Losing It

I have the pleasure this morning of watching Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” on high definition 1080p BluRay, the way it was meant it to be seen. When I think of all those poor, furtive souls getting their back-alley VHS laughs, all static and scrambled frames (recorded off TBS, no doubt!) I feel very blessed to have such a prime viewing experience before me. It’s not that I’m not poor or furtive, but I make the things that matter a priority. For instance, I thought that Netflix had delivered one of my favorite movies, “The Village,” on BluRay, but it was merely on DVD - which I already own! I sent that disc back as soon as I discovered the error, I assure you.

Last night was the exciting film premier of the vampire series that’s finally bringing back pale, “Twilight.” I did not attend a midnight showing, but my good friend D’s wife, H, stayed up for a 12:40 viewing. H is not a fan of the Twilight books, or Stephanie Meyer’s writing (Stephanie, if you are (still wealthy and) reading this most humble, unworthy blog, and are in need of a poolboy, I make a mean Virgin Mary (the secret is Clamato!) and have over one year’s experience fishing pale, half-dead things out of pools), or pointy teeth, or things pale - D himself could almost be called swarthy although he is naturally hairless and I have the pictures to prove it - but such is the zeitgeist that H was persuaded to leave her child at home with a strange man and travel halfway through the Salt Lake valley to watch the film at The Gateway.

The film, in H’s own words -

“…”

She’s not answering her phone; probably sleeping off the Clamato, or it’s possible she’s now a vampire. My life is turning into Castlevania. I called D and he said she’d say

“…one fang out of ten.”

Fanglorious!

The photos are of me, D and H out on the lake, boating and pre-cancerous, D naturally hairless, before sunlight and color went out of style.

I’m having my teeth filed later this afternoon.

I go in for surgery tomorrow morning, to have a little (painful) problem with my butt corrected. I’m looking forward to having it taken care of; my loved ones seem more anxious about it than I feel. The way I see it, I get to be sedated, wake up, take pain pills, sleep, and be taken care of by others until my shift at work next Monday morning. Should I be worried about dying? There’s always that remote possibility, but I really try not to think about, or what will be done to me while I’m asleep. The doctor said it’s a small, short procedure that he would do in his office if the pain wouldn’t be excruciating without anesthesia. I wonder if getting tattoo or having the bridge of my nose pierced would be more or less painful.

In enduring the condition I’ve had for the past four years, I’ve wondered what people with similar ailments must have gone through before there were painkillers or other treatments available. If I couldn’t pop a Lortab when the pain gets bad, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It’s also easier for me to get by than for someone whose crops or animals or what have you would suffer without bring tended to daily. I have the luxury of bring able to rest when I want to, for the most part; true, my work doesn’t give me sick leave, but my shifts aren’t ever longer than eight hours and then I can go home and crash.

I was worried about paying for the surgery as I don’t have insurance - my dad’s, or rather my step-mom’s plan wouldn’t cover me after I turned 26, which is de facto I suppose - and so I applied for Medicaid thinking it might cover me. My claim was denied, which made me feel kind of dumb. They only cover children of families in exigent circumstances, the disabled and the like. From time to time they enroll single people for coverage in a small plan within a limited network of doctors, but they didn’t know when the state would open that program again. I have to admit I felt a little bit resentful and could certainly understand the frustrations of those who want everyone to be covered by the government for health insurance. I have read about the issue and understand the costs and negative consequences that would bring, but for that day or two after I was denied I really WANTED to be covered, even though in principle I don’t believe it would be efficient or good. When I saw the surgeon for a consultation, I asked Iif he knew of any financial help that might be available. His receptionist scheduled the surgery at a not-for-profit hospital in the area. I’ll find out after the surgery if I’m eligible, which is a little unnerving, and I’m not sure whether they will also pay for the surgeon and anesthesiologist or just waive part of the hospital’s fee; I suspect this will still set me back, and I’ll still miss wages from work because they don’t give me sick leave, but it’s comforting to know I won’t “fall through the cracks,” as some are wont to call it. I can’t pretend I haven’t had a good safety net over the years, but I have been poor for a few years and have had assorted health problems and haven’t found myself unable to pay for medical help yet. It’s expensive, but - as I’ve said - I have so many luxuries I take for granted that I feel blessed to live in the time I do.

Dogs that bark all day for no reason should be legal to kick like a soccer ball.

