this is drivel

“I know why you like that Kavalier & Clay book so much,” I accused my Mom over the phone the other night. “All the characters in it talk like they stepped off the pages of a Salinger story.”

In particular, they talk like the members of the Glass family. Mom’s been in love with the Glasses since before I could read. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s had paperback copies of Catcher in the Rye; 9 Stories; Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and Seymour: an Introduction; and Franny and Zooey on the middle shelf of her desk in the living room. They’re the only books in there. It’s a shrine.

So when I smiled to myself for thinking that Sammy Clay sparring with his mother Muriel sounded a lot like Zooey Glass hounding his mother Bessie from behind the shower curtain in the ancestral Manhattan apartment bathroom, the light when on: This is the part Mom would’ve loved the most.

Mom said the dialogue brought the sound of the characters’ accents to life. I don’t know how I missed that until she mentioned it. After, I heard Walther Matthau in every line, not that I’m complaining. I bought a copy of the movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three mostly because I love to listen to the dialogue dripping with thick New York accents. Hearing Jerry Stiller brush off Walter Matthau with an offhanded, “Beat it, Zach, I’m busy,” without lowering his newspaper was worth squandering my lunch money.

All this by way of noting that I finished off Kavalier & Clay tonight, just in time to start another book for the weekend. Summarizing this 650-page book is no simple task — wait, yes it is: Sammy Clay’s dream is to draw comic books. Trouble is, he’s better at imagining the stories than drawing them, a major snag until his cousin Joe Kavalier steps into the story. Together they create The Escapist, Master of Elusion, and a whole passel of other characters to establish the empire of Empire Comics.

That’s it. That’s the whole book. With a plot as simple as that, you’d be tempted to think it couldn’t possibly be half as good as it is, but you’d be wrong. Even if you don’t give a tinker’s dam about comic books, it’s the characters the book is built on, and they carry the story right along.

I didn’t mean to suggest that author Michael Chabon’s work is derivative, but he really has done a marvelous job of capturing the life of a Jewish family in New York during the 1930’s and 40’s, coincidentally the same era that Salinger’s Glass family lived in. Chabon’s Clay and Kavalier show a lot of the same wit. I hope Chabon doesn’t go all reclusive on us now.

After reading the exploits of Kavalier and Clay making their mark in the tender years of the comic book business, I stopped by the library this afternoon to pick up a couple bound volumes of Will Eisner’s work in anticipation of this weekend’s open reading time, but I’ve already read one of the volumes, so by about Saturday evening I’ll probably read a book without pictures, too. The only thing I don’t like about comic books is that I go through them so fast.

The thought occurred to me this morning, as I washed my hands under the spigot of the kitchen sink, splashing water that quickly made its way across the countertop toward the toaster, that I might one day believe that crap about “it’s a good day to die,” but I didn’t believe it now, and I doubt anybody will ever convince me it’s a good day to be electrocuted.

I jumped away from the sink with a sprightly step, I can tell you. I’m a bit more of a morning person than the rest of the O-Folk, but I don’t normally possess the kind of vim and vigor I displayed just then. After a pause without a pop or hum or a shower of sparks, I snagged the plug with a plastic spaghetti fork and yanked it out of the wall. Making toast had seemed so routine, even boring until today.

Since the contractors packed up their toolboxes yesterday, our office has been visited by a steady stream of coworkers, some I hardly know, stopping by to gaze in wonder at my reconfigured cubicle. The walls reach to within a foot of the ceiling, and it has a door I can not only shut, but lock as well. One of these days, when I’m really bored, I’m going to call Properties to tell them I’ve locked myself out. I’m sure they haven’t heard that one before.

My new digs seem to confer upon me a measure of status I hadn’t anticipated. Apparently not just any schmuck rates a cubicle that’s almost an office. I am now looked on as a special kind of schmuck.

I sat down with an investment planner the other day (I can’t believe I’m typing these words) and of the many questions he asked me about my investments, about the only one I could answer was, “How old are you?”

“I’m forty-six,” I told him.

That took him a little aback. He did an actual double-take. Nobody’s done a double-take at me, ever. “You don’t look forty-six,” he finally said. Because I was older than he thought, he had to adjust the investment advice he had to give me, for which I thanked him profusely. The office I work in employs two college students about half my age, so sometimes I get to feeling a lot older than forty-six.

Auntie Sue finally stopped by the office to have a look at my new digs. “It’s an office!” she yelped. “How’d you get an office? I’ve been working here fifteen years and I still don’t have an office! You’ve been here less than two years and you’ve got an office already!” And so on like that. She was really quite veklempt.

When the cubicle was taking shape and I could see that it would be big enough to park a dump truck in, I prophesied to all who would listen (Angie happened to be in earshot) that I’d likely be working out of a broom closet inside of six months, because there’s no way I’d get to keep an office that big.

“Pessimism,” Angie said, swatting me away.

“Experience,” I corrected her.

Angie was in the office when Susan went out, still raving, and I waggled my eyebrows at her. “I might be getting bumped a lot sooner than I thought,” I said, and she guffawed like a trombone in the hands of a drunken jazz musician.

Penny, my supervisor, wanted to know what was so funny, so we explained it to her, which really got her into the spirit of the thing. “We’ve got to start a six-month calendar!” she said. “180 days from now would be, let’s see, August 30th?”

By an odd coincidence, August 30th is the two-year anniversary of my retirement from military service, the day they promised they would no longer consider reactivating me. (Oh, how I wish I could believe that.) The planets line up in odd ways, don’t they?

Breakfast at Cleveland’s! Barb’s treat!

I love the breakfasts at Cleveland’s Diner, especially the two eggs, two pancakes, and two strips of bacon for four-fifty. I think the cook scrambles up the eggs in butter. I love that. And he can fry up the bacon so it’s just the right degree of crispy. They’ll even serve the pancakes on a separate plate. That’s everything I want for breakfast, exactly the way I like it.

I was so happy with it that I didn’t even notice what Barb ate. Eggs and hash browns, I think.

We had the table in the front window where we could almost, but not quite, bask in the comfort of the morning sun. All the shades over the window but one were more or less permanently dangling, unfortunately, because the pull strings were all undone. On closer inspection, I didn’t want to futz with them so much that I’d send dust flying everywhere, either. Breakfast at Cleveland’s is truly a treat, but I don’t think they take much time after closing to hit the accoutrements with a good old dependable feather duster. It’s a minor quibble. Very tiny. Hardly bears mentioning.

The roads weren’t too bad this morning. We were worried they might be slippery from the snow drifting across the pavement wherever there was an empty lot or a break in the trees, but no. Driving was easy going, so after breakfast we headed for Park Street and the Asian food store Barb found last week. It looks like an old house except for the red torii gate superimposed over the whitewashed asphalt siding. The bottom floor is just like any one of the tiny general stores we’d been to in Misawa. As we squeezed through the narrow aisles between homemade plywood shelves we found all the brightly-colored cellophane packets of cookies, rice cakes, dried squid and candy we grew so familiar with back in Japan. Frosted plastic tubs filled with miso and sea food were just visible inside the doors of the hulking glass-fronted freezer units. Barb heaped a basket with various and sundry yummies, and in the evening we feasted on yakisoba, although technically yaki is ‘bird’ and Barb made it with pork strips. It’s delicious either way, though.

[CORRECTION:] My Darling B, who holds a certificate in Asian studies conferred on her by the University of Maryland and has actually studied a little Japanese, patiently explained to me last night that yaki means ‘fried,’ not ‘bird.’ Tori means ‘bird.’ Well, of course it does, anybody knows that. Even I knew that, and I didn’t study, I just shot my mouth off.

Dawn ... cats howling ... pee ... feed cats ... curl up in bed ... wake at more agreeable hour ... stay in bed & cuddle with wife ... roll out of bed ... scratch hairy butt ... put on heavy sweater & sweat pants ... crawl under bed to find slippers ...

Fill kettle, switch on heat ... fetch newspaper from drive ... stamp around making ‘warming up noises’ ... grind beans, make morning java ... peel newspaper apart, throw out sports section, spread across kitchen table & read ... drink cuppa joe ... take paper to easy chair ... open window blinds to let sun in ... read paper, drink more java ...

Get coat & gloves, shovel snow from walk ... stroll to convenience store ... bring home SOS pads ... stamp around making ‘warming up noises’ ... drink a bit more java ...

Go to bottom of stairs ... put hands on hips, survey scene of chaos & clutter, sigh heavily ... select unopened box, tear open ... throw away half of junk in box, keep other half ... repeat again & again ...

Late lunch ... make sandwich, devour ... return to basement ... put hands on hips, et cetera ...

Climb stairs, crawl into easy chair, wrap up in quilt & snooze ...

Fold laundry ... try to finish video of Lord Jim, can’t, stinks ... put away clothes ... wash up ... eat tasty supper ... watch Eat, Drink, Man, Woman with Darling B, much better than Lord Jim ...

Type up drivel ... stinks, type up again ... still stinks, post anyway ... feed cats ... floss & brush ... pee ... change into pajamas ... scratch hairy butt ... curl up in bed with book, read until sleepy ... tickle Darling B, get swatted away ... knit the raveled sleeve of care ...

