Hey

Hey! What's going on? Lissen up.

Brandi started counting calories. I did, too. I'm a follower. Almost immediately, I realized I was taking in a lot more than I thought I was, back when I wondered why I wasn't losing weight. Now I know why Subway doesn't show Jared eating that three pack of chocolate chip cookies. Now that I'm not just exercising to lose weight, I can focus on the marathon.

Hey.

Yeah, October will come all too soon if I don't start ramping up my mileage. Luckily, this time, I'm almost as ahead of the game as my sister Heather is on everything else. Last week, I ran 9 miles. You're supposed to ramp up by about a mile a week. I have 29 weeks. Possibly, I may be able to scale up more slowly than my first and only marathon.

Hey.

...is for horses, Brandi's most lovable bit when we drive along country roads. When she spots a bale, she points. "Hay!" she says, but it's not as funny typed. Try it with your friends.

Hey.

...makers are what boxers use to punch each other out. I feel that way in the morning. I try to tell myself I'm drinking that Diet Coke at 9:00 AM because it tastes so good. Who am I kidding? Caffeine is bad for you unless you have the genes to clear it out of your system. I have no idea if I have the genes. I don't smoke and drink in moderation. Can someone tell me how I can steer clear of an early grave and chug away at sweet things and not gain weight? Also, let me know if I'm asking too much.

Hey.

T. Hate is for losers. I try to keep a good attitude, but work sometimes gets me down, particularly when I feel a boss or co-workers lie to me. I'll probably blog more about this as I'm able to pull away more from it. Suffice it to say, if I had the opportunity to quit my job, pretend to be a gay hairdresser and tour around the country for the next six months giving, you know, "flamboyant" advice to straight women about their hair for a $50,000 paycheck, I'd do it. Which is why it's funny that I'm auditioning for just such a role on Tuesday. Time to bone up on my Sean Hayes impersonation. This may be a bit of a stretch for me. Forgive me, Brandi, for I may have to leave the wedding ring on the keychain this time. I hope next time the American Psychiatry Association has people giving out hilarious Lucy-style psychiatric advice in the style of Niles Crane. I can do a David Hyde Pierce.

Hey.

...beas corpus. Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum. Help, I am being held against my will in my job and my apartment. I want to live in a nice place and sleep for money, but apparently there's no money in being lazy, and I'm just going to have to toe the line until I can come up with the one thing everyone needs, nobody has, somebody can't market, and Microsoft can't co-opt. It might be an uphill battle.

I'm breaking out of the mold, though. I wear sneakers to work. I used RealVNC to access my Unix-based, elegantly interfaced at-home Mac mini from work. Technology is like growing extra arms; it's great until you get to the pits. Buying a car helped. Having a bicycle helps more, or would if I could just get my butt in gear and fix my flat. My cell phone doubles as a computer, and has more processing power than the one I owned ten years ago and a screen resolution just under half what I owned when I first went to college. Sprint, when you sold me the data plan, y'all got served.

Hey.

Rrrr. It's time to shave. I've got hair coming out of every pore on my face and an audition on Tuesday that I don't want to walk into as Harvey Fierstein. Time to get rid of the steel wool. I'll miss the maturity it gave me. I keep catching my eye in plate glass windows, somber, sober, bits of gray under my chin reminding me, "You're old. Eventually, you'll die, but before then, you'll turn into a fleshy raisin." Thanks, beard. On top, the advance of gray has slowed to a crawl. I feel a very mild betrayal coming from my body, like asking for a Gatorade and receiving a Propel. Sure, it's a little better for you, but, man, it's not what I asked for. My shoulders seem to have grown hair in sympathy. This may be the first summer I wax for the beach. The pain doesn't bother me, just the shame. Should I get one of those big sticks you can attach to an electric razor to shave your back? Or just wear a t-shirt and intimate I forgot to do my situps? Choices...

Hey.

...lows and pretty little angel wings, my comedy students are starting to enjoy class, which is great because I'm going to start kicking their butts. I teach ComedySportz 202, scenic study. After a boring beginning last week where I talked way too much, this week went a lot better, with more scenes, more action, more living examples of what it means to bring something to the table when you write and act simultaneously.

I read an article about younger folks making more demands when they start jobs. More vacation, more pay, more opportunities for promotion, and if they don't get it, they walk. All well and good, but what does it really mean? More excuses to live with Mom and Pop, waiting for the perfect opportunity. I dig boldness, yeah, but too much reads as arrogance. Sometimes you've just got to bite the bullet and take the best thing you can get. Do I sound like a spoiled white collar, white American with a bachelor's in drinking? Bite me. I did my time in food service. I might again, just to show those young non-bearded, non-graying schmucks. Want some attitude with your latte?

Hey.

Z. Purple haze. My calluses are coming in again for guitar. Before I started playing, I always thought you got calluses on your strumming hand. Funny how you just assume it's the more active one. Wire strings hurt. I'm starting in on bar chords, but they are really touch and go. My incentive: "Puff the Magic Dragon". Start in G, go to B min, C, back to G, A7, D7, G again. That first switch usually takes me a couple of minutes to get right. I want to get to the point where I can play it and not have the eight year olds I'm hypothetically supposed to be entertaining wandering off to see if their college loans are in order. Funny how I always wanted to play guitar, you know, without all that rigamarole of learning how to do it. It's the allure of the Matrix. Sure, machines took over the scorched earth, turned people into batteries, kept everybody alive by liquifying the dead and feeding them back to the living and trapped everybody in a bottle reality that looks suspiciously like an idealized Chicago. Keanu Reeves learned kung fu in, like, three seconds. Wish they'd downloaded an acting program.

Cheap shot, sorry, couldn't resist. Pure jealousy, Keanu. Now that Hugo Weaving, on the other hand...

Hey.

...zel eyes. What can be prettier? My wife has big, brown, beautiful eyes and looks like a movie star. She's stunning and nothing drives me nuts faster than anyone disparaging her inner and outer beauty, not least of all, her. What beasts lurk in our subconscious? Wicked, wicked beasts, always looking to tear us down. Do I look fat in this blog?

Hey.

...drian's Wall, the northernmost line separating Roman incursion into Great Britain, now, more or less, the line between England and Scotland. Mason Dixon of its day. The line between you and me, barbarians and civilization. Do the haters win when we close all our borders down and stop trying to meddle in the dark corners of the world? Are they winning already?

Hey.

..des, I'm running out of words, and time, and brown hair, and patience for people too clever by half. Play well with each other. It's a cold world out there, but, thanks to oil addiction and carbon emissions, getting warmer. Scientists agree: it's going to be an interesting future. Watch out. It's happening now. And now. And now.

Yes.

Now.

This is dumb, but...

...isn't it ironic that there's a "fist" in "pacifist"?

The point is that it doesn't use it.

ComedySportz Costume Contest

ComedySportz held rehearsal for new hires tonight, hosted by the second-to-newests. We each took a number - one through four - on the way in and divided into four groups. We then competed in a series of contests. First, we picked names. Ones became "Tramp-o-Lean", twos "TwosDaze with Morrie", threes "Helluva Fighter" and fours (my team) "Jaywalkers". Threes won that round, though there were many more after, including team cheers (two did human pyramids, us included), team logo, and - pictured here - team costume. ComedySportz and our second-to-newest facilitators provided the materials: markers, red, white and blue tissue paper, aluminum foil, tape and the bag to hold it all in. You can see from the picture two teams used their Office Depot bags as diapers. After costumes came eight sealed challenges. Congratulations to Tramp-o-Lean for taking the championship and to our daring models Ric Walker, Tim Whetham, Scot Goodhart and Zach Thompson. The push-ups are payin
g off!

Chunks Blown

I had a bad show last night. Everything but Rap Line started with a whimper and went downhill from there. My third show of three this week and the first since last week that I didn't ref. Don't get me wrong. I kind of blew chunks when I refereed the ComedySportz Training Center 303s and 404s, but the best-worst thing about reffing is knowing that, even if you f'd up, you've got half a million more words until the end of the show to redeem yourself. In the Sunday show, I completely blanked on explaining "Growing/Shrinking Machine". I've got a shoebox full of excuses, not least of which was an ambitious game lineup I that felt less like a solid show than trying to shoehorn two shows in one. So I got the suggestion and let 'er rip. Cap'n Alice, improv trooper that she was, played along, starting the scene out. Each person after shouted "freeze", entering the scene and thereby starting a new scene based on everybody's position... like "Freeze Tag" but with numerical constraints. When all the players are tagged in, the last player shouts, "Freeze" or finds a way to exit and the scenes return in reverse order. See? I can explain it. Except that I didn't and just admitted it to the crowd, saying, "Sorry. Well, you know what it is now. If anybody has any questions, see me after the show."

You don't get that chance as a player.

Every couple of weeks, the artistic direction at ComedySportz changes emphasis. Environment was being pushed two weeks ago. Now, it's want. Characters have an inner monologue that we as an audience only hear when the keyboard ramps up and the players burst into song. As a character last night, I had no want except for quiet, a want which all-too-easily reflected my own sleepiness when I got to the theatre, but which was hard to get amidst the spectacle and fake "I'm gonna punch you so hard your mama's gonna feel it" atmosphere of improv competition.

And you know what's funny? That's not even a counterproductive want for the show. The other team captain, Mike underplayed much of the show to brilliant effect. Challenged to come up with something more battle worth than Rocks-Paper-Scizzors, he brought out the Fluffy Chick... of Death. Then, when two thirds of the audience wasn't paying attention, he stomped on it. The final third fell in love then, and I can't say I blame them. Buster Keaton underplays well. He invested in situations that at time risked life and limb - see: house falling on, window in the right place, saved by - but it didn't play on his face. The trick is to hang back, ready to strike like the coiled cobra. Slumping in the corner like an understuffed owl just does not cut it.

I am proud of winning Rap Line, though. There aren't many words that rhyme with "Ferrari". I'll post the near-winning rhyme, umm, later. Everybody needs a mystery, even an understuffed own.

Live from Kol Ami

Brandi as Vashti, in her solo singing debut. Gershwin is the theme of Purim this year and as you can see, everybody went all-out. Well, kind of high school all-out, but the theme is there. The fellow in the Lone Ranger mask is playing Haman, the bad guy of the story, who wants to kill all of the Jews. You boo when you hear his name.

The performers cleverly adapted the lyrics to George and Ira Gershwin classics. I wish I knew more George and Ira Gershwin classics. Performances went from "really great try" to "well, okay, that was amazing; I wish the microphone hadn't cut out" and everywhere in between. Brandi was, of course, stunning.

As you can tell from the quality, I took these pictures with my cameraphone in the sanctuary. I hope I didn't break any rules doing so. I consider tacit permission given, since they asked me and another guy named Matt to videotape the proceedings, and of course they didn't specifically forbid photos.

If you found me tomorrow, struck by lightning, you'll know which deity to haul in for questioning.

Ticktockman

My watch reads March 17th, but I think it's getting ambitious. I don't know why it reset itself, but we had a thunderstorm last night and maybe my wrist got struck by lightning, just a little.

I had a tough time getting up this morning. All the flashes and booming sounded like somebody targeted Chicago for an airstrike. All the red states finally decided to gang up and get rid of those pesky blues dotting the edges of the map. The madness spreads until it becomes the de facto status quo, and that's just way too much Latin for anyone.

I meant to swim this morning. Nothing doing. It felt too good to lay in bed for the extra hour. Rather than do work today, I learned how to count to thirty-one on one hand. It's actually pretty easy if you do it in binary. Add another hand and you can count to more than a thousand. You have to have pretty flexible fingers to do it, but you can do it.

I played referee at a ComedySportz show last night. I kept forgetting key elements, like how the players were going to play their games. I blame it on a pre-emptive lightning strike on my brain. The best improv feels like surfing the information pool in your brain. The worst feels like you got caught in the eddies and all your paddling just gets you more tangled in the rushes. Also, it makes your metaphors really intricate. Twice in the last month, I've found myself in scenes trying to remember what Dean Kamen invented that was supposed to revolutionize the world of transportation by zipping people around on two self-balancing wheels. Hint: not a bicycle. Second hint: it's a Segway. Third hint: get a bicycle.

Last November, I wrote a novel called "Greater Than". It still needs finishing, but one of the characters deliberately downs aspartame to make himself more stupid and to drown out the voices of an alien consortium controlling him and the destiny of humankind. I think a lot of novel writing is wishful thinking, but that might be wishful thinking.

In a moment of panic last night, I thought I had a second ComedySportz show, so after my first show I dropped Brandi off at her rehearsal and zipped back up to the theatre. My friend and fellow performer Tara showed up to ref and I wish I could say we had a ref off, but I just left to hit the Target.

Tara is amazing. When she plays games she's just great. When she screws up she's even better. I use her as my gold standard for why failure should not bother you. Audiences love it when you a) acknowledge that what they saw and what you saw were both out of whack with what you intended and b) get over yourself and play to your strengths. Speaking of strengths, the hilarious thing about Tara is that, maybe sixty percent of the time she does an impression of everybody's dropped-out-of-high-school uncle, with a voice that sounds like she drinks a case of beer to fall asleep and a half a pack of cigarettes to wake up. You can see her face in the dictionary next to, "Heeeeeeyyyyyyyyy!" Thirty percent of the time, she sounds like a grandmother who has been carefully preserved in Oil of Olay and makes cooing sounds at each and every precious widdle thing you do. "Isn't that the most precious thing?" she'll say and then pile on the hugs. Ten percent of the time she sounds like Kathleen Turner, you know, when she was awesome, which is hot.

So, off to Target I went, where I tried to take a picture of our car, parked opposite another Scion XA, Scion a Scion, battle to the death, or at least better gas mileage. I couldn't get a good angle. You have to picture it. It's amazing. Some day, I need to get a wide angle lense for my cameraphone, or turn my eyes into cameras like they promised us all the Cyberpunk street punks would get in any William Gibson novel. Someday.

I take comfort in the knowledge that my watch will get there first.

The War on Pants

One and a half miles in the pool. Sixty laps in fifty-seven minutes. The chlorine doesn't bleach my hair so much as make it feel like a mass of wool dipped in tar. The Damen bus skipped right past me at Polk. I ran three blocks to catch up to it at Malcolm X college, trying not to feel too bad if I didn't. I assume I could fit in just fine at the MX campus. I'm white but I have soul.

I still feel fat.

Six miles on a treadmill on Wednesday. Twenty more to go before the long run is long enough for October. January second, my co-worker Nick signed up for the Chicago marathon. I waited until July last year. Registration closes at 40,000 runners, so the deadline is flexible, kinda. I needed a paycheck for the ninety bucks it costs to sign up. I missed it by a week. They won't catch me flat footed this year. Pun not intended. I signed up two months ago.

Another co-worker, Alicia, sees me in the hallway. "Did you gain weight?" she asks, perfectly innocently. "I mean, you look good..." Brandi promises to kill her.

I joined a gym. Two gyms, actually. The YMCA gives me a place to play racquetball with my honey, run, lift weights, do the elliptical trainer, hum along with the Village People song and feel bad for the residents who probably don't think it's all that fun to stay there, all close to home. After work, I can walk down to the University gym, which I joined almost the same time I signed up for the marathon, and swim to my heart's content in the 75 yard pool. Wintertime, not as many people feel like dipping a toe in so I usually get a lane to myself. Other swimmers make me competitive. How dare the guy in the Hulk underoos swim trunks flip kick faster than me? I answer by speeding up. I work up the water-analog of a good sweat. Another facility on West Campus gives me choice and a slightly longer pool. New facility on top of the old tennis courts Brandi and I used to sneak onto until they started padlocking them and almost as an afterthought tearing them down. Soon, I won't have to get too worked up to get my worked out.

That's soon. Last week, I bruised my waist on my old pants. I just could not believe how big my waist had gotten and how quickly.

We bought a car. I got depressed on night and ate almost an entire Jewel big cookie, a cookie about the size of a medium pizza, with frosting. I eat cookies or cake after every lunch. You don't have to be too religious to see that some things happen for a reason.

Still, tonight I swam a mile and a half. It's a start. As that weird Mortal Kombat guy who could morph into all the other characters except Goro said, "Finish him."

By him, I mean "it". And by "it" I mean, "getting healthy" and also "the Chicago Marathon: opening salvo in the war on pants".

Face Junk

Other than not being Jewish, I still have a chance of being buried in a Jewish cemetary. One of the prerequisites is no tattoos. Piercings, I don't know. I have a few scars from whittling, stage combat, and blood donations - never at the same time - but other than that, I'm clean of markings that don't wash off. I always wanted a tattoo. Somehow, I can't embrace the permanence of it. What I like in the morning I hate by nightfall; putting any one piece of art on my body means I have to stare at it when I get out of the shower, every single damn day, or at least the days I bathe. I have thought about drawing something. Speaking less charitably than usual, most tattoos are skin cartoons. Artists draw lines then fill them in with color (sometimes). I can draw cartoons. I have a friend who draws them professionally - and, yes, I can see the logical fallacy in this as, said the allergic-to-seafood man, "I have a friend who ate thirty pounds of shrimp; anything he can do, I can do better..." I've worked as a graphic designer and I have the talent of a Schulz but the temper of a Dali. I can't let my skin will mock me.

I can stand tattoos on other people, even the wrong tattoos for the right reason. For instance, everybody gets Asian symbols. I think it's a rule for anyone who has ever gone skydiving. What makes kanji so much better than our alphabet? Do Japanese kids get the word "yeah!" tattooed on their shoulder blades? On second thought, probably yes. I mean, "Yeah!" My friend Fred has two Japanese symbols inked into his skin, one for either shoulder, and, no, I don't remember what they stand for and don't know enough Japanese to guess just by looking. I like Fred's tattoos. He got them at a time when his life was descending into / recovering from chaos and I think they centered him. But even though I don't know the other people with Asian-style tattoos, I sure can judge them.

<sidebar> I heard an interesting story about an Asian tattoo artist so tired of inscribing the same words - "bravery" and "lover" and "soulful" - into the skins of people who could not read the characters or even, perhaps, really understand the meaning of the words in their native tongues - that he started writing swears instead. I wonder how long he thought he could get away with it. I mean, it's not as if he was gently raking the characters into a Buddhist sand garden. Tattoos stay with you forever. Even frat boys visit China, sometimes.

Now what if you had a guy who just kept on going back, for different symbols? If I were that tattoo artist, I'd pull out my DVD of Memento and bookmark AltaVista's Babelfish and just go to town. Then if the victim ever went swimming in Beijing, everyone would know who raped and killed HIS wife*. <end sidebar>

There are other ways to mess with your body, though, and I'm not just talking about breast implants. I read a disturbing article with even more disturbing illustrations about subcutaneous implants made from silicone. Imagine breast implants, but not shaped like a jellyfish and not stuck in under the soft bits. One guy had weird proto-horns growing out of his forehead. A girl had brass knuckles clearly visible as an imprint above the soft bits, just below the collar bone. In the picture, she wore a look like she was going to reach in under her own skin, yank out the implant and beat you to death with them. Just like the porcupine quills, sometimes Nature very clearly says, "Stay away."

Then come the piercings. I can understand piercing ears. Brandi got her ears pierced when she was a little girl, because her grandfather loved girls with pierced ears and he promised her diamond earrings. I grew up just as it became fashionable for boys to get earrings. Left ear meant you were straight. Right ear meant not. Both ears meant you were Will Smith, who is neither because Jada Pinkett-Smith is a robot. Ever seen her in the same room as a strong magnet? I rest my case.

So, once the fashionistas opened up the floodgates of men's earrings, that was when I think all hell broke loose. I blame one-upsmanship. Suddenly, your boyfriend has more jewelry than you. What to do? Get double-pierced. Now you've got four holes in the soft tissue on either side of your cranium, how fashionable! How your girlfriends envy you, for a time, or at least until they can find an ice cube and a safety pin to settle the score. Then it's time to pierce something else. How about your tongue? Navel? Eyebrow, nose, cheek, naughty bits...

Pretty soon, you find you have to leave four hours early to make your flight, because you can't make it through airport security without first removing six pounds of surgical steel and high-grade silver from your body. You and Jada Pinkett-Smith have the same nightmares: you're all alone in a darkened room when suddenly someone throws a switch. A faint humming echoes and you find yourself rising, pulled from above by... an enormous junkyard magnet! Oh, the humanity (robotity)!

I mean, it's an interesting look, but does anyone else out there think a nose ring looks like a shiny booger? I work with a woman who wears one and it's all I can do to keep my own hands away from my face, for fear of sympathetic wiping. Some of the kids who work at the Alley don't even bother with the stud and get the pull-down kind, as popularized by the beef industry and bull fights. Others get the metal spikes that stick out of lower lips like a really vicious soul patch. Newsflash: it looks like you got stabbed by a leprechaun. Eyebrow rings look like stitches, or the Band-Aids you put on in lieu of stitches during a boxing match.

Yet, in direct defiance of my reservations, people keep their face hardware firmly planted in their face. Why? Why did I have to clean out Brandi's upper ear piercing, repeatedly, swabbing with alcohol and Q-tips and pulling out the occasional stray hair wrapped around the shaft of the earring? Why do people not necessarily all that well suited to public speaking build even more walls in the form of mush mouthed speaking, the direct result of a tongue stud that will not stay clean or out of the way when they try to form words? "If I pull it out the hole will close up..."

