Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 36

Friday Five: Five Great Things About Today

Things get better, right? They always do.

They always do.

Here are five great things that happened today.

1. There was a "Bun" candy bar just sitting there in the cupboard after lunch. AND lunch was leftover burritos. AND I got to eat lunch with Sweetie because it was my day off, mostly (I worked for about 1 1/2 hours this morning but it was BY CHOICE).  Have you ever eaten a "BUN"? They are phenomenal. I tend to forget about them when it comes to candy. They're not even in the candy aisle.  At our grocery store, the BUN are on a weird shelf in between the candy and baby aisles, sort of by the produce.  You have to sort of plan on getting some apples but then at the last minute change your mind and think maybe you need paper towels instead, and then you'll pass by them.

2.  I finally beat that one level on Plants v. Zombies 2.  It's the one in the Old West where you only get 1500 suns and there are chickens and hopping miners or whatever. This probably makes no sense to you if you don't play the game but if you do you know exactly what I'm talking about.

3.  Someone added "CODES" on Goodreads. I'm up to FIVE people. TAKE THAT JK ROWLING.  It's a real groundswell.

4. I found my swimming trunks. Which had been missing for a week or two. I couldn't find them and couldn't find them and I asked Sweetie and she asked if I'd looked in my closet, and I said OF COURSE I had and pointed out that her asking me that was kind of like the time I called Dell to say that Mr Bunches' tablet wasn't working and the guy asked me if I'd plugged it in. Then later I checked in the closet and they were there, so I had to say I was sorry to Sweetie, but if I put my mind to it I can probably figure out some way to blame her for it.

5. Mr F and The Big Waterslide.  Today was the day of our annual trip to the Goodman pool, our end-of-summer big day with the boys; the pool is really big and has two large waterslides at it, so it's about the closest we can get them to a real waterpark.  I like to go to the Goodman pool, and I like it so much that I will only go once a year.  To go more often would be I think to rob it of the special quality that comes from only going one time per year, to celebrate having made it through another summer.

(Summers have the peculiar quality of being my favorite time of year and our worst time of year.  I have always loved summer.  I love it with a wistfulness that imbues just the very thought of summer with sepia tones.  In the winter I look at my pictures from the summer for hours, sometimes, thinking back to wading in the river with the boys, or walking on the nature trail, to hot nights outside with Mr F on his Big Wheel, just lazily sort of cruising in the street while a hummingbird pecks at the flowers down the way, to hose fights and walking to the health club pool and jumping off the pier at the Memorial Union and just to being able to walk outside without first putting on a layer of clothes and boots and coats and scarves and hats and even then you're freezing within seconds.

But summers have always been accompanied by the worst news.  If there is bad news to be had in my life, it will hit between June 1 and August 31, nearly always. 90% of the bad times in my life have come during the summer.  Summer is the bad girlfriend I can't break up with even though she's terrible for me.)

Today, after wading around with Mr F for a while, he wanted to go on the water slide.  He pulled me up to it, up the three flights of stairs to the top.  Not all at once: we walked up a flight, and then down. Then up, then down.  Then the next one. And so on. It took 20 minutes to get to the top, three flights up.  We leaned against the rail and watched the sliders go down.  There are two slides, the green one and the white one. The green one is open on the top, and you can see people sliding down in it.  The white one is a tube, closed all around.

I lined Mr F up for the white one; we have to be careful with him.  He is as likely to stop himself on the waterslide and try to climb out as he is to go all the way down, I figured, because I've seen him try to do that on regular slides that aren't 30 feet off the ground.

When we got to his turn for the slide, he wouldn't get into the little launching area, a sort of pad before the tube.  He put his foot on it, then pulled back and grabbed my hand.

I said "It's okay. You don't need to go." And we let a little girl go ahead of us, as the people behind watched the boy wearing a wetsuit gingerly stick his toe in the water while the girl slid gleefully into the dark opening.

We tried again.  This time he stood there, then bailed.  We let another kid go.  Then Mr F tried a third time.  He sat this time! Then stood back up immediately.

That was how it went for 20 minutes.  TWENTY. Standing there in the hot sun, people crowding up, watching as Mr F would sit in the slide launching area, then stick his feet out, then back out again.  We'd let a couple people go, then he'd try again.  Finally the lifeguard (who was being very nice) said the line was backing up too much.  Mr F tried a final time, sitting and getting himself almost all the way into the slide, before standing back up.

"It's okay, buddy. We tried," I said, and started leading him down the stairs. One flight down, he balked and turned around.  He marched back up and I had to stop him, stand him at the back of the line.  So we waited again, and got to the top, and he sat down, pushed forward inch by inch by inch and was nearly into the opening ... when he stood up.

I patted him on the head.  We let a couple kids go and did it again.  Then we moved to the back of the line again.

