What I’m Blogging

The rain continues. The grey is darker, more charcoal really, and I am felling sick. No, not the twisted, unbalanced kind of sick (I know what your were thinking). This is the more socially acceptable form of sore throat, ache in the joints, grumpy disposition kind of sick that keeps the pharmaceutical companies in business. Lord knows, I’m doing my part.

My wife is doing her part too. She is equally sick and by logical deduction, equally sore throat, ache in joints, but most important - equally grumpy. We are quite the pair. It wouldn’t be bad if it was just grumpiness times two, but the mathematical reality of shared grumpiness is more of an equation involving grumpiness raised to the power of two.

So we are going to be miserable today. Yes it’s our choice. We could decide to “buck up” and be happy, but the misery goes so well with the rain. It would be a shame to waste it.

It’s the birthday of Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot, born into a prominent Unitarian family in Saint Louis (1888). He loved the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe. He was a birdwatcher. He liked to watch steamboats going up the Mississippi. He didn’t have many friends in St. Louis or when he went to Harvard. He moved to England and got a job as a banker. He married a 26-year-old ballet dancer who he never was completely comfortable with. He couldn’t bring himself to shave in front of her. Virginia Woolf said of Elliot, “He was one of those poets who live by scratching, and his wife was his itch.”

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Overcast

Rain day. Yesterday was sky blue sky. Today is the we have a polar opposite. There is rain. More rain, and again rain. It’s a good thing I got off my rump and did the shopping yesterday, because if I felt lazy yesterday, today I feel positively catatonic.

I suppose the gloomy grey colour of the Autumn sky has something to do with it. The appearance of hopelessness tends to increase the self same feeling. It’s the kind of day you just want to curl up on the couch (sofa), drink coffee, stare out the window and pretend your a horribly depressed French poet. It really needs a cigarette to complete the scene, but I can’t stand the taste, and my French is really bad. This is a day that calls for some sad music and a reflective mood.

Rainy days and I have a history. I’ve moved houses in the rain. I’ve canoed the rivers of Northern Ontario in eight straight days of rain. I’ve sailed in the rain. It’s wet, cold and generally miserable. The tendency is towards reverse pathetic fallacy; nature doesn’t assume our mood, we assume nature’s. So I will try to stay upbeat and positive during the downpour while recalling the the words of Snoopy from Peanuts “It rains on the just and the unjust, but what about us in betweens?”

Saturdays are supposed to be for getting some things done around the house. Saturdays are supposed to be about cranking up that good old Protestant work ethic into full gear. There are lawns to cut, leaves to rake, cars to wash, and a host of other activities that are better suited to a TV ad for a huge corporate hardware chain store. In Canada it’s Canadian Tire…. your mileage may differ.

…I just don’t want to do anything…

My problem, apart from being a Protestant in protest and thus having no work ethic to cling to, is that I just don’t want to do anything. Nothing, nada, bupkiss. Like the gas tanks of North America after a gulf coast hurricane, I’m running on empty.

I should at least get dressed. Pajamas in the middle of the afternoon is not a very good way to inspire activity. The most complex thing I’ve done so far is brew coffee, and make lunch for the kids.

I don’t want to. I know in my heart that I should be all “once more into the breach”, but what I really want is a snooze button on life…. just 5 more minutes of not having to do anything. Really. Just 5 more minutes.

It’s the birthday of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, born in St. Paul (1896). He was working on his first novel when he met Zelda Sayre at a military dance in Montgomery, Alabama and fell in love. He told her she looked like the heroine in his novel.

…looked like they’d just stepped out of the sun…

They got engaged, but her parents didn’t approve because he didn’t have any money, so he moved to New York and tried to publish the novel. It was rejected twice. He moved home with his parents in St. Paul to rewrite it again.

While he worked on it, Zelda wrote him letters about the men she was dating and how maybe they should break off the engagement. His novel was about a man who loses a girl because he doesn’t have enough money, so he quoted lines from Zelda’s letter in the book. He changed the title to This Side of Paradise.

