Scattered Thoughts...Tank Update #5...12-21-2012

Things are freaky/weird right now.  I got the feeling something big, not the End of the World, but something, is going to happen.  Terrence McKenna had a theory he called Temporal Resonance that seemed to show a wave pattern in the Time-Space Continuum.  Novelty, or interconnectedness, plotted over the time wave seemed to reveal repetition of the wave over periods of linear time that would resonate.  For instance, the beginning of the Dark Ages had a wave pattern that resonates with the Reagan Administration...

Anyway, according to his calculations, December twenty-first, 2012, the Winter Solstice, the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, is supposed to be where the wave finally reaches Zero, or maximum resonance.

Is it just me, or isn't everything speeding up and transforming?

Or maybe the Earth WILL align with the Sun and the Galactic Axis and some kind of gravitational sling-shot action will propel us into the Sun, then the Sun itself will be pulled into the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.   Might be fun...

Anyway, the fish tank has been stable for a while now.  There are still five Dace and two of the other kind.  One of the two full-grown Dace has developed some kind of growth on its head.  I thought it was Ich, so I did a treatment, but the growth remains.  It looks like the meat is oozing out of the skin.  Like I said before, the Dace live in a Pediddleville all their own...

River Snorkeling...Communion With The Trout...Big Mamma And The Snapper...The Best Place On Earth...

It is now nearing Thanksgiving, and recent rains have raised the water level in Salmon River, but the drought made it very low all summer.  The drought hadn't been nearly as bad as in other parts of the country, but river snorkeling was pretty uninspiring this past summer.  Why not finally get around to the piece I've been meaning to write since the beginning?

One of the blessings of my life is the fact that I live about one minute away from the best place on Earth.  This one-sixteenth of a mile stretch of Salmon River is one of my favorite places on Earth, undoubtedly. It's been my favorite swimming spot since my teenage years.   Long ago there was a mill dam in this place, stretched across the river at the point where a natural formation of one giant continuous piece of bedrock has about a four foot step.  There must have been quite a pond above the dam, with that big flat rock comprising the bottom.  Now in place of the dam is a cascade that when running strongly is a fabulous back massager.  If you lean back even more while sitting on a rock step, you can make the water stream over you head, creating an air pocket behind the water that you can sit in and breathe underwater indefinitely.

Just below the cascades is a pool with an angled flat rock bottom, here and there pocked with potholes bored out by the endless water flow.  It's a great place to cool off effortlessly.  There are no loose rocks on the bottom like in the rest of the river, so scrapes and bruises and twisted ankles are less likely.  The bedrock then emerges above the water level to form a big open slab.  If you go there after the sun is down, even if the air is cool, you can feel the heat radiating from within the rock, stored up from the day's sun-baking.  I can lay there feeling the warmth and hearing the water, and be relaxed beyond relaxed.  This with the sound of the flowing water is way better than any relaxation tape.  Conversely during heatwaves, this place has been a Godsend.  I work outside, so the heat really depletes my energy.  Often at these times swimming cools you off, but if it's too hot the effect wears off rapidly, even if you retreat to air conditioning.  The river, on the other hand, fixes you up good.  I will go there after work and just submerge myself in the water, letting the current take away the heat, until I reach the point of self-induced hypothermia.  It makes the rest of the evening comfortable.

Just a few yards down river, after a section of rocky rapids, it opens up into a larger, deeper section that is also good for river swimming.  You can swim in parts of this area without knuckle scraping.  Here, with mask and snorkel, you can see the full spectrum of fish life found in the river, including small and largemouth bass, bluegills, sunfish, suckers, salmon parr, eels, and stocked trout--Rainbow, Brown, Brook, and Tiger Trout (a hybrid produced by fertilizing brown trout eggs with brook trout sperm with stunning patterns on its body).  It's a wide section where the water is slower-moving, but it is easy to locate where the current winds through.  I like to dive to the bottom, hold onto a rock, and just hang there in the current, feeling the awesome power of the moving water.  It's like my nervous system is plugged directly into the energy flow of the planet.  In psychophysiological terms, it's my Happy Place...

I wonder why I don't see other people snorkeling in the river.  I sometimes get self-conscious about what others might be thinking--"Who is that lunatic snorkeling in there?"  "What's there to see?"  Some people wouldn't think of snorkeling anywhere but some tropical island with crystal blue clear water and neon-colored fish, but I find it weird that more people are not interested in seeing what's under the water they're swimming in.  There's plenty to see, albeit New England drab, and it's very intersting to me.  On a practical level fishermen could really see where the good holes are, and what lives in them.

All that aside, I suppose many people just lack the kind of spiritual connection that I have with the river.  Sure, I'm aware that there are fly fishermen who are spiritual about their quest for the trout--knowing the water conditions, the feeding habits, the weather influence, Zen and such things, but I'm talking about being IN it.  Last year was the first year my wife and I felt that our sons were old enough to go there safely.  My older son Owen is old enough to be able to go snorkeling, and he likes it, and that just warms my heart.  A couple of times a few years ago I had snorkeled down sections of the river, say from the State forest down to Comstock Covered Bridge, or South of the bridge down to Leesville Dam.  One time last year we were at the river, and I figured we'd go home soon because I was getting a chill, but Ellen suggested Owen and I snorkel down to the bridge and she and  Emmet would drive down and meet us there.  Though I was cold, I jumped at the chance to spend more time in the water, making my way downstream exploring the river with my son.  Sometimes you float on the surface, letting the current propel you as you scan the underwater landscape. Other times your belly scrapes the rocks, and you have to stand up and wade a bit.  We made our way down, his hand grasping my ankle at all times.  I'd stop here and there to point out fish or various holes.  It was great to be sharing that experience with him.  A chip off the old bedrock.

One time we were there and Owen stepped on a rock that moved.  He looked down and got a look at it, then sprang out of the water.  It was a big snapping turtle.  I read on the internets that they are quite vicious on land, but underwater in their element they shy away from humans and rarely bite, unless they are provoked.  We'd see it now and then, parked on the bottom like a prehistoric gargoyle, or at times it would surface for air, and you'd see the bubbles rising all around it on the surface.   One time I was snorkeling and saw it directly in front of me at about two yards away.  I stopped and stood there looking at it, refracted sunlight mottling its bubbly face.  It stayed for a while and looked at me.  I started to move to the right, and as I moved, the turtle also moved so we both moved to the right around the same circle, all the while keeping an eye on each other.  After about 180 degrees the turtle broke from the circle and swam off.

One day I arrived home from work and Owen told me he'd been there earlier and had seen this giant fish in the swimming hole, and couldn't figure out what kind it was.  He had fife and drum corps practice that night, so after dinner I went down there myself.  Sure enough, I saw the fish.  It was about two feet long, and surely the biggest fish I'd ever seen in the river.  It swam around evasively in the pool, with me all the while trying to get a good look at it.   It had a curious-looking rounded-off tail and was very fat.   It would swim and sort of almost tip over when it took a turn, like it's fins were not strong enough to control its mass.  Finally I was able to identify it--it was a trout!  It was so hard to recognize because it was so fat, but the markings, the comparative size of the eyes and shape of the head--it had to be a monster trout.  Must have been brood stock released into the river from the stocking program.  She was probably Mother to most of the trout in the river, grown fat on easy food for years until she stopped producing eggs.  It was really funny to watch how uncoordinated she was in the natural environment of the river. She was used to swimming in a round tank for most of her life.   The varying depths and rock obstacles appeared to be foreign to her.  I named her "Big Mamma".

