Strictly business

Feeling soft. Girls touching me. Telling me I am this. Telling me I am that. Looking away. Well, that last part is nothing new. Remembering how nice girls are like space aliens. Unusual and bizarre. Thinking about Monday's ghastly experiment in which I tried to EXPRESS MY FEELINGS through music I wrote. Never again. From here forth it is back to business. Strictly business. In music as in all things. T'ings. Tongs. Ting a tong along...

Foggy memories

My sister told me some stuff today that I did not know regarding the evacuation from Laos. I have some foggy memories from the story having heard it a few times as a young person, but I have sketchy memories of the events.

The day we left Laos our mother showed up at our school in the middle of the day. She told the vice-principal that she was taking us to a dentist's appointment.

That part of the story I do remember. The teacher in my first grade class (Mrs. Coleman) was handed a slip of paper, and she called my name, saying (with a curious look in her face) to report to the vice-principal's office.

There was no dentist's appointment. My father had somehow gotten word that the Americans were soon to be evacuated from the country, and that we in particular should leave Laos immediately. Our mother then got us out of school early and drove us home, where we made hasty preparations to have the household furnishings shipped to the states. This shipment included, among other things, the Baldwin Acrosonic upright piano at which I would learn to play.

The piano and all our stuff (as my mother would often mention) would travel over desert sands by camel caravan at some point on the journey.

The drive home from school was not without indicent. We drove through the center of Vientiane, where a large group of people had gathered to either protest something or maybe to presage the impending invasion of Laos by the communists.

Whoever they were, this mob of people saw us and did not like us. They pounded on the windows of our car, surrounding the vehicle and rocking it as my mother gingerly drove through.

We got back to the house. I remember entering my room and finding a large wooden crate. I pitched anything I could get my hands on into the crate as my sister did the same in her room and as my mother did throughout the house.

The furniture and large objects were tagged for movers to pick up after we left.

I clearly remember that we had to leave the enormous stereo system in the living room. That was where I listened, countless numbers of times, to Elton John's "Caribou" album, Leon Russell's "All That Jazz," and Edgar Winter Group's "Shock Treatment." Those LP records sit on my shelves to this day.

Our early departure from the country conflicts with one of my memories of the event. I thought we were the absolute last Americans to get out of there. In fact we may have been the very first, and we had the large ferry across the Mekong all to ourselves, with plenty of room for our car and as many crates of belongings as we could assemble in such short order.

We spent three days in what I only know as "the General's trailer," located on the Thailand side of the Mekong. I do not know the General's identity or why we had exclusive access to a private residence of such a high ranking officer.

I remember that trailer, though in my memory it was, for some reason, in Tampa, not Thailand. There is a mental association between that trailer on the Mekong and a house we stayed in for a few days in Tampa when we landed there months later. The house in Tampa had a similar layout as the trailer, I think. And it had a television, which we had not seen for 2 years. Bill Cosby was on the TV.

The three day head start ultimately gave us no advantage in getting ourselves stateside before the rest. But it let us get our house full of belongings out of the country and shipped to an air base in the U.S. Most of the Americans in Laos had to abandon their houses and everything in them.

On our third day in the trailer the rest of the Americans were evacuated from Laos, and we joined them at the Chau Pia hotel (no idea if I'm spelling that right) in Bangkok. That part of the adventure has many vivid memories for me, but the strange fun today was in filling in the rest of the experience, reviving and clarifying some foggy memories along the way.

I can see myself forgetting the mob of people shaking and pounding on our car. I would forget that not because of fear or trauma, but because of my 1st grade inability to comprehend what was happening.

I do not know that my behaviour ever manifested these inclinations, but I remember arriving at school in Tampa feeling like some sort of royalty. Having been individually plucked from school that day and virtually escorted from Laos under U.S. Military protection I guess I imagined myself something special. I have foggy memories of either being excused from or thinking I should be excused from a certain 3rd or 4th grade course by virtue of the advanced courses I already took at the American School of Vientiane. I forget how that worked out.

Roger Clemens opened the Floodgates

Roger Clemens has opened the floodgates of government inquiry into his life and the lives of everyone he has known. There is no players union, there is no arms-length Mitchell report. The FBI can subpoena anyone it wants, and those who lie go to jail.

Baseball's house of cards is coming down, and Roger Clemens will be to blame. I look for Roger The Dodger to pull an O.J. drama move.

First Customer of the Day

Today was strange. Everything seemed to go well. I felt good, which was surprising because I basically drank all freakin' day yesterday.

I set to work on a web project I've worked on for a few months. Everything came easy this time. All the mod_rewrite crap, the search engine, even the file system I planned early on seems to work mostly as expected.

In between each of the day's tiny administrative triumphs I went to the piano and worked on that A Flat Minor thing started yesterday. It's got some distance to go but it was cool to re-visit it today and find that it still sounded interesting.

Who can explain the highs and lows? I would not want to explain it even if I thought I could. Today was not exactly a high but after last week it seemed like it.

I was completely dead inside for a few days last week. I felt like nothing, and to be nothing would have come as a relief. Days like these come and go but the disabling feelings of depression hadn't been that strong since the corporate youth days.

Who cares.

....

The morning today was wasted, but it was a fun way to waste a couple of hours. I started writing a word-of-the-day thing about the word "Chickasaw." I have never been much for native American lore but I know that the Chickasaw were a distinct peoples.

I know this because I attended summer camp as a grade-schooler from 1978 to 1980, and at those summer camps the kids were grouped in "tribes." My first year at camp I was in the Chickasaw tribe.

I found a web site for alumni of that summer camp. The site is filled with pictures from the 1970s, and I spotted myself in one of those pictures.

I got too distracted to finish the Chickasaw story, which will talk about the sound of that word versus the sound of the names of the other tribes.

The other day I spotted "Town Car" and started writing an essay about that car name. I changed my mind when I couldn't find any one story to focus on. "Town Car," could be the title of my father's biography, though, and I could fill many screens with my observations on his relationship with his car.

....

That web project I polished off today is a searchable version of Webster's 1828 English Dictionary. The Webster's 1828 is considered by some to be the finest English dictionary ever published. Religious fundamentalists like that dictionary because it cites more scripture than any other dictionary.

Today my 1828 site got its first-ever visitor. Someone found the site by typing "Webster's 1828 Dictionary" into a search engine.

This person looked up several words: Divine. God. Holy. Jesus. If their search terms were any indication then this person seemed to fit the profile of an 1828 Webster's reader.

After looking up several words from biblical verses this person surprised me by looking up FIRE FART.

Fire Fart? Is that from scripture? Is that some Cotton Mather apocalyptic preaching?

I only watch hit reports that closely while working on a new site. I watch the access_log for errors. Today a live person wandered in.

For me that's a really cool thing to set up a new site and be tailgazing when the first visitor arrives.

It reminds me of a time a friend and I road-tripped to Cape Cod. We found a resturant that looked OK, and we stepped in a few minutes after 12 noon.

The place was empty except for 3 or 4 employees, every last one of whom looked at my friend and me with obvious shock and bewilderment. It was a strange welcome, but the mood quickly turned normal and we ordered lunch.

We paid our bill and the waitress laughed, telling us that the place had just opened for business for the first time at 12 noon. We were the first customers ever to enter the place. It was a new building, a new business, a new place. And we were the first customers ever.

My first customer of the today ordered Divine, Holy, Jesus, and a Fire Fart.

Snot shakers

Aha. A company called "Movers, not Shakers", ends up with an unfortunate web address that some would pronounce thus: Mover Snot Shakers dot com.

Lies

Sitting at a Starbucks, thinking I will stay here at this table for the remainder of the year.

I found myself surprisingly wrapped up in the Roger Clemens nonsense yesterday. I was neither fan nor foe of the pitcher, but it interests me when people of great accomplishment in life crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Among a certain sphere of influence Clemens is regarded as an icon, but the icon himself has put nothing less than his legacy at stake by campaigning to the highest thresholds of power.

Everybody involved lied. The congresspeople and senators lied just by being there, their august presence infusing this trivial situation with preposterous significance.

I found the situation with Clemens' wife to be telling. She got an HGH injection from Roger's trainer and soon started complaining about side effects. In testimony Roger claimed to have been angry about his wife being injected without him knowing about it. He was never angry enough, apparently, to confront his trainer about it, nor was he concerned enough about his wife's side-effects to call a doctor or do a damn thing.

To me the scenario suggests that Roger had to have told his wife that these side-effects are normal and will pass -- and who but Roger would know better?

He couldn't take her to an emergency room because that would draw headlines.

Life is filled with High-profile liars. Clarence Thomas. Oliver North. Bill Clinton. I listened to the hearings yesterday and imagined myself in Clemens' (or Pettitte's) position, imagining how I would try to direct the questions toward my prepared answers. Clemens had no skill at that, while Clinton was the master.

Clemens bluntly ignored questions outright and launched into platitudes and retrospective summaries of his life and times, while Clinton turned questions to his advantage with magnificently nuanced haiku.

Lies are cultural. The drug dealer culture (alluded to in yesterday's hearings) is filled with lies and nuanced euphemisms. Burton, the representative from Indiana, has made headlines and soundbytes aplenty with his non-sequitor pomposinations about McNamee's past lies, safely avoiding the truth he seems to have told yesterday. That type of obfuscation is, I think, a lie.

Cling on

Sitting at a Starbucks, reflecting on the abundance of human contact I have had so far this day. A direct conversation with the landlord, friendly banter with someone at the next table here at the coffee shop, and substantive phone conversations with my accountant in Florida regarding my father's final taxes.

Completing that set of taxes has dragged on largely because of the accountant's very limited availability, though my own apathy about the matter has some play. It's just paperwork at this point, and there has been no urgency driving me to nag the accountant since 6 months ago when I sent him a large batch of papers.

I did go through the motions of nagging the guy, but it was genuinely pointless.

Going to my 181 today to see what other tax-related paperwork awaits. I have not visited the 181 in a while, but any time I do I remember how it used to be located 4 or 5 feet to the right of where it is today. They renovated the post office space to make room for a passport counter, moving my 181 and surround boxes several feet to the left.

Having received mail there for about 15 years when this shift happened I found it disconcerting, and I still do.

A similar thing happened in Tampa. I don't remember how old I was when the postal service changed our zip code from 33612 to 33613. That must have been 25 years ago but to this day I still have to correct myself when addressing letters to Tampa. I specifically mumble to myself "It's not 33612 any more. Add one. 33612 + 1 = 33613."

Maybe it's OCD, or maybe it's a way of clinging to the past.