It’s interesting how limited time alters your aesthetic threshold. I had heard ok things about Fever Pitch so I rented it last night on my way home from work. We made it ten minutes in before we decided that it is one of the worst written, poorly acted films of the previous year. This is what I get for renting at McDonalds. Ah well, it was only a buck.

I’m in that place again where I am doing lots of writing for school. The upshot is that I don’t have much time or energy for my blog. I actually have to post to a group chat room thing and so I am getting my blogging habit in by journaling for credit. Jes has started telling me that she misses me because our schedules are opposite and even when we are together I am often thinking about work or actually working.

I am feeling a little frustrated right now. I teach on the edge of the hood with all the gang violence, crime, and social upheaval that you can imagine. I can’t really write about it here because of issues of confidentiality. Suffice it to say that I am getting an education while I struggle to give one. My kids not only get shot at, they get shot. It’s a lot to take in while you’re trying to teach hyperbole and metaphor.

I am in the trenches a bit and at the same time I come home to my paradoxical comforts and am comfortable in body, if not in spirit. I joined a gym. One of my best students was arrested. I moved in a new buffet/bar for the front room. A student at my summer school was shot in the face and killed when he tried to rob a cab driver. I rented Transporter Two – it’s not a very good film. You get the idea…

I’m writing about it. It’s just not for public consumption.

diane (who is lower case like bell hooks) has captured the essence of how I feel of late:

Too Busy !!!!!!!

You should go look at Jes' page to see some great shots of the cat (and the ring) and to wish her well.

Yeah, so... after she said yes, I asked her father...and he said, "That's so cool!"

If you don't want to see how this turns out I wouldn't scroll down...

I wrote this Tuesday but didn’t have time to post even this brief little fortune cookie until Wednesday evening.

Day one back in the classroom involved memorizing seating charts, figuring out who left over break, and who the new students are. I also spent a little time choosing poetry and stories from the course anthology while conceiving a thematic to link them into a unit plan. Designing a unit is sort of like making a mixed tape; you ask yourself what themes will play well to the intended audience and what follows what given conceptual overlap. I am doing Zora Neal Hurston into Langston Hughes into Poe into Marquez into Neruda into Faulkner into Chopin into Tan into Hawthorn. That is my sixteen week plan for sophomoric literary bliss.

Since I wrote the above paragraph I’ve been busy with another day of school. I also got a new front axel and four new tires on my van (road trip?). That repair has needed to happen for awhile. I bought a climbing harness and such for my coming membership at Upper Limits climbing gym on sale at REI – of which I am also now a member.

I have been grading like a MO-FO for my online gig. I could list and list my many doings but what fun would that be for you? You like more universal anecdotes with a humorous take on the macabre mundane-ities of modernity.

The cat, Ajax, is learning chess. He is very good at rolling the glass castle in small circles and seems addicted to doing so.

The snake is chill when not pooping on me (twice now). Feeding the snake last week was fairly cool. I am thinking about starting another blog called The Menagerie where I just post pictures of our pets. I took twenty or so shots of the snake eating this mouse last week. I could structure whole parties around a feeding. It took about an hour for him to crush and consume a good size little rodent. I was most impressed. One reason for creating that alternate blog would be so that you wouldn’t have to see snake feeding photos if you didn’t want to. I don’t want to alienate anyone in my small readership over a little reptilian digestion.

Kat thinks I have ADD. I do certainly jump from topic to topic. I am just living on coffee of late. We have one of those machines that you can set to brew before you wake up. I’m drinking the stuff like Gator Aide; it’s keeping me in the game coach!! Speaking of which, I need to crash.

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Carlito Bandito!

1. Antarctica is the only continent without Carlito Bandito.
2. Carlito Bandito is the largest of Saturn's moons.
3. Over 2000 people have now climbed Carlito Bandito, with roughly ten percent dying on the way down.
4. Carlito Bandito can pollinate up to six times more efficiently than the honeybee.
5. If you don't get out of bed on the same side you got in, you will have Carlito Bandito for the rest of the day!
6. Carlito Banditoolatry is the mindless worship of Carlito Bandito.
7. Carlito Bandito is picked, sorted and packed entirely in the field.
8. If you drop Carlito Bandito from the top of the Empire State Building, he will be falling fast enough to kill before reaching the ground!
9. Contrary to popular belief, Carlito Bandito is not successful at sobering up a drunk person, and in many cases he may actually increase the adverse effects of alcohol!
10. The military salute is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armour raised their visors to reveal Carlito Bandito.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

My friend Jane Dark is a sterling academic and she recently shared some research she'd been doing on the essence of this blog:

Ten Top Trivia Tips about FulcrumMonkey!