Well, duh. What's that tapping? Nature, at the window again, gently reminding you that, orthotrycyclene and aspartame and antibiotics to the contrary, she does not like to be trifled with. She always gets the last word, because we're all going to the same place: a Jewish cemetary. Well, some of us.

It reminds me of a quote I saw on the back of a sk8-er t-shirt a few years ago. On the front, it read, "He who dies with the most toys..."

And on the back...

"...still dies. NO FEAR!"

Yeah! No fear!

* John G.

Sometimes, I...

...sing along with the AC/DC song, "Highway to Hell" and add an extra "p" at the end, so it's "Highway to Help".

That way, I've twisted the original, "evil" intent into something nice, or at least, the promise of nice, once the help finally arrives, or you drive far enough towards it. Like a rest stop, or a full-blown oasis. In that way, isn't AC/DC a lot like a scratchy-voiced, irritating, Down Under kind of life?

I have too much time in my own head.

Progress...

"Progress is failing in a different way."

- Sarah Newby, IGPA Research Assistant

...said to me while I mucked up for the nth time trying to get the fax/scanning workstation to remember to send out a document. Reminds me of Bill Clinton getting elected by quoting Alcoholics Anonymous, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." Isn't it?

Isn't it?

Also, that may not be the exact quote.

Must... Fight...

..the urge to post every other minute. It's just too easy.

I'm writing this on my Treo 650 on Adams and Canal, waiting for the no. 7 westbound. I *heart* technology. I know the whole blogging-on-the-spot thing came and went two years ago, but this time I promise it's different. This time it's me. I've got a web-enabled cell phone with a thumb keyboard sending off emails to a server that automatically processes the subject and text into title and post. If I see anything interesting, I'll snap a shot with my 640x480 phone cam and upload it to a different server, which will then dump it into the same weblog.

Probably, you've heard that one before.

I've got a college education, and before that, a high school one. I studied creative writing and then went on to become, in no particular order, a secretary, a graphic designer, a comedian, a network administrator, a draftsperson, a dishwasher, a Ghostbuster-wannabe, a 1920's-style Newsie, a driver, insurance underwriter processor, cat provider and husband. At some point, I plan to become a father.

And yet, that doesn't necessarily make me very interesting, does it? Certainly not to me. I'd rather read a good book than spend too much time rattling around in my own head. One of the hardest times in my life was training for the 1995 Cleveland marathon without benefit of a music player that could play more than one tape at a time. One of the best: running for hours listening to my iPod. Nothing distracts you from excruciating back-thigh-ankle-arch pain like a shuffle from A-ha to Tori Amos. And, no, I do not consider them to be mutually exclusive.

Still, I guess what makes me interesting is that I'm interested. I want to know. If you're reading this, I want to know about you, and if we're all a bit lucky, I'll shoehorn you in here in words. Then, we can all participate in Andy Warhol's fifteen minute future.

The Sound of Settling

Today, I did a lot of thinking about electrostatic forces and their relationship to their sisters, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear. Specifically, I thought about dust.

I work with computers at the University of Illinois. At one of my offices, we have a lot of surplus
computers, waiting to either get tossed out, used up or for the Big Crunch to make everything not matter any more. Have you ever gone over to friends' houses and, after a couple of minutes touching their keyboard or mouse, thought, "Washing my hands would serve not only my obsessive compulsive behavior, but the sanitation laws of the state of Illinois..."? Just me? I get that feeling every time I touch one of these computers. They have seen a lot of use. Over time, everything gets inside computers. Everything from a laptop up has a fan inside for dumping out waste heat from the compu-guts.

Some have more than one for improved airflow. Just like a river, carrying pebbles and sand for miles, then dumping them in various side-eddies when the current dies down, these fans dump dust and hair and, if you let them, spilled coffee all over the guts of your fine thinking
machine.

It gets worse. Electronics run off of electricity, which is the flow of electrons from a negative to a positive pole. All the interesting stuff that happens along the way controls how the computer works, but for the purposes of dust, the interesting thing is that it's negatively charged. This, coupled with the cooling fans, turns the inside of your computer into a giant ionizer. Spare, suicidal electrons leap up from the electronic components into the tiny dust balls, mites and drops of miscellaneous whatnot getting sucked through your computer. The dust gets charged. It becomes very sticky, with preference given to metals. I could draw a diagram detailing why this works, but then I would have to kill you. The important part is that your
computer gets even more dusty.

