Cool Link

Check out this link which grades your neighborhood on its "walkability."

I got an 83, not a bad score but you have to figure in the prostitutes and drug-dealers.But they're a lovable bunch once you get to know them. Well, not lovable in that way. Still proud of my hood though.

Ian's List of Worsts (Whine and Cheese)

Worst Concert: Grateful Dead in Charlotte, 1995. This show was devastatingly awful. With a terrible set-list, apathetic playing, a depressingly old looking Jerry Garcia and annoying deadheads everywhere, I have to say my worst concert was by one of my favorite bands. They redeemed themselves the next night in Atlanta though. Runner up: Toto (the tickets were free.)

Worst date: In high school I asked a girl to the homecoming dance. I spent the afternoon detailing my car. I decided for some reason to dress in sort of a grunge-meets-gomer outfit, with layered flannel shirts and old jeans with enormous holes in the knees. (What the hell was I thinking?) When I picked her up she was dressed to the freakin’ nines. I looked like I just got off work at Goober’s gas station. Luckily she had a change of clothes for the party after the dance and, believe it or not, the grunge/gomer look was kind of in, so she had holes in her jeans too.

Worst hangover: Don’t ever eat the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila. I’m just saying this because it's exactly what I did on my 21st birthday. I remember going out to eat the next morning. It was Sunday and all the church people were having proper Sunday lunches. I must have looked like an escapee from the morgue. I sure felt like it. I barely managed to hold down my eggs.

Worst roommate: The guy I lived with in Portland who spent the phone bill money on strip-clubs and drugs. He also gradually moved his wife, step-son and parakeet into our two bedroom flat. The parakeet would start chirping at three in the morning and pooped all over my couch. The wife chain-smoked Misty cigarettes and played solitaire all day. Runner up: The guy who would come home drunk and throw chairs at the wall. Bye-bye security deposit. He was a pretty decent guitar player so he misses first-place by a hair.

Worst illness: I had chicken-pox when I was about 37. You’re supposed to get chicken-pox when you’re a kid, that’s why they gave it that cute name. But I got it in my thirties and let me tell you…it was not cute! Besides looking like someone lowered a wasp-nest onto my head, my girlfriend mistakenly got the wrong type of antibiotic cream which made the symptoms worse. I spent a couple of agonizing nights with a wet washcloth over my face. Physically, I felt like I’d been steam-rolled. I remember watching the Elephant Man on TV and identifying completely. “I am not an animal!” Runner up: Staph infection in Costa Rica. Honorable mention: Whatever that thing was I had for the first month in Africa.

Worst meal: This is tough, I can’t really think of a really bad meal I’ve had although I know there has to be one. I got food-poisoning from a sandwich once, but that doesn’t really count. Oh yea, recently I went to a chain restaurant and ordered eggs-over-easy. The whites weren’t even close to being fully cooked. It looked like the eggs had been precooked and then dipped in warm water for service. Yow! Also, there have been times in my life when economy dictated I concoct meals out of what I had in the cabinet. This is usually a pretty sparse selection. I came up with some scary things during these times. However, I did discover the versatility of Top Ramen.
Actually there’s one more. I once ate a raw turnip on an empty stomach, (it’s a long story). Don’t ever, ever, do this. I won’t go into details as to why, just never, ever do it.

Worst book I actually finished: The Fountainhead. I know it seems like I have an axe to grind with Ayn Rand, but I just hate all that superior social darwinism crap. Problem is, and I don’t like to admit this, the writing was compelling enough to see me through to the end…and, sigh, actually made the book difficult to put down. There, I’ve said it. Moving on…

Worst movie: I learned not to completely trust the movie reviews in The New Yorker with this one. One of the reviewers, I don’t know if it was Denby, Lane or another one, salivated about a movie called Rangoon. Has anyone seen this film? I might have missed the point, but I found it excruciatingly dull and therefore list it as the worst movie I’ve ever seen. All I remember is everyone being very sweaty and damp through the whole thing (the actors, not the audience, well maybe the audience too.)

