caleb walker

"simple" is the word we use

I haven't written nearly enough about the dogs lately, so today Abi just up and handed me a story about himself. Here it is.

I came home from work today and took down the baby gates blocking Abi in the kitchen, and opened the crate to let Georgia out. They took off on their routine routes: Abi stomped around chewing his frisbee with determination; Georgia took off like a shot around the house. I went to the back door, and they came running to go out. I let Abi out on his own--frisbee still in his mouth--and hooked Georgia to her cable.

Now, maybe it was my fault. I broke their routine by filling their bowls with kibble while they were outside. So when I let them in, maybe they didn't know what to do. Georgia got it pretty quickly; she immediately buried her face in her bowl. Abi, though, kept pacing circles around the kitchen, still clutching his frisbee.

I called him to his food. He came. He tried to put his snout in the bowl, but couldn't, with the frisbee in his jaws. So off he went, on another lap of the kitchen. I called him again. He came and stuck his frisbee in the bowl, then, God bless him, he dropped it. It landed square on top of his bowl, like a lid. He picked it up again and headed out for another walkabout.

I stood slackjawed in awe. A window into Abi's brain had been opened for me to glimpse its secrets. It took me a couple seconds to understand, with a touch of pity, what was going on in his big hard head. I finally grabbed the frisbee and coaxed him to let it go (he understands "drop it"). Once unencumbered with that obstacle, he happily dug into his dinner.

The End.

nanowrimo

Yet another reason I thank the lord for inventing the Internet: NaNoWriMo.org (National Novel Writing Month). You sign up and begin writing a novel on November 1. On November 30, if you've written 50,000 words, then you win. It's a little like the Special Olympics; if you finish, you're a winner. They value "enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft." They confess right up front that "you will be writing a lot of crap."

So what's the point? According to their FAQ list:

1) If you don't do it now, you probably never will. ... The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START.

2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. ... You'll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there.... There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

3) Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. ... Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.

Will I do it? I'm tempted.

blues

I've been watching The Blues on PBS. Since I'm taping the series, I'm not sure what the original order was, but so far I've seen the ones by Scorcese, Wenders, and Richard Pearce. I don't know who Pearce is, but his is the best of the three. It's about life on the road, and he hangs out on B.B. King's and Bobby Rush's tour busses.

There is a wonderful sequence where Roscoe Gordon (no, I've never heard of him either) walks Memphis' Beale Street, chatting with bystanders and tourists. None of them know him, but he's jovial and friendly to them all. Some people ask him right out if he plays the blues; he looks like the prototypical 60-year-old bluesman. Others ask him where he's playing tonight; "Hang on, I wrote it down," he says each time, and pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket. He passes someone standing outside a restaurant holding a trumpet, singing into a mic. The guy stops, calls out Roscoe's name, and brings him over to the mic. I don't know if Roscoe knows who this guy is, or if he's just pleased to be recognized, but he's an instant ham at the microphone. They develop instant camaraderie, and after a little banter, Roscoe starts improvising a bit of a song: "Come on in, the food's really good here," or something, while the trumpeter starts playing along. It's a beautiful little scene.

A gentleman named Rufus Thomas is interviewed a little later in the show. He says that he tells this to his white friends: "If you were black for one day, Saturday night on Beale Street, you never would want to be white anymore." Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a quote of the day.

oregon calling

On my lunch hour today I was daydreaming about moving to another town. When I got back to my desk, I filled out the long survey at Find Your Spot, carefully sidestepping the opt-into-spam questions. (I must say that those parts of the site were very well-done. A friendly voice, and clear instructions makes unchecking those "sign me up" options a pleasure.)

When finished, I was given a list of 24 recommend places for me to live. Eight of those (a third of the list!) were in Oregon: Portland, Medford, Salem, Bend, Corvalis, Eugene, Ashland, and Milwaukie. My current home town of Pittsburgh didn't make the list, and neither did any place in Maine, source of many of my relocation fantasies. That's probably because I marked that I didn't want to deal with bad winters. (I feel this pull toward Maine, because I was born there, but had never set foot there since, until taking two great vacations there this summer.)

I mailed the link to KR. She'll probably end up in Nome or Bangor or Chicago. We'll send postcards back and forth, I suppose.

Here's a call for interaction. Oregonians: Is Oregon all that? Mainiacs: Is a Maine winter really that bad?

new wikipedia logo

Wikipedia, a sublimely useful site, recently ran a contest to pick a new logo from submissions by users. It's a good example of why putting a logo design to a vote is a bad idea. The world-puzzle metaphor makes excellent logical sense for a "Free Encyclopedia," but that should have been trumped by its lack of visual sense. And a vote, especially among the digerati, will focus on logic over visuals. (I've become disenchanted with logic, and maybe I'll rant about that some other time.)

Fortunately, some members recognize this, so there have been quite a few good (and bad) variants.

Hmm. Maybe it's an appropriate logo for an encyclopedia that doesn't include "logos," "graphic design," "design," "Paul Rand," or "Milton Glaser."

There were some very nice alternatives that didn't win.

a landlubber in awe

Here are two views from the porch of the house we stayed at in Stonington Maine (pasted together from a series of photos).

High Tide

Low Tide

If these were larger, better photos, you'd see how different the land- and seascape are. Little islands appear and disappear. Walking on the rocks at low tide, every step crunches, as you crush barnacles and snails like the acorns I pop as I walk to work every day. (Captain Bill called them periwinkles. They were introduced from Europe, and have taken over the shore.) And this scene-change happens four times a day! Inconceivable!

sam

In a previous post I mentioned creating a character to write about. I've done that. Sam is his name, and he's a graphic designer in a coastal town in Maine. Every day or so I write another little vignete about his life. This is my writing class for the fall, since all the other classes have already started. (That's also why I haven't written much here about my own self.)

So far nothing much has happened with Sam. He called a woman for a date, he sat on his fire escape with the New York Times crossword, he hitchhiked. That sort of thing. I don't have a third-floor fire escape to sit on, I haven't asked a woman out on a date for many many years, I've never hitchhiked, but still I feel that Sam is way too much like me. As a result, I'll just be getting into a thing with him and I'll get supremely bored and quit.

Sam needs a little excitement. So last night I mugged him. I brought a thug with a knife into this quiet little town and assaulted him. That had me going for a little while, until Sam thoroughly kicked his ass and walked home. Now what? Maybe Sam should have lost the fight (or his wallet), and gained a scar. Maybe he should be seriously wounded. Maybe he should develop a phobia or a superpower. Well, I can mug him again. I can do it over and over until it's interesting, until it sparks.

Aside from the action, what I've written isn't really engaging. It's got no style. There's no playful language, no love of simile, no metonymy or synecdoche. It's just words so far. Maybe rewriting a scene a few times will get me going.

Stay tuned.

fests

Our friend Ellen is in town from Austin, and stayed with us last night. She's extended an invitation to us to drive with her to the last annual Tom Waits Festival. It sounds like a blast, but we're not going, mainly due to a severe lack of vacation days and spontaneity.

She's also going to the Midwest UkeFest (that's uke as in ukulele).