Not Quite All The Way To Alcoholicville Apparently…
This last trip to Disney World found me hitting the Grand Mariner Orange Slushie stand in Epcot France and the Frozen Margarita stand in Epcot Mexico the moment I entered the park. The stresses of my life at this stage of it are making it increasingly hard to just…relax…and enjoy myself without some form of self-medication. It worries me. But the worry is itself becoming more and more vague. I’m starting not to care about my health anymore.
Anyway…I saw this graph which perked me up a tad…
My college experiences were So Different from most of the other kids… Who the hell even thinks they can down 10 drinks in a sitting, let alone that it would take that much for them to start puking their guts out? Anyway, the first thing I noticed about the graph is it Starts at five drinks.
So…I’m still cool. Five drinks and I am, not kidding, on the floor. If my end point is where everyone else is just getting started then I’m not doing so bad.
Women who went to university consume more alcohol than their less-highly-educated counterparts, a major study has found.
You don’t say…
I have often wondered about the relationship of intelligence to recreational drug use…and let’s be serious here, alcohol and tobacco are merely legal ones. Sherlock Holmes did cocaine because his mind couldn’t stand being without a problem to solve. I’ll go down to my household bar and humidor whenever Mr. Logical…
…this guy, if you’ve been reading A Coming Out Story, becomes too much to deal with.
The only cocktail I know how to reliably mix is the “Blue Glow-tini” I first had at the Disney World Hollywood Studios 50s Prime Time Cafe’. I loved it so much I googled the recipe the instant I got home. On thing I love about watching Rachel Maddow is her occasional Cocktail spot. One of these days it’s going to motivate me into fixing up the art room bar a little nicer. Add a bar sink and under the bar fridge and ice machine. The disadvantage of having a brain is the world makes you want to drink, but at least having a brain lets you do it decently.
Life Is A Process Of Growth And Maturity, Wherein We Seek Our Level Of Incompetance…
So I was handed the following books by one of my project managers today…
The One Minute Manager
Managing Projects – Harvard Business School Press
Leading Teams – Harvard Business School Press
Running Meetings – Harvard Business School Press
I guess I’m at that stage in the life of every little tadpole techno nerd kid who one day becomes an engineer somewhere and then goes on to become a senior engineer and then one day finds themselves reading the Harvard Business School Press. So I’m walking back to my little office feeling a tad elated somehow. It’s always Very Nice to know your employer wants to keep and nurture you. Plus, it’s good to find new challenges. Your brain needs challenge if you’re not to get simply old and tired and set in your ways. You just can’t let your one life slide on past you like that. Yes…this is all well and good. Except I’m walking back to my little corner of the Institute and this line from a song I haven’t recalled since I was a teenager suddenly bubbles up from somewhere in the shag carpet basement of my brain…
…Find out I’m the chosen one Oh noooooo!
Ever since The One Minute Manager first came out, something deep down inside of me would get a tad irritated every time I laid eyes on its cover. Any art you can teach in a minute cannot be that worthwhile. Is this why so many bosses are idiots? And now here I am reading the damn thing. But the Harvard stuff looks good actually. And…I guess I need to know this stuff now…
Sorry that my last post alarmed some of you, but this isn’t a political blog, it just looks like one sometimes. It’s just one guy’s little life blog…my small corner of the Internet when I can put up my cartoons and photography and write about this and that so family and friends can see what I’m up to. Life isn’t all wonder and joy, and I was very depressed when I wrote that. Thank you, those of you who write, for your kind words of encouragement. I think I’m over the worst of it now.
And I believe I understand better now, why I got so terribly down, and I’m working on a post about that. But for the record I took a brief weekend trip back down to Epcot a couple weekends ago and managed three things. First, I enjoyed the Epcot Food & Wine Festival immensely. Really…the food at all the little nation kiosks was fabulous. Second, I managed to drive past Hilton Head without so much as phoning my ex. I’m not over him so much as I understand better now why I need to keep my distance from him. It’s worse when they still want to be friends. There was no lover’s quarrel…I just got dumped but he still wants me to come around his way whenever I’m down there and it isn’t good for me to do that. I’m fifty-six years old and I’m only now learning lessons about dating and boyfriends I should have learned when I was a teenager.