Worst try-out: In fifth grade I tried out for the school soft-ball team. We couldn’t afford a soft-ball-mitt so, true to fashion, my mother offered to see if a friend who had sons would let me borrow one. It sounded like an okay plan, but I was a little suspicious. The glove that I got was tiny, and looked like it was manufactured around the-turn-of-the-century. (that’s the 20th century young-uns.) Predictably, the try-out went badly. The other kids had their huge non-antique-gloves and were scooping up soft-balls and hurling them back to home-plate with ease. I, on the other hand, couldn’t have handled a golf-ball with that glove and, sadly, didn’t make the cut. Runner up: this wasn’t necessarily a try-out, but I once had the opportunity to play bass with Ben Folds (he had hits in the nineties, remember?) I completely choked, and couldn’t play a note.

Worst moment in a classroom: I went to community college for a while and administration talked me into taking a piano class. It was a good class, but I got the date for the recital wrong and came into it completely unprepared. About fifty people watched me struggle through hickory-dickory-dock and a few other pieces. The instructor had to point at each key before I played it, patiently whispering “that one, then that one, now the black one again” etc.

Worst computer mishap: I was working on the big research-paper that all history majors had to complete when the library lap-top I was using shut-down. When I booted it back up I went to the recovery function and accidentally deleted several pages of my final draft. I was in a library so I couldn’t shout expletives at the top of my lungs, but I really, really wanted to.

Worst job: My first job when I went to Africa was assisting a surgeon with just general daily tasks. On of these jobs was taking photographs of surgery, which was exciting and fascinating. But I also had to do clerical work which wasn’t so great. The worst task assigned to me however was collecting sputum samples from the TB ward. Yes, really, I did that. Runner up: Chef at the Diamondback Café.

Worst fashion choice: I used to cut my own hair. ‘nuff said.

Worst bruise: I had a bruise on my hip from skiing that was the color of a black-hole and was kind of shaped like the Milky Way. Actually it was many bruises layered on top of each other because I kept falling on the exact same hip.

Worst airline experience: Flying from Transkei to Raleigh took four days. They had me on the wrong flight when I got to Johannesburg, when I finally arrived in Brussels there was an air-traffic-controllers strike, I missed the connection from New York to Raleigh by ten minutes and I was suffering from a malady which I won’t name but is extremely unpleasant to those who’ve experienced it. I had to start work at a summer camp on the same day I finally made it to North Carolina. It took me about a month to recover.

13 Years

I'm running late already, and I'm supposed to be in Asheville sometime today, but I had to write a (very) quick post to commemorate the 13th anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death. If I had more time I would write a long statement that I'm sure would convert the most ardent detractor of this man's importance to the popular culture of the 20th century. But there just isn't time today, and there are far better articles, columns, and books that do justice to the legacy of this icon. "Icon" seems like such a trite word for this, but it'll have to do for now.

I have issue 717 of Rolling Stone right next to me. A very intense Jerry stares out at Herbi Greene's camera in salt-and-pepper magnitude, and all the top caption reads is "Jerry Garcia 1942-1995." My copy is worse for the wear, and when I opened it this morning I found that I had placed clippings from the NY Times, New Yorker, Time, and an editorial from our local paper inside the front cover. As I was flipping through it, I welled up. Dammit, not supposed to get weepy...buck up kid!

