Woah

Just noticed this today, a review of a civil war exhibit, from the Washington Post no less.  Will wonders never cease?  Money quote:

The show proceeds thematically rather than chronologically. It raises large questions -- What led to the secession of the South? Were there efforts to avoid war? -- and then offers documents that should help visitors form answers. Early in the exhibition, viewers confront what might be called the Southern-apologist listening station, where you can both read, and listen to, a document laying out South Carolina's reasons for secession. After some boilerplate language about the Constitution comes reason No. 1: The right to property, which for South Carolina included the right to human chattel, had been infringed. 

There it is, in black and white, and coming at you through a very 1980s hand-held listening device: Slavery is the cause -- the essential, primary, undeniable first and sufficient cause for the war. While much of the exhibition aims at nuance and complexity, this should be sufficient to unmask the old masquerade about what the South was fighting for. Efforts to make it seem problematic and complex are all too often part of a nostalgia game, nostalgia for a time when every white Southern man had a God-given right to be a racist, if he so chose.

Ah-yup.  Nice to see some reporting without the usual dog-whistle phrases.

I.6

[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here] 


Knudsen

Knudsen was in a rage.  In order to calm himself, he played a game of Patience*.  The day before yesterday, Brägevoldt had visited him from Rostock and had appointed a Party instructor for today, after noon.  Knudsen told Brägevoldt: the Party can lick my ass.  The Party should have shot him, instead of sending an instructor now.  But this new Five Person Group System, Brägevoldt had said, is very interesting, you'll see.  Rubbish, Knudsen had answered, in Rerik there is only one Single Person Group, and that's me.  Brägevoldt: and the others?  Knudsen: shit scared.  Brägevoldt: And you? Knudsen: no interest.  Moreover, I have to get to the cod.  Brägevoldt had said something about a shock effect as a result of the increase in terrorism that would subside, and then he shoved off after he had arranged the meeting betwen Knudsen and the instructor.

While Knudsen laid down the cards, he could think about it.  Brägevoldt or the Party had put him in a difficult position.  The other boats had already sailed the day before yesterday.  Knudsen aroused suspicion if the "Pauline" stayed in the harbor  much longer.  Too, the youth was innocent.  Quite apart from the income, the tide was ebbing.  The pretty cod.  Knudsen yearned for cod.  His lost his Patience and flung the cards aside.

He went into the little garden that lay behind the house, a tiny space of dull, darkened greenness, in which a pair of white asters glowed.  On one side stood a rabbit hutch; Knudsen heard the animals rustling.  Bertha sat on the bench, knitting, despite the cold.  Put on an overcoat, said Knudsen, if you must sit outside.  Laughing happily, she went into the house and came back a few seconds later, wearing the coat.  Knudsen watched her, how she returned to sit on the bench.  She smiled.  Knudsen glanced at the part in her blond hair; she was blond and gentle, a pretty young woman of forty.  I must tell you a joke, she said.  Anxiously, she looked up to him and asked: Listen?  Yes, I will listen, said Knudsen, as he pondered about Brägevoldt and the Party instructions.  In Machnow, related Bertha, a man once watched how the lunatics jumped from a diving board into the pool in the middle of winter.  He said to them: there is absolutely no water in there!  They called back to him: we're just training for the summer, as they rubbed their blue bruises.  Why had she chosen this cruel joke, thought Knudsen, as Bertha expectfully watched him.  He smiled and said: yes, yes, Bertha, it's a good joke.  If I don't pay attention, he thought, they would take you to the lunatics also, even though you're not even crazy.  She just had a little quirk, he reflected.  It started a few years back, when she had begun to tell this joke of the lunatics who jump into the empty pool.  Otherwise she was friendly and gentle, a good woman.  He had never made out when and from whom she had heard this through-and-through bad joke.  She told it everywhere, but she had been telling it for years, and after a while the city stopped gossiping about Bertha Knudsen.  But a year ago one of the Others came to Knudsen and had said: your woman is mentally disturbed, we must put her in an institution.  With help from Doctor Frerking, Knudsen had prevented them from taking her away.  He knew what they did to the mentally disturbed when they put them in an institution for the first time, and he held on to Bertha.  When he was out to sea with the trawler he was always afraid that he would not find Bertha upon his return.  He had gotten the impression that they wanted to blackmail him with the threat of putting Bertha in an institution.  They wanted him to keep quiet.  They would use poor Bertha as a weapon against the Party.