Thirdly, I got to see a certain someone down in Florida this time around, that I didn’t last time. It cheered me up a lot.
As I said, I have a post I’ve been working on I want to put up here, before I resume regular blogging. In the meantime, I’ve been chattering away on Facebook, so you can look for me there if you want.
[Update…] I’ve pulled that post for the time being. My blog is a place for me to think out loud, vent, thump my pulpit…and even occasionally bleed in public. Just not too much.
A few readers here have asked me what’s up with the silence. It’s nothing serious…just life apart from the web. I’ve been real super busy with a major high visibility project at work and I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime on it. That’s "non-comp" time for all you salaried workers out there. But I don’t mind. Working at Space Telescope has been a dream come true for me, and the vacation package is so nice here I really don’t mind putting in long hours on something.
I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk about…but first, I’ve posted a bunch of new cartoons to the political cartoon page…two of which have been published in our local Baltimore gay paper, OUTLoud. I have a steady gig with them now and it’s been a real source of satisfaction seeing my cartoons in print. I’ve been published elsewhere but just randomly, whenever someone somewhere takes an interest in one of my cartoons and asks for reprint rights. This seems like it’s going to be a real steady gig so I’m delighted. Cartooning was the first love.
Here’s one I didn’t get into this month’s issue…
There’s more on the cartoon page. Hopefully, more to come soon as I get back into this. I have several other fun-er cartoons on the drawing boards, including the next episode of A Coming Out Story. Plus several political cartoons I didn’t put up from way back. You may have noticed that the last cartoon was from the aftermath of Proposition 8, and before that practically nothing for almost a year. I was just getting burned out on it, burned out on staring hate in the face week after week after week.
So I’ll try to post some more stuff soon. I have lots to talk about. But end of next week I’m going to disappear again for a while and visit Disney World in Orlando for my birthday and try to leave the ugliness behind. There are two anti same-sex marriage referendums coming up and it seems every time I look at the news I’m seeing anti-gay crap that just makes me angrier and angrier and venting about it here and on the cartoon page only gets it out of me a little. I’m at a stage in my life where I just want to bale out of civilization altogether and forget that I ever heard of the likes of NOM and Proposition 8 and so many people who don’t know me from Adam but keep screaming in my face that I’m a cancer on society…but they have nothing against gay people personally.
Basically, I got tired of how it was always getting in my face unless I had it pulled back into a ponytail. This is how I always used to wear it.
I’d forgotten how energetic the wave in my hair is. Without all that extra weight it just comes roaring back, even when I blow dry it.
I’m going to let it grow out again in the back and sides eventually, but I’m keeping the bang because I don’t like it getting in my eyes. The problem has always been finding hair stylists who know how to do long-haired guys any good. That was why I just let it all grow out some years ago…I’d given up on hair stylists and decided to just let it grow and pull it back into a pony tail when necessary. And…I wanted to see just how long I could get it to grow. Now I know…about a third of the way down my back. That’s it. It won’t grow any longer then that. I have this very fine baby hair and it takes forever to grow and it never gets very long. I was hoping I could get it down to my waist. But…not…
I’m Not Druck. Duck. Drunk. I’m Just Naturally Confused And Disoriented…
Via Sullivan… I find it hard to believe that the United States Of America drink more per capita then Cuba, Brazil and Mexico, and less then Britain, Germany, France, Spain and…Greenland…
Be interesting to see that broken down for the U.S. by state.
Probably not. But I haven’t been blogging as often as I have previously and it’s because I’m not sitting in front of a computer nearly as much. As I said previously, I’m finding I get a lot more done around the house when I’m not sitting down at my computer. But something else is happening. Something I was sort-of hoping would happen, though I hadn’t taken into account what it might mean for my blogging patterns. Slowly, but inevitably, my iPhone is becoming my all purpose communication – entertainment – information widget.
When it first hit the streets, the iPhone was lacking a couple of really important items in my personal information management toolkit: a sync-able notepad and ToDo tracker. But I have really great third party iPhone apps now that fill those slots. And as I get more comfortable with using them, I use Mowgli, my main household computer, less and less.
Last weekend, I had Mowgli off almost the entire time. I ran Bagheera, the art room Mac, to finish a couple of photography projects that I’d left on my plate for far too long. But Mowgli is slowly being relegated to finances and work related projects. I am keeping in touch with the world, and with my daily life, more and more with just the iPhone now.
And…there is this: My little patch of the good earth is on the cusp of spring, and I don’t want to be angry all the time. I read the news, in particular the continuing culture war on gay people, and I get angry. So I am avoiding the news.
This Saturday, I’m going to Disney World again, for a week. Mostly to just spend some more time in a place where it’s a small world after all, there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day, and dreams really do come true. Better there, then driving across the mid-west and listening to hate radio the whole way. My brother said they still have their YES ON 8 campaign signs planted in their front yards of houses all over Oceano, Pismo Beach and Arroyo Grande.
I’m not sick or dead or away somewhere…just discovering that I get a lot more done around the house when I have my computers turned off. The weather here in Charm City is trying to struggle itself out of winter and I’m finding a lot of things to do outside. Plus…I have two major photo projects I absolutely must get done this weekend. Plus, I have a project demo I have to do at work, plus start the process of migrating the test center to new quarters. In other words, I’m a bit swamped. So…lite to no posting for a while.
I am treating myself to some nice dinners out though. I’d become used to the Friday night happy hour and dinner with some gay friends in the Washington area. I’m not doing that anymore for reasons I may go into here at a later date. But there is tons of good eating right here in Baltimore, if not the tons of Gay bars and clubs that Washington has, and I’m taking more advantage of that now then I did before. Very good eating within walking distance from the house at Cafe’ Hon and elsewhere on The Avenue. And if I want to go downtown…my god Baltimore is just loaded with good eats. They say the best revenge is living well.
My computers are a subtil trap. They make me good money. But they also keep me sitting down. I don’t want to be spending the rest of my life sitting down.
Harder than some might think. I, for one, will never forgive Dominic West for McNulty.
That’s okay…I can’t bear to listen to Dick Van Dyke’s Bert. I never watched The Wire (I actually live in Baltimore…I don’t need to watch it on TV too…), but West couldn’t have been that bad.
It gets worse for actors with the global media these days. You watch British television on cable. You watch British movies. You watch ordinary English folk doing this and that on YouTube. And then you listen to American actors trying to get it right and maybe the best of them, or the ones who’ve lived in England most of their lives are convincing, but mostly it’s an embarrassment. Let it be said a lot of actors don’t do different American accents very well either (southern…deep southern…New England…Western…). That’s something you really notice the more you travel within the U.S.
Bawlmer, hon? Yeah…everyone here in my neighborhood knows I didn’t grow up here. J.K. Rowling was absolutely right to insist on a British cast.
There’s a bunch of you folks who come here on a daily basis…somewhat more who come here on a week-to-week basis. I can tell from the servers logs…but no…I have no idea who any of you are. Those of you who come here from a few of the major ISPs I don’t even know precisely where you live. But I have a small, but very satisfying audience here. And I am delighted with all of you…whether or not you comment. I have never once advertised this site. So I have to assume that those of you I don’t know personally, just stumbled upon my little place, and decided that it was worth revisiting regularly. That is just…amazing.
Per the previous post… I mentioned an author who has self-published a book on Authoritarianism. He has offered his book for free in PDF format to the world…but is also using a service called Lulu to create paperback copies if anyone wants to buy one. I just took a closer look at Lulu…and it is interesting to me on a number of levels.
Services like Lulu offer authors the ability to have books literally made-to-order, at prices competitive with what you’d get from Amazon or any mortar and brick bookseller. So if someone likes what you do, the technology now exists to make one-off copies for anyone who wants one. You don’t have to interest a big publisher. That means if your material is such that it only is of interest to a small subset of readers, you can still have your book printed and they can still read you.
I’ve been wanting to do books for ages. I have two primary interests here: my art photography naturally…but also some works of fiction. This is what I want to ask you about.
Most of you may not know this, but some years ago I had a series of fantasy world stories up here on my web site: The Skywatchers of Aden.
The series takes place in an alternate universe earth…one with different continents and different histories. There is a struggle to the death involving a theocratic totalitarian state…Ekrus…and a nation of refugees from that state…Aden…comprised of many non-conformist faiths who came together to form their own nation…a democracy based on religious freedom. But they cannot fight alone. There is a third nation…Atria…a nation of many native peoples who hold to many different values and worship many different gods…that is caught in the middle of this war between the theocracy and the democracy. Somehow, these people of wildly divergent views on faith and morality have to find common ground in order to preserver against the large and powerful theocratic state. The central focus of the stories is on a same-sex couple…one of which is a devout non-conformist believer from the nation of Aden…the other a native of Atria…who find themselves in love and in the middle of this scorched earth war between Aden and Ekrus.
As I said…some time ago I had these stories up here…and then I pulled them down when I became dissatisfied with them. I am not naturally a writer…I am a graphic artist. But I do write occasionally and this fantasy series still attracts my attention. I have been meaning to re-write some of what I initially put out and add some illustrations and re-post it. My question to you all is…would you be interested in reading it? Those of you who keep coming back here to read my occasional posts…is it conceivable to you that you might be interested in reading some fiction I might produce?
Just curious…because it seems the technology exists for me to turn this into a book after all. I would love to…one day…hold a book of my own in my hands.
If there is enough interest…I’ll start reposting some of the stories. I still want to add some illustrations though. But feedback would be…wonderful.
Contemplating The City Of Tomorrow While Calculating Gallons Per Mile
They’re figuring out now, that gallons-per-miles gives folks a better way to compare fuel efficiency and savings among cars then their miles per gallon figure. I’d intuited this for years, probably because I love taking big cross-country road trips. Take a few of those and pretty soon come to view your car’s gas mileage in terms of how much the total distance you went cost you rather then how many miles you get for the price of one gallon. The first thing I did when I seriously started thinking about replacing the Honda Accord with the Mercedes was try to figure out how much more it would cost me to drive the Mercedes from Baltimore to California.
Turns out…not so much. The Mercedes is actually very fuel efficient for a six banger. It takes the more expensive premium gas, but it uses it almost as well as the Accord did, and the Accord was a four banger mated to a five speed manual transmission. The Mercedes has a seven speed (yes…seven) automatic. If I let the cruse control decide how to maintain speed on the highway I actually get anywhere from 29 to 31 or 32 mpg. One trip back from southern Virgina I got 33 mpg out of it. That was at Virginia’s feeble 65 mph speed limit, which I didn’t want to break because the highway cops are thick on that stretch of I-83. So I had the cruse control on the whole time. But the car is no fun to drive like that.
This gallons-per-mile calculator tells me that the Mercedes, using only the EPA figures and not my own better highway figures, only needs an extra 38 gallons of gas to go from Baltimore to California and back again, over the Accord. That’s only a little over two tankfulls…not really all that much. But it is more expensive gas to start with. Even so, the extra works out to about 85 bucks more at $2.25 a gallon, about $120 bucks at $3.00 a gallon, and $150 bucks extra at $4.00 a gallon. On the other hand, at $4.00 a gallon the total trip costs me nearly a thousand dollars just in gas. That’s the problem. I could make up the difference in cost between the Mercedes and the Accord easily by just not buying so much turquoise every time I drive through the southwest. The difference between $2.25 a gallon gas and $4.00 a gallon not so much.
Buying the Mercedes really didn’t really make the big road trips much more expensive. It’s the rising price of gas that really hurts. And where that hurts the most is in your day-to-day use. That’s a line item in the household budget you can’t easily get rid of. But what the Gallons-Per-Miles calculator reveals is that trading in a car that gets 33 mpg for one that gets 50 actually doesn’t save you as much as trading in a car that gets 14 for one that gets 20. That hybrid you are looking at may not save you as much as you think.
Better to just not drive if you don’t have to. This is a hobby horse of mine, but I’ll say it again: if the nation wants to really do something to make a dent in oil usage, encourage walkablity in cities and suburbs. Mix housing and shopping with offices…even factories where feasible. Make city life attractive. Plan communities around pedestrian traffic. Try to make driving the exception rather then the rule…not something you do to get the basic necessities, but something you do to get the odds and ends you can’t get locally…or just to pleasure drive. I live within walking distance of work and two good grocery stores. My car sits in front of the house most of the time. That saves me tons of money. More people do that and there’s less oil being consumed and less damage to the environment.
Walt Disney had a dream for the city of the future. It was EPCOT (as opposed to Epcot – lower case spelling – the theme park his dream became after he died). In EPCOT he said, no one would ever need to use a car, except to go for weekend pleasure drives. The entire city was planned around the pedestrian, with the Disney monorails acting as transportation between the city, the Magic Kingdom theme park to the north, and the industrial center and airport to the south. Within the city Wedway People Movers would serve as transportation between the city center and the outlaying housing areas. There were lots of green spaces and pedestrian and bike paths, all cleverly isolated from the roads. A pedestrian would never have to navigate a street crossing in EPCOT.
Sniff all you want at the 1950-ish world-o-tomorrow dreamland, but had Walt Disney’s vision come to pass that Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow would be perfectly positioned to weather the oil price shocks now and to come. The whole transportation system ran on electricity and you could generate that with any number of alternative sources. It didn’t have to be oil. And with residents not needing to use their cars for anything other then pleasure driving, they needn’t be so dramatically impacted by the rising cost of gas. Yes, goods and services would still cost them more. And probably the taxes to support the transportation infrastructure. But how many household budgets were absolutely crushed by the monthly cost of gasoline for commuting back and forth to work every day? How much of that contributed to the current economic collapse? People can’t spend money they don’t have, because the gasoline bill ate it all.
I love to drive. I love the automobile. I have been entranced by them since I was a kid. I make no bones about it. The fact that some folks seem to just loath automobiles completely mystifies me. I cannot imagine a time when I would not own one. And I would have loved to have lived in Walt Disney’s city of tomorrow. Because as a matter of fact, I love to walk too. And I hate commuting. And I absolutely despise traffic jams. A city built from the ground up around the pedestrian would have suited me just fine.
I was re-reading the previous post, and just realized that I’d driven Traveler the equivalent of somewhat over once around the earth at the equator. But so far all that’s been up a little bit into Pennsylvania (to Stroudsburg to visit a friend), twice to Ocean City New Jersey, twice to Florida…once all the way to Key West, once only as far as Orlando and Disneyworld…once to Memphis Tennessee, once to Hillsville Virginia, and a lot around central Maryland and between Baltimore and northern Virgina.
It’s just a small portion of Planet Earth I’ve been driving on, yet I’ve already racked up enough miles to have theoretically driven once around the equator.
I am never tagged for these things. I just end up doing them. Peterson just did one (Facebook only) …and since he began his with a photo of his much younger self, I will too. The boy is father to the man and all that…
Twenty-Five Things About Me
I stopped wearing a wrist watch for decades. Then I found the mechanical wrist watch I wore in high school in a box of old memorabilia and had it repaired and restored. Took me months to find a wide leather watchband like the ones I used to wear back then…but eventually I found a place that made them online. Winding it every night before bed gives me a connection with the boy I once was.
Speaking of which…I keep boxes of…stuff…saved over the course of my life just to have it for memory’s sake. I think of them as History boxes. They contain old toys, notebooks, report cards, draft cards, letters, everyday knick-knacks…the random artifacts of life that at one time or another almost got thrown out, and that I decided at the last minute to keep instead and toss them in a "history box" for memory’s sake. I’ve done this since I was a kid.
I am almost always wearing blue jeans and sneakers and a light shirt of some sort. I hate long sleeves, and often roll up the sleeves on a long sleeved shirt if I have to wear one.
One of my childhood hobbies was model building. By the time I was 16 I’d made tons of models and had shelves in my bedroom full of them. Model cars, model airplanes, model submarines… Later, when in my 30s, I managed to get paid for it when I became an architectural model maker.
I visited a Disney theme park for the first time in my life last November…Disney World in Orlando.
Sandwiches make up 2/3rds of my diet. Ice Tea 90 percent of my fluid intake. I brew my own of course.
I smoke the occasional cigar. For the nicotine. When I’m stressed. Which is usually. Never cigarettes. I was never able to get tobacco smoke into my lungs. But I like the taste and smell of cigar smoke, believe it or not. Dad smoked them, so maybe there is a link there somewhere…either in the genes or the memory of him. I have to cut back though…my body is starting to complain.
I developed extremely crooked front teeth in my childhood, and my folks never had the money to get them straightened. So I hardly ever smiled openly when I was a kid. Just…grinned. Or put my hand up to my mouth when I smiled or laughed. It probably seriously impacted my dating abilities when I was a young man. Eventually I got them capped when I was in my late thirties, and for the first time since I was 5 or 6 I could smile openly. (Thank you forever Stuart!)
I love road trips. My favorite form of vacation is to just toss my bags and cameras in the car and just drive down some roads I’ve never been down before, and see landscapes and towns and roadside this and that I’ve never seen before.
The first not-a-children’s-book I ever read was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. In fourth grade. After I was told I was too young to be looking at the books on that side of the school library. Later that year, I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling. My English teacher at the time accused me of letting my mom write my book report on it for me…a thing I still get angry to remember.
I had a little stack of Tiger Beat and "16" Magazines stashed under my bed when I was in my early teens. I kept telling myself I just wanted to read about my favorite bands while I gwaked at the pictures of all the beautiful guys.
I still have my collection of 45 rpm records from back in the day. Most of them are very worn out though, and sound pretty scratchy.
I still have many of the comic books I read when I was a kid…the ones grandma didn’t throw out anyway. And my old Mad Magazines. And a big stack of Undergrounds from the early 70s.
I still have my first camera…a Kodak Brownie Fiesta mom gave me for my ninth birthday. Shutter doesn’t work right anymore though. And…I don’t think they even Make 127 roll film anymore.
I still have nightmares about my junior high school years.
But then…I have nightmares on a pretty regular basis anyway. They say it comes with the territory for us creative types. They don’t really scare me much anymore.
I love to paint in oils on canvas. However, I haven’t done an oil painting in years.
For the life of me, I simply cannot draw on a digitizer pad. I need a pencil or pen and paper. I can touch up just fine on a digitizer pad. But do the original art? No. It’s not just the disconnect between hand and eye…it’s the tactile feel of it. I don’t do big bold sweeping strokes of the pen…I do these nit-picky little lines and I need to feel them in my hand as well as see them on the paper.
I do most of my preliminary drawings entirely in my head. I compose most of what I write entirely in my head too. Then I just type it all out.
To relax, I take these once-or-twice-a-day walks in a big circle around whatever neighborhood I happen to be living in. A couple miles usually. I’ve done this ever since I was a kid.
When I am concentrating on what someone is saying to me, I have a bad habit of staring off into space, usually in a downward direction. It must seem like I’m not paying attention or getting bored but actually it’s total attention. I’m just tuning out the visual stuff and focusing on what I’m being told.
And…is it just me or does everyone else know they have more then one thing going on in their heads at any given moment? I have lots going on in my head. Constantly.
I was born in California. I often wish I’d grown up there too.
The walls of my basement art room are covered with random photos, artwork, and images clipped from various sources. They’re like a giant collage of random…stuff. Much like the thoughts in my head at any given moment. I did this to my bedroom walls when I was a kid too.
A few of the things decorating my office desk/hutch: Flaming Carrot action figure; Gigantor and Jimmy Sparks action figures; Stuffed Opus; Crazy Harry action figure; can of Wash Away Your Sins bubble bath; Original Slinky toy (that a co-worker can’t keep his hands away from whenever he comes over to my desk); small cast metal Supercar, sans Mike Mercury; Navajo Long Hair carving by artist Nelson Yazzie; Borg cube Christmas tree orniment; Walt Disney World Monorail replica; stuffed Maryland Crab toy with Blue Meany rider.
Okay…from all the books on German culture I’ve been reading lately, is this is something like saying Pope Still Catholic, or Bears Found To Prefer Woods To Port-A-Johns. Germans and angst are like southerners and barbecue.
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