The Unbearable Bobness of Being

Baby, Say Hi!

Tubob on Movies!

OK, first of all I'm no movie reviewer and rarely do so on this blog. But I did see two remarkable flicks this holiday vacation and I feel the world will remain a dimmer, more vacuous and vaporous place if I don't share my very special insights (VSIs) into both.

Avatar! Dig the cool hype, daddio. I loved this movie. Took my youngest, The Boy with the Sweet New Car Stereo, to see it at the Spokane Valley Mall Regal 12000 MegaDinoPlex.

Before all the haters chime in, and the neo-ironists, the sarcastic hipster whinerheads, yes, yes, YES, the story is weak, the characters cartoonish and overdrawn, the dialogue stilted and silly, the cultural overtones of a white soldier saving a race of gentle oppressed (by BIG MINING BUSINESS RAPIN THE ENVIRO) indigenous cat people is offensive to the maximum degree, but saying all that, the movie still kicks serious ass. It is a visual treat of ocular orgasmic qualities. Two hours and 30 minutes long? Didn't even notice.  

I was captivated, entranced, hypnotized and mesmerized by the stunningly gorgeous world invented by James Cameron. Blew me away. Is it a Cinematic Breakthrough of Biblical Proportions? Nah. I think it's an evolutionary leap of rather stunning results in CGI and special FX but maybe not an entire paradigm buster. It's as near perfect an escape from the shit world that surrounds us as I can imagine.

Avatar, like Star Wars, uses a simple plot, shallow characters, and tried and true themes as skeletons  to hang all the exhilarating and brilliant visuals upon. I skipped Star Wars back in the day as a pushback against the hype, feeling, as a young man, above it all and cooler than space ships, BESIDES LUCAS RIPPED OFF DUNE, MAN (I was a huge Frank Herbert fan). When I finally saw Star Wars years later, I Homer Simpson'd myself in the forehead with a giant D'OH! and realized what a dork I'd been. Don't be a dork like me. Go.see.Avatar.now.

The second movie was Paranormal Activity. Watched it as a rental DVD at home on the 50 inch plasma with my subwoofer suitably cranked (you need some sub for this movie, trust me).

First of all, I don't watch scary movies or shows much these days. I'm not fascinated with the paranormal or the merely creepy. I was going to find a way to weasel out of watching this with my daughter but decided to take one for the team.  I'm glad, sort of, that I did, because the movie was terrifying towards the end. Low budget, lame acting, didn't matter as the suspense was masterful and the climax was jump in your chair frightening. At least a half hour after the movie was over, I was still intermittently chilling up and down my legs.

Scariest movie I've seen since Blair Witch Project in the theater and The Ring on dvd. The director filmed it in seven days in his own home. It is very spare and uses simple effects (light turning on, thumping sounds) to terrifying effect. I wouldn't watch it alone at home at night if I were you. And the takeaway messages were don't pick fights with demons and don't eff with ouija boards.

So that's my holiday movie review extravaganza. I did watch District 5 in Blu Ray but was distracted during it by a few things, so I'll watch it again and maybe critique it.

Anyhow, go see Avatar, your eyes will thank you.

The Decade In Review

They were the oughts or the zeros or something. The new freaking millenium. Every time I've thought about doing a retrospective of this thankfully almost done decade I just stall and think why bother, I hated the oughts. The oughts sucked. I got divorced during the oughts, 3000 souls were lost in the tragedy of 9/11 when passenger jets took out the Twin Towers changing everything forever. Bush/Cheney, I mean Chimpy McStupid and Dick Chickenhawk, were power maddingly in charge of this great nation for 8 of the 10 years. God, that alone pretty much shitcanned the zeros into the trash heap of history.  We learned Strangelovian phrases like The Patriot Act which attempted to transform America into Stalinist Russia or something, phrases to justify our loss of civil liberties like the always moronic "The Constitution is not a suicide pact!"

Friggin' wingnuts. Teabaggers. Right wing hate puke machine. Terry Shiavo. Hurricane Katrina. Heckuva job Brownie! Bad mortgages. GOP RIP.

My 3 kids started the decade in grade school and middle school. Now I've got one left in school, a junior in high school. Got a grandbaby who thankfully was born as this suckade was almost over. I will consider her a child of the new decade, to tell you the truth. The 10s can't be worse than the zeros. Knock on wood.