I've been listening to a lot of Dead this week. Not really consciously, it just happens that these phases come around every now and then. Now I realize that it is the August solstice, the 9 days between Jerry's birthday, August 1st, 1942, and the day of his death, August 9th, 1995. I've mostly listened to tapes from 1970 when the Dead were part bar-band, part transcendental oracles and part folk balladeers. Jerry drove the majority of these concerts with relentless, some might say endless, guitar solos. But listening to each tape I'm amazed at how many variations the man was able to produce with just five fingers and a dozen or so frets (oh, and yes, probably lots of inhebriants). He could be sweetly lyrical one moment and turn on a dime to produce scary crunchy fuzz, then riff off blues licks and decunstruct everything into feedback and wonking noises and then find his way back to the lyrical melody.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I just know that I'm remembering this day particularly intensely this year. There is so much about the Grateful Dead that produces fodder for the morality police, not to mention the folks who want their songs to be about love and last no more than three-and-half minutes. Not knocking those folks, but if freedom of speech and expression is still a collective value, the Dead and Garcia proved how powerful that basic human right can be. Furthermore, to many of their fans, they also proved the profound transformative power of this practice .

igoogle (more cool vanity programming)

There's no doubt about it, librarians are cool. Because I work for a county library system, I get tech training every month or so. Last session we set up our own igoogle account which now opens on my work desktop. You can customize your homepage with literally thousands of options from tropical fish-tanks to stock quotes and video games. Being at work, I have to stick with book and research type options. Each box represents a group of links, so you can catagorize by subject. If you want a group of links to favorite sports teams, you can set that up or you can create a whole new page exclusivly for sports. igoogle also offers a tab called reference that already has dictionary.com, a language translator, wiki and other cool links built in. If this sounds like an endorsement, it is. I just happen to like this application a lot.

Here is my home page as it stands today.
more soon...

Iron Woman/Man Meme

From the always awesome Charlotte, this meme was one of the most fun I've done

1. My uncle once: made me set off one of those moo-cow noise makers in church.

2. Never in my life: have I wanted to conform.
3. When I was five: I went to England and ate chocolate mousse shaped like a baby bunny.
4. High school was: where I met people I'm still friends with.
5. I will never forget: Ryoko.
6. Once I met: Desmond Tutu.
7. There’s this girl I know: who had her back broken in four places, was in intensive care for a week, graduated from high school on time, and became a hero.
8. Once, at a bar: I beat a friend at darts .
9. By noon, I’m usually: pretty much awake and feeling fine.
10. Last night: I tried to relive my earlier days, went to see a band at a venue miles away from my town, rocked, and feel great.

11. If only I had: everything settled.
12. Next time I go to church: I'll listen to every word of the sermon, I promise.

13. What worries me most: abandonment
14. When I turn my head left I see: a crazy over-stuffed bookcase.
15. When I turn my head right I see: a stereo.
16. You know I’m lying when: The blotch between my eyes becomes bright red
17. What I miss most about the Eighties is: hating Reagan.
18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I’d be: One of the characters who tried to talk reason into all of the misguided idiots in Shakespeare.
19. By this time next year: I'll be me, but a year older.
20. A better name for me would be: Ian Mitchie.
21. I have a hard time understanding: women.
22. If I ever go back to school: I'll let you know when I'm finished.
23. You know I like you if: You haven't been a jerk.
24. If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be: Heather
25. Take my advice, never: put a beer-tab in the fuse-box of a Volkswagen in the hopes that it will make the stereo work.
26. My ideal breakfast is: Eggs Benedict cooked by someone who knows exactly how I would cook it, but not cooked by me.
27. A song I love but do not have is: City of Tiny Lights
28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest you: give it chance, a long chance, like about a year, and then realise we're doing the best with what we have to work with, and then...save yourself, move! or not.
29. Why won’t people: stop excepting mediocrity.
30. If you spend a night at my house: do it on a Tuesday, when things are clean but don't still smell of pinesol.
31. I’d stop my wedding for: someone telling me a had a ten record deal with Columbia.
32. The world could do without: cultural assertion.
33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: read Ayn Rand.
34. My favourite blonde(s) is/are: and/or/all of the above.
35. Paper clips are more useful than: nuclear weapons.
36. If I do anything well it’s: meander.
37. And by the way: I overhauled my living-room today.



Jeremy. Archie, Emily, Danny, all tagged.

