Coffee and Abuse

If you ever find yourself in the charmingly obscure hamlet of Myers Flat, just off Highway 101, in Northern California's Humboldt County, I double-dog dare you to patronize The Daily Grind Coffee House -- a cluttered little rodent hole next door to the Four Mori Market & Deli. They boast a "world famous mocha" (Ooo! color me impressed) but neglect to mention that the mocha, as well as all their other drinks, comes with a side order of surliness, a generous dollop of condescension, and a sprinkling of disdain. I have been there three times in as many years and each visit has been singularly unpleasant, yet oddly entertaining in a how-long-you-can-hold-your-finger-in-the-candle-flame kind of way. If your personality is at all inclined toward mischievous depravity, a visit is well worth the detour.

My first acquaintance with The Grind was back in the summer of 2005, when I was playing tour guide to my good friend, Hamish -- a large, boisterous, coffee-addicted Scotsman. It was a typical overly-warm July afternoon in the California redwoods and, having just circuited the Founders Grove, we were duly parched and yearning for refreshment. As we drove south, Ham -- who can sniff out coffee houses better than an airport beagle can sniff out carry-on salami -- suddenly commanded that I pull off at Myers Flat so we could, in his words, "have a tea." (Brits and their ilk refer to any afternoon repast as "tea." I don't understand it, but I'm prepared to accept it as one of their emblematic quirks, similar to the way we Californians refer to all people as "guys," regardless of their gender.)

Anyway, true to form, Ham ferreted out this funky little establishment that looked promising, despite what I would consider an inordinately thick window display of dream-catchers. A hand-lettered sandwich board propped outside the door proclaimed their aforementioned "world famous mocha" assertion. Beneath that, almost as a afterthought, it read, "and fresh fruit smoothies." We parked the car and walked in. Finding ourselves facing an eight-by-five-foot chalk board scrawled with a largely indecipherable list of beverages, we stood for several minutes, brows furrowed, muttering sotto voce questions to each other.

"Does that say 'blackberry-mango smoothie' or 'be merry and go smoking'?"

"I can't tell. What do you think they mean by 'espresso terminoso'?"

"No idea. Maybe drinking it gets you an audience with the Great Bean Maker in the Sky?"

All the while, a sullen, dreadlocked Rastafar-ette sat behind the counter, reading a battered copy of Greenhouse Growers magazine and pointedly ignoring us. Ham braved the first contact with her by requesting one of their Ultimate Iced Lattes.

"Waseyes?" she grunted, not even bothering to look up from her Hydroponics Made Easy article.

"Beg pardon?" asked Ham.

"WhhhaaT SiiiiZzze?" she repeated, glowering at him and enunciating as if speaking to a child.

"Large," said Ham, turning to me with a bit of worry in his eyes.

Rastette flung her magazine onto the counter, heaved an effortful sigh, lifted herself from her bar stool and walked out the front door. "Was it something I said?" asked Ham.

"Maybe she's going to pick the beans." I retorted.

Peeking out the door, I was just in time to see her bony vegan backside turn into Four Mori's next door. For a full six minutes, Ham and I stood in the shop surveying the accumulated bric-a-brac, not really knowing whether to stay or leave. Our constancy was rewarded when the ill-tempered little cur returned, carting a pint of vanilla ice-cream. "We don't have a freezer in here," she offered, whereupon Ham and I nodded thoughtfully and uttered mollifying "Um-hums."

Returning to her lair behind the counter, she spent 15 minutes effecting some uncharacteristically complex industry with a coffee grinder and a Cuisinart, ultimately producing a 24-ounce blended latte that appeared to have ground coffee beans mixed into its cool, creamy froth. Ham was ecstatic. He eagerly forked over the $5.50 for his bucket o' caffeine and immediately set himself to sucking frosty slush up the straw and into his sinus cavities. After depositing Ham's money in the till, Rastette slouched back onto her bar stool, retrieved her magazine and regressed into an unsociable sulk.

"I'm sorry," I inquired meekly, "but I was interested in getting a large strawberry-banana smoothie?"

With another loud exhale, she once again threw the magazine onto the counter, arose and exited the establishment. I shrugged a "whatever" to Ham, who by then was panting off his initial attack of brain-freeze, and we waited in silence once more. A few moments later Rastette returned with a basket of strawberries and two bananas. Pulling a large wooden cutting board from under a pile of newspaper, she began to Benihana the fruit with a large meat cleaver. I saw my life flash briefly before me when she swiveled, cleaver raised, and glared menacingly at me. "Did you want that made with yogurt?" she sneered.

"Sure, if that's how you do it," I replied cheerfully, hoping to feign my both my enthusiasm for her smoothie recipe and my endorsement of whatever means most facilitated her speedy completion of my drink. Wrong answer. Rastette smacked the cleaver down onto the counter and rolled her eyes with yet another exaggerated respiratory discharge, then wandered out the door. Several minutes later she was back grasping a tub of plain yogurt. It took her still another ten minutes to finish my smoothie. I handed over my $5.50 with an obsequious, "Thank you," which was met by freezing silence. Leaving her studying an electrical diagram for wiring grow-lights, Ham and I departed, pleasantly sated, though 40 minutes older and $11.00 poorer for our trouble.

My next dalliance at The Grind came a year later, while I was sharing time at my family's Redway summer cabin with my sister, Kit, and her brood. We had driven north to visit Eureka's Sequoia Park Zoo -- a favorite with her boys -- and on our way back to the cabin, Kit suggested we stop by the Shrine Drive Through Tree's curio shop (also in Myers Flat), to pick up some redwood-themed piece of kitsch for a friend back home. As we pulled off the highway, I pointed out The Daily Grind, jokingly referring to it as the "home of the latte troll."

"I wouldn't mind a latte," announced Kit's husband, Micky, who then tossed over his shoulder, "Do you boys want some smoothies?"

Despite my warnings, the consensus was for drinks all around. We parked outside the curio shop and Micky waited with the boys while Kit and I steeled ourselves to the task of beverage procurement. An hour later, after a torture session not unlike Ham's and mine, we returned with three smoothies, an Ultimate Iced Latte, an iced chai and significantly chaffed egos. The boys were asleep and Micky was getting ready to dial 9-1-1 and request that the Sheriff issue a missing person's report.

The most recent of my Grind ordeals transpired just this past August. I was again vacationing at the cabin, but this time with my brother Mark and his family. We had gone for a cruise up the Avenue of the Giants and, on returning, Ellen and Evan (Mark's wife and eldest son) expressed a fervent desire for chai. (I think the term they used was "Jonesin".) Having a chai addiction of my own, I was sympathetic to their plight and offered The Daily Grind as a close, albeit regrettable, fixative. We used the same strategy as had Kit and I. Leaving Mark and his two-man demolition team in the car, Ellen and I submitted ourselves for the inevitable abuse. This time, Rastette was not there to attend us. Instead, we were served (and I used that term loosely) by someone closely resembling Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice character. He was talking with one of the locals when we entered and, for at least five minutes, he refused to even acknowledge our presence. When he became sufficiently annoyed that we hadn't had the good grace to simply leave, he turned his head in our direction and barked, "What?!"

