O Bathroom My Bathroom

The best public restrooms in the city are widely considered to be the ones at Bryant Park. I learned this from a bus tour I took in Times Square.

Over the last year+, our family has become adept at finding and using public toilets. Finally discarding pull-ups for bedtime, Simone officially ended her potty training shortly in the new year. Hooray! Still, given that this is all a bit new to her, we are dealing with an unknown quantity when she clutches at her bladder and says, "I have to use the bathroom!"

Quickly and quietly, we enter crisis mode.

Few playgrounds in our neighborhood have public bathrooms, which is a real shame. The Diana Ross Playground just inside the park, uptown from the American Museum of Natural History was our very first, and I still remember taking Simone there during a break in the cold weather just a few weeks after moving to New York City. It's so close to the museum, though, that we have at least once used our membership just to use the bathroom. Membership also took a couple blocks off our cold walk home as Simone and I returned from an adventure at an indoor play space in Harlem.

The Adventure Playground at 69th and Central Park West also suffers for lack of bathrooms, although Le Pain Quotidien, a small cafe inside Central Park just above Sheep Meadow has some, often crowded on sunny days.  Farther down, Heckscher Playground offers one-stop shopping for swings, large boulders, sand pits, AstroTurf and rubberized terrain, water features in the summer and not one but two sets of bathrooms, one inside the official playground area and the other outside. (I don't know why they split it.)

On the east side of the park, the Billy Johnson Playground offers a huge granite slide that shows every evidence of having at one point been a water slide, a stone arch, sand pit, picnic tables, baby swings, but, alas, no bathrooms. Parents in need of immediate bathroom relief have to travel about a quarter mile south to Central Park Zoo, where (yet another) membership hath its privileges, or a quarter mile north to the cafe near the Alice in Wonderland statues.

Of course, at any time, any one of these bathrooms might be under repair, cleaned, occupied by other parents or generally genial homeless people who just need to poop. Here, it helps that Simone is starting to go to the bathroom by herself but is still small enough to accompany me in emergencies.

Near Simone's school, Bleecker Playground recently renovated their bathrooms, which are usually fairly clean and stocked with toilet paper. Neighborhood parents use the playground as a dumping ground for still-functional-but-outgrown toys, which is why I was overconfident about bringing and not locking up Simone's scooter, and also why it was ironic that that very day I had just been talking about how honest most New Yorkers are. One stolen scooter and many tears later, I learned my lesson: bring the lock.

Minetta Playground's bathrooms are the McDonald's next door. That's just how it is.

Washington Square Park also recently updated and upgraded its bathrooms. Simone and I once stood in line for the men's room as two people in wheelchairs inspected it for ADA accessibility. I'm all for fairness, but it's hard to be patient while your daughter's doing the pee pee dance on the ground next to you. They promise a family restroom soon, but not now, so their having said that to me felt like a cruel tease. The new bathrooms are a huge improvement over the old system, which was about a half mile hike to a coffee shop.

Sometimes, businesses will take pity on you. New York City real estate being what it is, not even every restaurant has a bathroom. Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side put its bathroom right next to the children's section, which to me is a win-win scenario, and vastly superior to the bathroom at the nearby McDonald's, which I hate using even if we ate at McDonald's, which Simone never wants not to do. Starbucks is the weapon of last resort, but, be warned, it's EVERYBODY'S weapon of last resort, which means (more) long lines and/or punch key or token access.

Stroller

Charles Dickens reportedly liked to walk, up to 20 miles a day. I don't even come close. Who has the time?

My dad asked me the other day if I was still running. "No," I said, "just some swimming."

But the fact is that caregiving is very active, particularly in the city. We sold our car before we moved. Caring for it would have been like adopting a high-strung dog. You can park on our street, sometimes, except for Tuesdays on the downtown (don't say "south") side, or Thursdays on the uptown (don't say "north"), or if they're shooting a movie, and don't expect to get your car out if a garbage, moving or delivery truck is blocking anywhere along it because traffic will be backed up to the East River (don't say... well, yes, say "East" river).

So kids move around a lot. When my kid isn't watching television, she's usually begging for it, bouncing up and down like a demented spring. The American Academy of Pediatricians recommend they get less than an hour a day of screen time. As our pediatrician noted when I asked him about long term health consequences, "They made the rule in response to an epidemic of obesity. But an extreme response to something extreme is no more correct." So we allow television, computer games and phone stuff. Without it, you're signing up for a world of hurt.

