244.366 - 2016 project and DoY 244

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

DoY 244

yes!  Day of the Year 244 - exactly two-thirds of our way along our path around the sun this year.(I love simple fractions, there are so few of them:  a half, one or two thirds, one or three fourths, one or five sixths,all of the sevenths, one or three or five or seven eighths, all of the ninths except three or six.  the tenths are no longer simple.)  Happy DoY 244!

243.366 - 2016 project and microelectronics

every day in 2016,  write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

microelectronics

once upon a time, the world was dark at night.  electricity happened in the form of lightning.  as late as the 1700s, most of us still believed some god stood on a Heavenly promontory and hurled down lightning as if it were javelins.  heck, for all I know,  most of us may still believe that.  humans don't learn very fast.  but engineers do.  maybe they're a subspecies.  in any case, it's not electricity in massive doses like lightning that I mean to appreciate in this paragraph, but rather tiny little needles and pins of electricity.  not the massive rivers of electricity that flow past us in high-voltage cables strung far above our heads, but tiny little sparks of electricity that it would take a billion kajillions of to make into a javelin of lightning.  you see, also once upon a time, way back in 1946, we had sorta corralled and broken electricity and we had invented a kazillion different vacuum tubes in which we made it do tricks so we could have radios and things like that.  we even had television, although almost nobody knew about it.  and then along came 1947, and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the transistor in Bell Labs.  if light didn't fall on the dark side of the earth, it should have.  something wonderful had just been born.  and it had only just begun.  almost before that first transistor was strong enough to walk out of the lab, there were newer, smaller, stronger, cleverer  transistors.  pretty soon, they were everywhere.  you couldn't be sure your cereal spoon didn't hold a secret trove of transistors doing something beneficial or malevolent or subversive.  humans forgot how to talk to each other and only stood around and marveled at what transistors could do now, and what more they could do now, and what immensely more they could do now.  meanwhile, transistors got smaller and smaller and smaller, til now you can't even see them.  you vaguely know a million or more are at work in a chip smaller than your thumbnail which is the heart of your computer.  and I only know that as hard as I try to keep up with knowing about them, they passed way out of my knowing long ago.  but I can tell you this with some confidence:  the next time you see a charming prince rescue a desperate princess from an implacable tower on a glass mountain, you can be certain that transistors were busily at work helping him, and they've already gone on to getting the next little spaceship-robot to Venus or Mercury or even to poor, almost forgotten Pluto.  transistors are busy and ephemeral.  a generation for transistors is about a year and a half.  yep, while you just blinked your eyes about that, another generation of transistors just graduated from college, started work, got married and had kids.  and by the time I finish this sentence those kids will be thinking about grandkids.  you and I can't keep up with them, but thank goodness engineers can.

242.366 - 2016 project and Brendan Constantine

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Brendan Constantine

"Dr. Underwood!  I haven't seen you since we sealed the Gates of Hell!"  outrageous, no?  no.  just Brendan.  humor and enthusiasm.  he has given himself permission to say and to do what breaks open our listening and our thinking so we can participate in poetry.  and so we can give ourselves our own equivalent of that permission.  so I can have a tied-up princess scolding a dragon for lack of forethought.  or you can have advice from a great-great-grand-aunt argued with by an ur-mother.  or someone else can have a leaf take 46 hours to fall eight feet because it needs to finish one last conversation with a breeze.  Brendan frees our imaginations to have a sheep dressed up in a suit give a lecture on Aristotle's misunderstandings of Socrates.  He lets us see a sandstone bridge that arcs from Asgard to Faerie.  The Navajo have a story that Brendan once slipped into and blocked the hole into Middle Earth until Coyote told him all his stories.  And then Brendan demanded six more.  The elves speak of Brendan, when they do, in hushed voices.  A butterfly once confided to a scarab that Brendan had taught her how to scan Aramaic verse.  That's Brendan.

241.366 - 2016 project and The Last Sunday

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

The Last Sunday

let me let them speak for themselves.  "THE LAST SUNDAY is a monthly poetry and story telling event, where veterans and civilians come together to share their art at the USVAA theater in Culver City. It is produced by Joe Gardner and Jerry Della Salla and their production team -- Bobby Strahan, Robert Rodriguez, Jennifer Gardner and Sam Spade."  and let me let the USVAA tell about themselves.  "United States Veterans’ Artists Alliance (USVAA) is a 501 (c) 3, non-profit, multi-disciplinary arts organization composed of a diverse group of dynamic, extraordinarily talented military veterans and artists located across the United States."  the USVAA owns and operates the little house, chapel, theater in which The Last Sunday open mic is put on every month.  what is special about this repeating event?  oh gosh!  so much!  to begin somewhere, they are so damned hospitable!  the group of guys and gals who put this on - 4? 5? 7?  I've never been able to count them - dash about setting up the event, and taking time to greet each of us who shows up as a friend and contributor before we know we're anything but audience and tentative guests.  they're all veterans, not of show business, but of the U.S. military, and they put the show on with esprit and vigor and zest, but also with humor, generosity, and welcome.  while the poets and storytellers come up and read their pieces, an artist works on canvases!  somehow the two activities complement each other, maybe because the veterans welcome both as if they belonged together.  oh!  there are so many poetry events in Los Angeles (bless us!) that surely no one has sampled them all,  I have only been to a few.  but one special feature The Last Sunday has that I think may be unique among poetry events in Los Angeles:  the mothers of the guys and gals who put on the event put on a dinner for whomever shows up in the hour before the event!  it's wonderful!  so c'mon down!  feed your body, your mind, and your spirit with all that goes on in this event!  and you get to participate as a welcome guest!

240.366 - 2016 project and holsters

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

holsters

I told you about my appreciation for carbines.  a carbine can be said to have a holster, the scabbard that attaches to the saddle and holds the carbine out of the way, but ready for the gunman to draw it out and use it.  but those aren't the holsters that fascinate me.  of course the holsters in comic books and movies attracted me almost as soon as guns did.  but once I had guns of my own, the question arose, what kind of holster would I have for my gun?  a neighbor, the man from whom I learned much about guns and the equipment that goes with them, the man who taught me the respect guns should be given, just by the way he spoke of them and demonstrated them, had seven handguns, and each had its own holster.  well, of course!  each handgun had its own shape and size!  but each holster also had its own angle to the belt.  what?  yep, and apparently it was on purpose.  huh.  so I read and read and read about holsters and - take this with at least one grain of salt, I was about fifteen and learning from gun magazines, not from any technical person - discovered that there was no science to them, no technical rules for them.  there was lore and preference and different considerations from a sportsman, a marksman, a quick-draw enthusiast, a police officer, and a professional gun user.  (the last one particularly fascinated me.  what did it mean to be a professional gun user?  did he hire himself out to use a gun for some man who didn't want to use one himself?  I never found out.)  so when the time came, I designed and built a quick-draw holster for my .32 revolver.  not just any workday holster either, one like Roy Rogers had, with carving and tooling.  I did!  build one, I mean.  I had already prepared myself, not only by all the reading I'd done, but also by teaching myself to work and tool leather.  I made my own notebook for class notes and homework and stuff.  none of that genuine simulated cowhide for me!  I made my own wallets.  I made purses for a lot of women and some girls.  some of the giftees even used my purses.  so first I designed the holster then I designed the toolworking that would decorate it, then I bought the leather I needed and cut out the parts, tooled them, lacquered them, and assembled them.  (see me beam)  yes, it looked good (to my eyes, and I was the only judge who counted), and worked and satisfied the criteria I'd learned from the quick-draw person's article.  so I bring that knowledge to my appreciation of holsters today, which are even more varied and spectacular than they were fifty years ago.  some holsters nowadays use no leather at all, except where they attach to the belt.  they don't contain the gun, they just support it.  I read, and listen, and wonder and mainly wonder.  I doubt that I'll ever make a holster again, but the ones available certainly intrigue me.  I thought writing this appreciation might reveal what underlies my fascination with holsters.  it didn't.  but it did display my appreciation of them I think.