For the next hour, Sweetie waited at the bottom of the slide.  Mr Bunches kept coming up and riding down the two slides, alternating.  Mr F and I, we would wait in line, get to the top, have him sit down, and then wait... wait...wait, as he inched slowly forward, getting closer and closer each time to sliding until each time he backed out.

Mr F is nervous about slides.  He usually likes to climb up them first before sliding down them, almost as if he is inspecting them for safety.  But he couldn't do that here.  So back to the end of the line we went, and waited again.

People were starting to know him.  Little kids were coming up to us and asking if he was okay, whether he was going to go on the slide.  "He's trying," I said.  "He just gets nervous." Little girls told him "It's okay! I go on it all the time, it's fun."  One girl told him not to be scared.  The lifeguard said, each time, you can do it buddy!  People would watch as he sat, stood, sat, stood, sat again... and stood.

Each time, I hugged him and patted his head and said I was proud and it didn't matter if he went down.  We'd go to the back of the line and start over, almost completely dry by now.  Mr F watched the opening to the slide from wherever he was on the slide.

After nearly 90 minutes, we got to the top again.  Mr F sat down, again.  He edged forward.

"You can do it, buddy," I said.

"Go on, guy," a little girl said.

"You can do it," the lifeguard said.

Mr F edged forward a bit.

A bit more.

A bit more.

He looked back over his shoulder at me.

I had my hand right by him.  I said "You can go, if you want."

He edged forward the tiniest bit more.



I mean it would be just SO GREAT if I could tell you he went down the slide and loved it and was happy and had the greatest day.

But he didn't.

He stood up again, and grabbed my hand, and pulled back from the slide.  And it was time to go. We had to leave the pool and that was it for the day.  I took Mr F's hand and said:

"I'm proud of you, buddy.  You were really brave."

Sometimes, winning is just trying. Mr F kept on trying, If we hadn't made him leave, I think he'd still be there, hoping that this time would be the one that worked, and if it wasn't, getting in line and doing it again.

He keeps trying.  I know an 8-year-old boy who is my SON shouldn't probably be my hero but he is.

He always keeps trying.

Picture Of The Day

Last night I took Mr F outside with me to replant the peas and peppers we'd been growing in little pots on our driveway. The seeds were from the library; they let you 'borrow' seeds if you promise to bring seeds back in the fall, and we did that.

Our backyard is overgrown with all kinds of stuff planned and unplanned. Somewhere in there is a blueberry bush. There are two apple trees that haven't borne fruit yet but maybe that's because one was once bitten in half by our neighbor's dog.  There is a sort of path with a few bricks marking it; I mow that path once a year. There are large trees looming over the whole yard, thick untrimmed lilac bushes lining the yard, and the tree Sweetie and I moved to the middle of the yard when we first moved here because my dad said it was growing too close to the house and would undermine the foundation. It is very pretty when it flowers, that tree. It was not flowering now.

In the old wagon with flat tires that I've turned into a planter a pumpkin vine is growing. It keeps flowering with those soft, melty orange flowers that pumpkins are before they are pumpkins. There is, beyond that, an abundance of what would be weeds except that I don't mind them being there.  A weed is any plant you don't want growing where it is my mom said once.

We replanted the peas and peppers and went to get the hose. There was a big spider on the hose, so we uncoiled it carefully, me holding Mr F by the hand while I unraveled the hose.  Mr F is almost always held by the hand, outside.

We got the hose undone and Mr F turned it on and we tugged and looped and dragged it back to the new plants, past the chair and the little truck and the patch of orange-y flowers that somehow ended up growing in our backyard by pure chance, and then began watering, lightly, the new plants in their recently-patted down soil in our backyard.

After they'd had a bit of water, we stayed outside playing "hose," spraying each other with the hose and making it spray up so it felt like it was raining and giving each other "soakers," which is where you let the water run right on someone's head full blast, and shaking the hose around to make patterns in the air with droplets.

The sun wasn't setting yet but all the trees around us made it seem like it was.  You could only see a tiny bit of blue sky directly above us, and everything else was lit by soft light filtered through dark thick leaves that made the light zig and zag and zig again just to reach us.  By the time it hit me and Mr F and our water, it was soft and gauzy.

Just before we went in, Mr F took the hose and pressed his thumb to it and made the spray go out in an arc, like a wall of mist forming a giant circle of spray around and above and behind him, almost at head level.  It was like he had a halo of water droplets, all lit by the faintest last light of a summer day.

I didn't have my camera on me but that didn't stop it from being the picture of the day.

10 MInutes About "California" By Eden Lepucki

10 minutes that will start with mentioning again that I'm really putting off reading To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, which was a book I really thought sounded good, and which I like when I read it, but I find it not very compelling so I haven't really wanted to read it.  Is that weird? It probably is.  But it's probably also why the book was discounted to $2.99, which was the whole reason I bought it in the first place, which says a lot about books and discounting and readers and probably society.