Thoughts on Costa Rica

In 1991, still reeling from a two-year train-wreck of a relationship, I joined a public service group called Youth Service International. The foundation planned trips to places like Papua New Guinea and the Australian outback to assist with forestation projects and construct eco-tourism camps. The year I signed on, the team was going to Costa Rica to start construction on a lodge in a remote part of the indigenous rainforest on the southwestern coast, a place known as the Osa Peninsula. The expedition would last approximately seventy-five days.

The group numbered around forty. Mostly recent college graduates, the age ranged from seventeen to twenty-five. I was twenty-four years old, in need of a fresh outlook and anxious to experience unspoiled areas of the globe, if there still are such places. In order to go I raised the money myself, somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand dollars. The two biggest fund-generators were a 120 mile bike-a-thon and a chicken-pie-brunch for the First Methodist Church in New Bern, North Carolina. I learned then that the best way to raise money is to feed people. The brunch raised about a third of the funds in around five hours.

To rendezvous with the other members, who were coming from all over the country, I had to reach Miami International Airport. In any international airport, especially in the late spring and throughout summer, one can see groups like ours strewn around on airport floors leaning up against over-stuffed back-packs and nervously checking passports and tickets. Some are less concerned with documents, reading battered paper-backs or exploring the terminals in search of the bar. Most represent a loose group of temporary expats, dipping their toe in the “other” world for a moment in hopes of life-changing insight or a fling with another culture. Whichever it is, it keeps an underground of back-packing adventurers moving around the globe like misplaced beetles in a never-ending column of ants.

Before the trip got underway, we were all assigned duties to be performed once we reached camp. Because of my background in restaurants, I landed the responsibility of purchasing all of the food for the camp. This was not an easy task, the camp was three hours away by boat from even the most remote town, and the boat trips were few-and-far-between. On top of this, I had to account for the tastes of forty Americans and roughly twenty Costa Ricans (nicknamed ticas and ticos) and all on a strict budget. I learned within a few days what most Costa Ricans think of oatmeal for breakfast. My Scotch ancestry took it for granted that everybody ate oatmeal for breakfast. Not in Costa Rica.

On top of this, I had a boss. Because I was a little late getting the job, the true supervisor of the food supply was an eighteen-year-old lawyer’s daughter from Westchester County New York. I’ll call her K.

I met K on the floor of the Miami airport when the YSI leader introduced us and claimed me as K’s assistant. She was small, ninety pounds maybe less, wearing over-alls and a deep scowl. She was about as impressed with me as she was with the spot on the wall she went back to staring at as soon as the inconvenience of shaking my hand was over. I tried to strike up a conversation, but this provoked only monosyllabic grunts. Still, she was pretty, I thought, and that helped.

K liked control. She didn’t know the first thing about supplying food to people, but she new a great deal about being bossy and difficult. This took her far on those first couple of supply outings where she would either ignore my suggestions outright or purse her lips and stubbornly contradict me. I had to just accept it for a while, she was in charge.

The trip soon created its own rhythm, and as we settled into the camp K became more comfortable with my help. I made some blunders yes (oatmeal) but I worked very hard, building a BBQ pit out of rebar and organizing a fresh coconut assembly line so we could have the delicious coconuts that were in never-ending abundance on the beach. Almost every morning fishermen, fishing in some of the best game waters in the world, would unload their throwbacks on us, mostly yellow-fin tuna and wahoo. The high energy arroz y frijoles and handmade corn tortillas always augmented these local gifts. I learned to make tortillas from the locals and in return I gave them some very bad but entertaining English lessons.

The insects were the drawback of the trip. Vicious sand-flies plagued any exposed skin, and one would have to wait until they bit to swat them because of their speed. In the forest, large bees would zero in and sting-at-will. An afternoon shower could bring on the hatching of millions of flying termites who would frantically fly and fornicate all over the camp, sending all inhabitants running for cover. I once found an intimidating scorpion on the inside of my shirt after pulling it off the clothes-line.

Infection was also a problem, with the smallest of nicks turning into a festering sore within a couple of days. At a later date I plan to write about the staph infection on my foot that came very close to becoming gangrenous, but that will require a whole new post.

K and I managed to become close. I built a little home-away-from home down the beach from the main camp. In a palm grove I pitched my tent on a platform made of material I pilfered from the construction sight. The platform at least kept the ground-dwelling bugs away. The tent was usually hot, but at night, with only the screen up, the breeze coming off the crashing waves of the Pacific would lull me into a light sweaty sleep.

In the camp was a mess tent with a long picnic table where the whole expedition would cram themselves at meals and play cards into the evening. I never considered the things I would miss from home until I reached the camp. One of these was chair-backs. Leaning forward over a picnic table for two-and-a-half months made me long for a lawn chair, a high-back chair, or even a church pew. So on my platform I made a porch of sorts. It was two twelve-by-fours hammered into the form of a bench. A bench with a back. Here, before dinner, I would watch the surf, drink a beer, or crack open a coconut for K and I to share. Often some others would join us and I’d pluck away on an old guitar I was teaching one of the ticos to play.

K moved into my tent not long after I finished the platform and the bench. She stayed there every night for the rest of the trip. We became friends despite the uncomfortable living conditions and differences on how to supply the camp. One night, when the entire camp had come down with pink-eye (yep pink-eye) except her, she led me like a blind man to the main camp in the dark so I could wash out my burning itching eyes. Something, possibly my habit of humorous complaining, got us laughing. We both were in hysterics over some inanity, laughing desperately while the giant indigenous trees listened and the insects kept up their relentless onslaught. It seems such a long time ago, but these things rarely leave the forefront of my recall for more than a day or two. I realize now that this is what I was looking for in Costa Rica.

So much about that trip transformed me into who I’ve become today. It was the briefest of periods, less than three months, less than a semester, less than a single season of football, less than a forth-of-a-year. Not long after, I went to Oregon while K went to Africa, at my urging. Sadly we lost touch, but as this entry suggests I haven’t forgotten her. Maybe it’s the same with her.

The dynamics and diversity of that group influenced me so positively after a period where I had foundered in the negativity of my home-town, that I felt spring-boarded forward. Now, when things are tough, I console myself with the never-ending mantra, “Well I survived Costa Rica, I can survive this too.” Its things like these that teach what you’ve really got inside of you.


Post Script:
This is Companario. Our group was the second to go down and start construction. None of what you see on the website was there when we started. Makes me want to go back.

Another One in a Row

I paid a long overdue visit to Archie's Archives today. One of his posts sent me surfing for Ron McKuen Poems. This is one I particularly like. Blogspot is no friend to the poetry format, so the full effect of the poem is lost from lack of proper indentation. The words are still brilliant.

ANOTHER ONE IN A ROW

Even wrinkled water stretches out

along its roadway to the sea.

A blemish under sunlight fades,

or darkens,

changes anyway as all things change

the more they meet the Elements.

Only the nightmare, one in a row,

is constant under Nature's gaze.

Lean or weighted down with weight,

everybody I see now is eloquent

In true proportion.

Dreams have taught me

to turn my back on nothing

that might be something.

Something being that other one

one always needs to compliment

the given hour.



Who knows how many dreams

die out of season

reaching for some added darkness

or twisting upward where the sunlight

sits on haunches in the tops of trees.



There are no ordinary dreams.

Every nightmare is extraordinary

and compared to bodies, every body,

the dream is truly plain.

The nightmare is nothing.



I am, of course, excepting my own body

which needs a little/lot of work

No mirror told me that.

Not seeing my reflection in an other body

was looking glass enough.



While looking down

above a dream some times

I do see my old self rolling in another's arms

And oh the sight is dazzling.



---Rod McKuen 1998