Thursday, September 25, 2003
I took the recycling in today, which took me through the industrial part of town. It's hard not to notice how many of the factories are empty shells now... so many have shut down, just this year. It's not that I mourn them, the foul things, but there's something indefinably sad about empty buildings.
And, besides, I know exactly how many people have been thrown out of work by those closings, and how desperate their situation is. My hometown is - was - a factory town. But now the factories are moving to Mexico or China or somewhere else, where the wages are cheap and the people more exploitable, and there's nothing to replace them. But it's also a really old town that's been here for hundreds of years... many of the people here haven't just lived here all their lives, but their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents lived here all *their* lives, too. And besides, even if they were to move - where to? There's no jobs anywhere else either, not for folks with high-school educations and twenty years' factory experience.
There's no jobs anywhere.
In a striking coincidence, I'd just been listening to a show on the BBC where someone or another (as often happens when I listen to these shows, the word "expert" is floating across my mind, looking for something to connect itself to) was being interviewed about the job situation. He said that these days it's basically not possible to find a job that would last for your whole life; companies were no longer hiring for life, but wanted to be able to fire and hire people as they needed them.
"But that's all cyclical, isn't it?" said the interviewer. "In ten years things could have turned around again, couldn't they?"
"No."
(I love BBC. Programs like this don't make it onto the air here.)
So the lifetime career of loyalty to one company is history... well, in the long run, that's probably a positive. Maybe people will start working for themselves instead of someone else.
But in the short run, it means empty factory buildings. We're in a time of change. And transitions - no matter how good the end result may be - suck.
And, besides, I know exactly how many people have been thrown out of work by those closings, and how desperate their situation is. My hometown is - was - a factory town. But now the factories are moving to Mexico or China or somewhere else, where the wages are cheap and the people more exploitable, and there's nothing to replace them. But it's also a really old town that's been here for hundreds of years... many of the people here haven't just lived here all their lives, but their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents lived here all *their* lives, too. And besides, even if they were to move - where to? There's no jobs anywhere else either, not for folks with high-school educations and twenty years' factory experience.
There's no jobs anywhere.
In a striking coincidence, I'd just been listening to a show on the BBC where someone or another (as often happens when I listen to these shows, the word "expert" is floating across my mind, looking for something to connect itself to) was being interviewed about the job situation. He said that these days it's basically not possible to find a job that would last for your whole life; companies were no longer hiring for life, but wanted to be able to fire and hire people as they needed them.
"But that's all cyclical, isn't it?" said the interviewer. "In ten years things could have turned around again, couldn't they?"
"No."
(I love BBC. Programs like this don't make it onto the air here.)
So the lifetime career of loyalty to one company is history... well, in the long run, that's probably a positive. Maybe people will start working for themselves instead of someone else.
But in the short run, it means empty factory buildings. We're in a time of change. And transitions - no matter how good the end result may be - suck.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Well, since my parents apparently want their bedframe back, I've just had to spend an hour getting all the junk I'd been storing on that convenient flat space stored somewhere else. Rats. I'm running out of places to move things.
I'm such a packrat. It's terrible. I mean, it's not just that I saved all the notes I took in all my college classes in little binders. Some of those notes *are* useful, or would be if they were in any discernible order, and my habit of scribbling story ideas in the margins at least provides some excuse. It's that I saved all the notes I took in my classes in New Zealand and shipped them back overseas. Not cheaply, either. I have piles and piles of graded and returned English papers, class handouts from classes I flunked, an entire sheaf of tracings from a book of costumes I thought were cool (because I was too broke at the time to do photocopies - I kid you not), birthday cards from people I barely remember, dozens of half-used notebooks, pressed flowers, hand-drawn star charts from made-up universes, broken CD cases, packs of index cards with things scribbled on them....
To make matters worse, the bro, who is now living in the room I used to live in when I was a kid, has been cleaning it out, too, and keeps coming it with items. "Hey, Kat, how come you had two railroad nails stuck up on the doorframe? Can I throw out this birdsnest you found when you were eleven? Is it okay if I take every map that National Geographic put out for the last ten years off the walls? Where did this horseshoe come from?"
The brighter side of this is that cool stuff turns up. I found a really nice thank-you note from my favorite professor and a brass rubbing of a plate showing the cover of the book of Kells that I'd done at this crypt-turned-cafe in London. (Brass rubbing is where you cover an engraved brass plate with a piece of paper and then rub the paper with a chalk, giving you a copy of the plate. Or a really big chalk smear. Apparently there's people who get very, very into this; for myself, although I enjoyed getting chalk all over myself, the table, and everyone present, once was enough.)
And I turned up yet another half-full notebook, this one dating back to my teenaged years. I went through it in some fascination. It's one of those three-subject notebooks, with dividers labeled "Beehives," "Bee Garden," and "Sewing," testament to my unshakable, if unfounded, belief that I will not only stick with my hobbies, but that I will actually use a notebook only for what it was meant to be used for. Needless to say there is nothing whatsoever about bees or sewing in this notebook. There's all kinds of other stuff, though - two pages of notes from what was either high school or sophomore-year college Chemistry (yet another of my unshakable beliefs: "This year I'll do all the class reading, and take notes on it while I read so that it sticks."); class notes from my Driver's Education course (amusing. Because I was homeschooled, I took the summer course of Driver's Ed, which meant I was mostly in with people retaking it for one reason or another. We had one day of learning driving stuff and four of drug education, which may shed some light on "one reason or another"); various lists, mainly having to do with me going off to college for the first time; pages and pages of roleplaying characters, worldbuilding, even sketches of spaceships, along with the address of the guy who first introduced the bro and I to roleplaying when I was fourteen and who I had entirely forgotten about (and how many people can say they learned to play D&D in a National Park? Or heard the words, "All right, very funny, now give me my arm back," in their first session?); and, of course, the writing. Ah, the writing. Cringe.
The notebook contains the first draft of my first-ever completed short story, which I had thought long lost and which I am actually glad to have, in a cringing kind of way. Then there's a few pages of two different novels. These are... educational. The first fragment was written when I was 12 or so, at a guess, and is kind of like a plagurization of Pratchett's Small Gods written in the style of Mercedes Lackey, if you can imagine this without your brain shutting down in self-defense. It is happily and unabashedly bad. The second was written several years later, at 15 or 16. This was after I had Gotten Serious about writing, as only a teenager is capable of Getting Serious. It's intensely, self-consciously literary, humorless, and utterly pointless. There's a couple of pages of conceptualization, too. I wasn't naming my characters at this point, I was giving them titles, like The Artist. And, yes, with the capitalization. It's just as bad as the stuff I was writing when I was twelve, but - and this was really talented of me - I'd managed to hit bottom in a completely different way with this one.
What really worries me is that I may be looking back over the stuff I write now 10 years down the line and thinking the same thing. Gah.
The more immediate worry, though, is that I'd had the idea, when I picked this notebook up, that it was the one containing a couple of really terrible, morbid, angst-ridden poems I'd written after my first boyfriend dumped me, and it's not. This means I don't know where the angst poems are. And this is a bad thing. I could be paying hush money for the rest of my life if my brother gets hold of those.
Oh, well, there's no way to ask after them without rousing suspicion, so I'll just have to keep a sharp eye out. In the meantime, I really need to find somewhere I can store all these binders full of notes and this horseshoe.
(Post-milking addendum: I really wish they'd tell me when they move the cows. It's embarrassing to be driving 'round the farm thinking, "Dammit, I know I left those 86 nine-hundred-pound cows lying around here somewhere."
I'm such a packrat. It's terrible. I mean, it's not just that I saved all the notes I took in all my college classes in little binders. Some of those notes *are* useful, or would be if they were in any discernible order, and my habit of scribbling story ideas in the margins at least provides some excuse. It's that I saved all the notes I took in my classes in New Zealand and shipped them back overseas. Not cheaply, either. I have piles and piles of graded and returned English papers, class handouts from classes I flunked, an entire sheaf of tracings from a book of costumes I thought were cool (because I was too broke at the time to do photocopies - I kid you not), birthday cards from people I barely remember, dozens of half-used notebooks, pressed flowers, hand-drawn star charts from made-up universes, broken CD cases, packs of index cards with things scribbled on them....