239.366 - 2016 project and spacecraft

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

spacecraft

oh spacecraft, how you have evolved!  once upon a time it was 1954 or 5, and everybody still liked Ike, and he had that fabulous smile, and he seemed to do not much of anything and the presidency just happened.  it was only much later, reading autobiographical pieces about those times, that we learned how goddam much work it takes to make a presidency look as slick as that.  what, you might ask, has any of that to do with spacecraft?  well, you might recall that that was about the time I got dumped into this country and sometime around then I discovered science and spacecraft.  they were grim, like the times.  you could still see the bolts that held the bulkheads in place.  a spacecraft was kinda like a submarine in space, uncomfortable and close-fitting and just barely accommodating the humans it carried.  the sixties arrived, and we were actually building spacecraft, tiny little robots, then a sphere big enough to let a dog die in, then truncated cones just big enough for a pilot, two pilots, oh-my-god three pilots and a detachable lunar lander!  yep, spacecraft looked about as grim and hostile as science fiction writers had described them.  but science fiction writers were becoming friskier and merrier - like the times, with hippies and with college students dissenting with their government.  oh my god!  science fiction writers began to envision spacecraft, still steel but with paint and large portholes, more like picture windows than like Zen windows.  we haven't built those and probably never will.  we've learned how to work with carbon and create spacecraft that resemble friendly private aircraft that you can get up and move around in, exercise in, pour yourself a cup of coffee and drink it in, and even carry tourists into space in!  wow!  the Eisenhower science fiction writers not only wouldn't recognize today's spacecraft, but they'd disapprove of them.  spacecraft weren't for smiles in their day!  meanwhile, I've lost track of science fiction writers, but at least the Star Trek writers expect a huge vehicle something like a battleship and something like an integrated neighborhood in which almost everyone is white.  someday we might get even more optimistic than that!  on the other hand, it's hard to improve on a spacecraft that, just like Roy Rogers' gun, never needs refueling!  I enthusiastically await the successors to today's real spacecraft.  bless engineers and wealthy eccentrics!

238.366 - 2016 project and disassembly and reassembly

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

disassembly and reassembly

I had a very generous grandfather.  I had another one too, but it was the very generous one who sent us all those grade-appropriate American school books a year or two before they were appropriate while we were in Brasil.  funny, I never thought about how odd it was for me to survive childhood speaking Portuguese and reading English.  but I did.  and then we came to this country - or as I usually say, we were dumped here -and I read in the same language that I tried to learn how to speak.  but I have gotten off-topic.  please forgive me.  my very generous grandfather also kept me supplied with things that almost worked.  that is, they were slightly broken.  he trusted my curiosity to figure out what "worked" was supposed to look like, then to take the item apart, fix it, and put it back together again.  I don't know that he did that on purpose, but I think he did.  in any case, I grew up taking things apart and putting them back together.  not just things my grandfather sent me - which would have been fine if they never worked again - but things around the house that interested me and I could scurry off with.  I lucked out.  I never took something apart that I couldn't put back together again.  so I learned how things worked!  when we got back to this country and my bicycle broke, I knew how to take the bicycle apart, fix it, and put it back together, except I didn't have the part that needed replacing.  when I got a job that paid me real money - my paper route - that problem was solved.  when I got to college and bought a car and didn't like the damned Hydramatic transmission it had, I was again lucky.  I told a friend what I was about to do, and he told me I was about to kill myself.  oh.  so, following his instructions, I put the car up on concrete blocks, way up, so I had room enough to crawl around under it, that kind of up.  I also followed his instructions and put the concrete blocks crosswise to the way I'd've put them, so they gave me side to side support as well as height support.  that way, when someone walked up and leaned on the car while I worked on it - and of course someone would, the whole thing didn't come crashing down and turn me into a pudding.  then, still following instructions - can you believe it?  an eighteen-year-old boy following instructions? - I rented the kind of jack that cradled the Hydramatic transmission, took the weight of it off the bolts that connected it to the engine, broke them free and unscrewed them, disconnected the engine from the driveshaft, and let the transmission down far enough that I could roll it out from under the car.  when I started that project, I had no idea what all was involved.  but the idea of it was simple:  remove the damned Hydramatic transmission and replace it with a standard transmission.  it's just that the doing of it was so much more complicated than anything I'd done before because of the size and weight of the transmission.  oh, and for the same reason, the doing of it offered so many more ways to kill me.  I'd never before taken apart anything that could fight back.  the standard transmission was so much smaller and lighter that I would have thought I didn't need the jack any more, but my friend convinced me that I didn't have enough hands to hold the transmission in place while I attached it to...wait!  where the hell was the clutch assembly?  Well, no one had mentioned a clutch assembly before, but now that he did, it made sense.  I had to have a clutch in order to shift gears, right?  which meant I had to install a clutch pedal.  which meant I had to replace the brake pedal that accompanied the Hydramatic transmission with a real brake pedal.  sigh.  how had my simple "replace" project gotten so complicated?  nevermind.  it had.  so I replaced the Hydramatic's brake pedal with a different brake pedal and added a clutch pedal, and made all the connections for the brakes to still work.  I attached the clutch assembly to the standard transmission, and made sure they were tight enough to hold the transmission in place, even when it was traveling at sixty miles an hour or so.  then I attached the two assemblies (clutch and transmission ) to the engine, and learned the rest of what I had to do.  sigh.  I replaced the driveshaft that worked for the Hydramatic with the driveshaft that worked with the standard.  fortunately I was able to find and buy an axle-and-differential assembly for the standard transmission to replace the axle-and-transmission assembly for the Hydramatic.  and I thought I hated that Hydramatic transmission before I started to replace it!  but I finally had the car mechanically reassembled.  I had the car towed to a mechanic to get all the lubrication and fluids replaced.  he asked me what in the hell I had done, then just about died laughing as I told him.  he lubed the car in half a dozen different ways, and I drove it away, and drove it for about three years.  my boss at the time bought the car so his daughter could drive it to school, and it worked for her til she decided she really needed a modern car.  I never heard about it after that.  but that wasn't the end of my disassembling and reassembling, just the climax.  damn, I learned a lot through the years, disassembling and reassembling!  and, given that I worked with engineers for most of my career, it was a good thing.  back in those days.  and yes I still grin, smile, or laugh about what I had to learn, and how, during a lifetime of disassembling and reassembling.  thank you, Granddaddy.

