Signifying nothing

I was listening to Jackson Browne's "Your Bright Baby Blues" and  I swear I heard one of the lines in the first verse was "Run as fast as you can rhyme."  I played it back immediately because couplings of words like that don't come along that often.  The line turns out to be more in line with the story the song is telling of the isolated observer watching people self-assuredly going places while the lonely singer-songwriter is pining either lost love, lost direction, or both: Everybody's going somewhere Riding just as fast as they can ride I guess they've got a lot to do Before they can rest assured Their lives are justified Pray to God for me baby He can let me slide  As it is, the song is an interesting enough exploration of purpose and direction in one's life, but I am still intrigued by the misheard lyric: running as fast as you can rhyme.  It is the sense/nonsense notion that appeals to me in the line.   The juxtaposition of two dispe...

Upper Provo River Valley, Uinta Mountains, Utah This has been a peaceful, mind-clearing vacation so far.  I pre-determined (aside from a rather rigorous hiking trip to the Uintas) that I was going to completely relax as much as possible and, more importantly, do not much of anything that really isn't just about basic living or taking care of emergencies--and even those I've managed to calm my way through.  I came upon the idea of just relaxing and letting my life flow along a river while hiking along a river in the previously-mentioned Uintas.  It was a pretty freeing thought to just let myself wander down that river a bit, sloshing through shallow and deep mountain water, not worrying, but following the river and a friend who has the good sense to know when to break the easy trail and head into the dark forest for no reason. That was week one of the vacation, and it was freeing and opening and, without being incredibly maudlin:  life sustaining. This week ...

It is amazing how much lower you can set your thermostat and still be comfortable when the temperature outside is hovering around zero Fahrenheit. The accumulation of pointless scraps of paper seems to be the human condition. Pointless scraps of paper may have information that could lead to your economic demise, so you should shred them. Shredders have built-in-obsolescence. Finding a new place to live has much more to do with gut feeling than with the intellect. When your gut tells you that a new place to live is right, produce your checkbook instantly. Ignore that other place you saw that is for less money and has potential, but your gut tells you is wrong, even though, intellectually, it is probably the better deal. Play close attention to potential neighbors who cause you to worry. Enjoy the future. Worry about the present. Forget about the past. Never rent from an octogenarian who lets her 50-something son take a crap in your potential bathroom while you are looking at the house. ...

Stockton Originally uploaded by Theorris Well it is that time of year again: the start of basketball season. Utah played Denver and waxed the floor with them--108 to 87 last night. Preseason, of course means nothing, but it is good to see the Jazz off to this kind of start. It is going to take a great deal of work, of course, for the Jazz to get back to the height of the Stockton/Malone era. Perhaps the statues out front of the Meltdown Center will finally work some magic after years of some pretty mundane play. With Collins gone, I'm not sure I'm going to have an Ostertag to bitch about this year, other than aiming that at the poor besotted Boozer. In a weird, pre-season bit of coincidence, former Running Ute Pace Manion, who is currently a rather stiff Utah Jazz commentator along with the non-stiff Thurl Bailey, was in the Apple Genius Bar line in front of me yesterday. I was just working out that it was him when the Genius approached and said "Pace? What's your p...

Wow, I'd nearly forgotten that I made this: At the time I made it, I was amused by the frustration that people exhibit over simple things. I guess I saw the wailing woman as a quaint expression of an inability to reconcile the complexity of the world with her own existence. That pretty much summarizes how I feel now about certain aspects of my work life, that I refrain (on purpose) from connecting to here. Still, the fun an games are sometimes forced to the economic reality of one's working life. I've purposefully refused to reconcile those myself, despite the fact that most of my readers are fellow workmates. Can one have a work life and a life life? Tell me Internet's tube. Tell me. Anyway, this piece pretty much sums up how I'm feeling about things these days, in an ironic way. It is not about general bitchiness, but how arbitrary decisions come about. Flood. Change. Shift. What the hell is the matter with people nowadays? Get ready for a shitstorm, my c...

So I hadn't even heard of the phenomenon that is Highschool Musical until Counterintuitive mentioned it in passing a few months ago. I still have no idea what this is all about, but I am well-aware that it is some TV-fanstical thingamagoo. Now the relevance of this is that, apparently, they have been filming scenes of its sequel ( Highschool Musical 2 ?) a street away from my house. So far over the last 3 nights, I've noted 2,417 white vans carrying cast and crew roving by my house and various prop school buses. As I write boom lights loom high above the trees to the south. The light streaks white across the wood of my floor through the living room French doors. I confuse it with the full moon. The cat lolls in its bright reality. This production is definitely much busier, but not as impressive as the Danny Glover movie that took place right next to my house up in the Avenues of SLC. (I'm too lazy and busy to look up the link to that extravaganza right now.) So wh...

Five simple candles, Gaudy with sanctimony, Punish me with fear.

Get on this, readers: Earlier this month, the Utah Radiation Control Board was the first state agency to take a stand against EnergySolutions’ plan to import 20,000 tons of nuclear waste from Italy. Now you can make your voice heard, too. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is taking public comments starting today on EnergySolutions’ request to import nuclear waste from Italy’s defunct reactors. Help us send a message to the NRC that importing another country’s nuclear waste sets a bad precedent for Utah and the U.S. to become the world’s nuclear waste dump and endangers our health, safety, and security. You can email your comments through our web-form here: http://www.healutah.org/energysolutions/ItalianWasteComments You can also mail your comments to: Office of the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, DC 20555 Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications The federal government has been at Utah’s door in the recent past, asking for our approval to let nuclear was...

Hightouchmegastore writes: 1. Is there someone who's planning to take my Christmas tree down for me, or help me decide what to do about the poinsettias, or who plans to enfold my shiny little Christmas objets in tissue paper? Because I could use some help with that. 2. When will there be a movie (preferably a comedy) that I can watch without effort and still feel happy at the end of it? 3 . Is Bruiser lonely? He seems lonely. 4. Am I missing something, or have I eaten at all the restaurants in SLC and now they seem stale and unimaginative? 5. Is the world more full of incompetent people than it was just a couple of weeks ago? Or is it that all the systems they have for doing practically everything have taken a turn and become really, really bad? 6. Why is it just pasta polenta rice polenta pasta around here? 7. Why did the people at Wild Oats let me leave without the butter, the cheese, and the mushrooms that I paid for? 8. Is it just me? Because it seems like maybe it's just m...

People in New York are funny. They are actually friendly when you engage them in conversation about some relevant topic or when you are the subject of their service, but overall without the pretense of a focussed topic they ignore you. Such is life in a megalopolis, I suppose. For example, when you pass some one in the street here, the usual interaction is to say nothing. You huddle up and scurry on your way. This suits me well. I generally dislike such trifling acknowledgments of our existence, and, I assume like most New Yorkers, just want to get about my business. I feel compelled, however, to change my ways in the city that suits me so well (being the rude, un-noticing son of bitch I can be), and tomorrow I shall greet every person on my path in a friendly manner. Perhaps this is noticing the difference between where I live and here. No. No. No. It is not that Salt Lake is the bastion of friendliness--in fact it is not. It is the fact that here you have the Salt Lake pro...

Well I'm back from San Francisco in what qualifies as a whirlwind trip. I won't bore you with the detail of my work there, as I will save that for the academic blog, perhaps, so I will excite you with the details of how I seem to have lost all ability to read contextual clues from everyday situations. In other words: I was the absent-minded professor this weekend. This morning I walked into the Olympic Diner across from my hotel and stood at the threshold like I assumed a good patron should and waited to be seated. The waitress, no doubt the grand daughter of the Greek-born cook manning the grill, looked at me quizicaly several times. She came towards me and said something which I didn't quite make out (perhaps my hearing is going) and then walked back towards the counter. I followed her, being a well-trained patron. She turned on me then and motioned wildly to the rest of the diner. I then realized this was a sit-anywhere-you-like establishment. "Should I sit w...

Holy fuck, I missed it. On August 31, 2007, I officially outlived Elvis. "On a cold and gray Chicago morn, a baby's born, and his momma cries."

Punk ass kids , originally uploaded by Theorris . I posted this photo over on flickr because I was quite amused by the antics, but after talking to my friend Tif and then reading what Dr. Write has to say about commonplace violence, was quite shamed by my actions: The bored, little, teenage wannabe baller punks* up the street have taken to throwing apples at cars. My house is across the street from their vantage point and, consequently, their spent ammo ends up in my yard. I shouted at them last night with a classic Hank Hill line: "Are you going to stop doing that, or am I going to have to come over there and kick your ass." Aside from a little back talk from them, they quickly dispersed, especially when I charged from the porch to the sidewalk. Great fun. It is not to hard to track down who the kids are, given that the neighbor up the street has an apple tree in his back yard next to their basketball hoop where these dipshits practice their mad ball skillz. It i...

Since I'm officially on vacation, I'm thinking of work--well some would probably not call it the writing I do as work, but they can go to hell. I like the idea of staying up late huddled in front of my computer fiddling around with words: the crickets outside singing the hours away. Anyone want to write a Renga with me? Kendrakoo? lisa b? Dr. Write? Middlebrow? Condiment? Anyone? ---------------- Listening to: The Rapture - Get Myself Into It via FoxyTunes

When I was ten I was instrumental in hospital triage and emergency care. You see one fine June day when school was out, I was dragged along by Mom to my grandmother's radiation treatment for breast cancer. Grandma was a downwinder and witnessed many of the open-air nuclear tests that happened in the 50's from her Cedar City vantage. Now, of course, her breast cancer could have been caused by many environmental and genetic variables, but given that none of her female ancestors suffered the malady--unlike my paternal grandmother who was also a Southern Utahn and died before said nuclear tests--it seems more-than-likely that there was a link to errant nuclear radiation causing her affliction, due to the fact that she was living in Southern Utah and breast feeding in the early 50's when the tests were being conducted. (I should note that my sister in the mid-70's visited the Panguitch cemetary at night to see the glowing headstones caused by radioactive fallout from t...