Kitchen Lust

My precious. The four oven AGA range makes succulent
roasts, delicious toast, and cures leprosy.

Greg:

Teresa and I have discovered the most covetable object on Earth: the AGA (pronounced AWW-guh) 4-oven range (pictured above).

Okay, so you're saying, "Buh-whuh-huh? It's a goddamn stove!" Nay, my friend. It is not just a goddamn stove. It is a scientific marvel invented by Gustaf Dalen, an honest-to-Sverige Nobel prize-winning physicist that can - and does - make enchanted toast.

But you're saying, "Right. It's a goddamn stove." Oh ye of little faith in toast. Attend to mine word. For I have been to the Sacred Place (read: Luwa Distributing in Renton) to witness the Miracle of the Checkerboard Toastage (read: product demonstration) and to bask in the countenance of the Blessed Appliance (read: AGA range). So stop your grinnin' and drop your linen whilst I evangelize you with my new found faith.

First of all, t'was none other than Sergeant Rock locked me in the thrall of this Questing Beast of Glazed Cast Iron. He and I went into Sutter Home & Hearth in Ballard because I needed a fireplace screen. As it turns out, they're AGA dealers. As it also turns out, Sgt. Rock is a hardcore AGA enthusiast. I never woulda pegged him for being all ghey for high-end appliances. Nonetheless, he began to witness and was soon joined by Clint The Sales Guy, and soon they were swapping stories, high-fiving, embracing, and weeping openly over the wonders of this appliance.

When it came to his toast, Nobel prize
winning physicist Gustaf Dalen did not
fuck around. One look at those wicked
shades of his will tell you that.

Of course, you can find out everything I'm about to tell you if you just go to www.aga-range.com, but let me give you the crib notes first. This is what I found to be astounding about the AGA, and why I must have one toot sweet! 1) It has no knobs or dials at all simply because you never have to turn it on or off or set the temperature. Like our life-giving sun, it is always on. 2) Despite the fact that it is always on, it doesn't burn a ton of fuel. It is a super-insulated thermal mass of cast iron, so once it gets up to speed, it remains hot and "coasts" as it were, and doesn't keep sucking down gas. By comparison, standard open-flame gas ranges are unquenchable gas-huffing beasts. If you prepare six meals on a standard gas range, you will have used all the fuel an AGA uses in a month. 3) You can cook right on the burner, just as though it were a flat-top grill. 4) It makes enchanted toast.

And speaking of kitchens, we're planning on redoing ours not just so that it can accommodate a 1,290 pound, ten foot square AGA range, but also so it can accommodate other modern appliances, like a refrigerator and a dishwasher. You know, the little things. As you know, my house was built during the Depression. Apparently people didn't eat during the Depression so they had no use for kitchens. Mine is the size of a mouse's hind teat. Teresa and I resolved that while the rest of the house should be left as it was in that era, the kitchen was going to have to be expanded. The downside is that we really don't have the cash on hand necessary to do a kitchen remodel at the moment. We decided that we should start doing the groundwork and cost estimates anyway so that when the Giant Cash Meteor lands in our yard some day in the future (or more likely when I decide to vampirize my home equity), we'll be ready to start work. We went ahead and met with an architect who told me (much to my surprise) that I could do the plan myself.

Speaking of home equity, we got a notice in the mail telling us that the county has decided that our house has increased $30,000 in value since we bought it on April 30th. How they figure that stuff out, I'll never know. They probably drove by the house the day I set the two dead toilets out front for pickup and figured that I was putting in two new restrooms or a Roman Bath or some goddamn thing.

We got some good news last night. A certified AGA fitter came over to do a free survey and told us that no, the ponderous weight of the AGA will not make our floor joists to snap like a sparrow's leg and cause the stove to crash right through crust of the earth and down to the Mohorovicic discontinuity as we had feared. But he'll have to come back after we get the addition framed in to make sure that he'll be able to install the venting properly.

But anyway, the best news thus far is that our kitchen remodel has cost us nothing but the calories necessary to fuel full-blown kitchen lust. When it starts to cost money, we may have to turn to crime.

Speaking of crime, I have to get to work.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

13:54 Of Fame Left

WARNING - MAY BE FRIGHTENING TO CHILDREN: My visage has been digitally
de-hanced to include wobbly jowls, extra eye baggage, and lemur-length fingers.
Oh, and my hair has been replaced by a digital overlay of JFK's famous 1961 atomic blast resistant pompadour.

Greg:

It has finally happened. There is a clip of me gibbering away like a disembodied clown head on YouTube. It is surely a sign of our Internet-infused times when a person's visage can dribble onto the Web and into the eyeballs of tens of persons without them having to lift a single greasy finger out of the Cheeto bag.

How the hell did this happen? Well I'll tell you. I was one of the test subjects for something that's actually really cool (and might be cooler still were it not for my face being on it) called Interview Studio. It's like Monster on Bovine Growth Hormone. Posting your resume on the Web is now passe. You must now back up your claims with video clips and scientifically sound skill and personality test results. The profile that Interview Studio creates for you is so thorough and lifelike that you might want to email an exam glove to your prospective employer along with a link to your profile.

In all seriousness, I'd much rather use a tool like this than go through the cornea-chafing process known as resume reading. Last time I had to hire someone, I had to read something like 100 resumes. (100 resumes = 1 shitload. -Ed.) Being a fan of the cinema, I'd've much rather sat down with a bag of popcorn, dimmed the lights, and let Interview Studio roll while I occasionally lobbed half-chewed Hot Tamales(tm) at my monitor. What more relaxing way could there be to screen candidates? Boo resume reading! Yay Interview Studio!

But enough about me and more about my latest invention: The Shiva Pile.

I am become Shiva, the destroyer of shrubs.
The bones of mine enemy (foreground) lay
at my feet while I brandish the tools of their
demise.

As you know I have a yard now, and as you also know I have been waging a (losing) battle with the shrubs and various other flora 'round about the Gunn estate. Last weekend, I waged a bloody campaign against a camellia bush that was threatening to eat my house. No, seriously, the sumbitch had got to be about 20 feet tall while I wasn't looking, and had almost completely blocked all sunlight from coming through my living room window. With every implement of destruction at my command, I hacked it down to a humble 4 feet. However, this also meant that I was left with a ponderous stack of leaves and branches that I would have to bribe either the city or an itinerant pack of beavers to destroy for me. Being the cheap-ass with a scientific bent that I am, I decided that I was going to devise away to rot the whole pile down to mulch without paying a cent to either the city or the beavers. Here's what I did: I got some landscaping fabric and some Stump-B-Gone (or whatever the shit they call that noxious powder that will supposedly rot tree stumps down to oatmeal). I made a neat pile of all the camellia detritus, soaked it with the hose, and generously dosed it with the Stump-B-Gone powder. (NOTE: Stump-B-Gone powder does not feel good in your eyes or nose. Do not use it in a high wind or a slight breeze. -Ed.) So of course a stout summer breeze sprang up and shot a handful of the powder into my eyes and nose, much to my chagrin. Undeterred, I covered the whole schmear with the landscape fabric, pinned the edges to the earth, heaved the remaining camellia branches on top to help hold it in place, and took a moment to marvel at my handiwork. In this fashion, I effectively created the conditions of the underside of a rotting log. Hopefully this will cause all that crap to compost into a dark and handsome mulch in the next six months or so. Then I will uncover it and spread the remains under my lilac bushes as a horrific gardyloo to all the other shrubs in the yard, lest they conspire to eat my house as well. I think that fear is an excellent gardening tactic.

Wired for sound. The little dealio on the right is not a pushbutton switch. It's
actually the depression era's answer to the InterWeb.

