I want to lead your attention to this post on November Hill Press blog, whence my friend Billie will lead it onward to an excellent interview with the writer Jim Harrison. She’ll simply do that leading best.
There, as you sip your tea, as I do now, or your kool-aid, or Thunderbird, or Stolichnaya, maybe you’ll find a clue to why I’ve titled this post as I have. That depends on the quality and quantity of your quaffing, I suppose.
Let me ask you ladies a question. If you had a cough, would you go to your medicine cabinet, take a swig of cough syrup, then check the label for the expiration date? No, a guy might do that but not a woman, because women are smarter.
Sorry guys, but it’s true. I even heard the Grateful Dead sing about it.
“It ain’t me it’s the people that say, men are leading women astray,I say, it’s the women today, smarter than the men in every way.”
Here are the full lyrics for you.
You are right my friend, that’s Bruce Hornsby of “The Range” fame, playing the accordion, starting at about 3:50. We saw him play keyboards with The Dead after Brent Midland died, but I never saw – or imagined I might – anybody play that instrument at a Dead show. Which is a good reason to love the internet, I guess. That’s pretty damn cool, if you ask me.
Anyway, I don’t feel totally stupid, I found a bag of Ricollas, so I’m OK. …And that exp. date? 01/2006. Yeah, I threw the bottle away.
A new poem to share, tinted by October consciousness.
Remembering lying awake in the early morning in my grandparents’
house in the San Joaquin Valley, knowing the creaking floorboards were
my family, up early making coffee and starting breakfast.
The floors in my condominium
creak and squeak as the wood
under the carpet gives way under me.
The windows give out onto views
of the ocean and the coastal hills
and other dwellings, streets where
countless clustered lights are coming on.
I am not alone if I move about the place
and listen to the floors.
These noises bring back memories.
I wonder if they creak in houses we
have left behind, when we move through,
remembering. I hope they sag
under the weight of us who haunt,
and wake the living people, causing
fear. I used to wake there knowing
the sound was someone sleepless,
whom I loved. But something
has gone wrong and now we're gone.
We move invisibly through rooms where
we are absences and memories and dreams.
We creak the floors and make the curtains
drift, then settle into chairs in places
where the lights are long since out.
We sit and whisper about love, transparently.
Windows give out onto nothing but
the past, flat and endless, steeped in fog.
Kyle Kimberlin
10.10.2010
Today is October 10th 2010. It’s 10:10 am! 10.10.10 at 10:10!
It’s the end of the universe!
A short time ago, a smoke detector started going off in a neighboring unit in my condo building. This happens from time to time. One goes off, but it stops in a minute – like a car alarm – when somebody discovers their carelessness in the kitchen and opens a window or two.
This time, it didn’t stop. After a couple of minutes, I got up and put on my shoes, grabbed my phone, and went out. I saw a neighbor woman – whom I’ve noticed has a few small children – going out of the laundry room downstairs. I headed down my stairs and around the building to her condo.
The front door was open, smoke coming from the windows and the living room and kitchen full of it, but no sign of flame. I pounded on the open door, yelling “Hello! Do you need any help!?”
She didn’t. The fire on the stove was out, and I guess the kids were OK. I suggested she get fresh air into the dwelling – open more windows being my point.
Hey, we’ve all done it, left food cooking and become distracted. But like I said, someone is there when the smoke alarm goes off, right? To me, it seems unwise to start dinner and leave the kids while you go off to do laundry. Can I get an Amen on that?
Let’s be careful out there, people. Because, in the words of Randy Hickey:
Being dead is definitely worse than being alive. When you’re dead you can’t do all the cool stuff you can do when you’re alive. You and I, we can do all kinds of cool stuff cuz we’re living, we’re not dead, we’re alive. If we were dead we wouldn’t be able to do all the cool stuff we can do, becuz we’re alive. Dead people can’t do cool stuff. Only people that are alive can do cool stuff, cuz they’re living, and you have to be living to be able to do cool stuff. You have to be alive. Yeah, ‘cept when you’re alive sometimes bad stuff happens too. Like sometimes you can get into a car wreck, or you can have a headache or twist your ankle or even stub your big toe… So being alive is kinda hard too, but I think it’s definitely better than being dead…
A Senseless War Begins Its 10th Year
…an address to the nation from President Barack Obama (as reported by Michael Moore) | MichaelMoore.com
“Believe in yourself, formulate a plan of action, and follow through with it. … I will deminstrate by breaking this bored on my head.” It’s not that he wanted to give up. He endeavored to persevere until he was nearly unconscious.
