LJ – Jingle All The Damn Way

From 02/11/2003


…A WINTER STORM WARNING IS IN EFFECT THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON…

This may become something of a treat for us, as if more snow on the ice we already have yields the feeling one would associate with the idea of “treat”. I don’t see any snow yet and I’m highly critical of our childlike weathercasters but we shall see if Kalamazoo is touched or more likely that Allegan is obliterated in a fog of dense blowing snow. I still maintain that Winter is the most romantic season, however I’ve noticed a distinct lack of monster pine trees, as everything around here is Oak and Maple and therefore skeletonized and totally dreary. If you listen very closely you can make out the happy tunes of “White Christmas” being played over and over again to an audience that is howling in agony. ‘Tis the season. 🙂

LJ – Vet Visit

From 02/11/2003


Owien and I are back from the Vet, all told each cat was $90 and they got their Feline Distemper, Leukemia and a Rabies Vaccine shots. The Vet said nothing new, Diva has some dental issues but they aren’t huge and maybe switching to Iams or Purina One would be a better choice than 9 Lives, we’ll see how much vomit we have to clean up when we switch – kitties have such tender tummies. Both are healthy as horses, Owien (the BIG male) may develop a weight problem just like his daddy Andy – of course Owien got his weight problem by being a lazy pig, his owner got his by being a… uh… er… nevermind :). I think the Vet is well meaning but I beg to differ, Owien is 12 pounds of muscular feline masculinity, this is plainly evident when he comes down the stairs, -thumpa thumpa thumpa-. The minute Diva saw the cat carrier with Owien in it, she promptly made for “under the bed” and Owien promptly made for “Damn I’m a DIRTY BOY, must clean, leave me alone” yeah, still cleaning – now he’s biting his claws… just like me. 🙂

I first considered that we owned the cats, but when you get right down to it who owns who? Scott and I work to make all the money while they get to lay about day in and day out, we buy them food and prepare it for them, we see to their health and pet them making them happy… it was only then while talking it over with Scott did I realize that indeed, the cats own us, or rather we are willing slaves. This is made more insidious because the cats purring lowers blood pressure and lengthens our lives – JUST SO THAT WE MAY CONTINUE TO SERVE THEM, HAND AND FOOT. I love my cats. 🙂

Synchronicity

Sometimes you can’t explain how things unfold. Previous generations labeled things like this kismet, or fate. A really tremendously great word for what I just dealt with could be called synchronicity.

A few days ago while I was marveling at my silly dress-up vest with the finished pockets sewn closed, I was standing under an old-time fixture that I had installed all on my own. Frankly it was going to turn out to be a nod to the past any way it unfolded. It was either going to be the fixture we eventually chose or a “in the spirit of” Tiffany-style lamp. So either way we were going to install a fixture that prized the past. We noticed the “Edison Style” bulbs immediately and almost in the vein of “love at first sight” these fixtures trumped the Tiffany-style stained glass ones almost instantly. It helped of course that the “Edison Style” was $45 while the “Tiffany Style” was $90. We could afford a small bit of throwback style for half the price.

So while I was looking at myself, all trimmed and shaved (for what it’s worth) in a dress vest, under an “Edison Style” bulb it had to be synchronicity for what transpired tonight. For the past few days I’ve been dwelling, at least mentally, in a space that appreciates how excellent really old designs are and sometimes these designs are actually pinnacle moments. They are wonders, marvels, true magnificence that once expressed can’t really be improved upon. It takes a real romantic to even entertain that an old thing retains value. In some ways I sense that old things not only retain their value but augment their value because they last, or touch something deep inside that means something very important to you.

So I stood there, in the civil twilight of pre-dawn right before work. Standing under an Edison-style bulb and appreciating my reflection in the hall mirror and being filled with a feeling that something quite like this could have been how my predecessors felt in the 1800’s when all this technology was brand new. Nobody then marveled at the warm yellow glow from an Edison bulb as a matter of romance, they saw it as an improvement to paraffin, naphtha, or beeswax candles. So for some strange reason I thought of someone I never met, ever in my life but only know through Ancestry.com. That would be my second great grandfather Fernando Race. The father of my maternal grandfather, Allan (I think). So oddly enough I had technically summoned the shade of my second great grandfather and it was something very deep and meaningful.

I never EVER knew any of these people. The only memory I have of my maternal grandfather is little blazes of bright memory. Me sitting on his lap while his model trains ran around his little train village in the basement of my grandparents home in Ithaca. It’s true that scent can bring you back, and it does for me. Funny enough if I catch WD-40, an industrial cleaner and lubricant, and it’s scent, accessing these memories of my grandfather all becomes very plain and very simple and they kind of burst forth right into my mind. Scents carry memory, alas, nostalgia. So getting just a scent of WD-40 puts me right back there. So thinking about the past also helps put me “back there” and frankly I find it highly entertaining that I find myself preferentially dwelling in the past where things I take for granted would mostly likely be interpreted as high sorcery.

It wasn’t until a few days after my “in the past” reverie that I called my mother out of the blue. No reason for it other than I love her and miss her terribly and the missing feeling goes away a little bit when I talk to her on the phone. So I called her on my way home from the gym. People at work who find me … unique… (a great word, I love it) always ask to visit with my mother to see if that can explain why I am the way I am. Why I’m emotional and ebullient and always say whats on my mind. I laugh at my coworkers who puzzle over my behavior at work. If they knew my parents, they’d understand I wasn’t crazy but that I was as they see me, which is beloved (and special, huge heaps of special) 🙂

Then my mother laid two big whammies on me. The first took my breath away. I don’t really want to delve deeply into it for it’s subject matter, at least not now, but while dashing down I-94 going somewhere between sixty and seventy miles per hour she laid a HUMONGOUS whammy on me. It was a challenge to retain my composure and not drive off the highway into a ditch. The news she shared created a new emotion. It was a complicated knotwork of surprise, shock, and a heavy dose of what would be if you mixed “Eureka”, “Synchronicity”, and patent incredulity. Baked at 350 for one hour and seasoned with a kind of half-joking expectation, almost a kind of odd deja-vu sensation.