The rest? Let's take that word at its face. The remainder of the day is a patchwork of activities, learning experiences, body moving time and just travel to each of these. To encourage Simone's mind last year, we joined the American Museum of Natural History. Membership gets you right in the door and sometimes past the lines of out-of-towners paying what the Museum recommends instead of what they want, which the rules allow. One of my neighbors pays a dollar each when he and his daughters go. They are still welcome. New York is like that. Simone found her niche--dinosaur movie, Discovery Center, overpriced strawberry milk in one of the many cafes--and got bored. Museums hold less interest for three year olds than a brightly decorated roll of wrapping paper. 

Groupon offered a two year membership to the Brooklyn Children's Museum. We bought it based on the reciprocal membership. Basically, a member at one museum could get in free at another. We could belong to the museum in Brooklyn (an hour away by train) but spend more time at the Children's Museum of Manhattan (walking distance).

Two months later, they ended it. We could get half price admission, but it would still be ten bucks out of pocket. 

Fine. I would squeeze value out of this membership if it killed me.

We can get to Brooklyn by train, but train lines away from Manhattan branch, spreading farther apart to serve an increasingly Wild West patchwork of communities. The Brooklyn Children's Museum is near two train lines, both of which run through our neighborhood, but "near" means different things depending on whether you have a scooter, stroller or just your own sneakers.

Shortly after we moved to Manhattan, Simone gave up her nap. In hindsight, we might have seen it coming. Getting her to sleep on weekends started to get difficult. She still got cranky without one but less so. We discovered after we moved that our downstairs neighbor played the saxophone. Every day. For anywhere between two to four hours, often the same riff.

It nearly drove bonkers. It certainly drove me out of the house, and out of the house was where all the action was. Without a car, I might have stuck Simone in the stroller and walked until she was all napped out, but with my knees still recovering from one marathon and carrying essentially the entirety of our apartment up and down stairs for two months, the idea quickly soured.

So we hoofed it a lot, including to the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Sometimes, I brought the stroller, but as often left it behind, as carrying it anywhere without a stroller check left it either unguarded or a total tripping hazard in the midst of the limited living space that is Manhattan. At first, I thought I could get Simone to nap by tiring her body. I encouraged her to walk, run, skip, jump, move forward any way she could, and while at first I tried to make it sound fun after just a couple minutes there emerged the whining, the pleading, the counting, the screaming and finally the time out, which I wish grownups could take because by then I sure as hell needed one.

I started carrying Simone on my shoulders, knees be damned. One way or another, they were. Simone enjoyed the view. I tried not to slam her into any scaffolding. New York City is covered in it. Crews come in, very efficient, unloading and building their Erector set building skirts overnight, or even during a productive morning. Some of the ones near our building have been up for more than a year. Sometimes, they sandblast. Others, they replace windows. Most often, nothing. Nobody ever finishes.

Me: "What would Manhattan be without scaffolding?"
Brandi: "Finished."

A couple days ago, I walked about three miles with the now-forty pound Simone on my back, plus her scooter, plus my backpack. The day before, I walked more than three miles, and seven the day before. I wear good shoes. Over time, and with good shoes, my knees felt better. We still take the stroller out with us, for breaks, but it's been replaced by a better model, a better stroller.

Me?

Hell, yeah, me.

Generations

In the 1998 movie "Dark City," the protagonist learns that--SPOILER ALERT--the strange bald-headed men using telekinetic powers to hunt him are aliens and that the titular city is dark because it is a spaceship rotated to face away from sunlight. It shares much of its gothic architecture with our city, and not by coincidence.

As a fan of science fiction, I used to dream about life among the stars. Our current understanding of physics does not allow for us to travel faster than the speed of light. The gaps between are inconceivably huge. Therefore, we need to plan for very long trips, and no getting off at Pluto/Charon to use the restroom. That's a minor planet now and we don't trust the bathrooms.

New York City shows me just how hard such a journey would be. You would need a large spaceship just to keep people from going insane. City size at least. Robotech: Macross Saga really nailed it here. Steady acceleration or spin could fake your gravity, but the stresses over the centuries would be enormous, structurally and emotionally. 

This city pushes people. The successful artists are truly exemplary because they had to climb a mountain of crap to get there. Consider the reaction mass you would need to accelerate even a splinter to solar escape velocity and imagine all that energy devoted to the making of the Rockettes or the trimming of the tree at Rockefeller Center. 