At times I have been there when no one else was there.  I like that because I don't get concerned about what they might think, and I can really get into the experience.  After work one day I went there and had the place to myself.  I started wading into the swimming hole, put on my mask and bent over to put my face in the water to look around.  I noticed there were a lot of trout in the hole.  They were all lined up near the bottom, hanging in the current facing upstream, letting the water stream through their gills.  There were so many of them, some nice Rainbows about sixteen inches long, Brookies and Browns ten to twelve inches, and a couple of Tiger Trout.  Big Mamma would lumber around on the outskirts of the school.  I noticed the trout really didn't seem to mind me being there if I didn't make any quick moves.  They must have recently stocked these fish--I tried to estimate how many there were, and I figured at least two hundred.  Then I noticed that behind me in the path where I had entered the pool, it had all filled in with fish--I was completely surrounded by hundreds of fish!  It was transcendental!  We were all together in this pool just meditating on the current, going with the flow...

As the summer wore on the number dwindled as they were caught, or moved to other locations in the river.   Big Mamma must have been caught by some surprised angler who took her home to eat, because she was not seen after a certain point.  Neither she nor the Snapping Turtle have been seen this past year at the swimming hole.  The river continues the relentless flow as the year wanes toward winter, and now I watch my little trout-looking Dace in my home aquarium and think of Big Mamma.

Tank Update #4: Aquarium Equilibrium...The Green Slime Abates...Hell Or Pediddleville...State Of The Blog...

I am now again considering getting some new fish, maybe only a few.  After the mass death in the tank, the number of fish has been stable at seven now for weeks.  Ich infected the tank and confounded me because it affected both the older and the newer tank residents.  Did the parasite that causes Ich come in with the new fish, or was it just beginning in the tank before the new ones were introduced?  Of the original batch of Dace, only Queen Dace and one Henchman remain, and he almost died.  Of the newer batch of fish there are three Dace and the two "others", who are growing fast on their goldfish flake diet.  The Ich treatment successfully stopped the deaths, and also seems to have stopped, or even reversed the growth of the blue-green algae bloom that was covering everything.  I still need to do a good cleaning and water change.  The pollywogs have not been seen for a while and I assume they starved or were killed by the Ich treatment.

The last several weeks have seen ramped-up frustration, and it takes a heavy toll on my motivation and attitude. Conditions at my workplace have become almost unbearable due to the evil shit-heads who run it.  If you are familiar with the book "Catch -22" by Joseph Heller, you may be able to understand.  I have always been a reliable, diligent worker, yet bean-counting little shits with MBA's have implemented a measurement/ranking system just inches off from what Hell must be like that somehow makes me look bad.  I never had this problem until this system was implemented, so it's obvious what's going on.  The company's sheer callous disregard for anything other than inflated profits approaches the ridiculous.  At a time when supposedly everybody is hurting, these fuckers are raking it in.  No matter how hard I try, it is a losing battle against a stacked deck.

I mention this because one reason I have this fish tank with fish from my beloved Salmon River is for stress relief, primarily stress from my job.  It is also why I write this Blog.  My creative output has always been something that I have used to measure how successfully I am navigating through life.   The job sucks the energy out of me, and despite the plans I often make to work on this or that after work, family obligations, and just "being there" are easy distractions.  Also I am a champion procrastinator.  Yes, I know I should be doing Yoga or some other theraputic method, but I see the hazard of the methods themselves becoming roadblocks to doing the things I want to get done.  These things take Time I don't have, and Energy I don't have.  I'd really just rather write and play music than work toward being able to do those things, and I know it is imperative that I get my ass out of this debacle that is my occupation or it will simply never happen.  For instance, there is one Blog post that has been languishing in my mind since I started this thing.  In fact, it is one of the first things I wanted to write, but the subject matter has been too big and important for me to ever complete it.  It is now about half-done in draft, and should be the very next post here.

No more writing about writers writing!  

I have been keeping a low profile--I have only told a small handful of people that this Blog exists, but after I publish the next post, I think I will go much more public.  I do get a kick out of seeing that I have had visits from people in Russia (I'm big in Russia!) Germany, Austria, United Kingdom, Macedonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and France.

The Beatles And 9-11

I was born six months before he assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.  When I was an infant the entire country I was a new citizen of was in deep mourning over it, and though I have no real-time memory of him or that tragic day, this event has affected my life from that point on.  As an infant, I believe, I picked up the vibe of the time, and it has had a definite emotional impact on me throughout my life.

After an extended period of sadness, people are looking for the good times, and lo and behold along came Beatlemania to lift up the spirits of the Nation!  Again, I was too young to remember the Ed Sullivan show or the whole early Beatles thing, but it seems to me that the Kennedy assassination and The Beatles function in my life in the same way that an astrological sign does for many.  More than anyone else, the Beatles taught me how to live my life, and I have always felt that though there was probably no likelihood that I would ever even get a chance to meet them, that they were my friends.

And so it was that in my adult life another national tragedy and The Beatles would again collide in my psyche, this time shaking my foundations in a most disturbing way...

It was about twelve-thirty in the morning on September 12th, 2001.  I was laying on the sofa, as I had been doing all night, distraught, bleary-eyed, watching the TV coverage.  I was trying to convince myself to go to bed, but it didn't matter.  Sleep?  What for?  The phone rang...

"Oh shit! Oh my God, what now?"

It was a good friend of mine.  He lives in New York City, and I had forgotten about him.  I didn't realize that he worked in a building right next to the World Trade Center.  He more or less witnessed the whole event.  He felt the first collision, evacuated his office building, saw the second plane hit. The collapses.  He was one of those people we all saw on TV, running for their lives away from that horrific scene toward a future they would never have imagined.  He lost friends, drinking buddies who were FDNY, in those building collapses.  His building was not damaged, and he had to return to work, so he would see that giant wound in the soul of his country EVERY DAY.  And it changed him, without question.  Though he claims he was starting to lean that way anyway, soon after 9-11 he definitely was staunch right-wing.  Over time he managed to quit drinking heavily, started going to church, and plays a great game of golf.  It works for him now, but it was a long, winding road.

Many of my liberal friends wonder how I could tolerate that change in him.  We had a few small political arguments, usually just via email, but early on I made it clear I just wanted to remain friends, not argue politics, so that's how it went generally, but above all I can really understand where he's coming from--because it almost happened to me...

In times of trauma, things from your past can be a great comfort.  Naturally I turned to Music for strength, and my old friends The Beatles, but something very disturbing happened.  I found it hard to enjoy their music, and had an especially hard time with their excellent 1968 double album called "The Beatles", or "The White Album". On a long car trip I recall once listening to the White Album, track-by-track in order, including "Revolution 9" entirely in my head, and now it was a problem. 1968 was a turbulent year, and the White Album for many seemed to be a kind of soundtrack to the collapse of the sixties (and in fact this was also the early days of the collapse of The Beatles themselves) just as Sgt. Pepper had been dubbed some kind of Summer Of Love soundtrack. There were all the "Paul is dead" clues. The Manson Family murders.  The album had some dark, sometimes violent imagery that had been more or less absent from their music up to that point.  I know now it was the state of shock I was in at the time that made me draw fear-based conclusions.  I was not religious, but I knew enough about end-times theories and the Book Of Revelations for this to fuck me up.

