Father′s Day

Packaging for The Vampire Tarot Photo source: Cult of Personality

Father’s Day is one of those quaint traditions that I never paid that much attention to. I know it was important to Dad, so I always make a point of calling him some time during the day. Other than that, it′s always been yet another way for Hallmark to make money. No biggie.

This year, Tubaboy and Beccano chipped in and bought me The Vampire Tarot. It’s really cool—well thought out and beautifully illustrated. I’ll try to do a more thorough review either here or on Tarot Obsession soon.

Other than that, yard work in the Texas sun. It wasn’t that bad. It still hasn’t hit a hundred degrees yet. And once it does, the grass won’t grow enough to worry about mowing that often.

More To Be Grateful For

Beccano in his brother’s dorm residence hall living-learning domicile

Last night Beccano told us that Junior Roundup—the day juniors at McNeil get their schedules and books—was this morning. Both he and Suna said that he had told us previously, and it had slipped all of our minds. So I got up early (for me) this morning to take him by school.

We had a nice talk on the way to school. About half way there, he said, “You know. You don’t have to go in with me. I’m just going to get my books. It shouldn’t take that long since I’m not getting a locker or anything. That’s what takes all the time.” So we planned put where and how I should pick him up when he was done.

I found a parking place in the lee of the PAC and started this blog about how proud I am of this young man. It was just a couple of years ago that he wouldn’t even ask a clerk at a game store about a game he really wanted. Now here he is going into a crowded room to deal with authority figures on his own—not wanting his peers to see him with a parental unit.

It also made me aware of how independent Trackgrease was and how I should have appreciated that more.

I am grateful to have had both of these fine young men in my life. I have learned so much from each of them that my paltry contributions to them are negligible in comparison. Mostly I am grateful to Trackgrease for surviving the vast number of parenting mistakes his mother and I made in raising him. I would do a much better job if I could have a do-over.

Mobile Blogging from here.

Life Is Hard But Good

OK. Suna blogged this one, too. But it’s such a nice picture. Photo by: Jon Montgomery

Well, I’m still not blogging with the consistency that I was earlier this year, but maybe that’s a good thing. Work is good, and it’s been taking most, if not all, of my writing energy lately. So I’ll keep this Grateful Monday short.

This week I’m grateful that our family economics are to the point where both Suna and I can start investing some of our energies outside the home. Tonight, Suna is leading a meeting at church. I cooked a nice sausage dinner—Suna and Beccano picked out the sausage yesterday—and had it ready when Suna got home.

Suna, the boys, and I sat down to dinner and conversation, something else to be grateful for. In spite of the dreadful manipulation of paranoid souls in which the Right continues to engage, I have some hope for the future. With Trackgrease, Tubaboy, and Beccano putting their energies into making the world a better place, how can we fail? Again.

I’m Back

I’m so glad to have this guy hang around for a little while longer.

I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a while—neither writing nor doing much in the way of reading. I’m sorry. It’s been a couple of months where life just got in the way. So I thought it appropriate to resume this endeavor with Grateful Monday.

I have so much to be grateful for, and so much has happened since 22 May. I hope to back-post some of what has happened, not that I think anyone is all that interested. I just have a thing for completeness.

So here’s what I am grateful for:

• Dad is alive and well. He is going to keep farming for at least another year and has decided to buy a new tractor. All of that has been in question at one time or another since May.
• Suna’s position at the company with which she has been contracting seems secure. They may even bring her on as a real employee.
• My contract at the Fruit Company will end about a month earlier because I have accepted an offer to work there (albeit in another department) as a real employee. I’m looking forward to getting back into tech support training and working with some old friends.
• TrackGrease seems to have gotten married. I don’t think I was officially invited, but I am happy for him. And I’m proud of him. I don’t think I tell him that enough. I know I don’t call enough.
• TubaBoy has been getting ready to start his undergraduate education at Southwestern.
• Beccano is getting ready for his junior year of high school. He continues to play guitar really well. Getting better all the time.

That’s the short version.

Memorial Day Weekend

Edwin Starr asked the first question in today’s menu roughly 40 years ago. We’ve been arguing this question for as long as there have been people, and it will probably be argued long after humans have gone extinct.Photo source: B&S Online

Once again, I am posting Food for Thought late—and for the same reason: job business. That’s a good thing.

Since this is Memorial Day weekend, I’ve been thinking about service and sacrifice lately. Not the happiest of thoughts, but sometimes necessary. The first question was written by modern thinker and soul singer Edwin Starr.

Appetizer: War: what is it good for?

In a perfect world, I would agree with Starr’s answer. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. It is occasionally necessary to fight, even to the death. It is not necessary anywhere near as often as we do it. War should be the diplomatic tool of last resort, not of first choice.

Soup: Whom do you honor on Memorial Day?

First, my son. Trackgrease volunteered to serve and stayed in the Reserves for eight years after he left active duty. My brother Edwin was a paratrooper during the Korean conflict. My brother Jim served in the Army during Viet Nam, luckily in Germany. My brother Bill, also served. My uncle Carol was in the Navy during WWII. My father tried to enlist but was turned away because he was unable to turn his wrist to the correct angle to “properly” hold a rifle—never mind that he could light a match with a bullet.

All of these survived their service.

Salad: Has there ever been a draft evader in your family?

My great grandfather came to the United States to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s army. Technically, I was a draft evader for 1o days. The law requiring us to register for the draft expired 10 days after my deadline for registration. A friend of mine went to register a couple of days before my deadline, and they just laughed at him for bothering. So I didn’t bother.

Entré: If so, do you support that decision?

Well, given the fact that I wouldn’t have been here if he had stayed in Germany, the self-serving answer is, “Of course I do!”

Dessert: Why do we continue to go to war?

The reasons for war are too numerous to list, but they always boil down to greed. Sometimes the greed is on both sides. Sometimes, only on one side.

I wish nations would follow the Taoist protocols, which have their parallels in most modern religions:

• Avoid rather than hurt.
• Hurt rather than maim.
• Maim rather than kill.
• Kill rather than be killed.

Grateful Monday

Trackgrease and Roxy came by to visit this weekend.

This weekend my son Trackgrease and his partner made it up to visit. Since they had said they were coming by a couple of times before, it was nice that they actually made it and stayed with us and went to church with us, too.

Trackgrease has been making a living singing, and I have always liked the sound of his voice when he sings. So it was no big surprise to hear him singing well at church. What did surprise me was that he even sang the out the children—neither the words nor music are easily findable in the hymnal.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised because he has mentioned that he might like to become UU minister. I don’t think he quite gets it that he has to finish a bachelor’s degree before he can enter the seminary, but that’s OK. Its a good goal. Suna and I would both like to take classes there, too. Just for the helluvit.

After church we went to South Congress. It was my idea. I wanted to do something nice for Suna, but I wasn’t prepared for the press of that many people. By the time we headed back north, my nerves were already shot, but I was trying to hold on. Then I made a wrong turn and got trapped in a parking lot where nobody moved and I couldn’t turn around to get back free. This set up a full-fledged panic attack. This couldn’t have helped Suna, who was already jangled from a series of stresses she has already blogged about. Sigh.

So I am grateful for Suna not freaking out when I had a panic attack. And I am grateful for one of the last things Trackgrease said to me before he went back home. He said he was glad that he could still come stay with me and feel like my son. So am I.

Spring Cleaning (of the Camera)

Beccano: just two years ago

Suna asked me to clean off the excess photos from the camera. Even with a 4GB card, we have to do that every couple of months.

Well, that’s never as easy as it sounds. First, I have to look at the pictures. Then I have to figure out what to do with them. Then I found out that Windows writes tags to the files to help search for them, so that meant I had to start looking at some of the older pictures.

One thing leads to another, and I found this shot of Beccano. I haven’t seen this little kid in a long time. He’s almost grown now.

Makes me wish there were more pictures of Trackgrease around. But we didn’t have digital cameras in those days, and we didn’t always remember to process the pictures we did take.

Does that mean I’m getting older, too? I hope not.

TrackGrease Contacted

Caption:

Photo by:

After playing phone tag for several weeks, I finally got to have a nice conversation with TrackGrease. He is working as a software tester at a company that makes games for the Wii, among other products. Since there is an undisclosed new product—luckily he and I both understand and honor NDAs—in the next few days, he has been in crunch mode, working in excess of 70 hours a week for the last few months.

He seems happy to have parted ways with the leather company. I think he’s finding out that there is more money to be made and more fun to be had in areas other than retail management. Granted, he’s contracting now—so he has no benefits—but there is an opportunity that his gig will become more permanent. At least working with the software engineers—he calls them “officers”—he’s learning that a degree can make the difference. He is planning to go back to school under the Hazelwood Act—a Texas law that covers all expenses for veterans who want an education. That is in addition to his GI benefits.

He and his SO are planning to marry in March, and he is going to try to make it here for the big day in November. He said he also wants to visit before then so that we can just hang out. That would be nice.

It is so wonderful to hear him being happy and planning for the future.

Ideopathy

Thanks, Trackgrease. I wish life could have been easier for you, but then you wouldn’t be who you are now. At least, you learned how to fight the ideopaths.

Beneath the complexity and idiopathy of every cancer lies a limited number of “mission critical” events that have propelled the tumour cell and its progeny into uncontrolled expansion and invasion.

—Evan & Vousden (2001)

I take today’s quotation from wordsmith.org’s word of the day. Wordsmith defines idiopathy as “A disease of unknown origin or one having no apparent cause.” From this entry, I looked for the word ideopathy, which I found in use but not on any of my favorite dictionary sites. It makes sense to define ideopathy as an idea or political movement that has become pathological. In this case, it fits the description of cancer that Evan and Vousden provide above.

Which leads to my decision not to vote in the Republican primary this year.

The other day, Suna got a recorded call from John McCain. In the recording, he promised to further the Bush administration’s attacks on the Constitution, fairness, and choice. He vowed to continue the war against science. While I realize McCain was probably trying to appeal to his rabid base, his (hopefully) disingenuous rhetoric convinced me that he is now owned by the ideocrats (read ideopaths) of the far right.

Perhaps Cthulu would be the lesser evil. Besides, he is the heir apparent to the Republican nomination. Voting for him in the primary would accomplish nothing.

That leaves Ron Paul, who has as much chance of being the nominee as I do. Voting for him would also be throwing away my primary vote.

So I am back to my usual course—voting in the Democratic primary—and my original dilemma. I still can’t decide which candidate to vote for. Clinton has the baggage that comes with experience. Obama has the vague optimism that speaks of inexperience. I still have a few days to agonize over this decision.

Grateful Monday

So that is what I am grateful for today. I am grateful that I live in a country where I can agonize over such a decision and speak publicly about that agony without fear of repression or reprisal—at least not yet.

And I want to thank Trackgrease for doing his part to help ensure that I have something here to be grateful for. He served four years in the Army and eight years in the National Guard. The operative word here is served. He was not an officer or a decision maker. He simply did what he could to put his nation’s safety and health above his own.

Let us all do what we can this year to protect and serve our democracy. If nothing else, vote. As Edmund Burke said, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Let this be the year we stop doing nothing.

References:

Gerald I. Evan and Karen H. Vousden (17 May 2001). Proliferation: cell cycle and apoptosis. In Cancer. London: Nature. In Wordsmith.org (13 February 2008).

Wordsmith.org (13 February 2008). A.word.a.day—idiopathy. Available: https://wordsmith.org/words/idiopathy.html

Manic Monday

Trackgrease and Sam frolick ca 1989.

It’s just another manic Monday

I wish it was Sunday

’Cause that’s my funday

An I-don't-have-to-run day

—[Bangles]

Today has been another ringer of a day. I was also unable to get a ride to get my bike out of the shop. I have a looming deadline at work, but my source doesn’t seem to have any sense of urgency about getting the material in shape. Sigh.

Then Suna got word that her contract will be terminated early (at the end of the fiscal year) because her department lost funding for her position. This is one of the things about contract work. It is somewhat less dependable than being “an employee.” But then, it pays better than being an employee.

Grateful Monday

So on a day like this, what do I have to be grateful for? There is always something.

After not being able to reach Trackgrease on Veterans Day, I was able to get through to him today. I’m not (and never have been) one to call anyone regularly. I sometimes go years without talking to relatives. But it’s always good to talk to my son.

And he had news for me. He’s engaged. I didn’t tell him that Suna and I are, too. I thought it was better to let him bask in the attention. I’ll tell him next time we talk. So again, I’m thankful for Trackgrease today.

Trackgrease

Trackgrease graduating from boot camp—just one of the times he has made me proud.

In an automobile or a crowded bar—

Well, I hope you're all right, wherever you are.

—Jimmy Webb

Grateful Monday

Today I start a new contract. For that I am grateful.

I also realized that I have been expressing gratitude for my new family. I am very grateful to have them in my life. At the same time, I don’t want to lose sight of how grateful I am to my son, who calls himself Trackgrease. Even though we don’t call each other very often, I know he is there, and I hope he knows I am there for him when he needs me.

Through the difficult times of the last year, I am grateful for the support he provided and for allowing me the room I needed. I am grateful that he did not try to second guess, psychoanalyze, or change the situation. He simply accepted that his mother and I were no longer a functional family and did his best to be fair to both of us.

Thank you, Trackgrease. You have made me very proud of you. It took me a long time to get here. For a long time, the wounds were too fresh, and I did not want to explain them to you. I still don’t, not really. Thank you for the time and space I needed.