"Could I get two iced chais, please," Ellen asked, "one large and one small."

Shaking his head in disgust, as if she'd asked him to pick up her dog's poop, Beetlejuice assembled Ellen's drinks with wordless belligerence. When she proffered a $20.00 note in payment for her $8.00 tab, he seemed vexed beyond the limits of human endurance. Dumping her return $12.00 onto the counter, he made a bee-line for the front door, but pulled up when he saw me.

"Did you want something?" he growled.

I was within a millisecond of parrying back a snide, "No, I'm just standing here to watch the maggots hatch," when better judgment stopped me. (It's never a good idea to piss off someone who will be preparing your food.) Instead I politely indicated that I, too, would appreciate a large iced chai, if the provision of such did not detain him from something more important -- like scraping the ingredients for his evening meal out from under his toenails. (Okay, I only said the toenail thing inside my head, but it satisfied, nonetheless.) My request elicited an ocular rotation and protracted exhalation similar to those I had garnered from Rastette in years past. But I was glad, at least, to see that Beetlejuice was keeping up The Grind's fine tradition of customer disservice. In due time, I handed over my $5.50 and stepped gingerly aside as he again sprinted for the exit, lest we or (heaven forbid) some new walk-in request more drinks of him.

So, by my count, The Daily Grind is O-for-three on likability. And what's more, I found two unfavorable online reviews (one at MerchantCircle.com and the other at Yelp.com) conveying sentiments akin to my own. No doubt the proprietors' acerbic ethos stems from the facts that: 1) their true interests lie with the purveyance of plant matter other than coffee beans; 2) this whole "world famous mocha" thing is merely a front to explain an otherwise implausible seven-figure income; and 3) they would probably be wholly delighted if nobody ever patronized their odious little hovel but rather left them alone to attend to the business of stuffing ganja buds into little salable plastic bags.

All this said, I would still invite you to drop into The Daily Grind, if for no other reason than to rekindle your affection for the brainwashed cyborgs who work at your local Starbucks. (Hey, at least they smile while they're neglecting your order.) And for a real kick in the pants, I would recommend the Grind's Ultimate Iced Latte -- but not if you're planning to sleep within, say, 48 hours of having drunk it. Oh, and while you're there, maybe have a go at ordering a non-fat, half-caff, half-decaff, triple grande, quarter sweet, sugar free, vanilla soy, extra hot, extra foamy, caramel macchiato, with nutmeg. You know, just to see if you can make their heads explode.

Flying Lessons

It wasn't a dark and stormy night, but something not too dissimilar -- a gray and foggy Friday morning, in downtown Berkeley, in July. Good little worker bee that I am, I had arrived at my cold, un-peopled, seventh-floor office, promptly at 7:30 a.m., hot cup of chai in hand, still not fully awake but nonetheless prepared for a quiet, low-staff-count day, during which I hoped to accomplish a goodly amount of back-burner database programming.

Nestling my rear end into my well worn office chair, I dedicated the first 30 minutes of my day to volleying yesterday evening's accumulated email out of my in-box and into someone else's. Then, switching my brain to geek mode, I double-clicked the Database.From.Hell file in my Stuff.That.Gives.Me.Headaches folder, and waited for the software to launch. Staring blankly at my list of partially defined fields and trying to remember where I had left off three weeks ago, I was startled out of Friday numbness by a messy flutter of gray feathers that careened over the awning above my office's sliding glass door and flopped clumsily onto the terrace just outside.

(Yes, I have an office with a sliding glass door that leads out onto a terrace. It overlooks San Francisco Bay. It is a proper office. It's not a cloth-covered veal pen. And it was hard won. I spent 16 years in cube-land, sucking up to the boss to earn that office. So just back off!)

Anyway, back to the bundle of gray feathers on my terrace. It had landed right up against the concrete retaining wall that prevents me from pushing things like moody copy machines and annoying co-workers over the edge. It appeared to be a bird but wasn't moving, so I watched for several moments, breath arrested, for evidence of life. Finally, I saw it bobble and ruffle itself into something that looked very much like an adolescent swallow. He (only a guess) was adorable: a beak that was still a little too big for his face; an amusingly disheveled raiment of semi-mature adult feathers punctuated by stray clumps of baby-bird fluff; and a general demeanor of oblivious naïveté.

And then... Well not much, really. He fluffed is feathers against the morning chill then hunkered against the retaining wall and sat. Occasionally, he glanced from side to side, but mostly he just sat. He was sitting at 8:30 a.m. when I looked up from a convoluted if/then statement to clear my head. He was sitting at 8:52 when I finished the last of my now lukewarm chai and peeled my eyes off the computer monitor long enough to aim as I pitched the empty cup into my garbage can. He was sitting at 9:05 when I got up to use the bathroom. He was sitting at 9:20 when the phone rang and I didn't answer it. And he was sitting at 9:58 when an uncooperative export script got the better of me and I launched my internet browser to take a Best of Craig's List break. (Oh, come on now! No scoffing. You know we all do it.)

Shortly after 10:00 a.m., the fog pulled back and the sun rose sufficiently high that its rays slanted over the roof of our building and onto the bird's back. Within seconds, he had de-fluffed and was issuing random "Cheeps." But still had not moved a millimeter.

"Hmmm..." I wondered, with my brain still slightly stuck in programming mode, "IF (ArrivalType = Crash Land) AND (TimePassed > 120 Minutes) AND (SubsequentBirdMovement = False), THEN (InjuryProbability = High) AND (RescueNeeded = True)."

The bird life in downtown Berkeley is remarkably diverse. Swallows abound, especially near our building where they nest under the concrete ledges. But I've also seen hawks cruising the lofty environs outside my office window, so I feared that the little guy might have been injured in a raptor attack. I temporarily forsook both Craig's List and Database.From.Hell in favor of what promised to be a much more fulfilling enterprise: Operation Swallow Rescue.

Digging through our supply room, I found a smallish box and that I lined with a big, cushy wad of toilet paper from the bathroom. Next, I returned to my office and slowly opened the sliding glass door. My overall plan was to capture Martin (I decided he needed a name), check him for injuries and then, if needed, transport him in the warmth and safety of his TP-lined box to the Lindsay Junior Museum's Wildlife Hospital, where they would nurse him back to health in true Florence Nightingale fashion.

As I stepped out the door, Martin swiveled his head and looked straight at me. "Cheep!" he said, "Cheep, cheep!" Now, I don't speak Swallow, but I'm pretty sure he was asking "When is breakfast?" I took a step closer and he cheeped again, then leaped up and fluttered a short distance toward me, sprawling most inelegantly onto the terrace about three feet from where I stood. More cheeping ensued -- not the "Help, I'm being attacked by crazy lady with a box of TP" kind of cheeping, but more the "I've just left my nest and am still a little bit stupid" kind of cheeping.