So, I got divorced, kept the house and kids, worked the same job, got relocated to Rainytown, owned 30 or 40 different vehicles, dated/had relationships with several hundred women in some sad and desperate effort to make up for lost time, to experience the rich hues and tones of dozens and dozens of break up emails and texts? I don't know. Maybe it was just another effect of the super bad juju of the worst decade in the world since maybe the Great Depression, which bred the Greatest Generation, like the oughts bred the Nothing Generation or something less than one generation (aka Generation Y, Millenial Generation, Echo Boomers). Baby boomers grew old and began to wear their well deserved mantles of irrelevancy.

What else happened? YouTubes, iPods, Facebooks, MySpaces, blogs, Lizards of Satan, tons of other internest computer shit including the dying of dead tree media. I got through the oughts with two desktop emachines, one hewlett-packard desktop (total POS), and one Gateway laptop. All were cheap low enders and except for the HP, loved me for a long time.

Music sucked. Nothing interesting happened in rock. Hipsters sucked. Most boring decade for music ever.

I turned 50 during the oughts, had my gall bladder out, a shoulder repair surgery (reaming and rotator cuff), couple fistulectomies (eeeew), and quit smoking.

I started writing creatively after a 25 year silence (mean women, e.g. ex wife, shut me down creatively) did well in a couple of short story and flash fiction contests,  got a couple of humor articles published in an alternative newspaper nobody knows, co-authored a scholarly article in a journal, wrote a million words that sucked but found a natural euphoria and wondrous joy in expressing myself with words.  Oh yeah, got interviewed on Anderson-Cooper 360 for satirical fake quotes of Sarah Palin that sort of took off.

Bought a 50 inch flat screen plasma HDTV to watch my beloved and accursed Seahawks choke in the Superbowl. Bought a Bluray DVD player this X-mas to watch movies in skin pore oozing resolution.

I don't know, this is all so shallow, this review of the worst decade.  What about the war on terror, the emergence of China, climate change, the amazing Barack Obama and his election, financial system collapse, what about all that stuff?

Whatever.

I hope you had a better decade of nothing than I. I hope the tens are awesome. I'll turn 60 during the tens. Jesus. But I may also retire and will teach my granddaughter to snow ski, to spit, and to gut largemouth bass. And I'll buy a cabin in the woods with the proceeds from my darkly disturbing humor-fantasy post-apocalyptic literary novel that takes the reading world by storm. The tens might be cool. One more day.

Happy New Year!

The Christmas Fruitcake Horizon

   mmmmmm

Now that the Christmas season is upon us, we can again gorge and nibble and chomp and masticate wonderous confectionaries and baked and frosted joyfulness. Cookies, peanut brittle, fudge, candy.

Fruitcake.

You either despise it with every fiber of your digestive system or you pretend you don't so as to not offend some elderly relative who finds meaning and purpose in preparing and gifting these vile holiday bricks.  There is no middle ground. There is only a default position of yuck.

Astrophysicists have long predicted, using elaborate cosmic models and algorithms, the dangerous densities of common Christmas fruitcake approaching the actual densities of black holes.  They have postulated that it is mathematically possible for some well meaning grandmother with an affinity for highly dense fruitcakes (which would be like ALL of them) to actually create the Black Fruitcake Hole Event Horizon, which, of course, would mean the instantaneous end of our earth and all life as we know it.  They've even named this phenomenon as "Hawking's Hunk."

Einstein's theory of General Relativity predicts that when a large amount of mass is present within a sufficiently small region of space, all paths through space are warped inwards towards the center of the volume, forcing all matter and radiation to fall inward.

There are no larger amounts of mass within smaller regions of space on earth than the common Christmas fruitcake.  That's why they make such excellent doorstops and catapault projectiles and ship ballast.  And one day - our doom.

Knowing this, you'd think the government would ban them, stop the sale of those disgusting little candied fruits and raise the price of walnuts beyond that of the fixed income of most elderly people, some fundamental federal intervention to prevent the sudden and massive sucking of all matter over the cooling and sweet event horizon and deep into the fruithole.  But then, you know, the astrophysicists would have won and ruined Christmas. Too bad. Let them have this one and we'll keep Easter. Peeps float.

The inescapable and immutable fact is the entire tribe of humanity, this amazing collective of hyper-evolved primates coexisting on this rich oxygenated blue world, is only one fruitcake soaking in cheap brandy away from utter annihilation.   

The last fruitcake on earth.  My mom has the recipe.

