Sweet Thang's Birthday.

She is my favorite. It's her birthday. Thank you universe.

The creeping specter of decrepitude

Snoring. The plague of the middle aged man, lost to his own sense of pride and self image, created to wreck his relationships and his sleep. A destructive, primary color cartoon of derision and bad jokes. Every four year old knows how to mimic snoring with gusto. It is a sitcom cliche for the overweight, the infirm and the witless dads. I am afflicted. It sucks.

More than anything else I would like it to go away. But like everything that I wish would spontaneously disappear in my futile, increasingly meaningless existence, it's removal would be expensive. My regressive punitive health care with it's high deductibles and fear of insolvency related punishments for accepting treatment keep me from doing anything until absolutely necessary. I have now given up and surrendered my check book to see if I have sleep apnea. I probably don't and instead have some kind of bargain basement Homer Simpson level comedic snoring, designed in some sub basement of hades by the universe to make me a buffoon.  It is yet another signpost of dissolution into my base elements. I have been sleeping in the spare room to give my poor wife have some kind of peace, and now I feel like the unwelcome relative that has become a burden.  I feel like a house guest that should have left some time ago.

Evolving past Childhood

This week marked the graduation from High School of our oldest son and the last week of elementary school for our youngest. I find myself conflicted with pride at their achievements, fear for their futures and the wish that I could make them both 6 years old again and do it all over.  I will miss walking to the bus with Tom. He is completely capable of, and has been doing it by himself for some time; he has a key and a phone and a reasonable amount of common sense.  He has no real need of his dad at the bus stop, but I do it because I am holding on to him as a kid. I know the time of him spontaneous grabbing of my hand when crossing the street is long over, but I will miss that feeling more than anything that I have ever lost. There is no way he will allow my presence at the bus stop next year. He will be in middle school, with all the hormonal imbalance and social cannibalism that leave young lives briefly wrecked or exalted. His public facing, small child phase is all but done.  I know he will still be a kid, and prone to to emotional outbursts and in need of comfort at home but the facade will be firmly in place by then. It isn't cool to have dad meet your bus to a sixth grader.

 Ned is facing the reality of his next step into adulthood, college at the University of Washington with a certain degree of non committal, willful ignorance that is the hallmark of self preservation in hostile environments.  I hope we instilled in him the discipline to stick with the hard times and see the important things through the maze of stupid, insignificant trials that await him.

We love these people God has loaned us for a few years. I will miss their childhoods. I wish I had made their experiences more interesting and their achievements more satisfying, but they never went hungry, always had a roof over their heads and were always loved. It will soon be their time on earth. And we will still love them as much as we did when they were children.

Bad Things.

Something horrible happened to the son of a friend. Something thats caused me to rethink my own kid's lives and mental states, as well as my own history and memory of difficult times.  In interest of privacy there will be no discussion of the incident, except to say it happened to a family that has always seemed very normal and friendly in the most interesting ways. I know several brothers, all of whom are at times brilliant and funny and weird. They themselves had a strange upbringing and I have always been amazed at how resilient they have been and how they took the very strangeness of their family and turned it into the source of their strength. That something like this should happen to one of their offspring is a gut punch. I wish the poor kid well, and a speedy recovery. I think about how I needle and push my sons to excel (or even just to actively participate) and the grim silence that follows.
 Nothing could be worse than the feeling that your kid has done something to themselves that took them from you.

Nothing.

College cost money...Money scarce...Bad thoughts....Happy Unicorns!

It's a well known fact. Money is hard to get for me. I am bad with saving it. I am generally skill free so making it is sometimes difficult. I am the father of two young men who will benefit greatly from high book learning, so I am going to have what money I do have, taken from me by higher book learning establishments. I was sad this morning when I realized if I were dead, that their college experience might be paid for more consistently through my life insurance. I then realized that this might be a sacrifice a dad might be expected to make...but I would have to die naturally and....At that point I realized that it might be easier to do some marketing or call some people to get more work. Dying to finance college seemed a bad longterm financial plan. It made me laugh eventually and it was not cause for the suicide prevention hotline.

