neighbors

I’ve noticed this since last fall when it started getting darker earlier. When I look out my bedroom window, as I usually do when I raise the shade in the morning or drop it in the evening, I don’t see the ocean in the distance so much as the flickering glow of my neighbor’s TV set. Directly in the line of sight with the tiny piece of ocean I can see is a rather tall and narrow window set into the lower part of the next door apartment about a hundred feet away. For six years I put my shade down and up and never gave much thought to what was through that window – it’s really not big enough to see anything and I’m not interested in my neighbor’s furnishings.

But now I can see this huge TV set flickering away at all hours of the day and night. Really. I’ve been up (for various reasons) at 2, 3, 4 in the morning; I think there was one time in the last three or four months the window was dark. I haven’t made a study of it and it’s harder to see in the daylight so I won’t try to attest to how much it’s on during the day but it’s on a lot.

I’m actually a little curious. Does this guy ever sleep? Does he leave it on when he’s not there?

Not enough to go over and ask him, though. Just enough to post this little rant.

ADDENDUM: Today, not even 24 hours after I wrote this, I came home about 5:45 in the evening. It was nearly full dark. I went into my room to drop the shade and . . . the TV was off!

Maybe he wasn’t home from work yet.

Actually, now as I write this, it’s 8 pm and it’s still off. I hope he’s alright.

(OK, not another word.)

feelings

There’s a James Taylor lyric that’s been running around my brain lately. I keep hearing it because it describes my feeling pretty well. It’s from his song Shed a Little Light.

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

The last week or so I’ve had this feeling. To me, it’s a prelude to having a good cry but it hasn’t happened yet. As in times before, the triggers are quirky and impossible to predict. Yesterday I was watching a football game and someone got seriously hurt. How seriously? They actually broke away for two commercials interspersed with showing the poor guy lying motionless on the field surrounded by anxious medical people. For some reason I got all choked up watching that.

But it still didn’t trigger the good cry. I guess it’ll come one of these days.

T-shirts

Laundry day today. Every time I fold my T-shirts I think about when and where they came from. At this point about half of my non-V-neck T-shirts are still from my days as a stagehand at Arco Arena in Sacramento. There it was common for a show to hand out T-shirts to the crew at the end of the load out. Occasionally they would be used to establish crews, with different colors indicating whether you were, for example, in sound, or carps, or backline, or lighting. More often they were all the same.

One I saw today I was particularly proud of. It was from a show called Walking with Dinosaurs. Walking with Dinosaurs was supposed to be a TV show and the show we did at Arco was an arena tour version of it. I say supposed to be because I had no direct knowledge of it.

I worked the shows on truss spot, which is sitting in a seat about 30′ in the air and aiming a small spot light at various people. I say people even though the stars of the show were these huge mechanized dinosaurs that slid across a special floor and acted out a story narrated by a guy walking amongst them. As the show ran several days I brought a small camera up to my perch on the third or fourth day and snapped some pictures when my light wasn’t being used. They’re not very good. This one is the best at conveying the size of the dinosaurs. You can see the Arco audience in the background. The shadows in the foreground are one of the speaker stacks and the frame holding my light.

But back to the T-shirts. For the load in and load out of this show, I was assigned a fork lift. I spent a whole day driving around to large trucks and lifting pieces of these dinosaurs off and taking them into the building. Fork lifts were a common accessory for the shows that came to Arco but it was rare that I got to operate one. I never considered myself an expert but I did ok. I ran a fork lift perhaps a half a dozen times at Arco. This show taxed my skills to the limit because the dinosaurs were not only heavy but bulky. It was important to maintain a low center of gravity while moving them. Some were unloaded in the parking lot and driven inside up and down ramps.

So, my T-shirt was the same color everyone else got but mine said ‘Fork Lift’ on it. I think there were probably three of us on that show so that was a pretty exclusive group.

The show was in 2008 and the T-shirt is showing signs of age. I’ll probably put it in the Goodwill pile before it’s completely trashed. Somebody might like it.

2016

OK, I’m going to vent here. All these people – most of them friends of mine – who moan about how 2016 is a terrible year because Carrie Fischer died, or George Michael, or Prince, or some other celebrity or pop star that I forget right now: get a grip!!

That is all.