How I Won Rudolph's Heart

The year I became an elf and lived under the Christmas tree in the twinkling panic of lights near a 1958 Lionel train idling at the switchyard cars full of candycane commerce I taught the baby jesus in his creche to roll dice and to play war and we'd take the grizzled old reindeers for everything they owned and when the housecat slunk under the low hanging wishes and lapped up the treewater dreams I'd hide behind the cows and the two wise men (one's been missing for years) and it is midnight at the North Pole and Mrs. Claus slips quietly from her bed to not awaken her Santa and pads softly into the kitchen and pours three fingers of vodka into a coffee cup and curses the darkness and I plug in the tree lights and illuminate the silent night and under the snowglobe side table the cat opens her eyes and blinks once, blinks twice.

Like a Baby

This is what they mean when they say "sleeping like a baby." Baby sleep is the best, just as they so fully connect and engage the new world when awake, they disconnect just as completely when asleep.

Babies conform to arms, pillows, whatnot in their limp slackness as they snooze. I think as we age we accumulate so much stimuli and stress and assorted crap that we never get to sleep quite like this.  We are more fitful, arousable, waking up too early, going to bed too late. Not babies. They gotta sleep all day? They sleep all day. Her cheeks sag downward, her mouth too. She hasn't learned yet to fight gravity, even in sleep. I kind of hope she never will.

Reason #563 Why Texas Should Grow the Hell Up

 

Me in high school, 1976.

I can't even say how much I hate a state that allows this crap.

BALCH SPRINGS, Texas - Pre-kindergartner Taylor Pugh likes his floppy hair just how it is: long on the front and sides, covering his earlobes and shirt collar.

But his long locks violate the dress code in his suburban Dallas school district. So Taylor again Wednesday found himself facing in-school suspension, sitting in a library with a teacher's aide while his friends played and learned together in a classroom.

"They kicked me out that place," said Taylor, 4, who prefers the nickname Tater Tot. "I miss my friends."

He's 4 years old and in school suspension because OMGZ HIZ HAIR IZ TOO LONGZ! What a collection of morons running this school. Is it any wonder we got the stupidest President ever known to man from this state?

According to the district dress code, boys' hair must be kept out of the eyes and cannot extend below the bottom of earlobes or over the collar of a dress shirt. Fads in hairstyles "designed to attract attention to the individual or to disrupt the orderly conduct of the classroom or campus is not permitted," the policy states.

The district is known for standing tough on its dress code. Earlier this year, a seventh-grader in the district was sent home for wearing black skinny pants. His parents chose to home-school him.

I mean, he's a little boy who prefers to be called "Tater Tot." He misses his friends. His parents are going to donate his long curly locks one day to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients.  I can't even believe crap like this still occurs in public schools.  Seriously, Texas, get your shit together or risk becoming even more irrelevant to the world than you currently are.

On its Web site, the district says its code is in place because "students who dress and groom themselves neatly, and in an acceptable and appropriate manner, are more likely to become constructive members of the society in which we live."

Damn dirty hippies! What horrifying time warp do these people live in? Maybe this nonsense goes on elsewhere, I know the whole school uniform fad is always out there, but the cookie cutter approach to appearance just reeks of the same old white privilege and white domination that subjugates and punishes people of all races, ethnicities, and creeds in a nation that sometimes treats its Constitution as more of a set of guidelines than principles and laws.

Free Tater Tot. When he is free so you will be.

Trip Report: 12/15/2009 - Spoklahoma to Rainytown

Guess where? (answer below)

Spoklahoma Basalt Transition Zone (SBTZ):

Departed 1330. Unremarkable. 90 plowed and chemical'd. Wet and mostly bare.

Basalt Zone to Moses Hole:

Bare and wet. Cruise optimal 75 mph. One radar trapper WSP parked on snowy median steep incline camo'd in snow. Clever.

Basalt Zone Moses Hole to Hellensberg:

Snowing. Slush trap on passing lane. Saw one DOT plow. Road surface slick with doom.

East Slopes Crashcade Mts to Mountain Kingdom of the Snow Trolls Summit:

Lanes progress to total compact snow and ice. Lane dividers invisible. Heavy falling snow like a snow vomited forth from an Angry God of Snow Clouds(tm). Like a billion white angels suddenly annhilated by a massive sonic death pulse issued by a brilliantly evil Child of Lucifer(tm) with a furiously amplified organic subwoofer mounted deep into the tectonic plates of earth and directionally targetable at the perfect beings of heaven. Saw only two DOT plows working mountain pass.