I’m going to bang out some drivel while sitting in front of the tube watching Heroes. I’m mentioning it only so that, if this becomes more disjointed than usual, you’ll know why.

Not that I’m pressed for time on Monday nights since they’ve cancelled Studio 60 and replaced it with a show that, to judge from the incessant advertisements that have been playing for the past three weeks, is about Irish people beating each other up with baseball bats. Just doesn’t interest me, for some reason. Studio 60 was interesting me less and less, to be honest, so I was going to end up with more free time either way.

Even with all that extra time, I’m still stuck for drivel, though. I’m going to blame it on Monday. I was at work all day long processing credit card applications, not something that makes for a good story, or even bad drivel, but it did keep me pretty damned busy. Mailed out packages, filed three kinds of paperwork, ran a tall stack of books back to the library ...

Owed the library a piece of money, so I paid them. I’ll bet they used to love to see me coming back when I couldn’t get any book I borrowed turned in on time. I’ve gotten a lot better in the last six months or so, but I’ve got this one book right now, The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, that I’ll end up essentially renting for the next week, I think. I picked it up off the library’s “Too Good To Miss” table two weeks ago, then made the dumb mistake of reading the first chapter of Kavalier & Clay, a book I owned and could have read any time, but did I think of that? Noooooo.

Once I knew I was trapped in Kavalier & Clay I could have returned The Spirit Catches You unread and would never have missed it. I could have put in a hold request at the library, checked it out again later, read it at my leisure, not had to worry about racking up fines. I could’ve been smart. Was I smart? You decide.

I peeked, just peeked at the first chapter of The Spirit Catches You Sunday night. I had no idea what it was about; all I wanted was to get the gist. Damned good book. Couldn’t put it down. Been reading it during my spare time ever since (this doesn’t count as spare time; Heroes is still on). So now the book is overdue and I face the choice: I can take it back unfinished, or keep reading and pay the fine. That’s a no-brainer, and coincidentally I have no brain for making these kinds of decisions.

And finally, for the record: Barb has an Associates in Japanese studies with a minor in Asian studies. No, she doesn't. Once and for all (I hope): She's got a bachelor's in psychology with an Asian studies minor, and an Associate's in Japanese studies. Did I get it right this time, dear?

Ahhh, cold, day-old coffee: elixir of life, high-octane battery jump-start, emergency back-up hydraulic fluid, all in one. I normally nuke it for thirty seconds or so, just to be able to pretend it’s almost fresh, but when there’s no microwave oven handy or I’m in a hurry, I take it straight. It’s an adaptive measure. There’s always plenty of cold coffee, but never enough hot, just that eighth-inch of boiling varnish left after somebody nearly, but not quite, filled their cup and walked away without making more. You know who you are.

The disgusted looks I get when I drink a cold cup of coffee poured from a Silex that’s been sitting all day honestly baffle me. I don’t think people would prune up like that if I were to slash the throat of a favorite puppy and drink its blood, but drink a cup of stale, cold coffee and they talk about you when you’re not around.

And it’s not like the stuff we brew in the break room is gourmet coffee. It comes in measured, olive drab foil packets wrapped up in a generic, white cardboard box. More often than not, you have to open the foil packets with your teeth. Now that’s refined. The deal includes a batch of those coffee filters that look like the frilly lace hats you see on English maids in Masterpiece Theater. I haven’t gotten caffeineated enough to try one on yet, but I’ve been working in the department only six months now. Anything could happen.

Book Report: I finished The Caged Virgin last week. I have to say it’s not much of a page-turner, unless maybe you’re writing a research paper on the treatment of women in Muslim society. The book is a collection of essays written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an Ethiopian Muslim, during the period she was living in the Netherlands and trying to incite a discussion that she hoped would reform Islam and put women on an equal footing with men. (Good luck with that, ma’am.) She’s still trying, but she had to leave the Netherlands after pissing off some of the Muslims there to the point that they were trying to kill her.

As the essays in the book seem to have been written over quite a long period of time, they touch repeatedly on the same ideas, so even though I could see that she was building up to a point, after the first essay I kept getting the déjà vu feeling of having already read each successive essay. Still, reading it was worth my time because I’m only beginning to learn some of this stuff after years of willful ignorance. It was also refreshing to read ideas about reform as straightforward as hers. Nobody can accuse her of pulling her punches. And she keeps on writing this stuff even while terrorist whackos keep looking for ways to kill her for speaking out. I liked that a lot.

I made a detour to the bathroom on the way downstairs to give my teeth a good, vigorous brushing, to get rid of that mouth full o’ moss feeling I got from drinking a can of soda pop before I left work. I used to drink two or three cans of that stuff a day sometimes, and once, just to see what it would be like, I drank a whole six-pack of Mountain Dew in an afternoon. I got rotten stomach from the sugar and a buzz from the caffeine so disorienting that I had to lay down, arms and legs splayed out across the mattress, as if I were fighting bed spins following a night in a smoky bar drinking too much beer. It was very unpleasant.

Now that I’m a boring old guy, all I can handle is maybe a can in the afternoon, usually with my lunch, and if I don’t brush my teeth right away afterwards I spend the rest of the day trying to scrub away the moss from the inside with the tip of my tongue. How did I ever enjoy drinking that stuff all the time? And maybe a more important question I should know the answer to is: How did I manage to drink so much pop and still keep all my teeth? Granted, I’ve got my share of cavities now, but given the caustic power of Coca-Cola, for instance (how many of your friends told you they dissolved an iron nail in a glass full of Coke?), every one of my pearly whites should have rotted out of my head years ago. Somehow, I’ve still got every one of them, with the exception of the wisdom teeth that were yanked out when I was too young to object.

That’s not a slap at my parents. They were only doing what the doctor told them to do, just as I was only doing what they told me to do. It’s one of the oddities of family decision-making, however, that’s made me shake my head in wonder all these years later: My parents told me that it would be in my best interests to let some guy I’d never met before — in point of fact, an oral surgeon they’d never met before — pump me full of powerful drugs that would send me so far off into the Land of Nod that he’d be able to cut gaps in my gums big enough to jerk out teeth the size of popcorn shrimp. And I went along with it.

Afterward, the oral surgeon left us with instructions that I was not to eat solid food for one whole freaking week. I ask you, how can anybody realistically expect a teenaged boy not to eat for a week? I made it two, maybe three days until a trip that weekend to an amusement park I had promised to take my friends to. (Our family had a full-sized van that held a half-dozen high school kids comfortably, and my parents trusted me to take it all the way to Gurnee, Illinois. I wonder if they ever realized how much I loved them for that?) Starving and surrounded by people happily stuffing their faces with every kind of junk food imaginable, I broke down and ordered a plate of spaghetti, sawed at the pasta with knife and fork until no noodle was longer than a grain of rice, then wolfed the whole mess down in about thirty seconds, gulping every mouthful because chewing was still painful. I’ve only felt as relieved one other time in my life, but that’s another story.

And now Tim’s going to have his wisdom teeth out. The dentist took a look in there and said they’re growing in crooked, they have to come out, and we said, Hoe-kay! At least there’s a real reason. I had mine out for an oddly vague reason, like, my mouth was too small, or my teeth were too big, something about crowding. Impacted teeth are bad, I can understand that, but “crowding” sounds like your mouth was somehow not expecting that many teeth to show up, and the dentist was sort of like a party host who was going to stack some of the chairs up in a corner to clear more floor space. What the heck? Are we, or are we not, all genetically coded to expect thirty-two teeth? The invitations went out, the RSVPs came back, and there were no party crashers on the way. I still don’t get it.

Well, it’s a moot point now (or, as I’ve heard some people say, a “mute” point, which is the most sense I’ve ever heard a malapropism make — “It’s a mute point! Stop talking about it!”).

I made supper for My Darling B this evening so that she could go straight to the bedroom, slip into her pajamas, and then go kick up her feet on the sofa and unwind with a martini.

All I did was whip up some scrambled eggs and bacon with a side of toast, pretty standard last-minute guy food, but it was the least I could do for her after the pretty harrowing day she had answering phones at the DMV. She has good days and bad, and even on bad days like today she still gets a caller like the guy who not only thanked her repeatedly for her help, but complimented her on how well she did it, and said she had a really sweet voice on top of all that. Buddy, in the unlikely event you’re reading this, thanks. Under other circumstances, I might’ve been a little steamed if I’d overheard you sweet-talking my wife like that, but today you were a kind voice in a howling wind of ignoramuses and hotheads.

For the rest of you who weren’t that guy, here’s a thought: If you’re going to call the DMV with a question about registering your car, renewing your registration, or in fact any question having to do with your car and the license plate on it, know your license plate number. It doesn’t just help the nice lady at the DMV (and I know she doesn’t always seem so nice, but let’s consider maybe she’s having a bad day), it also helps you and everybody else calling in. One of the reasons you were on hold for fifteen minutes was because the bozo ahead of you didn’t know his license plate number, didn’t have his certificate of registration on hand, and had to put down the phone and run out of his apartment, down the stairs and out to the parking lot where he could train his eyeballs on the actual six-inch-high block letters and numbers stamped into the license plate bolted to the butt end of his vehicle. Think he remembered it when he got back to the phone? Having a pen & paper on hand helps, too.

I understand the guys at Marvel Comics have killed off Captain America. If you’ve never read comic books, Captain America was the guy in the blue jersey, had a big white star in the middle of his chest and on his indestructible shield. Apparently he was on his way to court to challenge a federal law requiring him and the rest of the superheroes to formally register, or get a license ... y’know, carry some Real ID? He thought that wasn’t very American, requiring superheroes to submit their personal details to a federal database in the name of security.

Playing the devil’s advocate, corporate big shot Tony Stark, who also happens to be the red-stater — excuse me, red-suited Iron Man, argued that there was nothing wrong with holding super heroes accountable and maybe even whipping a little formal close-combat training on them, as if super-soldier Steve Rogers, Captain America’s alter-ego, needed a lesson in hand-to-hand.

And so Captain America took the feds to court, or would have if a sniper hadn’t shot him dead on the front steps of the court house. America snuffed out for challenging the feds on security laws? Man, that’s poignant.

Vagina.

Vagina vagina vagina vagina VAGINA!

Three high schoolers in New York state were suspended for saying the word “vagina” during their public performance of a scene from “The Vagina Monologues.”

The school principal justified their suspension by saying that he got them to agree not to say “vagina” in exchange for letting them perform a scene from a play with the word “vagina” in the title. (The girls said they never made such an agreement.)

The censorship was called for in this case, the principal explained, because there were little kids in the audience. And I say, if you bring your kids to a performance that includes a scene from “The Vagina Monologues,” you’re a capital-M Moron if you don’t think your kids are going to hear the word “vagina” at least once, probably from somebody in the audience.

It’s not that I’m insensitive to people’s feelings, or at least I don’t think so. I can see there’s a time and a place to talk about some things, and I understand that some people don’t want to talk about some things in mixed company, ever. I even get the concern for “little ears.” If the principal felt even a smidgen of that concern, however, that makes him a Moron for agreeing to let his students stage a scene from “The Vagina Monologues” right from the get-go, even if they did agree not to utter the word “vagina” during the performance.

Especially if they made an agreement like that, come to think of it. The occurrence, in one high school after another, of the fettering of its students with rules like this, instead of harnessing their restless and even rebellious nature to teach them how to responsibly use the civil freedoms our laws are supposed to give them, strains the bounds of irony.

Vagina.

Well, I was doing to spend the evening dinking around in the basement with a few new toys I bought this morning, but we’ve had beautifully warm weather all day today and, as a twisted consequence, the basement is about thirty degrees colder than the upper floor because the sun beating on the sides of the house has kept the furnace from running most of the day. I was down there for about ten minutes, lost nearly all the feeling in my fingers and my butt, and had to grab my laptop and beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen where I could pound out this drivel while basking in the comforting, radiant heat of a big pot of beer cheese soup as it simmered on the range top. This could be heaven, now that I think of it.

The line for breakfast at this morning’s Dane County Farmer’s Market was longer than I’d ever seen it before. My Darling B and I opened the front door of the senior center — the farmer’s market is indoors during the winter months — and found ourselves at the back of the line. We had to wait about thirty minutes to collect our tray and shuffle off to a table, but the egg sandwich they were serving was as darned good as almost any other breakfast we could’ve found in downtown Madison this morning (breakfast at Cleveland’s Diner excepted).

After Barb picked up a few items from the market, we walked up Mifflin Street to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s museum to play video games. Not the first-person shooter crap that passes for video games these days, but arcade games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Tempest, and even Death Race, which caused quite an uproar back in the seventies because the object of the game, running over pedestrians, offended the delicate sensibilities of many parents, even though the game’s video graphics were so primitive that the pedestrians were no more than stick figures.

A guy who collects these old arcade games volunteered to lend them to the state historical society for a week, set them up in the museum and let the general public play at the 1980’s price of twenty-five cents a game. Barb and I burned through a couple dollars’ worth of quarters in about ten minutes. I think we had the most fun, and spent the most money on Pac-Man, although I still think Tempest is the best arcade game and played more than a few times, and even set the high score, if only for the day.

So long as we were downtown we made a stop at “A Room of One’s Own,” a really good book store with a feminist theme. Barb found a bumper sticker that declared, “I (heart) My Vagina” and suggested I could buy it in solidarity with the students I described yesterday, but although I’m a staunch defender of freedom of speech, it doesn’t seem to be a statement I should be making, for technical reasons alone, if nothing else.

Before we wended (wound?) our way home, My Darling B indulged me with a side trip to a hobby shop on the west side where I could spend a few of my hard-earned dollars on a siding switch and some track for a toy train set I’m trying to put together in our basement’s finished room. I have yet to get a train to go any further than a couple feet, partly because I’m too lazy to bust my butt on the hard work of assembling everything, partly because it’s been cold enough to store beef down there all winter, and mostly because it’s a rather expensive hobby. Every payday I can put aside twenty or thirty dollars and buy a siding switch, or half a dozen pieces of track, or a sometimes a couple train cars when they’re on sale. For a big project like the power pack and throttle I put together a couple months ago, I have to stuff the piggy bank. Someday soon the trains will run, but right now the project’s going at walking speed.

I took a walk around the neighborhood after we got back. The day was too warm and sunny not to. Felt good to stretch my legs, and the fresh air I got made the nap I had after I got back even more satisfying.

I finished The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down during my Thursday afternoon break, and with the geekiness typical of a guy who will cheerfully read a 400-page essay about the culture of the Hmong, I unreservedly recommend it.

The book is framed by the medical case of Lia Lee, a Hmong girl with epilepsy, a condition well-known to the Hmong by the phrase that gives the book its title. The Hmong aren’t the only culture to view epilepsy as a gift from heaven to be respected and cultivated, rather than a chronic disability to be suppressed with drugs.

Author Anne Fidaman uses the episodes of Lia’s treatment to examine the culture of the Hmong and the clashes with the culture of Americans of nearly all stripes. It’s obvious that she’s amassed a wealth of knowledge on the subject, and she could probably easily fill another couple hundred pages, but I’m glad she didn’t. It very nearly feels as though the book’s too long as it is, but she wisely keeps it within the frame, holding it all together with Lia’s story.

I picked this one up on impulse. It was sitting on the “Too Good To Miss” table and when I recognized it as a book about the friction generated between Hmong and American culture, I grabbed it because there have been several such clashes in Wisconsin recently, and I knew next to nothing about the Hmong. In fact, nothing. I don’t even know how to say “Hmong.” Some people rhyme it with “tongue,” some with “gong.” This book didn’t help me with that, but Fadiman used it to communicate a very engaging history of the Hmong. That and her illustrations of their attempts to fit into American society would go a long way to helping almost anybody understand them.

I had a vaguely uneasy feeling during dinner until I figured out that I was puzzled about the bright daylight still shining across our back yard outside the window of the dining room. It was dark at dinner time yesterday. I really can’t stand Daylight Savings Time.

I know I’m no different from a lot of other people out there and this is not an unusual sentiment. I haven’t tried to google “daylight savings time” to see how many millions of other bloggers wrote more or less the same thing I just wrote, but I know I’m not alone.

I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out how DST makes truckloads of money for anybody out there, but I can come up with only one or two things, and they’re pretty lame. Maybe it keeps us awake longer to shop more. Maybe because we get up earlier, we’re burning up more power turning our lights on and running the furnace. Maybe freaking Starbucks sells more coffee when it’s dark.

Doesn’t sound like it would be worth the trouble, but there’s got to be a pile of gold in it somewhere if the feds bothered enacting a law to get it done.

Jim Doyle, the governor of our great state, had to enact a law that would allow bars to stay open until 3:30 AM on Saturday night, because even though you jump ahead before you go night-night, or after you wake up and have finished at least one cup of coffee, DST doesn’t officially take effect until 2:00 AM, and by state law all bars have to close at two-thirty. If Doyle hadn’t flexed his awesome gubernatorial (I love that word — it’s goober-riffic!) power, police departments all over the state could have raked in a ton of money fining every tavern owner the minute the clock struck two, which, though the magic of DST, would have instantaneously been three, and they all would have been out of compliance (except for the ones who kicked everybody out at 1:59).

Everybody took their pants off today.

Okay, not everybody. I didn’t, for instance, and most of the office workers who emerged, blinking, from their cubicles into the noonday sun kept their trousers on, but just about everybody took off their coats, at the very least. I wore my summer jacket today, and by the time I had walked down to the end of State Street and come back to cap square, I’d popped a sweat.

All the serious walkers and runners took their pants off, though.

Temps today were in the high fifties and, after weeks of below-freezing, the sun burning down out of a clear blue sky seemed hot enough to scorch exposed skin, but most people were willing to take that chance.

Grass showed through in patches on the capital lawn, there was no snow left on the pavement, and if I stared I could watch the dirty, banked snow along the curb shrink away as I waited at the corner for the crossing light. Melt-off streamed across the sidewalks, splashing underfoot where it pooled. Every storm sewer was a chorus of frying bacon as the rivulets gathered into a deluge and made its way to the lake.

I walked to the shore of Lake Mendota at the end of Wisconsin Avenue, turned toward campus up Langdon Street and made it back to cap square in just more than thirty-five minutes, so I went back to my cube and read a few chapters of WLT: A Radio Romance. There’s only so much sun and fresh air a guy can handle after being cooped up away from it all winter.

And I still hate Daylight Savings Time, just in case you were wondering.

“Wireless Network Connection is not connected,” my computer informs me. If it’s not connected, it’s not really a network connection any more, is it?

It’s not connected because I shut it off. If I hadn’t, I’d be sitting at my desk until dawn waiting for the hard disk to stop spinning so I could type a few words before it took off on its own again. Ever since I renewed my subscription for Norton anti-virus protection, the damned thing does practically nothing but update its virus database and scan my hard disk. I know virus protection is important, and the threat changes constantly so the files must be renewed frequently, but this is ridiculous. I unchecked all the boxes in the Norton Security Control Center, unscheduled all the tasks having to do with Norton on the startup screen, did everything but hit it with a hammer. Made no difference. Five seconds after I booted up the computer, the anti-virus software phoned home and it downloaded a thousand thousand megabytes worth of virus lists and software updates, leaving barely enough processing time for me to tap out a couple lines of drivel.

So I shut off the wireless networking signal. If it can’t talk to Norton, it can’t update any databases. I can drivel all I want. When I’m ready, I switch on the network, wait for it to reconnect, then type like hell trying to upload the new drivel file before the anti-virus software notices it’s got a connection and hogs all the bandwidth and processing time. I can almost always beat it, unless I fumble a few key strokes.

Every morning after my shower, I stumble downstairs to switch it on, then trudge back upstairs to make a hot pot o’ joe and two shingles of toast. By the time I’m done sufficiently serensifying myself, Norton has usually had plenty of time to reload every software file on my laptop. Usually, but not always. If it goes on like this, I may tell them to get the hell off my laptop and take my chances with the viruses. They couldn’t be much worse.

Good gawd, it took me almost as long to drivel about that as it does for Norton to release my machine from its terrorist-like hostage-taking grip.

The girl scout who took Barb’s cookie order back in January knocked at our door tonight. “Is this your order?” she asked, pointing to her sign-up sheet, where I could clearly make out Barb’s name next to our erroneous address, in Barb’s handwriting. It was missing a zero.

“Yep, that’s us,” I told her, and she trotted to the curb where her red American Flyer waited, stacked with boxes of cookies.

Barb felt pretty bad about badmouthing the Girl Scouts, I can tell you. In the last couple weeks she’s laid it pretty thick on the Scouts for failing to deliver their cookies in a timely manner, but she happily apologized for muffing our house number, filling out a personal check the whole time. Hope she didn’t leave any zeroes off that.

The cookies couldn’t have been delivered with better timing. We’d just finished a rib-sticking dinner of shepherd’s pie and were settling down to coffee. A couple of thin mints were just the treat.

Today’s fifty-some temperatures weren’t as nice as yesterday’s sixty-some temps, but during my lunch break I went for a long, long walk again anyway. Headed up to Lake Mendota on Carroll Street, followed fraternity row over to the campus, poked around by the shore (where a dozen or so doofuses were ice fishing, by the way. Ice fishing! I heard the ice was about six inches thick, but it was also deeply cracked and sloppily covered in puddles of melt water, idjits!), then back up State Street to cap square, all at a loafing pace.

This is going to make me sound like a broken record (as if mentioning the weather in every post didn’t already), but none of us seem to be able to get adjusted to Daylight Savings Time. Every one of us rose grunting and slit-eyed from bed, stumped to the shower to scald ourselves, then hung slump-shouldered at the kitchen table, eagerly slurping at a mug of coffee, or, in Tim’s case, wolfing down a box of Oatie-O’s.

It’s only an hour’s difference, for crying out loud! We’ve adjusted better to losing fourteen hours crossing the Pacific Ocean! Here it’s Wednesday, four days after we set the clocks ahead, and we’re still getting kicked in the head by an internal clock that refuses to sync up no matter how many times we look at a wind-up clock and shout, “Hack!”

My laptop woes are over, by the way, in case you were sitting on pins and needles waiting to see how that turned out.

I called up the Task Manager and the process that was hogging all my computer’s CPU time stuck out like a Cadillac Escalade at a Volkswagen rally. I googled the name of the offending process and found a fix: Shut it off. How about that? There were some pretty simple instructions, almost too simple to be believed, telling me how to call up the controls that would switch off the process. It’s been twenty-four hours, though, and the laptop seems pretty healthy so far, so there you go.

The lease on www.o-broze.net came up for renewal this week, not for the first time, but last year’s renewal was automatic. I didn’t have to lift a finger. Didn’t log into a web site, didn’t drop a check in the mail, didn’t have to call anybody. They had my credit card on file and I had checked the “renew automatically” box when I signed up. Don’t even ask me when it happened. I was no more aware of my automatic renewal than I’ve ever been aware of the secretions of my spleen. I sort of wanted it to stay that way, too.

No more automatic renewal this year, though. I got an e-mail informing me that expiration date on the card I’d given them had lapsed. The e-mail had a link to the web site of the company that I leased the domain from, and there lay my problem: I had no recollection of my customer service number and password. Not even a glimmer of a clue. I set up the account many moons ago. I might’ve written it down, but, if I did, right now it’s stuffed in a file that’s taped up in a box at the bottom of a stack of boxes in some corner of our basement. Alberto Gonzales himself couldn’t find that file in time to renew my lease, no matter how big his subpoena is. Oh, wait, I forgot: he doesn’t use his subpoena any more.

I called the leasing company on the phone, figuring maybe I could get them to give me access to my account in exchange for my name, my birthday, my mother’s maiden name and a few more of my most personal details that only a few thousand computer hackers have already sold several times over. No. The second thing they asked me for, after my name, was my address. They had my overseas address, my address when I leased the domain. I don’t remember it. Why would I? It’s probably written down somewhere, but I already told you about the files and the boxes and Alberto Gonzales and his subpoena.

I explained my situation to the guy on the phone. “You could give me your customer number and your pin.” I don’t know my customer number or my pin. “D’you want to take a guess?” Now there’s armor-plated security for you: “Take a guess.” The way I finally did get the lease renewed was by gathering up all my credit cards and reading off the last four digits of each one to the phone lackey until he yelled “Bingo!” I got him to reset the password, too, and send the confirmation message to my current e-mail address, by whimpering please help me over and over again until he went all soft and mooshy and threw security protocols into his deskside trash can.

If I’d failed? Then www.o-broze.net would have been up for grabs to anybody who wanted to lease it, and the last time that happened the leasing company itself bought the rights immediately, then offered to sell back the domain name at the bargain-basement price of $125.00! (Which is why this site went from o-broze.com to o-broze.net.)

But not today! Today, I prevailed, and o-broze.net is securely in the hands of the only Okonski Bros. who care enough to waste money on trivial crap like this site. Lucky for you.

I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard, by Tom Reynolds is the book about pop music I wish I’d written, if only I knew as much about pop music minutia as Reynolds seems to. I could’ve told you how “Round Here” by Counting Crows sucked big oily bowling balls, but I couldn’t have told you who wrote it, how he wrote it or why, all facts which Reynolds seems to have a command of for this and fifty-one other songs. Then again, maybe he googled them, same as I would have done.

Making fun of pop music can be pretty easy, but to keep it up for two-hundred pages, that’s talent. And it’s a quick and easy read; I finished it off in an evening, although I didn’t read every single review because some of the songs had been recorded in the last ten years, so I hadn’t heard of them and didn’t care enough to read about most of them. Still, the song he considered the absolutely most depressing ever was one I’d never heard of, but it was one of his funniest reviews, so I may go back to read the others.

Alas, there were no Neil Diamond songs on Reynolds’ list. He did include the duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” with Barbara Streisand, but how did he decide to leave out “I Am, I Cried,” arguably near the top of The 100 Pop Songs That Stink On Ice? I suppose he had only so much room in the book, and he wanted to include a little bit of everything. That’s excusable.

Garrison Keillor’s novel WLT: A Radio Romance is the story of Lake Wobegon, except that it takes place in a radio station, and everybody in it has sex. Lots of sex. Geeze Louise, Keillor likes to write about sex, although in point of fact he doesn’t often get around to depicting the act itself; he most often describes men chasing after women, men feeling women up, men talking to other men about women’s boobies, that sort of thing.

I’m not opposed to sex with women, or even reading about it, and it’s not that Keillor’s brand of erotica is even very objectionable; often, it’s not even as erotic as it is burlesque. I suppose I simply found it more than a little unexpected. Not unexpected that men should be panting after women like randy hound dogs all the time — that’s almost a refreshingly straightforward depiction of men in fiction, if you ask me — but rather unexpected coming from the man who I used to listen to every week reading the dryly amusing tales of the white bread folk of Lake Wobegon. Certainly they must have had sex, as evidenced by all the above-average kids, but I assumed those exchanges were brief and carried out in full accordance with the Hayes Code. Apparently Keillor’s characters have been keeping something from us all these years, saving it up until they found their way into one of his novels and then exploding like a pent-up teenager.

The novel follows the life and death of radio as the dominant entertainment media in the nation, telling its story through the lives of the people who worked the airwaves. Although the novel goes on for something like three-hundred pages, it’s really a collection of dozens of stories, so that reading the book is like listening to him recite several years’ worth of weekly Lake Wobegon installments. This can frankly feel a little tedious at times. Each of the stories by itself is delightful, but really, would you want to sit through a couple dozen all in one go?

I put a bookmark in the middle of it and set it aside for a couple months, and finally came back to it last week. Luckily I started with a chapter introducing Francis With, who tied together the last half of the book, although with a loose cord. After several dozen episodes of kooky mayhem, love and tragedy, and some more sex, television emerged to trump radio and the novel ended with a rather bizarre epilogue.

I’m not sure what to make of the book. I think I would have to read it again to give it a fair shake; my long hiatus in the middle might have been too much discontinuity for me to judge it well.

Tim and I went to the IMAX theater in Fitchburg to see The 300 this afternoon, a movie that’s supposed to be about the battle of Thermopylae. When I asked Tim, who knows a little more about history that I do (unless choo-choo trains were involved), if the battle was anything like the dramatization in the movie, he said that yes, there had once been people called Spartans, and a guy named Leonidas was their king. Pretty much everything else, he said, was dramatic license.

He still liked it, though. He liked it a lot, mostly for the “intense” fight scenes. “I’m going to buy that movie when it comes out in DVD,” he declared, and even said he was thinking about getting an HDTV to watch it on.

I thought it was okay. There was too much talking. The teasers I’d seen had led me to believe the movie would be two hours of unending slaughter, but a slew of non-fighting characters (one was named “Queen Gorgo,” honestly) babbled on and on in a sub-plot that had very little to do with the battle and was just plain boring. The battle scenes by themselves probably didn’t add up to more than forty minutes, maybe an hour if you included crap like the wise cracks before the charge and after, when they were piling up the bodies.

They were exceptionally well-choreographed battle scenes. The director went from a straightforward phalanx scene to a hack-and-slash scene to Jedi jumps and aikido spins, maintaining visual interest and even evoking the comic book format by cutting from a slow-mo to a slow-mo. The battle scenes weren’t all that much different from the mass attacks in Lord of the Rings or Gladiator, though, so I thought it got pretty repetitious, and thought it was a good thing they were short.

Other than the swords and the shouting, though, there wasn’t much else to this movie. I didn’t find it all that campy, as some people have said, and I didn’t think it was especially gory; I’ve seen Monty Python sketches with more blood. Did I mention there was too much talking? I see I did already. Sorry.

On a strictly uber-geeky note, we watched The 300 on an IMAX screen, and WHOAAAA! I wish all movies were shown in IMAX theaters. I might start going out to watch movies again if they did. There’s so much to look at, it’s almost overwhelming! Reminded me of the first time I saw Star Wars in a proper movie theater, one of those really huge old palaces with a screen that towered over me when I slouched down in the first row. I know it makes me sound like a curmudgeon when I say it, but watching a movie in one of those shoebox theaters at the CinePlex feels like a rip-off when you know there’s something better.

Before the movie, we were treated to a filmed visit from the anchor, weather forecaster and sports director of Madison’s Channel Three News Team, who fed us happy little bits of trivia such as: 70mm film is strong enough to tow a truck. Now there’s what I want more of when I go to the movie theater. Note to Star Cinema IMAX: Drop these guys like a cheating boy friend.

Since it was a big day out, what with this being the first movie I’ve seen in a movie theater in more than a year and it being a big old IMAX screen, I went in halvsies on what the snack bar advertisement termed a “value pack,” enough popcorn to fill a bag you’d normally find a hundred bucks’ worth of groceries in, and two soft drinks served in souvenir buckets. We somehow ate all the popcorn, but I couldn’t finish my soft drink. I didn’t think any human could and that I’d made a pretty good effort, until I noticed that Tim slurped his up right quick. He didn’t even look sick.

I woke up this morning with a craving for a tall glass of cold orange juice and a big sticky bun, and I knew we didn’t have either in the kitchen, so I pulled on a pair of trousers and my boots and a jacket, hopped in the car and drove up the road to Emian’s bakery, where they’d just put out a whole tray of breakfast buns. They’re almost like cinnamon rolls except they’re baked instead of fried and they’re dusted with sugar instead of smothered in syrup. I got two, and a cinnamon roll for Tim.

Then I had to make a stop at Ken’s to pick up the orange juice, which they didn’t have at the bakery, and when I caught my reflection in the window of the showcase I notice that I had a case of bed-head that looked sort of like an upside-down mullet, all the hair in back sticking almost straight up except the very end, which made a curly dippy-doo over my head. I patted it down and, when that didn’t work, gave it a good mussing so it stuck out all over and camouflaged the cowlick, more or less.

By the time I got back, My Darling B had made coffee. I waved the cinnamon roll under Tim’s nose to tempt him away from his video game, and he followed me back to the kitchen table, but he wolfed it down almost before my butt had a chance to warm up my chair, muttered a quick “thank-you” and was soon planted in front of the television set again, cheerfully blowing up aliens.

Barb and I slowly tore apart our breakfast buns and munched away; they were so crispy and good. I love weekends.

I finally found a video game Tim can’t beat me at. I had to dig up one from thirty years ago to do it, the classic arcade game Galaga, but even so I trounced him soundly. It didn’t stop him from crowing about beating his mother at Pac-Man, though. “Show me an arcade game with more than three buttons and I’ll beat you both,” he bragged.

But he didn’t beat me.

The arcade games were part of the featured exhibit at the museum of the Wisconsin State Historical Society on capital square. Today was the exhibit’s closing today, so our last chance to challenge Tim to play video games we might actually stand a chance of beating him at was almost gone. Our match on Space Invaders wasn’t decisive because one of the buttons was sticky, and we never did get a shot at Dig Dug because the guy ahead of us was so good his little hose-shooting digger never died.

There were plenty of other games but the one I really wanted to play, Tempest, was switched off with an “Out of order” sign taped over the coin slot, a major bummer, and the other games I wasn’t familiar with or never got the hang of way back when. We were there about an hour before it became really crowded and the lines were getting too long, but Tim and I did manage to get one more match on Donkey Kong, the first arcade video game I played, in fact the first one I laid eyes on in an Appleton pizza joint during a night out with a couple friends back in maybe 1976 or ‘77.

Gosh, it sure was nice to have that extra hour of sunlight after dinner tonight so that I could ... now, what did I do with that extra hour? Oh yeah! I was in the basement, trying to get my laptop to load some music on the MP3 player. I figured that would take about five or ten minutes, but it took an hour, as required by the first law of computing. (“If they give you an estimate for when it’ll be ready, double it and add half again. This is the minimum time it’ll be ready.”) When I came upstairs again, twilight had fallen.

I could’ve really used that extra hour of daylight this morning when I banged my shin on the coffee table. But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Damn. There I go again with the Daylight Savings Time rant. And I was doing so well holding it in up to now.

It’s been a freaking week already since we set the clocks ahead. I should be acclimated by now. When the alarm goes off in the morning I should not feel like I’ve been whacked in the head by a wrecking ball any more. It occurred to be last weekend that I could attempt to reset my internal clock by going on a bender, but waking up in a cold sweat with my face in the toilet is no longer preferable to life’s other unpleasantnesses.

Barb was thinking she could get around it by talking her boss into letting her flex her hours back. Now there’s an idea. We can’t flat-out ignore DST, but we are entitled to flex our work day a bit. It would almost be the same. Tim would be out of luck because he’s stuck going to school when they tell him to go, under pain of incarceration, but Barb and I have done our time in institutionalized education and got our “get out of jail free” cards. He’s still got a year to go. Sucks to be him.

On the sunny side of life, it was very nearly warm enough to go trouserless today, but not quite, drat the luck. I wore my Speedos, shaved my legs, the whole nine yards. Maybe my Batman leotards will arrive by the time the real spring weather gets here. I sort of hope so. Not that I think it’ll get me on the front page of the morning paper, above the fold, because I’d have to think up something a lot more startling than prancing down State Street in a Batman outfit to merit that.

But it was warm enough to bring out the panhandlers in full force, even the ones who go to school, if the guy who said he was a starving UW student wasn’t just talking out his butt. “They should not give guys like me American Express cards,” he said, by way of starting the conversation, then enumerated his woeful fiscal situation in detail. I ducked into a store to get away from him. Nothing I could have said would have made me feel better, because what I wanted to say would have gotten me punched in the nose, and he was a lot bigger than me. I kept my mouth shut.

The dominance of uber-baggy, big-butted men’s trousers may be finally weakening. Not much, and not so that it’s going to end in the next five years, but I’ve noticed that lately I can walk into the men’s department at Kohl’s and pick out a pair of khaki pants in under ten minutes, without having to dig through piles of denim trousers, each big enough that, if I were to unzip the fly and jam a telephone pole up one of the pants legs, there’d be plenty of room underneath for two circus clowns on unicycles to toss bowling pins back and forth to each other and a small crowd to watch them.

