Lafcadio
  • Mare Limen
  • Rerum Deliciae
  • Stargazing for Beginners
  • Counting the Rings
  • Wildlife Sightings
  • Portland Bridges
  • Dig Your Way Out

Day 5 - Natural Selection at Work

1/26/2006

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:060126: My captors have perplexing nocturnal habits. Are they trying to die? Driving is the scariest thing I do. I operate a large piece of machinery that could potentially kill several people at any instant if I'm not careful, or even if I am careful.

So I want to know what's up with this epidemic of idiotic pedestrians. I have no problem with pedestrians in general, but this pattern I've been noticing is a little disconcerting. Recently there have been several (like 25 in the last month) pedestrians walking in the street. Not crossing the street, just walking in it, like parallel to the sidewalk. On top of that, all of these street-walkers have been wearing dark colors and I have encountered all of them at night.

Luckily, I have not killed anyone yet. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the sidewalk. It's not flooded, it's not littered with dog poop or corpses, there aren't extra hills or even tree roots pushing up unwieldy obstacles. These are just ordinary, run of the mill, averagely kempt sidewalks.

In all of these cases, there has been a line of parked cars between the sidewalk and the moving traffic. The pedestrians walk between the parked cars and the moving traffic. If they come to a stretch where there are no parked cars, they do not veer to the right to be a little more out of the way of giant fast moving hunks of metal, they hold their course about 10 feet from the curb. Sometimes they walk in a group and do not walk single file. Also, less than half of them even bother to turn and look over their shoulder when headlights and car noises approach. How can they possibly know I even see them?

Am I missing something? Sure, pedestrians have the right of way, but that doesn't mean they should assume that everyone is automatically going to give it to them. At some point, someone will not see the darkly clothed group of people walking in the street, and then the sidewalk WILL be littered with corpses.

At some point, these pedestrians are going to learn a nasty and painful lesson. I just hope I'm not the one to accidentally teach it to them.
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Day 4 - Priorities

1/23/2006

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:060123: My captors just offered me a job. With benefits. I had no problem turning them down. Even with debt staring me in the face, and the prospect of paid vacations and inexpensive dentistry, I know where my priorities lie. My co-workers are nice people, and I probably wouldn't even have to interview, but sheesh... it's basically glorified data entry. This is kinda what the conversation sounded like:

Julie - "Do you want to do accounts payable for good?"
Me - "November through March?"
Julie - "No, all year."
Renée - "She's offering you a job."
Me - "My other job pays me more, I get to be outside, they feed me..."
Julie - "We'll pay you more. We'll give you benefits."
Renée - "Vacations, you can take vacations!"
Me - "I like to be outside."
Renée - "We can put your desk near the door, that's almost like outside."
Me - "It's not the same."
Renée - "You could go outside whenever you wanted."
Me - "That's a parking lot. I like having a job that requires me to hike 4 hours a day."
Renée - "We could get a treadmill."
Me - "It's not the exercise, it's the forest."
Julie - "We could take turns walking her."
Renée - "Whose turn is it to walk Lafcadio?"

They didn't really get it. It's not just the being outside, it's working for a company that doesn't do anything. It's retail. They don't help people grow, they don't conserve the planet, they aren't even for any sort of political cause. They just sell things. I might be able to justify a boring office job consisting of mundane tasks if I at least believed in what the company was doing with my services.

Staring at a spreadsheet, with no end in sight, for a retail store, wouldn't be worth all the benefits in the world. Not a bad temp job, though. Very temp. I did it for about 3 hours today. That should hold me for a while. Too bad those 3 hours didn't come with more pay and an eye exam.
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Day 3 - Epilogue

1/20/2006

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:060120: News from the outside. My Great Grandmother passed away today. Last week I was sorting through some old schoolwork, and I found an interview I had done with her about the 1920s. She was 11 years old at the beginning of the 20s, and this is what she remembered. Her answers were paraphrased when I did the assignment, so these are not her original words, but they are close.

Interview from January 30, 1995
We had electric heat, but before that we had the regular coal oil lamps. We had to get up early to make the fire every day and fire up the wood stove, which we had until the 30s. We would make oatmeal, and we would have pancakes every morning. In the late 20s we got a Model T Ford. My mom tried to learn to drive one day but she crashed into a tree and never tried it again.

I didn't finish high school; I'm kind of ashamed that I never did. I didn't go past the 10th grade because we had a large family, and I was ashamed of the clothes I wore. I babysat a lot and I worked in a dress shop for $15 a week. I also sold soap door to door. It was Rinsol, I think. I made $3 a day and I thought I was so rich. One summer I picked strawberries, and it was so hot that I nearly had a sun-stroke so they put me in a shed which wasn't much cooler than it was outside. I've never liked the heat since then. I also picked cucumbers one year and picked up potatoes with my brother. Working in the dress shop gave me confidence because I didn't have very nice clothes of my own. I wore plain dresses most of the time, with a print or something on them. We didn't wear slacks or anything back then, just dresses, unless you were playing or something, in which case you wore jeans, but I never did. I had one dress that I just loved. It was a white eyelet dress with a black ribbon around it just above the waist. My mother bought it for $5.

We had a large family and Dad was the head of the household. You always passed the meat to him first. Dad had his own special chair that no one else was allowed to sit in. Well if Dad wasn't there, why you could sit in it just fine, but if he was there, then you had to move. We walked a lot. It was a long way to our grade school, well, 9 or 10 blocks, so we walked a lot. I always came home for lunch because Dad always came home for lunch, and we had a full hour to eat.

Spring vacation was a lot different than it is today. Back then they called it Clean Up Week. The kids cleaned, raking up yards and making the yard all nice, and if we were good then on the last day we would get to have a bonfire. We would roast potatoes and sometimes marshmallows after the coals died down.

Every Saturday morning, my brother and I would go to watch a movie. It was 5¢ to get in, or maybe it was a dime, but I seem to remember it being more like a nickel. It was always a continuing story, so you had to come back every week. They gave out candy and stuff. They were always cowboy movies. I watched so many cowboy movies that I would have dreams that some man on a horse was chasing me and I was trying to get away, and I would thrash around so much that I would fall out of bed.

I can't remember which was my favorite movie but I will never forget one of them was called "Montana Moon," and I just loved that movie so much, and I wish that they would release it again sometime. I didn't ever see "The Jazz Singer," but I did go to the Vaudeville one time in Spokane. My parents couldn't afford to take me most of the time, but I went with a friend of mine one time. Her parents took us and it was just beautiful. I remember there was a painting of a ship on the stage. Afterward we went out for ice cream and I had an ice cream sundae. It was the first ice cream sundae I had ever had. We usually made our own ice cream a gallon at a time because our freezer couldn't keep it cold. We had an ice chest type thing that was about half the size of a normal refrigerator. We just kept a 25lb. chunk of ice in it to keep things cold. We couldn't shop for the whole week, we just kept the butter and the milk and maybe some meat in there. We didn't have real fancy meals.

Over labor day, we didn't ever go on any vacations, but Dad always got labor day off because of the union; it was the four Ls ... Loyal Loggers of Lumber ... anyway it was four Ls so on Labor day we would all go to the lake for a picnic. My mother would fill a basket like a clothes basket full of food for the lunch and we would take the electric train to the lake. There were always races and things there and it was something I always looked forward to. Sometimes my mother would bundle us up and she couldn't afford to take us to the circus but she would bundle us up anyway so we could see the parade. Us kids never really felt neglected or deprived.

We used to play cut the pie out in the snow with all the neighborhood children. The auditorium park had rides in the summer and they would shoot fireworks on the fourth of July. We would sit in the gully near the river, where we could sit up and see and look down on them. In the winter we would slide down the hill on sleds. Dad made a sled for me and my brother. It couldn't have been more than 18 inches long. We would go to a big hill. I would lie down on the sled and my brother would lie down on top of me because he was my younger brother. People thought we were sliding down with no sled because it was so small. I wish I still had that sled. I don't know what happened to it.

I didn't watch any sports until high school, when I watched football. Sports are so big business lately that they don't even seem like sports anymore. I played baseball and volleyball and tennis, and I went swimming in the summer at parks. During the Great Depression, Claude and I would get together with friends from the post office every other week on a Saturday afternoon. We would have a potluck supper and then we would play baseball and then pinochle.

I used to love Coney Islands. Sometimes Claude and I would splurge and we would go to a movie and then we would go to a Coney Island place. Coney island places are like chili dog places, like chili dog stands. They were 2 for 15¢ if you can believe that. And beer was 5¢ each. There was also this little man with a hamburger wagon and he would make little hamburgers for 5¢ each.

Something I didn't like about the 1920s was the dark wallpaper. It always made the room seem so dark. The style came back a while later but I never wanted to see it again. That was something that made an impression on me. Nowadays, everything is improved, the style of living is improved and comforts and such. I was never uncomfortable but there were 7 children in my family. We always had 3 meals a day and Mom baked. We would come home from school and you can't slice bread when it's fresh baked, so we would always get a loaf that we could just break hunks off of and spread butter in, and it was so good.
Ninety-six years, five months, and one day. She went from not having any electricity, or movies with sound, to watching video clips on a laptop computer. Who knows what's waiting for me in 70 years?

For the record, both my father and I tried for years to find "Montana Moon" on video or DVD for her to see again. As far as I can tell, they never released it outside of theaters.
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Day 2 - Freefall

1/19/2006

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:060119: My captors keep me confined to a small space, but space is all I need...

The following quotations are from the introduction to the first episode of Carl Sagan's legendary television series, "Cosmos."

"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us; there's a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries."

Have I mentioned I enjoy contemplating the universe? There it is, a poetic description of my mental thrill ride. The thrill never goes away. It is one thing the gaze up at the stars at night and be awestruck by their pure aesthetic beauty, but then to go deeper into space, and think about its edge. Yes, the edge, except there isn't one. Or even as you gaze "up" at the stars, to imagine yourself instead gazing "down" at them. Dimensions, light, gravity, time, energy, matter, distance, cycles; there"s no end to the mind-blowing topics. I am so far from understanding all the complexities of the universe, but I feel a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a sensation of falling, and just a little bit of rapture each time I get a little bit closer to Knowing some of what there is to Know.

"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature."

I believe that all there is to Know that is worth Knowing is an elegant truth, an exquisite interrelationship, or awesome natural machinery. I do not find comfort in impossibilities and faith and miracles. I find comfort in discovering the way the universe works, how each puzzle piece fits together to create the whole with such a complex natural order, one can only understand a fraction of the rules themselves, but one can believe that every aspect is governed by a rule.

"Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We've longed to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. The journey for each of us begins here."

That rules govern everything does not diminish the romanticism or the wonder of life. After all, I used to be a star, a heavenly entity. Everything and everyone is a part of everything and everyone. If you wait long enough, a molecule of air that I exhaled while typing just now, you (or someone with significant quantities of your genetic code) will inhale someday. Everything exists in relation to everything else. If you glance to the right instead of to the left as you walk down the street on an ordinary day, and in doing so, you make eye contact with a stranger, that stranger's day will be just a little bit different than if the stranger had not seen you at all.

Go outside. Look up (or, if you are standing, look as far away from your feet as you can). Choose a star. No, not that one, that one's mine. So is that one. Ok, you can have that little one on the left. Name your star after your least favorite person. Now... allow it to bring you joy.
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Day 1 - Secret Treasure

1/14/2006

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:060114: I have something, and my captors do not know it. It is a treasure. It is a library book, small and unassuming. A thick hardcover, but small nonetheless. There are no words on the front cover, not even any designs on the back cover. A sticker on the spine reads "shelved in closed stacks." Your ordinary library patron browsing through the books will never find it. They will also never find it because I have it. I intend to continue renewing it until they won't let me anymore (or at least until I've finished it, which seems to be taking me a while).

It is old. Very old. 109 in fact. Copywright 1897. It has that old-fashioned date-stamp sheet glued to the first page. The first stamp is September 27, 1977. It was only checked out 5 more times with stamps. The last one was July 8, 1991. When did the library switch over to computers? Maybe then, or maybe it's been shelved in closed stacks the whole time, and I am only the 7th person to ever check out this book. Three pages later, there is another date stamp, September 2, 1965. Is that when the library acquired the book? Perhaps. But for now it it mine. The pages are yellowed and they smell like dust. This book has spent some time in some sort of puddle because the first 147 pages have the same identical water mark.

This is no ordinary old book. Its age makes it fascinating alone, but how many books that old are actually interesting to read, as well? This one has a gem on almost every page.

"This ground beneath me is old as the Milky Way. Call it what you please, —clay, soil, dust: its names are but symbols of human sensations having nothing in common with it. Really it is nameless and unnamable, being a mass of energies, tendencies, infinite possibilities; for it was made by the beating of that shoreless Sea of Birth and Death whose surges billow unseen out of eternal Night to burst in foam of stars. Lifeless it is not: it feeds upon life, and visible life grows out of it."

Nice, eh? I shall keep it and keep it hidden until my captors figure it out.
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    Picture
    Picture
    "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something sepa- rated from the rest—a kind of optical delu- sion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widen- ing our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
                                                         - Albert Einstein


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    Day 32 - Olympic Design
    Day 31 - Just a Little Shak
    Day 30 - Neil DeGrasse Tys
    Day 29 - State of Design
    Day 28 - No Human Being I
    Day 27 - The Glass Is...
    Day 26 - Apparently I'm An
    Day 25 - You Know You Sh
    Day 24 - As Luck Would Ha
    Day 23 - Hassle Free Holid
    Day 22 - 9 Weeks Away
    Day 21 - The Catfish Know
    Day 20 - Divided by Two
    Day 19 - Catch Rays on the
    Day 18 - The Power of the
    Day 17 - Stuck to the Glass
    Day 16 - Stay for the Georg
    Day 15 - A Place to Put His
    Day 14 - The View From Be
    Day 13 - Color Geek
    Day 12 - Minor Celebrity
    Day 11 - We've Been Waiti
    Day 10 - Obtuseness Abou
    Day 9 - From the List
    Day 8 - Wearing the Right
    Day 7 - I Heart the Olympic
    Day 6 - Back When
    Day 5 - Natural Selection a
    Day 4 - Priorities
    Day 3 - Epilogue
    Day 2 - Freefall
    Day 1 - Secret Treasure
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