It's Complicated

I'm on a First Date with my new laptop from an unnamed company that may or may not be connected to the treacherous edible icon that brought down the Garden of Eden. (I don't blame Eve, by the way. She was hungry. Besides, it's not cricket.)

Things have been going OK, but, you know, how best to dispel the awkwardness of a First Date, when it's ostensibly happening in one's living room?  I don't know if I'm talking too much and not asking about its life, its preferences, its family, whether it's more Chicago Hope or Grey's Anatomy. It shouldn't be all about me, should it? One good sign: as soon as I powered her on, she somehow automatically re-arranged my sock drawer. But, you know, I don't know if I'm ready for that level of intimacy with a slice of plastic and electronics that's, in fact, not as thick as several wheels of cheese I've known. And you should have seen how they rolled...

Lest I'm bringing some kind of International Business Machine-themed, backslashed chauvinism to this new relationship, my actual girlfriend tells me my laptop is a she, and that her name is Twiggy. Antecedent warning! Antecedent warning! Does a supermodel-thin computer encourage positive body image in its owner? Will I have to put in at least 20 minutes of cardio before she'll allow me to check e-mail? And the questions only get thornier after that--for example, should I even be dating something I own? (the laptop, not the girlfriend. Again, not very cricket.)

Is it just me? Should I mourn that I no longer have C-colon in my life? Suspiciously, this is also the year I'm supposed to get a colonoscopy. How can these two events not be connected? Have powers greater than I ordained that one kind of computing platform is a cancer upon society that needs to be excised, while wearing hip, un-self-concious clothing? And will the surgeon be wearing flip-flops like all the male employees at one of my laptop's company's recent team-building field-trips? 

The blogger reserves the right to dedicate an entire post on the subject of men wearing flip-flops on any surface other than sand... this phenomenon outstrips the laminate on my personal computing mores...

In other technology news, File under Continuing Breakdown of Civility: When I call my voicemail--idling on some computer in the ether that's no-doubt not named for a piece of fruit--it's been cutting off the very beginning of the prompt tree. As a result, the first thing I hear is, "asscode..."

Shouldn't my asscode be different from my passcode? Don't I have an obligation to keep my ass safe and secure? Now that this First Date is going on with me unshaven in my sweatpants, will my hot, newlaptop turn off her encryption to spite my ass? Wouldn't there be unimaginable problems if someone were to steal my ass, and would I be responsible for my ass if it were brainwashed by persuasive captors and committed illegal acts, not unlike Patty Hearst's unfortunate time with the Symbionese Liberation Army?

Look, the more these things turn over in my head, the confuseder I get. If this First Date ends up in a makeout session between me and my laptop, as my actual girlfriend assures me it will, I'm going to have to re-evaluate a lot of stuff on the neutrino level. They're so sexy, neutrinos....

Thanks for reading. And please remember that just because it's possible that by the end of this post, I may end up like this guy, it doesn't mean that my secret plan for unheard-of riches won't come true: designing a computer that uses Ones, Zeroes, and.... wait for it..... TWOS! Keep it under your iHat, ok?

The Wonder Of It All...

Couple of things I've learned this week:

In Canada, if you pay an extra $1.25, you get sweet-potato fries.

One would do well to spend a portion of each day unsubscribing from e-mail lists.

My kid's former elementary school's PTA has been the hardest list from which to unsubscribe. Way harder than Buy!Buy!Buy!.com

In the 1600s, they lived half as long, but their lives were twice as uncomplicated. (I'll wait.....) And if they were English, they could attend a world premier of Shakespeare's and spend an evening laughing at four near-medieval yuppies dithering about in the woods. Meanwhile, we have Charlie Sheen, who's both a tragedy and a comedy, wrapped up in a stripper  enigma.

I pretty much love it when the Yankees' radio announcers are reduced to making jokes about clichés. It shows humility.

Post-Season baseball is like when a team shows up at the Pearly Gates, and St. Peter doesn't quite believe them yet.

