Falling apart

You hear all the time how, after a period of time together, pets and their owners start to resemble one another. Sweetie swears that I'm starting to look like furry dependant the elder; I think I have more in common with my '97 Civic: Cracked windshield, leaking fluids, squeaks and rattles galore. Needs to be traded in and replaced with something newer, faster, and sexier but just won't give up and die.

"And you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill."

–Little Feat, "Old Folks Boogie"

I'm not looking for sympathy at all, but there are times when I can really relate to that old (there's that word again) Rolling Stones line, "What a drag it is getting old."

Yesterday was kind of like that. There I was, sitting on the table with my 24-year-old internal image of myself, being poked and pulled and prodded, and being told, in essence, that all the disks in my neck are shot. Dried out, scrunched together, grinding against one another like an arthritic 65-year-old's.

My driver's license says I'm 5'9", but somewhere along the line I've shrunk to more like 5'7" (and a half). I guess I know why.

"We can try stretching exercises to open up the spine," the PT was telling me, "but the fact is that your range of movement is diminished, and your posture when you're riding your road bike is pretty much the worst position for your neck problems."

The ghost of Old Yeller passed through the room and left the hair standing on my worn-out neck.

Arliss Coates: Why did you shoot Rosemary?
Travis Coates: She was sick.
Arliss Coates: Well, you were sick. How come we didn't shoot you?
Travis Coates: That was different.

"...cortisone injections?"

"What?" Great. Now my mind was wandering off.

"Have you had any cortisone injections? In your neck?"

"Actually, I was sort of hoping the PT would work and I wouldn't have to."

Arliss, go fetch the rifle.

For me, the bottom line is that no one gets out alive, and in the grand scheme of things I'm unbelievably lucky.

I watch some of my friends with MS having to accept help sometimes just to feed themselves without slinging their food all over the walls. I see Sweetie's frustration every time she has to go the long way around to get into some building that's only grudgingly ADA compliant. There are people out there who didn't survive their cancers. There are people so depressed that they can't drag themselves from the sofa to the kitchen for a drink of water.

When I was a teenager, I developed this notion that I would die when I was 40 years old. I don't mean the general sense that, dude, that's, like, really old. I just had this premonition that 2000 was when I'd check out for good.

I didn't, and now I kind of feel like I'm living on my bonus life. I try to count my blessings and move on, doing my best to work with what God has given me and do it without too much complaint.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to replace the piece of wire that's holding my tailpipe on.

Random misfire

On another blog I was visiting this morning, I noticed the topic "Layers of the Onion". My first thought: "Kinky. Talk about making whoopie that would bring tears to your eyes."

I really should seek help.

Weekend update

This one's been a keeper on a number of levels, not the least of which being that I'm not sick any more.

1. I vacuumed the house (as promised), including using the attachments on the baseboards. For the bonus round, I donned the hazmat suit and put the smackdown scrubdown on the shower.
2. Schlepped out in the rain with Sweetie to finally rework our cellular plan and replace those six year old boat anchor phones we've been using. I don't need the blasted thing to play Bach's fugue in D minor as a personalized ring for when Sweetie calls. Having the ability to snap pictures with the phone while on a bike ride and beam them home to my wife would be cool, but we can't justify the expense of it just now. Still... the point is that we've got the phones for it now.
3. Trainer? We don't need no steenking trainer. It was 60 flipping degrees out today! I hopped on Ol' Stumpy and rode out to Allen Station to watch the kids practicing roller hockey, then back for about 14.5 miles round trip. I didn't push the pace, but I felt pretty darned good considering I was flat on my back all last weekend and hadn't even done a trainer ride in 20 days. BONUS: I'm starting physical therapy tomorrow, so I'm hoping that will work out and I'll be able to start logging some serious miles again.
4. Ever since I got into cycling a few years ago, I've been hearing how Breaking Away is sort of de rigeur, but I only got around to watching it today. It was fun, and cheesy, and weird seeing Dennis Quaid and Daniel Stern as babies. Not as entertaining as The Triplets of Belleville, for my money, but I'm weird that way.
   
5. All quiet on the volunteer webmaster front. I guess all the players rained in yesterday and out playing in the sun today.

In other words, I had a great weekend.

On the down side, I saw on the news this morning that the Dena Schlosser trial has ended in a mistrial. Oh, I thought. I guess someone couldn't just couldn't be persuaded that Schlosser was guilty. But no. The two holdouts were the guilty votes. Amazing.

There is no doubt in my mind that there's a place for the insanity defense, but not when the insanity is self inflicted.

If you go off your meds and you start having crazy thoughts, don't seek help, and then end up murdering your children, I put you in the same class as the person who goes out, gets blind drunk, and then kills the same children with his car on the drive home. Both can argue that they weren't in their right mind, and that's true; but how did they get that way? The drunk chose to drink and drive. The insane woman went off her meds and started seeing demons in her baby girl.

It's the same thing to me, which is why I'll never have to worry that I might be selected to sit on the jury for a trial such as this one.

Random misfires

Misfire the first

So I happened to glance at my header image and the phrase "bird on a wireframe" popped into my head.

Now why didn't I think of that?

I mean... I did think of that, but why didn't I think of that when I was trying to think of a name for the blog?

(The question is rhetorical, incidentally.)

Misfire the second

So I'm sitting here in my crappy little cubicle, debugging a wad of brittle C++ code that's broken because of someone else's inattention to detail. Time passes. I'm neck deep in the stuff and haven't even noticed that I've gone from 6:45 and my second cup of coffee to lunch time in the blink of an eye.

And then it hits me: the smell of burnt popcorn, wafting across the prairie dog colony like one of those phantasmal hands that emerge from cartoon pies and hook the nostrils of unwary characters with their wispy fingers. Like an olfactory alarm clock, same time every day.

My snoot has been awakened now, and I'm aware of other scents. Someone else in the area has turned loose into the common atmosphere something that strikes me as a cross between beef stew and a dead fish. I have the momentary sense that I've been transported to a movie theater full of field tripping third graders, several of whom have just succumbed to flu season and upchucked their lunches.

Maybe today would be a good day to take my Fritos and my baloney and Swiss sandwich to the break room to eat.

Now playing: Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band, The Mountain

Wanted: mental flotsam

I've been back to the blog several times over the past few days and even contemplated writing something.

But here's the thing: my schtick (or what I think is my schtick) is plucking random bits of cognitive flotsam from the stream of consciousness and writing about them in a wordy, mouthy, playfully cynical manner. Which is great, when those things come along; not so great when they don't.

Right now, my stream of consciousness is a mere trickle.

Is this the result of mental drought conditions? No. At least, I don't think so.

I suspect a certain passive-aggressive beaver has been at work upstream, damming my cerebral streamlet with chunks of PHP code cemented with expiring domain registrations. I could snipe and grouse about that, or I could talk about the new PDA Sweetie bought me so I could keep track of all my doctor/physical therapy appointments. I could talk about how frequently I'm not riding my bike. I could ruminate on how all the daily details and demands have been spinning my head lately.

Let's face it: that stuff's just not even particularly interesting to me, much less the blogosphere.

[mode: randomize]

And for the record, it turns out my pop is fascinated by curling, too. When I mentioned this to Sweetie, she pursed her lips and nodded knowingly, as if to say The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I should be so lucky as to turn out half the man—half the husband—my father is.

[mode: randomize]

I did hear this great joke the other day, but it's a little on the bawdy side so cover the small ones' eyes.

A man walks into his bedroom with a sheep under his arm and says, "Darling, this is the pig I have sex with when you have a headache."

His girlfriend is lying in bed and replies, "I think you'll find that's a sheep, you idiot."

The man says, "I think you'll find I wasn't talking to you."

Now playing: Def Leppard, High 'n' Dry

A couple quarts low

I couldn't remember what percentage of the human body is supposed to be made up of water, so I looked it up. 50-60%. Higher for men.

Arguably lower after a day like I had yesterday.

But I'm back and feeling much better. Sitting under the afghan my mom made some 27 years ago for me to take to college, steadily sipping diluted Gatorade, and watching as die Schweizer make the Canadian hockey team work for it. There's a winter storm warning for our area today, which means all those tall, tall Dallas overpasses will turn into ice chutes. What a perfect excuse to take it easy, watch some winter sports, rehydrate, and recuperate.

I want to return to the subject of curling for a moment. By the time Sweetie rolled in after an all day networking boot camp, I'd already watched the American women's curling team lose, taken a couple naps, and watched the women's hockey team lose to Sweden.

"What are you watching?" she asked. "Curling??"

"Yeah," I croaked.

I'd lost my voice sometime during the day.

"What a stupid game."

"What? No! It's fascinating," I said. "It's the perfect geek sport."

"Riiight..."

"No, really. Look, you've got all these very delicate laws of physics in play with the mass and velocity of the stone and the friction of the ice. You've got the physical conditioning of the madly sweeping sweepers and the strength and flexibility of the... of... the guy who slides the stones. Then there's the strategy of chess and the geometry of billiards."

Sweetie glanced at the TV and thought about this for a moment while watching the stone make its way slowly down the sheet of ice toward the "house".

"That's not a sport. It's an activity."

"Leave me alone. I'm sick."

Okay, I get the message already

After being awake for much of the night, listening to ominous gurgling noises and making short, quick trips to the next room, I get the message: too much code, not enough blog. Or maybe it's just a virus. Either way, I find myself lying on the sofa with the nurse cat on my feet, the laptop and an afghan on my lap, and women's Olympic curling on the tube.

"Why," you might ask, "would you waste your time watching curling?"

I might answer that it's one of those weird sports everyone makes fun of and no one understands. I might observe that I neither understood nor had any interest in hockey until after I'd taken the time to watch a few games. But the truth is that it's on because I can pretty much get up and... leave the room at a moment's notice and not really worry that I'm going to miss something important.

Long time gone

I see from a few of the comments that a few of you might be feeling abandoned. I've been checking in on you daily, but here's the thing: when I'm in full-on code troll mode, my head gets so—

[gurgle]

Erm. Excuse me for a moment.

A short time later..

Dear God, let it stop. Much more of this and I'll be as dehydrated as a strip of foo jerky.

Anyway. As I was saying, my head gets so full of conditionals and loops and ways to plug security holes that the side of the brain that I blog from doesn't get many CPU cycles to use in being creative. I get so wrapped up in the puzzle of whatever I'm working on that I don't notice the strange, interesting, and/or irritating things going on around me. My often-inspiring commute or walk from the parking garage to my workplace could include exploding fuel trucks or ninja power rangers, and I probably wouldn't notice.

I did post on Valentine's Day. It was a pretty funny one, I thought; but ultimately, I decided it was perhaps a bit too adult compared to the relatively restrained tone I've established here, to date. So I canned it.

That doesn't mean I didn't smirk every time someone wished someone else a "Happy VD". There's just something about "Valentine's Day" sharing a set of monogrammed towels and washcloths with... well, you know.

And...

...in case anyone's interested, the volunteer webwork is going well. The panicked e-mails have slowed to a trickle. I've shored up some places in the code that were vulnerable to ne'er do wells with too much time and too little ethics. My employers are easily impressed, but they are impressed, and that's a good side of things to be on, every now and then.

Happy VD

Am I the only one who's ever abbreviated (initialized? acronymized?) "Valentine's Day" and noticed that it shares a set of monogrammed towels and washcloths with "venereal disease"?

That's not what this post is about. However, in a blinding flash of synchronicity, it turns out that what prompted it also begins with the letter "V".

Yesterday, I was preparing to launch another in a long string of e-mails to the head honcho of the group for whom I've been doing all this web work. We were putting the finishing touches on a document I'd added to the site, and I was asking him if he thought it needed some additional verbiage to clarify a point.

Wait. Is it "verbiage", or "verbage"? I can't remember.

Off to Merriam-Webster Online (which, in itself, is a tempting topical tangent waiting to happen... but I'll resist).

So, I arrive at MWO, and the proprietors have my word in stock. Sometimes they don't, or it's a special word that requires a subscription, but today I find my word and my word is, in fact, "verbiage". And then I notice it:


Is it just me, or does Ads by Google's choice of sponsors seem just a little out of place on our venerable dictionary publisher's page?

Thank God I wasn't looking up "valentine" at the time. I might have been psychologically scarred.

Mysteries and mayhem

I knew there was a reason I liked this Bret character (besides the whole Kansas/Dixie Dregs business).

It appears he gets almost as worked up about idiots behind the wheel as I do, and his ideas regarding punitive, post-DMV driver eduction would make him a worthy write-in gubernatorial candidate. A treasure of the state, even.

I actually contemplated thinking about possibly beginning this very post yesterday. I didn't, as I've been more occupied poking my pro bono web site project's content providers with a digital stick, hoping to note some sign of life. The panicked e-mails impressing on me the importance that we "get this done" have stopped, now that I actually have the ability to do something about them, but I keep poking in the hopes that they're "just restin'".

Shagged out from a prolonged squawk, perhaps.*

Where was I? Oh yes: idiot drivers.

Illustration the First: To Serve and Protect

On my commute to work yesterday morning, I was girding my loins for the usual post-High-Five fire drill. I could tell the horses were edgy, sensing trouble ahead, but the trouble didn't start 'til the men were in bed a white Crown Victoria came bullying its way up the righthand lane, tailgaiting so closely that several dinkier cars pulled on to the shoulder to let it by. When it came even with my hood, it decided it wanted over and just came on.

No blinker. No Texas Turn Signal.** Just half a cup of coffee's worth of my reflexes between me and some personal interaction with my auto insurance adjuster.

From there, it the proceeded directly across two more lanes of heavy traffic in the space of about 10 seconds.

Maybe I'm living in the past, but that hardly seems like appropriate behavior for a police cruiser running without lights or siren or apparent goal except to avoid having to wait in line with everyone else. I have great respect for our officers of the law and the difficult job they do, but it's this sort of thing that will make it that much tougher to feel ashamed the next time one of them pulls me over—claiming I was exceeding the speed limit in a school zone even though the lights weren't flashing—and tickets me to make quota.

Illustration the Next: Take My Car... Please!

Earlier in the drive, some clown cut in front of a car two lanes over and slammed on his brakes. The car behind managed to avoid hitting him, but my pulse quickened just a bit in empathic outrage.

Ah, I thought. The smell of road rage and testosterone in the morning.

Sure, it was just a ratty old Sentra (or something similarly battered and smoking), but this twit was acting like... like... well, like a Hummer driver.

Then he (or she) whipped back out into the lane he'd just come from and did it to another car. And then another. No hits, but not for lack of trying.

I tried to guess what this idiot was trying to do, but the only possibilities that came to mind were that he was really tired of that piece of junk, or that someone had convinced him he could strike it rich by getting some rich Plano-ite to rear end him.

Which ring did Dante reserve for aggressively stupid people? You know, the ones who would have departed the gene pool ages ago, were it not for liability avoidance stickers.

"Do not place head under mower deck while mower is in operation."

"Avoid driving drill bit into eyes or chest cavity."

Those sorts of things.

And now... the mystery

Last week, while walking from the parking garage into my office building,*** I approached a line of cabs (minivans, actually) along the curb. In the space between the front of one and the rear of the next, I could see a man on his hands and knees, forehead to the pavement. My first thought was that he was examining the undercarriage of his cab. Then I wondered if maybe he was in some distress, as he seemed to be sort of rocking.

Then, as I came alongside, I noticed that he'd taken off his work boots and placed them neatly behind him. I also noticed that he was kneeling not on the pavement but on a very nice, ornately decorated rug, and that's when it clicked.

He was praying.

I wasn't quite sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it weirded me out, partially because this isn't something I'm used to seeing and partially because of the association Islam holds with terrorism, these days. On the other, I felt a bit deficient.

After all, when was I ever so devout that anyone might find me on my knees next to a curb at 6:30am, giving praise to my God?

Now playing: Mazzy Star, She Hangs Brightly


* Someone recently sent me a link to a South Park homage to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch. I found it amusing, but it is by the folks who do South Park, so caveat lector.

** Wherein the driver, usually in some outlandishly large truck or truck-like vehicle, indicates his/her intention to take your place on the road by crowding the dividing line between his/her vehicle and yours. No directional indicator may be used, because to do so would constitute a display of weakness or respect. Or sentience, perhaps.

*** This three-minute walk sure does provide a lot of blog fodder, doesn't it?

Come on Daisy...

"...don't drown me this time
Now the sparks are gonna fly
'cause I'm turned on again
burnin' up the future"
-Catherine Wheel, "Sparks Are Gonna Fly"

I know: how random.

It's Bret's fault, though. His recent up-bringing of Kansas and Dixie Dregs had me digging through The Doghouse* last night, populating my CD wallet with all sorts of music I hadn't listened to in a while.

And now I am.

[thought mode: randomize]

Imagine my surprise upon finding I'd been tagged with a meme by Bill (a.k.a., Mr. Food) over on Twelve Two Two Fondue.

Four jobs I’ve had

1. Dish washer/floor maintenance specialist at a hospital
2. Delivery driver for a drugstore
3. Manager of a body repair shop at a car dealership
4. Computer programmer
   

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Monty Python's Holy Grail
2. Dances With Wolves
3. The Iron Giant
4. The 5^th Element
   

Four Places I have Lived

1. Massillon, Ohio
2. Glasgow, Kentucky
3. Dallas, Texas
4. Allen, Texas
   

Four TV Shows I Love

1. House, M.D.
2. Family Guy
3. Various chopper/hot rod building shows on Discovery
4. Modern Marvels
   

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

1. Orlando, Florida
2. San Antonio, Texas
3. Um... I guess I really don't travel much
4. That, or I just can't remember where I've been
   

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. Szechuan Chicken
2. Deep
3. Cheeseburger and fries
4. Um... I guess I'm not really a connoisseur.
   

Four Sites I visit Daily

1. bikejournal.com
2. Twelve Two Two Fondue
3. Random Walk
4. My Gobhole
   

Four Places I’d Rather be Now

1. In my bed
2. On my bike
3. In an office
4. In my granduncle's kitchen, shooting the breeze and sampling his latest batch of homebrew beer.
   

Five People I am Tagging

Guess I'll give this part a miss, since I'm pretty sure this meme has been going the rounds, recently.


* "The Doghouse" is what my mother-in-law calls the largeish bonus closet off our family room, where the stairwell would have been if we'd built the house as a two-story. Mom's implication was that this is where I'd make my bed on those occasions that I was in trouble with Sweetie, but we ended up lining the entire 6'x10' back wall with shelves. About half of this space is taken up by my collection of compact discs.