Monthly Archives: August 2017

Sacktime Cinema

Scifi Dream

You can probably skip this one.

I know dreams are really only interesting to the dreamer, and I want to keep what I can of this one around because it was so involved. It happened in several segments as I awoke, fell asleep, awoke, went to the bathroom, awoken by the cat to let the it out, but the cat wouldn’t go, and so on. I’m not exactly sure of the order and it’s been hours since I got up, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

It was an end-times space-based dream. I was an astronaut and we were following a scout ship that was trailing an artifact, or silent alien ship as it passed through our solar system. Our ship was better supplied and equipped, but the scout ship was a small manned space station, maybe, and had started out first. One of the astronauts on the space station had drifted away from it somehow and everyone was mourning his loss. I knew he had to be on a similar path and nearby, so I went out on the surface of the ship in a pretty nifty space suit and called for a small course correction that wouldn’t cost us too much fuel. As we approached I could see the drifting space suit and anchored my feet on the ship and reached out and was barely able to grab him. My first instinct was to swing him towards the Earth’s Moon as we were nearby and have someone on the moonbase save him, but decided to just send him inside the ship.

I hung out on the outside of the ship for a long time and as we got near Jupiter we caught up and docked with the scout ship. There were clouds all around like maybe we were inside the upper part of Jupiter’s atmosphere. I could see a cluster of several glowing lights of different colors just inside a cloud and identified it as the alien ship. Then turning and looking around I could see several other ‘ships’ at different points in the clouds. There was a lot of discussion over the radio how we could reach them and what we should do.

Then we were back in geosynchronous orbit over Salt Lake City I was still outside the ship and marveling at how the city had changed in the decades that we were gone. The Great Salt Lake had been mostly drained for some sort of economic reason and a Bingham Copper Mine-like pit had been dug around the capitol area, lowering  it and the surrounding buildings and homes, intact thousands of feet. All that was left of the lake had drained into a little ring almost circling the capitol which was at the lowest point. The city and county building, however, was still at the original elevation and accessible by a small peninsula jutting out into the pit.

Then I was down in the arcology dug into the walls of the pit. A series of tunnels and rooms that the survivors were using as living and science quarters. We were covertly gathering esoteric equipment and planning on leaving the Earth behind to it’s doom. We could only save a small number of people and were preparing some sort of exodus. I was winding tubes and cords around the equipment preparing it to ship out. We decided to get to a base on the moon first and decide where to go from there.

We were in an underground moon base. I guess that thinking of it as an exodus had sunk in, because everyone that was leaving was Jewish except me. I’m not talking Hasidic stereotypes or anything, I just knew everyone was Jewish except me. A scientist came running in and started excitedly telling everyone that because of quantum entanglement we could jump in a split second from our cave to an entangled one on Mars and be safe from the apocalypse. There was a big argument about we didn’t know anything about the Martian environment inside the cave, whether there was air or water and whether it was occupied by anyone, human or otherwise. The Rabbi leader made the decision that we would set up here and send a scouting party ahead to evaluate the Martian caves. This wasn’t a popular idea among most of the people who were afraid we would be too late to escape.

Then we were in the Martian caves. Someone had taken upon themselves to trigger the jump and fighting broke out among most of the people. The few that weren’t fighting started heading out and exploring the caves, which seemed to be perfectly capable of supporting life. There was vegetation in places along the walls and somehow the caves were lit with a ruddy light that emanated from nowhere in particular. I moved into one side tunnel and came out in a small room where a few children had found tomato plants growing tomatoes the size of basketballs. One kid was holding one of the giant tomatoes and looking like he was going to dive in and give it a bite. I reminded him that he was allergic to tomatoes and shouldn’t even be holding one. He started to argue that 1) it was a Martian tomato and probably ok, and 2) he’d probably lost his allergy when making the quantum jump. I took the tomato away from him anyway and made him go wash his hands.

Somehow the whole thing was set to the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Show (Hey Oh)”

Adventures in the Big Blue Room

Road Debris

Every day for the last month or so as I go on my walk for my morning break, I’ve been passing a barbie-ish doll head in the road. Every day it seems to be a little farther west down the hill. Every day it seems to have a little less hair and be a little more grubby. When I first saw it I thought I ought to pick it up and throw it away in a garbage can, but I was somewhat concerned to be found carrying a severed doll head. Like, really, what would happen if I was found, hit by a car and thrown up into the weeds at the side of the road. The news wouldn’t say that an innocent pedestrian was struck by a car and left for dead, it would say, “Creep carrying mutilated little girl toy parts and wearing those funky toe-shoes and a Hawaiian shirt run down in probable revenge motive.”

I do often pick up debris on the road and take it to the trash, assuming it’s not leaking anything. I find batteries, nails and assorted hardware, and sometimes newly deceased fauna.  Something in me makes me go back and police the FOD before it causes an issue. I hope I’m building up some sort of karma, or something, because I could use some protection from flat tires, if I get any say in the matter.