I’m going to apply for a job as a mentor at a treatment center for troubled boys. It’s just down the road, as close as my current job i.e. within walking distance of my house. I found out by chance that a couple of friends are already on there and will recommend me for an interview. If I got the job it would be an instant 50% raise over my current wage, and the hours would be better and the schedule more flexible for when I start school again at some point.

A lot happening this week for me. I hope everything goes well and that you’ll keep me in your prayers.

My post from a month back proves prescient; indeed, Obama’s malaise rhetoric only sharpened and intensified as his campaign built up steam towards election day. Calling those who would prefer to choose themselves what to do with their money “selfish,” “unpatrotic,”; blithely stating his intentions to “bankrupt” America’s coal industry; indeed summoning language about wealth redistribution that, most unfortunately, my generation proves too young and naïve to be wary of. And the pendulum swings…

An anecdote I enjoyed from a friend at work:
His neighbor went out to eat at a restaurant. The neighbor’s server wore a tie that showed his support for Obama. At the end of the meal his neighbor asked “I noticed your tie; tell me what you like about Obama.”
His server said “Well I like how he talks about spreading the wealth around. Give hard-working people a chance, right?”
His neighbor asked “Well that busboy over there - he works pretty hard, don’t you think? Yeah, he does. I think he deserves a little of our wealth.”
So he stood up, gave the server’s tip to the busboy, and left.

I am looking forward, personally, to letting Mr. Obama pay for my rent, board, gas, and entertainment for the next four (hopefully eight!) years.

In truth, I now I look forward to a bound man floundering to appease his supporters without bankrupting a generation. I will take small comfort in knowing that when the markets crash, cash and credit become worthless, famine sets in, and crime and riots break out, all three branches of American government will have no-one to credibly blame but themselves and their washed-up mandate. McCain will at least be able to say - “it didn’t happen on my watch.”

My sister L’s birthday was last Saturday. We all gathered at Nunn’s park to celebrate. Across the river, over a disused bridge and down a trail, there’s an abandoned stonework water control house that my nieces and nephews were drawn to as a setting for mystery games. At one point my brother-in-law stood on the opposite shore and shook his fists, proclaiming “you meddling kids!” I left my real camera - with which I took about 700 shots that day - with my sister when I went hiking with the kids. I managed this shot with my camera’s phone, though; I like how all the kids look very Team Mystery Solvers.

The only mystery I encountered that day was the appeal of s’mores.

Also, I can now say I’ve been on The Great Western Trail

This is even one of the few circumstances when I would consider allowing a late-term abortion.

I don’t want to be offended, but I am. Child birth and child-rearing are sacred; a political campaign is profane, unless like Obama you believe you are without sin (or perhaps incapable of sin at all) and that your child will redeem a fallen nation and world. His running mate and party already speak of him messianically. If his campaign is his child, and he will become his campaign, and also give it birth, would that make him Mary, the father, AND the son? Maybe his invisible charm is the spirit. Wow, a quadroon god.

And we’re headed for four years (please not eight) of malaise. It’s the tenor of the times. I felt hope a few years ago when I read that my generation leaned towards more conservative politics than their parents — I can’t remember where I read this, and it’s obviously not true — but everyone I know who IS conservative feels helpless now. The media has decided Obama is America’s savior — probably Obama believes he is, too — and even when the country heads down the tubes, as it did for Carter, and a deep depression sets in, they’ll justify his broken promises and ineptitude by saying that he had the right ideas but the political climate was such that he couldn’t make them real. He’s already saying it. So, get ready — mark my words, I’m calling it now — four years of Obama malaise.

Feel free to share the button. Here’s the link.

http://losingit.thebutteredslice.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/obama_vignette_2.png

Subject of my absence from work not even brought up. I worked all that next day with both of my bosses and neither said a thing. I will not make a habit of dodging bullets.

Called some members I taught and baptized on my mission on Sunday, found out that the church will be opening a branch in the (very!) tiny town of Hemphill, Texas on Sunday Sep. 14th. I ’ve booked tickets to fly out there, which will be the second time in two years I’ll have gone back to the first area of my mission. Just by coincidence the home the church will be leasing for the branch to meet in is the former home of one of the families we baptized. They moved out last year and the house has been vacant since. It’s always a good thing when the church can open a new area for work, but it’s especially good for the many saints in Hemphill who’ve been caught between far-distant ward and branch buildings for a long time. Active members have been driving an hour-and-a-half to their meetings each week, but the cost and time have just been too much for some to be able to make it. I’m very excited to go back. I’ve tried to schedule enough time to get out to and take pictures of the places I remember most; I’ll post some of them here and some of them at my photography site, spencerhallphotography.com.

Write, write, write. I have three betta fish named Brian, Rusty, and Dracula. Their bowls have been filthy for months. I remember to feed them, I just neglect to clean their homes. Yesterday I displaced them all, scrubbed out the bowls, re-arranged their scenery, and returned them. Tonight I’ll be hosting people who want to watch me take pictures of them in their newly minted residences. (Ah, fish. Crystalline aquatic friends.) Those pictures should go up tonight.

My ward has a new bishop. I like the guy a lot. He’s one of those short-hair good-humoured former-marine-turned-marketer-for-Proctor-&-Gamble types. He and his wife have eleven (11!) kids. He looks his age; she definitely doesn’t. I’m sure he’ll be a mission president at some point. Although Proctor & Gamble is in league with the devil he didn’t smell like burning goat when I was around him.

I made a post on Craigslist in “missed connections.” I read those regularly to savor the desparation. You saw her at an intersection, she was totally hot, you knew it was meant to be. I can relate. This one time I saw a totally cute river otter and came back to the same spot for months, but never saw it bask again. Actually I always hope to see somebody looking for me. I love the thought of somebody I’ve never met tortured by the memory of my lithe/dumpy being eating a salad while reading great literature. If I have to write my own posts there to have it, so be it, and if there is any justice somebody will feel that pang of longing so similar to having a molar pulled.

oh my sweet otter

It’s been a long week — and it’s not over yet. I don’t want to go into work tomorrow, because after being absent from work a lot this week because I’ve been sick, I’m afraid my bosses are going to have words for me, and possibly official letters in my file, and a part of me really thinks I’m going to be fired. They don’t give part-time employees sick leave where I work. Any absence that’s not covered can be grounds for termination. I know this. The real problem was my error in judgement of being incommunicado, although I don’t know why I didn’t hear my phone ring when they tried to call.

There were other events this week where I now question my judgement, even more nebulous and fraught with anxiety. I can’t get into them here, except to say that I seldom know when to wrangle my passions and when to let them reign.

But tomorrow looms. Today I actually had work off (funny, yes) and had the good fortune to inherit my sister’s would-have-gone-unused ticket to a workshop about writing children’s picture books, presented by Carmen Deedy as part of the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival. Though I had heard various family members rave about her, I hadn’t seen her in person until today. She is a force of nature. Can a hurricane be graceful? If it’s a cuban hurrican in disguise as a southern belle. I wouldn’t mind being in a position where I could have regular conversations with people like her. She was a pleasure to watch and listen to, and to try and learn from. Speaking as an editor for Peachtree Publishers, she shared from her knowledge of the publishing industry. I may never even try to write a picture book — although the idea now holds a little more appeal for me than it did before — but it was a great glimpse down the rabbit hole. I reveled in her wisdom and pragmatism. The point may be passe, but Carmen also reminded me how many of the people we may look up to, and see in our minds as cynosures and supermen, are, behind their talents and natural gifts and genius, normal people, replete with neuroses and everyday, workaday concerns. Before the workshop started, as I took my seat, I wrote down in my notebook “who workshops Carmen? How did she get here?” The afternoon was not long enough to begin to answer that question, though I did glean a lot and would no doubt benefit from making myself familiar with her stories.

What struck me most

was her injunction to write, write, write, write, write. She asked the room “How many of you are writing? Not in your notebook as I’m talking, but like actually writing, working on something every day.” Five or six of the fifty people there raised their hand. I was not among those. Based on how some people have responded to my creative writing I do believe that I have a gift for using words well. I’m also terrified to write.

“There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
–Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

I spend less time writing than I do brushing my teeth. That should tell you a lot. I have at least four notebooks I could put my hand on where the first twenty pages or so are filled with mad handwriting, furious, leaning scribbles, most likely manic ideas none of which I can now recall, and whose following pages are blank. When George sees promise in the white canvas I feel faint.

