Exurbitude

Harvesting

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:18:00 +0000

A year and a half in the garden, and the harvest is modest but significant. I'm now blogging for our local food co-op, bringing the same mix of addlepated hilarity, aw-shucks sincerity, whimsical tomfoolery, plaid demonstrativeness, and pithy whining that you're used to from Exurbitude. I hope you'll stop in.

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Laying this Hammer Down

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:55:00 +0000

My neighbor Pete Seeger once told the musician Josh Ritter "the most important thing you could ever do is to choose a place and dig in."

I've done the first part, but I've fallen behind on the second part. So I'm taking a break of indeterminate length from Exurbitude.

This past weekend, I went away to San Francisco to see how much farther blogging could take me, and while I was gone the garden went batshit crazy. The tomatoes got heavy with fruit, reared up and fell over, deer ate practically all the leaves off the pumpkins, and the cilantro started to self-sow. My kids got larger. The tolerant, generous, dedicated woman who loves me went to the meeting for the new food co-op, and she introduced the clothesline I put in last week to its first set of fresh laundry. She sent me a picture of the sun shining on our lives.

Of all the things I learned in San Francisco, the one that applies here is that blogging differs from writing, which I’ve been doing all along. Blogging demands more, and writing is just the centerpiece to a world of commenting, flickring, twittering, emailing…what we call building virtual community.

I’ve found incredible people in that community (see partial list at left). And thank you all who are reading this for being part of it, and for your indulgence. But it also turns out that I live in a community. It’s made up of people I like and don’t like, resemble and don’t resemble, agree and disagree with, and whom I can look in the eye and argue with at a meeting, but keep it civil because later I’ll run into them at the convenience store. I haven’t been engaging my community properly, either.

At the BlogHer conference last weekend, there was a panel on following your passion in which everyone agreed that the lamest Internet thing you could do was to raise up your fist and walk off the blogging stage with a grand, gestural post. Eye roll. So I'm not doing that; I don't swear to be gone for all time. My five year old — who found his first loose tooth tonight — says things like "forever." I don't.

Ahhhh, who am I kidding? The grand gesture ROCKS. Anyone needs me, I'll be tending the garden.

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Moving the Goats

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:24:00 +0000

The bait: BBQ at our friends' house. The switch: "Can you help us move the goats?"

I've mentioned these friends before. They live in a large house a couple of towns away, the sort of voluminous newly-built home on a grand scale that has frequently been the subject of derision in this space, but which in their hands feels truly homey. Although the woman of the house calls it the "Plastic Palace," it's been the site of some lovely small gatherings and warm conversation. And they have a freezer full of venison donated by their oil guy. And hell, the man of the house is a Brit, the good kind--he even gets to wear a funny wig and a black robe, like, officially--and they have a kid named after a working man's folk hero, while the lady of the house is worldly and writes for a travel blog and if these two want a McMansion well then let 'em have it.

Another thing you can't argue with is the way they engage with the large meadow that surrounds it. They borrowed goats from a farm up the road.

As we drove up the long dirt driveway across this long expanse of meadow, we noticed that the portable paddock had been moved around to one of the overgrown areas in front of the house. No camera, of course, but the juxtaposition of the two goats (one black, one white), the chest-high weeds, the thick metal tubing of the fence, and the stately home with its Palladian windows and stone facing was quite something.

We entered and had our white wine, natch, and chatted about this and that, and admired the rosemary-covered chickens roasting on the rotisserie on the deck, then our friend casually said that the farmer had called and asked them to rotate the livestock. In other words, pick up the paddock sections and move them to an uneaten portion of the meadow and get the goats back inside.

Naturally the males of the group -- the risk management consultant, the marketing professional, the architect, the college student -- began ritual primate displays and paraded outside (after another fortifying Sauvignon Blanc) to show these beasts who was boss.