It was accepted by Scribner in September 1919. He took a train to Montgomery. She agreed to marry him. This Side of Paradise came out in 1920, when he was just 23, and he became an overnight sensation. He and Zelda got married a week after publication at St. Patrick’s in New York City.

They were the most famous literary couple of their day and perhaps any other. They were so famous that the Hearst papers had a reporter whose only job was to cover what they did. They were beautiful people. Dorothy Parker said, “Scott and Zelda looked like they’d just stepped out of the sun.”

Fitzgerald wrote a play, The Vegetable, produced in 1923. It was a flop. He sailed off to France in May of 1924. He started writing a novel about a bootlegger named Jay Gatsby. He worked on it all that summer. Fitzgerald was never satisfied with it. He said, “I never at any one time saw Gatsby clear myself, for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.”

By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart. He was running out of money. His drinking was catching up with him. It took him nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night, which got mixed reviews in 1934. He died in 1940, at the age of 44, in a year in which all of his books together sold 72 copies with royalties of $13.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

You never know that it is good until you get it. Yesterday gloom and Doom. Today, sunny, warm, and I’m at home. The car is still dead. It is still parked up by the takeout place where I left it last night. Unless someone has broken in, fixed it and taken it for a joyride. If my hopes for some kind of insurance settlement are to come true, I need a roving band of mechanically inclined neer do wells with tools. And parts. Sometimes I aim too high, but a guy has to have dreams.

…why do I have an office…

So my kitchen is now Network Command Central (please repeat with reverb on) for Gigantic Concrete. I get my email here. I get my phone calls here. I’ve got the big network monitor board with all the green and red dots that goes “PING” if anything goes wrong. Coffee is on the brew, a real breakfast is cooking on the stove, and loved ones are right here as well. So why do I have an office?

This morning started at 7:00 AM with a call from Quebec about fixing a network switch. Later I had a chat with the Network Architect about the budget for next year. I just got off the phone with the Regional IT manager for the Eastern United States about some site upgrades. I did the exact same things on my kitchen table that I would have done in my cube. I did them the same, but I did them happier (I also did them in boxer shorts because no need to dress for the occasion).

Blessings are disguised. The car breakdown is leading into a pretty good day.

You knew it was coming. You could see it forming on the horizon, imperceptible chaos lurking just off to the periphery of your vision. Before you knew it, it was all over you like ugly on an ape, leaving you to mutter the immortal words of Bill Murray from Ghost Busters, “That’s the one that slimed me.”

…That’s the one that slimed me…

So I had a good couple of days. Reversal of fortune, Alignment of the elements and all that. Well luck was no lady this time. The First day of autumn brought with it the work day from H-E-double-hockey-sticks. Rock was not flowing, tempers boiled over and now we need to have a royal commission to investigate why the wrong circuit got unplugged by the telephone company. You’d be amazed at how many people don’t appreciate the “sh*te happens” response.

Add to it the fact that my car decided to pick today to break down in a driving rain storm, Western civilization (except for a few Oil Companies) is about to be toppled by Mother Nature for the second time this year, and the three “canine amigos” at home alone decide to tear the house apart. Life is about balance. Yesterday was the good. Today is the bad and the ugly. [sigh]

Winter Approaches

Today is the first day of autumn. In the next few weeks, the shortening of daylight hours will tell the trees around us that winter is coming and they’ll begin shutting down their food-making process, preparing to live on the sugar they’ve stored for the winter. All the green chlorophyll in their leaves will be withdrawn into the trees’ branches and the leaves will turn red and yellow and orange and brown.

Sometimes the universe plays ball. Sometimes the forces that swirl uncontrolled and chaotic around us, align for a perfect moment. Moments of peace, calm, and, dare I say, even joy. Last night at the close of work such an alignment took place.

…perhaps it’s a lull before the storm…

For one thing, the phone stopped ringing. I am on call this week at Gigantic Concrete and when you’re on call the phone rings constantly. Perhaps it’s a lull before the storm, but for watever reason I had a call free night.

Next came an unexpected gift. One of my co-workers gave me a nice Cuban cigar. Yes this is Canada where we trade with Communist Cuba. This sends some Americans into a tizzy, but it’s not like we’re a major trade partner (at a deficit too) with Red China or anything… but let’s not dwell on the hypocracy of international trade politics. It was good. It was smooth. It was relaxing.

Third and best of all my schedule and the schedule of a good friend finally synced up. There was conversation, there was comedy and laughter, and there was Gin and Fresca. Who could ask for anything more really?

Normally the universe and I are at odds with each other. Yesterday it was nice to have a truce. Who knows maybe this could even lead to lasting peace…

It’s the birthday of a famous literary critic, Sir Edmund Gosse, born in London (1849). He was famous in his own time as the man who rescued the reputation of the poet John Donne, whom nobody read at the time until Edmund Gosse wrote a book about him.

…his parents believed that telling stories was a sin…

And he was the man who brought Henrik Ibsen to the attention of the English-reading and English play-attending audience. But we know him best as the author of a single book, his memoir, Father and Son, about his struggle to break away from his own father.

Gosse grew up in a strict fundamentalist Puritan congregation called the Brethren, where dancing, gambling, tobacco and the theater were all considered sinful, but worst of all, his parents believed that telling stories was a sin. Gosse wrote in his autobiography, “Not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy … Never in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’ I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance, and although I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name.”

As a boy, he was forbidden to read anything other than religious works. He was not allowed to go to college, so he got a job as a clerk in the British Museum and went to live in London. And just before he left, he realized that he had lost his faith in God. He became obsessed with literature instead of religion, and in 1907 published his book Father and Son about his childhood.

Edmund Gosse, who had grown up in a house without stories, died in 1928 in a house with a library that was so large, it was sold for a small fortune.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

All too familiar. I’ve been through these kinds of things before. I know very well the ins and outs of fortunes and their reversals. I lived as a dot com contractor during the crash that coincided with 911. That was a reversal of fortune on a very personal level resulting in a thing we like to call receivership. But this one was not like that.

…one of the outside indentured servants…

Today’s reversal of fortune was, for me, a more fortunate event. Today I got to be one of the outside indentured servants. Today I got to drive my car through the back roads of Central Ontario. The trees, rushing to beat the first official day of fall two days hence, display their autumnal colours boldly. Fall comes early in the north. Still warm enough to to leave the jacket at home, but late enough in the solar year for nature to dawn her multicoloured pajamas before winter’s sleep.

Today by fluke of corporate requirements I got the gift of time to be. To be out. To be free. To be engaged, even for a small moment of time, with the changing world around me. It’s a definite change of fortune, and I’m more fortunate for it.

It was on this day in 1519 that Ferdinand Magellan set out with his armada of five ships and 237 men on what became the first known voyage around the globe. Magellan was out to claim the Spice Islands for Spain. He had no idea how far he’d have to travel. The best-known map at the time placed Japan just a few hundred miles off of Mexico. Magellan’s ships were small, and they were not of the best quality, but they reached South America by winter and began to sail south along the coast. The men began to see strange new animals, including birds that they called “ducks without wings,” now known as penguins.

…Magellan managed to sail past nearly every single island in the South Pacific…

They met a very tall tribe of people who herded llamas, and Magellan nicknamed them “patagones” from the Spanish for “big feet.” And that piece of South America became known as Patagonia.

They almost turned back a dozen times, but they finally saw a narrow passage like the mouth of a river. They followed it to the other side, and they found themselves in a much calmer sea, which Magellan named the Pacific Ocean.

Magellan estimated that they would reach the Spice Islands in a few days. The weather was perfect for sailing, and everyone was hopeful. But days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and the ships began to run out of food. Somehow, Magellan managed to sail past nearly every single island in the South Pacific, so there was no way to get more food. The men were reduced to eating oxhides and llama skins, and many died of starvation. They finally reached their destination in March, three and a half months after rounding the tip of South America.

Magellan himself died on one of the islands, trying to convert the local people to Christianity by force. Of the five original ships, only one made the entire journey back to Spain, carrying seventeen men, the only survivors of the original 237. As a reward, the captain of that single remaining ship was given a globe with a Latin inscription that said, “Thou first circumnavigated me.”

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further nautical reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK