Burying a thrush

January 18, 2013 jkkblog 4 Comments

Just a small story about a thing I do now and then.

For whatever reason–and it isn’t poisons, as I use those sparingly on the property–birds come to our place to die. Some, sadly, hit glass despite my efforts to reduce that incidence. Others, it seems, simply come here to pass on.

The varied thrush, a slate-and-old gold-colored bird, winters in our area. Most winters, at some point, I find that one has not survived the winter. Today was such a day. I came home from work (I do some technical writing) and spotted the little body, claws up, clearly deceased.

I have always liked birds. My wife refers to me as her Raven Man, based on Alaskan legends of Raven as a trickster and protector. And interestingly, wherever she travels in Washington or nearby, she finds ravens watching her. Sometimes they are flying along with her, like a combat air patrol. But I was an avid bird enthusiast as far back as my single-digit years. I want this place to be popular with birds, and to be visited by many. So when a bird dies, it is a bit hard for me. There is only one thing I can do: a dignified little funeral.

For reasons of health precaution, I get a shovel and a big maple leaf, which I use to push the fallen avian onto the shovel as gently as possible. Then I take him or her around to where the hollyhocks sprout in the late summer, lay the body on something, and dig a small hole. When it’s over a foot deep, I nudge the deceased onto the shovel and lay him or her in the grave as gently as I can arrange. I then say a few words, making a holy gesture and bidding the bird farewell. I tell him or her that I hope that the passing was of old age, and that he or she had a good mate, many chicks, plenty to eat and lots of happy days flying and singing. I hope that the bird is now in a place where migrations are short and not painful, where predators do not exist and where there are sunny days to flock, make music and hunt for delicious fruit. I usually tear up.

And then, for there is nothing else to do, as gently as possible, I fill in the little grave, pat it down firmly, make a holy gesture once again, and walk away.

Farewell, little thrush.

Adventures, Married life

Freezing to death

January 12, 2013 jkkblog 2 Comments

As I write, it’s 21º F (-6.1º C) outside, not cold by my standards. For various reasons I understand, and some I do not, I have a bizarre natural cold resistance that welcomes the feel of -5 F on my face, and ice forming in my facial hair. But I’m resistant, not immune. I know this because I’m a great rarity: a survivor of third-stage hypothermia. And since some of what I’ve read about ‘what it’s like’ was obviously authored by someone who never felt it, maybe this is a good story for a cold night where I can feel ice in the air. I’ve told it enough times to friends that, maybe, it is time I wrote it down.

This happened at Ft. Lewis, WA, when I was in ROTC. I was young, in my second year, brash, opinionated, mouthy, motivated and clueless. I participated with a sub-group of the battalion known as the Ranger Company. It was purely voluntary, but among its numbers you could generally find the best of the battalion. They were tough, highly motivated, brave and dedicated to the military art. They respected the NCOs’ knowledge and soaked it up as fast as the latter would dole it out. They did extra futtockses (FTXes, ‘field training exercises’) involving long nights running around in the rain and cold at Lewis, being tired and miserable. They were in excellent condition, feared nothing, and were dedicated to winning or dying. They were not fanatics; they were rationally brave and intelligent. Had war come to NATO in the late 1980s, a number of Warsaw Pact formations would have been hurt far worse than they expected, thanks to some young men and women who had once worn a shoulder patch of purple and gold, and suffered in frigid misery patrolling in heavy fog and rain at 3 AM, and been expected to perform well anyway.

There I met some of the best people I’ve ever known. I didn’t complete the program in the end, for reasons which were about 90% the fault of my own immaturity, but I don’t regret my association with it. And one night, aged eighteen, it came so close to killing me that I could feel my life leaking out into the frosty night.

It was the usual FTX scenario: a night assault on a position with M16s firing blanks. (I hated that goddamn rifle so much that you couldn’t get me to buy a civilian assault rifle version for a buck. In fact, you’d have to pay me to take it away. Yes, I know they fixed some of its flaws. Still hate it and anything that looks like it.) A newly commissioned second lieutenant led us toward the pre-assault position. The idea was that a parachute flare would signal the ‘attack.’ We were supported by a psyops reserve unit, which had brought loudspeakers to heckle the opposition. They had a little camp area in the woods, where we had marshaled for the operation.

The night was cold but not seriously so, perhaps in the mid-twenties F, starry and moonless. The always-moist air of the western side of Washington, which can so greedily drain body heat, felt and tasted of ice. The lieutenant positioned us to await the signal, laying prone in the deep frosty grass, surrounded by forests. I don’t remember how long it took, but I was underdressed for a long laydown on icy ground. I hadn’t put the liner into my field jacket, and for whatever reason, the cold went straight into me.

The first stage of hypothermia involves convulsive shivering. This is not your ‘letting the dogs out to do their business for a couple of winter minutes’ shivering. I mean wracking shivering that you cannot suppress. That began for me at some point in the grass–I don’t recall how long it took, but the only other time I’ve felt shivers of that magnitude involved surgical anesthesia wearing off. At that point, I was at least somewhat mentally impaired and disoriented. It felt like it lasted an hour, though I doubt that’s possible. Time grew distorted as I lay there shuddering, miserable and unsure what I was supposed to do.

