Trouble Brewing

I had planned to brew on Sunday. I say planned. Planning being the operative verb. I pulled out my equipment (kettle, fermenter, spoon, ingredient kit). My great plan fell apart in assembly. My fermenter is a bucket with a spigot near the bottom. The spigot needed to be attached. I put it on and threw some water in to be sure of its watertightness. It was not watertight. As I started toweling up water off the floor, I noticed that one of the plugs near the baseboard was wet. Not good. It began to smoke. Really not good. Three inch flames shot from the outlet. Bad. The fire extinguisher kept for such occasions didn’t work. Yikes!

The circuit breaker tripped and the flames ended in an instant like they started.

So, I brewed a batch of American Wheat ale on Monday. In addition to the kit’s ingredients, I added a hint of fresh ginger, which should give it piquancy. As the reporters say, ‘it remains to be seen’ as to whether the batch turns out decent or not. One dog hair can spoil a batch and with my golden retriever, Peaches, wandering through the house, that can happen.

Yet, I still have a house for Peachy to wander through. Whatever I get, it’ll be sweet.

The Bemused, A Triangle, a musical

Synopsis (first draft): Euclid and Penelope are star-crossed math lovers. They are from different worlds. They don’t speak the other’s language. She’s English. He’s American. Soon they learn that they have the common language, love—of mathematics—and it looks like a formula that equals love. But during a discussion of String Theory, Penelope discovers that Euclid is a P-Brane. She calculates their love doesn’t add up and she dumps him for the guy who makes the ice sculptures on a cruise ship of Liberian registry.

Opening Song – The Sage Called Pythagoras (sung to the tune of Aquarius from Hair)

When math is what I can espouse
And triangles beat the parallel bars
I believe calculi charts the planets
And gravity steers the stars

This is the cloning of the sage of Pythagoras
The sage of Pythagoras
Pythagoras!
Pythagoras!

Bemused as right angles landing
It’s calculus I’m understanding!
No more split infinitives
Just give me integers or derivatives!
Put it all in an equation
And you’ll hear the celestial sphere’s gyration
Pythagoras!
Pythagoras!

Repeat until bored

Somewhat Self-Indulgent

One of last month’s reviews on YouWriteOn.com accused my story of being a “somewhat self-indulgent piece…”

I let a month go by to see if this review still rankled. It does. My feelings have festered. It seems that it’s time that I lanced this sucker and cleaned out the wound.

As I understand “somewhat self-indulgent” that means I ‘somewhat excessively’ indulged my own ‘appetites and desires.’ Or perhaps—according to the Oxford English Dictionary— my creative work is “lacking economy (careful use of words) and control (the power to restrain).”

Let’s skip what ‘somewhat excessively’ might mean for the moment. What would disturb anyone about such a characterization is that it’s just that—a characterization, bordering on psychoanalysis. If I need therapy, I’d prefer that it be from someone with credentials. I’m funny that way.

Now, if one were to do a better job of reviewing, one would review the piece and not resort to divining the writer’s motives for creating it.

Call the piece, “preachy,” “somewhat excessively laden with argot, bombast, buzzwords, cant, clichés, doublespeak, drivel, gibberish, and jargon,” or call it “heavy-handed,” and I’m fine with that. Review the story.

My reasons for writing the piece are that I believe this story needs to be told in a different way.

After all, as Kingsley Amis said, “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”

Let the healing begin.

Writing about forestry II

We just got back from San Luis Obispo. I spoke at the student chapter of the Society of American Foresters (SAF) there. It may seem odd to drive my high-performance Swedish driving machine (with 180K on the odometer) fourteen hours, seven minutes, 800 miles (roundtrip), and spend $118.66 for gas (plus $ for food and lodging), to talk to twenty people for a total of twenty minutes. It is. They gave me pizza. And it was good.

Thanks to Nikki Gross of Cal Poly’s SAF for inviting me. Thanks to Dr. Doug Piirto for sending out an email to lots of folks letting them know about my talk. Thanks to many of those folks taking time out of their day and studying for midterms to listen. And thanks to Norm Pillsbury for shining on his office hours to see me. My life is richer for it.

We talked about writing. The Cal Poly students and professors I talked with are experts in forestry. They know their stuff. Their writing in the professional journals is important. Yet, we need to look outward. I hope one of them starts a blog about forestry.

We also talked about my novel The God of Trees

Writing about forestry

On Wednesday, Mary, Peaches, and I will be zipping down to Cambria on the coast. It will be about six hours away. We have reservations for the Cambria Shores Inn, one of many inns in town that is pet-friendly. According to the front desk, they “not only allow dogs, they love them.” What’s not to love about a golden retriever like Peaches? Goldens may be the world’s sweetest breed.

