Can You Hear Me Now?

I read Alan Hutcheson’s online journal (please, do not call it a blog) today and he comments on a certain American Express commercial. He says that besides the humor ablating away with numerous viewings, that he doesn’t know any of the other celebs in the spot other than Scorcese and Ellen DeGeneres. I have zero idea as to who these people are. I’m a boomer. I don’t think it’s aimed at moi. I don’t read People, US, or watch Entertainment Tonight.

But, I love technology. I have a DVD-R machine that records my shows to a spiffy and shiny disk. The shows I copy to disk are The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, CBS News’ Sunday Morning, and assorted talks on C-SPAN 2’s BookTV. I read that about 80% of people who watch programs that they’ve recorded watch the commercials. Me? I pass through commercials like congress through money.

There is one ad for a cell phone that I noticed as the commercials did the 100 yard dash. The Jitterbug ads, now, there’s something aimed at me: a guy who needs glasses and a magnifying glass to read the text of a cell phone. They have large buttons and a display that can be seen from outer space.

Coffee East of Java


As I sit at my kitchen table with my steaming cup of substitute, let me say that I have had only one cup of coffee in fourteen days. No caffeine in thirteen of fourteen days. I miss it. I love coffee (not enough to marry it, mind you, our relationship knew no bounds). I had a map in my head of where every Starbucks was between Sacramento and Portland.

Pero, Roma, Rooibos, Postum (screw you Mr. Coffee Nerves), none of them are substitutes for coffee: Joe, Java, Arabica, French Roasted nirvana. I’m jonesing for Coffee; you know what I’m saying?

Also on the dietary no-no list are fatty foods like potato chips and French fries. In fact, to know what I can and can’t have, make a list of all the foods you love—chocolate, coffee, rich desserts—and cross all of them off your list.

Oh, and one more, to make matters even more dismal, I’m not allowed beer (no alcohol) either.

I hope my stomach appreciates the sacrifice that I’m making for it.

Skål.

Slang This

Last month, Mary and I were in Tucson, Arizona for her nephew’s PhD ceremony in Physics. I believe his dissertation is in String Theory that I think may be about orchestras or how to make Cat’s Cradles, one or the other. You might try looking up String Theory in Wikipedia: the online font of knowledge.

The day we arrived in Tucson, I had arranged with Stefanie Levine, producer of A Way With Words (not ‘Away With Words’), to talk with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett for AWWW’s Slang This segment. How it works: Grant has three slang terms. For each one he gives the phrase and three possible meanings for the word.

They would call the motel, route it to the room, and I’d be there. What could go wrong? It did route to the room, as planned, only I hadn’t activated the phone so I got nothing.

Stefanie went to Plan B (this is radio after all and not brain surgery) and I talked to Martha and Grant on my cell phone while sitting on stairs in the shade of a palm tree. The terms were Hockey Hair, Half-Shaved, and Woodsheddin.’ Due to time constraints, they cut ‘half-shaved.’ I didn’t guess the correct answer but I remember the correct answer had to do with drinking.

For ‘hockey-hair’ and ‘woodsheddin’ you’re going to have to find out by listening. I appear about 35 minutes into the June 9, 2007 broadcast titled Blog This!

Ya Cain’t Fix Stoopid

People have often commented on my driving . Usually the person riding my bumper is the one observing that I drive like a like old lady (not from Pasadena); while I can’t hear what they are saying, I can read lips.

Yesterday had all the elements of a great day as I drove my well-engineered Swedish chariot back up the switchbacks of CA Highway 29 over Mount St. Helena, sun and temperature were perfect for opening the sunroof and driving with the windows down.

With said windows open I heard tires squealing louder just out of my sight on the curve. I think NASCAR must make the average idjut think he can drive like Richard Petty or Dale Earnhardt. I was about at the apex of a left hairpin when the oncoming car careered around the bend straddling the double-yellow stripe. I had heard him (or her) coming, and since I drive as though most of the populace is as dumb as this guy, I went off into the gravel and avoided him.

While the safety equipment on my 1995 Volvo 850 would have protected me; I don’t need to prove it.

Drive safely everyone. Savor the moment and let the journey be as important as the destination.

For the record, my wife and mother-in-law love my driving.