I approached him slowly, talking in that silly saccharine tone that women use with babies and small dogs. "Hello, little fella. It's okay," I said. "I'm not gonna hurt you." (I'm sure he understood every word and felt enormously reassured.) Once I got close enough, I squatted down, slowly moved my open hand over his back, then gently I encircled his little body in a loose grip. He wriggled a little, but didn't struggle. As I lifted him, his feet caught hold of my thumb and he cheeped again. Bringing him closer to my face, I continued our conversation.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"Cheep," he replied.

"Having a little trouble this morning?"

"Cheep, cheep!"

"Anything I can do to help?"

"Cheep."

I turned him over to check for signs of injury. He didn't appear to be bleeding; his feet and legs looked fine; his tail feathers were a little short, but that probably had to do with his tender age. I gently opened each wing and they too looked well formed and adequately feathered.

"So, what's up?" I asked, turning him back over. "Are you supposed to be out on your own like this? Does your Mom know where you are?"

"Cheep, cheep, cheep!"

I opened my hand to see if he would flee, but he just sat there on my thumb, looking up at me with his wide, dark, trusting eyes. We exchanged pleasantries for a good ten minutes: I inquired after his siblings, asked if he was enjoying the mild July weather, complemented him on his new feathers, probed politely on his Autumn travel plans, and nodded convivially to each of his "Cheep!" responses. Concluding that he was physically sound, I decided I shouldn't detain him further from his business. So I placed him back in the patch of sun and assured him that I'd be "Just inside, if you need anything," then retreated to my office.

Back at my desk, once again wrestling with the recalcitrant export script, I kept an eye on Martin for the next half-hour. I was starting, again, to worry over his continued inactivity, when a sleek, arrow-like silhouette streaked into view, buzzed Martin's head, then alighted atop the retaining wall, just above him. It looked like Martin, only all grown-up. "Ah, this must be Mom," I thought to myself. My verdict was instantly confirmed when the elder swallow discharged a succession of scolding complaints that I'm guessing went something along the lines of, "Where have you been for the past two hours? Didn't I tell you not to cross the street by yourself? Your father and I have been worried sick! We thought you were lying in a ditch somewhere, dead!" Martin, cheeped back in capitulant docility, then, prompted by another of his mother's commands, joined her on top of the retaining wall.

She took off, immediately, swooping and darting in graceful figure-eights against the skyline, then returned to her perch beside Martin and, with the callous bark of a drill sergeant, chirped what I assume was the command: "Do it!" Martin cowered, shuffled his feet, looked side to side, then flung himself into the air with a frantic beating of wings and piloted his way, in clumsy dips and swerves, to the roof of Berkeley City Hall, across the street. His mother followed, whizzing past him, sliding swiftly through the air with one or two spare, staccato wing beats. Again they perched together, again she demonstrated, again he bumbled his way back over to my terrace. I watched, in delighted captivation, as the flying lesson continued for the next several minutes. Slowly but surely, Martin got the hang of it. There was less fluttering and more gliding; less hesitation on take-off; more graceful touch-downs. By the time they flitted away over the roof of my building and out of sight, he was flying very much like a proper swallow.

Later that day, on my way back from lunch, I dropped into the Walgreens on Shattuck Avenue and picked up a Thinking of You card for my Mom. "Thanks," I wrote to her, "for all the hours you spent kneeling in front of me with a smile on your face and your arms extended, as I teetered across the floor toward you, sometimes making it and sometimes plopping unceremoniously onto my diapered little behind. Thanks for holding my bony little frame afloat in the swimming pool and reminding me over and over keep my knees straight while kicking and blow the air out through my nose, while I flailed and splashed water in your face. Thanks for running up and down the street behind my little red bicycle, while I tried to figure out how to stop listing sideways onto my left training wheel and get myself upright. Thanks for holding my hands and walking in front of me while I shuffled and stumbled on my new roller-skates. Thanks for being calm and patient as you sat in the passenger seat of Dad's Chevy Nova, while I navigated us tentatively through the streets of Pleasant Hill, continuously asking 'How's my lane position?' and 'Am I going too fast?' And thanks for not getting exasperated every time I call you with a stupid question about how to be a grown up in this confusing, intimidating, daunting world."

Thanks for all the flying lessons, Mom. I love you.

Pool Smell

Here's a kooky circle-of-life thing: Two years ago, I started working in Downtown Berkeley, one block north of the YMCA, where (and this is the weird part) my parent's first met each other -- their respective swim teams both trained there. It's a strange feeling to walk past a building every day and know that, had it never existed, neither would you. But that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the smell -- that sharp, bracing, vaporous "pool" smell I catch a whiff of, each time I pass the frosted windows venting the Y's indoor swimming pool. It is a singularly distinctive bouquet of chlorine, sweat, ammonia, wet concrete and damp towels; and it's one of my favorite smells in the world.

I pretty much grew up in a perpetual haze of pool-smell. My parents are life-long swimmers. Both of them raced as children and Dad played water polo in college. At age 15, Mom won a gold metal, in the 200-meter breast stroke, at the 1955 Pan American Games. As an adult, she swam for exercise, including during all her pregnancies, which is why I'm relatively certain that pool-smell constituted one my first olfactory experiences (assuming one can smell in utero). While I was growing up, Mom and Dad were regulars at the local pool's evening lap swim and they came home each night with their skin and their soggy sweat clothes positively reeking of pool-smell. For me, that became the essence of strong, healthy, invigorated athletes.

Scientists and philosophers have long vacillated on now important the sense of smell is to humans. Weighed against sight and hearing, it has tended to rank low on the Can't-Live-Without Scale of sensory necessity. For centuries, learned scholars held that humans' sense of smell was superfluous and even disdainful; Plato and Kant had few kind words to say of olfaction, maintaining that it was vulgar, base and animalistic. Freud equated our need for smell with our need for a tail. (I don't know, Siggy Baby. There have been countless times when I've questioned the wisdom of abandoning my prehensile tail in deference to well-fitting trousers.) Modern day science is still not as interested in humans' sense of smell as it is our other senses, which I find particularly ironic, given the number of products that Madison Avenue is prepared to sell us for improving the ambient aromas surrounding our bodies, houses, cars, clothes, pets and major household appliances.

Our olfactory epithelia (little blobs of yellowish matter, located high in the roof of our nasal passages, whose job it is to detect chemicals in the air we breathe) maintain a high-bandwidth line of communication with important limbic system brain structures. These limbic structures have been with us since before we had opposable thumbs and, among other things, govern the incestuous fraternization of emotion with memory. Stimulating the limbic system, either by zapping it with electrodes (which tends only to happen to you if you are unlucky enough to have been born a lab rat, or stupid enough to use a blow-dryer while showering) or through natural sensory input (such as sniffing pool-smell), will thus trigger emotionally potent memories. Which is why pool-smell, for me, calls to mind tender thoughts of Mom and Dad.

