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 |  Don't do this
I have made the mistakes so you won't have to. |
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Real world advice for the reality-challenged. Always looking forward to what's around the next bend.   |
| SAD and home made lemon scented bleach - Don't do this |
| I haven’t had much energy for writing lately. I haven’t had much energy for anything except developing new and inventive ways to engage in unsanctioned activities. I don’t think it is a case of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), I think I have SAD – Seasonally Aggravated Dementia. I am not a particularly competent person. I used to be, but even then it was competency in things that were best left undone. I am not even competent with corrosives, combustibles, and oxidizers any more, evidently. My incompetence is aggravated by the onset on winter. The lack of outdoor opportunities drives me into my basement lair, the mother ship of unsanctioned activities. Many people do not fully appreciate the range of chemicals that exists in the common household. One would be challenged to find a more caustic solution than drain cleaner, it being matched only by oven cleaner. I find it remarkable that bleach is commercially available. The adhesive component of hairspray is an organic polymer, the properties of which are altered in a useful way by burning, which is remarkably easy to accomplish. Tile and grout cleansers often contain hydrochloric acid. Seasonally Aggravated Dementia symptoms are marked by the impulse to experiment with household chemicals. Winter would be a good time to be more competent. There are a few things that would be good to know before potentially hazardous substances are employed. Discovering them after the fact is not as good as being forewarned. That is the purpose of Don’t Do This in a nutshell. Here are a few tips that are Good Sense for those who lack it. 1) Everyone knows that mixing bleach and ammonia releases chlorine gas. It may be less well known that mixing bleach and vinegar will also. In fact, any acid mixed with bleach will produce chlorine gas. You may never have been inclined to mix bleach with lemon juice. If you have Seasonally Aggravated Dementia, you may. After all, bleach smells bad, lemons smell good. 2) if you are not a particularly competent person, have Seasonally Aggravated Dementia, and have free access to household chemicals, there are a few precautions that should be employed. Even the least competent among us realizes a respirator is essential to survival in an enclosed area filled with chlorine gas. What they might not realize is that many respirators available at home improvement stores are not rated for use in an enclosed area filled with chlorine gas. That is a good thing to check. 3) If you are not a particularly competent person, have a lair which is conducive to unsanctioned activities, have access to household chemicals, and have Seasonally Aggravated Dementia, you are in danger of losing access to both your lair and the household chemicals. Screw up badly enough and you may lose your access to beer. “Think before you act” is not practical advice for people like us. The best advice is, “Don’t act”. Spring will come eventually and it would best to see it arrive without serious injury. Unsanctioned outdoor activities are more fun anyway, and I have not found any practical use for chlorine gas. I am amazed you can buy bleach in a grocery store. |
| Hiding things from yourself: sound medical advice. |
| I was talking to my wife this morning as she was getting ready for work and doling out my medications as we talked. Like a lot of people my age, I take a lot of medications. And, like a lot of people of my disposition, a lot are psycho-active. I sorted out the medications and swallowed the handful. I noticed that I was running low on one so I dialed the pharmacy for a refill. When the robot asked for the prescription number, I held the bottle up and noticed that it wasn’t what I expected. I had taken two sleeping pills. I think everyone (of my age and disposition) has done that at some time. I am chronically forgetful and will take Tylenol every two hours if I don’t hide the bottle from myself. I usually make the leap of reason that if the bottle is hidden, then I must have taken some, so I quit looking. My doctor has suggested I put my meds in a pill sorter with compartments for each day of the week. I tried it and it was even worse for the following reasons: I don’t usually know what day it is so I don’t know if I took the pills anyway. Sadly, sorting them is an organizational task that is a bit out of my reach. It makes self-medication problematic. I am far too lazy to do it. I took the sleeping pills an hour ago. They are supposed to be a fast-acting, short-duration medication. I would have never done it on purpose (then), but it appears that three cups of coffee and two sleeping pills are a darn fine anti-anxiety concoction. The med didn’t work as an actual sleeping aid, and the reason is now clear. At my level of amplification, all it does is reduce the tremors and produce a mild euphoria. I solemnly vowed to my wife that I would not so much as set foot in the shop until I had woken up. It was a promise I made when the assumption was that I would fall asleep. I need to come up with an analog that takes into account that I didn’t and that I feel just fine (thank you). It is quite the fortuitous discovery. I would place it on the list of accidental discoveries between chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. I am going to tell the doctor and see what he says. I’m sure he will say it is a misuse of the drug. I’m not going to use it this way routinely if he does. I am going to put it in the emergency toolkit. And, I am going to put it someplace other than with the pills I take every day. Maybe I should hide it. |
| I am better at causing chaos than coping with it. |
| Any superlative you could apply to the phrase, “Grandchildren are _____”, would fit. Wonderful, a blessing, a joy, all of them true. Not to detract from that one bit is that they will also drive you crazy. Even the most patient among us will have their moments. My wife, who has worked with young children for the last twenty five years, will eventually be driven to madness. Here’s the thing – if you already have a head start on crazy, it is a much shorter trip. My wife is torn between conflicting dilemmas. If she tells me ahead of time that the grand children are coming, I will start making the trip earlier. If she waits until the last moment, my decline will be precipitous. Either way, I will be well on my way by the time the kids get here I love the grand children, they are ______. The problem is that to maintain an even keel and not become a disoriented crazy person shouting at nothing while speeding towards completely insane, I need a certain set of conditions. I need it to be quiet, or barring that, no sudden loud noises which will cause me to throw anything I am holding into the air. I also need a degree of order or I become confused(er). For me to make sense of the world, things must be in their place. Lastly, I need a degree of predictability. I have become quite poor at coping with sudden change. One might even remove the word “sudden” from that sentence. When our three grandchildren are behaving themselves and playing together well, none of those conditions are met. If things get a little sideways, the level of riotous disorder rises well beyond my ability to cope. Consequently, when they are