The second stage can involve hallucinations and an ebb in the shivering, though I promise you it still feels cold. I began to see strange hexagonal light patterns in the night sky, obscuring the winter constellations I knew so well from my teenage astronomy fixation. I also saw an aurora borealis, but not a real one. My mind conjured it from photos I’d seen, all of which were in static black and white. Thus, that’s how I saw it, not the authentic shimmery, changing, polychromatic Northern Lights of my wife’s Alaskan memories. For some reason, I noticed the starlight playing off the frost crystals on my field jacket sleeve. Some time during that stage, I saw some light explode in the sky and heard some noises in the distance. Only later did I realize that those were the signals for the ‘attack’ I was supposed to join in. I was confused and indecisive, and there I lay, awaiting some more definitive signal, or so I thought.

I was too young and dumb to realize my mortal danger during the second stage. It took the third for me to get the message.

After a while–and I’ll never know the actual amount of time–the last of the shudders faded away. Those who tell you that you feel warm in the third stage, certainly never lived through it. However, there is a sense of insulation from the cold as your body begins to mothball systems it deems non-essential: legs, arms, etc. You still know it’s cold, but it just isn’t quite penetrating the way it was when you thought you’d tear a tendon shivering. Evidently the lieutenant had failed to count up his people, and no one had registered that I was missing, because I later learned that no one was out looking for me. I’d heard a lot about how useless second lieutenants were, and how useless I too would be when I was (theoretically) commissioned one, but this was my first good look at the reality.

The hardest part, the hardest thing, about the third stage was the seductive reassurance of sleep. The brain rationalizes: you’ve finally gotten acclimated to the cold, now why not just give in to the fatigue and have a nap until morning? I tell the story through all the fogged memory of a mind impaired by my condition, but some memories are clearer than others, and one of them is why I live today. I had a moment of clarity that said: if you go to sleep now, you will die, out here on 11th Division Prairie or whatever the hell division prairie it is. I could feel life fading away, seeping out like sweat drains body moisture on a hot day. The cold had bitten, drank and was ready to sate itself. If I fell asleep, that’s where I’d be found eventually, dead at eighteen.

For some reason, for whatever reason, it registered with me that I had the choice to walk or die, and not much time to decide. I can’t explain why I made the choice I did, but I forced myself to my feet and started walking. Gods only know how I found the reservists’ bivouac, but somehow I wandered into it. No one checked me out, or seemed to realize that I’d been missing, and I didn’t say anything–I was both rummy and embarrassed that I hadn’t taken part in what I was supposed to do. In any case, they had coffee and stuff, and a fire of some sort, and there was ample opportunity to get warm. I didn’t tell anyone about my situation, so in the darkness and general banter of post-operation socializing, it went unknown and untended. Didn’t really matter; I wasn’t frostbitten and was no longer freezing to death.

Now as I look back on that night thirty years gone, I wonder how many other people have lived through that stage of hypothermia without some form of active rescue. I rarely read other survivors’ accounts. I wonder what others who died experienced, whether they saw the odd things I saw, why they fell asleep. Did it sneak up on them? Was there nowhere to walk to, probably true of most cases? What was it like for them? They felt the final ebb of life from their systems, the final fading, which I never did. And it’s too late for them to describe it, so I am as close as you can probably get.

The last time temperature had endangered my life, it had been sunstroke, and I’d been seven. The last thing I remember is them lowering me into a bathtub full of ice cubes. Before I was old enough to take a legal drink of beer, I had felt both extremes reach for my life, and come back denied.

I don’t fear the cold. Last year, when we got a rare cold snap down to -5º F, I couldn’t wait to go walking. I wore only rubber boots, sweats, t-shirt, windbreaker and a toque. I had gloves, which I removed early, and soon took my hands out of my pockets. I unzipped my windbreaker partway; it was getting hot in there. I took a twenty-minute neighborhood walk in the ice and snow, not long, just enough to feel it. It was so quiet, snowy, reflective, muffly, lovely. As usual with me, it was like an internal heater fired up (one whose pilot light had evidently been out that night at Ft. Lewis). When I came into the house afterward, I went straight to Deb and laid both my bare hands on her arm. They were hot, not cold, on her skin. She called me a freak, exactly as custom requires.

No, I don’t fear the cold. But I by the gods respect it. When I go out in it now, I feel it kiss me. Well, I know what it feels like when it gets to third base.

I think I’ll stick to the necking part from here on out.

Book reviews

Books: The Last Lion Vol. 3, Defender of the Realm

January 3, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

If you ever sought to research Winston Churchill, you at least examined William Manchester’s The Last Lion Vol. 1 (Visions of Glory) and Vol. 2 (Alone). Authors have an interesting time writing biographies of Churchill, because the old bulldog offered his own version. Whether you can believe Winston gives you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which you should at least question, he could out-prose almost anyone. Truest words he ever said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

There was to be a Vol. 3 (Defender of the Realm) in the early 2000s, but Manchester’s health failed before he could complete the work. He passed in 2004, a tremendous loss to the art of historical biography. During his final illness, Manchester asked journalist and friend Paul Reid to complete the work. Interesting choice: Reid was a newspaper reporter who had never authored a book. He had all Manchester’s notes to work with, but that’s much like a pretty good college baseball player yanked from alma mater’s dugout and marched up to the plate in a major league playoff game with men on base.

Having waited for this for ten years, you might say I was ardent to start reading.