Is there a way to overcome this anxiety?
Funny enough…

Instructions for a seven-week regimen that promises to train you to be able to do one hundred push ups in a row. I came across the link just this morning! And more serendipity, as I slouch here blogging, I’m listening to a playlist my cousin gave to my brother, and the song that plays is Foreigner’s “Eye of the Tiger“, my high school’s unofficial anthem. Talk about cosmic moments! When I’m done feeling pumped…

In order to develop my photography (that pun should be hanged), which does not generally cause me the same anxiety as writing, because with photography I don’t have to invent a world out of whole cloth but just see one that already exists, I’ve been getting out every day to take pictures. I have a lot to show for it, too. To put it in P.E. terms, with photography I feel like I can do about 40 push ups in a row. Writing this post, on the other hand, has nearly sapped me. This is the same mistake I make with exercise, where I go to the gym, run three miles on a lark, pay for it in pain and so stay away from the gym for three more months. Lather rinse repeat. Small daily updates? I just wrote a novel!

What was I trying to say? I’m going to try to write a post every day; I’ll probably miss a day here or there; what does this have to with children’s picture books? You gotta put in the work somewhere. Like push ups, you may think you’re working your arms, but you see results in all of your body. You get stronger all over when you exercise one muscle, reciprocal benefits and all that.

I probably won’t have a children’s picture book published, but I will be happier and more confident about my writing, and much less self-conscious about sharing my craft, and will hopefully temper my perfectionism some (starting this blog was excruciating!)

Photo Junket

I had another ticket, this one for a festival event tonight at Mt. Timpanogos Park. I didn’t really intend to go and listen — I brought my camera to take pictures, which I had thought (naively) I might offer to Orem City for publicity materials since I do have a good eye, a really nice camera, and a pretty sweet lens. A little creative work, ya know. I got a few mundane shots in around the park, until a volunteer worker heard click of my camera’s shutter click and asked if I had a press pass. I didn’t. Since that was all I had come for, I left, chagrined and embarassed. As I walked the scenic route back to my car, I formulated screeds to post here — polemics are a part of my heritage — about how cameras aren’t weapons, how they probably wouldn’t ask somebody taking notes if they had a press pass, how strange it is to not want free publicity, because I would have posted glamorous, friendly images and write-ups of the festival here…but that’s all very tiresome and would probably only be another check in the “errors in judgement” column for this week, and would seem petty as I now try to wrap this paragraph up.

Besides, Provo Canyon is gorgeous, there were dogs playing in the river, and their handler was affable, throwing sticks so I could take pictures of them plunging.

When the dog in the red vest finally spotted me on the opposite shore, he snarled at me with murder in his eyes. Had I not been perched twenty feet above him, safe on my enormous boulder, I think he would have gone for my ankles.

The old black dog wanted to play, but didn’t seem to want to swim…

So his handler thoughtfully lowered the bar for him.

I like the brown dog’s “dude, it’s just water” expression.

A nice cap to an overwrought day. For wading through those dog-awful pictures, I’ll give you one of the prettier ones I took tonight.

“Give to me the life I love, let the lave go by me…”

You can’t begin to believe how cool this is. Worthy of its own post, yes. Why didn’t my sister and I think of this back when she raised hamsters?

I’m certain the music used is from a Commodore 64 game, but I can’t remember which. Anyone know for sure? I love when they tip the maze on it’s side so he can “climb.” Genius.

“Hanseeeeel! Hanseeeeel! Hanseeeeel!”

my sister (another sister, also cool but not a blogger) got her family a kitten, rather, her daughter got the family a kitten. I took pictures of the kitten. Here are the pictures I took of the kitten. Click on the pictures to view a gallery of the kitten.

As you can see, he is a handsome kitten with white socks. He changed my brake pads and only charged me $80 because I’m family. I don’t know how he gets away with not charging union rates! I’ll worry if he’s not reporting the income! The IRS is closing down illegal kitten auto shops all over this town.

In non-kitten news,

I’m sick today. Mercifully I was able to leave work early, which is a rare occasions. My day started with washing five loads of wet towels from work that I had in my car overnight (the towels were wet from being used to protect the wood floors around the walls we were washing yesterday). I’m to report back to work soon to pick up more towels to take to the laundromat. Do you know how many quarters it takes to wash and dry four large loads of towels? Quarters are not scarce where I work, fortunately.

Tonight I’m taking pictures of a mission companion’s family because his brother is leaving on his mission next week. I need to go up to the Provo Temple before the shoot to scout some good shooting locations on the grounds. I feel a little nervous because I haven’t shot groups before, just headshots. They’re good people though. Taking pictures of awful people grows quickly tedious.

My bro-in-law has a contribution posted over at The Buttered Slice which I hope you will read and enjoy. The guy is wry.