Another of my favorite fragrances is Redway-smell -- a rich mélange of redwood needles, forest loam, dank cabin must, insect repellent, sunscreen, campfire smoke and river moss. It accumulates in my hair and clothes during the weeks I spend at my family's summer cabin, in Redway, California. It follows me back home in my duffles of dirty laundry and, like one of those Come Again Soon cards you get from B&Bs, a few days later Redway-smell cheerfully greets me with one last reminiscence, as I empty those duffles into my washing machine. Redway-smell makes me abandon all the up-tight, stressed-out, over-sanitized, self-conscious, rush-rush trappings of everyday life. Redway-smell is about snuggling in my sleeping bag until 9:30 a.m. while I listen to the dark-eyed junkos twittering in the scrub around me. It's about blistering my hands in a wood chopping competition with my little brother (because little brothers need to be put in their place, from time to time). It's about crisping my shoulders at the beach because, once again, I got engrossed in To Kill a Mocking Bird and forgot to replenish my sunscreen. It's about lazing for hours on the hammock, staring up into the tops of thousand-year old redwood trees and thinking about how my great grandmother did exactly the same thing when she was here. It's about swatting mosquitoes around the campfire while waiting for my steak to cook. And it's about bumping three of my nephews around camp, in an old Radio-Flyer, while leading them in 17 choruses of Old McDonald Had a Farm, stopping at 17 only because I've run out of farm animals and have now moved on to "...and on that farm he had an iguana, E, I, E, I, O!" I love Redway-smell.

Art-store smell is another one I like: part piney turpentine, part cedar pencils; the lubricious tang of oil paints mixed with a mellow waxy crayon odor; the solventy spice of rubber cement together with the sweet viscous aroma of white glue; finally add to that an acrid, rubbery eraser smell and a crisp scent of fresh paper and canvas. It's an aromatic collage of creativity. Art-store smell sets my mind scattering off into a thousand inspired directions at once.

Flower-stop smell, on the other hand, can banish every pestilent thought from my head, and within five seconds have me espousing love for all mankind. How could anyone possibly have a bad day while surrounded by that heavenly scent. Florists must be the happiest people on the planet. Thirty or so years from now, when I retire from my "real" job, I'm going to go work in a florist shop where I can spend my golden years inhaling essence of chrysanthemums and eau d'oasis.

Then there's old-church smell. Not new-church smell, mind you. New churches usually just smell of carpet and conditioned air. But old churches -- the ones that have been around for a century or so -- have an atmospheric patina redolent of life itself: birth, death, marriage, joy, sorrow, talk, song, prayer, silence. Old-church smell is an evocative synthesis of beeswax, incense, flowers, polished wood, dusty hymnals, starched altar linens, spilled wine, and a dank moldy draft that whispers mysteriously down the aisles. Old-church smell makes me talk softly and become suddenly conscious of the echoing tap-tap-tap my heels make on the floor. It makes me imagine clicking rosary beads and the murmured incantations of blue-haired Novena League ladies. Old-church smell fills me with awe and reverence, which I guess is appropriate.

All in all, I find this smell business quite fascinating, really. Smells are quintessentially intangible, difficult to measure and harder still to describe. Their qualities are subjective such that what appeals to me may repulse you and vice versa. They are an elusively recondite presence, hovering over us like an invisible puppeteer, manipulating our moods and whims. I don't mean to go overboard here -- I'm not prepared to subscribe unquestioningly to the touchy-feely tenets of aromatherapy; I doubt that sniffing anise will cure arthritis, or that inhaling rosewood will relieve a fever, and I'm sure as hell not going to let a dentist drill into my teeth while I forgo good old fashioned Novacaine in favor of a snort of cinnamon. But neither can I assert that I am entirely unaffected by odiferous influences. Moreover, I am not prepared to let my nose go the way of the prehensile tail because, in the end, whether the smells are pleasant or vile, whether they conjure sweet or sour memories, they constitute the frosting on my cake of life.

And isn't it comforting to know that, as long as there are swimming pools to sniff, Mom and Dad will be by my side.

Are You Sure?

I spent this past Sunday afternoon attending to sundry household minutiae that women typically only worry about prior to a visit from their Mother-in-Law. Now, either fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it ) I don't have a Mother-in-Law, but I do have a hypercritical Superego, which is effectively the same thing. So it was that Sunday found me, vacuuming the treads and risers of all my stairs, dusting the tops of all my baseboards, tweezing the dead moths out of the living room torchère, sanitizing the inside of my refrigerator with a 3% bleach solution, aligning the soup cans in my pantry (again), leveling all my wall art, and re-hanging the garments in my closet so their fronts all faced north. That done, I decided to conclude the afternoon's industry by purging my PowerBook's Documents folder of extraneous files.

After installing myself comfortably on the sofa, I propped my legs up on the coffee table, balanced Pipsqueak (my PowerBook's name is "Pipsqueak") across my thighs, and occupied a full hour systematically opening and evaluating the usefulness of each saved document. Those that did not pass muster I dragged to the trash. Once satisfied that I had rounded up and paddocked all the offending files, I issued a Shift+Command+Delete order to summarily banish them from my hard drive.

As it is wont to do, Mac OS X prudently queried, "Are you sure you want remove the items in the trash permanently?" Of course my first reaction was, "Yes, damn it! Delete already!" (I'm sure you will concur on the annoying nature of this "Are you sure?" business, which lately seems to preface every software function of consequence and quite a few of no consequence whatsoever.) But then, with a moment's pause, I got to thinking: How many of us are ever really sure about anything in life? At some level, couldn't we question our resolve on every of the myriad decisions we make each day? Starting with, "Are you sure you want to get out of bed this morning?" we could move on to, "Are you sure you want to wear clothes today?" then, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to eat Fruit Loops for breakfast instead of this organic muesli that looks more like patio sweepings than food?"

Would it be useful if Life's OS were to ask us, "Are you sure?" from time to time? Or would that become annoying too? In retrospect, let me say that perhaps I was slightly looped from having breathed too many bleach fumes, but whatever the cause, I spent the remainder of the day traveling a not entirely uninteresting path of introspection centering on how my life would be different now, had there been timely "Are you sure?" queries at certain critical moments.

