As we sat watching the fireworks after the parade of lanterns at Aomori's annual nebuta festival, Barb patted my hand and reminded me, "Just think, you could be getting home from work right now."
And I thought about that, and it was good.
I took a day of leave, just to make sure I was on the books as officially off duty, out of touch, out of area, not working. Maybe it wasn't necessary to go to all the extra trouble, but it felt good to make sure.
I didn't even have to drive. We signed up for a bus trip sponsored by outdoor recreation, and a Japanese guy who seemed to think he was Mario Andretti drove a full-sized bus through city traffic like he was playing one of those video games where your own vehicle is indestructable and you can run over as many pedestrians and smash into as many other vehicles as you want. "We're never sitting up front again," Barb pointed out to me, after we got home safely, against all the driver's best efforts.
"Why not?" Tim asked. He plays those video games, too.
It was an all-day trip, but luckily we didn't have to get up at a crazy hour, like we did on other outdoor rec trips. The bus left at nine-thirty and got into Aomori about eleven, so we had plenty of time to find the parade route and pick a good place to sit. Our tour guide, who refers to himself as "the Morita," tried his best to keep us on the bus as long as possible after we arrived, standing firmly in the doorway while he delivered a barrage of instructions that lasted ten or fifteen minutes and boiled down to (1) the crowds were thickest by the train station, and (2) meet him back here at nine o'clock. Takes a lot of talent to spin that into fifteen minutes, you gotta admit.
Because we had plenty of time, we walked along a couple of the main streets, poking our noses into shops and taking in the sights, before the parade started. One of the places we had to stop at was the monument to the purest drinking water in all of Japan, prominently marked on the tourist map but not as easy to spot as you might think such an obviously important tourist attraction should be. It looked like part of the architecture for a hotel, and I'm still not sure that I didn't kiss some run-of-the-mill corner watering fountain that a million little kids hadn't already slobbered on that morning.
We got a pretty decent curbside seat near the start of the parade route, which is good and bad in so many ways. Good because we get to see them bring out all the floats; bad because by the time the floats go all the way around the parade route, most of the participants are pooped. They can see the finish line, and they want beer, so maybe half of them are still in a festive mood, singing, dancing, squirting their water guns at the crowd. The other half are, well, to put it bluntly, dragging their butts. But in a good way.
The parade is pretty simple: First and foremost, you've got your floats. These seem to be mostly a couple of samuai fighting each other. Sometimes it's a samurai fighting a demon. Every once in a while, a horse is involved. The most customary float, though, is the two samurai facing off, usually in a low squat, holding their swords over their heads. The figures on the floats are made of paper glued to a bamboo frame, and at night they're lit from inside. We saw a few of them later on with the lights on, and another one being carefully torn to shreds as they dismantled the electric lamps inside the figures.
One or two of the floats were what you might call "less than traditional" -- although from what I understand, Astro-boy is just about as much a cultural treasure as Mount Fuji. He just had his fiftieth birthday, and you'd have thought the Super Bowl came to town. He popped up on television shows, he appeared as key rings and candy at the checkout in Circle K, -- there's nothing legal that Astro-boy can't sell right now, and if they've made any hardware upgrades to his little robot chassis, there's probably no limit to the illegal stuff he could promote as well. Maybe I'll do some Google research on that later.
And then there's this guy. I have no idea what kind of category you'd put this in.
Between the floats are the drummers and the fluters. Note that all these parade vehicles are being towed by people; there wasn't a single float pulled by a tractor, or hiding a built-in truck. All people-powered, and these floats weren't exactly lightweight -- so you can maybe appreciate how they felt by the time they hauled those things all the way around the center of Aomori city.
The drums are all in a row on a big cart. The drummers usually followed along behind, but on at least one of the carts, the drummer sat on top of the center drum. The drummers had a couple sticks as long as yardsticks, and they beat the crap out of those drums with an intensity that left my ears ringing like I'd just come home from a Cheap Trick concert. How the guys in front, pulling the cart, could stand that racket for the two hours it took to go around the city circuit, I'll never know.
That's right, two hours. When these guys put on a parade, they go in for it big time. I never counted how many floats went past, because I was having too much fun just trying to take it all in, and I didn't get photos of every one of them, but if for some reason you'd want to see all the photos I did get of the floats, they're just a click away.
You know those folks who video tape every event they go to, so that they're pretty much watching the event, the one that's going on right before their eyes, through the viewfinder of their camera? At events like these, I wonder, "What did he come here for? He could have bought the video and saved himself the trouble of traveling."
There's a new breed of these kind of people now. I don't know where the rest of the world is on this, but most Japanese cell phones have cameras built into them. I think it's supposed to be like a video phone, so you can see the person you're talking to, but some people are using it for other things -- I read in the paper that the Japanese are trying to figure out how to prosecute people who shoplift magazines by snapping photos of them with their phones and reading them later.
Almost every grown Japanese has a cell phone, and a lot of the kids do, too, and just about everybody who had a cellphone at the nebuta festival was using theirs nearly all the time -- at the parade, at the fireworks, just walking around, even while they were eating. Yuk. And between snippets of conversation they were snapping still shots of the floats or the fireworks (or sometimes, probably, themselves with a mouthful of yakitori, face covered with sweet sauce). It's hard for me to believe anybody was having a conversation over all that drumming and unbelievable din of the crowd noise, but there you are.
This is just so bizarre to me. I grew up with rotary phones, the kind that the people I work with who are under eighteen years old can't be bothered to use because it takes too long to dial a four-digit extension. (Yes, there are still rotary phones in the building where I work. Think about that the next time you're saying to yourself, "We're safe, because our Air Force has all the latest technology.") We used to oooh and ahhh at the video telephones at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry -- it was a booth full of clunky machinery. The boy in front of me had a video phone the size of a pack of chewing gum, and he was showing his friend in Shichinohe, or Wakkanai, or some other far-flung place, what the fireworks looked like. They can do this, but we still don't have jet packs on sale in Wal-Mart?
Barb and Tim have been doing a lot of work at the local animal shelter, and whenever they come home from their volunteer day, they tell me all about the latest additions to the pound. The place gets the occasional rodent and bird, but it's mostly cats and dogs, and since there's almost nothing cuter in the world than a kitten or a puppy, I hear all about the widdow biddy cutie-pie that Tim or Barb just fell in love with.
This week it was Ollie. We were never sure if it was a boy or a girl; the folks at the shelter usually called it "she," and we usually called it "he."
"If it's a girl, we want to call her 'Annie,'" Tim explained, "and if it's a boy, we want to call him 'Oliver.'"
Note to self: If you find yourself pinned down in a foxhole, never show a picture of your girl to the guy next to you, and if you bring home a kitten that you found, never name it until it's up and running around. Why? Same reason for both.
But Ollie's appeal as the cutest little thing on earth was so strong that we all fell in love with him -- the way he curled up in our hands and purred, the way he crawled up into the crooks of our necks and nuzzled, the way he lapped up the milk we gave him. It's been a while since I've held a kitten, but they always get you right through the heart, dang them.
Barb brought him home on Tuesday night. She asked me if it was okay, as if I had more power than a cute, helpless kitten -- almost exactly as if she were a little girl, and I was the big, gruff dad who stood in the front door, pipe in one hand, evening newspaper in the other. What could I say? What could any big, gruff guy say when he looks into the eyes of his favorite girl as she pleads for the safety of a kitten?
Candy, one of the board members, brought him over that night. Candy was overloaded taking care of other animals, and Barb easily agreed to bring the kitten home, even though she was overloaded with schoolwork and we were going to the nebuta festival on Thursday.
Barb made up a little basket for him, lined it with cotton batting and some fleece over a hot water bottle to keep him warm, and she and Timmy took turns holding him and feeding him and giving him more than enough love to keep him going all through Wednesday. You can't imagine how much attention they paid to him. Bonkers, our cat, didn't much care for him at first -- it took a couple cc's of hallucinogen to make him come around. Hang on, I'll get to that in a minute.
Barb turned Ollie over to Candy the night before we left for the nebuta festival, and she went back and got him Friday morning. His eyes were starting to open, which excited the heck out of Barb and Tim. But he wouldn't eat. It didn't seem troubling at first -- well, Barb was worried, because it's her job to worry when us dumb old guys don't know that we're supposed to.
Since he wouldn't eat, all we could do was keep watch over him and make sure he was warm and comfortable. Tim finally got Bonkers to snuggle up with the kitten and even lick his coat, which wasn't too hard, because Bonk was still pretty high on whatever sedative the vet used on him earlier that morning. He was so tranked up that he looked like a bobble doll when we brought him home. He was lots better in the evening, but still a little glassy-eyed, and he just wanted to sit around and take it easy. So really, we were taking advantage of his condition by curling the kitten under his chin. I was sort of hoping maybe the presence of another cat would encourage it, too.
But even though we kept a close eye on the kitten, there are times when kittens don't do what you think they're supposed to do, even when they seem so healthy that they're not just active, they're feisty. When Ollie started to slip away, he slipped pretty fast, and even an emergency run to the shelter to get help ... well, there just wasn't any help for him.
I never know what to do when a pet I've given my heart to ups and dies on me. Barb knew; she cried her eyes out. Girls always know the best ways to heal a broken heart. I went home and tried to make Bonkers as comfortable as possible. He was curled up in a cardboard box, and when Barb gave him a treat, the first thing he'd had to eat all day, he made that crazy squeaky sound he makes instead of the usual miaow you expect from a cat. Up to that time, he hadn't spoken since he came home from the vet. We all lit up so that you would've thought he'd uttered the Gettysburg Address.
I raised a tiny personal cheer in my head when they told me the rainy seanson in Japan had ended.
What that means is, it's time for typhoon season. Forgot about that.
Our first big old, wet typhoon has blown into Misawa, and it's dumped I don't know how many inches on us, but enough to almost wash us away. How can there be so much water up there?
Before you start worrying, we don't really get destructive typhoons up here. By the time they work their way north, most of them are just very rainy. Oh, sure, they hit us with some wind, just to keep up their reputations, but for the most part they're tired old men when they get to Misawa. They blow out to sea from here, where typhoons shuffle off to retire as tropical storms before they pass away completely.
This one is Etau. Now I'm going to kick into grumpy old curmudgeon mode and ask: When did they start giving hurricanes these goofy names? "Mildred" and "Ethyl" were good enough when I was growing up. I guess I should have seen this coming when they started with goofy names like "Camille," but at least it was still a name. Now it's "Etau." Is that a name? No. It's a really lame attempt to get the triple-word store with the jumble of vowels you've got left at the end of a game of Scrabble.
Curmudgeon mode off.
The radar picture tells it all: Colors don't lie. The blue over Misawa means we're under water. There's a butt-ton of it up there, and it's going to be up there, falling on us, all day.
The Japanese have lived with this for thousands of years, just like earthquakes, and they still don't build for it. In Texas -- I can't believe I'm going to hold up Texas as an example -- they have storm sewers that could swallow a city bus. Here, the sewers have just a little bit of trouble with the kind of output you get from your passing Etau. I was driving back from the BX yesterday during a cloudburst from a fringe storm, and I saw where water was gushing up from an overloaded sewer grate in the road.
So when I got home, I wasn't the least bit surprised to see that the road was covered in muddy water, or that it was washing up over the curbs and down the steps to my front door stoop. This happened last year at about this time. To keep it from happening again, they added a couple of sewer grates to the low point of the street in front of my house, but it just wasn't enough. There might not be a sewer grate made anywhere in the world that's big enough to suck up the kind of water we're talking about.
I thrashed around in water up over my shins, searching for the grate with my hands and bare feet, because I knew that it was clogged with sticks and leaves. When I pulled it up, a great sucking hole appeared in the swirling water. Then it immediately filled. I went searching for the other grate.
The cloudburst lasted only a couple minutes, but it took between five and ten minutes for the sewers to catch up and the water to drop below the curb. By that time, the water pouring over the sidewalk and down the hill to my yard had eaten a nasty gash into the hillside. Another cloudburst about a half-hour later widened and deepened the gash, and there was nothing we could do about it then, either.
Tim stood in the doorway, watching the water rise at the front stoop. There was no danger of it coming into the house, which didn't make it any less scary for us, or for the people in the building down the hill, who were watching it through their patio door as it rolled right up to their back stoop.
It settled down to a steady, drenching rain in the afternoon, as effective at keeping us in the house as a deep-freeze. Who wants to go out when a walk from the front door to the car will leave you soaked through to your underwear? So Barb spent the day catching up with her school work, Tim played video games, and I goofed around on the computer, writing long letters about rain. When I got stuck for the next sentence, I gazed out the window and watched as the rain fell from the sky as a heavy, grey curtain, rolled off the rooftops in sheets, and sprayed us through the window, which we've had to keep open or smother to death in the damp, gummy air.
The typhoon with the goofy name is gone and the sun came out. That can only mean one thing: Get out the lawn mowers! Mow like your life depends on it!
And the natives are getting perhaps a little cranky about it. At least two fathers out mowing their lawns had to shut down the power mowers to shout at their kids, who were just so glad to be out of the house, playing in the sun, that they were maybe a tad uncontrollable. "Siddown!" one of the dads shouted. "Sit on your butt!" Heck, dad, he can do that inside.
But I guess that tempers can get a little short when you're faced with having to spend the first clear day in a week pushing the lawnmower around a comically small back yard. Cutting such a small yard would be snap, you'd think, if only the contractors had seen fit to make it flat but, apparently to pack the buildings shoulder-to-shoulder, they had to do some pretty radical contouring. What should be a gentle drop to the yard behind our building is instead a jagged stair-step of forty-five degree drops that are certainly not made for cutting with the conventional lawn mowers that modern industry can supply us with today.
And this is not at all an isolated phenomenon here at Misawa. A friend of mine said that his back yard at Offutt AFB was a hill so steep that he would stand at the back of his house and haul the mower up and down the slope with a rope. That sounds like a job for aerially-delivered defoliants, if you ask me.
We didn't have to cut our lawn, because we did that just before the typhoon blew in. Instead, I went for a bike ride and called it PT, then sat on my butt and read a book until nappy time. It's a hard life.
"I can't believe you've gone over to the dark side," Barb said, when she saw the e-book I was reading.
I didn't intend to. I just wanted to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and the only copy the library had was on an e-book.
They are pretty cool. It's nothing fancy, just a screen with a page-up and page-down button. There are a few other functions, but you have to dig out a little pen-like thing to bring them up on the screen, which is kind of a pain in the neck. On the plus side, the screen is backlit, so you can read it day or night, in bed with the lights out or in the back seat of a car on a long trip. The batteries seem to last forever; I was reading from afternoon until after midnight, and when I plugged it in to recharge it, the battery wasn't half-used.
I thought to myself, This is great! A book I can read on the bus to work! I usually drive, but when Barb wants the car, I take my bike. There are times -- almost this whole summer, it turns out -- when the weather makes bike-riding impractical, though; it's frowned upon to report to work in a sopping-wet uniform. When I take the bus, sitting there doing nothing for forty-five minutes bores the pants off me, so I take a book along.
The problem with that is, for most of the year I get up so early that it's pitch dark out when I ride the bus to work. I end up awkwardly holding a flashlight over my book, because the bus doesn't have any lights over the seats. This e-book thing would eliminate that! And I wouldn't have to prop the book open, or ever lose a page again!
And then reality bit me in the butt: I remembered that I can't take electronic devices into the place I work, so the one really great use for an e-book is out. Bummer.
Just one other thing about an e-book that sucks: One side of it is thicker than the other, so it won't lay flat on a table. You pretty much have to hold it in your hands, which gets tiresome after an hour or so.
Except for the fact that they won't lay flat and I can't take them to work, though, they're pretty cool. Not that I'd want to buy one, but they're pretty cool as library books.
There is a lot I like about cats. They're very playful, very affectionate. Maybe not in the same slobbery, totally unreserved, oh-my-god-I'm-gonna-pee-myself way that dogs usually are, but then I like a pet that can show a little self-control. I like dogs a lot, too, but dogs need a lot of room for all their enthusiasm. You could give a labrador pup all the room of the baggage claim area of an international airport and he'd easily fill it with enthusiasm, and still have energy left to knock things over. Big, heavy things. I'm not knocking that. I love to play with pups, but I've always lived in a series of apartments -- I don't have the kind of room that a dog needs. But a cat I can handle.