here, I am hyper-vigilant in listening for early signs that war is breaking out. Then I call in the mediator because if I try, I sink to the level of the rioting children. I am told that this does not help. Having the kids is one of my wife’s greatest joys. It is a trial for me. It is Monday morning and everyone is gone. I am restoring the house to an acceptable level of order. I have the first load of wet towels started. I think there are two more loads to do, and then I can take care of all the detritus lying about. There is only one load of dishes to do because I have been keeping up with that. The entire house needs vacuuming. I need to ferret out all the blankets, partially-eaten food (because they never finish anything), and clothing from the secret places such as the attic and the closets that have been inhabited during the weekend. The house will be acceptable by Tuesday afternoon. Of all the things I am terrible at, I am perhaps the worst at grand parenting. One or two kids is pretty much OK. Having all three is far beyond my abilities. I would like to be better, but there is nothing I can do about the anxiety, and believe me, I have tried a lot of things. The quiet is starting to sink in now and I am at least steady enough to type. The lamps don’t have halos anymore (OK for deities, not OK for fixtures). I haven’t spoken with anyone yet, but I think I could do it without stuttering. And, I haven’t felt it necessary to shout at anything yet today, a good sign. I have Wednesday and Thursday to get ready for next weekend after the house is restored. I should be able to get back to the starting line by then. |
| Neither one of me can stand Christmas music |
| My wife is caught in a Christmas shopping dilemma. We will have a grand daughter this weekend. Next week we will be gone for three days to attend a friend’s wedding. Then something else happens, but I can’t remember what it is since she filled up my head with those two things. I reach mental saturation when a grocery list has more than four items on it. Grasping the logistics of Christmas is far beyond my abilities. The upshot of this complex set of variables is that my wife has one day to complete her shopping. She is taking tomorrow off to launch an assault on the retail sector. This morning, she said, “You don’t want to go do you?” I had to swallow the guffaw that arose from deep inside me. I thanked her and answered that I did not. It was very sweet of her to offer. She and I both know how it would turn out. I am not at my best in crowds. Sometimes I am not even myself. The person that takes my place is even worse at handling crowds. I become disoriented by bright lights and noise. There is no store that is not flooded with Christmas lights and horrendous music. I can’t imagine what evil and sadistic wretch believes that Christmas carols sung by children are somehow appealing. My mind executes an involuntary retreat in this environment. The situation is not very helpful to my wife. Yet she still offered to take me with her. An act of true love, no doubt. Adding to the complexity of my wife’s mission is that she must be at our younger daughter house 80 miles away by the time our granddaughter gets out of school. My wife believes all of this can be accomplished. So do I, but my solution requires additional dimensions. At least one of them would include an adequate amount of time for sedation. My wife has always been infinitely more competent than I am. I have deferred to her judgment in all things, mostly. I have disagreed on matters of confinement. She has an overly cautious approach to working on water heaters and dryers, but that is born of having Good Sense, which I do not possess. She is a good judge of what requires stitches, but is opposed to home remedies that include the miracle adhesive Durmabond. (Tip – Vet supply sources carry it. Buy sutures while you are at it.). If my wife says her mission can be accomplished, then it certainly can. That she thought she could do it even while dragging along a disoriented and confused person who may or may not be me is even more impressive. I am lucky to have her, even despite that she overreacts to injuries requiring surgery and to the alarmist reactions of medical professionals. If she declares that the breaker needs to be thrown while working on the water heater, I do it. If she says she will not help apply Durmabond, which requires three hands, then I accept her judgment. But, even though she offered to take me shopping out of love, the offer puts her Good Sense in serious doubt. |
| It is the best frying pan on Earth. Don't buy it. |
| I have one job at Christmas time. Not counting decorating, which I consider a recreational activity. My only job is to buy my wife a Christmas present. One would think that having only one task to complete would be a cinch, but one would be mistaken. I realize not all wives are the same, but expressions of bewilderment and uncertainty have been echoed by other men I have met while aimlessly meandering through stores hoping something will fall off the shelf and land on my foot. There are a limited number of stores a man is comfortable in. There are very few women who want a gift from a sporting goods store, a liquor store, the meat and beer sections of the grocery store, or an auto parts super store. An extensive search and a number of test trials have revealed that is certainly true for my wife. What remains is a morass of stores carrying items of indeterminate use and desirability. Trying to locate something my wife might like from the plethora of items that don’t have a use is impossible. My chance of choosing something my wife might want from among them is remote at best. I am not particularly well qualified to give advice on the subject, having seldom succeeded in conquering the problem, but I do have a few observations. 1) Just because she says she likes something doesn’t mean she wants it. I discovered this when we were first married by buying her an expensive silk suit that she had no earthly use for because she said she liked it. If a man says he likes a chrome lug nut spanner wrench in an auto parts super store, it means he wants it. Simple. 2) On a related subject, you may think you know what your wife likes to wear, and you may, but I can guarantee that you don’t know all the considerations that come into play when a woman buys clothes. The decision tree is worse than trying to wash clothes according to her instructions. You may be safe with socks, but not necessarily. I have developed a good relationship with the people at our local lingerie shop. They are capable of making a pretty good recommendation after only a couple of dozen questions. A scarf may be OK if you are pretty sure you know what you are doing. You probably don’t, but you could get lucky. 3) Beware of practical gifts, especially those from auto parts super stores or sporting goods stores. Avoid kitchen stores. A lot of emphasis is put on buying thoughtful gifts. If you have racked your brain and finally settled on a new ice scrapper, you have gone wrong somewhere. Ask a jewelry store clerk what constitutes a thoughtful gift. Don’t quibble over the number of zeros preceding the decimal point. If you are shopping in a jewelry store, you have obviously come to the end of your options. You may have no use for a 1-inch socket set or a miniature crossbow, but you would be thrilled to get one. Your wife could step through the doors of any sporting goods store and buy the first thing that meets her eyes, and you would like it. Stepping over the threshold into the multi-dimensioned world of shopping for your wife is disorienting, to be sure, but I can boil it down to two simple rules. 1- Don’t piss off the lingerie store sales people and, 2 – Pick a piece of jewelry that you can pay off before next Christmas, because if it works, you will be back. |
