Notes from the high country

bad boys

2006-01-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

bad boys
Originally uploaded by webgecko.

behind you

2004-11-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

behind you
Originally uploaded by webgecko.

template.jpg

2004-11-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

template.jpg
Originally uploaded by webgecko.

DNA and Dental Records

2004-11-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

My adaptation of the map found at http://member.shawn.ca/ianking His was "Jesusland."

Mine is about DNA and Dental records! It will be posted at my new address:< a href="http://flyfisher.typepad.com/geography">Please feel free to post it, steal it, use it, and taunt republicans with it. [I should state for the Record I was a registered Republican and I changed parties when the Patriot Act was signed. I didn't serve in the US Army to see our Bill of Rights and the Consitution be turned into toliet paper by momma boys.

I've moved

2004-11-06T16:54:00.000-07:00

I have moved over to to TypePad.

I have also started a blog that documents the how-to as I learn how-to. It includes sites, software, and tools.
It's Newbies

Buzz words, sexy computers, and killer appz

2004-10-11T13:09:00.000-06:00

Apparently I have just one linguistic nerve left and "getting the job done--" along with every other buzzword people slip into their conversations -- was just swinging off it like Tarzan on crack. Ergo, this is about buzz words, computers, and one really kick ass app.

Am I the only person in America that refuses to use buzzwords like "get the job done?" It was, apparently, Bob Costa's favorite new buzzword at the summer Olympics. During one evening's events, between Costas and the color commentators, I counted that phrase over 36 times in three hours. (That's 11 times an hour more than a human can bear. I get images of piping buzzwords into rat cages to see if it induces canniblism.) I thought I would have to bite my tongue in half trying to keep my mouth shut about it. By the third day they were all saying it, including Katie Couric. [Yes, I know I said I seldom watch TV but I always watch the swimming and gymnastics summer events and skijumping & luge in winter.]

I am currently reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It is a vast repository of buzzwords. [I am so glad I am not in the private sector and in management, I don't think I could survive the coffee breaks without throttling someone.] Buzzwords spill out everywhere to boggle my pointy little head. There is the classic "paradigm shift," "Maxing output while minimizing input," "garbage in and garbage out," and the tired and worn out "leverage this" and "leveraging that." You know what I mean. The book was a best seller in the business community two years ago. Apparently it takes two years to get trickle-down from management to geeks in the trenches. Suddenly, everything is Tuscany! [That's my sardonic response to the latest greatest fad de jour.... remember when everyone had to have white cotton and terra cotta pots scattered around everywhere?]

Back to the book. I am only one chapter into it, yet I can see one major flaw in his "bottom up" approach: there is no way to prioritize an item via importance (in terms of both context and in urgency.) Now that's one seriously major flaw if you ask me. [Hey, did your paradigm just shift? No? Maybe it's all done with smoke and mirrors.] I am going to give it a solid read; I hope the remainder of the book can address this fundamental flaw.

On to sexy computers. [Marvelous segue, yes?]

One of the things I used to hear a lot of was some pencil-necked geek saying a computer was "sexy." My response was to sorrowfully shake my head and say, "you really do need to get laid more." My twin sister and I were talking about the new G5 dually 2.5's, they are sleek and beautiful, inside and outside. (I just set up three of them, 2.5 GHz, 1 GB ram, 250 GB hds, and superdrives in an AV lab at work.) The only thing I don't like is the plastic CD tray. Apple apparently bought the cheapest possible plastic trays available anywhere in the world. Adjectives like flimsy, carpola, junk, and flaming smacktard leap to mind. One bump should shatter it. Note bene: I said shatter not break. The plastic looks as flimsy and brittle as the kind Sony first used on their incredibly overpriced laptops. I have more confidence in a Styrofoam cup, which is a shame since the case is made of brushed aluminum and the door to the bay drops down inside the front, sort of very Agent 99!

I called my twin sister last night, you can find her here The Evil Twin, [insert wicked evil grin here,] and mentioned that I thought they new G5s were about the only machine I ever saw that I thought was sexy. Long pause (I could hear her wicked-evil grin over the phone,) and she said, mournfully, "You really need to get laid more." So you see, is it any wonder I don't discuss operating systems or politics with her? (Hey, they aren't as incongruent as you think on first glance. Think about it.)

And that takes me into the killer app. [Yet another free and marvelous segue! Hell, if Mirc$oft can trademark "double-clicking [tm]" I don't see why I can trademark "marvelous-segue (tm)!" Can you believe they allow verbs to be trademarked? The true apogee of stupidity.]

If you are an OSX variety MacHead, go check this app out: DevonThink. Check out the DevonAgent too, they are powerful by themselves, yet combined they can "leverage" your researching needs "to the next level" [recognize any annoying buzzword?] It's fairly solid and can crawl the internet with far greater accuracy than Goggle and even Dogpile (my search engine of choice.) While it's loading and crawling, you can examine any hits in a preview pane which resembles Simple text but offers highlighted keywords based on your search terms. You can also click on any link and DT's internal browser will leap into life. I started using the demo of both and got hooked, they are excellent for someone like me that works in educational technology.

DevonThink is your new brain, honest... trust me. Its a freeform database, an outliner, browser, and organizer all rolled into one $40.00 application. It can handle simpletext, Word docs, rtf, pdfs, images, QT movies, and sound files. About the only thing it doesn't support is Excel. Site-sucking? Yep, you could, if you had a large enough hard drive and massive bandwidth, probably suck up the entire internet [which was, as we all know, invented by Al Gore.] Now I am running OSX 10.2.8 because this is an older G3 laptop (firewire.) I can go to 10.3 but it just doesn't seem prudent to force an older machine, one that is the bottom-feeder and at the bare minimum on list of requirements, to jump up to Panther. Still, I have say DT to be remarkably stable, and hung on me only once -- and that was when I accidently send my entire user library/application support folder into DT at one go, lol. (I am on the Pro beta version that has remarkable stability for a beta release, it's only crashed in one week of heavy use & abuse!)

Did I mention this software is "intelligent?" It learns your category habits, and will classify based on how you sorted, what keywords you used. In a short time the process is automatic, just drag the file into the DT (mine is sitting pretty in my dock, snuggled between Photoshop and InDesign and that's saying a lot,) and it will organize it for you. The first couple of days it mismatched a lot, but now its rock solid.

I keep a massive archive of pdfs, and the files themselves are huge, I think it is currently in the neighborhood of 2.5 gbs and another 3 gbs on a LaCie firewire HD for holding and backup.) Everything from a manual for Unix to Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX tutorials (with templates,) weather data charts (for fly fishing and figuring out the hatches.) I think I have around 3 gb worth of pdf's already loaded. One of my taskings at work is to keep abreast of instructional applications and know everything about them, so I have a ton of pdfs on both laptops. [That's probably why people call me "the big giant head." I can, via Safari Services and some handy DT scripts, send entire page into DT with a click of a mouse, either whole sites, one page or just the url.

I am working with some fairly simple categories: work, web, home, play, projects etc. I am using a lot of nested folders within each broad category. I can't recommend it enough. The work folder has sub-folders based on either scriptiing or software documenation. I am also using it in conjunction with AquaMinds Note Taker software. I wanted to use NT for blogging and backing up my blog as per Kevin's website. He is using ecto and NT to post his blog. It's an impressive combination. I am still on the NT trial, but I ordered the software last week (I love an educator's discount!)

PS.. eventually an "enterprise" version will be released.

[Why all the braces? Consider it a sarcastic/sardonic alert!]

A decade of yesterdays

2004-10-05T13:32:00.000-06:00

Memory, sand, and time. Remembering absent friends in Somalia.

I stare at the calendar, surprised that all those yesterdays added up, in a glacial snail's pace, and now it is eleven years, two days, and nine hours past. Each day is a casual sort of purgatory filled with ..... what? What words describe it? The thing I say to myself, again and again, is those four days sort of occurred outside of time, at least that's how it feels. I experience it as sharp and bitterly now as I did over a decade ago. They are with me still, the eternal present, and I expect they will always haunt my dreams. What words can detail everything that was Somalia? Give me some words that aren't clichés strip from either comic books or bad movies.

I trip over Mogadishu on a surprisingly regular basis. Once I found a Somali nickel, right here on Pearl Street pedestrian mall in Boulder. Another time I was flipping through a magazine, in the checkout line from Hell, and suddenly there was a picture of Randy Shugart's body being pulled through the dusty streets of Mogadishu. Then there was the store, a computer game store down at Flatiron's Mall, where I felt bitter rage boiling up when I saw they made a game of Mogadishu, it was all I could do to not explode into a mindless sort of rage and ruin. Once again I hoped Mark Bowden would rot in Hell. Like the book and the movie wasn't enough for him. Isn't it nice that people can reap an enormous profit from the pain and death of other people?

Unlike Mark Bowden, I was in Mogadishu when the events his book is centered on took place. I had been in country three months when it happened. I knew a lot of the men that died on Oct 3-4 1993. Except the killing started before that movie, well before. Start with twenty-five Pakistani's getting waxed in a single ambush and work your way up. The morning of Oct 3rd, three American's and a Somali National translator were blown to bits by a command-detonated landmine. I was one of the people required to examine the scene. Even this little bit of writing about it remains a struggle, sort of like that horrible plunging feeling you have in a sudden fall.

I miss you guys.