And when you're done playing, cats can understand that. They go off by themselves, or they sit in your lap. None of this constantly dragging a soggy chew toy back after you've opened your newspaper and you're obviously focused on trying to figure out a ten-letter word for a cliff face. (It's escarpment, in case you're stuck on that one.)
If there's just one thing I had to make mention of that I don't like, though, it's that funky litterbox. I'm grateful that I don't have to take a cat out for a walk when it's raining or snowing or on any other kind of day but the sunshiny, 78-degree kind, with maybe a gentle breeze and just a little bit of shade under the occasional tall elm tree. Sure, I'm sort of particular that way, and plenty of dogs are, come to that.
And it's not that I mind cleaning it. I don't clean it, I'll be quick to mention, because my darling wife does that, and if ever there was a case for giving credit where credit is due, this has got to be it. She does it constantly, for the same reason that I tend to hold my breath when I walk by the litter pan: Our cat stinks. Really bad.
Or rather, it's our cat's, ah, output that stinks. He himself is a clean freak. Cleans himself all the time, emits nary an offensive odor, except if he happens to be very close to my nose and he happens to yawn, but the way I look at it, that's another kind of output. He's got the breath of a putrid corpse.
Which is why we've been thankful that he doesn't, shall we say, emit from the other end. I don't know if it's because he considers himself too classy for that kind of behavior, even in front of his closest friends, or if he just doesn't have the kind of intestinal capacity to generate it. Either way, we're not complaining.
But we've taken in a kitten from the shelter who's got that capacity, with plenty to spare, and no scruples whatsoever about sharing it with the rest of us. I'm hoping this is an affliction that will pass as he gains in years, the way little human babies shed their diapers and all the unpleasantness that goes along with them, but I fully realize that hope amounts to just about zip when it comes to situations like this.
I know what you're thinking: "What's with all the kittens from the shelter at your house, Dave?" He's visiting on the shelter's "home foster" plan; volunteers can keep the shelter's pets at their homes, which everybody feels is probably better for the animals than leaving them cooped up in the tiny cages they have at the shelter.
If this little guy ever wanted to stay at our place for the long haul, first he'd have to make himself a little more agreeable to the resident cat, Bonkers. For now, though, they're playing an uneasy game of "King of the Hill." Most of the time it looks like they're just playing, but every once in a while it's easy to see that they're trying to establish the pecking order, and we're not sure yet who's going to come out on top. Bonkers is on the home court, and he's easily two or three times the kitten's size, but the kitten's got that indestructable attitude that kids always seem to have. He just doesn't care that Bonkers is bigger.
Bonk knows he could take the stinker, and when he's had enough of the teasing, he sends the kitten packing, but there are times when it's more a game of nerves, when a steelie stare and just the right kind of ice in the voice are what it takes to come out on top. When the kitten cops an attitude, it seems he can beat Bonkers with nothing more than a sneer. We've got his back, though. The kitten doesn't seem to realize that yet, or if he does, he doesn't care.
News story: Trains are remotely controlled now. Just like a boy with a toy train set, a guy with a box clipped to his belt makes the engines go back and forth through yards where they switch box cars to string them into trains. Trains moving many times faster than you can run, weighing forty million pounds, are scooting back and forth with nobody in them.
News item: The military is building and flying UCAVs - those are Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, or fighter planes with nobody in them. We sort of have them already: surveillance drones (UAVs to those who are hip to the lingo), which normally carry nothing more noxious than a video camera, have been known to carry guided missiles. A plane with nobody in it has fired guided missiles.
Pilots admit that the only thing keeping fighter aircraft from being even more lethal than they already are is the pilot. A pilot can only withstand so much of the physical punishment that he inflicts on himself when flying a fighter. A computer isn't affected much.
Suffering succotash, it's raining again. This is becoming The Summer That Wasn't! Two thumbs down.
I still don't understand what Sandburg's saying about 90% of the time. I just read "Broken-Faced Gargoyles" and I don't get anything other than he yearns to be footloose, so he's just one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. That'll come in handy at the next party.
Thanks to a movie soundtrack CD, I know all the words to the musical Annie, with the exception, thank goodness, of "Tomorrow." That song haunted me when they played it to death on the radio back in the day. I'm pretty sure I somehow managed to turn on the radio, or be in the room, every single time every station in mid-Wisconsin played it.
Speaking of radios and the music they play, I heard Aerosmith's "Jenny's Got A Gun" on the hall speakers at work, and was instantly taken back to Berlin. Whenever we move someplace new, we always try to remember to pack the radio with our household goods, so that when we get there we have something to do. You'd be surprised just how much fun you can get out of listening to the radio when everything else you own is in five or six big boxes on a container ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
When we moved to Berlin, we forgot a radio, so we bought one at the PX, and, in the mysterious, possibly even occult ways that AFRTS has of choosing what will be popular that summer, they played "Jenny's Got A Gun" at least twice every morning, noon, and night. When we moved to Denver, it was Barenaked Ladies singing "The Old Apartment," and when we moved to England, it was Madonna's Now, whenever I hear these songs, I'm time-warped back to the place I first heard them played ad nauseum by the good folks at AFRTS -- pronounced "A-Farts." It stands for something like "American Forces Radio and Television Service." I can remember a time before we became kinder and gentler that they used "Armed" instead of "American."
Tim cooked dinner again, Cajun chicken and home-made oven fries. This is a hobby I can get behind.
No cats. No rain. Just drivel.
The other night we stopped at the post office after a movie and found a zillion little yellow slips in the box. When they get a package that's too big for the box -- that would be just about any package, although there has been the occasional attempt by the spacially challenged to cram a manila envelope stuffed with magazines into it -- they give you a yellow slip, and you pick up your package at the window.
