Month: March 2017

Boring Dreams

Dreams have been boring of late.

I was reconciling with someone who’d angered me. I held my anger for a long time. Now I was being persuaded for the betterment of some project to make up. I didn’t want to but reluctantly agreed.

My seconds and I met with his seconds under an Interstate overpass. It was a dark, wet day. The terrain was brown dirt and highly sloped. Huge round pale pillars supported the highway. Interstate traffic thundered and roared overhead.

We approached one another. Words which I couldn’t hear were exchanged. I decked him.

Then, a voiceover: “Now let’s do it from his point of view.”

I was the other person. I knew I’d wronged me. I was sorry. I accepted that I would probably hit me. I walked into it knowing it would happen but accepted that it would.

And it did.

We were working on a project. Dad was involved. I’d done great on it. Everyone was congratulating me on my outstanding performance. I was pleased and excited but also uncomfortable with all the attention.

A celebration was set up. I was told I’d won a prize for my performance. A big white decorated sheet cake was brought in. People began taking pieces. I couldn’t get to it and get any. It was going quickly.

A new silver BMW convertible was brought in. I was confused as to whether it was my prize. I thought it was but others got in it to take it for a spin.

I was left waiting for my cake and my prize.

I was at a new military assignment. I’d just completed a prestigious assignment and had been recognized for my contributions. My OIC was a female, someone I didn’t know. She was young and I was teaching her how to set things up. Two other controllers were assigned to the location. A new one had arrived.

I was explaining processes to the new controller and explaining to him that one of the others – I think I gave a name – would be assigned to him to train him. Meanwhile, I filled out forms as templates to help him correctly process information.

I was almost done. The newbie was preparing to leave. So was I. The OIC suggested that I get an emergency number from the newbie. “Good idea,” I agreed, and called to him for one even as I thought, that would have already been done.

“How do we reach you?” I asked him. He was twenty to thirty yards away. “Do you have an emergency number?”

Walking back toward us, he replied, “I was born in Iowa.” He then began to tell us about his childhood.

The OIC and I were confused. Why was he telling us this?

The end.

So – it seems like these dreams reflect many facets. Of being recognized but not rewarded. Of needing to make up with myself and forgive. I don’t know what I’m forgiving. Past errors?

There seemed also an element of being confused about what was expected of me.

Ah, dreams.

 

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Catlias

Catlias: the other names by which a cat is know.

Example: Meep, A.K.A. The Ginger Prince, little one, the golden blade, golden boy, sunshine

8

Chow Down

Once again, it’s time to celebrate cereal. Yes, it’s National Cereal Day in America.

We’ve embraced cereal in America. The ready to eat stuff first originated in the 1800s. Pouring it into bowls and adding something to it is standard breakfast fare in many houses.

Back as a kid, my favorite was Wheaties. Yes, I was a Breakfast of Champions guy. The flavor was so-s0 but I believed in the advertising. My little sister was strictly a Cheerios person. It was Cheerios or nuttin’. This was back in the day when all that was available were those basic miniature oat inner tubes. She did like adding banana to it.  On Saturdays, the practice was done to the sounds of the Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny, cool friends to have.

Mom liked it because we could ‘make our own’ breakfast without involving electricity and sharp objects. I liked making a game out of it, racing around the kitchen while multi-tasking, grabbing the ingredients, bowl and utensils in the fewest possible steps and motions.

Unfortunately, the refrigerator wasn’t properly grounded. We were warned never to touch the refrigerator handle and the counter at the same time, but in my quest for speed, that’s what I did.

I can still feel that current coursing through me.

My reaction was apparently to scream and cry with pain. Mom came racing in. “What happened?” I told her I’d been shocked. “Well, keep it down,” she replied. “You’ll wake the baby.”

Blaming the Wheaties for my error while acknowledging that Wheaties essentially tasted like wet cardboard, I switched to Raisin Bran. It was my go-to for about a dozen years. Oh, I tried Kix, Trix, Coco Puffs and Life. I think Lucky Charms, Count Chocula and other disgusting, sugary cereals came out then. I tried them at friends’ houses during sleep-overs and found them repulsive.