I started thinking that the attack on the country was one of those signs of the Apocalypse.  Very disturbing stuff as it is, but when you add in an event such as this that seems to fit into it like a tee, the juices start flowing.  The Beatles problem made me very uncomfortable.  What was going on there?  It occurred to me that maybe The Beatles represented the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Nowadays I chalk it up to just not knowing enough about the Bible, because I've never heard anybody else say that about them, but at the time, the head trip I was in made it seem plausible.  Maybe those dumb crackers who burned their Beatles records in the sixties were right.  What a horrible, wretched feeling to realize that your heroes, your old friends, were not at all what you thought they were, and that you had been deceived all along.  Looking at the stark cover of the White Album I noticed an anagram of the word "beatles"--le beast.  Fuck, am I doomed?  How could this be?  I started thinking maybe the terrorists are right, that America IS the "Great Satan".  All sorts of paranoia and grieving.  Conspiracy theories.  The whole nine yards.

A few days after the attack my wife and I were driving down the highway with our year and a half old son.  We saw a bunch of cars pulled over on the side and people standing there looking at something up in the sky.  We pulled over when we saw what it was.  We got out and looked too.  It was the most vivid, intensely colored rainbow I've ever seen.  The prevailing winds blow Northeast from New York City right up our way, and I knew immediately that this rainbow was so beautiful because of the prismatic effect of the air being full of smoke particulates, toxic chemicals and Fear fuming out of the destruction.  I looked at my baby son and wondered "What have I done, bringing this poor child into this insane world?"  Would this be his Zodiac?  In those days I would drive around during the day on my job listening to the news reports with a rock-hard lump in my throat, quietly weeping.  I grieved for all the loss and Fear this was causing my people, but also perhaps selfishly for myself and the personal predicament I faced regarding my friends The Beatles.  How could I envision the darkness of life that would ensue as the repercussions of the attacks unfolded without having the solace and good feelings of their music?  Was it possible?  How bad would the future be?  What was my fate? It was a creepy, surreal feeling, full of deep anguish.

Such a negative reaction to a rainbow!  At the time I didn't get the beauty-out-of-death-and- destruction point I was supposed to be gleaning. My frenzied imagination was running amok.  When your mind is blown, there is no guarantee it will be pulled back together, and if it is, no guarantee it will be in the same order as before. Eventually, as the country settled down the state of shock subsided and I was able to talk myself out of this lapse of Faith in my heroes. A month and a half later George Harrison passed away, and I was okay with it, though sad that 9-11 was the last World event of the many momentous ones he witnessed.  Of course I knew that over all, the Beatles message was Love and Peace and Friendship.

Tank Update #3: Population Explosion And A New Giorgio...The Green Slime...Aquacalypse Now...

Funny how a fish tank can mimic your life.  Maybe I don't mean that.  I don't know.

There is a blanket of blue-green algae over many of the rocks and on the back panel of the tank that grew back almost immediately after I spent a whole afternoon cleaning it out a few days ago.

One day probably a month and a half ago now my sons and I went to a small pond near our house.  I wanted to add some new fish to the tank, to see what would happen.  We netted what we thought were tiny minnows or fry of some sort, and didn't notice until we put them in the tank that they were pollywogs!  Some of the large Dace went right for them.  I did notice one escape to the bottom, but figured soon enough my Dace would remember their hunting instinct and eat it.  Weeks later I was counting the Dace as I often do, and there were eleven out of a possible ten.  I reached in and moved the rock the eleventh was behind, and it shot out halfway across the tank and then I could see the tadpole tail and bulbous body.  Either the Dace don't like wog, or this guy is a true survivor.  Later my son reported to me that there were TWO pollywogs.  One is a bit smaller than the first.  Maybe they are a tree frog and a green frog, or a toad.  We'll see what they turn into.  They will have to be released into the appropriate environment when the time comes.  I believe they eat algae, and they hide a lot.

But what about fish?

The river has been running very low all summer, and through snorkeling, we know there has been no stocking of trout.  Though the fishing is not good, netting small Dace is made easier by the drought.  I was able to catch fourteen fish one day recently, including a new fish just like the deceased Giorgio, a bottom skulking fish with a very camouflaged body.  In fact I thought the original Giorgio was an accidental catch, but there one was in about five inches of water, and I was quick enough to net it.  I think the original Giorgio starved to death, not being able to find suitable food in the artificial environment, but this new one didn't last long enough to confirm the theory.  The new Giorgio died just two days after entering the tank.  Possibly he was injured in the capture.  I think I will leave this species alone from now on.

A couple of the new fish are not Dace.  They look similar in that they have a stripe down their side, but it is less prominent and their coloration is more silvery and they have more visible scales.  Their head is more blunt and they have a downward-angled mouth.  They are about an inch long and seem at home with the Dace.  They tend to swim in longer straight lines than the Dace, who swim around all willy-nilly. I think they may possibly be fry of a larger fish that I have seen while snorkeling in the river.  If so they could grow to about six inches.  If they survive we will see.  So far they seem to be doing okay despite the debacle I am about to relate.

After adding the new fish it became impossible to count them as they swirled around in the tank, but the ensuing die-off is making it much easier to count them now.  About two weeks ago I found one of the smaller, new-batch Dace sunk to the bottom, then I noticed another dead, stuck to the pump intake.  This was cause for some concern, because it was one of the big, farm-raised "Henchmen"!  This was a healthy strong fish that had lived in the tank for almost a year, so it wasn't just death due to capture and new environment. No, something is killing them off.

I figured I'd better get rid of that blue-green algae bloom and change the water in case it was ammonia build-up.  The stuff can be scooped up easily with a net, so I got as much as I could out, then changed out two-thirds of the water and cleaned the pump.  I looked forward to happier, healthier fish, but they kept on dying.  They begin to float at the surface and gulp air, and they sometimes have kind of a gooey look to them and then they're dead.  One henchman gone, the crooked Dace, Hercules, most of the new batch except the two odd-species ones, all dead.  Last time I checked, there were eight fish, but that was yesterday, so no deaths today.

Hey, why don't you Google "Ich"?

Okay, so maybe what I said about the tank mimicking my life was not far off.  The fish live in their own Pediddleville.  Off to the pet store to get some ich treatment.

Hero The Badge

I am not a frequent flyer. The last time I flew overseas before this recent trip to Switzerland was when cell phones were rare and laptops were even rarer.  Now there are all manner of smart phones, iPads, and laptops, and instead of being at the mercy of whatever the airline chooses for an in-flight movie, you have a big menu of choices of things to watch, individually, on the small screen on the back of the seat in front of you.

Though it was a long flight, I had no interest in watching anything, but my eyes kept being drawn to the screen of the laptop of a woman sitting across the aisle and one row ahead of me.  It was work material she was reviewing, some kind of marketing presentation for a major American beer brand.  It drove me crazy that I would have any interest in bullshit like that, but I must say it was an educational experience.  It was educational not in the sense that I learned interesting facts about the beer, but that I got a glimpse into the mindset of that particular tribe.  My tribe is artists, musicians, writers, creative people.  This woman, who was probably quite creative herself, was from, or was trying to join, the marketing tribe.

The marketing tribe has peculiar ideas about the use of the language my tribe reveres.

My tribe uses the language to create, to inform, sometimes to fight.  The marketing tribe uses it to manipulate, to set up artificial realities that have only one objective.

The gist of the marketing scheme she was studying was that they were trying to establish a market of people who not only were loyal to their product, but who actually believe that an integral aspect of their "lifestyle" was consuming that product.  Fair enough, if that's your job, I guess.  So this lifestyle would consist of certain activities, preferences, and such, with an emphasis on good times--and always present would be this product.  To put it in my terms, these people, this market, would be a tribe.