And one last thing - I found the coolest thing in my living room. No, not my wife, silly! There's some sort of outlet on the wall that I've been wondering about for the longest time. It looks like one of those old-fashioned push button light switches. Problem is that it's too far down on the wall (about six inches above the baseboard) and it's right next to an outlet. So last weekend I let my curiosity run away with me and I attacked it with a screwdriver. Pulling it away from the wall, I discovered two things. One is that the original tenant of this house had horrible taste in wallpaper. It was some kind of crazy black and silver "gothic" pinstripe, no doubt inspired by the gangsterwear of the era. Second is that subsequent tenants were lazy bastards and didn't even bother to pull the wallpaper from behind the plate to paint the walls. And then I discovered a third. Third is that there were two braided copper wires trailing from the back of this thing and going up the inside of the wall between the studs - not horizontally or down between the floor joists. And all of a sudden it occurred to me that what I was looking at was antenna wire. This little dealio I found was where you plugged in your floor console radio's antenna wire. This was the 1930s equivalent of having your house wired for Internet. If I can get my grubbies on a decently restored floor console radio of the era, I just might try reviving that antenna plug. How bitchen would that be? Maybe there are some radio shows from the 1930s still living inside my walls somewhere.

Crap. Gotta go to work. More later.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

New Roses

Is this bullshit really necessary? Neuroses, while they are inarguably
a pain in the fucking neck, are not actually as intractable as Big Pharma
would have you believe.

Greg:

You know what I can't wait for? Yeah, that's right - football season. I love football because it gives me an opportunity to take a gigantic emotional dump in public without getting arrested or having to buy booze. I never thought of myself as an exhibitionist or anally expulsive until I caught myself freaking out and screaming like a stone-cold lunatic at a Seahawks home game - correction - every Seahawks home game. (I hope to God you're using the term "anally expulsive" in the psychoanalytic sense and not actually firing turd javelins out of the 300 level. -Ed.) Actually going that nuts in public is so freeing that it makes me wonder why there aren't places where you can go and drop your inhibitions and just run buck-wild without having to take some kind of psychoactive substance. (There are. They're called whorehouses and football games. And neither one of them is free. -Ed.) Seems like there would be a lot less angst in the world if there was a place where you could just peel back your social mask and get batshit freaknuts without fear of reprisal. (Hmm. Well now you've ruled out football games. -Ed.)

Which brings me to neuroses.

Our talk on Sunday about neuroses - what it is and how to deal with it - got me to thinking, which is sometimes not a bad thing. Sometimes I use my brain for good and not for evil. Then again, sometimes my brain is not so good to me. Maybe it's bad to me because I have not yet given it what it wants, kinda like women I used to date who thought I could read their minds. They thought I was an incredible jerk for not simply giving them what they wanted without them having to ask for it. Maybe my brain is exactly that kind of pain-in-the-ass. Maybe my brain is in fact in my ass, like I'm some kind of latter-day brontosaurus. That would explain a LOT. It might even explain why I digress so often and so readily when I'm trying to make a point.

Oh look, a bird!

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, neurosis.

I should know a thing or ten about neurosis as my neuroses are beyond multitudinous. They are legion. It's like having a petting zoo full of comically deformed barnyard animals. Pigs with antlers. Sheep with steering wheels. Goats with extra goats on them. Fortunately, neurosis husbandry for me has moved beyond affliction into the realm of hobby. In other words, it is no longer an obsession but more of a bemusement. I take a walk every once in a while down the grotty stalls of depression, anxiety, neurasthenia and phobia, stopping to pat each on the head in turn and give it a peck of oats. Each neurosis then gives a pitiful bleat and ralphs on my Wellingtons.

Suffice it to say that I know a lot about neuroses (including the fact that phrase has 40 letters and 11 spaces in it). So to answer the questions you had when we were discussing the subject, I sewed together a number of definitions from sources medical and otherwise, and came up with a definition of neurosis that just about meets everything I know about the subject. It is this: Neurosis is a functional disorder in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective evidence of disease, all in various degrees and patterns, dominate the personality. It is a relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment not attributable to any neurological or organic dysfunction. (I think its intractability would be the indicator of whether it is a personality disorder or not. Sometimes it is and sometimes it ain't. It can also be transient, like in response to extreme stress or whatnot.)

Does that sound familiar at all? But wait, here's the good news. (My oil needs changing and my horse is pregnant? -Ed.) Neuroses arise from the inclination to focus on only the negative aspects of an event or situation. If you are so inclined, then you will have anxiety. You will be depressed. You will fall prey to magical thinking, believing that your rituals and systematic avoidances will have a direct influence on your outcomes. Worse yet, you will have manifold physical complaints without frank and objective evidence of disease or pathogens.

Yes it gets better! How do I know? Because thinking that way is just an inclination. It's not a certainty. It is not a truth about reality as a whole. It is a way that you have chosen to think about things, and other people would think differently about the same situation. On another day, with more sleep, I myself might even think differently and act differently in the same situation. I might see more possible outcomes than only the negative ones that I see right now.

To wit, I can be neurotic, know that I'm not neurotic every single day, and have faith that this neurosis too shall pass.

Martin E. P. Seligman one of the forefathers of positive psychology and former head of the APA lists depression and anxiety as the top two most curable neuroses in his book "What You Can Change And What You Can't". Considering that friggin' everybody and their dysfunctional uncle seems to suffer from those two things, that fact alone seems to offer a great deal of hope to humanity as a whole. Most heartening to me is the strong evidence that he presents that proves that panic does not respond to any medication and can be unlearned. UNLEARNED. When I was diagnosed with panic disorder in 1984, they told me it was intractable, could not be cured, and that I would be on medication for the rest of my life. I wasn't satisfied with that diagnosis and did everything I could to simply not ever feel like that again. And I sure as Eli Lilly didn't want to keep eating the truckloads of brain-stopping will-withering pills that they were giving me. I didn't know at the time that what I was doing by creating a program to deal with my panic was called "unlearning it". I thought it was called "how to not feel like shit every day". In the end, panic proved to be just an inclination - a patterned way of thinking, like the inclination I used to have to smoke cigarettes or order a Domino's pizza each and every goddamn day, both of which I am now disinclined to do. And just as a ten ton flatbed truck has the nearly unquenchable inclination to barrel down a 10% grade it is therefore not easy to stop, but with the right amount of force applied at the right time, it can be stopped.

Know what this means? Mm hmm. If this idea catches on, you better dump every bit of stock you have in Big Pharma.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Children, Fools And The Endodontist

The Prince of Pie nearly torches his own
eyebrows in a fit of birthday-induced joy. His
teeth (pictured, above) would later be subjected
to assaults that no one in their right mind could
smile about.

Greg:

I went to an endodontist for the first time in my life this morning. Now before you Google the word "endodontist", let me just save you some time and tell you what an endodontist does. They fuckin' torture you, that's what.

Check it out. Relive the horror with me. I was referred to an endodontist by my dentist because he couldn't figure out why'n'the shit my teeth still hurt so much after he put a couple of crowns in. That whole deal, the whole grinding-off-the-tops-of-my-teeth deal, launched me into new horizons of candy-colored pain. Tiny demons took ice picks and shotguns to my hurt bone, waking me up every night, driving me to eat Vicodin by the fistful. (I don't know why people eat those things to get high, by the way. All they do is make you feel sick and dumb. I used to get higher than that sucking the sugar coating off of mom's thyroid medication. Sue me! I was a child and they looked just like red M&Ms.) But get this: It turns out there's only so much Vicodin you can eat before it kills you. No really, it's a fact. So the dentist decided that maybe there was some more drilling or nerve pulling or something that they could do to put me out of my misery without the added risk of having me become another sad drug-related statistic.

So I go to the endodontist this morning and what does he do? He takes a cotton ball and freezes the crap out of it with some liquid nitrogen. Then he tells me he's going to press it against my tooth - not the tooth that is still causing me pain, but a completely different tooth to cause me completely new pain. He says, "Raise your left hand when you feel the pain" and then he puts the cotton ball against my tooth. I say, "GAGH!" and flip him off with the middle finger of my left hand. He says, "Good. Okay, we're going to use that as a baseline to compare how painful your crown is." And before I can say, "Baseline - what the hell?", he goes and freezes the crap out of practically every tooth on that side of my jaw. When he gets to the Hurtiest Tooth I Ever Had and presses the little frozen cotton ball against it, it causes an explosion of icy pain in my head along with a completely extemporaneous hallucination of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in its entirety (but fast-forwarded). I try to flip him off with every finger on my left hand. He says, "Good."

Long story short, I don't need a root canal. He said I was inflamed. I said damn right. I'm supposed to go back in a month for a follow up. Next time I'm going to ask him if he can use the cooling power of peppermint schnapps instead of that liquid nitrogen stuff.

