Season's Something

'Twas the night before Solstice, and all through Ballard
Not a customer was spending, no room on their cards.
Their pockets were empty, no bailout for them,
Just hopes that their kids would be happy next A.M.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of game consoles danced in their heads.

And mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just balanced the checkbook, and searched the kitchen for scraps.

When out on the street there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed while I heard my teeth chatter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Opened the curtains and threw up the sash.

The streetlights shone on the half-muddied snow
,
Made it hard to see clearly the shadows below.

What do my incredulous eyes suddenly see,

But a bum, balancing himself to more easily pee.

Stranded

It seems like it's something new with my car almost every other week... Had a wheel bearing go out, got rear-ended on the viaduct, got the fog lights smashed in by someone who couldn't parallel-park, and now the clutch pedal's bracket has broken, making it really hard to drive. So... here I am at home on a Friday night. I was going to go to a movie... or go shopping for presents... I hadn't decided. Now I can't afford the movie or the presents, even if I could get there.

Dammit! Where's my prescription for Fukitol?

Matt Damon on Palin.

I had a video of Palin making an ass of herself, but it was "removed due to terms of use violation" so whatever.

Goodbye David. I wish I’d known you better.

It's pretty sad, how little some families talk and communicate. I had a cousin, David H. Middleton (I'm David K.), who only lived in Federal Way - a few miles across the valley from me. I just found out by going to his law firm's website that he passed away. What the hell? Was nobody going to tell me until the family reunion in August? Fuck!

"NOTICE

It is with great sadness and unspeakable sorrow that we must announce the sudden and untimely passing of David H. Middleton on May 8th, 2008.
Attorney, husband, father, and friend, he will be sorely missed in the lives of all who knew him. We are grateful to have had the distinct pleasure and great good fortune of being able to share in a part of this wonderful man's abundant good nature, intelligence, and sense of humor.
Please bear with us while we deal with this loss and sort out the details of his passing and the future of the firm."

So I found this old notebook...

This is the random stuff I wrote in the margins, way back when...



Hell is a Summer Festival



Gehenna. More than a place. A way of life.



Life is a jigsaw puzzle. Some of us are fortunate to have pliable edges, so that we fit in many spaces. DM 4/19/91



Molding the Break

the footsteps we follow in have worn the path nearly smooth. hard to go our own way now.
the music we play is a "new rebellion" from that old rebellion of a past rebellion from some imaginary former conformity. hard to find something original.
the food we eat is new and improved over the other new and improved food which was better than something before. hard to get anything fresh.
the thoughts thought then by those before were of course wrong, now that we think in the correct way that we think now. hard to think clearly.
the roads are forked, we go the right way - do we know which that is - do we care - should we - can it make a difference? we'll arrive at our destination anyway. hard to get anywhere new.
DM 3/25/91


fortune presents gifts not according to the book
when you expect whistles it's flutes
when you expect flutes it's whistles
what various paths are followed in distributing honors of possession
she gives awards to some and penitence cloaks to others
(lines from a Dead Can Dance song)



Zusatzlichlieder
(I don't know what that means, or why I wrote it)

Camping

I remember now why I haven't been camping in ages. Bugs!!! Ants everywhere, mosquitos, flies, spiders, millipedes, plus so many others.... I hate bugs.

However... I did get to sit and have long chats with my sisters, and their husbands. Told a lot of jokes, shared stories, didn't do any ghost stories though. :( But we had a lot of great food! Thanks Chris, master of the grill! And I had a few s'mores. Yum... I can't remember the last time I made s'mores.

Anyways... a great time!

Strange Dream

I was traveling in the middle east. The only method we had to travel was by scooter. Not like a Vespa, but the little aluminum scooters, like a razor scooter, but with gas engines. The road was just as wide as a four lane highway, but it had never been paved. The surface was bare rock, dirt and gravel, yet somehow the scooters did ok. Mine was out of gas, but I kept up with the others just fine.
Next, I was on a rocky outcropping above the road. I was moving around, trying to find a ledge I could jump from, that wouldn't be so high as to kill myself. There was a way down, but for some reason I wanted to find the perfect height ledge. There was a woman on the road below, watching me. I've never seen her before.
Then I'm in the bushes behind a house, it doesn't seem like the middle east any more. The house has a deck attached, over the bushes. I climb up onto the deck, and the woman is there. She's American, and introduces herself as a doctor, an army colonel with the "____" project. She told me in the dream, but the name's gone. She's whispering, because she doesn't want the others in the house (dinner party for the project?) to know she's talking to me.
I woke up.