Line of semis in chain up area reached 3 times around the earth. Two huge military convoys passed. The Socialist Forces of Obama(tm) have mobilized. He has chained them to his will and they are driving on the freeway kind of slowly, like a Kung Fu master sizing up his foe, should I use the Crane or the Tiger or the Frog or the Seriously Agitated Salamander attack?

Summit of the Mountain Kingdom of the Snow Trolls, West Slope Crashcades to Highway 18 Tiger Woods Mountain:

Thick heavy slick slurry like an Oatmeal of a Northern Forest Ogre Made from the Bones of His Enemies and the Milk of Stolen Kindness(tm). Semis de-chaining in a line that reaches halfway around the earth. Two SUV's lost the game of Ironyopoly-Bad Conditions Highway Version(tm) and slid into the deep unpacked snow of the median. Trip report author could not stifle a chuckle.

Tiger Woods Mountain  (Highway 18) to Rainytown:

Wet and bare, dark and foreboding possessing of the howling providence of all that creeps and slimes and slithers in the inky night shadows of the Greater Pugestupia Salish Sea Catchment Zone. I-5 Traffic densely stupid through Tacomaroma relieving post Fort Lewis where the Armies of the Socialist Forces of Obama(tm) continue to prepare for the complete and utter takeover of the United States of God's America(tm). Rainytown uneventful except for almost being sideswiped by tweak junkie in a POS sedan.Arrived at 1936. Total trip time = 6 hrs 06 min.

Trip Addendum/Mortality Cessation Rating Index (MCRI):

MCRI - 7.5  (angels kissing my cheek and singing sweetly the welcoming songs of heaven into my torn and bloody ears):  Two potential life removing events - semi on west slope of Crashcades 90 suddenly and without warning changed from passing lane to center lane where I motated lost in dreamy thought of idyllic locales involving transportation methodologies of gossamer winged zeppelins filled with the burps of baby orchids for inflationary gases and caused me to engage in sudden brake slamming behavior in slush to almost form the middle creamy layer in a hellish metallic Oreo cookie of highway destruction. Second MCRI rating contributory event was the afore mentioned tweaker in POS sedan.

Answer to photo location question: 90 westbound approaching abyss-like downgrade to the Columbia River - Vantage Bridge.

Say What?

 

Grampa, I'm in this cute outfit to stay warm and cozy not so you can make up degrading nicknames like "Baby Lumpkins." Don't traumatize me, man, can't you see I'm just an innocent baby???

Baby Blogs

Look buddy, this is my blog now. No more creative flights of fancy unless they are about me. And enough with the parallel worlds that only babies can see. The first time was tolerable, the second was just forcing it a bit, don't you think? Couple of rules - no matter how fascinated you are with my poop it never gets blogged, ok? This isn't negotiable, sport. No embarrassing photos, absolutely no more comparisons between me and monkey-human hybrids! That crap's gotta stop. You can blog about my mommy sometimes, y'know, she is the one doing all the heavy lifting around here. And my uncles, God bless em, even though someone's gotta tell that big sweet Shane kid that I'm not china and I won't break. Supporting my head is good though. A few other things - when your commentators leave nice comments you know you could ONCE IN AWHILE respond to them. Especially if it's compliments about me. Step up a little, nobody said being a grandpa blogger was always gonna be easy.

I guess that's it for now, I think you've got potential, don't get me wrong, you are more than capable of doing sweet and cute, although from reading the rest of this mess one woulda never known that. Oh yeah, mention sometime how I like how you use big words when you talk to me and I'm still waiting to get all bundled up and walked around outside for some fresh air like you're always saying I need. Saturday? Capiche?

Baths and Coyotes

Fresh out of the tub, wrapped in a thick warm robe and bundled in a towel. Everybody in your world adores you, pays nothing but attention to you, has only your very best interests at heart. One day you will grow up and realize it is no longer quite so, but that's a million years from now and at least a few thousand warm soapy baths.

