柴胡加龍骨牡蠣湯

Or, if you prefer, chai hu jia long gu mu li tang. Three words in Chinese I can figure out, but eight sends me reeling.

The best I can translate it -- not the google way, but the "have three dictionaries open at once to five places in each" way -- is "Bupleurum plus dragon bone male viscera pestilence decoction".

Joe Hing Kwok Chu gives what has to be the most useful information I have found on it online without wanting to spend more than another hour on it. He saved me a lot of trouble by having it written out in Chinese so I could look up the individual ideographs and the Chinese in *this* post comes to you courtesy him, Unicode, and apple-c/apple-v. Yes, I have checked each word. The only one that doesn't seem to match quite right is "pestilence" (li), which seems to have another radical on its left in the name of the drink. No such ideograph in my dictionaries beyond what I take to be the radical on the right, which matches exactly the one that turns up as "pestilence". Maybe it's the same thing, maybe it's not, who knows, I'm not a doctor. Clearly whatever word appears has something to do with pestilence. Unless, of course, it's only there for pronunciation, which is I think just a little unlikely. "Bone" (gu) is also very slightly different, apparently depending on the font. The little box in the lower right hand corner of the little box on top is on the bottom left in my printed literature, but otherwise identical.

Doing it the google way, "Bupleurum D" or "Calm Dragon Formula" appears to be roughly the same thing -- maybe a patent medicine version of the loose herbs I've got here. I think Bupleurum is magnolia. I have no idea what constitutes a dragon bone, but yes, there is some sort of bone in what I'm decocting on the stove right now. It's lovely. Smells delicious. Some sort of fruit in it. Smells like cinammon. Going to dry out the boiled stuff on the counter tomorrow and go through it all.

I've gone from boiling rocks and seashells to simmering seashells, flowers, and dragon bones. Clearly I am losing my mind. I am, in the end, doing nothing more than taking medicine, yet when I do the most basic research on what I'm taking I can't help but grin from ear to ear. I love the discovery that goes with it. Not that other people haven't already translated things way better but it literally opens my mind.

I'm drinking it now. It tastes good. Smells fantastic.

For fun:

Search for 柴胡加龍骨牡蠣湯 in google. If anything turns up with "translate this page" listed as an option, click it. It's somewhere between helpful and hilarious, and just when you think it's too hilarious to be helpful it turns too helpful to be hilarious, and then flips back again. Translating into and out of French and Italian using google's for wussies. The poetic "calm dragon formula" name, or the relatively sober "bupleurum plus dragon bone and oyster shell" name comes out, oddly enough, as "English plus keel oyster soup". Well, they definitely got the "plus" right. I don't know whether I'm tasting the (fossilized?) dragon, the keel oysters (barnacles, perhaps?), or the Englishmen (possibly Barnacle Bill?), but I do rather like it.

I could go on wondering all night and follow all the leads for hours on end and never figure it all out. So I'll sign off now. The dragon's calm and I'm ready to sleep.

We're caught up.

We need more three day weekends! We're actually caught up on deposits and charges and payments at work. At some point yesterday the panic set in and I learned how to post the deposits, the part that was hardest for me to catch on to.

Erin, pardon the public letter but your comment sounded just a trifle, well, panicked, so I thought it better to respond privately. I responded by email to the one address I've got for you but don't know if you're still using the work address or not; it sounds like you've got a *lot* going on. Don't worry about the kitten, just take care of yourself and the kittens will be fine. If your email address has, in fact, changed, I'd love to have a current one but whenever you get around to it is fine. (My email address is in my blogger profile.) I know a thing or two about how life gets hectic and I hope whatever's thrown you into flux right now is as good a thing as can possibly be and know you'll come out better in the long run regardless. If there's anything I can do to help out, let me know. I still owe you one, bigtime.

Yesterday I think I played guitar for maybe twenty minutes. I just got crazy busy. The smoke free night's coming up in a week and it's promising to turn into a fiasco. Everyone's suddenly making tremendous demands of me. Well -- if I get run out of town, that might not be a bad thing -- finally I might have a reason to leave this old land of entrapment. They're looking for people to go to a tobacco conference in Washington DC in July and have scholarships. Hm. Sure is tempting. Would get me out of Albuquerque during the hottest part of summer.

Just played through much of my Tuesday night radio show I can't miss. I'm a public radio junkie. Some people don't miss soap operas. I have radio shows like that.

I'm getting better. Barleycorn's coming along slowly. Just like playing Scott Joplin on the piano, the trick is to s-l-o-w i-t d-o-w-n to the point you can actually play it in time without a pause while you stop to think "where's that go now?", then you'll naturally get faster. I mess around when playing with the radio or records but I'm not sure what I really learn -- the fretboard, I suppose. The intervals. But to actually carry a tune on more than one string I have to slow it waaaay down from what's on the record. That much is the same as on the piano. And nothing sounds worse than rushed music. I'll never forget the professional concert pianist who tried to impress us with how fast he could play "The Entertainer". I honestly felt sorry and embarassed for him try to play it triple speed, obliterating all its colour and feeling. So I'm getting it slowly. The initial burst of energy at making three chords remains enough to inspire me, and now it's time to practice like mad and play the same thing over so many times the neighbours will try and cut down my electricity wire so they won't have to hear me any more. It should be the easiest thing in the world. I'm only playing four strings at a time. But I have to change left hand chords and pluck individual strings in changing orders with my useless right hand. The good news is it does help to have a limp wrist.

It does help to have a good plectrum. I've got maybe five or six I bought to test and can now say I have a favourite. I think it's called a "butterfly" pick but I'm not sure. It's sturdy, ergonomic, and gets the best tone out of any I have tried so far. It's also the easiest to use. I don't know how to explain that, but with some I have to think about it. "Am I plucking down or up", or worse yet, "where is it", and I get tripped up. This one feels (dare I say it?) natural to me. I just kind of do what feels right and it winds up sounding good, to boot.

I took the good banjo out today and retuned it so it's in tune with the guitar. It's nice -- light as a feather -- but where are the strings? How do you make chords on it with two strings missing up around the first frets? I know where to put my fingers, but there's just no fretboard there. Hm.

I'll sign off now to either go read "Steal This Vote" (I also went to the library today) or mess around with the guitar some more. It's nice to have walls worth bouncing off of.

The kitchen is done.

Barely practiced at all today but did finish the kitchen.

There were boxes up to the ceiling. Most of them were empty, as usual. Some had rotted out badly.

There are now four boxes with papers I need to go through to determine what needs saving, what needs destroying, and what can just get thrown away.

The living room's a mess, but I know what everything is. There's a bunch of stuff I just need to part with -- the flowerpots and turntables and stuff like that -- perfect for Goodwill, I figure. I'd love to have a yard sale or take it all down to the flea market but don't know if I'm up to it. There's plenty of stuff I don't *want* to get rid of -- working coffeepots, when I already have one that works fine, for instance. Good thing about having a modest space with not enough storage, though -- you're forced to get rid of ballast. It's legitimate to have heaters in the closet in the summer and fans in the closet in the winter. It's not legitimate to have three working coffeepots that all make coffee about the same way.

The breakfast nook is no longer the breakfast nook. Don't ask me how it came to me but once I'd ammonia-cleaned the floor to the point you could eat off it, I thought wouldn't it be nice to have the hammon organ there? I took measurements and moved it in. Incongruously enough, it's absolutely perfect in that spot. It even sounds better. And -- there's even still room for the kitchen table.

Now, as I said, the living room is a mess, and I don't know how to handle that big empty space. It's full of stuff that needs to go away right now, and once I get all that cleared out, I'm sure something will come to me.

My first song.

One week -- yes, ONE WEEK after obtaining my guitar I am playing my first song.

I hardly left the house today. I did, however, go across the street to Mecca Music and Books, with the intent of seeking out guitarists whom I knew to have played Gretsches -- the best I could manage was Chet Atkins in arrangements of popular Hollywood songs. Not what I'd had in mind at all, but still sufficient to open my ears to some of the sonic capabilities of my guitar in the hands of a master.

Somehow or other I stumble across an album by a band I'd never heard of -- "Traffic" -- titled "John Barleycorn Must Die". As anyone who's ever been to an AA meeting knows, the name "John Barleycorn" figures prominently in the book they use in such meetings. The mere mention of his name is usually sufficient to make eyes roll back in peoples' heads as though suddenly everyone in the room is gripped by the same epileptic seizure. "Oh gawd", the thinking seems to go, "this again -- that corny midwestern businessman's talk from the 'thirties".

In point of fact, the legend of John Barleycorn goes back at least four hundred years in English literature. Imagine my surprise on discovering this. The back of the album has a blurb about the folk song, of which over 140 variants are known to exist. The oldest surviving copy of the lyrics were apparently printed by one Mr. H. Gorson, who died in 1641.

That places the commitment of this song to paper exactly at the point in English history that most amazes me. The standardization of the English language through nascent print media was well underway, while reading any author's intent became increasingly perilous thanks to the complex evolving political intrigues surrounding James I, Cromwell's Commonwealth, and eventually the Restoration of James II to the Throne. No written literature from this period is transparent. It is the era of Donne and Milton. The writing of the court and city became the basis for all literature in the English language, as the rise of the printing press allowed the cultural focus to rapidly shift from life in the countryside to London.

John Barleycorn, far from being a stolid, moralistic, midwestern personification of "drink" was in fact nothing less than a mythical archetype in the same class as the ancient Egyptian's Osiris. To make a long story short: the agrarian god figure is killed, hacked to bits, buried in the ground, raised back to life by the sun and the midsummer rains, grows to maturity at which point he's cut down at the knees, stabbed through the heart, tied to a cart, skinned alive, ground between stones, and still manages comes back in such a way that people depend on him for their very livelihoods. It's a song about life and death and cruelty and nourishment and folly from the cyclic perspective of an ancient agrarian society.