1. If you blow out all the candles on FulcrumMonkey with one breath, your wish will come true!
2. FulcrumMonkey has 118 ridges around the edge.
3. The word 'samba' means 'to rub FulcrumMonkey'.
4. There is actually no danger in swimming right after you eat FulcrumMonkey, though it may feel uncomfortable!
5. If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill FulcrumMonkey.
6. FulcrumMonkey is 984 feet tall!
7. Cats use their FulcrumMonkey to test whether a space is large enough for them to fit through!
8. All of the roles in Shakespeare's plays - including the female roles - were originally played by FulcrumMonkey.
9. FulcrumMonkey can use only about ten percent of his brain!
10. Fifty-two percent of Americans drink FulcrumMonkey.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

I recommend that you take me with a grain of salt. After two rather long winded and oddly philosophical posts I think it best that I return to mundane observances about my life and circumstance.

At some point over the weekend the house next to ours was broken into. No one lives there. The house is under construction. Either Saturday or Sunday night – the owner isn’t sure which, but is assuming it was a nocturnal raid – someone or some band of people kicked in the garage door and stole thousands of dollars in tools and not yet installed fixtures. As the owner was asking me if I heard or saw anything unusual I could tell that he was just heart broken over the theft.

Our backyard is fenced, but I think I am going to have to get chains for everything we keep back there. Theft is so common that I hear people talk about it as an unavoidable tax on city living. Ah well, at least defending the home front gives the dog something to do.

Crazy talk:

Changing one’s sleeping schedule is a lot like living with Jet lag – which is the same thing I suppose with an extra blow to your biology from the sudden shift in relation to the sun. I’ve never traveled for a living, but I have done England and back as well as the California and Hawaii turn around and I think that jet lag is an accurate model for my mood swings. I also have not been drinking enough coffee (can one ever?), so as to not be up late, and my addiction to the bean is showing. I am taking a remedy cup of Columbian as I write this.

My to-do list feels like a replicating strand of DNA spiraling off into near infinity. I’ve been doing some procrastinating, which always makes ones list feel worse. Chinese and Roman proverbs about the number of bricks in an edifice or the number of steps in a journey are cold comfort when faced with the prospect of teaching Hawthorn to sophomores. I hate Hawthorn in both topic and style, his tempest in a tea cup plots revolving round the human drain of repression remind me too much of my childhood in the Lutheran Church. On the up side I get to teach two Miller plays and a few short stories of my own selection – which I have yet to pick. That drama (of instruction) starts tomorrow and it’s the little things in preparation, like the need to iron all my shirts, which are driving me nuts.

I’m actually thinking about resuming a meditation practice in order to get my mental house in order. I know you have mixed feelings about the land of the new age, I do as well, but there are some aspects – particularly those of yoga philosophy and practice – that are worth closer scrutiny. The New Age is a millennial buffet of fusion cooking, but the yoga dishes all come from ancient recipes. I like Georg Feurstein’s view of yoga as a spiritual technology that has several thousand years of road testing under its belt.
I suppose I am showing my own Cartesian preferences and materialist leanings in viewing something “spiritual” as a technology – but too often spiritual is used as pass implying beyond logical scrutiny and yoga is anything but beyond logic. Samkhya Philosophy and Vedanta, while esoteric, reach pinnacles of logical thinking on a par with anything in the Western tradition and you won’t find much leap of faith language as virtually all yoga is empiricist in presentation – as in “if you do X you will experience Y”. As I think about that assertion I suppose that a leap of interpretation, if not faith, is an essential component of any explanatory theory of existence – since in the end the total truth may be beyond our capacity to know – or as the Taoists argue beyond language itself. I’ll have to chew on that one for a few lifetimes.

Yoga is a word with many etymological and philosophical attachments but linguists are in some agreement about the nexus of meanings that underlie the more metaphorical associations. Yoga and yoke both have a binding meaning, just as one binds oxen to a cart one uses yoga practice to bind mind and body – the more esoteric meaning would be to bind spirit and matter but there are dualist and non-dualist schools of thought that would argue about the necessity of such a binding when the continued interconnectedness of everything is self apparent (or is it?).

In classical Indian philosophy there are numerous schools of thought on how best to practice, but eight of them have the most mainstream pedigrees and are though of as the eight limbs – or schools - of yoga. If you do yoga to get fit then you are in the Hatha or diamond body tradition. The idea in Hatha is that spiritual practice is physically demanding and if you get the car in good working order you are more likely to make the long spiritual journey to realization without significant breakdown. If you leave off the goal and focus on the car for the car’s sake then you get something most Americans can live with – the bath water with no baby.