Frankly, I love my kids but they can get a loan. Being dead would suck and not worth a college education.

Child going to college: A joyless spiral of despair?

Ned has finally chosen a college: he will be going to the University of Washington. No laughter or high fives, just glum acceptance and weary paperwork. It was not as if he had won a car on "the Price Is Right" or a lifetime pass to a waterpark. It was like he had enlisted in the army and was now resigned to his fate.  I think he will miss his friends and his present life and doesn't yet see the possibility of his new life. He will be living in the same town and is just a short bus ride away from home cooking, his annoying little brother and free wifi.  Yet, like a true Sander, he sees only the glass half empty and the burden of uncertainty.

Broadcast TV: A Happy De-Evolution of Television

My family gave up cable several years ago. We were sick of the annoying stations offered and the cost. The service was terrible and the time waste was tremendous. We bought antennas for our TVs and figured we would make due with Netflix if we had need of the cathode ray. It has been a wonderful experiment. We do not (in most cases anyway ) miss the cable. Some days the reception is spotty but generally it is okay. All the local network affiliates come in well and in passable HD.

One by-product of the new, free, off air broadcast service are the amazing added benefits of the DIGITAL, STANDARD DEF CRAP STATIONS! There is the home shopping ghetto of the most horrifying garbage capitalism can offer it's most vulnerable credit card holders. There is random Korean, Chinese and Indian stations with their amazing and often incomprehensible cultural offerings.  I love the Indian station SURSAGAR, which will run the most jaw dropping Indian films; truly Bollywood is the master of the medium. There are also the expected multiple Christian stations, in many languages. Interestingly there are now Muslim stations, that have copied the Christian Broadcasting format with endless talk shows, over produced singing and self imposed gravitas of scary badly mic'd apocalyptic preachers. I saw one that showed a live feed of the Haj at Mecca (which frankly, was very boring TV)

What I am most entranced by is the time tunnel into my own youth reflected by the "entertainment channels".  It is a bounty of old school TV stations that do nothing but strip mine the American Television landscape of the 70's and 80's. It reminds me of growing up in the 1970's, when local stations, deprived of a network ran the back catalog of American TV series and movies to stay afloat. In Seattle we had channels 11 and 13 which were almost carbon copies of these new second their digital stations. It is like watching TV in my High School years again. There are several old movie stations locally that run a really awful cycle of 1980's sludge that is truly amusing. I avoid the Magnum PI reruns and Murder She Wrote, in favor of the movie stations. The absolute best among the worst is GRIT-TV, a Sinclair Broadcasting also-ran that is demographically tied to 25 year old to 75 year old shut-in males who are angry, have mullets, and presumably (by the advertising) diabetes and the will to sue someone for their misfortunes. The steady diet of B-Grade (and frankly some awesome) action films, war movies, westerns and general action star worship is fun to watch. The things most noted: The incredible lack of talent that the 1980s and 90's action stars had versus their predecessors. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Steve McQueen you name it, were light years ahead of Jen Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Stallone and Steven Seagal.  The 1980's are painful to watch but the cheese is still alluring. The sad part is that this experience of craptasijc excess will again be a relatively short evolutionary period of media. These stations will last a few years and become slicker as they become less expensive to create. They will stop showing the old movies because the people who can relate to them will die off. It is like all things in my life, immediately available to be turned into a metaphor about driving my el Camino: Its fun for now but the euphoria isn't endless, and the trip will soon be over and all that will be left is a huge, bulbous flatualent mess in the driveway that begs to be relevant again.

Well, actually it's not THAT bad...

My girlfriend came back from Europe with my dwarf lawyer.  In celebration I have chosen a photo at random from the huge data base of jumbled images on our shared computer. It is of globe thistles in our backyard taken by L. It is a good life, for which I am in fact very grateful. So please ignore previous post. 

Not that anyone reads this crap.

Because the world is over.

I hate to be negative but the news is not good. There is nothing that I like anymore.  There seems to be a pretty obvious downward spiral towards apocalypse. Here is one more sign post:

Burning Elf 2014

Burning Elf 2014