It took a humbling half hour, not so much to move the fence sections, but to persuade Mushroom, the more capricious of the two goats, to get back into the pen once we'd moved it. Lured by white bread, the much more tame Seven had wandered in directly. No, the funny bit was each of us trying in turn to get Mushroom's attention or herd Mushroom or persuade Mushroom to go to her home. Things goats don't respond to: clicking sounds, claps, whistles, kissing noises, their name, injunctions to "come on" delivered while slapping both thighs and bending forward. Walking toward a recalcitrant goat may cause a rearing, snorting, and suggestive horn-flinging in the direction of the walker, who, if he is a white-collar professional wearing a polo shirt, will step back in some confusion and utter a single "I say!"

We finally hit on the plan of opening the section of the pen nearest Mushroom really wide, and she walked in.

That morning at the organic farm I'd been talking to one of the local agitators, a man who refurbishes old houses and turns them into sustainable businesses, who railed against one village's unwillingness to envision a future that didn't depend entirely on oil; a self-sufficient future, with local jobs, local food sources, local culture, local commerce. We talked up over and around it for a while then said seeya, and later that evening I found myself moving a goat pen in front of a McMansion with my educated, citified, worldly friends before stepping inside to a delicious dinner and highbrow conversation.

If we're lucky and we plan right, moving the goats is the future. I certainly hope it -- or something like it -- is in my future. Because many of the alternatives are a lot worse.

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The insane root/That takes the reason prisoner

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:49:00 +0000

It's for their own protection.

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Encounters with the Wildlife

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:25:00 +0000

I.
There's a screen in the upstairs bathroom window, but there are these gnats that have evolved to be small enough to fit through its apertures because they derive some unexplained biological benefit from flitting around on the ceiling, just above the wall sconce, until they die and fall into it. There is a local legend that every time the sconce fills up with the carcasses of dead gnats, a doughty Viking warrior who long ago lost an ill-advised bar bet comes back from the dead, trudges into the house and up the stairs, tears the sconce from the wall and drains it in a single hearty draught, burps, places the sconce gently on the edge of the sink, and calls his friend Larry's brother-in-law who "[can] totally rewire shit."

II.
The day before I caught the pike, my brother and I were fishing for pickerel from the canoe. Nearby, the lilypads began moving of their own accord, spreading apart as though making way for an invisible bride walking upon the water. As I crossed myself and shook my charm bracelet, my brother looked UNDER that water and spotted the snapping turtle. We both peered at it in the shallows, remarking that its mighty legs alone would serve as hams, while its garbage-can-lid-sized shell would make an ideal garbage can lid. So imagine a garbage can lid balanced on four hams, but it's, like, swimming. I wish I had a picture, but the snapping turtle consumed the very idea of my camera before I even thought it -- which is just how big that turtle was.

III.
Next day, I caught my first northern pike. You know, you're just sitting there dangling bits of colored plastic decorated with needle-sharp bent metal barbs into the water and a fucking fish bites your shit. When animals attack, right?

IV.
Various deer. Constantly.

V.
Mouse in the grill. Covered that.

VI.
Some roadkill.

VII.
Oh, right, this morning. They've repaved the parking lot at the office park where I work, and this morning there was a security guard on the hot tar, standing watch over a "snapping turtle" -- I have to put it in quotes because of that one I saw in the Adirondacks last week -- as it crossed from god-knows-where to wherever-the-hell.

VIII.
I was tucking my son in tonight when I saw a yellowjacket sitting on his window sill, slowly undulating one antenna. I picked up North Dakota, gathered my courage, and thwapped it. It crackled like evil rice krispies. I still don't know if it was actually already dead, or paralyzed or something, but still, the bravery.

Just then I heard the heavy tread of a Viking on the stairs.

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Making Do

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:16:00 +0000

Imagine my delight when I opened the grill the other morning and found this little guy:

I was especially surprised at the amount of meat we got off him.

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The Walking Fool

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:05:00 +0000

In 2001, my friend Mark started walking from New Jersey to California. Several months later, in Sioux Falls, SD, he decided he was finished with the heat and mosquitoes, and came back to New York.

This March he set out again. I got a call from him tonight outside of Bancroft, Nebraska, and he wanted you all to know he was doing very well, but wouldn't mind a cool drink of water from friendly strangers now and then.