To make matters worse, the bro, who is now living in the room I used to live in when I was a kid, has been cleaning it out, too, and keeps coming it with items. "Hey, Kat, how come you had two railroad nails stuck up on the doorframe? Can I throw out this birdsnest you found when you were eleven? Is it okay if I take every map that National Geographic put out for the last ten years off the walls? Where did this horseshoe come from?"
The brighter side of this is that cool stuff turns up. I found a really nice thank-you note from my favorite professor and a brass rubbing of a plate showing the cover of the book of Kells that I'd done at this crypt-turned-cafe in London. (Brass rubbing is where you cover an engraved brass plate with a piece of paper and then rub the paper with a chalk, giving you a copy of the plate. Or a really big chalk smear. Apparently there's people who get very, very into this; for myself, although I enjoyed getting chalk all over myself, the table, and everyone present, once was enough.)
And I turned up yet another half-full notebook, this one dating back to my teenaged years. I went through it in some fascination. It's one of those three-subject notebooks, with dividers labeled "Beehives," "Bee Garden," and "Sewing," testament to my unshakable, if unfounded, belief that I will not only stick with my hobbies, but that I will actually use a notebook only for what it was meant to be used for. Needless to say there is nothing whatsoever about bees or sewing in this notebook. There's all kinds of other stuff, though - two pages of notes from what was either high school or sophomore-year college Chemistry (yet another of my unshakable beliefs: "This year I'll do all the class reading, and take notes on it while I read so that it sticks."); class notes from my Driver's Education course (amusing. Because I was homeschooled, I took the summer course of Driver's Ed, which meant I was mostly in with people retaking it for one reason or another. We had one day of learning driving stuff and four of drug education, which may shed some light on "one reason or another"); various lists, mainly having to do with me going off to college for the first time; pages and pages of roleplaying characters, worldbuilding, even sketches of spaceships, along with the address of the guy who first introduced the bro and I to roleplaying when I was fourteen and who I had entirely forgotten about (and how many people can say they learned to play D&D in a National Park? Or heard the words, "All right, very funny, now give me my arm back," in their first session?); and, of course, the writing. Ah, the writing. Cringe.
The notebook contains the first draft of my first-ever completed short story, which I had thought long lost and which I am actually glad to have, in a cringing kind of way. Then there's a few pages of two different novels. These are... educational. The first fragment was written when I was 12 or so, at a guess, and is kind of like a plagurization of Pratchett's Small Gods written in the style of Mercedes Lackey, if you can imagine this without your brain shutting down in self-defense. It is happily and unabashedly bad. The second was written several years later, at 15 or 16. This was after I had Gotten Serious about writing, as only a teenager is capable of Getting Serious. It's intensely, self-consciously literary, humorless, and utterly pointless. There's a couple of pages of conceptualization, too. I wasn't naming my characters at this point, I was giving them titles, like The Artist. And, yes, with the capitalization. It's just as bad as the stuff I was writing when I was twelve, but - and this was really talented of me - I'd managed to hit bottom in a completely different way with this one.
What really worries me is that I may be looking back over the stuff I write now 10 years down the line and thinking the same thing. Gah.
The more immediate worry, though, is that I'd had the idea, when I picked this notebook up, that it was the one containing a couple of really terrible, morbid, angst-ridden poems I'd written after my first boyfriend dumped me, and it's not. This means I don't know where the angst poems are. And this is a bad thing. I could be paying hush money for the rest of my life if my brother gets hold of those.
Oh, well, there's no way to ask after them without rousing suspicion, so I'll just have to keep a sharp eye out. In the meantime, I really need to find somewhere I can store all these binders full of notes and this horseshoe.
(Post-milking addendum: I really wish they'd tell me when they move the cows. It's embarrassing to be driving 'round the farm thinking, "Dammit, I know I left those 86 nine-hundred-pound cows lying around here somewhere."
Friday, September 19, 2003
The four-wheeler, our primary means of on-farm transportation, blew out its front wheel bearing. Dad can't fix it, and has been in a foul mood all day. We're trying to keep out of his way.
My little juvenile deliquents didn't help. By this I refer to this year's calves, now going on six months, and absolute trouble from hoof to head. Think 25 two-year olds who can run really fast and who outweigh you. They had to be moved today, but when we got out there about 5 had escaped and gone a-roving on their own, gotten lost in the woods, and were mooing forlornly off in the distance. ("We're sooooorrrry! Come saaaavvve us!") The bro had to go fish them out with the dog, and then they all tried to take a shortcut and got lost *again*, in the bramble patch, and Dad had to go cut them out with the machete. (Except the bro. The bro got himself out.) After *that*, they were pretty good, except for running poor Shep right into the ground. He's getting too old to be chasing deliquents around. Of course, he made up for it by sitting in my lap and panting out the window the whole way back, which, after the first few efforts to shift him (Shep weighs about 80 pounds), I resigned myself to, except for quiet protests of "Ow. My kidney," and the like. We all know what rolls downhill, and I long ago realized I was below the dog.
My little juvenile deliquents didn't help. By this I refer to this year's calves, now going on six months, and absolute trouble from hoof to head. Think 25 two-year olds who can run really fast and who outweigh you. They had to be moved today, but when we got out there about 5 had escaped and gone a-roving on their own, gotten lost in the woods, and were mooing forlornly off in the distance. ("We're sooooorrrry! Come saaaavvve us!") The bro had to go fish them out with the dog, and then they all tried to take a shortcut and got lost *again*, in the bramble patch, and Dad had to go cut them out with the machete. (Except the bro. The bro got himself out.) After *that*, they were pretty good, except for running poor Shep right into the ground. He's getting too old to be chasing deliquents around. Of course, he made up for it by sitting in my lap and panting out the window the whole way back, which, after the first few efforts to shift him (Shep weighs about 80 pounds), I resigned myself to, except for quiet protests of "Ow. My kidney," and the like. We all know what rolls downhill, and I long ago realized I was below the dog.
Thursday, September 18, 2003
So when the vet came by for herd check the other day, we had him take a look at our youngest dog, Kid, who'd been shaking his head a lot.
"He's got a bite at the base of his ear and it's gotten infected," he said, after examining it.
This did not surprise us greatly - the biting, that is. Kid has a very special relationship with our older dog, Shep. Shep is the alpha wolf of the dog pack, and he knows it, but like many an alpha wolf he's not very secure in his authority, and therefore makes up a lot of arbitrary rules about what Kid can and can't do. When Kid breaks the rules, he gets his ass kicked.
We'd noticed this, and done what we could to stop it (not much), but were puzzled as to why Kid kept doing the things that pissed Shep off and got him beat up. Shep outweighs Kid by quite a lot, so Kid doesn't really stand a chance in a fight, and we *know* Kid's smart enough to figure out the rules. What we finally realized was that it was a form of guerilla warfare involving us. Whenever Shep attacked Kid, he got yelled at and sent away, and Kid got patted and fussed over. And so Kid was carefully, deliberately, and very subtly provoking Shep into attacking him, and then gloating quietly as he was petted while the disgraced Shep sat and watched and simmered. Shep was winning every fight, but he was loosing the war.
From this we have reached the logical conclusion: Border Collies are scary.
But I'm getting away from the point of the story, which is that, although we had stopped rewarding Kid's provoking behavior once we figured out what was going on, the dogs still fought quite a lot, and Shep had already taken a chunk out of Kid's ear once, so the bite marks were not a big shock.
"Here's some sulpha," said the vet. "Give him half a tab morning and evening."
And so now I'm stuck with the chore of getting a half-tablet of sulpha down the throat of the sneakiest dog I've ever owned every day, twice a day. It's a war of cunning, and I think I'm loosing. The first time was easy - he didn't yet know what was going on. By the second time he was wise to it and started panicking the minute he saw the tablet. Luckily he's so much of an attention junkie that I don't have to work to catch him, but he can still make life difficult for me. He won't bite (although he did consider it, the first time, before some last, dying shred of common sense buried deep in his crazy doggie mind saved him), but he *will* clench his teeth shut so tightly that it requires a crowbar to get them apart. Any time that I am not actively holding him upright he tries to roll over on his back, which is a very Kid thing to do in that it is outwardly respectful (doggie submission position, throat bared) but actually damned cheek, since I'm sure he knows it's not possible to give him a pill like that. He mastered pill-spitting the first day, so I have to hold his mouth clamped shut until I feel him swallow. This morning he learned how to fake a swallow.
