The day before New Year’s Eve I was at home making a fire to try and bring some warmth to our little apartment in the ‘burbs, a task which I take on even though I don’t really have any special qualifications for firemaking.  In fact, they only turn out as well as they do because I cheat and start them all off with a Duraflame log, piling extra wood on once most of it has caught and started to crumble.  Anyway, I was poking around in this fire with the sawed-off end of a two-by-four, wanting to move some of the logs around to improve airflow and burn rate and other things  I like to pretend I know about before adding said end of a two-by-four to the fire.  I decided abruptly that a certain burning log should be moved, so I jammed the wood I was holding into it and started to lever it up, which meant my hand went down and because I didn’t plan this one out too well ahead of time I put my fingers down directly into the flames.

Fun fact!  The pain signal doesn’t have to make it all the way back to your brain before you react — it makes it to the spinal cord, which has no problem cutting in and moving your hand for you, which begs the question why it allowed you to use your hand in the first place since you were just going to go around doing things like sticking it into open flames.  Perhaps someone more versed in the sciences than myself knows the answer to that one, but my guess is that your autonomic nervous system is taking the tough love route with you, reasoning that if it always keeps you from sticking your hands into things that hurt you are just never going to keep them out on your own.

Anyway!  In the event that you put your hand directly into a fire like some sort of idiot, local control kicks in before the sensation of burning makes it very far at all, and your hand yanks itself away from the fireplace and back.  In some cases, you may find that your hand has also reacted by releasing the sawed-off end of two-by-four that you were holding.  I don’t imagine these sort of situations are very common at all, but I am willing to bet that in only one case in a million do the commands from the spine come through that dictate that the hand should hurl the piece of wood directly into one’s big toe.

Stubbing your toe is pretty bad, sure, but I can tell you that throwing a piece of wood at it and hitting it dead on is a lot worse, though it’s less that pain that makes you yell than the indignation that hitting something so small should hurt so bad.  ”ARRRGGHH!” I shouted, dropping to all fours and kicking my wounded foot back and up because I don’t know why.  Moving it away from the pain?  Trying to elevate it?  I raised it up behind me into the air, pressed my head against the cool tile in front of the fireplace, and yelled, “I SMASHED MY BIG LADY TOE!”

Lady toe?

Something you should know about me is that I have two younger sisters, and what they can tell you is what any younger sister anywhere in the world can tell you about older brothers: they are really, really annoying.  A few days before I was over at my mother’s place for Christmas, and my baby sister was over, too, and I guess she’s going to be twenty-three here before long but some things never change, and anyway we were taking a break from the game we’d been playing all morning of trying to catch one another unawares with a swift kick to the butt, and sat down at the dinner table to have cookies.  She took advantage of the break as an opportunity to start painting her toenails, a task from which I tried to distract her by poking her in the ribs with my foot.  She’s old enough now that she can just ignore me when she’s tired of my nonsense, so when I saw that my foot-poking tactics weren’t working, I plopped my foot down in her lap and said, “Paint my toes!”  She called my bluff and did so without missing a beat, painting three toes on my left foot a bright pink while I munched on my cookies.

I forgot all about the decorated toes of my left foot as soon as I put my slippers back on, chuckling when I switched out of slippers and into socks and shoes for the drive home, laughing in surprise when I took my socks off later, giggling when I looked down in the shower the next morning and discovered I had pink toes.  If you can imagine sitting the dude from “Memento” down in front of a computer and having him laugh fifty times in a row as you hit repeat on that “Charlie bit me” video on YouTube, you pretty much have my cycle over the next few days of forgetting about my pink toe nails, seeing them, and finding them hysterical all over again.  After a while I took to calling them my lady toes.

Here we are back at the fireplace, and since no one was there but me you’ll have to picture it: a fat guy dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt, head and hands pressed against the tile, one foot on the ground and the other up in the air as if I were trying to kick up into a headstand, bellowing about the pretty pink princess toes I had pointed at the ceiling.

If I had a destiny, ladies and gentlemen, that image pretty much sums it up:  I am a completely ridiculous person, to whom any number of completely ridiculous things occur on a regular basis.  It’s almost constant.  The very next day I was out for Korean barbecue and opened the wrapper on my chopsticks to find I only had one.  I’ve never heard of someone getting only one chopstick in one of those things before.  I’m pretty certain it didn’t happen to anyone else at that restaurant, since from what I could see I was the only one sitting around with a pitiful look on his face, holding a single chopstick in the air to try and get the attention of the waitstaff.

It’s fate, right?  Might as well have a sense of humor about it.

Now, go enjoy your weekend.  Go!  It’s going to be nice out.