The origins of the song aren't known. Even if it was (as the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs asserts it may be) "the creation of an antiquarian revivalist", it is still a very old song:

There were three men come from the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow:
"John Barleycorn must die."

They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
'Til these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead.

They let him lie for a very long time,
'Til the rains from heaven did fall,
When little Sir John raised up his head
And so amazed them all.

They let him stand 'til Mid-Summer's Day
When he looked both pale and wan;
Then little Sir John grew a long, long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with their scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee;
They rolled him and tied him around the waist,
And served him barbarously.

They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
To pierce him to the heart,
But the loader did serve him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him 'round and around the field
'Til they came unto a barn,
And there they took a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn.

They hired men with their crab-tree sticks
To split him skin from bone,
But the miller did serve him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

There's little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
And there's brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last.

The huntsman cannot hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn
And the tinker cannot mend his pots
Without John Barleycorn.

An alternate version of the song by Robert Burns naturally ends with the singers all drinking a toast to Scotland.

What got me, though, at first, was not the lyrics. Oh sure, I bought it 'cause I thought it'd be an interesting conversation piece if I ever have someone from the groups visit me at home, because it was a novelty of sorts, an in-joke. What got me is the fact that it only seemed to have four chords for most of it.

Sure sounds like an A minor.

Pull out the guitar. Let's check.

Yep. That sure is A minor. I wonder if that's a D. And if that there's an E.

Yep. Yep.

A few minutes later with Google I've got it all on paper. Chords and lyrics and tablatures and all. I've never read "tabs" in my life, but listen to the music looking at 'em and knowing how the guitar's set up and it makes sense. I mess around with it and now I'm working on transitions and right-hand stuff.

One week into having a guitar, an instrument that baffled and frustrated me just by having six strings, I've got it *down* and am even starting to get up to speed. The song on the record's at a walking tempo, but for me it's practically a hailstorm of notes. I play along with what I can, then turn the record player off and play it over -- SLOWLY. It starts to sound like music. And it's those same three chords that amazed me the first night I had the guitar.

A-minor.

E-minor.

D-major.

And C-major, just to make things interesting.

A wonderful addiction.

Made the mistake of drinking four cups of coffee after getting off work this evening. The days are long gone when I'd drink 48 shots of espresso and just barely feel it. So yes, I am still up.

Practiced a good two hours in roughly half-hour chunks on the guitar and am getting good at it, and fast. Finger memory -- I'm *getting* it. It's *not* "the same thing" as learning piano. Not at all. Each time I pick it up or make some tiny adjustment it sounds better and better, making me want to pick it up sooner the next time. I put it down finally because my fingertips are just worn out enough to really need a rest. I can't bear to leave it behind when I go anyhwhere. Then when I'm away from it at all for any length of time, all I can think of is the next time I will get to pick it up. Best addiction EVER.

I do hope to get five hours sleep. I'll have to move it (and the amplifier) off the bed, and doing that will make me want to pick it up. I'm terrified of falling asleep with it in my hands if I sit in bed playing it unplugged, 'cause I might shift positions in unconsciousness and hurt it.

Tomorrow's gonna be fun -- fifteen deposits or something like that need to be posted. Have to be fast &and& accurate. Spent three hours today just learning how to do a chargeback which is sort of the insurance industry's equivalent of a double-halfback-pirouette-media-veronica-swan dive bluff with a dash of tabasco. That's three hours spent on one line item in one check in one deposit that didn't even have anything to do with bringing in money but just moving numbers around. But it needs to get done, 'cause well, that's just accounts receivable. Or something.

Bill's given me the somewhat grandiose title "Account Manager", so I finally get to call myself something *much* nicer than "hired hand", "warm body", or "cannon fodder", which almost every job I've had up to now amounts to. This even though I don't actually *manage* anything, but just try to hold chaos happening all together everywhere at once as best I can. I'd honestly prefer the title "Junior Assistant Choreographer of Bedlam" but I think that wouldn't look right in the email signatures, 'cause no one working in the clinics ever reads Foucault and if they did they'd be offended by the reference. It's nice, though, having a title that makes it sound like peoples' fates are in my hands. Now I want a sash like the Mexican president, and finally get to aim for a chain of office like the lord high chancellor. But seriously, it's nice to be able to say who I am to the rare panicked or irate and always mentally unstable patient on the phone without going into "I'm the guy he took on 'cause he really needed someone".

Then I get paid -- tomorrow -- and I get to spend all weekend with my guitar in my apartment that I'll finally have time to work on. I think the kitchen may get done, at last.

Enough! I need to take a bath. And then dry off before I dare to approach my guitar, lest I get it wet. And then move it. Hopefully without picking it up to obsess over tunings or intonation or action or worst of all learning more chords. And then, I hope -- to sleep.

The ugly truth.

Regarding craigslist -- the best way to get responses is to offer something for free. I've tried to sell stuff but of course it never moves. Maybe I ask too much, who knows.

Twenty-seven people want my used flower pots, my vacuum cleaner, a belt-drive turntable, and/or a disassembled espresso machine. I could probably offer soiled diapers and get responses if I gave 'em away for free.

It's too many responses! I can't process the data. I'm severely overloaded.

Acupuncture today was amazing. I swear I went to another world. Could smell the genff and knew I'd gotten sucked into a temporal anomaly. Six thousand years later I wake up on the table and the guy says he's been gone ten minutes.

Restrung the guitar today with the strings it came into my hands with 'cause I wanted to reattach the tremolo bar and couldn't do that with the strings on. Plus the strings were all out of alignment what with the floating bridge and its little stringholder-nuts-that-must-have-a-name-though-I've-no-idea-what-it-might-be. Still plan to get it worked on at Marc's but figured what the hell, may as well do what I can in the meantime. Sounds way better and I think I've got the action set a little better than it was. Stretched the strings and tuned it but of course they're not all broken in yet so they slip out of tune way fast.

My fingertips are sore. It's a happy kind of sore, but still.

Apologies if I don't get back to you about the offer of the free stuff -- I was expecting maybe one reply or so and there's just no way on earth I can go through all those offers to take it off my hands.

Went to Double Rainbow on Central with Ferdinand and ate dinner.

Now at Flying Star downtown eating ICE CREAM. Glorious, decadent, cold, nonnutritional ICE CREAM. Thank you again, Mr. Hartman. Six months later you're still feeding me and getting me on a good internet connection.

I'm in a sort of "between paychecks" point right now, which is why I'm eating on the gift card. I've got five bucks 'til payday, then my next two paychecks are mostly spoken for. The guitar -- heh heh -- it kinda set me back a little bit! Oh well! It's *so* worth it. Better to improvise two days than have *another* "one that got away" story from the thrift stores, flea markets, and now, yard sales. Thank goodness I'm not a breeder. I can't imagine parting with that guitar by my free will. Only someone with kids (or a bad drug addiction) would ever do that.

Erin, your kitten is ready when you are.

I'm going to go home now and *not* go online when I get there. Maybe play the guitar. I'm up to maybe five or so chords that I've memorized. But of course moving between them is the hard part. Too bad they don't make one-chord songs, 'cause then I'd already be famous. May watch President's Men again, but probably not. I don't want the whole electricity thing right now. Of course the guitar doesn't count.

Guitar stuff & eliminating clutter.

Getting better on the guitar -- can make something approximating music with three chords, and want to learn so much more. I never *even* got this "good" on banjo. I don't know what it is, I guess the tuning, maybe the quality of the instrument, maybe a combination of the two, but it is super, super easy. Listened to "Happy Feet" on KUNM and kept the guitar in my hands and sort of played along, just silly little repeating patterns on single strings, mostly, with various pieces. There was a song about potatoes by Chet Atkins who made the Gretsch famous as much as anybody ever did. There was an Elvis Presley thing where he was playing one of the first songs he recorded about not letting your freind be your lover's lover or some such thing and I swear it was maybe six chords at most. There was a Bob Dylan piece I really enjoyed -- it just kept repeating and repeating -- so I got pretty good at following along, and then moved the pattern up on the fretboard, then down again, it went on so long. Something about being in Mobile but wanting to be in Memphis and not trusting the guys on the trains or something like that.

Put some listings on craigslist for "free stuff" -- flowerpots, an old, disassembled espresso machine, a vacuum cleaner, a belt-drive turntable -- and thought I wouldn't get any responses.

No such luck. Now I have to decide who I get back to in order to get rid of my stuff that I really don't need which is just making clutter. I think I've decided who gets the espresso machine -- guy says he's starting a chocolate business and just needs a way to make good espresso to blend in to the chocolate. The poor guy who wrote back about the "expresso" machine is clearly beneath contempt, not worthy of my fine (but disassembled) Italian machine.

Maybe I'll keep it. Heh. I hope not. I got a good bit of the kitchen cleared out today. That floor -- man -- it was brand new when I moved in. It's ruined. Stupid off-white linoleum tiles. BLACK, baby. BLACK. What kind of fool makes a floor almost white. I guess it was the cheapest colour. I can actually get to the window.

One less distraction.

No surprise, I slipped!

I made it all through the day without smoking. Bill was smoking in the office some and every now and then I'd get a whiff of it and it wasn't either horrible or good -- just smelled like burning paper -- and I'd think "why do I want to inhale that deeply, through my mouth?" The answer being of course that really I do not. Doesn't bug me the least when other people smoke, but it's sheer madness to actually suck on a flaming faggot of that particular variety. At least for me it is.