So instead of reading To Rise Again this weekend, I was going to continue with Kurt Vonnegut, whose Welcome To The Monkey House contains very little science fiction, even for Kurt Vonnegut, whose science fiction has always been more fiction than science.  Most of the short stories are almost Cheever-esque, perhaps with a few more twists than Cheever put in.  In fact, Cheever's The Swimmer is Vonnegut-esque, so the two maybe have more in common than I would have thought at the start of that sentence.

In fact, Cheever had a story called The Enormous Radio, in which a woman's husband bought her an (enormous) radio that actually played conversations from other apartments in the building.  The wife becomes more and more obsessed with this, while the husband spends too much money trying to fix the problem, and that worries him. This slowly tears at the husband and wife, who were happy before (or seemed to be; it's not clear whether the radio makes them unhappy or merely exposes their unhappiness.

Vonnegut's collection includes a story called Next Door in which a boy, left home alone for the first time, hears a loud radio from next door, and then a couple fighting over the sound of the radio.  He gets more and more scared that the couple will hurt each other, so he calls the radio station and requests a song from the husband of the couple to the wife of the couple. This has disastrous and mildly surprising results.

So there's a more direct crossover between them, although saying that writers in the 40s-60s were connected because radios featured in their stories would be like saying writers today were connected because their characters used laptops, I suppose.

There is a husband and wife (how's that for a segue!) in California, too.  Two husbands and two wives, so far, and lots and lots of dread.  I began California because even Vonnegut's non-scifi stuff tends to be rather depressing, and I wanted something a bit different.  California was not really the thing to choose, then: it's also depressing, already, but in a slightly different way.

At the start of the book, Frida and her husband Cal have abandoned Los Angeles, which (along with all of society) appears to have fallen apart nearly completely, and are living in a shed in the woods, where they've been for three years.  They are trapping food (a bit) and growing food, and Frida has just discovered she's pregnant, which makes her remember when they met their neighbors a few years before -- 'neighbors' being a loose word for the distant acquaintances whose family of four also lives in the woods (and built the shed Frida and Cal are living in, and also who spied on Frida and Cal at awkward times -- and told Frida about it).

There's so much that's weirdly sad in the book, already. It's like a kaleidoscope, or maybe like looking at a brilliant, detailed miniature world that has fallen on the floor and shattered into barely-identifiable pieces.  Frida has a turkey baster, made of glass, wrapped up and hidden with her 'artifacts,' one she bought just before the two abandoned Los Angeles, and which she keeps hidden from Cal.  There's a traveling junk trader who gets tense when people ask him too many questions period.  There's the vague, unsettling talk of just how far society has gone down hill -- stores that only took gold, medicines being only for the rich, malls overtaken by trees (or possibly).  And it's all recent: Frida and Cal have been in the woods three years (having driven there and then driven their car as far away as the empty gas tank would let them, to lead people away from where they are living/hiding.)

I mentioned that I liked Footfall because it wasn't post-apocalyptic, but apocalyptic.  I like stories that take place during the fall of civilization.  A writer on IO9 recently suggested that we like postapocalyptic stories in part because of the possibility of relief they present: in a post-apocalyptic world, we might have to fight mutants or wander a desert or maybe get kidnapped by Charlize Theron or whatever, but we wouldn't have to watch our inbox fill up with emails and pay credit card bills and register for school and the like.  The idea is that there would be almost a sense of freedom to a postapocalyptic world.

I'm not idiot enough to think I'd do well in something like that; as I've often said, my own skillset would qualify me for 'monster bait' after the end of the world.  (In another Larry Niven book, a Senator helps set up a new society after the end of the world from a comet; he's picked because he knows the law and everyone respects him.  So maybe there's hope for me.)  And post-apocalypses make me sad because I think of how hard life would be. I have kids; I can't imagine raising kids in a wasteland glowing with nuclear fallout.

That's one of the things that is weird and depressing and scary already in California: Frida is pregnant, and their neighbors (?) have two kids.  When they first meet, the neighbor lady asks Frida whether she is going to get pregnant, and when Frida hesitates -- after all, the world is falling apart-- the neighbor says "You didn't come out here to die, did you?" I sympathized with Frida: you wouldn't want to feel like you are giving up, but would you bring a kid into a dead world? Or a dying one? I know that the world Frida and Cal are living in seems kind of like pioneer times, but I don't romanticize pioneer times any more than I do postapocalyptic worlds. I'd have hated the 1880s, too. I'd have disliked anything before about 1957, I suspect.

