Herr Necklace

You know that land bridge that is to have existed in the past, connecting Alaska to Russia, whereby people and animales traveled back and forth and ventured into new lands? That's what I am reminded of every time I look at that area under my ears. Normally, there shouldn't be any hair there, trying to connect the hair of the head from the beard, but lately, once every ice age, or at least a fortnight, I must shave that area to avoid looking like a Cro-Magnon man.

Not only that, but when trimming my facial hair weekly, I also have to remember to get the insides of the ears, ear lobes, and inside of the nose. I get stray dark hairs all the way up to my cheekbones. I think the hair factory in my body is working overtime, but lacking production in one vital area, that is the widow's peaks that seem to be getting more and more severe each time I cut my hair.

In the CD booklet for Phish's live album Slip, Stitch, and Pass, there is a picture of Trey Anastasio, but his name is listed as Herr Necklace. He sports a black tee-shirt with a stretched-out neck, which hangs down to show his massive amounts of black chest hair. A patch of it clearly stands out, looking like he has on a necklace made of hair. I think if I wanted to, I could sport a nice hair necklace. A necklace of hair in the front, with the chain going up over the shoulders and around the back.

Isn't it a very cruel trick that nature plays on a man, giving him a full head of hair in youth, then slowly taking it away and adding it and then some to the rest of the body? I'm not really going bald yet, but it seems like if my head was a major metropolis, that too much of the hairs are moving to the suburbs of the ears, neck, and nose, with more living in the smaller cities of the shoulders, and some prefering the lonely flatlands of the back.

The only places on my body now that seem to be hairless are the bicep area, most of my hands, the bottoms of my feet, and the forehead. I can't really speak for my back because I don't spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, at least not looking at my back. I guess I would rather not know. I suppose I can consider myself lucky that I have not yet had to worry about growing a unibrow. Maybe that is next...

Kale recipe

Today during work I had an unrelenting urge to eat some kale, which is strange because to the best of my knowledge, I've never eaten kale before. After work, I headed over to the grocery store and bought a head, or a bunch, or a unit of kale, whatever the correct nomenclature happens to be. Having no idea what to do with it at that point, I used some different cookbooks as a reference for preparing the kale and formulated a gameplan.

Kale recipe:

Ingredients: Kale, bacon, garlic, Thai peanut sauce, sunflower seeds, water, serrano pepper

Prepare bacon as normal. Set aside cooked bacon, but save grease. Add garlic and a generous spoonful of Thai peanut sauce to the hot grease. Add chopped kale and serrano pepper to the grease mixture and stir, coating kale leaves before adding half a cup of water. Cover and cook at medium-high heat for 5 minutes. Uncover and cook at medium-high heat until water has evaporated. Cook until kale reaches desired tenderness. Stir in another generous spoonful of Thai peanut sauce, add a handful of sunflower seeds, and crumble bacon over kale. Mix together and serve, or like me, eat an entire plateful by yourself.

It was delicious. It was spicy because of the pepper, flavorful from the peanut sauce and bacon grease, and slightly cruncy from the sunflower seeds. I look forward to trying different things with kale in the future.

What was that again?

There have been a few phrases, words, or sentences I've heard or read recently that made me think twice. They will be presented and discussed.



"Market Value"

I was reading about Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel wanting to get "market value" from the Patriots, which means that he wanted to get paid more than others who produce less than him. In most situations, I would agree that this is a good salary rule: If you produce more than somebody else, you should get paid more than that person. In professional sports, where salaries are ballooning, it makes for some interesting contracts. Take Barry Zito's 7-year deal for $126 million, which has not paid off for the Giants. Now, pitchers who produce more than Zito, or even have the potential to produce like him, will get deals that approach or surpass those numbers. I guess my point is this: Is there that big of a difference between getting paid maybe 6 million a year and wanting 8 million a year? Yes, I suppose it is 2 million dollars, a large sum of money, but 6 million is still far more than some 99% of the US population makes in a year. I can see a person arguing that they produce more than a coworker and deserve a raise from $12/hr to $15/hr, but the numbers these professional athletes argue over have six zeroes behind them!