Each of the eight limbs are essentially defined by a similar central question of emphasis. Raja, or the royal path, is a good blend of everything if you’re looking for the biggest umbrella under which to weather the storm of your life. I have a friend from the upper crust of a Bombay family who told me that her set views yoga the way we view Arkansas snake handlers: a tad on the cultish side. When it comes to a nexus of attention and action money and class can be religions of their own and sociologically speaking the only real difference between a cult and a religion is popularity.

I am more on a Jnana or wisdom/knowledge based path (when I am being honest with myself about my own philosophical wanderings). There’s a crazy wisdom circle of post-logic logic that I get caught in where one goes left to get right, but I’ve long ago given up on explaining that kind of thinking to anyone. What the hell, I’ll take one stab at it just to give you a taste.

The key problem in Hatha and other forms of yoga (or any Eastern system for that matter) is that of ego. The idea that there is a you that is getting fit and that you are the architect of that fitness will become the biggest impediment to the realization of any spiritual goal that you can imagine, far greater and more perilous than any physical infirmity that you’ve overcome. Any “look how far I’ve come” thinking waters the biggest weed in your garden such that for every step forward you’ve taken ten back. The Taoist answer to this riddle is a concept called Wu Wei or action-less action, where you seek to become aware of universal tides and then go with the flow so your ego don’t grow. My version of that is the very simple philosophy “keep cool but care”.

I think that we see a similar ego debate in Christianity when it comes to the agency of salvation. When Luther emphasized the scriptural assertion that man cannot by his own reason or strength come to know or believe in God and that salvation happens through faith alone created by the working of the Holy Spirit and founded on the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ - he was essentially dealing with an ego/agency problem. He argued that not only does the church in the form of the Papacy lack the keys to heaven, so too the individual lacks those keys. Thinking that you have the keys to heaven is a surefire way not to get there.

This runs counter both to pre-Vatican two Catholicism and most of American Protestantism which takes the line of thinking that Christ “opened the door” but the individual must turn the handle by accepting Christ into their heart or taking some other form of ego based action. Millennial Christianity of the mega-church variety cuts an odd path between asking for forgiveness in a penitent mode of unworthiness and assumptive neo-Calvinism where the nation on the hill has been predestined by God to be both spiritually and materially rewarded. If you want a Jello mold filled with tasty morsels of both ego and hypocrisy rooted in judging your own progress in relation to that of your neighbor, I recommend mega-church.

One of my points, among several, in all of this theological hair splitting is the tapestry point. If the argument is similar even though the context, classical yoga and contemporary Christianity, is widely divergent then perhaps we come closer to truth in looking at the structure of the argument as it manifests in both circumstance. The circumstance is like a tapestry that’s been thrown over the truth and by comparing the structural similarities we avoid getting caught in the historicity of either view.

Unfortunately we then must admit that the apparent structural similarities could be a function of the universality of linguistic structure rather than ultimate truth, hence we give thought to the Taoist assertion that both ego and language are barriers to realization because they are rooted in a fundamental dualism of self vs. world. All the mystical traditions from the Sufi to Martin Buber deny this dualism as the fundamental illusion. This is the thinking that puts me in the crazy wisdom tradition, where it is most logical to be a-logical and you get right by going left. Otherwise I might end up in some sort of dogma tide pool arguing in a self referential system of do and do-not (or have and have not as the materialist version goes).

In all that complexity I still apply Occam ’s razor, that the simplest explanation is often the best. Keep cool but care. Do no Harm. Be of Service. Humor is the best medicine.

Today my time pendulum has swung in another direction. I was up at 4:30 in the a.m. and decided that was a bad idea so I slept in until six. Some have argued that I have super powers with regard to controlling my sleep schedule. I think when you spend your adult life as an academic with a schedule that changes every four to five months you just become adaptable.

I start a new phase today with an all day conference kicking off my student teaching. I am in my favorite little library nook on campus waiting for the festivities to begin. I am not happy with my options for getting here. What was a ten minute drive from my old place has becoming a much longer drive in rush hour conditions. I suppose it was about thirty minutes, which isn’t much to bitch about, but with gas prices being what they are it is not the time so much as the dime that concerns me.