I liked Puffed Rice and Shredded Wheat for a long time, but they gave way to my all-time favorite: Grape-Nuts. I put very little milk or sugar on them. It was, my wife noticed when I introduced them to her, like eating a mouthful of gravel. I found chewing rocks personally rewarding. Maybe it’s the Neanderthal in me.

They were once tried with beer, Miller Lite, I believe, just to see how that worked. It provoked a shrug sort of response, meaning, not good, not bad, just different.

But eventually, I drifted into eating oat meal regularly. Organic steel-cut instant oats (now GF and non-GMO) with a little brown sugar and cinnamon, berries, fruit and walnuts have been my breakfast preference for the past dozen years. And today, in honor of National Cereal Day, I had pancakes.

What’s life without whimsy?

Probably Cheerios.

 

1

Today’s Theme Music

This one has been downloaded from the memory cloud formed immediately after retiring from the USAF in 1995 and my new work commute to Progressive Angioplasty Systems.

I lived in Mountain View, in a little cul-de-sac not far from Moffett Boulevard and the Highway 101 ramps. PAS was located in Palo Alto off Univesity. Easy commute, right?

Sure, in the morning. It was eleven miles, if I remember it right. The morning commute required twenty minutes because I enjoyed working early and leaving early. I typically was the first or second to arrive, at 7:00 AM, and then would leave at 4:30 PM.

The 4:30 PM return trip was a completely different story. Those eleven miles consumed forty-five to fifty-five minutes on a good day. Rain and traffic accidents would mar that stellar time, creating a sixty to ninety minute commute. Bleah.

So I listened to music, news and audible books. This is a song from that commute era. Here is Jewel with ‘Who Will Save Your Soul’.

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Purrnotic

Purrnotic: (adjective) a trance-like state of paralysis induced by the close proximity of a purring feline. See also: purralysis.

2

The Energy

Of all the people visiting the coffee shop, one regular routinely negatively affects me. Her close proximity feels like angry energy brushing up against me. She fractures my concentration in multiple ways.

I can notice and rationalize many concrete reasons for this – her smell, her noise, she talks on her cell phone while sitting at the table (which irrationally irks me) – but I’ve sincerely concluded that her energy disturbs my energy, and not in a pleasant way. Whenever she’s at the next table, I feel forced to cut my writing short and leave. It doesn’t happen often, but today is such a day.

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Thinking

Tucker, one of the household cats, has a sweet quiet nature that hides multiple insecurities. He’s needy and anxious, shadowing my activities, sleeping on the desk beside me, seeking my lap. His other dominant trait is that he’s a fighter. He loves attacking and fighting other cats. They know this and avoid him but he’ll seek them out. So I end up segregating them. He often ends up locked up in the office. He has food, water, a litter box and windows. It’s a warm and cozy space, and the primary place my wife and I spend our time. Yet, he wants out.

He wants out because he has other places he enjoys sleeping in the other rooms, but he also wants out because he knows the others are out there. I frequently talk to him about all this as I pet him, explaining that I don’t blame him, because this is his nature. While explaining this to him two days ago, I experienced an epiphany about the part of the novel I was writing. It was a eureka moment.

I couldn’t help but think of this yesterday. I subscribe to Delancey Place. They post excerpts of non-fiction books. The featured book was ‘1666: Plague, War and Hellfire’ by Rebecca Rideal. The book excerpt was about Newton and his thinking on gravity, along with the apple falling from the tree to the ground.

“Whatever he was contemplating as he sat under the apple tree on this autumnal day was brought to a sudden halt when, above him, a stem holding one of the plump apples strained and snapped. The speckled red fruit thumped to the ground and, in a flash, Newton had a groundbreaking epiphany. It became clear to him that the fruit had been drawn to the ground because gravitation worked to pull things together and hold everything onto the Earth, and that its gravitation must extend beyond the sky, into space, and to the moon itself. Following where Galileo and Kepler had led, and Einstein would later follow, in 1666, Newton had started:

‘… to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon … and deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centres about which they revolve …'”

Chuckling, I compared my contemplation with Newton’s. Mine pale by magnitudes, of course, but I love the natural comparison and realization about how our minds work to evolve insights and furnish ideas. So cool.