I'm debating feeding him the hunk of pill in a piece of cheese or meat. On the one hand, it'd be easy, and not risk my fingers. On the other hand, this is a dog that can eat an entire bowl of dog food and leave on the bottom a neat little heap of the mineral-suppliment powder that I had sprinkled on the top. Getting the pill out of the middle of a hunk of hamburger probably wouldn't even present a challenge.
Sometimes I think that it would be nice, just once, to work with a normal animal. But I'd only get bored.
"He's got a bite at the base of his ear and it's gotten infected," he said, after examining it.
This did not surprise us greatly - the biting, that is. Kid has a very special relationship with our older dog, Shep. Shep is the alpha wolf of the dog pack, and he knows it, but like many an alpha wolf he's not very secure in his authority, and therefore makes up a lot of arbitrary rules about what Kid can and can't do. When Kid breaks the rules, he gets his ass kicked.
We'd noticed this, and done what we could to stop it (not much), but were puzzled as to why Kid kept doing the things that pissed Shep off and got him beat up. Shep outweighs Kid by quite a lot, so Kid doesn't really stand a chance in a fight, and we *know* Kid's smart enough to figure out the rules. What we finally realized was that it was a form of guerilla warfare involving us. Whenever Shep attacked Kid, he got yelled at and sent away, and Kid got patted and fussed over. And so Kid was carefully, deliberately, and very subtly provoking Shep into attacking him, and then gloating quietly as he was petted while the disgraced Shep sat and watched and simmered. Shep was winning every fight, but he was loosing the war.
From this we have reached the logical conclusion: Border Collies are scary.
But I'm getting away from the point of the story, which is that, although we had stopped rewarding Kid's provoking behavior once we figured out what was going on, the dogs still fought quite a lot, and Shep had already taken a chunk out of Kid's ear once, so the bite marks were not a big shock.
"Here's some sulpha," said the vet. "Give him half a tab morning and evening."
And so now I'm stuck with the chore of getting a half-tablet of sulpha down the throat of the sneakiest dog I've ever owned every day, twice a day. It's a war of cunning, and I think I'm loosing. The first time was easy - he didn't yet know what was going on. By the second time he was wise to it and started panicking the minute he saw the tablet. Luckily he's so much of an attention junkie that I don't have to work to catch him, but he can still make life difficult for me. He won't bite (although he did consider it, the first time, before some last, dying shred of common sense buried deep in his crazy doggie mind saved him), but he *will* clench his teeth shut so tightly that it requires a crowbar to get them apart. Any time that I am not actively holding him upright he tries to roll over on his back, which is a very Kid thing to do in that it is outwardly respectful (doggie submission position, throat bared) but actually damned cheek, since I'm sure he knows it's not possible to give him a pill like that. He mastered pill-spitting the first day, so I have to hold his mouth clamped shut until I feel him swallow. This morning he learned how to fake a swallow.
I'm debating feeding him the hunk of pill in a piece of cheese or meat. On the one hand, it'd be easy, and not risk my fingers. On the other hand, this is a dog that can eat an entire bowl of dog food and leave on the bottom a neat little heap of the mineral-suppliment powder that I had sprinkled on the top. Getting the pill out of the middle of a hunk of hamburger probably wouldn't even present a challenge.
Sometimes I think that it would be nice, just once, to work with a normal animal. But I'd only get bored.
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
I watch the progress of my blogspot ad banner, annoying thing that it is, with some fascination. It's keyword-oriented, you see. The idea there is that people who write blogs about books will have ads for bookstores in their banners, people that blog about tennis will see ads for sports sites, people who write about rap music will see rapper's websites, and so on. It's very clever, but in the case of this blog it neatly illustrates the brick wall that artificial intelligence programmers have been beating their heads against for the last twenty years: the smarter the machine, the stupider the result. I've seen ads for poetry contests and ads for novel-writing software, which almost make sense, but in the last week, for example, my banner has also featured an ad for a martial arts school (presumably because of my reference to X-Box fight games) and ads for tech pr, which I can only assume has something to do with me writing "advertising" and "webpage" somewhere in the vicinity of each other. Now, thanks to my reference to insects last post, it's displaying an ad for ant eradication.
I can only wonder what it'll come up for *this* post.
I can only wonder what it'll come up for *this* post.
This isn't a snippet from a work in progress. In fact, it belongs to something so nebulus that it can't even be called a work just yet; it's nothing more than a collection of odd characters and ideas that lurks way in the back of my mind and pops up occasionally to make pronouncements. This was an exceptionally strong pronouncement, and since it's currently recorded only on the back of a paper towel, and there's nowhere on my computer that I can think of to put it where I won't forget it, and the blog window was still open....
-----
"It was miraculous, my lord. Truly you have been chosen by the gods."
"Have I?" said the prince, running a finger around the lip of the empty bottle. He was silent then, silent long enough that the lackey had decided that that was, in fact, the only comment his lordship cared to make, and was casting about for some other topic of conversation, before the prince straightened his finger and tipped the vial over backwards. "Then I shall want another bottle."
It was only then that the lackey realized, with a profound shock, that his lord was drunk: not tipsy, as his mother the queen sometimes was after having an extra glass of wine with the meal, and not a bit in his cups, as the prince his elder brother was almost every night, prone to singing and pinching the chambermaids: but drunk, glaze-eyed and flush-cheeked and swaying slightly as he gripped the table with one hand. The lackey backed away.
"Shall I, er, shall I fetch it for you, lord?"
The prince tipped his head and blinked slowly, then spoke equally slowly, spacing his words with elaborate care. "That would be most kind."
The lackey fled, wondering what his friends would say to the gossip if he told them, but beginning already to doubt himself. Perhaps I was wrong, he told himself. Perhaps he is ill, or perhaps very tired.
Behind him, the prince blinked and reached for the empty wineglass, and then blinked again into its depths, puzzled to find it empty. He was indeed drunk, although, having gone to some trouble to make himself so, he found that he was not enjoying it greatly. It was true that it had dulled the edge from his mind, and slowed his thoughts, but it had not stopped him thinking entirely; and because he could not stop himself thinking, he could not stop the events of the day from parading before his eyes, nor stop the words of his father from ringing in his head, nor forget the future that the combination of the two, logically, inevitably to his historian's mind, would bring crashing down on them in flames and ruin. It was this treasonous knowledge that had set him on his quest for drunken oblivion.
Drunkeness he had found, in plenty, but to his despair the wine could not wash away the conclusion already reached. He had blunted his sword too late; now the cut had been made, the blood flowed, and no desperate dulling of his tretcherously sharp mind after the fact could save him from knowing that his father was wrong, that the enemy was right, and that there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it. Either his father would fall, would die - his hand, pouring the wine that the lackey had brought, shook at the thought - or the fine net that held together the worlds would be ripped and the work of thousands of years undone. Countless worlds would feel the backlash; empires would fall, cities would burn, plague and disaster run rampant for who knew how many centuries. Demons would walk the streets of peaceful cities. His hand shook again at the thought of seeing that.
He could not let that happen.
And he could not go against the will of his father.
And his father would see no reason; under his shirt, the rising bruise from his father's angry blow gave testimony to that.
Three impossibles. But one would come to pass.
The prince reached to pour himself another drink. It would, like all the others, fail to wash from his mouth the taste of fear.
-----
"It was miraculous, my lord. Truly you have been chosen by the gods."
"Have I?" said the prince, running a finger around the lip of the empty bottle. He was silent then, silent long enough that the lackey had decided that that was, in fact, the only comment his lordship cared to make, and was casting about for some other topic of conversation, before the prince straightened his finger and tipped the vial over backwards. "Then I shall want another bottle."
It was only then that the lackey realized, with a profound shock, that his lord was drunk: not tipsy, as his mother the queen sometimes was after having an extra glass of wine with the meal, and not a bit in his cups, as the prince his elder brother was almost every night, prone to singing and pinching the chambermaids: but drunk, glaze-eyed and flush-cheeked and swaying slightly as he gripped the table with one hand. The lackey backed away.
"Shall I, er, shall I fetch it for you, lord?"
The prince tipped his head and blinked slowly, then spoke equally slowly, spacing his words with elaborate care. "That would be most kind."
The lackey fled, wondering what his friends would say to the gossip if he told them, but beginning already to doubt himself. Perhaps I was wrong, he told himself. Perhaps he is ill, or perhaps very tired.
Behind him, the prince blinked and reached for the empty wineglass, and then blinked again into its depths, puzzled to find it empty. He was indeed drunk, although, having gone to some trouble to make himself so, he found that he was not enjoying it greatly. It was true that it had dulled the edge from his mind, and slowed his thoughts, but it had not stopped him thinking entirely; and because he could not stop himself thinking, he could not stop the events of the day from parading before his eyes, nor stop the words of his father from ringing in his head, nor forget the future that the combination of the two, logically, inevitably to his historian's mind, would bring crashing down on them in flames and ruin. It was this treasonous knowledge that had set him on his quest for drunken oblivion.
Drunkeness he had found, in plenty, but to his despair the wine could not wash away the conclusion already reached. He had blunted his sword too late; now the cut had been made, the blood flowed, and no desperate dulling of his tretcherously sharp mind after the fact could save him from knowing that his father was wrong, that the enemy was right, and that there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it. Either his father would fall, would die - his hand, pouring the wine that the lackey had brought, shook at the thought - or the fine net that held together the worlds would be ripped and the work of thousands of years undone. Countless worlds would feel the backlash; empires would fall, cities would burn, plague and disaster run rampant for who knew how many centuries. Demons would walk the streets of peaceful cities. His hand shook again at the thought of seeing that.
He could not let that happen.
And he could not go against the will of his father.
And his father would see no reason; under his shirt, the rising bruise from his father's angry blow gave testimony to that.
Three impossibles. But one would come to pass.
The prince reached to pour himself another drink. It would, like all the others, fail to wash from his mouth the taste of fear.
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Well, I finally did it - allowed myself a day off of schoolwork in order to (gasp!) clean my bloody room. I have a floor now. Wow. And a desk too. And various small insects have been unkindly rousted and told to find their own bloody rooms. I expect I'm the object of much bitter complaint in Insect World right now ("It was such a quality area, dozens of hiding places and half-eaten food galore, and then what happens? I tell you, the government ought to do something about people like that.")
But apparently there is a nest of bumblebees hybernating in my wall. I find this mildly disturbing, especially since they keep falling out and crawling around on the floor (now that I have a floor) looking dazed and confused and generally bumbly. I wish they wouldn't.
And, satifyingly, once I'd cleaned up and gotten a suitably large pile of paper trash, I got to take it out back and burn it. Thank God for living in the country. Housework would be even less appealing if there wasn't that promise, that Holy Grail, of getting to set fire to something when I'd finished.
But apparently there is a nest of bumblebees hybernating in my wall. I find this mildly disturbing, especially since they keep falling out and crawling around on the floor (now that I have a floor) looking dazed and confused and generally bumbly. I wish they wouldn't.
And, satifyingly, once I'd cleaned up and gotten a suitably large pile of paper trash, I got to take it out back and burn it. Thank God for living in the country. Housework would be even less appealing if there wasn't that promise, that Holy Grail, of getting to set fire to something when I'd finished.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
Today was Kat is the Cheese Writing Bitch day. Which is to say that every Thursday I work for my Mom. Usually this involves upkeep on the webpage, since I know the most HTML of anyone in the family (frightening thought. Also explains a lot about the webpage, when you get right down to it.) This is one hell of a chore, since the webpage has, in its four years of existance, been managed by half a dozen people before the management filtered down to me, including one professional who added a bunch of nifty features to the site (none of which I understand) but knew nothing about cheese, farming, or running a business. "Mess" is about the best way to describe it.
But the other Thursday chore which comes up from time to time is writing advertising copy. I hate this with a passion. I am no good at writing advertising. Unfortunately, the other members of my family and the cheesehouse employees are even worse, and since I'm the only semi-professional writer/English major around, guess what? Today was an attempt at revising our brochure, which needs to go to the printers at the end of the month. Mom and I brainstormed a bunch of ghastly advertising-type phrases, each one worse than the last, until we couldn't stand it any more and stopped. So we're nowhere near finished with this, but at least there was progress. I'll pull out what we did tomorrow or so and re-read it to see if I can't make it less ghastly.
This post brought to you courtesy my mother's laptop, since the bro has hijacked my computer to watch Babylon 5 DVDs on.
But the other Thursday chore which comes up from time to time is writing advertising copy. I hate this with a passion. I am no good at writing advertising. Unfortunately, the other members of my family and the cheesehouse employees are even worse, and since I'm the only semi-professional writer/English major around, guess what? Today was an attempt at revising our brochure, which needs to go to the printers at the end of the month. Mom and I brainstormed a bunch of ghastly advertising-type phrases, each one worse than the last, until we couldn't stand it any more and stopped. So we're nowhere near finished with this, but at least there was progress. I'll pull out what we did tomorrow or so and re-read it to see if I can't make it less ghastly.
This post brought to you courtesy my mother's laptop, since the bro has hijacked my computer to watch Babylon 5 DVDs on.
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Comments are back! Yay! Now I just need readers. *grin*
Found a nice bit of planning software courtesy Holly Lisle's blog. It's impressively flexible, flexible enough to accomidate even *my* plotting habits, and it's pretty, and I can think of at least other three uses for it besides novel plotting. The bad news is, it's seventy bucks. Sigh. Well, I'll see if I'm still as enamored of it when the trial period's up.
In other news, I've done two Latin lessons in three days, which is great but not particularly blogable. Also played X-Box again last night. Badly. I'm beginning to suspect, however, that X-Box is one of those things that I enjoy *because* I'm bad at it, and that if I ever became good at it, I wouldn't have half as much fun. There are other things that fall into this category. Golf, for example. Now I am *bad* at golf. Really, really bad. The last time I played golf the folks from the RV park next door were setting up their lawn chairs just so they could watch me, my bro, and my bro's two friends fail utterly at playing golf. That's how bad we were. Ours was the only golf match to feature extra events like the Twenty Foot Straight Up Into The Tree Golf Club Toss ("It doesn't count against my score! It never touched the ball!"), the Backwards Onto The Green We Just Played And Which Other People Are Trying To Play Tee-Off ("'Scuse me! Sorry! My bad!"), the Hundred Meter Ball Search ("It landed somewhere in this creek. I know 'cause I heard the splash,"), the Over The Ten-Foot Fence And Onto The Putt-Putt Course Tee-Off ("Oops,"), TWICE, and that all-time favorite, the Keeping of the Score ("I lost the little pencil again," "Hey, wait - I thought it was *you* keeping score," "Does anyone remember how many times I've hit this damned thing?"). I had the worst score, at something like 46 over par, on what can only be called a dinky little golf course. And I loved it. Every minute of it. Even the bit with the tiger lilies. I laughed so hard I thought I was going to piss myself, and how many people can say that about a golf game?
Golf when you're good at it, on the other hand, looks a dead bore. I'd be terrified of someday becoming good at golf, except that really - when you look at my past plays - that doesn't seem to be a risk. Likewise the X-Box.
As a side note, the people who program these things are a) male, b) exceedingly sexually frustrated, and c) have a touching faith in the power of female support garments. I have now been banned from shouting, "And let's hear it for... THE AMAZING LEVITATING BREASTS!" while playing fight games.
Found a nice bit of planning software courtesy Holly Lisle's blog. It's impressively flexible, flexible enough to accomidate even *my* plotting habits, and it's pretty, and I can think of at least other three uses for it besides novel plotting. The bad news is, it's seventy bucks. Sigh. Well, I'll see if I'm still as enamored of it when the trial period's up.
In other news, I've done two Latin lessons in three days, which is great but not particularly blogable. Also played X-Box again last night. Badly. I'm beginning to suspect, however, that X-Box is one of those things that I enjoy *because* I'm bad at it, and that if I ever became good at it, I wouldn't have half as much fun. There are other things that fall into this category. Golf, for example. Now I am *bad* at golf. Really, really bad. The last time I played golf the folks from the RV park next door were setting up their lawn chairs just so they could watch me, my bro, and my bro's two friends fail utterly at playing golf. That's how bad we were. Ours was the only golf match to feature extra events like the Twenty Foot Straight Up Into The Tree Golf Club Toss ("It doesn't count against my score! It never touched the ball!"), the Backwards Onto The Green We Just Played And Which Other People Are Trying To Play Tee-Off ("'Scuse me! Sorry! My bad!"), the Hundred Meter Ball Search ("It landed somewhere in this creek. I know 'cause I heard the splash,"), the Over The Ten-Foot Fence And Onto The Putt-Putt Course Tee-Off ("Oops,"), TWICE, and that all-time favorite, the Keeping of the Score ("I lost the little pencil again," "Hey, wait - I thought it was *you* keeping score," "Does anyone remember how many times I've hit this damned thing?"). I had the worst score, at something like 46 over par, on what can only be called a dinky little golf course. And I loved it. Every minute of it. Even the bit with the tiger lilies. I laughed so hard I thought I was going to piss myself, and how many people can say that about a golf game?
Golf when you're good at it, on the other hand, looks a dead bore. I'd be terrified of someday becoming good at golf, except that really - when you look at my past plays - that doesn't seem to be a risk. Likewise the X-Box.
As a side note, the people who program these things are a) male, b) exceedingly sexually frustrated, and c) have a touching faith in the power of female support garments. I have now been banned from shouting, "And let's hear it for... THE AMAZING LEVITATING BREASTS!" while playing fight games.
Sunday, September 07, 2003
"ALIEN IN SLAMMER AFTER FISTFIGHT WITH BILL... OVER HILLARY!"
Ah, tabloids. My wait in the grocery store checkout line would be so much duller without you.
Spent most of the day being introduced to the wonders of X-Box by my ever-lovin' (and bored) brother. We played three total - a first-person shooter, a fight game, and something that was supposed to simulate riding a snowboard, which I gather is a pretty good sweep of the field of X-Box/PS2/whatever game thingies. I enjoyed it, but don't expect me to become a regular player of these games... I don't have the reflexes. I also don't know my right from my left very well, and I get lost even in real life, which meant that in the first person shooter I spent a lot of time banging my nose against corners and being fragged by people, while proving that my own aim was absolutely absymal, unless I was shooting at my teammates by mistake, in which case I was very accurate. This led to a pretty predictable pattern for gameplay:
Bro: I'm coming down the stairs! It's me! Don't shoot at me! Don't... ARG! You killed me!
Me: Sorry. There's one of those red guys around here somewhere.
Bro: You shot me with a heat-seeking missile!
Me: Sorry. Cool gun, eh?
Game Screen: Conner has been defeated by Murphy. Again. Get a grip, woman! Oh, and Murphy has been defeated by Phoenix Commando.
Me: See? I told you one of those red guys was around here somewhere. Why didn't he die when I shot at him?
Bro: Because you were pushing the left trigger instead of the right. Also, you'd used up all of your ammo on me.
The fighting game I did a lot better at, or at least a lot better at than I deserved. This is because after a while I start panicking in these games and just punch as many buttons as I can, all at once, over and over, which turns out to be a pretty good strategy in fight games because:
a) My opponent cannot hit me, since my character is apparently trying to do the hokey-pokey while breakdancing and suffering from St. Vitus's Dance. Any blows anyone can land on her are completely accidental. Of course, I can't hit him either, but that's okay because
b) The programmers of these liked to put in a bunch of really cool moves which can only be accessed by knowing all the key combinations for all the characters by heart or, alternatively, by randomly pushing a bunch of buttons. This means that every so often, and to my complete surprise, my character would make a Mystical Hand Motion and announce, "The Path of the Lotus is Strewn With Rice Paper," or something, and then her opponent would be struck with blue lightening, frozen in solid ice, picked up by his feet and banged headfirst against the floor a couple of times, or, on rare occasions, all three, while my brother shouted, "What? How did you DO that? YOU'RE JUST PUSHING BUTTONS! THAT IS SO UNFAIR! Cool though." The opponent would then roll around moaning a bit while my character made finishing-up passes and smiled serenely, the impressiveness of her chi only slightly marred by the fact that I am not very quick on the uptake and so the hokey-pokey St. Vitus's breakdance had continued throughout.
Snowboarding was more or less a draw. My random-button-pushing did uncover several nifty snowboarding tricks for which I got points, but sadly it was not enough to make up for my complete inability to keep the character upright, going where I wanted, or, on several occasions, doing the course while facing the proper direction. I do not think I shall ever take up snowboarding. My ability to keep a real snowboard under control is probably not much ahead of my game abilities, and and the noises the characters were making while I careened them off of various solid objests were very realistic.
Ah, tabloids. My wait in the grocery store checkout line would be so much duller without you.
Spent most of the day being introduced to the wonders of X-Box by my ever-lovin' (and bored) brother. We played three total - a first-person shooter, a fight game, and something that was supposed to simulate riding a snowboard, which I gather is a pretty good sweep of the field of X-Box/PS2/whatever game thingies. I enjoyed it, but don't expect me to become a regular player of these games... I don't have the reflexes. I also don't know my right from my left very well, and I get lost even in real life, which meant that in the first person shooter I spent a lot of time banging my nose against corners and being fragged by people, while proving that my own aim was absolutely absymal, unless I was shooting at my teammates by mistake, in which case I was very accurate. This led to a pretty predictable pattern for gameplay:
Bro: I'm coming down the stairs! It's me! Don't shoot at me! Don't... ARG! You killed me!
Me: Sorry. There's one of those red guys around here somewhere.
Bro: You shot me with a heat-seeking missile!
Me: Sorry. Cool gun, eh?
Game Screen: Conner has been defeated by Murphy. Again. Get a grip, woman! Oh, and Murphy has been defeated by Phoenix Commando.
Me: See? I told you one of those red guys was around here somewhere. Why didn't he die when I shot at him?
Bro: Because you were pushing the left trigger instead of the right. Also, you'd used up all of your ammo on me.
The fighting game I did a lot better at, or at least a lot better at than I deserved. This is because after a while I start panicking in these games and just punch as many buttons as I can, all at once, over and over, which turns out to be a pretty good strategy in fight games because:
a) My opponent cannot hit me, since my character is apparently trying to do the hokey-pokey while breakdancing and suffering from St. Vitus's Dance. Any blows anyone can land on her are completely accidental. Of course, I can't hit him either, but that's okay because
b) The programmers of these liked to put in a bunch of really cool moves which can only be accessed by knowing all the key combinations for all the characters by heart or, alternatively, by randomly pushing a bunch of buttons. This means that every so often, and to my complete surprise, my character would make a Mystical Hand Motion and announce, "The Path of the Lotus is Strewn With Rice Paper," or something, and then her opponent would be struck with blue lightening, frozen in solid ice, picked up by his feet and banged headfirst against the floor a couple of times, or, on rare occasions, all three, while my brother shouted, "What? How did you DO that? YOU'RE JUST PUSHING BUTTONS! THAT IS SO UNFAIR! Cool though." The opponent would then roll around moaning a bit while my character made finishing-up passes and smiled serenely, the impressiveness of her chi only slightly marred by the fact that I am not very quick on the uptake and so the hokey-pokey St. Vitus's breakdance had continued throughout.
Snowboarding was more or less a draw. My random-button-pushing did uncover several nifty snowboarding tricks for which I got points, but sadly it was not enough to make up for my complete inability to keep the character upright, going where I wanted, or, on several occasions, doing the course while facing the proper direction. I do not think I shall ever take up snowboarding. My ability to keep a real snowboard under control is probably not much ahead of my game abilities, and and the noises the characters were making while I careened them off of various solid objests were very realistic.
Saturday, September 06, 2003
Ok, I can't resist.
Now, if I am reading this right:
I am plain vanilla and utterly, absurdly straight, which I knew already, and;
As far as thinking about it and talking about it are concerned I am lagging far behind the pack, but;
As far as actually having sex in my preferred way goes, I am way more experienced than most.
Why this should give me a case of the giggles I don't know. No complaints here, though, in spite of being identified as over three-quarters pure.
This came up in conversation recently, so of course I had to find the link and have another look. It's still funny enough to make me weep. Yes, I *was* bored today, why do you ask?
Chilly... I guess fall is really coming, and it seems like summer'd just barely gotten here. Not truly cold yet, just enough to make me think how nice it'd be to have a human space heater sharing the bed. Or maybe that's the cold. Or maybe I should spend less time thinking.
| Your Ultimate Purity Score Is... | ||
| Category | Your Score | Average |
| Self-Lovin' | 78.3% Never taken out of the packaging | 64.9% |
| Shamelessness | 90.5% Has yet to see self in mirror | 79.3% |
| Sex Drive | 89.5% The Pope is envious | 77.6% |
| Straightness | 21.4% Knows the other body type like a map | 45% |
| Gayness | 100% | 83.1% |
| Fucking Sick | 96.5% Refreshingly normal | 89.8% |
| You are 78.77% pure Average Score: 72.5% | ||
Now, if I am reading this right:
I am plain vanilla and utterly, absurdly straight, which I knew already, and;
As far as thinking about it and talking about it are concerned I am lagging far behind the pack, but;
As far as actually having sex in my preferred way goes, I am way more experienced than most.
Why this should give me a case of the giggles I don't know. No complaints here, though, in spite of being identified as over three-quarters pure.
This came up in conversation recently, so of course I had to find the link and have another look. It's still funny enough to make me weep. Yes, I *was* bored today, why do you ask?
Chilly... I guess fall is really coming, and it seems like summer'd just barely gotten here. Not truly cold yet, just enough to make me think how nice it'd be to have a human space heater sharing the bed. Or maybe that's the cold. Or maybe I should spend less time thinking.
Friday, September 05, 2003
You know - as has been pointed out to me, in various situations - when my body wants something, it's really not all that subtle about communicating it to me. My body, in fact, appears to have the diplomatic tact of a two-by-four. So does the rest of me, mind you, but it's a little startling all the same.
Today, for example, my body wanted sleep. So I turned my alarm off - more or less in my sleep - showed up half an hour late for work, and essentially sleepwalked through milking... to the extent that I was frightening my family and nobody would let me run any machinery. I felt like my head would fall off if I moved it too quickly. Everything was very far away and dreamlike and took great effort for me to focus on. I made it through milking, went back to the house, and went back to bed, although with the general expectation that I would take a bit of a nap, nothing more; I don't sleep very well during the day. Then I woke up at 3 pm.
However, that seems to have more or less done in the cold, so no complaints.
I have officially done nothing more than exist this week. Next week: activity returns. Maybe.
Today, for example, my body wanted sleep. So I turned my alarm off - more or less in my sleep - showed up half an hour late for work, and essentially sleepwalked through milking... to the extent that I was frightening my family and nobody would let me run any machinery. I felt like my head would fall off if I moved it too quickly. Everything was very far away and dreamlike and took great effort for me to focus on. I made it through milking, went back to the house, and went back to bed, although with the general expectation that I would take a bit of a nap, nothing more; I don't sleep very well during the day. Then I woke up at 3 pm.
However, that seems to have more or less done in the cold, so no complaints.
I have officially done nothing more than exist this week. Next week: activity returns. Maybe.
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Rain. It feels weird to complain about it raining - my area has been in drought for the past five years - but, jeez, did we have to have all the surplus delivered at once? We had more rain in the month of April than we had last *year*, for God's sake. The roads are flooded. Everything's flooded. Everything's damp. It's like I'm living in Wales again.
On the other hand, as I say, I remember the drought. And it was terrible. There were people shooting animals they couldn't afford to buy water for. Our hundred-year old springs were drying up. Everything was drying up... it felt like the end of the world. I still have one of my rare poems, somewhere, describing that time. It's awful, of course, as my poetry always is, and horrendiously long, but it makes me choke when I read it, because I remember so well. I'd be tempted to post it, except, well, it's awful.
But something to remember, when I feel the urge to curse the rain.
On the other hand, as I say, I remember the drought. And it was terrible. There were people shooting animals they couldn't afford to buy water for. Our hundred-year old springs were drying up. Everything was drying up... it felt like the end of the world. I still have one of my rare poems, somewhere, describing that time. It's awful, of course, as my poetry always is, and horrendiously long, but it makes me choke when I read it, because I remember so well. I'd be tempted to post it, except, well, it's awful.
But something to remember, when I feel the urge to curse the rain.
On second thoughts... I will post it, awful as it is, because I bloody well want to. You were warned.
Pray for rain.
Three months without:
The land is brown, shattered
Withering under the sun.
Under our eyes. How many years?
From an air-conditioned room,
Amongst the office buildings, safe
Behind civilization, the radio says,
“Another beautiful day!
Get your kids! Have a picnic!”
We turn it off.
My father goes outside
To look at the green hills, dotted with cattle
And at the cloudless sky.
We hear that, to the west,
The Mississippi runneth over.
Joyful, she sheds her banks, swelled with excess
The dams, the dikes, the sandbags
Fleas to the great dog river.
Silent and obedient for so long
Now that she remembers wolf days
Nothing will stop her.
The sun burned through our shirts, the thin cloth
Nothing to the old god, rageful
That he is forgotten: we were all red-backed with his anger.
One of the cows has sunburn.
The vet has never seen that before.
On the radio, the businessman says,
“Look. I consider myself
An environmentalist. But business is
Business.
We have no evidence of global warming.
We have no reason to think the climate is changing.
We have nothing to say ozone holes mean anything.
We can’t just stop making money on
Theories and suspicions.”
Pray for rain.
Dog days: the black dogs
Panting under the heat of the sun, looking mournfully at us, asking where
The cool weather has gone.
Is this September?
The spring that has run for a hundred years
Is dry. My father fights with pumps, pipes,
Water for the thirsty beasts.
In Vermont, we hear, they have had so much rain
That the grass is dying, choked, drowned
In surfeit.
And from Ohio, the caravans come
Crossing the mountains, crawling along the freeways, loaded down—
With gold? No: hay,
Farmer’s gold. The cows must eat.
We turn our pockets inside out and pay. We have to.
“Chance of scattered showers,” croaks
The radio, dry-voiced now, the cities feeling the pinch at last.
Hope. But it is only showers, to settle the dust,
Gone by morning, soaked up by a hungry land. Another year gone.
God, give us rain!
Goddess, give us rain...
We change religions by the day,
Old gods, new gods, false gods, true gods,
Anything for hope.
We wash the car. We leave the windows down.
My father buys a new raincoat
Which is too small:
It rains the next day.
We are not surprised.
We know the gods hate us.
Pray for rain.
“Sunny skies all week,” says the radio,
“And now, on to the
Important news.”
Outside, the dust blows by:
Dust, red as the sin of a businessman
Who signed the paper in some building in some city far away
Got his promotion, made his cash, retired:
Red dust blowing away
Our farm is taking to the air, leaving us
For more hospitable climes, where the gods are not angry
And water is not a miracle.
“Another record breaking year,” says the radio.
Record highs. Record lows. Record days
Without rain.
We broke last year’s record.
In the farm stores, tired eyes
slumped shoulders: we are the lucky ones. Here
The sound of mockingbirds
Has been replaced:
Hear the auctioneer yell “Going once—
Going twice— Gone!”
Gone.
Gone.
The record breaks.
The pump breaks.
The fence breaks.
My father’s heart breaks,
His eyes
Hollow and black
From staring at the sun.
The weather never breaks.
Pray for rain.
Lift your head, smell the air, smell that?
Smoke.
The forests leave us too,
Take to the air in wisps of dry, brittle flame,
Ash trickling through our fingers.
“Wait! Come back! We’re sorry!” Too late
They are gone. In their place
Scattered showers trickle down the blackened stumps
Like tears.
“Recession.” Oh, what a surprise.
Did you not know?
We are the farmers:
We are the backbone:
We are the canary in the mine.
When we begin to stumble, you will fall.
Remember the Depression?
My father laughs
With black humor, at the radio,
And buys a new pump for the spring.
The old one has burned out.
Burn, burned, burning. We hide
From my father’s eyes and anger.
No one can stand to see his face.
Pray for rain.
We ingrates,
We forgot
That the weather gods are the oldest gods of all.
War?
A new god, created
By those with food enough for time.
A distraction for prosperous times.
“Things will get better,” says the radio.
“This is just a setback, brief and passing.
If we all pull together, we can leave this slump behind.”
But my farm is leaving on the wind:
And in the mountains
Desert weather, hot days and cold nights.
We turn the radio off.
We do not believe it.
We go outside and look at the cloudless sky
And try to remember tales of the sun-god’s mercy.
There are none.
I am afraid.
Pray for rain.
Pray for rain.
Pray for rain.
Pray for rain.
Three months without:
The land is brown, shattered
Withering under the sun.
Under our eyes. How many years?
From an air-conditioned room,
Amongst the office buildings, safe
Behind civilization, the radio says,
“Another beautiful day!
Get your kids! Have a picnic!”
We turn it off.
My father goes outside
To look at the green hills, dotted with cattle
And at the cloudless sky.
We hear that, to the west,
The Mississippi runneth over.
Joyful, she sheds her banks, swelled with excess
The dams, the dikes, the sandbags
Fleas to the great dog river.
Silent and obedient for so long
Now that she remembers wolf days
Nothing will stop her.
The sun burned through our shirts, the thin cloth
Nothing to the old god, rageful
That he is forgotten: we were all red-backed with his anger.
One of the cows has sunburn.
The vet has never seen that before.
On the radio, the businessman says,
“Look. I consider myself
An environmentalist. But business is
Business.
We have no evidence of global warming.
We have no reason to think the climate is changing.
We have nothing to say ozone holes mean anything.
We can’t just stop making money on
Theories and suspicions.”
Pray for rain.
Dog days: the black dogs
Panting under the heat of the sun, looking mournfully at us, asking where
The cool weather has gone.
Is this September?
The spring that has run for a hundred years
Is dry. My father fights with pumps, pipes,
Water for the thirsty beasts.
In Vermont, we hear, they have had so much rain
That the grass is dying, choked, drowned
In surfeit.
And from Ohio, the caravans come
Crossing the mountains, crawling along the freeways, loaded down—
With gold? No: hay,
Farmer’s gold. The cows must eat.
We turn our pockets inside out and pay. We have to.
“Chance of scattered showers,” croaks
The radio, dry-voiced now, the cities feeling the pinch at last.
Hope. But it is only showers, to settle the dust,
Gone by morning, soaked up by a hungry land. Another year gone.
God, give us rain!
Goddess, give us rain...
We change religions by the day,
Old gods, new gods, false gods, true gods,
Anything for hope.
We wash the car. We leave the windows down.
My father buys a new raincoat
Which is too small:
It rains the next day.
We are not surprised.
We know the gods hate us.
Pray for rain.
“Sunny skies all week,” says the radio,
“And now, on to the
Important news.”
Outside, the dust blows by:
Dust, red as the sin of a businessman
Who signed the paper in some building in some city far away
Got his promotion, made his cash, retired:
Red dust blowing away
Our farm is taking to the air, leaving us
For more hospitable climes, where the gods are not angry
And water is not a miracle.
“Another record breaking year,” says the radio.
Record highs. Record lows. Record days
Without rain.
We broke last year’s record.
In the farm stores, tired eyes
slumped shoulders: we are the lucky ones. Here
The sound of mockingbirds
Has been replaced:
Hear the auctioneer yell “Going once—
Going twice— Gone!”
Gone.
Gone.
The record breaks.
The pump breaks.
The fence breaks.
My father’s heart breaks,
His eyes
Hollow and black
From staring at the sun.
The weather never breaks.
Pray for rain.
Lift your head, smell the air, smell that?
Smoke.
The forests leave us too,
Take to the air in wisps of dry, brittle flame,
Ash trickling through our fingers.
“Wait! Come back! We’re sorry!” Too late
They are gone. In their place
Scattered showers trickle down the blackened stumps
Like tears.
“Recession.” Oh, what a surprise.
Did you not know?
We are the farmers:
We are the backbone:
We are the canary in the mine.
When we begin to stumble, you will fall.
Remember the Depression?
My father laughs
With black humor, at the radio,
And buys a new pump for the spring.
The old one has burned out.
Burn, burned, burning. We hide
From my father’s eyes and anger.
No one can stand to see his face.
Pray for rain.
We ingrates,
We forgot
That the weather gods are the oldest gods of all.
War?
A new god, created
By those with food enough for time.
A distraction for prosperous times.
“Things will get better,” says the radio.
“This is just a setback, brief and passing.
If we all pull together, we can leave this slump behind.”
But my farm is leaving on the wind:
And in the mountains
Desert weather, hot days and cold nights.
We turn the radio off.
We do not believe it.
We go outside and look at the cloudless sky
And try to remember tales of the sun-god’s mercy.
There are none.
I am afraid.
Pray for rain.
Pray for rain.
Pray for rain.
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Ill. Bleh. Sleep.
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
I have slept, I have unpacked (in my own peculiar, chaos-theory way), I have cancelled my ATM card, I have been shit on by cows. Ah, the routine of home begins again. I'm also starting to come down with a cold, which does not really surprise me.
Other than that I've managed to write a little more on the story. It's rough draft material, but I'm kind of proud of it anyway... maybe just because it's the first thing I've written in weeks. Snippet:
"Attention!"
Attendance was, to say the least, sparse. News of the murder had not yet, by a miracle, gotten out, which by necessity limited the funeral attendance. Herself; the Commander; Thomas McMillian; Jason (after considerable browbeating); Norman, of course, and the new StarMind, a man named Siebel Nix, who had just arrived the day before. No others. Joey doubted there would have been more even if it weren't for the secrecy. Galee Inne had, after all, been a telepath.
They'd done a decent job on him, she noted dispassionately as the coffinship drifted by, displaying its cargo for one last time through special viewing windows on the side. For a man who'd spent the last week on an autopsy table he didn't look half bad. He was recognizable at least. She'd been to plenty of funerals where they hadn't been. Joey had always hated that, running up a dead man's records to find no next of kin, or worse, funding insufficient; burial in space required. No one to even claim the body, or at least no one with the money to have a body shipped all the way home, and only a cold military funeral with a handful of bored officers attending. Galee's had been worse. Family declines to accept charges. Meaning, they'd had the money, but didn't care enough to pay. Or didn't want him back, even dead.
Telepath. The tattoos were still visible on Galee's face, marking him for what he was. Even dead.
Keeping the formal parade posture was a strain. She was exhausted - not physically, which she could have handled, but inside, tired to the bone, the kind of exhaustion where you woke up worn out. Nothing. Every lead she'd had, and they'd been few, had petered out over the past week. Every path she'd tried to follow had dead-ended, in spite of her efforts, in spite of Patricia's increasingly shrill and increasingly frequent demands for progress. The time she had to find the murderer was ticking away, and she didn't even have a single suspect.
The coffin floated smoothly, and with stately slowness, through the airlock - not catching on the doors either, which Joey silently appreciated. The drone mind which ran the coffinship was not bright, and there were few things more unpleasant than chasing a dead body wrapped in a half-ton of metal through a freefall bay.
"Officers reform," Patricia said quietly, and they pivoted obediently to face the outside wall as the airlock shut. "Computer, display exterior."
The wall shifted to show a view of empty space. There was a long moment of silence, and then Joey felt the heavy thump of the mass driver releasing through the floor, and the coffinship shot into space.
Even with the mass driver it took a good ten minutes for the little bullet-shaped coffin to reach the sun, a ten minutes in which no one spoke. Stupid really, Joey thought, and incredibly wasteful, of both materials and energy and even organics. Any rational civilization would have dumped the body straight into the recyclers instead of going to all this expense. It was obscurely reassuring to realize that even the determinedly hard-headed Federation had its limits and its superstitions.
The ship's course wobbled slightly as it grew close enough to the sun to really feel the pull, and then it speeded up, plunging unerringly into the heart of the brown dwarf. Goodbye, Galee. I'm sorry. Joey's eyes were throbbing dully; she had to resist the urge to rub them. The ship's destruction barely caused a flare on the red sun. The Bloody Sun. Have you had enough yet? Eaten enough of us, you cat-loving thing?
"At your ease."
---
BTW, the reason there are no links for comments is that YACCS has a server down. Welcome to the Information Age, where nothing works and no one really knows why. And think good thoughts for the poor sod who has to fix that server....
Other than that I've managed to write a little more on the story. It's rough draft material, but I'm kind of proud of it anyway... maybe just because it's the first thing I've written in weeks. Snippet:
"Attention!"
Attendance was, to say the least, sparse. News of the murder had not yet, by a miracle, gotten out, which by necessity limited the funeral attendance. Herself; the Commander; Thomas McMillian; Jason (after considerable browbeating); Norman, of course, and the new StarMind, a man named Siebel Nix, who had just arrived the day before. No others. Joey doubted there would have been more even if it weren't for the secrecy. Galee Inne had, after all, been a telepath.
They'd done a decent job on him, she noted dispassionately as the coffinship drifted by, displaying its cargo for one last time through special viewing windows on the side. For a man who'd spent the last week on an autopsy table he didn't look half bad. He was recognizable at least. She'd been to plenty of funerals where they hadn't been. Joey had always hated that, running up a dead man's records to find no next of kin, or worse, funding insufficient; burial in space required. No one to even claim the body, or at least no one with the money to have a body shipped all the way home, and only a cold military funeral with a handful of bored officers attending. Galee's had been worse. Family declines to accept charges. Meaning, they'd had the money, but didn't care enough to pay. Or didn't want him back, even dead.
Telepath. The tattoos were still visible on Galee's face, marking him for what he was. Even dead.
Keeping the formal parade posture was a strain. She was exhausted - not physically, which she could have handled, but inside, tired to the bone, the kind of exhaustion where you woke up worn out. Nothing. Every lead she'd had, and they'd been few, had petered out over the past week. Every path she'd tried to follow had dead-ended, in spite of her efforts, in spite of Patricia's increasingly shrill and increasingly frequent demands for progress. The time she had to find the murderer was ticking away, and she didn't even have a single suspect.
The coffin floated smoothly, and with stately slowness, through the airlock - not catching on the doors either, which Joey silently appreciated. The drone mind which ran the coffinship was not bright, and there were few things more unpleasant than chasing a dead body wrapped in a half-ton of metal through a freefall bay.
"Officers reform," Patricia said quietly, and they pivoted obediently to face the outside wall as the airlock shut. "Computer, display exterior."
The wall shifted to show a view of empty space. There was a long moment of silence, and then Joey felt the heavy thump of the mass driver releasing through the floor, and the coffinship shot into space.
Even with the mass driver it took a good ten minutes for the little bullet-shaped coffin to reach the sun, a ten minutes in which no one spoke. Stupid really, Joey thought, and incredibly wasteful, of both materials and energy and even organics. Any rational civilization would have dumped the body straight into the recyclers instead of going to all this expense. It was obscurely reassuring to realize that even the determinedly hard-headed Federation had its limits and its superstitions.
The ship's course wobbled slightly as it grew close enough to the sun to really feel the pull, and then it speeded up, plunging unerringly into the heart of the brown dwarf. Goodbye, Galee. I'm sorry. Joey's eyes were throbbing dully; she had to resist the urge to rub them. The ship's destruction barely caused a flare on the red sun. The Bloody Sun. Have you had enough yet? Eaten enough of us, you cat-loving thing?
"At your ease."
---
BTW, the reason there are no links for comments is that YACCS has a server down. Welcome to the Information Age, where nothing works and no one really knows why. And think good thoughts for the poor sod who has to fix that server....
Monday, September 01, 2003
Well, my wallet is well and truly gone - something I discovered shortly after making the last post - and this has, in a pecular way, given me faith in humanity. Yes, somebody has presumably made off with my wallet and all the money in it. But everyone I dealt with about it - the lost and found, security, the dealers upstairs, random fans - has gone out of their way to be helpful and kind to me. I was fed for two days on someone else's kindness (and you *are* getting paid back for that, dammit, whether you want it or not). It pretty much backs up my feeling that people are, deep down, generally nice. As another example, just before the wallet was lost, I was trying to buy a Pratchett book from the signing and came up about $5 short.
"I'll just run to the ATM," I said, but he was already shaking his head vigorously.
"No no no, you want to get in the line before it gets any worse. Tell you what. You take this, go ahead and get it signed, and *then* you go on to the ATM, and you can come back and give me the rest later."
See?
In other news, airports are unspeakable pits of hell which shower you with strange slips of paper and then do their absolute best to make sure you loose them. I was run through a gauntlet of forms and scanners and security people and those silly rope mazes, finally made it to the gate, tried to call my mother only to discover that a simple call of one minute to the States would cost me $4.15. After a bit of rooting I got this together, but - and this was the catch - only if I counted my $2 coins. The machine did not take $2 coins. I was debating going around and testing my Human Kindness Theory again when I was paged by the airline people. Apparently the plane I was supposed to catch from Newark had been eaten or something - at any rate I was not going to be able to make my connection - and instead they wanted to hustle me onto a direct flight that left in 10 minutes. There was a great deal of panic and trouble but in the end I made it, and on the bright side I actually made it back to Charlotte 3 hours earlier than I would have. Incidentally, the flight I took *to* Toronto was supposed to be a direct flight, but for some reason I ended up changing planes in Newark. This flight was supposed to have had one change but ended up being a direct. Airport Logic, Airport Justice.
More begging and a promisory note required to get my car out of hock at the remote parking lot, since I could not pay the parking fee (see "I lost my wallet", above.) I also discovered, rather belatedly, that when the cat had jumped through the window my brother left down the night before I left and coated my car seat with cat hair, she had also deposited a dead rabbit on the floor behind the driver's seat. At least, I assume that's what happened. I cannot for the life of me imagine how else a dead rabbit got in the back of my car. After 5 days in a baking hot parking lot it was rather ripe, not to mention crawling with maggots and other little miracles of nature. I managed to scrape the worst of it out but was still obliged to make the 2 1/2 hour drive home with all the windows rolled down and my head out the window. Tomorrow I get to figure out whether eu de maggot-ridden rabbit can be gotten out of car carpet. Lovely.
Hmm. Looking back over the roller coaster of the past few days, I can only conclude that I have been unlucky enough to draw the attention of a God. A really bored God. One with the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old ("Here, let's poke it with a stick and see what happens.")
"I'll just run to the ATM," I said, but he was already shaking his head vigorously.
"No no no, you want to get in the line before it gets any worse. Tell you what. You take this, go ahead and get it signed, and *then* you go on to the ATM, and you can come back and give me the rest later."
See?
In other news, airports are unspeakable pits of hell which shower you with strange slips of paper and then do their absolute best to make sure you loose them. I was run through a gauntlet of forms and scanners and security people and those silly rope mazes, finally made it to the gate, tried to call my mother only to discover that a simple call of one minute to the States would cost me $4.15. After a bit of rooting I got this together, but - and this was the catch - only if I counted my $2 coins. The machine did not take $2 coins. I was debating going around and testing my Human Kindness Theory again when I was paged by the airline people. Apparently the plane I was supposed to catch from Newark had been eaten or something - at any rate I was not going to be able to make my connection - and instead they wanted to hustle me onto a direct flight that left in 10 minutes. There was a great deal of panic and trouble but in the end I made it, and on the bright side I actually made it back to Charlotte 3 hours earlier than I would have. Incidentally, the flight I took *to* Toronto was supposed to be a direct flight, but for some reason I ended up changing planes in Newark. This flight was supposed to have had one change but ended up being a direct. Airport Logic, Airport Justice.
More begging and a promisory note required to get my car out of hock at the remote parking lot, since I could not pay the parking fee (see "I lost my wallet", above.) I also discovered, rather belatedly, that when the cat had jumped through the window my brother left down the night before I left and coated my car seat with cat hair, she had also deposited a dead rabbit on the floor behind the driver's seat. At least, I assume that's what happened. I cannot for the life of me imagine how else a dead rabbit got in the back of my car. After 5 days in a baking hot parking lot it was rather ripe, not to mention crawling with maggots and other little miracles of nature. I managed to scrape the worst of it out but was still obliged to make the 2 1/2 hour drive home with all the windows rolled down and my head out the window. Tomorrow I get to figure out whether eu de maggot-ridden rabbit can be gotten out of car carpet. Lovely.
Hmm. Looking back over the roller coaster of the past few days, I can only conclude that I have been unlucky enough to draw the attention of a God. A really bored God. One with the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old ("Here, let's poke it with a stick and see what happens.")