I don't know why people are afraid of dentists. Dentists are the Sugar Plum Fairy compared to the endodontist. The dentist digs into your teeth and gums. The endodontist digs into your soul.

In other news - my birthday, which started on Wednesday, just wouldn't quit. I got to celebrate it again on Sunday. I was blessed with good company and several more gifts. My collection of the articles of suburban destruction has been added to quite nicely. I got a wheelbarrow, for instance. And not one of the little crappy ones either. One with real oak handles and a big fat tire that you actually have to pump up. I'm telling Teresa that we're throwing away that car of ours and taking the wheelbarrow to work every morning from here on out. Plus I got a corn knife, which if you did not know it, is kinda like a katana for hillbillies. With it I can now easily quarter, cleave twain or cleanly behead any pugnacious sister-cousin or uncle-daddy that gives me guff. It also cuts corn. Or so I am told.

Plus, I got a gift certificate to Hardwick's Hardware (since 1932), the coolest hardware store on the planet. And you should check out what I bought! I got a socket set with every size socket from Mouse's Toilet Bolt to Elephant's Nut Sack (and by that I mean sack of either stainless steel or brass nuts which are overly large and in the possession of an elephant, and not a pachyderm's man parts). It also contains the very rare 25/32nds socket which is only for parts that come from Taiwan. With that fact in hand, I'm taking my 25/32nd socket over to Taiwan and doing some damage. I'm going to loosen everything. Taiwan is going to fall apart when I'm done. You're gonna see thirty million bicycles all dissolve into a pile of loose parts - k-thwank!

And yes, there was PIE. Blueberry pie (pictured, above).

And now this word about toilets: I moved my two dead toilets from the side of the driveway into the back yard so's to stop offending the neighbors. Not that they made a ruckus or anything (the neighbors, not the toilets). I just needed an excuse to show off the pythons by lifting each toilet with one hand. (Don't try this at home. That said, I should not have tried it at my home.) A friend of mine pointed out that the problem with being burly is that it's never a question of if you can lift something one-handed, it's always a question of why you should lift something one-handed when there are things like dollies and forklifts in the world. That's the question you should always ask. Likewise, that is the question that I did not ask before I single-handedly beefed first one then the other six-thousand pound porcelain crapper ten or so yards into my back yard. And even though I did not ask that question, my back has answered for it as usual. My folly created such exquisite pain that I was entertaining the idea of opening my abdominal cavity so I could ice my spine from the inside. I'm okay now, though. My spine is back in tip-top shape and ready for the next foolhardy stunt I have to dish out. As the old saying goes, God looks out for children and fools. Thank God that despite my rather large collection of birthdays I still fit in one of those two categories.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Loving Everyone, Squirrels And A-Holes Included

Scariest book you'll ever read. It's a scary, scary
squirrel world, and we're just living in it.

Greg:

It's me, Thaddeus. Remember me? I showed up in your house somewhere back in 1962 - June, I believe. The 27th, to be exact. 45 years and three days ago. You thought mom and dad had brought a puppy home from the hospital. Ring a bell?

I'd have to use a calendar to recall how long it has been since I heard from you. And not just any calendar. I mean the Mayan Calendar, because it seems like millennia. I know you have a penchant for holing up inside your tuba with a peanut butter sandwich and a book of Green Stamps, thrift and nut butters being your keenest interests. But you should really poke your chalky-white face outside once in a while and take a look at who's making all the racket. You may find that it's me, the puppy your folks brought home from the hospital, begging you to throw me a bone. Or a word. Whatever.

I've been doing things. Working, for one. Reading, for another. I got a couple of really great books for my birthday. One was "Squirrels of the West" (Tamara Hartson, editor). Squirrels have filled me with a combination of warmth, fascination and horror ever since we had one as a pet when we were kids. Remember Desiree? Our little pet squirrel that we kept in the house who taught herself how to ride the turntable on the stereo? (Squirrels are such smart little bastards! Cross a monkey and a rat, get a squirrel. S'true. It's in every squirrel's creation mythology that they are the descendents of Hanuman and Karni Mata. Just ask one.) And remember how she pooped on, like, everything we owned? Living with a partially-domesticated squirrel is like randomly firing crap-rockets inside your own home. Few except us will ever experience the exhilaration of a chittering, crapping blur whizzing by their oatmeal bowl and caroming off the walls first thing in the morning. Unbelievable that we got away with it. No wonder dad drank so much. Either he let us get away with it because he was anesthetized by a half-rack of Carling most of the time, or he kept himself half-racked as a defense against random crap-rocket attacks. Not too sure which. Anyway, the book lets me feed my fascination with these vituperate, tree-dwelling rodents in the comfort of my own home, where I'm now safe from crap-rocket attacks. That is until I step outside of course.

Perhaps this book will teach me how to harness the power of squirrels for good. This has been one of my goals in life, believe it or not. A friend of mine once wrote a play wherein squirrels were a pervasive and aggregate evil. Hundreds of them would combine to create human forms and then attack the unsuspecting, Trojan Horse style. Not too far from real life, if you ask me. Judging from his personality, my cat could be nothing more than a dozen bilious and phlegmatic squirrels held together by cat-shaped spackle who are just waiting for the opportunity to explode like a seed pod and attack me from every corner of my being. But what if I could harness those squirrels and use their combined power to mow the lawn, replace my toilets, or shoot out the legs of my rivals? (That's a job best left for raccoons. -Ed.) Then I could make some real money. Then I could drive down Broadway in a faux gold trimmed Lincoln with a license frame that read "My Other Car Is A Squirrel".

The other book I got for my birthday was "Best Buddhist Writing 2006" which is more of a hoot than its title would lead you to believe. Usually books on religious matters are all too serious and leave me feeling like I've taken some kind of medicine that does nothing more than make me feel bad for being a schmuck. Not so much with this book, though. Allow me to submit as proof the laugh-out-loud-funny and deeply touching "Hair Braiding Meditation" by Seattle poet Polly Trout that is included in the book.

May I be filled with loving kindness. May I be well. May I be peaceful and at ease. May I be happy.

May my daughter, who wants a billion tiny little braids this morning, be filled with loving kindness. May she be well. May she be peaceful and at ease going to school with a billion tiny little braids.

May her best friend, who got a billion tiny little braids put in her hair at Club Med Ixtapa last week, be filled with loving kindness. Also her mother, may she be peaceful and at ease. And the woman the mother hired to do all that cornrowing, may she be well. May she be happy.

May I be filled with loving kindness as I put in these billion tiny little braids. May I be peaceful and transcend greed. Also, may I go to Club Med Ixtapa next season, when the beach will be even more inspiring due to my newly enlightened and greed-free state. May I be happy.

May my coworkers be filled with loving kindness as they wonder why I am late for work as I make these billion tiny braids. May they be peaceful and at ease.

May my daughter not notice that these braids are not nearly as cute as her friend’s braids that got done professionally in Ixtapa, or if she does notice, may she be peaceful and at ease about that, please for God’s sake.

May my toddler, currently trying to vie for my attention as I make these tiny braids for her big sister, be filled with loving kindness. May she be peaceful and at ease.

May my mother, who did this for me when I was five, be filled with loving kindness. May she be peaceful and at ease. I wonder why I never thanked her for that.

May I remember this day sitting with my daughter, braiding her hair, late for work again, peaceful and at ease, happy.

There's also the work of Marc Ian Barasch, an apparently very prolific Buddhist writer who I've never had the pleasure of reading before. What I really like about him is that he's a sort of Buddhist Everyman, a Dharma-working shlub who readily exposes his multiple warts and confesses his manifold failings in the face of his Bodhisattva vows. It's kind of like what it would be like if Thich Nhat Hanh did slapstick. My kinda thing, in other words. I highly recommend his essay "Searching for the heart of compassion". Aside from being quite engaging on an intellectual level, it's just plain fun reading. There's something very refreshing about teachers who engage in this sort of reverse pedagogy: "I can't tell you how to do it right, but I can tell you how many times I had good intentions and still completely fucked it up. Maybe you can pick up where I left off."