"Are you sure you want to race Matchbox cars on top of Mom's coffee table?" would have been a good place to start. I think I was about eight years old. My brother, Bert, three years my junior, and I had an enviable Matchbox collection. My favorite was a magenta, Classic Cord with a retro roof, which I still have, though the roof is missing. One afternoon, when Mom was at the grocery store, we decided it would be fun to race our cars in circles on top of her maple, American colonial coffee table. We scratched the finish horribly and I remember thinking, "Mom's not going to like this." But when you're eight, the integrity of your mother's coffee table doesn't hold the same import as winning a Matchbox race against your little brother. In the end, Mom was none too pleased, Bert and I spent the next week in penitent servitude, during which I learned some valuable household cleaning methods that would serve me well into adulthood, and the coffee table eventually got refinished. So, really, it was win/win all around.

The next occasion I can recall, wherein I might have benefited from an "Are you sure?" prompt, was a couple of years later when Bert and I were playing Hidden Pirate Treasure in the front yard. We each had little bags of quarters, hoarded from our weekly 50¢ allowances (only half of which we were permitted to squander on tooth-rotting confections from Bruce's Variety Store; the other half went into our 0%-interest bearing piggy banks). I believe my bag of pirate treasure totaled nearly $3 -- a veritable fortune by my standards of the time. Which is why a well timed, "Are you sure you want to close your eyes and let Bert bury your bag of quarters somewhere in the yard so you can go hunt for it later?" would have been serendipitous just then. I never did find the bag and Bert couldn't remember where he put it. (Some pirate he'd make, huh!) From this I learned that it pays to invest your savings, rather than secret it away in a ceramic pig or a hole in the ground. So I guess you could say that, notwithstanding the $3 stupidity fee, I came out ahead on that one as well.

At age 13, I could have stood a well-timed "Are you sure you want to ride your bicycle barefooted?" because there is still a numb spot on the medial aspect of my big, right toe, where the flesh was... well, I won't describe the injury to you, but let's just say that it was horror-film worthy. Continuing along this theme: At 17, prudent consideration of the question, "Are you sure you want to attempt a racing dive into the shallow end of the community swimming pool?" could have averted the singularly unpleasant experience of piercing two teeth through my bottom lip. More importantly, it would have spared me the consummate humiliation of having my wound attended to by Tom: the tall, blond, pulse-quickening hunk of a life-guard, for whom I harbored ardent teenage lust. Only as little as seven years ago, "Are you sure you want to ride your nephew's Razor scooter wearing platform shoes?" might have been an advisable musing, given that in a face-versus-sidewalk collision, the face always loses. Fortunately, my physical mementos from all three incidents are superficial and, on occasion, provide fodder for some interesting conversation. So, again, there's a silver lining for me.

Of course, there have been countless "Are you sure?" fashion decisions throughout my life. Notable among them, a wholesale and seriously misguided subscription to the Flashdance look, followed forthwith by a detour into what I call my "Nature Girl" phase -- my sister, Kit, refers to it as the "Crappy-Earth-Tone Years" -- coinciding with my enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley. There were also one or two "Are you sure?" coiffures and a few "Are you sure?" culinary endeavors. But, fortunately, none of those left me with permanent disfigurations (not counting my asymmetrical ear piercings).

Flipping the coin over, there are many ways in which my life is richer because nobody asked me, "Are you sure?" For instance, I am sincerely glad that question didn't come into play when I decided to hike up Mt. Whitney (at 14,505 ft. elevation, the highest point in the continental United States). Although "Hell no!" was my first response to the proposition that I join my (now ex-) boyfriend for that little adventure, once committed, I didn't question my certainty about wanting to kick that mountain's butt -- not until I was half way up, anyway, and by then the question was pointless. Standing on the summit, next to that U.S.G.S. placard, I felt like I could fly. I am also especially glad there was no voice questioning whether I was sure I wanted to spend three days backpacking into the Grand Canyon with my 60-something year old mother. Perhaps she wasn't so sure at first, but I knew it would be a wonderful trip. Sleeping on the Canyon floor, surrounded by two-billion year-old rocks, next to your Mom, feeling both exhausted and exhilarated, is an indescribably awesome experience. Neither of us will ever forget it.

On balance, then, it seems that I have fared reasonably well in life, without an "Are you sure?" at every turn. After all, I'm still here, aren't I? And all my extremities are still intact. I've still got all my own teeth. On the whole, I'm a fiscally responsible person and I only wear leg-warmers during ballet class. I now know that I am capable of hauling myself and a 60-pound backpack, up a mountain into the rarefied atmosphere of 14,000 feet elevation. And, best of all, Mom and I have this terrific inside joke about how many flushes it takes to dispose of calamata olives in the toilet at the Bright-Angel campground. (You had to be there.) So, I guess those software geeks can keep "Are you sure?" to themselves , because I'm really doing fine without it...

Except perhaps for my closet. On second thought, am I sure I want my clothes facing north instead of south? What with me being right-handed and all.

Notes on a Tomato Plant

There is a tomato plant growing from a pavement seam, next to Track No. 4 of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system's MacArthur station. I noticed it a few weeks ago and now I am alltogether fixated on its plight. Every day I check to see: Is it still there? Or did some brutish maintenance worker squirt it with Roundup? What's the tomato count? Have any more of them ripened?

For you non-locals, BART is the San Francisco Bay Area's main commuter rail system and the MacArthur station is one of its busiest. At the height of rush hour, hundreds of passengers race pell-mell up and down the station stairs, indiscriminately bashing each other with their messenger bags and wheeled brief cases; ten-car trains rumble through at three-minute intervals on four different tracks. The station itself stands adjacent to The Maze, the Bay Area's busiest freeway interchange, with six lanes of heavy traffic pounding past on both sides.

And in the middle of this bedlam, inches from the rampaging flow of Richmond-to-San Francisco trains, stands that silly tomato plant. Quiet as you please. Soaking up the sun as if it was rooted in some old lady's window box; just going about its own business, photosynthesizing and producing round globes of succulent fruit without help from anyone. I find that amazing.

This week it was sporting about three bright red tomatoes, with another four or so green ones waiting on the sidelines. Nobody molests it. The fruit, unreachable from the platform, remains unplundered. Before long, the tomatoes will ripen, then fall to the concrete, rot and desiccate; the plant's leaves and stem will brown and shrivel; the loosed, dry seeds will blow about in Autumn's cool breezes and some will find their way into other pavement seams on the station platform. Next year those crevices might issue forth still more tomato plants. And so the cycle will continue, just as nature intended. In a decade, the entire station may be nothing but one huge tomato patch.

OK, not really, but that little plant, along with every blade of grass or a bloom of dandelion I see valiantly thrusting itself through a sidewalk crack, reminds me of nature's awesome resilience and dogged persistence -- despite our best efforts to screw it up, Earth will prevail. As much as we humans contrive, construct, convolute, control and commit all sorts of nastiness on this precious little blue marble we inhabit, when we are gone, the planet will take itself back and miss us not even fractionally. It will wait, patiently and quietly, while we asphyxiate and poison ourselves into oblivion, and then it will repopulate itself with some other species and forget all about us.

