Gamma: H is five, too. Is H my twin sister?
Miguel: No, H is your pet turtle. She’s hibernating in the cellar.

I wrote a post about what I have to be thankful for, but everything crashed when I hit the “publish” button and the words disappeared. Did anyone feel a disturbance in the Force? See? That’s how unimportant a blog post is.

But just writing the list made me serene, or at least calm despite this Nescafe IV drip I’ve got going here at my desk. So I’m going to try writing the list again.

Continue reading →

And the word is amok.

Hey, it’s Thanksgiving, I’m probably not the only person swinging at the end of his mental rope.

I was thinking about freakouts on my way to work this morning. I had a grandmother who had a nasty temper. 5’2″, beautiful singing voice, she was the sweetest and funniest person you could imagine, as long as you didn’t piss her off. She could curse fluently in traffic situations.

I, on the other hand, usually lose my powers of speech when I get mad. That’s called apoplexia I think. Maybe it happens to you – your eyes do the Marty Feldman thing, the rest of you does the Yosemite Sam thing, and so on. I remain calm for the longest time, but then I lose it. It’s one reason why I don’t have a gun – people are far safer that way. Also Alpha doesn’t like guns.

I even feel uncomfortable around my new axe. Or driving my car sometimes. Sometimes this devil in my passenger seat says things like, sure would be fun just to crash into that asshole, wouldn’t it? Or take all the outside mirrors off this entire line of parked cars?

So far so good, though.

As you know, the word amok comes from Indonesian. Or Malay or something. For good reason. I saw an Indonesian person go amok once. All these other Indonesian people were standing around saying things like, “Amok…” and “Oh, amok!” It was a young maid, and four guys had their hands full holding her in a chair.

Quick, shoot her with a tranquilizer dart.

It was interesting how the word was used – the grammar was totally blurry. Was it a noun? Verb? Adjective? To my way of thinking, the word amok deserves to run wild in the garden of grammar, just like the person to whom it’s being applied runs wild.

[Coming sometime today, or not: what I'm thankful for.]

Do my comments remember you? When you click on “preview” do you get a preview, or do snakes come out your monitor and ask for cocoa?

If I’m a sputtering crank, it must be Wednesday. My Zen fell through the hole in the outhouse and I’m not in the mood to reach down and get it out just yet. I am not floating three inches off the ground as I walk down the street, I am wading through sidewalk up to my knees like snow. I, I, I.

OTOH, the back is getting better and Alpha got a red lava lamp at the furniture store recently, which gives a warmer, more romantic light than the green one, which gave us this alien/night-vision sort of look. And Gamma falls asleep every night on the sofa watching flames flicker in our new woodstove. And the red cat slept on my head last night, but in a good way. And I accidentally drove home from work last night with the sliding side door open a crack on the Dobl

Or however you spell it. I keep getting hits for things I misspell when the searcher misspells them in the same way.

What I wanted to complain about today was the way my morning started out. After staying up late working on a project, I woke tired and in a hurry, because I had to go drop the project off somewhere on my way to drop the kids off too and go to work. So, yeah, in a hurry. And then I had to help Gamma brush her teeth, and she wanted her hair braided too. So braided her hair. Finally got dressed, did a bunch of other stuff, dropped off the project, dropped off kids, rushed to work. Traffic jam. Finally made it into the city, where Buddha or whoever, in their infinite wisdom, in order to remind me of one of my philosophies of life, namely “it could be worse” sent me a boddhisattva in the form of a garbage truck.

It appeared to be headed the same place I was, because I followed it for miles. People sure throw away a lot of stuff. What can you do but take a deep breath and think, “well, it could be worse.” Because it always can. “At least a nickel and iron planetoid isn’t crashing into the Earth,” you think, and everything looks half as bad, seen from the new perspective.

“At least I don’t have to play cello in a recital.”

Oh, wait, my teacher was trying to talk me into that last night…

“At least I’m not dead and in hell.”

We got some money. We bought a woodstove and an axe and wood with the money, with exactly enough left to pay bills.

This morning when I went downstairs to make coffee, the thing we hang coats from had broken in half in the night (and was lying on the floor with all our coat) so now we need a new one of those. I couldn’t talk Alpha into a board with pegs sticking out.

What does furniture do while we sleep?