I got into the mindset of "must have a cigarette" and determined to get *my* brand -- the Players Medium Navy Cuts that cost a fortune. Poor me, the one place that had 'em just closed as I got there. Then off the the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center tobacco shop and gas station and bought a pack of Smokin' Joes -- my affordable, everyday brand.

Sat down with the book on the piano's music stand (it's got these little things to hold the pages -- very useful!) and worked my way through the 15 beginner chords. Got through them all and suddenly I "had to" smoke a cigarette. So I sat down and smoked one. And then another. Tried to read the book but what the hell do I need a stage prop of a cigarette for when I'm sitting at home in privacy trying to focus on my reading? The answer, naturally, is that I don't. Any more than I need one while driving or while talking on the telephone or while printing insurance claims or any time ever. If I stop to "reward" myself every single time I play real chords for five minutes running I'm never gonna learn a damn thing about how to play guitar. And damn it, I want to play! Way more than I want cigarettes.

Brand new pack -- thireen cigarettes left -- I don't even save one, I just finish the one I'm done with, take 'em all out of the pack and shred 'em in the gravel out front. It's too late to buy more now and damn it I don't need this distraction. I've got so precious little time on weekdays and I've got a hell of a lot more challenging and time consuming project than this blog to fill the time with.

Plus I really need to put some work into this apartment, though that seems to happen naturally on those rare weekends when I don't have people cloying at me for attention. I can't live like this anymore. This flighty "oh I need a cigarette" thing every few minutes, disrupting whatever I'm trying to *do* in order to inhale noxious poison gases into my lungs because I seem to think -- in error -- that it relaxes me or helps me concentrate or what have you. It's ridiculous. I need to get to the point that I can make it through an entire day without once thinking "oh I have to go get cigarettes". Then, maybe, I can be productive.

If I play guitar for an hour a day I might get rather good at it. if I smoke for an hour a day I will die. I will die anyway. And I'd much rather die knowing how to play this guitar. End of rant.

One down, five to go.

Got one of the kittens placed in a good home today. The guy came by and we visited for a good couple of hours. Wonderful to have someone in this space without it being creepy and weird. I think the Qi of the apartment is slowly changing. I guess it helped taking the roach poison off the kitchen counter and removing that piece of clear tape on the window over the sink with an obituary from 2001.

For the first time in over a year I have all the counter space in the kitchen clean and usable. I'm systematically working my way around the kitchen from the ceiling to the floor, one section of wall at a time. Reorganized one cupboard. Got two more to go, plus down below the countertops. Can hardly wait to have it up and running well enough that I can USE the kitchen table! What a luxury!

What else? Nothing else. A good stay-at-home day mostly. Cleaned the bokhara with a lint roller, which took an hour and a half. Finally decided since it's summer and the floors aren't cold, and since the cats are shedding about ten pounds of fur per day, I'll roll it up and bring it out for guests. Hardly got a chance to mess with the guitar at all but did as much as time would allow. Tuned it again. That floating bridge is nuts. Did polish it up. Looks fantastic, sounds even better. Can hardly wait to get it all restrung and cleaned and all that happy stuff.

My guitar.

Got up and worked around the house, cleaned the mattress pad in the bathtub and the bedspread in the kitchen sink. (Last night I started on the kitchen -- working my way down from the filthy ceiling and aiming, in due time, towards the breakfast nook.) Made coffee. Went out to get cat food and litter when what catches my eye as I'm driving off but this gorgeous electric acoustic guitar sitting out in its case on the unpaved ground in the Mexican neighbours' weekly yard sale.

I stop, get out, and look at it. I don't know the first thing about guitars but I recognize, in a general way, quality workmanship in musical instruments, be they violins and banjos or accordions and guitars. This knowledge is hard-won, the product of a thousand stupid purchases (pianos that will never play again, for instance). I know enough to tell the difference between mass-manufactured and hand-crafted. I *know* it's the guitar I've heard the neighbours playing with from time to time but nothing more than that. I ask the guy how much he wants for it. Two hundred bucks, he says, and he's including the big speaker in a black box with knobs which I believe is called an "amplifier" -- so named, presumably, because it has the effect of rather pronouncedly amplifying the sound of the guitar's vibrating strings electronically.

I don't think twice -- I say great, please hold on to it for me while I run to the bank.

I run to the bank and realise before I even try to pull in -- I just deposited my paycheck yesterday, meaning that I've got money in the bank, but since the deposit hasn't posted, I can't pull out two hundred. (See -- since I'm working in this sort of business now, these things make *sense* to me; it's not some evil plot by bankers to deprive me of a purchase that I know somewhere inside me is foolish -- ah, yet another musical instrument I'll never, ever play. Right? Right.)

I drive back, explain about the money in the bank, and offer him a check instead, expecting him to turn me down. No such "luck"! He seems willing to take it, given that if it bounces he knows exactly where I live. We do the deed -- exchange guitar for money. I put it into my apartment and Apolonio (for such is his name, as I learned upon writing his check) comes in and looks at my violin and accordion. He likes both, and asks how much I'll take for both. I offer him both for two hundred, which is what I paid for both and which I figure's fair enough and easier -- just void a check and we're all even-steven. He says he has to think about it. He wants the instruments, but needs the money. No problem -- you know where I live.

I go get cat food at Clark's Pet Emporium and who's there but the cat rescue people, adopting out cats. Wow. I tell them my story which is increasingly desperate since picking up the phone to call them is out of the question -- I depend on fortuitous circumstance to get *everything* done. They tell me all I need to know. Call this number and apply for low- or no-cost spay services. Take the kittens and the mother there to get their shots (they're cheapest) and get fixed and when you're ready bring 'em here and we'll help you adopt 'em out.

PERFECT. Now I can give the first-choice cats to the two or three people I trust to take good care of 'em and adopt the rest out the right way, instead of giving 'em to the Navaho neighbours who'll treat 'em like they treat wild animals -- not because they're bad people, mind you, but just because that is their way.

I remember before getting home that I've just bought a guitar and don't know the first thing about it but I figure I may as well get a pick, and maybe if I'm very lucky find something out about it at *the* best place in town for guitars -- Marc's Guitar Center, on Central, right across the street from Frontier Restaurant. The only thing "wrong" with the guitar is that the tongue-shaped metal thing that attaches via a sort of lever to the cylindrical thing that the strings are attached to beneath the bridge which moves up and down bending the notes is disconnected and while the connecting nut is still inside the giant spring, I don't want to do a butter-knife job on that super-heavy spring right next to the gleaming birds'-eye maple putting my own eye out at the same time I ruin the guitar, so I figure I'll maybe ask someone inside if it's worth fixing even though I didn't bring it in.

I go in, look around, and pick out a book that looks like it has what I need -- The Guitar Handbook by Ralph Denyer, with a foreword by Robert Fripp. The main reason I look at this particular book is the name "Robert Fripp", which I've heard Weasel banter about -- if Weasel likes a person musically, it's easily worth looking into. (He's the biggest single reason I know *anything at all* about guitars or that genre of music known as "rock" -- left to my own devices I'd only know Bach's complete organ works as played on all the great organs of Europe.) I am comforted considerably by the fact that Mr. Fripp dresses like a gentleman and seems a respectable sort of person, judging by his picture in the book.

The book impresses me -- it's got a little bit of everything, sort of an encyclopedia of this baffling instrument ("pipe organ = easy, guitar = hard", in my world). It's got technical stuff so I can figure it out on that level if and when I ever dare to tinker, but also has a good beginner's guide (noncondescending) on how to play the damn thing if I ever go down that road, which I absolutely positively know I never will, because, damn it, I am RESPECTABLE and RESPECTABLE PEOPLE DO NOT PLAY GUITARS. (Nor do they work as doormen in fag bars nor attend AA meetings, but I have always sought to subvert my own dominant paradigms, or something.) Finally it's got lots of pictures and charts and most importantly, seems surprisingly well-written for a book about an instrument played to the best of my knowledge predominantly by crazy homeless people trying to hitch a ride or wheedle a dollar out of you for sheer pity (if not to shut them up), long-haired, tie-dyed-t-shirt-and-birkenstock wearing hippies who say things like "cool, dude", a plethora of celebrities better known for dying badly than for living well, disheveled (but undeniably talented) kids in Austin, Texas, and of course, supporting characters in Rossini operas.

Then I see it.

My guitar.

In the book.

Truth be told, it's not *exactly* my guitar. Mine's got a double cutout, which is not the f-holes (as I'd thought, that being the only part that's visibly "cut out"), but the "dip" in the body where the body meets the neck. The accompanying caption:

Gretsch White Falcon (below): Introduced in 1955, the White Falcon was the world's most expensive guitar. The single cutaway was changed to a double cutaway in the 1960's.

So it seems I've gotten the world's most expensive guitar for two hundred dollars.

I ask the guy behind the counter what I should buy, explaining that I don't know the first thing about guitars (you see, I am respectable) but I'd sure like to give it a whirl maybe someday if I can do it without frustrating myself. He says buy a couple of picks and leads me in the right direction where that panic-inducing purchase was concerned. (Instrument I can't play for two hundred dollars from the neighbour? Easy. One-dollar guitar picks from a selection of 180 different kinds? Hard.) His name, incidentally, is Holden. He was very helful and steered me into definitely buying the book I had in my hand and away from the super-easy beginner books, while telling me about guitar picks in terms only someone who plays can grasp well enough to make explicable to someone as guitaristically imbecillic as myself.