The issues we currently face surrounding environmental degradation -- global warming, pollution, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, destruction of ecosystems -- do not threaten our planet. They threaten us: you, me, our kids, the fat guy next to me on the BART train who's hogging more than his fair share of the seat, his kids... We're not destroying the planet, we're just making it completely unlivable for our kind. I suspect that, after the human race has returned to dust, whatever is left of Earth's organisms will, like weary party hosts, heave a sign of relief and say, "Thank goodness that's over. I thought they would never leave!"

Prevailing paleontological theory maintains that there have been five mass extinctions in Earth's history. None killed fewer than 50% of the planet's organisms. The worst obliterated 90% of all Earth's species. And (surprise, surprise) all five occurred due to climate change. The first of these events -- the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, 439 million years ago -- happened when glaciers froze over the planet's surface causing obvious logistical problems for the predominantly marine-based life forms of the time. (It's kind of hard to breathe when your gills are frozen.) Somewhere between 50% and 60% of marine genera died off.

The next extinction -- a bit of a mystery -- ended the Devonian period (364 million years ago) and hosted the swan song of 57% of earth's marine genera. That extinction was probably also tied to global cooling, though paleontologists are still arguing over the ultimate cause. They throw around terms like, "stable isotopic excursions," "tektites," "platinum-iridium anomalies," and "physico-chemical events." It's not pretty. Don't watch unless you've got a strong stomach.

The Permian-Triassic extinction (251 million years ago), which has also been called "The Great Dying" or "The Mother of All Extinctions," relegated 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates to the fossil realm. Some believe that Earth's biodiversity has never since recovered to match that of the Permian period. The Permian-Triassic extinction, and the one that followed at the end of the Triassic period (about 200 million years ago) -- which, in case you're keeping tally, spelled quits-ville for 52% of marine genera -- are thought to have been caused by global cooling resulting from a double-whammy of asteroid impacts (causing some hellacious Spare the Air days) and massive volcanic eruptions that generated noxious gases surpassing all current-day SUV exhaust emissions and cow farts combined.

The last of the five major speciation do-overs happened a mere 65 million years ago (yesterday, by galactic standards), at the end of the Cretaceous period. Again, asteroids and volcanoes were to blame -- a plummeting hunk of space trash gave us Yucatan's Chicxulub Crater and a massive lava flow in India created the Deccan Traps. Nearly half of the earth's marine genera, along with 18% of its land vertebrate families, including Dino & Co., paid their bills and checked out -- permanently. It was only then that, hidden somewhere in the duff of a gymnosperm forest, a small band of tree shrews began launching their take-over plans. And, through a miraculous series of evolutionary accidents, not to mention utter dumb luck, here we are -- running the planet, or so we think.

Modern humans have existed for only the smallest fraction of Earth's history. And for only a still smaller fraction of that time have we had means to exert measurable control over our environment. We are specks in time; we are a cosmic triviality. We are weak, soft-bodied, dull-toothed, clawless, naked apes who would long ago have become hiena-chow, were it not for an overly-developed, highly-specialized bundle of neurons floating delicately inside the bony sphere we carry atop our shoulders. That neuronal mass has endowed us with an astounding intelligence, but also and quite unfortunately, an obnoxious arrogance, which I fear will be our undoing. But, I believe there is hope -- if only we can learn to truly treasure our world.

If you can manage it some day soon, I challenge you to pry yourself away from your T.V. and march your lazy butt a couple of days into the nearest wilderness area, where I guarantee you will become swiftly and wondrously reacquainted with the quality of your own insignificance. You will suddenly feel very small and vulnerable and you will, hopefully, realize what a very big place the world is, how it's not always particularly friendly, how it really doesn't care whether you live or die, and how it is certainly deserves more respect than you are currently affording it. Moreover, you will hopefully come to recognize just how tenuous, and at the same time tenacious, life is.

The global events that led to Earth's previous mass extinctions were huge -- far beyond any cataclysm humankind has yet witnessed and possibly far beyond any cataclysm humankind could generate. Nobody knows for sure whether the current atrocities we perpetrate on this planet are significant enough to precipitate our own extinction. This tiny globe we live on, in a distant corner of an obscure galaxy, in an incomprehensibly vast universe -- this planet is a moody thing. In its 4.6-billion-year history, Earth has been variously gaseous, molten, soggy, parched, sweltering, frigidly, noxious, desolate, teeming and violent. For the blip of time we have lived here, Earth has been a relative paradise. Anomalously so.

Perhaps the global warming we are currently observing has nothing to do with our dependence on petroleum-powered machines or our destruction rain-forest acreage in the millions. Perhaps the polar ice-caps would be melting anyway, because, like the life-cycle of that tomato plant on the BART tracks, it is just nature's way. Perhaps there's nothing we can do about it. Or perhaps there is. Humans are a part of nature and ourselves possess the same awesome resilience and dogged persistence as the MacArthur tomato plant. If only -- as they say in the comic books -- we would use our powers for good instead of evil. However you look at it, I don't think it would hinder the cause if we paid some respect to our wondrously beautiful home -- while we're still here to appreciate it.

Bill Bryson, in the concluding paragraphs of his A Short History of Nearly Everything, said it better than I can:

"...We are awfully lucky to be here -- and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally, modern human beings -- that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities -- have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks."

Born Yesterday

On my most recent foray to the globally franchised bookstore that I shamefacedly frequent, I was bumping around the History & Politics section when my attention fell to a book, entitled The Long Walk: The True Story of A Trek to Freedom. Maybe you've heard of it. It's by Slavomir Rawicz and accounts his capture by the Red Army in 1939, his imprisonment in a Siberian work camp, and his alleged escape and trek to freedom, on foot, over Siberian tundra, frozen rivers, Gobi sands and Himalayan peaks, to British-controlled India, some 4,000 miles south.

If you have already heard of it, congratulations. You were one up on me. If you are also privy to the controversy surrounding its veracity, I give you further props and suspect that you are either a history geek or old enough to have witnessed the media hubbub first hand, when the book was published in 1956. Though I like to think of myself as a shrewd cookie, not easily suckered into believing outlandish tales, my instincts failed me in the case of Rawicz's opus.

Jacketed in some fabulously compelling cover art (we're looking at tangled barbed wire and a blood red sunset), the current edition bears Stephen Ambrose's ringing endorsement about how he "...absolutely could not put [it] down," Sebastian Junger's approbation that "...it must be read, and re-read," plus sundry other words of laud and honor from none other than the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. How could I resist?

Those who know me well will tell you that I harbor a disturbing fascination for books in the man-versus-nature genre, most especially when the "nature" half of that equation involves Himalayan mountains. I am particularly taken with accounts of the stalwart souls who first traversed those lofty peaks during the early- and mid-20th century. I am talking about people like George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who first attempted and possibly summited Mt. Everest, though we'll never know because they died trying. Or guys like Noel Odell, who was first to bag Nanda Devi and, coincidentally, last to see Mallory and Irvine alive. Then there's Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, who were the first to summit Everest and return to tell about it. Honorable mentions go to Maurice Herzog (first to ascend Annapurna), Hermann Bhul (first to ascend Nang Parbat), and Sydney Wignall, who's gripping quarto, Spy on the Roof of the World, chronicles his recruitment into the Indian secret service, his capture and extended interrogation by Chinese communists, then his escape through uncharted Himalayan territory. (Read it. It's great.)

Those guys had some serious cojones, man. In many cases, their first challenge was to find the mountain they wanted to climb. (Herzog's Annapurna stands as a classic example of same. Read it too; also great.) Only after accomplishing that arduous task could they attempt to summit -- using, I might add, some woefully primitive gear (by today's standards). A photo taken by Odell, of Mallory and Irvine, on June 2, 1924, as they left the North Col for their summit push, shows the two in what are probably wool jackets, pants and socks, fur-lined caps and leather hobnail boots. No goose down. No Gortex. No ultra-wicking poly-blends. None of that sissy stuff. Their tents were canvas A-frames. Their ice axes had wooden handles and their ropes were twisted hemp. Today's mountaineers wouldn't dream of attempting Everest thusly equipped.

So, having read stories of the Great Ones, and being a competent outdoorswoman myself, I should have felt the pull on my leg as I paged through Rawicz's increasingly far-fetched chapters. But I didn't. I just sat there, doe-eyed and sighing, complete rapt over his haunting tale of perseverance and fortitude. (The book is eloquent; I'll give it that. But it's complete twaddle -- eloquent twaddle.) The jig was up a few days ago, when my curiosity itched to see photos of Rawicz and his fellow escapees. They sounded like quite a cast of characters -- a Polish border guard, a toothless Polish cavalryman, a blond Latvian giant, a Yugoslavian clerk with a penchant for stand-up comedy, a tight-lipped Lithuanian architect, and an American engineer with the cryptic moniker, "Mr. Smith," not to mention a coquettish 17-year old imp, named Kristina, who they pulled from under a bush, somewhere near Lake Baikal. (Hollywood couldn't have scripted it better. That alone should have made me suspicious.)

Google Images led me to Rawicz's photo in a BBC article, which demolished my naïveté with the efficiency of a chicken-kick to the head. Unlike me, people who read the book in 1956 immediately questioned whether a human could actually achieve what Rawicz claimed to have. "Critics particularly questioned one chapter in the book," the BBC states, "where the [escapees] apparently see a pair of yetis."

Yetis? Are you kidding me? Did they happen to spot the Tooth Fairy as well? How about Nessie? Any UFOs? Gnomes? Closet Monsters?

I seek solace in a personal conviction that had I, in my reading, reached Rawicz's yeti encounter, my bullshit meter would have tilted deeply into the red. I'll never get to that page, however, because I'm so thoroughly irritated with own gullibility, that I don't intend to finish the book. What most annoys me is that I overlooked some glaringly conspicuous malarkey surrounding the whole footwear situation. Allow me to explain.

Most debunkers focus simply on the improbable length of Rawicz's journey. How could a human walk over 4,000 miles from Siberia to India? That question is not bothering me. With enough time and a few smarts, even an ill-equipped trekker could walk such a distance. Next, his critics carp on Rawicz's claim that he and five of his crew survived an estimated 13 days in the Gobi desert without water -- he's not sure; they lost count. Now, in case your survival acumen is rusty, prevailing wisdom has it that a human can survive three to five days without water. But I'm prepared to give on that issue as well, on the grounds that Rawicz may have overestimated of the number of days they were actually in the Gobi -- being so delirious from dehydration and all.

Here's where I choked on my own stupidity:

In Chapter 4, Rawicz relates how, in a snow-covered potato field outside Irkutsk, his Russian captors issued him "rubberized canvas boots, laced to a point a few inches above the ankle." From what I can tell, he didn't have socks. Wearing these boots, he and the other internees walked 1,000 miles, over two months (December and January), through snow and blizzards, to Work Camp 303 located (allegedly) 400 miles southwest of Yukutsk and -- get this -- his toes didn't get frostbitten. Unlikely. But I missed that.

Next, in Chapter 10, he relates how, after having escaped Camp 303 and traveled a distance of perhaps 600 miles south, toward Lake Baikal, "the Irkutsk issue rubber boots [were] discarded as worn out" and all that remained for footwear was "long strips of thick linen" and sable moccasins "with skin gaiters wound round with straps of hide." In these, he walked 30 miles per day, in the snow, for (as best I can tell) three days. Hmm... That's 90 miles, in three days, in the snow, wearing the equivalent of bedroom slippers. And still no frostbitten toes. Doubtful. That one slid by me too.

Moving forward, in Chapter 11, Rawicz claims that he and his then six companions killed a "full-grown male deer" and made 14 new pair of moccasins (two for each man) from its hide with "still a piece of skin each left," which they saved presumably for future re-treading. You may be interested to know that I have made several pair of plains moccasins myself (they're great low-impact camp shoes for backpacking trips), and they require about three square feet of leather per pair (for a woman's size-nine foot). Even if we were so generous as to concede that all seven men had dainty little size-niners, they would still have needed at least 42 square feet of deer hide for this little merit badge project. (In case you're wondering, the biggest whole deer hide you can find is about 17 square feet.) Must have been one hell of a deer they slew. That one sneaked by me as well.

Rawicz makes no further mention of worn-out moccasins until his recounting of their arrival in the Himalayan foothills (a distance of 2,600 miles hence), which was where I left them when I put down the book, in disgust. I'll never know exactly how much farther their deerskin moccasins lasted but here's food for thought: I once wore 25% of the tread off my Vibram-soled hiking boots, on one 12-mile hike up and down California's Mt. Whitney. You do the math.

Rawicz's defenders have said that, though his facts may be flimsier than cheesecloth, the book serves as an inspirational account for those facing seemingly insurmountable odds -- "a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the universal desire for freedom and dignity" (quote from the nameless cover-blurbologist). Okay, fine, but let's not market it as a "true" story, then. Huh? Let's stick it in the Fiction Section, next to Paul Coelho's The Alchemist.

Bottom Line: If you are in the market for an eloquently constructed yarn, by all means, read Rawicz's book. If, however, you want to read a true story of escaped prisoners trekking through the Himalayas, stick with Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet. It may not be as eloquent as Rawicz's work, but at least Harrer has his footwear in order.

Quirks and Closet Monsters

Quirks. Everybody has them -- little personality kinks, oddities of temperament that cause us to wonder exactly where we, as individuals, fall under the normal bell curve of human strangeness. (Am I the only one who is twisted or is the boat of life filled with wackos?) I'm talking about the kinds of foibles that, among the broad strokes, don't matter unless you happen to be accused of serial murder, in which case everyone says, "Ah, yes, of course. We should have suspected she was a sociopath. She knits sweaters from her cat's fur, for Crimeny sake!" (Just for the record: I don't do that. No cat. Can't knit. Swear to God.)

There is this one thing about me, however, that I'm sure will end up in the prosecuting attorney's body of evidence if anyone ever discovers where I've stashed the severed heads. I figure it's bound to come out eventually, so by way of introduction, and in the spirit of the I'm-OK-You're-OK Zeitgeist in which I grew up, I share with you my strangest eccentricity:

I can't sleep if the the closet door is open.

Never could, not even as a child. Back then, it was because of Closet Monster. He materialized every night, as soon as Mom flicked out the lights. Through the crack in the closet door, I could feel him staring at me from those darkened depths, his coal-black eyes burning holes into my tender, young flesh. Sometimes I could hear him breathing -- a low, hungry, wolfish pant. I knew his plan: he was waiting for me to slip off into dreamland so he could come out and swallow me whole. The only reason I am alive today is because I would, within seconds of Mom's departure, leap from bed into the center of the room (thus avoiding the clutches of Under-the-Bed Monster), run to the closet, slam the door closed, then leap back into bed and dive under the covers (because, as I'm sure you recall, children hiding under covers are impervious to physical harm.)

When I moved out of my parent's house, Closet Monster stayed behind, as did Under-the-Bed Monster. I believe the two, along with Garage Monster and Woodshed Monster, formed a sort of cartel with a goal of consuming future grandchildren. Now I live in a house that is 99% monster free (there's one in the attic, but I never go up there so it doesn't matter). Still, I find it impossible to fall asleep if my closet doors are open. Worse still, this quirk of mine has metastasized to subsume all open closet doors in my house, as well as open bureau drawers and open kitchen cupboards. If they no-a shut, I no-a snooze.

As would any practiced neurotic, I have invested shamefully immoderate quantities of time cogitating on the marrow of this quirk. My free-associative self-analysis has led me to conclude that it no longer has to do with monsters. Rather, I have surmised that my quirk's current roots lie entangled in those nourishing my visually-oriented, nit-picker sensibilities -- the same ones that can't stand to have little puddles of water left standing on the kitchen counter. (Pardon me, one moment, while I shudder at the mere thought of them.) My conclusion, therefore, is that I am suffering from Clutter Aversion Syndrome.

Further introspection has led me to implicate Clutter Aversion Syndrome in a number of my other hang-ups. Chief among them is the whole soup-can-alignment thing I mentioned in last week's post. (But, I've stopped combing the fringe on my throw-rugs. It was taking up too much time, so I went out and bought new, fringe-less rugs. Clever, no?) I think Clutter Aversion Syndrome is also manifested in my abhorrence for extra spaces left at the end of paragraphs in word-processing documents (those of you in the copy-editing world will, no doubt, empathize). And, it's probably also responsible for the eye-twitch I develop when (like) listening to (like) people -- typically, vacuous, gum-snapping, cell-phone addicted, 20-something Paris-Hilton wannabes wearing those ridiculous bug-eye sun glasses -- who (like) litter their speech with (like) the word "like." (Ya, know?) And while I'm thinking of it, perhaps this also accounts for why I require that the toilet paper always be hung with the business end out in front of the roll, instead of back against the wall.

We're not talking OCD here. I don't check, a million times, that the lights are off before I leave the house. I don't count out the same number of Cheerios into my bowl every morning. I don't wash my hands until they're raw and bleeding. I don't floss every damned day... oh, wait, yes I do. We all do, don't we. And we never lie to our dentists about it. Right? (Just nod "yes" and smile.)

So, this closet door thing is harmless, really. Just a minor eccentricity. I'm not a wacko. I don't need to be medicated. You don't need to warn your kids away from me when we meet in the park. And my "alleged" stash of severed heads is not from dinner guests who failed to close the kitchen cupboard after getting themselves a glass of water. Really, it's not. (Again, just nod "yes" and smile. And maybe back away slowly... with no sudden movements.)

In The Beginning...

I suppose the beginning of a blog mandates some stripe of explanation. Some answer to the "why" other than just the "because."

Why would a busy, perfectionistic, creatively-over-diversified, organizationally-obsessed woman, with a full-time job and an already overflowing cosmic dinner plate, take time away from aligning the soup cans in her pantry and combing the fringe on her throw rugs, to assume the added responsibility of a generating semi-isochronal installments of droll (hopefully) discourse to entertain the masses (or maybe just the few)?

Two reasons, really.

First, I enjoy writing; especially creatively. I do a lot of writing during those 40 hours per week that my butt is planted in a PBDE-laden office chair, while I bask in the lambent glow of my 22-inch flat-screen, my eyes succumbing ever so incrementally to focal-strain myopia. Unfortunately, said labor usually centers around the construction of endless budget justifications, explaining, in somniferous detail, how (and I quote) "rates for standard-cost line items incurred in integral quantities that do not vary by the project’s staff level of effort (LOE), are calculated by applying the defined standard rate to an adjusted percent LOE, derived from the formula, Percent LOE on Project × (1 ÷ Percent Appointment)."

See, you're bored already. That kind of writing isn't creative. It's insipid. It's torpid. It's also a little bit bullshity... actually, it's completely bullshity.

At work, I don't get to use words like "somniferous," "torpid" or "insipid." And I only get to use "bullshity" when characterizing the excuses dispensed by our IT Department's mouthpiece, regarding why the Internet connection is so slow -- but even then, never in hard-copy. I don't get to use figurative language, contractions, allusions, irony, rampant sarcasm, ellipses... wait, where was I going with this?

Oh, yeah. Writing for work sucks. So that's reason number one for this blog -- a clamorous yearning for inventive expression.

Reason number two arises from the product of three personal factors:

1. I am extremely observant of the world around me.
2. I have strong opinions about how it should be run.
3. I live alone.

Come 5:00 p.m., when I have arrived home, stowed my Timbuk2 in the closet, kicked off my clogs, recycled the junk-mail, flopped onto the sofa and cracked open my evening Pepsi (some people have a brandy, I have a Pepsi), there are only two living organisms readily available, to which I can recount the events of my day: a long suffering peace lily and a finicky orchid. Neither are terribly conversant. Neither appreciates a good pun, let alone a well-timed Monty Python quote. The peace lily listens, nods thoughtfully and, I believe, tries to empathize, but the orchid stares off into the middle-distance, like a sullen teenager. (Really, I'm just waiting for the supercilious little stick to die so I can buy the peace lily a less uppity neighbor.) But I digress.

So it is, fair citizens of blogdom, that you shall be the ear into which I pour my non-bullshitty prose. And if you find my writing somniferous, torpid, insipid or if find yourself drifting off into...

Well, there are about 257 kajillion other blogs out there. You and the orchid can click the "Next Blog" button to your heart's content. (Though I doubt the orchid has a heart, really.)