perhaps ironically, the largest contributing factor is an electronic enabler they call "iphone." it's easier now to examine the dark tapestry that is the internet. but since those tiny virtual keys are just so darned hard to press with the precision you know i love, adding new weaves is just that much more difficult.

desks are so 2009½.

other obviously minor factors include (but are not limited to): a certain wee fleshling, being a breadwinner/baconbringer, a thing that increasingly seems not meant to be, twitter, and updating my xfn with a couple of 'met' tags.


i've been told this: when you are telling a story and can sense that you're losing your audience's attention, you should cut your losses: stop talking exactly where you are, and finish by saying "…and then i found twenty dollars."


…and then i found twenty dollars

anyway. you GUYS, have you heard the news? of course you have, because it was such a shock to everyone that they couldn't talk about anything else for weeks. remember?

so. i'm a little stressed about the whole thing. big surprise, i know, but listen. the more we do in preparation for the little guy, the more we get thinking about all that's required to keep him alive and functioning (not to mention, to keep us alive and functioning), and i have to say that a couple times i've had to consciously pull myself back from the verge of a panic attack. i've heard the transition from living baby-free to having a baby described as passing through the event horizon of a black hole. (you may understand why i like this analogy.) when you're on the outside, there's no way of knowing what's going on inside, because there is no way allowed by the laws of physics for the information to reach you. you can speculate and hypothesize and extrapolate, but you really just have no idea. and as your lifeless spaceship hurtles inexorably down the gravity well and space-time is torn apart around you, you only then begin to understand.

it disturbs me how something so physically small can have such a huge set of needs. i thought we were this advanced, capable species with large brains, or something? apparently no? elephants can hold their heads up immediately. horses can run the day they're born. baby cthulhu was inducing madness in entire civilizations in his first star-cycle. what's wrong with us?

i find i'm having to change my mind about a lot of stuff, in addition to changing habits. i've done a disservice over the last few years in my joyful mockery of my friends' tribulations with their own children. i'll tell you where i'm coming from. first of all, they'll repay in kind, because they're awesome. secondly, as a result of my actions they'll surely never give us a minute of free babysitting. but most importantly, and seriously, i've made light of what is basically the grandest struggle there is—turning babies into people—in a way that has probably trivialized it in my own mind, or at least my subconscious. i certainly don't mean i think it is trivial, which it certainly is not and i don't mean to say that at all. i'm saying that within my mind i've reduced it to just a source of humor without ever appreciating it or even really trying to appreciate what the experience meant to them. and i'm not sure how to feel about this, because they were living their lives just as i was, we were just at different stages in our respective lives. their lives involved the raising of a child. mine involved acting out my chosen social role, viz. making fun of that. but as i face the bizarre prospect of imminently having a son of my own, i'm seeing it a bit differently. as you might imagine.

you guys, my son is going to be a challenge. he's going to be a stubborn, slippery little trickster, and worst of all, he's going to be really damned intelligent. he will of course be quietly cerebral, and when for this reason he goes hours or days without willingly talking to us we will panic and feel like he's shutting us out of his life. beginning the day he's born i'm going to begin filling his head with nonsense but before long he will figure out my game and realize just how full of shit i am, and from that day forward my wife will love him more than she loves me. he's going to have a sense of humor unintelligible to everyone except himself; in fact he will have vast worlds in his head to which no outsider will have access, robbing us of the ability to understand the greater part of him. he's going to be a prodigy with the ladies, so all the parents at the pta meetings will always be bitter toward me. chelsey will try to turn him into the quarterback for the denver broncos and because she's his favorite (and also just to spite me; ref. comment about being full of shit) he'll actually do it, and because he's so intelligent he'll be really good at it and become a superstar and move to bermuda or wherever and we'll never see him again except in signed pictures his publicist will send us at christmas.

