More weird dreams

Ok, where does THIS one come from!?

I was dumpster-diving in a dumpster behind the old factory building downtown, where I worked summer before last, and I started pulling out all these bizarre collages, full of kids and water-color scenery...it was HENRY DARGER'S WORK!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

I looked around in amazement, and saw Henry sitting on the steps to the loading dock nearby. For some reason, I thought he would only talk to me if I brought him some food, so I went to White Castle for some burgers. When I got back to the factory, Henry was putting the paintings into my old '65 Impala (?!? how did that get in there?) and told me I couldn't have them he'd already given them to someone else. I tried to get him to eat some White Castles but he went on a long tear about how White Castle used child labor and it was wrong of me to give them my business.

After he drove off, I went back to the dumpster to see if he'd left any pictures, and he had, but they were all about some super-hero character called Mouseman, and didn't look too much like his earlier work. I started thinking of how I could convince anyone that they were real Dargers, and then remembered he was long dead....that's when I woke up.

WTF? Is this what I get for having hot mustard on my Sweet and Sour Chicken dinner??

Here Comes My Girl

(To truly appreciate this post, please start playing Tom Petty's "Here Comes My Girl" now)

By springtime, 1981, I was really a working musician. I'd made my living almost exclusively by playing guitar and singing for almost 4 years. I'd sojourned across the country, from job to job, from Missouri to North Carolina, up to Canada, down to the Deep South, here, there, and everywhere, anywhere they would pay us to play, first in this band, and then in another. My motto was, "whatever it takes." Even in my home town I didn't have a real residence; sometimes I just slept on my friend's couches, 'cause I would surely be on the road again soon. Sometimes I took a day-job, only to leave again as soon as I had a chance to make my living as a guitarist again.

Then I met her. The girl who made me think, maybe, there was a better life to be had just staying put; maybe the sacrifices demanded by a life on the road were really too much. Maybe I could still be a musician without sacrificing every other part of my life to the pursuit of fame and fortune, maybe being a musician was something I just WAS, without demanding that I do nothing else. She made me think, maybe I should go back to college, maybe I could do something else with my life, maybe I'd be happy doing that other thing...

While I was still working as a musician, Tom Petty brought this song out..."Here Comes My Girl"...it was totally up my alley. I worked it up, pitched it to the band, got the nod, and we played it a few times. Then, unexpectedly, the band decided I wasn't being serious enough, and I was invited onward.

No worries; I didn't want to go their way, anyway...I had My Girl, and I was actually looking forward to staying home, having a home, staying with My Girl. Except, she was leaving town, going away to college. Okay, I could still make a home for us here, that she could come home to, except that's not what happened, either. I know I don't need to lay it all out for you, this is a story as old as boy-meets-girl. The soundtrack for my "Dear John" letter was "Here Comes My Girl".

How could I have been so wrong?

Was I so wrong? There are no guarentees in life; maybe when I was really ready to settle down, I managed to pick the wrong Girl. All I can say with certainty is, when I met My Girl, I knew I was ready to really change my life, no holds barred, and, indeed, despite her abandonment, I went back to college, got a degree, and moved on into the rest of my life.

And, of course, there have been some other Girls in my life since then; that doesn't lessen the impact of That Girl, and the impetus that moves me to write about her now, because some musician friends have asked me to play "Here Comes My Girl" with them.

And I will, because, at the very core of me, some recondite part of me, still plays "Here Comes My Girl" for her. It always will.

Impotently ranting with bootless cries

Arrrrggghhh!! Perhaps this warning will spare my friends from my current frustration. Who would've thought such a thing likely?!
I have been busily rendering my VHS tapes into DVDs, using a somewhat tedious and time-consuming process that I'm employing because, well, it's FREE, and I'm BROKE. That being said, everything has been going along swimmingly until yesterday, when I spent several hours rendering a tape, only at the very final stage of the burn finding that somehow the whole system was HUNG...completely stuck and unable to complete the burn. I was puzzled, but when I reviewed the iMovie project everything seemed okay, so I chalked it up to an anomaly and decided to try to reboot the system and re-render the project into iDVD for another go at the burn. Several more hours later, that attempt HUNG AT THE SAME SPOT. I scratched my head, and then, in a flash of insight, decided to check the media...AND LO! This supposedly pristine disc, the last on the spindle, was COVERED WITH GREASY FINGERPRINTS!
Now, I have to establish some bona fides; ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I'm completely anal-retentive about optical media; I have literally hundreds of CDs and DVDs that have never had their read-surface touched by human finger. I shame and heap scorn on friends when I see them carelessly handling discs. I have been known to wash discs that I saw being handled carelessly, often right in front of the careless handler, all the while clucking my tongue and cursing silently under my breath the benighted fools who are so careless and lacking of appreciation of the miracle of optical media! I spent a DECADE waiting to be able to afford my first optical media player (CD, back in the day) and I'll be DAMNED if anyone is going to abuse my precious archives. So, I KNOW those fingerprints weren't mine. And no one around here ever approaches the rendering suite, so the only possible culprit had to be someone at the FACTORY. While I still think it highly improbable, given automation, that someone actually puts the discs onto the spindle by hand, SOMEONE had to handle that disc at some point; being it was the very last disc on the spindle, the assumption would be that someone picked up a stack of discs and did just that.
The only plea for forgiveness is the fact that by my count, it was the 52nd disc in a spindle of 50. So I suppose I should shut up...I'm still a disc ahead. BUT WHAT ABOUT MY TIME? What about my anguish?

And so the caveat, and a new element in my rendering process: CHECK THAT DISC BEFORE YOU START TO BURN. A greasy fingerprint can ruin your morning.

And, finally, some useful notes:
-while there are many disc cleaners on the market, I've yet to see one any more effective than dish soap and warm water. Work the dish soap into a thin emulsion with your fingers, and lightly clean the read surface, working from the inner surface towards the outer, and be very mindful of any grit that might scratch the plastic. Rinse well, and, if you're cool like me, use a micro-fiber fabric to blot the excess water off the disc.
-for truly filthy or scratched discs, I have actually succeeded in render many readable again with this process-first, wash the disc to remove any particles or debris. Once the disc is really clean, use a fine polish like diamond wax, or a veryyyyy low-grit car polish, and, again using your fingers, work the polish-wax from the inside to the outside edge, rotating the disc, and staying with it as you periodically rinse and examine the surface to see if the scratches are disappearing. The process is very similiar to removing fine scratches from an instrument's finish (where I got the idea) and the results can be amazing if done right. I have a CD that was found in the gravel on a street, and after diligent work (done for experiment) I rendered 5 of 7 tracks playable!
-In both cases, after the rinse has been blotted and air-dried there are still sometimes water-spots; remove these with a drop of optical glass cleaner and an optical polishing cloth-the same as you would use for eyeglasses is fine. Then, savagely excoriate anyone in your vicinity that would be so cavalier as to abuse this precious gift of nearly-permanent data storage. Just because replacements may be cheap doesn't mean you shouldn't care!

Back in the early '90's, some friends and I decided to try to calculate the potential life-span of CDs and DVDs. Assuming archival level treatment, we determined the two key dynamics were oxidization of the actual recorded metallic media, and hazing in the plastic surrounding the metallic media. I think the first part was used as a gimmick-pitch in the whole "gold-disc" boondoggle of the 90's. Of course, there is a kernel of truth there, since the more-common aluminum substrate can eventually oxidize by action of the oxygen molecules in the plastic stratus; however, we all know, now, that that plastic will long-before molecularly cross-link into a hazy layer that will just as effectively as oxidization confound readability. Now, how long would it take that plastic to degrade to the point of unreadability? Again, assuming the disc was properly protected from accelerating variable components, like sunlight, free exposure to airborne agents, etc, we had a chemist friend do some calculations and we came up with something like 50-150 years, plus or minus about 10 years.
My earliest CDs are just now 20 years old, and play perfectly. Properly treated, my media should outlive me by a very comfortable margin. Of course, player formats are still evolving, and rather like the end-of-life experience of magnetic data-storage and playback, the ultimate issue will become having a player that can render the media in question. And so, I have determined to create the QMech Museum of Still-Operable Obsolete Technology. So far, I have two VHS recorder/players (one a broadcast-quality machine), three stand-alone DVD players (I'm not counting DVD or CD playing computers...that will be a separate wing for Computers), two CD players (one a really sweet Sony single-shot that I just cannot turn my back on) and three cassette players (two deck-types and one portable, but, hey, it's a NAKIMICHI!). And while I'm shedding magnetic tape media as fast as epithelial cells, I'm currently putting those machines into long-term storage conditions, 'cause, HEY! why not?

Please note: I am not accepting donations of hardware for the museum. Bury your own dead. And especially, NO eight-tracks! I've already turned down the only one I would've considered, and it was a Marantz! I will eventually look for a nice reel-to-reel, but I'm spoiled, so I'll only consider a Teac 3340, 'cause when it comes to reel-to-reel, I'm gonna stick to what I know, and I really liked that 4-track. So if you got a 3340, we can talk.

Random thoughts to Move the Project Forward

I'm just tired of the post that's occupied front-and-center since last week, and while I have a host of thoughts I might blog about, they're all either too banal, or too involved, to feel like working on any of them. So here's a grab-bag of what's been on my mind, none developed too thoroughly, just skipping across the surface of my mind.

The Apollo 11 anniversary, while impactful for me, a bit, not nearly so important in my memory as the sheer nail-biting drama of the near-disaster of Apollo 13. I will have to eventually fully blog about my Apollo 13 experience; as a space-obsessed kid I was still fully committed to following our exploits in space, and I remember being angry and frustrated when the networks failed to broadcast their "live from space" TV broadcast. Like the scene in the movie, I was waiting for the broadcast and wondering what the heck was going on; I remember turning on the radio when I woke up the next morning and hearing the report of problems with the spacecraft; I was worthless that day at school, I couldn't get my mind off the situation up there. I knew enough to understand how slim the chances of their getting home were. As the days mounted I became more and more obsessed, to the point that, by the last 36 hours or so, I couldn't even sleep. My mom let me stay home from school to watch the return, mostly because I was so sleep-deprived I wouldn't have been able to do school work anyway. All of this for another time.

The passing of Frank McCourt. I'd heard some of the buzz about Angela's Ashes, but it wasn't until I'd heard McCourt on NPR that I realized this was a book I'd probably like. What a memoir! What a life! I read it twice in one go, was thrilled with how good the movie was, and rushed to buy 'Tis and Teacher Man as soon as they were published. They were every bit as good as Angela. Although I'm two generations removed from the old sod, I've always identified with the Irish, and the Irish experience; and it seems to me there really is something to the Irish stereotype in me, introspective and a bit melancholic, reflective, always feeling a bit out-of-step with the rest of European-derived American culture, feeling sort-of disenfranchised from the whole American middle-class experience, even though I was born into it.

The Irish are the race that God made mad;
their funerals all are merry,
but all their songs are sad.

I remember my father's mother, who was VERY German, telling me "you've got too much of the Irish in you; you'll never be happy if you're not sad, too." I was just a little kid, I had NO idea what that meant, until many years later, when it started to make sense to me. Because I was a bit in my cups, and feeling very sad about a rejection, and feeling the weight of my life and the world and all the sadness and melancholy of emotion, and longing, and love, and realized I was actually pretty happy about it all, that I was happy that I could feel so much, and maybe this was the bitter that gave savor to life, and balance to the times of sweetness. Maybe only an Irishman could find solace in that way; I don't know, but that's how it felt.

The broken-down wreck. That I am. Where went my youth? How did this all come to pass, sneaking up on me like an apache? One minute everything seems fine, and the next I know my hip hurts if I sit too long, my knee hurts if I stand too long, my guts hurt if I eat too much fat or drink too much beer, everywhere I turn it's this-hurts or that-hurts this-is-stiff that-is-stiff, today my glasses seem fine, today both, or should I say all four, prescriptions seem off: just what the hell is going on?! Why am I tired all the time? Except when I have some gratifying work to do, in which case I'm not tired at all, even after I've worked my *ss off all day?

So many thoughts now crowding into my mind, I can't seem to sort them all out. I'm not even sure I want to try.

I know what to do when this happens to me: start counting my blessings, and get involved in some trivial project that I've put off time and again. That usually does the trick.

Funny, the things we dream about

Dreamed about the print shop in Illinois again, last night. It's been almost 4 years since I was up there, and I was only there for about 20 months, and yet I've dreamt about it many times in the last four years--something like once every month or two. I suppose it has to do with unresolved feelings about the whole thing; I'd gone up there thinking I would work there until I retired, and, initially, I had every reason for thinking so.
I'd known Jim, the owner, for about 15 years, having been his customer service rep at the envelope plant for that whole time. I'd known his oldest son, Steve, for about 12 years, ever since he began working with his dad. I'd formed pretty strong friendships with both of them over the years, and, when they asked me if I was interested in coming to work for them, to help Steve run the company after Jim retired, I thought it was a match made in heaven. I enthusiastically closed up my affairs in St. Louis and moved the 90 miles north to White Hall, IL, expecting to be there for quite a long time.

What was left out of my calculations was Bev, Jim's wife, and, ultimately, the real owner of the company. Unbeknownst to me, the company had been funded with Bev's inheritance money, and she maintained the ultimate say-so, dependent not on business acumen but rather her feelings about things. And, unbeknownst to me, she viewed me as a threat to the #2 son, her favorite, and a world-class shirker of the highest order. It only took a couple of weeks for me to realize that she didn't like me, wouldn't like me, and wanted me out; I'd been brought on board against her wishes, a fact I only learned after I'd been there a year.

Let's just cut to the chase and note that it took her almost two years to work up the righteous indignation sufficient to force her will on Jim and Steve. On the day of my dismissal, Jim began with an attempt to justify what was happening based upon mistakes I supposedly made; when I challenged him for specifics, he ended up abandoning that course and just stated that they had to make more room for Eric in the running of the company. As with my departure from the envelope plant, I took the highest road I could manage, and told him I'd enjoyed my time in his employ, and that I was sorry to see things end this way, wished him well and took my leave. Part of me was devastated, but part of me was very glad to be done with Bev and her dismissive sniping, her pettiness.

And still I dream about that place; I'd made friends with the work-force, and, being the sort that likes pulling in double-harness, I'd really bonded with Steve. I was saddened by the fact that he wouldn't return my phone calls, but I understood. There was nothing he could do, and in a way, I think he was as hurt as I was. He'd had his right arm cut off by his own mother, who didn't seem to care that he'd now have to shoulder all the burdens that I'd gladly carried. Oh well.

Moving back to STL was actually a happy thing; I was really glad to move closer to my friends and family, and all the amenities of a major metropolitan area. I found a roommate and an apartment in my old haunts, and eventually another job, and got busy reforming my life again. Ultimately, I know I'm happier now than I was back then; if I hadn't had to move on, I wouldn't have found the job I have now, better than any I've had in decades.

But still I dream about that place. Why is that?

Pulling the plug on the summer job...

Well, I just had to; the long hours of constant sitting were giving me hip-pains, and getting up to walk around the building every hour or so was providing less and less relief. Finally, having eclipsed my calculated "drop-dead" date for summer earnings, I went in this morning and submitted my final time-sheet.

They are great folks, and very cool to work for, but that hip (and other problems arising from long hours sitting, best left undescribed!) compelled me to stick to my guns and give it up. And they were totally cool about it-I was just summer temp help, I was due to leave very shortly anyway, so they just wished me well and shook my hand. Good people.

Now, as long as I keep my head on straight and my belt a bit tight, I should be free to do as I will for the rest of the summer break. And there are plenty of no-cost options for summer entertainment for me; I've been missing some free training at the district's Learning Center that I'll be going to now, and I've got a boat-load of hobby-work here at home to perform, plus more tape-rendering, writing, and assorted projects.

As Don Juan said, "Life is sweet, the little price we have to pay for it is a joke."

Heck, I'm even going to go into the school a few days and help my full-time partner in getting things ready for the start of classes...why not? I'll be doing it for the fun of it! That says a lot about my job with the school: I love it so much, I'm going in just for the pleasure of being there and doing things on my own time, the way I want to do them, so I can enjoy things being right when I have to work on them this fall. *sigh* I've waited all my life for a job I like this much!

On the perils of the photo-bag

I had a dream last night, set in the old mobile-home I lived in during the last couple of collegiate years; funny how I dream so much about that place. I only lived there for about three years, but they were important, impactful years that probably have a lot to do with who I am now, so maybe it's not too strange. I spent a lot of time alone there; in fact, I was only half-joking when I referred to it as "the Trailer of Solitude".

I wanted to blog about the dream, so I dug into the unsorted bag I keep all my photos in, and that's when I realized the peril I was in. There's nothing for getting one derailed like trying to find a particular picture in a vast heap of unsorted photographs from all times of one's life. Still, I mustered all my steely resolve and dove in. I knew just the picture I wanted, and so I plowed resolutely through handful after handful, until the inevitable happened, and I discovered a whole sleeve of photos I couldn't even remember taking. From my marriage. From the good times.

NO! I will not be stayed! But I shoved them into a corner of the bag to be perused later. And dug back in, past the back-packing trips, past the college shenanigans, past the parties and band-jobs and pub-crawls and, ever more slowly, through the pictures which I didn't take, gifts from friends, showing me, younger and younger, until I came to a full-stop on a picture in the music store where I grew up, me behind the counter, long, long hair, in full late-70's regalia including silver and turquoise jewelry, wristband and LOOK! even my long-gone senior ring, hocked to buy a birthday gift for a girlfriend who broke up with me only hours after gifting her...

That Trailer of Solitude pic wasn't rising to the surface...if I wanted to think about that dream, write about that dream, write about the perils of the great bog of photographs that live in the closet, I had to pry myself away from all of this. No pic for the blog; in fact, now totally and completely derailed from the dream, the trailer, almost everything except thinking about how I, who try hard to not spend too much time in deep reflection, can be so easily pulled into the swirling downward spiraling drain deep into myself, my past, all the things that were and could've been and maybe, in some ephemeral thread of reality, are.

Ah, that photo bag is a perilous thing!

Platforms and OS and apps...oh, my!I

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/google.chrome.challenges/index.html

The link above is about Google's proposed "Chrome" operating system; probably the first major new offering for OS's since Linux and it's various iterations. I've had exposure to a fair few OS's, from my early TI-99-4a through PC-DOS and AmigaDOS and all the stripes of Windows and Mac OS7, then Mac OSX; and I worked with some bigger machine OS's but never at the programmer level or anything. Still, I think I understand a bit about how all this stuff works, and how OS's and architecture work together to allow softwares to launch and run and do all the cool stuff we want to do.

I think we're looking at some paradigm-shift sort of dynamics here; I can see some value to a stripped-down OS designed to hook-up to and run apps that are never machine-resident; Windows already does that with the OS that's used on hand-held RF scanguns and such. In my opinion, it was a bit of overkill, but the scangun manufacturer obviously found it financially expeditious to license and use that OS over rolling up their own OS and then having to render it compatible with all the different softwares that it might be required to interface with. There are so many new uses for personal computing power, it's probably time to approach the situation from a whole new perspective. Still, that's a daunting prospective, and the folks who get it right are going to own the turf for a little while.

For myself, I find it all very interesting and exciting; I grin like a ninny at the chance to fiddle around with the new things coming out, especially as all these other platforms of mine continue to work and do what I want them to do. And I'm still blithely skating along, well behind the cutting edge. I really do need to get that Linux machine built....

Holiday Fun with some of the toyz...

