Murphy’s Bye-Laws

It has taken me some time to get around to writing this, but I did have other things to do.  Eleven days ago a chapter of my life ended. A whole section and volume of my life’s saga ended. With this ending a new chapter and volume has begun making the previous work only history and memory. I’m talking about the birth of my first child, a perfectly beautiful son named Oliver Leo (O__, from here on out).

News of our pregnancy and the impending outcome was exciting. We had tried for so long that we had nearly given up hope. With the one major scare around 27 weeks, full term and the short remaining time came sharply into focus. Even as things calmed down and the day of his arrival neared, it would be impossible to anticipate the feeling of joy and love experienced when we finally made our acquaintance.

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“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government”
— Edward Abbey

“In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man, Brave, Hated, and Scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, For then it costs nothing to be a Patriot.”
— Mark Twain

This time of year, the patriotic season, is nauseating to me. The flag-waving, the unquestioning praise of brutality and its murderous perpetrators, and the shallowness of it all leaves me cranky and cynical. Why is patriotism wrapped up so much in war and aggression? Read the rest of this entry »

As the day when A__’s and my child’s arrival draws near, lots of things swirl around in my head. Looking into the dense fog of the future, the uncertainty can weigh on the brain as this new life will likely – hopefully – plunge further into that fog than its mother or I. Since we will not travel long with them along this new path, I had thoughts of what to send with them. So, I wrote those thoughts down. Then I looked at them and read them and thought they had some rhythm and I rewrote them into some poetic form.

The new poem For my unborn child can be found under the Poetry tab at the top of the page. Today we are T-minus 5 weeks. Who knows how long before the child actually reads this, but hopefully they don’t stop reading it.

Prelude: For anyone not following the adventures of this author away from this blog (read: all of my adventures lately), the Imperial PintofStout, a.k.a. my wife, a.k.a. A___ , and I are eagerly anticipating the birth of our first Half-PintofStout (or does ponybottleofstout work better? PintofNA?) Currently, we are about 30 weeks in and have half of our house disassembled and painted in anticipation of carpeting and a possible temporary first floor bedroom. Such are the joys of “nesting.” I convey this simply as background for what I’m about to talk about next.

This weekend, after what seemed like weeks of rain, we finally made it outside to tend to the yard. More specifically, we were removing grass and weeds that had invaded our landscaping on the front and sides of the house. The mulch – what was left of it – is two years old and essentially dirt now, thus reversing its role from preventer to enabler. After we cleaned up the beds, A__ set to trimming and shaping the bushes. The junipers we put in two years ago have grown faster than expected and the boxwoods are growing at a rate I wouldn’t expect. Looking at all this growth, especially of the boxwoods, got me to thinking about time and patience. And roots.

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While I haven’t blogged in a while, I have had time and access to other means of communication that have accommodated the time constraints and slightly altered focus of my web presence. There are so many options available for “social networking” these days, it can be a little overwhelming. I think I’ve found my comfort zone for now, though I’m no expert by any means, and thought I’d share thoughts on what helped me out in sorting it all out and other matters.

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Wow! Has it been that long since I wrote anything of substance on this blog? November 2005? Really? Damn.

Blogging, like American democracy, was a noble experiment for me.  And, depending on perspective and unlike American democracy, my blogging has been moderately successful. There have been droughts in my writing before, too, but this one seems so much more recent.

Of course, I have been busy beyond imagination with work and preparing for the arrival of our first child (not to mention my work on String Theory, cancer research, moonlighting as a costumed-crime fighter, and formulating an argument for why Lemieux is the greatest hockey player ever, bar none). As usual, when I’m too busy to find time to write, I have multiple ideas and topics on which to write. Then when things slow down, I have no motivation, energy, or ideas on which to write. That’s probably a Murphy’s Law or something.

I’m not not busy now, but I’m also not crazy busy, which explains the existence and the mediocrity of this nonsensical post. What? So, if you’re reading here for the first time since January, then stick around for another sub-par (that’s good, right?) post about social media and communication and shit.

Perusing the local paper’s website today for the foolishly ridiculous took only a few seconds to find the following story: Campbell lawmaker says gun prohibition takes away rights.
The headline is dangerously misleading and has very, very little to do with the actual story; rather it appears to be aimed at the discrediting of the lawmaker, who I would guess is unpopular at this paper. While the legislation does indeed interfere with rights*, the fact that this councilwoman said so is moot.

The headline should read “Policy-making Patsies Prevent Production in Prototypical Pandering Performance”. Ok, maybe not, but it is all true. This “emergency” legislation took away a person’s opportunity to add some productive service to his community. Zoning laws had already made this man’s opening of a firearms repair business more difficult, the council then sought to make it impossible. Based on the comments under the article, the council is surely pandering to the police force (who’d have imagined the police want a disarmed populace?) and other weak-kneed, uninformed citizens.

The fact that this person had thought to ask permission of government to try and make a living is repulsive. Governments create jobs?! HAHAHAHAHA! That’s laughable. This unidentified man should refuse to pay his property tax because he cannot use his property the way he sees fit; a way that does absolutely no harm to the people around him. Is the City of Cambell also going to become a dry town, not allowing the sale of alcohol to protect its citizens from the vastly more dangerous threat it causes? Or ban the sale of automobiles or hammers or stairs, since all of these things are very dangerous tools? Perhaps the practicing of law should be outlawed; we all know how dangerous a lawyer can be!

Even though this story is mostly focused on guns, I won’t rehash all the pro-and anti-gun arguments. I will say in closing, though, that prohibiting the sale of guns wouldn’t likely prohibit the sale of service on guns. Maybe this person has a case, after all.

*Read The Law of Conservation of Rights to see why rights cannot be taken away.

Ferris Bueller, with his carpe diem attitude and despite his carless existence, is known to have quipped that life moves pretty fast, and if one doesn’t stop to look around once in a while, one could miss it. In 1986 this bit of wisdom was true. On the brink of 2010 this wisdom holds as true as it did then. Life seems to have its foot firmly pressed to the accelerator. Why does life move so fast? And what’s the deal with -isms, anyway? Keep reading and some order will reveal itself from the chaos.

I quote Henry Miller in my email signature as saying, “Chaos is the score on which reality is written.” I also find this to be true. Call it a worldview. Fate, destiny, preordination; these all only exist in the imaginations of those who prognosticate what has already happened. The delicate imbalance of a single object with the entire universe – the forces acting on it, the forces acting IN it! – depends on an infinite number of variables. This whole equation raised to the power of everything else in the universe is the equation for the chaos we refer to as The Universe – or in Henry Miller’s words, “reality”. The fact that many things happen predictably over and over and over again shouldn’t diminish the perception of the uncontrolled and random nature of the universe. What we humans perceive as controlled, predictable, or even constant are but a mere snapshot of a universe in flux. Our human existence is a single frame in this Kevin Costner-length epic. So how can a snapshot seem to move so fast and be so out-of-control so much of the time? Well…

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The solstice has been on the brain. First the poem, now a whole new post. This post isn’t specifically about the solstice alone, but about all four points of inflection upon the ellipse of Earth’s  orbit. We mark our seasons by these inflections, one season terminating and another beginning at these orbital points: the equinoxes in spring and fall and the solstices in summer and winter. But what most people associate with the seasons are actually the weather and not the position of the sun in relation to the horizon, which of course are related, but weather being very tangible.

Let’s call the season delineations we currently have the astronomical seasons for obvious reasons. The weather associated with the astronomical seasons (the weather season) don’t fall neatly into the delineated times, though. One season’s associated weather likely bleeds into the preceding season giving the appearance that the season’s weather arrives first, like a Secret Service security team before a presidential stump speech.  That is because the weather is greatly affected, if not wholly produced, by the angle of the sun. The astronomical season markers are marking extremes, meaning both sides of the extreme will be very similar. If we had weather-delineated seasons, these markers should fall precisely in the middle.  Winter would encompass the months of December, January, and February; Spring would consist of March, April, and May; Summer containing June, July, and August; and leaving Autumn with September, October, and November.

Of course, weather is messy. Down in the dirty chaos of atmosphere, moisture, dirt, and wind there are no specific points to demarcate a change in seasons based solely on weather.  Perhaps this is why it would be best to not delineate the seasons so much as simply mark the progress of the year with those four extreme days. But knowing us humans, it is always about us and what we want and what we feel and how something affects us with little regard to facts or logic. So we’ll continue to have wintry weather in late fall and summery weather in late spring, etc, etc.

A new poem has posted under the poetry tab entitled “Solstice Solace”.

I’ve written on these pages before about how seasonal transitions would be a significant time to mimic our sun and pull an about-face in some manner. Some wait until New Year’s Eve to lie to themselves about change. Maybe the complete lack of significance to the new year holiday (or it could be the champagne!) contributes to the dismal success rate of new year’s resolutions. So this year try it out on a solstice and see how it works.

Some related posts:

Season’s Change

Spring Metamorphosis

New Year’s Resolve