I wish to believe you are not staring at the TV screen in the family room,  transfixed by large contrasting objects of light and shadow, but are instead wondering where your gramps is and how soon he will leave Rainytown and return to Spoklahoma and the Lazy Bar Bob ranchette, where the longhorn cattle pass easily through this world and the next and mostly range in the next because we never see them, but only occasionally, early in the morning while walking the fenceline, get a whiff of em, and the coyotes sing at night, mostly John Lee Hooker talkin' blues and Howlin' Wolf (for the less than subtle irony of top chain predator species envy) but on special nights when the moon hangs low and golden, swollen in the sky, like a God newly interested in the goings on of the earth below, the coyotes that cross the Lazy Bar Bob will suddenly break out in lullabies and the raccoons will stop stealing catfood left out on the back porch for the ranch cats and the horned owls up in the fir trees will blink and forget about boppin' the field mice on their little gray heads, and a baby girl will coo and giggle to the coyote lullabies, as she lays in her basinette, her arms outstretched, and nobody in the ranchette house will hear her as they either sleep or watch movies downstairs, but she isn't worried about that right now, she will leave them in the boundaries of their one world and she will enjoy the rising music from the other.

Life Lessons for the Young

 

Promo shot of my band around 1936 on our first Across Monster England! Tour

Back in the 1930s I played electric guitar and sang some background vocals (mostly woo woo's and ayuh's) in the Welsh  thrash-reggae band, "Burning Coal." We started out playing mostly bar mitzvahs, high school mixers and at pubs for angry drunk Welsh miners and goatherders who hooted and hissed and threw shovels, picks, and crooks at the stage until they would, almost reflexively and hypnotically, be seized by the 4/4 (downbeats on 2 and 4) reggae beat and dance and sing along with us. 

That wasn't an easy start to what later became a grand career of headlining all over Britain and Europe, but it was necessary to first pay your dues back in those days. There were rarely overnight successes during the Great Depression, it was all about slogging through the ankle and knee deep mud of persevearance and a special sub-categrory of persevearance I like to call "stick to it iveness."

In the end, we had a brief yet star-crossed career, made tons of money and brought joy and happiness to our little corner of the world. Many years after Burning Coal's farewell gig at Wembley Stadium, I was in London with some of my Finnish Special Forces (Arctic Snipery) charges on leave and we were wandering through an old record shoppe and they found a used copy of my band's only album "Burning Coal -  You've Got the Bloody Power, Mate!" and as they clapped their hands over their mouths in utter surprise and delight realizing their Dark Ops Sniper Adviser used to play guitar and sing some background vocals in a famous Welsh band, I was momentarily seized with a speechlessness that belied my usual boisterous hail-fellow-well-mettishness. Tears welled in my Arctic ice fields/solar reflection-induced permanently squinted eyes and for just a moment, a brief heartbeat of time, I remembered it all, the whole amazing rocket powered trajectory of fame and success and love and adoration, an amazing vectoring of talent and persistence across the starscape of the universe of possibilities.

I know, God willing, one day I will share this tale of reaching and grabbing the brass ring on the carousel of life with my little granddaughter so that she knows anything is possible. Anything at all. The human spirit is indomitable and fierce when it is ignited and fueled. I will probably not, however, tell her about the reindeer.

The Things She Sees

She sleeps in my arms and I watch her in REM. I hold my cellphone camera above and try to frame her for a sweet sleep pic, then just as I frame, she smiles and as fast as I can I press the shutter release button to grasp the picture.

She giggles and grins in her sleep.  Most certainly not gas smiles. Her giggle is a high soft trill. She is three weeks old. I want to believe the giggles and smiles are in preparation for the emergence of conscious social smiling at six to eight weeks. A rehearsal in REM.

No, that is a lie.

I really wish to believe babies possess dream worlds they visit to see the remarkable events and experiences that await them. In this dream world of their future, only things of love, magic, wonder and joy surround and appear in glimmering and gauzy forms, in air that sparkles, by a sea that sings to them with the faint, rhythmic echoes of womb music, of heartbeats, of a rising melody of their new world just beginning to form shape and gain tone.

When she awakens, her little eyes open wide and she looks at me and into the room. My left arm aches from holding her still during her sleep travels. We are both quiet for a few moments. I rock us in the soft recliner chair by the wood stove - the embers seem to whisper its warm enough, it's warm enough, it's warm and perfect.

Alaska, Diamonds, Alaska, BABY!!

If the search string fits: Somebody from Wasilla, Alaska searching for "hookers on cruise ships" landed on my blog. I think it is my favorite new euphemism for their former mayor and brand new public supporter of the crazed "birther" conspiratorial movement, the lovely and quite untalented Governor-Quitter Sarah Palin. A hooker on the Cruise Ship America. As an aside, I've never actually blogged about hookers on cruise ships and know nothing about either. I think they landed on one of my ethical dilemma posts, the one about the sinking lifeboat. Go figure.