"Tide of Iron"
Tide of Iron is a board game I purchased recently. It is a scenario-based World War II game, that I supposed could be described as Risk on steriods. Risk would be somewhat skinny, rookie year, 1987 bash-brother Mark McGuire, whereas Tide of Iron would be 1998, bulging arm vien, gum-chewing, muscleman Mark McGuire. I believe Tide of Iron is a great name for the game, as from the shore, the D-Day invasions must have turned the beaches into a tide of iron, but then the game itself has no scenarios that involve those battles. It deals with events that happen after D-Day, some almost a year after the operation. So, it's a great game, but the name doesn't exactly fit the game.

"We play everything"
That is the station motto for 100.3, The BUS, based out of Des Moines. They claim to play everything, but they don't. What you can hear on the BUS consists of most of the songs you can hear on any oldies station (93.3 here in Iowa), classic rock station (95), or 80s/90s pop station (102.5). They have some self-righteous DJ recordings that they play before songs and frequently talk about how their songs are played at random, even though there are a few heard daily. Well, they don't play everything, a wide variety of songs for sure, but nothing that approaches the all-encompasing "everything". They play no jazz, few blues songs, no country, no opera, no classical (Roll Over Beethoven doesn't count), no rap, no hip-hop, nothing you regularly hear on college radio stations, no Christian, no bluegrass, and no metal. Surely, many other genres are excluded. Well, I'd still prefer to listen to the BUS at work over any other radio station, but their self-proclaiming radio shorts really annoy me.

"All projects equal"
I went to my brother's senior art exhibition, where a woman served as a judge to give out awards. You know how you have to let people who didn't win feel good about their work? She tried to do that, but ended up not making sense. She said that all projects were equally good, but a few stood out from the rest. Seven pieces won awards, one first, one second, one third, four honorable mention, but they were all equally good... I wish I could take a math course that she taught where she would show how 1=2=3=4=4=4=4=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5... I'm not on an angry guy grammar or semantics rant here, I just thought what she said was humorous, then came up with the math parts in my head.

I'm sure I've come across more of these, but they were the few that I remembered to write about.

Clutch Maker to the Nation

Wow, I didn't realize it had almost been a month since I last posted. I want to thank those who posted previously, especially those who have never posted before. It is always good to know that your audience is larger than you think, which I believe now stands to be roughly 27 people.

My feelings towards work have changed a little, or maybe now I'm just too tired to exhausted to think about it at the end of the day. I remembered a Green Day song the other day at work, the one entitled "Welcome to Paradise", it kind of sums up my feelings towards work at this point, especially if you substitute the word "home" with "job" in the excerpt, which I will do for you.

It makes me wonder why I'm still here
For some strange reason it's now
Feeling like my "job"
And I'm never gonna go
Pay attention to the cracked streets and the broken homes
Some call them slums some call it nice
I want to take you through a wasteland I like to call my "job"
Welcome to Paradise

In the song, the protagonist moves to a new city, which is not his ideal place to live. At first he is nervous and unsure of his decision to have left home, but through a period of time, he comes to accept the new city as home, even though others, and maybe even himself, have such a negative view of the place.


I removed some old boxes of junk from my parent's house about two or three weeks ago. In the boxes were old baseball cards, stuffed animals, souvenirs, knick-knacks, and what seemed like all of the notes, tests, quizzes, worksheets, and handouts for every class I took dating back to my sophomore year in high school. I sorted through each individual sheet to look over things I had written in papers and on tests, pictures I had drawn in the margins of notes, and things I had learned about over a period of nine years. I came across a poem from my 11th grade American Literary Studies class, Chicago by Carl Sandburg. It inspired me to keep going and working hard at my current job. The excerpt, which shows the last third of the poem, applies to me, especially if you substitute the phrase "clutch maker" for "freight handler".

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating proud to be Hog Butcher, Toolmaker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and "clutch maker" to the Nation

That's about it for today. I have some topics to write about, but maybe not the motivation to sit down and write them.

Why do we fall?

"And we do we fall, Master Bruce?"
No answer.
"So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up."
From Batman Begins

I cried today.

