What Me Worry

I used to get seriously creeped out when I read newspaper accounts of UFO sightings. The idea that we here on earth were getting secret visits from beings from another planet was a nerve-wracking prospect. Where were they coming from, and what did they want? Or perhaps most importantly, did they have disintegrator ray guns and did their diet include human brains?
Eventually, this crippling fear diminished, and I was able to look again at the night sky without shuddering. This was accomplished primarily by making a point to no longer read newspaper accounts of UFO sightings. At this point, my paranoia shifted to a more local concern: Bigfoot. Even though Sasquatch is generally considered to be a problem in the Northwest, and I should consider myself fairly safe in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado. But when we went up into the mountains, my mind began to fill with all the possibilities for large, ape-like creatures wandering out of the woods and through the back door of our cabin. I kept an eye out for enormous footprints and my nose open for the expressly pungent odor that would announce the beast's presence.
And now, Nessie is back. A man has captured what Nessie watchers say is possible footage of the supposed mythical creature beneath Scotland's most mysterious lake - Loch Ness. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water," said Gordon Holmes, the fifty-five-year-old a lab technician who took the video. And now the questions: What could this thing be? How big could it be? What does it eat? The Scottish media is skeptical of Nessie stories but Holmes' footage is of such good quality that even the normally reticent BBC Scotland aired the video on its main news program Tuesday. Now, instead of worrying about humpback whales getting lost on their way up the California coast, I can start feeling the threat of a migrating Nessie.

Best Blog Ever

Epitomes are trouble. I know because this is often my preferred mode of discourse. The biggest, baddest, coolest, tallest, loudest, frostiest, chewiest, smelliest, grungiest, saddest, longest, strongest, stretchiest, cutest, testiest, meatiest, bounciest, grossest, sappiest - before I ever have to resort to using "most" anything - I periodically will announce the superlative for any given category just to see who (or what) flinches.
It makes a fun evening for me to begin a conversation with a phrase like, "I think the best TV show of all time was 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'." Moments later I can see how the rest of the night will go. If everyone smiles and agrees, then dinner will be a very dull affair. If someone says, "You're out of your mind. Everyone knows the best TV show was 'Full House'," maybe we should skip dessert. Then again, if someone suggests that "The Dick Van Dyke Show" just gave us a glimpse of the thundering talent that Jerry Van Dyke was, it might be worth calling the babysitter and telling her that we'll be home late.
The real challenge is picking a point that you can defend. You don't even have to do it with a straight face. Stephen King set off a thousand blogs when he made his list of the "Twenty-Five Greatest Rock Songs." All those Elvis songs, and not a single track from Black Sabbath? Once again ladies and gentlemen, these are opinions - not facts. This is the joy of pop culture. It is infinitely subjective. Firmly held beliefs are not a necessity, since you could find yourself on the other side of the swinging door of hypocrisy at any minute, but at least introduce your assertion with conviction. Then when the rest of the room caves in around you in disagreement, be prepared to point out that we live in a free and democratic society, and if you believe that "Physical Graffiti" is the best Led Zeppelin album ever recorded, take solace in the fact that the framers of the United States Constitution had you in mind when they put that whole "freedom of speech" thing in - which, by the way, happens to be the best of all the freedoms.

Surrender

"The rest is up to you." With these words, Peter Gabriel set his microphone on the stage and walked out of the spotlight, as the crowd continued to chant the refrain to his human rights anthem "Biko." He had led us on a musical journey to the edge of action, and then he gave us the chance to make a difference.
"It's up to you now." These are the words Cindy Sheehan used to sum up her resignation as the public face of the peace movement. "Good-bye America ... you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it." Ouch. Was she aiming at my pride, or something just a little bit lower?
Like many of us, she was stung by the Democratic cave-in on war funding last week. So much for timetables, so much for accountability. If someone asked you for a thousand dollars, you'd probably want to know how it was going to be used. You might even expect results. If you were going to give someone billions of dollars, wouldn't you expect some way to check in on how your money was being spent?
What if you didn't give them money? What if you gave them your son? Would you want to know that there was some measure of relative success or failure that might justify the loss of your child? Now her twenty-nine year marriage is over, and she has decided to call it a day while she can still spend time with her remaining children. "I'm going home for awhile to try and be normal," she wrote. Fair enough. It's what we're all trying to do these days, right?