I’m about halfway through, just after the start of Barbarossa (Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the USSR) and Operation Crusader (Auchinleck’s Western Desert offensive). While I like most of it, I see some weaknesses. Manchester chose Reid for his writing talent rather than his historical immersion, and it shows. I’ve noted a few side stories worthy of exploration, not generally known to most non-historians and WWII buffs, which Reid does not mention–yet which were directly pertinent to Churchill’s life and prime ministry. Manchester got what he wanted, though, for Reid is a capable writer and doesn’t shield us from his subject’s weaknesses.

The word on why it took this long is the combination of Manchester’s semi-legible scrawled notes, the sheer volume of the work undertaken, and Reid’s non-historical orientation. Considering what he went through in order to do this, I have to respect what Reid accomplished. I find that article fair in that Reid did not hew slavishly to all Manchester’s decidedly pro-Churchill stances, and despite discovering the depth of the sea only through repeated dives into it, kept at it until he finished the job.

Definitely good biography. I think those who insisted on having the first two books in hardcover will be happy.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life, Human relations, Married life

Professor Willis Konick

January 1, 2013 jkkblog 8 Comments

Let us begin 2013 on the ‘Lancer with something joyous and uplifting. [This text is superceded in mood by the final para, but let it stand as set for what it meant while Willis was with us.]

It has been a quarter century since I last saw him in person, he has since retired; and still when I see a friend post about Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, I think of Willis Konick.

To call him ‘Professor’ was unthinkable, as Willis would advise the entire class on the first day. An alumnus of and longtime professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, his entire life was bound up with the Russian language, Russian literature and UW. He taught Comparative Literature and Russian Literature there for so long it became hard to imagine UW without him. If I were to call him ‘Professor Konick’ in this blog post, someone would find out about it, and one of two things might happen. That person might call me out in comments as a complete fake, because anyone who ever actually attended a Willis lecture knew good and well that no one used his last name. Or that person might send the blog link to Willis, who would not only recognize my name and remember me, but who would write to me asking how I was doing, suggesting we have coffee any time I was in Seattle, and politely reminding me that his name was ‘Willis.’

I am not making any of this up, nor am I exaggerating. Willis did his best to have coffee with as many of his students as possible, and had an amazing memory for faces and names.

Willis’s class was the one no one skipped. It was always in a lecture hall with at least 200 seats, usually more like 300, purely because of demand. Yes. A literature professor so entertaining and appealing that the school was forced to schedule his classes in large lecture halls. People scrambled to get into a literature class. Whole decades of UW undergrads filled up their humanities distribution requirements with English 111 plus whatever Willis classes they could squeeze into. Except for a few hundred math and tech wonks from other countries who spoke such minimal English that a literature class was out of the question, at UW all 35,000 students learned of ‘Willis’ in the first week on campus.

While an excellent lecturer and student of the genre (he speaks and reads fluent Russian, and each year would read War & Peace or Anna Karenina, alternating), neither that nor his obvious love of everything about teaching accounted for all of his popularity. Much of that stemmed from his famous impromptu in-class skits to dramatize a character or concept. Willis would reach into the mass of 250 students, and without error, pick out the perfect individual as his foil. Didn’t matter whether it was a nervous young lady in a sorority sweatshirt, a blowhard, a future engineer, or one of his groupies. No one ever refused, even when he chose someone deliberately for shyness. He was known to dump buckets of water on his head on stage, strip to his underwear, open his shirt and claw at his pale chest, and so much more.

I too had my day, and the best way to convey Willis is to tell the story.

I can’t even remember whether it was a Comp Lit or Russian Lit class, not that the distinction ever made a difference with Willis. De facto always outshone de jure. He was teaching Anna, and as I recall, the class was in Gowen Hall on the Quad. Willis was explaining the nuances of Vronsky, and then his bespectacled eyes got that wild look which told us something was coming. He scanned the classroom like a confident quarterback whose pocket is just barely holding, quick head movements and a smile repressed only by force of professional will. The eyes achieved lock-on when they hit me. “JOHN! YES, YOU! JOHN! COME DOWN HERE, PLEASE, I’D LIKE A WORD WITH YOU!”

You know you are about to be had, but you go anyway. You know you are going to be embarrassed, but you also know you’ll remember it when you are twice as old as the day it happens. As I made my way to the aisle and descended the steps, I saw Willis do as he so often did, turning toward the stage and bounding onto it. Anything to do with acting or performance subtracted decades from his sixtyish physical age. He awaited me with sparkling eyes but as solemn a countenance as he could enforce. There was a sturdy wooden table up there, for some reason, and he encouraged me to have a seat.

“So, John, you were in my class last quarter,” began Willis.

“Yes, Willis, I was.”

“And you turned in your final paper.”

“Yep.”

“How do you feel about it?

Something in his tone cued me. I can’t explain it any other way. He had given me 4.0, and still I gave the right answer. “Not too good, Willis,” I responded glumly.

“No,” he answered gravely, making sure to pitch his voice so they could hear him in the back rows (he had an effect like Epidaurus that way). “I hate to say this, John, but that was the worst paper of the quarter.”

I waited, doing the despondent face as best I could.

“In fact, your paper was so terrible, it was the worst paper of the year. I’m confident that nothing that will come will be worse. Your paper was so awful, I have given you a 0.0 for the quarter. I trust you understand.”

Still I sat in mock glumness.

“Sadly, John, your paper was such a disgrace that I felt compelled to bring it to the attention of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He agreed with me that it was the worst paper he too had ever seen. It was so disappointing that, harsh as it may seem, you are being expelled from the University.”

I looked miserable.

“You know how Reagan calls the astronauts to congratulate them? President Reagan is calling your parents to chastise them for your paper!”

I heard the first giggles from the audience, but I held back my own.

His tone went almost sympathetic. “Now, John, it’s obvious you can’t stay here. You must go, as you must leave the University. But is there anything you’d like to say before you depart in complete disgrace? What would you like to say to the class, and to me? Would you like, for example, to ask for another chance?”

“Doesn’t seem right, Willis. It was a pretty poor effort.”

“Yes, it was,” he answered sternly. “Nor would you receive one. Would you like to plead that you tried your best?”

“That’d be lying. I didn’t try at all.”

“That much was obvious,” he said, voice mournful. “Would you like to tell them that in spite of all of this, you’re still a nice guy?”

He’d thrown a switch. Nothing in his tone signaled anything; it was all in the genius of his having chosen me for this specific skit. For the first time since he’d initially addressed me, my head snapped around to him. “YES!” I said, raising my voice a tad in indignation.

Willis smiled, stood up in his most professorial stance, actor’s posture discarded faster than you could think. He raised a finger. “I MAY BE A COMPLETE SCREW-UP, BUT AT LEAST I’M STILL A NICE GUY. And that is what Vronsky is trying to tell us here. John, thank you,” he added. I made my way back to my seat, as I had seen so many other students do. None of it had been rehearsed or planned. In a few seconds he could read precisely the type of person he needed, to react in the precise ways necessary to demonstrate his point, picking him or her out of nearly three hundred people.

Fifteen years later, when I was authoring my (as yet unpublished) Irish travel narrative, my wife encouraged me to write to Willis and ask him to author an introduction. I thought she was nuts, but I did it. He asked me to send him the ms, in print, and I did. He pointed out what was missing from it, and encouraged me to read a couple of other travel books that would demonstrate the qualities my ms needed in order to become publishable. You always take all personal career counseling given you by your most admired figures, or you’re an idiot. When I’d finished the rewrite, I sent him the portion he wanted to see. He praised my remedying of the flaws and agreed to write an introduction if I wished. While no one ended up publishing the book–which I still may do on my own–one more time, I learned a lot from Willis about writing.

He retired in 2007, aged 77. And if you think anything you just read is far-fetched at all, I have the Seattle Times to back me up.

Thanks, Willis, for everything on every level. Oh, and I’m re-reading Brothers. Maybe this time I’ll get at least half of it.

P.S., December 16, 2016: Willis passed away November 30, 2016. I feel so fortunate to have known him.

Married life

Don’ts for husbands

December 26, 2012 jkkblog 4 Comments

I’ve thought of this a lot over the years. While I won’t say that this can’t apply to husbands who have husbands, or to many other partnership situations and perspectives, I’m only speaking in particular to my own experience: as a husband who has a wife. Thus, for me, the other person is ‘her.’ I figured most of this out by talking to women, who shared with me both positive and negative examples. I tend to believe they know what they’re talking about. I tend to doubt they would mislead me. Thus:

Don’t ever suppress or insult her efforts to be creative. That is counterproductive and stupid.
Don’t criticize her cooking or cleaning, lest she shove the obvious rejoinder up your behind: “You know, honey, you are absolutely right. You are so right. So right, in fact, that in the future, I’m going to let you do it, and show me how I should have been doing it.”
Don’t be too big a jerk over rearranging furniture. Yes, it’s already in the logical places, and yeah, moving it around seems counterproductive. She probably likes change, and her life is naturally more attuned to it than a man’s. Got to go along with some of this.
Don’t get a complex if she out-achieves you in work. Instead, make plans for both your early retirement in greater comfort. Only a weak man wants a weak woman, or is threatened by her success. A strong man wants a strong woman he can brag about, a real partner with many abilities. It does not make you any less. If you are strong enough to be proud of what she achieves, it makes you more.
Don’t make unfounded paranoid accusations. For one thing, it’s not a loving act. For another, she may well decide that if she is going to hang for the crime, she might as well deserve it, which would mean that paranoia just created unfaithfulness that would never otherwise have come.
Don’t let your family abuse her. Ever. Be man enough to make clear to them that they can either treat her with kindness and respect, or they can be excluded from your life, yes, even your uncle that the whole family knows is a dick and tolerates anyway. No man worth a damn is comfortable seeing people be mean to his woman. Same for your friends–if they don’t show her courtesy and respect, then you hang around with the wrong people.
Don’t bring in the physical dimension. Don’t yell, threaten or gods forbid, lay a hand on her in anger. As long as she can absolutely trust you never to do this, your relationship has at least one great quality even if it has other problems. The day she no longer has reason to extend that trust, you broke something that’ll be hard to come back from.
Don’t call her names. Here’s a rule I find useful: if you’re about to call her something that, if it were true, there’s no reason you’d want to be with her, that name is potentially fatal to a relationship, and you had best never call her that.
Don’t just let her suffer without stepping up. This can mean a lot of things, but what underlies it is this: most of the time, she doesn’t really need someone else. It’s that 5% of the time, when she falters and needs to feel support and strength and all those good manly things, where she learns what you’re made of, and if you step up, reminds her why you’re good to have around. Shine when it is your time.
Don’t be a loose cannon with money. Too many men airily think it should be they who look after the finances, and then don’t use common sense. If you suck at money management, let her do it unless she sucks worse (in which case you two have some real serious potential problems).
Don’t be emotionally or physically bullied yourself. Happens especially with women coming out of abusive relationships. Does it suck to get punished because, basically, some other guy was a scumbag? It very much does suck, but the law won’t let you shoot him, so this is all you can do. Stand your ground on basic self-respect, and be patient, because the recovery process takes time even if she works hard at it and wants it badly. Abuse hammers her self-respect. By showing her that you respect yourself–and her–you give her a better vision.
When she’s with her gal friends, don’t screw up their fun. Simple. Don’t screw up the women’s fun. To women, children are the people that do not understand that other people are sometimes the priority. They already have access to children. They don’t want an overgrown adult one who can’t be left alone for three hours without having some need or want. If you wander into the gathering, say hello to them, be polite for a minute or two, then let them do their thing with good grace. What you need to understand is that when you do this with good grace, after you leave, the other women tell her what a nice man you are, and she gets to bask in that. Just be an adult, live your life without messing up their fun for the evening, and do that knowing you made her happy.
Don’t be a crappy listener. Stop thinking of how to win the debate, stop thinking of your next comeback. You can’t expect her to care how you feel if you don’t stop and listen to her tell you how she feels.
Don’t react to anything until you have a good idea how much effort or expense she invested in it, whether it’s her hair or her manuscript or her new epiphany. Because the more she put into it, the more crushing it is to hear something negative. A good percentage of my own married life has involved the struggle to shut up and think before I open my trap.
Don’t die on too many hills. It is true that it’s good to choose your hills to die on. Here’s the problem with choosing those hills: you do die on them. Most of us would rather not die any more often than we can avoid.
Don’t expect to buy your way out of big errors with a credit card. It may seem to work on the outside, but if you really screwed up, money and material stuff is just a patch, not a fix. A fix is when you resolve not to make that mistake again, face the music, and do what can be done to make it right. I ask myself “Am I sorry enough not to do it again, or just sorry she’s mad about it?” Plus, if your finances are even remotely joined, you’re also spending her money by way of apology.
Don’t play on her insecurities to manipulate her. Maybe she has none, but most of us do, and with good reason, because we have both real and imagined/exaggerated flaws. Every time you jab at an insecurity, it’s like a kick in the balls. I’m going to take a gamble here and assume that you have at least once been hit right in the sack, and that you did not enjoy it. (I’ve taken slapshots, sinkers and bad hops there myself. I could have done without those.)
Don’t expect her to echo all your religious and political views. Who wants a partner too dumb or fearful to challenge his thinking? Who is so shallow and insecure that he’s afraid of that? Who is really so sure he has everything figured out and that any other view is just stupid? A true idiot, that’s who.
Don’t try to get her to just think and be like a man about things. She isn’t one, and no matter how we arrange the world, she still probably will see the world differently than you. (Don’t believe me? Okay. Are you afraid to go walking at night by yourself? Probably not. She may not be afraid, but she has to think about stuff you don’t, unless she is naturally fearless or is not sane.) If you want a partner who acts like a man, well, it might be you have some questions to consider. Go far enough to accept that her logic, which on the surface may seem illogical to you, may be quite logical when the world is viewed through her eyes. Stop. Try to see it through her eyes.
Don’t destroy stuff in the process of ‘fixing’ it. Yeah, we mostly like to show off our handiness, but know when you’re out of your depth. A good friend and a wise husband once said: “From here, I will plumb no more forever.”
Don’t do too many things with bad grace. If you hate it, truly hate it, you’ve got a choice. Either decide you just can’t do it–and accept what that means–or do it anyway, as an act of love, with good grace because (I presume) it’ll make her happy. She doesn’t like much of anything you do with bad grace.
Don’t go silent without some explanation of the reason, but by the same token, don’t be stampeded or pressured into a discussion you haven’t really considered. It’s fine to say, “Look, I really haven’t worked out what I think about this. Can we talk about it when I have?” Of course, if you do that, and you just never take the initiative to restart the conversation, she will have good reason to think you’re just dodging discussions in the future. You can ask for a recess if you need it, but that puts it on you to decide when you’re ready to be back in session.
Don’t follow any rule off a cliff. True in writing, true in wedding.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

The Epinions days

December 20, 2012 jkkblog 10 Comments

Ho ho ho…it’s time for your early Christmas present. The article is just the wrapping paper.

My writing start came at a product review site called epinions.com. The concept was for actual consumers to provide consumer-helpfully written product reviews. Books, games, movies, lawn mowers, breast pumps, computers, cell phones–if you could buy it, you could probably get it added to the Eps database. When Eps first began, people could make real money there. By the time I got there, the gravy train was stuck at a siding. I believe the site began in 1999; I showed up in 2001 and was fairly active through 2003, tapering off thereafter. I’ve made about $433 from it over the years.

At first, I took the site seriously and attempted to write relatively serious reviews. It didn’t take long for me to realize that some of the most creative and witty minds I’d ever seen were also at Eps, and they were mostly not taking it seriously. In my halting way, I began to follow their various leads. I got some writing feedback, some positive and some negative. In hindsight, my work was mountainously egotistical, pretentious, sometimes facile, and often relied on cheap gimmicks rather than intellect, but I think it improved. I certainly got to see a lot of examples showing how to do it better.

