The Wrat Stuff

Fireflies

inkwrat — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:31:05 +0000

Fireflies, for Kathy & ken.

My internet’s down 2.6 percent of the time

inkwrat — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:35:09 +0000

The internet’s down at my house — happens a lot, thanks Mediacom! — so I’m blogging to Wordpad. Doesn’t feel the same.

And I’m only blogging because the internet’s down; if it weren’t I’d be playing chess. This will make perfect sense to you if you’re familiar with the various forms of internet chess; if you’re not it probably sounds like a non-sequitor, doesn’t it? But then if you’re reading this particular blog I guess you know all about internet chess. It’s difficult to stop writing for the sixth grade when you’ve spent a decade or two as a journalist.

Yeah, I guess I do still consider myself a journalist — that’s another thing it’s probably hard to stop doing once you start. I still do the random freelance job here and there, still read the “papers” every day (only now the print’s smaller, the graphics are better and they’re easier to fold). But back to chess.

I’d LOVE to play chess in my RL, but real people won’t play with me. Pathetic, huh? But the fact is I know only a handful of people who actually play the game, and among those only the few who can beat me with any frequency will still play with me. And since my friend Eddie died and my friend Ernie’s degenerative eye disease degenerated, that leaves the fat man.

The Fatty will play occassionally when he’s a)drunk enough but b)not too drunk and c)nobody will talk to him on the phone. I’d say he’s won maybe 30 percent of our games. What do you think, fatso? His buddies laugh at me but I believe my estimations are generally pretty close to the mark. And to be fair I will admit that he beats me at pool approximately 75 percent of the time.

He’s a good natural chess player and could be much better than me if he would only take a little instruction. I know a certain amount of chess theory and strategy and even a little history, and he knows how the pieces move and what the object of the game is. And he can beat me with some consistency … I think if we played more he’d average around 40 percent after a while, maybe 45, even in his current state of ignorance. And let me remind you that ignorance is a state that can be cured. Except when the patient is a mule.

So I have only rare opportunities for RL chess. And internet chess is a knight of a different color.

For one thing, if you play on the ‘net you’re going to wind up playing multiple games. I’m playing like 28 right now. And there may be as much as ten days between moves in some games, or as little as 24 hours. So when you come to the board, you have to stop and recall just who this is you’re playing, what the style has been, the dynamic of this particular game. You have to get your head back into it each time, and you may have ten boards waiting when you log on so you might have to do it ten different ways. That’s a lot of getting my head into anything.

Which is not to say I don’t love ‘net chess too. I do. It gives me the opportunity to play, which to me is a wonderful thing, like having a wise old besweatered neighbor who loves to play chess with me at his kitchen table … and also sometimes a little like having a creepy neighbor who’s doing nasty things to himself while spying on me from an upstairs window. There’s always a price.

Here’s where everybody always gets to play and nobody ever gets picked last:

http://www.chessworld.net

A haiku for Mr. Van Rompuy

inkwrat — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:30:44 +0000

I’m going to break with tradition — if two weeks can be said to make a tradition — and post this here on my main page rather than on the “Po & Poetry” page, so that if anyone is actually reading, they’ll be sure to see it. It came to me spontaneously as I read today’s news of a new president for the EU, and I’ve always thought spontaneous is best in poems … and sometimes in politics.

Sometimes you have to

take a few small steps backward

to make a great leap.

WTF .. Blog boy?

inkwrat — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:32:52 +0000

OK “Blog boy,” explain yourself. How did you get my mailing address? How did you even find this blog? And why send your missive through the US Mail, and not in email? I’m glad you enjoyed my post about the Vietnam era … I mean, if you did; you don’t actually say WHY you’re writing to me … but finding your letter in my mailbox this morning was a little spooky. My whole family agrees that it’s a little spooky, including my 120-lb Lab-mix, who’s absolutely vicious. I mean, we have to lock him in the basement whenever we have company, or he’d literally be ripping off arms and shit.

Seriously, if your intent was to freak me out, mission accomplished. If it wasn’t, I’d feel better if you explained yourself.