Nothing substantial, just a few brave pioneers leaving the comfort and safety of their homeland, expanding out over an ever-changing terrain of nose, cheek, hair, and chin, only to be wiped out of existence with the brush of a hand, or to dry up in alien territory.

The Patriots lost. For them, it may have only been a game, but for me it meant something more. I am aware that it is only a football game of minor significance, but for me, the near-perfect Patriots were the crux of a season-long metaphor.

In some consequential way, I felt that I needed the Patriots to win. I have been following the Patriots most of the season and have based Sunday afternoons and nights around their games. I wanted to believe that perfection was possible, that extraordinary achievement is within the grasp of ordinary men. Tonight, the broken pieces of a dream scatter my thoughts and feelings. Their failure just accentuates my failures and unrealized potentials all the more.

I wrote many months ago of A Raisin in the Sun, about Langston Hughes's Dream Deferred. I've never had many hopes and dreams for my own life; I haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I'm 28 years old. I feel like a tiring pugilist with too few tallies on my scorecard and too few rounds left to change anything.

I started working again recently. I make air clutches for an agricultural company in Ames; my job title is product assembler. I robotically grab appropriate pieces from storage boxes as fast as I can and put them together to fabricate, also as fast as I can, a small range of slightly different products. An image that runs through my head during work is of the giant machine-operated assembly lines of automobile plants. I pretend I am one of those machines, dulling my senses to baseline levels of being to steel myself against the relentless onslaught of a pedestrian existence.

Lana asked me what work was like. I told her that I died a little inside each day. I hope she doesn't believe me, I am only joking about a subpar situation, but make no mistake, I don't exactly well up with pride when I think of my job. I would almost rather tell friends and family that I am unemployed and have them think of me as a deadbeat than answer their questions about my work.

It does get to me though. Last week, on one particular day of which I can't properly remember the date of, I was fighting tears all day. I am not even sure why. I got up in the morning and simply felt hopeless. I struggled to not break down in front of Lana, struggled to keep it together on the way to work, and struggled to keep my composure during the eight hours of the day. I was reminded of an incident from my childhood that I just couldn't shake.

It was either fourth or fifth grade and a game of football was being played during recess. I was not an athlete, but a skinny, awkward, and unconfident player on any sports field. In fact, it was probably difficult to judge whether I was an on-field spectator or team contributer. One day I start getting some passes thrown my way...and I caught them! I was riding high off of an as-of-yet unknown wave of confidence and schoolyard glory. The player guarding me became embarrassed. After one fateful reception, instead of two-hand touching me, he rushes at me, sidesteps me, and somehow elbows me full-force in the side of the neck. I fall to the ground in a daze, get the wind knocked out of me, and recover to a state of excruciating pain in the muscles of my neck. I realize I have been crying unbeknownst to myself, then look up to see the perpetrator, crying himself. I always wondered why he was crying. I was in no state to fight back even if I had wanted to, which I didn't particularly wish for.

I spent the rest of the school day staring at the minutest details of my desk, focusing on trivial aspects of my surroundings to drown out the throbbing pain in my neck and head. When I lost focus, the blinding pain would return until I could trick myself into finding that tiny spot of infinite oblivion that was available on my desk. I didn't cry, though the makeshift dam in my mind was strained beyond any preconceived worst-case scenarios. Walking home increased the blood-flow to the injured area, and I could feel each and every systolic pulse as if there were a bass drum in my neck. I said hello to mom and walked straight upstairs to my bedroom where my dog, Ceaser was lying on a bean-bag chair. I shut the door and the levee broke. Hugging my dog, I sobbed until there was nothing left but the mucusy choking sounds one makes when they have exhausted the capacity to cry.

That is the way I felt at work on that particular day, like I would hold the tide of emotions in all day until I could just get home, hug one of my cats, for Lana would have been gone, and just cry until it was physically impossible to continue. But I didn't. I'm sure during the day my eyes grew red and glistened from an imminent outburst, but by the time I got home, I didn't feel so bad anymore. I suppose I'm not a kid anymore, maybe I'm no longer capable of such a range of emotions. Maybe adults just aren't supposed to wear their hearts on their sleeves, certainly men aren't encouraged to make their emotions so salient and observable. Yet, maybe kids are onto something. When do kids show their truest emotions? All the time! I know when my nephew is happy to see me, when he is thrilled to get a present, when he isn't happy about something, when he doesn't want to go to bed, when he is scared, and when he is sad. When do adults show the most emotion? When somebody is born or somebody dies.