Make my provisions ready, he said, I will sail later, and he saw her cheerful laugh, her perpetual and fatal laugh on her pretty, ever-youthful face, as he went back inside the house.  He sat on the bench by the oven and lit a pipe.

He had to decide now, if he'd keep the meeting with the instructor.  It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and he had one hour's time.  The boat was ready for sea; the youth had been aboard for two hours; at four o'clock they could already be far outside the pilot island.

But it wasn't about the one hour.  Knudsen thought harder. To meet the instructor meant to get involved.  The others had grasped this faster than he: they had already cleared out.  Elias had said it straight to his face: listen, we're not going to talk anymore about the Party.  It had happened remarkably: two years of preparation for the illegalities, then two years of sticking together, afterwards stagnation.  And now, in the year 1937, since no one was afraid anymore, the Others suddenly tightened the screws.  One heard of arrests in Rostock, in Wismar, in Brunshaupten, on the entire coast.  They smash the wood to pieces since it had begun to crumble.  They are preparing for war, Knudsen had said to Elias.  Elias just turned away.  The comrades still all spoke to Knudsen, but not about politics.

This was preferred, though, for this way the Others don't discover who leads the Party.  They knew that there were Knudsen, Mathiasson, Jenssen, Elias, Kröger, Bahnsen, and a few others more.  But to arrest them all wouldn't do in such a small town as Rerik. The Others had to be able to depend on the fact that nothing more about the Party would be spoken.  When no more is said about it, the Party exists no longer.

Naturally they knew that there was one -- at least one -- who led the Party further.  Knudsen was convinced that they reckoned with that one.  So it was dangerous for him that the "Pauline" lay still docked in the harbor while the entire fishing fleet had sailed.  But it was not dangerous if he didn't meet the instructor.  By the rules of the Party, the instructor didn't know Knudsen.  If Knudsen didn't go to the meeting, the instructor could turn black from waiting.  Then Knudsen was out.  When the new instructors from the Central Committees of the Party didn't arrive in Rerik, then there was no more Party in Rerik.  Then for Knudsen, just like for everyone else, there were just the cod and the herring.  And Bertha.  But if he went, then he involved himself in the measures that the Party took, thought Knudsen.  He couldn't go and then not carry out the instructions of the Party.  If he wanted, he really didn't need to go.  Now I'm the fish, thought Knudsen, the fish before the angler.  I can bite, or not.  Can the fish decide? he asked himself.  Of course it can, he thought with his ancient fisher's faith.  And with his ancient fisher's contempt: the fish is stupid.  But I've spent my entire life long biting at this bait, he remembered.  And the hook has always hurt.  Always has it yanked me into the air in which one could hear the screams of the fish.  I'll be damned, thought Knudsen, full of rage, if I am to be a silent fish.


*"Patience" is a european name for what americans call "Solitaire."  I decided not to change the name in translation here, because the subsequent play on words ("He lost his Patience") is a close and true approximation of the original, one of those rare instances where a translated phrase works really well.  ("He lost his game of Solitaire" just doesn't have the same effect.)

I.5

[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here] 


The Youth

Although he sat concealed under a curtain of willow branches, he could glimpse the tower from St. George and read the clock.  Half past two.  In a half hour I must be aboard the trawler, because Knudsen will want to sail away at five o'clock, he thought, and then the boring fishing will begin, the creeping about here and there with the boat at the Buksand and under the land, the monotonous work with seine nets, two or three days long, together with the sullen fisherman.  Knudsen never sailed out onto the open sea like father, even though father's trawler wasn't bigger than Knudsen's.  But then father was lost at sea.  And so I must get away, thought the youth, because I heard people say that father had been stinking drunk again when he died.  Huck Finn's father was a drunk, so Huck Finn had to run away, but I have to get away because my father wasn't a drunk, although they claim he was since they were jealous of him, for he was sometimes out on the open sea.  Not even one tablet did they hang for him in the church, a tablet with with his name and the words "died in with his boots on" and his dates of birth and death, like they do for all those lost at sea.  I hate them all, and that's the second reason why I have to get away from Rerik.

I.4

[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]

Helander

Knudsen would help, thought Father Helander, Knudsen wasn't foolish.  He bore no grudge.  He'd help against the common enemy.

No sound or echo came from outside.  There was nothing more empty than St. George Church Square in late autumn.  Helander  prayed intensely against the emptiness for a moment.  Against the three already leafless lime trees in the corner between the transept* and the choir, against the mute dark redness of the brick wall, whose top he couldn't see from the window of his study: the southern transept of the St. George Church.  The grounds of the square were a bit lighter than the brown-red bricks of the church and the parsonage and the humbler houses that were attached, older houses made from fired bricks, houses with small stepped gables and simple houses with glazed woodbrick roofs.

No one ever walks over this square, thought Helander, gazing down upon the cleanswept pavement.  No one.  It was an absurd thought.  Of course people walked over this dead corner of the church square too, where the parsonage stood.  The foreigners who came to the ocean spas in summer, in order to visit the church.  Members of his parish.  The sexton, father Helander himself.  Nevertheless, thought Helander, the square was wholly lonely.

A place as dead as the church, thought the priest.  Which is why only Knudsen could help.

He raised his gaze to the transept wall.  Thirty thousand bricks, a naked board without perspective, two-dimensional, brown-red, slate-colored red, yellow-red, blue-red, and finally a single, darkly phosphorescent red one, without depth, hanging before Helander's window, his decades-long antithesis: the board upon which the writing that he awaited never appears, so that he paints it with his own fingers, always erasing the text and writing new words and characters.  The grounds of the square waited upon steps that never sounded; the brick wall upon writing that never appeared.

In this way, Father Helander unjustly put the guilt upon the bricks, the dark bricks of the houses and the church.  His ancestors had come with the journeying king from a land in which the houses were built from wood and colorfully painted.   In that land, one's footsteps crunched cheerfully on the gravel in front of the wooden parsonages, and the Word of justice and peace was carved on the beams.  Happy dreamers, his ancestors were, when they were tempted to venture to a land in which the thoughts were dark and intemperate like the stone walls of the church in which they began to preach the true Word.  It wasn't heard, the true Word: the darkness remained stronger than the small Light that they had brought out from the friendly land.

The dark thoughts and the excessive brick churches were guilty for forcing him to go and seek help from Knudsen, thought the priest.  His fierce, reddened, passionate face grew darker.  His prosthesis creaked as he went to the desk to take the key to the parsonage out of the drawer, and he felt the pain in his stump that had for some time now had made itself noticed whenever he took a step too quickly.  The pain was stabbing: it impaled him.  The priest stood still and balled his fists.  And after a while, when the spear had slowly retreated back, he had the feeling as if, behind him on the church wall from which he had turned away, the writing that he was waiting for, appeared.  Carefully, he turned.  But the wall was as empty as ever.

*Classically, churches were built in the shape of the cross.  The nave is the long, "upright" bar of the cross, while the transept is the horizontal crossbar.

