Category Archives: gonzo life

the meaning of conflict

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Dang it, look at this.

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That is my calendar for tonight. The alumni band is practicing tonight at the high school. The other is self explanatory. What am I going to do? Maybe I should stay home and watch a movie. I won’t, but I should. I mean, of all the unmitigated audacity.

Update: I chose the Band practice, on the principle of acquiescence to The Next Right Thing. Which it was: I haven’t opened my trombone case, evening to dust the old horn, since last summer. I needed practice just marginally less than a swift kick in the seat.

unbewilder me

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One of these days, I’m going to start keeping a daily list of things I don’t understand. Then I’m going to write a book.

I don’t understand why people want meetings to be longer, instead of shorter.

I don’t understand why people are still driving like bats belched from the infernal depths, with gas at four bucks a gallon.

and I don’t understand Facebook.

I got it all set up and did my profile and my fun wall, etc. I have some friends, so I’ve been prodded or needled or something once or twice. But now it’s just sitting there.

Can anyone explain for me what the thing is supposed to do? More to the point, what am I supposed to do with it? I mean, I feel like there was a lot of hype. I heard Facebook mentioned many times. Barack Obama had a Facebook page before I did, and John Edwards, and several of my friends. But now, you know what it reminds me of? The college degree hanging here in my office.

It’s a nice thing, for sure. You’re expected to have one. Took a long time to set it up, and more than a few moments of abyssal bewilderment. Now it just hangs there. Which am I referring to, Facebook or the Bachelor of Arts? Well, both. This is a comparison paragraph.

Now for the contrast: The BA says something on it like, With All The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto. Facebook makes no such grandiose pronouncements. And I remember that I asked: Back at the university, I tried to find out just what Rights and Privileges I was now entitled to. I thought, and suggested, maybe free alumni parking and admission to football games would be nice. But no one could tell me.

That’s where the contrast ends, because no one can tell me what a pragmatist might expect to glean from Facebook either. Somebody needs to come along and give me a better job and show me how all this passive-aggressive networking makes us all happy.

help out

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Some people just don’t get my sense of humor.

I went shopping for a few things down at the Vons, which is a chain of supermarkets, for those of you in distant climes. I had about a dozen items in a little hand-basket. When I went to check out, I lifted the basket onto the conveyor with one hand, very easily.

The cashier said, “Would you like some help out?”

Now this question – as considerate and friendly as it is – always jangles my keys, ya know? I mean I hauled that little pile of crap up there with one hand. I think I can get it to the parking lot without help. I’m a grown man, for cryin in the rain. I work out, with 20 pound dumbbells.

I can see offering help to get your purchases to your car if you have a lot, or you’re an older citizen or infirm in some way. I admire people offering to help each other, really. So usually I just say no thanks. Sometimes I chuckle and say Well, I got it up here, guess I can get it out.

Tonight there was something plugging up my mood, and I had to be rid of it.

“One of these days,” I said, “I’m going to come up here with my five pounds of stuff and take you up on that offer. I’m gonna say Yeah Dude help me get this handful of stuff to my truck.”

I said it in a friendly way, laughing, joking. The cashier was just barely able to feign a weak half-smile.

While this was going on, a lady got in line behind me. She clutched a single item to her little chest. Something it a can, it was. One can of something. She may have been mumbling My Precious, My Precious.

I began to feel like a smartass jerk. When the cashier said, “Thank you Mr. Kimberlin,” I said, “Oh, thank you very much; have a good night.”

And as I turned and walked away, past the mini Starbucks, I heard him say to the lady with one can of something precious, “Help out tonight?”

could eat the earth

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The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. [NY Times]

Makes Global Warming seem a bit less dramatic, doesn’t it?

I was just wondering, do you suppose, after they finish the Collider, that they’ll make a few more, then start mass producing them and dropping the price so we can all have one? You know, like PCs and cell phones.

I wouldn’t mind having a small, personal black hole, into which I could throw things. For example, my snail mail, a few of my noisier neighbors, and war.

Strange matter indeed.

Obama, Clinton stress job creation

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Yahoo! News: “Obama, who is on a six-day bus tour through Pennsylvania, also toured a factory that makes the wires that eventually become Slinky toys.

The Illinois senator played with a Slinky through the visit, meeting with a small Saturday work crew.”

Oh, those presidential candidates get to have all the fun.

I think you probably need to hear the Slinky song at this point, don’t you? Here you go; don’t say I didn’t hook you up.

Conundrum

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Hey now, I just had an apostrophe epiphany.

I was sitting here with my laptop pulled up to the sofa, watching The Captain, and thinking that it would be cool to be a writer on a clever funny show like that. I’ll bet, said I to myself, that those guys have a blast writing that.

My next thought was something along the lines of If I was a writer on that show, I probably wouldn’t be sitting on my ass watching TV. And that’s when it hit me:

People who have the kind of life I want make a living creating stuff to entertain people like me, who don’t. And if I had the life I want, I certainly wouldn’t have time for the life I have.

Is there a conundrum in there somewhere? Maybe.

I’ll think about some more after Two and a Half Men.

Tres existential.

going down by the bow

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It’s an old seafaring term, meaning a ship sinking front end first. I just thought of it and laughed, remembering that it came to me as I sat listening to poets at last Summer’s SB Book and Author Festival. Most of them were great, but one poet was obviously – to me – uncomfortable with being on stage, at a microphone, in front of a group of people. I watched and listened and thought, “That poor woman is going down by the bow.” It struck me funny then too, and I’m only glad I didn’t blurt it out.

(You know that little switch in your head, that keeps you from yawping out thoughts best kept private? Do you think it can really be trusted? I’m never completely sure.)

Reading in public isn’t easy. We poets tend to be solitary when it comes to spelunking the caverns of our creative underworld. So to take one’s little offerings from the printer, carry them to a lecture hall or coffee house, and offer them up is an art or artifice in itself.

I consider myself well practiced in it, but I’ve taken on water and sailed off listing to starboard a few times myself.

All of which is prefatory to sending you off to mystic-lit, to read poet Joseph Gallo’s thoughts on readings. And you can read three of his fine poems too. … Aloud, if you please, if only to the cat or the living room wall. It’s all good practice.

hello world!

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My sitemeter says Metaphor has recently had visits from The Netherlands and Saskatoon Saskatchewan, way up north in Canada. Wow. Welcome.

It reminds me of the 70s, when we had a massive CB radio station, and an antenna on the roof that was larger than the house itself. We would talk to each other by skipping and squelching and exchange CQ Cards – custom designed postcards – via snail mail.

The equivalent of the CQ Card today is, of course, the much sought after but elusive Comment. Which, like voting, should be done early and often.

and miles to go for a cup of joe

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Here’s a recipe which serves me well on nights like this, which happens to be the longest night of the year.

Uncle Kyle’s Solstice Decaf Mocha, ala Cheapo.

First you make a small pot of decaf coffee.
Pour some coffee into a favorite Christmas coffee mug (example pictured).
Add 1 packet sweetener (optional).
Add 1 small squirt coffee creamer, preferably fat free (optional).
From the cupboard, produce one packet instant hot chocolate mix, preferably sugar free.
Add about a third to a half packet of the chocolate mix.
Note: If you’ve wandered off into impending Winter without some of this stuff, Heaven help you. And don’t use the whole packet; you’re making mocha, not pudding. Besides even the low cal stuff is 60 calories a pop.
Stir languidly but with pensive sincerity, while staring out the kitchen window at your Christmas lights – or at the back-splash, doesn’t matter – until bored.
Serve hot and sip while blogging insipidly into the abyss.


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Shot with my phone, so not a great picture. But yep, the flier in the background really says “Join Us for a Holiday Party at the Pool !!!” That’s from the homeowners association. Took place last Friday: Christmas party, outdoors, by the pool. At night. Kids watched Rudolph and his nose struggle against the vice grip of prejudice on our portable giant screen system. Don’t you wish you lived here? I do.

Anyway, there’s a pretty amazing moon out there, so it’s not the darkest evening. But while you’re enjoying a steaming mug of Uncle Kyle’s Solstice Mocha ala Cheapo, here’s a poem for the longest evening of the year.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
– Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.