Which brings me to a point which I consistently get hung up on: how to love the assholes in your life. As Barasch says in his essay, it's pretty easy to love the good people. Our expressions of compassion get winnowed down to the precious few in our lives. But compassion is supposed to be for everybody. And everybody means everybody: you, me, that guy I don't know, that asshole that wants to kill me, squirrels - everybody. The issue that I'd like to addressed exhaustively is how to express compassion for people who hate you. Better still, how to express compassion for people who will turn around and use your compassion to harm you. I mean, c'mon. Everyone has had that happen one time in their lives. There are people in the world who will do whatever they can to capitalize on the best part of your nature and will at some point use whatever you say or do to stab you. One of that species of person is mentioned in the article, but the issue is only dealt with briefly, and that is to say that a line was drawn in the sand. "Letting you use me as a doormat isn't good for either of us, so in the spirit of compassion, I'm telling you in the kindest way possible to fuck off and stay fucked off. Namaste." But there has to be more you can do than that, isn't there? Or is there? Maybe there comes a point when you're dealing with someone who can't help but be abusive that you just have to say "Okay, I'm done" and break that contact permanently. Maybe the only way to make that action compassionate is to not do it in a spirit of anger or retribution, but in a spirit of contributing to mutual well-being.

Or maybe I should just sic some squirrels on 'em.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

It's My 45th Birth - Wait, What Was I Saying Again?

This is the look of old. The ravages of time as recorded by a camera held in my
quaking 45-year-old hand.

Greg:

Jesus Christ, I'm 45 today. That means that you're...wait, I have to do the math...plus five...carry the twelve...six hundred and seventy eight years old, give or take. I don't know why people get so wanged out about getting older. I really don't feel any different than I did when I was seventeen...other than a little smarter...and not so impulsive...and my propensity for using ellipses has increased....yes it has.

Know what gives away the fact that I'm old? Here's the difference between my 20th birthday and my 45th. On my 20th, all I wanted to do was snort coke and Jim Beam off hookers while jumping the Snake River Canyon on a Yamaha. And for the most part that was how I rolled in back then. Now all I want to do is spend the day in my back yard, sitting in my folding recliner, yelling at my cat to shut up. And that's most likely what I'll be doing. And it'll be ossum. And I'll be happy.

What was I saying again?

Oh yeah. So we filled our ears with coins and swam naked all the way to Boston. And that' s how we me and your uncle Humbert licked the Jerries back in dubyah dubyah ought five. The End.

Oh man! You know what I've got in my back yard? Raspberries! They just ripened up the other day. We only have a few little canes, but they're pumping out a crapload of fruit. We threw some on some Chex the other day. Chex with raspberries in the back yard - now there's a picnic! If only we could've found a way to barbecue it...

Didja see that we (meaning RealNetworks) just released a new version of the RealPlayer that'll let you download videos right off the Web and barbecue 'em on a DVD so you can show 'em on your plasma TV and make your friends blow milkshakes through their noses from laughing at stuff like this right here? (Friends and milkshakes not included.) S'true. I fully endorse its use, however I'm barred from using it for religious reasons as I believe that putting your image on a DVD will trap your soul, then expose it to ridicule by milkshake -snorting troglodytes seated 'round a plasma TV.

Tip For Campers: While I was in Yellowstone, I got some kind of rash on my ankles, most likely from coming into contact with poison ivy or poison oak or poison raspberries or some damn thing while I was running around camp in my sandals. After I got home, I'll be gol-damned if I didn't re-inflame my ankles by putting on my sandals without washing them first. My point is that once an article of clothing has been exposed to poison [insert plant name here], it must be burned, and the earth around it must be salted, and you must turn your back on it and never speak of it again.

Don't I have a job? Shouldn't I be at work right now? Yes, I probably should be. Too bad for them

I'm going to go eat cake for breakfast because I'm a grown-up and I can do that.

Know what I really want for my birthday? The Field Guide to Squirrels. I know it exists, even though I can't find it on the InterWebs. I saw it in a bookstore just last Saturday. I plucked it from the shelf and gazed upon its pages with a mixture of awe and terror. Teresa axed me why on earth I would want that book for my birthday. I answered her with one simple phrase: Know thine enemy.

Time to go wring out the dog.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

A Tale Of Two Toilets

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. My toilets offended me so I cast
them out...all by myself, even!

Greg:

Have you ever used a toilet? It's that big porcelain thing full of water in that "closet" in the house that has other stuff that water comes out of. Looks kinda like something that would be produced if the "comedy" mask mated with the Elephant Man. Yeah, that thing. If you find one in your house, give it a wide berth and approach it with caution. If my experience is any indication, it could capriciously explode at any moment.

I only ask because I know you're the practical sort and as such may have eschewed the use of such sophisticated and pernicious plumbing accoutrements in favor of a large yard, some wide-leafed shrubs and a sturdy spade. Hey, I'm with you. If it's good enough for the cat... Unfortunately my wife does not share this purview, and demanded that I replace the toilets.

Wait, I'm ahead of myself.

I have two toilets in the house, one upstairs and one in the apartment downstairs. The downstairs toilet had been a cauldron of filth since the day we moved in. From the looks of it, the former tenants attempted to flush toxic waste and dead prostitutes with little success. To make matters worse, the owner of the house left the apartment unheated when it wasn't occupied, thus creating a cave-like atmosphere which in turn caused the toilet to grow a rather stout green beard 'round about the seat. It more closely resembled a troll than anything else. To our credit, we did give it a very thorough cleaning. This removed the beard, but not toxic waste or prostitute residue. It was functional nonetheless, so we (meaning I) took occasion to make it feel useful from time to time. It returned my kindness by failing. To wit, the wall spigot went to hell and then the inflow valve went on vacation. And one of the bolts that secures it to the shitter cap snapped off. As you can surmise, using this toilet was like the combined thrill of riding a mechanical bull while hoping against hope for a payoff from a slot machine. It had to go.

On the upside, even if the downstairs toilet was ferkochte, we still had the upstairs toilet. But then that one decided - apropos of nothing - to fracture its tank and send wee little tsunami rumbling through the bathroom...at 9PM...on a school night. I mean no one was even sitting on the goddamn thing when it busted! I say if you're going to crack and flood my bathroom, at least let it be because I beat you with a Crescent wrench. (How frequently do you say that and to whom? The authorities would like to know. -Ed.)

So there we were, a household without Toilet One, having to clench our bowels through the dark night, into the next day, and down the street to the Starbucks. When morning came, I called the first number of the first plumber on the first piece of junk mail I could find. (By the way, I found out that your mortgage company pimps out your personal information to every Tom, Dick and Plumber in thirty states the minute your loan funds.) Luckily, these guys were the shit (pun intended). They showed up on time (which just about made me faint dead away), took an educated and meaningful look at my situation, and showed me the rate sheet. They told me that what I could do for ten bucks worth of parts, they couldn't do for $400 in labor. They told me the parts I needed, and bid me adieu with no charge whatsoever for the call. I am their customer for life.

In the process of replacing the parts, I got the overwhelming "fuckitden" urge. If we were just going to replace the toilet when we refurbished the bathroom, just fuckitden. Might as well rip the freakin' things out and install a new one. Which is precisely what I did. I tore out two toilets and purchased and installed a new one. Now at least we have one functioning toilet. We also have one hole in the floor downstream from it that roars and gurgles every time you flush. I'm thinking of jamming a big-ass funnel in there and using it just the same (pun not intended), long as I can keep it secret from the wife.

But here's the important thing, not only was my standing as a man increased by doing all of this*, my admiration for our brother John's vocation as a plumber is now boundless. Now I know that he has to deal with The Most Noisome And Disgusting Object Known To Man on a daily basis - the wax ring that seals the toilet to the sewer pipe and keeps the evil locked within. I'd go into more detail, but you no doubt have a peanut butter sandwich in your hand at this very moment and will chunder directly into your tuba if I say any more.

Which reminds me of something I heard the Dalai Lama said once regarding attachment: "Even a delicious piece of chocolate cake eventually becomes something that no one likes."

Namaste on that, my brother!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

*...not to mention the angle that I stand at, considering that deadlifting and carrying two toilets fucked up my back Grand Royal.

