So easily entertained

Early spring happiness is after picking up roadside trash in my section of road, getting a wheelbarrow full of the neighbor's alpaca manure.

Sometimes you just have to laugh at aging

Old guy breakfast: Three eggs scrambled with cheese followed by a Crestor pill.

At great personal peril

Lately I have been texting a little with a friend who also works as an editor. As we type our messages back and forth it struck me how difficult it is to meet the expectations of one who works professionally with words when you are hitting those tiny little keys to write a brief message on a cellphone. You almost envy those people who say “u” and “ur” and “g2g” and all those other short forms developed for such usage. But you can’t because as a writer or editor you think you are expected to (even if not actually expected to) use proper English including spelling, punctuation and grammar. It takes so much longer to push a message into the phone when you have to use punctuation and spell words all the way out. But even with that envy I confess to sometimes perhaps too quickly judging a stranger who uses that jargon and I’ve discovered I lose interest quickly in people who do. It may happen too quickly because none of us use perfect English every time, and there are times I am just as guilty as everyone else.

I have known several other people who judge that usage harshly but I can see its value if you are texting or IMing informally, at least as long as it’s understood you do know the proper way to say things. Of course, between two editors it can only be used for a humorous application. What is disheartening is when that usage creeps into more formal writing, something I have been noticing more and more. Working as an editor I see “bio” and “info” so often I get tired of changing them and sometimes in frustration let one go. It’s “biography” and “information.” And, “veggies” used once a century ago probably was cute. Every day every time it comes up isn’t cute, it is damned illiterate. VEGETABLES! Lately I’ve noticed the “al” is being left off “almost” just about “most” every time it comes up in copy. When did that start? I often wonder about a teacher trying to instill proper usage in her students and having to use anything written in the last 10 years to do it. How do you convince a kid the word is spelled “light” when every time he sees it, it is spelled “lite?” Or to take it to an extreme, is a biohazard a danger in one’s life story?

And get this: In spell-checking, the program didn’t even stop on bio, info or veggies! It didn’t like lite, though.

Still, I learned the hard way years ago not to be correcting everyone’s grammar all the time, even teasing in a friendly way. You can lose friends that way.

So, what brought on this tirade so early in my weekend? At the risk of alienating a very good friend, but hoping in not identifying anyone here it will not be taken personally, and shouldn’t be because “most” everyone says it these days, this is what I read when I first woke up. It was in response to the “3,000” post I made last night. “Congrats.” That isn't really to pick on one person, I know several people who say it that way and some who even say it to me, but it grates.

Of course, it is the thought that counts, so, “TY.”

3,000

Who would have thought?

“...spirits are using me, larger voices calling ...”

What seems like a very short time ago I made a new friend. Unfortunately on the occasion of our first socializing she told me she was moving a long way away in two weeks, like from the harshest climate in the United States to the mildest. She is gone now, but I did receive a text when she arrived at her new home and it announced the arrival but also said something about if things didn’t work out she would be back “Septemberish.”

I had to think about that for a moment and about my own adventures and then I wrote back that she had to think forward not backward and that the first part of a new adventure is almost always a little intimidating.

Upon further reflection, more crossed my mind, about handling the early part of an adventure and about what had landed me in that situation in the first place.

I remember setting out on an ocean voyage once and one of the fellows on board apologized ahead of time for the depression he expected to experience after a day or so when he realized he had gotten himself into this once again.

I have had the same feeling at times when I felt the creative rush that gets me about a chapter and a half into a book until the inspiration wears off and it hits me that aw gees, this is the start of a year in my life. There are several well-intended, misguided attempts around here somewhere that were cut short by that realization. The same thing happened in the early days of building the three houses I built too. Fortunately I worked through it and persevered in those endeavors.

But then there are those thoughts that get you started in the first place, like the first time I went skiing. My friend and I stood at the top of the expert slope at a Western New York ski area (not exactly Vail). It looked pretty frightful to tell the truth. My friend said, “What’s the fun of doing something if you know how?” With that he took off down that hill and after an “oh crap,” I followed.

I still remember sitting across the desk from the banker who was about to give me the loan to build my first real house. All I had ever built to that point was the very simple cabin at the East Pole and a dog house. She asked, “Can you build this house?” Exactly $100,000 of her bank’s money was at stake. I remember taking a measured but deep breath and looking at the ceiling, then the wall, then out the window and then turning to look her straight in the eye and saying, “Yes.” Inside I felt nothing close to the confidence I was hoping I was showing her.

