Here I am pondering the world – mostly harmless. Wikipedia shut down for a day. You could still get into a back door. I never saw it. I turned off the Internet. I typed “google” into Google and it broke. Instead I went door to door selling stock in myself. A couple of takers. They called me today to set up appointments.

One of the most ponder able moments was the dialogue about the Beatles lyric, “Oh, that magic feeling. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go.” Each of us had a time when it applied. It always fit. Some were right outta college. Some were en media res. Each was a journey the other could never know. Nowhere to go. Magic!

We cursed people with cuss words in good fun. I would curse without cussing some other people in less fun later. Whatever. They are just jocks. They angered and frustrated me because I thought they did not like me, when, as it turns out, after I pissed all over the bed about it I realized that it was probably more that I did not really like them. We had no relation. They talked about running and beer and marathons and racing and winning shit like a Bostonian talking about baseball or a Boulderite and their diet. One dimensionals bother me. I want to know what they thought about politics or technology or the last movie they saw or a TV show they watch or even (gods forbid) how they feel about their job. I want a connection with people beyond the immediate easy road. If we met on the plane we can get the small talk stuff out of the way – this is a really big plane, do you fly often, is that your final destination, are you from there, where were you originally coming from, business or pleasure. Done. Now we can get into the really interesting stuff. I have had more connection with people on a city bus.

And my ponderance gives way to sleep as the final thoughts of teacher versus student accountability, Perry dropping out, whether “Food Stamp President” is truly racist or not, and the million stupid puns I can make about one eyed one horned flying SOPA / PIPA eaters.

          A man and a woman are dating. The woman tells the man she would like to be a stay-at-home wife until she becomes a stay-at-home mom. She makes it a condition for marriage. He agrees. They marry.

They both have jobs. He makes “alright” money. She makes a decent salary also. Together they are doing well. She loses her job. She tells him it is time to fulfill her marriage condition. She would like to be the stay-at-home wife now.

He tells her they cannot afford it yet. His salary alone will leave a married couple in meager circumstances. She tells him plainly that if he cannot provide for her, then she will leave him. He cannot. She divorces him.

What do you think?

My buddy broke his leg. I broke a vow. He considered this an even trade.

I have been running with this group called the Hash Hound Harriers. If you are not in the know, their concept is simple: follow the rabbit and drink along the way. They are a multinational organization with independently operated cells across the globe, like terrorists except for the drinking part. I mentioned that. Drinking. It almost needs to be mentioned again. And I am sure it will be.

The “hare” lays flour along his tracks. The rest of the group chases him. Every once in a while (1.5 miles give or take) they “beer check” you. That means you drink. At the end of the route is a keg and a circle and songs and dancing and shit talking and cuttin up. That means you drink more. It’s fun.

Right before that, the more drinking and singing and circle stuff, is when my buddy took a dive off a 12 foot wall.

This was not the normal hash run. It was actually a bike ride. They have all of these different variations in the 40 plus years the Houston Chapter has been active. They call the bike version the “Cychohash.” We rode 12 miles (really 15 because we lost trail for a bit and wandered in circles) ending at these abandoned grain silos along the bayou. You could climb up inside of them through this hole and a rope on the back side. I won’t say it takes too much of an adventurer to explore this, but evidently it does take enough of one since most of these hashers chose to stay on the ground.

And these people chase other people through the woods and back alleys of the city and the more “shiggy” a trail means more water and weeds and mud and forest obstacles. When a 12 year looked up the pipe, grabbed the rope and started his ascent with nobody following behind, I had a sudden revelation: There is a difference between an athlete and an adventurer.

I joined H4 because I thought it would be adventurous. Sometimes it is, but for the most part these guys are all athlete. I am not an athlete. Athletes were the guys who kicked my ass in highschool. I had a rude reminder of this at their New Years party. I felt like the social outcast nerd that crashed the jock frat party except they had grown up a little. They served better beer, they played terrible music on a soundsystem that could not handle it and instead of pushing me around they just ignored me and forgot that they knew who I was. Happy twenty twelve!

A few Hashers cross over into the adventurer athlete realm of the Vann Diagram. So, what’s the difference? An athlete is trying to win. An adventurer does it because it is there. Athletes avoid danger. Adventure seekers dive headlong into it. Athletes want speed. They want to hurry and get there. Adventurers crave the journey.

This pipe and silo was not at all the leg breaker of my buddy. Humpy Dumpty climbed a wall. He did not so much as fall as he did drop a couple feet from a hanging position and land awkward. He heard it snap. He saw it dangling. He shouted the only name he knew. Some of the crew heard him. It was a couple of women I met earlier. We had shaken hands and introduced ourselves. I remembered both of their crazy nicknames given to veteran Hashers who have done stupid things in the past to get those names. As my friend shouted my name they asked him, “Whose that?” Go figure. Nerd in the frat house.

Oh, they know my name now. They yelled for a medic. Nobody officially stepped up while everyone wanted to do their part in helping, which mostly included snapping pics of him on the ground with their cell phone cameras. I observed for a second to see if anyone was more qualified than my meager Eagle Scout wilderness survival skills. They weren’t.

“Step back,” I said. “Don’t move him. I need two sticks and some rope.”

Nobody moved. I was still not important enough. I found the sticks myself and used my scarf belt to stabilize the wood on either side of his leg. I normally wear a faerie scarf belt. This time was no different. You never know when you may need to tie something up. I used the scarf to brace the wood on either side of the fracture. This ex-navy dude whips out a cord of manilla from the trunk of his car. Together we bound him up with bowlines and half hitches and a square knot for good measure.

“No ambulance,” my buddy cried, “No insurance.” It looked like we were doing this ourselves.

Once his leg was immobilized so as not to exacerbate the break, three tough guys fireman carried him to the back of the hare’s car while I called his girlfriend. She followed us to the Methodist Hospital. We checked him into the emergency room.

Nurses and Doctors from other floors gathered round to look at my handiwork. I was proud. They even left the splint on to take the x rays. As proud as I was showing everyone pictures and retelling the story, that pride was missing one persons validation. I called my dad. Part of me did it to tell him about the experience (read: adventure). The other part, the part I did not realize until I was actually talking to him, was that I wanted to thank him for providing me with the skills to take control of a situation like this with adequate knowledge and calmness to handle it correctly.

How did I break a vow? I said I was not going to go to Ruddyards, a dive bar my broken ankles friend frequents, the biggest reason he is always broke, and just as big a reason he has enough weight sensitivity issues to not want to be called Humpty

Dumbass. Of course he went there that night. He needed some comfort food in the vein of 151 and coke. Yeah, I went inside to clink glasses with his stupid ass and break my vow.

He told me, “Alright. We’re even now, but I guess that ski trip is off, huh?”

]]> http://tymora42.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/houston-hash-gets-a-humpty-dumbass/feed/ 0 tymora42 20120114-075626.jpg 20120114-074214.jpg 20120109-083751.jpg http://tymora42.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/once-upon-a-darkness/ http://tymora42.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/once-upon-a-darkness/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:38:03 +0000 tymora42 http://tymora42.wordpress.com/?p=261 ]]> something broken. something blue. something shattered. something new.

please.

something new.

featuring:

I Hate Poetry
An Entire Relationship in a Dream
Drinking Contest
I Like How
Sadness Within
Something to Break
Cemetery
The Phonebook Burned (better than the newspaper)
A Moment Shared with Myself
Editors and Directors
Loved
Something New

I am interested.

Did  I mention also that I am the shit? I am.

You should hire me. Bring me in for an interview. You’ll see.

So, I told him this. He says he heard it on the news. It was Einstein. Then he dared me to “Look it up.” I do not know what news broadcast spouted this obvious misinformation. Knowing my father’s politics and the reference he was making toward the Obama entitlement spending force I can only assume it was probably FOX.

Einstein also proclaimed that “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” I do not see FOX repeating this quote anytime in the near future.

Anyway, I took his challenge and decided to look it up. This is what I have found:

The quote, through great debate, has been attributed to Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and Rita Mae Brown. It has been repeated through variation by coaches, athletes, overweight women, neurotic psych patients, housewives and, most recently, conservative political commentators.

I decided to look for primary sources with years and dates attributed to the article. There is no citation of Franklin or Twain actually writing this piece of wisdom or being recorded saying it in an interview. Franklin is cited in Wikiquotes without documentation and with serious debate about redacting it. In that same discussion one user claims to have found an article in an issue of the 1925 New Yorker verifying that it was, actually, an Einstein quote. I followed her link to Google Books to find not enough information to satisfy myself. The picture near the article did not look like it was from 1925, nor did the citation reveal any dates printed on the page. The image was too small to be zoomed into a legibly readable size and there were no links for further perusal. Finally, it seems through context to have been written by a fiction author offhandedly claiming that someone else, Einstein for instance, said it. Thankfully the comment and source was redacted as being unreliable.

Did this leave Rita Mae Brown’s novel, Sudden Death, as the only originator? No. Narcotics Anonymous also used the quote “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results” in their Basic Text (otherwise known as the Red Book yet filed under the title Narcotics Anonymous: Approved Literature) published about the same time. I went to the Library of Congress to determine the actual date of publication for these texts. Brown’s Sudden Death was published by Bantam in 1983. It appears on pg 68. Narcotics Anonymous has a publication date stating 1982, however, a source profiling rare books states that the actual publication was March of 1983. To further shroud the origination in mystery there are claims (without documentation that I could find) that Brown used it in a 1981 interview before her book was published and that the quote was included in the original preview edition of the NA handbook in the same year and that it dates as far back as 1979 when NA began researching and putting together the manuscript.

Who knows? It could very well be just an ancient Chinese proverb. I would sincerely love any information you come across regarding this. After all, the great Einstein once said, “Knowledge is power and knowing is half the battle.”

Normally saws come with a 3/8 chain on a regular bar that looks like a fish. Detailed carvings require a 1/4 chain on a bar that tapers almost to a point. To change that bar and chain requires a sprocket with a 1/4″ pitch. Not all chainsaws can be modified in that way. Eventually I decided on a STIHL model 171 because there is a STIHL certified shop in Durango and it was the least expensive for what I was doing. Originally I wanted the 192 CE arborist saw simply for the weight of it, but the top handle trigger made it difficult to maneuver. You can get them in the rear trigger for about fifty bucks more. This made the 171 over a hundred dollars cheaper for the sacrifice of a little more than 3 pounds.

Now I have two saws. Three if you count the outdated Craftsman with the equally outdated and broken oil pump. Outdated in this realm means finding a replacement part is next to impossible even with the vast resources of the all powerful internet. The Craftsman is still usable. You just have to keep manually lubing up the bar and chain after every few cuts or so.

The first two recommended projects are an eagle and a mushroom. The eagle allegedly teaches you every basic cut you would do with a carving saw. The mushroom is designed to be easy, quick, and repetitive practice without a schematic. Everyone knows what a mushroom looks like, right? There are a lot of stumps leftover from thinning the forest this summer. I have a feeling they will all become mushrooms.

Well, gotta go. I got logs to cut.

just so you know - we will not be doing this

My best friend is getting married. Being my best friend I have the opportunity to be none other than the best man. As the best man you are in charge of arranging the bachelor party, the sendoff of your friend into the new and exciting realm of matrimony. To perform this function correctly one must reflect on the spiritual aspect of the bachelor party, the debauchery, the objectification of women, the wild romp through the night before the union of two lovers. In our current politically correct society we must slough off the reins of morality to a point and carry on like the animals we are. Aside from the base pleasure orientation of the crusade, I propose there is a spiritual underlining to the ritual of the traditional bachelor party.

In the past I have been in four other wedding parties, this one will be the fifth. The very first I was a groomsman to the highschool buddy just graduating college to go off and have a life with a wife, who was also a mutual highschool friend. They hated each other in highschool. He asked her to prom and she declined because one night he dropped in the bushes next to the Sonic. Now, they have two children and a third on the way if it has not got here yet. My second wedding I had a shared best man duty with another guy. There was a bachelor party – sorta. More about this later. The marriage ended in a bitter divorce with affairs and distrust. The third was unmemorable. He was a good friend at the time. We lost contact. I was a simple groomsman that did not attend the night before sendoff. I think they played golf. I have no idea how they are today. The last wedding was my sister’s. Being the minister I took my role seriously and did not participate in the debauchery, which took place in New Orleans on Bourbon street so you can imagine there was some serious debauchery going on. They are still together.

The traditional bachelor party can wax and wane in structure, however, there is one key aspect that needs to be upheld: 1) The women and men must be separated on the night before the wedding. And this goes for ALL women and ALL men. Just because the groom is better friends with this girl he has known forever does not mean that she should come to the bachelor party. If they are really that good of friends the bride should invite her to the bachelorette. And this goes for the brother of the bride as well and that guy she has known forever. The typical modern pre marriage get together is the combination of both groups of bride and groom for one big blowout. That is what the wedding reception is for. Save it for the rehearsal dinner, split the parties on the night before. The bride and groom will be all mushy mushy the whole night and you do not get the chance to have a special moment with your buddy where you tell him how awesome she is and that he is making the right decision right before you send him and the stripper into the private room for a VIP lap dance. At my first bachelor party I watched the groom’s father, the guy who was always viewed as an authority figure through highschool when we were upstairs in his game room carefully trying not to mess the groomed fuzz on his pool table, slipping twenties into g-strings. This was the moment I started feeling like an adult. It passed.

Another bachelor party I attended did the whole strip club thing with one MAJOR exception. The groom was also friends with my girlfriend, who came with me because she was invited. Thanks pal. His marriage failed. Good. Maybe next time you will split the genders, dumbass.

Failed bachelor parties end in failed marriages. I have theories about this. The co-bestman wedding with the bitter divorce had one of those dinner at Chilis night before gatherings with both parties represented. Lame. Halfway through the night, myself and the rest of the groomsmen kidnap the guy out the back door to hit the town. One guy yelled, “Tittie Bar!” and we were off to our destination. None of us really cared to go, but it was traditional so we did. The groom lasted no more than ten minutes in the place before he paid the bouncer fifty bucks to throw him out. A half hour of searching later we figured out what happened. That pussy had already called a cab from the payphone outside to take him back home to his woman. They woke up together on the day of the wedding. If that was not bad luck, what is?

This anecdote brings up a few of my theories as to why that marriage did not work based on the failure of the bachelor party. Having the parties together hints on distrust, whether it is the bride distrusting the groom or the other way around. Distrustful people have either been burned really bad in the past or are not loyal people to begin with. Then there is the issue of distrusting yourself. Putting yourself into a lustful position with a potential and almost certain one night stand situation is a test of your fidelity. If you do not love her enough to resist that casual urge, much less do not trust yourself in that situation, what the hell are you doing marrying? Obviously your wild oats have not been successfully sown.

Then, there is the matter of going home to her and waking up together on the day of your wedding. You are roped. There is no out. Not that you would take it, but it needs to be presented for you to reject it. Get a hotel. Sleep alone. It may be the last chance you will get. A fundamental part of the bachelor party is for the groom to have that soul searching alone time where he accepts his future. Your brain has been so wrapped up in her and the catering and sending out invitations and getting a minister on top of normal life stuff like work and bills and keeping the house clean. You are stressed. You need a wild night of release where you can ask that one fatal question: Is the sacrifice of all of this worth her for the rest of my life? In a drunken stupor you sleep it off and answer yourself in the morning. Then you go get married.

This is what the whole shebang, the ritual of, the purpose for the bachelor party. This one question is what it is all about. The job of the best man is to be the devil, to throw temptation into the face of the groom to be. The rest of the attendees are minor demons assisting in bringing those temptations to the forefront. It is not because we do not want him to marry. Do you really think Satan, sent by God, really wanted Jesus to cross out of his circle of stones instead of dying on the cross? Hell no! He just wanted him to be confident he was doing the right thing.

Standing outside for a breath before testing a writing program I am not familiar with recalls those writers who have come before with their limited technologies. I take a moment to daydream on the process of constructing novels, plays, screenplays, and even short stories in the time previous to the word processor. How easy it is for us in this new century? How easy will it become? It is no wonder why the once elite market has exploded in a variety of those dedicating their life to the craft of being a writer.

My first retrospective goes to the typewriter, the tapping out of solid words onto the page. The immediate editing process of Microsoft Word, simply hitting the delete key over the highlighted section and reconstructing the previous thought to closer perfection as the writer intends it, could not even be considered to such technology. Even when the liquid papering function was installed in the machine, it could only perform menially, a letter at a time, a punctuation mark, at most a whole word at a time, never a full sentence. Only years before this they would have to spool up the page, apply the whitener, and let it dry before they could continue the thought. Before this they would have to key the whole page over and over. Once the first draft of those thoughts were finally smashed onto paper, the real editing began. Sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs, cut and pasted into different locations of the document, are circled and arrowed with pen knowing that the entire piece must be retyped again and again until it is correct. Obsessive Compulsive editors like myself would never have made it without superior discipline. This is where the admiration of greats like Thomas Pynchon, where every word and placement has significance, must be recognized. And those like Stephen King creating volumes of work with such immensity. It is no wonder he hates the abridgment of them when every revision of a thousand page volume needs retyping after each editing. I can see the dry portion of those novels being the result of the editor self proclaiming pages as worthy for the sole reason of decreasing the workload. Did Steinbeck own a typewriter in the early years? Could he afford new ribbons and paper? This must be why Of Mice and Men is so short. What of Mellville? Jane Austen? Did they pen their works initially before consigning them to typed manuscripts? Were the walls of their rooms covered in index cards with brief character biographies, plot devices, scenery descriptions pinned into the drywall with threads of yarn connecting them to black and white photographs and illustrations like a detective movie?

Shakespeare did not have a typewriter. He jumps further backward in time to the days of quills on parchment. Notes of scratches and older versions of Midsummer Night Dream have yet to be recovered by English archaeologists. Like the zen quote about the river, one can never see the same play twice. It is constantly being rewritten as it is being performed. Lines drop. Actors ad lib. Blocking and scenery is constantly in flux to the whim of the players on stage. Surely their was a stable copy at the start and a final after the run. And I have to picture them learning their lines. Did Willie stand before them in the empty Globe Theatre running through his mix and garble of word from memory expecting them to regurgitate it after a single once over? I would like to have seen his one man show describing the first act with all of the characters and blocking and details of the scenery and pit it against the closing night for consistency. No, to construct a single line with a quill would take considerable thought before the ink every touched the surface. Taking in the scenario of a poet lingering over the page for hours on end before scribbling out a word or two gives credence to the thought that writers were lazy.

Now, the future is here and their will be more future tomorrow. We print one copy and xerox the rest of our novels in multiples for out writing groups to peruse. We edit. We print more. Ink is cheap and paper grows on trees. We post them on Trigger Street and The Red Room and Smashwords for user to (hopefully) read and comment. We post blogs. We podcast. We delete whole sentences at a time. We reorder paragraphs. The tacks have been removed from the walls of our study. The index cards are filed away in drawers where we can wonder what they were ever used for in the first place. Final Draft and Scrivener and Celtx organize the bodies onto virtual corkboards and sticky notes. Characters have tabs for their biographies with images and research encompassed in quick click of a button reference. We hardly even have to type anymore if we do not want. We can tell the story into a microphone and DragonNaturallySpeaking (dragonspeak) will convert the dialogue into text. Windows Journal and similar programs type out scanned handwritten documents for you.

The next great leap in writer evolution that will flood the market over the walls of the dam will be the invention of thought to text. From there it will be a short stroll into the conversion of dreams into movies. Pioneers will consume hallucinogenic drugs to record their experiences. A new Hunter Thompson will arise. Loving or being hated by a writer, if we can still call them writers, will have further consequences than they already have when they are hooked up to these experiential machines transcribing their emotions into novels.

Whole stories will be constructed in the blink of an eye, as fast as one can think them up. Is this what they thought about the video camera? We have come so far from the day when the Guttenberg Press made the scribe monk obsolete. From the days when the ancients chiseled letters into stones. Imagine the editing process of that form. We stepped over the home typesetting invention of the QWERTY keyboard, designed to be less functional than the Dvorak because the speedy keys kept sticking, to the digital manifestation of the word processor. We are now in the age of the work specific visual writing program. As much as the imaginative can prophesize, only the future can tell where we will go next. Who knows? Maybe there will be someone in the distance looking back at you for your contribution to the world and he will say, “And they had to actually write it all by hand.”