If you're reading this, you weren't blown up in Somalia, executed in China, or drowned in the East River yesterday.

People might get over their unresolved issues faster if they handed their shrink fistfuls of cash at the end of every session.

Check out Star Trek VI again. You could do a lot worse.

The immunologist who died from cancer days before his Nobel Prize was announced--after applying his life's work to his own body in the form of experimental treatment--seems to have spent an exemplary time on this planet. He happened to be Canadian. I wonder if he went for the sweet-potato fries. I'm hoping he did.

The Blaiser Blog Post-Season Dream Team:

Starting Pitcher

Catcher

First Base Coach

General Manager 

Outfield

Infield

Manager

Third Base Coach

Pinch Runner

Designated Hitter

Closer

Bat Boy

Bat Girl

Relief Pitcher


Thanks for indulging me. Please also try to remember that the only thing that keeps us from floating off into space, and certain death, is gravity.

Summer Meltdowns and You

My pen's been dry for too long, collecting dust on the shelf while I lived the subterranean life of a stagehand with back-to-back megajobs. The first was Fashion Week in New York, in which Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park sprouts a tent city populated with Smart Cars and Dumb Models. And some clothes. And a lot of lights. And the second was the P-5, yo. No, not West Coast old-school rappers of a certain age, but rather the coalescing of a squad of homogenous, yet motley hopefuls just compared, mere moments ago on NPR, to the denizens of the Star Wars cantina. This gathering took me out of town for 10 days, and also required a lot of lights.

Meanwhile, there was epic chokage with my beloved Boston Red Sox. Like Old-Testament, Zombie Apocolypse, Cormac McCarthy "The Road" style chokage. It made the 2007 Mets look like winners. It made the ending of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," make sense. It made a lot of Yankee fans happy.

And if we're talking proportions on the scale of rhino-choking, then the question becomes, Where do you find a guy who can give a rhino the Heimlich Maneuver? I'm going with this guy:

Last night, Ryan Lavarnway, a September call-up from the Sox farm system, provided his team with an injection of life-saving juice. (Seriously--think Uma getting stabbed with a hypo in "Pulp Fiction." In this case, the Red Sox have been snorting the heroin, and Ryan Lavarnway is Travolta, and he may or may not have been arguing with, say, Jed Lowrie about who would plunge the needle into the boss's girlfriend.)

But it was Lavarnway who rose to the occasion, belting his first two Major League home runs, and helping the Sox limp into the final game of the season with the AL Wild Card up for grabs. I'd prefer Game 7 of the Championship Series against the Yankees to our current scenario. Our pitching staff has splintered like a cheap deli toothpick and injuries have hobbled a once-fearsome offense. Kevin Youkilis was last seen peddling Amway products in an effort to recoup lost value from the Bedard acquisition, and Carl Crawford's been looking into installing an assisted-living efficiency behind the Green Monster in Fenway. But for the moment, a philosophy major from Yale is the man. So let's be philosophcal.

We've been here before. Only the present matters. One game at a time. And so....  If the Rays win their game against the Yankees tonight at Trop Field, and no one goes to watch it, does it matter? Unfortunately, Yes.

There's been a lot of e-chatter about how funny it is for Red Sox fans to find themselves rooting for these guys tonight, but I have a different take. We go to the postseason on our own merits. We need to win. What happens to the other guys is beyond our ken. If a winner-takes-all game is birthed for Thursday night, well we'll just have to go out and win that one too, maybe even behind this guy, who will flutter once more into the breach in the way only a 45-year-old knuckler can: with more experience than you. Or pretty much anyone else.

And if not, then it's back to the drawing board for the Red Sox. Let the better team win the Wild Card. Pretty sure they usually do. Let us all earn, in a certain sense, our own victories.

Thanks for reading, and please remember---it's not for nothing that Eric Stoltz was the set-up man for the West Hollywood fast-pitch softball league. Honest!