There is something really creepy about doll heads in general. They pop up in movies and literature as omens or talismans of danger. Every time I pass it I can’t help but remember a part in William Gibson’s “Mona Lisa Overdrive” where Slick Henry recalls looking into a junked airliner on Dog Solitude.

He froze there, blinking in the sudden shade, until what he was seeing made some kind of sense. The pink plastic heads of dolls, their nylon hair tied up into topknots and the knots stuck into thick black tar, dangling like fruit. Nothing else, only a few ragged slabs of dirty green foam, and he knew he didn’t want to stick around to find out whose place it was.

The proximity of the park and the residential area don’t give me much concern as to where this came from. I’ve found far stranger things in improbable locations, but even trying not to sound too craven about it, this thing gives me the creeps every day. Just taking the photo made me feel dirty and silently judged from behind picture windows.

Several years ago this sort of concern about my perceived motives wouldn’t have even crossed my mind, but I’ve seen stories, and even had friends affected, by the current “see something, say something” culture.

Now this sort of consideration is part of my daily walk and is something that makes me contemplate my actions from an outside point of view, and thus the reason I’ve left that toy in the road. Maybe if I give it another couple months, or we get a good rain storm it will be close enough to a friendly dumpster for me to get it to the trash with an acceptable level of risk of finding myself as a prime suspect (deceased).
~

Uncategorized

The Wasp Homewrecker

So here’s something a little different. On Saturday I decided I really needed to borrow Jack’s framing nailer to do what I had hoped would be the quick roof fixin’ job that I rambled on about last entry. I called and asked if he was using his nail gun as he’s on a home addition project of his own. He said it didn’t look like he was going to be using it, so I ran up to Bountiful and picked it up.

Along the way I made what was probably a somewhat ill-advised stop to take a look at the pile of rubble where my studio was.

It was kind of heart-wrenching, even knowing what was coming, but I don’t really want to think about it tonight.

Anyway, I got back home and made a sandwich just in time for Jack to call and see how long I thought I’d be needing the nailer as his contractor had shown up and was looking on getting to work. Fortunately I had already cut all the pieces I needed for my repair on the roof and just needed to whack them into place. I told him to come on down to get it and I’d be done by the time he got to my house. It worked out pretty good, except for having to have us both make a trip out of our way on what was a heavy traffic morning.

In a way it makes me want to have my own framing nail gun, but Jack and I have kind of a pooled resource of tools. My pool isn’t so big, but I have a metal bandsaw that lives at Jacks, and his MIG welder has been at my house for several years. It works out well, because nobody has room for all the tools they need, and even less time to put most of them to work. It just happened this day the gun was in high demand.

I was taking a break from the heat, I guess I’m supposed to avoid it for the MS thing, but I’m finding it hard to not be outside in the half of the year I find tolerable. Jack and I have serious that-reminds-me issues that can be near interminable. Along with never having enough time for tools, time for conversations is usually at a premium. As the conversation stretched out we sat on my porch and Jack noticed a wasp flying into the small tubes of a wind chime over my head carrying a dried blade of grass. It would go in from the top, and right away the blade would sail out of the bottom and land on me. Earlier I had noticed a pile of grass building up on the porch, but hadn’t thought about where it was coming from.

The little builder came and went for quite awhile. Occasionally I would reach up and ring the chime and cowardly duck down fearing the worst, yet too lazy to actually move. Finally she brought a big curly piece of grass that managed to jam in the tube. I decided this was a bad sign and slothed into action taking hold of the wind chime and attempted to loose it from it’s stay. The ring from which it hung caught repeatedly on the bent eyelet. For several seconds I became increasingly agitated and worried as the ring flopped back and forth and stick on the mouth of the hook and I was really starting to fear a serious amount of stinging was headed my way. Twice I almost just gave up and ran for my life, but in the nick of time the whole thing came free the chimes jangling like an alarm, and I hurled it off the porch to the middle of the lawn. I confess I laughed a bit sheepishly at my own antics, and we continued our one more thing goodbye a bit longer. When Jack left I retrieved the chime and thought I’d put it in the garage for the rest of the season. As I was walking back to the studio I peeked in one of the chime tubes. I couldn’t see through it. I checked the others and three of the tubes had already become nurseries for the little beasties. Half of them were filled with nests and larvae.

I took a stick and cleared them out, but it was no easy task. The grass was all bound up in what looked like a web. I’m going to have to read up on wasps to see how it’s actually done. I’m a little afraid the wasps might be part spider. Part of me is always kind of sad to interrupt most of natures cycles, unless it involves cockroaches or yellowjackets. Those bugs get no quarter.