Please to visit his site and read his blog, then tell your Nebraskan friends to keep a friendly eye out, and wish him well. Someday you'll get to see the full documentary, the quality of which can be deduced from the trailer he made for a filmed version of his first trip.

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Taking Out the Garbage

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:08:00 +0000

Our household waste goes into a bunch of piles.

Compost
Glass, plastic, metal
Cardboard, paper
Back to the diaper service
Traditional garbage -- paper towels/tissues, packaging, non-compost food waste
The corpses of those who would call us self-righteous and smug

So what's actually great about this is that I get to go outside a lot, where the animals dwell. It's not that we're BETTER than anyone else. Anyone who clogs our landscape -- and the children, and freedom -- with cigarette butts, Schlitz cans, old stuffed animals, etc., is perfectly fine with me. I just like making piles. And if every time I wash out a dirty cloth diaper it makes the Virgin Mary smile, so much the better.

I can't believe I'm going to post this, but I checked in the bucket of things to say and it was empty except for this post. You have my apologies. Do check back sometime, wouldya?

UPDATE: You deserve better. Here's something from the commute:

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Did You Guys See That Year Go By?

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:56:00 +0000

A year ago I left the world's oldest international auction house for the last time and embarked on a new job. Not sure if I'm calculating this correctly, but I think I've saved 25 days' worth of commuting time. Which would explain why my kids look so much older; I've jumped ahead a month!

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Chips off the old block

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:02:00 +0000

My wife and I were driving a babysitter home not long after we'd moved up to this town from the other town to the south, and as we passed the country club where I'd married a beautiful, intelligent, progressive and funny woman one time, I saw a white-spotted pink boulder nestled in a stone wall.

"Rebecca," I said to the babysitter. "Do you know what kind of rock that is?"

Rebecca did not. Not because she wasn't smart, but because there was really no reason for a 16-year-old girl to know anything about Schunnemunk conglomerate, not unless she wore thick braids and coke-bottle glasses and played English horn and collected bugs, and these things Rebecca did not do.

Nevertheless, for a couple of minutes — as long as I harangued her about the distinctive rock, which is found nowhere else in the region and appears only in smaller patches in northern New Jersey — she was edified on the subject. Schunnemunk conglomerate. Doubtless she forced the mineral out of her mind as quickly as possible upon arriving home (home, which was back in the town we'd lived in earlier; this was before we'd integrated into our new digs, when the people of our new town still called us city folk and threw kittens into our well) by listening to that M&M and that Molly Cyprus woman or watching Dancing with the Chef.

This is what it looks like, and this is where it comes from.

Schunnemunk is a long narrow ridge, recently named a state park, that is ribboned with trails and rattlesnakes. That scene in Michael Clayton, when Clooney runs away from the burning car? He runs up the northern terminus of the Jessup Trail, which continues for about ten miles along the ridge. Also up there are the Dark Hollow, the Sweet Clover, the Long Path, and the trail up High Knob. At the high points where the soil doesn't cling, this peculiar pink stone larded with quartz shows itself between the pine scrub. It's a tacky-colored puddingstone, mauve, from the late Devonian, when such things were in fashion.

Here's where a better or worse writer might go for the metaphor. Certainly the territory is rich: remember, we're driving past the site of our wedding, the stones of this mountain are made up of these tiny quartz moments embedded in sandstone, and the whole ridge — a 3,000-foot thick cap of conglomerate atop earlier Devonian deposits — is highly durable and resistant to the elements. People have used the stone for centuries around these parts, and it has made its way from town to town. There's a millstone made from it beside a pond in Monroe; chunks of the rock are mixed in with the local gneiss in the stone planters outside the Town Hall in Highland Mills; Central Valley's got it in spades. Like the bits of quartz in their sandy matrix, pieces of Schunnemunk are embedded in the lives of the people who live in this region.

A better or worse writer might say that it is like my wife and me, this slightly tacky but useful stone, comprising sand and fire, part of the earth of these valleys; sometimes slightly invisible to the residents, but slowly incorporating into the local fabric.

