Lunar Obverse

Spoilers for “Fringe” and “Lost” below. You’ve been warned.

In this week’s episode of “Fringe”, the bad guy forces Agent Dunham to show off her psychic powers to remotely turn off light bulbs. Of course, Agent Dunham does not believe in psychic powers at all, let alone that she has them. The bad guy, however, tells her “Then I have something you don’t, Agent Dunham. I have faith in you.”

In this week’s episode of “Lost”, John Locke is trapped in a cave with a lovely compound fracture in his leg, and his spirit guide Christian Sheppard wants him to turn the big ol’ wooden wheel of time, collect his six friends and talk them into returning to Hell Island. The word “sacrifice” is used which makes Locke nervous; he doesn’t think he can do it. Christian tells him, “I have faith in you, John.”

Both of those are J. J. Abrams shows. But if those characters are searching for faith, they need to look to Friday nights, where Faith the Naughty Slayer has taken up a new job as a mind-wiped puppet solving crimes and kicking ass. (See what I did there?) “Dollhouse” looks complex and dark. Really really dark. You may have thought that a show about living over the mouth to Hell and killing vampires for a living (i.e., “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) was dark but that’s just peanuts compared to Joss Whedon’s follow-up, “Dollhouse”. The creepy submissiveness of the blank-slate Echo, played so well by Eliza Dushku, sets me on edge and makes me eager to see her get some retribution for being put into this position. Actually, from even the very first scene of pre-mind-wiped pre-Echo being recruited for this “job”, Dushku does an eerie good job of showing someone who thinks they have no other options but to… yes, submit… to this 5-year contract. Have I used the word “creepy” enough? It all gets darker from there.

Between Mr. Abrams and Mr. Whedon, I’m getting more than my weekly dose of well-written, well-plotted dark sci-fi. Which is a good thing, considering that “Battlestar Galactica” only has five more episodes left.

It truly is a good time to be a fan of dark sci-fi filmed episodic television.

In the earliest moments of Valentine’s Day 2009, I was sitting with a bunch of friends, including Tracy, in the Acropolis strip club, shouting at a friend of the DJ over his cell phone to some guy at home alone.

Tracy and Gina liked the girls at the Acropolis better than the ones we had seen a couple of weeks earlier at Devil’s Point. The dancers at DP are Goth-y, tatted, jet-black hair and lots of eyeliner kinds of girls. The dancers at the Acropolis span a much wider range: from tall blonde Barbie types to buxom Bettie Page types to young-seeming naughty schoolgirls to my favorite dancer of all, S., who is a slender sun-worshiping brunette who cracks wise and has a great laugh.

Tracy summed it up thusly: “The girls here look like what we wish we looked like.”

I hadn’t thought of that…

I haven’t yet had a chance to read it but I’m posting it here for anyone else to read.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has issued its opinion in the case of Lea Lakeside-Scott vs. Multnomah County and Jann Brown.

Apparently it has overturned the lower court’s ruling and accepted the defendant’s arguments.

A travesty of justice. I hope that Lea is not done fighting, because it’s not over yet.

The flip side of lost things is, of course, found things.

That’s a set of memories, however, that is buried a bit deeper. Nothing immediately comes to mind. So I’m typing it out, mentally clearing my throat by just typing randomly, until a memory resolves itself.

Found things. Found objects? I’ve found money before. I remember working in the mall, nearly 2 decades ago, and finding a small manila envelope with two twenty dollar bills inside. No identifying information at all, just the two bills. It was after the mall was closed, and I was walking through the now-dark empty shopping center. I spent that – on what, exactly, I don’t recall. Who lost it? Were they hurt by it’s loss? Did losing it prevent them from doing something important? Or was it just mad money? I’ll never know. I may have changed a life that night. I hope they didn’t come back to find it, re-tracing their footsteps and yet not crossing my path. The money didn’t exactly change my life, as far as I can tell, beyond giving me a paragraph to blog about.

Last weekend I I found a restaurant. Not that it was lost, mind you. I’m sure the staff, the owners, and all the previous customers were doing just fine by it before I walked through the front door. But my life is much richer for finding it. I’ve already eaten there twice. Once for brunch, as I documented, and once again for dinner, the following night, with an old and dear friend. I had the chicken fried steak with gravy, and an amazing corn bread stuffing that I can still taste if I close my eyes. And an awesome spicy Bloody Mary complete with every garnish known to man: celery stalk, pepperoncini, green olive with pimento, and green bean.