237.366 - 2016 project and guns

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

guns

oh geez!  oh yes!  oh guns!  let me take you way back to the 50s.  just pretend, not for real.  I would never take anyone back to the 50s for real.  before the civil rights movement?  before the women's rights movement?  nunh-unh.  bad times!  but the times when I was new in this country and needed my own gun.  and worked and worked and worked and worked and saved and saved and saved and saved and talked and talked and talked and talked and finally bought them.  two.  a .32 revolver and a .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle.  oh man!  I was ready for the world!  we didn't have shooting ranges in Albuquerque back then, or I didn't know about them.  they probably would have been too social anyway.  but I could get myself out to apparently public land - it wasn't fenced - so far from houses that I thought shooting a gun was safe out there.  no one ever told me no, so it must have been true.  I used that reasoning a lot back in those days.  I shot the rifle and shot the rifle and shot the rifle until I was pretty good.  I never convinced myself I was a sharpshooter, but I liked that I could hit my target so much more often than miss it.  after I got my .32, I did the same. I took it out into what I thought was the wilderness and shot it until I hit the target way more often than I didn't.  I knew that was important.  and I took care of those guns.  I cleaned them and oiled them after every shooting - that doesn't mean after every shot fired, that means after every morning or afternoon of shooting.  I still remember the shaky feeling of taking my rifle apart the first time, and how damned glad I was when everything went back together right, and that the rifle still worked when I put it back together.  I was just as shaky taking my revolver apart the first time and putting it back together, but I had to know how it worked!  I was just fascinated by the simple mechanics of each of them!  years later when I had to take a BSA engine apart and put it back together, I did it without the shakiness,  I'd already disassembled and reassembled my guns lots of times.  (oh!  a BSA - Birmingham Small Arms - was a British motorcycle way back in the early 70s.)  those were the old days for me.  I now have a Ruger 9mm, and for a long while I did go to the shooting range to shoot it.  lately my feet hurt too badly for me to do that.  but I still have the gun, still get it out and look at it.  I'm sure I'll go back to the range and shoot it again if or when my feet stop being an excuse for sitting around waiting for them to stop hurting.  I couldn't tell you why I need a gun or love a gun, but I sure do.

236.366 - 2016 project and calendars

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

calendars

ooooo!  calendars!  like the Mayan calendar that we've already overrun!  or the Aztec calendars, one with 365 days and one with 280 days per year.  the perhaps oldest calendar, in Scotland, twelve pits and an arc.  when I was little, I understood that someone or some group in the Middle East had developed a calendar and everyone used it, then the Egyptians came along with a better calendar and so on.  this appears to have been an oversimplification or just a misunderstanding.  apparently the early Middle East had as many calendars as cities.  but anyway, calendars.  they are our way to bring the kind of orderliness we see in the night sky into human affairs, except humans don't have much orderliness, and it turns out the skies won't follow anything we have devised so far.  darn those old stars and planets and the moon anyway!  but through convolutions of astronomers and emperors and popes, we arrived at a pretty good compromise, such that the calendar corresponds to the seasons fairly well, year after year.  whew.  but those weren't the calendars I really meant, they're the background for the calendars some of us use today, the ones on our computers or smart phones.  they are so handy!  you don't want to do the laundry today?  put it off til tomorrow.  the calendar lets you, even helps you.  on mine, I just drag an event to the right and Google does the rest.  if I have a poetry event scheduled for Saturday afternoon and need to move it to Tuesday night, it's a little more work but not much.  they are so damned convenient!  I can schedule an event for every Monday of every week, or the third Wednesday of every month, or the last Sunday of every month.  I can look up the solstices and the equinoxes.  I can check on the phase of the moon or whether we have a leap-second coming.  an extension will show me what the night sky would look like if I could just see it.  computer calendars are the best!  if you don't have a computer yet, you should get one just to be dazzled by what your calendar can do!  happy scheduling!

235.366 - 2016 project and undersleeping

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

undersleeping

we all know about oversleeping, right?  you wake up, happily check your alarm clock, and panic, trying to get out of the covers that suddenly wrap you as if you were treasure.  you should be at work!  or wherever.  there may be something to appreciate about that experience, but I'm apparently proof against it.  no, what I want to talk about is its faux twin, some would say its opposite.  you wake up, happily check your alarm clock, and equally happily sit up and shut off the alarm.  you woke three minutes early, or five, or seven.  early enough that you have time to stretch and smile before you plunge into the day's needs.  undersleeping!  it's wonderful.  it's even wonderfler when it becomes what you expect - trust me, you still wake up and smile, you're still glad of that extra three or five or seven minutes.  it feels like you've added them to your lifetime.  no, you've just awakened a little early, avoided being scared out of sleep (that's why we call it an alarm), and started your day on your own.  happy day!  and happy undersleeping!  may you have many more!

234.366 - 2016 project and Mother Teresa

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Mother Teresa

I am not a religious person, or I think I'm not.  that is, mostly I think I'm not, and once in a while I notice how many of my poems have titles that derive from religious times or events or conditions.  who gave them those titles?  why, I did!  hm.  but let's go with my normal myth:  I'm not a religious person.  and some of my heroes are religious persons.  weird.  who?  Buddha.  Gandhi.  Mother Teresa.  she wasn't born Mother Teresa, of course.  like the rest of us, she wasn't born anything.  her parents named her Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu and she grew up in Macedonia, a country in the Balkans.  she became Sister Mary Teresa in Ireland when she was eighteen.  she dedicated her life to charity, and meant that in the best way.  she served people.  but she was ferocious about it too.  somehow she wound up in the Vatican, according to lore I learned, and was so critical of the then-Pope that he imprisoned her for several years, then freed her and banished her to India.  wow!  it was her life calling.  her order of nuns established a school in the slums of Calcutta, a home for the dying destitute, a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic, and a string of mobile health clinics.  as I understand it, she lived to be 87, and was busy to the end caring for other people.  of course she collected probably apocryphal stories around her.  allegedly a woman flew from America to work with her, met her, and Mother Teresa said, "Well?  There's a rag, there's a bucket of soapy water, there's a couple of dozen tables that need to be scrubbed.  What are you waiting for?"  yeah, that kind of serving!  I don't remember the stories of her compassion, but they were the ones which first made me wary of Mother Teresa.  I'm a sucker for compassion.  fortunately it's not a part of religions as I know them, so I remain safe.  but thank you, Mother Teresa, for being the kind of human being we can all be proud of and grateful for.

233.366 - 2016 project and these appreciations

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

these appreciations

there are some mornings when I wake up and I don't appreciate nuthin!  not even having woken up!  but even on those mornings, one of the things I have to face is "what am I going to appreciate today?"  except on those mornings the question shows up as "what in hell am I going to appreciate today?"  on those mornings I scowl around into the darkness and have to dig up a flashlight and look through the debris of my life until I come upon something that makes me grin, or smile, or even laugh!  "oh!" I say, and get started.  and pretty soon the day isn't so dark after all, and I've had to grin or smile or laugh at my own work,  and I've had to think that my readers - if I have readers - probably are gonna grin or smile or laugh there too.  the world really is not so dark, in fact I can see daylight, kids riding bicycles, or running around.  there's even a sunflower or two.  damn!  this is sorta a pretty good world!  yeah, I appreciate these appreciations.

232.366 - 2016 project and RICE

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

RICE

in case you don't recognize it, RICE is an acronym for dealing with injuries to the feet and legs.  Rest - keep the legs still and quiet; give them time to recover.  Ice - wrap the injured part in ice, cool it down, help prevent inflammation.  Compress - wrap the injured part in an elastic bandage; do not tighten, just enough to resist swelling, or, if swollen already, to encourage the swelling to depart.  Elevate - prop the lower legs up so they remain higher than the heart; this supports the calf muscles in their function of getting blood back to the heart.  I feel very lucky that my podiatrist and my physical therapist only prescribed RE, rest and elevation.  I have had plenty of ice and compression, and am an unfan.  but if you're ever dealing with an emergency event in which you need to help people with foot, ankle, or leg injuries, remember RICE, and be grateful to whomever cooked it up.

231.366 - 2016 project and quiet

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

quiet

imagine me grinning at you.  no, I haven't found some new magical drug.  or some way to turn off Los Angeles.  as well as I can tell, Los Angeles still sounds like whizzing cars, sirens, and helicopters at any time of the day.  well no, three times a day, for an hour or two, the whizzing cars are replaced by creeping cars and horns and hollers.  so where's the quiet?  in my mind.  no, I can't tell you how I got it, but I attribute it to years of practice with what I learned from Landmark.  giving up blame and fault and wrong as well as I have.  giving up this-isn't-it and why-me? and this-isn't-fair as well as I have.  a lot of those voices in my head have shut up.  their silence is wonderful.  I can now hear sounds I appreciate, like how-goddam-much-fun-it-was-to-program-computers!  like what-a-pleasure-it-is-to-watch-a-woman-walk.  or even this-author-knows-how-to-write-English!  these voices are much quieter and not nearly so upset.  oh, don't worry, I still get fits of "wrong!  wrong!  wrong!"  that is, I still live in our world.  I still get the news.  I still feel for my fellow citizens of the world.  but mostly I don't live in that state of "wrong!  wrong!  wrong!" any more, I just visit it from time to time to remind myself of how I useta live..  being able to read part of a book while only reading part of a book is such a pleasure!  and when I put it down, the world is still here, ready for me to get upset about.  but I cherish those intervals of quiet, not just reading, but any of the times I work on something and just work on that something, as if I'd managed to close the door on all those upset voices for a while.  nice!

230.366 - 2016 project and rewards

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

rewards

rewards play a strange part in our lives, don't they?  we work hard to win one.  some of us never do.  imagine that, you work your whole life for a reward, hell any reward, and in the end you have a lifetime of cold gruel to show Death when he comes for you.  but most of us do, win a reward or two, or win one more than once.  and what we learn is that to win the next reward, even if it is the same reward, is to work harder or longer or smarter or slyer.  whoever is in charge of rewards uses them to modify our behavior and to taunt and tantalize us, and to torment us.  rewards are never just a kindness, never just a candle-flame in a dark world.  but they work!  we do modify our behavior, we do strive harder, longer, smarter, and slyer.  rewards are employed to give us hope and despair both.  and the reward-granters don't really care which overwhelms us, they win either way.  oh, you mock, what about the golden boys whose life is one reward after another.  they are part of the game, there to show us how arbitrary it is.  some few of them bliss their lives away, scarcely aware that the reward-granters can take it all away at a whim.  some of them suddenly do lose the favor of the reward-granters, and become the butt of crude jokes as they do over and over what used to win them the rewards, and nothing shows up.  if you are very strong-willed, you can convince yourself that the world is really fair, and if you just do the right thing, see?  you do get the reward.  it's probably a happier way to live, and your odds of getting a reward are just as good if you believe that.  the rewards-granters don't care what you believe, so long as you keep playing the game.  and if you don't?  so what?  you don't get any rewards.  unless you do.  it's a lovely game!

229.366 - 2016 project and spoken English

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

spoken English

"Pliss," says one of my heroines, "I not so well spik Ingliss."  yeah.  me too.  when I was dumped into this country, I had spoken Ingliss all my life.  hah!  no.  I had read textbooks and histories for boys and story books all my life, but I spoke Portuguese like a Brasilian child, or thought I did.  the Ingliss I spoke was to think of what I wanted to say but in Brasilian, then translate that word for word into written English, but pronounce it with a Recife-an accent.  whew.  kids who spoke Spanish could make out what I meant.  if I remember correctly, it took intense effort, listening and speaking, correcting my pronunciation again and again, for three years to learn to speak English more or less like an American.  how intense?  it cost me my Portuguese.  when I could relax about English, I discovered I had no Portuguese to speak!  I could listen and catch some words.  I could "read" and sound out the words and sorta get the gist of what I "read", but basically Portuguese was gone.  it's embarrassing.  (real people just learn a second language.)  but I had discovered something that most people seemed not to know.  we who speak and write English have two languages.  written English is a beautiful language full of rules, rules, rules, each of which is meant to be broken, but only in certain permitted ways.  it's an ideal language for a little boy who taught himself how to take apart and reassemble mechanical devices.  spoken English is an anarchist's friend.  it ain't got no rules hardly, and ain't nobody can tell you the rules it's got.  no, I don't mean no dialeck.  I mean what Murkins speak when they talk.  you know, when they're all tied up in a conversation, and they leave no stone unturned getting to the bottom of what's at hand.  a good friend who likes my stories quietly told me that no one speaks like my characters, who speak written English.  he's right, but I don't know how to fix that.  I can't think in spoken English.  but I can sure admire it when someone does it well.  and I do.

228.366 - 2016 project and fingernail painting

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

fingernail painting

when I was a child, I thought that fingernail painting  meant a choice like "rose?  red?  or ruby?"  heck, if I had listened to my mother and her....  (how odd to remember suddenly that when I was a child, my mother had no friends.  or rather she had one, who lived in Galveston, which wasn't even in Brasil!)  acquaintances then, or colleagues maybe, the American women she spoke to in northeastern Brasil.  (crimeny!  what a lonely life she had!)  for them, the choice was among the clear fingernail paints.  I remember being struck by what an odd concept that was, clear paint.  (and that it was even odder to live in a world in which it was sinful not to paint your nails, but it was also sinful to paint them any color but clear.)  there were no little girls I knew except my sister, but I knew other little girls existed.  I had seen them in church, and at the open air market I thought was downtown.  they wore painted fingernails, mostly shades of red.  (at some time I must've recognized that not only was my father crazy, but all the American men around him were as crazy as he was!  did that mean I had to grow up and become a crazy man?  maybe not!  maybe I could stay in Brasil and grow up to be a Brasilian man.  they didn't seem to be as crazy.)  but anyway, fingernail painting!  the National Geographic must've done an article about it, because I became aware that most women anywhere in the world painted their nails!  and almost none of them painted their nails clear.  and women had been painting their nails as far back as in Egypt!  (as far as I knew when I was a child, Egypt had existed thousands of years before and then gone away.  I was vaguely aware of Africa, but I don't think it ever occurred to me that history had happened in Africa too.)  much later, much much later, when I was no longer a child, and was trying really hard to become a man (after all, I was married, had a child, and owed a ton of money for a house and a car), I became vaguely aware of a group called hippies, and knew maybe a dozen young women who sorta wanted to be hippies, but liked living in houses and driving places in cars.  one or maybe two of those young women made me aware that women painted their toenails too!  (imagine me doing a backwards somersault in my chair.)  but even more amazing, they painted their fingernails in more than one color!  and there were no rules!  a girl could paint her fingernails - and her toenails! - each a different color.  or she could paint each of her fingernails in more than one color!  much much much later, long after the hippies had joined Egypt (they no longer existed), another young woman showed me that women could not only paint their fingernails in more than one color, but could add painting a daisy, or a Scottie dog's head, or a yin-yang symbol.  (imagine a double backwards somersault and a cartwheel in that same chair.)  not only were there no rules, but a woman could paint anything she had the imagination, patience, and skill to paint on her nails.  if I remember correctly, she had painted about a third of a face onto half of one of her nails, so she could paint a Dali mustache on that face.  (triple backwards somersault, but I didn't stick the landing)  now she told me, and I don't know how to verify or unverify what she said, that painting one's nails like that goes back to early China, and that they may have learned it from aristocratic women in Africa back before Europeans even knew there was an Africa!  I don't really know its history, but surely you can see that I do appreciate fingernail painting.