so of course i'm stressed. the hell of it is, though, it's not altogether justified. sure, it will be work, hard work, and plenty of minimal-sleep nights and full diapers and colic and fevers and spit-up on my new shirt, but taking care of all that is just mechanics and actually pretty straightforward. later comes the frustrating part: the inevitable teenage rebellion crap when he'll think no one understands him and blah blah. but even that is basically predictable, and even a little boring—even amusing?—from the perspective of having gone through it myself. ('oh, you've become a nonconformist, how original.') it will seem to him as though the world and everything in it is unfair, and to him it will be for a while, but he'll survive it just as we all do and he'll get to experience the absurdity of the next generation at that age, thinking they're the first ones ever to feel angst.

so where does this leave me? who knows. i often say to my co-conspirator in this matter that i'm afraid, and i suppose i am in a way, though it's not truly fear that i'm feeling, mostly just unease. at the idea that soon, this powerless monster is going to invade and turn my life on its head and demand that i keep it alive, and inexplicably i will appease it. a dear friend of mine once said, 'the secret to parenting is to remember that your goal is to raise capable adults.' i imagine i'll be repeating that to myself rather often over the next twenty years, especially when it's my turn for the nighttime diaper shift.

Out in some field smelling vaguely old and of aspirin
and the evening’s warm indulgences you dissolve: turn
back seeing stars and recall to memory’s language the thin
outline of Oregon crabgrass toe-thick and the repated sidewalk pattern
of brick as your bare now-four-year feet thump/thud to the threshold of the rear door.

Hum now past the dizzying laundry machines
warming sweaters, underthings, and cats self-cleaned
by cinnamon Brillo tongues. Drift into the entryway, leaving
behind this polyester, these shoes (millipedes have fewer), this static cling
and move: scent-lines float you to chocolate chip cookies, blackberries, other cuisine.



Now full, amble down the green wallpaper hall through the linoleum maze
to the screen through which your treehouse whispers and become
its oak, its leaves, its roof, its looking glass; fear and breathe
as you never have. Feel the sun. You are the vector sum
and king of all that you behold. Watch the breeze—

come grow old now and here. Herodotus could not have said it better.
Construct the mental temporal bridge you cross and burn.
Cold: enter sweater. Pain: insert aspirin. Unfetter
chains of touch, sight, sound, unconcealed
and evolve. Dissolve back to your field.

i have this short story that's been bouncing around in my head on and off for the last .. six years? seven? a hell of a long time. it's mostly written but it will never be done getting written. it rambles and jumps and has no respect for traditional continuity which makes it easy to pick up for an afternoon then set it down for eighteen months, which on the whole guarantees its development will forever be furtive.

i've picked it up semi-permanently this month and done some major rewriting of whole sections, added new material, all kinds of stuff that's really boring for you to hear me talk about but is actually quite exciting for me. i'd like to continue writing but life as a stable, unimpressive adult has a way of causing the creative juices to evaporate at an alarming pace. hopefully talking about it with an update to this blog (which also has some abandonment issues) will help keep me focused on th

ooh! i just remembered! i need to finish the geth incursions assignment in mass effect. see ya, suckers.

WASTE is a program that allows you to make selected data available to a small, trusted group of other WASTE users, and to transmit that data in a pretentiously secure manner. the bits flow directly, using really hefty encryption to keep people in the middle from listening in. (it's RSA. it's the top-shelf stuff. it's what secures your online credit card transactions. everyone knows everything about it and it's still unbreakable.)

intrigued? you should be. read on.

take note: if you don't mind your isp, the government, the mafiaa, and/or rogue wombats listening to your internet connection, or if all you're doing is sending your family members some pictures of your daughter, there are more appropriate systems that save you the considerable overhead introduced by the encryption. on the other hand, if you're transmeeteeng ze seecret deejeetal meecrofeelm, or if you just look good in a tinfoil hat, you will find WASTE to be 100% cromulent.

still intrigued? here's how to make it go:


1. install WASTE!

the official WASTE project hasn't been actively developed for a few years, but the program still works as advertised. officials familiar with the investigation confirm WASTE can function in windows 7. furthermore, there are a few project forks in the wild (such as WASTE again) but this blurb is only concerned with the original. help yourself to the installation files by clicking on this link with your favorite pointing device.

assuming you're using windows, drop the installer into C:\Program Files\WASTE, and run that sucker.


