evidence presented

here's yellow, on the left, the prime suspect. i present him to the jury, which consists, essentially, of me. i wear a lot of hats here. at the moment i suppose i'm the attorney for the defense. the suspect is exhibit a. does he look remorseful in the least? i think not. i rest my case.

exhibit b, to the right, is the victim. behold the sutures, the drain, the obvious agony, the proxmity to the toilet bowl. poor eliot. this was taken this morning, just after he received per os a syringe and a half of ampicillin and a syringe of buprenex, a narcotic.

a narcotic?! who still feels sorry for eliot? we made him soar! only one syringe of buprenex remains but i think i might take it myself. oh i'm kidding. we'll force it between eliot's jaws this evening.

drain

it seems that our little elly belly got himself in another scrape. when kara and i got home from seattle the other night, on eliot's neck there was a clump of wet fur. kara daubed it with a tissue and the tissue came away red.

the next day, which was the day before yesterday, i took him to the vet. they clipped away the fur and found a hole, about a centimeter in diameter, on the right side of his neck.

i don't know if it was a fresh wound or an old wound that got infected and formed an abscess that burst. (the prime suspect, of course, is yellow [a sociopath by history], though all the evidence is circumstantial.) either way, this is the second major neck wound for our eliot. i knew the drill.

i left him at the vet overnight. i missed him that night, as he usually sleeps on my foot. i missed seeing him around the house during the day the next day. he's a good little boy.

the next day, which was yesterday, he was put under general endotracheal anesthesia, the wound was debrided and sutured, and a drain was left in place.

he seems all right now. he was skittish when we got home but he warmed up to us after a few hours. we're going to keep him inside for at least a few days, which will be a challenge. he's the outdoorsiest of our cats.

the drain is in until monday. the sutures come out in 2 weeks. we are giving him liquid antibiotics and painkillers. (we tried to snap a photo this morning of the drain while we were giving his meds, but he was too wriggly and none of the shots were salvagable. [the photo above is from our voluminous library of eliot snaps - perhaps it looks familiar?] we'll try again.) yeah, he doesn't much enjoy kara forcing the dropper into his mouth.

lectures/duty

we went to seattle again yesterday, this time to see this chap, david quammen, chat. he seems a very sweet-spirited man. rather low-key, a bit touchy-feely, but still good. he talked about charles darwin and the 2 years between his return from the beagle voyage and stumbling upon the main principles of his theory of natural selection. it was a tumultuous, shattering conclusion for the young chuck d, and he was understandably reluctant to publish. science and religion were interwoven back then.

some of the same people were at this lecture who were at the shermer talk 2 weeks ago. soon we'll be regulars at these things too.

senator barack obama is coming to benaroya hall on 10/26/2006.

bill bryson will be at the elliott bay book company (where i was privileged enough to be employed as a bookseller for a few months in the summer and fall of 1999) the very next day, on 10/27/2006.

it would be swell to attend these events but tickets for each will be sold in advance only at the ebbc, not online and not by phone, and perhaps a special trip just to acquire tickets would have to be made. i'm not saying it couldn't happen; i'm just saying it would require a special trip.

... in other news, i have been summoned to jury duty. yesterday i got the notice in the mail. i am awash with emotions and thoughts about this. mostly i'm excited. it could be interesting. knowing me, i'll also be terribly nervous close to the date. i'm scheduled to appear on 10/30/2006, a monday.

consciencelessness

no actually i think actually i'm going to read this book about sociopaths instead of the sontag. the sontag will wait. i think it's too dense for me at the moment. i'm feeling too flighty for sontag!

i was going to read this richard powers book but i think it would be just too good for right now. too eloquent, too admirable. i do like what mr powers does. i read the first few pages this morning and, yeah, it's going to be good. i think it would distract me from writing and depress me. i will read it after november.

so, yeah, i'm on to sociopaths. i am prompted to read this book in part because of this local news. the crime - triple murder - happened 3/4 of a mile (give or take) from our house, back in february. the shooter pled guilty, showed zero remorse, and will get life in jail.

it's a horrifying crime but i am comforted by the fact that at least one of the victims was known by the perp. that is to say, it was not a random crime. it doesn't make the crime less of a horrorshow but i don't think i personally know anyone at the moment with a predeliction for killing folks. this makes me feel somewhat safer.

i don't know if this sort of personality - the lack of conscience - is at all penetrable from a psychological or sociological standpoint and i certainly would want to keep a considerable distance from such an individual, but on intellectual level i am deeply fascinated and curious.

i'll sit in a plush chair, smoke a pipe, sip brandy, and read this pop-sociologic text. i relish a safe distance!

bye old/hi new

this is the weight machine in our garage. a couple of weeks ago we made the mistake of going to a sporting goods store and kara saw another weight machine, smaller, smoother, and she wanted it. it's there in the box behind the other weight machine. for obvious space reasons we had to say goodbye to the old before effectively saying hello to the new.

yesterday morning i placed an ad on craigslist. it was my first experience selling anything on this site. i'm not kidding; 12 hours later - no, closer to 9 - the machine was gone and kara had the asking price in her pocket. it was thrilling how easy it was to (1) unload the thing and (2) recoup some of our losses.

today, while i'm up here typing up medical reports, she'll be in the garage assembling the new machine. pretty exciting.

leonard to sontag

whew! i finally finished this leonard book. i don't know why it took me so long. it's not that it was bad, though all the sentence fragments did start to wear on me. i get enough sentence fragments at work. the book was fine. i wasn't overly impressed but it was fine. plenty of deadpan action. i heard mr leonard on npr around the time that this book came out in hardcover and it sounded good. it was my first literary leonard, though i've seen a few movies based on his work.

i think i'm going to try susan sontag now. i've never read her and i'm interested. there was a piece i think in the new york times recently that contained some of her journal entries when she was living in paris in the 1950s and 60s.

poke/dad/sam

this is why i'm not an injection drug user: belonephobia. that's reason #1, anyway. it's also why i don't give blood so much. i get the willies! so: heroin? no thanks. not in a syringe anyway. plus i've seen trainspotting and requiem for a dream. is requiem for a dream about heroin? i don't remember.

anyway. new topic. onward and upward:
happy birthday, dad!

oh, and here's samantha morton looking at you. she's in neither of the abovementioned movies, except perhaps in spirit. plus she & i share a birthday!

also i wish it would shut up

this is the next-door neighbor cat this morning. day and night we can hear it meyowling by their side door, wanting in. apparently the neighbors don't want it in.

i don't know if i can fault them for that; some folks don't want cats in the house. plus, i'm only assuming it's their cat; perhaps it chose them and they are antagonized by it.

it's the cat that snuck into our house the other night. i'm tempted to attempt to adopt the poor thing, but i already know yellow's opinion on that subject.

poor little thing. i feel bad for the cat but i don't think there's anything i can do.

home invasion

i had a terrible fear earlier this morning. i think my greatest fear these days is home invasion.

of course it began with nightmares. yesterday afternoon i was watching a show on the discovery channel about flight 175, the second plane to hit the towers. kara came in and said, "you're going to have nightmares." and, lo, i did.

no planes or towers in my dreams, though. in the first dream i was in a crowd of people on a rocky crop. i think i was a young boy and i was with my extended family. we were having a picnic. a sedan pulled up and people with guns came out. they started shooting. i watched several people get hit before starting to climb down the rock. the people with guns came closer with their gunfire and it seemed getting hit was inevitable. i couldn't climb fast enough. i couldn't get far enough away. it was just a sickening feeling.

in the second dream, of course, i was jack bauer and i was hunting nina myers (okay, so we're almost done with disk 4 of season 3 of "24"). we were in a large old house and there were secret passageways and bombs on timers and nina, as per usual, was crafty. when the house finally exploded i was clear and i think nina was still inside, but, of course, i couldn't be sure.

when i woke up from this dream i was terrified. it was about 1:15am. the neighbors were pulling up their driveway in their car and talking loudly. i could hear people, perhaps intoxicated, on 6th avenue (half a block away) shouting back and forth. i was terrified we'd have a home invasion. some people would come into our house with guns or knives and tie us up and cut or shoot us. it was such a palpable fear and i couldn't even move.

the morning before, at about 2:30am, we did have a home invasion. the neighbor's cat entered our home. of course kara heard it before i did, but i woke to sounds of a scuffle upstairs. kara shouted out, asking me for help. she had got yellow off the neighbor cat but needed me to hold onto him while she herded the stranger out. she accomplished this pretty quickly and we went back to bed.

back to this morning. i realize we're probably not your regular targets of home invasions. we're not rich, we're not ostentatious, we don't know a lot of people, we keep to ourselves. i worry about the random attack. the jail is only a few miles away - what if someone broke out and made it this far and needed a place to hide out? there are a several bars just blocks away - what if there's a mean drunk out there who wants to vent a bit on some helpless people?

i kept thinking of the klutters, of in cold blood fame. that attack wasn't random, as apparently the killers thought there was a safe with cash. but the idea of being roused in the night by strangers, tied up, held, and finally shot was at the forefront of my mind when i woke up. terrifying, terrifying, terrifying.

it felt inevitable, someone random coming in. i kept thinking that the odds were against it, but that these things did happen to people. these things do happen. that is not how i want to die. i do not want to be murdered.

after an hour or so i calmed down and slept a few more hours. and when i woke up again i was fine. the fear was gone. i was okay. i have to wonder, though. how irrational is that fear? those kinds of things do happen. of course, being afraid doesn't help. it's no good to live afraid. if something awful is going to happen, then it's going to happen. there are bad people out there. i suppose i'm lucky not to have come across any thus far.

large slug on dirty green field

when i trekked to the end of the driveway at lunchtime today to retrieve our (thankfully emptied) waste and recycling receptacles, i noticed a sizeable slug in our tub for glass. i do not think it had been there, among all those bottles, when i hefted the container in the rain this morning. i took an inordinate number of photographs of this slug. none of them came out so well; these i think are among the best. the thing was 4 inches long and it moved at a pretty good clip. (it must have been moving fast because the rest of the pictures were blurry.)

bone retard no more

it so happens that the ceiling directly of my desk is slanted because of, you know, the roof of our house. i'm going to get these here posters from here and put them there. they are excellent references and i am excited about their arrival. so much information! (click 'em to enlarge! do it!)

i will glance upwards and there they will be. many of my questions (oh, i always have questions) will be answered in a flash.

the most interesting report i typed today was an epiphysiodesis. the epiphysis is the rounded end of a long bone, such as a femur. it's also called the growth plate. and the suffix -desis means to bind or tie together. the patient was a 10-year-old (give or take) boy and one of his legs was 3.5 cm shorter than the other one! who knew these things happened? i suppose my life has been rather sheltered, medically speaking and otherwise.

so the surgery involved a fusion of the epiphysis on this boy's femur, to retard the growth of the bone. it was done on his longer leg, i suppose so the other leg would have the opportunity to catch up. it sounded pretty gritty. and i think the little feller's going to be okay.

curiosity

we drove the mazda to seattle yesterday afternoon. it was the mazda's first time on the highway and it acquitted itself admirably. there are now almost 700 miles on it. it's a good car.

anyway. we went to see michael shermer, phd, chat a bit. that's michael there on the left. he's an energetic speaker, veering from topic to topic, example to example, talking clearly yet rapidly clearly, though the overall picture he created was quite coherent.

essentially he introduced several common arguments for the creationists, the believers in intelligent design. he used to be a creationist; he was born again, but then he discovered the scientific method and things changed for him. he refuted the creationist arguments with darwinian arguments, and although i'm already with him on the evolution thing, his arguments were compelling.

it's hard for me to imagine an illuminated refutation of evolution.

funny things about dr shermer: he laughs the way john stewart mimics george bush laughing, with a little "heh heh heh." he also uses the dubious contraction "all's" regularly, as in "all's i know is ..."

i like going to lectures like this. it feels worthwhile. it was good just sitting in the audience, among people, strangers, of course, who were moved to see an evolution scientist lecture on a tuesday evening. kara and i were taking in the car on the way home about how we don't understand the creationist point of view. i don't care if a person believes in god or not, but it seems that creationists shut themselves off from new knowledge.

i'm sure i don't have the whole creationist picture so maybe i shouldn't talk so much about it. but our conversation turned to people in general who don't go about attempting to learn things, who are content with their current base of knowledge. i'm not very interested in going back to school for further formal education (i'm still thinking about the coding thing), but i do read a lot. i like learning things. i learn things every day at work (even if i rarely retain my new knowledge out of context long enough to share it with kara!).

a main characteristic i saw in dr shermer is curiosity. he wants to know how things work, why things happen. this is what drew him to science. it's the lack of curiosity that creationists appear to affect that i do not understand.

we plan to go to these lectures too:
david quammen on 9/26/2006
e o wilson on 10/11/2006

some 12-1/2 hours later ...

my new chair arrived today. i built it, with minimal instructions, from parts provided.

here it actually is, in living color, in my workspace. oh, yes, i work here.

did i mention that i love working from home? oh but i do. it's the bee's knees.

so far i like the new chair, yeah. it offers significantly better back support. i shall have less pain heretoforth.

awake an hour and a half

i woke up early, thinking of people destroyed in plane crashes and fuel fires, people jumping from the towers. making the decision to jump is hard for me to imagine.

poem, etc.

portraits.

it's still early in the morning. plenty of time to do a little writing before work. we'll see.

dad's ants

dad snapped these ants too. he takes a good picture, doesn't he?

meanwhile, i'm working on the new story, and it's going okay. it's telling me where it's going, which is scarier but better than me telling it where to go.

in a while kara and i will run errands. she wants to get a sort of a raised food stand for max, because he's having trouble staying on his feet. they slide out from under him and he can't get back up without help. damn these hardwood floors!

we're also going to a sporting goods store to get some exercise stuff. another bar or two, some more weights, some grips for the machine. i want to look for a boxing thing, a thing to punch. not a heavy bag or a speed bag, but something else. i'm not sure what it's called.

meanwhile, i'm working on the new story. i hope my chair arrives this week.

it's not adhd

it might just be that i'm not ready to write a novel. my attention span is insufficient.

the writing has been stagnant the last several days and i fear my interest in the story is waning. last night, after watching the movie, i was thinking about the novel but the ideas weren't coming. i kept having to force my thoughts back to it, and i didn't like that. i'm going to take a break from it. an hour ago i started writing a new short story, with a new character.

i'm still thinking about national novel writing month and wanting to write something new for that. it has been pointed out to me that it would be against the rules to work on an existing project for nanowrimo. the point is to write something entirely new, from scratch, soup to nuts, in the 30 days. it's not that this rule in itself would stop me from using the month as i choose, but the current wave of apathy about the foibles and crimes of shannon et al is pushing me away.

so this is the new plan. i'll write a short story this month and one next month, in the neighborhood of 10,000 words each. the month after that is november and i'll do the 50,000-word thing. and that is that.

i feel bad about abandoning the old crew. partially for them and their story not being told and partially because i just feel lame for quitting. quitter. loser. wastrel. ne'er-do-well. will i never finish anything? but it's not as if i'm abandoning writing altogether. au contraire. as i say, i've already started something else. i don't know what it is yet, but i've got words on paper and i don't already hate them.

also, it's not as if i'm deleting the document in which shannon, dallas, and helen live. they'll be there, in suspended animation, waiting for my return. perhaps, one day, many years from now (or sooner), i will return.

this is me being disappointed in myself. and yet, at the same time, not so much.

status post 93

united 93. kara being kara, she wanted to watch it right away. we watched it last night. overall i have to say i was disappointed. the first part was excellent and appropriately terrifying and sad. there was a lot of stuff with the air traffic controllers, and seeing the events of the day unfold from their point of view was very effective. there were shots here and there of the people getting on board flight 93 and finding their seats, and that in itself was difficult to watch, just because of what was in store for them. i'd say the first hour and a half of the 2-hour film was very good.

then the same thing happened as happened in the television version. kara put it better than i could. after a certain point, what actually happened on the plane is, of course, speculation. without the backbone of the documented air traffic controller conversation as they track planes and planes disappear from their screens and the back-and-forth within the military as they try to scramble jets and establish rules of engagement, etc, the scenes on the plane, with the passengers, flight attendants, and hijackers, seemed like those in just another action movie. it could have been snakes on a plane.

does this mean i've seen too many movies? as i say, the first three quarters were very much in a documentary style, cinema verite. very moving, very gripping. but the last twenty minutes or half hour of the movie, despite my knowledge that it's a true story, devolved into a bruce willis (or, better, arnold schwarzenegger) action sequence and my involvement level plummeted. pun, perhaps, intended.

93

so i'm frightened. i put this movie on our netflix list some months ago, because i want to see it. as do a lot of people, i have a perhaps morbid fascination with the events of that day 5 years ago.

i put the movie relatively high on the list, but not at the very top, as i wasn't sure i wanted to see it right away. i expected terrific demand for it. i expected to see long wait or even very long wait by the title in my queue.

but no! i visit netflix and it turns out a copy of this movie was shipped to me yesterday! it might well arrive today! holy crap! (we're also getting this - different but also scary.)

kara and i saw the version that was on a&e some months back and i was shaking the entire time. except for the very end, when they rush the cockpit and they don't show the actual crash. can you believe i felt gypped? i don't always pretend to understand myself.

so i'm going to go through it again. watch the theatrical-release version of this terrible story. were the proceeds from this movie given to families of victims or to rumsfeld or something? i'm still not 100% down with the whole concept of this movie, dramatizing the terror attacks. it does seem exploitative. i imagine they got permission if not blessings from the appropriate people. i hope.

regardless, we're going to watch it this weekend, maybe on saturday. i'm already nervous.

maybe i'm a freak for wanting to watch it. well, no, i guess i'm not. arguably it's an allegory of the human condition, and i'm very drawn to the concept of facing one's own death. i just wish it weren't a true story.

visitors of science

i just learned that two of kara's favorite science writers are coming to seattle this month. we're going to try to go to both. michael shermer will be at town hall on 9/12/2006 at 7:30pm and david quammen will be there 2 weeks later, on the 26th, same hour. both have new books out about charles darwin. it won't hurt financially, going to these things, as the price of admission for each is only $5 at the door. they'll hurt only because they're both on tuesday nights and so on wednesday at work we'll be sleepy. but - a small price to pay, no?

if you're in town, stop by! we might go early because we don't know if there'll be crazy lines. there might well be.

she's not a scientist, but we love her. janeane garofalo will also be appearing, i think at town hall, on 10/7/2006 at 8pm. her show costs real money, though, so we'll see.

pending chair

i ordered me this here chair yesterday. i had to use ye olde internet to place the order, as no local shoppes had such a pleasing product as this.

i daresay it will serve me well. it could be as many as 2 weeks away, so i will be suffering with my current excuse for a chair for a short while yet.

i can hack. my back will hack.

some chair, though, huh? real professional looking. real smart.

dad's wasp

dad took and photoshopped this picture of a wasp and i rather like it. i've never photoshopped anything. i don't really know what's involved. but i like this image.

a day off today! yay! i'm going chair shopping and book browsing - i'm actually thinking of going to border's, which is sort of a traumatic train of thought, as i worked there for something like a year and a half or two years and despised just about every minute of it. but there aren't other new-book bookstores in tacoma that aren't christian-book bookstores. that i know of. (well - there's waldenbooks [mini-border's] in the mall but it's very small and doesn't have much to offer.) and i don't feel like driving to lakewood to the barnes & noble. objectively i don't see a significant difference between the horrors of barnes & noble and the horrors of border's, but the thing is i think i still know some people who work at the tacoma border's. nothing against those individuals personally, please, but the memories in general are just not good.

i'm still just so damn pleased i got out of there. there was a period of time in which i thought i never would.

today i just feel like looking at new books. yeah, and chair shopping. and a venture to the safeway will cap my errands. perhaps i'll go to the mandolin first for a coffee, as i like that place and a coffee doesn't sound bad. yeah. i think i'll do that.

i'm going to do a little writing first, and have a shower. and probably a bit more writing after i return and before kara is home from work.