this is drivel

This morning I woke to chaos and fear: There were no paper filters to make the morning coffee! O, Ye Gods!

At a loss for what to do, I wandered away to another corner of the house for a bit. This is how I deal with problems, big and small: wander away from them. Let the problem simmer on the back burner of my brain a little while, so to speak, until it comes to a boil. It’s a fool-proof method, and I’m a card-carrying fool so I feel qualified to recommend it.

(It was this problem-solving method that made me a lousy NCO, by the way. The Air Force is pretty laid-back when compared to the Army or the Marines. Those are both outfits which call for lightning-quick decision making, often under life-or-death conditions, but even in the slightly more relaxed environment of the Air Force a sergeant who deals with problems by ‘letting them simmer on the back burner’ isn’t held in the highest esteem by his superiors, let me tell you.)

I was plinking away at the keys of my laptop when I felt the warmth of the simmering problem spread like a loose bladder, or a very bad metaphor. In either case, I saw the solution to the problem all at once: I would make the coffee with a banana! No, sorry, that’s a Monty Python sketch. Attack somebody with a banana, make coffee with a coffee press. That’s how it goes.

We’ve had a coffee press for quite a long time but I usually make coffee by pouring boiled water through one of those filter cones on top of an insulated carafe, to keep the joe piping hot. It tends to cool off rather quickly while sitting in the coffee press. Never occurred to me before to pour it from the press into the carafe, probably because of that back-burner approach I have to solving problems. I’m far from perfect, but by fits and starts I may have a shot at achieving near-perfection, maybe before they pat down the mound of dirt over my face.

I have no resolutions for the New Year’s. I never went in for making them. Didn’t see the point. I figured if I could wait until the first of the new year to improve myself, instead of making an improvement immediately upon recognition of my flaws, then the improvement wasn’t worth making and the flaw wasn’t so bad to start with and I should probably leave it alone.

That’s not to say I don’t try to resolve my flaws. I have plenty of flaws that cry out for resolution; sometimes a whole new crop will come in at the same time. Trying to fix them is practically a non-stop process. That’s why I can’t wait until the New Year to get around to patching them up. It may be a quaint custom, even a charming one, but it takes too long to come around. A whole year? My flaws can’t wait.

Last night, Tim made a deal with the devil: He got out of washing the dinner dishes by agreeing to wash them for the rest of the next week. How this worked to his advantage is beyond my powers of comprehension, but he claims it was worth it. He sure didn’t get his sense of value from me.

I’d washed the dishes the night before and we’d been splitting them all weekend, so I had him to rights; it was his turn, no argument. He wanted to get out of it badly, though, so badly that he offered me five dollars if I’d wash them instead. He wanted to pay me to wash the dishes. That was an odd turn of events.

“Deal,” I said without hesitating. There are only one or two household chores I like less than scrubbing pans, plates and flatware free of drying, baked-on grot. For ten bucks an hour, though, I’d do it with my tongue.

“Wait! two-fifty!” he said.

I waved him off. “Forget it.”

He upped it to three but wasn’t willing to go higher than that. By then, though, I’d changed my mind myself, just to teach him a lesson, and wasn’t going to wash the dishes for any price ... or so I thought.

“How about if I do the dishes for a week?” he said, sweetening the deal considerably.

“Are you serious?” I asked. Washing the dishes for a week is worth a truckload of gold, as far as I’m concerned; positively worth a whole lot more than a five-spot.

He was serious. So, for the fleeting pleasure of not washing the dinner dishes last night, he committed to washing the dishes, afternoon and night, until next Sunday (except Thursday, when he’ll have to wash dishes for a paycheck at the Italian restaurant on the corner). How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?

I have been so constantly, euphonically gassy today that if I’d stood at the end of Navy Pier in Manhattan I could have called at least two dozen whales into New York Harbor in an afternoon. Just astonishingly flatulent, especially in terms of sheer volume. I believe I could’ve played a glissando on a trombone. To be absolutely truthful, as if you haven’t had too much information already, I’ve managed several times already to play a glissando without the trombone. Rooty-toot-toot.

This must have impressed the hell out of the new guy in the office. He started just this morning, and for the first few hours I was able to keep my John Phillip Sousa-like rumpa-pum-pum to a muffled rumble, but after about ten o’clock I had to excuse myself and go ventilate my lower colon in the men’s room. By noon I would’ve had to give up and park there for the rest of the day so I said to hell with it, turned my radio up and hoped nobody would notice the manly fragrance wafting from my cubicle.

I miss the days, in a very primitive, even caveman-like way, of course, when I was applauded for my talents in this regard. Really, there was nothing quite so satisfying as the round of applause I got for cropdusting the aisles between the desks on the ops floor, leaving a trail of gasping airmen in my wake. I never got too old for that. In fact, the older I got, the more I could express my talent. I think that’s the right way to say it.

If there is a right way to say it at all. I notice that, to people who don’t like to talk about farting, they really don’t want to talk about it, are deeply offended, even, that I might see it as something worthwhile to talk about. I feel the same way about celebrities. Doesn’t stop whole industries from being built just to talk about them, but I notice there’s not a single glossy magazine, not even a pulp-paper tabloid devoted to one of man’s favorite locker room topics.

And why is it that not a single woman enjoys breaking wind? I mean, I’ve known one or two who would abide it, not naming any names (because I could get hurt, and I’m a chicken), but none who whole-heartedly enjoyed it with the kind of dead-drunk love that men have for cutting the cheese. Women don’t understand the joke behind the fart like they don’t get the funny behind a Three Stooges short — and I’ll bet those guys cooked up a big honking helping of fart routines that never made it to film, if I know vaudeville, and more’s the pity.

No, I didn’t have anything else to write about. I had to write something. And it is called “drivel.” You knew what you were getting from the first word.

No one in our immediately family knows how to operate a door. Oh, we can all open doors well enough, probably even with much more skill than the average monkey-boy. If you visited our house (strictly a rhetorical device; nobody ever wants to visit our house), you’d find nearly every door yawning open where possible, the only exceptions being the cabinets under the sink where the cats might get in and tiptoe all over the Tupperware with the same paws they spent hours spitting on. Yuck.

The rest of the doors stay open. Psychologists could fill all the shelves of the ten biggest, ivy-covered university libraries with theses (rhymes with feces, for good reason) attempting to explain why the O-folk can’t close doors, but they’d never be able to defend a one of them. It defies explanation.

It’s almost as if we O-folk are not aware of doors after passing through them. Having pushed it aside, we instantly blot from the conscious mind any memory of an obstruction having impeded our career. Door? What do you mean, ‘please close the door?’ Oh, that! Sure, sorry. Forgot. And then open the next one, and leave it open.

I, being perfect, do not suffer this flaw. Only the others behave as if they were brought up in a barn.