And, like, you always think those trapeze artists who work without a net are fearless, but I don’t think so. I think it just makes them better and more careful because they know they are going to get hurt if they fall, as opposed to those who work with a net and know a fall is just that much more fun.

Was it Ben Franklin who said “nothing ventured, nothing gained?”

And I know Jimmy Buffett sang “we did it for the stories we could tell.”

And Crosby, Stills and Nash sang about, “...time we have wasted on the way.”

Or was it Gary Bacon screaming down that ski slope at Kissing Bridge, New York, his panicked “OOOOhhhhhhh, damn” fading into the distance?

Have you envied “all the dancers who have all the nerve?”

The urge is getting stronger every day to get it on again.

Swatches

There were remnants of daylight in the western sky at 11:30 tonight.

Extreme recycling

I woke up today to so much absurdity I can barely stand it.

Let’s start with politics. In Michigan, the tea bagger government has taken another step into lala land. Instead of raising taxes on people who can afford it, Republicans in power began selling off public facilities to private corporations: several schools to charter organizations and closed the most successful school in the country for pregnant teens, one that has a 98 percent graduation rate and 100 percent college acceptance rate. On top of it when faculty and pregnant students along with graduates with their children staged a sit-in to protest, they were arrested.

In Anchorage this past week there was one of the oddest twists yet on what we call here a Spenard Divorce. A woman who lived with another for around 20 years apparently killed her friend with a shotgun. According to the reports the roommate wouldn’t get out of bed to help her friend to the bathroom so that one pulled out a shotgun and blew her away. BTW Spenard is a former suburb that Anchorage finally grew and consumed, but it retains its reputation as a unique section with endless stories of absurdity. A Spenard divorce is usually executed by a wife who has grown tired of dealing with a recalcitrant husband and shoots him. They usually happen in early spring when people lose patience with how long it is taking for the weather to get warm and friendly.

Which leads into the most absurd of all. Talk about your recycling. A fellow who claimed to be one of the founders of Earth Day is now serving a life sentence for killing his former girlfriend and attempting to dispose of her body by COMPOSTING. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There are so many directions to go with that story but in deference to a few of my own exes, I will just let the tale tell itself. Here’s that story. But just to clear up any potential conjecture, yes, they all survived and i have never had a successful garden either.

Just one more for good measure: On the day between Good Friday and Easter, what the Anchorage Daily News has chosen to highlight on its Twitter feed is that today is Scoop Poop Day for people to go out and clean up the winter's dog leavings. Will that work in a compost pile? The ambiguity is on purpose in case you were wondering.

So, with that said, I have survived another Good Friday in Alaska. That’s 38 now with only one having been a disaster. Some have suffered two.

Clash of titans

Wispy lines of cirrus streak the sky from the northeast. From the southwest cumulus rises in gray pillows. New snow dusts the mountainsides higher up. In the valley, wind caught between the fronts roars down the river kicking up a dust storm of the flour caught between gravel pebbles exposed until glacial dams upstream break later in the spring. On the bridges cars have to slow because their drivers can't see through the dust at times. It is a time when weather fronts and seasons collide, sometimes catastrophically.

If you were me, you'd love this one

I am putting up this picture just because I love it. I met this charming young woman on the sail last summer. We were on the same watch and enjoyed several talks about creativity and art. She is a very talented artist. If you wish, you can see some of her work here Beasts and Biophiles.

Songs sung in the Key of Largo

October 13, 1982, a pirate
looks at forty; 1,000 miles off
Cape Mendocino, California

As spring blossoms, it has a way of tugging in several directions at once. Years ago this was the time of year I abandoned whatever adventure I had been on for the winter and headed back to the ocean. It was time for the most dreaded time in any sailor’s life: YARD WORK. It was also the time to renew old friendships and make new ones at whatever waterfront watering hole we preferred. One spring I came back wounded from a love affair gone horribly wrong and took to naming ours Key Largo after the song that was going around at the time about a lamented love with the line "we had it all, just like Bogie and Bacall."

As the summer progressed into new adventures and new women, the lament faded but the name stuck and we would head for Key Largo every night after the day's work was done. It was always a place that held music even if none was being played at the time. That fall I joined some friends on a boat sailing from Alaska to Hawaii. In the course of the trip we all became immersed in the sailing songs of Jimmy Buffett. The one that particularly appealed to me at the time was "A Pirate Looks at Forty," although I usually called it "mother ocean." I turned 40 during that trip and I guess I felt very piratical (romantically so, not Somalian).