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Change, Resistance, and Complacency

Writing science fiction, one area I end up studying and contemplating is change. I was happy to come across this Harvard Business Review (Walter Frick) interview with Tyler Cowen. Cowen’s newest book, ‘The Complacent Class’, addresses how America has become complacent and averse to change in recent years.

I’ve watched this develop. NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – was the rallying chorus to battle many new construction suggestions. Property values and appearances take precedence over more pragmatic uses of land, usually in the name of property values, especially when one small set who don’t live in the area will benefit to the detriment of those living in the area and fighting the action.

Yet, we can see the concrete results in places like Oroville Dam. Oroville Dam was headline news during some of February as record rains struck parts of California. The dam’s spillway was opened but damage caused it to be closed. With water rising behind the dam, the emergency spillway was employed but the visibly fast erosion taking place concerned many. Fears that the dam was going to collapse caused mass evacuation. Many area residents were pissed because the water behind that dam in their back yard benefited others living hundreds of miles away.

Almost as an extension of NIMBY, Homeowners Associations (HOAs), have developed to protect individual neighborhoods and developments here in southern Oregon. A large part of that is the agreement to establish a new development is centered around having an open green space, or mini-park, as part of the development. That park, and the attendant common areas, need a management focus. Hence, the HOA is used. To protect property values, the HOA restricts changes and uses. Home owners are limited to what they can plant; fruit and vegetable gardens are generally off-limits, frustrating people who want to grow their own produce. Some common interest developments address this by creating a community garden.

So, from the economic and social ramification of residing in America in the early twenty-first century, to watching and thinking about politics, to imagining our future, Cowen’s book entices me.

______________________________________________________________

HBR: And all this is happening during a time when we see a lot of change in technology, particularly in IT and machine learning, and, potentially, artificial intelligence. How does that progress fit with your thesis?

Well, there is a lot of change, but it’s concentrated in some areas. Look at a classic 20th-century notion of progress: how quickly you can move through physical space. That hasn’t gotten faster for a long time. Planes are not faster. With cars, there’s more traffic. It’s actually harder to get around, and that makes the physical world less dynamic. It’s harder to build things in the United States.

The thing that’s much easier to do is sit at home and have all of life come to you. You speak to your Alexa or your Echo, and you have things be ordered. You use the internet. You watch on Netflix. It’s made us all much more homebodies, feeling we don’t need to change things, more comfortable in our consumption patterns. And obviously that has big private gains, or people wouldn’t be doing it. But there’s nonetheless a collective effect that I think is worrying when our physical and geographic spaces become less dynamic, less mobile, less intermixed. And that’s the America we’re seeing today.

Read the entire short, engaging interview at HBR.

 

4

On This Day

On this day in 1990, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird set record. Flying over the continental United States, the aircraft averaged 2,144.8 MPH, and required one hour and four minutes to travel from Los Angeles, California, to Washington, D.C.

The aircraft has since been retired, and they’re no longer flown.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

My wife reminded me of this one. It came out waaaayyyy back in the 1960s. That seems like three lifetimes to some, and yesterday to others. It’s like the day before yesterday to me.

The Isley Brothers wrote it, but this cover, by The Human Beinz, is the one I know. The Human Beinz release made it to the Top 10 in 1968. My wife called it the ‘no-no’ song. Its real title is ‘Nobody But Me’, but listening to the lyrics, it’s easy to understand her confusion. They sing no thirty-four times in a row. Featuring a fast, jaunty beat with lively bass, the words and melody are easy to learn. My little sister likely doesn’t recall this, but I used to sing this song to her; it amused me as a twelve-year-old jerk to sing, “No, no, no, no no, no no,” to a toddler.

The song streams well on a wintry March walk.

 

 

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