The Ghost of Pokorny

COMCAST SUCKS.

I don't have the wherewithal in mere text to express the magnitude of my exasperation. Our internet service has been off since last Tuesday, when Comcast broke their own backbone by trying to upgrade without having redundancies in place.

We live in a valley in the mountains, and the fiberoptics have to come in through the canyon. Facing increased competition by Qwest (that model of customer service,) Comcast freaked out and decided that NOW would be the perfect time to add bandwidth in order to support VoIP and streaming video. Sure, I'd agree that more bandwidth is always a good thing, but losing my data umbilicus for nigh on a week is not worth the hassle. After three days we switched to Qwest. We'll have service, they say, by next Thursday. Yippee.

That is why I'm composing this little rant in Notepad, to be uploaded whenever the hell I get my ass into the computer lab at the University. Gah.

I also need a new computer.

Well, technically I now own a new computer; it's just still on its way here from the Apple warehouses in California. Yes, I finally broke down and spent money I don't have to get a laptop I can rely on. The present one? The one I'm typing on right now? A three-year-old bovine Dell that weighs the same as a gravid water buffalo and causes the straps of my laptop-hauling backpack to give me weird little linear hickeys on my shoulders when I have to travel with it.

My Dell has lately taken to informing me that I'm low on virtual RAM, and abruptly shutting down applications. Even before this, it had a distressing tendency to bluescreen if you looked at it sideways. About the only thing I can say for it is that it has endured something on the order of 40,000 air miles in a two year period and none of the outer bits have broken off, except the little rubber feet on the bottom. Of course I've been developing deltiods of steel to carry the thing, but I would appreciate it more if it worked my quads or triceps instead...

But I digress.

I've had my eye on an Apple for a while; firstly, because they're just more reliable (or so I've been told by all and sundry) and they're cool and silver and they have that weird single-click button. The case for Apple was bolstered the day I downloaded iTunes, and furthered still more by the iPod mini I was given as a wedding present. The cute little pink-aluminum-cased thang resolutely refused to intercourse with the Dell, even after I went out and bought it a brand new PCMCIA high-speed USB hub. For months, the mini sat in its box, languishing, and I got on with my life.

Finally, I booked a trip to Chicago for work and to visit some friends, and was going to be staying with the friend that gave me the iPod in the first place. I tossed it in my purse, and one of the first things I did when I got there was to ask him to please, please, put some music on it.

Did I mention he's a club DJ?

The mini's drive is 6GB. I didn't get a good look at my friend's music library, but I'd be surprised if it's much smaller than 20GB. iTunes, clever little program that it is, discerned that we were trying to put 20 pounds into a six-pound sack and asked if we would like instead to allow it to choose a "selection" to transfer. Rather than make the process into a test of endurance, I said "why not?"

I had no idea that so much techno Christmas music even existed.

I now have four different versions of "Baby it's Cold Outside," six versions of "Jingle Bell Rock," not to mention two versions each of "Carol of the Bells," "Auld Lang Syne," and "Joy to the World." I will be having one hell of a rockin' Christmas this year, for sure.

I also returned from Chicago with a couple of DVDs that my DJ friend very kindly made for me of his club sets while I was there. The second one didn't finalize properly, and I thought the same was true of the first one - but, true to form, it seems to be just one more case of schizophrenic technology at our house.

After the first few failed attempts at getting the DVD to load in the player hooked to the TV, I took it into the office and shoved it in Trent's laptop (a slightly less prehistoric Dell.) It loaded in a sort of half-assed fashion, and then proceeded to play every 20th frame of the DVD. The music sounded like something with a long neck trying to gargle a viscous substance. I was about to give up and get on with my life, when I hit some unknown combination of buttons and the video came clear. Aha! thinks me.

Later on, I tried the DVD again in the other player. It loaded perfectly, played 1/8 of the set, and then froze up. I tried reloading it again and got the finger. "Wrong disc," the DVD player said, or "you cannot do that with this disc at this time." What was I thinking? That a DVD player could be expected to play a DVD?

This morning, the Earth's magnetic field was once more perfectly aligned, and sunspot activity must have been low. The DVD loaded, and when I left the house it was playing quite happily far beyond the point at which it had balked yesterday afternoon. Go figure.

