Category: Journal

I’ve written three posts in the last three days and deleted each one of them. Not because they weren’t any good, but…wait, no, it’s exactly because they weren’t any good. Between the ongoing crisis centered in D.C. and the loss of my father, I’m struggling to concentrate on anything else. So I won’t. This is mostly for my own benefit, to remind myself. If you’re interested, by all means read on, but I won’t be upset if you decide to skip this one. Some of these memories could well be inaccurate, but that doesn’t bother me. They’re my memories and I don’t love them any more or less if they’re true. The first vacation I remember taking with my father back when The Beatles were still a band. We lived in a big, two story rental home in Dallas. We had a wall calendar and there was a picture of an airplane on the day when we were leaving. About all I can remember is that we were flying Braniff back when they were still a major airline and they painted all of there planes in different solid colors with white tails.  I hoped we’d take a blue plane because it was my favorite color. I don’t recall whether we did or not. I don’t remember our first proper camping trip. I do remember that the weather invariably turned rainy any time we camped. When I later became a Calvin & Hobbes fan, I really appreciated all of the strips where the dad insisted that they enjoy their camping trips no matter the weather, as camping in the rain “builds character.” I remember swearing that, when I grew up, I would never again camp in the rain. I have kept that promise. We owned a canoe and took semi-regular trips, mostly day trips, but sometimes overnight, to float the rivers in north central Texas. They were gentle floats, most of the time, as there was no white water anywhere near us. We floated the Trinity, the Caddo, and most often, the Brazos. The Brazos had a marvelous limestone bed which made the river incredibly clear. Dad did the bulk of the paddling as I was (and remain) lazy and preferred fishing to paddling.  The Brazos was most definitely “our place.” We had a preferred camp site, most likely on private property up a creek on the west side of the river below Lake Whitney. There was an enormous limestone boulder, a house-sized cube, just in front of the mouth of the creek. If you weren’t prepared, you’d miss the entrance and have to paddle back upstream. The first hundred yards were wide and slow and had a very low canopy of branches which gave the impression of being in a tunnel. The creek turned to the right at another, smaller, cube of limestone and the canopy gave way to open sky. There was a small, white beach behind the boulder where we could tie up the canoes.  You followed a short path up a ten foot cliff to and found yourself underneath a one hundred and fifty foot wide amphitheater carved out of a limestone cliff. Under the shelter of the shell was the softest, whitest sand you’ve ever seen. We often slept under in the amphitheater one just an air mattress and a sheet, no tents or sleeping bags, and watched the stars wheel by before falling asleep. More often, we’d camp either using our travel trailer or a borrowed Merry Miler conversion van. I loved that van. The idea of having a house behind the driver’s seat seemed very science-fictiony to my tween brain. We took it out to New Mexico, where I first smelled pinion pine fires and had my first sip of Jack Daniels by a camp fire on a cold, clear night at what was surely the highest altitude I’d ever experienced. We drove down to El Paso and I visited Mexico for the first time back when crossing the border was a simple thing to do. That night, my grandfather on my mother’s side passed away and we drove overnight back home through an ice storm. We stopped in Clyde, Texas, and we found that there was more than an inch of ice on the van, but we kept going anyway. The trailer wasn’t quite as much fun since I was stuck in the very uncomfortable back seat of a 1970’s Chevy Blazer. It was better for sleeping and cooking and showering, though. My mom always made her shrimp salad with iceberg lettuce, the smallest frozen shrimp I’ve ever seen, and Good Seasons Italian dressing. We took the trailer up for an overnight camping trip, dads and sons, by some reservoir in north Texas (I can’t remember which). The dads set up camp and started drinking bear and cooking beans and sausages and they laughed when we kids took off with fishing poles for a little sandbar near the camp sight. If you’ve never encountered a sand bass run, let me describe it for you: No matter what you throw out into the water, you will catch a sandy. The bait didn’t matter. The lure didn’t matter. We got to the point where we were tying multiple lures to the same line and catching more than one fish at once. When we returned to camp, each kid had a stringer or two full of pound to pound and a half sand bass. I still remember the look on all the dad’s faces. Alas, the trailer did not get a happy ending. One night, the night before we were going to go on a trip, my sister and I couldn’t sleep, so we were moving around the house and we noticed a light outside. It turns out that gas lines are difficult to repair and the trailer burned down that night and we never got another one. My father was very big on the traditional Big Family Vacation. He even had t-shirts screen printed with logos for the vacations, something that seemed very exotic at the time. The first one of these vacations I remember was to the Big Bend National Park. Our truck ran out of gas on the way down there and mobile phones were still a couple of decades away, so we flagged down a couple of…

…post a list of links! The news has had a certain Gish gallop quality to it. I have a lot to say about it, but I’m not sure I have anything useful to say yet, and so I’m linking these for posterity’s sake.  Charlie Stross on his travel plans (hint: they’re not going to involve visiting the United States for a while). Patrick Joseph with a list of the highlights from the first week of our unprecedented president. John Scalzi lays out his case for hope (or for despair-it’s a pretty fine edge). Gizmodo with an extremely short menu of options for people who want secure telephones. Virginia’s representative Dave Brat showing his knowledge of slang is equal to his understanding of women’s issues. The SPLC describes what an honest investigation of voting issues would turn up (I wouldn’t hold my breath). A convoy of Navy SEALS drove through Kentucky in otherwise unmarked vehicles flying Trump flags. Speaking of SEALS, the President sent them into action ‘without sufficient intelligence.’  Should we be expecting Benghazi-ish hearings? Um…wouldn’t bet on it. The new President, being as presidential as he can, uses the national prayer breakfast to mock Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you click the link, please be sure to watch Arnold’s response. And now, some Ted Leo to close out. Put on your boots and march. -RK  

…then it probably is.  These are really lousy times on both a personal and global level. One of the very few, very bright silver linings is how much love and support I’ve received from friends both near and distant. Even without the support bit, hearing voices I haven’t heard in a long time, even if only hearing them in my head while reading, has been a huge help to me. If you’re reading this, thank you, as there’s a very real chance it’s you I’m talking about. I switched the site over to a different font because the other one was too twee (and it handled quotation marks about as badly as I’ve ever seen them handled). While most of the experts recommend Helvetica or something similar for legibility, I kind of hate the look of it on my site, so we’re switching to something else shortly. I have a stack of books I’m eager to read, but unfortunately, that stack is virtual as the local Half Price stores don’t have what I’m looking for. I have a system for for book-hunting: 1. If the author is still alive, I buy it at a local indie bookseller to ensure the author benefits and the local bookstore gets their cut. 2. If the author is not longer with us, I’ll look at Half Price to try to support a local bookstore as I’m somewhat less concerned about enriching the author’s estate. 3. If the book is just plain unavailable locally, then I’ll look at Amazon. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that what I’m currently reading is Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which isn’t what I’d planned on reading next and isn’t really in my wheelhouse. Come to think of it, the fact that it isn’t the sort of thing I’d normally reach for is probably a good thing as I tend to gravitate towards what I’m comfortable. Anyway, I’m happy to give Klosterman a spin because he wrote one of the best rock-related essays ever, but I’m not entirely sure that that level of hipness will carry an entire book. -RK  

I’m avoiding social media entirely during work hours today, and probably for the week. Not only am I way behind at the office, but watching events unfold is throwing me in to fight or flight mode. I can’t do anything useful about what’s happening, and I can’t concentrate on work, so I just have to try to tune it out. If you need to reach me, there’s always e-mail or telephone*. The events of the day are extraordinary, utterly unlike anything I’ve ever seen, but I have to tune it out while I’m at the office. Be safe out there, and don’t let the bastards win.  -RK * It just occurred to me that I’ve had an email address for 24 years now, and I think I still have my original address. It can’t have been that long, can it? Funny old world.

It’s been a pretty shit month, hasn’t it? I’ll write more about that later, but I need to distract myself a little tonight, so that’s what I’m doing now. I dedicated my January reading to “authors who influenced authors I like.” I started out with G.K. Chesteron’s The Man Who Was Thursday. It’s an exquisitely written but ultimately puzzling book. It’s marvelously paranoid comedy in the opening chapters, turning to broad farce, and finally to something akin to magical realism and…I’m not sure exactly what. He’s a terrific writer, but I enjoyed it less and less the deeper in to it I got.  Next on the list was my first-ever Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye. I know it’s only one novel, but I can tell you already that I flat-out love Chandler. The plotting is a little over elaborate and some of the characterizations feel more racist now than they probably did when the book was released. That aside, he’s an incredible stylist. He keeps it tight without ever making it seem as though being sparse was an end of itself. He’s incredibly pleasurable to read, and I say that as a person who has never had any interest in crime fiction.  Friday, I finished P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves. I’m told that this is, at best, a middling example of the Jeeves books, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless. “Breezy” is the best word to describe these stories. The dialogue is hilarious, the inner monologue of the nigh-clueless Bertie Wooster is a hoot, and the plots, while a little repetitive, will make you grin. If you’re looking for something that you’ll enjoy reading without being overly challenged, Wodehouse is a perfect fit. In case you haven’t been following the latest news in web browsers (and frankly, I haven’t either), you might not be aware that Opera now features a built in VPN. I don’t know how it compares to other VPNs, but it is severely limited in terms of countries you can select. Still, a built in VPN seems like a Very Good Thing Indeed and it was enough to get me to take it out for a spin. Opera looks enormously like Microsoft’s new Edge browser, or maybe it’s the other way around. It has the features you’d expect in a modern browser. Most importantly, it supports extensions, so you can use things like LastPass (and you should be using LastPass or something like it), and it supports private browsing and things like that. It’s surprisingly lightweight as well. Just for grins, I pulled up Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge and loaded the same four web sites (Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook) to see how much memory they were using. Edge was by far the lowest, using a mere 28mb of RAM. I suspect this is partially due to it being built in to the operating system (I’m using a Windows computer tonight) and partially due to the limited support for extensions. Opera was the next lowest at 87mb. Chrome clocked in at 125mb, and Firefox sat in the 450mb range. WTF, Firefox?  UPDATE: Windows Task Manager is bullshit. When I opened the same sites on the different browsers, the memory usage for the browsers was reported as wildly different by Task Manager. But…the total memory usage percentage moved by almost identical amounts for each browser (in the 550mb range for all four). Opera still feels lighter and faster than Chrome and especially Firefox, but my initial numbers didn’t tell the whole story. Anyway, I think I’ll keep using Opera for a bit. The VPN even works on my Android phone, albeit as a separate app. The only downside I’ve found so far is the sync between different machines doesn’t seem to work especially well. I can live with that.  Here’s a little bit of required reading: Keith Law’s weekly Stick To Baseball post. If you’re not follow Keith, why not? He regularly writes about baseball (duh), books, food, music, and board games. That’s in addition to his weekly links-list-a-go-go. He writes frequently, he writes well, and he writes almost exclusively about things I’m interested in, so this is the easiest recommendation I’ll ever write. I just read that the courts have stayed the executive order barring people-from-certain-countries-but-definitely-not-just-Muslims from entering the U.S. Thank goodness for some good news in a week that’s been almost devoid of anything positive. Right now, I’ll take what I can get. R.K.

This is a perfect encapsulation of how my father fought: This is taken from Hellblazer #71 by Garth Ennis and the late Steve Dillon. Obviously, it’s not mine, and if they want me to take it down, I will., but it’s just about perfect for my father and I wanted to share it. 

My father passed away Monday morning. This is something that had been in the mail for a long, long time, and it was only his almost superhuman will to live that had seen him through more than enough medical issues to put down a lesser man like, for example, me.  Most of the good things I know about being a man can be traced directly back to his teachings and, more importantly, examples. His integrity was on a level I could never hope to achieve. Thanks to him and my mother, I never knew that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy reading or eating vegetables or things of that sort. He encouraged me to share his interests, but never made me feel forced and, if he was disappointed that my football career ended in third grade, he never let on. Even after my parents divorce, I never, ever had to question where I stood with him. What I didn’t learn, until later, was that he voluntarily increased the agreed-upon alimony payments to my mother because he felt that their agreement was unfair to her. That, in a microcosm, was who he was and who I strive to be. He was good, he was fair, and if he felt that something wasn’t right, he wouldn’t hesitate to fix it. He was incredibly silly, too, so my sense of humor, for better or worse, is something I got from him. Even in his mid-seventies, he was playful and affectionate. His granddaughters adored him. His wife lived for him, and he for her. He adored his children and he was genuinely proud of us, of what we’d done and who we’d become. He was a good man who was well-loved and well-respected. I miss him, and I hope I can live my life in a way that lives up to the example he set. Even if I can’t always reach that high standard, I know he’d be proud of me anyway.

Tomorrow’s going to be a rough day. I imagine you’ve already read your fill of people wringing their hands/gnashing their teeth/working themselves into a lather over the prospect of a Trump presidency.  That’s hardly a surprise as the president-elect hasn’t shown much in the way of good judgement or good taste since winning the election. Chuck Wendig posits that the awfulness is by design, and that could well be the case. What worries me the most about our next president is that he refuses to be held accountable for anything. Right from the beginning, he made it clear that the he didn’t care whether what he was saying was true or not, and when he was caught, he regularly doubled down with another lie. He couldn’t even be forced to produce his tax returns, the bare minimum financial disclosure expected of presidential candidates. Think about that one for a moment: It’s like interviewing someone for a job and having them tell you “you can see my references after I get the gig.” He’s appointed his son-in-law to a White House staff position, which is potentially a violation of anti-nepotism laws. He’s refused to divest himself of his business interests, which may be illegal in and of itself, but it sets up a situation where breaking the law at some point is a certainty. After admitting that Russia was likely behind the leak of extremely damaging information against Hillary Clinton, he said it was “time to move on,” suggesting that he wasn’t interested in investigation whether or not a foreign power interfered with the presidential election. The man who will take the oath of office tomorrow morning has made it clear that he does not feel even remotely beholden to the law and thinks he is not accountable to anyone. There are more things to scare me about a Trump presidency than I care to list, but this is the greatest. He has refused to accept any restriction, any limitation on his actions. That fact that he hasn’t been held accountable for his actions suggests that it will only get worse. -RK P.S. My thanks and admiration to everyone who will be in the District to march in protest, including my wife and several of her friends.  

When things get lousy, the thing I have the most trouble with is overcoming inertia. It’s been a pretty lousy time lately, so I’ve had all the forward momentum of an overturned tortoise. The best way to deal with unpleasantness is to face it head-on, but that’s a lot of work and I haven’t felt up to it. On the plus side, video games exist, right? Times like these, I feel an overlarge sense of accomplishment for fulfilling the least of my obligations. There are times when I can’t even manage that much, although I’ve come up with a Terribly Clever Strategy to keep me moving when I would rather not: I pretend that I don’t have any choice. That my seem a little slight and overly obvious, but I’ve found it to be a useful fib to tell myself. It’s what gets me out of bed and on the way to the office on cold mornings when I know work is going to be a bit of a pig and I have a beautiful wife next to me and a warm cat sleeping on my back. I would really rather be doing almost anything else than going to work or, ideally, doing nothing at all. I am not be nature especially ambitious or dedicated to my job, but I show up something approaching every day. Of course, abject fear of losing the job plays a part as well. Anyway, I’ve made a few commitments to myself and I’m telling myself that they are non-negotiable so as to encourage following through when I’d rather not. Maybe someday, I can use this sense of unease, on both a personal and larger level, as a spur to bring about changes in myself and the world around me. That sounds awfully noble, and I’d like to be the sort of person who does that. For now, though, I’ll just rouse myself by pretending that I have no other option. It’s not the most admirable motivation, but at least it works for me. “Another John Doe” by thenewno2, which is Dhani Harrison’s band. He sounds a lot like his father, doesn’t he? Anyway, I like the moodiness of this song and suspect I would like it more with an adult beverage in my hand.

Last week, I eagerly read Keith Law’s take on Stranger In A Strange Land, the most interesting Heinlein novel I’ve come across. The whole piece is good, well worth clicking the link, but the addendum is what stuck with me: “…I forgot to mention the one absolute nails-on-chalkboard line in the book, where one character (Jill?) says that nine times out of ten, a rape is at least partly the woman’s fault. I know it was written a half-century ago, but it’s absolutely cringeworthy, and knocked the book down a full grade for me.” I get and even agree with Law’s reaction, but the thing that I keep coming back to is that fact that the reader can hear the author’s voice behind the character. I’m not saying that Heinlein agreed with the statement in question, but when you read it, you hear him saying it, not the character. It’s not just Heinlein, either; if an author has a “bad” character make a statement like the one above, you can hear the author condemning that line of thought. If a good character says it, you hear the author condoning it. That’s a long way of saying that Law’s statement reminded me of the best book I read in 2016, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It was a terrific yarn, but what made the book stand out was the fact that the characters were so well drawn that you (almost)* never heard the author’s voice behind them. Strange and Norrell are both, for all their magical prowess, incredibly human. They say and do things because they’re the things that Strange and Norrell do, not because Clarke puts them on a soapbox to voice her opinions.  In the end, they’re neither altogether good nor bad, and reading their story reminds you of just how rarely characters are drawn so well. I wound up reading twenty four books on the train last year, a few less than I’d aimed for, but there were a couple of weighty tomes on the list that slowed me down a little. I won’t try to rank them, but a couple of ’em merit an end-of-year mention. The most interesting book I read was Dr. Greg Graffin’s Population Wars. I’m not sure how I’d classify it. It’s a memoir, a statement of natural philosophy, a biology primer, and a sociology…something. It’s not the most focused book I’ve ever read, but for all of the information, it’s never a dry read. The other contender for my favorite read of 2016 was William Gibson’s The Peripheral. It’s incredibly fast and smart and it begs to be read in one sitting. It comes across as near future speculative fiction, but at it’s core, it’s a cautionary tale about the devastating consequences to a culture which comes into contact with a more economically-advance culture. 2017 is off to a fine start, at least with respect to what I’m reading. I’m a little embarrassed to say I’ve never read G.K. Chesterton before, but he’s highly regarded by many of my favorite writers. I’m reading The Man Who Was Thursday now and I laughed out loud several times on the train tonight. And man, could I use a laugh or two right now. -RK   * There’s a bit of poetic justice near the end that, while satisfying, felt a little too clear cut in its black-and-whiteness and took me out of the story.