| Small strokes fell mighty oaks. Works with whiskey, too. |
| My doctor discourages “tinkering”, his word for self-medicating. I am a chronic tinkerer. If I went to him every time things got dicey, I would be in there every month. With a little judiciousness, I can stretch that out to four or six. It makes a big difference because he becomes concerned if I go in there all bent up every month. If he becomes concerned, everybody becomes concerned. He is not above ratting me out to concerned parties who audit the contents of the liquor cabinet. Self medication is not for beginners. I made some rookie mistakes early on and the results are still lingering. For instance, he no longer prescribes Risperdal, my favorite antipsychotic. That is evidently a bad one to sling about the way I did. He is not big on unauthorized combining of substances to achieve results, even as well as it works. He likes to point out that there is a reason that he prescribes the medications and I take them. It is hard to get around that reasoning. There may be a chance you are self medicating and don’t realize it. It is important you realize it before anyone who prescribes medicine does. I didn’t know it was considered a bad thing until the doctor asked me if I thought I was self medicating and I answered yes. Don’t do this. It will result in what medical professionals refer to as “stop doing that”. Here are a few guidelines to help discover if you are wading in dangerous waters: Do you commonly take pain relievers, even those specifically warning against it, with liquor? Me too. You aren’t supposed to do that. I don’t do it anymore because the result (unconsciousness) is too predictable. One of the big hazards we of intemperate disposition face is drug dependence. Switch it up. It will aid in keeping Risperdal in the mix. Remember the novel Contact by Carl Sagan? The main character, Ellie, is trying to find people transmitting on her short wave radio by twisting the tuner knob and having no luck. Her father comes to her and says, “Small moves, Ellie.” Take Sagan’s advice. Don’t go twisting the knobs and spinning the dials. If you are going to loosen a screw, don’t take it all the way out. If you think the accelerator needs to be increased, don’t mash it to the floor until you have reached escape velocity and are headed for open space. As Poor Richard said, “Moderation in all things”, depending on your definition. Finally this: If your doctor asks you if you are self medicating, answer “I don’t know.” The doctor will launch into a checklist of substances and behaviors to determine if you are. If it sounds really bad coming from your doctor, you should probably fess up. If things have gotten that bad, you have been over-tightening bolts and have taken the knobs off of the dials. Let the doctor locate all the missing pieces and then you can start over. As Poor Richard said, “Know thyself”. Just don’t tell anybody else. |
| I want to live where Muppets live |
| We raised our girls in a modest three-bedroom, one-bath house in town. The girls were thrilled about being able to ride their bikes on a sidewalk since we had lived in the country since they were born. We did it so they would be close to school and have a lot of friends close by. It was a good move and we were glad we did it, but my wife and I aren’t “town” people. It is too light at night, there are no chickens squawking, and you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a college student or professor. We have more in common with loggers and farmers. We decided to move back to the country after the girls graduated (or dropped out to follow the Grateful Dead at age fifteen). We searched for for a piece of property sometime and then attended an open house in a remodeled church. My wife fell instantly in love. I had wanted to live in a church ever since seeing the Muppet Movie and saw the Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem band living in one. Really. The living room has a fifteen foot ceiling, so we felt obligated to get a Christmas tree at least fourteen feet tall for our first Christmas in the house. So, the four of us piled into our Oldsmobile minivan in search of a very tall tree. Fourteen-foot Christmas trees aren’t easy to find. We ended up at a nearby cut-your-own lot that had a fixed price of fifteen dollars for any tree. We searched the lot until the plantation transitioned into forest. At the edge of the forest, we found our tree. Having no experience with fourteen-foot tall old growth Christmas trees, we really didn’t know how tall it was. But, it was tall enough that I did not feel comfortable felling it without an undercut, which is a good trick with a dull bow saw. Getting it onto the roof of the van caused three of us permanent injury. The van was bottomed out, resting solidly on the suspension stops. Getting it into the house was nearly impossible and standing it up was worse. A word here about Christmas tree farming. This is a big area for Christmas trees. Several times a year, crews of laborers will go through the plantations trimming the branches so the trees attain a slim, conical profile. That is not done in flat rate lots bordering the forest. The tree we brought home had a diameter of about eight feet. Decorating it required ladders. We bought as many ornaments as we reasonably afford. It took hundreds of feet of lights just to cover it sparsely. It was glorious mammoth of a tree. We vowed never to do it again. When we took it out, it left a trail of needles so deep they had to be raked out of the house. I cut the tree up for firewood and saved the butt cut as a reminder of our first Christmas in the house. It is ten inches in diameter. We now buy six-foot trees off of lots in town. The ornaments have thinned out over the years but we still have enough to decorate two trees. We haven’t put a merchantable tree on top of a car since. It requires a degree of instability to do that sort of thing without a log loader and a forklift, but we did it, and now we laugh every year at the thought of it. Besides, how often do you get to yell “TIMBER!” when you cut your Christmas tree. |
| Guitar construction requires 54,347 images |