The really twisted thing they did to my tribe's language was to refer to this whole lifestyle thing as a "badge", and the objective for the marketing tribe was to "hero the badge".  What the fuck?  Last time I checked, the word "hero" was not a verb.  I should talk, I guess.  I mean, "What the fuck" makes no grammatical sense either, but at least it's a recognized phrase, having a dramatic or comic effect.  These marketing people are just corrupting the language for commerce. I have been annoyed at how companies now "partner with" other companies or organizations instead of simply working with them. It's another example of this foolishness.  I guess it's supposed to sound more impressive to the average Joe when you "verb a noun", but I have a degree in English Literature, and it makes me cringe.

At some point she must have closed the laptop and maybe went to sleep, sparing me the eye draw.  Later I saw her, laptop bag in hand, at Baggage Claim.  We had gone from a clean, well designed airport in Europe to an old, oppressively warm one with stinky restrooms just outside New York City.  She may have been thinking Bud Light.  Here we go.  Hero the Badge.  I was still thinking Feldeschlosschen, Euli, Oufi, Warteck, Lowenbrau...We don't need no stinking badges!

Pediddleville's European Vacation

The following is an account, of sorts, of my recent trip with my son to the city of Basel, Switzerland.  He belongs to a junior fife and drum corps that was invited to the musters that were held there at the end of June.  It starts out more like a travelogue, but as it goes on becomes less detail-oriented, and more my own impressions of things. 

Installment #1 Sunday, June 24th, 2012

According to my iPad with cracked glass, it is 3AM in Basel, Switzerland, where we're headed.  Today has been long, and it will be longer yet.  Leaving JFK as the sun sets, we will see sunrise in just a couple of hours.  Compressed Time Travel.

We're on a British Airways 747.  Takeoff was delayed due to a malfunctioning air conditioning system, and it isn't much more comfortable in here now than it was when we got on, though the AC is running.  Maybe high altitude will help.

Hopefully our bus trip to JFK was not an Omen of how the trip will go.  Pediddleville Law, being similar to Murphy's Law, may be at hand here, but hopefully not.  Our group had chartered a school bus, which arrived twenty minutes late for the first dose of anxiety.  The driver never drove over fifty miles an hour all the way down I-95 from our starting point in Deep River, Connecticut.  She stayed mostly in the right lane, and even at this slow speed, certain driving behaviors that might be considered "reckless" or "clueless" were observed.  She kept veering into the rumble strips on the side of the road.  To pass the time and keep our mind off the heat, John, another father of a band member, and I were keeping a running tally of these variances.  If the rumbling lasted more than three seconds we often gave her two, three, or five points.  Then she grazed a Jersey barrier-20 points!  Damaged her side mirror on a toll booth-25 points!  She even asked if we, the passengers, knew the right way to JFK!  Emily, the teenaged Drum Major whipped out her iPhone and saved the day.

Getting cooler, just barely now, and everyone is settling in to movies and reading or sleeping, and oddly I think I smell pizza.  My son Owen has the window seat and is assigned UFO Vigil, but he's playing a game on his iPod.  Sunlight dark red on the horizon.  Soon we'll be in outer space and our truncated, but endless-feeling night will ensue.  Maybe I'll sleep.



Installment #2  Monday, June 25th, 2012

10:25 Greenwich Mean Time.  Stuck at Heathrow Airport for six hours awaiting a rescheduled flight to Basel.  As mentioned earlier, our flight from JFK was delayed for a malfunctioning air conditioner, then was delayed further after we boarded, simmering in our own juices, because of an unruly child who would not put on his seat belt.  His mother seemed unconcerned about this, or seemed to disbelieve that it was possible to belt him in, and so is now despised because we missed our connecting flight...


Installment #3 Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

Jet Lag plus C-Pap withdrawal makes for a hard night sleeping in a strange bed in Switzerland.  It would seem impossible that I could not sleep last night, but it sure did happen.  Actually I did sleep some--I know this because I remember dreaming about my job.  I'm an idiot even in my subconscious!

Earlier last night some of us went out to get a get a bite to eat and get a feel for the city.  We went to a falafel shop called Sam's Take-Away and ate at tables out on the sidewalk.  In my jet-lagged state and with a Feldeschlosschen in me, I remember looking at a passing tram at Claraplatz and thinking to myself "Already I know I love it here."  Owen is really enjoying it too, noticing the differences between here and Pediddleville.

Today we went with most of the group to walk along the Rhine and go to the spot where you can stand in Switzerland, Germany, and France simultaneously.  We then walked into Germany proper, and then crossed the Rhine on a footbridge into France.  Owen was feeling the pain of his ailment, so we left the group to have their lunch in France.  We caught a tram back to our hotel on Klingentalstrasse and went back to that take-away for our lunch.  Tonight we go to a welcome party barbeque outside the city at an old castle, which I'm sure will be a blast of beer and fife and drum jamming.

Installment #4  Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

Today toured the Roman ruins at Augusta Raurica outside Basel.  The kids seemed to want to just hang out together at the top of the colosseum for a while, and taking a cue from the obvious feeling of safety here, and knowing that most of them were good kids, responsible and smart, most of the parents went about sightseeing on their own or in small groups.  I got a little taste of a feeling I experienced once before, also in Europe years ago when I was traveling on the coast of Wales.   It was an exhilarating peak experience of realizing that nobody in the world who knew me, nor anybody who didn't, had any idea where in the world I was.  I may tell that story some other time, but not now.  Today was more of a remembrance of that, since there actually were many people close by who would be able to find me if they wanted to.  I was walking along a walkway through a barley field, here and there picking it and eating the raw grains on the way out to see the amphitheater--the place where gladiator fights had been held, when I had that feeling.

After that Owen and I had lunch together-Wienerschnitzel-then met up with others in the group.  In a beautiful island park in the Rhine, we waded in it briefly, then boarded a  river tour boat that took us North-downstream, through two locks, back to Basel.  The kids got a kick out of seeing the nude river bathers and people floating downstream in the strong current.  We saw nesting storks and Rhineland vineyards, and every hundred feet or so these small fishing shacks, each with a swinging boom and a net for trawling the swift current.

Had dinner in a great Pan-Asian restaurant that was reasonably priced, then later hung out drinking beer in the park across the street from the hotel.  Let's put it this way--in New Haven or New York City, just about everything we saw going on in that park would have drawn the Police, but it was a perfectly peaceful, safe scene.  I'm now having a hard time coping with how BACKWARDS the U.S. is, if you can believe that.  No crime here.  Why?  Because if you do the crime, you do the time.  For all offenses there are set penalties.  The people know this, and don't break the law.  They all behave like reasonable human beings.  Justice has nothing to do with how good or how well-paid your lawyer is in Switzerland.  Another example of this is that tipping is not expected, though much appreciated, so you don't have wait staff brown-nosing you for a good tip.  It's better this way, believe me.


Installment #5  Thursday,  June 28th, 2012

Night before last I finally got a good night's sleep.  Last night back to the same insomnia, interspersed with dreams about work again!  Seriously, what is wrong with this picture?  I barely got through my last few days at my job before vacation without going "postal", and here I am dreaming about it, when the sleep I AM getting needs to be restorative...

Italy won against Germany last night and the city was wild with cheers and car horns, and oddly, a man singing in Arabic through a bullhorn.

Yesterday, halfway through our time here we hit kind of a snag-and our first grievance with the Swiss-their supposed propensity to rip off tourists.  The Junior Corps and several others were to appear at what was called a "welcome party" as guests of the Muster organizers and as entertainment.  We were led to believe, or were not told that it was otherwise, that the meal was complimentary, but then found out that it would be eighteen francs for their meal of all-you-can-eat pasta!  Beer was pretty steep, too, at 6.50.  All the corps bagged out of it, leaving early, causing a row of back and forth umbrage.