I can't even keep up with the whole Tiger Woods stuff, he's apparently up to 3 girlfriends now and his wife has a new prenuptial promising her the planets Saturn and Jupiter, several newly discovered diamond mines in British Columbia and two precious metal bearing asteroid belts to be named later??

I'm flying home tonight to Spoklahoma in the Basalt Transition Zone-Rocky Mountains Precursor Area 51 instead of driving. I have to have some activity on my Alaska Air mileage plan at least once a year and I haven't used it since March 2008. So yay I get a break from endless miles of monotonous horror punctuated only by brief moments of bladder spasming terror as over-methamphetaminized truck drivers drift across the lane stripes as their bodies slowly convulse and their sweaty hands slide off their steering wheels. 

I wonder what's different in airports these days? I wonder if they still make you take your shoes off? Is belt removal now mandatory like it is when you walk through the metal detector at Spokane Co. Juvenile Court? Or is it still optional based upon a relatively subjective assessment of the metal weightage and surfacing of the buckle and studs if you got em. I think, quite frankly, if you wear a belt with studs or spikes you might as well just pull it off for two reasons, one, it's probably not going to clear the magnetonometer and two, the TSA security officers are going to make you just because it's studded and/or spiked and  looks messed up and three, because studded/spiked belts are acts of fashion terrorism.

Anyway, my flight is godawful late out of SeaTac as it was the cheapest mileage fare (15K round trip) and I will probably sleep the whole way to Spokanistan and miss the entire 38 minutes in the air of magnificent nocturnal wonder sights of miles and miles of pretty much effing nothing.

But the cool part of all that late night flying over the treacherous hell-lands pregnant with doom of the Evermean state is first thing Saturday morning, I will be ensconced in the soft and comfy recliner-rocker in my family room with a fire roaring and a cup of fresh french roast coffee and a little tiny cutie bug sitting on my lap and watching me with her big eyes as I'm talking all kinds of silly and making all kinds of goofy faces.  Can't wait.

Why Proto-Humans Formed Deeply Bonded Family Units and Smashed Sabertooth Tigers in the Head with Clubs When They Came Too Close to the Family Cave

 

My kiddo finally sent me a photo! We are back on track. Whining works, even if it is a bit unseemly and tragic.

I love how newborns look kind of like aliens (E.T. in particular) and as they quickly age into infancy they start resembling little hairless monkey babies. I adore monkey-people babies! Soon her cheeks will fatten up, her face will round out more and she'll get the full bore fully human baby look we all love so much with social smiling and burbling and cooing and spit drooling down her chin.

But for now she raises her tiny eyebrows and opens her eyes wide and reaches out with her hand as if to say "wow this is one interesting world I'm now in and I hope my grandpa gets an earlier flight home on Friday, because he's a blast (although he could learn some new lullabies and I don't care yet he's so off key)!"

You Never Write, You Never Send Me Pictures Anymore, I Guess You Don't Care About an Old Man Alone in Rainytown, You're Too Busy, I Understand, I Won't Be a Burden, Just Let Me Know When She Graduates High School, I'll Send Her a Card, A Gift Too.

I ask my daughter "please text me a photo of grandbaby every day while I am in Rainytown" and she does for one week. But then she stops and I have to go pilfer them off her Facebook page. Is it too much to ask a busy daughter with her first baby to send me a photo each day? No. Modern cellphone technology makes this easy and simple.  Should I have to jack them off her Facebook? No. I should be happily surprised each day when my cellphone buzzes with a new photo. Doesn't grandbaby look cute in her pink jacket and hood and car seat? Yes. She is cuter than a bug in a peach basket.

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "man you've lost your edge here in the bloggo world, no more post apocalyptic hell visions, no more effing disturbing examples of the loathsome and evil creatures of the natural world, no more bizarrely constructed ethical dilemmas, no more of what causes us to slow down on our morning fast commutes on the bloggo highway and stare at the flaming six car pile up and associated carnage of your blog, man.  Yes, I'm afraid it's true (and I warned you) I am becoming a cranky and whiny old grandpa in bloggo world. I am losing my once raggedly sharp machete edge and morphing into a butter knife with big globs of peanut butter and honey on it.  Oh well, just wait until I start coming up with cute nicknames for her. You.have.no.idea.