March 23rd of 2003 was a dampish day When our oldest daughter first became pregnant ten years ago, we decided to buy a digital camera. We knew we would be taking a lot of pictures and it only made sense. We thought it would be great to be able to take as many photos as we wanted since we could delete the ones that didn’t turn out. As everyone knows, the pictures were never deleted. As everyone with experience knows, a camera is in continual operation when in the presence of one’s first grandchild. As a result, we took 586 pictures before her first birthday. Then we hit our stride. It is fair to ask why I would go to the effort of finding out how many pictures we have of our grand daughter up to one year of age. I gave a desktop digital picture display to my wife a couple of years ago. I put a handful of images on it just for demonstration purposes. She has been watching the same few dozens images flip past for two years. She brought it home and asked me to put more pictures on it with a variety of subjects, not just family. I am so desperate to avoid working on the guitar I am constructing that I decided to accomplish her request yesterday. She knows we have a lot of photos. What she doesn’t know is that there are 54,347 files on our backup disk drive, the vast majority of which are photos. The command to find this out, in case you want to do it yourself, is to run cmd.exe and enter dir /a /s "c:\" |find /c /v "" substituting the disk drive in question in place of c:\. Cmd.exe is not a good place to screw up so be careful. Since I am a dutiful husband, and because it hurts my head to think about the insanely complex guitar I am building, I began sifting through images about 7:30. I completed the task at 4:15 after having transferred 739 files to her display. Both the guitar and our image collection began hurting my head around noon. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the dilemma presented by digital images. When all of our printed photos were kept in a big box, we would dump them out onto the floor and look at them every now and then. We did not have 54,000 of them. Now we seldom see our pictures. After yesterday, I know why. I perused every directory carefully selecting files (for the first few thousand, after that it was less carefully). After I had completed the first pass, I realized it was very heavy on family, so I went back through and selected images from my collection of rotting fungi and moss-covered swamps. It was an onerous chore, but it was also fun. We were all pretty young ten years ago. I got to visit several people who are no longer with us. Plus, I have a great new directory to use as a screen saver so I might actually see them again. I have also gained the benefit of desperately wanting to work on the guitar because digital images really hurt my head. |
| Chivalry costs $17.47 |
Well worth the cost of a broken window. One of the skills I have managed to acquire over the years is breaking and entering. It wasn’t done as a career choice, it was simply the natural outgrowth of having the restraint and judgment of a rabid cat. Although I can’t say I have never done it illegally since breaking and entering is an illegal act in some places regardless of whether it is your own property or not (come to find out), I never committed any other crime than that. They were all necessary acts and time has shown that I will do what I must because I can. We have all been locked out at one time or another. Whether it is an auto, an apartment, or a *never mind*, it is annoying as hell. Being basically the same person then as I am now, but without the benefit of medication, I was not satisfied to stand outside when all that separated me from the beer inside was a simple window lock. An all purpose breaking and entering kit of 1975 would have consisted of a butter knife and a coat hanger. The deluxe kit would have included a hammer. One day sometime around 1980, I came across a pretty young girl dressed in a gown leaning against a shiny new Mustang and crying pitifully. If the sight of a pretty young girl dressed in a gown leaning against a shinny new Mustang and crying pitifully doesn’t inspire you to chivalry, your chivalry bone is broken. She was to have been a bride’s maid at her best friend’s wedding but, alas, she was screwed now because she had locked her keys in the car. I fetched a coat hanger from my car (because I was never without a coat hanger and a butter knife) and unlocked the car by hooking the door lock with the perfectly-bent coat hanger. I wonder if she ever looked back on my heroic act with gratitude, or in horror after finding out her car could be broken into in about two minutes. I was in Crescent City last spring and I locked my keys in my truck. Having neither a butter knife nor a coat hanger, I called a tow truck. The driver pried open the top of the door, stuck a wedge in it, and inserted a metal bar which he used to press the unlock button. He charged me $50.00. I made a mental note. I went to town yesterday to have lunch with a friend and I locked my keys in my truck. My friend was distraught and asked what I was going to do. I asked her to take me to a home improvement store. I bought a 4-foot long length of aluminum bar stock, two rubber door stops, and a little pry bar. Total cost, $17.47. I opened the door in less than five minutes. I put the collection in the bed of my truck in case I need them again. Now, if anyone wants to break in, they can use the tools and save me the expense of a broken window. My glory days of breaking in to music venues to retrieve a forgotten amp (we had rented the hall for 24 hours but had locked the keys inside the hall as per instructions when we left at 1:00 am), or cracking rotary locks to *never mind* are over. Things are different these days. One can’t pop open a Yale lock by hitting it with a hammer in front of the hasp. Master Lock padlocks stopped being easy to pick decades ago. Window locks aren’t simple rotary devices that can be turned by inserting a butter knife between the frames. And, the old fashioned car lock knobs that were seemingly made to accommodate a well-bent coat hanger are gone, as are metal coat hangers. But, if a pretty young girl in a gown who is leaning against her shiny new mustang while crying pitifully ever requires a chivalrous act, I shall be willing and able to relieve her of the notion that her car is secure. |
| A normal prodigy |
Exceedingly normal I am suffering a slow decline, mostly. In yet other ways, my decline has been precipitous. Some of these have been countered by improvements. The result has been that when my wife is asked by friends and family how I am, she usually replies, “He’s OK.” That is an answer based on a weighted averaged using her own indices. God only knows what they are. They are probably things such as likely hospitalizations, potential interruptions to household services such power and water based on my current projects, her ability to leave me alone during the day, and the degree of difficulty in keeping up with conversations (including those she cannot hear). Those of you who have attained a certain age (about 35 in my case) are familiar with the setbacks aging brings. Things that were once easy become more difficult. Mental agility lessens. Your children begin treating you as a child yourself. I have become pretty good at these, having gained experience by starting early. The caveat I would add is that my mental agility is very good, just not as it relates to reality. If I were to recommend an endeavor in which to excel, I would say to go a different direction. Attaining the mental capacities of a crazy old man at an early age can be a bit restrictive. The strictures I live under are extreme and unwarranted (mostly). A large part of Don’t Do This is devoted to mitigating the fallout resulting from violating these overly cautious rules. The mishaps that occur are something that could happen to anybody. That they happen to me with such regularity just puts me at the high end of normal, or “very normal”, as it were. I am working on a maple guitar, a seemingly safe activity, relatively speaking. I am currently laboring to bend the sides into shape. As an aside, I would advise any of you that build guitars to use steel girders for the sides because they would bend easier than maple. Wood is bent using a combination of heat and steam. This combination would set off an alarm on my wife’s weighted average indices if she appreciated the implications. If she were to go into my shop, I would be banned from it until all the hazardous conditions were corrected. Right now, it is a hazardous playground, my favorite type. The process for bending intractable maple begins with streaming it to 212-degrees for as long as I can stand it (the shop becomes rather like a streaming swamp). Then the very hot wood is put on the bending iron, which is a flattened pipe with a propane torch inserted in it. I use an iron mounted on plywood to heat the top of the wood. The wood is carefully bent into shape, which requires a good deal of force, and placed in a form where it is clamped into place. I have never been good at those “What is wrong with this picture?” puzzles. They all look fine to me. When I leave my shop, and then turn to close the door, I ask myself, “What is wrong with this picture?” Dangerously hot steam issuing from an open box, a red-hot pipe on the workbench with a clothes iron of questionable virtue sitting beside it. The answer is that there is nothing wrong with that picture. Any normal person could expect a few second-degrees burns, and maybe even a small but inconsequential third-degree burn when working in that environment. I have again proven that I am quite normal. Exceptionally so in fact. |
| Yet another thing you don't want to hear speak. |
 Looking for and photographing mushrooms is one of my favorite hobbies. People generally assume I am looking for psilocybin mushrooms, but that is not the case. There may have been a time when I would have loved to find Psilocybes, but that was before my lucidity became so tenuous. Hallucinations these days are not a good thing. The only things worse are nearly severing a finger or shooting myself with a nail gun. And, I can drive myself to the ER when those happen. Driving while hallucinating is inadvisable. Don’t do this. These days I look for interesting subjects to photograph. It very well suits my other hobby of going where no sane person would go. I occasionally find edible mushrooms that are impossible to mistake for any other living thing on Earth. I don’t pick them. Nothing will inspire complete horror on my wife’s part more than the news that I have eaten a wild mushroom. She has intimated that if the mushroom doesn’t kill me, she will. I have promised that I will never eat a wild mushroom. Except while in Crescent City, because my dear friends eat wild mushrooms that are impossible to mistake for any other living thing on Earth. That, and because I am out range. Here are a few examples from my collection. Lime Green Hygrocybe. This is a rare mushroom which has a very small range limited to parts of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in Northern-most California. Finding it caused a bit of a sensation for the Redwood National and State Parks.  This is a less rare relative, the Scarlet Hygrocybe.  This common Russala has been nibbled on by a critter. It reportedly has a bitter, peppery taste to us, but everything from slugs to deer eat it.  I loved the way the sky and trees were reflected in the cap of this Hygrocybe.  Finally, this Black Chantrelle is reported to be delectable. You first. I thought it was ironic that this appears on page 666 of Mushrooms Demystified.  I found a patch of Psilocybe semilanceata, common name Potent Psilocybe, a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t take any pictures because they are pretty uninteresting. Aminita phalloides, or the Death Cap, that is an interesting mushroom. It will kill a person in five to ten really tortuous days. The tiny and numerous Mycena are interesting just because there are so many of them. There are a lot of very interesting mushrooms. Unless you are hallucinating. Then they a little too interesting. |
| Stick to bunnies or chickens, or move the chocolate closer |
| My wife and our daughter’s family are still in Disneyland. They are doing well. I think we can declare the park The Most Tolerable Place on Earth in terms of our grand daughter’s ability to handle it. When they get back tomorrow, her bedroom will reclaim the title. During the infrequent times when she has left the door open, she can be heard engaging in animated discussions and negotiations. At her age it is called “play”. I will be glad to have my wife home. Aside from that I miss her, she provides a moderating influence. Left on my own, I will eat nothing but fried foods, steak, and chocolate. I eat much better when I am hiking, but there is a limit to how many miles I can walk and how much food I can carry. Fourteen miles seems to be the upper limit. Perhaps slightly over the limit. That is the problem with locating boundaries and limits. The quest to locate them is always accompanied by exceeding them. I went to the store to buy a decent supply of foods suitable for frying, steak, and chocolate. I was perusing the meat counter while a butcher worked at arranging the display. I asked him something I had been wondering at for some time. “Why are there no Porterhouse steaks anymore?” I asked. When I provided computer support to the scientists at the Forestry Sciences Laboratory, I quickly discovered that they dearly loved to tell anyone who seemed interested about their science. I could imagine that their spouses were no longer interested and their co-workers had their own science they wanted to talk about. The same apparently applies to butchers. It turns out that the industry had recognized the need for a standard naming convention for the cuts of meat because there were too many names and it was confusing. So, Porterhouse was thrown over for the generic name of T-bone. He further added that the Porterhouse was a T-bone cut taken from the back part of the short loin and had more tenderloin. Then he added, “Like this one.” He extracted a steak of surpassing size and quality. It was easily half again larger than the other T-bones in the case. He handed to me and, having no spouse to warn me off, I eagerly accepted it. I later felt like a python that had devoured a goat. I could only reach the chocolate in the kitchen with great effort, so I brought the bag to my chair. I speculated that there are probably not too many people like myself that are single because they all die early due to goat bloat. I vowed never to eat steak again, so I fried a chicken the next night. It took me two days to face down the other steak I had purchased. It was more the size of a rabbit and I could reach the chocolate OK after eating it. My devotion to excess has been sated, and then some. I have discovered that my limit for eating steak is something less than goat-sized. In the spirit of offering helpful free advice that you will find nowhere else, I offer this for those considering eating a goat: 1) Place chocolate near your chair prior to eating dinner. 2) Limit your fluid intake because getting up may be challenging. 3) Asking a butcher a question about meat will result in a truly splendid cut of meat being delivered into your hands. This is best done without the moderating influence of having one’s spouse present. They probably don’t like goat anyway. |
| Mammoth bones are not useful tuning tools |
| I am having trouble getting back to working on the guitar lying in pieces all over my shop. I attribute this to the almost complete lack of imagination that came with increasing a stupefying medication. Stupefaction has its place. I could never tune my piano if I had enough sense to avoid it. I finally gave in to the grating annoyance of a slightly out of tune piano yesterday. I am terrible at tuning pianos and have absolutely no training. But, the age of electronic tuners has made things much better, as far as pitch goes. It is the act which is torture. My piano has 56 notes having three strings each. That is 162 strings which must be individually tuned. Now I image this: the same string being played over and over as it is slowly raised in pitch. Start about one note low. Now imagine this: ping ping ping ping ping ping (dammit, start over) ping ping ping… Then repeat the act for each of the two remaining strings in the note until they match. One cannot do this with improvised tools and limited skills while in possession of their full facilities. The lower notes are easier, having only two strings per note. Since I can’t discern the difference between the notes in the lowest range, those notes are very easy. You know those keyboards that play a chord when you strike a note? That can be simulated on a piano by tuning the three-string notes to a three-note chord. That requires something much less than full facilities, it requires manic delirium. The results are only fun in a transitory way, and retuning it afterwards sets the standard for the term tedious. Don’t do this. I have watched piano tuners at work. They have felts for silencing the strings not being tuned. If they aren’t silenced, they ring due to sympathetic resonance. Felts would help a lot. They also have these nice rubber wedges they insert between the strings to silence all but the one being tuned. I use the rubber from a cane tip cut into a wedge and jammed onto a piece of wire. Sometimes I feel like a Paleolithic human tuning the piano by beating it with the leg bone of a mammoth. Don’t do this either. To paraphrase a quote from the last entry, tuning a piano isn’t bad but the hangovers are terrible. In the end I am left with a piano which is somewhat less annoying. If I turn the stereo up very loud and play along, the tonal discrepancies aren’t noticeable. Plus, recording studio pianos of the R&B groups from the 50’s and 60’s were not tuned any better than mine. If I cared that much about it, I would buy felts and stops, but I still have a good chunk of cane tip left to use. I hear sympathetic resonances coming from the refrigerator and heater motor so I don’t think silencing the piano would help that much. I have to admit, though, having ping ping ping ping repeated well over a thousand times stuck in my head for two days would be maddening if I weren’t living so close to it anyway. My advice, hire a piano tuner and leave the house. Leave the cane tip alone. And, be careful when jamming a piece of wire into hard rubber. It’s dangerous. |
| Beware of bumblebees and helicopters |
| A quick update on our family’s expeditionary force sent to what now appears to be The Most Tolerable Place on Earth. Everyone made the trip just fine. That is much better than I would have done. I am turning into a hermit, which is fine because I am at a good age to start it. A twenty-year old hermit would be a concern, but a crazy old man hermit is within the “normal” range. I have a colorful history with flight. I was on a helicopter crew when I was a firefighter. It was an inherently dangerous job because it was widely acknowledged that helicopters were less likely to fly than bumble bees, which supposedly could not. We trained for “heli-jumping”. We never used the technique, thank God. The drills were harrowing enough. We would edge out onto the skid on the helicopter while several hundred feet off the ground (with no safety line). The helicopter would come to a hover some distance off the ground and we would jump. It was every bit as bad as it sounds. After I graduated to fire management teams, I would fly in small aircraft to remote locations. That was OK. I figured that if the pilot was not freaking out, we were in good shape. It was when I began using commercial flights that I had problems. The things made noises. They banked unexpectedly. I could not see the pilots and the flight attendants wouldn’t look worried if the damn plane was on fire. I told people that flying was OK, but the hangovers were terrible. I was un-medicated through most of this. I had several acquaintances who died in helicopter crashes. I knew people who died in retardant aircraft crashes. I personally witnessed two helicopter crashes, one minor and the other horribly bad. I have mixed feelings about flying. Aircraft are a crap shoot to travel in and the booze costs too much. And to make matters worse, they operate in and near airports, which are the antithesis of the most tolerable place on Earth. I just received a call from my wife. She reports that things are going swimmingly. I guess my motto of “plan for the worst but hope for the slightly less so” was overwrought. I am greatly encouraged that our grand daughter and daughter are coping so well. Hermitude does not appear to be in their immediate future. For me, my cave-like basement shop is the most tolerable place on Earth. As gruesome as it can sometimes be, there has never been an aircraft incident. |
| It is an extremely small world, all right. |
| My wife is accompanying our older daughter’s family to Disneyland. She is going with the express purpose of helping our oldest grand daughter cope. I wrote once about the challenges our oldest grand daughter faces. In the long-standing tradition of my side of the family, she stands out as a prodigy having been committed for a week at age eight. I don’t know much about my grandparents because my mom wouldn’t talk about her past, but she was quite unstable. Our grand daughter extends our family’s string of reality-challenged in-patients to four generations. She is doing better now, but starting with medication at such a young age is worrying. She and I get along great. I know exactly where she is coming from. The key is not putting her in a position of “flight or fight” with no escape route. She has a very, very low threshold so we escape a lot. Disneyland is, of course, the happiest place on Earth, but escape routes are limited. That is why my wife offered to go with them. She is escorting our grand daughter so that they run for it and leave the rest of the family to enjoy the trip. My wife has a good deal of escape route experience. We have executed emergency escape plans everywhere from the grocery store to the freeway. We don’t have many of those anymore. I can even go to a college basket ball game with a minimum of visible shaking. That is pretty good for someone who considers five people to be a crowd. The deafening timeout claxon, the insanely bright lights, the anxiety of parking (a big one for me), all these things create a great deal of pressure. It is capable of driving the less crazy me out of my head and substituting a considerably crazier version. I have the ways and means to subdue the lunatic who wants to lie on the floor between the bleacher rows. Our grand daughter is nine. She has a long ways to go before she learns how to cope. If she wants to hide under the seat, for God’s sake let her. So, while I am home enjoying the pristine silence that comes with throwing the main breaker, my wife will be navigating the minefield that is Toon Town. I believe they will have a good time mostly. She feels bad about going on this third trip without me, but I am OK with it. The very thought of the experience inspires anxiety. The torments are extreme. Have you ever been in house of horror? Not the Haunted Mansion, that’s fine. It is the Its a Small World display which is the epitome of insanity with no escape route. There is no strategy short of unconsciousness that will get one through that. |
| Mental riot police: Don't do this |
Mosh pit buzz kill If you read this blog, you may have surmised that I enjoy walking since it is one of the only three things I write about. It isn’t really hiking. I think of hiking as strapping on a backpack and going somewhere. I am not going anywhere. I am just going up and down, up and down, several times day sometimes. It might sound like an exercise regimen, but it isn’t so much that as it is a way to escape all the noise in my head. They are having a party in there. It is more like a mosh pit. Anyway, it is nice to get away from it sometimes. The way I do it is by forcing myself to walk until I am so miserable all I can think about is surviving the walk. Other people can achieve peace by taking a vacation or enjoying the company of friends and family. None of that for me. That just encourages them. Relaxation just makes more room in the pit, which is a bad thing. A decent mosh pit is a limited affair. When it is larger, it is called a riot. A riot in your head is not a good thing either. I have developed coping strategies over the years, most of which I don’t recommend unless your mental riot police are off duty. However, I can recommend walking until you are flirting with unconsciousness. One benefit is that it passes as a healthy activity by people who don’t know better. I am told by interested parties who know what I do out there that over-exercising is not healthy. Taken as a part of the whole, over exercising is the least of it. Secondly, it makes one sleep well. In my case, I sleep well for about four hours. That is better than sleeping poorly for four hours. The timing is important because if I sleep for four hours in my chair and my wife comes home from work, I am pretty well busted. The only excuse I could make is that I got wasted and fell asleep. That wouldn’t help. If I am somehow disabled, which is not uncommon, it is worse. My point here is that you should stay awake until your spouse gets home. Then make the excuse that you were trampled by an elk or attacked by beavers or that a Sasquatch threw a log on you and go to bed. I go places no sane person would go, for obvious reasons. There is no fern-covered cliff or slash field covered in blackberries that I won’t attempt. That takes a toll on my gear. I hesitate to put a number to the amount of money I have spent on hiking boots over the last several years because my wife occasionally reads this. It exceeds four figures. She knows that much. I have tried top-of-the-line hiking boots, mountaineering boots, and boots touted as THE boots for rough terrain. All of them fell apart within two years. I have had it with yuppie hiking boots. I am going with what I know. It is what I wanted to do to begin with, but I had the misguided idea that hiking boots would be better. I bought logging boots. I wore them for years when I was younger and never once did they let me down. Sure, passersby will wonder at the huge, black boots. They are not stylish. They easily weigh five pounds each. But I tell what, the mosh pit gets pretty quiet when I put them on, and there is sure as hell nobody dancing when I am done. |
| You locate the border by crossing it. Don't do this |
| I am searching for something the least bit humorous or interesting to write about, but I’m coming up empty. I am in a stupor, which is not unheard of, but this time it is without the aid of anything other than food and children. As I wrote earlier, I am taking a sleep medication which might cause sleep amnesia. If ever there was someone who was a good candidate for such a thing, it is I. So, I am strictly adhering to the directions regarding its use. This might sound like something anyone would do. I never follow the directions or heed the warnings of the labels stuck on medication bottles. It is just not in my nature. I don’t claim it is smart or advisable. I’m simply don’t have it in me. The second biggest hurdle I face is that if I read them, which I seldom do, I forget what they said. The primary hurdle is that I simply don’t give (insert the crude phrase here) about it. I certainly don’t advocate that, having had such limited success with it, but I am not finished with it and things could turn around. I’ll let you know if they do. I am a skeptic. When I read that one must not use alcohol with a medication, my question is, “How much?” A minute amount is probably OK. What about twice a minute amount? Thus begins an experiment to locate the border. I don’t do that anymore as I have located the border for most of the medications I have taken and can attest to the unpleasantness waiting on the other side. Don’t do this. If you have a question about why a medication warns against alcohol, consult the appendices of Don’t Do This. A clear warning label would read, “Only a fool would drink while taking this medication. If you are a fool, consult your spouse.” None of that this time. I am as pure as complete overindulgence can make me. Putting a Thanksgiving dinner in front of someone with the restraint and judgment of a rabid cat is a recipe for insensate stupefaction. Attempting to care for three young children for the following 24 hours is akin to the inadvisable mixing of incompatible substances. I haven’t provided a “crosswalk” in Don’t Do This to compare the effects as this is the first time I have tried it sober. I am not sure if that is advisable or not. I am on the road to recovery now. The near destruction of my digestive system is slowly being repaired and we are down to one grandchild. I believe I will lose the tremors in a day or two. Unintentionally throwing whatever I have in my hands, such as my cell phone, into the air at any sudden loud sound will take a few days. I may have to add a section to Don’t Do This regarding the border for mixing turkey, stuffing, gravy, and young children. I should do it now because I don’t believe I will try it sober again. |
| Somewhere over the bank was Dorothy's likely destination |
| A friend on facebook, whom I don’t know of course, posted a typically silly thing. It was a way to determine if one is young, old, very old, or older than dirt. I am older that dirt. I already knew that, but seeing it confirmed so definitively made it hard to deny. Having a birthday yesterday didn’t help things. Many of my friends that I don’t know, and some that I do, sent me birthday wishes. It was nice to be remembered. Facebook is a funny thing. I appreciated the greetings, but I feel like those who didn’t send me a greeting had purposely ignored me because they surely knew it was my birthday. Reminders were plastered all over their screens. It takes some nerve for people that you don’t know to ignore your birthday like that. I was lucky to have born in 1950. It makes the math easy when I am trying to figure out how old I am. I don’t know how the rest of you do it. Being married takes some of the pressure off because my wife always seems to know how old I am. I don’t how she does any of the things she does. One greeting I received included that the writer hoped I would see a rainbow. I didn’t think much about it, thinking being as difficult as it is, but then I saw a rainbow. I was in town and on the way home a brilliant rainbow burst into view. My first reaction was fear. One of the least understood qualities of rainbows is their hazardous nature. Humans are incapable of not looking at a rainbow. Young, old, sensitive people, terrible people, they all look at rainbows. When Rasputin saw a rainbow, he look skyward and said, “Wow”. Rainbows are a wonderful thing, except when driving. If I see a rainbow while I am driving, I start watching for transfixed people veering down the road. Rainbows are a hazard to navigation. They seem to neutralize the brain in same way a cell phone does. I am immune because rearranging my brain functions has no effect on my behavior. I am already there. I survived the rainbow and made it home. I have waded through all the birthday greeting notifications and “liked” them. I need to record who sent them so I can ignore the people that didn’t. I hope I get it right. Social media is hard for me because I am not a social person. Navigating the rules of social behavior is hard enough in person. Virtual etiquette is even worse. Dangerous rainbows, mysterious birthday greetings, it has been an interesting day. I wonder how many were careening down the road looking at a rainbow while texting a birthday greeting to someone they don’t know? |
| OK, fine. Chapt 1 - The jerk that wouldn't shut up |
| I have gotten the writing bug. That hasn’t happened for some time, a year or two maybe. I have started a fantasy piece. Not my usual genre, but it is going OK. There was a time when I wrote obsessively. That was a time when I did everything obsessively, alternating with periods when I did nothing at all. I achieved a very minor amount of success, my writing netting a few hundred dollars, but that exceeded all expectations. My lofty goal was to finish a piece as I had several in progress at any given time. I looked forward to retirement when I could devote a greater amount of time to writing, maybe even during daylight hours. Then I was rendered lucid and lost almost all desire to write. My writing has been limited to inane blogs ever since. This has caused me to be concerned about the mental state of the writers among you. I don’t know if gross instability is a requirement for writing, but I certainly can’t rule that out. Perhaps you don’t realize your deplorable, degenerative state of mind. I didn’t. If your writing has consumed you at times and caused you to neglect things such as eating (excluding drinking) and bathing, I offer this valuable free advice (the best kind!) in order that you might avoid the unpleasantries you may face. 1) Do the characters in your writing veer from your plot and go off to do things completely unrelated to the piece you are composing? If they start wring about you, kill them off before they write you out of the piece. A word of warning. They can be hard to kill, don’t miss! 2) If when proof reading you come across text that you don’t remember writing, be sure it isn’t in the voice of a character you killed off. They will commandeer the work if they can. 3) If you are taken by the urge to submit your writing to an evil publishing empire or a smaller malevolent entity, be prepared for them to suggest you give a larger role to the devilish character that won’t die. 4) If events, entities, or the evil little beast that refuses to stay out of your piece are dragging you down, there is a last ditch defense. Find a doctor who understands the behavior of such things, but be careful about what you tell them. See the “How to pass a mental evaluation” section of Don’t Do This. Doctors react badly to the independent actions of fictional characters, particularly those that are hostile. If you come away with medication that will finally bring horrible little devil into submission, you may lost the desire to write for a time. This is a small price, particularly if your writing keeps heading off in unintended directions anyway. If the character simply won’t shut up, give them their own piece. That is what they want anyway. |
| Attention shoppers, The Clowns is showing on isle nine. |
| I have been on the lookout for odd things, as I mentioned a while back. The reason is that if there are enough odd things, it is worthwhile asking if things are not odd at all, and it is yourself that is odd. I will have days where people look strange. People in the store look like caricatures of themselves, reddened cheeks, protruding noses, etc. I have come to realize that when everyone else looks weird, it is likely I do too. Furthermore, it is unlikely that everyone else looks weird, but rather they do not and only I do. The common element to all these happening is myself. So, when odd things are happening, or if people look like the Fellini versions of themselves, it is time to make quiet retreat and fortify the fortifications (with beer, usually). My recent observations have revealed a few unlikely things. I was driving to town when I passed one of the gravel roads that lead into the forest. There was a young couple that appeared to be readying for a run. The young lady was standing on the road with her hands on her hips. She was watching a young man doing pushups in the grass. A couple of things here: 1) Pushups are not typically done as a warm up exercise for running, and 2) the grass was soaking wet and he was in a field that had been tilled just a couple of weeks ago. He probably arose from his pushups soaking wet and muddy. My take on it is the young man was trying to impress the young woman, which he appeared to have done. I pulled into a restaurant parking lot later that day. I noticed a blue Honda Sol parked beside me. When I got out of my truck, I saw the rear window was missing. Then I saw the alarm light blinking on the dash. It was a strange and incongruous sight. I stood there unable to account for it. Maybe the alarm was a hassle to disable. Maybe the owner is hoping to somehow avoid having their other windows broken. It was a glaring inconsistency that will occupy my mind for some time. It could be that my preoccupation with blue Sols has had wider effect than I thought. My driver’s license expires tomorrow. It being my birthday tomorrow, I have a lunch date and can’t be bothered with renewing my license. Never put off until tomorrow what absolutely must be done today under threat of imprisonment I say, so I went to the objectionable town which is the county seat. Accusations that it is the most objectionable part of the seat have been put forwarded and not argued with. I am unavoidably called to the town every few years for reasons I attribute to the vengeful spirits of the town’s founders whose character and judgment I have impugned. I arrived at 8:45 hoping to avoid the opening rush, only to discover the office opened at 9:00. Still, things moved along quickly until the person who was helping me ran into computer trouble. After a long conversation covering her Thanksgiving plans, her family, the weather, the vagrancies of server-base systems, and the origin of the jewelry she wore, I was directed to wait in the lobby and she would call me when ready. She called me about twenty minutes later and the process was completed quickly. I was not recognized for my stellar impersonation of a goofy old man on the photo, but the competition there is tough, I suppose. I left the office happy to be leaving town and discovered my keys were not in my pocket. The initial shock gave way to a sinking realization. Then I remembered I hadn’t locked my truck! Happy day! I opened the door and my keys were in the ignition. This is an outlandish occurrence because the laws of the universe dictate that one must lock their car after having left the keys in it. Even all summed together, these incidents do not warrant concern. Young men will do stupid things to impress girls (as will older men), a car with the alarm armed is not unusual even with a broken window, and I am easily capable of much stupider things than leaving my keys in my unlocked truck. The situation warrants continued vigilance, though. If a grotesque clown appears in a store, I only hope it is a Fellini hallucination. Real clowns are scary. |
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