Something that may surprise my readers, considering my strong atheism, is that I’ve “found” God twice. Twice in my younger years I attended a church revival and approached the preacher at the end to be “born again”. The combination of the enthusiastic crowd, the charismatic speaker, the time-tested language of salvation, and my own dissatisfaction with mundane reality and my desire to please my friends, all led me to think that giving in to the brainwashing was a good thing.

Fool me once, shame on you… The second time, I rationalized it by thinking that I was a back-slider from the previous time, even though I had done far less than my friends who were supposed to be strong in Christ had done; I hadn’t done any of the major sins – no drinking (yet), no smoking, no drugs, no sex (not that I wouldn’t have given my left arm to actually have sex, mind you). My worst “sin” was that I played Dungeons and Dragons. So fearful of the powerful damnation caused by a simple game of make-believe that, once, I snuck a Bible in a coat pocket when I went to my friend’s house to play, and while engaged in role-play, reached into the pocket and touched the small book of Bronze Age writings, seriously expecting to be burned when I did so. I was not burned. Neither angels nor demons appeared and spoke to me. I did not receive any signs of divine intervention, even though I sincerely hoped and desired for one. It was just a book, and the game was just a game.

But even in my most lamb-like state, I still approached things with an experimental, scientific mindset. I tested the claims of the preachers and pundits. Of course they were found wanting.

Since those early years, I have found something much better: I have found comfort with myself, and with the world, and all the uncertainty that it represents. I don’t need an invisible sky man or a magic book to show me how to live my life. Morals and guidance come from a rational base of our social lives, our empathy for others and the world, and our desire to better ourselves and leave a better world for our children and future generations.

That’s the best thing I can think of finding.

It only just now occurred to me that my previous post was titled “Lost things” and posted on the night that “Lost”, the TV show, was on.

And yet there wasn’t a conscious attempt to connect those two things.

I picked the topic by leafing through the book “Writing Without The Muse” by Beth Joselow and picking a suggestion at random.

Is the connection a conscious one, a subconscious one, or a matter of apophenia – forging a connection after the fact when one didn’t exist prior? Who knows? Who cares?

OK, obviously, I care. Fascinating how the mind works.

Everyone has stories about things they have had, and lost. Small things, big things, personal things, public things, even things that aren’t things: ideals, people, senses.

If I reach into my brain and pull out something I’ve lost, one of the first things that comes to mind is my first car.

My actual first automobile was a truck: a mustard-yellow Ford Courier pickup, which was a hand-me-down given to me by my dad, after he had also given it to my sister, until she could save up for a car of her own. I drove that truck for almost a year, until the engine block cracked because it had overheated and run out of coolant, stranding me on the freeway on a hot summer afternoon. As my dad angrily described it after I had had it towed home, “It’s bone dry! It’s a big fuckin’ boat anchor now!”

Not my finest moment.

Even though I “lost” that truck, that’s not the car I think of as my first car. The car I bought after melting the truck was a 1978 Porsche 924. Nutmeg brown, with a tan interior. Sunroof, 2.0 liter 4-cylinder over-head cam engine, four-speed transmission. I paid $2900 for it, and it was the first, and last, car loan I ever had.

I drove that car for years, and drove it hard. It was the car in which my friend and I drove to San Francisco and back.

I autocrossed that car – autocrossing involves setting up a course with orange safety cones in a parking lot, and driving as fast as possible through the course. I earned the nickname “The Unicorn” in that car when I completed one pass through the course with an orange safety cone sticking straight out from under the air dam on my Porsche.

I took so many girls out on dates in that car. Some were happy when they heard I drove a Porsche; some of those were disappointed when they actually saw it. It was not impressive. The interior was a bit trashed. The sunroof leaked and there was a lake in the passenger side footwell on rainy days. And the Nutmeg Brown paint job had faded and chipped in places. But it was still my baby.

There was no sub-component of that car that I hadn’t fixed, replaced, or rebuilt. Engine, clutch, transmission, brakes.

And even though I loved that car, I treated it poorly. One time, in my hurry to go meet a friend after he’d gotten off work, I rushed off after a brake job without torquing down the bolts on the wheels. I didn’t notice until a mile or so from home, rounding a corner, when the entire car wobbled and shook. I pulled over and only then discovered that I had not one, not two but all four wheels about to fall off! I was able to wrench them down enough to drive, slowly, home, where I jacked it up, examined the damage (the soft alloy wheels had the bolt holes slightly enlarged but were otherwise fine), and called my friend back to tell him I wouldn’t make it in time.