So, I cried on the way home today. I doubt Lana even knew, it was dark and we weren't talking anyway. I wasn't crying because the Patriots lost, but because in their failure, my own felt significantly amplified. I certainly know that my lot in life is in no way attached to the success of a football team, but for one magical season, I seemed to staple my hope to the continued pursuit of perfection unparralled by any team of my generation. I still maintain hope for the future, as I've already coped with and begun to dissociate from a football game barely two hours over.

I believe a mainstream shoe company or sports drink company or something of the like would have us believe that "impossible is nothing". Well, impossible is something, indeed. But it is the challenge of besting "impossible" that makes life worth living; it is the ever-present foe, the unseen, worthy adversary that must be battled everyday. Loss is inevitable, but it is the fortitude needed to rise again to meet "impossible" that separates the eternal fighters from the footnotes.

Why do we fall?

So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up.

Reading List

I've been reading the Canterbury Tales over the last couple of days and have been thoroughly enjoying it. A few, selected tales were required reading in my twelveth grade British Literature class, but I remembered little of it. I got a used copy for a dollar at some point in my life, and discovered the book sitting in a stack of books that I've bought used and have yet to read. (This stack is some 40-50 books high). All I could remember of the Canterbury Tales was that our English teacher spoke some of the prologue in Middle English, one of the eight or nine languages he was fluent in (English, Middle English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Gaelic, Russian, I think). The other thing I remember about that class is that we watched Playboy's production of MacBeth (circa 1970?) during three class periods. I have no idea how that was legal. Lady MacBeth was portrayed by a former playmate, and a number of other busty semi-nude women were in the film. My professor giggled like a schoolgirl whenever there were topless women, which to me was more entertaining than the movie itself.

So, I've been enjoying the Canterbury Tales. It is an easy, fast read, yet there is a wide variety of vocabulary words. In the story, a number of people from a variety of professions pilgrimage to Canterbury. A contest is undertaken whereby each person tells four stories and the best story wins a prize. Chaucer does a good job of portraying each person and giving them a unique personality and writing from the perspective of many different people. There are stories of morality, references to the Bible, many dirty stories, stories told to defame another profession, stories told as jokes, and stories told with gravity. The bulk of the stories are only about ten pages, so it breaks the book up into smaller passages, too.

Reading this book made me think about other books I have enjoyed. I created a makeshift top ten reading list, plus a number of others that I have enjoyed.

1. Don Quixote--I've already decided that I'm going to re-read this one after I finish the Canterbury Tales. I was a little bored of the digressions that Cervantes had in the first book, and the digressions from the digressions, but the second book was well worth reading through it. William Faulkner used to read this book once a year. I may do that, too. For Christmas, Lana got me a lithograph of a Salvador Dali painting of Don Quixote on his trusty steed Rocinante. Reading this book, I wanted to become a knight-errant myself, defending my Dulcinea to the death with Sancho Panza by my side.

2. Moby Dick--I started reading this book twice, the third time was the charm. I got a large print, unabridged version of the book, so I wasn't reading size 4 font for 500 pages. This book was as much a study of whales and the whaling industry as it was a story about whalemen and the infamous White Whale. Even though Melville digresses from the story frequently to discuss various aspects of whaling, the digressions are still educating and entertaining, and the plot does not suffer for it. If you have ever wanted to read a book with chapters like "Chowder" and the chapter is three pages long and about the chowder that the character ate, then this book is for you.

I know Don Quixote and Moby Dick are numbers 1 and 2, not sure how to order 3-10.

3. A Clockwork Orange--What's it going to be then, eh? When I read this book I was into psychology and was dabbling in learning Russian. My liking of this book may have just been perfect timing. Either way, me and my droogs thought it was a malenky bit horrorshow.