It sucks when you know you've got a ton of packages, or even just one package, but it's too late in the evening to pick it up.
A whole bunch of our mail orders came in: Books and movies from the bargain bin, a bunch of post cards I got off e-bay, magazines. We spent the rest of the day tearing open packages, sorting the stuff out, and reading. Getting packages is better when they come in a little at a time, so you've got something to look forward to each day, but a trainload all at once was all right, too.
The post cards are my brother's fault. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. He says it's the geek in me that's to blame, and while I admit and even relish my geekishness, I still say a seed's just a seed until somebody waters it. He got me started on e-bay and those dumb post cards of Manawa -- freaking Manawa on post cards! -- and now I'm collecting the dumb things. I've moved on from Manawa to post cards featuring Green Bay and Appleton.
It's not a completely stupid hobby, as some hobbies can be. (Just think about jumping off bridges, for example. Okay, now stop.) I grew up in Green Bay, and I was born in Appleton, so in a way it has something to do with me. And the post cards are kinda neat; I love the hand-tinted old-time post cards, especially when they've been used. Some of the things that I've written don't seem quite so dorky when I can compare it to some of the things I read on the backs of post cards.
Barb and I went out to Cow Beer Staek (not a typo) (not mine, at least) for our anniversary dinner last night. I'm going to be working on the 25th, so we picked a night that we could both take off, and walked into town. Cow Beer Staek was one of those places we've heard everybody talk about and have always meant to go to, but haven't made the time for it until now. Nice place. Great staek.
The drag racers were tearing up the back roads around Misawa again last night. Some night, when the sound of big engines wakes us at three in the morning, we're going to have to get up and find out where the locals go to drag race, and call in an air strike on it.
The wind picked up about four o'clock in the morning, just before dawn. All our windows were open because the night had been pretty warm and humid up to that point, and all the doors in the house were open to keep the breeze moving. When the wind picked up, one of the doors downstairs slammed shut so loudly that I was pretty sure a bomb had gone off somewhere nearby, so I laid awake for about ten minutes, heart pounding, and could go back to sleep only after the expected sound of wailing fire trucks never appeared.
I haven't received any viruses or worms in my e-mail yet. I feel sort of rejected.
Tim's wish for a birthday gift was simple: he wanted us to rent him The Transporter, a movie that he'd seen parts of on the movie channel and liked because he thought it was about trick driving. The plot was pretty thin: a retired SAS guy living in the south of France indulges his hobby for driving sporty cars really, really fast, and makes a little extra money, by transporting "packages" for unsavory characters, no questions asked. Doesn't take long for him to get into trouble.
The star of the movie, Jason Statham, gets to beat up thirty or forty people in the spectacularly impossible way that movies stage fights, and there's an especially plagaristic scene on a French superhighway where he does an Indiana Jones, beating up the bad guy while he drives a huge truck at highway speed and without missing his exit. It's a pretty good movie for action; it hasn't got much else, though.
Barb, Tim and I went to see The Italian Job a couple nights back, a movie that came highly rated by all the critics. It's got lots of star power, featuring Mark Wahlberg, Charleze Theron, and a lead-in with Donald Sutherland. The action is fast-paced, the surprises are pretty good, the plot is even pretty well thought-out. I thought it wasn't as sexy as Ocean's Eleven, but Tim thought it was even better.
Now, not to get too deep -- they're only movies -- but what is it about these films that makes me root for the bad buys? I hate to sound like the goody-two-shoes geek I am, but isn't that kind of, well, wrong?
I'll admit that the way they all do their nasty jobs in the most action-packed, sexy ways can seem pretty appealing. Clooney's gang members in Ocean's Eleven were not only jazzy, well-dressed, suave, and casually did their work with oily precision, they were funny, too. I loved that. But even while I was having a great time listening to them lob quips at one another, and satisfying my James Bond gadget fetish at the same time, I felt guilty for liking these guys. They're stealing 185 million dollars -- not because it'll make life better for anybody else, but because it'll make life better for them. If they're burning Andy Garcia because he's a cold, money-grubbing casino uberlord, why don't I get a cut? You, too, of course.
I suppose I could argue a case for character development, if I thought an action movie was worth it. The "good" bad guys usually seem to have found some shredded ethic or scruple left over from their more idealistic days, and ask themselves if they can just ignore it. Clooney's Danny Ocean said he wanted to right the wrong he did to his wife by lying to her and committing a felony that got him locked up in prison. Naturally, the way to make her realize his devotion and win her back would be to bankrupt the man she's hooked up with -- that's the first thing that would've occurred to me, too. Statham's Mr. Transporter had a conscience that wouldn't let him ignore the screaming girl in the trunk of his car, but he scarcely hesitated, minutes later, to ruthlessly beat the snot out of two police who caught him at his business.
But if the argument for character-development doesn't take, I could fall back on good old, dependable vengeance. In each movie, the "good" bad guys are settling a score. The bad guys are just sticking it to the badder guys. Andy Garcia stole Clooney's girl in Ocean's Eleven, Ed Norton is a traitorous killer in The Italian Job, and The Transporter has not one, but two bug-eyed, gravelly-voiced slave traders for Jason Statham to sneer at. Of course I want to see justice done, even if it's done to creepy, immoral criminals by smooth-mannered, slightly less immoral criminals who have an immaculate sense for fashion.