Yay! What a fun day! It began with the phone and internet being down; now that I actually have a cell-phone, I was able to call tech-support and verify that my diagnostics were correct, and the problem was up the pipeline and outside of the walls. Thank goodness I'm an early-riser, I'm sure that's the reason I got a technician on-site in about an hour. And, indeed, the problem was up the pipe. Poor guy, service was back by the time he knocked on my door, but it was nice to verify everything was good inside the walls, and we got to chat enough so that he said, "you're pretty savvy-if you get a problem like this again, here's my cell number. Call me and I should be able to tell you if there's a service issue in the area and save you all that checking." Pretty cool.

Then, I ended up going onto e-Bay to look at a guitar pedal I was following. The short story is this-notice the beige pedal in the pic above-that's a Danelectro Daddy-O Overdrive pedal I bought about two weeks ago for $38 off e-Bay. My friend John and I had been looking at these with an eye to doing some modifications and seeing if it wouldn't be a good mate for the pedal next to it, my vintage Electro-Harmonix Big Muff. That Daddy-O just happened to have the exact mods John and I were planning on doing, and the seller offered it for $38 delivered. I bought it, got it, and have totally fallen in love with it! I was talking with John the other night, and mentioned I liked it so much, I thought it would be cool to get another one, while they're still available (it's been discontinued); John said he'd seen some on e-Bay, and a little research showed there were several and they weren't getting much action. I bid on one this morning, and won the auction for $12.50! Hoo-ha! Modding it to match the first will be good fun in a week or so!

The ensemble pictured above actually represents a concept I and another friend, Don, kicked around a couple of years ago-we called it "the C-note Rig". The notion is, a guy can put together a pretty fun guitar rig if he discounts label-conscious snobbery and buys some inexpensive, but good, stuff. And here it all is: beneath that black-face Vibro-Champ (vintage, and stupidly costly these days!) is a very cool Epiphone Valve Jr. tube amplifier that I bought for $90, delivered, about two years ago. The telecaster guitar is a chinese knock-off I bought for about $95, delivered, about the same time. Beneath the pedals is a floor-monitor I built decades ago, the materials for which cost less than $25; it has a nice Celestion guitar speaker in it that I paid about $50 buck for, again bought online. The finally piece to the puzzle is a tasty little stomp-box of some ilk, depends on what you want, that, as I've shown, can be had for considerably less than $100. Our vision was, $100 for guitar, $100 for amp, $100 for speaker cabinet, and $100 for stomp-box. Again, I've shown you can considerably beat those prices with judicious shopping and a little ingenuity.

Now, I'm just gonna fire up the grill and do some chicken, drink a cold brew and play with my toyz. Y'all have a great holiday weekend!

It's Hell Getting Old...but I suppose it's better than the alternative...

I had to bail early from the summer job; it involves sitting for long, long hours making call after call, and my hip just can't take it anymore. I consider myself lucky, since it's staying active that keeps me feeling physically good; I have friends my age, and some younger, who suffer when trying to stay active, and for me it's just the opposite. The more I stay on my feet, running hither and yon, the better I feel. When I have to sit for long periods, unless I can sort-of do the chaise-lounge thing, almost lying down, my left hip starts to complain, and eventually it turns into a burning ache that I just can't relieve without getting up and moving around. If I get up and work it out, I'm good for a little while, but the relief becomes shorter and shorter until I just have to either stand up for a couple hours or just lay down.

Among my ex-wife's various physical ailments was exactly the same thing I'm going through now, and, with her, the condition ultimately called for surgical intervention, to relieve congestion in the channel the sciatic nerve takes through the pelvis. It's quite a surgery, with a long recovery period, and I'm really not interested in going there myself. Especially since I know my usual practices, and my usual work-conditions, won't exacerbate things. I think I'm just going to have to pull the plug on this temp-job and mind my pennies through the rest of the summer.

I've resisted the changes age has brought on fairly well so far; I've studied Tai-Ch'i and Qi-Gong and Yoga, and I practice a fair bit, and it serves me well to maintain my flexibility and joint and muscle tone. One can only stave off these changes for so long, however, unless one makes it the whole business of life, which I'm disinclined to do. It's not all about living forever, you know.