4. Atlas Shrugged--Still not exactly sure who John Galt is. Is he a metaphor? A real person? A myth? A legend? A metalegend? A mythaphor? A real Galt myth? exactlyphor? A sure Johnmyth? who?

5. Mike's Corner--A small book of extremely short stories by Phish bassist Michael Gordon. Most self-destruct upon themselves similar to the comments about Atlas Shrugged. Some stories make you laugh, some make you cry from laughing too much, and some just leave you "not getting it".

6. A Tale of Two Cities--It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. I either really like or really dislike Charles Dicken's work, unlike say, Ernest Hemingway, who I like as an author, yet feel lukewarm about the majority of his works. Oliver Twist was my favorite book at one time, but no longer. A Tale of Two Cities has a great story, many connections between characters, a great plot, and a slight twist at the end. When Sidney Carton sacrifices himself at the end, I got all tingly and stuff.

7. Cry, the Beloved Country--Alan Paton's story about an umfundisi, a pastor, that must leave his small village to find his son in Johannesberg, who I think committed a murder. I read this during my African literature phase in which I also read Things Fall Apart and The Poisonwood Bible. Roots is good, too.

8. Dandelion Wine--If there is a book to read before the beginning of summer, this is it. This book remembers what it was like to be a child and have the endless possibilities of summer in front of you. It's about that time in your life everything seems possible and pedestrian activites can hold special significance. In the book, the boy gets a new pair of shoes, something adults take for granted. The shoe salesman asks what they feel like. Antelopes? Gazelles? The kid believes he can do anything in these new shoes. Did you ever feel that way? I did.

9. The Stand--Although not my favorite Stephen King book, it is well written and ties into the Dark Tower series. The miniseries sucks. I found a hardcover unedited version for ten dollars at Borders once. Short of stealing the book, it was a steal. Just watch out for the Crimson King.

10. The Grapes of Wrath--Gotta give a shout out to my boy John Steinbeck. I've read this book three or four times. Kind of depressing, but good.

Some honorable mentions:

Some of these books just couldn't make the top-ten list, even though they are great books and won awards. Others are simply interesting for the material presented or are entertaining, even if they aren't very deep.

To Kill a Mockingbird--Harper Lee
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time--Mark Haddon I'll get your book back, Seth
Rainbow Six--Tom Clancy Got this one for a dollar at a garage sale
Count of Monte Cristo--Alexandre Dumas Only read 2/3 of it, but it was good, need to finish
Poisonwood Bible--Barbara Kingsolver
A Room with a View--E.M. Forster Read this one in college English
Alaska--James Michener A history of Alaska through various eras and characters
East of Eden--John Steinbeck
A Blistered Kind of Love--Angela & Duffy Ballard A story about walking the Pacific Crest Trail
The Dark Tower Series--Stephen King Didn't love books 6 or 7, so it didn't make top-10
Oliver Twist--Charles Dickens
The Lord of the Rings Series--J.R.R. Tolkien
Les Miserables--Victor Hugo

Suggestions for reading? I got some more used books the other day as part of a Christmas gift certificate. I got Babbitt, All the King's Men, and Billy Budd, among others.

Cat/Man

Lana and I are going to be getting a new kitten, as our adoption papers went through today. The cat we are adopting is a grey striped short-hair cat, one that I have been wanting to get for some time. I'm nervous about how Baron and the new cat, Slugger will get along together, but they are both still young, Baron being about 14 months old, and both have a fair amount of energy. I'm wondering whether Baron will grow up faster and become more of a mentor for the new cat. Who else but Baron the Lion-Hearted to do such a thing?

Don't have much else to say on the topic, I'm excited to get the cat, but Lana and I will be heading up to Minnesota first. We won't be able to pick up the cat until we get back a week from today.

Slugger was going to be the name of my first-born son. Slugger Robert Seiler, but I thought of something even better (I know, what could be better than Slugger?). The name Sirius also received consideration, although I have to vote that one down because of the Harry Potter movies. I was thinking of the star when I thought of it, changed the spelling, and then remembered the Potter books. Bummer.

If I can get internet access up in northern Minnesota at my parent's lakehouse, I'm going to set up a live ice fishing blog that is going to rock the house, the icehouse that is.