Prune Back In Anger

The earth's fragile, beautiful biomass. Kill it first before it kills you.

Greg:

Got a yard? I wouldn't know. I haven't seen your new place. If so, does it have dirt in it? Hey, it's a fair question. Some places just have concrete or rocks or whatever that they paint green. Okay, so if it has dirt, are there any plants growing out of it? If so, -

KILL THEM NOW.

Scorch the earth. Pour salt on it. Get thirty eight dogs, make 'em drink six quarts of coffee each and have them piss all over the whole deal until it is dead dead dead. I've seen what happens to a yard when you have plants and you let them grow, and let me tell you brother, it ain't pretty.

First off, just get used to the fact that plants hate you. They're not "pretty". They don't want to "coexist" with you. They don't care about whether you need the oxygen or not. They know that all you see when you look at them is salad. I have a blackberry bush all the way at the far end of my yard that is just itching to strangle me. Every day when I get home from work, I notice that it has grown five more tendrils of six feet each. I just know that one night it's going to creep in through my bedroom window and wrap itself around my tender, tender neck and choke me 'til I'm dead dead dead. (...or "dead cubed". -Ed.) Why? Because I eat its children with abandon. I make them into pie. I put them in fruit salads. The blackberry bush knows this and has worked itself into a bloated, vengeful rage. It will not rest until I am deep in the humus. Good thing I'm the one with the pruning shears...and the opposable thumbs.

This does not explain why my lilac bushes are such bitches to me. I don't eat their kids. I thought I was doing them a favor by deadheading all of them and clearing out all their dead brush and suckers. Well, they returned my kindness by sending legions of now-homeless spiders into my house to set up shop in my dishtowels. (I know the spiders must've been told to do it. They're smarter than to come inside where my spider-eating cat lives.) Anyway, fuck them lilacs. Just fuck 'em. Who cares about a plant that doesn't pull its own weight? It blooms once, and then it spends the rest of the year taking up lawn space that I could be using for suntanning or burning tires. If the wife wasn't so fond of them, I swear I'd have a nice crackling lilac-wood fire in the fireplace right now.

Don't even get me started on you, pampas grass (rhymes with "pompous ass"). Your day will come, señor. And that day is this Saturday. You'll be staring straight down the blades of the shears that I have nicknamed Los Diablos Dos. I will first give you my special "butch" cut, the Howie Long special, The Flat-Top To End All Flat Tops. Then I will take my shovel, stab it into the earth, and tear out your still-beating heart....er...roots.

And you, House-Eating Camelia - I want you dead. I want your parents dead. I want your family dead. Your dog - if you had one - dead. Hamsters - dead.

So what kind of plant do I like? That's easy. Corn. It's tasty and makes a great fence. Think of it as "bamboo with benefits". And I like my cedar tree. It stinks pretty, keeps the bugs away, and provides shade for my surly old cat. Someday its mighty branches will be home to my Dubble-Seekrit Klubhaus (No Girlz!). And my three apple trees. Other than that, I could seed this whole place with alfalfa and be happy. And by that I mean that I could bury former child actor Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer in my yard were it not for the fact that he's been dead since 1959.

Hey, speaking of which, who are all those guys who are allegedly shaving the Amazonian rainforest down to the nubs? And what's their phone number? I have a job for them.

Shears,

-Thaddeus

My Hot, Hot Legs - And Other Father's Day Observations

Actual photo of my left leg. I don't know whether I should tan it or
baste it.

Greg:

It's early Sunday morning - Father's Day, to be exact. I find myself puttering around the house in my underwear with a cup of coffee and a perplexed look. I've been going around the house looking for something, and by the time I get to the place where I think I must've left it, I forget what it is. I never understood why our Dad did the same thing - puttered about with a cup of coffee, mumbling to himself, "Now where did I - hmmm, oh! No, that's not it." All I know is now I do it, which leads me to believe that puttering is gene-based.

I can tell you exactly why I putter without pants on, though. I'm old and my legs are hot. Hot as in temperature, not hot as in "damn!" Although, I must say that the last time I was in San Francisco - well let me just say that the fellows there know how to make a man feel appreciated. I went for a run one morning and got two - umm - compliments within three blocks. One was a rather passionate yowl from two bon vivants in a passing car. The other was when a guy walked out of a restaurant, ogled my legs and said, "WOOF! Oh honey I needed that!" This is not the same response I get when I wear running shorts around my own neighborhood, though. I stopped by my neighborhood Starbucks yesterday on the way home from the gym wearing the self-same pair of shorts that had garnered me so much praise in San Francisco. The septuagenarian VFW members in the cafe gave a few homophobic snorts and chuckles; the girls behind the counter asked my thighs if they'd like to try the new orange mocha. I suddenly understood that whole "eyes up here!" thing that women sometimes do. But I really don't mind if the girls at Starbucks only love me for my legs. They can talk to 'em all damn day if they want to. I'd be really concerned if they loved me for my wobbling mancakes (or "chesticles" if you prefer) or the wide selection of keratosii that cleave like sheaves of barnacles to my back and shoulders. I'd be even more concerned if they loved me for my ass, which is - well my ass is just wrong. That's all I can say about it. And I would gape in disbelief if they got steamed up over my pythons. When fully flexed, one looks like it has eaten a mouse; the other like it has eaten a piece of spaghetti with a knot in it. To put the whole thing into automotive parlance, I may have a nice set of rims but my upholstery is shot. Best to just gawk from the curb, ladies.

All of the above begs the question why my ex-wife spends any time trying to insult me when I already do such a good job of it myself. But then again, perhaps there are some people who aren't strong enough to kick someone unless that someone is already bound, gagged, and face down. I often think of replying to her vitriol by quoting Cyrano: "I find your vain attempts to insult rather ineffectual. If you had really wished to skewer me you could have said, oh a great many things." But even being playfully facetious means that I'd have to walk the same low road as my aggressor, and that's something I can't afford to do if I really want to give more than lip service to "be[ing] the peace that [I] want to see in the world". That is something that I really am dead-sober-serious about. Perhaps I insult myself to inure myself to insult, which is also a way to concurrently immunize myself against the compulsion to return anger and hatred in kind. Maybe not the best system in the world, but it works okay for the moment. Besides, I don't really believe that I'm all that ugly. I do, however, still have to sneak up on a glass of water. And I must say that my teeth are so yellow that I spit butter. (Thank you! I'll be here all week, ladies and gentlemen!)

I have digressed. Indeed, digression is my forte (pronounced "fort" meaning "strong point", not "for-TAY" meaning "loud"). Therefore I have succeeded in completing the metaphor that I set out with: wandering around the house in search of that thing - you know, that thing! What was I looking for again? Jesus, I can remember the difference between "fort" and "for-TAY", but I can't remember the difference between my ass and -

Hey, did I tell you a dug a hole in the ground the other day? First time in years. I even have my own shovel now. I was installing a kitchen waste composter in the back yard. Coolest thing ever. Throw table scraps in there and it turn 'em into humus in no time. Has a lock on it to keep the rats out and everything. Got it from the city. Sweet deal. Plus I got a yard waste composter from the city as well, one of those barrel-shaped deals that you throw lawn clippings and whatnot in. And let me tell you, that sumbitch gets HOT! I took the lid off and took a gander inside and it gave me a complimentary facial steam. I'm sure Aveda will be capitalizing on the dermatological benefits of compost soon.

Which brings me to my next point of digression, which is that I have found that homeowning is not so much owning an object as it is creating an enterprise. My home is a veritable factory of domestic products which include construction, organic waste disposal, small animal (dog and cat) farming, small animal (dog and cat) sewage treatment, junk mail recycling, neighborhood diplomacy, and homeland security (viz., keeping those goddamn kids from the flophouse out of my backyard). The only challenge now is to create positive cash flow from all of those pursuits, and to stem the tide of currency flowing out of the gigantic hole in the money-dike. Were it only as easy as digging a hole, I'd be set.

Hey look! I have legs!