I.3

 [What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]

 The Youth


Running away inland made no sense either, thought the youth who sat under the willow by the river.  Huckleberry Finn had had the choice either to go into the deep forest to live as a trapper or to disappear on the Mississippi, and he'd chosen the Mississippi.  But he could've just as easily gone into the woods.  But there were no woods here into which a guy could disappear, anyway -- just cities and villages and fields and plains of willows and so very little forest, as far as you could see.  So it was all just nonsense, thought the youth, I'm not a child anymore, I've been out of school since Easter and I don't believe in Wild West stories anymore.  But Huckleberry Finn was no Wild West story.  A guy has got to do like Huckleberry Finn and get away.

There were three reasons why you had to get out of Rerik.  The first went like this: because nothing ever happened in Rerik.  There was really, totally, nothing.  Nothing will ever happen to me here, thought the youth, as he pondered the autumn yellow, lance-shaped willow leaves on the Treene, drifting slowly away.

I.2

[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]

This part was harder than I expected.  I find Gregor's thoughts to be complex to the point of confusion sometimes.  He speaks and thinks with detailed imagery, almost stream-of-consciousness at times. Translating his thoughts is an exercise in understanding.

---

Gregor

It's possible, thought Gregor, provided that one isn't in danger, to see the pale, standing pines as a curtain.  Like this: an open assembly of lightly colored poles, from which matte green flags motionlessly fluttered under a gray sky until they united into a transparent green wall.  The practically black, macadamed street seemed like a seam between the two halves of the curtain, and one undid it while bicycling along.  After a few minutes, the curtain opens and reveals a scene of city and sea coast.

But since his life was in danger, thought Gregor, nothing was like anything else.  The objects comprised themselves in their names, fully and completely.  Outwardly, they revealed nothing of themselves.

So there were just solid things: forest, bicycle, street.  Where the woods ended, one finds the city and the coast -- no backdrop for a game, but rather the stage for a menace that freezes over everything in inalterable reality.  A house is a house, a wave a wave, neither more nor less.

Just on the other side of this menace, seven miles removed from the coast on a ship to Sweden -- if there should be a ship to Sweden -- would the sea, for example, be comparable to a bird wing, a wing of icy ultramarine that the late autumn scandanavians flew around.  Until then the sea was nothing more than the sea, a turbulent mass that one had to see firsthand to know if it were suitable to allow an escape.

No, thought Gregor, whether or not I flee doesn't depend upon anything about the sea.  The sea will allow passage.  It depends upon sailors and captains, upon swedish and danish seafolk, upon their courage or their greed, and if there are no swedish or danish seafolk then it depends upon the comrades in Rerik--upon them with their fishing trawlers, it depends upon their looks and thoughts, namely that their looks aim for adventure, and their thoughts can manage an easy sail-setting motion.

It would be easier, thought Gregor, to be dependent upon the sea, instead of upon men.

A new project

I'm going to start something new here, namely a serial translation of one of my favorite books: Sansibar oder der letzte Grund.  It was written by Alfred Andersch in 1957, a german writer, and translated to english as "Flight to Afar" in 1961, but I don't own a copy of the latter, and I've been meaning to reread it for some time.  A translation is a forcible way to thoroughly read and understand, and I'm a glutton for punishment, anyway, so....

The book is organized in chapters, each chapter subdivided in parts describing something about each of the main characters.  The places (cities and regions) are real, as are many other things in the novel (such as the statue that will make an appearance).  I will offer the spoiler that it is set in WWII-era Germany; this would become apparent after a while anyway, but it helps to know this from the start.