Driving to work every morning with the rest of Madison’s talented motorists guarantees at least one brush with death per day. It may be the slightest of brushes — somebody coasts through a stop sign while you still have time to slam on the brakes, say — while other times you may experience that moment when you know you’re faced with certainty and you’ve already done your taxes, so this must be death at last.

This morning, our brush was somewhere between those two extremes when I crossed the path of one hot spark plug of a driver who might’ve been related to Nascar legend Dick Trickle inasmuch as I called him by Mister Trickle’s first name, and I suspect I may not be the only person who’s on such familiar terms with him.

As I slowed down in order to swing our car into a diagonal parking slot on Carroll Street, he eased his car up the narrow space between my door and the rear bumpers of the cars parked along the curb. He thought I was going to stop in the road to pop out of the car, so he was probably as surprised as I was when I began to nose into the last spot. I honestly didn’t know he was there until he was a fraction of a second away from co-incidence in space/time with the driver’s-side door post, and that’s when I said the same thing Missus Trickle said when she called her boy to supper in the evenings.

He was still waiting at a red light as I stepped onto the curb and made my way up the pavement toward the front of the bank, and you know what he did? He rolled down the passenger’s window and shouted at me, “You need to use your blinker when you make a turn like that!”

I stopped in my tracks and stared at him so he could see the icy blue glow of my pupils as I fired up my death-ray vision. “What?” I asked, daring him to repeat his idiotic accusation. He was telling me it was my fault?

“I said, you need to use your blinker when you turn!”

“Yeh, thanks!” I answered, unleashing the awesome power of my Sarcasmotron. I hadn’t intended to hit him with a double whammy, but I wanted to maximize the blistering effect of the death ray, the better to chill every molecule of his noxious person until nothing more was left of him than a stump encrusted by my frosty derision.

Dick.

Another week seen to its end despite all efforts by the great and powerful to screw everything up.

Starting on a cynical note. Mustn’t do that. I offer my most contrite apologies. It has, after all, been quite a nice Friday for some of us, particularly the evening immediately following the whistle at quittin’ time when we went to Monty’s Blue Plate for a bite to eat. My Darling B had an omelet with chipped potatoes but I’d eaten a Cornish pasty for lunch and was much too full to eat again so soon, so I had just a slice of pie and a cuppa joe. Now that’s the way to enjoy a trip to the diner after work, take it from me.

About a half-dozen of the spam messages I got in e-mail this morning had Biblical scripture pasted into the subject lines — RE: Prepare ye, the way of the Lord, or SUBJ: I am the truth and the light and the life — that sort of thing. That’s either the latest trick to get this crap (spam, not biblical scripture) past spam filters, or a sign that the end is nigh.

Just to make sure, I checked the news headlines to see if they featured any obvious signs of the apocalypse. Guess what? I found tons. In hindsight, I can see where I went off the beam, but it was a simple mistake.

If we hadn’t been paying attention, we’d still have a Christmas tree.

Turning off Bridge Street on the way home after work Thursday night, we noticed a spruce tree on the curb by the corner ... and then another at the next house ... another on LaBelle Street, and so on. I don’t know where they got word about the tree pickup. We’d been checking the papers and web sites trying to find out, but there was nothing. It’s probably one of those things you just know after you’ve lived in the neighborhood all your life.

D’you think we marked it on our calendar? Nah.

“What are your plans for today?” B asked me as she crushed a sandwich between a fry pan and her new panini press.

“I’m going to putter,” I told her. And that was the extent of the useful things I did today.

Oh, yes, I did one useful thing: I cleaned the cat box. If there was ever a chore that would make you determined to putter the rest of the day away, cleaning the cat box would have to be it.

Yesterday I puttered, too, but I got way too much done to claim that I puttered the day away. I not only moved some furniture, I asked Tim to help me move furniture, too. If there’d been a pickup truck involved, I could have arguably claimed to have been working.

Determined that today was going to be different, I decided as soon as I woke up that I would devote the entire day to completely slacking off. Cleaning the cat box was a minor infraction in the grand scheme of the plot. I took an extra-long nap in the afternoon to make up for it.

A rather disheveled and, I have to say it, grumpy-looking older man stepped into our office the other day, assumed I was the receptionist as most visitors do, stopped in front of my desk and growled, “Badger Cab.”

That was a new one. Nobody’d ever said anything like that to me, as the supposed receptionist or otherwise, before.

“Yes, sir?” I answered him.

“You called a cab,” he said, adding with a shrug, dummy.

“Not me,” I said.

This time he tried to kill me with his eyes, which rolled once around the room before they stared daggers in my direction. “Well, somebody here at the bank did!”

When I can keep my wits about me, I respond to customers who get angrier and angrier by becoming more and more polite. Drives ‘em nuts. “Do you have a name, sir?” I asked him, ever so politely.

At that point I think he really did want to kill me. Luckily for my family, who would otherwise have become known as “surviving members,” one of my coworkers stepped out of her office and said, “I think somebody in the office next door is going out to the airport this morning. You might ask her.”

And he tramped out of the office and down the hallway, obviously glad to be rid of the most stupid room full of people he’d ever met.

“I’ll be shutting off a circuit later,” I informed My Darling B over supper, “in order to add an electrical outlet to the workshop.”

“And you’re telling me because the entire house will be plunged into darkness?” she asked.

“That, and I'd like you to be prepared to dial 9-1-1 if you hear a loud POP! from the basement.”

I didn’t say that last part. I didn’t have to. I’m sure she was reviewing emergency procedures in her mind anyway, and to tell the truth I’m always a little bit on edge myself when I take on a home improvement project that involves circuit breakers, wire cutters and unscrewing the lid off any junction box.

I know how electricity works in theory. Both my Dad and my Grandpa fiddled around with it more than Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and were not only happy but eager to teach me what they knew. I’ve wired plenty of electrical outlets and switches before without going snap, crackle or pop, yet somehow, even after watching the lights go out after cutting the circuit breaker and testing the leads to make sure they’re dead, I still expect that, as soon as I touch one of those wires, even if only to brush against it accidentally, my hair will stand at attention, smoke like a bonfire, and any witnesses will be able to see my bones light up like a cheap neon sign.

I’m pleasantly surprised when that doesn’t happen.

Also when the outlet works as expected.

Goodness, but my darling wife can certainly saw the cordwood while she sleeps! For reasons I couldn’t figure out, I didn’t sleep much last night. Neither did I get up and do something constructive, like read a book or paint a room. I just laid there and listened to Barb razzing away, first on one side, pausing briefly to roll over, then on the other side. She made a mellower buzz when laying on her right, a deeper, raspier honk on her left. On her back she stopped — snoring, breathing, anything and everything until she sucked her own tongue down her throat in a gasp that got me this close to wetting the bed. Then she rolled back onto her right and the cycle started over again.