I hear all this talk about Facebook, social networking, and privacy, and it makes me chortle. Facebook might be a little bit evil, but we have been violating each other’s privacy like crazy, ever since Al Gore invented the Internets by funding the first tubes. And by we I don’t mean me: I learned better at about the same time I got my first disc from AOL, long long ago.
Spammers, scammers, virus spewers and hackers don’t care what you did over the weekend. They don’t want your recipe for rutabagas flambé. They just want your email address and your name. Facebook does not give that out. But we – not me – are happily sharing it with criminals by the ton, all day long.
The truth is, I don’t mind getting a few funny or deep or generally trivial emails now and then. Internet banality kinda brightens my day. Or it makes me pause and ponder, whatever. I like to share it sometimes too. So I’m not saying stop, but there is a concern.
When you put more than one email address in the To field of your email and send it, everyone sees each other’s name and email address.
So if you send me a joke and also send it to your cousin Sally, I can see her name and address and she sees mine. But we’ve never met, and one or both of us might not appreciate that. We trusted you with our contact information.
If I forward that email to the guys in my Metaphysical Bungee Jump Club, they all get Sally’s name and email too. Did she tell you that it was OK for us to do that?
When that joke is then forwarded to more strangers, Sally’s email address gets spewed around the planet like crazy. See?
That’s why we receive emails with dozens or hundreds of names and email addresses in them. No wonder we get so much spam. We’re sending each others addresses to spammers, by the billions.
I think people should be able to decide who they want to have their email address.I think I should be able to give a friend my email address, or my phone number, shoe size, whatever, and expect and trust them not to broadcast it publically.
This is basic email etiquette, as much common knowledge as not openly sneezing on other citizens. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, and you hide multiple email addresses in the BCC field of the email form.
“We’ve all had this happen to us and it’s not O.K. Each day we receive messages or forwarded email from well intentioned onliners listing all those they are sending to in the To: field. And by doing so they are visibly displaying their contact’s email addresses to strangers!
If you do this and are thinking “no big deal” you are so wrong! If the only thing all the folks you are sending to have in common is you, you have breached your contact’s privacy by publicizing their emails to people they don’t know. Talk about showing a complete disregard for their privacy not to mention your lack of tech savvy!” [Link]
It’s easy to learn how to use BCC. Here’s a bunch of links on Google. Basically, you just put all the addresses in BCC instead of To.
One more thing.
If you get an email with a bunch of other people’s emails in it, clean it up before you forward it.
Just start the new email, highlight all the junk with your mouse, and press Delete, then send it.
If pressing Delete removes some or all of the good stuff you wanted to share, then the message is probably built in a table or a frame of some kind. That’s another topic, for another day in the new wild west.
I didn’t write a blog post today, but I want you to be happy. I want for you to laugh! So here’s a video that ought to do the trick.
Oh, this is good.
If you subscribe to Metaphor via email, that’s great. Much obliged.
But don’t forget the email is to serve as a reminder to read the blog, and a general idea of the post/s of the day. It is not a real substitute.
The blog as hosted here at http://kylekimberlin.blogspot.com is fully formatted html, surpassingly beautiful. An unwavering study of its sublime mnmlizt design and trenchant insights will bring more tears to the critical eye than a bucket of onions mashed flat by a truck.
Besides, the email won’t have the occasional videos.
Accept no substitutes, is my point.
Use the links in the email to come hither and behold.
I broke a tooth Thursday afternoon. I didn’t get in a fight with anybody, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was just minding my own business – a peaceable pilgrim passing through this worrisome land – when life said:
Tada! Here’s a reminder that you ain’t gettin’ any younger, Hooplehead.
I will spare you the grisly details. I went to the dentist yesterday and it’s hopeless, says he. The rest of the tooth will have to be pulled. And supposedly he has a great deal of experience doing so.
After I recover from the extraction action – in 4 to 5 months – I can have either a plant …
No, no. An implant. But trust me, there are no visual depictions of that concept, in all of Googledom, that are even slightly amusing.
… Or I can have a bridge.
I guess a viaduct is out of the question. It used to be a staple of all your better waterworks, but maybe they don’t do that anymore. But you gotta admit, it looks a lot like a bridge.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina. I had a root canal on the tooth that gave up the job, a few years back. So no pain. Just another hole in my head, now patched up temporarily with really cool space age composite goo.
… OK, OK, I know what you want. Here’s a canal.
Metaphor 