Like most post-war german novels, it is introspective of german society, but does so through the lens of each of the characters' personalities, and their struggles.  Each one seeks something, sometimes desperately, and their efforts to prevail illuminate the oppression of the society.  It's a timely novel for modern-era USA, I think.  I have left in a lot of german notation and names in my translation.  If you're like me, you read some passages aloud to yourself when you read as you go.  Here is a quick german pronunciation primer for english speakers, for those bits that are still native:

• Most letters "read how they look," if you have studied latin languages.  If you haven't, may god have pity on your soul.
• "ä" is pronounced as the letter 'a' in the english word "mate"
• "ö" is pronounced roughly like the first sound in a kid saying "EWWW!"  Just don't purse your lips.
• "ü" is pronounced as if you were to say the letter 'i' the way it sounds in "hit," but through pursed lips
• "ch," as in the pronoun "Ich," is not necessarily as gutteral and rough as american movies might make it.  In the north, where this novel took place, it is often very soft, almost like "ish."  (Listening to a dreamy blond Hamburg girl say "Ich liebe dich" is a rare pleasure.)
• J = 'y'.  Ja, ja, ja!
• V = 'f'.  "Von" sounds like "fon."
• W = 'v'.  "Woher" sounds like "vo hair."
• In a word with a compound vowel (e.g., "erschien") the pronunciation is of the second vowel.  So "erschien" sounds like "air sheen."

It's been ten years or more since I spoke or read german on a regular basis, so I'm sure to muck up the translation.  Anyone who has read this and knows where I made a mistake: please tell me!  That being said, it's really remarkable how fast it returns.

What follows is the first part and installment of this translation.

---

Zanzibar, or The Last Reason

And death shall have no dominion

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

The Youth

The Mississippi would be the best, thought the youth.  On the Mississippi a guy could just steal a canoe and get away, if it was true what was in Huckleberry Finn.    On the Baltic Sea nobody could ever get very far, quite apart from the fact that there weren't any canoes anymore but rather just old beat-up rowboats.  He looked up from his book to the brook, the Treene, flowing silently and slowly below; the willow under which he sat hung down into the water, and across the water in the old tannery nothing moved, like always.  The Mississippi would be better than the storehouse in the old deserted tannery and the willow by the slow moving creek.  Out on the Mississippi  a guy could escape, while at the tannery and and under the willow you could only hide -- and only as long as it had leaves, and they had already begun to fall and turn yellow upon the brown water.   Hiding wasn't the way, anyway, thought the youth -- you've got to get away.

A guy has to get away, but he has to end up somewhere.  And you can't do it like dad, who wanted to escape, but who always just wandered aimlessly out on the open sea.  When someone has no other goal than the open sea, they always come back.  You've only really escaped, thought the youth, when you find landfall beyond the sea.

Systemic Failure

Lotsa shit going down at the moment, and quite suddenly. I'm watching a decades-old marriage unravel. "It's working towards a resolution, one way or another," said L tonight, when I told her why I was ensconced in my office, awaiting email. And she's right. It's impossible to bottle oneself up forever. Eventually real feelings need to come out, one way or another. You can hold them back, but if unresolved, they WILL come back out, and with a vengeance. That appears to be what I'm seeing happening now.

It's sad, and nobody wins. Not the couple, not their kids, not their extended families, but the situation is even worse if they stay together.

Aside from that, how did you enjoy the show, Mrs. Lincoln?

Epistemic Failure

Second crop of arugula getting bigger, 2/10/10

I just spent nine hours up to my armpits in the guts of SNMP agent code, which if you recognize what that is, means that you know the stench inside of my brain at the moment. Consider yourself a blessed child of the universe if that makes no sense.

To get the foul brain stench out, I spent a couple of hours ripping up my lawn. Yup, ripping that sucker right out. For some reason, the landscapers who put it in back when my home decided that a quarter inch of topsoil on top of this pacific northwest clay was just fine, lawnwise. Turns out, not so much. Turns out, rain on grass on a quarter inch of soil on top of clay just kind of pools up, pretty quicklike, and the moss and weeds move in. So I'm ripping that crap out, working ten yards of compost back into the clay, and then I'll put some native grasses on top. Seriously, Kentucky Bluegrass on clay in western Washington? Dare I call those landscapers morons?