I dozed briefly during the mellower interludes, jerked awake during her apnea, and counted the chimes of the living room clock every hour on the hour as the night crawled by.

Presently the clock struck five. My alarm was set to go off at five-fifteen. No point in waiting for that, was there? Fetching some fresh underwear out of a dresser drawer, I made my way to the bathroom to take a scalding shower and face the day. Behind me in the boudoir, Barb switched to a rip saw and began cutting planks out of the last tree trunk on her table.

A woman in a banana suit walked into the office today. It’s not very often I get to start drivel with an item like that. Never, now that I think about it. It just doesn’t happen. A woman in a banana suit walked into the office today. The joke practically writes itself in just eleven words.

But that’s not all! She had a kazoo and a suitcase full of balloons and hankies and an old-time horn with a big brass bell on one end and a black rubber bulb on the other and it went OOOgah OOOgah when she squeezed it. She was a walking Looney Toons character.

Too bad she was in the wrong office. Worse, she left before we could get her to make any balloon animals for us.

“I suppose you’ll want to take the train to Sean’s graduation,” Barb guessed wearily, as we talked about our travel plans to Washington, D.C., over dinner.

She knows I’m unwilling to fly, unwilling in the extreme. More precisely, I love to fly, but I’m unwilling to use commercial air travel. Something about standing in line at the airport with my shoes off while TSA whiteshirts paw through my luggage wearing rubber gloves. I’ve spent whole months up to my ass in a snow bank on sentry duty that were more fun, relatively speaking, than going through security at the airport.

I know Barb’s unwilling to take the train because the one and only time I talked her into it, a holding tank in our car sprung a leak and, for the entire two-day trip, the air in the car was blue with the funk of a chemical toilet. They had the air conditioning cranked wide open, but it just couldn’t swap out air fast enough. Even I had to admit it stank to high heaven; how my delicate little flower kept from barfing, I don’t know.

“I guess we could drive,” I offered, which got Tim excited about helping drive cross-country until I told him we would take it in stages over a period of three days. I’m long past the age when I could stay awake long enough to drive cross-country. Think I’ll be able to sleep while he’s driving? Yeah, right.

“We could fly and you could meet us there,” Barb suggested, which was funny because I was thinking of making the same suggestion when the time was right. Apparently I missed my cue.

We let it drop without deciding one way or another, but I don’t think she’s going to go for it. She’s got a memory almost as bad as mine but I know she can still smell that busted toilet.

Footnote to yesterday’s drivel: I snore. A lot. With this nose, how could I deny it? But not when I’m lying awake at night. Then, only one of us snores, but I certainly never meant to betray a marital confidence by describing yesterday night’s observations. Mea culpa.

I finished John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War in just a few hours over two days; I only put it down to sleep and work, but I took it to work with me and finished it during my final, afternoon break. It’s Starship Troopers without all the preachy bits, Forever War without the strung-out Vietnam vibe, just GREEN HUMANOID CLONES AT WAR! I started Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades tonight. When I checked it out, day before yesterday, I was a little worried I might not be able to finish it in the two weeks they give you for a new book, but now I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem.

I don’t have anything nearly as wacky to report as a woman in a banana suit this time. I’m pretty sure that’ll be the weirdest thing to happen to me all month, maybe all year. Maybe not. This is Madison, after all. It’s a pretty weird place.

When I started the previous paragraph, I spelled it “whacky” and it got flagged by the spell checker. At first I ignored it, because I write a lot of made-up words that get flagged, but sometimes, when I’m stuck for the next thing to write and my hands wander around, looking for something to do, I click the flagged word to see how the computer thinks the word ought to be spelled. Sometimes the correction to the word in question is pretty good for a laugh. My name, for instance. The spell checker thinks “Okonski” should be spelled “coonskin,” which always gets a chuckle out of me. Anyway, I clicked on “whacky,” expecting to see “whisky” or “Waco” but instead the spell checker corrected it to “wacky.” Can you believe that somebody, somewhere, earned a paycheck by coming up with the correct spelling for the made-up word “wacky?”

Speaking of made-up words, Tim tells me that he almost, but not quite, got into trouble for using the word “poppycock” in the school library. Why? You may well ask. I certainly did. “Because it’s got the word ‘cock’ in it,” Tim said it was explained to him. Well, of course that’s why you should get into trouble for saying “poppycock.” As we all know, “cock” is a baaaad word no matter how you use it, particularly if you use it in a zero-tolerance setting like a public school.

I finished The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi this morning. I came within six pages of finishing it off before I turned in last night but in the end fatigue overtook the appeal of the book. I wish I could give it a better endorsement than that. It’s not that it’s a bad book, it just wasn’t as gripping and fun as Old Man’s War, sorry to say. Either that, or I should’ve let a week or so pass before I started in on the sequel, to let the first book settle into my consciousness. Sometimes a new book needs to do that before I can absorb any more of the same, although now that I think of it, Old Man’s War felt not only a lot more original, but more engaging, and funnier. Scalzi’s got an easily-likeable sense of humor that runs rampant through both books, but I thought that, while it felt appropriate in Old Man’s War, it distracted me from the story in The Ghost Brigades. It wasn’t bad; it wasn’t as good, that’s all.

In Old Man’s War, humans have run into some trouble as they moved out into the galaxy to colonize other planets. It’s not a new problem; it’s not a problem at all, if you take the Howard Zinn view that colonization itself is a bad idea. Scalzi’s characters wrestle rather briefly with the quandary that attacking and killing every race they encounter in order to satisfy a human imperative to expand and colonize for the sake of survival. He makes it easy for them to answer their own questions, though, by making sure that nearly every race Earth humans encounter is equally bloodthirsty, and just to make sure there’s no moral ambiguity, they don’t just kill humans, they eat them, too.

With that out of the way, Old Man’s War focuses on fighting the war. Soldiers are genetically modified clones who have green skin, computers in their brains, and all their blood has been replaced by submicrominiaturized robots. The most significant modification of all, though, is that the clones are grown from the DNA of seventy-five-year-old Earthlings whose minds are transferred from their aging bodies to the GM clones, hence the title of the book. That way, not only is the army of the future made up of superwarriors, the soldiers also have a lifetime of experience behind them and the population isn’t decimated by sending off the youngest people off to war. Neat-o.

My only criticism of Old Man’s War also happens to be what makes it such as easy read: It’s a rather glib account of warfare. There’s very little “What are we fighting for?” angst, and when it does come up, it’s very quickly dispensed with (owing to the baby-eating aliens mentioned earlier). Dialogue is all very quippy, light-hearted ... I’d hate to say banter, but there it is. I love banter. I gobble it up with a spoon and plenty of milk and sugar, but I couldn’t help feeling guilty about gleefully speed-reading through a glib account of war, even a made-up war.