I am bartending this weekend for Doc’s Harley Davidson. They are having a party at the glass factory and I will be the mixologist in residence. Actually I think it will be Don and I, but I’m not sure about that. That will probably be a long night and spin my schedule back the other way. There might be a story or two to look forward to with the Harley crowd, or maybe they’ll be a bunch of yuppies. I’m going to guess no on the yuppie front.

The Bus… I know some of you think I should sell it for scrap. Others envision some sort of electric Kool-Aid acid test grand Midwestern tour. My loan money is in and I have apportioned some of it to deal with the question. Personally I’d like to keep the bus, but I’m just not sure where to park it. There are practicalities of time and mobility to consider. It’s been sitting in a field since I moved here in 2001. When you roll outside the cultural box it can be perplexing. Ah well, registration for the “conference” is starting, so I best be off. Let me know what you think about the bus.

We are playing a fun game this morning called, “reset Karl’s internal clock.” For the next five months I need to be up at around 5:30 so I can get ready and get to work by seven at the latest. I’ve been on an up till three sleep till eleven schedule, my natural and preferred schedule, over break. So last night was bed at one (that was the best I could do) up at 6:30. After the coffee kicks in I’ll be fine, but the world is a little blurry at the moment.

Life in Karl’s head on a Wednesday night:

Here’s an odd one. I was just sitting here thinking about my amelanistic corn snake. BJ was saying he wasn’t a true albino because obviously he is partially pigmented with a sort of umber scale. The part of my brain that handles knowledge about how language works said, “Well, that makes sense in the context of the name because istic – or at the very least the “ic” is a Latinate suffix meaning “like”. So the snake is like an albino without being fully albino; sharing some properties with.” Here I am off on some Aristotelian classification jag.

I don’t know if that is accurate with regard to breeding – it’s reasonable argument and what a linguist might call a folk etymology or good bullshit that might actually have some truth in it. So then I was thinking that there were a few years when everyone was saying like between words instead of pausing, but now everyone is adding istic to everything so that I have to hear people say Buddhist-ic instead of simply Buddhist. So people are still getting their likes in but they are sticking them everywhere as word endings even where they are redundant as in my Buddhist example (on the model of reoccurring and recurring), unless of course they were in fact talking about something that was like Buddhism but not Buddhism. Even still, wouldn’t you say that Jain philosophy seems Buddhist? You just don’t need the istic.

Perhaps the perpetual like-ing of everything has something to do with the mediated aesthetic and the way that all experiences are framed with a kind of post historical parenthesis where everything is a quasi fallen form of the historical version from the time when we were all participating in events instead of just watching them; hokey pokey voyeurs with only one foot in and one foot out of our own experience. Nothing is anymore. It’s all like or akin to what once was. But then life, language, and my snake are all skin shedders working their way through the infinite onion of improbable possibility so I don’t suppose it matters much if people get into an istic habit.

It’s the exponentially increasing rate of change that is the most noteworthy aspect of this “post-historical” period. Theorists who get into this stuff used to contend that history ended in Nagasaki because we first realized the true Mayan zero of our own obliteration in opposition to the historical one of the past and then present. Regardless of the now pervasive presence of our own negation we are faced with the surprise of being Zeno’s Arrow; heading towards that disaster but somehow never reaching it. We don’t get zero, we get the postmodern paradox of shedding our skin almost faster than we can grow it, and shedding our skin in response to the act of looking at it such that as soon as we are able to see anything “like” identity, it is no longer our skin but only some recent past, thus everything must become a “like” in that the very act of framing it moves it out of the real.

Blah, it’s sad that one Baudrillard quote got so many smart people to sit through those two sucky sequels.

What happens when your culture becomes a Koan? You realize that is always was one. I suppose there are several hundred undergrad philosophy papers that follow the above line of thinking with references to Akira and The Matrix all through them. I wonder if any of them ever get anywhere interesting with these thought puzzles. I need to get myself to sleep obviously. Against the blank canvas of a silent universe all this etching is just another form of self stimulation.

In the last post I said that the dog was fine with the cat. This is an understatement. Sebastian loves cats and has virtually raised three of them himself. Ajax is a four and a half month old male kitten from the Humane Society. We went just to look yesterday and while we were there Ajax’s foster mother TJ brought him in. I heard her say his name and immediately thought he deserved a look. He’s a black domestic longhair with tufted ears. He loves to be held, he has lived well with two dogs; he is playful and is a people cat. He is also second only to Achilles in prowess on the battlefield.