Anthropology 101

I indulged my inner anthropologist over the weekend. It’s that time of year where we share our little southeastern shore of Clear Lake with—how shall I put this delicately?—morons. Wahoo! (This paroxysm of joy must be shouted to apprise everyone within 300 yards that the exclaimer is having a rapturous time.)

Memorial Weekend kicked off summer and that means wakeboarders, jet-skiers (aka dirt bikes on water), and water-skiers. With gas hovering near $4 a gallon here, where do people find the green? I guess if you can get the credit to buy a $12K jet ski, you can use credit to buy the gas. All must bring with them their soundtracks complete with sufficient bass to crumble concrete.

The squeals (presumably of delight) began Friday afternoon. One girl sunbathed on the dock. Four other equally pubescent girls frolicked on a six-person raft. One jumped up and down. “Oh yes! Yeah! Yeah!” she yelled. Her significant breasts bounced in counterpoint with little visible support. None of the bikinis contained enough fabric to make a useful handkerchief.

Now unattached cute little things don’t stay unnoticed for long. Aforementioned cuties send forth pheromones to lure males from the vicinity. I looked up from my chores when I heard the deep-throated thrub-dub of a ski boat idling. Four young males of the species initiated mating calls to the females, “Joo-see!”

A nubile female in a red bikini bent and displayed her rear to the males, gyrated her hips, then swiveled her head to look at them. “Uh huh,” she affirmatively responded to their ebullient mating chants, “JOO-see.”

By midmorning on Saturday, there were three boats and two jet skis tied up at the dock. Pubescent males swarmed around females like bees around a hive; 100-watt sound systems amplified the buzzing.

The mating frenzy culminated mid-afternoon. Two jet skis and three boats revved supercharged engines and roared off into deep water, one girl using her bikini top as a flag to wave around her head.

Ahh. Quiet again. Woohoo.

Editing my masterpiece

Sunset on Clear Lak

I trimmed 800 words from that 2100 word chapter. Literally, evaporated my carefully tended, sensitively considered, blah, blah, blah. Hot darn, 3 ½ pages sliced off like Van Gogh’s ear! And just about as painful. I hope it’s better (the story, not the ear). I know it’s shorter.

And lastly, I know it’s the weekend, so enjoy a sunrise on me.

How hard could it be?

How tough can it be to write a few pages? Easy peasy. In fact, I’ve already written it once: Chapter 8 of Timber beast. Two words describe it: preachy surplusage.

Elmore Leonard says “[t]ry to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So, as I turn Timber Beast into The God of Trees, I’m looking at each chapter, each page, each passage, and asking myself:
• what is the point of this scene?
• how does it advance the plot?
• does it have a goal?
• is there conflict on every page?

Don’t mind me, you can skip the numbered part if you like. I’m going to work out what I’m trying to do. This scene currently takes place in a classroom. Not the most exciting spot on earth.

  1. The point of the scene is to introduce another love interest, Liz Johnson, who is going to have the greatest impact on Nate, my protagonist.
  2. It does advance the plot, sort of. Without Liz, I have to find other ways for Nate to discover clues and examine issues. Liz is a prime source of conflict in the story.
  3. Goal…hmmm. Does just getting word count, count? No? I didn’t think so. Nate’s goal is to change the students’ minds about logging and getting away from the notion that natural is leaving the forest go fallow and Liz’s goal is to show what a putz Nate is. I know it needs work. I hate to lose this scene. It’s one of the few places the story talks about the issue of perception. How else can I illustrate that?
  4. Conflict. Well there’s my inner conflict. The inner critic telling me how lousy it all is. Beside that—on the pages—to get conflict, Liz has to be on each page, throwing verbal bombs. In the Timber Beast manuscript, it’s told in third-person from Liz’s point of view. The conflict there comes from Liz’s conflict in being drawn to Nate and hating what he is talking about. I’m working The God of Trees in first-person and trying to go from Nate’s PoV. I will try changing it to Liz’s and see if that helps. It means the reader has one more character’s voice to get to know and will lessen the sympathy for Nate.

Hi, welcome back, Skipper. The noise you hear is just the lapidary barrel in my head working off the rough spots in the story.

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.