227.366 - 2016 project and fingernail clippers

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

fingernail clippers

oops!  did I say something uncouth?  I had a manager once who about came unglued when I mentioned fingernail clippers.  but they do deserve appreciation, at least the real ones do.  I think most fingernail clippers are made from an amalgam of pot metal and used bubblegum.  they hold an edge just about long enough for you to get them home.  they bend, they twist, they fall apart.  they sometimes even clip fingernails but never where you meant.  ordinary fingernail clippers are awful.  but good ones, steel ones, hold an edge until you lose them.  by accident, of course, not just because you want some new ones.  they clip where you intend, or at least where you place them.  you can get good clean edges, just like a professional manicurist would.  you can even get curves on those edges that resemble what a professional does.  no, even the best fingernail clippers don't really get you professionally cut nails, but they do damned well, they do as well as their amateur wielder can do.

226.366 - 2016 project and movies

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

movies

oh come on, Wyatt!  really?  all movies?  oh yes!  movies!  think of any movie by Akira Kurosawa!  it's enough to make you salaam toward the west, toward Japan.  goddam, that man knew how to tell a story with pictures, with music, with conversation, with silence!  goddam!  think of a movie by Clint Eastwood.  similar goddams!  you can probably think of two or three other masters who know how to construct a movie that sweeps you into catharsis by the end.  or that leaves you wrung out by the end.  Hitchcock for instance.  movies are some of the greatest story-making lessons ever!  even movies that make you laugh when the director meant you to weep - "Gone With the Wind" did that for me - are a lesson in story-making:  what is it about that movie that you want never to do in your own stories?  and many movies are fun just for the spectacle and flash, like Cecil B. DeMille movies.  probably I never want to write a story like one of his movies, but I hope they were as much fun to make as they are to watch!  damn!  now, what actually got me thinking about movies and appreciating movies was after-school television back in the 50s.  most of them had started as shorts for Saturday matinees.  damn they were horrible!  they set the bar for story-making so low that a horse couldn't trip over it, so low that no rattlesnake would be impeded.  despite that, most of them did wind you up in tension, then spin you like a top with the ending.  oh, thank goodness!  the world is gonna work out anyway!  if I could figure out how they did that, you know I'd incorporate it in my own stories!  instead, I'll just grudgingly admire them, and be grateful for Kurosawa and Eastwood.

225.366 - 2016 project and the mystery guests in my mind

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the mystery guests in my mind

suppose you had asked me about the sources of my stories and poems and I had invited you in.  you step in warily, and it takes you a moment or two for your eyes and ears and nose, your tongue and your skin to adjust.  as soon as they do, you recognize that we have stopped after a daylong ride - your muscles ache with the unaccustomed feeling of a horse between your legs, and the small of your back is a little sore from working with the horse's walking most of the day.  nearby, a shallow river runs, providing a comforting background noise.  over to the right at the edge of the campsite, Cook has set up the chuckwagon and the cookstove.  he has started preparing us steaks and potatoes.  a boy and a girl around ten or eleven are dancing around him and the cookstove asking questions we can't hear, but then we can't hear his answers either.  the wranglers have taken our horses, removed their gear from them, and are letting groups of them exercise in the corral before they feed and water them.  most of us have seated ourselves on camp stools in singles or clusters around the edge of the campsite, although some have retreated into the shadows under the trees.  scattered among the folk or in clusters, you recognize poets you know and men and women you know are poets even if you don't recognize them.  some of the poets are talking to each other, some of them are ignoring the rest of us, and a few mingle.  you know, although you don't remember quite how, that each person who wants it has a drink, coffee, cold water, hot water (since I can't drink coffee), beer, whiskey, Irish whiskey, even a couple of glasses of champagne.  and then you begin to notice the mystery guests.  an elegant young woman in a nineteenth century riding dress drifts among us, talking to no one, or at most a few words and a disparaging smile.  her hair is done up under a hat with a veil, not a hair straggles, not one.  she wears gloves that come up halfway to her elbows.  you don't know her, because I don't.  no matter how many days we ride together, I haven't spoken to her yet.  a nineteenth century sailor looks a little askance at us, at you and me, I mean.  an eighteenth century pirate with a parrot wastes several attempts to get the elegant young woman to talk, then shrugs and finds someone else to annoy.  the pirate carries a scimitar, I think.  I haven't asked.  a loudmouthed, raucous salesman has started a dice game.  I hope he recognizes that most of the guests are armed.  an early twentieth century London middle class man probably wonders how he found himself among us.  he sometimes reads from a small book, which could be a poetry book.  Lauren Bacall, or a doppelganger, sits apart, almost in the shadows, and observes the rest of us.    a small smile plays on her face.  a cowboy from the Old West watches her for a while, then tries his luck in the dice game instead.  a man with a 1950s haircut wears jeans and a plaid Western shirt.  a circle of thirty-ish-year-old women have set up their own campfire.  they talk animatedly but we can barely hear them.  a boy stands by the corral and watches the horses.  a young man from today looks lost, talks to no one.  a soldier watches us all alertly.  I think he's exasperated to be without his body armor.  a young woman from the 60s or 70s stays in the shadows.  she watches the rest of us suspiciously, I think.  you probably have half a dozen left to catalog when Cook hollers "Supper" and everyone lines up except the boy and the girl who were asking him questions.  they become his auxiliary servers.  we notice that different people in the line require different amounts of personal space, that the elegant young woman still speaks to no one. that the lost young man has tried conversation with three different young women.  no one rebuffs him exactly, but no conversation ensues.  Cook must've expected you, the number of steaks comes out exactly right.  as we eat you study the characters and ask, "do they ever talk to you?"  most of them, eventually, so far.  except the elegant young lady, she only smiles, and not very often.

224.366 - 2016 project and desperadoes

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

desperadoes

one of the things that being dumped in this country when I was twelve brought me was after-school television:  Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Wild Bill Hickok, Hopalong Cassidy.  amazing stuff.  the good guys had sixguns that never ran out of bullets.  they could shoot and shoot and shoot all day and never need to reload.  bad guys had sixguns that ran out, but sometimes not until after twenty shots or so.  good guys could ride, run, or walk, dodging between bullets.  bad guys caught in a crossfire got shot.  some deadly wounds aren't, mostly if the good guy gets one.  a hug and a kiss are potent medicine.  if you force a girl to kiss you, she will love you forever.  real good guys don't fall in love.  I cain't help it.  I noticed these things.  I thought the good guys were stupid and the bad guys were stupider.  how come they played by those rules?  didn't they have anything to say about the rules?  but that was in St. Louis.  Perryton and Clovis didn't have television.  can you imagine?  but we moved to Albuquerque and it had after school television, and it was just as stupid.  and then I discovered Westerns!  I mean books you could read, books that lasted longer than half an hour, longer than an hour even, some of them longer than two hours.  if you picked the right ones, sixguns shot six bullets.  period.  the bad guys were a lot more real.  the good guys had to do a lot more than just be so everlasting good.  they had to outthink the bad guys, sometimes without much to go on.  but in the end, they always did, so it was just a better kind of foolishness.  then Sergio Leone came along and saved the Western for me.  and Clint Eastwood proved to be such an adept student.  and Linda Ronstadt sang that achingly beautiful song.  (okay, she covered an Eagles song, but I didn't know that.)  "yes!" I thought while she sang it, but around five minutes later I would recognize she only almost had it.  what was a desperado?  a mighty strong man.  prison couldn't break him  the desert couldn't stop him.  the law couldn't stop him.  somehow he made it through whatever the world threw in his way, and he imposed his will on the world.  not like the mighty corporationist in Ayn Rand, but like Tom Joad meant to be in _Grapes of Wrath_.  a man determined to get justice despite what's stacked against him.  (okay, ladies, there are probably women desperadoes too, and they have to be much cleverer, since they have to get their way walking backwards in high heels.  I acknowledge that, but it was the guys who fueled my dreams.)  I especially liked the ones who got away with it when they finished the task.  Shane.  Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.  the gunfighter in "Unforgiven".  I probably have never examined my fascination with them very much mainly because I can't imagine my taking on a suicide task with enough conviction to stay alive til I accomplished it.  but I like the idea.  especially if he gets to ride away in the end,  with the girl.

223.366 - 2016 project and a .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

a .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle

I was thirteen.  technically I may have been fourteen, but let's say I was thirteen.  crimeney, we were in Albuquerque so I may have been fifteen, but in so many ways, I was thirteen.  sad.  and I was a city kid.  which meant I was gun-stupid.  had I been a rural kid, I might have grown up around guns, shot guns since I was nine, received my own gun when I was twelve.  I probably wouldn't have cared about guns except if you threatened to take mine away from me....  peace!  you didn't.  but if I'd been a rural kid, familiar and comfortable with guns, my eyes would have been green, I would have had a bass voice, and hell I might have had a cape that let me fly when I needed to.  in other words, who knows what set of circumstances might have collected on me if I had been a rural kid and grown up in this country.  but I didn't and I wasn't.  I had spent most of ten years in Brasil, been dumped on one aunt in this country, then dumped on a different aunt, one who happened to have time and love to spare, and made me understand "home" for a few days.  then my parents collected me and my sister and my brothers and took us to Clovis, New Mexico, then moved us to Albuquerque.  I wanted a gun, and when I had one, I wanted another.  I think I got the rifle first.  I think I had owned and cared for and shot the rifle for nearly a year before I campaigned for and won and got my revolver, a .32 six gun that looked like and was a lady's gun, but I could afford it at a pawn shop.  but that's another story.  let's get back to my being technically fifteen but thirteen in so many ways, and gun-stupid like most city kids in this country.  but not gun-ignorant.  oh no!  I had read and read and read about guns.  yes, almost every adventure story I read had a gun in it, but I mean I had read about guns.  I knew about flintlocks and muzzle-loaders and single-shot rifles.  I may have known about cap-and-ball revolvers.  that is, I had read about them, and memorized selective facts from my reading.  I was still gun-stupid.  and what I wanted, as you may have guessed, was a carbine, but I had worked and worked and saved and saved, and what I could afford wasn't much.  oh god, I must've wanted that gun!  everything about it was a compromise!  you see, in some ways, I'm a real reactionary.  I never have liked fuzzy math, I never have liked fuzzy logic, but about guns, damn!  I'm not quite ready to go back to flintlocks, but I see no need for civilians to have Tommy guns.  You probably don't know what a Tommy gun is, but it's a fully automatic short-barreled rifle with a circular magazine.  it was wonderful for comic books and the FBI, but became a throw-away when people invented modern automatic rifles.  I didn't want an automatic rifle, and I don't think they were available to civilians on the white market anyway.  I didn't want a bolt-action either, so I convinced myself that the compromise was a semi-automatic.   that means you load the rifle, pop the first shell into the chamber, then shoot one bullet at a time, but without having to re-chamber a shell, until the magazine is empty.  it would do.  (remember:  I really wanted a carbine but couldn't afford one.)  I wanted a real gun, a .30-06 or a .30-30, but I couldn't afford one.  and I knew a boy's beginner gun was usually a .22.  Okay, but if I was going to have a semi-automatic, it needed to be a .22 long rifle - the gun needed the extra power to kick back the action and chamber a new shell.  so there you were.  I bought what I could afford, and I took care of it meticulously.  I shot it and shot it and shot it through high school and college, but then I got involved with spacecraft and didn't have time for guns for a while.  and I didn't need them either.  but damn, I've never lost my appreciation for them.  as much as that .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle wasn't what I wanted, I treasure my memories of it.  can still feel how it felt in my hands, against my shoulder.  It was a kid's gun, but a good one.  especially for someone trying to survive thirteen and maybe even get a little older.

222.366 - 2016 project and carbines

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

carbines

a horse-mounted rifle.  a Winchester 94.  a short rifle.  when I was little and some parts of the world were almost too wonderful to stand, someone showed me a carbine, I think it was a Winchester 94, even let me touch it.  whoever it was explained to me that it was a very old weapon, maybe eight times as old as I was, so we couldn't play with it, and certainly not in the house.  he told me that it was a rifle, well, sort of a rifle, and it had been made to be used on horseback, maybe even from a running horse.  oooo!  I asked if he could show me.  he asked if I could already ride.  "of course!" I said.  hell I could do anything if it let me shoot that gun!  he didn't laugh at me, so it may have been my granddaddy, my mother's father, my good grandfather, I called him.  he explained that we didn't have a horse, or a safe place for one to run, and besides that gun was worth more than him and me and the horse together, so we probably shouldn't shoot it at all.  so that's how I grew up with carbines having a very special place in my imagination.  a carbine was worth more than me and my granddaddy and a horse!  it was almost unimaginable.  when I saved enough to buy a .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle, I asked how much more a carbine would cost.  the man in the gun store told me - I was thirteen or fourteen - and I nearly swooned.  yep, I'd be saving until after high school to get a carbine!  it was still worth more than me and a horse!  (I wasn't sure anything was worth more than my granddaddy by then, and had a very unreal idea of the cost of a horse.)  damn!  I settled for the rifle and loved the rifle anyway.  but the carbine!  if you ever see me with my own carbine, you'll know I think I've made it.  heaven doesn't offer me anything as enticing.

221.366 - 2016 project and storks

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

storks

as well as I know, I have seen a stork or a set of storks one, two, maybe five times in my life.  I'm pretty sure that I first heard that storks brought babies.  if I remember correctly, I listened disbelievingly as the lady told me that, then she smiled and winked, and I knew that was one of those things grownups told children.  hmpf.  I think I looked up storks in _The Book of Knowledge_ and found a bunch of words I'd have to ask my granddaddy about, but I found pictures too.  I remember studying those pictures and wondering why grownups made up such ridiculous stories.  I must've pestered my granddaddy something fierce, since one day he packed up me and my sister and brother into his car and took us to a huge enclosed space that protected the birds from humans with bars, wire mesh, and barbed wire.  we're a tough bunch to keep out.  inside, storks, flamingos, and other birds waded and ate, and whatever else beautiful birds do while humans gawk at them.  still if I remember correctly, he took us through an industrial area, and pointed out a bunch of sticks and straw on top of a chimney and told us that was a stork's nest.  I didn't know whether he kidded me or not,  He also told me - us - that in Holland, people considered it good luck when a stork built a nest at the top of their chimney.  I later read that in a book that had no reason to support one of my granddaddy's yarns, so it may be true.  in some other book, I read that storks led children who were lost in the forest back to their home towns.  I had a tough time with that one.  in forests where I had been there was no sky, or almost no sky.  where in the hell did the kids see the storks?  or the storks see the kids?    sometime I learned that storks fled to Egypt for the winter, where they were considered sacred, then in the spring flew back to all of Europe.  Trying to confirm that later, I could only confirm the reappearance in Europe.  but the collection of all this lore is that somehow, storks became important to humans, and we talk about them, make up stories about them, hold superstitions about them.  so welcome, storks, to my house of appreciations.  enjoy your stay.

220.366 - 2016 project and hope

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

hope

aiee!  I do not like my choice.  first let's go back and consider "appreciate".  yep,  Google says "recognize the full worth of" and "understand fully, recognize the full implications of".  Google does not say "to admire" or "to fawn over".  good, because hope has an ambiguous place for me.  remember the story of Pandora's box?  the gods gave her a box and told her she must never ever open it.  right.  it's like when your mother tells you not to think of elephants.  what is the one thing you can't do while you "don't think of elephants"?  as the gods knew she would, Pandora opened the box.  and all the things the gods wanted a patsy for, all the things that God wanted to blame on the Devil, flew out of the box.  flies did, mosquitoes, gnats, chiggers did, hangovers, mental imbalances did, polio, black plague, cancer, tuberculosis, gangrene, STDs did, bed sores, bed bugs, and on and on and on.  and Pandora quick slammed the box shut, but it was too late.  well, it was almost too late.  from inside the newly re-closed box a sweet voice pled, "wait!  let me out!  let me out!"  the voice was so enticing that Pandora tried to peek into the box, but as soon as she opened the box at all, hope slithered out and flowed into the world.  leaving us to wonder whether hope is the last and worst of the afflictions the gods granted man, or the alleviator they sent to make up for all the other afflictions they devised for man.  hope keeps us drinking from the same well than made us sick.  hope declares war.  hope re-elects politicians.  hope keeps us living in pain while the medicine man experiments toward a cure.  hope chases a puppy into traffic.  hope remarries.  hope buys again from the same corporation.  hope joins another march.  on the other hand, hope gets women the right to vote.  hope gets a patient out of a mental institution.  hope sometimes wins the battle against alcoholism.  hope keeps an artist learning his or her craft.  hope sends us back into battle.  hope gets college degrees.  hope asks for a raise, or gets a different job.  if anything ever sticks it to the man, hope will have driven the bayonet.  hope is a gift of perfume and sweetness and softness, but a gift with razor-sharp edges.

219.366 - 2016 project and logic

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

logic

of course I was a fan of Mr. Spock!  at last!  someone on television who thought more or less like I do, who got just as stumped by what people do instead.  but Spock was better than that!  he had aphorisms!  some caught the beauty or the weirdness of logic, some caught his admiration for humans - he'd spent most of his life among us, but after he'd fully absorbed his own civilization.  yes!  Roddenberry imagined a whole civilization of people like Spock, only who not-quite-shunned humans because humans thought so messily.  yes!  I could get it!  and it wasn't just Spock!  I loved mathematics for its logic.  I loved physics, chemistry, and biology for seeming to do the same thing - I was pretty sure physics did, because I studied it.  and whenever I read chemistry from a chemist or biology from a biologist it sounded like logic to me.  (if a reporter helped, the logic vanished, but that made sense to me also.)  as far as I can tell, humans think with something like makes-sense.  it starts with no facts, and goes from anywhere one posits to anywhere one wants to go, as the day follows the night, or led step by step by I-wanna.  don't trust me on this.  I have not made a study of this, and no one else has either that I know about.  I've just listened to people explain, shuddered and slipped back onto my planet, where data and logic furnish the path of light through a world of chaos and darkness.  as far as I know, data and logic always lead to truth, even though truth may not be anything you'd want.  as far as I can tell, human thinking can include logic - after all, mathematicians are human, they're just peculiar humans - but logic doesn't have much to do with human thinking.  a friend of mine insists that two plus two equals four.  I seldom understand what that means apropos to a stolen bicycle, for instance, but I also know that anyone who's ever used a checkbook knows that two plus two equals four is just too limiting.  that's why we invented credit.  sometimes, like when you really, really, really want a rifle, you need to have two plus two equal fourteen hundred and seventy-four.  with credit, you make that happen, then for thirty-six months you complain about where in the hell did that extra charge of one hundred and fifty dollars come from, but you have your rifle.  you see why I trust logic, but admire human thinking.

218.366 - 2016 project and danger

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

danger

when I was seventeen going on eighteen, I was sure I was going to grow up and be a Marine officer.  I read everything I could about being a Marine officer, not just the recruitment papers - as I recall, there wasn't much of that, you were either already gung-ho or there was no use in selling you - but biographies of Marine officers, magazine articles about them, the Encyclopedia Britannica article about the Corps.  I think I not only knew who the Commandant was, but also the General who was responsible for the boot camps.  I think I knew what each of them had done during Korea and World War II.  I still remember reading that the life expectancy of a Marine lieutenant during a beach operation was twenty seconds, and I remember the smile I grew reading that.  yes, this was the life for me.  of course it wasn't!  don't be silly!  I was born with a heart murmur, a hole in the wall between my ventricles.  you couldn't drive a truck through it, but a good Marine might've been able to thread a Jeep through it.  no, I wasn't going to be a Marine officer.  but the point of this anecdote is that smile.  ever since I decided to defy whatever the doctors told my father, oh hell, maybe ever since I was born (remember the cave?), I've been a danger junky.  I was a boy!  I ran, I fell, I jumped, I climbed trees, I figured out how to get from tree to tree without climbing down, I stood at the edge of a cliff, I climbed cliffs.  as I told the physical therapist yesterday, I've done a lot of foolish things in my life.  the common thread is defying danger, defying being scared, and ultimately defying death.  so far death hasn't collected me.  I guess it can wait.  but the funny thing is, I don't regret a one of those defiances.  they're all related by that smile.  whatever I've done, this was the life for me.

217.366 - 2016 project and a sense of humor

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

a sense of humor

I so appreciate a sense of humor that laughs as if they are funny at my spontaneous jokes.

216.366 - 2016 project and typewriters ii

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

typewriters ii

so, when I was a little boy I discovered a very mechanical device that turned out to be a typewriter, a typewriter with my last name on it!  and I worked and worked to get my fingers strong enough to work the shiny buttons which turned out to be keys.  and that's when things got complicated.  I learned there was a ribbon in there.  took me another forever to figure out what the ribbon did.  and you had to feed in a sheet of paper whenever you wanted to use the typewriter.  feeding in a sheet of paper was easy, but you had to get it in just right.  if you didn't get the paper in just square to nothing you could see, then the typewriter would tear the paper up.  if you got the paper in but only almost nearly square to nothing you could see, the lines of letters the typewriter made lined up compared to each other but wound up cockeyed on the page.  when I finally learned the trick - no there still was nothing you could see to line up the paper with, but there was something you could feel.  when the paper was lined up right, it sorta pushed back at you evenly all the way across the bottom of the sheet.  whew!  then when I finally got paper to feed through correctly, it turned out there were rules.  you couldn't just type in endless rows of letters in any order you made up!  no!  you were supposed to type in words!  and only words.  and then it turned out you weren't just supposed to type in words, but you had to type in only words only in an order that made sense.  like when I wrote a letter to my granddaddy.  oh!  only when I wrote a letter to my granddaddy  I wrote big letters on a small page, so I only had to tell him the latest thing I did that it was okay for my parents to know I did, and tell him I loved him and I'd filled up the page.  with the typewriter, you used little bitty letters on a big page, so I had to tell him everything I'd done in a week or more, and make it sound like it was all stuff my parents could know about and I could tell my granddaddy not only how much I loved him but how much I loved the books he kept sending, and how goddamned glad I was that none of them were "Run, Dick, run" books any more!  geez!  writing a letter was hard work!  and it had so many rules!  no wonder grownups were crazy!  and then a funny thing happened.  I could finally use the typewriter, but I didn't have anything to use it for except my occasional letters to my granddaddy!  I felt kinda robbed.  it wasn't til I got to high school that I could really use it for essays and such.  and then another funny thing happened.  suddenly it was time to go to college, and I was told I was going to need my own typewriter to take to college with me where I'd use it to type gazillions of papers.  so I went to the typewriter store - yes, they still had typewriter stores in 1960 when I graduated from high school - expecting to find very mechanical devices in different sizes and maybe different colors.  no, unh-unh, nope.  sometime while I hadn't paid attention, everyone else had started using electric typewriters.  so I wound up with this little thing about a third the size of my old very mechanical device and it was hardly mechanical at all!  it sat there and growled at me all the time I used it.  but in a way, that was all right.  it turned out that grownups who had told me all about college were just as crazy as grownups had been all along.  I studied engineering, then I studied physics.  there were no gazillions of papers to typewrite.  I typewrote a couple of dozen essays for my English classes, then a few papers in classes like sociology and economics, but almost all my real work was done in math, and my typewriter was useless for math.  it was still useful for letters though.  especially business letters.  and another funny thing happened.  we started using computers.  I can't remember the last time I used a typewriter.

215.366 - 2016 project and typewriters

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

typewriters

once upon a time, I was a small boy, and my mother's room held a very mechanical device.  I had no idea what it did, but it had fancy painting - scrollwork and a name - on it.  it was black and had forty-leven shiny buttons on it, and, from my height, you could see that when you pushed down on one of those shiny buttons, thin pieces of metal under it moved down and forward.  when my mother used it, she pushed the shiny buttons way farther down than I could, and when she did, something snapped and something else popped!  wow!  I could hardly wait til I could use the very mechanical device too.  I had become impatient with "when you're older".  it took forever to get from three to four (years old), and seemed to take longer to get from four to five.  who the hell knew when "older" would happen?  but the very mechanical device was an example I could understand.  if I couldn't push the shiny buttons down far enough to get the snap and pop, then obviously I had to wait til I was older - and stronger.  so I waited and strongered, and one day it happened.  snap!  pop!  ooo!  I told my mother I was now old enough to use the very mechanical device.  grownups!  no, it turned out that every finger had to be able to push down on the shiny button far enough to get a snap-pop.  hmpf.  well since my index finger could, then my middle finger could, and my thumb could, but my lazy fingers were two years younger than the rest of my fingers.  I wanted to scream.  it took a lot of hidden practice - hidden practice was easy because my mother was often busy with the baby or with my little sister - but finally one day I could get a snap-pop with my ring finger - a dumb name if ever there was one.  I wouldn't have a ring until I was much, much, much older.  and some men never wore a ring at all.  why then, oh why, have a ring finger?  it didn't matter.  I could get a snap-pop with my ring finger on both hands!  oh those damned little fingers.  it did take forever before either one of them would get a snap-pop from the very mechanical device!  but both finally did.  I think I was a hundred and forty-two by then.  so I could finally start learning to use the very mechanical device, right?  of course not!  grownups are way slicker than that! - oh wait.  let me interrupt.  remember I told you that it had a name on it?  it did!  it had my name on it.  it said Underwood!  did that mean every child had to work like I did to use a very mechanical device that had his or her last name on it?  no, it meant a company named Underwood had made it.  no, the company had nothing to do with any Underwoods we were related to.  back in "the states", there were lots of Underwoods, and most of them had nothing to do with each other.  I was flabbergasted!  but still determined to use that damned device.  before I could though, I had to color on a very special map.  it showed the layout of the shiny buttons, which I must now call keys, even though they looked nothing at all like keys.  we called them keys because that was their name.  I sighed, "yes ma'am."  I had run into that argument before.  you couldn't win with grownups.  so now I had to color the map of keys with eight colors, one for each of my fingers.  what about my thumbs?  they didn't matter,  you didn't use your thumbs on the typewriter.  what was a typewriter?  it was what I called the very mechanical device.  damn!  it had a name!  oh, and I had to color the keys lightly.  no, not the real keys, the keys in the map.  I had to color them lightly so I could still see the symbol on the key after I colored it.  then I had to color a black circle around eight of the keys, and learn to call them the home keys,  they were where my fingers would wait to jump to some other key when I needed to.  then we had days and days - I used to claim months and months - of drills where my mother would say a word, and I would remember how to spell it, then push the right keys on the map in the right order with the right finger for each key.  finally I passed some test and I was ready to learn how to use the typewriter.  and you can see that it's going to take at least one more appreciation for me to get done with typewriters.  but you can also see how determined I was that I was going to learn to use that very mechanical device.  damn, I worked for that!

214.366 - 2016 project and fountain pens

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

fountain pens

in a good world, in a just world, you would only ever need three fountain pens.  your childhood fountain pen would facilitate your learning to use and to respect a fountain pen.  you would learn to write with it, to refill it, to keep the nib clean, to draw with it, to be expressive with it.  you would learn never to throw it against the wall, never to use it as a dart, and never to use it to decorate a girl's hair.  then you would be ready for your adolescent pen, your teenaged pen.  it has to be tougher because your feelings and emotions are so much more exaggerated.  if you were lucky, you would learn to clean it, to change nibs, to use different colored inks, to decorate the edges of your paper with drawings or abstractions that reflected your mood, or the season, or having driven away your girlfriend, your boyfriend, or some other significant friend.  and you would write and write and write, because you're a teenager and you have everso oh so much to say but nobody listens.  and then click.  you turn twenty, and about half of that shuts up.  but suddenly you're trying to act like a grownup, so much so that your still-teenager friends no longer trust you.  you need a new pen, a grownup pen, one that expresses your new maturity, your new responsibility, your new possibilities, your new appreciation of yourself and of others.  in a good world, in a just world, you would find such a pen when you're twenty and pass it down to a grandchild when you're done with writing, except it would probably be used up, and your grandchild would only treasure it for all it had been to you.  even in a real world, in which it takes so many more than three fountain pens to get through a lifetime, how wonderful that so many engineers, inventors, and craftspersons collaborated so you could have that magnificent device!  good writing!