Since the loss of Jake when R moved on and Bozo with M.B.’s departure Bastian has lost two good cat friends and playmates. I guess Gretchen and Juniper were his other cats, but they were not dog fans and generally clawed his nose up. I shouldn’t forget Gracie, Joey and Kitty Third Try; all of whom lived around Sebastian for varying lengths of time and exhibited a range of tolerance, indifference and fear. Jake and Bozo both treated Sebastian as a playmate and would engage in all manner of grooming and play with him.

Jes and I had noticed in just the few short weeks that we’d been here that with nothing to chase and play with and no stairs to climb up and down Bastian had been moving both more slowly and more stiffly. He is twelve after all. The cat has only been here one day and already Bastian is ten times more active. With both of us resuming work next week we still have time to supervise the development of their companionship before we descend into our respective schedules. They will have each other, the mailman, and the fish when we aren’t around.

The story of getting the cat is something of an epic. We ran into a bureaucratic snag as we are renters and couldn’t get in contact with our landlord. Kathy, the landlord, had already approved the cat and we got her mother to call and say so. Kathy works in a call center and so could not be reached for final approval. The word of the mother was not good enough for the adoption supervisor, nor was a copy of the lease outlining the policy. She decided for whatever reason that she did not want us to have this cat.

We spent several hours there, first trying to get in contact with the landlord and then simply attempting to stake our claim to the cat through the adoption window by simply keeping it with us. At one point it looked like we were just going to have to stay there until they closed and get the landlord to call in when she got off work later that night. They do not hold pets for any reason and this is the sort of cat that would not stay long. They wouldn’t let us pay the fee, they wouldn’t let us speak to a supervisor, they wouldn’t let us have Jes mom adopt the cat. It was a panorama of festive no.

Eventually TJ, the foster mom who met us when she first brought in the cat, discovered what was happening and got a big boss involved – who apologized profusely for the behavior of the petty tyrant and adopted Ajax to us quite speedily. To give you a sense of the drama, at one point our obstructionist took the cat from us and locked it up so she could go clean rabbit cages in another part of the building. None of the other cats were locked up. She was afraid we were going to try and steal him. She was something of a Nazi. It’s odd behavior when your mission is to adopt pets to good homes. She tried several times to get rid of us. Perhaps she wanted the cat herself or her bizarre cult frowns on longhaired intellectuals. In any case her plans were foiled and we have a lovely, crazy, snuggly cat to bless you with sneezes when you come over.

Vanessa: you do not warm mouse babies in the microwave. You just let them thaw overnight. The snake is very small and will not bother you at all.

Ah, yeah. So about that menagerie… meet our new cat Ajax







The dog is fine, but the fish are a little freaked

A lost post… I wrote a short post yesterday which I never got around to putting up and then today during an hour and a half wrestling match with my printer installation software I had to do a system restore to the weekend and I’ve just discovered that my trip back in computer time eliminated the post I wrote. Did you follow that?

Anyway, all I had said in my un-posted post was that school would be starting soon. I start Friday. I got an email from an instructor of mine advising me to take the week to fix my car, my computer, downsize my lifestyle, make a bunch of freezable casseroles and tell my loved ones that I will miss them during what has been hyped as the busiest term of my academic career.

I don’t really buy the hype, but I did take the cue to get my printer back online. I understand that for new teachers the content of this term might be overwhelming, but I am not that and so it won’t be. It will just be fun. I am going to rest up this week. I started by sleeping for eleven hours last night. I guess I didn’t get enough sleep leading into or during my weekend. Ah well, perhaps this is the calm before the storm. I think tomorrow I will wear cozy clothing and avoid leaving the house.

“Happy De-Lurking Week!”

According to Jen and others it is a little known festival time in the blogging world devoted to paying a presence tithe for your sometime entertainment. The premise is one of festive inversion rooted in the Carnival aesthetic whereby the readers do a little more posting (Carnival is traditionally a time of social inversion where social pressures are eased by roll reversals). If you read here but rarely or never comment you are asked to take a minute this week to say hi in the comments section. If you’re a blogger make sure and leave your link and you can be sure I’ll return the favor. Thanks, and happy start to the Carnival season.

Yesterday was the birthday of both Elvis and Stephen Hawking.


Stephen Hawking said, "[Human beings] are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

I have replaced my lost fish with a new pet. I got an……….



Albino Okeetee Corn Snake! My friend Mark in the ville is an amateur herpetologist and makes a few hundred to a few thousand bucks a year breeding snakes on the side (he’s a musicologist by day). Our friend Bob has been raising one of Mark’s snakes and I was so taken with this pet during my visit that I asked Mark what he might have available in something reptilian. He graciously hooked me up with a snake and a starter cage all my own.