So that is what it has come down to: me versus a lawn. And versus Finn, who seems to think that gardens are not for veggies, but rather for pooping. Everywhere. Three and a half years ago I helped forge a new route up one of the tallest peaks in the Andes, and today I'm digging up lawns in the rain and trying to catch our cat pooping in my tomatoes. Methinks I need to get a porch rocker, a knife, and some spare time to whittle.

But seriously, I'm enjoying the hell out of myself. One of my former associates, a woman who is somewhat well known for some solo first ascents up big wall routes ("big" meaning "you sleep on the wall for a few days since it takes that long to climb") and who was a technical assistant on some films in pakistan, climbing routes to run lines and support the camera crews as they hung suspended over voids, is one of my more frequent facebook commenters. About adventures? No. Climbing? No. Mountains? No. Naw, we chat back and forth about the best way to protect tomato plants from wind and cold, how to amend soil, etc. A little while ago, she gave birth to her first child, a little girl who today walked for the first time; no mention of future climbs in her happy announcement. And I was hilling up soil around my rampant potato plants when I took a break from work today, while Finn hunted mice twenty feet away.

I think that I'm beginning to sound somewhat repetitious. At this point, even I get it: yeah, it's nice to have a garden to hang out with, and no, I don't seem to do a whole lot of crazy adventures anymore.

I suppose that I keep coming back to it because I need to understand. This kind of life that I've got going here is not something that I would have pursued not too long ago, nor was it something that I thought I wanted. It's like how we keep dreaming the same dream, over and over, when something is bothering us. And so here I am, feeling pretty good about things overall, and wondering why that is.

I never used to wonder about things when I felt crappy. Seemed like that was status quo.

Taking It Too Far

If you're wont to getting sucked into Internet fads, then you've seen this:



Well... you know how these memes evolve:

 

And yes, somebody went there:

Reevaluation

I was thinking today about what it means to live an authentic life. By that I mean: to be living as an aware being, choosing a path, and not just blindly repeating the same motions day after day. Because that's what I've been doing the last few months: get up, eat breakfast, work at the computer for four hours, go work out, work four more hours, tend the garden, eat dinner, watch a film, read a book, sleep.

Repeat x120 days, modulo random variations.

This is not what I want my life to be. What I want more of:

• Real interaction with people in my life, instead of screen time (computers and television)
• To stop doing leisure time activities that I really don't like
• More stop & quiet

For the first one, I want to push the keyboard away, and figure out how to fill the spare time with my people.  Play backgammon with Laura, hike an evening trail, help mom haul some compost.  This sitting in front of screens thing has got to stop.  Really, it just has to.  Facebook is stupid, and a $5 comcast movie is a waste of both money as well as time.  I used to read a book a day, and I remember thinking and being challenged.  Now, I feel like a lemming, waiting for the next round of entertainment.

For the second, this is harder.  It means some real introspection.  You know what?  I really don't like the mountain rescue stuff.  They consume my weekends and my weekdays, and honestly, there were only four callouts last year and I was unavailable for all of them.  The guys in that group do it mostly to get away from their families for a night or a day.  That's not the kind of dynamic I want to be a part of.  I appreciate their efforts, but really, it's not fulfulling, and it's wasting my time.  If I'm going to volunteer my time for a cause, I want it to feel right.  I don't want to be a person who does things to get away from his life -- I want to do things to be a part of them.

For the last, it's the hardest of all.  I'm so sick of supermarkets playing pop songs in the background, and radios in the car.  Why must we always have noise?  And why must we always be moving or doing?  The best times of the last month that I can remember involve.. nothing that would make any headline.  I remember Finn sitting beside me as I crouched by a garden bed, shivering as he does when the ground is cold and his foot pads get wet.  I remember the warmth of Laura's skin as we stood together, watching the sun set in the forest.  I remember waking up and then lying still, listening to the frogs croaking in the stream bed outside.

Well, tomorrow is the start of a new day.  Let's see how it goes.