We ended up getting pizzas and drinks and having a get-together in the park, then went swimming in the Rhine.

Installment #6  Monday, July 2nd, 2012

Lots has been happening.  Two musters, in Basel and Liestal, a suburb of Basel.  The history of Swiss Fife and Drum Corps musters begins in Deep River, Connecticut, where Owen's corps hails from.  Each year the Deep River Junior Ancient Fife And Drum Corps hosts the Deep River Muster.  This type of music originated in Switzerland, was adopted by Colonial America, then took on a life of it's own.  Years ago some Swiss groups came over to Deep River and got the idea to do musters in their homeland.  These kids have been revered like heroes here, except for one little misunderstanding referred to in my last installment, that was really the fault of our travel agent/tour director.  All hatchets have been buried by now, no international incident has occurred, and the corps ROCKED the muster in Liestal.  A giant tent full of beer-drinking Swiss and German people singing along with them two nights ago was a very proud moment!

Tonight we go to a farewell party.

Another thing that has happened quite a bit since the last installment has been the swimming in the Rhine River.  I say swimming, but mostly it's drifting.  The Rhine at Basel is a swift-moving, deep river, full of clean water straight out of the Alps.  Giant shipping barges and tour boats are often seen on it, and Baselers enjoy riding its current for hundreds of meters or even kilometers.  If you try to swim upstream, it's like one of those exercise pools where you swim and swim and stay in the same place.  There has been some very warm weather, and the late sundown here has made for some great end-of-day get-togethers to cool off, mingling with the locals, who sit on the bank drinking and smoking hookahs.  I picked a few choice stones from the bottom for the fish tank at home.

It'll be hard to leave here, but there IS Salmon River...

Camper Full Of Men?

Sportsmen, Coachmen, Dutchmen

I have often wondered  at the peculiar names of these campers, or as they are now called, RV's, emblazoning the front top of the vehicle for all to scratch their heads at.  Is the Dutchmen model supposed to be full of guys from the Netherlands?  Is Holland the birthplace of such a vehicle?  How many coaches of various sports can fit inside a Coachmen?  Or is this an homage to the days when coach drivers would all live together in the chuck wagon?

My point is, these names are plural for objects that are singular.  To illustrate my point, lets look at automobile model names.  "Jim drives a Ford Mustangs." doesn't sound right, does it?  How about "Hello, I'd like to buy a Cadillacs."  "What kind of mileage will I get in this Priuses?"  (Prii?) Yikes!

The notion that this could go on at a company that manufactures these vehicles for so long without the mistake being pointed out and corrected is baffling.  I imagine the aging president of the company asserting at the board meeting, "Damn it!  I founded this company, and you will NOT change the name of this camper!  How dare you upstarts correct my grammar?"

What is more baffling is what I found out when I researched this phenomenon on the Internets.  I figured that Dutchmen, Sportsmen, and Coachmen were all different models manufactured by the same RV company.  It would stand to reason, but it is not so.  Coachmen Recreational Vehicles was founded in Middlebury, Indiana in 1964, and they produced camping trailers called Coachmen.  It would appear that in 1972 KZ Recreational Vehicles was founded, also in Middlebury, Indiana.  Possibly this was split off from the Coachmen company.  They produced campers named Sportsmen.  Dutchmen Manufacturing Inc. was founded in 1988.  Their site does not mention a city.   They produce sport vehicles called Dutchmen, Aspen Trail, Coleman, Kodiak and others.  So this grammar anomaly exists at two, possibly three different companies!  Weird!

Lots of people in Pediddleville say they're going to "Walmart's", which is wrong, but understandable since it harkens back to the days when there used to be a store or two in every town in this country that was named after the family that ran it.  Elkin's.  Thatcher's.  Harry's.  Mom and Pop's.  But the Camper Full of Men remains a mystery...

Driving Alone At Night With The Music Privilege

The Law of Pediddleville dictates that I may not have full freedom to enjoy my choice of music in the car that I drive.  This has been a long-standing curse that I have endured and accepted with a sense of humor.  No matter what car I drive on a regular basis to work or anytime I go somewhere on my own, I usually drive the older, more beat-up of our two vehicles, and there is always some issue with the sound system in that vehicle.  The cassette or CD player stops working.  You only get one channel.  The knobs don't do what they're supposed to do.  You can only get the strongest of commercial radio stations.  I have soldiered through all of these unpleasantries in several different cars.  Pediddleville Law, being similar to Murphy's Law, makes it not worth fixing or replacing the sound system because the car won't be around long enough to warrant the expense.  So I endure with what I can get.  Since there is no chance of getting pulled over for a broken sound system, I endure longer than I usually do with a burnt out headlight.  Procrastination rules the Nation of Pediddleville, which gets its name from the one-headlighted automobile.

One night I was driving our better vehicle, a mini-van that has a CD player that actually works.  Though I didn't think to bring along any CD's, I found a burned CD-R copy of "With The Beatles" and "A Hard Day's Night" that I had made for my sons to listen to.  This is music so ingrained in my soul that I could listen to it in my head without any kind of sound system.  I do, after all, have a very good auditory memory.  So I was driving, listening to clear sounding music that I had chosen--Wow!  I had the The Music Privilege!  After I got close to home I realized that all this time I could have been listening to my friend DeadBob's radio show.  I was so into the idea that I had The Music Privilege that I missed out on something that I probably would have enjoyed more.

Well, the other day the car I've been driving crapped out.  This car had a dead CD player--radio only.  Now we'll be registering an old pick-up truck that I'll be driving.  You guessed it-no working sound system at all.  Thank God for the iPad I recently bought...the iPad my son dropped the other day and cracked the glass, and I didn't buy the insurance.

There's no place like Pediddleville...

Tank Update #2: Disappearance And Death...Hercules Joins The School...King Is Queen?

As Spring nears Summer, I remember one of the reasons for setting up the tank.  The previous summer had been difficult, for many reasons, but Salmon River was the one thing that redeemed it.  It's a wonderful, beautiful place to go, a minute from home, and free.  I had always wanted to have an aquarium with some type of local fish, and the idea was to have something in the house to remind me of that wonderful place through the winter, when I could not go there for recreation.  I imagined sitting there in the easy chair, watching the fish and remembering back to the warm days of fishing, swimming, and snorkeling with my family.  It wasn't so bad a winter as I expected, not like last year, but it was still nice to have the tank.

Down to ten Dace, the fish in the tank appear to be doing well now.  There have been a few interesting occurrences.  As reported earlier, Giorgio, the very camouflaged bottom feeder has died, though his body has never been found.  Could the Dace have eaten him?  Soon after Giorgio's demise, I noticed that I could only find ten Dace when there had been eleven.

The smallest of the Dace had been named Hercules by my sons.  He generally kept to himself, probably due to his size, while the rest actively schooled around, scarfing up the goldfish flakes when they were dropped in, but though he was solitary, I could always find him.  He would spend a lot of time alone near the bottom, not getting as much food as the others, but he has definitely grown since October.