I told him I just got a guitar from my neighbour. He asked what kind. I said a Gretsch and mention there's a picture of one very much like it in this book I'm buying. He asks how much I paid for it. I say $150, subtracting fifty dollars to account for the big speakerbox that came with the guitar. The look on his face alone was worth $200. "Never let go of that", he says, dead sober. I don't hear clearly whether he says it's the "deal of the century" or the "steal of the century", but no matter. The meaning is clear. I won't tell you how much he thought it was worth.

I rush home, more excited than ever, intent on plugging it in. I open up the case and marvel. I dust it. Fiddle around with the tremolo bar. Go to plug in the amp. It's a three-prong. I've only got two-prong outlets and I know I used my second "cheater" plug on the coffeepot now sitting on my freshly uncluttered kitchen counter. I run over to Samon's on Central to get me two more. The line is excruciatingly slow, as there isn't a special express lane for persons buying a dollar's worth of cheater plugs who are on their way back home to play with their new toy. I rush home yet again.

The thing has got so many switches and knobs and I don't know what any of them do. I do get rather good, rather quickly, at making feedback, which makes me feel special in a short-bus sort of way. I read a little, then at five o'clock sharp call Marc's to ask 'em when they close. Five-thirty. Great -- I'll try and make it over.

I do. I intend to get an estimate on getting it fixed. Under a hundred bucks is the long-story-short of it. Restring it, clean it up, attach the tremolo bar, tighten up the volume knob. I can afford that. Paul helps me. Didn't know he was from El Paso 'til I saw the staff profiles on Marc's website, which Holden has something to do with. He offers -- twice -- to buy it from me on the spot. Remembering Holden's advice given right off the bat, sight unseen, I say I plan to hold on to it, but tell him I know where to come if I ever change my mind. Everyone stops what they are doing to look at my guitar. He takes the guitar in his hands and makes amazing music with it like it's just a part of him. I tell him I've got rent coming up but I'll definitely come by around the first week of the month. I definitely want this guy working on my guitar, just based on how he held it.

Back home, I finally get up the nerve to tune it. I then start messing around with the open chords recommended for beginners in the book. Maybe because I've tried so many times with the banjo, it's pretty easy. Maybe because of the tuning, compared to the banjo, it's amazingly easy to make something that sounds like music.

The only thing keeping my hands off it right now is the fact that it's rather too late in the evening to strum a guitar which at half volume shakes the building when you barely brush the strings.

A short while later Apolonio comes by. He clearly wants the violin, but doesn't want to do the trade I had proposed. Despite the language barrier, I get the gist of it -- he'll gladly trade anything in his yard sale for the violin, which he has fallen in love with. I make it very clear to him the neck's been repaired and it won't hold a tuning, but it doesn't matter. He wants it. Sunstroked hurt puppy look and all. I trade it with him for a working student clarinet, not offering to sell him back my guitar and tell him he should take it to Marc's, although I do feel slightly guilty about not doing so. I've gotten a guitar for round about a tenth what it is worth and traded a big instrument I can't play and which won't hold a tuning for a small instrument I can't play that does hold a tuning. I've taken the noisemaker out of the neighbours' hands and put a respectable musical instrument into their own.

Everybody's happy.

Let's see -- what's next on the agenda? Nuclear disarmament? World peace?

Maybe I'll just stop smoking. I think I can do it now. Reading The Easy Way to Stop Smoking at my acupuncturist's recommendation seems to have taken whatever pleasure I thought I got out of smoking out of smoking. May as well stop on the weekend, when everything is going well, when there's no stress and no triggers.

All right. This is it. I'm declaring it. I am now a nonsmoker. I plan never to partake of tobacco products again.

Oh, by the way, my guitar was manufactured on 7 November, 1967. Seven-eleven-sixty-seven. It was the 35th instrument turned out of the factory that day. Judging by the serial number. Ain't the internet grand?

My first honest-to-god tune I've picked out: "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Freind", but in a minor key.

Oh man. I love my guitar.

All the President's Men.

Yep. I checked out the above-mentioned DVD from the library and watched it -- great movie. Highly recommend it. Love the pacing. Some scenes had me laughing where Woodward and Bernstein are figuring out who's who based on initials and stuff. We have exchanges a little like that at work all the time, 'cause working out insurance claims is something of a puzzle and it's pretty rare for one person to have all of the pieces in one place.

Late. Long day. Not much to say. The Yu Nu Jian tastes pretty good, considering what it looks like (doesn't look worse than coffee, but does taste better). Quit smoking again this evening. Longish day possible tomorrow. Saturday I can put some work into my apartment which needs it. Not bad anything like before I cleaned it up but I need to keep busy, don't want to be around people more than I have to be, and have people coming to look at and take home kittens Sunday afternoon so it needs to be minimally presentable for them.

玉女煎

At home now and as always Alltel's taking forever to load simple pages.

Got acupuncture today. Needed it! I was a wreck after a month without it.

Different points used from before. Draining Heat and treating Stomach Yin Deficiency. Heat's a characteristic problem for me, but today was hardcore. I could feel it leaving me from that point in the palm of my hand at the root of the middle finger that I haven't looked up yet. I've got seeds in my left ear and magnets on each of my wrists (at Lung 7) and I'm feeling better than I have in a very long time.

I am now preparing a modified version of Jade Woman Decoction on my stove, the unmodified version of which acupuncture.com says

1. Yu Nu Jian (Jade Woman Decoction): Shi Gao (Gypsum), Shu Di Huang (Radix Rehmanniae Glutinosae Conquitae), Zhi Mu (Radix Anemarrhenae Asphodeloidis), Mai Men Dong (Tuber Ophiopogonis Japonici), Niu Xi (Radix Achyranthis Bidentatae).

Actions: Eliminates intense heat or fire from the Stomach; to replenish the yin.

So now I'm simmering gypsum and abalone shell before adding water, heating that for two minutes, turning it off, soaking the herbs in the warm water, then simmering them all together and finally drinking about a cupful twice a day. I've got enough for four batches. Each batch lasts two days. Loose herbs are the most potent way of getting Chinese medicine, *and* the cheapest, usually -- but hardly anyone does it because it's a pain in the ass for everyone concerned.

Poor guys at the clinic today -- it took four of 'em working all at once to get it put together, weighing out the herbs and tying them in bags inside of bags, and it took almost fifteen minutes at the same time they had other patients waiting. Show me *any* Western pharmacy where they'd do that for a prescription costing the patient precisely $13.80, when he could eliminate much if not all of the problem just by stopping smoking cigarettes.

What a wonderful thing to obsess over. But I realise the effort that went into putting it together now and will absolutely take it without fail as prescribed each day with no mistakes.

The people who write out the accompanying directions for preparing these on my end would be well served by reading cookbooks, though -- the way it's written out makes it sound way harder than it really has to be. Basically simmer this that long, add that, boil, lower heat, then simmer and drink warm.

It's done now, and it's black as night. I'm surprised I was able to find the ideographs for Yu Nu Jian in less time than it took to prepare the stuff itself. If your browser doesn't support Unicode, there's no telling what's up there in the post title, but oh well. Apologies to Chinese speakers if I've foolishly used the wrong ideographs, but I don't think I did -- I looked up each word in the GCMT and then found them in the CJK Unified Ideographs Unicode Map. What's scary is that when I stare for long enough I start to understand how radicals work and how lists of Chinese words are organized and can find exactly what I'm looking for. I think.

I'm literally boiling rocks and seashells on my stove. When the rocks and seashells are done, I'm going to add some black fruit type thing, some tree bark, some wood, and what I take to be some sort of roots and drink it. Yum. A person might be forgiven for thinking me a little mad right now. The gypsum, in the little plastic baggies that they give it to you in, look so much like crack cocaine I'm glad on getting home and looking at it that I wasn't stopped by any cops for any reason or I know I'd be in jail while the crime lab took its time determining that no, the person they picked up was carrying around little baggies of crystalline rocks from which the sands at White Sands derive.

From what I'm reading, 玉女煎 has applications, in terms of Western medicine, for conditions as diverse as Gingivitis and Diabetes Mellitus.

A Blue Poppy Press article about Gingivitis says it much more beautifully:

Within Yu Nu Jian, Gypsum [Shi Gao], which is acrid, sweet, and greatly cold, clears Yang Ming surplus heat. Prepared Rehmannia [Shu Di Huang], sweet and slightly warm, supplements Shao Yin insufficiency. These are this formula's two ministerial medicinals. When these two ingredients are combined, they clear fire and enrich water. Anemarrhena [Zhi Mu] is bitter, cold, and moist. It assists Gypsum [to] clear stomach heat. Achyranthes [Niu Xi] leads heat to move downwards. And if there is constipation, Rhubarb [Mai Men Dong, I assume] strengthens this protocol's the draining of heat.

I'm going to try it now.

At Flying Star downtown, marvelling over google maps.

And finally that google map loaded -- in about five seconds, flat!

And I'm using it to seek out wireless hotpots near where I live.

Oh wow. There's one in a laudromat 1.3 miles away. I think the universe is trying to tell me something.

Today was busy busy busy at work 'cause I missed yesterday, then faxed a request for patient information to one of the receptionists who's responsible for getting that to us but god bless her has a way of "forgetting". Two days of new patients to enter into the system plus those she never sent -- some going back to April, and then I had the always loads of fun experience of going to get my interlock checked. Nice girl there and I got into a conversation about the drag queens, her freind's cousin is one of the native queens and indeed I knew her, and she'd gone to AMC one night but gotten scared by someone who I'm 98% sure is Martinique 'cause she (the girl, not Martinique) was being drunk and stoopid. Seven feet tall, flawless, and meaner than god? Yep. That's Martinique. Can't be none other! Then home to pick up my cellphone I'd forgotten, then back to work where I printed out the claims for Medicaid and entered 'em all. I didn't get paid last Friday 'cause the place I work is out of checks. Oy vey -- Bill offered to get cash from the bank but I figure give it another day, 'cause in the words of Gloria Gaynor -- well, you know. But I need money for tomorrow because -- at last, I have Acupuncture.