Rings Update - FOUND

Just a fluke... I found the bag with the rings outside in the leaves in the carport. Dropped when opening and closing the sliding door? Maybe... I don't know or care. They are found, and I can stop freaking out about it.

Violation and Failure

As my friends all surely know by now, my home was broken into on Wednesday, while I was at work. there was a bit of a mess, but it seemed like the only things they took were DVDs and a home theater receiver. It didn't occur to me, as I looked around at open drawers and closets and knocked-down shelves, that I should look through all the closed drawers, cupboards, etc. I looked for certain things... birth certificates, important papers, anything someone could use for ID theft. That's what the police told me to look for, and it was all there.

Well, today I was doing a bit of cleaning, putting away some clothes in my dresser, and it hit me. There, in the dresser drawer, where I saw them nearly every day... I didn't see my grandmother's rings. Just a simple set; a plain gold band, and a pretty little gold ring with two yellow diamonds and a ruby, my mother's birthstone, installed after my grandmum lost one of the original diamonds. She never took the rings off... working, gardening, it didn't matter. She never wanted to lose them. They were all she had of her late husband. They, and a coin collection, were all I had of her.

It hurt to lose the DVDs, I hated the feeling that someone had violated my home and gone through my things. But now, this is horrible. These are irreplaceable. I feel as if I failed my grandmother by not keeping them safe.

Going Public... or... Why I'm Weird

First off, I don't want your pity. That's not what this is about. This about me freeing myself of the burden of secrets. Keeping secrets like this can destroy you, as it nearly did me. There have been at least a dozen times that I let this secret bring me to a level so low that I wanted to die. Never again.

Well, there's always the basics. the stuff (almost) everybody had to deal with.

When I was a kid, my dad was never around. He was a surgeon, on call all the time, and when he wasn't at the hospital, he was sailing his boats, or sleeping. I was a useless sailor, so didn't do that with him much. My mum decided that he was married to his job and not her, so she divorced him. My brother stayed with my dad, and my mum and two sisters and I moved from Bellevue to White Rock, B.C.
So, from about age 10, I saw my brother and dad 3 or 4 times a year. While that was hard, life didn't seem so bad, as my grandmother moved in with us for a while. I don't remember when exactly, but my grandmum moved to Penticton. She wanted to live near her son, and the family orchard. She needed more care than my mother could provide anyways. By about 12 or 13, my older sister, now driving, was never around. My grandmum was gone, and my mum worked odd hours. So it was just my younger sister Sue and I most of the time. A year later, and my older sister married and moved away. My mother had begun drinking heavily. She had always drank, just not as much. She was getting drunk every night when she got home. She totalled her car passing out at the wheel, as she wouldn't wait to get home most of the time.
That's where I was... thinking, because my mum told me so, that my dad didn't want us, and nobody else would take care of us. I believed that if she were not around, my sister and I would be out on the street. I think that's why I didn't say anything when she started molesting me. It happened a few times. She was always drunk. The last time, she was so drunk that she got sick and collapsed. I don't remember the exact details anymore, and I don't want to. She had to be hospitalized that night. She nearly died, and for some stupid reason I kept the secret. I think I've been a bit weird ever since. I pretty much buried it for years, and thought about it momentarily every few years after i was about 21 or so. Only when my mother was dying of cancer did it really come to the surface, with all the anger, and sadness, and confusion I'd been holding in.
I had pretended it didn't happen for about 25 years, and now when I told my family about it, only my sisters and one cousin actually believed and supported me. My dad blamed the alcohol, my brother stopped talking to me for a while, and everyone else is still pretending it didn't happen. Some of my family still doesn't know. I stopped talking about it after some of the reactions I got.
I guess they'll all find out eventually.

Through the swamp... or around?