It was a ridiculously long sentence, but those are some some ridiculously baggy trousers.

Barb had a similar problem, except in her case she’s sure there’s not enough fabric in most women’s pants, inasmuch as most of them ride way too low for her to feel comfortable appearing in public wearing anything remotely like that. Not to reveal too much, but she is in fact way too modest to wear anything remotely like that in the privacy of her own home, although it might have as much to do with keeping warm as it has to do with modesty.

And to think that at one time each of us considered ourselves more or less with it, if not fashionably hip. I’m not even sure I can spell “it” any longer (unless I cheat and use a spell checker).

Our neighbor across the street is Mister Freeze. That’s the only way to explain the pile of snow on his front lawn, the only one still standing in the neighborhood, even though temps were in the high fifties all day long, the sun was out, and just before dinner we had a solid downpour that washed away all the little patches of grimy snow that were still hiding out under bushes and against the shady side of a few houses. Across the street, the pile in Mister Freeze’s yard still stood tall as the sun faded.

I thought The Big Four was going to be a book that only a seriously fanatical train nerd could enjoy, but this is a story that anybody could get into. Honestly, I’m not just saying that to get you to read the book. Part biography and part history lesson, author Oscar Lewis does a pretty darned good job of condensing the essence of the partners who doggedly built and ruthlessly ran the Central Pacific Rail Road, as well as making it an easily readable story.

Before they became four of the most mind-bogglingly richest people on earth, “The Big Four” were Leland Stanford, a grocer; Mark Hopkins, a hardware store manager; his partner in the hardware business, Collis Huntington; and Charles Crocker, a forty-niner who went into the dry goods business. All very smart, very hard-working business men with a sharp eye for an opportunity, but really, pretty ordinary.

One night in 1861 they met railroad engineer Theodore Judah, who told them how they could control the traffic of all the goods and services that crossed California to the Nevada mines and the ore that came back. All they had to do was finance the rail road route he had surveyed through the Sierra Nevada mountains. The idea of building a railroad over the mountains was so crackers that people crossed the street to avoid “Crazy Judah,” but The Big Four listened and could hear the cha-ching! of cold cash.

Although there were a few lean years to start, for about half a century The Big Four held such absolute control over all the freight traffic that virtually everyone in California and Nevada was working for them. When the fruit growers had a good year, or when a mine hit a rich vein of ore, The Big Four raised freight prices to suck up all but the last cent of profit. It made them hideously wealthy. There was nothing they couldn’t own. And all the while, they were buying congressmen who renewed the due date on the government bonds that made the railroad possible, using the thin premise that the railroad was nearly broke. It was Robber Barons Gone Wild.

Although The Big Four would probably be a hard book to find in any except the biggest libraries, it would be well worth searching for. I couldn’t recommend it enough.

I try always to have a book in my bag to read now. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck waiting for a locked door to be opened, or a ride home, and have nothing to do but just stand there with nothing to do. A book is a perfect way to occupy those times. They’re also great for the fifteen-minute breaks I get; it’s usually just enough time to read a chapter.

But I’m stuck for my next selection. Barb had a book I was going to pick up and start reading, but it’s due back at the library in two days and it’s a special check-out, which means the fines go higher that the moon, the sun and the stars if I hang on to it. Guess I won’t be reading that one. And there’s nothing in my TBR pile because I don’t have one; I cleared it out, and haven’t stuck anything in it for weeks. So now I’ll have to troll through the bookshelves, hoping to be inspired by something I’ve always meant to read but haven’t yet gotten around to. Sometimes that works, sometimes I end up trolling for days without a nibble.

Thunder storm last night! Big one! Lots of rain, sleet, lightning, and rolling thunder loud enough to drown out the pimped-out cars with the gaudy gold trim and comically large wagon wheels that go thumpa-thumpa-thumpa as they roll down the street!

I almost forgot to mention the hail, big hail; not so big that it sounded like bricks hitting the roof, like the hail we got the first summer we were here, but big enough that you’d hate to have to go out in it. And it came down during that weird time of the night, some time between two and three, when we’d already been asleep a couple hours but were still several hours away from time to roll out of bed to hit the showers. That’s the time I hate to get woke up, like some people aren’t morning people. I tossed and turned through the storm. Barb got up and roamed the house, looking for dripping water, I suppose, or a missing wall. Tim thought he dreamed it.

The downpour lasted at least an hour, so it washed away just about everything except, of course, the pile of snow on the neighbor’s lawn. Barb said it was sixty degrees during the storm, and it was sixty degrees and sunny today, but the snow was still there when we came home from work this afternoon. Something very weird’s at work in that yard.

I hadn’t intended to wash out my coffee mug in the men’s room this morning but I did it anyway because whoever was in there just before me did it, too. I could tell because the basin looked as if fifty kids had just finished washing their hands after playing in the playground mud puddles during recess. I dumped my coffee, rinsed, used the water in the cup to swish out the basin, rinsed again — Voila! Clean as a baby’s bottom. Okay, maybe it’s not the best example. But really, how hard was that?

And how hard is it to pull in a little closer when using the urinal? If the guy who’s been dribbling all over the floor in front of the pisser was as well-endowed as he seems to think he is, everybody in the building would be talking about it, holding their hands that far apart and making “Oh My God” faces. I’m pretty sure he’d be a video on You Tube by now if he really needed to stand that far back, but he isn’t and he doesn’t. The evidence backs me up on this.

Now that the office has been reconfigured so that the cubicles have seven-foot walls, I have to say that I feel a little bit cut off from everybody else, which was the point, when it comes down to it. My supervisor lobbied to get me an office-like cubicle with high walls and a door so that I could have the privacy I needed to discuss proprietary information with tellers, branch managers and customers without having to worry about who might be listening. Not that anybody in the office cared to listen, but they might.

Ensconced in my corner cubicle I’ve frankly felt a little lonelier than before, when I sat in the middle of an open room. Conversations started all around me and I was free to join them, or just listen in, or ignore them completely and go about my work. Now, cordoned off behind the seven-foot-high cubicle walls, the gals in the neighboring offices tend to forget I’m even there, and I can hear only one-sided snippets of the conversations that spring up and die down, and given the maze-like layout of the cubicled room, I have to get up and travel so far to join a conversation that it’s usually over by the time I get there. So I listen in from afar, and try to puzzle out the meaning of what’s going on out there by way of the stray words and phrases that manage to reach me.

This morning, for instance, this snippet drifted over the top of my cubicle wall:

“They look perky enough. Have you tried doing push-ups?”

I’m not sure that is a conversation that would’ve sprung up in my presence. Needless to say, I didn’t step around the corner to offer my opinion.

“Son, please instruct me in the ways of sagging,” I requested of my youngest son as I swaggered into the living room, the waist of my new cargo pants barely covering my skinny, almost non-existent butt.

I was making light of his generation’s fashion mode, but he immediately stepped forward to correct the error of my ways: I was wearing them way too high. After adjusting my trousers so far downward that the waist band was then dangling free of my waist, hips or butt, he tugged at the back of my t-shirt until a tail was dangling. “Shouldn’t be tucked in,” he admonished.

“Does my butt have to be sticking completely out?” I asked, begging for some measure of modesty. It was kind of drafty, too. “Can’t I pull the waist band at least up to my hips and cover some of my butt?” He allowed that was the way some guys wore their pants who weren’t as cool, but the untucked t-shirt was law.

I don’t know how guys shamble through an entire day like that. Sagging that low, there’s nothing for the waist band to hang on to. No wonder I see them walking around with one hand clutching a big hank of denim, usually from the crotch, for reasons I don’t want to know about.

The lilac bushes outside the kitchen window appeared to be budding out all over. It’s one of those first signs of spring that I love to see up close, so I slipped on my shoes to tramp across the back yard for a quick look.

As I opened the back door I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to have the warm spring air in the house? I fetched the screen out of the basement, figuring it would be a quick change, but one of the screws broke off and the rest were frozen up. I ended up making three trips to the basement, once to get the screen, once to get a pliers to free up the frozen screws, once to take the storm window and the pliers back downstairs. Not as quick as I’d thought it would be, but still, I had it over and done with in about ten minutes.

The cats were very interested in looking out through the back screen door. If I opened the top half of the dutch door they tried to sit on the top of the bottom half, but they couldn’t do it very easily, and it didn’t look comfortable at all. Last summer I made a wide, padded wooden seat for them to sit on that fits snugly over the top edge of the bottom half of the door. We stored in the garage over the winter; I went out there to get it for them, slapped it in place, and they climbed right up there and had a nice time glaring at the chipmunks in the yard.

The garage was open and Barb took the car, making it easy to see what an awful mess there was all over the floor. There was a winter’s worth of salty dirt melt-off from the car, dead leaves that had blown in nearly every time the door opened, and some assorted trash that I never cleaned out because it was just too darned cold. I grabbed a broom and swept it all out into the driveway, picking out the trash as I went.