Uncategorized

Fretting the Night Away

Accepting limitations has never been one of my strengths. Here I am stuck wanting and needing to do things and not being able to for multiple reasons. And this isn’t different than any other time in my life, but like ever before, it seems like such a cop out. It’s like I can feel my potential and opportunities slipping away while I kill time waiting for conditions to be better.
 
And given my nature to be introspective, I kind of feel the need to write about it, but I also feel that my writing has become self-indulgent and melancholy. So I avoid writing, or at least writing and sharing. And I found out long ago that writing and then archiving/deleting isn’t as helpful as sharing. It’s almost like I need to let my ideas go out into the world instead of into a cage to experience any kind of growth.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my friend Anita recommended a book to me called, “Where’d You Go Bernadette?” by Maria Semple (and soon to be a feature film). In the book Bernadette is a creative person who suffers when she stifles her creativity. I enjoyed it very much and I can see parallels in some of my experiences. Right now I really want to make something, and I have several ideas for projects, as well as a need to get some pottery made for the post-Thanksgiving sale I do every November. My studio is in a shambles, though, and 95° in the studio is too oppressive to be doing anything. I have some slabs rolled out for carving, but they’re quickly passing the point where they’re too dry for what I want, and I just haven’t been in the frame of mind to babysit them.
In the meantime I’ve been listening to Adam Savage’s podcast on youtube in the evenings when I’m wasting time. It’s called “Still Untitled”  and is one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve found. He inspires me in a lot of ways, and I just watched one episode where they spent most of the podcast talking about the enjoyment they get from watching other makers videos on youtube. I felt inspired that I ought to be putting more video out for some of the stuff I do, but quickly began to shoot myself down. I don’t have any real special knowledge, or insight, but I have worked pretty hard to develop a certain level of skill that is not inconsequential. The idea of making videos just seems self indulgent, or at least it seems sort of meta self indulgent as I don’t really seek any sort of fame or adulation. I just agree with Adam in that it’s fun to watch.  I’ve played with making pottery videos before putting a couple of live things up on Facebook for fun, and I’ve been told by people that I ought to produce something a little more polished and less ephemeral than a Facebook post.
But it’s not just the pottery, I kinda-sorta document lots of stuff I do, but only halfheartedly, so I end up with lots of pictures in a folder.  And necessarily, some of the stuff I end up documenting, more in writing than anything else, is about the things that I go through in trying to maintain a somewhat corporeal existence. The whole convergence in this particular rambling train of thought brings me to my most recent health development. It looks like the reason, at least in part, that I’ve felt pretty crappy these last few years is that I’ve been ignorantly trying to deal with symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis.
I got the diagnosis when my physical therapist sent me in for a MRI to look at the arterial blood flow to my brain because she thought that my weird dizziness might be restricted blood flow. The results came back negative on any blood flow problems, but positive for signs of a demyelinating disease, most likely MS. Since then I’ve had a lot of tests, including a spinal tap (surprisingly easy, and now I go to 11). I guess it’s going to take some time to figure out how I’m affected by what’s going on, but it’s already starting to answer a lot of questions about things, some of them going back quite awhile. Although there is some confusion for me in that if this has been a long term thing how was I in a state of remission enough when I was having the scans 5-10 years ago when I had cancer that it didn’t show up on my scans then? I guess I’ve always been lucky.
As is my nature, I guess, I’ve been trying to keep track of the day-to-day issues that might be related to MS, just to get a baseline. I’ve tried out a couple of mobile device apps, but haven’t found one I’ve liked yet. I also have given a shot to doing it somewhat tediously though Evernote, but that is seeming less than optimal after two weeks. I almost considered just carrying around a small log book, which has some classical romantic interest for me, but I am a digital child and I can see the handwritten notes falling by the wayside, or at least becoming less useful, as I like to grep for things.
Bringing this around full circle (maybe for the second lap), while I was reflecting on when I can remember issues starting I thought back to last fall when I was doing one of the Facebook live videos and was having some trouble throwing a largish vase. I dug the vid back up and found the part where I had a significant hand tremor that I hadn’t had an issue with when throwing before. I remember it because at the time I couldn’t believe that I was that out of shape that throwing a couple pots had worn me out.
 My physical therapist pointed out that the tremors are, indeed, MS symptoms, and that I need to stop doing what I’m doing when they happen and not push myself. That’s going to be very hard. I have a lot of time sensitive projects on my hands that require quite a bit of physical activity. Already I’ve gotten behind while trying to sort of take it easy as I seem to be in the middle of a fairly lengthy exacerbation. I have a hard time asking for help, and today when trying to tackle a problem that absolutely needed to be completed by sundown it was looking like I was cutting it close. Debbie, without my knowledge, called our friend Jake and asked him to come help, which he did immediately. With his assistance I finished working on the garage roof with daylight to spare. I hate to bother people, and maybe this is a lesson I really (finally) need to learn.