What's more interesting to me is the why of liking apocalyptic stories.  Following that IO9 writer's idea, I spent some time wondering about why I might find these stories enjoyable, if a bit depressing. Probably it's because I've got so much going on, especially over the last year or so.  If life is hectic, or hard, or challenging, it can be escapist to see how people deal with even harder troubles.  It's a lot worse, I suppose, to have elephants invade the Earth or have to flee the cities after some (as yet unknown) disaster than it is to try to fit into a new firm or have a jury trial or worry about whether I'm doing everything I can for Mr F or Mr Bunches.  So reading books like this may be a way of putting my own life into perspective.

Friday Five: My Five Favorite TV Sitcoms (Right Now)

Television shows doesn't seem quite right, does it? Just like books don't seem to be books anymore, is it right to talk about them as television shows? I watch 98% of my shows/movies on my laptop, or my phone.  We have TVs in our house but the boys are always using them. (One, in their room, is permanently playing Chicken Little and we cannot turn it off or Mr Bunches gets terrified.  The other one, in our living room, generally shows Ice Age or The Incredibles these days.) But even televisions are televisions anymore. They're just screens.

Anyway, here's my Five Favorite Shows (Right Now), in no particular order (other than the order I put them in):

1. Brooklyn 99: This is my and Sweetie's lunch show. I started watching this and around episode 2 Sweetie got into it and we've worked our way through most of the two seasons available online, watching it while we eat lunch.  While you're obviously supposed to love Andy Samberg's Jake Peralta (and he is funny) I think Andre Braugher's stoic, desperately unhip police captain makes the show:



I loved Andre Braugher on Homicide years ago (and Homicide still has the single best episode of a tv show I've ever seen, the one where Vincent D'Onofrio gets pushed in front of a subway), and he's essentially the same character only in  a wacky precinct. It's awesome.

2. BoJack Horseman: The Boy got me into this show, and while I'm suspect of many of his pop culture choices (21 Jump Street is the funniest movie ever? SERIOUSLY?) he was dead on here.  This is too weird a show to be as touching as it is: BoJack Horseman is a former star of an 80s sitcom just drifting through his days aimlessly, drunk and hoping to get some fame or recognition or respect.  Season 1 followed him as a ghost writer wrote "his" autobiography, and Season 2 shows what happens after the book, which tells all the bad stuff about him, comes out.  There are hilarious comedy bits but this season was also really touching. I didn't think a show about a drunken horse buying a yacht in New Mexico could bring a lump to my throat, but it did.

One of my favorite characters is "Vincent Adultman," who only BoJack Horseman knows the truth about.  See if you can figure out Vincent's secret:




3. The Mindy Project: I love commercials. If it wasn't for commercials, how would a guy like me -- who generally distrusts people and/or society -- find out about stuff? I started watching The Mindy Project because it was advertised all the time on Hulu after it got canceled and then put on Hulu.  I liked Mindy Kaling on The Office so one night when Mr F couldn't sleep I figured what've I got to lose and gave it a shot.  It's surprisingly funny.  The concept is that Mindy, a successful (?) doctor, is semi-obsessed with making her life as much like a romantic comedy as she can, with of course funny if not hilarious results.  The show almost tries too hard to be cute at times, but is rescued by Mindy Kaling, who's funny, and even more so by her foil/love interest, Danny, who's exactly the kind of lunky loveable character that populates rom-coms.




4. Archer: Archer shows how more or less how I have abandoned broadcast TV, as well as being the funniest, smartest, adventure-iest show around.  I am a season behind Archer right now because when I tried to DVR it and watch the latest season, I couldn't really keep up with it. Some didn't tape, and I didn't like having to watch it on the TV in our bedroom (which was where I DVRd it because we can't watch the living room TV, but we never just hang out in our bedroom until the boys have gone to bed, which is almost never -- it's 8:46 on Thursday night right now and I'm sitting in the boys' room waiting for Mr F to fall asleep. He won't fall asleep unless one of us is in the room, so we alternate nights sitting in here.)

Archer ought to need no introduction or explanation by now. Its's both a spy show and a parody of a spy show, full of action that is every bit as cool (and cartoonish) as Mission: Impossible but which also makes fun of spy movies.  And the wordplay and inside jokes; like my prior favorite, Arrested Development, Archer can be watched and rewatched without getting boring, because each time I get some new joke I didn't before.

Plus the show just goes off in these wild directions. For one whole season, the ISIS spy group was trying to work as cocaine dealers and ended up with its accountant being a third-world dictator.  It's that kind of stuff that makes the show extra fun.

The clips are somewhat NSFW:



5. Adventure Time: I'm not actually sure this counts as a sitcom, but I do love it so whatever.  Adventure Time I think is by the guy who also writes Dinosaur Comics, and I learned that Adventure Time is a thing when we were wandering through Toys "R" Us trying to find Star Wars X-Wing Legos for Mr Bunches like 2 years ago.  I saw some "Adventure Time" action figures and had no idea what they were, so I looked them up when I got home, and learned that the show is about some sort of post-apocalyptic world in which a 13-year-old boy and his shapeshifting dog have adventures and fight various monsters to save various princesses.  It's weird and touching and interesting and sometimes funny, but not really laugh out loud funny.  I can only watch 1 or 2 episodes at a time, because they're sort of overwhelming in a way.  It's like a day at an amusement park just after your mom died.  That's the best I can sum it up.



If you like scifi or fantasy, you should definitely watch Adventure Time, especially if you like weird stuff. It looks like a kids' show but it's so definitely not.

Picture of the Day

I don't get to see my grandson all that often, what with taking care of the boys and trying to build a whole new business out of people who sometimes seem to be actively trying to discourage me from using them to build a business, so until this week the last time I saw him was when I babysat him back in May, when he snoozed while Mr Bunches watched TV: 


And then I got to take him swimming this past Sunday. Here he is, ready to go to the pool:


He's only just started crawling.   He crawled about 3 feet to get those snacks, and then flopped once he had them.  He's the laziest baby I've ever seen, although the fact that his Mom and Grandma do everything for him might contribute to that. 

10 Minutes About "Welcome To The Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut

I have the book To Rise Again At A Decent Hour on my Kindle, and having finished Footfall Saturday afternoon (SPOILER ALERT HUMANITY WON), I was looking for something to read today.  To Rise Again was sitting right there but while I am somewhat enjoying the book, it's not compelling.

So I went online to my library to see what was out there to read, and the first thing I found was California, by Eden Lepucki.  People may recognize her as the author who essentially won the writing lottery when Stephen Colbert, as part of Hachette's fight with Amazon, plucked her from obscurity and plugged her book on his show as well as having her on to talk about it.

Sweetie and I talk all the time about how luck plays a huge role in success, probably as much of a role as hard work.  I try not to be bitter about how some people get lucky and I do not, but sometimes it's hard not to be resentful. I won't read The Martian, for example.  It just makes me too mad: I wrote a story about an astronaut alone in space, too, I think, and wonder why The Martian gets made into a movie with Matt Damon while my book sells a copy every three months.

So I wasn't really thinking much about California but there it was, available, and I've wanted to read it: I was in the mood for more end-of-the-world books.  There are post-apocalyptic books a-plenty, but not many apocalyptic books, and Footfall was one of those and so I was in the mood for more read-about-it-while-the-world-is-ending-type stuff.  California isn't quite that, either.  So after I borrowed it, I kept on looking.  I borrowed a new book by Robert Asprin, too, The Adventures of Duncan & Mallory.  He's the guy that wrote the M.Y.T.H. Inc. series that I loved when I was much younger so I thought I'd give him a shot.

But I still wasn't sold, so I kept on looking and I came across Kurt Vonnegut.  Here is how: I started writing a story the other day and on the spur of the moment I decided that the story would be narrated by a ghost.  (It's a post-apocalyptic story, as it turns out.)  So I wrote the first few pages but today I kept thinking that I'd read a story narrated by a ghost before, and I was pretty sure it was a Vonnegut story.  So I googled story narrated by a ghost Vonnegut and found it: Galapagos, Vonnegut's take on Darwinism and evolution, in which the story is told by the ghost of the son of his fictional alter ego (?) Kilgore Trout, and the bad guy is the human brain.

I decided, anyway, to leave my story narrated by a ghost.  Vonnegut didn't patent that.

Galapagos isn't really a book I wanted to read, so I downloaded Welcome to the Monkey House, instead, a collection of the short stories Vonnegut wrote to get the money to pay for writing the novels he wanted to write.  I sometimes think it must have been far easier to be a writer back in the 30s or 40s or 50s, before everything got all splintered by cable and the Internet and Amazon.  But probably it was just as hard in a different way.

Anyway, Vonnegut wrote the introduction to these short stories, and in the preface he said some interesting things.  Things like:

I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.

I liked that, because it reminded me of back when I used to swim for exercise and I loved it because it felt like I was flying.

I began reading it right away. I was in a Vonnegut kind of mood, I guess, but unlike the sad scifi stories I read a while back from Saunders, these were not all sad and didn't depress me.  The stories I have made it through so far are:

Where I Live, which isn't Vonnegut-esque at all; it's kind of the story of a guy who stops by a New England town to sell some encyclopedias, but nothing much happens.  Despite that, the story is interesting and seems to have a momentum all its own, without going anywhere.  I liked it, and it's a good intro to the book.

Harrison Bergeron, which is more like what I expected: it's a terrible (in a good way) story of a future where everyone is noncompetitive, by force: the main character in the story is the father of the title character, and he is a smart man.  So to keep him from being smarter than other people, he must wear an earpiece that blasts a random loud noise into his head every 20 seconds.  He also wears a bag with 47 kg of pellets in it around his neck. Ballerinas wear bags over their faces if they are pretty, and weights to even them out.  In the story, Harrison Bergeron is taken captive because he is so extremely better than the others around him, and he escapes and gets onto the TV show his parents are watching, declaring himself to be the Emperor of humanity.  It ends badly.  The story is astonishing in the way that Vonnegut sometimes is.  It's like a gut punch: so much awfulness instantly and it just seems to keep on radiating out.  I loved it and will probably remember it forever.

I was once asked why I write so many sad stories. I hadn't thought I wrote that many of them, but I guess I do.  I think I write sad stories because it's a way to get out some of the stresses and sadnesses that are hard to express otherwise.  I worry about my boys, and am trying to (re)build a business, and have health concerns, and I want to help the older kids, and if you went around just all the time talking about how worrying those are, if you let the sadness overwhelm you at night as you lay there and try to read, you might never sit up again.  So I let it out in little doses in stories, and that helps me keep the happiness in charge.  I'm actually pretty happy most of the time.  I think it's because the stories I write let me let some of that steam out, relieve the pressure.

If that's true of me, it makes me wonder what was in Kurt Vonnegut that he would be able to write such terrible stories like this.  Here's another quote from his preface:

My only brother, eight years older than I, is a successful scientist. His special field is physics as it relates to clouds. His name is Bernard, and he is funnier than I am. I remember a letter he wrote after his first child, Peter, was born and brought home. “Here I am,” that letter began, “cleaning shit off of practically everything.” My only sister, five years older than I, died when she was forty. She was over six feet tall, too, by an angstrom unit or so. She was heavenly to look at, and graceful, both in and out of water. She was a sculptress. She was christened “Alice,” but she used to deny that she was really an Alice. I agreed. Everybody agreed. Sometime in a dream maybe I will find out what her real name was. Her dying words were, “No pain.” Those are good dying words. It was cancer that killed her. And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: “Here I am cleaning shit off of practically everything” and “No pain.”

Let's finish this on an upbeat note. The other story I read today in the collection was Who Am I This Time? The narrator is a man drafted to direct the local play.  He decides to do A Streetcar Named Desire, and casts the best actor in town, a clerk at the hardware store who is a phenomenal actor but otherwise almost completely nondescript, fading into near nothingness when he is not acting, never mingling with people.  They also cast a beautiful woman who is in town for just 8 weeks, and who cannot act at all -- except when around the clerk.  Of course the woman falls in love with the clerk, but the clerk cannot relate to anyone when he is not acting.

So on the last night of the play, the woman gives the clerk a present: a copy of Romeo & Juliet.  She asks the clerk to read a part to her.  They act out a scene, fall in love, and get married, continuously acting out various romantic plays.

It's both happy and sad, but sad in the good way: it's people who have found a way to prosper in a life that would otherwise be dysfunctional.  Isn't that what we all do? We all have to find a way to fit ourselves into our lives, lives we have sometimes chosen and sometimes stumbled into by luck.  We have to find a way to make what we are fit what we have to be, sometimes.

Who Am I This Time? we might as well be asking ourselves every day -- and the story gives the lesson that rather than taking the role we were thrust into, we could opt to pick a new one for ourselves, and, having leapt into those shoes, walk seven leagues in them.

Why do we tolerate failures all the time in our electronics? (IE the actual email I just sent to Hulu because that company cannot get its act together and simply show me my television shows.)

UPDATE: About 30 minutes after I posted this/emailed them, I got the credit for a month. WOO HOO.


I've said it before and now I will say it again: we put up with a failure/error rate in our computerized stuff that is astonishing.  I bet electronics fail 20% of the time. TWENTY PERCENT. If your car failed twenty percent of the time you would be dead before you could read this. If your house failed 20% of the time you would live in a cave.  
"But Briane electronics are complicated," people say.  Weirdo perverts like Louis CK say we should just be grateful they work at all.  Well, Louis CK The Molester/other people who defend the deplorable state of consumer eletronics: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.  Computers can work right 99.9% of the time.  Do you think NASA's computers fail 1/5 of the time? I doubt it.  Obviously we can make a computer that can do something like stream the television show I am paying you to stream, but we DON'T, and that is why I am frustrated.

And that is the lead-in to the email I just sent Hulu. It had to be written as if I were Sweetie because our Hulu account is under her gmail.  I tried to lighten it up a bit because when I get this annoyed if I don't try to find some humor I get really mean.

The email:

Dear Hulu,
Today, I tried to sit down and watch an episode of "Brooklyn 99" with my husband. We were trying to take a brief break from an otherwise busy day and had about 1/2 hour to do so. 