Annie Dillard, Maurice Blanchot, and me

2004-10-03T13:43:00.000-06:00

Were you ever jacked by a book? Have you ever read and reread a book that had layer upon layer of meaning, that forced you to work for every crumb?

I once read a book by Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (L'Ecriture Du Desastre,) that I thought was the most difficult book I ever read (in college anyway,) but I was wrong. To put this in context try and imagine a book composed of bullet statement commentary on everything from silence to the nature of complicity, and write it in French with untranslatable notions and a shy English translator, and just put it out there. Make it utterly obscure in the English translation and even denser in the French original. This was one of the texts I used for an honors project for my English degree. I was examining the role and nature of silence in works by Holocaust survivors, using a semiotic and metalanguage approach.

I remember countless frustrated hours, sitting in a Michigan library, trying to make sense of both the English and French editions. If you want to learn anything at all from Maurice Blanchot you have to suffer for it. He yielded no secret or context easily. Want an example?

"Effacé avant d'être écrit. Si le mot trace peut être accueilli, c'est comme l'index qui indiquerait comme raturé ce qui ne fut pourtant jamais tracé. Toute notre écriture — à tous et si elle est jamais écriture de tous — serait ainsi:le souci de ce qui ne fut jamais écrit au présent, mais dans un passé à venir."

I'm not much of a translator but here is how this passage speaks to me:

"Erased before the word can be understood, it's the indicator of that which would show erasure that can never erase what was never noted (or written.) All our writing -- with all that was never written at all -- would be as follows: the concern of what was never written at the present, but in a past that has yet to come."

That was simply one of thousands of typically cryptic bullet statements. Everything in the book related to everything and related to nothing at all. Within the dust jacket of that book was the meaning of silence, suffering, and the price of survival.

Fast Forward to Annie Dillard's For The Time Being. I have been reading and rereading this book for three years. When I travel it goes in a daypack with me, and a soft-covered Moleskine notebook with crabbed printing. The book goes fishing with me, tucked away in a Ziploc bag, I pull it out when sitting under a tree watching for a hatch. My copy of the book is underscored and marked up, crowded with notes in the margins, arguments continue on from the end papers to a moleskine notebook. And each time I pull it out and start at a random page, it feels rather like picking up a cherished arguement with an old friend. It all has great meaning together, but each morsel alone is a feast that could fill the world with meaning... if only I could break through the text.

The book has five central elements: meaning of numbers, a manual of birth defects, religion and faith (Judaism) throughout time, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's remarkable life's work and exile, numbers with and without meaning, personal meaning. The text seems to jump randomly from one topic to the next. There are no topical transitions. If you can't follow along tough noogies. This book is nothing like Dillard's previous work. I have read her since I was in my early twenties. The connection I shared with her was being around ten years and two miles apart. I grew up two miles from where she did, so her work has always been appealing to me.

The first few readings drove me crazy. I am a rather pedestrian linear thinker that wants books to move from left to right in an orderly fashion. After the second reading I was convinced she had just read Blanchot before she wrote the book. Each time I read the book, a secret part of me was certain I would suddenly transcend the text, that all meaning would suddenly connect for me. I still think that and it still hasn't happened. I was raised to believe tenacity is it's own reward.

I plan to keep returning to this entry as I find what is next around the corner.

Lists without context

2004-10-03T13:17:00.000-06:00

Not that anyone cares, but I thought it would be fun to create a list and let the reader roll their own context. What are you waiting for? Time to get sort of surreal.

1. The screaming three year old, always behind me on a flight, who kicks my seat non-stop from New York to Denver.

2. Cats resemble commas as they curl in sleep.

3. Why can't I find decent borscht in Boulder?

4. [Insert mental picture of Dubya and a rock here.] "Bush, just like a rock, but dumber." (as seen on TV.)

5. Paragraph six of the United Nations Charter.

6. New York Time's Sunday book review magazine.

7. Kimchee.

8. Le film chinois « Combat contre les crues », film qui vient d'emporter le titre du meilleur film du Prix Huabiao.

9. 4 Star- Zwilling 8" chef's knife.

10. Why does this born-again church have a skateboard park on its property?

11. Flannel sheets.

12. Fritters.

Dopplegangers to the top please.

2004-10-02T22:40:00.000-06:00

On top of the Rockies, perched on a summit and surrounded by the great abyss, it's not a really good time to wonder if you and your twin are as close as you ought to be.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a twin? There are a lot of very strange and twisted notions on "twinhood" -- yes I know that isn't a word but it's my blog so it stays -- out there, and maybe in here as well. When we were in school we heard them all, and felt them even more. I can't tell you how many times people pinched one of us to see if the other would yelp.

My sister and I look the most alike when we are seen separately. Strange, eh? It's true, standing next to each other we don't at all look like twins. To be honest, I think when people view twins together they focus on the differences, whereas when viewed separately people try and find the similarities. Yes, I know that's obscure but I didn't make the world I just live in it. Most people think we're sisters and that's about it. That is until we speak. Our voices are what are identical, even we can't tell who is who on an old tape recording. When we are apart, people seem to know instantly that they have met one of us before. You see it coming with a frown and a baffled tilt of the head and gathering of the brows.

Our birth is a bit of a mystery, hidden away in Korea and onionskin, written in Latin and Korean. For example, we have no idea which of us was born first. I guess it seemed unimportant to them at the time. Throughout our childhood I was a couple inches taller, so of course I took this as proof positive that I was older, hence wiser, and always the boss of us. The funny thing is as kids we fought over who was born first. Now we have crossed into our forties, we fight over who is the youngest.

We're oddly different. She is a lefty and I am right-handed. I bowl better left-handed and she bowls better right-handed. She is better at speaking foreign languages, and is in fact fluent in four languages, and I am terrible speaking but learn to read them fairly quickly. I excelled in history and science in high school. She was the math whiz. We both swam on our high school swim team, but we did it flipped: I swam the 100-meter freestyle, she swam the 100-meter backstroke. We both tried diving and lasted one whole day at it. We both ended up in the military, I in the Army and she in the Air Force. We both saw and survived combat, RPGs, Mortar rounds, snipers and ambushes: I was a UN Peacekeeper in Somalia; she was with a rather interesting spooky group in Iraq.

We both are foaming at the mouth fourteen-hour-a-day fly fishers that fish hard and forget to eat when we are on the river. Give us two slimjims, a bottle of fruit punch Gatorade and some cheese sticks and we're good to go. We live in different parts of the country but manage to fish together fairly often, all things considered. This year we managed joint trip up to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and rounded out our fishing by wetting a line Montana and Idaho. We're both happier chasing wild trout in out of the way streams than the big rivers.

I am a noon person, she is a night owl (Note Bene note I honestly admit neither of us are morning people, at least not without coffee.) Our politics and lifestyles are radically different, but we know the world is big enough to survive these common differences.

So as we stood on the summit, my sister holding on to my shoulders for balance as I sort of squated a bit for balance in the wicked wind, I wondered about how close we were as we balanced together at 12,476 feet in the air, I had to conclude we'd do just fine.

Mr. Poopyhead and me

2004-10-02T20:11:00.000-06:00

This is the first time I played midwife to a cat. I held him from the second he was born, and he still thinks of me as mom. I confess in advance that this is a goofy entry.

This was the boy at eight weeks. He loved to swat at my fingers when I typed on the windoze laptop but, strangely enough, he didn't do this when I was on my mac laptop. He was shamelessly addicted to blueberry yogurt, cheese of any kind, and salads.

Mr Poopyhead earned his moniker at eight days of age. There were three very ugly white kittens that resembled white lab rats not cats. Mr Poopyhead started to "develop" first with a spot over his eye. He looked like one of his littermates had an accident and he got in the way. At two weeks of age he responded to the name and has been my baby every since. He follows me around, tries to take a shower with me, and loves to curl up on my chest when I am trying to type or on my laptop in bed. (That is the beauty of a laptop!)

I found this yesterday, it made me very wistful and slightly bitter that I didn't think to make Mr Poopyhead a tin-foil-alien-thought-probe-proof beanie with antenna! Anyway, the picture is a link to the Adorablog, a photoblog of kittens found abandoned in a box. (Personally, I think there is a very special place reserved in Hell for people that do nasty things like that to any helpless form of life.)

I occassionally write poetry, much of it intentionally bad (trust me, you don't want to know what I can do with haiku and a theme of toe-jam. It isn't for the weak-hearted.) My cat poem, for my oldest cat Pita, who never grew out of 5 month-old size, has a poem of her own. This was written in an on-line poetry SLAM. Its called:

Pita goes ballistic

You stand on my chest
announcing
displeasure
in my ear
at five a.m.
(Where is my coffee?)

Points of contention:
new kittens
litter brands
the virtues of foil pouches over cans.
An erudite debate
you sing
whiskers back make the
point.

And while we're at it
You express yourself
on my choice of music
leaving kitty surprises
downstairs
landmines of displeasure
await me.

We negotiate:
Foil yes,
but the kittens stay,
if they rodeo
I'll give you catnip,
kitty heroin,
to soothe you,
while they stalk spiders
on ceilings
and scream their alarm.

Lying in Confession

2004-10-02T17:05:00.000-06:00

This is a true story, I was eight at the time. All Catholic kids lie in confession. You don't mean to. You just get bored telling the priest, "I called Jimmy a bad name. I fought with my brother. I was disrespectful to my parents." I am sure they get tired of it too. This is the confession to end all eight-year old confessions.

When I was eight, I was staying up late, watching television alone. I heard a word that sounded like a wonderful sin for Saturday. I had no idea what it meant, but all the movie stars were suitably horrified. Yep. A good sin. I would use it.

So I went to 2 o'clock confession. Our church was old, dark and monolithic. It was a place you expected Thomas a Becket to be murdered in, and die, clinging to a cross while monks prayed over his lifeless form.

I sat in the pew next to the confessional. My legs were swinging. All the other good Catholic kids were in the pews around me, heads bowed, thinking about the Pirates' game that night.

The left confessional door opened. A child came out, not nearly looking sorry enough for his sins, I thought. He probably had really boring sins. Not like my juicy one.

I got up, genuflected and crossed myself, and primly went in.

I heard the grill slide open. Father Lutz said, "yes, my child?" His voice always had that deep sound of paper, heavy paper.

I crossed myself again. "Bless me father for I have sinned it has been one week since my last confession." (I could almost hear his eyes roll.) "This week I said a bad word. I fought with my sister. I sassed back at my mother."

I took a deep, dramatic breath, then blurted out, "and I committed adultery."

Dead silence. "Say that again?" He asked, clearly shocked.

"I said a bad word ---"

"No, child, skip right to the end." He sounded very strange. He was making these odd gasping noises.

"I committed adultery."

Long, long silence.

Then he said, "Are you truly sorry?" He choked out. There was a strange pause between each word.

"Yes Father." I answered.

"Very well. Say five Hail Marys, five Our Fathers. And try not to do this again." He was choking. I was worried but knew I was okay. I said my Act of Contrition and got out of there.

When I closed the door behind me I heard Father Lutz explode into laughter. He went on for a good five minutes. All the other children looked at me. No one played with me at recess for the rest of the school year.

(This was orginally written for a contest. So, you may have seen this before here.)

What if time wiggles?

2004-09-29T18:09:00.001-06:00

We assume time is neatly linear and can be measured to mindboggling finite values, but what if it really wiggles?

It's rather customary for us to view time as both linear and discrete. We divide and subdivide time into units impossible to measure except by computers or mathematical computation. Most of do not live life in nanoseconds, which is one one-billionth of a second, or 10 to the ninth power. I tend measure time far less accurately, looking at events as simply before, during, and after. I measure it by marking off a calendar or staring helplessly and impatiently at my watch.

When I was in college I took an advanced class in sociology and ran smack into Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986.) I was reading an ethnography on the a tribe of Apaches that were uniquely matrilineal. The book was called Thunder Rides a Black Horse: Mescalero Apaches and the Mythic Present, by Claire R. Farrer. You can read a fair review of the book here. The key thing about this tribe are evocative phrases such as "in the time of the grandfathers," which is a unit of time that could be anywhere from thirty to one thousand years past, or maybe even farther back in time: events that occurred then also occur now.

One of the highlights of a young Mescalero's life is her coming of age ceremony, an event spread over four days and involves everyone in the community. They speak of a mythic figure, White Painted Woman, and during the four day ceremony the girls are not merely enacting rituals: the girls become White Painted Woman, she who exists in both the present and the past. They are believed to hold in them the power and magic of the original. There are reports of girls actually healing disease and illness when the re-enact the great rituals that mark them as women.

The most remarkable thing, to me, is not the miracles but the view of time. Time isn't linear. These girls enact the rituals that link them to the original through time. This isn't possible if you view time as linear. But I invite you to step away from our western notions and consider this: maybe time is a spiral with a single plane, a line if you will, that runs through the spiral touching all curving lines. Such a view would hold that everything is linked, not just distantly and with a sense of comfortable remoteness. What if time does unfold in a spiral that reiterates prior events like echoes in a canyon? I found that concept fascinating. It could explain the endless repetitions we, as a species, seem doomed to repeat. It could even go so far as to hint at explanations for that troubling sensation of Deju vu some claim to experience.

When I was writing my paper, I stumbled into Mircea Eliade's profound work, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. I admit he is better know for his work, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, both books I read and reread because they fascinated me. (What can I say, I found and was ruined by Joseph Campbell at an early age.) By reading him, and Farrer's book, I could see the connection within my own childhood, in what has to be the only western link to illuminate events in and out of time for me.

I was raised as a strict Roman Catholic, and I attended parochial school (more years than I ever want to think about.) One article of faith for Catholics is communion and how something so everyday becomes a link to our religious past. Not just the act of receiving it but the act of blessing it by the priest. In that moment, a simple unleavened wafer and red wine at transformed into the body and blood of Christ. We are not witnessing this from the secular present -- well, we didn't then as the entire mass was in Latin -- we are there and connected to an event that the faithful believe occurred almost two thousand years ago, and continues to happen with each mass. In the precise moment when the chalice is raised and consecrated, we are present at the Last Supper. It is an article of faith that the objects raised and blessed in fact are the body and blood of Christ, and we become a part of the last supper, if only through our latter day consumption.

When I was a child, if you dropped a communion wafer, after blessing, you had to wait for the priest to come, pick it up, and place it on your tongue, because it was consecrated and holy. I lived in fear of dropping a wafer at my first communion; I think every pre-Vatican II child feared that worse than the boogieman.

I looked at mass from the safe and secular present I live in, I that no longer practices any faith, and it still gives me goose bumps. What if the Mescalero are right and all time is linked together as a spiral and events that occurred one thousand years ago can have a deep and powerful, yet knowable, influence on our very modern lives today?

I am probably one of the few people that thinks about such strange things, or finds them both meaningful and moving. Personally, I like living in a state that allows for the unknowable side by side with the mundane and practical.

Photo taken near Basalt, a town in between Aspen and Glenwood Springs. I play trout bum there in the summer.

Time, notebook, and pen.

2004-09-28T19:38:00.000-06:00
At last, I found my people and the mothership is calling me home! And it revolves around something as simple as a pen and a notebook.

My whole life I have had this secret vice. I am addicted to fine paper and fountain pens. I cannot pass a stationary store. When I moved to Germany, fifteen odd years ago, the first place I went to was a small stationary store in Fischbach FRG. The first thing I bought in Germany was a wonderful Pelikan fountain pen. It is not the kind of vice that was acceptable in a generation that ingested vast quantities of drugs in the increasing need to escape our inner-demons and conflicts. I have always felt alone in this little secret vice, but no more.

There is something to the heft of real paper that calls out to me. The same is true of the scratching of a fountain pen over thick paper. I have just about every fountain pen currently made -- except a Sailor -- and all those little boxes and tins of ink cartridges. I even enjoy the feel of my hand as it moves across the texture of the paper. I love calligraphy and have always wanted to try my hand at illuminating a manuscript or even a single page. (I saw the Book of Kells as a teenager, when it first was exhibited in the United States.) The thing about writing in a Moleskine with a fountain pen is that it slows you down. It forces you to be mindful, to be aware as you write. We live in a world of constant distraction, rhetoric, and noise that tries to suck us into the maelstorm. The act of sitting down with a pen and notebook is one of defiance to modernity. (Ironic that I compose this on a computer. Trust me, the irony isn't lost to me.)

Maybe a part of this is the rebel in me, the one who must be dissatisfied. I want the fastest computer and DSL, but I also want a Moleskine notebook and a fine-nibbed fountain pen with black ink. And I don't want the world bugging me when I use them. It's all about the dichotomy between life at the speed of sound and the quiet and deliberate passion of putting pen to paper. It is one of the conflicts of my generation, how do we live between the contradiction of convenience and ever increasing speed versus any deliberate and purposeful action. I don't know that any of us can answer that.

Lastly, I think I am in the phase of my life when I begin to value slow and meaningful over more and faster. By anyone's most generous estimation I moved into middle-age this year. Time is different now, or I experience it differently. Before there was never enough time, I always needed more, life was so hurried and crammed full. I now feel more focused, less frantic in the face of deadlines, I am in this percise moment now, and I know in five years I won't even remember this project. Now I don't feel neurotic guilt for taking time to fly fish or draw in silverpoint. Sometimes I lay in the grass and study the random shapes of clouds. These things might, in one's twenties, seem an odd or even self-centered, but now they are ingrained habit. I find I understand my parents and grandparents better as I grow into their baffling years. Time will teach us when nothing else can.

PS. The image has nothing to do with this posting, I am sure you figured that out by now. I just like the picture. I took this on the drive back from Aspen last year. Every photo in this blog is mine, or I swiped from my sister. Any that are not mine are duly noted.

It's that time of year

2004-09-28T13:31:00.000-06:00
What to do when the circle of life sort of runs right over you.

Look close, you'll see about twenty elk in this picture. I took this as the elk came down for their evening drink.

This time of year it's dicey in the basins and meadows in the high country. The elk are in rut, this is announced by an incredibly eerie sound: the bugling of the bulls, which sounds day after day. The cows, which are normally quiet and travel in small family groups, suddenly combine into enormous harems and wait while the bulls sort themselves out.

Any other time of year the elk are very mellow, as long as they see you coming and you don't chase them with a camera, they won't bother you. I've been fly fishing, paying attention to the sky -- sudden blizzards can explode here, even in July -- and my fly. And suddenly I won't be alone in the pool. I've had as many as six young bachelor bulls come right into the water with me. The closest one was a mere three feet away. They almost ran over me getting to water. Then they ignored me and got down to some serious drinking. They had the small antlers of two year-old elk, covered in softest dun colored velvet.