The Ghost Brigades followed up on a premise floated in Old Man’s War: If you have the technology to grow clones of old people, you can probably grow clones of dead people, too. And they do. They seem to have certain ethical taboos against messing with the social mores of old people, but the dead people have no social mores. They pop out of the Clone-O-Tron as full-grown bodies, but their brains have a newborn’s personalities. They’re babies in adult bodies, a trait that the military uses to its advantage by raising them to believe that their only reason for living is to fight.

Interestingly, as the story plays out it quickly becomes apparent that, while some of the personality traits may be infantile, the clones clearly have very strong opinions about what’s ethical. When the military hatches a plan to kidnap the child of an alien bug queen (why do so many aliens seem to be giant bugs?), most of the clones are repelled by the idea. Why? They’ve snatched plenty of adults before. Where’d they get the idea that it made a difference when the victim was a child?

If the clones are not truly amoral in the infantile sense, the rest of the story, about a GM clone who learns what it means to be human (don’t you hate it when they do that?), doesn’t really play out very well. Then there’s the sub-plot about a traitor to the human race. He’s the agent of change for the GM clone, but I found his appearance in the book tiring.

And actually kind of stupid. He worked for the military, was a genius at finding ways to store and transfer the human consciousness, and yet when the military finds a recording of the traitor’s consciousness, the first thing they do is grow a superwarrior clone and try to transfer the traitor’s consciousness into it. A half-hearted objection is very quickly overruled. Does that make any sense? If the traitor is such a freaking genius, and the military lab he works in specializes in transferring consciousness from one body to another, doesn’t it follow that he wouldn’t accidentally leave a copy of his consciousness behind? That if he were planning to betray humankind to the baby-eating bugs, his plan might possibly benefit if the military were to stick his consciousness into a genetically modified superwarrior?

Never mind. As everything works out all right for humankind in the end, it’s a moot question. Still, I can’t say I sat up all night happily flipping the pages of The Ghost Brigades because I didn’t. Old Man’s War: OOOOgah! OOOOgah! The Ghost Brigades: not bad, but not as much fun, I’m sorry to say.

I wanted to take My Darling B out for breakfast or lunch or brunch or blunch, whatever she wanted. She asked to have breakfast for lunch at Cleveland’s Diner in town, a lucky thing because that’s all they serve there on Saturday. And a lucky thing because their breakfasts are awesome.

Cleveland’s is in a narrow storefront on Wilson street. There are just a few tables in the front by the window and a few more along the wall by the door; the other wall’s where the cook makes all the food at a griddle, and there’s a counter down the middle of the room. I think they can seat thirty, maybe forty people in there. The last time we went, there were so many people waiting to get in that the line stretched out the door. Saturday at lunchtime is apparently a much better day to visit. We walked in and grabbed the first table by the door.

She had the omelet with an extra side of bacon. She’s got a weak spot for the greasier foods in life. I had the pancakes, eggs & two strips of bacon. Our friendly waiter delivered our meals to us straight off the griddle and never let our coffee cups run dry. And we didn’t have to wash any dishes after. I wish we could eat out more often, especially when there are places like Cleveland’s.

“I tried to watch Andromeda Strain last night,” Tim said, the morning after I rented the disk from Bongo Video. I watched it last night while he was working. “The first part was pretty cool.” That’s when a spaceship crashes in a small desert town and the Killer Martian Death Flu snuffs everybody. I used to get so scared by that part that I’d watch it through my fingers from the far end of the sofa, curled up in a tight little ball.

“Then they went down to that underground bunker,” Tim went on, “and the next thirty minutes was about going through decontamination. I’ve never been so bored.”

When I was that fetal pre-teen on the sofa, I thought the whole Wildfire portion of the movie was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen, so I lapped it all up like a kitten at a saucer full of cream, even the boring parts. Not so much any more. The movie makers did a pretty darned good job at giving the bio-weapons lab a look that was sleek and ultra-modern, but watching it now the dialogue is dry as an old bone, and there’s virtually no action after they bring the spaceship back to the lab.

But when Andromeda Strain was on the late-late show, back when there used to be a late-late show, every minute of it used to scare the piss out of me ... and I had to watch every minute of it. I used to circle it in the TV Guide (back when there was a TV Guide) and wait for it all week, that and every other cheesy B-grade sci-fi flick they used to show. What a geek I was. No, wait: I’m a geek for renting it again. Oops! No, again: I’m very seriously nerdy for still liking it.

Just two disks left until we finish season two of Lost. Eight more episodes. Coming down the home stretch. At this point, though, I’ve got to wonder: Does it get any dumber?

Sawyer conned the few people who trusted him, took all the guns and hid them. Next episode: He wakes up in his tent. He wakes up in his tent? You mean there wasn’t a bunch of people waiting to drop a truckload of big rocks on him as soon as he fell asleep?

Although Charlie was sort of annoying and pathetic from the get-go, I could feel some sympathy for him, even when he flaked out and stole the baby, and even when Locke beat the snot out of him. Then Charlie turned to The Dark Side and helped Sawyer steal all the guns. Now he’s annoying, pathetic, vindictive and mean, and not only don’t I feel any sympathy for him, I can’t wait for Anna Lucia to grab his pistol and drill him full of holes.

In spite of his mystical personification of the island, Locke has been about the most level-headed of any of the castaways, but ever since he teamed up with Sayid to lock the new guy in the armory in order to torture the truth out of him, Locke’s been acting pretty creepy. Now the new guy’s trying to make Locke jealous of Jack with a little emotional manipulation that wouldn’t be considered subtle in a high school setting, yet Locke’s going for it, hook, line and sinker.

If Michael comes back begging for everybody to help him find Walt, I’m out of here.

I finished John Hildebrand’s Mapping The Farm last night. The book’s a memoir of his wife’s family and the big farm they’ve worked since pioneer days, but more than that it’s about how farming connects people to the land, and how people are losing that connection with every farm that’s bankrupted, or sells out to development, or just plain can’t go on for lack of willing people to run it. The fact that he can write the story from the perspective of a family connection makes it all the more poignant.

I went looking for Hildebrand’s freelance writing after reading Michael Perry’s book Truck: A Love Story last month. Perry started classes at UWEC the year after I left, and although he graduated with a degree in nursing, he must have taken quite a few creative writing classes because he mentioned Hildebrand and Bruce Taylor, instructors I took quite a few classes from. I figured I should be able to find most of Hildebrand’s magazine pieces through the public library’s computerized database, which is freakishly good at digging up that kind of stuff, but as it turns out I didn’t have to round them up one at a time. A whole bunch of his essays have just been released in a book, Northern Front, and I scored a proof copy through alibris.com last month. Mapping The Farm was available on the library shelves.

