10-23-00

Alright . . . rain, big city, people, the Tokyo Hotel on State and Ohio. Tourists and stock brokers, umbrella-wielding data-entry thirty-somethings looking smug as they saunter down the street, dry in the rain, alternateens walking briskly in their Ragstock, Belmont best, city-dwelling trail devils apparently oblivious to their sopping wet Kelty packs, d.i.n.k.s with Old Navy bags, limos and leather jackets, couriers internally screaming "BANZAI" as they steam the streets with their blazing wheels.

There is a frozen drink beside me which gives me a headache when I drink it. It cost me $3.75. How often do we consider it a pleasure to pay for pain? The Gap just walked by, all tight sweater and nylon, urban-styled, navy attache case/bag/thingy, hair shaved and spiked like an ad campaign on legs.

The rain has stopped. Smiles are appearing - a large, black woman and a small Asian man are laughing together. They're behind me, ordering some form of caffeine. Who are the unique? The homeless. All dignity has been stripped and abused and drugged and frozen and cooked out of them . . . human beings whose outer shell is paradoxically both fragile and calloused. Hopeless and hardened. Fences made of communion wafers - how many people care?

I keep drinking my $3.75 Tiazzi.

How long has that fragile girl been in a wheelchair? She handles it well. I need paint. Guess I'd better get going before it starts to rain again.

Installment Three of Tyler's Tot Terrors:

When I first saw this movie, I teetered on the precipice of abject terror, barely daring to breathe lest each breath become a scream. I give you . . .



The Secret of Nimh. I know. It's rated G. I saw it during the Fall Party at Bethany Fellowship in Bloomington, MN. This was the same Fall Party in which I got my neck zipped into my Wrangler jean jacket by my Auntie Carrie. I think I was four.
The culmination of the evening, after all of the kids were nearing maximum sugar saturation, was the movie in the community dining room. They set up a screen and a projector in the corner of the room. I was so excited to watch a cartoon that would last longer than a Bugs Bunny short - I imagined how much fun it would be - but then the movie began. Eerie, creepy . . . a gnarled hand, claws clutching a quill, moves slowly toward an inkwell - an inkwell that produces sparkling gold ink! A breathy, ethereal voice narrates as, not beautiful gold ink, but mysterious ink drifts from the well. Ink is black or blue. Not swirling and golden. And it CERTAINLY doesn't make the page you are writing on flash like fire! What kind of movie is this?!
The mysterious clawed hand then produces a strange medallion with a red gem in the middle. How odd.
That's when the title comes up. "The Secret of Nimh."

In this movie, there are many vicious and frightening characters, and all of them seem bent on some sort of mad destruction of something. Even the good guys are scary. Especially that Owl. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. Downright diabolical. I have sense memory of clenching my jaw shut in a grimace and averting my eyes to find something . . . anything! . . in the dark on which to devote my attention. Good luck when the only light source is the very thing that I'm trying NOT to look at.

Not too long after I was traumatized by that movie, I discovered my own little secret. In my mom's jewelry box, I found a gold medallion with a red gem in the middle. To my young eyes, that was the very same necklace as the one in the movie. I used to sneak into my parent's bedroom and pull the necklace out to look at it. It would give me a terrific thrill, and I would place it back into its spot, my heart fluttering wildly. As I grew older and the memory of the movie faded, I stopped looking at the necklace. It no longer made sense. The second I realized that it wasn't from the movie, it became uninteresting, even a little bit embarrassing, to think that the jewelry box held any secrets at all. It was just jewelry, not magic.

Part 2 of the Films/Videos that scared the snot out of me as a kid.

It's tough to decide which one to share next. Having found so many of my childhood nightmare videos online, I just want to post them all. Patience . . . patience . . . So here's the next installment:



Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. I remember hiding behind the black vinyl rolling chair in my dad's den while my siblings watched this during some sort of Saturday matinee. Occasionally, I'd need to dart into the living room to escape, but I'd keep coming back. I wanted to be cool like my brother and sister, but I was acting about as uncool as could be . . . and for good reason. Conflicting emotions!
Listen to the sound that the smog monster makes - a psychedelic wheeze with some sound engineer in Kyoto manhandling the phase knob. Absolutely frightening. And look at that! All it has to do is fly over the people and they drop down, polluted and dead. No warning. No fighting back. Very scary to a three year old.
Even the way that thing moves; its lurching, slouchy gliding was not ok with me. Nothing should move like that.