This is a ghost story, and it's a love story. It's about a man who loved a woman. A man who thought the flame of their love could never diminish. But it did. What had once been a dance had become a battle. They fought and fought. In the dead of the night, after angry words were spoken, he left their bed and saddled his horse. She said to him, "If you don't come back in 3 days, then you can never come back. Mark my words. I'll be gone."
Still angry, the man rode away. And he enjoyed the solitude. The noise of their argument was replaced by the soothing sound of the forest. But after just 2 days in the forest, he was filled with regret. He wanted to return to the woman he loved. And he wanted to return to the life he missed. So he found a shortcut through the woods and he took it. He was desperate, desperate to get back to the woman he loved before it was too late. Her threat surrounding his head... Would she wait for him or would she be true to her words? Would she be gone? He could feel his horse losing speed as if it wouldn't
make it through the night. The man came to the edge of a dark and unknown swamp. He had to make a decision. Does he go through the swamp or does he go around? We all ask ourselves that question, don't we? It's a very scary question to answer all alone.
Next to the swamp was a boy. The man asks the boy, "Tell me... does the swamp have a hard bottom?" And the boy tells the man, "It does." So the man guides his horse into the swamp. And as he begins to sink, deeper and deeper into the swamp, he says to the boy, "I thought you said it had a hard bottom!"
And the boy says, "It does... You're just not there yet."



(No, I can't write. This was taken from the show Dead Like Me)

Handlebars

Two ducklings, three geese, and ten rabbits...

...today on the Interurban Trail. Only made it about 15 miles this time. I was just too tired, after working all day. I kept up a pretty fast pace, much faster than the last couple times. I STILL didn't have enough water with me. i think I need to have some extra in the car. Holy crap my legs hurt! I think I still need to make some adjustments to the bike. (hobbles off to the shower)

More Quotes I Like

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.

It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings.

Many people think that if they were only in some other place, or had some other job, they would be happy. Well, that is doubtful. So get as much happiness out of what you are doing as you can and don't put off being happy until some future date.

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

Dale Carnegie

A cool video

Favourite Quotes

From my favourite author Douglas Adams...

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much, of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.


Helen Keller

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.


Albert Einstein

We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it (religion) should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.


Dogen Zenji

Not to study the Buddha way is to fall into the realm of shameless and erroneous ways. All preceding and succeeding Buddhas always practice the Buddha way.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Carrying the self forward to confirm the myriad dharmas is delusion. The myriad dharmas advancing and confirming the self is realization.

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?


Osho

If you are in the future, then ego seems to be very substantial. If you are in the present the ego is a mirage, it starts disappearing.

In your hopelessness is the only hope, and in your desirelessness is your only fulfillment, and in your tremendous helplessness suddenly the whole existence starts helping you.


Shunryu Suzuki

Real Practice has orientation or direction, but it has no purpose or gaining idea, so it can include everything that comes.

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.

Gabe is 12!

On friday, Gabe turned 12. We went out for pizza, and all the while, I was thinking, "My god he's growing so fast!" I remembered the single happiest day of my life; the day I first held Gabe in my arms. He wasn't Gabe then, of course. I named him Colin Gabriel. It was a little later, that my stepsister held him in her lap and said, "I'm going to call you Gabe." That was it. Now he's only Colin when he's in trouble (he is almost never Colin).
I remembered Saturday, as we were driving around to comic book stores, that I named him wrong. At least, wrong according to my family. My dad took me aside at the '96 family reunion and said. "You spelled it wrong." He was referring to 'Colin,' a name I had thought about for a long time. "The family spelling is a c-o-l-l-i-n," he said. He didn't like my reaction.
"I didn't know there was a family spelling, Dad," I said. "If I'd known Collin was a family name, I would've picked something completely different."
My son is the first boy in all the known generations in my family that doesn't have family names for both given names. I guess I like to be different.
Anyways... after comic-shopping, we had lunch at Taki's in Seattle, then came home and read comics, played with new action figures, and of course, a new Transformer! (Rescue Ratchet).
Today we're going to the movies to see Prince Caspian, then have lunch at Johnny Rocket's (Gabe's favourite). I love birthday weekends!

OK, forget that idea...

I was wondering if it was going to be possible to ride my mountain bike to work and get in shape while saving gas. For anyone who doesn't know, I drive 33 miles each way for my commute. Maybe some day I can do it on a bike, but not yet! I've been without a bike for a while now. My last one got stolen three years ago. This year, at my birthday, I got another bike. I've been waiting to get out and ride it, and finally did today. I went about 20 miles on the Interurban... and I feel like I'm going to collapse. I didn't realize how out of shape I'd gotten. Obviously I need to ride more.