How did I lose it? In a car accident. I was operating on too little sleep, and it was an early Sunday morning. I was in a hurry to go pick up a friend to take him back to my house, where other friends were gathering to play a little game of Dungeons and Dragons. When I arrived to pick up my gaming companion, the TV in the house was turned to an episode of Ren and Stimpy, which I had never seen before. The kids of my friend’s roommate were watching it. Ren was singing the “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy” song, and with my sleep-lack, it was perhaps the funniest thing I had ever seen. But I had to be going, so we got back in my car, and I took off. At the first intersection, I looked left, right, and pulled out into traffic. But a car had been coming and I must have missed seeing it; it slammed into the driver’s side, spraying glass over me and my passenger, and totaling the car. Even more dazed than before, I drove it over to the side of the road and the older couple in the green VW Type 4 got out, yelling at me. We exchanged insurance information and all the necessities, and my friend ran back the four blocks to his house to call for a tow.

My Porsche was towed twice; once to my home, and then once, again, to the insurance adjuster’s lot.

I never saw it again.

Craig, the building manager for my office, had come all the way into the basement to find my co-worker, Ken. But Ken was not there; he had the day off.

Ken had done Craig a work favor, circumventing the bureaucratic process by which work requests for our team were normally processed. Ken does things like that. He’s not, at heart, a functionary.

However, the favor involved two steps: first unplugging, then re-plugging (if that’s a word) a computer and all it’s peripheral devices. In between the un- and re-plugging, a group of sturdy men would disassemble a desk and work unit and reassemble it in a different, superior, configuration.

The favor was needed because the person who used that computer on that particular work surface in that particular office was located on one particular floor of the building in which I work. The highest floor, in fact, where all of the most important people spent their work hours. People far too busy and important to bother with things like bureaucracy and processes for notifying people like building managers and, well, Ken and I. So Craig had been given very little notice to get this particular, outside-of-the-ordinary work request completed. And so, he had come looking for a favor.

But the cunning plans of Craig and Ken had failed to take into account several factors, including Ken’s memory (he forgot about the second part), Craig’s lack of knowledge of Ken’s schedule (Ken was off today), and the slowness by which the sturdy men had completed their work (they had taken long enough that they were not finished before the end of Ken’s normal work day).

Which brings me back to the morning in question, when Craig had come looking for Ken, and found, not Ken, but Ken’s empty cube in the basement of the building where I work.

In the cube next to Ken’s cube was myself, a giant glazed cinnamon roll, and a steaming hot cup of half-decaf, half normal coffee, with lots of cream and lots of sugar. That’s just the way I like it.

“Ken’s not here,” Craig said helplessly.

“Nope,” I said, and I bit off a piece of my cinnamon roll and sipped a little bit of my coffee.

“He was doing me a favor,” Craig explained.

“I remember,” I replied, eyeing my cinnamon roll and hefting my warm cup of coffee.

“Where is he?”

“Ken?” I asked. Craig nodded. “He’s not here.” This was beginning to sound like a comedy routine, I thought. Maybe I can make it even funnier.

“I can see that,” Craig said. He was normally a patient man but I could detect a small hint of frustration.

“It’s his day off.”

“Oh, he’s off on Mondays?”

I nodded. My coffee wasn’t getting warmer. Quite the opposite.

“He was helping me unplug that computer upstairs.”

“Right.” I could smell the cinnamon and the sugar glaze. Wait. Can one smell a sugar glaze? I could taste it. I tasted it.

“But it needs plugging back in.”

“Right.” I nodded. I am not volunteering for anything, I thought.

“The movers are done upstairs,” Craig said.

The suspense was killing me. Why doesn’t he just ask me straight out? “But Ken’s not here,” I said.

“I can see that,” Craig said. “Can you plug it in for me?”

At last! So tempted was I to refuse. However… “Is that where you’re going with all this?”

Craig barked out a laugh of frustration. “Yes! That’s where I’m going!”

“OK.” I carefully set down my cinnamon roll and coffee. “Fine.”

I hate it when Ken does favors for people. It breaks our processes.

In the winter of 2000 I was far less politically interested than I am now. I was a member of the group of Americans who feel that “all politicians are corrupt liars”, which had led me to largely only vote in presidential elections, and then usually for the third-party candidate.

I had little idea what the difference was between a US Representative or a US Senator, except that they were both Congresscritters.

But I still liked the idea of Washington, D.C. And I had family friends who lived in our nation’s capital, and their adult son lived in New York City, and I had always wanted to travel to the East Coast. And I had vacation time accruing from my job, and money to spend.

So, in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, I arranged a little vacation.

I’d fly into Baltimore (my friends advised this as a cheaper, easier alternative to flying into National), take a short train ride into D.C., stay a few nights at my friends’ apartment, then take another train ride to Manhattan and stay with their son.

I barely remember the details of the flight, in those days before religious extremists flew planes into tall buildings, except that it was easier and more boring. And most of what I did inside the Beltway was visit as many of the Smithsonian museums as I could. The Lunar Landing Module at the National Air and Space Museum actually made me weep for the steps backwards we have taken as a nation in exploration and nearly pure science. I’m so sentimental. And I was suitably impressed with the Hope Diamond.

I’ve got many stories I could tell from that trip, but the one that makes me kick myself now is my dinner choice on my last night in D.C.

The couple I was staying with were political. Very much so. In fact, Tom had a job working directly with Vice President Al Gore. He was working on policies to help the salmon runs in the Columbia River, on behalf of the State of Oregon. My friends spent a lot of time with other politicians and policy makers, which is the way of things in our capital.

And Betsy told me that my final evening with them, they had already planned on having Senator Ron Wyden over for a private dinner, for some political reason I don’t remember now but was probably related to the policy work Tom was doing. And she offered me a choice of joining them, or finding something else to do.

If I had that choice now, I would leap at the opportunity to grill Sen. Wyden on many topics, including but not limited to the corporate bailout or telecom immunity or stealing an election or executive branch accountability or network neutrality or or or… So many things come to mind, and Sen. Wyden has taken brave stands with the majority on some of them, and has given the standard corporate Democratic position on others.

But on that trip, on that night… I opted for going out to a movie.

I saw a restored version of “Rear Window”, the classic Hitchcock thriller. I had never seen it before. And the idea of a small dinner with some boring windbag Senator bored me to tears.

Such a lost opportunity.

Can I get a do-over?

Cross-posted (with minor editing) from my running blog.

When I race, I have no illusions about competition. I’m a late-bloomer for running, and I’m not in the best of shape. And my gender/age group is the sweet spot for local champions – typically the winner is a man around my age. Those guys are fast!

So I just compete against myself. I try to best my previous record, or my record for that race or course.

Sunday morning I ran in my first race of the year, the Fanconi Anemia Valentine’s Day 5K.

I’ve been running every other day for a couple of months, since my last time of falling off the wagon. I’ve been working on increasing my overall distance, and in the last couple of weeks have tried to make my five-mile-plus loop my “default” run. I’m somewhat discouraged because on my training runs, I rarely average better than a 10:30-10:20 pace.

So going into today’s race, I figured I’d show up, do my best, and just use it to gauge my level of fitness for future races. No expectations. I just wanted to finish.

I did a mini-taper by running a slow 3.5 mile loop on Friday. I’ve been watching what I eat. I’ve been drinking plenty of water. Saturday I lifted some weights, mostly upper-body stuff. Got plenty of sleep the night before. Ate a cup of yogurt about an hour and a half prior to the start of the race, and a half-liter of water.

It was cold, below freezing the morning of the race, and windy, but I dressed for it; long pants, two long-sleeved technical shirts (one thin and one thicker in case I got too warm), gloves, skull cap.

The course was very flat – starting under the Morrison Bridge, heading south along the waterfront, then turn around near our beautiful expensive Tram and head back basically the same way.

When I passed the Mile 1 marker, I was astonished: 8:40?! Eight minutes and forty seconds? That can’t be right! I was pushing a little but not hard. I decided that the marker must be wrong. But I kept the same pace as long as I could.

Second mile was just around 9:00. Again, that seemed way too fast for how I felt. But, hey, keep going.

I didn’t mark the 3 mile point because I could see the finish line. I had slowed down, though, I could feel it. But with the finish line in sight I picked it up. And seeing the number 27 on the clock right next to the finish booth made my spirits soar.

My unofficial time was 28:08.56. Because I hadn’t double-checked my previous times earlier, I wasn’t sure where that fell in my overall personal records, but I knew it was near the top. I tweeted my astonishment, and my guess at this being my second-fastest.

But, actually, this is the third-fastest 5K I’ve ever run. First is the 2007 Race for the Roses at 27:30; second is the 2007 Mt. Tabor Challenge at 27:59.

Yes, only nine seconds separates my second and third best times. So close!

This is very very encouraging. Maybe all those slow miles actually do help? I’m happy, though, that my 5K times are starting to be more consistent.

My next race will be the Shamrock Run 5K. I’ll be running it in a kilt! I won’t expect to set any personal records, though; there’s far too many people to navigate around both at the start and finish. I’ll just be going out and having a good time. In a kilt.