So I dwell here, thinking about things and people in my life. It’s important not to say too much lest I give it all away that I know, but I’ve been waiting many years for this to happen and this has awakened the voice of my power animal, my totem if you will. He talks to me in my own voice, and comes from deep within, my intuition and I’ve learned to respect that part of me, or him, or both. I will dwell where I am, quiet and waiting. That’s what I think I should do and that’s what my totem is telling me outright to do.

Anyways, beyond the unavoidable teasing which I apologize for of the previous section, it wasn’t the end of the whammies my mother laid out on me tonight. She shared with me some things which I’d rather not share here, but bear directly on my random mental roulette ball landing on the Races and Tuttles. I could have chosen anyone from my past, and thanks to Ancestry.com and my Uncle John and my Mother I don’t really have to wonder much anymore, that who I thought of first would come, in a way, forward through time and tap me on the shoulder and in a very roundabout way give me a wholly unexpected hug from the 19th century all through the agency of nobody else but my very own mother. I hate to be cryptic about this, but I feel I have to be circumspect. Suffice it to say, in a very strange and surreal way I feel like this part of my life was meant to play out this way, and that Fernando Race, his son, or his grandson – my grandfather dwelled closeby me that day when I was caught in my reverie of the past.

It wasn’t until I talked with my mother tonight that so many tumblers all clicked into place. I don’t know exactly how much she appreciates what has happened, but for me, at the focus of this storm of synchronicity, with so much all colliding all at once as if it fit together so perfectly that it lacked seams, that these two things will likely come to pass if I do not meddle in my fate. Time and time again I have been ringside as I have attempted to meddle in my fate and been handed my hat for my troubles. This time I won’t. It’s very Zen, but in a way, to move forward I have to remain perfectly still.

I can say that the synchronicity thrills me. So if anyone out there puts two and two and the square root of minus two together and expects that answer, then we should indeed talk. Life is happy there, or at least, it could be.

Vizzini says "Inconceivable!"

Stafford Vest

Months ago, before I got serious about losing weight Western had “Operation Historic Moment” when we announced that we had received a record gift for our new medical school. As part of this we had a public unveiling of the gift and as such I had to dress up more than I have in a very long time.

For me to be in a suit and tie would require someone to die, barring death, perhaps a wedding of blood kin would be enough as well. So I had to dress up and it struck me that I could go half-way and pull off a black dress vest and a very nice button-down shirt with black slacks. It’s a look that even XXL men like me can pull off and not look like we’re wearing a tent. So off I went, with my heft and found at the venerable JC Penney’s this particular vest pictured above. It’s a black dress vest from Stafford. Paired with a nice shirt it wowed all my coworkers who never thought they’d see me in a nice shirt, a tie, or >GASP< all clean and dressed up nicely.

After the event, I put the vest in my closet and pretty much forgot about it. Then I decided to lose all this weight and over the intervening months I was pawing through my closet and ran across it again. I put it on and laughed. What was tight was now very roomy; I had lost enough weight where I could start wearing fine clothes like this and not feel like a blue whale being strained through linen. So I’ve been dragging it out into rotation every once in a while and I quite enjoy the entire style of it.

This morning it came to a head while I was standing in my hallway under my old-time Edison-light hall fixture:

Edison Light

That I was occupying the same space and time as my 2nd-great-grandfather Fernando Race. Or at least I imagine that bulbs like these, the ones that are very old and cast a wonderfully warm yellow light on everything were the ones that might have lit him from above as well. So I stood there for a few moments taking in the old light style, the vest, which is definitely a retro fashion and chuckled to myself that I am standing at a collision between super-cool futuretech and equally cool bygone style.

So today while eating my lunch I noticed little seams where two small pockets appear to be, but they are sewn closed. I laughed at the stupidity of putting dressing that leads one to think there are pockets there on a flat sheet of fabric. I ran my index finger along the seam and discovered that a part of the stitching that ran along the fake pocket was coming unravelled. It was enough space for me to explore using my index finger and I discovered that it isn’t a faux pocket at all, but a true pocket – finished and everything! So I snipped away the remaining seams on both sides and now I have a better vest than when I initially bought it. Now it has two functional, and whats more, finished pockets!

Which then begs the question that plagues me: WHY THE HELL WERE THEY SEWN SHUT!?! Why go to all the trouble to install and finish perfectly functional vest pockets and then sew them shut! I cannot understand the logic behind this move by Stafford. It was a cheap vest, so perhaps it was a factory second, a mistake. But even then, who the hell accidentally sews pockets closed? It takes a modicum of will to finish a pocket and then more to perfectly try to sew them shut! ODD!

Of course now that I have a nice dress vest with functioning pockets, and a certain romance about the past bouncing around in my head, obviously I went all the way to this:

Charles Hubert-Paris Pocket Watch

I’m thinking it would round out the look and it isn’t terribly expensive. It’s the kind of thing that nobody needs, but would really serve well to confuse people when they meet me. He has a pocket watch and an iPhone. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HIM.

I thrive on that entire idea. It entertains me enough where buying and enjoying the watch may be absolutely perfect. Evil Cackle 🙂 And no, I’m not going to ask people what they think because they’d likely declare I’m silly. And all right, I’ll be silly. But I’m fine with going that way. For nothing more, it’s agonizingly romantic!