Dad’s birthday

Dad turned 87 today. Teresa hosted a party at her house. All the Bay Area Woods were there. Mary called and sang him ‘Happy Birthday ‘ over the phone. He couldn’t hear her with the handset so Paul got the speaker phone going and that was better.

After dessert of lemon meringue pie (his request) he opened the cards from his children. All contained heartfelt personal statements of love and admiration. He had trouble reading them because they were handwritten, though. Jane was sitting next to him and helped out. He was in good humor all evening and even made a couple of jokes but sometimes the conversation moves too fast for him and he checks out. Other times he makes self deprecating remarks that recognize his limitations.

I had tea and conversation with Tom V yesterday who I haven’t seen in nearly a year. He lost his mother in the spring of 2015 and many of his reactions to the loss were familiar to me. He’s still feeling the effects. All death is traumatic, even when one is older and has lived a long life. It just makes me treasure Dad and Mom all the more. One day they’ll be no more and all we’ll have left are memories.

computers

I’ve been a computer guy for a long time. I actually took a computer class in my first quarter in college in 1971. I was part of a group of stagehands who pooled money to buy a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1982. I always had the ability to understand how to relate to the machine in such a way as to get productive work out of it. When other people had trouble, I was often the guy who was brought in to figure it out.

So, a couple of minutes ago, I was typing up a post when all the text disappeared. So many times I’ve been on the troubleshooting side and I ask, ‘What did you do?’ and the answer was. ‘I don’t know.’ I always was a little incredulous. How could you not know what you just did?

Well, I just found a key combination that erased 10 minutes of typing and I have no idea what it was. I couldn’t find any key combination that brought it back so I guess it wasn’t too important!

(If it wasn’t a key combination then my mental powers are greater than I thought. I wasn’t really happy with what I was writing. Now I’ve written this instead.)

puzzlement revisited

I made reference to my original ‘puzzlement‘ post today in an email and I thought of a comparison. Saying ‘Zach is dead’ is like saying ‘the Pacific Ocean is huge.’ Intellectually you know it is true but you really can’t grasp the real size of it.

grief cues

The weirdest things snag me sometimes. Some music came up on my rotation and even though I didn’t recognize it, something told me before I even looked that it had something to do with Zach.

He was a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie music. That’s what it was.

dreams

I want to document the extraordinary dream I had last night. I don’t usually remember my dreams but I can still – more than an hour after waking – remember this dream.

It was sort of like a Gibson-esque sojourn into cyberspace. I was moving in some kind of electronic environment and someone or something was looking for me. Someone or something that I wanted to remain hidden from. I had the ability to move amidst representations of data and manipulate it to some extent. It was all very abstract; I had no body. I remember thinking about the speed at which it was all happening and wondering what the speed was compared to the corporal world. I thought it was much, much faster.

I am also reminded of the character Gaby Plauget in the John Varley novel Demon. It’s too complicated to try to explain fully here. Read the whole Titan trilogy! Anyway, there’s a scene where Gaby is moving among what are clearly atomic particles where their movements can be clearly seen. In my case, I didn’t feel that I was sensing particles but images representative of data and I could manipulate that data.

Meaning? Who knows? It’s just so rare that I remember a dream I wanted to write it down. FWIW, I had a 16 hour day at Davies yesterday and didn’t take any sleeping pills before bed. I slept straight through from about 12:30 to 7:15 or so. That’s not bad.

Not really dreams but this is as good a place as any to mention the mini nightmares I get while driving these winter days. At night, driving City streets, it’s the worst. Usually it’s a bicycle rider appearing suddenly from behind a parked car or an intersection.

holidaze 2

Well I went tonight. It was fine. It was a totally different scene: at Eddie’s home instead of a public space, kids all over the place. I asked twice but he told me not to bring anything and there was lots of good food. The vast majority were relatives and neighbors but a few IA people were there so naturally I talked shop with them. I did talk to a few other people tho’.

Later the guitars, ukes and other instruments came out and Christmas carols and other songs were sung. Eddie gave me Diana’s guitar to play along with. I did for a while until my fingers started hurting from the big strings.

Sarah came by so I was able to be with her a little. She found the cookies in the back of the kitchen which I hadn’t noticed and made some nice designs. I had forgotten it was billed as a cookie party.

All in all, I did OK. I told a couple of people about Zach and they said things like, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ and ‘I can’t imagine . . .’ I’d probably say the same things if I were in their shoes. The horror is so great there really is nothing to say.

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