But they're all bad guys -- they're all bad guys. And somehow I still ended up liking Sutherland and Theron, Wahlberg and Clooney. If I didn't, the movie would suck because I wouldn't care what happened. But why do I like these guys? Why does a jazzy soundtrack, slick writing and flashy photography make really dispicable characters, people with no common morals, a bunch without a single scruple among them -- how do movies make people like this look so good? And, incidentally, how can I get that formula to work for me? I'm not looking for Brad Pitt's big-screen charisma; just a dash of that pixie dust on my resume would be fine.
Back to cats for a minute.
Had to take the cat to the vet. His eye wouldn't drain, and the sophisticated medical way to treat that is to poke a straw up there and suck out the nasty stuff. It's not easy to stick a tiny little straw into the duct in a cat's eye, even when the cat's holding still, which very few cats will voluntarily do unless you have what the vet has for just this purpose: Hallucinogenic drugs.
That's how vets anesthatize your pets. They tank your fluffy little kitten full of a drug called ketamine that makes him look and walk as though he's had a few too many daquiris. The Army vet on base thought it was pretty funny. He probably spends his weekends getting his labrador drunk, too.
But here's the really wild thing about ketamine: It's the drug of choice among ravers, or that's what the vet said, anyway. I don't care to speculate about how he knows that; draw your own conclusions. If it makes ravers look anything like our cat did, though, I know now that I made the right choice when I decided never to indulge in anything stronger than a beer. He looked pathetic. He could scarcely walk, and when he did manage a few careful steps, he had to sit down to work up the strength for some more, and to get his bearings. He couldn't focus on anything, and when he tried to look as us, he seemed about ready to cry.
I don't see how that's a decent way to treat an animal. Kinder just to hit them over the head with a blunt object.
Today's the day: Our youngest son somehow got off to school without a major clothing incident. Monday mornings usually require a major clothing incident: He doesn't have the right clothes, or he discovers that his favorite clothes are suddenly a size too small, and he can't be seen in public wearing clothes that are a size too small. He scurries around, looking for a new set of Monday morning clothes to wash at the last minute. He can't leave the house until he's wearing just the right set of clothes.
We've tried to head off these Monday morning clothes emergencies on Sunday night, but that doesn't seem to be immediate enough for him. When the emergency is in his face, then he's moved to action. Sunday evening is way too soon to be worrying about Monday morning. But I suppose he made some allowances this morning, being the first day of school, and put everything in order for a quick getaway. Almost. He wouldn't accept a ride to school until we made him, and we made him because there was a freaking typhoon outside that was dumping so much rain that the street outside was a Class Five whitewater rapids. "At least wear a raincoat," his mother begged him, but he insisted he didn't need a raincoat. "My jacket will just soak it up and keep me dry," he said, as if that made sense of some kind.
But finally he was out the door and safely delivered by his mother to the steps of school, where he no doubt hung in the parking lot with his peeps and none of them so much as mentioned the rain. I doubt they even noticed it.
Sean is finally at his new school today, too. We got a call from him around noonish, which should have been midnight his time, and just what the heck is he doing up that late, anyway? Well, his mother was so relieved to hear from him that it hardly matters. He said he spent today at orientation lectures, or briefings, or whatever they call it. If memory serves ... wait, memory doesn't have to serve! I have the internet! Sean's first day of school will be on Wednesday, and he'll register for classes on Tuesday. What an exciting new life to start in such a great place. I'm insanely jealous.
Let's see ... I already mentioned the typhoon ...
I'm off to stand my first mid watch in a four week string of mids, so you'll be getting some really whacked-out e-mail from me once I try to start writing while my mind is clogged with the gunk that gets up there when I haven't had enough sleep.
Finally and, not incidentally, today Barb and I celebrate 14 years of wedded bliss.
I fell asleep coming home on the bus. Not just the light doze I can usually fall into, so that I know more or less to within a block where I am and can wake up before the bus has gone too far. This time I was flat-out, chin-on-chest, snoring-through-the nose asleep, and I didn't wake up until the driver stopped to pick up a schoolgirl, several stops beyond my street. If I'd had anything but spiderwebs in my head, I could have jumped out right then and would have had to walk no more than two blocks, but I could barely manage to lift my head and mumbled "Missed my stop" to myself before the bus was halfway through the housing area and I had to walk home from the elementary school.
Such are the perils of working mids. But I do it for you, and to preserve the safety and democracy of the free world. That's just the kind of guy I am.
You've probably heard the saying that military service is 99% mind-numbing boredom and 1% sheer terror. Every minute of last night fell into the 99% category, no question. The most terrifying thing that happened to me was that I had to rewrite an airman's evaluation. Between that and making sure the bathrooms were clean, I had a watch that would've put anybody to sleep on the ride home, no matter how much coffee they'd been drinking.
I arrived at a hustle and bustle inside our front door. Today is Tim's thirteenth birthday, which required a certain amount of ribbing, and luckily I had the help of one Travis, one of his friends who lives up the street and walks with Tim to school in the morning. "Make sure you tell everybody that it's his birthday today," I reminded him, and he laughed with a look in his eye that said, I've got plans for you, sucker.
Then Barb had to introduce me to her new friend, a kitten that was turned into the shelter yesterday and was all googly-eyed for. Imagine it: I've been awake all night with little to do, I was so tired that I fell asleep on the bus and had to walk four blocks home in the morning drizzle, and now I've got to meet a cat. But Barb was right, she was a cutie. I stayed awake long enough to play a game of Kill The Feather Duster.
Then I wrapped myself in quilts and surrendered to sweet slumber...
Until the garage called. I'll spare you the technobabble: It was broke. When I made the appointment a week ago, it was broke in the two-hundred-dollar way, but now that the engine was in pieces on the floor of the garage, it was discovered to be broken in the thousand-dollar way, as these things so often happen. And it happened after I'd had about four hours sleep. Barb gently woke me and we got to have that "Wadayawannado?" conversation when the options are a) fix the old car, or b) buy another old car. After we'd made the decision to fix the old car (it was six of one, half-dozen of the other) and I called the garage to tell them, they said, Nevermind, we took care of it.
Think I could get to sleep after that? Not on your life.
I ended up here at the keyboard. The kitten hardly let me type a string of three words without attacking my knees with claws as sharp as quilting needles. Pretty soon I'll lay down with a book and, if there's any balance at all in the universe, maybe snatch another hour of sleep before I have to stand another mid watch and preserve democracy for yet another day.
Sleep well. Thanks for the anniversary wishes.
The day began in the usual way: Climbed blearily into the bus, fell into the seat behind the driver so I wouldn't have to jump far when I woke up to find I'd almost missed my stop. Almost immediately after sitting down, my eyeballs went into business for themselves and my eyelids started slamming shut with a power that atomic weapons couldn't match. The driver thought this was very funny, smiling to himself as he watched me in the mirror.
At home I had a quick bite to eat before burying myself in quilts and pillows and divorcing myself from the world for six blissful hours.
I woke around two with plenty to do, but my head still wasn't remotely close to being acclimated to mid watches. I stumbled through the necessary tasks, but it felt the whole time like my brain was in backwards, and only half of it was on-line. The other half kept giving me the mental equivalent of that pop-up my laptop gives me all the time, but doesn't mean anything: "The system is waiting for the Close Program dialogue box. You can wait and see if it appears, or you can restart your computer." I have no idea what the Close Program dialogue box is; I've never seen it, and nothing happens when I try to restart my computer; I have to power it down. Can't do that to my brain, at least not while I'm driving.
The first task seemed simple: Hit the post office to pick up the mail. The challenge: Half the roads on base were under construction. Main base in particular was a hopeless maze, and I hadn't kept up with the daily changes -- a rat in a laboratory would've had a better chance.
The second task: Pick up something at the commissary for dinner. The challenge: A trip to the commissary is so full of possibility. In the first place, the bookstore is right next to it. If that's not a recipe for distraction, I don't know what is. I trolled the bargain shelves, which had just been restocked with the culled books that weren't selling. Their two copies of Firestorm in Peshtigo were still there for going on the thirty millionth week, but the management still hadn't marked it down any further than twenty-one bucks. I'm holding out until it hits five. I figure there can't be more than two people on base, counting me, who even know where Peshtigo is.
While I was thinking bargains, I made my way around the corner to the BX, where I found they'd also restocked the shelves devoted to returned CDs, mostly just crappy pop music, and that rap stuff. I flipped through it anyway, stopping now and then to check out Now That's What I Call Music! or Ultimate Classic Rock, which included tunes like Kansas' Carry on Wayward Son, and Boz Skaggs' Lido Shuffle, music that made me grin to think about where I was and what I was doing when WDUX was playing it on AM radio back in the late 70's. Wait a minute! REO Speedwagon's Roll With The Changes?! No way! And Boston doing Foreplay/Long Time! That settled it; it went straight to the checkout with me.
Stopped and said hi on the way out to a couple of people I knew from work and then, distractions out of the way, I headed to the commissary, picked up a package of strip pork to fry up, yakiniku-style, for dinner, a few other sundries, and out the door, just an hour after I got there. Pretty good time for the rat to finish the maze.
I put REO Speedwagon on the stereo as soon as I got home, and Barb and I laughed as we played air guitar in the kitchen and slammed our heads back and forth to the beat of the *BLIP!*
What the hell?
"Tim, did you stop the music?"
"I gotta make a phone call," he called from the living room.
"Oh. Not, 'I've got to make a phone call, could I please turn off the stereo?'"
H E A V Y S I G H "Could I please turn off the stereo to make a phone call?" Sound of phone being dialed. And I think I could hear his eyeballs rolling.
After this very important phone call, he talked me into playing a little basketball with him. "Y'know, get some father-son quality time," he prompted, using my mother's guilt genes, to which I never evolved so much as an adequate defense. He just wanted to kick my tail around for a while; he can tell me all about school and dribble circles around me at the same time, not even break a sweat. So I let him.
I fixed the rice for dinner, but Tim wanted to conduct a food experiment on the pork instead of yakiniku. Wasn't a complete success; the pork tastes like pork, but I didn't have to fix it. I have the same attitude about fixing dinner that I do about free beer.
And the day drew to a close. I got two books in the mail that I would undoubtely spend the rest of the evening paging through, and I could set my new pop music CD on 'repeat' until Tim begged for mercy. Not a bad day at all.
So if you're tired of the same old story,
Oh, turn some pages.
I will be here when you are ready
To roll with the changes, yeah,
Keep on rollin', oooo ....
In the I Never Cease To Be Amazed Department, President Bush appears to have moved up a notch or two, so far as his status as a doll is concerned. I don't know if you recall the simple rag doll that came out last year; it had a loop in his back you could pull so he could babbble a randomly-chosen recording of one of his well-known verbal gaffes. That must have made the White House PR department so happy.
This year, he's morphed into a svelte, posable action figure decked out in fighter jock gear, complete with helmet and face mask. The President is an action figure! Practically a super-hero! This is great! Mom, can I have one? Of each? Puh-leeeeze?