Over time, the would-be comics of Epinions and their sympathizers coalesced into a rolling circus called the Fez Crew. Sordid-1, one of the funnier folks you’ll ever read, was the group’s founder and soul. My all-time favorite Epinions piece still remains his travel review of Arizona. He wrote a three-part review of his mercifully brief stint in the Maricopa County Jail. He did not recommend Arizona as a destination. For a couple of years there, we had a lot of fun. We did protests, writeoffs, even tribute pieces to members we learned were terminally ill. Some of us were one step from being ticketed or community blocked by the admins, and we were always afoul of the Eps cops. This group was heavily populated by stay-at-home moms (a fundamentally honorable profession practiced by more than one Fez Crew-woman) who took diaper pails, sippy cups, kiddy movies and such deadly seriously. They had private groups away from the site, which they reckoned were secret, where they kept hit lists of consumerly-unhelpful people and ganged up to try and rate their reviews negatively. We parodied them a lot, such as the time I reviewed Grand Theft Auto III as a homeschooling tool. But in the end–and only partly due to the Eps cops’ gang-rating–Eps ceased to be fun for most of us, and we went on to other things.

For a lot of Eps alumni (either Fez or simply friendly forces, admired for genuine writing talent), that meant careers writing for real money. Cornelia Read was one. David Abrams was another. Many of us eventually found one another on Facebook, though after we had all reconnected with the people we liked, we didn’t have that much to say to each other, so the Fez Crew on FB became moribund as a semi-informal grouping. Few of us still write at Eps, though most of us still write. Brett Nicholson will one day get a screenplay published. It wouldn’t be fair to call Markham Shaw Pyle an Eps alum–I understand that he was published before Eps began–but he wrote some of the more thoughtful reviews and commentary there. It turned out to be a pretty good literary practice field and weight room.

Something got me thinking of those days, this evening, contributed by frequent commentator OrionSlaveGirl. It seems that the spirit of Fez lives, as you can see in the Amazon reviews of this banana slicer. What you see here, good reader, is exactly the fun-loving Fez spirit we once had at Epinions. Enjoy. And happy holidays to you all, in whatever form and shape, and thank you for your many visits here this year.

Married life, Religion, Scumbag studies, Social comment

The day we faced down the Phelps gang

December 16, 2012 jkkblog 3 Comments

When thinking of people who have no purpose on earth but to hate and harm–real, true emotional terrorists–everyone but about fifty or so Americans agrees that Fred Phelps and his gang take the cake. Out of respect for my Christian friends, I’m not going to dignify the Phelps gang by calling them a Baptist church except in quotes (and tags). As much pain and indoctrination as real Baptists have inflicted on me in life while I was defenseless, even those involved in those abuses would not approve of the Phelps gang. Thus, I’m not cooperating with fake ‘Baptists’ in the effort to steal the title of authentic Baptists. I may not agree with much of anything that comes from the latter’s ecclesiastical leadership, but when it comes to Phelps, I’m okay singing a stanza of Onward Christian Soldiers with the real ones. (With my atrocious singing voice, they may not think of it as much of a joyful noise.)

Being a non-Christian here is actually pretty painless, because the Tri-Cities live by a quiet ethic of staying out of your face. It’s the same way with regard to homosexuality. If one doesn’t wash everyone’s face in one’s difference, and simply lives one’s life in peace, one is left in peace here. My gay, pagan and gay pagan friends living in other states tell me I shouldn’t take that for granted, and I believe them.

On 2 Feb 2007, Marine SGT Travis Pfister of Richland, WA died in Iraq. Always sad, but also an ever-present part of war. A memorial service was scheduled in early March for SGT Pfister at the TRAC (a trade show and expo center) in Pasco, to which one could presume his family, friends, and supportive community members might join in honoring his life and sacrifice. The Phelps gang announced that they were sending a picket.

Where there is a Phelps gang visit, counter-protests appear. For this one, attendance was triply obligatory. Phelps’s gang lives in my home state, in gutless Topeka which snivels and cowers before its barratry rather than taking concerted action to encourage them to find a new state. A civilized Kansan thus had to represent. Considering how many of my good friends are gayer than the 90s, I couldn’t look them in the eyes if I didn’t show up. I’m no patriot, but I respect service and sacrifice, and I don’t appreciate anyone–especially outside thugs–showing up to offend the family of someone who died keeping his oath of service. Deb, of course, was as dead set on attending as I.

We had company.

It was a pretty spring day, though I’m sure it didn’t feel springy for those who came to mourn. The law in Washington is that protests may not approach within 500′ of a funeral. The Pasco Police decided to confine the Phelps gang to a vacant lot across the street from the TRAC, well away from the main entrance and avenue of approach for mourners. A thin line of police officers manned the street with obvious reluctance, to prevent the crowd from physically tearing the Phelps gang to pieces. The air was filled with the sound of big motorcycles, for the Patriot Guard Riders had shown up with about 140 bikes. In most situations, to put it mildly, I am not a motorcycle enthusiast. For that day, I was happy to hear the rumbling sound. This organization travels around organizing counter-protests where necessary, and presumably doing other things associated with veterans’ causes. They do add a sense of muscle to the event, just by looking the way they look, not that we needed extra muscle. There were about two thousand people there, and it was a little difficult to get up the front of the police line. There was no way the family and attendees could see the protesters unless they worked at it. There was no way they could fail to see the rest of us, as there was barely room for cars to get around in the parking lot.