For the fun of it, 'cause I'm enjoying these google maps like mad, here is a hybrid satellite view of the parking lot at Foxes Booze 'n' Cruise, complete with street names superimposed. It's kinda scary to think you can see the oil slicks in our parking lot from outer space, but there you have it. The maps seem to miss street addresses by about half a block, so the little pointer's actually over the motel next door. Foxes is the ramshackle cluster building just to the right, and that L-shaped parking lot is none other than the one I patrolled. It's got a tractor-trailer in it -- probably delivering beer -- and two daytime drinking drivers inside. The picture's clearly kina old, 'cause well, that's Sid's car (the long one) right by the front door, in his reserved spot. Judging from the truck, this would have had to be taken on a Monday, after 10 AM but probably before 2 PM, when the beer gets delivered.

Anyone looking to save money on gas, btw, might be well advised to check Gas Buddy. Just enter your zip code and you're off. I just found where I can save 24 cents per gallon just by driving under two miles out of my way -- and that may actually just be worth it.

Wish I could stick around and play with these maps for some hours but this place closes at ten tonight. I don't *need* twenty-four hour places -- but I do wish sometimes there was something in this town open past ten besides bars and the Frontier Restaurant at 2400 Central, shown here in hybrid view, where you can see that yes indeed it does take up half the entire block. The bulding facing Central on the South side is the restaurant, with the footprints of the five dining rooms all visible in the roofline. Behind that is tons of parking (but never enough) and building 2, where I learned ethics from the dishwasher named Raoul but whom everybody called "Cuba" 'cause that's where he was from and he didn't speak a word of English but some of the most beautiful Spanish you've *ever* heard. Yeah -- that's building 2 -- with the big ventillators on the roof. Everything south to the Swimming pool and the apartment building surrounding it on Cornell is Frontier Restaurant. Again the image is old -- before building three blew up.

I've really got to go! They're going to close.

Be well!

Worst ISP ever.

Alltel's wireless internet service is without reservation the worst internet connection I have ever had the displeasure of using. And I go back to 14.4 modems where the internet's concerned.

Craigslist pages do not routinely time out. Except on Alltel.

Google's home page does not routinely turn up "page failed to load" errors after partially loading. Except on Alltel.

Blogger's "new post" page does not, in fact, require a minimum of twenty minutes to load, ever. Except on Alltel.

I'm sure the idea is to get me to fork out a ton of cash for a *real* internet connection, instead of this mickeymouse bullshit they're trying to pass off as being "as fast as a 56K modem". It is not.

I understand that traffic varies, but this is ridiculous. I don't download music, or programs, or hell, even GIFs. I deal almost exclusively with text and HTML and CSS and some very simple Java stuff -- the bread-and-butter backbone of the World Wide Web here -- nothing fancy or exotic, nothing terribly demanding of bandwidth. Yet it is *always* this bad. Without exception.

I have spent the last three hours trying to load a single Google map. It takes about 45 minutes and then stops loading even though it's not finished. That shit ain't Google's fault, it's Alltel's. Worst internet service provider ever.

Well -- ok -- AOL was worse. Not by much, though -- and I speak of the days of connection failures. But I was young and stupid then.

The waning gibbous moon is glorious outside my window, though.

Good riddance.

The Lucky Strikes got opened on the way back to Albuquerque.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that all I've got to show for it is a pounding migraine and the sense that I can not think of a single good thing that I get from smoking. Not one.

Threw up my last night in El Paso, which seems to be turning into how I deal with emotional stress. It was very unpleasant. Leaves me feeling weakened and drained every time. I had planned to be back in Albuquerque this morning but that fell through because I didn't have the strength for the drive in the searing heat of day having just lost everything I'd eaten, especially since I don't have air conditioning in my car. Emailed Bill basically calling in sick from out of state and we'll see how that flies, if it flies, which I do hope it does. I'm going in tomorrow and we'll see what happens then.

I finally felt safe to drive around two or so this afternoon and hit the road. Made the meeting, which was good, I needed it, and it was a lovely drive back, even if rushed, watching the weather change in the epic way it does over the desert Southwest. It even rained a little on the road.

Listened to Shrub's radio address on immigration while crossing the Rio Grande coming into Albuquerque. Great -- the already militarized border region I come from (the "deconstitutionalized zone", some of us natives call it) is now gonna be patrolled by National Guardsmen and unmanned drone aircraft (not that those are as of yet unknown in el paso del Norte). Good thing he lacks the strength to send in a latter-day General Pershing. I do believe with his megalomania he wouldn't be above atom-bombing Juarez if he thought it'd be "doable" without causing political backlash in El Paso, which allowed him to become Governor of Texas -- the highest office to which he has ever been elected -- while undermining his support in the so-called "business community" by obliterating the cheap labour pool that's gathered there like a festering swamp of inhumanity.

What else. Buh. Glad to be back but it's always a tricky situation going down for the weekend. Family drama does abound and then when I get back nothing I left up here needing to be done has been done. It's all still just waiting for me. Still got too many cats. Still got a trashed kitchen in desperate need of cleaning. These little jaunts down to El Paso get me very well fed and well taken care of but I'm not sure they accomplish much in the long run.

El Paso.

"Random Musings, Cont'd." celebrated its first anniversary yesterday, Saturday the thirteenth day of May, MMVI. In the year since its inception I have posted 251 times.

I am in El Paso as I write, loooking straight across the border.

I quit smoking on Thusday because that was the day the group set to quit. This is STOMP I'm speaking of when I say "the group". My incentives to stay quitted with smoking are fairly simple, quite compelling, but of course these last few days have nonetheless been something of an emotional rollercoaster. Driving down on Friday I stopped at my usual gas station in Truth or Consequences in a fury of a craving fit and asked for the brands I'd always bought there. No this, no that -- no one buys nonfilter -- but we do have Lucky Strikes -- great, give me one of those. One pack. Thanks very much.

I bought them but I didn't smoke them.

By the time I got out to my car where I could open up the pack and smoke them I had the presence of mind to realise the craving had gone. I didn't really want a cigarette, although I *had* wanted one maybe ten minutes before, when I decided to pull over to buy them. I figured maybe I'll smoke these later, but not 'til I really really really want one. So I've been carrying around an unopened pack of cigarettes with me these past few days and not smoking. I haven't found a good enough reason to, and always know the cravings will pass soon enough. I did my laundry and the smell of cigarette smoke in clothes strikes me as rather less than pleasant.

Yesternight had a gathering for someone's college graduation which was nice, mostly because of the garden. It's looking better than it ever has before. We sat out underneath the hundreds of tiny lights and the full moon and just enjoyed the space my mother's worked for years to make a glorious as it is.

Today my mother and I went to Ardovino's Desert Crossing. The Ardovino family is the one behind Ardovino's pizza shop on Cincinnatti in Kern Place, which in its golden days was a magical place for the locals to eat, get good meats and good cheese and good wines and amazing pizzas, salads, and sandwiches, always. Immigrant family that *made* the neighbourhood.

Maybe ten years or so ago they sold that restaurant and it got turned into a sort of yuppie shithole along with the whole damn street and neighbourhood. This is the street that had the original Casa Jurado, before it went all 'seventies, before the Jurado grandmother died and her kids finally decided to eradicate the amazing, one-of-a-kind abstract stained glass and copper window from another dimension. The same street that had a hardware store before it closed making way for an overpriced video rental place specializing in foreign films but lacking anything other than a handful of Italian directors' mature works, a print shop before it became an upscale boutique, a drug store with post office inside it before it became a pretentious overpriced restaurant and bar, a dry cleaners before it turned into a "gift shop" selling utterly useless stuff, a real men's clothing store before it turned into yet another dumb jock bar along with every other marginal business on the block, a ballet school, a dojo, and El Paso's first real coffeeshop, now sadly long gone along with all the wonderful quirky businesses that made that one block hum, known as Dolce Vita, may it rest in peace along with all the fondly remembered former businesses of that now gentrified neigubhourhood gone bad.

Any way. Ardovino's Desert Crossing is the sort of place I want to be when the bombs start falling. It's way out in Anapra, right by the train tracks, right under Mount Cristo Rey. The area is characterized by human folly, greed, and neglect on a scale dwarfed only by certain truly monumental strip mines and nuclear facilities. If anyone remembers what I was involved in a few years back -- what with ASARCO and Jobe Concrete and most of El Paso being declared a Superfund site and the connections between the Bush family and the president of the University where I was studying linquistics and the company that owned ASARCO and Gale Norton and the Jobe family intimidating local activists -- all that happy stuff -- that is Anapra. It's literally right across the highway from the tanker dripping acid which I oddly enough made an AV out of for the palace, which is up the tracks from the entrance to the smelter warning dire consequences for anyone who dares take pictures.

Anapra is one of the most deeply impoverished places in the United States. It consists largely of decaying trailers and prefabricated houses in the midst of the desert, and features some of the worst polluting industries in a part of West Texas known for the worst polluting industries in the whose damn country. When Ralph Nader speaks of certain border regions as a "toxic sink", he's speaking of Anapra and perhaps a hundred other places like it. It's a miracle out there that anyone has running water.

