Category Archives: Personal

Just Good Friends…

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a little FISH (as in Derrick William Dick, that is) – I hadn’t heard this song in so long, and tonight on the way home from Aikido I heard it, and I had to replay my favorite verse three or four times:

So are we left to chance meetings,
Is that all we can depend on?
Resigned to raise glasses
in anonymous cafes.
Reciting our failures,
as if we really needed that proof of regret,
Over what we have and what should have been
Darlin’ are we just good friends?

chorus:
What would you do,
If I got down on my knees to you?
Would you hold it against me?
Would you stand me in line?
What would you do,
If I opened up my heart to you?
Would I just be another who’s wasting his time,
Darling are we just good friends?

the first flower [with apologies to Thurber]

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for Kathy, and David, and their yet-to-be munchkin…

 

One day, the first flower appeared on the Earth (perhaps the first in the entire Universe).

It was a mutation, of course. In today’s parlance, we would call it a misfit, an oddball; an outcast.

Mother Nature had grown plants before, short and tall, green, with flowing leaves of various sizes. But this one had a genetic “tic”, and some of its cells morphed into something new. A bud formed, and the cells took on color, a color different from the green of its stem and leaves.

The rain and sunshine fed it and the cells in the bud filled with color and grew and grew and grew until there were so many of them the gentle skin of the bud burst and the petals of the world’s first flower faned out into the air and caught the glint of the sun.

There was no one around. There were not yet animals of any kind on the planet. There was life, but it was plant life, and sea weeds, and moss. Humans were not even yet a possibility.

But there it was, the first flower. And though no one was watching it, though no one was around to applaud its arrival, though no human was there to water it, stroke its soft petals, pluck it, put it in a vase, place it in a lover’s hand, or lay it upon a loved one’s grave, there stood the first flower blooming, showing its new-found colors to the whole universe, soaking up the sun, drinking in the rain, and dancing in the wind.

Percy…

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I just got word tonight that Percy Julian Jr. passed away; he was only 67 years old. Percy was the son of Percy Julian Sr. – the renowned scientist; he was a pioneering civil rights attorney [read more: http://www.madison.com/tct/news/274194].
He was also a student at Aikido of Madison. I had the pleasure of taking classes with him, but also of having some great conversations with him off the mat. On one particular occasion, we bumped into each other at Cleveland’s Diner off the Square and had brunch together.
He was a kind, intelligent, wise man who led a fascinating life.He had been away from Aikido for a while when he re-appeared this past Fall. It was great to see him on the mat, and to get a chance to catch up with him. I looked forward to many more conversations with him; those, alas, I will never have.
67; a stroke; it’s all so fragile, folks…

spineless…

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Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com gives a very thorough and easy to understand commentary on all of this, but the long and short of it is that the Democrats have once again rolled over and given the Bush administration a major victory, passing FISA – the Federal Intelligence and Surveillance Act, a bill that gives total, retroactive, immunity to Bush and members of his administration plus any telecom corporation that willingly gives over information on OUR communications (email, phone, cell phone) without a warrant. 

 

Says Greenwald:

“That’s really the most extraordinary aspect of all of this, if one really thinks about it — it isn’t merely that the Democratic Senate failed to investigate or bring about accountability for the clearest and more brazen acts of lawbreaking in the Bush administration, although that is true. Far beyond that, once in power, they are eagerly and aggressively taking affirmative steps — extraordinary steps — to protect Bush officials.”

 

Please note that neither Sen. Clinton nor Sen. Obama voted on this act. I know, they’re campaigning and all, but apparently their busy schedules didn’t afford them time to actually put their money where their mouth is and vote against this abhorrent piece of legislation.

 

Read more: 

 

Amnesty Day for Bush and lawbreaking telecoms

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

Fire in an (un)crowded apartment…

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… very uncrowded, as in vacant, as in the apartment downstairs from me… vacant for a year now, so not surprising that in this sub-zero weather the pipes froze.

 

In an effort to avoid cracks in said pipes, the manager from the building called one of the maintenance folks to come in and thaw them. Even though he had a hair dryer handy, he decided he wanted the job done quicker, and pulled out his propane torch. Seems the end of the nozzle on the torch was faulty, because just after he lit it, the nozzle bent and fell off, leaving him with a propane tank with a fireball on top of it.

 

He dumped the tank into the sink and within a second the drapes on the kitchen window caught and within moments the ceiling and cabinets became involved.

 

All of this was happening below me, as I was innocently typing away in my living room. Then I heard raised voices, and poked my head out my apartment door to see what was happening. I went downstairs and poked my head in the apartment below and saw the orange glow of flames and thick black smoke in the kitchen. Bill, our resident manager, ran past me to his apartment across the hall to grab a fire extinguisher. Poor fellow, he ran right past the large one hanging in the hall; I grabbed it, and ran back into the apartment – by this time the smoke was thick and I had to stoop at the waist to get under it to breath and see.

 

I handed the extinguisher to the maintenance guy and he got the fire out. I the mean time, I rushed back to the hall, where the stairwell was quickly filling up with smoke. I opened the small window in the stairwell, and then rushed to my apartment; when I got to my doorway, I turned and looked back – the smoke was so thick behind me I could not see a thing.

 

All of this took maybe thirty seconds. I am absolutely humbled and stunned at how fast it all moved – the flames and the smoke. I’ve never been in a fire before (esp. one inside, and with accelerants). I will never look upon them in the same way.

 

This also meant, I had to open all my windows to air out my apartment – on one of the coldest days we’ve had all winter. That, and I had to re-vacuum the living room (which I had just vacuumed this morning) to get rid of some soot that floated in with the smoke.

 

Smoke alarms, smoke alarm batteries, fire extinguishers, a well-thought out escape plan, folks.

 

Seriously.