One of the smaller fish had developed a problem--an apparent ruptured swim bladder.  He had a cavity where the rest of the Dace have a prominent bulge.  He would try to swim up, but couldn't stay off the bottom for long.  This fish would be a goner in the river.  He had a bent look near his head, and I wondered if he had gotten crushed when I was cleaning the tank.  He would try to rise, but quickly lose it and sink again, resting on rocks or on the gravel bottom.  After a while he seemed to be doing better.  He was still disabled, but could move, and was able to get some food.  Now he has made nearly a full recovery.  His spine is crooked, which is very evidently shown by the black stripe down his side.  The line is kinked just past the pectoral fins.  He'd still have no chance in the river, but in my tank, he's able to keep up with the school and doesn't seem to be struggling at all.

This still doesn't address the missing eleventh fish.  I thought maybe he'd leaped out of the tank and was eaten by my cat, but it was just a theory.  Hercules had been spending a lot of time in the far right corner of the tank swimming around a big rock with another flat rock laying on it, creating a hiding spot.  One day recently I spotted a strange looking white object at the bottom near this little cave.  It was curved and was moving.  It was the missing Dace.  He was paralyzed, laying upside down, unable to straighten out.  A mercy flush later and the tank had ten confirmed residents.  Almost immediately Hercules started swimming with the school again.  Had he been caring for this disabled fish, his work now done?

Another thing that I have seen, three times now, was a real surprise the first time I saw it.  One night I went into the room to look at the fish, and at first couldn't tell what was different-looking about King Dace.  The black stripe that runs the length of the body was much thinner, and the yellow stripe that lines the top of the black one was much thicker than normal, giving the fish an unusual look.  The fish actually seemed smaller than normal due to this colorization.  What was going on?  Some as-yet-unseen behavior was about to unfold.  King Dace started swishing around in a small gravel area near the front of the tank.  Soon, one of the larger other Dace started doing the same in the same area.  They were spawning.  Now the sexist misunderstanding came to light.   "King Dace" first, then the smaller male doing his business.  Just because she's the biggest fish doesn't mean she's the King.  I suppose the color variation was a hormonal thing, meant to attract the male.  The two of them did this several times, then when they were done, left the scene, swam around the tank, then returned promptly and began eating the eggs!

I've been feeding them goldfish flakes, and they seem to be doing well on them.  Certainly all of them have grown except for Queen Dace, who according to what I could find on the internet,  is full-grown at about three inches.  When I set up the tank there were two fish almost exactly the same size and were just over half as long as Queen Dace.  Now they are almost as big as Queen Dace, and it is sometimes hard to tell them apart.  These two fish I called "The Henchman" because they seemed to be the flanks to the King in my little aquarium society.  The way to tell them apart from Queen Dace is that they are more meaty, especially in the tail than she is, and I wonder if that is due to the goldfish flake diet that she didn't grow up on.  I wonder if The Henchmen will end up being much larger than her?

They Are Leaving The Things That Belong To Them At That Place

I've always thought that if I was a teacher, on the first day of class I would do a little exercise to separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.  It would be a dictation of a simple sentence.  It is a sentence that consists of only five words.  Five common, heavily utilized English words.  Three of these words are homophones that a large percentage of people for some weird reason simply cannot use correctly.  Commonly, they use one of these three homophones for all occurrences of any of these three words in writing.  Here is the sentence:   "They're leaving their things there."

How many of them would begin scratching their heads as they looked at the sentence they had scrawled on their papers?  "There leaving there things there."  How many would find that sentence perfectly acceptable?

Chim Chim Cheree

I've been meaning to write about this track from the classic John Coltrane Quartet for a while. Now that it's co-author, Robert B. Sherman has passed away, here's the motivation to put it down.

This track, released in 1965 by the classic quartet of John Coltrane-soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner-piano, Jimmy Garrison-bass, and Elvin Jones-drums on the album "The John Coltrane Quartet Plays", for me, embodies everything Coltrane was trying to achieve with his music at the time.  Coltrane was  known for taking some very "white culture" tunes and turning them into searching, soulful avant-garde jazz pieces.  Most notable was 1961's "My Favorite Things", a Rogers and Hammerstein tune from Disney's "The Sound Of Music", another was "Greensleeves", a traditional English folk tune.  Already having collaborated with Eric Dolphy and stretching things out with "A Love Supreme", the quartet was still moving ahead by 1965 when they took another Disney number to the outer limits.

As the studio track begins, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones provide a steady, loping vamp over which Coltrane states the main melody of the tune on the soprano. After about a minute he begins improvising over the increasingly wild drumming of Jones, complex, frenetic melodies that seem to fly in and out of the fray.  The "sheets of sound" he was known for appear near to the three minute mark as Elvin Jones chops away at the drum set.

Just after three minutes, McCoy Tyner takes over with an intelligent solo that seems to say "Okay, let's step back and take stock of what just happened. Don't worry, I'll guide you through this."  He seems to be providing a more rational explanation of the music that you are experiencing, preparing you for what's to come.  Some fast runs down the keyboard, then a jerky series of dissonant chords as Jones starts igniting things again.  Tyner breaks into an ascending crescendo ushering Coltrane back in at 4:36.  At this point the whole thing explodes into the cosmos!  Both Coltrane and Jones are ON FIRE!  Complete transcendent musical telepathy.  The sheer intensity of Elvin Jones' drum assault is jaw-dropping, and Coltrane wails and cries through the soprano like he's communicating the chaos and fury of the civil rights movement.  Great music makes visual images in my mind's eye.  I see Martin Luther King, riots, Viet Nam.  Back into the vamp as a coda and the track fades out.

This is one of the greatest moments in Jazz as far as I'm concerned.  It's like a distillation of Coltrane's entire arc as an artist.  It is believed that he had some kind of knowledge that his time was limited and that this knowledge made him progress so quickly, and this track, though he did not write it, may as well have been his because it is so potent a statement.  I got the chance to see Elvin Jones Jazz Machine live at Sprague Hall in New Haven years ago.  It was fantastic to see and hear him play.  At this show bassist Willie Ruff presented him with some kind of lifetime achievement award.  As he accepted the award on stage I was struck by how humble, even embarrassed, he was to be receiving such adoration from the audience.  He sure did deserve it.

The Gonzo Memorial Blog Post

Seven years ago the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide with a gun at his home in Woody Creek Colorado. Jesus God, I wish he had been able to maybe clean himself up a bit, deal with the health issues he had, and stick around for the current Presidential campaign.  As a political writer I have found him to be the best avenue to really understanding the way things are in this sick joke of a course of history we are in, at the primal level.  His predictions about many things, though often scoffed at as the ravings of a drunken malcontent have proven true.  It's understandable that most "regular" or "serious" or "patriotic" people would feel that way, but that's the point.  These people are often repulsed by any number of attitudes, physical appearances, religious foibles, ...differences... and can't really compute a person like he was.  How could a man who hated Richard Nixon and regularly used Mescaline be taken seriously?  How could he be trusted?  "Trust me, I understand these things." he would often say, jokingly, because he knew it would be seen as a joke, in correspondences with writers, politicians, news people, musicians, actors, a full array of interesting people from the full spectrum of the American experience.  He got high with Ken Kesey and the Hell's Angels-he got drunk with Patrick Buchanan.  He was allowed to ride in a limo and talk about football with the Devil himself, as far as he was concerned, his nemesis President Richard M. Nixon. He had a very unique viewpoint of how things work in politics because he saw many aspects of our society that most people never see, and could never therefore process. He really did understand those things.

One big reason I started this blog is Hunter Thompson, and let me say right off the bat that if you detect any similarity in my writing style with his, it is for good reason.  I am a chameleon.  I have no clearly defined style of my own.  When I was younger I read the writings of John Lennon, and that became my style.  Later it was Kurt Vonnegut.  In college writing classes I had to try hard not to write short, blunt sentences full of humorous musings.  Around that time I became aware of Hunter Thompson through my room mate, Barton Highfield III, who told me about this great book I'd like called "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas".  I never read it until much later, but I did really like a quote from the book that he told me, and it stayed with me all those years--"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."   Well, I was weird, in my own estimation, and the going WAS getting weird.  I had grown up in East Pediddleville, a small town on the banks of Salmon River.  Now I was living and going to school in New Haven, Connecticut, which was far weirder than Pediddleville.  There were parties, music clubs, bars with beers of the world, girls, people who participated in Peace rallies, artists, minorities, all coming at me like a whirlwind.  I wonder now how being initiated into Gonzo Journalism would have framed this new life I was living. It is important to note that this was the Reagan-Bush years, a truly harrowing time for a kid from East Pediddleville who was only just beginning to become a citizen of this land, and realizing that madmen were at the wheel. At the time my main artistic focus was writing, and my thoughts throughout the day usually took the form of a narrative.  It was something that I was very conscious of, though after school ended and I stayed in New Haven to live, the Narrative started to fade.  I was, after all, living in a house with a bunch of friends, cheap rent, playing bass in a band and playing gigs at famous clubs, meeting semi-famous touring musicians, recording scads of music on my 4-track, and only having to work part-time to get by.  The Narrative faded and the Music moved right in.

Time kept on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future... eventually I realized that I had lived roughly the first half my life in East Pediddileville and the second half in New Haven. I continued playing music and doing music-related things, but did very little writing. At the tail end of the optimistic trade surplus Clinton years I got married, and bought a house in Pediddleville right near the idyllic Salmon River that I remembered fondly from the first half of my life. I worked for a big local company that was eventually swallowed up by a giant global company.  I was now in the Belly of the Beast as they say.  Another Bush slithered into the White House, and then 9-11 happened.

Several years later the hostile atmosphere of my workplace and the discernible decline of the American experience had me pretty well freaked.  It was as if the rottenest dystopian paranoia was actually coming to pass.  The bucolic Pediddeville was no refuge from" The Fear"--something I would have defined for me soon enough.  I was frustrated about music.  I had little free time, and what time I had I often just pissed away procrastinating.  You see,  I have the Creatism disease.  It's an imaginary psychosomatic ailment that is a combination of Creativity and Autism. I must be doing something creative at all times or it is very bad for me.  Yet, I am a champion procrastinator.  And of course the state of things in the World was sketchy, very sketchy.  We were in a war that was a preemptive strike against something that didn't exist.  Fox News, since 9-11 had somehow mesmerized  half the country into thinking it was patriotic to be Republican, that you were not a true American if you were not Republican. Crazy shit, like people boycotting mustard and ketchup.  I was getting disturbing premonitions about the future.  Somewhere in there I started reading quasi-political books that I'd get from the library.  I read Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Al Franken,  also "House of Bush House of Saud" by Craig Unger, which really floored me.  I was beginning to perceive the full scope of just how fucked we are.  It was a realization that something horribly wrong was driving everything, and that there was no way to stop it. At this time I still had not read any Hunter Thompson.  My friend Deadbob was a fan of his, I knew, but I wasn't compelled to check him out.  Even when I heard he had offed himself I didn't read anything by him.

One day I was in the library looking for something to read.  I saw a book called "Liberty And Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto" by Mark Levin.  I had no idea who he was, but leafing through it, it seemed to be a pretty reasonable book, not bat-shit crazy like Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck.  I thought maybe I'd read it, you know, for balance,... what-the-fuckever.  Something about it bothered me though.  It was the smug look on the guy's face on the book jacket.  He had the kind of expression on his face that made me feel like I was being talked down to.  It said "I am right. I am superior to all Liberals.  They are stupid anti-American fools. You should think the way I do."  Hmmm.  I just could not get over that expression on his face.  I wanted to deface it somehow, like black out the eyes with a black Sharpie.  Then a book with a bright orange spine caught my eye.  It was "Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews With Hunter S. Thompson"  Instantly I knew--I looked at Mark Levin--"Fuck this asshole, I'm going Gonzo!"

It was a good introduction to the Gonzo worldview.  In one interview he talked about how he believed that 9-11 caused " a national nervous breakdown".  I got it.  A nervous breakdown.  It really did seem like that's what it is.  In the years since then, the nervous break down has gone untreated.  Things like the Tea Party, the gridlocked congress at a 10% approval rating, the Birther Movement, Occupy Wall Street, all symptoms of the breakdown. 9-11 caused a rift at an organization I belong to that has festered and widened to this day.  I see it as a microcosmic representation.  A fractal. Just like the course of many people's lives has gone downward since then. The damage has been done and the thing will just keep careening down the road until that part that lost a few bolts starts vibrating, and then it will work itself looser and looser until it shakes violently, causing gyrations that don't belong in other parts of the machine, causing it to swerve out of control and hit the side rails, maybe spin out, then who knows?  At what point does the driver decide it's time to pull over?  Who IS the driver?

Anyway, I was talking about Gonzo Journalism...

I read everything I could get my hands on by Hunter Thompson.  The Fear.  I understood those things. His main thing was The Death of the American Dream.  He was "a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger".  All of his writing was rife with examples of perfect explanations for why I feel the way I do. Here was a person who I had very little in common with, when you come right down to it--
I don't smoke. I don't have any interest in sports.  I very rarely drink hard liquor.  I don't like cocaine.  I don't own guns or explosives. I don't gamble.  My life had been pretty tame in comparison--and yet he seemed to think the same way I do. In addition to the factual journalistic starkness, told in a wicked, at times hilarious style, there are cautiously veiled allusions in his writing to his knowledge of extreme situations most of us can only shudder to think of.  It's all the confirmation I need to be able to form an understanding of how things work--at a primal level. It had such an effect on me for a while, that I unconsciously affected quirky physical mannerisms reminiscent of Raoul Duke.  The people of Pediddleville were alien to me also.  I had been from East Pediddleville, so I didn't know many people anyway, but they seemed like Yuppies to me.  These were people who I would feel uncomfortable explaining why I would do a radio show for no money, or why I would play gigs in clubs on weeknights for no money, or why I would go snorkeling in Salmon River.  They name their kids trendy names like Madison, or Taylor, or Hunter... I fantasize about going up to one of them and saying "Hey cool, your son's named after Hunter Thompson?" to see their reaction. Probably they wouldn't know who I'm talking about.  Once in the Pediddleville Public Library I asked the Librarian if they had any Hunter Thompson and she looked at me like I was on fire. Seven years away from having lived a third of my life in East Pediddleville, a third in New Haven, and the last third in Pediddelville, I began to really miss New Haven, and with everything going on in the world, the workplace almost a parody of "Catch 22", and reading Hunter Thompson, I achieved a certain  Gonzo affinity. Somewhere in there, the Narrative came back...

The current Presidential campaign freakshow just screams for Gonzo coverage.  Sure, there's a lot more cutting edge political journalism now because of the internet, and also the extreme bullshit stream of Fox News, so some might say that somebody like Dr. Duke isn't necessary, but they would be wrong.   We are poorer for not being able to read about the 2012 race in real time, in real Gonzo. The world always needs somebody like him keeping things weird so that they can be seen clearly by the rest of us. 

I want to thank Anita Thompson for putting out that book after his death.  It called out to me and it changed my life.

How Long, O Lord?  How Long?

The fat is in the fire.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

Mahalo.

Tank Update...Farewell Giorgio...Comstock Covered Bridge...And Mission Statement, of Sorts...

We may have our first tank fatality.  Yesterday Giorgio, the elusive bottom feeder, was seen laying on the bottom, distressed, out of sorts.  I scooped him up with the net and he barely struggled.  When I let him go he just sunk to the bottom, moved a little bit, then landed on a rock and stayed there for quite a while, just gulping every so often.  Today he hasn't been seen.  I wondered if maybe ammonia had built up and was getting to him, or if he's even eaten anything since October, when he and the other fish were put in the tank. I just figure he's been eating algae, goldfish flakes leftover from the dace, and maybe dace poop, but I don't know.  I figured maybe it's time to change the water, so I panned off about half of it, cleaned the filter, cleaned the algae smear off the back glass of the tank, and then started pouring clean water back in.  I figured Giorgio would either be seen skulking around, or that his dead body would float up from whatever rock it had settled under.  But I didn't see him, so I don't know what the story is yet. The "bug", or the caddisfly larva, also has not been seen in a few days.  Possibly it is metamorphosing, or maybe already has done so.  I have not seen a caddisfly in the house yet, so who knows?

When I was replacing the water the dace all had a great time riding the temporary downspout of water and bubbles that would come pouring into one corner of the tank every so often.  Like I've said before, these fish seem to like to have fun playing in the tank, they know me as their provider and playmate and seemed to appreciate the stimulus of the fresh column of water in a different area of their world.  With the new water they seem more energetic, so I hope it wasn't water quality that distressed Giorgio.  If he's gone, I'll miss him.  He was a cool little fish, and is probably irreplaceable. He was most certainly caught by accident when my son netted the dace.  He was so well camouflaged, that trying to find another to replace him is impossible, and only another fluke by-catch could be hoped for.

We finally got some snow in the Pediddleville area.  Today I drove by the newly refurbished Comstock Covered Bridge and saw the new bridge with a coating of new snow. The river is running very high right now.  There is very little white water, even at the cascades above the swimming hole. The bridge spans Salmon River from Pediddleville to East Pediddleville. Growing up in East Pediddleville, my friends and I used to occasionally end up at the bridge with beers or whatever, and hang out in the pitch darkness of the bridge, listening to the river rushing underneath us.  Partying in a covered bridge is not something that most kids have the chance to do.  Originally built in 1873, it is one of three existing covered bridges in Connecticut.  To me, the updated bridge  looks too modern, too square.  Maybe after the wood siding ages to a dark brown it'll be better.  Of course it was never the same after they installed the security cameras and closed it at sunset years ago before the restoration.  So it'll still be never the same.  Or, it'll still never be the same, or something...

I thought I would go over my intentions for this blog.  This blog I have described as "A Deceptively Innocuous Blog About One Of My Favorite Places On Earth, Among Other Things".  So it is about Salmon River, but the "among other things" will be appearing sooner, hopefully, than later, depending on my various motivations and lacks thereof (I am a champion procrastinator).  It may get weird.  It may get political.  It will chronicle several threads of my life in Pediddleville.  I plan to post things I've written from many years ago and of course, new stuff. Maybe some music reviews.  Maybe a somewhat fictionalized chronicle of my struggle in the workplace.  I am treading a line between yearning to play music and yearning to write and yearning to do quite a number of other things that I simply don't have enough time for.  I work full time for a soul-crushing company that drains my physical and emotional energy, and what time is left is hectic, loud, cacophonous, and fraught with reasons to avoid the things that would make me feel better.  The American Dream...

A Little Piece Of The River In My House

It is four days after the New Year, 2012, and I'm sitting in an easy chair, more or less shell-shocked, in front of the fish tank.  This tank contains no cichlids, no frilly tropicals, or even goldfish.  Inside this thirty gallon tank are locals--fish captured out of Salmon River, just a minute or so from my home.  There are eleven Eastern Blacknosed Dace (Rhinichthys atralulus) ranging in length from one to three inches.  Also there are two other inhabitants--welcome accidental by-catches.  The first is Giorgio, which I believe to be a Northern Hogsucker fry (Hypentelium nigricans), an elusive bottom feeder.  My two young sons named him after Giorgio Tsoukalos, noted proponent of the "Ancient Aliens" theory.   Those two are chips off the old block as far as sense of humor goes.  They have a list of their "heroes", or rather their favorite celebrity buffoons, which also includes Paula Deen, Guy Fieri,  Emeril Lagasse, and News Channel 8's traffic reporter Teresa LaBarbera. The second by-catch inhabitant is a caddisfly larva (order Trichoptera), a worm encased in a tube glued together from twigs and hemlock needles.  He's just known as "the bug".

The dace are very active.  They have an elongated body, similar to that of a trout.  They are a brown mustard yellow color on top, silvery yellow underneath, and have a thick black stripe lined on top with a thin yellow line running the length of their bodies.  An interesting thing about the stripe is that it fades away in the dark.  If you turn on the aquarium light late at night they will not have the stripe, just a ghost image of it that will return over the course of  few minutes.

                                                                        King Dace

 
There is little information on the internet about the dace, just little blurbs from amateur scientist types, and field study term paper sites that seem to trail off after the semester was over.  Obviously their behavior in the tank is different from that of in their natural river home.  Who are these fish?  What do they want?  I realize it sounds preposterous for me, their captor, to pose these questions.  They're wild fish, and they want to go back to their home in Salmon River.  Those are the obvious answers, but I'm not so sure...

I don't imagine they develop much of a social order in the wild.  They may inhabit the deeper water, but I think I've only seen them in the shallow pools near the river bank in small groups of no particular allegiance.  They're just hiding from predators and looking for food.


In the tank, they seem to understand that they can cruise around in the open water with no concerns about getting picked off by a bass or a snapping turtle.  They know that the big face coming at them is there to feed them, not eat them.  When they see me coming, they all come right to the front of the tank and zip around in a tight little mass of circles right in front of my face, waiting for the food to appear from above.  Could it be possible they're saying 'hello' to me?


The largest of the dace is a full-grown three inches long.  The next two largest are only a bit more than half his length.  My sons named him "Daddy",  but I secretly call him "King Dace". He is the only one of the fish that I could say, and I do say, that I have a relationship with.  He often hovers at the front of the tank, looking at me looking at him.  He'll bob up and down in the filter current and turn this way and that, looking right at me, trying to figure me out. He is clearly the leader.  The others will school up with him at times, and I've seen two of the bigger ones doing some kind of mating dance with him, swimming along together in a spiral.  Sometimes after  feeding, he'll get fierce bursts of energy and zoom around, charging the others, who make sure to get out of his way.  Generally though, the tank society is peaceful.  As I said, they appear to have developed a school, which may not have been a behavior for them in the wild. They know they are safe from predators and they don't have to look for food, so they have lots of time on their hands, er,... fins, to figure out something else to do.  I think I know what that something else is--fun.  They really seem to be having fun in their safe little world.  We collected cool blue rounded river stones and gravel from the river bed, and made little caves for them to hide in--which they often do--and they zip around endlessly to the surface, to the bottom, all around, chasing each other, following King Dace.

They were all netted by my son one October Sunday morning under the half-finished renovation of Comstock Covered Bridge.  That day was a brief hiatus from a personal nightmare caused by a perfect storm-type scenario, a coming together of Climate Change and Corporate Greed and Mismanagement that would completely disrupt my life for nearly three months.  More on that in later posts.  The point is, this river runs through my soul.  I have loved this river my whole life, and spending time there with my family makes me happy, grounds me, keeps me from going berserk, and I think that having a little piece of it in my house will help me make it through the winter.