We made it about 1/3 of the way through the program when that idiotic commercial with the thick bacon came on.  First off, this commercial is stupid and people who go crazy over bacon are stupid.  Secondly, this commercial is also dumb because it shows 10 seconds of a bacon commercial with two freaky looking strips of dried pig flesh talking about their body image, and then 'invites' me to 'learn what happened' by clicking to some other website. WHO WOULD WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED? These slices of bacon, and apparently bacon is female?, are barely introduced to us, and I have no emotional investment in their dilemma.  Perhaps with a bit more plot development or characterization I might care, but as it is, the commercial is simply annoyingly coy about this and it bothers me that they are attempting to divert my attention from Andy Samberg's show.

As if that were not bad enough, the commercial kept jamming up the computer; as soon as it ended, I got that screen that says Hulu is unable to show ads on my computer.  This is obviously false because I just watched an ad, if you could call it that because it was so bad.

This happened four times in a row until we had to give up on the commercial.  So much for our fun lunch! I would like you to remove the ad and also give me a free month's worth of subscription by giving me $8.  I will send you my paypal address to do so.

Thank you,

This won't end happily for Hulu.  I'm getting that eight bucks. And THAT will teach them not to mess with ME.

Friday Five: Five "Foods" That Are In My House Right Now, And Stuff About Them.

In the summer, I take every other Friday off to spend time with the boys and do summer-y stuff.  This is one of those days.  We're waiting for Sweetie to get home from her extreme workout session before we leave, which is why I have time to kill taking pictures of the "food" in my house.  Also, we recorded a very informative video about the solar system that I will probably debut tomorrow.

Here's the "Food!":

1. Gummi Krabby Patties:




A gummi candy modeled after Sponge Bob's Krabby Patties.  True fact: Mr Bunches liked Spongebob for a while when he was younger and for about two years he thought hamburgers were actually called "krabby patties."  Another fun fact: these are surprisingly good.  I don't particularly like gummi candy, but whenever Mr Bunches won't eat a batch of these (he is picky about textures and if they're a little stale he won't come near them) I "have to" finish them.  I like 'em.  I took a bunch to my office and put them in my candy vase, and the other lawyers ate them up in about 4 hours.   
2. Bologna: 
Bologna is my second-favorite lunchmeat, right behind liverwurst, which we didn't have right now. We don't buy liverwurst every week because it's superexpensive, especially compare to bologna, which is about 99 cents a ton.  


When we were kids my mom used to make fried bologna from the ring, fried up in butter with onions.  I still make that sometimes even though I am the only one in my family who will eat it.  
3. Frosted Mini-Wheats:

On a not-completely-unrelated follow-up to that last part, remember back when I had my heart attack? I had to talk to a nutritionist because hospitals have this thing where they want you to NOT keep coming back for emergency surgery even though if we were all healthy they'd be out of business DID THEY EVER THINK OF THAT? 
Anyway, the nutritionist suggested that I substitute frosted mini-wheats for snack chips, and I have done that pretty successfully: right now in our house we have an entire case of Doritos (courtesy of a client of mine who WORKS FOR FRITO-LAY I HIT THE JACKPOT) plus a bag of "Funyuns" which would have made it into this post but I haven't opened them yet, even though they have been in our house for nearly 24 hours.  
I like the frosted mini-wheats enough that I don't even hold it against them that they were recalled in 2012 for possibly containing metal shavings in them.  Have you ever noticed that almost no junk food ever poses a direct health hazard? Nearly every vegetable has caused a salmonella or e. coli outbreak.  Fruits are made up of 100% spiders. Kale was perfected by Hitler. Etc.  But when's the last time you heard of someone dying of Cheetos? NEVER. Unless you count someone getting murdered over a dispute about Cheetos, which is not an argument against Cheetos, it's an argument against ever being around other people.  
4. Cap'n Crunch:


Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch is actually my favorite.  I like it not just because it tastes delicious, but because it exemplifies everything I think is awesome/lamentable about modern society: We take a peanut, and grind it up into tiny powder, and then mix it with chemicals and then put it through a series of industrial processes to shape it into a fake peanut.
HUMANITY: 1, NATURE: 0.  Probably the score is more lopsided than that.  
I don't have Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch right now, and technically the Cap'n Crunch shown here is not a regular one; it's one of the ones that comes mixed in with the box of Crunchberries.  Mr Bunches likes the berries in Crunch Berries, but not the crunches.  I'm not sure what he disliked about them.  He tried to eat one to earn a star so he could buy a toy [when he wants to buy toys he has to earn 9 stars, which he can do through various tasks/challenges] and he managed to get it into his mouth and chew it but then he gagged and had to spit it out and drink about a gallon of milk.  He got his star.
So he picks the berries out, leaving all the crunches.  So I take the leftover crunches and put them in a box and eat them for cereal.  It's the circle of life.  
"So just buy him that All-Berries cereal," you're probably saying.
PRO TIP: When someone deals with a situation regularly and spells out a problem to you, if you can think of a potential solution to that problem in 0.0000001 seconds, assume that the other person has also thought of it.  Whatever you came up with instantaneously has probably occurred to that other person in the years they have been dealing with the problem, don't you think?  Like the time we were at our in-laws with Mr F, and he wanted some cheese puffs, and I tried to get him to eat them out of the bag because he was suspicious of bowls back then, and he wouldn't, and he dumped them onto the couch.  As I pushed them onto a paper towel to try to have some semblance of clean, my sister-in-law said: "Have you thought about giving him a bowl?"
WHAT? WHAT DEVILTRY ARE YOU SPEAKING OF WOMAN? What is this bowl you talk of? Some miraculous new contraption of science? I must learn more of this thing!
The reason we don't buy the All Berries is because that is not how Mr Bunches started eating Crunch Berries, and so he won't switch. We've tried. He won't touch them. It doesn't matter that they're the same berry.  And they probably don't taste the same: I'm of the opinion that the berries in Crunch Berries taste different because they are packaged with the crunches, and so the flavors mingle a bit, while the All Berries is more of a pure crunchberry flavor, suitable for purists.
5. Oreos.


