New China King for Old Men

Abby, pictured here at lunch, and I went to Ardmore today to see her rheumatologist. Afterwards, we ate at our favorite tiny hole in the wall restaurant, New China King, where the staff speaks almost no English, and where we get utterly fantastic food. She had moo goo gai pan, while I had fried bean curd country style. Both were piping hot, incredibly delicious, and not very expensive.

New China King has a handwritten sign that explains that the customer is the most important person...


We swung through Wal Mart and picked up a copy of "No Country for Old Men." It looked intriguing to us both, and Abby is a long-time Tommy Lee Jones fan. We watched it tonight with Mitchell and were not found wanting. We definitely recommend it.

The Rules

Rule #11: When a balloon pops, always say, “Oh, the humanity.”
Rule #66: Eat rendered koos koos.
Rule #12: Have a beer, neat.
Rule #98: It’s the porcupine apocalypse.
Rule #22: Wear a pleasant blouse.
Rule #7: Take as many naps as possible, preferably inside a tree hollowed out specifically for sleeping.
Rule #29: Always wipe front to back so you don’t get any crap on your under the butt nut hut.
Rule # 90: Remember that when you flip someone the bird, your middle finger is a little penis, and the fingers next to it are little testicles.
Rule #76: “Strap on no parts” backwards is “strap on no parts.” The same goes for “step on no pets” and “rise to vote, sir.”
Rule #16: If you work at a drive-through, on your last day say, “Welcome to the apocalypse, may I take your order?”
Rule #60: See at how many truly pointless things you can excel.
Rule #51: Don’t strain your god bone.
Rule #52: Empty your god bag.
Rule #9: Eat plenty of bitter grapes with huge, chewy seeds.
Rule #44: No gaping. Stare with dignity.
Rule #80: Crawl for all the right reasons.
Rule #77: Don’t fear the reeker.
Rule #2: Party on, Wayne.
Rule #69: Chicks with d!cks.
Rule #4: You should be ashamed of yourself.
Rule #50: Hide the past at all costs. If someone asks you about it, tell them you haven't seen it.
Rule #4: If you write it, they will come.
Rule #92: Take vitamins instead of food, and vice versa.
Rule #70: Make up lyrics to news themes.
Rule #21: Gimme gimme gimme.
Rule #39: Hold your tongue and say “My father owns a shipyard.”
Rule # 76: There’s already a rule #76.
Rule #2: You’re not good enough.
Rule #95: Use only the kryptonite washcloth to cleanse your soul.

Bigger Than That

To the Victor Go the Spoils

Mitchell: Touché!
Me: Three-ché!
Mitchell: Infinity-ché!
Me: You win this round.

Finally Enough Lava

As my readers know, I got Abby a lava lamp as one of her "smaller" birthday gifts (the larger being a heated, massaging recliner that is back-ordered, pun intended.) There were several bonus items associated with this gift...

1. Unlike the lava lamps in the time of Pink Floyd (when I was a kid), this one has green metallic lava, and green is decidedly Abby's favorite color
2. Abby and I were both fascinated by watching lava lamps when we were kids. My grandparents had one, and by the time I was 11 or 12, it was one of the main reasons I looked forward to visiting them.
3. Abby needed a night-light in her dressing room.

When we first plugged it in and turned it one, we expected to wait about two hours for it to achieve full lav, but even after the entire evening, nothing much was happening. In fact, it wasn't until the next day that its viscously mesmeric motion bloomed. But now it is going well, and on our way to bed tonight, we both stopped in our tracks and watched it, commenting on which blob was going to collide, which bubble was going to reabsorb, which sphere would boil up next. We laughed out loud watching it, making splashy sound effects to accompany this squishy ballet.

Pictured: the green metallic motion lamp of Abby's dreams.

Eight Things

Wil Fry got tagged by someone to post eight things about himself that no one, or at least very few people, knew about him. One of his was that he witnessed the murder of a police officer, which is tragic and wicked cool at the same time.

So, here are eight things you might not know about me...

1. My first recognizable word as a baby was, "Radio."
2. I am CMV free, making me a choice plasma donor, and I have donated five gallons of plasma.
3. I have performed aerobatics in three different airplanes, a Cessna 150, a Cessna 152 Aerobat, and a T-34 Mentor.
4. I dated 8 women who were 5' 2" tall. My wife Abby is 5' 7".
5. I cannot swim, and don't want to learn. In fact, I hate the water.
6. I once helped ditch a car that one of my high school buddies had "borrowed" from his grandfather then wrecked, in what became known in my circles as the "Valley of Shadows" incident.
7. In college I extensively infiltrated and explored the maintenance tunnel system at Oklahoma University. My friends and I were the "Mole Patrol."
8. I haven't eaten any meat at all since 1989, and no animal products since 1994.

That's eight!

Abby's Home! Abby's Home!

...and today is her birthday!

Abby and Dorothy have returned from Baltimore. Their trip was fantastic, and their travels went smoothly. On the way home from Dallas, Dorothy bought us a feast at On the Border to celebrate Abby's birthday. Later we gave Abby a couple of little, fun presents, since her big gift, a heated, massaging recliner, is back-ordered until June. Mitchell and I gave her a book full of cute animals (always a hit with Abby), and a lava lamp with green metallic slime.

Of course, the dogs were ultra-excited to see Abby, and to show these affections, they stretched out on her clothes as she unpacked them...

Funniest Junk Mail Ever

Once in a while I sort through my "Junk" folder. We use the excellent "Mail" app for Mac OS X, and once you have spent a couple of weeks in training mode, you can tell it to set junk aside. Occasionally, it will miss something, so I click the brown bag junk icon to check. Inside today was one of the funniest pieces of junk email I have ever seen. The text was, oddly, an editorial about racism in America, presumably pasted into the body to fool junk filters. The funny part was the photo...

Vernal Equinox

Today is the first day of spring, and around here, in southeast Oklahoma, it was a beautiful day. After work I came home and mowed, then grabbed a camera and went out to look at my trees and brush the goats. Here are a few images from tonight...

The sun sets on winter

With my backyard friend Buxton the Goat

Abby's pussywillow, budding for spring

Santa Rosa plum blossoms in my new orchard

Peach blossoms in the new orchard

I included this last image of the pedestal of my iMac because my wife is away this week, visiting her daughter in Baltimore. She was testing her label maker months ago and put this laconic message for me to see every day, and it's still right where she left it.

She said the sweetest thing to me on the phone today, and it stuck with me all day. She told me, "I miss you. It's like an ache in my side." I miss you too, my love. :>)

Arbeit Macht Frei

Damn the Nazis for ruining so many potentially cool ideas, like Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power, or his concept of the Ubermensche. I've read enough Nietzsche to say with some authority that his idea of a Superman wasn't about race at all, but about the potential of all humans who have the will to become great.

The Nazis also completely ruined "Arbeit Macht Frei," a phrase that, divorced from it's association with the death camps at Auschwitz and others, is nothing short of brilliant. Work, in its purest form, creating something from nothing for a purpose, will make us free. Unfortunately, much of the work that many people in the world do isn't pure at all, but pointless repetition, though as my wife's work ethic demonstrates, our jobs are almost certainly more purposeful if we actually do them well.

I was thinking about this as I mowed the front lawn this afternoon. It had grown high with early weed, a thick, loose, dark green spring ground cover that has small purple flowers. The rains earlier this week gave it a wild growth spurt, and when I saw our Chihuahuas up to their shoulders in it, I knew it was time to mow.

I have several friends who hate to mow, and either pay to have someone do it for them, or grudgingly, resentfully mow it themselves. At least one couple I know are trying xeriscaping.

I, however, find great purpose in the work I do on our patch of green here in bucolic Oklahoma. I look forward to it all winter, and today, the vernal equinox, is the first day of spring. The smell of spring summons something in my nature that is powerfully optimistic. Soon I'll plant my garden, this year bigger than ever, and tend my new fruit trees.

This work will make me free.

Pictured: rusty shovel in early weed.

A Knee Slapper

The Moral Ambiguity of Worms

A very good friend of mine at my office was fired yesterday, and in his swirling miasma of rage and hurt, he lashed out at me, in the form of a nasty voicemail on my cell phone. In the middle of listening to it, he dropped the F bomb, and I deleted it at that point. Later today he called back to apologize, and I accepted his apology. I like him a lot, and I think he's a pretty cool, intelligent guy, so I just want to say to him not to give up. And for the rest of us, I'd like to quote 1987's Oliver Stone movie Wall Street: "We're all just one trade away from humility, buddy." By that I mean, of course, that none of us is indispensable at our jobs, and if it ever happens that we are fired, don't despair, for it will all find its way in the end.