Funnily enough, while I was putting in an order for Northern Front I ran across another of Hildebrand’s books, Reading the River, which featured an endorsement from none other than Frank Smoot, another guy I know from my UWEC days. Frank usually carried a 50-sheet box of typing paper under his arm, his notebook on which to compose poetry, and smoked almost as bad as an old Ford truck with bad piston rings. We used to shoot the shit together in the office of NOTA, the campus literary magazine, and call it work. There’s a Frank Smoot working at the Chippewa Valley Museum in Eau Claire these days. Is it the same guy, or could there possibly be two Frank Smoots?

By googling a news bulletin posted on the UWEC web site, and through the magic of an alibris search, I found that Bruce Taylor’s published a collection of his poetry recently. It’s not available at the library yet, damn the luck, and I’m such a cheap bastard that I figured I wouldn’t be ordering it for my bookshelf until the alibris price fell below five bucks, so I didn’t put in an order.

The library did have a collection of Wisconsin poets that featured three or four of Taylor’s poems, one of them a sestina he wrote about his father. When I knew him, the only poetry I remember him writing was free verse, a form I’ve never learned to appreciate, so I was surprised by that sestina, a fiendishly convoluted poetic structure. I might have to bump my alibris threshold up to ten bucks.

My overdue library books got even more overdue yesterday when I decided not to walk the four blocks to the Central branch, despite taking them with me for that express purpose, because it was snowing and windy, and the temps got no higher than twenty all day.

Today was sunny and clear. The temperature, however, never got much higher than fifteen. Criminy.

(My spell checker, which is comprehensive enough to correct me when I put an ‘h’ in ‘wacky,’ doesn’t recognize the Beaver-Cleaverish word ‘criminy,’ pronounced CRY minnie with a nasal twang, at all. Of the choices I get — acrimony, crimping, cramming, ceremony, and Crimean — none are even close. It knows ‘jeepers’ though. Geeze Louise.)

Having overdue books doesn’t bother me in the least. If they have any idea how much I’ve paid them in overdue fines, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t bother the library folks, either. But when I’ve remembered to haul the books all the way to town with me and they’re sitting on the end of my desk, the guilt of not taking them the last four blocks is too much for me. When High Noon came around I bundled up tightly, scooped up the books with a gloved hand and shuffled through the slush down Carroll Street toward Mifflin.

With the wind quiet and the sun out, it wasn’t too bad. I’m not saying I would’ve let my coat hang open. My whiskers froze together where they stuck out of my scarf to catch the clouds of breath from my nose, the end of which quickly went numb, as it always does. For the theorists who believe long, narrow noses are supposed to be some sort of Nordic evolutionary adaptation to freezing weather, I’ve got a particularly runny exception for them to study.

I was so refreshed by the sun and fresh air that, after I dropped the books off, I went straight up Mifflin to Pinckney, hung a left on Main and went down a block to Webster, then circled back, just for the hell of it. What a dumb idea that was. Froze my nipples off. It made me just a little happier about getting back to my nice, warm cubicle, though, so I suppose it wasn’t a complete waste.

Dracula sucks blood. Zombies eat brains. The Blob is a huge, ambulatory wad of snot from space. Myth-makers from ancient to modern times usually go for the gross-out, but all of them have so far ignored the most obvious and common gross-out of them all: The clogged bathroom drain. I’d bet the mortgage check even H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t plunge the hair and grease out of the drain in his tub without getting queasy.

Can you tell I’ve been there today?

The night started with a good scrubbing with the latest eco-friendly mild abrasive, which did a bang-up job cutting through the soap scum, I might add. While I was rinsing out the tub the drain backed up, and my attempts to plunge the clog only made things worse. Brought up one heck of a lot of gunk, too. I’m a pretty boring homebody and don’t usually go out after hours, but I couldn’t leave that pool of scum and hair in the tub and besides, we’d have to shower in the morning, so an emergency trip to the store was not only in order, it was practically required.

Drano makes a kind of jellied anti-snot that’ll eat through just about anything. Don’t wear a shirt you like because you’ll find holes in it later (but please, for Pete’s sake, wear something), a bit ironic when considering that, just a half-hour or so earlier I’d been scrubbing the tub with environmentally-friendly scouring cleaner. I gave it the old college try with the plunger. After I had sprayed myself from head to toe with bilge water and flecks of sludge were dangling from the hairs on my arm, I found myself thinking: I could keep on dorking around with snakes and plungers or I could buy a couple bottles of the most chemically aggressive clog-buster on the market, pour it in the drain and crack a book while I waited for it to ream that crap out.

Heck, yes. I’d use napalm if it were commercially available.

ADDENDUM: It made no difference. More to come ...

Life seems to throw you a curve whenever you’re feeling just a little too comfortable doing the day-by-day. It might not be an especially big curve, if there is such a thing (I know it’s a baseball metaphor, but I have no idea what a curve looks like so I don’t know if they have more than one, big and small, or maybe they’re described technically using X/Y parabolic coordinates). I doubt our plugged shower drain counts for much in the panoply of life-altering events, but I’ll tell you this: the O-Folk have a much keener appreciation of modern conveniences, such as fully-working plumbing.

The vast majority of us sponged off over the sink this morning with a cotton cloth and lots of soap & water. Only I dared to test the effectiveness of “the arrangement” downstairs, a shower head connected by garden hose to the utility sink in the near corner of the basement beneath the stairs. It is, strictly speaking, effective, meaning water trickled down from the rafters so that I could soap up and rinse off, but there was no enjoyment in it, no lingering under a blast of hot water after I was finished, and padding across a freezing concrete floor in bare feet is a sensation I haven’t experienced in at least a dozen years. I can’t say I want to be reminded again soon.

I may have to use it again as soon as tomorrow, though. The clog defies detection. I poked around with a hooked wire, I snaked all the way to the elbow connection with the stack, but I did not run up against an immovable object. I want to let the water drain away completely, then give good old Drano one more chance to do its work; it’s never failed me before and I know it doesn’t want to let me down now. If that doesn’t work, though, we’ll have to call in the professional. I sense that the rest of the O-Folk would rather not resort to the trickle in the basement.

This next number’s a sing-along ...

Last night, Leon Redbone and Leo Kottke came to town to play a show for us at the Barrymore on Atwood Ave. Well, not for us in particular; we just happened to be there. As I was driving to work last month I caught the name Leon Redbone and the date on the marquee and had such an excited spasm that My Darling B thought I would run us both off the road. I bought tickets for three and we dragged Tim kicking and whining to the performance.

If you don’t know who Leon Redbone is, this won’t mean much to you. In fact, it might sound downright weird ...

Leon opened with Polly Wolly Doodle. “This number’s a sing-along,” he told us as he began by plucking experimentally at his guitar strings, then launched into the song. Nine out of ten people in the audience were older than I was; every one of them must’ve known the words, but I didn’t hear any of them singing, so I stopped. I didn’t catch on right away, but it turns out every number’s a sing-along to Leon. “That last one went so well I think we’ll play another sing-along,” he said after the second number, and after the third: “That last number was a sing-along; sorry, I forgot to mention it.” And so on.