After the trip we separated and went about the coming winter's adventures. When those were done most of us returned to Key Largo in the spring. Sitting there one night, we were barely listening to the lounge singer. This guy really was one of those Bill Murray patterned his Saturday Night Live act after. We tired of his act fairly quickly and after he made an attempt at a Buffett song, I said to a friend who had been on the trip to Hawaii that if the guy tried Mother Ocean I was going to mug him. To which my friend replied, "Yeah, Nautical Wheelers" too." I noticed the bartender slip out from behind the bar and go over and talk to the singer. After that I never heard him try another Buffett song while I was in there.

A few weeks later another singer had arrived, a woman who sang several familiar songs in a way that didn’t alter them. One night paying little attention I thought I might have heard, "this is for Tim," but paid it little mind. Then I heard the chords and the first words of Mother Ocean. I must have reacted obviously because the bartender quickly came over and put her hands on mine. "No, it's OK," she said. (I really wouldn't have mugged a woman anyway.) Then this woman, Suzan with a Z, sang the song beautifully. I was in love. Suzan played one place or another around that town for most of the summer and I always went to see her when I could and she always played a song or two she knew I liked.

And that was the way the music went in our harbor life. Toward the end of the commercial fishing season when the seiners worked closer in, they would often gather at Key Largo and those were the days when we started doing our own singing. We had several favorites, mostly older songs that lent themselves well to our raspy out-of-tune smoked up voices, songs like "That's Amore" and "Sixteen Tons." One night when the sunset colored the mountains at the east end of the bay, we actually made everyone in the bar stand up and sing "...purple mountains majesty...."

But it wasn't just in town, music was there with us most of the time on the boats. That next winter I went crab fishing with a friend. We took some time off over Thanksgiving and while away, I came across a new Buffett album called "One Particular Harbor." I didn't have a chance to listen to the whole thing until one morning over breakfast on the crab boat. When he came to singing the line, "we are the people our parents warned us about," I looked at my friend and he looked at me with this wide eyed visage of recognition and I laughed so hard I spit out a mouthful of breakfast.

Years passed, winter adventures, summers on boats, occasional long voyages and always the reunions at Key Largo in the spring, a day like today when the ocean beckons even if it it means scraping and painting a bottom. And music, always music which brings us to where this blog has been going.

Toward late August one of the last summers of that life, the seiners were just about done and thinking about heading south, a few guys off the other work boats around, a few of us from the tour boats all gathered yet again in Key Largo more relaxed now as the season was coming to a close and there were not very many tourists around any more.

Somewhere, someone started the song and before long everyone within earshot had joined in. It was in what Pete Seeger used to call veer harmony. This song wasn’t sung with our usual boisterousness. As it progressed the emotion was almost tangible, each singer reaching into memory for the those experiences that created the reverence that seemed to grow as the song sailed toward its crescendo. When the last line had been sung, the room remained very quiet for a moment as each of us absorbed what emotion had been brought up and shared among people who know the sea. It was a precious moment you wouldn’t expect among the souls in that bar. I looked at my friend, the same one from sailing, crabbing and others and just above a whisper said, “that was special.” He nodded agreement. Slowly the noise level rose again as conversations picked up. We didn’t sing another song that night.

Perhaps that is why it came to mind today, a day when the impulse is so strong. “Mother, Mother Ocean, I have heard your call ...”

By, by by the light ...

You know it's time for a life adjustment when the highlight of your day's accomplishments is a fuzzy picture of the moon at 10 p.m.

In my day the lovesick teen crashed his car on Deadman's Curve

Channel surfing the other night I came across another young woman singer who sounded and looked intriguing. (This may be becoming a problem I might have to take up with a psychologist at some point, but not today.) The song on TV had a drumbeat heavy on the tom-toms and her lyrics matched that heavy rhythm. Afterward, she was on another show and interviewed for a short time, interesting but she gave away what she meant by that particular song and took something away from it.

She sounded good enough to spend $10 on iTunes for her album, her second. I held onto it until the next day driving to work. What I heard was somewhat disappointing, many songs about teen angst, lost love, found love in an immature sort of way, the kind of music I suspect some alienated teen girls would like, but something most of us have heard before, though maybe not in her unique format. It reminded me of a letter I wrote years ago to a friend saying I loved the Beatles but if Paul McCartney sang one more insipid love song, it would be time to scream “enough!” Do you remember "Just another silly love song?"