FYI – the name Okeetee refers to the South Carolina County where the best and most collectable Corn Snakes come from. Apparently these snakes are tri-color in the wild and breeders then match them to select out one of the colors. My snake has been bred first to remove the black and then to be an amelanistic 'reverse' of an Okeetee corn – amelanistic means without melanin in the skin – otherwise known as albino. This is apparently something that snake folk really go for.

When he gets bigger he’ll look like the image in this link.



When Mary and I got back from the ville tonight I went to the pet store and got snake food (dead frozen mice called fuzzys) that can go next to the beef heart cubes for the Cichlids in our freezer. I’ve actually started feeding the Cichlids the occasional horde of guppies with their flake food. You can get twelve guppies for a dollar fifty and they keep the Cichlids from bothering the other fish in the tank. We’ve moved up the food chain here a bit at The Fortress. Ah, I haven’t told you about The Fortress.

I’ve started calling our house The Fortress as we have locks that work only with keys and so we are always locking ourselves in. Alternately people are ringing the doorbell and peeking in through the curtains while we hunt around for where we might have left the keys. The longer name for the apartment has to do with the food we served at the New Year’s Eve Party – we served what I called Pan-Asian Tex-Mex with a European Flare – so this is the Pan Asian Tex-Mex South Side Fortress. I’m not married to the name, but it is what I have been calling the place to myself. With the addition of the snake and all the new fish perhaps we should call the apartment The Menagerie.

Jes and I are vacationing separately this season – as are all the Nuevo Riche. She went to Chicago today with the girls (Beth, Kat, & Vanessa) to shop at Ikea – where broke folk can buy cool stuff without all the consumerist guilt that accompanies a Crate and Barrel purchase. The road trip to Ikea reminds me of the kids in the dorms who used to go to St. Louis and back in an evening for White Castle. These girls do a semi-annual trip to Chicago, usually they make the trip there and back in a day and sometimes they go so far as to rent a trailer to bring back their new chairs and couches. I know, this is a little scary, but it’s a thing and you know how people are about their things. I can’t fault them for liking cool stuff; aesthetics is the new identity baby.

As I understand it Jes has purchased arms for our couch. Did you know that you could buy just the arms? At Ikea all things are possible. She was also going to get some sort of shelving units for our stuff. It’s always good to buy stuff for your stuff; where else would you stuff the stuff? Groan! Ok, the sophomoric pap that I am generating here is annoying even me so I am off to watch my snake sleep. Be well.

I am blogging from Jen’s house in the ville. Mary and I got a wild hair and drove up yesterday to get a little out of town time before school resumes. Jes was busy this weekend with a fundraiser and so couldn’t join us on this little jaunt. Bob myself and a few others went and saw King Kong last night. I must say I hadn’t been planning on seeing it in the theater but it really was quite over the top on the spectacle front. I may even see it again. Bob is going to do a de-Kong-struction of the movie for the Miami Film and Literature conference. We did a roundtable on the five major allegories and have decided that is an ur text with linkages on a par with Finnegan’s Wake. It’s been a good lead in to the weekend with numerous friends joining us for food and drinks at Il Spazio and The Dukum. We had breakfast at Northtown Café and sat a booth away from local celebrity Rhonda Vincent – who is also a relation of BJ’s. – a cousin I think. B.J?

Anyway, we had coffee at Royce and Devon’s through the afternoon and then met The Ville Literary Society up at the Dukum for Pork Tenderloins and three full tables of conversationalists. Tonight we will be playing marathon poker with a different group of friends here at Jen and D’s– or an overlapping group of friends. Kat asked me why I was going to the ville. I have run into people I know all over town and actually had someone pull over to shout, “Meet you at the bar later!” Small town life for nine years and you end up knowing a fair chunk of the community. Jen wants to trim my hair so I’m off to get my pre poker game trim. Hope you are easing out of the holidays with much aplomb.

Happy birthday Umberto...

Umberto Eco wrote, "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

If you're wondering what is up at Fulcrummonkey - someone told me I wasn't blogging enough - several someones actually - so here you have it - by request - more.

By the way Sebastian turned twelve last month and it is around the time that I got him. I picked him out of a pile of pound puppies in January of 1994 and he was just a few weeks old.

Beth knows that Jes and I sometimes play with Lego so she got us a Lego house as a housewarming gift. I built a house which Jes then took apart and expanded. I got out my box of Lego so she had more roof tiles to work with and one thing lead to another.

