: as the channel changes :

There’s something to be said for daily routines; they’re familiar territory in a chaotic landscape. Oh, don’t pretend you don’t have one, we all do. We’re creatures of habit, you and I and the other humans. We start off with a morning routine and wind down with a bedtime ritual.

In between we slip comfortably into the same everyday patterns: we take our coffee the same way, use the same brand of toothpaste, go to the same barber, watch the same shows. Our routines speed us through the day on automatic pilot.

Then. Along comes fall with its all-new season of all-new shows at all-new times, and — kablooie. There goes your carefully crafted, oh-so-familiar routine, right out the window. Great, now how will I know what time it is? Or what day it is? Nothing is where it’s supposed to be. My cues are gone and everything’s out of whack.

The spiffy, new fall schedule, with all its changes and additions and cancellations, is disorienting. And, may I add, uninspired? It’s also a nasty reminder that I watch way too much television.

As a result of this upheaval, I’m perpetually tardy for social functions. The dog doesn’t get walked. And the days run together, each one indistinguishable from the next. I show up for church on Tuesday, the post office on Sunday, and miss book club altogether. I’m early for luncheons and late to weddings, a no-show at parties.

Autumn has become, for me, a season of cold shoulders and sincere apologies.

However, with the passage of time, a dependable pattern will slowly emerge and a new routine will fall into place. All will again be right be the world. Just in time for the holiday specials and prime time football games to throw a heavy, clanking wrench into the works. Ha-ppy New Year!

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: nothing is impossible :

Really, nothing. And I can prove it:

See? Cartoons can teach us a lot, if we pay attention. There’s many a life lesson to be learned at the knee of Popeye and Daffy Duck and Yogi Bear and Road Runner; perseverance being chief among them. Keep that in mind the next time you fall short or, you know, off a cliff. Dreams are meant to be chased, not easy to catch.

Get started, go, run. beep beep

: you can hear it ticking :

That thing on your nightstand? That’s not an alarm clock, it’s a miniature terrorist, a tightly wound package of pandemonium and chaos.We all have one, although none of us like them. In fact, alarm clocks may well be the most disliked of the small home appliances.

Right now, at this very second, one is ringing somewhere in the world, waking some poor schmo who wants nothing more from life than another hour of sleep. His alarm clock is there, standing sentinel, to make sure that never happens.

The clock may look innocent, but don’t be fooled. It’s busy counting the minutes until that one sweet moment in the cold, gray light of dawn when it erupts into a blaring, clamoring box of noise. And sends you straight into arrhythmia. There’s real hostility in that cold, mechanical ringer.

The only violent fantasies I’ve ever entertained, involved my alarm clock and a meat tenderizer. Such a strident, persistent racket is unwelcome any time, but first thing in the morning? Puts a harsh on my mellow, man.

By their very nature, alarms are unwanted heralds. They’re the harbingers of bad news: they shriek, ‘wake up’ or ‘the house is on fire’ or ‘someone’s stealing your car.’ Not news you’re eager to hear, is it? Even so, this being a weekend, I’ve granted a reprieve to my battered and dented alarm clock. The poor thing is only doing its job, after all. Albeit a little too zealously, if you ask me.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: duck and cover :

Heads up, a six-ton satellite the size of a double-wide is headed our way. But stay calm, NASA has done some calculations and concluded that the odds of a human getting hit by debris are 1 in 3,200 — not astronomical, but fairly unlikely. The odds of it being you, personally, are much, much lower, since there are currently 7 billion humans running around the place. Still.

Long shots do happen, ask a bookie or any Las Vegas oddsmaker. Not everyday, maybe, but with unsettling frequency. Watch the news.

In the case of this satellite, the UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite), NASA intentionally altered its orbit to bring it down earlier than planned, its job was redundant. But now that this apparatus is on the way, they’re not exactly sure where it will crash or when. Maybe Thursday, maybe Friday, could be Saturday. And anywhere from 57º north latitude to 57º south latitude. In this part of the world that ranges from Newfoundland to South America, give or take a few thousand miles. But that could all change.

Keep in mind, there are thousands of pieces of space junk floating right above us, each one a Sword of Damocles. The odds are someone, somewhere is going to be tapped sometime. We just won’t know when or where. Neither will NASA and they’re the ones who send most of this crap up there in the first place. One NASA dude, bearing the title of Chief Scientist for Orbital Debris, issued a reassuring “no one’s ever been hurt.” And I thought ‘yet,’ luck doesn’t hold forever.