Left Field Department: She Who Must Always Be Obeyed informed me, after a brief visit to the same bathroom that I used, that I'm never again allowed to loudly and enthusiastically condemn the cats for smelling up the house with their litter box. How does that follow?
Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor Department: Tim begged for permission to download music from the internet. Turns out he can't; he would have to be 18 years old to do that. I would guess this is because allowing underage music lovers to say just the titles of some of the songs out loud in mixed company, nevermind the lyrics, would get them grounded for a week. But, progressive parent that I am, I agreed to download some of this alleged music for him if I were allowed to listen to it first -- I'm so looking forward to that.
However, building an atom smasher from common household appliances is easier than trying to use one of these music-download sites. The first one I tried was afflicted by a plague of pop-ups from a meet-a-mate club called LavaLove, or something equally subtle. The second site just flat out wouldn't send me the e-mail that was supposed to unlock my account. After a hour of beating myself up like this, Tim let me off the hook for the night.
I Love My Job Department: I got to call one of the airmen on flight to make sure he had all his shots. You'd be surprised all the personal questions I can ask in the name of military readiness. I waited until about nine-thirty in the morning to call this guy, but apparently that was still a bit early; he sounded pretty out of it when he answered the phone.
I made my request, and had to repeat several parts of it before he understood the question. He fumbled around for a way to answer it; it felt like he was looking for a way to say he didn't know where his records were. "Look," I said, "if you need some time to find your shot records, you can call me back in ten minutes. If you need to run down to the clinic to consult their records or get your shot, you can call me back in an hour."
There was a silence.
"Uh?" he finally grunted. It seemed to require a lot of effort. "Master Sergeant, could I have a little more time?" he asked. "I was out really late last night. I'm in no shape to report to the clinic."
I remembered those days. "Sure," I said. "Call me back at noon."
The task here is to Name The Kitten.
The trick is that nobody likes the names anybody else chooses.
Barb thought up "Mimi," which I liked, but Tim didn't. It's been his nickname ever since he could talk. He heard us saying "Timmy," but he could only play it back as "me-me." It's also the Japanese word for "ear," which could cause some confusion when we take her to the vet.
Tim picks names like "Hagamemnon" or "Dwonkus" or "Bart Simpson" -- all of his nominations are out by default at this point.
I tend to use adjectives to name animals -- Trouble, Stinky, Noisy -- or I give them names of things that aren't human but describe them well -- Booger, Squeak. Human names are out for pets, as far as I'm concerned, so I'm not much of a judge of good names when it comes to the names Barb suggests.
I know which names I definitely don't like: Brandi, Cecil, Zoe. Okay, I like Cecil, but it's a guy's name. The kitten's a female.
So we're appealing to outside sources. Name The Cat! And please hurry. It's getting ugly over here.
Thanks.
Right off the bat, I've got to thank you for your unbelievably quick and imaginative responses to the Name The Kitten drive-by tasker I shot into the internet ether yesterday. We're carefully cataloging each and every one, and a team of highly-trained experts, working in clean suits and locked inside environmentally-controlled isolation rooms, will examine them, hoping to find one that we can all agree on. The preliminary results aren't in, so I can't even hint at a probable name yet.
I would like to ask, though: What's with the obsession on the ears? I mean, I know she's got some big ol' jug-handles, but a name like "Ears" is a heck of a thing to stick a youngster with, isn't it? Just imagine all the teasing she'd get from the other tabbies on the playground at recess. I'm afraid "Ears," or any foreign-language derivation thereof, will probably not do well when reviewed by the panel. It's not that I'm ungrateful for your response, it's just that I've got a nose like a snowman's carrot, and it sort of makes me wonder what you might've named me.
I stood a mid watch last night, a pretty dull one. The high point involved rewriting an evaluation ... no, wait, the high point was when we highjacked one of the overhead projectors and made the wall into a wide-screen television. Yes, this is what your Fighting Forces of Freedom do for fun on the weekends. We can be a pathetically sad bunch when we try really hard. Funny thing is, nobody wanted to watch it, which surprised the hell out of me. Usually everybody gaggles around a television set, but late-night TV was so boring that even that wasn't happening last night. One girl with a front-row seat had her nose in her biology book all night, in between the short periods when she had to do her job.
But aside from that brief diversion, I'd have to admit my biggest accomplishment was staying awake all night and for the fifteen minutes it took to drive home. Nobody was out of bed when I got there, it being Saturday morning, so I had my breakfast in the dead quiet of the kitchen, reading a magazine, then stumbled up the steps to the bedroom, where I roused Barb just enough to get her to snuggle up to me, much better than quilts for warmth and sleeping comfort. I don't remember much after that.
I don't know James Lileks, but I've been reading his on-line posts for long enough that I'll put a plug in for him. Besides having great taste in formica-and-chrome interior decoration techniques, he has what I would dare to characterize as a no-nonsense approach to solving complex issues, to wit:
Why not nuke North Korea’s nuke test? They’ve said they’re going to have a test; I presume we know where that will be. So we nuke it the day before. There’s a big explosion, a mushroom cloud; they blame us. We say what are you talking about? You said you were going to light one off. And you did. No! You did it! Right. We nuked your nuke test. And that makes sense . . . how, exactly? It would certainly keep them off their game. And just after we nuke the test - and every subsequent test, of course - we put a call to Li’l Kim’s cellphone, and someone with a Texas accent says oh, I’m sorry, wrong number. I was tryin’ to reach a live man.
You can check out more of James Lileks, a columnist for the Minneapolis-St.Paul Star-Tribune, on his web site. If you have a look, I hope you'll enjoy him as much as I do!
Sean called! From school! Nothing more to see here. Move along.