As for the title of this entry, it's been raining buckets for 24 hours now (and in turn watering my new trees). When I got home and opened the garage door, I found hundreds or even thousands of earthworms under the seal where the garage door meets the floor. I thought it was the coolest thing I had seen all week.

Pictured: a grillion earthworms in our garage.

The Wearing of the Green, the Eating of the Hammer

Abby and Dorothy (our defacto Mother-in-law) are in Baltimore this week with Abby's daughter Chele, who in Baltimore is known by her actual first name of Dawna. (Pay attention now - this will be on the test.)

While they are gone, I am increasing my chore slate by about five fold, since I can tear up anything and make any noise I want without disturbing my wife. One thing I did so far was to repair the long-inoperative drawer on her antique chest-o-drawers (which will pleasantly surprise her), which I decided to do after putting away a bunch of her laundry, which I also decided to do. While I was in the garage working on the drawer, I found some nails that were perfect for fixing the siding that the goats had knocked off the house while sharpening their horns, so I went out to do that. While I was cutting off a piece of broken sheet steel, Coal inexplicably began eating the butt of my hammer. He is normally a pretty picky eater (it's a myth that goats will eat anything), so I was a little surprised to see him adding tools to his diet. I chalked it up to Saint Patrick's Day, not because I thought it was the real reason, but because it game me an excuse to post photos of us in our excellent Dollar Tree Saint Pats hat.



Pictured: coolest hat EVER!

Shaft Synchronicity - Shaftronicity

For reasons that are not at all clear to me, I was singing Isaac Hayes' brilliant Theme from Shaft as I was preparing lunch in my kitchen just now. I was belting it out...

"Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft!) You're damn right."

"Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man? (Shaft!) Can ya dig it?"

...when I dumped a container of noodles onto my plate. It was a shaft of noodles!

What a wondrous world.

Toilet Humor Always Sells

I have to say, I haven't read a more interesting news story in years...

Sheriff: Woman Sat on Toilet for 2 Years
By ROXANA HEGEMAN (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
March 12, 2008 9:19 PM EDT

WICHITA, Kan. - Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years - so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

"And her reply would be, `Maybe tomorrow,'" Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."

A Harbinger of Spring

When Robert Stinson and I were in college, he and I drove to Oklahoma City so I could buy cheap tires for my 1973 VW Beetle. While we waited, we walked up the snowy street to grab a bite, and on the walk back, Robert photographed a rusty spring sitting in the snow. The next day he submitted it to the OU Daily, and it appear on the front page with tag line, "A Harbinger of Spring."

I thought of that tonight as I enjoyed another harbinger of spring, the shedding of the goats. After I finished planting the remaining five trees (two peach, two apricot, and a crepe myrtle in the front yard for Abby), I policed up the lawn implements. This was all to the amusement of our goats, who you will recalled are named Coal and Buxton. I threw them some hay from the pasture where I had mowed Monday to clear a place for the trees, them I gave then some early green stuff that grows in Abby's azalea bed. Finally, I got the rake.

If you've never had a goat, sheep, horse, llama, camel, donkey, etc., you might not know that they and their coats are tough. For our goats' thick winter coats, I use a grooming tool that looks like a rake. I do this for them every March, when I can see the pale undercoat start poke through Coal's black outer hair. At first they don't quite remember what I am doing, but before long they are pressing close to me, enjoying being brushed.

Pictured: about ten strokes of each goat's hair in the rake.

A Spy in the House of Light

Someone came into my office today to get away from the spitstorm into which an office environment can devolve. My office, which was once the darkroom at my newspaper, is mine alone, and if I want, I can close three steel fire doors between me and the newsroom. He came in and looked at all my photos on the walls for a moment, then said, "I came in here to get away from all that's going on out there." He paused and added, "It's like a church in here."

I didn't know exactly how he meant it, but I smile nevertheless.

Pictured: Me in my office in 2001. It has changed some, but its basic spirit is the same. If I remember, I'll try to make a new self-portrait in my office tomorrow.

Below: New image made this week. Major changes: enlargers gone, computer moved, pictures updated/replaced, sink used only for making coffee or oats, lots of pictures of Abby.

Development and Execution of the Muh

This story starts a couple of weeks before the invention of the zero. Before the zero was invented, everything started at one, and that usually meant we were running late.

M7 and I had more free time in those days. Our favorite thing to do before the invention of the Muh or the discovery of the Mohedrus was Earth toss. It was pretty simple. On weekend nights we would sit in M7's living room long after his wife had gone to bed, tossing a stress ball back and forth across the room, literally for hours at a time. The stress ball, designed to be soft so you could squeeze it during times of stress, looked like a little Earth.

As the repetition of the game liberated our minds, we came up with all sorts of wicked cool stuff. Examples:

• "Even if you have an eraser, you can't un-write something."
• "Space takes up a lot of room. I've found that if you let most of the space out of a piano, you can fit it in your trunk."
• "My modus operandi is nothing but a diarrhea-ic thought process."
• "The search for the absolute always ends in hot, futile tears."
• "One massive, unsymbolic Universe, moving toward nothing. Strangely, such a concept makes me happy."
• "Me writing poetry is like taking a dump. I don't want to be anywhere near the product, but the process is okay."
• "AAAAAH! I forgot the oats! You got me talking about Jesus and I forgot the oats."
• "Vegans are happy because it's impossible to be morose when you're farting all the time."
• "Hay fever. Hay pneumonia. Hay coma. My last breath is a sneeze."
• "Romance is just a bunch of smarmy, limp-wristed, narcissistic mental masturbation."
• "When God was handing out holidays, Buddhists thought He said 'Go take a dump,' so they weren't even in line."
• "If a blind man is about to die, does he hear his life flash before his ears?"
• "I don't understand! How can you not know exactly where the poop is going?"
• "What would the world be like today if, when he was 17, Franz Kafka had had a summer job at Disneyland?"
• "In every bullsh!t there's a pearl."

So, we were young intellectual supermen, dreaming of a gleaming futureopolis.


One night, out of the blue, Mohedrus popped into my mind. We couldn't stop laughing about it. It was the funniest thing we had heard or said in weeks.

Later, some months had passed. I came into his kitchen where he was cooking paella, and he greeted me with, "Muh."

I invented Mohedrus and he invented Muh.

Putting the Muh into our daily liturgy wasn't as easy as one might think. It was possible to overuse it. You would say Muh and people would look at you blankly, like a house cat staring at lettuce. Or they might confuse it with the Muhvagon, which most certainly isn't the same thing.

Other times, I found myself failing to use the Muh. One time M7's young daughter told him, "Daddy, Richard never says 'Muh!'" I knew I had used Muh around her, but I am ashamed to admit that I might not have been forceful enough with its deployment.

Eventually, the Muh and the Mohedrus established themselves. In 2001 and 2004, I photographed an object that we nicknamed the Mohedrus. It isn't the Mohedrus itself, but a facsimile.

I have only actually seen Muh in fleeting glimpses, which is its very nature. Ultimately, Muh lives within us all.

Pictured top: the Mohedrusfax in 2004.
Middle: M7 searching the desert southwest for signs of the Mohedrus.
Bottom: A doorway that might lead to Muh.

8/13ths

Mitchell and I dug and dug, then put chicken wire in the holes to keep out the gophers, then planted, then mulched, then watered. We got 8 of the 13 trees planted. The hardest were the pecans, which had long, narrow roots, so the holes had to be really deep. Tomorrow, at some point, we'll get the remaining trees in the ground.

Pictured: a shot I made of my sunglasses on my head that I feel makes my hair look really cool.

Arbor Day!

This project got pushed back a couple of weeks by miserable weather or job conflicts, but today I finally got to town in the truck and bought fruit trees! I got two Early Elberta peaches and two regular Elberta peaches, two dwarf Santa Rosa plums, two Early Golden apricots, two Bing cherries (I had to, since we live in Byng), and two paper shell pecans, one Stuart and one Choctaw. The tree place didn't have the shade trees we wanted for the driveway, like Willows or Redbuds, but we can get them later in the week.

I set the fruit trees out by the garden, the place I plan my orchard, in hopes that they might dig their own holes and plant themselves, but it looks like I might have to get the shovel after all.

A couple of my friends told me a few years back that fruit trees were more trouble than they were worth. At the time, that advice seemed like nonsense, and after last year's bumper crop of plums and peaches at Echo Canyon Bed and Breakfast, then peaches and apples down at Dorothy's house, I found that I wanted more fruit and in more variety. We live on a pretty large patch of land, and fruit is an almost perfect food for a vegan like me.

Last year one of the funnest things Mitchell and I did while mowing was grab a peach from one of Dorothy's trees as we mowed past on the lawn tractor, without even stopping, and ate it as we mowed.

Pictured: a truck load of potential; the trees I bought today.

The Oddest Playlist, and a Healthy Dose of Monoclonal Antibodies

In my head and in my iTunes I am composing a new playlist, one I hope will end up being a successful road CD. I have to admit, as much as I loved making tapes when I was 28, it has become exponentially harder to make a really good road CD. If I may quote the film High Fidelity...

"Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing."

The deal is that after I burn a CD of road songs or songs about some topic, then listen to it for a while, two things happen. 1) I get tired of it, and 2) I start to collect a whole new cadre of songs for my next CD, under the aegis of an iTunes playlist called "Next."

At the moment, my "Next" CD playlist reads like this...

1. Falling by Balligomingo
2. Marooned by Balligomingo
3. Unknown Track by Conjure One
4. You're Still the One by Shania Twain
5. Rainy Monday by Shiny Toy Guns (with special thanks to Steph for posting it on her web log.)
6. Post-Modern Sleaze by Sneaker Pimps
7. Love Is by Stevie Nicks, a song I decided to like after I read that Sarah McLachlan played piano and sang background vocals, which only became obvious after I learned that and listened to the song again
8. Dare You to Move by Switchfoot, which was a song I got from long-ago girlfriend Shel, then passed along to Frank when he was having a crisis
9. Here Without You by 3 Doors Down
10. Lines on My Face by Peter Frampton. Oddly, the lyrics to this song should be obvious, but I find them incredibly ambiguous.
11. Only Because of You by Roger Hodgson
12. Three Wishes by Roger Waters

That's about an hour of music. I might be able to cram one or two more songs onto the CD. I really need you, the humble reader, to guide me. (Please don't suggest King Missile's brilliant Detachable Penis - it has become Mitchell's favorite song.)

What was that about antibodies? Oh, yes, Abby had her second arthritis treatment, and it went fine. There still hasn't been much improvement in her condition, but we know that drug therapy like this can take weeks to become effective.

Pictured: Abby at Sandia Peak, New Mexico, 2003. In anticipation of her improvement, she and I have been talking about hiking more and more.

Return to Snowy Creek

After a weekend with a 74-degree Saturday, then a thunderstormy Sunday, then a rainy and windy Monday, last night we got snow. It's a little like a whole year compressed into 96 hours.

Pictured: snow on some bushes I observed while driving Abby to work this morning, and a neat-looking icicle in the alley near my office.

The High Road

There are few phrases my wife and I can utter to each other that elicit as much fancy in our hearts as "The High Road."

As many of you know, I like lists, names, and titles for everything, and since 1999 I have been naming all of my vacations. It makes for an interesting way to remember them, with titles like The Next Cairn, The Crossing, Sticks and Stones, Twelve Legs, Jornada del Muerto, and many more.

In the late spring of 2003, I decided, based on looking at a map of New Mexico, that I wanted to see what the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument was all about. I began planning a trip around it, and since Abby and I had been dating since January, she and I thought it would be cool to make it our first vacation together. It turned out to be a bellwether of our relationship, and in fact I more or less decided in that week that I wanted to be married to her.

The title of the trip comes from a Third Eye Blind song called Crystal Baller...

"Can we try and take the high road?
Though we don't know where it ends
I wanna be your crystal baller
I wanna show you how it ends..."

There is an 18-minute video to go with it, but the attached file is just the introduction. Watching it always brings us to a wonderful place emotionally, one of promise. I can't watch it without smiling.




You can see the web version of the video here.