Archive for April, 2006

Three posting days missed. (I did update The Jotted Line earlier, though, so, that’s not too bad.) I really was sick for two days. No excuse for the third except I was busy catching up on all the blogs I haven’t read in months. I tell you right now, if they gave a Pullitzer Prize for Weblogs, James Lileks would run away with the prize, hands down. (Maybe one year he could split the prize with Dooce or Blurbomat.)

This won’t happen often. I’m getting used to this stuff and I feel lousy when I don’t post. (I’ve actually got some old stuff written up that I’ve been meaning to post, but I just haven’t had the desire to. Not the real, down-deep, burning desire, anyway.

Also, In Memory, is still not up yet. I wrote the other day for a couple of hours and wound up with a huge biography that no one in their right mind would post on the internet. I’ve got to run it through a strainer and take out at least some of the really bad stuff and put back some stuff I left out. It was cathartic, but maybe too much so.

For instance, I left out the part where my drunken father accidentally chased my drunken mother through a sliding glass door on the weekend of the 4th of July the year I was 6. She almost died before they could get her to the hospital. They also couldn’t get her surgeon to the hospital because he’d been — doing what most people do on 4th of July weekend — drinking. So somebody, Heaven knows who, sewed her up — you know, so that she wouldn’t bleed to death. Dr. Surgeon of the year showed up next day to put long pieces of wire in her arm. Needless to say she was left horribly scarred and with an arm that was only in partially working order. Why they didn’t sue, I’ll never know? That incident was to prove to be pivotal in my life, in more ways than one.

 

O. K.. Enough of that. I’ll save the sob stories for ’In My Memory’ whenever it finally gets up. Here is where we say what we think about the stuff that is now. Stuff like: I don’t particularly enjoy having G. W. as a head of state; man, it’s been raining for two days now, when’s it gonna stop; I can only stand about 40% of SpongeBob SquarePants shows (guess what percent they’ve been showing every day this week); I really need to get busy finishing my poetry book instead of catching up on reading everybody else’s blogs that I haven’t read in months. You know stuff like that.

I hope ya’ll are still reading and waiting for better stuff, ’cause it’s coming, believe me. It might not be wonderful, but it’ll be something new and entertaining. O.K.. I have to go now, I have a two year old tugging at my sleeve and she has a marker in her hand. That can only mean one of two things: 1) she wants me to draw with her or 2) she’s already been drawing and the livingroom is now a masterpiece. Can you guess which one I’m hoping it is? 

 

Posted by teddyt on April 21, 2006 at 7:31 PM under Uncategorized.
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Just a short couple of lines to tell you all that I just did something I’ve never done in my life. I wrote a fan letter (actually fan e-mail). Wrote it to James Lileks and I have the horrible fear that it makes me sound like an idiot. I should probably not have done it, but I got the thought and thoughts are terrible things when they rattle around in your head for a couple of days. So . . . I wrote. I hit send. This is probably a disaster. I’ll try not to think about it. I’ll be fine. Maybe. Or not. (Meep)

Posted by teddyt on April 18, 2006 at 6:24 PM under Uncategorized.
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Oh, My, Gosh! It turns out the hits are real. There are several hundred people a day looking at this page. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I link to some pretty great people and well, with all the technology some of that linkage comes back to me. ( Have I mentioned yet how much I appreciate technology? No. Well. . .Technology rocks! )

Small problem. I figured out that something was actually wrong with the comment thing. I think/hope it’s fixed now. So. . . comment away. ( I’m pretty sure I’m ‘controversial’ enough. Somebody ought to want to at least tell me what a ‘jerk’ I am.) Otherwise, if you’re just looking, I appreciate that very much and I hope you enjoy this place. ( I hate the word ‘lurking’. I ‘look’ at other peoples blogs alot without commenting. ‘Lurking’ makes it sound like you’re stalking somebody. No. I don’t like that word. )

Please don’t comment about my grammar or punctuation ( unless you do it with humor. ) I’ve said before, ‘I’m no English teacher.’ I don’t write to be technically perfect. I write to get ideas out. Ideas don’t give a dang about grammar or elipses. Ideas come, I write them down (a. k. a. type them,) they’re out, they leave me alone and let me get some sleep. Language changes completely about every fifty or so years, anyway. Most likely, in the near future punctuation and grammar will be subjective ( I think that’s the word) anyway. I mean that you’ll be able to use it or not and it won’t matter. I mean, information is the thing. To me, it’s always been the thing. It shouldn’t matter how it comes as long as it’s real information. I’ve always thought it shouldn’t matter how someone is exposed to, say, Shakespeare, as long as they get the exposure. Television is a wonderful medium and if SpongeBob SquarePants could teach my kid Hamlet or All’s Well That End’s Well, that would be peachy with me. Later, if she has the desire to see the text in the original English she can go to a library, or a museum (or to the web page) and see it. Maybe she’ll even take a trip to England and see the places where it was all written. But first you have to get the idea into her. Interest her. Get her the information. (Even without punctuation.)

That paragraph was way too long and I admit it. I get ‘long thoughts’. I think that’s one reason I’ve never completed a novel. If I started one it would wind up being 7000 pages long. (I’ve got three story ideas that basically cover a lot of time. I’ve thought of turning them into epic serial books but then I’d just be writing forty 500 page books and that would be just as bad. Who wants to wade through all that to get to a completion that might not even be all that great? Ehem Mr. Ehem Steven Ehem King.) That’s why I’m working on my poetry right now. But poetry is slow going. It’s a thing that demands a muse, and I’ve recently lost mine. ( If curiosity kills the cat the disappointment and disillusionment often kill the muse. ) I’m searching for another, if anyone knows of one leave a comment or an e-mail and let me know.

I must go now and start a new section of my site. It’ll be called “In Memory” and will be about my life and all the stuff that has happened that I can remember and some that I can’t. Amazingly, enough has happened in my life that I can write something like that. (I’ll comment about the bad stuff as a warning and the good stuff as a reminder of how things can be and should be.)

O. K. that was the last bracket for this post. I promise. I’ll be back later today with some thoughts about the news. But for now, goodbye.

Posted by teddyt on April 18, 2006 at 5:31 PM under Uncategorized.
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Something is going on with this site and I don’t know what it is. I keep getting all these hits and . . . well. . .oh, I guess it’ll straighten itself out soon. It will or I’ll chuck the whole thing. Anyway, let me see if I can’t get anything new up here before the SpongeBob tape ends.

I survived my mother’s weekend holiday visit, barely. (She left early this morning, before anybody else was up and didn’t lock the door behind her. Nice of her to remember to close it at least.) Mom left just in time for Auntie Flo(rence) to show up for the week. (Such is my life. One pain follows another.)

The kid had fun yesterday, until . . . Nevermind, covered that already in The Jotted Line. (Its a new link on the right.) What matters is that she had fun most of the day. Ate three small boxes of pink Peeps (with my help) and took two bites out of every piece of chocolate she got. (Oh, my there was a lot of chocolate.) My kid is warped, she likes marshmallows better than chocolate! Noooo! (She even named her new yellow bunny Marmar — that’s what she calls marshmallows.) There was some chocolate that she really loved, unfortunately she only loved it for its wrapping. Spongebob Squarepants chocolates. Now, there’s a marketing idea that makes me weep. But the kid loves it and that’s all that counts.

The new week is off to a bang up start. Got a new Jotted Line up over at the site, updated the blog (if I can hit Publish. Hahaha.) I’m pretty proud of myself. Got some web reading done. ( Actually just catching up on James Lileks site. I still have to catch up on my Slate reading and . . . well, I hate to admit it but I haven’t read Dooce in weeks. Even getting behind on X-entertainment, but not too far. ) If the car can be fixed without it costing an arm and a leg I’m going to buy some new software (for about $40) and start a pod cast. Something weird with a little news of the day and a little public domain drama. Maybe a time warp thing. A different year every broadcast. Something like that anyway, with maybe a little poetry and speculative fiction of my own thrown in. It’ll be rough. It’ll be interesting. It may be horribly bad. But who knows? It’ll be up around the second or third of next month if all goes well.

Well, I’m running out of stuff to say. It’s just about dinner time around here anyway. Got to feed the kids, the little one and the big one. (The big one, L , would starve to death if I didn’t make him eat every once and a while. I’ve never seen anybody survive on coffee and non-dairy creamer.) The baby survives pretty well on dry cereal ( she still won’t eat it with milk — something about getting all sticky — she hates getting sticky ) and seven grain bread with cheese and sandwich meat. She doesn’t eat it as a sandwich. She just eats it one part at a time: a piece of bread; a piece of cheese; a piece of meat. Kids are weird. Some grape juice (the only kind she’ll drink) and a little sugarfree/caffeine free soda and she’s done until bedtime. (Maybe a little fruit thrown in. But she’ll only eat grapes and strawberries.) She gets milk and her teeth brushed at bedtime. (Whenever that happens to be. Sometimes early sometimes late.)

O. K. too many brackets again and I didn’t even start out to write this much stuff. I’ve got to go. I’ll update again tomorrow if anybody cares. (I might even do more tonight, if I can’t sleep.)

 

Posted by teddyt on April 18, 2006 at 12:43 AM under Uncategorized.
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Good morning and Happy Opposite of Christmas to you. I hope you’re all ready to celebrate this perfectly wonderful, beautiful spring day by hiding eggs and eating cupcakes with pastel colored coconut on top. We here at Odd Still Life sure hope the Opposite of Christmas Bunny brought you and yours lots of goodies. We hope you’re not to upset by some of the images that go with this sweet little holiday. Violent images of blood and human sacrifice and . . . well some things, like the horrible instrument of torture associated with this holiday and the few days prior to it, are just too terrible to describe here. I’m sure you understand. This is a family-type blog, after all.

Now, I say all that to say this, I respect and honor everyone in the universe’s right to believe in anything they want and to worship anyway they want and to live however they want. I, myself, was raised in a household that was split right down the middle between Methodists who only went to church on special occasions and Baptists who only went to church on special occasions. I myself turned out to be a . . . well . . . I’m not. I do not subscribe to any religious ideal. (Although, Judaism is my favorite religion, purely from an historical viewpoint.) I’ve basically been of this mind, what’s called a “free” one since I was 10. One day I was sitting in the home of my maternal grandparents, where I was currently living with my divorced mother, when we got a phone call telling her that one of my younger cousins had been “saved”. (Did I mention he was younger than me? Probably about seven or eight years old.) My aunt (or another member of our family) had called to tell us the good news and to tell the story of how it had happened. The young boy had asked a very simple question about the Bible. His mother had jumped up and called the local minister who immediately rushed over to pray and shout over him. (I had known this kid all my life at that point. He wasn’t the bravest kid. Heck, that summer I had scared him pretty badly by telling him I was a witch and that I was picking field grasses and plants to make magical potions with. I had been playing around. I was just a kid. It was fun and games.) I lay in bed half that night and thought about how frightened that kid must’ve been. (Heck the preacher at my paternal grandmother’s church was a Charismatic Baptist who yelled his entire sermons. He scared me terribly, at a time when hardly anything could.) Then I began to think about it myself. Should I have my mom call our nearby Methodist preacher and have him pray over me? Or maybe . . . well, my exact thoughts were very spiritual and very personal and they kept me out of church for the next seven years.

Until, that is, I visited a church where I fell instantly in- “crush” with the gorgeous, enigmatic, young preacher. A couple of months later I was “saved” and baptised in that church. A month later I had a very important spiritual question to ask the preacher. He couldn’t answer the question and gave a very vague response. I never went back. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve been inside an actual church since then. (A few makeshift ones because of my co-dependency and my desperate desire to rid myself of it, but not any “pew and steeple” ones.) I almost went into the Conservative Synagogue in Bakersfield, California (the one right across from the new library) but I chickened out at the last minute. I was dealing with some new problems at the time and I didn’t want to . . .well. . . I didn’t want to seem desperate for the wrong reasons.

O. K. so, I’m not a religious person. I believe you should be decent to everyone just because why be a rude, indecent person. There are too many of that type around already. I believe you shouldn’t steal (unless it’s life or death) because you’ll go to jail and our court and jail system is overloaded already. I think you should only beat someone up or kill them in self-defence.  I think you should help people who really need it (not the junkie on the corner who can’t be helped) because, heck, you might need help someday and why not set an example. I don’t always follow these rules because I’m a human being and I make mistakes, sometimes bad ones. I do try. I hope most people try. I believe that’s all that’s necessary to have a good life. Try and be decent and fairly good.

I do not however deny anyone else the right to their beliefs. As long as those beliefs do not infringe upon my right to believe whatever I want to, including nothing at all. I also don’t think its right for people to be able to tell other people that they are going to a bad place when they die, just because they don’t believe in some exact formula for getting to go to the good place. I’m not sure if either Heaven or Hell exist (although I wouldn’t mind believing that certain individuals might be roasting for a good long while ). I prefer the belief that, if there is life after this one, we are allowed to learn from our mistakes and go on to a place where we’re allowed to make more mistakes and learn from them until we finally wind up at the end, perfectly perfect with no mistakes or errors and realizing that it was all just one big party and all the mistakes didn’t even make any difference.  

I also don’t like having a beautiful spring weekend disturbed by the bad connotations that a cross or a sheep bring to my adult mind. To my kid the lamb is just a little animal that eats the Easter grass, so she can have her little ‘Lambkins’ sticker on her egg. Flowers and ducks and rabbits are fine, too. No crosses though, please. I never want to have to explain the symbolism of that to my 3-4-5-6-7-8 or 9 year old daughter. When she’s ten, if she’s curious, she can ask me and I can answer her without the aid of the local preacher. (She can go speak to a preacher also, when she’s ten or older. But she has to talk to me first.)

O. K., I’ve done enough of my own preaching for the night. Happy Easter, to those who believe that sort of thing is possible. For myself and my family it’s just a beautiful spring day (unless it comes a storm)with painted eggs and Spongebob Squarepants chocolates and big baskets that we can wear on our heads when we’re through.

Posted by teddyt on April 16, 2006 at 8:17 AM under Uncategorized.
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O. K. I’m late with this post. I know. I know. I had every intention of posting earlier, then I had every intention of never posting again. (A long story.) I’ve had a very trying week. I have a new section on the site, though. It’s a whenever I feel like it kind of think called The Jotted Line. (If you’re reading this before 6:00 p.m. it might not be up yet. I haven’t got to the actual ‘uploading’ yet.) It was supposed to replace this blog and it might still if some of the hundreds of folks who visited me the last couple of days don’t start leaving comments. I was shocked to see the traffic. I have no idea how y’all got here or why, but thanks and please come again. (There will be lots of links and the companion site is shaping up nicely. I’m even setting up a few downloads, but that’s a surprise for later.)

Now. I will stop with the brackets and continue with new news. What news? You well may ask. Well. . . let’s see. There’s the couple in Missouri who have the honor of being (probably) the first to think of pretending to have six babies at once. They will also have the honor of going to jail where, at least the husband will have the honor of being someone’s baby — if you get my drift. Then there’s happy-go-lucky old Iran. Ahh! It just doesn’t seem like springtime if someone isn’t threatening to destroy Israel. (Many have tried and failed and tried again. I’m not a religious person but it might be that Israel has some pretty big time protection and I’m not talking about the kind you might get from Sicily. I mean check their calendar. Its 5766 already. That’s almost six thousand years of survival. You’d think their enemies would get the hint and give up.)[Wait! Isn't Sicily a country? Why didn't somebody, besides me, catch that? Before almost three years had passed. Arggh!]

I almost didn’t write the last several sentences. Trying to be totally ‘politically correct’ is Hell. (Trying not to use brackets is even harder.) I mean I’m a polite person, but things are what they are and Italy [ and any other country, such as Sicily!] isn’t only full of saints and angels. Plus I’m sure there are a lot of fundamentalist somethings out there who . . . well, let me stop here before I ‘bracket’ again and bury myself even deeper in the old ‘p. c.’ hole.

The headline about George W. is how he’s showing Rumsfeld his ‘full support’ — until the Wednesday after next when Rumsfeld resigns and G. W. screams from the rafters how he knew it all along and was just biding his time waiting for the other shoe to fall or some such non-sense that no one understands, much less believes. As for me I can’t wait. Rumsfeld aggravates me. I’ve never admired the man or trusted him for a second. (Can you say ‘shadow government’? I knew that you could. How about ‘black ops’ or ‘Big Brother’? Yikes. If Rummy was my brother I’d invent a time machine, go back in time and shoot my father in the . . . well . . . you know. . .)

Anyway, that’s the news for the day. My ‘dearest mother’ is here for the weekend and she’s driving me nuts (as usual) so I might not get back to this for a few days. So, until later, good Passover, happy Easter and all that jazz.

Posted by teddyt on April 15, 2006 at 7:04 AM under Uncategorized.
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