From the little orange book

See what's possible.

Why not be happy?

The other day, I was feeling ridiculously fat. I've been overweight for a long time, and it hasn't really bothered me very much, but yesterday I just felt Something Should Be Done About This. Could have had something to do with the fact that I had to make a sojourn to Old Navy and Nordstrom Rack before I found anything that would fit my... Ahem... unique physique.

Today I was at Fred Meyer buying some odds and ends to take down to a local homeless camp. A friend of mine convinced me that this would be a perfectly good thing to do, and since my mother-in-law had recently told my wife that my karmic record was a tad shy of the required amount necessary for us to have a successful real estate transaction for this new house we're trying to buy... OK, I lost track of where I was in that last sentence. Ah, fatness, Fred Meyer, homeless people. So anyway, I'm standing in the checkout line looking at all the people around me, and I notice EVERYBODY IS KIND OF FAT! And for some reason, this makes me happy. Not because their fatness hides my fatness, but because we are living in a place where our needs are met. We're all fat! It occurred to me that I was looking at fatness the wrong way.

"We should be happy," I think to myself, looking around at all my fellow countrymen and countrywomen with their ample girths and their smart phones and their prescription eyeglasses and sparkling teeth.

We should be happy, because we have clean water and flushing toilets and schools for our kids and roads to drive around on. We should be happy because we have each other to keep each other company, and give each other ideas like bringing stuff to the homeless camp, or making chicken mole for the family, or writing an essay that encourages everybody to Just Be Happy.

Here is a song Hunter and I made earlier this year about this.

Or you can stream it, I think. Please enjoy.

Spooky salesman stories, Trois: the New House.

For reasons too complex to go into here, we decided to sell our perfectly good house and buy a different one. We ran about looking at houses and found one to our liking. The owners wanted a bit much for it, so we offered less, and the typical American-style haggling ensued. During one part of the haggling process, Pilar asked me, "What do you think we'll get it for?"

"352" I said, for number had been floating about in my head.

We did a bit more of the back-and-forth, and came up with a selling price of 356, with seller to contribute 4 to closing costs. 352.

We accepted this deal, as did the sellers, and everything was going along great. Then I got a call at work from my wife who had gone with the home inspector to look over the new place.

"We've got a problem with the inspection."

Turns out, the water pipes in this home were made of polybutylene, the so-called "pipe of the future" that was supposed to be better than copper. Builders liked using it, because it shaved approximately $1500 off the cost of a home. It was later discovered that chlorine in public drinking water supplies cause these pipes to fail, catastrophically, from the inside out. No warning. Just an inch of water in your kitchen and bathroom one morning. Or a waterfall gurgling merrily inside your walls. Oh yes, these pipes had been the subject of one of the largest class action lawsuits in US history.

As you can imagine, this began a second flurry of negotiations, visits from plumbing contractors, and late night discussions. Our Realtor heard from the listing agent that the sellers believed that the pipes weren't a problem, because their plumber had told them they were all set. Besides, they said, THEY'D never had any problems with the polybutylene pipes. We didn't derive nearly as much comfort from this as they did.

The Realtors did their thing over the phone, and it sounded like the sellers thought we were being a bunch of fussbudgets. We began looking at other houses. We didn't bother writing up an addendum for a few days, because we assumed it wasn't worth the electrons. The sellers' Realtor called our Realtor and asked if one might be forthcoming. He told us that she told him they were willing to deal. We countered with an addendum calling for the complete re-piping of the house, plus a few other fiddly bits that the inspector had discovered.

A few days later, we got a counter to that counter that offered to pay half. That night we agreed to walk. Even our Realtor felt the same way. However, the next morning I awoke with a number floating about in my head.

345

I talked it over with my wife, and told her of the mystical number. She said, "Well 346 would be an even ten grand price reduction which would cover the cost of the repairs plus some other stuff."

So we wrote up another addendum and sent it off.

(Somewhere in here, I actually wrote a mini essay on the logical fallacy of anecdotal evidence and fired it off to my Realtor, in hopes that he might be able to use it in some way.) Click here if you would like to read my mini essay.

That night, the sellers countered to the counter of the counter addendum with an offer to fix the fiddly bits AND give a price reduction equal to the cost of fixing the pipes. We had a deal. It came very close to the magical number floating in the mystical mists of my sleepy brain.

345

Spooky Salesman Stories, Part Deux

So yesterday, I got to thinking about a Big Customer of mine down in Georgia who should be ordering product soon. It worried me that I hadn't heard anything from the manufacturer about the latest rail transfer to the Atlanta warehouse, as we were out of a particular item this big customer buys all the time. I found out that the new load of stuff would arrive in Atlanta in about a week.

Sure enough, I got a call from a new guy at the Big Customer! They needed some of these missing products. I remembered that we had another manufacturer make some of this stuff, and that we were holding this product in reserve for just such an eventuality. I didn't see the wholesale pricing when I tried to put the order in. I called one of the other sales guys, and he got me straightened out. Turned out the backup vendor had a better price on the product anyway.

Spooky Salesman Stories, Part Un

Spooky salesman stories, just in time for Halloween.

Just doing my normal thing, calling customers up to see if they received a catalog that I sent earlier via email.

I get to this one customer, and I think, "Hmm... better send that one again using my personal Gmail account." Sometimes emails sent from our Customer Relationship Manager web application will get sent to a customer's Spam folder. In this particular instance, I get the appropriate documents attached to the email. I then realize I haven't even called the customer yet. Well that is just silly. I leave the window open and call the customer. Sure enough, he has not received the catalog, which I sent a couple weeks ago. I explain that sometimes I need to send the info from my personal email account, and that I will get this right over to him. Hit Send on the aforementioned Gmail window. And then sit here wondering.

A year or two ago, I was getting ready to call a customer. Well, not a customer, actually a prospective customer. Then this weird thing happened. I can only describe it as a sort of confusion that descended over me. It seemed like the guy should have an order in the system. Our CRM software shows if someone has ever ordered from us. Lists all their previous orders, in fact. I didn't understand why there were no orders associated with this customer. Hadn't he just ordered? I called the guy up, and he placed an order with me, his first order with us. I finished writing up the order, then went back to my CRM screen to make notes. Why didn't it show his order on the right hand part of the screen. I had that deja vu feelling... I was in the exact same space I'd been in before the call. That same hazy and befuddled feeling. I remembered that you have to refresh the CRM screen for orders to show up. I hit refresh, and there was the order, as I'd expected it all along (before I'd made the sales call that resulted in the first order.

Is it possible that a part of our consciousness peeks around the corner of the present moment? You're about to step out into the street, but a funny feeling makes you pause, and a car blows through the red light at forty miles per hour.

Or is it that a gentle expectation can bend the malleable fibers of the universe in a certain direction?

Home improvement

Having zero interest in upgrading or updating my home, I try to stay out of hardware stores, especially the big ones like Home Depot and Lowes. If you think your home needs all sorts of improvement, then maybe you shouldn't have bought it in the first place. If you wake up one morning and life is no longer livable because you don't have granite countertops in your kitchen and mahogany floorboards-- well then just MOVE to a house that has these magical counter tops and rainforest-depleting floors. Then you'll be happy.

Still, there are times when it becomes necessary to make a pilgrimage to one or two of these massive hardware stores. There are times when you sell your house and the buyer's home inspector wants you to buy a bunch of smoke detectors and ground-fault interrupt electrical circuits. So, if you want to buy that wonderful new house with the aforementioned counter tops, you'll need to fix up the smoldering hovel you used to call home.

I last set foot in a home improvement center some time long ago in the last century, before the Great Granite Counter-Topping of the early Zeros (or whatever we have decided to call the last decade). It's amazing to see the sheer volume of STUFF these stores contain! You could, if you wanted to, just build ANOTHER house in your backyard with all the stuff they have in these stores.