The Continuing Saga of the Overdue Water Bill

inkwrat — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:50:51 +0000

Stupid me, I sent the fatty to pay the water bill this morning. Disaster.

When we left our heroine, she was shamelessly playing the DID with the nice young man they sent to shut her water off (a fat man! a nice plump one!). And it worked, because lo & behold the mechanism was BROKEN, the nice young man was unable to shut off the water! Talk about your Deus ex machina!

But! The bitch from the water company sent another guy out! Because she did not believe the nice young man’s story of broken water shut-off mechanism! Most likely because it was almost surely at least partly contrived!

But. When the other guy got there, it turned out the thing was, indeed, broken, and so my water COULD NOT BE SHUT OFF!

You can imagine how this disappointed Renee (that’s the bitch). That cunt.

So yes our heroine, our ingenue, our sweet long-suffering DID, this morning she gives the bill money to a fat man with several drinking problems. And the fat man takes the bill money to the water company, but! It turns out youllhavetopaythereconnectfee even applies when nothing was ever unconnected! So the fat man, he hasn’t got enough money. So what do you think he did then?

Yes, you in the back, village idiot, do you know the answer? Of course you do. The fat man had beer. And not only the fat man! His buddies had beer too! Because the fat man had plenty of money.

Now, anyone who knows our poor heroine at all should be able to anticipate that her reaction to discovering this intelligence, discovering it as she did while hauling cases of Budweiser & Pepsi cans (our heroine drinks neither of these foul beverages) to the recycling center, was swift and violent.

OK, I wasn’t violent. Not precisely. But I obviously didn’t get enough venting done at Mickey’s garage. You know what that is, right, dyslexic alzheimer’s patient? That’s right, it’s where the fat man was drinking up the water bill money.

Life is way stranger than even the strangest fiction.

Aaaarrrgggh.

inkwrat — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:31:13 +0000

That’s the day I’m having, aaaaarrrrrgggggh.

Someone stole my recycling bin! How shitty is that? Now I have to pay $8 for another one, or stop recycling.

Of course I’m not going to stop recycling, and the $8 bucks is a lot cheaper than what I’d put in my gas tank … now, wait just one minute. The proverbial light just came on with an audible click!

Doesn’t my fat boyfriend spend 1o hours a day four days a week not a 1/4 mile from the recycling center? And doesn’t he really need to contribute a bit more to the domestic drudgery around here? These are rhetorical questions, fatso. So that’s solved.

But then!

I realized this morning that my water bill is overdue. Like, drastically so. So I call the water company to beg sweetly that they allow me to come in and pay it in the morning, (which, I know you find this difficult to believe, I have done a few times before) because now that it’s so late it actually has to be in cash, a commodity that’s generally scarce in my personal portfolio of financial instruments.

But this BITCH in the water company office tells me it’s too late, we already sent the trucks out.

But, I say, can’t you call them (I know perfectly well that she can)? I’ll come in first thing in the morning and pay it.

Well, she says, dripping snide, then you can bring another $21.40 for the reconnect fee when you do that.

But! I say. I’ve been paying this water bill at this location for more than 20 YEARS! You know I’m going to pay it.

Yesandyou’lljusthavetopaythereconnectfeetoo.

Aaaarrrgggh!

Coming home from the wars

inkwrat — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:33:40 +0000

When I was fourteen I found out about Vietnam. Oddly enough I’d not known much more than the word before then, even though I grew up during that “conflict.” But we were not allowed to watch television in those days; I remember my childhood television experience very clearly because it was so limited: we could watch Wild Kingdom on Sunday nights (but only in the ‘family room,’ conveniently located in the basement), and any sporting event my father was watching for as long as he could tolerate our presence in the room. During our summers in Burlington, we could watch Captain Ernie’s Cartoon Showboat for an hour or so on Saturday mornings, tennis matches in which the grown ups were interested, and, once every four years, the summer Olympics.

So I remember Marlin Perkins, Tom & Jerry, Evonne & Chrissy, Olga and Mark Spitz. I remember making up the cute little slogan “The Pac is Back!” when I was five or six, and being outraged that the television people stole it from me. I remember the tension in our house when the Badgers played Iowa, even though in those days neither team had beaten much but their breasts in ten years or more.

What I don’t remember is Vietnam, except, as I said, the word. And perhaps some vague and sinister elephant-in-the-parlor feeling: We know it’s there, but we don’t talk about it. Which to a child is just one more of those gaping holes in the world that open up randomly all around; we jumped over them like puddles.

But when I was fourteen I found out about it, and it made me really mad. I spent a lot of time being really mad when I was fourteen, so maybe Vietnam wasn’t strictly to blame. But what made me angriest about the whole of what I found out — accidental enlightenment, incidental fragments — was that We the People spit on the soldiers when they came home. We spit on them!

What I felt when I found that out (OK, OK, I’ll dispense with the italics, you get the idea) was what I still feel today when I think about it. Fury, and shame. Empathy, and pity.

My grandfathers on both sides served in the Great War; my uncle was in Okinawa during WWII. These were badges of pride to all my family, so far as I’ve ever known. I felt pride in them, seeing the pictures of young men in uniforms, the little crossed rifles underneath my grandfather’s picture. That’s what I knew about war and soldiers, until I — you know — found out about Vietnam.

It was music that drew me to it. I thought I was a hippie in 1978, and the music of the previous decade had some special significance, I thought, just for me. And that music was all about Vietnam: The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and Crosby et. al., and when at 16 I got the Woodstock 8 tracks (there were two) I thought, This is what they heard when we were spitting on them, this, and this …

And there’s my battle in a nutshell. I loved that music — still love that music — and the whole idea behind it, the idea which grew with that music from the folk music of the civil rights movement: that we could live in peace, could all be free, could overcome. And I hated every single American who could’ve managed to gather enough venom inside his or her ugly, ignorant head that it had to be spit out on the face of an American soldier.

In the 30-or-so years since then I’ve found out a lot more, deliberately and in as much totality as possible. And I’m still here in that same place, still fighting that battle, still in conflict.

I guess if I were President Obama I’d be considering a nice long talk with our Afghani & Iranian friends, a long talk that would take place in bean bag chairs while listening to Deja Vu and finding out if they’re just bragging about that hash. And then I might just want to see what I could do about turning Pakistan into a smoldering hole in the earth.

Probably a good thing I’m not Ms. President.

The only thing I know for sure, absolutely for sure, is that you’ll never see me spitting on an American soldier. I still believe they deserve our respect; I still feel proud. I feel sad and sorry and a little scared, too. But you won’t catch me spitting on a man or a woman who has stood in harm’s way for me — because that’s why they fight and kill and die, those soldiers, because the representative government of which I am a part odered them to do so, and if that government was wrong I have my part in that too, whether through ignorance or apathy.

I wish we could live in peace. Those hippies were mostly drop outs, you know. It was easier for them, because when you know anything about human history, it’s very hard to believe in the idea that mankind will ever put down his collective club.

Happy Veterans Day, brothers and sisters.

inkwrat — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:01:46 +0000

Thinking I’m going to try this blogging thing again, I decided to make a fresh start and ended up here at WordPress. It’s a little more complicated than other free blog sites I’ve used, but on the whole this is probably a good thing. At least for folks who know how to use all these gizmos and tools and options and things.

I’m not sure yet how to change my font, for instance, or if it can be changed. It seems I can write something in Word and paste it here, and possibly the Word formatting will carry over. I might try that, once I start to get a better feel for this vehicle. Inserting links and photos and the like looks to be pretty straightforward, which is a very good thing — I struggled like a crazy woman for hours trying to get pics to post on my LiveJournal blog at first, and still had problems later. Customizing the look of the page doesn’t seem to hard, either, but the options are a little limited … at least to me, now. I did manage to make my own photo header here, and the street and the house you see in that header are the street and the house where I grew up, at least the growing up I did in this town. I’ve always loved this place, though over the years the people who live in it have become less and less appealing to me.

It feels odd, writing here for absolutely no one, because absolutely no one knows I’m blogging here, yet. I guess I’m thinking I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing before I invite anyone to see it. On the other hand, knowing someone might read these things could motivate me to more than this drivel. But then again, it might not. Maybe it’s time to make that particular experiment.