Leon’s still dressing in a suit and vest, western necktie, sunglasses and a panama hat. A bamboo cane was hooked over his shoulder as he walked on stage (oddly, he didn’t sing “Walking Stick”) with his guitar. A pianist and a horn player, both wearing lavender suit jackets and slacks, accompanied him through about a dozen numbers.

By contract, Leo Kottke ambled onto the stage in a pair of rumpled khaki pants and an untucked, white button-down shirt undone at the collar so you could see his crew neck t-shirt. He was wearing glasses, but they made it too hard for him to see the frets up close so he took them off (the glasses, not the frets). And between numbers he kept up a patter of stories about musicians he knew. Leo Kottke is a great jazz guitarist, but he’s a pretty funny guy, too.

I’ve only heard of Kottke once before this, when a friend leant me a CD in the hopes that I’d listen to it and be transformed. That was fifteen years ago. I wasn’t transformed then, but I sure liked what I heard last night, and so did the rest of the O-folk, who’d likewise never heard of Leo until he walked onto the stage of the Barrymore with a guitar in each hand. When he played the 12-string, it sounded like there were two people playing up there. Come to think of it, he could do that with the 6-string sometimes, too.

I forgot to mention: Leon’s horn player could play two horns at once. That’s always good for a round of applause.

And: For Leon’s encore he played Shine On, Harvest Moon. The audience sung along. Finally.

The clog in the bathroom drain put up one hell of a fight, but we stomped that sucker last night. Here’s the short version: I shoved a garden hose down the drain, Tim turned the water on, and Barb, standing between us, relayed instructions. It was a full-fledged O-Family production.

Strictly speaking, you’re not supposed to do it that way after you’ve poured almost a gallon of chemicals down the drain that are strong enough to bite your head off. If any of it had come gushing back up out of the drain I would’ve become the picture next to the dictionary definition of S.O.L.

No cowardly clog, hiding somewhere in an elbow of the plumbing, was going to bring me up short, though. Armed with the garden hose, and armored with a face mask, long-sleeve shirt and gloves, I plugged the drain tight (to prevent the aforementioned gushing), shoved the hose down the vent above the drain, and yelled for Tim to let her rip.

The key to success was a rubber bulb attached to the end of the hose that looks a little bit like a black hot dog or, if you’re a sixteen year old with a potty mouth, a marital aid. When the water comes on, the bulb inflates to block the pipe so there’s no nasty backwash spurting in your face. A small hole in the end of the bulb shoots a stream of clog-busting water irresistibly down the pipe.

And just like that, the drain was working again. The clog was gone after two days of fiercely refusing to budge, and it took all of fifteen minutes. Talk about anticlimactic. A big round of applause, please, for Tim on the water tap, Barb on the relay team and hose-coiling detail, and yours truly with the goofy-looking windshield clamped to his face.

I finished up A Northern Front last night before lights-out. The only criticism I have is that I thought a lot of the essays were too short. The first essay examined the tensions that faced Hmong immigrants in Wisconsin, for instance, and was so grippingly told that, when I turned the last page to suddenly face the story’s end, I felt as though I had to slam on the brakes to keep from rear-ending a truck.

Practically all the essays were bound together by the theme of people living with people, and how we are all tied to the land around us — land in the literal sense, from the wide-open countryside to the confines of their yards; but “land” as a concept, too, the almost-forgotten idea that we belong to nature, and not the other way around.

I seem to remember Hildebrand once characterizing himself as a “woodsy” with a self-deprecating laugh, not a bad start but not the whole picture, either. One essay after another examines the bond we have with the natural world, but it would be a huge mistake to see him as a stereotypical vegan tree-hugger who wears home spun and keeps a sack of granola in his jacket pocket. For all I know he loves granola, but about half the essays in this book follow his thoughts while he stalks and kills deer. In the other half of the essays, somebody else kills the deer. He ponders the ethics of owning a vacation home in the “unspoiled” north, speaking as an owner of one himself. As a young man he traveled to Alaska with the idea of living off the land in a cabin he built himself. That didn’t work out the way he though it would, and all his writing since seems to be rumination over why that should be so.

I was touched by the frankly personal way he unselfconsciously compared his own foibles to those around him. It grounded his essays objectively, so far as that goes, so he seemed to be speaking more on the level of observation than cold scrutiny. If only there had been more.

Don’t eat bread cooked with Bleu cheese. It tastes great, especially toasted and slathered with margarine, but after it’s had a little time to sit in your gut, you’ll wish you’d doused it liberally with Bean-O. At least, I did. Bleu just got itself put on my list of evil cheeses. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I can still have all the beer cheese soup I want, though. Thank dog for good old Gorgonzola.

Military Families for Peace sponsored a rally last night that was held, appropriately enough, at the Ground Zero coffee shop on Williamson Street, so Barb and I went. The last rally we went to was a march from Library Mall on the campus to the Orpheum on State Street and drew about 1,000 people. Last night’s rally drew about, um, 50. Maybe. Not exactly a big draw, despite the delicious, free coffee, tasty treats and special guests, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and congressional Representative Tammy Baldwin.

Hizzonner the mayor joined a sing-along to mark time until five-thirty when he, and then the congresswoman, stepped up to the mike to tell us all that this was a very important, and that we wouldn’t be able to end the war unless we kept on meeting again and again. All 50 of us, presumably, in coffee shops.

I don’t mean to make light of the efforts of Military Families for Peace, and the presence of the congresswoman and the mayor certainly lends no small amount of credibility to their cause. When I go to an event like this one, though, I have a little trouble seeing how fifty people gathering around a coffee urn will Make A Difference, unless they happened to be the fifty most powerful, richest, most photogenic people on earth. With super powers.

I’d like to think ordinary people would make as big a difference. But I am, unfortunately, a skeptic.

After months of waiting for the good people at the Madison Public Library to notify me, the book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq finally worked its way up the waiting list to stop at my name, and I fetched it from the hold shelf today. They’ll let me keep it for four weeks. It’s 439 pages long. I’m fighting to keep up with The Female Man, a book for which I’m clearly out of my depth. Skepticism rears its ugly squamoid head and spits in my eye once again.

The President gave a speech tonight. Maybe you heard about it. Barb hangs on our fearless leader’s every pronouncement, so she staked out her favorite spot in front of the television well in advance to be ready to hear Bush’s first words.

I, on the other hand, would rather sit on a broken beer bottle than listen to Bush deliver yet another speech that promises insecurity, fear, death and destruction, so I hid out in my downstairs lair, far from the ugly realities of the world, where all was peaceful and I could infect the internet with more drivel. Just what it needs.

Barb reminded me, as we were headed home from work, that yesterday, the twenty-second of January, has been quantified as the most depressing day of the year, I guess because of the short winter days in combination with the empty feeling that follows the holidays. I remember hearing about this a year or two ago, but utterly forgot about it until she reminded me. It seemed almost as if she were daring me not to be depressed, so I took her home and ravished her. I thought it was the only appropriate response, really. Was I wrong?

Now there’s a word that doesn’t mean what I’ve always thought it meant. I had always pictured a rather romantic encounter on the order of sweeping her off her feet with a few whispered sweet nothings and perhaps a longing gaze. Turns out I might as well have simply bleeped the crudest four-letter word in my vocabulary. How the hell did that happen? What kind of flattery is ‘ravishing beauty’ supposed to be if it refers to assault and violation? This is a major let-down by the language I held dear. Now I’m all depressed again.

Sorry for the cynical vitriol that started yesterday’s drivel. I’d guess your eyes glazed over at the sight of the first six words and you didn’t have any memory of where you were until you hit the “back” button. I’ll try not to do it again. On to the potty-mouthed drek that makes this web page the best it can be.

No, only kidding. You won’t find any potty-mouthed comments here, I can assure you. The shock would be too much. I’ve seen the effects before. I mumbled a guttural curse at my computer a while back, causing a co-worker to raise an eyebrow and remark, “Why, Dave, that’s the first time I’ve heard you talk like that.” If that were the case, I noted, then he hadn’t been paying close attention. Then again, that’s how he caught me at it in the first place. I had gotten a bit too lax, cussing out my computer whenever it gave me a problem, and that computer gave me lots of problems, so I got used to it. It’s hard to put the snakes back in the bag, you know?

There must be a gene for it in the family. Dad cussed like, well, a sailor (he said, knowing he had Dad’s old Navy uniform in my basement). I never heard him cuss until I was old enough to drink beer — about twelve, I’d guess. (Those were the days.) Even then, he broke them out of cold storage one at a time, at intervals of twelve months or so — cuss words, not beer. He broke out the beer a lot more often than that. Didn’t want to hit me with too many cuss words at once, though. Sometimes he barked one out as a one-syllable response to dragging his knuckles across a cinder block, but sometimes I think he did it just to see how it would go over, eyebrows arched in the “What the hell was that?” expression that was so personally his own.

I’ve heard plenty of really inventive cussing as I’ve moved from place to place, but I lack the facility to articulate as well as some true geniuses of the art (I’m thinking of George Carlin with a grin), meaning that most of the time I stay with just two or three words. Okay, just two. They’re satisfying enough that I don’t see any reason to use more.

The boy unit, in contrast, cusses constantly and casually as a ditch digger, and can exhibit a startling variety of vocabulary if you can get him wildly spun up. It could be genes, but these days it’s easy to blame something like this on hip-hop, so I’ll go with gravity. Trendy, and leaves me out of the loop.

I can’t believe I forgot to tell you: We bought a dish washer. It’s not here yet, one of those alternate-universe situations that’s hard to explain unless you understand buying on credit, which is a pretty nebulous concept itself. We pretended to pay them, they pretended to give us a dish washer. Weird.

According to quantum mechanics, or the fine print on the credit agreement, whichever applies, they will deliver a dish washer to our house on Saturday some time between eight and four, and we will give them bags of money some time between next month and twelve months from now. Did we get the better end of the deal? If you ask me Sunday when there’s a working dish washer in my house, I’ll say yes, but if you ask me twelve months from now after we hand over the aforementioned bags of money ... only Heisenberg himself knows.

Werner Karl Heisenberg. The quantum physics geek. Never mind.

That’s assuming, of course, that the dish washer is working on Sunday. I have to cut a big hole in the cupboards under the counter next to the sink, connect the dish washer to an electrical junction box and the hot water feed, likewise connect the machine’s wash water dingus to the drain, all in less than twenty-four hours.

Cutting the cupboard up should be a snap. I can cut stuff up all day.

The electrical junction box is easy to get at. So long as I remember to turn the circuit off before I make any connections, you probably won’t be reading about me in the dailies.

The drain ... well, I don’t know. Even though the disposal is obviously one of the very first In-Sink-Erators every made, there’s a male connector for the dish washer hose, but that thing doesn’t handle clear water so well any more. I can figure out how to connect it, but how well it’ll work is anybody’s guess. I’m betting, though, that so long as we have a way of getting the dishes wet that doesn’t involve wiping them with a wash rag, everybody here will be happy, at least for a week. Maybe more.

One of my coworkers has been working in banks for the last twenty-two years, and shared this story with me this morning:

A robber walked into the bank where she worked. Bank robberies are a lot more common than you might expect, so tellers spend a lot of time learning how to react to robbers, but according to my coworker’s story, the way this robbery was handled was exceptional. The robber stepped up to the first teller on the line and quietly told her he wanted all the money in her drawer.

“I’m sorry, this window is closed,” she told him, “you’ll have to go to the next window.”

Pretty cool-headed, eh? What do you suppose she was thinking? I just balanced this drawer and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this dork screw it up.

The best part of the story was that he stepped over and robbed the next teller. He just couldn’t help following directions, I guess. And I’ll bet you the second teller had a nice little chat with the first teller later on that day, don’t you think?

“The hour is at hand!”

That was the only line I had to utter in a nativity play put on at my middle school back in good old Manawa, Wisconsin. I never learned to say those five words with enough conviction or believability to satisfy the English teacher who was directing the play. I waited in the wings tirelessly through one rehearsal after another, repeating the same dumb line over and over, using a differing inflection, a rising pitch, a more urgent tone. When I thought I had the character’s motivation set firmly in mind and just the right edge in my voice, I strode confidently onto the stage to announce, “The hour is AT HAND!” Then I’d look over at him to see if his expression would convey some hint that I’d finally pulled it off, so far as he was concerned, but he would roll his eyes, or slap his forehead, or simply turn away in disgust.

His derision molded my belief that I was and will always be the least convincing actor in the history of drama. I can’t demonstrate he was wrong, mind you. I just though I’d air out a neurosis I’ve been harboring for over thirty years.

I know it’s a telling aspect of my personality that I’ve allowed such an insignificant event to so perversely screw up my self-image. I mean, just how insecure do I have to be to let a teacher’s bullying comments bother me for such a significantly huge fraction of my life? Then again, I looked up to him because he was popular with other students for being passionate about teaching English. The opinion of my peers meant as much then as is does now, but even though I respected him because he was so admired, I never liked him. What seemed “passionate” to others seemed abrasive and mean to me. He’d throw a tantrum when a student couldn’t grasp the lesson he was teaching them, flinging erasers or staplers across the room, or, worst of all, dismiss their efforts and freeze them out of classroom discussion. He did that to me when I mispronounced Bob Dylan’s name. Wouldn’t call on me for a week. What a sad putz.

