I just tested my cable speed, since it seems to be OK. Check out these results:

Now I’m so sorry I whined. Only problem is, I can’t think of anything really huge I need to download. Dang.

My cable internet has been hosed, off and on for a few hours now. Don’t the guys at Cox know how this messes with my head? I wasn’t even going to use it tonight – I was going to write. Because writers write. But once it went out, my head went with it. Stupid obsessive perfectionist personality.

If you can get them on the phone, they won’t just say Yeah dude, you’re neighborhood’s out, maybe your whole town. Sorry, turn it off for the night and do something else. Don’t suffer over it. Our bad. No, they keep you on the phone for half an hour, unplugging it, turning off your computer, plugging it back in … arrrg!.

Can we please go back to 1968? I liked that year. I was seven; too young for the draft, old enough to know that girls are dangerous. And the most technologically advanced thing I had was my bike.

Think this will upload?

Did I tell you guys that I fell down? Yeah, ouch. Here’s the story, as excerpted from an e-mail to my brother:

Happy spent the night at my place last night, and when I took her out to pee at about midnight, I took a fall on my stairs. It was very foggy and the steps and rails were wet. I slipped about half way down, but grabbed the rail with my right hand. Wound up on my knees, facing the rail, and holding Happy’s leash in my left hand.

It took me a minute or so to get my feet back under me and pull myself up, all the while talking to Happy so she wouldn’t freak out. Thank God I had the leash around my wrist, or she would’ve been long gone.

I’ve got a couple of very minor abrasions, but I’m fine. Happy never knew anything was wrong, except that I was being stupid, trying to lay down on the stairs. I’ve been wondering for almost five years when those damn stairs were going to come for my ass, and hoping it wouldn’t be when I was carrying Tasha.

In case you’ve been wondering, in concrete terms, how things are going for our troops in Iraq, I’ve made a graph of US casualties.

If you’re the owner of the white pitt bull that came running up to me and Happy this afternoon at the park, I’m talking to you.  We have a leash law in this town, but apparently you think it doesn’t apply to you.  If I see you and that dog there again, we’ll find out for sure.  And I don’t care how old your dog is.  How’d you like to be walking a 16 pound Pomeranian and have a pitt bull run up to you?  So when you yelled – from 50 yards away – “it’s just a puppy,” I wasn’t comforted.  It’s at least a year old, and four times the size of my dog.  

I’m not afraid of strange dogs.  We encounter them every day, and 99% are no problem at all.  But think about it, moron.  You can’t expect to have one of that breed off leash and not have people getting uptight if it runs up to them.

I have the same right as everyone else to walk on that trail in peace and serenity.  I don’t intend to be hassled and do nothing about it.  Keep your dog on a leash like the rest of us, or we’ll have us a bona fide roshambo.  Bank on it, butthead.

Time magazine has posted their list of the 100 best novels since 1923.  Very cool.    

Watching Letterman here.  He had a 13-year-old musical prodigy named Kit Armstrong playing the piano tonight.  I took piano lessons for 10 years, from age 8 to 18, and I was never in any league from which one might look up and see the league this kid is in.  

I sometimes wonder why God chooses to give some people so much talent and some people no talent at all.  Doesn’t seem fair, does it?  Oh well, tough.  

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
-Robert Frost  

While I was putting on my socks this morning, I thought about Thanksgiving.  Not just the holiday – which, by the way, has nothing to do with Indians and Pilgrims and never did – but just the little things from day to day for which I’m thankful.  

At this moment, I’m thankful that, though I use my middle name and first initial, like I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby does, I don’t also have a stupid nickname that always has to be stuffed in the middle.  

Can you picture it?  J. Kyle “Spanky” Kimberlin?  Yep, I pretty sure if you did that, I’d avail myself of a large rock and beat you to death.  No fault of mine.  Though I’d have to drag to you Texas first, where “he needed killin”  is an affirmative defense to homicide.  

Apropos of which, looks like Scooter’s office – which means Dick “Dickhead” Cheney’s office – is getting the big roto-rooter service for the Plame leak.  So says the Washington Post.  

Now we meet a man whose mind is in need of quieting, whose heart is in need of comfort. From a hill, he looks down to where the freeway disappears in a curve among trees, and on the lights of his sleeping town. This is where he comes to meet such needs. There is half a moon, the thready inhalations of traffic, and airplanes blinking over the hills to the north.

He worries so much about nothing. The bills are paid, his health is good enough, no one means him any harm. Still he stands, searching the scene for meaning, hands in his pockets. His problem is simply that consciousness is; that the more aware you are, the more it confronts you. So he’s decided to stand here remembering. His way of fighting back.

He remembers things his father found, brought home and gave to him. A small stone, blacker than night and polished. A stalk of iceplant struck by lightning, turned to glass. A silver ring with naval coat-of-arms. A black puppy with white paws, who ran and played and slept; whose chin turned gray in his hands, who died in the yard one summer. Of all these, just the stone not gone to God. It rests in his pocket where he touches it, looking down at the lights.

His mother said the dog was free, relieved of old age, untroubled by the haunted wind that trembled through the hedge, and the cats that mewed to taunt him from the fence. His mother’s elegies were always pure and kind.

He remembers a river, green and brown by turns, which rose up to speak in April, laid down in August to whisper into fall. How he watched and wanted to join it, to sail away, to turn at its bends under the trees and feel the sun on its back. But when he finally did, it only brought him home.

He remembers women, the softness and clean smell of them, their racks and drawers full of clothing, their lights and laughter, the alcohol, the long car rides in terrible silence. He remembers this and coughs, and wishes he had a warmer coat. The moon is rising, the evening train has come and gone, and he can only smell the sea. Salt and stranded kelp.

There was a bicycle painted with rainbows and a long red seat, and what became of that? He was eleven then, and should have taken care of things. He doesn’t know. But if he had it now, he could fly down from here and through the town, stopping for nothing, needing nothing from the stores, indifferent to windows lit or set in darkness, immune to the clawing traffic. He could be free, more free than the dog they buried in the yard where it slept, more free than the freeway or the moon.


© 2005 by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved

Ssssh!  You didn’t hear this from me, but Rove has a plan.

[Time online]

“It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.”
— P.G. Wodehouse, who would have celebrated his 124th birthday yesterday, if he weren’t already dead.