Beer Review

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Okay, here's the spring beer review, also known as "what I do after ten hours of work, not including time spent wandering around the garden to see what has sprouted or furminating Finn."

Seriously, before I moved to the pacific northwest, I thought that I understood beer.  I am now properly chastened.  Here are three (relatively) local ales that pretty much rock, limited to that number because after three bombers I am unable to know or care what I'm drinking:

Tricerahops, by Ninkasi.  I am a mad fanatic for the IPA, and this is far and away the most consistent and hoppy IPA around -- and FSM knows, I've tried A LOT.  Freshly tapped it's even better, but even in a bottle from the grocery store, it kicks ever-lovin' butt.  This is some good stuff, folks.  Oh sorry, if you're from a Blue Law state, there is no Ninkasi in the grocery store.  Time to move, I guess.

 Boundary Bay Brewing's Imperial IPA.  This is even better than Tricerahops, but unfortunately it doesn't age well at all.  As in, it loses a lot just a few days after they tap it.  So you pretty much have to know when it's being brewed, when the tap is going in, and get yer butt up there to drink it.  But trust me, it is so worth it if you make that window!  Even after the window, it's still really good... I mean, I'm not going to stop drinking it just because it's not absolutely perfect anymore!  I even have the Imperial IPA hoody from Boundary, even.  Jealous?  This beer just won an award at the beer festival, too -- and I bet that that was tapped, older stuff!

 Chuckanut Strong Ale.   On any given wednesday, you'll find me wandering down to the Boundary Bay Brewery with an empty growler to be filled with Imperial IPA, but you'll never see me doing that at the Chuckanut, because the bastards don't sell their Strong Ale in growlers, only in pints.  Probably because the Strong keeps even worse than the Imperial, I'm guessing.  But OMG is the Strong so good out of the tap!  Besides, one pint is enough to make me need to spend some time down on the waterfront, chilling out.


A brewery that I haven't mentioned that is also (relatively) local is the Standing Stone Brewery in Ashland, Oregon.  I stopped off there for dinner over New Year's and was out-and-out stunned by how good their beer was, so much so that I bought a growler for the trip home.  Even makes me want to go back south again.

All this being said, I will still always love New Belgium for their marvelous philosophy (no other company looks after their employees as well!), their fantastic beer, and the fact that they're a Colorado home-grown native.  But alas, I am no longer a Coloradan.

What a day in the garden does to my thoughts

I spent this saturday helping to man a first aid tent for the local MS Walk.  I am a certified wilderness first responder, so the theory is that since I (theoretically) know how to deal with an open femur fracture more than an hour away from definitive medical care, that I should be able to put a band-aid on a knee.

Both of the above assumptions are wrong.  On the one hand, although I was taught in a twelve-day course how to apply traction and a splint to a femur fracture, I'm not at all certain how I would handle it for real.  And it was a year and a half ago that I took the course, so things are a bit fuzzy now.

On the other hand, it's really wrong to assume that just simple scrapes will happen with a community benefit walk.  The people who are doing this stuff are not in good shape, almost by definition.  And some of their relatives are REALLY not in good shape.  The whole day I had visions of needing to do CPR, and I hoarded free oranges and water bottles for possible diabetics since our supplied med kit had no glucose.  One old dude sat down in our patient chair and said "whew!  I made it a mile this year.  Double what I did last year, when I lost my sight since I'd forgotten my insulin!"

Whew, that was saturday.  And then sunday: all day in the garden.  I put up a third raised garden bed, and cleaned a bunch of rocks out of the yard.  Interspersed with a lot of just sitting and listening to the creek, the wind in the trees, and birds calling back and forth.  Finn was out with me most of the day, Zooey occasionally.  Finn caught a mole and a mouse.  Zooey sniffed them, but mostly she stayed close to me, wary of the wider world.  Sometimes I just had to stop, and sit, and be.  Occasionally Laura would open the door, come out, and come stand next to me.  She has her own battles, but the garden is good for both of us.  We stand, she listens, I listen.  After ten minutes, she nuzzles me and goes back inside to finish what she was doing.

