Invaders

Human beings are interesting.

We’ve spent the better portion of our existence on this planet invading other people’s space and then coming up with all matter of justifications for it.

An example, take the Romans – they managed to expand their empire to unbelievable proportions by invading areas outside of their realm, attacking the indigenous people who lived there and either killing or enslaving anyone that refused to join them or tried to defend themselves. The end result, other than the expansion of the Roman Empire, was quite brutal; a fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next months or even years due to famine, pestilence, and the occasional retaliatory attack by the seriously pissed off people left behind.

Jump ahead a few centuries – and we will find the Christians. They decided, through their own mysterious and meaningless studies of the aboriginal people living throughout the far reaches of the European continent, that they were superior in all ways, and it was their responsibility to enlighten everyone – everyone – to their way of worship. The way they brought this about was to label anyone that didn’t subscribe to their point of view a heretic, who would then be systematically tortured in unspeakable ways until they either relented or died. This jihad (although they called it “The Inquisition”) resulted in a very similar situation as the Roman excursions — a fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next months or even years due to famine, pestilence, and the occasional retaliatory attack by the seriously pissed off people left behind.

Then some ambitious explorer discovered this huge new body of land on the other side of that ocean to the West. He, excited to share this new discovery, went back to Europe and told everyone how beautiful it was and how seemingly endless its resources. This set off a whole new slew of invasions and disputes… far more elaborate because the little European countries couldn’t agree who would be in charge of this new land and fought viciously amongst themselves in an effort to gain control. Meanwhile, in the new land, large groups of settlers and explorers shoved the natives out of their homelands, brought new germs with them that decimated entire populations, and attacked villages. The end result was a fairly significant body count…

Yeah.

In the end, the new world was conquered, bloodily, and the native people were relegated to small encampments in largely inhospitable areas such as North Dakota and the deserts of Nevada, where many of them still live to this day in veritable poverty.

Then some ambitious inventor came up with something called the internal combustion engine. It relied on this gooey black stuff that bubbled under the surface of the earth’s crust to burn as fuel. As this new invention caught on and became de rigueur, the leaders of the first and second-world countries remembered that a whole lot of this black stuff was available for the taking over there in those third-world countries. An invasion was organized and deployed.

The invaders brought drills and guns and war machines, because one thing history has taught us is that the people living in countries being invaded have this annoying habit of being very put out by the people coming to invade them. But there was this black stuff, see, and the industrial nations wanted it at any cost and intended to fetch it, like it or not, never mind that the incumbent citizens had deemed the land to be holy and something to be revered.

The invaders also brought the narrow-minded belief that anyone that didn’t agree with their way of life and idea of democracy was inferior, so while they drilled for oil in the sand, they staged their own version of the Inquisition – hiring the subdued native people who would be hired to work at unliveable wages; and raping, pillaging or killing the ones that raised a ruckus at having an army of people drilling in their consecrated land.

They left behind a ravaged hole of sand and ruined ancient mosques and temples — as well as a fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next months or even years due to famine, pestilence…

The people left behind were seriously pissed off, and also suffered a lack of important funding for education or rebuilding, resulting in an entire generation of angry, ignorant, desperate people with a really big chip on their shoulder.

Unbeknownst to all, under the guise of political cooperation, the leaders of both the invading countries and the invaded countries all struck deals for huge sums of money so that the black stuff in the ground would still flow freely across international boundaries.

Then somebody got greedy. The deals were broken on one side or the other, and the leaders of the invaded countries decided they didn’t want the invaders to continue plundering what was left of their country and told them to get out. The invaders refused. So the leaders then appealed to the generation of seriously pissed off and undereducated people that were trying to eke out some kind of pathetic existence in the middle of drilled out sand and got them all riled up. Told them how evil and treacherous these invaders were, and that their home country was full of people who were even more evil and greedy and godless. The leaders got them so agitated that they organized a little group of very angry people and sent them over to invade.

The end result was a widely publicised, fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next years due to famine (the economy tanked), pestilence (the very dust in the air was toxic), and the ongoing retaliatory attack by the seriously pissed off people left behind…

Product review: Dryer Balls!

I made a terrible mistake this week. I went and bought dryer sheets from my local dollar discount store. Only 99¢, I figured dryer sheets were an innocuous enough item that it was no big deal. I washed my bedding and tossed them in the dryer with the cheap dryer sheets. BIG mistake.

The first night I felt itchy and thought it was a dry skin thing. By the morning, my skin was covered in a pink rash and felt like I'd been sleeping in mosquitoes. I thought I'd developed bedbugs overnight.

After the second night, my skin was on fire and I was convinced that my next-door neighbours had infested my bedroom with some alien bugform that came through the walls and invaded my bed to torture me. Taking a shower was excruciating.

Finally, after tearing apart my bed and inspecting every inch of the mattress and platform, I figured I either had invisible microscopic multi-legged demons in my bed, or I'd developed an allergy to my bed linens. Then I remembered the dollar-store dryer sheets. I took a fresh one out of the box and rubbed it on my arm. Instant agony.