But what a better or worse writer might not realize is that there's no excuse for boring a high school junior with her whole life ahead of her so badly that her eyes wander to the distant horizon, over the ridge she doesn't even see anymore, to dream of a place — far, far away from this town and the aging nerd in the front seat, babbling about rocks — from which she will never want to return.

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Meeting the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:06:00 +0000

The last couple of months have seen several in-person meetings with actual live bloggers. (Not actual live-bloggers, although some of them might do that if witness to something fascinating, or if they had a cell phone, a restroom and a Twitter account. Because they're addicts.) Big bloggers, regular ones, all of them very talented and incredibly good looking. And here's the weird thing: like the runners I'm privileged to know, they all seem to be decent people who support one another in their endeavors and who don't politicize the dynamic or judge you for your skill or your reactions or your thinning hair. I know that's not everyone's experience, but I'm new here.

It was natural that I'd combine the two pursuits sooner or later, so when I read on the Internet that Heather B. was running 5k's I thought "oh, I'll have to invite her down for a run sometime this summer," and as I thought that I passed a big banner for the first annual 5k at a local church, and I thought "yeah, I'll have to remember to find a race that makes sense and email her," and then I ran over a guy painting arrows to mark the course and I thought "yeah, if there were only a race of the correct distance nearby, I could totally invite her" and then I crashed my car into the race director and said "duh! I could invite her to this race! The one that starts about a foot from my driveway!" And naturally, having read her blog, seen her photos, read her Twitters and met her once, my next thought was "what kind of booze should I use as bait?"

I needn't have bothered with the booze: she never hesitated from the moment I suggested a run. An excellence of spirit and openness to new experience seem to be what Heather B. is all about, and I now know that "No pasa nada" translates to "yeah, I'm in." So she came down, refused mojitos and had some wine, got up completely game, and ran that race like an absolute pro with a form-perfect kick for the last fifty yards that was grace itself.

I made eggs, but didn't serve mimosas. Then Heather offered (ahem, for the record) to watch our kids for an hour when we announced that we had an appointment, which I had sort of neglected to mention. But after that lapse in good hosting, THEN, we took her to watch Polly turn seven, which is not something you see every day, I don't care what kind of fancy blogger you are.

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$1m Ideas: Niche Social Media & Retiring "Wooooo"

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:49:00 +0000

I.
I was writing an email earlier and started describing this novel I'm listening to on the CD, when it occurred to me that I should just put my impressions on Goodreads, where my correspondent would still see them, and I wouldn't have to go to the trouble of re-keying my opinion every time I wanted to tell it to someone. It then occurred to me: why not continue the fragmentation of subject-specific social media sites to the point of utter absurdity? For instance (and I'm sure these URLs are already taken, but obviously for the wrong reasons):

If you want to…	then visit…	and…
tell someone what you’re doing	twitter.com	update your status for your followers.
recommend a moving book	goodreads.com	apply five stars to your latest read.
seek sympathy during your kids’ illnesses	snottovoce.com	update the phlegm volume monitor and color chart.
describe an argument with your S.O.	bicker.net	create a graph of how many times that jerk said "you're pronouncing it wrong."
proclaim allegience to your local professional sports franchise	fansonly.com	log in to your home field and place a fanpoints wager on the big game.
discuss the way you feel when you see your child succeed at something new	boasteez.com	use the big hammer to hit the pride bell, which causes ring.wav to launch on your followers’ pages.
let your professional connections know about your latest project	linkedin.com	complete the “What are you working on?” field.
note that you’ve found a weird bruise on your leg, but can’t remember bumping it on anything	contusia.org	build-a-bruise™ using a color palette in yellows, purples and browns while your friends rate your injury with up to five(!) ice-packs.
extend this joke any farther	the comments link	do it there.

II.
Can we please stop screeching "Woooooo?" It's embarrassing. I recommend that "Woooo" be replaced with a simple humming sound. How majestic that would be as it swelled over the crowd at the parade, sports event, or concert.

How old I must be.

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Do Not Read This Post

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:18:00 +0000

Because there's a giant spider in it.

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Benchmarking: a Study in What Passes for Discomfort Among the Affluent

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:41:00 +0000

I’d never really encountered the word benchmarking until I came to my current job in the financial services industry. I’ve since warmed to it. Because it’s what I do all the time as I wonder just how other people are making it.

Don’t get me wrong: we’re making it. I’ve been told that enough times by enough people who know, and things are definitely more comfortable around here this year. I’m convinced, finally. But if we’re making it, why the pit in the stomach? Why the sense that we’re one room short of a full complement of rooms? Why do the ceilings seem a couple of inches too low and we powerless to change that?

I started writing this entry, then came up against the fact of our making it and had to cast my mind back, had to relocate my principles. Oh, that’s right: we chose it. A manifesto was perhaps written.

Once in a while, that rankles. The principles and justifications seem a little more elusive, a little less apparent. Are the kids just growing faster than we thought? Are the toy piles and innovative storage solutions (nooks, crannies) getting overfilled? Is it just the persistent sugar ants and nonresponsive exterminators that make us feel a hair below the comfort zone of privilege we feel we should inhabit? Hard to say. The people I meet, the bloggers I read, I want to know: how are they making it? It’s not about status per se. It’s more about the practicalities. "Look honey, that’s a one-income household but their ceilings are higher than ours!" It’s not about the high ceilings. It’s about the how. How do they have higher ceilings than ours?

If we’re making it, and we wanted higher ceilings, why do we have these low ones? I go back to our decisions, and realize again: we chose it. [Just squashed an ant.] Tonight, again, writing that first paragraph, I reran the math we ran when we sold the more expensive, larger house to purchase this 1,100 square foot one. I see what we did. I remember why. And I calm down a little.

But here’s the rub, for me: my fiscal conservatism is characterized more by fear of failure and pessimism than it is by frugality and intelligently converting money into more money.

So I benchmark, and it comes out like this: There are people with a near-innate self assurance. It comes across as street smarts, business savvy, negotiating skill. Sometimes there’s physical handiness. It combines tolerance for risk with an apparently willful lack of imagination regarding risk. Some of the least socially adept people I know have it. CEOs have it. It’s in the easy self-assurance of the lawyer, or the contractor, or the banker. It’s not just blind certainty; it’s that coupled with skill at mitigating risk. Many entrepreneurs have it—but it doesn’t seem prevalent in the more distant reaches of the cube farms. Sometimes those who possess this complex of traits actually fail, but I suspect they simply pick up and move on to the next project.

I haven’t got the gene. So what I DO have is a small old house whose purchase was very safe and which left us in pretty good shape for college down the road, PLUS a job in a cube, swoopy floors, little sugar ants, unfinished novels, a floody basement, poor air circulation, bats, and, sometimes, a sense that even this can’t last.

And that, friends, is what passes for making it. How are you making it?

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Assembly Required

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:48:00 +0000

I.

We have a neighbor – single mom to a four-year-old. She works full time, owns her house where she lives with her sister and the kid. She can install molding. She knows how to demo sheet rock and clean it up proper. Ceiling fan? She could do it.

She made fun of me this weekend because I chose to use an innovative technique to attach the front panel of my deerproof Plant Containment Unit to the body of the thing. She would have used a hinge. I went with the plastic zip ties. Because I moved AWAY from the upper east side, thank you very much, and I don’t need a hinge to open the damn thing. That’s what the can is for. I use another zip tie to close it.

I hope that when Lopsides crashes through her yard chewing on a cucumber, wrapped in chicken wire, the lashings and tomato stakes that make up my garden fence trailing from his farkakte antlers, that I am there to take a picture to share with you, O Internet.

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II.

In our town, on May 28th each year, the A/C Man comes through the main street on his great waggon that is drawn by four and twenty white oxen and piled to the canvas with the shiny bodies of sparkling new air conditioners. These his strapping sons heave down to the children of the town who give their tuppence to the sister, a barefooted redhaired girl in gingham who prances along with a tin pot for the money and who always keeps the change. The town children don’t seem to mind; it is the season. Hoisting their massive metal burdens to their narrow shoulders they stagger gamely home up the side streets on the hill, calling to their parents “Mother, Father, come see! It’s the Haier Koolblast ZX90! Do come, and bring baby Zillah, I’m sure she’d like to see her face reflected in its surface!” And the parents come, leading the little ones, who gurgle at the corrugated knobs and who must be chided for trying to lick the glistening side panels.

Then the Dads collect a few choice items and, with a prodigious will and profusion of sweat, take the window sashes out wrong, attach the brackets like a crazy person, slam the fucking thing into the godDAMN window frame, remove it because it’s WRONG, bend a couple of pieces of metal to fit around the projecting thing in the non-standard window, then carefully put…it…backDOWNONTHEIRMOTHERFUCKINGPINKY and finally shove a piece of plywood into the open space above, drive several screws into it haphazardly and assume they’ll figure it out in autumn. Fuck. They need a beer.

The A/C Man eats last fall’s thawed venison with the mayor and they laugh late into the night over a tankard of mead while watching Blazing Saddles on the TiVo. His children tend the air conditioners, making sure each has its ration of freon and straw, before they fall asleep under the wain, dreaming of sunshine and shade.

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III.

When the Chattanooga Iron Works closed down, the men walked the high-summer streets forlorn, their denim-ticking overalls picking up the red clay dust, until they came to Herd’s Garage. Clement Herd sat out front on a crate happy as a pig in shit and they stood around and one of them pulled out a mason jar half full and they passed it until finally someone said “Clem, why the hell are you so all-fired happy?” And Clem pulled out the blueprints for the cast iron and steel Char-Griller Super Pro Charcoal Grill/Smoker and all the men threw their caps in the air and they opened the shop that very week.

And, much later, I got one of those and I put it together. And I made this:

May all your parts fit snugly, and may all your washers be included in the original packaging this summer.

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Summer's Here. Time to Perspire.

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:24:00 +0000

Life is hard. Avoiding it shouldn't have to be.

Maybe this sounds familiar. You arrive at work, boot up your computer, get coffee, hit the john, make some cereal, reboot your computer, get another coffee, eat your cereal, wash your bowl, check your personal email, check your RSS feeds, check Twitter, get another coffee, check your work email, realize you're late to a 10:00 meeting, attend the meeting, check your personal email, check Twitter, check your work email, launch Word, launch Excel, launch Adobe Acrobat, close Excel, open the Word document you were working on last, check your personal email, go to lunch.

And before you know it, the whole day may have gone by with you slaving away accomplishing things, no one thanking you, the world still on its axis, and at 4:48 or so, when you start to pack up, you think "why am I knocking myself out like this?"

There's a better way.

You can slow down.

You can get more from each moment.

And a new blog, Perspire About the Little Things, can show you how.

Instead of the scene I've just painted, imagine instead that you arrive at work and then spend a few minutes staring off into space, reliving the commute. Instead of rushing to boot up your computer, maybe you take five minutes to retrace the steps your career has taken to get you to this point -- 9:05 on a Tuesday, seething over a cluttered desk, about to switch on your electronic overlord for another mind-numbing eight hour shift churning out money for other people. Or you take a little time to reflect on how the clerk at the little coffee stand put the lid on with the sip-flap directly over the seam in the cup...why do they always do that? Are they trying to make it dribble?

When you truly focus your attention on little things like these, time takes on new character. It passes more quickly, but you get less done. No more leaping from task to task like a chinchilla on bennies. No more rushing from room to room in your mind trying to straighten tottering piles of stacked information about products and services you don't understand. No. You are focused. Deliberate. Intentional.

Because Perspire gives you the tools you need to choose how you'll kill time. Simple tips, succinctly communicated. When you start reading Perspire About the Little Things regularly and put just one or two strategies into practice, you'll be amazed at the change you'll experience. And if you incorporate them all, you'll change your whole identity.

You'll never again have to wonder where the day went, or why the report on the Jenkins account still isn't up to date, or who was your biggest enemy at summer camp that one year. Because you Perspired, you'll always know where you stand, and you'll be able to look back at the blank periods in your day -- in your week, in your year -- and know that you decided how they should be spent.

On the little things.

You have the power to change. Start today, and check back on Tuesdays and Fridays.

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War Memorial

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:20:00 +0000

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Rock Star

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:42:00 +0000

I didn't realize that we weren't going to finish the race until pretty late the day before. By that time I'd purchased the makings for a stellar Elvis belt -- rhinestones, glitter, pleather -- and was resolved to stick with the Presley troupe for most of the course.

Which is how it played out. We launched our shopping-cart barge into a sea of kooks, got treated like Kings for four and a half miles, then I changed into running gear and made my way to the beach, after the course was closed, through a couple of police barricades and past a surprising number of live bison. From the time I started I was the only one running. For a stretch I was the only one on my feet -- never have so many gotten so wasted for so little. I covered the last two miles solo, through Golden Gate Park's eucalyptus and pines, and was the last to cross the finish line as they dismantled it.

My knee didn't bother me once, nor the next day. I'm back, baby. Long live the King.

Pictures of me and the Elvis phenomenon and the race itself.

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World's Least Convincing Elvis

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:42:00 +0000

Flowers in my hair. Thin flowers.

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:43:00 +0000

Tomorrow I follow in Mark Twain's footsteps and fly to San Francisco to visit friends and run the Bay to Breakers. While running, of course, I will be dressed as Elvis Presley, who disliked hippies, mostly, but did lots of drugs and sang about Love.

Mark Twain famously said, of the Bay to Breakers, "I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race; but, next to that, I prefer the gay and joyous mule-rush." He finished in 44:30, about a six-minute mile, and was so mad at not winning that he rent his gold lamé shad suit asunder and attended the after party in nothing but a boater, socks, and garters. Of that party, he said "It is not nakedness that gives the sense of immodesty, the modifying the nakedness is what does it." He then began attempting to get everyone else to take off their clothes, slurringly admonishing anyone who would listen that "Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born." And everyone was pretty cool with that and several traditions were born.

Elvis, on the other hand, said of Mark Twain, "cats were born to give you acne," then stumbled into a completely disjointed version of "I've Got a Woman" before launching into his famous tirade against newspapers and newspapermen, particularly Twain. Presley's time in the Bay to Breakers was a sad showing in his later years; he finished his final race a full seven minutes slower than the PR of 50:36 set in 1952.

You can read about the race here. I would like to return to many comments lauding my time, whatever it may be.

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Punchline: I get a speeding ticket

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:52:00 +0000

I used to tell the following joke when I was a kid, to virtually anyone who would come by. The first script I’d ever memorized: “Once there was this guy, and his plane was on fire. So he pulled the cord and nothing came out but strings. Then he pulled the emergency spoke and nothing came out but strings. Then this BIIIIG FAT moth flew by, and it said ‘I can’t believe I ate the whooooole thing.’ ”

So I’m driving to work Monday morning – because on what other day would this happen? – along the gently winding double-yellow-line road through the wealthy woodland suburbs of Westchester. This is my secret back way to work that avoids highways with the first name “I-”. It’s a perfectly driveable little road. Very nice, actually, with gentle slopes, plenty of visibility, and large houses on vast spreads set well back from the road behind sturdy stone walls.

Sort of in the middle portion of this back road there’s a speed zone where the limit is 25 miles per hour; a speed limit I’d thought was reserved for nursing-home parking lots or golf courses. Shoot, there are toll booths you’re allowed to roll through at faster than 25 miles per hour. But I gather the plutocrats of [REDACTED] don’t want non-Lexii to bypass the highways at the expense of their early-morning serenity. So 25 it is.

Now right in the center of this slow-mo zone, or slowmozone, as it will henceforth be called, is one of those gizmos that tells you how fast you’re going. I never read it, because who cares? But Monday morning, a mile past this gizmo, just at the clubhouse for the country club, there’s a cop standing at the side of the road, and he motions me to pull over.