So much engineering goes into the smooth operation of the city, it might as well be a spaceship. Great pumps draw water from freshwater sources, clean it and deliver it to each and every home, business and public toilet with more than 66% uptime. (My figures might be a little off.) Electricity ensures out refrigerators never run out of cold and that our Facebooks stay freshly stocked with inspirational cat pictures. Fresh fruit for smoothies and whatever hot dogs are made of for hot dogs truck into the city to be processed into the mouths of eight million people. Trains scythe through its heart. Taxis shuttle across and airplanes land at airports far enough from the city's heart to be convenient for no one. The closing of a bridge lane leads to traffic chaos and national controversy.

Then there are the aliens. 

So many different people, languages, cultures, races, party affiliations, careers, religions and orientations crowd the city. In the Midwest, an Italian atheist speaking Mandarin in a leather shop might feel a little out of place. Here, he's just trying to help the Jewish African American Republican find a prop for her philosophy class. To be clear, these are not the weird ones. "Weird" here is antisocial. Glarers. Those who refuse to join the conversation. Even hipsters are telling you something with their mustaches. 

Amidst the rumble of unreality engines that makes this place possible, it is the silence that is most disturbing. 

Construction Sights

I am thrilled by construction sites and must note these two things:

- That sweet backhoe is a mommy! See how she protects her baby, hiding her behind that great claw? Soon, they will dig a basement and tread out of sight, to emerge by way of connected tunnels as a crane. 

- Pants on the railing, lower right. Whose? Why? Did a worker finish for the day and change into slacks and a cardigan a la Mr. Rogers? Or is this the real crane dad's clothes, discarded after a moment of intimacy between man and machine? Do all construction sites keep a spare pair of pants in case the Hulk jumps down?

Guarded

See the stained glass?

If zombies ever overrun the rest of the country, I think New York City has better than even odds. Did the city already survive an attack? Sure, in its own way. Look closer at the hordes of hungry shufflers and you will see echoes of the same invasion. They won't bite you. (Keep your health insurance up to date, though.) The disease is poverty, and just because the wealthy don't understand how it transfers doesn't mean they don't fear it.

I get it. I grew up middle class, in suburban Cleveland, and while I went to school with a few threadbare kids stayed well above the poverty line. Homeless people scare me. Even if they're not all alike, I tend to treat them as though nature posted a big "Do Not Touch" sign on their backs. One guy in our neighborhood in blond dreadlocks walks around with a cart, makes magic signs with his fingers and curses under his breath. I get why you would want to fence that away. 

Another guy, of similar build but older and pushing a stroller full of knicknacks walked past me the other night on the way back from the gym. I stepped away, frightened for a moment until I realized he was just wishing me a good evening in his own quiet, dignified way. People root through our garbage several times a day, enormous transparent trash bags full of bottles balanced on their backs. New York City made a big recycling push years back, but I wonder if it's not just another way to fine landlords for trivial offenses. Certainly it would hardly be necessary if you could trade in money for cardboard. 

Like a cheap '70s exploitation movie for churches, here we put beauty behind bars, then lock it behind gates, cover it with barbed wire and scaffolding (to repair the crumbling fencing), then wonder why we stare at each other with such hungry eyes. 

Central Park Symmetry

Little Lost Post

I will not do that again.

Yesterday, I started a piece about the importance of maps. Blogger's iPhone app works well for on-the-go fathers looking to cram words in between adventures, and it normally doesn't fail me. So when I started the post, I naturally assumed it auto-saved when I closed it.

It did not. Also, it's worth noting that iPhones make decisions for you about what's worth keeping in RAM while other applications are running. Blogger got the short end of the stick. The unsaved piece went the way of the Dodo.

I've lost more. Fifteen years ago, my hard drive crashed, sending to Hell the only copies of short stories I wrote in college. Part of me knew I would always come back to them, improve them until they could be published. That part of me was wrong. Dead wrong.

I also had a backpack stolen out of the back of my dad's Jeep. Who would steal a backpack? I thought. Well, I'll never know, but the fact of the matter is that someone did, carrying with him or her a semester's worth of notes and drawings in a blank book they probably tossed in a ditch somewhere around Oxford, Ohio. A month ago, Simone's week old scooter was stolen from a playground FULL OF TOYS. We sat at a picnic table for snack time and then I got up to push her on the swings. When I returned, no more scooter. We searched the entire playground and outside and came up empty. A day earlier, we were talking about the surprisingly low incidence of crime in New York City.