I'm on a mission. An exorcising mission. I'm searching online for all of the videos that used to scare me as a little boy. Someone's bound to have posted a few of them, at least. Here's a good start:


The part that would get me in this cartoon was when the skeletons' skulls remain stationary while their bodies do a weird, gravity-defying, synchronized sweeping motion on the ground. This freaked. me. out. It just seemed wrong. Not only are dancing skeletons scary, but the fact that they are not bound by the same laws of physics that we are gave them a femur up on us young fleshy types.

When I first saw this, I was at the Decathlon Athletic Club during a brunch of some sort. There was a kiddie room/holding pen with a TV. This was on it. I remember bolting from the room when those skeletons started waving around. I would have none of that.

Here's an interesting online calculator. It determines how much you would need to consume of your favorite caffeinated beverage for it to kill you.

Apparently, I am 1/50th of the way to kicking the bucket. Why, it would only take 98.31 more cups - mere gallons - to cause my demise!
Of course, it only takes a few pints of sea water to drown, but that's not the point. I don't willingly ingest sea water on a daily basis. I guess if I ate 12 whole turkeys, that'd probably kill me too. So you there, with your seventieth cup of espresso - you've got one foot in the grave already. Put it down!

I know that this is a couple days after the fact, but I wanted to share this with y'all. Our nation recently celebrated National Night Out. I'll let the website explain what it is. The purpose of the day is tertiary to my reason for this blog.

On the left, you may behold the Night Out Knight! After all, what would a national community building/edumacational program be without a mascot, eh? The following, then, is my ode to the Night Out Knight.










"Knight Out"

Lights out!
When the Night Out Knight's out.
Why pout?
Tout the Night Out lout
When you're out
At night.

He's the Night's Knight.
A nice Knight.
Give a shout out loud
For the Night Out Lout
Whose clout's about right
For a Knight out now.

Bridges

Today's one of those days where I can't get a particular event out of my head, and I don't think I'm alone in this. Even though I'm halfway across the country, I feel a certain resonance with yesterday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Maybe it's because I still have many friends there and I was concerned about their safety.
Maybe it's because it's where I grew up; a great tragedy like this usually strikes a blow at happy memories of innocent days, driving home the fact that we live in a world that is constantly changing (read: decaying and in need of repair) - a vessel that is unable to hold the soup of our nostalgia due to the incessantly developing cracks.
Maybe it's because I've been driving across legendary bridges today - The Bay Bridge (which has recently suffered a collapse of its own), The Golden Gate - and one cannot help but think of plunging down into the water . . . not in a nervous, "it could happen to me" sort of way, but to look out at the water and for a moment understand how truly terrifying it must have felt to have the world simply drop out from underneath the tires of the 50 or so cars that fell along with the I-35W bridge.
I'm not sure I would have enough time to comprehend what had happened. That's probably a good thing - there's no time to be upset. One survivor said that one second he was driving along as usual and seconds later he was staring at the ground forty feet below through his windshield. His one thought was, "I'm going to die" but would you know why? Would you have time to think, "Well, I guess the bridge collapsed. What are the chances?"

There's an excellent vlog of the aftermath here. It does well at capturing the atmosphere surrounding the event - incredulity, morbid curiosity, and relief. Keep your eyes peeled for the little boy who glances off of the bridge at the Mississippi below. You know exactly what he's thinking, what we're all thinking.

Heidi's never been this close to such a high concentration of nerds in her entire life . . . and it shows.

Guess where I've been?



That's right. I've been at one of the world's only Kwik-E-Marts. Now, I'm not a die-hard fan of the Simpsons, though there are few things that have made me laugh harder than the 4th Annual Halloween Special of theirs. I saw it in college with a group of my dorm mates. We howled.

But that's not the point. You will never see a 7-Eleven store with a line that goes out the door and around the corner unless you visit one of the few Kwik-E-Marts in existence. They give you things to look at, though, while you're standing in line for what is, apparently, an IN-convenience store. Like-a so . . .



Wow! Real graffitti! You NEVER see THAT in Los Angeles!

After a whirlwind tour inside, I decided to get a "movie" donut and a Blue Vanilla Squishee (at the promptings of Roger Barr at i-mockery.com). The donut was quite good, and yes, I shared it with Heidi.



Buy why do you look so furious, Tyler? I'll tell you why. Because all of that sugar ramped my heartbeat up to that of a shrew . . . felt like I was vibrating. Sadly, I had to dump the rest of my delicious squishee into the garbage disposal lest I rattle the enamel off of my teeth.
Still, it was a fun visit. The 7-Eleven guys were hamming it up - saying "Thank you! Come again." to everyone as they left. People were in good spirits, taking photos. Who knew 7-Eleven could bring such joy to the world? I thought that was McDonald'ses job.

I had a lot of fun with this today. It's too bad I can't save my mix - clicking instruments on and off - to share with you all, but it should entertain you for about five minutes.

Chick chick boom chick-achicka boom!

Imagine how echo-ey it is in here. For scale, dig those doorways on the bottom right and bottom left of the photo.

Now imagine letting loose with a giant sneeze right in the middle of the room. I already thought sneezes were enjoyable, but I've never experienced one in as massive an echo chamber as this. I think my sneeze lasted about 23 seconds by the time it disappeared into the nether realms of the building where only ghosties and stray echos are kept.
This is Union Station in Kansas City and boy is it huge. I mean HUGE! Imagine if airport terminals looked like this. Why, it would almost make waiting for your overdue flight a joy. I dare say that it would . . . if you could sneeze every once in a while.

Shelf-Stable Milk: A Follow-Up

This morning, I decided to have some cold cereal. Dumped a pile of wheat pockets (Safeway's brand of Wheat Chex) into a bowl and then opened the fridge for some milk. What th'!?! No milk? Fine, I'll have some of Heidi's soy milk then. Hmmm. Lot's of boxes resembling soy milk (broth, soup), but none of them would go well with Wheat Pockets and honey. To the pantry! She must have an extra one stashed on a shelf (stably). Nope nope and nope. Does this mean that I have no milk for my cereal? Yes indeedy.

Sure wish I had that milk from yesterday.

Had a humorous moment at The Knitting Factory tonight. Eric's brother Ryan had a gig at 8:15p, and the band before them seemed . . . well . . . inexperienced; as if the freshman class Chess Club decided to form a band, learned a few chords and emoted furtively on a stage. They were about to start a song - the drummer just started clicking his drum sticks together in a manner suggesting Grandma's muffled metronome and was on his third click of four - when some jams-wearing music lover up at the front of the stage popped open a beer. The sound drowned out the last click from the drummer so the song began without the band member standing nearest the beer can, the bass player. It took him a few bewildered bars to catch up. Eric and I howled in the back of the room; the timing couldn't have been better or worse (depending on who you ask).

NEW FRONTIERS IN DIETARY EXPLORATION!!

It's lunchtime here at wordinedgewise, and Heidi's just made me a delicious meal of curried chicken with cranberries and almonds, whole wheat naan bread, and spinach. So I thought, "What better to wash down that tasty treat than Shelf Stable Milk?"

Mmm mmm! Nothing like Ultra High Temperature (UHT) processed milk in a juice box to really bring out the subtle nuances of the curry. Supposedly, no preservatives have been added to make this milk shelf stable, and the nutritional information seems to validate this claim. The best-if-used-by date is Feb. 2008. That's a ways away - that seems impossible knowing what I know of milk going bad and all (and I know a LOT, let me tell ya). But why do I have this in the first place, you ask? Well, the answer may not be as simple as you think, assuming you think that I bought it at the grocery store. Because I didn't. I got it from the United States government by way of their military. But why are you getting food handouts from the military, you ask? It's because of a claim I made to a certain Lieutenant at Ft. Irwin; I said that In-N-Out Burger, besides having delicious fries, has the best milk in the world. Yes, you heard me: The Best Milk. He found this claim to be outrageous and demanded to be taken to In-N-Out in order to try their world-class milk. Plus, since he'd never been there, he took the opportunity to get a Double-double animal style and some fries. And he got a milk. After sampling the milk, he looked non-plussed.

"Eh eh?! What do you think?" I asked eagerly.
"Meh," he said. "Tastes like milk."
"oh nononono, but they keep it on ice so it's as cold as can be. It doesn't taste different to you?"
"Not really," he replied. "You know what milk I like?" (you can see where this is going)
"What," I said, disappointed.
"Have you ever heard of shelf-stable milk?"
"Huh?"

Between mouthfuls of french fries, he went on to explain to me that the military provides a variety of new and interesting preserved items for the dogfaces to field test. He asked me if I wanted a few MREs when we parted ways the next day and I said sure. For good measure, he tossed in a carton of milk.

"Give it a try and tell me what you think," he said. This was a month ago.

So now I'm trying it. The verdict?
It tastes like individually wrapped Kraft Singles in liquid form. Very processed cheesy. Milk should not taste processed cheesy. It should taste like the milk from In-N-Out. Well, let's see what they suggest I do with their cheesy milk besides drink it. On the side of the carton, the Gossner family suggests that one can use this milk for:

Breakfast
Hiking
Camping
School Lunch
Travel
Food Storage

My vote goes to the last option. I hope it gets stored indefinitely.

Accident Prone

Here's a rundown of a few of my clumsier moments from this last week:

1. The Grand Slam that Wasn't

At softball on Tuesday, I had a monster hit that sailed deep into center field with two outs and the bases loaded. The outfielders were still running after it as I rounded second, but this is the moment when I, normally sure-footed, chose to stagger. I nearly ended up on my face in the dirt, but I managed to keep my feet with some large, ungainly, thudding steps. This didn't help my top speed though, and I ended up having to stop at third; if I'd kept my feet, I could have made it home. That moment played over and over again in my head that night - I have no recollection of catching my toe on second base or anything. It's like my internal gyroscope chose that particular instance to reset, because I have no explanation for my loss of balance.

2. The Burning Calf

I broiled some Chili Lime Chicken burgers on Thursday. They're some of my favorite things from Trader Joe's. I eat 'em with Ortega chilis, fresh tomato, avocado, and spinach all on a sweet, whole wheat bun. My mouth waters just thinking about it. Well, I just finished broiling my second two (Heidi and Rachel came home from a shoot and ate the first two, the dirty thieves) and I was breaking down the little box that the burgers come in to toss it into our recycling bin when I nearly fell down. What the . . .?!! But that's when I felt it. My leg was touching the oven, and I didn't even know it until my spinal cord decided to launch me across the kitchen to escape the burning on my calf. I stared, puzzled, at the oven because I had NO idea that it got that hot on the outside. "Maybe my leg's just sensitive," I thought, and I reached over to touch the side of the oven. "OUCH!!" I burnt my fingers, too.

3. A Race for Tempura

Last night, I decided to bake some tempura vegetables for dinner. I preheated the oven - the nasty, cruel oven - placed my tempura inside, then went to the living room to check my email until they finished cooking. At the appointed time, I jumped up and zipped toward the kitchen; my habit is to do a series of juke moves that gets me through my small, Z-shaped hallway in the quickest way possible. However, Heidi and I just bought a new armoire so the contents of the old armoire are strewn about in piles all over the place. Our TV is sitting on its rolly pedestal in the tail of the Z; it's big enough to take up most of the hallway and this threw off my juke. I slid past, and rather than having to bounce off of my left foot, I had more of a straight shot to the kitchen than usual. HOWEVER, I completely forgot about the sharp edged speaker stands that were sitting to the side in the hallway and I barreled right into them. I crashed into a painful heap cursing my stupidity for putting them there. When I staggered to my feet, I discovered that I was bleeding in many places. My right hip had a small gash in it, but my right forearm came out the worst - I have about five inches of missing skin near my wrist and several cuts from landing on the edge of the speaker stand and bouncing a couple of times. I bit it HARD!
Despite all of this, I didn't forget about my tempura. Lifting my bleeding arm above my head, I dashed into the kitchen, grabbed my food from the oven - the despicable oven - tossed it on a trivet, then bolted into the shower. Yowch! Serious stinging action. Moments later, I found my first aid kit in the closet and dressed my injuries. The tape's gonna hurt like the dickens when I remove it today to redress.

4. Lapping Milk

And now for the straw that broke this clumsy, bumbling camel's back. I usually breakfast at my computer since there a few blog sites I like to visit first thing in the morning - sort of the modern equivalent of reading the paper at the breakfast table. This morning's breakfast option was cold cereal - the Safeway version of wheat chex. As I lifted the bowl to drink the leftover milk, my spoon slipped and I made a spastic move to keep it from falling out of the bowl. This produced an effect in the milk not unlike a wave pool; the milk sloshed backwards, gathering itself for the rush forward. I watched it all in slow motion, helpless to keep it inside the bowl; the wave came forward, crested and broke over the lip of the bowl, splashing down onto my crotch with a wet slap. "Aww MAN! What's my deal?!" I yelled.

And then I wrote this (after I mopped up the milk, of course). Seriously, it's as if I'm making up for lost time with the amount of pratfalls I've condensed into one week.

The only thing that could make the tube slide at Hyland Park worse

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Mmm. Coffee. My first cup of the work week, and it's in my hand right now. Well, not right this red hot second. In between sentences, I'm sipping on it. Literalist! See, I've had this massive head cold all week long and the last thing I want during a bout with the lurgie is coffee. Not that I don't crave it on a visceral level while I'm sick - the massive, burning headaches don't help matters - but the last thing I need is for my nose to be running and my body to be exhausted while I'm struggling to suppress the desire to jump up and bolt out the door. So I drink tea, many cups back to back. Chain sipping. I've got one of those boxes of Irish Breakfast from Trader Joe's that has something like 100 bags in it - I put a serious dent in it this week. Why is tea ok during a cold? Everyone says it's supposed to be stronger than coffee; I even leave the tea bag in the water long after it's fully brewed which makes the water somewhat bitter like coffee . . . kinda like a tipsy frat boy's impersonation of Arnold Schwartzenegger. It gets laughs and all if everyone's sufficiently sauced themselves, but no one laughs when Arnie's actually in the room. Yeah, just like that. ':-/ I don't seem to have any limit to the amount of tea I can drink. After a cup and a half of coffee, though, I'm done until the afternoon. Being a reheater, I brew one large pot in the morning and then nuke it whenever the afternoon doldrums ooze in.

This morning, my alarm went off at 6:50 and I still had a sore throat. I thought, "When is this going to end?" Sometimes these things can hang on and on and on for a week or more, so I decided to get a couple more hours worth of the snoozin under my belt to see if I couldn't kick the last few straggling germs outta my system. I awoke at around 9, got some water . . . and felt pretty good actually! Then came the lactic acid test - cold cereal and milk. Verdict? No excess phlegmage due to dairy ingestion. That's a hopeful sign. Ok ok ok, let's try coffee! Quick quick. I picked up the can of beans and had a brief surge of panic - almost empty! How could I have let myself get to this point! Oh yes, the cold. How quickly one forgets. But who cares! Grind, brew a few measly cups instead of the usual 8, and drink. Ah. Mmmhmm. Fabulous.

I want one of these. Yesterday. He changes his dance every few bars. Kinda like having your own private Muppet.




I guarantee you, if I had this guy, I'd play "Mah Na Mah Na" on a weekly basis.

Manamana (aka Phenomenon) (Full Version).mp3

Check this comic out.


If you'd like, you can see it better at

http://xkcd.com/c255.html

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been my life experience. Preconceived ideas of bigness met and exceeded? Yes (The Grand Canyon, the Sequoias, etc.). Memories of forests and hills and slides retaining their epic proportions for my adult eyes? Negatory. Well, maybe the Hyland Lake Park Reserve in Bloomington, MN. That's a huge playground.


This is a photo of one corner of the park. They didn't have those crayola colored cupolas when I used to play there, but take note of the massive steel slide. That's a tamed-down version of the slide that was installed in the original playground. That thing was a beast! Kids would fire out the end of the slide like bullets from a long-barrel rifle, usually with the same amount of accuracy and spin, too; woe to the child who got up too slowly from unconciousness because there would usually be another kid, oftentimes thirty pounds heavier than you, who was hurtling down the tube like a meteor mere seconds after your ride. Not only did the slide feel like it was a mile high, but during the summer, it would get as hot as an exhaust pipe. I'd hop in there with my shorts on and my sweaty little hair-free legs would adhere to the surface like raw bacon. And then you'd feel like you were trapped - trapped! inside a sizzling hot death tube where one false move would send you careening to your doom, but to slow down meant a roasting, oven-like demise.
Most of the time, the park system would keep the entrance to the slide chained shut. They must have wondered how on earth they could have been convinced that a 50 yard, mirror-polished, steel tube slide was a good idea. Kids would crawl along the top and sides of the slide like ants after the colony's hill collapses - searching . . . searching. Hoping there was a chink in the armor that we could squeeze through.

Last time I visited that park (I think I was in college), they had removed it entirely and installed the less steep version you see in the picture. The beast has been declawed and domesticated. Oh to ride the original again!

Yet another video for your perusal. Fun with perspective!