By Booker B on
1/8/2011 8:45 AM
I saw the AA drill at second hand. Those people helped my mom pull out of the hole she'd dug, and she never did fall off the wagon after the day she finally called and they visited -- June 21, 1974. Her rock bottom was inability to do anything but sit on the couch, including go to work or do anything for us.
The old man tried AA and ran away in revulsion from the religious aspects to become the local PR flack for Madelyn Murray O'Hair's atheist group. Essentially he substituted addiction to atheist dogma for the booze.
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By Booker B on
12/11/2010 10:11 AM
So I'm making time for a short update, after a long, long time.
I've been thinking about fooling with the site layout for quite a while, and I finally made time for it. I like it so far. It's too plain -- needs some more detail/elaboration/whatever -- but it works as expected (thanks to a tiny javascript and some css -- very small footprint). I find it fun and way silly, as intended. I don't have a whole lot I particularly want this site to do, so it's a decent sandbox. This is nothing I would propose for a commercial site, but it's been an interesting exercise.
How have you been?
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By Booker B on
4/27/2010 12:40 PM
I was living in a mountain town & working as the local librarian there. The dream has nothing to do with that job, but it was part of the situation. I was returning to work from somewhere, at some point during the middle of the day. As I approached a big open intersection -- maybe a cul de sac of some kind -- I saw a group of local brothers. All were middle aged, with long, stringy greying hair, and all were similarly overweight, about normal for men their age. They were standing around a car sort of joshing around, and one had a football which he pulled back to throw. His brother got ready to catch, but at the last minute, the first one couldn't bring himself to let go of the ball, so he tucked it away and started to try to run off with it. They all rolled their eyes at having to deal with him again -- he was the wrong 'un and not quite all there, frequently in a petulant but still mostly good-natured way. But they all felt compelled to get his behavior organized so the game could go on, but he just couldn't make himself give up the ball, so they grouped around and started trying to pull it away, while he shuffled and twisted, trying to keep it. It was about to go from playful to cranky & frustrated when I woke up.
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By Booker B on
2/20/2010 11:41 AM
So I woke up from this LONG elaborate Burning Man dream. It was late spring, going into summer, IOW time to get the annual plan going and commence building stuff. Ivy and I were camping out in this vast backyard of some house someplace, and other groups were camped around the area. People were clumped together but circulating around, so it was almost a single campsite but not quite. And every single group was getting organized to build an art car.
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By Booker B on
12/2/2009 10:56 PM
I am suddenly and powerfully reminded of an incident when Yahoo no. 1 was 6 or 7 years old.
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By Booker B on
10/30/2009 4:03 PM
The dive downward into the murk started out as a bolt for freedom, but elation rapidly faded as the water quality degraded and light dimmed with every inch of travel. Soap was the dominant theme of the stagnant soup, along with bleach that seared delicate gills with every breath. But strength had returned with air once again an option, and the fish drove with increasing power through the murk, hoping for fresh water.
Distance brought no trace of change, nor any current at all, which was even more weird. The mystery was solved . . .
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By Booker B on
10/9/2009 8:22 AM
The complex had many small, outdoor hot tubs dotted about the place for use by the residents, one of them along a second-floor walkway a few steps from Ivy's back door. This pleased me a great deal.
Back in the party, Dawn and I chatted amiably and shared a grilled cheese sandwich. . . .
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By Booker B on
9/27/2009 4:55 AM
Back in a world of lint and random grit, the fish indulged in a moment of frustration. Possibly, it reflected somewhat belatedly, the world wasn't quite as universally liquid as it had supposed or hoped. The range of possible dry abrasions seemed much, much wider that would seem convenient or even acceptable. The weird rhythmic locomotion of these weird dry-landers only exacerbated the problem as it continually scraped all manner of scratchy stuff against all the delicate structures that a fish needs most to live its life.
Also, oxygen was in disappointingly short supply. . . .
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By Booker B on
9/23/2009 8:44 AM
The adventures available inside the tapered styrofoam cylinder quickly exhausted themselves. The distant droning of the class resolved down to uninteresting background hum, punctuated by random shuffling of no great interest. The fish floated for a while, working its gills and fins, presenting what it imagined would be a pretty (if alarming) spectacle, should the owner of the tea decide to retrieve it and view the scene from above. But this carefully composed tableau remained unregarded and of only passing significance, even to the creature who made itself the material of potential art. Attention remained determinedly elsewhere, and a desire for diversion began to glow, then blaze, then silently, colorlessly, motionlessly explode. The fish was bored. . . .
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By Booker B on
9/15/2009 5:26 PM
The fish bided its time as it gasped for breath in the syrupy liquid. It felt the rythmic sloshing as Daniel strode along, noticing the pauses as he navigated obstacles, all the time sinking further as the contents of the cup emptied bit by bit. A final lurch brought a welcome end to the jostling, as the backpack came to rest on the floor next to a desk in the auditorium-style classroom. The fish's eyes began to bulge with the struggle to breathe, and the project seemed likely to come to an early and disappointing end, while Daniel fussed with the fold-out writing table and pencils and whatnot.
Finally he reached down into his pack and pulled out a dripping notebook. He dropped it on the desk cursing, then rapidly yanked his expensive book, also badly wetted, from the pack blustering and gasping. Finally, he lifted the cup from the depths of the pack, peering down inside to see how bad the damage looked.
The fish was ready. Clinging with the tips of its dorsal fins to the open gap where it had entered, it gave a mighty pull and arch and squeezed back through to drop onto the open floor. Daniel felt the jump, and stared puzzled at the cup as the fish flipped and flopped behind his chair and out of sight. He angrily pushed shut the lid, muttering about the poor quality of the seal that he had trusted with so much.
The woman behind him handed over some napkins she had retrieved from her own bag to help sop up the mess, along with a sympathetic smile. The fish gasped with relief that she had set her own tea on the floor to root for the offering, and it managed to flip onto the toe of her boot, then immediately in a full circle up over the rim of her cup and down into the liquid. It wriggled in relief that the tea was only tepid and lightly sweetened, more clear than the sticky juice, if rather astringent in taste and feel. The fish rushed in circles at the bottom of the cup, as fast as it could, to rinse the gummy sugar from its gills and fins. It sighed in relief, as breath came in easier and easier gasps.
It heard a distant drone start up down the steps, as the professor began the class. Daniel's cursing and grumbling subsided, and scratching began above as the woman wrote her first notes. Attention shifted into the unknown distance.
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