Yard work day. Pruning shears, barrow, heavy lifting – all that and a temperature reaching for 90. I haven’t put in a day like that in way too long. Felt good. I’ll hurt tomorrow. OK. In an hour I’ll be sleeping like a marble slab, but right now malt beverage is in order. Secure the butts, Gunny; see  the brass is policed up.The smoking lamp is out.

Yesterday’s paper said we’ve given more money to Afghanistan than we paid for the Marshall plan. It added we should expect less accomplishment in return. I read stuff like that and my anger about greasy CEO’s sags a bit. When you live in a country whose leaders think bribing thieves and retrograde morons is the key to peace, why get mad at our homegrown thieves who are smart enough to dodge their taxes and watch the rest of us send our money to tyrants?  

Just got off the phone with our son, talking about 3D printing, He’s been kicking the stable gate for years waiting for this stuff. It’s our century’s answer to steam and electricity. He sees the potential. Just for starters, imagine a guy in Marfa, Texas who can take your salt-water ruined Rolex (you should be so lucky in the first place) and duplicate it, Precisely. Watch out; these little “ain’t that amusing?” toys are going to change the world.Exciting times.

Sometimes I like to imagine being a farmer. It’s so much more pleasant than actually growing things. I would point to my tomatoes. I would, but I won’t. They’re far too sensitive. A careless glance and they break out in blossom end rot. (Suggestive definition, no?) Good weather? Sunshine is brutality; they hang limp as scolded children. A good, cleansing drink of water? Cracks to hide in. But I am a slave to their luscious beauty, trapped in a humiliating one-sided relationship. Until I need a salad. Right now will do fine.

At least a half-dozen hummingbirds, fledglings and adults, have staked out the yard. A batch of dragonflies have claimed it, as well. Show-offs, every one of them, and belligerent. Stand out on the back deck and you’re in the middle of ongoing 1918 dogfights. All we lack at McQuinn Aerodrome is Snoopy and the Red Baron quaffing root beer.

Some days are so grand they make just about any troublesome stuff fade to black. Got up late and lazy this morning and wandered out onto the deck with the dog Terrible and it was better than opening the perfect gift. The Sound’s glinting in the sun, reflecting a cloudless sky, the breeze is heavy with salt air and the richness of land after a good rain. Hummingbirds swirl and glitter a few feet away. In the distance, Rainier watches. I asked the dog, “Does it get any better than this?” and she just looked up at me and wagged her tail. (She’s a truly crummy conversationalist, but she’ll let you know she has your mood tagged.) I hope you’re having a good day, too. Lots of them.

You can probably tell my son salvaged my computer from the hack creeps.

Naming names. I’m working on something new – sort of trying it on to see how it fits – and the characters are bugging me. The worst part is, I know exactly what’s wrong: I can’t come up with the right names. I can see them clearly enough. I’ve got a pretty good handle on how they think and why they do stuff. But the names aren’t right. You know what I mean. It’s the same way in real life. Some guys are christened Michael and that’s who they are forever. The Michael in the next crib over is Mike as soon as he shows up and you know the only people who’ll ever be comfortable calling him Michael are his mother and his wife. There’s a page of names out there somewhere showing how Dickens struggled to name Nicholas Nickleby. I probably take more solace from that than I should, but I figure if Dickens had trouble, I’m allowed any amount of stumble and halt. So let’s hear it for calling people names – so long as they work.

Today’s been sticky and it’s not over. I’m downsizing the place, and obviously one of the things that has to go is books. I’m hanging onto the signed copies and first editions and whatnot; someone in the family will want those. In some cases they know the authors. In every case of the signed books, they know I do. There’s a continuance there; the book has a power beyond being a fine read. It’s a link, friend-to-friend, family to family. Then there are books about writing, again some by friends in the game, some by other professionals I haven’t met but wish I had. Reading them is always inspiring, almost always educational (no matter how often you’ve read it before) and – most important – a reminder that I’m one of the luckiest men I ever met. I’m disposing of just about all the books from my previous career – everything from Lee’s Lieutenants to WWII in Europe to Irwin Rommel’s between-world-wars treatise on small unit actions and Sledge’s (practically) minute-by-minute history of his part in the Corps’ war in the Pacific. I know very, very few of those militaria authors but I had the honor and privilege of serving with some of the original cast, so a few of those go in the lockerbox for the descendants to puzzle over somewhere down the line.

What gets really tough is looking at an old, back-broken, raggedy mess and remembering it from your childhood. Example: Albert Payson Terhune’s collection of stories called My Friend The Dog, my copy published in 1926 by Harper & Brothers, first copyright 1922. I don’t even remember who gave it to me, but it was old when I got it. I read it and re-read it, always jammed in a corner where no one could see, because it made me cry. I wasn’t a kid who wanted other people to know I did stuff like that. I have a couple of books like that. They won’t go yet. I have to read them at least once more.

I guess I’m being foolish about it all. They’re paper and glue. Maybe cloth covers, maybe paperback. Inanimate objects, nothing more, and they get to move on just like we do. That’s the way it is. But damn it, though, sometimes I feel like I’m turning my back on a friend. It kind of hurts, you know?

There was a column in today’s Seattle Times complaining about people smoking marijuana in public. The author was offended because he was being forced to accept the second-hand smoke (is it just me, or is that one of the clumsiest phrases ever invented?) from joints in an area where puffing on a Camel a year ago could buy you a one-way ticket to Siberia. (OK, Wenatchee. Picky, picky.) He reports the police enforcing the law, which is pretty restrictive concerning cannabis pollution, are asking people to “voluntarily obey the law.” He goes on to hope the next time he gets stopped for a traffic violation he’ll be asked to voluntarily not speed or what-have-you ever again, cross-my-heart.

This is an interesting place to live. A few years ago there was a stink about grand theft auto. It was said (note to self: If you don’t have a law degree, stay as vague as possible) that anyone who boosted a car and got caught was let off with a warning because, if he/she (note to self: You live here, idiot – gender nonspecific or else) they hadn’t been arrested for the same thing before, it was a first offense. This was applied without reference to the occasional rap sheet that stretched from here to there and back. If your car ended up in a chop shop and the non-resale parts ended up dumped on a sidewalk, you could get hit with a littering fine, but the guy who took it may or may not have an official warning to never steal another car forever and ever. Can you imagine the terror? Whose? Yours, you nasty litterbug? Or the (as ever, penitent) thief?

Does it matter?

Not in Seattle. We are Westerners, pioneers, those who chased the setting sun in the eternal hope of finding a land where we could live free and unfettered. It is our lot today – our destiny as the most civil of civilizations – to accede to the law. Nevertheless, we must forever acknowledge the overarching law of laws: “If it messes with my fun, stick it.” Now that we sturdy settlers have run out of land to steal from the Indians, we’re being forced to push each other out of the way. Here in Seattle we think one way to do that is invent selective enforcement of the law. Blame that on the fact that Seattle leads the nation in book sales. Unfortunately, it’s all apparently fantasy or other forms of fiction. History seems insignificant here. If it did, perhaps more people would reflect on the fact that we’ve had selective enforcement of the law for generations. The law was the Constitution of the United States. The selective aspect led us to Jim Crow and the Seattle attacks on “The Celestials,” or Chinese.

But that’s a ridiculous comparison. Right? And it was a long time ago. Right? Light up, lighten up, light out.

It’s been a long time since I posted anything to the blog. There’s a reason for that. I was interested in posting because I wanted to say things about the writer’s craft. I still do. But there are a bazillion – or more – blogs out there doing the same thing. What I have to say isn’t unique. That means anyone interested in the craft can go anywhere to learn about it and my efforts to help are pretty much on the order of hollering down a well. It doesn’t matter whether or not I explain something to someone. What matters is that there are hundreds of perfectly qualified people doing it every day.

So I’m going to blog for my own pleasure. Yeah, I’ll put out stuff about craftsmanship, but just as much to organize my own thoughts on the subject as to benefit someone else. What I really want to do is start the engine. That means I’m going to approach this blog thing as part of my meditation process (more about that at another time). Rather than sit down at this infernal machine cold as an iceberg and simply start pounding on keys, I’m going to write something about a subject that has my attention at the moment. May be current affairs, may be other affairs (not mine), and may be the world in general. But instead of wasting my first hour of work writing toward a novel – and the material is junk for the trash can – I’m going to exercise my mind and my thought processes on something totally unrelated, just to get the engine up to speed. Maybe you’ll find it interesting, maybe you won’t. The point is, It’ll help me get my mind in order. And if no one else ever reads it, much less responds to it, listening to echoes coming back up a well shaft is always entertaining. Beside, they don’t argue with you.

But if they start, this whole schemozzle goes in the tank.