I know someone who doesn’t think very much of this little blogging community. She wrote an article for publication on Dork Bloggers and I think she had me in mind when she wrote it. In an effort to prove her right I present Karl and Jes dorky Christmas space Lego bar palace staring Jes’ space house on lunar land and karlo’s extravagant menagerie of space base sundries:



















Vacation all I ever wanted… vacation have to get away….

Gambling…I’m not much of a big gambler but I like to play poker with friends. As the party died down in the wee hours of Saturday morning we decided to break the poker table out and see how it fit in the new digs. I think it fits well in the bar room.


I went back into the archives and looked at last New Year’s Day – looks familiar. I had a beard then.



Set the way back machine for 1999:



How many parties have we had here at the new place already? People came over New Year’s Day to eat buffet style from the bar. Twice actually – we had a breakfast and an evening party.
This is the evening one (Jen cut ten inches off Jes' hair!!)


And the girls came over tonight to watch the Gilmore thingy and have pizza.


Cute/embarrassing story:
We went to the Casino last night with Mary, Beth, Jen & Derek. Jes actually turned twenty bucks into nearly forty on a penny slot. I walked into a women’s restroom because there was a pillar in front of the “wo” so from my vantage point when I looked for a sign I just saw two signs that read “men”. I didn’t get far down the hallway when I realized my mistake as the short Hispanic mopping maid held up her hand and said “women” so I snuck around the corner into the men’s room.

We were at the stage end of the Ameristar casino and a swing band, Hudson and The Hoo Doo Cats, were playing Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover. When I made my little sneak around the corner maneuver I heard the singer laugh and after the set he came up and joked about seeing me come out of the ladies room and duck into the men’s. The band had played Karen and John’s wedding so Jes and I have danced to their music before. They are one of the best local swing bands on a par with big Bad Voodoo Daddy and “Hudson” told me one of his own women’s restroom stories that ended with a police officer. That was icing on the cake for a trip where some of us left the building with more money than we brought in.

Leaping Lepranuses (I have no idea how to spell this fish name- much less pluralize it)!

I came home today from running errands to find a suicide fish. The fish we shall call L for the purposes of blogging leapt to his death at some point this morning. It’s not the first time he has “gotten out” of the tank. It’s just that no one was here to rescue him. We noticed odd behavior last night as he was nosing figure eights on the northern wall of the tank. He looked like he wanted out. There is a fairly small gap to jump through and I guess his genetic programming told him that the world was one big river. He should have known better having tested this theory on multiple occasions.

All his previous leaps occurred during feedings or cleanings where I had the top of the tank off. The first week we were here he jumped out and landed behind the TV. I had to move the entertainment center out and take off my shirt to use as a grasping aid. I knew the tank was too small for him and had been pricing 55 gallon tanks, but there is no point now as none of my other fish were in his league. Is it bad to post a picture of dead fish? I took one (a few). He was a seven to eight inch fish.



He’s not a fish I’ll replace. He was too aggressive and may have even killed my favorite Pleco way back when Jes and I first started dating. I had foolishly put my two largest fish in a tank together and L was making a habit of nipping the Pleco’s tail. I came home one day to find the Pleco in what can only be described as a crucifixion float. His fins were stretched wide and back like open arms. His head was at the top of the tank and his tail at the bottom. His spine was arched backwards with his bare belly facing out into the room. He had a huge hole in his belly that I believe L put there, but it was reminiscent of the centurion’s slash. I’ll never know for sure how the Pleco died, no curtains tore marking the hour, but I gave L his own tank after that so the Pleco died that other fish might live.



Now the betrayer fish, my Judas fish, has gone to his own grave – the dumpster out back actually – and will soon be recycled by an alley cat in the great circle of life. Does anyone else find amusement in the popularity of the Lion King in many Christian households? The central theme is Hindu or Buddhist emphasizing the metempsychosis of souls – this is the comforting notion that every mistake is tempered by the eventual intergalactic reset button in opposition to the Christian one-ride-around-the-park winner fit through the eye of a needle model we get from the Judaic line of thinking. Disney has long wrestled with these issues pondering as I do now whether all dogs go to heaven.



Death in the noon hour is a microcosmic moment for musings on mortality: will I, like my own fish out of water, pass from this world with all the insignificance of a flopping, gasping asphyxiation wondering what in the world went wrong with my latest and greatest plan for self improvement, a leap into an inhospitable something that makes me into nothing faster than a giggling sorority girl can order her sushi? It’s the riddle of the many and the one; there are more than six billion of us now in our interdependent struggles and the meaning of each tableau is hard to measure against a near infinity of options. If you’re looking for the appropriate “whoa” moment to pop your demographic cherry on, I recently heard a specialist on global population say that the majority of people alive right now have never spoken to someone else on a telephone. Stick that in your digital divide and smoke it.



