I would restrain him 'gently but firmly' until he acquiesced; or pinch his own cheek lightly between his upper and lower teeth as he tried to bite to provide some aversive reinforcement. Any form of physical defense would only incite him to more aggression. I would cut off 'play' when he got too rough, which was immediately after I would kneel or sit down in his domain. The only thing that seemed to snap him out of Kill Mode was the Dreaded Can. This trick was left over from Buster's much more tractable education, and it seems to get White Fang's attention here as well. If I bring the can down into the arena, he backs off from his aggressiveness, even though I have only shaken the rocks inside HARD once or twice. He will behave (and he knows, obviously, what parts of his behavior are being punished) with the threat of the can. I have also tried to reinforce (the accidental and infrequent) good behavior with lots of praise and tiny treats.

But now, here it is, later in the morning of his second day home with us, and the kinder, gentler Tsuga is back.. still playful but not the Demon Dog we brought home from Puppy Prison. And I can't help thinking how much more effective we could have been as parents had we only known about the soup can with the rocks in it when the kids were coming along. Maybe it's not too late. But then, Ann would wonder if it worked on husbands, too, so a smart man would just let the matter drop right there.

Alpha Male ~ Previous Installments

Takin' Care of Business

Norman Soloman considers "some implications of the Ten Commandments for modern corporate media." They do make a lot of people uncomfortable and are not generally good for business these days.

1 -- "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

This one has dubious growth potential. As any significant time spent in medialand ought to make clear, false idols are the essence of the advertising biz. These days, serious devotion to a non-monetary deity would seem rather quaint in contrast to Nielsen ratings, Arbitron numbers and the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The gold standard may have gone the way of the golden calf, but media references to spiritual pieties can be understood as window-dressing for an industry that knows there's a world of difference between prophets and profits.

2 -- "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image."

No problem. Wood and stone are passe. Media images are what matter: for fast food, beer brands, cigarettes, new cars, politicians...

3 -- "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."

No worries. Cable TV shows and movies are just so cool with all their extremely naughty words; scriptwriters don't even bother with taking the Lord's name in vain anymore.

10 -- "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."
Hey, you're supposed to covet just about anything that is thy neighbor's ... if you've seen it advertised. .... more

Yup

"Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin."Stanislaw J. Lec

Maps and Place: To Boldly Go

This week's Ecotone Biweekly topic is Maps and Place.

The other day I picked up a National Geographic map from a back room shelf and sat in a quiet place and traveled to Indonesia. It is a place I have never been, and yet, I am there, in a sense, knowing from the map about the vegetation types and terrain, following the courses of meandering rivers within watersheds, tracing contour lines that hint of the texture of the place, of its geology and age. I walk along trails and roads past orchards and quarries and swamps and skirt around the perimeter of villages and cities. To possess an accurate and detailed map and see the world through its symbolic language of place is perhaps the next best thing to being physically in the place depicted. And yet, at least today, there still remains a vast gulf between map and territory. This may not always be so, and the best maps and the places they symbolize may someday be difficult to distinguish from one another.

The computer "games" that grow in synergy with government-sponsored technologies like war are already closing the distance between map and territory. The average civilian like you and me sees glimpses of this in computer-enhanced reenactments of actual bombing runs from our recent spate of "regime changes" around the world. The camera, in a CNN glorification of the war du jour zooms down from orbital to suborbital to upper atmospheric, pulling into range over a middle eastern desert, flying lower, down between dunes, showing wadi and oasis zooming past, with realistic shadows, texture, signs of life. Then we follow 'ordinance' as it annihilates the target: a baby formula factory or palace, perhaps. I could have been in the cockpit with the pilot, so realistic were the images racing past as the computer recreated the map in three-dimensional reality. It seems so sad to me that our most advanced maps are not for exploring places but for incinerating them with our gamers-thumbs or our bunkerbusters. And yet, the day will come when we can travel virtually anywhere, perceptually if not physically, by state-of-the-art "maps".

Arising from this same game and war technology and augmented by others we've yet to imagine, the day will come when I (or more likely, my children or theirs) can don a map-helmet and view-visor and walk the trail up old familiar places I have loved-- I can hike up Henley Hollow once again, or climb to the top of Massey Gap or peer out from a floating island in the Okeefenokee by merely saying the name of the place. In those pseudo-real places there will seem to exist 'real' trees and rocks, and perhaps simulated wind and water noises and one may see from time to time the common creatures of those coordinates (or the ones that used to live there decades earlier, when the ecosystem was healthy and whole). These computer generated maps of the future will be as much like being there as one can get without literally being in the place. Still, the map will not unite us with the place, even though viewing it may evoke some of the feeling of having visited places I used to go easily and often.

There are so many alluring features that I see on my topo maps or out my windows as I drive the back roads of rural Virginia. And yet more and more of these places that I can see I will never visit as my physical strength and vigor diminish over the years. I have already had to say goodbye to distant wilderness valleys and mountaintops-- in the Smokies, or up in Cranberry Glades in West Virginia-- that I once experienced but will not likely have the opportunity or physical resources to visit again. And yet I would love to be there, in that place I remember or see in my mind's eye out my car window, just beyond the farthest ridge in the distance through the blue haze.

If there is indeed a God responsible for creating all of this that our senses and instruments have revealed to us about the Universe (as I believe) then He is not likely to think us content for eternity to ride on clouds and play harps in our pajamas. So while mortally bound to a failing chassis I daydream of heaven. I imagine that I inhabit a new body and am not bound by either time nor space-- and am in some sense omnipresent, a trait 'inherited' from God himself. In this eternal incarnation, the newly-corporeal thing that I call self can actually be present in those cherished earthly places I have remembered or in the tropical rain forest or tundra or steppes and places I never experienced in this body. I could fly away in the 'twinkling of an eye' to any place within the boundaries of the Universe, exploring galaxies and perhaps even Time itself. Then there would be no need for maps because the physical-temporal place itself would need no reduction to symbol or representation or picture-thinking. Eternity would not be a terror or a bore as some imagine. I would never tire of exploring without limit, without fatigue; and I'd never have to stop and ask directions again! And rather than the perpetual tedium of cloud-riding and harp-playing forever, over the eons I would only find ever greater wonder and awe in the things and places I would be and know within this largest place we call the Universe.

Dream of Flying

Granddaughter Abby ~ Cullowhee, NC ~ August 2003

... Both of our children have grown wings, metaphorically, and have taken great leaps into the unknown, and staid aloft in most graceful flight. And I wonder, when their time comes, and their stocky little 3-year-old runs barefoot in the yard on a summer day... will they tell her she can fly? I hope so.