My wife had stayed in the car to finish a phone conversation with her sister, who oddly enough is a lawyer specializing in real estate transactions. While they were discussing the merits of wired versus battery-operated smoke detectors and how this relates to the Magna Carta, I decided to get a head start on the project.

GFI Sockets.

These are handy little devices that will stop the flow of electricity through the outlet after you have been electrocuted. This is very handy for your heirs and assigns. After hiking seven miles, I made it to the mystical aisle where the leprechauns of Lowes keep their treasure trove of GFI sockets. I carefully considered the color choices, and then grabbed five. I also found five matching wall plates. I spent the next five minutes looking at the thousand different light switches they had, all the while imagining my wife's praise for my foresight in selecting those matching wall plates. She would see that I was doing my part in this deal! Perhaps she would even let me build a small house in the backyard of the new house. I was trying to figure out what sort of light switch to put in the little house, when my wife called me.
"Where ARE you?" she asked.
"In the electrical aisle."
"But where is that?"
"I think it's in a tunnel under County Cork in Ireland. But watch out for the leprechauns."
"You are a fuckwit. I'll be with you in a minute."

When she arrived, my wife took a look at the stuff in my cart.
"This is all wrong. You have to put it back." She did not praise my cleverness for remembering about the wall plate. Apparently some of the sockets were supposed to be 20 amp. I thought it sure would be nice if they put that sort of thing on the label, and when my wife pointed out the information on the actual label, I began to think that maybe it would have been simpler just to stay in the original house. But of course we can't do that, because it is sold. Or it is mostly sold once we get the smoke alas and sockets fixed. No going back now. But there will be probably many trips back to the home improvement store. It is like a purgatory you get sent to for your sin of coveting crap sold at the home improvement stores. I'm trying to escape, but I'm seven miles underground, and the leprechauns are about to take my money.

The permanent news

Your guy is ahead a little in the political race. Somebody blew something up in Iraq. North Korea is busy starving their people whilst building nukes. Rich people in the US need to pay less taxes because of reasons. There was a big flood somewhere. The economy is iffy, probably because rich people are paying too much in taxes. The schools are in trouble. There was an earthquake somewhere. Gas prices are up. They caught a pedophile. A prominent politician somewhere had an affair with someone. There is a new movie with car chase scenes. School or workplace mass murder. A new restaurant in your town. A car you'd like to buy, except it is gas-powered. Some kid crashed his car and died. Famous Hollywood couple getting divorced. Apple is suing because of reasons. The stock market did something. In 20 years, we'll all be bionic, with computers in our bottoms.

Towels

New business idea: towels with two colors, so that you can keep straight which part you use to dry off your naughty bits.

Praying to the Antelope Gods

This is a meditation on being tired.

Sometimes you don't feel a hundred percent. You may not even feel sixty-five percent. If you were on the Starship Enterprise, Chief Engineer Scotty would be talking some shit about how he's giving it all he's got, but the antimatter containment vessel cannae take na more. And your spirit is willing, like Captain Kirk was, to just zip down there in the elevator and slap someone until shit got done. But your antimatter IS running low, and you don't even have enough energy to go to the Commissary to pick up a rotisserie chicken and a salad for dinner. You slump in your command chair, Captain Limp-Dick, staring at the main screen as a thousand Klingon ships de-cloak in front of you. Warp 9, you think. Set a course for fuck this shit!

But fatigue is a product of civilization, isn't it? It's not like deer or rabbits or antelope have the luxury.

I know I can smell that mountain lion up in those rocks up there, but man it's just been a bitch of a day. I don't feel like running. I'm just gonna eat a plate of nachos and see if the new season of Sherlock Holmes is on Netflix.

No, they catch one scent, and they're hoofing it. And while they're running, they're praying to the God of Deer or their Antelope Gods or whatever: "Oh Lord, please let me run faster than this fucking cat."

Truth is, Nature is red in tooth and claw. The universe is profoundly indifferent to your fate. Whatever happens, happens as a result of your navigation and your power, and whether you got that lazy Scotsman to get off his ass and load the dilithium crystals into the main reactor. Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean the enemies aren't plotting to cut you off: sloth, procrastination, indulgence... just to name a few enemies who, like the Klingons, cloak themselves.

So my people, as the Klingons get closer, and the mountain lion screams from the rocks above, I recommend you get on up and move your ship. Fuck your fatigue. Do you want to live? You might want to pray to your Antelope Gods.

What I want for my birthday.

Ephemera

Out in the yard, the dog always lays down and watches the rear sliding door in case the Boy comes out. Summer's over, but he still watches. Will he still be watching when the Boy goes away to college?

The goats smile at me when I come over to see them. They call me Apple Man, because I always throw a few apples over the fence.

Autumn evening: my shadow stretches for an entire block. My silhouette slides all the way down the street, pausing when it gets to the parking lot of the Community Center. Reflectors flare bright red on cars owned by recovering alcoholics. My shadow seems to be studying this light. In October, the setting sun transmits a thousand messages in a single photon.

On being tired

I decided to make some tea, but for some reason I started the microwave before putting in the cup of water, teabag, etc. I know now that this is the incorrect method, as the house is filled with the smell of burnt toast.

Just another Friday afternoon in Oak Grove. A parable.

This really happened. I was standing outside the Buy-Rite Grocery Store, talking to the owner, Joe. There was some kind of commotion down the street. A couple guys were shouting at each other. This is not as uncommon an occurrence as you might imagine in the hamlet of Oak Grove, Oregon. Joe and I paused our conversation. We looked down the street to see what the hullabaloo was about.

A large overweight man without a shirt was walking slowly toward us on the sidewalk. He had his head tilted back, face to the sky, eyes scrunched shut. His arms were stretched out straight in front of him like a sleepwalker. In addition to being overweight, the man was tall, easily 6'3". He had a buzz cut, and my first impression of him was of a large, drunken bumble-bee. His associate, about twenty feet in front of him, shouted instructions: "Left! Straight! Right!"

By this time, the first guy had reached us. He had a strange, shambling gait that indicated some sort of disability, but whether this was mental or physical was hard to say.

"What the hell is his problem?" asked Joe.

"Something happened to him last night, I'm not sure." said the guy

"I can't believe I let you talk me into this!" shouted the large man, bumping into the handicap rail in front of my office, which is across the street from the Buy-Rite. I imagined what word Emily Dickinson would have used to described how the man's fish-white belly jiggled in the warm light of a September afternoon.

"What the fuck?" said Joe.

I decided Emily would have used the word unseemly.

I bid farewell to Joe. I walked out in the bike lane to avoid the large man who was by then veering from side to side in the crosswalk on Arista Avenue. From my car, I watched a couple teenaged girls coming down the sidewalk toward him. Predictably, they stepped out into the street to avoid a collision. The disabled guy and the big guy made it to the Buy-Rite and walked inside.

As I made my way home on my afternoon commute (1/5 of a mile), it occurred to me that I had witnessed an almost Jesus-quality parable about Fox News and their loyal viewers: mentally disabled individuals shouting instructions to drunken people who choose not to use their own eyes. I believe Emily would have used the word unseemly to describe such a phenomenon.

Stupid Blog

This was supposed to be in the Blog Description, but the format I chose wouldn't allow this many words:

A catch-basin of wit! --Shakespeare, Playwright

The final word on Being AND Time. --Henri Bergson, Philosopher

Possibly the start of a new religion! --His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Living Buddha

Keep reading Blargfargle Crumpets, and the veil of Maya will fall away. --Brahma, Godhead.

An American original! --Vladimir Putin, Democratically-Elected Russian Leader