There’s a patch of bare dirt alongside the driveway where we cut down some bushes last summer. Barb and I tacked some black plastic sheeting to kill off the grass and weeds, and after the winter winds were finished with it, the plastic was all wadded up. Looked terrible. After pulling on some gardening gloves I tried to stake it out again, but no matter how I wrapped the plastic around the stakes, they always tore through, so I said to heck with it and pulled up all the plastic. It was covered in mud and full of dead leaves and other crap, a stinking, messy job. I had to spend about five minutes at the kitchen sink when I was done, scrubbing all the way up to my elbows, to get clean again.

The lilac bushes outside the kitchen window appeared to be budding out all over ...

Spring was busting out all over this morning, and I just had to see some of it, so I climbed on my bike and tooled around the town, riding across Frost Woods Avenue to the lake shore where I followed Winnequah north through the overhanging boughs of budding maples and oaks and all other modes of verdancity. That’s not a real word, but when I get in this mood I make up a lot.

When I got back, My Darling B was pulling weeds in the yard. We got to talking about what to dig up over there, and what we wanted to plant over there, and pretty soon I was grubbing around in the back yard, digging up the Virginia creeper that tried to smother the flowering crab last summer, not because it was so unstoppably aggressive, but because I wanted to pull up a wire fence that used to surround maybe a vegetable patch. B wanted a garden there and the fence was only in the way. I’d been putting off pulling the fence out because the creeper had stitched it solidly into the fabric of Mother Earth, but today was warm without being hot, there were no mosquitoes yet to swarm all over me and sap me of my very will to live, and best of all the creeper hadn’t sprouted any leaves yet. Hack away all you want, you can’t pull it up until you can see the vines to cut them, and you can’t see the vines after the leaves bust out.

Like all yard work, I started with one project and was quickly involved in two more: clearing away the dead wood lying around, and cutting down a few trees. There are way too many small trees planted in the corners of our yard. I’m sure it was a pleasantly distracting hobby some years back for the previous owner, but they were too close together and getting too big now, except for the spruce, which never had a chance in the shade of the flowering crab. The little hawthorn went, too.

And then it was past lunch time, and I was hungry enough to eat [usually this is where you say something disgusting, like “a snake without skinning it” or “a possum covered in mud,” but I’m going to say] a lush green salad and some toasted garlic bread, with a side of sliced cheese on crackers. [Doesn’t have the same zing, but there you go.]

I tried to cop a nap in the afternoon, but the furshlugginer cat wouldn’t shut up and unfortunately he’s not an outdoor cat so I couldn’t chuck him out the window. He doesn’t understand “Shut Up!” no matter how loud you yell it, either. I gave up after about a half-hour, made myself a pot of coffee and driveled the rest of the afternoon away.

Tim had his wisdom teeth pulled today and wasn’t feeling so hot when I called to ask about him late in the afternoon. “Why don’t you just stay there with him,” I suggested to My Darling B, “I’ll find my way home.”

And then I got a brainstorm: I would walk home. For months I’ve wanted to follow the bike path along John Nolen Drive from cap square to Monona. Although ideally I’d wanted to be on a bike when I did it, we had such a beautiful day today that the merest notion of getting out in the fresh air and sunshine clouded my better judgment, and I set out on foot down West Wilson Street to Broom, hung a left and kept going until I hit the lake shore.

Right away, I was as out of place as a rabbit at a dog show. The path was crowded with dozens of people on bicycles and skates, running and walking, all in spandex and gym shorts and tank tops, and there I was in a button-down cotton shirt, khaki pants and a neck tie. I settled into a moderate stride with one hand casually tucked into a hip pocket, trying to look as though I belonged there.

Actually, it was a great day to be out for a walk, even if I was horribly overdressed for it. The six lanes of cars screaming past was sort of distracting, but a cool breeze off the lake moderated the pleasantly warm heat from the sun, until I got about a mile down the road and popped a sweat, and by the time I got to the convention center I had soaked my undershirt. Things never got any uglier for my personal hygiene than that, thanks to the cool breeze.

By the time I reached the Beltline I was feeling pretty good about making it that far on foot, while at the same time I was thinking that I wouldn’t turn down a ride if somebody offered it to me, a long shot because I didn’t know anybody who lived in Monona, biked home after work, and (most crucially and least probably of all) might have an empty seat on his bicycle I might occupy.

It took me an hour and a half to make it all the way home, a distance of about six miles, which means I managed a respectable four miles an hour, not too bad for a desk jockey. While I’m patting myself on the back I’ll also dump on myself and admit that it wore me out and I wouldn’t do it again for at least another week, and then only if there was a sizable bet riding on it.

Tim’s fine, by the way, or as fine as a boy can expect to be after an oral surgeon has violated his mouth and made off with four of his teeth. At least the boy ate something, which gladdened the cockles of his mother’s heart, even if it was merely a bowl of mashed potatoes.

We were about halfway through the movie Babel the other night and, right after the third or fourth accidental, tragic killing, I slapped my head and said aloud, “Geeze, does anything good happen in this movie?”

Well, yes and no. Mostly no. A qualified yes in the case of the estranged couple who learn to talk to each other again, and no for everybody else, who are variously shot, harassed, deported, rejected, reviled, and any number of other soul-wrenching circumstances you might be able to think of.

But it’s all done in a very arty way. Babel is a good-looking movie. Watching its cinematography is a joy.

Taking in the story is like cutting out a hangnail, though. Maybe worse, because you tell yourself that you have to get that hangnail out, but you could turn off the movie and walk away and your life wouldn’t be any more miserable for it. It’s not that I won’t watch difficult movies, but I’m still trying to figure out what there is to like about Babel, and I’m having a hard time coming up with something.

There was one very odd aspect to the movie, and my question regarding this might be answered by the title: Only a handful of the characters spoke English; the rest jabbered away in Spanish, Japanese, sign language, and whatever they speak in Morocco, and there were no subtitles. Of course, you can turn on the subtitles if you’re watching a DVD, and that’s what we did, but I wonder if the movie was released without subtitles? I haven’t been able to find out. Trying to sort out the film’s dreamlike storytelling technique without the benefit of being able to understand most of what was being said would have been a monumentally frustrating experience. I doubt I would’ve sat through the movie to the end.

By this time I’d spent a couple hours dorking around with the damned thing and was a little tired of blowing, splatting, soaking, dredging and rinsing, so I took the nozzle apart and dropped in the water-filled jar, then put it aside until tomorrow, when I’ll give it a reaming it’s never going to forget. Meanwhile, I’m trolling e-bay for a single-action brush that might perhaps be a little less generic and a little more dependable.

I planned to make a trip to the do-it-yourself store after dinner to pick up something really, really, REALLY important, so mind-bogglingly important that I didn’t bother to write it down because I knew it was so important that I’d never forget it.

“We’ve heard that before,” said the part of my brain that has learned from past mistakes, “write it down anyway.” And I knew I should have. I’ve been through this before. But I didn’t because, you know, it was just so important that I couldn’t imagine forgetting it, never in a dozen lifetimes, never so long as the wolf howled at the moon, no freaking way.

And while I was there, I thought to myself, I should buy light bulbs.

Fast-forward to dinner. Picture me at my place behind the table. No, actually I was at the wrong place because there was too much kitchen traffic still moving behind my customary seat. I confused the hell out of the cat when I did that, who came around after dinner to sit in my lap and found ... Tim sitting there. Freaked him big time.

I sat between the table and the window. If you can picture me there, make sure you picture me with a puzzled expression. Puzzle, puzzle, puzzle. What’s he thinking about? Why, he’s trying to remember what was so gosh-darned important that he was going to run all the way to Menard’s after dinner to buy, but light bulbs is all that comes to mind. It wasn’t just for light bulbs, was it? No, couldn’t have been. Puzzle some more.

Fast forward some more to see me standing at the sink, washing up a cast-iron pot and a pizza platter. Do I still look puzzled? You bet I do. By this time I’ve overloaded so many brain cells that there’s no way in hell I’m going to remember what was so important before the store closes. I won’t remember until I stretch out in bed and start reading a book, when it’ll hit me like two-hundred twenty volts of alternating current applied directly to the end of my nose with a dripping-wet curling iron. Odd, most curling irons only take one-ten. This is a really scary curling iron, killjoy.

Or I could remember while I’m standing in the shower, still half-asleep; or while I’m making the coffee, or buttering toast. But most likely I’ll remember some time after I get to work, when I’m least able to do anything about it until after dinner tomorrow evening. You can bet, though, that when it does come to me I’m going to roll up my sleeve and write it on my arm with an indelible magic marker.

If you stayed awake through your high school lit course you probably remember American poet Edward Estlin Cummings or, as he’s popularly known, ee cummings, the one who didn’t use capital letters, punctuation or line breaks in the boring old conventional way your teachers taught you.

You may have even been inspired, as I was, to try your hand at writing poetry in your very own style, and your teachers probably busted a gasket the day you handed that junk in to be graded, but they sort of pooped in their own bed when they held up old Edward as an example of a fresh, new voice in American poetry, didn’t they?

Cummings is one of my favorite American poets (Robinson, Sandburg and Bill Watterson are a few others in The Top Ten). I think I knew that he wrote a couple of memoirs, but I never read them before My Darling B gave me a copy of The Enormous Room for my birthday several years back, and then I got distracted by something else, put it down and left it to sit on a shelf (and, for a while, in a box) until now. If I’d known he was arrested on charges of espionage and held prisoner by the French for three months, I might have kept on reading.

Cummings volunteered to drive ambulances when the first world war broke out, but the guy in charge of the ambulances apparently thought quite a bit of himself and not much of Cummings, who spent all his time there washing staff cars instead of driving. When the French arrested almost all foreigners in France in a fit of nationalism, Cummings was arrested along with one of his friends and locked up.

Although he devotes the first two chapters to a straightforward narrative of his arrest, The Enormous Room is mostly a collection of portraits he wrote of the people jailed with him, as well as the people who ran the jail. His style is playful, like his poetry, ranging from delirious to outlandish to reserved. It didn’t bring to mind his poetry so much as the voice of Buddy Glass, the alter-ego of J.D. Salinger, and I had to wonder if Salinger wasn’t a fan of Cummings.

There’s one really frustrating aspect to The Enormous Room, that Cummings, who benefited from a classical education at Harvard, perhaps assumed wouldn’t be a problem for literate readers: He wrote more than half of the dialogue in French. I read a lot, but I don’t know much French. When he filled pages with a conversation in French, I couldn’t piece together so much as a mangled gist from a paltry vocabulary of a few dozen key words, so I lost quite a bit of the story.

But beside that, I liked it quite a bit, partly because it colored in a bit of Cummings’ background for me, and partly because I liked to read his opinions of nationalism, detention, and the wrong way to run a war. Funny how that keeps coming up.

I spent all of yesterday staggering around the halls at work, my creaking, swollen joints still complaining from the ten-mile trek I made going home on Monday. Geeze Louise, what was I thinking?

I was stupidly thinking that two years behind a desk couldn’t possibly have made me so unfit, but I was wrong. Not entirely wrong, because it didn’t kill me, and I knew it wouldn’t, but I’ve got to learn to use a little common sense about these things.

That said, if I hadn’t taken full advantage of it I would’ve been kicking myself the next day, even if I wasn’t nimble enough to raise my feet as high as my butt. And today was soggy and cold as the old washcloth that’s always hanging in the shower because nobody will admit it’s theirs. All things considered, even the tendonitis, I’ve got no regrets.

Today, however, I wasn’t going to be taking any long walks anywhere, not even across the square to the library to pick up the book I requested. With an umbrella in hand I might’ve made it there and back without soaking up too much of the early April showers we’re getting this week, but I’d forgotten it when I climbed out of the car this morning, and the emergency back-up brolly I usually keep in my backpack had been used in an emergency, then never replaced. I’ve been looking forward to that book for a month, but they’ll hold it for another week. It’s not so good it’s worth getting soaked for.

Whuf! went my butt as it hit the driver’s seat at the end of the day. “Busy day at work,” I told B.

“Exciting?” she asked, as we drove home.

“No. Not exciting. Particularly not exciting. Busy.” I hacked my way through a three-month backlog of applications that had to be prepped for scanning.

Paper applications are kept on file in my office for two months, then sent to the records section to be scanned. Maybe the paper copies are destroyed after that, I don’t know; so long as they’re not in my office any more, I don’t care. I’ve got one file cabinet to keep all my materials in, and the applications for the current month and the previous month occupy a whole drawer all by themselves. A backlog of more than two months is more than I’d like to have.

I let a three-month backlog build up because of a special circumstance; I wanted to have applications on hand so I could verify one if necessary, and a good thing I did, too [patting self on back], because I had to refer back to them about a half-dozen times in the last three weeks.

After they’d served their purpose, though, I had to get rid of them, and the sooner, the better, so I hunkered down in my corner and tore through the pile. Almost every one of them was a packet of three to five sheets stapled at the upper left corner; naturally, I had to pull the staples out. I also had to log each one in a register, print a bar code for each, and print a copy of the register for each batch I sent off to the records section. I started at about ten o’clock, after processing the applications that came in the morning mail. At four-forty I slipped a binder clip over the last batch, stretched until every vertebrae in my spine popped, but resisted the urge to claw my itching, bleary eyes out of my head.

Now my file drawer is cleared out enough to hold the next hundred or so applications that come in, and I also learned a trick to streamline the process a bit. Yay, me! But I still want to claw my eyes out.

I’ve never read a John Grisham novel, so I don’t know anything about him other than he’s a hugely popular writer of thrillers that are, I think, exclusively about lawyers, not the kind of people you’d normally think of as thrilling unless you were watching a trainload of them going over a cliff. [Okay, then, make up your own equally hackneyed lawyer joke.]

The Innocent Man is more about the law than lawyers, and how it was tragically abused when a guy in Ada, Oklahoma, with a troubled history of mental illness, gets locked up on death row for twelve years, fingered for a murder he didn’t commit. (To be fair, there were two guys, but then the book’s title doesn’t work grammatically, and you know what a stickler I am for grammar. I take it that the title refers specifically to Ron Williamson, even though Dennis Fritz was also convicted for the same crime.)

Grisham is clearly revolted by this miscarriage of justice. Practically every page is an exercise in enumerating every stupid mistake made by the police, the prosecutors and the judges who allowed this perversion of jurisprudence, while simultaneously heaping one truckload of sarcastic scorn and outraged derision after another on them. It’s got to suck to be the district attorney in Ada, Oklahoma right now.

Oh, yes, the guys who mistakenly stole twelve years from Williamson’s life are still on the job. Not only that, they apparently did the same thing to at least two other guys using similarly scatterbrained methods. A writer for The New York Times wrote a book about that case, too (The Dreams of Ada, by Robert Mayer), but it would seem that the standards for holding onto your law enforcement job in the area of Ada, Oklahoma, aren’t all that high, even when your stupid mistakes are held up to national scrutiny not once, but twice, so that everyone from Atlantic to Pacific can see that you not only incarcerate the wrong men, but you also let the real killers go free.

I found The Innocent Man a compelling story, particularly because the prosecution of the case against Williamson was an outrageous farce based on the flimsiest evidence. I’m dead-set against the execution of anybody (Grisham, it would seem, is, too), and a story like this is the prime example of my reason for feeling that way.

Yikes! I didn’t get to drivel last night! And it was all because of the oldest evil of the space age: channel-surfing. I ran across Judgment at Nuremburg just as the opening credits began to roll and the big names sucked me in. Spencer Tracy! Burt Lancaster! Richard Widmark! Marlene Dietrich! Judy Garland! Montgomery Clift! William Shatner!

William Shatner?

Yes, William Shatner in pre-Kirk days, and Werner Klemperer before he became most well-known to the American television viewing public as the bumbling but loveable Luftwaffe colonel in charge of Stalag 13.

Not only were the opening credits a great name-dropping game, they faded in and out over a still shot of the Nazi cross, this particular wreathed cross famous for being shot off the roof of a government building by a tank. But wait! It wasn’t a still shot at all! The final credit faded out, the shot zoomed in, and BLAM! went the swastika in a puff of smoke and shower of gravel. They had me.

Nice performance from Spencer Tracy as the folksy American judge presiding over a tribunal hearing the case against four German judges brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. Lancaster played one of the German judges on trial and mostly gazed solemnly into the distance, except for a soliloquy near the end that went something like: “We did what we were expected to do, but we never thought it would turn out like it did.” Tracy wasn’t buying that, and locked them all up in the brig forever and ever, amen. Gee, I hope I didn’t give anything away. Maybe you weren’t expecting the Americans to toss the Nazis into jail and throw away the key.

Maximillian Schell was the defense council for the Nazis, and does the best bug-eyed raving Hitler impersonation I’ve seen since John Cleese’s Monty Python days. He’d approach the bench, hair perfectly slicked back, a friendly smile on his face, and begin his argument in a reasonable tone of voice, then lead up to a point of defense that pissed him off big time, toss his head to dishevel his hair so it would dangle wildly over his forehead, and raise his voice, sharp as a crosscut saw, to a screech, eyes ready to pop, spittle flying, cheeks as bright red as two freshly-washed beets (quite a trick in a black-and-white movie, I must say).

Judy Garland was looking just a little too much like a worn-out film star. The oldest, weariest Judy I’d seen before this was when she danced in a tuxedo jacket (was that for A Star Is Born?) and after all this time that’s as old as I ever wanted to see her. When she stepped out of the shadows for her first scene, I was shocked. “Oh, my god, that’s Dorothy!” I gasped to Barb. She put on a pretty good performance, sobbing her way through her testimony as Schell snapped and snarled at her, but that’s about all she got to do, and I doubt she was on screen any longer than ten minutes.

What I didn’t know what that Judgment at Nuremburg is three freaking hours long. It’s not that it wasn’t worth watching; I’ve spent three hours watching movies that turned out to be great heaping piles of rotten carp, and I kicked myself for sitting all the way through them after. It’s just that last night I thought I was settling down to one of those ninety-minute black-and-whites from the good old days, and when it was over and I stood up to stretch and pop, I just about stroked out when I saw three hours had gone by. I don’t stay up past midnight much any more.

 
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Every gosh-darned word © 2007 Dave Okonski