Christmas tradegy narrowly averted

Posted on January 3, 2010 by Kyle Kimberlin

Well, I’m back from my 11 day trip to visit my brother, sister-in-law (SIL), and little nephew way up yonder in northern California. A fine time was had by all. Santa showed up right on schedule and, as always, brought me some wonderful gifts despite my intransigent and glaring presence on the Naughty list. Nephew T, who’s into dinosaurs these days, got enough toy ones to fill the La Brea Tar Pits. He’s on the Good list, no doubt about it.

My Bro, SIL and I rang in the new year in San Francisco, joining 8000 fellow deadheads and motley hoopleheads at a marathon show by 2 former members of the Grateful Dead – Phil Lesh and Bob Weir – and their band.

[Incidentally, for those new to Metaphor, hooplehead is a term often used in the HBO series Deadwood. Like this.

It means a member of the ignorant masses, an uneducated commoner, an idiot, riffraff, the madding crowd, the great unwashed. I’m certain no such persons would – or even could – read this noteworthy compendium.]

The show was great, and an excellent way to traverse the terminal cusp of the year. They played many of our old favorite Dead tunes, did a lot of cool psychedelic improvisational jam, and even covered Pink Floyd.

Here’s a little video I shot that night. It’s just a few seconds, shot in semi-darkness with a phone, 50 feet above the stage. But somehow, for me, it captures a moment of the energy.

There was one tragedy narrowly averted during our visit. On the afternoon of December 29, a few of us were sitting at the dining table. I was eating lunch, Mom was talking on the phone, and nephew T was doing something I don’t remember. The chandelier above the table fell; without warning, as is usually the case with such events. After all, if there had been some warning I would have moved my laptop.

That’s no flimsy fixture, kids. That’s real iron and leaded glass. And it missed the cover/monitor of the computer by an inch on 2 sides. … Wham! … There are little ceramic animals on the other sideof the light, which T made and was showing to his Nana. And those photo coasters are made of glass. Thanks to God that it didn’t smash my machine or anything on the table. It just fell in the midst of all our stuff, hurt no one, and broke nothing. It just put a decisive dent in the hardwood table, as a reminder that life’s justice is inscrutable and sets its own terms. And as you can see, the chandelier remained lit.

Mom does the crosswords, by the way. I haven’t cared for them since high school, when some teachers used them for homework exercises. Blech.

departure

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

Today’s Thought of the Day in my e-mail is a departure from the usual literary vein:

Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, re-arrange, and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. – Banksy, street artist (b. 1974)

I like that. It’s something to think about.

Today it’s time for me to withdraw into my Christmas retreat for a few days.

God bless, breathe deep, and try not to overeat.

invisible ink

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

-Vladimir Nabokov

So how was your weekend? Didja get your Christmas cards done? Watch some football? Watch the rain or the snow or the small animals out foraging for noms (goodies)? It’s all good.

I was just surfing around some Google results a moment ago and saw this: “Atheists who will take in your pets after The Rapture.” Wow. I didn’t follow the link, because I’d rather just ponder that for a minute.

First of all, every pet I’ve ever had was a better Christian than I am, so I’m not buying the premise of them getting left behind. Next metaphysical speedbump please.

I had a pretty good weekend I guess. Saturday was rainy, which was wonderful. I got a lot done over the 2 days. Christmas lights are up on the condo.

OK, that was last year, but not as far as you know.

I played around with some software over the weekend, which is a lot of fun. This time it was mostly MS Word. Sure I’ve been using it for years, professionally. But it’s one of those programs that’s so layered and intense that you can always learn something new, or find some things you want to tinker with.

Went to the gym twice. We have a nice gym here in Carpinteria. Just the right size for the town, and today it was practically deserted, which is always nice.

I did some writing and totally reorganized the files for my novel. Draft 5 now has 33 chapters and over 100,000 words, all nice and orderly. Then I started a story for children. First effort in that genre. It’s called Jasper’s Rainy Day, and it’s about a little dog who accidentally escapes from his yard on a blustery day, and the adventures he has. It’s pretty fun writing, because it really makes you focus on simple declarative sentences.

Jasper doesn’t mind the rain, because he has his own little raincoat. It is blue with a white stripe down the side. His mommy puts it on Jasper before he goes outside. It keeps him dry. It keeps his fluffy fuzzy white hair clean.

See? … See ya.

paper is pretty dead

Posted on October 29, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

A friend said that to me once, only not about paper. We were talking about nutrition and he said, “meat is pretty dead.” I think it applies to paper pretty well too.

When I got my new HP pc in early August, I was promised a free upgrade to Windows 7 when the time came, which it has. So I decided to scoot online and order my Windows 7 freebie upgrade today. God knows when it’ll actually arrive – weeks I guess – but there’s no rush.

I tell you what, though. I have a scanner and I’ve got to start getting in the habit of scanning things like receipts. They wanted the “proof of purchase,” and 6 boxtops from Lucky Charms, either uploaded or mailed separately. I had trouble remembering where on God’s Earth I might have put the receipt. I finally found it on a little shelf-table thing in the kitchen-dining room, where I keep my keys and phone and stuff.

When we buy something we might need the receipt for – anything that’s supposed to last, like electronics – I think the store should offer to e-mail a digital copy of our receipt to us. Because the whole world needs to stop printing important information on sheets of dead tree. And it seems like I can’t go out in public without somebody trying to give me freekin paper to clog up my life.

Whatever happened to the paperless office we were promised when we all started getting computers? We have computers in our offices and homes, surrounded by mountains of cellulose. Our landfills are overflowing, and the fact that paper is often recyclable doesn’t make up for the fact that we’re still grinding up forests to print out crap. I know people who print out their e-mails! E’Gads!

So I scanned my receipt and uploaded it to HP, and e-mailed it to myself, and backed it up on a disc. Now I just need to figure out where I’m going to store the original little slip of fading thermal paper.

Poor trees, we hardly knew ye.

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

rain comin

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

See, I ran out of potable water in the fortress of solitude. It happens. The water that oozes from the pipes in Carpinteria isn’t fit for man or beast. It tastes like it’s been stewing in the pipe behind a elementary school drinking fountain over a nice long holiday, or maybe in a Boy Scout canteen. Heavy metal, baby. Anyway, that’s why I had to go downstairs to the garage at midnight, to fetch a gallon from my truck.

It was raining, lightly. Sprinkling. It was nice. I let it fall on my face a moment, before I scuttled back into the lair.

The Santa Barbara area is an arid coastal plain, you know. We don’t get much rain. It’s a drought every year from mid spring to early to mid fall. We almost dry up and blow away.So let it come, Lord. But not too much; the people in places that burned are worried for the sky.

Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
– Anonymous

overflow

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

One time when I was a kid, our family went camping. We went camping many times, you know. This time it might have been Shaver Lake, south of Yosemite and northeast of Fresno. I’m guessing. Anyway, the campground was full when we arrived and the first night they put us in Overflow, a part of the campground set aside for just such times. It was more of a dirt parking lot than a campsite; those closer to the lake were beautiful.
It was just one night, we made a happy family adventure of it, and Overflow was our term – for years – for any situation in which a person or thing was exiled and expected to wait off to one side. If your food wasn’t ready for take-out as promised, and you had to stand and wait while the cashier rang up other customers, you were in Overflow. You get it.

I thought about that today because I used to have another blog a different URL, and since I moved Metaphor to this address, all those posts – 1783 – have been waiting in Overflow, at a defunct address. I finally got around to importing them, and Metaphor now has all 2262 I’ve made since I started it in 2003.

Excited about being able to browse all that good old stuff? I knew you would be.

Anyway, here’s hoping you always get the main campground, close to the lake, close enough but not too close to the bathrooms.

missed it again

Posted on June 18, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

Well, I can’t believe I’ve missed another Bloomsday. My calendar reminded me, and I thought about typing something witty or at least melancholic and Joycesque. But I was OBE.

I was having an out of body experience. … No.

I was overcome by events. As some of my many faithful readers might know, we’ve been dealing with a health crisis with our beloved little Pomeranian, Happy. I’ve been posting some about her on her own blog, Happy’s Trials.

Anyway, that’s been the hungry crucible of all of my free time of late.

Here’s a quote from Mr. Joyce:

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

Funny, Joyce never struck me as the kind of writer who would give a wet shilling for the English reading public. But, while I’ve read many thing by Joyce, I’ve read nothing about Joyce since my college days.

Here’s a better one:

“My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.”

Yeah. Happy Bloomsday, belatedly, y’all.

blogging on down the road

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

I guess I took a break from blogging for a while there, and not because I didn’t have stuff going on and something to say about it. Maybe you just didn’t need to hear about it. So, you’re welcome. … I’m teasing, but sometimes it’s good to live a life that’s at least undocumented; the unexamined life might be worth living after all, at least occasionally.

For a few days, I was up in northern California, visiting bro Joe, Linda, and little T. It was a good visit; I had a lot of fun. I even enjoyed the 16 hour round trip up and down the San Joaquin Valley. There can be something palliative about a long drive in a car alone. Your own air-conditioned fortress of solitude – atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed – with 2200 songs on the iPod. It’s good for the mind.

We went to see and hear The Dead at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. It was the first time we’d seen them since before Jerry Garcia died, and that was in 1995. They’re older, but so are we. The music was great. It went on for at least four hours, and there were songs to fill the air.

The road to the show took us past Google. We passed it and passed it, and when I was sure we were past it, we kept passing it. The company’s facilities are huge. Here’s a photo. Seems like that can’t be all of it; I think I saw annex buildings in other blocks. But I don’t know the area. I’ve read that it’s a cool place to work, forward-thinking and people-oriented. Which is nice. And I like their online content a lot, except for Blogger. But don’t get me started on that again.

Nephew T, who’s 8 now, went to the show with us. Now he’s an official Deadhead just like the grownups. We were in the lawn section, so after he danced up a little storm for the first set, his folks bundled him up on the ground between them and he slept through the rest of the concert. Which is fine. A lot of folks don’t remain conscious throughout the whole thing. And I’m sure T remembers the evening better than any number of people in their 20s who were there.

I remained alert, and thought the music was fine. It was what I remember from happy concerts of the past, though of course we all miss Jerry.

P5110016

spring

Posted on March 21, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

– e e cummings

Welcome to spring, everybody; that time of year when the young poet’s mind admits of nature’s brighter hues: the fornication of the flowers. The dialectic intercourse of pollination. Of course, I’m not a young poet anymore. So my mind is more likely turned to thoughts of insurance. Smoke detectors. Tire inflation.

We have to get from here to there without incurring avoidable damages, don’t you agree? Although to be sure, no one here gets out alive.

Here in Carpinteria, we’re having an overcast and drippy day, not quite rainy. Only the very athletic and mildly stupid are out upon the thoroughfare on bikes. And at 9:45am, I’m still in my comfy sweats, in my warm and cozy study, sipping French Roast from an aging mug replete with contemplative standing geese. Meeting life head-on, but only on life’s most obsequious terms. There can be a certain passive aggression to Saturday mornings, a middling denial and avoidance of Monday’s inexorable strife.

… mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Here’s a poem for today, in honor of poor lost winter, but not really about that at all.

Bee in January

It’s a winter way of looking at things,
of celebrating half-light and fog.
For instance, a bee I saw, just
for an instant, fumbling among
the camellias and darting past
the dog’s head. You’d almost believe
it was spring, forgetting the windmills
droning all night to save the lemon
trees from frost. But the chiminea,
warming in compassionate sunlight,
is half full of rain. And in January,
I prefer fog. I would rather have
a morning with the houses gray
and almost lost in it. With Papa
standing by the pickup, asking
if I’ve got good tires, a full tank
of gas, a map, some cash.
They called him Bee. He liked
a Timex watch, a good pen
in his pocket. Ballpoint, blue.
I had everything I needed, checked
everything but the weather.
So he stood there by his house
in the long, cold January, foggy
San Joaquin, breathing gray exhaust
in the gray world. He stood there,
waving as I disappeared.

give me a day

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

with not much to do but maybe
some laundry and to hang out with a dog,
write some stuff I get to make up as I go
and a coffeemaker all to myself,
a book to read, full of thoughts that don’t matter
then float some dark clouds over, pushing
cold wind that worries no one but the trees,
so I feel no guilt for a day spent indoors
unshaven and in worn out clothes
and when the dog falls asleep in an old
leather chair, I will care not
who writes the nation’s laws.

don’t wanna talk about it

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Kyle Kimberlin

Well. Did y’all have a good week? That’s nice.

Mine? I don’t want to talk about it. I went for a bike ride today to clear my head and … what? … Yes, I realize it might help to talk about it, but thanks anyway. It’s over. The End, and glory to God.

Let’s just drop it. Here, watch a puppy hiccup and blink.