The way I see it we have two choices: panic and head for Antarctica or grab a beer and watch the light show. As UARS breaks apart, the pieces should create some lively fireballs we’ll be able to see even in daylight. Ooooooh, aaaaaaaah, OWWW!

Note to self: pick up a sturdy umbrella.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: get me superman, i’m thirsty :

Have you bought anything lately? I have. And I’m still trying to get it out of the damn package.

Unbelievable as it sounds, opening a package used to be a breeze. Little kids did it, unsupervised, there wasn’t any skill involved and the only danger was a papercut. You’d yank open a flap or tear off a cellophane wrapper and remove your newly purchased item — bada bing, bada boom. That’s all there was to it. The whole thing, beginning to end, took six, seven seconds out of your day.

Now you need twenty minutes and a toolbox to break into a package: scissors, x-acto knife, welding torch, and the jaws of life. The other day I bought a flash drive (or jump drive or thumb drive) online, an itty bitty thing. When the package arrived, this little gizmo was entombed between oversized sheets of welded, reinforced, rigid, impenetrable plastic. I tried to get it out, I did. I twisted and pulled and pried, I banged it on the countertop. I even channeled Zena the Warrior Princess. Nothing. In the end, I had to pull a knife on it, a really sharp knife. It would’ve been less labor intensive to free Timmy from the old well.

It’s not just flash drives, either. Try to open a CD / DVD. There’s the outer wrap and an airtight seal and a puny pull-tab that breaks at the halfway mark and, yes, more adhesive. They make it so freaking complicated. Dismantling a bomb, on the other hand, takes no time — snip this wire, snip that wire, done (or boom, whatever). Even something as mundane as a cold drink puts you to the test. Try to open a bottle of Coke sometime, one with a twist-off top. It’s capped tighter than the Gulf oil spill. You’ll need Superman to open one for you. Why?

Eggs, with their brittle shells, sit in thin styrofoam cups under a flip-top. Delicate and fragile as they are you’d think they’d merit some type of protective packaging, but no. A curling iron with a steel barrel, that’s what needs sturdy, bullet-proof packaging. Seems bass ackwards to me, but what do I know? I can’t exhume my new digital camera from its vault.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: half-baked III :

Bikes have training wheels. Books have bookends. What do we have to keep us upright and in balance? Two spindly legs, that’s what. What we need are clothes with airbags. The savings in healthcare costs alone would be huge; the savings in pain and suffering would be huger. Broken bones and dislocations and physical therapy would become a thing of the past. As soon as the airbag sensors detected a gravitational pull or horizontal orientation, psssshhhhhhhh, they’d inflate and cushion our impact. Falling would be fun again. Someone should get on this.

That’s my thought, anyway. Well, not so much a thought as a brain cramp.  heh heh  All rightie, then, seems like a good time to find out what’s new elsewhere:

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach — this one’s a Shop-Vac of a book, it sucks you right in to an absorbing, old-fashioned tale ostensibly about baseball. But it’s not, not really. In essence the book is about failure and resilience and shortcomings and striving; aka the human condition.The novel’s setting is a small college in the upper midwest and it’s populated by characters as real and complicated as ourselves. You’ll miss them when the book ends. Check out Harbach’s magazine, n+1, too.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — this one just landed in my mailbox, so I’m short on details. But if you’re a gamer, a fan of 80s pop culture, a geek, or any combination thereof, this is your lucky day. The story takes place in 2045 and most everyone prefers a virtual world (OASIS) to the one they’re living in. There’s an intricate, high-stakes contest for gamers, which is the premise of the novel, there are also 80s music and video game references galore, plus the dude who wrote it was the screenwriter for the film, Fanboys.

Carolina Liar — a musician from South Carolina hooked up with a music producer from Sweden (think Snow Patrol) and, abra cadabra, the album Coming To Terms. The band’s new one, Wild Blessed Freedom, comes out September 27th and their tour begins October 10th in Columbus, OH with Gavin DeGraw and David Cook.

From the Toy Store — things have come a long way since Chatty Cathy and Matchbox cars. Now, they’re called Art Toys or Designer Vinyl and they’re created by artists like Frank Kozik, Brian Taylor, Gary Baseman, Brandt Peters — geniuses, if you ask me. Words cannot do justice to these awesome designs, you need to see them for yourself:

http://www.frozenempiretoys.com/home.html

http://www.kidrobot.com

Well, that does it for this, the third edition of half-baked. You’ve been a swell guest, you’re welcome to visit any time; the door is always open.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: there’s always the typing pool :

Eighty-four degrees, an impossibly blue sky, sun-dappled trees; ideal conditions for closing the pool. This morning the sign was posted declaring it officially off-limits, verboten.