Brandi bought the exact same scooter the next day. Sixty dollars well spent. Again. Simone rides that thing everywhere, and I love not having to carry her. We can and have traveled miles on it.

Which leads me back to the lost post. I waste a lot of words. One day I hope to waste them on the same idea, but not today. The gist of it was this: maps are useful, and have grown better since day one with the incorporation of digital maps and GPS positioning, but the best maps we use lie within our heads. In New York City, you can hardly see over the fruit stand at the end of the street, much less the stone behemoths behind it, and if you use a map, you risk vectoring in on a too-specific target. Walking suits me best. When I walk from one place to the next, I feel the geographic boundaries in a way taking the train, car, bicycle, taxi or bus miss. I see the neighborhoods lacking in direct access to healthy foods, are blighted with poverty or the simple crime of neglect.

I am immersed in New York City.

Swimming in it. And lost.

The Medieval in the Modern

When Brandi and I got married, we went to Italy on our honeymoon. Brandi planned the trip. While my talent lies in cramming as much gear and furniture in a moving van, I am far surpassed in Tetris-like mastery by her ability to embed events into a vacation. We traveled to Venice, Rome, Pompeii, past Pisa (no time to stop), Cinque Terre and back to Venice to stay in Marco Polo's childhood home. In a country steeped in history, our favorite was the furthest in the past, Pompeii. We wandered excavated ruins for hours. Yes, the plaster casts of people and dogs are tragic. Ancient Roman porn decorating brothel walls is hilarious and... educational. Some Roman columns were made of brick covered in cement. 

We brought along a book of overlays. You could see the crumbled walls as they stood, squares restored to a geometric clarity realistic only if they had a VERY efficient garbage collection service. 

I like to overlay New York City with its past self, when the narrow streets of Greenwich Village reflected an actual village unto itself. Before fire blasted across close tenements, necessitating the creation of wide streets as gulfs too wide for flames to leap across. When cathedrals dwarfed the lesser abodes of their worshippers scattered at their feet like stone supplicants. 

The function of height now, on this island where everything and nothing is in reach, depending on the price you're willing to pay, is to stack more people, to cram in things and ideas, to treat the space between buildings as virgin territory to exploit and conquer. Height in my imaginary overlay serves as hope. The copper spire rising above the neighbors' chimneys inspires godliness (even if there are occasional unfavorable comparisons to a certain language-challenged Tower of yore) and faith in something larger. 

I suppose you could argue that you will find a similar awe in the structures of today. You certainly can't rewind the clock without massive suffering. I feel sad, though, that such striking beauties lie smothered behind blank brick walls and concrete facades stained with decades of industrial strength pollution, graffiti and thoughtless choices necessitated by relentless capital pressure. 

Someday--perhaps after a disaster, but more likely given the resilience of the human race through a reassembly of the patchwork of historical evidence we have saved--future people might reassemble a snapshot of present day life. Just as the overlays of Pompeii present only the wildest speculation of ancient Roman life, there will be gaps, some large enough to drive a church through. Our task now might be framed as a link from past to the future, ever balanced on the knife's edge between enormities, but aware that, like church and buildings alike, they exist for us. 

Spring in NYC

A lot of New Yorkers complained about the winter. It was cold and long and, by Chicago standards, not too bad. I hate to be that guy. You know the type, the guy from Hudson Bay who says, "You think Chicago winters are bad. Let me tell you what frostbite really feels like..." and then removes his prosthetic nose. 

Well, maybe we don't ALL know him. I don't think I've met him, either. Still, like anything crazy, the best justification crazy people can show is by pointing out something even crazier. 

So Spring sprang. (SPROING.) And finally all this greenery at the end of our street hides the fact that the street doesn't end, that eight million people live here to buy up all the cat food in bulk so that Trader Joe's must establish firm limits on the number of cans we can buy and apple sauce is tightly constrained, particularly if you're in the mood for strawberry flavor. But bagels you can get pretty much everywhere. 

I read many years ago that trees in major cities grow lower than the same species in the forest. Despite all that additional carbon dioxide the city stresses them. I'm grateful for what they manage. All that greenery turns the too-narrow streets into secret passages, tunnels into the next adventure. They make you want to walk among them, to admire a natural architecture millions of years in the making. 

The trees in Central Park show signs of subtle cultivation, limbs hacked away to broaden the leafy rooftops, dead branches and crispy remnants of autumn leaves cleared to keep paths manageable. I wish every street fed into the park, or, on selfish days, only my own. 

Welcome, Spring.

Sunset construction

Diamond-shaped panels on a building that might as well be made of diamonds.

All-too-real estate

This blog changed today. More than the fact that I updated it. It changed to reflect my relationship with the city, which also changed since last I wrote here.

I live in Manhattan, New York City, New York, probably the second-craziest real estate market in the country, next to San Francisco, which has no excuse. I live with my wife, daughter and two cats, neither of whom have ever lifted a paw to pay rent. That won't change any time soon, but dream big and their learning to scoop their own litter will be a minor payoff.

I never wanted to follow in my father's footsteps as an architect. Words always appealed more, even if they didn't pay the bills all that well. What followed were numerous disparate careers that show no sign of settling down, even if I did achieve some small success in each: trail management, English tutoring, graphic design, network administrator, improvisational comedian and finally homemaker. Some day, I'll shoe horn writer in there, too, but I'm not holding my breath.

What I did glean from a childhood skipping around construction sites holding the other end of a tape measure was some appreciation for buildings before, during and after construction. I see them as living things, and on the island of Manhattan, I see them crowded together more closely than the revelers in Times Square ten seconds before midnight. They feed off electricity, water, money and labor, fighting decay and the encroachment of other, substantially larger buildings. In rare instances, they fall over due to negligence or attack, and that is particularly tragic.

Today, we visited the apartment of our daughter's school friend. The family plans on moving come July. What will happen to the apartment? [Tenting fingers in imitation of supervillain.]

Frankly, I planned this scenario since we moved from Chicago: find a serviceable apartment, sell our condo, forgive ourselves, make contacts, and try to talk or work our way into finding a cheaper apartment.

We liked the building from the start. Nice location, not far from Brandi's work and what we hope will be Simone's school, with two bedrooms, a generous kitchen, living room, decent closet space and light. I did not realize how much I missed light until Manhattan turned me into a Morlock. Smaller than our current place, though, so in the make-believe number in my head I figured rent would be lower.

No, no, no, no and most certainly no. Almost half again more, and our rent is killing us as it is.

Even worse than the letdown of knowing this was not the place I had dreamed was the social fact that we simply did not want to admit we were too poor to rent it. Brandi has a great job. In Chicago, we would live like kings! Or at least... better. But Manhattan real estate has a way of eating wealth away like the acid blood of the xenomorphs from the Alien movies. It never ends.

We want to find a place that can hold two grownups, one child, two cats and enough of our stuff that we can sleep, cook, watch movies and not have to do any of these from the inside of the litter box. It might come someday, but, frankly, I'm not holding my breath.

Flash Fiction Inspired by Real Life

DOS and DONTS

by Matt Larsen

Taking CTRL of years of hoarding, DEL had asked his girlfriend Susan if he could RUN old manuals down to her basement cache. It should have been BASIC, but things got complicated after he asked to give their relationship a BREAK.

"Fine," she said, "Then I CMD you to pick them up or else I'll put them out for garbage collection."

"SU, come on! I need HELP. I thought you were a capacitor," he said, "Not a resistor."

"GOTO hell," she said.

But all that came back was an ECHO. He'd already ended the CALL.

Dreaming, May 26, 2010

Last night, I had a vivid dream of flooding. Constant rain drummed at the windows of the office where I worked, a combination of the drum-shaped Thompson Center and 200 S. Wacker where I work in my waking hours. I watched the large drops spatter and explode against the thick panes. You could feel the bass of their landing. A great shared space occupied the interior of the building, and if you looked up you could see sheets of it cascading against the multicolored glass rooftop. I went outside when the rain abated to a dull drizzle. The building sat at the water's edge, a Great Lake of one kind or another filling the horizon with blue under the gray, leaden sky, a sandy beach extending all the way down to the cresting waves. People played on the beach, enjoying the lull or perhaps unconscious of or uncaring about the earlier downpour. The scene reminded me of the photo I saw yesterday from the Boston Times' Big Picture, of children in Louisiana playing in a pair of plastic pools on the beach, the better to keep the Deepwater Horizon oil at bay. I trotted a little distance along the shore, climbing amid some whitewashed pontoons lashed together into temporary docks for small sailboats. Returning to the beach by my office building, I noticed the waves piling up.

As happens in many of my wave dreams, they began to grow larger, enveloping more of the beach with every curl. They reached my feet. I stepped back, up a stone embankment, wondering whether the storm might drive the water farther inland. The quickly-cresting waves answered that question, washing past my feet again to lap at the windows of my office building. At once a great wave came down, swamping me and crashing against the glass. I slogged inside to inform my officemates, and we drew up a plan to retreat to the higher ground of downtown Chicago--I did mention this was a dream, right?--and drove up the road to the taller skyscrapers there.

We made it just in time, too. Looking back, we watched massive waves crashing into the rounded curve of our now abandoned building. We knew it would not last very long against the onslaught of murkey gray water. Yet still the waves came.

We checked into a motel room at the highest ground we could find. There were several men in business casual attire, shirtsleeves plastered to our bodies by rain and not a small amount of panic. Suitcases and backpacks littered the corners. The rear balcony gave us a view of the city as it was swallowed by water. The skies had cleared, but the waves rolled in, less destructive but still inexorable, like the world was a bathtub filling up.i think we breathed a collective sigh of relief. We'd survived, for the moment. We even took a stab at normalcy, resuming a presentation, but our hearts weren't exactly in it.

Some of the lads left to contact families, take smoke breaks, or buy groceries, eventually leaving only me to witness as our room, through a miracle of architecture and rising water, detached from its foundation and began floating away from the remnants of the city's high ground. Watery devastation lay all around. Even the edges of the mythical tall Chicago downtown lay buried beneath the waves.

I floated on. The ceasing rainfall turned the maiden voyage of my motel room into a pleasant, drowsy journey, but, since I had no idea why we could float in the first place, I worried the integrity of what passed for a hull might be compromised. Sure enough, each trip I took outside, the balcony felt lower to the water. I ate some pretzel sticks and tried to nap, dreaming within the dream.

In time, I heard a noise, a booming voice hailing me from outside my window. I looked out to see a stubby pirate ship no larger than an average motorboat but clad in wooden planking and decorated in iron chains. Sails billowed above. Her captain stood on the railing, a dirty blonde beard erupting from his windburned face, under a hawkish nose and piercing blue eyes. He asked permission to come aboard. I accepted and he climbed up the balcony.

"Interesting choice of sailboat, lad," he said.

I tried to explain about the rain and the waves that swallowed the city. He waved me off. Maybe he'd seen the destruction firsthand, or his stubby pirate ship came from the same thing. In any case, he said, the thing to beware now was not waves, but vermin, and to demonstrate he lifted a couch cushion to reveal an insect in the rather disturbing cast of an earwig--pincer mouth, scuttling legs atop a bulky body more like a linebacker than the dainty tapered waists of your wasp or ant, nightmare rear claw like a funhouse reflection of the front of the insect--bright blue in the body and traffic cone orange in the legs and a little bit larger than your average squirrel.

What could I do? I screamed. I'm pretty sure he screamed. We both jumped back in a way not unlike the time in waking life when Brandi and I walked in on a pissed off rat stuck in a large glue trap in an old apartment. My instincts were the same: burn the place down.

At any rate, the captain agreed to take me on his mini ironclad, and I looked around for any valuables I couldn't bear to leave behind. Nope, nothing. I walked precariously over the ropes he had helpfully strung between our vessels, and he stayed behind to scuttle the motel boat. Returning to his own vessel, we watched as the last known bit of Chicago was claimed by the hungry ocean of rain.

At this point, I knew our adventures were effectively over or just begun, depending on your perspective, but my unconscious could not help getting in one last twist. As we settled in to trim the sails, my perspective shifted to the outside of the pirate ship, where the anchor line emerged from the water. One of the enormous earwigs swam through the water, scuttling up the chain of the anchor and into the ship, presumably to wreak the same havoc there.

Sheesh, unconscious, way to twist the knife.

Returning from the Void

Hi! Thanks for tuning in or reading back to this post.

It's been a while since updates and I owe you an apology. Unfortunately for me, it's got to be a bigger apology than just one blog post. This blog has been dark for quite a while. Some things changed, others stayed the same.

Most importantly, very shortly Brandi and I will welcome our daughter into the world, at which point this blog will likely be inundated with pictures and anecdotes about the cutest baby in the world. I don't really believe this. Most babies to me look like Winston Churchill, but they say all that changes when it's your baby. We'll see. Babies steal your brainwaves, so if there's an even longer gap (say, until she goes to college), well, at least I tried.

I've changed posts within the University and now work at just one office as an IT Support Specialist, a title made up just for me, which automatically makes me an expert in the field. Consider me the sniper of malfunctioning applications.

I've been published! (Online.) I will be posting links to stories as I find them. Some, I've microblogged over at Facebook and need to dig up once more, but if you're interested you will be able to find my fiction.

More to come!

GRR

From Acme Heart Maker.
Inspired by my work with Dell Tech Support.

The Holiday Lush Decorations Must Come Down!

I saw this yesterday on a walk through my neighborhood, an entire
wreath made of corks at the doorstep of a local charity resale.
Finally, the Christmas decorations for alcoholics are coming down.
(We've been busy, dammit! And sick!) Maybe it's time to start on a
brand new cork wreath, which means spending less on screw top bottles
and maybe dipping a little more into our dialysis money. I wonder if
they found a use for the bottle tree and the beerstletoe.

On a side note, Brandi and I bought a bunch of wine on our trip to New
Buffalo, MI, which apparently has winery tours where they drive you.
Wow. A frozen paradise, we stopped into the supermarket for snacks and
toothpaste and walked out with six bottles of wine and no toothpaste.
The only thing standing in the way of drinking, womanizing and writing
like Hemmingway is that I am no Hemmingway, since I never received the
requisite turtleneck. Some fantasies must remain forever that.

And some, like a wreath made of corks, are blessedly within reach.

Me and Tuxedo Cat

Patrick and I try a Photo Booth shot together. I think it turned out well, particularly because he's always so well dressed.

I deliberately cut off the top of my head because my hair has gotten too darn long. It's a protest against cold weather and snow. I don't think winter got the message.

Mammal

Brandi and I are on our writer's retreat at the southwest corner of Michigan. We came in last night, taking off from work early and braving the beginning of rush hour traffic and sub-zero temperatures that caused the windows of our car to not only fog but ice up. It's always particularly frustrating in winter to put on all of your layers, hop in the car, and then struggle to get the top layer off while you're sitting at a traffic light or, worse, driving on the highway. I've grown quite skilled at yanking my gloves off with my mouth.

Of course, even if you get down to just a t-shirt in front of vents pouring out heat like jet engines, you've still got the long underwear and pants, and, if you're like me, the pajama pants you added in between because, hey, it's not layering unless you're having trouble flexing your knees.

Oddly, I'm starting to get used to the weather. Today, it warmed up to ten degrees and on our trip to the grocery store, Brandi and I couldn't stop remarking about how warm it felt. Is it warm when a can of soda will freeze so hard it pops the top for you? Warm when you can't get the car washed but have to settle for brushing the salt off the windshield with your glove? Warm when the icicles on the house across the street stretch practically roof-to-ground? Compared to yesterday, my body somehow says "yes."

This is the crazy part of being a mammal.

I made the choice Thursday to walk from a train stop up to a Polish restaurant where Brandi and her work friends (but good work friends, Diane and Ryan) planned on tucking away the heaviest potato-and-veal-based foods Eastern Europe has to offer. It was about minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and I had the option of waiting for the bus, but Chicago bus drivers have the same "meh" attitude you saw in the Soviet Union.

"It's not as though they have to stand out in the open," they might say, and they would be right, because the CTA saw fit to provide shelters every mile or so with roofs and walls that only leave a two foot gap at the bottom, so the wind chills only your feet, ankles, knees and lower thighs. Most have advertisements that you can read over and over again while you curse your god and wait for the bus that never seems to arrive.

I walked about forty minutes and saw a bus come only once, when I was about a half a block away from the restaurant. True irony? or just the Alanis Morisette style of terrible events that nobody wants to happen to them? By that time, the cold had killed the battery in my iPod, which went from a 50% charge to 20% to dead in the span of about a minute after I took it out of my coat pocket. If you're like me, you never pay attention to the optimal operating temperatures of electronic devices when you buy them because you so rarely come close to them. Next time, I'll probably keep it on the inside.

Of course, I didn't realize that cold had killed the little music player at the time, so when I got to the restaurant--first, as the rest of our small party was running late--I pulled it out, trying to figure out how I could plug in my USB to charge it. It was so cold, the glass on the front began to acquire condensation, and then that condensation began to ice up. Remembering what water can do to electronics, I treated the player like a hypothermia victim and stashed it close to my belly. It worked. The little guy is still alive and kicking to this day.