Across from us on the vacant lot were five pathetic individuals. I only remember a wild-haired adult male and a little girl. They were holding up their usual disrespectful signs, insulting military service, Christianity and homosexuals. What struck me was the great diversity of the crowd, a full representation of the Tri-Cities. Black, Hispanic, Asian, white; male, female, somewhere in between; straight, gay, still not sure; old, young, middle-aged; atheist, evangelical, Catholic, pagan, Mormon, Unitarian, agnostic; veteran, union, average joe or jane. At last, something we could all agree on and get together about! I am not a person for whom a sense of belonging or membership comes easily. I truly felt like part of the Tri-Cities that day, and proud to be so. We were supposed to turn our backs to them, or at least the Patriot Guard Riders tried to get us to, but not everyone did. I guess that’s the train wreck factor: it’s hard to look away.

In case you have never seen a Phelps gang protest, it works like this. They only send a small group (they’re a busy bunch, with a lot of people to offend nationwide). Their goal is to get attacked, or have some other event happen that will get them media time. If they do not get it, they lose. So they keep ratcheting up the outrage, in order to see what they can provoke, with increasingly offensive yells and signs. At the end, they had the little girl angrily stomp a U.S. flag into the dirt, which I gather is their ultimate step: if that doesn’t get them assaulted, nothing will. In this case, it didn’t. When it becomes obvious they won’t get what they came for, they leave. They may even have been gone before the family arrived at the memorial, which would be an added bonus. I think four squad cars of Franklin County Deputies escorted the Phelps gang’s car to the county line, off to whatever mission of antipathy awaited them next.

On the way home, I wondered if we’d done any good. I decided that we had. We couldn’t prevent the Phelps gang from doing what they did, but to whatever degree knowing of their presence made it worse for the family, perhaps a 400:1 support:hate ratio made it more bearable for the bereaved. It had gotten us all together, in all our different forms and ways of being and living, in good spirits. I didn’t see anyone showing disrespect for the police, who were doing a necessary and unpleasant job in a professional manner, and deserved cooperation from the good guys and gals. It must have been a moving experience for the gay counter-protesters, seeing so many of their neighbors so forcefully rejecting homophobia–which, after all, is the whole basis for this Phelps crap.

If nothing else, at least a few people learned that the Phelps gang is not representative of Kansas or Kansans. The heavy-bearded character in the KU t-shirt, looking like Gimli the Dwarf after a growth spurt, had something to say about that.

Married life

The costs of marital compromise

December 11, 2012 jkkblog 6 Comments

This holiday season I find myself in a frame of mind to tell funny stories.

Deb and I got Fabius, a black Labrador retriever puppy, within a few months of buying the house. Most of you know that I wouldn’t willingly share my house with dogs if it were up to me. However, it’s not just up to me. Marriage means compromise or it means divorce. You can die on any hill you wish, but the problem with choosing a hill to die on is that you die there. One of life’s lessons is to learn which hills to live on rather than die.

I chose not to die on Doggy Hill. We got Fabius, who eventually grew into an 85-pound freight train of a dog with a tail like a police nightstick. If you wonder why the name, it is for Q. Fabius Maximus Verrocosus Cunctator (“Delayer”), Dictator of Rome. When we first got Fabius, he would not come on his leash at all, and I had to drag him until he got the idea: he delayed us a lot. Also, Fabius Maximus was a noble and brave Roman general who gave his all for his country, and would have given his life had it been needed. If we had to have a dog, I wanted him to see himself as Deb’s protector unto the grave.

Fabius has given us that, but he’s also given us a few other gifts he can have back. This story covers one such gift.

For whatever reason, in his middle years, Fabius was a puker. You’d find a large decoration of dog vomitus somewhere in the house, which was real bad for the carpet when his food contained kibbles colored red. Most of the time, this was Deb’s problem (that was our agreement: it’s her dog, she will handle the bulk of the care and cleanup). One night, it became my problem.

I tend to go to bed later than Deb, who insists that the dog must be permitted to sleep in our bedroom. She doesn’t mind the smell, which to me is worse than the Sunnyside feedlots. This means that when I come to bed, I’m making my way in the dark, my sense of smell overwhelmed by dog smell. I focus mostly on trying not to stick the square corner of a bedpost top into my thigh, which is very painful when you just want to lie down and go to sleep. I also react badly to sudden pains out of nowhere, simply because of a bad startle that’s been with me since my teens. Friends know not to come up behind me, for example.

So one night, I was groggy and ready to go to sleep. At that time, I did not happen to wear clothing to bed. I came into the bedroom, disrobed, and strode toward my side of the bed in the pitch darkness. All I cared about was avoiding a thigh injury. My bare foot splooshed into something cold, mushy and wet alongside the foot of the bed.

Before I could register my shock and disgust, I slipped in what felt like a square yard of dog vomit. I can’t even figure out where Fabius stored all that. The WHAM of my backside hitting the puddle coincided with the beginning of a yelled curse. I felt vomit splatter as I landed right in the middle of the stuff. Poor me, but poor Deb: awakened from deep sleep by bellowed husbandly profanity and a house-shaking impact, for I’m not a welterweight.

Of course, if she did not insist on having a dog, and did not insist that it be allowed to sleep in our bedroom, this would not have occurred. And in other fantasy worlds, if people would use their turn signals before changing lanes, a lot of accidents would not occur. We do not inhabit a fantasy world.