And nothing. Came out. But strings.

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Soda, Pop

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:14:00 +0000

I've been to the bar Soda two times. The first time was about a month ago, for the post-memorial drinks and Mac slideshow in honor of a departed friend, at which no eye was dry and no future seemed quite right to anyone in attendance, without him.

The second time was this past Wednesday, when a kind insider included me on an email announcing drinks and a book signing for Things I Learned About my Dad (in Therapy), where Heather Armstrong, her husband Jon, Alice Bradley, Doug French, Sarah Brown, and Greg Allen (whom I didn't meet...was he there?) would all be in attendance, sitting in a small circle, entertaining the occasional reader who dropped in with stories of human cannibalism, climbing K2, writing novels with q-tips dipped in the jet-black ink of the elusive Architeuthis hartingii, and raising toddlers.

It was sort of like that, toward the end. When I arrived, however, there was a line snaking through the room, the books were all sold out, people were waiting to have non-books signed, and clusters of people who'd already been signed were still settled into booths rehashing their experience. Heather and the others were clearly enjoying real, prolonged face-time with actual readers, and the process aspect of the meet and greet had stalled. I reached this conclusion as I stood aside, waiting to greet my friends in that tiny circle of celebrity: society has reached the point where there are bloggers who need "people." Make of that what you will. It was a little more settled at the end, although even then, when we headed off toward the next venue for this month's Cringe reading, at which Alice and her husband were to perform, Heather and Jon were still on the sidewalk in a scrum of fans. Time and again, the crowd turned un-anonymous, as some long-time reader, commenter or Goodreads connection came forward to one of these folks to say "oh hi, you sort of know me." Perhaps best of all, Heather B. was there to have beer and marvel at the madness.

In traffic, and recognition, and self-identification as a blogger, I am orbiting at the very outermost fringe of that crew. But I've had a couple of tastes of it recently, and there's definitely something there. Whatever that means, I know this: Soda will never be just a bar for this blogger.

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Freeing up hard drive space

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:14:00 +0000

This weekend, five years after first buying a house, I went to Long Island to remove stuff from my old bedroom. In addition to the boxes of D&D materials, comic books, and letters with which I could not part, there were many items whose only value lay in their status as visual reminders of themselves. If that makes sense. So I took pictures of some of them, then set them free.

Then I posted the pictures on Flickr, natch.

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So Much to Say, All of it About Spring, and I am Lazy at the Very Thought of it

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:53:00 +0000

Where to begin? First, my in-laws' neighbors are clearly harboring a fugitive Nazi (hello, Mike Godwin!).

I was driving the Lad to a playdate and got there early, so drove around a little more and saw a cooler with a sign posted reading "organic eggs, $4/doz." A week later, a food-conscious woman who eats with me brought home a dozen of them. They are multicolored and utterly fabulous. I have three books on raising chickens out of the library now.

I had dinner with very talented people in New York City and they made me feel like one of an elite tribe.

Recently we ate at Woody's, an all-natural, grass-fed, mostly local beef, all-local-produce burger joint in a nearby town and boy howdy let me tell you that you should go to Woody's, even if you're a vegeminarian, because they even have a portabello sandwich for which one might opt to die. The burgers themselves you will also offer to die for, but! You don't have to. Just pay.

We went to Florida.

There's much to be said about the books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I've said a little something about each at Goodreads.com.

At the tail end of a shitty April, in which bad things befell wonderful people and we had a scare of our own, my sister had a son, and he is quite beautiful. So spring gets another chance.

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The New York Times People, Take Two

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Braine) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:35:00 +0000

"Later, Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have landed his plane 'at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally.' Mr. Bush first surveyed the damage when he flew over New Orleans in Air Force One when coming home from his Texas ranch two days after the hurricane, an act widely criticized." NYT, 4/24/08

Wait a second, sorry. WHERE was Bush when Katrina hit? That's right. Having cake with ol' Maverick "Free Ride" McCain.

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