I suppose context is key; the fish had a meaning in the context of his tank, removed from it he most closely resembles the well shaken etch a sketch or the daily shake of the food can in the larger tank of the dumpster diving possum. But for the grace of the moment, there go we.

Well, it’s after two thirty in the a.m. and I am getting back to a late night schedule. This does not bode well for my high school teaching career. Ah well, I have until the thirteenth of the month to switch back to a day schedule. I was up late before New Years cleaning and getting our house in order. Our last party guest left last night after four a.m. (not including the guests who didn’t leave until the sun was up). We gave up our bed to the wounded and slept air mattresses.

We had lots of compliments from our party guests who seemed astounded that the place seemed so complete after only two weeks in partial residence. You can go to Beth’s or Jen’s web page to find out a little more about our party. Beth has some good images up on her page. (You’ll find links in the sidebar.)

I guess I want to say that Jes and I have done a lot of picture hanging and furniture arranging, but having a party here for the friends who were able to come has done more to transform this space from a house into a home than any amount of cosmetic aesthetics could. Thank you all so much for a great New Years.

Derek was just telling me he thought that the party showed that we were able to transition many of the positive elements of the previous place while leaving behind acres of negativity – it really was a symbolic party for a new start in a new year.

Thank you Vicki-not-my-sister-at-outside-in for your great gift which has just found its way to me – I haven’t actually heard many of these Sedaris stories even though I’ve seen him speak twice now – Jes and I both enjoyed the chocolates.

Thank you Michelle de Seattle for all your long distance support; your encouragement and presence in my daily life at this computer is as much a gift as one could hope for.

Mary, thank you for reminding me that if activism worked once, it can work in the future. Just tonight you reminded us that even if the fix is in, everything can be fixed again. Even if the cohort are at times depressing, they are also still learning. We lean on each other. Thank you for your strength.

Fuzzy, I had a chance to taste your home brew today and your coffee stout is excellent. I’m looking forward to my climber’s pass at upper limits and getting a chance to really get into climbing this year. It will be fun to get to know both you and Meg better. Your coffee gift was enjoyed by many over the past few days – a little warmth goes a long way when you roast it right.

Beth, I played with your Lego housewarming gift (a Lego home) all morning while everyone else slept in, I had it spilled all over the kitchen floor, and then this evening Jes broke it up and used what you bought us in combination with all my other space Lego to build a house on the moon. Sisters know their brothers well.

Erica and Justin. You’ve asked me to perform your marriage ceremony. Thank you for the chance to tell you that that it would be an honor to participate in any way in the celebration of your choice to be together. Thank you also for providing the reason for me to get ordained by either the Ethical Society or the Church of the Universal Light.

Jason and Tif, this year I had the honor of writing and standing up in your wedding. What more could a person ask for than to be so trusted. Thank you for your faith and friendship.

Kat, your two meal chili was great for dinner and breakfast. Thank you so much for providing it for all of us. Thank you also for your example of commitment to causes that matter. I’ve learned a great deal from your example in the past year and value every opportunity for service that you’ve provided for me.

BJ, thank you for the poker chips and for years of friendship un-recount able (and in some cases unrecoverable) in a single night of drinking. You are my best man. When you stand up other people sit down and it’s more because of who you are than how you are.

Flippy, thank you for trying to make sense of this insane life. Thank you for making the choices that will keep you living it. We didn’t watch Wonder Boys today and have thus broken our short lived tradition – the spells end when we find what’s true. How many best men does one guy get?

Chris and Vanessa, thank you for manning the chocolate flinger, ubiquitous vegetables and now fruit, your “what else were we going to do” commitment to every funster whim car repair and move are where the rubber hits the road in friendship. Also thank you for your part in introducing me to Jes – had you two not met we never would have and her presence in my life is the best gift of the year.

Jen and Derek thank you for coming and marking this moment with us. Families mark time together and you are both most assuredly in my immediate family. Thank you also for the changer, a truly Hereclitian gift.

Thank you Jes for seeing something in me worth getting to know better and thank you to your family for shaping the strong, intelligent, beautiful woman that you are. Thank you universe for whatever the hell kind of thing “spark” is because we’ve got it in spades.

Thank you everyone for bringing food and drinks and good humor into our lives. I saw It’s a Wonderful Life for sale tonight on DVD at prices you would expect for a new release. Capra’s masterpiece says as well as it can be said that no man is a failure who has friends.