Anapra's most striking geographic feature is Mount Cristo Rey -- formerly Muledriver Mountain -- so named because since the 'thirties it's featured a huge Jesus statue on the very top of it that you can see for miles around. When Mrs. Juarez -- our next door neighbour of some decades running -- finally went mad before she died, she'd talk to the mountain from her porch for hours on end. Mexico, Texas, and New Mexico -- all borders meet on Cristo Rey, and it's an infamously dangerous place to go. You go with groups of people, for Easter or Christmas on pilgrimage if you're catholic, but under no circumstances do you ever go alone. People have disappeared in those hills; robbers still prey on passers-by and unsuspecting tourists, just like they steal things from the fast-moving trains that roar past the chain link fence delimiting the United States from Mexico.

Anapra is a no-man's land.

You drive out of downtown El Paso, past the smelter, past the brick works, past the strip mine, speed around the dead-man's curve and pass the burned out husk of the chemical works, turn off before you hit the power plant, go past the entrance to the Cristo Rey trail leading to the mountain's summit, turn left, and suddenly you are in Ardovino's Desert Crossing.

The place is magical.

As a restaurant, it has very much the feel of an inn. They're actually working on that, now -- what with their collection of vintage Airstream trailers, which they plan to rent out by the night. You know what I mean, though -- the kind of place you'll make a day trip out to when visiting the south of France, the place that's worth driving two hours to get to because they're the only place that makes the aligot with the young cheese from the local cows whose milk tastes just exactly so because of whatever herbs grow wild in the fields right there and no place else on earth. At the same time Ardovino's has a downright cosmmopolitan feel to it -- feels like Vegas in the sixties -- hard to pin it down. Every detail is perfect. The original building goes back to roughly 1910. It was featured in a 1957 "top ten Roadside Inns" in Life Magazine. People who work there live in the apartments that are part of the place. A whole barn-sized structure has been converted to host weddings and the like. There's a pianist playing showtunes live when you show up for lunch or dinner, as though every place had pianists playing live. Parking attendants show you where to park, a doorman opens the front door. Each glass and fork is lined up absolutely perfectly. The waitstaff is freindly, attentive, and never leaves you wanting anything at all. The setting gives you the most glorious views of the sunset you'll find *anywhere*. The owners and their family -- three or four generations of 'em -- come to chat at your table carrying on discussions you've been having with them all your life. The place is impeccably clean and unbelievably quirky. They also host a farmers' market every Saturday during the growing season, and grow a lot of what they cook, and buy locally most of what they don't grow.

The food is divine.

Leave and you know that all's well in the world. You go in through the gates and are transported to another universe. You leave the same way and take Ardovino's with you.

Rubick's Cube.

I think I've successfully painted myself into the corner of being the coffee guy at my home group for the next few months. No one else has volunteered to make coffee, and now that we have a coffeepot that takes some modicum of skill to operate nobody likely ever will. If you do it wrong, you burn out the tank and ruin the coffeepot.

Since we've been needing new coffeepots I got one on sale today at Target -- a Bunn -- damn fine coffeepot -- and gave it a test run before buying another for decaf. (Now that I've given it a test run, I'm getting something much cheaper and more basic for decaf, since hardly anyone drinks it, and the purpose of the new coffeepot was to be able to brew the coffee fast and silently.) It takes some time to warm it up but once it's warmed up it takes just three minutes to brew ten cups in perfect silence. And it's damn good coffee, too. It's basically a home version of what you'll find in 90% of restaurants that serve coffee. It was on sale because the newer version of the same exact thing features slightly different lines, or something similarly ridiculous.

The problem is, in the words of someone else who'll go without being named, that it's a "Rubick's Cube" of a coffeemaker! You have to pour in one carafe of cold water, then put the carafe under the empty brewbasket and close the lid, allowing the water to flow into the tank without dripping out onto the porcelain warmer plate. Then you have to pour in a second carafe full of water and catch whatever overflows in the carafe (don't close the lid before putting the carafe on the warmer plate!), then pour that excess water out, and only then can you plug in or turn on the coffeepot. Then it takes fifteen minutes to get the water up to brewing temperature. Then you fill the carafe a third time, pour it in, put the carafe back underneath the now-full-of-ground-coffee brewbasket, flip the "warmer" switch, and *finally* close the lid on the top of the machine, letting the fresh water enter the warming tank and expelling the hot water in the tank in a powerful, fast shower over the grounds.

Three minutes later you have snapping fresh coffee brewed at the correct temperature, as opposed to muddy brownwater brewed cold and then reduced to the consistency of gravy on a too-hot burner fifteen minutes later. The trick is to show up early enough to have it ready to go when people walk in the door for the meeting, and that means getting there at least a good twenty minutes before the meeting's set to start.

Thanks to everyone who likes the smoke free night poster -- I'm lowering the stuff in the center but otherwise the general design is set.

What else. Today at work was, well, kind of odd. It was one of those days where we all seemed to go in circles. The lady at MMH said I had to bill the H00015s on a U92, but since we're not a hospital, we use HCFA 1500s, not U92s, and the auth that she gave us should have worked for the IOP charges. I had to call twice to get this one thing straightened out. It was completely over my head, and honestly the most comforting part of it was that I clearly knew as much about it as the person on the other end of the telephone.

We also are starting to get calls from people -- patients, not insurance companies -- who got their statements of account today. Finally something to be customer servicey with. They're usually pretty mad and I have to go through and figure out what's what and whether they owe 72 dollars or whether, I'm so sorry, we seem to have made a mistake, it's only 14 dollars that you owe because we got an adjustment in and it somehow didn't get entered into the system so in fact it's just two copays from the 14th and the 21st of February since we got got check number 3509 dated April 19th and entered it into your account on May 3rd, thank you for calling back have a nice day. Tomorrow promises more of the same, but I'm kind of just thrown into the fray with these calls. Which is fine -- better to learn this by having to look at it and talk to the people than by having a three-week training course with stupid motivational cheers and stuff. It's kind of unpleasant, but it's *real*, and I miss that from Foxes, it gets so abstract when people with my stalkers' condition aren't "psychotic biploar" but just plain old 296.36. I need to be professional, but I'm not lectured how to enhance the image of the corporation, blah blah blah. For the most part I just get turned loose on whatever project needs to be done and if I'm told to do something a certain way there is a reason. But man oh man -- it takes a fair amount of skill just to know what I'm even looking at most of the time. Insurance Aging or Patient Aging? Transaction Journal? IA or IP? What's that ref number for -- a PPC or PPCC? And I'm not even dealing with the prepays and the PPIPs and stuff yet. It's almost like being the doorman at Foxes, the biggest difference being that when the fæces hits the fan you use your brain instead of your body. Hehe.

I'm cooking carne adobada and it's taking forever. I'd write all night but damn it I have *got* to get back to Bluebear!

I need to be up in six hours, more or less.

What is keeping me up is none other than Bluebear.

Reading of Round 11 in the Duel of Lies has kept me more on the edge of my seat than anything has since that first Feria des Taureaux match I saw in Nimes, when suddenly I realized that it was real life and death down in that ancient Roman coliseum, right before my eyes, what with its monstrous cruelty combined with absolute perfection of æsthetic form and that I played a part in it by even being there.

Bluebear is just. That. Good.

I've still got 128 pages to go 'til it's over. I do not want to put the book down. I haven't read like this or enjoyed it this much since I was a somewhat precocious twelve year old.

My inclination is to try to sleep! Like, if I don't "sleep" in the next five minutes to pick up the book again and read 'til I fall asleep -- or more likely, finish the book.

Now that the lights are on and I am typing the cats are being the funniest and most amazing that I've ever seen them. The two calicos are defending the "high ground" from eachother on top of the books in the lowest shelf of my bookcase when not pouncing on the white spots in the lineoleum. The remaining four are doing the "corridor with many doors" gag from any old cartoon using the spaces beneath my bed and dresser as the doors, when not playing gladiator on the bokhara. I guess they've mastered "climb the broom", the object of that game apparently being to knock the broom over so many times that I stop setting it upright for them to climb.

Now rather suddenly they're all nursing again.

Television never even came close.

And now I sleep.

Good night.

Excruciating wind.

The wind's at 35 mph, gusting up to 48. It's headachy, grit-between-your-teeth buckin' fugly out there. The air is beige. The sky is taupe. There are at least 2900 people without power just in city limits as I write this. Part of me wants to go to Flying Star downtown just to get into a climate-controlled environment.

I need to make signs for the bars for the smoke free night at Foxes, which is definitely gonna happen this coming 5th of June. I'm terrified it's gonna be a fiasco -- just imagining taking all the ashtrays away from the remaining happy hour stragglers gives me the chills -- and I know the people who'll show up for it aren't bar types generally, but people from the smoking cessation group, state Department of Health, and others not acquainted intimately with the workings of Foxes. At the same time it's gonna be strange for me to be back in that place for the evening. I had to miss the latest meeting of the STOMP committee so I wasn't there in person to say "it's better to start it after eight than right at six" but oh well.

It's not a perfect setup but heck, it never is, is it? (Those drag queens at the Stonewall Inn sure never thought "gee if only we could arrange to get raided tonight maybe we could start an uprising that changes American culture for all time and degenerates into a commercially-sponsored parade in three decades' time".) If it brings in five people who wouldn't normally go to Foxes on a Monday it'll be a success where the bar is concerned; if a few brochures get handed out it'll be a success where STOMP is concerned; if it's a success where the bar and STOMP are concerned combined it'll be newsworthy enough for the Voice, and I shouldn't expect that it's gonna change the world overnight or satisfy everyone 100%.

Done. Here's the sign. Yes, I am a one trick dog where Photoshop's concerned. The sign has to get approval from the Department of Health, which I believe is afraid we're going to try and use hardcore porn or something. Approval takes two weeks.


So naturally it may change quite considerably before it gets posted. But what's important is that it work as a bar sign/handbill -- meaning it has to read like a billboard. It also has to work as a nonprofit/public interest group poster, meaning everyone (funding sources, baby -- funding sources) has to be acknowledged.

If you can't tell I never did go out to Flying Star. Fine with me. Save a little money. I'm going home for Mothers' Day -- this coming weekend I'll be in El Paso.

Listening to the most amazing old jazz record on KUNM 89.9 FM's "Home of Happy Feet" program. That is indeed the old tagline of the Savoy Ballroom. I love this show. Worth staying home for. I love KUNM.

Paperwork and coffeepots.

Cats everywhere. Driving me nuts. The mother has mastered the ten thousand tones of discontent in her voice. Work today was good -- mailed out statements to patients and I got to stamp "PAST DUE" on all the deadbeats' bills right under the balance. Leo organized the office very thoroughly which makes it possible for me to work efficiently, just knowing where things come from and go when I'm done with 'em. I would gladly organize, myself, but I'm not comfortable doing that just yet -- I still have no clear idea what's important and what's not, where paperwork's concerned. The purpose of insurance companies is to generate as much paperwork as possible while dispensing as little money as possible. United is the worst. Hey insurance buyers -- don't waste your money or your time with United Healthcare.

The meeting was good but the coffeepots thing is just plain out of hand -- the group's too big for a standard sized coffeepot but too small for a big old monster and truth be told I know whatever I get people aren't gonna be happy with it. Either it brews too slowly or doesn't hold enough or drips or goodness knows what else. I'm about to the point of saying screw it, you don't like the coffeepot I get, then *you* can volunteer to do the coffee the way *you* like it and see if it makes everybody happy. Hehe. Did ask for input during announcements 'cause I am *definitely* getting one this week, so if they don't like it mo one can say I didn't warn 'em. I mean that in the nicest way possible, though it must sound dreadful being in print and all. Still wish I could get my hands on a Marzocco. Ah well.

Year in review.

It's an odd thing.

I'm starting to understand about being isolated, and starting to "get" why people in AA spend way the hell too much time going to meetings. On the most basic level, it's something social to do that does not involve alcohol, and can actually be sort of fun if you're in the right frame of mind for it.

Please pardon me if I get into "program" stuff but that's about what my mind's on this weekend, for whatever reason. The weekend has sort of dragged on with not much around for me to occupy my mind with and I'll be damned if I didn't think some decent trappist ale could make it "better". So yet again it's kinda come down to "I'm playing a different game today, and one of its rules is 'I won't drink today' so I'm gonna play along just a little further and see what happens tomorrow". The spirit in which I do this is completely pragmatic -- playing this little game I seem to have worked my way out of an interesting job that did not pay the rent into a baffling one that does. And "baffling" is only "interesting not figured out" -- and I definitely need to pay the rent.

What started me down this road was way back about a year ago when I decided I'd never work for breeders again. All my career moves have been moves *away* from what I *didn't* want, rather than moves *towards* what I *did* want. This was just before I started "blogging". Had a love/hate relationship with Frontier Restaurant, the 24-hour hotspot where the address and the hours were the same -- twenty-four-hundred Central Avenue. I'd gone to work there 'cause I'd previously decided I wanted only to work for local businesses -- no corporate chains -- and because the unionization campaign at the so-called "co-op" had failed so miserably. Worked graveyard there -- the bar rush started every night around 1:30 AM and often went four hours or more without a break -- making half a million tortillas -- the most famous in the state, and damned if they aren't good, if not the best by any stretch of the imagination. (Our tortillas -- my tortillas -- were literally famous. Come Christmastime people would send 'em all over the world.)

I don't know what it was that set me off exactly -- the homophobic security guard from Everest showing me his hollow tipped bullets? getting my tyres slashed in the parking lot while I worked? the murder that took place in the parking lot behind building 3 before building 3 blew up? the separate murder of a coworker on break? the speculation about how I never showed up with a girlfreind and didn't ogle the women who came in? -- but I made two simultaneous decisions: get out of foodservice, and never work for breeders ever again, and don't look back, no matter what.

That's when I started to work for Charles in super high-end landscaping. God bless him -- great guy, lousy employer -- Charles works for Charles, and doesn't have the inclination to grow his business to the point where it can support anyone but him. He could if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to, and that's his business. He let me work for a gay man before anyone else would and for that may he be remembered well to all posterity. He paid me better than anyone has ever paid me, but too many days it turned into my waking up to see if he wanted to work and find out that he didn't. He also got me taken on a Gertrude Zachary, which I enjoyed, but that all fell apart because -- who knows? Gertrude is infamously fickle. When all the gay bars got raided that one night in July, and I happened to be the one to carry the message from the Ranch to Foxes that the Vice Squad was shutting down bars, and Foxes didn't get shut down, I found myself someone worth having stick around the bars.

What better place for a faggot who'd just decided that he never wanted to work for the breeders again? Time came a couple of weeks later when Alex hadn't had a night off in two weeks and Sid was desperate for a doorman so voila -- and just like that -- I found myself becoming the doorman at Foxes Booze 'n' Cruise, the oldest gay bar in the Southwest (some say the third oldest in the United States). A perfect place for me to gather up the history and stories of the people of the bars, where gay organizing began and still lives on.

When I worked at Foxes, and before that when I worked at Frontier, weekends were never a problem. I simply worked through them. It was something to grouse about, sure -- "everyone's out having fun, but me, I have to work". But it meant that precisely when "everyone" was out, so was I, specifically serving whatever their needs were in the middle of the night. My "off" nights were other peoples' work nights, so there was hardly anything to do with them, until I landed in County jail on the night of the thirteen martinis, which in a very roundabout way got me into AA which surprise, surprise I find that I rather like enough to stick with past the point that I can legally drink -- if I want to.

Do I want to? Kinda, sure, but not enough to actually do it. The simple fact is that I do give a rat's ass about the people in my home group and don't want to make things hard on them by going out and drinking anymore than I'd want to make things hard on the guys at Foxes by being drunk while on the job. It's my own still imperfect way of serving the community I live in and am part of. I don't have a good enough reason to drink. I kind of like where not drinking has gotten me these last six months and want to give it a little longer to see where it takes me. All the time I've got it etched in my memory -- all the people who disappeared or overdosed or showed up slightly dead from when I worked as doorman. I don't like being the bearer of bad news, and hope never to be the one bad news is borne about.

The legal repercussions levelled off in the months following the night of the thirteen martinis and my finances stabilized slowly, to the point that I realized even without having to pay fines and court costs and fees, I'm not making enough to survive. This didn't become clear until long after the day job at Hartman had dematerialized. I knew that working days and nights was hard on me, but didn't know what else to do. Eventually I managed, somehow -- don't ask me how -- to extricate myself with grace from Foxes and take a full-time day job offered by someone in the groups.

Now my time off is coordinated with that of normal people and I have no idea what to do aside from go to bars or eat at Frontier Restaurant. Unfortunately that's about the sort of town that Albuquerque is.

I went out today to look at coffeepots since I've been assigned the task of getting a new one for my home group. It's turned into a big old drama for me -- a major ordeal -- figuring out how many people we usually have and then finding the *perfect* coffeepot, to the point I'm completely baffled. I think I've finally decided which ones I'm gonna get -- they've only been asking me to do it for the last three months, now.

I also went to Trader Joe's today. I can imagine now how the Spaniards must have felt on riding in to Nuevo Mexico too see a mission in the distance -- the orchestra swells as the camera reveals the silouhette of their distant outpost on the horizon, underneath the rolling clouds before the setting sun as the conquistadores raise their hands in jubilation shouting "civilization!". I got some cheap, good coffee, and some cheap, good chocolate truffles, and some cheap, good wasabi peas. It's such a joy to finally have one of these in town. Too bad it's way the hell out on the other side of town, but heck, it may be worth a trip out there every couple of weeks.

Of course there was that fabulous wine section, what with all the affordable sulftife-free wines and trappist ales and Danish liqueurs and stuff that was the real reason I mostly went to Trader Joe's in California, picking up a bag or oranges or frozen dim sum or something else to sort of make the trip more than a beer run, albeit one with taste and style. Beer runs are something impoverished urban indians do. Trappist ale runs are -- well, basically the same damn thing.

So today I'm not drinking, and while it's neither here nor there, nothing exceptional I want to be patted on the back for, it's the one absolutely positively stable thing I've got going for me, and it seems to tend to bring on more stability. I guess I'll stick with it. And what the hell -- if I were still drinking I wouldn't have this job to go to tomorrow. Granted the "blog" might be more interesting if I had something dreadful to report from the parking lot at Foxes but the parking lots of Albuquerue aren't kind places, and I wish to spend just as little time in them as possible from here on out.

The book report.

The blogger "new post" page has still not loaded as I start this, and I first tried 48 minutes ago.

Watching fireworks from my window onto Central. I assume it's for 5 May but I don't really know. They seem to be over the state fairgrounds.

Ferdinand took me out to lunch today for my birthday which was very nice. I tried to keep it a secret until it was over this year, and it worked, but once he found out he decided he would treat me to lunch and I was powerless to stop him. He and his significant other also took me to "Yard Fest", a micro arts and music festival held in someone's backyard just off of Central. Very Albuquerque, that. Perfectly delightful. Unfortunately I didn't know that I'd committed to going, so he showed up on my doorstep and caught me in my bathrobe. I didn't answer the door 'til I heard his voice since I've got excellent reason for not answering the door 'til I know who is there. I was under the impression we were going to speak telephonically prior to actually going someplace specific. Ate at Dagmar's German restaurant which I've been meaning to try for ages, and enjoyed quite thoroughly. Their strudels are magnificent.