Deb jumped out of bed to assess the damage. There wasn’t any, except for painful bruising of my tranquility, buttocks and ego, and of course the need to get up and cleanse the carpet and surroundings of splattered dog ralph. I was not at my best husbandly composure and civility. In between vulgarities, I ordered her to clean up the offending substance and exile the dog to the kennel while I took a shower. I credit her for realizing that this was not the time for her to snarl “Don’t talk that way to me!” She kenneled Fabius and proceeded to deal with the present he had left.

I get a heavy adrenaline surge when startled, so I didn’t get to sleep easily. I didn’t laugh about it for several days. But I did learn that marital compromise does come with costs. The more important lesson was to step carefully going into the bedroom in the future.

Gods, but that was disgusting. Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

======

Postscript: just last night, marital compromise came full circle after all these years. I was indisposed, to put it delicately, atop the starship USS Sanitize. I heard a feminine yell of great, sudden dismay from the living room, penetrating walls and door. This is not a good moment, because while one will get up and rush to assistance if one must, one devoutly hopes the situation can safely wait for one to finish in an orderly manner.

“Are you all right, dear?” I yelled. No answer. Oh, damn. Louder: “Dear! Are you all right?”

From the vicinity of the hallway: “Yes. Leo just threw up all over me! He was just sitting there, and then he puked!”

That’s even worse than about three years ago, when she was on the floor sorting Christmas ornaments, and the insufferable little creature defaecated on the carpet–right next to her.

Now I’m worried it’ll be my turn soon.

Religion, Social comment

My telemarketer FAIL

December 7, 2012 jkkblog 4 Comments

This needs some backdrop. I am of the following beliefs/persuasions:

Non-Christian, and disinterested in reconsidering that.
Committed to leaving people alone about that, if they leave me alone. I thus consider all active proselytizing very offensive and annoying, one of the worst social misbehaviors there is.
Some businesses and jobs are not legitimate employment, and that practice of a bad job liberates me from social obligations of courtesy and honesty when it intrudes on my life. I’m not moved by ‘they’re just doing their jobs.’ So are drug mules. If your job is to bother people who did not ask to be bothered, that’s a bad job.

So not only do telemarketers annoy me, they are fair game within the confines of law, just as are missionaries who dare bother me on my property. It does not follow that I am always necessarily dishonest or mean to either. It simply means that, within the confines of the law, I may be so if I choose, and I feel I’ve done nothing wrong. They always had the choice not to bother me. I wasn’t bothering them.

The only enjoyment I can get from a telemarketing effort, therefore, is a sense that I made it less worthwhile for the telemarketing company and its employees. To some extent, whether I do that through comedy, annoyance or venting depends upon the conduct. Obviously-read scripts offend me. Scripts that imply insults to my intelligence offend me. Illegitimate questions offend me, and since the querent has no right to ask me anything about my whole life, all telemarketing questions are illegitimate, especially if the individual has not even asked whether s/he may start asking them.

I’ve handled it various ways over the years. I actually got a robocall operation to leave my cell phone alone when, after about eight hangup calls from them, I called back and strongly implied that I had the power and will to traverse the electronic medium and cause grave physical infirmity. (That’s illegal, and not normal for me, but I was pretty tired of what amounted to crank calls. Oh, and it worked.) With males, I have been known to attempt a sultry tone hinting at seduction. I often take charge and say “I’m asking the questions here. How did you get my number?” I’ve pretended to have comprehension disabilities, or to speak little English. I give stupid answers, or make up a bunch of baloney. If I’m feeling lazy, I just say I’ll go get the person they want, pretend to call someone to the phone, lay it down and just not return. A minute wasted, some other person somewhere spared a call, the company’s money wasted, my little good deed for the day.

One time, some twenty years ago, I decided that I had the perfect screw-you planned out. I would preach. I was raised around a lot of that, for my father loved the 700 Club and religion was rammed down my throat by emotional and physical abuse all through my teens, until I (predictably) threw up. I know how to imitate a televangelist. So, next time the phone rang, and it was someone telemarketing me, I had all tubes loaded with canister. This was going to be my most successful, obnoxious telemarketing response ever. This would be for the ages.

“Good evening, sir, I’m Susan with Suchandsuch Co. Who is the main decis–”

“You know, I’m going to give you something better than a sale today,” I blared in my outside voice. “I’m going to give you the truth of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! It says in the Bible…” I went on. And on. And on. I pontificated for minutes; no hangup, no interruption. I turned up the heat: “…because the alternative is the fires of Hell, and there is a real Hell, and it’s even worse than you imagine…” I quoted John 3:16 and offered interpretation. I began to wonder why she hadn’t just hung up, or butted in to bring the conversation around to what she wanted to sell, or responded in any way. I did this for about five minutes, getting a little curious, but starting to run out of wind.

When I began to slacken, she finally spoke up. “Wow, this is so wonderful. I also am born again, and it’s so great to meet someone who believes as I do and isn’t ashamed of the Gospel. Sir, this has been the best call of my day, and thank you so much for sharing your faith with me. I’m at work though, and I have to get going on other calls now, but God bless you, and have a wonderful evening. Good night!”

*click*

I never did find out what she wanted to sell me. I stood there, blown-out, dumfounded, struck silent, my whole plan having backfired about as back as a plan can fire. It was like the South Carolinians had tried to fire on Fort Sumter, but due to incompetent artillery direction, had shelled downtown Charleston instead.

Then I did the only thing that a sense of justice or humor would allow. I laughed until I was incoherent, red-faced and gasping for breath. In fact I’m tearing up laughing just thinking about it.

I haven’t pulled the preaching stunt since.

The Editorial Maverick