This can do a lot of bad things to you. First, it can make you sneeze. I do that a lot. Second, it can
make you dirty. Washing your hands gets it out, but don't forget, or your lunchtime sandwich will taste like a mummy. Third, it can short out the computer. When the dust gathers in rope-like chains, it can bridge connections from one part of the electronics inside of your computer to another. Since the logic gates of all electronica work by encouraging electrons to leap across tiny gaps inside of them, making a different connection from one end to another, be it through dust, soldering iron or just plain breaking the chip will cause mayhem. I have seen this meltdown and it ain't pretty.

So dust gathers. Gather enough dust, and you've got a layer of sediment, marking time, something future historians might call, "The Electronics Age", "Early Millennial Tomfoolery", or "The Bush Mistake, Part II". Our whole planet gathers dust. Something on the order of ten tons of meteorite dust rains down on our planet every day, remnants of an earlier solar system filled with the planetary building blocks of comets and meteors, adding to our planetary mass. We don't notice because the forces that shape our world are so strong. Here, gravity and the electromagnetic force duke it out, occasionally allowing the forces of entropy to do their business, too. Heat exchange (entropy) runs the weather. Complicated chemical processes (electromagnetic force, quantum mechanical behavior of electrons in shared orbits) replenish an unstable atmosphere which, left alone for a few million years in a bottle, would settle out into an unbreathable, de-oxygenated mess.

When I was growing up, I remember reading that, according to the sages of the day, volcanoes were formed from the heat welling up from the center of the earth. When the Earth first formed, so much stuff got slammed together that it made the young planet very hot. The center is the hottest and of course the most dense because everything heavy falls until it can fall no longer. Liquid iron surrounds a dense crystal of iron at the heart of the Earth, kept solid by the enormous pressure holding it there. If you think volcanoes are hot now, imagine the days back when Earth was just a big, glowing ball of goo, molten everything rendering life impossible.

Recently, though, scientists have had to revise their estimation of what drives the heat at the center of the Earth. They found another way for heat to have formed there: radioactivity. Decaying nuclear materials (weak nuclear force) act like a gigantic nuclear explosion going off every moment for billions - yes, let me write that again, billions - of years. We're shielded from it by distance and lots of materials. Iron in the intervening layers soaks up spare neutrons, so only background and solar radiation, so mild it almost tickles, remains. This makes a better kind of sense because we know the Earth has heavy, unstable elements (we mine them from it to make our nuclear reactors and weapons) that would have settled in the early days of planetary formation. It just happens that the stuff that settled on top of it or got blown out of it was the stuff of life. Water came from comets or, also more recently theorized, mantle outgassing. Planetary farts formed the skin that covers two thirds of our planet. Life, like dust, settled into the crevices, and out of it came us.

So the next time you pick up a bottle of Pledge and a rag, walk around the house with gigantic steps, making ominous music and pretending it's 65 million years ago and you're the 10 km meteor hurtling down on the heads of the dinosaurs. As you slam your fist down, declare, "You got too big, fat and lazy, sauropods!" and make a big, exploding sound.

That is the sound of settling.

The Bartender Said to the Horse...

"Hey, why the long face?"

Wining

On the Loss of Marbles

Last Friday at ComedySportz, the Horned Toads faced off against the Penguins, in the opening salvo of the improvisational dance-off called March Madness (at CSz). Alida Vitas-Dow, Keith Whipple and I valiantly challenged the vastly talented and bespectacled team of Ross Bryant, Bob Ladewig and Rebecca Hanson, a veritable stew of quick wit and quicker reflexes. We lost the first round, Rap Line. I got out on my first rhyme, a slant rhyme I knew I could not get away with, not under referee Sam Super's watchful eye. What can I say? I used to have a superior, ironic diffidence toward rap. I can't hear lyrics that well to begin with, so when it comes to angry people spitting them at me, I'm totally lost. Unfortunately, ComedySportz in general and Cayne Collier in particular would have none of that and one workshop taught the tricks of the trade that people enjoy about rapping. Now, I've lost the arrogance, and listening to myself trying just makes me sad. Pity you can't regurgitate that apple from the Tree of Knowledge. You just walk forward, cold and naked and unable to even rap about it.

So, losing that round gave us the chance to play Five Things, the gibberish/mime extravaganza that pits the players against the normalcy of the audience. Every audience, after realizing that it can not only sit and be entertained but also participate in its entertainment, really tries to stretch during the Five Things round. What do you replace the ice in ice skating with? If you're 65 percent of audiences ever, you'll shout "Jell-o!" ad nauseum. You might also choose quicksand, lava or acid, but players learn the shortcuts quickly. Guessers learn to watch for the characteristic wobble of Jell-o (which inevitably receives the additional lay on of a flavor that would never be a flavor, like "cat" or "envy"). The challenge comes when audiences are just... strange, often without even realizing it. Tight knit groups sometimes bring in their own in-jokes that really, truly stump a guesser. Five minutes goes by quickly when you've got fifteen to thirty guesses to make and excruciatingly slowly for audiences watching a player get stuck on one.

The word was "marble". I don't remember what it modified, but I chose to set it up by showing your classic Renaissance artist chipping away at a block until a David emerged. Keith, our guesser, guessed Venus de Milo, then granite, two separate guessed that ate up about thirty seconds. I was stumped. How to indicate igneous rock? Alida came to our rescue, recovering my fumble by indicating the classis kids' game, on the ground, shootin' aggies. Keith got it. We got four out of the five.

We still lost.

So it goes. The next day, Brandi and I drove down to Starved Rock, the Illinois state park famous for the legend of a group of Native American warriors chased down and bottled up at a high place until they starved to death. Not exactly the stuff of your usual two year wedding anniversary, but the veracity of the legend is lost to history. Today, people go to the park and nearby Matthieson State Park, Utica, LaSalle and Peru to get away from the big city and by "people" I of course mean "us" or, more correctly, "we". "We" hiked a pair of trails, squeezing in what we could before the sun went away. Several striking things: an enormous Elm tree trunk, cut crosswise and on display at the visitor's center, showed a survivor of time's ravages that knew America at the time of the Civil War, casually absorbing a bullet at some point and shading its rivals out in a thirty yard blast radius of dense foliage. It died of Dutch Elm disease, a fungus carried by beetles, the low making humble the mighty. We stood on the stump and felt the emptiness. Twilight and space yawned.

At Lover's Leap, a rocky cliff opposite Starved Rock on the bank of the Illinois River, we took pictures, one self-timed and another by a friendly group happening by at the right time, clowning around as if we were to leap to our doom. We survived. I got a lot of air in the self-timed shot. Brandi jumped early and looks like she is just standing awkwardly. In the other shot, I picked Brandi up, wedding night threshhold style. She looks much more convincingly terrified there. There, the emptiness is much more beautiful, a sense of possibility instead of loss. Vistas like that consume my imagination, and I'm richer for it.

Then, at some point along the way, I lost my ATM card. Possibly before or after the wine tasting. On the way home, little stuff kept disappearing. A Transformer we got at Wal-Mart. My shoes. My pre-Oscar calm. My marbles.

Silly, silly me.

The Shining City of Larsen

Somewhere, next to a vast ocean of information, at the crossroads of what I know and what I'm going to learn, there is a city of me. It's an open city. Sure, Rick Steve's guide steers you clear of those dark spaces at the intersection of Open Bar and Karaoke Night and the Bridge of Sighs is much more of a tourist trap than its owners would have you believe (the Troubled Waters beneath appear to be Troubled largely because of the collection of pretty, hungry goldfish gathered at its surface) and the sports complex appears to be entirely deserted and entirely complicated. Still, if you get a chance, stop in at the Bird Brain restaurant, where the owner can be enticed to speak airily for hours at a time, his meal before him growing steadily colder and inedible, when before long, to satisfy the gods of hunger and punning, he is forced to Eat Crow.

Larsenopolis will not always entertain. It will not always endear itself to your heart. It promises to try, however, and hopefully not "try" as in "the Crucible" but "try" as in Olympiad, eternally hoping for bronze, silver or gold but even more secretly hoping to get its face on the front of the bloggers' Wheaties box.

Periodically, photographs should appear on this site. Romantics throughout the ages have valued them at approximately 1,000 words, but a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that, with a per-character memory limit of about 256 bytes for ASCI character, and an average word size of about four characters, each picture on this site should weigh in at about 1 megapixel, far, far greater resolution than on my crappy cameraphone. My pictures will be worth about 500 words, possibly less. I do not vouch for the colors and the graininess may astound photo aficionados. Nevertheless, some of us like to see the pretty pictures, if only to decide that Larseonopolis is a city we would love to visit by Internet and avoid in the flesh.

I hope you like it.