I went to my local natural products grocer and saw these blue "dryer balls" on the laundry aisle. They were priced at $9.99, and after reading the package and thinking that I'd give ten times that much to never itch like that again, I purchased a pair. They claimed to fluff and soften laundry without chemicals.

They're made of some kind of rubberised plastic and look like giant, blue pollen spores. I took them home and washed my sheets and pillowcases twice, with one extra rinse cycle to get all of the offending chemicals out. Then I tossed everything into the dryer and threw in the Dryer Balls.

The first thing I noticed was the muffled banging noise as the dryer ran through the cycle. Mildly annoying, but not too bad. I had set the timer for 40 minutes instead of the usual 60, because the package claimed that my laundry would dry in less time (therefore saving even more money on energy costs).

At the end of the cycle I discovered that yes, the load of fitted sheet, flat sheet, and four pillowcases was totally dry. They also looked poofier than usual, as if the Dryer Balls had beaten air into the cotton fibres. They were slightly less wrinkled than usual, and I noticed that there was no static, which was kind of a big deal since I live in an extremely dry climate and I usually have very serious static in the laundry if I don't use liquid fabric softener or dryer sheets.

I put the sheets back on the bed, and they were at least as soft as fabric softener would have made them, but without the weird oily film that it can leave. Encouraged, I tried the Dryer Balls with a load of bath towels.

The result was quite dramatic. They came out so fluffy that the stack of folded towels was almost too fat to fit on the linen closet shelf! I also noticed a measurable increase in absorbency and a decrease in lint fuzz - my lint screen in the dryer had caught far more lint than usual, but the towels were left fluffy-soft and almost totally lint-free.

I am very pleased with the performance of the Dryer-Max Dryer Balls and would highly recommend this product, especially to anyone who has skin sensitivity to chemical fabric softening agents.

Life flashes in front of your eyes one frame at a time

In the summer when I was five or six years old, I remember sitting in the grass in the back yard, seething about some annoyance. I was peeved. Really peeved. About something. 

My Dad got home from work and came outside still in his work clothes and sat in the grass next to me. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a few minutes, and then, looking into the trees, leaned over and nudged me with this shoulder.

“What,” I said. Short, clipped, the anger of a five year old.

“Wanna see a trick?”

I didn’t look at him. “What?” Still clipped. 

He looked around in the grass for a moment, and then pulled a fat blade from the green, prickly carpet. He fiddled with it and placed it between his thumbs and then put it up to his face and blew. It made a screech like a train whistle and I jumped.

“Wow! How’d you do that?” 

Anger forgotten. To this day I don’t remember what I’d been mad about.

Yeah, Dad… how did you do that?

Deja Root Beer

This afternoon I went to the vending machine at work and discovered they'd stocked it with real brown glass bottles of IBC root beer for one dollar. Cool.

At the first swig I was catapulted back 35 years to my favourite family tradition: Every spring, usually in late April or early May, my whole family would get together on a Sunday evening and retreat to the cool shadowed basement to cook up a batch of homemade root beer.

Amidst the washer and dryer and the gigantic concrete wash sink that was bolted to the cement wall, Dad would bring out the cases of empty glass bottles, our huge 10-gallon pickling crock, the hoses and bags of shiny new bottle caps and lay them out on the cement basement floor. Mom would fill the sink with scalding hot water and all the bottles went in the bath to clean out any bacteria (and possibly spiders) and my brothers and I would put them on the drying rack that dad made out of a plank with a forest of wooden dowels growing out of it.

Meanwhile, dad made the root beer. He filled the crock with water, sugar, real root beer extract and active yeast and mixed it all up with a huge wooden spoon. It took about a half hour, stirring slowly, for all the sugar to dissolve. By then the bottles would be dry.

Dad used a red rubber piece of tubing to siphon the root beer into the bottles, making sure to leave a space for "growing room" at the top. He then handed the filled bottle to me so I could carefully place one of the bottle caps on top, and I'd hand it to my oldest brother so he could use the long-handled bottle cap crimper to seal it tight. Then my middle brother would take the filled, sealed bottle, wipe it off with a towel and place it back in the wooden crate. After an hour, we had about 100 newly-minted bottles of homemade root beer, give or take a few, lined up in the crates like little brown soldiers.

While Mom cleaned out the pickle crock in the big sink, Dad and us three kids would nestle the cases of root beer in the dark, cool space beneath the stairs in the basement and cover them up with a furniture blanket to catch any glass if one of the bottles should burst. We always lost a few, and sometimes we would hear one blow if we were in the kitchen when it exploded. There they sat for 30 days in the dark so the yeast could ferment and make the fizz. (No mean feat in Colorado, where the altitude could cause cakes to bake flat like goopy chocolate tortillas.)