I can’t imagine where that came from. I sat down to write some drivel, thinking, “the time is at hand,” and that popped out. Memmm reeeeez, like the corners of your mind, misty, water-colored memmmmmm reeeeez, of the wayyyyyy we whirrrrrrr ...

Sorry. That came out of nowhere, too. I won’t let it happen again.

Our weekend project to install a dish washer in the kitchen was a success! The Sears guys delivered our beautiful new Bosch just before dinner time on Saturday and it was fully hooked up and purring quietly before bed time that night. It churned out its first full-sized batch of clean dishes this evening to a chorus of ‘hallelujahs’ from all who saw its work.

And that’s about as exciting as things got around the O-Home this weekend. We’re a pretty free-wheeling bunch, wouldn’t you say?

Steve Canyon is returning to the funny papers! Or rather, not the funny papers, exactly, but an internet version of the funny papers. The cartoon site Humorous Maximus is hosting one of my oldest favorites, and it looks like they’re starting the strip from the very beginning of its run in January 1947; the rerun of the strip was apparently timed to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the strip’s creation.

This is a big, big deal. I used to follow Steve Canyon the way some people follow American Idol, reading it every day from the time I was ten or twelve years old. Obviously I never got to see how the story started, but now, here it is. I love the internet.

When I pulled the car out of the garage into the driveway this morning to warm it up, Tim apparently took that as the cue that we were ready to go. He went out the door just as I was coming in and sat in the car while I stood in the kitchen, reading the funnies.

A little more than five minutes passed, then the back door opened and Tim stuck his head in. “Are you guys okay?” he asked, looking worried.

“Just fine,” I answered nonchalantly.

“Oh,” he said, and ducked back out the door to go wait in the car. I was surprised he stayed out there so long. It takes the O-mobile at least five minutes to warm up enough for you to feel it, and it was bitter cold this morning, temps on the low end of the terrible teens, which is why I cranked it up in the first place. I don’t usually do that, but this being Monday morning I thought a warm, cozy ride would be the best way for all of us to start the week. As far as that went, Tim sort of shot himself in the foot.

Do the funny pages everywhere just plain suck now, or is our morning paper’s funny page the only one in the nation that has a profoundly lame sense of humor? I read only two or three strips any more, and that’s mostly out of habit. Force of habit, by the way, used to get me to read lots of comic strips that have reached toxic levels of anti-humor. I can’t remember how many times my wandering eye would lock on to the latest Cathy, Beetle Bailey, or Blondie comic strip and start reading before my conscious mind rebelled and cut off all communication with my optic nerves until the eyes looked away and promised not to read that again.

My Mom doesn’t entirely get the appeal of a dish washer. She’s not the only one I’ve spoken to who feels that way, but I’m going to pick on her ... I mean, use her as an example.

When I told her that we’d bought a dish washer last week, she congratulated us but posed the “washing dishes before you wash them” conundrum that keeps her from liking dish washers. Doesn’t sit well with her, and it wouldn’t sit well with me, either, if in fact I had to wash the dishes before I put them in the machine, but I don’t consider what goes on during the pre-washing-machine-washing phase to be “washing.” (Did you follow that? If so, how?) I brush the crud off the plates under a stream of warm water from a running tap. That’s “rinsing” in my book, and I had to do it when I washed them by hand, too, so it doesn’t feel like an extra step for me. And after rinsing, I don’t have to stand over the sink for another half-hour very nearly poaching my hands in a scalding tub of water. That’s the “washing” part that I’m pretty darned glad to leave to the machine, even at the exorbitantly high prices people like your friendly Maytag guy charges for them.

Mom wonders how that high price is worth washing a few dishes every day. I have to give her that. If you end each day with just a few dirty plates, two forks and a knife, it’d probably be just about impossible to justify laying out that much money. She doesn’t have many dishes to wash after a meal, having only herself and her partner to clean up after, and I even know people with a family who’ve told me they don’t run their dish washer more than once or twice a week. How they get away with that is beyond me. We O-Folk must set a pretty extravagant table, because we have never ended the day with only one or two plates and a few assorted pieces of flatware in the sink. We can fill a dish washer every single day and still have a big stock pot, frying pan or salad spinner left over to wash by hand.

I’m not saying we need a dish washer. It’s a luxury, no doubt about it, but when I’m curled up on the sofa with a book in my lap, listening to the wash machine hum quietly as it washes the dinner dishes I might have been doing by hand, I’m as close as I’ll ever be to saying I’m glad I forked over all that money.

Besides, it’s made by a company called Bosch. Don’t you just love the sound of that? Bosch, Bosch, Bosch. I have as much fun saying that as I do when I chant “spackle spackle spackle,” although I don’t do that much now that I got my Thorazine prescription refilled.

My Darling B said we should just think about going for a walk after dinner tonight, go for a walk in our imagination, and hope that our good intentions counted for something. I’m secretly glad she suggested it (or not so secretly, since I’m blogging it now). I didn’t want to sound whiny, but a walk around the block in these temps and I’d have to chip the icicles out of my beard.

Gawd, Michael came back. I was so relieved when he left, chasing after that brat of his, but then he came back, dammit, still babbling “they took my boy and I’m gonna get him back!”

If I were that actor I’d be so friggen pissed at the writers. “Come on, man! Give me something else to say!”

But in last night’s episode (do not adjust your set; we’re finishing up season two on DVD) even the writers were getting sick of it. Jack and Kate were doing their little bondage thing, Ana Lucia jumped Sawyer, Hurley chased after Libby, and Michael, oh, God, Michael was this close to hollering, “WAAAAALLLLLLT!” again, so they gave him a gun and had him shoot everybody. I told you that guy was nuts.

And what’s with killing off all the women, anyway? The women are dropping like ducks on opening day, but the only guy they’ve killed off so far was Boone, and he was sort of a pretty boy. Maybe they thought he was a woman.

As of tonight I’m done waiting for the next episode of Lost. I don’t care if they never get off that island, who The Others are or what the freaking Dharma Initiative is. The show’s plot has gone from mysterious to ridiculously convoluted to laughably unbelievable. At first it was cute that some of the passengers coincidentally bumped into one other in the airport in Sydney, but in the last episode we watched Ana Lucia cross paths with just about every freaking survivor before she got on the plane. “Oh, look who’s waiting in line behind Jack this time!” And The Others were a lot spookier when they stayed hidden in the jungle. Then the bearded guy stepped into the open and ruined the whole spooky thing with his Eric the Viking look, and Henry “Mister Bug Eyes” Gale, cooing “Woe is me” every time somebody opened the armory door, was about as scary as a glass of milk.

I know why Michael shot himself. I’d want out of that nutso show, too.

But I’m going to miss chanting Bad Robot!

 
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Every gosh-darned word © 2007 Dave Okonski