It's weird.  Where I am now, I would not have thought I would ever be, just 3-ish years ago.  Which is an example of hope, I guess.  Plenty of things go wrong, but time passes, and we go on. 

A new page is just a day away.  Well, if we let it be, it seems.

What's Not Up (or what is)

Spring is here, finally and certainly.  We awake to songbirds through open windows and fall asleep to frogs chorusing in the creek bed of the forest just behind the back yard; the radishes are bulbing out and will be ready for salad in just a few days, the spinach and arugula throw out more leaves every day, and the afternoon sun beams lean long and warm.

Finn has taken to catching moles, about one a day.  He doesn't really know what to do with them: they're obviously not food, to his mind, since they look and taste nothing like kibble, but in his attempts to figure them out he inevitably kills them.  I feel a bit sorry for them, but then it's his nature to hunt.  Death is a part of the rebirth of spring, after all.

Tomorrow I plant my red cabbage starts (fish tacos!), and prepare for my saturday of administering band-aids, moleskin, and aspirin to the participants of the MS Walk here in town as one of the medical volunteers.

Overall, a boring update.  Because life is good for me right now, and boring -- such as it is -- after years of strife and uncertainty -- is just fine.

MINE

So, I'm a member of a mountain rescue group, yada yada yada.  It's a interesting way to maintain mountaineering skills and to learn rescue techniques, which are pretty far and away different from standard mountaineering geekery.  Also, there are helicopter rides, sometimes.  And free bratwurst at the summer picnic!

Anyway, there are a number of women in the group, which is not unusual.  It doesn't stop all manner of sexist joking, like the lead rigger screaming that the mainline raise team is "HAULING LIKE A BUNCH OF GIRLS!" or another rigger delicately quoting lines from "Forty Year Old Virgin" as he helped haul a 3:1 leverage system on a belay line, and I quote him, "SUCKER MOTHERFUCKER! IN THE ASSHOLE! COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKER!"

(Yarding on haul lines is hard work.)

They're a pretty tight group, these guys.  And morbidly funny.  We'll have a membership meeting and be going over points: recent donations, upcoming trainings, blah blah blah.  Then the president will close the meeting with an offhand remark like, "and oh yeah, don't forget that spring is here now and we've still got a couple up in the freezer who are going to thaw out soon, so stay ready."  As in, two corpses somewhere up on the glaciers that are going to surprise some tourist hikers soon and necessitate a quick body recovery.  (Or two.)

So last week, Laura asked me if it would be okay by me*, if she joined the group.  She said that one of her previous SO's used to rigidly partition "his activities" and "their activities."  As in, he didn't want her doing "his stuff."  So he refused to take her camping, for example**.

I can sympathize with that attitude to a very small degree, because I know I like to carve out my own bit of the world that I can call my own.  But seriously?  It's really pretty childish to declare that someone can't do something because you need your space.  You gotta make your space, not deny space to other people, I think.

Plus, I really can't wait to see what happens when a bunch of good-natured he-men are exposed to a feminist who won't back down, and who can probably out-perform (athletically) most of them.  She'll swear up a blue streak right next to them, and turn those "bunch of girls" remarks right back on their heads.

Yeah, this is going to be pretty amusing.  Hell YEAH she should join!

*Obviously, we still are getting to know each other.  I can't imagine Laura asking the same question of anyone that she knew well.  She'd just say "fuck it, I'm joining this thing!"

**Which is just patently stupid because skinny dipping with a hot girl in a mountain lake is the best thing ever.  Just saying.

HA!

"I just think that it's funny that you fart in your sleep and then blame it on Finn*, aloud, also while you're still asleep."

*Finn is our kitten