There, at the padlocked gate, I felt like crying. Like uncorking a downpour of big, fat, chlorinated tears. Tomorrow they’ll drain the water and install the pool cover, the burial shroud. I won’t watch, I’ll be home with the shades drawn, an abiding sadness in my heart.

You see, I’m a swimmer and a pool is where I’m happiest. From the time I was a toddler, I’ve spent my summers in the water. It’s my element, my métier. A pool is where I belong. Much more so than on dry land, where I get tripped up by gravity and equilibrium. In water, I discover gracefulness and ease, traits that remain elusive on cold, hard ground. And now that magical place is shuttered to me.

I’m left feeling as if my parole was revoked. No more happy, carefree times. It’s back to the big house and orange jumpsuits and stoolies. Orange is not a good color for me and I won’t like stoolies, either. Or prison food. But I saw The Shawshank Redemption, I know how to dig a tunnel, too.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: i’ve never had a microwave :

I’ve never had a Sub-Zero refrigerator, either, or a Viking range, that’s just overkill when all they’ll do is store and heat frozen dinners. A block of ice and a heating pad could do as much. Regrettably, my enthusiasm for cooking began and ended with my Easy-Bake Oven. When the light bulb burned out, the oven’s only heat source, so did my interest in food preparation. Baking and cleaning up were highlights when I was six. Now? Not so much.

For a few weeks in high school I was a waitress at a diner. The owner was a miserly, ill-tempered woman who lived above the restaurant. One of her cost-saving measures was to return uneaten dinner rolls to the warmer, to be served again and again. The dinner rush ended by 6:30, the place being a favorite of the elderly, and she’d disappear to her quarters until closing. One such evening, an impromptu jell-o toss broke out in the kitchen. The goal was to get the days old jell-o squares to stick to the wall. Throw too hard and it splattered, too soft and it bounced. Long story short, I got busted mid-toss, then fired.

That was my introduction to bad kitchen experiences. Years later, the lid got stuck on a pressure cooker. I gave the lid a good twist and heard the hhsssssss, but kept going until the ka-boom. After a quick trip to the emergency room and three weeks of healing I was good as new. Bad kitchen experience II. And there was the time I got a Coke from my sister’s refrigerator and opened it with a pair of scissors, the bottle opener being no where in sight. After a quick trip to the emergency room and four stitches, I was good as new. Bad kitchen experience III.

You get the point, right? Why invest in fancy, schmancy appliances when nothing good would come of it? Buying a microwave would make as much sense as buying an unexploded bomb. Believe it or not, there are some chances I’m not willing to take. I can get a pizza delivered in minutes without endangering my health. I can open a box of cereal in seconds, no stitches or burn creme necessary. I mean, I like food and everything, but let’s not go crazy here. I don’t need to be the one who prepares it or the one suffers the consequences. And neither is the dog — he learned that the hard way.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: feets don’t fail me now :

For a long time I’ve been scared of Doc Martens. They’re intimidating shoes with their thick soles and ominous yellow stitching. They had a bad attitude, you know? A reputation. I’d find myself staring at anyone brave enough to wear them and try to guess what they did for a living. Tattoo artist was a common hunch, there was a tormented poet, an avant-garde caterer, a bounty hunter, a dog breeder, and an aromatherapist. Not one near-sighted, middle-aged woman in the bunch.

Of course, I wasn’t always middle-aged; I was young once. For a minute. Even then I was more of a tennis shoes and loafers type. On rare occasions, I wore heels. Oh, and those little black flats, I loved those. These days fashion isn’t the priority when I go shopping, comfort is. The cute shoes, the elegant heels, they don’t make it out of the closet like they used to. They’re relegated to the back where they’re busy gathering dust and hoping for a return to the front. I haven’t told them, but that’s not likely to happen. Their best days are behind them.

Sadly, my feet’s best days seem to be history, too. Old favorites, shoes I’ve loved and worn happily, have turned on me. They squash my toes together, they cramp my feet and crush my instep, they leave bruises on my toes. Why are they doing this? Do feet bear grudges?

Finally, at the urging of a friend, I reluctantly tried a pair of Docs, the least intimidating pair in the store. They look like chukka boots, only leather. I tried the brown ones, brown seemed friendlier. And, what do you know, they were comfortable. They weren’t heavy or clunky, they were just shoes and they fit. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather — I expected them to be big and awkward and way too heavy to lift. They were none of those things. I looked at the price and, again, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Wow, they’re expensive, but I’m told they’ll last forever.

Now that I have a decent pair of shoes I can wear without limping, I wonder what my feet are up to. I mean, come on, they can’t go all Sasquatch on me now, I still need them. We have places to go and things to do. We still have some asses to kick and names to take. Feets don’t fail me now.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: where am i :

Lost, that’s where I am. Both literally and figuratively a great deal of the time, but let’s deal with the literally for now.

Here’s the problem: I didn’t come equipped with a sense of direction, not even in a general sense, nor have I acquired one in the course of my travels. Big deal, right? In the grand scheme of things, a lousy sense of direction isn’t much of a hardship, especially when one considers maps and gps and the position of the sun. Well, guess what, I can’t read a map. I can’t program a gps system. And it’s usually dark or cloudy or noontime as I tour parts unknown.

On the plus side, I can tell up from down and, quite often, right from left. When the technical terms start flying, like ‘head north for a quarter of a mile, then turn east,’ well, that’s just  gibberish. Some try to guide me with landmarks, ‘turn left at the giant taco,’ which works like a charm as long as the taco is in the middle of the road waving sparklers. Otherwise I sail right on past, oblivious and in a hurry to get somewhere else I don’t recognize.

Other drivers, the ones I’m sharing the road with, honk and tailgate and gesture obscenely. My very obvious predicament doesn’t engender sympathy among my brethren. Their vigorous encouragement to get the $@#! out-of-the-way only adds to the stress. Gas stations aren’t the help they used to be, either. They’re too busy selling lottery tickets and Big Gulps to give you much attention, so the best bet is to ask a customer. Ideally, one who’s driving a truck. Ideallier, one who’s a cop. Idealliest, one who’s a cab driver.

What I need is a navigator. A confident, knowledgeable individual who can get me where I’m going and back again without unscheduled side trips. Someone who knows the ropes. Someone who knows his / her way around this very confusing planet. Or maybe I should buy a bus pass. In a way, bus drivers are navigators, they know their way around. Remember Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners? He was a bus driver. Loud and full of bluster, I know, but he probably had a very keen sense of direction.

Me? I’d settle for a vague directional orientation. I don’t need latitude and longitude and equators and degrees, just a bit of insight into which direction I’m heading. I’ve never known, not literally. In the figurative sense, I’m probably better off in the dark.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.

: half-baked II :

Welcome to another edition of half-baked, the half-assed post. This has been a truly crappy week, what with one thing and another, and I just don’t have the proper attitude to do a proper post. I’m cranky, and maybe you’re cranky, too, so let’s just move on to happier things. Ready?

Amy Sedaris — is the sister of author / humorist David Sedaris. She’s also an author, most notably of a book entitled  I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. What a gas. My copy of that book is a bedraggled, well-thumbed, tattered, dog-eared and beloved keepsake. With chapters like 15-Minute Meals in 20 Minutes and one called Pantyhose, Crafts, and Good Ideas, there’s something for everyone. If for no other reason, buy it for the recipes, they’re wonderful. There’s hospitality advice for all occasions: blind dates, a visit from a rich relative, entertaining children and / or the elderly. Although, if you’re easily offended, better stick to Martha Stewart. It’s, how should I say this, earthy, yes.

Pink Martini — several years ago a colleague recommended these guys to me. This is a band of twelve musicians from Portland and their music is hard to pin down. According to their bio, they’re influenced by the elaborate musicals of the 30s and 40s, but it doesn’t end there. At times, they sound like a French music hall or a festival in Rio. They’ve played with a number of symphonies around the world, as well. In other words, Pink Martini is very unique. If you’re in the mood for something fun, give them a listen on iTunes. My favorites are Tea for Two with Jimmy Scott and Hey Eugene.

What’s Ahead — I have a couple of ideas for new posts in the days ahead, one or two might be departures from the traditional format. Or they may not. Personally, I like variety, so I’d like to try a couple different things. If they don’t work out as planned, well, at least I will have tried. I’d love to find some fresh, unique ways to entertain and amuse you all. You deserve it.

Oh, my, look at the time. I didn’t mean to keep you this long, so you all skedaddle off to a great weekend. Adios, boys and girls.

Copyright © Publikworks 2011.