2. find your power numbers!

the WASTE installer will help you find two big, big numbers (keys) that fuel the encryption. one key is public. you hand this one out to your pals (hence, 'public key'); they can use it hide information inside a bunch of nonsense and send it to you. the other key is kept private, and you use it to turn the nonsense back into the original information. anyone with your private key can unlock anything ever sent to you, so keep it secret (hence, 'private key'). the private key will be stored locally and wrapped up under a further password. if you forget the password, you have to start over. (you can have WASTE remember the password, but only if you're absolutely sure your spouse works for the KGB.)


3. connect to other humans!

log in to your router, and tell it to forward port 1337 to your local ip address (the one that looks like 192.168.XX.XX). this is important, but obscure, and if you've gone through a full WASTE installation and you're still unable to connect to other people this is a likely culprit.

several things have to happen in order to form a connection between any two users:

a. both users have to join the same WASTE network. (preferences > network > password)
b. each user has to have the other's public key. (preferences > public keys)
c. at least one user needs to know the other's ip address. whatismyip.com knows it, even if you do not.

make these happen, and you one user connects to the other's ip (under network status). anyone who connects to anyone else in the mesh will instantly be able to talk to everyone else who is connected to the mesh.

say alice, bob, and carol are all in the same WASTE mesh; alice has a direct connection to bob, and bob has a direct connection to carol, but alice does not have a direct connection to carol. data can still flow between alice and carol, but it will be piped through their mutual connection to bob. the mesh will use the most efficient route between users, and we know by the triangle inequality a direct connection will be fastest.

you should tell WASTE to automatically try connecting to a list of ip addresses when it starts. in (preferences > chat > perform), use "/connect host 12.34.56.78:1337", no quotes, for each ip of friends in the mesh.


4. share..

pick some folders, any folders (preferences > file sharing > sending). your friends will be able to browse the contents of these folders, wantonly sampling their delectable bits. those gluttons.


5. ..and enjoy.

now your friends can see just how refined your taste in digital goods really is, and you theirs, and the rogue wombats are altogether cut out of the loop.

1. she claims the covers end up on my side of the bed in the morning because i pull them that way in the night. i claim it's because she rolls exclusively to her left (toward me) all night, converting her own rotational energy into linear motion of the covers. in these last five nights that i've had the bed to myself, the comforter has mysteriously remained perfectly centered, without having to pull the frakking thing four feet back over to her side every morning.
2. by the narrow definition of the word, i have no actual proof that fast food eaten in a girl's presence tastes better than fast food eaten not in a girl's presence, but i have some anecdotal evidence to that effect.
3. sometimes, fast food eaten not in a girl's presence does not taste as good as fast food not eaten.

   by the way. 'froots?' i seem to have a vague memory of these 'froots,' and their odd-sounding cousins the 'vej tubbles.' will you please tell me more?

4. the freedom to leave the seat up is a pretty minor one. i cite the fact it's a well established habit for me to put it down each time, cover and all; leaving it up requires conscious effort and just leaves me acutely aware of the act's underlying emptiness.
5. bulldog kisses are a damn poor substitute for wife kisses.
6. pulling on yesterday's socks is way easier than going downstairs and collecting the clean laundry.
7. cynical schadenfreude is most satisfying when it has the opportunity to annoy someone.
8. measured in terms of wakefulness, appetite, and leg-jumps per hour, the dog is less happy when chelsey is gone.
9. measured in terms of wakefulness, appetite, and leg-jumps per hour, the boy is less happy when chelsey is gone.

girls, you just don't know the power you have over boys. if you do know it then you are evil geniuses. evil, pretty geniuses. we just don't stand a chance.