Perhaps this highlights one of the reasons Lady Gaga resonates. She has something to say, and she does it uniquely with her own style.

In describing this new singer (new to me, this is her second album) to a friend I said I liked her voice and I liked her sound, though there is too much echo in it. She has a beautiful and strong voice, not one of these modern whisperers. Her name is Lykke Li, (pronounced Licky Lee) and given her talent the hope is she will mature and her subject matter will grow with her. In the meantime the song I heard on TV I still like, but there is this: It has very suggestive lyrics presented with almost an African beat, but the sensuality is lost when she explained her mention of prostitution relates to giving up ideals to get along in the music business. I have heard that before, too. In fact, I might even have said it, myself, about the publishing business. Quel dommage.

Arches

Northern lights coming home tonight, three bands of green seemingly radiating from a single fiery source to the west all the way across the sky and converging again over the mountain ridges to the south as bright as they have been all winter, At the river bridge they had reached a brilliance, showing red along the bottom and sending tendrils of light higher into the sky. A bright half a moon lighted the way for them until they faded into the mountains.

Snow has gone now except for the gullies on the north slopes of hills and mountains. It made a valiant, one can hope, last gasp Sunday, snowing in bright sunlight, one of THOSE spring days, but it didn’t last long.

Trees are brown skeletons now, their bare branches spread as if opening welcoming arms to the sun, waiting for green day which is most likely three weeks away yet.

A blanket of slushy snow covers the swan pond still, waiting too, but maybe in vain. The way things looked that guy killed the pair that uses it last year and one can only hope another pair finds it.
You have to watch the road carefully these days, it’s about time for the porcupine bloom and they’ll be shuffling along the pavement soon.

It may be time to begin digging in the dirt.

Watching the earth awaken is always a joy..

Oil prices, Sharia law and a super hero stopped in his tracks

A bit of a diversion into politics. This place is going sort of nuts. First, the silent governor appointed a guy to a council that chooses judges for the governor to pick from for his nominations. In an interview, the guy he named said he thinks extra marital sex should be against the law. Wow. As the cliche goes, wrong on so many levels. Imagine the overcrowding in prisons if that were the law of the land ,,, and how much lawbreaking would be going on INSIDE. Today he withdrew from the nomination saying he didn't want to distract from the important work of the Judicial Council. Thank you so much.

This next one will take some explanation. There is a tax structure set up for the oil companies here that among other things has a graduated scale that goes up when the oily's profits rise. Of course the industry had objected to that for years. The silent governor, who used to work in the oil industry, made it his legislative priority this year to repeal that tax. He says the cut is to induce the industry to do more exploration, development and production In Alaska, however there is no guarantee that will happen. Since the Legislature has been in session, that has been the primary issue. The state revenue department said repeal would cost the state about $2 billion a year in lost income. Nevertheless, a repeal bill passed the state House but the leader of the Senate said earlier this week there will be no oil tax cut in this session, which would effectively kill it for at least another year. Then yesterday, the head of Conoco Phillips Alaska said the company would invest UP TO $5 billion in Alaska next year if the tax cut passes. Talk about your blackmail. "Up to" is no guarantee they WILL spend that much or any. Any amount, even $5, could qualify as UP TO $5 billion. Politics is often a matter of compromise though that seems a lost art these days, so, with compromise in mind, I have a better solution. How about you do this Conoco, you spend UP TO $4 billion and we will keep our $1 billion which is paid ostensibly because the people of Alaska own that oil, not you and not the governor and not the Legislature.

OK, now that is solved, there's this. As the rich in this country (read Republican overlords) continue their assault on the rest of us, a state Legislator here, MY representative in fact, entered a bill attacking public employees' collective bargaining rights. Good grief. I doubt there is a working person in this country who doesn't owe some part of his income to a union somewhere back in history (think six degrees of separation) and yet now as governments give away billions to industry (read above, or better yet look into the subsidies provided to the oil industry just to do what they do while they make obscene profits) the regular old workers with collective bargaining take the blame for the economic problems. There is way too much involved in that issue to put in a short blog post but you get the idea. Give billions to profit-hungry industries and blame teachers and policemen and firemen, that's the ticket. Fortunately calmer heads prevailed in Alaska and the bill was withdrawn. But, the guy was not to be dissuaded from pushing another outrageous issue. He actually introduced a bill in the Legislature that would make it illegal for an Alaska court to make a judgment based on sharia law. Are you kidding me? Sharia law? Make women wear burkas and allow honor killings? Hey Gatto, we have a Constitution and more than 200 years of precedent law. We won't be stoning anyone anytime soon. The thing is, I get to vote when that guy runs again next year. I already have a campaign slogan for him: Gatto's gotta get gone.

Enough of a rant I guess for one day. The only thing left is this headline that showed up today: "Arctic Man delayed by blizzard." Lots of interpretations for that one, aren't there, but in the long run this question: Who is this Arctic Man and what kind of a wimp is he to claim that title and be stopped by a blizzard. Hell i walked the width of Wasilla Lake in a blizzard yesterday and it was in the Governor Interrupted's home town where being a liberal is a shooting offense. Ok some explanation for Outsiders. Arctic Man is a gathering every April in the Hoodoo Mountains (Not kidding). As many as 12,000 people show up in motor homes with snowmachines and form the third or fourth biggest city in Alaska for a few days. It is based around a competition where a snowmachiner tows a skier up a mountain, then releases the skier to ski down, picks him up at the bottom for a tow sometimes at as much as 80 mph to the top of the next hill before another ski to the finish line. There are other events, too, but mostly it is a huge party. Still you have to admit it does seem a bit ironic that Arctic Man can be stopped by a blizzard.

As the Beatles and Muppets used to sing: "Letter B, Letter B, there will be an answer, Letter Beeeee.

Taking back the night

Driving home at midnight, a light blue high in the sky, rose hue on the horizon with graduated azure progressing from light to dark toward land in the west. For a brief moment on a rise and between trees, Mount McKinley and Mount Foraker rise above the treeline a somewhat shadowy white against the other colors somewhere more than 100 miles away. On the blue highway no porcupines yet and Green Day seems late; it was May 8 last year but still not here this year. Most of the ice is off the swan pond and bright petunias are filling the kitchen table, so it can’t be far off. Half a silver-colored moon does what it can to add to the available light. Remindful of that song line “May was full of promises, but didn’t keep them quick enough for some.” Those promises actually failed miserably at least on a figurative level. They will eventually produce in a more tangible way and that progress starts today with taking the petunias outdoors for hardening. Doing so and working around outside may be hardening for me as well, something I am in need of after more than a week of setbacks.

History? I'll show you some history

A teacher friend of mine was telling me today about showing her elementary school students a picture of an old dial telephone. They figured out it was a telephone but were very curious how it worked and were impressed with her operational knowledge. She wondered if they thought she was wise or just awfully old. I suggested she was simply historic, but that might have been a mistake, one of those things that a man had best make no comment at all about to a woman. But it did remind me of a similar experience a few years ago where indeed “historic” was the correct word.

I was helping chaperone a field trip with my son’s fourth grade class to the history and arts museum in Anchorage. I had recently been working on a research project about sea otters in Alaska history and that had included a considerable amount of research into Aleut culture.

We came across a diorama of an Aleut village and I was sharing my knowledge of it with a small group while others wandered through the exhibits. Suddenly a girl came rushing up to me shouting, “Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones, you’re in the museum.”

My first response was “I am way too young to be in a museum.” She would not be dissuaded and grabbed my hand tugging me toward the far end of the huge display room.

“There,” she said, pointing at a floor-to-ceiling photograph that was part of a display about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And, sure enough, in the foreground of that photo, almost floor to ceiling in all my glory, memorialized on a museum wall, I stood there looking incredibly important and ... incredibly younger (at least to me).

Frankly I was a bit shocked. I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed or just feel old. I had already had to deal with my son studying “history” that happened in my lifetime, but this was worse, I was now a confirmed artifact of that very same history.

I’ve always, like my teacher friend, been curious what those kids actually thought. Did they put me in the same category with dead presidents, or did they think, wow, Chip’s dad is old? I never did get any kind of a reading.

But someday I do have a story to tell all those kids of that age a story about the Exxon Valdez and its influence on their lives.

OK quick sidebar: When there are long electrical blackouts people always notice a surge in births nine months later. Exxon Valdez was a severe disruption in the lives of many of us living at that particular ground zero of the time. We were rushing around and perhaps not always doing the right thing. In the recent past and in the years following Exxon Valdez the elementary school always had three classes at each grade level. But for the one year when children would have been conceived during the hectic turmoil of the oil spill, there were four classes. In other words there were enough spill babies to fill a whole classroom at the Valdez elementary school. How's that for being part of history?