Major cat drama unfolding now. The kittens are starting in on solid food but not quite weaned. They use their teeth and are eating the poor mother cat alive. She finally just got up in the middle of nursing them and came over to me, and all the kittens followed, screaming. Viscious. Breeders. Typical.

The Lincoln Perry biography, Stepin Fetchit, has sort of lost me. I understand he's a difficult subject for biography, but it seems to be more about his professional life and what critics said of him at various times through his career than about the person, himself. As such it is an important and valuable book and I plan to finish reading it. But it's not what I expected -- I expected to get a feeling for the human being behind the character based on interviews with people who knew him, and while I do get bits of that, I get it more or less in snippets peppered into long, exhaustively researched accounts of his performing with this or that theatre circuit and varied critical response in the black and white press of the day. It's a very fitting media biography of a media figure, and from a "history of ideas" perspective throws considerable light on black representations in film. I'm only slightly saddened Mr. Perry still remains a mystery.

Bluebear, on the other hand, has me enthralled -- you know, the book that makes me *glad* they have self checkout machines at the library now, so I don't feel I have to explain to the librarian why I'm reading anything so clearly frivolous. It's so very well written I can't put it down. It is total nonsense, of course. Would make perfect reading for a slightly precocious 12-year old. But I'm enjoying it, damn all the people who'd throw mud for it not being "serious" enough. After reading Voices from Chernobyl, I'm entitled to a Bluebear. With the unwitting help of the Mountain Maggot, Bluebear has just gotten out of the caves following his expulsion from Professor Nightingale's Nocturnomath Academy by turning himself into a fish, and while wandering through the Zamonian Great Woods has encountered -- but why should I ruin it for you? Read the damn thing yourself.

I recently purchased My Lives by Edmund White, about whom I read a piece in the Alibi recently and from whom I read a short story in a 1996 anthology of gay fiction given me by someone from the group. I like his style and perspective and will probably wait to start his book until I don't have library books with a due date coming up right soon.

The DVDs I got from there are overdue -- but only by a day or two, so it's no big deal. Really. I swear. They'll go back Monday, come hell or high water, all of that -- I want to recheck Bluebear and I can't do that if I hold onto overdues. I want to hold onto Bluebear but don't want to buy a copy. Heh. Not yet, at any rate.

Payday.

And I get to put gas in my car. Now that I'm making a living wage I also get to take care of some very basic "quality of life" type things that have been festering for years.

I got a bathrobe. Buying that was an adventure -- ask for "mens' bathrobes" at Burlington Coats and *everyone* directs you to the *bathrooms* in the basement. I have one already of course but it's totally trashed. I've looked everywhere and it's a shame how hard it is to find simple bathrobes. Anywhere. Cost me twenty bucks though and it's a good one.

I got cat litter and cat food. I put gas in the car. I got groceries, including live yoghurt and lavender flowers since I've learned the hard way not to drink black tea after a certain time of night. Yes -- I who used to "test the shots" drinking upwards of four dozen shots of espresso per day now find simple Ceylon black tea keeping me awake when I should be sleeping. My body is indeed that sensitive to caffein.

Also got carne adobada to cook at home and cheap cereal for something that involves zero minutes preparation time.

The kittens are exploring more than ever, going into every dark, forbidden corner behind and underneath everything that I can't move alone on short notice. They're even eating solid food. The next door neighbours want a kitten; I dunno, last time they got adopted by a cat their cousin took it out to the reervation where it got taken by a hawk. I'm serious. I don't want to be racist but I honestly don't think they understand what pets are all about. It seems to be a cultural thing, along with yelling howdy through the open screen door, which is the worst part of not having air conditioning. I'm all for being freindly but "door open, screen closed" doesn't translate to "please start a pointless conversation with me" in my world, any more than having a detached bedroom means I want to entertain large crowds of people in my home.

A curious dilemma.

My victims are no longer quite defenseless.

You see -- I tend to write quite a lot about work -- as you might well have surmised from the subtitle of this online journal. I spend very little time around other people outside of work. Meetings as well these days, the way things have turned out, but that's all more or less "off limits", and utterly boring to anyone who's not into that scene themselves -- "works for me" or "doesn't work for me" being all they ever want to hear on the subject, if that.

So now I talk about my victims behind their backs, as always, but unlike before, they check every few days and don't just comment when they feel like it, but mention such-and-such about what I wrote last night, in person. Don't get me wrong -- I rather like that, a sort of consolation prize for having missed the fame and fortune -- but it throws me for a loop even to be acknowledged as the person in the outside world who is responsible for what here passes as writing. Agreeing on a pseudonym with Leo (as I call him here) was a curious negotiation the likes of which I've never yet encountered. The name suits him, but spoils my meter. Given the fact that he is bound to figure here, it does seem only diplomatic to allow him to choose his own name.

The job *is* monotonous, but that's why I'm being paid to do it. (Beats taking crazy risks for *less* money and failing to pay rent.) It's not the "tedium is not entirely unknown to me" aspect of office work which frightens me, but then it's not the curious circumstances regarding Box 33 on the HCFA-1500 that I really long to write about. The physical details of the job, the jobsite, and the tools used are, believe it or not, as streamlined and minimalistic as they can be -- given what passes for a healthcare system in this country, given what passes for programming and interface design at Microsoft. The most interesting part of those little details for me is diagnosis or "DX" codes -- five digit codes wherein patients' illnesses and conditions are codified in numbers, utterly devoid of value judgments -- everything from methamphetamine addiction to angeoplasty -- and what can possibly be said of those, except that they're extremely clever in the way that they use numbers to stand in for the ten thousand human tragedies and horrors that lead up to Western diagnoses?

The fact of the matter is that I find my job tremendously amusing, and *want* to write of it, but not so much in entering data as in observing humankind under a very different set of lights than those to which I have become accustomed. I learn a lot from Bill and Leo. Different things from each. We're human beings and there's friction and pull because of it. Also because of that friction and pull (which even to acknowledge in passing terrifies me I'll offend one or both of them), unbelievable things happen in that office every day. It amazes me given what they're up against -- what we're up against -- each day that claims move through the system at all. Ever. Yet it happens by the dozen, every day.

Here, for instance, is a "registration and referral" -- two pieces of paper fresh from the telefacsimile machine which are supposed to have perhaps 20 or 30 vital bits of information on it so the patient can be treated and the provider get paid -- only there are precisely three bits of data that are clear and unambiguous and ready to be entered, two which are illegible, two more which are interchanged, one which was forgotten by the patient, one which was entered wrong by the receptionist who *should* know better, two more which require you to check two different websites, one which requires you to wait on hold for fifteen minutes with the call center in Eden Prairie only to be told you need to contact Chattanooga, and one which requires you to call back whichever person's been training you because although he's shown you almost everything that ever happens, that one-in-a-thousand situation just came up after he left the room which you have to get past before you can *do* anything other than stare at the screen, blink, breathe, and drink coffee. One person's better on the phones, another's better with arcane but vital details, one person organizes with incredible efficiency, another deals with insurance company bureaucracy with grace, and without everybody doing *their* thing it simply wouldn't happen, period. And you've got ten more registrations and referrals to enter before you even enter charges, which comes long before you file claims, which comes long before the provider, not to mention the billing service company for which you work, get paid. And yet we do get paid -- enough to pay our own respective rents and mortgages, even -- and it's a miracle.


If we do our jobs right, and if the miracle occurs, then providers get paid, we get paid, and the patients get treated. It's that simple. But human beings will be human beings and by the time we get the information that we need we've usually had to jump through several dozen hoops, of which the data entry component is actually one of the most relaxing if in general the least worthy of writing anything about. I don't know much about this business, but I know that both the guys I work with do it right enough that we've got providers lining up asking us to do their billing for them, even while we scramble every day to catch up and stay caught up, even while we seem at first encounter with this bureaucratic tangle to be absolutely nuts in everything we do.

What has any of this to do with my dilemma?

It truly doesn't matter what I say about the drunkard passed out in the parking lot with fire ants crawling on his face because the chances are extremely good he's not computer literate; and if he is, he will be disinclined to search online for the name of the establishment where the freindly doorman woke him up from his stupor to call his ambulance to come and get him. If he smells of rotting flesh, it makes no matter whatsoever if I say so, since he'll never see the words in print, never be hurt by them, and absolutely never casually say the following day that he liked what I wrote but did think he smelled more of rotting cheese.

Whereas since now the people I work with each day not only use computers but do actually read in here from time to time, I'm terrified of writing anything besides "fine people", and they are. I might describe someone's offhanded comment as "piquant" when in point of fact it was merely "pointed", and thus misrepresent their true intents. At very least I shall have to excercise a level of diplomacy somewhat more subtil than that brought to bear in keeping Foxes safe.

I absolutely won't stop writing, and I really, really like this job.

But circumstances dictate that where work's concerned, I fictionalize. Names absolutely can't be shared -- one person I work closely with is a "program person" as borne witness by his comments here and there, while patient confidentiality is protected by law. The business I work for may be held in esteem in the field, but you'll never know its real name from me. Details will have to shift, the Jaquar will become a BMW, the seven shades of rose will make appearances as the seven shades of peach from time to time -- identifying details *will* be regularly changed before they find their way in here, and I will have to keep it all together, somehow or another. Perhaps I will grow confident enough to make up situations all my own and blend them in to basely masked reality. I do not know. I can not say. And if and when it happens, if I do it right, neither will you.

So finally by force of circumstance I'm working my way into writing fiction. Please pardon me if I'm sloppy or unartfully mix fact and fiction. Just know that every word I write is absolutely true, while every single sentence is a blatant falsehood, too.

After all, this is only a journal -- practice writing.