no, i don't want to fall in love
no, i don't want to fall in love
with hoth
with hoth

what a wicked game you play
to make me feel this way
what a wicked thing to do
to let me dream of you
what a wicked thing to say
you never felt this way
what a wicked thing to do
to make me dream of you
and i don't wanna fall in love
and i don't wanna fall in love
with hoth

world was on fire
no one could save me but you
strange what desire will make foolish people do
i never dreamed that i'd love somebody like you
i never dreamed that i'd lose somebody like you

no i don't wanna fall in love
no i don't wanna fall in love
with hoth

nobody loves no one

lately though, i feel like there's this whole separate universe being played out around me and i'm utterly not a part of it. as though there's a club with a secret entrance code, a code which everyone knows except me, and i'm standing at the entrance struggling to understand why no one let me in on the secret.

tonight, as chelsey and i were discussing how to divvy up amongst my coworkers the cookies she had made, we discovered that there were not enough gift bags to hold all the groups of cookies we wanted to distribute. no big deal, right? we'll just put some of the cookies in nice simple plastic bags and hand them out that way, because it's christmas, and they're cookies, dig?

no. dear me, no. such a thing is not conscionably done.

you see, it's the small things that matter. the cookies need the gift bags. worthless without them. it's not the making of the cookies that matters, not the time it spent with mixing bowl or oven, it's the wrapping of the cookies that matters. it's not the words that you say, it's the tone of voice in which you say them. it's not the thing itself, it's the framing and the context and the gist of the thing. it's this parallel world of undercurrents and subterfuge and small all-important para-things that completely fails to resonate with me, to which i have absolutely no sensitivity.

this is why i fucking hate christmas. do you hear me? hate it hate it, with swear words for emphasis. it's not enough that i think well of you, or that i want nice things for you. it is expected that i spend time in thinking about something you secretly want, that i go out and get it for you, and that i wrap it up and put a bow on it, and turn what would be (at any other time of the year) a gesture of goodwill and potentially unexpected awesomeness into just another thing that is done for its own sake. we've turned what might have once been called the spirit of christmas into a fat lot of empty, expected gestures.

a bit unexpected, admittedly, coming from a guy who prides himself on being mindful of the little things.

far across the distance
and spaces between us
hoss has come to show hoss goes on

near, far, wherever hoss are
i believe that the heart does go on
once more hoss opens the door
and you're here in my heart
and my heart will go on and on

love can touch us one time
and last for a lifetime
and never go till we're gone

love was when i loved hoss
one true time i hold to
in my life we'll always go on

near, far, wherever hoss are
i believe that the heart does go on
once more hoss opens the door
and you're here in my heart
and my heart will go on and on

you're here, there's nothing i fear,
and i know that my heart will go on
we'll stay forever this way
hoss are safe in my heart
and my heart will go on and on

ahem.


she was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene
i said don't mind, but what do you mean i am the one
who will dance on the floor in the round
she said i am the one, who will dance on the floor in the round

she told me her name was hoss reinsteen, as she caused a scene
then every head turned with eyes that dreamed of being the one
who will dance on the floor in the round

people always told me be careful of what you do
and don't go around breaking young girls' hearts
and mother always told me be careful of who you love
and be careful of what you do 'cause the lie becomes the truth

hoss reinsteen is not my lover
she's just a girl who claims that i am the one
but the kid is not my son
she says i am the one, but the kid is not my son

for forty days and for forty nights
the law was on her side
but who can stand when she's in demand
her schemes and plans
'cause we danced on the floor in the round
so take my strong advice, just remember to always think twice

she told my baby we'd danced till three, then she looked at me
then showed a photo my baby cried his eyes were like mine
'cause we danced on the floor in the round, baby

people always told me be careful of what you do
and don't go around breaking young girls' hearts
she came and stood right by me
then the smell of sweet perfume
this happened much too soon
she called me to her room

(chorus)