The day after school let out for the summer in early June, Dad would wake early and take out six bottles and sneak them into the back of the refrigerator. We would have a great feast that lasted all day, with roasted chicken, potato salad and fresh corn on the cob from the local farmer who sold it 'thirteen-ears-for-five-bucks' from a rickety stand right on the edge of his cornfield. We would make hand-cranked ice cream in the afternoon, and have watermelon-seed spitting contests in the back yard. Dad would take the train out of its shed where it slept through the long winter and spend the day tinkering and adjusting the engine and sending us kids out to clear any grass clumps from the train tracks. He would never let it run on that first day -- he just took it out so he could check it over and get us kids excited about it all over again. The first 'train day' always came later.

When the sun was going down and the fireflies were just starting to spark little wavering spotlights in the trees, Dad would bring out the ancient, thick art-glass mugs filled with scoops of ice cream, and with much fanfare and anticipation, he would open that first bottle of root beer. It was always a tense moment... would it be fizzy and foamy or would it be flat?

But always, with a satisfying *pop*, the bottle cap would go flying, we all cheered, and Dad would pour the root beer over the ice cream in each mug, insert a long-handled sundae spoon and a long straw, and the five of us would enjoy the rewards of our labours in the summer grass. We always agreed it was the best batch of root beer ever.

And thus, Summer officially began.

12 of 12 - July 2009

Yeah, I’m late. Get over it.

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12 of 12 – June 2009

Ok, I’ve never done this before, but many of my friends have. The “12 of 12” project is a fun essay (see link) whereas on the 12th day of the month, you take 12 candid snapshots of whatever is in your life that day. Here’s mine for June of 2009. (hover cursor over each photo for description)

Spring Cleaning

This is the time of year I go through my garage and closets and sort through the accumulation of the past year. I'm brutal. Things I haven't used or no longer fit are donated to charity. Sometimes I have a garage sale. I'm left with a more streamlined, tidy existence (at least for a while), and maybe a little extra cash.

Cleaning out my head is harder. I have quite an accumulation in there this year. Clearing space for new ideas and finding new ways to approach old issues is always a fight, especially when old mental and emotional baggage takes up so much room and isn't as easy to unload as a pile of clothing or a used mobile phone. We tend to cling to ideas and emotions, not because they're good for us or give us pleasure, but because they're familiar. Familiarity disguises itself as safety. And we’re all afraid of the unknown, whether we admit it or not.

One morning several weeks ago, however, I woke to a dark, pre-dawn bedroom and in a moment of absolute clarity, just as if someone had washed a window into my head and I got a good look in there for the first time in years, I realised that the familiar, so-called "safe" ideas and emotions that I'd been holding onto so desperately weren't all that safe. They weren’t even that familiar any more – I’d been doing the same things over and over out of nothing more than habit. A bad habit to boot.

So this was the weekend for me to break out the yard-sized hefty bags, crank up something loud on iTunes and start clearing out the clutter. As I uncovered old photographs I’d forgotten, jackets that I once loved but no longer wore, shoes with cracked heels that I’d always intended to have repaired, I also found a scrap of optimism that I was sure I’d lost forever. I shook the wrinkles out of a set of sheets for the charity pile and at the same time I shook the mental wrinkles out of my sense of well-being and self worth.

I’m making room for something really good. And it’s about time.

Moments

Late at night, when I can't sleep for whatever reason... my mind starts wandering. I start remembering moments of my life, like a slideshow. That's what life is, really. Moments remembered, moments forgotten.. all strung together. The sum of one's existence.
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I'm five and in a tent with my brother in the back yard on a summer night, overcome by an uncontrollable case of the giggles because my brother farted in his sleeping bag and it sounded strange. When I hear the odd noise, I ask "What was that?" and he replies, quite seriously, "My butt."
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I'm thirteen and my Dad got me a job cleaning tables and serving desserts at the American Legion hall. One evening there's a big party for someone's 50th wedding anniversary, and the Legion hired a big band to play. I was in the kitchen filling water pitchers for the dinner, and one of the musicians was in there warming up, playing an old, romantic 1940's tune. I started singing along softly, and he stopped and came over to me. He said the song was "their" song, meaning the couple celebrating their anniversary, and he thought it would be great if I would be willing to go up and sing it for them, since the band had no singer. I was flattered and agreed.

After dinner was served, the tables were cleared for dancing. I had nothing to wear, so I went up on stage in my kitchen black pants and turtleneck. My father and mother looked strangely at me as I took the stage. The band began to play.

I will never forget the expression on my Dad's face as I started to sing. By the end of the song, both of my parents were dancing and weeping.

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I'm twenty-one and living on the island of Maui. It's early one morning and I'm on the phone with my Mom, looking out the window at the ocean, which is smooth as glass. Suddenly the water explodes and a gigantic, full-grown humpback whale leaps from the depths into the air. I'm struck speechless. It's only about 300 yards from the shore. I spend the next 45 minutes watching three whales play in the morning sunshine, describing the scene to my Mom over coffee.

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I'm twenty-four and I'm sitting in my doctor's office. She's telling me that the tests have found endometrial cancer in my uterus and she's explaining treatment options. My ears are ringing and my eyes won't focus.

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It's three-fourteen in the morning, November 21, 2008. I can't sleep.