*

Oh, and Julius Pokorny (the respected etymologist) has nothing at all to do with this rant. I just like to say the name: Pokorny, Pokorny, Pokorny.

The Demon Sideboard

In Other News...

I've heard the recommendation (from various sources), that if you're going to marry a guy, make sure that--besides being an archangel incarnate--he also comes with a lot of cool stuff. Some husbands come with stock options and a private yacht; some come with lots of neat tech gear; some with a house or a small trust fund or just a really nice car. Mine came with antiques.

As I've mentioned before, my husband's great-grandad was a banker in Detroit for various and sundry Robber Barons. The income from this enterprise allowed for several trips around Europe to buy up pretty much any bit of culture that wasn't nailed down. Now, other American fallen-gentry families got rid of their antiques around 1965, at about the same time that dropped acoustic ceilings, shag carpets, and melamine furniture came into style; however, Husband's family (specifically, his mother) hung onto their antiques, only selling those bits and pieces that were outrageously overvalued, such as the O'Keefe.

One bit that survived the cull was this thing here; officially known as a sideboard, but it is to a normal sideboard as a Sherman tank is to a Mini Cooper. This is the kind of furniture that frightens small children. The six strapping young Mormon men who helped us ramp the damn thing into our house estimated that it weighs in excess of 400 lbs. It is five-hundred-plus years old, hand-carved, held together with dowels and hand-forged iron spikes, and ostentatiously wormeaten. It has spent the last ten years in a Utah storage unit, losing what was left of its native moisture and gathering an elaborate blanket of dust.

Now, it squats majestically (where did I crib that phrase from?) in the front room, intimidating the hell out of any other bit of puny modern furniture we put near it. I've spent the morning daubing a product called "Old English scratch cover for dark woods" into its crevices with a bristle paintbrush, wondering if I'm committing some kind of dire sacrelige. It does bring out the grain nicely, though.

A Bridal Moment

"Bridal Moment" -(Hallmark definition). Any of a number of points preceding the actual wedding when the bride grows horns, sprouts fangs, and starts breathing fire on the nearest unfortunate. Lesser men will cut and run when faced with a Bridal Moment; it is for this reason that women have them: we want to make sure that if he's going to run, he'll do it in time for us to get part of the deposit back on the reception hall.

Considering my initials during my first marriage were ABM, it's odd I didn't have the guts to throw a Bridal Moment, not even in the car a week before the ceremony when I realized that the man I was about to marry resembled all the worsts bits of my father in all the worst ways. Plus he was on parole, not to mention that over the course of his then 29-year life, he'd dropped something on the order of six or seven hundred tabs of acid, and had a tendency to see giant rats running silently along the baseboards when he'd had a little too much to drink. I could rattle off any number of sordid reasons for my lack of backbone, but what it boils down to is that my head was up my ass, and I was passive-aggressively wrecking my own life to spite my mother.

Ya hah, I was that smart.

My first husband was not A Bad Man (there's that three letter acronym again), but he was, definitely, fucked in the head. I started dating him while he was on parole and I was on probation. We were lawbreakers together - it was so romantic. One of these days I'll tell you about my personal drug-bust farce, but it wasn't anywhere near as spectacular as my ex-husband's, which I'll tell you about right now, after a short digression.

He was raised in a part of rural Georgia that's since become part of suburban Atlanta. Actually, while I was dating him I could watch the land around us being subsumed in a kind of extended stop-motion animation. It was surreal - I lived in Asheville, North Carolina, and would drive the 250 mile commute every second weekend or so to visit my jailbird boyfriend, who was on parole and therefore had to get permission to leave the state of Georgia. A view of the same patch of Georgia over any given four-to-six-week period would go like this:

Starting week: five acres of kudzu-infested Georgia jungle, innocently sitting across a five-lane highway from a Best Buy.

+2 weeks: bare earth and a stray bulldozer waiting to be picked up by a flatbed semi.

+4 weeks: Pier 1 Imports and TJ Maxx have seemingly burst, fully formed, straight from the fertile Georgia soil. Or maybe they were dropped there by passing alien spacecraft. Whatever their genesis, they certainly attracted their share of pod people...

But (as I said,) I digress.

All the relevant formative events in my ex's life happened before the Great Henry County Construction Boom. He grew up wild, the son of a single mother, raised for the most part by his mother and grandma. His grandfather, who died while my ex was in jail, was apparently a real abusive son of a bitch, quite a bit like my dad on his bad days, actually. The way my ex describes his childhood and adolescence sounds like a cross between the Dukes of Hazzard and the Manson family; shootin' guns, drivin' cars, evadin' the police, stealin' stuff, makin' pipe bombs, and smokin' dope and droppin' acid. At one point he and a friend made off with some unfortunate metalworker's oxy-acetyline rig. They planned to use the gas to blow stuff up, but finally figured it was too dangerous and lost their nerve. They threw the tanks, still full, into a pond. Later, the pond was filled in and used as the foundation for a housing development during the construction boom. If a house in south Atlanta unexpectedly explodes, we'll know why.

So, in his early 20s my ex ended up living with two or three other guys in an unspeakably fetid house they dubbed (for various reasons) the Montego Crime Circle. Here he led a happy existence as a bottom-rung psychedelics dealer and proprieter of his own private menagerie. I can't remember all the stories about pythons, boa constrictors, tarantulas, monitor lizards, giant marine toads and Tokay geckos; maybe I was stoned when he told me. I do remember tales of Oscar the Pig (a Foul and Horny Beast, said my ex,) who would fuck anything, including an empty five-gallon bucket, and who could hypnotize dogs. My ex dealt drugs, mostly acid, mostly to college kids and local house-framers. One day, of course, there was this guy on the framing crew, and everyone thought he was someone else's friend, and he seemed real nice, and he bought ten hits of acid...

And a week later my ex was sitting in his house at his computer with a loaded Glock 9mm in the desk drawer and a housemate's girlfriend snorting coke in the bathroom, when, knock, knock, BOOM! Here came the DEA with a battering ram and a search warrant.

He got a good lawyer who got him first-offender status (five years, serve two) and into a boot camp rehabilitation program. Since my ex had already been through military boot camp when he joined the Navy out of high school, he said jail boot camp was a joke. He kept his nose clean, impressed the right people, helped some other prisoners to get their GEDs, and was released on parole after seven and a half months. Two weeks later, he was visiting the sister of his best friend, who just happened to be my across-the-hall neighbor. She introduced us, said we were "perfect for each other" (was it the fact that we both had shaved heads, or was it the drug-crime thing?) and set us up. We obliged her by drinking a liter bottle of Monte Alban mezcal and spending the rest of the night rolling around naked in her bed, too drunk to fuck.

Fast forward two years, and there we were, getting 'married' by a minister of the Unitarian church (though I tried my best to explain the difference between the Unitarians and the Unity Church, my mother swore to God he was a moonie) at the Deer Park Inn on the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. Very posh, and very expensive, and therefore not easy to call off. We had, in any case, been legally (and secretly) married a month before in the side yard of the local synagogue-cum-Unitarian church, so that we could legally live together and fuck each other without violating the North Carolina law against cohabiting, which is only enforced against those on parole or probation anyway. Go figure.

Anyway, I could have used a well-timed Bridal Moment to cut me loose from what both you, best beloved, and I, in my latter wisdom, can see was destined to be a fiasco from start to finish. I'll elide the gory details and just note that the wheels came off, spectacularly, a year and a half later. But as I said before, I hadn't yet developed the spine to act on my convictions (har har). Life then spent the next seven years or so beating the crap out of me. More stuff happened; I'll tell you later.

Eccentric America

I felt myself ovulate today. Working out on the lat machine, to be precise, I felt a kind of semi-painful "twing!" in a specific lower-left-groinal area I've come to associate with ovarian stuff.

Well, I thought, that explains the paranoia.

I don't know if I'm alone in this or not, but I swear my hormonal cycles make me certifiably nuts at least half the time. Not just moody-bitchy-menstrual, not Hallmark-card Sweet-Potato-Queen catty, but actually out-and-out fucking batshit insane.

I catch myself doing it, too; thinking, "if that guy over there came at me with a knife, I'd have to stick my thumbs in his eye sockets and pry his eyeballs out of his head before he managed to stab anything important," or "that ringing in my right ear is viral meningitis; I suppose this is as good a day to die as any," or "that black Chevy S-10 is following me - it's my ex-boyfriend come to stalk me and then torture me to death." And some little saneish part of my mind is sitting there rigid and wide-eyed going "hon, you need to take a xanax and step the fuck back, OK?"

And then there's that little "twing!" and I realize it's just that I'm not letting myself want to be impregnated, and that this, in addition to my Albrecht Dürer-like tendency to violent melancholia, leads to the sort of mental conflict that makes my head feel as if it's filled with angry bees. And I take some deep breaths, and maybe half a xanax, and things get better. Well, most of the time.

High school was worse. At least now I've stopped wondering whether I'm fit to live, and instead spend my time obsessing about less fundamental questions, like whether I'm fit to be a mother. And whether if I got pregnant I'd just lose my grip altogether and spend five months strapped to a table in a maximum-security mental hospital. Or whether I'd make it through the pregnancy just to snap from postpartum depression, hand the kid off to my husband, and take off for Guadalajara to spend a year smoking crack and making intricate sculptures from my toenail clippings.

Is this what Grendel's Dam felt like?

I caught the end of an interview on NPR today with a guy named David Allen. He, apparently, did melt down at some point and spent some amount of time insane and homeless before he scraped himself together and went on to found an extremely successful corporate self-help program called Getting Things Done. His webpage is very slick, and in his pictures he looks very happy. He makes enough money, as my ex-husband would say, to burn a wet mule. He says he was never actually cured of his mental illness, i.e. the obsession with the "inner life" that makes people identify so strongly with Jesus, but that he realized at some point that you couldn't force your outer life to be subservient to your inner life; i.e. just because you're the Son of God doesn't mean you can get by and have any quality of life you care to support without (a) making money and (b) engaging in society, going to the dentist regularly, paying taxes etc. He calls himself "high-functioning" and asserts that his outlook on the world hasn't changed since he was a homeless crazy person.

Amen, brother. Can I get a dollar?

the Atomic Trinity and Skeleton Boy

God, were we ever so young?

My big secret is that throwing clay pots on a wheel is as good as xanax. Something's changed over the past few years - I don't know if it's that I've spent more time in the gym building up my upper-body strength, or that I've just learned to finesse the clay more effectively. All of a sudden I'm able to throw five and seven pound lumps of clay and work them into pots. I'm mesmerized by this, as if it's not really me that's doing it.

You have to break the clay first, after you cut it loose from the block. It's been sitting still since it was pugged, and it's formed a grain. I raise the chunk level with my head and slam it down hard on the wedging table, four or five times. Then I knead the clay in four or five different directions; a spiral bull's-head wedging technique I'm not very good at. It doesn't seem to matter. I block the clay into a basic round chunk, then smack it into a sphere with my hands. My wedding ring leaves little indentations on it.

On a clean wheelhead, I press the clay to center. Add water, start the wheel spinning, lock my left hand into the clay by wedging my elbow into my hip bone. Push to center with my left hand, push down on the top of the clay with my right. Sooner or later the clay and I come to an agreement and the clay turns true, more or less.

There's always an annoying divot in the top of the clay at this point. I use my right thumb to carve it out on center and use the resulting pit as a starting point for a well. Add water, keep the clay spinning. First I concentrate on the bottom of the pot, making it approximately the thickness I'll want it to be. Then I pull the sides; the pros like to make a big deal of making a finished pot in three pulls. I take more like ten or twelve, but I'm still pretty fast. I can throw 25 pounds of clay in just over an hour.

I don't know how to tell you to shape a pot. You do stuff with your hands, and stuff happens to the clay, and your brain isn't involved.

I like to pre-trim the bottoms of all my pots before I cut them off the wheelhead. This is the only thing I use my wooden tool for. Then I splash a little water on the wheelhead and run a wire under the pot, bringing a film of water into the cut. The pot slides off the wheelhead when I push it, and I catch it on my fingers. The tricky bit...is not breathing...while I slip it onto a wooden bat...the pot usually flexes, making the top an oval shape instead of circular, and I have to coax it back to true just a smidge. Then I scoot out from behind the wheel and lift the pot on the bat, take it out the side door of the studio, and set it in the sun.

And then go back and make another.

Repeat five or seven times.

And life is somehow a little easier to take than it was before.