:-)

On Holding Babies (Part 1)

Not how we hold babies. America eventually grows disgusted with politicians who refuse to hold babies correctly.

There are only a few basic ways to hold and carry a flaming battle-axe when being swarmed by rageful and deadly Visigoths or Huns as one defends one's castle or goat farm against them. Two handed or one handed, generally shoulder height or above, perhaps side armed or even under armed if attempting a return hack following a chop down on one's opponent. Holding and swinging a flaming battle-axe is certainly different, for many important reasons, than holding and carrying an infant.

For infant packing, one must first be aware of the infant's preferences and attempt to match to those, so if a baby prefers a cradling in the crook of the arm carry that would be the one most undertaken, realizing that in many cases it can change depending on various factors, e.g. infant comfort, carrier comfort, need or not to have a hand free, etc.

Some babies, if colicky, might prefer to ride up high against the shoulder facing behind the pack human, staring at a world in reverse, a world that reminds the baby that at such an early age everything is forward motion, little is history or to be reminisced, and the tummy pressed against the shoulder may gain relief from the colic as the pack human motates forward, perhaps even walking up and down stairs or over objects, e.g. curbs or boxes of baby wipes, causing some tummy ache relief. Or that might be the worse possible position for symptom amelioration requiring at least a moderate ability by the pack human to be flexible and attempt other carrying positions which may be more comfortable and relieving.

It should be noted that positions where the carrier can obtain and maintain an eye contacting gaze with the baby are, to my mind, preferred, so that the key social cueing and messaging and most importantly, pack human to human baby bonding, may most optimally occur.

In future blog posts, I will share what I have deemed effective holding and carrying strategies and methodologies per the phenomenological context of me and my little grandbaby. And I may even share how I discovered that she can be soothed when fussy, by being cradled in my arms while I run the bathtub faucet full blast and sing, horribly off-key, to her.

The Day After Tomorrow

Today is Tuesday and it is one day away from Monday and yet it is one day closer to next Monday. This is the Sisyphean horror of what it means to be a working person.  You flee from the gaping maw of one furious hellbeast and into the razor sharp teeth of another. It is the cycle of futility. The wheel that breaks you upon it over and over. The optimist is the one who chooses to believe that Saturdays beget more Saturdays.  The pessimist accepts this only to the degree that Saturdays are a cruel trickster who hands you a perfect golden banana when you are starving but brains you with a rock while you hurredly devour it. The optimist/pessimist yin/yang balanced zen-ranger believes Wednesdays are the chalk drawn start lines of the hopscotch game of life, that Wednesdays allow for a midpointing of extremes and in Wednesday's tepid spit water we can engage the endless repetition of work in a bearable manner. Me, I don't know. I do know that this Thursday is Thanksgiving, and with a little sweetie girl of a baby granddaughter in the house who has the name of a Roman princess and who will undoubtedly one day command her grandpa and her two strapping uncles to shine her chariot and bring her her ponies and we will race each other to do so, that I will not only stuff myself with turkey and a million other foodstuffs but I will shout in my head "thank you!" at least seven times.

Big as the Sky

 

Grandbaby falling asleep pictures. In case you're wondering, yes, this blog will likely become a grandpa blog with endless entries about my granddaughter written in a deeply annoying manner in which I appear to believe I'm the first grandpa in the world.  And since she and her mom, my daughter, both live with me and I'll see them every weekend when I drive back home from Rainytown, you can only imagine what an enriching and exciting experience this will be for all of you.

I am holding her in what I call the Modified Sitting Buddha Baby Position. Note the placement of the thumbs as they support her in front and back - holding her in a sitting stance and supporting her head in a midline position and maintaining her in a non-, what I like to call "floppy" position.  What you can't see are my palms and fingers expertly holding her back up and keeping her head from rearward floppage. It is the perfect position for her to scan her world and stare endlessly at her goofy grandpa as he chatters baby chatter and makes silly faces.

She is so alert and wanting to gain mastery over her world, looking around, moving her hands and arms in what appear to be very uncoordinated ways but grow more targeted and directed daily - she can already grab her hands together in front of her, and although it still looks a bit accidental when she accomplishes it, I have no doubt she will be applauding her world soon. She has a powerful rooting instinct and we all swear she was trying to smile at us yesterday.

I don't doubt the careful and gentle reader has already noticed the pizza sauce stains on my sweater. Me and my kids had a Papa John's Delivery Special Lunch Adventure yesterday and I was a bit messy as I ate and balanced baby in the Modified Sitting Buddha Baby Position and I know I'm going to have to clean up my act once she is high chaired and spooning big glops of green pureed stuff into her mouth, as I must model neat and tidy eating behavior for her.  Perhaps I should procure a grandpa bib to wear whilst eating messy foods.

My grandbaby is now one more person I will miss when I leave Basalt Transition Zone Land and drive back to Rainytown each week. And although she is tiny in size, she is as big as the sky in missing.

Holding Babies

The first time I held my grandbaby Sophia, adjusting the crook of my elbow to support her neck, holding a baby again felt novel and fragile, like I hadn't held a baby in a million years and needed my muscle and heart memories to reemerge and they did reemerge, my movements became smooth and sure and my heart strings twanged and thrummed and plucked and bowed into rolling crescendos of heart song, and not long after a few holds and carries I was nagging instructing my daughter on making sure to keep baby's head in-line and not let it angle too far forward or back and telling my son to not prop her up that way unless he supports her better.

As I held her some more, I felt I was carrying my own babies back in their hospital rooms all those years ago, then, just as suddenly, my babies seemed so long ago and I struggled to remember what holding them had been like. Experiencing this instant melange of then, now, all the intervening years, and the years to come for baby Sophia, was disorienting and melancholic entwined with warm and comforting. Smiling. Sighing. Time felt like a circle not a straight line.

And now, Sophia is our magical china doll baby possessing a fineness and delicateness about her none of my babies ever did, my kiddos were all very robust neonates in weight and height. Sophia seems tiny. She has such long fingers.  She sleeps in the arms of her rambling and overimaginative old grandpa. She makes time shift.  Oh the world has changed in wonderful ways because of you, little Sophia, look at what you've done!

She'll be a star basketball player of unrelenting grace and power AND a heartbreaking cellist of unspeakable beauty and feeling!

Baby Sophia the Coolest Grandbaby in the Whole World

My First Full Post Since Becoming a Grandpa

Damn kids. I catch those rotten neighbor kids cuttin cross my lawn again on their damn shiny bikes their spoilin moms and dads bought em, something's goin to happen! Dammit. I work too hard on rakin up the damn leaves this time a'year and let me tell you I'll never use a damn leaf blower like those idiots down the way, makin all that commotion and stinkin up the place just to blow leaves around! Damn fools.

Next time those kids come through lookin for a short cut to their damn public school fulla liberals and hippies teachin em to expect mollycoddlin' by the damn federal US government, I'm gonna seriously think a'stringin up some 80 lb test monofilament about neck high. Just like our boys did in the big WW Two when they flipped Gerries off their damn motorcycles and plugged em with M-1s! Except I do that and one of them damn poor dears gets a damn owie on their behind then I'll have the damn sheriff at my door, hasslin me, a law abidin and tax payin citizen, while them damn kids wreck yards and smoke their damn mary jane while poppin wheelies on their damn bikes or ridin skateboards in the middle of the damn street!

And I sure as h-e double damn hockey sticks won't be palaverin with no damn new neighbors just moved in with their butt ugly ski boat and noisy damn motorcycles, about no sittin down with these damn reprobates on their damn bikes and talkin no sense into them! Ain't my job that's a job for their damn parents. Straighten your own damn kids up!

That's all I got to say this morning I need to get off this damn dumb box here and go to down to Walgreens and get me some milk of magnesia and cascara, I'm backed clear up to damn Bonners Ferry. Damn it.

Grampa!

I am one! :-)

Could Use Some Duct Tape too ...

I haven't written one of these in awhile. From yesterday on Craigslist.

We found ourselves in a field near three ancient school buses floating in straw. Although ruined, the buses were still yellow as sunflowers. I said it was school bus yellow. You pointed to a honeybee and asked if it was school bus yellow, sunflower yellow, or honeybee yellow, except when you spoke, each word became a peasant woman and her child gleaning for straw . You said more but I could barely understand then I could not. After a time your tears flooded the field and the buses drifted away. The peasants made canoes of their straw and floated after the buses.  You laughed at the peasant children splashing the tear water.  We swam after the peasants as the clouds became flies and the sky grew dark with their sound. I asked if you remembered who we were and you said no, do you remember?  I said  if we don't get out of this water soon we will freeze. You said it felt warm, like when you are ashamed and your blood rises but cannot get out, can only heat the skin and flesh as it beats to escape.