Keep Me In Your Heart For A While

Memorial Day has always been about memories. From the visits to Mountain View cemetery to the ten kilometer runs, I have a series of benchmarks that take me from my past to the present. I remember patiently waiting on those bright spring days for the release from my mother to leave the decoration of graves to go play with my brothers on the cannon located at the far end of cemetery. I remember my first Bolder Boulder race after knee surgery, when I was still hobbled but kept going by the cadence set by a group of Marines running just ahead of me.
And I thought of my father - the man who once wrote "scatter me here" in our cabin's guestbook, so we took him at his word. Consequently, there isn't a convenient graveside to decorate, though there is a plaque mounted to a boulder next to the creek, just behind the high school we all graduated from. That's okay, since proximity is not essential here. I carry these notions with me as I run, and put them together with other thoughts to create what you read here - a kind of "brain smoothie". What came out today was this: A recollection of the bumper sticker on our neighbor's station wagon. It had a peace symbol, and read "Footprint of the American Chicken." This was a family that came to our little cul-de-sac in Boulder, Colorado from the somewhat more conservative enclave of Kansas City, Missouri. During the 1970's, they existed as the right-wing element in an otherwise politely liberal landscape. They were the Fox News Channel in an NPR neighborhood. It was only today that it occurred to me how challenging that must have been for all concerned, but the image that came to me was one of my father, suggesting a "neighborhood salute." My father was always very much a uniter. He loved to bring people together, so until now, this only appeared to me as another way for my dad to bring the street along as an extension of his fun-club. The salute he was suggesting involved hanging his fingers down in a claw - the footprint of the American Chicken. Maybe I've got this wrong. Time does funny things to even the best memories, but I choose to remember my father's quiet bit of neighborhood resistance.

Shock and Awe

We have been decorating the graves of our war dead for the past one hundred thirty-nine years. We are about to put flowers on the thousandth American grave since the last Memorial day. As a nation we continue to struggle with the challenge of supporting our troops while maintaining our particular stance on the war on terror. We seem to have learned at least one lesson from our experience with Viet Nam. Or have we?
From the new introduction of "Born on the Fourth of July" by Ron Kovic: "I have watched in horror the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding. So many similarities, so many things said that remind me of that war thirty years ago which left me paralyzed for the rest of my life. Refusing to learn from our experiences in Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception, distortion, manipulation, and denial, doing everything it can to hide from the American people their true intentions and agenda in Iraq. The flag-draped caskets of our dead begin their long and sorrowful journeys home hidden from public view, while the Iraqi casualties are not even considered worth counting--some estimate as many as 100,000 have been killed so far."
How do we honor the memory of those who have served our country, and fought to maintain our freedoms? I would suggest that each of us must continue to exercise those very rights and privileges - including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Fixing A Hole Where The Rain Gets In

When you fall off a bicycle, you're supposed to get right back on and ride. The same is true of being thrown from a horse. After yesterday's thirteen hours of essentially non-stop television viewing, there was no real interest in sitting down on the couch and letting the comforting glow from across the room absorb me once again.
Instead, I climbed up on the roof. I have an absurd connection to this phrase which is connected to what I believe is the funniest joke in the world, but it is in fact what I did. There was a section of the roof over our back porch that had been rotting for several months now and today was the day that had nothing for me to do - except fix the dry rot on the porch roof.
The best part of the job was that I got to use a number of different power tools. Like so many things in my life, my carpentry skills have always been a little suspect, but I make up for that with a certain swagger and bravado. Of course I can fix it: plywood, nails, shingles, what else?
For one thing, I'm doing most of the work on the roof. Even my devil-may-care attitude couldn't make up for the fifteen or so feet between me and the ground. I know the acceleration of gravity on Earth is generally considered to be a constant, and I know my mass (give or take the weight of the tools on my belt) and I only needed to do a little conversion from feet to mass to figure out what force my body would make on the concrete below. I chose instead to concentrate on the task at hand.
Three hours later, the rotted wood was in the compost bin, and the rusty nails had been thrown away. The new wood needs a coat of paint to match the rest of the porch, but order has been restored in my corner of the universe once again. Now I have the rest of the day to fight the urge to lay on the couch and watch television.

Marathon Men

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of "Star Wars". With this in mind, my friend and I decided to undertake a marathon viewing of the entire series of the "Planet of the Apes" films. No, it doesn't make nice simple sense like watching all of George Lucas' galactic saga, but I have been waiting for almost a year to find the time to sit down and take in the science fiction fantasia that began nine years before, in a galaxy not so far away.
9:30 AM - The show begins with the Twentieth Century Fox logo - just like Lucasfilm, only with a little shorter fanfare. We're in for the one hundred and twelve minute introduction to a land where man is primitive and super-intelligent apes run the show. We realize that we can't recreate the experience of moviegoers back in 1968, since the shock ending has become a punchline in the past four decades.
10:35 AM We hear Taylor croak, "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" This was voted as the #66 movie quote by the American Film Institute.
11:30 AM - Hey, he never left Earth at all. They blew it up, or at the very least they let the New York shoreline get all messed up. Thus endeth chapter one.
11:38 - Lunch orders in, comfort stops made, we plunge "Beneath the Planet of the Apes." Our initial observations regarding Doctor Hasslein's theory of Observed Time suggest that time begins to slow as we continue to watch films about super-intelligent apes. The first one was almost two hours, this one clocks in at just barely an hour and a half.
12:45 PM - We're wondering if we didn't hit our own "defect in time" and start watching "Star Trek" reruns starring orangutans and chimpanzees.
1:05 PM - Is it any wonder that our astronauts have such a hard time dealing with reality when they are trained to deal with such varied threats as a gorilla army, mutant mind control and a doomsday bomb?
1:10 PM - And just like that, they blew up the planet. The whole thing. Just like that. How could there possibly be another film?
1:45 PM - We can't spend too much time trying to comprehend what Doctor Hasslein had in mind. We've got to keep moving if we want to be free of "Escape From..." before sundown.
2:16 PM - It is fun to watch chimpanzees discuss the evolution of their species.
2:33 PM - I have just recalled that I had a great many quotations from the "Apes" movies on Dymotape labels stuck on my bedroom door - including "It wasn't our war - it was the gorilla's war."
3:13 PM - It has just occurred to me that we will shortly be leaving Kim Hunter behind as we move still further down the line of our possible futures. We'll miss you, Zira.
3:29 PM - We are now rounding the clubhouse turn as we pile on into "Conquest of..." There is a giddy sense of euphoria as the dystopian future (1991) that has already passed. Maybe Doctor Hasslein was right after all.
4:17 PM - In 1991 we have phones without cords - well, at least the 1991 that we see in 1972... Wow. And all those turtlenecks. And sideburns. This future is none too friendly, is it?
4:53 PM - Caesar has just decreed that he will lead his "people" out of bondage, to witness the birth of the Planet of jump-suit-clad super-intelligent Apes.
5:07 PM - At last we find ourselves in the year 2670 A.D., with the Lawgiver (who bears a shocking vocal similarity to John Huston) giving us a rundown of the last six centuries. We can smell the barn, or the monkey house.
5:18 PM - Virgil the Orangutan is waxing on about travelling faster than light, and bending time. What does an ape know about such things? And how did he write all those fabulous tunes?
6:01 PM - Can man and ape live in peace? Only time (and Doctor Hasslein) will tell.
6:23 PM - The rag-tag armada of the mutants is presently attacking what looks like a Renaissance Faire attended by a group of super-intelligent apes.
6:46 PM - "Lawgiver, who knows about the future?" "Perhaps," says a foam latex encumbered John Huston, "Only the dead may know." Okay, them and the those of us who spent the daylight hours of May 29, 2007 watching all five "Planet of the Apes" movies. I feel as though I've only aged a day...