YOU SHOULD SEE THE OTHER GUY

And it's August ! If it were ever going to be high, The Cotton need wait no more, and if it were ever going to be easy, The Living is looking at its best chance in recent months. Not everyone, however, seems to realize the importance of making the most of August 3, sadly.

In Manhattan today, some people were mightily inconvenienced when a derailed train complicated their morning commute. "Someone isn't doing their job right," said Curtis Weaver,who was waiting for the 6 train uptown on 33rd Street on his way to his security guard job on Park Avenue. "They shoud improve the trains."

(DNAinfo.com clearly shoud

improve their proofreaders…)

In Hama, Syria, today, security personnel fared much better in their morning commute, arriving for work in the center of town via tank and armored vehicle, where they continued to put down a popular uprising. One hundred had been reportedly killed during a weekend of heavy shelling and bombing. Casualty reports from today are not yet available, although corpses are reported to be strewn in the streets.

It’s safe to say that getting to work in Hama for any non-security personnel was just as bad as Mr. Weaver’s experience traveling in Manhattan: helicopters patrolled the skies, snipers had taken up positions on the tops of buildings, and people were being killed for protesting against the Assad regime.

Caroline D. had similar complaints today about encountering hostilities during a return trip from her weekend in the Hamptons. It seems a Jitney bus attendant victimized her with some heinous atrocities. She had…

Called ahead to reserve a seat on the 3:30pm bus 08/02/11. Got there at 2:50pm when the Ambassador was pulling away, it had one seat but someone stand-by took it. When I called, no one gave me this option. Went inside to buy a ticket, unsmiling, unhappy workers that barely made eye contact. Went outside to wait because the Omni smells of sweat and mildew, the coffee shop was gated shut at 3:00pm…. A bus pulled up at 3:20 so I got up and the attendant said no, this is not your bus, it's going East so I sat back down.
The next thing I know, another attendant shows up and tells me to " get in line!!!" I stand up and see he is taking names so I pull out my ticket and ask him if he will take my name but he says " I will take your name when you get in line!!!" and then I see at least 20 people have lined up but I tell him I was the first person waiting so I stand behind the person he has just taken their name. Do then he yells at me " Oh so you are just going to cut in front of all these people now???!!!" I have never been so humiliated and a guy next to me said he was waiting after me too. We sat on the bench at the front! This attendant has ZERO people skills and was incredibly rude and condescending! I told him he should give his customers the benefit of the doubt before he goes ahead and decides I am trying to cheat! He told me " to get over it!!!" If I didn't have to get back to the city, I would not have let it go. …Once I got on the bus, it was pretty full so I had to sit at the back near the toilet and someone went inane took a stinking dump!!! Seriously, you can't wait to do that at home???
 -- thanks to Yelp.com ...

At home in Hama, where water, electrical and phone lines had been cut, and food supplies were dwindling, residents also had to “get over it,” or else find other arrangements to not only take a stinking dump, but also to bury their dead, who as mentioned before, are apparently still lying in the streets.

Nearly all middle-class Americans ought to take a deep breath today (or at least my New Yorker brothers and sisters) and drink from the overflowing fountain of perspective. Most of us do not have high-powered scopes covering our front doors, nor have 120mm tank guns trained on our places of employment. 

Photo: Evan Blumenstein

Most of us have lives of relative ease. I just scheduled a canoe trip with my son for later in the week. I woke up to sunshine. I have people in my life whom I love and who love me. Nothing’s perfect, but I’ve never had a day like the freedom fighters had in Hama today. For far too many, it was their last day. Think on that.

Back to the comedy. I think Louis CK covers a version of this sentiment the best, so I’ll let him to the talking.

Thanks for reading, and please always remember that in the road of life, it's best to avoid New Jersey jug handles....

T-Minus 2 Minutes

STS - 135. . . Sounds like a concept car at the Javits Center.

The final launch of the Space Shuttle program is scheduled to light up the Cape Canaveral sky in a little less than an hour and a half. I'll aim to post by that time, and then watch it live via laptop. I'm looking at footage now--a bunch of guys in faux space suits, harnesses and baseball hats working through their checklists in the White Room, an "environmentally controlled" compartment from which the astronauts enter their rocket ship. The prep crew are periodically looking up at the camera and offering grins and showing off pieces of equipment, used for the last time, for the viewers back home. It's all a victory lap, but Atlantis has to safely launch and return before such a celebration is earned. Over their shoulders one can see the exposed hatch of Atlantis, with a caution-tape-lettered arrow pointing to a latch near a tiny porthole, that says "RESCUE." Still, around the launch area, this pre-liftoff limbodance, performed by hundreds of technicians for the last 30 years, has a few deviations this morning. They stop for photo ops with their colleagues and friends, imminently a former fraternity of space professionals...

They're working to ensure the safety of the four souls as they rocket into low-Earth Final Frontier. They are Chris, Doug, Sandy and Rex. You can see their photos on the NASA site, their faces and profiles coming up like Marvel superhero dossiers, Fantastic Four style:

I was lucky enough to witness a Shuttle launch in February and posted some thoughts while they were in their landing approach.

Back to pre-lauch coverage. A comlink computer needs to be re-booted and the technician informs the Flight Controller with just a tiny, tiny note of hesitation in his description. They hold the countdown. Their computers crash just like this laptop... it's unsettling for the lay-watcher, for someone whose generational Kennedy moment came in the middle of 11th Grade English class on a January morning in 1986.

Now, the software's been re-uplinked, the countdown resumed, and then stopped for a built-in hold at T-Minus 9:00. The play-by-play is thrown to Houston's Mission Control, where a very reassuring, informed voice tells America the controllers have been at their desks since 4:30 this morning. Bet they drank their coffee. Atlantis has flown some 115 million miles to date. That's one hell of a lot of oil changes.

The Shuttle, nested in its Floridian launchpad is an elegant modern-art installation, seen in this way

Take the wider view, however, and its reality is also a bleak and lonely thing, a metaphor for some aspects of This Human Journey that we are all destined to take, indeed that we're taking right now.

This is also Atlantis, some 30 minutes from launch this morning

All we can do is hope for the best. They're professionals. No one on the planet is better at changing the Shuttle's oil, after all. And it's not a Marvel comic book. It's very, very real.

The Flight Director now polls all the departments, a flurry of acronyms and abbreiviations. One guy says, "Flight, I'd appreciate it if you'd come back to me and poll me last," like a not-quite-decided diner in a party of 12 might say to a waiter. Mere moments later, he's decided he'll have the salmon after all, and we're all agreed upon "Showing No Constraints." The complexity depth is dizzying, what leads up to a rocket launch. And yet it boils down to "Go/No Go," and of course, Alan Shepard's prayer, uttered 50 years ago from the launchpad of Freedom 7, and paraphrased here as, Oh Lord... please don't let me fuck this thing up.

Crew Orbiter Access Arm is being retracted. T-Minus Nine. All the announcers are invoking 30-year salutes and up-to-the-moment well wishes to the crew and everyone listening. What do I have to do today? Shave and then go watch my kid in his musical theatre day-camp performance of "SchoolHouse Rock, LIVE!"

Godspeed indeed to the bravest among us. We can only move forward. Thanks for reading and please remember: In the event of an existential engine failure, your closest RESCUE hatch may not be the one through which you entered.

A Midsummer Night's Bream

"I have never used steroids, human growth hormone, or any other type of illegal performance-enhancing drugs" —Roger Clemens, in a congressional hearing, 2008.

Except maybe for the 20 times your trainer claims he injected you with the junk? Or was he was the one doing the "using" or otherwise "employing," it, or in this case, "deploying" it into your fat ass, because you just weren't a big enough arrogant bully without it.

Sorry. That wasn't necessarily a classy comment by a classy writer. I do let my emotions take hold from time to time, hopefully in service of the irreverance I pathetically attempt strive to achieve for my scanty yet plucky readership.

Want a class act? Me, too, and for the Fenway fortunate, one is available for close observation every time Tim Wakefield picks up a baseball, or otherwise walks into a place.

Wakefield, one of the last remaining sporting heroes. Wakefield, who was nominated 8 times for the Roberto Clemente good-guy award and won through his consistent, quiet action, unlike Jerkweed Supreme Roger Clemens, who had the audacity to call himself "the gooddest guy around," when he's not pitching. No, that would be the Other Guy, actually—a soon-to-be 45-year-old who still bakes a richly seasoned humble pie, and slings irregular slices of it at men who were swinging nothing more fearsome than Sippy Cups during Wake's Rookie Year.

 

He's on the mound again, tonight, in pursuit of Win # 198, versus some guys from Toronto. The progeny and I will tune in, witness the carnival cannonshot that is a knuckleball, and the ironic surprise of a sub-80 mph "heater." I'll also attempt to throw a weak-ass dinner pitch past my suspicious kid: some whole, deep-sea bounty that was swimming off the coast of Massachusetts recently, courtesy of my landlord. Haven't yet had the ichthyic pleasure of meeting this particular species before. Pretty sure a bunch of garlic and olive oil will be involved, so everyone hope for the best.

That's not a bad approach to life. Don't hand power over to the bullies, throw knuckleballs of great humility well into one's 40's, and periodically try a new fish.

Thanks for reading, and please remember: Even if you say Porgy and I say Sparidae, we should not, in fact, call the whole thing off.

A Poem For Early Summer

The end of an era is a heartbroken promise
But celebrate the good and great things from that time
Didn't your life expand like a baloon, fat and beaming?
Accept the speed limit. Obey local laws.
Ride the tectonic trucks for what they were,
     not what they weren't.
Vacuum your father's barn
Turn your diesel engine into a catamaran
Observe the surf

Then, what better time for spiritual deck-swabbing and sail-hoisting?
Maybe you balance standards, alternating the pirate flag with the snowy egret
Maybe you haul everything in, ass-over-tea-kettle style, laughing even
      (laughing, definitely—you love to laugh), clumsy but effective
So that the horizon offers—to the clear eye—The Next Thing
     when it chooses to float by.
And who knows—you might already be swimming in it, so look around...
Perhaps the flail of sudden water-treading will self-organize into
     a tight stroke, an origami of the water.

The blue sky reminds: there is both calm beauty
     and certain impermanence—it might cloud over by afternoon.
While sunshine pours down upon your sleeping lover's long, brown hair,
     so are the Days of Our Lives (or so they say!)
Yes, there's the daytime soapdish. Use it for hands, often.
Or washing away the drama of a dirty dish.
Clean the drain.
Revel in the pleasure of grilled fish.
If you reach out, the hand next to you brushes with affection
Let the skin squeal with delight
Dance  Stop fighting the sweaty ballroom
Let the simplicity of desire take over, and notice
     what had been obscured, perhaps, by the fine layer
     of sawdust you made when you insisted
     on running the hack saw against the grain.
And there you were, sawing away, with a kind of specialized envy
     reserved for hedge-fund managers and pentacostal snake handlers.
Now there's an audacity you can't quite summon
But you can set down the wrong tools and begin anew.
Start with a film festival.

Feed the birds and what do you have?
Happy birds, actually.
And they don't want your poetry—they'd rather have your crusts.
Divide the loaf sparingly, or with great slabs of garlic gusto.
Mix it up with salad greens and a cold Chablis.
I know the French are a pain in the ass, but gambling on a grape,
     you gotta admire that.
Move South for the panache of grenache.
Reserve a clay court. What a racket!
These people know how to live and that's why we're jealous
     of flower pots on interstates,
     a nouvelle novel,
     an église.
Arousal by the sauté pan    (a romance begins with accent marks)
You plan on fewer mistakes, so why not a pen? An inkwell?
Put on some gifted vinyl and respect when you have to stop
     every 20 minutes—the end of a side.
     The end of a chapter.
Your library is living large.
There will always, always be another good book.