Yet Another Way To Keep Up With My Boring Exploits

I started up a Tumblr blog about a year ago because, well, everyone seemed to be doing it, although I admitted I didn’t have the first idea what I was going to use it for.  So it sat, and sat, and then one day I joined Instagram, and then I noticed than an update to the Gowalla client for iPhone allowed you to post your updates to Tumblr, and something clicked in my brain and I realized I could use the Tumblr as a stalker blog.

I freely admit to ripping this idea off from the DaveStalker page on Blogography.  If you visit my own stalker page, you’ll see that it’s Instagram photos tagged with my location at the time, or else photos cross-posted from my Gowalla check-ins.  Every once in a while I might post a check-in from Gowalla if it’s someplace cool (like the Space Needle!  Or the San Diego Zoo!) but probably not if I’m just going out for Mexican food (again).  The page looks pretty boring right now because I haven’t modified the CSS or anything, just pasted in some code to make the last ten Tumblr posts display.  Most of those photos will be posted on Flickr anyway, and if you want to follow the actual Tumblr blog itself it’s here, and isn’t the reason blogs are falling by the wayside because we all have about nine different services we use these days?  No doubt this is a matter for another post entirely but I remember back when I started this silly blog of mine we all just used Bloglines to keep track of new posts, and some of us spent a lot of time commenting on Flickr, and these days there’s Twitter and the Facebook and Tumblr blogs and Goodreads and Foursquare and everything else and I’m having trouble keeping track of what I have out there, just remembering as I write this that I think I have a Friendfeed set up someplace.

But I digress.  I have a stalker blog set up and I will try to make it a little prettier later.

As you were.

He chuckled at that.  ”No, but I guess it could!”

Later, after we’d laid grandma to rest, and moved on to the memorial service, I’m pretty sure this was one of the times we ducked out by the parking lot and shared a few sips of smuggled whiskey, and grumbled and joked about our extended family.  They’re good people for the most part, and I love them, but they can be a stuffy, conservative lot, which is why we had to sneak out for whiskey in the first place.

He died, last week, on Sunday.  When I had spoken with my mother on the phone just a few days before she’d brought me up to speed on Robbie and his tumor.  I was surprised when she told me Joan had met with ‘the hospice people,’ as I thought he had been recovering.  ”Didn’t they cut it all out?”

“They did, but not enough, it seems.  It grew back, and he’s just been getting worse.”  It had grown on the side of his brain where we keep all our words, eating away at his powers of speech, of his ability to connect with other people.  It’s frustrating enough to have a word or a name at the tip of your tongue, but that your brain won’t quite release it to you yet; quite another to know that there might have been words once, and an awareness that they were missing, but not to have the faintest idea what they were or where they went.  I imagine it might be like waking up knowing that you had been in the midst of a dream, but not able to recall any of it.  Maybe it was strange, or scary, but the actual content was lost to you, having drifted away to wherever it is where these things go.  Of the phrases he had retained, ‘I don’t know’ seemed to be one he could still use freely.  ”He and Joan were sitting in their living room, watching TV,” my mother told me, “and he suddenly just shouted out ‘Hey!’, and after a minute he shouted it again, and when Joan asked him what was wrong, he just said, ‘I don’t know.  I don’t know.’”   Maybe it was “this hurts,” he wanted to say, or “I know I’ll be gone soon.  Don’t ever forget that I love you,” or something else deeply felt, but that he was no longer able to articulate.

I don’t know.

I got a text from my mother on Sunday morning, asking me to call.  I put it off, having a sick feeling in my gut about why I needed to call.  It’s far too soon, I reasoned.  He must have at least a month left, or maybe two months, or any other small amount of time that seems like it ought to be enough, and if hanging on for a year after your first surgery isn’t enough time then I guess nothing is.  She told me that he’d died, and my first thought was of his girls.  Becky had just come back from her first year of college, and I am horrible at keeping track of how old everybody is but I don’t think Rachel is any older than eight or nine, and I imagine like me they just sort of quietly hoped he was going to keep hanging on, and probably woke up on Father’s Day ready to spend a day with dad only to discover he had already left.

I remember the day he joined our family.  We drove up here from San Diego for the wedding.  I was probably twelve or so, dressed in a clip-on tie that clashed badly with my dress shirt and my very silly cardigan.  (My mother had recently allowed me to start picking out my own clothes, and twenty years later I don’t seem to be much better at it.)  He was wearing his Marine dress uniform, in honor of his brothers-in-arms deployed in Desert Storm.  We have photos somewhere — he and Joan looked very young, and very happy.  I’ll remember him that way, and the jokes about the family we sometimes felt like outsiders in, and those swigs of whiskey in the parking lot, and his gentle Southern drawl and his infectious chuckle.  I wish he could have stayed to watch his girls grow up a bit more.  He was a good father, and I know he was very proud of them, even if he couldn’t have told them as much there at the end, he doubtless had it written down in his bones in a language that needn’t be spoken anyway.

As always for this time of year, it’s going to take me at least three more weeks until my eyes, long used to weeks upon weeks of cloud cover, finally adjust to the blue skies and large amount of ambient sunlight.  It will be at least three weeks after that before I start hearing people complain about the heat, and wishing for the rains to come back (I wish I were joking about this last part).

There was a moment of silence from her end of the line, and then, “That’s a good question!  I’m not sure.”

“I was thinking,” I said, which wasn’t true at all, because I’m fairly sure I came up with this on the spot, “that the 25th would be a good date, because you first came to Portland on the weekend of May 25th, and then you were here again in June on the 25th, and you’ll be here next week, which includes July 25th…and I’ll take you out someplace nice, and it will be our three month anniversary.”  Also the 25th was a good round number that I was unlikely to forget, but I didn’t bring that up.

“Hmm,” she said, “you know, we met just a month before that on April 25th in Santa Fe.”

“That’s true.”

“And kissed for the first time.”

“Also true.”

“So how about April 25th?” she proposed.  ”Then we can have our four month anniversary on my next visit to Portland.”

“Wait.  You want to backdate our anniversary?”  I had to admit I was intrigued by the idea.  You can’t fight fate, not really, and our lives had definitely changed course that night in New Mexico.  Why not?  ”Okay, I’m in.  April 25th it is.”

That first year was an odd one: dating a girl I’d met online who lived in another state is probably the weirdest thing I’ve done in a life filled with weird.  Then one day I flew down to California, and we collected all Sarah’s things and drove her up here to Oregon, and then not too long after that I decided that quitting my job, while probably not the best idea in the Great Depression Of Our Times, was about the only option I had.  And then we moved in together.  Stressful much?  You bet.  But we made it through, a little rougher, a little wiser, and we’re doing fine.

The anniversary of our first year together came and went rather quietly, falling as it did on the heels of the last TequilaCon, and we didn’t say a word because the show must go on, people.  We spent it in Victoria, with friends, taking in a lucky day of Pacific Northwest sunshine in that beautiful city.

I’d be lying if I said we hadn’t had plenty of challenges this second year.  But we’re stronger for that, we survived life coming at us with both barrels blazing by supporting each other through thick and thin.  If it was just me going through all that I know I would have given up, but neither of us gave up on each other, and now we know that if we made it through the lowest parts of this last year we can make it through anything.

Happy anniversary, baby.  Here’s to the next two years.  And the next two after that.  And then after that probably another…aw, heck, you get the idea.

Dave is a pretty cool guy.  And here’s something you should know about Dave: he doesn’t really celebrate his birthday, hasn’t done so for quite a few years now.

I can appreciate that.  I tried to give up celebrating my own birthday but people just kept buying me beer and cake or even making me tortilla soup so I pretty much gave up on giving up.  Still, I can appreciate not wanting to celebrate one’s own birthday, and so, on this day, which (depending on when you read this entry) may or may not still be the anniversary of Dave’s birth [edited to add: definitely not now, thanks to our sucky cable internet service being down most of the night], I do solemnly declare this to be the Dave Appreciation Day, wherein I shall let the aforementioned (and above pictured) Dave know how much I appreciate him.

Dave, I appreciate you, you big lug.  I appreciate that, in true Buddhist fashion, you non-violently threatened me with non-harm if I didn’t cough up a story for the premier issue of Thrice Fiction.  I appreciate that, thanks to you, I got to see my first ever published story.  I appreciate that one time you let me stay with you in a swanky New York hotel, then helped me play tourist all over town, including going to the Brooklyn art museum (again, look at the picture, you dopes) wherein you talked about Murakami and all the influence he had on your own art.  I appreciate you letting me crash with you during Comic-Con that one time, and that other time you came out to Seattle so we could catch the premier of Watchmen.  I appreciate most of the times we had a lot to drink together, but not the times that led to hangovers the next day because I am not fond of hangovers.  Well, I guess I appreciate those times a little.  I have some pictures indicating we probably had  a good time.  Also I appreciate that you let me share my vast nerdy knowledge of science fiction with you by pushing books off on you constantly.  I’m at least twenty percent gay for you (that’s an estimate, I haven’t done the math yet).

In short, I appreciate Dave.  If you, the non-Dave reader out there, have something you appreciate about Dave, do be sure to let the dude know.

If this happens early in the morning (as it frequently does) I mumble one of my Favorite Words to Say Before 9 AM, like “Fuck” or “Goddamn’t” or “Meh.”  If this famous bug in my operating system should happen to occur in front of witnesses, which is more common when I’m out at happy hour, I’ll just go right to dabbing up the spilled liquid off my shirt with a napkin and explain, “Sorry ’bout that.  It’s part of my condition.”

While talking, if I find I can’t recall a word or the name of something, be it a movie or a restaurant or whatever, I will pause and make a weird noise.  A lot of the time it is a clucking noise I make with my tongue.  Other times it’s a low two-note whistle, which is often accompanied by a back and forth eye roll.  This usually does the trick and causes the thing I was trying to recollect to jump to the top of my mind.

My right leg is the one with all the trouble, and after sleeping through the night it manages to swell up a bit, and then refuses to wake up along with the rest of me.  For the first forty minutes or so after getting out of bed, I walk around the way that most of us imagine a zombie to walk: rather lopsided, dragging my right leg behind me.

When trying to solve a problem, it’s not too unusual for me to mumble to myself.  Sometimes this is accompanied by tugging on my right earlobe, which is also something I do when trying to remember what the hell it was I was supposed to pick up at the grocery store.

There is a certain point at which I have consumed enough alcohol that the dam just bursts  and I just start talking, leaping from topic to loosely connected topic, all of it incredibly ridiculous.  People tend to find it incredibly amusing when this happens.  If no one else is talking I will sometimes make up dialog for them and start speaking it, occasionally using a new voice I have just made up to indicate that these are actually your lines that I’m saying, but sometimes just moving my arms back and forth in a robot like fashion, which I seem to think is the universal sign for “This is actually someone other than myself drunkenly holding forth discourse on this subject.”

My furiously churning brain will sometimes bring up something particularly funny that I read or saw anywhere from a few days to a a few years before, and if it’s something particularly hilarious I will start laughing.  Obviously no one else is privy to the endlessly playing movie in my mind, so I imagine it just looks like I’m laughing at nothing.  I suppose that’s how crazy people must look.

What about you?  Anything especially odd that you do that can only be described as being part of your condition?

I found this little guy hanging out by the river early one particularly cold morning.  Although it’s not terribly uncommon to see the occasional seagull in Portland, keep in mind that there’s 80 or so miles and a whole mountain range between us and the nearest ocean.  If the storms along the coast get pretty bad, though, a few will wander inland, fighting with pigeons for food scraps and trash.

He wasn’t too certain about me, inching closer to him with one arm outstretched.  When he thought I was close enough he gave me a little glare, so I snapped my photo, and he flapped his wings and flew off, his business with me done.

If you don’t have time to watch it, here’s a brief synopsis of the song for you:  the protagonist is in love with a woman, and in an attempt to prove the extent of this love he lists a number of unlikely situations to which he would willingly subject himself.  In no particular order, these include:

• Catching a grenade.
• Putting his hand on a blade.
• Jump in front of a train.
• Take a bullet through the brain.
• Be run through by a rabid unicorn’s horn.
• Get hammered by the Norse god, Thor.
• Eat his weight in chicken feet.
• Listen to Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” on repeat.

I am probably making at least some of those up, as I did not listen to the song too carefully or bother to look up the lyrics prior to writing this post — people, I’m a blogger, which means I’m practically a journalist, so don’t expect me to do things like check facts or verify accuracy on something before hitting publish.  ANYWAY, I think you get the point.

What I am left wondering is how the hell he thought any of this was going to impress his girl, or win her back.  I mean, anyone can promise a bunch of things that sound really impressive because you probably won’t have to deliver on any of them.  I can only imagine the response from Bruno’s beloved to all of his promises.

BRUNO: I would catch a grenade for you, baby!

LADY FRIEND: We live in the O.C., not the Gaza Strip.  Who’s even throwing grenades around here?  UNIMPRESSED FACE.

BRUNO: Well, I would…I would put my hand on a blade for you.

LADY FRIEND: What does that even mean?  You don’t know how to use power tools.  You don’t even own a good socket wrench set!

BRUNO: Listen, I would jump in front of a train for you…

LADY FRIEND: It’s more like, “I would wander out into traffic because I was texting and wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking.”  AMIRITE?

(At this point, no doubt, you can imagine our protagonist getting a little riled up at being called on his bullshit.  So, he switches tactics.)

BRUNO: I don’t understand.  I would go through all this pain.  What do I need to do to prove my love to you?

LADY FRIEND: Instead of telling me you’re going to “take a bullet right through the brain,” how about that you’ll “unclog that slow bathroom drain?”

BRUNO: What?  That’s crazy talk.

LADY FRIEND:   How about you pick up your dirty socks off the floor?  Or if you remember not to slam the door?

BRUNO: I don’t really see what you’re getting at…

LADY FRIEND: Hey, here’s a good one: Don’t dribble on the toilet seat.  Ooh!  Keep off the carpet with your dirty feet.

BRUNO: Man, this is some bullshit right here.  Did I mention the part about how I would catch a grenade….?

LADY FRIEND:  Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, Bruno.  It’s not as terribly glamorous to say that you’ll clean up around the house for your girl, but it’s a lot more believable than a lot of the stuff you put in your song, and will probably even get you laid.