The next day, I’ll be talking with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s student chapter of the Society of American Foresters. I picked May 24 way back last December. In prime procrastinator fashion, I thought that something akin to lightning would strike me between then and now and I’d be witty, amusing, and deep.

I think it’s a truism for everyone, except the current administration, to see him or her self as a fraud, at least sometimes. We got lucky and if we’re not careful, we’ll be exposed as the imposter that we know that we are. I graduated from Humboldt State University thirty-three years ago. Crap. What can I tell some college students, who know more about today’s forestry, about the business of forestry? Yes, I have been the assistant forest manager at Mountain Home State Forest (asst forest manager of a state forest has more gravitas than the local burger franchise, don’t you think?), coordinated the natural resource management training for the California Dept of Forestry and Fire Protection, and been the forest manager for Boggs Mountain State Forest. Still, that’s what I used to be. What can I impart about how to be relevant? How do I tell them how to have a vocation in forestry in the 21st century?

Time for a point of view shift. I’m going to talk about writing.

What could be better than books on TV?

It’s Friday, the weekend is almost upon us, and you know what that means—Book TV. Yes, if you’re nerd enough to watch C-SPAN 2 (the second of three Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network feeds) you’ll know that it covers the US Senate during the week and devotes itself to non-fiction authors on the weekend.

Mary and I have printed the schedule, highlighted all the authors we want to hear, and have the popcorn ready to go for good stuff like Jonathan Eig’s, Opening Day: The Story Of Jackie Robinson’s First Season…the only thing better would be a Ken Burn’s marathon.

Apparently, there are other diversions going on. Something called the NBA is doing something…I don’t know what. I understand that David Stern (whoever he is) is a doodyhead in Phoenix. Strong words.

Embrace your inner geek. Have a good weekend.

Volvos to the left of me, Volvos to the right, stuck in the middle

Yesterday, I looked at one of the three high performance Swedish driving machines that I own. The registration tag was out of date. Well, I’ll be, it is past March isn’t it? So, today I went to the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. I know, I know, some people break out in hives if they set foot inside the doors of the DMV. Nothing says, “government bureaucracy” quite like the DMV. They have a nice system that lets you make an appointment. No sooner had I walked through the automatic doors under DMV’s slogan “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (it sounds classier than “Abandon all hope, you who enter here”), than I met the person at the window. It’s one of the benefits of living in a rural area.

It turns out that, according to DMV’s records, the fine 1995 Swedish driving machine hadn’t been registered for two years. Oh dear. You may wonder how this happened. I know I did. It turns out that Mary and I had our hands full two years ago then. Around that time, my father was growing progressively weaker. His caregiver had called to let us know he had started falling. One loses track of things when going through hospitals, dementia, convalescent homes, and mortuaries. Not to mention selling a house in Washington, estate stuff, and memorials. It’s been two years on May 28 that Pop’s been gone.

So, a mere $250 later, I think I have the cars registered. I think. Now where did I put my car keys. . . .

A Way With Words

Back in February, I’d come across a word—catachresis—in my American Heritage Dictionary. I forget what I had been looking for originally. Catatonic? Doesn’t matter. Catachresis means the “misapplication of a word or phrase” such as “the use of blatant to mean ‘flagrant’.”

Mary and I have been podcasting KPBS’s A Way With Words (AWWW) and so I called them to ask what on earth the difference could be. If you’re not familiar with AWWW, it’s sort of like Car Talk for word geeks. I got a call from AWWWs’ exec producer, Stefanie Levine, and we set up a talk with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett the hosts of the show in early March.

My call (actually, they call you) aired on May 12, 2007. Here’s the link if you’re interested in knowing the difference between blatant and flagrant (about 25 minutes into the broadcast).

Rejection by the rejected

Nate Carpenter, the protagonist in my story The God of Trees muses, “Unlike relationships, my line of work is dirt simple…you grow trees, you cut trees, you plant trees. I’ve planted thousands of seedlings during my life, some grow, some don’t. It all boils down to location and luck.”

I’ve been posting the first chapters of my story to a British website called YouWriteOn.com since October 2006 and found that so much depends on luck. Who YWO assigns to review one’s story makes/breaks its overall ranking. The top five in the month’s ratings get a professional review. The effect is akin to having dozens of teacher’s assistants grading papers.

It’s sort of like a writer’s Russian roulette for word geeks. Some of the things people write cut to the bone. Words have tremendous power. I heard a Barnes and Noble “Meet the Writers” interview with Chuck Palahniuk. He has people faint at his readings. After some reviews and ratings I consider suicide by pastry.

Ah well, it is all part of the writer’s development of thick skin. It’s natural that we want people to like us, I suppose. And, therefore we want people to like our writing. Ain’t gonna happen.

Would you pass another scone please…oh yes, slathered in jam and butter would be great!