It was so hot when I got up this morning that I could actually hear every one of my pores spitting sweat. Imagine that. It's pretty disgusting, I know, but imagine a football stadium filled to capacity, and everybody in it is spitting. Wow, is that a gross idea. And that football stadium was me, a fountain of spitsweat. Just think about it. Wait, better not.
Tim came out of his room, stood in the doorway, and said, "Wow! This feels great! It's so cool this morning!"
"You're kidding," I said. "Cool?"
"Yeh," he said, looking genuinely refreshed. The weather had obviously warped his brain in a shocking way.
It's festival season in Japan, so Barb and I went to Hachinohe to see the festival of the three shrines at the invitation of Akiko, a woman Barb met at an English school. Barb sometimes teaches English to the Japanese, when she gets the chance, and she lucked out when she met Akiko, who is not only one of the sweetest Japanese ladies I've met, but also because Akiko's aunt owned a kimono shop on the main street of Hachinohe. It's normally just about impossible to find a place to sit along the parade route through a town, but Akiko's aunt pretty much owned a stretch of the sidewalk, where she set up chairs and we gratefully sat down in the shade of the building across the street to watch the floats go by.
Since it was the festival of the three shrines, they brought out the kami from each of the shrines and paraded them along the streets. Even a kami has to head into town once in a while. There were lots of kids and adults in costume, although the adults in this parade weren't drinking as much as they do in other parades we've seen. Usually, they're drinking lots and lots of sake and beer. Yesterday, though, they weren't, possibly because the weather was still so unspeakably hot that any more than a can of beer would've been lethal. Even without the usual liquid encouragement, the people in the parade were doing their best to yell and drum and make festival noises, but the best they could manage was a sort of wilted, checked-the-box kind of participation, as if to say, There. I yelled. I want to go sit in the shade now.
But we still had lots of fun despite the heat, and for the first time in three years I got to talk with somebody else who loves cartoons, or in this case, Miyazaki cartoons. It's hard for me to take that kind of thing for granted.
My camera's batteries died. I'd like to blame it on the heat, but I think it was just because I got stupid and forgot to charge the camera. But I managed to squeeze off a couple shots before the battery gave up the ghost, and you can see them on the updated picture page.
I had a little trouble with gas in the morning, the kind of trouble that keeps me awake, and not the kind that keeps Barb awake, if you know what I mean, and if you're fortyish like I am, then you probably do know. Gas is a young man's party joke, and an old man's curse. I think William Blake said that.
I was also having no small amount of trouble sleeping because of the cats. They like to roam the upstairs rooms in the dark, knocking things off the dresser tops, dumping the laundry baskets on the floor and crawling inside, and pouncing on me whenever I make the slightest move. Cats are like kids in the way that, when they're sitting in your lap, purring, they're just the sweetest things on earth, but when you're walking the floor in the middle of the night trying to put one to sleep, euphemistically in the case of the cat, you wonder whatever made you crazy enough to want one in your life.
I took a shower after I got home from work, to rinse off the sweat that popped out of my skin just two steps beyond the air-conditioned shelter of the building I work in. Also, to rinse the spiderwebs out of my hair. There's something about my hair and spiderwebs. I seem to be made to brush them out of every doorway I pass through. It's not that I'm that much taller than most people, it seems to be the case rather that I'm usually lucky enough to be the first through most doorways. Same goes for all the trees I pass by when I take a walk in the morning. By the time I get back home, I've got enough spider webs streaming from my head and arms that I could knit a sweater with them. How does a guy get born under that cosmic star?
The heat wave we've been suffering through for the past week has left people reaching for a new alternative to the simile "sweating like a pig" — and it turns out there aren't any, are there? Whenever it's so hot that we're covered in buckets of our own slick, stinky slime, we automatically think of pigs. I've heard people say they stink like a goat, but we all sweat like pigs. And why is that? I mean, I know that pigs stink to high heaven, but do pigs even sweat? I don't know, and I bet you don't, either. (According to porkpeople.com, they don't, and I've just got to believe a website called porkpeople.com.)
Veering off that topic — do I hear a grateful sigh? — I was reminded by nothing relevant of our recent trip to the mall to watch a Japanese movie none of us could understand. The movie theater's in a mall that's about a twenty-minute drive from home. We parked on the roof so that we could be on the second floor, same as the theater. It seemed to make sense at the time. What we didn't count on was that the mall would be closed and locked up tight when the movie let out. We had to exit from the backside of the mall and were left standing in a parking lot, wondering where the hell to go from there, and when we finally figured out what direction to go in, it turned out there was just one way to get up onto the roof where the car was parked — the ramp entrance, which was hell and gone from the theater exit, by the way. Walking home might've taken less time and been more satisfying. Note to self: Don't park on the roof any more.
Got an e-mail from a friend of mine who lives in France. Where he lives is relevant, honestly. He wanted me to try Skype, an internet telephone service. I downloaded the software, bought a microphone, and we chatted through the internet connection for about a half-hour. Really chatted, using our voices, not telegraphic cutsey-pie crap in a pop-up window th!z !z w@y 2 cooooool! Total cost: $7.95 for the microphone, which Tim used to record burps and farts after I was through with it, so its value is incalculable, really.
Barb bought a cell phone today. It's such a tiny thing that I can hardly believe it's a telephone. It flips open just like Kirk's communicator did, but Barb's phone does way more than anything Roddenberry ever could have dreamed of — it's a video game, it's a camera, it's got internet access, and who knows what else it can do. But the most interesting thing about it: you can send e-mail from it, and e-mail is cheaper than a phone call.
So, just to summarize: You can make a telephone call to the other side of the world on the internet for much less than the cost of using an actual phone, and you can send e-mail from an actual phone for much less than the cost of making a phone call. Maybe things like this will make sense again someday, but I'm starting to feel like I probably won't live to see it.
There are all kinds of things on the internet that you shouldn't see because they're just too weird, or gross, or they could land you in jail, and then there's GoodPlasticSurgery.com, before-and-after photos of nose jobs, tummy tucks, boob lifts, and a lot of other "enhancements" you might never have thought of on your own. I'm not exactly recommending it, because that would sort of feel like telling people where to see the latest road accident, but it is strangely engaging, as is its counterpart, AwfulPlasticSurgery.com.
Whenever I connect to the internet, one of the first things I like to do is check the latest news, to see if everybody's gone completely whacko yet. I'm very rarely disappointed by the indicators. Here's the one I found withing five seconds after loading up this drivel — I had to come back and add this link to the Miss Plastic Surgery Pagent in China.
Barb and I are starting a laundry list of rhetoric that must be exterminated. Wanna join us?
In the political sphere, where threadbare phrases lie heavily (or maybe not so heavily, as the metaphore goes) all over the floor, I've already said my piece on the phrase, Freedom Isn't Free, but it's still on the list, although it's sinking to the bottom just through sheer overuse. Coming up from behind, They [the terrorists] hate us because we're free hasn't been heard as much as it once was, but still pops up often enough to make me clench my teeth. What a stupidly oversimplified way to summarize a life-or-death struggle. It's got to go. And although it would seem that a politician could hardly dole out more honor and reverence with a phrase like paid the ultimate sacrifice, isn't it perhaps just a bit trite? Wouldn't the concrete and more accurate died for a noble cause or perished in defense of the nation be much more illustrative, and hold greater weight, than the rather bland euphemism of paid the ultimate sacrifice? I'd like to think so.
Barb spotted yet another example of what has to be the most crassly-used rhetoric in journalism, drank the kool-ade, referring to the Jim Jones massacre, and used to illustrate somebody who thoughtlessly swallowed a line of bull. I get the unpleasant feeling that the journalist who wrote the piece smugly patted himself on the back for coming up with that one, and shouldn't have. It's the prosaic equivalent of coming up with a new dead baby joke. No matter how clever it might be, it's still a dead baby joke, and you shouldn't tell it in mixed company. I don't think I'm being too sensitive on that one.
When I stepped out of the shower yesterday, Barb was sitting on the bed in the next room, playing with her new cell phone. I jumped back into the bathroom like a scared cockroach. That thing's got a camera on it, and it's connected to the internet 24/7. There's just no way that can not be misused, or mistakenly used. If Barb knows your e-mail address, odds are pretty darned good you're going to get a photograph from her sometime this year, accidentally or no. So if a snapshot of me naked in the bathroom is something you can stand to see in your inbox, you've got something to look forward to. Otherwise, I'd start thinking about changing my e-mail address, if I were you.
Just how creepy do these camera phones make you feel, anyway? Having that tiny eye pointed at me by everybody talking on a cell gives me the heebee-jeebies, and is more than a little like finding myself trapped in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I used to read science fiction stories, tons of them — that's not hyperbole; I had a couple hundred pounds of paperback science fiction books stockpiled in the bottom of a closet in my parents' home, before my dad started taking them to the trade-a-book stand at the local library. The geeks who wrote those stories could imagine all kinds of weirdness, but, so far as I can remember, none of them forsaw a future in which we'd all willingly walk around with Orwell's eye pointing out the front of our portable telephones.
I WENT TO THE STATES FOR TWO WEEKS to visit family members flung here and there. This would ordinarily have cost a couple thousand bucks, but I lucked out because I could plan my trip around a couple of military hops. I would have to travel "space-available," which meant that I could fly so long as some officer's butt didn't want to sit in the seat that I was shooting for.
IT'S FUNNY, AND IT'S NOT: I had never traveled space-A before, so I called the passenger terminal and told the guy who answered, "I've never traveled space-A before, what do I do?" He told me when to show up at the passenger terminal to sign up. The day before sign-up, I was going over my travel plans with Barb, who asked if I had my tickets, if I had my passport, if I had my EML orders ...
"My EML orders?" I asked. "I have to be on EML orders?"
It turned out I could travel on my leave papers, but if I had EML orders, I'd be in a higher priorty bracket. Didn't know that. Never traveled space-A before. (Did I mention that?) So I got EML orders, took my papers down to the passenger terminal, and signed up. The guy at the counter was very helpful — told me when to show up for roll call, gave me tips on how to pack, and, before I left, I said, "I've never traveled space-A before. Is there anything else I should know?" There wasn't.
Until I got called for an available seat. "Twenty-seven fifty," the guy said, when he was finished with all my paperwork.
"Beg pardon?" I asked.
"It's a landing fee; we have to pay it whenever we land at a civilian air field," he explained. "Twenty-seven fifty."
I'm not complaining about the price; I think anybody would agree that it's a bargain. By this time, though, I'd told at least three different people that I'd never been in space-A status before, and asked them point-blank what I had to do. Seemed like everybody knew, but nobody wanted to tell me.
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART: There's a two-hour sign-up process for space-A travel. "Show time" is four o'clock, and the departure lounge is impenetrably sealed from the outside world at six o'clock, even though the plane doesn't lift-off until seven-thirty. Bring a magazine.
IT TOOK ABOUT TEN HOURS to fly from Misawa to Seattle, although they said it would take only eight. But you know what? By the time you've spent eight hours in a chair that's ten inches wide ... hmmmm ... you know, I was going to say another two hours wouldn't matter, but that would be a stupid thing to say. Of course it matters. I can't sleep on planes. I like to read, but I rarely spend eight hours at a stretch reading. And there's only so much junk food I can eat anymore. So, after eight hours sitting in a ten-inch wide seat, I would sell my mother to slavers for a nickle if they promised that I could get OUT of that seat.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT OUR AIRCRAFT: Just before takeoff, the pilot lit the "Fasten Seat Belt" sign, which was hardwired to the "No Smoking" sign.
"No Smoking?" the guy behind me asked his buddy. "Who gets to smoke on a plane?"
"Dude, this plane was built in the Stone Age, yo," his buddy answered. Maybe not quite the Stone Age — maybe more like the Iron Age. The L-1011 is an aircraft so old that the pilots get it going by dangling their legs out the bottom and paddling their feet against the runway. After that, the boilers have enough steam to keep it going, so long as the stokers keep enough coal on the fires.
I HATE BAGGAGE CLAIM, and for people like me, Seattle/Tacoma Int'l airport has a very special hell waiting: after standing at the carousel for a half-hour, watching the bags go round and round, and then playing tag with the airline representative when my bag didn't turn up, I left the arrivals area with my check bag to get on the subway to the main terminal. Two guys were waiting at the exit doors. "Take your carry-on, and claim your check bag at Baggage Claim One," he said, reaching for my bag.
"Excuse me?" I said, snatching my carry-on bags.
"Pick up your check bag at Baggage Claim One," he said, tossing my bag on a conveyor belt. Yes. I had waited for it, I had hunted it down, it was in my hands, and then it went bye-bye and I had to go stand at another carousel — at the far end of the main terminal, natch — and wait another half-hour for my bag to appear, again. What sick, twisted animal thought of this?
A HUGE THANK-YOU TO THE VOLUNTEERS OF THE SEATAC USO LOUNGE: The friendly faces here are a breath of fresh air to the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who've just busted out of commercial aircraft from all over the world, and are searching for a place to crash for a couple hours, or are looking for a sandwich and a coke that they don't have to mortgage the farm for. If I had to be stuck at any airport for twelve hours, it was a lucky break to be stuck here.
JET LAG SUCKS. I tried to stay awake last night for as long as possible, because I have only a short time here and I didn't want to spend a big part of it awake at three o'clock in the morning, and falling asleep every evening just before dinner. I made it past dinner last night, thank goodness, and even managed to stay up past eight, but by nine my eyelids were slamming shut and I was turning into a bobblehead. Mom laughed at me and said, "Just go to bed, Dave." My head weaved in her general direction, and I managed to uncross my eyes momentarily. "But I'm so much fun to watch, aren't I?"
I was out cold by nine-thirty, and I didn't get out of bed until nine-thirty this morning. A twelve-hour nap will do a lot of good sometimes.
There was a short time after I woke up around three in the morning that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep, but it was a very short time.
SINCE I'D SLEPT THE MORNING AWAY, we kept the day simple — a short bike ride along the trail from Hortonville, then back home to throw some steaks on the grill.
The bike trail that runs through Hortonville is an old railroad grade, so it was just about flat, and it ran through the woods along the edges of one farm after another. The sky was mostly clear and sunny, and a light breeze almost kept the bugs off us. I had a bit of a panic when I noticed that the deerflies were out in twos and threes. Deerflies made one of the most traumatic experiences of my life when they attacked my Dad and I as we were canoeing down the Little Wolf River past Manawa, way back when. They came off the water in a cloud, and never stopped biting us until we pulled out of the river a mile or so downstream. Just one deerfly bite is painful; dozens make you miserable; but hundreds are terrifying. By the time we pulled out, I was in a state of almost total mental melt-down.
But there were just a few out today, and only one managed to light on Tom long enough to bite him. We kept moving along the gravel path fast enough to enjoy a largely bugless ride. Can't post any photos yet; I remembered to pack my camera, but forgot to pack the patch chord that connects the camera to my laptop, and it might be a few days before we're anywhere close to an electronics store. Sorry 'bout that.
CRIBBAGE IS A GAME OF STRATEGY, cunning, and suited only to people with nerves of steel. Which is why I rely on incredible luck when I play. Mom asked for a game last night, and again tonight, and I kicked her butt over the moon both times. In the last game, I double-skunked her. I can't remember ever doing that before, but I got an unbelievable run of lucky cards and took off up the street like a jackrabbit on the very first hand.
MY GOALS WERE SIMPLE for today: Mom was going to take me shopping in Appleton, and all I really wanted to get was a sports coat, and a pair of sandals. The sandals took care of themselves, lucky me. I asked Tom if I could borrow a pair of his when we went on a bike ride the other day, and he said I could have them. The jacket took a little bit of searching, poking into one men's store after another, before Mom suggested we give Penny's a chance, and what do you know, they had a suit jacket and pants on sale, half off, that fit me. Big deal. Okay, but it went off so easily that I just had to say something.
Then, just in case we passed by a Radio Shack, I wanted a patch cord so I could download photos, because I wasn't bright enough to remember to pack the one that came with the camera. And there was a Radio Shack, and they did have one last patch cord, although we only just made it out of there before sunset when it turned out the clerks were bored and wanted to chat us up.
A WORD ABOUT THE PICTURE: Dinner. We're having dinner at a sandwich shop in King, Wisconsin. That's Mom in the middle, and Tom on the right. I asked our waitress, Virginia, to take this snapshot. She's a photography major at the university. Pretty good eye, eh?
I'M STUCK ON MISAWA TIME, so I was wide awake all night long. Here I thought that little twelve-hour nap I had the other night was going to do some good getting me adjusted to a local schedule, but no luck. Counted about a million sheep, read a couple chapters of a book, then just gave up and channel surfed until everybody else woke up. I can't imagine how people who travel like this all the time for business can manage to get anything done, up all night, and walking around in a daze all day.
THE WEATHER HERE is cool, in the fifties at night and maybe in the seventies during the day, and we had some wonderfully refreshing rain showers last night. It didn't help me much when I was trying to get to sleep last night; I seem to still be on Misawa time.
SAW THE SIGHTS OF MANAWA TODAY — there are a few, I promise you. At one time, there were dozens of picture post cards in circulation that featured the amazing sights you'd see around the town. I spent the morning bicycling around with my digital camera, snapping photos of the old sights, so that I could put together a Then And Now collection. It was especially fun to find that most of the skyline along main street, if you can accept that Manawa has a skyline, hasn't changed much, although on the fringes of town, there are quite a few buildings, like the Esche-Nelson mill, that were missing, and the milk condensory was just about unrecognizable.
AFTER THAT WHIRLWIND TOUR, we went out for lunch in Clearwater Harbor, just outside Waupaca. Tom and Mom ate a couple of healthful salads while I made a pig of myself with a Walleye fillet, which I can only call "sumptuous." Look it up. Our waitress was Laura, who was perhaps the happiest waitress in all of the Northern Hemisphere. Certainly, nobody else had a bigger smile, or more teeth.
I BORROWED MOM'S CAR to drive out to Conroy's Bear Lake resort to snap some pictures of the beach and lake. This is the first time I've driven a car in the States in three years. In Japan, we hardly ever drive faster than about forty miles an hour. Most of the time, we're doing about twenty or thirty, so it was an invigorating experience shooting down the highway at sixty-five, and realizing that the guy who was about three inches behind me was trying to tell me I wasn't going fast enough. But he just had to cool his jets, because it was all I could do to handle the car at that pokey speed.
KICKED MOM'S BUTT AT CRIBBAGE AGAIN TONIGHT. Just thought you'd want to know. — and —
NO TROUBLE SLEEPING LAST NIGHT, in case you were worried.
THE INGENIOUS CONTRAPTION you're looking at is a sack of toy marbles hanging from the drain handle in the bathtub at Mom's house. Without the weight of the marbles on the lever, the drain snaps closed, and the water quickly rises up around your ankles while you're taking a shower. The local plumber says it would cost a bundle to make it normal again, and advised her to just keep doing whatever she's doing to keep it open. Mom used to have a sack of seashells hanging from the handle, but doesn't remember what happened to it.
IT'S SO QUIET HERE AT NIGHT, and I forgot how intimidating it can be to try to sleep when there's just about no sound at all. It's so quiet, that the normal ringing in my ears is like the shriek of a thousand trumpets, and when a car passes by on the street, or somebody wakes up and coughs, it's like a bomb going off. Not at all like the nights with the windows open in on-base housing, where jet planes are taking off and landing all night long, and the buzz of the city just outside the gates carries over between the waves of jet noise. To help get to sleep tonight, I was thinking of spinning up a Sammy Hagar CD and cranking the volume on my Walkman up to 10. Let you know how that goes.
COLD AND RAINY TODAY, so we had to abandon plans to try out the 9-hole golf course in Waupaca, and settled for browsing the stacks at the used bookstore on main street instead. Not quite the same thing, but I did find a couple of books I've been looking for, so it sort of evens out. After dinner, Mom and I went out to the movies to see the latest Tom Cruise movie, Collateral, possibly the scariest movie I've seen all year. Any movie that can take my mind off the popcorn deserves to be described as "riveting."
MOM HAD A WATER SOFTENER INSTALLED in the house, so now, of course, I can't get the soap off anything, no matter how long I rinse. This doesn't seem to bother Mom much, but I can't tell when the dishes are soapy, and when they aren't, unless I were to touch each dish and glass to the end of my tongue to taste for soap, which would possibly bother Mom just a wee bit. And I haven't even begun to work out a way, stupid or not, to figure out when the shower's rinsed all the soap out of my hair. It'll probably come to me on the last day I'm here.
MANEATING SUV SIGHTED: I saw my first Cadillac Monstro, an SUV so large that it generated its own gravity. I counted at least twelve satellite SUVs orbiting it. The owner, who was descending from the driver's seat via the handy door-mounted escalator, said that it got twenty gallons to the mile. I would've snapped a picture of it, but my camera doesn't have a wide-angle lens, and I didn't have the time to back up far enough from it to get it all in the frame.
But the SUV wasn't all that unusual; ALL the vehicles here are built to monstrous propotions. Especially the trucks. Cripes, there are trucks everywhere you go here. Then again, this is Wisconsin, so it isn't especially strange to see a lot of pickups. Seems like every family's got at least one. But the era of the normal, run-of-the-mill pickup truck that I knew is over, no question about it. The trucks they have here now are all ripped monsters that look like their owners are dumping a little too much creatine in the gas tank before every fill-up.
THE MARVELS OF VENDING TECHNOLOGY have been harnessed to make sure that you will never find yourself dockside without live bait. This amazing contraption not only guarantees that you will never be embarrassed by your bad memory, but offers you a wide range of live bait options: leeches, worms, grubs, smelt — the choices are dizzying. If you've got money, you will always have squirmy, slimy vermin to impale on your fishing hook. I spotted this vending machine along the Fox River biking trail in DePere.
THE SUN FINALLY CAME OUT for the first time this week, so we loaded the car up with golf clubs and spent the morning at the Royal Oaks, a nine-hole course near Waupaca, where I sliced nearly every tee shot into the trees, never to be seen again, although that didn't stop Tom from dashing into the underbrush to try to find my ball, bless him. On one hole where they let me take the shot over, I sliced both balls into the trees. On the plus side, Tiger Woods had a pretty lousy day at Whistling Straits today, too, hitting a five over par, so I'm in pretty good company, if you look at it from the right perspective.
After the golf game and a bit of lunch, we lashed the bicycles to Tom's Toyota and drove all the way to Green Bay to ride the trail along the Fox River between DePere and Green Bay. The trail ran along an old railroad right-of-way, like lots of other long biking trails in Wisconsin, most of the time right on the bank of the river, so every time it zigged out of the trees, we got a great view. The trail seemed to be very popular with every kind of pedestrian, skater, and cyclist — we saw all kinds, from the guys who dress up in form-fitting multi-colored speed pro shorts and jerseys, to people who looked like, well, like me, slowly riding along in street clothes, and occasionally stopping to suck on a bottle of Country Time lemonade and munch on chocolate chip cookies that his mother brought along.
HAPPY HOUR STARTED AT FOUR, so we scooted right over to Green Bay after strapping the bikes up to the car. We got to Grazie's with plenty of time to get the twofers at the bar before sitting down to a sumptuous repast. I spent the ride back to Manawa dozing in the back seat, although I woke up when Mom pointed out the sun dog that popped out of the clouds as the sun set.
I DROVE A CAR AGAIN on the way to Algoma and back, so that Mom wouldn't be stuck driving me around all the time, and just to see if I could handle city traffic without completely freaking out. I can, but only just. Highways spoil the hell out of people. Everybody can go seventy miles per on the interstate roads, which I'm here to tell you is a LUDICROUS SPEED, and yet they all want to go even faster — especially the guy right behind me.
We went up to Algoma for a cookout with family, but they weren't going to fire up the grill until later, and town was gearing up for Shanty Days, so Mom and I stopped for lunch at a streetside cafe, then wandered through the streets of the town. She seemed to have a story about every single building, street corner, hill, and tree that we saw along the way, and shared just a little of what she knew with me as I furiously made mental notes that'll never survive the kind of handling my brain's going to give them.
As we rounded the corner and passed the Hotel Stebbins, she pointed out a tiny storefront. "This used to be Olive's," she said, looking in the window, "a restaurant that stayed open until two o'clock in the morning, so she got all the drunks at about one o'clock. But Olive was good for that." And then, as we walked away, a woman who had seen us peer in through the windown popped out the door and asked us to come in. Turned out the place was now the home of the Door County Historical Society, and when they found out who Mom's family was, they had all kinds of photos and stories and news clipping to share. We stayed for over half an hour listening to stories.
We caught up with the rest of the family at Eileen's place in the country. Somehow, all the girls managed to show up, even Lisa, all the way from Texas, who was in town for a wedding, although she couldn't stay for too long on account of the rehearsal that afternoon. Ruth was in from Milwaukee, and Dorothy took time out from working on a remodeling project at home to say hi.
IT WAS MY FINAL DAY IN MANAWA, and I drank too much beer. I guess that somehow had to happen.
Jim and Sue Bach and the Bach offspring, Carrie and Michael, drove up from Madison to have a big chicken lunch with us at the ancestral manse. Jim's the culprit who brought a bunch of really tasty beer with him, a couple of different microbrews, some Corona and Dos Equis, and Newscastle brown ale — my particular weakness. The fiend! I had to toddle off to bed early that night, rubbing my eyes like a little kid.
PLAYED ONE LAST HAND OF CRIBBAGE WITH MOM, and she skunked me. The cards were all in her favor, and all against me, and she played them beautifully.
I FIRST CAME TO TEXAS IN 1984. I was supposed to be here for only six weeks of basic training, but for various bureaucratic reasons, I got stuck here for about sixteen months. Just before I left, I swore an oath that I would never come back, a promise to myself that I've broken just once before, when I vacationed in the Padre Islands with some friends. The Padre Islands were worth breaking the promise. This time, I'm here to visit my brother. That was worth it, too.
Pete's been living here for about five years, if memory serves, and this is the first time I've seen him since he and his family moved here. I wasn't so sure I'd be seeing him, though, when I arrived, which I did in my very own, especially bumbling fasion. I'll have to examine the records of my outgoing mail, but it appears I told Pete I'd be here on another day, which meant that I had to putz around at the airport until I found a way to get to my hotel.
Being in an airport gives you a pretty clear idea what it's like to be a rat in a maze, don't you think? Everybody gives you directions in code — "We will arrive at gate G-8. Claim your luggage at baggage carousel C12, between gates C-16 and C-17." I get the feeling that airport personnel get their kicks watching the passengers try to figure out where they're supposed to be through those security cameras, sort of like in the Spielberg movie, and, if they are, I know I never disappoint them. "Here he comes again!" they've got to be saying, watching me pass the same gate for the third time, crumpled notes in my hand, my head on a swivel.
Somehow, my bag arrived when I did. I was dead sure that wasn't going to happen — my plane from Green Bay arrived in Chicago just twenty minutes before my flight departed for Dallas, but somehow the ground crew moved my bag from one plane to the other, while I was running full tilt through O'Hare airport to just barely make it to the gate on time. At Dallas-Forth Worth, I went through the motions of waiting at the carousel for my bag to not appear, and was drop-jawed astounded when it did.
I made reservations at a Comfort Inn on the north side of Dallas, because it was just fifteen minutes from my brother's house, but it was also about a thirty-minute drive from the airport. For some reason, it never registered on my brain that a hotel that far away from the airport might not run a courtesy shuttle for airline passengers. When I called to ask about the possibility of getting a ride, the lady on the other end answered tiredly that I was pretty much on my own.
At about the same time that a cab driver was telling me that a ride to my hotel would cost about fifty bucks, a shuttle bus to the rental car terminal pulled up to the curb. A rental car couldn't cost more than fifty bucks a day, right? Well, in fact, with tax and insurance, it ended up costing seventy bucks, but I had a car for the next twenty-four hours, and I got the experience of driving through Dallas rush-hour traffic at LUDRICROUS SPEED! The hotel was a tiny box in a distant suburb of Dallas, but it was air-conditioned, and they still had my reservation. Some things will still go smoothly when you really need them.
I tried to call Pete at home twice by this time — once at the airport, to beg for help, and once from my hotel room, but I got no answer, so I had begun to flip through the television channels to see if I could find out anything at all about the local area, where to eat, etc., when then phone rang. "Weren't you going to tell anybody you were in Texas?" Pete asked, when I picked up the phone.
We went to a deli for supper and to catch up. He brought Jack-boy with him, but, try as I might to coax a smile from him, Jack wasn't quite ready for me yet. Takes a little while for him to warm to strangers, says Pete. We stopped by Pete's house to say hi to the rest of the family; Melissa met me at the door with a hug, and Dakota gave me the nickel tour of his room and a run-down on every video game he owned — and he's got a considerable number of them. We stayed up late, catching up a bit, until I gave out and retired to bed.
PETE AND I AGREED TO MEET at the IHOP for breakfast at nine. When they got there at nine-thirty, Melissa pointed out that Pete didn't say anything to her about it until about eight-thirty. When I told Barb this story on the phone, she said, "Sounds like the Okonski boys are just about the same." Get our wives together and you'd hear some stories.
Dakota has got to be about the happiest kid on earth, more talkative than anybody who's ever tried to chat me up, and all smiles, especially when he's talking about his favorite video games. And when the waitress put a chocolate-chip happy-face pancake covered in whipped cream in front of him, he demolished it with a kind of enthusiasm that I haven't seen since Sean left home for college. Might've eaten it just a bit too fast, though, to judge from the way he held his stomach and moaned afterward.
We went into downtown Dallas to spend the day at the aquarium, which was like a tiny little rain forest inside a renovated warehouse. I thought the exhibits were pretty remarkable. Pete pointed out the air conditioning ducts, expertly hidden under tree trunks, behind leafy overhangs, within the folds of rocky outcrops — he could spot them all, and stopped to examine every one. I wouldn't say he was obsessed by the air conditioning, but I think maybe it's possible he's been in Texas just a little too long.
Jack fixed his great big, gorgeous green eyes on the animals in the exhibits, threw his hands in the air, and squeaked with fascination, and when Pete set him down on the ground, he took off like a track star. He doesn't just toddle, he sprints! Melissa said it was the first time they'd been to a place with that much open space, and Jack seemed determined to take full advantage of it.
In the evening, we drove out to a distant mall to have dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe, a combination jungle extravaganza and fast-food joint. If you've never been, the interior is hung with leaves and vines and other thick undergrowth, from which animatronic jungle beasts jump and growl. The kids got a big kick out of it, and I sat up to look around the first few times, trying to see it all, but by the end of the meal the gorilla to my left had beat his chest and grunted about a hundred times. Whatever.
ALMOST NOTHING WE PLANNED TO DO came off today. We thought we were going to ride the Tarantula Train, but it doesn't run on Tuesday, so that was out. And the emergency back-up plan these last couple of days has been a trip to the water park, but it's not open on weekdays this late in the season, so that was out.
We planned on breakfast at the home of the Dallas Okonskis, and that we managed to pull off without a hitch. We had bacon and eggs, waffles, muffins and jam, and whatever Pete and Melissa make that they call coffee. They make it with coffee beans, but it's a completely different process from the one I watched my Mom follow. She measures out three 1/4-cup scoops of coffee beans in the grinder. Pete just dumps beans in until there's a heap over the lip.
After a week at Mom's, I thought I was a coffee drinker. Was I ever wrong. Mom's coffee is a sort of a slight nudge to get a guy started in the morning — Pete's coffee is like a whack upside the head with a rolling pin. Sticking my tongue in an electrical socket would be less startling. And the brew that he served to me was about half a cup of the coffee that came out of his pot, and about half tap water. The stuff he and Melissa were drinking must've been absolutely atomic.
After a little brainstorming, we decided to visit one of those hands-on science museums. The theme of the museum seemed to be endoscopy, a medical procedure that makes most people my age clench up. Half of the exhibits seemed to focus on endoscopes, the other on firing high-energy radiation in a tight beam through people's brains. The little kids we saw running through the place must've just loved this. Especially the boys.
Jack just loved running. The wide-open space of the museum was a golden opportunity that he wasn't going to pass up for anything, and he took off like a shot every time he got the chance. The one exhibit he really liked was the cryotherapy room, which had an entrance and exit covered with clear plastic meat-locker flaps that he loved pushing through, over and over again.
Pete fired up the grill in the evening and burned some ribeye steaks for dinner, something you sort of have to do on vacation. And after dinner, he brought out the cribbage board and left me just short of the stink hole after a close game. I just couldn't get any cards together for more than a couple decent hands.
OF ALL THE VERY GOOD EXPERIENCES I TAKE WITH ME from this trip home, perhaps one of the best is the realization that Wisconsin is the e-pit-o-mee of the kind of place I want to live, and Dallas, um ... well ... is not. Wisconsin was green and cool and quiet; Dallas was dry and hot, and I was surrounded by a constant white noise of air conditioners, car engines, piped-in pop music, and sixty channels of inane jabber on basic cable. Wisconsin was a neat checkerboard of wide-open farm fields; Dallas was a haphazard, concrete sprawl of ugly office buildings, strip malls, and cookie-cuter mansion wanna-be's.
Not everything about Wisconsin was good: there are too many cars for me, and they go too fast, and I saw too many new roads that have rolled over the countryside to accomodate them — but Dallas has the same problem, magnified by a factor of a hundred. And they have the same problem with basic cable.
JUST A FEW OBSERVATIONS I jotted down as I got ready to head overseas once more:
If I hear the words "Scott Peterson Murder Trial" in that order ever again, it'll be too soon. Same goes for any television coverage of Michael Jackson.
I sure am tired of cheap hotel rooms and public toilets, especially the tiny ones on airplanes.
There's no place like home.
THREE WORDS DESCRIBE MY JOURNEY BY AIR FROM SEATTLE TO TOKYO: HOE LEE CRAP. I flew to Seattle from Dallas-Fort Worth by commercial airline, so that went smooth as silk, but to get to Tokyo, I had bet on traveling space-available again, which everybody had assured me was a snap. Well, there were four seats available, and 88 people wanted to sit in them. When that happens, somebody's got to sit on laps, but I wasn't going to be one of them. I was too far down the list.
I made a call to Northwest Airlines to ask about getting a flight home; the very helpful agent on the other end of the line could indeed get me home that day for a thousand bucks, or, I could wait twenty-four hours and get a ride home for four-hundred sixty. Kind of a no-brainer. And you know how much I love hanging around airports anyway. So I went up to the USO to dump my bags, and instead of plopping myself down in front of the big-screen TV to start a marathon couch potato session, I chatted up a guy who'd also been waiting for a space-A flight to Misawa. He mentioned that he managed to book a flight to Tokyo on United that left in a couple hours, so I picked up the telephone again and asked if I could get in on that deal. Indeed I could, said the agent, but I had to hurry. In fact, I had to dash through the airport like O.J. Simpson. Check your head for gray hairs if you get that joke.
Fast-forward to the United terminal, where they were calling my name as I approached the gate. The ticketing agent explained that my connecting flight to San Francisco was going to run too late to connect with the flight to Tokyo, so they wanted to put me on the non-stop flight for the same price. Sweet. Not only would I avoid changing planes, I had time to grab a bagel and some java for breakfast — a real life-saver, because I hadn't eaten since my brother sprang for my supper the night before, and I was pretty sure my next meal was going to be airplane food.
Whew.
Somehow, I not only kept up with all this, but I stayed awake long enough to write this drivel, even though I'd been awake for twenty-seven hours, occasionally dropping off long enough to drool on my collar. I remained in that semi-wakeful state for about another three hours, until the 777 blasted off, at which point it became impossible for me to even doze. I can't sleep on airplanes. The pain. The agony.
As I munched a bagel for breakfast this morning, I read a half-dozen chapters the 400-page paperback novel I'd been working on during this trip; I did a couple laps around the terminal, just to keep my legs from going numb; found a set of chairs I could stretch out across, then set my head down on my knapsack to catch about ten winks; and, after I woke and did a few more laps, stretching the kinks out of my joints, I realized that I'd spent twenty-four hours in SeaTac so far this trip, making it a significant part of my vacation. I've walked the length of all the terminals. I had three meals here; one of them was pretty good. A guy treated me to a beer in a pub. I almost felt I should buy a souvenir t-shirt.
WHEN FLYING OVER THE ATLANTIC OR PACIFIC, I used to play a mind game with myself called, "Don't Look At Your Watch, Dave, It'll Only Make You Scream," because ten hours in an airplane, no matter how big it is, could make a total mental wreck out of anybody, or at least I like to think so. But computers and modern aircraft have made a mockery out of my little game. I flew back to Misawa on a 777, which is a pretty nice plane: very large, lots of room inside and around the toilets, and a television screen for every seat. They have three channels of television shows and three movies on an endless loop, and after channel surfing it all, I think I watched everything they had. Including — I've sort of wandered again, but this is the point of my story, so pay attention — the channel that shows you a map with the plane's position marked on it, followed by a data screen filled with gee-whiz information such as how high the plane was, how fast it was going, how long it had been since takeoff, and how long until landing. Well, Crap! So much for my game.
There always came a point in the game, after I'd been wedged into my tiny little seat for about eighty-two hours, cramping every muscle in my body and developing lethal blood clots in my legs, when I finally surrendered to the temptation to look at my watch, because, my God, it's got to be almost over by now. The realization that I still had to spend another ninety-seven hours eating peanuts and slurping apple juice always hit me between the eyes like a brick thrown by a major-league pitcher. That feeling doesn't get any easier with this newfangled data screen, it's just more prolonged. They update the screen every minute. Every time I channel-surfed past it, whack! another brick between the eyes. I began to avoid it almost right away.
I can't sleep on airplanes, no matter how tired I get, but the train rocked me to sleep like a loving mother. When I took off from Seattle, I'd been awake for twenty-seven hours, although, strictly speaking, I did put my head down on my backpack at the airport and nodded off for thirty minutes or so. The flight was ten hours, and it took me an hour and a half to pass through customs, file a lost baggage report — they have to lose your bags at least once, right? — and book a ticket for the bullet train to Misawa. I was a staggering zombie when I collapsed into my seat on the airport shuttle, snoring as I fell, thirty-two hours (a subjective million years, give or take) after I woke up back in Dallas.
Sleeping on the shinkansen (bullet train) was even stranger. I bought myself a lunch box at the station, wolfed it down as we left (they tried to feed me a cheese sandwich on the plane; what a disaster that would have been for lil' old lactose-intolerant me), and reclined in my seat after finishing off the rice cakes and reading a paper. I woke up with in a panic when I realized that the train wasn't moving, and everybody around me was gone! But when I prarie-dogged up out of my seat, I could see about a half-dozen people still seated, and at least two of them were snoring powerfully. When I got my wits back, I remembered that the shinkansen wouldn't go any farther than Hachinohe; I wasn't going to miss my stop, no matter how long I slept. My heart was still pounding at that point, though, so I brushed the fur off my teeth and read a little more of the paper before dozing off again.
Barb met me at the train station in Misawa. Finally going home was such a huge relief that I hardly thought about sleeping, although I stayed up only a couple hours. When I finally went to bed, I slept like a rock all night long.
I BROUGHT A HEADCOLD BACK WITH ME, which I probably got from all the cold, stale air I'd been breathing from every air-conditioner in every building and plane between Dallas and Tokyo. This was no ordinary headcold. This was a monster headcold that wore brightly-colored tights and wrestled for money on its time off. And it had a buddy named jet lag, and they tag-teamed me until I was flat on my back, struggling to keep my eyes open, which I just couldn't after eight in the evening or so, when I finally had to just throw in the towel and crawl off to bed. I slept for twelve hours. It was sort of jet lag in reverse — before, I stayed awake all the time, and now, I slept way more than I ever did.
AS IF I HADN'T HAD ENOUGH FUN WITH THE AIRLINES ON FRIDAY, they brought even more joy into my life today: They were supposed to deliver my luggage to my house, instead of to San Francisco, or Osaka, or wherever they delivered it the first time. See, it was never officially "lost," just mis-delivered, because they put it on the flight I was originally booked on. When they swapped me to the non-stop flight to Tokyo, they apparently didn't tell the luggage guys.
Because I lived hundreds of miles from Tokyo, they were going to deliver it to my house by handing it off to a local delivery service that worked like the cable guy — he was supposed to deliver it any time before six in the evening. I had to stay home all day long to wait for him. I suppose I could've found something constructive to do, but I was still on leave, so I goofed off all day long. Came six o'clock, though, and no delivery guy. What a bite.
First day back at work after the vacation. That's always pretty hard to do, isn't it? I can't remember the last time I went off for so long to go so far away, and came back feeling so ready to get the hell out of Dodge. It was like being an airman again. All I wanted to do was skate around the building, showing my face but never really doing anything, until it was time to go home.
I had 250 e-mails when I checked in, which shows you how much attention people pay to the out-of-office reply that I switched on before I left: "Dave's not here right now, and he'll just mass-delete your e-mail when he gets back, so why bother?"
The typhoons that blew through here while I was gone have apparently returned the weather to normal. A sunny day is no longer hot enough to scorch the skin off every living thing, and my office is once again a meat locker.
Barb and I were halfway into a game of cribbage last night when, as I was counting up my hand, she reached over, scooped up the deck, her cards, and my crib, and started shuffling them together. I wished aloud I could've told my Dad about that one.
I finally got a barber to give me just the haircut that I wanted. First time for everything. She didn't speak much English, but she knew what I meant when I said, "Don't touch anything on top," and patted my head. I was a little worried when she switched on her electric clippers, but she only buzzed a test patch around my right ear and asked if that was short enough. After I told her it was good, she carefully buzzed around the sides, blocked up the neck, and worked the rest over with a scissors, just as if she were a professional barber who knew what she was doing. Whoda thunk you could find one of those around here? I still look like a dorky old brush head, but if I can get her to do the same again, I should have a slightly less scary appearance in just a few more weeks.
Next scary subject: I am going to retire from the military. I have an appointment tomorrow morning with airman Scaramouche — I swear I am not making that up — and will have a retirement date before lunch. Big step, but it's time to make it, so that we can find a place to settle down, get jobs, and, most important of all, put down roots and NEVER MOVE AGAIN. More as this story develops.
And now, some trivial crap from the news: According to a report by the BBC, the Chinese have come up with the ultimate in electronic horror stories: a virtual girlfriend. You subscribe to a service, a virtual girlfriend shows up on your computer, and you must keep her happy by buying — spend actual money — on virtual flowers and gifts, or she'll stop talking to you. Sure, it's ludicrous, but I predict they'll make a bundle on this.
On a somewhat related note, here's the boyfriend arm pillow.
Note to self: Always make sure you know where PT is going to be held before you get up at six in the morning to go there. I saw a lot of people in the gym at that hour — I'll betcha they all go that early to beat the crowds — but none of them were from my squadron. Then I found out that the morning's PT session was held in the north area, a couple miles from where I live. Whups.
Before I forget: Today was our wedding anniversary. We ate dinner at the cafe to celebrate — there's nothing like chicken wraps with a side of fries and a coke to make a special day even better. And there's no mess to clean up! Just throw the plates away! You, too, can be this classy, but only after fifteen years of wedded bliss.
I took care of Step Two in the retirement process this morning: Airman Scaramouche — I just love that name — sat me down beside her desk, called up my records on her computer, then paused before hitting any more keys and asked, "Are you sure you want to retire?"
I grinned. "Yep. I'm sure."
"You're not being forced to retire?"
I still grinned, but a little crookedly this time. "No."
She went back to generating paperwork. "I love it that they make me ask that," she said. Then she gave me a checklist and a one-sided form to sign, and I was in the system. It's the most painless thing I've ever done in the military.
Movie Time: I watched The Scorpion King — The Rock fights a magical king with an invincible army. He wins. Didn't see that one coming.
Step three of The Retirement Process was to take the form I got from airman Scaramouche and give it to my commander to sign. Like everything else in the military, I have to ask somebody for permission to do just about anything before I'm allowed to do it, even get out.
I was in my civvies when I dropped the form off for my commander, because my boss gave me the day off. I was going to work day watches Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so she gave me some time off before and after, sort of to prepare myself before the abuse began, and to recover after. On my way back to my car, I ran into a friend in the parking lot, who smiled at my casual attire and said, "Just came in to give notice then, hey?"
What could I do but laugh at that? "As a matter of fact, I did," I said, but she didn't hear me.
Today is Tim's birthday. We usually give the kids their choice of what they want for dinner. They can have whatever they want, within reason. Tim wanted take-away ramen from the noodle shop. Now that you know what Tim thinks is a birthday celebration, and you know how Barb puts on the Ritz for our anniversary, I ask you: Do we know how to serve a celebratory feast, or what?
News Flash: People who drink soda pop are more likely to gain weight and develop diabetes. Wow. Who'da thunk it?
Yesterday, while we were at the planetarium, waiting in the office for the technician to take us to the recording studio, two small boys in school uniforms stopped at the window to have a good gawk at us. I don't think they knew the window was open, and they sure didn't know we could understand them, when one of them asked the other, "Gaijin desu ka?" — "Are those foreigners?" We all turned to look, and self-conscious laughter rippled through the office. The boys backed away from the window, surprised, then one of them stepped forward and said, "Hello!" before they both ran away.
Today was my first day of a long weekend set, back on the ops floor as watch superintendent. Turns out I'm still certified to sit the position, so they keep asking me back, darn it.
One of the few things I miss about working on shift is the goofing around when we're supposed to be working. These shifties are at work for twelve hours, so it's practically a survival mechanism, but it's also a lot of fun. I watched a couple of guys devise an ingenious mechanism in a desk drawer that would spray shredded paper all over whoever they tricked into opening it up. Another guy performed what looked like a martial arts demonstration combined with the chicken dance, as a birthday present for one of the other shifties. And then there are the spurs, little paper stars that get stuck to the heels of your boots. Somebody knows who did it, but you never find out.
There are a few good things about being on shift, and there's One Big, Bad Thing — the hours. Especially that last one. It's somehow just as long as the eleven preceeding hours, and on weekend watches, it's doubly boring. I don't miss that a bit.
Here's another thing about shift work that I don't miss: I eat too much junk. It's hard not to. Various offices hold going-away parties every other month, and they give away plaques, or photos, or presents to the people who are leaving, and to pay for all of that, they usually stock a snack locker, but never with anything that's good for you. Snack lockers are always full of pop tarts, and chocolate bars, greasy chips and microwavable chili pots, cup noodles, burritos and chicken nuggets, and gum. Gum is the most healthy thing anybody has. If I chew gum, I won't eat much junk, but I still eat some — it's just too tempting.
So I have a pop tart with my morning coffee, and a bag of chips with my sandwich at lunch, and a can of pop in the afternoon — did you know that people who drink soda pop every day are more likely to get fat and sick? Whoda thunk it? — and I usually buy a Hershey bar and nibble on it through the afternoon, while I'm waiting for the final bell.
This odd diet played evil tricks on my guts, and this afternoon I absent-mindedly released one of these tricks while I was working at my desk. The three analysts sitting at the next desk almost immediately sprang from their seats and retreated to minimum safe distance, waving books in the air and gasping. They were followed shortly by everybody else in the office, except for one guy who kept on sorting through is e-mail, despite shouted warnings from his co-workers, apparently unaffected by my digestive imbalance. The rest of them politely requested I warn them the next time I felt the need to ventilate myself.
You may have missed the news this week that Kim Chong Il, dictator of North Korea, and the man we more affectionately know as "The Chonger," lost a wife to cancer, a tragic event made perhaps just a skosh less tragic by the added fact, in the news bulletin I read, that she was his "favorite wife." I suppose if you end up in the harem of a megalomaniacal dictator, it's best to be his favorite. According to the news, he had a wife for each day of the week, so I suppose he'll be shopping for another, now, and the competition will be on to choose a new "favorite wife."
Because they had plenty of spare time to think about this news, and there was plenty of blank paper around, it was only natural that the analysts I worked with would eventually make up their own "Dream Team" of favorite wives, one for each day of the week. They tried to corner me into playing along, too, but I kept throwing in names like Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and Tina Louise — one guy dimly remembered that the last one played Ginger on Gilligan's Island, after which they stopped asking me. But they were doing the same thing to me, essentially — the only name they mentioned that I recognized right away was Britney Spears. They had to jog my memory for all the other names, and I didn't get half, most of them pop singers who appear semi-naked in music videos I never watch any more.
That killed the better part of an hour, and discussion was so lively that they didn't want to stop, so they started over again, this time choosing hot chicks from Saturday morning cartoon shows. They didn't ask me to play that time, even though I recognized most of the names they were throwing out, and even though one of the guys picked Rosie, the robot from The Jetsons. They kind of cheated by selecting Josie and all three pussycats for Sunday. I don't remember if Rosie made the final cut, or not.
Step Three in The Retirement Process: I dropped off my paperwork to be forwarded to the Air Force Personnel Center, where it will remain, largely inert, for up to six weeks before it comes back here approved/disapproved. I've added another countdown clock. Let the waiting begin.
I was having a dream that I could comb my hair. I combed it straight back, and it lay on my head in wavy rows. I combed it to one side, then another, admiring the jet black color — this was obviously a dream — and the way it curled up at the end. I got it wet and combed it. I added gel. I combed it until I passed out from exhaustion. I mean, I was really into combing my hair. I've been growing it for about four weeks now, and it's finally gotten to that stage where it's not quite long enough to lay down, but too long to bush straight up, so it's not quite ready to comb, but I guess my subconscious wanted to tease me just a bit.
I've been recalling my dreams a lot more than usual lately. Until recently, I didn't remember dreaming at all. Maybe going on vacation helped make them more lucid, I don't know. The ones I recall are usually pretty scary dreams, like I'm the last guy on earth. That dream never turns into the one about being embarrassed in front of hundreds of people in my underwear, so it's sort of a good dream, if you look at it the right way. I've also had several reruns of the dream that I'm an especially bad gunman. I'm never a well-schooled, highly-skilled gunman. Whenever I carry a gun in my dreams, I end up getting shot a lot, which is probably what would happen for real if I was ever dumb enough to carry a gun. And whenever I get shot, I look down and see a whole bullet, brass casing and all, sticking out of my arm, or wherever. And it hurts. That's never a good dream, no matter how you look at it.