We have Oreos in our house because Mr F likes the middles.  And also so that late at night I can feel a little hungry and open up the cupboard and see them and think "I'll have just one," and then eat 7 of them in a row before forcing myself to go upstairs and try to get to sleep, vowing that tomorrow for sure I'll start dieting or something.  It's an almost-nightly ritual.
We're working on Mr F at least depositing the Oreo shells on the table:

Did you know that Oreos were a knockoff product? It's true: They were the Mr Pibb to Hydrox cookies' Dr Pepper, so to speak.  The current design of the Oreo was done by William Turnier, in 1952.  Or at least he is who is generally given credit.  Nabisco won't officially say it was him.  That is the biggest miscarriage of justice since the guy who invented the Doritos Locos Taco got the shaft: Todd Mills came up with the idea and sent a letter to Frito-Lay in 2009. They rejected the plan, and then made it anyway.  Mills never got any money, and died on Thanksgiving 2013.  He was like a modern-day John Harrison. Of tacos. 

The Clone Wars: Amidala needs to eat a sandwich.

Andrew Leon at StrangePegs and The Armchair Squid are running "The Clone Wars Project," blogging about each episode of The Clone Wars' animated TV series.  They're way ahead of me; I'm only up to Episode 4. 

Episode 4: "Destroy Malevolence." I think the thing that stood out most for me in this episode is how much I'm beginning to dislike this animation.  It was Padme Amidala that did it for me.  Amidala looks like this in the movies:



But like this in The Clone Wars:

I get that it's an animation style, and a style it is, but not one I like.  I haven't yet gotten used to Obi Wan's weird beard:

Looking like it's made of wood, but this episode was the worst: Amidala looks skeletal, anorexic, sickly.  And weird.  It's like a walking stick put on human skin and then was animated.  It really bothered me throughout the episode, to a distracting degree.
The story itself was what I think of now as a prototypical Star Wars story: The Empire has a giant death machine of some sort, and Alliance has to destroy it, but first there are some adventures to get there, and then there's some sort of personal excursion into the death machine.  Star Wars has perfected that formula, and this episode hits all the marks.  It almost felt like it was a Star Wars knock off or mashup:  Instead of Han Solo having to fly through an asteroid field and avoid a giant space worm, Anakin must fly through a nebula filled with giant sting-ray-ish things.  Instead of the Death Star, there's the giant Star Destroyer Malevolence.  Obi Wan, Anakin, and the two droids sneak onto the ship while it's temporarily destroyed, reminiscent of the Death Star raid in the first movie.  Where A New Hope had Darth Vader bearing down on Luke at the climactic scene, General Grievous was bearing down on Anakin here at the end. 
Mostly, this episode felt lazy. It wasn't terrible but there was nothing too compelling about it, either. There wasn't any real character development, the action felt been there done that (and a bit of a foregone conclusion; for some reason, I never really doubted that they would destroy Malevolence. Hmmm.
Anyway, it wasn't boring enough to make me quit, but it was the weakest episode so far.  And to harp on it some more, I do wish they'd change the animation.  Bad artistry is too distracting from the storyline.  While I was watching it, I kept thinking back to the few comic book artists whose styles I knew by sight.  There was George Perez, who was my favorite:

I always favored the more realistic-ish artists, who didn't overly bulk their superheroes but also made them more or less lifelike.

But I could handle the more stylized art of Jack Kirby:


Which while not as realistic, at least wasn't distracting, and for certain comics (like Thor) the style worked really well.
Then there was the one I hated: Keith Giffen.  Giffen started out okay:


But as his style got simpler and more stylized, I liked it less and less:

 to the point where eventually I wouldn't buy comics drawn by Giffen. 
The art in The Clone Wars isn't that bad, but it's awfully close.

Daisies? I think they're daisies. Doesn't matter. Move on. (Picture of the Day)