They stayed with me until some idiot tourist started chasing them with bread and cameras. I don't know why but tourists seem to think Colorado is one massive petting zoo. I saw the same thing in Yellowstone this July, when I went up to Idaho and Montanna to fly fish. I watched a very dumb man sneak to within fifteen feet of a two-thousand pound very annoyed bison. It's quick way to get hurt or dead. At one point we had almost 300 bison surrounding us as we tried to leave. I was more than a tad bit nervous. For as big as they are, they are shockingly quiet, I could only hear the soft sound of leaves moving as they grazed off grass and trees.

The weirdest two things that I've witnessed happened at the same time. I was in Wyoming fishing the North Platte river, about ten miles north of Colorado. A young fawn came right up to me, watching me cast. I felt like I ought to hold my breath and wait, motionless. It felt so magical that I didn't want to break the moment. When I said hello to him he bolted. I was still shaking my head over it when I saw an even weirder sight: A moose was travelling with an orphaned deer fawn. They came up to the river, directly across from me. I slowly pulled in my line and began to carefully back away from them. Moose are no joke, they will happily pound you into a broken pile just because they feel like it. One travelling with young is twice as ornery and needs a great deal of space and respect. If you see a moose in the forest start backing up very slowly and hope you get clear before it decides it really doesn't like you.

Lighting and mood

2004-09-26T14:24:00.000-06:00
Storm in the Rockies.

I felt so drawn to this moment of change depicted in this photo, I don't really know why. I downloaded it from a free image library, changed it to 75 ppi and cropped it in Photoshop, I'm not very visual, but sometimes you just find an image that somehow communicates how you feel in a precise moment of time. That's what this is for me, a perfect visual metaphor for things I can't even begin to articulate or understand.

Another reason it speaks to me is that I live in that sudden space that borders the endless eastern prairie and the Rocky Mountains. It isn't unusual to get snow in August, or see a bald eagle fishing, or watch herons stalk prairie dog pups. In this belt of land that snakes up and down Colorado, you'll see mule deer, bears, moose, mountain lions (well, no one ever sees them, you can find them by scat and tracks,) elk, big horn sheep, wild mountain goats, and just about every predator bird you've ever heard of. We have year-round Canada geese, and I have (believe it or not) been harassed by pelicans when fly fishing. I live in a place with great seasonal flux, at altitude (around 6,000'.) It’s fluid and dynamic in the daily encroachment of prairie versus mountains. You can literally see for 30 miles or more, on a clear day. The sky seems endless and you sort of feel naked before it.

Last night we had some very serious hail (again!) that dimpled my sad car. I still haven't removed the dents from the last hailstorm, which lasted ten minutes and delivered hailstones larger than a golf ball.) My garden is a mess, all the lavender is listing to the south, and the basil plants will probably croak today. I guess making pesto is out this fall. The cloud ceiling is below 600 feet; the Divide is completely shuttered away behind this massive cold front. The sky has that funny San Francisco look to it, being slate or gunmetal gray, and it is so still out. I saw only one flock of Canada geese out, and they were flying low and fast.

After the Fall

2004-09-26T11:14:00.000-06:00
Some frightening events spark very strange responses. In my case, surviving an ambush in Mogadishu, Somalia led to writing a poem, about the only way to express the wide-open shock that someone wanting to kill you inspires.

After The Fall

Rind, orange and curled
dusted by sand, on
bloody pine boards,
under a lidless
African sun.

We dream of rest,
oil bores,
lock and load.
We dream of the
darkness,
after the fall,
when sleep is prayer.

This is probably the only piece of creative writing I have done that I actually like. I learned to write fast, though not well, by playing in on-line poetry slams. I am fairly good-natured about sucking as a poet, I was in it for the fun and comraderie.

iPod: entre the dark side

2004-09-26T08:40:00.000-06:00
iPods, international copyright law, and downloading communism. Learning I am not cut out for the dark side.

I think I am the last person on earth to get an iPod. My sister sent me one as an early Christmas gift. I suddenly found myself plunged into the dark world of MP3s, Limewire, and various other download sites, curling my lip at RIAA and wanting to chant "Death to suits." It did occur to me that I was probably old enough to be everyone's mother on those sites. That realization sort of took the gothic edge off being nefarious.

It also occured to me that I am probably the only person with only 3 GB's used on an iPod. The rest is just gleaming white space on the little harddrive. That got me thinking about music and how I suddenly transformed into my older cousins. When I was a kid my cousins would kidnap me, take me places, and force me -- during the ride -- to listen to 1950s "Golden Oldies." I was less than enthusiastic since I was a child of the 60s, the last of the Baby Boomers. My idea of good road tunes were CSNY, Melaine S., Joan Baez. Sorry but hearing about someone wanting to cry because it was her party left me monumentally uninterested. I mean, where was the social commentary and demand for change?

So almost all the music on the iPod, excepting Counting Crows and Nora Jones, is at least 20 years old. I have oodles of CDs I listen to at work, and the kids come into my office and roll their eyes. (A few of them, the ones with ex-hippie, commune-dwelling, tofu-swilling parents were raised on this. Do you know how deflating it is to hear "Hey, my mom and grandmom love that song.") So I have slowly become my cousins, abusing children with tunes like Helpless, Joe Hill, Blinded by The Light. And they, like myself as a teenager, roll their eyes at my choice of music. I guess its only karma.

There were things that I found just plain weird. One was that you can find almost every Johnny Cash song on Limewire. Can't find certain modern day singers, but I found tons of Patsy Cline. There was even some Neil Diamond! Jimmy Buffet, come on in. The other funny thing was that, given the nature of Limewire, finding bible study software listed right next to porn passwords documents/pdfs. The internet makes for strange bedfellows. I mean, come on, that has to boggle everyone's mind. What would an uber-born-again Christian in need of bible-study software be doing in Limewire? What's next, selling crack to buy bibles for Russia? Anyway, I think I am just too old to enjoy the vicarious thrill of warez and stealing software, ebooks, and music online. But I am not too old to find some of the content just funny as Hell!

(And the downloading of communism? There was a gif floating around the internet a few years ago. A kid at an iMac downloading warez/mp3. Behind him is this menacing dictatorial type, drawn in Russian poster style. The caption said: "Everytime you download MP3s you are downloading communism. It still makes me laugh.)

visual irony

2004-09-25T21:57:00.000-06:00
What can I say, I've always been drawn to the visual irony.

I took this in March of this year. We were still off, in terms of snowpack -- an indicator here of drought -- but if you check out the top of the sign, it is normally 12' tall. This was taken just north of Vail in Aspen Canyon. I have this on another site where I am a mod.

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately, and I find them a compelling form of comunication that is intensely personal that moves into a sphere that is utterly public. I have kept an online journal for two and a half years, but its in a format that is locked in and not very flexible. I like how this looks, and it seems idiot-proof, which works for me. Also, friends at work, including students, know my user name at the other site, so I want to move these ramblings here, under a different user name, so I maintain some privacy.

Front Range

2004-09-25T21:54:00.000-06:00
Living life in the slow lane: Boulder, Colorado on a lazy sunny afternoon. Just a bit about me to get started.

Frontrange
Originally uploaded by webgecko.
Just a picture I took late in the afternoon a few years ago. I was facing west, aiming at the layers of the Flat Irons as they give way to the Rockies.

The light in the late afternoon is incredible, amber and and clear. Its the kind of light they want in car commericals. You can't see it but the cottonwood trees were blowing and sending puffy packets of seeds to collect in small snow drifts.

I don't really know what I want to focus on. I am trying a mess of sites and software to try and make an intelligent choice and find what suits me best. (Although, I have to admit I am leaning toward NoteTaker and Ecto.)

I joke about being bi-platform. My situation is reversed of everyone else though as I work in a mac enviroment and frequently use a Windoze laptop at home. I also have a G3 laptop running OS 10.2.8. I do prefer life on the mac though, especially for writing, I find it more creative and it seems so simple and elegant. (Trust me, I know from work it isn't.. as does anyone who ever heard the Chimes of Doom.)

I often say I am the jack of all trades and the master of none. About the only thing I am foaming at the mouth rabid about is catch and release fly fishing. I fly fish most of the summer (I work in education and have summers off.) I tie flies in the winter. I spend every possible moment tucked away in the Rockies. I live in the Front Range, in what we mockingly call The People's Republic of Boulder. I am a tad conservative politically, in other words I am not your typical Boulder Granola-head. I actually find some of it hysterically funny. For example, in Boulder you do not own a dog. You are its legal guardian. They passed that last year while the rest of the state shook their collective heads, chortling, "Only in Boulder."

Anyway, I expect to talk about fly fishing (as a form of reflective living,) education, therapy, and maybe technology (though I lack expertise in the latter category.) I don't have a religion, although I was raised a very strict pre-Vatican II catholic including more years than I want to think about in parochial schools. I might talk about my checkered past. I have lived in Africa, Europe, and Asia, and worked in many different cultures as an American Expatriate. (Except time in Africa.) I've been in the Army, worked and taught paramedics, and sold critters in a pet store as a teenager.

I try and live fairly simply. Other than the expected bills, I seldom spend much money. (Well, okay, I spent a lot on fly fishing rods, but I have all I need... except maybe that new 00 weight Sage rod!) Well, I guess that is enough information for now.