This is the great part of being a mammal: saving electronics with your own belly warmth.

I look forward to the springtime, when my antlers begin to grow and I am forced to spar with my fellow males over the attentions of the females who will bear our young. Luckily, unlike some species I don't care to mention (spiders), they will not eat our heads when we mate.

This, too, is the great part of being a mammal.

Testing the Limits of the Unknowable

I read an amazing article in New Scientist recently, about scientists searching for gravitational waves and possibly finding something much more important. This is kind of a neat by product of good science, where the person doing the testing finds something went wrong and says, "Oh, that's interesting..." before going on to, for instance, invent the microwave oven, penicillin, or the flying machine.

You can pretty squarely blame Stephen Hawking's brilliance. Once again studying event horizons , he theorized that information from an "evaporating" black hole does not get lost when it disappears, but is mapped onto the virtual quantum particles at its edge. That edge, kind of like a shadow, is a two dimensional form that exists in our three dimensional universe, and that information has to make a weird transition from the inside of the black hole, where it's 3D, to the outside, where it's 2D. Another good example of 3D information mapped onto a 2D surface is holograms, hence the title, "Our world may be a giant hologram..." which is slightly inaccurate, since the set of things that might be holograms include every particle in the universe, of which our world is only a tiny, tiny part.

They go on to connect more dots. The event horizon of a black hole is roughly analogous to the the Big Bang, when everything in the universe was packed into a segment of space smaller than an atom. What blew it apart is a complete mystery still, but the behavior of all that mass in that tiny amount of space is exactly like a black hole. Even more amazing, if you were able to travel faster than light, 13.7 billion light years in any direction, you would reach the edge of the universe, where you would see an inside-out version of the mapping going on at the edges of black holes. In fact, all of the matter in our universe would have the information of the big bang mapped onto it.

All of this really gets my science and science fiction juices flowing, so I'm going to subject you to some of my thoughts. Here goes:

• As a black hole evaporates, the event horizon grows smaller, since the mass inside of it no longer has the ability to capture light as far away from the singularity inside of it. Our universe is different, though, since it's basically a black hole turned inside out. And evidence has shown that the energy inside of our universe is increasing, as matter is pushed farther apart as the result of "dark energy," which might, uncounted eons from now, result in space flying apart so quickly that even atoms are unable to hold together. This would be called "the Big Rip." (Which is the opposite of what scientists expected when they made up "the Big Crunch.")
  
• Does this mean that the total amount of information in the universe is increasing? And can an increasing amount of information result in the one-way temporal direction known as entropy?
• What caused the expansion of the universe in the first place? This is beyond the scope of the article, but I'm dreadfully curious. Since the force is so mysterious, almost any speculation is useless, but I wonder if I can spin another analogy with atomic nuclei. Put two protons near each other and they fly apart, but include a neutron and they stay together, forming a helium nucleus. Put two neutrons and it's a helium nucleus in a special case known as an alpha particle. Three neutrons and it's unstable again. Move up the periodic table of the elements in order of neutrons and protons and you see this happen again, with the more things packed into the nucleus, the more unstable they become. Except... as humans experiment with energies not found in nature, there is some evidence that there might be what some call "islands of stability" hidden in the far recesses, well after Thorium and Einsteinium and Yourmomium. What if the universe is the inverse of that, with a lot of stability in relatively lower masses ("lower" being a relative term, since we're talking masses smaller than galactic superclusters), but explosive when enough mass is reached.
• Given that quantum mechanics means almost anything can happen if you wait long enough, and virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear and disappear constantly at a scale impossible for us to detect, eventually in a very, very long timeframe, it is possible that a particle could appear that is the mass of the entire universe. The challenge is that it's impossible to test, except in very, very long timeframes, and I just don't have that kind of patience.
• One result of the above is that an antiparticle would have to also have been produced, which is interesting, because I always wanted to have an evil twin. And now I've got one.
  

Normally, I like to include a picture with a post, but the photographer I sent outside the universe to take a snapshot is bound by the laws of spacetime, and promises to return in 27.4 billion years, which is well below the time constraint for "the Big Rip," but too late for this post to have any relevance. I'll do better next time.

Traffic Out the Window

Surreal and beautiful.