Speaking of which, Teresa got me a manure fork for Father's Day. I am now the proud owner of yet another item on the list of Things That Make You A Man. My manure fork takes a place of honor alongside my stainless steel Coleman cooler, the cargo nets in the back of my Subaru, my 6,000 cu. in. vol. Gregory (that's the brand name) backpack, my JetBoil, and my Seneca-Wallace-autographed football. And of course my Johnson, which is the name of the tiny stuffed buffalo that I purchased in the gift shop at Yellowstone. Why, what did you think I meant?

Now I forgot what I was talking about.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Happiness Is Wood

Fig 1: A cross-section of old growth happiness. In the future,
we may be able to practice sustainable happiness practices, and
not rely solely on harvesting irreplaceable old growth stands.
(You said "practice practices". Idiot. -Ed.)

Greg:

I had another realization about happiness (You don't say. -Ed.), and its relationship with other emotions and I thought I'd pass it along.

While doing my "three things" exercise, I suddenly realized that one of the three things that made me happy that day was writing down my three things. That seems like a paradox, but I'm perfectly okay with that. It's as though practicing happiness begets more happiness. That's kind of a "duh" realization, I know. But you'd think there would be a diminishing return in that control structure somewhere. (E.g., in psuedocode it might read like: "practicing happiness will make you happy UNLESS OR UNTIL some douchebag comes along and fucks up your day. CASE NEXT: Continue practicing. CASE ELSE: beat aforementioned douchebag soundly about the head and shoulders.") As a point of logic, though, it seems that if you practiced happiness regularly and without interruption, you would create a perpetual state of mental well-being that was unshakeable.

From my experience, it seems that's possible, but looking at my day-to-day emotional life, I know that's not the case. Not yet, anyway. For instance, last night we were getting ready to go out the door to the theater ("West Side Story" at the 5th Ave - not a bad show as it turned out), and I couldn't find the tickets. Did I undertake a serene mental recapitulation of my actions in order to recall where the tickets might be? As the French say, "Oh FUCK NO!" I ran around the house ripping stuff out of drawers and turning pockets inside out while hurling epithets and verbal assaults on everything and everyone including but not limited to mine own creator. I was on the verge of giving the dog a cavity search when lo, the tickets didst appear to me, verily in the spot where I left them. But where was my happiness then? Where was that unshakeable feeling of "everything's going to be okay"? I should've probably turned the house upside down looking for that instead of the tickets. As it was, once I had the tickets were in hand, I was instantly ashamed of how I had acted.

Maybe all of that is fodder for practice, too. As I said in my last letter, dealing with frustration seems to be the next big challenge in this whole quest-for-happiness thing. And in trying to ameliorate anger and frustration in order to gain happiness, I've come to realize that anger and happiness are not opposites. Not that practicing happiness doesn't go a long way as a prophylaxis against anger and discontent. It does. But it's like comparing apples and horse apples. They're completely different. (Glad you pointed that out. After the last time we had lunch, I was beginning to wonder if you knew the difference. -Ed.) I'll save the whole point-by-point explanation of exactly how they are different for another letter. Just suffice it to say for now that the only thing they share in common is the rubric of emotion, and that's where the similarity ends.

Anyway, getting back to the paradox (or tautology, if you will) that practicing happiness is a way to be happy. The fact that writing my three things is one of the things that makes me happy reminds me of that old saying about how wood warms you three times: once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it. Likewise, happiness warms you three times: once when it happens, once when you recall it (like when you do the "three things" exercise), and once when you share it. That doesn't roll out quite as smoothly as the thing about wood, but you get my drift.

I tried explaining all of that to Teresa this morning. She waggishly replied with, "So happiness is wood." This only led to a back-and-forth exchange of very naughty puns, each more titillating than the last, and none of which are fit to reprint here. But just let me say this. While wood by itself may not be happiness, it can be a very important ingredient of happiness in consensual relationships between mature adults. Ahem. (A phrase containing the terms "spank" and "plank" also comes to mind. -Ed.) (Quiet you. -TRG)

Okay now I'm embarassed.

-Thaddeus

Happiness: The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz attempting to induce an aggression
response in a goose by blowing his stinky-ass pipe smoke in its face. The
goose later ripped off his beard and crapped on his nice new shirt.

Greg:

I feel like chokin' a fool. Lawd, lawd does I feel like chokin' a fool!

And through that statement, you may have guessed that our Cognitive Science lesson for today is on Dollard and Miller's Frustration-Agression Hypothesis. Put down your tuba and peanut butter sandwich and stop readjusting your frilly under-drawers and listen, dammit. This is important. The lives of thousands of customer service professionals are at stake.

Ready? Begin.

Way back in 1939 when everyone was nice (except maybe Hitler), a buncha eggheads (Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, et. al.) got together and worked out this crazy idea that frustration and aggression were inextricably linked. According to them, aggressive behavior was a response to what they called "goal frustration". In English, that meant that if you have a goal in mind, and you try to achieve that goal but you can't, you respond with aggression in order to achieve that goal. They said that pretty much all aggressive behavior could be explained that way.

Okay. So. A few years go by and a bunch of critics call bullshit on that, so Dollard et. al. come out with another paper that says, "Dear Chumps: We didn't say that aggression was the only response to frustration; we said that aggression was one kind of response to frustration. Love forever and - seriously - go fuck yourself. Dollard et. al. PS: We spent all the grant money on bathtub gin. Ha ha ha on you."

Konrad Lorenz - remember the guy with all the geese following him around? That guy - he was another one who studied aggression in animals 'round about the same time as Dollard and Miller. In his book "On Aggression", he hypothesized that aggression was a natural drive that had to be slaked by acting out from time to time. I say bullshit. First off, he worked with geese, and everyone knows that geese are the most predeterminately pissed off animals in the universe. Second, I'd like to meet him and his geese some Friday night down at the Fight Club. I've got something they can slake!

Look, I'm not saying that Dollard and Miller were right or they were wrong. (I am saying that Lorenz was wrong, though.) What I am saying is this: it seems that dealing with frustration is my next great hurdle in this whole happiness thing. The "3 things" exercise has worked out swimmingly. I highly recommend it. It seems to be a panacea for a whole spectrum of neuroses...half a dozen of my own, at least. (At this very moment somewhere in New York State, a certain Dr. C. J. Spezzano is higly amused. -Ed.) My state of mind is generally pretty - what's the word - "chill" I think is the correct clinical term. But every once in a while, specifically when I'm in some sort of frustrating situation with some public utility or Internet service provider or contractor or - well pretty much anyone you have to deal with to - what's that word - live, I find myself thinking very aggressively if not acting aggressively, and that certainly doesn't make me happy. To wit, the Death List that I have recently composed which consists of several public institutions and enterprises that have stymied my attempts to live a calm and peaceful life. Chief among them (with their various transgressions enumerated for your edification) are:

My Mortgage Company: who just this morning sent me on a circuitous jaunt through PhoneLand and the Valley of Being On Hold because they got my Social Security number one %$#@ digit off.

My Phone Company: who still have not flipped the tiny, tiny switch that makes my downstairs phone work, despite my manifold entreaties and requests...not to mention the fact that they just doubled my phone bill instead of halving it and combining it like they said they would...and don't even get me started on how &^%$ing long it took to get my service hooked up in the first place.

My TV Company: who...aww Christ, I don't even want to say it. The appointment is for between 1P and 5P. They show up at 9:30P, whistling a merry tune. Then they don't even install my...arrrrrrrgh. Choke, hell!Where's my gun, goddammit?! (You're a pacifist. Remember? -Ed.)

My Various Contractors and Service People: who, while they're very cordial and congenial and do good work, I still have to...every time I call they don't...and then I have to...arrrrrrrrgggggggh! I said where's my gun goddammit!!?? The big gun! The one with the knife on the front of it and the part that sprays poison!! Find it!! (Gun, hell. You need some booze! -Ed.)

Okay, there's more but I gotta stop. Otherwise I'm going to have to get someone to stand on this blue vein on my forehead to get it to go down.

Frustration is a part of life. That's just a natural fact. (Or a Noble Truth, if you like. -Ed.) If there weren't any frustrations, that would mean that things happened exactly the way you wanted them to every single time, and all you'd have to do was blink to get anything you wanted, and then where would you be? That's right. You'd be a ditzy blonde living in a tiny bottle, polishing the chrome on Major Healy every time he turned around. (You youngsters ever watch "I Dream of Genie"? -Ed.) And how's that a way to live? Fuckin' no thanks. The interesting thing about life is that it has some randomness and surprises to it, and that's what makes it ossum. Can't have surprises without frustrations. They're flipsides of the same thing.

But how to deal with the frustrations when they arise? It always seems to me that they're so sudden and unexpected that you're stuck in the middle of one before you can say "I need to kill a fool". And since these little, petty things seem to be the only obstacle left between me and a constant state of happiness, it seems like if I get this one solved I'll be doing pretty goddamn good. Plus, I'll be able to pass the savings on to you! (And by "petty" I mean for example that it was the TV guys that showed up late. It's not like I was waiting for a dialysis machine or rabies vaccine or something. That would be totally worth getting freaked out over.) And the solution must be at least slightly more complex than "just chill the hell out". It seems that frustration is one of those autonomic responses, like startling, sneezing or grasping at donuts. Or maybe that's just me.

Awright. So that's the next "assignment" that I'm going to give to myself: come up with a way to disarm frustration. But in the meantime, any suggestions that you have would be more than welcome. Remember (he said, polishing a .303 Enfield with a drop sight), the lives of thousands of customer service professionals hang in the balance.

Cheers, goddammit!

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone

If it gets any more beautiful here, my head will explode. Me and Teresa
near a rapids on the Yellowstone River. My hair is standing on end because of the
shocking amounts of beauty we were exposed to each day, and not because I rubbed
six quarts of DEET and #50 sunblock into it and then baked it in the white-hot heat
of the red-hot sun. I discovered on this trip that I could really give a marmot's ass
about civilization, and really never cared if I saw it again.


Greg:


Just - and I mean "just" - got back from backpacking for four days in Yellowstone. Yes, I mean capital-The capital-Yellowstone, and no, that's not a euphemism for some mosquito-infested water park that I spent the weekend at.

Where do I start? Christ, man - it's Yellowstone! The great-grandpappy of national parks! The one with Old Faithful (which I did not see) and the buffalo (which I did see) and the bears (which I had spray for but did not see)! How much more park-ier can you get than Yellowstone? It's vast, the size of something really big, like the InterWeb or maybe Stupidity. And - with the slight exception of the heavily touristed areas, like the steam vents or the restrooms - is as wild as wild can be. Animals spend their whole lives eating other animals there, and they never run out of animals! How freaking freaked out is that? It's like having a lifetime pass to Kentucky Fried Antelope if you're a bear. And you can walk for six to eight days and never, ever see a toilet. S'true.

We were hiking along a migration path for the whole of our trip, and although we did not see much large wildlife, we were constantly confronted by their bleached skeletons and almost loveseat-sized turds. We were compelled by these parts of our experience to write a new ad slogan for the park - "Yellowstone: Where Animals Come To Eat, Shit and Die". We think it'll be huge with the juvenile male demographic.

True fact that I just made up: The average weight of a single tourist at the Mammoth Visitor Complex is six hundred sixty eight pounds, not counting the Winnebago that they ate for lunch. And you can tell their age by counting the hairs on their back.

Oh oh oh! Speaking of Winnebagos - When we were driving back from the end of the trail to our hotel, Christina, one of our guides, happened to mention (apropos of nothing), "Didn't I tell you guys about the 'anal" thing?" To which we replied - in chorus - "NO." So she told us about how hilarious it is when you add the word "anal" to the beginning of the name of any motorhome that passes by you on the road. And she had just heard the so-far best of this ongoing "competition", and it was this: Anal Dutchman Express. And she was right. It was hilarious. And we howled like rabbits until we could no longer breathe. Of course I had to chime in with: "...when your usual Anal Dutchman just isn't fast enough." The Anal Pop-Up, The Anal Rimrock Express, and The Anal Sunseeker provided us with enough guffaws to make it all the way back to Jackson, where Teresa dished out an honorary self-propelled vehicular title to a wayfaring Anal Ram 1500.

Look, okay, maybe we were high on Gorp and had been massaging our bare hineys with prickly pears for four days. Anything would've been funny. I know I was in a physically compromised state. The two days previous, I drank six quarts of water per day and only peed once. Maybe I was high on thirst.

I wish I could give you some travelogue about the trip like what we did day by day, but doing that just seems so boring and mundane. Was the hiking difficult? At times, yes. On the third day, we had some pretty good elevation gain up some pretty rough terrain. Not the worst I've been on, but - hey, who wants to hear me whine about heat and exertion? I know I don't. Exertion and exposure and bug bites and all that are part and parcel of backpacking, and if I didn't like that kind of stuff, I'd stay at home and tape cheesecake to my ass. The rest of it you can probably guess, having backpacked yourself before. It's the usual pains, made completely immaterial by the unusual, unexpected, and at times indescribable glories of nature. At the end of the trail, I honestly thought I was going to cry. I saw the end of the trail come into view, and all I wanted to do was turn around and go back whence I came, back into the comfort of Yellowstone.

So yeah, maybe instead of trying to give you a blow-by-blow, I'll just include a link to the photos and let them tell the story. For now I'll just go curl up in my nice, warm, civilized bed and dream that I'm still out there somewhere near the Yellowstone River, happy as hell, face down in the weeds and the bugs and the dirt.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone 2007

Ruminating: It's Not Just For Cows Anymore (Happiness Part 10)

Joy may be fleeting, but self-loathing and doubt are
lifelong companions. Just ask my editor. (Props to my homey
Marc Chagall.)

Greg:

Remember that "happiness experiment" I was doing, the one where every night, I'd write down three things that had made me happy that day? Well I decided that I'd stop doing it for a while to see if any of the benefits that I had received from doing the exercise would disappear and if I'd go back to my old cycles of thinking. I got some interesting results.

By the way, this is how I help combat animal testing. I do experiments on my own brain rather than, say, a Rhesus monkey or, say, my cat. My own brain is less expensive, is right here where I can reach it all the time, and I don't have to clean up any poop. I foresee a glowing, cruelty-free future where all psychology students will do the same. I also foresee a future of totally wigged-out zombies who roam the earth in search of research grants so that they can feast on the sweet, sweet money inside them. But that's a discussion for another time.

So did I go back to my old thought cycles? Yes and no. The "lows" in my day-to-day mood never returned. I never had what I would term a "bad" day since I started the exercise or since I took a break from it. There was always something positive, some accomplishment that I sensed in the back of my mind. The feeling of "everything's going to be okay", even if it was only slight, never went away whether I was doing the exercise or not.

However, I did go back to ruminating quite a bit. As I've said before, I believe that rumination is at the center of every neurosis, so that covers pretty much everything except maybe the schizophrenias, brain damage, and organic disorders. I also think that rumination must be in large part a chemical process in the brain. I know that it can be controlled by the same supplements that help defeat the over-firing of neurons that occurs in the locus ceruleus of people like myself who suffer from panic disorder. (Think of over-firing as a sort of "feedback loop" that doesn't stop when it's supposed to.) Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is an over-the-counter supplement that works pretty well, but if you take too much of it or take it for too long, it inhibits your ability to...oh what's that thing? The thing that you do when there are thoughts in your head? Oh yeah...THINK. And that...ummm...what's that thing where something's really bad and you hate it? Oh yeah...BLOWS.

Don't even get me started on Elavil, Norpramin, Xanax, Valium, or Imipramine. I think those should all be reclassified in the PDR as Schedule IV Dick-Wilting Barbiturates. (Was that crude? Beg pardon.)

But back to the point. Since I stopped doing the exercise, any kind of...how shall I say this...negative stimulus, whether it was general stress (traffic, work, and the myriad daily frustrations) or specific stress (my ex-wife calling me names - everything from "sub-human", "complete failure" and "sperm donor" to "faux Buddhist"), caused me to go off into wild tangents of rumination, sometimes lasting for days.

(Hey, cut her some slack. At least she didn't call you "motherfucker" this time. Although I can see how her calling you that, while it may have been intended as hurtful, borders on comically tautological. -Ed.)

(Oh yeah. Hilarious. But c'mon, don't make fun. People who are that pissed are not having a good life. Don't contribute to the suffering. That ain't right. -TRG)

(Oh dude, c'mon that was AWESOME! I even threw in the word "tautological"! That was fuckin' SWEET! That'd get you hella points in Scrabble! -Ed.)

(May I continue? -TRG)

(Whatever, ya fuckin' faux fuckin' Buddhist fucker. -Ed.)

(Thank you for giving me an opportunity to practice. Namaste. Now onward. -TRG)

And I don't mean ruminating just a little. I mean quite a bit. On the upside, it wasn't the old, negative kind of rumination, like "how can I retaliate? or "on a scale of one to a billion, how hateful can I feel?" Instead it was more along the lines of "what is the best, most ethical way to handle this?" And then afterward ruminating ad infinitum on whether I handled the situation well or not.

Well I've pretty much decided that whether it's ruminating on good things or bad, ruminating at all - if it doesn't have any specific outcome - is a pretty huge waste of brainpower, not to mention a phenomenal waste of time. It's like putting your car up on blocks and revving the hell out of it in neutral. Even if you engage the clutch, nothing is going to happen. In the meantime it's a huge waste of fuel - and with gas prices being what they are this Memorial Day Weekend and what with the Global Warming and all the drowning of the polar bears and whatnot, and all the stinky of the exhausty fumes blowing into the neighbor's yard while he's trying to have a barbecue, and then him getting all aggro with the threats and the dog and the shotgun...well, you can see how ruminating just makes it bad for everyone.

Okay. So. Yeah. Here's the good part. Just one day of doing the happiness writing exercise brings all that unnecessary rumination to a tire-barking halt. I know because I resumed the exercise. It was like Baby Jesus poured out a mighty flood of calm that immediately extinguished my brainfire. The experience was truly phenomenal. It's as though the action of focusing on things that made you happy even for a moment completely negates the brain's ability to ruminate. It's as though you can't be miserable and happy at the same time. Shocking I know. (Whatever, ya fuckin' faux fuckin' failed cognitive scientist. -Ed.) (Namaste. -TRG) It's also probably something that Big Pharma would hate for you to find out, but there you are. If doing this simple exercise is all it takes to elevate a person's general mood and inhibit if not altogether stop neurotic ruminations, then Big Pharma is going to go broke. And I know there must be something to this because I performed this experiment on the most jacked-up brain I could find: my own.

Cheers, (Whatever. -Ed.)

-Thaddeus

Jerk Appreciation Day

Soda Jerk ca. 1940: While most believed that Soda Jerks were
trained to be complete assholes, the truth is that they were hired for
their natural penchant for blatant assholery.

Greg:

Ever heard of rice? They eat it like crazy in Asia. They even make "milk" out of it. Word on the street is that a little farm girl offered some to the Buddha during his ascetic period and it was so tasty that he said (and I quote), "Fuck this 'starving' shit. Suffering is for the birds. Rice milk shots for everyone!" And then they all got enlightened. The end.

But wait - one more thing about rice. I've found that it is the training food of the future. I've been using it to train for my backpacking trip to Yellowstone, and let me tell ya, it works. All ya gotta do is load 40 pounds of the stuff on your back, and your legs will be as burly as oaks in no time. I filled my backpack with a Buddha-load of rice today (1 Buddha-load = 40 pounds or roughly 385 East Indian pala. -Ed.) and then commenced to haul my hiney up and down every hill I could find in Carkeek Park. It was awe-inspiring. I swear that I sweat out my entire body weight and achieved pure freedom as an Emissary Of The Light. Then I woke up and dragged my 260-pound rice-burdened ass home through the pouring rain.

I hear the only downside of training with rice is that you get huge, but you occasionally experience "rice rage". We'll see about that.

Speaking of things that are good for you but cause also cause you pain, I've developed a whole new appreciation for difficult people, or "jerks" as some refer to them in the vernacular. Perhaps you've met some. Perhaps you've been one. I know I have, so it is not without a certain affinity that I offer "jerk" as an omnibus term that includes people like me. (I foresee a new best seller: "Jerk Like Me", by T. Gunn. -Ed.) I realized a little while back that were it not for the jerks I've known, I wouldn't have some of the truly wonderful things that I have in my life right now. I'm going to take this opportunity to redefine the word "jerk" for myself like this. Instead of it being a pejorative, I'm going to give it the neutral definition of "anyone who gets your attention much as you would get a dog's attention by jerking on its choke chain". It is not pleasant attention-getting, but it is potentially useful attention-getting nonetheless.

This begs the question "what the fuck are you talking about?" Bear with me. As my Spanish teacher used to say, por ejemplo:

When I worked at Perkins-Coie, the mammoth international law firm in downtown Seattle, I used to share a work space with a woman who drove me nuts. Our personalities were as compatible as water and flaming trucks of dynamite being attacked by Mongol hordes with flaming trucks of dynamite. And I had to sit with her in a tiny room every day and listen to her blather and prattle while doing the most demeaning work known to man: litigation support. Just as my frustration with her was driving me to the point of double murder/suicide (meaning I would kill myself, rise from the dead, and kill myself again while she prattled on unawares), she brought in a newspaper clipping and showed it to me. "There's a story about a really cool company that just opened, and I think you ought to work there." The story was about AtomFilms. So strong was my desire to work there, and so strong was my compulsion to flee this woman's presence that I harassed AtomFilms until they gave me a job. (No, really, I did. There was no open position at the time.) So in a way I have her to thank for my job at Atom, which lead to - well pretty much the rest of my copywriting career. Thanks, Horrendously Annoying Lady!

More recently, there were the people who moved in upstairs from us at Uwajimaya. We'll call them The Thumpingtons. These people were so noisy that you could swear that they were made of solid lead, suffered from fainting spells (or at least leapt into the air and belly-flopped on the carpet for no reason), and flew into apoplectic fits where they threw their furniture across the room. (Their furniture was also ostensibly made of lead from the sounds of it. -Ed.) We let 'em know that we could hear everything that they did, not in a "shut the fuck up" kinda way, but in a more friendly "you are compromising your privacy by all that goddamn noise you make" kind of way. That freaked 'em out pretty bad (I'd say from the looks of them, they were born freaked out. -Ed.) and caused them to increase the noise forty-fold. Mrs. Thumpington started vacuuming with a power saw (from the sounds of it), and Mr. Thumpington attached a motor to the davenport and started ramming it into the walls (again - from the sounds of it). So great was our noise-induced distress that we decided to do the unthinkable. We called John L. Scott President-Award-Winning Real Estate Moghul Gloria Lee and got her to sell us a house. Now each night when we come home to nothing but birdsong and the wind in the cedars as a soundtrack (and neither crashes nor thumps emanating from the ceiling), we thank Scott and Tami Thumpington of the Uwajimaya Village Apartments for motivating us to achieve our dream of perfect tranquility through home ownership.

I've got a ton more, but I'll save all of them for another time. But suffice it to say, if I'd've been dismissive with these people and just shunted their presence in my life off as annoying jerkitude that I couldn't bother with (or worse, tried to engage it and do battle with it), I never would've experienced the gifts that they offered me.
I honestly bear no grudge against these people, these "jerks" as I've said. I truly feel that I owe them a debt of gratitude for all the good they've done, although I don't know what form the repayment of that debt would take other than to stay as far from them as possible. "Look, we don't get along, so I'll do you and me the favor of giving you a two-state-wide berth." So I've unofficially declared May 18th as Jerk Appreciation Day for every person I've ever known who gave my life a yank in a positive direction. (And why not? It's the same day that Mount St. Helens blew up and the anniversary of my high school graduation. Not to say either one of those things was a yank in the right direction, either academically or geologically speaking. Although there are certain fans of vulcanology who might disagree.)

When I saw the Dalai Lama in San Francisco last month, he had something interesting to say about jerks. The Chinese government has done some unspeakably reprehensible things to his people over the years, and someone asked the question of how he found it possible to still sit down and negotiate with them. He said - and this is an imperfect quote, mind you - that he always approaches the situation this way: he truly believes that the people he is negotiating with are his friends. He says that he knows this because as human beings, they have the same fundamental needs and desires as he does. But, he said, although I truly believe they are a friend, I never forget what they are capable of.

That's compassion tempered with wisdom, to be sure.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus